World Cup 2014: Scoreless Draw Keeps Japan and Greece Alive

Abstract: NATAL, Brazil — Greece promised goals that did not come. Japan pressed for a victory that eluded it yet again. The ultimate result of what has turned out to be a rarity at this World Cup — a 0-0 draw — is that Colombia is guaranteed to move on to the knockout rounds, and Greece and Japan are still clinging to life in Group C. Reduced to 10 men after the captain Kostas Katsouranis was sent off in the 38th minute with his second yellow card, Greece held on for a critical result in the group by returning to the rock-solid defense that Colombia had blistered for three goals in an opening loss. “My players were brilliant,” Greece Coach Fernando Santos said. “They worked hard after the red card. Without the red card we probably would have won the game.” Both teams inserted new strikers in search of goals and a first victory, but ultimately the main objective was survival, and both achieved that with one match left in group play. Japan would have been eliminated with a loss. Once Katsouranis was sent off after a rough challenge on Makoto Hasebe, Greece withdrew into a defensive setup and held firm. Even short-handed, Greece was better organized against Japan and avoided any critical mistakes. Japan defender Atsuto Uchida said he could sense Greece building a wall around the goal as soon as Katsouranis was sent off. World Cup 2014: How Teams Can Advance to the Next Round Analysis and graphics show what needs to happen for teams in the 2014 World Cup to advance to the Round of 16. “I had a bad feeling about it,” Uchida said. “It happens a lot in soccer, when a team goes down to 10, they know exactly what they need to do. And that also happens to be exactly Greece’s way to fighting — to fight by defending.” Japan pressed forward after halftime and had several chances to score. The best came in the 68th minute when Shinji Kagawa played a long pass over the top to Uchida, who sent it back across the middle to Yoshito Okubo, who blasted the volley over the net. Greece goalkeeper Orestis Karnezis was also forced to make a diving save in injury time to preserve the draw and the point for Greece. Greece came in determined to turn around its dismal scoring history in the World Cup — 18 goals conceded against just two scored — inserting Kostas Mitroglou up front. Greek players had even promised goals against Japan. But Mitroglou’s best effort was an early volley that spun off his foot, and he did not even make it to halftime. He collapsed to the ground after taking an elbow in the side in the 30th minute. He got up and walked off under his own power but soon determined he could not continue and was taken off for Theofanis Gekas in the 35th minute. Things got worse for Greece just moments later when Katsouranis was sent off. Greece retreated into its half of the field for most of the second half. Japan had 68 percent of ball possession. Katsouranis will be suspended for Greece’s final group match against Ivory Coast. “It was a terrible start, losing a man,” Greece defender Sokratis Papastathopoulos said. “But we have a point and we have hope.”


Liberty Takes Control Early in 93-81 Win Against Dream

Abstract: ATLANTA (AP) — Shameka Christon scored 17 points and Janel McCarville had 15 to help the Liberty pull away for a 93-81 win on Sunday against the Atlanta Dream in the W.N.B.A. The Liberty (2-3), which began its season with three losses, scored 29 points in the third quarter, including two 3-pointers by Christon. “We got good looks and made shots,” Liberty Coach Pat Coyle said. “I think that is the nature of this team.” Atlanta (3-3) never led after losing a 4-point lead in the first quarter. The Dream used a strong zone defense to win its past two games but failed to defend the perimeter against the Liberty. Christon was 3 for 5 from 3-point range; the Liberty was 9 for 18 as a team. “Everyone was great at defending, but my mentality is to score more than they want to stop me,” Christon said.


Duke’s Amile Jefferson Is Sidelined

Abstract: Duke said forward Amile Jefferson, the leading returning scorer from last season’s national championship team, would be out indefinitely with an unspecified right foot injury. ■ Azura Stevens had 24 points and 10 rebounds, and the No. 13 Duke women (8-2) beat visiting Massachusetts (3-6), 70-46.


Ford to End Production of Its Mercury Line

Abstract: DETROIT — Edsel Ford conceived the Mercury brand in the 1930s as a way to fill the gap between basic Fords and luxury Lincolns. Now, that gap will again go unfilled. Ford Motor announced Wednesday that it would discontinue selling Mercury models this fall, ending a 71-year-old brand that once stood for innovation and speed but that became a “me, too” division. Mark Fields, the president of Ford’s Americas region, said Ford directors approved the step on Wednesday. He said the company would focus its resources on its core Ford division as well as Lincoln. “As we close this storied chapter on Mercury, we are opening a very exciting chapter, not only on Ford but on accelerating Lincoln,” Mr. Fields said. Mercury came to life during the Depression, when Ford was striving to keep pace with General Motors, which had passed Ford to become the country’s top-selling automaker. At its cultural height in the 1950s, Mercury became known for innovative cars like the Turnpike Cruiser, whose features included a power rear window, the “seat-o-matic” adjusting seat, and the “Merc-o-matic” automatic transmission. James Dean, playing a rebellious teenager, drove a black Mercury coupe in the 1955 film “Rebel Without a Cause.” Mercury joins a sizable list of venerable Detroit brands that have disappeared in recent years. In 2009, General Motors said that it would eliminate Saturn, Hummer and Pontiac as it streamlined after its bankruptcy filing, and it did away with Oldsmobile in 2004. Saab was also discontinued as a G.M. brand, though it will have new owners. Chrysler dropped the Plymouth brand in 2001, and the Chrysler brand itself is considered by some analysts to be in doubt, now that the company is under the management control of the Italian automaker Fiat. “This decade is for sure going to be remembered in the auto industry as a decade of consolidation, a renewed focus on profitability instead of going blindly after market share, and shedding dead weight in terms of dealerships,” said Jesse Toprak, vice president of industry trends and insights for TrueCar, a new-car pricing Web site. Before Mercury, the two ends of Ford’s spectrum were its inexpensive cars and trucks, which the founder, Henry Ford, encouraged buyers to buy in the color black, and the sleek Lincoln models, which were known for their streamlined appearance. But G.M. picked up customers by offering “a car for every purse and purpose,” a phrase coined by its president, Alfred P. Sloan Jr. So, Mr. Ford’s son Edsel commissioned the development of the Mercury Eight, which went on sale in 1939. The car had a 95-horsepower V-8 engine that was 10 horsepower stronger than the Ford V-8, but it cost less than a Lincoln. Sales were strong until World War II interrupted production. They prospered again in 1949, when the first all-new postwar Mercury models reached showrooms. By the 1960s, Mercury had become a place for slightly different and generally more expensive versions of the cars sold by the Ford division. “Mercury products have been nothing more than modestly restyled Fords for decades, and that’s not how you build or maintain a brand,” said Karl Brauer, a senior analyst with Edmunds.com, a Web site that offers car-buying advice. Mercurys of the 1960s included the Comet, a stretched version of the Ford Falcon, and the Cougar, originally a muscle-car variation on the Mustang but which was three inches longer and boasted a gutsy front grill that some likened to an electric shaver. In the 1970s, because of the energy crisis and new fuel economy standards, Mercury made smaller cars, including the Capri, initially built in Europe. When Ford developed the Taurus sedan in the 1980s, it gave Mercury a version called the Sable. More recently, Mercury’s lineup has included the Milan, its best-selling model, which is based on the Ford Fusion , as well as the Grand Marquis, a rear-wheel drive car that has been sold by Ford in some fashion since the 1970s. Mercury sales peaked at 580,000 in 1978, also a year of record hourly employment for the Detroit auto companies. In 2009, Ford sold fewer than 93,000 Mercury models. So far in 2010, Mercury sales are 41,680, up 11.6 percent from last year, but they make up only 0.8 percent of the American car market. Mr. Fields said Ford has no stand-alone Mercury dealers, which should simplify shutting the division. He declined to say how much closing Mercury would cost Ford. Mercury models are sold by 1,700 dealers, which also have a franchise with Ford, Lincoln or another brand. Bob Tasca Jr., a Rhode Island dealer who heads Ford’s national Lincoln-Mercury dealer council, said dealers had pressed Ford for years to tell them the fate of the division and finally learned this year that a decision was at hand. Although expected, Mr. Tasca said, the step was fraught with emotion. For dealers, he said, “there’s going to be some cases where a lot of them are going to make it and prosper and some are going to go out of business.”

Lincoln-Mercury Division of Ford Motor Co


China Weighs Helping a European Debt Rescue

Abstract: HONG KONG — Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said Thursday that China would consider working with the International Monetary Fund to help shore up Europe’s finances. But he left unclear whether China was willing to drop conditions that so far have made its proposed help unappealing to European nations. Mr. Wen’s comments came at a Beijing news conference after he met with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on the first day of her three-day visit to China. Mrs. Merkel is the first of several European leaders scheduled to visit China this month, as China’s huge holdings of foreign exchange reserves have begun to give it financial influence that could potentially rival Washington’s. Mr. Wen said that Chinese officials were studying whether the country should be “involving itself more” in helping Europe solve its debt troubles by investing in the region’s two big rescue packages: the existing European Financial Stability Facility and the planned European Stability Mechanism. China’s contributions could be channeled through the I.M.F., he said. Lending money to the I.M.F. to, in turn, relend to Europe would effectively transfer more of the risk of any European debt default to the I.M.F. China has previously made clear that it would need to buffer the risk of lending more money to Europe. In December, Russia embraced the lending approach now being weighed by China, but Moscow was willing to lend the I.M.F. only $20 billion. Europe is trying to expand its bailout funds by hundreds of billions of dollars. Britain has also said it would consider sending more money to the I.M.F. to help with Europe’s troubles — but only after the Europeans demonstrated they were finally taking bold steps to stem the contagion. China had $3.18 trillion in foreign exchange reserves at the end of December, dwarfing the reserves of every other country and potentially giving it the financial firepower to make a significant contribution. Having Chinese money on the table could help restore the international investing community’s confidence in Europe. It would also signal that the Chinese believe Mrs. Merkel and other European leaders have taken the necessary steps to begin solving Europe’s sovereign debt crisis . One big question, though, is what kind of political or trade concessions China might want in exchange for assistance. When Mr. Wen suggested last September that the European Union could dismantle its legal protections against low-price Chinese exports, the idea was immediately condemned by European trade officials. An opinion article Thursday in the official China Daily newspaper raised Mr. Wen’s trade condition again and suggested that the European Union should also make political concessions — like lifting a longstanding ban on arms exports to China. “As a Chinese saying goes, one does not visit the temple for nothing,” the column warned. Christine Lagarde, the I.M.F.’s managing director, has been playing a prominent role in trying to broker an agreement that will satisfy creditor nations like Germany and debtor nations like Greece at the same time. That includes a possible plan to convert the temporary, 440-billion euro ($577 billion) European Financial Stability Facility into a permanent, 500-billion euro ($655 billion) European Stability Mechanism. European officials have been approaching China intermittently for two years. The aim is to persuade the Chinese government to increase the approximately one-quarter of its foreign exchange reserves that are thought to be held now in euros, mostly in government bonds issued by the financially strongest countries in Europe — and to get Beijing to diversify that lending by buying the bonds of other, more troubled nations in the euro currency union. Economists and officials with a detailed knowledge of China’s position have said repeatedly that China would be willing to help, but only if its loans could be made essentially risk-free. One way to do this would be for the European nations jointly to agree to repay the loans even if some nations defaulted. But Germany has been wary of any arrangement that could make it the guarantor of other European nations’ liabilities, and there has been little sign that German thinking on this has changed. Another way to address China’s concerns about risk would be for the I.M.F. to assume the liability. Chinese officials indicated in November and early December that they were leery of helping Europe, noting publicly that the country’s foreign exchange reserves had been financed with money borrowed from the Chinese people. Beijing suggested that it might be safer to invest it in infrastructure projects overseas instead of government bonds. But since then, the sense of crisis in Europe has diminished somewhat. That is largely because the European Central Bank in mid-December began extending large three-year loans to European commercial banks at extremely low interest rates, damping concerns of a Lehman Brothers-style liquidity crisis breaking out. Europe’s troubles are far from over, however. The euro region’s economy is expected to languish in recession for most of this year. Greece has also been struggling to raise the money for bond payments due next month in order to avoid a default. So the financial negotiations to stabilize Europe remain urgent. A clear priority for Beijing has been to prevent a slump in the value of the euro against China’s currency, the renminbi . Such a slump, by increasing the renminbi’s relative value, would make Chinese goods less competitive in Europe, China’s largest export market. “China supports Europe in safeguarding the stability of the euro,” Mr. Wen said at the news conference, alongside Mrs. Merkel. Germany has joined the United States in the past in supporting a stronger renminbi. But Mrs. Merkel was circumspect on the subject Thursday, saying only that she supported the Chinese goal of working together to make the renminbi more convertible on global currency markets.

China
Wen Jiabao
International Monetary Fund
European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- )


Epiphany Came With a Cell, and a Dream - Neediest Cases

Abstract: As he stood on a street corner in Jacksonville, Fla., and handed a $10 bag of marijuana to an undercover police officer, Theorpia Eugene Carter did not see the heavens open up or hear choirs of angels sing. Yet he remembers it as the moment that God changed his life. “It’s like a light came on,” he said, adding that in the midst of the arrest, an officer asked why he was smiling. The reason, Mr. Carter recalled, was that after two previous jail sentences — a few months each — and years of addiction to marijuana and crack, he somehow knew that it would all be over. That was in 2002. “I turned my life over to Christ,” he said with his ever-present, toothy grin. “I’m still smiling today.” Though Mr. Carter, 49, is short, at 5-foot-6, his direct and outgoing manner commands attention. His voice, tinged with a northern Florida twang, resonates with the rhythmic inflection of a Baptist minister. (He was ordained a deacon in 2008, and when he speaks, he often sounds as if he is preaching a revival sermon.) He is given to handshakes and hearty laughter. While Mr. Carter was serving six months in jail and undergoing substance abuse treatment, he remembers, a fellow prisoner confronted him about his inexplicably positive attitude, saying, “I just don’t believe that nobody can be so happy locked up.” “I started to laugh,” Mr. Carter said, “and I reached my hands out to pray with him.” Today, he is still praying, but he has more trials to overcome. In March 2009, he was laid off from his job as lead carpenter at a construction company, Harry Pepper & Associates, where he had been earning as much as $50,000 annually, with overtime. Mr. Carter is also an experienced forklift operator, concrete finisher and barber. Despite his varied skills, he had no luck on his job search, and he and his wife, Carol, decided to leave Jacksonville in October 2009. They placed many of their possessions in storage and flew more than 800 miles, headed to Astoria, Queens, to live with her adult son from a previous marriage. The crowded, two-bedroom apartment is just big enough for Mrs. Carter’s son, daughter-in-law and two young grandchildren, and she and Mr. Carter sleep in the living room. They have received some help. With a grant from the East River Development Alliance — a beneficiary agency of the Community Service Society, one of the seven organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund — Mr. Carter was able to pay $340.30 in back storage fees for his and his wife’s belongings. And in June, after an agency training program in résumé writing and computer skills, he was hired as a mailroom clerk at G-III Apparel Group — a full-time job paying $12 an hour. Last month, he also started working part time as a maintenance man for the Center of Hope International, whose Long Island City church houses the East River Development Alliance’s offices. As always, religious faith keeps him motivated, and his fervor has not gone unnoticed by the church staff. “A lot of people, you ask, ‘What are they after? What is their motive?’ ” said David Thomasson, a church elder. But with Mr. Carter, “you could see that he had a zeal to help people any way he can.” Still, Mr. Carter is far from where he wants to be. He dreams of moving into a new apartment soon, and — maybe, one day — of being a construction superintendent, or a minister to his own congregation. For now, there are bills to pay and work to be done. So on Friday nights, he can be seen jogging down the church’s long, narrow stairs, with a mop and bucket in hand. His mission is to keep the building tidy, from the sanctuary to the sinks. “I want God to notice me,” said Mr. Carter, solemnly, as he leaned over, mopping a bathroom floor. “When he notices you, he makes provisions for you.”

East River Development Alliance
New York Times Neediest Cases Fund
Philanthropy


Error Messages From Air France Jet Offer Details but Little Insight

Abstract: WASHINGTON — A transcript of the error messages sent by Air France Flight 447 makes clear how many details the investigators have about the last minutes of its flight — and how little it tells them. A routine message about a malfunction in one of the plane’s lavatories is followed by a worrisome one that says that the speed sensor has a problem, but the cascade that follows is hard to parse. The plane, an Airbus A330 , crashed June 1 on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, with 228 passengers and crew members. Searchers have recovered 44 bodies, including three on Friday. The plane was approaching a line of huge thunderstorms, but these were not unusual for the location and season, experts said. The transcript was posted on www.eurocockpit.com , and its authenticity was confirmed by industry officials. The error messages were received by an Air France maintenance base. The messages begin with a routine one, a problem in one of the lavatories. But an hour and 47 minutes later, another message indicates that the autopilot has switched itself off, an event that can be caused by a variety of problems. Soon after, the plane reports it has lost a computer protection that overrides any commands from the cockpit that would threaten the flight’s stability. The Airbus has a computer that accepts commands to change various settings and transmits them to the rudder, flaps, ailerons and other parts, but only if such commands do not threaten stability. For example, the computer would not let the pilot pitch the nose so high that airflow over the wings would be disrupted and lift would be lost. But the computer switched to a mode in which the protections either disappeared or could be overridden. Experts said that could happen if turbulence was so severe that the plane was thrown into an unusual attitude, but it might also be caused by the breakdown in the speed-sensing system. The messages also indicate that warning flags appeared on the displays of the captain and the first officer indicating a problem with the speed sensing. Jets sense their speed with a system that includes a part called a Pitot tube, an open-ended, forward-facing tube. Pressure in the tube varies with speed and is compared with the pressure in an opening facing the side of the plane. The plane that crashed had a model of Pitot tube that Airbus had recommended be replaced because it had a tendency to collect moisture, giving inaccurate readings. Air France was in the process of replacing the tubes on its A330s, but it had not gotten to that one. The problem was not perceived as urgent — and, in fact, it has not yet been proven so. Regulators in Europe and the United States have not made the replacement mandatory. Another message indicates a problem with the rudder travel limiter, a system that prevents the pilot from turning the rudder too hard when the plane is flying fast. The functioning of the rudder travel limiter was an issue in a previous Airbus crash, an A300 in New York in November 2001, but in this case the message might simply indicate that the computers, confused about the speed at which the plane was flying, decided to lock the rudder into the narrow range of motion allowed at high speed. A later message indicates a disagreement among navigation devices that receive information from the speed-sensing system. And another shows problems with one of the three primary computers that control the flight, and one of the two secondary computers, possibly for the same reason. Then a flight management computer, which keeps track of the required course and altitude, shows a fault. The last transmission shows that air pressure in the cabin was dropping rapidly. Cabin pressure, which is ordinarily maintained at a level equivalent to 10,000 feet above sea level, was changing at a rate equivalent to more than 1,800 feet per minute. That advisory may mean the plane has depressurized or broken up in the air. Aviation experts caution that the error transcript has two main weaknesses: the messages are sent in batches, and within a batch, their order is not meaningful. And some were probably caused by the cockpit crew trying to reset components that were acting up, like a person trying to reboot a computer, rather than by new failures.

Airlines and Airplanes
Accidents and Safety


Cardinals Fend Off Sweep; Marlins Fire Their Manager

Abstract: Kolten Wong hit a tiebreaking home run in the sixth inning, and Lance Lynn got his fifth career R.B.I. to back his dominant pitching as the host St. Louis Cardinals beat the Detroit Tigers, 2-1, on Sunday night to avoid a three-game sweep. Miguel Cabrera’s run-scoring double in the first inning was the only damage against Lynn, who gave a weary bullpen a break before walking the final two batters he faced at the end of his seven and a third innings. Seth Maness’s only pitch resulted in a double-play ball to end the eighth, and Trevor Rosenthal finished for his 13th save. Matt Carpenter added two hits, and Peter Bourgos tripled and scored on Lynn’s single in the third. The Cardinals improved to a major-league-best 25-12 despite having two players thrown out at the plate. Alfredo Simon gave up two runs in six innings for the Tigers, whose three-game winning streak ended. MARLINS FIRE MANAGER Mike Redmond was fired as Miami’s manager, moments after the Marlins were nearly no-hit in a home loss that completed a three-game sweep. Atlanta’s Shelby Miller was one out from a no-hitter when Justin Bour singled in the Marlins’ 6-0 defeat, which dropped them to 16-22. Redmond’s replacement will be announced Monday, the team said. Rob Leary, Redmond’s bench coach, was also fired. Following a busy off-season highlighted by the signing of Giancarlo Stanton to a record $325 million contract, the Marlins had high hopes of ending their 11-year playoff drought. But their bullpen has been poor, and most of the batting order has struggled. NATIONALS 10, PADRES 5 Stephen Strasburg rebounded from a rough start to defeat San Diego for the fourth straight time, and Bryce Harper and Danny Espinosa hit three-run homers to power visiting Washington. MARINERS 5, RED SOX 0 James Paxton stretched his scoreless streak to a career-best 20 innings, and host Seattle trounced Boston. Brad Miller homered for the third time in two games for the Mariners, and Kyle Seager added a two-run drive in the eighth. DODGERS 1, ROCKIES 0 Mike Bolsinger pitched three-hit ball for six innings, and Yasmani Grandal singled home the only run, leading host Los Angeles to a win that salvaged a split of its four-game series against Colorado. WHITE SOX 7, ATHLETICS 3 Avisal Garcia hit a two-run homer, Alexei Ramirez had two hits and two R.B.I., and Jeff Samardzija pitched eight innings as Chicago capped its first series sweep in Oakland in 18 years. ASTROS 4, BLUE JAYS 2 Collin McHugh pitched seven strong innings, and Luis Valbuena and Colby Rasmus homered, leading host Houston past Toronto for its fifth straight win. GIANTS 9, REDS 8 Brandon Belt homered for the third time in three games, Nori Aoki drove in three runs, and visiting San Francisco edged Cincinnati after nearly wasting a five-run lead. RANGERS 5, INDIANS 1 Mitch Moreland had a two-run homer after an earlier hit bounced off the top of the wall, Prince Fielder hit two more singles, and host Texas defeated Cleveland to avoid a three-game sweep. PIRATES 3, CUBS 0 A. J. Burnett worked around five walks while pitching seven innings, and visiting Pittsburgh ended a four-game losing streak by topping Chicago. RAYS 11, TWINS 3 Evan Longoria drove in three runs and had two of Tampa Bay’s season-high 18 hits, Chris Archer threw six innings for his first win this month, and the visiting Rays crushed Minnesota. PHILLIES 6, DIAMONDBACKS 0 Sean O’Sullivan won a big league game for the first time in more than four years, staying in after he was hit on the throat by a throw from his catcher in the sixth inning, and host Philadelphia routed Arizona for its first five-game winning streak since last summer. ORIOLES 3, ANGELS 0 Mike Wright took a three-hitter into the eighth inning of his major league debut, and host Baltimore ended Los Angeles’s five-game winning streak.

St. Louis Cardinals
Detroit Tigers
Mike Redmond
Baseball
Miami Marlins
Braves


State Senator Carl Kruger’s Shadow Family

Abstract: EVEN in a city that celebrates unbridled ostentation, the sprawling estate at 139 Bassett Avenue in the seaside enclave of Mill Basin, Brooklyn, seems to redefine conspicuous consumption. The front yard is a gaudy stab at Versailles, with four-foot obelisks at each corner of the driveway, intricately tiled fountains and a series of steel sculptures that depict dolphins mid-dive, children at play and birds in flight. The 7,000-square-foot home, whose aesthetic is cruise-ship-meets-mob-mansion, has five terraces, a curved-glass elevator and an arcade room outfitted with gumball machines. On the second floor, there is what the residents call their “ice cream room,” furnished with an old-fashioned counter and soda fountain. Creating this eclectic palace was a huge mess. There were bitter legal disputes with contractors. Neighbors filed numerous complaints with the city’s Buildings Department questioning whether there were proper permits. At one point, a police officer moonlighting as a steeplejack fell and injured his spine when the flagpole he had been hired to fix cracked. The house is owned by two never-married middle-aged brothers, Drs. Michael S. and Gerard I. Turano, gynecologists whose 39-foot yacht, Special Delivery, is often docked out back. They live there with their mother, Dorothy, 73, a Brooklyn native who manages the local community board. But the person who oversaw the construction — and browbeat the contractors — is State Senator Carl Kruger , an Albany power broker and Democratic moneyman whose official residence is at his sister’s, two miles away. The tangled ties among Mr. Kruger, the doctors and their mother — long a topic of gossip and speculation in the insular neighborhood and nearby political precincts — were thrust into view this month when the senator and the older Turano brother were among eight men charged in what the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York described as “a broad-based bribery racket .” For more than 25 years, Mr. Kruger and the Turanos of Mill Basin have forged the most unconventional of domestic arrangements — at once public and opaque, widely whispered about and poorly understood. The Turanos are variously described by friends, neighbors and colleagues as the senator’s social acquaintances, lovers or surrogate relatives. In 2002, Michael Turano testified that Mr. Kruger was his “best friend.” Benjamin Brafman, Mr. Kruger’s lawyer, says the senator “often describes the Turanos as his family,” though in depositions Mr. Kruger has understated how long he has known them and how frequently he visited their home. (A process server testified that he saw Mr. Kruger at the Bassett Avenue home, on several occasions, “in his pajamas coming out of a bedroom.”) Investigators, who tapped the senator’s cellphone for months, have both muddied and clarified the situation, suggesting that Mr. Kruger, 61, had his most intimate relationship with Michael, 49, picking him up at the office and fielding phone calls from him throughout the day. “Kruger spoke with Michael Turano,” court records say, “in a manner that revealed that they relied on and supported one another.” But when asked whether Mr. Kruger was a close friend of her son, Ms. Turano, through the security intercom at her front door, said: “He was my friend. That’s why I don’t understand about this. Whatever comes out is going to be so wrong.” In the days since the criminal complaint was filed on March 10, the four central characters in this drama have declined to talk extensively to reporters. But interviews with two dozen people who know them, along with previously undisclosed court and city records, reveal a strange symbiosis. Mr. Kruger vaulted the Turanos into his spheres of power and influence, prosecutors say, landing Dorothy a plum job and, later, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into her sons’ bank accounts to finance a $200,000 Bentley and pay down a $1.2 million mortgage. The Turanos, in turn, provided the senator companionship, and prosecutors say the brothers helped conceal his growing payoffs from lobbyists and corporations. Mr. Brafman denied any wrongdoing but did not dispute the unusually close ties. “Despite the tenor of the complaint,” the lawyer said, “I think we will ultimately be able to establish beyond question that the Kruger-Turano relationship is a close family relationship, not a part of a criminal conspiracy.” Like many classic New York tales, the story of Mr. Kruger and his shadow family involves love, money, conflict and real estate. It is a story of an internecine political world of favor-trading and access-peddling. It is a story of an obscure waterfront expanse of garish mansions and decadent cars, a pocket of wealth unreachable by buses and subways and unseen by most city residents. And, now, it is a story of unwanted attention. TO hear 76-year-old Michael P. Turano tell it, Carl Kruger took his family. “Until he came into the picture,” said Mr. Turano, whose marriage to Dorothy ended in 1985, “we were a very happy family.” Michael Turano of Bensonhurst and Dorothy A. Bianchini of Flatbush met at a church social in 1956. He worked at a bakery, she at an insurance company. They both liked to dance. They lived modestly: His car was in such a sad state that he had to borrow his in-laws’ 1947 Buick to drive to Miami for their honeymoon, in 1957. Their sons, born two years apart, had little need for friends because they had each other. “They were soul mates,” their father said in an interview from his home in Florida, where he moved a decade ago. “Ninety-five percent of the time, they were together.” The brothers went to South Shore High School : Michael, class of 1979, was executive council chairman, and Gerard was president of the class of 1981. “They really were what you would call ‘Mr. South Shore,’ ” said Michael Ingram, a former English teacher at the school. “They were wonderful students; they were very, very active in school activities; they participated in everything.” “Dottie,” Mr. Ingram added, “was a supermom” — PTA president, a volunteer school aide. “She got all sorts of wonderful things done for the school.” Friends of Ms. Turano, though, detected an unfulfilled craving for a career. Her liberation came through local politics — and Mr. Kruger, a young up-and-comer who was not much to look at but possessed the currency that mattered most in that sphere: connections. He was a protégé of Anthony J. Genovesi, the gruff assemblyman who presided over the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club, which groomed generations of elected officials. By 1985, Mr. Kruger had won a coveted post as chairman of Community Board 18 in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, making him much sought after for people trying to do business in the area. He had also already been indicted on state corruption charges, in 1980, but he was acquitted at trial, represented then as now by Mr. Brafman. According to her former husband, a retired accountant, Ms. Turano soon began to devote much of her free time to the Jefferson club — and to Mr. Kruger. He became a regular dinner companion, inviting the entire Turano clan out to local restaurants and regaling the family with tales of his political triumphs. Around that time, the brothers attended the City College of New York, where both were part of a prestigious program, Sophie Davis , that puts high-achieving local students on a fast track to medical school. When Michael graduated from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1986, the father said, Mr. Kruger threw him a party that was written up in The Canarsie Courier. Mr. Kruger’s longtime lawyer, Mr. Brafman, said, “The Turano marriage was broken for more than 10 years before Mr. Kruger even met the family.” But the estranged former husband points to the senator. “I could see the writing on the wall,” he said. “He was cultivating my wife and two kids as his family-to-be.” Mr. Turano recalled telling Dorothy, “You quit the club — or I quit you.” WHEREVER Mr. Kruger popped up, Dorothy Turano seemed to follow: fund-raisers, news conferences, community meetings. In 1989, Mr. Kruger, still chairman of the community board, tapped her as its district manager, a full-time job with generous benefits that she still holds, now with a salary of about $109,000, among the highest for that job at community boards across the city. Technically, Ms. Turano was a bureaucrat, an intermediary among politicians, city agencies, civic associations and local residents. But she turned the bit part into a major role, telling board members she viewed herself as on a par with elected officials. She socialized with real estate developers, attended high-profile events like the installation of Timothy M. Dolan as archbishop in 2009 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and always managed to finagle a spot in photo-ops (often next to Mr. Kruger). “It’s amazing that a district manager influences things the way that she does,” said Charles Barron, a longtime City Council member from the area. “It’s not like somebody like her should be wielding any big-time power.” In the early 1990s, Ms. Turano helped Mr. Kruger commission a new headquarters for the board, with an arched roof and a high-end audio system; the building’s costs eventually escalated to an eye-popping $7 million in city money. In 2002, Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, presented her with a proclamation declaring Sept. 14 “Happy Birthday Dorothy Turano Day.” Constituents and politicians routinely took their complaints or proposals directly to her, bypassing board members, who increasingly deferred to Ms. Turano anyway. “She gets things done,” said Tom Hernandez, who joined the board in 2007. Mr. Kruger, meanwhile, ascended to the State Senate in 1994, selected by the Brooklyn Democratic machine as its favored candidate in a special election. Once in the Republican-controlled Senate, the loyal Democratic foot soldier turned dealmaker, offering his vote on social issues that played well with the conservative Orthodox Jews in his district and cementing his position back home with vigorous constituent service. In political circles, Ms. Turano referred to Mr. Kruger as her partner, but the pair remained something of a riddle to those around them. Ms. Turano’s ex-husband described the relationship as “motherly” rather than romantic. Frank R. Seddio, a former assemblyman and surrogate judge who was Community Board 18’s chairman and a previous district manager, said they were a couple, but then he stopped and said, “I don’t know if you can call them a couple.” Since the early 1990s, Mr. Kruger had all but lived at the Turano childhood home, a modest brick two-family on Glenwood Road in Canarsie, parking his dark Cadillac in front at all hours. Beyond the frequent visits by a state senator, neighbors found the arrangement peculiar. “I couldn’t understand it,” said Rosemarie Campanile, who lived across the street for years. “They were both prominent physicians. Why live with your mother?” The brothers run a joint practice, with offices in Manhattan at New York Downtown Hospital, and in southeast Brooklyn opposite Beth Israel Medical Center. Their business cards bear the motto “Two Doctors, One Commitment,” and say, “Practice limited to gynecology,” though they used to do obstetrics as well. Like many ob/gyns, the brothers have faced their share of malpractice lawsuits: at least seven between them in the past 14 years. Gerard, 47, has won both cases against him, and Michael prevailed at trial in a case that involved surgical intervention. But Michael also settled a case, involving a baby who ended up with brain damage and cerebral palsy, for $1.1 million in 2005; and another, regarding an abnormal Pap smear, for an undisclosed sum. He also paid a $150,000 judgment in a 2004 case in which he administered Pitocin, a labor-inducing drug, to a woman having strong contractions. It was in 1995 that the brothers bought the home on Bassett Avenue in southeast Brooklyn, for $995,000: they took out an $800,000 mortgage and embarked on a $565,000 renovation that was expected to take six months. They sold the old row house on Glenwood Road, for $240,000, to Eric Bascombe, a city bus driver. But they did not leave for two years, sparking another nasty legal fight. Mr. Bascombe had signed an agreement, which he said he had not fully understood, that allowed the Turanos — and their forever guest, Senator Kruger — to remain as renters. Livid, Mr. Bascombe eventually took to staging loud protests on the sidewalk, calling the Turanos “liars” and demanding that they vacate the property. Mr. Bascombe said the disagreement had escalated into shouting matches with Mr. Kruger, who served as the point man for the family; Mr. Bascombe reported two of the confrontations to the police. “He’s the boss; he takes care of his family,” Mr. Bascombe said. “That’s how he operates.” In 1998, the Turanos moved out and paid Mr. Bascombe $12,000. A handwritten settlement drawn up by lawyers declared that “both sides agree not to harass each other and to live in peace.” BEFORE the Turanos touched the house on Bassett, the F.B.I. had already been there. The bureau had taken a keen interest in a previous owner, Anthony Casso, a mob boss in the Luchese crime family. It was Mr. Casso who originally conceived of the giant complex, only to order the execution-style murder in 1991 of the architect who designed it, for fear that the man, Anthony Fava, could become a witness against him. F.B.I. agents stormed the house looking for evidence, punching holes in the walls as they searched for hidden bodies. When they took it over, the Turanos went far beyond patching the holes. Documents show they requested a special snow-melting device for the driveway, steam systems in the bathrooms on the second and third floors, and custom-decorated walls with Baltic birch plywood. The budget for granite alone was $50,000. Next to the house, they seized a stretch of city-owned waterfront and walled it off as a patio, with two Samurai sculptures flanking a multitiered fountain. Neighbors have complained to the city about the unusual use of city land, but Robert F. Katzberg, a lawyer for the younger Michael Turano, said the family leased the land “at fair market value.” As the costs swelled to $1.4 million, the family sued the contractor, Mike Mermelshtayn, for $8 million; he countersued, seeking $130,000 in expenses and fees. Though Mr. Kruger was not named as a party in that suit — which, like the flagpole case, has been settled — depositions highlight his outsize role. It is Mr. Kruger whom Mr. Mermelshtayn begged, in a letter, to keep the dispute out of court. “We never had a problem communicating with each other,” he wrote. “Whenever you called, I was there for you. Whenever you called, I responded.” Dr. Michael Turano testified that Mr. Kruger oversaw the work “every day.” Mr. Kruger, however, repeatedly eluded efforts to depose him in this case and in the one involving the man who fell from the flagpole. Twice, lawyers say, he canceled, claiming urgent work in Albany — once, via fax on Senate stationery 90 minutes before — only to appear on television or in the newspaper at events in Brooklyn on the same day. As the cost and scope of the renovations mounted, the Turano brothers borrowed heavily, taking out a second mortgage, of $400,000, and arranging for a home equity loan of $500,000, records show. By 2002, payments topped $8,500 a month. PROSECUTORS say Mr. Kruger had already begun to orchestrate the bribery scheme, turning the everyday routines of Albany into a business in which he took payments from lobbyists to advocate for their clients. And, the authorities charge, it became a family affair. Dr. Michael Turano, according to the criminal complaint, set up two front companies and bank accounts to stow away the sudden influx of cash — eventually, more than $1 million. One, in which Gerard was also involved, was called Bassett Brokerage, after the address of the family home. It was fitting: much of the money, said an F.B.I. agent in the complaint, was funneled to the bulging mortgages and the black Bentley Arnage parked in its garage. In a telephone conversation recorded in November, prosecutors say, Michael Turano seemed to grow anxious when a $15,000 payoff did not show up as expected. “I got the mail,” he told Mr. Kruger. “Nothing.” In another taped conversation, Mr. Kruger appears annoyed that Gerard Turano was trying to distance himself from the operation. “I made life easier for the two of you and he is going to be the beneficiary of my work,” Mr. Kruger said, according to the criminal complaint. “No, it was supposed to be that we were going to all share in the benefits of it.” From her perch at the community board, prosecutors suggest, Dorothy might have played her own small part. After rejecting plans for a retail development at a vacant site in 2004, she and the board approved a similar proposal in March 2007. Within a few weeks, a developer involved in the proposal began sending checks totaling $472,500 to Michael’s bank accounts. On Wednesday, less than a week after the criminal charges were unveiled, Dorothy Turano arrived promptly at 8 p.m. for the scheduled monthly meeting of the community board, dressed in fuchsia blazer and matching lipstick. She politely waded through the crowd of journalists waiting in vain to talk to her, then hugged board members and blew a kiss to a police officer. At her place on the dais, board members had placed a vase of daffodils and a single red rose, with a heart-shaped balloon that said, “We love you.” Upon learning of the charges, Ms. Turano’s ex-husband called her for what he said was the first time in two decades. She was at the community board office. Mr. Kruger was there. Mr. Turano told her that he needed to make sense of what had happened to his family. After all these years, he asked, “this is what you produced?” Recalling the fraught exchange, he said, “She cried quite a bit.”

Bribery and Kickbacks
Kruger Carl
Brooklyn (NYC)
Turano Michael S.
Turano Gerard I.
Turano Dorothy


Fear of Taliban Drives Women Out of Kunduz

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban occupation of Kunduz may have been temporary, but what they did to Afghan women’s rights could prove to be lasting. In a methodical campaign, the Taliban relentlessly hounded women with any sort of public profile, looted a high school and destroyed the offices of many of the organizations that protected and supported women in Kunduz. Among those who have fled are the women who ran a shelter for female victims of violence, who Taliban commanders say are “immoral.” Gone are educated women who worked for the government or international organizations; gone are some women who were school administrators and women who were activists for peace and democracy. They left, mostly at night, on foot or in run-down taxis, hiding under burqas, running for their lives. “I won’t go back — I will never go back,” said Dr. Hassina Sarwari, the Kunduz Province director of Women for Afghan Women , which ran a shelter for abused women, a family guidance center and a center for the children of women in the Kunduz prison. After the Taliban completed their campaign of burning and looting women’s organizations, they continued their attacks verbally , by text messages and telephone calls, threatening women and their relatives, making it clear that the women would remain in their sights. The Taliban’s message, based on interviews with a half-dozen women who received the warnings after fleeing Kunduz, was that they escaped this time, but that next time they would not be so lucky. “Before we managed to take control of the shelter, Hassina Sarwari, the head of the shelter house, along with all the runaway sluts and immoral girls, had already left Kunduz city,” said Abdul Wali Raghi, a Taliban commander in Kunduz. “Hassina Sarwari herself is an immoral slut, and if we had captured her, she would be hanged in the main circle in Kunduz city,” he added. Image Dr. Hassina Sarwari, the Kunduz Province director of Women for Afghan Women, in 2014. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times If in their publicity statements in recent years the Taliban had sounded more moderate, their behavior in Kunduz left little doubt where they really stand. Within the first three days of the Taliban occupation, women who ran organizations aimed at helping women had their homes and offices looted, their computers stolen, their furniture, televisions and appliances smashed. Then, the Taliban left messages on their phones, or with relatives or neighbors, saying, “Return and you will be killed.” Among the organizations destroyed by the Taliban were three radio stations run by women: One was burned, the other two looted. The Fatima Zahra girls’ high school and the Women’s Empowerment Center, which held social and political awareness sessions and taught women to sew, were also looted. Women for Afghan Women’s office and children’s center were looted, its computers and cars were stolen, and the organization’s shelter for abused women was completely burned; it also appeared to have been attacked with sledgehammers, the windows shattered, the walls and door frames smashed. Some allegations against the Taliban — that they raped women in the Kunduz University dormitory and the women’s prison — have not been proved. The accusation of rapes in the dormitory was broadcast on Tolo TV, and allegations of the prison rapes were broadcast on One TV. But the evidence supporting the allegations is still sketchy. Taliban commanders and spokesmen forcefully denied that charge and threatened to kill “any staff or reporter” of either Tolo or One TV, calling them “satanic media” that repeated “propaganda.” The Taliban noted that because their invasion of the city occurred during the annual Eid al-Adha holiday, the women were not even in the dormitory, but home visiting their families. The Kunduz University president, Abdul Qadoos Zarifi, said the same in a television interview. What happened in the prison is less clear. Mr. Raghi, a Taliban commander in Kunduz, strongly denied the rape allegations. However, there are reports among some women’s groups of at least one woman being raped multiple times. Much remains unclear about that case, including who the attackers might have been. Even amid the broader destruction in Kunduz over the past few days, including dozens of casualties and widespread building damage, the threat against women there was particularly chilling. That is in part because of how rare, and how recent, improvements for Afghan women have been in territories beyond Kabul, the national capital. In Kunduz, known for having some of the most horrific cases involving women including at least two cases of stoning in the last five years, gang rape and rapes of children, it has taken years for women to feel secure enough to work there. Now that they feel targeted and under surveillance by the Taliban, they are unlikely to return or, if they do, are likely to choose jobs where they are less visible and less easily tracked. “There is psychological damage,” Fiona Gall, the director of A cbar , an umbrella group representing nongovernmental organizations in Afghanistan , said about the effects on both women’s organizations and smaller humanitarian groups working in Kunduz. “These people are going to be much more reluctant to do anything that stands out,” for fear that their families will be targeted, she said. Fawzia Bostani, a civil engineer who works for the Ministry of Public Works in Kunduz, had been threatened for years by the Taliban. She was sure they would come looking for her once they entered the city. She is the only female civil engineer working in Kunduz, she said. And her projects — including routing and restoring roads in Kunduz and its neighboring provinces, and taking part in an effort to learn the views of local women on the construction — have made her well known in the area. The day after the Taliban arrived, she put on a burqa and slipped through the alleys to a neighbor’s house — it turned out just in time. “That night the Taliban came to my house and said, ‘Where is that woman who is working in street building?’” Ms. Bostani said. “My older brother said, ‘There is no woman working in any organization doing that work in this house.’” Video The Taliban’s takeover of the northern Afghan city of Kunduz gives the insurgency control over a crucial corridor, and potential to further its reach. The Taliban members showed her brother a photograph of the corner of their block, saying that they had watched a car pick her up every morning. As soon as the Taliban left, her brother called her and told her to flee. Although it was dark, she walked until she was at the edge of the city and then took a three-wheel all-terrain vehicle almost 70 miles to neighboring Baghlan Province. A few days later, the Taliban returned to her house in Kunduz and left a message with her sister-in-law: “We don’t want to see her here again.” Ms. Bostani said she has no plans to return to Kunduz. The head of the Afghan government’s Women’s Ministry office in Kunduz, Naheed Asifi, also fled and made clear she was reluctant to return. “If your life is in danger and you know that there is a significant threat, would you go back?” she asked. “I am sure you would not.” Asked if the government will be able to find someone else to fill her job in Kunduz, Ms. Asifi said: “I don’t think anyone would go.” Despite the sense of crisis and deterioration, Manizha Naderi, the executive director of Women for Afghan Women, said she was sure that the organization would find a way to re-establish its services for vulnerable women in Kunduz, but acknowledged that it would take much more than finding new offices. “I don’t see most of our people who worked in Kunduz returning, so it will be a big challenge for us to find staff,” she said. She paused and added: “But, people need us so we have to come up with a plan. If we stop working, it’s a big victory for the Taliban.”

Taliban
Kunduz
Afghanistan
Hassina Sarwari
Women for Afghan Women
Rape
Women's rights,Feminism
Women and Girls
Terrorism


Lewis Takes 3rd-Round Lead in Alabama

Abstract: Stacy Lewis shot a seven-under-par 65 to take a two-stroke lead in the L.P.G.A. Classic in Prattville, Ala.


Tibetan Man Dies After Self-Immolation in Protest of Chinese Rule

Abstract: BEIJING — A Tibetan man set himself on fire and died outside a police station in the western Chinese province of Gansu on Tuesday, becoming the 134th person to self-immolate in protest of Chinese rule over Tibetan areas, according to a report by Radio Free Asia, which is financed by the United States government. The man, Sangye Khar, 33, self-immolated in the mountain town of Sangchu, known as Xiahe in Chinese, home to the Labrang Monastery, one of the most important sites in Tibetan Buddhism and a major tourist attraction. The self-immolation, the third in a row to take place outside a police station, coincided with a major Tibetan religious festival. Chinese security forces have flooded many parts of the Tibetan plateau to prevent self-immolations and other protests of Chinese rule. The Chinese authorities have set up a widespread web of controls to monitor the restive region with ubiquitous surveillance cameras, paid informers and plainclothes security agents at monasteries. The authorities frequently shut down the Internet after incidents of unrest.

Sangye Khar
Buddhism
Immolation
China
Tibet
Labrang Monastery Gansu Province China


Black Boxes From EgyptAir Jet Are Going to France for Repair

Abstract: CAIRO — After days of unsuccessfully laboring to revive the flight recorders of the EgyptAir jetliner that crashed in the Mediterranean last month, Egyptian investigators said on Thursday that they would send the damaged devices to France for repairs next week. The flight data and cockpit voice recorders of Flight 804 will be flown to the French aviation accident investigation bureau near Paris, the investigators said in a statement. The French bureau will try to restore the devices by, among other things, removing accumulated salt, the statement added. Once information can be retrieved, the boxes would be flown back to Cairo for analysis. The Airbus A320 mysteriously plunged from 37,000 feet into the Mediterranean on May 19 on a flight from Paris to Cairo, killing all 66 passengers and crew members on board. Egyptian officials have repeatedly suggested that the disaster was most likely the result of terrorism, though no group has claimed responsibility for it. In a statement this month, Egyptian investigators said they would send the black boxes abroad if the damage they sustained in the crash proved to be too severe. The recorders were found last week along with some wreckage from the aircraft scattered along the seabed. After it was pulled out of the water, the cockpit voice recorder looked “crushed,” an Egyptian aviation official said at the time. If restored, the memory units of the black boxes should provide investigators with details about the aircraft’s navigation systems, engines and the pilots’ conversations during the flight.

EgyptAir
France
Cairo
Egypt
Plane Crash
Airlines,airplanes
Recording Equipment
Mediterranean Sea


Remo Belli, Who Developed Synthetic Drumhead and Changed Music, Dies at 88

Abstract: Remo Belli , a precocious musician who was credited with developing the first commercially successful synthetic drumheads — saving the hides of countless animals, turning millions of finger-tapping novices into accomplished percussionists and feeding rock ’n’ roll fever in the 1960s — died on April 25 in Pasadena, Calif. He was 88. His death was confirmed by Brock Kaericher, the president of Remo Inc. , the drum manufacturer that Mr. Belli, who was universally known by his first name, founded and served as chief executive. The company said the cause was complications of pneumonia. In 1957, along with his collaborators, Mr. Belli (pronounced belly) perfected and started marketing what has been described as the first successful artificial drumhead, the membrane that stretches over the open end of a drum. He replaced animal hides — usually calfskin, which could be finicky in high humidity — with a durable, acoustical polyester film manufactured under various brand names, including Mylar, made by DuPont. Initially used for weather-resistant film on nighttime military reconnaissance flights, it was later incorporated into products as varied as nail polish and spacesuits. (The first Mylar drumhead was made in 1953 by Jim Irwin, a chemical engineer for what is now known as the 3M Company, for the jazz drummer Sonny Greer, according to “The Drum Book,” published by Geoff Nicholls in 1997, and the 2007 Encyclopedia of Percussion, edited by John H. Beck.) After opening Drum City, a musical instrument store in Hollywood, in 1952, Mr. Belli was introduced to Mylar on a visit to the Slingerland Drum Company in Chicago, which was experimenting with it. “But they didn’t know what to do with it,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2010. He bought some Mylar when he returned to California, stapled it to a drum’s wooden hoop and immediately realized its potential. His accountant, Sid Gerwin, introduced him to Samuel Muchnick, a chemist, who developed a process to mass-produce synthetic drumheads by using a quick-setting liquid resin that bonded the plastic film to an aluminum hoop. “The synthetic drumhead revolutionized things” when rock musicians “introduced a rhythm that people responded to,” Mr. Belli told Inc. magazine in 2011. “That changed everything in the whole musical instruments category. It was no longer woodwinds and brass winds and strings. It became guitars and amplification and drums.” Mr. Belli’s enterprise eventually expanded from a 500-square-foot store to a factory of more than 210,000 square feet in Valencia, Calif., a neighborhood of Santa Clarita, where he lived with his wife, Ami Belli, a doctor. The company declined to provide information on his survivors. His company developed a broader selection of percussion instruments, including drums made from recycled wood fiber as well as tambourines, congas and baby rattles. He also became an advocate for drumming as therapy for children, older people and anyone facing physical or emotional afflictions. Remo Delmo Belli was born in Mishawaka, Ind., near South Bend, on June 22, 1927. Enraptured by his uncle’s polka band, which played at a local Italian-American club, he was urged by his father to learn the accordion, but he preferred the snare drum. He began drumming when he was 12, hanging around the Leedy & Ludwig drum factory in nearby Elkhart. With World War II on and most drummers in northern Indiana drafted, he started playing jazz professionally when he was 16 and still in high school. “My education is high school, period,” he said. “The rest is what I picked up by living life.” After serving in the Navy (he enlisted and was assigned to a band), he arrived in California with $60, played in strip clubs and saloons, and toured with the singer Anita O’Day and the bandleader Billy May. He borrowed $2,300 from his parents to open his first store on Santa Monica Boulevard with another drummer, Roy Harte. “Our shop was like a master class for me,” Mr. Belli recalled. “I kept my mouth shut and my ears open.” To dispel any doubts about his Weather King drumhead (so named because it was impervious to humid conditions in places like Atlantic City and New Orleans), Mr. Belli solicited endorsements from eminent musicians, including Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. Roy Burns, a drummer, teacher and instrument maker, recalled Mr. Belli once saying that “when rock ’n’ roll hit, there were not enough calf drumheads to meet the demand for all of the drum sets being sold.” Mr. Belli’s plastic drumheads, he added, “bridged that gap.” The original synthetic drumheads were calfskin look-alikes, but later versions were transparent and double-ply for durability. Mr. Belli and his wife also worked with neurologists and educators to incorporate rhythm into wellness regimens . They developed the Rhythm Pal drumhead as an educational tool; it fit on ordinary pails sold in hardware stores and helped connect a child’s experience of simply banging on a bucket to playing a drum. That lid now generally sells for $39.95. Some Remo instruments have sold for hundreds of dollars and, in at least one case, for far, far more. The Remo 20-inch bass drumhead seen on Ringo Starr’s Ludwig kit when the Beatles made their American debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964 was auctioned last year for more than $2.1 million.

Remo Belli
Drum
Musical instrument
Obituary
Pop Rock Music


Leon Panetta, in His Own Words

Abstract: In two extensive interviews, Leon E. Panetta talked about his long career in Washington, his role as the C.I.A. director who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and the challenges confronting him as President Obama’s new secretary of defense: On the unsolicited letter that first brought him to Washington in 1966: “I wrote Joe Califano, who was at that time an assistant to Lyndon Johnson. And it wasn’t that I knew Califano, but I figured his name was Califano, and I was Panetta, and maybe he might, you know, help another Italian. So I wrote him out of the blue, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t call me and say, you know, ‘What are you interested in doing?’ ” On learning that President Richard M. Nixon was firing him as director of the Office of Civil Rights: A newspaper “had an article that I was resigning. And I went to the secretary, Secretary [Robert] Finch, and said — you know, and there had been other rumors that I was resigning or this kind of thing — and I just went to him and said, you know, I’m denying that. And he said, ‘No, no, go ahead. It’s just another story.’ But then Ron Ziegler, at a press conference at the White House, was asked the question, you know, did Panetta resign? And he confirmed that I resigned.” On the raid that killed Bin Laden: “There were a hell of a lot of risks. You’re going in, you know, 150 miles into Pakistan. Would the helicopters be detected? What if they go down? What if the Pakistanis open fire? What if you’re fighting a war in the middle of Pakistan — you know, what do you do, how do you rescue our guys? So there were a lot of risks involved.” On voting against wars as a congressman in the 1980s and 1990s, but being more hawkish now: “Some of the wars that I voted against, I didn’t think that that was — you know, that they were not — they did not make the case. But after 9/11, there was no question in my mind that we were dealing with a group that attacked America, killed a lot of Americans, and that it was important for us to take action.” On his position on the Iraq war before it began: “What I was concerned about is whether or not it was simply, you know, a political judgment to take advantage of the moment, as opposed to going after Al Qaeda. That concerned me. On the other hand, I have to tell you that I had been through the same briefings, I’m sure, that Bush got, that talked about weapons of mass destruction. And, you know, you always worry about those kinds of weapons being in the hands of the wrong people.” On Iraq today: “I’m on the other end of this thing now, and I want to make sure that Iraq becomes a, you know, stable country in a very important region. So that becomes a big job I’ve got here now, is to make sure that regardless of how we got into this war, that we get out of it with stability and with a sense that we’ve done the right thing.” On his disputes with Dennis C. Blair, then the director of national intelligence: “There was always an effort to kind of control the operations at C.I.A., as opposed to coordinating. So that bothered me, because the relationship was very demoralizing at C.I.A. Almost anything that we would do, you know, would run counter to D.N.I., and it was just creating an additional conflict that frankly was not healthy.” On whether he has made up with Representative Nancy Pelosi after their dispute, when she was the Democratic speaker of the House, on whether the C.I.A. had misled her in the past: “Nancy keeps telling me to run for president! No, Nancy and I are fine. I mean, we — as you know, that’s a long — that’s an old relationship.” On whether he cursed when protesting Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s decision to reopen investigations into C.I.A. officers: “Very possible. I tend to do that.”

Panetta Leon E
United States Politics and Government
Central Intelligence Agency


Via Tablet or Smartphone, Learning With MOOCs

Abstract: MASSIVE Open Online Courses — or MOOCs — are a snowballing revolution in education. Thousands of courses from some of the world’s finest institutions are available free online, covering everything from astrophysics to the arts. For each course, students, sometimes numbering in the thousands, take part from home — where they view video lectures, take tests and submit essays through a Web interface. It’s a digital classroom with no actual “room,” and where you can study more or less when you like. Nowadays of course, your smartphone means you can also study when you’re on the move. Coursera’s free iOS and Android app is perhaps the very best way to take part in a MOOC through a phone or tablet — maybe during your commute to work or your lunch break. The app gives you limited access to Coursera’s list of available courses as well as any you have already signed up for. The app’s “Find Courses” section lists courses available by subject. Each subject has its own summary page with images showing off the individual courses along with their titles, the institutions providing them and their dates. Tapping a course brings up an introduction video that typically tries to interest you in the content, as well as detailed descriptions of what the course covers, workload requirements and which languages are available. If you like the look of a course, you can sign up ahead of time. Image A screenshot of Coursera’s app. When you’re already taking part in a course, you can view its lecture videos through Coursera’s app. These can be streamed or, if you plan ahead, downloaded in advance so that you don’t burn through your mobile data allowance while traveling. Because the app is connected to your account, the videos you’ve viewed will be marked as already seen when you log in later through your computer. The app is limited, though, and doesn’t let you take some of the multiple-choice tests or perform peer-review assignments. This functionality is something the company has hinted will arrive later, undoubtedly pleasing many users. However, I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t be able to focus on a quiz about quantum physics or the history of improvisational jazz while sitting on a rocking metro train. Coursera’s app is extremely clearly designed, which makes it easy and lovely to use, and it is free — so try it, and see if there’s anything you’d love to learn. The Khan Academy app, also free on iOS , takes a slightly different approach to MOOC-based learning. In subject matter, Khan Academy courses are a little more traditional than Coursera’s, so you’re more likely to be learning about statistics or economics than Hollywood filmmaking history. Image A screenshot of a Khan Academy course. The app’s interface is simple but elegant. You can view a list of subjects, and drill down into each menu to find the course you’re interested in. Course videos then run on the screen with a neat rolling transcript shown beneath them so you can double-check, at a glance, that you heard something correctly. Like Coursera, watching these videos syncs with your Khan Academy account, so you get credit for watching them and you can download them ahead of time to watch when offline. Using the Khan Academy app to take part in a MOOC feels very different, much less formal perhaps, than using Coursera’s app. This might be something you like, but I prefer a more structured approach. There’s also no official Android app yet. However the free, unofficial Viewer For Khan Academy app for Android is pretty well designed, and gives you access to 4,000-plus videos. If you’re just starting out learning with MOOCs, the MOOCs4U app may be worth using. This free iOS and Android app lists the many thousands of different MOOCs available from providers like Coursera, Udacity, edX and more. Image Write is a minimalist-designed note-taking app. It’s just a list of courses, though, not a portal to taking part in them. Also, I wish it let you choose the subject you were interested in before you had to choose a MOOC provider, because this would make searching easier. Juggling MOOC-based study with your daily work may be tricky, especially if you’re a keen student taking more than one course from different providers. To help with this, check out the GroupMOOC app, which helps you build timetable plans including study time and deadlines in a calendarlike format. It’s free on iOS . Omni Study is a more generic, but also more elegant, alternative on iOS , great for organizing your study schedule. It’s $1. On Android , the free app My Study Life is a similar study planner that’s good-looking and quite powerful. Lastly, if you’re watching a MOOC video on your computer, then why not try using an app like Write, $2 on iOS , to make notes on what you’re learning? That way you can browse your notes later when you’re out and about. Write is a minimalist-designed note-taking app that’s particularly good. If you’re on Android , try taking notes with SomNote instead; it’s great-looking and free. QUICK CALL The popular Sunrise calendar iOS app has just hit Android phones for the first time. It’s an extremely elegant-looking app that could lure you away from using Google’s own calendar solution. It’s free .

Coursera
Khan Academy
Calendar
E-learning
Mobile Apps


Djokovic Ousted in Madrid Open

Abstract: Top-ranked Novak Djokovic was ousted from the Madrid Open, 7-6, 6-7 (8), 6-3, by the unseeded Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov after straining his right ankle. Djokovic was down a break in the second set when he twisted the same ankle he injured while playing for Serbia in the Davis Cup last month. Image Novak Djokovic injuring his right ankle during the Madrid Open. Credit Julian Finney/Getty Images

Madrid
Novak Djokovic
Grigor Dimitrov
Tennis


The Knicks Are Waiting for Shumpert to Be Himself

Abstract: Coach Mike Woodson says he can see the difference in Iman Shumpert this season. It is easy to spot watching videotape. Woodson recognizes that Shumpert, who returned last month after an operation on his left knee, has been tentative as a perimeter defender. “I think right now, he’s reaching too much defensively,” Woodson said. “He’s getting beat instead of moving his feet.” That was not the case for him as a rookie last season when Shumpert used his quickness and aggressiveness to make steals that resulted in fast-break points. When Woodson watches tape of Shumpert from last season, he notices how Shumpert’s movements were fluid and his feet were quick. Neither Shumpert nor the Knicks know how long it will take for him to get back to the level of last season. In most cases, players who have torn their anterior cruciate ligament and the lateral meniscus say it can take up to a year to have complete confidence in the strength of the knee. Image Iman Shumpert, who returned last month from a knee operation, has been slow to display the skills on defense he showed as a rookie. Credit Kerim Okten/European Pressphoto Agency Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls tore his A.C.L. on the same day as Shumpert during last season’s playoffs. Rose is expected to miss at least another two weeks before making his return. In 12 games Shumpert has yet to produce a defensive highlight show, but Woodson remains confident. “That will come the more he plays and gets his confidence back and in being able to push off and move,” he said. “It’ll come.” The trade deadline will be three days away when the Knicks return from the All-Star break. Shumpert has been the only Knick in speculative trade talk. His teammates said they do not want to see him traded. “We’re confident with the guys we have,” Amar’e Stoudemire said. “This has been a year of guys recovering from injury. Iman has done a phenomenal job with his recovery. He’s playing well. He’s doing everything we’ve asked him to do. We’re pretty solid with where we are.” During his weekly show on MSG Network, Woodson detailed one play in which he wanted Shumpert and Stoudemire to switch and guard the opposite player after a high pick-and-roll by the Detroit Pistons. The play ended with Shumpert’s being late to guard Jason Maxiell, who made a midrange jumper with two seconds left on the shot clock. “Now I was hollering switch this because it was coming down the late clock,” Woodson said of the play that was occurring in front of him. He added of Shumpert: “So I’m hollering switch and Rook, see, he never heard of it. That’s going to be his excuse.” REBOUNDS Tyson Chandler did not finish Tuesday’s practice because of a sore right ankle. Mike Woodson said he expected Chandler to play in Wednesday’s home game against the Toronto Raptors. “He went through our conditioning part of practice and then he was a little sore, so we pulled him out,” Woodson said.

Knicks
Iman Shumpert
Tyson Chandler
Basketball
Sports injury


Fisherman's Legacy, Long After Last Net Is Cast

Abstract: Ossining, N.Y. - IT sits by the edge of the Hudson just north of Sing Sing and down from the railroad station like an eyesore within an eyesore -- an ancient shanty inside a fenced-off industrial site that for many years housed a bus yard. But within the weathered wooden walls of the shanty is something at once ordinary and quite magical. Along with old gasoline cans and battered paddles are handmade fishing boats and sturdy nets as intricate as spider webs, crab and eel pots, fyke nets, barrels of old Lisbon cork, a century of fishing history in one little shed. E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com Soon it will all be gone, the artifacts taken out and put into storage, the shanty knocked down, the site, now prime riverfront property, scheduled to become -- what else? -- a $78 million condominium and retail project called Harbor Square and public park space. But before everything changes, people who knew him are remembering Henry Gourdine, the river savant who fished the Hudson for more than 80 years, built the shed and most of what's in it and died in 1997 at the age of 94. And along with their remembrances they're trying to figure out how best to keep his remarkable legacy alive. The shad are just beginning their run up the Hudson, making their annual journey upriver from the ocean to spawn. Were he alive this would be the busiest time of the year for Mr. Gourdine, six weeks or so of nonstop activity governed by the tides, not the clock, with crews out at every high tide bringing in what once seemed like an inexhaustible bounty of shad, their metallic, blue-green bodies glistening in the sun. Once there were shanties like Mr. Gourdine's in every town on both sides of the river. But pollution and overfishing killed most of the industry over time, with striped bass and American eel and sturgeon declared off limits in the Hudson. Now commercial fishing is almost gone altogether. But during its heyday, few did it as well as Mr. Gourdine, who mended his nets and dreamed about the river until the day he died. There may be some fish tales in the fish tales. Was it 12,000 or 13,000 or 14,000 pounds of fish that he and his crew caught in one legendary haul on Crawbuckie Beach, just south of the mouth of the Croton River, a catch so big that his men couldn't pack it all for shipment to the Fulton Fish Market in time to set their nets for the next high tide? Is it true that part of his $1 lease contract with the Van Cortlandt family for another shanty was an unwritten promise to deliver to the manor house his first bucket of rainbow smelt each season? But no one disputes his knowledge of the river or the craftsmanship he brought to his work, something he exhibited in every net, every one of the perhaps two dozen boats he built, the way he insisted on using copper rivets, not nails in his boats, the way he'd fashion the perfect circles for his hoop nets out of saplings steamed and softened and bent just so. "He was a craftsmen as much as he was a fisherman, and what he left behind is the history and memory of the way fishing was done for a couple of hundred years," said Christopher Letts, a friend and fellow fisherman and a naturalist with the Hudson River Foundation. "Everything he did was simple, precise, Shaker-like. Almost was never good enough." He left behind not just the artifacts in the shed, but maybe just as much in the barn and basement of his house. The village has contacted the Hudson River Museum to see what may work there. The Hudson Fisheries Trust, which wants to build a commercial fisheries museum on an old railroad barge, has expressed interest. Two filmmakers, Ken Sargeant and David Davidson, are working on a film about his life, to be called "Tales From Henry's Hudson." Mr. Gourdine's three children have final say on what happens to what he left behind. They'd like something in Ossining, maybe part of the museum being considered at Sing Sing, maybe -- though it seems like a long shot -- something started from scratch. "So many kids here don't even know there is a Hudson River," said his only son, Norman. "And their parents are in the same boat." They are convinced it's what he would have wanted. After all, on the last day of his life, he was talking with Mr. Letts and another friend about one of his favorite subjects, teaching children about fishing and the river. So maybe something will happen, there will be memories of a working harbor as well as Harbor Square. But, still, it seems a lot more complicated than watching the tides, fixing the nets, bending that sapling just so, putting his favorite boat in the water and going fishing on the Hudson.

HOUSING
HUDSON RIVER
OSSINING (NY)
GOURDINE HENRY
AREA PLANNING AND RENEWAL
FISHING COMMERCIAL
RETAIL STORES AND TRADE
FISH AND OTHER MARINE LIFE


Markets Watch Greece, and China Market Continues Tumble

Abstract: World stock markets mostly drifted lower Friday ahead of Greece’s weekend referendum, while China’s main stock benchmark plunged as government efforts failed to reassure panicky investors. European stocks were mixed, with Britain’s FTSE 100 declining 0.7 percent to 6,585.78. Markets in Asia will get the first chance to react to the result of Sunday’s vote. A Chinese market rout deepened as investors dumped shares in spite of government measures this week aimed at restoring confidence, such as cutting fees and easing rules on borrowing money for trading. The China Securities Regulatory Commission, the market watchdog, said late Thursday that it was starting an investigation into suspected stock market manipulation, state media reported, an indication that the government was trying to halt the market slide. The Shanghai Composite Index ended down 5.8 percent at 3,686.92. The index has plunged 29 percent since hitting a peak of 5,166.35 on June 12. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.8 percent to close at 26,064.11, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 edged up 0.1 percent to 20,539.79. United States markets were closed in observance of Independence Day. Benchmark United States crude fell $1.41 to $55.52 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The dollar fell to 122.78 yen from 123.09 yen late Thursday. The euro rose to $1.11 from $1.1083.

Greece
China
China Securities Regulatory Commission
Stocks,Bonds
Currency


One Tax Rebate Isn’t Enough

Abstract: TAX rebates have been arriving in bank accounts and mailboxes, and will eventually put more than $100 billion into the hands of consumers. The hope is that by spending the money, they will lessen the risk of economic disaster from the subprime crisis. Have the rebates, now mostly distributed, achieved their objective? It’s not very likely. The rebates may be helping the economy, but the stimulus they are providing is certainly too small to make a real difference. More will be needed, perhaps much more, before the economy is truly on safe ground. From the outset, government officials considered the tax rebates as a kind of insurance for the overall economy. In January, just before Congress passed the stimulus bill authorizing the rebate checks, Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, wrote that, in the current economic situation, there was a risk of “a self-reinforcing spiral (of less lending, lower house prices, more foreclosures, even less lending, and so on) that could further impair economic activity and potentially turn a mild recession into a long and deep recession.” In his view, there was only a moderate probability that this “self-reinforcing spiral” would take hold. The goal of the rebate checks, he said, would be to lower this probability “to an acceptable value.” He thought that an economic stimulus bill might well make the difference. When he signed the stimulus bill in February, President Bush called it a “booster shot for the economy.” This analogy to immunization suggested that the rebate would reduce the chance of some economic disaster. Has the tax rebate substantially reduced the probability of a downward spiral? It is too soon to tell, because the Treasury only started to send out rebate checks in late April. Retail sales did rise in May. But the dreaded serious recession still seems very much a possibility. The unemployment rate shot up to 5.5 percent in May, from 5 percent. The Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index has fallen below the lowest levels of the last two recessions. The theory supporting tax rebates was originally devised by John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the last century. In 1931, during the Great Depression, he compared the economy to a stalled car. (The car, he said, had “magneto trouble,” referring to a device once commonly used in automobiles to generate an electric spark for ignition.) In Keynes’s analogy, when an engine is running properly, each stroke of a piston gets the next piston ready to fire, which in turn gets another piston ready, in rapid sequence. Similarly, he said, when the economy is functioning properly, each time someone spends money, he provides income for another person, causing that person to spend money, and so on. What was needed in the dysfunctional economy of the 1930s was a government stimulus to get things started again. Keynes referred to the additional rounds of expenditure, set off by the initial stimulus, as “repercussions,” and to their total effect as the “multiplier.” But people who have studied such models find that these repercussions aren’t powerful enough unless the initial stimulus is really large. Consider the Fair simulation model ( fairmodel.econ.yale.edu/main2.htm ), a free Web site that embodies much of Keynes’s theory and is offered by Professor Ray C. Fair of Yale. With the “U.S. Model” on this site, I increased transfers from government to households (“TRGH”) by $100 billion in the second quarter of 2008. The results showed a $59 billion increase in 2008 gross domestic product. That is less than half of 1 percent of G.D.P. The simulation also showed that this year’s rebates would have further repercussions in 2009, bolstering G.D.P. by $36 billion that year. After 2009, the effects of this stimulus will just sputter out. This is not going to mean the difference between prosperity and recession. The Fair model quantifies the repercussions included in Keynes’s theory. Why aren’t they more powerful? Part of the answer is in the slowness of people to spend extra money. Another is that some of the rebates will be spent on imports. That money will flow abroad, to stimulate other countries’ economies, with little of their rounds of expenditures finding their way back home. Third, the domestic expenditures will tend to result in higher interest rates, both long and short, which should reduce investment and lower asset prices. When asset values decline, people tend to cut spending through a negative “wealth effect.” It is also possible that the effects of the rebate will be even smaller than the model predicts. Heightened anxiety about the economy might spur people to use the money to pay off debts and to save, rather than spend. And issuing tax rebates raises the government debt, at least initially, which might create angst for consumers who fear the possibility of higher taxes when the government repays the debt. Fuzzy as this picture may seem, there is unfortunately even more uncertainty about the rebates’ effects. Much of the recent dynamics of the economy are not captured in Keynes’s theory, in Fair’s Model, or in any conventional econometric model. For example, these models have not taken account of the reasons for the peculiar lending dynamics in the subprime mortgage market, or of the state of financial institutions’ balance sheets and the confidence that the public has in these institutions. Nor have they taken account of the vagaries of speculative asset markets, mistakes by securities rating agencies and the problems of bond insurers. THE economy is too complex to capture all these things in any single model. In trying to steer the economy, we are necessarily trying to steer something we don’t properly understand. We simply do not have the means to quantify all the issues related to the rebates. But the models we do have suggest that the overall effects of the rebates are modest at best. The reality of the subprime situation, augmented by the energy crisis, at least suggests that we’d better get ready for another round of rebates. There is little talk of it now, but we should be putting in place another stimulus package like the current one, and stand ready for another after that, and another.

Economics
Economic Stimulus Act of 2008
United States Economy
Economic Conditions and Trends
Politics and Government
Recession and Depression


Smoke Bomb Raises Security Concerns for M.T.A.

Abstract: The video was almost cartoonlike in its antics, something Wile E. Coyote might have conceived: a trapdoor to the street — really, an emergency exit for the subway — opens slowly and a head appears. Suddenly, a young man jumps out of his hiding spot, throws a smoke bomb toward Bar Pitti, a restaurant in the West Village, slides back into his rabbit hole and disappears. While various theories — including a longstanding feud between the owners of Bar Pitti and a neighboring restaurant, Da Silvano — were being floated around the neighborhood as possible reasons for the episode on Friday, the police have not identified a motive or a suspect. The police said the smoke bomb was a “commercially made pyrotechnic smoke generalizer that emitted a red smoke.” No injuries were reported, but the case raised security concerns for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Kevin Ortiz, the spokesman for the authority, said on Tuesday that the agency was still investigating how the young man had gotten to that emergency exit. “We take security of our system very seriously, and we will take all necessary steps to secure our system,” Mr. Ortiz said, adding that he would not discuss the specifics of those steps. The emergency exits are supposed to be locked from the street but are designed to be opened from beneath street level in case of an emergency, according to an authority police officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to talk about the case. Video The police are searching for a man who emerged from a subway emergency exit grate and threw a smoke canister into the outdoor seating area of a West Village restaurant. “It’s pretty much just a push bar,” the officer said. The only way to gain access to the emergency exits is through the subway tunnels, the officer said. The exit in question, at Avenue of the Americas and Third Street, would be closest to the tunnels used by the A, C and E lines, or by the B, D, F and M lines, which all pass through the West Fourth Street station. When the door is opened, it is supposed to set off an alarm to the authority and the Police Department, according to the officer. A Police Department spokesman said he did not know if an alarm had sounded. On Tuesday, transit workers were seen doing maintenance on the bright yellow trapdoor, cordoning it off with a yellow and black accordion fence that matched Da Silvano’s sunflower-colored awning and black chairs. Absent a clear motive, there has been speculation that a longstanding rivalry between Da Silvano and Bar Pitti, separated by only a door to an apartment building, might have prompted the attack on Friday. Silvano Marchetto, the owner of Da Silvano, a West Village hot spot since 1975, opened Bar Pitti with a former manager and waiter of his restaurant, Giovanni Tognozzi, in 1992. The two owners split after a lawsuit in 2005, and Mr. Tognozzi kept Bar Pitti. Mr. Tognozzi said he could not comment. Daniele Perugini, a manager at Da Silvano, said the restaurant had nothing to do with the smoke bomb. “These are successful restaurants with a lot of celebrities,” he said. “They’re famous, trendy restaurants. Why would they bother with something like this? It doesn’t put money in my pocket.” Mr. Perugini said Mr. Marchetto was away and could not be reached for comment. Robert Snyder, who has lived in the Village for 65 years, was meeting his sister for lunch at Bar Pitti on Tuesday, which he said he had done at least once a week since it opened. “There’s a neighborhood rumor about these places, that the owners hate each other,” he said. “So it probably wasn’t a random thing, but we’ll never know. “It’s just another one of those little mysteries of the Village, I guess.”

Bombs
Subway
West Village Manhattan
MTA
Bar Pitti Manhattan NY Restaurant


Advances in Sensor-Based Computing Bring ‘Smart Dust’ Closer

Abstract: In computing, the vision always precedes the reality by a decade or more. The pattern has held true from the personal computer to the Internet, as it takes time, brainpower and investment to conquer the scientific and economic obstacles to nudging a game-changing technology toward the mainstream. The same pattern, according to scientists in universities and corporate laboratories, is unfolding in the field of sensor-based computing. Years ago, enthusiasts predicted the coming of “smart dust” — tiny digital sensors, strewn around the globe, gathering all sorts of information and communicating with powerful computer networks to monitor, measure and understand the physical world in new ways. But this intriguing vision seemed plucked from the realm of science fiction. Smart dust, to be sure, remains a ways off. But technology’s virtuous cycle of smaller, faster and cheaper has reached the point that experts say sensors may soon be powerful enough to be the equivalent of tiny computers. Some ambitious sensor research projects provide a glimpse of where things are headed. Last year, Hewlett-Packard began a project it grandly calls “Central Nervous System for the Earth,” a 10-year initiative to embed up to a trillion pushpin-size sensors around the globe. H.P. researchers, combining electronics and nanotechnology expertise, announced in November that they had developed sensors with accelerometers that were up to 1,000 times more sensitive than the commercial motion detectors used in Nintendo Wii video game controllers and some smartphones. The use of accelerometers in consumer products points to the changing economics of sensors, notes Peter Hartwell, a senior researcher at H.P. Labs. In the 1980s, accelerometers began to be used in automobiles, to detect crashes so that air bags would inflate. That was a specialized, costly application of motion sensing. But today’s low-cost sensors, Mr. Hartwell says, are opening the door to widespread use, linking the physical world to computing as never before. In places like desktops and data centers, computing power marches ahead relentlessly. “But it is still as if the computer is a brain that is blind, deaf and dumb to its surroundings,” Mr. Hartwell says. “Closing that gap is what the sensor revolution is all about.” Microchip-equipped sensors can be designed to monitor and measure not only motion, but also temperature, chemical contamination or biological changes. The applications for sensor-based computing, experts say, include buildings that manage their own energy use, bridges that sense motion and metal fatigue to tell engineers they need repairs, cars that track traffic patterns and report potholes, and fruit and vegetable shipments that tell grocers when they ripen and begin to spoil. Power consumption has long been the Achilles’ heel of sensor-based computing. Smart dust, observed Joshua Smith, a principal engineer at Intel Labs in Seattle, proved impossible because the clever sensors needed batteries. Instead of dust, he said, the sensor nodules would be the size of grapefruits. But the power barrier, Mr. Smith says, is rapidly eroding. Advances in sensor chips are delivering predictable, rapid progress in the amount of data processing that can be done per unit of energy. That, he said, expands the potential data workloads that sensors can handle and the distance over which they can communicate — without batteries. At Intel, Mr. Smith is doing sensor research that builds on commercial RFID technology (for remote identification) and adds an accelerometer and a programmable chip — in a package measured in millimeters. Its power, he explains, can come from either a radio-frequency reader, as in RFID, or the ambient radio power from television, FM radio and WiFi networks. (For the latter, Intel is developing “power-harvesting circuits,” he adds.) “The ability to eliminate batteries for these sensors brings the vision of smart dust closer to reality,” Mr. Smith says. In this model of computing, the sensors are servants. They exist to generate data. And the more sensors there are, the better the data quality should be. When mined and analyzed, better data should in turn help people make smarter decisions about things as diverse as energy policy and product marketing. If sensor-based computing takes off, it will ignite fresh demand for a wide range of hardware and software to store, process and search the new oceans of data for nuggets of useful knowledge. So it could be a boon to business, a foundation for what analysts call “the Internet of Things.” “It does feel almost like the beginning of the Internet,” says Katharine Frase, vice president for emerging technologies at I.B.M. Research. “You can see that sensor computing is going to be important and useful, but it’s not possible to see in advance just how it will transform things.” The recent advances in stand-alone sensors may be impressive, but some researchers are pursuing a different path. “We already have massively distributed wireless sensors — they’re called cellphones,” explains Deborah Estrin, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ms. Estrin and her colleagues at the university’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing have designed several projects that use cellphones and people in data-gathering and analysis. Cellphones, they say, are versatile data collectors and are becoming more powerful all the time — with cameras, GPS, accelerometers and Internet connectivity. Their work is at the forefront of an emerging field called participatory sensing. One project involves collecting travel, time and location data that is fed into Web databases to calculate an individual’s personal environmental impact and exposure to pollutants ( peir.cens.ucla.edu ). Another project, in cooperation with the National Park Service, uses a smartphone application to identify, photograph and track the advance of invasive plants, like Harding grass and poison hemlock, which can crowd out local species and undermine biodiversity ( whatsinvasive.com ). STILL another is a Twitter application for self-reported data on one’s daily life ( your.flowingdata.com ), which can be assembled into small graphs that show a person’s behavior over time. The most common use since the site went up last fall, says Nathan Yau, a graduate student who created the application, has been to track personal health — eating habits, weight, blood pressure, glucose and sleep times. The cellphone is a constant companion — immediate and intimate, always there to inform, remind and prompt. “The killer app for this is personalized health and wellness,” Ms. Estrin says. “The potential to help people make behavior changes and lead healthier lives is tremendous.”

Sensors
smart dust
Computers and the Internet
Hewlett-Packard Co
Intel Corp
Science and Technology