Hakeem Nicks Leaps And Limps To Big Day For Giants

Abstract: EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Wide receiver Hakeem Nicks displayed the quickness and speed he is renowned for in making 10 catches for a team-leading 199 yards in the Giants’ dramatic 41-34 come-from-behind victory against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers . Anyone who saw Nicks head toward an exit at MetLife Stadium was given a different view. He clutched a game ball presented to him by Coach Tom Coughlin as he walked with a pronounced limp, a painful reminder of the broken bone he sustained in his right foot in May, the subsequent operation and a period of rehabilitation that limited him to two series in the final preseason game. The injury appeared to slow Nicks when he finished with only 4 catches for 38 yards in the Giants’ season-opening 24-17 loss to the Dallas Cowboys, a subpar performance that perhaps encouraged the Tampa Bay defensive coordinator, Bill Sheridan, to attempt to handle him with one-on-one coverage rather than the double teams Nicks usually commands. Quarterback Eli Manning and Nicks continually exploited that strategy. “Getting single coverage doesn’t come that often for me,” Nicks said. “Eli just took advantage of it.” Nicks’s foot was so sore after the Dallas game that Coughlin opted to limit his practice time as a precaution, believing rest was more important than trying to make up for lost time by getting him more repetitions with Manning. The challenging circumstances made Nicks’s huge afternoon that much more compelling. “You can’t say enough about him,” Coughlin said. “He goes out there with one day of practice and made an awful lot of plays.” Nicks, selected by the Giants 29th over all out of North Carolina in the opening round of the 2009 draft, has always known how to make plays. With 79 catches for 1,052 yards in 2010 and another 76 for 1,192 last season, he joined Del Shofner and Amani Toomer as the only receivers in team history to produce consecutive 1,000-yard seasons. He played a huge role in the run to the N.F.L. title last postseason, pacing the team in receptions (28), yards (444) and receiving touchdowns (4). Those kinds of numbers don’t come as easily after a broken foot and its lingering effects. The strength and soundness of his feet have everything to do with his ability to alter routes in an instant while providing a constant long-ball threat, critical elements of his game. “Talking to guys who had this injury, they said you’ve got to get back to trusting it,” Nicks said. When asked how his foot felt after the shootout, he did not complain. “It’s good,” he said. “It’s what I expected after a long game like this.” Nicks credited the team’s medical staff with helping him make it back in time for the regular season. “They do a good job of taking care of me during the week to get to the games,” he said. “When it is game time, I don’t think about it.” Nicks was his old consistent self in the first half against Tampa Bay, making 5 catches for 93 yards and a touchdown, on a 23-yard bullet from Manning that cut the Giants’ deficit to 17-13 with just under two minutes remaining before halftime. He snared another 5 passes for 106 yards in the second half and was clutch in the fourth quarter. With the Giants trailing by 27-16 and facing a third-and-11 at the Buccaneers’ 19-yard line early in the fourth quarter, Manning found Nicks breaking free from cornerback Aqib Talib on the left side for a gain of 14, positioning Lawrence Tynes’s 24-yard field goal. A 20-yard strike to Nicks immediately preceded a 33-yard throw deep down the right side to tight end Martellus Bennett, helping the resilient defending champions to a 34-27 advantage with 3 minutes 59 seconds left. When it was over, Nicks’s mind was not on how his foot would respond to the quick turnaround before the Giants visit the Carolina Panthers on Thursday night. His thoughts revolved around his maternal grandmother, Dorchina Urrutia, who played an instrumental role in raising him. She had watched him play here for the first time. The game ball would be hers. “I dedicated the game to her,” he said.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Football
New York Giants
Nicks Hakeem


Rollins Caps the Phillies’ Comeback

Abstract: WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 (AP) — Jimmy Rollins’s run-scoring double in the eighth gave Philadelphia the lead an inning after Jayson Werth’s pinch-hit home run helped erase a four-run deficit as the Phillies rallied to beat the Washington Nationals on Thursday night, 7-6. It was the Phillies’ seventh win in eight games, a streak that pushed them a game and a half behind the first-place Mets in the National League East after the Mets lost to the Marlins, 8-7. Philadelphia has not spent a day in first this season, and trailed the Mets by seven games on Sept. 12. “We’re here now,” Rollins said. “How? I don’t know. But it’s sweet now, and that’s all that matters.” Philadelphia Manager Charlie Manuel sounded an optimistic note before the opener of this four-game series. “We’re still looking at the division,” Manuel said. “Things can happen. We could win three in a row, they could lose three in a row.” Philadelphia looked on its way to squandering this game, though, thanks in part to a poor outing by starter Kyle Lohse. When he left after two innings, the Phillies trailed by 6-2. But Werth’s three-run homer in the seventh cut the deficit to 6-5. Rollins then doubled and scored the tying run in that inning before he came through again in the eighth. Jonathan Albaladejo (1-1), Washington’s fourth pitcher, walked Carlos Ruiz, who stole second. With two outs, Rollins lined a shot just inside the first-base bag to drive in the winning run. That made a winner of J. C. Romero (1-2), who got out of a two-on, one-out jam in the seventh by getting pinch-hitter Tony Batista to ground into a double play. Tom Gordon came in to get two outs with a man on second in the eighth, and Brett Myers worked the ninth for his 18th save. This game ended as well as it began for the Phillies: Chase Utley’s two-out triple was followed by Ryan Howard’s 41st homer to make the score 2-0 in the first. But Nationals starter Jason Bergmann settled into a nice groove after that, and did not allow another run. When he left after six, the problems began for Washington. Luis Ayala allowed the only two batters he faced in the seventh to reach base. He was replaced by left-hander Arnie Muñoz, brought in to face left-handed pinch-hitter Pete Laforest. Manuel countered with another pinch-hitter, Werth, who homered on Muñoz’s fourth pitch. Rollins then doubled off Muñoz and eventually scored on a fielder’s choice. Muñoz then hit Howard on the right forearm and was replaced by Albaladejo, who got out of the seventh — but could not stop the Phillies in the eighth.

Washington Nationals
Philadelphia Phillies
Baseball


Justice Department to Monitor Polls in 28 States on Election Day

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said on Monday that it would deploy more than 500 people in 28 states on Tuesday to monitor Election Day practices and guard against intimidation and disruptions. The number is a sharp decrease from the 2012 presidential election, when the Justice Department had more than 780 personnel in place on Election Day at the close of what was a much less tumultuous campaign. Officials placed blame for the shrinking federal presence on a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that limited their ability under the Voting Rights Act to deploy observers in jurisdictions — mainly in the South — with a history of voting discrimination. In announcing the assignment of monitors and observers, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, “We will continue to have a robust election monitors program in place on Election Day.” She said the personnel “will perform these duties impartially, with one goal in mind: to see to it that every eligible voter can participate in our elections to the full extent that federal law provides.” The Justice Department said it would have personnel in 67 jurisdictions to look for signs that anyone is being hindered from voting because of race, ethnicity, language, disability or other criteria. The department’s Civil Rights Division will also have a hotline to field complaints of discrimination or voting problems (1-800-253-3931 or 202-307-2767, or TTY 202-305-0082). The Justice Department is deploying both Election Day observers — inside polling places — and monitors, who remain outside the polls unless local voting officials agree to allow them inside. The department did not break down how the more than 500 people would be split between the two groups. Vanita Gupta, the head of the Civil Rights Division, said that “we work closely and cooperatively with jurisdictions around the country to ensure that trained personnel are able to keep an eye on the proceedings from an immediate vantage point.” Donald J. Trump has repeatedly warned of what he said could be a “rigged” election, charging that illegal immigrants and others who are not eligible to vote could turn out in large numbers; he has urged supporters to monitor polls on their own. Democrats say that the divisive climate could intimidate legitimate voters, and that evidence of actual voter fraud is minimal. In a letter last week to Ms. Lynch, Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said he was troubled by reports that a white nationalist group planned to monitor polls in Philadelphia with surveillance cameras and other tactics. He said these plans “are little more than thinly veiled attempts to suppress and delegitimize the votes of predominantly minority citizens.”

Justice Department
2016 Presidential Election
US Politics
Voter registration
Southern US


Sifteo's Interactive Cubes Recall Games of the Past

Abstract: Put Sifteo cubes in front of someone who’s never seen them before, and you’ll think somebody is reading the thesaurus. “Cool!” “Neat!” “Awesome!” “Serendipitous!” That’s because nobody’s ever seen anything like them. Sifteo is a new “gaming platform,” which is an icky tech industry term for what they really are: a kick in the imagination. If the business brains behind Sifteo could only keep up with the engineering end, the gamers of the world would be trembling in their boots. Sifteo tiles ($150) are white plastic blocks, 1.5 inches square and about a half-inch tall. Each has a color screen on the top. The breakthrough idea, dreamed up by a pair of M.I.T. students, has three parts. First, the cubes communicate with one another wirelessly; they know when they’re next to one another, and which side is against which side. (They don’t have to be touching; they can just be close.) Second, they have very sensitive tilt sensors. Third, the top screen is clickable. These three simple ideas, in combination, permit a huge range of games. In one, you guide a cartoon critter along a path by tipping his cube so that he slides onto the next one. In another, you unscramble words by sliding the tiles into the right order on the table. In another, you can click a screen to advance to the next game level. In many games, you can get back to the main menu by flipping the cubes upside down and back up again. Sometimes you reset or shuffle a game by shaking the cubes in the air. It works. The communication between cubes, the animation and the gravity simulations (when you tilt cubes) are smooth and seamless, creating a perfect illusion. The company asserts that this is more than a new game paradigm. They say it’s a healthy, essential cultural shift. It’s a return, they tell us, to the simpler times when play meant manipulating things — blocks, checkers, Legos — with your fingers on a table. A return to the pleasures of interactive, face-to-face, tabletop game playing — a retreat from the iPod Touch syndrome where everybody’s face is bent down toward a different, isolating screen. Sifteo may well be right about that. But its amazing little cubes must first mount three obstacles that loom before it like the Pyramids. First — and this is the big one — the cubes don’t work without a computer nearby. In addition to three Sifteo cubes and a charger (which has slots for six cubes), the set comes with a tiny white transmitter nubbin that you are supposed to insert into the USB jack of a Mac or PC. Then you download a program called SiftRunner. SiftRunner lets you shop the online catalog of games, download them to your computer, read their instructions and transfer them to the cubes (wirelessly, courtesy of that transmitter). Once you’ve sent the games from your computer to the cubes, which can take about a minute, you click a Play button on your computer’s screen. At this point, the computer supplies both the computing horsepower and the music and sound effects, which add a great deal to the experience. That’s a clever arrangement, but the computer requirement puts a huge damper on the portability of Sifteo. These tiny, pocketable, sophisticated tiles, with their four-hour battery life, would be the world’s greatest back-seat-of-the-car activity. They’d be the perfect waiting games: waiting rooms, waiting in line, waiting for dinner. But since you can’t use them at all without a computer a few feet away, they’re impractical as pocketable entertainment. The company is well aware that the computer requirement is keeping its Sifteo cubes grounded. It says that it’s exploring all kinds of solutions — maybe letting a phone or tablet serve as the computer, for example. At the least, you should be able to load the cubes up with one favorite game and then leave the laptop behind. But for now, even that’s impossible; the computer must always be on and within range. And don’t lose that transmitter, either; it’s about the size of a hydrogen atom. The second huge obstacle is the price: $150 is awfully steep for three cubes. Sifteo’s creators have been demonstrating the cubes for several years — long enough for Hasbro to borrow the idea and produce a copycat product called Scrabble Flash. The Scrabble screens are black and white, there’s no music or soundtrack beyond beeps, and there is essentially only a single game (rearrange the cubes to spell words). But you do get five cubes for $25, which really puts Sifteo’s deal at a disadvantage. You can buy up to three more Sifteo cubes — again, steep at $45 a cube — and you probably should; three seems really bare-bones. More cubes make an enormous difference in the flexibility, challenge and interest of these games. The system can handle as many as six. A few simple games are free, but the better ones cost $5 each. (The company has chosen to emulate Microsoft ’s baffling Xbox “points” system, where you buy points with cash and then buy games with points. It works out to 500 points for $5, so why not just use currency? The company says that this system “keeps us from getting dinged by small credit card transaction fees.” But as with Microsoft, the superfluous conversion seems meant instead to confuse your sense of value.) In any case, $5 a game also seems high, especially if you compare their relatively low sophistication to what you would get on, say, an iPod Touch for much less money. The third obstacle is, of course, building a game catalog. Without games, there’s no game platform. Only 13 games are available now. The company says that many more, including some from big-name game designers, are on the way. In demos, some of them look creative and fun. For example, you might stack the cubes on edge instead of keeping them flat on the table. That’s lucky, because the current selection is fairly sparse, and there’s some duplication. For example, three of them are guide-the-animal-from-cube-to-cube games. Two of them involve unscrambling letters to form words. A couple of them are standouts. There’s Chroma Lite, a distant cousin of Tetris, where you tilt the cubes and rearrange them so that matching colored dots align across cubes. Moon Marble is vaguely PacMan-like, except that you tilt a cube to guide your star-eating ball through the mazes. The best app of all, though, may be the Creativity Kit. It’s a simple put-the-cubes-in-order game that you can easily duplicate and edit. In the SiftRunner program on your computer, you prepare the answers. They can be letters that you have to sort into words (“C A T”), words you have to sort into sentences (“we love dad”), numbers you have to put into sequence (“1/2, 0.875, pi”) elements you have to sort by atomic weight (“He Ne Ar”), animals you rank by size and so on. You can set a time limit for this task. Sifteo says that its prime target market is 6- to 12-year-olds. Sure enough, my own children, 6 to 14, got a lot out of the cubes, but had the most fun with the Creativity Kit. It’s exciting, then, that Sifteo says it will enhance the kit with challenge types that go beyond sorting: grouping, multiple choice, multiplayer quizzes, flashcards, music and so on. For the moment, Sifteo cubes are fascinating, innovative and different. They may find a niche as educational tools. If the company can find a way to make the prices lower, the cubes more self-sufficient and the game catalog more varied, that will be a happy niche indeed.

Computer and Video Games
Computers and the Internet


Worlds Converge in Deadly Crash on New Jersey Highway

Abstract: In one vehicle there were 13 immigrant workers, men and women commuting home in a van after a long Saturday shift at a Chinese restaurant. In another was a young data analyst heading home after mentoring a teenager. And in another, two farmers hauling a truckload of Kentucky cattle back to Maine. Under normal circumstances they may have never crossed paths, but last weekend they did in the most terrible of ways when the three vehicles crashed on the side of an Interstate highway in New Jersey. The episode ended three lives but ruptured far more, laying bare on the side of the road starkly different worlds that for some that night changed forever. “It all happened too fast; I don’t know what happened,” said Tao Qing Wu, one of the restaurant workers who was traveling in a passenger van on Interstate 287 when it crashed into a car and a cattle trailer stalled in the northbound shoulder in Bernards Township, N.J., according to the State Police. “I just feel so much pain.” Mr. Wu spoke this week from his hospital bed at Morristown Medical Center, in Morristown, N.J., after undergoing surgery to repair a broken right leg. His right arm was bound in a cast, and his swollen face contorted with pain as he tried to feed himself soup. He had not yet been told of the deaths of two of his co-workers, whom the authorities identified as Jose Gustavo Cruz Cardona, 55, and Jiang Hua Lu, 57. “I’m so seriously injured,” Mr. Wu said, “so I don’t know how other co-workers are doing.” Mr. Wu said he had worked for about 11 years at Ling Ling Riverwalk, a homey sit-down Chinese restaurant in a small shopping complex in Basking Ridge, N.J., where an oversize stuffed version of Ling Ling, the panda given to America by the Chinese government in the 1970s, sits sentry by the door. Nearby are framed newspaper reviews extolling the 13-year-old restaurant’s fare. On the night of the crash, Mr. Wu and his colleagues piled into the worn Ford van owned by the restaurant as they always did to make the short trip to a tattered house in nearby Morristown that served as living quarters for the restaurant’s workers. Image Ravi Naik, 23, was killed. Credit Neel Naik They are part of the small army of people who chop vegetables, bus tables and handle woks around the New York City area but live far from the Chinese restaurants where they work. Mr. Wu sometimes travels to Coney Island to be with his wife and children because he works six days a week at the restaurant, where he said he was paid $1,200 a month to be a line cook. But on Nov. 28, most of Ling Ling’s staff — 11 men and two women — never made it to Morristown. It began with three Kentucky-bred bulls and a broken axle. Troy L. Chase, a farmer who lives in Pittston, Me., and works occasionally as a truck driver, was hauling three newly bought brown and white Chianina calves from a farm in Kentucky to his barn in Pittston in a trailer hitched to his 2003 Dodge Ram pickup truck. The truck began to have trouble, according to a timeline provided by the State Police as well as a report about the farmer on the news site CentralMaine.com. Mr. Chase, who declined to comment this week, pulled over onto the shoulder. With a passenger, identified by the website as Peter Poland, he began to repair what turned out to be a broken axle, when the trailer was struck from behind by a car driven by Ravi Naik, a 23-year-old data analyst from Hillsborough, N.J. The crash knocked the trailer with the calves onto its side, Mr. Chase told CentralMaine.com. One calf, it was later discovered, had been killed. Mr. Naik was on his way home to Hillsborough around 10:30 p.m. from mentoring a teenager, his cousin Neel Naik said, and stopped his Hyundai Elantra beside the trailer after the crash. Moments later, the van full of restaurant workers drifted across lanes and crashed into the stopped vehicles, the State Police said. Mr. Naik, who was standing outside his car, was killed. The driver was Xu Feng Ma, a longtime worker at Ling Ling. Mr. Ma and his wife, Kathy, are Chinese immigrants who recently became owners of the restaurant, having bought the business in installments over time, said his cousin, Lucy Ma, a certified public accountant, whose husband, Walter Cheng, was an owner of Ling Ling. (Mr. Cheng has stayed on during the ownership transition, she said.) “They had the American dream, and they are working hard,” Ms. Ma said. “Now I think they don’t think they can, still.” Ling Ling was closed for several days after the crash; a note posted on its glass doors asked for prayers. It opened again on Thursday, a necessity, Ms. Ma said, to pay its workers and bills. Ms. Ma disputes the police account of the accident. She said her cousin, who suffered injuries to his face, including several broken teeth, believes the van may have been hit from behind by another car. Image The address listed for Troy Chase, 43, a trucker from Pittston, Me., who was involved in the crash. Credit Tristan Spinski for The New York Times Sgt. Jeff Flynn, a spokesman for the State Police, said there was no indication this had happened, but Sergeant Flynn added that an investigation was continuing and that no charges had been filed. Mr. Ma could not be reached for comment this week because he was in the hospital. After learning of the crash, Ms. Ma and her husband raced among the hospitals where the injured were taken, some by helicopter, including Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in Somerville, N.J., and the medical center in Morristown, checking on the workers and acting as translators for several who spoke only Chinese. Most of the workers, who ranged in age from 18 to 64, have been released from the hospital. But that night, two workers — Mr. Cardona and Mr. Lu — were not among them. “We had been driving to four different hospitals,” Ms. Ma said. “We were going nuts.” At 7:30 a.m. the next day, she said, she discovered why they could not be found: They had died on the side of the road. On Wednesday, a funeral was held for Mr. Naik, a devotee of the Hindu philosophy of Swadhyay Pariwar, Neel Naik said. Mr. Naik, whose family is from India, studied statistics and economics at Rutgers University and was a passionate fan of the Dallas Cowboys, his cousin said. During a get-together with friends the weekend he died, he left early despite their protests because he had promised to tutor a younger sister in calculus. His body was cremated, in accordance with his beliefs. “It just hurts to see your best friend and brother go, and he had so much going for him,” Mr. Naik said. “At the same time our Indian spiritual belief is that his soul will always move forward in terms of spiritual progress and he will be reincarnated into something that will help him grow.” Others had no such solace. In the strip mall that houses Ling Ling, a Chinese man who works at a nail salon a few doors down stood in the parking lot a few days after the crash, dialing and redialing a number on his cellphone. One of his friends had worked at the restaurant, said the man, who declined to give his name or that of his friend. He had not heard from him since.

New Jersey
Ravi Naik
Xu Feng Ma
Car Crash


Judge Says Suspect in Brooklyn Rape Case Should Be Released

Abstract: A State Supreme Court judge on Thursday authorized the release, until his trial, of a Brooklyn man who had been jailed for almost a year on charges of rape and sex trafficking, saying that there appeared to be problems with the credibility of his accuser. The man, Damien Crooks, is one of four arrested last year and accused of committing various sex crimes against a woman from Crown Heights over nearly a decade. The crimes started when she was just 13, prosecutors have said, and included instances in which she was forced to have sex with other men for money. He is the second of the men to be released from jail in the last two weeks, after the Brooklyn district attorney’s office acknowledged that the accuser had recanted part of her story almost immediately after telling the police that she had been raped in 2010. During a hearing before Justice John P. Walsh on Thursday morning, a lawyer for Mr. Crooks, who initially had been held on $1 million bail, commended prosecutors for recently turning over information that could be beneficial to his client. But the lawyer, Elliot S. Kay, also said he believed that some people in the district attorney’s office had known there were discrepancies in accounts provided by the woman before the case was presented to a grand jury. In court, Michael F. Vecchione, the head of the rackets bureau of the district attorney’s office, said the agency was reinvestigating the case. The allegations attracted considerable attention when they were announced last summer, in part because the men were all black and the woman an Orthodox Jew. The two communities have long lived, sometimes uneasily, alongside each another in Crown Heights. Last week, Justice Walsh ordered that another defendant in the case, Darrell Dula, be released from custody after information emerged that the woman who had accused him of rape told the police the next day that her original statement was false. The rape charge against Mr. Dula is expected to be dismissed. A spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney said then that a new prosecutor assigned to the case had realized that information was not in the case records and requested a missing file from the Police Department that included the exculpatory statement. That information, recorded in a police report, was then given to defense lawyers. “As soon as we became aware of the recantation, we took the proper actions,” Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, said Thursday. “We are reinvestigating the entire matter.” Mr. Kay said in court that he believed that some officials in the district attorney’s office, including members of the sex trafficking unit who presented the case to the grand jury, had most likely been aware of documents that contradicted some assertions made by prosecutors while announcing indictments. For instance, he said after the proceeding, a batch of material that had recently been turned over by prosecutors included a document that originated with the district attorney’s office and identified dates on which the woman was allegedly victimized. A handwritten note on that document included a reference to a recantation, Mr. Kay said. Certain police reports and medical reports also conflicted with accounts presented to the grand jury, he added. “Every single incident alleged in the indictment is completely contradicted by documents prepared by police, by the district attorney’s office and by doctors,” he said after the hearing. Mr. Crooks, who was portrayed as a ringleader of the group, still faces four counts of rape and two of sex trafficking. The district attorney’s office said the case would proceed against him and the two other defendants. Mr. Kay said that while Mr. Crooks had been held in $1 million bail connected to the sex case, he had also been held in bail of $1 connected to what he believed to be a marijuana charge, stemming from a separate case. Mr. Crooks would be released, he said, after the dollar had been paid, probably on Thursday.

Sex Crimes
Brooklyn (NYC)
Crooks Damien
New York State
New York City
Walsh John P


Three Chemists Win Nobel Prize

Abstract: One Japanese and two American scientists have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for taking the ability of some jellyfish to glow and transforming it into a ubiquitous tool of molecular biology for watching the dance of living cells and the proteins within them. The fluorescent proteins are now routinely used for observing the growth and fate of specific cells like nerve cells damaged during Alzheimer’s disease . The winners are Osamu Shimomura, 80, an emeritus professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Boston University Medical School; Martin Chalfie, 61, a professor of biological sciences at Columbia University; and Roger Y. Tsien, 56, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. Each will receive a third of the 10 million krona prize (about $1.4 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Dr. Shimomura said he received a 5 a.m. phone call informing him he was a Nobelist. “The reaction was just surprise,” he said. Dr. Tsien was not caught completely unaware. Last week, the Thomson Reuters news service listed him among its predictions for this year’s Nobel Prize winners. “I didn’t want to put any credence in it,” Dr. Tsien said, noting that the predictions for the physics and medicine prizes this week were wrong. Dr. Tsien (pronounced chen) added that his work was “only one little piece” amid the work of many. “It wasn’t necessarily the case they had to give it to me,” he said. “Obviously, it’s pretty nice to hear.” Dr. Chalfie never received the phone call from Sweden. “I slept through it,” he acknowledged at a news conference at Columbia. He said he had inadvertently turned down the ringer on his telephone a couple of days ago. He woke up at 6:10 in the morning and thought the soft ring was coming from a neighboring apartment. “I was a little bit annoyed that they weren’t answering their phone,” he said. “I then realized because it was after 6, that they must have announced the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I decided to find out who the schnook was that won it this year. So I opened up my laptop and found out I was the schnook.” Biologists have long observed that some sea creatures glow in the dark. In 1962, Dr. Shimomura, then a researcher at Princeton, and Frank Johnson, a Princeton biology professor, isolated a specific glowing protein in the Aequorea victoria, a jellyfish that drifts in the ocean currents off the west coast of North America. The protein looked greenish under sunlight, yellowish under a light bulb and fluorescent green under ultraviolet light. Dr. Shimomura and Dr. Johnson called it the green protein, but now it is known as green fluorescent protein, or G.F.P. for short. The green fluorescent protein consists of a chain of 238 amino acids bent into a beer can-like cylindrical shape, and for two and a half decades it remained a little-known biological curiosity. Dr. Chalfie first heard about the protein at a seminar in 1988, and thought he might be able to use it in his studies of Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent roundworm. “It didn’t take much to realize that if I put that fluorescent protein inside this transparent animal, I would be able to see the cells that were making it,” he said. “And that’s what we set out to do.” He thought that the fluorescent protein could be made to serve as a biological marker by splicing the gene that makes the protein into an organism’s DNA next to a gene switch or another gene. “That serves as a lantern,” Dr. Chalfie said, and biologists would be able to see when specific genes turn on or off and where different proteins are produced. He was not able to pursue the idea until Douglas C. Prasher, a scientist then at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, found the G.F.P. gene and shared it with Dr. Chalfie in 1992. Dr. Chalfie said that within a month his group was able to insert the gene into E. coli bacteria. In 1994, Dr. Chalfie and his collaborators reported that they had inserted the protein into six cells of the C. elegans worm. When placed under ultraviolet light, those cells shined green, revealing their location. For many biologists, it was a surprise that inserting the G.F.P. gene was all that needed; many had thought that other jellyfish proteins would be needed to help G.F.P. fold into its light-emitting shape. Dr. Tsien was thinking along similar lines as Dr. Chalfie, also contacting Dr. Prasher. But for the biology experiment he wanted to conduct, he needed two colors of fluorescent proteins. Dr. Tsien started mutating the G.F.P gene and looking at the resulting proteins. Some, he found, glowed blue instead of green. “That was the first evidence you could change the color,” Dr. Tsien said. Other scientists have since expanded the palette, enlisting similar proteins from corals to produce fluorescent reds. The multiple colors allow biologists to track different processes simultaneously. In one experiment, the brain of a mouse was transformed into a kaleidoscope of color by tagging different nerve cells with different fluorescent proteins. The protein has even entered the world of art. In 2000, Eduardo Kac, an artist, displayed a green glowing rabbit named Alba, which he had commissioned a French laboratory to modify genetically with the G.F.P gene. Scientists have also made green-glowing pigs and zebra fish, which they hope will aid research on stem cells and cancer .

Nobel Prizes
Proteins
Genetics and Heredity
Science and Technology


A Water Wonderland, From an Unlikely Source

Abstract: BARAY, Cambodia — The dry season has taken hold here, but water is everywhere. It pours out of sluice gates with the roar of an alpine torrent. Children do backflips into the ubiquitous canals and then pull their friends in with them. Fishermen cast their nets for minnows, and villagers wash their Chinese-made motorcycles. “It’s never dry here,” said Chan Mo, a 36-year-old rice farmer standing on top of a dike. The Khmer Rouge canals have come back to life. By the time the brutal government of Pol Pot was toppled three decades ago, 1.7 million Cambodians were dead from overwork, starvation and disease, and the country was a ruin. But the forced labor of millions of Cambodians left behind something useful — or that is how the current government here sees it. The Khmer Rouge leaders were obsessed with canals, embankments and dams. They presided over hundreds of irrigation projects to revive the country’s glorious but perhaps mythical past of an agrarian wonderland. “There has never been a modern regime that placed more emphasis and resources towards developing irrigation,” wrote Jeffrey Himel, a water resource engineer, in a recent study of Cambodia’s irrigation system. “The Khmer Rouge emptied all cities and towns, and put practically the entire population to work planting rice and digging irrigation dikes and canals.” Some of the canals were poorly designed — “hydraulic nonsense,” says Alain Goffeau, a French irrigation expert with the Asian Development Bank. But many were viable. The Khmer Rouge built around 70 percent of Cambodia’s more than 800 canal networks according to a survey commissioned by the United Nations in the 1990s. Now, across this impoverished nation of 14 million people, the canals are being rebuilt by a government hoping to take advantage of the world’s increasing demand for rice. The Asian Development Bank is helping finance the rehabilitation of a dozen canals, adding to projects financed by Japan and South Korea. “There’s a lot of possibility,” Mr. Goffeau said. For older Cambodians, the canals are a source of ambivalence. Men like Loh Thoeun, a 61-year-old rice farmer, think back to the basketfuls of dirt they carried away hour after hour. He recalled the horrors of the Khmer Rouge — the laborers, hands tied behind their backs, who were “dragged away like cows” and never returned; the Muslim families who were thrown down a nearby well. The foremen of the irrigation project in Baray were killed after the canals and embankments were completed. Mr. Loh Thoeun said he once saw Pol Pot inspect the canals on what he described as a “speedboat.” Mr. Loh Thoeun had a particularly wide view of the Khmer Rouge earthworks: when he was not digging he was assigned to collect the sweet sap from the tops of towering palm trees. All of the work was done by hand here in Baray, a two-hour drive north of the capital, Phnom Penh. There was no talking allowed among laborers. The Khmer Rouge played revolutionary songs and banged hubcaps to encourage the workers. Contemporary photos show huge crowds toiling in the dust. “The earth here is very hard, and when we dug deeper we got to the hardest part — the most compact ground,” said Mr. Loh, sitting in a bamboo shelter beside his rice fields. “We had to hammer at it. It was like cutting down a tree.” For so many Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge years, from 1975 to 1979, were about digging. Villagers and residents of Phnom Penh, who were forced to move to the countryside, were organized in small work units. “I was a slave,” said Ang Mongkol, now the deputy director general of the Interior Ministry who was a law student when the Khmer Rouge came to power and was assigned to haul dirt. Mr. Ang Mongkol is leading an experimental project that uses water from the canal to irrigate fields of hybrid rice varieties that promise to yield four times as much as the variety traditionally grown here. Because only about 20 percent of Cambodia’s fields are irrigated, its rice farmers harvest on average half of Vietnam’s yields and one-third of China’s. The irrigation system in Baray, which is fed from water diverted from the nearby Chinit River, functioned for several years after the Khmer Rouge were forced out. But in the mid-1980s it fell into disrepair and the canals often went dry. It was only in 2005 that the government began rebuilding it. Today, the local municipality hires a maintenance crew to repair the embankments and keep the water flowing. Mr. Loh Thoeun hopes the canals he built will help double or triple his rice output. “I always recall the past to my children,” Mr. Loh Thoeun said. “I say, ‘We have water from this canal that was built by the people. And many of them died.’ ” Among the current workers on Baray’s canal system is Sim Vy, 48. As a teenager she was also enlisted by the Khmer Rouge to help build the canals here, carrying dirt away on baskets tied to bamboo poles. She was told she was working for national glory but received only watery gruel as recompense. Now she is paid $55 a month. “I prefer working this way,” she said.

Water
Cambodia
Canals
Khmer Rouge
Irrigation
Asian Development Bank


Larry McGuire Builds Up His Austin Enterprise

Abstract: Larry McGuire, Austin’s prolific restaurateur, sits down to lunch at his newest restaurant, Josephine House, in the central Clarksville neighborhood. With impeccably clean hands, he straightens his Rag & Bone shawl-collar cardigan and unfolds a crisp napkin, which he places over his lap. Josephine House opened last month, and its dining room, with whitewashed wood-paneled walls and marble counters, is already packed with neighbors and food aficionados. If Mr. McGuire, 30, is anxious about his restaurant’s reception, he does not show it. He glances occasionally at a waiter delivering fresh salads — red grapefruit, orange and avocado in one hand; roasted pears with Texas honey in the other — and at the eager diners. But after opening six restaurants in six years, he wholeheartedly trusts his enterprise, McGuire Moorman Hospitality , now a $25 million company with more than 400 employees. Mr. McGuire has wanted to work in the food industry since he was a teenager growing up in the Travis Heights neighborhood of Austin. “He was determined,” says Lou Lambert, the chef and author of “Big Ranch, Big City.” “At 16, he walked into Liberty Pie and said: ‘I want a job. I want to cook.’ ” At 24, Mr. McGuire and Mr. Lambert opened Lamberts Downtown Barbecue in the Second Street district of Austin, now a booming area that is also the home of the Moody Theater and a W Hotel. With a concept — fancy barbecue — Lamberts was part of a restaurant revolution in Austin, incorporating great design, excellent service and food that joined the city’s music and art scenes in luring visitors from the East and West Coasts. It was there that Mr. McGuire began to develop a team, mostly hip young adults who might look the part at a successful Silicon Valley start-up. Tom Moorman, who was a stagiaire, or intern, at the Montreal restaurant Toqué before becoming a head chef in the Lamberts kitchen, is Mr. McGuire’s partner. (Mr. Moorman is not as well known as Mr. McGuire and likes it that way.) Both Joe Holm, now McGuire Moorman’s project manager and designer, and Ryan Smith, the creative director, started as waiters at Lamberts. Image Larry McGuire, an Austin restaurateur, opened his newest place, Josephine House, last month. Credit Matt Rainwaters The five restaurants that Mr. McGuire subsequently opened throughout central Austin were inspired by their respective neighborhoods and have spurred their growth. Each has a distinct concept, cuisine and atmosphere, but they all share a laid-back sophistication. Elizabeth Street Café in South Austin, for example, takes everyday French and Vietnamese foods — pho, banh mi, croissants and macarons — and elevates them with stylish packaging. The restaurant has turquoise leather stools and playful floral wallpaper. Tables are topped with vintage silverware and colorful Chinese soup spoons. At Clark’s Oyster Bar, an East Coast-influenced seafood restaurant, a clean-lined nautical theme plays out through details like original shiplap walls, waiters in Sperry Top-Siders and a striped yellow awning printed with the restaurant’s geographical coordinates. Mr. McGuire has the last word on every decision. “The mark of a good restaurateur is someone who understands the individual pieces of a restaurant, from the service to the food, uniforms and music, and appreciates how they interrelate,” Mr. Lambert said. “Larry has that gift.” McGuire Moorman is working on the second part of Josephine House, the restaurant Jeffrey’s, which will open in April. “This is Larry’s baby,” Mr. Moorman says. “It has special meaning to him since he grew up here.” Jeffrey’s originally opened in 1975 under Jeffrey Weinberger and Ron and Peggy Weiss (they are still co-owners of the project) and is steeped in Austin history. It has been host to celebrities and politicians, including Laura and George W. Bush. The new Jeffrey’s will not be politically inclined, but it will continue as a fine dining restaurant, updated.It has not always been easy to work on a project that is so close to the city’s heart. “Everyone asks me if we’re bringing back the fried oysters and Johnny Guffey,” Mr. McGuire said, referring to a veteran waiter. “Guffey is coming back, but the oysters are still under consideration.” The new concept will honor the old Jeffrey’s, though substantial changes have been made. The Austin architectural firm Clayton & Little gutted most of the building. The new interior will include polished plaster walls and local sycamore paneling by Vintage Material Supply, an Austin company. Music played on records, beverage carts carrying martinis and waiters dressed in silky smoking jackets and oxford lace-up shoes are also part of the master plan. “Think ‘The Great Gatsby’ meets ‘The Royal Tenenbaums,’ ” said Mr. Smith, the creative director. Otherwise, décor will be toned down to let plates like wood-grilled lobster thermidor and dry-aged Texas beef shine as brightly as the new neon sign on the building’s exterior. Change may be inevitable, but it can be graceful, something that Mr. McGuire is trying to demonstrate one plate of oysters, one Nakashima chair and one seersucker suit at a time.


Doctors in Tucson Say Giffords Will Survive Shooting

Abstract: TUCSON — Just three days after a bullet passed through Representative Gabrielle Giffords ’s brain, and one day before the president was scheduled to come here to address the shooting rampage in which she was wounded, doctors said Tuesday that Ms. Giffords’s chances of survival were certain. She is able to breathe on her own, although she remains on a ventilator as a precaution. What her recovery will look like, however, and how long it will take remain unclear. “She has a 101 percent chance of survival,” said Dr. Peter Rhee the director of medical trauma at the University Medical Center, where Ms. Giffords is being treated. “I can’t tell whether she’s going to be in a vegetative state. I hope that she’s not and I don’t think she will be in a vegetative state, but I know that she’s not going to die.” President Obama will deliver a speech here Wednesday evening at a memorial service for the victims of the attack. His aides said he would focus on the theme of service to country and avoid the debate about whether the state’s political climate might have played a role in the tragedy. Instead, Mr. Obama, who was still working with his speechwriters on Tuesday, will call for unity among Americans, while trying to hold up the lives of the victims, including their service to government, as an example to all Americans. He will share some anecdotes about the victims from private phone calls he has made to the families, aides said. Meanwhile, across Tucson, there was a flurry of efforts to address the psychological effects of Saturday morning’s shootings, which left six dead and 14 wounded. Two churches held memorial services Tuesday night, drawing large crowds. In Phoenix, the State Legislature quickly passed an emergency law to block a controversial church that protests outside funerals from getting too close to the services planned in Tucson. The measure, which keeps protesters 300 feet back from funerals, is intended to head off members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, who have praised the shooting and plan to picket the funeral on Thursday of Christina Green, a 9-year-old victim, and a service on Friday for Judge John M. Roll of Federal District Court. “I was physically sick when I heard this,” said State Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who sponsored the measure. “Then I decided to do something. Nothing happens in one day in politics, but this did. This tragedy is nonpartisan. It’s human.” Community volunteers were mobilizing to plan their own street-side memorial service to counter the protesters, with some planning to wear angel wings. At the hospital, Ms. Giffords’s doctors said the outcome could have been far worse. They said she had done remarkably well so far. But they cautioned that there was little more they could do medically to help her improve. Over the last several days, Ms. Giffords has repeatedly given nonverbal responses to her doctors’ commands, they said, and CAT scan X-rays have shown that there is no swelling, which continues to be the most serious threat. So far, doctors said, she has shown only slight movement on the right side of her body, raising questions about her functional neurological status. Doctors again declined to give some specific details about Ms. Giffords. “This is the phase of the care where it’s so much up to her,” said Dr. G. Michael Lemole Jr., the hospital’s chief of neurosurgery, during a news conference Tuesday morning. “As long as we don’t backslide and as long as she holds her own, that’s good. That keeps us hopeful. But we have to play this really according to her timeline, not ours.” Dr. Lemole said Ms. Giffords would remain connected to a ventilator as a precaution, to prevent pneumonia or infections in her windpipe. But because she cannot talk it is so far not possible for doctors to assess more complex brain functions. For the last three days, Ms. Giffords has repeatedly gripped hands or flashed a finger after doctors prompted her. Dr. Rhee said Ms. Giffords appeared to be responding without prompts now, repeatedly flashing a thumbs-up at doctors and her husband, Mark Kelly, an astronaut. “She has no right to look this good, and she does,” Dr. Lemole said. Five other victims remained in the hospital on Tuesday, including Suzi Hileman, who had taken 9-year-old Christina Green to the event Saturday. Ms. Hileman is expected to recover from at least three gunshot wounds and a shattered hip. The most difficult path ahead will be grappling with the emotions, and guilt, over Christina’s death, her husband, Bill Hileman, said Tuesday. Several times in the last three days, Mr. Hileman said, his wife has screamed “Christina! Christina!” as though she were having a flashback. “She keeps talking about how they had this incredibly tight grip on each other” when the shots began, he said. “She told me that they were almost breaking each other’s hands.”

Giffords Gabrielle
Murders and Attempted Murders
Tucson Shooting (2011)


Broadway’s Marketing Turns Interactive

Abstract: THE bright lights of Broadway draw millions of people to New York’s theater district every year, but having a celebrity’s name on a marquee does not always guarantee a full house. So to fill more seats, theater producers are turning to MySpace to make a few new friends. Broadway, like every other segment of the entertainment industry, has been using the Internet as a marketing tool for years. The Web sites of Broadway shows typically come with the requisite biographies of the cast and creative team, critics’ blurbs and a link to buy tickets online. Lately, however, producers have been stepping up their online presence in an effort to spread word of mouth among Internet users, a concept known as viral marketing. Broadway productions now offer pages on social networking sites. For example, the MySpace page for “In the Heights” features a blog with updates about the show, widgets that fans can embed in their own MySpace pages, a jukebox that plays songs from the show and several music videos from the cast. These include a parody of the song “Umbrella” called “Abuela,” and a spoof of “High School Musical” that features Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s lyricist and star, singing and dancing in Central Park. Mr. Miranda has created several videos for the Web, including a series called “Legally Brown,” which lampooned the MTV reality show that chose a replacement for the lead in “Legally Blonde.” In the series, which is at legallybrownonbroadway.com and on YouTube, Broadway stars like Matthew Morrison of “South Pacific,” Allison Janney of the coming “9 to 5: The Musical” and Cheyenne Jackson of “Xanadu” competed to become the next piragua vendor on “In the Heights.” “It’s another creative outlet,” said Mr. Miranda, who has posted 16 videos on YouTube for his show since it opened Off Broadway. Mr. Miranda said he was able to attract such high-profile names to the “Legally Brown” project after “In the Heights” won the Tony Award for best musical. “I call ‘Legally Brown’ the most decadent use of post-Tony capital ever,” he said, explaining that he reached out to people he met on the awards show circuit to satirize their celebrity status in his videos. “We’re surrounded by some of the brightest talents around in the theater community, and it’s a shame not to take advantage of that.” But Broadway is still feeling its way through uncharted territory. “It’s been more about casting the net and seeing what works,” said Sara Fitzpatrick, the director for the interactive division at SpotCo, an advertising agency based in New York that has worked on campaigns for “In the Heights,” “Shrek the Musical” and “Chicago.” “We’re still in the newer stages.” Ms. Fitzpatrick says the trend to use viral marketing techniques in theater has been growing in the last year, and it is becoming an important part of a marketing campaign, which also includes traditional elements like newspaper, television and outdoor advertising. “Shrek the Musical” has its own social network at www.shrekster.com , a Web site with profiles of the show’s characters and the latest news from the kingdom of Duloc. Giving theater fans access to a show through the Internet helps generate interest and sell tickets. Paid attendance for the 2007-8 season dipped 0.2 percent, to 12.27 million, from the previous season, according to the Broadway League, an industry trade association. The decline was attributed mainly to a stagehands’ strike that shut down most Broadway productions for 19 days in November 2007. There is anecdotal evidence that viral marketing draws theatergoers from all over the world. Mr. Miranda said that he had met fans at the stage door after a performance who told him that his videos inspired them to come to New York to see his show. Some fans even pay tribute with their own videos. After seeing a video on YouTube of a 10-year-old from New Orleans rapping songs from “In the Heights,” Mr. Miranda said he was impressed. “He had never seen the show; he just watched clips online,” Mr. Miranda said. “He did this on his own, just because he loved the show.” When he found out the boy, Nicholas Dayton, and his mother were coming to New York to see the show, Mr. Miranda invited them backstage after a performance to film a video of Nicholas singing the show’s finale with the cast. Kevin McCollum, a producer of shows like “Avenue Q,” “In the Heights,” “Rent” and “[title of show],” said he was a strong advocate of using the Internet to reach a niche audience that might not be accessible through traditional marketing. His theory is that the more people gravitate toward technology, the more they will hunger for human interaction. “Technology is the tool, not the destination,” Mr. McCollum said. “The destination is a live audience.” Marketing agencies are experimenting with ways to benefit from having that live audience gathered to see a show. Situation Interactive, a firm based in New York, used marketing campaigns that incorporated mobile phones for shows like “Blue Man Group” and “Mamma Mia!,” offering audience members a chance to win prizes by sending text messages from their cellphones. For “Hair,” which is headed to Broadway in March, fans will get the chance to text their reviews to the show’s Web site immediately after a performance. This concept, known as mobile marketing, is a natural fit for live entertainment, said Situation Interactive’s president, Damian Bazadona, because people tend to have cellphones with them at all times. “Mobile is entrenched in everything we do,” Mr. Bazadona said. “It’s happening full swing. It’s becoming part of the overall marketing plan.” Situation Interactive experimented with new technology in other campaigns as well. The firm worked with the producers of “Billy Elliot” to create videos that chronicled the rehearsals of the three boys who rotate as the lead character. For “9 to 5: The Musical,” the firm is working on an online game in which players can upload pictures of their bosses for a shooting gallery. The show’s Web site will feature personalized e-cards, featuring the voice of Dolly Parton greeting recipients. To help the producers of “Sunday in the Park With George” build a relationship with theatergoers, Situation Interactive set up a Web site that allowed users to digitally recreate Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” with personalized dots. For “November,” the playwright David Mamet contributed a blog, writing as the play’s lead character, the president of the United States. Fans were invited to participate in online karaoke for “Hairspray” and a digital ticket rush for “Spring Awakening.” “The challenge of marketing is how to target people,” said Mr. McCollum, the producer. Of course, viral marketing is not suited to every show. Some Broadway shows still rely on a more traditional campaign. The trick is to find a balance. “In the theater, there is only one proven marketing technique that works: to generate word of mouth,” Mr. McCollum said. “Everything else is a shot in the dark.”

Theater
Online Advertising
Computers and the Internet
Advertising and Marketing
Social Networking (Internet)


Vague Job Outline Leads to Defining Role With Seahawks

Abstract: PHOENIX — Rocky Seto is the Seattle Seahawks’ defensive passing game coordinator. “Am I actually in charge of the pass game?” Seto said. “No.” This, then, is what Seto does do: He spearheads the tackling tutorials, oversees the scout-team defense, delivers the most creative presentations at Seattle headquarters, instructs the safeties, teaches the cornerbacks, draws on Bruce Lee and the animal kingdom to inculcate turnover-forcing techniques, executes special projects, analyzes third-down and red-zone and two-minute tendencies, advises Coach Pete Carroll, assists the defensive coordinator Dan Quinn on game days and assists everyone else every other day. Seto approaches his job with the narrow focus of a position coach and the macro view of a coordinator, jotting down notes, thoughts and ideas. If he were to list all his responsibilities on a résumé, he would need a second page. “Our detail guy,” cornerback Richard Sherman said. Seto, 38, does most of it out of public view, fulfilling similar functions as other assistants around the league, but with a far vaguer title. Much the way Tom Pratt (Cardinals) is the only pass-rush specialist and Jim Bernhardt (Texans) the only director of football research, Seto is the only defensive passing game coordinator in the league. When offered the position in 2012, a promotion from assisting his former Southern California teammate Kris Richard with the defensive backs, Seto said his duties were somewhat nebulous. So he defined them by filling in the voids, by researching intricate projects, watching game tape and coming up with concepts, synthesizing information for the then-defensive coordinator Gus Bradley. “Sometimes with those titles, you don’t know what you’re getting, but Rocky was very involved,” Bradley, now the Jaguars’ coach, said in a telephone interview. “No one ever felt threatened that he was intruding on their responsibilities. Everyone — players, staff, coaches — really trusted him.” In the Seahawks’ hierarchy, Seto occupies a spot somewhere below Quinn but on the top tier of Carroll’s cabinet: a close confidant and a trusted resource — the keeper of all the records, as Carroll put it. “He’s got all the information,” said Carroll, who retained Seto at U.S.C. after being hired in 2001 and has kept him on staff ever since. “He knows everything we’ve ever done and how we’ve done it.” Seto prepares his presentations, given in front of the entire team, to fit the day’s theme. On Competition Wednesdays, he focuses on situational football and playing smart, and later, he will have cheat sheets and indicators uploaded to players’ iPads. Those demonstrations, however critical, pale to Turnover Thursdays and Fundamental Fridays, when Seto intersperses football cutups with clips of whatever he can find on YouTube or Animal Planet that advance a teaching point. When players lunge to tackle, they lose their balance and cannot regroup quickly. Seto showed the team footage of a mongoose using its feet to elude an attacking cobra. To show the importance of gaining leverage, he pulled video of rams head-butting one another — the lower ram always won. To demonstrate different methods of dislodging the ball, he plumbed the Internet for tape of boxing kangaroos and Bruce Lee knocking an adversary out of a chair with a strike from close range. To remind them of tackling principles, he found film of a snake coiling around its prey and yanking it to the ground. “That’s what we do — wrap the legs and twist to our leverage side and take our prey down,” cornerback DeShawn Shead said. Seto’s impact is felt throughout a defense that allowed the fewest points and yards in the N.F.L. for the second consecutive season, that again forced 20 fumbles. The Seahawks also rank fourth in the league in fewest yards after contact, according to Pro Football Focus, a statistic that reflects how players have taken to the team’s innovative approach to tackling. Players are taught to track the near hip of the ball carrier, lead with their near shoulder and strike somewhere between the knee and thigh — a method that allows them to hit just as hard without putting their heads at as much risk. According to the Seahawks’ internal studies, the details of which Seto said he could not share for legal reasons, occurrences of head injuries have decreased sharply. Carroll adopted this manner toward the end of his tenure at U.S.C., his staff refining it every year, but it was not until a football coach at the University of Birmingham, in England, visited the Seahawks’ facility that Seto had a revelation. After listening to Seto explain the team’s tackling philosophy, the coach said, “Oh, you mean a rugby tackle?” “We wondered, can we do the same thing with the face mask on?” Seto said. They could. Seto culled clip upon clip of rugby matches and, during training camp in 2011 — while still a defensive backs assistant — started cultivating a relationship with Serevi Rugby, an organization headquartered in Seattle. He became the conduit between the Seahawks and Serevi, applying elements of rugby to football. “The whole unit is interested in different techniques, in going the three extra inches to do what they do,” said Ross Young, the chief executive at Serevi, “but Rocky’s been the constant.” This is the Seto ethos, and has been ever since he orchestrated an accidental meeting with John Robinson, then the U.S.C. coach, at Heritage Hall nearly two decades ago, bumping into him in a corridor so he could tell Robinson in person that he hoped to walk on at U.S.C. His plea granted, Seto, an undersize inside linebacker, became the fieriest player his teammate Chad Morton said he had ever played with. “He went full speed, whether you liked it or not,” said Morton, the Seahawks’ assistant special-teams coach. “If he was on scout team, he was going to hit you. He didn’t care if it was walk-through or the end of the week. You wanted everybody to go as hard as he does.” With no pro prospects, Seto intended to attend graduate school at U.S.C. for physical therapy — he even sent in his deposit — until the coach at the time, Paul Hackett, offered him a job as a volunteer assistant. So began his foray into coaching, 16 seasons of working with safeties and linebackers, of quality control, of running defenses. And of coordinating passing games on defense, a job he never knew existed. But, like the rest of the Seahawks, he is sure glad it does.

Seahawks
Rocky Seto
Coaches
Pete Carroll
Football


Mets Maintaining a Close Eye on Arms, Injured and Otherwise

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — The durability of starting pitchers remains one of baseball’s most nebulous issues. For the Mets, the topic on Monday arose from all angles, from all parts of the country. In New York, the left-hander Jon Niese, who has been recovering from a rotator cuff injury, was told that he could resume throwing and expect to rejoin the team this season. In St. Louis, the right-hander Shaun Marcum’s status remained in flux after his own medical examination. Marcum will not make his next start, but with a final diagnosis pending on his balky arm, his future otherwise remained murky. The most immediate and compelling discussions, though, involved Matt Harvey, the Mets’ star right-hander, who over the weekend was named to the National League All-Star team. Harvey was scheduled to make two more starts before the All-Star Game — to be played July 16 at Citi Field — and questions have lingered about how he might be used. For the most part, Manager Terry Collins deflected questions about Harvey, who started Monday night against the San Francisco Giants, saying that he had not spoken to anyone about possible plans for Harvey and that his readiness for the All-Star Game would be decided after his final scheduled start on Saturday. Collins said he did not usually harbor fears about sending his pitchers to the All-Star Game. Still, pitchers are handled delicately these days — particularly highly valued ones like Harvey — and Collins acknowledged a heavy workload Saturday could preclude him from Tuesday’s game. “I’d only have an issue if I don’t think he’s ready to pitch in a game like that,” he said. But he added, “If there’s a question whether or not he’s going to be used, if Saturday night he throws 115 or 120, he probably won’t pitch Tuesday.” But summing up the premature nature of the conversation, Collins said: “I haven’t had one discussion with anybody. I don’t know where Matt stands.” The discussions, however preliminary, carried additional weight Monday because the Giants’ Bruce Bochy will manage the N.L. team. Bochy revealed that he was already leaning toward a particular pitcher to start the game, but that he was not at liberty to share his thinking. Regarding Harvey, he said: “This kid’s had a special year. I know he’s from New York. All that’s been discussed. But I’ll just leave it at that right now.” While these hypotheticals were being discussed, Niese was on his way to the Mets’ complex in Port St. Lucie, Fla., to begin a throwing program — a pleasant surprise in what once seemed a far gloomier situation. Last month, Niese was told he had a partial tear in his rotator cuff. He received a follow-up magnetic resonance imaging test Monday that revealed a less dire prognosis, according to John Ricco, the team’s assistant general manager. The first test showed inflammation and fluid buildup that the doctor believed indicated a tear in the tendon, Ricco said. The second scan, which was easier to read because the inflammation and fluid had subsided, showed something more akin to the “normal wear and tear” any pitcher might have, he said. “The other part of it is Jon is asymptomatic on all of his tests, so he’s feeling great and looking forward to getting going again,” Ricco said. The Mets had less to share about Marcum, who saw a specialist in St. Louis to address the tingling in his hand that he felt during his last start and on and off earlier this season. Ricco said the team would be able to share more details about the diagnosis Tuesday, but a stint on the disabled list seemed a possibility, as the right-hander Gonzalez Germen was summoned from Class AAA to join the Mets in San Francisco. Germen, however, has not been officially added to the roster. At the very least, Marcum will not make another start before the All-Star break. His removal from the rotation allowed Harvey to be moved up to Saturday, a game that may be closely watched by Mets fans curious and concerned about the ace. As the ordeals of Niese and Marcum reiterated, a pitcher’s health can be a delicate thing. INSIDE PITCH David Wright, the N.L. captain this year for the Home Run Derby, selected Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals and Carlos Gonzalez and Michael Cuddyer of the Colorado Rockies to complete his team for the July 15 competition. Wright said Monday that he picked Harper because he won baseball’s fan poll and Gonzalez because he was the home run leader when his selection was due. He joked that Cuddyer, a close friend from the same hometown, was his “Ryder Cup captain’s pick.”

Mets
Baseball
Jon Niese
Shaun Marcum
Matt Harvey
David Wright
Bryce Harper
Carlos Gonzalez


No Strangers to the Cold, Voters Now Feel the Heat

Abstract: HILLSBOROUGH, N.H. — People here treasure their rugged surroundings and relative isolation in the hills of southwestern New Hampshire . They welcome winter, and consider their distance from urban sprawl a clear advantage. But for many, the benefits of living in rural New Hampshire have also become burdens. Gasoline and home heating oil are no longer comfortably affordable, especially for the roughly 60 percent of residents who commute more than 25 miles to work. Of about two dozen people interviewed here in late December and early January, nearly all said energy policy was a top concern as they looked to the presidential primary on Tuesday. Some said they had bought wood-pellet stoves to supplement oil heat; others said they had looked into installing solar panels or even living off the grid, with no reliance on public utilities. “Oil affects everything,” said Paris Wells, who owns the Central Square Ice Cream Shoppe on Main Street. “We need someone in office who’s going to look seriously at alternative power of some form.” Mr. Wells said he was spending more than $1,000 a month on heating oil in winter, which, judging from the estimates others gave, is within the norm. Because of its old housing stock, New Hampshire is more dependent on oil heat than any state except Maine and Vermont, according to the Energy Information Administration, with 58 percent of homes using it. The average national cost of home heating oil was $3.34 a gallon last month, up from $2.44 a year earlier. But despite what many here consider a rising crisis regarding dependence on foreign oil, most said the presidential candidates had disappointingly vague approaches to energy policy or, worse, little interest in the subject. Some, like Mr. Wells, spoke admiringly of Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat and former energy secretary, who they said seemed more passionate than most candidates about reducing oil prices and consumption. Mr. Richardson is a long shot — he won only 2 percent of the vote in Iowa’s caucuses last week — but some of the other candidates have focused more on gas and heating oil prices in the last few days. In the Republican debate on Saturday, most candidates said they wanted to wean the nation from dependence on foreign oil and to expand domestic energy sources, like nuclear power. In the Democratic debate that followed, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said energy costs for families in New Hampshire had tripled during President Bush’s tenure and called for more heating assistance for poor families. Still, voters here said that they doubted the winners would make energy policy a priority if elected, and that polarizing subjects like the war in Iraq and illegal immigration had largely eclipsed the kitchen-table economic issues that affected daily living here. “I remember when the center of a presidential campaign was a promise to take care of people in our country,” said Norma Hubbard, who runs the local food pantry and feeds about 100 families a week. “That is not there for most of the candidates now.” Christopher Duncklee, a longtime resident who raises sheep and grows vegetables on a small farm, said he liked Mr. Richardson for his energy proposals but could not support him after his poor showing in Iowa. Mr. Duncklee normally votes Republican, he said, but is considering Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a Democrat, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Republican. Mr. Duncklee predicted that the Iowa results — especially the victory of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a favorite of evangelical Christians, on the Republican side — would not sway many New Hampshire voters. “People here do not think religion belongs in politics,” he said. Almost everyone interviewed said they were not only undecided as the primary drew near, but also considering candidates from both parties. Surprisingly few said they liked Mrs. Clinton or former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who were long perceived as front-runners in their respective parties here but face steeper challenges after losing in Iowa. Forty-two percent of the state’s registered voters are independents, and they are famous for waiting until the last minute to choose a candidate. Like other small New Hampshire towns once dominated by families who lived there for generations, Hillsborough, with about 5,700 residents, has seen an influx of people from Massachusetts and other points south. Drawn by lower taxes and housing costs, they came willing to commute to cities with plentiful jobs. But high gas prices are making the tradeoff less worthwhile. “People buy houses out here and commute a long way,” said Carl Goodman, who owns a small electrical contracting company in Hillsborough, “but then they find the cost of the commute and everything else is too much.” Mr. Goodman, an independent, said he would vote for former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a Democrat who placed second in Iowa, after Mr. Obama. “I just think Obama is a little wet behind the ears in the political system,” he said, “and Hillary has as many enemies as supporters. I think Edwards is the most electable nationwide.” Among cities and towns with more than 5,000 people, Hillsborough had New Hampshire’s highest per-capita rate of foreclosure auction notices last year, according to the Warren Group, a real estate research company in Boston. While the state’s overall foreclosure rate trailed the national rate in recent years, it rose sharply in 2007, almost catching up. In November, the number of foreclosures statewide was up 68 percent from a year earlier. Sara Randall, a bartender at Tooky Mills Pub, said pocketbook issues loomed largest for her, especially the cost of health care. A diabetic who spends about $400 a month on health insurance, she is torn between Mrs. Clinton and Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a libertarian-leaning Republican. “They both have a lot to say about health care,” Ms. Randall said, “so they are who I’m focusing on.” Glenn Mathison, an apprentice electrician who said he had been out of work for two years, said that he liked Mr. McCain’s position on the Iraq war but that no candidate stood out in terms of improving the economy. For people like Mr. Mathison who want to work in Hillsborough and the immediate surroundings, options are few. A century ago, Contoocook Mills, which made hosiery, provided steady work. Now the biggest employer is Osram Sylvania, a lighting manufacturer that employs about 700. Some residents, like Pete Colbath, drift from job to job. He worked in a real estate office, a video store and a fireworks store before opening a drive-through coffee shop, Java Pete’s, in Hillsborough last year. “Business is not growing fast,” said Mr. Colbath, who added that he would probably support Mr. Huckabee in the primary. “The price of fuel and heating oil, that’s making decisions for a lot of people.” With unleaded gasoline averaging $3.05 a gallon in New Hampshire — 2 cents lower than the national average but up from $2.41 a year ago — several people here said bringing more shops and other businesses to town was crucial. A Wal-Mart Supercenter was to open in Hillsborough, but the company changed its mind in the fall. “The people who have to drive to Concord or Keene to buy shoes for their kids are really disappointed,” said Kim Wells, who owns a gift shop here with her husband. Mrs. Wells, the mother of Paris Wells, said she was an independent who liked Mr. Richardson, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain. Her son praised Mr. McCain for realizing “we need to do something” to curb oil consumption, but he said he was not counting on the next president to make radical changes in energy policy. Instead, Mr. Wells said he intended to cut his own energy costs. “It’s going to get tougher and tougher,” he said. “I’m buying stuff now so when I retire, I can live totally off the grid.” Mrs. Hubbard, who said she would vote for Mr. Edwards, Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain because they seemed compassionate, wondered aloud why the candidates were not talking more about the need to conserve. “We need leadership — someone to say, ‘This is what we need to be doing, so let’s all pull together,’” she said. “I’m just not seeing it.”

New Hampshire
Presidential Election of 2008
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)


Video Feature: Apps, Like Elves, Help Make the Season Bright

Abstract: THE holidays are approaching, meaning gifts, budgeting, parties and other events — in other words, a hefty dose of stress. Fortunately, there are many apps that may help restore some holiday cheer. One excellent way to entertain friends and get yourself into the holiday mood is to download the ElfYourself app. To use it, snap photos of as many as five faces — yours and those of friends and family. Then center the faces in a special frame, add a custom text message and press “O.K.” ElfYourself pastes the faces onto animated dancing elves in a short, funny musical cartoon — for example, a Christmas countdown song that includes kittens popping up in unexpected places. You can share the resulting video on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere. Be prepared for giggles. The app is free on iOS and Android , but comes with just one video — the kitten one. Unlocking more video themes costs $6, for which you get different music styles like hip-hop or an “Oh Hanukkah ” video. Next up: Tackling the task of choosing gifts. If you’re like me, you may struggle for great ideas. But one of the planet’s finest digital brains is available to help via the IBM Watson Trend app. IBM has set its intelligent Watson machine scanning through thousands of social media websites, shopping sites, review sites and more to work out what gifts people are talking about buying this year. The app is an interface into Watson’s findings, where you can see top trending gifts or find out more about different categories like toys. Tapping on an item in the list will take you to detailed information, including a graph of how popular Watson thinks the item is, related quotes and images that have been shared online. Watson also tries to show products that are rising as trends. The app is easy to use and is free on iOS . For organizing your gift selection, check out the Santa’s Bag app. Santa’s Bag is my favorite gift organizer app because its design is cheerful, modern and bright, and it’s flexible. When you’ve thought of a gift for someone, you simply enter details into the app including price, the store you’re planning on buying the item in and the recipient’s data. Once all the information is entered, you can view your holiday gift list sorted in different ways, such as by recipient or by store. There’s a useful summary page that details your budget breakdown and tells you how many items on your list you have already purchased. Santa’s Bag is free and is iOS only . While it’s not the most full-featured list-making app available, it does the job for the holiday season. Another iOS-only option with similar functions, plus a few extras like being able to keep track of delivery and order numbers, is Gift Planner by Andrew Milham. This app also has an Apple Watch extension that shows coming events like birthdays. Because Gift Planner is not themed for Christmas, it can be useful throughout the year. The app is free but costs $2 to use all of its features. If you’re an Android user, check out Christmas Gift List by engApps, which is a free gift planning app that has many of the same features that Santa’s Bag offers, along with a similarly cheerful and modern interface. This is also the time of year I fire up the famous NORAD Tracks Santa app, which purportedly uses advanced defense technology to spot and show where Santa is as he speeds round the globe delivering presents. The app is sure to thrill children with its cute “real time” animations on Christmas Eve. It’s also useful before the holidays as a countdown timer. The app is free on iOS , Android and Windows 10 . Google has a similar Santa tracking app for iOS and Android if you’re not a fan of NORAD’s program. Lastly, there are many charity apps through which people can donate money to those less fortunate this holiday season. That includes Google’s One Today, which is a kind of social network for making small charitable gifts. The app is free on Android and iOS , though for Apple devices you will need to set up a payment process through Google’s systems. Quick Call The popular “to-do list” app Wunderlist has undergone a big overhaul on iOS. The app’s interface has been simplified and cleaned up so it’s easier to see what tasks you have planned. The developers have also added support for 3D Touch on the latest iPhones, which makes it easier to control to-do items on your lists. Wunderlist is free .

Holidays
Gifts
Christmas
Android
Mobile Apps
Nexus One


Track’s New Power Couple Prove It With Medals

Abstract: MOSCOW — One month after their marriage, Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton have two shiny new wedding presents. Eaton, who holds the Olympic title and the world record in the decathlon, won his gold medal in the world track and field championships Sunday night. Early the next morning, he made a dash for the bus from the hotel to Luzhniki Stadium and assumed the role of cheerleader as Theisen-Eaton competed for Canada in the first day of the heptathlon. “I think it’s more nerve-racking to watch, because it’s out of your control,” Eaton said. Theisen-Eaton, just 11th in last year’s Olympic heptathlon, was feeling edgy herself, well aware that with the top five finishers from the London Games missing from this competition, she had a golden opportunity to win her first medal in a global championships. In the end, she settled, with a regret or two, for silver on Tuesday, and the newlyweds were soon embracing on the edge of the track. “I always watched him,” Theisen-Eaton said, “and I watch him get his medals, and I say: ‘I wonder what it feels like? I can only imagine.’ So I’m getting a little taste of it.” Track and field has not seen anything quite like the Eatons. At the 1952 Olympics, the Czech Emil Zatopek, one of the best distance runners in history, won gold in the 5,000 meters. On the same day, his wife , Dana Zatopkova, took gold in the javelin. Eaton and Theisen-Eaton have yet to manage that sort of golden double. (Ganna Melnichenko of Ukraine won the gold medal in the heptathlon with 6,586 points, with Theisen-Eaton second with 6,530 and Dafne Schippers of the Netherlands third with 6,477.) What makes the couple distinct is that they excel in the same family of events, known as the multis in the track-and-field world. Though they represent different nations — Eaton competes for the United States — both attended the University of Oregon and have trained together exclusively under the veteran coach Harry Marra since November 2009. Image Mary Cain, far left, of Bronxville, N.Y., in a 1,500-meter semifinal. She qualified for the final. Credit Christian Petersen/Getty Images Their medals in Moscow were quite a birthday present for Marra, who turned 66 on Tuesday. “It was an amazing four days; I’m happy for both of them,” Marra said. “They are 25 and 24, gold and silver. I was pumping gas back then. I wasn’t winning medals.” Eaton and Theisen-Eaton met when he was a freshman at Oregon and she was a high school senior on a recruiting visit. They met again at the 2007 Pan American Junior Athletics Championships in São Paolo, Brazil, where Theisen informed Eaton that she had signed with Oregon. “It was track and field that brought us together,” Eaton said. Training in Eugene, Ore., brings them together often and sometimes the track-and-field conversation extends well past working hours as they advise and analyze each other. “We have sat down and watched some YouTube videos and videos of ourselves before and gone back and forth,” Eaton said. “We tend to disagree a lot on that stuff, so I don’t know if it’s productive or not. It’s just weird because we’re both good at different things.” Marra, who had never coached a couple, ended up being the man who married them on July 13 in Eugene. “They said, ‘We think you know us better than anybody else, and we want you to be the guy who marries us,’ ” Marra said. “I went, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ and I said, ‘If the nuns I went to grade school with ever heard this, they’d be spinning in their graves because I was nothing but a cut-up.’ ” But Marra ultimately accepted the offer. “Ashton came over one day,” Marra said. “I went online, and we got ordained in 30 minutes. Wham. Did it. It was great.” Plenty of other great work was done on Tuesday at Luzhniki Stadium, the fourth night of competition here and the first night when the crowd was big and boisterous enough to give the impression that these were indeed a world championships. The reason for the enthusiasm? Yelena Isinbayeva, the pole-vaulter who remains the biggest star in Russian track and field. After dominating the discipline for years, setting world record after world record, she has been eclipsed in the major championships since 2008. But in what she said could be her final major competition, she rose to the occasion once more, winning the gold medal with a best effort of 16 feet and then missing on three world-record attempts at 16 feet 8 inches. Her rival Jennifer Suhr, the American who won the Olympic gold medal last year, was second at 15-10. It was the third world outdoor title for Isinbayeva, who also won Olympic gold medals in 2004 and in 2008. But it was her first victory at the world championships since 2007, and she now plans to take a potentially permanent break from the sport to focus on having a family, although she may return for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Image LaShawn Merritt winning the gold medal in the 400 meters in 43.74 seconds, 0.66 of a second ahead of his American teammate Tony McQuay. Credit Cameron Spencer/Getty Images “I’m not retiring for the moment; I just take the break to have a baby,” she said at a news conference that ended after midnight. “I’d like to have a baby next year, and then I will try to come back for Rio.” Other winners on Tuesday included Mohammed Aman of Ethiopia in the men’s 800 in 1 minute 43.31 seconds and La-Shawn Merritt of the United States in the men’s 400 in 43.74 seconds. Mary Cain, a 17-year-old phenomenon from Bronxville, N.Y., qualified for the women’s 1,500 final. With the Kenyan world-record holder David Rudisha missing, the 800 was an opportunity for the rest of the field, and Nick Symmonds of the United States took the silver medal behind Aman. He then spoke out against Russia’s antigay law, which came into force in June. “As much as I can speak out about it, I believe that all humans deserve equality as however God made them,” he said in remarks reported by R-Sport, a Russian site. “Whether you’re gay, straight, black, white, we all deserve the same rights. If there’s anything I can do to champion the cause and further it, I will, shy of getting arrested.” In the men’s 400, Merritt, beaten by Kirani James of Grenada in the last world championships and Olympics, was an irresistible force. His time, the season’s best, was 0.66 of a second faster than the 44.40 that his American teammate Tony McQuay ran to get the silver medal. James faded to a surprising seventh in 44.99. Despite all of Eaton and Theisen-Eaton’s collective ambition, they nearly did not make it here together. In March, while they were training with Marra in Santa Barbara, Calif., there was a miscommunication, and Ashton walked downfield to retrieve his javelins while his fiancée had one javelin left to throw. “I was telling her something, ‘You’ve got to get your arm up’ or something, and Ashton now has walked ahead,” Marra said. “And Brianne never pulls to the left, never. Always if she pulls, it goes off to the right. So she threw and as she threw it’s going right at Ashton.” It was heading, in fact, straight for his upper back. “I panicked, froze like a deer in the headlights and thought, ‘How are we going to rehab that?’ ” Marra said. “It looked like it was going right through his shoulder. And she screamed bloody murder at the top of her lungs.” Ashton instinctively twisted away, just in time. “I call it the limbo in my generation, but they call it the matrix,” Marra said. The javelin grazed Eaton’s face. “It skinned the top of his lip and made him bleed,” Theisen-Eaton said. “It was pretty traumatic.” She added: “I could see him shaking, but I was, like, vibrating. My eyes weren’t even focusing right. He came over and was like, ‘I’m fine.’ ” Recalling the story on Tuesday, the medals safely secured, Marra still looked a little shaky himself.

Ashton Eaton
Brianne Theisen-Eaton
Track and field
Canada
US


Democratic Convention Day 1 Takeaways: Michelle Obama Steals the Show

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — The Democratic National Convention began with the ouster of the party’s chairwoman, protests in the streets, disruptions on the convention floor and a torrential thunderstorm. Facing the prospect of chaos, an array of party leaders — including Michelle Obama , and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — moved to heal the breach in the party, seemingly with some success. Our takeaways: It’s Michelle Obama’s party Image Michelle Obama speaking on Monday, the first day of the Democratic convention. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times It’s Hillary Clinton’s convention, and it was Mr. Sanders’s big night. But the unquestioned star of the program on Monday was Mrs. Obama, who used her prime-time speech to describe an optimistic, confident view of American social progress, and to embrace Mrs. Clinton as the natural heir to the Obama presidency. She praised Mrs. Clinton as a big-hearted public servant and as a political survivor, and rebuked Donald J. Trump as a bully without mentioning his name. Most important, Mrs. Obama wrapped her speech in a sunny narrative about what the country has accomplished during her husband’s presidency, celebrating the image of a black family in the White House and casting Mrs. Clinton’s election as a similar milestone. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great,” Mrs. Obama said. “This, right now, is the greatest country on earth.” It was a strikingly positive speech in a bitter election season, and a vivid rendition of the political worldview that lifted the Obamas to the top of the party in the first place. The powerful response Mrs. Obama drew from the crowd showed just how formidable she is likely to be on the campaign trail. The elected left embraces Clinton Mrs. Clinton needed a bear hug from liberal Democrats on Monday night to have any chance of easing tensions with supporters of Mr. Sanders, who entered the convention in a state of rage over the Democratic National Committee’s meddling role in the 2016 primaries. And a bear hug is what Mrs. Clinton got, most crucially from Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. In a speech that celebrated his own victories at length, Mr. Sanders also gave Mrs. Clinton his full-throated backing. “Hillary Clinton,” he said, “must become the next president of the United States.” Ms. Warren delivered a string of sharp attacks on Mr. Trump, while praising Mrs. Clinton’s liberal agenda and urging Democrats to “work our hearts out to make Hillary Clinton the next president.” Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, reminisced about Sanders rallies in his state, and said it was time to join forces with Mrs. Clinton. Still, those testimonials are unlikely to placate the most agitated demonstrators in the streets of Philadelphia. The question now is how many of Mr. Sanders’s supporters are equally implacable. Democrats have a protester problem At first, the program appeared headed for disaster, as pro-Sanders activists shouted angrily at even liberal Democrats like Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland and Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon. The party barely averted an evening of unsightly clashes. By the start of the prime-time hours the rowdy heckling had largely abated — but not entirely. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, the Senate’s only black Democrat, was interrupted by chants of “Black lives matter.” Some attendees taunted Ms. Warren, too, calling out, “We trusted you!” — a reproach for supporting Mrs. Clinton. It’s not clear how big a chunk of Mr. Sanders’s coalition these disruptive voices represent. But their willingness to keep jeering at the party’s top leaders promises to keep cramping the proceedings as the week goes on. Trump plays a supporting role The unifying theme at the Republican convention last week was fierce opposition to Mrs. Clinton. Her name was a rallying cry starting on the first night, as a jumbled collection of speakers railed against familiar offenses: her use of a private email server, her handling of the Benghazi, Libya, attack and more. Mr. Trump has not yet taken such a central place in the Democratic convention. He was the target of attacks from a number of speakers, especially Ms. Warren, but anti-Trump riffs from other speakers were not surefire crowd pleasers, and the mere utterance of his name did not seem to electrify the audience. That may change as the week progresses, and the focus of the convention shifts from achieving party unity to winning the general election. But on Monday, Mr. Trump was often relegated to his least favorite place: the background.

Democrats
Philadelphia
Hillary Clinton
2016 Presidential Election
Democratic National Convention,DNC
DNC
US Politics
Bernard Sanders,Bernie Sanders
Debbie Wasserman Schultz