1922 Theater Reopens to a Rock Beat

Abstract: MONTCLAIR AS the headliner reopening the Wellmont Theater here on Tuesday night, the rock band Counting Crows displayed their usual laid-back style. But the process of turning the old Art Deco theater into a performance venue in the heart of Montclair’s congested downtown was not without its hectic moments. Take opening night, originally scheduled for last Monday. Hours before the curtain was to go up, promoters sent out the word, by e-mail, on line and on the radio, that the show had been postponed by a day, explaining that Counting Crows’ lead singer, Adam Duritz, was ill. The concert went off mostly without a hitch the next day; the opening act, Wild Sweet Orange, played a couple of extra numbers, and Counting Crows were a bit late taking the stage. But more than 1,300 people eventually pumped their fists to favorites like “Round Here” and the opening number, “A Long December.” An hour before show time, a battalion of security officers was directing a convoy of concertgoers in S.U.V.’s, and traffic was flowing smoothly in an area known to wear down would-be diners and moviegoers seeking a coveted parking space. Back in September, Joseph Hartnett, chief executive of the municipality, said, “Keeping all of these people moving is going to be a challenge in an already parking-challenged town.” As it turned out, concertgoers said parking was less an issue than other factors, at least on a Tuesday evening when the theater was not filled to capacity. “There’s ample parking on the street — I had no problem at all,” said Chris Kunstadter, 53, of Bloomfield. Mr. Kunstadter received e-mail notification of the postponement in time to avoid heading out on Monday, but when he made it inside on Tuesday, he had a different concern. “They should have seating on the lower level,” he said, referring to the capacious open space near the main stage, where clumps of concertgoers convened. For this concert, seats were available only on the Wellmont’s upper tier. “On the Web site, it shows a seating plan” for the lower level, Mr. Kunstadter said. The theater’s managers say they will be bringing in seats for certain shows. Shawn Savage, 26, of Wanaque, complained that the Wellmont’s three bars were charging “Manhattan prices” for beer: “They could bring it down a buck or two,” he said. Nancy Livingston, 39, of Bloomfield, called the theater’s interior “industrial and unfinished-looking.” Most recently a movie triplex, the Wellmont dates to 1922. In comments on the Web site Baristanet, some other concertgoers complained that it was chilly inside. The theater, which accommodates up to 2,500, secured 800 parking spots in three lots several days before the opening. The deal was struck by Andy Feltz, 50, of Montclair Entertainment LLC, a new concert promotion company in partnership with the Bowery Presents, a New York-based group that owns the Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge. Mr. Feltz ran the Beacon Theater in Manhattan from 1986 to 2006 and is currently presiding over shows at the United Palace Theater, also in Manhattan. “My kids go to school here,” he said. “I’m not going to do anything to upset the town.” The Wellmont’s lineup of boldface names on the way already includes Al Green, Steely Dan, Brian Wilson and John Legend. “I think it’s unreal that we’re getting this kind of venue in Montclair, which is mostly just a town of restaurants and stores,” said Chris Castellani, 33, a Montclair resident and operator of the blog MusicSnobbery. “Probably a lot of people are going to discover that Montclair is a cool place to come and hang out.” The Wellmont’s booker, Anthony Makes, 40, who used to secure bands for the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles, said anyone who thinks that he will be bringing in staid acts for an audience of stiff suburbanites should reconsider the surroundings. “It’s pretty hip around here,” Mr. Makes said, noting that ticket sales for more under-the-radar bands like the Decemberists were already brisk. “This is an audience that knows music.”

Parking
Rock Music
Montclair (NJ)
Duritz Adam


Starboard Value, Taking Stake in Perrigo, Looks to Make Another Big Investment Pay

Abstract: The hedge fund that helped prod Yahoo into selling its core business has found a new target for its brand of shareholder activism: the drug maker Perrigo. The fund, Starboard Value, has taken a 4.6 percent stake in the pharmaceutical company and has urged it to take steps to bolster its sagging stock price, according to a letter sent to Perrigo’s board. In the letter , Starboard pointed out the steep drop in Perrigo shares since the drug maker rebuffed a takeover bid last year by a fellow pharmaceutical company, Mylan. That bid was valued around $205 a share at the time. Shares of Perrigo have fallen more than 50 percent during the last 12 months, closing on Friday at $88.71. According to Starboard, Perrigo has mismanaged its core business of generic over-the-counter medicine and has failed to deliver on promises it made during its defense against the bid from Mylan. Starboard also complained about bonuses that Perrigo executives received after successfully fending off Mylan. “We believe that Perrigo trades at a significant discount to fair value and that there is substantial value to be created at Perrigo for the benefit of all its shareholders,” Jeffrey C. Smith, Starboard’s chief executive, wrote in the letter. “However, these are challenging times for Perrigo, and we strongly believe that material change is necessary.” In a statement on Monday, Perrigo said that it “will review the letter carefully and looks forward to a constructive and productive dialogue with Starboard — as we do with all of our shareholders — while we execute on a number of strategic and operational initiatives.” Perrigo’s case will be led in part by its chief executive of only a few months, John Hendrickson. His predecessor and the architect of the defense against Mylan, Joseph C. Papa, left for the drug maker Valiant Pharmaceuticals International this year. Since assuming his post, Mr. Hendrickson has criticized Mr. Papa’s tenure at Perrigo, arguing that the company’s “recent track record of performance against our own expectations is unacceptable.” Starboard’s 4.6 percent stake makes it the company’s third-biggest shareholder, behind the mutual fund giants Vanguard and Capital Research, according to regulatory filings.

Starboard Value
Perrigo
Pharmaceuticals
Shareholder Rights


Pierce Helps Celtics Beat Lakers in Finals Rematch

Abstract: Paul Pierce scored 32 points, Kevin Garnett had 18 points and 13 rebounds while playing with a large bandage on his head, and the Boston Celtics won an N.B.A. finals rematch with the Lakers in Los Angeles on Sunday, overcoming 41 points by Kobe Bryant in a 109-96 victory. “It’s another game, but it was definitely an emotional game, especially because we lost Game 7 here,” Pierce said. Bryant became the youngest to pass 27,000 career points but could not spark the Lakers, who have lost four of seven. “Is it the playoffs yet?” Lakers Coach Phil Jackson said. “No.” Boston, which has won 8 of 10, showed off a complete offensive game, outrebounding the Lakers by 43-30, hitting nine 3-pointers and getting 34 assists. “We knew we could run on L.A.,” Rajon Rondo said. “L.A., given the personnel that we have, we thought we could outrun them.” Garnett was cut near his left temple in the second quarter after Pau Gasol swiped his hand at him. HEAT 108, THUNDER 103 Eddie House made a go-ahead 3-pointer with 22.2 seconds left, then added two free throws to seal the victory for visiting Miami, whose All-Star threesome — Dwyane Wade, LeBron James and Chris Bosh — played together for the first time in nearly three weeks. Wade scored 32 points, James added 23 points and 13 rebounds and Bosh had 20 points. Kevin Durant scored 33 points for Oklahoma City but missed a shot with 15 seconds left that would have tied the score. SUNS 104, HORNETS 102 The backup center Marcin Gortat scored 25 points for host Phoenix. New Orleans nearly erased an 8-point deficit in the final 18 seconds, but Grant Hill blocked an inside attempt by Marcus Thornton with 3.9 seconds left and a 3-point attempt by the Hornets’ Chris Paul missed at the buzzer. MAGIC 103, CAVALIERS 87 Dwight Howard had 20 points and 20 rebounds in three quarters of work, and Ryan Anderson added 23 points and 16 rebounds for host Orlando. Howard had his 36th double-double of the season by halftime. Cleveland has lost 30 of 31, including 20 in a row. 76ERS 110, NUGGETS 99 Andre Iguodala scored 24 points and Thaddeus Young had 21 for host Philadelphia. Chauncey Billups led Denver with 27 points. FINE FOR RIVERS Celtics Coach Doc Rivers was fined $15,000 for leaving the court too slowly after being ejected from a loss Friday night in Phoenix. PACERS FIRE O’BRIEN The Indiana Pacers fired Coach Jim O’Brien. The Pacers were 121-169 in O’Brien’s three and a half seasons, including 17-27 this season. The assistant Frank Vogel was named the interim coach.

Boston Celtics
Basketball
Los Angeles Lakers
Pierce Paul (1977- )


W.N.B.A.’s Liberty Receiving Little Face Time on MSG

Abstract: The Liberty is fading from television. Two years ago, the MSG Network carried 26 Liberty games. Last year, it televised 14. This season the Liberty, 3-4 and last in the W.N.B.A.’s Eastern Conference, have appeared once. The next four or five Liberty games on MSG will be televised as a part, which is unspecified by the Garden, of the team’s new Foxwoods casino sponsorship. MSG has not yet scheduled dates for the games. This shift in priorities at a media company like Madison Square Garden is astonishing. The Garden owns the MSG Network and the Liberty. The network has needed spring and summer programming since the Mets left to start SNY after the 2005 season. But even as the presence of the Liberty, whose games are lower rated than the Mets’ were, has decreased, MSG is carrying 22 Red Bulls soccer games. That’s 22 games of a team the Garden does not own versus five or six of a team it does own. And it’s not as if the Red Bulls are a drastically bigger draw than the Liberty or that MSG is paying a big rights fee to carry the games. In a Red Bulls-Liberty rating comparison, we see a difference between tiny and teensy-weensy. MSG’s eight Red Bulls this season have averaged a 0.14 rating, or 10,490 households; the Liberty’s 14 games last year on MSG averaged a 0.1 rating, or 7,493 households. Scott O’Neil, the president of Madison Square Garden Sports, conceded that the company was saving money by carrying fewer Liberty games. He said it was better to reach Liberty fans by streaming its games, using a technology that is cheaper than the $35,000 to $50,000 price tag for a traditional game broadcast. O’Neil said, “W.N.B.A. fans tell us, ‘We want access where we want it and how we want it,’ and the most prudent way to reach the most fans is with WNBA Live Access,” the league’s year-old streaming service. Let’s dispense with the Garden needing to save money by slashing TV access to the Liberty (unless it is looking to sell the team). The Garden had earnings of $27.7 million in 2009 and $17.4 million in the first quarter this year. No one expects the Garden to be profligate. But shareholders of this newly spun-off public company should wonder why MSG paid to produce all those clearing-the-salary-cap Knicks games the last two seasons, which should have been relegated to streaming. And who needed to see those Isiah Thomas-coached seasons in high definition? Streaming sports is increasingly common and is becoming increasingly important as an option for laptop and mobile users who do not want to be tethered to their televisions. Understood. It is a great and viable screen alternative to the stationary television. But it is not yet the mass medium television is. O’Neil, who called WNBA Live Access spectacular, said that “the most important thing for us is to make sure the game is accessible to our fans.” But slashing TV coverage does not achieve that goal regardless of the technical sophistication of Liberty fans. “We want to reach the most fans in the most efficient way,” he added. He subverted his argument by saying streaming brings in “different fans than TV.” If that is true, MSG should augment a streaming strategy with one that restores a majority of the home games to MSG. The Garden is bucking a trend in the W.N.B.A. Last year, 61 of the league’s games were carried locally by the 13 teams’ television outlets, Donna Orender, the W.N.B.A. president, said. This season, the figure is 130 games despite the Garden’s cuts. (Forty-one of those games are simulcast on NBA TV.) Another 18 games are carried nationally on ESPN2. “We’ve made it a real focus to broaden our local TV exposure,” Orender said. “There are 20-plus games in Chicago. Eighteen to 20 in Atlanta. This is good for our fans.” She praised the Garden’s efforts to improve the Liberty and declined to criticize MSG’s reduction of the team’s telecasts directly. “As a league, we’re focusing on maximizing our exposure in every delivery option we can,” she said. Rebecca Lobo , a former Liberty star, said that when MSG carried 26 of her team’s games, “it was unheard of; most teams had five, six or seven.” She added, “It was great for fans and you would like to see them continue to carry them.” Lobo, now a W.N.B.A. and college basketball analyst at ESPN, said, “The positive is you can watch the games streamed on WNBA.com , with fairly good quality.” But, she said, an ESPN or MSG broadcast is better. The concept that the Garden would deny one of its own teams broad TV exposure seems bewildering. But not to O’Neil. “We’re fully aligned” at the Garden, he said. “We’re making the best decisions. This decision went through a healthy debate, and one of the waves of the future is online growth.”

Television
MSG Network
Basketball
New York Liberty


Britain: Setback for Nurse With Ebola

Abstract: The Royal Free Hospital in London has admitted a Scottish nurse who has already recovered from Ebola twice before for another “late complication” from her last infection with the lethal virus. In a statement on Tuesday, the hospital said that the nurse, Pauline Cafferkey, would now be treated by its infectious diseases team. Last December, Ms. Cafferkey was treated for meningitis that developed from lingering Ebola virus in her system. She was first infected in 2014 while working in Sierra Leone.

Ebola
Royal Free Hospital
Pauline Cafferkey
Great Britain


Just Asking About J.Lo, ‘Chicago’ and Manning Up

Abstract: IT is time again to ask 20 questions about advertising, marketing, the media and popular culture. ¶ Now that the Chrysler Group has twice had trouble with ads for the Fiat 500 featuring Jennifer Lopez — the first was called “quite possibly the worst automotive spot of the last decade, hands down,” and the second was mocked after a blogger revealed that a body double was in scenes in her old Bronx neighborhood — is it time for Chrysler to give up before it has as many problematic Lopez ads as she has had marriages? ¶ Why do the employees of the Stage and Screen channel at the Music Choice cable music service believe that the slides on screen when Bebe Neuwirth performs “All That Jazz” from the musical “Chicago” ought to include photographs of and facts about the band Chicago? ¶ Did anyone involved in the decision to buy a commercial for Chevrolet trucks during the NBC sitcom “30 Rock” stop to think that there are probably, oh, 30 zillion other programs that are likely to have more truck buyers in the viewing audience than a series set in Manhattan about the female head writer of a television show? ¶ Would Murad be advertising in Teen Vogue magazine a facial scrub from its Clean Scene skin-care line if the product were not named Gaga for Glow? ¶ Will consumers want to buy a line of sandwich meat from Hormel Foods called Hormel Natural Choice after they remember that Hormel also sells the quintessential meat-in-a-can, Spam? ¶ Did it surprise the BET cable channel to find that it had promoted a new season of its series “The Game” in an ad supplement that was wrapped around an issue of the AM New York newspaper carrying the front-page headline “NYC Ain’t Got Game”? ¶ How many English teachers have blown a gasket over ads for the Honda Civic, intended to celebrate the different types of people who adore the car, that carry the headline “To each their own”? ¶ And how many English teachers have fallen ill over ads for the BlueCross BlueShield Association that show three photographs of different families with the surname “Williams,” each labeled “Meet the Williams” rather than “Meet the Williamses” or “Meet the Williams family”? ¶ Did readers of magazines like Whole Living who saw advertorials for the Secret Natural Mineral antiperspirant sold by Procter & Gamble, which carried the headline “The nose knows,” recall how the comedian Jimmy Durante loved to use that line, including in commercials for Chock full o’Nuts coffee? ¶ Is it a bad omen for the Paul Mitchell hair care brand that ads for its new Mitch line of men’s grooming products, which carry headlines like “Man Up” and “Man Up for the Holidays,” are appearing in magazines around the time that ABC decided to stop production of a new sitcom, “Man Up,” and remove it from the prime-time schedule? ¶ Was J. C. Penney chagrined that it ran an ad in New York subways that carried the headline “We make style the perfect price. You budget better than Albany ” after the State Legislature passed a budget described as “one of the leanest budgets in recent years,” which was also the first on-time budget in five years? ¶ Will consumers with long memories respond to ads from the Kellogg Company for its new Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats Touch of Fruit in the Middle cereal — which carry the headline “Fruit in the middle? Thought you’d never ask” — by declaring: “Oh, but we did ask. And you once gave us Kellogg’s Raisin Squares cereal with a jingle that proclaimed ‘Raisin in the middle.’ But then you stopped making it.”? ¶ Wouldn’t a television commercial for Carnival Cruise Lines in which an announcer declared, “Tell us what you’ve always wanted to do, on Facebook,” have been clearer if the announcer had said, “Tell us, on Facebook, what you’ve always wanted to do”? ¶ After RedLaser, a bar code-scanning mobile app from eBay, participated in a promotion with the rapper Lupe Fiasco, were executives able to answer reporters who asked, “Was Fiasco a success?” without sounding like the “Who’s on First?” routine from Abbott and Costello? ¶ Was it a coincidence that a biography of the actor Eric McCormack distributed by the cable channel TNT after it approved the production of “Perception,” a new series featuring him and Rachel Leigh Cook, omitted from his credits the TNT series “Trust Me,” which the channel canceled after its first season? ¶ Does an ad for the Pepperidge Farm Milano chocolate cookies sold by the Campbell Soup Company, which runs in women’s magazines and carries the headline “Some relationships are meant to be,” reinforce stereotypes about lonely women who substitute chocolate cookies for human interaction? ¶ Have the executives at the Sofitel chain of luxury hotels heard of a brand of toilet tissue, made by Royal Paper Converting and sold at Dollar Tree stores, that is named Sofitelle? ¶Will consumers seeking a cold drink confuse the Coke Zero soft drink sold by the Coca-Cola Company and the Café Zero coffee-based ice cream drink sold by Unilever? ¶ Does a line of kitchen appliances named after Better Homes and Gardens magazine, which is sold at Wal-Mart stores under the BHG brand, run the risk of being dissed or dismissed by shoppers who will utter three initials that sound like “BHG” but cannot be printed in a family newspaper? ¶ Would a singer, whose difficulties as a star of automotive ads are likely to cost her the chance to be nicknamed Jenny From the Engine Block, tell a reporter, “You ask a lot of questions for someone from Brooklyn”?

Advertising and Marketing
News and News Media


Sierra Leone Official Seeks Asylum in United States

Abstract: DAKAR, Senegal — Vice President Samuel Sam-Sumana of Sierra Leone said Saturday that he had requested asylum at the United States Embassy in his country after soldiers surrounded his home in the wake of his expulsion from the governing party this month. Mr. Sam-Sumana was expelled from the All People’s Congress party, led by President Ernest Bai Koroma, after an investigation accused him of creating his own rival political movement in his home district, Kono, in the country’s Eastern Province. The accusation raised doubts about whether he could continue as vice president. “I have fled my house and am with my wife in a place I cannot disclose, waiting to hear from the U.S. ambassador, whom I have asked for asylum,” Mr. Sam-Sumana said. A government spokesman, Abdulai Bayraytay, who said he was traveling with Mr. Bai Koroma in northern Sierra Leone, declined to comment. In late February, Mr. Sam-Sumana said that he was placing himself in a 21-day quarantine after one of his bodyguards died of Ebola. The virus has killed more than 10,000 people in three West African nations, including Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone
Samuel Sam-Sumana
Ernest Bai Koroma
Right of asylum
US


Guidant Debated Device Peril

Abstract: Six months before the Guidant Corporation publicly disclosed short circuits in its heart devices, a debate may have been going on within the company over whether to alert doctors about such failures, internal company documents released yesterday suggest. The documents appear to indicate that some Guidant executives recommended in January 2005 that the company find a way to tell doctors about the failures posed by a device known as the Contak Renewal, an advanced heart defibrillator. The records, which were disclosed yesterday as part of a court proceeding in Texas, include handwritten notes said to have been composed by a top Guidant executive. Guidant started receiving a small but growing number of reports of short circuits in Contak Renewals in late 2004, more than two years after it discovered a similar problem in another defibrillator, the Prizm 2 DR. The Guidant records suggest that company executives came close to alerting doctors about the Contak Renewal last January, but that some officers opposed the idea. The company also conducted tests on the device. One executive later reported that the unit's failure rate was not as bad as first feared, the documents show. Because the records are handwritten notes, it is not clear whether the "recommendation" in them refers directly to the Contak Renewal, though that appears to be the case. Asked specifically about the issue, Guidant declined to comment or explain. In a statement, the company said, "As the documents reflect, the company took responsible action during an ongoing investigation of Renewal and Renewal 2." It also noted it had "aggressively evaluated product performance and communication thresholds." Guidant publicly disclosed problems with the Prizm 2 DR and the Contak Renewal last spring after it came under scrutiny. Seven people are known to have died in connection with short circuits in the devices; five deaths have involved a Contak Renewal or a related model known as the Contak Renewal 2. But the number of deaths is probably higher because physicians only recently became aware of the problem. Defibrillators electrically interrupt potentially lethal heart rhythms, and short circuits can render them useless. Guidant has said the number of reports it received did not warrant an earlier physician alert. At a minimum, the disclosure of the new Guidant documents is likely to fuel efforts to develop industrywide standards about when and how doctors and patients should be informed by heart device makers about malfunctions. A report by a committee formed by Guidant is due out in March, and a medical group, the Heart Rhythm Association, plans to issue recommendations in May. The documents released yesterday also include a slide presentation, which is hand-dated Oct. 20, 2004. It contains a projection, apparently made at that time, indicating that as many as 55 Contak Renewal units could short-circuit by November 2005. "If we would communicate, what would it be?" a handwritten note on the slide states. "Start thinking and working on it now (Contingency)." But the records could also mean more legal problems for Guidant, which is the subject of a takeover battle between Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson. Guidant is also under investigation by the Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department. The records released in Texas yesterday are among hundreds of documents provided by Guidant to plaintiffs' lawyers in connection with a product liability lawsuit filed against it in a state court. The records were initially produced under seal, but yesterday the case's presiding judge, Judge Jack Hunter of State District Court, citing a Texas state law barring the sealing of court records related to safety issues, ordered a few pages of internal Guidant records released. He also set the stage for the potential release of more documents; late yesterday, Guidant received a stay of that ruling pending an appeal. On Wednesday, The New York Times had filed a motion in the case seeking the release of any records related to public health and safety. Guidant first told doctors last May about short circuits in the Prizm 2 after it learned that The Times was about to publish a report on the device. In June, it recalled the Prizm 2 DR, the Contak Renewal and the Contak Renewal 2. The records ordered released in Texas by Judge Hunter yesterday consist of three pages of handwritten notes and seven other pages that reproduce the slide presentation. Bob Hilliard, a plaintiff lawyer in Corpus Christi who is suing Guidant on behalf of two patients, said in an interview that the handwritten notes and slides were recently given to him at the end of a pretrial deposition of J. Frederick McCoy Jr., the head of Guidant's cardiac device unit. Mr. Hilliard said that the handwriting in the notes resembled handwriting that Mr. McCoy identified during the deposition as his own. It could not be determined yesterday if Mr. McCoy had written the notes. The notes, dated June 22, 2005, appear to be an annotated timeline that reconstructs company events and decisions involving several issues, including the Contak Renewal, over the course of about two years. In an entry dated Jan. 7, 2005, the chronology notes a "recommendation," which followed several reports of electrical failures. "If we can a find a way to communicate on this trend in such a way that it would help physicians manage patients and does not result in patient harm via undue concern, then we should communicate," the entry reads. The same entry noted that at least one executive was "not on board with this recommendation." In the wake of Guidant's disclosures last year, many heart specialists have said that they want to know about significant device failure so they, rather than manufacturers, can decide whether the units need to be replaced. Apart from its statement, Guidant declined to comment on any aspect on the documents. In a recent update to doctors in December, the company projected, based on laboratory testing, that 35 Contak Renewals had short-circuited. The slide presentation also contains descriptions of the electrical problem, photographs and a chart comparing the Contak Renewal failure to that of the Prizm 2 DR.

DEFIBRILLATORS
GUIDANT CORP
LIABILITY FOR PRODUCTS


Task Force Recommends Improvements for Nuclear Plants

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns show that it is time for “redefining the level of protection that is regarded as adequate” at American nuclear plants, a special task force of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has concluded. The task force recommendations were to be released Wednesday, but a copy of the summary was obtained Tuesday evening by The New York Times. It lays out numerous areas for improvement, based on the experience in Japan after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. American plants need to plan for simultaneous accidents at adjacent reactors, something they have never done, the task force said. They also need to make sure that the “hardened vents” added to reactors over the years to prevent hydrogen explosions would actually work in an emergency, the report said, and determine where hydrogen, which is produced by overheated fuel, might flow. Japanese operators had trouble using the vents, resulting in the explosions in the secondary containments. Some of the improvements the industry voluntarily adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks have not been regularly inspected or maintained, the report said. Those should be inspected using the more “formal” procedures that are in place for the plants’ original safety equipment, the task force recommended. And plants should have a better way to add water to spent fuel pools and monitor conditions in those pools, the task force said. Fukushima focused new attention on spent fuel pools, which usually have more radioactive materials in them than the reactors do. In desperation, the Japanese used water cannons to refill them. Even now, the task force wrote, there was uncertainty about what happened at Fukushima, and information was “unavailable, unreliable or ambiguous because of damage to equipment at the site and because the Japanese response continues to focus on actions to stop the ongoing radioactive release.” The five-member commission is scheduled to meet next week to consider the work of the task force, which it considers a quick, first look at the Fukushima disaster’s relevance to reactors in the United States.

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan)


Mayor Seeks to Disband Lower Manhattan Panel

Abstract: In a forcefully worded critique of ground zero redevelopment, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg demanded on Wednesday that the state complete the 9/11 memorial by September 2011, totally redesign a major transit hub nearby and disband the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation . In an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bloomberg wrote, “Progress on the redevelopment of the World Trade Center has been frustratingly slow, owing in large part to a multilayered governance structure that has undermined accountability from the get-go.” But while Mr. Bloomberg’s piece took the state to task for the delays, his remedies were not strikingly different from what officials with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have already publicly advocated, including speeding up construction of the memorial and simplifying the $2.5 billion transportation center and PATH train terminal. The Port Authority, which is overseeing the redevelopment plan, is expected to make those recommendations and others in a report to be released on Sept. 29. The authority is not, however, likely to propose disbanding the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation as Mr. Bloomberg has demanded. The Bloomberg administration, through Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber, has been involved with the committee working on that report, which will lay out a new budget and timetable for the reconstruction. Last week, Mr. Lieber praised the work of the development corporation at a meeting of its board. Reactions to Mr. Bloomberg’s article differed sharply. Julie Menin, chairwoman of Community Board 1, which includes ground zero, applauded the mayor’s demand that the memorial be completed by Sept. 11, 2011. But Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose district includes Lower Manhattan, said that he opposed the mayor’s call for eliminating the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, because it helped coordinate the city, state and federal agencies involved in reconstruction. “I’m glad the mayor understands finally how important it is to get this rebuilding effort off the ground,” Mr. Silver said in an interview. Reactions from Gov. David A. Paterson and the Port Authority were more muted. In a statement released on Wednesday, the governor said, “The mayor and I share a sense of disappointment and frustration at the unacceptable pace of the ground zero rebuilding, which has never had a realistic timetable or budget — an absolute necessity for undertaking construction of this scale.” The Port Authority, which owns the 16-acre site and is responsible for building the transit hub and the Freedom Tower, also declined to comment on the mayor’s recommendations. Stephen Sigmund, an authority spokesman, said, “The point of the report we are doing is to make decisions on exactly these tough issues and move on to getting every project on the site completed as quickly as possible.” Mr. Bloomberg’s criticisms, which came on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the attack, are hardly novel; he and others have made many of them before. And Governor Paterson earlier this year ordered the authority to devise more realistic timetables for the rebuilding effort. At that time, state, city and Port Authority officials already had a thick internal report indicating that rebuilding was hopelessly off schedule and over budget. In June, Christopher Ward, the Port Authority’s executive director, said that the memorial’s plaza, tree-lined park, waterfalls and below-ground spaces would be completed by the 10th anniversary. But he said it was unlikely that the museum would be completed by then or that the public would have full access, because the surrounding area would still be a construction site. The authority for some time has also been hinting that it would simplify the transportation center, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. The center’s mezzanine lies directly under part of the memorial plaza, so its framework must be completed nearly to street level by July 2010 to guarantee that the memorial opens on Sept. 11, 2011, said Joseph C. Daniels, president of the memorial and museum. Many officials have repeatedly articulated one of Mr. Bloomberg’s central complaints: that the rebuilding effort has been plagued by a thick web of competing bureaucracies. There are 19 public agencies, two private developers, 101 construction contractors and 33 designers, architects and consulting firms involved in the process. Gov. George E. Pataki created the development corporation in late 2001 to oversee the rebuilding of ground zero. Although Mr. Bloomberg has appointed half its board, he has viewed it as a state agency that often fails to act in the city’s best interest. His concerns led to the joint creation, with Governor Pataki, of another agency, the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center. The command center was initially supposed to coordinate all construction activity in Lower Manhattan. James A. Parrott, deputy director of the nonprofit Fiscal Policy Institute, was part of a coalition of labor union and community organization officials who called for the abolition of the development corporation in 2003. But they were rebuffed by the mayor, he said. In remarks to reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Bloomberg defended his demands, saying, “I would assume that everybody at the state level would try to do exactly what’s right: this is a sacred site, this is part of NYC, this is part of America.”

World Trade Center (NYC)
Lower Manhattan Development Corp
Monuments and Memorials
September 11 (2001)
Bloomberg Michael R


Residents Abandon Daraya as Government Seizes a Symbol of Syria’s Rebellion

Abstract: BEIRUT, Lebanon — Hundreds of rebel fighters and their families left a long-besieged suburb of the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Friday, under an agreement with the government that amounted to an opposition surrender of territory and a symbolic defeat. Carrying their belongings in suitcases and overstuffed plastic bags, residents filed out from between rows of destroyed buildings to board buses that would take them from the town of Daraya to rebel-held Idlib Province, a place about 200 miles north that few of them have ever seen. Thousands more civilians are to leave for other government-held suburbs of Damascus in the coming days under the deal that hands the town to the government. Few of Daraya’s residents hold out any hope of returning. As they prepared to evacuate Friday, residents kissed the ground and visited the graves of relatives for the last time. The scene was reminiscent of the evacuation of rebels and civilians from the old city of Homs two years ago, an area that remains largely deserted today. Daraya, like Homs, has been a symbol of revolt since the earliest peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011: Leaders of the civilian opposition hailed from Daraya, and many of them were imprisoned, with some tortured to death while in custody. The ultimate fall of the rebellious town now symbolizes the failure of the moderate opposition rooted there and those affiliated with the early civilian protests to firmly unite fractured rebel groups. Isolated by government blockades for four years and bombarded relentlessly, Daraya stood out as a place where the main rebel groups remained under local control and not affiliated with extremist factions. Because it lies close to a military airport and is less than two miles from downtown Damascus — and also perhaps because it represented an alternative to government authority and the rule of extremists affiliated with the Islamic State or Al Qaeda — government forces had been determined to take the town. Its fall will free up hundreds of pro-government fighters for other battles. Image Many Daraya residents were taken by bus on to Idlib Province, a rebel-held area about 200 miles north. Credit Associated Press “The regime will keep Daraya empty, dead land, as a graveyard,” said Abu Mohammad, 60, who left Daraya four years ago for the government-held suburb of Sahnaya, and asked to use his nickname for fear his family in Daraya would be subject to reprisals. On Friday, he and his wife sat glued to their television set watching coverage of the evacuation, hoping for a glimpse of four of their children, whom they have not seen since the couple fled Daraya. Their children — two sons fighting with the local rebels and two daughters married to fighters — are leaving for Idlib, where hard-line Islamist groups wield power and government and Russian warplanes strike daily. A few blocks away in Sahnaya, a pro-government fighter who uses the nom de guerre Abu Odai exulted in the victory, saying that many young men from Sahnaya had died in the battles and that until now he had been afraid that fighters from Daraya would harm his family. Still, he asked that his real name not be used out of fear his family would be harmed and because he was speaking without authorization from his commanders. “The government told the armed groups in Daraya for years to hand over their arms and stay peacefully in their towns, but they refused and called for freedom,” he said. “Today they got their freedom by going to Idlib.” The United Nations, which closely monitored the evacuation of Homs in 2014, was not able to oversee the exodus from Daraya. U.N. officials said on Friday that they had only been informed overnight of the plans to allow residents to leave. “It is tragic that repeated appeals to lift the siege of Daraya, besieged since November 2012, and cease the fighting, have never been heeded,” the United Nations’ special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said in a statement. “It is imperative that people of Daraya are protected in any evacuation that takes place, and that this takes place voluntarily.” But local council members in Daraya said that government negotiators had given them no real choice, instead offering an ultimatum as the rebels ran out of ammunition: Leave or be wiped out. The evacuation came as Secretary of State John Kerry and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, met in Geneva in what officials described as a renewed effort between the United States, which backs parts of the opposition, and Russia, which backs the Syrian government, to map out a political transition that could end the war. After a long day of talks in a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva, Mr. Kerry told reporters that he and Mr. Lavrov had “achieved clarity on the path forward” and agreed on the “vast majority” of technical issues holding up progress toward ceasing hostilities and creating the space needed to restart talks on a political solution. But the two diplomats said their discussions still left unresolved a number of issues that they declined to detail. American and Russian experts would continue negotiations in Geneva in the coming week in an effort to produce a deal that could help kick-start deliveries of humanitarian aid and pave the way for a resumption of political transition talks. That did not mean the Assad government would halt its airstrikes, Mr. Lavrov made clear, but it would make them “more efficient” in targeting terrorist groups. But the Syrian government has long sought to undermine the transition process, preferring a “starve or kneel” strategy — named for slogans scrawled by pro-government militiamen outside besieged areas — and negotiating individual surrender deals with rebel groups rather than pursuing an overall settlement. The government strategy has yielded mixed results: fighting has quieted in many areas but other agreements have fallen apart, leading to renewed clashes. The failure to end the widespread and debilitating conflict has also been abetted by the inability or unwillingness of opposition groups — and their international backers — to unite, politically or militarily, firmly against Mr. Assad. The attention of some rebel groups and their United States backers have shifted to battling the Islamic State group. Image Syrian soldiers in Daraya on Friday. The fall of Daraya will free up hundreds of pro-government troops for other battles. Credit Youssef Badawi/European Pressphoto Agency There were angry recriminations on Friday from some rebels against American-backed opposition commanders in southern Syria who, following their backers’ instructions, have refrained from major offensives against pro-government forces in recent months. That decision has freed the government and allied militias to focus on dislodging rebels from the suburbs around Damascus, such as Daraya. For years, the town was under siege, receiving just two small international aid deliveries permitted by the Syrian government while undergoing near-daily bombardments. Residents of Daraya held out after a massacre of hundreds of people by pro-government militias four years ago, on August 25, 2012, and suffered the effects of one of the government’s deadly sarin attacks in August 2013 that killed more than 1,000 people in several Damascus suburbs. The United States had declared the use of chemical weapons to be a “red line” in the conflict, but rather than retaliate, Washington instead struck a deal with Russia to remove the government’s chemical weapons. Since that decision, an emboldened Syrian government has stepped up attacks on residential areas, and a confidential United Nations report found that the government continued to carry out chemical attacks with chlorine. Around 8,000 of the 80,000 people who lived in Daraya before the war remain. Evacuation buses Friday were escorted by volunteers from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. Rebels were allowed to take their personal weapons. Civilian activists said they, too, were choosing to go to Idlib because they feared anyone who had taken part in protests against Mr. Assad would be subject to arrest in government areas. In Sahnaya on Friday, where residents have become used to the reverberations of bombardments on Daraya, there was an unfamiliar quiet. Abu Mohammad, who had farmed grapes and vegetables on the outskirts of Daraya when he lived there, teared up as he watched on television as his former neighbors abandoned what was left of their homes. His wife leaned forward, her face draped in a long white head scarf, close to the screen. “This is my daughter,” she said, then corrected herself. “No, she is not — someone who looks like her. All Daraya’s families are related, and they look alike.” She dabbed her eyes with a napkin. “Oh God,” she said, “let me meet with my sons and daughters for one hour and then die, to be buried in Daraya’s soil.”

Daraya
Syria
Damascus
Evacuation
Bashar al-Assad


It's a Whole New Ballgame in Ireland, and a Movie, Too

Abstract: The plucky crusade to introduce baseball to Ireland ignited because of a bumper sticker. Mike Kindle, an American who moved to Ireland in 1990, saw an Irish Softball Association sticker on a car and begged the driver to tell him where he could find the group. He prayed it was no joke. Kindle found the co-ed softball players tossing high-arc pitches on a mushy field. Softball was obviously a recreational activity, like flipping a Frisbee. The discovery still motivated Kindle, who preferred the more serious style of hardball that he had left behind in San Diego. So Kindle persistently pushed the sport of baseball on a country without a single baseball diamond at the time. Eventually, there were about 30 regulars, some taking awkward swings, some making tortured throws and most, they said, falling in love with baseball and the notion of possibly playing it for Ireland. "We decided we should try and form an international team," Kindle said. "We said, 'Let's get some uniforms and funding and go play.' We were sitting in the boozer over a couple of pints. Over a couple of pints, it sounded good." The story of the recent birth of baseball in Ireland, its growth and its baby steps in international competition is told in "The Emerald Diamond," a film by John J. Fitzgerald. The film will be shown in 20 cities and towns throughout the United States, starting Feb. 25 at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, N.Y. Fitzgerald's movie is a charming look at how baseball captivated some dedicated Irishmen. Those young men, supplemented by American-born players who had a parent or grandparent born in Ireland, transformed themselves from bumbling weekend warriors into respected competitors. Think of Rudy, the Notre Dame walk-on, and multiply it by about a dozen. "I found out about them and I said, 'This is amazing,' " Fitzgerald said. "I had no idea Ireland had a national team." The Irish are still minor players on the international scene and are not one of the 16 federations competing in the inaugural World Baseball Classic next month. While Ireland won the bronze medal in the B Pool of the 2004 European Championships, the 10-year-old Irish team remains a baseball neophyte. But Fitzgerald said some players dreamily speak about qualifying for the next classic or the one after that. The team has playfully wondered if the Yankees' Derek Jeter, who has Irish roots on his mother's side, could be coaxed into playing for Ireland. That dream of Jeter wearing green would be impossible, though, since Jeter's grandmother was born in New Jersey. Before Fitzgerald decided to do a documentary on the Irish, he wanted to be on the team. Fitzgerald played one year of college baseball and thought he was eligible because his grandmother is a dual citizen. After four months of workouts, Fitzgerald found out that he was ineligible because his grandmother was born in New York, not Ireland. By then, Fitzgerald had communicated with the coaches of Baseball Ireland and heard about their humble start, their endless obstacles and their snippets of success. If Fitzgerald, a 28-year old from Valhalla, N.Y., could not play for Ireland, he wanted to follow the team with a camera and recount an intriguing, and mostly unknown, tale. "Even now, when I talk to people from Ireland about the baseball team, they think I'm talking about hurling or an Irish-American team from the U.S.," Fitzgerald said. "Outside of Dublin, no one has ever heard of it." Cormac Eklof, a pitcher who has a tattoo of Nomar Garciaparra, added, "Nobody knows who we are." When Kindle, Eklof, Sean Mitchell, John Dillon, Darran O'Connor and some other originals initially played in Ireland, they trudged across rugby or soccer fields. There were no mounds, so the pitchers dug foot holes, and no backstops, so they hammered beams into the ground and attached netting. Rain was almost as predictable as the ball being white. They did have bases, which Eklof said were swiped from the softball team. The film shows scenes of players with choppy swings and players fielding balls as if they were catching shot-puts. The Irish were learning on the fly. Dillon, a strong rugby player, was 25 when he made his baseball debut, an age when many Americans have stopped playing. He has now been the starting center fielder for a decade, combining grit with grace. Ireland debuted in the 1996 European Championships and lost to the Czech Republic, 23-2, but the proud players were content because they had succeeded in at least competing. Losses to Norway (19-1), Poland (20-10) and Lithuania (15-5) followed, and exasperation bubbled. Could they be that terrible? The answer was no. Ireland stopped Yugoslavia, 8-6, in the final game, and the team was ecstatic and relieved. Still, to continue growing, the Irish needed a real place to play. Peter O'Malley, the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, helped make that a reality by donating$140,000 to build adult and youth fields that sit side by side in West Dublin. Some locals who did not know a double from a double play had to be reminded not to tear up the infield while practicing golf shots. The diamond gave Irish baseball a home and an identity. Ireland won two games in the 1998 European Championships and one in the 2000 tournament. By 2002, the Irish, who had followed the practice of other European teams by adding a few American-born college players who possessed dual citizenship, thought they were threats to win the title. They finished fourth. But, in 2004, with the additions of Joe Kealty, who hit .337 at Boston College; Chris Gannon, who was 11-4 for the same university; and Brendan Bergerson, an intimidating left-hander from the University of West Virginia, Ireland had its best team ever. The Irish beat Serbia-Montenegro to win a bronze medal. "It feels like we've been on a good trip," said Chris Foy, who is from Seaford, N.Y., and moved to Dublin and joined the team in 2000. "It took guts for the guys who were playing softball to pick up baseballs and say, 'Let's give this a try.' " One of the greatest challenges for Ireland has been developing pitchers because the popular Irish sports, like hurling, soccer, rugby and Gaelic football, do not involve throwing balls. When Ireland adds talent from America, the focus is on pitchers. The Irish are also wary of keeping their team from becoming what Eklof called "a bunch of ringers" who could ruin team chemistry. So the roster is limited to one-third American-born players. As important as the national team is to the future, the current players are also concerned about having successors. Rory Murphy, a sturdy catcher, hit .538 as a 16-year old in the 2004 championships and is considered the premier prospect in Ireland. In a country where 300 children play baseball, that Murphy favors the new sport over rugby is a coup. "We need to keep the kids coming," said Will Beglane, the youth director. "If we don't do that, the national team will end." Several players will be in New York to see "The Emerald Diamond" before returning to prepare for the 2006 European Championships in August. The two top teams from the B Pool advance to A, and keener competition in 2007 against the likes of Italy and the Netherlands. If Ireland can indeed rumble into the A Pool after only a decade of international play, Kindle, the pioneer who spied the softball bumper sticker that helped inspire it all, thinks it would be time for Fitzgerald toplan a sequel. "Even if I wasn't involved, I'd think it was a great story," Kindle said. "You've got a bunch of knuckleheads running around playing in the rain because they love baseball. It's a writer's dream."

IRELAND
BASEBALL
FITZGERALD JOHN J
MOTION PICTURES
EMERALD DIAMOND THE (MOVIE)


Reverberations as Door Slams on Hope of Change

Abstract: TEHRAN — It is impossible to know for sure how much the ostensible re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represents the preference of an essentially conservative Iranian public and how much, as opposition voters passionately believe, it is the imposed verdict of a fundamentally authoritarian regime. But for those who dreamed of a gentler Iran , Saturday was a day of smoldering anger, crushed hopes and punctured illusions, from the streets of Tehran to the policy centers of Western capitals. Iranians who hoped for a bit more freedom, a better managed economy and a less reviled image in the world wavered between protest and despair on Saturday. On the streets around Fatemi Square, near the headquarters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi , riot police officers dressed in RoboCop gear roared down the sidewalks on motorcycles to disperse and intimidate the clots of pedestrians who had gathered to share rumors and dismay. “Another four years of dictatorship,” a voter muttered. “This is a coup d’état,” several others agreed. Some women wept openly. Some talked of “mutiny.” Others were more cynical. “It was just a movie,” said Hussein Gharibi, a 54-year-old juice vendor, scoffing at those who had gotten their hopes up. “They were all just players in a movie.” Far off, President Obama and other Western leaders who had seen a better relationship with Iran as potentially helpful in resolving the problems of Afghanistan , Iraq and nuclear proliferation faced the prospect of doing business with a man who, in addition to being a Holocaust-denying hard-liner, now stands suspected in a sham election. There were some important constituencies that took satisfaction from the outcome. Domestically, Mr. Ahmadinejad appealed to the fears of the more pious and poor who had found change unsettling. This included those alarmed by the days of political street carnival preceding the election and those (not just men) put off by Mr. Moussavi’s attention to the traditional, second-class role of women in this paternalistic quasi-theocracy. They were joined by the civil servants, police officers and pensioners who all enjoyed the incumbent’s oil-financed generosity to his base, by those who relished his name-naming attack on corruption and by those who took pride in his defiance of the West. Outside Iran, the result was comforting to hawks in Israel and some Western capitals who had feared that a more congenial Iranian president would cause the world to let down its guard against a country galloping toward nuclear weapons capability. (Mr. Moussavi, while promising a more conciliatory foreign policy, did not disavow the country’s nuclear-processing project, which Iran insists is for civilian ends alone.) “In fact, Moussavi will be more difficult to deal with, because he will be nicer,” one skeptical Western diplomat said on the eve of the vote. Among downcast Iranian journalists and academics, the chatter focused on why the interlocking leadership of clerics, military officers and politicians, without whose acquiescence little of importance happens, decided to stick with Mr. Ahmadinejad. Did they panic at the unexpected passion for change that arose in the closing weeks of the Moussavi campaign? Did Mr. Moussavi go too far in his promises of women’s rights, civil freedom and a more conciliatory approach to the West? Or was the surge an illusion after all, the product of wishful thinking? The optimists in Iran and abroad have to ask themselves whether the joyful ruckus that filled the streets represented a new popular force or just an opportunity to let off steam. While Iran is not quite the closed society many imagine — it is a nation of text messagers and Facebook users, with access to Persian-language BBC broadcasts and other independent voices — it is still a controlled society. On the street, the speculation focused more on how the election was manipulated, as many voters insisted it must have been for Mr. Ahmadinejad to score such a preposterous margin of victory. One version (from somebody’s brother who supposedly knew someone inside) had it that vote counters simply were ordered to doctor the numbers: “Make that 1,000 for Ahmadinejad a 3,000.” Others pointed out that the ballots seemed designed to lead opposition voters astray. Voters were obliged to choose a candidate and fill in a code. Though Mr. Moussavi was candidate No. 4, the code No. 44 signified Mr. Ahmadinejad. One employee of the Interior Ministry, which carried out the vote count, said the government had been preparing its fraud for weeks, purging anyone of doubtful loyalty and importing pliable staff members from around the country. “They didn’t rig the vote,” claimed the man, who showed his ministry identification card but pleaded not to be named. “They didn’t even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it.” The government on Saturday insisted that the election was aboveboard and made it ominously clear that it would have little patience with anyone who questioned the purity of Iranian democracy. It was far from clear what recourse the opposition had left. Mr. Moussavi, who disappeared amid rumors that he was under house arrest or worse, sent word that there would be no turning back, but he did not say how he or his followers should challenge the outcome. The text messaging that is the nervous system of the opposition was shut down, along with universities, Web sites and newspapers the government regarded as hostile. Mr. Moussavi was not allowed a platform on Saturday and barely managed to get out a communiqué calling the election “a magic show.” Although there were bursts of defiance that were forcibly subdued, there was also a palpable fear; on Saturday, unlike on Friday, few opposition voters would let their names be used. “By the evening, people will pour into the streets,” predicted one young woman, from inside the hood of her black chador. “But Ahmadinejad will become president by force.”

Election
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Iran
Mir Hussein Moussavi


Frantic Search for Survivors in Guatemala After Mudslide Kills 69

Abstract: GUATEMALA CITY — Dulce del Carmen Lavarenzo Pu had just returned from church when the ground shook and she heard a terrible noise. A wave of mud slid from the nearby mountainside and buried everything just 150 feet from her house. “Everything went black, because the lights went out,” said Ms. Lavarenzo Pu, a 28-year-old homemaker, speaking of the mudslide that struck Thursday night in her neighborhood on the outskirts of Guatemala City. “Ash and dust were falling, so we left the house. You couldn’t see anything.” The rain-sodden hillside about 300 feet high had collapsed onto her neighborhood, killing at least 69 people, including a cousin of Ms. Lavarenzo Pu. She burst into tears upon seeing the body of her cousin brought into the morgue on Friday. At least 36 other people have been reported injured. The number of dead was expected to rise with family members reporting hundreds of people missing. The number of missing could be as high as 600 based on at least 100 homes in the area of the slide, said Alejandro Maldonado, executive secretary of Conred, Guatemala’s emergency disaster agency. Search efforts resumed at dawn on Saturday. Julio Sánchez, spokesman for Guatemala’s volunteer firefighters, said that workers had recovered four more bodies in the early morning, raising the death toll to 30. Hundreds of rescue workers used shovels, pickaxes, dogs and backhoes in a frantic bid to reach survivors on Friday, pulling one man alive from the rubble of his collapsed home more than 15 hours after the landslide hit. They had to call off the search late Friday until Saturday morning for workers’ security because they were getting tired and it was starting to rain, the authorities said. Mr. Sánchez said Friday that the dead, including two babies, were carried to an improvised morgue where weeping relatives identified the bodies of their loved ones. The dead included Quani Bonilla, 18, who played on the national squash team, he said. Also among the bodies, rescuers found a mother embracing her two girls, said Carlos Turcios, a doctor who saw them when he came to help the rescue. The hill that towers over Cambray, a neighborhood in the suburb of Santa Catarina Pinula, about 10 miles east of Guatemala City, partly collapsed onto a 200-foot stretch of the hamlet just before midnight, burying an estimated 68 homes. Raul Rodas, an assistant village mayor, said about 150 families had lived in the area where the mudslide occurred. Some of the untouched homes in Cambray, which sits on the edge of a small river, were abandoned by their owners for fear of further mudslides. Early in the day, Marleni Pu, 25, stood at the edge of the mudslide, her face swollen with weeping. “My uncles, my cousins, my nieces and nephews are all there,” she said, looking across the field of debris where about two dozen relatives had lived. “Six houses where my relatives lived are all under the hillside now.”


John Derr, Golf Reporter at 62 Masters Tournaments, Dies at 97

Abstract: John Derr, who reported from the Masters golf tournament 62 times and was part of the CBS team when the event was televised for the first time, in 1956, died on Saturday at his home in Pinehurst, N.C. He was 97. His daughter, Cricket Gentry, said he apparently died of a heart attack while watching the Belmont Stakes on television. She went to his house after the race, in which American Pharoah captured the Triple Crown, and found him in his chair in front of the TV. “It was like he had stood up and said, ‘Hooray!’ and then fell over,” said Ms. Gentry, who is a paramedic. Mr. Derr covered the Masters for CBS from 1956 to 1982. According to Golf Digest, he was a 17-year-old reporter for The Gaston Gazette in North Carolina when he went to a college football game and sat next to the sportswriter O. B. Keeler, who suggested he attend a new spring tournament at Augusta National Golf Club hosted by Bobby Jones. Mr. Derr went to the second Masters, in 1935, the year Gene Sarazen shot a 2 on the par-5 15th hole, helping to put the Masters on the map. Along the way, Mr. Derr forged relationships with some of golf’s giants, including Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Byron Nelson. He wrote about his encounters in his third book, “My Place at the Table: Stories of Golf and Life” (2010). In an interview with Golf Digest, Mr. Derr told of seeing Albert Einstein taking his daily walk along the golf course at Princeton. He asked Einstein if he had ever played the game, he recalled, and Einstein replied: “I tried once. Too complicated.”

John Derr
Golf
Masters Golf,Masters
Obituary


Whole Foods Once Again Reduces Its Profit Forecast

Abstract: Whole Foods cut its profit outlook for the third time in recent months on Tuesday, signaling the intensifying competition the grocery chain is facing in the market for organic and natural foods. Whole Foods now expects to earn $1.52 to $1.56 a share this year, down from its previous forecast of $1.58 to $1.65 a share. The company reported that profit in its latest quarter was unchanged from the year earlier at $142 million, or 38 cents a share. Analysts had expected earnings of 41 cents a share. Revenue rose to $3.32 billion, but fell short of the $3.34 billion Wall Street had expected, according to FactSet. Sales at established locations are expected to rise by 5 to 5.5 percent, down from the previous forecast of 5.5 to 6.2 percent.

Whole Foods
Supermarkets
Earnings Reports


Lawyers for Barry Bonds Try to Exclude More Evidence

Abstract: With Barry Bonds ’s trial on federal perjury charges nearly two months away, his lawyers are making a renewed effort to exclude more of the government’s evidence from the case against him. Those efforts, set forth in court filings in San Francisco federal court about a week ago, could set up prosecutors for another significant setback to their longstanding effort to convict Bonds . He was indicted in 2008 on charges of lying to a grand jury in 2003 by denying he ever knowingly used steroids. “The government’s case has already been severely damaged by the court’s prior decision to exclude evidence,” said Mathew Rosengart, a partner at the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips law firm and a former federal prosecutor. “If the judge rules to exclude even more evidence, it could be another major blow, so the upcoming decision is crucial.” United States District Court Judge Susan Illston is expected to hear arguments next Friday and in early February regarding potential evidence that will be used in the trial, which is scheduled to start on March 21. Already, Illston has barred the prosecution from introducing several pieces of evidence against Bonds because his former trainer, Greg Anderson, has refused to testify before a grand jury or in court. According to Illston, that evidence — including two positive steroids tests that the prosecutors contend were Bonds’s and a log sheet from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative that listed the positive results under Bonds’s name — is unusable at the trial unless Anderson testifies and establishes its authenticity. An appeals court subsequently agreed with her decision. Anderson and four other men pleaded guilty to illegal drug distribution in the Balco case, which involved dozens of professional and Olympic athletes. Anderson spent more than a year in jail for refusing to testify, and Bonds’s lawyers are taking full advantage of his resolve. In their recent filings, Bonds’s lawyers are trying to chip away at the government’s use of Anderson, this time asking Illston to exclude from the trial any mention of Anderson’s refusal to testify. They also have asked, yet again, for the judge to dismiss what is said to be a tape recording of a clubhouse conversation between Steve Hoskins, Bonds’s former business manager, and Anderson, in which Anderson acknowledged injecting Bonds. The judge has thrown out part of that conversation, but the defense wants it excluded completely. Allen Ruby, Bonds’s lead lawyer, declined to comment on the strategy. But Mark Geragos, Anderson’s lawyer, lauded the defense for being so aggressive in attacking the prosecution’s case. “It’s at that point where I think they won’t be able to get any of the documentary evidence in that mentions Greg Anderson, and I don’t think they could continue to try the case,” Geragos said, adding that the hearing next week would be a “potential make or break moment” for the government. “It looks to me that the case is fatally flawed from the prosecution standpoint and, at some point, I think they will pick up their gloves and bats and go home.” Some legal experts said it was unlikely prosecutors would move to dismiss the case, no matter how the judge rules on the evidence. The prosecutors, who declined to comment, have invested too much time and money in the case to turn away from it now, the experts said. Peter Keane, a professor at Golden Gate University School of Law, said the prosecutors would be reluctant to drop the case because of how such an abandonment would look to the public. “There is motivation to move forward when you have charges against someone like Bonds, who is such a big fish,” Keane said. “If prosecution just says we move to dismiss, a lot of people would get the idea that lying to a grand jury is something you can get away with.” Since Bonds testified before the grand jury more than seven years ago, four United States attorneys have overseen the matter. But the arrival of yet another top federal prosecutor in San Francisco — Melinda Haag, who was confirmed last August — will not deter the government’s case, experts said. Keane said Haag was unlikely to tell the prosecutors to give up on Bonds’s case because of how new she is to the job. “She actually has more invested in the case than the old U.S. attorney because one of the things she needs to do is maintain the respect of her line prosecutors, and that includes the ones who have been working on this case for years and years,” Keane said. “If she made the decision to walk away, that would damage her credibility with the people she relies on every day in the courts and would be terrible for the morale of that office.” In next week’s hearing, the prosecutors will argue why their evidence, particularly relating to Anderson, is important. They will try to persuade her to rule against Bonds’s lawyers in their effort to strike about a quarter of Bonds’s grand jury testimony, erasing all allusions to the evidence that Illston has already ruled inadmissible. They will also try to persuade Illston to allow testimony from athletes — six former and current Major League Baseball players and one former N.F.L. player — who have said they obtained steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs from Anderson. The government’s plan is to have those athletes describe how thorough Anderson was in helping them use performance-enhancing drugs. He gave them the drugs, instructed them on how to use them, discussed their effectiveness and advised them to keep calendars regarding their drug use, the prosecutors say. Bonds’s lawyers have asked Illston to bar those athletes from testifying.

Steroids
Major League Baseball
Baseball
Bonds Barry
Decisions and Verdicts


S.E.C. Proposes Tighter Limits on Private Trading System

Abstract: WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal regulators are proposing tighter oversight for so-called dark pools, trading systems that do not publicly provide price quotes and compete with major stock exchanges. The Securities and Exchange Commission voted Wednesday to propose new rules that would require more stock quotes in the dark pool systems to be publicly displayed. The changes could be adopted sometime after a 90-day public comment period. The alternative trading systems, private networks that match buyers and sellers of large blocks of stocks, have grown explosively in recent years and now account for an estimated 7.2 percent of all share volume. S.E.C. officials have identified them as a potential emerging risk to markets and investors. The initiative is the latest action by the agency seeking to bring tighter oversight to the markets amid questions about transparency and fairness on Wall Street. The agency has floated a proposal restricting short-selling — or betting against a stock — in down markets. Last month, the agency proposed banning “flash orders,” which give traders a split-second edge in buying or selling stocks. A flash order refers to certain members of exchanges — often large institutions — buying and selling information about stock trades milliseconds before that information is made public. Institutional investors like pension funds may use dark pools to sell big blocks of stock away from the public scrutiny of an exchange like the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq that could drive the share price lower. “Given the growth of dark pools, this lack of transparency could create a two-tiered market that deprives the public of information about stock prices,” the chairwoman of the S.E.C., Mary L. Schapiro, said before the vote at the agency’s meeting. Two Republican commissioners, Kathleen Casey and Troy A. Paredes, while voting to put out the proposed rules for public comment, cautioned against rushing to overly broad regulation that could have a negative impact on market innovation and competition. Dark pools might decide to maintain stock trading at levels below those that activate the required public display under the proposed rules, Mr. Paredes said. “Darker dark pools” could be worse than the current situation, he suggested. When investors place an order to buy or sell a stock on an exchange, the order is normally displayed for the public to view. With some dark pools, investors can signal their interest in buying or selling a stock, but that indication of interest is communicated only to a group of market participants. That means investors who operate within the dark pool have access to information about potential trades that other investors, using public quotes, do not, the S.E.C. says. The proposal would require indications of interest to be treated like other stock quotes and subject to the same disclosure rules. A 1999 S.E.C. rule established a separate set of regulations for alternative trading systems, which have grown to 29, from 10 in 2002. Among the pools are Credit Suisse Group’s CrossFinder, Knight Link, Goldman Sachs Group’s Sigma X, Getco and LeveL, according to the TABB Group, an analytical firm based in Westborough, Mass.

Securities and Exchange Commission
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry


International Energy Agency Sees Oil Use Falling

Abstract: Global oil consumption will drop this year for the first time since 1983, as an economic downturn in the West and slower growth in China cut fuel demand, according to the world’s main energy forecaster. The International Energy Agency, an adviser to industrialized nations, said on Thursday that it projects worldwide demand to fall by 200,000 barrels a day, to 85.8 million barrels a day, in 2008. The new forecast is 350,000 barrels a day less than the agency’s last monthly report, which is widely read among energy experts. Oil demand may recover somewhat next year, although at a much slower pace, as the global economy turns the corner in the second half of 2009, according to the energy agency. It sees consumption growing by 0.5 percent, or 400,000 barrels a day. That is still 260,000 barrels a day less than was expected last month. “Clearly, if we are now heading for a prolonged and global outright recession, then the 0.5 percent global oil demand growth we now envisage for next year may not materialize,” according to the report. Many other energy forecasts have painted a far bleaker picture of the oil markets for the next 12 months. Many analysts had already predicted lower consumption this year, and some also expect demand to drop next year. The Energy Department said earlier this week that global consumption would probably fall by 450,000 barrels a day in 2009, the first time in more than 30 years that demand will decline for two consecutive years. As a result of the global recession, the price of oil has fallen more than 70 percent since its peak this summer as demand dropped in the United States and other industrialized countries. Oil fell to $40 a barrel last week, after rising as high as $147 a barrel in intraday trading in July. On Thursday, oil futures in New York surged $4.46 to $47.98 a barrel, after the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, said that his country had cut its production to 8.5 million barrels a day, down more than 1.2 million barrels a day from its August peak. The agency’s report could add grist to the view that producers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries must reduce their output to prevent a complete price collapse. The oil cartel is meeting next week in Algeria to consider reducing its output and stem the price drop. The world’s idle production capacity has risen to its highest level in six years, and now stands at nearly five million barrels a day. Tight spare capacity, which had fallen to a low of a million barrels a day, was a big factor in the price surge in recent years. OPEC’s efforts to stabilize prices may be getting some assistance from other producers. Russia suggested on Wednesday that it would coordinate a possible production cut with the cartel, while President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia said on Thursday that the country could not rule out joining OPEC, according to local news agencies. Other producers that have cooperated with OPEC in the past, like Norway or Mexico, have so far ruled out cutting production. Oil demand in the United States has been particularly hard-hit this year, especially when gasoline prices exceeded $4 a gallon nationwide over the summer. Consumption is expected to fall by 6.3 percent this year compared with 2007, to 19.4 million barrels a day, and again by 1.4 percent in 2009, the energy agency said. But as gasoline prices have fallen back to a nationwide average of $1.66 a gallon, there are preliminary signs that consumption may be picking up again. Last week, gasoline demand rose for the first time in 33 weeks, according to a survey of national sales conducted by MasterCard.

International Energy Agency
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline


U.S.C. Erases Stanford From the National Title Picture

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — As it turns out, a loss to Utah, once the lone blemish on Stanford’s sterling résumé, will have little effect on sorting out the Bowl Championship Series title contenders over the final weeks of the regular season. Nine days after thrusting themselves back into the national championship chase with a dominating victory over Oregon on national television, the fourth-ranked Cardinal fell with a thud Saturday night, when Andre Heidari’s 47-yard field goal with 19 seconds lifted Southern California to 20-17 victory in a Pacific-12 Conference matchup. Stanford looked sluggish at the start, and even after reasserting control, the Cardinal squandered several scoring opportunities in the fourth quarter. Quarterback Kevin Hogan, who had not been needed to throw against Oregon, threw two costly interceptions in the fourth quarter. One killed a drive inside U.S.C.’s 10-yard line. The other, a regrettable throw while Hogan was in the grasp of linebacker Hayes Pullard, set up the Trojans’ winning drive. “It was Kevin trying to do too much,” Stanford Coach David Shaw said. “He was trying to get rid of the ball, but he threw the ball in bounds. He should have just taken a sack and played it smart.” That failed gambit led to a successful one — by the Trojans interim coach Ed Orgeron, who kept his offense on the field facing fourth-and-2 at the Stanford 48 with 1 minute 23 seconds to play. “I knew I was taking a chance,” Orgeron said, adding that he knew by looking at his players that they wanted to go for it. “I wanted to take the best shot to give them what they wanted.” From there, it was left to two Trojans who had been having disappointing seasons to rescue their teammates. Marqise Lee, the Biletnikoff Award winner a year ago, has been bothered by knee and hamstring injuries as well as increased defensive attention. After catching one pass in a rout of California last week, Lee joked that he would file for unemployment benefits. But Lee, who had hobbled off the field moments earlier with an injured shin, told quarterback Cody Kessler he had one more play in him. Kessler hit him on a slant for 13 yards. That set up the field goal by Heidari, who had missed two attempts in a 10-7 loss to Washington State and two more in a 14-10 loss to Notre Dame. He also had missed an extra-point attempt earlier Saturday. But before his kick had even sailed through the uprights in the final seconds, Heidari’ had sprinted to the opposite end zone in celebration as the sold-out Coliseum shook. Moments later, students and fans poured onto the field, as the Trojans continued their resurgence since the firing of Lane Kiffin as coach last month. The Trojans have begun to resemble a different team since Kiffin was summoned off the team bus in the middle of the night and fired as they returned from a blowout loss at Arizona State. Their only blemish in six games under Orgeron was the defeat at Notre Dame. The Trojans (8-3, 5-2 in the Pac-12 South) kept their Rose Bowl hopes alive. The victory also gave considerable momentum to Orgeron’s candidacy to stay on as coach beyond this season. Last week, Athletic Director Pat Haden said Orgeron would be considered. The loss not only ended Stanford’s national title hopes but also severely dented its Rose Bowl hopes. The Cardinal (8-2, 6-2) now trail Oregon by a game in the North Division, although they hold the tiebreaker. “It’s not a good feeling,” Stanford running back Tyler Gaffney said. “It’s the first time I’ve lost to them and I think it’s the first time anyone on this team has lost to them. It’s a tough thing to swallow.” Stanford did not waste time giving life to the idea that it would be ripe for a letdown. Although the Cardinal had won five of its last six games against U.S.C., the last three were by a total of 17 points, and they had played so brilliantly against Oregon. Before the game was three plays old, the Cardinal was whistled for a false start and had to use two timeouts. When they finally ran a play, Ty Montgomery, who had raced past the U.S.C. defense, watched a long pass slip through his hands. The Cardinal fell into a 17-7 hole but began to assert themselves late in the first half. When they drew even on Gaffney’s 18-yard run with 8:22 left in the third quarter, their physical offensive line had begun to wear on a U.S.C. defense that because of injuries had used only two substitutes. For an offense seemingly built for tight spaces, the Cardinal struggled in the red zone — which had to bring back unpleasant memories of its only defeat, a 27-21 loss to Utah that ended when Stanford was stopped on down in the final seconds inside the Utah 10-yard line. On Saturday night, the Cardinal managed only 17 points on five trips inside the red zone. Conrad Ukropina’s 30-yard field goal, which would have put Stanford ahead, was blocked midway through the third, and Hogan was intercepted by Dion Bailey at the Trojans’ 7-yard line with just under 11 minutes left. But that mistake was not as costly as his final one, which the freshman Su’a Cravens picked off at the Trojans’ 44. It almost certainly ended Stanford’s hopes for a trip to the national title game.


Maruyama Has Two-Shot Lead at Sony Open

Abstract: HONOLULU (AP) — Shigeki Maruyama had another five-under-par 65 and found himself atop the leader board in the Sony Open on Saturday, allowing him to look ahead to the final round. He is more concerned about stamina than nerves. Maruyama, winless on the PGA Tour since 2003, hit a bunker shot that banged into the pin and dropped for birdie on the par-3 seventh to break out of a tie, and a two-putt birdie on the short par-5 ninth gave him a two-shot advantage over the early starters. Stuart Appleby, the 18-hole leader, was among those who played Waialae in the afternoon. Because the opening round was washed out by rain, the Sony Open is to be decided by a 36-hole final round Sunday. Maruyama, 41, looked at his shoes and said with a laugh: “My feet. It’s a problem.” Maruyama, who was at 10-under 130, added, “I’m getting older, and 36 holes is going to be a struggle.” He was two shots clear of Steve Marino (67) and Roland Thatcher (65), whose runner-up finish at Disney in the final PGA Tour event last year enabled him to keep his card and book a trip to Hawaii. Matt Kuchar, coming off a PGA Tour money title and the Vardon Trophy, had a 67 and was at 133. The group at 134 includes Boo Weekley (66) and Chris DiMarco (67), who are looking to turn their fortunes around. Anthony Kim had the best score of the morning group, a 64 that put him back in the picture. Maruyama, playing on a sponsor exemption, is popular at this tournament with several Japanese in the gallery and a Japanese sponsor. He has not been heard from much since going three straight seasons with a PGA Tour victory a decade ago. But he is well aware the tournament is only half over. “I haven’t gotten that far yet to think about winning,” he said through an interpreter. “Right now, it’s just been about really trying to play good golf and entertain the Japanese tourists.”


Matt Cain Pitches the Giants Past the Phillies

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Just about every time he had faced the Philadelphia Phillies , Matt Cain had been treated like a piñata. So when Cain, a soft-spoken right-hander, took the mound Tuesday afternoon, he made it clear with a couple of well-placed fastballs — one under the chin of Cole Hamels and the other in the ribs of Shane Victorino — that he would not be batted around this time. Cain was dominant, allowing two hits over seven innings, and the Cody Ross-fueled offense continued to be just enough as the Giants beat the Phillies, 3-0 , to take a 2-1 lead in the National League Championship Series. “No question, there’s a sense of confidence when you’re going against such a great team and outstanding pitching,” said Giants Manager Bruce Bochy, who will send Madison Bumgarner against Joe Blanton on Wednesday in Game 4. “You find a way to win ballgames, it does a lot for them.” This was nothing like the Cain the Phillies had seen before. He had never beaten them, and he had a 6.23 earned run average in five career starts . But Cain struck out five, walked three and hit two, and he capped his day by retiring Victorino with two runners on to end the seventh inning. Javier Lopez and Brian Wilson pitched the final two innings. “From what I’ve seen of him in the past, he would get kind of aggressive with his fastball,” Phillies Manager Charlie Manuel said. “Today, he used all his pitches and his command was better. He pitched a super game.” It was a near-perfect day in San Francisco, and it was that way from start to finish for the Giants. Barry Bonds made a rare appearance at AT&T Park, bouncing up the dugout steps to throw a ceremonial first pitch, and waving his arms to a loud ovation. Bonds might have a place in this lineup, as much as it struggles to score, but with the pitching the Giants continue to receive, it was again enough. San Francisco won its fourth playoff game in which it has scored three runs or fewer. And again, Ross was at the center of it, his run-scoring single with two outs sparking a two-run fourth inning. “For the most part, it’s about confidence, going up there and knowing you’re going to get the job done or do something to help your team,” said Ross, who has hit three home runs in the series. If the Giants’ confidence soared after they took a 2-0 lead, it is not without reason. The Giants were 63-19 in the regular season and are 4-1 in the playoffs when they score first. “It’s important for us to get runs early to take the pressure off them,” Giants second baseman Freddy Sanchez said. “I think it’s difficult for any pitching staff when it’s 0-0, or 1-0.” Though Tim Lincecum has turned in the Giants’ signature pitching performance of the playoffs — a 2-hit, 14-strikeout shutout of Atlanta — and Jonathan Sanchez has won key games down the stretch, Cain has been quietly effective in the playoffs. In 13 2/3 innings, he has not allowed an earned run. “This has got to be the top one, really,” Cain said. “To be able to pitch in the postseason is great, and to be able to go out there and throw the ball well and help your team win is a great feeling.” The Phillies put the ball in play against Cain, but rarely did they do so with any authority. He allowed only singles by Carlos Ruiz and Ryan Howard. “What he does best is he’s able to throw all his pitches for strikes and he keeps those guys off balance, and when you have a team with as much firepower as Philadelphia has, you have to do that,” said center fielder Aaron Rowand, a former Phillie. “If you’re not throwing strikes with certain pitches, they’re going to recognize that and then they’re going to sit on the other ones and make you pay.” The hardest-hit ball may have been Raul Ibanez’s line drive at first baseman Aubrey Huff in the seventh. Cain then hit Ruiz and walked pinch-hitter Ross Gload, but after a visit from Bochy, he retired Victorino on a groundout to second. For Chase Utley, the Phillies’ star second baseman, it was not a good day in the field. He has had problems throwing the ball in recent playoffs, and he did little to help with his glove Tuesday. Huff’s two-out roller into the hole escaped under his glove, bringing in the second run in the fourth. And the Giants added another in the fifth when Utley misread Sanchez’s soft liner. Instead of taking two steps in to catch it, Utley played the ball on a short hop, and it caromed off his chest and into center field. The play, ruled a hit, allowed Rowand to score from second. At the center of each Giants rally were Rowand and Edgar Renteria, a couple of playoff-tested veterans who lost their starting jobs in the second half. They were put into the lineup because the Giants had struggled to score any runs that were not produced by Ross. Center fielder Andres Torres and third baseman Mike Fontenot, who were a combined 5 for 37 in the postseason, were benched, and Juan Uribe, who has a sore wrist, was shifted to third to create a spot for Renteria at shortstop. The Phillies are searching for a similar spark. “There’s not enough time to analyze situations,” Victorino said. “Let’s go out there and worry about tomorrow.” Nearby, Howard, with a host of reporters waiting at his locker to speak with him, excused himself to spit out some mouthwash. Washing away the taste of this defeat, though, had to wait another day.

Philadelphia Phillies
National League
Playoff Games
Cain Matt
Baseball
San Francisco Giants


Police Shooting Victim in Georgia Tried to Follow ‘Sensible’ Path

Abstract: MONCKS CORNER, S.C. — Long before two bullets from a police officer’s handgun tore through Anthony Hill’s chest, he had tattooed it with the words of advice that his grandfather regularly imparted to him in this small Southern city: “Be sensible.” Last week, Mr. Hill’s relatives buried him in Moncks Corner. On their shirts and lapels, they had pinned photos of him, smiling and sharp, in his Air Force uniform. It was a wordless rebuke to the TV news images that had shown Mr. Hill as he wandered in his last moments — naked, unarmed and acting in a way that alarmed neighbors — through his suburban Atlanta apartment complex. It was March 9, a Monday afternoon. A DeKalb County police officer, Robert Olsen, arrived on the scene, responding to a 911 call. Witnesses said that Mr. Hill, an African-American, approached the officer, who is white, with his hands either up or at his sides, but that he did not heed the policeman’s order to stop. Officer Olsen fired. And Mr. Hill would become another hashtag for a roiling movement of Americans who questioned the value that police officers place on black lives. For those closest to Mr. Hill, the pain has been amplified by the fact that he had, until that last day, largely heeded his grandfather’s counsel. He had no criminal record. He had served in the war in Afghanistan. And before his death, Mr. Hill, 26, had been trying, like many other Americans, to make sense of the complex questions of race and law enforcement that have emerged since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Image Anthony Hill with his parents. In a Twitter post on Dec. 24, Mr. Hill challenged protesters not to reflexively condemn all police officers. “If 99 of 100 officers” were on the streets “killing black men like its hunting season,” he wrote , “that still leaves 1 just doing his job. Stop w/ the generalizations.” A state investigation of the shooting is underway. But according to friends and family, doctors told Mr. Hill that he had bipolar disorder after he returned from Afghanistan. They believe that his bizarre antics before the shooting — in which he removed his clothes and clambered down from a second-floor balcony — were symptoms of his illness. In Moncks Corner, the grief and anger commingled with incredulity. Mr. Hill was the last man anyone would have expected to tangle with the police, they said. And he deserved better. “To come home from Afghanistan and be killed by someone who’s supposed to protect you — that I don’t understand,” said James A. Hill, 29, Mr. Hill’s brother. His father, also named Anthony, said, “Why would you go directly to deadly force for someone who clearly does not have a weapon?” Image Anthony Hill’s mother, Carolyn Giummo, and his grandmother Theola Baylor, who helped raise him, in Moncks Corner, S.C. Credit Stephen Morton for The New York Times Mr. Hill’s mother, Carolyn Giummo, said that she did not hate Officer Olsen, who has been placed on administrative leave pending the inquiry by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “I’m very disappointed in him,” she said. Ms. Giummo, 54, raised her son with the help of her parents, Theola and William Baylor, in Moncks Corner, a Lowcountry city of 7,900 where residents take pride in a certain racial harmony. The public high school, from which Mr. Hill graduated in 2006, is racially mixed, and students tend to segregate by areas of interest, not skin color. Over the years, Mr. Hill’s extended family came to include a number of nonblack members. “I never thought to tell my son, ‘You’re black, you’d better look out,’ ” said Ms. Giummo, who is African-American. Armed instead with “Be sensible” — his grandfather’s counsel nearly every time he left the house — Mr. Hill came of age in a world that revolved around school, family and the weekly rhythms set by the Moncks Corner African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he sang in the youth choir and was captivated, early on, by the power of music. In high school, he played the male lead, Danny Zuko, in a production of “Grease.” The summer after graduation, his mother said, he worked as an intern with a local law enforcement agency. He tried his hand at college, but eventually dropped out to enlist, in 2008, in the Air Force. Two years later, Mr. Hill was deployed to Afghanistan. His father said he had been responsible for loading ordnance into aircraft in Kandahar Province. Image Pallbearers carried the flag-draped coffin of Anthony Hill for his funeral service at the Berkeley High School auditorium in Moncks Corner, S.C. Credit Stephen Morton for The New York Times His Atlanta roommate, Kailien Alexander, a 23-year-old college student, said that Mr. Hill had told him that he had post-traumatic stress disorder, and that he had seen children killed in Afghanistan. “It just didn’t sit right with him,” Mr. Alexander said. After doctors diagnosed the disorder, his mother said, he was “medically retired” from the Air Force. Later, Mr. Hill moved to Atlanta, in hopes of breaking into the music business. He worked as an intern at a recording studio, and took odd jobs while constructing R&B tracks at home, sometimes recording in his closet with Mr. Alexander’s help. He was open about his mental illness, even commenting about it on Twitter. The illness, his family members said, seemed to mostly manifest itself in bursts of hourslong phone conversations. But before March 9, no one had seen him fully lose control. Mr. Alexander said he and Mr. Hill were poor but happy, and eager to make friends in an apartment complex mostly filled by families. One hot afternoon, Mr. Alexander recalled, the pair spent some of their last money on ice pops for the children in the neighborhood. They also followed the national conversation about minorities and the police prompted by the shooting in Ferguson. Mr. Alexander said Mr. Hill was troubled by examples of overaggressive policing. But on social media, he challenged those who would dismiss all police officers as evil, and those who sought simple definitions of heroes and villains. “Some of us black folks have to start actually living like #blacklivesmatter but I’ll probably get called a house slave for saying so,” he wrote on March 6. Image Mr. Hill was raised with the help of his grandmother Theola W. Baylor, who wore a pin that showed him in his Air Force uniform. Credit Stephen Morton for The New York Times At the same time, Mr. Hill was struggling with the medication he had been given by doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Bridget Anderson, 22, Mr. Hill’s girlfriend, said he had stopped taking his medicine about 10 days before he was shot. On the morning of March 9, Mr. Hill made his final Facebook post : “Where i once saw death i only see life.” Mr. Alexander said that before he left for class that morning, Mr. Hill seemed upbeat. DeKalb police officials said Officer Olsen had a Taser with him at the time of the shooting. They also said the officer had undergone training in dealing with the mentally ill. This week, the department announced that it would increase its training requirements for “critical incidents,” which include encounters with the mentally ill, but Capt. Steven R. Fore said the change was unrelated to the shooting. In an interview last week, Mr. Hill’s family blamed the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to properly treat Mr. Hill, arguing that he should have had better guidance after he learned of his mental illness and retired. Officials said they could not comment on an individual case. Ms. Giummo said she did not think her son’s story had much to do with race. “There is a ‘black and white’ issue” in the country, she said, “but our main concern is we want to know what happened.” “And if he was a black officer, we’d still feel the same way,” she added. At Mr. Hill’s funeral last week in the public high school, the P.A. system played Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” — Mr. Hill’s favorite song. Sandy W. Drayton, the former pastor at Moncks Corner A.M.E. Church, referred to the officer as “the betrayer who misunderstood,” and asked God to forgive him. Mr. Drayton described death as the door that leads away from this world — away from “the racial stuff” and “the ethnocentrism” — and into “a new heaven, a new earth, a New Jerusalem.”

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings