Donald Trump, With Bare-Bones Campaign, Relies on G.O.P. for Vital Tasks

Abstract: Donald J. Trump is leaning heavily on Republican Party organizations to provide crucial campaign functions like getting out the vote, digital outreach and fund-raising, at a time when some leading Republicans have called for party officials to cut off Mr. Trump and focus instead on maintaining control of Congress. Despite an influx of campaign cash from small donors in July, Mr. Trump’s operation still largely resembles the bare-bones outfit that he rode to victory during the primary season, more concert tour than presidential campaign, according to interviews and documents filed with the Federal Election Commission through Saturday night. And some Republicans believe he is effectively out of time to invest in the kind of large-scale infrastructure that the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, will bring to the polls in November. Mr. Trump spends little on polling and made his first advertising purchase of the general election campaign only last week. His rapidly growing digital fund-raising and voter-targeting operation is a partnership with the Republican National Committee, relying significantly on lists built and maintained in recent years by the party. In July, when Mrs. Clinton spent almost $3 million to field a staff of 700 people at her Brooklyn headquarters and in swing states around the country, according to Federal Election Commission payroll data, Mr. Trump spent more money on renting arenas for his speeches than he did on payroll. A senior Trump campaign official, who asked for anonymity because he was not permitted to discuss staffing publicly, said Mr. Trump’s campaign had fewer than 200 total staff members at the end of July, about evenly divided between field offices and New York. Although he has opened offices in Ohio and Florida in recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s field efforts rely primarily on roughly 500 Republican National Committee organizers scattered across 11 swing states. The arrangement is a kind of throwback to the pre-Citizens United era, when party organizations — not independent “super PACs” and political nonprofits — assumed many of the financial and organizational burdens of national campaigns. But it also highlights the bind in which Republican leaders find themselves as Mr. Trump’s struggles threaten to undermine the party’s Senate and House candidates in November: As dependent as Mr. Trump is on their organization, the party is now deeply dependent on Mr. Trump’s surging base of small donors to finance it. “There is no moving the turnout operation or the absentee ballot program away from Donald Trump and in some senator’s favor,” Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, said in an interview on Sunday with CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “It doesn’t work that way. There’s no hundred million dollars in a drawer that might not be spent on one person, but in favor of another.” In contrast with campaign financing in 2012, there is no outside cavalry of deep-pocketed super PACs preparing to buttress Mr. Trump’s television and field efforts. Two of the largest outside groups backing Mr. Trump began August with less than $4 million combined cash on hand, according to Federal Election Commission filings, half of it from a single donor, the wealthy New York investor Robert Mercer. The primary super PAC backing Mrs. Clinton, Priorities USA Action, reported $38.6 million in the bank and claimed an additional $44 million in committed funds from wealthy donors. The Republican-aligned groups with the deepest pockets, the American Crossroads operation co-founded by the Republican strategist Karl Rove and the constellation of political groups overseen by the billionaire industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch, have abandoned the presidential race , choosing to focus their efforts down the ballot. Republican strategists overseeing the party’s most competitive Senate races have begun crafting their own independent turnout plans, mindful that their candidates need to reach middle-of-the-road voters Mr. Trump has forsaken. The parties cannot raise unlimited “soft money” contributions — money raised into state rather than federal accounts and parlayed into large-scale political advertising campaigns — as they could during the 1990s, before super PACs became legal. “In 1996, national party committees could raise both federal money and nonfederal money,” said Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a former chief counsel at the Republican National Committee and a longtime Republican election lawyer. He added, “The 1996 R.N.C. raised significant money on its own it could spend as it saw fit.” Some Republicans believe that with the fall campaign weeks away, the party should focus its money and efforts down ballot to protect Republicans’ congressional base. That would mean quietly ignoring Mr. Trump’s call this month for a 50-state field operation and instead emphasizing congressional districts and swing states that are also Senate and House battlegrounds. “They can’t do anything publicly — you can’t rebuke your nominee,” said Liam P. Donovan, a former aide to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “But you could allocate resources to places where it helps up and down the ballot.” The difficulty, though, is that as November approaches, the Republican National Committee is more reliant on Mr. Trump for cash than on other recent nominees. Millions of dollars are coming in through a small-donor-focused committee operated jointly with the committee, which is splitting a share of the proceeds with Mr. Trump. Over half the money raised by the Trump campaign and the committee combined in July came from donors giving less than $200, far more than for any recent Republican nominee. (That figure does not include additional small donations raised by a joint fund-raising committee that Mr. Trump’s campaign treasurer controls, which is not required to file disclosures until October.) The campaign’s large-dollar fund-raising, also run jointly with the Republican National Committee, yielded $16 million in cash in July, but much of it is reserved under law for party accounts dedicated to the Republican National Convention, legal expenses and expenditures on offices. Despite being able to collect far more from each of the biggest Republican donors under new campaign finance rules passed in 2014, the committee is well off pace from its July fund-raising in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the party’s nominee. While Mr. Trump has expanded his field operation in August — he announced the opening of 15 regional offices in Ohio, among other moves — his ability to find and turn out low-propensity Republican voters, a crucial group given his campaign strategy, will most likely turn on the Republican National Committee’s operation, set up three years ago to provide a basic grass-roots foundation for the party’s eventual nominee. Mr. Trump also relied on the committee to front $3 million in cash to ramp up his direct mail, money the party recouped in July, according to Federal Election Commission reports. The party is in turn providing much of the fund-raising expertise and technological backbone, including up-to-date donor lists and systems that will send roughly a billion emails by Election Day. A third of the party’s digital team is now embedded at the San Antonio firm that formerly built websites for Mr. Trump’s properties and is now leading his campaign’s online efforts. Payments to that firm, Giles-Parscale, amounted to $8 million in July, most of which was paid out for online advertising to reach grass-roots supporters and donors, according to party officials. “The R.N.C. has built the most efficient and effective ground game in the party’s history,” said Lindsay Walters, a party spokeswoman. “No other campaign, committee or organization has been doing this for as long as we have. We are the infrastructure for the entire G.O.P. ticket. And the Trump campaign has embraced that.”

Donald Trump
Republicans
Hillary Clinton
Campaign finance
2016 Presidential Election
US Politics
Campaign advertising
RNC


Japanese Trade Surplus Narrowed in July

Abstract: Japan’s trade surplus narrowed more in July than economists had forecast as automobile exports cooled, heightening concern that growth in Japan, the world’s second-largest economy, might slow. The surplus shrank 21.1 percent in July from a year earlier, to 671.2 billion yen ($5.9 billion), the first drop since January, the Finance Ministry said in Tokyo yesterday. The median estimate of 35 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for 844 billion yen. Export growth to the United States slowed to 1.3 percent, a fifth of the pace of the previous month, underlining concern that a slump in the American housing market is damping demand for Japanese cars and electronics. The yen’s 3.7 percent gain against the dollar this month could further depress sales overseas. Exports rose 11.7 percent, to 7.06 trillion yen, last month, less than the 13 percent expected by economists. The increase in June was 16 percent. Growth in shipments to Europe and China also slowed. Imports climbed 16.9 percent, to a record 6.39 trillion yen, as a weaker yen in July drove energy costs higher. July oil prices in yen terms were 8.7 percent more than in the corresponding month a year earlier and the highest since September. Japan imports virtually all of its oil.

Japan
International Trade and World Market
Economic Conditions and Trends


ISIS Keeps Up Pressure Near Baghdad as Iraqi Troops Hesitate

Abstract: BAGHDAD — Islamic State militants are still dominating the fight in Iraq’s crucial Anbar Province weeks into the American air campaign, as the Iraqi military has struggled to go on the offensive and has been unable to make the most of coalition air support, officials say. Even as international airstrikes have factored heavily in allowing Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting farther north and in Syria to make gains against the jihadists, the air campaign has been limited in Anbar, in part because Iraqi forces there have mostly stayed at their garrisons. American military advisers are increasing pressure on their Iraqi counterparts to leave their bases and seize the initiative, officials in Washington say. Exploiting the slow pace, fighters for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have aggressively pressed their campaign in recent weeks, commandeering towns and military garrisons along the Euphrates River Valley in Anbar, a vast desert province that stretches from the outskirts of Baghdad to the borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. “Anbar Province is in trouble,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said recently. “We know that.” As Iraqi and American officials have tried to rally the Iraqi security forces, efforts in Baghdad to achieve a more unified political front to face the crisis have also gone slowly. Iraq’s new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, has been struggling to gain support not only from minority Sunnis and Kurds — a process President Obama called critical to any military effort — but even within his own Shiite bloc . Despite weeks of wrangling, he has yet to fill the two crucial security posts in his cabinet: defense and interior. The Islamic State’s advances in Anbar Province, which is largely Sunni, have been a central concern for the Iraqi authorities since the beginning of the year. The militants first established a major foothold there in January when they seized the city of Falluja. They have expanded their authority throughout the province, sometimes by force, but also by taking advantage of the profound disenchantment among Sunnis alienated by the government in Baghdad. The most recent string of Islamic State victories in Anbar Province began with the onslaught last month of the Saqlawiya military garrison, followed closely by the defeat of a detachment of Iraqi troops based in the village of Albu Aitha. The Islamic State also gained control of Hit, a town on the main east-west road between the Haditha Dam and the provincial capital of Ramadi, both of which the militants have sought to take. In those battles, the Iraqi military largely stayed on the defensive against a highly mobile militant force. Islamic State fighters have recently begun to push into the west side of Ramadi, local officials said. Further down the Euphrates, militants have been mustering outside the oft-contested town of Amariyat al-Falluja this week , and on Thursday launched an attack that was repelled by Iraqi forces in collaboration with local tribal fighters, officials said. Over the course of the week, hundreds of additional Iraqi forces have been deployed to both Ramadi and Amariyat al-Falluja, local officials reported. But the fighting in those places this week involved only one airstrike by the American-led coalition: a bombing northwest of Ramadi last Sunday that destroyed a personnel carrier. Officials say the air campaign in Anbar has been limited in part because the terrain is more difficult for air support, with militants finding cover in the orchards, cities and towns that line the Euphrates. American officials said they have been especially concerned that civilian casualties in the Sunni-dominated areas where the Islamic State has thrived would damage the Iraqi government’s efforts to enlist Sunni support in Iraq and abroad. In addition, bad weather has scrubbed surveillance flights in recent days, officials said, and the intense focus on Kobani in Syria has diverted planes. Officials also said that since the start of the coalition air campaign, Islamic State fighters throughout Iraq and Syria have learned to disperse into smaller units and have taken more care to hide weaponry and equipment. Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi Efforts to stem the rise of the Islamic State. American officials said that in pushing their Iraqi counterparts to become more aggressive, they are not trying to jolt the Iraqi troops in Anbar off their bases before they were suitably trained and armed. Preparedness levels of units, they said, varied greatly, and hundreds of American advisers in Iraq have been integrated into the Iraqi military command to help assess troop strengths and supply needs as well as assist in designing operations. “The American advisers are doing everything they can to help the Iraqi security forces be more competent and confident in the field,” said one senior American military official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss battlefield considerations. “They’re trying to get them to be able to dislodge ISIL as best they can.” But the Islamic State’s gains in Anbar have raised concerns among Iraqi officials and their American counterparts. Control of the province would give the militants greatly improved mobility throughout a vast swath of the country from the Syrian border in the west to the outskirts of greater Baghdad in the east, and from Babel Province in the south to Mosul in the far north. Some analysts have argued that further Islamic State gains in Anbar would also put Baghdad International Airport — the nation’s main hub, including for American troops and diplomats — and the capital itself at greater risk of falling. Iraqi and American officials, however, insist that Baghdad is not at risk of being overrun. Tens of thousands of Iraqi government forces and the Shiite militia members are stationed in the city, along with a heavy concentration of American weaponry at the airport, including Apache helicopter gunships. And a siege would likely inspire a popular armed resistance by the majority Shiite population. The closest town to the capital under the control of the Islamic State is Zaidan, a largely Sunni village about a dozen miles west of Baghdad International Airport, Iraqi officials said. The group has not come closer in significant numbers since seizing the town early in the summer, officials said. Instead, officials say, militants will likely continue to search for weaknesses in the city’s outer defenses, and to send suicide bombers into crowded Shiite neighborhoods to foment sectarian animosities and unnerve the city. In pushing for a more aggressive Iraqi response in Anbar, American officials point to successes elsewhere, including Iraqi offensives in late August to retake Mosul Dam and to break the siege of Amerli in Salahuddin Province. Both operations were supported by airstrikes. Similarly, the pesh merga, the military of the Kurdish region, have successfully led offensives, backed by airstrikes, to retake several towns in the north, including Rabia on the border with Syria. Last week, Iraqi security forces scored a rare and significant victory in Anbar when the Iraqi Army drove the Islamic State from three towns in northeastern Anbar, severing a key transit route for the insurgency between the west of the country and the north. The towns had for months been under the control of the jihadist group and had allowed fighters to transport supplies between key strongholds. On Friday, Iraqi forces began trying to free the Baiji refinery in northern Iraq, which has been encircled by Islamic State fighters for weeks, Iraqi and American officials said. At a news conference in Washington on Friday, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the United States Central Command, pointed to some of those efforts as evidence of Iraqi progress against the Islamic State. “They are doing some things now to incrementally recapture ground that’s been lost,” he said. “We’re doing some things to incrementally improve conditions.” He added: “We will begin to train and equip Iraqi security forces to regenerate some much-needed combat power. But it’ll take time.”

Iraq
Anbar Province
Military
Iraqi Army
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Pentagon
US Military


Twins’ Morneau Gets Big Hit in Return

Abstract: Justin Morneau hit a crucial two-run single Saturday in his return from a five-game absence, leading the way as the Twins broke out of an offensive slump in a 10-3 victory over the Cleveland Indians in Minneapolis. The Twins held a 3-1 lead in the bottom of the fifth when Cleveland starter Fausto Carmona (1-3) intentionally walked Jason Kubel to load the bases with one out for Morneau, who was hitting .200 and had just recovered from an illness. Carmona then threw Morneau a changeup, which he lined to center. Indians Manager Manny Acta said, “If I’m in bed for four days, I think I’d rather see an 86-mile-an-hour changeup than a 92-m.p.h. sinker.” The Twins scored more than five runs in a game for the first time. Danny Valencia hit a two-run homer and Kubel had two hits and three runs batted in. TIGERS 9, WHITE SOX 0 Brad Penny of host Detroit lost a no-hitter on a tough call in the sixth. With one out, Brent Morel hit a chopper down the third-base line. Brandon Inge backhanded it behind the bag and made a low throw that first baseman Miguel Cabrera could not field cleanly. The official scorer, Ron Kleinfelter, ruled the play a hit, drawing boos from most of the 35,227 fans at Comerica Park. RANGERS 3, ROYALS 1 Alexi Ogando (3-0) pitched into the seventh for host Texas, holding Kansas City scoreless until Kila Ka’aihue homered on his 114th and final pitch. With closer Neftali Feliz placed on the disabled list because of shoulder inflammation, Darren Oliver pitched the ninth for his first save since July 25, 1994. RED SOX 5, ANGELS 0 Daisuke Matsuzaka (2-2) allowed one hit in eight innings and Kevin Youkilis homered for visiting Boston, which is 9-5 since its 0-6 start. RAYS 6, BLUE JAYS 4 Ben Zobrist’s three-run homer broke a 2-2 tie in the sixth as Tampa Bay withstood Jose Bautista’s sixth and seventh home runs for host Toronto. Bautista’s homers were off David Price, who is 7-0 with a 2.30 earned run average in eight games against Toronto. BRAVES 5, GIANTS 2 Tim Hudson (3-2) outdueled host San Francisco’s Tim Lincecum (2-2), falling an out short of his first complete game of the season. With his team leading by 5-1, Atlanta Manager Fredi Gonzalez left Hudson in to start the ninth, but he gave up Pat Burrell’s leadoff double and Miguel Tejada’s sacrifice fly. Martin Prado drove in Atlanta’s first three runs as the Braves secured just their third series win. Lincecum gave up five runs and six walks, a career high. CUBS 10, DODGERS 8 Jeff Baker’s tie-breaking two-run double capped host Chicago’s five-run rally in the eighth. Starlin Castro, Darwin Barney and Marlon Byrd combined for nine hits, six R.B.I. and four runs. Andre Ethier’s two-run double, which broke a tie with two outs in the Dodgers’ sixth, extended his hitting streak to 20 games. ROCKIES 3, MARLINS 1 Jason Hammel pitched a season-high six and two-thirds innings and bunted home a run for Colorado, which improved to 8-2 on the road. The Rockies’ bullpen finished with two and a third perfect innings and has allowed two runs in the past 221/3 innings. PHILLIES 4, PADRES 2 Ryan Howard hit a two-run, opposite-field double to left field with two outs in the 11th inning, lifting Philadelphia to its third straight victory in a series in San Diego. ASTROS 9, BREWERS 6 Humberto Quintero hit a two-out, two-run double in the 10th inning, sending Houston to victory after Brandon Lyon blew a save in Milwaukee. PIRATES 7, NATIONALS 2 Andrew McCutchen scored three runs, stole two bases and singled in a five-run first inning for Pittsburgh, which won for the second time in seven home games. REDS 5, CARDINALS 3 Miguel Cairo’s two-out, two-run single broke a 3-3 tie in the eighth for visiting Cincinnati, which had lost seven of nine games. GUTIERREZ GETS AN ANSWER Doctors at the Mayo Clinic told Seattle center fielder Franklin Gutierrez that irritable bowel syndrome had caused his lingering stomach problems, and he said he expected to feel better soon. ... Pittsburgh activated infielder Brandon Wood, who was claimed on waivers from the Los Angeles Angels. ... Toronto put infielder Jayson Nix on the disabled list with a bruised left shin.

Cleveland Indians
Baseball
Minnesota Twins
Morneau Justin


New York Lawyers’ Group Backs Altering Judicial Investigation Rules

Abstract: The New York State Bar Association recommended on Friday that the state adopt sweeping changes in the judicial-discipline system that could make it more difficult for judges to be removed from the bench. The 77,000-member bar association has no legal authority, but its action is expected to begin a contentious battle over the issue in Albany. Critics had said that the proposal, put forth by a Manhattan lawyers group, the New York County Lawyers Association, was framed to help judges facing charges and did not reflect the views of the public. But at its annual meeting in Manhattan, the state bar association, through its House of Delegates, accepted many parts of the proposal, effectively promising to work for changes in state law. Some of the recommendations would require legislation or amendments to the State Constitution. The broadly framed proposal would divide the state agency that investigates judges, the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, into two parts, one to prosecute judges and one to rule on the charges. It would also give judges early notice of investigations, would permit them to question investigators’ witnesses before any hearing and would add new limits on how much the commission could expand an investigation after an initial complaint. The bar association also called for the state to pay for lawyers for judges who are charged with misconduct. The judicial conduct commission investigates about 250 judges a year, and it publicly disciplined 15 judges last year. There are about 3,500 full- and part-time judges in the state. During a debate on Friday in the 298-member House of Delegates, some delegates said they knew of no problem with New York’s current judicial-discipline system, but for others, “it’s very important that we support our judges,” as one delegate put it. Dennis R. Hawkins, a delegate who is the executive director of the Committee for Modern Courts, a group that has focused on court issues for decades, noted that the proposal made no mention of a decades-old recommendation that judicial discipline hearings be open to the public. The hearings are secret under state law, and many judges favor keeping them closed. James B. Kobak Jr., the president of the New York Country Lawyers’ Association, said his group would study the secrecy requirement. The president of the state bar association, Stephen P. Younger, said changes in the judicial discipline procedure were needed “to protect those who are charged unfairly.” But Robert H. Tembeckjian, the administrator of the judicial conduct commission, said the commission would oppose the proposed changes. He said that if they were adopted it “would be harder to investigate and discipline judges who have committed misconduct.” Mr. Tembeckjian was at the bar association meeting on Friday, at the Hilton New York. But he was not permitted to address the meeting. He said it was “absurd that they would not let me speak.” But Mr. Younger said the commission’s views had been considered and the association “followed its standard procedure” in hearing only from its own delegates. Still, during the debate, the Manhattan lawyers’ group backed down on two divisive proposals. The association withdrew a proposal to require “clear and convincing evidence” to prove judicial misconduct and dropped a proposal that would have required investigators to “accord judges the highest degree of respect” when looking into misconduct. Instead, the delegates passed a provision that would merely suggest that everyone involved with judicial-conduct investigations “treat each other with respect.” The Manhattan lawyers’ association agreed to the change after a New York City lawyer, Mark H. Alcott, suggested it during the debate. Mr. Alcott, a former state bar association president, said proposing that investigators must treat judges with the highest degree of respect “could cause a perception problem,” making it appear that the lawyers’ group wanted favorable treatment for judges.

New York State
Judges
Committee for Modern Courts
New York State Bar Assn
New York County Lawyers' Assn
Commission on Judicial Conduct (NYS)


For Obama and Indian Leader, a Friendly Stroll if Not a Full Embrace

Abstract: WASHINGTON — In a get-to-know-you visit fraught with awkward undertones, President Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India sought to repair a strained relationship between their nations on Tuesday, emerging with expressions of good will but little in the way of concrete deals. At an Oval Office meeting and during a stroll around the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Mr. Obama and Mr. Modi emphasized what they had in common as democratic leaders who overcame personal obstacles, campaigned as outsiders and embraced technology as a vital tool in politics and governing. But their talks yielded no resolutions to thorny disputes over taxes, trade and civilian nuclear energy cooperation that have divided the United States and India in recent years. And there was little sign that human rights — a particularly sensitive topic for Mr. Modi, who has been accused of being complicit in deadly anti-Muslim riots — was a major item on the agenda. “Human rights and the importance of inclusive governance were part of the discussions between the president and the prime minister today,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary told reporters. But a statement issued jointly by the United States and India after the talks made no mention of the issue. The White House has grappled with the perceptions of a visit meant to spotlight the president’s high hopes for working with Mr. Modi while not lavishing the full measure of White House pageantry on a leader who until recently was barred from entering the United States because of the allegations of human rights abuses more than a decade ago. Still, in a striking gesture that Mr. Modi later said gave their relationship a “new dimension,” the president left the White House on Tuesday to give the prime minister a personal tour of the King Memorial, recalling Mr. Obama’s own visit in 2010 to the onetime home in Mumbai of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indian champion of democracy and nonviolence who was a model for the American civil rights leader. At a luncheon at the State Department not long after, Mr. Modi was effusive in thanking Mr. Obama “from the core of my heart” for leading him around the memorial. “He took out a lot of time,” Mr. Modi said. “We were together yesterday and today for quite some time, and today in fact he took me around, and with such ease and such humility.” Mr. Modi had been denied a visa to visit the United States because of accusations that he failed to stop religious violence in Gujarat in 2002, when he was chief minister there, which took the lives of more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims. On Thursday, while Mr. Modi was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, the human rights group American Justice Center filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan against him on behalf of two survivors of the rioting, seeking a judgment that his conduct was tantamount to genocide. American officials have declined to comment on the case, except to say that sitting heads of government enjoy immunity from lawsuits in American courts. But human rights activists had pressed the Obama administration to get the president to raise the issue with Mr. Modi while he was in Washington. If he did, it was in private. “The purpose of these meetings was to improve U.S.-India relations, so we weren’t expecting Obama to give him the cold shoulder, but we were hoping there would be a little bit of measure in the red-carpet treatment, so we were surprised by the Martin Luther King side visit,” said John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “Delivering a message about human rights is always awkward.” It was hardly the only tricky element of Mr. Modi’s visit. Their get-together began on Monday night with a small dinner in the White House Blue Room that was a protocol nightmare: Mr. Modi was in the middle of a nine-day fast to observe the Hindu festival of Navratri, but insisted his hosts go ahead and eat. Mr. Modi sat in front of an empty plate and had warm water for dinner while Mr. Obama and the two leaders’ entourages ate avocados and goat cheese, crisped halibut and basmati rice, a pumpkin crème brûlée and a California chardonnay. The 20-person dinner was a stark contrast to the lavish affair Mr. Obama threw for Mr. Modi’s predecessor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in November 2009, when more than 300 guests dined on arugula salad, curried prawns and pumpkin pie tart at an event whose bill came to more than $570,000. This two-day meeting did produce some agreements, including the renewal of a 10-year defense cooperation framework, a pact to cooperate on maritime security and several clean-energy initiatives. And as Mr. Obama intensifies the American campaign against the Sunni militant group known as the Islamic State, the two agreed to improve their counterterrorism cooperation and intelligence sharing. “We discussed the issues of trade, issues of making sure that maritime rules are observed, and we discussed how we can continue to work together on a whole host of issues from space exploration, scientific endeavor, to dealing with humanitarian crises like Ebola in West Africa,” Mr. Obama said after a two-hour meeting with Mr. Modi in the Oval Office. Mr. Modi, for his part, said he wanted to resolve disputes that had stalled the implementation of the American-India civilian nuclear agreement and stymied progress on trade. He said the two leaders had a “candid discussion” on trade. “We already have the foundation of a strong partnership,” Mr. Modi said. “We now have to revive the momentum and ensure that we get the best out of it for our people and for the world.”

India
Narendra Modi
Barack Obama
US Foreign Policy


In EMI Battle, Citigroup Is at Odds With Private Equity Firm

Abstract: AFTER the Grammy Awards last Sunday, the stars came out for EMI’s party at the W Hollywood Hotel. The country music hunk Keith Urban arrived with his wife, Nicole Kidman. Katy (“I Kissed a Girl”) Perry sparkled in a form-fitting dress that would become gossip fodder on the Internet. There were also rappers (Cypress Hill), guitar heroes (Slash and Dave Navarro) and a coffeehouse darling (Norah Jones). There was one person, however, whose absence was conspicuous at the soirée: Guy Hands, the chairman of Terra Firma, the British private equity firm that bought EMI, the music publishing and recording company, for what it now says was $8 billion at the peak of the credit bubble in 2007. Mr. Hands was once a mainstay at such glitzy affairs, happy to pose for pictures with the likes of Ms. Perry. Now, he is less eager to be seen at those events because, by his own acknowledgment, the EMI acquisition has been a disaster for his firm and his investors. As soon as Terra Firma took control, Mr. Hands spoke publicly about the need to drastically reduce artist advances at EMI and immediately alienated some of the storied company’s most famous acts. Radiohead and the Rolling Stones departed. Lily Allen, a major star in England, told the British press, “I hate Terra Firma.” “I don’t think he appreciated how sensitive and unpredictable artists can be,” says Bill Werde, editorial director of Billboard. “It seemed to me at the time that he looked at artists like just another asset — like the company’s distribution channel or its music publishing company.” But the real clash has been between Mr. Hands and Citigroup , the bank that financed the EMI acquisition and many other Terra Firma deals. Terra Firma used only $3 billion of its investors’ cash to buy the music company; it borrowed the remaining $5.2 billion from Citi. Why was Terra Firma’s lender so generous? The bank thought it could later offload this debt by selling it in smaller chunks to other investors. Then reality intruded. Before the deal closed in August 2007, the credit market froze — leaving Citi holding a vast bag of debt that it designated as “substandard.” The transaction offered yet another example of the kind of promiscuous lending that forced the government to rescue Citi the next year. Two and a half years later, EMI’s results are improving. The company says its revenue for the most recent fiscal year, ended last March, was $2.4 billion, an increase of 7.4 percent from the previous year. Last week, “Need You Now,” the new album by EMI’s breakout country music act, Lady Antebellum, topped the Billboard 200. Even so, the company still had a net loss of $1.6 billion during the fiscal year, and it still isn’t generating enough cash to cover the debt that was larded onto EMI’s books to finance Mr. Hands’s takeover. In the last 17 months, Terra Firma has breached loan covenants on its EMI debt five times and has had to inject nearly $150 million into the ailing company to stave off default. Mr. Hands tried restructuring his deal with Citi, but the talks broke down in October. People familiar with the discussions, who requested anonymity because the talks are confidential, say Citi believes that Terra Firma’s equity in EMI is worthless and that the firm should hand over the company to the bank. Mr. Hands, who declined to be interviewed, doesn’t give up so easily. He hired David Boies, who is to the legal profession what Bono is to arena rock, to do battle with Citi. In December, Terra Firma sued Citi in New York State Supreme Court, accusing the bank of defrauding the private equity firm. The suit, which has been moved to federal court in Manhattan, highlights the dual role Citi played in the transaction as both an adviser to EMI’s former management on the sale and Terra Firm’s lender — a common practice in the private equity boom. No matter the outcome, the lawsuit has illuminated the relationship between Citi and Britain’s most famous private equity investor. After a string of successful deals together, the investor and his bankers plunged into a catastrophic deal that is emblematic of the credit boom’s excesses. Terra Firma’s lawyers say David Wormsley, one of Citi’s top London dealmakers, didn’t inform Mr. Hands in the final hours of a bidding war for EMI that Terra Firma’s only rival, Cerberus Capital Management, had dropped out. Instead, the complaint says, Mr. Wormsley urged Mr. Hands to offer an inflated price for EMI. Mr. Boies and his team say the Citi executive’s alleged failure to convey that fact was “at minimum, negligent, and fell below the standard to be expected of a reasonably competent investment banker in Mr. Wormsley’s position.” A Citi spokeswoman, Danielle Romero-Apsilos, denies the lawsuit’s claims. "We believe this suit is without merit, and we will defend ourselves vigorously,” she said, declining to comment further. Citi’s lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison argue that the case should be heard in Britain, where many of the events in Terra Firma’s complaint transpired. This could complicate matters for Mr. Hands. Last year, he moved to Guernsey, a tax haven in the Channel Islands, and can therefore spend only a limited amount of time on British soil. Not surprisingly, his lawyers counter that Terra Firma and Citi had plenty of dealings in New York, Citi’s base. Some people in the industry say Terra Firma’s suit is merely a negotiating ploy meant to recoup part of its EMI investment and to avoid reputational damage that would make it harder for the firm to raise money in the future. “It sounds to me like a textbook case of a private equity firm that bet the ranch, and now it has buyer’s remorse” says Paul Povel, a finance professor at the University of Houston who has studied Mr. Hands’s industry. Jonathan H. Sherman, a Boies, Schiller & Flexner partner and Terra Firma’s chief litigator in the case, dismisses that notion. “At the heart of this case is an allegation as serious as it is simple,” Mr. Sherman says. Citi, he says, “induced Terra Firma to invest $3 billion by manufacturing the appearance of competition in an auction when it knew the auction was a bust. That is fraud.” IN Britain, Guy Hands is a financial rock star. He has amassed a tidy fortune by snapping up undervalued assets like British pubs, European movie theaters and roadside concession stands in Germany and wringing cash out of them after borrowing the money he needed to buy them. Along the way, he became the British equivalent of the Blackstone Group’s founder, Stephen A. Schwarzman. Mr. Hands owns a 12th-century estate in Tuscany, where he produces wine and olive oil. He has an enormous collection of karaoke records, and, on at least one occasion, has belted out “My Way” after an exhausting day of deal-making. Citi played a key role in Mr. Hands’s ascent, with Mr. Wormsley bringing him some of his best deals. According to several people familiar with the dealings of Terra Firma and Citi, Mr. Hands’s other close contact at the bank was Michael S. Klein, a rising star who would become the head of Citi’s investment banking operation and was in a position to help arrange financing for these transactions. Mr. Wormsley and Mr. Klein declined to be interviewed for this article. The three men enjoyed one another’s company. According to people familiar with their extracurricular activities, Mr. Wormsley regularly took Mr. Hands and his wife, Julia, to the opera in London. Mr. Hands reciprocated by making his Italian vineyard available for the 40th birthday party of Mr. Wormsley’s wife, Vicky. For his part, Mr. Klein invited Mr. Hands and his wife, Julie, to his 40th birthday on Barbados. So not surprisingly, according to the suit, Mr. Hands listened intently when Mr. Wormsley called him in November 2006 to tell him another company was for sale: EMI. And EMI seemed to fit the mold Mr. Hands preferred: a troubled enterprise with untapped value. One of the company’s founders, Emile Berliner, invented the disk phonograph record in 1887. Over the years, EMI became a force in the music industry. In 1955, it bought Capitol, the American company whose roster included Frank Sinatra; . the company signed the Beatles seven years later. EMI’s publishing division, meanwhile, amassed copyrights to songs from “Over the Rainbow” to ones made famous by Kanye West and Beyoncé. EMI seemed to lose its momentum in 2001 after its Virgin Records unit unfurled a bomb: Mariah Carey’s album “Glitter,” which did so poorly that the company had to pay the singer $28 million to sever its relationship with her. “After that, it was all about, ‘Have you hit your numbers this week?,’ ” says Ted Cohen, a former EMI senior vice president who now runs a consulting business. “I think they just took their eyes off the ball when it came to the creative side of the business.” EMI’s weaknesses became abundantly clear in the last decade, when the industry was shaken by music piracy and declining CD sales. Unlike all but one of its rivals, the Warner Music Group, it was a standalone, publicly traded music company. In 2005, EMI’s stock tumbled when it revealed that forthcoming albums from its hit bands, Coldplay and Gorillaz, wouldn’t arrive on schedule. This prompted it to seek an acquirer the next year. In strolled Mr. Hands — right behind a number of his rivals, including Cerberus; JPMorgan Chase’s buyout unit, One Equity Partners; and the Fortress Investment Group, all of which submitted preliminary bids for EMI in April 2007. IN conversations recounted in court documents, Mr. Hands told Mr. Wormsley that he would need Citi’s backing for an EMI bid because he was coming in on his rivals’ heels. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Wormsley alerted Citi’s debt team and, shortly thereafter, Mr. Klein sent Terra Firma’s founder an e-mail saying he was “personally involved” in getting the deal underwritten. EMI then told its suitors that they would have to present their final offers on a Monday in May 2007. One Equity and Fortress dropped out. Terra Firma’s lawyers say Cerberus abandoned its hunt the day before the meeting. Cerberus declined to comment. The lawyers contend, however, that Mr. Wormsley prodded Mr. Hands until early Monday morning, telling him he needed to submit a high number if he didn’t want to lose EMI to his firm’s American rival. “Citi’s representations to Terra Firma were knowingly false” Terra Firma’s lawyers said in their complaint. Once Terra Firma submitted its binding offer for EMI, however, there was still a two-month closing period, during which the financial world began to unravel. While it would be another year before Wall Street approached an outright breakdown, the debt markets went into a coma as traders realized the severity of the subprime mortgage crisis (which Citi had played a pivotal role in fomenting.) It soon became clear that Citi wouldn’t be able to syndicate the billions in debt it took on to do the deal. It also meant that Terra Firma would have difficulty refinancing or raising more money in the future. In hindsight, Terra Firma could have exited the deal before it was completed, and there were opportunities to do just that. According to people familiar with the closing process, Cerberus approached Terra Firma with an offer to put equity into EMI, which would have reduced the British firm’s investment. Terra Firma, however, has a policy of not doing “club deals” with other private equity firms. So it spurned Cerberus’s advances. Citi could also have shut down the deal altogether but chose otherwise. A person with knowledge of Citi’s deliberations, who requested anonymity because of the litigation, says the bank was fearful of losing its standing with private equity borrowers if it abandoned a longstanding client like Terra Firma. So Citi stayed in. In a sworn statement filed last week, Mr. Hands said Mr. Klein arranged for him to meet with Charles Prince, then Citi’s chief executive, to discuss the deal in New York five days before the closing. Shortly afterward, Mr. Hands said, Mr. Klein set up a telephone call between Terra Firma’s founder and Edgar Bronfman Jr., C.E.O. of the Warner Music Group. Mr. Hands said in his statement that he made the call to Mr. Bronfman because he eventually wanted to merge EMI with Warner Music. Warner Music declined to comment, and Mr. Prince could not be reached for comment. Even before Mr. Hands completed the acquisition of EMI, cracks in the Terra Firma-Citi relationship were already beginning to show — including some frosty closing meetings in New York, where Citi tightened the covenants on Terra Firma’s debt. Nevertheless, Mr. Hands remained confident. Even if Terra Firma violated its covenants, it could avoid default by injecting more equity into the company. Terra Firma raised $200 million from investors like the Canadian Pension Plan and set it aside for this purpose. The music industry has a long, tortured history of treating outsiders roughly. (Think of the animosity directed at the former NBC president Andy Lack when he took over SonyBMG.) But Mr. Hands was a fairly sharp-elbowed guy himself. He granted autonomy to EMI’s profitable music publishing business. But as soon as the deal closed in 2007, he inserted himself into the day-to-day operations of the recorded music division, eliciting a hue and cry from artists and their managers about heavy-handedness. That didn’t stop Mr. Hands. He cut the recorded music division’s payroll of 4,500 by a third, bolstering EMI’s cash flow. Still, hopes for a 51 percent increase in digital music sales — a key element in Mr. Hands’s turnaround plan— didn’t materialize. EMI’s hit-making apparatus, meanwhile, remained moribund. According to Nielsen SoundScan, EMI had only one album — “Viva la Vida” by Coldplay — in the annual Top 10 in the United States in 2008. As a result, sales and profits plummeted, and by the end of 2008, Terra Firma had written down its EMI investment by 90 percent. MR. HANDS, meanwhile, relinquished his managerial duties at EMI to Elio Leoni-Sceti, a former brand manager for Reckitt Benckiser, the consumer products company with brands like Mop & Glo, French’s Mustard and Lysol. Mr. Leoni-Sceti had no previous music experience before taking the job. But according to Billboard’s Mr. Werde, he is a less polarizing figure than Terra Firma’s founder, and has done a surprisingly good job of repositioning the company. “What EMI and Terra Firma need more than anything is time,” says Jon Cohen, a music promoter who is working with Mr. Leoni-Sceti’s team. “They are under so much pressure with all that debt.” But time may be running out. In a recent corporate filing, Terra Firma says it has exhausted all but $15 million of a $200 million financing line it had created to resolve covenant violations. The company is trying to raise $188 million to avoid defaulting on its next covenant test in March. All of this lent a sense of urgency to Mr. Hands’s attempts to restructure the company’s debt. But he is no longer dealing with some of his old mates at Citi. Mr. Klein left in 2008 after a management shakeup caused by the bank’s near-collapse. Mr. Wormsley remains at Citi. Indeed, until talks fell apart in September, Mr. Hands sat across the table from bankers interested in one thing: getting Citi’s money back. He offered to put $1.6 billion into EMI if Citi wrote down that amount. That would have left Terra Firma in control of a company with a more manageable debt-to-equity ratio. Citi’s position was that Terra Firma’s equity in the company was worthless and that Mr. Hands should therefore just hand over the company in exchange for a small percentage of the upside if the bank could later sell it. Richard X. Bove, a banking analyst at Rochdale Securities, says Citi has written down nearly all of its EMI debt. “I think they think they have a pretty good chance at getting something back now,” Mr. Bove says. There would be no shortage of bidders for EMI Publishing, which has remained healthy through all the turmoil. As for the recorded music division, there is one likely buyer: Warner Music. In December, Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at Pali Research, wrote that Warner Music was “hoarding cash” in the hope of doing just that sometime in the coming year. In short, it could be Citi that sells EMI to Warner instead of Terra Firma, which would be a cruel irony for Mr. Hands. Then again, it’s unlikely that either Terra Firma or EMI will emerge from their mutual woes without feeling more pain. Claire Enders, a London-based media analyst who has followed the deal closely, says that there is no other way it could have ended. “For Terra Firma, it was ego,” she says. “Citigroup did not want to be the one that brought the party to an end. But this was the pin coming out of the private equity balloon. After that, it went poof.”

Music
EMI Group Plc
Citigroup Inc
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures


In ‘Beyond Rodin,’ at the Rye Arts Center, the Human Form Unleashed

Abstract: RYE, N.Y. FOR its current exhibition, the Rye Arts Center is inhabited by sculptural depictions of the human figure. They perch on pedestals and line the walls; a woman on a swing is suspended from the ceiling. Several pieces have been placed outdoors: a nude on the lawn, a huge head among the bushes, brightly hued bodies cavorting on poles. A ceramic baby clings precariously to a second-story window, rolls of fat around his shoulders and knees. The more than 50 works on view in “Beyond Rodin: New Directions in Contemporary Figurative Sculpture” are intended to demonstrate a revitalization of the human form in art. “For decades, the figure was off-limits for serious sculptors,” said Bob Clyatt , the creator of the imperiled baby and the curator of the exhibition. “There was Rodin, there was Degas, Giacometti and Moore, and then Segal and Hanson got some mileage out of body-casting, but that was about it. Figurative sculpture was considered old-fashioned or kitsch.” This has begun to change, said Mr. Clyatt, who is traditionally trained himself and lives in Rye. “In the last 5 to 10 years,” he said, “we’re seeing sculpture that is classically rooted but undeniably contemporary.” The 20 artists in the show, who range in age from 30 to 81, handle the figure in various ways. They carve, cast and hand-model; a few use computer-assisted design. They work in bronze, wood, clay and paper; they make use of found objects and space-age polymers. Some of their sculptures are portraiture; some are narrative; some simply venerate the human body. There is whimsy here, alongside somber messages about decidedly contemporary matters. Susan Saladino’s “The Last Bird,” for instance, laments humans’ ravaging of nature. Its blindfolded woman, with her torso of stoneware and her skirt of twigs, presses a bird to her breast. The figure was inspired by two screaming jays circling a demolished lot near Ms. Saladino’s home in Florida. Flailing skeletons, topsy-turvy shopping carts, farm animals and nearly 100 other fanciful characters tumble through “You Wish,” Jedediah Morfit ’s 72-inch-by-44-inch white urethane plastic bas-relief. The piece was inspired, he said, by the chaos that followed last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Mr. Morfit, who is based in Philadelphia, has been working in bas-relief for six years. “I’m thinking of Josiah Wedgwood and 19th-century decorative plaster and cherubim,” he said. “I like that my work has all those historical resonances, but at the same time tells a 21st-century story.” Recurring throughout Mr. Morfit’s composition is a bustled woman pushing a wheelbarrow. In one spot, she is an empty shape on the wooden background — the first time Mr. Morfit has incorporated this negative image. It represents, he said, “the desire to absent yourself from the flotsam and jetsam of existence.” He added, “But you can’t — you’re in it and you’re not getting out.” Though all this may sound gloomy, other works are not. Consider Bret Reilly ’s “Pink Sneakers,” the woman on the suspended swing, all white papier-mâché except for her shoes, a real pair of pink plaid sneakers. Or Joan Benefiel and Jeremy Leichman ’s resin women, approximately two feet tall and tinted in vibrant shades of red and orange, who balance on poles inside and outside the center, and along Purchase Street in downtown Rye. Ms. Benefiel and Mr. Leichman are a married couple who founded Figuration, L.L.C ., a studio in Brooklyn. Their 15 figures in “Beyond Rodin” are maquettes for the “ Hudson River Pilings Project ,” a gathering of larger figures, some 15 feet, to be displayed in the Hudson off Houston Street. In 2009, the project was approved by the Hudson River Park Trust; the couple are raising money for its realization. Their maquettes have also been installed in Manhattan’s fashion district and at Nokia Plaza in Los Angeles. Among the sculptures on display are those that pay homage to the nobility of the human form. These include Christopher Smith ’s “Perfectly Naked,” a row of 20-inch male and female nudes, and Bernard Rowan ’s seven-foot “Tania,” the nude on the center’s lawn. “This one body in this one time becomes a timeless presence,” Mr. Rowan wrote, “unique, irreplaceable, forever, and never to occur again.” But with cast works, iterations of the same piece can occur. Over four decades, versions of Carole A. Feuerman ’s hyper-realistic sculptures have appeared around the globe. Here, gallerygoers can marvel at the degree of detail — strands of hair loosened from bathing caps, drops of water glistening on skin — in two of her swimmers: “Moran,” a young woman in a red swimsuit, and “Miniature Serena,” another young woman resting on an inner tube. The latter is a scaled-down version of Ms. Feuerman’s monumental “Survival of Serena,” which had its debut at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and won first prize at the Beijing Biennale in 2008. This summer, an 800-pound painted bronze edition of the work will be on view in Lieutenant Petrosino Square in Lower Manhattan. Ms. Feuerman, who lives and works in Manhattan, says that with each casting she makes subtle alterations: “I change the nose, or the angle of the face.” Most of her pieces require more than 100 coats of paint to achieve their realism. But that realism, she added, is an illusion. “I’m actually idealizing the human form,” she said. “It’s not life as it really is. It’s more a dreamlike, magical state of how you’d want it to be.”

Rye Arts Center
Art
Sculpture
Westchester County (NY)


Greece Agrees to Sell Stake in State-Owned Betting Firm

Abstract: ATHENS — In Greece’s first major privatization deal since the country’s debt crisis erupted three years ago, the government on Wednesday agreed to sell a controlling stake in the state gambling company OPAP to Emma Delta, a Greek-Czech investment fund, Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras said. “The first major privatization in our country has been completed successfully,” Mr. Stournaras said. Emma Delta is buying a 33 percent stake in OPAP, making it the company’s largest shareholder. Greece’s state privatization fund said the purchase price was €652 million, or $860.5 million, with Greece also retaining €60 million in dividends. The government last month rejected a €622 million offer from Emma Delta, which was the sole bidder for the stake. Mr. Stournaras did not comment on what the deal might mean for OPAP’s 1,000 employees. OPAP was Greece’s most profitable company last year, with net profit of €505.5 million. About two-thirds of that came from lottery games, with the rest from sports betting. Mr. Stournaras said the deal would have “multiple” benefits for Greece as it “demonstrates the trust of investors in the Greek economy.” He added that Greece’s privatization drive, which has failed to take off over the past three years, would contribute to “accelerating the country’s exit from the crisis.”

Greece
Privatization
Euro Crisis
Czech Republic


Races Seek Techniques to Prevent Fatalities

Abstract: More than 10,000 runners crossed the finish line of Sunday’s Boilermaker 15K Road Race, an event in Utica, N.Y., that boasts the largest and most competitive field of the nation’s 15-kilometer races. But Sean O’Neill, a 24-year-old resident of Brooklyn, collapsed near the 10-kilometer mark and never got up. He died less than an hour later. O’Neill was the latest example of a sudden death in long-distance running, a problem that race organizers said they feared and that they had worked hard to prevent. But with races involving thousands of participants of all ages and backgrounds, conducting medical screenings of all runners is usually not an option, nor is it a foolproof preventative measure. “It would be nice, but it’s somewhat impractical,” said Dr. William O. Roberts, a former president of the American Road Race Medical Society and the current medical director of the Twin Cities Marathon in Minnesota. O’Neill’s problem probably would not have been detected by a standard screening before the race. Mark Bentz, the Oneida County coroner, said in a telephone interview yesterday that O’Neill died of “natural causes due to cardiac arrhythmia,” with physical exertion as a contributing factor. “He would have had to have a complete heart workup done, and that’s something not usually done on healthy 24-year-olds,” Bentz said. O’Neill’s death was the fourth in the 30-year history of the Boilermaker races. But the other three, the most recent of which occurred during the 5K training run in 2004, involved participants between the ages of 54 and 71 who died of heart-related problems. O’Neill was a young man who finished last year’s Boilermaker in 1 hour 28 minutes 25 seconds. His father, Kevin O’Neill, said in a telephone interview yesterday that Sean enjoyed running, skateboarding and snowboarding. Mike Turzanski, one of Sean O’Neill’s best friends, also said yesterday that Sean was “a really healthy kid all his life,” and he had been training for the race at least four days a week for a year. The unpredictability of sudden collapses and fatalities in running leaves race organizers with one choice: to prepare for the worst and encourage runners to take the right precautions for training and staying hydrated during the race. “It’s the most serious thing we do, and it’s the most important thing we do,” said Richard Finn, the spokesman for the New York Road Runners, which organizes more than 50 races a year, including the New York City Marathon . Finn added that Road Runners race organizers “probably go above what is necessary” in placing medical and water stations along the race routes. Finn said there had not been a death in a Road Runners race for “several years.” Robert Ingalls, the race director for the Boilermaker, said in a telephone interview that racers in Utica cannot run more than half a mile without passing medical personnel. Ingalls said an emergency medical technician arrived at O’Neill’s side within a minute of the call for help. An advanced unit of emergency medical technicians was on the scene within five minutes of the call, and O’Neill had reached a hospital about a half-mile away within 13 minutes of the call, Ingalls said. “I can tell you with conviction that I was absolutely elated with the response,” Ingalls said. Finn said all participants in Road Runners races were required to sign a waiver. O’Neill signed a waiver before running in the Boilermaker; race organizers had not spoken with the O’Neill family as of yesterday afternoon, according to Ingalls. Roberts said the American Road Race Medical Society attempted to compile accurate statistics about how many runners fall fatally ill during races, but it was difficult to find accurate and complete reports. He said that for every 40,000 people who finish a marathon, one person has sudden cardiac arrest, and about one person dies from cardiac arrest for every 80,000 to 100,000 finishers. But those numbers do not include fatalities from other conditions, like heat exhaustion, dehydration and hyponatremia. And they do not include runners who participate in races that are shorter distances, like O’Neill.

Running
New York City Marathon
Medicine and Health
Marathon Running


After His Mother Gives Him a Lift to the Course, a Player Makes a Leap

Abstract: PARAMUS, N.J. — By the time Morgan Hoffmann made his way up the 17th fairway, looking at a birdie putt for a share of the lead, a sizable crowd had begun to form and people were already whispering to one another, “You know he’s from Wyckoff?” Yes, that little township in the northeastern nook of New Jersey, only about 10 minutes from Ridgewood Country Club, where Hoffmann was climbing the leader board on Saturday. Some might have remembered his name from Ramapo High School, or maybe there was talk of him at his home course, Arcola, which is practically next door to Ridgewood. Some might even know his mother, Lorraine Lionetti Hoffmann, who drove him to the course Saturday morning. And in his childhood bedroom, where he is staying this week, photographs of Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods still hang on the walls. But this was not Hoffmann’s first time playing in the Barclays in front of a crowd of familiar and embracing faces. The pressure from all that seemed to unravel him last year, when consecutive double bogeys on the back nine caused him to miss the cut. This year, Hoffmann, 25, shot a 70 on Friday to escape the cut and then blitzed the field Saturday morning, birdieing five of nine holes during one stretch between the fourth and 13th holes. He finished with a bogey-free 66, putting him two strokes off the lead held by Jim Furyk and Jason Day, at nine under par, entering Sunday’s final round. Staying with Mom, it seems, has not been so bad after all. “I went out with some friends last night I haven’t seen in forever,” Hoffmann said. “I was cracking up all night and just trying to keep the mood a little bit light, and it seemed to be working.” That was not quite the case last year, when Hoffmann fell apart down the stretch at Liberty National in Jersey City — a nightmarish collapse that could have put him in a prolonged funk. “That was hard for me to watch last year,” his mother said of the 76 that Hoffmann shot in the second round after he had shot a 67 on Day 1. She said that the pressure of trying to perform on such a stage, in front of a local audience, during his first year on the PGA Tour, had weighed on him. “He was hard on himself,” Lorraine Hoffmann said. “He learned patience. I think he realizes that if he relaxes, he plays better. He’s just started to come to terms with that.” Morgan Hoffmann entered this year’s tournament ranked No. 124 in the FedEx Cup standings, the second-to-last entrant into the postseason mix, so he said there was essentially nothing to lose. He tried to play aggressively, more his style, and some familiarity with the course clearly helps. He could not estimate how many times he had played at Ridgewood. On the ride to the course Saturday morning, Mom drove and Mom talked. “I’m just kind of listening to music, and she’s just being positive like she always is,” Hoffmann said. “I’m like, ‘Mom, let me just listen to music.’ ” On the course, Hoffmann’s celebrity status ballooned as his scores dropped. As he played with Ryo Ishikawa, who shot a 68 to move to five under par, a small gallery made up mostly of friends and family on Thursday and Friday had grown to one of the largest crowds on the course by Saturday afternoon. “Somebody yelled to him out on the course today, ‘Hey, Newtown Road!’ ” Lorraine Hoffmann said, referring to their street address. “He had to stop for a second because he thought it was so funny. We’d never heard that before.” Hoffmann missed the 18-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole that would have tied him for the lead, but he made par. He had a longer birdie attempt on 18 that did not fall, either. But his 66 remained the low round of the day. Day made 12 one-putts, including a 56-footer on the third hole, to post 68, while Furyk played bogey-free to stay at the top of the leader board. Neither Adam Scott nor Rory McIlroy, both at four under par, made the third-round charges some were expecting. Scott finished with a 75 on Saturday, while McIlroy shot a 70. And it was another rough day for Mickelson, who shot a 75 to finish at five over par. Amazingly, he hit another errant tee shot on the fifth hole. “Not again,” Mickelson said as he saw his ball veering left. Then he cried, “Fore left!” Again, the ball bounced off a cart path and landed on a patio in the hospitality area, in almost exactly the same spot where he had ended up Friday afternoon. And again, Mickelson opted to chip it off the thin carpet rather than take relief. He managed to stick it within 30 feet of the hole and save par.


Deal Raises Officers’ Pay 4% a Year

Abstract: Avoiding arbitration for the first time since 1994, the primary police officers’ union reached a tentative four-year contract with New York City on Thursday that gives raises of 4 percent a year and increases starting salaries to nearly $42,000. The union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association , which represents 23,000 police officers, said the agreement narrowed the salary gap with suburban police forces, a gap that has made it difficult for the city to recruit new officers. The contract covers two more years, with two years of retroactive increases. The agreement, which was reached at the bargaining table, was unusual because negotiations between the police union and the city have been notoriously nasty, protracted fights traditionally settled only through an arbitration panel. “I’ve never been shy to stand on the steps of City Hall and say I didn’t agree with something,” said Patrick J. Lynch, the union’s president. “Well, I am equally not shy to stand inside City Hall and say when something is right. This is right. Our members should be very proud of this contract.” With the economy in a downturn, union officials felt pressure to seek raises through negotiations rather than through a lengthy arbitration process, which might have produced an unfavorable outcome. The annual raises of 4 percent are higher than the historic average for the city’s municipal contracts. But they still lag behind the rapid growth in consumer prices over the last year, a rise of nearly 6 percent. At a City Hall news conference, Mr. Lynch and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stood together beaming, after years of criticizing each other. Mr. Bloomberg said, “I have always believed the best contracts are those that are reached at the bargaining table, and I think this is a good example of that.” The agreement will increase starting pay to $41,975 by the end of the new contract, up from $35,881 under the old contract. It also increases base pay to $76,488 after five and a half years on the job, up from $65,382 under the old contract. The new agreement, on which the rank and file will vote over several weeks, runs from Aug. 1, 2006, through July 31, 2010. Thursday’s agreement comes just three months after an arbitration panel awarded police officers a retroactive raise of 9.7 percent for the period from Aug. 1, 2004, through July 31, 2006, while significantly raising starting pay for that period to an annual rate of $35,881 from $25,100. Police Department officials had complained bitterly about that $25,100 starting rate — which had been ordered by an arbitration panel — saying that it created huge difficulties for efforts to recruit enough police officers. Mayor Bloomberg applauded the new starting salary, saying, “We believe this will help make the job more attractive to potential recruits so we can continue to attract even more top-quality candidates.” These negotiations had been carefully watched because New York City faces yawning budget gaps over the next several years. Mr. Bloomberg estimates a $2 billion shortfall in 2010. City officials said Thursday’s agreement would increase payroll costs by $540 million over the four years. The 4 percent raises were based on a pattern set last year in a contract with the police sergeants’ union. City officials said they had already budgeted for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association’s 4 percent increases. Union officials said they were also pleased that longevity pay increments, which police officers receive after 5, 10, 15 and 20 years on the job, would increase at the same rate as the basic pay, helping to lift pay for officers with greater seniority. Traditionally, longevity pay remained unchanged, even as various contracts increased the police officers’ starting pay and maximum basic pay. The city’s contribution to the union’s welfare fund will also increase, with the city also contributing a $400 one-time payment to each officer. In a victory for the union, shooting range practice will be conducted on a work day rather than on a vacation day, as the previous contract provided. In a concession to the city, the union agreed to drop six lawsuits.

Police
New York City
Patrolmen's Benevolent Assn
Wages and Salaries
Organized Labor


With Greeks Now Ready to Make a Deal, What Can We Expect?

Abstract: Q. Now that the Greek Parliament has approved a package of pension cuts, tax increases and other changes along the lines of what the country’s creditors have been demanding as a condition for more bailout money, what happens next? A. Finance ministers from the countries that use the euro are meeting in Brussels on Saturday to decide whether Greece has come far enough in meeting their demands to justify opening negotiations over another bailout, the third since 2010. Q. What are the prospects for a deal? A. Certainly better than they appeared a few days ago. France is pushing hard for a compromise. The United States has been encouraging everyone to work things out. But in many European countries, not least Germany, there is deep suspicion about whether the Greeks are really willing to follow through on their end of the bargain, especially after a national referendum last Sunday in which Greeks overwhelmingly rejected pretty much the same terms the government says it is now willing to accept. Q. What happens if there is no agreement this weekend? A. Greece’s banks are all but broke, able to allow only small withdrawals each day. Without a deal, they could go belly up in the next day or two. The government is also struggling to pay its bills, never mind some big debt payments that are looming. The economy is seizing up. Without an agreement this weekend to resume talks — or at least make substantial progress in that direction — Greece might well have to drop out of the euro system and start printing its own currency. If that happens, it will be the first time a country has exited the euro, a currency union in which membership was intended to be irrevocable. Q. If there is a deal, will this whole complicated situation really be over? A. No, not at all. Any agreement this weekend — the finance ministers’ meeting on Saturday is to be followed on Sunday by meetings of the leaders of all the eurozone countries and then the entire European Union — would only be to start formal negotiations on a new bailout. Lenders would have to come with some arrangement to keep the Greek banks solvent and allow the Greek government to meet its financial obligations while a bigger bailout is hammered out. Q. How much does Greece need? A. The amount has been changing as the country’s situation has deteriorated. Greece had asked for 53.5 billion euros, or about $59 billion, from Europe’s bailout fund over the next three years. But Greece’s main creditors — the other nations that use the euro, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — estimated on Saturday that the actual amount necessary over that period is on the order of €74 billion. Q. Who’s to blame for this mess? A. Much of Europe feels burned by the Greeks, saying that Greece has already been bailed out twice but failed to take the harsh medicine necessary to get its economy back on track so that it can repay what it owes and allow its citizens a shot at greater prosperity. Much of Greece feels burned by its creditors, especially Germany, which Greece blames for imposing budget-cutting austerity measures that undercut economic growth and impose more misery on the Greek people without any payoff. Finding common ground against that backdrop remains difficult, to say the least.

Euro
Greece
Eurozone
European Central Bank
Euro Crisis
European Stability Mechanism


Global Poverty Drops Sharply, With China Making Big Strides, U.N. Report Says

Abstract: UNITED NATIONS — Dire poverty has dropped sharply, and just as many girls as boys are now enrolled in primary schools around the world. Simple measures like installing bed nets have prevented some six million deaths from malaria. But nearly one billion people still defecate in the open, endangering the health of many others. These are among the findings that the United Nations released Monday as part of a final report on the successes and failures of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets established 15 years ago to improve the lives of the poor. “The report confirms that the global efforts to achieve the goals have saved millions of lives and improved conditions for millions more around the world,” the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said Monday as he released the report in Oslo. In fact, though, how much of those gains can be attributed to the goals is unknown. The sharp reductions in extreme poverty are due largely to the economic strides made by one big country, China. Likewise, some of the biggest shortfalls can be attributed to a handful of countries that remain very far behind. In India, for example, an estimated 600 million people defecate in the open, heightening the risk of serious disease, especially for children. Experts said the most important contribution made by the Millennium Development Goals was establishing yardsticks for measuring what countries have and have not done for their people — not just in broad-brush economic indicators but in concrete measures of well-being, like how many women die in childbirth or how many children are clinically malnourished. “It’s a data revolution, and that’s important in and of itself,” said Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development in Washington. “It has changed the norms of what development is about.” The findings in the report are likely to figure in contentious debates this summer over the United Nations’ next set of development goals, which world leaders are scheduled to adopt by September. A draft of those goals includes 169 targets that would require huge amounts of aid money to meet and would raise a host of tricky political issues about global trade and climate change. In releasing the report, United Nations officials celebrated meeting some of the goals. For instance, one of the targets was to halve the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty by 2015, but the actual decline was steeper: 14 percent of people in the developing world are extremely poor now, compared with 47 percent in 1990. China did the most, reducing the share of its people in extreme poverty to just 4 percent this year, from 61 percent in 1990. Other targets were missed, including those to reduce child mortality and women’s deaths in childbirth each by two-thirds, although progress was made on both fronts. Malaria has been made a far less deadly scourge than it was in 2000, when the targets were set, with the mortality rate down by 58 percent, the report said. Fewer children are dying of measles than in 2000, but measles vaccination coverage has stalled, the report said, and 21.6 million children were not fully immunized in 2013. Most measles deaths were concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the report called for greater investments in public health. South Asia also accounts for the highest levels of child malnutrition, with 28 percent of children who are younger than 5 classified as “moderately or severely underweight.” Jobs are not keeping pace with population growth in either rich or poor countries, an especially acute challenge for countries like India that have ballooning populations of young people in need of work. One of the starkest failures acknowledged in the report concerned gender equity. Women are more likely than men to be poor, according to the report, and women’s participation in the global paid labor force has inched up only very slowly. Critics say that setting global targets alone is not very instructive. “I’m not opposed to having a global yardstick, but I don’t put much stock in it,” said Dean Karlan, an economics professor at Yale University who studies poverty. “You can’t compare one country to another. It doesn’t give us much, in terms of telling us what to do.”

Poverty
China
Malaria
Millennium Development Goals
India
UN


Everex gPC TC2502 Computer With Linux

Abstract: Advocates of Linux, the free open-source operating system, like to say that buying a standard-issue computer involves a Microsoft Tax, because you have no choice but to pay for Windows. New versions of Linux and inexpensive hardware like the new Everex gPC TC2502 make that tax avoidable. This computer has a 1.5-gigahertz Via processor, 512 megabytes of memory and an 80-gigabyte hard drive. What makes it stand out, however, is GOS, a version of Linux specially made to run Google applications like GMail and Google Documents. It also runs OpenOffice, an open-source office suite that can handle Microsoft Word documents, and some multimedia applications. The interface features an intuitive desktop interface with a set of icons. Clicking on the Map icon, for example, brings up Google Maps. The ostensible goal is to move much of the processing from the PC to the Internet. The gPC is available now at Wal-Mart for $200, including a keyboard and mouse. A monitor costs extra, and the Microsoft Tax is missing entirely. JOHN BIGGS

Everex
Computers and the Internet
Linux (Computer Operating System)
Google Inc


Aide Clarifies Weiner’s Claim on Coining of ‘Obamacare’

Abstract: Anthony D. Weiner’s advocacy for Obamacare was well known to anyone watching cable news when the House of Representatives passed the legislation in 2009. But did he really coin the term? He said so in an interview with The New York Times recently, which quoted him saying it, near the bottom of a front-page article on Thursday about Mr. Weiner’s record in Congress. Published, the claim prompted a round of invented-the-Internet-style mockery at Mr. Weiner’s expense on Thursday. After all, the term Obamacare had circulated for some time — Mitt Romney used it in a presidential debate as early as 2007 — and Mr. Weiner did not become outspoken on the issue, let alone embrace the term, until much later. “Well, no one said you get elected mayor on modesty,” Edward-Isaac Dovere of Politico wrote on Twitter. Emalie Clamage, a blogger, joked that Mr. Weiner’s father was “the inventor of Toaster Strudel.” But Barbara Morgan, a spokeswoman for Mr. Weiner, who is running for mayor of New York City, insisted on Thursday that he did not mean that he was the first person ever to use the term — only the first on the left to embrace it unapologetically. “Up till then, the right had used the term as a pejorative,” she said. “He realized that running from the term was a mistake, and eventually so did the White House and the Obama campaign.” In the interview with The Times, which was recorded, Mr. Weiner was defending his work on behalf of the health legislation when he brought up the term Obamacare. He added, in an aside, that it was “a term, by the way, that I coined and used proudly, long before the administration decided it was a good idea. And I got yelled at by the White House for using it, and then they eventually reached the place where they used it.”

Mayoral races
NYC
Anthony Weiner
Barack Obama
Obamacare,Affordable Care Act
Health Insurance


Ball Clubs Take Care Before the Bubbly Chaos

Abstract: When the Philadelphia Phillies arrived Wednesday at Dodger Stadium for Game 5 of the National League Championship Series, they found sheets of plastic rolled up and taped above the lockers in the visitors’ clubhouse. Sometime near the end of the Phillies’ pennant-clinching 5-1 victory hours later, the plastic was unfurled to shield their belongings from the Champagne-and-beer carwash of the party to come. The Phillies bounded into the room and found large bins filled with drinks that would hardly reach their mouths. Corks popped. Cans cracked. Dressed in championship shirts and hats that had been ordered and stashed for the occasion, the Phillies bathed, almost literally, in their accomplishment of making the World Series. The scene confirmed one certainty of playoff baseball: When the biggest victories come, there will be bubbles. And a mess. That is the tradition, isn’t it — players celebrating the biggest victories by dousing one another in the clubhouse with carbonated beverages? Players are armed with a seemingly endless supply of well-shaken party favors. When the Tampa Bay Rays beat the Chicago White Sox in a division series last week, they emptied 200 bottles of Champagne (not counting the six bottles of higher-end bubbly reserved for coaches and management) and 35 cases of beer. “They had 206 bottles of champagne,” said Gabe Morell, the visiting clubhouse manager for the White Sox. “And 200 of them ended up in my carpet.” So much liquid is sprayed and spilled that players have taken to wearing swimming goggles, even scuba masks. The carpet is inevitably left saturated and squishy. And somewhere in the background of every such celebration is a clubhouse manager. They are the practical ones, the party planners and the room cleaners who oversee the details of the chaos, ranging from the time-tested ones (put the Champagne on ice in the seventh inning) to wisdom that comes only from experience (always hide the milk). In the weeks before the Rays clinched their first playoff berth last month, Chris Westmoreland, the team’s clubhouse and equipment manager, ordered plastic-backed carpet, cut into well-measured pieces, to roll atop and protect the regular carpet in the home clubhouse at Tropicana Field. He had vinyl curtains, custom-made with the team logo, fitted to hang from the ceiling and protect the lockers. He asked Nike about swim goggles to protect the celebrators’ eyes, and the company donated 48 pairs. He thought to ensure that all the empty Champagne bottles and their popped corks were immediately authenticated by Major League Baseball, using special hologram stickers. And he had a bin ready outside the clubhouse door where players could deposit their hats, gloves and spikes — equipment needed for future games, and not fit for washing machines — before plunging into the soaking celebration. “There’s really not a lot of drinking going on,” Westmoreland said. “It’s all mostly getting dumped.” Not everyone plans as fervently as Westmoreland. The Red Sox , accustomed to more clubhouse celebrations than any team in recent years, wait until the big game ends to start hanging the protective plastic in the home clubhouse at Fenway Park. “We can do it in about six minutes,” said Joe Cochran, the clubhouse and equipment manager. “Unfortunately, the players usually come in the fifth minute, so we’re always scrambling.” Predicting the timing of the party complicates matters (“You always want a 10-2 blowout, but that never seems to happen,” Cochran said). So does the fact that many celebrations occur far from home. When the Rays arrived in Chicago for Game 3 of their best-of-five division series, they led the White Sox, two games to none. So Morell, working with Westmoreland and Tampa Bay Manager Joe Maddon, hung plastic sheets from the ceiling, twist-tying them for quick release. “I said, ‘I don’t want you to think I’m jinxing you or anything,’ ” Morell said. Maddon is not the superstitious type. But the plastic stayed bundled until the ninth inning of Game 4. In the seventh inning of what became a 6-2 clinching victory, the liquor was unboxed and placed in three large troughs. Ice was dumped on top. In the eighth inning, the clubhouse’s tables, chairs and coaches were moved into a hallway. With one out in the ninth, the plastic was untied and rolled to the floor. With two outs, the troughs were rolled into the middle of the room. “And the third out seemed like it came immediately, and corks were flying around everywhere,” Morell said. The White Sox have hosted plenty of clinching moments in the visitors’ clubhouse over the years. That is why Morell knows to hide the milk. A team several years ago ran out of bottled liquid to spray. Players found milk in a refrigerator and started dumping that. Morell can handle a carpet soaked with Champagne, beer and soda. Not spilled milk. Another team, unable to quench its thirst for drenching itself, found a hose that Morell uses to clean the whirlpools and showers. He countered by pulling down the plastic sheets, prompting the players to stop, lest they soak their own belongings hanging in the lockers. “I took the hose out before Game 3,” Morell said. He did not need to worry. He said that the Rays were “professional and classy” and “partied like a young team should.” Still, the rug in the clubhouse has been steam cleaned several times in recent days. “It still has a little tinge of smell,” Morell said. Some parties never get started. Philadelphia’s director of team travel and clubhouse services, Frank Coppenbarger, worked for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1985, when they led the Kansas City Royals in the World Series, three games to two and 1-0 in the ninth inning of Game 6. The Royals scored twice in the bottom of the ninth, a rally that began with the umpire Don Denkinger’s now-famous missed call at first base. The Royals won easily in Game 7. But Coppenbarger’s memory is from the inside of the visitors’ clubhouse. “We had the trophy in the room, the Champagne in the room, the plastic in place,” Coppenbarger said. “And then they won in the bottom of the ninth, and we never saw it again.”

Philadelphia Phillies
World Series
Baseball
Tampa Bay Rays
Major League Baseball
Boston Red Sox
Los Angeles Dodgers
Branch John


FIFA Decision Boosts U.S.’s Chance to Host 2026 World Cup

Abstract: FIFA’s governing council voted on Friday to bar countries in Europe and Asia, which will host the next two World Cups, from bidding to host the tournament in 2026. The decision significantly increases the chances that the event will take place in the United States, either as the sole bidder or in partnership with a neighbor such as Mexico or Canada. The change to the bidding process — a proposal to make the host confederations of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups ineligible to bid for the 2026 event — was among several approved Friday in a meeting of the FIFA Council in Zurich. Russia will host the next tournament in Europe in two years, and Qatar will carry Asia’s flag in 2022, so their confederations, UEFA and the Asian Football Confederation, are already out of the bidding for 2026. That is bad news for England, which last hosted in 1966 and was bitterly disappointed to lose out to Russia for 2018, and for China, which is eager to host its first World Cup. But it was great news for Concacaf, which governs the game in North and Central America and the Caribbean. In an interview after the FIFA Council’s session, the president of U.S. Soccer, Sunil Gulati, feigned surprise when he was asked if the decision was good news for his confederation. “Oh, I hadn’t noticed that,” he said with a grin. “Perhaps.” The World Cup could look very different in 2026. Led by its new president, Gianni Infantino, FIFA is considering expanding the tournament to 40 teams, or even 48, for 2026, up from the current 32. Infantino has pressed the expansion plan as a way to allow more countries to take part in soccer’s biggest event, but the plan has drawn criticism inside the game . FIFA said this week that a vote on expansion would take place in January. The infrastructure required for an expanded event — stadiums, hotels, transportation systems — would limit the field of host countries considerably. Brazil was stretched to its financial and organizational limits by hosting the 2014 World Cup, and a 48-team tournament would be an enormous challenge for any country in FIFA’s two other confederations, Africa and Oceania. Still, FIFA left a door open for multiple-country bids, voting to consider co-hosting proposals “on a case-by-case basis.” UEFA has had co-hosts for its continental championship several times, and it will host the 2020 European Championship under an even wider format, with 13 cities in 13 countries taking part. But a joint bid among Concacaf countries would have to overcome significant logistical and security concerns that did not exist the last time the event was held in North America. The United States hosted its only World Cup in 1994, a 24-team tournament that, despite the event’s expansion to include more teams and more games in later years, still holds the World Cup attendance record. Mexico has hosted twice, in 1970 and 1986. Canada hosted last year’s Women’s World Cup, a far smaller tournament than the men’s version. The vote on the 2026 World Cup host had been scheduled for May 2017, but the corruption scandal that rocked FIFA last year forced a recalculation. In May, FIFA announced that a new four-phase plan for the process would culminate in a decision in 2020.

Central American and Caribbean Association Football CONCACAF


Joakim Noah Is Still Finding His Way With the Knicks

Abstract: During their last two games, both victories, the Knicks have played some of their most resilient basketball of this still-emerging season. In defeating two possible playoff teams, the Knicks have generally looked cohesive and fluid and, for the most part, defensively stout. Coincidentally, they have done it without Joakim Noah, their marquee off-season signing. Noah’s absence and the Knicks’ good play of late are not necessarily related, but their play in his absence was another example of the rocky beginning Noah has had in his return to New York. The Knicks signed him to a four-year, $72 million deal this summer — one of the priciest doled out to a free agent, even in a landscape that often looked like a gold rush. It was a questionable deal from the outset, but Noah, a 31-year-old self-professed New Yorker, was supposed to at least be a conspicuous cog in the Knicks’ attempt to return to the postseason. Instead, his playing time at center has been irregular, and his performances have been bumpy. Occasionally, the Knicks have looked better without him, and Noah acknowledged that he needed to improve substantially if he wanted to evoke memories of his chest-thumping prime in Chicago. “I’m trying to figure it out,” he said recently. “There’s no question. It’s been really up and down, but I think that’s kind of my role on this team. Some nights, it’s going to be my night. Sometimes it’s not. At the end of the day, I just have to be consistent with my effort and try to bring something positive to this team.” It is difficult to judge Noah’s true value because he has hardly ever been a stats-fueling star. He has never averaged 13 points per game in a season. But he was clearly a life force for the Bulls, anchoring their defense for a good part of nine seasons and operating as a savvy passer. This year with the Knicks, however, Noah does not look like the man who helped provide the Bulls with their best years of the post-Michael Jordan era. Instead, his current statistics more closely resemble his final two injury-riddled seasons with the Bulls. He is averaging 4.3 points per game and 8.9 rebounds, along with 3.5 assists. Noah has looked his old self only in spurts, said Jeff Van Gundy, the ESPN broadcaster. He has followed poor outings with strong ones. “Certainly, he’s had some really good moments,” Van Gundy said. Over all, Noah is averaging just 23.4 minutes a night and has sat on the bench the majority of the time in eight out of the 12 games this season when he has dressed. Jeff Hornacek, the Knicks’ head coach, said the fact that Noah had sat so much — he missed the last two games with an illness — is not all that significant. Kyle O’Quinn has started in his place in recent days and has had an effect. Willy Hernangomez, an import from Spain, has shown himself to be capable as well. “We don’t really look at how many minutes — oh, like we’ve got to keep him to this number, that number — for the long haul,” Hornacek said of Noah. “We’re just looking at it like, does he have the energy out there? Are the other guys doing well? Can we go to a small lineup a little bit?’’ When the Knicks sit Noah, it allows them, at times, to move Kristaps Porzingis to center and Carmelo Anthony to power forward and to fill the court with shooters. And it benefits Porzingis defensively, allowing him to use his length and shot-blocking skills around the rim. Anthony, 32, has professed his comfort in playing as the nominal power forward, something he has done with the Knicks in the past. Van Gundy said he believed Anthony would grow into that position more and more. But Anthony said he wanted to play it only in bursts. Hornacek is also hesitant to play Porzingis, 21, at center for long periods of time, wanting to avoid too much wear on him. But when the Knicks do use that formation, they are in sync with the direction the N.B.A. is taking. “I think the way that the game is going now, the way that the league is going, small ball is in,” Anthony said. How much the Knicks miss Noah when he is out is difficult to ascertain. He has been, by player efficiency rating, an average player this year. Yet, according to ESPN.com’s real plus-minus, Noah was the sixth-best center in the league before he was struck by illness. In general, the Knicks seem to benefit from his presence on the court. They average 11.7 points more per 100 possessions when he is playing than when he is not. And some of Noah’s value is hard to quantify. He is a vocal leader for the Knicks and a veteran guidepost. On defense, he does not necessarily accrue statistics that can be counted, but he helps the team with his positioning and defensive rotations. Still, as questions pop up about Noah’s usefulness to the Knicks, and the value of his deal, Van Gundy offered a reminder that it is still early in the season, and still early in Noah’s four-year contract. “I think there’s a rush to judgment on whether a move is good or bad far too soon,” Van Gundy said. “We haven’t even been through one month of the regular season. I think at the end of the second season of his four-year contract, you’ll be able to definitively say, ‘This worked well, this worked O.K.,’ or, ‘This didn’t work as well as we had hoped.’”


Brooklyn Museum Cancels Controversial Graffiti Art Show

Abstract: The Brooklyn Museum has canceled plans to mount a controversial exhibition of graffiti art, citing financial constraints. The show, “Art in the Streets,” is currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it has drawn large crowds but has also attracted criticism for prompting an increase in graffiti in the surrounding neighborhood. Among the critics was Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who published an article in City Journal this spring, titled “Radical Graffiti Chic,” in which she accused the Los Angeles museum of glorifying vandalism. Her article alerted The Daily News that the show was headed to Brooklyn in 2012, and in late April, it ran a sharply critical editorial, writing that art “mavens will be sticking their thumbs in the eyes of every bodega owner and restaurant manager who struggles to keep his or her property graffiti-free.” On May 5, shortly after the editorial ran, Peter F. Vallone Jr., a member of the City Council, wrote to the director of the Brooklyn Museum, Arnold L. Lehman, urging him not to do the exhibition. “Let me be very clear, taxpayer money should NOT be used to encourage the destruction of our taxpayers’ property,” Mr. Vallone wrote, noting that the museum receives about $9 million annually from the city. But in announcing the show’s cancellation on Tuesday, the museum cited cutbacks, not political pressure. “This is an exhibition about which we were tremendously enthusiastic,” Mr. Lehman said in a statement. “The cancellation became necessary due to the current financial climate.” One of the featured artists, a street artist based in Los Angeles named Saber, said that he was disappointed the show would not go to Brooklyn, but that Mr. Lehman and the Brooklyn Museum’s curator, Sharon Matt Atkins, had been receptive. “Maybe there are some things going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about,” Saber said, but “the people who work there — the director, Sharon — they’re all really enthusiastic, great people.” Jeffrey Deitch, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, said he had approached another institution in New York, which he declined to name, about taking the exhibition. “We will find a way to bring it to New York,” Mr. Deitch said in an interview. “If not in a museum, we’ll just do it on our own.”

Brooklyn Museum
Museums
Graffiti
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art