Rival’s Penalty Helps Lewis Hamilton

Abstract: Lewis Hamilton’s bid for the Formula One championship got a boost when Ferrari decided to put new engines in its cars at the United States Grand Prix in Austin, Tex., prompting a 10-spot penalty for Sebastian Vettel on the starting grid. Vettel is a distant second to Hamilton in the driver standings, and Ferrari has already used its allowed four engines this season. Using a fifth incurs the penalty.

Lewis Hamilton
Formula One
Ferrari
United States Grand Prix
Sebastian Vettel
Car Racing


Rwandan General Shot in S. Africa

Abstract: JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) — An exiled Rwandan general was shot and wounded in South Africa on Saturday in what his wife called a Rwandan-backed assassination attempt, a charge the Rwandan government dismissed as “preposterous.” Lt. Gen. Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa was in the intensive care unit of a Johannesburg hospital after being shot in the stomach, his wife, Rosette Kayumba, said. Once a close confidant of President Paul Kagame , General Nyamwasa fled to South Africa this year after falling out with the president, later accusing him of using an anticorruption campaign to frame opponents. Ms. Kayumba said she, her husband, their children and a driver had returned home from a shopping trip when an armed man approached their car and shot her husband. Her husband and the driver got out of the car and scuffled with the gunman before he fled, she said. She said doctors told her her husband would survive. Ms. Kayumba said she believed President Kagame was behind the attack, and ruled out an attempted robbery or carjacking because the gunman shot only her husband and did not try to steal the car. “He must be behind this,” she said. “I don’t have proof, but we’ve been harassed for such a long time.” Rwanda ’s foreign minister and government spokeswoman, Louise Mushikiwabo, denied the accusation. “Not only do I deny it,” she said, “I think it’s preposterous for Mrs. Nyamwasa to be making that kind of comment.” She added: “The Rwandan government does not go around shooting innocent citizens. The time when presidents and governments went around assassinating their citizens is over in Rwanda.” The flight of General Nyamwasa, who fought alongside Mr. Kagame to end the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, was a sign of a growing rift between the president and some of his top aides. During and after the war to end the genocide, General Nyamwasa held a number of key positions, including army chief of staff and head of the intelligence services. Rwanda is due to hold a presidential election in August, which Mr. Kagame is widely expected to win. The United States has toughened its stance on the country, saying it is concerned about democratic freedom there. In the period leading up to the elections, Rwanda has suspended two independent newspapers, arrested a high-profile opposition figure and prevented two opposition parties from registering, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Johnnie Carson, told the United States Congress this year. Rwandan authorities link General Nyamwasa and another fugitive senior officer in South Africa to a series of deadly grenade attacks in the capital this year, and accuse him of nepotism and unlawful accumulation of wealth. He has rejected the charges and said the president has used his anticorruption campaign to intimidate political opponents. “If accountability is going to be used as a political weapon to frame perceived opponents, then it ceases to be meaningful or useful,” he said in a statement printed in the Ugandan newspaper The Monitor in May.

Rwanda
South Africa
Kagame Paul
Murders and Attempted Murders
Nyamwasa Kayumba


It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado

Abstract: DURANGO, Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West. Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago. Now two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining groundwater in their aquifers, have already opened the skies or begun actively encouraging people to collect. “I was so willing to go to jail for catching water on my roof and watering my garden,” said Tom Bartels, a video producer here in southwestern Colorado, who has been illegally watering his vegetables and fruit trees from tanks attached to his gutters. “But now I’m not a criminal.” Who owns the sky, anyway? In most of the country, that is a question for philosophy class or bad poetry. In the West, lawyers parse it with straight faces and serious intent. The result, especially stark here in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, is a crazy quilt of rules and regulations — and an entire subculture of people like Mr. Bartels who have been using the rain nature provided but laws forbade. The two Colorado laws allow perhaps a quarter-million residents with private wells to begin rainwater harvesting, as well as the setting up of a pilot program for larger scale rain-catching. Just 75 miles west of here, in Utah , collecting rainwater from the roof is still illegal unless the roof owner also owns water rights on the ground; the same rigid rules, with a few local exceptions, also apply in Washington State. Meanwhile, 20 miles south of here, in New Mexico, rainwater catchment, as the collecting is called, is mandatory for new dwellings in some places like Santa Fe . And in Arizona, cities like Tucson are pioneering the practices of big-city rain capture. “All you need for a water harvesting system is rain, and a place to put it,” Tucson Water says on its Web site. Here in Colorado, the old law created a kind of wink-and-nod shadow economy. Rain equipment could be legally sold, but retailers said they knew better than to ask what the buyer intended to do with the product. “It’s like being able to sell things like smoking paraphernalia even though smoking pot is illegal,” said Laurie E. Dickson, who for years sold barrel-and-hose systems from a shop in downtown Durango. State water officials acknowledged that they rarely enforced the old law. With the new laws, the state created a system of fines for rain catchers without a permit; previously the only option was to shut a collector down. But Kevin Rein, Colorado’s assistant state engineer, said enforcement would focus on people who violated water rules on a large scale. “It’s not going to be a situation where we’re sending out people to look in backyards,” Mr. Rein said. Science has also stepped forward to underline how incorrect the old sweeping legal generalizations were. A study in 2007 proved crucial to convincing Colorado lawmakers that rain catching would not rob water owners of their rights. It found that in an average year, 97 percent of the precipitation that fell in Douglas County, near Denver, never got anywhere near a stream. The water evaporated or was used by plants. But the deeper questions about rain are what really gnawed at rain harvesters like Todd S. Anderson, a small-scale farmer just east of Durango. Mr. Anderson said catching rain was not just thrifty — he is so water conscious that he has not washed his truck in five years — but also morally correct because it used water that would otherwise be pumped from the ground. Mr. Anderson, a former national park ranger who worked for years enforcing rules and laws, said: “I’m conflicted between what’s right and what’s legal. And I hate that.” For the last year, Mr. Anderson has been catching rainwater that runs off his greenhouse but keeping the barrel hidden from view. When the new law passed, he put the barrel in plain sight, and he plans to set up a system for his house. Dig a little deeper into the rain-catching world, and there are remnants of the 1970s back-to-land hippie culture, which went off the grid into aquatic self-sufficiency long ago. “Our whole perspective on life is to try to use what is available, and to not be dependent on big systems,” said Janine Fitzgerald, whose parents bought land in southwest Colorado in 1970, miles from where the pavement ends. Ms. Fitzgerald, an associate professor of sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, still lives the unwired life with her own family now, growing most of her own food and drinking and bathing in filtered rainwater. Rain dependency has its ups and downs, Ms. Fitzgerald said. Her home is also completely solar-powered, which means that the pumps to push water from the rain tanks are solar-powered, too. A cloudy, rainy spring this year was good for tanks, bad for pumps. The economy has turned on some early rainwater believers, too. Ms. Dickson’s company in Durango went out of business last December as the construction market faltered. The rain barrels she once sold will soon be perfectly legal, but the shop is shuttered. “We were ahead of our time,” she said.


After Centuries Away, Deer Return to New York City

Abstract: It may sound like a plot from a Disney film, but deer, which were driven out of much of Manhattan by deforestation during the Revolutionary era, have been slowly returning to the city over the last 15 years. Deer have been sighted in Alley Pond Park in Queens, Inwood Hill Park in Manhattan and in some wooded areas in the Bronx and on Staten Island. “It can be very startling to see them,” said Michael Feller, a naturalist for the parks department. “You’re not used to seeing something that big in New York City.” Eric Sanderson, a senior conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society , said deer vanished in the 18th century when trees were cut for firewood during harsh winters in a growing city. Ultimately, “Deer were nearly extricated from New York State at the turn of the 20th century,” he said. Why are they returning now? For the same reason many two-legged creatures arrive — to seek a better life. There is an overabundance of deer in the suburbs because of a diminishing number of predators. Mr. Feller said deer would continue to migrate toward food as they “eat themselves out of habitat upstate.” Because deer can swim as well as scamper, they can find their way to the big city along parkways, greenways and waterways. The deer could, as they do elsewhere, harm the ecosystem and spread Lyme disease. Still, their beauty can stun city dwellers. “I don’t like the idea of them in New York City intellectually,” said Mr. Feller. “But they’re pretty majestic on a winter day when you can see their breath.” CHRIS HARCUM


Owners Should Watch Bogart, and Learn

Abstract: IF you like classic movies, you've probably seen "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." If you haven't seen it, you should. So should Paul Tagliabue, Gene Upshaw and all the N.F.L. owners. Each has probably seen that movie, but they need to see it again as a reminder of the prospectors on a mountaintop who fought too long and too loudly over sharing their treasure until the wind blew their gold dust away. Although the negotiations are between Tagliabue, the commissioner, and Upshaw, the executive director of the players union -- the talks broke off again last night before the free-agency deadline was extended to 12:01 a.m. Thursday -- Tagliabue will still need to persuade the league's 32 club owners to approve a new collective-bargaining agreement. Not that pro football fans care. They were wondering what team would sign Shaun Alexander (Seattle kept him with an eight-year, $62 million offer last night). With multibillion-dollar television contracts and several glitzy new stadiums, pro football is on a mountaintop of prosperity for owners, coaches and players. In the 1948 movie, which starred Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston (an Oscar for best supporting actor) and was directed by John Huston (an Oscar for best director), gold prospectors in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico were never more prosperous. But in a greedy fight over shares, their gold dust is scattered by the wind. With the N.F.L. having more gold dust than ever, the high-revenue club owners should share and share alike in whatever negotiated revisions develop in the economic system that has put pro football on the mountaintop. When the owners eventually meet to discuss (and possibly reject what Tagliabue and Upshaw have wrought), pro football's gold prospectors, alias the high-revenue owners, especially Daniel Snyder of the Redskins, Jerry Jones of the Cowboys and Robert K. Kraft of the Patriots, will be fighting to keep the former agreement. Fans are wondering if the Redskins or Cowboys will sign the free-agent kicker Adam Vinatieri, or if will he return to the Patriots. With each team's salary cap expected to rise to more than $100 million from the current $94.5 million, the high-revenue franchises (Washington, Dallas, New England, Philadelphia, Houston, Denver, Chicago and Cleveland) that have more lucrative luxury-suite and local television-and-radio deals will still be left with far more profit than the low-revenue franchises. It also means that a high-revenue team, notably the Redskins, can continue to use some of that profit to pay higher coaching-staff salaries. With no cap on coach's salaries, Snyder is able to pay about $2.5 million a year to each of Coach Joe Gibbs's coordinators, Gregg Williams (defense) and Al Saunders (offense). Another of Gibbs's assistants, the defensive line coach Greg Blache, is making $1 million a year. Other high-revenue clubs can afford similar coaching salaries, but the low-revenue franchises can't. Fans are wondering if the Colts will re-sign the free-agent running back Edgerrin James, or if he will wander off to another team. Whatever happens at the owners' meeting, Tagliabue's stature will be affected. The N.F.L.'s lead attorney before he succeeded Pete Rozelle in 1989, Tagliabue has had a high approval rating among the owners in developing consensuses for decisions on his negotiations with the union, the television networks, the stadiums and the sponsors. If Tagliabue eventually obtains the required 75 percent approval vote by the owners after a union agreement is reached, his overall grip on the owners will be stronger than ever, but he still could be a target of the owners who vote against it. In Rozelle's reign, he not only had to fight off Al Davis's restless moves with the Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland Raiders, he had to quell a rebellion led by Carroll Rosenbloom, then the owner of the Los Angeles Rams. Rozelle prevailed until health problems, perhaps created by the stress of the job, persuaded him to retire in 1989. He died in 1996. Fans are wondering if the Dolphins are the front-runners to sign the free agent Drew Brees, or has shoulder surgery made him too risky? If Snyder, Jones and Kraft don't get what they want from a new agreement with the union and are outvoted in its acceptance by other owners, they may retaliate by trying to unseat Tagliabue. Hell has no fury like an owner scorned, especially a high-revenue owner. But as Rozelle showed when scorned (and sued) by Davis, hell hath no fury like a commissioner scorned. Fans are wondering where the free agent Antwaan Randle El, the Steelers wide receiver who threw a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl, will alight. For all the dragged-out negotiations so far, before the owners gather for their meeting with Tagliabue, they ought to rent a video of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." They should watch it together and learn the lesson of that movie: Don't fight too long and too loudly over your gold dust, or the wind will blow it all away.

FOOTBALL
NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE
LABOR
SPORTS OF THE TIMES (TIMES COLUMN)
WAGES AND SALARIES
FREE AGENTS (SPORTS)
ORGANIZED LABOR


Hunt for Suspects in Mauritania Killing

Abstract: DAKAR, Senegal — Law enforcement officials in Mali , Mauritania and Senegal were searching on Wednesday for three men linked to a North African affiliate of Al Qaeda and suspected of killing four French tourists in a Christmas Eve attack. Gunmen shot members of a vacationing French family as they picnicked Monday on the side of a road near the town of Aleg in southeastern Mauritania, not far from the border with Senegal. A fifth tourist was wounded in the attack and has been flown to France, according to the French Foreign Ministry. Government officials initially said that the attack was an attempted robbery, but on Wednesday they said that two of the suspects had been previously arrested on suspicion of having trained in Algerian terrorist camps run by the terrorist group Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The group has sworn allegiance to Al Qaeda and has claimed responsibility for the deadly car bombings this month in Algeria. It is among a number of violent religious, ethnic and nationalist groups operating in the sparsely populated and poorly policed region. Still, the objective of the attack in Mauritania was not immediately clear. Another man, who is suspected of helping the attackers and has similar ties, was arrested in Aleg, along with a taxi driver who told the police that he took the men to the Senegalese border. The other suspects are believed to be in Senegal, perhaps on their way to Mali, according to Mauritanian officials and Western diplomats in the region. Mauritania, at the western edge of Africa, has a history of civil discord and dictatorial rule. But in the past two years, the country has been undergoing a transformation. In 2005, the military overthrew the civilian government, which was widely reviled for its repressive tactics. This year the country held its first wholly democratic presidential election since independence. The new government has been trying to unite the country and to ease tensions between the country’s Arab and Berber population in the north and the black African population in the south. It has introduced new laws to strengthen penalties for slavery, which has persisted here for centuries, and to fight corruption. Seeking to develop its nascent mining sector and tourism industry, Mauritania has courted the West, making it an unusual ally for the United States — a pro-Western Islamic republic that recognizes Israel. These moves have brought criticism from Arab nationalists and Islamic groups, according to analysts and diplomats in the region. The United States military has been working with armies in the Sahel region over the past few years to train them to guard against terrorist groups suspected of operating in the vast, empty reaches of the semi-arid belt beneath the Sahara, populated by millions of Muslims. There has been debate about just how serious the threat is in countries like Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal, all of which are relatively stable and hold regular elections. While each of these nations is heavily Muslim, the Islam practiced in the Sahel has largely proved resistant to extremism. A report on terrorism threats in the Sahel published by the International Crisis Group in 2005 concluded that there were “enough indications, from a security perspective, to justify caution and greater Western involvement. However, the Sahel is not a hotbed of terrorist activity.” Until now, Mauritania had not been viewed as an exception. The killings stunned Mauritanians. As he left afternoon prayers in Nouakchott, the capital, Mohamed Ould Abdi said that the attack would only hurt a country struggling to get back on its feet. “If Al Qaeda or Salafist groups are looking for someone to kill,” he said, “they should go to politicians not people who take their vacation in a Muslim country.”

Mauritania
Senegal
Mali
Terrorism
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
Islam


U.S. Drops Bid to Explore Oil in Eastern Gulf

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it had rescinded its decision to expand offshore oil exploration into the eastern Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic Coast because of weaknesses in federal regulation revealed by the BP oil spill . Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that a moratorium on drilling would be in force in those areas for at least seven years, until stronger safety and environmental standards were in place. The move puts off limits millions of acres of the Outer Continental Shelf that hold potentially billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. The decision essentially reverses the much-disputed drilling plan announced in March, which would have initiated environmental studies and exploration activity in previously untouched areas off the Gulf Coast of Florida and along the East Coast from Florida to Delaware. “As a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we learned a number of lessons,” Mr. Salazar said in an afternoon briefing, “most importantly that we need to proceed with caution and focus on creating a more stringent regulatory regime.” After the BP spill, Mr. Salazar disbanded the discredited agency charged with regulating offshore oil and gas operations, the Minerals Management Service, and replaced it with a new bureau with enhanced powers. The agency was faulted for inadequate staffing, a cozy relationship with the oil industry , a failure to perform regular inspections of oil rigs and lax enforcement of environmental and safety rules. Exploration and production will continue in the central and western Gulf of Mexico, although under a set of new safeguards that were put in place after the deadly BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in April. Future gulf leases will be subject to further environmental and safety studies, he said. Shell’s pending lease in the Arctic Ocean off the Alaska coast will be honored, but drilling will be allowed only after a new environmental review is completed and more spill response requirements are met. That may push the oil company’s plans back by a year or more, officials said. Other potential drilling sites in the Arctic will be studied before any leasing decisions are made for 2012-2017, Mr. Salazar said. The Interior Department identifies areas for potential leasing by oil companies in five-year periods. It concluded that the enormous task of drawing up detailed rules, conducting environmental studies and drafting spill response plans for vast swaths of the gulf and Atlantic where drilling has never taken place should not be rushed in preparation for that leasing phase. The proposal to expand drilling to those areas, unveiled just three weeks before the BP accident, was part of a political plan to encourage more domestic oil production in exchange for Congressional action to limit carbon dioxide emissions that are contributing to global warming . The eastern gulf and the Atlantic Seaboard had been off limits to oil companies for years because of Congressional opposition, but lawmakers in Atlantic coast states have been pushing for offshore oil activity to reduce foreign imports and to generate tax and royalty revenue. Ultimately, Wednesday’s announcement was an admission that the Interior Department erred in deciding last spring to open up vast new areas offshore to drilling without adequate safeguards. And politically, the plan brought the Obama administration nothing. The administration’s package fell apart as a result of the oil spill and the Senate’s refusal to take up comprehensive legislation on energy and climate change. Prospects for such legislation are even dimmer now after the Republican takeover of the House. Oil company executives said that while they had been eager to begin drilling in the eastern gulf and along the Atlantic coast, they could not estimate how much they would have been willing to invest there. That would require exploration, which will now be deferred for years to come, although federal geological officials could potentially carry out acoustic tests to map oil reserves. The government estimates that the eastern gulf contains 3.7 billion barrels of oil and 21.5 trillion cubic feet of gas, while the Atlantic coast has 3.8 billion barrels of oil and 37 trillion cubic feet of gas. Taken together, that is roughly comparable to Norway’s proven oil reserves and Canada’s proven gas reserves. The expansion of offshore drilling announced in March only partly opened those waters; but it still would have made available enough oil to fuel more than 2.4 million cars and gas to heat 8 million households for 60 years. The administration imposed a moratorium in May on all deepwater offshore drilling while the new safety procedures were drawn up. Mr. Salazar lifted the ban in October, and oil companies have been seeking new permits to resume exploration in the gulf. Industry executives complained Wednesday that the government was overreacting to the BP spill and called the new safeguards more than adequate to prevent another major spill. “This is an unfortunate decision that will eliminate badly needed government revenues, inhibit employment growth and increase reliance on imported energy,” said Kenneth Cohen, vice president for public and government affairs at ExxonMobil. “It ignores the industry’s track record and commitment to improving environmental and safety performance as well as the overwhelming evidence that the Gulf of Mexico spill resulted from practices far outside industry norms." The American Petroleum Institute called the decision a mistake at a time of economic distress. “I’m surprised and disappointed by this decision, which will stifle investment and clearly stop the creation of tens of thousands of jobs,” said Jack Gerard, president of the petroleum group. “This really compounds the problem with the existing de facto moratorium in the gulf. Eventually the oil and gas pipeline for production for the country will slow to a trickle.” Environmental advocates welcomed the administration’s reversal of a policy they had vigorously opposed. “What it means is they’ve learned a great deal from the Macondo blowout and they’re taking a lot of places off the table that originally were going to be considered,” said Marilyn Heiman, an oceans expert at the Pew Environment Group . She said she was troubled, however, by the decision to move forward with exploration off Alaska. “They still need to learn a lot more as it relates to drilling in the Arctic.” Ola Morten Aanestad, a vice president at Statoil, a Norwegian company, said the eastern gulf and Atlantic coasts offered “significant potential.” But what is most vital to the industry, he said, is that drilling be allowed to begin again in areas where the deepwater moratorium was lifted in October but there have been continuing delays in permits. Separately, BP said it was suspending an Arctic drilling project that sits on a small artificial island in 22 feet of water and is not classified as an offshore rig. BP said it was having unspecified technical problems with the rig, designed to drill two miles down and then six to eight miles across to reach what is believed to be a 100-million-barrel reservoir of oil under federal waters.

Gulf of Mexico
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
BP Plc
Salazar Ken
Offshore Drilling and Exploration
Obama Barack
Accidents and Safety


Espada’s Lawyer Calls Federal Embezzlement Case ‘Rotten’

Abstract: A lawyer for former State Senator Pedro Espada Jr. placed a giant poster of a red apple in front of a federal jury on Wednesday and said that the prosecution’s case claiming that her client embezzled money from a nonprofit health center was “rotten to the core.” The lawyer, Susan R. Necheles, used her closing arguments, which capped a six-week embezzlement trial in United States District Court in Brooklyn, to accuse the government of threatening witnesses who supported Mr. Espada to get them to change their testimony and of allowing other witnesses to testify falsely. She wrote those claims on the poster in black marker. “You take that shiny apple out of the plastic bag and it’s mushy and full of bruises,” Ms. Necheles said. “The bruises on that apple were a sign to you.” Mr. Espada, who briefly emerged as one of the top leaders in the State Legislature before charges of corruption ended his political career, is accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the nonprofit organization that he founded and ran, Soundview Health Center in the Bronx. Prosecutors said Mr. Espada and his son, Pedro Gautier Espada, who is also on trial, spent money from the center on lavish meals and parties for their family. Ms. Necheles argued that Mr. Espada’s contract allowed him to bill the organization for all of the purchases he made. “If he was entitled to the meals, then who cares what kind of meal he had?” Ms. Necheles said. In her two hours of summation, Ms. Necheles did not directly address any of the counts in the case. She is expected to continue her argument on Thursday. The proceedings on Wednesday started with Todd Kaminsky, a federal prosecutor, finishing the closing argument that he began on Tuesday by describing several schemes that he said Mr. Espada and his son used to steal money from Soundview. Much of Mr. Kaminsky’s argument centered on a for-profit janitorial-services company that Mr. Espada owned. Soundview paid the company to clean its buildings until 2006, when government regulators raised questions about the arrangement. Mr. Espada then claimed to have incorporated the janitorial company into the nonprofit medical center, but continued to spend its revenue on him and his family, Mr. Kaminsky said, including payments to a cake maker and a photographer for a family birthday party. The Espadas misrepresented those purchases to people at Soundview, Mr. Kaminsky said. “The defendants know they could never really tell the accountants what was going on in their slush fund,” Mr. Kaminsky said. If convicted, Mr. Espada, who read a book as the prosecutor spoke, before turning his rapt attention to his own lawyer’s closing arguments, faces a maximum of 10 years in prison for the counts of embezzlement and five years on the conspiracy charges.

Embezzlement
Soundview Health Center
Espada Pedro Jr
Bronx (NYC)
Espada Pedro Gautier


Scrutiny of Nannies May Become More Intense After Killings

Abstract: The battery of questions that can rain on nannies from prospective employers or agencies often resembles a psychological appraisal, far more probing than mere background and reference checks. Did the nannies have happy, healthy childhoods? What was their relationship with their parents like? What is going on now in their personal lives? A nanny who has children of her own might be a red flag for some: she — or sometimes he — might resent having to mind another’s child, and pine for her own. One nanny might be deemed too old or too indifferent to energetically engage with the children. Another might be deemed too young or attractive, and pique a mother’s jealousy. Still another might be deemed too envious of her employers’ better fortunes. In the end, the decision might boil down to whether a person gets a good gut feeling about a potential employee. In their quest for the perfect caregiver for their children — in essentially hiring a stranger to become a part of the family — a parent can leap all of these hurdles. But even the most thorough background check cannot guarantee that something will not go horrifically wrong, as it did on Thursday when, the police say, two young Upper West Side children were killed by their nanny, Yoselyn Ortega. She had been their caregiver for about two years. By most accounts, cases like this are rare. Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist with a half-century’s experience in his field, could recall only a few instances in which nannies murdered their wards. “It’s rare and therefore very hard to put in some kind of psychological pigeonhole,” Dr. Stone said of Ms. Ortega’s alleged actions. “This woman is unique.” Still, parents and experts agree that extensive precautions must be taken. There is no one way to hire a nanny. The Krims, parents of the two children who were killed, received a referral from a friend, the police said. Other parents comb through Web sites of nannies’ résumés, while still others turn to agencies to help them find the best fit. But no method is airtight. Jodie Abbatangelo-Gray, mother to a 2-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son, cycled through five nannies in five years before finding the perfect fit, relying on word-of-mouth recommendations and nanny-finding Web sites before finally going through an agency. “I’m hypervigilant of what the connection is looking like between the nanny and the kids,” she said. Jocelyn Miller, 40, a photo editor at Condé Nast Traveler, said the stress of finding a nanny was often exacerbated by how quickly mothers generally have to return to work — just three months after a baby is born. “You have these very strong instincts,” Ms. Miller said. “If anything is telling you something’s off, you have to immediately move on from that relationship.” Ms. Miller and her husband interviewed about 10 people they had found through various Web sites before turning to an agency, Heyday Inc., which specializes in placing educated nannies between 25 and 35 years old and plays matchmaker between prospective clients, whom they visit at home, and employees, whom they thoroughly interview and vet. “It was like night and day compared to the people I was meeting on my own,” she said. Even parents who said they had been happy with their nannies found themselves rattled to the core, questioning whether they had taken enough precautions. Darra Gordon, 39, found her Trinidadian nanny on the Internet — she seemed loving, caring and knowledgeable, a good fit to care for her 5-month-old daughter. But now Ms. Gordon is planning on conducting a thorough background check and looking into installing cameras this weekend in her Upper West Side home. “It’s a reminder of just how anything could happen that you have no control over,” she said. Nannies said being hired these days was no easy feat, with stressed New York parents taking all possible precautions. Along with prescreenings and background checks, multiple interviews are often conducted, covering discipline styles, lesson plans and whether nannies can handle kosher kitchens, speak additional languages, play an instrument or swim. “It was tough before,” said Shadé Miguel, 24, who has been watching the same Upper West Side family for a year and a half. “Now it’s going to get tougher. We all know what’s going to happen. Things are going to get even more serious.”

Child Care
Upper West Side (NYC)
Ortega Yoselyn
Children and Childhood
Murders and Attempted Murders
New York City


Hunters and Tourists Stalk Pythons in the Everglades

Abstract: FLORIDA CITY, Fla. — Thousands of Burmese pythons, the offspring of former pets, have invaded the Everglades, eating birds, bunnies, even alligators. It has gotten so bad that Congress is considering an outright ban on buying or selling nine kinds of giant snakes. But an odd thing has happened here in the swamp: the pythons have become celebrities. The snakes are fast becoming an element of Florida lore, attracting “oohs” and “ahhs” from tourists, along with groans from biologists and even python hunters like Bob Freer. “It’s a little frustrating and very strange,” said Mr. Freer, who figures that his 40 captured pythons — most of which he has euthanized — make him the state’s top private hunter. “They’re asking about pythons that don’t even belong here, instead of alligators.” Trouble is, the newfound fascination obscures what biologists and Mr. Freer describe as a serious problem. In their view, python proliferation — still significant despite a cold winter that might have killed half the population — is simply the sexiest example of widespread disrespect for pets and the wilderness. “People need to view exotic species invasions as pollution — biopollution,” said David E. Hallac , chief of biological resources for Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Parks. “In some cases, this form of biopollution can be even more difficult to remedy than chemical pollution, mainly because in most cases, we have no way of cleaning up exotic species from our natural environments.” Nowhere is the problem more visible than in the open expanse of southwestern Dade County, where tract housing gives way to sawgrass and airboat engines. Mr. Freer, a grandfather who cuts the sleeves off his T-shirts, has lived here for a decade, giving animal presentations to tourists and running a wildlife refuge that doubles as his home. He grew up in rural New York on a dairy farm with a pet alligator, and he used to live north of Miami with another gator (named Lazy) until his neighbors complained. Now Mr. Freer and his third wife are free to mix with whatever animals they like, and there are plenty. Near the back of their five-acre property, for instance, sits Rocky, a tiger once owned by a stripper. Buc, an arthritic grizzly bear, lies in a cage next door near the hyenas, Chewy the camel, birds the color of daiquiris, and a lemur from Madagascar whose previous owner pulled out its teeth, so that all its food must now be mashed. In nearly every case, pet owners gave the animals up or had them taken away by county officials. Pythons, Mr. Freer said, have been part of the mix since the mid-1980s. “It was very exciting then to think about these giant snakes and being able to find them here in Florida,” he said. “I never really thought there would come a time when you would actually go out and hunt pythons.” State officials say they had no choice — especially after last July, when an eight-foot python sneaked out of its cage north of Orlando and strangled a 2-year-old. It led to a six-week hunting season to reduce the python population. “We really wanted the help, and still need it, to get rid of these things,” said Tony Young, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission . With all the attention, the snakes became bigger stars. Reporters have interviewed officials at Everglades National Park around 300 times. Mr. Freer, meanwhile, has turned up on Animal Planet and the History Channel’s “Monster Quest,” after an episode about the Hillbilly Beast of backwoods Kentucky. He said that he initially understood the alarm. Pythons are what biologists call “apex predators” that eat nearly everything, including endangered species. And there were financial benefits, too: a group of Canadian snake enthusiasts paid him to help find pythons. But on a hunting trip in the Southern Glades , a 30,000-acre tract that abuts Everglades National Park, Mr. Freer struggled to shake a sense of melancholy. The area has become a dumping ground littered with both human ruin — a shuttered fish farm, a closed juvenile detention camp and a former rocket test site — and abandoned animals. In addition to the pythons, Mr. Freer said he had come across cobras and black mambas, emus and ostriches. Since the recession started, he said, he has seen more horses that owners can apparently no longer afford to feed. The python craze, he said, only illustrated a problem far larger than most people recognize. Mr. Hallac, at Everglades National Park, agreed. “We have well over a dozen exotic fish that have invaded the park and may pose a threat to our native aquatic organisms,” Mr. Hallac said. “But being that they’re underwater, and not particularly scary to humans, their stories are rarely told.” At Everglades Alligator Farm, an adventure park where Mr. Freer manages the animals and puts on shows for visitors, python presentations are still a hit. Rangers at the national park are regularly asked about how to avoid or see the famous pythons. Mr. Freer said he now looked forward to a day when pythons were scrubbed from his routine. “People will be asking me about alligators again,” he said, “And that’ll make me happier.”


A Review of 105-TEN Bar and Grill in Briarcliff Manor

Abstract: One of the biggest restaurant trends in recent years is the rise of the gastropub. Combining the comfort of a relaxed, local hangout with a serious, often farm-to-table approach to food, these places can have a high-low combination that is tremendously appealing — but not that easy to achieve. The gastropub 105-TEN Bar and Grill , which opened in Briarcliff Manor in January, reaches for local appeal with its very name: 10510 is Briarcliff’s ZIP code, and the 105 prefix covers much of Westchester. The space has an industrial-chic design, with exposed ductwork along its high ceiling, exposed brick walls and a cement floor. Its comfortable lighting and seating, wood tables and little touches, like dish towels for napkins and jam jars as glasses, create a homey feel. People are bringing their children to the restaurant, hanging out at the bar that runs along one wall, meeting groups of friends. There seems to be a hunger for this kind of hangout. Image The 105 burger has lean beef but decadent melted Brie and truffle aioli. Credit Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times And that other kind of hunger? What 105-TEN is definitely trying for, as co-owner and executive chef Eddis Martinez said on the phone after my visits, is “an elevated approach” to food. And it succeeds often enough to make this restaurant a welcome addition to the county’s restaurant scene. Several small plates are standout examples. Smoked pork belly sliders came with a terrific meat-to-fat ratio and were served on house-made open-faced baguette slices with roasted cherry tomatoes, arugula and smoked aioli. Steak sliders were tender and peppery, and sat in delicious little brioche rolls. A starter of seared sea scallops, crusty but not overdone, took on an added dimension with a salty-sweet bacon jam. That same condiment appears on the 105 burger. A gastropub’s longevity might be determined by its burger, and this one is excellent. The meat is lean, but the rest is, happily, decadent: melted Brie, truffle aioli and a large version of the kitchen’s brioche roll with a side of crisp hand-cut fries. It is an embodiment of the restaurant’s overall high-low approach in a single dish. And if you want something more straightforward, there’s a basic burger that comes with tasty little pickle chips. Image A starter of seared scallops, with a strawberry mojito. Credit Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times Other appealing lighter dishes include a special appetizer of grilled artichoke hearts and an entree of seared sea bass prepared in a garlic olive oil with fresh basil, sautéed spinach and a bracing jolt of lemon juice. The orecchiette is spare and lovely, also made with olive oil, garlic and basil as well as arugula, cherry tomatoes and a milky mozzarella. The kitchen’s weakness is an occasional heavy hand. A special starter of potato chips in truffle oil and blue cheese fondue was a gloppy mess below the first few chips. A rack of lamb special was overcooked (the waiter had not asked how we would like it), and a grilled whole young chicken was also cooked to the point of dryness, with a dollop of Sichuan barbecue sauce just sitting on top of it. The pea risotto was nicely done but sitting in close to an inch of oil. Still, when everything comes together, 105-TEN is a fun place to be. There’s a good selection of 11 mostly craft beers on tap and another 18 bottled, and the coffee is fresh and rich. The desserts, mostly cakes, are primarily made outside of the restaurant and pedestrian, though an Oreo bread pudding exceeded expectations with its subtle richness. But one dessert stands above the rest and, if they are making it the night you go, should not be missed: warm chocolate chip cookies with a glass of whole milk. Like the best of 105-TEN’s menu, it is freshly made, thoughtful and evocative.

105-TEN Bar and Grill
Restaurant
Westchester
Eddis Martinez
Briarcliffe Manor NY


Issue of Arab Spring Migrants to Cast Shadow on G-8 Talks

Abstract: LONDON — When the leaders of the Group of 8 meet next week — among them, Barack Obama , David Cameron , Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy — one of their official concerns will be supporting attempts to make democracy emerge in some kind of recognizable form from the Arab revolts in countries like Tunisia and Libya. Unofficially, and perhaps even without public mention at the summit meeting in the French resort town of Deauville, that helping hand also means providing sufficient economic incentive to hold off a wave of Arab migration toward Europe. The potential human flood gets described by the apocalyptically minded as “biblical.” Of course, no one in Deauville would talk in those terms. But a European diplomat has acknowledged that there is more than a tacit link between sustaining the process of change in North Africa and avoiding a flow of refugees to the four European Union countries (including Italy) that make up the G-8 alongside the United States, Canada, Japan and Russia. Sounding irritated, António Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, has spoken of a “grudging ” response from Europe, described as largely interested in “how to keep out” people trying to seek shelter on the other side of the Mediterranean. But reality doesn’t sit still. What is changing now is that none of the heads of the four big Western countries at Deauville in 2011 can avoid immigration as a domestic/international political issue that carries with it the emotional vote-getting-or-vote-losing volatility of war or taxes. For example: Mr. Obama last week traveled to near the Mexican border to insist he’s cracking down hard on illegal immigration. The New York Times wrote that this was the president’s fifth immigration-linked event in the last four weeks. In parallel, signs are emerging of left-of-center politicians’ acknowledgment of the legitimacy of European voters’ concerns about how their lives are affected by the failed integration of many Muslim immigrants. Here was Ségolène Royal, who ran as the French Socialist Party’s candidate against Mr. Sarkozy in 2007 and seeks its 2012 presidential nomination, saying last week that no one entering France because of the Arab world’s turmoil should think they’re “destined” to remain in the country. Why? Because Ms. Royal obviously regards that saying “no” on the issue means votes in an eventual party primary. She argues that exceptions must not be made to the principle of rejecting all illegal immigration. This sounds like support for efforts by some European Union member governments to tighten the open border-passage provisions of the community’s internal controls. To boot, Ms. Royal was reported telling residents of French immigrant neighborhoods, “Stop complaining.” In Britain, Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party, which has a hard-edged take on immigration, fared very well in local elections in England a couple of weeks ago in spite of its austerity budgets and undistinguished economic results. The prime minister had been attacked on immigration from inside his governing coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Vince Cable, one of the party’s cabinet members, chastised Mr. Cameron for his pronouncement of the death of multiculturalism in Britain and his more recent promise to sharply cut non-European immigration. The cabinet minister accused the prime minister of “inflaming” Islamic extremism in the process. But the voting went badly for the Lib Dems — not the Conservatives. Mr. Cameron explained he was fighting the idea that “concern about immigration is somehow racist.” Saying nothing, he argued, created room for the real bigots in extremist parties. He spoke of immigrants who “on occasion” were unwilling to integrate, and who created “discomfort and disjointedness in some neighborhoods.” That’s a long way from the language of being invaded, swamped or made to feel an alien in your own country. But Mr. Cameron insisted at the same time that it would be “untruthful” and “unfair” not to address a real problem. A reflexive equation linking concern about immigration with reactionary thinking has been dulled in Europe, but not without embarrassment. In a clumsy attempt to cozy up to its wavering white working-class constituency, the German Social Democratic Party leadership voted last month not to expel Thilo Sarrazin, a party member who wrote a best seller, larded with genetics-based arguments, designating Muslim immigrants as a drag on German society. Yet for parts of the European left, a serious question exists about a way to move closer to the immigration themes it once rejected as reflecting bigotry. In France, how could the Socialist Party not consider them in a presidential campaign landscape where both Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, the head of the extreme right National Front, talk tough about immigration’s downsides? Recent polling by Harris Interactive provides the answer: 76 percent of the French (including 62 percent of left-wing voters) think that immigrants don’t make sufficient effort to integrate into French society. Speaking for the polling group, J.D. Levy told a French reporter that while the events of the Arab Spring were presented positively by the media, “most people were mainly worried” that they would mean “even more potential immigrants.” A strategy paper on how to win in 2012 drawn up by supporters of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the strongest Socialist Party candidate before his arrest on sexual assault charges in New York, suggests a successful campaign must include a focus on the value of work and the secular character of French society, while emphasizing citizens’ duties — a kind of nudge-nudge message to voters that the party understands their worries about Muslim immigration. To leap ahead of the nudge and wink stage, Gaullist party sources have told me that Mr. Sarkozy no longer wants to talk of immigrants’ integration but promote their “assimilation.” That’s always been a loaded word. Currently, it is used by Islamists in Britain to paint Mr. Cameron’s rejection of multiculturalism as an assimilation plan robbing Muslim immigrants of their Islamic identity. Surely, at Deauville there will be no desire on the part of the summiteers to wade into such a contentious bog. But there is the real likelihood that the summit meeting plays a role, even unspoken, in accompanying a palpable change in the politics and discussion of immigration and its intensifying impact.

Europe
European Union
Muslims and Islam
Group of Eight
Merkel Angela
Sarkozy Nicolas
Obama Barack
Cameron David


U.S. Tells Russia of ‘Strong Concerns’ About Strikes on Syrian Rebels

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Senior American and Russian defense officials held what the Pentagon described as an “extraordinary” videoconference on Saturday to discuss Russian airstrikes that days earlier hit a garrison manned by Syrian rebels backed by the United States. The Russian strikes hit Syrian opposition fighters on Thursday at the al-Tanf crossing , which lies on Syria’s border with Iraq. The rebels there are battling the Islamic State, the Pentagon said, and are also supposed to be covered by a partial cease-fire that the United States and Russia brokered in February. During the videoconference on Saturday, Pentagon officials “expressed strong concerns about the attack” on forces that are fighting the Islamic State, Peter Cook, the Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement. American officials told the Russians that their strikes had continued even after they were officially informed of allied air support underway for the rebels and that this had “created safety concerns for U.S. and coalition forces,” the statement said. Though fighting has tapered off in many areas since the cease-fire went into effect in February, there have been fierce clashes in recent weeks in areas of northern Syria where the Islamic State and the Nusra Front are strongest. American officials have accused Russia of failing to stop the forces of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, from violating the cease-fire and attacking rebel groups backed by the United States. There was no immediate word on how Russian officials responded to the concerns expressed by American officials on Saturday. But the videoconference took place as Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, met with Mr. Assad in Damascus and visited the Russian air base in Syria, The Associated Press reported. Since the Russian air campaign in Syria began in September, it has helped Mr. Assad’s forces reclaim territory, reversing the fortunes of a regime that at this time last year appeared to be in an increasingly perilous position. American-backed rebel forces, in contrast, have continued to struggle on the battlefield against both Mr. Assad’s forces and the Islamic State, and more than 50 State Department diplomats recently signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria . The memo pressed for American military strikes against Mr. Assad’s government to stop what it said were persistent violations of the cease-fire. American policy has been “overwhelmed” by the violence in Syria, the memo said.

Russia
Syria
Bashar al-Assad
US Military
US Foreign Policy
US
Videoconferencing
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State


At Florida, Women’s Lacrosse Fast Becomes Familiar

Abstract: When Janine Hillier arrived at Florida as a freshman last school year, she proudly told some math classmates that she played for the Gators’ new women’s lacrosse team. Then they looked at her as if she were speaking in differential equations. One person asked if lacrosse involved horses. Another wondered if it was played in swimming pools. Hillier, a Long Island native who has played lacrosse since third grade, was surprised that the sport was an enigma in Gainesville. But this season, Florida’s second-year program has become an improbable contender for the national championship, and its sudden success could accelerate the rise of lacrosse in the South. The Gators, who are 15-3 and seeded No. 4 in the N.C.A.A. tournament, will face Stanford in a first-round game Saturday. “We’re fast, we’re strong, we’re athletic, and we’re all really tan,” said the sophomore attack Kitty Cullen, who is second in the nation with 71 goals. Florida avoided many of the growing pains associated with a new team, even in a sport much of the university was unfamiliar with. The Gators have 12 full lacrosse scholarships, the N.C.A.A.’s maximum allotment, and they play in a new $15 million stadium. “We had a desire to add a sport that competed for national championships,” Florida’s athletic director, Jeremy Foley, said. “But even I didn’t see it happening this quickly.” There were no Division I college lacrosse teams in Florida five years ago when the Gators announced plans to start their program. In 2007, before a stadium was built or lacrosse sticks were purchased, Foley hired Amanda O’Leary, who had gone 162-65 in 14 seasons as Yale’s coach. “It’s quite a jump she has made taking that program from something that didn’t exist to what it already is now,” Yale’s athletic director, Tom Beckett, said. O’Leary, who was an all-American at Temple and is a member of the Lacrosse Hall of Fame , gave the athletic department a primer on the sport. She also took a PowerPoint presentation to local retirement homes, rotary clubs and community groups. Although O’Leary had to persuade recruits to join a team that had not been created yet, she did not lower her standards. She returned to the Northeast and aggressively pursued the nation’s top high school players. “We told the girls, ‘Listen, we don’t have a tradition yet, but we didn’t start lacrosse for a one-year thing; this is forever,’ ” O’Leary said. “ ‘You just have to take a chance.’ ” When recruits visited Florida’s campus, there were no current players to meet, so O’Leary pointed out that most of them would start as freshmen. The stadium was not built yet, so the recruits were shown the football team’s weight room. They were also reminded that when practices were held in February, Florida would be sunny and warm while much of the lacrosse world would probably be snow-covered. “When a coach says ‘Florida,’ you think of a place people go for vacations,” Hillier said. The Gators’ inaugural freshman class was considered one of the nation’s best. Sixteen of the current players are from Maryland, five are from New York and two are from New Jersey. More than 2,000 people flooded into 1,500-seat Donald R. Dizney Stadium for the Gators’ inaugural game last year against Jacksonville, which was the only other Division I program in the state. The Gators, who compete in the American Lacrosse Conference , won that game and finished with a 10-8 record. On campus, the learning curve was gradual. Caitlyn McFadden, who won the Tewaaraton Award as a senior at Maryland last year, was hired as an assistant this season, but the significance of her award was lost. Then O’Leary explained that the Tewaaraton was the equivalent of the Heisman Trophy. She found that anything that can be related to Tim Tebow resonates well. The sophomore attack Ashley Bruns said that fans sitting near her parents at games sometimes used them as a cue for when to cheer. The team Web site has a section on the roots of lacrosse and the basics of the game. “For all of us who didn’t grow up around lacrosse, there’s a lot of learning along the way,” said Lynda Tealer, Florida’s senior associate athletics director for administration. But everyone knows that when the ball settles in the net, it is a good thing, and that has happened often this season. On April 14, Florida defeated Northwestern, which has won five of the last six national championships. The Gators had a 14-game winning streak, and their three losses came by a total of five goals. With no seniors and just one junior , the Gators bask in their identity as a young and fun-loving group. On Halloween, they went to practice dressed as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, SpongeBob SquarePants, Snow White and a bunch of grapes. “Last year, we were a bunch of freshmen and we were all hyper and people were like, ‘Who are these crazy girls?’ ” Cullen said. “But this year, they’ve come to accept us.” Florida football players often attend the team’s games, and the lacrosse players are recognized and congratulated on campus and at grocery stores. The Gators have also given clinics to middle school girls in the area, and when they arrive, no one asks where their horses are.

Lacrosse
College Athletics
University of Florida
Women and Girls
Colleges and Universities
NCAA Lacrosse Championships


Krispy Kreme’s New Owner Dunks Doughnuts in Coffee Empire

Abstract: A German billionaire family has been on a breakfast buying binge. The newest item on its plate: doughnuts. The board of Krispy Kreme, best known for its warm glazed doughnuts, agreed to the company’s acquisition by JAB Holding Company and a minority investor, BDT Capital Partners, for $1.35 billion, it announced on Monday. JAB is the investment arm of the Reimann family, the heirs to the German consumer goods conglomerate Joh. A. Benckiser. Its subsidiary, JAB Beech, plans to add the company’s doughnuts to its other quick-serve American breakfast staples, including several coffee chains and a bagel company. In recent years, JAB has acquired the parent company of Einstein Brothers Bagels, as well as Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Caribou Coffee . In December, JAB acquired Keurig Green Mountain for $13.9 billion, its biggest bet yet in building its coffee empire. Krispy Kreme, founded almost 80 years ago, is most famous for its glazed doughnut, but it also sells a wide assortment of other flavors such as lemon-filled and sour cream. More recently, the company has made coffee a priority with new offerings and promotions. Coffee also happens to be the key ingredient in JAB’s other recent acquisitions. JAB’s portfolio makes it the “near-ideal candidate” to control Krispy Kreme, Will Slabaugh, an analyst at Stephens, said in a research note on Monday. JAB would be able to improve Krispy Kreme’s operations, add food and beverage options, and help it expand nationally and internationally, he said. Peter Harf, senior partner at JAB, said in the statement, “We are thrilled to have such an iconic brand as Krispy Kreme joining the JAB portfolio.” “This is yet another example of our commitment to investing in extraordinary brands with significant growth prospects,” he said. Breakfast has become more lucrative for fast-food restaurants in recent years. All-day breakfast at McDonald’s contributed to a 35 percent increase in its first-quarter profit. Other chains, such as Wendy’s and Taco Bell, have also focused more intently on the first meal of the day. The attention created more competition for customers in the morning hours, a time when Krispy Kreme already had fierce competition from Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and Tim Hortons. JAB plans to acquire Krispy Kreme for $21 a share in cash, a premium of more than 25 percent from Friday’s closing price. Krispy Kreme has almost no debt. Its shares jumped in Monday trading to just a few cents shy of the buyout offer price. BDT Capital Partners, the investment firm led by Byron D. Trott, the former vice chairman of investment banking at Goldman Sachs, is investing alongside JAB and will hold a minority stake. As part of the agreement, Krispy Kreme will remain independently operated from its headquarters in Winston-Salem, N.C., and will no longer trade on the public markets. The transaction, which needs shareholder approval, is expected to close in the third quarter. JAB also has stakes in the cosmetics maker Coty and the shoe designer Jimmy Choo. Wells Fargo provided financial advice to Krispy Kreme, while Barclays and BDT & Company advised JAB. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice were the legal advisers to Krispy Kreme, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom worked with JAB.

Krispy Kreme
Doughnut
JAB Holding Company
Mergers and Acquisitions


Licensing Plan Gives Fresh Plays to Beatles

Abstract: As Paul McCartney closed the Grammy Awards last year with an all-star Beatles medley, Owen Husney, a veteran music executive, read Twitter in horror. In one message after another, young people asked a question that could give a baby boomer a heart attack: “Who is Paul McCartney?!” “I was so angry,” said Mr. Husney, who is best known as one of Prince’s first managers. “But I realized it was only natural. There is a whole audience born around 1990 that knows the Beatles, but is wholly unfamiliar with their writing.” In response, Mr. Husney has teamed with a small music publisher on a project to introduce the songs of the Fab Four to a younger generation. One project is an album of Beatles covers by young bands, but if Mr. Husney and his partner, Herb Jordan, are successful, they will also get more Beatles songs onto television and in the movies, something that has long been difficult — and correspondingly expensive — for Hollywood producers. Their efforts are the result of a little-known kink in the Beatles’ business history. While the publishing rights for most of the band’s work is owned by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, a joint venture between Sony and the estate of Michael Jackson, the North American rights to six early songs were held separately, by the Pincus family of publishers in New York. Round Hill Music, a small publisher, and the Adage Group, an intellectual property rights firm, bought these rights for an undisclosed sum in a deal announced early last year . (Music publishing concerns the copyrights for songwriting, not recordings.) The new owners said they wanted to find new ways to make money from the songs, including film and television, which has become a crucial outlet for artists old and new as record sales fade. So Mr. Husney and Mr. Jordan, the chief executive of the Adage Group, began commissioning covers of the six songs, over which they would have all necessary rights. The first example of the project’s licensing strategy was heard on Sunday night’s episode of the HBO drama “True Blood”: a version of “I Wanna Be Your Man” — a song that John Lennon and Mr. McCartney wrote for the Rolling Stones in 1963 and also recorded with the Beatles — played by Mobley, an indie band from Austin, Tex. Image The Beatles performing on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1965. Credit Sofa Entertainment and TJL Productions The album, “Beatles Reimagined,” will be released on Oct. 1 by Community Music, and features “She Loves You,” “I Saw Her Standing There” and other early Beatles songs played by mostly underground bands like Badwolf and the Well Pennies. The best known of the bunch is Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. “Anyone can rerecord the Beatles,” Mr. Jordan said. “What it really comes down to is that we control both the publishing and the masters as a one-stop shop. For music supervisors, that is an ideal situation.” Some Grammy tweets aside, the Beatles are hardly forgotten. The group’s compilation album “1,” released in 2000, was the best-selling album in the United States in the first decade of the 2000s, and it has sold more than 30 million copies around the world. But Beatles songs rarely appear on film and television both because of their price and because of the complex checklist of approvals needed. For most Beatles songs, a user would need the approval of Sony/ATV, the publisher; EMI, the record label; and the Beatles and their estates. Last year “Mad Men” paid an estimated $250,000 to use the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”; Matthew Weiner, the creator of the show, said it took him several years to get the necessary approvals to use a Beatles song. For the “Beatles Reimagined” songs, however, the process is much simpler. Adage and Round Hill control the publishing rights, and Mr. Jordan and Mr. Husney, as executive producers of the project, also control the recording rights. Mr. Jordan said that for these early songs, the approval of the Beatles was not necessary, although he added — choosing his words carefully — that they strove to maintain good relationships with all the various parties in the Beatles camp. Gary Calamar, the music supervisor for “True Blood,” declined to say how much money changed hands in the deal for Mobley’s version of “I Wanna Be Your Man.” (So did Mr. Jordan.) But he made it clear that it was a lot easier this way. “Of course we are paying a lot less for this master than for the Fab Four,” Mr. Calamar said. “This did cut out a lot of the red tape.”


Teofilo Stevenson, Olympic Boxing Champion, Dies at 60

Abstract: The Cuban boxer Teofilo Stevenson, a three-time Olympic heavyweight champion with a devastating right hand and a gentlemanly demeanor, died Monday at 60, Cuban state news media reported. Stevenson won gold in 1972, 1976 and 1980.


Governor Says It’s All Settled but the Money

Abstract: Andrew M. Cuomo arrived at The New York Times in an expansive mood on Wednesday. Reporters being reporters, they barraged him with the usual, “Hey, you going to let New York’s new mayor tax the wealthy in pursuit of prekindergarten” questions. He smiled, jaunty: No problem. Prekindergarten with every bell and whistle the mayor could imagine — it’s all going to happen. “Whatever he needs,” he said of the new mayor. “As fast as he can phase in, we’ll fund it.” Just one detail: The mayor will not accomplish this with a tax increase on the wealthy. Oh, and you know, the governor confided: “Nobody has a good estimate on what it is going to cost. The mayor appointed a commission to figure it out.” He smiled. Gov. Jiu Jitsu was making a house call, and he was a trip to behold. For weeks, liberals have barked at him on money to fight foreclosures, on the minimum wage and now on prekindergarten. He’s picked up his heels and stepped gingerly. No doubt he’s not entirely happy, but what’s he to do? The new mayor, Bill de Blasio, who was Mr. Cuomo’s man Friday when the governor was secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has smiled that jolly professorial smile of his and professed deep admiration for the governor, even as his allies urge everyone to fire up the battleship boilers and steam on up the Hudson to Albany. The governor is no politician to be trifled with, as he reminded The Times on Wednesday. He will offer a tax break to the gilt-edged elderly people who worry about their ancestral estates — and he will make New York the fourth state to offer universal prekindergarten. In truth, his numbers could provoke curiosity in the comatose — his staff claims that $100 million next year will jump-start prekindergarten, when by most estimates New York City alone needs much more than that. The Citizens Budget Commission, a well-regarded monitor of the city and state budgets, eyeballed the figures and placed it closer to $1.4 billion, annually. Then there’s the question of where to find the money to acquire and rehabilitate the school buildings. The governor’s people point to a proposed bond issue — one that voters have not yet passed. The after-school programs could rely on money from casinos that are not yet sited, much less built. (I could have sworn I heard the governor’s people argue that this gambling dough was going to pay for other education expenses, but whatever.) “Where is the revenue to pay for this?” State Senator Liz Krueger of Manhattan, who has a richly detailed understanding of the state budget, asked. “No school district in its right mind will set up a whole system without a guaranteed funding stream.” And yet you have to appreciate this governor. Ask about New York City and he feels obliged to point out that he’s all about fighting inequality. “I don’t want this just for New York City,” he said. “I don’t want just rich cities to do this. I want Buffalo to have the same pre-K system as the city has.” A majority of New York’s public school children live within hailing distance of the poverty line. The governor noted, fairly, that New York City had not yet come up with a plan. Mayor de Blasio’s numbers so far have been “back of the envelope,” though his aides say that will soon change. “Nobody knows how long it will take to phase in,” the governor said. “You get a wide variety of opinions.” The governor sounded almost pained as he tried to explain the mayor’s thinking: “Part of what he ran on is income inequality, and part of the answer to income inequality is taxing rich people. That’s what he’s saying, and that’s a political position — I understand that.” His sympathy did not brim over on this point. And yet, say this: Gov. Jiu Jitsu seems to have committed to paying for prekindergarten. I got Michael Gecan on the telephone. A few years back, he and others from Westchester United , a citizens’ group, pushed the governor to make good on 45,000 promised jobs from the Tappan Zee Bridge’s rebuilding. For months, they couldn’t get a straight answer. Then a spokesman for the governor clarified that the governor was talking about 45,000 job years, which could mean 5,000 people working nine years. Or something like that. What, I asked him, do you make of the governor’s latest promise? “It looks good, it sounds good, it just has to happen. It has to be real, right?” Right.

New York
Tax
Bill de Blasio
Andrew Cuomo
Preschool
NYC


A Ghost Town, Going Green

Abstract: NIPTON, Calif. — Gerald Freeman leaned on a walking stick on a dusty hill near the four rows of his solar arrays, talking about it like an apostle on a mission. Down the road are the eucalyptus trees he planted as a potential source of biomass. And not far away, he said, he hopes to install a hydrogen system, another source of renewable fuel. It’s all part of Mr. Freeman’s unlikely dream here in the Mojave Desert — to turn this tiny town into a community running on clean power entirely of its own making. The dream began in earnest about 30 years ago, when Mr. Freeman, a gold miner living in Malibu, bought this ghost town — hotel and general store included. He still has a ways to go, but Nipton now produces roughly half the electricity for its fluctuating population of 30 to 70 residents from the array Mr. Freeman installed in 2010. “The more independent we can become of outside resources, the better,” Mr. Freeman said, citing the rising cost of utility power, frequent outages and preserving the environment as motivation. “I’ve been conscious of the global warming issue since my early days in school. It’s only now beginning to be so much part of the present day. People are slow to adapt to an oncoming reality.” For decades, people have experimented with self-reliant living, whether hippies flocking to communes in the hills or survivalists hunkering down across the plains. But not since Henry David Thoreau took off into the woods near Walden Pond has the idea of going off the grid seemed so within reach — albeit this time without sacrificing the modern conveniences. With cheaper and more widely available ways to make power at home or in town, individuals and communities have been moving ever closer to declaring their energy independence, using technologies like solar, batteries and even small-scale wind. In recent years, towns dedicated to environmental sustainability while reducing the reliance on fossil fuels — known as transition towns — have sprung up in Europe, Australia and the Americas. Still, it is not yet easy to unplug from the power system, as Mr. Freeman’s journey — which he may not get to complete because of flagging health — illustrates. Mr. Freeman, 81, first got to know the place — not much more than a few buildings plopped behind the railroad tracks like a movie set — back in the 1950s. With a degree in geology from the California Institute of Technology, he would come from Los Angeles to prospect for gold, spending days climbing and sampling the rocks on his own. He eventually established a successful mine and moved to Malibu with his second wife, Roxanne Lang, now 63, whom he had met on a dive boat off Catalina and wooed with the opening line, “Can I help you with your wet-suit?” she recalled. But Malibu became expensive and was far from the mining operations he oversaw. So when Nipton came up for sale, he bought it, moving there with Ms. Lang in 1984. The town offered tremendous natural resources in the form of a Pleistocene-era underground lake whose waters flow there first and strong, year-round sunshine barely trespassed by clouds. It also had a rich history, bustling from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries along with the mining industry, and even boasting a hotel that played host to the silent-movie star Clara Bow, who owned a ranch nearby. But by the time the couple moved there, it was all but empty and in disrepair. They stayed for six years, until their son outgrew the one-room schoolhouse that serves the area, and then moved to Henderson, Nev., a Las Vegas suburb. Image The tiny town of Nipton, Calif., a former mining outpost, generates around half its energy from a solar array. Mr. Freeman may use eucalyptus trees as biomass. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times In that time, they reopened the store and cafe and restored the hotel room by room, creating a destination for bikers, hikers, miners and tourists, especially Europeans, looking for the flavor of the Old West. Michael Truman, for instance, usually escapes the cold of Medicine Hat, in Alberta, Canada, to come to the area from November to March. He had never been to Nipton before, but took a different road looking for places to travel with the dog he was planning to look after for friends and stumbled upon it. “It looked cool, so I said, ‘I’m going there,’ ” he said, adding that he would probably bring the dog back for a day in the preserve bordering the town. “I like plants and animals more than people — they’re easier to get along with.” It has also attracted a cluster of about 10 full-time residents who work in Nipton, some who say they were attracted by its peace and solitude. The couple running the cafe, Susan and Fernando Gamez, have begun growing some of the vegetables they use for offerings like the If Looks Could Kale burger, using an intensive vertical system intended to save on space, energy and water. “The whole area is more and more into how do we use our environment,” said a woman behind the cash register who gave her name as Brenda M. “Let’s not trash it; what can we do with it?” Image Mr. Freeman and his wife, Roxanne Lang, reopened the town’s store and cafe, and restored the hotel, room by room, creating a destination for bikers, hikers, miners and tourists. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times For Mr. Freeman, those questions were there all along. He had begun experimenting even before he bought the town, using a grant from the state to plant eucalyptus as a potential energy source and farming euphorbia, which produces a latex that can be refined into fuel. But he had always been interested in solar, he said. Over the years, he talked to several companies about installing an array, but it was too expensive. Then he came across a Palo Alto-based company that used mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on light-sensitive material to increase the efficiency and lower the cost, and decided to go ahead, especially given the generous state and federal incentives. That company, Skyline, has since gone out of business, but the array shines on. “It seems to come up when the normal path of the 20th century toward eternal growth is stymied or when groups of people feel like that path is not going to work for them,” said Dona Brown, a University of Vermont professor and author of “Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America.” Mr. Freeman said he was now looking to a system to make hydrogen, both to store energy and to sell. The couple have put in five tent cabins using a modified Frank Lloyd Wright design and are talking about building an R.V. park to accommodate workers from the giant Ivanpah solar power plant nearby and a rare-earth mine just around the bend. Mr. Freeman may not be the one to see all those plans to fruition, however. With diagnoses of congestive heart and renal failures, he is considering selling the town or finding a partner who can realize the vision. Standing near the spot where, on those long-ago prospecting trips, he would call the train depot to tell the motorman to pick him up on the way back, he referred to the need for self-sufficiency in the face of global warming and economic instability. “Things are evolving and the future is clear,” he said. “It’s just a question of how soon we can get there.”

Gerald Freeman
Mojave Desert
Commune
Global Warming
Renewable energy
Climate Change
Solar energy
Wind power
Nipton CA


Federer Still Shopping for a Coach

Abstract: Despite a lengthy test session with Darren Cahill in Dubai, Roger Federer is still without a full-time coach. Federer, the 13-time Grand Slam singles champion from Switzerland, and Cahill, one of the most successful coaches in tennis, have long been considered a likely match. Each is understated and analytical, and Federer has a strong connection to Australia, Cahill’s home country. But Cahill and Federer’s agent, Tony Godsick, confirmed on Wednesday that Cahill and Federer would not be working together, in large part because Cahill was not prepared to travel as extensively as Federer would have required. Cahill, originally from Adelaide, Australia, has children ages 7 and 4 and is based in Las Vegas, where he moved in 2002 when he was coaching Andre Agassi. “With Roger being European and all those away weeks and the kids entrenched in school here in Las Vegas, the reality really hit in Dubai,” Cahill said in a telephone interview. “It was 100 percent that. We couldn’t get past that practical hurdle.” Federer, now ranked second in the world, is preparing to return to action at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif. He has not played since losing on Feb. 1 to Rafael Nadal in the final of the Australian Open in Melbourne. “It never really got to the point where I had to think too far and make a decision on my own,” Federer said of Cahill at a news conference in Indian Wells in comments reported by the Associated Press. “I never really had to go there. He took the decision for me." Federer withdrew from an event in Dubai and the first round of Davis Cup against the United States, citing concerns about a lingering, if unspecified, lower-back problem. According to Godsick, Federer’s back had bothered him in Australia. Meanwhile, Cahill resigned in February as coach of the Australian Davis Cup team, which, in theory, provided him with an opening to work with Federer after years of speculation. Cahill said he now intended to pursue discussions with Adidas, to formalize his relationship with the sporting goods company. Cahill also intends to continue his television commentary work for ESPN. Federer has not had a full-time coach since 2003, when he split with Peter Lundgren, a former Swedish touring pro who was as much a companion as a mentor. Federer did maintain Pierre Paganini as his full-time trainer. Federer spent 2004, the year he rose to the top of the men’s game, without a coach, then hired the Australian Tony Roche in 2005 to work with him on a limited basis. Federer ended that relationship in May 2007, shortly before the French Open, citing a communication gap. Since then, he has relied on Severin Luthi, Switzerland’s Davis Cup captain, for part-time coaching. Last year, he worked occasionally with José Higueras while Higueras was also coaching Robby Ginepri. But Higueras, who last worked with Federer at the end of last season in Dubai, has now joined the United States Tennis Association as director of coaching for elite player development. Godsick said he did not know when, or if, Federer would hire a full-time coach. “Severin is in Indian Wells with him; he’s always going to be there,” Godsick said. “Certainly there will be an onslaught of résumés coming in now. But Roger’s not just looking for a coach; he’s looking for the right person to help him.” The measuring stick remains Nadal, who has established a firm hold on the No. 1 ranking, winning three of the last four Grand Slam titles and beating Federer five times in a row. “It’s not that Roger is playing worse,” Higueras said. “I think Rafa is playing better.”


Germaine Tillion, French Anthropologist and Resistance Figure, Dies at 100

Abstract: Germaine Tillion, a major figure in contemporary French thought who used experiences studying peasants on the edge of the Sahara, fighting Nazis and surviving a concentration camp as compelling intellectual fodder, died on Saturday at her home in St.-Mande, France . She was 100. Her death was announced by the Web site of her association. Ms. Tillion, an anthropologist, lived through moments of high drama, including being arrested by the Gestapo on Aug. 13, 1942, for her role in the formation of the French Resistance. The charges against her included five that could have led to the death penalty. At Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women in eastern Germany where she spent three years, she learned that she had been designated to disappear without a trace, with the label NN, under Hitler’s Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) decree on the fate of Resistance workers. She survived, but her mother, who was picked up for hiding a British airman, died in a gas chamber at Ravensbrück in 1945. She was selected for death for having white hair. After the war, Ms. Tillion was drawn into the biggest controversy in France in the 1950s, the Algerian demand for independence from France and the French opposition. In the summer of 1957, Saadi Yacef, a leader of the Algerian forces, asked to meet with her. After two and a half hours of conversation, Mr. Yacef said, “You see that we are neither criminals nor murderers.” As described in her book “France and Algeria: Complementary Enemies,” printed in English in 1961, Ms. Tillion “sadly, but firmly” answered, “You are murderers.” Ms. Tillion emerged as an important public intellectual in the 1950s and ’60s, when thinkers like Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre passionately debated the issue of Algeria. She argued that the French had a responsibility not to allow Algerians to sink into poverty, and that they therefore should retain some kind of ties with what was then their colony. But she delved into her past to recall “specters of the Gestapo” in becoming one of the first and loudest voices to protest French torture of Algerian prisoners. As quoted in The New York Times in 1958, Albert Camus, a native Algerian, wrote of Ms. Tillion: “No one, either in Algeria or throughout the world, can henceforth discuss the Algerian problem without having read what an understanding and cultivated woman has written about my misunderstood, desperate native land, now stirred by a heart-rending hope.” Ms. Tillion mined her experiences to write two books on Algeria, three versions of her book on Ravensbrück and an influential study of the condition of women in the Mediterranean world, among many other works. At her death, she was honorary director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. In recent years, as France still wrestles with ghosts from past wars, she has been the subject of biographies, exhibitions, conferences and films. Her moral authority and clarity of intellect eventually gave her “the status of a sage,” wrote Tzvetan Todorov, a philosopher and student of 20th-century totalitarianism. In an interview with French Politics, Culture and Society in 2004, Mr. Todorov said that whenever he faced a thorny question, he asked himself, “What would Germaine do?” Ms. Tillion was one of France’s most decorated people. Her awards included the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, which only four other women have received. On her 100th birthday, President Nicolas Sarkozy wrote her a letter expressing “the affection of the entire nation.” Germaine Marie Rosine Tillion was born in Allègre, France, on May 30, 1907. Her father was a judge and her mother was a writer. She studied anthropology at the University of Paris and other schools, and in the 1930s conducted four research missions to study Berbers and other groups in northeastern Algeria. She returned to Paris after Germany invaded France in 1940. She quickly fell in with intellectuals at the Museum of Man who were forming one of the first underground groups to resist the Nazis. Of the four leaders, she was the only one who was not killed. Denounced by a priest, she was deported to Ravensbrück. During short breaks from building a road, she taught other prisoners a course on the history of man. She also painstakingly figured out the precise economics of how the SS profited from slave labor. “Paltry shopkeepers of death,” she called the SS. At night, she scratched into the wall her plan to reform primary education in France after liberation, David Schoenbrun wrote in “Soldiers of the Night: The Story of the French Resistance” (1980). Among Ms. Tillion’s great sorrows was the Nazis’ confiscation of a suitcase with years of anthropological research notes when they arrested her, according to published reports. A greater sorrow was seeing mothers being made to watch the drowning of their babies in buckets, she wrote. When liberated by Russian soldiers in April 1945, she carried undeveloped photos made with a smuggled camera, which she had hidden for years, showing women’s legs scarred by Nazi medical experiments. After the war, Ms. Tillion became a strong spokeswoman for the heroism of Resistance fighters in the face of evidence that many French had collaborated with the occupiers. Two groups of former Ravensbrück prisoners chose her to be their representative at trials of camp administrators. In an interview with the journal History and Memory in 2003, she said criminal trials could not address the acts of those living in a society in which crimes were not an aberration. She said she saw “the deepening of the abyss being dug between what really happened and the uncertain re-presentation we call history.” Ms. Tillion’s biographer, Jean Lacouture, called her a “major witness of our century,” but she was more than a witness. She appealed to François Mitterrand when he was minister of the interior to send her back to Algeria to be an advocate for the people she had studied in remote areas. Her political role grew after unnamed people asked to speak with her about a brochure she had written. Their leader turned out to be Mr. Yacef of Algeria’s National Liberation Front. After they met a second time, the violence stopped, as he had promised, and did not resume until he was arrested. Ms. Tillion, who did not marry or have children, wrote an operetta, “A Camp Worker Goes to Hell,” while in the concentration camp. It was first performed in Paris last year by a professional troupe. She had kept it in a drawer for 60 years because she worried that “people would get the wrong idea and think we were enjoying ourselves.” The sheer darkness of the humor makes that unlikely. A character joked that the camp offers “all the creature comforts — water, gas, electricity — especially gas.”

Nazi Policies Toward Jews and Minorities


Oakland Raiders at Chicago Bears Preview

Abstract: Oakland Raiders (2-1) at Chicago Bears (0-3) 1 p.m. Line: Raiders by 3 High-profile trades are rare in the N.F.L., but in the last week, Chicago shipped Jared Allen to Carolina and Jonathan Bostic to New England. Now pundits are trying to figure out where Matt Forte and other Bears starters could end up. The team was already painful to watch, but now it is underdog-against-the-visiting-Oakland-Raiders bad. That is about as bad as you can get. Pick: Raiders


U.S. Rallies Past Turkey in World Cup Warm-Up

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — The United States defeated Turkey, 2-1 , in an exhibition Saturday, but two second-half goals by the Americans will bring only a degree of comfort to a continuing series of defensive lapses that trouble this team as it departs for the World Cup. Landon Donovan assisted on goals by Jozy Altidore in the 58th minute and Clint Dempsey in the 75th minute for the United States, which overcame a laborious first half with sharpness and vigor from the bench before a crowd of 55,407 at Lincoln Financial Field. Still, the shaky defense of Jonathan Spector at right back, the rust apparent in Jay DeMerit at center back and the continuing uncertainty about a convalescent Oguchi Onyewu leave the Americans with many unanswered questions before they leave for South Africa on Sunday and face a World Cup opener against England on June 12. There were a number of bright spots for the United States. In the second half, Donovan was resolute on the right side of midfield. Dempsey was predatory after dropping to the left wing from forward. José Francisco Torres brought energy, creativity and defensive commitment to the midfield. Robbie Findley stretched the Turkish defense with speed as a substitute forward. Carlos Bocanegra also appeared comfortable at left back, appearing for the first time since having surgery for a sports hernia May 5. And yet the United States could have just as easily lost to a quick, counterattacking Turkish team that did not qualify for the World Cup. “We were a little all over the place,” goalkeeper Tim Howard said of the porous American defense in the first half. “I’ve been saying that’s been something we have to try to get better at, and we don’t have a lot of time to do it.” In the first 45 minutes, the American defense was frequently caught in a kind of no-man’s land as the Turkish forward Tuncay Sanli rushed into spaces between the midfield and the back line. Indecisiveness as a team and individual breakdowns, especially by Spector, left the United States vulnerable. DeMerit, too, had his awkward moments, playing for the first time in more than a month after recovering from a strained abdominal muscle. In the 27th minute, Turkey scored on a searing counterattack. Spector made a slaloming run to the top of the Turkish penalty area but was dispossessed of the ball. The American defense was wrenched badly out of shape, and no one retreated quickly enough to provide cover for Spector. Forward Colin-Kazim Richards sprung the Turkish midfielder Arda Turan with a long diagonal pass as Spector and DeMerit sprinted desperately to catch him. But they arrived just too late and Turan put Turkey up, 1-0. “They started running at us; we didn’t do a good job of bottling things up, staying tight, tackling from the front,” Howard said. “There was some not great one-on-one defending going on. We needed to do better collectively. The second half, I thought it was night and day.” Steve Cherundolo replaced Spector at right back and helped settle the defense. Onyewu also played solidly for the final 45 minutes, but no one can know how consistent he will remain after missing seven months with a ruptured patellar tendon. More than anything Saturday, Torres and Findley seemed to shift the game into a different gear. Often considered a defensive liability, Torres worked hard to clog the midfield and to close the spaces between the midfield and the back line. He was crisp with his passing and hit the goal post on a free kick in the 89th minute. “I thought José was sharp,” Coach Bob Bradley said. “He found the right people and covered all the holes very well.” A surprise choice for many on the World Cup team , Findley also tracked back on defense and used his pace to create space for Donovan and Dempsey. In the 58th minute, Findley chested a pass from DeMerit and chipped the ball to Donovan on the right flank. Volkan Demirel, the Turkish goalkeeper, strayed recklessly off his line, and Donovan touched the ball once, then crossed superbly to Altidore, who scored into a yawning net from 4 yards to tie the score at 1-1. In the 75th minute, Donovan passed to Dempsey near the top of the penalty area after a throw-in. Dempsey fended off the Turkish midfielder Sabri Sarioglu, freed himself and slotted the ball under Demirel’s left arm to give the Americans a 2-1 lead. Speaking of Findley, Bradley said, “It’s a really good half to build on.” Bradley might have also cautioned that it will take more than one good half each match for the United States to succeed at the World Cup.

Turkey
United States
Soccer
World Cup (Soccer)
Altidore Jozy
Dempsey Clint


No Conspiracy in Publicist’s Killing, Police Conclude

Abstract: A career criminal acted alone in gunning down the Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen during a botched robbery, police said Thursday, ending speculation that he may have conspired with someone to kill her. The case against the man, Harold Martin Smith, was concluded, although it will be a couple more weeks before it is formally closed, said the Beverly Hills police chief David Snowden. Mr. Smith, 43, killed himself on Dec. 1 when the police arrived at a Hollywood apartment building to question him. Ms. Chasen, 64, was shot on Nov. 16 as she drove her car through Beverly Hills after attending the premiere of the movie “Burlesque.” Speculation about possible motives bubbled after the killing and ranged from road rage to a gang-initiation killing.

Murders and Attempted Murders
Chasen Ronni
Beverly Hills (Calif)


I Want Revenge Wins Gotham Stakes at Aqueduct

Abstract: I Want Revenge pulled away from Mr. Fantasy in the stretch for an eight-and-a-half-length victory over Imperial Council on Saturday in the Gotham Stakes at Aqueduct. I Want Revenge, a 3-year-old colt trained by Jeff Mullins, came into the race with only one win in six starts on synthetic surfaces in California. “He struggled on the synthetic, and we always thought he’d run better on the dirt,” David Lanzman, the owner, said in the winner’s circle. The jockey Joe Talamo and I Want Revenge stayed with the pacesetter Mr. Fantasy until the top of the stretch. “I had so much horse the whole way around,” Talamo said. Mr. Fantasy, who came into the race with wins in two starts and went off as the 2-1 favorite, finished third, followed by Masala, Russell Road, Axel Foley, Naos, Haynesfield and Giant Ryan. Haynesfield, who came into the Gotham on a four-race winning streak, never threatened. The winning time was 1 minute 42.65 seconds for the mile and a sixteenth on the fast track. I Want Revenge earned $150,000 from the $250,000 purse, boosting his earnings to $366,000. He paid $8.30 on a $2 bet to win. Mullins said I Want Revenge would remain in New York and train for the Wood Memorial on April 4, then begin preparing for the Kentucky Derby on May 2. NICANOR FINISHES SECOND Nicanor, the brother of Barbaro , finished second to the heavily favored Custom for Carlos in a $40,000 maiden race at Gulfstream in Hallandale Beach, Fla. Nicanor broke sharply and took the lead in the seven-furlong race, but Custom for Carlos drew even on the outside in the stretch turn, took the lead at the top of the stretch and opened a two-and-a-half-length lead nearing the sixteenth pole. Nicanor closed to within a length at the wire. “He just needs experience,” said Mike Martz , the trainer of Nicanor who also trained Barbaro. “He’s going to be a good horse.” Custom for Carlos, ridden by Kent Desormeaux, ran seven furlongs in 1:23.25 and paid $3.40 to win. Discreet Street was third in the field of 10 3-year-olds. In the $100,000 Grade III Honey Fox Stakes for fillies and mares, the heavy favorite Wild Promises was going for her seventh straight stakes victory but tired badly to finish off the board for the first time in 18 career races. I Lost My Choo came on to win the race, going one mile on the grass in 1:33.40 and paying $16.40 to win. Rustic Flame was second and Flibberjibit third.


Manhattan: Electronics-Recycling Bill

Abstract: A City Council committee heard sharply differing views yesterday on a bill that would require makers of computers, televisions, digital music players and other electronic devices to set up a free “take-back” system to collect and recycle or reuse the devices. The bill would let manufacturers design the system but would require them to meet minimum collection rates; companies would get double credit for devices donated to a school or nonprofit group. The Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Action said the bill would shift the cost of handling electronic waste away from taxpayers and would protect sanitation workers and the public from toxic chemicals released when the devices are crushed or incinerated. The Consumer Electronics Association said the issue should be handled nationally or regionally.

Recycling of Waste Materials
Hazardous and Toxic Substances
Environment


Wisconsin: Enforcement of Abortion Law Is Delayed

Abstract: A federal judge on Monday granted a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of a new Wisconsin law that bans doctors who lack admitting privileges at nearby hospitals from performing abortions. The order, by Judge William Conley of Federal District Court, will remain in place pending a fuller hearing on July 17. Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and Affiliated Medical Services filed a lawsuit Friday. The suit alleged that the requirement would unconstitutionally restrict the availability of abortions in the state, violate the Constitution’s due process guarantee and unconstitutionally treat doctors who perform abortions differently from other doctors. The bill was introduced in the Legislature on June 4, passed nine days later and signed into law Friday by Gov. Scott Walker.

Wisconsin
Abortion
Planned Parenthood
Scott Walker