Rupert Ravens Contemporary

Abstract: The alternative art scene in Newark can be a hit-or-miss proposition, but City Without Walls and Rupert Ravens Contemporary are two galleries that do a pretty good job of finding and promoting talented young and emerging artists. Both are worth a visit at the moment. The annual Metro show at City Without Walls, one of the oldest juried exhibitions of small works in the country, displays pieces that are 13 inches or less in each direction. The title originally referred to the tradition of moving the art by rail to various cities around New Jersey. Today, the organizers use many forms of transportation, but the exhibition’s premise remains the same: to provide little-known newcomers an opportunity to display their work in a statewide, yearlong touring exhibition. This year’s show, the 26th, includes 69 works by 43 artists selected by a jury of prominent New York art world figures. It is a slick, handsome exhibition, with the accent on finely detailed figurative paintings. There is also some good photography and, happily, an absence of the kooky stuff that has marred previous shows. Paintings by Lauren Ennist, Jen Mazza and Claudia Waters catch the eye, partly because they are colorful and partly because they are well executed. The figurative subject matter is often clichéd but shows all three artists, who are still warming up in their careers, trying to expand from the merely pretty into something more serious. While eclecticism is the norm in these sorts of shows, Metro 26 includes a concentration of excellent photographs. Marco Muñoz won the best in show prize for a series of intimate pictures of youths playing football in a park, shrouded in mist. Collectively titled “Voices From the Fog,” they herald the arrival of a new talent. Among other outstanding photographs are Aimee Hertog’s wickedly funny “Hamptons Fun v. Iowa Flood,” in which the artist has digitally collaged imagery of people swimming in the Hamptons into flooded urban landscape scenes from Iowa. The juxtaposition is so incongruous and silly that you can’t help but laugh. As usual, the show is well supplied with collage and sculpture, some of which is interesting, like Jan Huling’s oddball assemblage “Kid Stuff,” combining beading and little cameos. Greg Leshé’s “Mobile Auto-Graph Writing Pile No. 2” is also intriguing, consisting of piles of circular paper covered in line drawings and resting on turntables with wheels. I didn’t see it in motion, so have no idea how it works, but I love its ingenuity. A fierce creative intelligence is also in abundance nearby at Rupert Ravens Contemporary, Newark’s newest major commercial gallery, which opened in 2007, spread over three levels of an old furniture warehouse on Market Street. The current exhibition is “Next Post,” an impressive show of 18 simultaneous solo projects by artists from Europe and America. It grabs your attention from the moment you walk in the door. Two colorful projects fill the ground-floor entrance area, Donald Bruschi’s wood and steel sculptures with neon lights and Saya Woolfalk’s odd installation consisting of an exotic sculpture made of trash that resembles an old-fashioned computer in a room with a lime-green floor and blue walls. It is not entirely resolved in my view, but Ms. Woolfalk seems to have the talent to take her strange project to the next level. Many other surprises await those willing to venture deeper into this behemoth of a space, including Cordy Ryman’s simple but attractive painted geometric sculptures that are made entirely using 2-by-4-inch wood studs. Miya Ando’s refined, subtle works of rolled steel, made of sheets of burnished and chemically treated metal, are also a must-see for anyone interested in post-minimalist contemporary art. Headlining the show is “Drop,” an inflatable 60-foot orange cone-shaped sculpture by a group of artists known as AK Airways that fills half the length of the second-floor gallery from ceiling to floor. Lighted from inside, it gives off a subtle amber glow. The theme of the work, Mr. Ravens said, was the fragile and provisional nature of human existence. Other works are equally spectacular, like Gae Savannah’s opulent assemblage sculptures using glass beads, trinkets, reams of gossamer and other cheap objects and materials relating to shopping and the beauty industry. Her assemblages are risky, but when they come together there is a wonderful sense of lushness and overflowing color. If all this sounds a little too edgy or experimental, the show also includes a couple of paintings by Fred Gutzeit that soothe the soul. His subject is the landscape, chiefly scenes of rocks and foliage. Here, among hard-core assemblages, junk and inflatable sculptures, they look like bashful visitors from another world.

Art
City Without Walls
Newark (NJ)
Ravens Rupert Contemporary


South Carolina Governor Criticizes Accuser

Abstract: COLUMBIA, S.C. — Gov. Nikki Haley lashed out Thursday night against a fellow Republican who has accused her of ethics violations. Testifying before a state ethics panel, Ms. Haley called her accuser a “racist, sexist bigot who has tried everything in his power to hurt me and my family.” The House Ethics Committee is hearing testimony from business executives and lobbyists who worked with Ms. Haley, the state’s first governor who has not been a white man. A powerful Republican fund-raiser, John Rainey, has accused her of illegally lobbying on behalf of a hospital and an engineering firm while she was in the Legislature from 2005 to 2010. All 10 witnesses denied she had done anything wrong. Ms. Haley was not scheduled to testify, but in a surprise appearance, she asked to clear her reputation. “I want to tell you the truth, because I know I’ve done nothing wrong,” she said. Ms. Haley says that while running for governor, Mr. Rainey made inappropriate comments about her family. She accused him of asking whether she had connections to terrorists, a line he has said he did not recall, but dismissed as most likely a joke. Mr. Rainey did not testify but his lawyer, Christopher P. Kenney, wrote in a statement that the panel had not asked tough enough questions of its witnesses. ‘The fix was in on this from the beginning and the House Ethics Committee ought to be ashamed of itself,’ he wrote.”

South Carolina
Haley Nikki R
Ethics (Institutional)
United States Politics and Government
Rainey John


Police Review Board Seeks Grand Jury Records in Eric Garner Case

Abstract: The debate over grand jury records connected to the chokehold death of Eric Garner at the hands of the police took a new turn on Friday as lawyers argued over whether the Staten Island district attorney’s office should provide that material to the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The board, which is charged with investigating police misconduct, filed a court petition in May seeking evidence and testimony presented to the grand jury. Lawyers for the review board wrote that those records were needed to review New York Police Department actions related to Mr. Garner’s death last summer during an attempted arrest. They added that “efforts to obtain evidence from the N.Y.P.D. concerning that investigation have not been successful.” The district attorney’s office opposed the request, saying that the board lacked standing to obtain the records, which are traditionally kept secret, and that their disclosure would undermine the ability of future grand juries to reach decisions free of outside influences. On Friday, Justice William E. Garnett of State Supreme Court on Staten Island questioned the review board’s lawyer, Brian Krist, asking several times how the grand jury evidence would be safeguarded and who would be responsible if it were leaked. “There is curiosity or an honest desire to see it,” Justice Garnett said. “There is that danger.” Mr. Krist replied that the review board would be willing to designate one person to handle the evidence. “We would actively encourage the court to issue an order” restricting its distribution, he added. The review board has the authority, in the most serious cases, to prosecute police officers in administrative proceedings and refer them to the police commissioner for disciplinary measures, including termination. Mr. Garner, who was unarmed and suspected of selling untaxed cigarettes, died after Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold. A grand jury declined to indict Officer Pantaleo in December, leading to days of protests in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The decision not to indict also led to calls for the district attorney’s office to make the grand jury records public, as prosecutors in Ferguson, Mo., had done after a grand jury there declined to return an indictment in the case of Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by a police officer last summer. In March, Justice Garnett ruled against a group of plaintiffs who had sought the records, including The New York Post, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the public advocate, Letitia James. The judge wrote that they had failed to establish a “compelling and particularized need” to make the grand jury minutes public. The review board has distinguished itself from those plaintiffs, saying that it will not make public witness names or testimony and that it was not seeking information about “advice or directions” provided to the grand jury. Mr. Krist told Justice Garnett that the review board had been unable to complete its investigation because the district attorney’s office had asked it to step aside temporarily. A similar request came from the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, which has announced an inquiry to determine whether police officers violated any federal civil rights laws. A spokeswoman for the review board, Linda Sachs, said on Thursday that the board’s chairman, Richard D. Emery, had been “in discussion” with the Police Department since December to obtain results of the police investigation into Mr. Garner’s death, but that the police had refused to provide those records. Stephen Davis, the top spokesman for the Police Department, declined to comment, saying the matter was under litigation. During the hearing on Friday, Justice Garnett noted that the City Charter requires the police to provide reasonable assistance to the board and asked why Mayor Bill de Blasio could not simply order the department to turn over material to the review board. In response to the review board, prosecutors with the Staten Island district attorney’s office wrote that it was essential to maintain the secrecy of the grand jury process to ensure that those panels could have the ability to indict “the powerful and influential” or dismiss unsupported charges “even where the accused is publicly despised or the alleged crime is notorious or heinous.” Many witnesses had testified with assurances of secrecy, the prosecutors wrote, adding that their identities would surely be exposed if the review board used their statements during an administrative trial. “The content of their testimony would then be the subject of scrutiny,” the prosecutors wrote. “With the inevitable harassment and retaliation.”

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


As Glaciers Melt in Alaska, Landslides Follow

Abstract: An enormous landslide that spread rocky debris more than six miles across a glacier in southeastern Alaska last week was not the first to occur in the area, and certainly will not be the last. The slide, first noticed by Paul Swanstrom, a sightseeing pilot , on June 28, occurred when part of a mountain gave way near Lamplugh Glacier, in Glacier Bay National Park, about 100 miles northwest of Juneau. Photographs taken by Mr. Swanstrom several hours after the slide showed a dark mass spread over the glacier, which is about eight miles long and ends in Johns Hopkins Inlet, part of Glacier Bay. A cloud of dust from the slide was still visible. The slide caused seismic tremors that first registered at magnitude 2.9, , according to data from the Alaska Earthquake Center . But that magnitude was computed as if the tremors were from an earthquake. Scientists at the center later recalculated the magnitude and came up with a higher figure, 5.5. The source of the slide appears to be a peak on the west side of the glacier that was more than 6,500 feet high. It is unclear how much rock broke away, but an early estimate from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory suggested the slide involved more than 132 million tons of material. The Alaska Panhandle in and around Glacier Bay National Park has been the source of many large landslides in recent years. Scientists say the slides will most likely continue as warming temperatures cause more glacial melt. Glaciers buttress the mountainsides that surround them; when the ice disappears, the slopes lose some of their support, and erosion or earthquakes can cause them to collapse. A mountainside next to Tyndall Glacier gave way in October after heavy rains. The debris slid into an arm of Icy Bay, causing a tsunami that struck a hillside across the water from the slide, shearing off trees at an elevation of more than 500 feet. This part of Alaska was also the scene of what is thought to be the largest tsunami ever measured, in Lituya Bay, a small inlet on the coast about 30 miles southwest of Lamplugh Glacier. On the evening of July 9, 1958, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake shook loose a huge mass of rock that fell 3,000 feet from atop a mountain into the bay. The resulting wave scoured vegetation 1,720 feet up on the opposite hillside. Three fishing boats were in the bay at the time; two made it through the event safely but the third, with two people onboard, was never seen again.

Glacier
Alaska
Glacier Bay National Park
Tsunami
Landslides,Mudslides


Israeli Leader Vows to Intensify Gaza Attacks on Hamas

Abstract: JERUSALEM — As new volleys of rockets whizzed toward Israel’s major cities on Wednesday and Israel pressed its intensive air bombardment of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed to increase “the assault on Hamas and the terrorist organizations in Gaza.” But even as Israel’s jets and drones battered targets all across the narrow Mediterranean enclave, the rising Palestinian death toll and increased international alarm suggested Israel would not have the leeway for a military operation on the scale of 2008’s Cast Lead, which lasted three weeks and involved extensive infantry combat in Gaza. The Israeli government was already facing condemnation and criticism from Jordan, the European Union and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority as the death toll across Gaza hit at least 53 since Saturday. No Israelis have been reported killed. The United States’ support for the Israeli operation also appeared conditional, Israeli analysts said, as Washington called for “restraint from both sides.” Video How Israel’s latest airstrikes on Gaza are seen as part of a broader tactic known as “cutting the grass,” or using military incursions to manage conflict. Credit Credit Abir Sultan/European Pressphoto Agency Israel and Hamas began this latest round of fighting after a spike in tensions fueled by the abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers hitchhiking in the West Bank and what is suspected to be the revenge killing of a Palestinian teenager by Israelis. On Wednesday, after Hamas fired nearly 100 rockets into Israel, Mr. Netanyahu met with senior military commanders near Gaza and vowed to press on. He said that with public support “the operation will be expanded and will continue until the firing at our communities stops and quiet is restored.” Responding to the increasing number of casualties in Gaza, Mr. Abbas said Israel was waging “a war against the Palestinian people in every sense of the word” and accused it of “genocide.” He said he had been in contact with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, who promised to try to restore the cease-fire of 2012 but who has also pointedly not come to the aid of Hamas, which he sees as an adversary. In a televised speech from Qatar, the Hamas political chief, Khaled Meshal, blamed Israel for the conflict and rejected mediation efforts. “We receive calls from mediators from Arab and Western sides to broker a cease-fire,” he said. “We say to those who ask us for a lull: Go back!” Image The mother and brothers of a Palestinian man killed Wednesday in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. Credit Wissam Nassar for The New York Times The deadliest single strike of the latest flare-up took place early Wednesday when a missile hit the house in northern Gaza of an Islamic Jihad rocket commander, Abdullah Diyfallah, killing him and five family members. Israeli strikes hit other military figures and their houses, as well as rocket launchers and storage facilities. Hamas continued to fire longer-range rockets across Israel, keeping many Israelis at home or in shelters. One Syrian-made M-302 rocket hit near Hadera, about 70 miles from Gaza, according to an Israeli Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, who said that Palestinians in Gaza had “tens” more like it. Still, despite the reach of the rockets, Mr. Netanyahu is thought to be reluctant to order a large military operation in Gaza, which could quickly turn bloody for both sides. A ground operation could bring more intense criticism of Israel, as in 2008, for what could be large numbers of Palestinian dead, as Israeli troops fight armed Hamas members who often dress like civilians and live among them. In 2008, 1,400 Palestinians died and fewer than 15 Israelis. But Israel then had a more favorable international environment, said Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States until last September. At that time, Israel had made what was considered a serious peace offer to the Palestinians and got credit for it, especially with Washington. Similarly, Mr. Oren said, Israel’s withdrawal of troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 won it some international praise, and slowed the criticism when Israel went to war in Gaza and southern Lebanon the next year for more than a month. Video Israel released video of missile strikes it says are targeting weapons facilities in Gaza. Credit Credit Hatem Moussa/Associated Press “But we have no credit now in the international community, and that will play quickly in the United Nations Security Council,” said Mr. Oren, a scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya. “Our air force is much better and very accurate, but inevitably civilians will be hit and the international reaction will be very quick.” All that, he said, “is a restraint on a big operation or a prolonged one.” Some in government believe “let’s just get it over with and take the blame in the Security Council because we’ll end up there anyway,” he said, while others are urging more caution, wanting simply to end rocket fire from Gaza while diminishing the power of Hamas. Gerald M. Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, said that “this is one of those accidental wars,” one from which Mr. Netanyahu “won’t benefit.” One reason, Mr. Steinberg said, is that after the failure of the extended peace effort by Secretary of State John Kerry, the United States is “seen as exhausted, unable to convince anyone to back off, and Europe is the same.” And the Arab world is in turmoil, he added, undermining the influence of the Arab League. Image An Israeli border police officer surveying the damage caused to a structure after it was hit by a rocket near the border with the Gaza Strip. Credit Ronen Zvulun/Reuters As the politicians played to their audiences, the mood of the communities on both sides was somber. In Kiryat Malachi, in southern Israel near Gaza, Hani Azagvi packed essentials for her small daughters. In 2012, the house next door took a direct hit from a rocket, and she decided this time to go to friends in Nazareth. Achsa Halili, 56, pointing to another family leaving for Hadera, said: “As long as we are here and they are on the other side, there will be no quiet. They think they can be safe in Hadera? There are rockets there, too.” In Ness Ziona, an orderly suburb south of Tel Aviv, a large chunk of shrapnel from a rocket intercepted in the air by an Israeli missile crashed on tree-lined Weizmann Street, landing between cars in the morning rush hour. “There’s a feeling of war,” said Avi Mashiach, 40, who works as a clerk in Ness Ziona’s City Hall. “Israelis want to see the people of Gaza surrender. We should send in more aircraft, tanks and commandos. This is the time to finish Hamas, to destroy them.” Roi Eliahu, 39, was at the shopping mall trying to amuse his two young children with miniature airplane rides after he and his wife decided it was not safe to send them to their summer day camp. “We are willing to put up with even a year of sirens as long as they are doing what needs to be done,” he said of the government and the military. “If the army wanted to, it could dismantle Hamas in five hours and flatten Gaza.” The mood was very different in Gaza and in the West Bank, too. When air-raid sirens sounded over Jerusalem on Tuesday night, there were cheers, applause and shouts of “Allahu akbar!” in East Jerusalem neighborhoods and at the Al-Aksa mosque compound. “The ball is rolling down, and the third intifada has become unavoidable,” said Mustaser al-Sheikh, a pharmacist in the Qalandia refugee camp near Ramallah. He said that Israel could not win a war against guerrilla fighters supported by a 1.7 million population in Gaza. “All my friends are celebrating the falling of rockets on the major cities,” he said, referring to the rockets striking Israel. By day, the refugee camp was calm, but at nightfall, at the end of the day’s fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, youths have been throwing stones at the Israeli checkpoints to the south and north of Ramallah and clashing with soldiers. Muhammad Hammad, who owns a cosmetics store at the Amari refugee camp, which abuts Ramallah, said of the warnings of a new Palestinian uprising, “I know it is coming, but it will be disastrous for us.” If the second intifada that began in 2000 set the Palestinians back 20 years, he said, a third one would set them back double that time.

Hamas
Israel
Benjamin Netanyahu
Palestinians
Gaza Strip


Notre Dame’s Loss Leaves Charlie Weis Hanging by a Thread

Abstract: SOUTH BEND, Ind. — There was no blue-gray sky to provide the backdrop. No horseman, never mind four of them, to come to the rescue. There was no cosmic channeling of karma from Touchdown Jesus or a touch of luck from Fighting Irish legends like Knute, Ara or Lou. Instead, a program steeped in lore is at a crossroads, its uncertain future again clashing with its mystical past. Connecticut beat Notre Dame, 33-30, in double overtime Saturday, the latest setback for a program that has plunged into mediocrity. This loss could be a defining one, the symbolic end of the Charlie Weis era after five seasons in South Bend. Weis has six years left on a contract that is probably going to cost the university more than $15 million to buy out. But a three-game losing streak, a second consecutive loss on senior day to a middling opponent and a trend of playing down to the competition have made Weis’s departure all but inevitable. “Today’s not the day for me to reflect on things like that,” Weis said. He added that he would contemplate his future during his news media briefing Sunday afternoon. On Saturday, Weis’s main concern was the 33 Notre Dame seniors who saw a 14-point lead turn into another heartbreaking loss. “Today is the day for me to be worrying about those 33 guys,” Weis said. “I really feel absolutely miserable for those 33 guys.” If the script from the latest Notre Dame loss looked familiar, that is because the Irish have emerged this season as college football’s consummate drama majors. Nine of Notre Dame’s past 10 games have been decided in the final 2 minutes 10 seconds, with most of those games in doubt until the final play. Notre Dame’s five losses have come by a combined 21 points, a sign that this team, much like the Weis era, kept coming up short. Weis is 35-26 over all at Notre Dame, a record similar to his predecessors Bob Davie and Tyrone Willingham. Most damning is that Weis has gone 16-20 over the past three seasons, those in which he has played predominantly the players he recruited. And in a fitting end to a game that will probably be synonymous with the end of his tenure, the Irish were frantically trying to call a timeout before Connecticut’s Andre Dixon ran in untouched from 4 yards for the decisive touchdown in the second overtime. Weis sent the defensive coordinator Corwin Brown sprinting down the sideline, as Weis called it, “trying to give us a little more time.” As the day’s resplendent sunshine settled into dusk and the game stumbled toward overtime, the Irish appeared to be living on borrowed time. Two Connecticut touchdowns that would have given the Huskies the lead during the final two minutes were negated because of holding penalties. After a fumble by Notre Dame’s Armando Allen Jr. put Connecticut in position to win in regulation, the sophomore kicker David Teggart pushed a 37-yard field-goal attempt left as time expired. “I said, ‘Here we go again,’ ” said Connecticut Coach Randy Edsall, whose team has lost games this season on everything from a holding penalty in the end zone to an 81-yard touchdown pass with 22 seconds left. But for a Connecticut team that has had to deal with the stabbing death of the junior cornerback Jasper Howard last month, the day ended with a victory Edsall called the best in program history. “You’ve got to understand what this team has gone through,” Edsall said. “A couple of close games, and then you lose a teammate, you lose a brother, you lose a son, and you’re trying so hard to honor him by winning on the field.” He added: “If it wasn’t emotional, to me, you’re not human.” For Notre Dame, emotions and questions will be swirling until Jack Swarbrick, the university’s second-year athletic director, decides Weis’s fate. The decision could also affect the status of quarterback Jimmy Clausen, who has thrived this season and finished Saturday with 329 passing yards and 2 touchdowns. Clausen, a junior, declined to say if Weis’s future would have an effect on his decision to stay at Notre Dame for his final season. When the four Notre Dame captains, linked arm in arm with Weis, led the team onto the field, it was a show of solidarity for a program that appears to be falling apart. “He had tears coming down his face,” Clausen said of Weis during the pregame walk. “It’s hard we couldn’t get a victory for all those seniors and Coach Weis.” But as Notre Dame finishes another lost season, the echoes of its storied past are nowhere to be heard. Soon, the search will almost certainly begin for the next coach with the tall task of trying to wake those echoes.

Football
College Athletics
University of Connecticut
University of Notre Dame
Weis Charlie
Clausen Jimmy
Howard Jasper
Edsall Randy


Journal News Takes Down Gun Permit Map

Abstract: A newspaper has removed an interactive online map of handgun permit holders in two New York counties that drew nationwide anger and prompted threats against its staff, the publisher said Friday. The decision by the paper, The Journal News, to take the information off its Web site came in response to the passage of sweeping gun legislation in Albany this week, the publisher, Janet Hasson, said in a statement. “While the new law does not require us to remove the data, we believe that doing so complies with its spirit,” she said. Legislators pushed to add the measure to the new law in response to the paper’s publication after an outcry from gun-rights advocates and some law enforcement groups. “From the beginning it was irresponsible conduct from The Journal News,” said Roy T. Richter, the head of the Captains Endowment Association , which represents the upper echelons of the New York Police Department. He said thousands of retired officers live in the two counties — Westchester and Rockland, just north of the city — and some objected to seeing their personal information published on the newspaper’s Web site. “The problem is,” he said, “once you put things on the Internet, they’re stuck out there.” The newspaper, which is based in White Plains, used public records to create the map, a clickable collection of the names and addresses of thousands of permit holders in the two counties. Since it first appeared in late December, the online map had been viewed nearly 1.2 million times, the paper said. The paper received a flood of angry phone calls and letters, and opponents posted the home address of editors and other staff members online. The reaction prompted the paper to hire armed security for its headquarters and for a bureau in Rockland. The new gun law, which Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed on Tuesday, includes a provision prohibiting the release of information on gun permit holders for 120 days, and it also allows those with permits already in the statewide database to request the removal of their names and addresses. State Senator Greg Ball, a Putnam County Republican and a sponsor of the provision, applauded the map’s removal. “I am proud to have passed legislation keeping The Journal News from doing this ever again,” he said. In a note to readers published on Friday, Ms. Hasson said the decision to remove the interactive map, which was posted in response to the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., was neither a concession to critics nor a response to threats. “We know our business is a controversial one, and we do not cower,” she said. She said the paper would continue to pursue its request for permit records from Putnam County. Local officials have so far declined to release them. Ms. Hasson said a snapshot of the map — with its dots visible but personal information absent — would also remain on the site, “to remind the community that guns are a fact of life we should never forget.”

Guns
Newspaper
New York
The Journal News
Janet Hasson
Westchester
Gun Control
Rockland County NY


Death and Life of Dash Snow, Artist, Addict and Provocateur

Abstract: WHEN the artist Dash Snow died of an overdose on July 13, stoned and alone at the Lafayette House in the East Village, detectives found the following items in his room: an empty can of Amstel Light, an empty can of Heineken, an empty bottle of Bacardi rum, three used syringes and 13 glassine envelopes emptied of heroin. Mr. Snow, who would have turned 28 on Monday, had checked into the hotel that morning, the authorities say, booking a three-day stay. He spent the afternoon and a good part of the evening on a dedicated bender, but as the night drew on, he called his companion of several years, Jade Berreau, who was at a nearby restaurant with friends discussing his deteriorating state and a possible intervention. He was cheerless and dejected on the phone, ranting incoherently and hinting at a fast-approaching death. As the conversation ended, he told Ms. Berreau, who was sitting with their 2-year-old daughter, Secret: “Goodbye. I love you. I’ll see you in another world.” Ms. Berreau, a dark-haired model, scrambled to find the hotel’s address and hurried over with a friend, the photographer Hanna Liden. The women burst into the lobby and asked the startled desk clerk for keys to Room 11, then rushed upstairs to find a bolted door. They managed to get the lock undone but struggled with the chain, then finally kicked the door down to find Mr. Snow naked and submerged in the bathtub. They called 911 and started CPR. When the medics arrived, they, too, tried, banging on his chest for nearly 90 minutes. But Mr. Snow’s heart had stopped. He was pronounced dead in the room at 12:24 a.m. It was a gruesome end — a pathetic end — for an artist and provocateur who, at least according to his birthright, never should have been there to begin with. Dash Snow was, in no particular order, a jokester, a jailbird, a thief, a freak, a successful art-brut savage, a doting father, a connoisseur of various cocaine bathrooms, a retired writer of graffiti and the latest incarnation of that timeless New York species, the downtown Baudelaire. Two years ago, New York magazine anointed him one of “Warhol’s Children” in a skeptical but mostly glowing profile that served to intensify his celebrity if not elevate his artwork. But he was also East Side royalty, the discontented scion of the famous de Menil family, whose contributions to the American art world are vast. He met a junkie’s end but did so in a $325-a-night hotel room with an antique marble hearth. His death was not unlike his abbreviated life: a violent, jumbled collage of high and low. As the days and weeks go by, that death and life are certain to be studied as a cautionary tale. But Mr. Snow’s demise could also be read as a story about New York and the tribal immobility that undercuts the city’s reputation as a celebrated home for self-invention. “The facts are pretty simple,” said Javier Peres, Mr. Snow’s art dealer. “Dash, as a child, rebelled against his family. There was a lot of anger and unresolved baggage with the family — especially with his mother. There might have been a blanket there at times, but he thought about himself as basically being alone.” Being alone, of course, is not the same as being free. And after the drugs, the sex, the squats, the art, the casual stance toward hygiene and formality, some basic questions linger: Did Mr. Snow ever escape the East Side pedigree that caused him so much anguish? How long does someone have to live their life before they fully possess it? Was he on an inevitable crash course from the start? IT was July 2007, and the myth of Dash Snow had ascended toward perhaps its steepest peak. He was married to Agathe Snow, another downtown artist, but Ms. Berreau — who declined to be interviewed for this article — was about to give birth to their child. It was during this period that two of Mr. Snow’s close friends died of heroin overdoses. His own career was on fire, but he had not yet been singed by the flames. With the artist Dan Colen and others, Mr. Snow installed a Hamster’s Nest at Deitch Projects, a SoHo gallery. A Hamster’s Nest is what it sounds like, but with humans in the rodent roles: You shred a few hundred phone books, paint the walls, then ingest enough intoxicants so that every scrap of sentience disappears. “It was really intense,” recalled Ms. Snow, whose divorce from Dash was finalized this summer, though she remained close to him to the end. “We were all really high, and there were concerts. It was like a whole other world, an intense moment, all these people with paper, piles of Yellow Pages, no air or ventilation and fumes everywhere. We were already so drunk. The iPods kept getting lost in the paper.” Three days later — with no clue how it happened — she woke up in Berlin. That weekend was the end of what looked in retrospect like the innocent phase of Mr. Snow’s rebellion. There was notoriety, youth and beauty in copious proportions, a big show at one of the city’s finest galleries. Six months earlier, the New York magazine profile had traced his journey into prominence from his days as a mutinous graffiti tagger roaming the streets. It was a story that is fairly well known by now: how at 15 he helped found Irak NY , a graffiti operation led in part by a man with the Dickensian name Earsnot; how as a teenager he stole a Polaroid and always documented his location so as to remember it when he sobered up; how Mr. Colen and the photographer Ryan McGinley took him on as a fellow blithe spirit and something of a muse. They encouraged Mr. Snow to exhibit his collages of newspaper headlines, many of them revealing his obsession with Saddam Hussein, and his photographs of oral sex, nude girls, lines of cocaine being snorted off body parts. It worked: His first solo show was in 2005, and his work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The art world was not yet settled on whether Mr. Snow was an important artist, a young talent with promise or a reckless pretender. Well-known collectors including Charles Saatchi have bought his pieces, generally at five-figure prices; Benjamin Godsill, a curatorial associate at the New Museum, said Mr. Snow’s work “captures this period bracketed by the fall of the World Trade Center and the fall of the financial system.” Jacob Lewis, the director of Pace Prints Chelsea, said, “Some people think of him as the Kurt Cobain of the art world. Other people think of him as the Paris Hilton.” When you talk to those who knew Mr. Snow, certain phrases tend to recur: crazy, free-spirited, lived by his own rules. “Irresponsible, reckless, carefree, wild, rich — we were just kids doing drugs and being bad, out at bars every night,” Mr. McGinley wrote in an e-mail message circulated to friends after Mr. Snow’s overdose. “Sniffing coke off toilet seats. Doing bumps off each others’ fists. Driving down one-way streets in Milan at 100 miles an hour blasting ‘I Did It My Way’ in a white van.” For such a feral presence, though, Mr. Snow understood how to turn criticism into opportunity. New York magazine derided him for making art by ejaculating on copies of The New York Post; he blew up that section of the article, ejaculated on the copy and displayed it at an art show in Los Angeles. His sadness and his money and his drugs were a powerful dynamic, said Jack Walls, a close friend of Mr. Snow’s who is a former lover of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe: the sadness was abetted by the drugs, the drugs abetted by the money. Mr. Walls distinguished Mr. Snow from working-class addicts like Herbert Huncke — and himself. “It was like his money never ran out,” Mr. Walls said. “When it came to doing drugs, he could do these marathons for days and days on end. In my day, in Huncke’s day, in Burroughs’s day, when we wanted a fix, we had to go work — we couldn’t just sit around getting high for three straight weeks.” A HALF-BLOCK off Fifth Avenue, on East 81st Street, down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a baroque town house rises like a monument to the Manhattan establishment. This is the familial home of the de Menils, the wealthy French-Texan clan to which Dashiell A. Snow was born. His great-grandmother Dominique de Menil was an heiress of the Schlumberger oil fortune, an American grande dame who rode horseback in the Bois de Boulogne and married a French banker she had met in a ballroom at Versailles. One of their daughters, Philippa, co-founded the Dia Center for the Arts in Manhattan, while another, Christophe, married Robert Thurman, a famed scholar of Buddhism. Mr. Thurman eventually divorced her and remarried, fathering with his second wife (a German-Swedish model previously married to Timothy Leary) the actress Uma Thurman. Reached in Italy while on vacation, Mr. Thurman — Mr. Snow’s grandfather — suggested that the family’s foundational conflict was between his ex-wife, Christophe, and their daughter — Dash’s mother — Taya Thurman. “The mother insisted she knew better — she interfered with the daughter,” Mr. Thurman said. “Taya realized at a certain point that Dash might end up going a little out of control, so she tried to instill a bit of discipline. Dash, of course, resisted.” That resistance took the form of teenage pranks: tire-slashing, truancy. And when Mr. Snow was 15, his parents (his father was Christopher Snow, a musician) sent him to the Hidden Lake Academy , a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia (“a little boot-campish,” Mr. Thurman said). Mr. Snow’s mother obtained a restraining order barring her own mother from seeing the boy until he was 18, but Mr. Thurman said the grandmother nonetheless set up expense accounts that Dash used to fuel his binges. Christophe de Menil declined to be interviewed, as did Taya Thurman, who released a written statement. “As a mother, watching Dash self-destruct through addiction has been the most devastating experience of my life,” she wrote. “My efforts seemed only to create a painful rift between us, a rift that adds to my sadness over his senseless death.” Ms. de Menil grew up in a family whose sensibilities were such that they often had black guests at their home in Texas at the height of segregation. An artist, she is deeply involved with the family museum, the Menil Collection in Houston. For Mr. Snow, the choice between an authoritarian mother and a creative, laissez-faire grandmother was no choice at all. At 18, he and Agathe, just married, moved in with Ms. de Menil, staying from 1999 to 2003. But his rebellious ways continued, even deepened, until it seemed that he was not only strung out on drugs, but strung up between the poles of a privileged East Side life and a gritty existence on the street — plagued, some friends have said, by a tortured-rich-kid syndrome in a way that never seemed to bother his brother, Maxwell (a socialite who once dated Mary-Kate Olsen), or his sister, Caroline, a writer. Other friends, however, insisted that Mr. Snow’s outlaw nature was not concocted or tormented, but authentic and instinctive. “When I first met him, he told me his name was Tropical Fantasy — I think he was 19,” said Jesse Pearson, the editor of Vice magazine. “Say what you will about his background, he put himself into a lifestyle that only the strong survive — to a point, as we see now. He was living the life you saw in his work. There was nothing that was a pose.” THE one thing that truly did not care if Mr. Snow was posing or not was drugs. He tried a rehab program in upstate New York, according to several friends, and attempted treatment with an experimental drug called Suboxone . In March, he checked into a private detox center in the Caribbean, having reached that stage of addiction where his problem was not his problems; his problem was the drugs. “He could go a month clean,” Agathe Snow recalled, “but then if he had one glass of wine, it would become a bottle, then coke, then heroin. There was not a slow buildup. It was like a beast building up.” The last time Mr. McGinley saw him was over the Memorial Day weekend at Mr. Walls’s property upstate. “We chilled all day, picking yellow flowers, watching ‘Sesame Street’ and petting cats and dogs,” Mr. McGinley wrote in his e-mail message. “Dash stayed in his room the entire time.” After that weekend, Mr. Snow disappeared. “Instinctively, I knew he was strung out,” Mr. Walls said, “because if he wasn’t strung out, I would have heard from him.” The weekend before his overdose, Mr. Snow, his girlfriend and their daughter went with friends to the home of a family friend of the Berreau’s in Bridgehampton, N.Y. “He spent about five days partying, not sleeping, and then went out to the Hamptons and slept for an entire day,” said a friend who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a code of silence adopted by some after Mr. Snow’s death. “He wanted to be left alone and didn’t come down for a dinner party. He stayed asleep the entire time. Then he went back into the city, got his drugs and knew exactly what he was doing when he went to that hotel.” MR. SNOW’s body spent the night of July 13 in a basement refrigerator at the New York City morgue, chilled to 32 to 40 degrees. The next day, it was sent to the Andrett Funeral Home, a few blocks away. That night, friends gathered at Ms. de Menil’s house, where Ms. Snow, Ms. Berreau and others drank Prosecco, the hostess’s favorite wine. The next day, the family held a private viewing at the funeral home. “We went there,” Ms. Snow said. “There was no actual funeral. Only his next of kin could go in and recognize his body. Jade went in and she wanted to take pictures of his tattoos. His parents didn’t think that was a good idea and didn’t let it happen.” By the end of the viewing, there were dozens of mourners milling on the street — friends, admirers, pillars of a certain downtown scene. There were stories, reminiscences, tears, then everyone went to eat at Lucien, a French bistro on First Street and First Avenue. Mr. Snow’s body, meanwhile, was taken to New Jersey and cremated.

Art
Snow Dash
Drug Abuse and Traffic
East Village (NYC)


Searching for Answers in the 1961 Death of an Ayn Rand Follower

Abstract: Joanne O’Connor keeps a three-ring binder as thick as a cinder block to contain the story that echoes through her head. It is stuffed with her research about a young woman she never met who died more than 50 years ago. She has trouble explaining why obsession gripped her so, but she does know: “I had to find out what happened.” Ms. O’Connor is a 61-year-old wedding and events planner who lives with her cat and dog in a small, elegant Kips Bay apartment. Six years ago, she found herself pondering her building’s history, but no one living there remembered much. Nor did her landlord. So she called the Buildings Department while at work one day. She will never forget the operator’s first words, she says, which set off the investigative odyssey that has consumed her life since. “Well, she didn’t die there,” the man said, “if that’s what you wanted to know.” “Who died where?” she asked. Image A ledger from Vivian Grant’s Kips Bay landlord. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times “The lady,” he replied. “She died of a botched abortion. Her name was Vivian Grant.” The tragedy involving one of her building’s former tenants occurred in the early 1960s. Most of the characters involved are dead. But at the time, the death of Vivian Grant was widely reported in newspapers across the country. In New York, she shared the front page of The Daily News, smiling primly, in a photo alongside a picture of President John F. Kennedy and headlines on the hijacking of a cruise ship. Vivian Grant was by most accounts a pretty and ambitious Russian-Jewish 23-year-old from the Bronx who had moved to Manhattan to seize her dreams. But in January 1961 she grew convinced she was pregnant and visited a gynecologist in Queens, Dr. Mandel Friedman. He tried to perform an abortion — then illegal — and she died of an air embolism. The autopsy revealed that she carried no child. “A fatal desperation,” read the caption underneath a picture of her in The News. The story riveted Ms. O’Connor. She raced home to try to learn which of the building’s six apartments Ms. Grant had occupied. In a rickety basement filing cabinet she found an aged ledger and discovered that Ms. Grant was a previous tenant of apartment 2F — her apartment. Ms. O’Connor had been sleeping in Ms. Grant’s former bedroom for years. “I had been telling myself all day: ‘Not my apartment. It can’t be my apartment,’ ” Ms. O’Connor said. “But it was. Somebody was saying hello.” Image Ms. O’Connor visiting Ms. Grant’s grave. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times Ms. O’Connor has a penchant for investigation. Her profile photo on Facebook is of Nancy Drew holding a magnifying glass. But Vivian Grant’s story, she says, was different, coming over her “like a force.” She has often wondered, “Does Vivian Grant want me to tell her story?” The coincidences Ms. O’Connor sees, or perhaps chooses to see, are numerous, and she records them diligently, interpreting them as signs that a forgotten story wants to be told. Two years ago, she says, she found Ms. Grant’s last name scrawled on an old piece of tape in a hard-to-reach section of her building’s mailbox. As a teenager she watched “ Love With the Proper Stranger ,” a 1963 movie unrelated to Ms. Grant’s death; in it, Natalie Wood is faced with the decision to have an illegal abortion, and parts were filmed near Kips Bay. And there’s her cat: a tuxedo she initially had no intention of adopting when she encountered it at a local pet shop five years ago. But weeks passed without anyone buying it, so she took it home. She learned in its release papers that it had been found in the Bronx, a few blocks from Ms. Grant’s childhood home. “This cat was trying to get into my life,” Ms. O’Connor said. She named it Vivian Grant. Joanne O’Connor was born to a nurse and a banker in the Finger Lakes region and, like Ms. Grant, moved to Manhattan to reinvent herself. She has worked as a roller-skating waitress and a hostess at Delmonico’s, and she aspired to be an actress. She is still prone to theatrics, leaping into show tunes during casual conversation. She is now the director of catering and events at the Water Club, where she has worked for 11 years. Image Ms. O’Connor’s cat, named Vivian Grant. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times After she discovered the dusty ledger, she began spending nights at the library, blurring through old newspaper microfilms and entering a world of “unhelpful librarians.” She mined ancestry archives and posted online queries about Ms. Grant’s life on message boards. When she broke a wrist in 2011, she made the best of it, inhabiting a James Stewart in “Rear Window” kind of existence, an invalid who could stay on the phone for three hours on hold. She had many breakthroughs: tracking down the case’s court documents, finding an impassioned letter that Ms. Grant once wrote to a political magazine, and reaching old acquaintances of Ms. Grant as well as Gloria Levine, a first cousin of Vivian’s who lives in Boca Raton, Fla. Ms. Levine said she had always felt her older cousin’s story fell through the cracks, so she opened up to Ms. O’Connor. “She was gorgeous,” she told her over the phone. “Like a movie star. Like a Natalie Wood.” From that moment, Ms. O’Connor had a primary source and an avid collaborator. Vivian Grant was born in 1937 to Anna and Aron Greczka, and her adolescence, Ms. Levine said, was defined by the attention showered upon an only child. Her father owned a beauty salon on Nelson Avenue in the Bronx, and she attended Taft High School. Ms. O’Connor obtained a 1954 Taft yearbook and found Vivian in a class portrait: Dressed in black, she is the only student not smiling. A caption declared her “outstandingly well groomed.” Toward the end of 1960, according to Ms. Levine, Ms. Grant brought an older boyfriend home to meet her parents; it was a pivotal moment in Ms. Grant’s short life. Image The author Ayn Rand on Park Avenue in 1957. Credit Allyn Baum/The New York Times “There was a huge argument,” Ms. Levine said in a recent phone interview. “The parents said, ‘It’s either him or us.’ ” Ms. Grant apparently chose him, moving to Manhattan, where she would later start a job as an editor at Dell, the publishing house. According to Ms. Levine, it was one of the last times Ms. Grant’s parents saw their daughter; Mr. Greczka’s hair, she said, turned “white overnight” when his daughter died months later. It was also in Kips Bay that Ms. Grant was able to fully embrace her passion for the teachings of Ayn Rand , who lived in nearby Murray Hill, famously holding smoke-filled salons for her acolytes, a congregation she dubbed the Collective. A young Alan Greenspan, the future Federal Reserve chairman and a favorite of Rand’s , and Nathaniel Branden, one of her most prominent disciples , would attend. One essay about those times describes how a “typical New York Randian, upon his or her conversion, would leave his parents and find an apartment as close to Rand as possible.” The article added that “virtually the entire New York movement” lived within a few square blocks. Vivian Greczka also changed her name to the more Randian-sounding Vivian Grant, as was customary. Beyond personal accounts of the salon, not much is known of Ms. Grant’s involvement with Rand’s circle; she was most likely Junior Collective and not a part of the circle closest to the author. In any event, it would not be long before her appointment with Dr. Friedman. One year after Ms. Grant’s death, Dr. Friedman, while out on bail, would perform another fatal abortion, on a woman named Barbara Covington. He was eventually convicted of two counts of manslaughter and sentenced to two to four years. He died in 1980. Image An article about Ms. Grant’s death in The Daily News in 1961. But of all the details surrounding Ms. Grant’s death, Ms. Levine said the boyfriend’s identity gnaws at her most: News reports say he took her to Dr. Friedman — indeed, it was reported that the $800 fee for the procedure was returned to him after Ms. Grant’s death. But he was never named. “Over the years I’ve thought he was a very powerful person because his name was never mentioned in any news articles,” Ms. Levine said. She hints darkly that he must have been an influential member of Rand’s inner circle and that members were “sworn to secrecy” after the tragedy. To what extent an intellectual salon in Murray Hill could have manipulated a murder investigation is not clear. Court documents suggest (in Ms. O’Connor’s reading, at least) that a key witness testified in exchange for anonymity, and when she acquired the case’s documents in Queens, she noted, the court clerk withheld a set of sealed papers. “He pulled it right out of my hand,” she said. “There is something in that file not meant for the public.” One cold day this month, I took a train with Ms. O’Connor to Kensico Cemetery, in Valhalla, N.Y. I live in her neighborhood and have known Ms. O’Connor for some years. Her belief in synchronicity extends even to me. I briefly mentioned her and her cat in a 2012 article for this newspaper about a cat wrangler. I knew then of her research project, and I recently decided to write about it. In Ms. O’Connor’s eyes, the first article was merely the necessary prelude to this one. “Am I done with the story?” she sometimes asks. “Is the story done with me?” She took white roses to the graveyard. The anniversary of Ms. Grant’s death was approaching, and she wanted to lay them at her grave, as she has taken to doing since she discovered the burial plot in 2012. The winter’s first snow had fallen overnight. The graveyard was otherwise empty and blanketed in white, which made for a jarring sight: a lone set of footprints leading directly from the road to Vivian Grant’s grave. Ms. O’Connor erupted into speculation: Could they belong to a certain former lover who never let go of the tragedy of his first romance? It took her a moment to calm down. She knelt over the grave and dusted off the snow. It read “Vivian Greczka.” She placed the roses on the slab. “Well, Vivian, look who’s here,” she said. “It’s me.”


Reports Show Mixed Economic Picture Ahead of Fed Meeting

Abstract: New data on the economy presented a mixed picture yesterday, providing little guidance for investors ahead of the Federal Reserve board’s meeting next week to consider an interest rate cut. Sales of new homes rose slightly in September but remained near the lowest level in a decade. Orders declined for durable goods — major consumer products like appliances, airplanes and machinery — but a crucial measure of business spending rose. New-home sales reached an annual rate of 770,000 in September, an increase from the previous month only because the August figure had been revised downward to 735,000, the Commerce Department said. The September figure was down 23.3 percent from September 2006, when sales were at an annual rate of 1.004 million. Inventories continued to move higher last month, with home builders now saddled with 8.3 months’ worth of unsold supply. Prices rose, however, with the median cost at $238,000, up from $232,100 in August. “This was on the whole another quite weak report, particularly given the aggressive price-cutting that home builders have been implementing in order to try to reduce inventory,” Joshua Shapiro, the chief United States economist at MFR, said in a research report. On the manufacturing side, orders for military and transportation goods fell in September, with military spending declining 38.7 percent. Shipments of motor vehicles, semiconductors and commercial aircraft all fell, though sales of those goods are considered relatively volatile. Still, overall durable goods orders fell 1.7 percent in September, accelerating a 5.3 percent decline in August. Orders are down 8.4 percent in the last 12 months, the Commerce Department said. But one crucial indicator — orders of nonmilitary capital goods that includes appliances and home computers, but excludes aircraft — rose 0.4 percent, suggesting stronger spending by consumers. “It was basically a mixed bag,” said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, a hedge fund based in Greenwich, Conn. “Nothing in that report is enough to allay anyone’s concerns about what happens in the fourth quarter and going forward.” The report indicates that American businesses have been buoyed by a weak dollar and strong foreign sales, analysts said, but domestic spending may be slowing. Overall orders, excluding military-related goods, rose 0.7 percent in September, though they have fallen 4.9 percent since this time last year. The Fed will meet on Tuesday and Wednesday and is expected to consider an additional cut to its benchmark interest rate. Investors betting on the Fed’s action appear certain that the governors will cut rates, but some analysts say underlying strength in the economy could dampen chances for a cut. The reports are the final flurry of economic data before the meeting. On the job front, fewer workers filed for unemployment last week, with the Labor Department reporting 331,000 claims for first-time benefits, down 2.4 percent from the previous week. But continuing claims ticked up 0.3 percent for the week that ended Oct. 13, to a seasonally adjusted level of 2,530,000. Analysts said the reports, which tend to jump around from week to week, indicate a job market that is softening, though they still predict an overall gain in jobs for September.

Interest Rates
Economic Conditions and Trends
United States Economy
Federal Reserve System


Judge Rejects Settlement of Suit Against Sharper Image

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 11 (AP) — A federal judge rejected Thursday a proposed settlement that would have required the troubled Sharper Image Corporation to distribute $19 coupons to millions of consumers who bought air purifiers alleged to be defective in a class-action lawsuit. As Sharper Image scrambles to survive a sales slump that has saddled it with huge losses, the decision by Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga of Federal District Court in Miami dealt the company another setback. Sharper Image, the San Francisco-based retailer of tech gadgets, had hoped to rid itself of a potentially crippling headache with the settlement. In arguments supporting the settlement proposal, Sharper Image depicted it as the best consumers could hope for because the company is on the verge of bankruptcy, according to Judge Altonaga’s 61-page ruling. Sharper Image has lost $113 million since January 2005. Despite the company’s woes, Judge Altonaga decided the settlement was inadequate because consumers stood a good chance of prevailing in some of their claims if the case were to go to trial. “While we respect the court’s decision, we are clearly disappointed,” Sharper Image said in a statement. “The proposed settlement was the result of substantial negotiation,” the company said, and it “provided fair terms for all parties.” Sharper Image had estimated the settlement could be worth $60 million to the 3.2 million consumers eligible to participate. Other documents in the case estimated about $25 million of the coupons would be redeemed. The lawsuit, filed by Manuel Figueroa in 2005, claimed that the Ionic Breeze purifiers did not remove dust, pollen and other nettlesome particles as Sharper Image advertised. The devices sold for several hundred dollars apiece. Sharper Image has repeatedly stood by the Ionic Breeze’s effectiveness, a position it reiterated Thursday. The company’s shares fell 44 cents Thursday, to $3.31, after management reported September sales plunged by 39 percent.

Sharper Image Corporation
Suits and Litigation
Defective Products


Taliban Fissures in Afghanistan Are Seen as an Opening for ISIS

Abstract: KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Across a violent swath of southern Afghanistan , rumors are swirling about a band of former Taliban fighters who have claimed allegiance to the Islamic State and are said to be fighting their former comrades for dominance. Reports of a firefight this month between the competing bands of jihadists in the remote district of Kajaki, in Helmand Province, quickly created a stir. Some Afghan officials described a growing threat from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, more than a thousand miles from its home territory. But interviews with Western and Afghan officials, along with accounts from local residents, the Taliban and a militant who described himself as a subcommander in the new ISIS band, pointed less to a major expansion of the Islamic State than to another example of internal divisions within the Taliban. After the Taliban’s years of war against the American-led military coalition and the new Afghan security forces, the movement’s cohesiveness has increasingly come into question. In particular, the long absence of the Taliban’s reclusive leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar , is said to be driving discontent within the Afghan Taliban ranks. In that environment, the Islamic State’s rush of success on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq has created a new banner for disgruntled Taliban to adopt. The militant commander at the center of the concerns in Helmand Province is a prominent former Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim. He was detained at the Guantánamo Bay military prison for several years, then returned to the Taliban ranks after his release, serving as a provincial-level military commander. He has since fallen out with his fellow insurgents, and he is said by some to be calling for recruits to support him in his new role as the local leader of the Islamic State. But descriptions of the extent of that schism vary. Local Taliban figures and their neighbors dismiss claims that Mullah Khadim has established a significant new Islamic State cell in Helmand Province. “He has nothing to do with the Islamic State,” Hajji Durani, a farmer with relatives in the Taliban, said. He lives near Mullah Khadim’s village in Kajaki and says he sees the former Talib daily, usually accompanied by a dozen or so longtime supporters. The local Taliban commander, Mullah Mohammad Shah, also dismissed claims that the Islamic State was active in Kajaki, or elsewhere in Helmand. “We have not seen any Islamic State militants on the move in Kajaki,” he said by telephone. “We know Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim. He was a member of the Taliban, but now he is sitting at home.” Others disagree. Hajji Mullah Sahib, a tribal elder in Kajaki, says Mullah Khadim is actively recruiting under the Islamic State banner and has had success. Two pickup trucks full of fighters and their families moved nearby recently. “They are trying to find people, sending out letters to people to support them,” the elder said. Another tribal elder, Hajji Sharin, said Mullah Khadim was pressing his old Taliban comrades to join. “He has asked them to renege from the Taliban, and he is working to bring Islamic State to Kajaki,” Mr. Sharin said. In interviews, a man who called himself Hajji Mirwais said he had joined the Islamic State as a deputy under Mullah Khadim and claimed that their cell numbered 300 fighters. He said Mullah Khadim had been alienated by Mullah Omar’s long silence and had doubts about the Taliban’s exiled leadership. “Before, field commanders received direction and guidance from Mullah Omar, but we haven’t heard from Mullah Omar for several years,” Mr. Mirwais said. “This is our big concern. We respect Mullah Omar. But if he is alive, why does he not appear and guide us?” Local Taliban members later said that a man named Hajji Mirwais used to be a Taliban fighter under Mullah Khadim and had been seen with him recently. Western officials say they are closely following reports about the Islamic State in Afghanistan and trying to discern whether the Islamic State is attracting a new generation of militants or mostly providing a rebranding opportunity for veteran Taliban fighters. Video How has ISIS, a 21st-century terrorist organization with a retrograde religious philosophy, spread from Iraq to Syria, Libya and beyond? Gen. John F. Campbell, commander of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan, said in an interview that his staff was investigating reports of Islamic State recruiting, including night letter drops at a university in Jalalabad and Mullah Khadim’s effort in Helmand. So far, General Campbell said, the results seem to be limited. But he added: “I don’t want to discount this. ISIS in Syria and Iraq went so quickly, and people don’t want that to happen here.” General Campbell also said that the Islamic State’s message might prove attractive to disaffected Taliban members. “They may be disgruntled and turn to Daesh, thinking they’ll get resources and a bigger name,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “I think there will be people trying to get on the bandwagon.” General Campbell included Mullah Khadim in that group, saying, “He’s looking for another way to be relevant.” This is not the first time that reports about the Islamic State have surfaced in Afghanistan. Last year, local Afghan officials in Ghazni claimed that the Islamic State was beheading people in Ajristan District. Later, one Afghan official admitted that he had made up the rumors to persuade Kabul to deploy more troops to his area, according to two Western officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. But the Islamic State’s quick march through Syria and Iraq has clearly captured the attention of militants in Afghanistan, who despite significant gains in some areas this year have been unable to seize and hold any major district centers. One United Nations report noted that some Taliban splinter groups would “glorify” the Islamic State over the Internet. A jihadist video online shows a group of militant commanders announcing that 10 insurgent leaders from Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan had sworn fealty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State. In the video, which ends in a prisoner’s beheading, one insurgent leader claimed that Afghan adherents to the Islamic State included militant groups in Kunar, Logar and Nangarhar provinces. But it is unclear whether the Islamic State would make much headway in Afghanistan, where a range of Sunni militants has long organized around the Taliban, whose ideology and goals are mostly locally focused and quite distinct from jihadist groups with international aims. For other reasons, the Islamic State may find recruitment in Afghanistan harder than in Iraq and Syria, where much of the Sunni population welcomed the jihadists after years of marginalization and abuse by Shiite leaders. But in Afghanistan, the Sunnis have long been dominant. General Campbell alluded to those differences when discussing the Islamic State’s prospects in Afghanistan. “We think it’s going to be a hard message to sell to the Afghans,” he said. But he said he was curious about the political effects of Islamic State recruiting in Taliban territory, as appeared to be happening with Mullah Khadim’s group in Helmand. “It will be interesting to see if the Taliban takes action against them,” General Campbell said. Both Mullah Khadim’s camp and the Taliban said there had been one clash so far. Mr. Mirwais, the professed Islamic State deputy, spoke of a clash “one month ago, in which one of my men was killed by the Taliban.” The local Taliban commander, Mullah Shah, confirmed that a firefight had occurred in Kajaki, saying it had been over control of a checkpoint, not an emerging Islamic State. Residents of Kajaki say they are seeing signs of doctrinal differences between the militant camps. One of the first issues involved the decoration of graves, of which Mullah Khadim reportedly disapproves. Residents say he removed the flags and sticks that marked where his relatives were buried. Mullah Shah said he was not yet certain how his group of Taliban, or the wider organization, would respond to fighters who claimed allegiance to the Islamic State. “If the Islamic State shows their faces in Kajaki, or in Helmand,” he said, “we will listen to the supreme leadership of the Taliban for how to respond or what to do against them.” The overall spokesman for the Afghan Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, seemed to suggest that some discussion of policy toward Islamic State upstarts had begun. “After watching the recent Islamic State video, in which some people take an oath to follow them, we accordingly began an investigation to reach the bottom of the issue,” Mr. Mujahid said in an interview. “Our investigation is underway.”

Taliban
Afghanistan
Kandahar
Muhammad Omar
Kabul
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State


Isaiah Thomas Extols Playing in Boston, Warming an Old Celtic

Abstract: Typically given to fits of full-ranged emotion on the subject of his beloved Boston Celtics, Tommy Heinsohn, after reading a recent article published under the byline of Isaiah Thomas, said: “It made you want to cry.” He meant himself, of course. Heinsohn, the team’s tape-measure homer of a television analyst, was born in Jersey City but has been boisterously bleeding Celtics green since his playing days in the 1950s and ’60s. Thomas, a mercurial 5-foot-9 point guard, has become the most identifiable player among an otherwise star-challenged but overachieving cast of Celtics, who won 48 regular-season games under Coach Brad Stevens and were the first of two teams late this season to defeat the record-setting Golden State Warriors at Oracle Arena in Oakland. But what made Heinsohn joyfully weepy was Thomas’s journalism debut — an unbridled declaration of love for Boston, still the N.B.A.’s most championship-credentialed city with 17, though seldom speculated about breathlessly as a potential place for the league’s most gifted and talented to take their talents. Writing in The Players’ Tribune on the eve of the Celtics’ first-round playoff series, which produced two deflating losses and key injuries in Atlanta before Thomas erupted for a career-high 42 points in a 111-103 Game 3 victory on Friday night in Boston. He raved: “Playing in Boston is just one of those things you can’t prepare yourself for. You can’t understand it until you experience it.” Interestingly enough, he had been advised of that likelihood by his Hall of Fame point guard namesake. In his Players’ Tribune account, he wrote that Isiah Thomas had texted him after last season’s trade from Phoenix, and wrote, “This is the best thing that will ever happen to your career.” The younger Thomas wasn’t sure why that would be, “so,” he wrote, “I called him up, and he broke it down for me.” Isiah the elder told him: “Now you’re gonna experience what real basketball is like, what real fans are like, what a real organization is like. And they’re gonna fall in love with you more than any place you’ve ever been.” Image From left, Bill Russell, Red Auerbach, Tommy Heinsohn, Jim Locustoff, and K.C. Jones in 1964. Credit Associated Press Isiah Thomas, of course, played for Detroit through the 1980s — worshipfully known as the Larry Bird era in Boston. He facilitated one of the city’s and the N.B.A.’s classic did-that-just-happen moments by floating an inbounds pass with five seconds left in Game 5 of a fierce 1987 Eastern Conference finals playoff series with his Pistons clinging to a 1-point lead. Bird stole the pass and hit a cutting Dennis Johnson for a layup, and the Celtics won the series — more commemorative smoke from Red Auerbach’s legendary victory cigar. But the Celtics have won one championship in three decades — in 2008, powered by the organizationally nurtured Paul Pierce along with Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett, the prize acquisitions of Danny Ainge, the team’s president for basketball operations. What was a splendid run to the 17th title and Game 7 of the league finals against the Lakers in Los Angeles two years later ended when Allen left for Miami’s better playoff prospects in 2012 and the aging Pierce and Garnett were sent to the unnecessarily desperate Nets a year later for a trove of draft picks that Ainge is now squeezing like a key to Fort Knox. The championship banners hanging at TD Banknorth Garden still represent pro basketball’s most auspicious history curriculum. Twenty-one retired jerseys — including Heinsohn’s No. 15 — give the rafters the look of a team store. The great Bill Russell, 82, would be happy to misremember the old days when black players were not exactly celebrated in Boston and bearhug any worthy so-called max player willing to bless Boston as a free agent. “Right now, we’ve got a good nucleus and a great young coach,” Heinsohn said in a telephone interview. “Obviously, we could use a guy who’s going to be an All-Star every year. “I think what happened is that the Celtics over the years always had winning teams, but when free agency really started to be a big thing, they didn’t have winning teams and the best players went looking for greener pastures.” Not whiter, which Boston is known for during its snowbound winters. In addition, driving in Boston, reaching the Garden at North Station, is not unlike getting to the rim against the very best N.B.A. defenses. The arena itself, futuristic compared with the suffocating hall of horrors that the old Boston Garden was to opponents, is 21 years old, not the league’s most glamorous. What was that? Excuse Mr. Heinsohn. “It still feels like a magical place,” he said. “It’s not just the banners, the flags. It’s the fans. It’s like Isaiah said in that story. After they got swept in the playoffs by Cleveland last year, nobody booed. The fans got up and started chanting, ‘Let’s go, Celtics.’ “I don’t know how many cities are as appreciative of a player who has a terrific career as Boston is.” Agreeing with Heinsohn was Isiah Thomas, who said in a text message that the notion of Boston as an unsexy or less appealing market had been changing. “I have regular conversations with former and current players,” he said. “It absolutely is a free-agent destination.” That could be because Ainge is possibly on the verge of his second inspiring remake within a decade, when one such construction has been beyond the reach of many floundering franchises. No less a competitive stud than Kevin Durant, a 2016 free agent, said upon visiting Boston last month: “I like the city a lot. It’s cold, but they love sports here. It’s a family atmosphere I feel when I walk around the city.” Heinsohn read that, too, and, along with the rest of Celtics Nation, immediately envisioned Ainge using a package of picks and solid role players to trade for another All-Star-caliber player with which to further entice Durant. Speculation is free, and often worthless, but as Heinsohn said: “Smart players should want to go where there is organization, character and smart planning. That’s what the Celtics already have.” This can’t yet be said about the Lakers, Boston’s most time-honored and successful opponent. Nor their closest rival, geographically. “Look at the Knicks,” Heinsohn said. “They got Carmelo Anthony but traded away the nucleus of another team to get him, and where has that left them?” O.K., so the Boston bombast in Heinsohn couldn’t finish up without wielding a New York needle. It’s an old habit, like believing in his adopted city’s basketball pedigree, in an eternal Celtics magic, memorably scripted once more Friday night by the smallest player on the floor, the no-longer doubting Thomas.

Isaiah Thomas
Celtics
Basketball
Thomas W Heinsohn


Eric Bledsoe’s Grade Change Questioned but Upheld

Abstract: An independent investigation into the improbable academic makeover of Eric Bledsoe, which allowed him to qualify for a scholarship at Kentucky, has concluded that the reasons for a grade change that assured him eligibility are “not credible.” The report, released Friday night, casts doubts upon the legitimacy of Bledsoe’s grade in a specific class, and said that Bledsoe’s grades were changed “far more frequently” than others in the class. Birmingham Schools Superintendent Craig Witherspoon said in a telephone interview that the grade in question would not be changed. He said that although there was no evidence that Bledsoe did the makeup work to justify the grade change, there was no hard evidence that he did not do it. “We have to take it as it is,” he said. “I understand that there are questions that still linger.” That means that it is unlikely that the N.C.A.A. will look into the matter. The grade in question, as reported by The Birmingham News , was a C in an Algebra III class that was bumped up to an A. If Bledsoe’s grade had been changed back and he no longer met minimum standards, it could have put the results of Kentucky’s 2009-10 season in jeopardy. Bledsoe entered the N.B.A. draft after one season and is now with the Los Angeles Clippers . Witherspoon said he briefly spoke to Mark Hicks, the associate director of high school review at the N.C.A.A. eligibility center, before the release of the report. He said that the N.C.A.A. indicated that it would act on the report if needed. “We maintain our reliance on the high school, university and N.C.A.A. eligibility center for initial eligibility and will continue to do so,” Kentucky Athletic Director Mitch Barnhart said in a statement. “At no point was the University of Kentucky under investigation by the N.C.A.A. nor had any reason to believe we were ever under investigation.” N.C.A.A. investigators went to at least three places in Alabama last winter to look into Bledsoe’s background, but there has been little evidence since of N.C.A.A. involvement. Witherspoon said the school district would use the Bledsoe case as a learning experience to better handle grade-change situations. “The questions are there,” he said. “We’re not in position to say that he didn’t do the makeup work, as the teacher indicated.”

Los Angeles Clippers
University of Kentucky
Bledsoe Eric
National Collegiate Athletic Assn
National Basketball Assn
College Athletics


Richardson’s Gift to Iowa: A Little Humor

Abstract: Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico ran a series of four humorous advertisements in Iowa , all with the same theme: Mr. Richardson posing as an overqualified job candidate being interviewed by a boorish potential employer. PRODUCER Murphy Putnam Media, L.L.C., in Alexandria, Va. THE SCRIPT A potential employer is looking over some papers and starts out just mumbling: “Mmmmm. Hmmmm.” In a bored voice, he says: “O.K., 14 years in Congress. U.N. ambassador. Secretary of energy. Governor of New Mexico. Negotiated with dictators in Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, Zaire, Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Kenya. Got a cease-fire in Darfur. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times.” “So,” says the interviewer, pausing to bite a sloppy sandwich, “what makes you think you can be president?” Mr. Richardson looks into camera, deadpan. His voice is heard: “I’m Bill Richardson, and I approve this message.” ON THE SCREEN The setting is a nondescript office. The camera focuses on Mr. Richardson, hands folded, well dressed and looking like a respectful job seeker. The interviewer, in a blue shirt, reels off Mr. Richardson’s accomplishments rapidly and dismissively as Mr. Richardson nods along. In an adding-insult-to-injury moment, the interviewer starts to eat and talk at the same time. It ends with Mr. Richardson giving the camera an exasperated look, while jaunty music begins to play. ACCURACY During the Clinton administration, Mr. Richardson frequently met with international leaders to open back-door negotiations. The list of countries mentioned in the advertisement is correct. The Darfur cease-fire was only for 60 days, and it has not accomplished its goal of lasting peace. The mention of the four Nobel nominations, while accurate, is a bit of a stretch — he was repeatedly nominated by the same Hispanic leaders. SCORECARD These are the most popular political advertisements in Iowa. With self-deprecating wit, Mr. Richardson introduces himself, establishes his political résumé and entertains as well. They are also on YouTube. In Iowa, voters often mention the commercials and thank him for injecting humor into the presidential campaign. LESLIE WAYNE

Iowa
Political Advertising
Presidential Election of 2008
Richardson Bill


Following a Kindly Light, and Casting One

Abstract: POMONA, N.Y. There is an endless, ragged road from the almost-forgotten prelude to history that played out in 1947 to the combination protest and ritual yesterday when dozens of people gathered for the 262nd consecutive Saturday at the northwest corner of Route 59 and Middletown Road in Nanuet in Rockland County to protest the war in Iraq. They began it before the war had even started. Yesterday began their sixth year of vigils with no end in sight. Thinking of them and the faithful at other weekly vigils in towns large and small, it’s hard not to wonder what keeps them going. George M. Houser does not wonder. He was there in 1947. He was on the corner yesterday. At 91, he’s one of only two people alive who participated in the first freedom ride through the segregated South that preceded the famous one of 1961 by 14 years. And at a time when religion in American politics almost invariably means the religious right, he’s a vibrant reminder that faith cuts through politics from more than one direction, with more than one message. Mr. Houser, a Methodist minister, isn’t forgotten. He’s often cited in civil rights histories and has been featured in several PBS documentaries as a co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality and a longtime participant in efforts to end colonialism in Africa. But to understand his most remarkable moment it’s essential to remember that before Rosa Parks there was Irene Morgan. Mrs. Morgan, who died in August, was a black woman who worked in a plant that made World War II bombers. The mother of two small children, she was returning to Baltimore aboard a Greyhound bus in 1944 after a visit to her mother in Virginia. When told to give up her seat to a white passenger, she refused, as Mrs. Parks did 11 years later, and took her case to court. The Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that segregation in interstate commerce — as distinguished from local transit — was unconstitutional, a ruling largely ignored in Southern states. To test it, Mr. Houser and the pioneering civil rights leader Bayard Rustin organized the first freedom ride into the South, dubbed the Journey of Reconciliation. In April 1947, 16 blacks and whites exchanged proscribed seats on interstate buses over two weeks, blacks in front, whites in back, from Washington through the Upper South. Sometimes they were ignored or even supported. Sometimes they were arrested and even attacked. Mr. Rustin and two other protesters served 22 days on a chain gang in North Carolina after being arrested for violating Jim Crow laws. The pillars of Jim Crow did not immediately tumble and fall. But Mr. Houser figures they didn’t have to. Instead, he said, the experience taught him first that a small group of people with an idea can have a huge impact over the long stretch of history. Second, he said, it taught him that you have to take the first steps even if you don’t know where they will lead. “I have kind of a theme, which comes from an old hymn,” he said. “‘Lead, kindly light, amidst the encircling gloom/Lead thou me on/The night is dark and I am far from home/Lead thou me on.’ And then it goes: ‘I do not ask to see the distant scene/One step enough for me.’ “And I believe that,” Mr. Houser said. “I believe one step is enough and you take it, as long as you have faith you’re doing the right thing to begin with.” Of course, Mr. Houser’s relative youth may shape his point of view. He was conversing at the time with Irving Wolfe, 94, who also lives in Skyview Acres in Pomona, a cooperative community to which they both moved in 1949. There’s still a free-book kiosk near the entrance, and a sign proclaiming the community, which is about 30 miles from Manhattan, “a nuclear-free zone” — Mr. Houser’s touch, it turned out. Mr. Wolfe’s knees can’t hold up to two hours of standing, but he’s a regular at the Rockland Coalition for Peace and Justice vigil, too, even if he needs to bring a chair to make it through. There’s no guarantee that the religious left gets it right any more than the religious right does. And they were joined yesterday, as usual, by an equally committed crowd across the street of flag-waving supporters of the war. Still, for a nonagenarian shaped by the leftist politics of the Depression era and the struggles against Fascism, it might seem a little Sisyphean: all these years to contemplate Iraq, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iran, global warming and the rest. But then Mr. Houser said he had seen Jim Crow come and go, seen Africa pass from colonial rule to self-rule not without enormous pain, past and present. Steps forward. Steps back. So yesterday they joined the other regulars, ranging in age from 13 to Mr. Wolfe’s 94. The vigil faithful had a dinner planned last night. And unless the world ends, they’ll be back there next Saturday, however distant, however out of sight the shore.

Civil Rights
Rockland County (NY)
anti-war protest


Lonely Advocate for Restraint in Egypt Tiptoes Around Talk of Compromise

Abstract: CAIRO — The news agency headline last week seemed harmless enough, perhaps even flattering. It paraphrased an Egyptian cabinet minister saying that his government and its opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood, should pursue “reconciliation.” But the headline meant trouble for the minister, Ziad Bahaa el-Din, a lonely voice in Egypt’s hard-line government who has pleaded for restraint. In the divisive months since the military deposed President Mohamed Morsi, “reconciliation” has been transformed into an epithet. A television host interrogated Mr. Bahaa el-Din about whether he had used the word, and suggested it could incite public outrage. He explained that what he had actually said was that the country needed to move toward “calm, and a new political framework.” There is little appetite for compromise in Egypt these days, with the country on a war footing and security officials rallying the news media and large sections of the public to their fight against the Islamists. The climate has left Mr. Bahaa el-Din in a precarious place, trying to coax the government toward moderation while coming under fire from both the military’s supporters and its critics. Pro-military columnists and commentators have derided him as a fifth columnist. On the other side, some antigovernment activists question why he continues to serve alongside officials who ordered the worst mass killings in recent Egyptian history. And his supporters hope that Mr. Bahaa el-Din will hang on, to lend reason to the government’s debates, and to monitor abuses by Egypt’s emboldened security services. “There needs to be someone to put on the brakes on what the government can do,” said Khaled Fahmy, an Egyptian historian who has been a friend of Mr. Bahaa el-Din’s since college. After trying and failing to stave off the government’s brutal crackdown on Islamist sit-ins in August, Mr. Bahaa el-Din is now staking his reputation on fighting a draft law that human rights advocates say would essentially criminalize protests. His approach to the battle, and others, he said, is to “get away from the polarity of the government versus the Brotherhood — to ensure there is a democratic path, so we don’t get fixated on that transaction.” But there may be no getting away from it. Egypt’s latest polarizing moment is expected Monday, when Mr. Morsi’s trial on murder charges is scheduled to begin. Mr. Morsi’s treatment has been widely criticized — he has been held virtually incommunicado for months — and his supporters say the trial is intended to produce victor’s justice rather than truth. Mr. Bahaa el-Din said he saw little hope for an end to the standoff between the Brotherhood and the government, and blamed the Brotherhood for not responding to various political initiatives, despite the fact that most of its leadership is imprisoned or on the run. “Signals can be sent,” he said. “Anybody who is willing to make a statement about this can begin to have a discussion. But there has been no reaction so far, as far as I’m concerned.” With no resolution in sight, the military-backed government, bolstered by billions of dollars in aid from wealthy Persian Gulf nations, has pressed ahead with what it calls a road map that will lead to elections. Before he joined the interim government as deputy prime minister for economic affairs, Mr. Bahaa el-Din, 49, a lawyer and an economist, had a reputation as an independent, effective technocrat who stood out from Egypt’s flailing bureaucracy. He served under the country’s longtime autocrat, President Hosni Mubarak, including a tenure as head of the country’s investment authority, and championed anti-corruption initiatives while remaining one of the few senior officials who did not join the ruling National Democratic Party. After Mr. Mubarak’s fall, he helped start a political party and won a seat in Parliament representing the city of Assiut. Like his father, who was a well-known columnist, Mr. Bahaa el-Din wrote frequently about Egyptian politics, avoiding polemics while writing in opposition to the Islamists during their time in power, Mr. Fahmy said. After he joined the government, Mr. Bahaa el-Din’s name started to surface in the news media again in August. He was said to be part of a tiny group led by the vice president, Mohamed ElBaradei, that was trying to persuade Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the defense minister, not to send security forces to storm two Islamist sit-ins in Cairo. “They were pushing for a political solution,” said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a human rights advocate. “There were divisions, and Sisi was torn between the two camps. I don’t think it was inevitable.” But the hard-liners prevailed, leading to the killings of hundreds of protesters. Mr. ElBaradei immediately resigned in protest. Many people assumed that Mr. Bahaa el-Din would follow him. His future in the government has remained a constant topic of speculation since then, and he said in the interview that he was tired of discussing it. “I’m there,” he said. The debates about his role overshadowed what he said was progress on other fronts, including a large economic stimulus package and financial relief for farmers and students. “Every time I talk about economics, no one seems to care,” he said. “I spend about 90 percent of my time on this.” But he also seemed to understand that his success would be measured differently, and noted that the debate over the emerging Constitution, the new election law and other legislation represented important tests of the government’s effectiveness. Others set a different standard. Mona Seif, an activist working to end military trials for civilians, said advocates had presented Mr. Bahaa el-Din and other ministers with the names of some of the thousands of people detained since July — many of them on political charges — and received no response. Before the military takeover, she noted, Mr. Bahaa el-Din had been an outspoken critic of military trials for civilians. “Now there is nothing,” she said. With the government committing mass human rights violations, she said, if “you are not using all your political weight to stop it, you’re as much a part of it as anyone,” adding, “You tend to expect much more from people who are considered to be on your side.” To fight the proposed protest law, Mr. Bahaa el-Din appears to have tried both confrontation and consensus-building. The Egyptian news media has published accounts of a yelling match over a draft of the law between him and the interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, who had advocated the crackdown on the sit-ins. At the same time, Mr. Bahaa el-Din brought together human rights activists and political parties in the hope of building “a wide constituency” to water down the legislation, said Mr. Ennarah, the activist. Mr. Bahaa el-Din said he was not sure if the effort had succeeded but hoped it would provide a template for other fights. “So much depends on how much the democratic forces will keep pressing,” he said. “The outcome is not determined yet.”

Egypt
Ziad Bahaa el-Din
Mohamed Morsi
Arab Spring
Muslim Brotherhood Egypt