Matt Kemp May Be the Best Player in the Majors

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The O’Malley family sold the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1998, but artifacts from decades of stewardship remained. One was a brochure for Dodgertown, the lavish spring training campus in Vero Beach, Fla., where Jackie, Pee Wee, Campy and the Duke once roamed. Mike Leuzinger, a longtime team scout, kept the pamphlets after the O’Malleys left. He liked to show his draft picks where they would go to carry on the tradition. One such player was Matt Kemp. Leuzinger was based near Dallas, but he had spent much of the spring of 2003 at a hotel in Midwest City, Okla., tracking a prospect who was equal parts frustration and amazement. Kemp was a converted basketball player — 6 feet 3 inches, 215 pounds, solid but nimble — who would strike out four times one day and hit three homers the next. Sometimes Leuzinger stopped by the field as practice was ending, to see how committed his prospect really was. Invariably, teammates would scatter and Kemp would stay, placing ball after ball on a tee for hack after thunderous hack, teaching himself to hit like his favorites, Frank Thomas and Gary Sheffield. Leuzinger had to have him, and that June the Dodgers chose Kemp in the sixth round , 181st over all. The day after the draft, Leuzinger took his brochure to Kemp’s grandparents’ modest one-story home. “He showed us where I’d be staying, where I was going,” Kemp said last week, at his locker before a game at Nationals Park. “I really had never been to the beach. I think I was just excited about getting away from home and seeing how it was. I didn’t want to be a little bonus baby or anything.” Leuzinger sat in the living room with Kemp and his parents, and offered $100,000. Kemp had no agent, but he was shrewd enough to reject the first offer. Then Leuzinger got up to leave. He shook Kemp’s father’s hand, told him to think it over, and walked out. Leuzinger crossed the street and opened the door of his GMC Envoy. He did not notice that Kemp had left the house and followed him. Kemp startled Leuzinger and shut the door. “We’ve got to get this done tonight,” Kemp said, and Leuzinger was delighted. He had been right: Kemp, at 18, was as serious about baseball as he thought. Leuzinger called his boss, Logan White, who raised the offer by about $30,000. The kid from Oklahoma was going to the beach. A Step Back So much has changed. The Dodgers, who were then owned by Fox, were sold the next year to Frank McCourt, a real estate developer from Boston. McCourt is in the midst of a costly divorce , the team is in bankruptcy, and baseball wants new ownership. The Dodgers have moved their spring home to Arizona, and Leuzinger now works for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He left in 2004, McCourt’s first season, when the team reduced its scouting staff in Leuzinger’s area. Kemp remains. In a season of body blows to the Dodger brand, he has been a shining exception. Kemp, 26, is the best all-around player in the majors this season, and he would be the obvious choice for the National League Most Valuable Player award, if only the Dodgers were contending. He still may win. “If we don’t have Matt, where would we be?” said starter Clayton Kershaw , a leading candidate for the N.L. Cy Young Award. “You look at guys on winning teams, and that makes Matt even more impressive. They’ve got guys all through their lineup doing stuff. Matt’s got over 100 R.B.I.’s, and our next closest guy’s in the 50s. He’s getting walked all the time, not to mention he’s putting up better numbers than all those other guys. If you hinder him because our team doesn’t have a winning record, it’s stupid.” Before this weekend’s series in San Francisco, Kemp led the league in total bases and ranked in the top three in batting average (.318), homers (32), runs batted in (107), hits (167), runs (94), stolen bases (37) and on-base plus slugging (.962). Kershaw exaggerated only slightly about the supporting cast; Andre Ethier was second on the team in R.B.I. with 62. Kemp’s breakout is not surprising. His raw talents blossomed immediately in pro ball, and he reached the majors at age 21. The Dodgers played in the N.L. Championship Series in each of his first two full seasons, and in 2009 he won Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards. Larry Bowa, the former Dodgers coach, said Kemp’s work ethic and attitude had always been fine until last season. But a few weeks into spring training, Bowa said, Kemp’s attitude turned sour and his focus seemed divided. Kemp always wanted to play — he did not miss a game — but his concentration lapsed. As a hitter, Bowa said, Kemp would jog from the batter’s box on routine grounders. As a base runner, he would not look up to track the ball off the bat. In center field, he would forget to charge in when a catcher threw to second base. In pitchers’ counts, he would fail to shift away from a hitter’s pull side. Now an analyst for MLB Network, Bowa studies the subtleties of Kemp’s approach when he watches the Dodgers, he said. He sees a player with supreme focus again. “Everything is kicking in,” Bowa said. “He’s realized what it takes to be a superstar.” Rediscovering the Gift The Dodgers changed managers after last season, with Don Mattingly promoted from hitting coach to replace Joe Torre. Bowa also left, and Davey Lopes joined the staff. A more significant change for Kemp may have been in his personal life: after last season, he split up with the pop star Rihanna after a year of dating. Kemp has never blamed the relationship for his subpar season, in which he hit a career-low .249 with a .760 O.P.S. Though the gossip media no longer hound him, he said the spotlight was simply part of the routine in Los Angeles, and did not bother him. “I just promised myself that I would have more fun this year, and not let little things get to me,” Kemp said. “You can’t control a lot of the outcomes, but you can put in the work and try your best. It might not always work out, but in baseball you play so many games, you can come back the next day and redeem yourself. “I used to look at it as ‘Man, I went 0 for 5, two or three strikeouts,’ and get down on myself. Now I’m like ‘I’ve just got to get ’em tomorrow.’ ” In Mattingly, Kemp has a strong ally. Mattingly said he told Kemp before spring training that he understood the burden of expectations. Mattingly is a former M.V.P., but he never had Kemp’s range of skills. “Your talent is a curse,” Mattingly said he told him. “Because when I got on first base, nobody threw over there. They want you to hit for average, they want you to hit for power, they want you to make plays in the outfield. When you get on first, they want you to steal. “When do you get to go, ‘O.K., I did it, I’m on first’? Never. That takes a huge amount of energy, and there’s a lot of parts to the game you have to work on. But when you’re given that kind of gift, all you ask of guys is to take advantage of what you have.” After a lost season, Kemp is doing it again — and doing it better, perhaps, than any other player in baseball. With his franchise’s reputation in tatters, he has elevated his own. In some ways he is still the teenager in the batting cage, dreaming of where he will go next. “I don’t want to let up,” Kemp said. “I still want to prove to everybody that I can play this game.”

Los Angeles Dodgers
Baseball
National League
Kemp Matt


Trying to Fill Void, France Holds Talks on Mideast Peace Process

Abstract: PARIS — With the Obama administration having effectively given up on negotiating a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, France tried its hand on Friday at making Middle East peace but ended the day with little to show for its efforts. Even before President François Hollande convened diplomats from 29 countries for the session — including Secretary of State John Kerry but no representatives of either the Israelis or the Palestinians — France had backed off its initial hope that it could produce progress where United States-led efforts had not. Still, the meeting underscored how the tense relationship between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, weak leadership among the Palestinians and the array of other conflicts in the region have combined to create a diplomatic void at a time when Europe’s support for Israel has shown some cracks. “The French are taking advantage of the vacuum left by the United States,” Frédérique Schillo, a French historian who specializes in Israel and international relations, said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. “They have duly noted the failure of Kerry’s mission,” Ms. Schillo said, referring to nine months of talks spearheaded by Mr. Kerry that collapsed in 2014 . “And they have also noted a certain disengagement of the Americans in the Middle East,” she added, including in Israel, but also on other issues like the conflict in Syria, where the United States backed out of conducting airstrikes in 2013, leaving the French bitter . Since then, however, the United States has been by far the most active country in the fight against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Mr. Hollande acknowledged the complexity of the peace talks in his opening remarks on Friday. “We are no longer in the situation of 1993, with the Oslo accords , or of 2002, with the Arab peace initiative . We aren’t in the situation of 2007, with the big international conference in Annapolis ,” Mr. Hollande said. “We are in 2016, with the war in Syria, with the war in Iraq, with terrorism and fundamentalism.” In the two years since Mr. Kerry’s efforts to negotiate a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians broke down, tensions between the two parties have simmered and flared repeatedly, prompting France to propose a new process. But in the months since revealing its initiative in January, France had already tempered its ambitions and its policy positions amid a change in its foreign policy leadership. The French foreign minister at the time of the initial proposal, Laurent Fabius , had said in January that France would unilaterally recognize Palestine as an independent state if the effort failed. Mr. Fabius has since been replaced by Jean-Marc Ayrault and is no longer pushing for unilateral recognition of an independent Palestinian state. The meeting on Friday, which lasted only about three hours, amounted to little more than an extended photo opportunity, a way for France to show that it was still committed to a peace process in the Middle East. In a statement issued after the conference, the participants said that they had “reaffirmed” their commitment to a two-state solution, and expressed alarm about the situation on the ground, “in particular continued acts of violence and ongoing settlement activity.” “The participants underscored that the status quo is not sustainable,” the statement said. The statement called for “fully ending the Israeli occupation that began in 1967,” language that differed from that typically used by the United States in its diplomacy around the conflict. But the conference produced few concrete measures to be taken in the near future. Instead, French officials said, the meeting was the first step toward fostering a positive environment for the Israelis and the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table. The French said they would coordinate discussions and help organize another international conference by the end of the year, this time with the Israelis and the Palestinians. “The goal isn’t to force the parties to negotiate,” Mr. Ayrault said at a news conference after the meeting. “But we are not doomed to do nothing, doomed to stay sit idly by as observers, simply expressing regrets.” Israel and the Palestinians have expressed strong disagreements about the French initiative. The Palestinians, who have spoken of the need to “internationalize” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have welcomed it. Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official and the Palestinians’ chief negotiator, said in an op-ed published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Thursday that the French initiative was the “the flicker of hope Palestine has been waiting for.” “We are confident that it will provide a clear framework with defined parameters for the resumption of negotiations,” Mr. Erekat wrote. Israel, however, is stridently opposed to France’s initiative. Reacting to the meeting held in Paris on Friday, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said that the conference “constituted a missed opportunity.” “History will record that the conference in Paris only hardened the Palestinian position and distanced the chances for peace,” the statement said. Speaking on the eve of the Paris meeting, Dore Gold, the director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, even compared the French effort to the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret colonialist pact signed by Britain and France 100 years ago to divide up the territory of the Ottoman Empire. Describing the modern Middle East as being “in an advanced stage of meltdown,” Mr. Gold said, “Initiatives of this sort failed then and will fail today.” The Israeli leadership says it prefers a regional track whereby the moderate Arab states would provide the infrastructure for a resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But it is unclear to what extent Arab leaders will be willing cooperate openly with Israel’s right-wing government, and after years of futile, intermittent negotiations with Israel, the Palestinians say they have lost hope in bilateral talks. After the meeting in Paris on Friday, when asked about Mr. Gold’s comparison of the French initiative to the Sykes-Picot agreement, Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said that without a “regional and international framework” the two parties would not “spontaneously” sit down at the negotiating table. “It is not about imposing, it is not about dictating, it is not even about indicating the steps or the content,” Ms. Mogherini said. “It is about creating the space, the possibility, the framework for the parties to re-engage seriously, credibly.” “We still refer to the Middle East process, but the reality of fact is that at this moment there is no peace process at all,” she said.

France
Palestinians
Israel
International relations
Francois Hollande


Study Shows Conservatives May Enjoy Humor More

Abstract: While Americans choose their next president, let us consider a question more amenable to science: Which candidate’s supporters have a better sense of humor? In strict accordance with experimental protocol, we begin by asking you to rate, on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious) the following three attempts at humor: A) Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in midswing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.” B) I think there should be something in science called the “reindeer effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.” C) If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone. Those were some of the jokes rated by nearly 300 people in Boston in a recent study . (You can rate some of the others at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab .) The researchers picked out a variety of jokes — good, bad, conventional, absurdist — to look for differences in reactions between self-described liberals and conservatives. They expected conservatives to like traditional jokes, like the one about the golfing widower, that reinforce racial and gender stereotypes. And because liberals had previously been reported to be more flexible and open to new ideas, the researchers expected them to get a bigger laugh out of unconventional humor, like Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” about the reindeer effect and Hambone. Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more. “I was surprised,” said Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, who collaborated on the study with Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College. “Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated, but they liked even the more complex humor.” Do conservatives have more fun? Should liberals start describing themselves as humor-challenged? To investigate these questions, we need to delve into the science of humor (not a funny enterprise), starting with two basic kinds of humor identified in the 1980s by Willibald Ruch, a psychologist who now teaches at the University of Zurich. The first category is incongruity-resolution humor, or INC-RES in humor jargon. It covers traditional jokes and cartoons in which the incongruity of the punch line (the husband who misses his wife’s funeral) can be resolved by other information (he’s playing golf). You can clearly get the joke, and it often reinforces stereotypes (the golf-obsessed husband). Dr. Ruch and other researchers reported that this humor, with its orderly structure and reinforcement of stereotypes, appealed most to conservatives who shunned ambiguity and complicated new ideas, and who were more repressed and conformist than liberals. The second category, nonsense humor, covers many “Far Side” cartoons, Monty Python sketches and “Deep Thoughts.” The punch line’s incongruity isn’t neatly resolved — you’re left to enjoy the ambiguity and absurdity of the reindeer effect or Hambone’s affection for dolphins. This humor was reported to appeal to liberals because of their “openness to ideas” and their tendency to “seek new experiences.” But then why didn’t the liberals in the Boston experiment like the nonsense humor of “Deep Thoughts” as much as the conservatives did? One possible explanation is that conservatives’ rigidity mattered less than another aspect of their personality. Rod Martin , the author of “The Psychology of Humor,” said the results of the Boston study might reflect another trait that has been shown to correlate with a taste for jokes: cheerfulness. “Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general,” said Dr. Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. “A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a sense that things need to change before one can be really happy.” Another possible explanation is that conservatives, or at least the ones in Boston, really aren’t the stiffs they’re made out to be by social scientists. When these scientists analyze conservatives, they can sound like Victorians describing headhunters in Borneo. They try to be objective, but it’s an alien culture. The studies hailing liberals’ nonconformity and “openness to ideas” have been done by social scientists working in a culture that’s remarkably homogenous politically. Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one on social science and humanities faculties, according to studies by Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University. If you’re a professor who truly “seeks new experiences,” try going into a faculty club today and passing out McCain-Palin buttons. Could it be that the image of conservatives as humorless, dogmatic neurotics is based more on political bias than sound social science? Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviews the evidence of cognitive differences in his 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” said that while there were valid differences, “liberals and conservatives are roughly equally closed-minded in dealing with dissonant real-world evidence.” So perhaps conservatives don’t have a monopoly on humorless dogmatism. Maybe the stereotype of the dour, rigid conservative has more to do with social scientists’ groupthink and wariness of outsiders — which, come to think of it, resembles the herding behavior of certain hoofed animals. Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.

Psychology and Psychologists
Comedy and Humor
Democratic Party
Republican Party
Sociology


With Offer, Europe Tries to Spur Trade Talks

Abstract: GENEVA — The European Union began crucial global trade talks Monday with an offer of reducing its farm tariffs by 60 percent — the highest figure it has yet offered — in a challenge to developing countries to make concessions. The offer from the European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, was intended to ignite the stalled Doha trade round, which began seven years ago. Until now, Europe has offered a maximum of 54 percent tariff reductions, but Mr. Mandelson’s spokesman, Peter Power, said the higher figure could be achieved by including a range of tropical products. It remained unclear whether Europe’s intervention would break the overall stalemate, because the basic shape of the European offer remained the same. The talks this week in Geneva are seen as the last chance to achieve a global deal to liberalize trade in the near future. With a presidential election looming in the United States and Europe scheduled to change its trade negotiator next year, a breakthrough this week is seen as essential to any hopes of a swift agreement. Europe and the United States want developing countries like Brazil and China to open up more of their markets for industrial goods and services in exchange for concessions on agriculture. Washington has said that it is willing to cut farm subsidies. But developing countries remain dissatisfied with the agricultural concessions offered so far by Europe and United States. “We’ve decided to help the negotiations this week get off to a strong start by raising the average cut in our agricultural tariff,” Mr. Mandelson said, according to The Associated Press. “That is a very considerable improvement on our own part, but of course it’s light years away from any effort we’ve previously made in a trade round.” Mr. Power added that the offer had failed to produce any response from the developing nations. “We have shown leadership throughout these negotiations,” he said, “and we are kicking this meeting off by showing our continued willingness to do so. The disappointing reality is that we are not seeing any return so far.” Earlier, the United States trade representative, Susan C. Schwab, gave her first public reaction to comments by the Brazilian foreign minister, Celso Amorim, that compared what he called rich countries’ deception in commerce talks to tactics used by the Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels. “This is not the time and not the week for falling back on tired rhetoric,” Ms. Schwab said. “Rhetoric designed to perpetuate old divisions or create new ones.” Meanwhile, there was no sign of a breakthrough in a dispute over Europe’s banana tariffs, which have threatened to derail the talks. Latin American nations are at odds over the proposed new regime with Europe’s former colonies, which have traditionally had preferential treatment.

European Union
Agriculture
International Trade and World Market


Political Bias at Facebook?

Abstract: Is Facebook two-faced? The social network claims it is in the business of connecting people and things, largely through powerful (and supposedly impartial) algorithms that focus on things like what other people are reading and talking about online, as well as a user’s own interests. Now, however, Facebook is facing accusations of all too human censorship after a report on the website Gizmodo said curators working for Facebook suppressed news stories from typically conservative outlets because they didn’t like the politics, write John Herrman and Mike Isaac . Gizmodo’s story said a team of people assigned to post links and brief story descriptions to the Facebook “Trending” section suppressed stories about Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and conservative gatherings, even though Facebook’s computers flagged these as popular items. The site also said certain stories were inserted arbitrarily, and stories about Facebook itself were left off. These decisions appear to have been at the whim of managers and differed depending on who was in charge. It’s not clear that there really is liberal bias inside Facebook. Mr. Herrman and Mr. Isaac report talking with other former employees on the “trending” desk who said left-wing stories were also bounced, despite qualifying for a ranking. And the prime source in the Gizmodo story is a self-described conservative. So maybe this is a story about conservative bias against liberal bias against conservative biased media. As the kids say, ugh. More important may be the fact that, in Facebook’s algorithm-driven world, the scandal is happening in a corner where humans were in charge. The Facebook employees also seem to have believed they were being observed, Gizmodo said in a different story , so that they might someday be replaced by software to write the trending briefs. That wouldn’t be too surprising: There is already software that writes sports and breaking disaster stories, and Facebook is good at revising algorithms and building products on a big scale. That means the outcome of this scandal, regardless of whether bias is confirmed, may well be more robo journalism, as Facebook strives to look impartial by letting computers do the work.


Patriots Said to Add Darrelle Revis; the Jets Pick Up Eric Decker

Abstract: The Jets cleared significant salary-cap space earlier this week, producing the expectation that they were preparing to splurge on new players. Early in free agency, however, they were largely silent, even as their archrival, the New England Patriots, snatched up Darrelle Revis hours after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers released him Wednesday, according to a person in the N.F.L. who requested anonymity because the deal had not been formally announced. Late Wednesday night, however, the Jets sprung, agreeing to terms with the former Denver Broncos receiver Eric Decker. New England was to make Revis the N.F.L.’s highest-paid cornerback at $12 million, the person in the N.F.L. said, although the team minimized its risk by committing to him for only one season. The Patriots were racing to fill a gaping hole created when Aqib Talib left as a free agent to sign with the Broncos, the defending A.F.C. champions. The Patriots will hope that Revis, 28, can return to the form that made him a shutdown corner for five seasons with the Jets before he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in 2012. He gradually progressed for Tampa Bay last season, yet there was some question whether he was able to blanket opponents as he once had. Then again, many players need two years to be at their best after having an operation like Revis’s. Tampa Bay acquired Revis , a five-time Pro Bowler, from the Jets last spring in exchange for a first-round draft pick in 2013 — which the Jets turned into the N.F.L.’s defensive rookie of the year, Sheldon Richardson, a lineman — and a fourth-round selection in this year’s draft. The latter would have improved to a third-round pick had Tampa Bay retained Revis. Revis’s situation with the Buccaneers had raised some speculation that he would return to his former team. Jets Coach Rex Ryan often praised Revis as the game’s best cornerback during their time together, but Revis’s relationship with the team soured, and he twice held out during contract negotiations. After John Idzik was hired as the Jets’ general manager last year, he quickly determined he was not prepared to make the long-term commitment that would have been necessary to ensure that Revis spent all, or most, of his career with the team. Few teams are willing to commit as much money to a cornerback as the Patriots did. But New England Coach Bill Belichick, who like Ryan is regarded as one of football’s finest defensive coaches, knows firsthand how much Revis meant to the Jets. The Jets were so successful in their use of Revis that elite receivers were said to be venturing onto “Revis Island.” The Patriots’ urgency in pursuing Revis reflects an awareness that their window of opportunity with Tom Brady, who turns 37 in August, may be closing. In addition, they were under pressure to counter a batch of significant signings by Denver. It was unclear whether Idzik, who had positioned the Jets to spend heavily to fill many of their needs in free agency, wanted Revis back and whether he was outmaneuvered. The acquisition of Decker, however, gives the Jets a receiver worthy of Revis’s attention and will help ease the apprehension of the team’s fans. Decker, who turns 27 on Saturday, had 87 catches for 1,288 yards and 11 touchdowns with the Broncos last season. He was at the Jets’ complex on Wednesday and had dinner with a contingent of team officials, The Associated Press reported. In contrast to the Jets’ early stillness, the Giants on Wednesday agreed to terms with Jon Beason, a middle linebacker they viewed as the most critical among their 26 unrestricted free agents, and made official a series of signings. They retained safety Stevie Brown, kicker Josh Brown, cornerback Trumaine McBride, running back Peyton Hillis and the reserve quarterback Curtis Painter, and they formally added guard Geoff Schwartz and center J. D. Walton, beginning an overhaul of their offensive line. “I’ve played right guard lots in my career, and I know that Snee is still there, so I will be starting at left guard,” Schwartz said, referring to the longtime Giant Chris Snee. Walton, a third-round draft pick by Denver in 2010, has not played since September 2012 because of an ankle injury. He will be given every chance to replace David Baas, who was waived.

Patriots
Darrelle Revis
Jets
Eric Decker
Buccaneers
Football


Paul J. Wiedorfer, Medal of Honor Winner, Dies at 90

Abstract: Paul J. Wiedorfer, who earned the Medal of Honor for charging across an icy field in Belgium in 1944 and eliminating two German machine-gun nests that had pinned down his platoon, died on Wednesday in Baltimore. He was 90. The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter, Randee M. Wiedorfer, said. During the Battle of the Bulge, Mr. Wiedorfer’s platoon was crossing a clearing around noon on Christmas Day when camouflaged machine gunners supported by riflemen opened fire. The Americans dove behind a small ridge about 40 yards from the German emplacements. Mr. Wiedorfer, a private, ran at the first machine gun, sliding on three inches of fresh snow and ice. He made it to within 10 yards of the fortification and hurled a grenade. After it exploded, he shot the remaining soldiers, then turned and attacked the second emplacement. He wounded one German, and the other six surrendered. “Suddenly something popped into my mind,” Mr. Wiedorfer told The Baltimore Sun in 2008. “Something had to be done and someone had to do it. And I just did it. I can’t tell you why.” Mr. Wiedorfer (pronounced WEE-door-fur) was wounded two months later in Germany when mortar shrapnel tore into his stomach and broke his left leg and two right fingers. He was in traction at a hospital in England when another patient saw his name in Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, and told him he had won the Medal of Honor. Mr. Wiedorfer also earned two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. Paul Joseph Wiedorfer was born on Jan. 17, 1921, in Baltimore. He graduated from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute high school in 1940. He left the military in 1947 and worked for Baltimore Gas and Electric, retiring in 1981. His wife, the former Alice Staufer, died in 2008. In addition to his daughter, Mr. Wiedorfer is survived by three sisters, Catherine Smith, Margaret Pitt and Frances Hopkins; two sons, Paul Jr. and Gary; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Deaths (Obituaries)
World War II (1939-45)
Awards Decorations and Honors


Back-Stabbing and Threats of a ‘Suicide Parachute’ at Hershey

Abstract: HERSHEY, Pa. — One toasty afternoon in mid-July, four 10-year-old boys gave a tour of their home at the Milton Hershey School, a boarding school for at-risk children and one of many gifts bequeathed by the chocolate magnate to the community that bears his name. In the kitchen, a plate of brownies sat unattended. The boys yearned and stared — but kept their hands to themselves. This seemed so improbable that someone asked, Why aren’t you guys grabbing dessert? “We’re mature enough not to take stuff without asking,” said Jayce, a blond-haired boy with a dimpled chin. “But if we were to ask,” he added, raising a hopeful forefinger, “we would ask like this: ‘May I please take a brownie?’” Given this show of discipline, it may come as a surprise to learn that in recent years, some serious behavioral issues have convulsed the Milton Hershey School . But the problem isn’t the students. The problem is the adults in charge. Thanks to a historic gift by M.H.S.’s founder, the Hershey Trust Company has an endowment of $12.3 billion and an ownership stake in Hershey Company, giving it control of the candy dynasty behind Kit Kat, Reese’s and Hershey’s Kisses, to name a few. With Hershey now the subject of a $23 billion takeover bid, the trust is enduring one of its periodic turns in the klieg lights, and the timing is hardly ideal. A leaked internal memo has revealed back-stabbing, allegations of insider trading and the threat of something called a “suicide parachute.” All of this is happening as a dubious deal to buy a golf course continues to reverberate and as critics charge that members of the trust’s board are more interested in earning hundreds of thousands of dollars on Hershey-related boards than in helping needy children. In the last 12 months the trust has spent more than $4 million on lawyers to investigate charges of misconduct that board members have lodged against one another. In one instance, Robert F. Cavanaugh, then the board’s chairman, was accused of improperly securing a summer job for his son with JKMilne Asset Management, one of the trust’s outside investment companies. In a sharp escalation, Mr. Cavanaugh, an M.H.S. alumnus who worked in real estate finance, accused two board members of trading Hershey stock on privileged information, which is basically the corporate version of crying “Murder!” Image The distribution center and warehouse at the Milton Hershey School, a boarding school for at-risk children. Credit Will Figg for The New York Times Image The auditorium at the former high school, which is now a middle school called Catherine School. Credit Will Figg for The New York Times Image The distribution center and warehouse, where students pick up school uniforms and their parents can get food and domestic supplies. Credit Will Figg for The New York Times After a small fortune in billable hours, all three board members were given a clean bill of ethical health. But this group operated in what was apparently a toxic atmosphere. Four board members have quit since late 2015, one after serving a mere three months. The Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General sent a letter to the trust in February that gave the board until July 31 to adopt some changes or face possible legal action. On Friday, the attorney general announced a deal with the trust, unveiling an agreement that establishes term limits for board members and sets base compensation at $110,000 a year, before add-ons. Three trustees who have already served more than a decade will step down by the end of December. Two other long-timers, including the chairwoman, Velma A. Redmond, will stick around through 2017 to provide institutional memory. To the board’s detractors — and there are many, in academia and in an alumni group called Protect the Hersheys’ Children — the agreement is only the latest attempt at a tummy tuck for an institution that, they say, needs a heart transplant. This might be a strictly local story but for that multibillion-dollar fortune and the takeover bid by the food giant Mondelez International. The chocolate company’s board batted away the offer in early July. A Hershey Company representative declined to comment, citing the quiet period before an earnings report, but it’s unlikely the company said anything about the bid without consulting the trust’s board. “They are the power behind the throne,” said Bob Fernandez, author of “The Chocolate Trust,” a book about the board published last year. “Almost no one knows their names, and they aren’t in the public much, but they are the ones behind the scenes who control what will happen to the largest chocolate company in the country.” Perhaps it is naïve to expect that a treasure as immense as $12.3 billion could sit anywhere without producing at least some acrimony and intrigue. In a way, this is a tale about human nature, and how great gobs of cash evince both the best and worst of it. While the money is earmarked explicitly for disadvantaged children, its fate is decided by grown-ups. And while they may care deeply about the school, at the same time some are being enriched financially, and others — mostly elected officials — have shown motivations more political and economic than scholastic. During a recent interview at the Hershey Trust office, which operates out of the 22-room home that was once Mr. Hershey’s, Ms. Redmond played down the internal squabbles. She and her colleagues were devoted to the school, she said, and ready to embrace change. “This is a new day,” she said, as negotiations over the deal announced on Friday were unfolding. “We do have a heightened sensitivity to issues that have been brought up in the past, in terms of compensation, in terms of board collaboration. We are committed to a future in which we are more transparent and no longer carrying the baggage of the past.” This is precisely the kind of reset that has been promised for years, said Frederic Fouad, an M.H.S. alumnus and a Protect the Hershey’s Children co-founder. He said the agreement changed nothing of substance and failed to address the systemic issues that have long plagued the trust. He and Pablo Eisenberg, a senior fellow at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown, contend that it’s absurd that board members are paid at all, other than to cover expenses. They say the school is more interested in bricks-and-mortar projects that help local vendors and the economy — more than $1 billion has been spent on upgrades and new construction in the last 20 years — than in expanding the student population. “I don’t think I’ve seen a greater nonprofit scandal in the last 30 or 40 years,” said Mr. Eisenberg, who has studied the trust and found its leadership and structure wanting. “The whole board needs to be replaced.” Bitter Rivalries The warm, avuncular face of Milton Hershey beams from photographs hung just about everywhere here, the kind of ubiquity once associated mainly with communist nations and their maximum leaders. But Mr. Hershey, as everyone here calls him, more than 70 years after his death, is a kind of anti-Mao. The presence of his image seems like a token of heartfelt gratitude from locals who understand that the “sweetest place on earth,” as it bills itself, would not exist without this mustachioed man and his chocolate fortune. He and his wife, Catherine, never had children of their own. In 1909 they founded the school, originally open only to white orphaned boys. Over the years, the criteria for students expanded and the student body now includes girls as well as children of all races, as long as they come from families at or near the poverty level. Lately, though, some of the biggest beneficiaries of the school are the members of its board. This stems from the odd structure that results when a nonprofit entity (the school) owns for-profit companies (the Hershey Trust Company, which is the source of the board members’ salaries; the Hershey Company; and the Hershey Entertainment and Resorts Company, which operates Hersheypark and other attractions). For years, three members of the trust board have sat on the board of the Hershey Company and one member has sat on the board of Hershey Entertainment. This makes a seat on the trust, which has paid about $100,000, a ticket to a perch on more lucrative boards: A Hershey Company board member is paid about $250,000. Trust watchers say the rancor may have originated with the extended tenure of people like Mr. Cavanaugh, who has served on the trust’s board since 2003 and landed one of the trust’s three Hershey Company board seats the same year. According to Hershey’s most recent annual report to shareholders, Mr. Cavanaugh currently has $3.6 million in a deferred compensation account with the company. Historically, tenure on a board seat has had an informal 10-year limit. A few members elected in the early 2000s, including Mr. Cavanaugh, have stayed longer. When Mr. Cavanaugh learned last September that board members had apparently been conspiring behind his back, he expressed outrage, according to an internal memo that leaked to the news media. The memo, dated Sept. 30, 2015, and written by the former chief compliance officer of the trust, Marc Woolley, described a phone conversation in which Mr. Cavanaugh told Mr. Woolley he wanted to “take out” members of the board who had run a “smear campaign” against him. Mr. Cavanaugh also told Mr. Woolley that he was aware of a letter sent by four board members to every other member except for him. Image Velma Redmond, chairwoman of the board of the Hershey Trust Company and the Milton Hershey School. Credit Will Figg for The New York Times Image Kathleen Kane, attorney general of Pennsylvania, demanded changes at the Hershey Trust Company after an investigation of a golf course deal. Credit Will Figg for The New York Times Image Richard Lenny, former chief executive of the Hershey Company and board member of the Hershey Trust Company. Credit Will Figg for The New York Times If that sounds high school, the tone of the conversation then took a dark turn. Mr. Cavanaugh threatened to deploy something he called a “suicide parachute,” though exactly what he meant is unclear. He also told Mr. Woolley, according to the memo, that he had “a timeline mapped out” of trades in Hershey stock by two board members, Joan Steel and James Nevels, implying that they were made improperly. “He stated,” wrote Mr. Woolley in his memo, “that if I thought that the investigation into his dealings with J. K. Milne were long and expensive,” that “I had not seen anything yet.” Mr. Cavanaugh, in a statement, disputed Mr. Woolley’s recounting of the conversation. “I believe Mr. Woolley’s memo contained a number of errors, misstatements and omissions that were self-serving and significantly changed the context of the conversation,” he said. He said he had called Mr. Woolley to discuss matters involving board members and personnel, “and to inform Mr. Woolley of my continued dissatisfaction with his job performance.” In the conversation, Mr. Cavanaugh also articulated his theory that a trust employee named John Estey was responsible for the friction on the board. Why he thought that, Mr. Cavanaugh did not say, but he told Mr. Woolley that “John had better just continue to do work for the board.” As it happens, Mr. Estey’s work for the board would soon end, though for reasons that had nothing to do with Hershey. A former state lobbyist, Mr. Estey had been caught in his former job in a 2011 sting by F.B.I. agents who were posing as favor-seeking executives of a fictional company. The “executives” provided Mr. Estey with $20,000 to give to lawmakers, a violation of state laws barring lobbyists from acting as conduits for corporate donations. But Mr. Estey handed over $7,000 to state politicians. The rest he kept. In May, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud. At that time, he was earning a salary from the trust of more than $900,000 a year. Mr. Woolley did not last at the trust much longer. In June, he was put on administrative leave. A few weeks ago, according to a spokesman for the trust, he was fired. The reason? “The trust considered Woolley a ‘disgruntled employee,’” said a spokesman, Kent Jarrell, in an email. As evidence, Mr. Jarrell pointed to a letter, which Mr. Woolley helped write in November, in which he supposedly complained about the board. Reached by phone last week, Mr. Woolley said, “I am anything but disgruntled. I’m disappointed about the board and their issues, but I’m passionate about the kids and the mission.” In the Rough The public was largely unaware of the trust’s mission, and the huge sum that Mr. Hershey had sunk in it, until 1923, when The New York Times ran a front-page article with the headline “ M.S. Hershey Gives $60,000,000 Trust for an Orphanage. ” By then, Mr. Hershey had become one of his era’s richest men, having found a way to turn milk chocolate, a luxury item in the 19th century, into an affordable treat for the masses. A former farm boy, Mr. Hershey made chores a part of daily life for his orphans. Later, M.H.S. became known as one of the country’s finest blue-collar vocational schools, with training in auto-body repair, carpentry, construction, printing and more. In an era without child welfare, it was a vast improvement over the alternative, which was destitution. Even during Mr. Hershey’s time, money from the trust was used to develop the town’s infrastructure and attractions. Usually these deals cause few ripples. But a 2006 purchase became a public relations disaster. That year the trust purchased a money-losing golf course for $12 million, which an investigation by The Philadelphia Inquirer later found was two to three times its appraised value. The deal rescued several dozen investors who had built the course and who otherwise would have faced losses. Among those investors was Richard H. Lenny, who was the chief executive of the Hershey candy company and a member of the trust board when the acquisition was approved. The trust also spent $5 million on a Scottish-inspired restaurant and bar on the premises. After a torrent of negative publicity, the trust said that it had always planned to build student housing on the property as part of a school expansion. The original purchase announcement, though — issued well before the P.R. fiasco — stated that the acquisition “ensures the long-term future of the championship-caliber course.” Ground is now being broken, according to the trust spokesman, for student homes on what was formerly known as Hershey Links. In 2010, Tom Corbett, then the attorney general, opened an investigation of the golf course deal. That inquiry was ultimately closed by the current attorney general, Kathleen G. Kane, soon after she took office in 2013. She found no criminal conduct and stated there was no evidence that Mr. Lenny participated in the trust’s decision to buy the golf course. But she demanded reforms that were intended to curb pay, increase vigilance about conflicts of interest and hasten the recruitment of new members with backgrounds in at-risk children. Critics said there were no teeth in the agreement struck with the trust in 2013, which is why a do-over was required on Friday. Ms. Kane believes that the agreement simply needed an update. “I would have been pleased if we didn’t have to revisit the agreement,” she said in a recent interview in her office, overlooking the State Capitol in Harrisburg. “I thought at the time that what we signed in 2013 was a step forward, but times change, directors change, and you have to go back and make improvements.” Ms. Kane announced the deal at a news conference on Friday, which was a bit of a surprise to many involved. Her license to practice law was suspended last September , after she was accused of leaking grand jury material to a reporter in an effort to embarrass political enemies, and then lying about it under oath. She has denied wrongdoing. Her trial for perjury and other charges is tentatively set to begin soon. A Suitor’s Obstacle Course Image Students playing hockey on the grounds of the Milton Hershey School, which serves children from families at or near the poverty level. Credit Will Figg for The New York Times What, if anything, the recent agreement and the coming turnover of members mean for the Mondelez bid is unclear. Mondelez — the maker of Oreos, Ritz crackers and an assortment of gums, chocolates and mints — has not announced that it is giving up its pursuit of the company. On paper, the union makes a lot of strategic sense, according to Erin Lash, an analyst at Morningstar. Mondelez does not sell chocolate in the United States, and Hershey has never had a strong presence overseas. “Mondelez has vast geographic reach,” Ms. Lash said. “Only 20 percent of its sales are in the U.S. Thirty-five percent are in Europe and the rest are in emerging markets, like Brazil, China, Russia and India.” Hershey might also want to link up with a company that can quickly expand its revenue base beyond chocolate, as it has tried to do on its own, with a recent venture into beef jerky . Overall sales at Hershey fell last year for the first time in a decade. Still, for Mondelez to succeed, it would need to mount one of the greatest charm offensives in corporate history. To understand why, consider what happened in 2002, when board members of the school decided that the trust’s portfolio was dangerously overweighted in Hershey stock. The group announced it was looking to sell Hershey, preferably to a company that could pay cash. Outrage ensued. The attorney general, who was then running for governor, opposed the sale, and obtained a preliminary injunction to block it, invoking a common-law authority, known as parens patriae, to act as a kind of public guardian for M.H.S.’s students. It was a bold power play, possible only because it was supported by many of the people of Hershey and the Dauphin County Orphans’ Court, which has jurisdiction over the trust. The plan was soon abandoned. Ten board members resigned. For good measure, the state legislature passed a law that year mandating that Hershey cannot be sold without the approval of the attorney general. While arguably a boon for the community, the law, according to Robert H. Sitkoff, a professor at Harvard Law School, was also indefensible. “Imagine if the legislature of New Jersey passed a bill that said Princeton had to invest more than half of its endowment in one local company?” Mr. Sitkoff said. “That’s what the Pennsylvania Legislature did in 2002. It’s outrageous. The trust is supposed to be rescuing needy kids.” Mondelez seems attuned to the obstacle course it would need to navigate to win Hershey. Already, the company has reportedly promised to relocate its global chocolate headquarters to Hershey, protect local jobs and take Hershey as its name. That’s a start, said Mr. Fernandez, author of “The Chocolate Trust.” “This isn’t just about a great share price,” he said. “It’s about absolutely boosting the local economy, which is what the trust has been doing for years.” Mondelez, he said, might try to sway opponents of any deal by promising to add chocolate-making capacity in Hershey, or by naming trust board members to the Mondelez board. “Basically, it will have to convince politicians in Harrisburg that it won’t walk away in five years,” he said. Whether a deal would be good for M.H.S. depends largely on whether the trustees properly manage the windfall. There are skeptics, such as Mr. Fouad of Protect the Hersheys’ Children, who say the current members lack the kind of self-restraint demonstrated by those 10-year-old boys with that plate of brownies. But Mr. Fouad wants to see the sale anyway. “The board is incompetent,” he maintains. “But it’s far better to get the billions and then let the right people pressure them to reform. Failing to would be just another triumph of local interests and jobs over needy kids. And five decades of that is enough.”

Hershey
Milton Hershey School
Pennsylvania
Mondelez International
Bob Fernandez
The Chocolate Trust
Georgetown
Mergers and Acquisitions
Milton Snavely Hershey
K-12 Education


A Contest From Target With a High-Tech Twist

Abstract: TYPICALLY, a contest sponsored by a retailer involves asking consumers to count the number of gumballs in a jumbo glass jar, challenging them to name a new product or inviting them to fill shopping carts with merchandise as they race up and down store aisles. Now a giant retailer has joined with a magazine’s blog to co-sponsor a contest with a high-technology twist. The retailer, Target, part of the Target Corporation, and the new Co.Labs technology blog published by Fast Company magazine, owned by Mansueto Ventures, sought out developers to take part in a competition they called the Retail Accelerator contest. The goal was to encourage the development of mobile apps with shopping purposes; the grand prize winners would receive $75,000 and a chance to have their entry brought to life by Target for customers to use. The contest began in March at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. On Wednesday, Target and Co.Labs plan to announce the winners of the grand prize: a group of seven people who work at TBWA/Chiat/Day and TBWA Worldwide in New York, part of the Omnicom Group, and competed on their own, separate from the agencies, under the name Team Pilot. Team Pilot’s winning entry, called Divvy , is meant to improve digital experiences in the realm of group shopping or social shopping by, for instance, enabling several people to update a shopping list in real time and making it easier to divide a bill among numerous shoppers and distribute copies of receipts among them. The idea from Team Pilot — led by Christopher Reardon, team leader and head of user experience — was one of seven finalists in what was formally called the Co.Labs and Target Retail Accelerator contest. Each finalist received $10,000 and a chance to present to judges, including Jeffrey J. Jones, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Target in Minneapolis. There were initially about 350 individuals and teams who registered for the contest, Mr. Jones said, of whom about 75 submitted completed entries. The 75 were winnowed to the seven finalists and then to the grand prize winner. The genesis of the contest was a question Mr. Jones asked as follows: “How do we continue to find ideas to accelerate our multichannel agenda?” By that, he meant ways of engaging with customers that include “target.com, our in-store experience, our Target app and the mobile Web.” “As a reader of Fast Company, someone who is passionate about design and technology, I felt we were going to what I believe is the best media source that understands what’s going on and has access to the right people Target has to know, the best minds in the R.& D. community,” Mr. Jones said. The contest is another example of a popular trend on Madison Avenue known as content marketing , which provides consumers with articles, video clips, charts and other materials that are sponsored by marketers. The purpose of content marketing, also known as branded content, custom content or sponsored content, is to surmount the increasing skepticism among the public for traditional advertising. Image The winning app, Divvy, enables several people to update a shopping list in real time and makes it easier to divide a bill. “I wanted to create some different models of how we can work with advertising partners,” said Christine Osekoski, publisher of Fast Company in New York. “If you’re going to work with them on custom content, the question becomes how you make sure it’s content readers really want to read,” she added. “You have to be selective.” Matthew Smith, integrated advertising director at Fast Company, agreed, saying that in this instance “the interests of church and state and the client and the community all aligned” because “we were speaking to them in an authentic way.” That was echoed by Chris Dannen, the editor of Co.Labs. A way to achieve compelling content is to be transparent with readers, Mr. Dannen said, because “if they can’t see what’s going on behind the scenes, they won’t trust you.” As a result, “we let it happen as it happened,” he said of the contest, adding: “There was the chance that no one would submit anything good. We were biting our nails.” Mr. Dannen also shared some shortcomings, principally that because “we did not give people stringent guidelines on what their submissions should look like, some people put all their energy into the idea, some did highly detailed mock-ups and some submitted sketches on graph paper.” The contest concept was first brought up a year ago, Ms. Osekoski recalled, when she met Mr. Jones in Los Angeles at the introduction of another Fast Company blog, Co.Create. Although “Target is not a traditional advertiser for Fast Company,” she said, the retailer was keenly interested in reaching out to developers through the magazine. “Fast Company could be the conduit, the connector, the consultant,” she added. Target is running ads on the Co.Labs blog to promote the contest. Target is involved in other content marketing efforts, including the publication of its own online magazine-cum-blog, A Bullseye View. Mr. Jones said he and other Target executives “love what’s come out of” the collaboration with Co.Labs. But he added, laughing, “don’t let Christine tell you I promised to do this again.” Ms. Osekoski, when told of Mr. Jones’s remark, said, “He reads my mind,” and laughed. Although Fast Company is happy with how the partnership has turned out, she added: “This is not a contest to name a shade of lipstick or a nail color. This was a huge experiment for everybody. It takes a lot of work.”

Target
Retail
Fast Company
Mobile Apps
advertising,marketing
Contests and Prizes


Google Engineer Told Others of Data Collection, F.C.C. Report Reveals

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Google ’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report. The report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission after a 17-month investigation of Google’s Street View project, was released, heavily redacted, two weeks ago. Although it found that Google had not violated any laws, the agency said Google had obstructed the inquiry and fined the company $25,000. On Saturday, Google released a version of the report with only employees’ names redacted. The full version draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off. The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world. When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.” “That never occurred,” the report says. Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material. A Google spokeswoman said Saturday that the company had much stricter privacy controls than it used to, in part because of the Street View controversy. She expressed the hope that with the release of the full report, “we can now put this matter behind us.” Ever since information about the secret data collection first began to emerge two years ago, Google has portrayed it as the mistakes of an unauthorized engineer operating on his own and stressed that the data was never used in any Google product. The report, quoting the engineer’s original proposal, gives a somewhat different impression. The data, the engineer wrote, would “be analyzed offline for use in other initiatives.” Google says this was never done. The report, which was first published in its unredacted form by The Los Angeles Times, also states that the engineer, who began the project as part of his “20 percent” time that Google gives employees to do work on their own initiative, “specifically told two engineers working on the project, including a senior manager, about collecting payload data.” As early as 2007, the report says, Street View engineers had “wide access” to the plan to collect payload data. Five engineers tested the Street View code, a sixth reviewed it line by line, and a seventh also worked on it, the report says. Privacy advocates said the full report put Google in a bad light. “Google’s rogue engineer scenario collapses in light of the fact that others were aware of the project and did not object,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “This is what happens in the absence of enforcement and the absence of regulation.” The Street View program used special cars outfitted with cameras. Google first said it was just photographing streets and did not disclose that it was collecting Internet communications called payload data, transmitted over Wi-Fi networks, until May 2010, when it was confronted by German regulators. Eventually, it was forced to reveal that the information it had collected could include the full text of e-mails, sites visited and other data. Even if a user was not working on a computer at the moment the Street View car slowly passed, if the device was on and the network was unencrypted, all sorts of information about what the user had been doing could be scooped up, data experts say. “So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake,” a Google executive wrote on a company blog in 2010 . “The project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.” But according to the report, the engineer suggested in his proposal that it was entirely intentional: “We are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing.” Attending to paperwork did not seem to be a high priority, however. Managers of the Street View project told F.C.C. investigators that they never read the engineer’s proposal, called a design document. A senior manager of Street View said he “preapproved” the document before it was written. More than a dozen countries began investigations of Street View in 2010. In the United States, the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and the F.C.C. looked into the matter. The engineer at the center of the project cited the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Because F.C.C. investigators could not interview him, they said there were still unresolved questions about the case.


Saudi Arabia: U.N. Denounces Flogging of Blogger

Abstract: The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan, publicly appealed to Saudi Arabia on Thursday to halt the flogging of a blogger sentenced to 1,000 blows, 10 years’ imprisonment and a large fine for creating a website that contained criticism of the country’s religious establishment. The first 50 blows were given to the blogger, Raif Badawi, last Friday. Prince Zeid made the appeal on the eve of the second in a series of floggings, which are to be administered every Friday until all 1,000 blows with a cane have been completed. “Flogging is, in my view, at the very least, a form of cruel and inhuman punishment,” Prince Zeid said in a statement on his office’s website. He reminded the Saudis that the United Nations considers flogging a form of torture. As of Thursday evening, there was no indication that the authorities planned to halt the punishment, which has been widely condemned around the world.

Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al Hussein,Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein


Shakily, Rafael Nadal and Maria Sharapova Survive Upset Bids

Abstract: MELBOURNE, Australia — His knees, back, wrist and appendix have all failed Rafael Nadal recently. On Wednesday, his stomach joined the list of ailments, but he gutted out a five-set victory, 6-2, 3-6, 6-7 (2), 6-3, 7-5, to reach the third round of the Australian Open. Nadal seemed fine in the first set, racing to a 4-1 lead over Tim Smyczek, a journeyman from Milwaukee who has never beaten a top player. But then he showed signs of sickness, bending at the waist and seeming to vomit on the court. His serve lost its zip, his groundstrokes their pop and his movements their blur. “I felt very tired,” Nadal, who is seeded third, said. “I don’t know, at end of the first set, I start to feel my body very bad. I was sweating like crazy.” Smyczek broke Nadal’s serve in the eighth game of the second set, then saved a break point on his own serve before winning the set. As he headed for his seat, Smyczek gave a disbelieving look to friends in the crowd. Winning that set against one of history’s greatest players was by far the best result he had ever experienced. The next set went to a tiebreaker, which Smyczek won with an ace — one of 15 in the match. Aware of Nadal’s problems, Smyczek began playing conservatively, trying simply to rally with Nadal by hitting balls in the center of the court until Nadal tired — a normally unthinkable strategy against an indefatigable player. But Nadal’s forehand seemed to reawaken, and he won the fourth set, 6-3. In the fifth set, Smyczek tried to get Nadal running, not by crushing balls but by safely hitting them side-to-side. Sometimes Nadal reached them and managed to generate the torque needed to crush winners. Sometimes he didn’t. At 5-5 and down, 0-15, Smyczek hit a swinging volley right at Nadal, and Nadal passed him. At 15-30, Smyczek rushed the net and again got passed. At break point, Smyczek hit an easy forehand into the net. Nadal won three straight points on his serve, including one in which Smyczek gave Nadal a do-over after a fan shouted during his service delivery. Nadal squandered three match points, seemed to gather himself, won the next two, and dropped to his knees. “What he did at the end of the fifth was just amazing,” Nadal said of Smyczek’s act of sportsmanship. “Very few players can do that after four hours something of a match. Thanks to him, because he’s a great example, what he did today.” In postmatch remarks, Smyczek said giving Nadal the do-over “was the right thing to do.” The day was the warmest so far of the tournament, and Nadal said his long layoff from competition, missing most of the last six months of 2014 because of a right wrist injury and an appendectomy, made the humid conditions harder to manage. “I should not be that tired after 40 minutes,” said Nadal, who added that he felt dizzy and nauseated and was close to quitting the match. “I feel luck to have the chance to finish the match and find a way to win.” In the third round, he will face Dudi Sela of Israel, who upset 28th-seeded Lukas Rosol, 7-6 (2), 5-7, 7-5, 6-3. Earlier Wednesday, facing match points against her, second-seeded Maria Sharapova banished her doubts with aggressive shot-making that salvaged her best chance in years to win a second Australian Open championship. Against Alexandra Panova, a 24-year-old Russian qualifier ranked 150th, Sharapova saved the first match point by stepping around her backhand and blistering a forehand service return that painted the left line. On the next point, she dumped her return in the net and faced doom again, this time ending a rally with a forehand that again painted the left-side line. Next point, she hit the right sideline with a backhand, finally ending the game with a cross-court forehand that — you guessed it — hit the line. Panova, who has never beaten a top-30 player, stared in shock. Panova had been crushing serves and forehands all day, but, clearly rattled, grew tentative, and Sharapova pounced. She won her next service game easily and broke Panova’s serve on a second break point after Panova sprayed a forehand wide. Sharapova won, 6-1, 4-6, 7-5. “I think I was dwelling too much on my mistakes, what I was doing wrong, not really being in the present, something that I’m really usually good at,” Sharapova said. “I just really tried to take it a point at a time, think positively and change my thought process a little bit.” With a parade of other seeded women having lost in the first round, Sharapova’s victory means that she will not face an opponent ranked in the top 20 until the quarterfinals at the earliest, if she continues to win. She agreed that her draw had suddenly become unusually easy. “Yet there are always girls coming up that are rising, doing well,” said Sharapova, who will play No. 31 seed Zarina Diyas in the third round. “But I don’t think the focus is really on the other side. I think especially after today’s match, I really just want to focus on what I have to do.” No. 3 seed Simona Halep and No. 7 Eugenie Bouchard, who are also in Sharapova’s half of the draw, won in straight sets Wednesday. On the men’s side, second-seeded Roger Federer and No. 6 Andy Murray advanced to the third round, with only Federer losing a set. Federer lost his second service game and then the first set after Simone Bolelli of Italy began the match playing extremely well. But Federer broke Bolelli in the first game of the second set and was never challenged again, winning by 3-6, 6-3, 6-2, 6-2. “I’m happy I’m still in the tournament because there for a while today it wasn’t looking very good because Bolelli was playing very well,” Federer said. “But it’s always a good feeling fighting your way out of a match.” Federer served 15 aces and got in two-thirds of his first serves. He rushed the net 36 times, winning 21 of those points. He will next play Andreas Seppi, who beat No. 29 seed Jeremy Chardy in four sets. Tomas Berdych, the seventh-ranked Czech, had a shaky start to his second-round match Wednesday, losing an early service break to Jürgen Melzer of Austria by double-faulting. But he soon broke Melzer back and won the first set by blanking him, 7-0, in a tiebreaker. In the second set, Berdych broke Melzer in the sixth game after the Austrian dumped a forehand into the net and won the set, 6-2. Melzer was broken at the same point in the third set, this time by hitting a sliced backhand into the net. Berdych managed to win 14 of 17 net points and won the match, 7-6, 6-2, 6-2. Murray easily won his second-round match against Marinko Matosevic of Australia, 6-1, 6-3, 6-2. Murray all but apologized in an Australian newspaper before the match for the drubbing he was about to administer to one of their countrymen. “I was timing the ball well on the return and serving well from the beginning of the match, and it helped a lot because obviously the crowd were behind him,” Murray said later. He said the warm conditions allowed him to hit a lot of high bouncing balls that Matosevic had trouble handling. “So when the temperature’s like this, I quite like it,” he said. No. 10 Grigor Dimitrov also dropped a set, but advanced. He will meet Marcos Baghdatis, a former finalist here, who defeated No. 20 seed David Goffin of Belgium, 6-1, 6-4, 4-6, 6-0.

Maria Sharapova
Australian Open
Roger Federer
Andy Murray
Tomas Berdych
Richard Gasquet
Tennis


Arizona: Instructor Killed While Showing Uzi to Girl, 9

Abstract: A shooting instructor was accidentally shot and killed while showing a 9-year-old girl how to use an automatic Uzi. Mohave County sheriff’s officials say the instructor, Charles Vacca, 39, was standing next to the girl on Monday when she pulled the trigger and the recoil sent the gun over her head at Last Stop shooting range in White Hills.

Arizona
Charles Vacca
Guns
Fatalities,casualties
Accidents and Safety


A Saudi Royal Shake-Up With a Goal of Stability

Abstract: RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — In a series of predawn appointments on Wednesday, King Salman of Saudi Arabia eased the potentially treacherous issue of royal succession by placing a new generation of security-focused leaders first in the line of succession. The far-reaching changes carry the potential to reshape not only the kingdom and its place in the region, but also its relations with its most important ally, the United States. “The government is now in the hands of the next generation, under the supervision of the king,” said Khalid al-Dakhil, a Saudi political analyst. With Saudi Arabia locked in bloody proxy wars with its longstanding regional rival, Iran, for influence in Yemen and Syria, the 79-year-old king promoted the two princes most responsible for the kingdom’s security. Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, 55, the interior minister who has headed the kingdom’s counterterrorism efforts, was installed as crown prince, with King Salman pushing aside his youngest half brother, Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, 69. The defense minister, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who may be in his mid-30s or even younger and is one of the king’s youngest sons, was named deputy crown prince. It was a startling move in a royal dynasty that puts great stock in age; when lining up to greet the king, Al Saud princes long stood in a row according to age. And Prince Saud al-Faisal, who served as foreign minister for four decades, was replaced by the much younger Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. While not of royal blood, Mr. Jubeir is well connected in Washington and has recently served as the international spokesman for the Saudi-led Arab coalition that intervened this month in Yemen’s civil war. Propelling the moves are the death, aging and ill health of the top princes, as well as frustration with what Saudi leaders see as American neglect and an overeagerness to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran. As with many important decisions in the kingdom’s opaque ruling structure, the changes were announced by a royal decree. This one was released at 4 a.m. on Wednesday. It is a historic change, in that Prince Mohammed becomes the first heir apparent who was not a son of King Abdulaziz, who founded the kingdom in 1932. By nominating a grandson, the king answered a question that has been hanging over Saudi Arabia for at least a decade, as succession passed from one ailing, elderly son of the founding monarch to the next. “This is King Salman’s solution to the aging-leader problem,” said a veteran Saudi analyst and onetime adviser to the government, Jamal Khashoggi. “I am sure that the king, who is aware and has an interest to preserve the dynasty in Saudi Arabia, came up with this solution.” The new leaders, relatively young, consider terrorism and Iran to be the biggest security threats. They have shown little interest in democratic or social reforms. While advocating strong ties to the United States, they are increasingly willing to act independently — as in the Yemen campaign. While the new appointments may cause some grumbling among left-out princes, they were not likely to destabilize the monarchy, said Steffen Hertog, an associate professor of comparative politics at the London School of Economics who studies Saudi Arabia. “I don’t think there is any organized resistance, and no one else in the family still has a strong power base,” he said. Few Saudis were surprised by Prince Muqrin’s removal, which Saudi state news media said was by his own request. In addition to leading the country’s widely praised counterterrorism effort, his successor, Prince Mohammed, is a son of the longtime interior minister, Nayef bin Abdulaziz, who held the sensitive position of liaison to the country’s influential religious conservatives. Still, some saw an inauspicious precedent: If King Salman could remove the crown prince designated by his predecessor, what would stop the next king from overriding King Salman’s choice? Image Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the powerful interior minister, was named next in line for the Saudi throne. Credit Saudi Press Agency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images “In a sense, the king has set a precedent that may actually harm his son’s future career as much as aiding it,” Michael Stephens, the head of the Royal United Services Institute in Qatar, wrote in an essay published online by Al Jazeera. The new line of succession clearly centers state power in the hands of King Salman and his two successors at the expense of other branches of the family, Mr. Hertog said. All three men share a security-oriented view of the region that has led Saudi Arabia to pursue a more openly interventionist foreign policy. In the past four years, the kingdom has struggled to deal with political upheaval across the region that has resurrected the rivalry between the Sunni Muslim majority and the Shiite minority that stretches back to the earliest era of Islam. In Iraq, King Salman has maintained Saudi Arabia’s role in the United States-led coalition that is bombing the jihadists of the Islamic State, even as that bolsters the fortunes of Iran’s allies in Baghdad. The Saudis have also stepped up coordination with Turkey to arm rebel groups fighting in northern Syria against the Iran-backed government of President Bashar al-Assad, contributing to recent rebel advances there, analysts said. Saudi leaders have long been frustrated that the United States has not done more to force Mr. Assad from power in Syria or to limit Iran’s influence in Iraq. The three men have also been the architects of Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen, its southern neighbor, where the Houthis have seized territory and forced the Saudi-backed president into exile. Fueling these interventions is a prevailing sense among Saudi leaders that the United States, its longtime ally and security guarantor, has withdrawn from the region, leaving a vacuum that Iran has exploited. The Obama administration’s focus on reaching a deal with Iran on its nuclear program has only increased this sense of neglect, Saudis say. “With the withdrawal of the U.S. and the collapse of Syria and Iraq, and the exposure of the influence of Iran reaching the borders of Saudi Arabia, I think Saudi Arabia and the other gulf states concluded that they have to step in to protect themselves,” said Mr. Dakhil, the Saudi analyst. But such interventions come with risks, especially if they exacerbate conflicts in ways that might pose a threat to Saudi Arabia. Chaos in Syria has provided a haven for the Islamic State, whose supporters are increasingly trying to target the kingdom. And any loss by the Houthis in Yemen could be exploited by Al Qaeda “Saudi Arabia is responsible for Yemen,” Mr. Khashoggi said. “It must finish the job and bring stability, or it will be blamed for it just like Bush is blamed for Iraq, and that is not a good position.” Aside from consolidating the throne around two key princes in the security establishment, the new line of succession also restores the Sudairi clan to the core of power. The seven sons that King Abdulaziz had with Hassa bint Ahmed al-Sudairi, his favorite wife, long formed a powerful alliance within the sprawling royal dynasty. For nearly three decades, King Fahd and two Sudairi brothers, Prince Sultan, the defense minister, and Prince Nayef, the interior minister, were the triumvirate who ran the kingdom, brooking little criticism and jailing dissenters. King Abdullah, who succeeded King Fahd in 2005, somewhat diluted the grip of the powerful clan, but with these changes, King Salman, a Sudairi, has firmly returned his clan to center stage. The decree announcing the changes said that it had been approved by the Allegiance Council, a committee made up of one member representing the family of each of the roughly 36 sons of the founding monarch. But in the past, some senior princes, notably Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, the father of the billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, have suggested that they should be considered for succession. It was considered an unlikely prospect, since Prince Talal was banished in his youth for leftist tendencies. It was not immediately clear what happened in the Allegiance Council that led to the elevation of the two young princes. With 7,000 members of the ruling family, periodic predictions that the House of Saud was wobbling have long seemed implausible. The fear instead was that competing factions within the Al Saud clan, with princes controlling the key governorates and military branches, would turn on one another in the fight for the throne. If King Salman’s decision sticks, that appears less likely, as he has named successors who are expected to be around for decades to come.

King of Saudi Arabia Salman,Salman bin Abdul-Aziz


20,000 Days Down the Road, a Night on the Path

Abstract: JAFFREY, N.H. Let us take a walk in the woods. With no afternoon commitments, one of the great perks of retirement, this is what Jim and Eleanor McQueen decide to do: take a walk in the woods on a pleasant September afternoon. Nothing ambitious. Back in time for dinner. Truth be told, Eleanor could do without the walk; she would be just as happy to work in her flower garden. But Jim has always loved to hike, and now with this new right knee of his, he is eager to make up for lost time. They are both 81; best they go together. Twenty minutes later, their white sedan pulls up to a sign that welcomes them to the densely wooded Heald Tract. It refers to a “short, 1.5 mile hike that is part of a more extensive trail system.” That’s the one, says Jim, who researches these things — though Eleanor describes this research as getting mailings “from every cuckoo outfit out there.” Yes, the McQueens have quarreled now and then during their 55 years of wedded bliss. Or, as Eleanor puts it: “We’re at swords’ point all the time. All the time!” The only trail opening they see is a few yards down the road; blue rectangles on trees seem to suggest the way for this short hike. If it’s 3 o’clock now, they reason, we’ll be out by 4. Short-sleeve shirts over T-shirts are fine. In they go. They hike under maple and beech, past stone walls and small ponds, through an old orchard where they pluck some apples to eat. After a while, Eleanor says this is the longest damn mile-and-a-half she’s ever walked. Jim studies the pink map he picked up during his research, but it provides no comforting, geo-specific certainty. Overhead, a canopy of trees blots the sunlight. They keep walking, hoping to find that certainty around the next bend. After another while, Eleanor asks, What time is it anyway? Jim reaches for his glow-in-the-dark Timex, the one with the broken wristband. Seven o’clock, he says, and they both know they have to get out of here now. Their hopes dim with the fading light. They are not lost so much as trapped by the descending darkness. Jim suggests that they plop down for the night. Eleanor readily agrees, which pleasantly surprises Jim. Are you having fun yet? Eleanor teases. Yeah, yeah, Jim says. They do not worry about things that go bump in the night; they are 81. Their concern is the dropping temperature. They try to snuggle on the rocky, sloping ground, but their exposed arms are too cold. They slip their arms into their shirts, sit beside each other, and begin to talk. If this were a movie, the McQueens would now reflect on their shared 55 years and profess their love for each other. But this is real life. Some things are just understood; stipulated, you might say. Stipulated: That they were introduced at a Catholic social at Columbia University in 1950. Jim was a World War II Navy veteran of the Pacific theater and Eleanor was a nurse. They married and eventually settled in Somers, Conn., where they had three children. Stipulated: That over the next half-century, they did the best they could. Jim, a chemical engineer, often suffered the vagaries of big business; the toughest came in 1970, when a new job meant uprooting the family and moving 100 miles north to Jaffrey. Eleanor kept the house together, then returned to nursing to help pay the tuition bills coming simultaneously from three colleges. Stipulated: That in retirement, they may still butt heads, but they also still put heads together. On the dining room wall, for example, there hangs a framed saying: “May You Live All the Days of Your Life.” She did the calligraphy; he made the frame. Eleanor should be taking her blood pressure medication about now. Felix the cat is probably waiting to be let in. The cellphone is sitting on a windowsill. Jim wouldn’t use it anyway, reasoning that the situation isn’t dangerous enough; Eleanor would, though, just to alert people. They amuse themselves by imagining their children’s response to all this (“You did what!”), and shouting to a passing airplane (“We’re here! We’re here!”). They seek warmth by lying on top of each other, though this proves awkward, what with their arms inside their shirts. We’re babes in the woods, Eleanor thinks, and suddenly she is a child again, watching one of her older sisters — Grace, wasn’t it? — in a junior high school production of the Humperdinck opera “Hänsel und Gretel.” Grace would die in her mid-20s, but now here, in the wooded darkness, her baby sister is singing the evening prayer: When at night I go to sleep Fourteen angels watch do keep Two my head are guarding Two my feet are guiding Two are on my right hand Two are on my left hand Two who warmly cover Two who o’er me hover Two to whom tis given To guide my steps to heaven. Hansel and Gretel veer between dozing and shivering. I wish two angels would bring us blankets. Having fun yet? Dawn comes, and two people who have spent more than 20,000 days as husband and wife continue their walk through the woods — to the way out. Soon the children will find out. Soon Eleanor will write down her account of the night, which will prompt Jim to write down his account. They don’t exactly match. But right now Jim and Eleanor are finding their way again, and she is carrying some of those plucked apples.


Sperm - Sleek, Fast and Focused: The Cells That Make Dad Dad - Natalie Angier

Abstract: We are fast approaching Father’s Day, the festive occasion on which we plague Dad with yet another necktie or collect phone call and just generally strive to remind the big guy of the central verity of paternity — that it’s a lot more fun to become a father than to be one. “I won’t lie to you,” said the great Homer Simpson. “Fatherhood isn’t easy like motherhood.” Yet in our insistence that men are more than elaborately engineered gamete vectors, we neglect the marvels of their elaborately engineered gametes. As the scientists who study male germ cells will readily attest, sperm are some of the most extraordinary cells of the body, a triumph of efficient packaging, sleek design and superspecialization. Human sperm are extremely compact, and they’ve been stripped of a normal cell’s protein-making machinery; but when cast into the forbidding environment of the female reproductive tract, they will learn on the job and change their search strategies and swim strokes as needed. Sperm are also fast and as cute as tadpoles. They have chubby teardrop heads and stylish, tapering tails, and they glide, slither, bumble and do figure-eights. So while a father may not be entitled to take the same pride in his sperm as he does in his kids, it’s fair to celebrate the single-minded cellular commas that helped give those children their start. Sperm are pretty much the tiniest cells in the human body. The head of a mature, semen-ready sperm cell spans about 5 microns, or two ten-thousandths of an inch, less than half the width of a white blood cell or a skin cell. And a sperm cell is absurdly dwarfed by its female counterpart, the egg, which, fittingly or not, is among the biggest cells in the body. At 30 times the width of a sperm, the egg is massive enough to be seen with the naked eye. But men have the overwhelming quantitative edge in the gamete games. Whereas current evidence suggests that a human female is born with all the eggs she will have, and that only about 500 of her natal stock of one million will ever ripen and have a shot at fertilization, a male from puberty onward is pretty much a nonstop sperm bakery. Each testicle generates more than 4 million new sperm per hour, for a lifetime total of maybe 12 trillion sperm per man (although the numbers vary with the day and generally slope downward with age). The average ejaculation consists mostly of a teaspoon’s worth of nonspermic seminal fluid, a viscous mix of sugars, citric acid and other ingredients designed to pamper and power the sperm cells and prepare them for difficult times ahead; the sperm proper account for only about 1 percent of the semen mass. Yet in that 1 percent may be found 150 million sperm, 150 million human aspirants yearning to meet their mammoth other halves. To which one can crack, dream on. Not only are there far too few eggs to go around, but also the majority of sperm couldn’t fertilize an ovum if it were plunked down in front of them. “Only a perfectly normal sperm can penetrate an egg,” said Dr. Harry Fisch, a urologist at Columbia University Medical Center, “and the majority of sperm are abnormally shaped.” Some may have pinheads, others have two heads, some lack tails, a third don’t move at all. As a rule, Dr. Fisch said, a man is lucky if 15 percent of his sperm are serviceable. “One guy I saw had 22 percent,” he said, “but that’s rare.” Creating sperm is a complex, multistep operation in which immature cells spend one or two months wending through a labyrinth of tubules coiled in the testes, at each stage losing a bit more of the blobby contours and yolky contents of standard cells and assuming the streamlined profile of sperm cells. The operation is a delicate one that must be performed at temperatures some 2 degrees below that of the body, which is why the testicles hang outside the body, where breezes can keep them cool; why a man hoping to become a father is advised to skip the hot baths and saunas; and why a bout of high fever can disrupt fertility for months. The model sperm that emerges at tubule’s end has, like an insect, three basic body segments. Of crowning importance is the head, which is taken up largely by a supercondensed tangle of 23 chromosomes, half the complement of DNA found in a normal body cell and thus the right number to merge with an egg’s 23 chromosomes and begin tapping out a whole new body. At the tip of the sperm head is the acrosome, a specialized sack of enzymes that help the sperm penetrate through what Joseph S. Tash, a male fertility expert at the University of Kansas Medical Center, calls the “forest” of ancillary cells and connective tissue that surrounds the ripe, ready egg. Below the head is the midpiece, which is packed with the tiny engines called mitochondria that lend the sperm its motility, and below the midpiece is the tail, a bundle of 11 entwined filaments that thrashes and propels a sperm forward at the estimable pace of one-twelfth of an inch per minute, the equivalent of a human striding at four miles an hour. Sperm do not really hit their stride until they are deposited in the female reproductive tract, at which point chemical signals from the vaginal and cervical mucus seem to spark them to life. Released from the buffering folds of their seminal delivery blanket, they at first swim straight ahead, torpedo-style, “with very little back and forth of the head,” Dr. Tash said. They may linger in the cervical mucus for a couple of days, or cross the cervix and enter the uterus. If an egg has burst from its ovarian follicle and been plucked by a fallopian tube, sperm can sense its signature, a telltale shift in calcium ions. The sperm become “hyperactivated,” said Moira O’Bryan, a sperm expert at Monash University in Australia, switching to “a crazed figure-eight motion” ideal for boring through barriers. The ovum eggs them on, signaling some to play the sacrificial kamikaze and explode their enzyme sacks prematurely, loosening the corridor for other, shapelier sperm to pass through intact. A few dozen fine-figured sperm find their way to the final barrier, the egg’s plasma membrane, where they waggle with all their crazy-eight might and beg to be chosen — but only one will be taken, will fuse with the egg and be absorbed into its rich inner sanctum. In a fraction of a second, an electrical, ionic jolt dramatically changes the egg’s outer coat, to forestall the lethal intrusion of additional sperm. The wheels are in motion. How do you like your new tie?

Sperm
Men
Testicles
Genetics and Heredity
Infertility