Brian Williams Says Fabrications Came From ‘Bad Urge Inside of Me’

Abstract: Brian Williams tried to repair his sullied reputation with the public on Friday during his first interview since being removed as anchor of “Nightly News” on NBC, but crisis communications experts, critics and social media users said his efforts fell short of making a convincing argument. Speaking with his NBC colleague Matt Lauer in a taped segment for the “Today” show, Mr. Williams blamed his ego for telling stories that were not true, and said his fabrications “came from clearly a bad place, a bad urge inside of me.” But he also spoke about getting things mixed up, and when pressed by Mr. Lauer about whether he had lied and should have admitted that he did, he said: “I know why people would see it that way. It is not what happened. What happened is a whole host of other sins.” The qualifying, and the parsing of words, was problematic, and betrayed a lack of sincerity, said Mike Paul, president of Reputation Doctor, a crisis and reputation public relations firm in New York. “There are no ifs or buts in a true apology,” Mr. Paul said. “This was a non-apology apology.” Andrew D. Gilman, chief executive of CommCore Consulting, a crisis communications group, said that while Mr. Williams took a first step, he still is far from rebuilding trust. “At the end of the day, people want to have the traditional anchor as somebody they can trust,” he said. “I don’t think that came through. It is not his chair. It is the anchor chair.” NBC announced on Thursday that Mr. Williams would not return to his previous position after suspending him in February. He will return to work in August as an anchor of breaking news and special reports for the MSNBC cable news network. Once considered one of the country’s most respected broadcast journalists, Mr. Williams was found by NBC to have made a number of “inaccurate statements” about his experience during a helicopter attack in Iraq and other issues. The interview broadcast on Friday was part of an apology tour that started this week in efforts to rebuild trust and respect in Mr. Williams among viewers and NBC staff members. Mr. Williams was under additional scrutiny, communication experts said, because much of the controversy erupted after he gave a muddled, insufficient apology in February after his fabrication about the helicopter attack stirred a skeptical response. While he owned up to fabricating stories, Mr. Williams did not apologize directly for telling falsehoods about his reporting experiences or betraying trust, which some communications experts called a mistake. “I know why people feel the way they do,” Mr. Williams said. “I get this. I am responsible for this. I am sorry for what happened here. I am different as a result, and I expect to be held to a different standard.” Experts said Mr. Williams should have avoided making excuses, called his actions unacceptable and simply apologized outright. Some said he should have also apologized to the military veterans who originally raised complaints about his statements. The public is willing to give celebrities second chances after they make mistakes, experts said, but they need to be humble, direct and authentic, and commit to rebuilding trust. Video A compilation of Brian Williams’s television appearances shows how his accounts of a 2003 episode on military helicopters in Iraq gradually became more perilous. Others wondered whether legal issues prevented Mr. Williams from making a clear and direct apology. Another major issue came when Mr. Lauer, who said that neither he nor Mr. Williams had agreed to any conditions or guidelines for the interview, repeatedly pressed Mr. Williams on whether he lied. Mr. Williams wouldn’t go that far, and said he had not intended to mislead people. “It is so clear to me that I said things that were wrong,” he said. “I told stories that were wrong. It wasn’t from a place where I was trying to use my job or title to mislead.” Communications consultants said that Mr. Williams’s response conveyed a sense that he still hadn’t fully come to terms with his actions or their consequences. “A lie is absolutely seeking to mislead someone, and an exaggeration is a lie,” Mr. Paul said. “There is either a lie or the truth. We teach our children that.” NBC conducted an internal investigation into Mr. Williams’s reporting that was not made public. The network said in a news release on Thursday that Mr. Williams had “made a number of inaccurate statements” about his experiences in the field. Mr. Williams did not directly address a question from Mr. Lauer about whether he wanted to correct the record of other instances of his reporting. Rather, he said that “what has happened in the past has been identified and torn apart by me and has been fixed and has been dealt with.”

Brian Williams
NBC
Apologies
NBC News
News media,journalism
Ethics Misconduct Malfeasance
TV


Orders for Durable Goods Rise, but Report Shows Sliding Consumer Sentiment

Abstract: WASHINGTON — A jump in demand for commercial airplanes bolstered orders for long-lasting American factory goods last month. But orders for most other goods fell as businesses cut spending, a possible sign of concern about the partial government shutdown that began Oct. 1. The Commerce Department said on Friday that orders for durable goods rose 3.7 percent in September, above the 0.2 percent gain in August. But a 57.5 percent jump in aircraft orders accounted for nearly all the gain. Durable goods are meant to last at least three years. Orders for core capital goods, which include industrial machinery and electrical equipment, fell 1.1 percent. The 1.5 percent gain in August was revised sharply lower to 0.4 percent. Economists pay particular attention to core capital goods, which exclude aircraft and military-related goods, because they are a sign of business confidence. Another report on Friday showed that American consumer confidence fell in October as concern grew that the shutdown and political fight over the nation’s borrowing limit would slow growth. The University of Michigan said that its index of consumer sentiment fell to 73.2 from 77.5 in September. The index has fallen for three straight months after reaching a six-year high of 85.1 in July. A measure of Americans’ expectations for future growth fell to its lowest level since late 2011, pulling down the overall index. Image Credit The New York Times Falling confidence can cause Americans to spend less, which would slow the economy. Lower confidence “going into the holiday season could somewhat limit consumers’ plans to splurge,” said Yelena Shulyatyeva, an economist at BNP Paribas. Americans made more negative references to the federal government’s impact on the economy this month than at any time in the roughly 50-year history of the survey. Richard Curtin, the survey’s director, said that it was the third time in the last three years that negative comments about the government had reached a high. The previous two occurred when Congress and the White House fought over raising the borrowing limit in August 2011 and when a package of tax increases and spending cuts, known as the fiscal cliff, loomed at the beginning of this year. The Commerce Department figures echo other economic data that suggest companies were reluctant to expand or invest in new equipment in September, as budget battles in Washington intensified. Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics, said the drop in core capital goods orders points to weaker growth in the October-December quarter. Shipments of core capital goods, which are used to calculate economic growth, also dipped last month, a sign that growth in the July-September quarter will also be weak. Mr. Ashworth cut his growth estimate for the third quarter to an annual rate of 1.8 percent from 2 percent. Commercial aircraft is a volatile category that can swing widely from month to month. Boeing said it received orders for 127 planes in September, up from just 16 in August. In September, demand fell for machinery, fabricated metals, electrical equipment and autos. Orders rose for computers and communications equipment and military-related goods. Excluding aircraft, autos and other transportation goods, orders fell for the third straight month.

Durable Goods
Commerce Department
Consumer Confidence
US Economy
Airlines,airplanes
Closings


2012 French Open: Li Na Loses and Sharapova Struggles as Surprises Continue

Abstract: PARIS — Behind the microphone, Li Na sighed. She had no answers, only questions, like the reporters who packed around her, who wondered about the weather and whether she had prepared properly for this French Open . Li, the defending women’s singles champion at Roland Garros, did not play as if she were defending anything Monday. She played as if she were lost, and then she did lose, in a spectacular collapse. The final tally read 3-6, 6-2, 6-0 in favor of Yaroslava Shvedova of Kazakhstan, a doubles specialist who entered the match ranked 142nd in singles. Behind the microphone, Li fought back tears. She also fought with reporters, the edge her game lacked Monday suddenly evident in her answers, the back-and-forth emotional and contentious. They kept returning to the French Open title she seized in 2011 , the way it changed her life and ballooned her bank account, the way it changed her, if indeed it did. “You say I won last year,” Li shot back. “It’s one year already. I just lose one match, so don’t try to push me down.” With Li’s loss, the women’s singles draw had another presumed contender fall, leaving the bracket even more wide open than before. Gone is Victoria Azarenka, the top seed, and Agnieszka Radwanska, the third. Gone, too, is No. 5 Serena Williams. Even Maria Sharapova , seeded second but often shaky on clay, needed three grueling sets filled with double faults and unforced errors to stave off an unseeded Czech named Klara Zakopalova, 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-2, and advance to the quarterfinals. Sharapova will assume the No. 1 ranking if she makes the final. The way this women’s singles tournament has gone, that is far from a sure thing. Some familiar players remain, like Sam Stosur, the reigning United States Open champion, and fourth-seeded Petra Kvitova, who on Monday ended the run of Varvara Lepchenko , a player from Uzbekistan who settled in Allentown, Pa., but trains in Queens. But with another day of tournament play concluded, it was harder, same as it has been harder every day, to look at the women’s draw and find either a favorite or an upset that would any longer be considered big. The men’s draw, on the other hand, has had no major upsets. Andy Murray, the No. 4 seed, started slowly but defeated Richard Gasquet, 1-6, 6-4, 6-1, 6-2, to reach the quarterfinals. He will face No. 6 David Ferrer, who beat Marcel Granollers, 6-3, 6-2, 6-0. Second-seeded Rafael Nadal routed Juan Monaco, 6-2, 6-0, 6-0, setting up a meeting with his countryman Nicolas Almagro, a straight-sets winner over Janko Tipsarevic. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the No. 5 seed, and No. 9 Juan Martín del Potro finished matches held over from Sunday and will have little time to dwell on them. On Tuesday, Tsonga faces No. 1 Novak Djokovic and del Potro meets No. 3 Roger Federer. This will be the fifth consecutive year the French Open has crowned a first-time women’s singles champion. That list includes Li and Francesca Schiavone, the 2010 winner, who fell to Lepchenko in the third round. Asked why women’s singles champions struggle to repeat here, Li said she could not speak for the others. She said she needed to take a break before Wimbledon and “totally forget tennis.” She added, “I’m not a machine.” Sharapova played like one throughout the first week here. She lost zero games in her first match, two games in her second match and three games in her third. On Monday, Sharapova walked onto Court Philippe Chatrier to gusts of wind and sprinkles of rain, football weather for a tennis match. Hers took 3 hours 11 minutes, and it included the first set she lost in this tournament. Afterward, she discussed the tailored jacket she wore on court and copped to her diva reputation with a smile — “Glamour and diva,” she said. “Hmm. Yeah, that’s me” — but she avoided directly answering questions about whether she should now be considered the women’s favorite. Sharapova, it should be noted, has won every Grand Slam tournament except this one. “I have no control of who wins and loses except on my matches,” Sharapova said. “Those are just things I can see and hear about and those are just results.” Li’s opponent, Shvedova, had reached the singles quarterfinals last year. If she seemed in a zone, perhaps it came not from practice but from matches, lots and lots of matches. Not only did Shvedova play in singles qualifying, she also played doubles and mixed doubles and, of course, the main singles draw once she made it in. She looked like a female version of Tipsarevic, without the tattoos. Both wear those spectacular racquetball-type glasses, presumably to shield their eyes, augmented by colorful outfits, the individual style strong. Forbes reported Li had signed seven new endorsement deals after she won the French Open last June; she signed a book deal and doubled her career prize money in 2011; she became not just the best player from China but basically her own corporation. She was asked Monday if that hurt her preparation. Her glare came back, icy and intense. “I mean, this is tennis,” she said.

Li Na
Tennis
Shvedova Yaroslava
Sharapova Maria
French Open (Tennis)


Woman Who Died in Brooklyn Tests Negative for Ebola

Abstract: A woman who died, apparently of a heart attack, at a Brooklyn hair salon and who had recently been in one of the countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak tested negative for the virus, New York City health officials said on Wednesday. The woman, whose name was not released, came to the United States almost three weeks ago from Guinea, in West Africa, the city’s health department said. She did not show symptoms of the virus before her death, but was being monitored because she was within the 21-day incubation period for the virus. The city has been tracking about 300 people who have traveled in West Africa. Fire Department officials said they were called to the hair salon, African Queen Hair Braiding, on Tuesday for a patient in cardiac arrest. The woman was pronounced dead there. Jim Long, a Fire Department spokesman, said the medical examiner’s office collected blood specimens from the woman and gave them to the health department for testing. The only person to receive an Ebola diagnosis in the city, Dr. Craig Spencer, recovered and was released on Nov. 11 from Bellevue Hospital Center. He contracted the virus while in Guinea with the aid group Doctors Without Borders.


Worried About Their Dollars, More Are Turning to Gold

Abstract: It is the resurgent passion of the doomsday crowd, a bet that everything will go wrong. No matter what has you worried, they say, the answer is gold. Inflation, deflation , government borrowing or the plunging euro — you name it — the specter of these concerns has set off a dash to gold, driving the precious metal to new highs and illustrating how fears of economic turmoil have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. And gold bugs, often dismissed as crackpots who hoard gold bars in the basement, are finally having their day. “I just think you’re in a world where a lot of chickens are coming home to roost,” said John Hathaway, manager of the Tocqueville Gold fund. “Gold is an escape hatch.” The most visible new gold enthusiasts range from the Fox News commentator Glenn Beck on the right to the financier George Soros on the left, with even some sober-minded Wall Street types developing a case of gold fever. While their language may differ, they share a fundamental view that the age-old refuge of gold is relevant again, especially as other assets like stocks and national currencies show signs of weakness. Now, individual investors are following their example around the world. The United States Mint is running short of gold coins, and the South African mint increased Krugerrand production by 50 percent late last month, to its highest level in 25 years, on brisk European demand. The debt crisis in Europe and the ensuing drop in the value of the euro are the most recent catalysts for gold’s spike last week to $1,254 an ounce, a record before adjusting for inflation, but the deeper concern is that even in the United States, government borrowing is unsustainable and the day of reckoning is at hand. Sales of American Eagle one-ounce gold coins tripled in May from the month before. If governments print more money to pay off their debts, the logic goes, inflation will destroy the value of the dollar , the euro and other paper currencies — thus enhancing the value of gold. What is more, with tax increases unlikely and with Europe on the brink, the unthinkable — a sovereign debt default or the collapse of the credit system — has suddenly become thinkable. To be sure, gold buyers have always been motivated by fear. What has changed is that some of the most respected investors on Wall Street are now among the fearful. “In recent years, we have gone from one bubble and bailout to the next,” David Einhorn, a New York money manager who was among the first to foretell the failure of Lehman Brothers, said in a speech last month. “Our gold position reflects our concern that our fiscal and monetary policies are not sufficiently geared toward heading off a possible crisis.” Since ancient times, gold has been deemed intrinsically valuable, holding its worth even as governments fell and currencies collapsed, while seemingly casting a spell on its owners. Still, gold can go down — sometimes sharply. After peaking in 1980 at more than $800 an ounce, gold sank over the next two decades, bottoming out at just over $250 an ounce in 1999. But unlike paper assets that can become worthless, gold always retains at least some value. These days, gold is also something of a political Rorschach test. On conservative talk radio, opposition to the Obama administration’s economic policies and warnings that huge budget deficits will set off runaway inflation have made gold a hot topic of on-air discussion — and lured gold companies as advertisers. Tongue only half in cheek, Glenn Beck advised his audience to consider “Gold, God and Guns,” while laying out three possible scenarios for the economy: recession , depression or collapse. One major advertiser on Mr. Beck’s show is Goldline , a huge California marketer of gold coins and bars that is also a sponsor of programs hosted by other prominent conservative commentators like Laura Ingraham and Mike Huckabee. Mr. Beck has said he “was a client of Goldline long before they were a client of mine,” adding: “I personally don’t buy gold as an investment. I buy it for protection.” Of course, the right hardly has a monopoly on gold. Mr. Soros, a prominent donor to liberal causes and candidates, holds more than $600 million in bullion and gold mining shares. Even as worries about the global economy have intensified, gold has become easier to buy. Although some people still regard bars of gold in a vault as the ultimate insurance policy, exchange-traded funds , or E.T.F.’s, that hold gold have exploded in popularity in recent years. Gold E.T.F.’s, which trade like stocks but track the price of physical gold, account for 1,856 tons of gold, up from less than 500 tons in 2005, according to Credit Suisse. Besides luring individual investors, these funds have also made gold more appealing to hedge funds and other institutions, allowing them to own vast amounts of gold without the burden of having to store it. John A. Paulson, a top New York hedge fund manager who earned billions betting against subprime mortgages, holds $3 billion worth of gold E.T.F.’s, making gold the largest single position in his $35 billion portfolio. Daniel J. Arbess, who manages more than $2 billion in Perella Weinberg’s Xerion fund, is another new gold lover. A few years ago, he said, he would not have taken a second look at gold as an investment. But now Mr. Arbess, a Harvard Law graduate and a generally conservative investor, is very serious about gold. Spiraling deficits in the United States, Japan and Britain are unsustainable, he said, and could eventually hurt confidence in what are called “fiat currencies” — paper money not backed by gold, including the United States dollar. “Indebted countries may soon be forced to choose among three politically difficult alternatives: sharp cuts in expenditures, debt default or printing money to pay off debt,” he said, with the last option the most likely outcome. Gold, he said, is a logical hedge against this risk, because firing up the printing presses ignites inflation. True believers note that gold has risen in each of the last nine years, and that while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is down 13 percent since 2001, gold is now worth nearly five times what it was then. For all its newfound respectability, gold still manages to bring out the inner survivalist in its adherents. Gold bugs like Peter Schiff of the investment firm Euro Pacific Capital in Westport, Conn., envision a black market arising in the United States, with merchants refusing paper money and insisting on gold instead, while Mr. Hathaway, the gold fund manager, says the credit system has entered “the end game.” “People probably still think I’m nuts,” Mr. Hathaway said. “But I’m not talking to myself in an isolation chamber anymore. We’ve got company now.”

Gold
Economic Conditions and Trends
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
International Trade and World Market


Fiat May Balk at Investment in Naples Plant

Abstract: ROME — Fiat stopped short of confirming a major investment to ensure the survival of its Naples plant on Wednesday, after receiving less than full support from workers for plans to increase productivity there. A groundbreaking plan on working conditions promoted by the Fiat chief executive, Sergio Marchionne, was seen as a watershed for Italian industrial relations. Backing came from around 62 percent of 4,642 workers who voted on Tuesday at the Pomigliano plant. Mr. Marchionne had demanded unanimous support from five unions at the plant before investing €700 million, or about $860 million, and moving production of the new Panda model to the plant from Poland. “Fiat acknowledges the impossibility of reaching agreement with those obstructing” the plan, the company said in a statement. It added that Fiat would “work with those unions who took up the responsibility of the accord.” But the statement made no mention of the investments or of car production. While some union members felt it was positive over all, others called for clarity. “It confirms the investment. The Panda will come to Pomigliano,” said Bruno Vitali, head of one of the unions supporting the deal. “I also think Fiat will want more guarantees, so there is work to do.” But Giuseppe Farina, a leading official in part of the same union, said he wanted more detail. “I am interested to understand if Fiat is confirming the Panda project at Pomigliano,” he said. “If Fiat is not confirming that, we are strongly against.” Mr. Marchionne had proposed making shifts more flexible, restricting strikes and limiting benefits like sick days. The Fiat chief is one of the first auto executives to complain about overcapacity in Europe and to press for change. The Italian labor minister, Maurizio Sacconi, has said that Fiat should be satisfied with the unequivocal result of the ballot and that Mr. Marchionne would certainly respect a deal to invest in Pomigliano. Four out of five unions at the plant expressed support for Fiat’s proposal, with only the Fiom union saying it broke rules on rights to strike and sick leave. Fiom called on Fiat to reopen negotiations to reach consensus. Fiat shares fell 2 percent to close at €9.33 on Wednesday in Milan. Analysts at Banca Akros in Milan said the ballot was disappointing. “We would have expected a much higher percentage of positive votes, (in the range of at least 83 percent),” they wrote in a note. The plan calls for Fiat to increase employment at the Pomigliano plant to 15,000 and produce as many as 300,000 Pandas a year there. Two-thirds of the €8 billion to be invested under Fiat’s 2010 to 2011 strategic plan have been earmarked for operations in Italy. Pomigliano, located in Italy’s underdeveloped and crime-plagued south, has a history of labor unrest and the worst productivity of all five of the company’s Italian plants, even taking into account slow demand for the Alfa Romeo models produced there. With the Italian economy struggling to emerge from its worst post-war recession, unemployment in the region is already running far above the national average of nearly 9 percent. Fiat is Italy’s biggest manufacturer and a major player in its car industry, which accounts for 11.4 percent of the €1.5 trillion economy. Economists say the proposed Fiat deal could set an important precedent for labor relations nationwide, moving Italy into line with more productive European countries like Germany. Ford Motor plans to hold back on discounting in Europe, even as it cedes market share in the region and as the end of cash-for-clunker programs saps demand, Bloomberg News reported. “The scrappage effect has come off since the beginning of the year, but the industry is still being drugged by heavy incentives,” John Fleming, Ford’s top European executive, said Wednesday in an interview at an industry conference in Bilbao, Spain. “Our message to the team is let’s go for profit in a very difficult world.” Ford’s European market share slipped to 8.7 percent in the first five months from 9 percent a year earlier, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. The company projects that European car sales will fall to as low as 14 million vehicles this year, from 15.9 million a year ago, following the end of government incentives to encourage people to trade in old cars for new ones. Additional public budget cuts will add to market pressures on the industry in the second half of 2010, said Mr. Fleming, chief executive of the Ford of Europe unit. “Now, we are facing debt issues and austerity measures — none of these austerity packages are going to help car sales,” he said.

Fiat SpA
Factories and Manufacturing
Naples (Italy)


Killing Haunts Ecuadoreans’ Rise in New York

Abstract: Always crowded and often perilous, the twisting road that brought the Sucuzhañay family from Ecuador to New York City has transformed the city, first neighborhoods in Queens and more recently parts of Brooklyn where surging numbers of newcomers have made Ecuadoreans one of New York’s largest Hispanic communities. The father came first. In the early 1990s, unable to support his family as a farmer in southern Ecuador, Florentino Hidalgo Sucuzhañay made his way to New York — his family refused to say how he got here — and found work as a dishwasher. Over the next decade, six of his children made the same journey. His son Jose was among the most successful. Starting as a waiter, he became an owner of a Brooklyn real estate firm and bought several buildings. He sent money home to his family in Ecuador, where his two children live. But on Dec. 7, a familiar story of immigrant striving took an awful turn. As Jose walked with his older brother Romel home from a bar in Bushwick, Brooklyn, their arms around each other, three men attacked them, shouting anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs and beating Mr. Sucuzhañay with a bat, the police said. He died on Friday night at a Queens hospital, one day before his mother, who had been awaiting a visa, arrived from Ecuador to see him. Though the murderous attack has provoked widespread anger, it has been particularly poignant for Ecuadoreans, who not only shared a homeland with the victim, but saw in the Sucuzhañay brothers (pronounced suh-KOO-shen-y’eye) the kind of success they were reaching for. And there was outrage because of the assault’s setting in a neighborhood where Ecuadoreans had begun to carve out a niche. The Sucuzhañay family — there are 12 siblings, 6 of whom live in the United States — joined thousands of their neighbors who, starting in the late 1970s, left Ecuador’s impoverished southern highlands and made New York City home to the largest community of Ecuadoreans in the country. In later years, as border security tightened, many Ecuadoreans paid enormous sums to migrant smugglers, or coyotes, who secreted them into the country on unsteady boats, or through safe houses and across the Mexican desert. Most immigrants settled in Corona and Jackson Heights, two neighborhoods in Queens that have long been home to concentrations of Ecuadoreans. Some spent their first nights on camas calientes — warm beds in cramped boarding houses — before the lucky ones found their own places. The No. 7 subway line carried them to jobs in Manhattan. In 1990, there were about 76,000 Ecuadoreans in New York. Today, there are about 170,000 Ecuadoreans, the fourth-largest Hispanic group in the city after Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Mexicans, according to census figures analyzed by demographers at Queens College. The community’s growth has been fed by a succession of economic crises in Ecuador, and by people like Jose O. Sucuzhañay, whose accomplishments seemed to signal what was possible. His younger brother Diego said Jose “was ambitious.” After arriving from Ecuador, Jose Sucuzhañay held down a number of jobs, including one at a pizzeria. Restless, he started to invest his money and became interested in real estate. After working for another real estate firm, Jose struck out on his own. “He didn’t like bosses,” Diego said. Jose was able to put together enough money to buy buildings in Brooklyn and Queens. At one building, on Hancock Street in Ridgewood, Queens, a tenant, Conrad Marshall, said Jose Sucuzhañay was so well known that he rarely had to list apartments; word of mouth was enough. Mr. Marshall, a banker, said Mr. Sucuzhañay was “always professional.” His death was the second reported killing of an Ecuadorean immigrant in the New York area in a month. In November, Marcelo Lucero was attacked and stabbed by a group of teenagers in Patchogue, on Long Island, who wanted to attack a “Mexican,” the authorities have said. Mr. Lucero, like Florentino Sucuzhañay, had come from southern Ecuador in the early 1990s, to send money home. In both cases, the attackers almost certainly did not know that their victims were from Ecuador — the men who beat Mr. Sucuzhañay called him a “Hispanic” — but that did not stop Ecuadoreans from feeling vulnerable. Gloria Castro, who lives in Bushwick, close to where Mr. Sucuzhañay was attacked, said she did not allow her children to go out at night. There have been no arrests in the case. The killing of another Ecuadorean immigrant, in 1994, turned Walter R. Sinche into an advocate and led him to found a cultural group that works to preserve Ecuadorean identity. The victim in that attack, Manuel Aucaquizhpi, a homeless man, was beaten to death in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, by attackers using lead pipes, chair legs and other weapons. One of the attackers was convicted of criminally negligent homicide. Mr. Sinche said he was trying to ensure that such an attack would never happen again. “Our community is growing,” he said, “and so are all the problems and success.” There have been two or three waves of recent Ecuadorean migration to New York, according to people who study the community. Beginning in the late 1950s, middle-class immigrants came from Quito and the coastal cities of Guayaquil and Manta, said Jose Elias Rodriguez, an insurance wholesaler and the founder of the Ecuadorean World Federation. Visas were relatively easy to get, he said, and the mostly middle-class immigrants settled in areas with established Hispanic communities, joining Colombians in Queens and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Brooklyn. A second wave of immigrants, most of them undocumented and working class, started coming about 20 years later, mainly from rural towns in the southern provinces of Azuay and Cañar. Florentino Sucuzhañay, in fact, came from a small town in Cañar. David Kyle, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis, said that longstanding ties between New York and Ecuador were based in part on the once-lucrative trade in Panama hats: Ecuadoreans had produced them since the 1800s, forming relationships with banks and buyers in New York. Many southern Ecuadoreans were employed making the hats until the 1960s, when men stopped wearing them and cheaper versions in Asia undercut the business. “The people who were most hurt were rural communities involved in the basic production of hat weaving,” Professor Kyle said. “Nothing ever replaced the hats.” The unraveling of the Ecuadorean economy and classic migration patterns that propel migrants towards people they know brought the rural southerners to New York in the 1980s. “It was all from a handful of communities in these two provinces,” Mr. Kyle said, referring to Azuay and Cañar, as he described an intensely communal phenomenon. “All the men from one community are going, but in the neighboring town, no one is going.” The Immigration Reform Act of 1986 put many of those immigrants on a path to legal status, which led to even more migration, Mr. Kyle said. The first wave of Ecuadorean immigrants, like Mr. Rodriguez, provided services for the next. In southern Ecuador, new houses appeared, built with money sent from New York. The houses got bigger, but as more Ecuadoreans came to New York, many of the new homes sat empty. As border controls tightened in the 1990s, the trip to New York became more dangerous and more expensive. When Ecuador adopted the dollar as its currency a few years later — sending prices rising — a new surge of migrants headed to New York. That, combined with the heightened border security after 9/11, meant that Ecuadoreans who used to travel back and forth to their home country increasingly chose to stay in New York, Professor Kyle said. Gloria Castro’s husband, Juan, a banana farmer, came to New York first, in 1998, paying smugglers $10,000. He flew to Panama, and then to Guatemala. From there, he traveled in a series of vehicles from one safe house to another, passed off from Ecuadorean smugglers to Mexicans. “It was barbaric, without eating for two, three days at a time, without water,” he said. Once in New York, he saved enough money to send back for his family, borrowing some from a relative. Juan worked at a construction company, and separated trash at a recycling plant. He paid coyotes about $50,000 so the rest of his family could join him. The family lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Bushwick. “I worked and worked and worked, and thanks to God, I brought my family,” he said. If Queens was the beachhead for Ecuadoreans, Bushwick was regarded as something of a frontier. More than 4,000 Ecuadoreans moved there from 1990 to 2007, according to the census. Diego Sucuzhañay tried to persuade his brother not to. “I said the neighborhood wasn’t safe,” he said. “But he wanted to be useful.” Jose was planning to make a trip back to Ecuador later this year, Diego said. Instead, on Sunday, as mourners gathered at a vigil in Bushwick in Jose’s memory, his mother made arrangements to send her son’s body back home to be buried.

Ecuador
New York City
Hispanic-Americans
Hate Crimes
Immigration and Refugees
Brooklyn (NYC)
Bushwick (NYC)
Murders and Attempted Murders
Queens (NYC)


Italian Court Upholds Berlusconi Sentence, Setting Stage for Crisis

Abstract: ROME — For years, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi deftly navigated the labyrinth of Italian justice, always finding an exit — until Thursday, when Italy’s highest court handed him his first definitive sentence, upholding a prison term for tax fraud and sending Italy’s fragile government on the road to crisis. The court called for a re-examination of a ban on Mr. Berlusconi’s holding public office, but did not reject the ban. This staved off the imminent collapse of the right-left coalition of Prime Minister Enrico Letta, which was formed to tackle Italy’s dire economy — but probably only bought it more time. Parts of Mr. Letta’s center-left Democratic Party are reluctant to share power with a now-convicted criminal. Meanwhile, the center-right People of Liberty party looked poised to split between Berlusconi loyalists and those seeking more independence from the former prime minister in a future bloc. “The barometer signals a very strong storm,” said Giovanni Orsina, professor of contemporary history at LUISS Guido Carli and author of “Understanding Berlusconi.” “I expect a lot of quake tremors in the next few days, but I think that the government will survive.” The Court of Cassation confirmed Mr. Berlusconi’s four-year prison sentence, which had already been reduced to one year under a law aimed at combating prison overcrowding. Two lower courts had convicted Mr. Berlusconi and other defendants on charges of buying the rights to broadcast American movies on his Mediaset networks through a series of offshore companies and falsely declaring how much they paid to avoid taxes. In other cases over the past 20 years, Mr. Berlusconi, a three-time prime minister, has been convicted of tax evasion, buying judges and embezzlement, but was either acquitted on appeal or the statute of limitations had run out. (A trial in which Mr. Berlusconi is accused of paying for sex with a minor is continuing.) Image Protesters demanding prison for former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gathered on Thursday in front of Italy’s high court in Rome. The court’s decision upheld a prison term for tax fraud. Credit Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters Thursday’s ruling, like everything about Mr. Berlusconi, polarized Italy. Some of the former prime minister’s loyalists called it the equivalent of a judicial coup d’état, while his critics called it tantamount to Al Capone being convicted of tax evasion. After the ruling, a furious, saddened and uncharacteristically unsmiling Mr. Berlusconi took to the airwaves of Rete4, one of the channels in his Mediaset empire, and declared his innocence, attacking the magistrates who he said had tormented him for 20 years and become an antidemocratic force within Italy. “The sentence is absolutely groundless and violates my personal liberty and my rights,” Mr. Berlusconi said. The man who once called himself “the politician most persecuted by prosecutors in the entire history of the world throughout the ages,” added that he would once again create Forza Italia, the party he founded in 1994. He had dissolved that party to form People of Liberty with another right-wing party. “Long live Italy, long live Forza Italia,” he concluded. Mr. Berlusconi is widely seen as wanting to stay in public office in the hope of wielding the political influence he needs to protect his business interests. Thursday’s ruling did not automatically send Mr. Berlusconi to prison or house arrest. It is up to the same appeals court in Milan that convicted him to formally request his arrest. Mr. Berlusconi’s lawyers can also request a suspended sentence. Experts said that considering his age, 76, Mr. Berlusconi would more likely face house arrest or community service than prison. Opposition politicians immediately called for Mr. Berlusconi to resign from Parliament. Vito Crimi, a member of Parliament from the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, called it “shameful” that Mr. Berlusconi would stay in public office. Image Mr. Berlusconi during a voting session at the Senate in Rome last month. Credit Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press In other circumstances, the ruling might have dealt a final blow to Mr. Berlusconi’s role in politics. But today Mr. Berlusconi, who came back from the dead in national elections in February, is an element of stability in the coalition government. The government was formed to help put Italy’s economy back on track. Unemployment is 12 percent, rising to 39 percent for young people, and the national debt is close to 130 percent of gross domestic product, the second highest in the euro zone after Greece. But the government has chosen to delay a series of decisions on hot-button issues like taxes. Even as political analysts said they did not expect the government to fall, if only because of a lack of clear political alternatives, they also said the coalition would not escape unscathed. “It’s very hard that the broad coalition government can go ahead as if nothing happened,” said Stefano Folli, a political columnist for the business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. President Giorgio Napolitano, who would have to decide whether to call new elections if the coalition unraveled, urged calm. “The country needs to rediscover serenity and cohesion on vitally important institutional matters which have for too long seen it divided and unable to enact reforms,” he said in a statement. Paolo Flores d’Arcais, the editor of the left-wing monthly magazine MicroMega, said that the Democratic Party would “pretend nothing happened,” because its leaders had already chosen to govern with Mr. Berlusconi, even if its base had not. “For the left it doesn’t mean anything because the left doesn’t exist,” he said. “If Italy were a normal country, it would obviously be a new chapter. But if Italy were a normal country this would never have happened because Berlusconi wasn’t electable.” Many Italians were unsurprised by the ruling. “After dozens of trials, it was probable that he must have done something,” said Massimo Dolce, a restaurant owner in Rome. But Mr. Dolce did not think the government would fall. “When you have a broad coalition, the ruling has less of an impact,” he said. “It won’t be an epochal shift because the conditions for that don’t exist in this country.” He added, “It’s all very gray in this country.”

Italy
Silvio Berlusconi
Tax Evasion
Criminal Sentence


For Medical Marijuana in New Jersey, a First Few Ounces

Abstract: MONTCLAIR, N.J. — They skulked in and out like criminals, shoulders hunched, heads down, declining to comment. It was the opening of New Jersey’s first and so far only medical marijuana dispensary, in downtown Montclair, on Thursday, nearly three years after the law allowing such enterprises was passed . The opening had been delayed by political battles over whether it would lead to the de facto legalization of marijuana. Patronizing the dispensary was perfectly legal, provided a doctor’s prescription for a list of specified medical conditions was presented, yet the pioneering visitors — it was not clear if they were patients — seemed none too eager to declare themselves, perhaps taken aback by the horde of news reporters there to greet them. One visitor, who would give only a first name, Ed, said he had been in pain since being shocked on the job for an electric company in 2003. Not for them the whimsicality of the Magical Mystery Tour and other happy drug allusions of the ’60s. The opening was all business, down to the pious name, the Greenleaf Compassion Center. Visits were by appointment only, and a uniformed security guard stood outside the front door at 395 Bloomfield Avenue, checking identifications before letting anyone into the store, which had black glass windows, making it all but impossible to see inside. The operators of the dispensary did step out for a cigarette break, strictly tobacco. The chief executive, Joseph Stevens, 40, said he had been a funeral director for 12 years in Nutley, where he was inspired to go into his current business by seeing firsthand the suffering of families whose relatives had died of painful diseases. “It’s a comforting experience,” Mr. Stevens said, describing how patients had reacted to the dispensary. “They’ve lived in the shadows for so many years.” He said this was a place where they could get the therapy they needed yet “feel safe, have no fear of prosecution, and go home.” His business partner, Julio Valentin Jr., 43, the chief operating officer, is a former Newark police officer who had run a Montclair establishment, the Café Eclectic, known for its funky ambience, up the street for 15 years. Mr. Valentin said the town had been very welcoming, and stressed that the dispensary was “not going to be your typical head shop or mom-and-pop shop. This is a professional program.” He had designed the interior décor, which he described as “beautiful,” with “earth tones, a soothing atmosphere, leather couches, like an upscale doctor’s office.” The partners said they had been friends for 32 years, and Mr. Stevens said they were growing the marijuana in a “very clean, very secure” warehouse. Asked if they had ever personally smoked their product, Mr. Stevens said, “No, I don’t. I just don’t like it,” but quickly added that if he were sick, that would be a different story. Mr. Valentin gave a theatrical shrug and a sheepish smile. They said they received several patients Thursday and dispensed between a half ounce and two ounces of marijuana to each of them. Two inspectors from the State Health Department also paid a monitoring visit. Montclair is known as a suburban version of Park Slope, Brooklyn , a town with an haute bohemian feel, home to many writers and journalists. But the dispensary is in a down-at-the-heels section of the commercial strip reserved for offbeat and pariah businesses: a string of ethnic restaurants; a cigar lounge; a head shop with an adults-only section in back; and right next door, an abortion clinic with a forbidding concrete facade. Passers-by reacted mostly enthusiastically to the dispensary on its first day. Looking on in fascination, Francis David Robinson, or F.D.R., as he likes to be called, a debonair 74-year-old who runs errands for tips, said, “Could I get a freebie?” Told that his glaucoma was one of the conditions that could qualify, along with diseases like terminal cancer and muscular dystrophy , he said dismissively, “I hate doctors.” One person unabashedly rejoiced in the arrival of the dispensary. Surrounded by colorful glass bongs, Candi Cooper, the manager of the combination head shop and adult shop, called the Montclair Video Boutique, with peace signs in every “O” in its name on the sign out front, said she looked forward to a fruitful relationship. “It’s kind of like a hospital,” she said, of the dispensary. “You get morphine and Dilaudid at the hospital. Does that make the place that sells medical equipment to put the morphine in a bad thing? No.”

Medical Marijuana
Marijuana
New Jersey
Montclair (NJ)
Law and Legislation


Looking Behind the Decline in Credit Card Debt

Abstract: The substantial drop in credit card debt in the United States since early 2009 has been widely attributed to newly frugal consumers. But analysts say that a significant portion of the decline is actually the result of financial institutions writing off billions of dollars in credit card debt as losses. While consumers have done their part by shying away from exceeding new credit limits and turning increasingly to debit cards, the question is to what extent are consumers voluntarily reducing their balances, and to what extent are banks making the decision for them. The answer has wide implications for the broader economy as banks try to determine whom to extend credit to — and how much — and as businesses try to adapt to the changes in consumers’ spending patterns. “There is a lot of debate going on right now among economists,” said Cristian deRitis, the director of credit analytics with Moody’s Analytics, which is studying the issue. “Is there truly deleveraging or are charge-offs removing a lot of balances?” Kenneth J. Clayton, senior vice president for the American Bankers Association for card policy, said the impact of tighter credit was working its way through an economy in which consumers continue to feel the effects of joblessness, lower incomes and declining housing values. “It has a braking effect on the economy, and the key thing is to get to the right balance,” he said. “We are in a process right now of finding that balance.” Consumer debt has been steadily falling over the last couple of years. The Federal Reserve said last week that household liabilities — including mortgages , credit card accounts and nonrevolving accounts like auto loans — totaled $13.9 trillion in the second quarter of 2010, down $200 billion from the same quarter a year earlier. Outstanding revolving accounts, mostly credit cards, declined to $832.2 billion from $915 billion in that same period, the Fed said in a separate report earlier in the month. But economists said they were trying to calculate how much of the drop in credit card debt was the result of banks writing it off — charging off, in bank parlance. Mr. deRitis, of Moody’s, said he was examining the credit card accounts of individual borrowers. He said he expected to learn which borrowers were voluntarily paying down their debt, which were taking on new debt, and to what extent existing borrowers were curtailing balances by paying more than the minimum. While the study is not yet complete, Mr. deRitis said it appeared so far that most of the overall decline is in the form of charge-offs. “There clearly is a differential impact with defaulting borrowers having greater difficulty finding credit in the future,” he said. “Nondefaulting borrowers are reducing their overall credit exposures but not at an especially rapid pace, given stagnant incomes and wealth.” “Bottom line — we are becoming more of a polarized set of consumers,” Mr. deRitis added. A study released last week by Evolution Finance’s CardHub.com , calculated that financial institutions charged off about $20 billion each quarter from early 2009 through early 2010, about equal to the amount of the decline in outstanding credit card debt. “This study’s findings give real insight into how seriously the recession crippled consumers with credit card balances,” said Odysseas Papadimitriou, the company’s chief executive. “These write-offs also indicate that many banks are still experiencing deep losses and are still in serious trouble.” But Gregory Daco, a senior economist with IHS Global Insight, said that the revolving debt figures alone did not explain consumer behavior. He said the Fed figures showed that consumers were clearing their balance sheets of various kinds of debt — mortgages, revolving debt for credit cards and nonrevolving debt like car loans . Still, Mr. Daco said, the numbers only “give you an overview of the consumer credit picture.” “You don’t know,” he said, “the exact proportion of how much people are actually paying off. It is a fact that part of the downward trend in consumer credit is due to charge-offs, but it doesn’t give you a clear answer as to what are the main underlying causes of that. And the best way is to refer to anecdotal evidence.” Analysts said they had found that consumers who once relied on home equity are shuffling their finances, with some not paying their mortgage and using the temporary increase in liquidity to pay off credit cards, which they can then use again and again for daily necessities. The consequences of that behavior play out in offices like that of Urmi Mukherjee, a financial counselor in Kansas. She had a client who “had to make a decision between paying the mortgage and paying credit card debt,” she said. “We see it very often.” Ezra Becker, a director in the financial services business unit of TransUnion, a credit information company, said any bank that ignored shifts in consumer behavior did so at its peril. That behavior, he said, “needs to inform lender policy or lender strategy in how they approach their customers both today and going forward.” In interviews, officials at several of the top American banks that issue credit cards said they believed the worst of the troubled balances have worked their way through the system. Some said in filings this month that their delinquency rates for August were at their lowest levels this year and that they expected write-offs to decline, too. “We see deleveraging of the consumer,” said Jerry Dubrowski, a spokesman for Bank of America, adding that a frugal consumer, decreasing demand for credit and declining balances were also factors. “As they work the balances down, they are not replenishing that with new debt,” he added. Bank of America’s chief executive officer, Brian T. Moynihan, said in April that consumer loan balances were down $37 billion from a year earlier, with $34 billion of that reduction the result of charge-offs. But Mr. Moynihan said he expected future credit card losses to be lower. Even private label cards, or those that can be used only at a single retailer, report an improvement. The largest issuer of such cards, General Electric, said delinquencies and charge-offs were lower in the second quarter of 2010 than in the previous quarter and year. “U.S. consumers are by and large deleveraging,” said Stephen White, a spokesman. “They are buying less and electing to make purchases more often with debit cards.” Economists agree that one of the consequences of deleveraging has been the shift to debit cards from credit cards, a migration that started before the recession but accelerated during it, said James Van Dyke, president of Javelin Strategy & Research. David Robertson, the publisher of The Nilson Report, an industry newsletter, said the dollar amount of purchases put on debit cards is set to exceed those on credit cards sometime in 2014. That is partly because more cardholders will fall by the wayside as issuers raise prices for outstanding balances in response to the Card Act, he said. “Between the recession-related psychology of not wanting to spend, out of fear of what the future might bring, you have the reality of people who simply don’t have a credit card anymore.”

Credit Cards
Consumer Behavior
Credit and Debt
Banking and Financial Institutions
United States Economy


Fuel Targets Threatened by Demand for Big Autos

Abstract: DETROIT — Despite praising automakers for recent gains in fuel economy, two federal agencies said on Monday that surging consumer demand for pickups and sport utility vehicles made it unlikely that the industry could meet the government’s ambitious projections a decade from now. If fuel prices remain low, and trucks continue to outsell cars, the industry will probably not meet the goal of 54.5 miles per gallon as a fleetwide average by 2025, but will probably come in at only about 50 miles a gallon, according to a report by the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency. The report issued on Monday was termed a draft by administration officials, and included input from the California Air Resources Board, as well as the two federal agencies. That lower fuel economy number would translate into higher levels of carbon dioxide emissions, which environmentalists say would make global climate change worse and undercut efforts to curtail greenhouse gases agreed to by the Obama administration in last year’s Paris climate accord. The report’s release kicks off a lengthy review period for the nation’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy program, and sets up a battle between car companies and environmental groups to influence the final mileage rules. Automakers want lower requirements, while clean-air advocates are pushing for big reductions in vehicle emissions. “The 54.5 miles-per-gallon average is at risk,” said Daniel Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign in Washington. “Rather than weaken the projections, the regulators should be tightening the standards for larger vehicles.” But automakers say a fair analysis of market conditions is required to set realistic mileage projections for coming years. “Getting the midterm review analysis right is crucial for everyone,” said Gloria Bergquist, an official with the Alliance for Automotive Manufacturers, which represents a dozen carmakers including General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler. Federal officials said that the midterm review released on Monday was primarily a factual tool to help set final CAFE rules for 2022 to 2025. After a public comment period, the government is expected to complete those mileage standards by early 2018. The agencies said the automakers had exceeded the initial forecasts for fuel-economy improvements set when the latest CAFE rules were set four years ago. “Automakers are developing more technologies to improve fuel economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions than we thought possible a few years ago,” said Janet McCabe, a senior E.P.A. official. When the CAFE rules were adopted in 2012, the government set 36.6 miles per gallon as the projection for 2017 model-year vehicles. The industry is on track to meet that number using a complex formula that sets specific mileage standards for vehicles of various sizes. Companies can also improve their CAFE score with credits for technology such as electric cars. But the government’s projection of a 54.5 miles-per-gallon average in 2025 is in jeopardy because of a marked shift in demand toward heavier vehicles with lower mileage standards. When the forecast was made four years ago, regulators expected that cars would account for about two-thirds of overall vehicles sales in the United States in 2015. Low gas prices, however, have contributed to increasing demand for lower-mileage models such as pickups and S.U.V.s. In the first six months of this year, for example, trucks and S.U.V.s accounted for 58 percent of all vehicles sales in the United States. The industry successfully lobbied four years ago for the current midterm review period. Ms. Bergquist, of the auto alliance, said that auto companies would incur extra costs if the mileage rules were set too high. “Excessive regulatory costs could impact both consumers and the employees who produce these vehicles,” she said. Environmental groups vowed to push for the highest possible mileage standards during the public comment period leading up to the final rules. “The national fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards are a vital program to cut oil use and reduce the risk of climate change,” said David Cooke of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Obama administration officials said the projections of 54.5 miles per gallon outlined in 2012 were based on different market conditions than those existing today. The officials also said, however, that technological innovations had consistently increased mileage in large and small vehicles. The broadest gains have been in gasoline-powered models, which have benefited from more efficient engines and transmissions, lighter materials and more aerodynamic designs.

Cars
California Air Resources Board
Vehicle Emissions
Union of Concerned Scientists
Fuel efficiency
SUVs
EPA
Transportation Department


T-Mobile to Make It Cheaper to Make Calls While Abroad

Abstract: Cellphone plans are a little like languages: they don’t always translate well in foreign countries. Often, travelers have to pay an extra $100 to their provider to get any cell service abroad. Or they must sign up for a short-term plan with a carrier in the country they are visiting. T-Mobile US, one of the largest phone carriers in the United States, wants to change that. The company on Wednesday said it was eliminating the charges that a customer normally paid to use their phone number and data service in a foreign country, called roaming fees. John Legere, T-Mobile’s chief executive, said in an interview that travelers had long been shocked by exorbitant cellphone bills after they traveled, so many people now just leave their phones off. He said the point of the change was to help the people who would pay $100 for service abroad. But it was also to help “the people who fear turning their phone on.” T-Mobile customers will be automatically enrolled in the free-roaming agreement on Oct. 31. Those who subscribe to the company’s plan, called Simple Choice, can take their smartphone to a foreign country and pay 20 cents a minute for voice calls. Text messages and data will be unlimited. Image John Legere, T-Mobile’s chief, expects new customer influx. Credit Mary Altaffer/Associated Press The free roaming benefit will apply to about 100 countries, including France, Spain, China, Japan and Russia. The plan is the latest aggressive move from T-Mobile, which has been on a campaign to disrupt the American wireless industry over the last year. The company has said its goal is to eliminate the things that make people angry with their phone companies. In March, the company shifted from requiring customers to sign two-year contracts . And in July, the carrier offered an option for customers to upgrade to a new phone after as little as six months, instead of waiting two years. The company also continues to offer unlimited data plans, which AT&T and Verizon Wireless discontinued long ago for new customers. The changes are working. In August, T-Mobile reported that it had gained 1.1 million customers in the last quarter, its largest growth in four years. The elimination of roaming fees raises a question: if the customers don’t have to pay the fee, then who will? Mr. Legere said he expected customers to continue joining T-Mobile in droves, which will more than make up for the money that could have been made from charging roaming fees. “We just changed the game to where our coverage map is now the world,” Mr. Legere said. “Our network is now by far a much bigger coverage area than AT&T and Verizon combined.”

T-Mobile US
Mobile phone
John J Legere
Price


Portrait of a Politician: Vengeful and Profane

Abstract: CHICAGO — Little in Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich ’s background prepared the people of Illinois for the man who was revealed in the criminal complaint that dropped like a bombshell here on Tuesday. Delusional, narcissistic, vengeful and profane, Mr. Blagojevich as portrayed by federal prosecutors shocked even his most ardent detractors. “I almost fell over,” said Cindi Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform and a frequent critic of the governor. “I was speechless and sickened. In all of the millions of indictments I’ve read over the last years, I can’t remember anything as vile as this.” Mike Jacobs, a Democratic state senator and former friend of the governor, suggested that Mr. Blagojevich may have lost his grip on reality. “I’m not sure he’s playing with a full deck anymore,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I think he brought a lot of this on himself. He’s so gifted, but so flawed in a number of fundamental areas. It’s like he dared the feds to come get him.” Drama and suspicion have long surrounded Mr. Blagojevich, a 51-year-old Democrat known locally for his quirky love of Elvis and a big black signature hairstyle of his own. Though he ran for office as a reformer, he has been embroiled for years in a federal investigation into hiring fraud that included multiple departments under his purview. More recently, his reputation was left badly damaged after the corruption trial of the political fund-raiser Antoin Rezko, who was convicted in June of fraud and bribery among other charges. Mr. Blagojevich’s name and administration surfaced again and again during Mr. Rezko’s highly publicized trial in Chicago. The governor’s approval rating, according to The Chicago Tribune, had sunk to 13 percent. Yet, despite what looked like his lead role over many years in a political theater of the absurdly corrupt, Mr. Blagojevich, the seemingly earnest son of a Serbian steelworker, was not charged with any wrongdoing. Rumors swirled, and denials were issued. Tuesday changed all that. It was not simply the extortion and venality with which he was charged that left mouths gaping, but the ruthlessness and grandiosity revealed in the federal wiretap transcripts, even as he knew he was being investigated. “You might have thought in that environment that pay to play would slow down,” the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said at a news conference announcing the charges. “The opposite happened: it sped up. Governor Blagojevich and others were working furiously to get as much money from contractors, shaking them down, pay to play, before the end of the year.” In the words of Dick W. Simpson, head of the political science department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a former city alderman: “It’s over the top, even for the governor.” Ms. Canary, the reform advocate, said she was trying to figure out the pathology that might explain such actions because they are not part of the classic style of Chicago corruption. “He was raised in the old Chicago ward system where the most important principle is loyalty,” she said. “It’s about protecting one another, spreading perks, and earning personal power. It’s not about huge personal enrichment.” But that, according to the 76-page criminal complaint, seems to be exactly what Mr. Blagojevich, who cast himself as a man of the people, was after. Whatever his current motivation, he came into office with a very different persona. As a young congressman representing the North Side of Chicago, Mr. Blagojevich was pegged as a rising star with a populist touch. Undistinguished as a lawmaker but with proven likability in and out of Chicago, he seemed hellbent on pushing reform and cleaning house in a state with an embarrassingly overt culture of political corruption. Running on a do-good theme as a candidate of change, he swept into the governor’s office earlier this decade mainly on promises that he would be different, that he would restore integrity to the governor’s office after the previous chief executive, George Ryan, was sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison for racketeering and fraud. “Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Illinois has voted for change,” he told a crowd at his victory party on election night in 2002. Back then, it was not a secret that Mr. Blagojevich had big dreams for himself that included the White House. The federal complaint suggested that he was disenchanted with being “stuck” as governor, and had his eyes still trained on the presidency — in 2016, since 2008 was a lost cause. Kent Redfield, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said Mr. Blagojevich had clearly come into office believing he was destined for bigger things, and may have been tripped up by that ambition. “The combination of arrogance and stupidity that would prompt him to continue in these types of behaviors is just stunning,” Dr. Redfield said. “There’s no feedback loop or reality check.” Mr. Blagojevich had grown increasingly isolated in recent years, particularly from his own state’s Legislature and even from his father-in-law, Dick Mell, a powerful longtime Chicago alderman who showed him the political ropes as a younger man. The governor was rarely seen around his offices in Chicago and Springfield, preferring instead to spend time at home on the North Side. “I believe he became a prisoner of his own home,” Mr. Jacobs said. Dr. Redfield said he had little sympathy for a man who regarded “the state of Illinois like it’s a big Chicago ward, where a U.S. Senate seat is like granting a zoning variance or liquor license.” He added: “The damage to the state, it’s going to take a long time to dig out.”

Illinois
Blagojevich Rod R
Frauds and Swindling
Extortion and Blackmail
Politics and Government
Ethics
Chicago (Ill)


Bomb Kills 8 in Yemen Near President’s Residence

Abstract: AL MUKALLA, Yemen — A bomb-packed car driven by a suicide attacker exploded at a checkpoint near the presidential palace in the southern city of Aden on Thursday, and security officials said at least eight people were killed. The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the blast, the latest in a series of assaults that underscored the frail security in a part of the war-ravaged country that was triumphantly reclaimed by the government less than six months ago. President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi was unharmed in the explosion, according to a security official and a witness. Officials said that the bomber appeared to have been targeting a convoy of senior officials who were driving toward the palace. Mr. Hadi was forced out of power last year by Yemen’s Houthi rebels and exiled from Sana, the capital. After spending months in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Hadi and other cabinet members returned to Yemen in September but stayed in Aden, proclaiming that it had been liberated from the Houthis. But the government, which is backed by a Saudi-led military coalition, still has only a tenuous hold on Aden and other parts of southern Yemen. Among the armed groups vying for power are Al Qaeda’s powerful affiliate and the Islamic State, which has carried out a series of large-scale attacks in Aden, including one in December that killed the governor of Aden Province. In a statement reported by news agencies, the Islamic State said the latest bombing had been carried out by one of its fighters, whom it identified by a nom de guerre, Abu Hanifa al-Hollandi. The war has devastated Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest country, which has long suffered one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world. In the latest measurement of deprivation, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said Thursday that more than half the population — about 14.4 million people — are “food insecure,” which means they are struggling to avoid hunger. “Food insecurity and malnutrition are becoming highly critical,” Salah Elhajj Hassan, the organization’s Yemen representative, said in a statement . Etienne Peterschmitt, the deputy representative, called Yemen “a forgotten crisis.”

Bombs
Yemen
Aden
Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi
Houthis
Saudi Arabia
Al Qaeda
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Terrorism


Search for Athletes Continues to Change

Abstract: HAVERFORD, Pa. — Four years ago, Greg Kannerstein, Haverford College ’s director of athletics, surveyed the convoluted intricacies of small-college athletic recruiting as it had evolved in his lengthy career and offered this appraisal. “The nature of the recruiting process gets more organized every year,” Kannerstein said. “The parents are more savvy, the athletes are polished and the institutions are meticulous. But if anything, it gets harder to predict, which, of course, is the one thing everyone is hoping to be able to do.” Kannerstein, who later became the college’s dean, died last year at 67, leaving a hole in the Haverford community. His legacy endures, however, said his successor as the athletic director, Wendy Smith. “Maybe the recruiting system is not any more predictable four years later, but Greg knew we had to be committed to it, anyway,” she said. “It is the only way to strike the athletic and academic balance. If you don’t go out and aggressively recruit, you aren’t going to find the top scholar-athletes because everyone is competing for them. If the school is committed to excellence, then athletics shouldn’t be any different.” In four years, however, the recruiting landscape has changed in a few notable ways. “YouTube is taking over,” the men’s lacrosse coach, Colin Bathory, said. “And that’s a good thing. Too many kids had to pay for expensive DVDs. For players to be able to shoot a game video one morning and for me to be able to see it that evening, that’s a breakthrough.” Several Haverford coaches said they thought YouTube had allowed the video part of the recruiting process to reclaim some of its authenticity. “I feel like homemade videos seem more genuine,” the softball coach, Jen Ward, said. Dave Beccaria, the baseball coach, laughed when he talked about the recruiting video he viewed last year on YouTube made by a freshman on his current roster. “He obviously was pitching to his father, who wasn’t very skilled as a catcher,” Beccaria said. “About every third breaking pitch, the father took one off the shins. But you know, I saw that he had a pretty lively breaking ball. And when I met the father, I commended him on his bravery.” Beccaria was less complimentary about a trend he sees with high school players who participate in 10 or 12 showcases in a spring and summer season. “It’s not necessary to go to every showcase event, and it might even hurt your chances,” Beccaria said. “As coaches, we talk about players who are so busy showing their skills, they no longer have time to work on their skills.” One issue raised frequently four years ago that continues to come up is whether athletic achievement should play any role in small-college admissions. “It will always be part of the debate,” said Jess Lord, Haverford’s dean of admissions. “And that is why athletes who are admitted must have more than one thing compelling about them. Athletics can be a part, it cannot be the whole.”

Haverford College
Draft and Recruitment (Sports)
Colleges and Universities
Athletics and Sports
YouTube.com


Bengals’ A.J. Green Is Fierce Playmaker With Quiet Approach

Abstract: CINCINNATI — Choosing his favorite catch as a Bengal would figure to be a strenuous exercise for A. J. Green, what with the one-handed miracle at Kansas City , the double-coverage touchdown against the Steelers and that end-zone fade in Denver all vying with a few other candidates. Alas, it is not. His answer tumbles forth without pause: a 21-yarder along the right sideline with eight seconds remaining last Sunday in Pittsburgh. That catch, on “just a simple corner route,” drew Cincinnati within field-goal range for Josh Brown, whose kick secured a 13-10 playoff-clinching victory. “Doggone it,” said James Urban, the Bengals ’ receivers coach, who laughed and shook his head when told of Green’s selection. “That’s him, man. That’s why we love him.” Playing a position notorious for its divas and showboats, for a franchise long accustomed to coping with the whims of Chad Johnson, Green embraces the understated. He does not perform CPR on footballs after touchdowns or wear Hall of Fame blazers or even signal first downs. He celebrates by slapping hands with his teammates. He flips the ball to the official. And then he does it again — and again and again. After a tantalizing rookie year, Green, 24, has established himself as one of the league’s superlative receivers this season, a 6-foot-4 vulture with no discernible weakness, as dangerous in the flat as he is across the middle as he is downfield. Heading into the Bengals’ (9-6) season finale Sunday against Baltimore, Green ranks seventh in the N.F.L. in receptions (95), fifth in yards (1,324) and tied for third in touchdown catches (11). A few teammates, unprompted, predicted in interviews that he would surpass Calvin Johnson’s single-season receiving yardage record (currently 1,892 and counting); inspired by Johnson’s nickname of Megatron, defensive end Carlos Dunlap is considering calling him Bumblebee, another character from the Transformers franchise, if it would direct more attention his way. The Hall of Fame receiver Michael Irvin cited Green’s grace, polish and versatility and characterized him as “the best all-around receiver in the National Football League — period.” “A guy like A. J. Green, when he popped out of his mom and the doctor tried to spank him, he caught the doctor’s hand,” Irvin said in a telephone interview. “He said: ‘Oh, I’m supposed to let you hit me? I’m sorry. I just naturally catch everything.’ A. J. Green has been a bad man from Day 1. This guy was born to play the position.” Green said he was humbled by the superlatives, dismissing comparisons to Randy Moss or Larry Fitzgerald as “an honor but definitely weird” while describing himself as “just a country boy from South Carolina.” That is, if country boys honed their hand-eye coordination through juggling, could dunk by seventh grade and had arms longer than a French documentary. “There are guys around the league who do certain things well,” said Bengals safety Chris Crocker, in his 10th N.F.L. season. “Mike Wallace can run by you, but he’s not the best route runner. Some guys are great after the catch, like Steve Smith. But A. J. does everything good. He can do it all.” On the field, Crocker meant. But also in the locker room, where Green’s arrival in 2011, as the fourth overall pick, coincided with the dawn of a new era — a new offensive staff, a new quarterback in Andy Dalton. Out went Chad Johnson a few months later, and in came Green, the alpha dog without pretense. “He’s never thrown a temper tantrum,” said the offensive coordinator Jay Gruden, who was hired three months before the 2011 draft. “He’s just come in and worked and done what’s expected of him and made himself better. I really can’t find one negative thing to say about him, and I usually can.” Bengals receivers had what Urban, hired a few weeks after Gruden, described as an “obnoxious habit” of waving for the ball when open. Green never waves, so now no one else does. He is repulsed by tardiness, so he shows up early to meetings, boards buses 20 minutes before departure. He demands perfection, so his fellow receivers do, too. “When something needs to be done or a play needs to be made, he’s the guy people look up to,” said the rookie Marvin Jones, one of five active Bengals receivers who are in their first or second year. “That’s the kind of guy you want around you.” Jones was around Green late Wednesday afternoon, when Jack Brennan, the team’s public relations director, interrupted a receivers meeting to announce that Green had been voted a Pro Bowl starter. As his teammates congratulated him by banging their desks, Green did not budge. “Not even a smile,” Urban said. “He said, ‘Thanks, fellas,’ and then we went back to watching film.” Green inherited his humility, if not his athletic gifts, from his parents, Woodrow and Dora, who joined him here for the second half of the season. Woodrow pulled triple shifts at a steel company, telling his son: “Nothing in life is free. Go get what you want.” Dora has worked for Walmart for nearly 26 years. When A. J. came home from school wearing a do-rag, she scolded him. “My son is not dressing that way,” Dora said she told him. Sure enough, she added, “it never happened again.” Dora and Woodrow instilled in him the importance of loyalty, a virtue tested but never compromised after he orally committed to the University of Georgia as a high school junior, upholding the nonbinding pledge for a full 16 months — fending off, among others, Urban Meyer on a visit to Green’s high school — before signing day. His lone misstep in college — he missed four games after selling a jersey for $1,000 to someone the N.C.A.A. determined was an agent — was offset by a standout career, and the Bengals yearned for a dynamic receiver to headline their offensive overhaul. Already smitten with his talent, Urban and Gruden wanted to assess his character, evaluate him in his natural environment. They took a plane to Georgia, meeting him for dinner at Porterhouse Grill, a popular steakhouse on the outskirts of campus. The coaches arrived to discover that Green had thought ahead to reserve a table, under his name. The longer they talked, the more Urban and Gruden liked him, and their impressions were confirmed the next morning, when chaos reigned at Green’s pro day. Scouts and coaches were barred from watching Green’s workout from the sideline because Green’s quarterback, by living outside the Athens metropolitan area, did not satisfy the league’s eligibility rules. “When Jay and I were driving back to the airport, I turned to him and said, ‘He handled everything as well as you could want,’ ” Urban said. “For a while, there was total confusion, but A. J. didn’t stress about it, he didn’t bat an eye. Now you talk to him, and he talks about how stressful it was, but we had no idea then.” Two weeks later, when Green visited the Bengals, Gruden asked him which quarterback he would most like to play with. Again, no hesitation. The guy from Texas Christian, Green replied — Dalton. The Bengals took him in the second round. “Everybody says we’re a dynamic duo and all that kind of stuff,” Dalton said. “I’d like to think we can keep this going.” Green, like Dalton, knows only of triumph in Cincinnati, not the decades of futility or bag-wearing fans: two seasons, two playoff berths, with the promise of more — perhaps much more — to come. More success, more muted celebrations, more catches for a highlight reel that, whether Green deems them impressive or not, grows by the week. “He’s the perfect guy to be considered the face of this franchise,” said Dunlap, the defensive end who has known Green since eighth grade. “He’s like Derrick Rose, prime example. A great guy. A humble guy. And he just plays ball.”


Belarus: Swedish Envoy Expelled

Abstract: Belarus has expelled Sweden ’s ambassador for “being too supportive of human rights,” Foreign Minister Carl Bildt of Sweden said Friday. Belarus said that it merely chose not to extend the envoy’s accreditation, calling his activities destructive. Western nations say President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus stifles human rights. Belarus said that Ambassador Stefan Eriksson had met with opposition activists and that Sweden had provided a university with books about human rights. Mr. Bildt said that Sweden would not allow Belarus’s incoming ambassador to take up his post and that two diplomats from Belrus had been asked to leave Sweden. Last month two Swedish activists were reported to have used a plane to drop hundreds of teddy bears bearing messages supportive of human rights into Belarus.

Diplomatic Service Embassies and Consulates

Human Rights and Human Rights Violations


With Shares Battered, A.I.G. Ousts Leader

Abstract: For the second time in three years, the board at American International Group , the giant insurance company, replaced its chief executive Sunday in the wake of its falling stock price and regulatory concerns about its accounting. Martin J. Sullivan, who was named chief executive in 2005 after an accounting scandal claimed his predecessor, was removed by the board at a closed-door meeting. Robert B. Willumstad, chairman of the company’s board and a former top executive at Citigroup, was named as Mr. Sullivan’s successor, A.I.G. said in a statement . The board also named Stephen F. Bollenbach, a member of the A.I.G. board and a former chief executive of Hilton Hotels, as its lead director. The change at the top comes as pressure has mounted on the company to respond to a steady stream of bad news, including record losses, that has pounded down the stock price more than 40 percent since December. A.I.G.’s shares closed at $34.18 on Friday, down from $57.05 in December. In 2005, Mr. Sullivan’s predecessor, Maurice R. Greenberg, was asked to resign by board members unnerved by news that regulators had sent the company subpoenas. Mr. Sullivan’s departure comes just weeks after A.I.G. confirmed that it was the subject of new investigations by regulators and the Justice Department. Investors had every reason to hope that Mr. Sullivan’s tenure would be free of such turmoil. Months after he took office, A.I.G. restated financial results covering a five-year period and went on to negotiate settlements with regulators. There were supposed to be no more surprises. Instead, the mortgage crisis ensnared the company. It has had to revise its accounting for complex transactions involving securities backed by home loans, generating huge paper losses and leading investors to worry that other companies that made similar investments might also adjust their accounting methods. The removal of Mr. Sullivan is an attempt to calm fears of new surprises from the company. “We’ve had too many negative surprises, and until we don’t see those surprises, this stock I don’t think is going to rally,” said Andrew Kligerman, an insurance analyst at UBS. Changing top management is only a first step, he continued. “While there were several large investors calling for the ouster of Martin Sullivan, that doesn’t solve everything.” In an interview late Sunday, Mr. Willumstad said that his first step as chief executive would be to meet with A.I.G.’s regulators and with rating agencies. The company will also hold a conference call with investors on Monday morning, he said. “In several weeks I intend to get on a plane and go around the country and around the globe meeting with all the leadership of A.I.G.,” Mr. Willumstad said, both to learn his way around the company and to evaluate its various business lines. He said he did not anticipate additional personnel changes in the company’s senior management team in the coming weeks. Three years ago, when the board asked for the resignation of Mr. Greenberg, it was amid a widening accounting scandal. Regulators had identified a financial transaction that Mr. Greenberg had struck in 2000 and 2001 that made A.I.G.’s financial position look better. The company ultimately acknowledged that its accounting for several transactions was faulty. In February of this year, five former insurance industry executives, including one from A.I.G., were convicted in federal court in Connecticut of conspiring to manipulate the company’s financial statements; A.I.G. had already paid $1.6 billion in 2006 to settle federal and state investigations of the matter. The company’s board turned to Mr. Sullivan, who had risen to co-chief operating officer at A.I.G. and who had already been chosen by both the board and by Mr. Greenberg to take over leadership of the company — if not quite at the time that he did. Mr. Sullivan succeeded in steadying the ship, and did so with a personal style that was kinder and less combative than his predecessor’s. Investigations were resolved and settlements negotiated. And for the past several months, the board has stood behind Mr. Sullivan. But pressure to make changes in personnel has increased steadily. The losses reported by A.I.G. this spring — and perhaps more important, how the reporting of those losses was handled — raised damaging questions about Mr. Sullivan’s stewardship. In December, Mr. Sullivan said that the turmoil in credit markets was “manageable” for A.I.G. Then in February, the company disclosed that its auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, had identified “material weakness” in the accounting for A.I.G.’s swaps portfolio. A few months later, the company announced that it had lost $5.3 billion in the last three months of the year. And in May, it reported a loss of $7.8 billion. Never before had A.I.G. reported back-to-back quarterly losses. The company has had to mark down the value of complex investments called credit default swaps, which essentially guarantee the performance of other securities — in this case, securities backed by home loans, whose value has plummeted in the ongoing credit crisis. Then earlier this month, A.I.G. confirmed that both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department were examining how the company had come up with its valuations for the swaps. In May, the company announced a plan to raise $12.5 billion — it ultimately raised $20 billion — in an effort to “fortify” its balance sheet, as Mr. Sullivan put it in a conference call with analysts. But at the same time, in a puzzling move, the company increased the size of its dividend. Mr. Kligerman, the UBS analyst, said it was unclear whether the transactions that have caused A.I.G. to report losses recently were undertaken on Mr. Sullivan’s watch or previously, under Mr. Greenberg. “One might assume that it’s more recent accounting for it because that’s when the industry troubles surfaced,” he said. Mr. Willumstad, in the interview late Sunday, said that most of the transactions that have resulted in recently reported losses were booked in 2004 and 2005, during Mr. Greenberg’s tenure, and early in Mr. Sullivan’s leadership. “Towards the end of 2005 the company made a decision not to engage in that business any longer,” Mr. Willumstad said. “I’d say the bulk of them were put on the books before Martin Sullivan became C.E.O." Mr. Sullivan is entitled to at least $15 million of cash severance and a $3.7 million pro-rated bonus, according to corporate filings. He also has retirement benefits worth about $3.75 million. It is up to the board to decide whether he will receive about $10.9 million in restricted stock, which cannot yet be cashed out. All that is on top of about $24.5 million that Mr. Sullivan had been paid since taking over as chief executive in 2005, according to an analysis by Equilar and Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant. Mr. Sullivan is not the first casualty of A.I.G.’s latest crisis. In February, the company announced the retirement of Joseph Cassano, who headed AIG Financial Products, the unit that focuses on sophisticated financial instruments like credit default swaps. Mr. Cassano had estimated in December that A.I.G. would lose $1.1 billion in its swap portfolio, not $11.1 billion — $7.2 billion after taxes — as the company later reported. In May, the company announced that it was looking for a new chief financial officer. These steps have not placated shareholders. Last week three investors — Eli Broad, Shelby M. C. Davis and Bill Miller, who together hold more than 100 million A.I.G. shares — sent a letter to the company’s board, complaining that management had not been held accountable for missteps at the company. “Significant and immediate changes at both the management and board level are clearly called for,” they wrote. They proposed that a search committee be created immediately to identify a new chief executive. The departure of Mr. Sullivan appears to have mollified at least one critic of A.I.G.'s management. In a statement released on Sunday night, Mr. Broad called the personnel changes "a positive step forward." George L. Miles Jr., a member of the company’s board, said that Sunday’s meeting was planned before the most recent calls from large investors for changes in senior management. The meeting “was really a culmination of a number of conversations with our board,” Mr. Miles said.

American International Group
Appointments and Executive Changes
Sullivan Martin J
Willumstad Robert


Campbell Goes From to Columbia to Silicon Valley and Back

Abstract: When Bill Campbell was the head football coach at Columbia University , he wound up hospitalized for exhaustion a time or two. He eventually found himself a more healthy occupation — Silicon Valley mogul . The same vigorous approach he had used in Ivy League football worked with executives and engineers. “You know, when they hear you’ve been a football coach, they think you’re going to swing through the room on a vine,” Campbell said the other day. “I wanted to be a businessman like everybody else. I wanted to put the stereotype behind me.” He has never left football . William V. Campbell, chairman of Intuit, guru to other corporations, has become a shining beacon for the possibilities of life after shoulder pads . His name is now being attached to one of the highest honors in his sport. The National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame announced Wednesday that the annual award to the top scholar-athlete would be renamed for Campbell. “They should have given it to Roger Staubach ,” Campbell said in a telephone interview, in his Monongahela River Valley rasp, but he sounded a bit pleased all the same. The award is regarded as the academic Heisman, a reference to the Heisman Trophy, given to the best college player every December. The foundation, trying to ramp up its presence , is changing the name from the Draddy Trophy to honor Campbell, a fiery 165-pound linebacker at Columbia from 1959 through 1961. “He would never give in and would will his way to victory,” said Jonathan R. Cole , a star baseball player at Columbia in the early ’60s, later the provost there and now a professor. “He was like a Pied Piper with his teammates and friends — people who would follow him anywhere.” Campbell helped Columbia share the 1961 Ivy League championship, something it has not done since. In a subsequent nonleague finale, Columbia lost at Rutgers , 32-19, which allowed Rutgers to finish undefeated. “People were sitting in the ivy,” Campbell said, recalling the overflow crowd on a bleak November day. “It was the most exciting game I’ve ever seen. We were up, 19-7. Ochhhh.”  Among the players on the field that day, a Columbia receiver, Russell Warren, has become a pre-eminent orthopedic surgeon, and the center for Rutgers was Alex Kroll , who played one year for the New York Titans (now the Jets) and later became chairman of Young & Rubicam. Campbell knew what he wanted to be. “My dad was a coach,” he said, referring to the man who worked the night shift at the steel mill in Homestead, Pa ., and worked all day at school, ultimately becoming superintendent. At Columbia, Campbell played for another son of Pennsylvania, Buff Donelli . He wanted to be like them, so he became an assistant, first at Columbia, then at Boston College, before coming home as head coach in 1974, only to encounter the rigid academic and acceptance standards of the Ivy League. “Back then nobody knew whether a kid was coming until April 15,” he said the other day. “When I was at Boston College, you were done in January. You could worry about football. At Columbia you spent all your time freaking recruiting. Drives you crazy.” He had to visit 100 prospects all through the Northeast winter to secure 25. “I’d leave after workout programs, at 4:30, and I’d drive to Albany and back in a night. Scranton and back,” he said. “Just so I could be back in the office the next day.” A friend shamed Columbia into buying Campbell a fresh set of tires lest he slide off the road in the Poconos or the Berkshires. None of it helped. Campbell resigned after a six-year record of 12-41-1 and, at 39, went job-hunting. A football friend pointed him to J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency, and he has since been involved at Kodak, Claris, Apple, Go, Google and now Intuit, the maker of financial software. Campbell admits he had some failures, but the skills that did not win games on the Upper West Side of Manhattan were spectacular in the emerging Internet world. A business major, he found an affinity for engineers, bringing groups of them together to talk shop, sometimes with a football game blaring in the background. “I appreciate what engineers do in the world,” he said. “You surround yourself with good people and see how it works.”  He remains a regular in earthy pubs in New York, Homestead and the Bay Area. Without bragging, Campbell casually said, “Once I got a few bucks in my pocket,” he was able to do some good things, including donating computers at Homestead and naming a field and a gym after his late father and brother. Now the chairman of the Columbia trustees, Campbell also donated the weight room in Donelli’s name. He was sighted there last weekend, while dropping his daughter, Maggie, for her first year at Columbia. His son, Jim, played football there earlier in the decade and Campbell’s wife, Roberta Spagnola, was a dean at Columbia when they began dating. He is sanguine enough about the abuses of big-time sports but says that at the majority of colleges “the rules are not broken, kids are provided with the right place to study, they get their degrees and their job opportunities.” His pub voice coming through loud and clear on the phone, the chairman of Intuit sounded like the intense young coach with the bald tires. Hard to imagine him on the verge of exhaustion, ever.

Football
Columbia University
Ivy League
National Football Foundation
College Hall of Fame
Draddy Trophy
College Athletics
Colleges and Universities
Silicon Valley (Calif)
Awards Decorations and Honors