Asian Economies Strengthen as Demand for Exports Grows

Abstract: HONG KONG — The gradual recovery in the United States, Europe and China filtered through to much of the rest of Asia in October, data released Friday showed, lifting manufacturing activity and easing concerns about the region’s flagging growth. Emerging Asia’s economic expansion, red hot in the years immediately after the financial crisis, has slowed in the past few years amid persistently weak demand from the West and a sharp deceleration in China and India, two of the region’s largest economies. Growth in the region slowed from 9.1 percent in 2010 to about 6 percent this year, according to estimates from the Asian Development Bank. But recent numbers show a more optimistic picture. In South Korea, for example, trade data showed October exports climbed 7.3 percent, compared with those of a year earlier, far more than expected, reflecting better demand from the rest of the world. “It’s looking reasonably solid,” said Klaus Baader, a regional economist at Société Générale in Hong Kong, adding that South Korea is the first country in the region each month to report on its trade performance and that its export data serves as a bellwether for global demand. “It reflects the pickup we’ve seen in China during the third quarter — but it also reflects what is going on in the rest of the world, including the better tone in Europe, which has at least left recession now.” Surveys of purchasing managers in manufacturing also showed that sector had regained some momentum. The indexes, compiled by the research firm Markit and published by HSBC, rose to their highest levels in several months in China, Taiwan, Indonesia and South Korea. In the case of Taiwan, the reading jumped a full point, to 53.0, its highest level since March 2012. And in China, a similar index published by the Chinese statistics bureau climbed to 51.4 in October, an 18-month high. The exception was India, where the index came in at 49.6, reflecting that country’s slowing growth. Readings above 50 represent expansion. At the same time, the picture in Japan has improved significantly in the past few months, as a package of aggressive stimulus measures implemented by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has injected vigor into an economy that had been languishing for years. “Japan has ceased to be a drag on the rest of Asia,” Mr. Baader said. “You have to remember, Japan is still the world’s third-largest economy, so if it is back in the ballgame, it makes a significant difference to the rest of the world — and especially for Asia.” The improved global backdrop has created demand in disparate areas, including air transport, with the International Air Transport Association saying on Thursday that global demand for passenger traffic had risen 5.5 percent in September from a year earlier. Asia-Pacific carriers reported an increase of 8.5 percent. Many corporate giants in the region have reported better earnings in recent days. The South Korean carmaker Hyundai Motor, for example, reported a 4 percent profit improvement for the quarter that ended in September, and Samsung Electronics’ quarterly profits jumped 25 percent. “It does look like the developed world environment is a bit more comfortable than it has been for the past couple of years,” said Richard Jerram, chief economist at Bank of Singapore. “This is helping to provide an offset to the fact that domestically driven growth has been flagging a little bit.” Mr. Jerram cautioned that the slight pickup in the October purchasing managers indexes did not necessarily herald a sustained or sharp reacceleration in the region. Growth in many of Asia’s developing economies is closely tied to that of China, whose expansion has slowed from more than 10 percent before the global financial crisis to about 7.5 percent this year as the authorities have sought to put the economy on a more sustainable and balanced footing. Few analysts think the Chinese economy will manage more than 8 percent growth next year, and some believe it could sag below 7 percent. Faster growth in Japan could help increase demand from that country, but the weaker yen also means Japanese manufacturers have become more competitive, relative to their foreign rivals. And the Federal Reserve will probably pare back its support of the U.S. economy next year — a move that is likely to cause inflows of Western cash into emerging Asian economies to drop off. Rob Subbaraman, chief economist for Asia outside Japan at Nomura in Singapore, said that would be painful in Asia, which has become “addicted” to the easy money and foreign capital of the past few years. Although he expected exports from Asia to improve next year as Japan and the United States picked up steam, an ailing Europe and slower growth in China meant that exports would remain “subdued,” he said. “It would be rash to suddenly get bulled-up on Asia,” Mr. Subbaraman said. “Investors will become increasingly more discerning, differentiating between different countries’ economic fundamentals. It has become increasingly hard to generalize across the region.”

Asia
Economy
Europe
China
International trade
US


Darrell Royal, Texas Coach Who Pioneered Wishbone Offense, Dies at 88

Abstract: Darrell Royal, a folksy former all-American player who became one of college football’s most acclaimed and innovative coaches, leading the University of Texas Longhorns to three national championships, died on Wednesday in Austin, Tex. He was 88. The cause was complications of cardiovascular disease, the University of Texas said. Royal had been treated for Alzheimer’s disease. When Royal was named the Texas football coach in 1957, he took over a team that had won only one game the previous season. When he retired after 20 seasons, he had coached the Longhorns to 11 Southwest Conference championships and 16 bowl appearances, and he never had a losing team. He was named national coach of the year five times and was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983. His squads pioneered a wishbone offense running game that influenced college football far beyond the Austin campus. Royal introduced the wishbone, devised largely by his assistant Emory Bellard, in September 1968. It featured three runners lined up in the shape of a Y, or a wishbone, the fullback directly behind the quarterback and two tailbacks split behind them, offering several options on a given play and emphasizing quickness. Alabama, under Bear Bryant, and Oklahoma, coached by Barry Switzer, were among the programs that copied this attack and thrived with it. Texas had fine teams in the 1940s under Coach Dana X. Bible but never finished atop the national rankings. Royal not only reached that pinnacle three times, but also endeared himself to Longhorns fans with his homespun style. After Texas was beaten by Arkansas and Rice on successive Saturdays in 1965, Royal was asked if he planned major changes. He replied, “There’s an old saying, ‘You dance with the one that brung ya.’ ” He favored the ground game. As for passing: “Three things can happen, and two of them are bad.” As for attitude: “You’ve got to think lucky. If you fall into a mud hole, check your back pocket. You might have caught a fish.” Royal, who was an all-American player at Oklahoma, a Texas rival, coached stars like Earl Campbell and Roosevelt Leaks at running back, Scott Appleton at tackle and Tommy Nobis at linebacker, compiling a record of 167-47-5 at Texas. But his image came under fire when one of his reserve linemen of the mid-1960s, Gary Shaw, told of brutality and intimidation in his 1972 book, “Meat on the Hoof: The Hidden World of Texas Football.” Shaw wrote that Royal had put seldom-used players through drills in which they pummeled one another, hoping that many would quit so he could find more recruiting spots for highly talented high school players. “I don’t deny at all that we ran a tough program, especially back then,” Royal told Texas Monthly in 1982. “I don’t think we ran it without feelings.” He added: “I didn’t recognize some of those drills he described. We never had them ever — at any time.” James Street, the outstanding Texas quarterback of the late 1960s, told Texas Monthly that Royal could be aloof, even toward his top players. “We sure never went to him for fatherly advice,” Street said. Royal delighted in players who relished hard hits, among them Nobis, his all-American linebacker of the mid-1960s. “Aside from his super ability, he’s just one of those trained pigs you love,” Royal told Sports Illustrated. “He’ll laugh and jump right in the slop for you.” Royal faced charges of racism for Texas’ belated use of black players. In 1970, Julius Whittier became the first African-American letterman to play for the Longhorns. “We should have done it a lot sooner,” Royal said in “Coach Royal: Conversations With a Texas Football Legend,” written with John Wheat. “That had to change eventually, and thank goodness it did.” Royal was not like some coaches “who made it their goal to make sure college football stayed white,” Whittier told Terry Frei in “Horns, Hogs and Nixon Coming: Texas vs. Arkansas in Dixie’s Last Stand.” “I didn’t see that in Coach Royal. Not that he was some big social revolutionary or anything, but I think he recognized that to stay where we were, we were going to have to use black athletes.” Darrell K Royal (the middle initial was in honor of his mother, Katy, who died of cancer when he was a few months old) was born in Hollis, Okla., on July 6, 1924. When he was 15, his father, Burley, who worked odd jobs, took Darrell and a brother to California in the Depression-era migration of the so-called Okies. But a few months later Darrell returned to Hollis to play high school football and live with a grandmother. Royal, at 5 feet 10 inches and 170 pounds, was an outstanding quarterback and defensive halfback and a brilliant punter at Oklahoma for Coach Bud Wilkinson. He was an all-American in 1949, playing on an undefeated Sugar Bowl-winning team. He was the head coach of the Edmonton Eskimos in the Canadian Football League (1953), Mississippi State (1954-55) and the University of Washington (1956) before getting the Texas post. Royal’s Longhorns achieved their first No. 1 ranking in 1963 when they were 11-0 and defeated a Navy team led by the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Roger Staubach in the Cotton Bowl. Royal’s Texas teams beat Oklahoma in the Red River rivalry every year from 1958 to 1965. Royal’s best-remembered game, known as the Big Shootout, came in December 1969, when top-ranked Texas rallied to defeat second-ranked Arkansas, 15-14, at Fayetteville, Ark., with President Richard M. Nixon in attendance. The Longhorns shared a third national championship with Nebraska in 1970. They won 30 straight games from 1968 to 1970. Royal retired as coach after the 1976 season but stayed on until 1980 as athletic director, a post he had held since 1962. He was later a special assistant on athletic matters to the university president. The Longhorns’ football field has been known since 1996 as Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. Survivors include his wife, Edith, and a son, Mack. A daughter, Marian, died in a car accident in 1973, and another son, David, died in a motorcycle accident in 1982. In February 1964, the University of Texas rewarded Royal for his first national championship by making him a full professor with tenure. But his down-home presence seemed unaffected. Mickey Herskowitz, a Houston Chronicle sportswriter who gave the wishbone attack its name, recalled how the Texas sports information director, Jones Ramsey, walked into Royal’s office when he was a newly minted professor and saw him scowling while he scribbled on a pad. As Herskowitz told it: “Jones asked what was wrong. Royal looked up and said, ‘I’ve been sitting here for 30 minutes, trying to figure out if professor has one or two f’s in it.’ ”

Football
University of Texas
Royal Darrell
Deaths (Obituaries)
College Athletics


As Lender, Senate Candidate Impacted Bank Woes

Abstract: Alexi Giannoulias would be nothing in Illinois politics if not for Broadway Bank. Now the near-failure of that family-owned bank is threatening to make him a political non-entity again. Broadway Bank is the source of the wealth that has made him a viable candidate. It also provides his main claim to professional expertise, the ability to write loans and tally a balance sheet. But now the precipitous implosion of the bank’s finances — punctuated last week by an agreement with regulators that the bank must raise more capital or else — is a potentially serious blow to Mr. Giannoulias’s viability in the race for the United States Senate seat once held by President Obama. Mr. Giannoulias, 33, has ducked all but the most general questions about which loans he approved that might have contributed to the bank’s trouble. He said there would be time later to get into such details. I interpret that to mean: “I hope I can get this past my fellow Democrats. I’ll worry about my Republican opponent later.” Though he would not talk to the Chicago News Cooperative, in public statements Mr. Giannoulias has noted that four years have passed since he left the bank. In a statement, the bank said only 9 percent of the $242 million in nonperforming assets currently on its books originated under Mr. Giannoulias. But here is an inconvenient fact about bank failures: They do not happen overnight. A dollop of reckless lending here, a dash of destabilizing hot money there, hide a few troubles over there. Let that simmer for a while and, voila!, an insolvency soufflé. After law school, Mr. Giannoulias went to work full-time at the bank in 2002. He quickly became a senior loan officer and then a vice president. Whether merely by coincidence, or because of the ambition and aggressiveness of its well-pedigreed new junior executive, the bank’s profile changed sharply between then and when Mr. Giannoulias resigned after winning the race for state treasurer in November 2006. According to a review of the bank’s annual filings with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation from 2001 through Sept. 30, 2009, the bank plunged into the sort of lending that has caused bank crises across the country: construction and development loans. Mr. Giannoulias’s lending department sharply increased the construction and development portfolio to $356 million by 2006, six times the level it had been before he went to work there. In 2006, the bank set aside $2.2 million as a provision against loan losses, a safety measure that federal regulators require banks to take. Despite its large increase in risky loans, Broadway only doubled its bad-loan reserve in the time Mr. Giannoulias was there. A bank spokesman said he had been only lightly involved during that period. Construction-related lending jumped to more than triple the bank’s required regulatory capital during this period, and the loans started to go bad. By the time Mr. Giannoulias departed, Broadway was left with nearly $14 million in real estate on its books, more than 10 times the level when he arrived. Foreclosures take time, though — often about 18 months. And within two years of Mr. Giannoulias’s departure, the bank was left holding $38 million in real estate. The move into real estate coincided with a headlong push into brokered deposits. This is quintessential hot money — large amounts that jump from bank to bank, each bank offering the lure of high interest , which the banks then must fund by making ever-riskier loans. During Mr. Giannoulias’s time at the bank, brokered deposits catapulted fourfold, to $640 million. The typical bank at this point was growing brokered deposits at about 9 percent a year. Mr. Giannoulias’s bank was increasing its load by as much as 48 percent in a single year. Broadway Bank’s brokered deposits reached 80 percent of total deposits in 2006. No one knows for certain how big a role Mr. Giannoulias played in these decisions. As Broadway’s top lending officer, he must have influenced the move into construction lending. As a connected family member, he was probably present during discussions of the hot-money play. Certainly, he took part in the family’s decision to take out some $70 million in dividends from the bank in 2007 and 2008, even as it careened toward a consent decree with the F.D.I.C. Mr. Giannoulias told reporters that a time would come when he could answer questions about what happened at his family’s bank. Here is hoping there is plenty of time, because questions keep mounting faster than the troubles at Broadway Bank.

Illinois
Giannoulias Alexi
United States Politics and Government


A Dictionary Is Updated, and a Campaign Will Spread the Word

Abstract: TRYING to sell a $60 print dictionary in 2011 is like trying to sell a silent movie. Wait ...What’s that? The Weinstein Company is releasing “The Artist,” a modern-day silent movie, in theaters on Nov. 25? O.K., how is this: Trying to sell a $60 print dictionary in 2011 is like trying to sell a print newspaper. Wait ...What’s that? Many people are reading this article in print newspapers? Well, it goes to show, the line between the legacy media and the new media is not as finely drawn as some believe. That is particularly true in this instance, as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt begins a campaign to market the fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Executives at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt say they do not believe they will sell as many print copies of the new dictionary as they did of previous editions. That is why there is a free companion Web site for the dictionary, at ahdictionary.com . That is also why the dictionary is being made available as an app and for e-readers. (The app is free with the purchase of the print dictionary and $24.99 if bought separately. The app is published by Enfour, to which Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has licensed the rights. The e-reader version, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has a suggested list price of $60.) The executives also believe, however, that many consumers will still find value in owning a dictionary of more than 2,000 pages in book form, and the marketing campaign reflects that. The campaign, scheduled to begin on Tuesday, has an estimated $300,000 budget. Most of the work is being created by Mechanica , an agency in Newburyport, Mass., and the rest by Verso Advertising in New York. The campaign’s theme is “You are your words. Make the most of them.” In keeping with the interaction between the print and digital versions of the dictionary, the campaign has an extensive presence online as well as in print (newspapers and magazines) and on radio (sponsorship credits on NPR). For instance, the theme is brought to life in a microsite, or special Web site, at youareyourwords.com , where computer users can create images composed of word clouds.  The dictionary also has its own Twitter handle, @ahdictionary. In recent days, people who have been using interesting words in their Twitter posts — among them, “belie” and “disingenuous” — have won free dictionaries. The campaign was inspired by research conducted by Mechanica that showed surprising results, said Bruce Nichols, a senior vice president and publisher at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in New York. “You might think, if you had to guess, that there’s an old-fashioned slice of the market that wants a print dictionary and a younger, hipper slice that wants it digitally,” Mr. Nichols said. “But the audience most likely to buy the new edition in print is the same audience likely to consume it in multiple formats.” “Our main target wants a print edition at home for the kids, to have a richer experience looking up words,” he added, “and they want it on their devices to have it everywhere.” “The print market is certainly nothing like it was 10 years ago,” Mr. Nichols said, when the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary was published, “and the digital world is a lot bigger.” But the research “convinced us the way to market the new edition is by appealing to the thirst for knowledge” of the target audience “by reaching them in every possible way,” he added. Jim Garaventi, founding partner and creative director at Mechanica, said: “A book like this, a dictionary, an American Heritage dictionary, is a different type of book. It’s a beautiful object. There’s also a utility to the object and it says something more to own it.” At the same time, he added, consumers with a propensity to purchase dictionaries in book form “also index high in the purchase and use of e-readers.” The “You are your words” theme signals how “we define ourselves through the written word more deeply, more broadly than ever, through tweets, through posts,” Mr. Garaventi said.  In the end, he said, “people go where the information is that they want,” adding: “I don’t think they start by saying, ‘Am I going to go online? Or offline?’ Those of us in advertising, media and marketing tend to dissect online and offline more than people who don’t make a living that way do.” For example, Mr. Garaventi described his recent experience buying the biography of Steven P. Jobs by Walter Isaacson. “I never spent so much time deciding” between a print book and a download, he said, laughing, before finally selecting the book. Tom Thompson, vice president and group director at Verso, which is creating the print ads, agreed that “there is so much play between the print and digital environments that it’s not an ‘either/or’ ” for consumers. “The connectivity is the way things are right now,” Mr. Thompson said. Still, “there’s a place in this world for a beautifully made book,” he added, noting that “people still want a four-color cookbook for the shelf” when “it’s so easy to get a recipe online.” The newspaper and magazine ads will be aimed at that market, Mr. Thompson said, which he called “the hard-core book-buying audience.” Those ads will run in Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review. If such shoppers represent a countertrend, will their behavior be defined in a future dictionary as “booklash”?

Dictionaries
Advertising and Marketing
Books and Literature
Houghton Mifflin Co


Chilean Miners Must Aid Own Rescue

Abstract: SAN JOSÉ MINE, Chile (AP) — The 33 trapped Chilean miners who have astonished the world with their discipline a half-mile underground will have to aid their own escape — clearing 3,000 to 4,000 tons of rock that will fall as the rescue hole is drilled, the engineer in charge of drilling said Sunday. After drilling three small holes in recent weeks to create lines of communication and deliver food and medicine, Chile ’s state-owned Codelco mining company plans to begin boring a rescue hole on Monday that will be wide enough to pull the men up through 2,300 feet of earth. The rescue hole drilling will force rock to fall into the mine shaft area near the trapped men. “The miners are going to have to take out all that material as it falls,” said Andres Sougarret, Codelco’s head engineer on the operation. The work will require about a half-dozen men working in shifts 24 hours a day. While it is not clear if the government is simply trying to underpromise, then overdeliver, there is widespread agreement that the drilling is unlikely to endanger the miners.

Chile
Rescues
Mines and Mining
Accidents and Safety


Amar’e Stoudemire Returns but Offers Very Little For Knicks

Abstract: Throughout the Knicks’ surprising start this season, there remained a large and familiar puzzle piece still anchored to the bench, along with his $99.7 million contract and All-Star résumé. But the return of that piece, Amar’e Stoudemire, on Tuesday at Madison Square Garden — his first action since knee surgery in October — was greeted with a cautious optimism. The Knicks, after all, were 21-9 without him, coexisting with a delicate balance of veteran leadership, tough defense and Carmelo Anthony’s lead role. Now, starting a new year, it seems the Knicks are also beginning a new season. With the Stoudemire experiment under way, the Knicks lost to the Portland Trail Blazers, 105-100, their third defeat in four games. Anthony, who missed the previous two games with a hyperextended left knee, returned to the lineup and tied a season high with 45 points. But the Knicks’ frontcourt struggled against the energetic and springy Trail Blazers, who led by as many as 19 points by expertly running pick-and-roll after pick-and-roll, with the Knicks’ defense always seemingly one step behind. “Defensively we’re just not where we were at the beginning of the year,” Coach Mike Woodson said. “It’s too much of an uphill climb.” Stoudemire played only 16 minutes off the bench, scoring 6 points and shooting 3 of 8. Woodson said he would need to ease him back into shape, knowing Stoudemire began practicing with the team only on Sunday. Image Amar’e Stoudemire, who acknowledged that he is still not 100 percent after knee surgery, scored 6 points in 16 minutes in his season debut. Credit Elsa/Getty Images The fans cheered as he rose to enter the game for the first time, with 3 minutes 31 seconds left in the first quarter, and he brought the crowd to its feet with a rousing dunk late in the third. But otherwise, Stoudemire appeared unsure of himself. He committed a turnover on his first possession, stepping out of bounds underneath the basket, and missed his first five shots. “The game felt like it was going 100 miles an hour,” Stoudemire said, adding: “But the second half was better than my first. I’m hoping my second game will be better than my first.” At one point, after several missed assignments defending Portland’s pick-and-roll, Woodson sat down Stoudemire and appeared to coach him on the run. Stoudemire said Woodson was telling him to be more patient. “I expected that was going to happen,” Woodson said. “We’ll show him on film tomorrow and hopefully he’ll learn from it and we’ll build on it.” Almost certainly there will be better, more typical Stoudemire performances to come, but his role with these new-look Knicks remains a topic of debate. On the surface, the return of Stoudemire, a six-time All-Star who averaged 17.5 points and 7.8 rebounds in 47 games last season, represents a significant improvement of the roster, particularly the bench. There are concerns, however, chiefly about whether Stoudemire might disrupt the team’s harmony and flow, and about how he will interact with Anthony, who is off to a start worthy of most valuable player consideration. Would Stoudemire be better coming off the bench? Will he accept a reduced role? Image J. R. Smith, who had 28 points, and Carmelo Anthony, who led all scorers with 45, took more than half of the Knicks' shots. Credit Bill Kostroun/Associated Press “Those guys have been playing phenomenal all season long,” Stoudemire said. “I just want to get out there and help them as much as I can, any way I can.” Woodson would not speculate on lineups, saying only that he hoped Stoudemire made it through Tuesday’s game healthy enough to practice Wednesday. Stoudemire was originally planning on a Christmas Day return against the Lakers in Los Angeles, but the timetable was pushed back. He said before Tuesday’s game that he was still not feeling 100 percent, but after the game he said his legs felt fine. “I felt very explosive,” he said. “I had no hesitation at all. It’s a great sign.” The Trail Blazers were energetic underneath — they scored 32 points in the paint, with 16 coming on second chances — and assisted on 15 of their first 25 field goals. Only Anthony kept the Knicks afloat, hitting 8 of 11 shots in the first half. Anthony scored 13 of the team’s first 16 points and also banked in a desperation 3-pointer as the buzzer sounded to send the Knicks into halftime down by 58-47. They came out of the intermission with more energy and quickly trimmed Portland’s lead to 3. J. R. Smith scored 8 points in the third quarter, and the defense did a better job clamping down on J. J. Hickson, who scored all 18 of his points in the first half. The Trail Blazers held a 12-point lead with four minutes remaining, but the Knicks cut the advantage to 100-97 on a 3-pointer by Anthony with 55 seconds left. But Anthony missed a game-tying 3 with 15.9 seconds left, and the Blazers grabbed the rebound. “I will take that shot anytime,” Anthony said. REBOUNDS J.R. Smith scored 28 points, becoming the first Knick to score 25 or more points in four straight games while coming off the bench.

Knicks
Carmelo Anthony
Trail Blazers
Basketball
Amar'e Stoudemire
Damian Lillard


Mets Rest Matt Harvey and Get Their Sweep, Too, as Logan Verrett Stands Out

Abstract: DENVER — Matt Harvey looked comfortable sitting near the top of the Mets’ dugout Sunday, wearing a sweatshirt, with sunglasses perched atop his hat, as he leaned over to get a closer look at Logan Verrett striking out Carlos Gonzalez swinging on a nasty slider. Harvey could afford to relax. The Mets had given him the day off, skipping his turn to start as part of their plan to limit his innings in his first season back after Tommy John surgery. And Verrett, the rookie who replaced him, was pitching a gem in his first career start — in Coors Field, of all places, a park where the altitude makes the ball jump. Verrett, 25, showed poise beyond his years, holding the Rockies, who have one the best offenses in baseball, to one run and four hits in eight innings, and set the tone for a 5-1 win that completed a three-game sweep and kept the Mets’ lead at five games in the National League East. Even the Mets’ spot starters are capable of stealing the spotlight, apparently. “It was kind of funny,” Verrett said. “I joked with Matt the other day — I said: ‘Why is everybody freaking out? Don’t they know I’m a way better pitcher than you are?’ He laughed.” Verrett approached this start with the same confidence. There were a few moments in which it seemed that the Rockies would humble him the way they had Bartolo Colon and Jon Niese on the two previous days. The first two batters Verrett faced singled, and he looked a tad erratic, an appearance his catcher, Anthony Recker, attributed to his being excited. But Verrett threw a changeup that Gonzalez hit into a double play, and Wilmer Flores made a diving stop against Nolan Arenado to end the inning. Arenado spiked his helmet in disgust. Image The Mets' Curtis Granderson rounding third base on his way to score in the first inning. Credit Justin Edmonds/Getty Images Perhaps Verrett’s maturity was acquired over the last nine months or so as three organizations passed him around. The Mets left Verrett, a third-round pick of theirs in 2011, off their 40-man roster and lost him to the Baltimore Orioles in the Rule 5 draft in December. The Texas Rangers picked him off waivers in April, and he then returned to the Mets when the Rangers designated him for assignment after he had been with them for about a month. The Orioles and the Rangers both had incentive to keep Verrett on their major league rosters or risk losing him, and he said Sunday that their coaches had helped him improve a great deal. While the Mets bounced him between their bullpen and the Las Vegas 51s, their Class AAA affiliate, he had been able to pitch on the West Coast, in climates similar to the one he pitched in on Sunday. After that first inning, Verrett calmed down and repeated his delivery, keeping the ball down and the Rockies guessing. He located his changeup and his fastball on the corners, all while mixing in his slider, his out pitch, when the Rockies least expected it. He finished with eight strikeouts, including four against the Rockies’ Nos. 3, 4, and 5 hitters. “They were fairly aggressive,” Recker said. “We used it against them.” Verrett made one real mistake, a changeup that Gonzalez hammered over the center-field wall for a solo home run, teaching Verrett a valuable lesson. “Don’t throw CarGo changeups belt-high down the middle,” Verrett said, smiling, referring to Gonzalez by his nickname. Verrett looked that much better because his counterpart, Rockies starter David Hale, pitched a messy game. He hit a batter and threw four wild pitches, including two in a row in the second inning, each of them allowing a Met to score from third base. Again, the Mets got contributions from their entire lineup. Michael Conforto, another rookie, collected three hits and gunned out a runner at third base to end the sixth inning. Recker, the backup catcher, smacked a run-scoring double, and so did Daniel Murphy. Manager Terry Collins stressed Saturday night that true playoff teams beat the teams they are “supposed to beat.” And the Mets have built their winning record doing just that. Their record is 27-5 against the four worst teams in the National League: the Rockies, the Cincinnati Reds, the Miami Marlins and the Philadelphia Phillies, their next opponent. Thirty of their final 39 games are against teams that have losing records. Hitting at Coors Field helped the Mets’ confidence. Over three games here, they compiled 33 runs, 45 hits and 21 extra-base hits. If that were not enough, after missing four months while undergoing rehabilitation for spinal stenosis, David Wright was set to rejoin the team Monday in Philadelphia, just in time for the Mets’ final playoff push. All the reports Collins had received on Wright were positive, he said. Wright was moving well, swinging well. He batted .321 in eight rehab games. But Collins made clear that there would be a transitional period. Wright had played his rehab games in Class A, after all. “It’s the Florida State League,” Collins said, and then he raised his voice for emphasis. “It’s the Florida State League! Nolan Arenado has not had any at-bats in the Florida State League. They hit the ball a little harder here. “He’s moving fine. He’s in the Florida State League, and he’s playing good, really good. I have no idea what’s going to happen until he steps foot on the field tomorrow, and the grass is this long as opposed to being this long.” Collins held his index fingers apart to illustrate that the grass in Philadelphia would be much shorter. His point: Wright had not fielded grounders as fast as the ones he would this week. As for Verrett, it appears as though he will be around for the rest of the season. When he came off the mound after his last out, his teammates converged on him and patted his back, and the small crowd of Mets fans here gave him a standing ovation. Afterward, Collins said Verrett would be a candidate to make another spot start. For now, Collins said he planned to use him out of the bullpen in big spots. This game showed that Verrett could command his stuff well enough to be trusted. “It’s a really good feeling,” Verrett said. “I’m not going to lie.”

Mets
Matt Harvey
Carlos Gonzalez
Rockies
Baseball


The Wealth Trajectory: Rewards for the Few

Abstract: IF there is one thing about the United States economy in recent years that is beyond dispute, it is this: It’s a great time to be rich. Yes, I know, being rich has never exactly been a downer. But today it is all the more sweet. You see it in the daily headlines. The financial pages tell us that Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, took home $68.5 million last year. The political pages tell us that during the last eight years, Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in $109 million. These stories are not mere aberrations. According to the economists who crunch the numbers, they reflect a long-term trend of increasing economic inequality. The best data on the superrich comes from Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley. Professors Piketty and Saez have been studying historical data from tax returns and recently updated their work to 2006. They report that one out of every 10,000 American families has income in excess of $10.7 million. These lucky duckies number less than 15,000. Put together, they could all fit into a modest-size town. (We could call it Aspen or Nantucket.) What’s more, the superrich have been getting an increasing slice of the economic pie. In 1980, the top 0.01 percent of the population had 0.87 percent of total income. By 2006, their share had more than quadrupled to 3.89 percent, a level not seen since 1916. Critics of the Piketty-Saez data argue, with some justification, that tax return data is unreliable. Tax rules are constantly changing, and the rich have ways to manipulate the system. It is impossible to be sure whether a change in reported income is merely a change in tax strategy or a true change in circumstance. It is hard to escape the conclusion, however, that Professors Piketty and Saez are finding something real. Other data sources lack much information on the superrich, who are simply too rare to show up in significant numbers. But when we compare the merely affluent with those at the low end of the pay scale, these other sources show similar, if less extreme, trends. Take the government’s Current Population Survey, which covers about 50,000 households and is best known for producing the monthly unemployment rate. Like the tax return data, the C.P.S. also shows rising inequality. From 1980 to 2005, the earnings of the 90th percentile full-time male worker increased 49 percent more than the earnings of the 10th percentile worker. Among full-time female workers, there has been a similar divergence between high and low earners. Offsetting this trend to some degree is the shrinking gender gap. Female workers started well below their male counterparts and have been catching up. But despite this equalizing force, the earnings ratio of the 90th to 10th percentiles, men and women combined, has risen 30 percent. What accounts for rising inequality? Some pundits are tempted to look inside the Beltway for a cause, but the case is hard to make. Government policy makers do not have the tools to exert such a strong influence over pretax earnings, even if they wanted to do so. Also, the trend toward increasing inequality has been fairly steady, despite changing political winds. The income share of the richest families increased substantially both during Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office and during Bill Clinton’s. The best diagnosis so far comes from two of my Harvard colleagues, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, in their forthcoming book “The Race Between Education and Technology” (Harvard University Press). Professor Goldin is an economic historian, and Professor Katz is a labor economist who briefly worked in the Clinton administration. Their bottom line: “the sharp rise in inequality was largely due to an educational slowdown.” According to Professors Goldin and Katz, for the past century technological progress has been a steady force not only increasing average living standards, but also increasing the demand for skilled workers relative to unskilled workers. Skilled workers are needed to apply and manage new technologies, while less skilled workers are more likely to become obsolete. For much of the 20th century, however, skill-biased technological change was outpaced by advances in educational attainment. In other words, while technological progress increased the demand for skilled workers, our educational system increased the supply of them even faster. As a result, skilled workers did not benefit disproportionately from economic growth. But recently things have changed. Over the last several decades, technology has kept up its pace, while educational advancement has slowed down. The numbers are striking. The cohort of workers born in 1950 had an average of 4.67 more years of schooling than the cohort born in 1900, representing an increase of 0.93 year in each decade. By contrast, the cohort born in 1975 had only 0.74 more years of schooling than that born in 1950, an increase of only 0.30 year a decade. Because growth in the supply of skilled workers has slowed, their wages have grown relative to those of the unskilled. This shows up in the estimates of the financial return to education made by Professors Goldin and Katz. In 1980, each year of college raised a person’s wage by 7.6 percent. In 2005, each year of college yielded an additional 12.9 percent. The rate of return from each year of graduate school has risen even more — from 7.3 to 14.2 percent. WHILE education is the key to understanding broad inequality trends, it is less obvious whether it can explain the incomes of the superrich. Simply going to college and graduate school is hardly enough to join the top echelons with Lloyd Blankfein and Bill and Hillary Clinton. But neither is education irrelevant. If Mr. Blankfein had left the New York public school system and gone directly to work, instead of attending Harvard College and Law School, most likely he would not be the head of a major investment bank today. If the Clintons had been content with high school diplomas and not attended Georgetown, Wellesley, Oxford and Yale, they most likely would not have reached the White House and Senate, and it is a good bet that they would not now be getting multimillion-dollar book deals and $100,000 speaking dates. A top education is no guarantee of great riches, but it often helps. Maybe educational levels are like Willie Wonka’s chocolate bars. A few of them come with golden tickets that give you opportunities almost beyond imagination. But even if you aren’t lucky enough to get a golden ticket, you can still enjoy the chocolate, which by itself is well worth the price.

United States Economy
Millionaires and Billionaires
Income Inequality
Presidential Election of 2008
United States Politics and Government


Republicans Resist Obama’s Move to Dismantle Apparatus of Deportation

Abstract: DENVER — For four years Arturo Hernández García, an immigrant from Mexico, tried every legal move to stop his deportation. As a last resort, he camped out in the basement of a church here, seeking sanctuary from federal agents trying to expel him. Obama administration officials have long said they are not looking to deport undocumented immigrants like Mr. Hernández García — a taxpaying business owner and parent of an American citizen. But after he was arrested over a workplace argument in 2010, the immigration authorities were alerted to his status by a federal monitoring program. They began deportation proceedings that have continued to this day, even though he has been cleared of the criminal charges. Mr. Hernández García was ensnared by an enforcement program known as Secure Communities , which connected local and state police departments across the country with federal immigration enforcement. Now the program, which generated the majority of the 2.3 million deportations under the Obama administration, is at the center of the battle between the president and Republicans over his executive actions to transform the deportation system. Along with the hotly contested initiatives he announced in November allowing millions of unauthorized immigrants to stay and work legally, President Obama also canceled Secure Communities, replacing it with a new program that will greatly reduce the threat of deportation for immigrants like Mr. Hernández García who have no record of serious crimes. Under new, sharply revised priorities in the overhaul package, immigration agents will focus almost exclusively on deporting terrorists, gang members and felons who pose security risks. Republicans, who now control Congress, describe Mr. Obama’s actions as an unconstitutional overreach and have vowed to reverse them. On Wednesday the House passed a Homeland Security funding bill that would cancel his programs protecting illegal immigrants. The measure would restore Secure Communities and increase its funding, while taking away the president’s authority to set priorities for deportation. Mr. Obama said Monday that he would veto the measure, which now goes to the Senate. Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, called it “a reasonable response to the extreme actions the president has taken to undermine and rewrite our immigration laws.” Secure Communities, Mr. Smith said, helped federal agents “successfully remove hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant criminals.” But to administration officials, Secure Communities had become a liability, causing separations of long-settled immigrant families, fraying relations with police departments and generating damaging legal challenges. In a Nov. 20 memorandum canceling the program, Secretary Jeh Johnson of the Homeland Security Department said it had “become a symbol for general hostility toward the enforcement of our immigration laws. Image Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, said the Secure Communities program had helped to “successfully remove hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant criminals.” Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times For Mr. Hernández García, Secure Communities was the start of a torturous deportation process that continued inexorably even as administration officials insisted that they were going only after dangerous convicts. Coming as a tourist 15 years ago, Mr. Hernández García stayed and built a business laying floor tiles, now with six employees. At a construction site in 2010, he had an argument with a worker from another crew who had trod on a freshly laid floor. The man called the police and Mr. Hernández García was arrested on an assault charge. His fingerprint check drew the attention of immigration agents. He insisted on a trial, and was acquitted after witnesses confirmed that there had been no attack. “I’ve had all these problems because one person spoke falsely,” Mr. Hernández García said. He and his wife, Ana, 40, who is Mexican, applied years ago for green cards through her father, an American citizen. Their applications are buried in processing backlogs. They have a Mexican daughter they brought here as a baby; another daughter, 9, was born in the United States. But an immigration judge who heard his deportation case was not convinced that it would be a hardship for his family if Mr. Hernández García was deported. He spent New Year’s Eve in a chilly basement room at the First Unitarian Church with his family, singing karaoke to melancholy mariachi songs. The congregation has agreed to shelter him, since immigration agents generally refrain from entering churches to make arrests. This week, immigration prosecutors in Denver declined to cancel his deportation order, so he will present a new application to have it temporarily postponed. “I want the citizens of Denver to know,” he said, “that we are not criminals.” Except for his deportation order, Mr. Hernández García has all the qualifications for a work permit under Mr. Obama’s new program. Started in 2008, Secure Communities rapidly expanded under Mr. Obama to cover the entire country. Under the program, fingerprints of anyone booked by local or state police officers were shared with immigration agents. The agents could then issue orders, known as detainers, to the police to hold people suspected of being in the country illegally for up to 48 hours after release from local custody, giving agents time to detain them for deportation. Official statistics show that agents modified their operations over time to deport more convicted criminals. But the government continued to expel immigrants following traffic stops or misdemeanor arrests, or after charges that never resulted in convictions. The aggressive use of the program led to widespread protests. Demonstrators from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a tenacious adversary, chained themselves to detention center fences and lay down in roadways to block buses carrying deportees. Image Roxana Burciaga said that if her husband, Mauricio Rosales, was deported she would be left alone to care for their 14-month-old daughter, her two children from another marriage and her elderly grandparents. Credit Kevin Moloney for The New York Times Some police departments also stopped participating in the program, saying it eroded trust with immigrant victims and witnesses. A 2014 law in California limited the police to honoring immigration holds only for serious offenders. Last week, the departing governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, a Democrat, ordered the police to stop complying with any immigration detainers. Several federal courts have found that the detainers violated constitutional rights against illegal seizure. By the end of last year, 270 jurisdictions were refusing to honor detainers, and during 2014 local police departments declined to respond to 10,182 of the orders, Homeland Security officials reported. The replacement program devised by Mr. Johnson, called Priority Enforcement Program , will start in the coming weeks, and still relies on fingerprint checks at the time of bookings by the police. But instead of mandatory holds, immigration authorities will in most cases send only requests, asking for advance notice when the police plan to release immigrants after they have been convicted of crimes. Agents will issue detainers only for immigrants who fit in the highest categories of the new priorities, which went into effect Jan. 5, and they will have to specify why they have probable cause to pursue deportation. Juliet Stumpf, a professor at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., said the new plans were “a sea change” from the canceled program. “Instead of a hammer,” she said, “the administration is giving agents a screwdriver and an instruction manual and requiring them to follow it.” But in Denver, Hans Meyer, an immigration lawyer, is still battling many deportations of immigrants snagged by the old program. “The administration has a big credibility hole to climb out of,” Mr. Meyer said. At a hearing last month, he pleaded with an immigration judge to allow Mauricio Rosales, 32, a Mexican, to stay. Mr. Rosales was leaving a Broncos football game in a borrowed pickup truck when a policeman stopped him because of a dangling taillight. The officer ordered a blood test, and the two beers Mr. Rosales drank during the game were enough for a low-level misdemeanor of “driving while impaired.” He was sentenced to 15 days of probation. Immigration agents, alerted by Secure Communities, went to the probation office to arrest him. His wife, Roxana Burciaga, 22, an American, sat in court in a daze, trying to imagine how she would cope if she was left alone to care for their 14-month-old daughter and her two children from another marriage, all Americans, and her elderly grandparents, who depend on her help. “I’m the only one who is working,” Mr. Rosales said, citing steady jobs as a carpenter. Mr. Rosales might qualify for a work permit under Mr. Obama’s new program for undocumented parents of American citizens, and that could mean an end to the deportation case. Mr. Meyer won a few more months for Mr. Rosales to find out.

Republicans
Deportation
Homeland Security
Illegal Immigration
US Politics
Barack Obama
Jeh C Johnson


Florida’s High-Speed Answer to a Foreclosure Mess

Abstract: TEN days from now, a four-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac in Middleburg, Fla., is scheduled to be auctioned off at the Clay County courthouse, 25 miles south of Jacksonville. A judge who recently took over their foreclosure case has ordered Rodney Waters; his fiancée, Terri Reese; and their four children to leave the home they bought in 2006. Mr. Waters, a supervisor at a local packaging company and the family’s sole breadwinner, fell behind on his mortgage two years ago after his property taxes jumped unexpectedly. He now owes $264,000 on the house; a similar home down the street sold for $138,500 in February. The predicament of the Waters-Reese family is common in Florida today. The state routinely sets new records for foreclosures — in the second quarter, 20.13 percent of its mortgages were delinquent or in foreclosure, a national high, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. And with housing prices still in a free fall, almost half of all borrowers in Florida owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, says CoreLogic, a data firm. While the Waters-Reese case may not be unusual in Florida, the coming auction of the home is still notable: it will be a result of the Florida Legislature’s new effort to cut the number of foreclosures inching their way through the state’s courts. Earlier this year, Florida earmarked $9.6 million to set up foreclosures-only courts across the state, staffed by retired judges. The goal of the program, which began in July, is to reduce the foreclosures backlog by 62 percent within a year. No one disputes that foreclosures dominate Florida’s dockets and that something needs to be done to streamline a complex and emotionally wrenching process. But lawyers representing troubled borrowers contend that many of the retired judges called in from the sidelines to oversee these matters are so focused on cutting the caseload that they are unfairly favoring financial institutions at the expense of homeowners. Lawyers say judges are simply ignoring problematic or contradictory evidence and awarding the right to foreclose to institutions that have yet to prove they own the properties in question. “Now you show up and you get whatever judge is on the schedule and they have not looked at the file — they don’t even look at the motions,” says April Charney, a lawyer who represents imperiled borrowers at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid . “You get a five-minute hearing. It’s a factory.” But Victor Tobin, chief judge in the 17th Judicial Circuit, which includes Broward County, defended the effort. “There are more assets devoted to those three foreclosure divisions in Broward than to any other division in the building in terms of case managers and that sort of thing to help the general public,” he said. “The people who come get fully, fully heard.” In any event, huge numbers of cases are being handled. In an article last week in The Florida Bar News, Belvin Perry Jr., chief judge for the state’s Ninth Judicial Circuit, said that during July, 1,319 cases had been closed by three senior judges in the district’s two counties, Orange and Osceola. Florida’s foreclosure mess is made murkier by what analysts and lawyers involved in the process say are questionable practices by some law firms that are representing banks. Such tactics, these people say, have drawn out the process significantly, making it extremely lucrative for the lawyers and more draining for troubled homeowners. Doctored or dubious records presented in court as proof of a bank’s ownership have become such a problem that Bill McCollum, the Florida attorney general, announced last month that his office was investigating the state’s three largest foreclosure law firms representing lenders. “Thousands of final judgments of foreclosure against Florida homeowners may have been the result of the allegedly improper actions of these law firms,” said Mr. McCollum in an interview. “We’ve had so many complaints that I am confident there is a great deal of fraud here.” To be sure, adjudicating foreclosure cases is difficult, complicated by multiple transfers of mortgages and notes when a loan is sold, bewildering paperwork submitted by loan servicers and shoddy record-keeping by the many institutions that touched the mortgages during the byzantine securitization process that fueled the housing boom. Nevertheless, Florida law requires that before a financial institution can foreclose on a borrower, it must prove to the court that it actually has the standing to do so. In other words, it has to show that it is truly the owner. And this is done by demonstrating ownership of the note underlying the mortgage. The Waters case offers an example of how wrong things can go in complex foreclosure cases. While AmTrust, a failed Ohio bank that is now a division of New York Community Bank, said it owned the note and could foreclose, Mr. Waters’s lawyer produced documents showing that Fannie Mae, the taxpayer-owned mortgage finance giant, was really the owner. In spite of the conflicting evidence, Aaron Bowden, the retired judge overseeing the case, made a summary judgment on Aug. 3, ruling that the property should go back to AmTrust. Mr. Bowden did not return phone calls seeking comment. Chip Parker, managing partner at Parker & DuFresne in Jacksonville, which represents Mr. Waters, said: “The threshold issue in any foreclosure case is who has the right to foreclose. We presented evidence to the judge that Fannie Mae owns the note and mortgage, and yet the judge ignored this crucial evidence.” Mr. Parker is concerned that some homeowners are victimized by the system. “What we are talking about is railroading homeowners through the rocket docket,” he added. When contacted by a reporter on Thursday, a spokeswoman for Fannie Mae confirmed that it owned the note. David Tong, the lawyer representing AmTrust in the case, declined to comment on the matter. But on Friday, he did an about-face, filing papers with the court acknowledging that Fannie Mae owns the note. Clearing the Backlog Florida law requires that banks argue their cases before a judge if they want to recover property from borrowers in default, and 471,000 such cases were pending in Florida at the end of July, according to the Florida State Courts administration. Setting up discrete foreclosure courts statewide was seen as a way to help deal with the issue; consumer law experts say they aren’t aware of any other state that has set up a temporary court to work down such a backlog. But it is paradoxical, say lawyers representing homeowners in the cases, that Florida’s attorney general acknowledges problems in the cases while retired judges, intent on reducing caseloads, seem unconcerned about those same problems — like flaws in the banks’ documentation of ownership. “The most shocking thing of all is the A.G.’s office understands the problem and yet the court system turns a blind eye to the fact that mortgage servicers are the problem,” says Margery Golant, a lawyer in South Florida and a former executive at Ocwen, a large mortgage servicing company. “In the meantime, neighborhoods are being destroyed, homeowners’ associations are being destroyed, and the tax base is being clobbered.” Steven P. Combs, a lawyer at Combs, Greene, McLester, who formerly was general counsel to the Fourth Judicial Circuit as well as a family law magistrate, says the entire process may be unconstitutional. The Florida Supreme Court has consistently recognized the need to hire retired judges on a temporary basis, Mr. Combs said, and has ruled that such a “temporary” use is constitutional. But because the retired judges are being given foreclosure assignments “repeatedly and consecutively” to the point of usurping the elected judges’ jurisdiction over all residential foreclosure cases, he said, their use may not qualify as temporary and could thus violate the Florida constitution. The fact that these judges are being paid to reduce the court’s case load creates a perception among homeowners that the judges have a financial interest in dispensing cases prematurely, Mr. Combs said, creating a potential bias against borrowers and possibly violating their right to due process. He pointed to a recent case in Broward County in which a retired judge refused to postpone a borrower’s foreclosure sale even though the bank had agreed to it. The judge stated that she was there to “dispose of cases.” “If you are an individual whose house is being foreclosed and you hear these judges are being paid to clean out the backlog, under a realistic appraisal of human tendencies, do you think that the average judge would be biased in favor of prematurely terminating your case to clean out the backlog?” Mr. Combs asked. J. Thomas McGrady, chief judge in the Sixth Judicial Circuit, said in a press release announcing the program: “We have to clear these cases because of the negative impact they are having on other civil litigation. The real estate crisis has placed a tremendous burden on our judges, and people with other types of pending litigation are also entitled to their day in court.” Who Owns the Notes? A foreclosure crisis that has forced millions of delinquent borrowers from their homes across Florida and elsewhere has also created enormous profits for the law firms and foreclosure servicers that represent banks and financial services in these actions. Among the busiest of these firms are the three under investigation by Florida’s attorney general: the Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson; Shapiro & Fishman; and the Law Offices of David J. Stern. “These law firms appear to be mills,” says Mr. McCollum. “They submit false documents, fabricate the documents, or the documents actually don’t exist. They wanted to speed the process up because the faster they get the foreclosures done the better.” But Mr. Stern said: “I can’t speak for the other firms, but I can assure you there has not been submission of fraudulent documents. We feel a lot of it is politically motivated. We have done nothing wrong and are going to cooperate fully.” Lawyers for the other two firms also disputed the attorney general’s contentions, maintaining that they work diligently on behalf of their clients. Borrowers’ lawyers say they confront dubious practices, often involving false documentation “proving” who owns the note on a given property. Typically, they say, this involves questionable affidavits asserting ownership of a note because the actual document has been lost or cannot be produced. Because the affidavits are often signed by bank representatives who have a stake in the outcome, they should not be allowed as evidence, borrowers’ lawyers say. Yet they routinely are introduced as evidence; the Waters case involves such an affidavit signed by an AmTrust official. The problem of who owns the note is a result of the process of bundling home loans into securities and selling them to investors — a common practice in the housing boom. This meant that notes documenting ownership on a property were repeatedly transferred, blurring the identity of exactly who controlled the note. Documents showing that a note has been assigned to a foreclosing bank are often dated after a foreclosure, meaning that the bank bringing the case may not have the right to foreclose. Other questions arise involving documents with improper notary stamps and wildly different signatures on legal papers supposedly prepared by the same person, borrowers’ lawyers say. In a case in May 2009, Thomas E. Ice, a defense lawyer at Ice Legal in Royal Palm Beach, Fla., took the deposition of Cheryl Samons, an operations manager at the David J. Stern law firm. He asked her about instances at the firm of backdating the assignment of mortgages to allow foreclosures to go forward. Mr. Ice and his wife, Ariane, who works with him, had found problems with notary stamps on mortgage assignments. “Many assignments of mortgages were signed and notarized with a stamp that had not been issued at the time of the signing, reflecting that the assignment was backdated,” Mr. Ice says. In her court deposition with Mr. Ice, Ms. Samons testified that she was both an executive of the entity that handles the mortgage transfers and an officer at the Stern firm. Mr. Ice says that this creates a conflict of interest because clients of the Stern firm — most of the nation’s major banks — benefit from the transfer. The law firm helps its own clients by “creating an illusion that the signing took place before and it did not,” says Mr. Ice. Mr. Stern attributed any backdating to sloppiness on the part of paralegals and said that it had since been corrected. As for Ms. Samons’s dual roles at the mortgage transfer registry and the law firm, he responded that, “We believe it is a solid practice.” Ms. Samons did not return phone calls seeking comment. Another popular practice that ties up courts’ calendars occurs after a foreclosure is granted and the property is scheduled to be returned to the bank. As ownership shifts from borrower to bank, so do all the obligations associated with it, like payment of homeowners’ association dues. But few banks want to pay these bills, so firms representing them move to delay the final step in the process by canceling the sale of a foreclosed property at the last minute, court officials say. This does not require the banks to restart the foreclosure process, but it keeps the property in the hands of the borrower, who remains responsible for maintenance and association dues. Earlier this year, Jennifer D. Bailey, administrative judge in Miami-Dade County, said such cancellations were occurring in 55 percent of cases in her district. In July, she instituted new rules to reduce last-minute cancellations, including a requirement that a judge hear the reason. “There was huge volume to start with and then with this extra bogus stuff going on, the courts were cross-eyed from it,” says Ms. Golant. “There is a certain amount of truth to the gridlock, but the reason for the gridlock is the foreclosure firms are practically running the courtrooms.” One Firm, Many Cases The lawyer most closely identified with Florida’s foreclosure morass is David J. Stern. He is something of a mystery man within the foreclosure world; it is impossible to reach him by phone since his name is not in the firm’s voice-mail directory and, until recently, there were no publicly available photographs of him. Several prominent borrowers’ lawyers who have litigated against his firm say they have never met him. Operating out of a gleaming eight-story office building in Plantation, Fla., Mr. Stern, 50, has come a long way from the South Texas College of Law, from which he graduated in 1986. He spent his early career as a quality-control lawyer for Gerald Shapiro, a lawyer who represented mortgage lenders. He opened his own firm in 1994; Fannie Mae voted him attorney of the year in 1998. Mr. Stern’s company, which now includes a law firm and ancillary foreclosure support businesses, employs more than 900 people. The firm filed 70,382 foreclosure cases last year. Critics say the Stern firm has been able to handle this high volume because its lawyers frequently refuse to work with borrowers and are very aggressive about pushing cases through the courts even when there are questions about the documentation. Mr. Stern sees it differently. “I refer to us as an efficient law firm with a specialization in mortgage lending,”’ he responded. “Should I feel ashamed that I have built a successful practice?” he asked. “No one references how committed I am, how I built my firm and how I work 20 hours a day.” But some question the thoroughness of the firm’s work. Bill Warner, a private investigator in Sarasota, said the Stern firm filed a foreclosure suit against him on behalf of Deutsche Bank Financial Trust in January 2009. But the bank did not own the property and the suit erred by including in its claims a federal tax lien on another person with the same name but a different Social Security number, Mr. Warner said. Mr. Warner’s mortgage was actually owned by Countrywide, which had sold it to Wells Fargo. “I fought them myself for a year and a half,” he recalls. “In the meantime, we did a loan modification with Wells Fargo but Mr. Stern’s firm pursued the foreclosure on the property anyway.” Last May, Mr. Warner filed a motion to dismiss the case, alleging submission of a fraudulent document because Deutsche Bank was not owner of the note. He filed another motion questioning the credibility of the Stern firm and the lawyer on the case, he said. On June 14, Deutsche Bank withdrew the case. Earlier this year Mr. Stern, who has profited handsomely from the foreclosure trade, sold the part of his operation that provides support services for his firm’s foreclosure work — DJS Processing — to a public company called the Chardan 2008 China Acquisition Corporation. The processing company and affiliates generated revenue of $260 million in 2009, financial filings show. Brian Foley, a compensation consultant in White Plains, concluded that Mr. Stern made $17.8 million in 2008, including $12.64 million in compensation and nonrecurring benefits of $4.36 million. In the deal with Chardan, Mr. Stern and his affiliates were paid $93.5 million: $58.5 million in cash and $35 million after the transaction closed, according to government filings. In addition, Mr. Stern got a promissory note for $52.49 million to be paid out over the next couple of years. In recent years, Mr. Stern and his wife, Jeanine, have bought nearly $60 million in real estate, mostly in Florida, property records show. Their Mediterranean-style home on Harborage Isle Drive, in a gated community in Fort Lauderdale, faces water on two sides and cost almost $14 million. Not far away, in Hillsboro Beach, the Sterns bought two waterfront properties for $17 million. Mr. Stern also spent $6.8 million last year on a 9,273-square-foot apartment at the Castillo Grand Residences in Fort Lauderdale, part of a Ritz-Carlton complex. He and his wife own two homes in Beaver Creek, Colo.; one was purchased in 2001 for $4.975 million, and another bought in 2007 for $14.2 million. His automobile collection may be worth $3 million, auto experts said; it includes a 2008 Bugatti, multiple Ferraris, Porsches and Mercedes and a Cadillac. This being Florida, Mr. Stern also collects boats. A 108-foot Mangusta yacht, Lady J, is for sale at $5.9 million, Web postings show. It was replaced by a 130-foot yacht that cost about $20 million, according to an acquaintance who requested anonymity over concerns about Mr. Stern’s influence in the community. In a nod to his foreclosure work, according to the acquaintance, Mr. Stern mused about possibly naming the larger yacht Su Casa Es Mi Casa — “Your House Is My House.” But his wife and others cautioned against it, according to this acquaintance, and Mr. Stern named the boat “Misunderstood.” Mr. Stern denies that he considered the “Su Casa Es Mi Casa” name. Resigned to Moving While Rodney Waters and Terri Reese are resigned to leaving their home and moving their family into a rental, they still face another problem. Under Florida law, a lender may pursue Mr. Waters for the difference between what it says he owes on the house and what it will fetch in a sale. Thanks to foreclosure fees and other charges, he owes almost double the $138,500 received in February by the seller of a neighboring house. Included in the amount that Mr. Waters owes is almost $10,000 in fees generated by AmTrust’s lawyers in the case. Mr. Bowden, the retired judge overseeing the case, ordered Mr. Waters to pay the fees. His lawyer, Mr. Parker, had hoped to persuade the owner of the note to offer a new loan to his client in a smaller amount to reflect the reduced value in the property. He argued that this would be a better outcome for the lender and the borrower, since a foreclosure usually ends up costing a lender far more than does a principal write-down that leaves the borrower in the home. But with the judge ruling in favor of the lender, such a deal is unlikely. Mr. Parker filed an appeal late last week, but Mr. Waters may have to file for bankruptcy to stop the foreclosure sale.

Florida
Foreclosures
Housing and Real Estate
Suits and Litigation
Subprime Mortgage Crisis


Lawyer to Chronicle People Who Fight Abuse of Elderly

Abstract: MARIE-THERESE CONNOLLY is using the prosecutorial skill she honed fighting nursing home fraud to add dimensions to the public’s awareness of the widespread problem of elder abuse, including highlighting the costs to society of financial, physical and psychological mistreatment of older adults. “Elder abuse is ubiquitous,” Ms. Connolly, 54, a former Justice Department prosecutor, said. “But we are not connecting the dots and realizing that the economic costs are high. Few people realize the huge implications for Medicare , Medicaid and family programs.” She has been working — writing federal legislation, testifying and prosecuting cases — for years, but a grant last fall from the MacArthur Foundation recognized her efforts in the area and gave her the financial freedom to reframe the issue on her own terms. Despite the occasional highly publicized case like the one involving the actor Mickey Rooney, who told Congress he had been mistreated by relatives, or the conviction of the heiress Brooke Astor’s son on charges of defrauding her and stealing millions of dollars from her, the biggest challenge is that aging is something that everyone wants to ignore, Ms. Connolly said. “We need to talk about this,” she said. She decided to write a book, but not about the many examples of how older people are exploited or mistreated. “The engine of the book is going to be the people on the ground who are doing amazing things to help older people who are suffering from all these different kinds of abuses,” Ms. Connolly said of the book, which she said would be published in spring 2013. With no coordinated national approach, “the social workers and others who are trying to help are forced to invent the wheel over and over,” she said. Protecting the elderly is not a top national concern, she said, although 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, and large numbers of baby boomers are in or approaching their 60s, a period when they become more vulnerable. Ms. Connolly, an energetic mother of three, did not set out to become a champion of rights for the elderly. As a newly minted lawyer out of Northeastern University School of Law, an early assignment was prosecuting civil fraud cases at the Justice Department. Several years later, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional watchdog agency, uncovered widespread nursing home abuses. That prompted the Justice Department to set up the Elder Justice and Nursing Home Initiative to, among other things, pursue fraud against older adults. She was named to lead it in 1999. She left the post in 2007, becoming a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington research organization, and founding the nonprofit group Life Long Justice to help detect abuse of the elderly and find solutions. In 2010, Congress passed the first federal legislation, the Elder Justice Act, which she helped write, to address such abuse and exploitation. Despite the law and efforts to shed light on the problem, the toll on victims remains vast and grim, she said. Just making sure that the people who come into contact with older adults, including doctors and social workers, are trained to distinguish between accidental bruises, which are common among older adults, and marks that are inflicted by someone else would be an important step, she said. Ms. Connolly also wants people to understand the economic toll of abuse, noting that studies show that abused elderly people “are more likely to be admitted to a nursing home, for example, and far more likely to suffer from increased mortality and morbidity.” When financial, physical or other abuse means that an older person cannot live independently, taxpayers pick up the bill for costly acute, intensive or long-term care via Medicare or Medicaid, she said. Financial exploitation alone costs victims $2.9 billion annually, according to a 2011 MetLife Mature Market Institute study. Ms. Connolly said that the actual cost of abuse could be much greater, but no comprehensive study had been done. A major drawback to public awareness, she said, is the lack of research, especially in the areas of intervention and prevention. It is difficult to pinpoint the precise number of cases of mistreatment and abuse of older people, she said, because abuse takes many forms, can be hard to detect and can occur at home or in nursing homes and other institutions. Citing surveys and studies over the last decade, Ms. Connolly estimated that several million older Americans suffered abuse each year. But she said, “It’s very hard to put a finger on the prevalence.” To arrive at more precise figures, she is working with some other specialists on the elderly to research the various aspects of abuse and to find financing to support the effort. Her no-strings $500,000 MacArthur award helps make up for the fact that she has not drawn a salary since she left her federal job — something her family has taken in stride although her older two children are in college. Her husband, Daniel Kohrman, is a lawyer with the AARP Foundation and works on issues involving older adults as well. But Ms. Connolly says she knows focusing public attention on abuse of the elderly is not going to be easy. “Despite the tide of aging baby boomers, people are still far more aware of child abuse and domestic violence than they are of what happens to an older neighbor or relative,” she said. “Elder abuse is still a national blind spot.”

Elderly
Elder Abuse
Law and Legislation
Elder Care
Connolly Marie-Therese


Olive Garden Breadsticks to Debut in Lunch Sandwiches

Abstract: Olive Garden, faced with steadily declining sales, announced plans to capitalize on perhaps its most popular menu item, breadsticks. The restaurant chain, owned by Darden Restaurants, says it will use its breadsticks for chicken parmigiana and meatball sandwiches starting June 1. Consumers ordering the new items will, of course, get unlimited breadsticks. The breadsticks used for sandwiches will be shorter and wider than the regular ones, said Justin Sikora, a Darden representative. Olive Garden’s breadsticks gained attention last year during a dispute with an investor, Starboard Value. Among other criticisms, Starboard said Darden wasn’t being disciplined in its distribution of breadsticks to customers. It also said the quality of the breadsticks seemed to have declined. Shortly after, Starboard won its bid to take control of Darden’s board. The new sandwiches will be available only on the lunch menu. The meatball sandwich will cost $7 and the chicken parmigiana $8, Mr. Sikora said.

Sandwich
Darden Restaurants
Starboard Value
Olive Garden Italian Restaurants
Bread


Donald Goerke, SpaghettiOs Creator, Dies at 83

Abstract: Donald Goerke, a Campbell Soup Company executive whose nonlinear approach to pasta resulted in SpaghettiOs, died Sunday at his home in Delran, N.J. He was 83. The cause was heart failure, his son David said. Introduced in 1965, SpaghettiOs has been a fixture in the American pantry ever since. Its memorable advertising jingle — “Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs!” — sung by the pop singer Jimmie Rodgers, is indelibly lodged in the public consciousness. More than 150 million cans of SpaghettiOs are sold each year, a spokeswoman for Campbell, based in Camden, N.J., said Wednesday. Mr. Goerke, who worked for Campbell from 1955 until he retired in 1990, also created the company’s Chunky soup line. Donald Edward Goerke was born in Waukesha, Wis., on Aug. 8, 1926. (The family name is pronounced GUR-key.) He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from what was then Carroll College in Waukesha and an M.B.A. from the University of Wisconsin. Besides his son David, Mr. Goerke is survived by another son, Brian; a daughter, Ann Nassoura; a brother, Fred; and seven grandchildren. His wife, the former June Marie Uthus, died in 2008. Mr. Goerke was a marketing manager with Franco-American, then a division of Campbell, when he was asked to supervise the development of a new canned pasta for children. The shape was crucial on two counts. The first was durability: it had to withstand canning and reheating. The second was damage control: long pasta and young children mix dangerously, with child, chair and walls ending up beribboned with dripping strands. A simple “O,” Mr. Goerke realized, would solve both problems. Its stable shape allowed a thinner strand of pasta to be used, making the reheated product less gummy. It also fit tidily in the bowl of a spoon. Shapes considered and rejected by Mr. Goerke’s team included baseballs, cowboys, spacemen and stars.

Goerke Donald
Campbell Soup Co
Deaths (Obituaries)


Through Puppets, Bringing New Life to Subway Life

Abstract: Life must be hell when a subway beggar doesn’t want your money. Meghan Healey was a design student and flat broke several years ago when she handed a man her pocketful of pennies. “I really was giving him all the money I had,” Ms. Healey recalled. “And he threw them back in my face! I couldn’t believe a homeless person was telling me my money was no good.” But humiliation turned to inspiration: she has transformed the penny-flinging panhandler into Homeless Bob, the surly yet selfless soul of her play-in-progress “Subterraneo: A Cruel Puppet’s Guide to Underground Living.” The piece is a puppet mash-up of Dante’s “Inferno” and real-life subway stories gathered by Ms. Healey and a half-dozen student volunteers at Queens College , where she is an assistant professor of costume and scenic design. Plans call for Homeless Bob to guide the Commutrix — an earnest rider not unlike Ms. Healey — through the subway the way Virgil led Dante through the nine circles of hell, from Limbo to Betrayal. Along the route, they will be serenaded in Spanish by the Undead Mariachi Trio and watch beggars like Legless Joe bewail their afflictions to tug on the heartstrings and purse strings of weary commuters. Depending on the scenes, to be written by Ms. Healey and several collaborating playwrights, Homeless Bob will be funny, friendly or furious. “I think of him as a modern-day New York Virgil, if Virgil was homeless in New York,” Ms. Healey, 34, said. “He’s not as benevolent. He’s angry.” One quiet morning, she and her students were intently working on puppets inside a softly lighted studio at the college. One student gently stuffed crumpled newsprint into Bob’s plastic-bag body, while another dug her thumbs into a chunk of clay being molded into another puppet’s head. Mariachi skeleton puppets lay on a table awaiting decorations for their tiny charro jackets. Music, it turns out, is one thing people like about the subway, said her students, who went out several times a week to interview commuters about their underground likes, dislikes and strangest encounters. Late trains or dirty stations still top many riders’ most-hated lists, and plenty have had more than a few run-ins with subway psychos. Sex and violence have come up a lot in their interviews, even if people are reluctant at first to share risqué tales with the puppet masters. But as Ms. Healey explains, “Pinocchio” this isn’t. “By calling them ‘Cruel Puppets,’ I wanted to make sure people knew this was a grown-up thing,” she said. “And the stories are so surreal and strange, that puppets are the perfect way to tell them.” She has had no shortage of odd run-ins since she came to New York 15 years ago to study at New York University and work in the theater, witnessing all sorts of spectacles on late-night rides home. There was the time, she said, that a man decked out like a rhinestone cowboy threatened to stab a female security guard who had — unprovoked — threatened to shoot him. Ms. Healey and a businessman watched in alarm, then grabbed each other’s hands and bolted for the doors when the train stopped. “The guy and I nodded and went our separate ways,” she said. “For all I know, those two could have killed each other.” The notion of turning those moments into drama was also prompted by her work with community-based theater, where plays are based on something — a neighborhood or an interest — that the group has in common. Aided by a grant from the college’s provost, who wanted to spur faculty-student collaborations, Ms. Healey and her students went looking for shared experience below the streets. “You ride the subway from one end to the other and you come across every economic sector,” she said. “It’s the real New York City. Millions of people, body to body. The fact people don’t kill each other, why does that happen?” It took the students a while to learn to approach strangers on the train, and then to learn that they would fare better outside major stations than on bustling platforms. In recent weeks they have trolled Union Square Park. Younger people are more friendly, they said, though their elders offer surprising insights. “They say the conditions have improved a lot in terms of safety and cleanliness,” said Elyse Price, a senior. “I was shocked when I heard that. I’m from Queens, and the 7 train has not been good to me over the years. They still have the red cars.” Many riders said they enjoyed the musicians on the platforms, taking the edge off their commute. Others talked about regulars they saw every day, especially artists, who made them feel part of a rolling community. As for the subway’s infernal parts, the students found enough stories to flesh out the second circle, Lust. “One person told me she had a bet with her friend that she could find somebody to sleep with on the train,” Ms. Price said. “She went over and started taking to one guy and wound up sleeping with him. On the train.” Another commuter provided potential fodder for the first circle, Limbo. “He said everyone who is on the train is alone,” said Henry Cheng, a senior. “We are surrounded by people, but all alone in our bodies. It reminded me of something I read in a play, that trains travel so fast that it takes time for the soul to catch up to the body. When you’re in transit, you lose a bit of your personality.” That could apply to those who live in transit, like the homeless people Mr. Cheng has seen over the years. Yet he has come to see them as a small community of people who help one another out — say, pooling money for meals or clothes for the laundry. Indeed, in Ms. Healey’s reimagining of Dante, which she intends to perform for the first time next spring, she has lent a touch of nobility to her panhandler, who sacrifices himself for those who would otherwise shun him. She based the episode on recent news reports about a homeless Queens man who was stabbed as he defended a woman against an assailant, then went ignored by passers-by as he bled to death. Maybe she has been influenced by her other underground interest: photographing people reading religious texts on the train. Given that she takes four trains and a bus from her home in the north Bronx to the college campus in Flushing, she has plenty of time to behold the varieties of religious experience. “You’re alone with your thoughts,” she said. “It becomes a place of unexpected spirituality and refuge.”

Queens College City University of New York


A Communist Insider Turned Exile, and the Secrets He Never Shared

Abstract: BEIJING — Xu Jiatun, a former senior Communist Party official, took many secrets to his grave, say people who knew him. Since his death in June after 26 years of exile in the United States, new details have emerged of Mr. Xu’s daring escape from China after the suppression of the Tiananmen democracy demonstrations in June 1989 and about the party’s presence in Hong Kong, where from 1983 to 1989 Mr. Xu headed the local office of Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. That made him China’s de facto representative in what was then a British colony. This is of more than historical interest, with the forces of communism and democracy locked in a bitter contest in Hong Kong. The Communist Party has always maintained an omertà-like silence about its activities in the territory, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Martin Lee, the founder of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, met with Mr. Xu several times during Mr. Xu’s tenure at Xinhua, Mr. Lee said in an interview. “One time he and I had lunch, and he told me not to worry too much. Beijing had already brought about 50,000 people into Hong Kong to work in all sectors of life — the civil service, the professions.” If Britain pulled out before the handover, he said, “these people would just take over.” Image Pro-democracy protesters in Beijing in 1989. Credit Catherine Henriette/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images He intended this to be reassuring, Mr. Lee said. “But now when you look at Hong Kong, I think that they are running this place. Our chief executive is one of them, a secret Communist Party cadre, obviously,” he said, referring to Leung Chun-ying, the territory’s leader. Mr. Leung has denied that he is a party member. Mr. Xu made many friends in Hong Kong, including democrats and tycoons, said Kam Kin-yat, whose father, Kam Yiu-yu, was the editor of the pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po and an old friend of Mr. Xu’s. Mr. Xu was open-minded, but making friends was also part of his job, Mr. Kam said by telephone from Los Angeles. Mr. Xu encouraged Mr. Lee, a lawyer, and Szeto Wah , a union organizer, to set up political parties, Mr. Lee said. In Mr. Xu’s discussions with Mr. Szeto, Mr. Lee said, “he added one thing that he didn’t tell me — that Szeto Wah didn’t have to worry about money. And now, of course, in Hong Kong the pro-Beijing political parties are paid by Beijing, indirectly through local tycoons.” Mr. Szeto became an outspoken critic of the party after the Tiananmen protests. As those protests rocked China, Mr. Kam said that Zhao Ziyang, the party general secretary, asked Mr. Xu to evaluate the government’s best response to the demonstrations from a Hong Kong point of view. Mr. Xu told Zhao that a “peaceful resolution” was necessary. Zhao agreed, but he was dismissed for this stance and placed under lifelong house arrest by hard-liners including Deng Xiaoping. In 1989, Mr. Xu asked to retire but was instead dismissed from his post. In January 1990, a conservative, Zhou Nan, was appointed as his successor. Mr. Xu moved to Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, apparently awaiting news of his fate from Beijing. But he took his fate into his own hands. About 8 p.m. on April 30, Mr. Xu went for his usual evening stroll out of the Xinhua headquarters in Shenzhen, according to Mr. Kam, who said this was the first time he was publicly sharing details of an escape he helped plan. “He went for a walk empty-handed,” Mr. Kam said. “He didn’t bring a single suitcase.” Mr. Kam’s role was confirmed by Ho Pin, the publisher of Mirror Media Group, who is based in New York. Accompanied by a family member, Mr. Xu crossed the border into Hong Kong at Lo Wu, wearing a golf cap for a disguise. He boarded a train, alighting at the Sheung Shui station, and walked about 100 feet along the tracks to where Mr. Kam was waiting in a car. That same evening, an order from Beijing arrived at the Xinhua office in Shenzhen to confiscate Mr. Xu’s passport, Mr. Kam said. In Hong Kong, Mr. Xu wrote a letter to Deng, in care of Xinhua in Hong Kong, promising he wouldn’t reveal any secrets. He hoped his family in China would be treated leniently if he remained loyal to that promise, said Mr. Kam, who mailed the letter. The United States Consulate issued Mr. Xu a visa and helped arrange a last-minute air ticket. Mr. Xu kept his secrets, but the party never granted his wish to return home.

Xu Jiatun
China
Hong Kong
Communist Party of China


New York F.C. And Villa Agree to 3-Year Deal

Abstract: David Villa, a veteran Spanish striker who has lifted the Champions League and World Cup trophies in a title-filled career, joined New York City F.C. on Monday as the Major League Soccer club’s first player. The club announced that Villa, 32, had agreed to a three-year contract. He joined on a free transfer from Spain’s Atlético Madrid, meaning New York City F.C. did not have to pay a fee for him. Financial terms of the contract were not released, but it can be expected that he will be among the highest paid players in the league. Villa is the first player signed by the team, which is jointly owned by the Yankees and Manchester City of England’s Premier League and will begin play in M.L.S. in 2015. “It’s a real honor that the people who have formed the club have thought of me” as the first signing, Villa said in Spanish in a video posted on New York City F.C.’s website Monday morning , adding, “It’s an honor to be the first player and a flag-bearer of New York City as they begin life in M.L.S.” Villa won the Spanish league title with Atlético this season, adding it to the two he won at Barcelona in 2011 and 2013, and he started for Atlético in its loss to Real Madrid in the Champions League final last month. In addition to Barcelona and Atlético Madrid, he has played for Sporting Gijón, Zaragoza and Valencia, but never for a club outside his native Spain. Image David Villa won the Spanish league title with Atlético Madrid this season. Credit David Ramos/Getty Images He was also a member of Spain’s European Championship team in 2008 and its World Cup-winning squad in 2010, and he was confirmed Monday as a member of Spain’s team for the coming World Cup in Brazil. It will be his third World Cup, giving him a chance to add to his record total of 56 goals for Spain’s national team. The timing of his signing presented some complications because the European and M.L.S. soccer calendars do not match. Europe plays a late-summer-to-spring schedule, while New York City F.C. will not gather for preseason training until the third week of January, and it will not begin play until next March. Claudio Reyna, New York City F.C.’s sporting director, said the team and Villa had worked out a schedule that included rest after the World Cup, fitness training with the team’s staff and a loan to an unnamed team in the fall. “He’ll be playing some games,” Reyna said, though he said those games would not be with New York City F.C.’s parent club in Manchester. Villa praised Manchester City’s ambitions and the growth of M.L.S. as factors in his decision to leave Europe. “I’m really looking forward to helping the City group grow even bigger with the team in New York,” he said. “So let’s hope it all goes well.” The club said Villa would wear his familiar No. 7 in New York. The team previously announced that it would play at Yankee Stadium while it pursued plans for a permanent home, and it could soon add a second marquee name. Reports in England over the weekend said Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard was in talks to join New York City F.C . for 2015 as well.

David Villa
Soccer
Frank Lampard
New York City Football Club Soccer Team
MLS


Discord, State by State

Abstract: WISCONSIN THE BILL The proposal backed by Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, would strip nearly all collective bargaining powers from most public employee unions. It would also impose cuts in state workers’ take-home pay — 6 percent to 8 percent on average — by diverting more of their pay to finance health care and pension costs. WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW The Republican-controlled Assembly has passed the bill, but it is stalled in the Senate because the 14 Democratic senators have fled to Illinois to prevent a quorum. Union members and other protesters have for two weeks staged huge demonstrations against the bill around the Capitol. WHEN IT MIGHT BE RESOLVED Not until Democrats return to the Senate or until the governor drops his insistence on eliminating most collective bargaining powers and other provisions that have drawn the strongest objections. RICHARD A. OPPEL JR. INDIANA THE BILLS Several measures would weaken organized labor, most notably legislation that would bar any requirement that employees in unionized, private sector workplaces pay any union dues or fees. WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW Most of the Democratic members of the House of Representatives remained in Urbana, Ill., to prevent the chamber from having a quorum to conduct business. In Indianapolis, Brian Bosma, the Republican who is speaker of the House, told reporters on Monday that he would not negotiate with Democrats while they were away and encouraged them to return to discuss the bills on the House floor. Meanwhile, union groups held another rally at the Capitol. WHEN IT MIGHT BE RESOLVED Neither side appeared willing to budge. House Democrats said it was unlikely they would return to the Capitol on Tuesday. John Schorg, a spokesman for the Democrats, said they would not go back as long as Republicans refused to negotiate. EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS OHIO THE BILL Senate Bill 5, introduced by Senator Shannon Jones, a Republican, would all but eliminate collective bargaining for state and local workers, require higher payments into health insurance plans and do away with automatic pay increases for teachers. WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW Republican senators were putting finishing touches on changes to the bill, and a new version will be made public Tuesday. Pro-union groups say they have called a statewide rally on that day to oppose the bill. WHEN IT MIGHT BE RESOLVED The bill is expected to pass the Republican-controlled Senate this week. It then requires several readings in the House, which is also controlled by Republicans. Lawmakers said they expected it to go to Gov. John Kasich, who supports it, by mid-March. SABRINA TAVERNISE

Wisconsin
Illinois
Indiana
Organized Labor
Ohio
United States Politics and Government
Demonstrations Protests and Riots