S.E.C. Charges Venture Capitalist With Fraud

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Federal authorities accused William Del Biaggio III, 41, a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist and part owner of the Nashville Predators hockey team, of defrauding investors and using the money to buy his $25 million stake in the professional sports team. The Securities and Exchange Commission said in a complaint filed in Federal District Court here that Mr. Del Biaggio, who is known as Boots, also used the money to pay off gambling debts and maintain a lavish lifestyle and luxury home in San Jose, Calif. Mr. Del Biaggio faces a civil injunctive action of securities fraud by the S.E.C. Federal prosecutors filed a single criminal charge of falsifying documents to obtain $100 million in loans. He agreed Thursday to be barred permanently from serving as an investment adviser, according to Michael Dicke, associate regional director for enforcement at the S.E.C. in San Francisco. Since 2003, the complaint said, Mr. Del Biaggio has misappropriated $19 million from individual investors and used the money “as his personal checkbook.” Since August 2007, it said, he forged documents to obtain $45 million in loans by pledging as collateral securities owned by unsuspecting customers of a San Francisco brokerage firm. Mr. Del Biaggio’s lawyers at the San Francisco firm of Keker & Van Nest did not respond to requests for comment. In May, Mr. Del Biaggio resigned as a general partner of Sand Hill Capital, a venture debt firm that he founded in Menlo Park, Calif. In June, he filed for bankruptcy protection. Mr. Del Biaggio is the co-founder, along with his father, of the Heritage Bank of Commerce in San Jose, Calif. He used his Silicon Valley business connections to mislead investors, Mr. Dicke said. That included fabricating names that included the words Sand Hill, which is the name of a Menlo Park road that is home to the most prominent venture capital firms. “That’s how he got people to trust him,” Mr. Dicke said. According to the S.E.C. complaint, a friend and personal broker at a San Francisco brokerage firm, which was not identified by the S.E.C., helped him carry out the scheme by sending him clients’ account statements. Mr. Del Biaggio then doctored them by replacing the clients’ names and addresses with his own, according to the complaint. In an August filing with the S.E.C., the Merriman Curhan Ford Group, an investment firm, said it was facing numerous lawsuits in connection with loans made to Mr. Del Biaggio. It also laid the blame on a single former employee, which it did not identify. “It was interesting to see how easy it was for him to obtain all these fraudulent loans,” Mr. Dicke said. “It’s shocking in some ways that he was able to get $45 million in loans from a fairly simplistic fraud.” Mr. Del Biaggio faces imprisonment and fines. “We want the money to go back to the victims,” Mr. Dicke said.

Venture Capital
Nashville Predators
Securities and Exchange Commission
Frauds and Swindling
Del Biaggio III William


Blazers Drop Sixers to 0-14

Abstract: LaMarcus Aldridge scored 33 points to help the Portland Trail Blazers win at Philadelphia, 114-104, on Monday night, sending the 76ers to their 14th straight loss to open the season. The win was the eighth in a row for Portland (11-3). Michael Carter-Williams had 24 points for Philadelphia, which moved a loss away from matching its franchise mark for consecutive losses to begin a season. The 76ers will look to avoid an 0-15 opening when they host the Nets on Wednesday. The Sixers are just four losses from tying the 2009-10 Nets for an N.B.A. record by beginning the season 0-18. If the losing continues, Philadelphia can break the league record for losses to start the season on Dec. 5 when it hosts Oklahoma City. RAPTORS 104, SUNS 100 Jonas Valanciunas had a career-high 27 points and 11 rebounds, DeMar DeRozan scored 23 and host Toronto won its fifth straight game, beating Phoenix. The Raptors improved to 9-1 at home and 4-0 against Western Conference opponents. Eric Bledsoe scored 25 points for the Suns, whose four-game winning streak ended. CAVALIERS 106, MAGIC 74 LeBron James scored 29 points, and Cleveland broke a four-game losing streak with a win over visiting Orlando. After bluntly assessing his own play at a morning shootaround, saying, “I stink,” James took control early, with 16 first-quarter points, and led his team to a comfortable victory. CLIPPERS 113, HORNETS 92 Blake Griffin had 22 points and a season-high 16 rebounds, and fell one assist short of a triple-double, and Chris Paul had 22 points and a season-high 15 assists as Los Angeles handed host Charlotte its sixth straight loss. PACERS 111, MAVERICKS 100 Donald Sloan scored 29 points to lead seven Indiana players in double figures in a win at Dallas. BULLS 97, JAZZ 95 Jimmy Butler had 25 points and Pau Gasol had 23 as Chicago won in Utah. TAYLOR WON’T APPEAL BAN Charlotte forward Jeffery Taylor said he would not appeal the 24-game suspension he received from the NB.A. after he pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges. Taylor said he took “full responsibility” for his actions.

LaMarcus Aldridge
Trail Blazers
76ers
Michael Carter-Williams
Basketball


Pacers’ Bench Proves Too Much for Nets

Abstract: Rodney Stuckey scored 20 points, David West added 17, and the Indiana Pacers overwhelmed the Nets, 110-85, on Saturday night at Barclays Center. The former Nets guard C. J. Watson, who played for the team during the 2012-13 season, came off the bench to score 17 points. Luis Scola added 13, Chris Copeland had 12 and Lavoy Allen chipped in 10. Jarrett Jack had 22 points and Joe Johnson added 18 for the Nets, who had won their previous three games. The Nets, who entered the night 12-2 against teams with losing records, could not handle the Pacers, who improved to 11-20. Indiana’s bench, the third-best in the league with 39.6 points entering the game, outscored the Nets’ bench, 50-16. After the Nets cut the deficit to 69-60 with 2 minutes 54 seconds left in the third quarter on a 3-pointer by Deron Williams, the Pacers went on a 24-11 run, converting nine Nets turnovers into 12 points to take a 93-71 lead with 8:27 left in the fourth quarter. RAPTORS 110, CLIPPERS 98 Kyle Lowry scored 25 points, and visiting Toronto’s reserves came up big in the fourth quarter of a victory over Los Angeles, ending the Clippers’ eight-game home winning streak. Jonas Valanciunas had 22 points and 11 rebounds for Toronto, the defending Atlantic Division champion. The Raptors’ DeMar DeRozan missed his 14th straight game because of a torn muscle in his left groin, and Landry Fields was sidelined for the third game in a row with a concussion. Lowry made 9 of 17 shots after averaging 9.3 points and 27.5 percent from the field during his previous four games against Los Angeles. Terrence Ross scored 11 for the Raptors. GRIZZLIES 103, HEAT 95 Mike Conley scored 24 points, Marc Gasol added 22 points and 10 rebounds, and Memphis never trailed in Miami. Beno Udrih scored 11 for the Grizzlies, who led by 19 points early in the second half before the Heat scored to get within 1 or 2 points on 11 different occasions in the final minutes. Image Lavoy Allen of the Pacers shooting over Mason Plumlee of the Nets at Barclays Center. The Pacers defeated the Nets, 110-85. Credit Seth Wenig/Associated Press But the Grizzlies always had an answer, with six players in double figures, to end a four-game losing streak. Dwyane Wade scored 25 points for Miami. Danny Granger scored a season-high 18 off the bench for the Heat, who got 16 from Luol Deng and 13 from Chris Andersen. BULLS 107, PELICANS 100 Jimmy Butler scored 33 points, Derrick Rose had 19, and host Chicago knocked off New Orleans for its sixth consecutive victory. The Bulls also had three reserves score in double figures in their ninth win in 10 games. Aaron Brooks scored 13 points, while Taj Gibson added 12 points and 10 rebounds. Nikola Mirotic finished with 10 points. Anthony Davis had 29 points, 11 rebounds and 6 blocked shots for the Pelicans. Tyreke Evans scored 26 points, while Jrue Holiday had 19 points and 7 assists. New Orleans, which was coming off a 97-90 victory over San Antonio on Friday night, was outrebounded, 45-37. WIZARDS 101, CELTICS 88 Kris Humphries scored 18 points, Paul Pierce had 17, and host Washington defeated Boston. It was the Wizards’ eighth win in their last 10 games, and it was decided quickly. Washington scored 13 consecutive points to take a 15-2 lead with less than four minutes gone. Jeff Green scored 23 points for Boston, which has lost four straight. By the time the Celtics’ nightmarish first quarter ended, they were behind, 30-12, had been outrebounded, 16-6, and had 8 turnovers. MAGIC 102, HORNETS 94 Nikola Vucevic had 22 points and 11 rebounds, Tobias Harris scored 21 points, and visiting Orlando overcame 42 points from Kemba Walker to top Charlotte. Walker scored a team-record 35 points in the second half and finished 15 of 30 in the highest-scoring game of his career, but the Hornets could not regain the lead after falling behind by 10 at halftime. It is the seventh time in the past 10 games Walker has scored at least 20 points.

Pacers
Basketball
C J Watson
Brooklyn Nets


Ralph Esmerian, Jeweler, Is Charged With Fraud

Abstract: A Duchess of Newcastle diamond brooch, circa 1887. A gilded album commissioned by Marie Antoinette in 1781. A carved ivory, enamel and jeweled case made at the request of Czar Nicholas II in 1893. Taken together, these intricate pieces and sparkling objects are valued at about $3 million. But they make up only a fraction of the jewelry and other collectibles that federal prosecutors say were at the center of an equally intricate series of frauds orchestrated by Ralph O. Esmerian, the former owner of the jewelry company Fred Leighton, who has draped his glittering treasures around the necks and wrists of celebrities in what some have called a red-carpet marketing campaign. Agents from the United States Postal Inspection Service arrested Mr. Esmerian, 70, a former board president of the Museum of American Folk Art and one of its biggest patrons, on Monday morning. He was charged with bankruptcy fraud and wire fraud and concealing assets, and he appeared later in the day before a federal magistrate in United States District Court in Manhattan. A fourth-generation jeweler, Mr. Esmerian was accused of embezzling and pledging as collateral the same $40 million in connection with $217 million in loans that he used to finance his business, officials said. Some of that money, from Merrill Lynch Mortgage Capital, went to his 2006 purchase of Fred Leighton, which had an inventory, according to his estimate at the time, worth about $192.3 million. “Ralph Esmerian allegedly lied and looted to maintain his personal and financial status by tricking his lenders, stealing from investors and deceiving the bankruptcy court,” the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, said in a news release announcing the charges. The 20-page criminal complaint in the case, sworn out by a postal inspector, Eleanor Berry, accuses Mr. Esmerian of a range of schemes and transactions, from the loans and surreptitious sales of various multimillion-dollar pieces of jewelry and collectibles to fraud in connection with a transaction involving his apartment. Among the other jewels involved in the schemes, according to the complaint, were a 13-carat Burma ruby and diamond ring, which was part of the collateral for one of two Merrill Lynch loans and which Mr. Esmerian valued at $2.94 million, and an Endymion butterfly brooch, worth about $2.45 million. Between the 18th- and 19th-century figures, the litany of pink gold, diamonds, rubies and emeralds and the details of the charges, the complaint has a taste of European history, a bit of a bankruptcy treatise and a hint of a shopping scene from “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” But the charges that Mr. Esmerian faces, if he is convicted, could land him in federal prison for a maximum of 30 years. He did not have the air of a downtrodden defendant, however, when he walked into the courtroom, wearing a dark-blue shirt and a gray suit with a light-chalk stripe. He strode into the well and turned right away to look at his longtime companion in the gallery, nodding and smiling at her. During the proceeding, before Magistrate Judge Theodore H. Katz, a prosecutor from Mr. Bharara’s office said federal authorities believed that Mr. Esmerian was a flight risk, citing what he said were the jeweler’s ties abroad — relatives in Paris and some time living in Greece — and strong evidence that he had bank accounts in Switzerland or Liechtenstein. “There is tens of millions of dollars in missing collateral that has simply vanished,” said the prosecutor, David B. Massey. “He has lied repeatedly to the bankruptcy court.” But Mr. Esmerian’s lawyer, Patricia Pileggi, said that he had lived in New York practically his entire life and argued that he posed no flight risk. She said that while his parents were dead and that he was estranged from his sister, his companion, Bonnie Selfe, was the only one willing to help him. Ms. Selfe works for a company affiliated with Van Cleef & Arpels and previously worked for Cartier. Magistrate Katz ordered Mr. Esmerian released on a $3.5 million personal recognizance bond, co-signed by Ms. Selfe and secured by the equity in her Tudor City apartment, which Ms. Pileggi said was worth $3.5 million. Outside the courtroom, Ms. Pileggi spoke briefly to reporters, saying, “We look forward to responding to these allegations.”

Jewels and Jewelry
Frauds and Swindling
Leighton Fred
Esmerian Ralph


Indonesia’s Orangutans Suffer as Fires Rage and Businesses Grow

Abstract: NYARU MENTENG, Indonesia — Katty, a docile, orange-haired preschooler, fell from a tree with a thump. Her teacher quickly picked her up, dusted off her bottom, refastened her white disposable diaper and placed her back on a branch more than seven feet off the ground. Katty is an orangutan, about 9 months old, whose family is believed to have been killed by the huge fires last fall in the Indonesian regions of Borneo and Sumatra. The blazes are an annual occurrence, when farmers clear land by burning it, often for palm oil plantations. But last year’s fires were the worst on record, and scientists blamed a prolonged drought and the effects of El Niño. The blazes destroyed more than 10,000 square miles of forests, blanketing large parts of Southeast Asia in a toxic haze for weeks, sickening hundreds of thousands of people and, according to the World Bank, causing $16 billion in economic losses. They also killed at least nine orangutans, the endangered apes native to the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra. More than 100, trapped by the loss of habitat or found wandering near villages, had to be relocated. Seven orphans, including five infants, were rescued and taken to rehabilitation centers here. “This is the biggest in the world for primate rehabilitation, not just orangutans, but we’re not proud of it,” said Denny Kurniawan, the program director of the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation Center, who oversees the care of 480 orangutans at seven sites in Central Kalimantan Province on the island of Borneo. “The number of orangutans here is an indicator of the mass forest destruction due to lack of law enforcement and the local government giving out palm oil concessions.” The suffering of the wildlife is part of a larger story of corporate expansion in a developing economy crashing into environmental issues in an era of climate change. Image Orphaned orangutans at a rehabilitation center in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan. Credit Kemal Jufri for The New York Times Indonesia has approved palm oil concessions on nearly 15 million acres of peatlands over the last decade; burning peat emits high levels of carbon dioxide and is devilishly hard to extinguish. Multinational palm oil companies, pulp and paper businesses, the plantations that sell to them, farmers and even day laborers all contribute to the problem. Groups like Greenpeace and the Indonesian Forum for the Environment put most of the blame for the blazes on the large plantations, which clear the most land. While it is against Indonesian law to clear plantations by burning, enforcement is lax. The authorities have opened criminal investigations against at least eight companies in connection with last year’s fires, but there has yet to be a single high-profile case to get to court. The government in Jakarta, the capital, has recently banned the draining and clearing of all peatland for agricultural use, and it has ordered provincial governments to adopt better fire suppression methods. But it has not publicly responded to calls for better prevention, such as cracking down on slash-and-burn operations by large palm oil companies. “Investment is good, but so is the environment,” said Eman Supriyadi, the director of a satellite rehabilitation center where two orphaned orangutans — 6-month-old Oka and 3-year-old Otong — are bottle-fed human infant formula and sleep in bamboo cribs. “There has to be a balance.” The government has admitted that it made a “mistake” in granting large strips of land to big corporate palm oil and pulp and paper companies over the past 10 years, said Luhut B. Pandjaitan, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs. “The Indonesian government has taken serious measures to freeze any new land rights or concessions for those giant industries,” he said. “We are encouraging them to be more efficient, so productivity can grow without adding more land.” Image A 3-year-old orangutan named Otong, believed to have been left orphaned and homeless after last year’s fires, is being cared for at an Indonesian center. Credit Kemal Jufri for The New York Times However, he said the main cause of the 2015 fires was the previous environmental destruction combined with the El Niño climate cycle. Katty, the roughly 9-month-old orangutan, was found in a charred forest by villagers in Central Kalimantan last October and eventually brought to the Nyaru Menteng center, which was established by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation in 1999. She now lives with 20 other infants in an old, one-story wooden house that was converted into an orangutan nursery, where they sleep side-by-side in colored plastic laundry baskets stuffed with leaves. They will spend the next seven or more years learning from their human minders how to climb trees, make a nest of leaves, spot edible forest fruits and avoid snakes and other predators, before being released back into the wild as young adults. At 7 a.m. each day, they are carted by wheelbarrow, three or four per load, to a fenced-off forest area more than 300 feet away for survival classes. They subsist on fruit, mainly bananas and rambutan, and on human infant formula. The minders take pains not to be overly affectionate with their adorable charges: The orangutans need to learn to avoid humans and not be accustomed to their presence, in preparation for their return to the jungle. Most of the center’s older orangutans are also orphans, found alone and rescued by conservationists or local villagers, or confiscated from people illegally keeping them as pets. The center aims to release 68 young-adult animals per year. Each returned animal is tracked by a computer chip implanted near the base of the neck that sends signals to the center for about two years. The release program has also been jeopardized by the fires, which have drastically reduced the potential orangutan habitat. Over the years, thousands of square miles have been cleared for plantations, a majority in lowland areas that are the prime habitat for orangutans. The fires last year destroyed more than 1,650 square miles of forest in Central Kalimantan alone, or 16 percent of its total. “Our challenge for now is, if we have information that orangutans should be rescued, we don’t know where we will relocate them because in Central Kalimantan there is no forest left,” Mr. Denny said. “Every day it’s estimated that we’re losing forests the size of a football field, and that’s orangutan habitat.” Since 2012, his rehabilitation center has returned 158 orangutans into a 124-square-mile protected forest known as Batikap. But Batikap has reached its maximum recommended orangutan population, Mr. Denny said. He said the center was negotiating with the federal government to establish a 288-square-mile preserve in Bukit Baka-Bukit Raya National Park, in Central Kalimantan and West Kalimantan Provinces, for future releases. Last year’s fires caused such an outcry that the provincial government and local district chiefs in Central Kalimantan have approved no new palm oil concessions this year. But with dry conditions again this year, new fires have broken out. Last month, the governor of Riau Province in Sumatra declared a state of emergency because of fires, and the Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency issued a warning about the increased risk of fire in Sumatra and Borneo through the end of April.

Indonesia
Fires
Palm oil
Monkeys and Apes
Wildfires
Borneo Indonesia
Sumatra Indonesia
Conservation of Resources


Child Welfare Tightens Law on Removal

Abstract: New York City has enacted a tough new policy that allows the authorities to remove newborns from their parents’ homes in all but an “extraordinary instance” if the parents previously had children taken from their custody and their case is still open. John B. Mattingly, the city’s commissioner of children’s services, announced the more aggressive approach during a City Council budget hearing on Tuesday at which he faced questions on his agency’s role in the death of Pablo Paez, an 11-week-old boy whose older sibling had been removed from the same home at age 3 months, a year earlier. The children’s mother, Kiana Paez, a 23-year-old drug addict, was charged on April 25 with beating Pablo to death. Child welfare workers had been in frequent contact with Ms. Paez since the first baby was placed in foster care because of violence in the home, but they did not try to remove Pablo. Mr. Mattingly said that the new policy was influenced by the Paez case, but that he had been considering the changes — a natural outgrowth of other changes he had made at the agency — for a long time. The policy, which had been toughened in 2006, was officially revised again on April 21, 18 days after the baby’s injuries were discovered. “When I got here three and a half years ago, the assumption was the child would stay in the home,” Mr. Mattingly said in a telephone interview. “Most of us in the country have the view that if older siblings are in foster care, and the court has affirmed that they are at substantial risk of harm, it makes very little sense to make the opposite assumption about a 6-pound baby coming into the home.” Even under the new policy, removals will not be automatic. When caseworkers learn of a pregnancy, they are required to have a safety conference with family members, lawyers or advocates to evaluate the risk for the new baby. If they feel a new child should stay in the mother’s home, a borough supervisor will have to sign off on the decision. Otherwise, the agency will initiate the court proceedings required to remove any child from the parents’ care. “The assumption should be we are going for removal,” Mr. Mattingly said. “This is a very serious matter, and only the highest authority can make a decision not to remove the child.” City officials could not say whether any babies have been removed under the new regulations, but they estimated that 150 to 200 infants a year were born into families with children in foster care. Several child-welfare experts said on Wednesday that New York’s new regulations were among the most aggressive they had seen. “The presumption is toward keeping a baby home unless there is imminent risk,” said Anne Marie Lancour, director of state projects at the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law. Richard Wexler, executive director of the Virginia-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform and a major critic of foster care, said that New York had basically adopted “a de facto confiscation-at-birth policy.” “What this policy is really saying, to the worker, the supervisor and even the borough commissioner, is, ‘Go ahead and leave that child in the home if you want, but if anything goes wrong, your career is over,’ ” Mr. Wexler said. For the authorities to remove a child from a home for any significant period of time, they must have an order from a family court judge. Child-welfare officials in New York have long held that a court order for the removal of a single child from a home includes the right to monitor the safety of any new children born into that family. The degree of aggressiveness in how the city pursues that jurisdiction, however, has varied widely over time. Mr. Mattingly said he had seen a need to tighten the protocols for dealing with such families after reviewing child deaths and seeing too many situations like the one involving Pablo Paez. He declined to state which cases in particular had worried him, but it was clear from his City Council testimony that Pablo’s case bothered him deeply. Officials said that caseworkers had been monitoring the home of Kiana Paez carefully since her first child’s placement in foster care, and that her drug screening tests had all come back negative, leading them to believe she was becoming more responsible. But the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, has said that as a result of abuse at her hands, Pablo had severe brain injury and fractures, including broken ribs and a broken leg. Bill de Blasio, the chairman of the City Council’s General Welfare Committee, praised the new regulations, saying they were “desperately needed.” But some parent advocates worried that the aggressive approach might cross a civil rights boundary. “The extraordinary circumstances language is troubling,” said Michael Arsham, executive director of the Child Welfare Organizing Project. “There has to be a reason beyond simply their history. There has to be a new allegation. There has to be an immediate and pressing concern.” Bill Baccaglini, executive director of New York Foundling, one of several dozen foster-care agencies that will help administer the new policy, said he was “willing to be the subject of a little criticism from the civil libertarians.” “This comes out of the best of intentions,” he said. “Being on this side of the business I know if we make a mistake you could lose a life.”

New York City
Children and Youth
Child Abuse and Neglect
Mattingly John B


Radiation Presents Barrier to Plan for Fukushima Nuclear Plant

Abstract: TOKYO — Robots deployed inside two reactors at the Japanese nuclear plant overrun by last month’s devastating tsunami have detected radiation levels too high for workers to enter, posing immediate challenges for a new plan to bring the ravaged complex under control by year’s end. Workers have not been able to enter four of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant since the days immediately after the earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11. Vital cooling systems at the plant were knocked out, and the ensuing hydrogen explosions at four of the plant’s six reactors blew off their roofs and littered the site with radioactive debris. On Sunday, two robots made their way into two of the reactor units, opening doors and navigating radioactive debris and puddles of water to return with temperature, pressure and radioactivity readings. The readings, released Monday, showed continued high radiation levels. At Unit 1, robots detected up to 49 millisieverts per hour; at Unit 3, the reading was 57 millisieverts per hour. In recent weeks far higher readings have come from areas where contaminated water has accumulated, like the turbine building at Unit 2, where experts say the reactor pressure vessel may be cracked and leaking nuclear material. Still, exposure for emergency workers in Japan is currently capped at 250 millisieverts of radiation annually. So the current levels effectively limit a worker to just a few hours of labor. “It is a harsh environment for humans to work in,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. He said the levels would require the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, to be “creative” in bringing the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown within six to nine months, as the company laid out in a timetable on Sunday. The Japanese government continues to face severe challenges, both technical and political, in the aftermath of a multifaceted disaster that has left 13,800 people dead and 14,000 missing. At least 137,000 people remain in evacuation centers, some driven from their homes by radiation leaks from the Fukushima plant. Japan’s Finance Ministry has said the damage from the earthquake and tsunami alone could reach $300 billion, making it the world’s most costly natural disaster. The toll from the nuclear disaster — which has disrupted farming and fishing, curtailed power supplies across eastern Japan, and inflicted other wounds on the economy — is yet to be tallied. Prime Minister Naoto Kan came under fire on Monday from opposition lawmakers who accused him of bungling the initial response to the nuclear crisis. “Many Japanese feel that Prime Minister Kan has no leadership,” Masashi Waki, a lawmaker of the main opposition, the Liberal Democratic Party, said at an unusually heated parliamentary session. Sadakazu Tanigaki, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, last week called on Mr. Kan to resign. “I do not think that my response has been inadequate, as many say,” a flustered-looking Mr. Kan said, amid heckling. “Nonsense!” A poll released Monday by The Nikkei, Japan’s largest business daily, appeared to back the opposition’s claims. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said Mr. Kan should be replaced, while 70 percent said the government’s response to the nuclear crisis was unacceptable. The Nikkei said it surveyed 983 people across the country from April 15 to 17, excluding some areas where phone lines remained down. Tokyo Electric’s ambitious plan for bringing the reactors to a cold shutdown has also been criticized. The plan, drawn up at the government’s order, is meant to give residents evacuated from the area around the plant an idea of when they might be able to return home. But experts question the viability of the plan, which calls for swiftly building critical new cooling systems. Tokyo Electric faces “substantial barriers” in following the timetable, said Haruki Madarame, chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, an independent panel of experts appointed by the government to oversee the nuclear industry. Mr. Madarame, a former professor in nuclear engineering at Tokyo University, told reporters Monday that the presence of highly radioactive water at Unit 2 posed a particular challenge. There and at other units, workers have been cooling nuclear fuel at the reactor’s core and in storage pools by pumping in hundreds of tons of water a day, producing dangerous amounts of runoff. “We must make sure that the tight schedule does not lead to a neglect of safety,” Mr. Madarame said. Robots could help tackle some of the challenges. The remote-controlled PackBots used Sunday, built by the iRobot company of Bedford, Mass., are 60-pound contraptions with steel arms and tractor treads. They can lift about 30 pounds, go up and down steps, send images back to an operator and carry a hazardous materials kit that senses radiation. IRobot, which also makes the popular Roomba vacuum, has delivered over 3,800 PackBots, primarily to the government and military, according to Tim Trainer, an iRobot vice president. After arriving in mid-March, the robots were programmed to open reactor doors and navigate narrow passageways, said Mr. Nishiyama of the nuclear safety agency. Robots, along with remote-controlled hovering drone aircraft made by Honeywell called T-Hawks , have let engineers survey and take measurements at the plant while minimizing workers’ exposure to harmful radiation. A PackBot entered a third reactor building late Sunday.

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan)


She Answered His Ad for a Roommate, Moved In and Never Left

Abstract: Kerry Ryan needed a new place to live; her crazy Yugoslavian roommate had become unbearable. So, as people did in 1991 in New York City, she turned to the classified ads in The Village Voice. Ms. Ryan was 21 at the time and had immigrated from her native Ireland only a month and a half earlier for an internship in the fashion industry. She was naïve, by her own description, but apparently not lacking in gumption. The ad said: “29th & 3rd Ave-3 mos. poss longer. M seeks non-smoking F, strictly Platonic. Own room in 2BR apt. elev bldg A/C.” She called the listed number, and the man who answered the phone invited her to come check out the place. That man, John Juback, then 43, was a stage actor, born in the Bronx and raised in New Jersey. He had been living alone in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Kips Bay and for reasons that he can no longer remember — perhaps he needed some extra money for something, he said — he had decided to sublet the second bedroom. He had rented to a woman once before, a college student who spent a summer in the city, and it had gone very well. So he decided to try it again. Mr. Juback hoped the ad would provide public reassurance that he was not laying some sort of trap. Furthermore, he was in a long-term relationship. “I wanted to really make the women feel comfortable,” he said. Things did not start off that way. As Ms. Ryan, wearing a dress printed with sunflowers, ascended the stairs to the apartment on Aug. 16, Mr. Juback, standing in his doorway, exclaimed: “Well, look at you!” (“I always thought that was terrible,” she said. Mr. Juback, for his part, said he did not intend the comment to be provocative: “She looked great!”) Still, the “interview,” as Ms. Ryan calls it, seemed to go fine. “I met him, I thought: ‘O.K., here’s this dude. He’s not really what I was thinking about as a roommate type. He’s a lot older than I am. I was just off the plane. I had never been to the United States before. He’s a New Yorker. He’s an actor. He’s really out there.’” But it was the best option she had. “I didn’t know about John,” she continued, “but it was better than living with the Yugoslavian lady.” Days passed without word from Mr. Juback. So Ms. Ryan, who grew up in Fethard, a village in County Tipperary, started calling. It was the era of answering machines, which mystified Ms. Ryan. (“We didn’t have answering machines where I came from,” she said.) Though she was brave enough to start a new life in New York at 21, her courage flagged at the sound of the beep. It was also, of course, the era of real-time message-screening, of which Mr. Juback was an accomplished practitioner. There were a lot of hang-ups. Ms. Ryan, using pay phones, ate through a stack of quarters. Finally, she mustered the courage to leave a message. “Hi, John. This is Kerry,” she began hesitantly. Mr. Juback, listening in his apartment, picked up immediately. “I’d love for you to be my roommate,” he blurted. He had lost her number. Ms. Ryan moved in at the end of August after sneaking out of her old apartment, her belongings stuffed in two garbage bags, because the Yugoslavian woman had forbidden her to leave. Mr. Juback had a busy professional life and a serious girlfriend. Ms. Ryan, on the other hand, “tore the city apart,” she said, hitting clubs at night and dating voraciously. “I had a lot of men in the city. I did the United Nations.” (“Don’t put that in!” she quickly added. Then just as quickly: “O.K., O.K. Put it in.”) Mr. Juback said he admired how “fancy free” she was and recalled one emblematic scene from that time. He was coming home in a taxi late one winter night and spotted Ms. Ryan walking alone down Third Avenue. “It was 1 or 2 in the morning,” he said. “There was a light coat of snow on the ground, and Kerry was doing a sort of loose, laid-back version of a German lock step. She was kicking snow up as she was walking. She was pretty much the only person on Third Avenue.” Image Ms. Ryan inside the building. She and Mr. Juback shared a place in Kips Bay as roommates before what she calls their “whole hot buildup.” Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times The two gradually became very good friends. They went out for meals, drank, took walks and hung out. They made each other laugh and confided in each other. “We talked talked talked talked talked talked,” Ms. Ryan recalled. For a long time, the thought of something more did not really occur to either of them. Mr. Juback’s first inkling of deeper feelings came one night in early 1992. Ms. Ryan had joined his girlfriend and his sister for a performance of “Search and Destroy” at the Circle in the Square Theater; Mr. Juback was in the cast. Afterward, they had all gone to Joe Allen’s for dinner. Mr. Juback’s relationship with his girlfriend had begun to wane, and over dinner he thought to himself that he wanted to find “someone just like Kerry, only older.” Still, he kept his distance. “I didn’t want to be a lech,” he said. “My whole deal was, ‘I’m not going to be one of those guys,’ so I didn’t make any moves.” For Ms. Ryan, something shifted decisively on the cusp of that summer. She had an opportunity to rent a great apartment on Delancey Street and suggested to Mr. Juback that they look at it together. He was reluctant to move for practical reasons: He had a good deal on his place and did not want to give it up. In the course of this discussion, Ms. Ryan realized she did not want to move without him. That realization led to an even deeper epiphany. “I decided I wanted him,” she said. “And that was it.” “I made it my business to go about getting him.” So began what Ms. Ryan calls “the whole hot buildup.” As the summer heat escalated, so did the electricity between them. There was the night Mr. Juback massaged Ms. Ryan’s feet when she hobbled into the apartment after breaking her heel at a club. Your Best or Worst Summer Dates in New York City This summer, we’re exploring love in the hot season, and love often starts with a date. We want to know about yours. There was the trip to hear evensong at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, after which their eyes met knowingly as they picked out peaches at a street vendor’s stand (“dripping fruit,” Ms. Ryan noted). There was the time Mr. Juback bought sunflowers, which Ms. Ryan read as a poetic echo of the dress she had worn the day they met; the time Mr. Juback asked Ms. Ryan to recommend a scent for him; the time he invited her to watch the film “Swept Away.” “There was this whole question in the air,” she said. In mid-August, Ms. Ryan secretly made strawberry shortcake, one of Mr. Juback’s favorite desserts, in honor of the first anniversary of their meeting. “I made it from scratch,” she said, “because that’s what I was brought up to do.” On Aug. 16, she reached into the refrigerator and said, “Look what I made you.” As he went to kiss her on the cheek, she swiveled and met his lips with hers. The kiss was momentary, somewhere between chaste and lustful. They kept each other at bay until the next day, when, after returning home from brunch at the Noho Star, their resistance melted. Neither knew where they were headed. “I was, like, ‘Was that an accident between roommates?’ ” Mr. Juback recalled. But it continued. Early on, Mr. Juback urged caution. He worried that Ms. Ryan might wake up someday, decide she wanted someone younger and move on. “He told me he worried that I was messing around with him,” she said. The weeks became months. She kept the relationship a secret from her parents, knowing that they would not approve. But she blew her cover with a misstep. She had written separately to her sister and her mother, mentioning the relationship in the letter to her sister but omitting it in the letter to her mother. Image Ms. Ryan and Jack, 4, at home in Greenwich Village. The Village Voice ad that brought her and Mr. Juback together hangs on the wall. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times Then she switched the envelopes. Ms. Ryan’s parents were livid, refusing to accept her choice of a boyfriend. “World War III,” Mr. Juback said. “Kerry’s mother would write letters telling her to come to her senses.” (“John, Mammy may read this,” she interjected, referring to her mother. “Good!” he replied.) It would be several long years — not until the couple decided to marry — before Ms. Ryan’s parents finally accepted their daughter’s choice. In 1997, after returning from six months of traveling alone — a trip she took partly to test her commitment to Mr. Juback — Ms. Ryan proposed that they get married. They were on the subway returning from brunch. “I said, ‘Let’s do it,’ ” she recalled. They married in April 1998 in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. Both are quick to point out that their marriage, like any long relationship, has not been without its turmoil. They declined to offer much detail except to say that Ms. Ryan — who calls herself “the hothead” in the relationship — once stormed out of the apartment and got a room at the Bowery Hotel in the East Village. Later that night, however, she called Mr. Juback in a gesture of détente to invite him over. In an echo of their first telephonic pas de deux, he missed the call and did not hear her message. Each slept alone. They made up the next day. In 2011, after more than a decade of trying to have a child, Ms. Ryan gave birth to their son, Jack. Apart from the stares of strangers trying to do the math, the age difference between them has not been a big deal. The divide manifests itself only in the realm of technology, they say: Ms. Ryan, who continues to work in the fashion industry, is more comfortable with technology than Mr. Juback, something they both attribute to their having come of age in different epochs. Mr. Juback, who still works as an actor, looks remarkably youthful for his age, and the difference in years seems to fade amid the obvious chemistry and ease between them. They now celebrate two key anniversaries in their relationship: the date of their marriage and the date they met, when Ms. Ryan went to see Mr. Juback’s apartment. That older anniversary has greater resonance, in part because it is imbued with the seven-year foundation they built before getting married. The Village Voice ad that brought them together is now framed in their apartment. “Good for a laugh, that platonic thing,” Ms. Ryan said.


A Merger Means a Payout for Lucent Chief

Abstract: If merger talks with Alcatel are successful, Lucent Technologies' top executive could get a quite substantial payout, depending on how the companies structure the deal, but she would be guaranteed at least $1.78 million in accelerated vesting of stock awards. Under her employment contract, the chief executive, Patricia F. Russo, would be able to sell the remaining unvested shares of restricted stock that Lucent gave her in 2002 if there is a change in control of the company, even if she remains. Unlike many other executive contracts, her deal with Lucent does not automatically let her sell the millions of restricted shares and options that she has been awarded in the four years since then, but that have not yet vested, according to the company and a compensation consultant who studied the contract. Ms. Russo had 3.84 million shares of Lucent, worth about $11.8 million, after selling about 200,000 shares in January, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. It is unclear from the filing how many of those shares she is restricted from selling today. The combined company after a merger could simply assume and convert the remaining restricted-stock awards into the stock of the new company. But like much else in mergers and acquisitions, what Ms. Russo and her fellow senior executives receive is subject to negotiations, said Shekhar Purohit, the compensation consultant. "I will be surprised if part of the agreement on behalf of the Lucent executives is not to accelerate vesting of their equity," Mr. Purohit, who is with the Delves Group, a compensation consulting firm based in Chicago. Under her contract, if Ms. Russo left the company after a merger, she would receive a severance package worth two years' salary and expected bonus, or about $6 million, and the company would cover excise tax payments she might owe on stock she is allowed to sell at a faster pace. Lucent offered Ms. Russo a rich package of stock options and restricted stock, shares that can be sold after a set date, to return to Lucent from the Eastman Kodak Company in 2002. Many of her millions in options are worthless today because their strike price is higher than the $3.06 that the company's shares closed at yesterday. As of the end of September, the company estimated the worth of her options at $4.6 million. Additional options issued in December are worth about $500,000. A Lucent spokeswoman noted that two-thirds of the restricted stock and stock options that Ms. Russo received in 2002 had already vested and that the remainder were scheduled to do so in January 2007 -- or at a change in control of the company. For the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2005, Ms. Russo made $8.4 million in salary and bonus, up from a salary and bonus of $4.2 million in 2004.

LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES INC
ALCATEL SA
RUSSO PATRICIA F
MERGERS ACQUISITIONS AND DIVESTITURES
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
STOCK OPTIONS AND PURCHASE PLANS
TELEPHONES AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS


Aromas Beckon, Food Delivers

Abstract: Like many Westchester residents, I love shopping at the Italian markets around Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. I’ll pick up bread and pastries in one spot, braciola in another, sauce in yet another. But the trek south is out of the question when I’m pressed for time. The Iron Tomato in White Plains, which opened in May, has come to the rescue. The new market is a great way to get many of the same supplies from Arthur Avenue in one place — and at 5,000 square feet, it is big enough to offer a nice range of items. The aroma of the prepared foods section, headed by Joseph Giardono, the former executive chef of Valbella in Greenwich, Conn., will beckon when you enter the store, but take a minute to survey the items on the shelves to the right. Just beyond boxes of panettone ($3.99 to $29.99) and 105-ounce tins of peeled tomatoes ($5.99) is a fun array of pastas, from extra-long tubular versions — they must be nearly two feet — to teeny boxes of orzo. There is also a selection of fresh housemade pastas ($3.99 to $7.99). Breads from — where else? — Arthur Avenue ($2.49 to $7.99) are just beyond the marinated artichokes, dozens of dried Italian herbs and about 80 different olive oils. The more than 200 cheeses ($5.99 to $33.99 a pound) include several locally made versions. At the substantial meat section you’ll find housemade sausages, including one made with chicken, Granny Smith apple, caramelized onion and Jarlsberg for $5.49 a pound, and at the long counter of prepared foods, offerings range from scallops stuffed with crab meat, scallions and mascarpone ($14.99 a pound) to thin-crust pizzas (a 10-inch margherita is $7.95). Just before leaving, visit the bakery. The selection would make any North Bronx shopper feel at home. The Iron Tomato, 57 Mamaroneck Avenue, White Plains; (914) 328-9400. Open daily at 8 a.m. Closes at 10 p.m., Monday to Wednesday; 11 p.m., Thursday to Saturday; 8 p.m., Sunday. EMILY DeNITTO

Food
Pizza Pies
Westchester County (NY)
Retail Stores and Trade
Iron Tomato The


Microsoft Profit Falls as PC Sales Shrink

Abstract: SEATTLE — Microsoft is on the verge of releasing Windows 8, its biggest software product in years — and the company’s lackluster financial results on Thursday underscored how badly the company needs it to succeed. The software company, based in Redmond, Wash., said net income for its fiscal first quarter which ended Sept. 30, dropped 22 percent to $4.47 billion, or 53 cents a share, compared to $5.74 billion, or 68 cents a share, for the year-earlier period. Revenue was $16 billion, down 8 percent from $17.37 billion a year before. Microsoft deferred the recognition of $1.36 billion in revenue in the quarter because of software upgrade offers and the sale of copies of Windows 8 before its official release. But even if that had been included in the quarter, Microsoft’s revenue would have been flat. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected Microsoft to report earnings of 56 cents a share and revenue of $16.42 billion. Microsoft’s shares fell more than 1 percent in after-hours trading. The results reflected the grim market for personal computers, the technology from which Microsoft still derives much of its sales and profit in one way or another. Smartphones, tablets and other devices have been taking in more and more money that might have once been spent on PCs. The soft economy has not helped PC sales either. Signs of the personal computer slump are everywhere. The research firm IDC recently reported that PC shipments declined 8.6 percent globally in the last quarter, much worse than it had expected. Intel, the primary maker of chips that power PCs, said this week that its sales and profit fell because of weakness in the market. Microsoft expects Windows 8 to help bolster the overall PC market, though Peter Klein, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, declined in an interview Thursday to say how significant it would be. The earliest adopters of new versions of Microsoft’s operating systems tend to be consumers rather than businesses, a pattern Mr. Klein said he expected to continue with Windows 8. Microsoft said revenue from its core Windows operating system declined 33 percent to $3.24 billion,though it declined 9 percent if Microsoft had not deferred revenue related to Windows 8. Even the Microsoft division that includes its Office applications, which also tends to benefit from sales of new PCs, had a decline in revenue — 2 percent in the quarter to $5.5 billion. Mr. Klein also said Microsoft had strong sales to corporate customers, many of whom tend to buy software through big multiyear contracts. But Mr. Klein said the company’s results suffered because of “challenges in the PC environment,” especially the consumer market. During the first two months of the quarter, he said, retailers cleared out PCs running older versions of Windows in anticipation of new Windows 8 machines, which they began ordering late in the quarter. One reason Microsoft has suffered is that it has had trouble capitalizing on the growth in mobile devices. Its Windows Phone operating system has made little progress in halting the momentum of Apple’s iPhone and devices running Google’s Android software. The huge success of the iPad has started to eat into sales of low-end laptops, though no one in the industry is sure by precisely how much. The planned release of Windows 8 on Oct. 26 will be Microsoft’s most serious effort yet to take part in the surge in interest among consumers and businesses in tablet computers. Microsoft has radically changed the operating system to take better advantage of touch-screen devices, though it is also aimed at more conventional PCs operated with a keyboard and mouse. With Windows 8, Microsoft is also preparing to release a tablet of its own design , called Surface, that will go on sale for a starting price of $500 on Oct. 26. (Surface will use a variation of the Windows 8 operating system called Windows RT.) Some analysts say that they believe fears about Microsoft’s deteriorating future are overblown, and that the PC market is still very large. “People want to make it like the last PC was shipped,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners. “Yes, it’s in decline, but it’s not dead.” Most of Microsoft’s other divisions experienced declines or little growth in the quarter. The revenue of the company’s entertainment and devices division, which includes one of the company’s biggest consumer hits, the Xbox 360, fell 1 percent to $1.95 billion, as the console showed further signs of age.

Software
Microsoft Corporation
Company Reports
Computers and the Internet


After Getting a Bargain, an Urge to Spend

Abstract: People who get a bad deal on a hotel room are much more reluctant to go shopping than those paying the same price for a good room, according to a paper in the October issue of Journal of Consumer Research. The study examined “spillover effects” — how unexpected deals or price increases on one item affect willingness to buy another. In the hotel situation, subjects went through a Priceline-style computer simulation where they paid for an imaginary room without knowing its quality. Those who were pleasantly surprised were far more willing to buy extra items, like guidebooks, than those who were disappointed. In another study, the authors found that the effects of a retail sale on one product spill over to others: those given a deal on one item buy more nonsale items than otherwise. “When you see a price is unexpectedly low, you have this positive prime of feeling flush,” said Robert J. Meyer, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the paper’s three authors. ALEX MINDLIN

Sales
Consumer Behavior
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)
Retail Stores and Trade
Hotels and Motels


Professor at Columbia Retracts Papers Over Research Questions

Abstract: A Columbia University chemistry professor has retracted two papers and part of a third published in a leading journal after experiments performed by a graduate student could not be reproduced. The senior author of all three papers, which were published in 2004 and 2005 in The Journal of the American Chemical Society, was Prof. Dalibor Sames; the graduate student, listed as an author on each, was Bengu Sezen, who left the university after getting her doctorate last year. The research was part of efforts by chemists to devise ways to transform simple hydrocarbon molecules like methane into more complex and useful molecules like those in plastic. Such manipulations are difficult to perform with precision, because the bonds between the carbon and hydrogen atoms are strong. All three retractions said key findings could not be reproduced after Dr. Sezen's departure. The journal noted the retractions on its Web site on March 1, and they were reported this month on two chemistry blogs. Columbia is also reviewing the research. "There's an internal review in process to determine why the work couldn't be reproduced," said Mariellen Gallagher, a university spokeswoman. In an e-mail message yesterday, Dr. Sames said, "I am sorry, but I have nothing to add to what has been said in the correction statements." Attempts to locate Dr. Sezen yesterday through e-mail messages and Internet search engines were unsuccessful. Citing privacy regulations, Columbia said it could not release any information about her other than that she had received her doctorate. Peter J. Stang, the editor of the chemical journal, said that while the retractions were hardly at the level of the fabrication scandal that toppled the South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk, "these are important areas and papers." Dr. Stang noted that it was Dr. Sames, not other researchers, who raised concerns about the papers with the journal. "This is a perfect example of science being self-correcting," he said. Dr. Stang said he did not know the underlying reasons for the retractions or whether any misconduct had occurred. "What I know is what the author said in those additions and corrections, that they could not reproduce their data and so they are withdrawing their papers," he said. "We don't have the resources, and we don't have the means to investigate them."

Research
Columbia University
Chemistry
American Chemical Society
Hydrocarbons


Relentless Replay Deprives N.F.L. of the Beauty of Imperfection

Abstract: My first experience with instant replay was not in sports. President Kennedy had been assassinated Nov. 22, 1963. Two days later, Jack Ruby jumped out of a crowd and gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. Fifteen or so minutes later, a tape of the shooting was shown on network TV, allowing viewers to watch the surreal drama again and again. Tony Verna, at the time a 29-year-old sports producer for CBS , watched the tape as well. Verna was stunned by the moment, though what really caught his attention was how long it took the network to replay the incident. Verna came up with a solution, and about two weeks later, he unveiled it. On Dec. 7, 1963, CBS, thanks to Verna, introduced instant replay during the Army-Navy football game. The network showed only one replay — a touchdown — but the effect was profound. Within a year, instant replay was becoming a staple of football broadcasts. Nearly 50 years later, we are addicted to video replay in a way that has become unhealthy. The N.F.L. ’s use of replacement referees and replay’s ability to paper over their inadequacies show the degree to which an innovation designed to enhance the viewing experience has been appropriated and turned into an intimidating Big Brother. The improving technology of replay has increased the scrutiny of on-field officials in a way that Verna never imagined. I’d like to see the N.F.L. call a moratorium on the implementation of replay innovation. Let’s re-embrace the human element, mistakes and all. It’s no wonder that the N.F.L. likes replay. It has extended already long afternoons, allowing networks to squeeze in extra commercials, especially after scoring plays, which are automatically reviewed by the replay official. This season, it has provided a safety net that allows the league to get away with using replacement officials and perhaps gain leverage in negotiations. But forget for a moment the bottom line. Has replay made the game better? Verna says that its overuse is robbing football of its soul. “The game has lost some of its sensuality,” he said. “It’s become all about angles now.” Verna never intended for instant replay to become a tool to help officiate a game, but instead saw it as a more artistic innovation designed to show viewers tantalizing inside aspects of a play that they might have missed. “My whole thing is ‘instant,’ ‘now,’ ” he said during a recent phone interview. “Why didn’t a receiver get to his spot at the right time? Well, it’s because he was tripped by the defensive back. Or how did a lineman execute a block? This is what was missing; these are the things I wanted to show.” Not that Verna has a problem with how replay has been used to officiate or, some say, second-guess officials. It was, he suggests, an inevitable evolution. “You can’t have a Super Bowl and get the call wrong,” he said. “Fans demand that. It’s like the light bulb. It had to be invented. That’s it. And I expect it to get better and better and better.” The stakes in the N.F.L. are indeed high. The season is short. Teams play a game a week. Mistakes are magnified and are more devastating and costlier than in other mainstream sports with longer seasons. But the notion of always having to get it right, that pursuit of perfection in an industry that is largely defined by its imperfection, is troubling. Mistakes are part of the games we love. The home run is the result of a pitcher’s mistake. The passed ball, the blown save, the interception, the fumble, the dropped pass — all human mistakes that are part of the games. Yet we demand perfection from human beings who happen to be officials. We’re heading in a direction that may one day see games being officiated by cameras and computers, with human officials little more than water boys for technology, relegated to marking down and distance. No need for challenges; the games will be perfectly officiated. Never a blown call again. Perfection, soulless perfection. During a 1998 interview, the former referee Jerry Seeman described the officials’ challenge. “This is not a perfect world, and football is not a perfect game,” he said. “Players aren’t perfect. Coaches aren’t perfect. But officials are asked to be perfect the first game and then improve every week. Their life is a fishbowl, and it is then microscopic within that fishbowl. But really, that is the beauty and the challenge of being an N.F.L. official.” Rich McKay, the Falcons’ president and a member of the N.F.L.’s competition committee, which oversees rule changes, has also recognized the difficulty of the challenge. “Since we brought instant replay back, it’s not necessarily a good thing for officiating,” he once told reporters. “You begin to scrutinize plays at milliseconds. It creates an unreasonable and unreal standard that you can’t meet.” When asked about replay in baseball, Joe Torre waxed philosophical, once saying: “The game isn’t perfect. For all of us that want everything to be right all the time, that’s not going to be the case, no matter how much replay you’re going to see. I don’t know why we want everything to be perfect. Life isn’t perfect. I think this is a game of life, myself.” As Torre suggests, there is something to be said for fallibility. It is true that because we recognize that we are imperfect, we innovate. And innovations lead to improvements in quality, efficiencies and profit. But we can lose something, too. In the real world, it’s often jobs. Our self-worth takes a hit. Worse, the quest for perfection, for always getting it right and using technology to get there, has in some ways made us soft and lazy. But here is another, more visceral reason for holding replay — as an officiating tool — at bay. In sports, controversy works. It’s good for the soul, keeping us engaged and speaking passionately to one another. Baseball has resisted the wholesale intrusion of replay. Likewise, the N.B.A. and the N.H.L. allow only limited incursions, while international soccer, despite pressure to implement goal-line technology, had rejected it altogether until recently. Verna wants to put some of the lost soul and passion back in football. Last month, he received a patent for what he calls talking replay, a variation on instant replay that leans heavily on players. Talking replay is prerecorded audio of players describing how they execute a particular task or move. The audio is stored for use during a replay and then pushed to a mobile device. As viewers watch a replay of Peyton Manning completing a touchdown pass or Michael Vick running, they will hear Manning talking about an aspect of passing or Vick discussing why he chooses to run instead of pass. Talking replay captures the essence of what Verna had in mind in 1963 when he introduced instant replay. “Instead of having some analyst guessing what’s going on in the athlete’s mind, you have the athletes themselves talking about what they’re thinking,” Verna said. “There’s a lot of mental stuff, a lot of thinking going on out there, but you never hear the athletes’ perspective.” In 2003, the N.F.L. embraced expanded replay as an enforcement tool. The key moment was a blown call during a Giants- 49ers playoff game won by San Francisco . The commissioner at the time, Paul Tagliabue , was irate and called the error the most disappointing moment of his tenure. Asked at the time about the commissioner’s reaction, Preston Robert Tisch, the Giants co-owner, responded in a way that put the almost obsessive preoccupation with getting it right in perspective. “He’s a decent guy, and he wants the game played the way it should be,” Tisch said, referring to Tagliabue. “But they made a mistake, and life goes on.” We make mistakes, and now we review, and then move on.


3 Responses, All Bad, to the Syrian Revolt

Abstract: PARIS — There are three operative approaches to the slaughter in Syria , where a dictator’s army meets a citizens’ uprising with new savagery day after day. Silence: from the Arab world — and jarringly so from Egypt and Tunisia, whose successful revolts built the notion of an Arab Spring and raised the possibility of a wave of democratic solidarity supporting rebellions against despotism in places like Syria. Talk: a vocabulary full of words about the “inacceptable” and “intolerable” nature of the Syrian regime’s “murderous path” from the United States, France, Britain (and even Germany), but no palpable steps to stop the killing beyond a few very ignorable sanctions. Action: from Russia, which, as Syria’s main arms supplier, is defending its strategic handhold in the Middle East by opposing or blocking U.N. reports on its ally’s nuclear program and arms deals with Iran, and through a probable veto of a condemnation of Syria if it comes up in the Security Council. In the absence of an activist position involving Syria’s Arab neighbors, the situation’s external backdrop involves three leaders contemplating the ongoing massacres and calculating how (don’t look shocked) their actions will play out in presidential elections next year. Barack Obama (in November) and Nicolas Sarkozy (in May) will both seek second terms. Vladimir Putin , the pre-eminent figure in the Russian power structure as prime minister, has an advantage over both democrats: no risk of losing in a presidential election in March if he chooses to run — while stroking a “patriotic” constituency that wants him to demonstrate that the West, particularly America, is in retreat, two-faced and unwilling to help troublemakers challenging established authority. Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Putin meet in Paris on Tuesday. Discussing Libya, where Mr. Putin has passionately condemned NATO’s intervention (although it remains likely that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi will be ousted from power), is one thing. But Syria is another. Leaning on Russia, which has real leverage in Damascus, stacks up as an entirely different matter. For Mr. Sarkozy — this goes for Mr. Obama and his Russian reset as well — calling out Moscow, a so-called NATO “strategic partner,” for playing Syria’s protector, or saying for all to hear that the Russians should suspend their arms supplies to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, would be contradictory. Contradictory in capital letters, because France signed a $1.52 billion contract with Russia on Friday to supply it two with Mistral assault vessels, a deal described in Washington by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as “deeply troubling” at a moment when she said that Russia was “taking an increasingly hostile approach” toward America and Europe. Yet Mr. Sarkozy has some leeway. An allied official whose brief includes international security matters sees increasing Russian orneriness and noncooperation next year — and even more so with a Putin presidency. Add to that Sarko’s desired brand identity at home as a crisis leader whose planes struck Libya first. Could he confront the Russians on Syria? Foreign Minister Alain Juppé has said that if Russia chooses to veto a French-sponsored Security Council resolution condemning Syria (the United States supports it at a distance), “it will be their responsibility.” French presidential politics would then leave Mr. Sarkozy with a hard time not defining that responsibility. The United States, in a lower octave, and without specifically mentioning Russia, has said through its U.N. ambassador, Susan E. Rice, that “we will be on the right side of history if it comes to a vote” in the council, and that other countries’ refusal to approve Syria’s censure “will be their responsibility to bear.” Talking about historical good and evil when it concerns Russia is a novelty for an Obama administration that has characterized the Cold War as a kind of neutral event. But not pointing to Russia’s role in Syria is to flee a reality when the Obama reset is bogged down on the things Washington can’t get from Moscow, including any Russian willingness to discuss its superior arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. This comes as Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican eager to deflate the reset as a significant foreign policy accomplishment of the president, has announced hearings on U.S. policy on Russia in the coming weeks. The fact is, Russia (with China) voted against the International Atomic Energy Agency’s decision two weeks ago to report Syria to the Security Council for its covert work on a reactor believed built to produce plutonium for atomic bombs. According to Reuters, Russia also attempted in May to suppress a U.N. publication on illegal Iranian arms transfers to Syria. The circumstances’ miserable realities are multiple. A very significant part of the West’s options on Syria remain in the area of gesture. Without a very improbable Russian turnabout — one French analysis holds that an Assad government or a successor assuming a similar relationship to Russia is fundamental to Moscow’s notion of its status in the Middle East — the Syrian slaughter is likely to go on unhindered. Yet doing nothing about it, or avoiding focusing on Russia’s responsibility, could well be a re-election campaign liability for both the French and American presidents. Once Mr. Putin or President Dmitri A. Medvedev emerges as a candidate later this year, how could Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Obama not confront the rigged nature of the Russian presidential election without exposing themselves to accusations of having failed in their judgment of Russia’s capacity for change? And more: Portraying the possible upside of the Syrian regime’s overthrow — a Syria no longer functioning as Iran’s conduit to Hezbollah, and open to peace with Israel — is a notion too close to the truth in the mouths of opposing presidential candidates here and in America for either incumbent to belittle it. In France at least, these are domestic political issues Mr. Sarkozy fully grasps. At a news conference last Friday, the French president, who has led NATO’s dawdling military efforts in Libya, said, “We don’t want to intervene” in Syria. But he added ambiguously, “If there were a more severe Security Council resolution against the regime, we would obviously accept all the consequences.” Taken on the current level of the West’s talk-show response to Syria’s murderousness, that’s mostly more verbiage and inactivity. Coming from a fast-draw president, it’s also a real-time, open-to-interpretation hedge on a potentially awful alternative.

Syria
Vinocur John
War and Revolution
Putin Vladimir V
Obama Barack
Sarkozy Nicolas
United Nations


Trump’s Treasury Pick Moves in Secretive Hedge Fund Circles

Abstract: As a hedge fund manager, Goldman Sachs trader and bank chief executive, Steven T. Mnuchin has long been a member of the financial elite. Yet even on Wall Street he was not widely known before Donald J. Trump chose him to be his campaign fund-raiser last spring. Now, Mr. Mnuchin is on a path to become the first hedge fund manager to head the Treasury. As befitting that closed-door world of finance, Mr. Mnuchin’s record shows a willingness to take on risks and a penchant for secrecy that members of both parties expect will be a focus of his Senate confirmation hearing. A case in point is a Delaware company that he owns, Steven T. Mnuchin Inc., whose existence has not been reported outside of official records. Mr. Mnuchin set up the company months before Goldman went public in May 1999. It had a Goldman mailing address and at least one Goldman director. It stayed that way years after he left the Wall Street bank in 2002 to start his hedge fund career. Its purpose is a mystery. The only clue is in a description on corporate filings in Delaware calling the entity an “investment in partnerships.” Barney Keller, a representative for Mr. Mnuchin, said the company “held small legacy Goldman Sachs investments” and “hasn’t made any new investments since 2002.” Over the course of his career, Mr. Mnuchin, 53, has kept a low profile and has rarely granted interviews. His one previous spell in the limelight was when he ran OneWest Bank. He and other deep-pocketed investors cobbled together the California bank out of the wreckage of IndyMac, a lender that the federal government seized in 2008 as the financial crisis grabbed hold of the nation. His tenure at OneWest spurred controversy because tens of thousands of borrowers — many of them older people — were foreclosed on. When a group of protesters gathered outside his Los Angeles house in October 2011 to voice their anger at OneWest’s foreclosure practices, police officers were called to disperse the crowd. He responded later by periodically scrubbing the internet of any reference to his home address to protect the privacy of his three young children, according to a filing Mr. Mnuchin made in a 2014 divorce proceeding. He is more comfortable in his own element — wealthy hedge fund managers like himself. Days after being tapped by Mr. Trump to be his finance chairman in May, Mr. Mnuchin flew out to a hedge fund conference at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. There, in a swirl of rock concerts, pool parties and casino nights, he schmoozed with billionaires. Mr. Mnuchin dined with Kenneth C. Griffin, the Chicago hedge fund titan, and government veterans like David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director and retired general, and John A. Boehner, the former House speaker. He shook hands with Leon Cooperman, a 73-year-old pioneer in the industry and another Goldman Sachs alumnus. The courting paid off: Not long after the hedge fund conference, Mr. Mnuchin helped bring the billionaire investor John A. Paulson on as a donor, as well as Wilbur L. Ross Jr., now Mr. Trump’s commerce secretary nominee . It is these ties, however, that are expected to be fertile ground of investigation for senators who must confirm his selection as Treasury secretary. “I think he would be controversial — former Treasury secretaries have been top bankers and businessmen or lawyers and they were well-recognized top leaders in their professions,” said Prof. Richard Sylla at the Stern School of Business of New York University, whose research focuses on financial history and economics. “But Mnuchin wasn’t that famous as a Goldman Sachs guy, and probably not even as a hedge fund guy, so why is he there? Well, he took the job of raising money for Trump.” Mr. Mnuchin shares a network with some of the biggest names in the $3 trillion hedge fund industry, but his work with Mr. Paulson is of particular interest. An adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Paulson, who is best known for making a $15 billion wager that the housing market would collapse, has managed some money for the president-elect. The day after Mr. Trump formally selected him, Mr. Mnuchin said that the government should get out of the business of running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , the two giant mortgage finance firms that the federal government bailed out in 2008. The shares of the two companies soared in response to his words — some of the sharpest one-day gains for the stocks since the government conservatorship began. Image Steve Mnuchin and other investors cobbled together OneWest Bank from the wreckage of IndyMac, a lender that the federal government seized in 2008. Credit Rex Features, via Associated Press The seemingly off-the-cuff declaration was cheered by hedge fund managers and others who have bet big on the privatization of Fannie and Freddie. One of Mr. Paulson’s bigger bets is that the federal government will return Fannie and Freddie to private investors largely unfettered. And Mr. Mnuchin’s remark may have benefited someone else: Mr. Trump has invested $3 million to $15 million with Mr. Paulson’s hedge fund, according to the financial disclosure statement filed during his run for president. To date, the Trump transition team has not commented on whether Mr. Trump continues to own stakes in Mr. Paulson’s firm and other hedge funds listed on the disclosure statement. “We’re not sharing any additional information at this time,” said Jason Miller, a Trump representative. The president-elect has said that he will announce a plan for separating himself from his many business interests before his inauguration on Jan. 20. Similarly, Mr. Mnuchin will have to file financial disclosures with the Senate Finance Committee before his confirmation hearing. On Monday, he began the process by filing three years of tax returns. Mr. Mnuchin’s time at his hedge fund, Dune Capital Management, which he formed with two former Goldman colleagues in 2004, is one area that the Senate Finance Committee is expected to examine more closely. At its peak, the firm had roughly $2 billion and was backed by the billionaire investor George Soros. It had a taste for real estate, movie financing deals and exotic investments including life insurance policies, which Dune bought through a third party at discounted prices from cash-poor older Americans. Dune had plans to package the insurance policies — called life settlements — into bonds that could be sold to investors. Life settlements represent one of the most macabre actuarial bets that Wall Street has dreamed up. It’s a wager that the elderly person selling the policy will die sooner rather than later, meaning the hedge fund does not have to make many premium payments to keep the insurance policy in force and collect the payout upon that person’s death. But the market for life settlements largely collapsed during the financial crisis. Eventually, Dune, like many hedge funds during the worst of the crisis, faced investor withdrawals. Mr. Mnuchin and one of his co-founding partners, Chip Seelig, decided to wind down the operation. The real estate arm of Dune was spun off into a firm led by Dune’s third co-founder, Daniel M. Neidich. After the split, Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Seelig set up shop in Southern California. Both became big players in movie financing, lending money to hits like “Avatar” and “Gravity” along with flops like “In the Heart of the Sea.” But it was the deal for a failed California bank, IndyMac, that contributed mightily to Mr. Mnuchin’s personal fortune and the one deal that has created the most political heat. On Friday, Senate Democrats, in a sign that they intend to go hard after Mr. Mnuchin, set up a website that calls him the “foreclosure king,” and asked customers of OneWest to submit complaints in advance of the confirmation hearing. In late 2008, Mr. Mnuchin joined with Mr. Paulson to put together the OneWest deal. They were part of the initial round of bidding for the assets of IndyMac, which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation had seized that summer. The group, which also included Mr. Soros and other investors, won the deal with a $1.55 billion bid. One of the competing bids was put together by J. Tomilson Hill, head of the Blackstone Group’s hedge fund and asset management group, and Goldman. “As a deal person, I had nothing but admiration for how entrepreneurial he was and how quickly he adapted to the circumstances,” Mr. Hill said in a recent interview. He was one of the first to call Mr. Mnuchin to congratulate him on his new job as campaign finance chairman. The remnants of IndyMac reopened under the name OneWest with Mr. Mnuchin as chairman and chief executive. But controversy followed, including complaints over foreclosures on soured mortgages that IndyMac had written before the crisis. In particular, it drew scrutiny for its business in reverse mortgages — products pitched to older people who had paid off their initial mortgages but needed cash. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is investigating complaints about the foreclosure practices of OneWest’s reverse mortgage business, which resulted in 16,000 foreclosures alone. CIT Group, which merged with OneWest last year in a $3.4 billion deal that provided a hefty payout for Mr. Mnuchin and his co-investors, has said it is trying to resolve the HUD inquiry. It is also dealing with a $230 million charge the company said in July it had to take in connection with accounting issues from the reverse mortgage business. An analysis in 2015 presented by the California Reinvestment Coalition, which lobbied against the merger, found that 68 percent of the 36,000 foreclosures in California by OneWest, including those on reverse mortgages, occurred in communities that were primarily nonwhite. A government filing shows OneWest offered to modify about 101,000 mortgages for its customers. Mr. Mnuchin stepped down from the helm of OneWest in March, not long before he became among the first in finance to come out for Mr. Trump and against Hillary Clinton. Mr. Keller said Mr. Mnuchin was “proud of his record at OneWest.” Still, the worlds of finance and politics can be small ones, and Mr. Mnuchin even has a connection to Mrs. Clinton. The in-house accountant at Goldman who prepared a tax filing for Steven T. Mnuchin Inc. many years ago has among her clients, at her current accounting firm, the former Democratic presidential candidate.

Hedge fund
OneWest Bank
Steven T Mnuchin
Donald Trump
Treasury Department
US Politics


Campaigns Halt as Nevada Court Upholds Term Limits

Abstract: A day before the start of early voting in Nevada , 21 incumbents found that their re-election bids were suddenly over as the State Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld term limits passed by voters in 1996. The officials include county commissioners, registrars of voters, two university regents and a mosquito and weed abatement supervisor. They had been in office for at least 12 years, the limit specified in the 1996 referendum. Commissioner Bruce L. Woodbury of Clark County, the state’s longest-serving commissioner, had brought his re-election campaign into full swing after legal opinions, including one from the attorney general, had predicted that term limits would not apply this year. Mr. Woodbury said he had spent more than $200,000 and hired a staff of eight. He said he had come to the end of his 27 years in office feeling glad about his long service but concerned about the potential for “chaos and confusion at the polls.” “I and these other campaigns were locked in,” Mr. Woodbury said, “and other potential candidates didn’t run because they didn’t know these seats would be open.” The state does not have time to remove the names of the newly ineligible candidates from the primary ballots, said Ross Miller, the secretary of state. He said his office would work with local voter registrars to post notices at polling sites for the Aug. 12 primary, alerting voters to the ruling and listing the names of the candidates affected. Should an ineligible candidate receive the most votes, the results would vary depending on which office was at stake, Mr. Miller said. The court did give a reprieve to state legislators, ruling that they were not subject to the term limits until 2010. Legislators began their 1996 terms a few weeks before the limits took effect, and the court said limits could not apply retroactively. Still, for long-term legislators like Barbara Buckley, the Assembly speaker, and Senator Bill Raggio, the Republican leader, 2008 is the last year they can run for the offices they now hold. Mr. Woodbury, the county commissioner, said he had several thousand T-shirts and campaign signs lying around. “Maybe I can get a refund,” he said.

Nevada
Term Limits (Political Office)
Elections


Taking Issue With the Grind of the N.B.A. Season

Abstract: No sooner had Oklahoma City defeated Boston on Wednesday night than the Celtics’ disappointment was washed away by the anticipation of Friday night’s game at home against the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Big 3 of LeBron James, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving. Oops. This just in: The Cavaliers’ first-year coach, David Blatt, announced that the Big 3 would not play. The team has to fly back to Cleveland for a game Saturday evening against Atlanta. The players need their rest. I’m making this up, of course. James, Love and Irving are scheduled to take on the Celtics. But this is the kind of tactic the N.B.A. will be increasingly opening itself up to if it does not address the ethical blind spot already being exploited by Gregg Popovich, the accomplished coach of the defending champion San Antonio Spurs. Last week, Popovich raised eyebrows — yet again — when he announced that five Spurs would not play in Houston in a nationally televised game against the Rockets. Appropriately, the length of the N.B.A. season and the controversy over resting players in games on consecutive nights have now become quality-of-life issues that the N.B.A. will be forced to confront by the players union’s new, and very determined, executive director, Michele Roberts. Roberts was picked to run the union last July, making history . In a new and fairly provocative interview with ESPN the Magazine, she took an aggressive approach by stating what would seem to be some basic truths. As in: The players are the game, not the owners. “Why don’t we have the owners play half the games?” she said in the article. “There would be no money if not for the players. Let’s call it what it is.” Image The Spurs stars Tim Duncan, left; Manu Ginobili, center; and Tony Parker have sat out entire games together at times. Credit Darren Abate/Associated Press And as in: The salary cap is incredibly un-American; my DNA is offended by it; no one says it out loud, but it’s a monopoly. “I don’t know of any space other than the world of sports where there’s this notion that we will artificially deflate what someone’s able to make, just because,” she said. Roberts’s comments were strong enough to compel the N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, to respond with a statement on Thursday in which he said the league “couldn’t disagree more with these statements.” Silver is now making headlines of his own with an article on the Op-Ed page of Friday’s editions of The New York Times in which he endorses legalized betting on N.B.A. games. Nevertheless, Roberts got his attention. “The N.B.A.’s success is based on the collective efforts and investments of all of the team owners, the thousands of employees at our teams and arenas, and our extraordinarily talented players,” Silver said. “No single group could accomplish this on its own. Nor is there anything unusual or ‘un-American’ in a unionized industry to have a collective system for paying employees — in fact, that’s the norm.” As for the salary cap, Silver said it had served as a “foundation for the growth of the league” and had allowed N.B.A. players to become “the highest-paid professional athletes in the world.” Silver went on to say that all of these issues would be discussed with the union at an “appropriate time.” And indeed they will be, with Roberts leading the way. In her remarks to ESPN, she hit at the toll the long season takes on players, the grind it becomes. “Every time a player gets hurt, I think, ‘My God, they really are pushing their bodies,’ ” she said. “And back-to-backs, those are the ones I really find disturbing.” Image Michele Roberts’s comments in a recent interview were strong enough to compel the N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, to respond with a statement in which he said the league “couldn’t disagree more with these statements.” Credit Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times She added, “I don’t think it would hurt the game to shorten the season.” Unthinkable? Who would have thought an N.B.A. commissioner would endorse legalized betting? When Popovich famously sent his stars back to San Antonio to rest in 2012 rather than play in a nationally televised game against the Heat in Miami, he noted that the N.B.A. had not really detailed any guidelines on resting players. “I don’t really know what the rules are,” he said. He is not alone. The N.B.A. does require teams to notify the league in advance if they are considering resting a player. As soon as a team makes the decision, it has to make an announcement. Earlier this week, the Spurs considered sitting Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili. They were listed on the injury report as questionable, with “rest” listed as the injury. Both Spurs wound up playing. But there is really no hard rule as to how many players can properly be rested for a single game, or a group of games. Meanwhile, Popovich’s defiant rest initiative is as strategic as it is compassionate. Perhaps even more strategic than compassionate. Resting players has compelled the Spurs to develop a deep bench while keeping veteran players fresh. Brad Stevens, the Celtics’ coach, said he noticed the difference last season, when the Spurs played the Celtics without Tony Parker, Ginobili and Kawhi Leonard and used backups instead. “They came in and played great, and those guys continued to play all through the playoffs,” Stevens said. “Not only were they well rested when the playoffs came, but guys on the bench were ready.” Scott Brooks, the Thunder’s coach and a former N.B.A. player, has concluded that less is more. “When I played, there were no days off,” he said. “It was a code of honor: You played every game and you practiced every day.” He remembers two-a-day practices before the season began. “I’m glad we are not doing that,” he said. “I can’t imagine putting our players through that. That was too much. I think it’s a good balance right now.” Nonetheless, Popovich is exploiting an ambiguity that the N.B.A., in conjunction with an assertive Roberts, should clarify. Cleveland is scheduled to play a high-profile game against San Antonio on March 12. Perhaps, on the day of the game, disappointed Spurs fans will learn that Cleveland’s Big 3 will not play. The reason? They need their rest.

Michele Roberts
Adam Silver
Basketball
NBA


Jim Buck, Who Made Walking Dogs a Job, Dies at 81

Abstract: There are eight million occupational stories in New York City, and none cries Gotham louder than that of the professional surrogate — the shrewd city dweller who spies a void that other New Yorkers are too hurried, harried or hard-pressed to fill and rushes enterprisingly in. Over time, the city has spawned professional car-movers and professional line-standers, but its most visible — and audible — paid surrogates are indisputably its professional dog walkers. By all accounts, Jim Buck was the first of them. Mr. Buck, who died on July 4 at 81, is widely described as the first person to professionalize dog walking in New York City and, by extension, in the United States. Starting in the early 1960s, Mr. Buck, the scion of a patrician Upper East Side family, rose each morning at dawn to walk passels of clients’ dogs, eventually presiding over a business in which he and two dozen assistants walked more than 150 dogs a day. When he began that business, Jim Buck’s School for Dogs, it was the only one of its kind in New York. Today, the city has scores of professional dog walkers. During the 40 years Mr. Buck ran his school, he was an eminently recognizable figure: an elegantly turned out, borzoi-thin man of 145 pounds, he commanded the leashes of a half-dozen or more dogs at a time — a good 500 pounds of dog in all — which fanned out before him like the spokes of a wheel. He walked in sun; he walked in rain. In wintertime, his charges might be clad in small sweaters bearing the logos of the European resorts where their masters skied. Jim Buck’s School for Dogs was equal parts exclusive preparatory academy, exercise class and reform school. In a 1964 profile of Mr. Buck in The New York Times, Gay Talese described him, plying his trade, as looking “like Charlton Heston in the chariot-racing scene in ‘Ben-Hur.’ ” But with hindsight, it is more apt to liken Mr. Buck to Lee Marvin in the 1967 film “The Dirty Dozen.” Mr. Buck’s clients were refined. Their dogs were less so. The clients, mostly Upper East Siders, included some of the city’s most prominent names in the arts, government, finance and industry. (Continuing the tradition of walker-client confidentiality to which Mr. Buck long hewed, his family declined to name them. It did confirm Mr. Buck’s death, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan, apparently of complications of emphysema and cancer.) The dogs included the intractable, the obstinate and the profoundly pampered. One, an otterhound known to Mr. Buck’s staff as Oliver the Awful, was used for some years to audition prospective employees. “Oliver knows when he’s testing someone new, and he can be counted on to leap into the first phone booth along the way and slam the door and wedge himself against it,” Mr. Buck told The New Yorker in 1965. “Brute force is of no avail; the only way to get him out is to remain poised and quietly talk him out.” James Augustine Farrell Buck was born in Manhattan on Nov. 28, 1931. His family, socially prominent, had prospered in steel and shipping. As a youth, Jim showed dogs; he also trained horses at the Connecticut country homes of his uncles. Footloose, determined and eager to flout convention, Mr. Buck bypassed college. But by the early ’60s he was leading the sort of gray-flannel life of which he despaired, chafing in New York as a salesman for an electronics concern. Mr. Buck knew dogs — as a young man, he bred Great Danes. He also knew New Yorkers. Before long, a void was filled. By 1964, The Times reported, he was making $500 a week, more than his electronics job paid. His cobbler enjoyed a regular cut: Mr. Buck wore through the soles of his shoes every two weeks. Mr. Buck’s marriage to Ann Sage ended in divorce. A resident of Manhattan, he is survived by three sons, Jonathan, Christopher and Graham; two sisters, Mother Debra Joseph, a Benedictine nun, and Connie Buck; and a brother, Richard. Jim Buck’s School for Dogs is gone now, closed a decade ago when Mr. Buck retired. But its legacy endures: some of the city’s professional dog walkers are his former employees. As the city changes, so too does their work. There are no more telephone booths for latter-day Olivers to barricade themselves in. Few cobblers remain. And in years to come, in perhaps the keenest loss of all, there may well be no more newsprint. A 20th-century artifact increasingly deemed redundant in the electronic age, it remains, for New York’s dog walkers, a vital, and indispensable, means of upholding the law.


Kyrgyzstan Insists U.S. Base to Close

Abstract: MOSCOW — Kyrgyzstan appeared Thursday to rebuff an appeal by President Obama for closer cooperation as Washington sought to retain an American air base there that provides an important staging area for the war in Afghanistan. In February, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev gave the United States six months to leave the installation, Manas Air Base , a decision that was seen as influenced in part by Russia, which pledged a $2 billion loan to the impoverished Central Asian country. On Thursday, Foreign Minister Kadyrbek Sarbayev said there were no plans to reverse that decision, despite the appeal by Mr. Obama, who, according to the Kyrgyz government, sent a letter to Mr. Bakiyev seeking greater cooperation between the countries. American officials in the region had no immediate public comment on the Kyrgyz government’s statement. “The decision to abolish the agreement on the military air base, Manas, has been made, and there is no turning back from this,” Mr. Sarbayev told the Kyrgyz online news agency, www.24.kg . Closing the base could hamper the war effort in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has authorized an additional 30,000 American troops to go there in the next two years. The United States has used Manas as a staging point since the war began in 2001. The base has played an important role for NATO, providing a refueling stop and transit hub for thousands of troops and 500 tons of cargo each month. The United States pays about $17.4 million annually to rent the base and also provides $150 million each year in aid. Kyrgyzstan’s leaders have complained that the United States has failed to compensate the government adequately for use of the base. Relations were also strained in 2006 when an American serviceman killed a Kyrgyz truck driver on the base. Washington has signaled a willingness to negotiate to keep the base open. Mr. Bakiyev’s office announced Thursday that Mr. Obama had sent a letter to Mr. Bakiyev thanking “the people and the leadership of Kyrgyzstan for their efforts in stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan and the fight against international terrorism and drug trafficking .” “Barack Obama expressed his desire to strengthen various forms of cooperation between the United States and Kyrgyzstan,” the statement released by Mr. Bakiyev’s office said. The letter did not mention the Manas base, but said Mr. Obama would soon send high-ranking officials for negotiations. Ilin M. Karypbekov, a spokesman for Mr. Bakiyev, said the Kyrgyz leader had received the letter and had ordered his government to draft recommendations for Mr. Obama that “will be formulated on the basis of Kyrgyzstan’s national interests.” But he reaffirmed that no negotiations would be held with regard to Manas. The United States military has not begun closing down operations at Manas, said a military spokesman at the base.

United States Defense and Military Forces