A Bonus Is Declined; a Problem Remains

Abstract: When IBM reported fourth-quarter and full-year earnings a few weeks ago, they could have been an excuse for popping champagne corks in the executive suite. That’s because annual bonuses for the company’s chief executive, Virginia Rometty, and her top executives are based on a formula that heavily weights earnings growth, and IBM’s earnings were a record $5.73 a share, up 12 percent. Ms. Rometty stood to collect up to twice her target bonus, or $8 million, on top of her $1.5 million salary and other compensation. “She could have draped herself in the short-term metric of earnings per share and said, ‘Let’s celebrate,’ ” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management and founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute. Instead, Ms. Rometty announced, “In view of the company’s overall full-year results, my senior team and I have recommended that we forgo our personal annual incentive payments for 2013.” Soon after, Barclays’ chief executive, Antony Jenkins, turned down his bonus, too, for the second year in a row. “I have concluded that it would not be right, in the circumstances, for me to accept a bonus for 2013, and I have, therefore, respectfully declined the one offered to me by the board.” Mr. Jenkins could have earned up to 1.7 million pounds, or $2.8 million, on top of his annual salary of £1.1 million pounds. Last year, Royal Bank of Scotland’s chief executive, Stephen Hester, turned down his £1 million bonus. Even Larry Ellison, the highly paid chief executive of Oracle, last year declined a $1.2 million annual performance bonus and took only a token $1 salary, although those are only a drop in the bucket of his $77 million stock-based compensation. Bonuses are only one part of a chief executive’s pay package, and a relatively small one in many cases. And these few examples notwithstanding, executive compensation is still going through the roof. Google announced this month that it paid its chairman, Eric Schmidt, $100 million in stock options and another $6 million in cash even though he was replaced as chief executive. American bank executives have not followed the lead of their British counterparts, and have been reaping big pay increases this year despite many of the same scandals and penalties afflicting the British banks. The gap between the pay of chief executives and average workers has never been wider. Image Virginia Rometty, chief executive of IBM, stood to collect a bonus of $8 million on top of her $1.5 million salary and other compensation, but turned it down. Credit Brendan McDermid/Reuters “More C.E.O.s should consider this, absolutely,” said Professor Sonnenfeld, who discussed the bonus issue with Ms. Rometty before she turned it down. “They surely don’t need the cash to live on. A few companies in distress have done it, but that’s not the case at IBM. It’s a great marriage of substance and symbolism, and I find it very refreshing.” While still unusual, turning down pay may become “something of a trend,” said David Eaton, vice president for proxy research at the shareholder advisory firm Glass Lewis, because of increasing public awareness of executive compensation. “It’s a little bit of public penance for poor performance. But what it really comes down to is increased scrutiny by large investors on executive compensation issues. Paying out or accepting bonuses in times of underperformance that hit the shareholders just doesn’t appear right.” That’s certainly the case at IBM and Barclays. IBM may have just reported record earnings, but over the last year, IBM shares have dropped over 8 percent, and are more than 14 percent below the level reached last March. Barclays shares have dropped nearly 4 percent in the last year and are still far below levels reached before the financial crisis. By comparison, over the last year, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has gained 21 percent. At IBM, Ms. Rometty did not say exactly what she meant by IBM’s “overall full-year results,” but they surely included revenue, which was down 5 percent, and pretax operating income, which dropped 8 percent. Revenue at IBM’s systems and technology unit declined a steep 26 percent and the unit lost $500 million. Of course, the fact that the chief executives at IBM and Barclays turned down large bonuses — not to mention all the chief executives at underperforming companies who took them — raises the question of why they were getting bonuses in the first place. As Allan McCall, a founder of the consulting firm Compensia and a researcher on executive compensation at Stanford Business School, put it, “If a company had a bad year, then what are the metrics that would lead a company to pay a bonus?” According to IBM’s most recent proxy statement, annual incentive bonuses for the chief executive and other members of top management are calculated based on a formula that looks at revenue growth, operating net income, operating earnings per share and free cash flow. Of those factors, operating net income accounts for 60 percent of the weighting in the formula. The stock price is not a factor, even though it is usually what shareholders care most about. IBM does not disclose specific targets, citing competitive reasons. But the bar may not be all that high. According to the company’s proxy statements, IBM’s chief executives received the full target bonus every year since the target bonuses were disclosed beginning in 2005, except for 2009. Given IBM’s performance last year, Ms. Rometty presumably met or exceeded this year’s targets for earnings and free cash flow. While revenue may have fallen short, that accounts for only 20 percent of the formula. While the compensation committee might have considered some discretionary factors, if Ms. Rometty exceeded the earnings and cash flow targets, she would have been in line for 80 percent of her maximum bonus, or $6.4 million, even in what was a disappointing year. Image Barclays' chief executive, Antony Jenkins, turned down his bonus, too, for the second year in a row. Credit Lucas Jackson/Reuters “That suggests something is out of whack,” Mr. McCall said. (An IBM spokesman declined to disclose the size of the bonus Ms. Rometty turned down and otherwise declined to comment beyond the company’s news release.) Mr. Eaton of Glass Lewis said: “We’ve brought this issue up as a criticism of IBM. We think with regards to the short-term incentive plan, those goals could be disclosed retrospectively. Shareholders are left in the dark when those targets aren’t disclosed. Some other companies are much more transparent. It’s very commonplace to disclose the short-term target and what the actual performance was.” Still, there is little doubt that Ms. Rometty chose to leave a good deal of money on the table — a fortune to most people. Professor Sonnenfeld praised the message it sent to shareholders as IBM is making large capital investments in its new Watson development platform in the cloud. “She’s trying to lead by example,” he said. “She believes actions speak louder than words.” He continued: "It’s a great struggle to turn the IBM battleship. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s great she’s done this and is willing to make big bets on the future. She believes it’s going to pay off and she’s putting her compensation behind it.” Mr. Eaton added: “I think IBM made a good move. It’s not necessarily something that we’d push for, but if the company thinks it’s the right thing, after talking with the investor base, it can be an appropriate step.” Ms. Rometty’s decision also sends an important message to employees, Mr. McCall said. “It’s another way to communicate to the organization that things aren’t going great, we need to do better, and we’ll take something out of the pockets of the executive team to set an example.” In the Barclays case, the message may have been aimed primarily at regulators, a British public still furious over financial bailouts and even the House of Commons, which has been much more aggressive than Congress on issues of executive pay and threatened to hold hearings last year on Royal Bank of Scotland’s decision to award bonuses to top executives. In declining his bonus, Mr. Jenkins of Barclays spoke of “legacy litigation and conduct issues,” presumably referring to the scandal involving the rigging of the global benchmark interest rate Libor, which led to the ouster of his predecessor. Still, however laudable Ms. Rometty’s and Mr. Jenkins’s sacrifices, and even if turning down bonuses does become a trend, leaving a bonus to the discretion of the chief executive does not get at the larger problem that many of them are overpaid. “It may be fine for the chief executive to waive a bonus,” Mr. Eaton said, “but it’s really the compensation committee of the board that should be more proactive, and not give one in the first place. Of course, from a public relations perspective, it looks better for the C.E.O. to turn it down.”

IBM
Bonuses
Barclays
Executive Compensation
Board of directors
Virginia M Rometty
Antony P Jenkins


Robert Ebeling, Challenger Engineer Who Warned of Disaster, Dies at 89

Abstract: Thirty years ago, Bob Ebeling drove to the headquarters of the aerospace contractor Morton Thiokol in Brigham City, Utah, to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. On the way, he leaned over to his daughter Leslie and said: “The Challenger is going to blow up. Everyone’s going to die.” Mr. Ebeling (pronounced EBB-ling), an engineer at Thiokol, knew what the rest of the world did not: that the rubber O-rings designed to seal the joints between the booster rocket’s segments performed poorly in cold weather. A severe cold snap in Florida was about to subject the O-rings to temperatures more than 30 degrees lower than at any previous launch. During the afternoon and evening before the launch, Thiokol engineers, relying on data provided by Mr. Ebeling and his colleagues, argued passionately for a postponement of the launch in conference calls with NASA managers at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. They were overruled not only by NASA, but also by their own managers. On the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, sitting in a conference room with his daughter and Roger Boisjoly , Thiokol’s chief seal expert, Mr. Ebeling watched on a large projection screen as the Challenger cleared the launching pad. “I turned to Bob and said, ‘We’ve just dodged a bullet,’” Mr. Boisjoly told The Guardian in 2001. A minute later, the O-rings failed and the Challenger exploded in a ball of fire, killing all seven crew members aboard. Among them was Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from New Hampshire who had been chosen to be the first citizen passenger in space. Image Bob Ebeling Credit United States Fish and Wildlife Service Mr. Ebeling never recovered from the disaster . “I’ve been under terrible stress since the accident,” he told The Houston Chronicle in 1987. “I have headaches. I cry. I have bad dreams. I go into a hypnotic trance almost daily.” He soon left Thiokol and the engineering profession. For the rest of his life he faulted himself for not doing enough to prevent the launch. At times, he seemed to carry the entire burden of the disaster on his shoulders, although it was he, on the afternoon before the launch, who made a critical phone call to Allan J. McDonald, the Thiokol engineer in charge of the solid rocket motor project at the Kennedy Space Center, alerting him to concerns about the O-rings. “I think this was one of the mistakes that God made,” Mr. Ebeling told Howard Berkes of NPR in January, on the 30th anniversary of the event. “He shouldn’t have picked me for that job. I don’t know, but next time I talk to him, I’m going to ask him, ‘Why? You picked a loser.’” Mr. Ebeling died on Monday in Brigham City at 89. His daughter Leslie Serna recalled the morning of the launch in an interview on NPR that day. The Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster, 30 Years Later The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986, remains one of the worst accidents of the American space program. Robert Vernon Ebeling was born on Sept. 4, 1926, in Chicago. His father, Ado, an auto mechanic, took the family to San Diego when Robert was a boy. After graduating from high school he was called up by the Army — his mother, the former Irene Kramer, sat on the local draft board — and served as an infantryman in the Philippines during World War II. He returned to San Diego after his discharge and in 1949 married Darlene Popejoy, who survives him. In addition to his daughter Leslie, he is also survived by three other daughters, Kathleen Ebeling, who confirmed his death, Judy Kirwan and Terrie Johnston; 12 grandchildren; 16 great-grandchildren; and two great-great-grandchildren. Mr. Ebeling enrolled in California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, earning a degree in mechanical engineering in 1952, and went to work for Convair, a San Diego manufacturer of airplanes, rockets and spacecraft. The company made the first Atlas rockets used by Project Mercury, NASA’s manned orbital flight program. Mr. Ebeling joined Thiokol, as it was then known, in 1962. A supplier of rockets and missile propulsion systems, the company in 1974 won the contract to build solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle program. Mr. Ebeling was manager of the ignition system and final assembly for the shuttle boosters. After leaving Morton Thiokol, Mr. Ebeling became a volunteer at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge near his home in Brigham City. In 1989, in response to damage caused by flooding of the Great Salt Lake, he created Friends of the Bear River Refuge , which raised money to restore the sanctuary. Drawing upon his engineering background, he also helped repair dikes and water-control structures. In 1990, President George Bush presented him with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Award for his work. In 2013, he was named the National Wildlife Refuge System’s volunteer of the year by the National Wildlife Refuge Association and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Mr. Ebeling’s anguished interview with NPR in January moved hundreds of listeners to send expressions of support and sympathy. Mr. McDonald, his former boss at Thiokol, called him. “I told him that he was not a loser, that a loser was someone who has a chance to act but doesn’t, and worse, doesn’t care,” Mr. McDonald said in an interview on Thursday. “He really did do something,” he added. “I told him that if he had not called me, we never would have had the opportunity to try to avert the disaster. They would have just gone ahead with the launch. At least we had the opportunity to try to stop it.” The public response to Mr. Ebeling’s interview eventually had an effect, especially after a former Thiokol executive and a NASA official contacted by Mr. Berkes of NPR wrote words of encouragement. In a follow-up piece, Mr. Berkes asked Mr. Ebeling if he would like to respond. Mr. Ebeling said: “You helped bring my worrisome mind to ease. You have to have an end to everything.”

Robert Ebeling
Engineering
Space Shuttle Challenger
Obituary


Circuit Breaker Kicks In for Citigroup Trading

Abstract: An experimental circuit breaker for stock markets that was put in place after last month’s so-called flash crash kicked in for the second time on Tuesday after an erroneous trade caused a sudden plunge in the price of Citigroup shares. Trading in the shares of Citigroup, one of the most heavily traded stocks in the United States, was paused for five minutes at 1:03 p.m. after an over-the-counter trade of about 8,821 shares was posted at a price of $3.3174, or 12.7 percent lower than the $3.80 price of the previous trade. The trade was later canceled, according to Nancy A Condon, a spokeswoman for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which regulates brokerage firms. Even so, Citigroup shares closed 5 percent lower for the day, at $3.79. The circuit breaker rules, put in place across all stock markets two weeks ago on the recommendation of the Securities and Exchange Commission , require exchanges to pause trading for five minutes in any individual Standard & Poor’s 500 stock that moves 10 percent or more in either direction in a five-minute period. The circuit breaker program, which is being tested for six months, was started in response to a minicrash on May 6 that affected a range of stocks and caused a rapid, 1,000-point decline in the Dow Jones industrial average. Wall Street analysts said that the halting of Citigroup’s shares on Tuesday highlighted the effectiveness of the mechanisms being tested to prevent disruptive movements in share prices. “What the S.E.C. has recommended is working,” said Patrick J. Healy of the Issuer Advisory Group, which advises public companies on how and where to list their shares for trading. “Had they done this two months ago, there never would have been a flash crash.” Until this month, only the New York Stock Exchange had circuit breakers in place on individual stocks. Regulators have said that a lack of common rules across all markets worsened the flash crash, causing it to spread across a broad range of stocks. Automated trading systems analyzed the slowdown in trading on the exchange incorrectly, regulators have said, and kept bidding down prices in hopes of attracting buyers. The new circuit breaker system was set off the first time on June 16, after the share price of the Washington Post Company nearly doubled in an instant. That movement was also ascribed to an erroneous trade, and the trades were canceled, according to exchange officials. On Monday, shares of Boeing suddenly fell 44 percent, to $38.77, from $68.77. The trades were later canceled on Arca and Nasdaq, according to the exchanges. This move, however, occurred before the new mechanism took effect, at 9:45 a.m. daily, so trading was not paused. Despite the new measures, the S.E.C. and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have still been unable to identify the exact cause of the sharp market decline that shook investors and markets in early May. They are continuing to investigate. In their preliminary findings, the agencies have said the drop was caused by traders withdrawing from the market during a time of acute market anxiety and refusing to buy or sell, in both the stock and futures markets. The sell-off occurred when global markets were on edge over the European debt crisis. That market scare underscored how the growth of high-frequency computer trading was affecting market prices. Regulators said those systems could cause an avalanche of automated selling after prices declined by a certain amount. The agencies said there was no evidence that the market decline was caused by entry trading errors, or by computer hacking or terrorist activity. They added, however, that they could not “completely rule out these possibilities.” Adam Honoré, research director at the Aite Group, said the new market rules were a step forward. “It provides some assurance in the market,” he said. “Things happen so fast now with electronic trading. You have got to have some mechanism to check the electronic trading, giving everyone pause to work out what is going on.” He added that he thought the pilot program should be expanded to cover more than the 500 stocks in the S.& P. 500. Despite the new rules, Mr. Honoré said that price movements were being exacerbated by the fact that exchanges were using different circuit breaker systems. For example, the New York Stock Exchange uses a tighter circuit breaker system than those used by other exchanges, switching from electronic to manual trading when a single stock moves as little as 2 percent on the day. “This can create a vacuum,” said Mr. Healy of the Issuer Advisory Group. “That makes price falls worse until the marketwide circuit breakers kick in. There needs to be a standardized platform.”

Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
Securities and Exchange Commission
High-Frequency and Flash Trading
Stocks and Bonds
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry
Citigroup Inc


Officer and Gunman Are Wounded in Brooklyn, Police Say

Abstract: A gunman who shot a police officer in the leg was in turn shot and wounded by other officers early Sunday morning in Brooklyn, the police said. The encounter began around 2:30 a.m., when plainclothes officers on patrol in an unmarked vehicle noticed a man adjusting his waistband near Marcus Garvey Boulevard and Monroe Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Police Department said. Suspecting the man was carrying a gun, the police said, the officers got out of the vehicle and approached him. When they did, the man ran, the police said. A block away, at the intersection of Marcus Garvey Boulevard and Gates Avenue, the man came upon two other officers on foot patrol and opened fire, the police said. He hit one officer, John Hirschberger, 28, in the left thigh, and continued running as the other officers returned fire, the police said. The man rounded the corner onto Gates Avenue and made it about halfway down the block before he was apprehended. He had been shot once in the back and was taken to Kings County Hospital Center, where he was in critical condition. The suspect, Naim Owens, has been charged with attempted murder, assault on a police officer and criminal possession of a weapon. Mr. Owens, 22, lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant. A .38-caliber Rossi handgun was recovered from the scene. Officer Hirschberger, who joined the department a year ago, was also treated at Kings County Hospital Center and released, the police said. Earlier on Sunday morning, a 23-year-old man was found dead on a Bronx street corner with several gunshot wounds, the police said. Even as the homicide rate in New York continues to decline to historic lows, the authorities say, there has been a rise in shootings. As of midnight Sunday, there were 792 shootings, an increase of 7.9 percent from the same period last year. And there have been over 800 shooting victims in the city this year, despite efforts by the Police Department to bolster patrols in high-crime areas. On one night in mid-August, 14 people were shot in different parts of the city; two of them were killed.

John Hirschberger
Naim Owens
NYPD
Attacks on Police
Bed-Stuy


Economic Recovery Lifts Profit at Shell

Abstract: LONDON — Royal Dutch Shell , Europe’s largest oil company, said Thursday that profit rose 7 percent in the third quarter as a global economic recovery pushed up energy demand. Net profit rose to $3.46 billion in the third quarter from $3.25 billion in the same period last year. Excluding one-time items and inventory changes, Shell earned $4.9 billion compared with $2.6 billion in the third quarter of last year. Earnings growth at Shell is expected to outpace that at BP, which is still paying for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. BP is due to report its figures next week. Shell benefited from improving conditions in the industry, the Shell chief executive Peter Voser said in a statement. Shell was “making good progress against our targets, and there is more to come,” Mr. Voser said. The shares rose 1 percent in early trading Thursday in London. Like its rivals, Shell is reducing costs to try to improve profitability. Shell sold $2 billion of assets this year, including older oil assets in Norway and refining capacity in Germany. The company said it expects to sell another $6 billion of assets by the end of next year, mainly operations in Europe and Africa that are not part of its core business. To increase output, Mr. Voser plans to invest in new projects in Qatar, China and the United States. He said Thursday that Shell was “in a delivery window for new growth.” A new oil sands mine in Canada started production in the third quarter, and Shell has decided to invest in deep water projects in the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil. Production in the third quarter rose 5 percent to 3.058 million barrels of oil equivalent a day from 2.92 million barrels in the year-earlier period. Sales for liquefied natural gas, or LNG, rose 22 percent to 4.26 million tons. Shell’s earnings came a day after ConocoPhillips reported net income more than doubled to $3.06 billion as crude oil and gas prices increased. The French firm Total is to report earnings Friday.


Prince Plans to Make New Album a Tidal Exclusive

Abstract: Prince announced on Friday that he had signed an exclusive deal with the music-streaming service Tidal to release his new album, HITNRUN. A longtime advocate for artists’ rights, Prince recently began removing his music from most streaming services. But he has left his music on Tidal, the subscription service owned by Jay Z and more than a dozen other artists (Prince is not thought to be among them). Last month, Prince released a new single, “Stare,” on Spotify, another streaming service.

Prince
Tidal
Music
Audio Recordings
Downloads and Streaming
Video Recordings


Conserving Creativity, Even if It’s Cow Bones

Abstract: As a conservator specializing in sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art since 1984, Lynda A. Zycherman, 61, has applied a preservationist’s touch to sculpture composed of every conceivable material: marble, bronze, steel, textiles, chocolate and — once was enough — three tons of cow bones imported from Italy. Ms. Zycherman deemed the bones unsanitary and sent them to Oklahoma to be pickled before allowing a Marina Abramovic sculpture to go on display recently. Widowed with two grown children, she lives on the Upper West Side. Early start: Every week my parents took me to the Met, and I can also remember going with them on Sundays to MoMA for the tours when I was 5, 6, 7. I’d be the youngest one there, sitting up in front of the lecturer on the stone floor. A thing for rings: I went to the High School of Music and Art as an art major, but I never enjoyed facing a blank paper. [At New York University] I wrote my master’s thesis on Minoan signet rings; they showed scenes of life from around 1250 B.C. I enrolled in one of N.Y.U.’s first graduate programs in the conservation of art. It was kind of a new field back then. Mending broken glass: In 1973, I went to the Corning Museum of Glass for a four-month internship as an assistant restorer. Hurricane Agnes had pretty much destroyed the museum in 1972. The floodwater had risen 10 feet inside the museum, so the objects inside cases that were bolted to the floor were floating in a mix of mud and water, but the objects in cases that hadn’t been bolted down had been lifted up and smashed. It was a disaster site. The Met, the Freer: I interned at the Met in 1974, and from there I was hired by the Smithsonian to do conservation work in the Freer Gallery. I spent eight years, mostly studying the provenance and preservation of ancient Chinese bronzes. On to MoMA: Around the time I was due with my second child, MoMA was looking for a person with classical conservation training. They hired me and were kind enough to hold the position for me while I was on maternity leave. Climbing ladders and handling solvents and heavy pieces is not a good fit for a pregnant person. Where’s the art? I started as an assistant conservator in 1984, and I have to confess that the transition from classical to modern art took some time. In the beginning, I can remember being called to the storeroom to look at something and not recognizing which thing was the art. A wastebasket? A piece of crumpled paper? But over 25 years I’ve gotten more appreciative. I was promoted to sculpture conservator in 2003, and I have to say, I’ve never had a dull day in this place. Watering the garden: When we did our Richard Serra exhibition, he told me to spray saltwater on the steel sculpture in the garden to speed up the weatherization process, so there I was, every day at 4 p.m., outside with a mister. On hot days the water steamed when it hit the sculpture and made for a tremendous visual. Most memorable fix: That would be a piece from Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” series that used two colors of sparkly rock salt, white and a grayish pink, embedded in resin. Well, it cracked wide open, and I wound up reapplying samples of salt to the break line, one crystal at a time. Maybe that’s why I like to say my favorite MoMA piece is an outdoor sculpture by David Smith called “ Cubi X.” It’s made of stainless steel, and it doesn’t give me any problems. No corrosion. No peeling. Just wash it off to remove the bird poop every once in a while, and you’re done!

Sculpture
Museum of Modern Art
Careers and Professions


A Review of ‘Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print’ in Princeton

Abstract: Two events from the last decade demonstrate how Edvard Munch (1863-1944) remains relevant in widely varying contexts today. One is the $119.9 million price paid in 2012 for a pastel version of “The Scream” (1895), which made it briefly the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. The other is a proposal to use a version of “The Scream” to label a nuclear waste storage site , warning future generations — or visitors from other planets — of the toxic dangers lurking within. Munch’s era, like our own, was filled with financial speculation, vast disparities in wealth, human displacement because of industrialization, and natural disasters. (Some art historians have linked the blood-red sky in “The Scream” to the 1883 eruption of Krakatau in Indonesia, which, although it happened more than a decade before the painting was made, emitted volcanic dust that produced spectacular sunsets around the world for months.) It is Munch’s uncanny representation of humans in distress or extreme states that resonates today, however, and that is evident in the 26 etchings, lithographs and woodcuts in “Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print, Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art, New York,” at the Princeton University Art Museum . And while it seems like a small show, Munch — as demonstrated by the potency of “The Scream” and a handful of other works — was a master of evoking sensibility and expression with a few deft figures and lines. Like other artists associated with Symbolism in the late 19th century, he was more interested in mining the interior world of memory, anxiety, fear and loneliness than in recording changes in the outside world as the Impressionists did. A wall label includes a famous aphorism from his writings: “I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.” Image “Vampire II” from 1895 to 1902, lithograph and woodcut. Credit Courtesy of the Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society, New York Printmaking fueled him in this quest. Raised in the working-class tenements of Oslo — the city was called Kristiania at the time — Munch was trained on a scholarship in Paris, where he encountered the work of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Gauguin’s lithographs and woodcuts in particular inspired him, including the coarsely carved woodblocks Gauguin used for his book “Noa Noa,” which were left for safekeeping with a neighbor in whose apartment Munch would have seen them. Prints were also more affordable than paintings and reached a wider audience. Munch had become responsible for supporting his family after his father died in 1889 — his parents and his sister eventually died of tuberculosis — so this was crucial. In 1893 Munch moved to Berlin, and a year later he began working with a master printmaker. Some of the earliest works here allude to the tragic events of his biography, including “The Sick Child” (1894), a drypoint, and “Death in the Sickroom” (1896), a lithograph that uses solid black forms for the figures and sinuous lines to capture the dark mood of the room in which his sister Sophie died. Other works attempt to capture emotions like loneliness or desire. “Two People. The Lonely Ones,” with two figures, a man and a woman, seen from behind — a common pose in Romantic portraits — went through multiple versions over the decades, and several are on view here. The work also has biographical links: In 1898 Munch became involved with Tulla Larsen, the daughter of a wealthy wine merchant who wanted to marry, but Munch suffered from what today might be called commitment issues. “I have been given a unique role to play on this earth,” he argued in a letter quoted in a wall text, “by a life filled with sickness, ill-starred circumstances and my profession as an artist. It is a life that contains nothing even resembling happiness.” The couple parted in 1902. Image “Death in the Sickroom” (1896), a lithograph. Credit Courtesy of the Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society, New York “The Kiss” was another subject popular with Art Nouveau artists, and there are multiple versions of that here, with male and female figures entwined into one curving, organic mass. “Anxiety” (1896), a lithograph with undulating red lines hovering over a group of blank-faced figures, recalls the unsettling atmosphere and alienating psychology of “The Scream.” It was the woodcut, however, one of the oldest printmaking methods, that particularly intrigued Munch. Emulating Gauguin but expanding on his work, Munch used larger blocks and native woods like spruce, oak and birch. He also weathered his woodblocks to create a textural grain; sometimes he cut them up to create puzzle-like compositions. “Angst” (1896) and the fantastically eerie “Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair” (1896) use the grain of the wood to enhance the linear emphasis of the works. The latter work also shows the Symbolist proclivity, at times flagrantly misogynist, for depicting women as femmes fatales. You can also see this in works like “Vampire II” from 1895 to 1902, in which a faceless, predatory woman hovers over her helpless man, and “Ashes II” and “The Woman,” both from 1899, and which might, in other circumstances, be seen as celebratory images of bold, strident women. One of Munch’s most famous female subjects was the “Madonna.” A beautiful lithograph and woodcut version on view here, made between 1895 and 1902, shows a dark, sexualized Madonna, seen from below. In the corner of the work is what looks like a fetus: the vestiges of what would have been, in earlier centuries, the Christ child seated happily on the Madonna’s knee. Taking a traditional Christian subject and updating it in the age of Nietzsche and Freud — as well as the era of the gramophone, the typewriter and film — Munch achieved in his moment something that was shocking, but uncannily apropos. In 1892, a solo exhibition of his works at the conservative Berlin Artists Association was shut down because of outrage over its scandalous nature. A decade later, though, Munch was a celebrated artist, championed by fellow artists for his modern sensibility. Clearly, despite the century that has passed, that sensibility, with its acute focus on human fragility, angst and uncertainty, endures today.

Edvard Munch
Art
Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton NJ
New Jersey


Local Chocolate, for Local Consumption

Abstract: BERGL, AUSTRIA — In 1996, Josef Zotter’s bakery business in Graz, Austria, was floundering. Facing bankruptcy, he decided to close shop and go back to his roots, a village named Bergl in the Feldbach district of Styria. There, with 2 of his 40 former employees, he set up a tiny chocolate factory in a converted cowshed on the farm where he had grown up. His plan was to build a microbusiness, buying “fair trade” chocolate beans from smallholder producer cooperatives in Nicaragua and Brazil for the small-scale production of chocolate confectionery using local produce, for local consumption. Turning out bars with flavors like apricot and sheep’s milk, he built a following among customers who liked the concept of Austrian specialty chocolate made in an environmentally conscious way. Today, the factory has grown to cover more than 5,500 square meters, or 60,000 square feet, from its original 200 square meters. The company, Zotter Schokoladen Manufaktur, employs 112 people producing as many as 50,000 to 80,000 bars a day in a range of more than 200 classical and exotic flavors. Among the odder ingredients: Fish; soy; green tea; açaí berry; and ketchup and peanut butter — a tongue-in-cheek celebration of American taste, for President Barack Obama’s election victory. Sales have grown by word of mouth. “We don’t advertise whatsoever,” Mr. Zotter said in an interview last month. The company organizes factory tours, however, that bring about 150,000 visitors a year to taste and smell and also to sit on cocoa bean bags in the on-site “Cocoa Cinema,” where they can watch presentations on the brand’s history and ecological principles. Other attractions include a “Drink Chocolate Online” room where a small cable conveyor system, like a miniature ski-lift, trundles bars of chocolate around the room, waiting for visitors to pick them off and turn them into cocoa drinks at an adjoining hot chocolate bar. A recent visitor found crowds of children drinking from cocoa fountains at the entrance to the factory while their parents cut chocolate chunks from brimming samplers. But behind this playful, almost whimsical, presentation lies a strong commitment to sustainable production and equitable trading relations with the company’s suppliers. The company’s chocolate beans have been certified as “fair trade” products since 2004, meaning that it buys directly from the producers, offering them a higher price by cutting out middlemen. Mr. Zotter said he traveled regularly to Nicaragua and Brazil to meet with the producers, for whom he has financed the purchase of machinery and the construction of storage space. “I know how much they earn, and how much of their salary such equipment represents,” he said. Residues from grinding the beans are fed into a biomass converter to produce heat, power and fertilizer. Between the biomass plant and solar panels, 60 percent of the energy required by the factory is produced on the site. “We aim to reach full energy autarchy in the next 10 years,” Mr. Zotter said. Since 2006, the factory’s output has been certified organic. Mr. Zotter uses dairy products from organic farmers in the mountains of Tyrol and specialty organic products, like seeds, fruit and nuts, from local farms. “I want to use as many local specialties, and specialists, as possible. Steiermark needs the jobs,” Mr. Zotter said, using the German name for Styria. Mr. Zotter has also established an organic canteen on the factory site for his employees “so they get used to quality,” he said. “Also, I want them to work not just for money, but in a place they feel good in.” Other environmental gestures include using water from local springs only, which is then recycled for cleaning; and using environmentally friendly packaging, without glossy coatings. “You can make changes by paying attention to the smallest details of everyday life,” he said. Applying the same principles to his private life, he says he has driven an electric car for the past 15 years and powers his home with a domestic solar/ biomass generator that produces more energy than he needs. “My home energy production is really efficient,” he said. “I actually produce too much, so I wind up reselling it.” In an extension of his fair-trade principles, Mr. Zotter is also involved in several social projects, including one in Colombia that aims to wean coca growers onto cocoa as a substitute crop, and his product line includes fund-raising chocolates, like the Zuki bar, a flavorsome blend of açaí, mango and brazil nuts. The company says it donates 30 percent of Zuki bar sales to an aid project for Calcutta street children. Mr. Zotter says he is not interested in developing a global presence or selling through large distribution chains. Franchising has no place in his strategy, and faster growth is not an object. “I’ve reached my ideal size,” he said. “Plus, I don’t think we need yet another global brand. The world needs a completely new approach to making the economy work. I find it so frustrating to see the same products in every corner of the globe.” “The world is changing,” he added. “There is a return to simplicity. Greed is over.”

Chocolate
Austria
Organic Food
Local Food
Sustainable Living


Missed a Train? Cheer Up: The Next One Will Come Sooner Now

Abstract: WITH gas prices soaring and the debate intensifying over ways to reduce automobile congestion on the streets of Manhattan, Metro-North Railroad’s announcement that it will add 67 trains a week in and out of Grand Central Terminal is welcome news, commuter advocates say. “Finally, the word seems to be spreading that the train is a better way to get into the city, rather than paying all that money for tolls and gas and parking,” said James F. Blair, a member of the Metro-North Railroad Commuter Council, created by the State Legislature in the early 1980s to represent riders. The new schedule, which goes into effect on April 6, is aimed at several groups of riders, including those who commute to and from Manhattan; those who visit the city for social and cultural reasons, and second-home owners who keep their cars out of town and return home by train to the city on Sunday evening. Ridership is growing most rapidly at Metro-North’s northernmost stations, among them Poughkeepsie, Wassaic and New Haven, said Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for Metro-North. “Especially in Poughkeepsie,” she said, “it’s been increasing like gangbusters.” In the past decade, as the cost of buying a home closer to Manhattan has risen markedly, new housing developments have sprouted throughout Putnam and Dutchess Counties, attracting commuters willing to take on longer commutes. Sections of those counties have also become popular with second-home owners, and for that group, Metro-North is initiating a Sunday Evening Only limited-stop express train, which leaves Poughkeepsie at 4:21 p.m. In all, there will be 4,439 trains a week, a 35 percent increase since 1983, when Metro-North began service, Ms. Anders said. Metro-North’s announcement of the new train runs came after the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which oversees the railroad, said it was delaying service improvements on the Long Island Rail Road, subways and other agencies. The M.T.A. relies in part on revenue from real estate taxes to finance its operations, and the latest figures show those taxes under budget this year by $31.5 million. But Metro-North’s $2.4 million service expansion was approved last year, before the current budget problems, Ms. Anders said. On its Hudson Line, the railroad is adding 41 trains a week, including 21 on Saturdays and Sundays. Nine new Lower Hudson Line limited-stop express trains are scheduled on weekends between Croton-Harmon and Grand Central. There are also two new Upper Hudson Saturday Only limited-stop express trains — one inbound leaving Poughkeepsie at 9:21 a.m., and one outbound leaving Grand Central at 5:26 p.m. On weeknights, three new off-peak Lower Hudson Line limited-stop expresses will offer trains leaving Grand Central for Croton-Harmon, and stops in between, at 9:16 p.m., 9:55 and 10:55. In the morning, a new express train will leave Croton-Harmon at 9. On the Harlem Line, an early-morning express will depart North White Plains at 5:55, making stops in White Plains, Hartsdale, Scarsdale and Crestwood. In the evening, a new train will leave Grand Central at 7:57, providing express service to Scarsdale and Hartsdale. To reduce travel time, a 7:52 p.m. train from Grand Central to Southeast in Putnam County will no longer stop at North White Plains, Valhalla, Hawthorne or Pleasantville. To serve Upper Harlem Line stations, a new 10:29 p.m. train from Grand Central to Southeast will run Monday through Saturday. On the New Haven Line, a new early-morning train will leave Waterbury, Conn., at 5:57 a.m., with riders able to connect in Bridgeport with a train arriving in Grand Central at 8:18, or another in Stamford with a train that gets to Midtown at 8:16. In the afternoon, a new limited-stop express train will leave Stamford at 3:47 and arrive in Grand Central at 4:41. “This is all a very big deal,” said John Lyons, president of MetroPool, a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes mass transit and other alternatives to driving alone. “When Metro-North puts on this many new trains, it’s saying something very important.” New timetables are available at the stations or www.mta.info .

Metro-North Commuter Railroad
Transit Systems


Officials Clash Over Mentally Ill in Florida Jails

Abstract: Correction Appended MIAMI, Nov. 14 — For years, circuit judges here have ordered state officials to obey Florida law and promptly transfer severely mentally ill inmates from jails to state hospitals. But with few hospital beds available, Gov. Jeb Bush ’s administration began flouting those court orders in August. Now, in a growing standoff between the government of Florida and its judges, the state is being threatened with steep daily fines if it does not comply. And at least one judge has raised the possibility that the secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families could go to jail for contempt of court. “This type of arrogant activity cannot be tolerated in an orderly society,” Judge Crockett Farnell of Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court wrote in an Oct. 11 ruling. State law requires that inmates found incompetent to stand trial be moved from county jails to psychiatric hospitals within 15 days of the state’s receiving the commitment orders. Florida has broken that law for years, provoking some public defenders to seek court orders forcing swift compliance. With the state now rebuffing even those orders, a rising number of mentally ill inmates, now more than 300, have been left without treatment in crowded jails because the state’s 1,416 psychiatric beds are full. Two mentally ill inmates in the Escambia County Jail in Pensacola died over the last year and a half after being subdued by guards, according to news reports. And in the Pinellas County Jail in Clearwater, a schizophrenic inmate gouged out his eye after waiting weeks for a hospital bed, his lawyer said. Public defenders in Miami-Dade County describe psychotic clients who have hallucinated, mutilated themselves and attempted suicide while awaiting transfer to hospitals. The state says that shortages of beds and financing have made compliance impossible, and that court orders forcing the transfer of certain inmates are unfair to those who have waited longer. Most judges have responded skeptically, asking why the Department of Children and Families has not sought more state money as the number of committed inmates has soared. The agency cut its budget by $53 million this year, which public defenders say makes no sense given the inmate crisis and the state’s $8 billion budget surplus. In one of the toughest rulings to date on the subject, Judge Farnell said last month that he would start fining the department $1,000 a day for each mentally ill inmate who stayed in the Pinellas County Jail longer than 15 days. The judge, based in Clearwater, expressed outrage about the agency’s “conscious decision” to ignore court orders. Judges in Broward, Hillsborough and Miami-Dade Counties are also weighing motions to force the department to comply with the law or to hold it in contempt for letting the mentally ill pile up in unsuitable jails. The department appealed after three state judges in Miami ordered it to take custody of several inmates last month, but a panel of the Third District Court of Appeal indicated last week that it might rule against the department and its secretary, Lucy D. Hadi. “It strikes me that ultimately you’ve got contempt issues,” Judge Frank A. Shepherd said during oral arguments, “and Ms. Hadi may be going to jail.” The problem is not unique to Florida, although it is especially severe in Miami-Dade County, which has one of the nation’s largest percentages of mentally ill residents, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group. A Justice Department study released in September found that 64 percent of inmates in county jails around the nation reported mental health problems within the last year. Many are arrested for petty crimes, advocates say, yet remain in jail an inordinately long time because there is nowhere else for them to go. Only 40,000 beds remain in state psychiatric hospitals around the nation, down from 69,000 in 1995. Advocates for the mentally ill say that community-based treatment programs, which were supposed to replace psychiatric hospitals after the deinstitutionalization movement of the ’60s and ’70s, have not begun to make up for the loss. Long waits for beds are especially common in the nation’s urban areas. Last week, 307 mentally ill inmates were waiting for one of Florida’s 1,416 psychiatric beds, and 72 percent had waited longer than 15 days. The state has three psychiatric hospitals with secure beds. “This is a national problem, and it’s a direct reflection of the lack of adequate beds and coordination between the criminal justice and mental health systems,” said Ronald S. Honberg, legal director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In Miami, an average of 25 to 40 acutely psychotic people live in a unit of the main county jail that a lawyer for Human Rights Watch , Jennifer Daskal, described as squalid after visiting last month. Seventeen such inmates are currently waiting for state hospital beds, said Valerie Jonas, a county public defender, adding that the number has been as high as 30 in recent weeks. Ms. Daskal said that some of the unit’s 14 “suicide cells” — dim, bare and designed for one inmate — were holding two or three at a time, and that the inmates were kept in their cells 24 hours a day except to shower. None of the mentally ill inmates receive group or individual therapy, she said in an affidavit. Officials with the Department of Children and Families have argued that the agency cannot be held in contempt when it simply has no more beds, and that it could not have anticipated this year’s sharp rise in commitments. In June 2005, they said, only 125 inmates were waiting for hospital beds, of which 38 percent had waited longer than 15 days. “We are at the moment on a daily basis trying to find a short-term solution to the bed shortage,” said Al Zimmerman, a spokesman for the department. “We are trying to find ways to pay for additional space, pay for additional beds.” The department requested and received money for about two dozen new secure beds this year, and it has asked for 38 next year. Each bed costs $100,000 a year, Mr. Zimmerman said. Ms. Jonas, the public defender, said it was unconscionable that the department would not ask for more. “Given they’ve got a wait list of over 300 and they’re running all over the state claiming inability to comply,” she said, “where do they get off requesting only 38 new beds?” Yet Mr. Honberg said that putting more mentally ill inmates in state hospitals should not be the ultimate goal. The treatment they get there often skims the surface, he said, and many end up deteriorating when they return to jail, only to end up on the wait list for a hospital bed again. “You have large numbers of people sent to state hospitals not for therapeutic purposes, but for purposes of making them competent to proceed to trial,” Mr. Honberg said. “We’re not going to solve these problems until we invest adequate resources into services that work for people before they get to jail.”

Florida
Justice Department
Human Rights Watch
Mental Health and Disorders
Prisons and Prisoners
Bush Jeb
National Alliance for the Mentally Ill


Self-Defense Claim in New York Subway Killings

Abstract: A criminal justice student charged with fatally stabbing two New York subway riders was defending himself after a group of passengers broke a bottle over his head and put him in a headlock, his lawyer said Friday. The student, Brenddy Garcia, 19, sobbed as he was arraigned on murder charges in Manhattan. He is being held without bail. Prosecutors say he overreacted after other passengers tossed or kicked a bag of trash at him on a No.2 train early Sunday . But his lawyer, Pamela Roth, said that any actions he took were in self-defense. She said he had recently enrolled in a criminal justice program at Brooklyn College. Darnell Morel and Ricardo Williams, both 24, were killed in the encounter.

Subways
Murders and Attempted Murders
Crime and Criminals
New York City


Obama’s Speech on Libya (Text)

Abstract: Following is the transcript for President Obama’s speech on the upheaval in Libya on Wednesday, as released by the White House: Good afternoon, everybody. Secretary Clinton and I just concluded a meeting that focused on the ongoing situation in Libya. Over the last few days, my national security team has been working around the clock to monitor the situation there and to coordinate with our international partners about a way forward. First, we are doing everything we can to protect American citizens. That is my highest priority. In Libya, we've urged our people to leave the country and the State Department is assisting those in need of support. Meanwhile, I think all Americans should give thanks to the heroic work that's being done by our foreign service officers and the men and women serving in our embassies and consulates around the world. They represent the very best of our country and its values. Now, throughout this period of unrest and upheaval across the region the United States has maintained a set of core principles which guide our approach. These principles apply to the situation in Libya. As I said last week, we strongly condemn the use of violence in Libya. The American people extend our deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of all who’ve been killed and injured. The suffering and bloodshed is outrageous and it is unacceptable. So are threats and orders to shoot peaceful protesters and further punish the people of Libya. These actions violate international norms and every standard of common decency. This violence must stop. The United States also strongly supports the universal rights of the Libyan people. That includes the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. They are not negotiable. They must be respected in every country. And they cannot be denied through violence or suppression. In a volatile situation like this one, it is imperative that the nations and peoples of the world speak with one voice, and that has been our focus. Yesterday a unanimous U.N. Security Council sent a clear message that it condemns the violence in Libya, supports accountability for the perpetrators, and stands with the Libyan people. This same message, by the way, has been delivered by the European Union, the Arab League, the African Union, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and many individual nations. North and south, east and west, voices are being raised together to oppose suppression and support the rights of the Libyan people. I’ve also asked my administration to prepare the full range of options that we have to respond to this crisis. This includes those actions we may take and those we will coordinate with our allies and partners, or those that we’ll carry out through multilateral institutions. Like all governments, the Libyan government has a responsibility to refrain from violence, to allow humanitarian assistance to reach those in need, and to respect the rights of its people. It must be held accountable for its failure to meet those responsibilities, and face the cost of continued violations of human rights. This is not simply a concern of the United States. The entire world is watching, and we will coordinate our assistance and accountability measures with the international community. To that end, Secretary Clinton and I have asked Bill Burns, our Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, to make several stops in Europe and the region to intensify our consultations with allies and partners about the situation in Libya. I’ve also asked Secretary Clinton to travel to Geneva on Monday, where a number of foreign ministers will convene for a session of the Human Rights Council. There she’ll hold consultations with her counterparts on events throughout the region and continue to ensure that we join with the international community to speak with one voice to the government and the people of Libya. And even as we are focused on the urgent situation in Libya, let me just say that our efforts continue to address the events taking place elsewhere, including how the international community can most effectively support the peaceful transition to democracy in both Tunisia and in Egypt. So let me be clear. The change that is taking place across the region is being driven by the people of the region. This change doesn’t represent the work of the United States or any foreign power. It represents the aspirations of people who are seeking a better life. As one Libyan said, “We just want to be able to live like human beings.” We just want to be able to live like human beings. It is the most basic of aspirations that is driving this change. And throughout this time of transition, the United States will continue to stand up for freedom, stand up for justice, and stand up for the dignity of all people. Thank you very much.

Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )


President Mohammed Waheed Hassan of the Maldives Blocked From Addressing Parliament

Abstract: In a sign that tensions are still running high in the Maldives , hundreds of supporters of the island nation’s former president blocked the current president from addressing Parliament on Thursday. The former president — Mohamed Nasheed, the country’s first democratically elected leader — stepped down on Feb. 7, but then said he had been forced to resign in a coup orchestrated by people close to the country’s former dictator. Mr. Nasheed has demanded that a new election be held sooner than October 2013, when it would ordinarily be due. The current president, Mohammed Waheed Hassan, who was vice president under Mr. Nasheed, has insisted that the resignation was voluntarily, but that an early election was possible. The Maldives, a tiny country of 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean southwest of India, is best known for luxury beach resorts that are visited by nearly 1 million tourists, most from Asia and Europe, annually. Diplomats from India have tried to broker a settlement among Mr. Nasheed, Mr. Hassan and other political leaders, but the talks have not yet produced an agreement on what appears to be the main demand of Mr. Nasheed and his supporters, a date for a new election. India, the United States, Europe and other powers have taken an interest in the turmoil in part because they fear a rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the country, whose population is mainly Sunni Muslim. At the end of last year, religious parties protested against policies pushed by Mr. Nasheed and members of his party that the religious parties said were anti-Islamic. On the day Mr. Nasheed resigned, a group of men swarmed into the National Museum in Malé, the capital, and destroyed about 30 Buddhist statues dating back to the sixth century. President Hassan was scheduled on Thursday to deliver the annual address on the state of the nation, which precedes the first parliamentary session of the year. But the roads outside the Parliament building in Malé were blocked by supporters of Mr. Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party, while inside Parliament, lawmakers from the party removed the chairs for the speaker and the president to keep them from taking their accustomed places. Masood Imad, a spokesman for Mr. Hassan, said that the president waited in an anteroom during the afternoon for the speaker to re-establish order in the house. “Restraint is our key word,” Mr. Imad said by telephone in midafternoon. In the evening, though, army soldiers entered the hall and forcibly removed three members of Mr. Nasheed’s party from the Parliament, and the speaker, Abdulla Shahid, adjourned the session without setting a date for when lawmakers would reconvene. Over the course of the day, the police arrested 44 protestors, both sides said. Mr. Imad said they would be released soon. He said 16 policemen were injured, and that one with life-threatening wounds had been flown to Sri Lanka for treatment. Mr. Nasheed’s party said in a text message that four of its supporters had been injured in confrontations with the police. Ibrahim Nashid, who is Mr. Nasheed’s brother and adviser, said the party decided to mount the protest and block Mr. Hassan from speaking because Mr. Hassan had not kept a promise to set a new election date by March 1. “The demonstrators, mostly the women, they are very, very determined that they will not go home before they get a date for the early elections,” Mr. Nashid said by telephone from Malé.

Maldives
Hassan Mohammed Waheed
Demonstrations Protests and Riots
Nasheed Mohamed


Olympian Leaves Hospital

Abstract: The six-time Olympic gold medalist Amy Van Dyken-Rouen left the hospital in Englewood, Colo., and said she was feeling “1,000 times better” after two months of rehabilitation. She was left paralyzed just below the waist in an all-terrain vehicle crash on June 6 in Arizona.


Player Agency Finds a Way to Make Its No. 1s Add Up

Abstract: ST. LOUIS — It was a few weeks before N.F.L. training camps opened when Ben Dogra missed an early-morning call from Jets General Manager Mike Tannenbaum. Dogra, maybe the best football agent attracting the least attention, knew why Tannenbaum called. “He’s either going to tell me: Hey, let’s start negotiating the contract for Vernon Gholston, the sixth pick, or, Hey, I’m going on vacation, so let’s talk when I get back,” Dogra said. “I’m assuming it’s a reach-out call.” Dogra, a 43-year-old born in India but raised largely on American football, listened to the message. Tannenbaum vaguely said he wanted to “touch base.” Dogra was the man both in the middle and on top of it all. He helps oversee the most dominant player-representation agency in football from an office that is 10 stories above St. Louis and overlooks a suburban canopy stretching to the horizon. That is what 3 percent of a player’s contract — the going rate for N.F.L. agents — buys when your agency has more top-end draft picks than anyone. On his bookshelf was a football painted with the logos of the University of Michigan and the Miami Dolphins. It read, “Game Ball presented to Jake Long, 1st Overall Selection, 2008 N.F.L. Draft, 4/22/08.” The date — four days before the draft — marked the completion of Long’s five-year, $57.5 million contract, of which $30 million is guaranteed. But most of the office looked like Dogra moved in last week and brought only what fit in his car trunk. It represents his no-pretense, on-the-go nature. There was a television on the floor. Several framed posters leaned against walls. Five cardboard file boxes huddled in a corner. A bobblehead doll of Ravens receiver Mark Clayton was on the desk. In the doorway appeared Tom Condon, Dogra’s primary partner in the football branch of Creative Artists Agency, a well-known firm in the entertainment industry. He surveyed the room. “You’ve only been here, what — 12, 13 years?” Condon asked. Dogra and Condon, along with their associates Jim Steiner and Ken Kremer, represent about 130 N.F.L. players. Among them are 4 of the first 8 picks from April’s draft, and 6 of the top 21. They have represented four of the past five first-overall choices and 48 first-round picks since 2001, far more than any competitors. They are the current champions in their mysterious corner of professional football. Dogra and Condon are an unlikely and relatively new combination. Condon, 55, has long been one of the N.F.L.’s power brokers. His clients include Peyton and Eli Manning, Chad Pennington, Matt Leinart, Brady Quinn and LaDainian Tomlinson. Condon was an N.F.L. guard for 12 seasons and a former president of the N.F.L. Players Association. He has a brain hard-wired in the complexities of contracts, salary caps and collective-bargaining agreements. He has lived through much of the N.F.L.’s growth. “I was a 10th-round draft choice” from Boston College in 1974, Condon said, “and I didn’t have anybody recruiting me. So, yeah, I negotiated my own $18,000 contract myself.” Dogra’s background is far different. Dogra moved from New Delhi when he was 6, and his family hopscotched before opening a restaurant in northern Virginia when he was in high school. He did not play sports but wanted an N.F.L. career. Being an agent seemed a reasonable route. After attending George Mason, Dogra chose St. Louis University Law School based on its proximity to two sports agencies, for whom he hoped to work days while studying at night. “My dad said, ‘Is that the equivalent of going to Los Angeles and being a bartender to become an actor?’ ” Dogra said. “I said, no, because if I don’t become an agent, I’ll be in law school.” One of the agencies was Steiner’s, which initially rejected Dogra. But he kept returning to plead for work and eventually latched on to the bottom rung, far below the agency’s five agents. “I literally didn’t talk to Steiner for a year and a half,” Dogra said. They ultimately became partners. Dogra showed a knack for relating to players and their families. Within a few years, he was competing for some of the most-coveted college players against the biggest-named agents, including Condon and Kremer, an ex-N.F.L. player turned agent. “We went nine consecutive years where Kenny and I either had the most first-round draft choices or were tied,” Condon said. “And when it was tied, it was Benny who we tied with. And then the 10th year, I thought we were going to get the decade, but he beat us. I realized this guy is formidable, considering he didn’t have the advantages that Kenny and I had.” When Condon and Kremer switched to Creative Artists from IMG in 2006, they pondered ways to grow. Condon and Dogra had met only a couple of times, but they recognized that their differences complemented the other’s strengths and they decided to join forces. Condon and Kremer moved last year from Kansas City, Mo., and headed to the St. Louis office, where the halls are lined with jerseys and photographs of clients, hung properly and proudly. There is a staff of 15. Four handle player endorsements, 20 percent of which goes to the agency. Others help handle whatever else comes up. “We negotiate a contract, like we did for Matt Ryan,” Dogra said, referring to the Boston College quarterback chosen third over all by the Atlanta Falcons. “Six years, $72 million, set the record of $34.75 million guaranteed. So the deal is done? It doesn’t work like that. “We still have constant contact during that six-year period. Now we’re working on his marketing deals. And if Matt calls and says: ‘Hey, I’m trying to do something special for my mom. Do you have any access in the Bahamas?’ We try to help out with all those things.” The contracts for Long and Ryan caught the attention of N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell, who said in June that it was “ridiculous” for rookies to receive such sums. Condon and Dogra, negotiating the biggest share of such contracts, shrugged. “I can’t tell you how many times where I’ve talked to a general manager who said: ‘How far can this go? How much more money can there be?’ ” Condon said. Dogra picked up the argument. “They’re not paying out something that they don’t have,” he said. “Where is it coming from? It’s coming from ticket sales, suite sales and broadcasting rights. And if that market were to go down, it would go down proportionately for the players.” Condon called debates about rookie contracts “a false issue,” partly because they establish a foundation for veteran contracts and partly because rookie contracts tumble steeply after those received by the top players. Carolina running back Jonathan Stewart, a Dogra client, was chosen 13th over all but got a contract worth about a third of Long’s. “The league is substantially below the salary cap, so it’s not like they’re going to take that money and give it to the veterans,” Condon said. “They have it now, and they’re not giving it to them.” Eventually, it comes time to joust, as Dogra and the Jets’ Tannenbaum did when they finally connected, one wanting the most for his client, the other wanting to pay the least for his team. They discussed the merits of forging ahead to make Gholston one of the first high picks to reach a deal, or waiting for the draft picks on either side of him to sign, thus setting the parameters. It was clear what Dogra wanted. “Here’s the deal, Mike,” Dogra said. “If you think we need to wait, and we can’t do a deal by the 15th, that will be absolutely wrong. The question is: How far is our ceiling if we go first? Are we in the first stratosphere? Are we going out to the moon? And where is your floor going to be? Are you on the pavement, or are you six feet under?” Dogra listened for a minute or two. Tannenbaum was talking about 2007, when the Jets’ first-round pick Darrelle Revis (represented by other agents) missed 21 days of camp in a contract dispute, frustrating the team and Coach Eric Mangini. “It would be hard for both of us to make our mark on one deal,” Dogra responded. “The only mark we’re going to try to make here is we want the best deal for Gholston, you want a deal that works for the Jets and gets this kid to camp on time, and then I get the game ball from Mangini.” In the end, Gholston missed a day of camp before signing a five-year contract that has $21 million guaranteed and could escalate to $50 million. It came before the fifth or seventh picks signed. But on this day, Dogra pondered the bigger picture from high above the middle of the country. Every contract affects subsequent contracts, rippling through the draft class. “Most teams have one first-rounder,” he said. “But we have six. It means more to us.”

Football
Creative Artists Agency
Wages and Salaries
Dogra Ben
Condon Tom


Reaping Benefits of Expansion, Emirates’ Profit Rises 43%

Abstract: PARIS — Emirates, the fast-growing Persian Gulf airline , reported on Thursday a 43 percent jump in annual profit as its international expansion and the steady introduction of new wide-body jets to its fleet drew millions of new customers through its Dubai hub. But some analysts warned that the carrier, the world’s fourth-largest in terms of the number of international passengers, risked slower growth in the coming years as heavy investments in new planes and premium-class services begin to erode profit margins. Net profit for the year to March 31 climbed to 3.3 billion dirhams, or $898 million, from 2.3 billion dirhams a year earlier on revenue of nearly 81 billion dirhams, the airline’s chairman and chief executive, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, told reporters in Dubai. The airline, which is the world’s largest customer for the twin-deck Airbus A380 as well as for Boeing’s new 777 jet, said it carried 44.5 million passengers last year, up 13 percent, as it added nine destinations in Asia, Europe and North America, and took delivery of two dozen new planes. Seat capacity growth of around 14 percent outpaced growth in the airline’s fuel bill, which rose by around 10 percent to just under 31 billion dirhams, the airline said. Because of a drop in jet fuel prices over the year, Emirates said it had succeeded in reducing its fuel cost per seat by around 4 percent. “On the face of it, it’s good that they still have increased profitability” over the past year, said Saj Ahmad, chief analyst for StrategicAero Research in London. “But I wonder whether they could soon be hitting the buffers in terms of how much physical expansion starts eating into their profitability.” Facing intense competition from smaller Gulf carriers like Qatar Airways and Etihad of Abu Dhabi — particularly for coveted first- and business-class passengers — Emirates is engaged in an ever-more heated battle with its rivals in the region to acquire the latest aircraft from Airbus and Boeing. Emirates, which is wholly owned by the Dubai government, turned industry heads in November when it placed orders for 150 of Boeing’s new 777X — a revamped version of its popular wide-body aircraft — with an option for 50 more, and ordered an additional 50 Airbus A380s on top of the 93 it had on order for delivery by 2019. Etihad and Qatar announced orders for roughly 200 new wide-bodies between them. Emirates already flies 47 A380s, more than double the number operated by Singapore Airlines, the world’s next-largest customer for the plane. Some analysts have questioned whether the airline’s heavy exposure to the model also put it at risk of potentially costly service disruptions as Airbus works to put into effect modifications to the wings of roughly 122 A380s that were discovered in 2012 to have components that are susceptible to cracking. The repairs require that each plane be taken out of service for as long as three months. Referring to Emirates, Mr. Ahmad said, “They are obviously impacted by this more than anyone else.” Emirates brushes such concerns aside, however, as it continues to bet on a long-term future that rests heavily on the support of its only shareholder, the Investment Corporation of Dubai, to which Emirates said Thursday it would pay a dividend of roughly 1 billion dirhams, equivalent to nearly one-third of last year’s profit. Air transport is big business in Dubai and the rest of the United Arab Emirates, representing nearly 15 percent of gross domestic product. Airlines in the Middle East — driven largely by Emirates and its Gulf rivals — are expected to register a combined $2.2 billion profit in 2014, a record for the region, according to forecasts by the International Air Transport Association. With the help of Dubai’s rulers, Emirates takes full advantage of its strategic location. The Persian Gulf within an eight-hour direct flight of the fast-growing economies of Asia, as well as the big economies of Europe and the United States. By offering connections through the glittering terminals of Dubai International Airport — among the world’s most modern and, spanning nearly 400 acres, largest air terminals — Emirates and its Gulf rivals have pushed aggressively into the home markets of leading European and North American carriers, focusing in particular on wealthy business travelers. The Dubai carrier’s first-class and business-class services are consistently rated among the world’s best in passenger surveys, offering amenities like private “suites” with showers and spas, as well as a stand-up bar. Last year, it was ranked first out of 200 airlines in the Airline of the Year survey by Skytrax, a British air travel research company. The survey is based on an online satisfaction survey of 18 million passengers worldwide. Last year, Emirates sought to leverage its high-end reputation and confront European and American rivals head-on by introducing its first daily trans-Atlantic service between Milan and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. The route, set up as a stopover between Dubai and New York, competes directly with nonstop connections offered by Italy’s struggling flag carrier, Alitalia, as well as Delta, American Airlines and United, which flies to nearby Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. But the service — which has been operating since October — raised the hackles of European and American competitors, who last month persuaded an Italian court to order that it be suspended on the grounds that Emirates, as a non-European operator, did not have the right to ply routes that did not pass through its home market. Sheikh Ahmed said on Thursday that Emirates would continue to operate the Milan-New York route pending the outcome of its appeal of the Italian ruling, which is expected in the fall. While he declined to provide financial figures, he insisted the route was profitable for the airline. “I don’t think we operate any political routes,” he said. But analysts stressed that making money on the trans-Atlantic service was probably a secondary concern for now. “Emirates has so many profitable routes in Europe that they could cross-subsidize this route for as long as they need to,” Mr. Ahmad, the StrategicAero analyst, said. Provided Emirates is able to persuade the courts that trans-Atlantic flights are compliant with European laws, he said, “they might eventually be able to make this work from Spain or Germany as well.”

Dubai
United Arab Emirates
Airlines,airplanes
Emirates Airlines
Earnings Reports


Google Won’t Rethink Anti-Islam Video’s Status

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Google said on Friday that it would not comply with a White House request to reconsider the anti-Islam video that has set off violent protests in the Arab world in light of its rules banning hate speech on YouTube, which it owns. Google said it had already determined that the video did not violate its terms of service regarding hate speech. In this case, the video stays up because it is against the Islam religion but not Muslim people. The company also said Friday that it had blocked access to the video in India and Indonesia because it violated local laws. These actions came after Google temporarily blocked the video on Wednesday in Egypt and Libya of its own volition — not because it violated laws or YouTube’s terms of service — an extraordinary measure that it said it took in response to the delicacy of the situation. The video is accessible in the rest of the world, even as protests spread to nearly 20 countries, from North Africa to Indonesia. Google said its decisions were consistent with a 2007 policy for controversial content in which the company would take into account not just laws and its own policies, but cultural norms. “One type of content, while legal everywhere, may be almost universally unacceptable in one region, yet viewed as perfectly fine in another,” Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president for communications and public policy at Google, wrote in the 2007 policy . “We are passionate about our users, so we try to take into account local cultures and needs.” YouTube said it was continuously monitoring the circumstances in other countries. The controversy over the video has raised questions about the role of Google in governing free expression by determining which content is acceptable to show online and which is not. The company does not police videos uploaded to the site because of the sheer volume involved; 72 hours of videos are uploaded each minute. It reviews videos only if users flag them as inappropriate or if it receives a valid court order or government request to remove them for violating the law. That was the case in India and Indonesia, which have laws restricting content that provokes enmity. Also, Google removes illegal content only in the 45 countries in which it has local Web sites, which include Egypt, Indonesia and India but not Libya, Pakistan or Afghanistan. “We’ve restricted access to it in countries where it is illegal such as India and Indonesia as well as in Libya and Egypt given the very sensitive situations in these two countries,” YouTube said Friday in a statement. “At Google we have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression in everything we do,” Ms. Whetstone wrote in Google’s 2007 policy. “But we also recognize that freedom of expression can’t be — and shouldn’t be — without some limits. The difficulty is in deciding where those boundaries are drawn. For a company like Google with services in more than 100 countries — all with different national laws and cultural norms — it’s a challenge we face many times every day.” Meanwhile, a Facebook spokeswoman confirmed that the company had restricted access to a link to the film in Pakistan, at the request of its government. Kevin Bankston, director of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group that focuses on digital civil liberties, said that Google, as a private company, could decide what was appropriate on its sites and what was not. But he added, “Considering the power that many of these platforms have, it’s important for them to be as clear and transparent as possible about those decisions.”

Egypt
Libya
Innocence of Muslims (Movie)
Google Inc
YouTube.com
Freedom of Speech and Expression
Video Recordings and Downloads
Muslims and Islam
Censorship


U.S. Women Name Roster for World Cup Qualifying

Abstract: Alex Morgan, the Cal forward whose goal against China last week helped preserve the United States women’s team’s nearly six-year unbeaten streak at home, is the only college player on the roster for the World Cup qualifying tournament later this month. The veterans Kristine Lilly, the only player to play in all five women’s World Cups, and Abby Wambach are also on the 20-woman team.

World Cup 2010 (Soccer)
Lilly Kristine
Wambach Abby


New Search Service Aims to Answer Tough Questions

Abstract: Every new online search service must face the inevitable question: “Is it better than Google?” WolframAlpha, a powerful new service that can answer a broad range of queries, has become one of the most anticipated Web products of the year. But its creator, Stephen Wolfram, wants to make something clear: Despite the online chatter comparing it to Google, his service is not intended to dethrone the king of search engines. “I am not keen on the hype,” said Mr. Wolfram, a well-known scientist and entrepreneur and the founder of Wolfram Research, a company in Champaign, Ill., that has been quietly developing WolframAlpha. Mr. Wolfram’s service does not search through Web pages, and it will not help with movie times or camera shopping. Instead it computes the answers to queries using enormous collections of data the company has amassed. It can quickly spit out facts like the average body mass index of a 40-year-old male, whether the Eiffel Tower is taller than Seattle’s Space Needle, and whether it is high tide in Miami right now. WolframAlpha, which is expected to be available to the public at wolframalpha.com in the next week, is not a finished product. It is an early working version of a project that has been years in the making and will continue to evolve over years, if not decades. As such, there is much it cannot answer now. But even as he dismisses the Google comparisons, Mr. Wolfram, a former child prodigy who published his first research paper on particle physics at age 15 and is best known for creating the math-formula software Mathematica, is happy to add fuel to the simmering expectations surrounding his service. “I think WolframAlpha has the potential to be quite important,” he said. The goal of creating a computer system that can answer questions has been a tantalizing but elusive pursuit for many computer scientists for more than four decades. Some veterans of the field say Mr. Wolfram may have come as close as anyone yet. “In many ways, creating a system like this has been a holy grail of lots of folks for some time,” said Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, an investment company that owns a portfolio of patents. “It has wound up being considered something that is virtually impossible,” Mr. Myhrvold said. WolframAlpha has shown “that it wasn’t impossible but really difficult,” he added. “It involved applying lots of different tricks.” Doug Lenat, an artificial intelligence expert whose company Cycorp has spent the last 15 years developing a system that brings human-like reasoning to some computer systems, said WolframAlpha can handle “an astronomical number of questions,” and could eventually turn into a favorite destination on the Web. “It may become a massive player alongside Google,” Mr. Lenat said. Traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo, by and large, excel at finding information that already exists online. If there are Web pages that include the words used in a query, the engines will find them and rank them in order of relevance. WolframAlpha is different. For starters, it does not gather data from the Web. Instead, its “knowledge base” is made up of reams and reams of data — ranging from the kinds of facts you would find in a World Almanac, to highly specialized data from physics and other sciences — that some 100 employees at Wolfram Research have gathered, verified and organized over several years. When a user types in a query, WolframAlpha tries to determine the relevant area of knowledge and find the answers, often by performing calculations on its data. If you type “LDL 120,” it will return a graph showing the distribution of cholesterol levels among the United States population, and display the percentage of people above and below that figure. If you type “LDL 120 male 33,” it will adjust the results to focus on that gender and age group. In response to “how far is the Moon from Earth,” WolframAlpha will calculate the exact distance based on an algorithm that computes the ever-changing distance between the two bodies. The engine that computes answers is largely built on Mathematica. In its current state, there are many queries that WolframAlpha cannot answer, either because it does not understand the question or because it does not have the requisite data. For instance, it is stumped by queries like “obesity rate,” “housing prices New York” or “unemployment San Francisco” (but it will answer “unemployment San Francisco County”). “It is going to be very good in some areas and incomplete in others,” said Nova Spivack, the chief executive of Radar Networks, which is using artificial intelligence and other techniques to help people find Web content that is interesting and relevant to them. WolframAlpha does not actually try to work out the real meaning of a query, as some artificial intelligence systems do, so there are some questions it will never be able to answer. But experts say its approach appears to be effective in many areas. “He’s done a great job of marrying the acquisition of data with the mathematical algorithms,” said David A. Ferrucci, an artificial intelligence researcher at I.B.M., who is leading a team developing a computer program that will compete with humans on “Jeopardy.” If successful, WolframAlpha has the potential to become a large business opportunity. For now, Mr. Wolfram said he plans to offer advertising and other forms of sponsorship on the site, and perhaps offer premium versions of the service for researchers. And somewhat coyly, he said he has discussed potential partnerships with the “obvious people,” including search engine companies. “We are actively pursuing interesting relationships,” he said. Representatives for Google and Yahoo declined to discuss WolframAlpha. Mr. Spivack and others said WolframAlpha may become a complement to traditional search engines, which themselves have begun to offer simple versions of the kinds of calculations and data manipulation at which WolframAlpha excels. “There is a huge space of possible questions that Google doesn’t answer,” Mr. Spivack said. “I think WolframAlpha will go well beyond the academic world to cover business and industry, economics, health.”

Search Engines
Wolfram Research
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and the Internet


Top Greek Tax Official Is Dismissed

Abstract: ATHENS — The Greek government on Thursday dismissed the country’s top tax official, saying she was not fulfilling her duty to aggressively collect taxes and fight tax evasion. The firing of the official, Katerina Savvaidou, the head of a supposedly independent public revenue authority, came at a sensitive moment in the country’s effort to mount an economic comeback and live up to the conditions of its international bailout program. The government is eager to begin receiving payments from the 86 billion euro, or $97.6 billion, bailout program it agreed to this summer with its eurozone creditors. Disbursement of small slices of that money is contingent on the creditors’ assessment of the progress of the country’s economic overhaul measures. Greece’s notoriously porous tax collection system and high level of tax evasion are parts of the economy that creditors have demanded be fixed. Despite the government’s stated reason for dismissing Ms. Savvaidou, it was too early to tell whether Greece’s creditors might nonetheless see her firing as an unwelcome political encroachment on what is supposed to be an independent agency. “We are definitely following the situation closely, but we have no comment to make at this stage,” Annika Breidthardt, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, said during a daily news briefing in Brussels on Thursday. The commission, the executive arm of the European Union, helps monitor the Greek bailout. Ms. Savvaidou, who was appointed in June 2014 by the previous, conservative-led coalition, has lately been engaged in a public dispute with the left-leaning government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who was recently re-elected on a pledge to meet the conditions set by the country’s creditors. The country’s finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, sought Ms. Savvaidou’s resignation last week, after a prosecutor charged her with breach of duty for granting Greek television stations additional time to pay a tax on advertising revenue. She is also being investigated in relation to a decision to review a €78 million fine on a Greek company. Olga Gerovasili, a government spokeswoman, told reporters on Thursday that the Greek cabinet decided “unanimously” to dismiss Ms. Savvaidou. “In such difficult times for Greek society, for the Greek people, it is not acceptable for a public functionary to operate against the public interest,” she said. Ms. Savvaidou had refused to step down, contending that her actions were not illegal. She also cited the independence of the agency she led, the secretariat for public revenue, which was set up in 2012 under the conservative-led coalition government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras at the behest of Greece’s creditors to stop political meddling in the country’s tax administration. Image A protester in front of the Greek parliament in Athens. Credit Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Speaking by telephone, Ms. Savvaidou said on Thursday that she had not been informed about the decision by the government. “I heard about it on television,” she said. In a written statement a few hours later, Ms. Savvaidou said that she had fulfilled her duties “to the full” and that extending a deadline for the payment of taxes was “a standard practice in administration,” not an offense. Ms. Gerovasili, the government spokeswoman, said on Thursday that the government would not accept “certain companies that were given special treatment under previous governments, and which constituted the core of vested interests, being favored again.” She did not name the companies. But the Tsipras government has pledged to break the ties among the political system, media organizations and Greek oligarchs. On Saturday, the Greek Parliament is scheduled to vote on legislation that paves the way for a new policy for issuing broadcasting licenses, a step vaunted by the government as the first step to establishing a truly independent media. Ms. Savvaidou’s statement accused Ms. Gerovasili of “pre-empting the judicial verdict” by accusing her of granting favors to companies. The statement said Ms. Gerovasili had made “an unprecedented intervention” in the independence of the tax authority and Greek justice. Ms. Savvaidou’s predecessor, Haris Theoharis, quit last spring after political pressure and accusations he was “mismanaging” his role. No details were given regarding a successor to Ms. Savvaidou. A government official said that a “senior official in the general secretariat” would take over temporarily until a permanent replacement was appointed. Mr. Tsipras is preparing for a visit by the French president, François Hollande, who is widely regarded as a staunch ally of Greece and a counterweight to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and her strict prescription of budgetary austerity. Mr. Hollande, who arrived in the Greek capital on Thursday evening for a two-day visit, was expected to urge the country to stay the course on overhauls and to encourage French investment in Greece. He is traveling with a large delegation of French government officials and entrepreneurs. In an interview with the center-right daily Kathimerini, Mr. Hollande said, “I am coming to Greece to express France’s support, but also to send a message, particularly to French companies: Come and invest in Greece.”

Tax Evasion
Greece
European Commission
Alexis Tsipras
Euro Crisis
Francois Hollande