University of Washington President Named to Head N.C.A.A.

Abstract: Mark A. Emmert, the president of the University of Washington, was named the president of the N.C.A.A. on Tuesday, concluding a seven-month search for the successor to Myles Brand, who died last September of pancreatic cancer. “This is not just another job for Mark Emmert,” Ed Ray, the president of Oregon State University and the chairman of the search committee, said at a news conference at the N.C.A.A.’s headquarters in Indianapolis. “He has a commitment to intercollegiate athletics and to student athletes that runs deep.” Emmert, 57, has served since 2004 as president at Washington, his alma mater. A native of Fife, Wash., Emmert earned a bachelor’s degree in political science, then a master’s and a Ph.D. in public administration from Syracuse. He has spent his entire career in higher education. He was the chancellor at Louisiana State University from 1999 to 2004 and before that was the chief operating and academic officer at Connecticut. “Through his leadership, intercollegiate athletics have both flourished on the field and courts and have fully integrated into the mission of those campuses,” Ray said. The choice of Emmert to lead the N.C.A.A. was seen as somewhat of a surprise, because he is not well known in college athletics circles, despite having held leadership positions at athletic powerhouses. Emmert is not on any N.C.A.A. committees, said Erik Christianson, an association spokesman. “I don’t know him except by reputation,” said Walt Harrison, the president of the University of Hartford, who was a candidate for the position. “I do know the search committee. I know them well, and I have every confidence that they picked a great leader.” Michael Adams, the president of the University of Georgia, who was considered a contender for the N.C.A.A. position, also praised the choice. “I have known Dr. Emmert for most of our careers,” he said in a statement. “He is a very capable and effective president and will perform likewise in his new role at the N.C.A.A.” Ray said 32 finalists emerged from a pool of 100, with backgrounds that ranged from academics to the corporate world and government. Final interviews were conducted Tuesday, he said. However unexpected, the choice continues a philosophical shift that began in 2002 with the selection of Brand, a former philosophy professor who was then the president of Indiana University. Brand was viewed as a relative outsider to N.C.A.A. politics. He was also the first university president to lead the association, which created the position in 1951. Brand was hailed as a crusader who spoke forcefully on topics ranging from academics to gender equity. In 2004, he helped push through academic reforms that held colleges and universities accountable for the academic performance of their athletes. Emmert, who received a five-year contract, said that he intended to continue Brand’s legacy and that although he had no specific plans, he intended to take the reforms a step further. “That has been a highly successful initiation — initial effort,” he said. “It’s now starting to bear very important fruit. My intention is to continue that trend.” Another priority, Emmert said, is helping university presidents handle the increasingly high costs of college athletics, an issue that has taken on new urgency during the recession. He said each college needed to make its own choices, but “what the N.C.A.A. can do is arm them to make those decisions as wisely and effectively as possible.” When a reporter asked Emmert’s view on a playoff in the Bowl Championship Series, Emmert quipped, “Do you have any controversial questions?” In 2008, Emmert told a Seattle Times reporter that he believed a playoff was inevitable and shrugged off arguments against it as illusory. But on Tuesday, he refused to tip his hand. “Those are decisions that presidents of the institutions will make, not the N.C.A.A.,” he said. Jim Isch, the interim president, will continue in that role until Nov. 1, when he is expected to return to his previous position as chief financial officer.

College Athletics
National Collegiate Athletic Assn
Appointments and Executive Changes


A Colonial-Era Wound Opens in Namibia

Abstract: SWAKOPMUND, Namibia — The statue, depicting a German marine holding a rifle in his hands and standing guard over a dying comrade, has stood undisturbed for decades in the most prominent spot in Swakopmund, a city on Namibia’s coast. It has survived the end of colonial rule in this corner of southern Africa, the subsequent occupation by apartheid South Africa, independence in 1990 and the present government by the black majority. But a few months ago protesters spilled red paint over the monument, which stands in front of a colonial building that is now known as the State House and serves as the summer residence of Namibia’s president. The statue, known as the Marine Denkmal, was erected in 1908 to commemorate soldiers who helped crush a rebellion against German colonial rule by the Herero and Nama ethnic groups, a war that led to what Germany’s current government is close to recognizing as a genocide . “They can take it to Germany, or they can take it to a museum,” said Uahimisa Kaapehi , an ethnic Herero city councilor who introduced a motion for the monument’s removal. “We as Hereros and we as Namibians don’t want German soldiers in front of our State House.” The push for the removal comes as the governments of Germany and Namibia are engaging in negotiations to close one of the grimmest chapters in Africa’s colonial history, the genocide of tens of thousands of Herero and Nama between 1904 and 1908. After decades of denial, German officials say they are ready to acknowledge the genocide formally, issue an apology and offer compensation. German reticence is not the only reason the reckoning has taken so long. Namibia’s complicated internal dynamics have contributed as well. The Herero and Nama are minorities in a nation led since independence by the liberation party, the South West Africa People’s Organization, or Swapo, which is dominated by the Ovambo ethnic group. If Swapo has historically shown little interest in highlighting the colonial-era genocide, Namibia’s tiny but economically powerful German-speaking minority has shown strong resistance. A desert city facing the Atlantic, Swakopmund is the center of Namibia’s German-speaking minority. It has what is perhaps the best collection of well-preserved colonial buildings in Africa, as well as a Bismarck Street and other thoroughfares named after German figures. Menus in hotels and restaurants are in German, catering to Namibia’s German minority as well as to German tourists. Wilfried Groenewald , the single German-speaking person on Swakopmund’s 10-member City Council, said removing the monument would hurt the city’s economy. “It’s essential for our tourism industry,” he said. “People come here to see this.” Germany ruled Namibia, then known as South-West Africa, from 1884 to 1915. Alone among Germany’s African colonies, it attracted thousands of settlers, who grabbed land from locals. Between 1904 and 1908, the Herero and Nama launched the biggest — and last — rebellion against the Germans. Mr. Groenewald argued that the Germans alone were not to blame for the cruelty of the war between 1904 and 1908. “The conflict, of course, was there,’’ Mr. Groenewald said. “But who started the war? Was it Hereros who killed the German settlers? There was a past from all sides. Everybody had a bad side.” Only 1 percent of Namibian households speak German as a main language, according to a 2011 census . But Namibians of German descent make up a tightly knit, economically powerful group, with their own schools and a daily newspaper . Since independence they, like other white Namibians, have experienced a shrinking of their once outsize role in the country. Politically, they have been marginalized; economically, their dominance has been eroded by new groups, ranging from a new black elite to Chinese businessmen. “Our children are leaving Namibia,” Mr. Groenewald said. The threat to remove the monument speaks to the community’s fear of impermanence in Namibia, said Elke Zuern , a politics professor at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., who has done research on the meaning of Namibia’s national monuments. “The thing that worries the German speakers in Swakopmund in particular is that this is a site where they have annual commemorations,” Professor Zuern said of the marine monument. “It’s not just this monument with all the symbolism that entails, but actually a site they go to to commemorate the deaths of the marine troops and to rally the community.” Professor Zuern said the German-Namibian community was stuck in the past. Unlike Germans, who have slowly come to terms with their colonial past, many German-Namibians reflexively seek to defend the era, minimize its harmful legacy or even deny the genocide, she said. In public — and even more so in community meetings held in German — some German-Namibians still express the kind of racist views that would be unthinkable in South Africa or other neighboring countries, Professor Zuern said. Six years ago, the most prominent statue of the German colonial era was toppled from a hill overlooking Windhoek, the capital. The e questrian monument, known as the Reiterdenkmal, showed a soldier on horseback, commemorating the Schutztruppe, or protection force, which played the main role in putting down the challenge to German rule. The equestrian monument was moved to make way for a North Korean-built independence museum that is a paean to Swapo’s liberation movement. It is now in storage inside the courtyard of a nearby German fortress, a source of enduring bitterness for many Namibians of German descent. Image A cemetery for German soldiers killed during the Battle of Waterberg in 1904. German officials say they are ready to formally acknowledge the genocide of the Herero and Nama. Credit Joao Silva/The New York Times Andreas Vogt , a German-Namibian whose great-grandparents immigrated to Namibia and the author of a book on the country’s national monuments, said Namibia lacked “an understanding of the historicity of a monument” and was guided by resentment toward the former colonial rulers. “The ideological mainstream is antiwhite,” Mr. Vogt said. “It is very easy to say that it was the white people who stole our land, and it is the white people who have all the wealth, and it is the white people whose kids go to better schools, and it is the white people who have everything while we have nothing. “This is a very simple statement,” he continued, “and I understand it fully, because the people of Africa, the majority, are of simple mind.” Laidlaw Peringanda , the leading activist against the marine statue, said the open glorification of soldiers responsible for the massacres of his Herero ancestors had irritated him for years. “But I just kept silent because our founding president talked about national reconciliation,” he said, referring to Sam Nujoma . But he changed his mind after an incident last year that he and other Hereros regarded as an insult to their culture. In their section of the municipal cemetery, the Herero, traditional cattle herders, exhibited the horns of a cow belonging to their late paramount chief — drawing complaints, presumably from people tending to the cemetery’s German section. The City Council eventually ordered the horns removed, angering many Hereros. As for the marine statue, which has two German-language plaques explaining that, with God, the colony’s soldiers fought for the “Kaiser and empire,” and was declared a national monument in 1969, the Council has referred the matter to the National Heritage Council. Mr. Kaapehi, the councilor pressing for the removal, acknowledged that it was a difficult fight. Like many Hereros, he believes that Swapo, which controls the City Council and dominates the rest of the country, is interested only in a narrative that promotes it as the liberator of blacks from white-minority rule. Any reminder of the Herero and Nama resistance to German rule diminishes the Swapo-centric national founding myth, he said. Nehemia Salomon , a black Namibian who is a former mayor of Swakopmund and a current Council member, said his party, Swapo, promoted inclusivity. Everyone, including those of German descent, should have a say in the fate of the marine statue, he said. “Is this a concern of Hereros only?” he said. Maria Elago , a black Namibian who is the city’s deputy mayor and a Swapo member, said that though the National Heritage Council would deal with the monument, she did not support its removal.“It doesn’t affect me,” she said. “I don’t have a problem.”

Namibia
Germany
Nama Tribe
Herero Tribe
Monuments and Memorials


More Layoffs in Mortgage Industry

Abstract: Lehman Brothers Holdings and the National City Corporation said yesterday that they would lay off more than 2,000 workers as the banks scale back their struggling mortgage businesses. The moves are the latest layoffs in the mortgage industry, which is suffering from decaying credit quality, slipping home prices, and a drainage of demand for home loans. Two weeks after closing its BNC Mortgage subsidiary, Lehman Brothers said yesterday that it was winding down some of its home lending business in the United States and Britain. Lehman is laying off 850, closing its South Korean mortgage business and consolidating its businesses in the United States, Japan and Europe into a single unit. Scaling down the business will cost Lehman Brothers $20 million after taxes. National City, which is based in Cleveland, said it would lay off 1,300 workers and scale back its mortgage business. The bank is cutting back on issuing home loans it cannot sell to government agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bank will also suspend issuing home equity loans through brokers. The home equity unit and mortgage unit will be combined into one subsidiary. Because there is so little demand among investors for home loans, National City said it might have to keep some of its mortgage debt instead of sell it. When a bank elects to keep a loan, it must record the market value of this loan on its books. National City said it would probably record a $30 million accounting charge to reflect the lower value of loans on its books. Shares of National City lost 66 cents, to close at $26.67. Lehman stock slipped 52 cents, to $53.83.

Mortgages
National City Corporation
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc
Layoffs and Job Reductions


British Airways and Korean Air Lines Fined in Fuel Collusion

Abstract: LONDON, Aug. 1 (AP) — British Airways was fined almost $550 million on Wednesday by American and British regulators after the airline acknowledged colluding with a rival, Virgin Atlantic, over fuel surcharges. The carrier was fined £121.5 million ($246 million) by the Office of Fair Trading, in Britain, and $300 million by the United States Justice Department after parallel trans-Atlantic investigations. The fine was the largest ever imposed by the Office of Fair Trading, Britain’s competition watchdog. The Justice Department also levied a $300 million fine on Korean Air Lines for colluding with competitors to fix fuel surcharges on cargo shipments to the United States and fix some passenger fares from the United States to Korea. It said both airlines had agreed to plead guilty to price fixing. In addition to the fuel surcharge fixing, American officials said British Airways and Korean Air Lines were involved in a conspiracy with the German carrier Lufthansa to fix charges for international cargo shipments. The Justice Department said Virgin and Lufthansa would not face penalties because they had come forward to the authorities. In a statement, British Airways said that from August 2004 to January 2006 it colluded with Virgin Atlantic over the surcharges added to fares in response to rising oil prices. Under the Office of Fair Trading’s leniency policy, Virgin Atlantic is not expected to face a fine because it reported the fuel discussions to the authorities. British Airways’ chief executive, Willie Walsh, said passengers had not been overcharged. Mr. Walsh said a “limited number of individuals” in the company had broken competition rules. The authorities in Britain and the United States have been investigating accusations of price-fixing on fuel surcharges since June 2006. During the period under investigation, fuel surcharges rose from about £5 ($10) to about £60 ($120) a ticket for a round-trip long-haul flight on British Airways and Virgin. Two British Airways executives — the commercial director, Martin George, and the head of communications, Iain Burns — went on leave after the inquiry began and later resigned. The office found that British Airways and Virgin had discussed fuel surcharges on at least six occasions over the year and a half up to January 2006.

British Airways
Korean Air Lines
Lufthansa
Antitrust Actions and Laws
Virgin Atlantic Airways
Fines (Penalties)
Airlines and Airplanes


Intel, on the Outside, Takes Aim at Smartphones

Abstract: With an “Intel Inside” sticker affixed to their PCs, computer buyers in the 1990s could hardly avoid knowing whose microchip was making their machines work. The campaign made Intel one of the most recognizable brands and cemented its position in the PC industry. As long as PCs were dominant, Intel was dominant. But it’s now a new world in which tiny hand-held computers, more commonly known as smartphones, are outselling personal computers. And usually, there is no Intel inside. Instead, the processors in smartphones and tablets these days are more likely to be made by companies that few consumers would recognize, like Qualcomm, Nvidia and Marvell. And those companies are fighting to gain market dominance in much the same way Intel did with chips for personal computers: by making what’s inside the phone matter to consumers. “It’s become an arms race, like the early days of the PC industry,” said Chris Jones, vice president and principal analyst at Canalys, a market research company. These chip companies are racing to improve the speed and performance of their processors so they can boast of having the fastest application processor on the market. With smartphones and tablets increasingly performing the tasks of full-size computers, they have an additional obsession: making energy-efficient chips that will prolong the battery life of a mobile device. So far, the obsession with speed and energy efficiency has paid off for everybody but Intel. The PC chip giant has been conspicuously late to the mobile market, having canceled plans to ship a smartphone version of its Atom processor after a demonstration of it running in an LG phone over a year ago. The difficulty for Intel, say analysts, has been to get its chips’ power consumption down to a level reasonable for a phone. Still, Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, vowed recently that Intel-powered smartphones would be on the market before the year is out. With those phones, Intel hopes to rebuild credibility in a business some customers had thought it would never get right. But meanwhile, the company has just recently lost its mobile champion, Anand Chandrasekher, the 24-year Intel stalwart who has long headed up the company’s mobile processor development, including the wildly successful Centrino product that made Wi-Fi a household name. While industry analysts were divided on whether Mr. Chandrasekher had resigned or had been pushed out, they were in agreement on one thing: The company has a lot of catching up to do in the mobile market. “It’s clear that Intel’s mobile business is not going as well has they had hoped,” said Linley Gwennap, an industry analyst and head of the Linley Group in Mountain View, Calif. “But this is not an indication of a change of strategy, just of leadership.” Intel executives quickly assured the industry that the company remained committed to smartphones, despite the sudden departure of Mr. Chandrasekher. Competitors say they will be ready for Intel when it arrives. “I always assume they’ll show up,” said Michael Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia’s mobile group. “All I can do is innovate rapidly to stay ahead.” Intel’s competitors are also hoping that a recent decision by Nokia, the largest phone maker, to use Windows Phone 7 rather than the Symbian operating system, will help them fend off Intel, given that the Microsoft program is currently optimized for ARM-based cellphones. “Nokia used to be a nonopportunity for us,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia. “Our market opportunity just got 33 percent bigger.” Qualcomm has the same idea. Anything that expands the “Microsoft phone ecosystem,” said Steven M. Mollenkopf, executive vice president and group president at Qualcomm, based in San Diego, is a “positive thing for Qualcomm.” In contrast to the PC market, in which Intel and Advanced Micro Devices slugged it out through the 1980s and 1990s, the list of companies supplying chips for smartphones is long. Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Samsung lead the market with a combined market share of 87 percent — with the biggest share of that belonging to Qualcomm. Nvidia, Broadcom, Samsung, Marvell and others are vying for the remainder, according to the market researcher Strategy Analytics. While most PCs have long run Microsoft’s Windows operating system on an Intel chip, the smartphone business is increasingly mix-and-match when it comes to chips and operating systems. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip, for example, powers Google’s Nexus One phone, which runs Google’s Android operating system. The LG Optimus 7 has a Qualcomm chip but runs Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. Likewise, Samsung’s Focus uses the Qualcomm chip and Windows, while Dell’s Streak, a tablet, uses a Qualcomm chip and runs Android. Motorola chose a Texas Instrument chip for its Droid smartphone and the Tegra 2 for its Atrix smartphone, yet both run Android. The Apple iPhone 4 uses a chip, called the A4, which was designed by Apple and manufactured by Samsung. That phone’s operating system, and that of the iPad, is Apple’s own. But given how fast the mobile market is growing, the market landscape could change at any time. “Over the next year or so, there’s going to be a lot of innovation in the industry,” said Mr. Mollenkopf. “It’s not clear who is going to be the winners of that.” The stakes are enormous. In 2010, smartphone shipments increased 74 percent over the prior year, according to the market researcher IDC. In contrast, the PC market grew only 14 percent. That means a lot of chips. IDC forecasts cellphone makers will sell 330 million devices in 2011. Strong smartphone sales drove revenue in the communications chip sector to $80 billion in 2010. Qualcomm’s advantage may lie in its ability to integrate an application processor with communications and graphics functions, and in its long history in the communications chip market. “In the long term, the industry favors those who have significant volume,” Mr. Mollenkopf said. Nvidia, a maker of graphics chips, entered the ARM-based smartphone market in January and has already scored numerous commitments from handset makers. Motorola chose Nvidia’s Tegra 2 for its Atrix smartphone, which when docked with a laptop serves as the laptop’s processor. Motorola also chose the Tegra 2 for its Xoom tablet. Samsung is using the Nvidia chip for its Galaxy phone. Nvidia executives say the company’s experience and reputation in the graphics chip market have made its move into mobile computing a smooth one. “The shift to these devices turning into computers is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us,” Mr. Rayfield said. “They’re moving to a space where Nvidia has grown up.”

Smartphones
Computer Chips
Tablet Computers
Intel Corp


Waffling on Muzzling the Mullahs

Abstract: PARIS — The United States’ notions of U.N. sanctions on Iran have devolved over the past months from crippling ones to ones that bite to the currently described smart ones, which although packaged with the words tough and strong might not be hard-nosed enough to cost the mullahs a half-hour’s lost sleep. Is this a descending spiral of resolve fated to result in sanctions that pinch, nip or tweak? Over the long haul, if the United States acts alone or with a handful of Western friends to curb Iran’s drive toward nuclear weapons, perhaps not. But for now, as the administration tries in the manner of George W. Bush to haul Russia and China on board for their fourth set of Security Council sanctions since 2006 (grade them so far from ineffectual to meaningless), the answer became clearer in the margins of the meeting in Prague last week between President Barack Obama and Dmitri A. Medvedev, the president of Russia. Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, offered it up three separate times, with minor changes in diction, at a news briefing. He said, “Sanctions that would cause grave humanitarian concerns to the Iranian people, we’re not interested in that.” Which means the United States could seem to some of its allies to be shying away from pressing the United Nations to adopt extensive sanctions on the export of refined petroleum products to Iran. That is exactly the opposite of the approach voted by the U.S. House of Representatives, 412 to 12, when it passed a bill that would authorize the president to penalize any company or body shipping gasoline to Iran. The bill was described by the House Democratic leadership as aiming at Iran’s “Achilles’ heel” because imports account for 40 percent of the fuel used by the country’s car and trucks. As laid out by Mr. Rhodes, the American position sounded a lot like what Russia said about a “total embargo” — although no one ever called for one — on exports of refined petroleum products (read gasoline and diesel fuel) to Iran. In the great tradition of Russia’s never threatening cutoffs in supplies to its natural gas clients, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov explained that blocking deliveries would be “a huge shock” to Iranian society and is “something we are definitely not prepared to consider.” Arguably, there’s no crippling blow or even a bite here. Instead, you get something that looks like incoherence. And you can question what sense there is in preemptively disqualifying via dubious moralizing a type of sanction that both the House and, more recently, the Senate have suggested is the smartest way to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons plans. America’s allies could still consider restricting Iran’s supply of gasoline in following up on a new (although limited) Security Council resolution with harder European or ad hoc sanctions. But resistance to them will be greater because of the United States’ present contradictory take on gasoline supplies. Besides, if we’re dealing in morality on serious methods for depriving Iran of nuclear weapons capability or a bomb, lowering the level of gasoline exports to Iran instead of carrying out airstrikes on presumed nuclear installations would seem to be a far preferable “humanitarian” approach (Mr. Rhodes’ word) for both Iranians and the U.S. military. The French, who are pretty consistently tough on Iran, appeared truly irritated a few months back when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in moving away from her call for crippling sanctions, expressed a preference for sanctions that would “not contribute to the suffering of ordinary Iranians.” Tactically, that may have been related to American intelligence findings leading Gen. David H. Petraeus to assure the world it would not encounter a nuclear-capable Iran “this calendar year.” But Le Monde reported that French diplomats, without referring to Mrs. Clinton, said concerns like those she expressed were “exaggerated or baseless.” In the event, the French wound up putting gasoline export sanctions in a draft resolution they circulated for consideration in New York. An American draft did not include them, but the Americans acknowledged in Prague last week that energy issues were not off the table and came under discussion there with the Russians. So, noting their humanitarian motivations on gasoline, what have the Russians, the mullahs’ main supplier of arms and nuclear wherewithal, given back in terms of help on Iran in exchange for Mr. Obama’s reset of relations? A recent draft of new U.N. sanctions was initially reported to include a full ban on supplying arms to Iran and recommend a full inspection regime, but according to Reuters, the Russians stopped it short, while saying “they could live with a call for ‘vigilance’ over the weapons trade.” Ah, vigilance. It’s also the word, open to a hundred interpretations, that has come under discussion as a substitute for U.N. sanctions banning transactions involving Iran’s central bank. With all its vagueness, vigilance now has a place in the major league of fuzziness alongside “unacceptable,” the term used by the United States and its friends concerning Iran’s eventually achieving nuclear weapons status. No course in diplomatic exegesis is required to think that’s an awful long way from saying, “We won’t allow it.” For Thérèse Delpech, the French Atomic Energy Commission’s director of strategic affairs, the circumstances show “the Russians are playing with Monopoly money on the subject of sanctions on banks or arms or gasoline while the Americans stand by and smile. If there are U.N. sanctions, they will be minimal.” There’s not much of a leap — although Ms. Delpech did not say it — from this view on the likelihood of enacting punitive sanctions on a country that has spent billions on developing atomic weapons, and is on the edge of success, to a notion in the international foreign policy community that the Obama administration plans in the end to deal with a nuclear-capable or nuclear-armed Iran through a policy of containment. Washington denies it. But if you scorn the gasoline sanctions that look to many like the best nonbelligerent shot you’ve got to spook the mullahs (after all, they came to power after a strike closing gas pumps demonstrated the impotence of the shah’s regime), then Iran may well think it has scant reason to believe the United States’ still-official bottom line: that when it comes to stopping the Iranian nuclear drive, all of America’s options remain open.

Iran
Nuclear Weapons
Clinton Hillary Rodham
France


Machinima Using Game-Themed Videos to Lure Young Men

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — Big Media’s hunt for young male viewers is not going so well. News Corporation is holding a fire sale for IGN, its online network aimed at guys. Disney XD, a cable channel for boys, is growing in popularity — among girls. Comcast’s game-focused G4 channel is retooling its entire programming strategy. Where are all the “lost boys,” as analysts sometimes call them? Increasingly, the answer involves Machinima. Intensely focused on 18- to 34-year-old men, Machinima (pronounced ma-SHIN-i-ma) is a Web and mobile distribution network that delivers free game-oriented shows, trailers and news reports. The company, founded in 2000, generates more than 2.2 billion video views a month, according to comScore data. Machinima Prime, a YouTube channel that arrived in August and is dedicated to highly polished episodic series, ranked as the video hub’s No. 1 destination this month. Despite their escalating reluctance to watch television or go to the movies, young men continue to flock to traditional outlets like Disney’s ESPN or Viacom’s Comedy Central. And Machinima is certainly not the only online network where young men congregate; Break Media operates testosterone-heavy sites like MadeMan.com and HolyTaco.com . But Machinima has rapidly evolved into a must-visit site for young men by improving the quality of its programming. The company’s mission is not dissimilar to that of cable channels: gain a foothold with inexpensive content (in Machinima’s case it was user-generated videos) and then use that perch to attract higher-quality programs, as AMC did with “Mad Men.” Ultimately, Machinima intends to produce its own long-form episodic series. First, Machinima must prove that YouTube can indeed become the new television — that consumers will watch long videos and come back the next week for another episode. In many ways, Machinima just pulled that off with “ Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn,” a five-part live-action series. “Forward Unto Dawn,” which cost Microsoft $10 million to make and was meant to promote the release of the game Halo 4 on Xbox, has been viewed about 27 million times; four related videos delivered 9.2 million additional views. Machinima also said it experienced very little viewer “fall off,” an industry term for people leaving after watching only a couple of minutes. Fans understand that this kind of programming is really marketing masquerading as entertainment, said Allen DeBevoise, Machinima’s chief executive. But he contended that “high-quality content is better marketing than traditional advertising; if it’s the equivalent of what people would watch on their own anyway, fans really appreciate that.” Halo 4 had $220 million in global sales in its first 24 hours in stores. “If you’re a marketer and not paying serious attention to Machinima, you’re really behind the curve,” said Matt Britton, a founder of MRY, a youth-focused New York marketing firm. “College kids may not be bringing TVs to their dorm rooms anymore, but Machinima, because it has smartly built itself around YouTube, is right there on their laptops.” NBCUniversal recently decided Machinima was the best way to bring one of its TV movies to consumers. “Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome,” a prequel to the Syfy channel’s 2004 “Battlestar Galactica” series, was cut into 10 episodes and is rolling out on Machinima Prime. “Blood and Chrome” will then run on Syfy next year as a two-hour movie. Warner Brothers is completing a programming deal with Machinima for a new series tied to its Mortal Kombat game franchise. “Mortal Kombat: Legacy,” a nine-part series, ran on Machinima last year, and at least one installment captured over 10 million views — on par with viewership for some fantasy programs on television. Machinima, which is based in Los Angeles and makes money by selling advertising, got its start in 2000 as a Web site dedicated to a genre of digital filmmaking that uses video game graphics to create original animated movies. In 2005, Mr. DeBevoise and his brother, Philip, bought the Web site and set about turning it into a global entertainment network. It has about 200 employees and secured a $35 million round of financing in May; the company declined to discuss revenue or profitability. Mr. DeBevoise said about 50 percent of Machinima’s total traffic now came from overseas. The company — with backing from MK Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Google, which owns YouTube — also has a significant presence on mobile devices. Machinima Prime is part of YouTube’s strategy, started a year ago, to lure television viewers and advertisers with higher-quality videos, even if aimed at niche interests. YouTube invested about $100 million in the overall effort — Machinima received an undisclosed portion — and in recent weeks YouTube began evaluating which channels had done well enough to receive a second round of financing. In addition to Machinima Prime, YouTube successes include AwesomenessTV, aimed at 12- to 17-year-olds, and Vice, which also courts young men. In an e-mail, Malik Ducard, YouTube’s director of content strategy, called Machinima “a great example of how a Web brand with a laserlike focus on serving a single audience can drive massive eyeballs.” Mr. Ducard added that YouTube partners like Machinima, sometimes dismissed as niche players, were adding subscribers at a rate “four times faster” than they did just a couple of years ago. “Niche may not be the right word because that may sound small,” he said. “Billions of views is not small.”

YouTube.com
Machinima Inc
Web-Original Programming
Men and Boys
Advertising and Marketing
Computers and the Internet
Youth
Computer and Video Games


Ivory Coast: 7 Peacekeepers Killed

Abstract: Armed men ambushed and killed seven United Nations peacekeepers trying to protect villagers in Ivory Coast on Friday, and more than 40 of their colleagues who stayed to guard against more attacks remain in danger, the United Nations said. Hundreds of villagers were fleeing the area around the town of Tai, near the Liberian border, and United Nations officials said others might have been killed or wounded. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations condemned the attack and said he was “saddened and outraged” by the deaths of the peacekeepers, all from Niger. Ivory Coast’s deputy defense minister, Paul Koffi Koffi, blamed “militia men or mercenaries” for the attack. Peacekeepers were first sent to Ivory Coast in 2004 to help end a civil war and have stayed through the country’s recent political turmoil.

Ivory Coast
United Nations
Defense and Military Forces
Deaths (Fatalities)
International Relations


On Heels of Points Leader, Ethiopian Will Not Let Up

Abstract: With a $500,000 prize at stake when the World Marathon Majors series concludes Nov. 4 at the New York City Marathon , Gete Wami of Ethiopia is planning a rare feat. She is running the Berlin Marathon on Sept. 30, then the New York City Marathon five weeks later. Such a turnaround is mostly unheard of in distance running. But with the World Marathon Majors series (Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York City) concluding its first points race from the 2006-7 season, Wami, the 33-year-old reigning Berlin champion, has a new incentive. New York Road Runners, the organizer of the New York City Marathon, plans to announce her entry today. The announcement will include two other big names. Tegla Loroupe of Kenya, the New York City winner in 1994 and 1995, will return to run. The reigning Boston Marathon champion, Lidiya Grigoryeva of Russia, will also join a field that includes the two-time defending champion, Jelena Prokopcuka. Prokopcuka is the current series leader with 55 points; Wami has 40. The winner of a major marathon gets 25 points, the runner-up 15, with a sliding scale to follow. A victory in Berlin would give Wami 65 points and put her and Prokopcuka in direct competition in New York. The last woman to win two major marathon championships relatively close together was Grete Waitz, the nine-time New York City champion. In 1983, she won the world championships, then won 11 weeks later in New York.

New York City Marathon
Running
Marathon Running
Wami Gete


Campaign Says, ‘I’ve Got Your Number: 989’ - Campaign Spotlight

Abstract: The number 989 is, among other things, an area code for sections of Michigan, part of the name of a brand of video games and, with a decimal point between the 8 and the second 9, the frequency of radio stations in markets like Fort Wayne, Ind. The number 989 is also part of the name of a new bottled beverage with a cap that, when twisted open, releases into the water below ingredients that include vitamins, minerals and electrolytes. The beverage, which comes in six flavors, is called 989 OnDemand , the “OnDemand” referring to the cap with its twist-and-release technology. The 989 OnDemand brand is among a spate of beverages being brought out as alternatives to carbonated soft drinks. As Americans drink fewer sodas, they are drinking more waters, teas, sports drinks, energy drinks and other “non-carbs,” as they are referred to by beverage industry analysts. The 989 OnDemand line is being introduced on a regional basis by H2M Beverages in Pompton Lakes, N.J., which also sells Liquid Lightning Energy Drink and Herbal Mist Teas. An advertising campaign for 989 OnDemand is being created by Red Tettemer & Partners in Philadelphia, an agency that also works for Renuzit Fresh Accents air fresheners, Dial for Men, Century 21 and Maaco. The budget for the 989 OnDemand campaign is estimated at $3 million to $4 million. The tasks that Red Tettemer & Partners is handling for the new beverage include developing the logo and packaging design, creating the ads that appear in print, outdoors and in stores; designing the brand’s Web site; media planning and buying; and public relations assignments like planning events and managing social media. The campaign has two goals: conveying how the bottle cap is the delivery mechanism for the ingredients of 989 OnDemand and encouraging consumers to drink it frequently. Those goals are encapsulated in the theme of the campaign, “Twist. Release. Daily.” “Twist to release fresh vitamins and minerals,” one ad declares. Another ad describes how the 9 vitamins, 84 minerals and 5 electrolytes are “kept fresh and secure in the cap until released.” (How would 9 plus 84 plus 5 equal 989? The first 9 refers to the vitamins. The 89 is the sum of the 84 and the 5. Ah, the idiosyncrasies of brand names.) Use instructions are also printed on each bottle of 989 OnDemand: “Twist cap clockwise to release the fresh vitamins and minerals. Then twist cap counterclockwise to open.” Other ads take a more creative tack. One offers readers this option: “Twist. Release. Rock your day like it’s 1964 and you’re a British singer/guitarist who’s singing in front of an American crowd for the first time, and let’s just say they can’t get enough of what you’ve got.” And on the drink989.com Web site, there are messages for each day of the week, like this one for Wednesday: “Time to take your week to a whole new level. Bulldoze this mountain of obstacles known as Hump Day and set your sights on the weekend. Twist. Release. Daily.” The “eureka moment” in the development of 989 OnDemand was “gaining experience in the beverage business and realizing that every beverage had one thing in common: it came in a bottle or can,” says Charles Musumeci Jr., chief executive at H2M Beverages. Turning the cap into a way to add ingredients to the water in the bottle means that “consumers can participate in making their own drink,” he adds, bringing “interactivity” to the experience. The goal is to take advantage of “the wow factor” of the technology in marketing 989 OnDemand as offering consumers “a fresh dose of good-for-you,” Mr. Musumeci says. That should help the brand stand out in the crowded health and wellness segment of the beverage market, he adds. Many other products can match 989 OnDemand in saying they are natural and have zero calories. As for the target audience for the new beverage, Mr. Musumeci says he has “a very diverse market: It’s called anyone with lips.” More seriously, he defines it as “healthy, active people who are thirsty.” Jody Piagesi, director for marketing and consumer relations at H2M Beverages, said that she and Mr. Musumeci were drawn to Red Tettemer & Partners for several reasons, among them that the agency was full service and “really down to earth.” The agency also helped the executives in figuring out the target audience for 989 OnDemand, Ms. Piagesi says, after some initial discussions that it was better to aim it at younger consumers, ages 18 to 32. “We talked with Red Tettemer about aiming it at about up to 52,” she says, at “healthy, active people with disposable income.” (Each 20-ounce bottle is priced at $1.99 to $2.49.) “Obviously, it’s a supercompetitive category,” Steve Red, president and chief creative officer at Red Tettemer & Partners, says of the market in which 989 OnDemand competes, “but they have something kind of special.” The agency was also intrigued in discussions with Ms. Piagesi and Mr. Musumeci as “they talked about their idea of ‘liquid theater,’ ” he adds, “that when you twist and release the vitamins and minerals they and the color drop down below and create this experience.” “The way we approached” the assignment was to focus on “the way everybody works, their pressure-packed lives,” Mr. Red says, adding: “It’s almost a cliché to talk about. But it runs them down, it makes them feel less well.” From that comes the selling point for 989 OnDemand, Mr. Red says, which is that “in this day and age, everyone could use a little bit of goodness in their day.” “We want to try to position 989 as something you can use in your life every day,” he adds, as “part of your daily ritual of wellness.” As for his assessment of the product, Mr. Red says, “I like the pomegranate blueberry the best.” (The other flavors are grape, kiwi strawberry, lemon lime, orange and punch.) H2M Beverages began selling 989 OnDemand in New England, in a distribution partnership with a regional powerhouse, Polar Beverages, and expanded into New Jersey and New York City, where it is sold in stores like Duane Reade and Food Emporium. “We’re about to enter the Washington, D.C., area and eastern Virginia and eastern Pennsylvania and Philadelphia,” Mr. Musumeci says. The plan is “to continue down the East Coast to Florida, from Miami on up,” he adds, “and next onto the West Coast, then Texas to Illinois.” --------- If you like In Advertising, be sure to read the Advertising column that runs Monday through Friday in the Business Day section of The New York Times print edition and on nytimes.com . And read coverage anytime of advertising, marketing, television, print, movies and new media on the Media Decoder blog at mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com .

Beverages
Advertising and Marketing
Online Advertising


New Soups Help Profit Beat Forecast at Campbell

Abstract: The Campbell Soup Company posted a better-than-expected quarterly profit on Thursday as price increases and newer products such as lower sodium soups helped offset higher commodity costs. The company said sales growth in the current fiscal year should exceed its long-term expectations, with earnings up 5 percent to 7 percent, excluding one-time items. Campbell said it earned $89 million, or 24 cents a share, in the period, compared with $61 million, or 16 cents a share, a year earlier. Sales in the period, which ended Aug. 3 and was the fourth quarter of the company’s fiscal year, rose to $1.72 billion from $1.52 billion. The most recent quarter had one more week than the earlier period. Soup sales in the United States rose 6 percent in the quarter, excluding the effect of an extra week in the fiscal year. That follows 3 percent decline in the previous quarter. Campbell introduced several new products in the last year to tap into consumers’ desire for healthier food. The chief executive, Douglas Conant, told analysts in a conference call it was hard to know what part of the increase resulted from demand for lower-priced meal options, like soup, because of the weak economy, and what resulted from new products and other Campbell efforts. Stock in Campbell, which is based in Camden, N.J., rose $1.42, or 3.8 percent, to $39.00 a share.


Asia's Challenge to Europe

Abstract: The BaShiTong food court, a collection of small eateries on the third floor of an office building in central Chongqing, China, closed this summer just three months after it opened. Workers sued for back wages. The owner of one spot lost all his savings and barged into the office of the food court’s promoter with a propane tank, taking him hostage and threatening to blow the place up by igniting the tank. It was Chinese capitalism in action: very messy, often unfair, sometimes violent. But the BaShiTong hostage incident ended quietly. While litigation continues over the back wages, workers quickly found new jobs, sometimes less stressful ones. Zheng Feng, the athletic, 28-year-old former manager of a dumpling shop in the food court, now sells sportswear at a fashionable shop nearby. “It is much easier — plus the air-conditioning is better here,” he said. Almost 3,700 kilometers, or 2,300 miles, to the southwest of Chongqing lies the sprawling, overcrowded city of Mumbai, the commercial capital of India. Bharat Petroleum, a state-controlled oil company in India whose sales rank it in the top 250 multinationals, has its headquarters in a dilapidated building in the city’s oldest British colonial neighborhood. A rickety, claustrophobic elevator takes visitors up to the chairman’s elegant office, tastefully decorated with abstract paintings in vivid blues. Raj K. Singh, the company’s chairman and managing director, smiled when asked in late August how it treated its workers. Unionized employees performing even menial jobs earned the equivalent of $560 a month until this summer, when a new labor agreement raised their pay to $800 a month. Nonunion workers in India doing the same tasks earn as little as $50 a month, he said. The company’s losses, mainly the result of fuel price regulations but also its own high costs, are heavily subsidized by Indian taxpayers. BaShiTong and Bharat Petroleum illustrate several facets of the Chinese and Indian economies. The economies could scarcely be more different. Yet each represents a formidable challenge for Europe in the years ahead. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany repeated tirelessly during her successful re-election campaign this year that Europe has only 7 percent of the world’s population and produces 25 percent of the world’s economic output, but represents 50 percent of the world’s social spending. Sustaining those lopsided percentages requires that Europe remain at the forefront of competitiveness. Europe needs to produce quickly and efficiently a wide range of goods and services that the rest of the world is willing to work much longer and harder to buy. That will not be easy. The problems for Europe look formidable. China has embraced a version of the rapidly churning, sometimes Darwinian capitalism of the United States, including an almost American acceptance of large holes in the social safety net. Businesses like BaShiTong can and do fail quickly in China. But the resources are swiftly absorbed elsewhere. The country has proved uncommonly adaptable to opportunities in a wide range of markets — including Europe’s. To be sure, China and India share two serious handicaps: chronic corruption and pollution. Both problems are particularly troublesome for their people and their economies. Project delays and substandard quality associated with corruption, and eventual cleanup costs associated with pollution, affect their competitiveness. But they do not offset the impressive gains that both countries, especially China, have made in recent years, and continue to make. China has quadrupled its output of graduates in the past decade, built national networks of bullet trains and modern highways, and acquired the latest foreign inventions through joint ventures and technology transfer agreements. In the years to come, said Mary Gallagher, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, “It’ll have a labor force more like Europe’s, it’ll have an infrastructure more like Europe’s, it’ll have levels of foreign investment that will make it more competitive.” A quadrupling of blue-collar wages in the past decade has made China increasingly uncompetitive in areas like garment manufacturing and shoemaking, which are shifting to poorer countries in Asia. But the result has been an accelerated shift by Chinese industry into higher-value sectors vital to Europe. Partly as a result, China’s appetite for European exports is faltering, even as Chinese exports to Europe keep rising. Image China has built national networks of bullet trains, quadrupled its output of graduates in the past decade and acquired the latest foreign inventions through joint ventures and technology transfer agreements. Credit European Pressphoto Agency China already buys only half as much worth of European exports as the United States, even as Europe now imports far more from China than anywhere else. China’s purchases from Europe fell slightly in the first half of this year from a year earlier. Swiss watches and French wines may receive a lot of attention, but the three dominant categories of European exports are industrial machinery, vehicles and electrical machinery (mainly computer components). China is ramping up its own production rapidly in all three, and stepping up exports to overseas markets that used to buy from Europe as well. Walk the noisy aisles of the IGP car and truck axle factory, which opened in Jakarta in 1987, and the European and Japanese brand names on the manufacturing equipment are conspicuous. But that is the exception these days: Chinese equipment is flooding into factories all over Indonesia. “They make it so cheap that no one can compete,” said Sofjan Wanandi, the tycoon who partly owns the factory. India’s challenge to Europe is different from China’s, but a potent one as well. In a strange way, India’s often self-inflicted economic wounds are actually making it a tougher competitor for Europe, by weakening India’s currency. India is trying to create what in many ways is a low-rent replica of the European model of social democracy. Parliament, acutely conscious of national elections next year, voted to distribute subsidized food to two-thirds of the population. That program could increase the already large budget deficit and limit the government’s ability to build needed ports and highways for manufacturers. India also has a two-tier labor system like Europe’s. Employees of government agencies and state-controlled enterprises like Bharat Petroleum receive relatively high wages, as do the unionized workers of large manufacturers, still heavily protected from foreign competition. Their high salaries come partly at the expense of widespread unemployment, extremely low wages and an inflated cost of living for the rest of society. Budget deficits and an uncompetitive manufacturing sector have crippled the rupee, whose value has dropped steeply in currency markets this year. That has made European exports much less affordable in India. At the same time, India’s huge outsourcing industry has become much more competitive in euro terms. Many European companies are already shifting large chunks of their computer programming, legal, accounting and architectural design divisions to India. The rupee’s fall makes the savings from doing so even larger. Rapid expansion of Indian universities since 2006 makes it unlikely that the country will run short of educated workers, while rising wages and declining competitiveness for them do not seem to be arriving any time soon. With 20.7 million university students enrolled by 2010, India passed the European Union, with 20 million, that year. Both trail China, at 31 million. In an Internet-linked world, that means China and India have many trained minds looking for business opportunities, and not just huge numbers of unskilled laborers. “We should not think in terms of bodies,” said Ajay Kapur, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, “but in terms of brains.”

Europe
China
India
Economy
International trade


Axelrod Questions Calls for Halt to Foreclosures

Abstract: WASHINGTON (AP) — A top White House adviser questioned the need on Sunday for a blanket halt to home foreclosures, even as pressure grows on the Obama administration to do something about growing evidence that banks have used inaccurate documents to evict homeowners. “It is a serious problem,” said David Axelrod , who said that the flawed paperwork was hurting the nation’s housing market as well as lending institutions. But he added, “I’m not sure about a national moratorium because there are in fact valid foreclosures that probably should go forward” because their documents are accurate. Mr. Axelrod said the administration was pressing lenders to accelerate their reviews of foreclosures to determine which ones had flawed documentation. “Our hope is this moves rapidly and that this gets unwound very, very quickly,” he said. With the reeling economy already the top issue on voters’ minds, the doubts raised over foreclosures and evictions are becoming a political issue with the approach of the Nov. 2 elections. Underscoring those pressures, two leading lawmakers took opposing stances on the wisdom of a moratorium. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Florida, said she backed a foreclosure moratorium and government discussions with the banking industry to devise ways to let lenders reshape troubled mortgages. She said the foreclosure problem had been “extremely vexing” in her state. The No. 2 Republican in the House, Eric Cantor of Virginia, said a national moratorium would remove the protections that lenders needed. “You’re going to shut down the housing industry” with a national stoppage, Mr. Cantor said. “People have to take responsibility for themselves.” On Friday, Bank of America became the first bank to halt foreclosures in all 50 states. Three other institutions, JPMorgan Chase, the GMAC Mortgage unit of Ally Bank and PNC Financial Services, have stopped foreclosures in the 23 states where foreclosures must be approved by a judge. Mr. Axelrod spoke on “Face the Nation” on CBS, and Ms. Wasserman Schultz and Mr. Cantor were on “Fox News Sunday.”

Foreclosures
Mortgages
Banking and Financial Institutions
United States Economy
Axelrod David


U.T. Experiment Grapples With Essence of Gravity

Abstract: We have all experienced gravity, but even to the brightest minds in science, it remains largely a mystery. Gary J. Hill, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, is trying to change that. “We don’t know why there’s gravity,” said Mr. Hill, one of the lead astronomers on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment , or Hetdex, which could turn gravity’s time-honored laws on their head. “We have a pretty good theory of it. It may be that our observations could have a bearing on finally formulating why gravity exists.” Mr. Hill has teamed with Karl Gebhardt, an astronomy professor at U.T., on the $36 million project, which has prevailed despite the threat of natural disasters, potential lack of financing and all the kinks that can throw off a long-term project. The experiment’s goal is to analyze our understanding of how the universe is expanding — with ramifications on gravity, the Big Bang theory and the fate of the universe. “Not only is the universe expanding, but it’s accelerating,” Mr. Gebhardt said. “And so that’s what we call dark energy — the existence of the acceleration. And that’s the huge thing that no one can explain.” Granted, in a time of high unemployment, crazy gas prices and water shortages, studying the swelling of the universe might seem out of touch. But when asked about its importance, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize -winning physicist at U.T., said, “Do you really need a sermon on why settling questions about the fundamental laws of nature are worth pursuing?” For Mr. Hill, 48, and Mr. Gebhardt, 46, even to be in position of rewriting the books is fortunate. The McDonald Observatory — where the dark-energy observations, made with the third-largest telescope in the world, are set to begin next spring after nearly 10 years of development — is about 425 miles west of Austin, in Fort Davis. In April, the Rock House Fire, which started 35 miles south of there, in Marfa, scorched the Davis Mountains surrounding the state-of-the-art observatory, putting it perilously close to going up in flames. Mother Nature has not been the only threat. Lack of financing for an abstract experiment with little or no immediate pay-off has stymied several similar projects that sprang from the discovery of dark energy in 1998. Now, only a handful of those remain, and none have the proprietary will of Hetdex — a testament to the ego of the state of Texas. Nearly a third of the money raised for Hetdex, which includes a one-of-its-kind $16 million spectrograph created by Mr. Hill called Virus (Visible Integral-Field Replicable Unit Spectrograph), came from private in-state sources. The largest donor, Harold Simmons, a Dallas investor and U.T. alumnus whom Forbes magazine ranked as the 55th-richest person in the United States, gave two gifts totaling $6.5 million. (Mr. Simmons’s family foundation is a major donor to The Texas Tribune.) “I could see that figuring out the nature of dark energy would be of historic importance, not just in astronomy but for all science, and for all humankind,” Mr. Simmons said in an e-mail. “As a proud Texan, I wanted a Texas-based, Texas-led project to be first.” Meanwhile, broader debate has recently emerged over the role of academic research in state universities, with some conservatives calling for a greater emphasis on teaching to improve efficiency. But many in the higher education community have argued that the benefits of research extend beyond universities’ bottom lines. “This is helping us train the next generation of engineers and leaders in these fields of technology,” Mr. Gebhardt said of Hetdex, which derives about a quarter of its financing from U.T. and a $6 million special biennial line item in the state budget. “And that’s important because we don’t have a lot of that in the country.” The impact on education goes even deeper, Mr. Hill said, explaining: “Kids, when they’re 5 or 6 or 7, these are the ones who get interested in science through fields like paleontology and astronomy. These are exciting areas.” Where the education system falls short, Mr. Hill added, “is failing to take that excitement and actually train them so they remain excited through college.” The McDonald Observatory’s history also provides a valuable lesson in collaboration. On a recent tour, Thomas Barnes, the observatory’s superintendent, said U.T. did not even have an astronomy department in 1926, when William Johnson McDonald, a banker from Paris, Tex., bequeathed his $1.1 million fortune to start an observatory. U.T. enlisted the University of Chicago to design and build the operation under the direction of Otto Struve, a Russian-born, fourth-generation astronomer who operated the McDonald Observatory for 30 years, ushering it into the U.T.-led era. “Better a foreigner than a damn Yankee,” one of the U.T. regents at the time said of Mr. Struve’s appointment, according to Mr. Barnes. And now the U.T. astronomy department has a chance to enhance its history. “There will only be one time when we figure out what is in the universe, and then it gets placed in the textbooks,” Mr. Gebhardt said. “We are basically living through that time now.”

University of Texas at Austin
McDonald Observatory
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Dark Energy (Astronomy)
Telescopes and Observatories
Austin (Tex)


Facts Are Murky on Location of Dead Babies in Ireland

Abstract: TUAM, Ireland — That 796 children, mainly babies, died at St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home between 1925 and its closing in 1961 is not disputed. A local historian, Catherine Corless, says she researched the death certificates. What troubled her was that she could find burial records for only one child and wanted a plaque to commemorate the lives of the others. Ms. Corless surmised that the children’s bodies were interred in a septic tank behind the home, and she then met a local man who said he had seen bones there while playing as a child. While even she acknowledges that the conclusion was a circumstantial leap, once it was picked up in the local press, it was sensational enough to rocket around the globe, becoming a story of a disused septic tank brimming with bones. Since the news broke last week, however, some of the assumptions that led Ms. Corless to her conclusion have been challenged, not least by the man she cited, Barry Sweeney, now 48, who was questioned by detectives about what he saw when he was 10 years old. “People are making out we saw a mass grave,” he said he had told the detectives. “But we can only say what we seen: maybe 15 to 20 small skeletons.” Where and how the bodies of the children were actually disposed of remains a mystery — and a scandal in tiny Tuam, population 8,200, that has for the moment revealed more about the ways local lore and small-town sleuthing can be distorted in the news media juggernaut than about what actually went on decades ago at the state-funded home for unmarried pregnant women run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Roman Catholic order. The claims have provoked calls for a long-overdue independent inquiry — which the government has so far resisted — and revived memories of the many abuses that commonly took place in such homes. “I think that the facts should be brought together in a coherent form because some of the headlines that went abroad internationally were quite horrendous and gave a very mistaken impression of what actually happened,” Ireland’s education minister, Ruairi Quinn, said on national radio on Monday. Over the years, thousands of children died in the homes from ailments, including typhus, measles and malnutrition. The death certificates Ms. Corless collected list a range of common causes at a time when infant mortality was much higher than today. The death rates at the homes were always well above the national average, according to official figures. In some years, more than 50 percent of infants died, and there is evidence the state knew this; several commentators have called the homes’ problems “a scandal hidden in plain sight.” Ms. Corless said on Monday that she remained confident that the babies are buried in the general area of the septic tank, if not all are inside. “If they’re not there, where else would they be?” she said. “That home was surrounded by eight-feet-high walls, and everything seemed to be done inside there.” She says that to date she has not been contacted by any government officials or by the police, but she expects that she will. “I have presented a case. My words have been twisted in terms of the terminology: I have never used the word ‘dumped,’ for example,” she said, referring to the way the story has been sensationalized. “But I still believe those bodies are there in that general area,” she said. “There were two babies a day dying at some stages; the chances are they were buried somewhere convenient.” “It doesn’t matter if there is even one body in that tank,” Ms. Corless said. “That child was buried illegally.” What matters now to her, and to many others here, is that those children’s lives be acknowledged and respected. Local residents are divided about the procession of national and international journalists and camera crews, but many appear to welcome the coverage. Others are hoping that the controversy will provide the chance to open an inquiry independent of the Irish government and the church into the abuses that occurred at the homes for women, which gained notoriety last year with the release of the movie “Philomena.” “We didn’t want to bring any attention to those little babies,” said Anne Collins, a member of the committee that has tried to raise money for a plaque at the site. “But if you buried your dog in the back garden, you would want it marked, and that’s all we wanted.” Ms. Collins said the news media and “church bashers” had hijacked the situation, and she disagreed with the widespread condemnation of the nuns. “All of the locals knew this was a kiddies’ burial ground, but we didn’t realize they weren’t in tiny little graves,” she said. “But people weren’t overly stunned to learn otherwise or even the numbers involved. They knew the poverty; I lost a sister myself when she was just 18 months old. We grew up hungry in Ireland, and we are able to understand.” Another committee member, Maura Ryan, who lives opposite the site, said there was little local appetite for a criminal investigation, particularly if it entailed an excavation. “There will be uproar if they take them up,” Ms. Ryan said. “That’s our biggest fear now since all this started. They should be marked and then left to rest in peace.” In life, peace was rare for many of the children at such homes, according to numerous accounts from those who survived them. Derek Leinster, who spent time at the Church of Ireland Bethany Home in Dublin, wrote graphically about his experiences and is credited with finding the remains of 219 children from that home in unmarked graves. “Throughout my childhood, Ireland has always portrayed itself as a very, very religious and God-fearing country,” Mr. Leinster said. “This representation is at odds with the cruelty I experienced during my childhood and the experiences of all those other lost souls and hopeless causes who were raised within the heart of this supposedly Christian country.” Ms. Ryan’s husband, Johnny, recalled going to school with the “home babies.” They were segregated in the classrooms and in the schoolyard at break times, he recalled, and they were even dismissed 10 minutes before everyone else so they could walk home separately. “It was just the way it was: They were different, or at least we were told they were,” Mr. Ryan said. In a statement, the Bon Secours spokeswoman said the order would cooperate fully with any inquiry. But none of the sisters who worked at the home were alive, the statement said, and the order handed all records over to the county council when the home was closed in 1961. The archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary, said in a statement that the archdiocese was not involved in the home and, like the Bon Secours Sisters, had no relevant records, a stance that has angered some because clerical power is often accused of creating the climate of stigma in which these homes operated. But one of Ireland’s most senior clerics, the archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has called for an independent inquiry into all such homes for mothers and babies. “The indications are that if something happened in Tuam, it probably happened in other mother and baby homes around the country,” Archbishop Martin said. “That is why I believe that we need a full-bodied investigation. There is no point in investigating just what happened in Tuam and then next year finding out more.”

Babies
Ireland
Fatalities,casualties
Catholic Church


Qihoo 360 of China Announces C.E.O.-Led Takeover Bid

Abstract: The Qihoo 360 Technology Company, a maker of mobile security software in China, said on Wednesday that a consortium led by its chief executive had offered to acquire the company for about $10 billion in cash. The consortium includes the chief executive, Zhou Hongyi; Citic Securities; Golden Brick Capital; China Renaissance Holdings; and Sequoia Capital China, according to a statement from the company . It is offering $77 in cash for each American depositary share, or $51.33 for each ordinary share, a 17 percent premium to the company’s closing price of $66.05 in New York on Tuesday. Qihoo, which also operates a search engine in China, said its board intended to form a special committee of independent directors to consider the offer. Shares of Qihoo were up more than 8 percent in trading in New York on Wednesday. The proposal is the latest attempt by a Chinese company listed in the United States to go private.

Qihoo 360 Technology
Mergers and Acquisitions
Computer security


Weary of Debris, Haiti Finally Sees Some Vanish

Abstract: PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Wearing a Nike visor, sunglasses, a crisp linen shirt and pressed jeans, Randal Perkins of Pompano Beach, Fla., watched with satisfaction as his $400,000 hydraulic excavator clawed into a towering pile of concrete chunks in the shattered heart of this city. “This is what the people have been waiting for,” Mr. Perkins declared in his booming voice, sweeping his arm to take in a crowd of bystanders mesmerized for hours by the demolition and removal of a collapsed funeral home. Mr. Perkins had been waiting, too, with increasing impatience, for the cleanup of Haiti to begin. Chief executive of a Florida-based disaster recovery firm, he had made a $25 million gamble that he could capitalize on the Jan. 12 earthquake. He had partnered with a Haitian conglomerate, imported a dozen shiploads of heavy equipment and set up a state-of-the-art base camp here — but then, nothing. It has been obvious since January that clearing the wreckage is the necessary prelude to this country’s reconstruction, physically and psychologically. But the problem was so dauntingly big and complex that the government and donors got stuck in visionary mode, planning the future while the present remained mired in rubble. It was easier, in a way, to conceive ambitious projects that would, someday, address Haiti’s longstanding issues, like its weak educational system or its crumbling roads. By late summer, however, the need to tackle the earthquake damage directly became so glaring that some initial steps were taken. The government tendered its very first cleanup contract to Mr. Perkins’s Haiti Recovery Group. Worth $7.5 million to $13.5 million — nobody would be more precise — the contract represented a minuscule piece of a debris removal operation expected to cost $1.2 billion. But it was at last a start, breaking the paralysis symbolized by the teetering ruin of the destroyed national palace. “Finally, something is moving in debris,” Jessica Faieta, the United Nations Development Program’s senior country director in Haiti, said with relief. Mr. Perkins echoed her relief. “All along I’d been thinking, ‘Somebody finally has to take the initiative and say, ‘Ready, set, go,’ ” he said. “You just pick a spot to begin and things will fall into place.” Mr. Perkins, 46, competitive and ambitious with a loose-limbed swagger, flew to Haiti within days of the earthquake to start staking his claim. He knows that companies like his are sometimes seen as disaster vultures but dismisses the criticism. “People always say you make money off other people’s misery,” Mr. Perkins said. “But, listen, somebody’s got to do the work.” He did not know the headaches that lay ahead. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the American military and several American contractors were busy clearing roads and setting up logistical support for the Haitian government and international groups. One of Mr. Perkins’s chief competitors — the DRC Group of Alabama — already had an office in Haiti and started right in with the grisly task of recovering bodies. After that initial burst of activity, though, the cleanup slowed to a crawl. International officials blamed the Haitian government for failing to take charge and create a master plan for debris removal and resettlement. Haitian officials, however, maintain that international donors themselves were slow to make rubble a priority. “What is happening now could have happened in March if there had not been a laxity on the part of the international community,” said one senior official in the planning ministry, who asked that he not be identified for what he called political reasons. “As you know, we ourselves don’t have the means.” Chuck Prieur, senior vice president of DRC-Haiti, said that rubble removal was never “sexy” to donors. “Nobody wants to do cleanup,” he said. “Everybody likes to do shiny stuff you can put your name on.” Shortly after the earthquake, Mr. Prieur said, he sketched out a debris plan and calculated that the cleanup could, theoretically, be done in nine months. “But I knew that nine months could be nine years if the forces weren’t mobilized,” he said. Ms. Faieta said that the search for a perfect approach — taking into account, say, environmental concerns and land ownership issues — had proved “paralyzing” but added that the contractors had a different vantage point. “They are entrepreneurs, there to remove rubble and remove it fast,” she said. Always a self-starter, Mr. Perkins ended up in the disaster recovery business by being in the right place at the right time. The son of a prison guard and a probation officer, a college dropout who had gotten married at 19, he was a landscape contractor in South Florida when Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992. A large engineering company needed bucket trucks; he had bucket trucks. AshBritt Inc., named after his daughters Ashley and Brittany, was born. After Hurricane Katrina , the Army Corp of Engineers gave AshBritt what Mr. Perkins said ultimately amounted to a $900 million contract to clean up debris. Mr. Perkins said AshBritt held hundreds of “prepositioned” federal, state and municipal contracts for disaster recovery, but Haiti’s earthquake was its first international disaster. Soon after the earthquake, Mr. Perkins made the rounds, visiting the ambassador to the United States, Haitian ministers and the country’s president. He also met with the GB Group, a leading Haitian conglomerate. Where AshBritt had disaster recovery experience, GB had a distribution network, relationships with local suppliers and political connections. They formed the Haiti Recovery Group. In early spring Mr. Perkins started building a deluxe base camp inside GB’s 35-acre industrial complex, outfitting shipping containers with air-conditioning, flat-screen TVs, a fully equipped gym and a cafeteria. “We weren’t assured of anything,” Mr. Perkins said. “The only thing we could control was setting up a first-class operation and bringing over the equipment we needed.” When rubble removal finally became an urgent priority late this summer, only baby steps were taken. At its September meeting, Haiti’s reconstruction commission, led by Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and former President Bill Clinton, approved a $17 million United Nations Development Program plan to clean up six neighborhoods — an important project but only a small piece of the $1 billion in reconstruction projects approved to date. At the same time, the Haitian government set itself a goal to clean up the downtown area — where government offices will be rebuilt — by late November, when presidential elections are scheduled. Major cleanup and rebuilding is not expected to happen until next year, frustrating contractors like Mr. Prieur, although his firm does have work, building shelters and a residential camp for the United Nations. “I’m here, so I’d love to get going, and my American greed says I’d love to have everything given to me,” Mr. Prieur said. His company’s competitor, Mr. Perkins’s firm, got the first major cleanup contract because it had “the capacity,” Michel Content of the planning ministry said. The government is paying $32.50 to $58 a cubic yard for debris removal. That is considerably more than the American government paid contractors after Hurricane Katrina. But the work in Haiti, contractors say, is tougher: trucks can haul fewer loads a day because of bad roads; fuel costs are higher; buildings have to be demolished. On the other hand, labor costs are far lower. The Haitians Mr. Perkins has hired and trained — close to 100, he said — are getting $1,000 a month, a substantial wage in Haiti, though much less than the $450 to $500 a day he is paying American machine operators here. The government recently granted a second contract to a Haitian company, reportedly paying less. Both contracts were no-bid, Mr. Content said, because of the need for speed. Once Mr. Perkins’s Haiti Recovery Group got the go-ahead, HRG trucks were everywhere downtown. Collapsed buildings, their remains putrefying with oversize rats crawling through the rubble, are now spray-painted with a red “HRG — O.K.” when they are cleared for removal. Crowds gather to watch the demolitions, partly because they are big, noisy spectacles and partly because the glistening new dump trucks always leave something salvageable behind. “It’s beautiful,” Ernst Saint Albor, 36, said as he leaned on his bicycle watching one building come down. “It looks like destruction, but it’s progress. We cannot bear to see these collapsed buildings any longer. Be gone with them.”

Haiti
Earthquakes
Haiti Recovery Group
Contractors
DRC Group


A Challenge to European Political Elite

Abstract: LONDON — When Chancellor Angela Merkel won a stunning third term in Germany’s election this week, she emerged from the fray at the pinnacle of European political power. But great battles — political or military — sometimes cloak small skirmishes that end with more ambiguous results, and so it was in Berlin. In the shadow of Ms. Merkel’s victory, another less obvious contest was fought by players who, like their equivalents elsewhere in Europe, tapped a vein of discontent that seems too insidious for mainstream leaders to ignore. In Germany, it was the Alternative für Deutschland party — the Alternative for Germany — that reshaped a corner of the political landscape, much as small insurgent parties from Athens to Amsterdam have brought new calculations and pressures to bear on the political elite. And the emergence of these gadfly groupings served to highlight a European phenomenon that small protest parties — some of them no more than single-issue alliances of convenience — have come to embody: Even without formal political power, or perhaps because they flourish outside the traditional salons of influence, they exert a disproportionate pull on national political life, to the detriment of larger and more established parties. In the formal arithmetic of German parliamentary democracy, the most obvious point about the Alternatives’ showing was that they lost, failing by a hair’s breadth to secure the five percent of the ballot required under German law to enter Parliament. In the process, though, the Alternatives took some 430,000 votes from the liberal Free Democrat Party, Ms. Merkel’s most recent coalition partner, contributing to its exit from Parliament for the first time in over six decades. Voters, it seemed, were drawn in large numbers to the Alternatives’ antipathy toward the euro zone and its embrace of conservative social values on issues like gay rights. And by contributing to the Free Democrats’ woes, the insurgents also created prickly problems for the triumphant Ms. Merkel in her efforts to build a new coalition. Maybe it was no more than a knock-on effect, driven by a law of unintended consequences, almost guaranteeing that politicians’ best-laid plans will somehow unravel. But there were parallels with developments in elsewhere in Europe earlier this year, when the euro-skeptic United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, alarmed the dominant Conservatives with a surprisingly high showing at local British elections, winning 23 per cent of the vote, and spurring Prime Minister David Cameron to commit himself irrevocably to an in-out referendum on membership of the European Union if he wins the next national vote. That came only months after Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in Italy won 25 percent of the vote in national elections in February to become the most powerful challenger to Italy’s established order for decades. The very status of such parties as insurgents and rebels reflects their dilemma: By positioning themselves as outsiders, they exclude themselves from the mainstream, which they anyhow revile or mock as emblems of a corrupt and elite establishment that has failed the people. That, in turn, deepens their vulnerability to the inherent frailty and short shelf life of narrow, issue-driven politics. Indeed, the failure of many to build the kind of political machines that determine Western elections leaves their leaders dependent on sometimes troublesome lieutenants and exposed to squabbles within their ranks. In Britain, Nigel Farage, the beer-drinking, one-of-the-lads leader of UKIP, has tangled frequently with rambunctious figures in his own party, most recently last week, when one of them, Godfrey Bloom, was suspended after referring to women as “sluts” and using a copy of the party’s political program to beat a television reporter over the head, on camera. Even Mr. Farage admitted that the episode on the fringes of the party’s autumn conference had been a huge setback. “We can’t have any one individual, however fun or flamboyant or entertaining or amusing they are, destroying UKIP’s national conference and that is what he has done,” Mr. Farage said of his erstwhile ally. It is no coincidence that such populist tub-thumping parties — often anti-immigrant and conservative, but by no means limited to the far right — have seized headlines as Europe’s economic crisis has bitten deeply not only into pocketbooks but also into the reputation of the political elite. The range of contenders embraces Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands as much as parties on the left and right in Greece, including the neo-fascist Golden Dawn. The insurgents’ record for durability is mixed. Some, like the Greens in Germany, or the more established National Front of Marine Le Pen in France, which long predates the latest wave of start-up rebels, have settled into the political spectrum. Others, like Germany’s Pirates, whose main issue is Internet freedom, have fizzled. Britain’s maverick Respect party has one lawmaker in Parliament. UKIP has none, relying for representation on council seats at home and, paradoxically, on 13 of the 72 seats allocated to Britain in the European Parliament — a tally Mr. Farage wants to expand in next year’s European elections as a platform to broadcast his euro-skeptic views. “Populist parties pit the good, the honest, ordinary voter against the out-of-touch, liberal mainstream political elite,” the writer Jamie Bartlett said in the left-wing New Statesman weekly in Britain. “They claim to represent the former against the latter, an authentic and common sense voice in a world of spin and self-interest.” “It is not the extreme right that is on the march across Europe,” he said, “but a much wider rejection of mainstream, established politics.”

Politics
Angela Merkel
European Parliament
EU


Kiev Protesters See Potent Ally Under a Spire

Abstract: KIEV, Ukraine — After riot police officers stormed Independence Square here early Saturday, spraying tear gas, throwing stun grenades and swinging truncheons, dozens of young protesters ran, terrified, scattering up the streets. It was after 4:30 a.m., the air cold, the sky black. As they got their bearings, the half-lit bell tower of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery beckoned. Inside, the fleeing demonstrators found more than warmth and safety. They had arrived in a bastion of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyivan Patriarchate, where they were welcomed not only on a humanitarian basis but because the church, driven by its own historical tensions with Moscow, is actively supporting their uprising. It strongly favors European integration to enable Ukraine to break free from Russia’s grip, and has joined the calls to oust the Ukrainian government. From the conversion of Princess Olga, the regent of Kievan Rus, in the 10th century to the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Orthodox Church has generally flourished by acting in close concert with political powers. Its efforts to confront the authorities have tended to go badly, as when Philip II, the metropolitan of Moscow, protested political massacres in 1568 by refusing to bless Ivan the Terrible. He was jailed, chained around the neck and strangled. But in recent days, the Kyivan Patriarchate, which controls St. Michael’s, has emerged as a powerful ally of the thousands of protesters demanding the resignation of President Viktor F. Yanukovich and the revival of the far-reaching political and trade accords with the European Union that he has refused to sign . Some priests have even led prayer sessions in Independence Square, which protesters have occupied. “Our church is together with the people,” the Kyivan Patriarchate’s 84-year-old leader, Patriarch Filaret, said in an interview. “It supports Ukraine entering the European Union. We pray to God that he will help us enter the European Union in order to keep our statehood, to keep peace and to improve the life of the people.” On Wednesday, the demonstrators who have laid siege to public buildings in the rattled Ukrainian capital expanded their protest, blockading the central bank, setting up tents and lighting bonfires on the sidewalk outside. Protest leaders had vowed to surround more government buildings after the Ukrainian Parliament on Tuesday defeated a measure calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and his government. But as of Wednesday morning, their goal of blockading the presidential administration building had not been achieved. While the situation remained fluid, the protesters could count on the support of the church and of Filaret, whose oppositional posture provides a striking contrast to Patriarch Kirill I of the Russian Orthodox Church, a close and increasingly important ally of President Vladimir V. Putin. As Russia sought in recent months to persuade Ukraine and other former Soviet republics to turn away from the agreements with Europe, Kirill lent his own spiritual muscle to the effort — making a personal visit, for instance, to Moldova, where he denounced Europe and the West as places where “morals are simply disappearing.” Image People prayed at a protest camp in Kiev. The Kyivan Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has thrown its support behind the push for European integration. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times Filaret is neither as powerful nor as influential as Kirill. The Kyivan Patriarchate is one of three governing entities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, along with the Moscow Patriarchate, led by Metropolitan Volodymyr, who reports to Kirill, and the smaller Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. There are also many other faiths in Ukraine, including the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which dominates the western part of the country. Experts said pluralism made religious leaders less likely to echo the views of the government. “Ukraine has the most pluralistic religious market in Eastern Europe,” said Viktor Yelensky, president of the Ukrainian Association for Religious Liberty. “Because none of the churches unite more than a quarter of citizens, there is a balance of forces.” “In Russia,” he added, “there is a main church, which cooperates with the authorities, while in Ukraine the church is more dependent on the people.” A number of religious leaders in Ukraine, including Volodymyr, have issued statements condemning violence and urging a peaceful resolution to the unrest. Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, urged the authorities “not to permit the shedding of even a drop of blood,” and that church’s former leader, Lubomyr Husar, spoke at a large protest rally on Sunday. But the Kyivan Patriarchate has gone far beyond such statements, providing direct and active support to the uprising. The sheltering of dozens of beaten demonstrators in its monastery is regarded among protest organizers as a major turning point. “I don’t know who made the decision to go to St. Michael’s, but it was the right thing, in part because it rested on the whole concept of sanctuary,” said a Western diplomat observing the events here, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in accordance with diplomatic protocol. “The monks closed the gates, and that was the thing that gave them the time to reconstitute.” Yulia Onyschenko, 19, a student at Kiev Polytechnic Institute who was among those fleeing the violence, said church officials had protected the demonstrators as the police gave chase. “They closed all the gates, and there are a lot of gates,” Ms. Onyschenko said. “We’re very grateful.” Church officials gave the protesters tea and blankets, and many slept on carpets on the floor of the main cathedral as a monk chanted prayers through the night. Participants have described it as an almost mystical experience, recalling events about 800 years ago when people sought refuge from invading Tatars and Mongols in the original monastery, long since destroyed. “It’s very symbolic,” said Yuri Ignatenko, 27, an actor from Zhytomyr, about 85 miles west of Kiev. He has spent several nights in the church, and his eyes glistened as he recalled the nightlong prayer. Referring to the Ukrainian riot police, Mr. Ignatenko said, “The Berkut were like the Mongols who chased the people to the monastery.” “It’s very important that the church is supporting people without any motive, but sincerely,” he said. “We can feel it.” Image Women light candles at a cathedral in Kiev. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times By Saturday afternoon, more than 10,000 protesters had gathered in the square outside the monastery. Volunteers brought food and clothing and tossed cash into plastic bags put out by organizers. It was an unexpected precursor to the huge march and rally by hundreds of thousands of people on Sunday in which demonstrators seized control of Independence Square and several public buildings. “The church was always with the people,” said Yulia Solntsova, 28, a psychologist who spent Tuesday night at the monastery. In the interview on Tuesday at his downtown headquarters, one subway stop from Independence Square, Filaret said the protesters, and people throughout Ukraine, had reason to feel betrayed by Mr. Yanukovich. The president, Filaret said, had promised for more than a year that he would sign the accords, only to reverse course last month under heavy pressure from the Kremlin. “People really believed the president and believed in the government,” he said. Filaret added that he recognized the challenges organized religion has faced in Europe, but that the promise of freedom and independence for Ukraine was more important. “We are under no illusions about Europe,” he said. “Europe has its disadvantages. But it doesn’t mean that Europe stopped being Christian.” There are no illusions about Russia’s effort to keep a grip on Ukraine, either, Filaret said, adding that the tug of war between Europe and Russia created the risk of a new Cold War. “If Ukraine enters the European Union,” he said, “then a big democratic force is created in the world, which means Europe and the United States of America. This is a big democratic force based on freedom, technological progress and peace. And this force can influence the whole world.” Russia’s effort to derail the accords with Europe has been viewed by many here as an attempt to keep Ukraine stuck in Moscow’s orbit and to prevent improvements in public services, including the rule of law, and a general increase in quality of life. Older Ukrainians have bad memories of Soviet times, and so has the Orthodox Church here. In the 1930s, for instance, Soviet officials demolished St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, which was originally built in the 1100s and destroyed and rebuilt several times over the ensuing centuries. The complex was most recently rebuilt, modeled on an earlier design, in the 1990s. Filaret said he believed that Russia was seeking to maintain geopolitical leverage. “Without Ukraine, Russia does not have such big influence,” he said. The patriarch also had some advice, perhaps wishful. “My opinion, personal, about how we should exit from this situation: First, Ukraine’s entry into the European Union. Second: resignation of the government. If those conditions will be met, people will be happy with that.”

Kiev
Ukraine
Ukrainian Orthodox Church
Russia
Mykola Azarov
EU
Vladimir Putin


Harvard Gets the Better of Yale

Abstract: Harvard won the 147th Harvard-Yale Regatta, completing the four-mile downstream race on the Thames River in New London, Conn., in 19 minutes, 41.3 seconds. Yale finished in 19:51.2.

Harvard University
New London (Conn)
Yale University
Rowing


Yankees to Reduce Prices on Some Premium Seats

Abstract: The Yankees were unable to regularly fill their premium seats this season. With prices as high as $2,500 for the fanciest seats, fans found them just too expensive. So the team is cutting the price of some of the seats and rebranding them. Next season, the team says in its new premium-seating brochure, about 25 percent of the seats in the Legends Suite that hug the field from the outfield to the dugout on both sides of the field will be called the Champions Suite . The seats will cost between $300 and $500, if bought as part of full and 41-game season-ticket plans. The same seats as part of a 20-game package will cost an extra $25. The 507 seats have cost $500 and $650 since the end of April, when they were reduced from an opening-day range of $500 to $1,000, Fans in the Champions Suite will no longer have access to the Legends Club but will have in-seat waiter service and access to lounges along the first- and third-base lines. The highest-priced Legends Suite tickets have also been cut to $1,500 from $2,500. Last month, the Yankees said 84 percent of the tickets in the stadium would remain the same next year and another 13 percent would have their prices cut by about 25 percent. The prices for 3,400 field-level seats will decline to $250 or $235, from $325. Prices in the Delta Sky360 Suite and the Legends Suite were also cut, but the team did not say by how much at the time.

Yankee Stadium (NYC)
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)
Baseball
New York Yankees
Stadiums and Arenas