After Israeli Visit, a Diplomatic Sprint on Iran

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Now that President Obama has established what he called a “clear timetable” for Iran to halt its nuclear program — progress must be made by the end of the year, he declared on Monday — both American and Israeli officials are beginning to talk about how to accomplish that goal. But even after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ’s first visit to the White House on Monday, where he and Mr. Obama stressed common goals and played down their differences on strategy, it seemed clear that they still do not agree even on the basic question of how much time remains to stop Iran from gaining a nuclear weapons capability. So now begins Mr. Obama’s diplomatic sprint. His declaration Monday that “we’re not going to have talks forever” was a warning to the Iranians that his fundamentally different approach — serious American engagement with Tehran for the first time in three decades — must bear fruit before Iran clears the last technological hurdles to building a weapon. It is a strategy that some administration officials describe as “negotiations with pressure” — a combination of direct negotiations, reassurances that Washington is no longer seeking regime change in Iran, and an effort to persuade the ruling mullahs that the alternative to serious concessions will be painful: international sanctions that are far harsher and more tightly enforced than the weak mix of actions imposed so far by the United Nations Security Council . “There’s a three-way race going on here,” one of Mr. Obama’s strategists said the other day. “We’re racing to make diplomatic progress. The Iranians are racing to make their nuclear capability a fait accompli. And the Israelis, of course, are racing to come up with a convincing military alternative that could plausibly set back the Iranian program.” Neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Netanyahu made any reference on Monday to Israel ’s regular allusions to those alternatives. This was, after all, a first meeting. Their most obvious public differences were not over Iran at all. Instead, they centered on Mr. Obama’s insistence that Mr. Netanyahu should order an halt to new Jewish settlements in the West Bank before there can be any hope of serious negotiations with the Palestinians . True to form, Mr. Netanyahu said he was ready to restart the peace process but refused to say whether he viewed the creation of a Palestinian state as the ultimate goal. Mr. Obama pushed back — gently — saying that “all the parties involved have to take seriously obligations they have previously agreed to.” That seemed like enough of a public split for a first meeting. On Iran, the divisions are not as public. But they start with the fundamental issue of how much time remains to stop the Iranian program. “We’re looking at the same evidence,” Brigadier General Michael Herzog, the chief of staff to Israel’s minister of defense, said during a visit to Washington earlier this month. “We interpret it differently.” The American interpretation is that Iran could reach the capability to build a bomb any time between 2010 and 2015 — a window that cracks open right after Mr. Obama’s rough deadline to show that negotiations are working. But in their public comments, senior American intelligence officials say they think Iran would not have a serious nuclear capability until the end of that range. “We have some time,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insisted earlier this year. Mr. Herzog offered a grimmer assessment. “Under a certain scenario,” he said, if the Iranians decide to speed ahead, “they can have a first device by the end of 2010, perhaps the beginning of 2011, and that’s not very far away.” Presumably, that was why Mr. Obama went out of his way, with Mr. Netanyahu sitting next to him, to warn the Iranians that “we’re not going to create a situation in which talks become an excuse for inaction while Iran proceeds with developing a nuclear — and deploying — a nuclear weapon.” Mr. Obama’s strategy is based on a giant gamble: That after the Iranian elections on June 12, the way will be clear to convince the Iranians that it is in their long-term interest to strike a deal, trading their ability to produce their own nuclear fuel for a range of tempting rewards. For months, White House and State Department strategists have been debating just which incentives to offer the Iranians up front, and in what order. But they start with the prospect of opening the spigots of investment in Iran’s decrepit oil infrastructure, and even recognizing — and aiding — a civilian nuclear capability for Iran, as long as the country kept its hands off the nuclear fuel. Behind the scenes, there has been work on the other side of the ledger: How to escalate pressure if the Iranians drag their feet. Some tactics involve corner shots, like persuading the Chinese to stop blocking the imposition of some sanctions against Iran. And if, by year’s end, the Iranians still refuse serious negotiations, Mr. Obama’s aides have debated more extreme sanctions. One involves cutting off credit guarantees to European companies that do business with Iran. “That’s been impossible until now,” said one American official, “but it could become possible.” Mr. Obama raised a far more extreme possible sanction during his presidential campaign, though he has not discussed it publicly since his inauguration : Threatening to cut off the supply of refined petroleum products like gasoline to Iran. Of course, that would inevitably lead to Iranian cutoffs of crude oil exports, the country’s most effective conventional weapon. But Israeli officials express skepticism that any combination of new diplomatic openness and gradually escalating pressure will work. Their assessment is that Iran wants the bomb, full stop. Privately they raise doubts over whether Mr. Obama has really defined in his own mind what it is that constitutes, as he said on Monday, “moving in the right direction.” A senior Israeli who talked with journalists after the two leaders met said that to his mind, the only benchmark that really matters this year is a halt in Iran’s enrichment of uranium. Otherwise, he said, Iran just gets closer to a bomb capability every day that talks drag on.

Iran
Benjamin Netanyahu
Nuclear weapon
Israel
Barack Obama
US Foreign Policy


Dean Smith Was Pioneer in Use of Analytics

Abstract: For decades, Coach Dean Smith would tell his players, both at halftime and after a game, how many points they had scored and had allowed per possession. In the 1960s, he began to assign managers to track the statistic. “That was always something we went over,” said Jeff Lebo, now East Carolina’s head coach, who played for Smith at North Carolina from 1985 to 1989. “ ‘We’re 1.2 per possession, the other team’s 0.6.’ We knew what that meant.” Today, employing statistics that are calculated per possession — or per 100 possessions — is as commonplace as sending five men out on the floor. Most coaches and analysts consider such figures more useful than raw numbers, which are not adjusted for teams that play quickly or slowly. But Smith — who majored in mathematics at Kansas, and who told his longtime collaborator John Kilgo that he would have been happy to be a high school math teacher — emphasized possession-based analysis as early as 1959. “Forty years later,” said Dean Oliver, director of player personnel and analytics for the Sacramento Kings, “this was still below the radar.” Smith, who died Saturday at 83, is being remembered by his many fans, including President Obama, and his former players, including Michael Jordan, for his accomplishments on and off the court. To the list add this: Smith was one of the most innovative basketball coaches ever, and the most prominent early proponent of possession-based analysis, which is now standard operating procedure in college basketball and the N.B.A. “All signs point to him being the father of basketball analytics,” said Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets’ general manager and one of the leading proponents of advanced statistics in the sport. Smith was so ahead of the curve on basketball analytics that, as Morey noted, “it didn’t have that name at the time.” In an article on ESPN.com posted Sunday, the ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas wrote that Smith’s 1981 book, “Basketball: Multiple Offense and Defense,” was “still the best book on basketball I have ever read, and it was the first time I ever heard of ‘points per possession’ long before the current age of analytics.” Lebo said that frequently changing rules and rosters drove Smith’s innovations. The four-corners tactic that Smith loved to use — a way to drain the clock to protect a lead — helped push the Atlantic Coast Conference and then the N.C.A.A. to introduce the 45-second shot clock in the 1985-86 season. Smith won one national title before the shot clock, and one after it. Image Dean Smith’s 1981 book "Basketball: Multiple Offense and Defense." Similarly, Lebo said that North Carolina’s offense changed for the 1986-7 season, Lebo’s sophomore year, when the N.C.A.A. introduced a 3-point line. (The A.C.C. had experimented with one a few years earlier.) Smith used to demand that his players get the ball inside to big men for high-percentage shots, but after the introduction of the 3-point line, Smith designed plays to produce open looks for strong shooters like Lebo and Kenny Smith. “He was always really good at devising ways to play when the rules changed,” Lebo said. Even so, Smith’s favorite shot remained the free throw. “He was a firm believer that the best way to play offense was to get to the foul line,” Kilgo said. This tactic has been endorsed by advanced statisticians who value players, like the Rockets’ James Harden, who are good at being fouled and then converting. Like his other advances, Smith’s emphasis on per-possession statistics was a logical response to circumstances. Specifically, the college game’s talent disparity and more variable paces (first, without a shot clock; then, with a 45-second clock) made per-possession analysis especially useful. “Teams — especially in college, where Coach Smith coached — played at very different rates, especially prior to the shot clock,” Morey said. “So if you’re trying to judge how good of a defense you were, you couldn’t just look at the raw number of points you gave up. That wouldn’t tell you a lot. You had to look at points and divide it by chances.” In “Basketball: Multiple Offense and Defense,” Smith pointed to possession-based analysis as part of the “statistical basis” of his system. It seems likely, Kilgo said, that Smith also left an imprint on “The Importance of Possession Statistics,” a section of “Defensive Basketball,” a 1959 book by Frank McGuire, then North Carolina’s coach, for whom Smith was an assistant. The importance of possession statistics, then, was not a stray insight, but rather a key aspect of Smith’s worldview. In both books, its discussion appears in the opening pages. It was also seen as Smith’s distinctive innovation. According to another player Smith coached, Tony Shaver, now William & Mary’s head coach, per-possession statistics were known in the 1970s as Carolina efficiency ratings, in much the way that Bill Walsh’s 49ers schemes were called the West Coast offense. Although Smith was esteemed as brilliant and worldly, his innovations appeared to arise from no motive beyond competition. “He was pretty fearless in the causes that he stood for and also the things he did on the basketball court,” Kilgo said. “He never coached not to lose. He coached to win.”

Dean Smith
Statistics
College basketball
College Sports
NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness
NCAA
UNC


Fed Adopts Rules to Help Protect Mortgage Borrowers

Abstract: The Federal Reserve on Monday moved to end a controversial lending practice that had helped propel the housing boom to unsustainable heights and then accelerated its collapse. The Fed announced that it was adopting new rules banning yield spread premiums, which allowed mortgage brokers and lenders to gain additional profit from loans by charging borrowers higher-than-market interest rates. Reaction to the change was muted. For one thing, the recent package of financial reforms passed by Congress this summer already addressed the issue. And some thought a ban should have been imposed long ago, at a time when it could have directly affected loan quality. Michael D. Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, described the action as “a real milestone,” but he said that he had been trying to convince regulators for at least 15 years that yield spread premiums were no more than illegal kickbacks. Many borrowers had little idea of what a yield spread premium was, even when it was costing them money. Traditionally, mortgage brokers were paid directly by the home buyer. The rise of the premium allowed the brokers to be compensated by the lender as well. Lenders in effect started paying bonuses to brokers who brought them high-interest loans that were naturally coveted by mortgage investors. From there, critics said, it was a short step for some brokers to put unsuspecting buyers into these loans and tell them it was the best deal they could get. Subprime lenders in particular often used yield spread premiums. “People didn’t just happen to end up in risky loans,” Mr. Calhoun said. “Mortgage brokers and other people on the frontlines were getting two to three times as much money to push buyers into those loans than they were into 30-year fixed-rate loans. So what do you think happened?” Brokers argued that it was frequently in the interest of the borrower, especially a low-income buyer, to pay a higher rate in exchange for bringing less cash to closing. Attempts at reform achieved little, and during the housing boom the yield spread premiums became ever more prevalent. In many cases, groups like the Center for Responsible Lending found, borrowers never realized they were paying both higher fees and a higher rate. While the new rules prohibit payments to a lender or broker based on the loan’s interest rate, they do allow for compensation based on a fixed percentage of the loan amount. To avoid steering the buyer into a loan that is offering less favorable terms, the rules now say that the borrower must be provided with competing options, including the lowest qualifying interest rate, the lowest points and origination fees, and the lowest qualifying rate without risky features like prepayment penalties. The National Association of Mortgage Brokers, which had long argued that efforts to reform the premium unfairly singled out its members, pronounced itself satisfied with the new rules. The Fed rules “put everybody on the same footing,” including brokers and banks , said Roy DeLoach, executive vice president for the brokers’ association. The rules take effect in April. Similar, and in some ways broader, rules in the financial reform bill will take effect later.

Mortgages
Federal Reserve System
Credit and Debt
United States Economy
Banks and Banking


Agnes Varis Dies at 81; Founded Drug Company

Abstract: Agnes Varis, a daughter of threadbare immigrants who parlayed a chemistry degree and $50,000 into a profitable drug company, and in so doing became a prolific philanthropist whose causes included the Democratic Party, access to generic drugs and access to opera , died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 81. The cause was cancer , said her cousin Ted Leonsis, an entrepreneur who owns the Washington Capitals hockey team and the Washington Wizards basketball team. Ms. Varis, a leading figure in the generic-drug industry, was the founder and longtime chief executive of Agvar Chemicals, based in Little Falls, N.J. The company supplies active ingredients to international drug makers — in particular the makers of generic drugs. Privately held, Agvar has annual revenues between $50 million and $100 million, Bloomberg News reported in March. A major Democratic contributor, Ms. Varis gave the party’s candidates millions of dollars over the years. As The Wall Street Journal reported in 2006, after the election of President George W. Bush she paid tribute to his predecessor by adorning the front and rear of her Bentley with bumper stickers that read, “I miss Bill.” Ms. Varis’s long public advocacy of prescription-drug reform did little to endear her to the makers of those drugs. “Her roles as a drug executive, a Democrat and a gadfly are not always easy to reconcile,” read a New York Times profile of Ms. Varis in 2003. That, from all appearances, was putting it mildly. She helped draft the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984, intended to ease generics’ passage to market. She also helped draft the Greater Access to Affordable Pharmaceuticals Act, which was intended to close loopholes in the 1984 law. The legislation, sponsored by Senators Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, was passed as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. Though Ms. Varis stood to gain financially from such legislation, she said in interviews that her chief concern was to put low-price prescriptions in the hands of those who needed them. “The only way to make drugs affordable,” she told The Times in the 2003 article, “is to stop brand people from being greedy.” An ardent opera and jazz fan, Ms. Varis was at her death a managing director of the Metropolitan Opera, a position to which she had been recruited by the soprano and administrator Beverly Sills. In May 2010, Vanity Fair reported that she had given the company nearly $21 million. At the Met, Ms. Varis’s best-known projects included the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rush Tickets Program, which she and her husband inaugurated in 2006. The program — in essence a generic-drug plan for opera lovers seeking affordable infusions — makes orchestra seats available for $20 at many weekday performances. The seats normally cost $100 or more. Ms. Varis also underwrote several Met productions, including its premieres in 2008 of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” and John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic.” Last year, President Obama appointed her to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The youngest of eight children of Greek immigrants, Agnes Koulouvaris was born in Lowell, Mass., on Jan. 11, 1930, and reared in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Her father, who sold ice cream from a pushcart, died when she was 14. Her mother, who could neither read nor write, sewed buttons in a garment factory. The only one among the children to go to college, Agnes earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and English from Brooklyn College and later studied at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She shortened her surname to Varis on entering the business world. Ms. Varis, who said she deliberately avoided learning to type so as never to drown in a typing pool, took a job as a chemist with Fine Organics, a New Jersey manufacturer of industrial cleaning compounds. While there, she founded New Jersey Business Executives Against the Vietnam War, an initiative, she said afterward, that did not delight her boss. She became an executive vice president at Fine Organics before leaving to start Agvar with her life savings and her husband’s — $50,000. She later helped found Marsam Pharmaceuticals, a maker of injectable antibiotics , and Aegis Pharmaceuticals, a generic-drug maker. Ms. Varis’s husband, who owned a printing business, died in 2009. She leaves no known immediate survivors. Her other philanthropic projects included support of the Opera Orchestra of New York, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Jazz Foundation of America and Tufts University’s veterinary school. She helped found the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, an industry group, in 2000. Some years ago, Ms. Varis offered a consolation prize of sorts to the drug industry executives she so often antagonized: she bought and distributed among them 200 copies of her friend Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village,” autographed by the author.

Agvar Chemicals
Varis Agnes
Drugs (Pharmaceuticals)
Deaths (Obituaries)
Medicine and Health


Web Crime Glossary

Abstract: Bot Short for robot, a simple program that runs automated tasks on command. Botnet An army of bots connected via the Internet to perform arbitrary tasks such as automatically sending spam, transmitting more malware or disrupting Internet-based services. Malware A contraction of “malicious software,” malware is a general term meant to include different types of harmful software. Trojan A program that appears to be benign, like a Trojan horse, but in fact performs some malicious function. A typical trojan might be disguised as a computer game, but in fact be a keystroke-logging program intended to steal personal information. Virus A program that can attach itself to a digital document or application in order to duplicate itself, often in copies sent to another computer. Computer viruses can be spread by e-mail, compact disks, or USB drives. Worm A self-replicating program that can move from computer to computer via a network. Unlike viruses, worms do not need a host document or application, but propagate on their own. Zombie A computer that has, unknown to its owner, been taken over to perform some malicious task, often as a member of a botnet.

Computers and the Internet
Computer Security


Trail Blazers Send Knicks to Third Straight Loss

Abstract: PORTLAND, Ore. — The $19.5 million knee was back in Manhattan, with a small needle hole in it. The $19.9 million knee was recovering from surgery. The $13.6 million knee was wrapped in ice in the visitors locker room at the Rose Garden. All told, the Knicks were missing $53 million in knees on Thursday, all of them attached to All-Stars — the very core of their identity, their payroll and their self-image as contenders. In their place stood a collection of bargains, castoffs and creaky veterans, all with healthy knees but much less ability to change a game, or the course of a calamitous road trip. The Knicks were competitive for a time, getting an offensive burst from J. R. Smith and some vintage performances from Marcus Camby and Kurt Thomas, but they ultimately succumbed to the younger, healthier Portland Trail Blazers, 105-90. Damian Lillard, the spectacular rookie point guard, paced the Blazers (30-34) with 26 points and 10 assists and thoroughly outplayed the former Blazer Raymond Felton, to the delight of the crowd, which gleefully booed Felton all night. The defeat left the Knicks 0-3 on this five-game trip, which continues Sunday against the Los Angeles Clippers. By then, the Knicks can only hope to have Carmelo Anthony and Tyson Chandler, and their knees, back in the lineup. “No matter if they come back or not, we still got to figure out how to stop the bleeding,” Jason Kidd said. The Knicks (38-25) have lost five of their last eight games, with and without their stars, and have seen their Atlantic Division lead cut to a single game over the Nets. But it is the injuries that remain their foremost concern. Anthony was in New York on Thursday, having fluid drained from the back of his right knee, after spending more than three weeks fighting stiffness and soreness as his game deteriorated. He is expected to rejoin the team Friday in Los Angeles and is considered questionable for Sunday’s game. Chandler missed his first game of the season on Thursday after bruising his left knee a night earlier in Denver. He said afterward that the knee had improved and that he might be able to play Sunday. Chandler, the bedrock of the Knicks’ defense, was the only Knick to have started every game this season. Amar’e Stoudemire, of course, had already been lost to knee surgery, which will keep him on the sideline for the rest of the regular season. Image Iman Shumpert of the Knicks drives against Damian Lillard. Credit Greg Wahl-Stephens/Associated Press So Coach Mike Woodson deployed every imaginable lineup Thursday, combining old and young, reliable and not-so-reliable. The 40-year-old Thomas rejoined the starting lineup, along with the rookie Chris Copeland and the 35-year-old Kenyon Martin, who made his first start as a Knick. At times, Woodson used Kidd, Thomas and the 38-year-old Marcus Camby together. Smith, the Knicks’ only healthy scorer, provided 33 points, going 11 for 21 from the field and leading a fourth-quarter rally that fell short. Smith hit three 3-pointers early in the fourth as the Knicks knocked the deficit from 16 points to 4. But LaMarcus Aldridge answered with a layup, and Lillard and Nicolas Batum combined for three 3-pointers to put the game away. It was an improvement over the blowout losses the Knicks absorbed in Golden State and Denver, but not by much. “I thought tonight we were a little bit better, in terms of competing,” Woodson said. “But at the end of the night, it’s still a loss.” It was a noisy loss, with fans loudly booing Felton — retribution for his brief stint with the Blazers last season. Felton was out of shape and generally awful, and he was widely blamed for the Blazers’ ills. The fans reminded him of his failures every chance they got. The booed every time Felton touched the ball, which was often, since he is after all a point guard. A few signs poked fun at his being overweight last season. Felton, who has never been an All-Star — or even a particularly noteworthy player — enjoyed his curious moment in the spotlight. He dribbled through the boos and smiled puckishly after hitting an early jumper. The boos kept coming. And when Felton shot a 23-foot air ball, the fans howled in delight. “It was my first time ever,” Felton said of the constant booing. He smiled wide, almost proudly. “First time ever for my career, man.” Considering his Blazers career lasted just 60 games, Felton had to chuckle a bit at the outsize reaction. “I guess I did make a big impact, if they booed me like that,” he said. It was ’80s night at the Rose Garden, and the public-address system blasted Twisted Sister, Run-DMC and Eurythmics. The Knicks did their part by deploying a lineup old enough to know who those bands were. Thomas played 24 minutes, finishing with seven rebounds. Kidd, who turns 40 next week, played 34 minutes. Camby played 19 minutes, finishing with 10 rebounds and 8 points. And Martin played 31 minutes, finishing with 12 points and a memorable dunk. The old guys can still play a little. The Knicks will surely need them again.


Lockheed’s Profit on F-35 Will Rise With New Pentagon Contract

Abstract: Lockheed Martin expects to earn a profit in the high single digits under a new contract signed last week for the fifth batch of its radar-evading F-35 fighter planes, company officials said. Lockheed executives have said the company earned about 4 percent during its decade-long effort to design and develop the plane. The company signed the latest contract, to build 32 planes, on Friday. It came after a year of contentious negotiations with the Pentagon, which has dealt with a series of cost overruns and delays in creating the sophisticated jets. The F-35, the Pentagon’s largest program, could cost $396 billion if the military builds more than 2,400 planes for the Air Force, Navy and Marines. Pentagon officials said the price of each plane would drop by 4 percent in the fifth batch from the fourth. Excluding the engines, its target price is $105 million for each of 22 planes for the Air Force, $113 million for each of three planes for the Marines and $125 million for each of seven planes for the Navy. The Pentagon will require Lockheed to cover a slightly larger share of any cost overruns than it did on the last batch. The company will also have to fix some of the technical problems with the planes without earning a profit on that work. The effort to develop three versions of the same plane has been complicated, making the program a tempting target for budget cutters. But Pentagon officials said basic versions of the planes were performing well in flight tests, and the Air Force approved plans on Monday to begin training pilots at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Col. Andrew Toth, a wing commander there, said the Air Force hoped to begin operating the new planes in 2016.

F-35 Airplane
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Military Aircraft
Defense Department


With Profits Slipping, Cisco Plans to Cut Jobs

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Cisco Systems may be doing a little better than Wall Street expects, considering its technology and sales challenges. But that does not mean the company will avoid layoffs in the coming months. On Wednesday, Cisco released fourth-quarter earnings that illustrated its troubles as one of the tech industry’s giants competing in a rapidly changing environment. In a conference call with investors and analysts, Cisco executives said the company planned to cut up to 6,000 jobs, or 8 percent of its work force, in the coming months. They offered no specific timeline for the cuts. Long the dominant player in hardware that ships the world’s digital information around and between computer centers, Cisco faces challenges from younger companies that, while far from toppling the company from its perch as one of tech’s bellwethers, have made it harder for it to command the profit margins it once did. Fourth-quarter revenues, Cisco said, were $12.36 billion, down from $12.42 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Net income was $2.25 billion, or 43 cents a share, down from $2.27 billion a year ago. Using nonstandard accounting common to many tech companies, Cisco had fourth-quarter net income of $2.8 billion, or 55 cents a share. The results from the quarter were slightly higher than the $12.14 billion in revenue, and per-share earnings of 53 cents, projected by a survey of analysts by Thomson Reuters. John Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive, was a star salesman at IBM early in his career. He has long sought to move Cisco toward the kind of software and business consulting that saved IBM when its computer hardware business stumbled in the early 1990s. In Cisco’s case, the goal is to sell governments and companies on developing new kinds of large, sensor-rich networks. But while this direction holds promise, it has yielded relatively little business. Cisco has also been pushing something called an “Intercloud,” a kind of high-performance series of cloud computing systems. “Cloud is an area where we are making significant investments to fuel our future growth,” Mr. Chambers said in the call, adding that significant earnings from this were still some time off. For its recent fiscal year, which ended July 26, Cisco’s revenue was $47.14 billion, down 3 percent. Net income was $7.85 billion, down 21 percent. Cisco has recently repurchased many shares, so per-share income for the year of $1.49 was down by 20 percent. The price of Cisco shares fell about 1.4 percent in after-hours trading. “We are executing well in a tough environment,” Mr. Chambers said in a statement. The company’s business focus, he said, is in areas like “security, data center, software, cloud and Internet of everything,” or sensor-rich networks. All of these areas are growing quickly, and tend to be highly profitable. While business in emerging markets and with traditional communications service providers continues to be weak, he said, growth in new areas such as advanced computer servers for data centers was encouraging. “We’re far from finished,” Mr. Chambers said.


Despite Pledges, Tax Reform Remains an Elusive Goal

Abstract: MANCHESTER, N.H. — From a distance, tax reform reflects the shimmering frontier of American economic policy: bold plans from Republican presidential candidates, hints of interest from the White House and Hillary Clinton, bipartisan whispers in Congress. Up close, however, the picture dims. For reasons both economic and political, the idea of a fundamental overhaul that closes loopholes, lowers rates and simplifies the tax code faces a deeply uncertain future regardless of who controls the White House and Congress in 2017. The first grim sign came in 2014. Dave Camp, a broadly respected Republican and, at the time, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, spent months crafting a bipartisan plan bounded by two core requirements. One was remaining “deficit neutral,” since budget red ink has alarmed so many Americans since it increased in the Great Recession. The other was ensuring that the overhaul would be “distributionally neutral,” meaning it wouldn’t deliver outsize benefits to the wealthy amid rising concern about income inequality. The plan collapsed immediately. Just as so often in the past, those who fared worse under the plan (like large Wall Street firms facing a new “too big to fail” tax) outshouted those subject to lower rates. The second sign has come from the presidential race. As Republicans scrambled to raise campaign cash last year, they proposed sweeping overhauls. Jettisoning the limitations that constrained Mr. Camp, they looked to cut the top income tax rate of 39.6 percent to as low as 10 percent, which Senator Ted Cruz of Texas proposed under a flat rate. But as on-the-ground campaigning intensified in Iowa and New Hampshire, those plans were elbowed aside. Republican candidates rely increasingly on working-class voters, who have less interest than donors in cutting rates for top earners. Terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., suddenly placed security fears at center stage. Thus, in the Republican debate last week, candidates referred to “ISIS” 44 times. The phrase “tax reform” was uttered once, by Mr. Cruz. A third splash of cold water came last week from the White House, which has long been lukewarm about efforts to change the tax code. In a speech, a top adviser for President Obama explained why: Potential benefits are not worth the immense political trouble. Jason Furman, who leads Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said that a commission appointed by President George W. Bush estimated in 2005 that a fundamental tax overhaul would add less than 1 percent to long-run national economic output. By contrast, increases since 1986 in tax credits for low- and moderate-income workers and parents, which hardly simplify the tax code, have increased by 7 percent the take-home pay for the bottom 40 percent of earners. The allure of simplicity itself, Mr. Furman argued, is largely a chimera. “Most of the complexity in the tax code derives from efforts to accurately measure” income, he explained, rather than from deductions for things like mortgage interest and charitable contributions. Some Republican experts have urged party leaders to turn away from rate-slashing overhaul plans. “Big tax cuts, particularly for the wealthiest, do not work in an age of high inequality and heavy debt,” James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute wrote recently. With the number of people collecting Social Security projected to swell to 65 million in 2025, from 49 million in 2015, that hurdle will grow higher. Mr. Furman acknowledged that overhauling business taxes — the United States’ corporate tax rate of 35 percent is the highest of any advanced economy — carried the potential for greater benefits. Mrs. Clinton sees similar benefits. But while denouncing the “perversion” of corporate tax avoidance to campaign audiences, she hasn’t outlined a plan to overhaul corporate taxes and may not do so this year. Republican leaders in the House and Senate have made overhauling corporate taxes a major goal. But they disagree on when and how to move forward. The last comprehensive tax overhaul in the United States came 30 years ago. The next one won’t come soon, or easily.

Tax
Income tax
Corporate tax
2016 Presidential Election
US


U.S.C.’s Cameron Balances Basketball and Motherhood

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — When Brynn Cameron is awakened at dawn by the little man of the house, she rubs the sleep from her eyes and gets ready for the start of another day. After a breakfast of eggs, oatmeal and fresh orange juice, she and her curly haired, chubby-cheeked, 2-year-old son, Cole, play games, run errands or watch “Madagascar” for the umpteenth time. Only occasionally does it occur to Cameron that this routine as a single mother and a student-athlete is different from that of her teammates on the University of Southern California basketball team. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like,” Cameron, a senior, said on the eve of the Pacific-10 Conference tournament . “I almost forgot what it was like not having Cole. Taking naps and going out — it’s so far behind me.” Juggling basketball, books and a bouncing boy is complicated enough, but because Cole’s father is Matt Leinart , a former Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback at U.S.C. who is now with the Arizona Cardinals, Cameron’s balancing act is sometimes a public one. When Cole attends her games — using empty seats as a jungle gym or sitting in the lap of his aunt or grandmother — fans stop to take pictures. When Cameron and Leinart attended custody hearings, it made for salacious reports on entertainment Web sites. A photograph of Cameron with Cole appeared in People magazine. This has been an adjustment for someone who is comfortable in her own skin, but not in the limelight. Cameron, 22, met Leinart as a freshman when he introduced himself during study hall. They shared a laugh about how they wore the same uniform number, 11. Cameron said she had been uneasy with Leinart’s celebrity but was won over by his charm and by the goofy sense of humor they shared. They dated for more than a year but broke up near the end of Leinart’s senior season. Soon after, Cameron learned she was pregnant. She said her once-strained relationship with Leinart has become amicable. During football season, Leinart flies to Los Angeles on Monday, his off day, to be with Cole, and he sees his son regularly in the off-season at his home in Manhattan Beach. Leinart did not return telephone calls seeking comment for this article. “We still fight and disagree on things,” Cameron said. “We’re both on the same page now for what we want with our son. We’ll be in each other’s lives forever, so we may as well get along and make the most of it.” News of Cameron’s pregnancy was too good for late-night comedy writers to pass up. For Cameron, there were the barbs calling her a gold digger, eager to tap the guaranteed $14 million that Leinart would receive from the Cardinals, not to mention his endorsements. “I was already devastated that I was pregnant,” Cameron said. “Then being pregnant and having it so public, emotionally, I can’t deal with this. There were times when I would break down — why is this so public, why do people care? After a while, you learn to not listen, to not care.” Cameron turned to her safest haven, her family. Her parents, Stan and Cathy Cameron, met as students at Brigham Young, where Stan played basketball. They married and had four children in five years. Because they moved en masse in those early years, the Cameron children became as close socially as they were in age. But within that environment, the children were encouraged to think for themselves. When Brynn, a Mormon like the rest of her family, was turned off by a religiously tinged recruiting pitch from B.Y.U., her parents backed her decision to attend U.S.C. So when Cameron told her parents that she was pregnant and intended to keep the baby, she knew which question would come next: Did she want to marry Leinart? “I was young and a lot of people said, ‘Oh, it makes it easier to get married,’ ” Cameron said. “But I was 19, Matt was off doing his thing. We had completely different lifestyles, and I don’t think either of us were willing to change.” She added: “I had so much support. I knew I could do it. I didn’t need a husband to make it O.K.” Cameron gave birth to Cole in October 2006 and took the year off from U.S.C., moving back home with her parents in Newbury Park, a suburb 50 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. When Cameron returned to campus, her parents followed, renting a nearby apartment. They cook and baby-sit, and Cathy travels to all of U.S.C.’s away games so Brynn can bring Cole along. That a woman basketball player would take time off to have a child is not unheard of — particularly here. Lisa Leslie, the former star of the W.N.B.A.’s Los Angeles Sparks, did so in 2007, and the team’s current marquee player, Candace Parker, is pregnant. Both have been celebrated for putting family first; Parker even appeared on the cover of ESPN the Magazine, smiling and cradling her stomach. In August, Cameron’s brother Jordan, a basketball player at B.Y.U. who transferred to U.S.C. to play football, moved in with her. The support Cameron has received — not just from her family, but from professors, coaches, friends and teammates — has left her appreciative. She knows that many single mothers her age are on their own. Although she has been encouraged by some in sports television to pursue a career in that field, she has been looking into starting a foundation to help single mothers. The transition back to basketball has not been so fulfilling. She loves the game, but after two hip operations unrelated to her pregnancy, she is not the same player who sank 72 3-pointers as a freshman, helping U.S.C. to the N.C.A.A. tournament. Cameron still has occasional moments. She scored a combined 33 points in consecutive victories over Oregon and Oregon State. But her biggest contribution is her leadership. “We call her Mom,” said guard Camille LeNoir, a senior. “She’s so responsible.” Cameron’s career will end unless the Trojans (15-14, 9-9) can win three Pac-10 tournament games in three days to advance to the N.C.A.A. tournament. They open on Friday against 16th-ranked Arizona State (23-7, 15-3). Cameron stood with her fellow seniors on the court before their final regular-season home game. She held a bouquet of flowers in one arm, Cole in the other and had her parents at her side. She could not contain her emotions, dabbing tears from her cheeks. She will soon have a degree in sociology and is ready to move on — even if she is not quite sure where. In that way, she is not so different. “I wouldn’t trade anything for what it is now, because it wasn’t the same path I thought I would take,” Cameron said. “You know, it’s the journey.”

Basketball
Single Mothers
University of Southern California
Parenting
Athletics and Sports
College Athletics
Leinart Matt
Cameron Brynn


Rangers and Knicks Share Owner, but Little Else

Abstract: GREENBURGH, N.Y. — The two teams in the Madison Square Garden empire practice perhaps 100 yards apart, their locker rooms separated by a long hallway. Some days, like Tuesday, they each practice at the Madison Square Garden Training Center, and they eat in a common lunch room. It is the one place the Rangers and the Knicks actually talk to each other. Or at least exchange hellos. From the Rangers’ point of view, the Knicks operate in a sort of parallel universe, separated by something deeper than distance. Their playing fortunes could hardly be more different. The Rangers are 16-12-2, a point out of first place in their division, and looking to contend for a championship this season. The Knicks (6-14) are struggling to avoid public ridicule. “We’re definitely friendly with each other, but they’re doing their thing and we’re doing our thing,” Rangers forward Sean Avery said. “We see them, but we don’t. Everybody’s cool with each other, but we’re in different worlds, I think, with the same owner.” That owner, Cablevision, presides over two teams that are vastly different, not only because of their records. Their worlds may sometimes bump into each other over lunch, but their conversations rarely go much deeper than wishing each other luck in their next game. On Tuesday, the Knicks were reeling from their latest loss and controversy, and the Rangers were coming off a cathartic victory over the Devils. These days, the Rangers generate little controversy away from the playing arena; such occurrences seem to be a Knicks staple. Most of the Rangers live in Manhattan; the Knicks largely stay in Westchester County. Many Rangers ride the subway to the Garden. When they drive to practice here, they enter the same secure players parking lot as the Knicks do, parking their Land Rovers and BMWs alongside the Knicks’ flashier cars, a collection that includes a Bentley. “You see a lot of Rolls-Royces down there, big trucks with nice tires and rims on them,” Rangers forward Ryan Hollweg said. “A lot of that has to do with their salaries, and how different they are as well.” As forward Brendan Shanahan added: “The difference is, we’re in parking spaces and they just park anywhere. We actually park in the lines. They just pull up to the door and get out of the car.” The Rangers say the in-person exchanges among the players are always pleasant. The players seem to know how the other team did in its previous game, although few probably saw more than a passing highlight or headline. The bigger news stories, like the sexual harassment trial involving Coach Isiah Thomas , caused some raised eyebrows among the Rangers. But they insist they do not revel in the image of being the functional part of the empire, perhaps looking even better compared with the dysfunction down the hall. “We’re M.S.G., so we’re all in it together,” Rangers center Scott Gomez said. “When you see things in the papers, you feel bad for some of those guys, what they’re going through.” The way the Garden management sees it, the teams are not so different. The Rangers were struggling several years ago. As recently as the 2003-4 season, some fans at Rangers games would chant for the firing of General Manager Glen Sather. That was nearly four years into Sather’s tenure, and the team showed little sign of ending its streak of failing to reach the postseason, which dated to 1997. The Rangers have made the playoffs the last two seasons, after a lockout brought in a salary cap and the team began to develop its own talent to go with its big-ticket free agents. The Rangers now have a seemingly harmonious mix. While Garden officials were giving Thomas a vote of confidence in recent days, they drew a parallel to sticking with Sather through the low spots. Thomas, they pointed out, is four years into his job. But the gap can hardly be papered over that easily. “Hockey and basketball, it’s different,” said Jaromir Jagr , the Rangers’ captain. “In basketball, I would say it’s about one guy if you want to have a successful team. He’s on the court all the time. He’s got the ball all the time. He can be the difference. It’s different in hockey, where you have to have a team. “I think they’re just waiting for the one guy.” The Rangers recognize that the Knicks are the higher-profile team, whether they are winning or losing. The players are more recognizable because of their size, and because they do not wear the helmets and visors that hockey players wear. Their sport also receives far more national attention. But the teams play under New York’s intense spotlight. They share a renowned arena filled with fans who remember the glory days and want them back. “I don’t know anything about basketball, and I’m sure they don’t know anything about hockey,” Shanahan said. “But being a professional athlete, especially playing in New York at the Garden, you probably have more in common than you realize. We definitely root for them.” Still, Shanahan, a 20-year veteran, said he liked the atmosphere in the Rangers’ half of the empire. He likes that they make their news almost exclusively on the ice. He likes that most of his teammates live in the city. He likes riding the subway from his home on the Upper West Side. “What other team does that?” he said, smiling. “We’re New York’s team.”

Madison Square Garden
New York Rangers
New York Knicks
Hockey Ice
Thomas Isiah
Shanahan Brendan
Jagr Jaromir


Clues to Framework of the Satyam Fraud in India

Abstract: NEW DELHI — How did B. Ramalinga Raju , the chairman of one of India’s largest information technology companies, carry out the biggest financial fraud in this country’s history? Apparently it does take a village. And although the billion-dollar fraud at Satyam has been called this country’s Enron, an examination of the company’s accounting suggests the scandal may more closely resemble the fraud cases at HealthSouth and Peregrine Software. A little over two weeks ago, Mr. Raju confessed to padding the company’s balance sheet by $1 billion in cash. But investigators now suspect he was less forthcoming than it first appeared. According to a person involved in the case, investigators think at least some of Satyam’s cash reserves were genuine but were siphoned off to a web of companies controlled by Mr. Raju and his family. This explanation is more plausible than Mr. Raju’s version of events, accountants and analysts said. Sales figures and earnings statements are relatively easy to manipulate, but lying about a company’s cash position is considered difficult. “It is hard to believe that what he is saying is right,” said Saurabh Mukherjea, an analyst for the Noble Group, a British investment bank. “The scale of the cash manipulation is breathtaking and without precedent anywhere in the world.” In September, Mr. Mukherjea used a computer model to examine India’s 500 largest public companies for signs of accounting manipulation. He found that more than 20 percent of them were potentially engaged in aggressive accounting, but Satyam was not on the list. This is because the automated screens that analysts like Mr. Mukherjea use to pick up signs of fraud begin by searching for large discrepancies between reported earnings and cash flow. In Satyam’s case, the cash seemed to keep pace with profits. But Kawaljeet Saluja, an analyst from Kotak Securities, an Indian investment bank, spotted a puzzling phenomenon. From December 2006 through September 2008, the company’s total Indian bank deposits remained more or less flat. But over that period the portion of that money kept in current accounts, which allow easy access to cash but earn little interest, increased more than sevenfold. Mr. Saluja quizzed the company’s management during a September conference call. Satyam’s former chief financial officer, Srinivas Vadlamani, said the money would soon be transferred to higher-earning accounts. Mr. Saluja pointed out that for the last four quarters “most of the incremental cash flows have been parked in current accounts” and asked Mr. Vadlamani again to “highlight a reason for it.” Mr. Vadlamani brushed the question aside. Today, Mr. Vadlamani is in jail, charged along with Mr. Raju and his brother, B. Rama Raju, a former Satyam director, with conspiracy to commit fraud, cheating and forgery. S. Bharat Kumar, the lawyer for the men, could not be reached for comment. The presence of large sums of cash in current accounts could be further evidence money was being siphoned from the company, according to Mayur Joshi, an Indian forensic accountant. The Satyam scandal bears only passing similarity to Enron, where top executives used a maze of special-purpose vehicles and related-party transactions to move liabilities off the company’s balance sheet. Instead, Satyam may have more in common with HealthSouth, the rehabilitation services company that barely survived an accounting fraud uncovered in 2003, and Peregrine Software, which inflated revenue and earnings by hundreds of millions of dollars until prosecutors caught up with the company, also in 2003. At HealthSouth, according to prosecutors, senior executives engaged in a conspiracy from 1996 through 2002 that inflated the company’s profits by $2.7 billion. Executives used a variety of techniques, including falsifying entries in the company’s accounting system. They also resorted to outright forgery, generating bank statements for 20 fake accounts that allowed the company to overstate cash reserves by more than $370 million. At Peregrine, prosecutors said, executives also falsified accounting entries to record nonexistent sales. At Satyam, investigators say they are beginning to see signs of similar tactics. K. Ajay Kumar, a public prosecutor, said that investigators had found one forged deposit receipt for an account with the Indian bank HDFC. Other forged bank statements also have been found, according to Indian news reports. Such forgeries may explain why Satyam’s auditors, Price Waterhouse, the Indian arm of the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers, failed to raise the alarm. In HealthSouth’s case, its auditor, Ernst & Young, contended it was duped by the company’s management, which presented it with fraudulent data. A number of investor groups, however, are still suing the accountants for failing to detect the scam. Price Waterhouse has said it was unaware of Satyam’s inflated financial figures until Mr. Raju revealed them. Investigators are not so sure. Over the weekend, police arrested two Price Waterhouse accountants who oversaw the audit of Satyam’s books, charging them with criminal conspiracy and cheating. Elaborate frauds like those at HealthSouth are extremely difficult for investors to detect simply by reading published financial statements. But when several accounting professors analyzed HealthSouth’s statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission after that scandal, they did find some irregularities — and some of these are present in Satyam’s S.E.C. filings, too. (Because its stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, as well as in India, Satyam had to file financial statements with the S.E.C.). One is erratic fluctuations in the amount a company reserves for uncollectible credit sales. In 2005, according to Satyam’s S.E.C. filings, its revenue grew about 40 percent and its allowance for bad debts grew about 9 percent. The company reported similar numbers the next year. But in 2007, the company reported that revenue increased by a smaller amount — only 33 percent — and yet the company’s allowance for bad debt suddenly rose 19 percent. It leaped another 36 percent last year. The amount of bad debt the company actually wrote off annually varied wildly, but as with HealthSouth, it was always only a fraction of what the company had estimated. Such data hints that at the very least Satyam’s management might have been massaging the company’s earnings to meet stock market expectations. A footnote in Satyam’s 2007 and 2008 financial statements might have raised eyebrows too. It warned of an unquantified “increase in the collection period” for credit sales. The fraud at Peregrine began to unravel, in part, when the company, which had been booking fake credit sales, went to desperate lengths to conceal the growth in the amount of uncollectible revenue it was booking and the length of time customers were taking to pay. There are other oddities in Satyam’s books, like fluctuations in the amount of unbilled revenue the company recorded. Unbilled revenue is work done for a customer but not yet invoiced. Analysts who follow outsourcing companies like to see unbilled revenue because it represents future earnings. But there is little documentation associated with the number, so unbilled revenue is easy to fudge. One of the central pieces of the Peregrine fraud was the sale of receivables, many of them fraudulent, to banks. This technique, sometimes called factoring, generated cash on the company’s books. But in Peregrine’s case, the company was selling receivables it knew to be fake, and it often promised the banks to which it was selling them that it would cover any nonpayment from its customers. This meant the money the company received should have been booked as a loan and not as operating cash. Again, at Satyam there is some evidence that factoring may have been used to inflate sales and profits as well as generate cash. Mr. Raju has told investigators that he had secretly pledged Satyam’s receivables from January to March 2009 to raise $245 million, according to accounts in the Indian press. In his resignation letter, Mr. Raju took pains to say that Satyam’s directors and senior executives had no knowledge of the fraud. But if there is a final lesson of the HealthSouth and Peregrine scandals, it is that such elaborate financial games are usually the work of a large conspiracy. The chief executive or even the chief financial officer rarely acts alone. At Peregrine, the government ultimately charged 18 people with involvement in the scam. At HealthSouth, more than 17 executives, including five former chief financial officers, pleaded guilty to fraud-related charges. In what might be an instructive tale for Mr. Raju, who is as politically connected in his home state of Andhra Pradesh as Richard M. Scrushy, HealthSouth’s charismatic founder, was in his home state of Alabama, Mr. Scrushy fought the fraud charges and was ultimately acquitted by a jury in 2005. But a year later, he was found guilty of bribing Alabama’s governor for a seat on a state hospital board and was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison.

Outsourcing
Satyam Computer Services Ltd
Raju B Ramalinga
Frauds and Swindling
Accounting and Accountants


For The Hartford Courant, 250 Years in Print

Abstract: At a time when many newspapers are just trying to survive, it is hard to think of them lasting another century. But The Hartford Courant, which published its first issue on Oct. 29, 1764, will celebrate its 250th anniversary this week. Thomas Green, the paper’s founder, started printing a one-page edition of what then was called The Connecticut Courant. According to a history reported by The Courant’s staff, much of the early paper included news from outside Hartford, including the growing dissatisfaction with British rule, and notices about slave and liquor auctions as well as lost livestock. Over the years, its pages became filled with boldface names throughout history: George Washington took out an advertisement to rent part of his land at Mount Vernon. Thomas Jefferson lost a libel lawsuit. Mark Twain stopped by the offices and wrote for The Courant on occasion. For much of this year, The Courant has been publishing monthly special issues on statewide topics like race and equality, innovation in Connecticut, and arts and popular culture. On Friday night, it held a gala with elected officials from Connecticut. Image The first issue of the newspaper, formerly called The Connecticut Courant, was published in 1764. Credit Connecticut Historical Society On Wednesday, the paper will have a birthday cake and cocktails for its staff. The Connecticut Historical Society is also hosting a monthlong exhibit on The Courant that features an early press and a copy of the first issue of the newspaper. While readers have responded with praise for the sections, these celebrations have also helped The Courant financially. Nancy Meyer, the publisher and chief executive, said the anniversary coverage had attracted new advertisers like the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox and United Technologies, which wanted to be sponsors and advertise in its special issues. “It has certainly been a revenue generator,” Ms. Meyer said. While the anniversary may not bring back print subscribers, The Courant has held onto a critical mass of them. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, which has tracked circulation of The Hartford Courant since 1919, the paper’s Sunday circulation peaked in 1993 at 323,892. The Courant’s most recent publisher’s statement shows its total Sunday circulation is 180,584 and its average circulation Monday through Friday is 120,473. Ms. Meyer credits The Courant’s long survival partly to the reading habits of Connecticut residents. A spokesman for Tribune Publishing, which owns The Hartford Courant, said Hartford and New Haven have among the highest concentration nationwide of adults who read a daily newspaper every week. Diana McCain, head of the Research Center at the Connecticut Historical Society, said that through the decades, The Courant has tried to remain adaptable, “whether switching from weekly to daily publication in 1837 or expanding onto the Internet 150 years later.” Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, says The Courant has survived at a time when many other papers have gone under because the paper appreciates how much Connecticut residents want news about their communities. “The Hartford Courant seems to recognize that,” Mr. Carroll said. “They cover the local news. They cover the neighbors.”

Hartford Courant
Newspaper
Connecticut Historical Society
Hartford Connecticut


A Fourth Budget Carrier Halts Operations

Abstract: HONG KONG — Oasis Hong Kong Airlines, a long-haul budget carrier that tried to offer premium service and spacious seats at low prices, suddenly went into liquidation on Wednesday and canceled all flights. It was the fourth budget carrier worldwide to halt operations in the last week and a half. The bankruptcy filing by Oasis stranded thousands of passengers in Hong Kong, London and Vancouver. Many of the would-be passengers stuck in Hong Kong are children trying to return to British boarding schools after spring break. High jet-fuel prices have taken a heavy toll on the airline industry and particularly on low-margin budget carriers. The other three to shut down since March 31, all in the United States, are Aloha Airgroup, ATA Airlines and Skybus Airlines. The spate of bankruptcies threatens to undermine travelers’ confidence in budget carriers. But airline industry experts say that Oasis’s business model of punctual, top-notch service and lots of legroom at discount prices made it especially vulnerable as crude oil prices passed $100 a barrel. For other budget carriers, the lesson of Oasis’s demise is that “they have to pack more seats and more passengers into their aircraft,” said Derek Sadubin, the chief operating officer of the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, a consulting company in Sydney. Stephen Miller, the chief executive of Oasis, said at a brief news conference on Wednesday that the carrier still hoped to find an investor to buy its operations. But Eva Cheng, Hong Kong’s secretary for transportation and housing, said the company had made a voluntary filing for liquidation on Wednesday morning only after lengthy negotiations with a possible investor broke down on Tuesday. Ms. Cheng said the sudden cessation of service by Oasis was particularly troubling because it came at a time when many flights on other carriers were already fully booked — and many children, some traveling without adults, were trying to return to school in Britain. Virtually all civil servants in Hong Kong, a former British colony, are eligible for a taxable government allowance that covers more than half the cost of sending children to boarding school in Britain. An estimated 40,000 young people from Hong Kong attend schools in Britain. The High Court in Hong Kong appointed the accounting company KPMG on Wednesday as the provisional liquidators of Oasis, which was started in October 2006 by Raymond and Priscilla Lee, a wealthy Hong Kong couple active in real estate and philanthropic causes. Oasis operated four roomy Boeing 747-400s with twin aisles on its nearly 13-hour flights from Hong Kong to London and Vancouver. But the planes also have four engines, which gulped fuel. Oasis was an unusual hybrid of the new all-business-class airlines now appearing over the Atlantic and the inexpensive economy-class carriers spreading around the world. It allocated 22 percent of its seats to business class and charged as little as a third of the prices of one competitor, Cathay. It sought a niche among travelers who dread long flights in economy class but are reluctant to pay $6,300 round trip for business class.

Hong Kong
Oasis Hong Kong Airlines
Bankruptcies
Airlines and Airplanes
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)


Days Before Election in Turkey, Blasts at Rally Kill 2

Abstract: ISTANBUL — A huge opposition political rally in the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir on Friday ended with smoke, panic and defiance as two explosions killed two people and wounded more than 100 others, a senior government minister said. The blasts came as Selahattin Demirtas, the leader of a pro-Kurdish group, the People’s Democratic Party, prepared to address hundreds of thousands of supporters at the rally, one of the final campaign events before Sunday’s national election. Officials initially said a faulty transformer had caused the explosions, but the energy minister, Taner Yildiz, told CNN Turk that the blasts occurred away from electrical equipment, ruling out a malfunction. Video of the second explosion, and the ensuing panic, was shared online by Hayat TV, a broadcaster that came under fire from the authorities for covering protests in Istanbul in 2013. The episode occurred at a particularly tense time in Turkish politics, with just two days left until the country votes in what analysts have described as one of the most consequential elections in its history. The governing Justice and Development Party hopes to win a supermajority in Parliament that would allow it to rewrite the Constitution and establish a strong executive presidency, a goal of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the party’s co-founder and Turkey’s longtime prime minister who last year was elected to the presidency, which had been a largely ceremonial post. The People’s Democratic Party, on the other hand, has been campaigning hard to become the first Kurdish party to secure representation in Parliament. If it achieves that goal, with 10 percent or more of the vote, it could deny Mr. Erdogan his supermajority. Over the course of the campaign, the party has been the target of sharp criticism, and attacks involving guns and explosives. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said an investigation into Friday’s deadly explosions was underway. “Whatever is behind this incident — whether it was a power transformer explosion, an assassination attempt, an act of provocation — we shall investigate it,” he said addressing supporters in the southeastern city of Gaziantep. “I call on my brothers in Diyarbakir: Please beware of exploitation of the incident and provocations.” Throughout the campaign, Mr. Davutoglu has assailed Mr. Demirtas and demonized his party by linking it to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, fueling tensions in the country’s southeast. Last month, simultaneous bomb blasts ripped through offices of the People’s Democratic Party in the southern cities of Adana and Mersin. At least six people were wounded. In a written statement, Mr. Erdogan called Friday’s attack a “provocation” that was designed to undermine peace ahead of the election. Television footage showed scenes of chaos unfolding after the explosions. People rushed to carry out the wounded as others stayed to begin an immediate protest. After organizers announced that the rally had been canceled, the police dispersed crowds that remained with tear gas and water cannons. With conflicting reports as to the cause of the blasts, some Kurdish Twitter users studied images of the blast sites posted online, looking for evidence of a bombing. Speaking to reporters afterward, Mr. Demirtas said it was “thought-provoking” that the episode took place right before the election. “Whatever the cause of the blast,” he said, “I am calling on the people of Diyarbakir to keep calm.”

Election
Turkey
Kurdish
Selahattin Demirtas
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Bombs
Justice and Development Party Turkey
People's Democratic Party,HDP


Rescued Hens Fly Cross-Country, No Flapping Required, to Find New Lives

Abstract: It may just be the greatest airlift of escaped egg-layers ever. Packed, prepped and finally flying high, some 1,200 rescued hens aboard a chartered cargo plane touched down in Elmira, N.Y., early Thursday morning, completing a cross-country chicken run that involved two pilots, dozens of doting animal lovers and untold numbers of grateful clucks. The birds, just 2 years old and on their first man-powered flight, had come all the way from California, where they had lived in harsh conditions on an unidentified egg farm, in cold metal cages, with little fresh air and less leg room than your average seat in coach. “Farmed animals are at the bottom end,” said Kimberly Sturla, the executive director of Animal Place , a farm-animal rescue operation in Grass Valley, Calif., which organized the flight. “And at the bottom end’s bottom end, chickens probably have it the worst.” Protecting farm animals like chickens, cows and pigs has become a priority for animal-rights groups across the country; in 2008, California voters passed a proposition that would effectively outlaw the small “battery cages” in which the Elmira passengers once lived. (It takes effect in 2015.) But once rescued, finding new homes for beleaguered birds — de-beaked, atrophied and often suffering from osteoporosis — can be a challenge. For its part, Ms. Sturla’s group had received a flock of 3,000 birds in late July from a farm that was planning on euthanizing them as their prime egg-producing years — all two of them — approached an end. Still, the group worried that placing them all in good, non-omelet-loving homes on the West Coast would be impossible. And so it was that the group looked to East Coast animal sanctuaries, several of which offered to take the White Leghorns, a common variety used for eggs, if the California group could figure a way to get them there. Hence the charter. “We realized that driving them wouldn’t work,” said Ms. Sturla, “and commercial airlines will not take adult hens.” The overnight flight cost $50,000, according to the group, and was paid for by an anonymous benefactor and apparent bird fan. It began at dusk — a chicken’s bedtime — on Wednesday in the Bay Area city of Hayward, Calif., amid a flurry of feathers, curious reporters and somewhat wary aviation professionals. “Mostly we fly boxes, not chickens,” said Ken Couche, division manager for Ameriflight, the company that operated the plane. “Once we flew a bunch of wolves up near Canada, but far fewer media people turned up for that. I guess chickens are more popular than wolves.” But also perhaps more high-maintenance: the birds’ trek began with weeks of psychological and physical rehab, according to Ms. Sturla, followed by a lengthy drive to the Hayward airport. There they were hoisted into the plane by staff members from Animal Place and volunteers, most of whom were 20-something women wearing galoshes. (Droppings are an occupational hazard of chicken rescue.) A whipping wind was blowing in off the Pacific Ocean, creating a minor blizzard of feathers, and it took about an hour and a half to load the plane, with crates stacked five or six high. Once the 4,000 pounds of hen were packed onto the twin-engine turboprop, special arrangements had to be made to keep the hens’ chatter and dander under control. Fans were kept whirring in the cabin, keeping the temperature at a cool 65 degrees, both to calm the birds and minimize the aroma of uncooked chicken. “I’m less concerned about the squawking than I am about the stink,” Craig Ciaffoni, the flight’s Cincinnati-based pilot, said before takeoff. No word on whether there was a flight safety announcement, but Mr. Ciaffoni’s co-pilot, Nick Terleckyj of Chicago, took his fear of foul — and, yes, fowl — odors further, taking along a white surgical mask to protect against the fumes. Image After arriving in New York on Thursday morning, the White Leghorn hens were taken to various animal shelters, including the Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, N.Y. Credit Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times The flight was decidedly no frills; no drinks or snacks provided, no mediocre movies shown. The only nonwinged passenger in the back was Jamie London, a 32-year-old animal care expert, whose job as a de facto flight attendant included walking the aisles and checking on the chickens, though they mostly behave like red-eye regulars. “Once they’re in the dark,” she said, “they’re out.” Before boarding, Ms. London, a vegan, had lifted her fist and shouted “Stop eating eggs!” And sure enough, while activists are pleased with freeing animals, the larger goal of many groups is to reduce people’s appetite for other living things. Wayne Pacelle, the president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, said that while most of his group’s supporters eat meat, they want those animals treated compassionately. “We don’t think that we as a society can sustain this level of animal product consumption,” he said. But led by Big Egg states like Iowa and Pennsylvania, American companies have shown little sign of cracking, producing nearly 93 billion eggs in 2012 . California itself topped five billion eggs last year, and more than a billion were laid in New York , according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. And the average American eats about 250 eggs a year, according to Mr. Pacelle. Mitch Head, a spokesman for the United Egg Producers, the trade organization for the nation’s egg farmers, said his group did not believe the cages they used were cruel. And while he said his group had no problem with the hens’ trip, he said it seemed a little unnecessary. “California seems like a big state,” Mr. Head said. “They should be able to find some room for them there somewhere.” Sure enough, most of the eggs the nation consumes are from caged hens like those that ended up going coast to coast. After a refueling stop, the flight touched down just after 6 a.m. in Elmira, a small city in New York’s Southern Tier, where trailers were waiting to transport the chickens — many still drowsy from their long flight — to the organizations awaiting their arrival. One of those is the Catskill Animal Sanctuary in Saugerties, a rolling 110-acre rural tract, which is taking 200 birds to be housed in an old wooden barn and allowed to roam outside as much as their beaks desire. “They will have everything they lacked in their egg-laying facility,” said Kathy Stevens, the group’s director, adding that while her group would try to find adoptive parents for the birds, some would inevitably end up staying put. “We live in a culture that doesn’t obviously view these animals as worthy of companionship,” Ms. Stevens said, adding that at her sanctuary, “they will live very much like companion animals: able to make choices about how to spend their day, who to be friends with, and etc.” Ms. Stevens said the Elmira mission was important because of the attention it brought to the plight of farm animals, which she believes too many people feel are simply anonymous entrees. “Ten chickens are as different as 10 people or 10 dogs: You’ve got the shy one, you’ve got the hilarious one, you’ve got the one that dotes on people, you’ve got the one that’s not particularly interested in chickens and would rather follow the goats around all day,” said Ms. Stevens, mentioning a few more poultry personalities. “There are universal things that make us human, and of course, there’s universal things that make them chickens.” That sentiment was echoed by Ms. Sturla, who said that she knew the flight might cause some chuckles, but was worth it. “I know there’s been a lot of questions, and I anticipated this, people saying, ‘This is ridiculous: a private plane, a cargo plane, taking just chickens,’ ” she said. “But that is really what we are all about, which is respect and compassion for all life. And if anybody could go inside of that farm, they would have made the same decision.”


Denny Hamlin Wins Nascar Pole at Martinsville

Abstract: MARTINSVILLE, Va. (AP) — Denny Hamlin figured that to give himself the best chance to succeed at Martinsville Speedway on Sunday, he had to start making it happen Friday. Using practice to work only on his qualifying setup — for the first time in his career, he said — Hamlin accomplished what he called “objective No. 1” by winning the pole position for Sunday’s 500-lap race here. The track is the shortest and trickiest on the Nascar Sprint Cup circuit. “This is the first time for us doing that, and obviously we executed it,” he said. The reason for the attention to qualifying was twofold: the pole-sitter gets the best pit stall on the track’s narrow pit road, at the front with nothing to obstruct the exit, and Hamlin wants to gain ground on the points leader, Jimmie Johnson, this weekend. Johnson holds a 41-point edge over Hamlin with five races left, and the two have combined to win the last eight races on the 0.526-mile oval. Hamlin has won three, including a race last spring in which he plowed to the front, from ninth, in the final four laps. Johnson qualified 19th for Sunday’s race, and Kevin Harvick , who is third in points, was 36th.

Hamlin Denny
National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing
Automobile Racing
Johnson Jimmie
Harvick Kevin


Irving Feiner, 84, Central Figure in Constitutional Free-Speech Case

Abstract: Irving Feiner, who played a significant role in the Constitutional debate over free speech when the Supreme Court upheld his conviction on charges of disorderly conduct for dangerously provoking a crowd as he spoke from a soapbox in Syracuse in 1949, died on Jan. 23 in Valhalla, N.Y. He was 84. The cause was a ruptured cerebral aneurysm, a ballooning blood vessel in the brain, his daughter Emily said. Mr. Feiner said years after his conviction that he was “a contentious young man” when, as a Syracuse University student, he mounted the soapbox at South McBride and Harrison Streets around 6:30 p.m. on March 8, 1949, to promote a leftist rally to be held at a hotel in Syracuse. The police said he urged blacks to take up arms against whites. Among other targets, he castigated the Syracuse mayor, the local political system and the American Legion. (He always denied widespread reports that he called President Harry S. Truman a bum, saying that if he had meant to insult the president, he would have used an earthier phrase.) The police estimated that 75 to 80 whites and blacks — 25 or 30, according to Mr. Feiner’s side — had gathered and were blocking the sidewalk and becoming restive. People heckled Mr. Feiner, and at least one man threatened him. Saying he feared a riot, a police officer at least twice asked Mr. Feiner to get down from the box. Mr. Feiner refused and was arrested on the misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, found guilty by a judge and sentenced to 30 days in jail. The conviction was upheld by two New York State appellate courts, and on Jan. 15, 1951, the United States Supreme Court followed suit by a 6-to-3 vote. Writing for the majority in Feiner v. New York , Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson said that he had no objection to the content of Mr. Feiner’s remarks, but that the reaction they engendered justified his arrest and conviction. A dissenting opinion by Justice Hugo Black said that Mr. Feiner’s arrest resulted from his “deliberate defiance” of an arbitrary command and nothing else. “I understand that people in totalitarian countries must obey arbitrary orders,” Justice Black wrote. “I had hoped that there was no such duty in the United States.” The legal principle involved came to be known as the “heckler’s veto,” meaning that a disruptive listener could effectively stop a controversial speaker by threatening havoc. Over time, the Supreme Court’s 1951 decision, which put public peace ahead of freedom of expression, was superseded by nearly opposite judgments in later cases. “The court abandoned the approach that the expression of mere ideas themselves could be punished as fighting words leading to breaches of the peace,” Jack Levin and Gordana Rabrenovic wrote in the journal American Behavioral Scientist in 2001. Irving Hyman Feiner was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 23, 1924, to immigrants from Poland who ran a candy store. He grew up in Harlem and the Bronx and dropped out of high school to serve in the Army in Europe in World War II. After the war, he attended Syracuse University on the G.I. Bill. He was a junior, and active in a leftist organization called the Young Progressives of America, when the group invited O. John Rogge, a former United States assistant attorney general, to speak. Mr. Rogge was part of the defense team for a group of black men accused of killing an elderly white shopkeeper in Trenton. Called the Trenton Six, they were first sentenced to death by an all-white jury on the basis of confessions that later proved to be false. They became a celebrated cause of the left and civil rights groups. Eventually, four were acquitted, and two were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mr. Rogge and the folk singer Pete Seeger were scheduled to appear in a public school auditorium in Syracuse, but at the last moment Mayor Frank J. Costello revoked the permit. Mr. Feiner and others took to the streets with loudspeakers to promote attendance at the new location, the Hotel Syracuse. After his arrest, Mr. Feiner was expelled from Syracuse University, and his admission to several law schools was revoked. He went on to success in the printing, movie exhibition and tropical-fish businesses. He ran unsuccessfully for offices that included Rockland County executive, state assemblyman and mayor of Nyack, N.Y., where he lived. He wrote more than one cantankerous letter to newspapers. Mr. Feiner is survived by his wife of 58 years, the former Trudi Kramer; his daughters Susan Feiner and Emily Feiner; and five grandchildren. Another daughter, Rachael, died in 1971. He returned to Syracuse and finished the work for his undergraduate degree, which he received in 1984. In 2007, the university invited him back to lecture on free speech.

Supreme Court
Freedom of Speech and Expression
Decisions and Verdicts
Deaths (Obituaries)
Censorship


Detainees, as Lawyers, Test Tribunal System

Abstract: GUANTÁNAMO BAY , Cuba — Walid bin Attash , a detainee with a wry smile who is charged as a planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, had a question. Why, Mr. bin Attash asked the military judge at a hearing here on Thursday, was he barred from reading classified reports as he prepares to represent himself at the trial the Bush administration wants to be the centerpiece of its Guantánamo prosecutions. He predicted that his yet-to-be-scheduled trial along with four other men charged in the 2001 attacks would end with executions, including his own, limiting the risk that the defendants would disclose any secrets. “Those evidence will go with me,” he said with that smile, “those evidences will be protected better than C.I.A. and F.B.I.” Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann, the judge, did not see the logic. “You do not have the necessary security clearance,” Judge Kohlmann said. So it was this week, as the military tribunal here faced its latest perplexing challenge: how to handle detainees who are insisting on representing themselves, and keep them from turning the military commissions upside down. In a series of hearings for the defendants — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed , the admitted chief plotter of the Sept. 11 attacks — the tribunal struggled to sort through fresh questions about how men under strict detention rules can work on their cases, how secret evidence will be handled and how much leeway they will be permitted. At times the hearings devolved into the kind of paradoxical debate that has become common as the troubled tribunal system has struggled to deal with lesser-known suspects. This case, however, involves men charged in the biggest terrorist attack in American history, and who have trumpeted their roles in the jihad. “Any attack I undertook against America,” Mr. bin Attash managed to say before the judge stopped him, “I am proud of it, and I am happy about it.” Mr. bin Attash, known as Khallad in Al Qaeda, began his hearing by stopping things cold with the explanation that he could not respond to a court filing because it had just been handed to him. “I was handcuffed, and I didn’t read it,” he said, through a translator. The judge called a recess. On Wednesday, it had been the turn of two of his co-defendants to present puzzles about how to proceed. The detainee known best by his alias, Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Mr. Mohammed, explained that he was already handling his own case, as the judge had authorized. But there were issues. Mr. Baluchi had written the judge two letters and a legal motion, he said. But his Guantánamo jailers had refused to transmit them. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t deliver this letter,” Mr. Baluchi said, holding a yellow sheet. Lawyers for others held here have long said that detainees’ communications are blocked, censored or delayed. Asked about Mr. Baluchi’s claims, a Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, said officials had put in place a process to assure that detainees’ communications to the court were “handled appropriately and efficiently.” Judge Kohlmann, who once wrote an academic paper concluding that “even a good military tribunal is a bad idea,” seemed perplexed. “I don’t understand why they didn’t get this to me,” he said to Mr. Baluchi. All but one of the detainees charged in the Sept. 11 case are insisting on representing themselves. The fifth, Mustafa Ahmad al Hawsawi, wavers. But Mr. Hawsawi provided an explanation. At the defense table with him were American lawyers, including two in military uniforms. “How do you expect me to trust them?” he asked. The defendants appear to have varying goals: to challenge Guantánamo as unjust, to invite martyrdom, to convey some message to the outside world. But the pretrial work this week was more basic. Prosecutors were struggling to define the rules, saying that each of the men would see all classified evidence that is to be used in court. But they made it clear that there would be limits. The vast classified files that might usually be turned over to the defense, are not to be open to detainees charged with an audacious act of terrorism, the prosecutors said. Col. Lawrence J. Morris, the chief prosecutor, said his lawyers were working to get the detainees what they need to handle their cases. But Colonel Morris argued that questions about nitty-gritty items like typewriters for detainees should not be seen as a setback. “Sure it complicates the prosecution’s management of the case,” he said, “but not every complication is a problem.” But when it came his turn on Thursday, Mr. Mohammed, known as K.S.M., dwelled on the challenges. He said he had asked the guards for paper so that he could begin to draw up legal motions. The answer, he told the judge, was that paper was not authorized. Judge Kohlmann seemed to acknowledge the challenge of writing a motion without paper. Nevertheless, he told Mr. Mohammed, even such a small thing as a request for a pad of paper had to follow procedure. “There’s going to have to be a motion,” the judge said, “in accordance with our rules.”

Detainees
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba)
Attash Walid Muhammad Salih bin
Kohlmann Ralph H
Mohammed Khalid Shaikh
Ali Ali Abdul Aziz


For Swiss, a Distasteful Jolt With Coffee: Hitler Creamer

Abstract: PARIS — The labels on Swiss mini-cream containers tend toward the pastoral and cuddly, with pleasant images of Alpine landscapes and locomotives, or dogs and cats. So it was something of a shock to one consumer at a Swiss train station to find the face of Hitler staring back at him when he reached to lighten his morning coffee. Migros, a Swiss retail giant, said it did not know exactly how the image came to be on the label. But it offered its apologies Wednesday for the “unforgivable incident” and withdrew about 2,000 containers, some of which also featured the face of Mussolini, from about 100 cafes in the German-speaking part of Switzerland . Tristan Cerf, a spokesman for Migros, said by telephone from Lausanne on Wednesday that the company had been horrified by the failure of its internal controls to detect the images on its cream containers. He said the problem had come to Migros’s attention after a customer drinking coffee at the Baden train station was startled by the discovery and sent a photo of the label to the newspaper 20 Minutes. In coffee-loving Switzerland, labels from the mini-cream containers are cult collectibles, and producers often seek new and inventive ways to enhance their appeal. Mr. Cerf said the mishap had occurred when an outside company asked ELSA, a dairy manufacturer and Migros subsidiary, to supply a series of 55 coffee cream containers based on vintage cigar labels, two of which featured the dictators. He said that the outside company had provided the controversial designs, and that ELSA typically produced plastic creamers with charming and innocuous images on them — not fascists. “I can’t tell you how these labels got past our controls,” Mr. Cerf said. “Usually the labels have pleasant images like trains, landscapes and dogs — nothing polemic that can pose a problem.” Switzerland has in the past been forced to grapple with its relationship with the Nazis during World War II , including accusations that Swiss banks abetted the National Socialist regime. But Mr. Cerf emphasized that the accidental circulation of the plastic Hitler creamers had nothing to do with the country’s social mores, but rather reflected an isolated mistake. Migros is not the first company to run into such trouble. In the spring, a German furniture chain apologized for selling ceramic mugs with Hitler’s face on them, saying a Chinese designer had mistakenly used an old image of a stamp bearing the dictator’s image behind an antique motif of roses. “Whoever made this mistake was not thinking properly,” Mr. Cerf said of his company’s creamers, “as these aren’t images accompanying a book about World War II, but rather something meant to be enjoyed with coffee and a chocolate cake. “You cannot put Pol Pot or a terrorist on a milk creamer,” he added. “It is unacceptable.”

Switzerland
Dairy product
Federation of Migros Cooperatives
Adolf Hitler
Benito Mussolini


Arson Is Suspected at Bill Clinton’s Childhood Home

Abstract: LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A fire that caused minor damage to former President Bill Clinton’s childhood home in Hope, Ark., was apparently caused by arson, the local authorities said. J. R. Wilson, the chief of the Hope police, said a motorist spotted flames early on Friday at the Clinton Birthplace National Historic Site. When firefighters arrived a short time later, the chief said, flames were shooting eight feet into the air on one side of the structure. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that the fire was quickly extinguished and that only one interior room was damaged by flames. The cause of the fire is under investigation. Arson is suspected because investigators said they smelled an accelerant at the scene. Mr. Clinton lived in the home as a child before moving to Hot Springs, Ark. It was designated a National Historic Site in 2011.

Arson
Bill Clinton
Hope
Historic preservation


Romney Edges Past Paul in Maine Caucuses

Abstract: Mitt Romney averted embarrassment on Saturday when he was declared the winner of a presidential straw poll in Maine’s nonbinding caucuses. He won 39 percent of the vote, barely edging out Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the only other Republican candidate to campaign actively in the state. Mr. Paul drew 36 percent. Rick Santorum won 18 percent, and Newt Gingrich 6 percent. Mr. Romney scraped by Mr. Paul by just 194 votes. But fewer than 6,000 votes were cast — about 2 percent of registered Republicans. Mr. Paul was unbowed, and gave no indication that he would drop out. “We’re not going away,” he told his supporters. Although the vote had no substantive meaning in terms of delegates, losing it could have created a political headache for Mr. Romney, the former governor of nearby Massachusetts, and extended a negative storyline that had been building since last week when he lost Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri to Mr. Santorum . Those losses suddenly increased the symbolic importance of Maine’s all-but-ignored caucuses, and an additional loss on Saturday in his own backyard would have magnified concerns that he cannot seal the deal with voters. As it was, Mr. Romney also won the annual straw poll of activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. He took 38 percent of the 3,408 votes cast, compared with 31 percent for Mr. Santorum, 15 percent for Mr. Gingrich and 12 percent for Mr. Paul of Texas, who won the last two years but did not attend this time. Mr. Romney was among those who had ignored Maine, assuming he had it sewn up, until he arrived Friday night . In the face of tough questioning at a town-hall-style meeting in Portland and the evidence of strong organization by Mr. Paul, Mr. Romney decided to stay over Saturday and campaigned at caucus sites. His campaign added a last-minute jolt of radio and television advertisements. Mr. Paul made a foray to the state last month and also visited caucus sites on Saturday. It was not clear how much the late activity helped either candidate because many people had already voted in the rolling caucuses, which began on Jan. 29. “Romney’s win shows that the pragmatists in the Maine Republican Party really came out in force,” said Sandy Maisel, a political scientist at Colby College in Waterville, Me. “Remember, this is a state party that has elected Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to the Senate, over and over,” he said. “While the Tea Party element is strong,” Dr. Maisel added, “those whose principal goal is beating President Obama came to the fore.” Mr. Romney easily won the low-turnout caucuses four years ago, with Mr. Paul coming in third. But this time around, Maine offered a rare opportunity for Mr. Paul, a libertarian, to plant his flag. Although New England Republicans are generally more moderate than the party’s supporters elsewhere, the Maine members are fiercely independent, and the state has become a cauldron of activity for Tea Party supporters, fiscal conservatives and libertarians. “We like to be left alone by government,” Charlie Webster, the state Republican Party chairman, said in an interview. “We’re an independent lot.” Still, he said, Mr. Romney, who owns a vacation home in New Hampshire, had been solicitous of state Republicans over the last several years and helped them raise money. He was endorsed for president by several state legislators and others in the state Republican establishment. Mr. Romney still leads the field in number of delegates, but Maine did not add any to anyone’s column. The straw poll was a beauty contest, with no bearing on the allocation of the state’s 24 delegates, who will not be picked until a convention in May. The lengthy and arcane caucus system — and Mr. Romney’s presumed advantage — discouraged other candidates from participating and diminished its national significance, until Mr. Romney’s losses last week. Unlike other states that hold caucuses, Maine does not conduct its vote on a single day. The state party had encouraged towns and counties to hold them between Feb. 4 and Saturday, but they began Jan. 29 and will not end until March 20.

Maine
Republican Party
Presidential Election of 2012
Primaries and Caucuses
Romney Mitt
Santorum Rick
Paul Ron
Gingrich Newt
United States Politics and Government
Tea Party Movement


Bombings Mar Sri Lanka’s 60th Anniversary of Statehood

Abstract: COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lanka celebrated the 60th anniversary of its independence on Monday with parades, speeches and a security clampdown. But it failed to prevent two bombings that the military said killed 13 people. In an effort to block such attacks here in the capital, troops sealed off many roads, and a major cellphone operator shut down its text-messaging service throughout the morning as officials and residents gathered for the national ceremony. President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in a televised speech, spoke angrily about the rebels, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam , and said that current economic and security difficulties would be over soon. He reiterated the government’s vow to crush the rebels, who seek a separate ethnic Tamil homeland in the northern and eastern parts of the country, after decades of warfare, despite an escalation of the civil war in recent months. “Terrorism is facing a defeat that it has never before faced,” he said. Top government officials have said they hope to rout the rebels by the end of the year. Thousands of troops, local dancers and religious leaders paraded along Colombo’s coastal road in the independence celebration. Hours later, a roadside bomb tore through a civilian bus in the Welioya region, about 150 miles northeast of Colombo, a military spokesman said. The attack killed 12 people and wounded 17 others, he said, blaming the rebels. A rebel spokesman, Rasiah Ilanthirayan, did not answer calls seeking comment. The Tamil Tigers, listed as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, routinely deny responsibility for such attacks. Another roadside bombing in the southeastern town of Buttala killed one soldier and wounded two others, the military said. The blasts came amid a wave of bombings focusing on civilians across the country. On Sunday, a suicide bomber blew herself up inside Colombo’s main railway station, killing 11 people and wounding 92 others. A day earlier, a bomb on a bus killed 18 people, mostly Buddhist pilgrims, in the central town of Dambulla. The United States Embassy advised American citizens to avoid unnecessary travel in the region of the capital during the holiday, warning of possible attacks. The government also closed schools in Colombo for the week because of the security situation, said an Education Ministry official, Nimal Bandara. The Tamil Tigers have been fighting since 1983 for an independent homeland for minority Tamils after decades of marginalization by Sinhalese-dominated governments. More than 70,000 people have died. A 2002 cease-fire ushered in several years of calm and fostered hopes that peace would prevail, but the truce broke down as renewed attacks in the past two years killed 5,000 people. The government ousted the guerrillas from their strongholds in the east last year, and daily fighting rages along the front lines in the jungles of the north, where the rebels still control a de facto state. The government officially pulled out of the cease-fire last month and forced independent Nordic truce monitors to leave the country. Many had high hopes for the nation, formerly known as Ceylon, when it achieved independence from Britain in 1948, months after its South Asian neighbors India and Pakistan became independent. But the civil war undermined the country’s potential to become a regional economic power, said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives, a Colombo-based research group. “The development potential was huge, and it has been totally stymied by this war,” he said. Post-independence governments lacked the foresight to develop a national identity that would include all ethnic groups, Mr. Saravanamuttu said.

Sri Lanka
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
Terrorism