Israeli Electric Car Company’s Chief Steps Down

Abstract: Better Place, an electric vehicle infrastructure company, said on Tuesday that it had replaced Shai Agassi, its charismatic chief executive and founder, with Evan Thornley, the company’s top executive in Australia. Mr. Agassi founded the company five years ago with the ambitious goal of replacing the world’s gas pumps with battery-swapping stations for electric cars. But despite vast publicity, the idea has gained little traction so far. The announcement of Mr. Agassi’s departure fed speculation that the company’s widening losses were the cause. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the company has posted $477 million in cumulative losses since the beginning of 2010. The paper reported that Better Place has $181 million in cash reserves, which at the current rate of spending would last four and a half quarters. Joe Paluska, a spokesman for Better Place, declined to comment on the reason for Mr. Agassi’s departure. Mr. Agassi will stay on as a board member and remains a major shareholder in the enterprise. Mr. Agassi amassed more than $800 million in private capital since the company’s founding. He used lofty rhetoric about the need to rid the world of its addiction to oil to persuade investors and powerful leaders to back his plan. But the business feasibility of the battery-swapping network has always been uncertain. “Battery swapping is applicable to certain markets where you have higher fuel cost and smaller geographic profiles, like Israel and Denmark,” said John Gartner, research director at Pike Research, a clean-technology research firm. “But it’s not a model that’s going to work in a lot of places or give the company the ability to scale the technology in the same way that the company’s been investing money and receiving capital to this point.” In a September 2011 interview, Mr. Agassi said that the global electric car market, and Better Place’s network, would take time to grow. “The first flight after the Wright brothers took off in the air, for about 10 feet, wasn’t to the moon,” he said. “What you do is slowly move up, gradually.” Mr. Paluska said the company was operating 24 battery swapping stations in Israel, and 12 in Denmark. He said these locations give more than 750 customers the ability to drive across those tiny countries. The process of swapping a depleted battery with a fully charged one takes about five minutes. Better Place subscribers buy their cars, but not the expensive battery packs that provide power to the vehicles. For a fixed fee of about $350 a month, customers lease access to the batteries, swap stations and charge points. To reach scale, Better Place needs car companies to build battery-swapping capability into their vehicles. To date, only the French automaker Renault has signed on, adapting its Fluence Z.E. sedan to enable battery switching. Mr. Thornley, the new chief executive of Better Place, is a former Australian legislator who founded the Internet advertising company LookSmart in 1995. In 2008, he left government and soon after joined Better Place, where for the last three years has overseen the company’s efforts in Australia.

Israel
Electric and Hybrid Vehicles
Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations
Better Place LLC
Agassi Shai


Steelers Release Receiver Hines Ward

Abstract: During his 14 years as a receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers , Hines Ward attained a revered status. Almost two years ago, when quarterback Ben Roethlisberger prepared to practice for the first time after an off-season of battling a sexual-assault allegation and an accompanying suspension, it was Ward who accompanied him out of the locker room on the long walk to the practice field through a gantlet of fans. In those few minutes, Ward was able to signal, to the fans watching, to the teammates on the field, that Roethlisberger was back in the fold — after Ward was outspoken enough to say that Roethlisberger owed his teammates an explanation. The Steelers put an end to Ward’s remarkable run Wednesday, announcing that they would release him. The move was not a surprise. Ward has been passed by younger receivers and the Steelers have significant salary-cap problems. Ward, who turns 36 next week, was known for his toughness. He was as willing to deliver devastating blocks as catch passes. He was disliked by many opponents — they thought he whined too much — but revered by many Steelers. “Hines has been an integral part of our success since we drafted him in 1998, and we will forever be grateful for what he has helped us achieve,” the Steelers’ president, Art Rooney II, told the team’s Web site. “He has meant so much to this organization, both on and off the field, and we appreciate his efforts over the past 14 years. Hines’s accomplishments are numerous, and he will always be thought of as one of the all-time great Steelers.” Ward had spoken of taking a pay cut to remain with the Steelers, who as part of a salary-cap purge will save more than $3 million by releasing him. Ward has slowed considerably, and last season he had just 46 receptions for 381 yards. Ward said in a statement that he hoped to play in 2012. “This isn’t how I wanted this chapter of my career to end,” he said. “I did everything in my power to remain a Steeler and finish what I started here 14 years ago. I want to thank the organization, my teammates and coaches and everyone who made my run as a Steeler the best years of my life.” A third round-draft pick in 1998, Ward is the team’s career leader in receptions, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns. After he retires, he will almost certainly be considered for a place in the Hall of Fame. His career highlight came in Super Bowl XL, when he was named most valuable player with five catches for 123 yards and a touchdown. In the final game of the 2011 regular season, the Steelers paid homage to Ward’s career in a singular way: they made sure he got the 1,000th reception of his career. It was the last catch he made for the Steelers.


Luck Runs Out for a Leader of ‘Brexit’ Campaign

Abstract: LONDON — One day in 2004, Boris Johnson was interrupted on his morning jog by a pack of tabloid reporters massed outside his house in North London. They asked about rumors that Mr. Johnson, then editor of The Spectator magazine and a member of Parliament, had once had an extramarital affair, gotten his lover pregnant and paid for her abortion. The chronically disheveled Mr. Johnson, wearing voluminous shorts and a bandanna decorated with skulls and crossbones, responded with his usual cocktail of charm, bluster and obfuscation. Having already dismissed the story as “a completely untrue and ludicrous conjecture,” and “an inverted pyramid of piffle,” he cheerily advised the reporters to “go for a run, get some exercise and have a beautiful day.” He was lying. The reports were correct, and he was fired from his parliamentary job as the Conservative Party arts spokesman. But it didn’t seem to bother him too much. Mr. Johnson has always had a knack for recasting disaster as farce, and he devoted his weekly newspaper column to the virtues of being fired. “Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike,” he wrote, “as much as the sight of you ker-splonked on the Tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under.” Mr. Johnson, 52, has had a singularly charmed life, always wafting upward on a Teflon cloud of charm and guile even as people have questioned his integrity, seriousness and competence. But not anymore. Having gambled his political future on the chance to lead his party and country through the aftermath of the “Brexit” referendum on whether to exit the European Union, Mr. Johnson found on Thursday that his luck had run out . He withdrew from the race. In the end, he was done in as much by his own hubris, lack of preparation and bewilderment in the face of the Brexit result as he was by the treachery and dwindling support of his colleagues. As he abandoned his campaign to be the Conservative Party leader — and with it, probably, his chances of ever being prime minister — he seemed almost relieved to be spared the burden of running the country he had done so much to destabilize. Video Boris Johnson, a member of Parliament and a former mayor of London, announced on Thursday that he would not seek to be the next prime minister. Credit Credit Leon Neal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Mr. Johnson, the former mayor of London, who has not given an interview since the Brexit vote, did not respond to a message left on his parliamentary office voice mail. For a student of Shakespeare, which Mr. Johnson is (he is writing a biography) the situation was replete with ironies. A man who had spent his life behaving like Falstaff and making merry in the pub had failed to convince his party, and perhaps himself, that he had somehow suddenly turned into Prince Hal, poised to lead the country through its crisis in Europe. On Thursday, the anger at Mr. Johnson was palpable, replacing last week’s anger at Prime Minister David Cameron for calling the referendum in the first place. The sense that Mr. Johnson had presided over the Brexit campaign without a plan for what to do if it won — and then walked away without cleaning up his mess — was particularly enraging. “He’s like a general who marches his army to the sound of guns and the moment he sees the battleground abandons it,” Michael Heseltine, a Tory politician, told the BBC. “I have never seen anything like it. He ripped the Tory party apart. He has created the greatest constitutional crisis in peacetime in my life.” Just a few days earlier, Mr. Johnson had seemed poised to coast into position as prime minister when Mr. Cameron stepped down in the fall. Outside London, at least before the referendum, he was the Conservative Party’s star candidate, a populist maverick for the times. With his air of disarrayed befuddlement, his crazy coiffure, his idiosyncratically imaginative P.G. Wodehousian locution, his habit of slipping into Latin and Greek, his foot-in-the-mouth self-deprecation and his obvious delight in himself, he oozes a charm rarely seen in politicians. He cycles to work and carries his things in a backpack. He looks as if he’s slept in his clothes and just gotten out of bed. He has the privileged demeanor of an old Etonian (he went to school there), but a Bill Clintonesque way with crowds and an appeal that transcends class. In headlines he is “BoJo”; to most Britons he is simply “Boris.” Image Mr. Johnson prepared to speak at a Brexit campaign event at York Racecourse in York, England, in April. Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times But his surface success has always carried alongside it a reputation for lies, evasions and exaggerations, a lack of seriousness and discipline, a tendency to wade blindly into situations without thinking through their ramifications, and a perception that he puts his own ambitions first. He has a habit of deflecting tough questions and affecting an amused insouciance about his mistakes, which include fathering a child with a woman other than his wife (he and his wife, a lawyer, have four children). He is better on the big picture than he is on the details. Take last Monday’s column by Mr. Johnson in The Daily Telegraph , the first substantive statement anyone from the Brexit side had made since the vote. As chaos swirled outside and Britain waited nervously for a sign that someone had a plan, Mr. Johnson produced a shoddily prepared article that seemed uncertain of its facts and backtracked on a number of key Brexit promises. Supporters of Mr. Johnson said at the time that the article had been written hastily and turned in late and should be treated more as a first draft than as a definitive statement. In fact, it was as a journalist who played around with the facts that Mr. Johnson first made his name. He was fired from his first reporting job, at The Times of London, for inventing a quote and attributing it to an Oxford professor (who happened to be his godfather). But he was hired anyway by The Daily Telegraph and sent to Brussels in 1989 to cover the European Union. It was a boring assignment, but Mr. Johnson found a way of livening it: He made things up. His great talent was to take tiny grains of information in reports and proposals, repackage them as official European policy and present them as part of a broad narrative about Brussels’s risibility. His stories were full of wrong-sized condoms, fishermen forced to wear hairnets and international disputes over cheese policy. While his stories became increasingly influential in the euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party and in many ways set the tone for the British papers’ coverage of Europe ever since, Mr. Johnson tends to treat his approach as great fun. Image Mr. Johnson in York, England, in April. One Conservative politician said “He ripped the Tory party apart.” Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times “I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall and listening to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England,” he told an interviewer . “Everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing explosive effect on the Tory party,” he said, “and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.” After Brussels, Mr. Johnson became editor of The Spectator, which functions as a kind of house organ for conventional Conservative Party wisdom, and began writing a popular weekly column in The Daily Telegraph. In 2001 he won a seat in Parliament. I was in London at the time and wrote a profile of Mr. Johnson . He boasted to me in the humble-brag way peculiar to British upper-class men that, trying to juggle three jobs, he was unable to do any of them properly. “Because I have no time to do it, I do it in no time,” he said of his Telegraph column. “You just whack it out.” Mr. Johnson seemed constitutionally incapable of taking anything truly seriously. Deciding he did not feel like being photographed for The Times article, for instance, he got another man in The Spectator office to impersonate him in the photo session. The photographer duly snapped away, until the magazine’s publisher found out what was going on and made Mr. Johnson sit for the portrait. (He was 37 at the time.) Around that time Mr. Johnson also became a bona fide celebrity, honing his trademark persona as a hyperarticulate upper-class-twit-for-the-masses in a string of highly amusing appearances on the current events quiz show “ Have I Got News For You .” Viewers adored him. “His charming, bumbling buffoon image was neatly done and went down very well with audiences,” said Ian Hislop , editor of Private Eye magazine and a panelist on the show. In 2008, Mr. Johnson unexpectedly ran for mayor of London and, even more unexpectedly for a Conservative in a Labour city, won. The same complaints that had dogged him in the past dogged him again, along with criticisms that he had failed to address serious issues like air quality and affordable housing. “We had eight frustrating years where we’d ask detailed policy questions, and what we’d get back in response was bluster and grandiose claims,” said Joanne McCartney, a Labour Assembly member who is now deputy mayor. “If he didn’t know the answer to the question, which was a regular occurrence, he’d use bluster and wit to avoid answering.” Mr. Johnson all along denied that he wanted to be prime minister, saying it was about as likely as his being “reincarnated as an olive.” But he has always been wittier, quicker and more charismatic than Mr. Cameron. The 2012 London Olympics proved the perfect showcase for his off-the-cuff anarchic wit. Filmed stranded haplessly on a malfunctioning zipwire, Mr. Johnson took an incident that would have humiliated most other politicians and somehow used it to burnish his appeal. (A photograph of the dangling Mr. Johnson was used to quite different effect last week on the cover of the French newspaper Libération.) Mr. Cameron has always been threatened by Mr. Johnson; his efforts to slough off the mayor as a kind of amusing Tory mascot never worked. But it wasn’t until Mr. Johnson betrayed the prime minister by throwing his support behind the Brexit campaign that the party saw the extent of his ambition. Before now, Mr. Johnson has rarely been confronted by a situation he could not maneuver his way through. But a harbinger came in March, when he was summoned before a House of Commons committee and forensically interrogated by its Javert-like Tory chairman, Andrew Tyrie, about a series of statements he had made over the years about Europe. Mr. Johnson tried his normal humorous approach. Asked, for instance, about his assertion that the European Union has a law saying that balloons cannot be blown up by children under 8 (it doesn’t), he deflected the question, saying, “In my household, only children under 8 are allowed to blow up balloons.” He continued in this vein throughout the session, as Mr. Tyrie peered unsmilingly at him, acid in his voice. “This is all very interesting, Boris,” Mr. Tyrie said at one point. “Except none of it is really true, is it?”

Brexit
London
Boris Johnson
Conservative Party
Referendum
Great Britain
EU


Tenet Settles Charges in Kickback Case

Abstract: By Reuters The Tenet Healthcare Corporation said yesterday that it had agreed to pay $21 million in a civil settlement with federal prosecutors in California to resolve long-running criminal charges of kickbacks to doctors. The deal comes after two federal juries deadlocked on criminal charges involving Alvarado Hospital, run by Tenet in San Diego. Last week, the federal Medicare agency threatened to bar the hospital from government insurance programs. While the Alvarado settlement removes an obstacle for the company, Tenet's troubles with the government are not over. A much bigger case is the Justice Department investigation of Tenet's Medicare billing. Steven Campanini, a Tenet spokesman, said the San Diego settlement would let the company focus on settling the broader case. "The deal enables Tenet to continue talks with the federal government for a potential global settlement, and we are optimistic we will reach an agreement soon," he said. As part of the deal with the United States attorney in San Diego, Tenet will sell or close the hospital. The San Diego case involved accusations that Tenet illegally recruited new physicians with lucrative payments and helped to set up their practices in exchange for patient referrals to the hospital. Tenet admitted no wrongdoing, but did say it was "distressed" by several instances of excessive payments the hospital made to doctors. Tenet will record the $21 million payment as a charge in the second quarter. Shares of Tenet, which is based in Dallas, rose 62 cents, to $8.03.

Tenet Healthcare Corporation
Medicine and Health
Bribery


Texas County’s Racial Past Is Seen as Prelude to Sandra Bland’s Death

Abstract: PRAIRIE VIEW, Tex. — When Sandra Bland enrolled in 2005 at Prairie View A&M University, the historically black institution founded here almost 140 years ago, its students were still waging a civil rights war that had ended elsewhere decades before: a legal battle, against white Waller County officials, for the right to vote in the place they lived. It took years and a federal court order, but the students won. When Ms. Bland returned here the morning of July 9, driving 16 hours from Chicago to interview for a job at her alma mater, the Justice Department had abandoned its court-ordered oversight of students’ voter registration, the campus had its own polling place, and the county had, in one key respect, passed a racial milestone. Four days later, Ms. Bland was dead in a county jail cell after a routine traffic stop by a state trooper escalated into a physical confrontation not 500 yards from the university’s entrance. And any talk of milestones gave way to questions about whether the county’s checkered history of race relations had set the stage for a tragedy that the authorities acknowledge might never have happened had they followed their own rules. Prairie View now joins a list of places — Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, Cleveland, New York and others — where African-Americans have died after encounters with the police, and where assumptions about progress in race relations have been challenged, if not dashed. But here, in a county where most blacks and whites are still buried in separate cemeteries, those assumptions have been especially shaky. Image Students at Prairie View A&M University, where Sandra Bland graduated in 2009. Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times “The caste system still exists here,” said LaVaughn Mosley, a former counselor at Prairie View A&M who had been friends with Ms. Bland since her undergraduate days. “There is a whole race of people here who are treated like second-class citizens.” Local officials mostly disagree. “We are not a bunch of backwoods, red-necked racists,” said County Judge Carbett J. Duhon III, the region’s chief executive officer, who is known as Trey and is white. “Far from it.” Some African-American elected officials also insist that the vestiges of racism are being addressed. “It’s not the Waller County of the ’60s and ’70s,” said Mayor Michael S. Wolfe Sr., the third black mayor of Hempstead, the county seat. “Things have changed tremendously.” Image LaVaughn Mosley, a former counselor at Prairie View A&M who had been friends with Ms. Bland since her undergraduate days. Credit Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times But at a time when deaths of African-Americans after confrontations with law enforcement already have the nation on tenterhooks, the county’s legacy of racial disparities has only catalyzed suspicions about almost everything that happened to Ms. Bland, a 28-year-old aspiring researcher who had proclaimed solidarity with the movement against racial bias in law enforcement. Here and across the country, her last days — from the moment the trooper pulled her over on July 10 for failing to signal a lane change to her death by hanging in the jail, ruled a suicide — are being exhaustively parsed for evidence of bias. Ms. Bland’s family is challenging the suicide finding. Johnie Jones, who was president of the Prairie View A&M student body in 2009 and fought for voting rights, has followed the news with sorrow and dismay. “It just blew my mind that we were still in that same place and haven’t really moved forward,” said Mr. Jones, who graduated with Ms. Bland that year and described her as smart, generous and outspoken. “How could we still be dealing with these issues in 2015?” Image William Wagner, left, and Darrod Smith rode horses through downtown Hempstead, Tex., the hub of Waller County, which has roughly the same number of blacks and whites. Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times Waller County, about an hour northwest of ever-growing Houston, is home to roughly 47,000 residents, a fourth of them African-American. It was a haven for freed slaves during Reconstruction, but that soon changed: One study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit advocacy group, suggests that blacks were subsequently lynched here more frequently than in almost any other county in the state. In the last decade or so, disputes have erupted over student voting rights, the neglect of black cemeteries, a white mayor’s refusal to attend a parade marking the liberation of slaves at the end of the Civil War and the firing of a police chief, later twice elected sheriff, after complaints about police misconduct against black residents. Prairie View A&M, established in 1876 as the Alta Vista Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas for Colored Youths, is the county’s economic anchor and, many contend, its most progressive force. The university, serving 8,000 students and known for research and community service, is immaculately tended. But the surrounding community of Prairie View, incorporated in 1969 and always headed by a black mayor, is bereft of the stores, lodging and restaurants of a typical college town. Home to about 5,800 residents and nearly 90 percent black, it feels like the forgotten stepsister of the rural county’s other, whiter towns. Assessing the Legality of Sandra Bland’s Arrest A video released by Texas officials confirms accounts of a physical confrontation between Ms. Bland and a state trooper. But her arrest and cause of death remain in dispute. Drug dealers are being blamed for several recent murders here, leading some people to call for help for the town’s seven-officer police force. But when he stopped Ms. Bland, State Trooper Brian T. Encinia, 30, was apparently on a routine patrol of University Drive, a sleepy state road that leads from the highway to Prairie View A&M’s entrance. Trooper Encinia, a white officer who joined the force 19 months ago, first pulled over a university student, issuing a polite warning to watch the speed limit, before making a U-turn and trailing Ms. Bland. The stop quickly became confrontational , ending with Ms. Bland in the back of a police car headed for jail, facing a felony charge of assaulting a public officer. No official here is defending the trooper’s behavior: After Ms. Bland refused to extinguish her cigarette, he ordered her out of her car, threatened her with a stun gun and handcuffed her. Elton R. Mathis, the county’s district attorney, said he was “not happy” about what he had seen on the videotape from the trooper’s dashboard camera. Mr. Wolfe, the Hempstead mayor, said he was “very, very upset” by it. The State Department of Public Safety has said the trooper violated protocol. An inquiry is underway. Herschel C. Smith, the elected constable whose precinct includes Prairie View, said the encounter underscored the need to overhaul the culture of how law enforcement officers treat minorities, a point he said he had made repeatedly to his counterparts here. Questions Still Swirling Around the Death of Sandra Bland Critics on social media are questioning what happened after the arrest and highlighting inconsistencies on reports released by the Sheriff’s Office in Waller County, Tex., where she died. Mr. Smith, who is black, recalled that even he had been pulled over this spring and detained for 45 minutes by a police officer from Hempstead who ran his license plate through a computer database, even though he was wearing his uniform at the time. “How humiliating is that for an elected official?” he said. “They have no respect, even when we do get elected. So I know how Sandy Bland felt.” Handcuffed, Ms. Bland was driven about 10 minutes to Hempstead and the Waller County jail, run by Sheriff R. Glenn Smith, a controversial figure since his days as Hempstead’s police chief. A decade ago, Hempstead’s only full-time black police officer sued, alleging that Chief Smith had dismissed him on a trumped-up charge after he complained about his supervisor’s racial slurs. An African-American couple also sued, alleging that Chief Smith had turned them away when they reported that a white man had assaulted their 7-year-old son at Pee-Wee football practice. Those suits were dismissed, but in 2007 city officials suspended Chief Smith after he pushed a black man who he said had spit on him in the street. The next year, after complaints about officers who executed faulty warrants against black residents and searched a young black’s man underwear in public, he was fired. Autopsy of Sandra Bland A county prosecutor concluded that Ms. Bland, who died in a jail cell in Waller County, Tex., on July 13, had injuries that were consistent with suicide, not homicide. Just months later, he was elected sheriff with two-thirds of the vote, making him one of the county’s most powerful officials. He was accused of racism as police chief, Sheriff Smith said in an interview, “but racism was not what was going on.” “I am not a racist, nor have I ever been,” he added. Yet the criticism has continued. Detractors charge that the sheriff’s chain of command is lily-white; while Sheriff Smith said he could not immediately give a racial breakdown of his 85-member staff, one of his four top deputies is black. On the morning that Ms. Bland died, he said, all three jailers on duty were black or Hispanic. He acknowledges the jail’s failures to protect Ms. Bland by not placing her on a suicide watch, not checking on her in person and leaving her with a plastic trash bag that became the makeshift noose from which she was found hanging. Those appear to reflect a more general pattern; state inspectors also cited failings in 2012 when a white inmate hanged himself with a bedsheet. Whether Ms. Bland’s treatment was criminally negligent is now up to Mr. Mathis, the county district attorney for nine years. In an interview and at nationally broadcast news conferences, Mr. Mathis, who is white, has cast himself as a refreshing contrast to Waller County’s less savory racial past. Whereas one of his predecessors wrongly insisted in 2004 that the black students at Prairie View A&M had to return to their counties to vote, he said he had helped ensure officials carried out a 2008 federal consent decree prohibiting them from unfairly rejecting voter registration forms or erecting other specious obstacles to voting. “A lot of that stuff they say about Waller County is true,” he said last week. “I grew up here.” But he insisted, “There is a new generation in control in Waller County, a more progressive generation.” Still, when the Rev. Walter Pendleton, an activist African-American preacher in the county, accused Mr. Mathis in a May 2014 text message of mollycoddling a white former official who got into trouble, Mr. Mathis’s response seemed almost reminiscent of an earlier era. Texting back in a message laced with vulgarity, he said the 66-year-old preacher was “too stupid to know” the meaning of the term selective prosecution. Mr. Mathis urged him to “jump off a high cliff.” “Keep talking,” he wrote. “When I talk, people will listen.” Mr. Mathis later said he had sent the messages in anger. At Prairie View A&M, students taking summer classes now travel down University Drive more warily, with a makeshift roadside memorial as a reminder of Ms. Bland’s experience. “We don’t even know what society we live in anymore,” said Chad Wilkinson, a 20-year-old junior from Nassau, the Bahamas, who is majoring in health. “We thought we were so safe until it happened. “Now everyone is on guard, and saying, ‘Who could be next?’ You don’t know who’s going to be next. It could be that guy. It could be anybody.”

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


Francisco Rodriguez Apologizes in Return to the Mets

Abstract: After he issued a brief public apology in the afternoon and said he would undergo anger-management therapy, Francisco Rodriguez , the Mets ’ volatile closer, pitched Saturday for the first time since his arrest early Thursday on charges he assaulted the grandfather of his 11-month-old twins. As he jogged in from the bullpen before the top of the ninth inning, Rodriguez was booed at Citi Field. He pitched a scoreless inning in a nonsave situation as the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Mets, 4-0. “That’s something that I cannot control,” Rodriguez said of the negative reception from many of the 39,151 fans. “The only thing I can do is go out and do my job.” When he walked into the dugout after the inning, Rodriguez received a more positive greeting as he bumped fists with Manager Jerry Manuel and was welcomed casually and supportively by several teammates and members of the coaching staff. Before the game, Rodriguez made a statement lasting less than a minute in which he said he accepted the anger-management counseling and apologized for the incident that occurred Wednesday night at Citi Field. He was arrested on charges of assaulting Carlos Pena, the grandfather of his twins, outside the team family room. The arrest took place after a 6-2 loss to the Colorado Rockies in which Manuel’s reluctance to use Rodriguez became an issue. “First of all, I’m extremely sorry and I want to apologize to Fred Wilpon and Jeff Wilpon and Mr. Katz for the incident that happened Wednesday night,” he said, referring to the Mets’ chairman, the chief operating officer and the team’s president, Saul Katz. “I want to apologize also to the Mets’ fans, to my teammates. I want to apologize, of course, to the front office for the embarrassment I caused. “I’m looking forward to being a better person.” Part of that will presumably include the anger-management program, which was mandated as part of the overall punishment meted out in concert by the Mets, Major League Baseball and the players association. The punishment included two days on the restricted list without pay. The program was ordered to address Rodriguez’s numerous outbursts, including two violent ones this season; one in the bullpen when he attacked the bullpen coach Randy Niemann, and Wednesday night’s incident, in which the authorities said he punched Pena, the father of his common-law wife, Daian Pena. Rodriguez was arraigned Thursday at Queens Criminal Court on charges of third-degree assault and second-degree harassment. According to the plan hashed out by the team, M.L.B. and the union, Rodriguez will be evaluated by a mental health worker chosen by baseball and another chosen by the union. After consultation, an anger-management program will be devised that Rodriguez must adhere to, or he could face more disciplinary action. “Right now, the plan is I’m going to be going to an anger-management program,” he said in the statement. “I cannot speak further about the legal stuff that we’re going through right now. I apologize. I’m sorry.” Rodriguez, who is from Venezuela, would not answer any questions from reporters until after the game, and he declined a request to repeat his statement in Spanish. He then left the room and returned to the clubhouse, where life quickly returned to its prearrest norm. He sat at his locker for more than an hour, talking and laughing with teammates. After batting practice, when most of the players retreated to the back of the clubhouse, Rodriguez remained at his locker, one of only two Mets players in the area of the clubhouse open to reporters. He sat silently and checked his iPhone , just as he does before virtually every game. Before the game, he shaved off most of the bushy beard that, he told Newsday a day before the arrest, he had grown to annoy Daian Pena. Manuel said Rodriguez apologized to him when the two met earlier in the day at the stadium. “I’m not a psychologist or anything like that,” Manuel said, “but from what I know of him and the experiences that I’ve had, I take it as to be a very sincere apology.” Manuel said Rodriguez would speak to teammates individually to apologize for Wednesday’s incident. As of 6 p.m. Saturday, it was hard to find a player who had received that apology. “I haven’t heard anything,” Jeff Francoeur said before the game. “I imagine he will, probably. And like I said, we’ll kind of move on from there.” Asked if he had spoken to teammates, Rodriguez declined to answer. “That’s something that’s personal that I don’t think I can share with you,” he said. Outfielder Angel Pagan said he sought out Rodriguez. “I went up to him and said, as a teammate, we’ll back you up,” Pagan said. Carlos Beltran, who was the most outspoken of the Mets in condemning the incident, said he spoke to Rodriguez, who seemed remorseful. “He’s sorry it happened,” Beltran said. “We’re glad it’s over and we’re happy to have him back.”

Baseball
Rodriguez Francisco
New York Mets


Clippers and Chris Paul Survive the Spurs With Trust, Toughness and Resolve

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — On Saturday night, after nearly three hours of unscripted theater, Chris Paul wore an unconventional ensemble to his news conference. From the waist up, Paul was business casual: black jacket over a white shirt, which he accented with a black hat. Carmelo Anthony, a friend and fellow headwear aficionado, would have been proud. But from the waist down, Paul revealed what he had endured against the San Antonio Spurs. He was still wearing basketball shorts, and ice packs encased his left leg. An epic first-round series was over, the Clippers having prevailed in seven games thanks to Paul’s game-winning shot with a second left, and he had nothing to hide. “I’m going to get with my training staff,” he said, “and I know my grandmother back in North Carolina is praying right now. She’s praying, and she’ll let my Mom pray over it, too.” It was a victory worth celebrating. But Paul, after playing with a strained left hamstring for the final three quarters, was already acknowledging the hard truth — that he and the Clippers had about 48 hours to recover for Monday’s opener against the Houston Rockets in the Western Conference semifinals. The playoffs are ruthless, especially in the high-octane West — and most especially for the Clippers, whose reward for finishing the regular season with 56 victories was two weeks on a trapeze against the defending champion Spurs. The cumulative score after seven games? Spurs 724, Clippers 721. “Both teams competed their butts off,” said Gregg Popovich, the coach of the Spurs. The Clippers did more than survive. Led by Paul, they showed toughness and resolve, and after decades of futility as the N.B.A.’s resident laughingstock, the Clippers made a statement on Saturday about their future. Ousting the Spurs, long the league’s standard for excellence, only underscored the significance of their 111-109 victory. “I think if we had won this series against someone else, we probably would have been happy, obviously,” said Doc Rivers, the coach of the Clippers. “But playing against them, it’s like being taught during a competition on how to act, how to play and how to trust.” That trust was apparent when Paul left for the locker room late in the first quarter after he felt a pull in his left hamstring dribbling the ball up the court. In his absence, role players like Jamal Crawford and Glen Davis (who had sprained his left ankle in Game 6) were able to sustain the Clippers and prevent the Spurs from building a lead. Once Paul returned, he was magnificent. Despite playing with a noticeable limp, he struck a balance between creating opportunities for teammates and taking advantage of scoring chances when they presented themselves. He finished with 27 points and 6 assists, and shot 9 of 13 from the field in 37 minutes. He was 5 of 6 from the 3-point line. In the afterglow of his game-winner, a runner over the outstretched arm of Tim Duncan that caromed off the glass, Paul moved from hug to hug. He started by hugging the actor Billy Crystal, a longtime fan who had stuck with the team through its many struggles. He hugged Steve Ballmer, the team’s effervescent owner. He also hugged his brother, C. J. “That’s my ace, my road dog,” Chris Paul said. “He’s the guy who, when I’m missing shots, is on the baseline talking junk to me.” Then again, motivation was not terribly difficult for Paul to find in this series. He is one of the league’s top point guards, his bona fides unquestioned by now. But the playoffs have been a consistent nemesis. Since turning pro in 2007, Paul has made seven trips to the postseason but has never advanced beyond the conference semifinals. The Spurs were a familiar obstacle. San Antonio bounced Paul from the playoffs in 2008, when he was a member of the New Orleans Hornets, and again in 2012, when he was in his first season with the Clippers. Last season, the Oklahoma City Thunder eliminated the Clippers in the conference semifinals. At the time, the Clippers were coping with the fallout from the removal of Donald Sterling as the team’s owner, after Sterling was found to have made racist statements. The team’s premature exit was particularly hard on Paul. But the Clippers were able to approach this season free of distractions, with a new owner in place. They just wanted to play basketball, and Paul appeared in all 82 regular-season games. Paul said he had trouble sleeping Friday night, and then his body betrayed him in Game 7. When he returned in the second quarter, he left an impression on everyone. “I don’t really know what to say to be honest,” the Clippers’ Blake Griffin said. “There’s not really a good word that comes to mind. To be injured like that — when he came back, I was like: ‘Man, what can you do? Can you do anything? And he’s like, ‘We’ll see.’ ” On Sunday, the Clippers listed Paul as questionable for Game 1 against the Rockets. The Clippers are not a deep team even when Paul has two functional legs. But these Clippers are not the same as the old Clippers, and while Paul has made sure of that, they also have the Spurs to thank. “Just the grind of this series, it has to make you better,” Rivers said. “I don’t know how, but it has to when you go through something like this.”

Clippers
Chris Paul
Spurs
Basketball
Houston Rockets


State Officials Blast Penn State in Sandusky Case

Abstract: STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — The Pennsylvania attorney general and the state police commissioner excoriated Penn State officials on Monday for failing over several years to alert the authorities to possible sexual abuse of young boys by a prominent football assistant. They said the university employees who declined to report the incidents to the police put countless more children at risk of being abused by Jerry Sandusky, the longtime assistant who has been charged with sexually abusing eight boys over a 15-year span, including during his tenure as an assistant at Penn State. Frank Noonan, the police commissioner who spent more than 30 years with the F.B.I. and the attorney general’s office, said the nature of the alleged incidents was unprecedented in his experience. Even after Sandusky “made admissions about inappropriate contact in the shower room” in 1998 to the Penn State campus police, “Nothing happened,” Noonan said. “Nothing stopped.” He said that janitors witnessed a sexual act in the football facility’s showers two years later, and still “nothing changed, nothing stopped,” because the janitors feared for their jobs and did not report the incident. Then, in 2002, according to prosecutors, another sex act involving Sandusky and a young boy was witnessed by a Penn State graduate assistant coach, who reported it to Coach Joe Paterno — yet the police still were not contacted. “That’s very unusual,” Noonan said Monday at a news conference at the Capitol in Harrisburg where he and Linda Kelly, the attorney general, summarized the cases against Sandusky and two university officials. “I don’t think I’ve ever been associated with a case where that type of eyewitness identification of sex acts taking place where the police weren’t called. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like that before.” Through his lawyer, Sandusky has maintained his innocence. Two Penn State officials charged with perjury in their grand jury testimony and failing to report the suspected sexual abuse surrendered Monday, a day after they stepped down from their positions. The officials — Tim Curley, 57, the athletic director; and Gary Schultz, 62, the vice president for business and finance who oversaw the university police — were not required to enter a plea. They have denied any wrongdoing, and their lawyers are expected to seek to have the charges dismissed. “I think you have the moral responsibility,” Noonan said. “Anyone — not whether you’re a football coach or a university president or the guy sweeping the building — I think you have a moral responsibility to call us.” When asked if there might be more victims beyond the eight children mentioned in the grand jury report, Kelly said, “When you look at the totality of the circumstances and the number of victims that we have, I don’t think it would be beyond the realm of possibility that there are other victims that exist here.” She and Noonan encouraged any other possible victims to contact the attorney general’s office. Kelly said Paterno had cooperated with investigators and fulfilled his legal obligation to pass the information to a superior when, in 2002, the graduate assistant told him about an incident involving Sandusky that he had witnessed in the football facility’s showers. Paterno is not considered a target of the investigation at this point, Kelly said. After the graduate assistant told Paterno, Curley and Schultz about what he had seen, Curley briefed the university president, according to the grand jury report. No one at the university alerted the police or pursued the matter to determine the well-being of the child involved. In fact, Kelly said Monday, the identity of that child remains unknown. “Those officials and administrators to whom it was reported did not report that incident to law enforcement or to any child protective agency,” Kelly said. “Their inaction, likely, allowed a child predator to continue to victimize children for many, many years.” According to prosecutors, Sandusky preyed on young boys he met through the charity he founded years earlier, the Second Mile, which was designed to help disadvantaged boys. The charity released a statement Monday that said that Curley had told the organization’s chief executive in 2002 about the report from the graduate assistant, but that the matter had been reviewed internally and no wrongdoing was found. “At no time was the Second Mile made aware of the very serious allegations contained in the grand jury report,” the statement said. The grand jury report has no mention of an internal review of the incident by Penn State. According to prosecutors, Penn State could have halted the abuse in 1998, when Sandusky was an assistant for Paterno. A mother of an 11-year-old boy Sandusky had befriended at his charity reported to the campus police that her son had been touched and held by Sandusky in a shower at the football facility. Prosecutors said an investigation — which grew to include allegations about a second young child being similarly touched by Sandusky in a shower — was carried out by the campus police. When asked whether Paterno or the university president, Graham B. Spanier, was aware in 1998 of the investigation, Kelly said, “All I can say was that investigation was handled by Penn State University’s police department.” Paterno’s son Scott said in a telephone interview Sunday that Paterno had not been aware of the 1998 investigation. Gerald Lauro investigated the 1998 allegation for child protective services. He said he did not find enough evidence of sexual assault to determine that the charge was founded. “I did my investigation and I based my determination on all the available evidence,” he said. Noonan, a former chief investigator at the attorney general’s office, said the methods Sandusky was suspected of using were common in these types of investigations. He said it was known as “grooming” victims, in which an adult identifies a child, becomes a mentor, gives him gifts and establishes trust. Prosecutors say he took many of the boys to campus to visit the team’s field and eat in the dining hall, and took them on trips to postseason games. Even after the 2002 incident that Paterno, Curley, Schultz and Spanier were told about, it appears the university continued to allow Sandusky on campus. And as recently as 2009, the university system was promoting the Sandusky Football Camp, a four-day, three-night clinic held at Penn State campuses in Erie and Harrisburg, according to an advertisement for the camp published Monday by Deadspin.

College
Football
Jerry Sandusky
Joe Paterno
Child Abuse
Rape
College football


Alcoa to Sell Two Divisions

Abstract: The aluminum maker Alcoa said yesterday that it was close to selling its packaging and consumer business and its automotive castings business. It also said it planned to revamp its electrical and electronic solutions business in the Americas and Europe, and expected to record $845 million in reorganization and impairment charges in the third quarter. These actions, combined with the recent sale of Alcoa’s stake in the Chinese aluminum maker Chalco for $1.8 billion, will allow Alcoa to focus on its core business of mining bauxite and producing alumina, which in turn is manufactured into aluminum, the company, based in Pittsburgh, said. The company said that it had decided to sell its packaging and consumer business, which includes products like kitchen foil and wraps, and that it would sell its automotive castings business by the end of this year.

Aluminum
Alcoa Incorporated
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures


The King Is Back, in Hong Kong

Abstract: HONG KONG — He owns more than 20 sparkly suits, two guitars and a black wig sprouting outsize sideburns. Melvis Kwok Lam-sang takes his job seriously. Very seriously. Better known as Melvis the Elvis , Mr. Kwok is Hong Kong’s most prominent impersonator of, yes, The King. He has been rocking and rolling his way through the city’s bars, a couple of hours every night, for nearly two decades. Now somewhere between 45 and 61 years old — he is coy about his age — he has no intention of stopping. Slight of build and gaunt of face, he haunts the alleys and back streets of the Lan Kwai Fong and SoHo neighborhoods in search of appreciative-looking audiences. When he finds them, he bursts into song. He’s not particularly melodious, but he’s passionate, with a pelvic thrust and a cool Elvis mien — and, occasionally, with hands thrown up in musical ecstasy. He never passes up a request for a photograph. Melvis plus group of tourists? Fine. Melvis plus blow-up doll? No problem. He poses. “Elvis is my savior,” he said in broken English in a rare interview, leaning back in his chair in a Hong Kong coffee shop, before heading out for that night’s round of the bars. More than three decades after his death, Elvis Presley is as popular in Asia as ever, with fan clubs all over the region — in the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, India, Singapore and, of course, Hong Kong. Junichiro Koizumi, the former Japanese prime minister and an avowed Elvis aficionado, once tried on a pair of Elvis shades while visiting Graceland. In Hong Kong, the Elvis Presley Fan Club, founded in 1968, boasts about 120 members, including, besides Mr. Kwok, a female bus driver, a Japanese performer, a Burmese obstetrician, lawyers, doctors, businessmen — and another noted impersonator, Johnny Ma, also known as Hong Kong Elvis. But few take the business of impersonating Elvis as seriously as Melvis Kwok — the only one in town whose entire livelihood comes from performing Elvis songs. Even in the United States or Europe, where many take Elvis very seriously, the great majority of tribute artists don’t do Elvis full-time. Mr. Kwok became a fan in 1977, the year Elvis died, after watching “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is,” a 1970 documentary about the man who was one of the most popular musicians of the 20th century. “I cried a long time,” Mr. Kwok said, remembering when he first saw the film. By 1992, Mr. Kwok had given up his job as an electrician and thrown himself into life as the “Cat King,” which, for reasons that are somewhat obscure, is the common Chinese moniker for Elvis. To this day, it’s what sustains him — emotionally, he says, as well as financially. Every night, Mr. Kwok heads out, suited up, bewigged, guitar slung over his shoulder. He says he averages about 500 Hong Kong dollars, or $64, in tips from bar patrons, as he croons one of the many Elvis songs he knows. His favorite: “It’s Now or Never.” “The Western people, they are very generous,” Mr. Kwok said of his patrons, who are mostly expatriates or tourists, speaking in a soft, slightly husky voice. Then there is the occasional appearance at private functions or corporate events, from which he earns up to another 2,000 dollars a week. To put that in perspective: a lock of Elvis Presley’s hair sold for $18,300 at an auction in Chicago last year. And Elvis Presley’s estate generated $55 million in the 12 months up to October 2009, according to a ranking published by Forbes. Still, in Hong Kong, where manufacturing workers can expect to earn about 300 dollars a day and unions are calling for a minimum wage of 33 dollars an hour, Mr. Kwok’s income is not bad going. It is enough, Mr. Kwok said, to pay the bills and cover the expense of occasional additions to his collection of Elvis suits. These, he has made for him, for 2,000 dollars a pop. “This one is new,” he breathed, referring to a snappy blue number dotted with silver studs. If you want to book Melvis, you have to find him first. Hong Kong may be one of the most wired cities in Asia — and one of the most driven by the urge to make money — but Melvis Kwok has no Web site. Find him as he goes busking, and you may be able to get one of his business cards. “Melvis Kwok Lam Sang — Lan Kwai Fong Elivis,” they read, typo included. The back is adorned with a color picture of him brandishing a guitar and flanked by go-go dancers. The number on the card gets you through to Mr. Kwok’s wife, Anna, who doubles as his manager. “I didn’t really support him in the beginning, because Hong Kong is not a place where people have great passion towards the Cat King,” she said. “But then I was moved by his persistence and devotion to the job.” It’s hard to find a job one loves, she said. “Now that he’s found it, I am happy to support him.” “I am very satisfied,” said Mr. Kwok. “If I stop, I will collapse.” Andrea Deng contributed reporting.


Guns at Hand, a Prison Town Tracks a Manhunt for Escaped Convicts

Abstract: DANNEMORA, N.Y. — In a town where residents are either corrections officers or live next door to one, few admit to being fearful about the two convicted murderers who escaped the walls of the prison here last weekend. But their actions reveal a heightened watchfulness. Abby Boire, 32, an assistant professor at a nearby college, said she checked on her 4-year-old daughter seven times as the child slept on Wednesday night. Ms. Boire also had a gun ready. In the six days since the two convicted murderers were discovered missing from the Clinton Correctional Facility here, after creeping up through a series of pipes and out a manhole on a residential side street, they have been the targets of a sprawling manhunt that continued to grind through the area’s forests, roads and even front lawns on Thursday. Now, caution and self-protection have been on the minds even of residents accustomed to living near the prison . Immediately after the prisoners, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat, were discovered to have escaped, the danger did not seem imminent, several townspeople said. A joint news conference on Wednesday between Govs. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Peter Shumlin of Vermont appeared to indicate that the men had left the vicinity, maybe even the state. But as the search redoubled on Wednesday night among the forests of sugar maple and American beech just a few miles from the prison, and investigators said that a possible accomplice who was to provide a getaway car, Joyce Mitchell, an employee in the prison’s tailoring shop, had had a change of heart, some local residents said it felt as though the danger had lingered. Here where properties span several acres, a new morning ritual has emerged: checking sheds, barns and vehicles for the escapees, with gun drawn. Devi Momot, 52, drove her daughter’s pet Staffordshire terrier, Ayla, to a newly widowed neighbor to stay with the woman for the night. Never mind that while the muscle-bound dog looks intimidating, it is in fact about half as ferocious as a large stuffed bear. “It made her feel safe,” Ms. Momot said. Her brother Clark Currier was not leaving anything to chance. “I’ve got a shotgun by the back door, two rifles in the living room and a shotgun upstairs in my bedroom,” said Mr. Currier, as he sat in the offices of Twinstate Technologies, a cybersecurity firm he owns with his family. (Ms. Momot is a co-owner.) He gestured toward the back of his jeans: “Plus my pistol.” The low building abuts land near Route 374 where hundreds of law-enforcement officers were still combing the woods. They had been searching there since the night before, after a tracking dog had appeared to pick up a scent, a State Police official said. Outside their home just a few thousand feet from a police cordon at Trudeau Road, Phyllis and Ken Phelps were planting tomatoes and playing catch with their two dogs as their grandson buzzed along with a weed trimmer. But their idyll was riddled with hints of anxiety, though they were loath to admit it. “I’m in the kitchen and I keep looking back at the woods,” she said. “Don’t make it sound like she’s scared,” Mr. Phelps, in his straw gardening hat, said to a reporter, adding that his wife could easily have been looking for something else. “Yes, a fox might come in and try to eat the chickens,” she said. Guns are a part of life in the North Country, the thickly wooded tracts at the uppermost edge of New York State. There are hunting rifles, but here in the shadow of the state’s largest maximum-security prison, they keep pistols and revolvers, too, most often unloaded — just in case. At Vann’s Gun Shop & Reloads in nearby Plattsburgh, one of the owners, Mary Vann, said she had not seen a run on ammunitions, nor sold any more than usual of her top seller, a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol, since the escape. There was no need. “Everybody is pretty well armed up here to begin with,” she said. “We are prepared up here for almost anything.” On Wednesday night, some residents received robocalls instructing them to stay indoors. Schools were closed on Thursday; some teenagers took advantage of the free day to go to the beach at a nearby riverfront. Some had left for friends’ or relatives’ houses in neighboring towns outside the sweep of where the authorities were marching through the bushes, and halting cars at checkpoints, popping open trunks for inspection. Theresa Driscoll’s sister Michelle Young, 48, drove in from Lisbon, N.Y., about two hours away, to stay at Ms. Driscoll’s house on Emmons Street, just a few blocks off from the prison’s immense walls. She sat in the sun on Thursday in a folding chair outside the red-shingled house to see any drama unfold live, rather than on her television set. Ms. Driscoll, 56, however, did not share in her sister’s thrill-seeking. Since the jailbreak, she said, she has slept with a five-inch hunting blade wedged in the doorjamb of her bedroom. Vigilance is a way of life here, where the prison is the area’s top employer, said Peter Light, 67, a retired corrections officer who served at Clinton for decades. He said that when he walked through places like a shopping center, he found himself absent-mindedly tugging on door handles to see if they were locked, as he would during cell checks. “We’re naturally vigilant,” he said.

Dannemora
Clinton Correctional Facility
David Sweat
Prison escape
Richard Matt


It’s Open Season on Alex Rodriguez

Abstract: Detroit On the tombstone of his Yankees career, Alex Rodriguez may one day be remembered in his own words from a moment of unvarnished introspection during an interview session before the 2008 All-Star Game at the old Yankee Stadium. “It’s always been something with me,” he said. He soon added, “I’ve learned to put whatever issues on the front page in a small box over here.” And, yes, for a time that carried him through an exhilarating 2009 postseason that promised to be personal vindication and career validation, Rodriguez largely stanched the flow of “something.” He negotiated a truce with those typically inclined to believe the worst about a man who was strangely capable of simultaneous preening and hiding; a player blessed with the richest of salaries, yet haunted by skeletons and syringes. But now the box is one of glass, and the Yankees have locked Rodriguez inside it with all of his issues, incipient and erstwhile. Once vilified for bulking up, he has become, in a figurative sense, the incredible shrinking slugger, to the point where the growing belief is that he might soon disappear from New York, against all economic odds. The Yankees’ season remained alive after Game 4 of the American League Championship Series against the Tigers was postponed Wednesday night because of rain. One of their famous alumni coined a rather memorable phrase about it not being over till it’s over, but it was difficult not to begin looking ahead to 2013 in the wake of a 3-0 series deficit. And the question of what to do with Rodriguez suddenly loomed larger than all others — including the recovery from a broken ankle of the captain, Derek Jeter. What do you say about a man who, in the span of a few unsightly days, has been pinch-hit for and benched on multiple occasions, essentially stripped of his professional dignity one step before the World Series? Remember the recent time of batting order innocence, when the budding controversy was whether Rodriguez should be dropped from the third position? On Wednesday evening, General Manager Brian Cashman volunteered that Rodriguez had become a $30-million-a-year platoon player for the remainder of the season, however many hours or days that would entail. As with his manager, Joe Girardi , the discussion of the riddle nicknamed A-Rod was conducted in earnest but businesslike tones, Cashman citing a season’s worth of statistics — chiefly Rodriguez’s subpar numbers versus right-handed pitchers that plummeted in the playoffs. Were they mad at him for the recent New York Post report that had Rodriguez turning the dugout into a dating service after being pinch-hit for in Game 1 on Saturday night, perhaps compensating for the on-field emasculation by puffing up his manhood? “Purely baseball related,” said Cashman, who has had his own indiscreet fling with the gossip columns. “This is all about winning, regardless of the report that is out there that is a non-baseball-related story.” Because it has become open season on Rodriguez at the putative end of the 2012 season, any newsbreak has become possible — and immediately deemed plausible. Cashman stamped on a so-called story that a trade was percolating with the Marlins — though his denial said there were “no discussions whatsoever with the Florida Marlins.” Note to hopeful conspiracy theorists: technically speaking, they’re the Miami Marlins. Girardi added: “It’s not that I want to sit Alex Rodriguez.” But he did just that Tuesday night against Justin Verlander even when the numbers — Rodriguez had homered twice off Verlander this season — suggested that he deserved to play. For his part, Rodriguez stepped out of the dugout for batting practice with the reserves to admit his unhappiness. “Obviously, I come to the ballpark feeling I can help the team win, and when you see your name is not in the lineup, obviously it’s disappointing,” he said. “You’ve got to just sit to be a cheerleader.” He insisted that he still had rah-rah feelings for the Yankees, saying, “I love this organization.” But are those feelings real? If so, can they possibly be mutual? Cashman admitted that the decision to bench Rodriguez was “discussed organizationally,” though he said Girardi had the final call. Clearly no one was going out of his way to cushion the blow for Rodriguez, who wound up asking a reporter late Wednesday afternoon for information on the lineup against the Tigers’ scheduled starter, Max Scherzer. Over all, there has been little overt sympathy expressed by the Yankees for their troubled third baseman, their expensive albatross, which is really the root of the underlying tension. They apparently blame Rodriguez for the 10-year contract that will ultimately cost at least $275 million — unless Miami or some other team can be talked into picking up a small percentage in a trade and the Yankees not only swallow the rest, but have it count against their payroll for revenue-sharing purposes. But if Rodriguez is not one to easily feel sorry for, whatever in-house resentment there is for him and his contract is misplaced and grossly unfair. He didn’t force the Yankees to re-sign him. Rodriguez, in fact, provided them an airtight excuse to sever all ties when he opted out of his original deal during the 2007 World Series. Be it Hank Steinbrenner acting alone or with encouragement from brother Hal and others, a disastrous decision was made because they believed Rodriguez — then considered to be the likely future and clean home run champion — was a potential cash cow. They even had the audacity to officially announce the deal on the day George Mitchell released the contents of his long investigation into baseball’s steroids culture — the sort of cheesy, transparent call for attention that Rodriguez had long been known for. All things considered, the events leading to where they are now might convince a few folks to think the inscription on that A-Rod Yankees tombstone should actually read: They deserved each other.

Baseball
Rodriguez Alex
New York Yankees
Girardi Joe
Cashman Brian
Playoff Games


Woman Breaks Through Chains of Forced Marriage, and Helps Others Do the Same

Abstract: NEWARK — One day in March 2011, Fraidy Reiss went to her lawyer’s office to close on a house. The prosaic routine of paperwork somehow diminished her sense of accomplishment. Not even the seller was present to hear what she yearned to say. She was only buying a Cape Cod on a small patch of lawn in a blue-collar neighborhood in New Jersey. Yet she and her two daughters had already named the place “Palais de Triomphe,” palace of triumph. The house symbolized her liberation from an arranged marriage, threats of violence at the hands of her estranged husband, and indeed the entire insular community of stringently Orthodox Jews among whom she had spent her entire life. In that moment of emancipation, Ms. Reiss also felt the sudden, unbidden summons of obligation. “The house meant that I’ve gotten to the other side,” she recalled. “I wanted to do something to give back. I wanted to use my pain to help others in the same situation. And, selfishly, I thought that would help me heal.” Four years later, on a blustery morning early this month, Ms. Reiss, 40, stood in a classroom at Rutgers University in Newark telling her story to three dozen lawyers. She spoke with well-practiced pacing and emphasis — childhood in Brooklyn, coerced betrothal in her teens to a man she barely knew, and then the harassment and stalking and death threats, all of it documented in court papers. Finally, there was college and therapy and, after 15 years of marriage, divorce. Ms. Reiss spoke with a very specific purpose. The lawyers were attending a continuing education course sponsored by Unchained at Last , the nonprofit group that she founded four years ago to help women extricate themselves from arranged marriages. Her hope was that some of the lawyers would be moved to represent Unchained at Last’s clients without charge. “It’s a moral imperative,” said Katherine Francis, a corporate lawyer from the Trenton area, after Ms. Reiss’s presentation. “I hadn’t even planned to be here, but you know how you start a Google search and wander? And all of a sudden I saw this class and thought, ‘Hmm, there’s the universe talking.’ ” Unchained at Last operates in the contested crossroad between the modern secular concept of marriage for love between consenting adults and longstanding ethnic or communal customs of arranged marriage. Religion does not require such marriage, but is very often invoked to provide moral justification for it. And the laws of certain faiths, Orthodox Judaism in particular, give a husband the sole right to grant a divorce. A reliable estimate of arranged marriages is difficult because the definition is inexact. But the Tahirih Justice Center, an advocacy group for immigrant women, reported that about 3,000 cases of “forced marriage” took place in the United States from 2009 through 2011. Almost all of the 90 women whom Unchained at Last has helped had been pressured into marriage by their religious community: Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Mormon, Unification Church. Most lived in the New York area, though one was in Arizona. The women’s nations of origin stretch through Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. On a basic level, Unchained at Last provides legal services because most of the women’s cases involve divorce and child custody litigation, and some extend into immigration status and restraining orders against a violent spouse. Because the clients’ situations can be so catastrophic — forced at gunpoint to accept a marriage, raped by a husband, essentially imprisoned within the home as a domestic servant — Unchained at Last also provides mentoring, access to therapy and cash stipends for everything from basic clothing to English as a second language class. Ms. Reiss’s earliest collaborator was Shehnaz Abdeljaber, a Rutgers classmate of Palestinian Muslim ancestry. In their barrier-crossing friendship, the women discovered a common bond. Ms. Abdeljaber had been pushed by her parents into an engagement to a young man from her extended family whom she had never met. Though she managed to break off the engagement, the broader issue intrigued her. “From the day I met Fraidy, I knew she was going to be part of my life,” Ms. Abdeljaber wrote in an email. “Little did I know that we weren’t going to be just friends. We became sisters, family and partners with her vision.” In early 2011, Unchained at Last incorporated in New Jersey. Ms. Abdeljaber became the first president of the group’s board, which also included a Hindu woman, Kavitha Rajagopalan. The annual budget back then came to barely $20,000, most of it from Ms. Reiss’s pocket. By now, Unchained at Last has a $3.4 million budget, with about $200,000 in donations from individuals and foundations and $3.2 million in free services from participating lawyers. In her own life, Ms. Reiss has become an atheist, and, after several years as a journalist, she became a private investigator. Most clients find the group through word-of-mouth. At the outset, Ms. Reiss said, the organization struggled to find enough volunteer lawyers. Child-custody litigation is particularly difficult. Religious communities have been successful at times in turning out large numbers to paint Unchained’s client as an “unfit mother” because she has left the theological corral. That has not deterred Ms. Reiss. Unchained at Last successfully lobbied in the New Jersey State Legislature last year for a law easing crime victims’ access to court records. This week, Ms. Reiss took part in an initial planning session held by the White House Council on Women and Girls to develop a national policy on forced marriage. Even in its more sophisticated form, though, Unchained at Last has retained the personal touch of what the Rev. Henri Nouwen , writing about ministry, called the “wounded healer.” Ditty Weiss, for one, experienced it. After 10 years in an abusive marriage, Ms. Weiss decided to risk leaving both her husband and their fervently Orthodox community. The only problem was that she had no idea who could help her. In a sort of desperate whim, Ms. Weiss sent an email to Deborah Feldman, the author of an acclaimed memoir, “Unorthodox,” about her rejection of the Satmar Hasidic sect in which she had grown up. Ms. Feldman steered Ms. Weiss to Ms. Reiss, who soon lined up two volunteer lawyers from a prominent Manhattan firm. When Ms. Weiss needed cancer surgery, Ms. Reiss babysat for her children. And as Ms. Weiss underwent chemotherapy, Unchained at Last gave her money to hire an au pair and a buy a used car. “I cannot even describe,” Ms. Weiss recalled, “what it’s like to have an angel sweep down and kiss you on the forehead and then hold your hand and tell you, ‘I’m not letting go until you’re O.K.’ ”

Marriage
Fraidy Reiss
Divorce
Judaism
Women and Girls
US
Hinduism
Islam


In Debate, Hillary Clinton Sent a Message to Doubters

Abstract: HENDERSON, Nev. — Democrats expressed growing skepticism on Wednesday that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. could find a foothold if he entered the presidential campaign as Hillary Rodham Clinton ’s commanding performance in the first Democratic debate here abruptly quieted murmurs about her candidacy. With no obvious constituency ready to support Mr. Biden, his prospects have been based on the possibility of Mrs. Clinton’s faltering, repeating some of the missteps she has made since declaring her candidacy or falling prey to more damning revelations about her use of a private email server as secretary of state. But with Mrs. Clinton showing her mettle in Tuesday’s debate, and Democrats increasingly convinced that questions about her emails are little more than a Republican and news media fixation, she suddenly appeared far better positioned to allay skeptics in her party. She is scheduled to testify next week before the congressional panel investigating the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. “If Biden’s only rationale is that Clinton is tanking, then that’s no longer an option,” said Stephanie Cutter, a longtime Democratic strategist. Mrs. Cutter, who worked for President Obama’s re-election, said Mr. Biden could now “risk a backlash” from Democrats if he runs. Image From left to right: Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Martin O'Malley and Lincoln Chafee. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times With her crisp answers to nearly every question, an aggressiveness her rivals did not seem ready for and a level of confidence that has often been obscured over months of email questions, Mrs. Clinton sent an unmistakable message to Mr. Biden and to her party. Her strong showing in the Las Vegas debate may have been the best moment of her campaign, and it came at a crucial time. After a steady decline in the polls, Mrs. Clinton benefited from a stroke of good fortune late last month when Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, suggested in a televised interview that the Benghazi probe was aimed at tarnishing her political prospects. And now Mrs. Clinton has made her own luck, reminding Democrats of the formidable candidate she appeared to be at times in her 2008 campaign. “Those are two big changes in the status of the race,” said Jeff Link, an Democratic strategist based in Iowa who is not committed to any candidate. The changes seemed so significant that many Democrats unaligned with Mrs. Clinton or her rivals began describing the closing, if not the slamming shut, of a door on Mr. Biden. “If the Biden candidacy is predicated on Clinton’s weakened position, I think last night makes that a tougher argument,” Mr. Link said. Video As he pondered his own White House bid, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Wednesday he thought the Democratic hopefuls did well. Credit Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Mrs. Clinton seemed to recognize as much, flashing a grin Wednesday afternoon as she received the endorsement of the painters’ union here in Henderson, a Las Vegas suburb. “I’m feeling really lucky in Las Vegas,” she said, pointing to what she called “a good night” and the union’s support. She declined to speculate about Mr. Biden’s decision, saying that “everyone else, whether they’re in or they’re not in, will have to make whatever judgment is best for them.” Mr. Biden, briefly speaking to reporters Wednesday, shed no new light on his intentions but said he had felt “proud” watching the night before. “I thought every one of those folks last night — I’m mildly prejudiced — I thought they all did well,” he said. But Mrs. Clinton’s backers here were elated, making the case that her authoritative performance offered an unspoken rejoinder to those Democrats calling for Mr. Biden to make a late entry into the race. “I think that kind of cemented it,” said Representative Dina Titus, Democrat of Nevada. “She said, ‘I’m a progressive who can get things done.’ That’s the perfect combination that we need.” Mrs. Clinton’s brand of center-left liberalism was also stating that she would carry that banner as Mr. Obama’s heir. She portrayed herself as Mr. Obama’s partner, the candidate who would perpetuate and enhance the president’s legacy. Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Democrat, offered her a crucial lift on two fronts. Mr. Sanders’s unsteady response to her surprisingly tough attacks on guns — the one issue on which she is safely able to outflank him from the left — gave Mrs. Clinton an opportunity to solidify her support among the nonwhite Democrats Mr. Biden would need to defeat her. Polls show that some of the strongest supporters of gun control are African-Americans and Hispanics. And, by effectively offering her a political amnesty on her email travails — saying “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails” — Mr. Sanders made it difficult for himself to seize on the issue should it worsen, and gave Mrs. Clinton a way to isolate Mr. Biden should he try to use the subject to attack her character. But what may have been the most lasting result of the first Democratic face-off was Mrs. Clinton’s attempt to fend off a threat from the vice president by linking herself so closely to the president they both served. “The Obama heir with her own credentials and opinions,” as Ms. Cutter put it. Mrs. Clinton turned to Mr. Obama as a shield when faced with questions that could raise doubts about her on the left. “Well, I recall very well being on a debate stage, I think, about 25 times with then-Senator Obama, debating this very issue,” Mrs. Clinton said when the first hint of criticism arose about her initial support of the Iraq war. “After the election, he asked me to become secretary of state. He valued my judgment, and I spent a lot of time with him in the Situation Room, going over some very difficult issues.” Asked about her differences with the president, she first sought to avoid the question entirely, then said only that she would “build on the successes” of Mr. Obama and try to go even further in some policy areas. How the Democrats — and CNN — Fared in the Debate Everyone onstage at Tuesday night’s debate had something to prove. Mrs. Clinton never mentioned Mr. Biden — his name did not come up once during the entire debate — but she alluded to one of the most memorable areas where she and Mr. Obama were in agreement, but the vice president was not. Recalling the “tough decision that President Obama had to make about Osama bin Laden,” Mrs. Clinton noted that she was “one of his few advisers” on that question — seeming to catch herself so as not to point out that Mr. Biden had doubts about that military operation. It was walk-to-the-edge caution that her advisers and surrogate supporters also employed after the debate, when they were clearly instructed to adhere to Mrs. Clinton’s respectful line on all questions about the vice president’s plans. But Mrs. Clinton allowed herself a little indulgence Wednesday when she was asked about whether her running mate had been on the debate stage the previous night. “Well, I like the assumption underlying your question a lot,” she said with a relish that has not always been evident since she entered the race. “But I think I’ll wait to answer that.”

Hillary Clinton
Democrats
Joe Biden
2016 Presidential Election
Political Debates


North Korea Says It Tested New Missile With Success

Abstract: SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Saturday that its leader, Kim Jong-un , had overseen the test-firing of a new antiship missile, weeks before planned joint military exercises by South Korea and the United States that the North has protested. “The intelligent rocket precisely sought, tracked and hit the ‘enemy’ ship after taking a safe flight,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said Saturday. The report, which characterized the missile as “ultraprecision,” said the test had been held off the country’s east coast but did not say when or exactly where. The state news agency also released photographs of a missile in flight and of Mr. Kim apparently observing the test from the shore, with binoculars. South Korea’s Defense Ministry did not immediately comment on the missile test. But Yonhap, a South Korean news agency, quoted an unidentified government source as saying that the missile tested was similar to the North’s KN-01 sea-to-sea cruise missile and that it flew about 62 miles. Like his father and predecessor as North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011, Kim Jong-un has focused on building up the North Korean military, saying it is needed to repel what the North insists is a planned American invasion. Under Mr. Kim’s leadership, the North has conducted missile and rocket tests, mostly involving short-range projectiles, more often than it had in the past. It also carried out its third nuclear test, in 2013. Last month, North Korea offered to impose a moratorium on nuclear tests if the United States and South Korea suspended their annual large-scale joint military drills, scheduled for March, which the North called a rehearsal for an invasion. Washington quickly rejected the proposal. Since then, the North’s state media has issued reports of Mr. Kim’s overseeing coastal drills involving submarines, ships and planes. Mr. Kim was quoted as saying that he felt no need to negotiate with American “rabid dogs” and that Washington was plotting to overthrow his government. The report on Saturday said the new antiship missile would be deployed in the near future. North Korea has tested KN-01 missiles before. South Korean media also reported last year that the North may have introduced the Russian-developed Kh-35 antiship cruise missile or a copy. In recent months, North Korea has repeatedly proposed talks with the United States and South Korea, but both countries have accused the North of lacking sincerity about ending its nuclear weapons program.

North Korea
Kim Jong-un
Korean Central News Agency
Nuclear weapon
Missiles and Missile Defense
Nuclear weapons testing


With Change Coming, Aetna Targets Employers

Abstract: AS the country marches toward a new health insurance system, insurance companies have spent millions on consumer advertising to position themselves as health care companies. But because a majority of Americans are insured through their employers, the insurance companies have to reach several audiences. Speaking to human resources professionals, health care providers and policy makers is still an important part of many insurance companies’ marketing plans. Aetna, one of the largest of the companies, will introduce a new campaign on Tuesday aimed at those groups. It will highlight the company’s goal of cutting billions of dollars of expenditures through so-called Big Data, electronic health records and other technologies as well as encouraging better coordination among health care providers. The campaign, called “Our Healthy,” will run online, in print and on mobile devices through the end of 2013. “We believe that the health care system is desperately in need of improvement,” said Robert Mead, the senior vice president of marketing, product and communications at Aetna. Mr. Mead cited a report by the Institute of Medicine that tallied more than $760 billion in health care “waste” created annually as a result of consumer fraud, unnecessary procedures and excessive administrative costs. The campaign was created by OgilvyOne in New York and is an extension of a consumer campaign called “What’s Your Healthy?” that Aetna began earlier this year. Both “What’s Your Healthy?” and “Our Healthy” are part of a $50 million advertising and marketing strategy for the company. “If you’re a consumer, you don’t know what things cost,” Mr. Mead said. “You don’t know what things are worth. You don’t always know how to get the most value out of the health system. We have to bring everybody to the table.” Image Mr. Mead said the campaign also stressed the need for health care providers to shift to a model known as “accountable care,” which shifts their reimbursement models for health care professionals from being paid for the volume of services they perform to being paid based on the outcomes of patient care. Accountable care systems are usually linked to technologies that help health care providers measure performance and manage patient data. Aetna has 27 accountable health care agreements with hospitals and other health care providers around the country. A video for the “Our Healthy” campaign features Mark T. Bertolini, the chief executive of Aetna, explaining the company’s goals. “Unless you fix that health care system, you cannot fix the economy,” Mr. Bertolini said in the video. “If we fix just 20 percent of it, we could pay for the Affordable Care Act. We could insure everyone without increasing taxes.” Like other insurance companies, Aetna has over the last few years been ramping up its technical products and services. It created Healthagen, a division of the company that sells health technology services to consumers and providers, like a mobile application that helps patients assess their symptoms and find doctors. “The fee-for-service model is broken,” Mr. Mead said. “The Affordable Care Act encourages the system to move to accountable care,” he added. “The challenge with that is that doctors and hospitals need technology and support to make that work.” But more technology and more data may not solve the problem of waste in health care, said Robert S. Huckman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the faculty co-chairman of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Initiative. “When you’re talking about having to manage waste in the system, most would agree that a lack of coordination rests at the heart of a lot of it,” he said. “Data without an educated way of querying that data is not helpful. It is a start.” While insurance companies like Aetna have access to vast amounts of patient data that could be used to manage costs, according to Mr. Huckman, the economic impact of even widely adopted technologies like electronic health records is still unclear. “Within providers and within a hospital, the electronic records have made greater inroads. But the question of moving toward greater coordination and greater interoperability is an issue we are still grappling with.” The cost of health care, however, is something everyone can agree is too high, Mr. Huckman said: “I think the cost issue is most salient right now for most Americans. It hits you front and center when you look at some of the prices.” He noted how costs could vary widely depending on where a person lived and who their insurer was. “It shouldn’t vary that much,” Mr. Huckman said. “The cost of a product on Amazon is the same no matter where I buy it from. It does defy a little bit of explanation.”

Aetna
Health Insurance
advertising,marketing
Obamacare,Affordable Care Act


Medical Examiner Opens Old Cases, and Graves, to Identify Dead

Abstract: On a winter’s night in early 2004, after a late visit at his parents’ house near Cleveland, Javier Reveron called his mother to let her know he had driven home safely. Then he vanished. Evidence would point to New York. A plane ticket was bought and used. A car parked near La Guardia Airport was broken into, and some of Mr. Reveron’s belongings were found: his wallet, a driver’s license, business cards and a banana peel. There would be sightings, most likely false, in places like Queens and Ohio. Then the trail went dry. But about six years after his disappearance, the New York City medical examiner’s office discovered what became of Mr. Reveron. The office is undertaking an ambitious effort to identify the nameless dead in the city’s potter’s field, seeking to capitalize on the expertise that it gained over the last decade identifying remains from the World Trade Center attack. Through old-time detective work and newer DNA technology, the office established that Mr. Reveron, 27, had drowned not long after arriving in New York in early 2004, and that his body was buried on Hart Island, home to the potter’s field, the graveyard of the poor, unclaimed and, in rare cases, the unidentified. Some 980 bodies have been found in the city, or its waterways, since 1990 whose identities have never been determined. After a month or more in one of the city’s morgues, the unidentified victims are generally sent to be buried in the same trench graves on Hart Island as the indigents. But now, as the medical examiner’s office conducts a systematic review of its old cases, the office is not only reopening dormant case files; it is also opening old graves. Since 2010, the city has exhumed 54 bodies from the potter’s field for further study. So far, the effort has led to about 50 identifications, mostly through DNA evidence . In the case of Mr. Reveron, his parents, Rigoberto and Judith, came to New York to try to find their son. They handed out fliers and visited store owners who thought they may have seen him. When friends visited New York, the Reverons would give them more fliers to distribute. “All to no avail,” Rigoberto Reveron said via telephone from his home in Lorain, Ohio. “We didn’t know he had already been buried.” In March 2010, Mr. Reveron filled out an electronic form concerning missing and unidentified people. Within a few days, he got a call from Ben Figura, the director of identification at the medical examiner’s office, who said, “I personally want to get involved and help you find him.” The medical examiner’s office got critical biographical information about Mr. Reveron’s son: He was a high school and college wrestler who after college was found to be bipolar. He had an appendectomy, had donated a kidney to his older brother and had the scars from both operations. That information, Mr. Reveron said, matched “a John Doe buried on Hart Island.” The match was then confirmed by DNA, using an autopsy sample and DNA taken from the parents. “In April 6, 2010, our chief of police and pastor of our church came looking for my wife and I to tell us a positive match had been made,” Mr. Reveron said. “Six years later.” The medical examiner’s office declined to discuss any case in which an identification had been made, citing privacy concerns. But the cases, according to a person familiar with the identification process, have also included Sean Wheeler, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who disappeared in late 2003 after a car accident on the Henry Hudson Parkway. His body was found about three months later, floating in the Hudson River by a ferry captain, but it was not until 2010 that a match was made. Mr. Wheeler’s relatives said they had been in touch with the medical examiner’s office in early 2004, so it was somewhat frustrating to have had to wait so long for an affirmative match. The confirmation of Mr. Wheeler’s death “was very depressing,” an aunt, Kimberly Wheeler, of Independence, Mo., said. “It shouldn’t have taken so long if they’d put any effort into it.” Another aunt, Carol Wheeler, said that the initial match was based on his appearance, height and weight, and a distinctive fraternity brand on Mr. Wheeler’s arm, and that it was confirmed by DNA testing of his aunts and uncles. “We came to the conclusion that New York was a big city and a lot of people go missing,” she said. “As time went on, you know, it became a cold case.” Not all of these nameless dead perished unnoticed. The unknown cases include several Chinese immigrants who drowned after the Golden Venture ran aground off Queens in 1993. The episode drew extensive news coverage and shed light on the brutal conditions and deprivations that some Asian immigrants endured to make it to New York. Another old case that has attracted the attention of the medical examiner’s office is that of “Baby Hope.” The young girl, about 5 years old, has been known as Baby Hope since shortly after her body was discovered packed into a picnic cooler off the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1991. As the subject of an active homicide investigation, her body was exhumed in 2007 from St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx even before the medical examiner’s office had begun looking into all of its old unknown cases. But at the time, biologists were unable to extract any DNA because her bones were in such poor condition. “She had been in a cooler in the sun, and her bones were very brittle,” said Sheila Estacio Dennis, an assistant director in the medical examiner’s department of forensic biology. By 2011, because of advances in the medical examiner’s office in the DNA extraction process, Ms. Dennis said, the office was able to obtain a full DNA profile. It did not yield a match to existing DNA databases from convicted felons or from active missing person cases in which samples had been collected. Investigators believe that her parents, or one of them, most likely murdered her, as no one has come forward to identify the girl as his or her child. In reviewing hundreds of old cases, the medical examiner’s office has in effect been conducting a census of “the unknowns,” as Mr. Figura calls them. The deceased are overwhelmingly male, typically white and often homeless. They are usually found in Manhattan. The sidewalk is a common deathbed, as are subway platforms, where 106 of the unknowns — or 11 percent — were found. Some 15 percent are presumed homicide victims. About 22 percent of the unknowns are pulled from the water, and investigators presume that many are suicides. In most of the older cases, the medical examiner’s office typically keeps a tissue sample from the autopsy, which has been used to extract DNA samples in numerous instances over the last three years. In cases without an autopsy sample, the medical examiner’s office has sought to exhume the body. Fingerprints have also led to identifications in a few cases, as improvements have been made in the sensitivity of the software that compares uploaded prints to various databases. Simply running the prints again years later has resulted in several identifications, Mr. Figura said. Central to the medical examiner’s efforts is a public database, called Namus, containing information on 7,645 missing person cases and the remains of 8,516 unidentified victims. The database has helped investigators, the relatives of missing persons and even amateur sleuths try to establish matches between the known missing persons cases and the unidentified. Mr. Reveron’s father, an usher for the Cleveland Indians and a former city councilman in Lorain, followed Mr. Figura’s instructions to use Namus to give a fuller profile of his missing son. When the identification was confirmed, the Reverons requested that their son’s remains be returned. They learned that Javier’s body had been disinterred before, when investigators suspected that he might have been a match with someone else. When the match came up negative, his body was reburied on Hart Island. The Reverons decided to cremate the remains in New York, and then took the ashes back to Ohio. On June 19, 2010, the Reverons gave their son “a Catholic Mass and a proper Christian burial,” Mr. Reveron said. He said the family was grateful to Mr. Figura, saying that without his “personal involvement, we’d still be searching.” But, he added, “What happened in six years should’ve only happened in one year.”

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York