Girl Is Pioneer at Quarterback for Florida High School

Abstract: South Plantation High School’s third-string quarterback was warming up on the sideline before the fourth quarter of a recent preseason game, and each pass was quick, concise and purposeful. The quarterback’s nervous mother, Kathleen DiMeglio, was capturing the moment on video from the bleachers. Then, in an instant, the quarterback vanished from the frame, lost amid the sea of white jerseys. “Where’d she go? Where’d she go? Where’d she go?” DiMeglio said, and then it quickly dawned on her: “Is she going in?” When the Seminole Ridge Community High School announcer told the crowd Erin DiMeglio was at quarterback, there was little reaction, because the name Erin, when pronounced, does not connote a gender. But then everyone saw her ponytail swaying as she jogged onto the field. Then there was some buzz. Is that the girl? Can she play? Can she throw? South Plantation Coach Doug Gatewood knew that the answer to all three questions was yes. The one question he did not know the answer to, and did not want to know, was whether she could take a hit. So when DiMeglio dropped back for her first pass, saw no open receivers, and began to roll to her left, Gatewood felt queasy. “Go down, Rock,” he said quietly. “Go down.” DiMeglio, who is 5 feet 5 inches and 140 pounds, did not go down, but she did fire a pinpoint pass to a receiver, who turned upfield for a 10-yard gain. Fans cheered. Cheerleaders chanted Erin’s name. Kathleen DiMeglio exhaled. “Oh, my God,” she said. This event, observed on video and recounted by Gatewood in an interview, was not a publicity stunt or a tale of a small-town football team with a jersey to spare. South Plantation High is near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., nestled in one of the nation’s high school football hotbeds. The Paladins’ roster is filled with college prospects. The star running back has committed to Miami, and its starting quarterback has offers from Navy and Air Force. And, yes, one of the backup quarterbacks is a girl. Erin DiMeglio, a 17-year-old senior, was 2 for 3 passing in that scrimmage at Loxahatchee. And on Friday night, she took two snaps in the Paladins’ 31-14 season-opening victory against Nova, handing the ball off both times. She is believed to be the first girl to play quarterback in a Florida high school football game. “My friends all think I’m crazy,” DiMeglio said. “But they also think it’s pretty cool.” DiMeglio’s father, Tom, a police officer, taught her to throw a football when she was a child. Most often, Erin tried to mimic her favorite player, Dan Marino. She joined a flag football league when she was in the fourth grade. There were about 90 players, and DiMeglio said all but four of them were boys. Among the girls, Erin was the only quarterback. “She’s always had a really strong arm,” Tom DiMeglio said. “She could throw better than a lot of the guys.” When Erin was a freshman at South Plantation, she stood on the sideline at varsity football games and helped however she could — as a ball girl, a manager or a trainer’s assistant. She also became the quarterback of South Plantation’s girls’ flag football team, which plays in the spring. “She’ll get upset because the girls can’t catch her ball because she throws too hard,” said Gatewood, who also coaches the girls’ team. “For the most part, she’ll drill them in the hands and it’ll fall off. I have to remind her to throw a catchable ball, because she’s not throwing to Michael Irvin. But she can pretty much wing a girls’ football wherever she wants to put it.” Last spring, Gatewood invited DiMeglio to throw to the boys at an off-season workout. She adjusted to the bigger football and proved herself immediately, then asked to try again the next day with a helmet. She threw while wearing the helmet, then asked if she could try in full pads. “I said, ‘Sure, but you’re not playing,’ ” Gatewood said. “She wore me down and she wore her parents down.” Last summer, DiMeglio played for South Plantation’s varsity team in a seven-on-seven tournament at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She threw five touchdown passes and three interceptions in three games. “We’d be warming up, and people would stop over and wait for her to throw to see if she could play,” the Paladins’ starting quarterback, John Franklin, said. “And then they’d walk away like, ‘Oh, they have a girl, and she’s for real.’ ” Even though DiMeglio was playing against boys, there was no tackling, no need for her to leave her comfort zone. If the quarterback still had the ball four seconds after it was snapped, the play was ruled a sack. But DiMeglio’s performance gave her confidence to take the next step. Her parents were leery of seeing her get tackled. Gatewood assured them that DiMeglio would line up in the shotgun formation rather than under center, so she would have more time and space to elude a hit. And DiMeglio reminded them that she was tough. As the star point guard for the South Plantation girls’ basketball team, she has had a broken nose, a torn labrum, dislocated fingers and a concussion. “We kind of realized she’ll actually be protected with a helmet and shoulder pads,” Kathleen DiMeglio said. Tom DiMeglio added, “She’s not the kind of girl that’s going to worry about splitting a nail.” After her parents relented, DiMeglio rushed a consent form to Gatewood. The coach did not believe it. “So I still asked for a letter from her mom,” he said, “another layer of ‘Are you freakin’ sure?’ ” DiMeglio had proved herself to the other players during spring and summer workouts, so when she officially joined the team, it was met with a respectful shrug. She has her own changing area in the girls’ locker room, and at the seven-on-seven camp last summer, she shared a room with the cheerleading coach. Otherwise, she is one of the guys, and they are protective of her. Last month, DiMeglio and several teammates traveled to a rival high school to watch a scrimmage. Some students from the other high school approached the players. “They were kind of making comments about how they heard we had a girl quarterback,” said wide receiver Hordly Seide, who has a scholarship offer from Memphis. “We were just like, ‘Yeah, she’s standing right here.’ ” After DiMeglio’s debut in the scrimmage, a game in which she was untouched, she brought cookies and dessert to her offensive line. Gatewood knew he had to prepare her to be hit eventually. Last Wednesday, he brought junior varsity players up to the varsity and taught DiMeglio the best way to take a tackle. She popped back up each time, ready to do it all again. “Everybody says, ‘What happens when she gets hit?’ ” Gatewood said. “This isn’t a knock on Erin, but she’s bigger than 10 kids on my team. I have a wide receiver that weighs 25 pounds less than her. And the pads she wears are the same as the pads he wears.” Gatewood has told DiMeglio that she may not throw a pass this season. If she enters a game, South Plantation will probably have a sizable lead and be trying to run out the clock. And that will pose a quandary for DiMeglio, because during this unforgettable season, she would prefer that time stood still.

Florida
Football
Interscholastic Athletics
Women and Girls
DiMeglio Erin


Freya von Moltke, Part of a Core of Nazi Resistance, Is Dead at 98

Abstract: “He put the question to me explicitly — ‘The time is coming when something must be done,’ ” Freya von Moltke said. “ ‘I would like to have a hand in it, but I can only do so if you join in too,’ and I said, ‘Yes, it’s worth it.’ ” So, with a wife’s assent, began a famous challenge to Hitler. At the height of the Nazi victories, Count Helmuth James von Moltke invited about two dozen foes of Nazism, many of them aristocrats like himself, to imagine a new, better postwar Germany. For him, his wife’s participation was essential, as she remembered the conversation in “Courageous Hearts: Women and the Anti-Hitler Plot of 1944,” a 1997 book by Dorothee von Meding. The dissidents met at the count’s ancestral estate, Kreisau, which Bismarck had given his legendary great-great-uncle, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, for his victories over Austria and France. It was a perilous act of resistance. As many as half of the dissidents were later executed, some for actively plotting to kill Hitler, others for thinking the unthinkable: they had marshaled logical, moral and religious arguments to question the legitimacy of the Third Reich. Their high-minded planning for a future without Nazis angered a regime that expected to endure 1,000 years. Mrs. Moltke, who disdained the title of countess, was the last living active participant in the group. She died of a viral infection on Jan. 1 at her home in Norwich, Vt., her son Helmuth said. She was 98. In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” (1960), William L. Shirer said the Kreisau circle had provided “the intellectual, spiritual, ethical, philosophical and, to some extent, political ideas of the resistance to Hitler.” They initially rejected violence, if only for fear of making Hitler a martyr. But as the killing went on, support for assassinating him grew. Indeed, military conspirators were pushing ahead. At 12:40 p.m. on July 20, 1944, a bomb they had planted in a suitcase beneath a table at which Hitler was sitting at the Wolf’s Lair field headquarters exploded. Hitler suffered only minor wounds. Mrs. Moltke said she believed that her husband would have backed that assassination attempt — had he not already been in jail for warning a friend, Dr. Otto Kiep, who was plotting violence against Hitler, that Dr. Kiep risked imminent arrest. Count Moltke was never released. He was hanged, most likely by piano wire, in January 1945 after Gestapo agents had linked the assassination attempt at Wolf’s Lair to the Kreisau circle. In fact, there is strong evidence that Count Moltke was in contact with the July 20 conspirators. Andreas Hermes, one of the few ringleaders who were not executed, told The New York Times in July 1945 that he “vividly” recalled Count Moltke’s participation. Women who joined their husbands to oppose Hitler treaded the same dangerous ground as the men. Mrs. Moltke could have faced the death penalty simply for serving food and drinks to the conspirators. Her husband relied on her first impressions of people to make life-and-death judgments. She contributed ideas, particularly on legal issues, her area of expertise. In an enduring contribution, she gathered up Kreisau circle documents and letters from her husband and hid them in the estate’s beehives. In 1990 she published them as “Letters to Freya.” The papers have proved valuable to scholars for their gripping portrayal of heroic, almost certainly futile resistance, as well as for their glimpses at daily life in the Third Reich. In her later years, when the German government and others came to recognize her contributions, Mrs. Moltke expressed gratitude on behalf of other resistance widows as well. “We were all wives of our husbands,” she said. Mrs. Moltke’s son said in an interview that the only surviving wife of a Kreisau circle member is Clarita von Trott, whose husband, Adam, played a central part in the July 20 plot and was executed in 1944. Freya Deichmann, whose father was a banker, was born in Cologne on March 29, 1911. She attended idealistic work camps that brought young people of all classes together to share ideas and dreams. At 18, while on a vacation to Austria’s lake district, she met Count Moltke. They married two years later, in 1931. He studied in Germany and Britain to become an international lawyer. In 1939, he was drafted to work in military intelligence. His boss, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, a covert foe of Hitler, encouraged him to use his legal and political expertise to save Jews and curb German atrocities. On trips abroad, he met with Allied officials to discuss a possible coup. Mrs. Moltke was haunted by the first time she saw Hitler in 1931 or 1932. She had noticed a man in a dark movie theater, she told Ms. von Meding in “Courageous Hearts.” “I thought to myself, what terrifying eyes,” she said. When the house lights went on, she saw who he was. Mrs. Moltke earned a doctorate in law from the University of Berlin (today's Humboldt University) in 1935. She then took over management of Kreisau, then in eastern Germany and now part of Poland. The Kreisau circle began informally among friends, then became more serious as members assembled in small groups in Berlin to discuss specific subjects, like a new constitution. Larger meetings at Kreisau occurred in the spring and fall of 1942 and the spring of 1943. The circle and the Moltke family benefited from the immense prestige of Count Moltke’s military ancestor. Another protection was the fervent pro-Nazi views of the manager of the estate; his local stature helped contain public denunciations of a family that refused to say “Heil Hitler.” Mrs. Moltke’s letters to Count Moltke in prison concerned farm matters, like the wisdom of keeping a pair of ducks. She told her husband that the Gestapo officer who read all his letters had spoken nicely to her on a visit. “They’re not really so bad,” she ventured. “Except when they tear out your fingernails,” Count Moltke answered (though he was not tortured in that way, he said). After the war, Mrs. Moltke moved to South Africa and did social work, but she grew to hate the country’s official system of racial segregation and eventually returned to Germany. She moved to Vermont in 1960 to join the philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, whose wife had died. They had met in the youth camp movement and, after reuniting, remained companions until his death in 1973. In 1998, she helped turn Kreisau — Krzyzowa in Polish — into a center to promote understanding between Germany and Poland. In 2004, a foundation named after her was set up to support it. Besides her son Helmuth, Mrs. Moltke is survived by six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. Another son, Konrad, died in 2005. The letters Mrs. Moltke hid in the beehives remain poignant. In the last one he wrote before his execution, Count Moltke said he would “gladly accompany” his wife “a bit further on this earth.” “But then I would need a new task from God,” he continued. “The task for which God made me is done.”

von Moltke Freya
Holocaust and the Nazi Era
World War II (1939-45)
Deaths (Obituaries)


Chinese Protests Bring Out Few Demonstrators but Many Police

Abstract: BEIJING — A call for protests on Sunday in more than 20 Chinese cities resulted in a tiny turnout but an enormous law enforcement presence that led to police clashes with foreign journalists in Beijing. The appeal urged protesters to walk slowly or stop in front of landmarks in their cities’ downtowns at 2 p.m. The idea was to emulate the spirit of the so-called Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia that kicked off protests throughout North Africa and the Middle East — but in a nation where a strong security force makes full-blown demonstrations almost impossible to organize. Like with a similar appeal last week , few people responded to the call on Sunday, in part because it was carried on Internet sites like Twitter and Boxun that are banned in China . Efforts to repost the calls for protest on Chinese social networking sites were immediately blocked by censors. There also is little evidence of a groundswell of popular anger against the government in China, which boasts three decades of strong economic growth. Officials, however, are concerned that inflation and rising property prices could lead to unrest. In an online chat, Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to hold down food prices . He also lowered the official target for economic growth this year to 7 percent from 7.5 percent, a sign that the government will focus more on quality-of-life issues than its growth-at-all-costs strategy. But in central Beijing, few people seemed aware of any protest. Uniformed and plainclothes police officers were out in force on Wangfujing Street, a shopping district where the demonstration was scheduled to take place, but several shopkeepers attributed the police presence to the Chinese Parliament session that opens this week. “I don’t know,” said a noodle shop owner who asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the topic. “Why is there a protest? I never heard of it.” Three men were detained in front of the Wangfujing Bookstore, witnesses said. The Beijing police did not return calls. The police tried to turn back some foreign journalists approaching Wangfujing Street by making them register, a requirement contrary to government regulations put in place for the 2008 Olympics. Police officers also forced people to move along and not loiter in front of stores at one end of Wangfujing. Later, the authorities used water trucks to flood the sidewalk and directed sanitation workers with long brooms to sweep the water toward the journalists. “We have to keep Beijing clean,” one worker said. The police also assaulted at least two foreign journalists who tried to record the heavy security presence.

China
Politics and Government
Demonstrations Protests and Riots


Musharraf’s Treason Trial Is Postponed

Abstract: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The scheduled opening on Tuesday of treason proceedings against the former military ruler Pervez Musharraf was put off until the new year after bomb materials and handguns were found along his route to the trial, officials said. A three-member special court, headed by Justice Faisal Arab, is trying Mr. Musharraf, 70, on charges that he subverted the Constitution in late 2007 when he imposed emergency rule and fired much of the judiciary. He is the first military ruler to face such serious charges in the country’s 66-year history. If he is found guilty, he could face the death penalty. Mr. Musharraf denies the charges and has called the case politically motivated and vindictive. Mr. Musharraf, who ruled the country from 1999 until he resigned under pressure in 2008, has seen a sharp decline in his fortunes after he returned to Pakistan in March from self-imposed exile. After failing to revive his political career, he was hit by a barrage of court cases stemming from his time in power. He is now free on bail , and has generally kept to his fortified farmhouse on the outskirts of Islamabad out of security concerns. Those concerns were renewed on Tuesday morning. Just before Mr. Musharraf’s scheduled court appearance, police officials discovered an unassembled 11-pound bomb and two pistols on the route he was to take from his house to the National Library of Pakistan , where the special court has been set up. The library is just behind the prime minister’s secretariat and other important government buildings here in the capital. Anwar Mansoor Khan, a defense lawyer for Mr. Musharraf, told the court that the former army chief could not appear because of “serious security threats.” He requested that the court order the government to ensure Mr. Musharraf’s safety. Justice Arab accepted the defense motion and directed the Islamabad police to provide extra security for the former dictator during his next court appearance, next Wednesday, when charges are to be read out against him. Mr. Musharraf, who was once described as Washington’s most important ally in fighting terrorism, has a wide array of political and ideological enemies. He has survived at least three assassination attempts that were claimed by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. And he has been harshly criticized by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was overthrown by the military and replaced by General Musharraf in 1999. Some officials worry that Mr. Sharif’s desire to see Mr. Musharraf convicted could open a new round of hostilities between the civilian government and the military, and even create a rift in the country’s judiciary.

Treason
Islamabad
Pakistan
Pervez Musharraf
Bombs
Faisal Arab


At Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center, Honoring Slain Nuns

Abstract: There is no way that Flor Lazo could have memories of the unspeakable crime that rocked her homeland, El Salvador, on a distant Dec. 2. That monstrous deed — the torture, rape and murder of four American churchwomen by a military death squad — took place in 1980, a brutal time in El Salvador. Ms. Lazo was not born until five years later. Yet she feels connected to the victims. How could she not? New to this country, she is taking the first steps toward getting a command of English in classes held at a social services center in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that bears the names of two of the churchwomen, Maura Clarke and Ita C. Ford . Both were Maryknoll nuns from New York City. Ms. Lazo’s English is rudimentary. It was in Spanish that she told how she had let her mother know where she was studying. The mother’s flash of recognition was instant. “Yes,” she said to her daughter, “I remember that day when they were murdered.” Others do as well. For many Catholics — certainly for women who have dedicated their lives to the church — the Dec. 2 anniversary brings back clear memories of where they were 30 years ago, just as people can tell you exactly what they were doing when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot or that the twin towers had fallen. Thursday, for some, was given to prayers for the four victims, who included Dorothy Kazel , an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary. Naturally, the day had special resonance at the Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center , in a building on Menahan Street that is primarily a Roman Catholic school. The nuns had gone to El Salvador to work with the poor. The Bushwick center does the same. Like many nonprofit organizations in these rough times, it has been forced to swim extra hard to keep its head above water. It helps new immigrants, most of them women from Spanish-speaking countries, to acquire job skills, get business pointers and — the essential — learn English. Janet Marcic, the center’s executive director, bent one of her own rules by letting Ms. Lazo speak Spanish. “I try to encourage them to speak only English, short of a fire or some other emergency,” Ms. Marcic said. “They’re comfortable in Spanish.” The point is not to make them comfortable. It is to get them to learn. The rules were relaxed again on Thursday for a memorial ceremony held in both languages. It ended with a prayer for the murdered women: “Their lives challenge us to hear the urgent cry for justice in our world.” That theme resounded the night before in an auditorium at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. There, 11 singers dressed in black performed “Resilient Souls,” a new oratorio by the composer and writer Elizabeth Swados . A DECADE ago, on the 20th anniversary of the murders, Ms. Swados wrote an opera called “Missionaries,” focused on the lives of the four churchwomen. Her new hourlong work, which will also be performed this weekend in Manhattan and Queens, turns more on the lasting impact that the deaths had on others. It echoes with reflections on social and economic justice, a concept that seems to receive less emphasis from the church hierarchy today than concerns about matters like who wakes up in the morning next to whom. “It’s like a piece of cloth,” Ms. Swados said, describing the oratorio to an audience of about 70 people. “It’s woven between the past and the present,” all the while asking, “Did the tragedy change the world?” The deaths surely affected her, she said in an interview. “They were regular women who really had guts,” she said. “At that time, it was very important to me as a person but also as an artist.” She was captivated, too, by the denunciations of social injustice delivered back then by the Salvadoran archbishop, Óscar Romero, who was assassinated while celebrating Mass several months before the churchwomen were killed. “I was just taken with his words and his courage,” Ms. Swados said. And though she is Jewish, she said those Catholic women and the archbishop “stood up for something that I believe in and I’ve never forgotten.” Christine Morrison, the board chairwoman at Maura Clarke-Ita Ford, said Ms. Swados had told her more than once about “the responsibility she feels to keep their legacy alive.” “She says this is her mitzvah,” Ms. Morrison said, using the Hebrew word for a good deed. “She says it’s a 30-year one.”

Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center
Nuns
El Salvador
Swados Elizabeth
Clarke Maura
Ford Ita
Kazel Dorothy
Donovan Jean
Murders and Attempted Murders


Bode Miller to Be Sidelined With Disk Surgery

Abstract: Bode Miller was to have had outpatient surgery on his back Monday in San Diego and was expected to be sidelined until at least January. Miller, 37, missed the start of the World Cup season because of a herniated disk.


North Korea Declines Invitation to Papal Mass in Seoul

Abstract: SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea has declined to send a delegation to a Mass that Pope Francis will preside over during a visit to Seoul this month, Roman Catholic officials in South Korea said Wednesday. Francis is scheduled to visit South Korea from Aug. 14 to 18, in his first trip to Asia as pope. In May, Catholic leaders in South Korea invited North Korea’s government-run Korean Catholic Association to attend a Mass that the pope is scheduled to lead on Aug. 18 at Myeongdong Cathedral, seat of the Archdiocese of Seoul. The North Koreans recently declined the invitation, church officials said Wednesday. North Korean defectors have said that no religious activities are allowed in the country, outside of a handful of churches and temples that they say are run by the government to create the impression that it allows religious freedom. The North has arrested or expelled foreign Christian missionaries on charges of using religion to undermine its political system. The United States State Department and international human rights groups list North Korea as one of the world’s worst violators of religious freedom. Still, there are ties between the South Korean church and the North’s Catholic organization. North Korea opened a cathedral in Pyongyang, its capital, in 1988. Since 2008, the South Korean church’s Committee for the Reconciliation of the Korean People and the North’s Korean Catholic Association have held a joint annual Mass there. Catholicism reached the Korean Peninsula about two centuries ago. Church leaders in the South believe there are still active Catholics in the North, quietly practicing their religion apart from the state-sanctioned churches. It was unclear why the North Koreans rejected the church’s invitation. But the pope’s trip overlaps with a joint military drill that the United States and South Korea plan to conduct later this month. North Korea has previously cited such military exercises, which it characterizes as preparations for invasion, in canceling exchanges with the South. Also Wednesday, the South Korean government approved church officials’ request to send a delegation to the North on Thursday to discuss holding another joint Mass this year. Church officials said they hoped to use that meeting to persuade the North Koreans to reconsider the decision not to attend the papal Mass.

North Korea
South Korea
Pope Francis
Catholic Church


Young New Yorkers Make a Brand New Start of It, on the Cheap

Abstract: Laura Werkheiser knew she would have to make many sacrifices to live in Manhattan. Foremost among them was shopping for clothes. Anticipating, rightly, that her Manhattan digs would be cramped and her budget stretched, Ms. Werkheiser, 26, shipped 18 boxes of her clothes to her parents’ house in Omaha before moving here from San Francisco. The boxes sit in her parents’ basement. When she feels she needs to freshen up her look, Ms. Werkheiser has her mother ship her several outfits from what she dryly refers to as the “Nebraska boutique.” “If I shop,” said Ms. Werkheiser, “I can’t have a social life and I can’t eat.” Having one’s mother mail rotating boxes of old clothing is just one of the myriad ways that young newcomers to the city of a certain income — that is, those who are neither investment bankers nor being floated by their parents — manage to live the kind of lives they want in New York. Every year around this time, tens of thousands of postcollegiate people in their 20s flood the city despite its soaring expenses. They are high on ambition, meager of budget and endlessly creative when it comes to making ends meet. Some tactics have long been chronicled: sharing tiny apartments with strangers. Sharing those apartments with eight strangers. Eating cheap lunches and skipping dinners — not just to save money, but so that drinks pack more of a punch and fewer need be consumed. But there are smaller measures, no less ingenious, that round out the lifestyle. These young people sneak flasks of vodka into bars, flirt their way into clubs, sublet their walk-in closets, finagle their way into open-bar parties and put off haircuts until they visit their hometowns, even if those hometowns are thousands of miles away. Ms. Werkheiser’s salary as a publicist, while well south of six figures, might be considered enviable elsewhere in the country, but in New York she has had to reprioritize. So the remote wardrobe was not her only money-saving tactic. She also gave up being a blonde. Before moving from San Francisco last fall, Ms. Werkheiser realized that paying salon prices for platinum tresses in New York would require cutting back on needs like food and shelter. “So I went natural,” said Ms. Werkheiser. “I dyed it dark, a New York brunette.” She and her friends have also located just about every B.Y.O.B. brunch spot in the city, plotting them out on Google maps. The cost-consciousness, Ms. Werkheiser says, is worth it: She adores New York and lives, with two roommates, in a $3,450-a-month three-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, verily the center of the universe for Manhattan’s young and hip. Drinking and eating carry their own complications. Especially if you are, say, Noah Driscoll, a 25-year-old project manager for a Chelsea marketing company whose salary is comparable to what a rookie teacher might make. “For a little while I only ate grapefruits for my lunch,” said Mr. Driscoll, who pays $400 a month on his college loans, “because they have a lot of nutrients and they got me through the day.” Mr. Driscoll has since started packing two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Dinner might be two baked potatoes. On a recent Monday, it was franks and beans. On a good night, he might spend up to $6. “To live like a human being on the salary that I make is very difficult in this city,” he said. “You’ve got to forget about brands, you’ve got to forget about, you know, what your mom made you growing up, and take what’s out there.” Mr. Driscoll’s rent is reasonable: $725 for a room in a converted loft space that he shares with five friends in Gowanus, Brooklyn, near Park Slope. Most of his friends, however, earn far more than he does, and Mr. Driscoll is guilty of that quintessential New York sin: coveting thy neighbor’s salary. One recent night, his roommates went to Peter Luger Steak House. Mr. Driscoll waved them goodbye and stayed home. Peter Naddeo, a 24-year-old musician, earns $15 an hour working as a temp in Web development in Chelsea, and has perfected the tricky art of stretching lunch into dinner. He moved to New York from Pennsylvania last fall and can barely afford his $80 monthly college loan payments. He listens to a hand-me-down CD player because iPods are out of reach. He pays $600 for a 10-by-10-foot room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that has one saving grace: a window that faces east. For lunch, Mr. Naddeo usually orders a $3.50 plate of yellow rice and beans from a Latin American diner on Eighth Avenue, and eats late to ward off hunger pangs. Sometimes he hits up a bar in his neighborhood where a $6 pint comes with a small pizza. Or he relies on friends to feed him. “My friends aren’t rich,” said Mr. Naddeo, who is slight. “They’re just nice.” “Pre-gaming,” youth speak for drinking at home before going out, is another cash saver. So is ferreting out bars that offer free drinks at certain times, information that is handily compiled at myopenbar.com . Another trick is to become a semiprofessional “plus one,” and tag along with connected friends to events and shows. Strapped partygoers the city over often sell the contents of goody bags online. The truly bold scrimper, armed with designer swag, might “return” items to a department store for credit. Cassaundra Reed, a 26-year-old concierge, lives in the West Village with three roommates, and pays $925 for a narrow room where the only viable sleeping arrangement is a twin-size loft bed. Though she lives paycheck to paycheck, her job comes with heavy perks: She often eats at top restaurants, drinks at trendy clubs and sees Broadway shows, all free of charge. “A lot of the things that I do in New York, I wouldn’t be able to do, because I would have to pay for a lot of it,” she said. “A lot of the restaurants that I’ve been to, I wouldn’t be able to go to at all, because I wouldn’t be able to afford it.” Allison Mooney, 27, whose first job in the city was in publishing, often skipped dinner before going out, and instead took along mixed salted nuts in her purse. When things got really tight, she occasionally sneaked a flask filled with vodka into bars. Other times, she reluctantly resorted to flirting. “I find in other cities guys are more apt to buy you drinks and expect nothing from it,” Ms. Mooney said. “Here, if they do buy you a drink, which is rare, you have to suffer through flirtations. It’s true,” she said, adding, “It’s really cheesy.” Now, though, Ms. Mooney is a publicist, and this month received a 40 percent raise. She is also about to move in with her boyfriend, so the hard-core scrimping and forced flirting are behind her, at least for now. Still, some young men insist that women have it easier. The men say strangers never buy them drinks. Mr. Driscoll recently took a date out for margaritas, to a place that was supposedly cheap. They had four drinks and the bill came to $45. “I looked at the charge four times and immediately regretted it,” he said. Grooming presents its own challenges. Mr. Naddeo cuts his own hair with an electric razor and wears hand-me-down clothes from friends. Mr. Driscoll has curly hair that he says requires specific products and “some taming.” “I wouldn’t go just anywhere” for a cut, Mr. Driscoll said. “Not to sound metro, but I like my hair.” For women, though, grooming can break the bank. Like Ms. Werkheiser, Ms. Reed gave up being blond. But Ms. Werkheiser went further, renouncing manicures and pedicures, and trolling Craigslist for hair stylists offering cheapish cuts. Andrea Duchon, a 22-year-old freelance publicist, landed a spot as a hair model for Bumble and Bumble, where she gets free cuts. Victoria Varney, 23, a brand manager for the Soundgirl clothing line, schedules haircuts into her trips home to Ohio. She also relies heavily on handouts from friends who work with other designers, and on sample sales. “That is how you shop,” Ms. Varney said. “There is no need to pay full price here.” Some indulgences are less negotiable than others. So Ms. Varney, formerly a self-professed “huge Sephora shopper,” allows herself Dior mascara and high-shine lip gloss, which cost about $25 each. “Everything else, I’ve regressed and buy at Duane Reade,” she said. Ms. Werkheiser refuses to give up her Bumble and Bumble shampoo. “I don’t do drugstores,” she said. “I will eat Pringles for dinner instead.” Adam Leibsohn, a 27-year-old communications strategist who makes roughly $60,000 a year and pays $1,650 a month for his own apartment in the East Village, says the trick to squeaking by in the city is to swear off impulse purchases and credit cards. He cooks for himself, pirates wireless Internet access and buys electronics from Craigslist or eBay. If he wants new clothes, he unloads old ones first at the Salvation Army, keeping the receipt for his taxes. “It’s kind of a spartan lifestyle,” he says. “I eat a lot of street meat for lunch.” Sarah Avrin, a 23-year-old music publicist, said she was struck recently by the sacrifices that some people make to sustain their New York lifestyle when one of her friends endured the long, painful process of selling her eggs. Many young people wonder just how long they will be willing or able to pay their dues to stay in New York until that new job, that big break or that coveted raise comes along. Mr. Driscoll tries to constantly remind himself that he “won’t be eating scraps” forever. Mr. Naddeo, who has his own band, Archipelago, and plays in several others, said, “The whole plan is that something good will come along eventually, like something will just come my way.” One of the bands recently earned $180 at a gig — not a bad haul, except that 13 musicians were playing. “I mean, New York’s just the place for that type of thing to happen. And I’m hoping it will soon,” Mr. Naddeo said. “I’ll be rich and famous and this is going to be hilarious.”


High Jinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu Provocateur

Abstract: James O’Keefe III , the guerrilla videographer, advised conservative students this month that they needed to start taking more risks. “The more you put yourself out there and you take those calculated risks,” he told the Web site CampusReform.org , which works to foster conservative activism on college campuses, “you’re actually going to get opportunities.” Just days later, Mr. O’Keefe, 25, took his own advice, but did not get quite the opportunity he expected. He and three other men — including a 24-year-old associate, Joseph Basel, who was interviewed alongside Mr. O’Keefe by the Web site — were arrested and charged with a federal felony, accused of seeking to tamper with the office telephone system of Senator Mary L. Landrieu , Democrat of Louisiana. Two of them were impersonating repairmen in the senator’s New Orleans office and were caught after being asked for identification. Mr. O’Keefe said Friday that the four men had been trying to determine whether Ms. Landrieu was avoiding constituent complaints about the Senate health care bill after her phone system was jammed in December. (Her office said no calls had been intentionally avoided.) On reflection, he said in a statement, “I could have used a different approach to this investigation.” But that approach was precisely the kind that he and others have been perfecting for years, a kind of gonzo journalism or a conservative version of “ Candid Camera .” Those methods took root on college campuses in the latter half of George W. Bush’s presidency, fostered by a group of men and women in their late teens and early 20s with a taste for showmanship and a shared sense of political alienation — a sort of political reverse image of the left-wing Yippies of the 1960s. They studied leftist activism of years past as their prototype, looking to the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer who laid the framework for grass-roots activism in the ’60s, as well as those of gay rights and even Communist groups. They held “affirmative action” bake sales with prices set based on the age and race of the buyer, posed as donors to Planned Parenthood seeking to contribute to the abortion of African-American fetuses only, and held a mock “Love Thy Prisoner” campaign to find American homes for Guantánamo inmates. Mr. O’Keefe made his biggest national splash last year when he trained his secret camera on counselors with the liberal community group Acorn — eliciting advice on financing a brothel on videos that would threaten to become Acorn’s undoing. He quickly became a cult hero among young conservatives who saw his work as groundbreaking and sought to emulate him. Liberals have denounced his methods as dishonest, a form of entrapment, but national Republican leaders seized on them as revelatory, pressuring Congress into cutting Acorn’s financing. Mr. O’Keefe produced his videos with a partner, Hannah Giles, who posed as a prostitute in them. Although he may be the most public face of this new approach, he is just one of a group of young conservatives who use political pranks and embarrassing recordings to upend what they view as overwhelming liberal biases on college campuses and in the culture at large. The Path to New Orleans In the incident in New Orleans, several of the group’s central players came together. They had met through a small community of conservative college newspaper editors that is fostered by advocacy organizations supported by old Republican families like the Coorses and Scaifes. One of those arrested was Stan Dai, 24, a former editor in chief of the irreverent GW Patriot at George Washington University, where he published an anti-feminist article lampooning the play “The Vagina Monologues.”His version was called “The Penis Monologues.” Another was Mr. Basel, 24, the co-founder of a conservative publication at the University of Minnesota, Morris, that features headlines like “Third World Countries Need Sweatshops” and “I Hate Che Guevara T-Shirts.” The fourth was Robert Flanagan, 24, who did not know the others before roughly two weeks ago, his lawyer said, when Mr. O’Keefe gave a speech for the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a libertarian organization in New Orleans for which Mr. Flanagan works a few hours a week. Until then, Mr. Flanagan, a star athlete and son of a federal prosecutor, had not been known by friends to be particularly provocative in his conservatism, though he had been sharply critical of Ms. Landrieu on the institute’s blog. And then there was Ben Wetmore, 28, who was not arrested but who allowed Mr. Dai, Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Basel to stay at his house in New Orleans this month. The authorities have not indicated that Mr. Wetmore, a Loyola law student, was connected to the incident at Ms. Landrieu’s office, but he has nonetheless played a vital role in Mr. O’Keefe’s career, as well as that of Mr. Basel and other activists. Mr. Wetmore helped introduce many of the activists to one another and inspired them through his take on attention-grabbing tactics. His often behind-the-scenes role was detailed in a trail he left on the Internet, as well as in several interviews. “Benjamin Wetmore: a mentor of mine; a genius,” Mr. O’Keefe said during an interview with The New York Times in September, after the Acorn videos were released. “He said, ‘Take on the politically correct crowd on campus, satirically.’ ” Mr. O’Keefe declined several interview requests, and Mr. Wetmore responded to an e-mail message by sending photographs of Jayson Blair, a reporter for The New York Times who resigned after admitting to plagiarism and fabrication. Mr. Dai, Mr. Basel and Mr. Flanagan could not be reached for comment. (The four men arrested were freed on bail, awaiting a pretrial hearing.) The partnership between Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Wetmore appears to have started in earnest in 2004. As a philosophy major at Rutgers University, Mr. O’Keefe came to believe that conservative-leaning students were being force-fed a diet of academic liberalism. As he put it at the time, they were “drowned in relativism, concepts of distributive justice and redistribution of wealth.” He and some friends started an alternative conservative publication called The Centurion with $500 from the conservative Leadership Institute’s Balance in Media grant program, which was overseen at the time by Mr. Wetmore. The institute, founded in 1979, is based in Arlington, Va., and is best known for training campus conservatives to influence public policy. Before joining the institute, Mr. Wetmore had established his own bona fides as a college provocateur at American University. He drew national attention after being arrested by the campus police and accused of breaking a prohibition against recording Tipper Gore during a speech she gave there in 2002 and refusing to surrender the tape. The arrest became a cause célèbre for First Amendment advocates and showcased what would become a standard technique of Mr. Wetmore and his cohort: taping classes, lectures and other campus events in the hopes of catching professors and others in moments of excessive political correctness or other embarrassments. He made headlines again roughly two years later when American University’s president, Benjamin Ladner, unsuccessfully tried to stop Mr. Wetmore from running the Web site BenLadner.com , which was devoted to criticizing him. Campus pranks have a long tradition, but Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Wetmore were “among the early users of putting multimedia content online for the conservative cause,” said Ryan Nichols, a grass-roots conservative activist and former colleague of both men at the Leadership Institute. “In that sense, they were pioneering.” The group’s other main tactic, which Mr. O’Keefe has said was inspired by “Rules for Radicals,” Mr. Alinsky’s manifesto for left-wing organizing, was to caricature liberal political and social values by carrying them to outlandish extremes. In the Times interview last September, Mr. O’Keefe credited Mr. Wetmore with giving him the idea for one of his most talked-about video farces, which continues to draw attention on YouTube : a campaign to rid a dining hall of Lucky Charms cereal, because it was offensive to Irish students. In the video, Mr. O’Keefe quickly exhibited his absurdist improvisational style, telling a school official that the leprechaun on the cereal box appeared as “an Irish-American” who is “portrayed as a little green-cladded gnome or huckster.” Making Waves His first issue of The Centurion — with a mock New York Times front page with headlines like “Study Shows Mr. Bush Unfit for Presidency” — drew an immediate reaction, and a following. “Everyone was like: ‘Whoa, what is this? Oh my goodness,’ ” said Gregory W. Levitsky, a friend and colleague of Mr. O’Keefe at The Centurion. Anthony Gioia, another former Rutgers student, said he joined the newspaper after seeing that first issue. “Rutgers, like every university, is a very liberal institution, so we were a small group of friends trying to combat that atmosphere,” Mr. Gioia said. “The way we went about it was very provocative and made people take notice, and we won over a lot of people to our way of thinking.” Mr. Gioia recalled discussions of “Rules for Radicals” and visits to the paper by Mr. Wetmore, whose motto was “Don’t complain about the media — be the media.” But if The Centurion delighted fellow conservatives, it frequently left campus liberals flabbergasted. When it published an opinion article titled “The Inequality of Black History Month,” a student, Whitney Pennington, wrote in The Rutgers Daily Targum, “Honestly, in responding to this article, I do not even know where to begin.” Tabitha Rice, who was in the College Democrats at Rutgers and who had numerous run-ins with Mr. O’Keefe, described him as “insufferable.” “He always would do something that would get a rise, but he always knows how to work the system,” she said. Around the same time, Mr. Wetmore wrote on his blog about a visit with another recipient of a Leadership Institute grant, Mr. Basel, who used the money to start his newspaper, The Counterweight. Among Mr. Basel’s stunts was one in which he put up posters all over his campus in Minnesota that said “End Racism & Sexism Now: Kill All White Males.” The posters prompted such an outcry that he was asked to speak at a campus forum, where, according to two students, he asked why everyone could not use racial epithets the way black rappers do. Many black students walked out. “His methods were kind of to create an uproar,” said Nate Giles, a former president of the black student union at the university. “That’s what was abrasive, not his actual points.” After college, Mr. O’Keefe took a job with Mr. Wetmore at the Leadership Institute and began traveling the country to help students with their publications. He worked intensely, said Morton Blackwell, the institute’s founder, remaining dedicated to his own projects. But eventually the institute developed some discomfort with the approach. “He wanted to do sting operations that would affect legislation; he made some calls which have been covered in the news media to Planned Parenthood,” Mr. Blackwell said. “That was beyond the scope of what we had hired him to do. We are an educational organization. We are not an activist organization.” Mr. Blackwell said he offered Mr. O’Keefe the choice between pursuing activism or working for his organization, “and he said he was committed to the activism.” In the end, Mr. O’Keefe’s Planned Parenthood campaign — in which some of the organization’s workers were recorded accepting donations from one of Mr. O’Keefe’s characters who said the money should go to abort only black fetuses — forced Planned Parenthood to apologize in multiple states, though officials also complained that some tapes were “heavily edited.” Old Tactics, New Goals The campaign caught the eye of Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Web publisher and a former editor of The Drudge Report. In an interview, he said he had admired the Planned Parenthood campaign but did not know who was behind it until Mr. O’Keefe approached him with the Acorn project. Mr. Breitbart likened Mr. O’Keefe’s approach to that of Abbie Hoffman and Hunter S. Thompson. His business arrangement with Mr. O’Keefe to run the videos on his Big Government site is widely credited with giving them national exposure, and making Mr. O’Keefe a star of his movement. By last fall, Mr. Wetmore seemed less involved in Mr. O’Keefe’s projects, apparently because he had moved to New Orleans to attend law school at Loyola University. Nonetheless, Mr. O’Keefe, Mr. Basel and Mr. Dai showed up in town a few months later. Mr. O’Keefe had been invited to speak at a Pelican Institute luncheon on Jan. 21. The invitation had come about, said the institute’s president, Kevin Kane, because the institute had done its own investigations of Acorn, albeit of the more traditional kind. The topic of the day was undercover video and new media, but Mr. O’Keefe made it clear to some who attended the luncheon that he had other, unspecified work to do in New Orleans. Also at the luncheon was Mr. Flanagan, who had worked as an intern in the offices of several Republican members of Congress. He moved to New Orleans last year, putting in a few hours a week as a blogger for the Pelican Institute. David Centofante, who was in a defense and strategic studies program with Mr. Flanagan at Missouri State University, said he received an e-mail message from Mr. Flanagan a couple of weeks ago. “He said to me, ‘You know the guy O’Keefe who did the Acorn thing?’ ” Mr. Centofante said. “ ‘We’re working together on something kind of cool.’ ” Things did not quite work out as planned.

O'Keefe James E III
Landrieu Mary L
Conservatism (US Politics)
New Orleans (La)


For Sale: Aging Boat That Had an Unenviable Job

Abstract: Kevin Byrnes stood on the bridge of the Newtown Creek, an aging, 300-foot-long tanker that has served New York City since 1967, and looked admiringly down its length. “It’s got really nice lines; you can’t get a nicer-looking ship of this kind than this,” said Mr. Byrnes, chief of marine operations for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, the agency charged with the unenviable but essential task of disposing of the city’s sewage. Mr. Byrnes, who oversees the city’s fleet of sewage-transporting sludge boats, seemed sincere in his praise of the Newtown Creek, and not just because he was trying to sell it. He had obliged a request for a tour from a reporter who had seen the vessel advertised for sale by the city on an online auction site. After nearly half a century of hauling New Yorkers’ sewage, the Newtown Creek was being put out to pasture. The page for Auction 1327532 — “Ship, Cargo, Sludge Tanker, Newtown Creek” — allows viewers an extensive photo and video tour, and describes the vessel as seaworthy, “in good working order” and “no engine trouble or oil leaks.” The vessel is to be sold in “as is” and “where is” condition, the page notes, and the opening bidding price was listed at $235,000, payable by credit card. Image Twin 1,500-horsepower diesel engines powered the ship’s propellers. An auction page described the vessel as seaworthy and “in good working order.” Credit Pablo Enriquez for The New York Times In contrast with the page’s bureaucratic language, Mr. Byrnes’s description of the vessel was almost sentimental as he walked aboard the ship on Wednesday at the department’s wastewater treatment plant in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He sounded more like a coach seeing his star veteran player retire, as he looked out over its maroon painted deck topped with large pipes and valves. Some of its crew members spent decades on the ship, he said, adding that “some of the guys really fell in love with it.” Sludge vessels have been a part of the city’s wastewater treatment system since the late 1930s. Formally called marine cargo ships, they transport sludge, the term for the residual organic material removed from wastewater during its initial treatment. After that, the sludge undergoes a dewatering process for conversion to pellets, which the city pays to have shipped out of state by trucks. Since six of the 14 treatment plants in the city lack dewatering capabilities, the boats are necessary for transporting sludge from those six plants to one of the other eight for a final treatment. The department retired the Newtown Creek last summer, and currently uses a fleet of five other sludge boats to transport nearly 1.2 billion gallons of sludge per year. Three of those vessels were put into service last year, and have nearly double the capacity of the Newtown Creek, Mr. Byrnes said. “We’re trying to keep up with the population and the production of sludge,” he said. The Newtown Creek was built to dump sludge directly into the ocean away from the city, a practice that was ended in 1992, Mr. Byrnes said. Image The tanker’s old control equipment. Credit Pablo Enriquez for The New York Times The Newtown Creek used to transport 1.2 million gallons of sludge per day, seven days a week. On a typical day, in its later years, it would load sludge from the Owl’s Head treatment plant, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and take it to the Port Richmond plant on Staten Island. Then it would take another load from the North River plant in West Harlem to the Wards Island plant. Its gray hulls may have dings and scrapes and dents, but its tall cylindrical stacks still stand tall, after serving decades as exhaust methane vents for the sludge tanks. Its propellers, at seven feet in diameter, were powered by twin 1,500-horsepower diesel engines. It was powerful and ocean-worthy and maneuverable, Mr. Byrnes said. Though its storage tanks are empty, the feculent odor of its cargo is unmistakable. Mr. Byrnes called the vessel’s life span remarkable. “They usually last about 30 years, so we did very well with this vessel,” he said The vessel was well maintained and rarely had any problems, he said, but over the years, it had become difficult to find replacement parts. “It’s been a great ship; it hasn’t taken too many sick days,” he said, heading up to the navigation bridge, with its 1950s-era fixtures and equipment that recalled a scene from “McHale’s Navy.” After more than two months, the bidding window ended on Tuesday, with the Newtown Creek attracting no formal bids. But Mr. Byrnes said two potential buyers had sent representatives recently to inspect the vessel. One was a Florida municipality — Mr. Byrnes would not divulge its name — seeking to sink it offshore as an artificial reef. The other was a scrap dealer from Maryland interested in the raw value of the 2,500-ton steel vessel. It may not be the most elegant end for the Newtown Creek, he noted, but “the city certainly got its money’s worth out of this ship, and then some.”


Unrest Encourages Start-Up Funding for the Middle East

Abstract: AMMAN — At a gathering of the Celebration of Entrepreneurship forum here this month, young Arab techies, some dressed in jeans, others in pinstriped suits, exchanged business cards and listened to advice from investors. The goal of these would-be entrepreneurs: to start local businesses that tap into a rapidly growing market for Internet and mobile telecommunications applications. Investors from the region say they are ready to provide as much as $500 million as seed money for new businesses in Arab countries. The key role played by social media in the Arab Spring political movement has helped to encourage the growth of online start-ups across the Arabic-speaking region. Young entrepreneurs say that creating businesses that employ people and contribute to social change can be just as revolutionary as marching in demonstrations. “It’s an alternative path for us to have an impact on economies and societies which is not tied to the government,” said Omar Christidis, 29, the founder of ArabNet, an online service that keeps digital professionals and entrepreneurs abreast of industry news as well as events like conferences. “No one can stop you,” he added. “Through this, you can empower yourself and it’s an open opportunity.” Venture capitalists financed 65 technology companies in the region in 2011 compared with just 17 in 2010, according to a recent report by Sindibad Business, an online portal. Those 2011 investments created an estimated 450 jobs, it said, while another 23 companies attracted financing in the first quarter of 2012. At regional forums young executives learn that start-ups go through stages — from the concept, to the business plan, to securing venture money, to operations. And veterans counsel that entrepreneurship is not for the timid but for the bold. “Many start-ups will fail and less will succeed, and that is the case the world over,” said Tom Speechley, founder of Wamda.com and a senior partner at Abraaj Capital, a large private equity firm based in Dubai. “In some sectors you can only have 2 or 3 winners, but there might be 10 companies chasing that space.” Investment in online start-ups is relatively new in the region, but after the acquisition of the Web portal Maktoob.com by Yahoo for $165 million in 2009, investment in such businesses has grown rapidly. Business founders say it is not easy to find local talent for the technology industry. The schools and universities in the region do not produce enough technically trained and independent-minded graduates. Speakers at a digital media conference in Dubai this year said that the growth of Arab online content was being held back by a lack of talent. “The talent comes from the education system, and these jobs are knowledge-based,” said Elie Habib, a venture capitalist in Lebanon and in Silicon Valley in California. “Knowledge comes from the education system and universities, so the country that has a more sophisticated education system will generate more skilled people.” Between 2000 and 2010, the number of Internet users in the Middle East and North Africa grew tenfold to more than 100 million, according to a World Bank report. There are more mobile telephones than there are people in the region. Nearly 85 percent of mobile phone owners use their devices to access the Internet and to download applications for social networking, according to the World Bank report. One result of the Arab Spring has been to give people a sense that they can reach goals they previously thought were unattainable. Interest in establishing new companies is one result. Entrepreneurs are shrugging off the current chaos and moving ahead with their plans. “I want the region to be better, and this is how I can do it,” said Mr. Christidis, the ArabNet founder. There are already some fairly large players in the Arabic content area. Diwanee, based in Beirut, is a digital media company that creates and distributes Arabic content. Diwanee digital publications like Yasmina.com and 3a2ilati.com reach 1.8 million women under the age of 35 across Gulf countries. “In three years we have created 140 jobs at Diwanee,” said Tarek Homsi, general manager and partner. “These people are learning a new trade, and we are creating new positions in a fast-moving environment where we’re really trying to become the leaders of women audiences.” The opportunities in new media suddenly seem limitless. “For decades you only had a restrictive media and one or two government players,” said Con O’Donnell, chairman of books.com.eg , an Arabic online bookstore. “Now new players can come to a new market and publish newspapers and create a wealth of independent media forums.” Among one of the more ambitious new companies is Kharabeesh, based in Jordan. It produces popular Arabic animated cartoons, music videos and talk shows and is not afraid to tackle political issues. Although Kharabeesh, which means scribbles in Arabic, has existed since 2008, its popularity has grown since the Arab Spring. Its top videos include skits on the former Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and a satirical parody on the recent presidential elections in Egypt. “We began as a small production company, and all we wanted to do is to inspire the youth and our own spirit of being experimental, edgy, provocative and being Arab,” said Wael Attili, 33, one of the founders of Kharabeesh. “With that tone and spirit already in place, the Arab revolutions gave us more of a purpose and a way to contribute to the revolutions taking place across the region,” Mr. Attili added. Kharabeesh, which employs 40 people, is planning soon take its animated characters and comedians offline and onto a live stage. “People see something new, something simple, and they see something that is purely an Arab innovation,” Mr. Attili said. “That inspires them in a very simple way.” “Simplicity is very important, because people have to feel and believe they can do something similar,” the young entrepreneur added.

Start-ups
Middle East
Entrepreneurship
Venture Capital


Where No-Carb Is Now the Rule, a Century-Old Ritual of Giving Bread

Abstract: Early Saturday morning in North Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the festival booths stood bare of sausage and zeppole and the Ferris wheel was still. Breakfast was supposed to start at 9; the coffee did not start flowing in earnest until at least an hour later. But soon enough, people were pulling up near Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, returning to the old neighborhood from Queens or Long Island or New Jersey, children of a Williamsburg that used to look like Little Italy and would once again. Backs were slapped. Cheeks were kissed. The men — and a few women — smoked, sized up a funeral across the street, exchanged the ribs they had exchanged for years. “What, you can’t shave every day? Got precious skin?” “Wow, we got you up early! Look at you! It’s celebration week!” “’Scuse me, do I know you?” “No, you don’t know me.” A grin. “Oh, O.K.” The next day, they would be in their element, the lifters, lieutenants and capos hoisting the giglio, a 70-foot-tall tower, as they do every July during the two-day Giglio Feast. The mayor himself would pay his respects to the festival, a century-old ritual with roots in an ancestral southern Italian village honoring San Paolino di Nola. It would be as it had always been, as if half of those in attendance had not left the neighborhood, as if people in Williamsburg still understood what they were talking about when they said “giglio” and “St. Paolino.” On Saturday it was just a few dozen people and their brass band gathering to perform the ritual of the questua, taking to the streets in Williamsburg and Greenpoint to hand out loaves of bread in exchange for small donations for the church. Outside of their little stronghold on Havemeyer Street, their born-in-Brooklyn voices would echo strangely in the ears of people newly arrived from the Midwest or the South. So it was important to talk as loudly as ever. To make the same jokes. To eat the same breakfast. To show they belonged. The questua is about giving blessed bread to others, but there is plenty of eating on the marchers’ part, too, starting with breakfast for everyone in 85-year-old Lucy Smith’s double-wide backyard patio, an event she has hosted since the 1960s. They have to keep their strength up for the sweltering day ahead. “Lucy ... Smith?” a newcomer asked. The explanation came with a glad-you-asked smile: Her husband, Jimmy Smith, was the first Irish No. 1 capo, the man in charge of lifting the giglio on the Sunday of the feast. She ushered her guests toward a heart-stopping array of pastries from Peter Pan Donut and Pastry Shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn — jelly doughnuts, cream doughnuts, chocolate-covered doughnuts — plus piles of watermelon and cantaloupe slices. Mr. Smith bought their house 40 years ago for $5,000. Now a luxurious development hovers several stories above the rowhouses, and Ms. Smith’s sons, who live in New Jersey, had to buy the rowhouse next door to keep her from getting boxed in by new developments on both sides. The children taking part in the questua, like Annemarie De Nonno, 8, who has participated since she was in a baby carriage, have no memories of growing up in Williamsburg. But the alms collection is an initiation ritual of sorts, a way for the festival’s children to grow up together. On Saturday morning, Annemarie, in pink Skechers shoes, cavorted as the band played on the patio, then grabbed fistfuls of bread bags and trotted down Skillman Street. “I want to eat these!” she exclaimed to her father, Tony De Nonno, 67. “Rituals are rare in America,” Mr. de Nonno said. “It’s incredible. It has connections to the fifth century. It’s all lost in America, but now there’s this.” His father was born on North Eighth and Havemeyer Streets in 1910. It is important for Annemarie, he said, “to know that her great-grandmothers and grandfathers were part of a tradition.” As he explained the feast’s significance to passers-by, the tireless Annemarie gave bread to a graying man sitting on a stoop and a young man in tortoiseshell glasses and a Google T-shirt. They stopped at the Franco family’s house, with its backyard full of bagels and front yard with a red, white and green sign congratulating Louie Franco, an apprentice capo. They continued on to Sal’s Pizzeria and the Salerno Service Station. Between stops and bright bursts from the brass band, which led the procession, the streets were quiet. Young Williamsburg was still waking up, going to brunch, taking the occasional iPhone photo of the band. Joe Mirando, 48, offered a loaf to a young woman in sunglasses and a green dress. “Sorry, I don’t eat bread,” she said, smiling. “You don’t eat bread?” Mr. Mirando said. He glanced at his belly. “I can’t eat bread! You can eat bread!” Mr. Mirando, who had come from Islip, N.Y., on Long Island, with his 14-year-old son, Mike, shook his head. “The whole neighborhood’s on a no-carb diet,” he said ruefully. “It’s amazing. It gets harder every year. I mean, what do they think tradition is?” It used to be different. People would hang out of the windows, and “we’d throw the bread up, and they’d throw a dollar down,” Joe Rubino, 63, said. “This used to be the best place to eat. They used to stay up all night, making macaroni and eggplant,” he continued, conjuring tables laden with trays. Every now and again, there were fire hydrants and mailboxes painted the colors of the flag. Italian flags waved from a few houses, and signs congratulating lifters on their elevation to lieutenant or to capo blared from others. Spirits remained high: Mike Mirando was so eager to hand a loaf to a man smiling from a window that he leaned precariously over the house’s iron fence, not seeing a gate right in front of him. “They’re always complaining we’re not selling enough now,” he said. “But I’m starting to beat my dad at selling.” Soon he would be old enough to help with the lifting. In a matter of years, perhaps, he would make lieutenant. But for now he loped ahead, bread in hand, eyes sliding past the brunch restaurants and the people heading to them in search of the next Italian flag.

Bread
Festival
Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Williamsburg Brooklyn


Nasdaq to Increase Annual Listing Fees

Abstract: By Bloomberg News Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. plans to raise the annual fees it charges the almost 3,200 companies that list their shares on the electronic marketplace. The increase, to take effect next year, requires approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It would raise fees by about 22 percent for the smallest companies and 27 percent for the largest. Nasdaq said it would offer benefits not previously included in its package of services to listed companies, including distributing news releases and negotiating insurance policies for directors and executives. Initial listing fees will not be affected by the changes, a spokeswoman for Nasdaq, Bethany Sherman, said. She declined to elaborate on plans to offer expanded services to companies as part of their annual listing fees. Under Nasdaq’s proposal, annual fees for companies with fewer than 10 million shares outstanding would increase to $30,000, from $24,500. For companies with more than 150 million shares outstanding, annual fees would increase to $95,000, from $75,000. The increase would be smaller — 1.2 percent — for companies that have 50 million to 75 million shares outstanding.

Nasdaq Stock Market
Securities and Exchange Commission
Stocks and Bonds


Amazon Proves Infertile Soil for Unions, So Far

Abstract: SEATTLE — In early April, Kellen Wadach, the general manager at Amazon’s warehouse in Middletown, Del., told hundreds of workers at the cavernous facility a troubling story about his family being abandoned by his father’s union. Flashing a photograph of himself as a boy with his father, Mr. Wadach said the union did not help his family financially after his father died suddenly in front of their house, not even bothering to send a condolence card, according to three current workers at the warehouse who heard him speak and asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. The problem with Mr. Wadach’s story was that much of it appears to have been untrue. For years, Amazon has successfully battled to keep unions out of the company. And the incident involving Mr. Wadach was an illustration of how important it was to Amazon — or at least to some of its employees — to keep it that way. Just days after a reporter approached Amazon about inconsistencies in Mr. Wadach’s story, Scott Stanzel, an Amazon spokesman, said Mr. Wadach was no longer with the company. Mr. Wadach did not respond to repeated messages sent to his email address and Facebook account. A voice mail message left at a listed number for his mother was not returned. In the United States, Amazon employs more than 90,000 people in what the company calls fulfillment centers, giant warehouses where customer orders are prepared and shipped. Some Amazon fulfillment center workers see unions as a way to gain more influence on pay, how job assignments are doled out and the handling of workplace complaints. Amazon worries unions will burden its operations with red tape, hurting the nimbleness of facilities it is constantly adjusting to be more efficient with robots and other innovations. “Amazon’s culture and business model are based on rapid innovation, flexibility and open lines of direct communication between managers and associates,” Mr. Stanzel said. “This direct connection is the most effective way to understand and respond to the wants and needs of our associates.” Union officials think Amazon fights so hard to keep them at bay to prevent a domino effect among its warehouses. “This is Amazon’s biggest fear,” said Andy Powell, a district organizer for the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers who is trying to organize Amazon fulfillment center workers in Delaware and several nearby states. “The minute one falls and people see they got a better deal, it’s going to be a cancer for them.” Unions have not made much progress at Amazon after years of campaigns, which union officials and warehouse workers blame partly on the high turnover rate in its fulfillment centers. A labor union in Germany has organized frequent strikes over pay and workplace conditions by a portion of workers at Amazon fulfillment centers in the country, though workers do not have a union contract with the company. In 2014, the machinists union helped organize a union vote by a small number of technicians and mechanics who worked on order-fulfillment equipment at the fulfillment center in Middletown, a community of about 19,000 about a half-hour from Wilmington. It was the first vote of its kind at an Amazon warehouse, but workers voted 21 to 6 to reject the plan, which was opposed by Amazon. The company said there were about 3,000 full-time workers at the facility. Since late fall, representatives of the machinists union, including Mr. Powell, have passed out leaflets at a busy intersection outside the fulfillment center. Some employees at the facility have encouraged co-workers to consider the potential benefits of joining a union. In many cases, pay and benefits are not even the top concerns of workers — pay at the Middletown warehouse starts around $13 an hour and health care and parental leave benefits are the same for warehouse workers as they are for senior executives at Amazon. The company said full-time workers at the facility made, on average, over $15 an hour in overall compensation when including base pay, bonuses and stock awards. But workers want things like better protection from termination and mechanisms for contesting favoritism by managers. Mr. Stanzel said the company had a process for employees to appeal terminations and an open-door policy that encourages workers to bring their concerns to managers. Like many other companies, Amazon employs standard “union avoidance” techniques, telling workers in gatherings that they will no longer be able to communicate directly with Amazon if a union represents them, union officials said. Around Christmas last year, managers began making the rounds at the Middletown warehouse, questioning workers on their thoughts about unions, said employees at the warehouse. Last June, Scott Gragilla, a former Amazon fulfillment center employee at the warehouse, began asking questions about why workers were not receiving bonuses they had gotten in the past. Not long after, he said, he was reprimanded for his job performance for the first time. Mr. Gragilla, 38, worked as a picker, someone who gathers items from shelves for Amazon orders, and eventually was promoted to “ambassador,” an employee who leads training sessions for other employees. He began openly promoting the idea of unionizing the warehouse to co-workers. But in early December, Mr. Gragilla said he was told he was being fired by Amazon for his work performance, including leaving early for his lunch break and failing to return after being ordered back to work by two managers. He denies either is true. Amazon maintains that no employee has ever been terminated as a result of union activity, said Mr. Stanzel, the company spokesman. Mr. Gragilla filed a complaint about his termination with the National Labor Relations Board. He said he was unable to gather enough former co-workers from the Amazon fulfillment center to testify on his behalf, and the board declined to take the case to a judge. Mr. Wadach’s emotional story, after those months of union activity, aroused suspicions among employees who were skeptical that a union would act so callously. Word of the story got to the machinists union, which found an obituary in The Ithaca Journal in New York on April 20, 2006, that said Mr. Wadach’s father, Peter Dana Wadach, had died while jogging on a family vacation in South Carolina — not in front of the family home, as Mr. Wadach had said. The obituary and another news story said Peter Wadach was a partner at an insurance agency in Ithaca and had worked in the insurance business for nearly three decades. He was 49 when he died. Amazon declined to discuss details of Kellen Wadach’s departure from the company. Charlotte Garden, an associate professor of law at the Seattle University School of Law, said Mr. Wadach’s story, odd as it may have been, would probably not reach a legal threshold for “coercive” behavior. “That’s a pretty high bar,” she said. “That means a lot of employer persuader activity is lawful.”


A Bronx Cheer

Abstract: When the January wind whips down the Harlem River in the South Bronx, threading through the 1920's facade of Yankee Stadium, baseball season seems far away. But in the Highbridge neighborhood around the stadium this year, the sport is on many minds. It was six months ago that the Yankees proposed building an $800 million, 53,000-seat stadium that the team would pay for entirely. The city would replace the 22 acres the team wants for the stadium in the Mullaly and Macombs Dam parks with 28 acres of parks, ball fields and tennis courts. It seemed like a perfect plan. The South Bronx, where the Yankees would remain, would get a new shot at economic revival. Elected officials could boast that they had kept the club in the Bronx at modest public cost. And the team would get a stadium with plenty of luxury boxes. But now the few murmurs of dissent that greeted the proposal have swelled into something stronger, even with baseball and opening day a distant dream. "I'm a Yankee fan," Ernesto Maldonado, who lives just west of the Yankees' historic home, said during a noisy public hearing last month in the rotunda of the Bronx County Courthouse, where the team laid out its plans to build a new home in two neighborhood parks. The meeting attracted no fewer than 500 people, with dozens forced to wait outside. "I'm totally opposed to this," he said. "We've never benefited from the stadium, and we don't believe we'll ever benefit from it." Much of the anger is focused on a plan that would eliminate nearly all of the popular Mullaly and Macombs Dam parks, which are about as old as Yankee Stadium itself, and replace them with smaller parks scattered around the neighborhood. Some would be placed on the roofs of new garages for stadium parking, and one would be on the waterfront along the river. But the team's plan has also suffered from a longstanding perception that the Yankees have been a bad neighbor with nothing but contempt for residents of one of the city's most impoverished neighborhoods. The dispute has reopened old fissures between the club and residents who still resent the team owner George Steinbrenner's loud complaints about falling attendance and crime at a time when the most common arrest on game days was of drunken fans for public urination. The knotty relationship has been complicated by the team's periodic threats to move to Manhattan or New Jersey. In recent months, the Yankees have increased contributions to Bronx youth groups and access for Spanish-language newspaper and television reporters. But many residents complain that the team reaps millions of dollars of revenue in the South Bronx, but performs little meaningful community outreach and did not consult most residents about the new stadium plan until November. Many have not forgotten the furor over a Yankee executive, Richard Kraft, the team's vice president for community relations, who in 1994 resigned over remarks attributed to him in which the phrases "colored boy" and "monkeys" were used to describe neighborhood youths. "They just ignore this community," said Mary L. Blassingame, 64, a member of Community Board 4, whose district includes the stadium. "If they had been a good neighbor, they would not have put this plan through." Critics of the plan have started petition drives and held protests. The plan was rejected by the local community board -- a move that, while not legally binding, is an important gauge of the neighborhood's mood, and was especially embarrassing to Adolfo Carrión Jr., the Bronx borough president, who supports the new stadium and appointed the board's 50 members. To go forward, the stadium proposal needs the approval of the city's Planning Commission, which is scheduled to take it up later this month, and eventually of the City Council. It calls for construction to start by this summer, and for the new stadium to be ready by opening day in April 2009. When the stadium is finished, the current structure would be razed and transformed into a public park with baseball and softball fields. A soccer field and a track would be built on the street-level roof of one parking garage, while another garage would be turned into a skating rink. Residents, however, say that the new parks would be a patchwork compared with what they now have, and that the two new proposed parks on top of parking garages are especially inappropriate for a neighborhood in which community leaders have complained about high rates of asthma. The Yankees and the city's Parks Department, which is overseeing the project's design, say that they are working closely with the community to allay concerns, but that the current plan would greatly benefit the neighborhood economically and provide more parkland. The Parks Department has committed to spending $110 million on new parks in the area. "People understandably have a tough time looking past what they have now, but in the end, they're going to have nicer facilities," said Joshua Laird, chief of planning for the Parks Department. The plan is supported by almost all of the area's elected officials, as well as by some residents. Some support groups have received money from the Yankees. Although the Yankees have agreed to pay for the cost of the stadium, the team would not pay rent, property taxes or sales tax on construction. The city would spend up to $135 million on replacing and improving local parks; the state would provide about $70 million for four new parking garages and low-interest financing. Randy Levine, president of the Yankees, said the team has tried to burnish its image in the Bronx in recent years and deepen its ties to the community. In the past, he conceded, the stadium was "like an island in the Bronx," remote and uninviting. Last year, he said, $291,000 of the $1.5 million distributed by the Yankee Foundation nationally went to dozens of Bronx community groups, including Little League teams, the youth leadership program at 12 Bronx community boards, a soup kitchen and various churches. The team itself gave out an additional $450,000 in tickets, bats, balls, uniforms and caps, he said. Brian Smith, the Yankees' director of community relations, said he was unsure how the team's contributions to Bronx-based groups in recent years compared with the 1990's. Gary Israel, coach of the Morris High School robotics team, said that he was shocked by the criticism of the Yankees, who had been helpful to his program. Over three years, the Yankee Foundation gave the robotics team $39,000, helping it travel across the country to compete. Mr. Carrión said the project would guarantee construction jobs for residents of the Bronx, which has the highest unemployment rate in New York State. "There's always been opposition to change, and the argument that I'm making is that this is a change for the better," Mr. Carrión said. Still, the Yankees lack a deep reservoir of good will in the surrounding neighborhood, where residents might otherwise have given the team the benefit of the doubt. Highbridge residents have collected thousands of signatures -- they say more than 4,000 -- opposing the project. The Mullaly and Macombs Dam parks attract large crowds, particularly on summer weekends, and have been the playing fields of generations of children who dreamed of playing in the stadium next door. Macombs Dam Park's quarter-mile track was once a major training center for athletes, including Hannes Kohlemainen, a long-distance runner from Finland who won three gold medals in the 1912 Olympics. It is now used for school track meets. The location and utility of the new parks are crucial, because federal law dictates that if parkland is removed from public use, it must be replaced by public parks of "at least equal fair market value and of reasonably equivalent usefulness and location." Some residents are also concerned about traffic, noise and pollution. And they complain that the parks would not be completed until after the stadium is completed, and that a rooftop ball field is a poor substitute for a tree-lined park. "We are not against the new stadium," said Pasquale Canale, a member of the community board, president of the 161st Street Merchants Association and the owner of the Hero Factory sandwich shop. "We're against taking parks away from the neighborhood and sandwiching that big stadium up against the apartment buildings right across the street." Mr. Laird said the city had accelerated the creation of parks and ball fields because of community comments and at Mr. Carrión's urging. Still, Peggy Escalera, a 35-year resident whose two sons grew up playing in the park, did not feel assured as she listened at the public hearing on Dec. 12. Some of her neighbors were barred from the hearing because construction workers backing the project had gotten in early, taking many seats. "We just feel so disrespected," she said. "People feel as if they weren't consulted. They created a plan, and then talked to the community."

BASEBALL
PLANNING COMMISSION
BRONX (NYC)
NEW YORK YANKEES


Sumner Redstone’s Granddaughter and Ex-Companion Form Alliance

Abstract: In yet another twist to an already tangled case, a judge on Wednesday rejected a petition by the granddaughter of the media mogul Sumner M. Redstone to join his former companion in the legal battle over his mental competency . The petition was made by Keryn Redstone, the 34-year-old daughter of Brent Redstone, Sumner’s son. And it essentially puts her in conflict with her aunt, Shari Redstone, who after public disagreements with her father over the years has said that she has reconciled with him. Keryn Redstone could still act as a witness in the case. Shari Redstone has spent the last several months challenging the suit, which was filed in November by Manuela Herzer, the former companion and onetime romantic partner of the elder Mr. Redstone. Ms. Herzer asserts that Mr. Redstone, 92, was not mentally competent in October when he removed her from a directive that would have put her in charge of his health care. A deposition of Ms. Herzer was scheduled for Thursday, but was delayed until next week because her lawyer said she had strep throat. The development comes after settlement talks between the two sides fell apart in recent weeks. Ms. Herzer says she is concerned with Mr. Redstone’s well-being. His lawyers state that she is motivated by greed. On the same day that Mr. Redstone changed his health care plan, he also removed Ms. Herzer from his personal estate in which he had planned to leave her $50 million and his $20 million Los Angeles mansion. In court documents, lawyers for Mr. Redstone called Keryn Redstone’s effort to join the proceeding “disappointing but not altogether surprising” because Ms. Herzer and Keryn Redstone are “the two individuals with a financial interest in setting aside Mr. Redstone’s October 2015 estate plan.” Like his sister, Shari, Brent Redstone has had an uneven relationship with his father. He sued Mr. Redstone in 2006 , saying that his father favored his sister and froze him out of the family business. They settled in 2007, when Brent Redstone’s share of the business was bought out. In a declaration to the court, Keryn Redstone, who lives in Los Angeles, described her grandfather as a “prisoner in his own home” and said that she had been restricted from visiting him since February. She described her relationship with her grandfather, whom she called “Grumpy,” as close and affectionate and recalled childhood memories of playing the piano and tennis together. In contrast, Keryn Redstone called the relationship between Mr. Redstone and Shari Redstone “very tempestuous and difficult” and said that Shari Redstone had “consistently expressed hostility toward me, my father, and Grumpy in sometimes dark, threatening ways.” She described several fights with her aunt over the years about the care of her Aunt Cecelie and seating arrangements at Mr. Redstone’s 91st birthday party. In the declaration, Keryn Redstone described “distressing changes” in her grandfather’s behavior shortly before and after Ms. Herzer was thrown out of his home, including extreme mood shifts, disorientation, blank expressions and crying for no apparent reason. In a statement, Shari Redstone said, “This is not the first time that Keryn has sued an elderly relative for her own financial gain.” “I am sad and disappointed that Keryn has chosen to align herself with Herzer against my father,” she added. “I will not dignify the absurdity of Keryn’s false claims with any further response.” A trial is scheduled for May 6.

Keryn Redstone
Manuela Herzer
Sumner M Redstone
CBS
Viacom
Lawsuits


An Aging Nomad, Jose Reyes Longs for a Team in the Hunt

Abstract: It was around midnight, and Jose Reyes was sleeping in his Toronto home when his wife received a call from a Toronto Blue Jays trainer summoning him to the ballpark. Reyes had spent the off day mostly hanging around the house. At 32, he needed ample rest and recovery. But the trainer said it was urgent, so Reyes got up and walked to Rogers Centre, which was nearby. He was greeted by his manager, John Gibbons, and the Blue Jays’ general manager, Alex Anthopoulos, and it was only then, he said, that he actually realized he was being traded. Not only that, he was being dealt to the Colorado Rockies, one of the worst teams in baseball. As Reyes retold the story Monday at Citi Field, that was when he paused and sighed. He was now with his fourth team in five seasons, and he was going up against the Mets, his first club and the one with which he had played his best baseball. He was not a star anymore. The lines in his face had deepened. Naturally, his priorities had changed. All he wanted was what the Mets now have: a shot at the postseason. “We had an opportunity when I was there,” he said, thinking back to the days when he was an All-Star Mets shortstop. “In 2006, 2007, 2008, I feel like we had a team that could win maybe one World Series. We weren’t able to get it done.” He added, “Sometimes, it crosses my mind.” When Reyes left the Mets as a free agent after the 2011 season and signed a six-year, $106 million deal with the Marlins, he was 28 years old and one of the more exciting players in baseball. He was, at that point, a four-time All-Star who, at various times, had finished first in the National League in steals, triples, base hits and batting average. But the Mets were rebuilding and under financial constraints and were clearly leery of giving an expensive long-term contract to a player whose best attribute, his speed, would deteriorate as he aged. The Marlins assured Reyes that he would not be traded, that he was part of their future, and then, after one season of a backloaded deal, they traded him anyway — to Toronto, with its artificial turf. Reyes has not made an All-Star team since leaving New York. His stolen bases have diminished; his triples have disappeared. Advanced metrics indicate that his defense and range at shortstop now cost his team runs. His combined on-base percentage this season (.312) going into Tuesday’s game against the Mets is his lowest in a decade. Asked why he had no triples this season, he claimed it was partly by design. He does not want to push his body too far and risk injury at his age. “My game is a little bit different, for sure, but I still feel like I do my job,” Reyes said. “When you get older, you have to find a way. You know your game is going to change one way or another. That’s the way it is.” Nevertheless, Reyes is still one of the highest-paid players in baseball. He is making $22 million this year, and he is owed $22 million in each of the next two seasons. He will make $22 million in 2018, too, unless his contract is bought out for $4 million. His contract is so big that it would seem to make him untradable, although the Blue Jays were able to deal him because they took on Troy Tulowitzki’s even bigger contract from Colorado. Reyes has had to watch for the past two weeks as the Blue Jays, with Tulowitzki at short and with David Price now heading their rotation, have begun playing like the best team in baseball. Going into Tuesday, the Blue Jays had gone 11-0 in games in which Tulowitzki started. Price has pitched two gems. The Yankees had appeared to be running away with the American League East, but no longer: The Blue Jays are right there. When Reyes met with the New York news media on Monday, he answered questions carefully, as if he did not want to make headlines. He said he wished the Blue Jays well and noted that he still had friends there. He joked that he did not miss playing on the artificial turf in Toronto. He did not openly voice his displeasure with having been traded to the Rockies. He only hinted at it, saying: “I’m an employee. Wherever they send me, I have to go there and perform.” Glancing around at his new teammates, Reyes said: “At this point, I just want to win. No matter what people say, or whatever people think. I’m at the point in my career where I want to win. If it’s here or someplace else, I don’t know. Next year, I mean, should be better. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my career playing on a last-place team. When I retire, I’m going to go home and say, ‘I played for what?’ You know, if I don’t win anything.” When Reyes first went to bat on Monday night, the Citi Field crowd gave him a standing ovation. He stroked a single into center field, but Jon Niese deftly picked him off at first base. If he were a Met, his salary would count for about one-fifth of the team’s payroll. Reyes still keeps a home on Long Island and lives there in the off-season. Like any baseball fan with New York roots, he follows the Mets from afar. He knows about their young, dominant pitching. He still thinks about 2006, the year he was one victory away from playing in the World Series. When he walks the streets of New York, people shout at him: “Come back! Come back to the Mets!” He gets the same messages on Twitter and Instagram, too. It all makes him smile. “It’s not that easy,” Reyes said Tuesday afternoon, after he had had some more time to reflect. “I’d love to — not now, because I have two more years on my deal. But I’d love to finish my career here in New York. I have some great memories here.”

Jose Reyes
Rockies
Baseball
Mets
Troy Tulowitzki
Sports Trades
Playoffs