Drug-Smuggling Tunnel, Found in San Diego, Is Longest Yet

Abstract: For all the talk about a wall between the United States and Mexico, the problem with border security continues to be as much below ground as above. On Wednesday, officials in San Diego announced the discovery of another cross-border tunnel built by drug smugglers — the longest one found yet, at about half a mile. The tunnel had rails, lighting, ventilation and even a large elevator leading to a closet in a modest house in Tijuana, United States Attorney Laura E. Duffy said. On the San Diego side, where the tunnel emerged in an industrial park in the Otay Mesa neighborhood, the authorities arrested and charged six people last week and confiscated more than a ton of cocaine and seven tons of marijuana that they said had been smuggled through the passage — the largest drug seizure associated with a tunnel. Despite the superlatives cited by officials, the cat-and-mole game between law enforcement and drug cartels shows no sign of abating. In the last five years, the authorities said, they have found more than 75 cross-border tunnels, mostly in areas of California and Arizona where there are enough buildings to disguise illicit activity, and the soil is conducive to digging. In Tijuana, in particular , the tunnels are considered an intractable fact of life. Specialists on border control say no one has a clear idea how many tunnels are operating, or how much of a role they play in the drug trade, but they will be a factor for the foreseeable future. In just the last month, another long tunnel was found linking Calexico to Mexicali, and a shorter one near Calexico. “They keep finding tunnels, they keep getting bigger and longer and more sophisticated,” said David A. Shirk, associate professor of political science and international relations at the University of San Diego. “It just seems like we haven’t reduced the capacity of people to make tunnels. I think this is a problem we have to manage, not a problem we can actually solve.” Law enforcement agencies have explored high-tech ways to detect tunnels using vibrations or magnetic fields, but those have not been effective. Most often, experts say, tunnels are found through old-fashioned police work, acting on tips or putting suspected traffickers under surveillance. The tunnels demonstrate the persistence and resources of the cartels. Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Sinaloa cartel boss known as El Chapo, famously used tunnels to escape twice from prison , and to flee a hide-out shortly before his most recent capture. Some experts say the tunnels are also a testament to the improved effectiveness of drug interdiction. Traffickers would not resort to digging, which is slow and expensive, unless they thought it was necessary, said Jayson Ahern, a former acting commissioner of United States Customs and Border Protection, who is now a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security firm. “You still are dealing with a very adaptable adversary, who will try to get their drugs into the U.S. by any means necessary,” Mr. Ahern said. “Every time you go ahead and displace a smuggling route, you make it more difficult for yourself to detect the next route.” The tunnels have not been known to be used for large-scale smuggling of people, which would increase the number of people who could be caught and disclose a tunnel’s location. And despite fears raised in Congress, experts say there is no evidence that the cartels are helping terrorists enter the country. “A package of cocaine or heroin is much easier to move and hide than a person, and the profit it represents is far greater,” said Christopher Wilson, deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a policy research group. “Working with terrorists would bring a huge amount heat on the cartels, and that’s bad for business.” The latest tunnel discovered, in an investigation involving several federal agencies, was almost 900 yards long. At about 10 feet deep and three feet wide, it was narrower and shallower than some others that have been found. The northern opening was in a fenced commercial lot with stacks of wooden pallets. “I think it fair to say that few would suspect that traffickers were moving multiton quantities of cocaine and marijuana in this very unassuming way, in full view of the world around them,” Ms. Duffy said.

Smuggling
San Diego
Mexico
Tijuana
Drug Abuse
Bridges,Tunnels


A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning

Abstract: MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii — Two gray machines sit inside a pair of utilitarian buildings here, sniffing the fresh breezes that blow across thousands of miles of ocean. They make no noise. But once an hour, they spit out a number, and for decades, it has been rising relentlessly. The first machine of this type was installed on Mauna Loa in the 1950s at the behest of Charles David Keeling, a scientist from San Diego . His resulting discovery, of the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, transformed the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth. A graph of his findings is inscribed on a wall in Washington as one of the great achievements of modern science. Yet, five years after Dr. Keeling’s death , his discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming . When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide. By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution. The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth? Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide traps heat at the surface of the planet. They cite growing evidence that the inexorable rise of the gas is altering the climate in ways that threaten human welfare. Fossil fuel emissions , they say, are like a runaway train, hurtling the world’s citizens toward a stone wall — a carbon dioxide level that, over time, will cause profound changes. The risks include melting ice sheets, rising seas, more droughts and heat waves, more flash floods, worse storms, extinction of many plants and animals, depletion of sea life and — perhaps most important — difficulty in producing an adequate supply of food. Many of these changes are taking place at a modest level already, the scientists say, but are expected to intensify. Reacting to such warnings, President George Bush committed the United States in 1992 to limiting its emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Scores of other nations made the same pledge, in a treaty that was long on promises and short on specifics. But in 1998, when it came time to commit to details in a document known as the Kyoto Protocol, Congress balked. Many countries did ratify the protocol, but it had only a limited effect, and the past decade has seen little additional progress in controlling emissions. Many countries are reluctant to commit themselves to tough emission limits, fearing that doing so will hurt economic growth. International climate talks in Cancún , Mexico , this month ended with only modest progress. The Obama administration, which came into office pledging to limit emissions in the United States, scaled back its ambitions after climate and energy legislation died in the Senate this year. Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science. Some of the Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January have promised to subject climate researchers to a season of new scrutiny. One of them is Representative Dana Rohrabacher , Republican of California . In a recent Congressional hearing on global warming, he said, “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.” But most scientists trained in the physics of the atmosphere have a different reaction to the increase. “I find it shocking,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the government monitoring program of which the Mauna Loa Observatory is a part. “We really are in a predicament here, and it’s getting worse every year.” As the political debate drags on, the mute gray boxes atop Mauna Loa keep spitting out their numbers, providing a reality check: not only is the carbon dioxide level rising relentlessly, but the pace of that rise is accelerating over time. “Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried,” Jeffrey D. Sachs , the Columbia University economist, said at a recent seminar. “Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.” A Passion for Precision Perhaps the biggest reason the world learned of the risk of global warming was the unusual personality of a single American scientist. Charles David Keeling’s son Ralph remembers that when he was a child, his family bought a new home in Del Mar, Calif., north of San Diego. His father assigned him the task of edging the lawn. Dr. Keeling insisted that Ralph copy the habits of the previous owner, an Englishman who had taken pride in his garden , cutting a precise two-inch strip between the sidewalk and the grass. “It took a lot of work to maintain this attractive gap,” Ralph Keeling recalled, but he said his father believed “that was just the right way to do it, and if you didn’t do that, you were cutting corners. It was a moral breach.” Dr. Keeling was a punctilious man. It was by no means his defining trait — relatives and colleagues described a man who played a brilliant piano, loved hiking mountains and might settle a friendly argument at dinner by pulling an etymological dictionary off the shelf. But the essence of his scientific legacy was his passion for doing things in a meticulous way. It explains why, even as challengers try to pick apart every other aspect of climate science, his half-century record of carbon dioxide measurements stands unchallenged. By the 1950s, when Dr. Keeling was completing his scientific training, scientists had been observing the increasing use of fossil fuels and wondering whether carbon dioxide in the air was rising as a result. But nobody had been able to take accurate measurements of the gas. As a young researcher, Dr. Keeling built instruments and developed techniques that allowed him to achieve great precision in making such measurements. Then he spent the rest of his life applying his approach. In his earliest measurements of the air, taken in California and other parts of the West in the mid-1950s, he found that the background level for carbon dioxide was about 310 parts per million. That discovery drew attention in Washington, and Dr. Keeling soon found himself enjoying government backing for his research. He joined the staff of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography , in the La Jolla section of San Diego, under the guidance of an esteemed scientist named Roger Revelle , and began laying plans to measure carbon dioxide around the world. Some of the most important data came from an analyzer he placed in a government geophysical observatory that had been set up a few years earlier in a remote location: near the top of Mauna Loa, one of the volcanoes that loom over the Big Island of Hawaii . He quickly made profound discoveries. One was that carbon dioxide oscillated slightly according to the seasons. Dr. Keeling realized the reason: most of the world’s land is in the Northern Hemisphere, and plants there were taking up carbon dioxide as they sprouted leaves and grew over the summer, then shedding it as the leaves died and decayed in the winter. He had discovered that the earth itself was breathing. A more ominous finding was that each year, the peak level was a little higher than the year before. Carbon dioxide was indeed rising, and quickly. That finding electrified the small community of scientists who understood its implications. Later chemical tests, by Dr. Keeling and others, proved that the increase was due to the combustion of fossil fuels. The graph showing rising carbon dioxide levels came to be known as the Keeling Curve . Many Americans have never heard of it, but to climatologists, it is the most recognizable emblem of their science, engraved in bronze on a building at Mauna Loa and carved into a wall at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. By the late 1960s, a decade after Dr. Keeling began his measurements, the trend of rising carbon dioxide was undeniable, and scientists began to warn of the potential for a big increase in the temperature of the earth. Dr. Keeling’s mentor, Dr. Revelle, moved to Harvard, where he lectured about the problem. Among the students in the 1960s who first saw the Keeling Curve displayed in Dr. Revelle’s classroom was a senator’s son from Tennessee named Albert Arnold Gore Jr., who marveled at what it could mean for the future of the planet. Throughout much of his career, Dr. Keeling was cautious about interpreting his own measurements. He left that to other people while he concentrated on creating a record that would withstand scrutiny. John Chin, a retired technician in Hawaii who worked closely with Dr. Keeling, recently described the painstaking steps he took, at Dr. Keeling’s behest, to ensure accuracy. Many hours were required every week just to be certain that the instruments atop Mauna Loa had not drifted out of kilter. The golden rule was “no hanky-panky,” Mr. Chin recalled in an interview in Hilo , Hawaii. Dr. Keeling and his aides scrutinized the records closely, and if workers in Hawaii fell down on the job, Mr. Chin said, they were likely to get a call or letter: “What did you do? What happened that day?” In later years, as the scientific evidence about climate change grew, Dr. Keeling’s interpretations became bolder, and he began to issue warnings. In an essay in 1998, he replied to claims that global warming was a myth, declaring that the real myth was that “natural resources and the ability of the earth’s habitable regions to absorb the impacts of human activities are limitless.” Still, by the time he died, global warming had not become a major political issue. That changed in 2006, when Mr. Gore’s movie and book, both titled “ An Inconvenient Truth ,” brought the issue to wider public attention. The Keeling Curve was featured in both. In 2007, a body appointed by the United Nations declared that the scientific evidence that the earth was warming had become unequivocal, and it added that humans were almost certainly the main cause. Mr. Gore and the panel jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize. But as action began to seem more likely, the political debate intensified, with fossil-fuel industries mobilizing to fight emission-curbing measures. Climate-change contrarians increased their attack on the science, taking advantage of the Internet to distribute their views outside the usual scientific channels. In an interview in La Jolla, Dr. Keeling’s widow, Louise, said that if her husband had lived to see the hardening of the political battle lines over climate change, he would have been dismayed. “He was a registered Republican,” she said. “He just didn’t think of it as a political issue at all.” The Numbers Not long ago, standing on a black volcanic plain two miles above the Pacific Ocean, the director of the Mauna Loa Observatory, John E. Barnes, pointed toward a high metal tower. Samples are taken by hoses that snake to the top of the tower to ensure that only clean air is analyzed, he explained. He described other measures intended to guarantee an accurate record. Then Dr. Barnes, who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, displayed the hourly calculation from one of the analyzers. It showed the amount of carbon dioxide that morning as 388 parts per million. After Dr. Keeling had established the importance of carbon dioxide measurements, the government began making its own, in the early 1970s. Today, a NOAA monitoring program and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography program operate in parallel at Mauna Loa and other sites, with each record of measurements serving as a quality check on the other. The Scripps program is now run by Ralph Keeling, who grew up to become a renowned atmospheric scientist in his own right and then joined the Scripps faculty. He took control of the measurement program after his father’s sudden death from a heart attack . In an interview on the Scripps campus in La Jolla, Ralph Keeling calculated that the carbon dioxide level at Mauna Loa was likely to surpass 400 by May 2014, a sort of odometer moment in mankind’s alteration of the atmosphere. “We’re going to race through 400 like we didn’t see it go by,” Dr. Keeling said. What do these numbers mean? The basic physics of the atmosphere, worked out more than a century ago, show that carbon dioxide plays a powerful role in maintaining the earth’s climate. Even though the amount in the air is tiny, the gas is so potent at trapping the sun’s heat that it effectively works as a one-way blanket, letting visible light in but stopping much of the resulting heat from escaping back to space. Without any of the gas, the earth would most likely be a frozen wasteland — according to a recent study, its average temperature would be colder by roughly 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But scientists say humanity is now polluting the atmosphere with too much of a good thing. In recent years, researchers have been able to put the Keeling measurements into a broader context. Bubbles of ancient air trapped by glaciers and ice sheets have been tested, and they show that over the past 800,000 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air oscillated between roughly 200 and 300 parts per million. Just before the Industrial Revolution, the level was about 280 parts per million and had been there for several thousand years. That amount of the gas, in other words, produced the equable climate in which human civilization flourished. Other studies, covering many millions of years, show a close association between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the earth. The gas seemingly played a major role in amplifying the effects of the ice ages, which were caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit. The geologic record suggests that as the earth began cooling, the amount of carbon dioxide fell, probably because much of it got locked up in the ocean, and that fall amplified the initial cooling. Conversely, when the orbital wobble caused the earth to begin warming, a great deal of carbon dioxide escaped from the ocean, amplifying the warming. Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University , refers to carbon dioxide as the master control knob of the earth’s climate. He said that because the wobbles in the earth’s orbit were not, by themselves, big enough to cause the large changes of the ice ages, the situation made sense only when the amplification from carbon dioxide was factored in. “What the ice ages tell us is that our physical understanding of CO2 explains what happened and nothing else does,” Dr. Alley said. “The ice ages are a very strong test of whether we’ve got it right.” When people began burning substantial amounts of coal and oil in the 19th century, the carbon dioxide level began to rise. It is now about 40 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution, and humans have put half the extra gas into the air since just the late 1970s. Emissions are rising so rapidly that some experts fear that the amount of the gas could double or triple before emissions are brought under control. The earth’s history offers no exact parallel to the human combustion of fossil fuels, so scientists have struggled to calculate the effect. Their best estimate is that if the amount of carbon dioxide doubles, the temperature of the earth will rise about five or six degrees Fahrenheit. While that may sound small given the daily and seasonal variations in the weather, the number represents an annual global average, and therefore an immense addition of heat to the planet. The warming would be higher over land, and it would be greatly amplified at the poles, where a considerable amount of ice might melt, raising sea levels. The deep ocean would also absorb a tremendous amount of heat. Moreover, scientists say that an increase of five or six degrees is a mildly optimistic outlook. They cannot rule out an increase as high as 18 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet. Climate-change contrarians do not accept these numbers. The Internet has given rise to a vocal cadre of challengers who question every aspect of the science — even the physics, worked out in the 19th century, that shows that carbon dioxide traps heat. That is a point so elementary and well-established that demonstrations of it are routinely carried out by high school students. However, the contrarians who have most influenced Congress are a handful of men trained in atmospheric physics. They generally accept the rising carbon dioxide numbers, they recognize that the increase is caused by human activity, and they acknowledge that the earth is warming in response. But they doubt that it will warm nearly as much as mainstream scientists say, arguing that the increase is likely to be less than two degrees Fahrenheit, a change they characterize as manageable. Among the most prominent of these contrarians is Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , who contends that as the earth initially warms, cloud patterns will shift in a way that should help to limit the heat buildup. Most climate scientists contend that little evidence supports this view, but Dr. Lindzen is regularly consulted on Capitol Hill. “I am quite willing to state,” Dr. Lindzen said in a speech this year, “that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon, though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.” The Fuel of Civilization While the world’s governments have largely accepted the science of climate change, their efforts to bring emissions under control are lagging. The simple reason is that modern civilization is built on burning fossil fuels. Cars, trucks, power plants, steel mills, farms, planes, cement factories, home furnaces — virtually all of them spew carbon dioxide or lesser heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Developed countries, especially the United States, are largely responsible for the buildup that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution. They have begun to make some headway on the problem, reducing the energy they use to produce a given amount of economic output, with some countries even managing to lower their total emissions. But these modest efforts are being swamped by rising energy use in developing countries like China , India and Brazil . In those lands, economic growth is not simply desirable — it is a moral imperative, to lift more than a third of the human race out of poverty. A recent scientific paper referred to China’s surge as “the biggest transformation of human well-being the earth has ever seen.” China’s citizens, on average, still use less than a third of the energy per person as Americans. But with 1.3 billion people, four times as many as the United States, China is so large and is growing so quickly that it has surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest overall user of energy. Barring some big breakthrough in clean-energy technology, this rapid growth in developing countries threatens to make the emissions problem unsolvable. Emissions dropped sharply in Western nations in 2009, during the recession that followed the financial crisis, but that decrease was largely offset by continued growth in the East. And for 2010, global emissions are projected to return to the rapid growth of the past decade, rising more than 3 percent a year. Many countries have, in principle, embraced the idea of trying to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, feeling that any greater warming would pose unacceptable risks. As best scientists can calculate, that means about one trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the gases released into the atmosphere before emissions need to fall to nearly zero. “It took 250 years to burn the first half-trillion tons,” Myles R. Allen, a leading British climate scientist, said in a briefing. “On current trends, we’ll burn the next half-trillion in less than 40.” Unless more serious efforts to convert to a new energy system begin soon, scientists argue, it will be impossible to hit the 3.6-degree target, and the risk will increase that global warming could spiral out of control by century’s end. “We are quickly running out of time,” said Josep G. Canadell, an Australian scientist who tracks emissions In many countries, the United States and China among them, a conversion of the energy system has begun, with wind turbines and solar panels sprouting across the landscape. But they generate only a tiny fraction of all power, with much of the world’s electricity still coming from the combustion of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. With the exception of European countries, few nations have been willing to raise the cost of fossil fuels or set emissions caps as a way to speed the transformation. In the United States, a particular fear has been that a carbon policy will hurt the country’s industries as they compete with companies abroad whose governments have adopted no such policy. As he watches these difficulties, Ralph Keeling contemplates the unbending math of carbon dioxide emissions first documented by his father more than a half-century ago and wonders about the future effects of that increase. “When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. “ ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.” On Dec. 11, another round of international climate negotiations, sponsored by the United Nations, concluded in Cancún. As they have for 18 years running, the gathered nations pledged renewed efforts. But they failed to agree on any binding emission targets. Late at night, as the delegates were wrapping up in Mexico, the machines atop the volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean issued their own silent verdict on the world’s efforts. At midnight Mauna Loa time, the carbon dioxide level hit 390 — and rising.

Hawaii
Charles David Keeling
Carbon dioxide
Ralph Keeling
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Climate Change Global Warming
Greenhouse gas


Miami Wins With Last-Minute Score

Abstract: Dallas Crawford had a 3-yard touchdown with 16 seconds left to give visiting No. 10 Miami a 27-23 victory over North Carolina on Thursday night. Crawford’s score ended a 90-yard drive by the Hurricanes (6-0, 2-0 Atlantic Coast Conference). He finished with 137 yards on 33 carries and 2 touchdowns to help the Hurricanes avoid an upset by the Tar Heels (1-5, 0-3).

College football
UNC
University of Miami


Hillsborough Stadium Disaster: Verdict Faults Police for Fans ‘Unlawfully Killed’

Abstract: LONDON — More than a quarter century ago , 96 Liverpool soccer fans were crushed and trampled to death at an English soccer match, a tragedy that convulsed Britain and shocked the world, even as police and safety officials blamed victims for causing their own deaths. On Tuesday, a jury found that the fans who died during the match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, had been “unlawfully killed” and the victims of what proved to be fatal police mistakes, a verdict that represented a long-sought victory for family members who had fought for a full accounting. The jury answered yes to the crucial questions of whether there were errors or omissions by the police in planning and executing security for the match on April 15, 1989, and it specifically cited the actions of commanding officers. The victims suffocated as they entered an F.A. Cup semifinal between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest after the police opened an exit gate in an effort to relieve congestion outside the stadium before the game. In the chaos that ensued, some victims were crushed against steel fencing. Others were trampled, and more than 700 people were injured. The victims were ages 10 to 67 and included 37 teenagers. The jury was given 14 yes-or-no questions in deciding how the 96 people died, and it said no to only one: whether the fans were responsible for the deaths. Together, the findings amounted to an unambiguous rejection of a narrative pushed for many years by the police and some in the news media that portrayed the fans as drunk and out of control. After the verdict was announced, family members clasped hands outside the coroner’s court in Warrington, England, east of Liverpool, and sang the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the tune that Liverpool fans belt out at every game. Some held photographs of their dead relatives. Others sobbed. An 11-page statement on behalf of the families of 22 victims said the verdict “vindicated the long, long journey of the 96 families who have striven tirelessly for 27 years to obtain the truth, obtain justice and make those responsible for the Hillsborough disaster accountable.” “The story of Hillsborough,” the statement said, “is a story of human tragedy, but it is also a story of deceit and lies, of institutional defensiveness defeating truth and justice.” Senior police and safety officials had initially blamed the victims for causing their own deaths, which an independent inquiry later called “the most serious tragedy in U.K. sporting history.” The events on that day changed how the game is watched : Standing-only sections at stadiums that were vulnerable to overcrowding have been replaced by seating areas at most venues in Britain, and fences around the field were removed. “I want them 96 to rest in peace now, because they have suffered for these 27 years seeing the families suffer,” said Margaret Aspinall, whose 18-year-old son, James, died in the crush and who leads the Hillsborough Family Support Group. “They done nothing wrong that day,” she told Granada Reports, a regional news program for North West England . “They were the heroes.” Prime Minister David Cameron said the verdict had delivered justice that was long overdue. David Duckenfield, the South Yorkshire police officer who was in charge of security for the game, later falsely claimed that spectators had opened the gate. Video Chief Constable David Crompton of the South Yorkshire Police said his department's handling of the 1989 disaster at Hillsborough Stadium, which led to 96 deaths, was "catastrophically wrong." Credit Credit Dave Thompson/Getty Images The inquest was not a criminal trial, and it does not confer civil damages or penalties; rather, it is a finding of fact. After the verdict, however, the Crown Prosecution Service said it was evaluating whether to press charges in light of the findings, and legal experts said that such a case would most likely focus on Mr. Duckenfield. During the inquest, Mr. Duckenfield described how he “froze” during the vital moments when police officers responded to the overcrowding threat and did not foresee that his failure to close a tunnel leading to crowded pens after a large exit gate was opened would prove fatal. In the days after the deaths, efforts by the police to assign responsibility to soccer fans culminated in a story in the British newspaper The Sun under the headline “The Truth.” It blamed Liverpool fans for bad behavior and said they had attacked rescue workers, urinated on police officers and picked victims’ pockets. The Sun’s editor at the time, Kelvin MacKenzie, apologized more than 23 years later. In 1996, a former spokesman for Margaret Thatcher, who had been prime minister at the time of the stadium deaths, wrote a letter to Graham Skinner, a Liverpool fan whose friend had died in the crush, blaming the fans. “I believe that there would have been no Hillsborough disaster if tanked-up yobs had not turned up in very large numbers to try to force their way into the ground,” wrote the spokesman, Bernard Ingham . Mr. Duckenfield, who is now 71, left the police force at the age of 46 and retired to the south coast, where, according to the British news media, he largely disappeared from public view. Chief Constable David Crompton of the South Yorkshire Police told reporters on Tuesday that he unequivocally accepted the verdict of “unlawful killing.” He apologized to the families of the victims, saying that the force had handled events at Hillsborough “catastrophically wrong.” The verdict, which capped the longest case heard by a jury in British legal history, comes more than two years after the inquest began, on April 1, 2014. During the inquest, the jurors — six women and three men — were asked to answer the 14 questions related to how and when the victims had died, and they concluded that the fans’ behavior did not cause or contribute to the disaster. The jurors working through the questions had unanimously agreed on answers to all of them, save for the matter of whether the victims were unlawfully killed. The jury voted seven to two on that question. A new inquest into the disaster was ordered after an independent panel concluded in September 2012 that there had been a vast cover-up in which senior police officers sought to dissemble blame by making scapegoats of victims and survivors. In December of that year, a high court in London overturned the original inquest verdicts of accidental death. The independent panel’s report, citing post-mortem examinations, said the coroner had assigned an arbitrary time of death for 41 victims, even as their hearts and lungs continued to function. Some members of the victims’ families fainted when they read the report. When the 2012 report was published, Mr. Cameron issued a government apology to the families of the victims, saying that they had suffered a double injustice. “The injustice of the appalling events, the failure of the state to protect their loved ones and the indefensible wait to get to the truth,” and “the injustice of the denigration of the deceased — that they were somehow at fault for their own deaths.” The Hillsborough tragedy culminated a dark decade for English soccer. Fifty-six people were killed when a fire raced through the stands during a Bradford City soccer match on May 11, 1985. Less than three weeks later, 39 people were crushed to death at Heysel Stadium in Brussels before the start of the European Cup final between Liverpool and the Italian club Juventus.

Police
Soccer
Stampede
Great Britain
Stadiums Arenas
Accidents and Safety
Hillsborough Stadium Sheffield England
Sheffield England


National Guard Force to Be Cut at Mexican Border

Abstract: The contingent of National Guard troops at the Mexican border will be cut to about 300 from 1,200 by the end of March. Members of Congress were briefed on the reduction on Tuesday by officials from the Homeland Security and Defense Departments. The remaining troops will focus on aerial surveillance missions, the officials said.

United States Defense and Military Forces


C.C. Sabathia Speaks Volumes, but Yankees’ Bats Are Mute in a Series Finale

Abstract: In scratching back into the playoff chase during the last week, the Yankees put a heavy burden on the young and talented players now populating their roster. The team still has veterans with large profiles and larger salaries, but it has been youth that often carried the day. On Sunday, though, it was C. C. Sabathia, 36 and in his 16th major league season, who performed the dutiful work for the Yankees. He pitched six and two-thirds innings against the Baltimore Orioles, subduing for most of the game the fourth-highest-scoring offense in the American League. When he walked back to the Yankee Stadium dugout midway through the seventh inning, fluttering his glove in his right hand as he prepared to bounce down the steps and disappear into the clubhouse, the crowd applauded his performance, even if it had been in vain. The Yankees lost, 5-0, falling short of a three-game sweep of the Orioles and giving back a game to the team that now leads them by three and a half games for the final wild-card spot. The defeat added a sour coda to what had otherwise been a good weekend for the Yankees. They had come home for three games between six-game trips, and on Friday and Saturday they thrashed Baltimore’s faltering pitching, thanks in part to the rookie catcher Gary Sanchez, who again homered in consecutive games. But on Sunday, the Yankees were the ones with little offensive zest, and their four-game winning streak ended. “It’s not what you want, but we’re playing good baseball and we’re winning series, and that’s what we need to continue to do,” Manager Joe Girardi said. “If someone says you’re going to win a series against Baltimore, I think you’re going to be pretty positive. But when we win the first two, I think sometimes guys can get down a little bit. I’m not down. I thought we played very well this weekend, and we need to continue to do. I’ll take our chances.” Image Yankees starter C.C. Sabathia gave up three runs and struck out eight in six and two-thirds innings. Credit Kathy Willens/Associated Press Orioles starter Kevin Gausman thwarted the Yankees for seven shutout innings, striking out nine, while giving up seven hits and dancing around trouble. He kept Sanchez relatively quiet, too. Sanchez, the designated hitter Sunday, went without a home run for the first time in four games but had a single and a double in four at-bats. It was just the fourth time in 11 games that he did not homer. Still, the Yankees kept it close because of Sabathia. Age and wear had gotten the better of Sabathia (8-11) over the summer, turning a solid start to the year into another season of middling results and an inflated earned run average. But he held the Mariners to a run in seven innings in his previous start, and on Sunday he looked strong again, keeping a lineup of sluggers quiet except for a solo home run by Steve Pearce. He struck out eight batters and allowed six hits. But the seventh inning became a fault line, for Sabathia and for the Yankees. Sabathia loaded the bases with his 99th and final pitch, walking Hyun Soo Kim, the ninth hitter in the order. Girardi came to lift him, but the Yankees were already slowly capsizing. When Pearce humbled them once more, lining a two-run single to center field off reliever Adam Warren, the game became an opportunity wasted. “It’s just the way it’s been going,” Sabathia said. Despite the defeat, the Yankees have been able to work their way near enough to the Orioles to have the postseason in sight. They have heightened the worth of the final five weeks of the season. The young players the Yankees called up over this last month now have a chance to perform in a crucible, rather than play tedious September games for a team out of contention. This, Girardi said, has turned into an unexpected advantage. “I think it’s very valuable because they’re games that, in a sense, have pressure,” he said. “It’s not a game where you can say, ‘Oh, it’s another game.’ It’s not that way. I think the meaning of the game, you get a better evaluation of players and that’s important.” Those players showed their growing pains Sunday. Aaron Judge went hitless, continuing his cold streak. Since homering in the first two games of his career, he has spent the next 11 spiraling down. He has struck out 19 times in 43 at-bats and did so twice against Gausman. Even Sanchez made a mistake. In the fourth inning, with Orioles third baseman Manny Machado shifted from his usual alignment, Sanchez thought he could advance to third on a single by Mark Teixeira. But Pearce’s throw from right field still caught him, and the Yankees did not score despite having three hits in the inning. “It’s an aggressive play,” Girardi said. “We’ve been playing aggressive. That time it caught up to us.”


Orb-Weaving Spiders Diversified Long Before the Insects They Catch

Abstract: There are thousands of species of orb-weaving spiders, found on every continent but Antarctica. Now, researchers report that these spiders that build spiral-shaped webs first emerged about 230 million years ago, during the Middle Triassic period. They then rapidly diversified, and a wide variety of orb weavers emerged by the middle of the Jurassic period, about 170 million years ago, according to a study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B . In the past, scientists thought that orb weavers diversified when flying insects did — that the spiders needed to specialize to catch different insects. But the new research indicates that “there is no real direct relationship,” said the study’s first author, Dimitar Dimitrov, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen. In fact, he said, flying insects diversified 100 million years after the orb weavers. He believes that orb weavers diversified for another reason: to create specialized habitats. Some create webs ideal for tree branches, while others specialize in webs better suited for tree trunks and tall grasses. “When you see them today they might be in the same place, at the same time, but occupying different niches,” he said. Dr. Dimitrov and his colleagues used DNA samples of existing spiders, along with fossil remains, to create an evolutionary tree and a timeline. “We were able to find that the orbs have a single origin,” he said. SINDYA N. BHANOO

Spiders
Insects
Research
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Science and Technology


Aided by Growing Sales, Chrysler Profit Increases 80%

Abstract: DETROIT — Chrysler , the third-largest Detroit automaker, said on Monday that its third-quarter profit rose 80 percent on the strength of new models, less debt and steadily growing sales in both American and international markets. The company said it earned $381 million in net income, up from $212 million in the same period a year ago. Revenue for the quarter was $15.5 billion, an 18 percent increase from $13.1 billion in the same period last year. The results could be seen as the latest evidence that Chrysler’s improbable comeback from its government bailout and bankruptcy was not only sustainable, but accelerating. “We’ve changed the conversation at Chrysler Group,” said Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive of both Chrysler and its Italian parent, Fiat. “We continue to work feverishly and are pleased to see that our all-consuming aspiration for excellence is translating into results.” Chrysler’s solid results are propping up the faltering European operations of Fiat, which was scheduled to release its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday. Mr. Marchionne may announce new moves to cut losses at Fiat, which is struggling to cope with the steepest decline in sales in Europe in nearly 20 years. But there’s no need anymore to fix Chrysler, which has repaid its debt to the American taxpayers and totally revamped its product lineup since emerging from bankruptcy in 2009. The company said its worldwide sales increased 12 percent in the third quarter to 556,000 vehicles. For the first nine months of the year, it sold 1.7 million vehicles, up from 1.4 million in the same period in 2011. Before its financial collapse, Chrysler relied mostly on its pickups, S.U.V.’s and minivans to contribute the bulk of its profit. The company was particularly vulnerable to swings in gas prices, which drove consumers to buy smaller, more fuel-efficient passenger cars from other manufacturers. With the assistance of Fiat technology and parts, Chrysler has broadened its lineup to include a compact car, the Dodge Dart, which gets 40 miles per gallon of gas. The company is also putting more efficient engines into its bread-and-butter models like the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Chrysler 300. Mr. Marchionne on Monday reaffirmed Chrysler’s full-year targets of $1.5 billion in net income and global shipments of 2.3 million vehicles. Chrysler’s balance sheet also continues to improve as its business grows. The company said it had $11.9 billion in cash at the end of the third quarter, compared with $9.5 billion in the same period a year ago. The company’s net industrial debt was $693 million at the end of the quarter, considerably lower than the $2.86 billion in debt on its books a year ago. Chrysler’s two American rivals, General Motors and Ford, are expected to report lower earnings for the third quarter than a year ago, primarily because of growing losses in the troubled European car market. Ford was scheduled to report on Tuesday and G.M. on Wednesday.

Automobiles
Company Reports
Chrysler Group LLC


Prehistoric Massacre Hints at War Among Hunter-Gatherers

Abstract: The scene was a lagoon on the shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The time about 10,000 years ago. One group of hunter-gatherers attacked and slaughtered another, leaving the dead with crushed skulls, embedded arrow or spear points, and other devastating wounds. The dead, said the scientists who reported the discovery Wednesday in the journal Nature, seem to have been scattered in no apparent order, and eventually covered and preserved by sediment from the lake. Of 12 relatively complete skeletons, 10 showed unmistakable signs of violent death, the scientists said. Partial remains of at least 15 other people were found at the site and are thought to have died in the same attack. The bones at the lake, in northern Kenya, tell a tale of ferocity. One man was hit twice in the head by arrows or small spears and in the knee by a club. A woman, pregnant with a 6- to 9-month-old fetus, was killed by a blow to the head, the fetal skeleton preserved in her abdomen. The position of her hands and feet suggest that she may have been tied up before she was killed. Violence has always been part of human behavior, but the origins of war are hotly debated. Some experts see it as deeply rooted in evolution, pointing to violent confrontations among groups of chimpanzees as clues to an ancestral predilection. Others emphasize the influence of complex and hierarchical human societies, and agricultural surpluses to be raided. Image The skeleton of a woman found at the site also had a fetal skeleton in her abdomen. Researchers say the position of her hands and feet suggest she had been tied up. Credit Marta Mirazon Lahr No one is suggesting that one discovery, at a place called Nataruk, will settle this argument, but it may be the first instance of a massacre in a foraging society. A discovery in Sudan from an earlier date found burials of victims of intergroup violence, but that society may have been more settled. Marta Mirazon Lahr and Robert A. Foley, of Cambridge University and the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, and a team of other scientists, concluded in Nature that the find represented warfare among prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Luke A. Glowacki, a postdoctoral researcher in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University not involved with the discovery, agreed. “There’s no other find like it,” he said. With Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, Dr. Glowacki has traced the evolutionary roots of human warfare in chimpanzee behavior. And, he said, this find “shows warfare occurred before the invention of agriculture.” Douglas P. Fry, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who was not involved in the research, agreed that the evidence looked like a massacre of one group by another but said that “based on skeletal evidence from one site in an area, it may be jumping the gun to call this ‘war.’” Image The researchers said the find represented evidence of warfare among prehistoric hunter-gatherers. War is generally viewed as arising in settled communities. Credit Marta Mirazon Lahr Dr. Fry said in an email that nomadic foragers were unlikely to practice war, which tends to arise in more complex societies, and that these foragers may have already been in transition to a more settled life. He said he would like to see “fortifications, villages built in defensible locations, specialized weapons of war, artistic or symbol depictions of war,” and more than one site before calling it warfare. The first person to spot the bones, some of which were lying on the surface, Dr. Lahr said, was Pedro Ebeya, one of the fossil hunters who work with the Turkana Basin Institute. Researchers have been exploring a large area there since 2009 that is rich in fossils, remnants of tools like harpoons, and some evidence of pottery. Mr. Ebeya was walking an area about 19 miles from the current shore of Lake Turkana that would have been the shore 10,000 years ago when the lake was bigger. When he returned from his walk, Dr. Lahr said, he told her, “I’ve got bones for you.” At the site, she saw broken human bones on the surface mixed with gravel. “Then I saw the back of a skull,” which turned out to have major injuries. Further digging uncovered one violent death after another. The injuries showed no signs of having healed, which means that they had occurred at the time of death. And the position of the bodies showed no effort at burial. The injuries, she said, showed that two different size clubs were used, as well as arrows. Deep cuts to foreheads, jaws and hands, she said, meant that a third type of weapon, with embedded stone blades, must have been used. The stone remnants were obsidian, which is rare in that area, and, she said, they “suggest the attackers were coming from somewhere else.” The authors of the Nature report say the attack could have been a raid for resources, or it could be an example of organized violence that was common among ancient hunter-gatherers, but rarely preserved. This was a highly fertile time in the Lake Turkana area. Pottery found in the region suggests that some groups of foragers at that time may have been storing food — resources worth stealing. Or the attackers may have been after captives. Bones from one young teenager were found at the site, and remains of adults and children under 6, but no remains of older children, who might have been taken by the attackers. Dr. Lahr said the population of the area may have been expanding at the time, causing conflict as new bands formed and sought territory. There are conditions that lead to warfare, she said, “and those conditions I think applied in moments of the past to hunter-gatherers.”

Lake Turkana
Kenya
Evolution
Marta Mirazon Lahr
Robert A. Foley
Cambridge University
Turkana Basin Institute
Archaeology,Anthropology
Nature Journal
War and Revolution


Oregon: Governor Relents on Scrutiny of Fiancée

Abstract: Gov. John Kitzhaber on Monday asked the state’s attorney general to look into influence-peddling allegations surrounding his fiancée’s work for advocacy organizations. In a defiant letter to Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, Mr. Kitzhaber, a Democrat, maintained that he and his partner, Cylvia Hayes, had done nothing wrong, but he said an outside review was necessary because of “the rush to judgment currently underway in the Oregon media.” The request is a change of course for the governor, who had insisted a state ethics commission could do an adequate investigation. But it came after Ms. Rosenblum, also a Democrat, publicly said she would look into the allegations, and he stopped short of appointing a special prosecutor as his critics have requested since October. Newspaper reports since October have shown that Ms. Hayes did paid consulting work for advocacy groups seeking to influence state government. At the same time, she took an active role in Mr. Kitzhaber’s administration.

Oregon
John Kitzhaber
Ellen Rosenblum
Cylvia Hayes
Ethics Misconduct Malfeasance


Falling Behind in N.H.L. Playoffs Is No Reason to Lose Hope

Abstract: The Stanley Cup playoffs’ wild first round was a reminder of just how improbable hockey can be. San Jose trounced Los Angeles in their first three games, and then the Kings trounced the Sharks in the last four. The Pittsburgh Penguins advanced, even though Sidney Crosby did not score a goal. The Rangers extended their 12-game losing streak while holding a series lead, but then won their fourth straight Game 7. Chicago and St. Louis each had two overtime victories, as did Minnesota and Colorado. Anaheim won its series by scoring twice in the last 2 minutes 10 seconds to tie Dallas, and then scoring again in overtime. In total, there were 29 comeback victories in 48 games, with 10 of those rallies coming from multiple-goal deficits. Seven games were tied in the final 2:30 of regulation. Yet there were no big upsets. Coaches and players always say that no one knows what is going to happen until the games are played, but it is no cliché. Avalanche Coach Patrick Roy said it well during the opening round. “How many teams have been 16-0 in the history of the N.H.L.?” he said, referring to a perfect postseason record. “Is there one? No.” He added, “It’s tough in the playoffs.” Purging New York When the Vancouver Canucks’ new president, Trevor Linden, fired John Tortorella on Thursday, it was not the first mess from New York that Linden had to deal with. In 1997, Linden was the Vancouver team captain, and so respected as a player and a leader that he was known as Captain Canuck. But that year, the team signed Mark Messier, who had left the Rangers in a contract tiff, and Linden felt obligated to hand his longtime captaincy to Messier. A short while later, Messier, the undisputed team leader, was instrumental in the hiring of Mike Keenan as the coach. It was three and a half years after Keenan and Messier had won the Stanley Cup with the Rangers. In those days, Keenan regularly berated players as part of his survival-of-the-fittest approach, and he reserved his most withering tirades for Linden. Although some players rallied to Linden’s defense, Messier issued statements about the need to embrace change, tacitly siding with his handpicked coach. At midseason, a dispirited Linden was traded to the Islanders. The Canucks imploded soon after. Keenan was dismissed, and Messier left after three miserable seasons. In 2001-2, the Canucks made a trade with Washington to get Linden back. His return was greeted as a return to normalcy after a period in which the Canucks had deviated from their organizational traditions. That was the same reasoning that led to Linden’s hiring as the team president last month, in the wake of the Canucks’ most chaotic season since the Keenan days. But this time, Linden drove the screaming coach from New York out of Vancouver. Asked what he is looking for in a new Canucks coach, Linden said, “I think he is a teacher and able to communicate with his players on many levels, and understands players need to be communicated with differently for the different type of personalities.” Keenan Keeps a Promise There is evidence that Mike Keenan is a changed man. Last week he coached Metallurg Magnitogorsk to the Gagarin Cup championship, the Kontinental Hockey League’s equivalent to the Stanley Cup, and became the first coach to win the top titles of North America and Russia. As part of the celebration in the dressing room, Keenan kept a promise to sing in Russian, gamely belting out a karaoke version of a ballad by Grigory Leps, who is sort of the Leonard Cohen of Russia. Keenan said recently that he had mellowed with age, although defenseman Evgeny Timkin called him strict and driven . Keenan is believed to have an out clause that could release him from the second year of his two-year contract if he sought a coaching job in the N.H.L. A few positions are available, including one in Vancouver, but he should probably not expect any calls from Trevor Linden. What They Said Two memorable quotations from the first round, starting with Tampa Bay Coach Jon Cooper’s comment about a former Ranger after the Lightning were eliminated. “As long as I’m coaching this team, I want Ryan Callahan on the bench,” Cooper said, putting the pressure on General Manager Steve Yzerman to sign Callahan, a pending free agent. “I don’t know how much stronger I can be about that.” And in the West, Minnesota defenseman Ryan Suter started to spout a platitude about playing in a Game 7, then went in another direction. “You dream about playing a Game 7,” he said. “I don’t know why. You’d think you’d want to get it over with earlier.”

Playoffs
Trevor Linden
Mike Keenan
Jon Cooper
Ryan Suter
Ice hockey


Shaking Injury, Lindsey Vonn Wins Third Race in Three Days

Abstract: Lindsey Vonn offered more proof on Sunday that her bruised left arm was no longer an issue, at least in the speed events. She captured her third straight World Cup race in Haus im Ennstal, Austria, winning a super-G to become the first American to earn a victory on three straight days and the first woman to do so since 1997. Vonn covered the Krummholz course in 1 minute 26.69 seconds to beat Anja Paerson of Sweden by 0.53 of a second. The win followed downhill victories on Friday and Saturday. “There was definitely a little bit more pressure today because everybody was wanting me to do the three in a row,” Vonn said. Vonn, who extended her lead in the overall standings, bruised a bone in her left arm in a slalom in Lienz, Austria, on Dec. 28. The injury impaired her ability to plant her pole and caused her to struggle in slalom races. FRENCHMAN WINS SLALOM An inspired second run propelled Julien Lizeroux of France from 12th place after the first leg to victory in a World Cup slalom in Adelboden, Switzerland. Lizeroux had a combined time of 1:51.88 after slicing through the gates 0.92 of a second faster than anyone else the second time down the course. Marcel Hirscher of Austria was second, 0.34 back. Bode Miller finished 14th, the highest of any American, after being the ninth fastest in the morning. Miller, a two-time overall World Cup winner, is still searching for race fitness after sustaining an ankle injury and missing off-season work while he considered retiring. “I lose weight slowly,” he joked after his first run. A FIRST FOR AMERICANS Bill Demong and Todd Lodwick finished 1-2 in a Nordic combined World Cup event in Val di Fiemme, Italy, becoming the first Americans in the sport to be on a World Cup podium together. Demong, who was third in the jumping portion, won the 9-kilometer (5.6-mile) hill climb in 33:49.9 for his first victory since March. Lodwick finished 15.3 seconds behind. BURKE LEADS BIATHLON TEAM Tim Burke, the first American to lead the World Cup biathlon standings, was nominated to the United States Olympic men’s biathlon team. Also nominated were the former Olympians Jay Hakkinen, Jeremy Teela and Lowell Bailey, along with Wynn Roberts. Burke regained the World Cup lead Sunday with a second-place finish in a mass start race in Oberhof, Germany. The women’s team consists of Haley Johnson, Sara Studebaker, Lanny Barnes and Laura Spector. SNOWBOARDCROSS SWEEP Nate Holland and Lindsey Jacobellis won World Cup snowboardcross races in Bad Gastein, Austria, improving their chances of making the United States Olympic team. Jacobellis, who won the silver medal at the 2006 Olympics, beat Helene Olafsen of Norway. Holland defeated Pierre Vaultier of France in the final. U.S. 2-3 IN BOBSLED Steven Holcomb and John Napier of the United States took second and third place behind the three-time Olympic champion Andre Lange of Germany in a four-man World Cup bobsled race in Königssee, Germany. Lange finished in 1:37.07, three-hundredths of a second ahead of Holcolmb, the World Cup leader. PUCKETT FOURTH IN SKI CROSS Xavier Kuhn of France and Ashleigh McIvor of Canada won World Cup ski cross races in Les Contamines, France. The American Casey Puckett, 37, finished fourth, improving his chances of competing in his fifth Olympics. HüFNER’S STREAK STOPPED Natalie Geisenberger halted her fellow German Tatjana Hüfner’s three-race luge World Cup winning streak in Winterberg, Germany, winning in 1:53.179, one-hundredth of a second ahead of Hüfner. Erin Hamlin of the United States was third. AUSTRIAN JUMPER WINS AGAIN Gregor Schlierenzauer of Austria ski-jumped 203.5 and 205 meters in a World Cup meet in Bad Mitterndorf, Austria, for his 29th career title.

Biathlon
Skiing
World Cup (Skiing)
Vonn Lindsey
Paerson Anja
Alpine Skiing
Nordic Combined (Winter Sport Event)
Bobsledding


An Unlikely Megachurch Lesson

Abstract: One Sunday morning in 1995, Ron Wolfson and Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman braked to a halt in an oddly enlightening traffic jam. The line of cars was creeping toward Saddleback Church in Southern California, whose services were drawing thousands of worshipers. As two Jews, Mr. Wolfson and Rabbi Hoffman had crossed the sectarian divide to try to figure out how and why. As they inched down the road, they spotted a sign marked “For First-Time Visitors.” It directed them to pull into a separate lane and put on emergency blinkers. Bypassing the backup, they soon reached a lot with spaces reserved for newcomers. When Mr. Wolfson and Rabbi Hoffman emerged from their car, an official Saddleback greeter led them into the church. Those first moments on the perimeter of the church set into motion a dozen years of increasing interaction between a Jewish organization devoted to reinvigorating synagogues and one of the most successful evangelical megachurches in the nation, the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. This has not been a studiously balanced bit of ecumenicism. Synagogue 3000, the group led by Mr. Wolfson, an education professor, and Rabbi Hoffman, a scholar of liturgy, went to the church to figure out what evangelical Christians were doing right that Jews were doing wrong or not at all. “To put it bluntly,” Mr. Wolfson said, “if there are thousands of people waiting to get in, I want to know what’s going on. I want to know what they’re doing that’s tapping those souls.” The latest outgrowth of this unlikely learning curve is Hallelu Atlanta, a gathering tomorrow of 4,000 members of 18 congregations. With its amalgam of praise songs and spiritual testimonies, Mr. Wolfson describes the event as “a Jewish tent meeting.” A similar event outside Los Angeles in 2002 drew 5,000 participants. Since 1995, Synagogue 3000 and its precursor, Synagogue 2000, have taken member congregations and seminary classes to Saddleback and had Mr. Warren conduct a workshop in congregation-building for nearly 20 Jewish leaders. Mr. Warren has delivered a d’var Torah — a sermon on the weekly Torah portion — at Sinai Temple, a prominent Conservative congregation in Los Angeles. His books “The Purpose-Driven Church” and “The Purpose-Driven Life” inspired similar volumes by Mr. Wolfson (“God’s To-Do List”) and Rabbi Hoffman (“Rethinking Synagogues”). All this cross-pollination comes as a historical and theological anomaly. In the postwar decades, American Jews have built sturdy ecumenical bonds with Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and African-American Christians on social issues like civil rights and economic injustice. In the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Jewish congregations sought out Muslim leaders or congregations for dialogues. Evangelical Christians, however, tended to excite the greatest wariness among Jews, with the exception of certain Orthodox groups that make common cause on issues like school vouchers. Not even the rise of Christian Zionism has overcome Jewish anxiety about a brand of Christianity whose defining word, “evangelism,” connotes a determined effort at conversion. “Some Jews, especially in areas where they are a minority, fear thatChristianity is contagious,” said Mark I. Pinsky, an author based inFlorida whose books include “A Jew Among the Evangelicals.” “On anotherlevel, there is a palpable resistance  call it arrogance  to the notionthat these relative ‘newcomers’ to religion have anything to teach us. Andfinally, there is the class issue, that evangelicals aren’t as deep as weare, that they are in their sanctuaries for entertainment, rather than forspirituality.” What got Mr. Wolfson and Rabbi Hoffman over those impediments was what is known in Jewish parlance as a “shidduch,” Hebrew for “a match.” From the early years of Saddleback, which Mr. Warren founded in 1980, the pastor had relied on an observant Jew, Mel Malkoff, for expertise in land acquisition and property development. Mr. Malkoff in turn told his rabbi, Elie Spitz, of Saddleback’s propulsive growth since Mr. Warren started the congregation with seven people in his home. (It now has 82,000 members and routinely has 25,000 people attend its multiple Sunday services.) Mr. Spitz then told Mr. Wolfson, and before long he was stuck in traffic. For all its utility and good will, the relationship between Mr. Wolfson’s group and Mr. Warren’s church has required some delicate diplomacy. Saddleback may be politically centrist on the evangelical Christian spectrum — Mr. Warren has taken on AIDS and global warming as key causes — but on issues including abortion and gay rights it stands in polar opposition to the socially liberal mainstream of American Jewry. When Mr. Warren conducted his workshop for Synagogue 3000’s leaders in 2005, several participants challenged his view of homosexuality as abnormal and unbiblical. “Every faith has its own parameters,” Mr. Warren responded, calmly and firmly, in an exchange preserved on a DVD of the session. “You can’t believe it all.” On the topic of conversion, Mr. Warren told his Jewish listeners, he “doesn’t believe in coercion” though he “does believe in persuasion.” That seemed to placate, if not necessarily please, the group. The Jewish leaders were visibly captivated, however, when Mr. Warren recounted building the church — going door-to-door seeking people who belonged to no congregation, asking them why they didn’t belong, devising an initial program to directly meet their desires. Those desires resonated immediately for Jewish leaders frustrated in the failure of synagogues to engage the unaffiliated, the disaffected, the spiritual seekers. Mr. Warren’s informants had told him they yearned for a friendly welcome, quality child care, a sermon that had a pragmatic message for their weekday lives and an overarching sense that the church cared more about each member as a person than as a revenue stream. Mr. Warren told the workshop listeners what he had come to realize: “Acongregation isn’t a building. God dwells in people.” He explained thatSaddleback did not construct its own building until it had 10,000congregants. Even in the church’s current vastness, a decentralized networkof ministers and laity seek to connect every newcomer to at least sixlongtime members. “The biggest challenge we have in transforming synagogue life,” Mr. Wolfson said recently, recalling the workshop, “is transforming the basic relationship of most Jews to most synagogues.” He added: “It’s a fee-for-service model. I’m going to write you a check, and you’re going to give me what I need — a rabbi on call, High Holy Days seats, a Hebrew school for my kids. It’s not deep.” Mr. Hoffman said the most obvious exception in the Jewish world was the Chabad movement of the Lubavitcher Hasidim. Its success at what is called “inreach,” meaning proselytizing unobservant Jews, has become a source of fascination, envy and enmity. In a strange way, it may have been less controversial for Synagogue 3000 to emulate Christians who are total outsiders rather than a Hasidic sect that competes for the same pool of Jewish souls. “Jews need to be more quote-unquote evangelical,” Mr. Wolfson said. “We need to do a better job of presenting Judaism to our own people. The story doesn’t get across that Judaism is a way to find meaning and purpose in your life. And that’s another lesson I’ve learned from the evangelical model.”


Lawsuit on F.B.I. Informant Seeks a Mobster’s Link to Kennedy’s Assassination

Abstract: A New Jersey paralegal with a longstanding interest in government corruption filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department and the F.B.I. on Monday, seeking the release of the full case file on a murderous Brooklyn Mafia informant — papers she believes may shed light on the possible involvement of a dead New Orleans crime boss in the killing of President John F. Kennedy . The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Washington by the paralegal, Angela Clemente, asks the Federal Bureau of Investigation to make public any documents it may still hold related to the mobster, Gregory Scarpa Sr., who for nearly 30 years led a stunning double life as a hit man for the Colombo crime family and, in the words of the F.B.I, a “top echelon” informant for the bureau. In her suit, Ms. Clemente asked the bureau to release all papers connected to Mr. Scarpa (who died of AIDS in 1994 after receiving a blood transfusion), especially those related to Carlos Marcello, a New Orleans don suspected by some of having played a role in the Kennedy assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. Ms. Clemente filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Mr. Scarpa’s file in April, and the F.B.I. acknowledged her request in a letter on June 9, saying that bureau officials would search their records for relevant papers. Ms. Clemente’s lawyer, James Lesar, said that the F.B.I. had not yet told her if it would release the file or not, but that under federal law, a lawsuit can be filed compelling the release of records 20 working days after such a letter is received. John Miller, a spokesman for the F.B.I., did not return phone calls on Monday seeking comment on Ms. Clemente’s suit. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said officials would review the suit and respond if needed in court. In pursuing the Scarpa file and its potential to flesh out Mr. Marcello’s possible role in the Kennedy killing, Ms. Clemente is following a trail blazed in part by G. Robert Blakey, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame who also served as the chief counsel and staff director to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which from 1977 to 1979 investigated the killings of President Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While the Warren Commission said there was no link between Mr. Marcello and the president’s death, Mr. Blakey’s report to the House was considerably more circumspect, saying the F.B.I.’s “handling of the allegations and information about Marcello was characterized by a less than vigorous effort to investigate its reliability.” Ms. Clemente is in possession of several heavily redacted papers from the Scarpa file, which suggest, however vaguely, she said, that Mr. Scarpa, who spied on numerous gangsters for the F.B.I., may also have spied on Mr. Marcello. Professor Blakey, reached by phone at his office at Notre Dame on Monday, said he had seen the papers, adding that no matter what the unredacted versions might eventually reveal, he was convinced that he should have seen them 30 years ago, while conducting his Congressional investigation. “The issue here is not what’s in them,” Professor Blakey said, “so much as that they seem to have held them back from me. I thought I had the bureau file on Marcello — now it turns out I didn’t, did I? So I’m not a small, I’m a major, supporter of what Angela is trying to do.” Ms. Clemente, 43, often refers to herself as a “forensic intelligence analyst.” She has been researching Mr. Scarpa for nearly a decade as part of a broader project on the improper use of government informants. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has said her work on Mr. Scarpa was instrumental in helping the office file quadruple murder charges against Mr. Scarpa’s former F.B.I. handler, Roy Lindley DeVecchio. The charges against Mr. DeVecchio were dropped midtrial in October when Tom Robbins, a reporter for The Village Voice, suddenly showed prosecutors taped interviews he made years ago with the main prosecution witness, Mr. Scarpa’s mistress, suggesting that she had changed her account and damaged her credibility. Faced with the sudden demise of years of investigative work, Ms. Clemente went back, she said, to the redacted papers she already had. She said she was intrigued, after additional study, to discover references to Mr. Scarpa’s apparent involvement in F.B.I. projects in New Orleans in the late 1950s and early 1960s — well before his publicly acknowledged role in helping the Kennedy administration learn the whereabouts of three slain civil rights workers by traveling to Mississippi to threaten a member of the Ku Klux Klan. She said the F.B.I. had fought her “tooth and nail” in her efforts to obtain the full Scarpa file for Mr. DeVecchio’s trial. The F.B.I. did not return phone calls seeking comment on that allegation as well. “And that,” she said, “is what really piqued my curiosity.”

Assassinations and Attempted Assassinations


Yankee Stadium Soundtrack

Abstract: Ronan Tynan, a 48-year-old Irish tenor, has become stitched into the fabric of New York by his singing “God Bless America” at Yankee Stadium for most of its recent major events. There were much more than 30 seconds to chat with him because of the unexpected pleasure of sitting next to him on a flight to Florida. ALAN SCHWARZ WHY DO YOU NEVER SING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM, JUST “GOD BLESS AMERICA”? I’m not an American citizen. I’ve been asked thousands of times, but I believe that honor should always be reserved for an American citizen. WHEN YOU SING “GOD BLESS AMERICA,” WHY DO YOU START WITH THE FIRST STANZA RATHER THAN THE MORE FAMILIAR SECOND ONE? Because that’s the way Irving Berlin wrote it. It shows how passionate he was about his country. I wouldn’t leave the first four lines out of “Danny Boy,” either. WHEN DID YOU START SIGNING AT YANKEE STADIUM — ON THE FIELD, THAT IS? I did a cabaret at the Regency Hotel in 1999, and I was asked to sing on April 8, 2000. We were playing Boston and we won, 8-2. George Steinbrenner said after that, “I’d love to have you sing anytime you want.” FEW PEOPLE KNOW YOU WERE AN ACCOMPLISHED ATHLETE AFTER YOUR LEGS WERE AMPUTATED BELOW THE KNEE AFTER COMPLICATIONS FROM A MOTORBIKE ACCIDENT. YOU WON FOUR GOLD MEDALS IN THE DISCUS, THE SHOT-PUT AND THE LONG JUMP IN THE 1984 AND 1988 PARALYMPICS . Sport was my way of allowing me to dream. I wanted to be the best that I could be — I knew I had the will inside me to be the best, and when I captured that will, I became the world champion. I learned the thrill of being a winner and also to be gracious and humble in defeat. YOU ARE AN OPERA SINGER; WHAT IS YOUR GUILTY MUSICAL PLEASURE? I like Metallica. They have tremendous power and conviction to their music and performing. You have to admire that, no matter the genre. WILL YOU OPEN THE NEW YANKEE STADIUM NEXT YEAR? I hope so. That’s one of my dreams. I hope I’m given the privilege, and I hope I’m given the privilege of closing the old one. WHICH YANKEE IS THE RONAN TYNAN OF BASEBALL? If Jason Giambi was a singer, he’d be comparable. He’s very extroverted. He plays with massive determination. But he always says hi to people.

Tynan Ronan
New York Yankees
Yankee Stadium (NYC)


Rival Manufacturers Chasing the iPhone

Abstract: SEOUL, South Korea, June 29 — While Americans have been blitzed with news about the iPhone ’s debut, many in South Korea’s and Japan ’s technology industries initially greeted Apple ’s flashy new handset with yawns. Cellphones in these technology-saturated countries can already play digital songs and video games and receive satellite television. But now that analysts and industry executives are getting their first good look at the iPhone, many here are concerned that Asian manufacturers may have underestimated the Apple threat. Analysts and executives in South Korea say that the iPhone, with its full-scale Internet browser and distinctive touch screen with colorful icons, is more than just another souped-up cellphone. They fear this Silicon Valley challenger could leap past Asian makers into the age of digital convergence by combining personal computing and mobile technologies as no device has before. “Apple’s impact will be bigger than Asian handset makers think,” said Kim Yoon-ho, an analyst in Seoul at Prudential Securities. “The iPhone is different from previous mobile phones. It is the prototype of the future of mobile phones.” The fear now is that Apple may repeat in wireless communications what it accomplished in portable music with the iPod : changing the industry. And just as when the iPod came out six years ago, big Asian manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and Sony could find themselves wondering what hit them, say analysts and industry executives. Here in South Korea, manufacturers are taking the threat seriously, and are rushing out their own iPhone-like handsets. By the end of the year, Samsung, South Korea’s biggest cellphone maker, will unveil its Ultra Smart F700, with a large touch-controlled screen displaying rows of icons, much as the iPhone does. LG Electronics, another large Korean handset maker, has begun selling a smartphone in Italy that can view full-size Web pages. Pantech, which sells most of its phones in the United States under the carriers’ brand names, will also unveil its first touch-screen smartphone this fall. Sony Ericsson plans this fall to introduce its latest Walkman phone, the W960i, which will feature a touch screen and memory space for 8,000 songs. Nokia of Finland, whose N95 is probably the closest competitor to the iPhone in the United States, said it also plans a touch-screen cellphone called the Aeon, though the company has not said when it will go on sale. Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Ill., plans to sell this summer the Razr 2, the successor to its once-popular Razr upgraded with a Linux operating system and full-scale Web browser. “If the iPhone changes the rules in the cellphone market, then we have to adapt as soon as possible,” said Yi Seung-soo, a cellphone designer at Pantech. “We can take advantage of being a follower,” he said. It’s the same method Korean manufacturers have used before — quickly developing similar products that are cheaper but which contain a few more features than Apple, he said. That strategy has not diminished iPod’s dominance in the music-player market in the United States, but makers in Asia have fared a bit better in their home markets. For the time being, their concern is over the handset market in the United States, where the iPhone went on sale Friday. Apple will not sell its new phone in Asia until next year, and there are also doubts whether iPhone will catch on in markets like South Korea, where consumers often pay for small, sleek phones packed with functions. Bulkier smartphones and BlackBerrys have so far failed to sell well here. But even if iPhone’s success is limited to America, it could be a setback for South Korean electronics companies, which export heavily to the United States. In particular, say analysts, Apple could end up seizing much of the top end of the American cellphone market, where a handset that cost $100 or more offers the highest profit margins. That segment of the American market represents about a quarter of America’s 250 million cellphone subscribers, according to Strategy Analytics, a market research firm based in Newton, Mass. In contrast with cellphone users in Asia, more than half of American subscribers paid $50 or less for their cellphones. Apple, whose biggest challenge may be persuading Americans to spend $500 or $600 for an iPhone, has said it wants to have the devices in the hands of 1 percent of the world’s cellphone users, or about 10 million people, by the end of next year. For its part, Samsung says it is ready for Apple’s challenge, offering a far broader range of high-end products. Some of Samsung’s recent products in this segment in the United States include the BlackJack, a $200 smartphone that uses Windows Mobile, and the UpStage, a phone on one side and an MP3 player on the other. “Samsung is not a one-hit wonder,” said Pete Skarzynski, senior vice president of strategy at Samsung Telecommunications America. “We offer many different products, for all different market segments, and not just one blanket product.” For a glimpse of what Samsung may offer Americans in the future, step into one of its Anycall cellphone stores in South Korea. One new device, the SCH-B450, fits in the palm of a hand, yet it packs a 2-megapixel camera, MP3 player, satellite TV receiver and an English-Korean dictionary with 330,000 words. Its biggest selling point: Plug it into a TV to turn it into a mini game console, allowing the user to play video games with the phone itself serving as controller. “Oh, it’s a phone, too,” said Lee Eun-jung, manager at an Anycall cellphone store in the Shinchon neighborhood of Seoul. She said the phone, which costs the equivalent of $700, is popular among college-age Koreans. Ms. Lee herself owns a different model with an additional function that appeals to mothers in education-obsessed Korea. It shows animated fairy tales in four languages, helping children learn not only their native Korean, but also English, Japanese and Chinese. “I use this phone to baby-sit my children,” she said. Samsung employees insist, and analysts agree, that Samsung handsets offer better durability and higher performance than the iPhone. But if the iPhone succeeds, the lesson will be that engineering alone is not enough to win consumers, say analysts and others in the industry. Analysts and executives say that Apple is leading the cellphone industry into a new stage, where success depends on features that are outside the phone, such as the ease of downloading music and video content and an easy-to-use operating system. “Tech-wise, the iPhone is not so advanced,” said S. Jay Yim, vice president of overseas marketing at Pantech. “But Apple makes up for that in content and software. As handsets look more like PCs, software gets more important.” Indeed, Dr. Yim said that riding on Apple’s coattails may turn out to be the best business strategy for Pantech, which recently underwent a bank-led revamping. He said the hype around iPhone may open more Americans to the idea of paying more for cellphones, including the function-packed phones that Korean makers excel at building. “In the past, U.S. consumers were unwilling to pay $300 for a phone,” Dr. Yim said. “If Apple can change their buying habits, then that would be good for us, too.”

iPhone
South Korea
Japan
Wireless Communications
Cellular Telephones
Computers and the Internet
Apple Inc
Silicon Valley (Calif)


Timing a Rise in Sea Level

Abstract: Thirty-five years ago, a scientist named John H. Mercer issued a warning. By then it was already becoming clear that human emissions would warm the earth, and Dr. Mercer had begun thinking deeply about the consequences. His paper, in the journal Nature, was titled “West Antarctic Ice Sheet and CO 2 Greenhouse Effect: A Threat of Disaster.” In it, Dr. Mercer pointed out the unusual topography of the ice sheet sitting over the western part of Antarctica. Much of it is below sea level, in a sort of bowl, and he said that a climatic warming could cause the whole thing to degrade rapidly on a geologic time scale, leading to a possible rise in sea level of 16 feet. While it is clear by now that we are in the early stages of what is likely to be a substantial rise in sea level, we still do not know if Dr. Mercer was right about a dangerous instability that could cause that rise to happen rapidly, in geologic time. We may be getting closer to figuring that out. An intriguing new paper comes from Michael J. O’Leary of Curtin University in Australia and five colleagues scattered around the world. Dr. O’Leary has spent more than a decade exploring the remote western coast of Australia, considered one of the best places in the world to study sea levels of the past. The paper , published July 28 in Nature Geoscience, focuses on a warm period in the earth’s history that preceded the most recent ice age. In that epoch, sometimes called the Eemian, the planetary temperature was similar to levels we may see in coming decades as a result of human emissions, so it is considered a possible indicator of things to come. Examining elevated fossil beaches and coral reefs along more than a thousand miles of coast, Dr. O’Leary’s group confirmed something we pretty much already knew. In the warmer world of the Eemian, sea level stabilized for several thousand years at about 10 to 12 feet above modern sea level. The interesting part is what happened after that. Dr. O’Leary’s group found what they consider to be compelling evidence that near the end of the Eemian, sea level jumped by another 17 feet or so, to settle at close to 30 feet above the modern level, before beginning to fall as the ice age set in. In an interview, Dr. O’Leary told me he was confident that the 17-foot jump happened in less than a thousand years — how much less, he cannot be sure. This finding is something of a vindication for one member of the team, a North Carolina field geologist, Paul J. Hearty . He had argued for decades that the rock record suggested a jump of this sort, but only recently have measurement and modeling techniques reached the level of precision needed to nail the case. We have to see if their results withstand critical scrutiny. A sea-level scientist not involved in the work, Andrea Dutton of the University of Florida, said the paper had failed to disclose enough detailed information about the field sites to allow her to judge the overall conclusion. But if the work does hold up, the implications are profound. The only possible explanation for such a large, rapid jump in sea level is the catastrophic collapse of a polar ice sheet, on either Greenland or Antarctica. Dr. O’Leary is not prepared to say which; figuring that out is the group’s next project. But a 17-foot rise in less than a thousand years, a geologic instant, has to mean that one or both ice sheets contain some instability that can be set off by a warmer climate. That, of course, augurs poorly for humans. Scientists at Stanford calculated recently that human emissions are causing the climate to change many times faster than at any point since the dinosaurs died out. We are pushing the climate system so hard that, if the ice sheets do have a threshold of some kind, we stand a good chance of exceeding it. Another recent paper, by Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a half-dozen colleagues, implies that even if emissions were to stop tomorrow, we have probably locked in several feet of sea level rise over the long term. Benjamin Strauss and his colleagues at Climate Central , an independent group of scientists and journalists in Princeton that reports climate research, translated the Levermann results into graphical form , and showed the difference it could make if we launched an aggressive program to control emissions. By 2100, their calculations suggest, continuing on our current path would mean locking in a long-term sea level rise of 23 feet, but aggressive emission cuts could limit that to seven feet. If you are the mayor of Miami or of a beach town in New Jersey, you may be asking yourself: Exactly how long is all this going to take to play out? On that crucial point, alas, our science is still nearly blind. Scientists can look at the rocks and see indisputable evidence of jumps in sea level, and they can associate those with relatively modest increases in global temperature. But the nature of the evidence is such that it is hard to tell the difference between something that happened in a thousand years and something that happened in a hundred. On the human time scale, of course, that is all the difference in the world. If sea level is going to rise by, say, 30 feet over several thousand years, that is quite a lot of time to adjust — to pull back from the beaches, to reinforce major cities, and to develop technologies to help us cope. But if sea level is capable of rising several feet per century, as Dr. O’Leary’s paper would seem to imply and as many other scientists believe, then babies being born now could live to see the early stages of a global calamity.

Anders Levermann
Greenhouse gas
Climate Change
Global Warming
Nature Geoscience Journal
Michael J O'Leary
John H Mercer
Paul J Hearty
Oceans and Seas


As Obama’s Tour Ends, He Says U.S. Involvement Abroad Must Not

Abstract: LIMA, Peru — President-elect Donald J. Trump, with his “America First” campaign slogan, sees an America that has for years been taken for granted by weaker nations and is too quick to intervene in intractable conflicts far away. But in his final news conference on his last foreign trip as president, President Obama argued on Sunday for a foreign policy in which America continues to take on the biggest global problems of the day, lead where others stand on the sidelines and help the least fortunate. Mr. Obama pointed out that before the order imposed in large measure by the United States after World War II, war and famine ravaged the globe. He said that while the United States could not maintain global order on its own, it was the linchpin in ensuring that it continued. China is an important country, he told reporters in Lima, the final stop on his tour, but the Chinese did not organize the Paris climate talks, help write the agreement to reduce global warming or undertake the negotiations ensuring that all parties agreed to it. “Russia is a very significant military power, but they’re not worrying right now about how to rebuild after a hurricane in Haiti. We are,” Mr. Obama said, his voice rising. “And I’ve said before, that’s a burden that we should carry proudly.” Mr. Obama’s final overseas trip while in office was supposed to be a valedictory tour, but it has instead been one long exercise in crisis counseling, as he seeks to reassure foreign leaders and audiences that Mr. Trump will not upend alliances and trade relationships that presidents from both major parties have spent decades carefully constructing. His toughest task was here, at a summit meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, which helped bring forth the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade accord that Mr. Trump has vowed to kill. Peru, like the rest of Latin America, has also been made uneasy by the prospect of a sudden shift in United States immigration policy under Mr. Trump. The atmosphere during this trip has been noticeably different from that of previous ones. Mr. Obama’s schedule has had surprising gaps, when he seemed to have little to do, and staff members — out of their jobs in two months — have been unusually somber. Some of the leaders Mr. Obama has met with have grown wistful. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, not known for emotional frankness, seemed genuinely moved when she said Wednesday that “taking leave from my partner and friend, well, yes, it is hard.” And on Saturday, President Xi Jinping of China commended Mr. Obama for his intensive focus on their relationship, noting that the two had met nine times, including three times in 2016. But President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia betrayed no obvious regret when he met with Mr. Obama for a few minutes on the sidelines of the summit meeting here. Mr. Obama has blamed Russia for deepening the humanitarian crisis in Syria and accused it of meddling in the United States election by hacking into the emails of the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has praised Mr. Putin and has openly called for improving ties. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin looked grim in their brief chat, which Mr. Obama said was “candid and courteous.” He said he had asked Mr. Putin if they could end the slaughter in Syria or complete an agreement in Ukraine before Mr. Obama left office. At its end, Mr. Obama said, “O.K.,” before a brief and probably final handshake. Mr. Obama ranked the problems resulting from alleged Russian hacking far below those generated by fake news being circulated on social media. “The concern I had has less to do with any particular misinformation or propaganda that’s put out by any particular party, but a greater concern about the general misinformation from all kinds of sources, domestic, foreign, on social media, that make it very difficult for voters to figure out what’s true and what’s not,” Mr. Obama said. If elections are “full of fake news and false information and distractions, then the issue is not going to be what’s happening on the outside,” he added. “The issue is going to be what are we going to be doing to ourselves from the inside.” The remarks followed similar comments at a news conference in Berlin on Thursday in which Mr. Obama was sharply critical of the role Facebook and other social media companies play in spreading false news — a remarkable change in tone for a man who has spent so much of his presidency praising the transformational and beneficial effects of social media. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, published a detailed post early Saturday describing ways the company was considering dealing with the problem of fake news. In his news conference on Sunday, Mr. Obama suggested, for the first time, that he would continue to be active politically when his presidency ends. He said that at first, he would “get some rest, spend time with my girls, and do some writing, do some thinking.” But he added that he reserved the right to speak out. “If there are issues that have less to do with the specifics of some legislation issue but go to core questions about our values and our ideals, and if I think it’s necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, then I’ll examine it when it comes,” he said. Then he said, to laughter, “But what I do know is that I have to take Michelle on vacation.”

Lima
Peru
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
Donald Trump
Barack Obama
US Foreign Policy


Charles McDowell, Commentator, Dies at 84

Abstract: Charles McDowell, a retired columnist for The Richmond Times-Dispatch who brought a folksy manner to a regular stint on the PBS program “Washington Week in Review” and to a prominent role in Ken Burns’s PBS series “The Civil War,” died Friday. He was 84. The cause was complications of a stroke, said his wife, Ann Webb McDowell. Mr. McDowell worked for the Richmond paper for almost half a century, covering local news and state politics from 1949 until 1965, when he became the paper’s Washington correspondent. His nationally syndicated column ran from 1954 until his retirement in 1998. Television viewers knew him from frequent appearances on a variety of PBS programs, including “Summer of Judgment: The Watergate Hearings,” for which he was the writer, narrator and host. In the acclaimed film “The Civil War,” first broadcast in 1990, he appeared on camera as a genial commentator with a wide grin and a deep drawl and off-camera as the voice of Samuel Watkins, a Confederate soldier from Tennessee, reading excerpts from Watkins’s battlefield letters. Mr. McDowell is also heard in the Burns documentaries “Baseball” (1994) and “The Congress” (1988). He wrote three books, including “Campaign Fever,” a diary of the 1964 presidential election. Mr. McDowell spent 18 years as a panelist on “Washington Week in Review,” starting in 1978. In an article in The New York Times about the program in 1984, John Corry wrote: “Mr. McDowell apparently has covered Washington for some time, and when he is not sitting in one of Mr. Duke’s chairs, one supposes he perches on a cracker barrel. Abetted by his colleagues, he comes close to being a raconteur.” Charles Rice McDowell Jr. was born in Danville, Ky., on June 24, 1926. He joined the Richmond paper after graduating from Washington and Lee University and the Columbia University School of Journalism. Besides his wife of 58 years, he is survived by two daughters, Jennifer M. Pellegrini of Potomac, Md., and Catie McDowell of Boulder, Colo., and a son, William, of Missoula, Mont.

McDowell Charles
Public Broadcasting
Documentary Films and Programs
Deaths (Obituaries)