Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story

Abstract: Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years. The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function. Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago. Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny. Three populations were studied, Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favored by natural selection. The selected genes, which affect skin color, hair texture and bone structure, may underlie the present-day differences in racial appearance. The study of selected genes may help reconstruct many crucial events in the human past. It may also help physical anthropologists explain why people over the world have such a variety of distinctive appearances, even though their genes are on the whole similar, said Dr. Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society. The finding adds substantially to the evidence that human evolution did not grind to a halt in the distant past, as is tacitly assumed by many social scientists. Even evolutionary psychologists, who interpret human behavior in terms of what the brain evolved to do, hold that the work of natural selection in shaping the human mind was completed in the pre-agricultural past, more than 10,000 years ago. "There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago who headed the study. Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues, Benjamin Voight, Sridhar Kudaravalli and Xiaoquan Wen, report their findings in today's issue of PLOS-Biology. Their data is based on DNA changes in three populations gathered by the HapMap project, which built on the decoding of the human genome in 2003. The data, though collected to help identify variant genes that contribute to disease, also give evidence of evolutionary change. The fingerprints of natural selection in DNA are hard to recognize. Just a handful of recently selected genes have previously been identified, like those that confer resistance to malaria or the ability to digest lactose in adulthood, an adaptation common in Northern Europeans whose ancestors thrived on cattle milk. But the authors of the HapMap study released last October found many other regions where selection seemed to have occurred, as did an analysis published in December by Robert K. Moysis of the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Pritchard's scan of the human genome differs from the previous two because he has developed a statistical test to identify just genes that have started to spread through populations in recent millennia and have not yet become universal, as many advantageous genes eventually do. The selected genes he has detected fall into a handful of functional categories, as might be expected if people were adapting to specific changes in their environment. Some are genes involved in digesting particular foods like the lactose-digesting gene common in Europeans. Some are genes that mediate taste and smell as well as detoxify plant poisons, perhaps signaling a shift in diet from wild foods to domesticated plants and animals. Dr. Pritchard estimates that the average point at which the selected genes started to become more common under the pressure of natural selection is 10,800 years ago in the African population and 6,600 years ago in the Asian and European populations. Dr. Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford, said that it was hard to correlate the specific gene changes in the three populations with events in the archaeological record, but that the timing and nature of the changes in the East Asians and Europeans seemed compatible with the shift to agriculture. Rice farming became widespread in China 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, and agriculture reached Europe from the Near East around the same time. Skeletons similar in form to modern Chinese are hard to find before that period, Dr. Klein said, and there are few European skeletons older than 10,000 years that look like modern Europeans. That suggests that a change in bone structure occurred in the two populations, perhaps in connection with the shift to agriculture. Dr. Pritchard's team found that several genes associated with embryonic development of the bones had been under selection in East Asians and Europeans, and these could be another sign of the forager-to-farmer transition, Dr. Klein said. Dr. Wells, of the National Geographic Society, said Dr. Pritchard's results were fascinating and would help anthropologists explain the immense diversity of human populations even though their genes are generally similar. The relative handful of selected genes that Dr. Pritchard's study has pinpointed may hold the answer, he said, adding, "Each gene has a story of some pressure we adapted to." Dr. Wells is gathering DNA from across the globe to map in finer detail the genetic variation brought to light by the HapMap project. Dr. Pritchard's list of selected genes also includes five that affect skin color. The selected versions of the genes occur solely in Europeans and are presumably responsible for pale skin. Anthropologists have generally assumed that the first modern humans to arrive in Europe some 45,000 years ago had the dark skin of their African origins, but soon acquired the paler skin needed to admit sunlight for vitamin D synthesis. The finding of five skin genes selected 6,600 years ago could imply that Europeans acquired their pale skin much more recently. Or, the selected genes may have been a reinforcement of a process established earlier, Dr. Pritchard said. The five genes show no sign of selective pressure in East Asians. Because Chinese and Japanese are also pale, Dr. Pritchard said, evolution must have accomplished the same goal in those populations by working through different genes or by changing the same genes — but many thousands of years before, so that the signal of selection is no longer visible to the new test. Dr. Pritchard also detected selection at work in brain genes, including a group known as microcephaly genes because, when disrupted, they cause people to be born with unusually small brains. Dr. Bruce Lahn, also of the University of Chicago, theorizes that successive changes in the microcephaly genes may have enabled the brain to enlarge in primate evolution, a process that may have continued in the recent human past. Last September, Dr. Lahn reported that one microcephaly gene had recently changed in Europeans and another in Europeans and Asians. He predicted that other brain genes would be found to have changed in other populations. Dr. Pritchard's test did not detect a signal of selection in Dr. Lahn's two genes, but that may just reflect limitations of the test, he and Dr. Lahn said. Dr. Pritchard found one microcephaly gene that had been selected for in Africans and another in Europeans and East Asians. Another brain gene, SNTG1, was under heavy selection in all three populations. "It seems like a really interesting gene, given our results, but there doesn't seem to be that much known about exactly what it's doing to the brain," Dr. Pritchard said. Dr. Wells said that it was not surprising the brain had continued to evolve along with other types of genes, but that nothing could be inferred about the nature of the selective pressure until the function of the selected genes was understood. The four populations analyzed in the HapMap project are the Yoruba of Nigeria, Han Chinese from Beijing, Japanese from Tokyo and a French collection of Utah families of European descent. The populations are assumed to be typical of sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Europe, but the representation, though presumably good enough for medical studies, may not be exact. Dr. Pritchard's test for selection rests on the fact that an advantageous mutation is inherited along with its gene and a large block of DNA in which the gene sits. If the improved gene spreads quickly, the DNA region that includes it will become less diverse across a population because so many people now carry the same sequence of DNA units at that location. Dr. Pritchard's test measures the difference in DNA diversity between those who carry a new gene and those who do not, and a significantly lesser diversity is taken as a sign of selection. The difference disappears when the improved gene has swept through the entire population, as eventually happens, so the test picks up only new gene variants on their way to becoming universal. The selected genes turned out to be quite different from one racial group to another. Dr. Pritchard's test identified 206 regions of the genome that are under selection in the Yorubans, 185 regions in East Asians and 188 in Europeans. The few overlaps between races concern genes that could have been spread by migration or else be instances of independent evolution, Dr. Pritchard said.


A Laptop for Tree Huggers May Also Appeal to Penny-Pinchers

Abstract: At first blush, the Everex StepNote NC1500, available at Wal-Mart for $498, seems like an average bargain laptop. But inside is a special low-power processor that is intended to help the computer appeal to the eco-conscious and frugal. The VIA C7-M processor runs at 1.5 gigahertz, a bit slower than average, but uses only 12 watts of power, or about 43 percent less than an Intel Pentium running at the same speed. This helps reduce heat, cut energy bills and save the planet. It comes with a 60-gigabyte hard drive, 512 megabytes of RAM and a built-in DVD/CD burner. The NC1500 runs Windows Home Edition. The 15.4-inch screen has a resolution of 1,280 by 800 pixels and uses an S3 UniChrome Pro graphics chip, a processor powerful enough to handle office applications and the occasional video game. The laptop, which weighs a bit over five pounds, also has built-in Wi-Fi . VIA and Everex are promoting this notebook, with its decreased power consumption and environmentally friendly components (the motherboard and chip designs use less carbon and other resources), as a breath of fresh air in the electronics race. Its low price makes it good for the wallet as well. JOHN BIGGS

Energy Efficiency
Computers and The Internet
Computer Chips


Trying to Help Financially Troubled Homeowners

Abstract: People seem to pass certain milestones on the road of financial desperation. First the unpaid bills pile up. Then the bank forecloses. Finally, they reach the end of the line: bankruptcy court. But now policy makers are talking about redrawing this map by putting the bankruptcy court before foreclosure to give people a chance to keep their homes. It has been done before, on a relatively small scale and with some success. In the midst of the farm crisis during the 1980s, Congress gave bankruptcy judges the power to reduce onerous farm loans to reflect a steep drop in land prices. The Obama administration and Congressional Democrats are pushing a similar idea to stem the swelling tide of home foreclosure. Yet a close look at the farm experience raises questions about how widespread any relief would be. While the creation of a special bankruptcy workout for farmers, known as Chapter 12, helped resolve that earlier crisis, many farmers still lost their farms or had to scale them back, according to judges and lawyers who studied the effects. If a similar allowance is provided today for Chapter 13 filings, which let homeowners keep their property while working out their debts, bankruptcy courts could help a few million homeowners. But millions more would still face foreclosure, especially if unemployment continued to rise. Credit Suisse, for example, estimates that about 20 percent of an expected eight million foreclosures could be avoided by letting judges alter the terms of home loans. “We are making the best of a lousy situation,” said Joseph A. Peiffer, a bankruptcy lawyer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who has represented both farmers and lenders and favors giving bankruptcy courts power to modify home loans. But, he added, “there will still be people losing their homes.” One of his clients, a farm family in eastern Iowa, sought Chapter 12 bankruptcy in late 1986. The family had borrowed when times were good to pay medical bills, but struggled to keep up with payments when interest rates jumped and crop prices fell. The day before the family filed its case, a lender seized half of its 350 cows. “It was sort of like a perfect storm of bad things,” Mr. Peiffer said. The bankruptcy court eventually wrote down about 40 percent of the family’s $1.5 million debt, and today, they are still farming, according to Mr. Peiffer. That type of resolution may help troubled homeowners avoid foreclosure, advocates say. Having a bankruptcy judge change loan terms can solve disputes that bankers and borrowers might be unable to tackle on their own, they say. And some loans could become more profitable for banks in bankruptcy than in foreclosure, where losses can be 50 percent or higher after legal and home repair costs, according to Rod Dubitsky, a Credit Suisse analyst. Perhaps more important, a bankruptcy judge can also cut through a thicket of legal complications for mortgages packaged into securities and sold to investors, which some banks say they have no authority to modify. Some investors have threatened to sue banks if those mortgages are altered. But the banking industry fiercely opposes the proposal to amend bankruptcy law. Officials warn that they would have to raise the price of credit to offset the cost of having to wait years to see whether borrowers successfully pay off modified loans — or slide back into default. Only a third to 40 percent of Chapter 13 personal bankruptcy filings are successful, experts say, often because people lose jobs again, become sick or get divorced. Foreclosure might bring them less, but banks and investors would get some money right away if they seized homes. In Chapter 12, judges could change interest rates and reduce, or “cram down,” debts secured by farmland, which suffered a boom-bust cycle in the 1970s and 1980s. The amount written down was added to other unsecured debts, like credit card balances, which are repaid cents on the dollar from money left over after living expenses and secured debt payments. Congress made Chapter 12 a permanent part of the Bankruptcy Code in 2005. Neil E. Harl, an agriculture and economics professor at Iowa State University, found that 85 percent of the first 150 farmers in Iowa who filed bankruptcy under Chapter 12 were still farming in 1995. But many farmers who encountered distress did not seek bankruptcy protection: from 1986 to 1997, farmers filed 19,216 Chapter 12 cases, according to the Agriculture Department — less than 1 percent of the two million family farms that existed in 1995. “As soon as everybody knew it was there,” Mr. Harl said about cram-downs, “they did the next best thing, which is to sit down and negotiate.” Nonetheless, bankers say that Chapter 12 resulted in higher interest rates, as lenders passed on the costs of bankruptcy. The Agriculture Department estimated in 1997 that rates on farm loans increased by 0.25 of a percentage point to 1 percentage point as a result of the law. The Financial Services Roundtable, an industry lobbying group, calculates that cram-downs may increase the cost of mortgages by up to 2 percentage points either through higher rates or bigger down payments. The restrictions on cram-downs “keeps the cost of homes low, and this bill will unravel that,” said Scott E. Talbott, its chief lobbyist. But other experts say such estimates are inflated. Adam J. Levitin, an associate professor of law at Georgetown University who favors changing the law, said rates may only rise by 0.15 of a percentage point. Lawmakers and lobbyists in Washington are deeply divided on cram-downs. The opposition includes Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who helped create Chapter 12. Banks, with the exception of Citigroup, have vowed to fight cram-downs, though some lobbyists have been pushing for amendments that would limit them to certain loans and would let lenders recoup losses if home prices rebound. The Obama administration and Democrats, including Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, hope to pass the measure either on its own or as part of another bill. The measure is eagerly awaited by households like the Benitez family in Palm Coast, Fla., which hopes bankruptcy will help them keep their three-bedroom house. Rosa Benitez, a real estate agent, and her husband, Carlos, who works in construction, have been unable to pay their mortgage since payments on their adjustable rate loan shot up in early 2008. At the same time, given the housing crash, they are making a lot less money. “Everything started going down when the mortgage payments went up,” Ms. Benitez said. The couple owes $227,000 on their mortgage and $31,000 on a home equity line of credit, but their home is worth only $175,000. Ms. Benitez said the couple could catch up if their debt was reduced to the current value of the home. Still, the couple, like many others, is vulnerable to falling behind again as home prices decline further. But Robert M. Lawless, a law professor at the University of Illinois who favors cram-downs, said success should not be viewed simply “in terms of dollars and cents.” “We forget the human side of the bankruptcy case,” he said. “Sometimes bankruptcy is about the soft landing.”

Foreclosures
Mortgages
Personal Bankruptcies
Housing
Subprime Mortgage Crisis


Obama, in El Paso, Prods G.O.P. on Immigration

Abstract: EL PASO — President Obama came to this border city on Tuesday to argue that he is doing his part to crack down on illegal immigration , and that Republicans must now join him in overhauling the nation’s immigration laws for the millions of workers already here illegally. Mr. Obama’s speech at a park within sight of the border with Mexico — and a billowing 162-foot-by-93-foot Mexican flag — was heavy with political overtones for 2012 and beyond, given the growing ranks of Latino voters in a number of swing states. He sought to reassure those increasingly frustrated voters of his commitment to liberalizing immigration laws as a moral and economic imperative, and to blame “border security first” Republicans in Congress for his inability to deliver on that promise. “We have strengthened border security beyond what many believed was possible,” Mr. Obama said, citing increases since the George W. Bush administration in the amount of fencing and aerial surveillance and the number of border agents, National Guard troops, intelligence analysts and deportations of illegal immigrants. His first stop here was at an inspection facility on the Rio Grande, one of the busiest of the 327 official ports of entry to the United States for cargo, vehicles and even walkers entering from Ciudad Juárez, a sprawling city afflicted by Mexico’s drug wars. “We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement,” he added. “All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done. But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I’ve got to say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time” — to the point of seeking a moat and alligators, he joked. “That’s politics.” Mr. Obama’s own politics were central to the trip, his first to the border since he was elected with 67 percent of the Latino vote, which makes up a significant and expanding portion of the electorate in battleground states like Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and North Carolina. In Texas, where Republicans have dominated since the 1980s, Democrats likewise look to one day regain power through the state’s expanding Latino electorate — though not likely in 2012. Even so, broadcasts of Mr. Obama’s trip reached next door into New Mexico. The visit, however, underscored a tension over Mr. Obama’s immigration record that colors his re-election prospects: his boasts of strengthening border security win him no credit among Republican lawmakers and only alienate many Latinos so long as he cannot deliver on his campaign promise to them — a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants already here illegally, many of them for years. “If they think that this is going to be the thing that mobilizes an increasingly disappointed Latino electorate, I think they’re wrong,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice , a group advocating for liberalized immigration. “They are going to have to make some big administrative action to make up for the fact that he promised something big.” Mr. Obama did not push comprehensive immigration legislation in his term’s first two years, when Democrats controlled Congress, and it has virtually no chance of passage now that Republicans have a House majority. And he does not plan to introduce such legislation now, to the disappointment of some advocates. But in his speech, Mr. Obama reiterated his goals: a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that would require them to come forward, pay taxes and a penalty, and learn English; legal status for foreigners who graduate from colleges here and want to remain and start businesses; and the so-called Dream Act, providing citizenship to young people who were brought to the United States as children and receive an education or want to enter the military. Back in Washington, Congressional Republicans dismissed his proposals. “Providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, as the president called for again today, without requiring illegal immigrants to return to their countries of origin and apply for legal status, is amnesty,” said Representative Elton Gallegly of California, the chairman of a House subcommittee on immigration. “Amnesty will not pass Congress, Mr. President.” Without much chance of immigration changes becoming law, pro-immigration advocates are pushing Mr. Obama to take executive actions at least. Chief among them, they want the administration to quit deporting illegal immigrants and residents without criminal records. But Mr. Obama refuses to do that — as he acknowledged here. His administration is not acting “haphazardly,” he told the crowd, but “as long as the current laws are on the books, it’s not just hardened felons who are subject to removal, but sometimes families who are just trying to earn a living, or bright, eager students, or decent people with the best of intentions.” The president’s trip to Texas was his fifth event in four weeks to promote comprehensive immigration changes. He previously hosted three meetings at the White House with a wide range of groups, including Republicans, business leaders and Latino celebrities like the actress Eva Longoria of “Desperate Housewives.” And Mr. Obama gave the commencement address at Miami-Dade Community College in Florida, where his lines on immigration were among the most applauded. Through the increased activities, including those involving cabinet members, the White House is seeking to show that Mr. Obama is not just checking a political box with an occasional speech or rally, but is actively pressing the issue — and making sure people know Republicans are standing in the way. “For the president’s message to take hold, he must show that this is not a Hispanic issue, this is an American issue,” said Lillian Rodríguez-López, chairwoman of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda , a coalition of the 30 leading Hispanic organizations in the United States. “With a struggling economy and weakened labor force,” Ms. Rodríguez-López added, “we cannot afford to prohibit the millions currently living in the shadows from fully contributing to our economy.” Mr. Obama similarly put his case in economic terms. “One way to strengthen the middle class in America is to reform the immigration system so that there is no longer a massive underground economy that exploits a cheap source of labor while depressing wages for everybody else,” he said. As with many trips lately, Mr. Obama combined the immigration policy speech with Democratic fund-raising. From El Paso, he flew to Austin, the state’s liberal capital, for two such events, one a larger rally with lower-priced tickets and the other a smaller private dinner for high-dollar donors.

Illegal Immigrants
Texas
Obama Barack
Immigration and Emigration


Photo of Narendra Modi at the Spinning Wheel Invokes Gandhi, and Some Cry Blasphemy

Abstract: Image Mahatma Gandhi with his spinning wheel in 1925. Credit Rühe/Ullstein Bild, via Getty Images NEW DELHI — It is an image familiar to every Indian — an icon in an iconic pose. Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father of independent India, sits at a spinning wheel producing cotton thread — a simple but potent symbol protesting the purchase of British textiles and British rule. Gandhi has long been associated with the homespun cloth known as khadi, as well as with a lesser-known publication: a calendar sent annually to the employees of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission, a government body set up to promote the fabric. Image A photo from a calendar sent out to employees of a government body set up to promote khadi, the hand-spun fabric that Gandhi famously wore, shows Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a spinning wheel in a pose that recalls a famous one of Gandhi. Credit Khadi Village Industries Commission This year, however, the bespectacled leader sitting at a spinning wheel on the calendar’s cover was not Gandhi, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. The prime minister’s opponents were outraged and equated Mr. Modi’s cover photo with blasphemy. Dozens of commission employees staged a protest against the calendar on Thursday, according to the Press Trust of India. “Khadi & Gandhiji are symbols of our history, self-reliance & struggle. Removing Gandhiji’s photo is a sacrilegious sin,” Randeep Surjewala, a spokesman for the Indian National Congress party, wrote, using an honorific with Gandhi’s name, in a Twitter post . “Gandhiji is the Father of the Nation. Modi ji what???” Mamata Banerjee , the chief minister of West Bengal, wrote on Twitter on Friday. Commission executives said there was no policy that mandated Gandhi appear on every calendar, and six publications since 1996 have not included his image. “There is no policy for mandatory use of a photograph of Mahatma Gandhiji on the calendar,” said V.K. Saxena, the commission’s chairman, in a statement on Friday. Mr. Modi “emulating the father of the nation is an unmistakable image of dedication to the core national values,” he said in the statement, adding that because of Mr. Modi’s work to promote khadi, sales of the textile had increased by a third from 2015 to 2016. “Just by posing, nobody can become a worshiper of khadi,” said Tushar Gandhi, the leader’s great-grandson, in a televised interview. Gandhi “spun his own yarn and got his garments stitched of the cloth made from the same. That khadi was different.” Mr. Modi’s pose on the other hand, said the younger Mr. Gandhi, was “a mere photo op.”

Narendra Modi
India
Textile
Khadi and Village Industries Commission
Politics
Mohandas K Gandhi


Treasury Auctions Set for This Week

Abstract: The Treasury’s schedule of financing this week includes Monday’s regular weekly auction of new three- and six-month bills and an auction of four-week bills on Tuesday. At the close of the New York cash market on Friday, the rate on the outstanding three-month bill was 0.01 percent. The rate on the six-month issue was 0.05 percent, and the rate on the four-week issue was 0.01 percent. The following tax-exempt fixed-income issues are scheduled for pricing this week: TUESDAY Los Angeles, $117 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. Montgomery County, Tenn., $65 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. WEDNESDAY New York City, $85 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. Washington State, $714.0 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. Wisconsin, $337.8 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. THURSDAY Frederick County, Md., $55.8 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. Los Angeles, $380 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, $634.1 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. ONE DAY DURING THE WEEK Atlanta, $372.1 million of airport general refinancing bonds. Siebert Brandford Shank. Charlotte, N.C., $92.6 million of revenue bonds. Bank of America. Chicago Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, $400 million of general obligation capital improvement bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, $63 million of housing mortgage finance authority. J. P. Morgan Securities. Dallas International Airport, $150 million of airport joint revenue refinancing bonds. Cabrera Capital Markets. Frisco, Tex., $123 million of general obligation and improvement bonds. Morgan Keegan Harris County, Tex., $200 million of toll road senior lien revenue and refinancing bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. Kishwaukee County College, Ill., $79.4 million of debt securities. Raymond James. Lakeland Hospital, Fla., $77 million of regional hospital system debt securities. Citigroup Global Markets. Maryland, $100 million of general obligation bonds. M&T Securities. Massachusetts School Building Authority, $142.4 million of sales tax bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Modesto, Calif., Irrigation District, $150 million of electric system refinancing bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. New Jersey Health Care Facilities Financing Authority, $101.3 million of revenue and refinancing bonds. Goldman Sachs. New York City, $760 million of general obligation bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. Ohio, $416.8 million of school general obligation refinancing bonds. Morgan Stanley. Oregon, $788 million of full faith and credit tax anticipation notes. Citigroup Global Markets. Raleigh, N.C., $62 million of combined enterprise system revenue refinancing bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. San Jacinto County College, Tex., $68.2 million of limited tax general obligation bonds. Southwest Securities. Spring, Tex., Independent School District, $58.3 million of unlimited tax refinancing bonds. Morgan Keegan. Tampa Bay Water Utility System, $141 million of utility system revenue refinancing bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. Tampa Bay, Fla., $150.1 million of water and sewer revenue bonds. Raymond James. Texas Convention Center and Entertainment Facilities Department, $252.6 million of hotel occupancy tax and special revenue refinancing bonds. Piper Jaffray. Texas Public Finance Authority, $357.4 million of general obligation and refinancing bonds. Siebert Brandford Shank. Tucson, Ariz., $73 million of hospital revenue bonds. Bank of America. Washington State Motor Vehicle, $50 million of fuel tax general obligation bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities.

Auctions
Stocks and Bonds
Credit and Debt


Coaxing India's Rich to Give More

Abstract: NEW DELHI — How cruel that the men and women who were about to pledge substantial amounts to charity for the very first time in their lives had to pass through the illuminated showrooms of Hermès, Burberry, Gucci and Ermenegildo Zegna before reaching the venue of the First Givers Club. Here the imminent philanthropists, who appeared resolute, mingled with more seasoned givers, the employees of India’s charity industry and the type of men, common at Delhi’s banquets, whose job profiles are incomprehensible. The evening, organized by Give India — a service that unites potential donors and the needy — proceeded with the somewhat frequent use of “inflection point” and “ecosystem” and, one of India’s favorite alliterations, “demographic dividend.” India’s miseries are so many and so visible that affluent Indians of sound mind live with a relentless hum of conscience nudging them to donate to causes. Television commercials and print advertisements show them bleak images, often in black and white, of unhappy children whose lives could be better. These artistic images are largely unnecessary because almost all of India is a plea to its own to make it a better place. Yet, there is very little in the way of philanthropy. In fact, the direct contribution of Indian business to social causes is so low that a law soon taking effect will require companies of a certain size and profitability to spend a fraction of their wealth on what is ambiguously termed corporate social responsibility, or explain to the government why they have failed to do so. Such a responsibility has traditionally been a corporate ruse to save on taxes by showing expenditures on seemingly charitable causes, or, in old-fashioned business houses, a way to keep the women in the family occupied as the men did ostensibly more important things. But now the government wants Indian companies to get more serious about it. One reason most Indian businesses have been so parsimonious is that, very simply, they probably don’t care so much about orphans. And, they are as new to wealth as India is. Also, the cost of doing business in India is high to begin with, which is a euphemism for having to give bribes and be the primary sponsors of political corruption. But there have been some companies that have very consciously developed a philanthropic profile. One of the speakers at the First Givers Club was Rakesh Mittal, the high-spirited vice chairman and managing director of the conglomerate Bharti Enterprises. He said that Indian companies today “are looking at doing more beyond business, not because the government is forcing them, but because we cannot have islands of wealth. You cannot take this country forward if we are just worried about what I have and what I need for me and my family, and the ecosystem and the society around is crumbling.” He spoke about opening scores of schools for the poor and how his success inspired state governments to ask him to run their schools, and how it was often a “nightmarish” experience to work with the government. The next morning I asked the Indian minister of state for human resource development, Shashi Tharoor, to comment on Mr. Mittal’s experience with the government. Mr. Tharoor said, “I am in the government and I find it nightmarish at times.” When Mr. Mittal tried to acquire land to start his schools, he faced opposition from villagers who suspected that he was trying to seize their land to set up cellular towers. Among the poor, Indian corporations have a reputation for being thieves, and that is not merely because the nation has been seasoned in socialist paranoia for decades. The perception is well earned. In fact, Mr. Mittal’s brother, Sunil Mittal, chairman of Bharti Enterprises, has been accused by the Central Bureau of Investigation of colluding with a former minister and a bureaucrat more than a decade ago and bagging a mobile telephone spectrum license that eventually resulted in a loss of nearly 8.5 billion rupees, or $132 million at current exchange rates, to the government. He has denied the allegation. Speaking before the First Givers Club, Anu Aga, one of India’s noted business figures and philanthropists, said that she was inspired by her son, who died in a car accident when he was 25. He was very affected by India’s poverty, she said, and believed that a substantial part of his family’s wealth should go to charity. That is, somehow, an unusual wish for a wealthy Indian. But it is not uncommon for temples to receive huge donations. They are periodically surprised by gold coins, gold bars and jewels in the offering box. Such donations are, of course, meant to win divine favor for the donors and their children. There is another reason, according to Rohini Nilekani, who recently sold a portion of her shares in Infosys, which her husband, Nandan Nilekani, co-founded, to raise money for her philanthropic work. “Temples are institutions of trust,” she told me. In a nation where people are suspicious of anyone who seeks to separate them from their money, religious organizations offer themselves as trustworthy receptacles of donations. But their balance sheets are mostly opaque. And even though they do build hospitals and schools, they hoard most of their substantial wealth in fixed deposits. God, it appears, not only converts donations into idle money, but also corners vast amounts of finite charity that would have otherwise been put to better use by more material organizations. But the government does make up for all the shortcomings that Indians exhibit when it comes to giving. On Monday evening, despite the nation’s acute fiscal deficit crisis, the Parliament passed an extraordinary bill that guarantees free or subsidized grain to two-thirds of India’s 1.2 billion people. With a magnanimous government like this, every Indian taxpayer is a philanthropist. Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”


Yes, Federer Is Struggling, but He Is Still Ranked No. 1

Abstract: MASON, Ohio — Roger Federer joked Tuesday that after uncharacteristic back-to-back losses, he was thrilled to be on a one-match winning streak. But with his No. 1 ranking potentially hanging on the results of the Cincinnati Masters this week, he is happy with a victory of any kind. At times, Federer can sound nonchalant when talking about the No. 1 ranking and what it means to him, but he is serious about keeping No. 2 Rafael Nadal from displacing him from the spot he has held since Feb. 2, 2004. “If he gets it, he deserves it,” Federer said. “He’s been No. 2 for a long, long time. Let’s not forget about that. He had his chances in the past and now he’s closer than ever. He’s been on an incredible roll.” The proper term is Federer-like. Since losing in the second round of the Rome Masters in May, Nadal has gone 29-0 and won five tournaments, including the French Open and Wimbledon. He beat Federer in the final of three of them. He defeated Federer on clay at the French Open, then dispelled the notion that he could not stop him on grass by winning an epic Wimbledon final. Nadal will play his first match here Wednesday night, against Florent Serra of France. If he wins this tournament and Federer is eliminated before the semifinals, Nadal will be the new No. 1. Federer, meanwhile, has been faltering. After losing at Wimbledon, he was upset last week by Gilles Simon in the second round in Toronto. On Tuesday, Federer had trouble defeating Robby Ginepri, 6-7 (2), 7-6 (5), 6-0. Ginepri, ranked 64th, was serving for the match at 6-5 in the second set, but could not hold serve. Federer, however, no longer appears to be an unstoppable force. “I think guys have seen that he’s human,” Ginepri said. “In the last four years, he’s had such a stellar career that it’s hard to keep that up. Maybe he’s not as steady as he used to be. “I think guys are feeling that a little bit more now, especially in the past couple weeks. He’ll find his way if he doesn’t stay at No. 1 this week or in two weeks. I think he’ll find his way back up to the top.” Publicly, at least, Nadal has said that he is not thinking about the top spot. “I don’t think about the No. 1 because I’m the No. 2,” Nadal said Tuesday. “If any day I’m No. 1, I’m going to think about the No. 1. Sure, it is a goal, yes. For me, if I am No. 1 any day, it will be very nice. But right now, my goal is to continue playing like I did before.” He has certainly been playing like the top player in the world. Even if Nadal cannot unseat Federer this week, it seems that a change at the top may be only a matter of time. “Nadal is having one of those years that Federer has had for the last four years,” said Tommy Haas of Germany, who is ranked No. 42. “If he can have a decent hardcourt season and do well at the Masters Series, he deserves to be No. 1. I’m sure Roger would be the first one to admit that.” But Haas raised some caution flags, adding: “We’ll see if he can make that happen. We all know what Roger has done the last four years. I don’t think he’s worried about the No. 1 ranking. I think he’s frustrated that he hasn’t won a big tournament yet this year. I think that’s all that matters to him.” Federer said he was not feeling any pressure about the possible transfer of the No. 1 ranking. He said he just wanted to start winning again. “He hasn’t made it yet, you know,” Federer said. “I’m still hanging in there.”


Weak Links in China’s Food Chain

Abstract: When McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in China in the early 1990s, it did not turn to local suppliers for meat, which most likely would have been cheaper. Instead, it relied on its longtime partner the OSI Group, which had been linked to the fast-food titan ever since Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s founder, in the 1950s tapped the Chicago butcher Otto & Sons to provide consistent, reliable meats to his expanding empire. As McDonald’s grew, so did OSI, quietly developing a sterling reputation that attracted many of the largest global restaurant chains, including KFC, Burger King and the Papa John’s pizza chain. The company’s focus on food safety was one of its selling points. “As a private company in a foreign country, we’re setting an international standard for best practices in food safety,” Brady Sidwell, vice president for corporate development and strategy for OSI’s Asia Pacific operations, wrote in a blog post last fall for the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis. Eight months later, OSI is caught up in a messy, very public food safety scandal in China. A television station there broadcast a program in late July accusing employees in its Shanghai plant of doctoring labels to extend expiration dates on chicken and beef products and showing workers scooping up meat that had fallen on the ground and putting it back on conveyor belts for processing. It was a rare black mark for OSI, one of the top American meat producers, with more than $6 billion in sales and about 20,000 employees in dozens of processing plants in 17 countries. “It was definitely a head scratcher to me,” said Adam Aronson, chief executive of Arrowsight, which provides remote video auditing of OSI plants in the United States. “They spend a lot of money on food safety systems, more than most others.” That OSI — which other suppliers have looked to as a model — is dealing with these issues speaks to the broader weaknesses in the Chinese food safety system. After a series of food safety scandals in recent years, regulators repeatedly have promised to tighten food safety standards only to have another problem arise. The country is making strides. Last month, the University of California, Davis and the Northwest Agricultural and Forestry University in Shaanxi Province started laying the groundwork for establishing a joint research center for food safety in China. Roger Beachy, executive director of the U.C. Davis World Food Center, said the Chinese government had made food safety a top priority, particularly as it looked for consistent supplies to feed its rising middle class. But China is also playing catch-up to more developed nations — and on a much grander scale. “Companies have grown so fast, but the rate of growth hasn’t been met with equally robust systems for training and educating the work force,” Mr. Beachy said. OSI said in a statement that what had happened at the Shanghai facility was “terribly wrong” and “completely unacceptable.” The company has reassigned executives in its China operations and started an investigation into the matter. It has also promised to bolster its systems. OSI has reached out to Arrowsight to help improve its processes in China. “We will bear the responsibility of these missteps and will make sure that they never happen again,” OSI said. The company declined to comment further. Image A building at the Shanghai Husi Food Company, which is connected to a food safety scandal. Credit Reuters Although the company had been in China for two decades, OSI embarked on a $400 million rapid expansion plan in 2011 that included three new poultry production and processing facilities and additional capacity at its Shanghai and Beijing plants. “The goal was to completely recreate the U.S. system — from feeding and watering regimes down to the exact rate of air flow and size and placement of windows in the poultry houses — but to make it locally relevant,” according to a 2013 Harvard Business School case study about OSI’s China business by Prof. David E. Bell. At the three new facilities, the company used a so-called vertically integrated model, giving OSI greater control over its product, from the selection of breeding birds to packaging for shipment. “For companies that have absolute raw material control, they get top priority and have a selling point around food safety,” Dennis Zhang, general manager of Husi Foods, OSI’s Chinese operation, told The National Provisioner, a trade publication. But it also posed a new challenge for its bottom line. McDonald’s and KFC wanted to buy only the dark meat that Chinese consumers demand, which meant OSI was saddled with finding new customers for the rest of the bird, around 80 percent of it. OSI’s strategy in China seems to have become a standard for other foreign food companies setting up shop. Last year, Tyson, the world’s largest meat-processing business, began adopting a similar strategy for its poultry business in China, which started in 2001. And Nestlé, which is facing a lawsuit over pet treats containing ingredients from China and sold under the Waggin’ Train and Canyon Creek Ranch brands, said this year that it was moving to a single supplier for raw materials sourced in China. Dan Fogleman, a spokesman for Tyson, said in an email that in addition to Chinese government oversight, the company deployed “dozens” of food safety and quality assurance workers in its facilities to verify compliance with its standards and existing regulations. Those workers do not report to local management but rather directly to corporate headquarters in Arkansas. “This independence ensures that their function is dedicated solely to food safety and quality monitoring, rather than any financial goals,” Mr. Fogleman wrote. OSI also passed muster with the United States government. The Shanghai plant was inspected by the Agriculture Department in 2004 and 2010 — and given a clean bill of health both times. “The sanitary conditions and general operations of the establishment currently meet FSIS’s requirements and appear to be in compliance with PRC regulatory requirements,” the audit team wrote, referring to the People’s Republic of China. Experts in food safety and plant operations say, however, that even the most rigorous protocols and standards can be undermined by culture, particularly at a fast-growing company — OSI’s revenues doubled between 2011 and 2013 — in a country where high monthly turnover of factory workers is not uncommon. “The average Chinese factory worker comes from someplace where food has likely been scarce and picking up a piece of meat that has dropped on the floor and eating would not be unusual — it’s not unusual for us to drop food on the floor and anyway eat it,” said Andy Tsay, a professor of operations management at Santa Clara University who was one of the authors of a paper on recalls of Chinese made products in 2007. Steve Gruler, chief executive of Global Quality Consultants, a firm that provides risk management advice to a variety of companies, recalled visiting a grain elevator in China where workers were unloading grain onto trucks. “A plume of dust comes from under the door of the elevator and rises up over the truck,” Mr. Gruler said. “Our eyes got about as big as saucers.” Grain dust is highly combustible and such explosions have been deadly. Mr. Gruler and a colleague asked the engineer at the facility whether it had a dust collection system. “Oh, yes, he said, but it had been shut off to conserve electricity,” Mr. Gruler said. “He didn’t understand that dust could cause an explosion that would blow the place apart.” OSI itself acknowledged such challenges in interviews with Professor Bell of Harvard. “When we began building modern broiler houses, we found that the workers often took shortcuts even though every detail was spelled out in the plans,” Stefan Chen, senior vice president and general manager for OSI’s poultry operations in China, told him. “For instance, they would change the size of a window to save material. This seems like a small thing, but it affects the ventilation, which affects the production efficiency.”

China
Food
Meat
OSI Group
Food Safety
Poultry


Sprint Reports Loss on Nextel Write-Down

Abstract: Sprint Nextel , the country’s third-largest wireless carrier, on Thursday reported a wider loss for the second quarter as it wrote down the value of its moribund Nextel network. But Sprint was successful in persuading smartphone subscribers to pay more for the “unlimited data” service, and its service revenue climbed, beating Wall Street’s estimates. The results cheered investors, who sent Sprint’s volatile stock up 20 percent, or 68 cents, to $4.05, its highest level in nearly a year. In the April to June period, Sprint’s net loss was $1.37 billion, or 46 cents a share, compared with a loss of $847 million, or 28 cents a share in the same quarter last year. Analysts polled by FactSet on average had been expecting a loss of 41 cents a share. It was the 19th consecutive quarter of losses for Sprint, which is struggling to compete with its two bigger rivals, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Still, Sprint raised its forecast for adjusted operating earnings for the year by 18 percent. The measure excludes interest expenses and writing down asset values. Sprint’s revenue totaled $8.84 billion, up 6 percent from a year earlier. Analysts were expecting $8.72 billion. Sprint’s goal is to complete the shutdown of Nextel in the middle of next year. It bought the network in 2005, a deal that proved disastrous. Nextel’s strength is its push-to-talk capability, functioning like a walkie-talkie, but it is not built for smartphones or data service. As subscribers abandoned it, Sprint was saddled with the cost of maintaining the network. The company’s chief executive, Dan Hesse, said Thursday that Sprint was ahead of schedule in deactivating Nextel antennas. The company is using the space freed up on the airwaves to make data service faster. Customers on contract-based Sprint plans paid an average of $63.38 a month in the quarter, a record high and nearly as much as AT&T customers are paying, even though AT&T has had the iPhone , which attracts high-paying customers, for a longer time. IPhones proved surprisingly popular at Sprint. It activated 1.5 million of the phones in the quarter, the same number as in the first quarter. AT&T and Verizon had a drop in iPhone activations from the first quarter to the second, as the excitement around the latest model, the iPhone 4S, cooled. Sprint, unlike Verizon or AT&T, still offers unlimited data service, and Mr. Hesse said that was a major reason Sprint keeps attracting iPhone subscribers. However, Sprint offers relatively slow data speeds.

Smartphones
Sprint Nextel Corporation
Cellular Telephones
Company Reports
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)


100 Years Old. 5 World Records.

Abstract: SAN DIEGO — Don Pellmann had been at the San Diego Mesa College track for less than an hour Sunday morning and had already moved his lawn chair twice to remain in the shade, which was receding fast. By the time Pellmann set his fifth age-group world record, in the early afternoon, the temperature on the track was creeping toward 100, which also happens to be the birthday Pellmann recently celebrated. Pellmann, the most senior athlete in the San Diego Senior Olympics, became the first centenarian to break 27 seconds in the 100-meter dash and the first to clear an official height in the high jump. He also broke records for men in the 100-and-over age group in the shot-put and the discus and set a record in the long jump. Wearing baggy shorts and a faded red T-shirt with “Donald Pellmann Established 1915 Milwaukee, WI” written across the front, he opened his program by trying to become the oldest man, by roughly nine years, to record a height in the pole vault. He dislodged the bar three times at 3 feet 1 ¾ inches, which gnawed at him the rest of the day. “I thought I was in better shape,” he said. The meet volunteers, composed of students from San Diego State’s nursing program and Mesa College’s track team, were awed by Pellmann’s fitness level. They sought him out between his events to express their admiration. “He’s very, very steady on his feet, and his posture’s very erect,” Sarah Provencher, one of the nursing students, said. “He doesn’t have as much bone and muscle degeneration as others in his age group. You can see he has really maintained his muscles.” Samantha Foster, 17, a freshman pole-vaulter on the Mesa track team, planted herself so close to the pit that she could hear Pellmann muttering to himself after each of his three vaults. “I love when he says he needs more practice,” she said. “It’s cool to watch him being able to still do this at 100.” His fellow competitors also sought him out for selfies, including 57-year-old Robert Silva, who said, “You see people that are 100 run, but to see someone that age pole-vault or long jump, that’s another galaxy.” Pellmann said he had been a gymnast and a high jumper in his youth. The Depression cut short his athletic career at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, then known as La Crosse State Teachers College. Pellmann said he quit the track team to get a job. After raising three children with his wife, Marge, who is in her early 90s, Pellmann retired from his job with a General Electric subsidiary in 1970. At the urging of one of his children, he entered a masters track meet. He did so well that he kept going. “I’ve been in 127 meets since,” Pellmann said. Before Sunday, two years had passed since Pellmann’s last competition in the pole vault. He used to practice by taking a bamboo stick and jumping into the sandbox at a children’s park, he said, but those days are long gone. “The only time I can practice is at the meets,” said Pellmann, who lives with his wife, who is ailing, in an assisted living home in Santa Clara, Calif. He approached the vaulting pit with trepidation, running with a pole he had borrowed from Nadine O’Connor, 73, who is also a record-setting masters athlete. O’Connor and her partner, Bud Held, a 1952 Olympian in the javelin, live outside San Diego and hosted Pellmann, whom they got to know on the seniors track circuit. Held acted as Pellmann’s coach. In the pole vault, Held urged him to run faster on his approach and consoled him each time he knocked down the bar. “All you’ve got to do is get a little more speed,” Held said. Easy for him to say. Held, after all, is a fit 87. “This is the worst day I’ve had in months,” Pellmann said glumly. He added, “I’m sorry about that pole-vault disaster.” O’Connor slathered Pellmann with sunscreen, plied him with bananas and tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to get him to drink water so he would not become dehydrated. “I don’t want to drink too much because that will make me take a trip to the restroom,” Pellmann said. O’Connor walked off shaking her head. He can be stubborn, she said with a laugh. When she picked him up at the airport Saturday, she said, Pellmann refused a wheelchair and would not let her take the roller bag that he had carried onto the plane. “He doesn’t take any vitamins, and I couldn’t get him to eat anything last night except fried macaroni and cheese,” O’Connor said. Pellmann also refused to warm up or stretch, despite encouragement from Provencher. When she told him she was a nursing student, he joked, “I hope I won’t need you,” and remained rooted in his lawn chair. One of his hearing aids had stopped working, Pellmann said, adding to his misery. “I woke up feeling unwell,” he said. “It could be the traveling. Or it could be old age setting in.” He added, “At this age, each week it goes downhill.” To conserve his energy, Pellmann limited himself to one attempt in the long jump, at 5 feet 10 inches, and then retreated to a closet-size training room off the track. Pellmann had an hour to rest before the 100 meters, his main event. He did not bother to take off his shoes, which were falling apart. His left sock poked through a hole he had cut in the shoe to relieve pain caused by a bunion. Pellmann acknowledged that he had owned the shoes for a long time, but he added, “They’re not quite as old as me.” He was stretched out on a massage table with his eyes closed when Ardy Riego, an athletic trainer at Mesa College, walked in, introduced himself and offered to give Pellmann what turned out to be his first-ever massage. While kneading the muscles in Pellmann’s legs, Riego said, “All I can say is his body is still functioning like a normal person’s body, which is amazing.” Pellmann has not had either knee replaced, and he cannot remember his last injury. “I guess I have pretty good genes,” he said. Image Don Pellmann tried to become the oldest man, by roughly nine years, to record a height in the pole vault. He dislodged the bar three times at 3 feet 1 ¾ inches, which gnawed at him the rest of the day. Credit Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times Gary MacDonald, the track and field commissioner of the San Diego Senior Olympics, suspects that there is more to Pellmann’s athletic longevity than that. MacDonald poked his head into the training room to check on Pellmann and offer him a bottle of water, which Pellmann waved off. “Now I know how he got to be 100,” MacDonald said, laughing. “Because he has an attitude.” As the 100 meters drew nearer, Pellmann grew quieter. “I just hope the massage will help me for my 100,” he said. “The 100 meters is why I came here.” Pellmann had his sights set on the age-group world record of 29.83, set in 2010 by Hidekichi Miyazaki of Japan. At home, he said, he has marked off 100 meters on Pacific Drive, the road outside his home. At least once a week, he sprints the distance and times himself, he said. The other days, he takes long walks. “I’ve done it in 26 seconds, so I should be able to break the world record,” Pellmann said. His heat, which included runners in their 70s, was delayed because a woman in the previous heat fell midway through the race and had to be helped off the track. All of the other runners crouched into the blocks for the start, but Pellmann stood with his hands on slightly bent knees. At the sound of the starter’s gun, Pellmann took off running. The winner of the heat broke 15 seconds. Pellmann was timed in 26.99. “That’s what I wanted,” he said. O’Connor swooped in and guided Pellmann to a spot in the shade. Less than 15 minutes later, she led him to the shot-put area. Pellmann took two throws. His first, which measured 21 feet 6 ¼ inches, counted. It was three feet better than the record. He scratched on the second attempt when he exited the front of the throwing area instead of the back. Pellmann’s fifth event, the high jump, was delayed because the official setting up the event had to be treated for heatstroke. The temperature was over 90 degrees when Pellmann was driven in a cart used to transport hurdles to the other end of the track, where the high jump was set up. One of the other competitors, a man in his 70s, was asked how he had practiced for the event. “By jumping onto my bed,” he said. Pellmann made his first attempt at roughly 2 feet 5 inches. Held had coaxed him to start at that height after Pellmann stated his intention to open at roughly three feet because “if I can’t go three feet, I don’t deserve to be considered for a record.” He cleared the lower height on his first try and made his second height at 2 feet 11 ½ inches on his third. It was his fourth world record in roughly three hours. One of the other high jumpers patted him on the shoulder and said, “That ties Jesse Owens’s record for world records in a single day.” At the 1935 Big Ten track and field championships, Owens tied the world record in the 100-yard dash and broke the world records in the long jump, the 220-yard dash and the 220 low hurdles in less than an hour. Pellmann, who was born two years after Owens, set his fifth world record of the day in the discus. He made three throws and improved his distance each time, ending with a throw of 48 feet 9 inches. After his final attempt, he clung to the netting around the throwing area while catching his breath. Then he returned to his lawn chair and allowed Riego to apply a bag of ice to the back of his neck. Pellmann asked O’Connor if she would collect his gold medals. “I’ve had enough,” he said.

Don Pellmann
Track and field
Longevity
Records and Achievements


‘James Bond of Philanthropy’ Gives Away the Last of His Fortune

Abstract: As it happens, Donald J. Trump is not the only person to announce plans to shut down a personal philanthropy, just the best known. This is the story of a man who made and kept that same promise. Nearly five years ago, Charles F. Feeney sat in a cushy armchair in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan, grandchildren’s artwork taped to the walls, and said that by the end of 2016, he was going to hand out the last of a great fortune that he had made. It was a race: Mr. Feeney was then 81, and Atlantic Philanthropies, a collection of private foundations he had started and funded, still had about $1.5 billion left. Flinging money out the window or writing checks willy-nilly was not Mr. Feeney’s way. Last month, Mr. Feeney and Atlantic completed the sprint and made a final grant, $7 million to Cornell University, to support students doing community service work . He had officially emptied his pockets, meeting his aspiration of “giving while living.” Altogether, he had contributed $8 billion to his philanthropies, which have supported higher education, public health, human rights and scientific research. “You’re always nervous handling so much money, but we seem to have worked it pretty well,” Mr. Feeney, now 85, said last week in a phone interview. His remaining personal net worth is slightly more than $2 million. That’s not quite broke, by any standard, but it is a modest amount for a man who controlled thousands of times as much wealth. He and his wife, Helga, now live in a rented apartment in San Francisco. “You can only wear one pair of pants at a time,” Mr. Feeney has said. Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag. For many years, when in New York, he had lunch not at the city’s luxury restaurants, but in the homey confines of Tommy Makem’s Irish Pavilion on East 57th Street, where he ate the burgers. None of the major American philanthropists have given away a greater proportion of their wealth , and starting in 1982, Mr. Feeney did most of this in complete secrecy, leading Forbes magazine to call him the “James Bond of philanthropy.” His name does not appear in gilded letters, chiseled marble or other forms of writing anywhere on the 1,000 buildings across five continents that $2.7 billion of his money paid for. For years, Atlantic’s support came with a requirement that the beneficiaries not publicize its involvement. Beyond Mr. Feeney’s reticence about blowing his own horn, “it was also a way to leverage more donations — some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights,” said Christopher G. Oechsli, the president and chief executive officer of Atlantic. During the early 1990s, Mr. Feeney met secretly with paramilitary forces in Belfast, Northern Ireland, urging them to drop armed guerrilla conflict and promising financial support if they embraced electoral politics. Atlantic grants paid to create a public health system in Vietnam, and to provide access to antiretroviral treatment for AIDS in southern Africa. The last rounds of grants, about $600 million, included support for Atlantic Fellows , described as young emerging leaders working in their countries for healthier, more equitable societies. Raised in Elizabeth, N.J., Mr. Feeney served as a radio operator in the Air Force and attended Cornell University on the G.I. Bill. In 1960, he and a partner set up a company that sold items like brandy and cigars to travelers in duty-free shops at airports. It became a booming success. Mr. Feeney has also been a shrewd investor in technology start-ups. In 1984, he secretly transferred all of his assets, including his 38.75 percent ownership of the duty-free business, to Atlantic Philanthropies. He grew the Atlantic pot with early investments in companies like Facebook, Priceline, E-Trade, Alibaba and Legent. A business dispute in 1997 forced disclosure of Mr. Feeney’s funding for Atlantic. As for Mr. Trump, if he really does shut down his foundation — stung by inquiries about the use of foundation money to pay Mr. Trump’s personal liabilities, or purchase football helmet memorabilia, or oil paintings of himself — he is not likely to follow the Feeney model. The two men are mirror images. For years, Mr. Trump lobbied hard to get onto lists of the wealthy, like the Forbes 400; Mr. Feeney has tried to stay off them. The Atlantic endowment came entirely from Mr. Feeney’s money; much of the money that went into the Trump foundation in recent years was from others. One of Atlantic’s projects was to propose reforms to the American health care system, which helped lay groundwork for the Affordable Care Act; another was advocacy for the end of the death penalty for juveniles. Mr. Trump has been on the other side of both of those issues, vowing to “dismantle Obamacare on Day 1,” and calling, in 1989, for the restoration of the death penalty after five teenagers were arrested in the rape of a jogger in Central Park. (They were convicted but later cleared of the charges.) Just as Mr. Trump was opening Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in the early 1980s, Mr. Feeney was a few blocks away in Makem’s pub, thinking about the first big checks he would write for charity, on the condition that his identity not be disclosed. “I don’t recall ever meeting Trump,” Mr. Feeney said last week. No wonder. The thought crossed my mind 20 years ago that Chuck Feeney is what Donald Trump would be, if he lived his entire existence backward.

Philanthropy
Atlantic Philanthropies
Donald Trump
Charles F Feeney


Little Cambodia, Growing Still Littler

Abstract: VIBOL SOK SUNGKRIEM, a 31-year-old aspiring filmmaker, had invited a few friends over for dinner, and his apartment just east of the New York Botanical Garden was flooded with camaraderie and the aroma of spicy Southeast Asian food. Like Mr. Sungkriem, who wears a whisper of a mustache and favors baggy clothes, most of the half-dozen guests were Cambodians who came to New York as refugees in the 1980s. Over katiev, a spicy Cambodian noodle soup made with beef, shrimp and fish balls, they told stories about escaping from Khmer Rouge soldiers in Cambodia as they fled to refugee camps in Thailand. They talked about running from thugs on Fordham Road when they were younger, when violence was a fact of everyday life in many Bronx neighborhoods. As they ate, Mr. Sungkriem opened his laptop and switched on its video instant messaging so that two absent friends could join the party. Within the past few years, both had moved from New York to Cambodian communities elsewhere in the country; one, a police officer, to Los Angeles, for a better job, the other to Stockton, Calif., after a particularly harrowing mugging. Those two departures tell a broader tale. Not long ago, Mr. Sungkriem and his friends held such parties frequently. But since the mid-’90s, a growing number of Cambodians have left the city, and the parties are held less often. Data from the 2000 census shows that the city’s Cambodian population decreased by 31 percent from 1990 to 2000. According to a census analysis by the Hmong Studies Internet Resource Center, the decline occurred as nearly all the country’s other Cambodian communities were expanding. At the high-water mark of 1990, census figures show, 2,565 Cambodians lived in the city, primarily in the Fordham, University Heights and Bronx Park East sections of the Bronx. Most were refugees who were resettled in New York after fleeing the repressive Khmer Rouge regime, which fell in 1979 and claimed nearly two million lives. According to an analysis of 2005 numbers prepared by the Census Bureau, barely 1,000 Cambodians then remained in the city. “Everybody is leaving,” Mr. Sungkriem said recently at an IHOP restaurant near his apartment. “It used to be if you walk down Fordham Road, you would bump into lots of Cambodians walking or shopping. Now you can be driving up and down all day, and you never see any.” Trials are finally expected to start sometime this year for five major Khmer Rouge figures who were detained and will face a special tribunal backed by the United Nations, but many of New York’s dwindling number of Cambodians are focusing on more immediate problems. “In the ’80s, people didn’t understand what Cambodians were,” Mr. Sungkriem said. “They just called us Chinos. But if you said you were a gangster, you were a star. A lot of people have grown out of that, though, and there are no jobs, no community services. So a lot of people left.” Among those eager to leave is Paul Keo, 36, who moved to the Bronx when he was 11 and grew up with Mr. Sungkriem. Mr. Keo, who recently married, works as a technical administrator for Pratt Institute, and the other day, dressed in corduroy pants, fleece jacket and running shoes, he could easily have been mistaken for a Pratt student, save for the ring of keys on his belt. Although he enjoys his work, he is increasingly weighing the options. “The community here is broken,” he said in an empty Pratt classroom. “I really don’t want my children to grow up in the same difficult environment I did.” FOR many Cambodians who came to the city in the ’80s, the high school years were tainted by crime and violence, and poor schools left them prepared only for the manufacturing jobs that had already begun leaving the city. Mr. Keo said his solution was to “steal” his education. “After high school,” he said, “I would go to colleges and sit in on classes and observe the material without registering.” The problems of Cambodians in New York were compounded because the community, small to begin with, became established during a decade when the city struggled on many fronts. “The violence they experienced during the Khmer Rouge was similar to the violence they saw every day in the Bronx,” said Chhaya Chhoum, director of the Youth Leadership Project at CAAAV, formerly the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence. “So they were never able to move away from their trauma.” The group occupies a former convent on Valentine Avenue near Fordham Road that it plans to make a Southeast Asian cultural center. In the turbulent Bronx, few of the Cambodian cultural, religious and community centers that have formed in places like Long Beach, Calif., Lowell, Mass., and Minneapolis took root. Groups like the Vietnamese fared better. Although many of them came to the Bronx roughly around the same time as the Cambodians, they arrived in larger numbers. And unlike the Cambodians, a culturally isolated people, the Vietnamese forged bonds with the city’s large Chinese population, with whom they share cultural ties. One result of the exodus of the city’s Cambodians is a widening generation gap. Cambodians who remain in New York tend to be older and in failing health; those who leave are typically younger emigrés who attended school in the United States and have the ability or the resources to find jobs elsewhere, often in hotels or garment factories. One emigré, Siek Chanty, 51, who is unemployed and spends time at the center, said she wanted to leave the Bronx but had nowhere to go. Many who were separated from their families during the war have located relatives in places like California or Texas. But, Ms. Chanty said through an interpreter, “I haven’t found anyone.”

Cambodia
Census
Population
Immigration and Refugees


Sometimes Woods Is Down, Although Never on Himself

Abstract: MARANA, Ariz. — With the sun sinking slowly over the desert moonscape, it was time to cue the theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Tiger Woods had one foot in the desert waste and another down the road in Tombstone. Three down with five holes to play Wednesday in his match against J. B. Holmes, he was on the verge of a most untimely departure in the first round of the Accenture Match Play Championship. Unless Woods could mount his biggest comeback in a match-play event as a professional and his best since he came back from 2 down with three holes to play in the finals of the 1996 United States Amateur Championship, the No. 1 golfer in the world was done. Well, guess what? Peering into a Grand Canyon-size hole he had dug for himself, Woods summoned the indefinable something that he seems to reserve for just such moments: timing, karma, kismet, luck, destiny, skill, good fortune. Whatever. He went on one of his patented runs starting at No. 14, with three birdies in a row and an eagle. With putts of 14, 17, 22 and 36 feet, he roared to a 1-up victory, turning the dazed, 25-year-old Holmes into roadkill, one of 32 golfers eliminated in the first round. Joining Woods in the second round were the No. 2 seed, Phil Mickelson, who outlasted Pat Perez, 1-up, and No. 3 Steve Stricker, who defeated Daniel Chopra in 20 holes. Ernie Els, the No. 4 seed, fell by 6 and 5 to Jonathan Byrd for his fourth consecutive first-round exit. “I just kept telling myself, even when I was 3 down, that I still had a chance to win in regulation,” Woods said. “I was just going to have to play a hell of a lot better. All of a sudden, putts started falling in from everywhere.” Holmes had taken advantage of three mistakes by Woods — an off-the-map drive that led to a bogey at No. 1, a missed green resulting in a bogey at No. 9 and another wide-right drive into the desert at No. 13. But he was helpless to stop the Woods onslaught. “I got beat,” Holmes said. “Playing the best player in the world, 3 up with five holes to play, I just told myself: ‘Don’t do anything stupid. Make him beat you.’ And he did. He started making tons of putts. What can you do?” Not much, really. When he was 2 down, Woods hit his drive at No. 13 where the rattlesnakes play — way right, into a pile of sagebrush by a saguaro. He took an unplayable lie, slashed a long iron short of the green and then nearly holed his pitch shot from 30 yards, skimming the edge. The bogey was his last real mistake. Holmes made only one of his own, three-putting the 15th hole before Woods inadvertently sank a 17-footer he was trying to lag. Holmes had a chance to square the match at the 18th, but missed an 8-footer. While all this was going on two groups ahead, Perez had gamely fought his way back into the match with Mickelson, going from 2-down to all square by holing two monster putts in a row, the first from 49 feet at No. 14 and the second from 40 feet at the 15th. Mickelson came right back with one of his own, a 35-footer at the 16th, to retake the lead for good. “It was a good feeling to watch it go in and respond to the two he had made,” Mickelson said. “That was the best way to respond was with that putt going in.” Even before the late theatrics by Woods and the Mickelson-Perez exchange, putts were diving into the hole like prairie dogs, from one end of the course to the other. Woody Austin, a match-play rookie, set the tone early in his match with Toru Taniguchi with four consecutive birdies to open the match he eventually won, 6 and 5. “It was pretty much a dream matchup for me as far as the way I played,” Austin said. “I just got off to the best start I could possibly get off to. I did what I was supposed to in match play — I never gave him a hole.” Examples of the good far outstripped the bad. In the day’s best-played match, Paul Casey was nine under par and beat his friend and Ryder Cup teammate Robert Karlsson, who was seven under, 2 up. The good: Boo Weekley birdied four holes in a row — 10 through 13 — in his 2 and 1 victory over Martin Kaymer, and Padraig Harrington birdied 7 of 15 holes in his 4 and 3 victory against Jerry Kelly. For the final example of ugly, there was the tee shot by the defending champion, Henrik Stenson, who — needing only to halve the last hole to win his match with Robert Allenby — sent his drive into the left desert. “Hit a pull, heely, low, scabby, amateur shot,” is how he described it. But he found the ball and managed to send it back into the fairway, 188 yards from the hole. He hit that to just outside 5 feet and made the putt for the par and the victory, the ugliest of the day.

Accenture Limited
Golf
Woods Tiger
Holmes J B
Athletics and Sports


As a Distracted Brazil Mourns, Lawmakers Gut a Corruption Bill

Abstract: RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil was still mourning the victims of one of its most agonizing sports tragedies, the crash of a plane carrying the Chapecoense soccer team . But the country’s scandal-plagued Congress had its own priorities: gutting what was supposed to be a pioneering anticorruption bill. Shortly after President Michel Temer declared three days of official mourning for the victims of the crash, Brazilian legislators held a marathon session that went into early Wednesday. The result: legislation that could significantly erode the authority of prosecutors and judges who are investigating politicians in corruption cases. “It was disrespectful to have voted on this on a day of mourning,” said Andrew Moreira do Nascimento, 28, the co-owner of a restaurant in São Paulo. “The focus was completely off them because of Chapecoense, and they took advantage. We’re represented by people whose own interests are their main concern.” Many members of Brazil’s lower house are facing graft cases of their own. By watering down the anticorruption bill, they not only stirred the anger of their constituents but also set up a clash with the judiciary, heightening tensions among branches of the federal government. “This move is an attack on Brazilian democracy,” said Roberto Veloso, the president of Brazil’s Association of Federal Judges. “They had to do it at night, as Brazilians were sleeping after a day of mourning. By weakening the judiciary, legislators are strengthening those who profit from corruption in this country.” The vote reflects how Brazil’s political class is growing increasingly fearful as huge graft inquiries advance, including the investigation into a sweeping bribery scheme at the national oil company, Petrobras. Just last week, legislators tried to rewrite the same bill to grant amnesty to themselves and others ensnared in corruption cases involving political campaigns, provoking a widespread outcry. Though the lower house had to abandon that amnesty measure, legislators reconfigured the bill to introduce penalties against prosecutors and judges for “crimes of responsibility,” such as disrespecting lawyers for defendants in a courtroom. While the legislation still needs Senate approval, judges warn that it would erode the independence of the judiciary, potentially opening the way for an institutional crisis. Legislators also rewrote the bill to reject measures aimed at allowing prosecutors to reach more plea deals and enhance the power of the judicial authorities to seize assets of civil servants in graft cases. They also altered the bill to maintain statutes of limitations allowing many corrupt politicians to avoid jail time. After voting ended around 4 a.m., Rodrigo Maia, the speaker of the lower house and an ally of Mr. Temer, called the vote “the democratic result of the legislature.” Brazil’s Senate had already faced protesters ’ burning cars and smashing windows when they approved a cap on federal spending on Tuesday. The austerity measure was championed by Mr. Temer, whose allies ousted President Dilma Rousseff this year. Mr. Temer is facing one of the most difficult periods of his fledgling government. He became embroiled in a corruption scandal in recent days after a former minister in his cabinet accused him of exerting pressure to assist a top ally in a property deal. The ally, Geddel Vieira Lima, resigned from his cabinet-level post as government secretary. But since then, the political opposition has begun maneuvering to start impeachment proceedings against Mr. Temer. Hélio Bicudo, a legal scholar and an author of the request to impeach Ms. Rousseff, has said that Mr. Temer should be impeached as well. As the political drama intensifies once again, many Brazilians wondered aloud how their elected representatives could prioritize such tone-deaf legislation. But there seemed to be broad consensus in the lower house of Congress regarding the bill, with legislators approving its rewriting by wide margins. Josías de Souza, a prominent political columnist, described the vote as an act of “vengeance” against the judiciary. “At a time when there’s a hunger for cleaning up the country, the Brazilian legislature labored until dawn to show what they’re made of,” he said.

Brazil
Corruption
Michel Temer
Legislature


Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Softens Accusations Against Reformists in Iran

Abstract: CAIRO — Iran ’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , appears to have undercut President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ’s attempt to convict dozens of former government officials, journalists and academics of collaborating with the West to overthrow the government, saying a connection had not been proved. But Ayatollah Khamenei has stood by the government’s position that foreign forces orchestrated the postelection protests that gripped the country after Mr. Ahmadinejad claimed a landslide victory in the disputed presidential election in June. “I don’t accuse the leaders of the recent incidents of being affiliated with foreign countries, including the U.S. and Britain, since the issue has not been proven for me,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in a meeting with a group of university students in Tehran on Wednesday, according to Iranian news services . “But there is no doubt that the events were planned, no matter whether their leaders knew it or not.” The comments, while appearing to throw the brakes on the most damaging charges against those under arrest, fit neatly with Ayatollah Khamenei’s track record of moving to reinforce his authority by cultivating divisions between factions. It also appeared to be a first step toward trying to reclaim a position as the fair arbiter, a standing badly damaged by his handling of the election dispute, political analysts said. While he has shown no support for rescuing the reform movement from its current political impotence, he has alternated allegiances within the hard-line factions, nurturing tension between various arms of the state. He appointed Sadeq Larijani, a member of the hard-line camp who is an adversary of the president, as head of the judiciary. He appointed a cleric, Kazem Sedighi, who is also a rival of the president, as a new leader of Friday Prayer. And on Thursday, there were more unconfirmed reports that Ayatollah Khamenei had fired the Tehran prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi , who was close to the president and was responsible for orchestrating the mass trials of those accused of plotting a so-called velvet revolution. “Khamenei has always ruled from a position of insecurity,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He’s wary of capable, independent-minded people who could one day challenge his authority, and has tried to ensure his pre-eminence by selecting subordinates who are absolutely loyal to him but opposed to one another.” Ayatollah Khamenei’s comments were the latest in a series of small, if significant, steps that appeared aimed at slowing Mr. Ahmadinejad’s drive to consolidate power and define members of the reform movement as enemies of the state. There is even the suggestion, some political analysts said, that the supreme leader has begun to grow weary of Mr. Ahmadinejad, especially after the president resisted his demand not to appoint Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei as vice president. Mr. Mashaei was eventually appointed the president’s chief of staff. In his comments, Ayatollah Khamenei suggested that the protest leaders were duped, rather than conspirators, and in so doing signaled that, for now, he would not go along with calls for arresting top reform leaders like Mir Hussein Moussavi, Mehdi Karroubi or Mohammad Khatami, a former president. “His confrontation with Ahmadinejad did not leave a good taste in his mouth, over the appointment with Mashaei,” said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. “He is stuck with Ahmadinejad, and he is stuck with the Revolutionary Guard and their daily demands to arrest Moussavi. He is trying to calm them down.” The leadership on Thursday appeared to be moving to blunt some of the more serious charges against it — including that prisoners were treated badly, tortured and even raped — while amplifying the leader’s notion that reform figures were pawns in the postelection crisis and therefore should be pardoned. A former vice president, Muhammad Ali Abtahi, whose noticeable weight loss has raised concerns over his treatment, was allowed for the first time since his arrest to post remarks on his popular blog . It said the election was clean and the protests were organized by outsiders. “I know that around me many of my friends are imprisoned,” Mr. Abtahi wrote. “Here and there I have heard some names. I think we all share in the hardship of prison and are confused about being here. But we can understand why they have arrested us.” Mr. Abtahi also wrote about his personal anguish — missing his daughter’s college graduation and his granddaughter’s first steps. “Loneliness,” he wrote, “is very painful.”

Iran
Prisons and Prisoners
Khamenei Ali
Ahmadinejad Mahmoud
Political Prisoners


Mayor de Blasio’s Poll Ratings Rise as He Adjusts His Image

Abstract: Mayor Bill de Blasio ’s approval rating has ticked up amid his concerted effort to convey a more forceful public image, and he now receives positive marks from half of New York City voters, a Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday found. But support for Mr. de Blasio, who garnered a 50 percent job approval rating, remains polarized along racial lines, and voters are split on whether he deserves to win a second term in 2017. Black and Hispanic voters approve of the mayor by large margins, but two-thirds of whites disapprove. A modest plurality of voters said Mr. de Blasio, who is a Democrat, deserved to win a second term. Forty-eight percent said he should be re-elected; 44 percent said he should not. The poll would seem to allay fears, at least for now, that Mr. de Blasio’s political position might deteriorate precipitously, buckling under persistent criticism of his management style and his response to a spike in homelessness. An Oct. 29 poll by Quinnipiac showed him with a 45 percent approval rating. Mayoral advisers have long argued that Mr. de Blasio has a solid foundation of support from black and Hispanic voters and from the most liberal whites. That foundation appears mostly intact. Mr. de Blasio has sought to quiet criticism of his leadership abilities in recent weeks, adopting a more intense public schedule of events around the city where he has highlighted his administration’s accomplishments. Karen Hinton, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said in an email that he was uninterested in his poll numbers. “Mayor de Blasio will continue to build on the accomplishments of the last two years,” Ms. Hinton said. “All New Yorkers are benefiting, and that is what matters to him.” The telephone poll was conducted Jan. 11 to 17, surveying 1,143 city voters. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. While more voters viewed Mr. de Blasio in basically positive terms, few gave him glowing reviews. Asked to rate his performance with a letter grade, only 11 percent gave him an A. The most common letter grade was a B, issued by 37 percent of voters, including nearly half of Democrats. Half gave Mr. de Blasio a C or worse. On the issues, voters divided almost evenly on Mr. de Blasio’s handling of education and the budget. Most disapproved of his management of the Police Department, and of relations between the police and the community. By solid margins, voters said Mr. de Blasio was honest and trustworthy and understood the problems of people like them. It is unclear whether Mr. de Blasio will face a formidable opponent for re-election. The poll found he would hold a wide lead over two possible opponents, Raymond W. Kelly, a former police commissioner, and Ruben Diaz Jr., the Bronx borough president, if either man ran as an independent. Mr. de Blasio had a narrower edge over Scott M. Stringer, a Democrat who is the city comptroller. If Mr. Stringer ran as an independent, Mr. de Blasio would start out with 44 percent of the vote against 33 percent for Mr. Stringer. But Mr. Stringer is seen as likelier to challenge Mr. de Blasio for the Democratic nomination than to run as an independent, if he runs at all. The poll did not test any matchups in a Democratic primary.

Polls
Bill de Blasio
Voting
Quinnipiac University
NYC


Finland Regains Top Spot in World Hockey Championships

Abstract: Host Finland, the defending champion, regained the top spot in its group at the world championships in Helsinki with a 5-2 win over Switzerland. Valtteri Filppula Jarkko Immonen each scored twice.


Exulting in Science’s Mysteries

Abstract: A selection from the prolific, provocative work of Richard Dawkins . On Atheism We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. “Snake Oil and Holy Water,” in Forbes magazine, 1999 Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do. “The God Delusion,” 2006 On Science The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. “Unweaving the Rainbow,” 1998 On Evolution It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn’t work. “Climbing Mount Improbable,” 1996 The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. “The Blind Watchmaker,” 1986 On a Scientific Rival Adaptation to the weather, to the inanimate vicissitudes of ice ages and droughts, may well not be progressive: just an aimless tracking of unprogressively meandering climatic variables. But adaptation to the biotic environment is likely to be progressive because enemies, unlike the weather, themselves evolve. Review of “Full House,” by Stephen Jay Gould, in the journal Evolution, 1997 On Selflessness We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. “The Selfish Gene,” 1976 On What Lies Ahead My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. Time magazine, 2006

Atheism
Evolution
Dawkins Richard
Science and Technology


Review: The Grey Lady Opens in Montauk

Abstract: The term “Gray Lady” is not just a nickname for this publication. It’s also used, often with the alternative spelling of “grey,” to describe the island of Nantucket when shrouded in fog. This salt-and-sea image — rather than the ink-stained one — is the concept behind a small upscale chain of New England-style restaurants, which serve straightforward seafood dishes in casually stylish settings. Grey Lady locations, however, are anything but casual. With outposts in Aspen, Nantucket, Manhattan, and now Montauk, this is a Lady with expensive taste in real estate. Anyone who’s been to one of these restaurants knows that owners Callum McLaughlin and Ryan Chadwick have a great eye for décor. Each address has an aesthetic that embraces its region, and the Montauk branch, which opened Memorial Day weekend, is no exception. The tiled floors reveal a convincing driftwood motif; the seating is padded in beachy blue and white stripes; and the walls are adorned with gorgeous black and white photographs of vintage seascapes. An outdoor patio sets you dockside to Lake Montauk. The large tile bar is beautifully put together, too, painted Riviera blue and framed by stainless steel fixtures. The inventive cocktail list includes a coconut margarita and — for those wishing to get things going quickly — a Grey Lady sangria, which features a walloping dose of tequila. Image The calamari appetizer. Credit Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times Once the food starts coming, though, there are times when you can see a new restaurant still working out its kinks. An appetizer of tuna tartare, for example, was mysteriously studded with quinoa, giving the dish an odd sandy texture, and the harissa seasoning failed to provide zip. The New England clam chowder — a dish that any Grey Lady restaurant needs to knock out of the park — was also disappointing; it had an overly thick, porridge-like consistency. However, a scallop appetizer was brilliant. Two meaty scallops were seared rare and served with a date jam and mustard crème fraîche, then sprinkled with bacon bits and English peas; it was a knockout combination of taste and texture. And we loved the extremely tender Point Judith calamari, which was fried with crispy brussels sprouts, and served with an excellent tahini rémoulade. The entrees could be quite good as well. A flaky roasted cod was served with a leek and herb Johnnycake and creamy corn chowder. And the all-important lobster roll was a more-than-solid interpretation, arriving with a heaping amount of lobster meat on a toasted brioche bun with a side of hand-cut fries. Image The lobster roll with hand-cut fries. Credit Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times Then there is the lionfish. If you don’t know already, this predatory species depletes local fish and shrimp populations and has been invading western Atlantic waters . Eating lionfish is good for the oceans. Judging from this kitchen’s preparation, it is also pretty tasty, having a flavor and texture close to black sea bass. Two seared fillets were served on a cooling salad of baby spinach and melon, though the fish portion was startlingly small, coming in somewhere, I would guess, at around five ounces. The lionfish entree may be unique and helpful to the environment, but for $32 you would hope for more than just a few meager bites. There was also a pan-roasted local tilefish with a crab meat, red pepper, and mascarpone cream sauce; it was delicious even if there was twice as much sauce on the plate as seemed necessary. The meat entrees included a very good pan-roasted half chicken, boneless and seasoned with a tasty Dijon-maple glaze. Hanger steak was grilled and served with a nice burned onion and manchego crema, but accompanied by a bland side of farro and wilted spinach. There had been a single dessert on our first visit — an excellent panna cotta with fresh berries. This may be by design, the idea being to keep tables turning. In order for that to happen, however, the restaurant will have to iron out some rough spots, which can include lengthy waits between courses. No doubt these professional restaurateurs will set things straight. In the meantime, for this Grey Lady, the fog has not entirely lifted.