How Argentina Settled a Billion-Dollar Debt Dispute With Hedge Funds

Abstract: The Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan has long been a location for secret diplomacy, but few meetings there would have seemed as unlikely as the one that took place one day in early December. In a hotel conference room, a top Argentine politician drank coffee with two hedge fund executives — a meeting that was nothing short of remarkable after more than a decade of bitter legal skirmishes between Argentina and a group of disgruntled debt holders who at one point seized an Argentine Navy ship. The previous Buenos Aires government reviled the hedge funds as “vultures.” That meeting on Dec. 7 between Luis Caputo, who days later would be sworn in as Argentina’s finance secretary, and Jonathan Pollock and Jay Newman from Elliott Management , the $27 billion hedge fund founded by Paul E. Singer, was the start of a rapprochement leading to a momentous debt deal that has now allowed Argentina to rejoin the global financial markets that it had been locked out of for 15 years. Last week, Argentina successfully sold $16.5 billion in bonds to international investors, a record amount for any developing country. And on Friday, Elliott and the other bondholders finally received their reward in the form of billions of dollars in repayment, representing returns worth multiple times their original investments. “Today, we have put a definitive close to this chapter,” Alfonso Prat-Gay, Argentina’s economic minister, told an Argentine radio station on Friday. The negotiations that led to the deal were set in motion by the election in November of President Mauricio Macri, who ran on a promise to reignite Argentina’s flailing economy. Striking a deal with the country’s aggrieved bondholders was central to getting that done. How Argentina and the hedge funds were able to break the long stalemate and reach a deal in a matter of weeks is a story of furious back-channeling and clashes that nearly derailed an agreement. Details of those negotiations have emerged from interviews with eight people who were involved in those meetings, as well as court filings and emails reviewed by The New York Times. Many of those people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. There were moments when the talks nearly fell apart. Three days before a deal was signed with Elliott, Mr. Caputo, exasperated by a back-and-forth with bondholders over whether they would return government assets they had seized, emailed the court-appointed mediator: “THIS IS A JOKE; NO DEAL.” That mediator, Daniel Pollack — who had not previously met Mr. Pollock at Elliott — was appointed by the court in June 2014 and played a central role in the final negotiations. Indeed, hours before his December assignation with the Elliott executives, Mr. Caputo had been just a few blocks down Park Avenue at the offices of the McCarter & English law firm. There, he introduced himself to Mr. Pollack, a prominent trial lawyer best known for arguing two landmark mutual fund cases before the United States Supreme Court in 1979 and 1983. Mediating in closed-door negotiations, Mr. Pollack cajoled both sides, at times resorting to theatrical moves like getting a court order to summon Mr. Singer, the founder of Elliott, to his office. Mr. Pollack’s rule of no pens and paper during crucial negotiations frustrated some, with two hedge fund managers complaining privately that the mediator was an obstacle to the settlement process. Others spoke highly of Mr. Pollack’s ability to get a deal in a matter of weeks. “You have to give Dan Pollack immense credit for creating an environment where, if they wanted to, they could get together and have a discussion,” said Michael Straus, a principal at Montreux Partners and one of the first in the group originally led by NML Capital, a unit of Elliott, to sign a deal. Elliott executives also formed their own back channel, forged with an influential Argentine businessman, Marcos Mindlin, whom they met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. At times, Mr. Mindlin, who is managing director of Pampa Energía , one of Argentina’s biggest energy companies, was used to communicate with Argentina’s negotiators. Image Luis Caputo, now Argentina’s finance secretary, attended a secret meeting with two hedge fund executives in December. Credit Kena Betancur/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Despite the groundwork that had been laid, formal negotiations got off to a rocky start. At a news conference in Davos, President Macri had insisted that Argentina’s proposal would be made public. So on Feb. 1, when Argentine officials presented an informal agreement to a group of six hedge funds — Elliott’s NML Capital unit, Aurelius Capital Management, EM Ltd., Montreux Partners, Bracebridge Capital and Davidson Kempner — several people in the room loudly protested the public approach. But two of the firms, Montreux Partners and EM, accepted Argentina’s proposal. EM’s deal, which was signed by its lawyer, Kenneth E. Johns, had been written out on a piece of notepad paper. Argentina struck another deal that same week to pay $1.35 billion to a group of Italian investors who were holding defaulted bonds. The other four main bondholders instead submitted a document outlining their terms and the conditions of any agreement. Undeterred, on Feb. 5, Argentina publicly announced an offer to pay $6.5 billion to the holdout bondholders. “After a 15-year legal battle we’re going to agree to a long-form napkin?” Mr. Pollock said in an interview, referring to the deal with Montreux Partners and explaining the initial reluctance. He added that he had a duty to his investors to negotiate something more secure. The core group of bondholders, led by NML, remained obstinate. In a recent interview, Mr. Pollack, the mediator, said that the bondholders had wanted to turn negotiations into a complex debt restructuring, while he argued that a business transaction would be simpler. The holdouts were deeply cynical, he recalled. Argentina’s recent history was still fresh on their minds. The populist administration of Mr. Macri’s predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, had an economy minister with Marxist leanings who lectured bondholders that they would never get more than 30 cents for every dollar of their bonds. “If you are at war long enough, it’s very difficult to shift to a mode of peace,” Mr. Pollack said. Concerned that they would not be able to get a deal with the conditions they wanted, one Elliott executive met with Mr. Mindlin on Feb. 17 in New York and expressed his concerns over dinner. The following day, Mr. Mindlin spoke with Mario Quintana, the secretary of the government’s economic cabinet. Argentina representatives met with bondholders later that day. On Feb. 19, Judge Thomas P. Griesa of Federal District Court in Manhattan, who presided over the dispute in the courts, dealt a blow to the remaining holdouts by agreeing to lift an injunction that prevented Argentina from making any bond payments or raising new money. Under his ruling, Judge Griesa had set a deadline of Feb. 29 for any deal to be recognized. While the economic terms of the deal with the holdouts had been agreed upon, some of the smaller details were still in dispute . After several frantic meetings and heated discussions over conditions, including that the hedge funds continue to have a say in Argentina’s future domestic market fund-raising, NML, Aurelius, Davidson Kempner and Bracebridge signed a deal on Feb. 28 . In the agreement, Argentina agreed to pay $4.65 billion to the hedge funds, which included bond principal, interest and “certain legal fees and expenses incurred.” Two days earlier, Mr. Pollack, the mediator, requested that Judge Griesa sign an order summoning Mr. Pollock and Mr. Singer of Elliott to his offices. On Friday, Argentina paid all of the holdout creditors who had agreed to deals — a total of $9.3 billion, the economy ministry said. Elliott received $2.4 billion, a 392 percent return on the original value of the bonds, according to the ministry. Writing to Elliott employees hours later, Mr. Singer thanked them for “persisting through this lengthy, complicated and contentious process.”

Argentina
Debt
Hedge fund
Luis Caputo
Elliott Management
Mauricio Macri
Aurelius Capital Management
Government bond
Daniel A. Pollack


From New Jersey, Schmooze Express Heads to Nation's Capital

Abstract: Correction Appended WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 - The annual pilgrimage for New Jersey's political and business establishments known as the Schmooze Express, a four-hour convention-on-rails, started on Thursday in Newark, picked up passengers at Trenton and other stops and then disgorged them in the nation's capital. The trip was the first for Jon S. Corzine in his incarnation as governor, and, given his warnings about the state's troubled budget and his focus on ethics reform, it might as well have been called the No-Nonsense Special. There were far fewer souvenirs than usual being handed out by lobbyists, business interests and nonprofit institutions, although Kean University gave away vinyl tote bags emblazoned with its name, and a new lobbying firm, Mulroy, LiCausi & Gibbs, distributed computer memory storage devices. There were also only a few legislators and hardly any candidates for political office, compared with previous years when the governor and the State Legislature were up for election. "There's been a lot of talk that the new pay-to-play laws might have something to do with the slight shrinkage in turnout," said Darryl Jeffries, the vice president for public relations of Bruno Associates, a consulting firm in Clifton, N.J. "It's still a festive atmosphere, but a bit less obsessive with the carousing and all that." Whatever the case, those who made it to Car No. 9 of the 18-car train could find Mr. Corzine in his trademark navy sweater vest, talking about the state's imperiled Transportation Trust Fund with one person and the New Jersey Supreme Court with another. "He's a smart guy, and I think he actually wants to make something happen," said Kevin J. McMahon, the chief executive of Edwards and Kelcey, an engineering firm in Morristown, N.J. Mr. McMahon said he was surprised by Mr. Corzine's eagerness to talk sober policy on a trip where not everyone was necessarily sober. The trip, sponsored by the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, cost a minimum of $560. Most passengers also spent the night here to hear speeches by Mr. Corzine and others and attend parties and receptions given by businesses and groups that do business in the state capital. Though no state officials face election this year, several candidates for other offices walked through the train. And so did State Senator Thomas H. Kean Jr., the namesake son of a popular former governor and the presumptive Republican candidate for United States Senate. He handed out buttons with his slogan, "T2." Correction: February 7, 2006, Tuesday A picture caption on Friday about the Schmooze Express, an annual pilgrimage to Washington for New Jersey's political and business establishments, used an erroneous spelling in some copies for the given name of one passenger, a candidate for mayor of Newark. He is Cory Booker, not Corey.

NEW JERSEY
ELECTIONS
NEW JERSEY CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
WASHINGTON (DC)
UNITED STATES POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT
RAILROADS
LAW AND LEGISLATION
LOBBYING AND LOBBYISTS


Losses Signal Gains at HSBC

Abstract: HSBC is getting back to form. A sharp fall in losses at the bank’s American operations, coupled with a strong performance from its investment bank, helped drive a doubling in first-half earnings from the same period in 2009. The negative impact of impairments in the behemoth’s troubled personal financial services business in the United States shrank. Declining credit losses in Latin America and Europe also raised its profit. Lower loan losses will, however, take HSBC only so far. Fortunately, it is also showing growth in the right places. Its investment bank generated revenue of $10.8 billion, the division’s second-best performance ever. It made more in the heady first half of 2009, when share and bond issues were flying off the shelves and there were bumper profits to be made on the trading floor. But HSBC is now making more money in investment banking than it did before the crisis. Few banks can make that claim. Meanwhile, revenue is growing nicely at HSBC’s Asian commercial businesses and falling sharply in its American retail unit, which is being wound down. That shift is a healthy rebalancing of activities toward higher-growth markets. Still, there is only so much HSBC can do on its own. While the low interest rate environment is helping borrowers, it is a drag on HSBC’s earnings. The bank’s net interest margin, the difference between its interest income and financing costs, fell to 2.8 percent, from 3.1 percent in the first half last year. Over all, the profit rebound allowed HSBC to increase its Tier 1 ratio of capital to assets by 0.7 percentage point, to 11.5 percent, during the first half, despite paying out around $2 billion in dividends. Yet that hefty capital base makes it harder for HSBC to make money. The first-half return on equity, at 9.3 percent, is well below its 15 to 19 percent target. If its American business moves back into profit and other positive trends continue, HSBC should creep into its target range. But getting to the middle or top will be tough. A Fine Line in China Evidence that the Chinese economy is slowing should be fodder for double-dip doomsayers. But investors have taken in stride a fall in the country’s manufacturing index to a 17-month low. With further cooling measures now looking unnecessary, they are probably right to be sanguine. Continued Chinese expansion is a critical support for the troubled global recovery, but some deceleration is helpful. Gross domestic product rose by more than 10 percent in the year to June, much higher than the official 8 percent growth target for 2010. That led Beijing to introduce measures aimed at the hot property market and credit growth, in turn prompting investors to fear that tougher intervention might be in prospect. The latest data provide some reassurance that the current measures are working well enough. The official manufacturing index was down to 51.2 in July, from 52.1 in June. But July figures are always lower than June’s, so it is not quite the slowdown it seems. On a seasonally adjusted basis, the July index even went up by 0.4 percentage points from June, according to Goldman Sachs. The figures are also distorted by July’s floods, with heavy rains hitting the industrial bases of southern and northeastern China hard, damaging roads and forcing factory closings. Recent tightening measures have nonetheless had an effect, in particular on the bubbly real estate sector. But activity is already recovering, helped by new public housing projects. Inventories of long steel products, typically used in construction, are falling and prices are rebounding sharply. Finished goods and raw materials inventories are also low. Judging by hiring activity, Chinese industry does not envisage a nasty slowdown. Manufacturers continue to add new workers, anticipating that they may have to raise production. The situation is still finely balanced. For now, intervention seems to be producing the desired modest slowdown in growth, and it’s easy to see why investors pushed Chinese equities higher on Monday — despite an already strong rebound — with the positive sentiment helping American stock markets, too. But the Chinese economy often goes through wild swings. It will take more than one month’s data to be certain of a soft economic landing. NICHOLAS PAISNER and WEI GU

China
HSBC Holdings PLC
Banks and Banking
Economic Conditions and Trends


For Mets, First and Short Have That Third-and-Long Feel

Abstract: There was a premise that carried the Mets through the winter and into the start of this season. Though the present was not to be dismissed, one eye would be cast toward the future, when a collection of young pitchers and a homegrown infield would help re-establish a winning team in Queens. But through the first two months of the season, that premise already seems at risk. Certain assumptions have been fulfilled. David Wright has been his All-Star self at third base. After some early hiccups, second baseman Daniel Murphy has rediscovered his steady form. The right-hander Matt Harvey has emerged as one of the top pitchers in baseball. And the right-hander Zack Wheeler, the Mets’ top minor league pitcher, will soon make his big-league debut. And still, anxiety has risen as first baseman Ike Davis and shortstop Ruben Tejada — two young players expected to be infield linchpins this season and into the future — have played at inexplicably poor levels. Before Wednesday’s game at Yankee Stadium, Manager Terry Collins acknowledged the two were called into his office late Tuesday night. Collins declined to reveal the substance of those conversations, but reasonable assumptions could be made. Asked whether the message, whatever it was, was comprehended by the players, Collins emphatically replied, “Oh yeah.” Asked whether the message would have a positive effect, Collins smiled and said, “We’ll find out.” Asked whether certain players needed their job security threatened to play better, Collins said: “I don’t know yet. There are guys who play very well when they’re comfortable, and maybe there are those guys who play more aggressively when they’re standing on the edge. We’ll find out.” What seemed clear was that demotions to the minor leagues remained a real possibility, that both players were poised on the edge. It was less clear after the Mets’ 9-4 win whether their respective performances would help. Tejada singled to open the game, and seven batters later, Davis chased starter David Phelps from the game with a two-run single to left. It was an encouraging at-bat: Davis fell behind, 0-2, took three straight balls and then hit an outside fastball to the opposite field. He went 2 for 5 and grounded out with the bases loaded in his final at-bat. “It definitely felt good to make solid contact twice and have decent at-bats,” said Davis, who has used a taller stance at the plate. Tejada’s night felt far more mixed. During the Yankees’ two-run sixth, with runners on second and third and no outs, he fielded an easy grounder up the middle and seemed stricken by indecision. By the time he threw to first, everyone was safe. Tejada went 1 for 5 and struck out on three pitches — fastball, fastball, curveball — in his final at-bat. In the ninth, Tejada slid awkwardly while chasing a pop-up in foul territory, and with one out to go, he limped out of the game. Tejada revealed he felt a pull in his right quadriceps. He will see a doctor Thursday morning, and a disabled list stint seemed possible. If so, the Mets may be saved a tough decision. “I have to concentrate on my job,” he said after the game. “I have to get better every day.” Davis’s problems have not come out of nowhere. He struggled mightily for the first part of last year while working back from a long-term injury layoff the previous season as well as a bout of valley fever. But Davis eventually got going, finishing the season with 32 home runs, and he entered this season determined to pick up where he left off. Instead, he is batting .160. After a couple of promising at-bats over the weekend, he looked lost again on Monday and Tuesday at Citi Field, going hitless in six at-bats and striking out five times. Tejada’s troubles have been somewhat more surprising. Despite his age — he is 23, three years younger than Davis — he entered the season already established as a solid, if unspectacular, performer at the major league level. His compact swing and patient approach produced consistent, serviceable numbers in 2012, as his .289 average exemplified. His sure hands earned him a reputation for dependability on the field. But Tejada is batting .209, and he has made eight errors. He fumbled through the game on Tuesday, recording a throwing error, getting picked off second base and miscommunicating with Murphy on a ground ball up the middle. Collins on Wednesday did not dispute a reporter’s characterization that Tejada seemed timid. Collins said he told Tejada recently: “It’s time. It’s time to get going. We’re 50 games into it. All of the kinks should be out by now. Let’s go be the player we know you can be.” That may be the heart of the problem. Before they undergo any type of renaissance, the Mets need to determine what sort of players Davis and Tejada can be, what their true identities are, whether they represent two pieces of the future or two place-holders. The urgency has grown. All season, amid the mounting losses, Collins has preached a positive attitude, belief in one’s ability. “But it doesn’t mean we have to accept the down times,” Collins said. “We’ve got to do something to fix it.” After all, 2014 is just seven months away.


On CBS, Kellogg Is a Work in Progress

Abstract: In obvious ways, Clark Kellogg is the antithesis of Billy Packer, the man he replaced as the lead college basketball analyst on CBS: charming, humorous, optimistic and not the least brusque. Packer was dogmatic. Kellogg is easygoing. Packer’s verbiage was unadorned. Kellogg has his own lexicon. Packer was a chatterbox brimming with analysis and opinion. Kellogg is a more engaging, friendlier personality, but not nearly as analytical. Kellogg’s work in the Final Four and particularly in the Michigan State-North Carolina men’s championship game Monday night brought out his endearing assets, but also exposed a blind spot in analyzing defenses. Through all three games, Kellogg settled too easily when he assessed defenses and did not routinely zero in on player matchups. He waited beyond the halfway point in the first half to identify North Carolina’s man-to-man defense against Michigan State. Analysts need to be first-guessers who suggest options for inbounds plays before passes are thrown and who are willing to criticize coaches’ decisions. In this, Kellogg seemed too reluctant. Kellogg is fluid in describing offensive plays, but he needed to offer prescriptions for the issues he raised. If Michigan State had to choke off the Tar Heels’ 3-point shooting Monday night, what did they have to do? And why did the Spartans fail to do it? He waited until the second half to say why the North Carolina point guard Ty Lawson was so successful at stealing the ball, but why was there no Telestrator to demonstrate his skills at anticipating where passes were headed? Kellogg called it “tracing the ball.” Show it! When Kellogg called North Carolina’s defense “really solid,” what did he mean? How did Roy Williams’s team stop Michigan State’s dribble penetration and how did the Tar Heels so successfully steamroll the fast-paced attack that defeated Connecticut on Saturday? Why had the Spartans been so savvy at throttling Connecticut’s A. J. Price? All questions that demanded more than the general answers Kellogg often gave.  Sometimes, as he discussed what Michigan State had to do to come back from its early double-digit deficit against North Carolina, Kellogg leaned too much on what the Spartans had to do offensively but did not detail what they had to do defensively. Did Coach Tom Izzo have to shift Michigan State from man-to-man to a zone? Did he have the right players in the man defense? Viewers could see how far out on the perimeter the Spartans had been pushed on offense; what was North Carolina’s defense doing? Kellogg and his partner, Jim Nantz, were a little more willing to attribute the blame for Michigan State’s woeful offense and ball-handling to its players’ inexperience and their need to please their economically devastated state than to the defense that was tying them up. Here is where the contrast with Packer was sharpest: Packer would have been playing the coach, questioning Izzo’s moves, and would have declared the title game over by the middle of the first half. But Kellogg suggested twice in the second half that the run-down Spartans had a chance if they sank their 3-pointers and stopped turning the ball over. “They’ve got to get a few shots to go,” he said with 7 minutes 23 seconds left and North Carolina leading by 16.  Kellogg would have benefited from Nantz’s asking questions to prod more detailed answers about the defenses, or had their producer, Bob Dekas, pushed him to be more specific. Nantz never had to goad Packer, who was relentless about saying what teams had to do. Perhaps Kellogg was just too excited to offer aggressive and specific defensive analysis. In the pregame show, he declared that he was “amped up two more levels” over his normal excitement. That might account for his uttering one of the weirdest lines I’ve ever heard. During a North Carolina scoring run, Kellogg said it was “the epitome of the spurtability team.” His wordplay is a signature aspect of his work. A foul by North Carolina’s Tyler Hansbrough was evidence that he was going for “a little lower-body root-canal action.” If only similar, nervy creativity were applied to analyzing defensive strategies.

Basketball
College Athletics
CBS Corp
Packer Billy


Inter Milan Edges Past Lazio to Stretch Its Lead

Abstract: Inter Milan sprinted eight points clear at the top of Serie A with a 1-0 win over Lazio, while Juventus’s miserable form continued with a 2-1 loss at home to Catania, which is in second-to-last place. Samuel Eto’o put Inter ahead in the 14th minute Sunday after Lazio keeper Fernando Muslera had palmed away a header by the Cameroonian. Lazio, which has been struggling this year, rallied in sub-zero temperatures at the San Siro but, apart from an appeal for handball against Maicon in the area, they created few clear chances. Inter, the defending champion, goes into the winter break with 39 points from 17 matches. AC Milan, in second place, has 31 points and a game in hand after its visit to Fiorentina on Saturday was one of four weekend games postponed due to snow. Juventus, which is in third place with 30 points, was sunk by substitute Mariano Izco’s late goal after Hasan Salihamidzic had cancelled out Jorge Martínez’s 23rd-minute spot kick for Catania. FRANCE Lyon’s hopes of recapturing the Ligue 1 title diminished further after a 1-1 draw at Monaco dropped them 10 points behind Bordeaux. Lyon started well, with Michel Bastos scoring on a free kick in the 22nd minute. The home side, however, earned a share of the points when Korean forward Park Chu-young volleyed home 12 minutes later. Bordeaux, which crushed Lorient, 4-1, on Saturday, is in first place with 40 points; Marseille is eight points back but has a game in hand. Lille rose to third, a further point adrift, with a 3-0 victory over Le Mans. Netherlands Twente Enschede went into the winter break on top of the Dutch league after all five top-flight matches scheduled for Sunday were postponed because of heavy snowfall. Only the pitch for the match between N.E.C. Nijmegen and Vitesse Arnhem had been declared unplayable, but travel advice prompted the Dutch soccer association to postpone all the day’s matches. Twente, topping the table with 47 points from 17 matches, had been scheduled to play at Utrecht, while second-place PSV Eindhoven (45) was set to travel to Roda JC Kerkrade. BELGIUM The snow also played havoc with games in Belgium. Two matches were postponed, including a meeting in Brussels between Anderlecht, the league leader, and second-place Club Bruges. Cercle Bruges, was awarded a 5-0 victory when Mouscron refused to play in Bruges, saying the field was frozen and dangerous.

Inter Milan
AC Milan
Soccer
Juventus Football Club


Knicks as a Lottery Lock? Picking the Notion Apart

Abstract: For Knicks fans anticipating the best possible draft lottery news on Tuesday night simply because they believe it is in the N.B.A.’s best interests to deliver it, here is David Stern to rain on your 19.9 percent parade. “My God, the league has had a string of successes that are continuing without a championship team in New York,” he said. “Haven’t the last 30 years been the proof against the idea that we had to have one?” Stern, who presided over the league as commissioner for 30 years until February 2014, knows how to hit skeptics where it hurts: right in the ego. Patrick Ewing? Frozen envelope? Lottery fix? On the telephone, you could almost hear the smirk on his face. The dependency on New York, Stern said, “was never true except in the minds of people who rooted for the Knicks and those who covered the sport in New York.” He was clearly including the voice at the other end of the line. But in the interests of disclosure, let me say that I have never believed in the conspiracy theory that the inaugural draft lottery of 1985 was predetermined to land Ewing with the 24-58 Knicks. Never thought Stern would risk everything for, as he said, “something that would probably have been a criminal act.” That said, the notion that having a great team in New York at the time wasn’t a priority — if not a preoccupation — would be naïve. It is easy to look back to the 1979 arrival of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and conclude that everyone lived happily and lucratively ever after. Even Stern conceded that the league’s ascension and eventual global prominence was a gradual process, over years. While already riding the Boston-Los Angeles wave in 1985, the corporate shoe company agenda that would drive the popularity of the game’s biggest stars was in its infancy. There had been no explosion of television riches or an Internet reach to indoctrinate the basketball-loving masses. There was no way to know that the day was coming when any reasonably telegenic star could become transcendent, no matter the size of his market. By today’s standards, that would be LeBron James in Cleveland and Kevin Durant in Oklahoma City as Exhibits A and B. When the stars of stage and screen beautified the courtside environment at Madison Square Garden in the late 1960s, Madison Avenue began to recognize the game’s potential high-end appeal, how it might blur the lines between entertainment and sports. But that was mostly a big-market concept, a New York-Los Angeles conceit. By the time Ewing came along, Michael Jordan had taken his high-wire act and Nike shoe contract to Chicago, joining Bird and Johnson as the game’s most compelling impressionists. But Ewing was hyped as a generational game-changer, a Bill Russell reincarnate. It was only natural that the leaguewide buzz focused on how commercially impactful he could be if he helped to restore championship glory in New York. If the six other teams in a lottery that was not weighted by order of finish only pondered New York’s insider influence, Jack Krumpe, the Garden’s president, spoke openly of it on May 12, 1985. In a swanky ballroom on the 18th floor of the Waldorf Astoria, Krumpe sized up a swelling news media crowd of about 100 and said: “Substitute San Antonio for New York, and there wouldn’t be half the people here. New York’s involved — that’s what’s making this so big.” I had that pre-lottery chat with Krumpe while covering the event for The Daily News. The follow-up, posed in jest, was why the league wouldn’t manipulate the proceedings given the potential growth benefits for all. Krumpe, a big man with a hearty laugh, said: “Hey, I told them how to fix it 60 days ago. You call up Ernst & Whinney, and you say, ‘If we don’t get Ewing, you’re fired.’ ” Ernst & Whinney, it turned out, was the powerhouse accounting firm that handled the business of Gulf & Western, the Garden’s corporate parent, and it had also been hired by the N.B.A., and one of its employees had privately placed the cards with the team names into the envelopes before the lottery took place between halves of a Boston-Philadelphia playoff game. Hence the frozen-envelope theory, supposedly allowing Stern to identify the Knicks’ winning ticket. Asked that day if he knew about what could be perceived as a conflict, Stern said, “No, I didn’t.” In a recent interview, he said he’d forgotten more than he remembered, mostly recalling being nervous because he had “never been a game-show host.” Throughout the years, no commissioner had to deal with the multitude of conspiracy charges that Stern encountered. Much of this the league brought on itself by selling individuals over teams, the constant carping by coaches about officiating that has fed the notion of engineered playoff advancement for the most popular stars and a history of big-market indulgence that traces all the way back to Ned Irish, the Garden’s impresario when the league was born. How much did the league figure in the Ewing lottery? Probably as much as the horseshoe from a champion pacer at Yonkers Raceway, where John Cirillo, the team’s public relations man, had previously worked. Cirillo placed it in Dave DeBusschere’s pocket before DeBusschere, the Knicks’ top basketball executive, took the stage. When DeBusschere played for the Knicks, the N.B.A. was still more of a mom-and-pop, grass-roots league. These days, its arenas are glorified television studios — it matters less and less where they actually are. So when Tony Kornheiser on ESPN contends that it is predetermined for the Knicks and the Lakers to finish 1-2 in Tuesday’s lottery to grab the Ewing wannabes Karl-Anthony Towns and Jahlil Okafor, it’s because the conspiracy narrative has become a kneejerk gag line, largely played out. The upside, as Stern said in 1985, was that “people are talking about the lottery instead of drugs, unauthorized franchise moves or anything else negative.” Thirty years later, the trade-off is probably still a deal that most game-show hosts and contestants would happily make.

Knicks
Patrick Ewing
Basketball
Playoffs
Dave DeBusschere
Karl-Anthony Towns
Jahlil Okafor
David Joel Stern
NBA


Fast-Moving Blaze Kills 19 Firefighters in Central Arizona

Abstract: CONGRESS, Ariz. — Nineteen firefighters were killed on Sunday battling a fast-moving wildfire menacing a small town in central Arizona. The firefighters died fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire near the town of Yarnell, about 80 miles northwest of Phoenix. Steve Skurja, a spokesman for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, said there were “several fires still active” in the Yarnell area. In a search of the scene, Mr. Skurja said, crews found the bodies of the firefighters. They were members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a specialist team of wildfire fighters based in Prescott, Ariz., said Mike Reichling, a spokesman for the Tempe Fire Department. He declined to identify the men until their families had been notified. “This is as dark a day as I can remember,” Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer, said in a statement. “It may be days or longer before an investigation reveals how this tragedy occurred, but the essence we already know in our hearts: fighting fires is dangerous work,” she said. “When a tragedy like this strikes, all we can do is offer our eternal gratitude to the fallen, and prayers for the families and friends left behind. God bless them all.” President Obama issued a statement Monday as he was ending a visit to South Africa and flying to Tanzania. “Yesterday, 19 firefighters were killed in the line of duty while fighting a wildfire outside Yarnell, Ariz. They were heroes — highly skilled professionals who, like so many across our country do every day, selflessly put themselves in harm’s way to protect the lives and property of fellow citizens they would never meet. “Michelle and I join all Americans in sending our thoughts and prayers to the families of these brave firefighters and all whose lives have been upended by this terrible tragedy.” Image Credit The New York Times The firefighters had to deploy their emergency shelters when “something drastic happened,” Fire Chief Dan Fraijo of Prescott told The Associated Press. The crew killed in the blaze had worked other wildfires in recent weeks in New Mexico and Arizona. The unit was established in 2002. In a Facebook post, the United States Wildland Fire Aviation Service asked “for prayers for the families and friends of these brave men and women.” Until Sunday, Arizona had suffered 21 firefighter fatalities in wildfires since 1955, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. “It started on Friday with a lightning strike, and it’s grown,” Mr. Reichling said, citing weather conditions on Sunday. The fire is spread across “well over 2,000 acres,” he said, and had “brought down half of the town of Yarnell. It has decimated that town.” The town had been evacuated previously, he said. A reverse 911 call was sent, and sheriff’s deputies alerted residents. Flames were traveling north, away from the small community of Yarnell, 4,800 feet up a mountain between Wickenburg and Prescott, in central Arizona. Some residents there left to go to neighboring Peeples Valley, where an evacuation order was in place, to help people pack up and leave their homes. Others stayed behind, watching the parched bush burn in the distance or, like Nina Bill Overmyer, 66, taking a nap. Suddenly, the wind shifted and the flames changed direction, rushing through the forest straight toward Yarnell. Ms. Overmyer’s husband, Chuck, woke her up and they picked up what they could. He took his motorcycle. She took their Dodge truck, pulling the flatbed trailer bearing their lime-green Model A street rod, one of their most prized possessions. By the time they came back to get their dogs, the blaze was roaring just above them, rolling down the mountain and swallowing everything around: the town’s library, community center, diner. Video Aerial video clips from Yarnell, Ariz., show the remains of houses burned by a wildfire that swept through the area, killing 19 firefighters. Nearby, Adria Shayne, 52, grabbed her parrot, Jingles; her dog, Spanky; her cat, Gizmo; and nothing else. Her daughter-in-law, Cynthia Somers, said there was no time to think of what to take and what to leave behind — “It was get up and go.” Ms. Shayne, smoking a cigarette outside the Arrowhead Bar & Grill on the edge of Route 89 in Congress, where sheriff’s deputies had blocked traffic from going any farther north, choked up as she described her “little nice house,” the only one in town with a white picket fence . “ Oh, God,” she lamented. “It’s all gone.” More than 200 firefighters were on the scene Sunday night, “minus the 19 we have lost,” Mr. Reichling said. The authorities planned to double that number by Monday, he said. Helicopters and a DC-10 jet, dropping slurry, were also aiding the effort. When asked how under control the fire was, Mr. Reichling replied: “Not very. Right now we have zero containment.” According to government figures, the fire Sunday represents the largest number of firefighters killed in one wildfire since a 1933 blaze in California that killed 25, and the largest loss of firefighters since 341 and two paramedics died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City. Mr. Skurja said officials had decided to allow many homes in the area to burn, because the crews were having such a hard time; The Arizona Republic reported that about half of the town’s 500 homes were expected to be destroyed. Yarnell is an old gold mining town of about 650 residents, based on the latest figures, though full-time residents numbered about 400. Sean Kriner, 47, said that when the economy went sour a few years ago, many people left. “There are empty homes everywhere to this day,” he said, but a strong sense of community remains. “People helping people,” Mr. Kriner said. “That’s who we are.” About 14 Yarnell-area residents had arrived Sunday afternoon at a shelter at Yavapai College near Prescott, Brian Gomez, a spokesman for the Red Cross Grand Canyon Chapter, told The Republic. He said the power went out because of monsoons but was restored. More people were expected to need shelter as officials ordered further evacuations, Mr. Gomez said, and the Red Cross was ready to open a shelter at Wickenburg High School.

Fires
Arizona
Wildfires
Granite Mountain Hotshots
Fatalities,casualties
Yarnell AZ


Fund-Raisers and Shopping Fill Obama’s Visit to Manhattan

Abstract: President Obama came to New York on Tuesday to pick up a few sweaters and more than $1.5 million in cash. The sweaters were for his daughters. The cash was for his political allies. In a whirlwind visit, Mr. Obama headlined two big-dollar fund-raisers for Democrats at the Manhattan homes of two prominent investors, Hamilton E. James, the president of the Blackstone Group, and Alan Patricof, managing director of Greycroft Partners. But before hanging out with his wealthy supporters, the president made a photo-friendly stop at a Gap store at Third Avenue and 42nd Street for a little shopping and a political point. The visit, just after 4 p.m., was a reward for Gap, which is raising its minimum pay for employees to $10.10 an hour in keeping with Mr. Obama’s stalled proposal to increase it across the board. “It’s not only good for them and their families, it’s also good for the entire economy,” Mr. Obama told reporters. Along the way, he bought sweaters for his daughters, Malia and Sasha, and a light workout jacket for his wife, Michelle. “I think the ladies will be impressed by my style sense,” he declared. A ticket to the fund-raisers that followed went for $32,400 — or 3,208 hours of work at the president’s proposed minimum wage. The proceeds went to the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Mr. Obama told the crowd at one event that his party has its flaws and “our crazy folks” but was more committed to making the country a better place. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who boasts of his populist credentials, attended the second event. “They needed a token nonwealthy person, so I was there,” he quipped. Both hosts have had moments of friction with Mr. Obama. Mr. James bristled at attacks on private equity during the race against Mitt Romney in 2012, while Mr. Patricof was a strong supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008. But it was all friendliness on Tuesday. In a Fifth Avenue apartment, Mr. James lauded Mr. Obama’s record while the president praised the host and his wife, Amie, as “great friends.”

Democrats
Minimum wage
Barack Obama
Gap Inc
Hamilton James
Alan J Patricof
Retail
US Politics


Dozens of Migrants Said to Be Missing From Boat Near Italian Coast

Abstract: ROME — Rescue teams on Friday were searching the waters off a southern Italian islet for survivors of a boat loaded with migrants that apparently ran into difficulties a day earlier while crossing from Africa. Italian and NATO vessels rescued 56 people, including a pregnant woman, and recovered one body, but passengers on the ill-fated craft said that dozens of people were missing. Survivors have given varying versions of the passenger count, so “it’s unclear how many were on the boat,” said Commander Filippo Marini, a spokesman for the Italian Coast Guard. Initial reports suggested that the migrants were Tunisian, he said, but their nationalities would only be confirmed after primary assistance had been issued. Several Italian and NATO ships and aircraft were involved in the rescue operations, Commander Marini said. A plane used for marine surveillance by Frontex, the European Union border security agency, was also searching the waters. A passenger on the boat used a mobile phone to issue a distress call early Thursday evening, the spokesman said, and rescue ships were immediately mobilized, but the moonless night made the search difficult. The first survivors were tracked down in the early hours of Friday, after telephone operators were able to pinpoint the location from which the call had been made. Some migrants were rescued at sea, others had managed to swim to the small islet of Lampione, south of Sicily. Commander Marini said that the boat transporting the migrants had not been found, and officials have not declared it a shipwreck. Prosecutors in Agrigento, Sicily, have opened an investigation into the episode, the Italian news agency Ansa reported. Survivors have been taken to the island of Lampedusa, which annually receives hundreds of migrants and refugees because of its proximity to North Africa. According to Amnesty International, in 2011 some 1,500 died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.


N.C.A.A. Tournament — 4 Former Cinderellas Meet in Lexington

Abstract: LEXINGTON, Ky. — The wily bracket-crafters on the N.C.A.A. tournament selection committee missed a chance to create a blissful sort of havoc at Rupp Arena on Thursday afternoon. If only they had also slotted the tournament sweethearts Gonzaga and Virginia Commonwealth and Valparaiso and, why not, Northwestern State in a pod already teeming with upstarts. As it is, unaffiliated fans will have a hard enough time deciding whom to root for in the opening two games. All four teams involved in Thursday’s day session — Butler and Bucknell tip off at 12:40 p.m. Eastern, Marquette and Davidson about 3:10 — captivated the tournament in Marches past, rising from relative obscurity to become national darlings. So it seems a bit unfair that these so-called Cinderellas have gathered here for the equivalent of musical slippers, with only one advancing to the Round of 16 next week in Washington. At least that is the sentiment of Kevin Bettencourt, who led the Bison in scoring the night Bucknell tipped mighty Kansas in 2005 in one of the most shocking upsets in tournament history. When the pairings were unveiled Sunday, Bettencourt felt a swell of pride — and disappointment. “It was great that we got an 11 seed, but I couldn’t believe we were playing Butler with Davidson there, too — they’re two of my favorite teams to watch,” said Bettencourt, who is now an assistant at Division II Bentley (Mass.). “It was always easy to cheer for the underdogs, but now all the perennial underdogs aren’t underdogs anymore. I really wish they were in different brackets so I could root for all of them.” Image Bucknell beat Kansas in the first round in 2005. Credit Jeff Mitchell/Reuters On Monday, the eighth anniversary of Bucknell’s victory, Bettencourt received an e-mail from a former old teammate, Chris Neisz. Attached was a photo of the team celebrating a game that, Bettencourt said, “if we played it 100 times, we’d lose 99.” Memories flooded back. How the band from Northern Iowa, which lost earlier that night, welcomed the Bison back to the hotel by playing the Bucknell fight song. How not a single reporter ventured into their locker room the day before the game. How what seemed like every reporter at the arena in Oklahoma City crammed inside the day after. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, a 14-year-old boy absorbed it all, too — but from a hotel room. His name is Bryson Johnson, and he is now the team’s career leader in 3-pointers made. Before that night, Johnson had never heard of Bucknell, did not know if it was in Alburgh, Vt. (no), or Big Stone Gap, Va. (no), or Lewisburg, Pa. (yes). “That’s the effect that one game can have,” Johnson said. “It did on me.” Bucknell aspires to become the Butler of north-central Pennsylvania, so much so that its coach, Dave Paulsen, said he tried modeling aspects of his program after the once-underdog Bulldogs. (For instance, the Bucknell assistant Charles Lee, a member of the 2005 team, said the team had adopted Butler’s approach of using a big man to help corral the opposing point guard in transition.) To which Brad Stevens, Butler’s coach, said with a smile: “I’m trying to steal from them. I don’t know if they — they probably shouldn’t waste their time looking at us.” Stevens, turning serious, said he realized how Butler’s soaring profile and remarkable success — consecutive appearances in the national championship game, after being seeded fifth and eighth — had flipped its reputation, how Bucknell on Thursday would be seeking to eliminate a big-time program. He said Bucknell, with its depth and experience, seemed to him “a lot like the Butler teams of the past.” Image Butler, in black, played Duke in the championship game in 2010. Credit Amy Sancetta/Associated Press “People in basketball circles know there’s a reason they don’t schedule them in the preseason,” Stevens said of Bucknell and Davidson. Two weeks in 2008 propelled Davidson, a tiny liberal arts college north of Charlotte, N.C., into the spotlight. Behind the mesmerizing play of Stephen Curry, the Wildcats, then seeded 10th, edged the midmajor standard-bearer Gonzaga, overcame a 17-point deficit to defeat Georgetown and then whipped Wisconsin before losing, by 2 points, to Kansas in the regional final. Whenever Andrew Lovedale, a forward on that team, wears a Davidson sweatshirt or T-shirt, people invariably tell him that he looks familiar. It happened not long ago at the airport in Detroit after he had gotten off a plane from France, where he had been playing professionally. “It validated everything that we had strived for all year long,” Lovedale said of that Davidson team’s success. “I know this year’s team feels the same.” Among the four, Davidson, a 14, owns the lowest seed. It also owns the longest current winning streak in the nation, 17 games. Video The FiveThirtyEight blogger talks to The Times’s Megan Liberman about his statistical analysis of the men’s basketball tournament. The 2008 team was steeled by a tough schedule, by dropping regular-season matchups against Duke, North Carolina and North Carolina State by a total of 11 points. So was this team, which lost to Gonzaga, New Mexico and Duke but beat Vanderbilt and West Virginia. “You don’t forget what it’s like playing against those kind of guys,” said the senior forward Jake Cohen, who added that the 2008 run “absolutely” influenced his decision to go to Davidson. “I think we’ll be ready.” The Wildcats’ feat caught the attention of a few members of Thursday’s opposition, some of whom were not even aware that Marquette enjoyed a similar stretch in 2003, a few years before N.C.A.A. appearances became de rigueur for the Golden Eagles. A decade ago, a triple-double by Dwyane Wade helped Marquette blast top-seeded Kentucky, riding a 26-game winning streak, to advance to its first Final Four since 1977. “We weren’t cocky,” said Todd Townsend, a guard on that team. “It was confidence dressed up really nicely.” As evidence, he offered Travis Diener’s message to fans at a rally after the Round of 16 victory in Indianapolis, when Diener told them to book their tickets to and hotels in New Orleans, site of the Final Four, because “there’s no way we’re losing” the next two games. Center Chris Otule did not know until he was being recruited out of Texas that Wade had preceded him, but he understands that, as in a game of word association, Marquette will forever be linked with Kentucky. Same as Bucknell with Kansas; Davidson with the 2008 tournament; and Butler with its bracket-busting forays in 2010 and 2011, when it transformed into one of the nation’s premier — and most recognized — programs. “I like when teams that you’ve never heard of make deep runs,” Otule said. “That’s what makes this so much fun.”

College basketball
NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness
Butler University
Bucknell University
Davidson College
Marquette University


A Skin-Deep Dinosaur Issue

Abstract: Q. Did dinosaurs peel or shed their skins? A. Presumably, said Mark A. Norell, chairman of the division of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. But not all at once. “Since we can’t directly observe extinct animals, we need to look at close relatives,” Dr. Norell said. “Birds are living dinosaurs, crocodilians their closest relatives. Both shed skin in patches and strips, not entire skins like snakes. “Because crocodiles and birds share a common ancestor, we predict this skin-shedding style was present in that ancestor,” he continued. “Nonbird dinosaurs descend from this same ancestor. Without other information, we predict that even giant dinosaurs exfoliated their dead dry skin in patches.” Everything that has skin sheds it, Dr. Norell emphasized, but there is a tremendous diversity in how skin sheds. In humans, for example, rubbing the dry skin of an arm across something black leaves a white scuff of dead skin cells, he said. And in birds, skin dries and sloughs off as small patches, like peeling after a bad sunburn. Reptile shedding usually conjures visions of whole snakeskins, shed as a continuous piece, “looking like the ghost of a living serpent,” Dr. Norell said. But this is an anomaly; most animals do it differently. Typical reptiles — lizards, crocodiles and turtles — shed dry, irregular skin patches, and that is probably how dinosaurs did it, he said. question@nytimes.com

Skin
Dinosaur
American Museum of Natural History
Birds
Crocodile


Alex Cassie, Who Aided ‘Great Escape’ From Nazis, Dies at 95

Abstract: It was on the moonless night of March 24 and 25, 1944, that 76 Allied prisoners of war, most of them British, clambered down a 30-foot shaft and crawled through a 340-foot-long tunnel below the supposedly escape-proof Stalag Luft III camp in eastern Germany — the daring breakout that was celebrated in the classic 1963 movie “The Great Escape.” In their pockets, the escapees carried what looked like officially stamped documents, identification cards, business cards and even letters written in German from purported wives and sweethearts, all of which were intended to make it possible for them to befuddle a hapless guard or police officer stopping them on their way to freedom. Flight Lt. Alex Cassie, a British bomber pilot, was one of a half-dozen artists who had been forging those documents for months, playing a central role in the larger conspiracy to free hundreds of the nearly 1,000 airmen in the camp. They called their unit Dean and Dawson, after a well-known London travel agency. Having meticulously falsified hundreds of documents, Lieutenant Cassie was placed among the top 50 on the list of those who would sneak into the tunnel that night. But knowing that he was claustrophobic, and not wanting to impede the others, he chose to stay in the barracks. Lieutenant Cassie, an amateur artist since childhood and a psychologist after his military service, died at a nursing home in Surrey, England, on April 5, his son, Adrian, said. He was 95. His decision to stay behind on that fateful day troubled him for the rest of his life. For while the breakout is hailed as one of Britain’s momentous acts of heroic resolve in World War II , it did not end as hoped. Of the 76 escapees, 73 were soon recaptured, and 50 of those were executed on orders from Hitler. “All five of my hut mates had been shot,” Mr. Cassie told the British newspaper The Sun in 2001. “Often I’ve asked myself, ‘Why didn’t I go?’ I can’t shake off the vague feeling of guilt, that why should I have been the lucky one?” For anyone else aware of his deeds, he was a hero. While other prisoners were digging three tunnels (code-named Tom, Dick and Harry) under the six compounds at the camp, shoring them up with boards from their bunks, Lieutenant Cassie and his fellow forgers were at work in tiny rooms. “One of Dean and Dawson’s occupational hazards was that they had to sit by a window so they could get enough light for their finicking work,” Paul Brickhill, a prisoner at the camp, wrote in his 1950 book, “The Great Escape,” which became the basis of the movie. Fellow prisoners standing outside would signal if a guard approached. A guard “nearly caught them a couple of times,” the book continues, “but they were just able to cover the work before he reached the window.” To produce their forgeries, Mr. Cassie told The Sun, “we got the best of the paper from the flyleaves of books which arrived at the camp” through the Red Cross. “The rest — ink, photography, timetables, etc. — was bribed from the Germans. It was amazing what a few cigarettes could do.” They got hold of a typewriter with a German typeface. Lieutenant Cassie used cold tea to age documents. He etched official-looking stamps from boot heels. In the movie, starring Steve McQueen and James Garner, Donald Pleasence played a forger based in part on Lieutenant Cassie. “As a piece of cinematic entertainment, it ranks very highly, but it isn’t a particularly accurate historical record,” Mr. Cassie told the Scottish newspaper The Aberdeen Press and Journal in 2000, which pointed out that there was no jaunty, baseball-throwing, McQueen-like American leading the breakout. Of the forgers, Lieutenant Cassie was “the most distinctive, in appearance anyway,” Mr. Brickhill wrote in his book, with a “great thatch of long ginger hair that fell over his eyes like a Skye terrier and little tufts of ginger beard sticking out of isolated spots around his jaw.” Lieutenant Cassie had been the pilot of a Royal Air Force bomber, flying missions over Germany and France, when his plane was shot down after it attacked a submarine in the Bay of Biscay in September 1942. He and his crew were picked up by a French fishing boat and turned over to the German authorities. The lieutenant was immediately taken to Stalag Luft III. He remained there until January 1945, when, with the Soviets advancing from the east, the Germans emptied the P.O.W. camps and forced thousands of prisoners to march west. They were liberated by the British in April. Alexander Cassie, known as Sandy, was born in Cape Province, South Africa, on Dec. 22, 1916, the only child of George and Jessie Cassie, who had emigrated from Scotland. After high school, he went to Scotland and began studying psychology at the University of Aberdeen. “I always had a pencil in my hand and had always been a competent artist and used to do covers for the university rag magazine,” he told The Aberdeen Press and Journal. In 1940, two years after graduating, he joined the R.A.F. Mr. Cassie’s wife of 56 years, the former Jean Stone, died in 2005. Besides his son, he is survived by a daughter, Rosalyn Postance, and four grandchildren. In 2004, 17 of the prisoners who had been involved in the great escape, Mr. Cassie among them, reunited at the Imperial War Museum in London. Archaeologists had excavated one of the tunnels at Stalag Luft III, the British newspaper The Telegraph reported, adding, “Artifacts recovered include a rubber stamp carved from the heel of an airman’s boot and used to forge documents for escapers.”

Prisoners of War
Germany
Movies
England
Cassie Alex
Prison Escapes
Deaths (Obituaries)
Holocaust and the Nazi Era
World War II (1939-45)
The Great Escape (Movie)


Violence Mars Birmingham’s Win Over Aston Villa

Abstract: Birmingham fans ran onto the field and threw flares at rival supporters following Wednesday night’s 2-1 win over local rival Aston Villa in the League Cup quarterfinals. Villa supporters responded by ripping up seats and threw them onto the St. Andrews field. The violence was reminiscent of that which marred English soccer through the 1970s and ’80s, but Birmingham manager Alex McLeish said the violence should not affect Thursday’s vote on the 2018 World Cup host. England is competing with Spain-Portugal, Russia and Netherlands-Belgium. ”Fans shouldn’t come on to the pitch at any time. It soured it a bit for us,” McLeish said. ”I don’t think that will affect the World Cup bid. I’m sure that’s already decided, and let’s hope England gets it because it deserves it. It doesn’t look good, though, when you see fans running on the pitch like that and carrying on. It takes us back to the Dark Ages.” Police issued a statement referring to the violence as ”sporadic outbreaks of disorder at the Birmingham derby.” ”The FA abhors acts of violent behavior and we urge the clubs and authorities to identify any individual involved in disorder and impose the stiffest available sanctions including banning orders,” the Football Association said in a statement. Birmingham took the lead in the 10th minute when Sebastian Larsson converted a penalty kick after Richard Dunne’s foul on Lee Bowyer. Gabriel Agbonlahor tied the score in the 30th, but Nikola Zigic beat American goalkeeper Brad Friedel in the 84th to put Birmingham in its first League Cup semifinal for nine years. Birmingham will play West Ham in the semifinals and Ipswich will meet Arsenal. Ipswich beat West Bromwich Albion 1-0 on Grant Leadbitter’s 69th-minute penalty kick to become the only second-tier team in the semifinals.

Aston Villa
Soccer
UEFA Champions League (Soccer)
World Cup 2018 (Soccer)
Manchester City (Soccer Team)
Friedel Brad
Leverkusen Bayer
Kljestan Sacha
Bocanegra Carlos


A Lesson for the Birds: Those People Aren't So Bad After All

Abstract: For a Magellanic penguin, a species that lives along the coast of Argentina, the first time it sees a human is a scary experience. It turns its head back and forth, warily staring at the intruder with one eye, then the other. Stress hormones flood its bloodstream. Some biologists have worried that such encounters -- increasingly frequent with a rise in ecotourism -- may harm the penguins and other animals whose habitats are invaded by human visitors. But a new study has found that at least in the case of Magellanics the sight of a few more humans quickly subdues the panic. "This head-spinning thing that they do slows down very quickly, within 10 days," said Brian G. Walker, a professor of biology at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., and the lead author of a study that appears in the February issue of Conservation Biology. The level of stress hormones drops, too, Dr. Walker said, and the penguins take little further note of people. "The take-home message, I think, would be right now it looks like it's O.K.," he said, of the tourists' presence. Still, he added, that may not hold true for all penguins. More aggressive species like the Magellanic might be less disturbed by the visits than more timid species, Dr. Walker said. An earlier paper by Dr. Walker and two colleagues at the University of Washington, P. Dee Boersma and John C. Wingfield, did find that people were a source of stress for baby Magellanic penguins. At less than a week old, the chicks showed levels of stress hormones usually not seen until the age of 3 months. "That's worrisome," Dr. Walker said. "Early exposure to these stress hormones can have negative effects much later in life." In humans at least, people who grow up in stressful households suffer from greater heart disease as adults. Whether that is also true of penguins is not known. KENNETH CHANG

BIRDS
PENGUINS
GONZAGA UNIVERSITY
CONSERVATION BIOLOGY
WALKER BRIAN G
RESEARCH


For Growing Ranks of the White-Collar Jobless, Support With a Touch of the Spur

Abstract: HOFFMAN ESTATES, Ill. — The meeting could have been at any number of corporations across the country. Everyone present sat at tables around an LCD projector with their laptops open. But the setting was a church conference room, not a board room, and the spreadsheets under discussion focused not on work but the lack of it. They documented how many hours each person had devoted the previous week to looking for a job. “Total hours I spent last week was 68,” said Bob Roeder, 51, one of the group’s co-leaders, going over his report on a recent Monday. “Number of letters sent out was four. Total number of network contacts was 12.” This was the weekly meeting of a job search “accountability” group, organized by the Executive Network Group of Greater Chicago, an organization for executives “in transition.” Membership in various networking organizations across the country for unemployed executives and other professionals has ballooned in recent months, leaders of several say, as the recession has continued its march, sparing not even the highly educated and skilled. And job search support groups like this one have become quasi families for people like Mr. Roeder, who was laid off nearly two years ago from his job earning almost six figures as an area sales manager for Electronic Data Systems. Providing a spur as well as solace, the groups offer glimpses in miniature at the travails of a swath of individuals in this recession whose lives had once seemed, if not charmed, at least quite comfortable as they carved out places in the middle and upper-middle class. “A job loss in America is, psychologically, a real big hit,” said Cathy-Ann Romero, 53, another co-leader, who lost her job as a human resources manager 10 months ago. Ms. Romero, who holds two master’s degrees, recently applied for a part-time job as a packer on the overnight shift at an online grocery store to help make ends meet. The Monday morning meetings at a church in this Chicago suburb, she said, help the members realize, “We’re not in it alone.” Indeed, white-collar unemployment rose to 4.6 percent in December, up from 3 percent the year before. The figures still pale in comparison to the 11.3 percent unemployment rate for blue-collar workers. But Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said white-collar unemployment rose faster in the past year than in any other recession dating to at least the 1970s, even the devastating downturn of the early 1980s. Moreover, white-collar workers also tend to form a disproportionate share of the long-term unemployed — those who have been out of work six months or longer. In the Chicago group, which has been meeting since April 2008, seven of nine members have been out of steady work for six months or longer; the other two are approaching the six-month mark. Several in the group are now considering part-time “survival jobs.” Many are wrestling with whether, or how much, to draw down on their retirement accounts. Holding onto health insurance, with its high cost without an employer, has been a constant worry. Mr. Roeder, who has two young children, took a part-time job this winter plowing snow for his township to pay the bills. He was initially depressed at what he considered the indignity, but then he discovered that several others in his crew were unemployed professionals just like him. He jumped actively into his job search last February but said he had gotten fewer than 10 interviews in two years, despite averaging nearly 40 hours a week looking for work. “I’m not getting any face time, and that is extremely frustrating,” Mr. Roeder said. With his family’s savings rapidly dwindling, he drove seven hours to Troy, Mich., last weekend in a snowstorm for a job fair organized by BAE Systems, a military contractor, standing in line for two-and-a-half hours to get an interview. “You can never turn down a job possibility in this economy,” he said. Gregarious by nature, Mr. Roeder enjoys leading the group through its paces, enabling him to function, albeit briefly, in a corporate environment again. And he said he took special pleasure in compiling the members’ weekly reports, which are due to him every Sunday. “I feel like I’m working again,” he said. Jim Moorman, who arranged for the group to meet at his church, lost his job 16 months ago as a senior engineer at Motorola, where he was making more than $100,000 a year, after working there for 33 years. After months of scrambling, Mr. Moorman missed his first mortgage payment last month. “I have some alternatives,” said Mr. Moorman, who is also fretting about how to pay for a daughter going to college next year. “But they’re not ideal ones.” He said he had struggled to get interviews and wondered at the recent meeting whether he was spending too much time applying to jobs online. “I’m not doing something right yet,” he said later. Nevertheless, the group’s sessions are intentionally businesslike and upbeat. Griping and self-pity are discouraged. Meetings begin with members reporting two highlights from their job search — even if they are hard to name — as well as two activities they did besides looking for work. Mr. Roeder said he “plowed snow for 15 hours on Saturday and slept afterwards.” Tom Nolan, 54, who lost his job earning six figures as a chief financial officer of a midsize manufacturing company six months ago, reported seeing the movie “Slumdog Millionaire” with his wife. But the urgency of their situations inevitably intrudes. Ms. Romero told others in the group that “reality is checking in” and that she needed cash, so she had applied for the part-time work. The problem, she said, is that she was one of some 300 people applying for 15 jobs on the graveyard shift. So group members brainstormed ways she could gain some advantage. The group meets on Mondays to provide structure for the week. Members’ days are filled with a revolving door of networking meetings, applications and chasing down the all-important but elusive hiring “decision-maker” at their target companies. The stress has taken its toll on not just the members but also their families. Ms. Romero’s husband, Joseph, who is retired from his job as a public works supervisor, began seeing a psychiatrist for depression. In an unheated workshop in the couple’s basement, Mr. Romero has been lighting candles to the Virgin of Guadalupe, in front of a crucifix draped over one of his son’s amplifiers. “I heard she does miracles to a lot of people,” he said. “I figure she can give us the miracle of Cathy finding a job.” For Jack Elliott, 58, who was laid off nine months ago from a six-figure job as director of franchise operations for Merlin 200,000 Mile Shops, a Chicago-area automotive maintenance chain, this is his third job search. “Nowadays, you work someplace, you work there three years,” Mr. Elliott said. “Not only is this my third time, there will be a fourth time, more than likely.” Many in the group are dialing back their expectations, conceding they will most likely have to take a pay cut, or accept a step down in responsibilities. But Matt Zimmerman, 28, who was laid off five months ago as director of new business development for a home décor company and is the group’s most aggressive networker, assured a new member at the meeting that this group was “beating the odds.” Two former members of the group found jobs over the summer. And some have had success getting interviews. But it is not lost on members that no one in the group has landed a job since Lehman Brothers collapsed in September. Promising leads suddenly dried up. And their lives remain stuck.

Unemployment
Layoffs and Job Reductions
Recession and Depression
Executives and Management
United States Economy


In Cuomo’s Budget, Much to Alarm School Districts

Abstract: ALBANY — It is an annual tradition on the day the governor unveils his budget. Flipping page after page of stapled booklets collated by the state’s Education Department , lawmakers search through tiny print for a series of magic numbers. They are looking at how their school districts fared, and even in the rosiest of fiscal years, the ensuing legislative debate about school aid tends to be fierce. But this year, with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo having put a budgetary bull’s-eye on school districts all across the state, it may be worse than ever. Much of the anxiety among education groups and teachers’ unions centers on the sheer scale of the cuts that Mr. Cuomo has proposed. But some political fault lines have emerged, too, with Republican state senators from Long Island expressing concern that they are bearing an unfairly large share of the pain. Mr. Cuomo’s proposed school cuts will be the subject of a joint hearing in Albany on Tuesday, and lawmakers predict it will be a heated session. While the governor’s cuts to school aid are calculated through what he describes as a progressive formula, education groups say the reductions will still widen the funding gap between wealthier and poorer school districts. “The governor’s budget hurts school kids across the board, because the cuts are enormous, and they are much larger in poor districts than rich districts,” said Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education , an advocacy group. Nearly two-thirds of respondents in a Siena College poll released on Monday said they opposed Mr. Cuomo’s school-aid cuts. No other spending reduction in his budget drew as much opposition. And Mr. Cuomo’s proposal has already raised the specter of a court battle. A coalition of eight education groups argues that his proposed cuts would effectively wipe out funding increases mandated by the settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity ’s long-running lawsuit to force the state to give more money to New York City schools. “We really are concerned that after so much work and so much progress, we are turning the clock back,” said Geri D. Palast, the campaign’s executive director. Aides to Mr. Cuomo are quick to offer their own spreadsheets with school data to rebut critics. They argue that reserves and leftover stimulus money provide a hefty cushion for school districts, and that schools should also seek to save money by curtailing pay for superintendents. Beginning Tuesday, they plan to emphasize a new argument, focusing on districts’ ability to cut nonclassroom expenditures, like information-technology services, transportation, food services and facilities maintenance. “Cut the fat, build the muscle” is how a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, Josh Vlasto, put it. Still, the governor’s cuts are a window on how hard it is — even for someone who has declared Albany’s budgeting process a “sham” and vowed to make fundamental changes — to break away from traditional formulas. Four years ago, Gov. Eliot Spitzer tried to do that by greatly increasing school funding to New York City and other needy districts. But his plan would have upended the longstanding practice of apportioning a fixed slice of new state spending on school aid to Long Island and another fixed slice to the city, with the rest of the state sharing what is left over. (Republicans from Long Island have long held a big voting bloc in the State Senate, providing the political might to preserve the arrangement.) Mr. Spitzer ultimately won passage of a new formula to hand out school aid, but only after ladling on top extra funding for wealthy school districts that essentially recreated the traditional funding allocations — with about 13 percent of new state school aid going to Long Island and about 39 percent to New York City. Mr. Cuomo’s budget hews to the same rough portions for the total school-aid budget. But of the total money being cut, about 14.6 percent of it would come out of Long Island, and lawmakers there have criticized the cuts that many of their districts face. “The point that our members were making was those cuts should be equitable,” said Scott Reif, a spokesman for Senate Republicans. Long Island takes a bigger hit from Mr. Cuomo’s cuts because the governor’s budget takes into account a school district’s wealth in computing the size of the reduction in state aid. Mr. Cuomo’s budget reduces year-to-year school aid by 9.4 percent statewide, not including money for school construction. What the Education Department considers “low-need” and “average-need” districts would have their state funding cut by about 14 percent. “High-need” districts would lose about 8 percent, as would New York City. But poorer districts rely on state funding far more than wealthier ones, so a cut smaller in percentage terms can be far costlier in terms of dollars lost. For instance, the 11 percent decline in total state school aid that Mr. Cuomo has proposed for the affluent community of Roslyn on Long Island equals less than one-half of 1 percent of the school district’s total budget this year. Places like Elmira and Niagara Falls face only single-digit percentage decreases in state school funding, but that amounts to at least 4 percent of their current budget, because they rely more on state funding. Not including construction aid, low-need districts will lose an average of $348 in state funding per student, according to state data, versus $811 for average-need districts and $751 for high-need districts. New York City will lose $548, according to the state data.

Budgets and Budgeting
Education (K-12)
Cuomo Andrew M
New York State


Childbirth Takes Longer Than 50 Years Ago, Study Says

Abstract: Women spend much more time in labor than they did 50 years ago, a new study has found, and one reason may be that obstetric practices have changed. Scientists at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and elsewhere compared 39,491 births from 1959 to 1966 with 98,359 births from 2002 to 2008 . All the women initially went into labor without complications. Compared with the women in the first group, those in the more recent group were, on average, two and a half years older, the researchers found. They were also heavier — women giving birth in the later years had an average body mass index of 29.9, compared with 26.3 50 years ago. Medical intervention was much more common in the 2002 group. Only 4 percent of women in the 1959 group received epidural anesthesia, compared with 55 percent in the recent group. About 12 percent of the women in the first group received oxytocin to induce labor, compared with 31 percent in the 2002 group. The researchers also found that babies born in the later group were slightly bigger and healthier, with higher measures of overall health, called Apgar scores , at one and five minutes after birth. After controlling for a variety of factors, the researchers found that labor was, on average, 2.6 hours longer in the 2002-8 group for women having their first baby, and a little under two hours longer for women who had previously given birth. Medical intervention may be the cause, the study’s authors said. “Some of the difference is due to change in obstetric practice, and that should drive us to look at labor management,” said a co-author, Dr. D. Ware Branch, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah. Other experts were uncertain that medical intervention was making labor longer. “There are a lot of unmeasurables in these patients,” said Dr. Christian M. Pettker, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale. “It could be inherent properties of the women beyond what they’re measuring.” In any case, Dr. Pettker said, a longer labor may not be bad. “Adverse outcomes are certainly lower than they were in the ’50s, and neonatal survival is extraordinarily better even in full-term infants than it was in the ’50s and ’60s,” he said. “So it’s not necessarily so that this longer pattern is worse.” The study was published online on March 10 in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.


A Difficult Year for Latinos in East Haven

Abstract: “It’s a cute town,” Cynthia Rojas said about her home, East Haven. But relations there between immigrants and suburbanites have had their ups and downs in 2009. According to the most recent estimates, 7 percent to 8 percent of East Haven residents are Latino. Most of the rest are non-Latino whites. “We Latinos stick out at this point in history, and some people can’t get used to the change,” said Angel Fernandez, leader of the pastoral council of the St. Rose of Lima Church in New Haven, which counts many East Haven Latinos among its members. Several incidents increased tensions in East Haven this year. In March, fliers calling for the deportation of all illegal immigrants were hand-delivered by a white supremacist group to local Latino businesses. The move was a response to allegations by Ecuadorean business owners, who accused the police of harassing Latinos. Then, in August, some immigrants held a march against racial profiling. As they proceeded to East Haven Town Hall, a number of groups, some waving “White Pride Worldwide” flags and some shouting anti-immigrant slogans, gathered to conduct their own counterprotest. But since those tense encounters, said Patricio Troya, consul of Ecuador in Connecticut, there have been some initiatives to increase dialogue and understanding between the police and the Ecuadoreans. Mr. Troya said that he was hopeful, and that East Haven’s mayor, April Capone Almon, had helped in this effort. What does Ms. Rojas think about the current state of relations in her town? “I don’t think it’s simmered down,” she said. “But it’s gotten quiet.” CHRIS HARCUM

Illegal Immigrants
Connecticut
Race
Discrimination


In Massachusetts Senate Race, Both Brown and Warren Pounce on Akin’s Rape Comment

Abstract: NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Heated exchanges over the “war on women” have suddenly come to dominate the closely watched Senate race here, thanks to an obscure Republican congressman from Missouri. Soon after the congressman, Representative Todd Akin , said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that women who are victims of “legitimate” rape rarely become pregnant, both Senate candidates here seized on the comments for their own benefit. Senator Scott P. Brown , a Republican who is locked in a tight re-election battle against Elizabeth Warren , used them to distance himself from his party — a necessity in deep-blue Massachusetts. He was the first Republican senator to call on Mr. Akin to quit his race for the Senate. As Mr. Brown told a group of women here on Tuesday, he was feeling a little heady from the experience. “Gail and I were laying in bed last night and talking a little bit, as we do every night,” he said, “and I said: ‘Honey, can you imagine? Here I am, Scott Brown from Wrentham, and I’ve got a truck that’s got 238,000 miles on it and, you know, something like this comes up and I’m the first guy in the country to even bring it up and tell the guy to step down,’ ” Mr. Brown said. He said his denunciation of Mr. Akin’s comments was “really kind of amazing, kind of eye-opening” and “led to other senators and other people and other groups to say, you know what, that conversation has no place in the public discourse.” Ms. Warren, Mr. Brown’s Democratic challenger, pounced on Mr. Akin’s ill-advised comments, too, and put them in a campaign commercial , which also may be a first. Her ad, which began running on radio on Wednesday, includes audio of Mr. Akin making his original comment: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” A female narrator says the comments were part of a Republican pattern and warns that “if the Republicans control the Senate, they decide who sits on the Supreme Court and whether we could lose Roe v. Wade.” The ad does not mention Mr. Brown, but refers listeners to Ms. Warren’s Web site. The urgency on both sides reflects the importance of female voters in Massachusetts, where they outnumber men by a few percentage points. Early polling here has shown a gender gap in which Mr. Brown trails Ms. Warren among women, but those polls also show a bigger gap among men, who favor Mr. Brown, in a state that has never sent a woman to the Senate. “What this says is, she has a huge problem among men,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster working for Mr. Brown. The problem for Mr. Brown, he said, is that “women tend to be more Democrat.” Mr. Brown has undertaken a full-court press to appeal to women as part of his larger effort to appeal to independents as he tries to blur party lines. This effort included his call on Tuesday for the Republican Party platform to reflect the views of those who support abortion rights, as he does. (The party ignored him and adopted a hard line against abortion.) It has included ads featuring his wife and daughters and showing him doing chores like folding laundry. Gail Huff, Mr. Brown’s wife, a popular television reporter in Washington who has campaigned for him, called Ms. Warren’s claims absurd on Wednesday, and told reporters, “As Scott Brown’s wife of 26 years, I can’t think of anybody who is more supportive of women.” While Mr. Brown was claiming the role of pied piper, leading his party away from Mr. Akin, Ms. Warren was just as vigorously tossing Mr. Brown into one big anti-women Republican stew. “Remember,” Ms. Warren told reporters, “Scott Brown got on this train when he voted against equal pay for equal work, when he decided to become a co-sponsor of an amendment that would deny women access to birth control, and when he stood up and said, ‘Yay, Mitt Romney,’ who said he was going to get rid of Planned Parenthood, and, ‘Yay, Paul Ryan,’ who’s out there on a bill wanting to redefine rape. Scott Brown is in this one up to his neck.” Never mind that Mr. Brown did not praise Mr. Romney or Mr. Ryan on those issues; Ms. Warren says he wants a Republican White House and a Republican Senate so they can adopt a “radical Republican agenda.” These are dirty words in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts
Senate
Abortion
State Legislatures
Brown Scott P
Warren Elizabeth
Presidential Election of 2012
Akin Todd
Sex Crimes


Telecom Italia Raises $887 Million in I.P.O. of Wireless Tower Unit

Abstract: LONDON — Telecom Italia raised 780 million euros, or about $887 million, in the initial public offering of its wireless telecommunications tower unit, Infrastrutture Wireless Italiane, late Thursday. In May, Telecom Italia announced plans to sell 40 percent of the unit, also known as Inwit, in an I.P.O. on the Borsa Italiana. Inwit said late Thursday that its I.P.O. was priced at €3.65 a share, valuing it at 2.19 billion euros. The company’s shares are expected to begin trading in Milan on Monday. About 90 percent of the shares in the offering went to institutional investors, while about 10 percent were sold to retail investors in Italy. Inwit owns, operates and leases about 11,500 wireless towers in Italy, generating revenue from leasing space and providing services to mobile telecom operators. Banca IMI, Deutsche Bank and Mediobanca served as joint global coordinators on the offering.

Telecom Italia
Italy
Wireless
Borsa Italiana
IPO
Mergers and Acquisitions


Egypt's Long-Term Economic Recovery Plan Stalls

Abstract: CAIRO — The Egyptian government’s failure to revive the country’s ailing economy is likely to be a defining issue in parliamentary elections expected to begin in October. The umbrella opposition group, the National Salvation Front, has heaped criticism on President Mohammed Morsi’s administration, accusing it of poor economic stewardship, lack of vision and inability to improve life for millions living below the poverty line. Gehad el-Haddad, one of the top Brotherhood officials charged with developing a long-term economic recovery program, conceded in an interview that progress on major elements of the plan, known as the Renaissance Project, or Al Nahda in Arabic, had stalled. He blamed a combination of government bureaucracy and internal conflicts. The Renaissance Project envisioned an ambitious transformation of Egypt’s economy from one that relied on rentier capitalism — which is largely based on income from various forms of property — into a productive, value-added economy that would contribute to society, according to a description of the project’s main features on the Web site of the Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. This was expected to lead to a gross domestic product of 6.5 percent or 7 percent in five years, though how this growth rate would be reached was unclear. The project also aimed to reduce Egypt’s unemployment rate by 5 percent a year and increase the budget for education to 5.2 percent of G.D.P. from 3.3 percent. Instead, Egypt’s jobless rate has risen to almost 13 percent in two years, from 9 percent, economic growth has slowed to 2 percent, from about 5.5 percent, and there are very few moves being made to restructure budget allocations. “We miscalculated the power of the bureaucracy beast,” said Mr. Haddad, one of a team of five executives in charge of the project. “It’s the idea that almost everyone has the power to stop anything by not putting pen to paper.” Mr. Haddad and his colleagues say they have been reduced to picking “low-hanging fruit” while the project, struggling against financial and personnel shortages, has been quietly put on the back burner. The economic recovery blueprint, touted as a 20-year comprehensive program for social and economic change, was a pillar of Mr. Morsi’s campaign last June. But the project quickly has become more of an incubator for grand ideas than a blueprint proposing specific measures for economic improvement. In the early days after the uprising, the Brotherhood built a reputation in many communities for offering healthcare clinics, cheap food and education services. But they have been unable to transfer their success in grass-roots community organization to running Egypt’s sprawling bureaucracy. Under Mr. Morsi’s presidency, the Renaissance team has been unable to follow through on any major project, including plans to trim the government’s inefficient sprawl of 36 ministries. “We are understaffed and neither have enough financial or human resources, but at the same time, the priorities are still there,” said Mr. Haddad, an experienced administrator who was among the first to be hired for the job after years working in nongovernmental organizations. However good its intentions, the project has become a focus of ridicule. On the social media site Twitter, a popular trend has emerged for Nahda movie title parodies — “There’s Something About Nahda, ” for example, and “The Devil Wears Nahda.” Mr. Haddad, the son of Essam el-Haddad, the president’s top foreign policy adviser and arguably one of the most powerful Brotherhood officials in Egypt, has been a target of the backlash because of his visible role as a leading spokesman for the Brotherhood. Working with him is Hussein el- Kazzaz, chief executive of a business consulting firm, Skopos , and an adviser to Mr. Morsi — a role that ensures some degree of communication between the government and the Renaissance team. The other three members of the advisory board are Ashraf Serry, a Muslim Brotherhood economist; Ahmed Deif, a policy adviser to Mr. Morsi’s presidential campaign; and Ahmed Soliman, a senior Brotherhood member. The brainchild of Khairat el-Shater, the Muslim Brotherhood’s first choice for president until he was disqualified, the Renaissance Project was trumpeted as an Islamist road map for Egypt after the revolution in 2011. Drawing inspiration from Turkey’s years of prosperity and the rise of an Islamic middle class, Mr. Shater saw Egypt’s “mission as clear: restoring Islam in its all-encompassing conception.” The mission was to institute “the religion of God; the Islamization of life, empowering of God’s religion,” according to a transcript of a lecture that he gave in Alexandria, Egypt, in April 2011. In reality, reconciling Islamist theories with an economy perilously close to collapse has been difficult. Ihab el-Fouly, a businessman who is among several consultants aiding the project — but who is not a member of the Brotherhood — said he saw the lack of cohesion with the government as a major obstacle holding back the Renaissance Project. “We need to have some kind of orchestrated effort. But if ministries are not properly in harmony and subscribing to the Renaissance vision, actually subscribing to any vision, forget about renaissance,” Mr. Fouly said. Close watchers of the Brotherhood are still more skeptical, questioning not only the lack of buy-in, but the essential vision of the project itself. Alison Pargeter, a scholar specializing in political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, described the Renaissance Project as a “crystallization” of reform initiatives put forward by the Brotherhood over recent years. Unfortunately, she said, like those ideas, the project was a “vague and generalized wish list that bears little relation to the reality on the ground.” It highlighted, she said, the “Brotherhood’s political naïveté, with their seemingly believing that promises alone will be sufficient to bring people over to their side.” As the difficult realities of government become steadily plainer to Mr. Morsi and his administration — and in the absence of a solid plan for which Egypt can win long-awaited financial backing from the International Monetary Fund — short-term solutions are increasingly likely to take precedence over the project. In the past two years, the Renaissance project team has traveled to almost 20 countries, including South Africa, Turkey, India, China, Japan and Singapore, trying to garner support and advice of international companies and experts in the fields of construction, automobiles, media and manufacturing. On its last trip to Japan in February, Mr. Haddad said, his delegation met with eight companies, including the car giants Mitsubishi and Toyota, looking to broker prospective manufacturing deals with Egypt. The team is also in contact with the Islamic Development Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to identify small businesses and entrepreneurs these institutions can partner with in Egypt. But Egypt’s deepening political and economic crisis is working against it, undermining the credibility of Mr. Morsi and the government and paralyzing the country. Parliamentary elections have been delayed for at least another six months, and a long-sought agreement with the International Monetary Fund for a $4.8 billion loan has yet to be signed, despite 20 months of negotiations. “The fabric of Egypt’s political system is under great strain and we need to know which way the political situation is heading,” said Nathan Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. “While basic state functions still continue, it’s really not a time when a long-term plan is applicable.”

Egypt
Cairo
Unemployment
Muslim Brotherhood Egypt


Dutch Say Separatists in Ukraine Block Inquiry Into Malaysia Jet Crash

Abstract: MOSCOW — Pro-Russian separatist leaders in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk have blocked access to Dutch law enforcement officials pursuing an investigation into the downing of a Malaysian jetliner nearly a year ago, the Netherlands Public Prosecution Office said on Saturday. The obstruction by separatist officials prompted the investigators, from the Dutch National Police and Ministry of Defense, to cut short their field work in Ukraine without conducting research into cellphone towers and cellular networks in the region, the public prosecution office said. The passenger jet, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 , was shot down on July 17 as it flew over the war zone in eastern Ukraine during a journey from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board, including 196 Dutch citizens. Based on preliminary analysis and intelligence, including from the United States government, the aircraft was widely believed to have been destroyed by a surface-to-air missile fired from territory controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces. The separatist groups, however, strongly deny that they had anything to do with the crash, and the Russian government has sought to provide evidence that the plane was fired upon by a Ukrainian jet fighter. And on Friday, a senior Russian official said the Kremlin would oppose a plan by Malaysia calling on the United Nations Security Council to create a tribunal to try suspects in the downing of the jetliner. Calling the idea “ill-timed and counterproductive,” Gennady Gatilov, a deputy foreign minister, told Russian news agencies, “We need to wait for the end of the investigation, not adopt hasty resolutions on the creation of tribunals.” An official international inquiry into the cause, which is being led by the Dutch aviation safety agency, has not made any official determination. A preliminary report issued in September found that the aircraft had experienced no technical difficulties and had made no distress call, while wreckage of the plane indicated that it was destroyed after being hit by high-energy projectiles that ripped it apart in midair. Although the report did not say so, that kind of damage is consistent with a missile attack. The destruction of the plane sharply focused international attention on the worsening violence in Ukraine, and briefly put Russia under intense pressure over its role in the conflict, amid suspicions that it had supplied the missile system. But as the first anniversary of the disaster approaches, Dutch officials have expressed mounting concern over the lack of progress in determining the precise cause and in identifying those responsible, a likely reflection of intensifying political pressure, including from families of the victims. The criminal investigation is being carried out separately from the safety investigation. The Dutch officials spent about two weeks in eastern Ukraine, mostly at the crash site in the region of Donetsk, which is also largely controlled by pro-Russian separatist forces. The investigators ended their work on Saturday after concluding they could proceed no further. In Donetsk, however, investigators received greater cooperation from officials of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, the Dutch prosecution office said in its statement on Saturday. Investigators were also aided by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is monitoring the conflict zone. “The most important goals of the mission were in this region,” the prosecution office said. “Ground samples have been taken at various locations and technical research has been conducted to locate cell towers and check the working of the eastern Ukrainian telephone network. The information that has been collected during the mission will be examined and analyzed in the Netherlands.” Efforts to conduct a similar inquiry into cellphone towers in Luhansk were stymied, the prosecution office said. “The mission was also aimed at technical research into cell towers and telephone network in the Luhansk area,” the statement added. “This has until now not succeeded, as representatives of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic in talks with the O.S.C.E. until now have refused access to the Luhansk area.” Cellphone communications could be integral to the investigation because Ukrainian intelligence services said they had intercepted telephone conversations in which separatist commanders discussed the shooting down of a plane — apparently believing their forces had just destroyed a Ukrainian military jet. One Western official with close knowledge of the work in eastern Ukraine said that the investigators were ill-advised in trying to conduct an inquiry amid continued sporadic fighting. “I think they were extremely naïve to go back there and launch a criminal investigation in one of the most open and dangerous crime scenes in the world,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate politics of the inquiry. This month, the Dutch foreign minister, Bert Koenders, visited Moscow, where he discussed the inquiries with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov. In a statement after the meeting, he added: “It’s our responsibility to pull out all the stops in order to keep the attention of the international community focused on MH17. We owe it to the victims and the next of kin.”

Ukraine
Russia
Luhansk
Netherlands
Malaysia Airlines 17
Plane Crash
People's Militia