A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA

Abstract: CLEWISTON, Fla. — The call Ricke Kress and every other citrus grower in Florida dreaded came while he was driving. “It’s here” was all his grove manager needed to say to force him over to the side of the road. The disease that sours oranges and leaves them half green, already ravaging citrus crops across the world, had reached the state’s storied groves. Mr. Kress, the president of Southern Gardens Citrus, in charge of two and a half million orange trees and a factory that squeezes juice for Tropicana and Florida’s Natural, sat in silence for several long moments. “O.K.,” he said finally on that fall day in 2005, “let’s make a plan.” In the years that followed, he and the 8,000 other Florida growers who supply most of the nation’s orange juice poured everything they had into fighting the disease they call citrus greening. To slow the spread of the bacterium that causes the scourge, they chopped down hundreds of thousands of infected trees and sprayed an expanding array of pesticides on the winged insect that carries it. But the contagion could not be contained. They scoured Central Florida’s half-million acres of emerald groves and sent search parties around the world to find a naturally immune tree that could serve as a new progenitor for a crop that has thrived in the state since its arrival, it is said, with Ponce de León. But such a tree did not exist. “In all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of immunity,” the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said. In all of citrus, but perhaps not in all of nature. With a precipitous decline in Florida’s harvest predicted within the decade, the only chance left to save it, Mr. Kress believed, was one that his industry and others had long avoided for fear of consumer rejection. They would have to alter the orange’s DNA — with a gene from a different species. Oranges are not the only crop that might benefit from genetically engineered resistance to diseases for which standard treatments have proven elusive. And advocates of the technology say it could also help provide food for a fast-growing population on a warming planet by endowing crops with more nutrients, or the ability to thrive in drought, or to resist pests. Leading scientific organizations have concluded that shuttling DNA between species carries no intrinsic risk to human health or the environment, and that such alterations can be reliably tested. But the idea of eating plants and animals whose DNA has been manipulated in a laboratory — called genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.’s — still spooks many people. Critics worry that such crops carry risks not yet detected, and distrust the big agrochemical companies that have produced the few in wide use. And hostility toward the technology, long ingrained in Europe, has deepened recently among Americans as organic food advocates, environmentalists and others have made opposition to it a pillar of a growing movement for healthier and ethical food choices. Mr. Kress’s boss worried about damaging the image of juice long promoted as “100 percent natural.” “Do we really want to do this?” he demanded in a 2008 meeting at the company’s headquarters on the northern rim of the Everglades. Mr. Kress, now 61, had no particular predilection for biotechnology. Known for working long hours, he rose through the ranks at fruit and juice companies like Welch’s and Seneca Foods. On moving here for the Southern Gardens job, just a few weeks before citrus greening was detected, he had assumed his biggest headache would be competition from flavored waters, or persuading his wife to tolerate Florida’s humidity. But the dwindling harvest that could mean the idling of his juice processing plant would also have consequences beyond any one company’s bottom line. Florida is the second-largest producer of orange juice in the world, behind Brazil. Its $9 billion citrus industry contributes 76,000 jobs to the state that hosts the Orange Bowl. Southern Gardens, a subsidiary of U.S. Sugar, was one of the few companies in the industry with the wherewithal to finance the development of a “transgenic” tree, which could take a decade and cost as much as $20 million. An emerging scientific consensus held that genetic engineering would be required to defeat citrus greening. “People are either going to drink transgenic orange juice or they’re going to drink apple juice,” one University of Florida scientist told Mr. Kress. And if the presence of a new gene in citrus trees prevented juice from becoming scarcer and more expensive, Mr. Kress believed, the American public would embrace it. “The consumer will support us if it’s the only way,” Mr. Kress assured his boss. Image To avoid spreading a scourge further, orange trees infected by disease are burned in Clewiston, Fla., at groves owned by Southern Gardens Citrus. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times His quest to save the orange offers a close look at the daunting process of genetically modifying one well-loved organism — on a deadline. In the past several years, out of public view, he has considered DNA donors from all over the tree of life, including two vegetables, a virus and, briefly, a pig. A synthetic gene, manufactured in the laboratory, also emerged as a contender. Trial trees that withstood the disease in his greenhouse later succumbed in the field. Concerns about public perception and potential delays in regulatory scrutiny put a damper on some promising leads. But intent on his mission, Mr. Kress shrugged off signs that national campaigns against genetically modified food were gaining traction. Only in recent months has he begun to face the full magnitude of the gap between what science can achieve and what society might accept. Millenniums of Intervention Even in the heyday of frozen concentrate, the popularity of orange juice rested largely on its image as the ultimate natural beverage, fresh-squeezed from a primordial fruit. But the reality is that human intervention has modified the orange for millenniums, as it has almost everything people eat. Before humans were involved, corn was a wild grass, tomatoes were tiny, carrots were only rarely orange and dairy cows produced little milk. The orange, for its part, might never have existed had human migration not brought together the grapefruit-size pomelo from the tropics and the diminutive mandarin from a temperate zone thousands of years ago in China. And it would not have become the most widely planted fruit tree had human traders not carried it across the globe. The varieties that have survived, among the many that have since arisen through natural mutation, are the product of human selection, with nearly all of Florida’s juice a blend of just two: the Hamlin, whose unremarkable taste and pale color are offset by its prolific yield in the early season, and the dark, flavorful, late-season Valencia. Because oranges themselves are hybrids and most seeds are clones of the mother, new varieties cannot easily be produced by crossbreeding — unlike, say, apples, which breeders have remixed into favorites like Fuji and Gala. But the vast majority of oranges in commercial groves are the product of a type of genetic merging that predates the Romans, in which a slender shoot of a favored fruit variety is grafted onto the sturdier roots of other species: lemon, for instance, or sour orange. And a seedless midseason orange recently adopted by Florida growers emerged after breeders bombarded a seedy variety with radiation to disrupt its DNA, a technique for accelerating evolution that has yielded new varieties in dozens of crops, including barley and rice. Its proponents argue that genetic engineering is one in a continuum of ways humans shape food crops, each of which carries risks: even conventional crossbreeding has occasionally produced toxic varieties of some vegetables. Because making a G.M.O. typically involves adding one or a few genes, each containing instructions for a protein whose function is known, they argue, it is more predictable than traditional methods that involve randomly mixing or mutating many genes of unknown function. But because it also usually involves taking DNA from the species where it evolved and putting it in another to which it may be only distantly related — or turning off genes already present — critics of the technology say it represents a new and potentially more hazardous degree of tinkering whose risks are not yet fully understood. If he had had more time, Mr. Kress could have waited for the orange to naturally evolve resistance to the bacteria known as C. liberibacter asiaticus. That could happen tomorrow. Or it could take years, or many decades. Or the orange in Florida could disappear first. Plunging Ahead Early discussions among other citrus growers about what kind of disease research they should collectively support did little to reassure Mr. Kress about his own genetic engineering project. “The public will never drink G.M.O. orange juice,” one grower said at a contentious 2008 meeting. “It’s a waste of our money.” “The public is already eating tons of G.M.O.’s,” countered Peter McClure, a big grower. “This isn’t like a bag of Doritos,” snapped another. “We’re talking about a raw product, the essence of orange.” The genetically modified foods Americans have eaten for more than a decade — corn, soybeans, some cottonseed oil, canola oil and sugar — come mostly as invisible ingredients in processed foods like cereal, salad dressing and tortilla chips. And the few G.M.O.’s sold in produce aisles — a Hawaiian papaya, some squash, a fraction of sweet corn — lack the iconic status of a breakfast drink that, Mr. Kress conceded, is “like motherhood” to Americans, who drink more of it per capita than anyone else. Image A rally against Monsanto, which dominates the crop biotechnology business, in Los Angeles in May. Consumers who believe that genetically modified crops are harmful protested in hundreds of cities. Credit Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images If various polls were to be believed, a third to half of Americans would refuse to eat any transgenic crop. One study’s respondents would accept only certain types: two-thirds said they would eat a fruit modified with another plant gene, but few would accept one with DNA from an animal. Fewer still would knowingly eat produce that contained a gene from a virus. There also appeared to be an abiding belief that a plant would take on the identity of the species from which its new DNA was drawn, like the scientist in the movie “The Fly” who sprouted insect parts after a DNA-mixing mistake with a house fly. Asked if tomatoes containing a gene from a fish would “taste fishy” in a question on a 2004 poll conducted by the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers University that referred to one company’s efforts to forge a frost-resistant tomato with a gene from the winter flounder, fewer than half correctly answered “no.” A fear that the genetic engineering of food would throw the ecosystem out of whack showed in the surveys too. Mr. Kress’s researchers, in turn, liked to point out that the very reason genetic engineering works is that all living things share a basic biochemistry: if a gene from a cold-water fish can help a tomato resist frost, it is because DNA is a universal code that tomato cells know how to read. Even the most distantly related species — say, humans and bacteria — share many genes whose functions have remained constant across billions of years of evolution. “It’s not where a gene comes from that matters,” one researcher said. “It’s what it does.” Mr. Kress set the surveys aside. He took encouragement from other attempts to genetically modify foods that were in the works. There was even another fruit, the “Arctic apple,” whose genes for browning were switched off, to reduce waste and allow the fruit to be more readily sold sliced. “The public is going to be more informed about G.M.O.’s by the time we’re ready,” Mr. Kress told his research director, Michael P. Irey, as they lined up the five scientists whom Southern Gardens would underwrite. And to the scientists, growers and juice processors at a meeting convened by Minute Maid in Miami in early 2010, he insisted that just finding a gene that worked had to be his company’s priority. The foes were formidable. C. liberibacter, the bacterium that kills citrus trees by choking off their flow of nutrients — first detected when it destroyed citrus trees more than a century ago in China — had earned a place, along with anthrax and the Ebola virus, on the Agriculture Department’s list of potential agents of bioterrorism. Asian citrus psyllids, the insects that suck the bacteria out of one tree and inject them into another as they feed on the sap of their leaves, can carry the germ a mile without stopping, and the females can lay up to 800 eggs in their one-month life. Mr. Kress’s DNA candidate would have to fight off the bacteria or the insect. As for public acceptance, he told his industry colleagues, “We can’t think about that right now.” The ‘Creep Factor’ Trim, silver-haired and described by colleagues as tightly wound (he prefers “focused”), Mr. Kress arrives at the office by 6:30 each morning and microwaves a bowl of oatmeal. He stocks his office cabinet with cans of peel-top Campbell’s chicken soup that he heats up for lunch. Arriving home each evening, he cuts a rose from his garden for his wife. Weekends, he works in his yard and pores over clippings about G.M.O.’s in the news. For a man who takes pleasure in routine, the uncertainty that marked his DNA quest was disquieting. It would cost Southern Gardens millions of dollars just to perform the safety tests for a single gene in a single variety of orange. Of his five researchers’ approaches, he had planned to narrow the field to the one that worked best over time. But in 2010, with the disease spreading faster than anyone anticipated, the factor that came to weigh most was which could be ready first. To fight C. liberibacter, Dean Gabriel at the University of Florida had chosen a gene from a virus that destroys bacteria as it replicates itself. Though such viruses, called bacteriophages (“phage” means to devour), are harmless to humans, Mr. Irey sometimes urged Mr. Kress to consider the public relations hurdle that might come with such a strange-sounding source of the DNA. “A gene from a virus,” he would ask pointedly, “that infects bacteria?” But Mr. Kress’s chief concern was that Dr. Gabriel was taking too long to perfect his approach. A second contender, Erik Mirkov of Texas A&M University, was further along with trees he had endowed with a gene from spinach — a food, he reminded Mr. Kress, that “we give to babies.” The gene, which exists in slightly different forms in hundreds of plants and animals, produces a protein that attacks invading bacteria. Image Shoots grown in a laboratory to resist the disease citrus greening are grafted onto normal orange trees in a test plot. The shoots are endowed with a gene from spinach that produces a protein that attacks invading bacteria. Florida growers turned to transgenic trees after citrus greening began infecting millions of orange trees. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times Even so, Dr. Mirkov faced skepticism from growers. “Will my juice taste like spinach?” one asked. “Will it be green?” wondered another. “This gene,” he invariably replied, “has nothing to do with the color or taste of spinach. Your body makes very similar kinds of proteins as part of your own defense against bacteria.” When some of the scientist’s promising trees got sick in their first trial, Mr. Kress agreed that he should try to improve on his results in a new generation of trees, by adjusting the gene’s placement. But transgenic trees, begun as a single cell in a petri dish, can take two years before they are sturdy enough to place in the ground and many more years to bear fruit. “Isn’t there a gene,” Mr. Kress asked Mr. Irey, “to hurry up Mother Nature?” For a time, the answer seemed to lie with a third scientist, William O. Dawson at the University of Florida, who had managed to alter fully grown trees by attaching a gene to a virus that could be inserted by way of a small incision in the bark. Genes transmitted that way would eventually stop functioning, but Mr. Kress hoped to use it as a stopgap measure to ward off the disease in the 60 million citrus trees already in Florida’s groves. Dr. Dawson joked that he hoped at least to save the grapefruit, whose juice he enjoyed, “preferably with a little vodka in it.” But his most promising result that year was doomed from the beginning: of the dozen bacteria-fighting genes he had then tested on his greenhouse trees, the one that appeared effective came from a pig. One of about 30,000 genes in the animal’s genetic code, it was, he ventured, “a pretty small amount of pig.” “There’s no safety issue from our standpoint — but there is a certain creep factor,” an Environmental Protection Agency official observed to Mr. Kress, who had included it on an early list of possibilities to run by the agency. “At least something is working,” Mr. Kress bristled. “It’s a proof of concept.” A similar caution dimmed his hopes for the timely approval of a synthetic gene, designed in the laboratory of a fourth scientist, Jesse Jaynes of Tuskegee University. In a simulation, Dr. Jaynes’s gene consistently vanquished the greening bacteria. But the burden of proving a synthetic gene’s safety would prolong the process. “You’re going to get more questions,” Mr. Kress was told, “with a gene not found in nature.” And in the fall of 2010, an onion gene that discouraged psyllids from landing on tomato plants was working in the Cornell laboratory of Mr. Kress’s final hope, Herb Aldwinckle. But it would be some time before the gene could be transferred to orange trees. Only Dr. Mirkov’s newly fine-tuned trees with the spinach gene, Mr. Kress and Mr. Irey agreed, could be ready in time to stave off what many believed would soon be a steep decline in the harvest. In the fall of 2010, they were put to the test inside a padlocked greenhouse stocked with infected trees and psyllids. The Monsanto Effect Mr. Kress’s only direct brush so far with the broader battle raging over genetically modified food came in December 2010, in the reader comments on a Reuters article alluding to Southern Gardens’ genetic engineering efforts. Some readers vowed not to buy such “frankenfood.” Another attributed a rise in allergies to genetic engineering. And dozens lambasted Monsanto, the St. Louis-based company that dominates the crop biotechnology business, which was not even mentioned in the article. “If this trend goes on, one day, there will be only Monsanto engineered foods available,” read one letter warning of unintended consequences. Mr. Kress was unperturbed. Dozens of long-term animal feeding studies had concluded that existing G.M.O.’s were as safe as other crops, and the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization and others had issued statements to the same effect. Image “The consumer will support us if it’s the only way,” said Ricke Kress, President of Southern Gardens Citrus, who believes the only way to save Florida’s entire citrus crop is to alter the orange trees’ DNA. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times But some of his researchers worried that the popular association between G.M.O.’s and Monsanto — and in turn between Monsanto and the criticisms of modern agriculture — could turn consumers against Southern Gardens’ transgenic oranges. “The article doesn’t say ‘Monsanto’ anywhere, but the comments are all about Monsanto,” Dr. Mirkov said. It had not helped win hearts and minds for G.M.O.’s, Mr. Kress knew, that the first such crop widely adopted by farmers was the soybean engineered by Monsanto with a bacteria gene — to tolerate a weed killer Monsanto also made. Starting in the mid-1990s, soybean farmers in the United States overwhelmingly adopted that variety of the crop, which made it easier for them to control weeds. But the subsequent broader use of the chemical — along with a distaste for Monsanto’s aggressive business tactics and a growing suspicion of a food system driven by corporate profits — combined to forge a consumer backlash. Environmental activists vandalized dozens of field trials and protested brands that used Monsanto’s soybeans or corn, introduced soon after, which was engineered to prevent pests from attacking it. In response, companies including McDonald’s, Frito-Lay and Heinz pledged not to use G.M.O. ingredients in certain products, and some European countries prohibited their cultivation. Some of Mr. Kress’s scientists were still fuming about what they saw as the lost potential for social good hijacked both by the activists who opposed genetic engineering and the corporations that failed to convince consumers of its benefits. In many developing countries, concerns about safety and ownership of seeds led governments to delay or prohibit cultivation of needed crops: Zambia, for instance, declined shipments of G.M.O. corn even during a 2002 famine. ”It’s easy for someone who can go down to the grocery store and buy anything they need to be against G.M.O.’s,” said Dr. Jaynes, who faced such barriers with a high-protein sweet potato he had engineered with a synthetic gene. To Mr. Kress in early 2011, any comparison to Monsanto — whose large blocks of patents he had to work around, and whose thousands of employees worldwide dwarfed the 750 he employed in Florida at peak harvest times — seemed far-fetched. If it was successful, Southern Gardens would hope to recoup its investment by charging a royalty for its trees. But its business strategy was aimed at saving the orange crop, whose total acreage was a tiny fraction of the crops the major biotechnology companies had pursued. He urged his worried researchers to look at the early success of Flavr Savr tomatoes. Introduced in 1994 and engineered to stay fresh longer than traditional varieties, they proved popular enough that some stores rationed them, before business missteps by their developer ended their production. And he was no longer alone in the pursuit of a genetically modified orange. Citrus growers were collectively financing research into a greening-resistant tree, and the Agriculture Department had also assigned a team of scientists to it. Any solution would have satisfied Mr. Kress. Almost daily, he could smell the burning of infected trees, which mingled with orange-blossom sweetness in the grove just beyond Southern Gardens’ headquarters. A Growing Urgency In an infection-filled greenhouse where every nontransgenic tree had showed symptoms of disease, Dr. Mirkov’s trees with the spinach gene had survived unscathed for more than a year. Mr. Kress would soon have 300 of them planted in a field trial. But in the spring of 2012, he asked the Environmental Protection Agency, the first of three federal agencies that would evaluate his trees, for guidance. The next step was safety testing. And he felt that it could not be started fast enough. Dr. Mirkov assured him that the agency’s requirements for animal tests to assess the safety of the protein produced by his gene, which bore no resemblance to anything on the list of known allergens and toxins, would be minimal. “It’s spinach,” he insisted. “It’s been eaten for centuries.” Other concerns weighed on Mr. Kress that spring: growers in Florida did not like to talk about it, but the industry’s tripling of pesticide applications to kill the bacteria-carrying psyllid was, while within legal limits, becoming expensive and worrisome. One widely used pesticide had stopped working as the psyllid evolved resistance, and Florida’s citrus growers’ association was petitioning one company to lift the twice-a-season restrictions on spraying young trees — increasingly its only hope for an uninfected harvest. Others in the industry who knew of Mr. Kress’s project were turning to him. He agreed to speak at the fall meeting of citrus growers in California, where the greening disease had just been detected. “We need to hear about the transgenic solution,” said Ted Batkin, the association’s director. But Mr. Kress worried that he had nothing to calm their fears. Image In Southern Gardens groves, trees that are infected with citrus greening are marked, cut down and burned. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times And an increasingly vocal movement to require any food with genetically engineered ingredients to carry a “G.M.O.” label had made him uneasy. Supporters of one hotly contested California ballot initiative argued for labeling as a matter of consumer rights and transparency — but their advertisements often implied the crops were a hazard: one pictured a child about to take a joyful bite of a pest-resistant cob of corn, on which was emblazoned a question mark and the caption “Corn, engineered to grow its own pesticide.” Yet the gene that makes corn insect-resistant, he knew, came from the same soil bacterium long used by organic food growers as a natural insecticide. Arguing that the Food and Drug Administration should require labels on food containing G.M.O.’s, one leader of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group, cited “pink slime, deadly melons, tainted turkeys and BPA in our soup.” Mr. Kress attributed the labeling campaigns to the kind of tactic any industry might use to gain a competitive edge: they were financed largely by companies that sell organic products, which stood to gain if packaging implying a hazard drove customers to their own non-G.M.O. alternatives. He did not aim to hide anything from consumers, but he would want them to understand how and why his oranges were genetically engineered. What bothered him was that a label seemed to lump all G.M.O.’s into one stigmatized category. And when the E.P.A. informed him in June 2012 that it would need to see test results for how large quantities of spinach protein affected honeybees and mice, he gladly wrote out the $300,000 check to have the protein made. It was the largest single expense yet in a project that had so far cost more than $5 million. If these tests raised no red flags, he would need to test the protein as it appears in the pollen of transgenic orange blossoms. Then the agency would want to test the juice. “Seems excessive,” Dr. Mirkov said. But Mr. Kress and Mr. Irey shared a sense of celebration. The path ahead was starting to clear. Rather than wait for Dr. Mirkov’s 300 trees to flower, which could take several years, they agreed to try to graft his spinach gene shoots to mature trees to hasten the production of pollen — and, finally, their first fruit, for testing. Wall of Opposition Early one morning a year ago, Mr. Kress checked the Agriculture Department’s Web site from home. The agency had opened its 60-day public comment period on the trees modified to produce “Arctic apples” that did not brown. His own application, he imagined, would take a similar form. He skimmed through the company’s 163-page petition, showing how the apples are equivalent in nutritional content to normal apples, how remote was the likelihood of cross-pollination with other apple varieties and the potentially bigger market for a healthful fruit. Then he turned to the comments. There were hundreds. And they were almost universally negative. Some were from parents, voicing concerns that the nonbrowning trait would disguise a rotten apple — though transgenic apples rotten from infection would still turn brown. Many wrote as part of a petition drive by the Center for Food Safety, a group that opposes biotechnology. “Apples are supposed to be a natural, healthy snack,” it warned. “Genetically engineered apples are neither.” Others voiced a general distrust of scientists’ guarantees: “Too many things were presented to us as innocuous and years later we discovered it was untrue,” wrote one woman. “After two cancers I don’t feel like taking any more unnecessary risks.” Image Test trees are covered in Southern Gardens groves. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times Many insisted that should the fruit be approved, it ought to be labeled. That morning, Mr. Kress drove to work late. He should not be surprised by the hostility, he told himself. Mr. Irey tried to console him with good news: the data on the honeybees and mice had come back. The highest dose of the protein the E.P.A. wanted tested had produced no ill effect. But the magnitude of the opposition had never hit Mr. Kress so hard. “Will they believe us?” he asked himself for the first time. “Will they believe we’re doing this to eliminate chemicals and we’re making sure it’s safe? Or will they look at us and say, ‘That’s what they all say?’ ” The major brands were rumored to be looking beyond Florida for their orange juice — perhaps to Brazil, where growers had taken to abandoning infected groves to plant elsewhere. Other experiments that Mr. Kress viewed as similar to his own had foundered. Pigs engineered to produce less-polluting waste had been euthanized after their developer at a Canadian university had failed to find investors. A salmon modified to grow faster was still awaiting F.D.A. approval. A study pointing to health risks from G.M.O.’s had been discredited by scientists, but was contributing to a sense among some consumers that the technology is dangerous. And while the California labeling measure had been defeated, it had spawned a ballot initiative in Washington State and legislative proposals in Connecticut, Vermont, New Mexico, Missouri and many other states. In the heat of last summer, Mr. Kress gardened more savagely than his wife had ever seen. Driving through the Central Valley of California last October to speak at the California Citrus Growers meeting, Mr. Kress considered how to answer critics. Maybe even a blanket “G.M.O.” label would be O.K., he thought, if it would help consumers understand that he had nothing to hide. He could never prove that there were no risks to genetically modifying a crop. But he could try to explain the risks of not doing so. Southern Gardens had lost 700,000 trees trying to control the disease, more than a quarter of its total. The forecast for the coming spring harvest was dismal. The approval to use more pesticide on young trees had come through that day. At his hotel that night, he slipped a new slide into his standard talk. On the podium the next morning, he talked about the growing use of pesticides: “We’re using a lot of chemicals, pure and simple,” he said. “We’re using more than we’ve ever used before.” Then he stopped at the new slide. Unadorned, it read “Consumer Acceptance.” He looked out at the audience. What these growers wanted most, he knew, was reassurance that he could help them should the disease spread. But he had to warn them: “If we don’t have consumer confidence, it doesn’t matter what we come up with.” Planting One recent sunny morning, Mr. Kress drove to a fenced field, some distance from his office and far from any other citrus tree. He unlocked the gate and signed in, as required by Agriculture Department regulations for a field trial of a genetically modified crop. Just in the previous few months, Whole Foods had said that because of customer demand it would avoid stocking most G.M.O. foods and require labels on them by 2018. Hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world had joined in a “March Against Monsanto” — and the Agriculture Department had issued its final report for this year’s orange harvest showing a 9 percent decline from last year, attributable to citrus greening. But visiting the field gave him some peace. In some rows were the trees with no new gene in them, sick with greening. In others were the 300 juvenile trees with spinach genes, all healthy. In the middle were the trees that carried his immediate hopes: 15 mature Hamlins and Valencias, seven feet tall, onto which had been grafted shoots of Dr. Mirkov’s spinach gene trees. There was good reason to believe that the trees would pass the E.P.A.’s tests when they bloom next spring. And he was gathering the data the Agriculture Department would need to ensure that the trees posed no risk to other plants. When he had fruit, the Food and Drug Administration would compare its safety and nutritional content to conventional oranges. In his office is a list of groups to contact when the first G.M.O. fruit in Florida are ready to pick: environmental organizations, consumer advocates and others. Exactly what he would say when he finally contacted them, he did not know. Whether anyone would drink the juice from his genetically modified oranges, he did not know. But he had decided to move ahead. Late this summer he will plant several hundred more young trees with the spinach gene, in a new greenhouse. In two years, if he wins regulatory approval, they will be ready to go into the ground. The trees could be the first to produce juice for sale in five years or so. Whether it is his transgenic tree, or someone else’s, he believed, Florida growers will soon have trees that could produce juice without fear of its being sour, or in short supply. For a moment, alone in the field, he let his mind wander. “Maybe we can use the technology to improve orange juice,” he could not help thinking. “Maybe we can find a way to have oranges grow year-round, or get two for every one we get now on a tree.” Then he reined in those thoughts. He took the clipboard down, signed out and locked the gate.

Oranges
Ricke Kress
Florida
Southern Gardens Citrus
Genetic engineering
Food


France Will Not Deal With Kidnappers

Abstract: The French military said Tuesday that it would not negotiate with gunmen claiming to be from the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram who have taken a French family of seven hostage in retaliation for French military intervention in Mali. The three adults and four children were kidnapped in northern Cameroon near the Nigerian border last week. In a video posted online, the gunmen said France had declared war on Islam with its campaign in Mali, and they threatened to kill the hostages unless the authorities in Nigeria and Cameroon freed militants there. “We do not negotiate on that kind of basis, with these kind of groups,” the French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, told RTL radio. “We will use all possible means to ensure these and other hostages are freed.”

France
Kidnapping
Boko Haram
Hostage
Mali


George Washington Library Opens at Mount Vernon

Abstract: MOUNT VERNON, Va. — George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate has opened a $47 million library dedicated to the study of America’s first president, with plans to host a series of scholars who will examine the lives of Washington and the other founding fathers. Since 1853, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association has been dedicated to preserving and promoting Washington’s legacy. But with the opening on Friday of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, Mount Vernon is committing itself to sponsoring a formal level of scholarship about Washington, and Mount Vernon officials say they have no intention of insisting on a glossy interpretation. “There is this vision of Washington as a man on a pedestal,” said Curt Viebranz, Mount Vernon’s president and chief executive. “I actually think if you take him down off the pedestal, it’s an even more compelling story. We’re not going to try to control the message.” The library’s director, Douglas Bradburn, said there was a trend among historians now who might be more likely to look at the American Revolution through a more cynical lens, resurrecting arguments from a century ago that Washington and the other founding fathers were motivated more by their own economic interests than by any lofty notions of liberty and self-governance. Mr. Bradburn said the beauty of a library like Mount Vernon’s was that historians and researchers from various schools of interpretation could come together, collaborate and commiserate. Sandra Moats, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, who will be one of the first seven visiting scholars at the estate, will research Washington and the advent of American neutrality after the Revolution. She said she was looking forward to delving into “the nitty-gritty policy in the way a historian would with any president.” She expects her work to be neither critical nor glowing, but a more straightforward examination. “He’s not someone with a lot of scandals or problems,” she said. “He’s not someone where I’m expecting to find a lot of skeletons.” The library also gives Mount Vernon an opportunity to hold seminars and retreats for political and military leaders and others who want to understand Washington’s values. Mount Vernon has often hosted small gatherings like these, but it never had the facilities to accommodate such larger meetings to the degree it would have liked.

Mount Vernon Va Home of George Washington


Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and a Line Etched by a Day of Disaster

Abstract: Five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center. Downtown smelled like Coke cans and hair on fire. It was televised live. In New York City, 2,749 people were killed. About eight million remained. Since that day, the numbers have changed. The population grew by more than 134,000 from 2000 to 2005, the city’s latest Planning Department calculations show. In that time, 645,416 babies were born and 304,773 people died. A half-million more people came from other countries than departed for them, and 800,000 more people left for the 50 states than came wide-eyed from them. The meaning in the math is that today a great many New Yorkers lack firsthand knowledge of the city’s critical modern moment. Five years on, New York is a city of newcomers and survivors. And between them runs a line. The line makes for no conflict, no discernible tension; it works a quieter breach. Borne of the routine comings and goings of urban life, of births and deaths, the line divides views of a singular moment. Across the line, consummately familiar events can appear contorted. On one side, the newcomer side, a man seeks accounts of that day; on the other side a man withholds his account. On the newcomer side, a woman visits the absent towers to feel some connection; on the other side a woman feels connected, and then some. On the side of those who lived in New York, you can share a sense of trauma both layered and ill-defined. “It’s like someone who has been in a war zone,” said William Stockbridge, 50, a finance executive who was working downtown during the attack. “It’s different.” On the other side, you can feel like the new boyfriend at your girlfriend’s family reunion the year somebody died — somebody young, somebody you never met. “You feel like you’re on the outside,” said Matthew Molnar, 26, a waiter in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who lived in Middlesex County, N.J., in 2001. “You feel like you missed out on a little bit of history.” Newcomers and survivors: those terms ring harsh and blunt only because the line is so often unspoken. It runs soundless and invisible down Broadway from Harlem over the Williamsburg Bridge out to Coney Island and to Fresh Kills, up past the airports across the Grand Concourse into Yankee Stadium, through the bleachers where you can’t drink beer anymore and up out of the park into the nighttime sky. The line flashes into view on the city streets for moments at a time. When jet fighters buzz the skyscrapers for Fleet Week, some of the people below — the ones who were here on Sept. 11 — flinch. More frequently, though, the line operates beneath the surface of conversations, of interactions, of transactions, of life. The line controls small things, controls the way people react to the phrase “and then Sept. 11 happened,” as though a date on the calendar could “happen.” The line’s contours emerge in conversations. Ask about the attack, and people will describe a sense of ownership. “You either experienced it firsthand,” said Amanda Spielman, 30, a graphic designer from Jackson Heights, Queens, who was in the city, “or you didn’t.” Others describe that sense differently, but draw the line in the same place. “I think for the people that seen it on TV, it is more painful than for the people who saw it here,” said Paolo Gonzalez, 29, who manages a parking lot under the Brooklyn Bridge and who saw the attack. “For the other people it was real. If you was here, when the buildings came down the only thing you were thinking was, ‘Run.’ ” Across the line, the new arrivals recognize that sense of ownership. “I’ve been told that I just don’t get it and that I could never understand what it was like to be there in New York on Sept. 11,” said Laura Bassett, 27, who moved to the city from North Carolina after 2001. “I hate that five years later, people still debate which bystander is allowed to be more upset, the New Yorker or the American.” The line emerges perhaps most powerfully around the fallen towers, 2.06 acres of concrete known as ground zero. Because of the line, the site is a paradox, an emotional contradiction, a mass grave and a tourist attraction. Some people feel so strongly about the place they cannot agree on an arrangement for listing the names of the dead; others feel so strongly about the place that they make sure to visit between Radio City Music Hall and the Statue of Liberty. Between those emotional poles is a middle ground, and the line runs through its center. “People who moved to New York, everyone wanted to go down and see it,” said Dede Minor, 51, a real estate broker who was in her office in Midtown on the day of the attack. “For New Yorkers, it was too real.” Jose Martias, 57, a construction worker who was drinking coffee near the East River when the attack began, said he knew why the newcomers visit the site. “They don’t understand it so they go down there to see the hole,” Mr. Martias said. “It’s an attraction to them, like going to the circus.” But across the line there is genuine emotional curiosity, a feeling that people in less cynical times used to call empathy. “I’d didn’t think I’d be that affected,” said Leah Hamilton, 24, a logistics consultant who moved to Manhattan from Washington State last year. “But when I went to ground zero, it was the first time I’ve felt an emotional reaction like that to something I wasn’t a part of. You feel the energy and you could feel the sadness.” The line can reach into the future, forging perceptions of New York and its destiny. Some new arrivals speak of the attack as a reason to come to the city. “We felt like there was a lot of energy here,” said Meg Glasser, 26, a student who moved to the East Village from Boston this year. “We wanted to be a part of it in some way.” But across the line, that sense of energy is tempered by standards for comparison. “I know people who have been here a year or two, and they find New York fantastic,” said Father Bernard, 67, a Roman Catholic monk who was born in Brooklyn and who goes by only that name. “They’re right, but they didn’t know the New York before.” The line reaches into the past as well, dividing memories. Each generation tells the next where they were when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, when the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were killed or when a space shuttle exploded, but a major act of destruction in a major American city creates more firsthand accounts. Psychological studies suggest those accounts have played a role in drawing the line. After the attack, a group of academic researchers interviewed 1,500 people, including 550 in New York City, to gauge memories of detail, said Elizabeth Phelps, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. Proximity to Lower Manhattan during the attack, Dr. Phelps said, “increases your confidence in your memories, and your accuracy as well.” In a separate study, the researchers measured activity in parts of the brain connected to memory. With verbal cues, subjects were asked to conjure visions of the terror attack and of personal events from the summer of 2001. Only half registered a difference in neural activity. “Those who did show a difference were, on average, in Washington Square Park,” Dr. Phelps said. “Those who didn’t were, on average, in Midtown.” Among those who have come to the city since 2001, the line dividing memories is undisputed. “I had been there as a tourist to the World Trade Center, so I have memories,” said Marielle Solan, 22, a photographer who moved to the city from Delaware this year. “But obviously I can’t have any sense of what it was like. Every Sept, 11, you get a sense of fear and depression, but in terms of actual visceral reactions, I don’t really have that.” The new arrivals have found a conspicuous void of shared memory. “I’m amazed because it was such a big event, and people never mention it,” said Deenah Vollmer, 20, who moved to the city last year. “When you do mention it, everyone has these crazy intense stories.” Across the line, many of those who lived in the city hold their memories close. “The people I already knew know my stories from that day, so there’s no need to repeat them,” said Ms. Spielman, the graphic designer. “The new people I’ve met don’t ask me. It’s not something I bring up.” But each year the calendar brings it up. Alexandria Lambert, 28, who works as an administrative assistant, sees the line run through the center of her office. Each year, a co-worker who witnessed the attack asks for the day off, and each year a boss who did not declines the request. “His point of view is, ‘Don’t let it get you down,’ ” Ms. Lambert said, “but she just doesn’t want to be here.”

Terrorism
New York City
World Trade Center (NYC)
Psychology and Psychologists


Germany: Merkel Comment Draws Fire

Abstract: Opposition lawmakers and rights groups in Germany criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday for saying that Christianity was “the most persecuted religion worldwide.” Jerzy Montag, a lawmaker with the Green Party, said Ms. Merkel’s comments were “mistaken” and “not very helpful.” Rights campaigners said ranking faiths according to persecution was pointless. Ms. Merkel made the comment at a meeting of the German Protestant Church on Monday, in which she said that Germany needed to protect Christian minorities abroad.

Germany
Merkel Angela
Christians and Christianity


Gloomy Numbers for Holiday Shopping’s Big Weekend

Abstract: It was a cold, clear day in Leesburg, Va., and a security guard at an outlet mall there said the midmorning crowd was similar to that of a typical busy Saturday. But an ordinary day it was not. It was Black Friday, traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year. With the economy bumping along at a lackluster pace, and this year’s shorter-than-usual window between Thanksgiving and Christmas, sales and promotions began weeks before Thanksgiving Day, making this holiday shopping season more diffuse than ever. That left Black Friday weekend itself, the season’s customary kickoff, looking a bit gloomy. Over the course of the weekend, consumers spent about $1.7 billion less on holiday shopping than they did the year before, according to the National Retail Federation, a retail trade organization. “There are some economic challenges that many Americans still face,” said Matthew Shay, the chief executive of the retail federation. “So in general terms, many are intending to be a little bit more conservative with their budgets.” More than 141 million people shopped online or in stores between Thursday and Sunday, according to a survey released Sunday afternoon by the retail federation, an increase of about 1 percent over last year. And the average amount each consumer spent, or planned to spend by the end of Sunday, went down, dropping to $407.02 from $423.55. Total spending for the weekend this year was expected to be $57.4 billion, a decrease of nearly 3 percent from last year’s $59.1 billion. The holiday season generally accounts for 20 to 40 percent of a retailer’s annual sales, according to the federation, and Thanksgiving weekend alone typically represents about 10 to 15 percent of those holiday sales. This year, in the scramble to get to shoppers early, retailers tempted buyers with pre-Thanksgiving deals, both in stores and online. On Walmart.com, for example, the holiday season started Nov. 1. And according to the retail federation, 53.8 percent of shoppers surveyed in the first week of November said they had already started their holiday shopping. Image Shoppers browsing coats on Black Friday at a Macy’s store in Chicago. The day’s overall retail sales fell compared with 2012. Credit Andrew Nelles/Associated Press John D. Morris, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said that aggressive promotions the day before Thanksgiving may also have taken some sales from the Black Friday weekend. “There were a lot of advertised sales that were bleeding into Wednesday this year,” Mr. Morris said. “Sales were being pulled forward.” On Sunday, the retail federation pointed to the season’s early start, with holiday sales going as far back as October, and said it still expected that sales this holiday season would grow 3.9 percent over last year, despite the year-over-year decline of Black Friday weekend. They also said that altercations involving shoppers in stores on Black Friday seemed to decline this year, despite a number of videos of physical confrontations that attracted widespread attention online and in various news media reports. Many retailers have been warning of a muted holiday shopping season. Walmart and Target both trimmed their yearly forecasts recently, citing economic factors like slow wage growth, unemployment and sliding consumer confidence. Executives at Best Buy cautioned that intense price competition on some items during the holidays was likely to affect their bottom line, despite its healthier performance recently. Data from the research firm ShopperTrak, which collects data from more than 700 retailers, painted a more optimistic picture of Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. (The data, released Saturday, did not include shopping online or any shopping done over the weekend.) ShopperTrak found that sales were off 13.2 percent on Black Friday. But more stores were open on Thanksgiving this year, and for longer hours, and the combined sales on Thursday and Friday were actually up 2.3 percent over the same two days last year. “The Thursday store openings did well,” said Bill Martin, ShopperTrak’s founder. “But a lot of it was at the expense of Black Friday.” And while sales increased for the two-day period, he continued, there are additional costs associated with being open on Thanksgiving, like holiday pay for employees. “Thursday is going to be a tough day to make any profit,” Mr. Martin said. The retail federation’s survey found that Black Friday shopping grew a bit, rising to more than 92 million people this year from nearly 89 million people last year, including online and physical stores. Image Shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally retailers’ busiest day, in Troy, Mich. Credit Joshua Lott/Getty Images Online sales grew substantially on both Thanksgiving and Friday this year, up nearly 20 percent Thursday and almost 19 percent on Friday, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which tracks about 800 retail websites in the United States. Mobile traffic was also up substantially, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all online activity on Friday, said Jay Henderson, the strategy director for IBM Smarter Commerce, which put out the online retail data. “That’s pretty staggering,” he said. “You hear a lot about the year of mobile, and this is probably the fifth annual year of mobile. But 40 percent of all traffic feels like a tipping point.” Mobile sales accounted for about 26 percent of total online sales on Thursday and nearly 22 percent on Friday. On both days, IBM saw a late surge in online shopping, presumably as people finished spending time with their families and snuggled up on the couch with their credit cards. Smartphones accounted for about 25 percent of traffic on Friday, in contrast to over 14 percent from tablets. But actual purchasing came predominantly from elsewhere. Tablets made up about 14 percent of online sales, compared with about 7 percent for smartphones. “You tend to see that a lot of smartphone traffic is predominantly during the day,” Mr. Henderson said. “People are out and about in stores, comparing prices and looking for ratings and reviews. Tablets start to take hold late in the afternoon and in the evening.” Despite all this growth, online purchases remain a very small portion of retail sales. Mr. Martin of ShopperTrak said that more than 90 percent of all United States retail commerce still takes place in physical stores. While many people proved perfectly willing to head to the mall on Thanksgiving Day, for some, two days in a row of Black Friday-style shopping was just a bit too much. Melvina Bolston, 48, ventured to a Walmart on Thanksgiving, waited 85 minutes in a checkout line, and was back in the fray on Friday at her sister’s behest, at an open-air shopping center in Norcross, Ga. “You can pretty much put it in the books: I will never do it again,” Ms. Bolston said. “This is like torturing yourself on purpose.” Perhaps next year, she will just shop online instead.

Economy
Retail
Black Friday,Cyber Monday
E Commerce


Mixed Martial Arts Sees Past and Future in Title Fight

Abstract: A classic matchup of youth versus experience will be on display Saturday when Brock Lesnar faces Randy Couture for the Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight title in Las Vegas. But the fight also represents a generational shift for both mixed martial arts and amateur wrestling. Couture, 45, is the crafty mixed martial arts veteran, the standard-bearer for the sport for more than a decade. Lesnar, 31, is the up-and-coming star, a former World Wrestling Entertainment fan favorite whose popularity prompted the U.F.C. to grant him a shot at the title after only three bouts. Couture is also a member of the old guard of amateur wrestlers who turned to fighting when doing so offered little money or fame. Lesnar is part of a growing trend of amateur wrestlers who hope to make top dollar as professional fighters. Today’s fighters have to be well versed in wrestling, submissions and striking, but since the U.F.C. began 15 years ago, many with stellar wrestling backgrounds have found success. In the 1990s, amateur wrestling standouts like Couture, Mark Coleman, Don Frye, Kevin Randleman and Dan Severn fought their way to U.F.C. titles. Part of the reason is that wrestlers can often control where the fight takes place, by bringing it to the ground. The rigorous conditioning and training of college and Olympic wrestlers also prepares them for the grueling preparation for mixed martial arts. Couture has found success for both of those reasons. In 1992, he finished his wrestling career at Oklahoma State and opted for a low-paying coaching job at Oregon State while he trained for the Olympics. (He was an alternate on four Olympic teams.) Five years later, after Frye, a former college teammate, won the U.F.C. tournament in 1996, Couture decided to test himself in the Octagon. “I saw the direct application of years of wrestling training and wrestling technique in the sport,” he said. “I also heard about the type of paychecks the guys were making.” Couture won two fights in one night and earned $20,000, nearly his entire year’s salary as a college wrestling coach. Now the economic incentives of mixed martial arts are much larger. Entry-level fighters can still make as little as $3,000 a bout in the U.F.C., but top stars command millions of dollars a year for their fights and endorsement deals. Over the past four years, the U.F.C.’s success has brought the sport to a mass audience. In 2000, when Lesnar won an N.C.A.A. wrestling championship, the U.F.C. — then under different ownership — was an unregulated fringe sport with limited money and limited visibility. Lesnar wanted to continue his athletic career, but saw only two options: trying to make the Olympic wrestling team or playing football, a sport he had not played since high school. “Going to the Olympics, there’s really no money in that,” he said. “I was a guy from Webster, S.D., who didn’t even have two nickels to rub together.” Instead, Lesnar opted to turn to professional wrestling and became a star. Last year, after five years of “wrestling-entertainment,” a number of injuries and a failed stint with the Minnesota Vikings, he realized his dream of becoming a professional athlete. While Lesnar is still developing his fighting skills, the influx of young, top-level wrestlers is certain to increase the talent pool in mixed martial arts. “A higher caliber athlete is coming,” said Marc Laimon, the coach of Team Takedown, a management company that recruits top wrestlers and tries to mold them into mixed martial artists and that is the owner of Cobra Kai Jiu-Jitsu in Las Vegas. “The guys who fight in the U.F.C. to get chicks in the clubs, those guys are going to fade away.” Ted Ehrhardt, one of Team Takedown’s founders, said he received 20 to 30 e-mail messages a week from fighters asking about management. “I’m taking the very top wrestlers in the world,” he said. Among the company’s clients are Jake Rosholt, a three-time N.C.A.A. champion; Johny Hendricks, a two-time N.C.A.A. champion; and Shane Roller, a three-time all-American. Ehrhardt said he was also interested in signing Henry Cejudo, an Olympic gold medalist, and Muhammed Lawal, a former N.C.A.A. champion and Olympic hopeful. Despite the increased financial incentives, and the success of fighters like Couture and Lesnar, not every wrestler is looking to follow in their footsteps. “It’s not for everyone,” Ehrhardt said. “A lot of guys who like to wrestle might not necessarily like getting punched in the face.” But if wrestlers continue to succeed, wrestling at all levels could reap the benefits. “Mixed martial arts and its recent success have put a spotlight on wrestling,” said Gary Abbott, a spokesman for USA Wrestling, the amateur sport’s governing body. Regardless of who wins on Saturday, that spotlight seems likely to expand.

Mixed Martial Arts
Lesnar Brock
Couture Randy


University of Missouri Fires Melissa Click, Who Tried to Block Journalist at Protest

Abstract: A University of Missouri professor whose shout of “I need some muscle over here,” to remove a student journalist from a demonstration sparked an international debate over the limits of protest and a free press, has been fired, the university announced Thursday. Melissa Click, an assistant professor of communications, was captured on video on Nov. 9 trying, with dozens of others allied with the protesters, to prevent photographers from approaching the protesters’ encampment on the flagship campus in Columbia. When a young man making a video recording identified himself as a journalist, she told him to leave, grabbed at his camera and called out, “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.” Later, it emerged that she had been involved in a confrontation with the police in October, along with students who were trying to block a homecoming parade. The university’s governing body, the Board of Curators, began an investigation, and suspended her last month. The board voted Wednesday night to dismiss her — a decision it said she could appeal. “The board believes that Dr. Click’s conduct was not compatible with university policies and did not meet expectations for a university faculty member,” Pam Henrickson, the board chairwoman, said in a statement released Thursday. “The circumstances surrounding Dr. Click’s behavior, both at a protest in October when she tried to interfere with police officers who were carrying out their duties, and at a rally in November, when she interfered with members of the media and students who were exercising their rights in a public space and called for intimidation against one of our students, we believe demands serious action.” Dr. Click had no immediate response, according to Status Labs, a public-relations firm that has been working for her. But in an interview last week , she offered something of an explanation for her conduct on the video, saying it represented just one moment in her career. “When I watch it, I am embarrassed and sorry,” she said. “I see someone dealing with a high-stress situation who gets flustered. I see a moment where I feel like I’m not representing my best self, and I see somebody who’s trying to do her best to help marginalized students.” After the November clash, she quickly apologized for her conduct toward photographers. And the group organizing the protests, ConcernedStudent1950, released a statement endorsing the right of the news media to enter the site. But prosecutors brought a misdemeanor assault charge against her, which will be dropped as part of a deal , if she completes community service and probation. The episode diverted attention from the subject of the protests, racism experienced by black students, which they said the university had not taken seriously and had done nothing to combat. A series of racist incidents , including death threats against protesters that resulted in arrests, increased tension on a campus already roiled by unrelated conflicts, including a dispute over graduate teaching assistants’ health care and their attempt to unionize, and the university’s decision, under pressure from conservative lawmakers, to sever ties to Planned Parenthood. The students and university employees protesting racism considered themselves part of the growing Black Lives Matter movement, and many of them had taken part in demonstrations in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, after a white police officer there killed an unarmed black man. The campus conflict came to a head when the university football team threatened to boycott a game unless the president of the university system, Timothy M. Wolfe, resigned. Mr. Wolfe did step down , along with R. Bowen Loftin, the chancellor of the Columbia campus. Protesters had set up camp and at times, their supporters formed a cordon around the site, blocking and pushing those who tried to get in, insisting that even on a public quad, the protesters had a right to privacy and to be left alone, and that journalists and others had no right to enter. Because of the video, Dr. Click became the public face of the upheaval, to the dismay of some of the protesters. She was publicly scolded by journalists who said she had failed to grasp the basics of the First Amendment — at a university famed for its journalism school, no less — and held up by conservatives as a symbol of intolerance in academia.

University of Missouri
Melissa Click
Civil Unrest
College
News media,journalism
Freedom of the press
Columbia MO


Officers Sued by Michael Mineo Seek to Add Defendant

Abstract: Lawyers for three police officers named in a civil rights lawsuit by a man alleging sexual abuse filed a motion on Monday in federal court in Brooklyn that seeks to make an officer likely to testify against them a defendant in the case as well. The man, Michael Mineo , has said he was sodomized on a Brooklyn subway platform by Officer Richard Kern as he and other officers arrested Mr. Mineo for smoking marijuana in October 2008. In a criminal trial last month, Officer Kern and two other officers, Alex Cruz and Andrew Morales, were acquitted of all charges. The filing seeks to include as a defendant Officer Kevin Maloney, a prosecution witness in the criminal case who testified that he saw Officer Kern place his police baton between Mr. Mineo’s buttocks. In the motion, lawyers for Officers Kern, Morales and Cruz say that because Officer Maloney was involved in arresting Mr. Mineo, he is jointly responsible for any claims against the others. If Officer Maloney, who is still on active duty, is named as an additional defendant, city lawyers may have to defend him and thus take a more active role in the case. A lawyer for Officer Maloney said he had not yet seen the filing. Mr. Mineo’s federal lawsuit names the three officers accused in the criminal trial and another officer, Noel Jugraj. It also names the city, unnamed police officers and police supervisors. A federal judge split the case in two, so that any claims against the city will be heard only if a jury finds the four officers liable for damages.

Police
Mineo Michael
Suits and Litigation


Obama’s Visiting Security Adviser Tells Karzai to Sign Agreement

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, told President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Monday to stop his delay in signing a security agreement or potentially face the complete and final pullout of American troops by the end of 2014, according to American and Afghan officials. But while Mr. Karzai was said to have assured her he would sign the deal at some point, he gave no time frame for it. And he insisted on difficult new conditions as well, including the release of all inmates at the American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, adding to the perception of crisis between the two nations, officials from both countries said. “Ambassador Rice reiterated that, without a prompt signature, the U.S. would have no choice but to initiate planning for a post-2014 future in which there would be no U.S. or NATO troop presence in Afghanistan,” according to a summary of the meeting released by the White House. The meeting came a day after Mr. Karzai rejected a recommendation from his own handpicked assembly of Afghan leadership figures, a loya jirga, that by year’s end he should sign the bilateral security agreement, which would allow for an extended American military presence in Afghanistan after 2014. Mr. Karzai told the loya jirga that he wanted to wait to sign it until after the Afghan presidential elections next April, while continuing to negotiate with the Americans. In response, the White House summary said, “Ambassador Rice stressed that we have concluded negotiations and that deferring the signature of the agreement until after next year’s elections is not viable, as it would not provide the United States and NATO allies the clarity necessary to plan for a potential post-2014 military presence.” Ms. Rice arrived in Afghanistan under a cloak of secrecy on Saturday, and the White House did not confirm she was here until after she was already meeting with Mr. Karzai on Monday evening, along with other top officials from both Washington and Kabul, and Mr. Karzai’s senior aides. A senior administration official said, however, that the primary purpose of her visit had been to meet American officials and troops before the Thanksgiving holiday, not to speak to Mr. Karzai, and that the apparent secrecy was only related to security concerns. The meeting lasted two hours, and it continued into what Aimal Faizi, Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, who was there, described as a working dinner at the presidential palace. And while the tone was said to be generally diplomatic and polite, the president at one point became angry at the American ambassador, James B. Cunningham. Mr. Cunningham voiced objection to an extra demand by the loya jirga: the release of all Guantánamo inmates. He insisted that United States law governs the release of the prisoners and that the issue had no bearing on the bilateral security agreement, or B.S.A. “That made the president very angry; his reaction was very strong and intense,” Mr. Faizi said. “The president said we cannot separate the recommendations of the loya jirga from the B.S.A. now — we cannot pick and choose. All those recommendations have to be taken seriously.” He was referring to all 31 recommendations issued by the loya jirga on Sunday, the main one being that the Afghan president should sign the agreement within one month. Nearly all 50 committees of the jirga recommended that deadline. The other recommendations, from various committees, ran the gamut from allowing Afghan observers to attend American military trials to banning Christian religious observances on American military bases. Another recommendation was for an American military base in the remote province of Bamian, the most peaceful place in the country. For her part, Ms. Rice warned Mr. Karzai that his refusal to sign the agreement would jeopardize Western aid to Afghanistan, including an annual $4 billion to support its military, which is entirely dependent on American aid. “The lack of a signed B.S.A. would jeopardize NATO and other nations’ pledges of assistance,” she told Mr. Karzai. She added that the United States would “continue to work with Afghanistan to support a smooth security transition and to help ensure free and fair elections.” But the senior administration official made it clear there was still hope that Mr. Karzai would sign the agreement. “Really what it was was us emphasizing that we’re ready to sign, and that we’ve seen the Afghan people say that they’re ready to sign, so now we’re waiting for President Karzai,” the official said. Mr. Karzai’s strongest language was again said to be over American counterterrorism raids on private Afghan homes. Despite having approved in principle a security agreement that allowed for such missions, with limits, in his address to the loya jirga on Sunday, he insisted the raids should be banned immediately and completely or he would cancel the security agreement. Such raids are the main combat activity remaining to American forces in Afghanistan now, and have been identified by American commanders as a crucial, continuing mission. “The president insisted on the stance: a total ban on home raids since yesterday,” Mr. Faizi said. “He assured Madame Rice they will get the B.S.A. signed — you will get a B.S.A. signed, but give the Afghan people time to see that the U.S. has changed its behavior, that home raids are banned in practical terms.” He said Ms. Rice deferred that issue to the American military commander, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. , who assured that he had given instructions to his forces to “take all necessary measures to avoid civilian casualties and that the commanders will be acting in accordance to the recommendations of the loya jirga and what is said in the B.S.A.,” Mr. Faizi said. But the Afghans were not satisfied with that reply. The only point of agreement from the talks, according to Mr. Faizi’s account, was on another demand that Mr. Karzai made during the security negotiations: transparency in elections. Mr. Karzai was referring to what he has called American interference in the 2009 presidential vote, when pressure by American officials in response to allegations of election irregularities led Mr. Karzai to agree to a second round of elections. Ms. Rice’s visit to Afghanistan is her first foreign trip since taking over as Mr. Obama’s national security adviser in July. She was scheduled to leave Tuesday. Mr. Karzai expressed his hope that Ms. Rice would convey his views to President Obama and then return to negotiate the issues further, Mr. Faizi said. But the White House summary made no mention of any further talks on the issue with Mr. Obama, and made it clear the negotiations were considered closed.

Afghanistan
Hamid Karzai
US Military
Afghanistan War
Susan Rice
US Foreign Policy


U.S. Urges North Korea to Fulfill Deal

Abstract: WASHINGTON (Reuters) — North Korea has not met its commitment to account fully for its nuclear activities by the end of 2007 under a disarmament agreement, the United States said Sunday, urging North Korea to comply with its obligations. North Korea, which tested a nuclear device in 2006, is facing a deadline at 11 a.m., Eastern time, on Dec. 31 to disclose details of its nuclear program under a disarmament-for-aid deal it reached with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. “It is unfortunate that North Korea has not yet met its commitments by providing a complete and correct declaration of its nuclear programs and slowing down the process of disablement,” a State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said in a statement. “We urge North Korea to deliver a complete and correct declaration of all its nuclear weapons programs and nuclear weapons and proliferation activities and complete the agreed disablement.” American and South Korean officials have called on North Korea to say how much plutonium it has produced — about 110 pounds by the United States’ estimates — and respond to American suspicions about a secret program to enrich uranium for weapons.

North Korea
Atomic Weapons
United States Armament and Defense


Tough Talk From Nets at Brooklyn Rally

Abstract: On a stage of marble, between Roman columns that stretched toward the sky, the Nets declared an identity and made an audacious claim: New York is officially a two-team town. Officially, Friday’s pep rally on the steps of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall was dedicated to Deron Williams and Joe Johnson, the newly united All-Stars who were introduced as “Brooklyn’s Backcourt.” Unofficially, it served as a shot across the bow of the city’s other N.B.A. franchise. “For nearly 40 years, the Manhattan Knicks have shown that they can’t bring the championship home to New York City!” Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, bellowed to a crowd of about 1,000. “So it’s going to take the Brooklyn Nets to get the job done!” Williams, Johnson and Nets officials could only smile sheepishly. The Nets know they are not contenders yet, but they made a leap in the right direction over the last two weeks. In retaining Williams and trading for Johnson, the Nets secured a little star power to open the Barclays Center next fall. With the additional signings of Brook Lopez, Gerald Wallace, Mirza Teletovic and Reggie Evans, the Nets have enough talent to make a playoff push in the Eastern Conference. Much work remains to be done. The Nets need viable backups at point guard, center and small forward, and they need more rebounding and defense throughout the roster. They are working to re-sign Kris Humphries, their starting power forward, who appears likely to return after flirting with the Charlotte Bobcats. General Manager Billy King said a deal with Humphries was “close,” but added, “It’s a process.” He also confirmed that the Nets were working on a deal with Jerry Stackhouse, the veteran guard. The Nets left most of the hyperbole to Markowitz, but they held nothing back in promoting their star-studded new backcourt. Banners featuring Williams’s and Johnson’s faces hung outside Borough Hall and in the interior room where the team held a pre-rally news conference. At separate points, King and Coach Avery Johnson each unabashedly referred to the two All-Star guards as “the best backcourt in the N.B.A.” — a heady proclamation to make in the same week that Steve Nash joined Kobe Bryant. “They’re good,” King said of the Lakers’ guards, who have three most valuable player trophies between them. “I like them. But I think ours is better.” Bryant, naturally, assigned the Nets’ backcourt a slightly lesser ranking. “They’re probably right behind us,” he said earlier this week. “Steve’s got a couple M.V.P.’s. I got a couple finals M.V.P.’s, regular M.V.P. and multiple championships, so I think that gets the nod right now.” Both Williams and Joe Johnson can score, pass and defend. Both will draw double-teams. Either one can score 20 points on a given night. Johnson, a six-time All-Star, has averaged at least 18 points a game in each of the last seven seasons, and more than 20 points a game in the first five years of that stretch. He also has career averages of 4.4 assists and 4.2 rebounds, making him one of the more well-rounded shooting guards in the league. Williams, a three-time All-Star, has averaged at least 18 points a game for five straight seasons and more than 20 points a game in each of the last two. He is perennially among the league leaders in assists and is widely regarded as one of the top point guards in the game. “There are a lot of good backcourts, but I don’t think there are backcourts that can do that,” King said, “two guys that can get you 18 and 20 every night and they can defend their positions.” The Nets had visions of a three-superstar lineup, but their pursuit of Orlando’s Dwight Howard stalled when they could not provide the Magic with enough talent and draft picks. The talks were finally suspended on Wednesday, when King instead re-signed Lopez, who would have been the centerpiece of a deal. Although talks could potentially be revisited on Jan. 15 — when Lopez is eligible to be traded — King spoke as if the pursuit was over for good. “I’m just glad now that we have a direction,” King said, referring to the Nets’ new core. King said he recently apologized to Lopez for “what’s been going on” — a reference to the trade talks — and told him, “Now it’s behind you.” The Nets’ party on Friday would surely have been bigger and louder had Howard been standing on the marble steps with Johnson and Williams. But Avery Johnson spoke optimistically of a “Big 4” that included an improving Lopez — whom he called a potential All-Star — and the sturdy Wallace. Outside, the celebration was buoyant but modest, perhaps tempered by the sweltering heat. The rally began with a remix of M.O.P.’s “Ante Up,” which declares, “Respect mine, we Brooklyn-bound” — the lyrics interspersed with play-by-play calls featuring Williams and Johnson. David Diamante, the Nets’ new public-address announcer, declared it “a momentous day for the borough and your hometown team, the Brooklyn Nets!” The crowd cheered at every mention of the word “Brooklyn” and roared when Williams and Johnson appeared between two columns at the top of the Hall’s marble steps. Some fans were draped in official black-and-white Nets apparel. That sea was broken by a lone patch of orange — the crown of a Knicks cap. Markowitz kept up the taunts. “Move over, Manhattan — enough air balls!” he said. “You’ve had your chance.”

Joe Johnson
Knicks
Gerald Wallace
Kris Humphries
Billy King
Basketball


Dire Warnings Along East Coast as Snow Piles Up

Abstract: WASHINGTON — A massive winter storm that threatens to dump two feet of snow on the nation’s capital began pummeling the East Coast on Friday afternoon, as millions of people from the Carolinas to New York braced for a weekend of severe winds, power losses and coastal flooding. Thousands of flights were canceled; governors and mayors warned people to stay indoors and off the roads. Governors in at least 10 states declared states of emergency, and travel was disrupted in at least five major airport hubs, with 6,300 flights canceled on Friday and Saturday and 4,675 more delayed. In North Carolina, more than 114,000 homes lost power. The Washington region’s mass transit system took what an official called an “exceedingly rare” step of shutting down for the weekend. Cities from Nashville to New York started emergency operations to respond to what the National Weather Service deemed a “potentially crippling winter storm.” In Virginia, where snow began falling Friday morning in the southern part of the state, Gov. Terry McAuliffe put 700 National Guard members on standby; by Friday evening, hundreds of accidents had been reported. In Baltimore, shelters added hundreds of extra beds to accommodate the homeless. Officials throughout the Mid-Atlantic region warned that it could be days, or even a week, before residents will be able to dig out. In New York, where blizzard conditions are expected to hit early Saturday and bring 18 to 24 inches of snow, Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents to use mass transit and to stay home as much as possible. “Unless it is urgent, stay off the roads,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.” With Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York all in line for blizzard conditions — and winds of up to 50 miles an hour — forecasters predicted a storm of historic proportions. Here in Washington, where wet, heavy snowflakes began falling in the early afternoon, officials told residents to get indoors by 3 p.m., and warned of the potential not only for power losses and treacherous roads, but collapsed roofs. Mayor Muriel Bowser said the storm has “life-and-death implications.” At a late afternoon news conference, her director of emergency operations, Chris T. Geldart, urged drivers to get off the roads. A Picture of the Blizzard’s Aftermath A satellite image from NASA shows the extent of the huge winter storm that blanketed the East Coast with snow on Saturday. “This is a dangerous storm, and it’s coming fast,” Mr. Geldart said. “This is deteriorating quickly; we need folks to get where they are going to be.” Meteorologists said the dire warnings were appropriate. “Temperatures are going to be into the upper 20s into the low 30s,” Rich Otto, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said in an interview. “When you combine that with extremely heavy snow, blowing wind — which will generate whiteout conditions — if you are trying to venture outside, it could be life or death.” The storm — called Snowmaggedon2016 on Twitter, and named Winter Storm Jonas by the Weather Channel — could approach the 28 inches in January 1922 that ranks as Washington’s snowiest storm and is likely to easily surpass the highest recent snowfall, 17.8 inches that fell in February 2010. Image Jeff Sheehan, left, and Brandon Snyder were equipped with shovels and salt for clearing storefronts in downtown Asheville, N.C., on Friday. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times But Mr. Otto said the region west of Washington, including parts of Virginia, West Virginia, southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Maryland, will form the “bull’s-eye” of the blizzard, with as much as 30 inches of snow expected there. In Charleston, W.Va., near-whiteout conditions appeared on Friday afternoon as snow piled high enough to hide the curbs on the sidewalk. City snowplow drivers reported abandoned cars blocking the roads. On the Jersey Shore and southern Long Island, there was concern about possible wind-driven flooding. Given the region’s history with Hurricane Sandy , Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said he was more worried about flooding than snow. Image Snow fell Friday afternoon in Washington, D.C. Credit Drew Angerer for The New York Times “Flooding can do tremendous, tremendous damage, as we’ve learned the hard way,” Mr. Cuomo said. By Friday night, nine deaths — five in North Carolina, one in Virginia, one in Kentucky and two in Tennessee — had been attributed to bad road conditions and ice. Governors in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky had declared states of emergency. Schools throughout the region, including some universities, were closed Friday, as were many government offices. Many businesses instructed people to telecommute, and countless activities were postponed. President Obama put off a White House ceremony where he was to award medals to scientists and technology innovators. In Baltimore, the country music star Garth Brooks postponed two sold-out shows. At the Capitol, lawmakers wrapped up their business early and rushed to get out of town. And Speaker Paul D. Ryan offered a social-media worthy alternative to streaming television: He set up a live stream from the balcony of his office, just off the Capitol rotunda, so Americans can watch the blizzard hit the National Mall. There were long lines to get gas in the Washington area — some stations ran out of regular gas on Friday. In suburban Bethesda, traffic was clogged with cars trying to squeeze into the parking lot of Strosnider’s, a local hardware store. People in knit caps and puffer coats crowded the aisles in search of batteries, flashlights, salt and snow shovels. One woman, Susan Schwartz, gave up and left, going to another store in nearby Kensington, which was by then devoid of storm supplies. “There were no shovels and no salt to be found,” she said. In Baltimore, where an estimated 3,000 people are homeless, more somber preparations were underway. Deputy Mayor Dawn Kirstaetter said the city had deployed teams of mental health specialists to bring homeless people in from the storm. City employees planned to work overnight to staff shelters with expanded bed space; officials at Catholic Charities of Baltimore said they were expecting hundreds to show up for meals on Saturday. “Five years ago, 400 people showed up for lunch,” said Bill McCarthy, the group’s executive director, referring to the region’s last major blizzard, in February 2010. “I’m expecting the same thing — and they will be served.” In Virginia, Mr. McAuliffe told CNN that if conditions deteriorate, he would consider closing a major rural thoroughfare, Interstate 81. “The second the state police call me and inform me that Interstate 81 is not safe for traffic, I will pull the trigger immediately,” he said. “We will shut it down immediately. This is a major snow event for us.” Perhaps the most extraordinary step here in Washington was the closing of the Metro system, the bus and rail service that serves Washington and its Maryland and Northern Virginia suburbs. Trains were to stop running at 11 p.m. Friday and were not expected to resume until at least Monday morning. Dan Stessel, a spokesman for Metro, said the early decision to shutter the system — announced Thursday — was highly unusual. Amid the preparations, at least one event did go on as planned on Friday in Washington. Even as snow started falling early in the afternoon, what appeared to be more than a thousand anti-abortion activists — albeit fewer than most years — rallied beneath the Washington Monument for their annual march commemorating the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. The crowd heard from Carly Fiorina, a Republican presidential candidate, and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who thanked them for braving the cold and “putting on your coats, your mittens and your gloves to fight for life.”


Villagers Rushed to Help in Frigid Russian Crash

Abstract: LYKOSHINO, Russia — Rudolf Denyayev climbed over a small ridge on Friday night and saw the whole disaster spread out before him: train passengers wandering blindly, luggage tossed in all directions, screams coming from the derailed cars. These were the frozen hours after a bomb devastated a luxury train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg, killing more than 25 people, and before the country rushed to help. The explosion took place deep in the forest, as the train sped past a power station and a small painted wooden house where an elderly woman lives alone. Because the area is so remote, people from nearby towns got to the site hours before rescue workers, and some of the grimmest work — sorting the dead from the living — fell to them. By the time Mr. Denyayev was down the hill, some passengers had straggled out of three derailed cars, some barefoot and some barely dressed, as if they had just gone to sleep to the quiet rhythm of the train. They didn’t seem to know what was going on, Mr. Denyayev recalled in an interview on Saturday night. Anatoly Myagchenkov, a tractor driver who made it to the site with two friends, noticed that he was stepping on passports, money and cellphones as he approached the overturned train cars. He held onto the back of a friend’s sweater. It took all his concentration to keep from stepping on a body. “Everyone thought no one was coming,” said Mr. Myagchenkov, 30. “The passengers thought I was one of them. Those who couldn’t stand, we took out the window. We put the living on one side, the corpses on the other.” The next 24 hours would bring wave upon wave of strangeness to this village near the crash site where weathered wooden houses evoke another century. Around 30 rescue cars were immobilized in the mud as they struggled to reach the wounded over country roads; reporters made the two-mile trek from a nearby road, walking along the train tracks. Then federal agents began visiting residents of Lykoshino one by one, asking them if they had seen anyone unusual — in particular, anyone who appeared to be from the Caucasus region in southern Russia, which includes Chechnya. Muslim extremists from the Caucasus have for years been waging an insurgency and have been responsible for many, but not all, terrorist acts elsewhere in Russia in recent years. Rumors circulated all day, said Mr. Denyayev, 38. Some said four young men from the Caucasus had been renting a room from a local man — something that would stand out in Lykoshino, which has dwindled to a population of 600, most of them pensioners. The work, for those first hours, was agonizingly slow. Mr. Myagchenkov spent three hours taking apart train seats, and he estimates that he withdrew 13 bodies in that time. While trying to clear a car of shards of twisted metal, he bent down and realized that what he was looking at was a piece of a human brain. When he headed home, spent, he met the first column of ambulances to arrive, he said. But even in his warm house — where earlier in the day he had celebrated his daughter’s second birthday —he could not shake the picture of the train car from his mind, and he lay awake until morning. A day later, Mr. Myagchenkov’s face was still slack with shock from what he had seen. Asked what should happen to the people who bombed the train, he answered quickly and quietly. “They should be shot,” he said.

Russia
Bombs and Explosives
Railroads
Terrorism


Microsoft Works to Perfect Windows Vista

Abstract: An advertising blitz intended to help Microsoft polish the tarnished brand of its Windows Vista operating system began this week with a head-scratcher of a commercial. The ad features Jerry Seinfeld flexing some new shoes, Bill Gates adjusting his shorts and no mention of Vista. Microsoft says the ad is meant to get people talking, and that other parts of the marketing campaign will actually get into what its software can do. But the advertising, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars over several years, is really just “air cover,” according to Bill Veghte, the Microsoft executive who is responsible for sustaining Windows, probably the most lucrative franchise in history. For more than a year, Mr. Veghte and his team have been developing ways to transform the experience of buying and using personal computers that run Microsoft software. Corps of Microsoft engineers, for example, have been dispatched to tweak hardware and software to make Vista PCs faster and less crash-prone. Microsoft has stepped into the world of PC retailers in a way it never has before, offering training and advice — and even paying to put hundreds of “Windows gurus” in stores. By now, Microsoft insists that most of the frustrating technical problems with Vista, which was introduced in January 2007 after repeated delays, have been resolved — and many industry executives and analysts agree. Yet Vista’s image problems have opened the door to alternatives to Windows as never before. Windows still commands more than 90 percent of the market for personal computer operating systems. But Apple’s Macintosh operating software — which runs only on Apple machines — is gaining ground, especially in the United States. Microsoft’s stumbles have also given momentum to the shift of software away from the PC and onto the Web. Web-based programs for e-mail, spreadsheets and other tasks can be run in a browser, undermining the value of the underlying operating system. Indeed, Google’s entry into the browser market this week is an implicit declaration that the browser is increasingly supplanting the PC operating system as a strategic computing gateway. Microsoft makes much of its living from Windows, and a very good living it is. In the year ended in June, Microsoft’s Windows group generated revenue of nearly $16.9 billion and operating profits of more than $13 billion, a phenomenal 77 percent margin. To keep that business humming, Microsoft needs to have consumers and corporations upgrade to new versions of Windows — something that has not been so easy with Vista. “What we’re seeing with Vista is that for the first time some significant portion of consumers and business customers have decided it’s not worth upgrading,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “If they don’t, the end of the franchise is at hand.” The main problem with Vista, Microsoft said, was that given the delays, uncertainty and significant changes in the software, the rest of the industry was not ready when Vista finally arrived. There are one billion worldwide users of the various versions of Windows. Hundred of thousands of hardware devices and software applications run on it, and they need connecting programs, called drivers, to work smoothly with it. Vista represented a big shift from its predecessor, XP, so it required a lot of new drivers — and Microsoft did a poor job of communicating how much work was needed. Often, Microsoft said, an older driver still worked with Vista, but it slowed down the PC or made it crash unpredictably. Today, 77,000 hardware devices and components are compatible with Vista, more than twice the number when Vista was introduced. “We are in a very different position with Vista than we were even six months ago,” said Mr. Veghte, senior vice president for Windows strategy and marketing. “And there are a lot of people holding forth with criticism of Windows Vista that have not used Vista, or not recently.” Just after Vista shipped, Steven A. Ballmer , Microsoft’s chief executive, tapped Mr. Veghte, 41, to move to the Windows business. In his 18 years at Microsoft, Mr. Veghte has had a wide-ranging career in sales, marketing and software development (he holds two patents). Vista’s troubles were seen within Microsoft’s management ranks, characteristically, as an opportunity. Mike Nash, who had worked with Mr. Veghte before, signed up to join him. “There was so much we could do better,” said Mr. Nash, who is vice president for Windows product management. “Our task was to shake things around and make the Windows business much more sustainable over the years.” In a meeting in July 2007, Mr. Ballmer signed off on Mr. Veghte’s plan to step up investment in the Windows business. In broad terms, the strategy was to work more closely with PC makers and retailers, and change perceptions of the Windows brand with a multiyear marketing campaign that Mr. Veghte called “a sustained conversation about what Windows is.” The team called its mission FTP 168, short for Free the People 24x7 — meaning the freedom to do all manner of things with Windows on a PC, a cellphone or over the Web, at any time. The campaign is meant to move the Windows brand decisively beyond the PC, so the business can thrive even if the PC becomes less important. Microsoft believes that its broad reach gives it the upper hand against rivals like Apple or Google. “It’s about the PC, phone and the Web, and Microsoft and Windows can connect those for customers in a way no other company or technology can,” Mr. Veghte said. To set more detailed plans, Mr. Veghte plucked 10 other managers from across the company, and the group set up offices away from headquarters in Redmond, Wash., in an office building in nearby Bellevue, which they called “the Bunker.” In their opening meeting, Mr. Veghte, according to team members, began by saying three things: Your personal reputations are on the line. We won’t automatically respect what Microsoft has done in the past. And we’ll try to test things quickly, in rolling pilot projects. In a Seattle warehouse, Microsoft built a “retail experience center” to test ideas about the behavior of shoppers. With retailing now accounting for 40 percent of PC sales worldwide, and growing twice as fast as other sales channels, Microsoft decided it had to get more directly involved instead of just delivering products and promotional subsidies. “We weren’t coming in with the tools and people to help them,” said Bill Brownell, general manager of retail marketing at Microsoft. Microsoft is sharing its research with retailers. It is also paying for a few hundred Windows experts to talk to shoppers in Best Buy, Circuit City and other stores. These Windows gurus technically work for employment agencies, but Microsoft recruits and trains them. Manny Gouveia, 30, is a Windows guru in Orlando, Fla. A college graduate and technology enthusiast, Mr. Gouveia went through a seven-day training program at Microsoft and gets regular online training. He also participates in two conference calls a week to share information and tips with Microsoft and other gurus. He works at a Circuit City, where he demonstrates how to use a Vista PC to edit movies, post family photos online and record television shows. “We’re there to give people a sense of the great experiences they can have with a PC, not just e-mail and Web browsing,” Mr. Gouveia said. “People do come in with the view that Windows Vista is not up to par. But I can turn that perception around in five minutes.” Mr. Gouveia himself needed some convincing at first. “Before this project, I had never used Vista,” he said. “I had not seen a compelling reason to upgrade.” He has since bought two Vista PCs. With PC makers, Microsoft started an initiative called Vista Velocity to improve performance. It includes days of specialized testing, close collaboration with Microsoft engineers and fine-tuning of software programs and hardware drivers. On some models, for example, the start-up time for Vista has been reduced by 60 percent. At Sony, 20 percent of its Vaio consumer models have gone through the Vista Velocity program so far, and the goal is to cover them all, said Mike Abary, senior vice president for marketing in Sony’s Vaio PC business. The result, Mr. Abary said, has been improved performance that should make for a “more compelling why-to-buy proposition.” “There has been hesitation in the marketplace,” he said.

Software
Microsoft Corp
Computers and the Internet
Advertising and Marketing
Gates Bill
Seinfeld Jerry
Ballmer Steven A