Mets Owners Turn to Appeals Court in Hopes of Limiting Liability

Abstract: Ever since Bernard L. Madoff ’s Ponzi scheme collapsed, the owners of the Mets have insisted they were unwitting victims who, like thousands of other investors, lost millions of dollars at the hands of a devious swindler. Their most powerful evidence boiled down to this: The last statements they received before Madoff was arrested in December 2008 said they had hundreds of millions of dollars in their accounts, and then that money was just gone. Unfortunately for Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz , the owners of the Mets, Burton R. Lifland, the federal bankruptcy judge overseeing the unwinding of Madoff’s scheme, has supported an alternative formula for deciding how much money investors lost and gained: the difference between the money investors gave Madoff and how much they withdrew, often over many years of supposedly lucrative investing. Using this method, Irving H. Picard , the trustee trying to recover money for those he regards as legitimate victims of Madoff, said that Wilpon and Katz earned about $300 million in “fictitious profits” — the difference between what they took out and what they put in — in the accounts they had with Madoff. Picard has sued them to get that money back, and has sought another $700 million because, he alleges, the two men looked the other way for so long while their empire benefited from tainted Madoff money. Having been recast as winners, and potentially being forced to pay a crippling amount, Wilpon and Katz have joined other investors in appealing Lifland’s ruling. On Thursday, they will argue their case in the federal appeals court for the Second Circuit in Manhattan, where they will be lined up against Picard and the Securities Exchange Commission. The appeal is perhaps the last chance for the Wilpon and Katz to stop what has turned into a legal freight train bearing down on them, several lawyers said. If the three-judge panel overturns Lifland’s judgment, the decision would erase the enormous liability that Picard wants to impose on some investors now classified as winners. In the case of investors like Wilpon and Katz, who Picard contends ignored warning signs, the trustee may continue to demand repayment of monies they withdrew. The decision by the appeals panel is not expected for months. If the judges uphold Lifland’s ruling, Wilpon and Katz can appeal the case further, an uncertain process that would take many more months. Meanwhile, the team’s owners have the option of continuing to negotiate with Picard and his legal team, who appear determined to recover as much money as they can. To date, Picard and his team have collected $10 billion. The talks with the Mets’ owners, though, have been so tense that Lifland had to ask former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York to help broker a solution . “Picard can keep clawing back money” while the appeals are going on, said Charles M. Tatelbaum, a bankruptcy lawyer at Yoss LLP who is not representing any clients in the case. “He can always give money back to people” if Lifland’s ruling is ultimately overturned. Because the appeals judges take a fresh look at the arguments and the precedents involved, it is difficult to handicap which way they will rule, Tatelbaum and other lawyers said. But bankruptcy courts in general look for ways to treat victims in a consistent way. That was one reason Lifland approved Picard’s formula for determining who lost and made money. Picard argued that the only reliable figures were the deposits and withdrawals that Madoff investors made. All other figures should be disregarded because Madoff created them without buying or selling securities. The accounts “have no relation to reality” because Madoff “pulled the fictitious amounts from thin air” so the income on the victims’ statements was “entirely divorced from the uncertainty and risk of actual market trading,” Lifland wrote. Using the statements would “permit Madoff to arbitrarily decide who wins and who loses.” Lawyers for Wilpon, Katz and other investors appealing the decision said the statements should be used as the basis for what was lost because investors believed they were true and lived their lives accordingly, paying taxes on the gains, giving money to charities and so on. They had a reasonable expectation that their money would be there and had no knowledge of the fraud. But ultimately, the appeals judges are likely to give Lifland the benefit of the doubt in deciding which formula makes the most sense for the trustee to use in determining winners and losers, bankruptcy experts say. “If it’s a complex case, the judge will get wide discretion,” said John Pottow, a law professor at the University of Michigan who clerked at the Second Circuit. “The appellants are not frivolous. But I’d still go with the trustee in this case.” In general, Pottow added, bankruptcy judges do not have any particular sympathy for investors who argue that the fraud hurt them financially because so many people are in similar situations. The judges also try to focus on the most equitable way to return money to victims, not necessarily the potential fallout for one investor or another. “No one is ever happy with bankruptcy proceedings,” Pottow said. But “the fact that this might bankrupt the Mets is not going to persuade the Second Circuit.”

Ponzi Schemes
New York Mets
Wilpon Fred
Katz Saul B
Picard Irving H
Madoff Bernard L
Baseball
Decisions and Verdicts
Ponzi and Pyramid Schemes


After Loss to Dolphins, Angry Jets Wag Their Fingers at the Mirror

Abstract: A day after the Jets blew three fourth-quarter leads against the Miami Dolphins on national television, Kris Jenkins, nose tackle and defensive leader, broke his silence. Jenkins, who declined to speak with reporters after the Jets’ 31-27 loss on Monday night, was still frustrated, angry and embarrassed. “Now, the philosophy has to change,” Jenkins said Tuesday night in a telephone interview. “With all our talents, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with talking a little trash. But you have to back it up. We have a coach I love. He is going to demand a challenge. Players have to understand what that means and play up to that level. “If not, it’s going to be a long season,” Jenkins added. “Because basically, every week we’re picking a fight.” Jenkins said Coach Rex Ryan “ripped everybody” before the team flew home to New Jersey, landing around 5 a.m. Ryan told reporters Tuesday in a conference call that he did not sleep. Instead, he watched game film that was more horror movie before turning his attention to Buffalo, the Jets’ opponent Sunday. Ryan labeled his team’s practice tempo last week “horrible,” and Jenkins agreed with the assessment. Jenkins, 30, banished thoughts of retirement this off-season by surveying the talent that surrounded him and thinking the Jets could win a Super Bowl this season. He does not care, he said, if teammates talk less trash or more. “But the level of play has to definitely increase,” said Jenkins, who had three tackles. “I mean me, everybody. Regardless of what our record says, that game was horrible. The defense just played horrible. It’s hard to take that, as a man.” The Dolphins played their own role in the Jets’ demise. Coach Tony Sparano and the offensive coordinator Dan Henning played master strategists, running bootlegs, fake bootlegs, three-step drops, seven-step drops, wide receiver screens, running back screens, and sets with anywhere from no receivers to four. The Dolphins stymied the Jets’ pass rush by using maximum protection — two tight ends, two running backs and one receiver — to eliminate pass-rushing lanes. They sent running backs Ronnie Brown and Ricky Williams right at the defense, daring it to stop the run — and then ran downfield for 151 yards. Of course, Miami also used its Wildcat formation, with new wrinkles, to great success. The Dolphins ran 16 plays and gained 111 yards from that formation, figures that do not account for the 3 snaps and 12 yards amassed with the backup Pat White at quarterback. “Thanks for reminding me,” Jenkins said. The most effective Wildcat personnel grouping came with four running backs and two tight ends, a bevy of blockers who also provided four directions for the ball to head. But that was not the Dolphins’ only trick. On their 15-play, 64-yard scoring drive that spanned the end of the third quarter and the fourth, the Dolphins kept quarterback Chad Henne off the field for five consecutive snaps. On the game-winning touchdown drive, in which Brown scored out of the Wildcat from the 2 with six seconds left, the Dolphins had four players take snaps from center. The Jets opened the game in a 4-4 defensive front that was designed to stop the run. But when Brown tossed a 21-yard completion from the Wildcat formation, it forced the Jets to reconsider the Dolphins’ ability to throw. Ryan shouldered the blame, admitting he had failed. There were questionable coaching instances, certainly. The Jets shut down the Wildcat early in the third quarter by employing the 46 defense that Ryan’s father, Buddy, made famous. Then, inexplicably, the safeties mainly played farther off the line of scrimmage from then on, almost inviting the Dolphins to run. But although Jenkins credited the Dolphins — unlike linebacker Calvin Pace, who called the Wildcat “nonsense” — Jenkins said the Jets were not surprised by Miami’s variety of formations and personnel groups. This season, Jenkins said, they were ready for the strategic chess match they encountered Monday night. They simply failed to execute the formula that stuffs the formation, which is disciplined football, with players assigned gaps they are not supposed leave. “Even the wrinkles, we knew what they were going to be about,” Jenkins said. “For it to go the way it did, that had nothing to do with the scheme. It was a matter of us getting outplayed at the point of attack, over and over again.” The Dolphins churned out yards methodically, gaining their second most ever in the Wildcat (their best was 119 yards last season against New England) and leaving the Jets’ defense on the field for long stretches, wilting under intense heat and humidity. But Jenkins refused to use that as an excuse, adding that he played more snaps this game than in any of the previous four. Along with three leads, the Jets also squandered a chance to take sole possession of first place in the American Football Conference East, along with a three-game lead on the Dolphins. Instead, they were left with a short week and an experience Ryan called humbling. “This is a step back,” he said. “But we can make a huge leap forward.”

Miami Dolphins
Football
New York Jets
Ryan Rex


Bayern Munich Official Suggests Summer Schedule for European Soccer

Abstract: Major League Soccer may have found a new best friend in Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, the top official at the German champion Bayern Munich and the chairman of Europe’s 207-member club association. In an interview with France Football , Rummenigge suggested that shifting schedules away from games in the winter to the summer would make sense. His view is especially timely as officials at FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, grapple with the pros and cons of playing the 2022 World Cup in the summer in Qatar or shifting the tournament to the cooler winter months. “Everywhere, be it Germany, France or England, summer is the best period of the year,” Rummenigge said. “And that is the season we don’t play. In deepest winter, when it is very cold and snowing, we play nearly all the time in conditions that are disagreeable for both players and spectators. It is not logical.” Germany’s Bundesliga takes a six-week break in December and January, while leagues in France, Italy and Spain take shorter breaks over the holidays. In England, the Premier League plays through Christmas and New Year’s with an extensive schedule of games. Many observers in England have lobbied for a midseason break — because of the weather, but also because of anecdotal evidence that English players fare poorly in (summer) international competitions because their club season stretches too long. A change to a league schedule that begins in January would enable FIFA to shift the World Cup from the summer to perhaps late in 2022, as a top FIFA official suggested on Wednesday. Rummenigge said that FIFA and UEFA were “seriously thinking” about changing the European league calendar. “My sense is that we are heading straight in this direction,” Rummenigge said. He added that changing the calendar was “completely possible, even if this idea does not thrill our friends in South America,” where the summer and winter seasons are reversed. Rummenigge’s statements can be nothing but heartwarming to officials at M.L.S. in Manhattan, as they have long been fending off requests from fans, players and others to shift the league from its current March-to-December schedule to the European calendar, with its fixed dates for international play. Commissioner Don Garber has pushed back against a shift, though he has softened his stance in recent years as the majority of M.L.S. teams have built their own stadiums. The recent cold wave across the United States, however, has only served to buttress Garber’s assertion that playing through the winter in North America (even with a break of a month to six weeks) would be a hardship, mostly for the fans. M.L.S. has franchises that play outdoors in Montreal, Toronto, Chicago and Columbus, Ohio, among other cold-weather cities. In an email to The Associated Press on Tuesday, FIFA said that the international calendar for 2018 to 2022 would have “to be completed by 2016 at the latest.” Any discussion of a shift in timing is fraught with obstacles involving broadcast contracts, and a sporting culture that has evolved over the past century. Perhaps the biggest advantage to changing the schedule, Rummenigge said, would be that it would split club and international competitions and remove the crunch of matches that often forces players to make long trips to their home countries for various qualifying matches. “In the future, there could be two phases: one for club competitions, the other for qualifying matches or finals of the World Cup or the Euros,” he said. “For one month, national teams would be completely free to call up their players.” Finally, Rummenigge acknowledged that shifting the 2022 World Cup could clear the way for an overhaul of the European soccer calendar. “It is clear that there will soon be negotiations to examine what can be done,” he said. “My point of view is that an eventual change to the calendar shouldn’t be viewed critically but more as an innovation that could improve the general context. Changing the calendar carries risks but it is also an opportunity. The issue of the calendar will become more important the closer 2022 gets.”

Soccer
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge
FIFA
2022 FIFA World Cup


Galen Rupp Primes for Olympic 5,000 Meters

Abstract: LONDON — A mobile lab drove up to the hotel and Galen Rupp prepared for what amounted to the world’s coldest shower. He climbed into a chamber wearing his socks and underwear. His head and hands poked out the top of the cylinder. For three minutes Tuesday Rupp let nitrogen vapor blow across his body, lowering his skin temperature to about 32 degrees. The treatment, known as a cryosauna, or cryotherapy, is designed to inhibit inflammation and enhance blood flow and oxygenation of the muscles. On Saturday night, Rupp had won a silver medal in the 10,000 meters, the first Olympic medal in the event for an American since 1964 and only the third ever. His training partner, Mo Farah of Britain, had won gold. On Wednesday, both were set to run their first heats of the 5,000 meters . In theory, cryotherapy would hasten their recovery from the first race and help increase their energy entering the second. “It feels like an ice bath on steroids,” Rupp, 26, of Portland, Ore., said with a laugh. Rupp and Farah advanced to Saturday’s final in the 5,000, a distance of 3.1 miles, though they admitted to being tired. Farah is the 2011 world champion. Rupp broke the 13-minute barrier (12:58.90) at the Prefontaine Classic in June, then won the Olympic trials over Bernard Lagat in July with a blistering last lap of 52.54 seconds. No American has won Olympic medals in both the 5,000 and 10,000, much less in the same Games. In the Olympic 10,000, Farah ran the final of 25 laps in 53.48 seconds, and Rupp slightly faster, to break an East African stranglehold on the event. Their coach, Alberto Salazar, believes that the Kenyans and Ethiopians, chastened, might try to nullify the searing kicks in the 5,000 by going out fast or by making a fierce charge with about three laps remaining in the 12 ½-lap race. Still, Salazar will likely offer familiar advice: fast pace or slow, sit and wait and outkick everyone at the end. “Either Galen or Mo, I’m not going to advise them to push it,” Salazar said. “You just believe when it gets to the end, whether it’s a fast race or a slow race, you’re going to outkick them. If you develop yourself to that point, the race becomes very simple. You don’t really even have to look at the clock.” For 12 years, since Rupp was a freshman at Central Catholic High School in Portland, a soccer player not yet committed to running, and Salazar was the school’s cross-country coach, the two have worked together. Rupp remembers his mother’s forcing him to introduce himself at a barbecue to Salazar, a three-time winner of the New York City Marathon and a victor at the classic 1982 Boston Marathon . Salazar remembers Rupp’s devoting only a month fully to running that autumn long ago and still finishing second in his age group at the national junior cross-country championships. “You wanted me to run every day and I thought you were joking,” Rupp told his coach as they sat in Salazar’s hotel room in central London. “You said, ‘Just go for 20 minutes.’ I was like, no. I couldn’t believe it.” Twelve years later, Rupp is an Olympic silver medalist. “I can’t believe we’re here and it actually happened,” he told Salazar on Saturday. When Salazar brought Farah into their training group at the Nike Oregon Project in the winter of 2011, Rupp did not initially embrace the idea. Trust me, Salazar said. Farah would be a good friend and a necessarily challenging partner. They would make each other better runners. Rupp came to see that Salazar was right. “I’m training with the best distance runner in the world right now,” Rupp said. “We do 99.9 percent of our training together. I’m right there with him in all that. So there’s no reason I can’t beat everybody.” In the middle of the Olympic 10,000, a race with an erratic pace and much jostling, Rupp started to get anxious when a gap of 10 yards or so opened between himself and the leaders. He started to move up when he felt a tap from Farah, who told him: “Relax, they’re going to come back to us. We need to save our energy and be smart.” When a final burst became necessary, Farah and Rupp both had plenty in reserve. Salazar has driven home two points with them: trust your training and realize that your body is tuned to run fast even if it does not feel good. And your kicks are better than their kicks. A week and a half before the Olympic 10,000 final, Rupp and Farah honed their finishing speed with workouts at 6,000 feet in the Pyrenees that included 400-meter runs in 52 seconds. “You aren’t feeling great at that point; that’s when you need to learn to sprint,” Rupp said. “It’s more important to be running fast at that point than doing 49 or 50 seconds at the beginning of a workout.” He added, “You’re never going to feel fresh” at the end of a race. On Wednesday, Rupp took an early lead in his 5,000 heat, then stepped off the gas, running the sixth-fastest overall qualifying time in 13:17.56. Whatever strategy the Kenyans and the Ethiopians plan for Saturday, he said: “We’ve gone through every scenario in our heads. We’ll be ready for it.”

Running
Olympic Games (2012)
Track and Field
Rupp Galen
United States
Great Britain
Farah Mo


Koran Burning in Afghanistan Prompts 3 Parallel Inquiries

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — Three major investigations were under way on Wednesday into the Koran burning at Bagram Air Base by the American military last week, the event that plunged Afghanistan into days of deadly protests claiming as many as 30 Afghan lives and coinciding with the shooting deaths of four American soldiers. Two of those American deaths, in the Afghan Interior Ministry on Saturday, prompted Gen. John R. Allen, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, to immediately withdraw hundreds of military advisers and trainers from government ministries in Kabul. Military vehicles were back on the streets of Kabul again on Wednesday, and NATO had begun to prepare procedures to send the trainers and advisers back into the ministries, said Brig. Gen. Lewis Boone, the NATO spokesman, but he could not say whether any had begun to work again. “We are working with the Afghan government to put in place procedures that would allow advisers to return to their workplaces,” General Boone said. “General Allen will approve these procedures.” General Boone did not say what those procedures were. In a tense atmosphere in Afghanistan, the investigations signal the seriousness of the incident for both the Afghans and the Americans and an understanding of the need to offer a full explanation and a reckoning for the perpetrators. After the protests, Afghanistan has been quiet in the past few days, but the findings of the reports are keenly awaited by Afghans and are likely to prove politically delicate and to be a test of public opinion. One investigation is by Americans, one is by Afghans and one is a joint Afghan-American inquiry. The formal American military investigation is the only one that can lead to punishment, while the other two will include recommendations but do not carry formal legal weight. The formal legal inquiry, opened by General Allen on Feb. 21, is intended to understand the events that led to soldiers throwing Korans and other Muslim religious texts into a burn pit at the military base more than a week ago. The investigation, known as an AR15-6, the number in the Army regulatory code, is a first step in a process that could lead ultimately to criminal legal action or lesser administrative punishment. The formal investigation ordered by General Allen involves initial fact finding by a senior military officer, an American Army brigadier general, who was not involved in the incident. The inquiry will conclude with a final report, which could comprise a recommendation for further legal action, including a more formal process that could lead to court-martial. The final report is due to be handed to General Allen in the second half of March. Any legal action will be pursued under United States laws and regulations, not Afghan laws, a NATO legal official who asked for anonymity because the investigation was continuing said Wednesday. The brigadier general in charge of the investigation has been at the Detention Facility in Parwan and the Bagram Air Base since Feb. 22, interviewing the people involved and inspecting the evidence, and was in the process of returning to the capital, Kabul. The formal investigation overlaps with a joint inquiry that also includes three senior Afghan security officials from the Afghan Army, the National Directorate of Security and the Interior Ministry, who have been at Parwan and Bagram with the American brigadier general. This joint inquiry will lead to a joint report that will be passed to General Allen for review, and that could then be released publicly as early as the next three or four days. It is much more preliminary and its recommendations will not be binding, but it is likely to include much of the material in the formal investigation, and so could provide a snapshot of the issues involved. Similar investigations were undertaken in the past when the American military defamed the Koran. There have been at least two other serious instances, and at least one led to the punishment of military personnel. One group of incidents occurred at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the other in Iraq, when at least one soldier used a Koran for target practice . At Guantánamo Bay, there were accusations — later deemed untrue by the military — that soldiers had flushed a Koran down the toilet. The final military investigation concluded, however, that there had been five instances of the mishandling of the Koran by guards and an interrogator over the course of a number of years, and two soldiers were punished. General Allen can choose to act on the recommendations of the AR15-6 investigation, ignore them or combine them with other steps, a military officer said in a background briefing. Among the available punishments are everything from demotions and discharge from the military to imprisonment. “General Allen takes this process extremely seriously,” said an legal official with the NATO-led coalition. “He can accept the recommendations, and he can make his own recommendations.” While one possible result of the investigation is a court-martial, and even imprisonment, officials say that would be an extreme outcome. There are many more minor forms of punishment — yet even those far lighter penalties would be taken seriously by people in the military chain of command. More than 30 Afghans have died in the violence that followed the Koran burning, and there have been at least three assaults on American military personnel since thousands of Afghans took to the streets to protest. The assaults on Americans took place in the Khogyani district of Nangarhar Province when a man in an Afghan Army uniform shot and killed two American soldiers; in Kunduz Province, where a grenade thrown by protesters near a base wounded at least six American service members; and in Kabul where two American military officers were shot in the head by an Afghan assailant who entered a secure area of the Interior Ministry where the two were working. The third, purely Afghan investigation is by a task force that includes members of Afghanistan’s Ulema Council and some Parliament members. The Ulema is the pre-eminent religious authority in the country and is made up of scholarly mullahs. In violence around the country on Wednesday, a suicide bomber drove a vehicle into a convoy of a NATO provincial reconstruction team in Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province in the south, wounding at least six people, while a car bomb outside a bank in Takhar Province in northern Afghanistan wounded 12 people, government and police officials said. Separately, an explosion in the Nawa district of Helmand Province on Monday night in the home of a man suspected of being associated with the Taliban killed the man’s wife and six children, a police official confirmed Wednesday. The official said investigators were trying to determine whether the home was used for manufacturing bombs.

Koran
Afghanistan
Bagram Air Base (Afghanistan)
Afghanistan War (2001- )


U.S. Pursues Richard O’Dwyer as Intermediary in Online Piracy

Abstract: Richard O’Dwyer, an enterprising 24-year-old college student from northern England, has found himself in the middle of a fierce battle between two of America’s great exports: Hollywood and the Internet. At issue is a Web site he started that helped visitors find American movies and television shows online. Although the site did not serve up pirated content, American authorities say it provided links to sites that did. The Obama administration is seeking to extradite Mr. O’Dwyer from Britain on criminal charges of copyright infringement. The possible punishment: 10 years in a United States prison. The case is the government’s most far-reaching effort so far to crack down on foreigners suspected of breaking American laws. It is unusual because it goes after a middleman, who the authorities say made a fair amount of money by pointing people to pirated content. Mr. O’Dwyer’s backers say the prosecution goes too far, squelching his free-speech right to publish links to other Web sites. Mr. O’Dwyer did not respond to requests for an interview, but his mother, Julia, a nurse with the state-run health service, described him as a somewhat reserved young man who grew up playing Super Mario games on his computer and became devoted to coding. He studies interactive media and animation at Sheffield Hallam University and, his mother said, long ago spent the money he had made from his Web site. “He would take his mates to the cinema and pay for them,” she said. No matter how Mr. O’Dwyer’s legal problems are resolved, the case against him reflects the complexities of wrestling with piracy in the digital age. The entertainment industry lobbied Congress hard for the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, which was withdrawn this year after an online uproar led by Web companies and their consumers. Another bill on Capitol Hill would establish intellectual property attachés in American embassies. An international antipiracy treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, was roundly rejected last week by the European Parliament. In the last two years, the Obama administration has closed about 800 Web sites suspected of piracy, including those that stream new Hollywood films. In a widely publicized case, the Justice Department has sought to extradite the operators of Megaupload, a site that let users anonymously share movies and music, on criminal copyright infringement. “There is a problem of copyright infringement on the Internet, and copyright owners have been struggling over how to deal with that,” said Mark A. Lemley, a Stanford law professor who has represented Internet companies like Google in intellectual property disputes. “The U.S. government is aggressively getting involved in turning what used to be civil lawsuits into criminal cases. The combination of that and reaching across the border is new.” The extradition case against Mr. O’Dwyer has turned him into something of a cause célèbre. Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, is leading a crusade to save him, with an online petition that has gathered over 225,000 signatures worldwide in two weeks. Still, the British home secretary, Theresa May, approved the extradition order in March and said Monday that she would let the order stand. Mr. O’Dwyer has appealed; a hearing in Britain is expected this fall. His lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. The federal prosecutors in New York who are handling the case also declined to comment. The criminal complaint against Mr. O’Dwyer is sealed. Mr. O’Dwyer’s story began in 2008 when he set up his Web site, TVShack.net , which allowed users to search for and link to other sites, including ones that the authorities say showed pirated movies and shows. Because the domain name was registered in the United States, it fell under the ambit of American law. The government shut down TVShack.net in summer 2010. Mr. O’Dwyer was unbowed. TVShack.net had been growing in popularity, and it made about $230,000 from advertising over the course of two years, federal prosecutors say. “America? They have nothing to do with me,” Mr. O’Dwyer’s mother said he had told her. He reopened his site as TVShack.cc , which he reckoned was beyond the reach of the United States. A few months later came a knock on the door from the British police. A judge ruled that Mr. O’Dwyer would not be prosecuted in Britain. Instead, the United States would seek to extradite him. His mother was stunned. “This is for fugitives and murderers and terrorists,” she recalled thinking. “Richard has never fled the scene of a crime. He has never left the U.K.!” A judge released Mr. O’Dwyer on bail. On his mother’s orders, he shut down his site, which makes it difficult to tell how it operated. At the heart of the O’Dwyer case is a question of what to do about Web sites that help users find unlicensed content. According to British court documents examined by The New York Times, the Justice Department argues that Mr. O’Dwyer enabled Internet users to easily avail themselves of copyrighted material by providing links to third-party sites that contained thousands of pirated films and television programs. Prosecutors say that on one day in 2010, his Web site contained links to seven films, described as the “most popular movies today,” that were still playing in theaters and had not been authorized for distribution on the Internet. Mr. O’Dwyer, prosecutors suggest, was aware the material was copyrighted. They cite an announcement on TVShack that urged users to be patient with download times because they were “saving quite a lot of money (especially when putting several visits to the theater or seasons together).” Ted Shapiro, the Motion Picture Association of America’s general counsel for Europe, said the fact that Mr. O’Dwyer had not stored illegal material on TVShack itself signaled that he knew how to evade the law. “The fact that the U.S. government is willing to step up and protect content from the film industry and the copyright sector is an amazingly important thing,” Mr. Shapiro said. “We are talking about protecting things Americans are good at.” Mr. O’Dwyer’s backers say his site was effectively a search engine. To prosecute him, they argue, would set a dangerous precedent — tantamount to holding one person accountable for the acts of another. “Something that lets you find illegal content can also help you find legal content,” said Mitch Stoltz, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “When you go after intermediaries, you’re going to shut down legal and legitimate speech and commerce and innovation to get at what they perceive as illegal copyright violation.” Peter Decherney, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote the book “Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet,” said the O’Dwyer case showed how difficult Hollywood has made it for people in other countries to consume American entertainment online. Sites like Netflix, Hulu and iTunes have limited offerings overseas, if any. The demand for American entertainment drives a lucrative underground economy of pirated movies and television shows. “In many other countries, unauthorized distribution is the only form of online distribution,” said Mr. Decherney, “and consumers will continue to make Robin Hoods out of anyone who can help them get to media online.”

Movies
Television
Extradition
Copyrights and Copyright Violations
Computers and the Internet
O'Dwyer Richard
Freedom of Speech and Expression
Great Britain


In the Belmont Stakes, a Rested Commanding Curve

Abstract: Terry Finley is a West Point graduate who served as an Army captain and an airborne Ranger. He began forming horse racing partnerships under the name West Point Thoroughbreds in 1991. Experience has taught him to cope with pressure and strip emotion from decisions. But Finley’s adrenaline was still pumping a day after Commanding Curve staged a dramatic rally through the long Churchill Downs stretch and missed overtaking California Chrome by one-and-three-quarter lengths in the Kentucky Derby on May 3. Finley’s heart took over as he thought of the prospect of a rematch with the Derby winner two weeks later in the Preakness Stakes . “I had never experienced the pure jubilation of running so well in the Kentucky Derby,” Finley said. “The first thing that happens is you have people talking about going to the Preakness right away, and you get caught up in the talk.” Forty-eight hours after the race, the calculating former military man was back in charge. “When I met with my team, we really felt very strongly the Preakness would not suit our strengths,” Finley said. “We didn’t really have the pressure of going on to the Preakness, not having the Derby winner.” The trainer Dallas Stewart agreed. California Chrome will attempt to become the 12th horse to win the Triple Crown when he races in the Belmont Stakes on Saturday. “We wanted to take the Preakness off the board very quickly because we felt it would be too tempting if we did not,” Finley said. “We put a circle around the Belmont Stakes and felt very good about it.” West Point Thoroughbreds will learn the wisdom of its decision on Saturday, when Commanding Curve will be among the horses standing in the way of California Chrome’s bid to become the 12th Triple Crown champion and the first in 36 years. Stewart said the rest and the longer distance in the one-and-one-half-mile Belmont may allow his horse to deny California Chrome, who fended off Ride On Curlin by one-and-a-half lengths in the Preakness. “The best scenario would be to just catch him at the eighth pole and let them fight it out,” Steward said. “It would be a dream to see them fight it out in the stretch.” Commanding Curve also benefited from remaining at Churchill Downs, his home base, after the Derby. He produced two strong workouts there before being shipped to Belmont Park, where he turned in another sharp four-furlong drill Sunday. He worked in the company of Cost Effective, another West Point horse, and bested him by one length in blazing four furlongs in 47.38 seconds. The workout ranked third of 25 at the distance on a fast track. It appeared to be the latest evidence that staying on the sideline was wise. “I don’t think so; I know so,” Finley said. “For our horse, we made the right decision.” The last eight Belmont winners skipped the Preakness. The freshness of some of the Belmont entrants seems to worry Victor Espinoza, who has ridden California Chrome for six consecutive victories by a combined 27 1/2 lengths. “I think anyone who skipped the Preakness is dangerous,” he said. Stewart described it as “pushy” to run any horse back on two weeks of rest, the gap between the Derby and the Preakness. “As a horse trainer, you are always thinking about the care and safety of the horse,” he said. For Commanding Curve, it appears his best days may be ahead because he was slower to progress than some classmates. He did not earn his first victory until the fourth and final start of his 2-year-old season. That remains his lone win. He made his 3-year-old debut by finishing sixth in the Risen Star Stakes at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. He ran third in the Louisiana Derby there in his second start this season. Injuries to other horses allowed him to qualify for the Kentucky Derby. In all, he has been a runner-up twice with two third-place finishes for earnings of $542,434. His recent maturation suggests his peak performance may come in a major race later this year. Or it could come Saturday.

Belmont Stakes
Horse racing
California Chrome
Triple Crown Horse Racing


U.S. Engineers Cite Lengthy Cleanup in Japan

Abstract: Veterans of the Three Mile Island cleanup said that a much larger task faced the Japanese engineers who are trying contain and secure the damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactors. And Three Mile Island took 14 years. Lake Barrett, the senior Nuclear Regulatory Commission engineer at Three Mile Island during the early phases of the cleanup said by comparison, “it was a walk in the park compared to what they’ve got.” The Fukushima Daiichi reactors are similar to those in Pennsylvania — “the cores are probably really similar, partially melted,” Mr. Barrett said — but engineers pointed out several key differences in the aftermath of the accidents. In Japan , four separate reactors are damaged, and fixing each one is complicated by the presence of its leaking neighbors. It will also require a major infusion of equipment to replace parts far from the reactor’s core, like pumps and switchgear that were destroyed by the tsunami. In the short term, weather is a factor: according to engineers who managed the American cleanup, which ran from 1979 to 1993, Tokyo Electric Power has only a few weeks to patch up the three smashed secondary containments before the coming rainy season, when downpours could wash more contamination into the environment. And the company will have to carefully watch that the number of workers with the necessary skills do not burn out under the size of the task, or absorb so much radiation that they have to quit. Still, Mr. Barrett and others say that the mess at Fukushima Daiichi can be contained, cleaned up and even securely wrapped up for long-term disposal. The plant may benefit from past experience, because it is the second major accident worldwide in a big water-cooled reactor, they say. The first task, they agree, is to fill the reactors and the spent fuel pool with water that can be pumped out again, cooled and then returned to the reactors. That would sharply reduce the possibility of generating new hydrogen and new explosions, and would go a long way toward declaring that the plants were stable, a point that the N.R.C. observed recently that Fukushima Daiichi had not reached. Right now the reactors are in “feed and bleed” mode, adding clean water and cooling the fuel by letting that water boil off or dribble out, but such bleeding allows radiation leakage. “Whatever you bleed is letting cesium out,” said Mr. Barrett, referring to the radioactive isotope. Cooling with recirculating water could end releases of radioactive materials, but will require new pumps and possibly new piping, experts said. Before that new equipment can be installed, engineers will have to clean up the water in the basements of the reactor buildings, the turbine buildings and other structures. At Three Mile Island, water in the reactor building and the primary auxiliary building gave radiation doses as high as 1,000 rem an hour, said Ronald L. Freemerman, a Bechtel engineer who was the project manager of the cleanup. That meant a worker would hit the N.R.C.’s annual limit in about a minute. The water can be pumped through filters that will strain out the radioactive elements. Engineers from Three Mile Island laid out the three next steps: First, decontaminate the walls and floors, to hold down the potential radiation dose. “They have to economize on how they expose these people,” Mr. Freemerman said, or the company will run out of trained workers. Second, rebuild the secondary containments of units 1, 2 and 4, and fix or replace the heavy cranes just beneath their ceilings. That would allow workers to defuel the reactor. That step alone took five years at Three Mile Island, where no buildings had to be rebuilt. Third, peek inside the reactor vessel and figure out what tools will be needed to remove the wrecked fuel in the core. Three Mile Island was a surprise, Mr. Freemerman said, because so much of the core had melted and flowed beneath a support made of five plates of thick steel. Another veteran of the cleanup, Michael McGough, said only then did they realize they would need new remote-controlled tools to cut through the metal, to get to the material below. Mr. McGough’s technicians worked from a trailer outside the containment vessel, manipulating a cutting tool that was operating under about 40 feet of water. They also used long-handled picks and scoops to break apart the fused mass of ceramic fuel pellets and metal. “Basically we dug our way down through that debris until we got everything removed,” Mr. McGough said. At Three Mile Island, technicians then painstakingly loaded debris into shielded casks, under water to shield themselves from radiation, and then brought the casks to the surface. Eventually about 150 tons of radioactive rubble was shipped to an Energy Department laboratory in Idaho Springs, Idaho, where it still sits, waiting, as all used American fuel does, for a final resting place. Japan may have another option if the wrecked core isn’t too thoroughly mixed with other materials. It already has a reprocessing plant, where old fuel is chopped up, dissolved in acid, and then sorted, with its plutonium being removed, and the uranium sorted out for possible re-use. But that process is likely years away.

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Japan)


Mark Cuban’s Offer Would Make Sideshow of Brittney Griner

Abstract: NEW ORLEANS What was Brittney Griner supposed to say to the hackneyed notion of her or any woman trying out for the N.B.A., raised recently by the Dallas Mavericks’ owner, Mark Cuban? That it would be an invitation to embarrassment? That she — at 6 feet 8 inches — would rather dominate in the W.N.B.A. against undersized (or mere) women? Graciously accommodating, Griner took the high, happy road even if Cuban’s self-promoting spiel was a proposition that could lead only to nowhere good for the cause of gender equity in sports, conceptually speaking. “When are tryouts?” Griner told reporters Saturday at New Orleans Arena, where the women’s Final Four proceeded Sunday night without her and the tournament favorite, Baylor. “The W.N.B.A. is where I’m at. That is where I’m going. After that, if I get a shot, why turn down something like that? That’s big, even if you don’t make it.” Actually, it was just the standard big tease, typically propagated by men, and one that — perhaps unintentionally — would make a sideshow out of a player who has been considered revolutionary by women’s basketball standards. Yes, girls do compete against boys in various sports at the youth and high school levels. Danica Patrick has become a fixture in men’s auto racing. Women like Ann Meyers (now Meyers Drysdale) and Nancy Lieberman took dips in the coed pro basketball pool back when the women’s game was just getting off the developmental launching pad and needed the boost. But women have worked hard to develop incrementally their own college and professional arenas, their own measures of expectation and excellence. What, exactly, would be the point of setting up the most imposing female player to emerge from the college game to be physically overwhelmed by men? Why impose male standards on Griner and give those inclined to dwell on such comparisons more ammunition in making the case that the women’s game is inferior? Geno Auriemma, Connecticut’s outspoken coach, treated Cuban’s pitch with the scorn it deserved. “His genius would take a huge hit if he drafted Brittney Griner,” Auriemma said. “I think it would be a sham. The fact that a woman could actually play right now in the N.B.A. and compete successfully against the level of play that they have is absolutely ludicrous.” At least when Auriemma states something so obvious, it is with the credibility of one who has devoted a professional life to fighting pejoratives, stereotypes and pointless apples-versus-oranges comparisons. When Connecticut approached (and surpassed) U.C.L.A.’s 88-game winning streak, the longest basketball run in N.C.A.A. history, late in 2010, Auriemma fumed or laughed when some critics surmised that the achievement was less worthy. More recently, he brazenly proposed lowering the rim from 10 feet in the women’s game to adjust for the average player being smaller — in effect saying that women should be confident and independent enough to play by their own rules that work best for them. Only 22, here to collect more awards for another dominant season on the way to being the likely first pick of the W.N.B.A. draft, by Phoenix, Griner understandably sounded more flattered by the attention than flustered. “I was like, wow, Mark Cuban, he tweeted me?” Griner said. “It definitely made me feel good, feel special. I tweeted him back, ‘When is tryouts? I can hold my own.’ I’ll try, too. I’m not going to back down from a challenge.” Serena and Venus Williams dealt with similar pseudo challenges back when they were perceived to be too physically imposing for the women’s tennis tour. Fortunately, that line of thinking died a merciful death. Still dominating the women of her era, Serena can now wage comparative war against the all-timers of her sport. Why should competing against men — “pushing the envelope,” as Griner called it — be a yardstick for her when the question people should be asking is: how will she fare next summer in the W.N.B.A. against the likes of Tina Charles and Sylvia Fowles? In the women’s game, they have earned that respect and undoubtedly will demand it from Griner when she suits up against them. “I would hope that she would just stay with the W.N.B.A., because she’s got the opportunity to make a huge impact and continue to prove what we already have,” said Jeff Walz, the Louisville coach, whose physical team defense on Griner was credited in the Round of 16 defeat of Baylor. And last anyone looked, he didn’t have Dwight Howard or Tyson Chandler defending the paint. Summing up the story of Griner and Cuban, Walz said: “I’m not sure it would really be for her, or would it be for publicity to try to say, ‘Look what we did in Dallas, look what we’ve done’? ” Nothing good, in all likelihood, for women’s sports.

Mark Cuban
Brittney Griner
Mavericks
NCAA Women's Basketball
College basketball
Baylor University


Ohio State Too Much for Minnesota

Abstract: David Lighty scored 19 points, Jared Sullinger had 18 points and 13 rebounds, William Buford and Jon Diebler made three 3-pointers each and No. 1 Ohio State won at No. 18 Minnesota, 82-69, on Sunday. Every starter for Ohio State (24-0, 11-0 Big Ten) scored 10 or more points to help stretch the second-longest winning streak in team history, creeping toward the record of 32. Buford added 15 points, 4 assists, 4 rebounds and 2 steals, and the Buckeyes checked another opponent off the list in this most challenging month. Up next is a trip to No. 19 Wisconsin on Saturday, and after a home game against Michigan State, the Buckeyes travel to play No. 11 Purdue. They have won 12 straight conference road games dating to last season. Blake Hoffarber led Minnesota (16-7, 5-6) with 16 points but had 4 turnovers. Minnesota, which also lost at Indiana on Wednesday and will probably fall out of the national rankings, matched its season high with 19 turnovers. NOTRE DAME 76, RUTGERS 69 Ben Hansbrough scored 25 points despite a tough start to lead No. 9 Notre Dame to a win at home over Rutgers. Hansbrough hit only two of his first eight shots — he was one of seven from beyond the 3-point line — but he drew plenty of fouls and ended up making 11 of 13 free throws. Notre Dame scored only twice from the field in the last eight minutes. The Irish (19-4, 8-3) reclaimed sole possession of second place in the Big East behind No. 4 Pittsburgh. Scott Martin added 14 points for Notre Dame. Jonathan Mitchell scored 24 for Rutgers (12-11, 3-8). WISCONSIN 82, MICHIGAN ST. 56 Jordan Taylor scored 30 points to lead No. 19 Wisconsin in a pounding of visiting Michigan State, the Spartans’ fifth loss in six games. It was just short of the Spartans’ worst loss to the Badgers, a 27-point defeat in 1972, and comes on the heels of a 20-point loss to last-place Iowa. The Badgers shot 59 percent from the field, including 11 of 17 from 3-point range. Jon Leuer had 20 points and 6 rebounds for the Badgers (17-5, 7-3 Big Ten). Kalin Lucas led Michigan State (13-10, 5-6) with 20 points. U.N.C. 89, FLORIDA ST. 69 The freshman Kendall Marshall had 9 points and a season-high 16 assists — the most by a Tar Heels player in any Atlantic Coast Conference game — to help No. 23 North Carolina beat visiting Florida State. Harrison Barnes, also a freshman, had 17 points and 10 rebounds to lead the Tar Heels (17-5, 7-1). Marshall was thrust into a leading role with the abrupt departure of the junior Larry Drew II, who left the team after he was benched in the wake of a 20-point loss Georgia Tech. North Carolina’s 89 points were the most allowed this season by the Seminoles (16-7, 6-3), who entered the game second in the A.C.C. in scoring defense. Chris Singleton scored 15 points to lead Florida State. Women BAYLOR 84, OKLAHOMA ST. 57 Brittney Griner scored 19 points and Destiny Williams had her second big game in a row with 17 points, leading No. 1 Baylor past Oklahoma State to achieve the best start to a season in team history. Williams followed a career-high 19 points in her last game by going 6 for 8 in this one, giving the already-loaded Bears (21-1, 8-0 Big 12) one more weapon. Vicky McIntyre scored 12 points to lead host Oklahoma State (13-8, 1-7). U.C.L.A. 74, U.S.C. 67 Darxia Morris scored a career-high 24 points, Jasmine Dixon added 23 and No. 10 U.C.L.A. beat host Southern California, giving the Bruins a fourth consecutive victory over their crosstown rivals. Antonye Nyingifa added 13 points for the Bruins (19-2, 9-1 Pacific-10), who won their fourth straight. U.C.L.A. continued its best start since the 1976-77 squad won 20 of its first 22 games.

College Athletics
Basketball
Ohio State University
University of Minnesota


Pelicans Edge Bucks to Move Back Into Playoff Spot

Abstract: Anthony Davis had 20 points and 12 rebounds, and the Pelicans held off the Milwaukee Bucks, 85-84, in New Orleans. When Ersan Ilyasova’s 3-point attempt at the final horn rattled off the inside of the rim twice before bouncing out, the Pelicans moved back into the Western Conference’s final playoff spot. ■ Oklahoma City Thunder forward Serge Ibaka could miss the rest of the season after having an arthroscopic procedure Tuesday on his right knee. General Manager Sam Presti said Ibaka would be out four to six weeks. The playoffs begin April 18. Presti said the procedure shaved off damaged cartilage from under Ibaka’s kneecap that had caused pain and swelling. Ibaka had averaged 17.1 points and 9.4 rebounds since the All-Star break and was shooting 55 percent.

Bucks
Oklahoma City Thunder
Serge Ibaka
Basketball
New Orleans Pelicans


A Young Star Seeks Her Place Among Spain’s Elite

Abstract: With Rafael Nadal roaming the world’s baselines, this is a golden age for Spanish tennis. But that only applies to the Spanish men. The women reached their peak more than a decade ago, when Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and Conchita Martínez were regularly challenging for and winning significant titles. There has been no sign of a genuine successor, and it has been nine years since a Spanish woman reached the singles semifinals of a Grand Slam. It is a surprising state of affairs. Spanish sports are still on a roll, from Nadal to the national men’s soccer team to the National Basketball Association star Pau Gasol. Although women’s participation in sports continues to lag behind that of men in Spain, the gap is narrowing, as evidenced by the rise in the number of Spanish women Olympians. Tennis, with Nadal producing the biggest bang, is in the midst of a boom, and Nadal himself is the logical, formidable extension of a long line of outstanding Spanish men’s players, including Carlos Moya, who also reached No. 1 in the world after learning the game on the Mediterranean island of Majorca. But Sánchez and Martínez — and the attention they drew to women’s tennis in Spain — did not set the table for another women’s champion. At least not yet. “We are giving it all we have,” said Carla Suárez Navarro, 20, who is Spain’s most promising women’s player since the big two. She bears a resemblance to both. Like Sánchez, Suárez is short and sturdy and reliant on the speed in her legs to counter the power of her taller opponents. Like Martínez, Suárez has a stylish one-handed backhand that came naturally. “Her backhand is her best shot; it reminds me a bit of Justine Henin’s,” said Sánchez, while taking a break this week from caring for her 2-month-old daughter, Arantxa. “She’s not tall, but she’s very talented. For me, she is the only younger women’s player in Spain who can really achieve quite a bit more. She needs more consistency, but we’ll see how far she can get. So far, she’s the only one who looks like she might have it what it takes. I wish I could see more names.” With Henin, the Belgian star now retired, the 23rd-ranked Suárez and the 21st-ranked Amélie Mauresmo of France are the only players in the top 40 who use a one-hander. It allows Suárez to produce the sort of shifts in rhythm and spin — including quality drop shots — that are all too rare in the upper reaches of the women’s game in this power-hungry era. “Whenever I finish a match, people always come up to me and talk to me about my backhand and even thank me for my backhand,” Suárez said. “My first coach, Alfonso Pérez, had a one-handed backhand, and so did his sister. And they taught me that way, and since I had the strength to do it, I guess they never tried to change it.” Like Nadal, Suárez grew up on a Spanish island, but her home was considerably farther south. She was born and raised in the Canary Islands, in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where her mother was a physical education teacher whose areas of expertise did not include tennis. “Neither my mother nor my father played,” she said. “Nobody in my family played. I guess it was meant to be for me.” Suárez felt obliged to leave for the mainland at age 18 for an academy in Barcelona, the Spanish tennis capital. It is a move that many Spanish women’s players have hesitated to make in a society that remains family-oriented, which is one of the reasons Spanish coaches give for the gap between the men’s and women’s professional games. “At home, I was always playing with the same people and to travel was always more complicated; it was an extra flight each time,” Suárez said. Suárez is not the first prominent women’s player from Las Palmas. Magui Serna peaked at No. 16 in the world in 2004, and Marta Marrero reached the quarterfinals at the French Open in 2000. But both Serna and Marrero struggled with their fitness and faded from prominence. Suárez, who started to play at age 9 in school, eventually chose tennis over basketball, her other childhood sporting love. Those who have seen her dribble a soccer ball, including her coach, Xavier Budo, confirm that she has ample talent for that game, as well. Such athleticism is necessary, considering that Suárez — at 1.62 meters, or 5-foot-4 — is one of the shortest players in the top 100. Small wonder she has spent considerable time studying Henin, the greatest recent player of unimposing height. Suárez compensated beautifully in January, as she ambushed Venus Williams in the second round of the Australian Open in a true upset that required her to produce plenty of world-class defensive play and acute angles with her backhand. She then advanced to the quarterfinals. That was a reminder that the 2008 French Open was no fluke. There, Suárez advanced through qualifying to make her first Grand Slam appearance and then upset Mauresmo and the tough Italian base-liner Flavia Pennetta with Sánchez cheering her on from the stands en route to the quarterfinals. But in the months that followed, she struggled with her nerves and consistency, losing early at Wimbledon, the Beijing Olympics and the U.S. Open. She has improved her hard-court results this year and is comfortable on quicker surfaces because she grew up training half the day on hard courts and half the day on clay. But clay remains her favorite workplace, and she is delighted that the most significant women’s tournament in her country is now played on clay in Madrid. “This tournament is terrific, because it’s going to help all of us get better known in Spain and give us the chance to play at home in front of our public,” Suárez said. That should increase the chances of Sánchez and Martínez finding a true successor. Unless, of course, Suárez manages to get the job done first.

Tennis
Madrid (Spain)
Nadal Rafael
Moya Carlos
Martinez Conchita
Sanchez Vicario Arantxa


Osama bin Laden Was the Most Wanted Face of Terrorism

Abstract: Osama bin Laden , who was killed in Pakistan on Monday, was a son of the Saudi elite whose radical, violent campaign to recreate a seventh-century Muslim empire redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century. With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Bin Laden was elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin. He was a new national enemy, his face on wanted posters. He gloated on videotapes, taunting the United States and Western civilization. “Do you want Bin Laden dead?” a reporter asked President George W. Bush six days after the Sept. 11 attacks. “I want him — I want justice,” the president answered. “And there’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ ” It took nearly a decade before that quest finally ended in Pakistan with the death of Bin Laden in a firefight with American forces who attacked a compound where officials said he had been hiding. He was generally believed to be 54. The manhunt was punctuated in December 2001 by a battle at an Afghan mountain redoubt called Tora Bora, near the border with Pakistan, where Bin Laden and his allies were hiding. Despite days of pounding by American bombers, Bin Laden escaped. For more than nine years afterward, he remained an elusive, shadowy figure frustratingly beyond the grasp of his pursuers and thought to be holed up somewhere in Pakistan and plotting new attacks. Long before, he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world, as much a myth as a man — what a longtime C.I.A. officer called “the North Star” of global terrorism. He had united disparate militant groups, from Egypt to the Philippines, under the banner of Al Qaeda and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam. Terrorism before Bin Laden was often state-sponsored, but he was a terrorist who had sponsored a state. From 1996 to 2001 he bought the protection of the Taliban, then the rulers of Afghanistan, and used the time and freedom to make Al Qaeda — which means “the base” in Arabic — into a multinational enterprise for the export of terrorism. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the names Al Qaeda and Bin Laden spread to every corner of the globe. Groups calling themselves Al Qaeda, or acting in the name of its cause, attacked American troops in Iraq, bombed tourist spots in Bali and blew up passenger trains in Spain. To this day, the precise reach of his power remains unknown: how many members Al Qaeda could truly count on, how many countries its cells had penetrated — and whether, as Bin Laden had boasted, he was seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. He waged holy war with modern methods. He sent fatwas — religious decrees — by fax and declared war on Americans in an e-mail beamed by satellite around the world. Qaeda members kept bomb-making manuals on CDs and communicated through encrypted memos on laptops, leading one American official to declare that Bin Laden possessed better communications technology than the United States. He railed against globalization, even as his agents in Europe and North America took advantage of a globalized world to carry out their attacks, insinuating themselves into the very Western culture he despised. He styled himself a Muslim ascetic, a billionaire’s son who gave up a life of privilege for the cause. But he was media savvy and acutely image-conscious. Before a CNN crew that interviewed him in 1997 was allowed to leave, his media advisers insisted on editing out unflattering shots. He summoned reporters to a cave in Afghanistan when he needed to get his message out, but like the most controlling of C.E.O.’s he insisted on receiving written questions in advance. His reedy voice seemed to belie the warrior image he cultivated, a man whose constant companion was a Kalashnikov rifle that he boasted he had taken from a Russian soldier he had killed. The world’s most threatening terrorist, he was also known to submit to dressings down by his mother. While he built his reputation on his combat experience against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s, even some of his supporters questioned whether he had actually fought. And though he claimed to follow the purest form of Islam, many scholars insisted that he was glossing over the faith’s edicts against killing innocents and civilians. Islam draws boundaries on where and why holy war can be waged; Bin Laden declared the entire world as fair territory. Yet it was the United States, Bin Laden insisted, that was guilty of a double standard. “It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this,” he told CNN in the 1997 interview. “If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.” The Turning Point For Bin Laden, as for the United States, the turning point came in 1989, with the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. To the United States, which had supported the Afghan resistance with billions of dollars in arms and ammunition, the Soviet retreat was the beginning of the end of the cold war and the birth of a new world order; to Bin Laden, who had supported the resistance with money, construction equipment and housing, it was an affirmation of Muslim power and an opportunity to recreate Islamic political power and topple infidel governments through jihad, or holy war. He declared to an interviewer in 1998 , “I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.” In its place he built his own legend, modeling himself after the Prophet Muhammad, who in the seventh century led the Muslim people to rout the infidels, or nonbelievers, from North Africa and the Middle East. Just as Muhammad saw the Koran revealed to him amid intense persecution, Bin Laden regarded his expulsions from Saudi Arabia and then Sudan in the 1990s as signs that he was a chosen one. In his vision, he would be the “emir,” or prince, in a restoration of the khalifa, a political empire extending from Afghanistan across the globe. “These countries belong to Islam,” he told the same interviewer, “not the rulers.” Al Qaeda became the infrastructure for his dream. Under it, he created a web of businesses — some legitimate, some less so — to obtain and move the weapons, chemicals and money he needed. He created training camps for his foot soldiers, a media office to spread his word and even “shuras,” or councils, to approve his military plans and his fatwas. Through the 1990s, Al Qaeda evolved into a far-flung and loosely connected network of symbiotic relationships: Bin Laden gave affiliated terrorist groups money, training and expertise; they gave him operational cover and furthered his cause. Perhaps the most important alliance was with the Taliban, who rose to power in Afghanistan largely on the strength of Bin Laden’s aid, and in turn provided him refuge and a base for holy war. Long before Sept. 11, though the evidence was often thin, Bin Laden was considered in part responsible for the killing of American soldiers in Somalia and Saudi Arabia; the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993; the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; and a foiled plot to hijack a dozen jets, crash a plane into the C.I.A. headquarters and kill President Bill Clinton. In 1996, American officials described Bin Laden as “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremism in the world,” but he was not thought of as someone capable of orchestrating international terrorist plots. When the United States put out a list of the most wanted terrorists in 1997, neither Bin Laden nor Al Qaeda was on it. Bin Laden, however, demanded to be noticed. In February 1998, he declared it the duty of every Muslim to “kill Americans wherever they are found.” After the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in August 1998, President Clinton declared Bin Laden “Public Enemy No. 1.” The C.I.A. spent much of the next three years hunting him. The goal was to capture Bin Laden using recruited Afghan agents or to kill him with a precision-guided missile, according to the 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission and the memoirs of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence from July 1997 to July 2004. The intelligence was never good enough to pull the trigger. By the summer of 2001, the C.I.A. was convinced that Al Qaeda was on the verge of a spectacular attack. But no one knew where or when it would come. The Early Life Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1957, the seventh son and 17th child, among 50 or more, of his father, people close to the family say. Many experts believe he was born in March of that year, though Steve Coll, in his book “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” reported that Bin Laden himself said he was born in January 1958. His father, Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden, had immigrated to what would soon become Saudi Arabia in 1931 from the family’s ancestral village in a conservative province of southern Yemen. He found work in Jidda as a porter to the pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Mecca; years later, when he owned the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, he displayed his porter’s bag in the main reception room of his palace as a reminder of his humble origins. The elder Bin Laden began his family’s rise by skillfully navigating the competing interests within and around the House of Saud in the 1950s. He first built palaces for the royal family and was then chosen to renovate holy sites, including those at Medina and Mecca. In 1958, when several Arab countries set about to renovate the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, on one of the holiest sites in Islam, he won the bid for the Saudis by offering to do the job at a loss. In interviews years later, Osama bin Laden would recall proudly that his father had sometimes prayed in all three holy places in one day. By the 1960s, King Faisal decreed that all construction projects be awarded to the Bin Laden group. All of the Bin Laden children were required to work for the family company, meaning that Osama spent summers working on road projects. Muhammad bin Laden died in a plane crash in 1967, when Osama was 10. The siblings each inherited millions — the precise amount was a matter of some debate — and led a life of near-royalty. Osama — the name means “young lion” — grew up playing with Saudi princes and had his own stable of horses by age 15. But some people close to the family paint a portrait of Bin Laden as a misfit. His mother, the last of his father’s four wives, was from Syria, and was the only one not from Saudi Arabia. The elder Bin Laden had met her on a vacation, and Osama was their only child. Within the family, she was said to be known as “the slave” and Osama “the slave child.” Within the Saudi elite, it was rare to have both parents born outside the kingdom. In a profile of Osama bin Laden in The New Yorker , Mary Anne Weaver quoted a family friend who suggested that he had felt alienated in a culture so obsessed with lineage. “It must have been difficult for him,” the family friend said. “Osama was almost a double outsider. His paternal roots are in Yemen, and within the family his mother was a double outsider as well — she was neither Saudi nor Yemeni but Syrian.” According to one of his brothers, Osama was the only Bin Laden child who never traveled abroad to study. A biography of Bin Laden provided to the PBS television program “Frontline” by an unidentified family friend asserted that Bin Laden had never traveled outside the Middle East. That lack of exposure to Western culture would prove a crucial distinction; the other siblings went on to lead lives that would not be unfamiliar to most Americans. They took over the family business, estimated to be worth billions, distributing Snapple drinks, Volkswagens and Disney products across the Middle East. On Sept. 11, 2001, several Bin Laden siblings were living in the United States. Bin Laden had been educated — and, indeed, steeped, as many Saudi children are — in Wahhabism, a puritanical, ardently anti-Western strain of Islam. Even years later, he so despised the Saudi ruling family’s coziness with Western nations that he refused to refer to Saudi Arabia by its modern name, instead calling it “the Country of the Two Holy Places.” Newspapers have quoted anonymous sources — particularly an unidentified Lebanese barber — about a wild period of drinking and womanizing in Bin Laden’s life. But by most accounts he was devout and quiet, marrying a relative, the first of his four wives, at age 17. Soon afterward, he began earning a degree at King Abdulaziz University in Jidda. It was there that he shaped his militancy. He became involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of Islamic radicals who believed that much of the Muslim world, including the leaders of Saudi Arabia, lived as infidels, in violation of the true meaning of the Koran. And he fell under the influence of two Islamic scholars: Muhammad Quttub and Abdullah Azzam, whose ideas would underpin Al Qaeda. Mr. Azzam became a mentor to the young Bin Laden. Jihad was the responsibility of all Muslims, he taught, until the lands once held by Islam were reclaimed. His motto was, “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogue.” The Middle East was becoming unsettled in 1979, when Bin Laden was at the university. In Iran, Shiite Muslims mounted an Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah and made the United States a target. Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. And as the year ended, Soviet troops occupied Afghanistan. Bin Laden arrived in Pakistan-Afghanistan border within two weeks of the occupation. He said later that he had been asked to go by Saudi officials, who were eager to support the resistance movement. In his book “Taliban,” the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid said that the Saudis had originally hoped that a member of the royal family might serve as an inspirational leader in Afghanistan, but that they settled on Bin Laden as the next closest thing when no princes volunteered. He traveled more like a visiting diplomat than a soldier, meeting with leaders and observing refugees coming into Peshawar, Pakistan. As the family friend said, it “was an exploratory rather than an action trip.” He returned twice a year for the next few years, in between finishing his degree and lobbying family members to support the Afghan mujahedeen. Bin Laden began traveling beyond the border into Afghanistan in 1982, bringing with him construction machinery and recruits. In 1984, he and Mr. Azzam began setting up guesthouses in Peshawar, which was the first stop for holy warriors on their way to Afghanistan. With the money they had raised in Saudi Arabia, they established the Office of Services, which branched out across the world to recruit young jihadists. The recruits were known as the Afghan Arabs, though they came from all over the world, and their numbers were estimated as high as 20,000. By 1986, Bin Laden had begun setting up training camps for them as well, and he was paying roughly $25,000 a month to subsidize them. To young would-be recruits across the Arab world, Bin Laden’s was an attractive story: the rich young man who had become a warrior. His own descriptions of the battles he had seen, how he had lost the fear of death and slept in the face of artillery fire, were brushstrokes of an almost divine figure. But intelligence sources insist that Bin Laden actually saw combat only once, in a weeklong barrage by the Soviets at Jaji, where the Arab Afghans had dug themselves into caves using Bin Laden’s construction equipment. “Afghanistan, the jihad, was one terrific photo op for a lot of people,” Milton Bearden, the C.I.A. officer who described Bin Laden as “the North Star,” said in an interview on “Frontline,” adding, “There’s a lot of fiction in there.” Still, Jaji became a kind of touchstone in the Bin Laden myth. Stories sent back from the battle to Arab newspaper readers, and photographs of Bin Laden in combat gear, burnished his image. The flood of young men following him to Afghanistan prompted the founding of Al Qaeda. The genesis was essentially bureaucratic; Bin Laden wanted a way to track the men so he could tell their families what had happened to them. The documentation that Al Qaeda provided became a primitive database of young jihadists. Afghanistan also brought Bin Laden into contact with leaders of other militant Islamic groups, including Ayman al-Zawahri, the bespectacled doctor who would later appear at Bin Laden’s side in televised messages from the caves of Afghanistan. Ultimately Dr. Zawahri’s group, Egyptian Jihad, and others would merge with Al Qaeda, making it an umbrella for terrorist groups. The Movement Through the looking glass of Sept. 11, it seemed ironic that the Americans and Osama bin Laden had fought on the same side against the Soviets in Afghanistan — as if the Americans had somehow created the Bin Laden monster by providing arms and cash to the Arabs. The complex at Tora Bora where Qaeda members hid had been created with the help of the C.I.A. as a base for the Afghans fighting the Soviets. Bin Laden himself described the fight in Afghanistan this way: “There I received volunteers who came from the Saudi kingdom and from all over the Arab and Muslim countries. I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.” In truth, the Americans did not deal directly with Bin Laden; they worked through the middlemen of the Pakistani intelligence service. In the revisionism of the Bin Laden myth, his defenders would say that he had not worked with the Americans but that he had only tolerated them as a means to his end. As proof, they insisted he had made anti-American statements as early as 1980. Bin Laden would say in retrospect that he was always aware who his enemies were. “For us, the idea was not to get involved more than necessary in the fight against the Russians, which was the business of the Americans, but rather to show our solidarity with our Islamist brothers,” he told a French journalist in 1995. “I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts against Communism or Western oppression. The urgent thing was Communism, but the next target was America.” Afghanistan had infused the movement with confidence. “Most of what we benefited from was that the myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims,” Bin Laden told an interviewer. “Slumber and fatigue vanished, and so was the terror which the U.S. would use in its media by attributing itself superpower status, or which the Soviet Union used by attributing itself as a superpower.” He returned to Saudi Arabia, welcomed as a hero, and took up the family business. But Saudi royals grew increasingly wary of him as he became more outspoken against the government. The breaking point — for Bin Laden and for the Saudis — came when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Bin Laden volunteered to the Saudis that the men and equipment he had used in Afghanistan could defend the kingdom. He was “shocked,” a family friend said, to learn that the Americans — the enemy, in his mind — would defend it instead. To him, it was the height of American arrogance. The United States, he told an interviewer later, “has started to look at itself as a master of this world and established what it calls the new world order.” The Saudi government restricted him to Jidda, fearing that his outspokenness would offend the Americans. Bin Laden fled to Sudan, which was offering itself as a sort of haven for terrorists, and there he began setting up legitimate businesses that would help finance Al Qaeda. He also built his reserves, in 1992, paying for about 500 mujahedeen who had been expelled from Pakistan to come work for him. The Terrorism It was during that time that it is believed he honed his resolve against the United States. Within Al Qaeda, he argued that the organization should put aside its differences with Shiite terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the better to concentrate on the common enemy: the United States. He called for attacks against American forces in the Saudi peninsula and in the Horn of Africa. On Dec. 29, 1992, a bomb exploded in a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where American troops had been staying while on their way to Somalia. The troops had already left, and the bomb killed two Austrian tourists. American intelligence officials came to believe that it was Bin Laden’s first attack. On Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in a truck driven into the underground garage at the World Trade Center, killing six people. Bin Laden later praised Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of the bombing. In October of that year, in Somalia, 18 American service members were killed — some of their bodies dragged through the streets — while on a peacekeeping mission; Bin Laden was almost giddy about the deaths. After leaving Afghanistan, the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle, thinking that the Americans were “like the Russians,” he told an interviewer. “The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat,” he said. “And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda about being the world leader and the leader of the new world order, and after a few blows, they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.” By 1994, Bin Laden had established new training camps in Sudan, but he became a man without a country. The Saudi government froze his assets and revoked his citizenship. His family, which had become rich on its relations with the royal family, denounced him publicly after he was caught smuggling weapons from Yemen. This seemed to make him only more zealous. He sent an open letter to King Fahd outlining the sins of the Saudi government and calling for a campaign of guerrilla attacks to drive Americans from Saudi Arabia. Three months later, in November 1995, a truck bomb exploded at a Saudi National Guard training center operated by the United States in Riyadh, killing seven people. That year, Belgian investigators found a kind of how-to manual for terrorists on a CD. The preface dedicated it to Bin Laden, the hero of the holy war. The next May, when the men accused of the Riyadh bombing were beheaded in Riyadh’s main square, they were forced to read a confession in which they acknowledged the connection to Bin Laden. The next month, June 1996, a truck bomb destroyed Khobar Towers, an American military residence in Dhahran. It killed 19 soldiers. Bin Laden fled to Afghanistan that summer after Sudan expelled him under pressure from the Americans and Saudis, and he forged an alliance with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban. In August 1996, from the Afghan mountain stronghold of Tora Bora, Bin Laden issued his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Who Occupy the Land of the Two Holy Mosques.” “Muslims burn with anger at America,” it read. The presence of American forces in the Persian Gulf states “will provoke the people of the country and induces aggression on their religion, feelings, and prides and pushes them to take up armed struggle against the invaders occupying the land.” The imbalance of power between American forces and Muslim forces demanded a new kind of fighting, he wrote, “in other words, to initiate a guerrilla war, where sons of the nation, not the military forces, take part in it.” That same month in New York City, a federal grand jury began meeting to consider charges against Bin Laden. Disputes arose among prosecutors and American law enforcement and intelligence officers about which attacks against American interests could truly be attributed to Bin Laden — whether in fact he had, as an indictment eventually charged, trained and paid the men who killed the Americans in Somalia. His foot soldiers, in testimony, offered different pictures of Bin Laden’s actual involvement. In some cases he could be as aloof as any boss with thousands of employees. Yet one of the men convicted of the bombings of the embassies said that Bin Laden had been so involved that he was the one who had pointed at surveillance photographs to direct where the truck bomb should be driven. Bin Laden was becoming more emboldened, summoning Western reporters to his hide-outs in Afghanistan to relay his message: He would wage war against the United States and its allies if Washington did not remove its troops from the gulf region. “So we tell the Americans as a people,” he told ABC News, “and we tell the mothers of soldiers and American mothers in general that if they value their lives and the lives of their children, to find a nationalistic government that will look after their interests and not the interests of the Jews. The continuation of tyranny will bring the fight to America, as Ramzi Yousef and others did. This is my message to the American people: to look for a serious government that looks out for their interests and does not attack others, their lands or their honor.” In February 1998, he issued the edict calling for attacks on Americans anywhere in the world, declaring it an “individual duty” for all Muslims. In June, the grand jury that had been convened two years earlier issued its indictment, charging Bin Laden with conspiracy to attack the United States abroad, for heading Al Qaeda and for financing terrorist activities around the world. On Aug. 7, 1998, the eighth anniversary of the United States order sending troops into the gulf region, two bombs exploded simultaneously at the American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The Nairobi bomb killed 213 people and wounded 4,500; the bomb in Dar es Salaam killed 11 and wounded 85. The United States retaliated two weeks later with strikes against what were thought to be terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which officials contended — erroneously, it turned out — was producing chemical weapons for Al Qaeda. Bin Laden had trapped the United States in a spiral of tension, where any defensive or retaliatory actions would affirm the evils that he said had provoked the attacks in the first place. In an interview with Time magazine that December , he brushed aside President Clinton’s threats against him, and referred to himself in the third person, as if recognizing or encouraging the notion that he had become larger than life. “To call us Enemy No. 1 or Enemy No. 2 does not hurt us,” he said. “Osama bin Laden is confident that the Islamic nation will carry out its duty.” In January 1999, the United States government issued a superseding indictment that affirmed the power Bin Laden had sought all along, declaring Al Qaeda an international terrorist organization in a conspiracy to kill American citizens. The Aftermath After the attacks of Sept. 11, Bin Laden did what had become routine: He took to Arab television. He appeared, in his statement to the world, to be at the top of his powers. President Bush had declared that the nations of the world were either with the Americans or against them on terrorism; Bin Laden held up a mirror image, declaring the world divided between infidels and believers. Bin Laden had never before claimed or accepted responsibility for terrorist attacks. But in a videotape found in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar weeks after the attacks, he did precisely that, reveling in the horror of Sept. 11. “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower,” he said. “We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all.” In the videotape , showing him talking to followers nearly two months after the attacks, Bin Laden smiles, hungers to hear more approval and notes proudly that the attacks let loose a surge of interest in Islam around the world. He explained that the hijackers on the planes — “the brothers who conducted the operation” — did not know what the mission would be until just before they boarded the planes. They knew only that they were going to the United States on a mission of martyrdom. Bin Laden’s voice continued to be heard, off and on, for almost the next 10 years as he issued threats, warnings and pronouncements on video and audiotape from wherever he was hiding. As recently as October he appealed for aid for flood victims in Pakistan and blamed the West for causing climate change . Bin Laden long eluded the allied forces in pursuit of him, moving, it was said, under cover of night with his wives and children, at first between mountain caves. Yet he was determined that if he had to die, he too would die a martyr’s death. His greatest hope, he told supporters, was that if he died at the hands of the Americans, the Muslim world would rise up and defeat the nation that had killed him.

United States Defense and Military Forces


Recalls of Organic Food on the Rise, Report Says

Abstract: New data collected by Stericycle , a company that handles recalls for businesses, shows a sharp jump in the number of recalls of organic food products. Organic food products accounted for 7 percent of all food units recalled so far this year, compared with 2 percent of those recalled last year, according to data from the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture that Stericycle uses to compile its quarterly report on recalls. In 2012 and 2013, only 1 percent of total units of food recalled were organic. Kevin Pollack, a vice president at Stericycle , said the growing consumer and corporate demand for organic ingredients was at least partly responsible for the increase. According to Stericycle, 87 percent of organic recalls since 2012 were for bacterial contamination, like salmonella and listeria, rather than a problem with a label. “This is a fairly serious and really important issue because a lot of consumers just aren’t aware of it,” Mr. Pollack said. For that matter, the overall amount of food recalled because of suspected bacterial contamination has increased this year, adding to what has been an upward trend in food recalls since 2012, according to Stericycle, which predicts a 24 percent increase in the number of food units that will be recalled by the F.D.A. this year. The Organic Trade Association, however, took issue with Stericycle’s accounting of recalls, saying its own quick analysis of recall data from the F.D.A. and the Agriculture Department shows the problem is less severe, with organic products accounting for 4.9 percent of recalls, in line with the percentage of organic food sold out of total retail sales of food. “A key point to keep in mind is that an overall increase in organic recalls between 2012 and 2015 would not be surprising — not because organic food is less safe, but because of the dramatic increase in organic food sales and purchases that we’ve been seeing in this country,” said Gwendolyn Wyard, senior director of regulatory and technical affairs at the trade group. “Sales of organic food in the U.S. have risen by almost 25 percent just since 2012, and the number of organic products on the market is increasing steadily as demand for organic increases,” she said. Ms. Wyard also noted that food safety mechanisms had increased since 2012, with a corresponding increase in food recalls. For instance, organic spinach from one producer was recalled in March because of the possibility that it was contaminated by listeria. The spinach was used by five brands, including Amy’s Kitchen and Costco, in more than 500,000 individual units. No one has yet claimed to be sick from eating any of the products containing the spinach, said Bill Marler, a lawyer in Washington State who is an expert on food safety issues. Stericycle counts every unit affected, while the trade association argues that it was really just a single recall. Nonetheless, more consumers are buying food products that are either wholly organic or incorporate some organic ingredients, as more food companies incorporate organic ingredients in their products. According to the association, sales of certified organic products hit $39 billion last year, up 11.3 percent from 2013. Mr. Marler said the trend in organic food recalls reminded him of rising recalls of foreign products several years ago. “People would get so excited when a product from overseas caused illness and injury, saying, oh, it’s because of more imports from China or Mexico or wherever,” he said. “I used to say it wasn’t a big deal because there wasn’t that much imported food, but now we are seeing more recalls related to foreign-produced food because there’s more of it on the market.” He also noted that a single large recall involving tens of thousands of products may cause distortions in the data. “Is it a spike or a trend?” he said. “You have to watch what happens over time.”

Organic Food
Stericycle
Agriculture Department
Food Safety
Bill Marler
Recalls and Bans
FDA
Organic Trade Assn


Ivory Coast: Strike Follows Party Lines

Abstract: A general strike called to pressure the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo , to step down was observed roughly along party lines on Monday. Bouaké, the rebel capital and a stronghold of Alassane Ouattara , widely recognized as the winner of the presidential election, was shut down. But much of Abidjan, the country’s largest city, did not follow the strike, and Gagnoa, a stronghold of Mr. Gbagbo, was open for business.

Ivory Coast
Strikes
Elections
Gbagbo Laurent
Ouattara Alassane D


Just Another Beer? Not to Those in Laos

Abstract: VANG VIENG, Laos — In this tourist town on the Nam Song River, Beer Lao is as ubiquitous as sneakers and sunburns. Backpackers stroll the streets with a bottle of lager in each hand. Beer snobs like it, too. Time magazine has called it Asia’s best local beer. And the brand’s logo adorns everything from patio furniture to street signs. But the buzz stops there. Outside Laos, Beer Lao is notoriously hard to find. Like a film festival winner without a distribution deal, the rice-based lager has struggled to turn cult status into anything other than good press. Even with backing from the Danish brewer Carlsberg, which owns 50 percent of the company that makes Beer Lao in partnership with the Lao government, just 1 percent of its annual production is exported. The company, Lao Brewery, hopes to change that. It would like to see 10 percent sold abroad, and it is counting on Vang Vieng’s beer-loving backpackers to help them make the sale. Lao Brewery is building a network of fans-turned-distributors who import and sell the beer in select markets. Some distributors are former travelers who see potential in a brand with little international exposure. Others just really like the beer. In Hong Kong, the brand is in the hands of Jerry Cheung, who has a love for lager and an affinity for the laid-back pace in Laos. Mr. Cheung first tried Beer Lao while living in Cambodia in 2006. “It was the most unique beer I’d ever tasted,” he recalled. He flew to Vientiane, where the beer is made, soon afterward. Beer Lao is made with rice in addition to malt. This, Mr. Cheung says, gives the beer a flavor that is light and crisp. Not everyone is sold on the beer. Randy Mosher, a beer marketing consultant and author of “Tasting Beer: An Insider’s Guide to the World’s Greatest Drink,” is skeptical about the beer’s “unique” taste. “This is very much one of the international-style pilsners that happens to be brewed in exotic locations,” he said. “Fizzy yellow beers tend to be all the same.” Mr. Cheung, however, was sold. Within a year he had quit his job, persuaded Lao Brewery to appoint him as a distributor and founded an import firm with two Canadian friends. That firm, Aseurica, is now the exclusive distributor for Hong Kong and Macao. It sells cases of beer to local bars and sponsors yachting trips and beach parties aimed at expatriates. The beer is priced competitively, Mr. Cheung said. In Hong Kong’s central district, it sells for 44 Hong Kong dollars, or about $6, a bottle — about the same price as Carlsberg, Stella Artois or Heineken. Part of the challenge is selling grass-roots chic to the masses. Since Hong Kong is low on backpackers and high on bankers, Mr. Cheung and his partners use locally made promotional materials instead of merchandise from headquarters. This allows them to offer, say, a yacht-appropriate custom-fitted bottle cooler instead of a branded beer glass. Mr. Cheung said the strategy was a bit do-it-yourself, “but it gives us flexibility.” Butsarakorn Srikhongrak, Lao Brewery’s marketing manager, said the ad hoc approach was working. Because of similar deals with a handful of distributors, Beer Lao is available across Southeast Asia and in cities in the United States, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. There are plans to expand to the Philippines, Israel and China next year, she said. Lao Brewery said it sold 132 million liters, or almost 280 million pints, of beer last year and had revenue of $145 million. This year, the company is expecting revenue to grow 10 percent. Beer Lao enjoys a 99 percent market share in Laos. In other countries, however, when it is lined up next to big brands like Heineken and Corona, it becomes more critical to stand out. An added challenge, said Sivilay Lasachack, Lao Brewery’s Laos-born, Czech-trained brew master, is that few people know what — or where — Laos is. “When I travel internationally, people say, ‘I like your beer, but what is Laos?’ ” she said. “I tell them it’s the country next to Vietnam, come visit.” Mr. Cheung encounters similar questions. “Even here in Asia, people are like, ‘Laos, where is that?’ ” he said. Relative obscurity, or the lure of the exotic, is certainly a big part of the appeal — as Coors learned in the days when its beer was available only in the Western United States. That may be why Carlsberg and Lao Brewery are moving slowly. It is definitely why Fiona Read, a teacher from Britain, shopped for Beer Lao T-shirts while vacationing in Vang Vieng recently. A friend from Britain had asked for a Beer Lao shirt. Ms. Read obliged. “Apparently it’s quite a cool beer to drink in London,” she said. “I think it’s considered sort of a funky, travelers’ beer,” she added. “Anybody who has traveled would drink it.” Lao Brewery hopes that proves true. Not everyone has traveled, but nothing makes you thirsty like a beer you cannot drink.

Far East South and Southeast Asia and Pacific Areas