Mysteries of an Unusual Traveling Salesman

Abstract: Bernadette M. Rogoff, curator of museum collections at the Monmouth County Historical Association in Freehold, has a recurring, unsettling dream: She is in downtown New Brunswick, and a man ahead of her, dressed in black and carrying a bundle, is walking away. “I know it’s Micah, and I realize if I can get to him I can ask him questions,” she said. “ ‘Where did you come from? What was your first portrait? Was that you in the tornado?’ ” But people in wagons get in the way, “and I can’t walk fast enough, and then when he turns the corner that’s the end of the dream,” she said. Micah is Micah Williams, a 19th-century portrait artist who is the subject of a first-ever solo exhibition, “Micah Williams: Portrait Artist,” on display through Sept. 29 at the historical association. Image Bernadette M. Rogoff, curator of museum collections. Credit Marc Steiner for The New York Times Ms. Rogoff’s dream suggests the enigma of Mr. Williams’s largely undocumented life, much of it spent in New Jersey. She has been working for the museum for 21 years and researching the artist for 18 of them, drawn to his story because “he’s just so good,” she said. “Even now, after all these years, if I turn around and look at one of his portraits, it still catches me,” she said. “But he’s a mystery man,” said Ms. Rogoff, 50, of Ocean Township. A lot of the mystery surrounding Mr. Williams has centered on finding and cataloging his work. Of 272 known portraits, few are signed; the sitters themselves may have written his name on some pieces. But he is not so much of a mystery that his paintings — richly detailed portraits, mostly pastels, from 1815 to 1835, of middle-class New Jersey and New York residents — have escaped the notice of galleries, museums and collectors. “A lot of collectors who specialize in folk art like to have at least one Micah Williams,” Ms. Rogoff said during a recent tour of the exhibition, which includes 67 portraits in three galleries, as well as one of the artist by an unknown painter. The historical association owns 22 Williams pastels and one oil painting. The other works were lent by private owners in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania and museums including the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Ms. Rogoff’s research suggests that the artist was born in 1782, possibly in Hempstead, on Long Island, and moved to New Brunswick, where he worked as a silver plater and married his wife, Margaret Priestly Williams, in 1806; the couple raised seven children. His earliest portraits are dated 1815; he left New Jersey briefly in 1829 to pursue his painting in Manhattan, returning a few years later to New Brunswick. He died in 1837; he may have been injured in 1835 in a tornado Ms. Rogoff read about in old newspaper clippings she unearthed at the Archibald S. Alexander Library at Rutgers University. “It was a ‘Wizard of Oz’-type tornado, and there was a slightly incoherent report that included mention of an M. Williams, who was seriously injured,” she said. “What I wouldn’t give for a first name.” Image The exhibition is on display through Sept. 29. Credit Marc Steiner for The New York Times Mr. Williams is considered a folk artist because when he began painting professionally, he had no formal training. He was itinerant, traveling from home to home, painting as a hired hand. As Ms. Rogoff pointed out, “Nobody knew photography was on the way.” So hiring a portraitist, if there was no painter in the family, was a practical way to preserve likenesses of loved ones. Still, it was uncommon. Ms. Rogoff guesses that individual portraits may have cost $5 to $10 during Mr. Williams’s artistic career, which would have prevented families not securely within the middle class from commissioning them. The New Jersey corridor he traveled, though — towns including Freehold, Marlboro and Middletown — was “a jackpot,” Ms. Rogoff said, because it was part of what was known as the Great Eastern Butter Belt, where farmers raised dairy cows and crops for city markets in New York and Philadelphia. “I guarantee you, people were thinking for weeks about what they were going to wear, how their hair was going to look,” before sitting for Mr. Williams, Ms. Rogoff said. And the artist, as many of the painstakingly restored portraits in the show reveal, made sure none of that careful planning went unnoticed. Ruffled collars, jewelry and furniture are documented in precise detail. Some subjects hold props to better illustrate the details of their lives. For example, the baby depicted with her mother in “Sarah Conover Schenck Smock and Baby Elenor,” probably painted in 1819 in Freehold, is holding a peach. “That’s a reference to Aaron Smock’s peach orchards,” said Ms. Rogoff. Aaron Smock was the baby’s father, a local farmer. Collectors now pay $60,000 or more for works by Mr. Williams, according to Ms. Rogoff. But it is probably safe to say he never expected to become rich from his paintings. Mr. Williams was arrested and sent to the Middlesex County Jail in 1814 as “an insolvent debtor,” and financial troubles followed him for much of his life. A letter written to one of his sons, included in the exhibition’s catalog, indicates that he also struggled with alcoholism. But Ms. Rogoff said she suspected that he was “a good guy.” Though some have concluded that Mr. Williams was “a wheeler and dealer” based on his debts, Ms. Rogoff disagrees. “I don’t think anybody who could produce works like this, with such an attention to personality, would be a wheeler and dealer,” she said. “I think the creditors he racked up indicate he was nice enough, and good enough, that people wanted to let the debt go. They wanted him to keep going.”

Micah Williams
Art
Freehold NJ
Monmouth County Historical Assn


Japanese Food Companies Seek Growth Abroad

Abstract: TOKYO — Until he moved to Japan three years ago, Arturo Vega, a Spanish-language teacher, had no idea that the Sofyl brand of yogurt that he had bought in his native Mexico was made by Japanese company named Yakult Honsha. While Japanese products in the technology and auto sectors are household names worldwide, the same is not true in the food industry. But that may be about to change. As birth rates and the consumer market shrink at home, food companies in Japan are increasing the pace of their overseas expansions and trying to improve promotion of their brands. Analysts say that increasing sales abroad is crucial for manufacturers. To do so, the companies are combining, undertaking joint ventures, cutting production costs and creating strategies for new markets. “The domestic market is shrinking, deflation is cutting into sales and the sense of crisis is looming stronger and stronger,” said Arihiro Muroya, a senior economist at Norinchukin Research Institute in Tokyo, an organization affiliated with the leading Japanese agricultural lender, Norinchukin Bank. The sector’s strategy has been twofold. First, Japanese companies have been infiltrating the health food and condiment categories overseas with soy-based products like tofu in countries where few domestic companies can compete. Second, Japanese producers capitalize on cute Asian-themed characters like koalas and pandas and apply technology to make amusingly shaped treats to attract snack-happy consumers. The Japanese confectioner Ezaki Glico, for example, makes a chocolate -dipped stick-shaped cookie that is sold in Europe, through a joint venture with Kraft Foods , as the Mikado, and elsewhere as Pocky. Mikio Kusama, head of the global business division at Ezaki Glico, said that Mikado sales brought in 15 billion yen ($159 million) a year and that Mikado sales in Europe were growing about 10 percent year. Yakult Honsha, which says its Sofyl yogurts and Yakult fermented-milk drinks contain bacteria that aid digestion, now draws 25.7 percent of its 293 billion yen in annual revenue from overseas units, thanks to 38,000 “Yakult women” who sell the products door to door in Asia and Latin America. The company says it sells 6.5 billion units of Yakult and Sofyl a year outside Japan. “We want our product to be available virtually everywhere, like Coca-Cola , and make a contribution to the health of people around the world,” said Hiroshi Narita, director for the international department at Yakult Honsha. Ajinomoto, a leading Japanese food company, with about 1.2 trillion yen in annual revenue, has increased its overseas sales ratio to 31.8 percent, from 22.8 percent, in eight years. The company’s flagship product, the flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate, sells widely in Asia, Latin America and Africa, with overseas sales leaping 80 percent in the last decade, the company said. By contrast, overall company sales in Japan show “a totally different story, growing just a few percentage points every year,” the chief executive, Masatoshi Ito, said. “The home market is a mature one, where we focus on rich, high-value-added goods.” In terms of expansion, Japan’s Asian neighbors offer the biggest opportunities. Countries like Thailand already embrace a Japanese food subculture, and in China, growing numbers of upwardly mobile workers are increasingly inclined to purchase prepared foods and snacks. The international survey firm Euromonitor says that the Lotte Group, a company in Tokyo that sells products in more than 70 countries, is the leading Asian-owned confectioner, with a 10.3 percent market share. The company, maker of Koala’s March — chocolate-filled koala-shaped cookies — ranks fourth in terms of sales among global companies in the Asian sector excluding Japan — ahead of Nestlé but behind Mars , Perfetti Van Melle and Cadbury . Despite quality concerns raised by the recent recalls by Toyota Motor, a scandal caused by the sale of expired dairy products and eggs at Fujiya confectionery in 2007 and the Snow Brand food-poisoning fiasco in 2000, Japanese food manufacturers express pride in the country’s technological expertise. Mr. Muroya, of the Norinchukin Institute, said that safety issues raised in the past had not erased the reputation for reliability that Japanese food companies had nurtured with customers in Asia and Latin America. “Just take the packaging technology,” he said. “The quality of printing, like pictures and letters, and the sealing technology are hard to match.” Ichiro Nakamura, spokesman for Lotte in Japan, said that the 400 versions of Koala’s March cookies — some smile and some cry, some hold musical instruments and some play sports — are much more challenging to manufacture than people might think. “We have a special technology that puffs up the koala-shaped cookies so there is hollow space inside where soft chocolate can be injected later,” Mr. Nakamura said. “And unless you have the right technology, the cookies are going to break easily when packed into boxes.” Mr. Kusama, of Ezaki Glico, is also proud of its Mikado-producing capabilities. “Big Western manufacturers go for mass production and low-cost efficiency,” he said. “I suppose the things we make are too costly and time-consuming for them.” In fact, the sales and marketing strengths of Western food companies far outweigh those of the Japanese. Kraft, for example, has gross sales of $50 billion a year, nearly 10 times as much as Lotte, which grossed about $5 billion in sales in its 2008 financial year. (Lotte has a South Korean affiliate with equal revenue, however.) Analysts and management consultants said that the struggle of the Japanese food companies to keep up with their Western rivals in overseas territories sounded familiar: Japanese companies that have higher-quality products are still sometimes hampered by weak marketing and brand strategies. Yoshizumi Nakano, a senior consultant at Funai Consulting in Tokyo, said that multinational consumer product companies like Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola could attract talented personnel to their local sales networks, and that that translated into sizable local market share. “They employ the most talented people locally, pay them well and involve them dynamically in building local strategies,” he said. “For the Japanese firms, on the other hand, their overseas expansion is often just an extension of their home operation,” Mr. Nakano said. The local head is usually Japanese, he added, and is the only connection to the headquarters back home. Other local staff members, he said, often have little direct understanding of the company’s overall strategic direction. Kentaro Mori, managing director in Tokyo for the Boston Consulting Group, said: “Japanese firms may say, ‘We have superior products.’ That alone won’t do. You need sales and personnel who understand the trends of the local market, developers who will take the local taste into account and marketers who can explain the product to the locals on their terms.” “You need the whole package in order to win,” he said.

Japan
Food
Sales
International Trade and World Market
Kraft Foods Inc
Coca-Cola Co
Nestle SA
Mars Inc
Cadbury Plc


Topping the List: Health Care and Pay

Abstract: WEEKS after the Democrats took control of Congress, important issues to small businesses, like the minimum wage and health care policy, top the agenda. Since Congress convened on Jan. 4, bills have been introduced to address these matters, including one to require small businesses to offer sick leave to employees; another to simplify tax filing; and one requiring that interest be paid on small-business bank accounts. Questions have also arisen about the financing and future of the Small Business Administration , the federal agency set up to help the nearly 18 million small businesses nationwide. On the legislative front, proposals to lift the federal minimum wage quickly bogged down over a disagreement on how, or if, the added cost to businesses would be offset. Small-business lobbyists opposed raising the minimum hourly wage to $7.25 from $5.15 over two years, saying that many small businesses could not afford it. Wrangling continues over whether to link the minimum-wage increase to tax offsets for small businesses, like a credit for small companies that hire disadvantaged workers, including wounded veterans or people living at the poverty level. The House first voted to increase the minimum wage without tax offsets, but the Senate adopted a version that included an $8.3 billion package of tax relief. House Democrats then came up with their own proposals, and the full House approved a $1.3 billion package last week. The final bill awaits House-Senate negotiation. On the health care issue, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and the new chairman of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, introduced legislation to help small businesses lower their costs for providing health care. Opposition from small businesses helped sink efforts by the Clinton administration to broaden health care coverage a decade ago. But the issue persists, and health care costs are a top concern of small businesses. In his State of the Union address last month, President Bush proposed capping the tax exemption for employer-provided insurance, and allowing individuals to take a tax deduction for their insurance cost. It is similar to some proposals floated by lawmakers, but Todd McCracken, president of the National Small Business Association, said that broader measures were needed. “We are actively courting change,” Mr. McCracken said. “Piecemeal solutions are not going to work. We need to have universal coverage and subsidize people who are least able to afford it.” Mr. Kerry’s bill, the Small Business Health Care Tax Credit Act of 2007, is considered an interim step. It would give a refundable tax credit to companies that have fewer than 50 employees and that pay at least half of their workers’ health care insurance premiums. The provision would cover employees earning up to $50,000 a year. It is not clear what the chances are for the bill, but it is most likely to be among many proposals tackling the problem. Also up for consideration is expansion of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which would require businesses with 15 or more employees to provide workers with seven paid sick days. The Healthy Families Act, introduced by the Massachusetts Democrat Edward M. Kennedy in the Senate and Rosa DeLauro, Democrat from Connecticut, in the House, would also cover certain part-time workers. But small-business lobbyists say that temporary and part-time workers less invested in their jobs may take advantage of sick leave. All these issues may not be resolved soon, but at least they are on the agenda.

Small Business
Minimum Wage
Small Business Administration
Senate
Health Insurance and Managed Care
House of Representatives


BMW and Volkswagen Team Up to Expand Network of High-Speed Charging Stations

Abstract: WASHINGTON — As sales of electric vehicles languish, automakers are starting to address one of the biggest obstacles to their wider acceptance: the lack of charging stations. On Thursday, BMW and Volkswagen announced a plan to install 100 high-speed charging stations on busy corridors this year on the East and West Coasts, like Interstate 95 between here and Boston. The stations will be part of a fast-growing network run by ChargePoint, the nation’s largest, and will be compatible with nearly all electric vehicles on the road. BMW and VW are taking a cue from Tesla Motors, which has its own network of high-speed chargers in the Northeast corridor and in California, but its proprietary connectors work only with Tesla’s cars. Some analysts, though, warned that even 100 new stations would barely begin to provide the infrastructure needed to give electric vehicles broad acceptance. “There are more than 100 gas stations just in Santa Monica,” said Eric Lyman, a senior analyst at TrueCar. “It’s going to be extremely difficult to reach the level of convenience of gasoline, which is a system that’s developed over a century to put stations on nearly every commercial corner.” Still, automakers, facing strict federal mandates to increase fuel efficiency and reduce carbon emissions, have little choice but to press ahead. By 2025, their corporate average fuel economy must be at least 54.5 miles a gallon, well above the current average of 25 miles a gallon. Only about 120,000 vehicles that require a plug-in electric charge were sold in the United States last year, an increase of 20 percent over 2013 but a tiny fraction of the 16.5 million vehicles sold over all. Analysts, and automakers themselves, say the push to install high-speed charging stations is an acknowledgment of a miscalculation made when mass-market electric-powered vehicles were introduced five years ago. Consumers, carmakers figured, would be content with charging their cars at home, at the office and perhaps the local movie theater and would embrace a new class of electrified vehicles. After all, that would be enough for most Americans’ commute, they assumed. But they soon discovered that consumers did not want their cars limited to commuting or short trips — a dynamic known as range anxiety. “What we learned is people want to use their cars beyond a single charge range; they want to take longer trips, to drive like they were always used to driving,” said Robert Healey, head of electric vehicle infrastructure at BMW of North America. “Especially important is they want one car that can be their primary vehicle.” That means easy access to fast, public charging stations that make a road trip in an electric car no different from one in a gas-powered sport utility vehicle. Image Charging in Salt Lake City. Carmakers, trying to make electric cars more appealing to shoppers, are starting to invest in large networks of charging stations. Credit George Frey/Reuters “Drivers want to be on the road, with no fuss, and know that they can stop somewhere for a quick fill-up when they need one,” Mr. Healey said. “That instinct hasn’t changed.” Since high-speed chargers are rare, automakers are pushing ahead with new efforts to fill the gap, hoping that easing range anxiety will be a breakthrough for electric cars’ viability. Pasquale Romano, chief executive of ChargePoint, said for office buildings and “around town” charging, a few hours of being plugged in would be fine. But he said for longer trips, high-speed charging stations were a must. “This is the last piece of the puzzle to let people make an electric car be their primary vehicle,” Mr. Romano said. “Otherwise, you’re telling drivers they can’t travel, and that just doesn’t work.” ChargePoint has been aggressively expanding its network and now has more than 20,000 stations around the United States. Only about 120 of those, though, are high-speed versions that charge a car in about 20 minutes. The rest can take several hours. Mr. Lyman, the analyst, said that even though most drivers did not regularly take longer trips, such limitations still gave them pause. “It’s the idea of ‘I can’t do it’ that people fear,” he said. “It’s like third-row seats in S.U.V.s. Most people don’t ever use them, but they like having them there in case they need them.” The partnership among BMW, Volkswagen and ChargePoint aims to place the new high-speed chargers less than 50 miles apart along the Northeast corridor’s Interstate 95 between here and Boston, and will expand the locations from there, including installing stations in larger cities in the region. BMW and Volkswagen are paying to build the stations and will decide on pricing for the electricity. ChargePoint’s business is based on a subscription model; it provides a payment system and customer network for stations that are operated by others. (The company also sells charging equipment.) John O’Dell of the automotive website Edmunds.com said the announcement was “great, but it’s just a start.” “For both battery electric and fuel cell electric vehicles, the refueling structure is critical,” he said. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles received a lift on Thursday as well, as Toyota announced it was joining with the supplier Air Liquide to build 12 hydrogen fuel stations in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

BMW
Volkswagen
Electric Cars and Hybrids
Energy industry


Fines Imposed in LCD Price Fixing

Abstract: BRUSSELS — The European Commission imposed fines Wednesday on five South Korean and Taiwanese companies for fixing the prices of liquid-crystal display panels in popular devices like flat-screen televisions, computers and notebook devices. The fines, totaling 649 million euros ($859.6 million), were related to violations dating to 2001, when the companies started meeting to fix prices of LCD screens. Although most of the illegal activity took place in Taiwan, the Brussels regulator said European action was necessary because the activities of the companies raised prices on goods sold to European consumers. The value of the goods was more than 7 billion euros, the commission said. “Foreign companies, like European ones, have an obligation to respect competition rules when they do business in Europe,” the European competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, told a news conference. “The fact that the cartel meetings took place outside the E.U. is no excuse.” Chimei Innolux, a Taiwanese company, was ordered to pay almost $400 million, the largest fine. The other Taiwanese companies ordered to pay fines were AU Optronics, Chunghwa Picture Tubes and HannStar Display. Samsung of South Korea, the largest maker of LCD screens in the world, was not fined because it had reported the cartel to the authorities. A second South Korean company, LG Display, was fined $286 million, the second-largest amount. Mr. Almunia said the six manufacturers met about 60 times from 2001 to 2006 to agree on prices — including price ranges and minimum prices — and to exchange information on future production planning, capacity utilization and trading conditions. The cartel fixed the prices of LCD panels that were sold either alone or in televisions, computers and notebook devices. The commission, the executive agency of the European Union , has imposed fines totaling more than $4 billion this year in cartel cases, the second-highest year on record. The record is 2007, when the commission imposed fines totaling nearly $4.4 billion. Mr. Almunia also announced Wednesday that he had dropped antitrust charges against Visa Europe, a card payments company, after accepting its pledge to cut fees passed on to retailers for cross-border transactions. Visa Europe said it was still in talks on settling a separate inquiry into fees for credit card and deferred debit transactions.

Chunghwa Picture Tubes
HannStar Display
European Union
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry
Antitrust Laws and Competition Issues
LG DISPLAY Company Ltd
AU Optronics Corp


Restaurant Chains Try to Woo a Younger Generation

Abstract: From sun-dried tomato wraps to agave-sweetened smoothies, restaurant chains are working to court an exceptionally particular generation — the millennials. For reasons as varied as the economic downturn and a heightened interest in local foods, a significant shift in eating patterns is under way among the millennials, those 18 to 30. Oddly, at least by historic trends, they are eating out less than the baby boomers did at that age. Many in the restaurant business worry that it may be impossible to reverse the decline, which affects 50 million to 60 million young people. The statistics alone are stark. Restaurant visits among millennials have fallen 16 percent over the last four years, according to research by the NPD Group, a consumer marketing firm, and have failed to pick up as the economy has improved. “The outlook for the restaurant industry over the next 10 years is dismal,” said Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant industry analyst at NPD. Over all, sales are expected to grow less than 4 percent in the next decade, a troublesome projection for not only burger chains like McDonald’s but for the newer “fast-casual” dining businesses like Chipotle. McDonald’s stunned investors last month when it announced that its sales in stores open at least a year had fallen 1.2 percent after rising every quarter for almost the last decade. And so far, restaurant chains have failed to benefit from the steady improvement in the overall economy. “The informal eating out industry is either flat or declining in many markets around the world,” the chief executive of McDonald’s, Don Thompson, told investors last month. It is true that restaurant chains like Chipotle, which has a devotion to explaining the origins of its ingredients that brings to mind the “Portlandia” sketch about a chicken dinner, and Subway, where customers plan their own sandwiches and watch them being assembled, are doing better among the millennials than traditional sit-down restaurants and fast-food chains. But between the proliferation of artisanal food trucks and items like cupcakes made of Valrhona and Callebaut chocolates and topped with a fondant daisy for $2.75 at Georgetown Cupcake, or Fresh Direct’s offering of “heritage” pork from the Flying Pigs Farm in upstate New York, millennials tend to spend their dining dollars sparingly and in a more calculated way. “This was the group hardest hit by the economic crisis, and there’s a debate right now about whether their purchasing behavior has changed fundamentally as a result,” said Tony Pace, chief marketing officer for Subway. “I think, personally, that there appears to be a structural change. There isn’t a single point — ta-da! — that points to it, but there are a lot of little things that do.” Vera Chang, 26, who lives in Vermont, is one of those consumers who pays attention to the ingredients on the menu and the origins of the food they favor. She says she rarely eats at chain restaurants, finding places instead through Edible Communities, which gives advice on restaurants, chefs and food, or the local newspaper, which tells her about the chef and the provenance of the foods served. “I like to know the story about the places I eat,” Ms. Chang said. “I think it’s key to feed one’s heart in addition to one’s stomach when going out.” She said it was harder for chain restaurants to tell stories about the people behind the food they served and about themselves. David Palmer, who follows the restaurant industry for UBS, underscored Ms. Chang’s points, noting how particular the younger clientele could be, especially during tough economic times. “The austere crowd has cut back, and pretty significantly,” Mr. Palmer said. “It’s partly that they’re economically challenged by the job market and student loans, but they also want authenticity in ingredients and the ability to customize meals in restaurants.” According to NPD, it is not that millennials have abandoned fast food altogether: Hamburger chains like McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King get nearly 28 percent of the millennials’ fast-service patronage. They just tend to eat there less often, or they have switched to other burger places like Shake Shack, Mooyah, In-N-Out Burger and Smashburger. Pulin Modi, 32, said he preferred newer concepts like Protein Bar, a “quick service” restaurant with 12 locations in the Chicago area and Washington, where he works. He said newer chains tended to offer more choices for vegans like himself. Image A new commercial for the Subway restaurants promotes an avocado offering, one way the chain tries to appeal to members of the millennial generation. “They’re not all vegetarian or vegan,” Mr. Modi said of Protein Bar, “but they have so many options that will work for vegetarians and vegans, like quinoa, tofu and smoothies made with almond milk or soy.” He also frequents the new juice bar in a Walgreens near his office. And he has been eating more at home. “When you’re 18 years old, it may not sink in how much the cost adds up when you eat out compared to when you bring your own lunch or have a friend over for dinner,” he said. “I’ve learned how to eat healthier and within a certain budget.” Of course, cyclical challenges like bad weather, higher gasoline prices and the end of the federal payroll tax cut have also hurt restaurant sales. Additionally, comparisons to last year’s sales are tough because the weather was warmer a year ago, and people were eating out more. “This winter was longer, and I think I went out less because of that,” said Adriana Villasenor, 32, of New York. Even Chipotle eked out a mere 1 percent sales gain in the first quarter this year. The chief financial officer, John R. Hartung, told analysts that the low level of sales growth threatened to erode the company’s traditional profit margins. Several companies told analysts they would effectively buy customers with promotions and other price strategies to try to keep traffic through their stores stable, which would also eat into profit margins. Olive Garden, for example, is now promoting a three-course Italian dinner for $12.95, a special price. “All of them are behind last year,” said Malcolm M. Knapp, an adviser to the restaurant business who compiles data used by Wall Street and others to gauge sales. “It all came to a head in February, when consumers were feeling shock, anger and betrayal over payroll taxes and the weather wasn’t all that good, either.” He said comparable store sales fell 5.2 percent that month after slumping 0.6 percent in January. Sales picked up in March but not enough to offset the declines in the previous months. In an internal memo obtained by Advertising Age , McDonald’s said it was not in the top 10 restaurants among 18- to 32-year-olds, and it calculated that without its new Premium McWraps, it could lose 22 percent of those customers to Subway. To appeal to the millennials’ tastes for exotic flavors, McDonald’s also features blueberry pomegranate smoothies and Fish McBites, a limited offer that met a desire for healthier choices. Subway, which is privately held, reported sales in the United States of $12.1 billion last year, compared with $11.4 billion in 2011. Mr. Pace of Subway pointed to some of the strategies his company has used to appeal to millennials, like offering an avocado add-on when the fruit is in season, or its Smokehouse BBQ Chicken sub, a limited offering that weighs in at just 380 calories. “People have talked about health and food for a long time, but I think millennials are acting on that information in different ways,” Mr. Pace said. “They want healthy food, but it also has to be interesting food that tastes good.” And Darden, which operates sit-down restaurant chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster, saw its comparable-store sales drop 4.6 percent in the first quarter, weaker than the company had expected. The company is experimenting with things like Seaside Express, a fast-serve lunch option from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in two of its Red Lobster restaurants in Orlando. Customers place orders at a counter or the bar and fill their own plastic cups, then take a seat to wait for their orders. They can choose from among new, less expensive menu items like shrimp salad and lobster grilled cheese sandwiches, which range from $6.99 to $8.99. Ms. Riggs from NPD said the biggest opportunity for restaurants now is among the baby boomer generation, which unlike aging generations before it, is eating out more as it gets older. “The growth of the morning meal at restaurants is almost entirely supported by boomers,” she said. “They’re holding the industry even at this point.” To cover that base, McDonald’s has a new egg white McMuffin.

Restaurant
Aging
Fast food
Subway Restaurants
McDonald's
Youth
advertising,marketing


Allyson Felix Wins 200 Meters; U.S. Relay Team Disqualified

Abstract: BERLIN — The first rainy night at these world track and field championships was the night the United States struck back in its no-longer one-sided sprint rivalry with Jamaica, as Allyson Felix won the women’s 200 meters and the Olympic champion Veronica Campbell-Brown did not. But this soggy Friday was also the night the United States fell back into old, bad habits in the relay. The American men’s 4x100 team added to its litany of major-championship gaffes by being disqualified from the heats after a protest. The protest came from Britain even though its team had already advanced to the final from the same heat. So much for what the Britons like to call “the special relationship” with the United States. But a review of the footage clearly showed that Darvis Patton, the anchor of the American team, broke the rules by touching the baton for the first time before it had crossed into the passing zone as it was being handed to him by the third-leg runner, Shawn Crawford. The race referee did not notice the transgression and the Americans went on to win and look eagerly ahead to Saturday’s final and a rematch with Usain Bolt and the Jamaicans. But the Americans will not take part in that race. “To be disqualified is something that is hard for all of us to accept, but at this point we can only use it as inspiration for our remaining three relays, and as a lesson for future championships,” Benita Fitzgerald Mosely, the chief of sports performance for USA Track and Field, said in a statement. “It does a disservice to the champions we crowned tonight, and to all our medalists here, to allow this to overshadow what has been a strong overall team performance in Berlin.” It would also be a disservice to history to fail to mention that the United States men’s 4x100 team has now failed to reach the final because of passing errors in the 1988 Olympics, last year’s Olympics in Beijing and four world championships: 1995, 1997, 2005 and now 2009. In Beijing, Patton was also involved in the team’s elimination when he and Tyson Gay failed to connect on the final pass during the preliminaries, with Gay dropping the baton. Improving on that performance here was a priority, and the four-man team that was disqualified was the same four-man team that ran the relay in 37.85 seconds without Gay in a preparatory meet in Cottbus, Germany, before the championships. “Are we ready to win? I think we are,” the head men’s team coach, Harvey Glance, said last week. Other Americans were ready to win on Friday, including Felix and LaShawn Merritt, who won the men’s 400 by maintaining his edge over his fellow American Jeremy Wariner. Friday’s other gold medalists were Dani Samuels of Australia, who threw 65.44 meters (214 feet 8.37 inches) to win the women’s discus, and Yaroslav Rybakov of Russia, who won the men’s high jump on a countback after clearing 2.32 meters (7 feet 7.33 inches) on his first attempt. But with two days of competition remaining in Berlin, the United States now leads the gold medal standings with six to Jamaica’s five, although Bolt and his teammates are certainly heavy favorites to get No. 6 Saturday. Bolt took the night off on Friday, which happened to be his 23rd birthday. He signed autographs in the Olympic Stadium shortly before a torrential downpour that delayed competition for more than an hour. Bolt also received his gold medal for the 200 meters he won on Thursday in a world-record time of 19.19 seconds. When Bolt was up on the podium, the crowd of 42,000 in Olympic stadium serenaded him with an a cappella rendition of “Happy Birthday.” “He’s awesome, a freak of nature and very great for our sport,” said Debbie Ferguson-McEnzie, the 33-year-old from the Bahamas who took the bronze medal in the women’s 200 behind Felix and Campbell-Brown. Campbell-Brown trumped Felix at last year’s Olympics, winning the gold medal in the 200. But Felix has now won the last three world championships and is still just 23. She won Friday on the strength of her smooth, strong final 100 meters, where she drew away from the more powerfully built Campbell-Brown to finish in 22.02 seconds. Campbell-Brown, who said she missed five weeks of training because of injuries this season, crossed the finish line in 22.35 seconds. At the postrace news conference, Felix turned to Campbell-Brown and told her she would gladly trade her three world titles for her Olympic gold. “Of course I’m serious,” Felix said. “Beijing was disappointing. It was disappointing not to reach my goals, but I’m just blessed. I’m grateful for those experiences. I feel like I’ve learned a lot. This is special. It begins the healing process.” And what will end it? “London,” she said referring to the site of the next Summer Olympics in 2012. Merritt, a 23-year-old who trains in Norfolk, Va. and now rules the men’s 400, has no bitter Olympic memories. He won the gold medal last year on his first attempt, dethroning Wariner, who also won the 2005 and 2007 world championships. But even Wariner’s decision to resume working with his former coach Clyde Hart this May did not change the equation in Berlin. Wariner went out faster, but Merritt was stronger in the final straightaway, winning in 44.06 seconds, the year’s fastest time. “I think we both felt he was a little further along,” Hart said. But Wariner can still win a gold medal here by joining forces with Merritt in the 4x400 relay on Sunday. It is a relay that has proved much less problematic for American men than the 4x100. “We’ll just make it up in the 4x4,” Merritt said.

Track and Field
Bolt Usain
Awards Decorations and Honors


George Blake, British Double Agent, Turns 90 in Moscow

Abstract: MOSCOW — The 90th birthday of a double agent from the height of the cold war has been made the occasion for extensive celebration in Russia , with a documentary film, a rare newspaper interview stressing his happy retirement in Russia and a personal birthday greeting on Sunday from President Vladimir V. Putin. The spy, George Blake, betrayed British intelligence starting in the 1950s; he was found out in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison. But he escaped five years later using a ladder of rope and knitting needles, made his way to the Soviet Union and has been living out his last years serenely in a cottage outside Moscow. His story contrasts sharply with those of other Russian moles in British intelligence from around the same time, most notably Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. Mr. Philby was said to suffer from depression and alcoholism afterward, which some said stemmed from disappointment and disillusionment with the Communist state he found there. He died in 1988. Mr. Blake, on the other hand, has lived well and apparently happily on his Russian pension, and over the years has rebuilt his contacts with his children in England, who traveled to Moscow for Sunday’s festivities. “I am a happy person, a very lucky person, exceptionally lucky,” Mr. Blake told an interviewer from Rossisskaya Gazeta, the official government newspaper. Though condemned as a traitor in Britain, where he is believed to have caused the deaths of scores of British agents, he made it clear that he is not agonizing over the past. “I do not believe in life after death,” he said. “In my childhood, I wanted to become a priest, but that passed. As soon as our brain stops receiving blood, we go, and after that there will be nothing. No punishment for the bad things you did, nor rewards for the utterly wonderful.” It seems unlikely that Mr. Blake should end his days so comfortably. A convinced Communist dating to a period when he was a prisoner of North Korean forces, he was responsible for a crushing defeat for American espionage, the discovery of a costly secret tunnel the Americans had dug into East Berlin to let the Central Intelligence Agency tap buried Soviet telephone cables. Using information supplied by Mr. Blake, the K.G.B. uncovered and thwarted the tunnel after 11 months and 11 days of operation, according to research published in the book “Battleground Berlin.” Mr. Blake was exposed by a Polish double agent a few years later. After his escape from the Wormwood Scrubs prison in London, he was smuggled to Berlin in a wooden box in the back of a van. In the interview published last week, he said he then presented himself to border guards in East Berlin, asked to speak to a Soviet officer, and when told to wait, immediately fell into a deep sleep. “These have been the happiest years of my life, and the most peaceful,” he said of his life in Moscow. He described, quite fondly, how he and the other British defectors stuck together in their new lives in Russia. His mother, he said, had taken a liking to Mr. Philby because “Mum liked to drink martinis in the evening, and so did Kim.” He recalled his naïve intention, after the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service awarded him with a Volga car, to climb into it and drive across the country. “At that time,” he said ruefully, “I knew very little about Russian roads.” Mr. Blake, known in Russia as Giorgi Ivanovich Bekhter, rarely appears in public. When a reporter from The Daily Telegraph tracked him down near his home recently, he explained he could not give an interview without permission from the Foreign Intelligence Service. Mr. Putin, himself a former intelligence officer, hailed Mr. Blake’s service to the Soviet Union and told him that he had a place in the “constellation of strong and courageous men.” “You and your colleagues made an enormous contribution to the preservation of peace, to security, and to strategic parity,” he wrote in a telegram made public on Sunday. “This is not visible to the eyes of outsiders, but very important work deserves the very highest acknowledgment and respect.”

Russia
Blake George
Espionage and Intelligence Services
Cold War Era
Prison Escapes


P.S.G. Parade Ends in Riot

Abstract: Paris Saint-Germain’s celebrations at ending its 19-year wait for the French league title were cut short after supporters clashed with the riot police. Fans at Trocadero plaza, near the Eiffel Tower were frustrated when the players were led away by security officials after only a few minutes. Small groups of riot police started to move forward, and the mood turned increasingly ugly. The fans threw stones and other objects at the police, who fired tear gas canisters in response. ¶ In front of tens of thousands of flag-waving and chanting fans, Manchester United players and the retiring manager, Alex Ferguson, paraded the Premier League trophy in Manchester.

Parade
Soccer
Paris St-Germain FC Soccer Team
Paris France


Circuits | Who’d Win a Match Between Donkey Kong and Princess Peach? Not Me

Abstract: I was repeatedly beaten up by a 16-year-old girl. It was more than a beating, really. It was a demolishing, or perhaps a soul-crushing devastation. The girl was my friend Suzanne’s daughter Zoe, who had come over to school me in the fighting game Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Brawl is a game that answers the crucial question: Who would win in a fight between Donkey Kong and Princess Peach? The game allows players to choose from a wide selection of Nintendo characters and fight it out, battling one another for the most part by pressing a few buttons on the controller. Exactly what mode of attack depends on the character. Pikachu from the Pokémon games can bring down a bolt of lighting, Link from the Zelda games can fire arrows and the pink blob Kirby can suck enemies inside him to acquire their powers. I knew Zoe was going to be tough to beat. I had played the original Super Smash Bros. game for the Nintendo 64 with her when she was 7 or 8. I found the game perplexing, with little Nintendo characters jumping and punching and falling off platforms, and I didn’t really get the hang of the game in the 20 minutes I played it. Zoe still has her N64 (which she declares the ultimate game console) and has sunk hundreds of hours into Super Smash Bros., so I prepared by playing through Brawl’s single-player mode, titled the Subspace Emissary, which mixes fighting with leaping from platform to platform. It is interspersed with wordless animations of Nintendo bad guys kidnapping Nintendo good guys. Even though the Smash Bros. games gained popularity as something to play with friends (or against opponents online), the single-player part is quite entertaining. There is also a “classic” mode, letting you simply fight a succession of increasingly tough opponents. In arena fights, the game keeps track of how much damage each contestant has taken; the more you’ve been hit, the easier it is to throw you out of the arena. While you can sometimes make it back into battle, if you are thrown far enough you lose a point. Each character has a few distinct fighting moves; they can also use weapons that periodically fall into the arena. Arenas are wonderfully bizarre; most are a series of platforms floating in space. One periodically sinks into the sea, where you can be eaten by a fish. Another changes as images drawn on the screen become part of the platform. I was especially taken by an arena based on the Wario Ware games, where combatants periodically take breaks from battle to dodge objects or chisel statues. Zoe started out with a psychological advantage. The last time I saw her she was still ordering from the children’s menu, and seeing her a foot taller and in possession of a driver’s license made me feel a thousand years old. She also had an eye-hand coordination advantage: in a series of two-minute bouts, she handily won the first five. “Do you have any suggestions?” I asked. Zoe shrugged. “Hit buttons randomly in the right direction,” she suggested. “That’s what I’m doing now!” She shrugged and punched me off a platform. I somehow managed to win one fight, but that was before Zoe realized she hadn’t been using the controller’s trigger button, which opened up a whole new set of attacks. To offer some challenge, we added two Wii-controlled combatants. She soon had to increase their strength setting from “weak” to “hardy,” and then again to “burly.” I suggested that she could simply change her handicap setting to give me a chance, but that didn’t appeal to her. Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a tremendous amount of frenetic fun, but I would have preferred a less skilled opponent. Perhaps I simply didn’t train hard enough; I had divided my time between Brawl and the action/role playing game Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates for the Nintendo DS, which has as much fighting but offers it with more context. Ring of Fates begins pleasantly, as two children, Yuri and Chelinka, learn about their magic powers from their father before going off to tussle with a few scrawny monsters. But when they visit the nearest town, things seem off, as ringing bells turn the population oddly docile and the siblings’ father seems to forget who they are. Soon the pair’s bucolic childhood gives way to a desperate fight against evil beings seeking Chelinka’s powerful magic. The story is engaging, but the game’s primary focus is on bashing an unending supply of monsters. For the most part, this involves approaching monsters and pressing the attack button. Yuri and Chelinka are later joined by companions who can launch ranged attacks, and the player can quickly switch from one combatant to another. The player can also use objects called magacites, which can set a monster on fire or revive a fallen comrade. Unfortunately the process is quite awkward; you have to select a magacite then hold down a key while using the direction pad to move the target reticule and hope a monster doesn’t hit you and interrupt your attack. Fates is a basic dungeon crawler: you wander through a series of passages fighting monsters and trying to find your way to a goal by exploring every pathway. Dungeon crawlers often seem designed for people who enjoy getting lost, but I find wandering in circles frustrating. On the plus side, unlike role- playing games where you have to fight another monster every 15 seconds, the game will usually let you run past monsters if you are in the mood to just get where you’re going. Outside of wandering and fighting, Fates is a rather pared-down experience. The system to buy or create new weapons isn’t that interesting and the puzzle-like game elements are generally too simple to actually be referred to as puzzles. Still, the game’s intriguing story and straightforward combat make for a pleasant if somewhat forgettable experience. The game also has a multiplayer component, but I didn’t have a DS for Zoe so we could not try it out. That was fine with me: I can only take so much abuse from a girl who just learned to drive.

Computer and Video Games
Nintendo Company Limited
Computers and the Internet


Dozens Die as Tsunami Hits Samoa Islands

Abstract: SYDNEY, Australia — A powerful tsunami generated by an undersea earthquake killed more than two dozen people and wiped out several villages in the tropical islands of American Samoa and Samoa early on Tuesday there, according to officials and local residents who were working to assess the damage. The earthquake struck around dawn, as many residents were preparing for work and getting their children ready for school. Officials said they expected heavy damage in the southern parts of Samoa and American Samoa , a United States territory with about 60,000 residents. Damaged telephone lines on both islands hampered efforts to count the casualties and assess the destruction from the earthquake, with a magnitude of 8.0. It struck below the ocean about 120 miles southwest of American Samoa and 125 miles south of Samoa, and it was centered only 11 miles below the seabed, according to the United States Geological Survey. At least 14 people were killed in American Samoa, the territory’s governor, Togiola T. A. Tulafono, said at a news conference in Hawaii. The toll could rise as emergency workers gain access to damaged areas, he and other officials said. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at Ewa Beach, Hawaii, raised a regionwide alert that extended from American Samoa to New Zealand, though minimal damage was reported elsewhere. Tsunami awareness is relatively high in this earthquake-prone part of the world, particularly after the devastating earthquake and tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004 , that killed 227,898 people around the Indian Ocean, according to the United States Geological Survey. Even so, Filipo Ilaoa, deputy director of the American Samoan office in Honolulu, said that the tsunami struck the coast of American Samoa in “a matter of minutes” after the quake, and that many residents would not have had much time to run for higher ground. “American Samoa is a small island, and most of the residents are around the coastline,” he said. “There was no warning or anything at all. By the time the alert was out of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, it had already hit.” Both islands are just east of the international date line , which is why it was early Tuesday morning when the quake occurred, but it was already early Wednesday in Japan, China and Australia. On Samoa, there were reports of at least a dozen casualties. Russell Hunter, the managing editor of The Samoa Observer newspaper in Vaitele, outside the capital, Apia, said his reporters had received word that at least 17 people on the island had been killed. Samoa’s police office did not respond to telephone calls, and phone lines on much of the island were cut or jammed. “There is extensive damage in the southeast part of the island,” Mr. Hunter said. “It seems to be mostly in the rural villages,” which he said were mostly clustered along the coast and whose houses were generally made of light materials, including wood. Many residents told local reporters of flattened houses and cars that were swept into neighboring towns. Graeme Ansell, a New Zealand tourist who was at Faofao Beach Fales on the southeast coast of Upolu Island, told Radio New Zealand that the village had been decimated. He said he and others had clambered up a nearby hill to safety.


Seeking Infield and Bullpen Help, the Yankees Turn to Two Veterans

Abstract: The Yankees added to their infield and bullpen depth on Tuesday, agreeing to contracts with second baseman Brian Roberts and the left-hander Matt Thornton. Roberts will get a $2 million guarantee for one year, and Thornton will make $7 million over two years. The Roberts contract was confirmed by a baseball official who was not authorized to speak publicly because the deal is pending a physical exam. Thornton’s agent, Adam Hubble, confirmed his client’s contract agreement and said Thornton would have a physical in the next week. Roberts, 36, gives the Yankees another option at second base after the free-agent departure of Robinson Cano, who left for a 10-year, $240 million contract with the Seattle Mariners. Thornton, 37, replaces Boone Logan, who signed a three-year, $16.5 million deal with the Colorado Rockies. Roberts, a switch-hitter who made the final out at the old Yankee Stadium, batted .249 with 8 homers last season, playing 77 games, his highest total since 2009. He has missed significant time since then because of concussions and abdominal, groin, hip and knee injuries. This spring, before the last of his 13 seasons with the Baltimore Orioles, Roberts described his ordeal with concussions. He said he had migraines for months after his second one, in the summer of 2011, and spent many days with the lights off, covered under blankets on his couch, in a near-constant fog. “You can’t sleep and you wake up and you’re dizzy half the day and you have headaches all day long,” Roberts said. “There’s times when it just feels like there’s not a whole lot to live for, and you just can’t see the end coming. That was the scariest part: Is this ever going to end?” Roberts said he finally started feeling like himself again in November 2012, and he started at second base on opening day. But in the third game of the season, Roberts ruptured a tendon behind his right knee and did not play again until June 30. If healthy, Roberts can team with Kelly Johnson and perhaps Brendan Ryan at second base. Ryan, primarily a shortstop, could also play third, with Eduardo Nunez and Johnson, to fill in for Alex Rodriguez if an arbitrator upholds some or all of Rodriguez’s 211-game drug suspension. In signing Johnson, Ryan (a late-season trade acquisition) and Roberts this winter, the Yankees are collecting low-cost, established infielders to cover their losses at second and possibly third. They hope to avoid the roster scrambling they were forced to do last season, when injuries devastated the offense. Thornton is the only pitcher in the majors to work at least 60 games in each of the last eight seasons, all with the Chicago White Sox until a trade to the Boston Red Sox last July. Thornton, who made the All-Star team in 2010, allowed a .235 average to left-handed hitters last season, compared to .333 against right-handers. Lefties have hit .233 off him in his career, and righties .241. Thornton missed most of August with a strained oblique muscle, and had a 3.52 earned run average in 20 games for the Red Sox, allowing 22 hits in 151/3 innings. He was not included on the postseason roster. “Matt has a history of being both durable and consistent in his performance,” Hubble said. “It was a rough small sample in Boston, but he had an oblique strain. That throws everything off for a pitcher, and he probably came back earlier just because of the situation. That really didn’t reflect who he is.” The Yankees, whose best left-handed option before Tuesday was probably the untested Cesar Cabral, are betting $7 million on Thornton’s track record. He joins a bullpen with David Robertson, Shawn Kelley, Preston Claiborne and at least two open spots.


Sales Decline, but Cost-Cutting Helps the Gap

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The apparel retailer Gap Inc. said on Thursday that despite a decline in sales, its second-quarter profit rose 51 percent, helped by cost-cutting and tight control on inventory. Profit for the three months ended Aug. 2 rose to $229 million, or 32 cents a share, from $152 million, or 19 cents a share, a year earlier. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had predicted a profit of 30 cents a share, and the company had forecast earnings of 30 or 31 cents a share. Revenue fell 5 percent, to $3.5 billion, from $3.69 billion last year. Analysts had expected revenue of $3.52 billion. Sales in stores open at least one year, a main measure of industry performance known as same-store sales, fell 10 percent. In North America, same-store sales fell 6 percent at both Gap and Banana Republic and fell 16 percent at Old Navy. International same-store sales also fell 6 percent. Gap also reaffirmed earnings guidance of $1.30 to $1.35 a share; analysts expect a profit of $1.34 a share. The company said it would open 15 fewer stores, mainly Banana Republic, than previously expected during the year. It said it now expected to open 100 stores. Earlier on Thursday, Gap named John T. Wyatt, a 30-year retail veteran, as president of its Old Navy chain. Mr. Wyatt, 53, had served as acting president of Old Navy since February, when Dawn Robertson stepped down after struggling for 16 months to turn the division around.

Retail Stores and Trade
Gap Inc
Company Reports


China’s Exports Rise 2.9% in November, Less Than Expected

Abstract: HONG KONG — Exports from China edged up 2.9 percent in November, far less than analysts had expected, highlighting the crucial role that homegrown stimulus and reforms will play in the renewal of China’s acceleration while the trajectory of global demand remains highly uncertain. After slowing sharply this year, the Chinese economy began to bottom out in September, but then perked up again. Data released Sunday reinforced the view that China would most likely avoid a sudden, sharp slowdown — a so-called hard landing — at least for now. Industrial production grew 10.1 percent and retail sales grew 14.9 percent in November from a year earlier. Both figures were higher than those recorded in October, showing that the modest rebound of the last few months had continued to gain traction. The modest recent acceleration has been widely attributed to a combination of stronger demand for exports and the effect of intensified stimulus efforts from Beijing in recent months. Trade data released by the Customs Department on Monday, however, served as a reminder that the trade element of the recovery remained highly vulnerable to the persistent economic turmoil that is gripping many parts of the developed world. The 2.9 percent year-over-year expansion in exports fell far short of the average of 9 percent that economists surveyed by Reuters had expected. It also represented a sharp slowdown from 11.6 percent in October and 9.9 percent in September. Imports were flat from a year earlier. Together, the data from Sunday and Monday painted a picture of a recovery that is solidifying, but that nonetheless faces considerable challenges. With exports likely to grow an anemic 5 percent next year, China’s recovery “will be driven by domestic activity,” Zhiwei Zhang, China economist at Nomura, said in a call with news media on Monday. The prospect of tax increases and spending cuts in the United States, and the continuing debt crisis in Europe , have long been flagged by economists as significant risk factors for recovery in countries like China, which derive a large part of their growth from selling goods to the United States and Europe. Weak demand from the world’s largest developed economies — the United States, Europe and Japan — was the main reason for the weakness in Chinese exports in November. Shipments to the United States slipped 2.6 percent and those to Japan by 3.8 percent, while exports to the European Union plummeted 18 percent. “Without the strengthening of the two key Western markets, the sustainability of the exports sector’s rebound is questionable,” Xianfang Ren, a China economist at IHS Global Insight in Beijing, said in a research note. “The extremely weak exports data have thrown in one more piece of evidence about the fragility of the recovery.”

China
Production
Beijing (China)
International Trade and World Market
United States Economy
Economic Conditions and Trends


Russian Local Elections Draw Charges of Fraud

Abstract: MOSCOW — As Russians voted in local and regional elections on Sunday, democracy advocates in the only region where they were allowed to run accused the authorities of fraud and said the police had blockaded an apartment where opposition activists were tracking the vote. Although candidates from President Vladimir V. Putin’s United Russia Party were widely expected to win, Sunday’s vote was being viewed as a dress rehearsal for 2016 parliamentary elections and a test of voter turnout amid an economic downturn and Western sanctions. Results were expected on Monday. In the Kostroma region, about 200 miles northeast of Moscow, a coalition of opposition politicians, including Aleksei A. Navalny, fielded candidates under the banner of Parnas, or People’s Freedom Party. Boris Y. Nemtsov, a political reformer who was shot dead near the Kremlin in February, was the party’s co-founder. Kostroma’s electoral commission granted Parnas approval to run only last month, after several attempts to keep its candidates from running for the regional legislature. Mr. Navalny, who is barred from running for office because he is serving a suspended prison sentence on a fraud conviction, has campaigned for the coalition’s candidates and was in Kostroma on Sunday night. He posted on Twitter that, according to the coalition’s own exit polls, United Russia had won 47 percent of the vote, while Parnas had 6 percent, crossing the 5 percent barrier required to qualify for seats in the legislature. But Vtsiom, a state-owned polling agency, said its exit polls showed Parnas with just 2.6 percent of the vote, and opposition activists posted on Twitter that they were preparing for a long night ahead. Opposition activists said the police had raided an apartment housing the local headquarters of Open Elections, a monitoring arm of Open Russia, the civil society foundation of Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon and Putin opponent who spent a decade in jail. Activists recorded a police officer on camera as saying that officers were responding to a call that someone had been killed in the apartment. The Open Elections staff members were not allowed to leave the apartment for hours, activists said. Later in the evening, Vladimir Churov, the chairman of Russia’s Central Election Commission, said at a briefing that the reports of a murder had not been confirmed. Mr. Navalny spoke to reporters outside the apartment building in Kostroma. “What we’re seeing right now is a kind of amazing thing,” he said in a report posted on YouTube. “On the one hand, United Russia is declaring its future unconditional victory. On the other hand, we are witnessing a real assault on an organization that is making observations.”

Russia
Election
Fraud
United Russia
Vladimir Putin
Kostroma Russia
Aleksei Navalny
Freedom Party NYS


Florida State Fans Spare Coach Jimbo Fisher the Tough Questions

Abstract: TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — “What is it about this team, this year, that throughout your career you’ll always remember?” “Do you think that the Marching Chiefs” — the university’s marching band — “motivate the team during the game?” “The Jimbo Fisher Call-In Show” was underway, and some of the Seminoles’ most dedicated fans were giddy with the opportunity to engage Fisher, the coach of Florida State’s football team, which is 10-0 and the defending national champion. Florida State has been in the national spotlight the past two seasons for various off-field problems, including accusations of sexual assault and domestic abuse and a hit-and-run car crash. But college football is local, not national, and when Fisher gives fans a weekly opportunity to talk, the conversation tends to focus on the 10-0. College football coaches around the country host radio call-in shows. For Fisher’s, Florida State fans head to the Ornate Chorus Ballroom on the lower level of the Four Points by Sheraton, a blue cylindrical tower a few blocks from campus and across the street from a restaurant called Bird’s Aphrodisiac Oyster Shack. No one, it seems, has any concerns about the program. “We don’t ask Jimbo those kinds of questions,” said Chris Gilmore, a Florida State senior who said he went to the show every week. “We don’t bring that negativity here, anyway. It’s more a get-together, a fan thing.” Fisher and Gene Deckerhoff, “the voice of the Florida State Seminoles,” sat at a table in the low-ceilinged ballroom on Wednesday night. When Deckerhoff announced that the next caller was Mike from Jacksonville, Fisher and Deckerhoff, as well as dozens in attendance, knew what was coming next. Image Fisher after the Seminoles defeated Notre Dame in October. A typical call to Fisher’s show is a fan’s satisfied observation of a standout play or player. Credit Streeter Lecka/Getty Images “Touchdown, Florida State!” Mike said, initiating his call as he had previously, his high-pitched voice piping into the room. The crowd, many of whom had already raised their hands above their heads in the sign for 6 points, cheered. “You can tell the newcomers, Mike,” Deckerhoff said. “They don’t have their arms up!” Fisher smiled. Like Mike from Jacksonville, many of the participants in Fisher’s call-in show are regulars. “We always sit at that end,” one fan said to another upon arriving, “but it looks like the better seats are up here.” This is what football season looks like in football-mad Tallahassee. Entering Leon County from the east on Interstate 10, drivers are greeted by a sign that says “Home of the 2013 B.C.S. Champ,” a reference to Florida State’s 34-31 victory over Auburn in the title game in January. After the Seminoles’ come-from-behind victory at Miami last Saturday, and with two games left in the regular season — both at home, against Boston College and Florida — a crowd of about 150 gathered to witness the hourlong taping. Although a couple of dozen people had to stand, no tickets were issued; attendees walked right in. They could also have listened to the show on the radio, watched it on television or streamed it on the Internet. The crowd Wednesday was especially big — “The largest group of Seminoles fans I have ever seen at a ‘Jimbo Fisher Call-In Show,’ ” Deckerhoff said — perhaps because the Seminoles are on the path to repeat as national champions. The team, which last lost on Nov. 24, 2012, is third in the College Football Playoff rankings — to the extreme consternation of Seminoles fans, who note that theirs is the last undefeated major-conference team and has already clinched a berth in the Atlantic Coast Conference championship game. College Football Scenarios: Six Teams, Four Spots We cut through the rankings turmoil to tell you which teams have the inside track. Many in the crowd wore garnet-and-gold Florida State apparel, and most brought gear like footballs and helmets for Fisher to sign, which he eagerly did before the show and during commercial breaks. During the breaks, a staff member asked trivia questions like “What is Boston College’s home field?” and made announcements, including one noting that the actor Burt Reynolds, a former Seminoles halfback, would ceremonially “plant the spear” before Saturday’s game. The walls were lined with photographs: of the storied Seminoles coach Bobby Bowden, who secured a 315-98-4 record and two national titles over 34 seasons; of a Seminoles cheerleader; of Osceola, the Seminoles mascot, who rides a horse named Renegade onto the field before games; of quarterback Jameis Winston, the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, triumphantly lifting a trophy. At one show earlier this fall, Deckerhoff described the scene as a “pre-pre-tailgate.” Nobody came to interrogate Fisher. There was nary a hint that the team had been enveloped in off-field scandal. Winston was accused of raping a fellow student in late 2012, but prosecutors declined to press charges after a police investigation that was found to have been flawed . A campus disciplinary hearing is scheduled for early next month. In the spring, Winston admitted to having stolen $32 worth of crab legs from a supermarket. Earlier this season Winston was suspended for half a game , a punishment that was later upgraded by the university to a full game, for shouting an obscene phrase in the student union. In addition, two starters this season have been accused of varying degrees of domestic abuse (one charge was lowered to domestic disturbance); several players, including Winston, were involved in BB gun shootouts ; and last month, the team’s starting cornerbacks fled the scene of a car crash. Of those players involved in off-field episodes, only Winston has been suspended from the football team, and that was for shouting the obscene phrase. But such things are not what “The Jimbo Fisher Call-In Show” is about. Instead, the show is a campfire chat for a camp that has had much to celebrate. “It’s Jimbo talking about the things that are actually happening at Florida State, not what people are thinking is happening at Florida State, because they’re not here,” said Kyle Griffin, a Florida State senior who was in attendance. “We’re right here. We know what’s going on.” So there is a love-in. Last month, “Notepad Rick” from Orlando — another regular — said, “I don’t know that there’s a parent in the country that, their young man’s getting ready to play football, he wouldn’t be proud for that young man to be playing football for Jimbo Fisher and the Florida State Seminoles.” During the same show, Chris from Tallahassee asked Fisher about other coaches he admired, suggesting similarities between him and San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich. “How that organization conducts itself, it’s really a class act,” Chris said. N.C.A.A. Fan Map: How the Country Roots for College Football We’ve published maps showing where fan support for one team begins and another ends for baseball and basketball. Now we’re pleased to offer another one: the United States according to college football fans. The purely positive atmosphere of Florida State’s show is typical of college coaches’ call-in shows. “I’ve never had a hostile question,” said Dave South, who hosts Texas A&M Coach Kevin Sumlin’s weekly show from the Wings ’N More restaurant in College Station, Tex. Last season, Aggies quarterback Johnny Manziel was criticized in some circles over his partying and an accusation that he had violated N.C.A.A. rules, but that did not come up during Sumlin’s show. On Fisher’s show, critical questions are not censored, just not asked in the first place. Calls are screened, but mainly for propriety, said IMG, the entertainment and media company that produces many college call-in shows, including Florida State’s. Perhaps the most typical calls — after fulsome statements of praise, concerns over injuries and gripes that the Seminoles are not running the ball more — are satisfied observations of particularly standout players and plays. In reference to a third-quarter touchdown pass last Saturday that involved a Miami defender’s inadvertently tipping the ball to an open Seminoles running back, an audience member facetiously asked, “I would like to know just how many times our wonderful quarterback, Mr. Winston, has practiced the ricochet shot off to Karlos Williams?” Last month, Williams’s girlfriend sought to terminate a domestic abuse investigation involving Williams a few days after it was opened. But the question concerned the play, and Fisher addressed that. “Karlos was the third read in the play,” he said. “They dropped an extra defender.” With pride, he added: “We drop a touchdown the play before. Our kids come back, play very hard and see a ball tip. Instead of loafing, Karlos hustles. Good things happen to you. It’s kind of the karma of our team.”

Jimbo Fisher
Tallahassee
College football
Radio
Jameis Winston
College Sports
Florida State University


Higgs and Englert Are Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics

Abstract: The “God particle” became the prize particle on Tuesday. Two theoretical physicists who suggested that an invisible ocean of energy suffusing space is responsible for the mass and diversity of the particles in the universe won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday morning. They are Peter W. Higgs, 84, of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and François Englert, 80, of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. The theory, elucidated in 1964, sent physicists on a generation-long search for a telltale particle known as the Higgs boson, popularly known (though not among physicists) as the God particle. The chase culminated last year with the discovery of this particle , which confers mass on other particles, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland. Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert will split a prize of $1.2 million, to be awarded in Stockholm on Dec. 10. “You may imagine that this is not unpleasant,” Dr. Englert said in an early morning news conference. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had not been able to contact Dr. Higgs, who had vowed he would not be available Tuesday. A friend and fellow physicist, Alan Walker, said in a phone interview on Tuesday morning that Dr. Higgs, who does not use a cellphone or a computer, had gone off by himself for a few days without saying where, and that he would return Friday. Dr. Higgs, he said, is a modest man who likes his own company and the ability to come and go without a fuss. Even before the announcement, he said, one journalist had invaded Dr. Higgs’s building looking for an interview. “He was sent away with a flea in his ear,” Dr. Walker said. Image Peter W. Higgs, right, and François Englert at a conference in Switzerland on July 4, 2012. Credit Fabrice Coffrini/A.F.P. — Getty Images In a statement released later by the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Higgs pronounced himself “overwhelmed,” saying, “I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.” The prize had been expected ever since physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider announced on July 4, 2012, that they had discovered a particle matching the description of the Higgs. Thousands of particle physicists worked on the project , and for many of them the Nobel is a crowning validation. Fabiola Gianotti, who led one of the teams at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, called the prize “a great emotion and a great satisfaction,” adding that it was nice that the experiments were cited in the award. “The young physicists are superexcited.” The Higgs was the last missing ingredient of the Standard Model, a suite of equations that has ruled particle physics for the last half-century, explaining everything from the smell of a rose to the ping when your computer boots up. According to this model, the universe brims with energy that acts like a cosmic molasses, imbuing the particles that move through it with mass, the way a bill moving through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous and controversial. Without the Higgs field, many elementary particles, like electrons, would be massless and would zip around at the speed of light. There would be no atoms and no us. For scientists, the discovery of the Higgs (as physicists call it) affirmed the view of a cosmos ruled by laws of almost diamond-like elegance and simplicity, but in which everything interesting — like us — is a result of lapses or flaws in that elegance. That is the view that emerged in a period of feverish and tangled progress after World War II, in which the world’s physicists turned their energies from war to looking under the hood of nature, using the tools of quantum field theory. Image Scientists at CERN in Switzerland reacted Tuesday to the announcement of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Credit Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images At the heart of this quest was an ancient idea, the concept of symmetry, and how it was present in the foundations of physics but hidden in the world as we experience it. In art and nature, something is symmetrical if it looks the same when you move it one way or another, like a snowflake rotated 60 degrees; in science and math, a symmetry is something that does not change when you transform the system, like the length of an arrow when you turn it around or shoot it. In 1954, the theorists Chen Ning Yang and Robert L. Mills at the Brookhaven National Laboratory concluded that all fundamental forces were the result of nature’s trying to maintain symmetries — for example, the conservation of electric charge in the case of electromagnetism, or the conservation of momentum and energy in the case of Einstein’s gravity. By then, however, two more forces of nature had been added to the roster: the so-called weak nuclear force, responsible for some types of radioactive decay, and the strong force, which holds atomic nuclei together. In quantum field theory, forces are transmitted by bundles of energy called bosons. By quantum rules, the mass of a boson is related to the range of the force: the more massive the boson, the shorter its reach. When the physicist Sheldon Glashow, now of Boston University, wrote down a theory in 1961 that explained the weak force and electromagnetism as manifestations of a single “electroweak” force, the math indicated that the particles that transmitted the nuclear part of that force should be massless, like the photons that transmit light and can spread across the universe. But the nuclear forces barely reach across an atomic nucleus, suggesting that their carriers should be among the most massive of elementary particles. How did the carriers of the weak force become so massive while their brothers the photons remained free and easy? It was Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago, who would win a Nobel in 2008, who suggested that the fault might lie not in the laws of physics but in how those laws play out in the real world. By a process called symmetry breaking, a situation that started out balanced can wind up unbalanced. Imagine, for example, a pencil standing on its tip; it will eventually fall over and point only one way out of many possibilities. The mass of the boson can be thought of as the energy released when the pencil falls. Image The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland, which provided crucial research on the Higgs boson, or “God particle.” Credit Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images In 1964, three papers by the different physicists showed how this could work by envisioning a kind of cosmic molasses filling space. Particles trying to go through it would acquire mass. The first to publish this idea were Dr. Englert and his colleague Robert Brout , who died in 2011. Dr. Englert was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1932, and he studied engineering and physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, emerging with a Ph.D. in 1959. While a research associate at Cornell, he bonded with Dr. Brout, a professor there. When Dr. Englert returned to Belgium, Dr. Brout went with him. While they were working on their paper, Dr. Higgs, a young theorist born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, was working on his own version of the theory. His paper was rejected by the journal Physics Letters, which was published at CERN, as having no relevance to physics. So he rewrote it and sent it to a rival journal, Physical Review Letters. Along the way he added a paragraph at the end, noting that the theory predicted a new particle, a spinless creature of indeterminate mass, which would become famous as the Higgs boson. That paper was accepted with the proviso that he mention Dr. Englert and Dr. Brout’s paper, which had beaten him into print by seven weeks. Meanwhile, three other physicists — Tom Kibble of Imperial College, London; Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester; and Gerald Guralnik of Brown University — were writing their own paper . Just as they were about to send it in, mail that had been delayed by a postal strike came in, containing journals with the other two papers, the one by Dr. Higgs and the one by Dr. Englert and Dr. Brout. Video It was the longest, most costly manhunt in science for an elusive particle that was said to be key to the workings of the universe. For a generation of physicists, it was an appointment with history. Credit Credit Denis Balibouse/Reuters The groups and their friends have been arguing ever since over exactly who did and said what. In 2004, Dr. Higgs, Dr. Brout and Dr. Englert won the Wolf Prize, considered an important forerunner of the Nobel. In 2010, all six physicists shared the Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society, another big award. Dr. Brout might logically have shared the Nobel if he were alive today; the prize is not awarded posthumously. The Higgs boson became a big deal after Steven Weinberg made it the linchpin in a 1967 paper that unified the electromagnetic and weak forces along the lines proposed by Dr. Glashow earlier, earning himself a share of the 1979 Nobel Prize. Along the way, the Higgs boson achieved a presence in pop culture rare in abstract physics. To the eternal dismay of his colleagues, Leon Lederman, the former director of Fermilab, called it the “God particle” in his book of the same name, written with Dick Teresi. (He later said that he had wanted to call it the “goddamn particle.”) Journalists and the news media could not resist the nickname, however, and many particle physicists grudgingly admitted that the name had brought a dose of drama and public excitement to a field almost breathtakingly austere and abstract. The July 4 announcement last year ended that tension. That day was also the first time that Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert had ever met. Indeed, the newly discovered boson so far fits the theoretical predictions so well that physicists are a little dismayed. They were hoping for a surprise or two that would tell them how to improve on the Standard Model. The award on Tuesday sets the stage for the Swedish academy to figure out someday how to recognize the 10,000 scientists who built the Large Hadron Collider and sifted 2,000 trillion subatomic fireballs for a few dozen traces of the precious godlike particle. “We are of course thrilled — the first big discovery of the L.H.C., for which we built the giant machine and detectors,” said Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology and a member of one of the CERN teams that tracked the Higgs particle down. “For the experimentalists,” she added, “we are kind of used to being excluded from the Nobel.”

Nobel Prize
Physics
Higgs Boson
Peter Ware Higgs
Francois Englert


Haiti: U.S. Adds $120 Million in Aid

Abstract: Six months after the Haiti Recovery Fund was established to help the earthquake-shattered country, the United States announced Wednesday that it had signed an agreement to contribute $120 million to the fund. The long-awaited American contribution will nearly double the assets of the fund, which is only one source of reconstruction financing. Although the United States spent more than $1 billion in humanitarian aid to Haiti after the earthquake, it has been slow to honor its pledge to the recovery fund as well as its overall promise of $1.15 billion in reconstruction money. Announcing the contribution at the third meeting of Haiti’s reconstruction commission, Cheryl Mills, chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton , said that the United States preferred that 75 percent go toward rubble removal and housing repairs.

Haiti
Humanitarian Aid
State Department
Clinton Hillary Rodham
Foreign Aid


Palestinians Serenade Survivors in Israel

Abstract: HOLON, Israel — For just over an hour on Wednesday, a club for elderly Holocaust survivors on a side street in this suburban town south of Tel Aviv came alive with an encounter of an extraordinary kind. A youth orchestra came to play for the elderly Israelis, a good turn that might pass in other countries as routine. In this case, though, the entertainers were Palestinians , a group of musicians 12 to 17 years old from the Jenin refugee camp, once a notorious hotbed of militancy and violence in the northern reaches of the West Bank. Holocaust survivors and descendants of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war would make bizarre companions at the best of times, but the Jenin camp strikes a particular note of discord. The capital of suicide bombers to the Israelis and a symbol of resistance to the Palestinians, it was the scene of a bloody battle between advancing Israeli forces and Palestinian gunmen in 2002. Four years later, a young Israeli man from Holon was killed in one of the last suicide attacks in Israel, when a Palestinian from Jenin blew himself up in a restaurant in Tel Aviv. Adding to the dissonance, one of Jenin’s militant leaders in the second intifada was commonly known as Hitler, a nickname he had answered to since his teens. Yet for a while on Wednesday, the politics of the conflict were put aside. The youths scratched at their violins and the Holocaust survivors clapped along, trying to keep up with the changing rhythms of the darbouka drums. “We are here to play,” Wafaa Younis, 51, the Israeli Arab orchestra director, told the rapt audience. “I do not believe in politicians, only musicians and these children.” Any potential awkwardness may have been dulled by the language barrier — other than Ms. Younis, the Palestinians spoke only Arabic; the survivors only Hebrew and their native European tongues. Each also appeared to have only the sketchiest knowledge about the other side. Zehava Zelevski, 73, was born in Poland and came to Israel via camps in Germany for displaced people in 1948. Her three brothers were killed during the Second World War. Ms. Zelevski said she knew about the Jenin camp from television and the newspapers, remembering that “all the terrorism came from there.” One of the young musicians, Qusai Samur, 17, looked blank when asked about the Holocaust. He said he knew only what somebody here had told him — that these people lived alone as children because their parents had been killed. The event, at the Amcha Center, was organized as part of Israel’s annual Good Deeds Day, an initiative of Shari Arison , a prominent Israeli-American businesswoman and immensely wealthy heiress. Ms. Arison said in an interview before the concert that she came up with the idea for Good Deeds Day while taking a walk a few years ago. Anybody, whether rich or poor, can help a blind person cross a street, cheer someone up with a smile or help with someone’s shopping bags, she said. Most of the day’s events are organized by Ruach Tova , an organization of the Arison Group that couples nonprofit groups with volunteers. Ms. Younis, the orchestra director, had told Ruach Tova that she wanted to bring the Jenin camp youth orchestra, Strings of Freedom, to perform in Israel. Ruach Tova made the match with Amcha, an Israeli association that provides Holocaust survivors with emotional and social support. The first item in the short concert was a specially composed Arabic song, “We Pray for Peace.” The youths performed it standing, with the seriousness of a funeral dirge. Things livened up a little once the darboukas came out. Ms. Arison, who attended the well-publicized event, was invited to dance. By the end, it was hard to tell who had done the good deed for whom. After the concert, Ms. Zelevski, the survivor, said she was “surprised” and “very excited,” seeing things were possible “not by war.” Debating the rights and wrongs of the conflict among themselves, some of the elderly Israelis commented that the Palestinian musicians were “only children” and were not to blame. The young Palestinians, on a rare trip out of the West Bank, were all smiles. They had performed three times before in the Israeli port city of Haifa, but this was the closest they had come to the Israeli cultural metropolis of Tel Aviv. Soon, a staff member from the Amcha Center politely asked the orchestra and attendant journalists to vacate the small hall. It was time for the survivors’ exercise class. Outside, some of the elderly Israelis and the young Palestinians mingled, trying their best to interact. Ms. Younis, a feisty retired music teacher, appealed for support. She said that an Israeli playwright, Dan Almagor, had donated violins for the Jenin youths, and that the Mormon University in Jerusalem had given other instruments and equipment, but that the orchestra needed more. “Israel should give them violins,” she said. “We take the pain out of people’s hearts.”

Palestinians
Israel
Music
Holocaust and the Nazi Era
Jews and Judaism


Beltran Already at Ease Wearing a New Uniform

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — As Carlos Beltran pulled on a San Francisco Giants uniform for the first time, the large television next to his locker in the visitors’ clubhouse here on Thursday afternoon broadcast the Mets ’ sweep-completing victory over the Cincinnati Reds. The scene provided a snapshot of Beltran’s past and present. But he was already moving on, having received a thank-you telephone call earlier from Jeff Wilpon, the Mets’ chief operating officer. Beltran did not even glance at his former team’s game as he slipped into spikes before his new team’s 4-1 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies. It was another night, another ballpark, but for the first time since 2004, Beltran did not suit up for the Mets. “The years that I was healthy, I did the best that I could to help the team win,” Beltran said of his time with the Mets, which was marked by his knee injuries and the team’s underachieving play. “Unfortunately, when you’re hurt, there’s no chance you can help the team win. We didn’t win anything, but we had good teams.” Beltran went 0 for 4 and landed hard on his surgically repaired right knee while making a difficult sliding grab to rob Jimmy Rollins of a hit in the fifth inning. He said after that he was fine, but the play caused those in the Giants’ dugout to hold their breath. “He took a pretty big divot,” Manager Bruce Bochy said of Beltran’s dive into the turf. “I kept watching him to make sure he was all right.” The Giants are relying on Beltran, who batted third in his debut, to provide power to the middle of their lineup. They are also hoping that he helps them make a playoff run, just as he did for the Houston Astros in 2004, when the Kansas City Royals shipped him out before the trading deadline. Giants General Manager Brian Sabean had been in contact with the Mets about Beltran since July 1. The conversations with Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson heated up Monday, after the Giants visited the White House in honor of their winning the World Series last season. “Quite frankly, I never thought I’d say this, but once Buster went down I thought we were dead in the water to be able to come close to replacing him,” Sabean said, referring to the injured catcher Buster Posey. “And Carlos certainly has a chance to do that.” Wearing a gray suit and sunglasses, Beltran arrived at Citizens Bank Park literally carrying baggage from his time in New York. He toted a Mets’ duffle bag with him as he walked into the stadium. Throughout the afternoon, Beltran’s movements were tailed by a documentary film crew, which was gathering footage for a Showtime series about the Giants. He also met with a trainer to discuss his equipment needs, but otherwise appeared at home with his new team. The issue of Beltran’s jersey posed a minor problem. Beltran wore No. 15 with the Mets. In San Francisco, however, that jersey belonged to Bochy. Beltran jokingly asked if Bochy wanted a watch with or without diamonds as a gift for giving up No. 15. Bochy switched to No. 16. The crowd of 45,646 showered Beltran with the loudest boos of any of the Giants’ players during the pregame introductions, and also before his at-bats. Philadelphia fans have gotten to know him over the years. In the clubhouse, Beltran seemed just as familiar to his new teammates. Before the game, he joked with a group of Spanish-speaking players who crowded around Guillermo Mota’s locker. Meanwhile, reliever Jeremy Affeldt tested out his burgeoning grasp on the language, asking from across the room how Beltran was feeling. Beltran’s ease was evident in his reply: “Tranquilo.”

San Francisco Giants
Beltran Carlos
Baseball
New York Mets