Battle for Spots in Solheim Cup Presents Tough Choices

Abstract: Only three L.P.G.A. tournaments remain before the United States team is selected for this year’s Solheim Cup, the biennial match-play competition between the top female golfers from the United States and Europe. The final points event will be the Women’s British Open, set for Aug. 1-4 at the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland. The United States and European teams will be announced after that 72-hole championship. This year’s Solheim Cup, the 13th event, will be played Aug. 16-18 at Colorado Golf Club in Parker, Colo. Between now and the British Open, players will try to secure spots on their squads on merit, and the captains will plot their wild-card selections. The American captain, Meg Mallon, said she was looking for a mix of strong results and match-play chops. “If a player is playing well and they have had that experience behind them, they are definitely at the top of my list,” Mallon said. Heading into this week’s Manulife Financial L.P.G.A. Classic in Waterloo, Ontario, the Americans’ projected roster includes a host of familiar names. Stacy Lewis, a two-time winner on tour this year, leads the points ranking system, followed by Paula Creamer, Cristie Kerr, Angela Stanford and Brittany Lincicome. The top eight players qualify automatically, and Jessica Korda, Lexi Thompson and Brittany Lang currently hold the last spots . Korda and Thompson will be Solheim Cup rookies if they make the team. “I’m not worried about those two young players,” Mallon said. “They’ve both won L.P.G.A. tournaments.” But where it gets more interesting is filling out the remainder of the 12-player roster. The ninth and 10th spots will go to the players highest on the Rolex World Rankings not already on the team, and Mallon will choose the final two members. Among those she will consider are the second-year L.P.G.A. Tour player Lizette Salas, who is currently ninth on the points list, and the former Solheim Cup player Morgan Pressel, who is 10th. (The world’s top-ranked player, Inbee Park, who has won six tournaments this year and lives in Nevada, is ineligible for the United States team because she was born in South Korea.) Image Jessica Korda is sixth in the standings. Credit Scott Halleran/Getty Images The European selection process will choose four players through the Solheim Cup points system (operated through the Ladies European Tour), four top-ranked players from the world rankings, and four players selected by this year’s captain, Liselotte Neumann. The current points leaders for the European teams are Suzann Pettersen of Norway, Catriona Matthew of Scotland, Carlota Ciganda of Spain and Caroline Masson of Germany. Anna Nordqvist of Sweden, the Spaniards Azahara Munoz and Beatriz Recari, and Karine Icher of France round out Europe’s current top eight. “I get four captain’s picks, but I think that’s going to be tough,” said Neumann, who played on six Solheim Cup teams. “It’s going to be very, very close between some good players and there will be some new members on the European team.” While the players in the top five spots for the United States team can feel secure, the next three tournaments could turn into a battle among players hoping to move into the top eight. Jennifer Johnson, a winner on tour this year, is hovering in the 11th spot, just ahead of Michelle Wie. Three other former Solheim Cup players — Nicole Castrale (15th), Vicky Hurst (16th) and Natalie Gulbis (18th) — are just behind them in the top 20. “It’s hard in those last few events,” said Mallon, who played on nine of the previous 12 United States Solheim Cup teams. “As a player, all you’re thinking about is getting into the Solheim Cup.” But Mallon is also pragmatic. “If you’re not in the top eight, and you’re not in the top two qualifiers on the Rolex World Rankings, you shouldn’t expect to be on the team,” she said. “That’s how I felt when I played.” That is not to say that Mallon would overlook a veteran like Juli Inkster (currently ranked 22nd) for her team as a captain’s pick, just as Neumann might covet the value of an experienced player like England’s Laura Davies for her side. In addition to her L.P.G.A. tournament schedule, Davies, 49, has been playing tournaments on the Ladies European Tour to accumulate points toward Europe’s Solheim Cup team. She is currently 22nd.

Solheim Cup
Golf
Meg Mallon
Liselotte Neumann


For Ivy League Players, the N.B.A. Is Rarely a Destination

Abstract: If Harvard held an alumni game for its former basketball players who went on to play in the N.B.A., it would have to settle for a game of two-on-two. And all but one of the players would be shooting a set shot. That is because the list of former Harvard players who have played in the N.B.A. since the 1953-54 season begins and ends with point guard Jeremy Lin, who scored 25 and 28 points for the Knicks in his last two games on his way to attaining cult-hero status at Madison Square Garden. When Lin made his N.B.A. debut , for the Golden State Warriors on Oct. 29, 2010, he became the first Ivy League player to suit up for an N.B.A. team in the regular season since Matt Maloney of Penn played for the Atlanta Hawks and Chris Dudley of Yale played for the Portland Trail Blazers in 2002-3. There have been great N.B.A. players with Ivy League roots , like Geoff Petrie of Princeton, who averaged 21.8 points a game for Portland in six seasons in the 1970s; Bill Bradley of Princeton, who played on the Knicks’ two championship teams; and Jim McMillian of Columbia, who won an N.B.A. title with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1972. But the only Harvard players besides Lin to play in the N.B.A. were Saul Mariaschin, who averaged 7.7 points in 43 games for the Boston Celtics in 1947-48; Edward Smith, the sixth pick over all in the 1951 draft, who averaged 2.5 points in 11 games for the Knicks in 1953-54; and Wyndol Gray, an all-American at Harvard in 1945-46 who played the next season for the Celtics, then finished his two-year career in Providence and in St. Louis. Mariaschin and Gray played for the last Harvard men’s basketball team to make the N.C.A.A. tournament, but that is another story. In leading the Knicks to back-to-back victories , Lin broke the previous high for points in an N.B.A. game by a player from Harvard, which had been 20, set 64 years ago by Mariaschin, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. “It’s really quite amazing what he’s done,” said Glenn A. Fine, the former inspector general of the Justice Department, who was drafted out of Harvard in the 10th round by San Antonio in 1979 but did not try out because he won a Rhodes scholarship. “And after these two games, it looks like he has a pretty good chance to stick.” At least 10 Harvard players have been drafted by the N.B.A., according to university records. Five were drafted in the 1970s, including the sportscaster James Brown, one of the nation’s top high school prospects in 1969. Brown was taken by the Atlanta Hawks in the fourth round in 1973, but did not earn a roster spot. In 1985, forward Joe Carrabino was drafted in the sixth round by the Denver Nuggets and guard Bob Ferry, the brother of the Duke star Danny Ferry, was taken in the seventh, by the Hawks. And in 1987, Keith Webster was drafted in the seventh round by the Utah Jazz. None of them made a roster, and for some time, it appeared that Harvard’s lasting contribution to the N.B.A. would be a nonstudent, Tom Thibodeau, the current coach of the Chicago Bulls, who was an assistant at Harvard from 1985 to 1989. Webster came close. He tried to make the Jazz as the team’s third point guard, behind the starter Rickey Green and John Stockton. He was one of the last three players cut, a victim of stiff competition and guaranteed contracts, but not before playing the entire preseason. The first time Webster saw Lin play, against Cornell in Lin’s senior season, his seat was near a group of coaches. The consensus among them was that Lin was not N.B.A. material. “I stuck my neck out and said, ‘I think he’s going to make it,’ ” Webster said. “He’s 6-3, really athletic, has good hops and long arms. And his best attribute is his vision. Fundamentally, he leaves his feet a lot and his jump shot’s kind of funky, but he gets to the rim with his crossover and he’s a great finisher. In some sense, it doesn’t surprise me that he made a team and he’s doing well. It just goes to show what you can do if you work hard.” No Harvard player has been drafted since Webster, not even Lin, most likely because the N.B.A. reduced the number of rounds in the draft to three in 1988 and to two in 1989. With Webster, the Harvard pipeline, such as it was, had run dry. Or so it was thought.

Basketball
Lin Jeremy
New York Knicks
Harvard University
Draft and Recruitment (Sports)
College Athletics


Teachout, Cuomo Opponent, Is Unbowed by Underdog Status

Abstract: There she was, just to the right of the stage, waving her arms furiously, hoping that the event’s host, Eric L. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, would see her and give her a shout-out. No such luck; a tall security guard was in the way. As Zephyr Teachout was leaving the gospel concert in East Flatbush, a man in a wheelchair called out, “Who are you?” Ever eager, she explained that she was running as a progressive against Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the Democratic primary. The man, won over, pointed to a homemade campaign button pinned to Ms. Teachout’s jacket. “Can I have your button?” he asked. She gladly obliged. Just a few months ago, Ms. Teachout was a popular Fordham University law professor with ties to Occupy Wall Street and a keen interest in political corruption. But after the liberal Working Families Party approached her to run against Mr. Cuomo — before it arrived at a bitterly contested decision to stick by the governor — Ms. Teachout decided, with the encouragement of other liberal activists, to mount her own long-shot campaign. Yes, she knows that few New Yorkers have heard of her. Yes, she knows that she will not have enough money for television ads. And yes, she knows that her best shot at statewide exposure — a debate with Mr. Cuomo — is unlikely. Still, she insists that she is gaining momentum, and is zestily campaigning with a kind of cynicism-free optimism that makes her a sunny surprise. Image Ms. Teachout, a candidate for governor, gave away her campaign button to a potential supporter this month after a gospel concert in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. Credit Andrew Renneisen/The New York Times “I didn’t know politics would be this much fun!” she beamed after a South Asian festival in Queens a week ago. Privately, Ms. Teachout’s admirers say that her campaign has already succeeded, by forcing Mr. Cuomo to embrace more liberal causes. If she gets more than 25 percent in the Sept. 9 primary, some argue, then Mr. Cuomo might need to worry about liberal angst heading into a general election against the Republican candidate, Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive. Ms. Teachout does not pretend that her task will be easy. But she said the worst that could happen would be that she got only 1 percent of the vote, and that she became known as an idealistic but politically naïve professor. “We’re underdogs, we know that, but we’re serious underdogs,” she said at a house party near her apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Ms. Teachout and her running mate for lieutenant governor, Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, talked about winning over the small number of Democrats who actually vote in primaries. They hope to tap into disillusionment or even anger with Mr. Cuomo among teachers, public employees and upstate residents opposed to hydraulic fracturing. Image Ms. Teachout speaking at a cocktail party in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where she currently resides. Credit Andrew Renneisen/The New York Times “In the face of Andrew Cuomo’s silence, I am being loud,” she said in Fort Greene. Mr. Cuomo has not publicly mentioned Ms. Teachout by name, and his campaign has declined to comment on her candidacy. Still, avid Democrats are getting to know her. A Vermont native, Ms. Teachout, 42, worked as a death penalty lawyer in North Carolina and co-founded an organization intent on breaking up Wall Street banks. The author of a coming book on political corruption, she is on track for tenure at Fordham early next year. Her most formative political experience came in 2003, when she became the director of online organizing for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. “She was terrific; she was hard-working,” Mr. Dean said during a 10th-anniversary celebration that Ms. Teachout attended for Democracy for New York City, a Dean-inspired group. She often mentions two United States senators — Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sherrod Brown of Ohio — as role models. She also raves about State Senator Gustavo Rivera of the Bronx and Letitia James, the New York City public advocate. She even buys into the anti-“crony capitalism” message, if not the prescription, of Dave Brat, the Virginia professor and Tea Party upstart who defeated Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader, in the Republican primary in June. Image Ms. Teachout tried on a sari this month at the Chatpati Mela festival in Jackson Heights, Queens. She spoke with the vendors about the challenges of running small businesses. Credit Andrew Renneisen/The New York Times Like Mr. Brat, Ms. Teachout has little money. But contributions have increased so much since Mr. Cuomo unsuccessfully tried to kick her off the ballot that a highly targeted online advertising campaign is planned. She has a paid staff of about 10, and shares a cramped office in Midtown Manhattan with lawyers, real estate brokers and a casting company. On the trail, she often asks people what they want in a governor. She has also honed a stump speech, talking about her unusual name (yes, that is her first name, and her last name is Dutch), then touching on public schools, small businesses, transportation and infrastructure. “In my vision we can have an economy and a democracy that works for all of us, not just the wealthy and well-connected,” she said at a street fair outside the Bronx Zoo a week ago, eliciting a few “that’s right” replies. To get around, Ms. Teachout usually takes public transportation or relies on rides from volunteers, especially when she travels to Ithaca, Binghamton and other areas to fire up “fractivists.” One afternoon she spent $65 to take five people, including an aide and an independent filmmaker, from the Bronx to Queens by livery cab. Things do not always go according to plan. At the Chatpati Mela celebration in Jackson Heights, for example, she could not distribute any campaign literature (black-and-white photocopies) or speak onstage — it was a strictly nonpartisan affair. Unfazed, she talked excitedly with vendors until she stumbled upon some Bangladeshis selling saris. After hearing about the travails of establishing small businesses, she bought an orange one for $20, and tried it on. “Should I wear this to my debate with Governor Cuomo?” she joked.

Zephyr Teachout
Democrats
Primaries
New York
Andrew Cuomo
Gubernatorial races


Pfizer to Explore Sale or Spinoff of a Division

Abstract: Pfizer said yesterday that it would explore spinning off or selling its consumer health care division, a unit that had $3.9 billion in sales last year and whose brands include Listerine mouthwash and Benadryl allergy medicine. Pfizer, the world's largest drug maker, has taken several steps recently to bolster its flagging stock, including raising its dividend and trying to streamline its operations. Spinning off the consumer unit would be another step to please Wall Street, because investors view the division as outside Pfizer's core business of prescription drugs, analysts said. The unit accounted for less than 8 percent of Pfizer's $52 billion in sales last year, and about 4 percent of operating profit. Based on the price-sales and price-earnings multiples of other consumer products companies, the division could be worth $8 billion or more as an independent company. Pfizer did not disclose whether it expected to lay off any of the division's 3,500 employees as part of a sale. "It's at the margin," said Robert Hazlett, an analyst at SunTrust Robertson Humphrey. "It's $3 billion and change of a $50 billion company, so it's not inconsequential, but is it critical to the growth of the company going forward? No." Besides Listerine and Benadryl, the unit's other well-known brands include Rogaine, Zantac, Rolaids, Bengay and Lubriderm. The unit has nine brands with more than $100 million in annual sales, according to Pfizer. Pfizer made the announcement yesterday afternoon, after the close of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. In after-hours trading, Pfizer shares rose almost 46 cents, or 1.8 percent, to $25.64. In a statement, Pfizer said it wanted "to unlock the value of the business for Pfizer shareholders at a time when market valuations are attractive for large, high-quality consumer businesses." Pfizer said it had not yet committed itself to selling the unit and could still decide to retain it. But a sale is probable after yesterday's announcement. The division had $670 million in operating profit last year, Pfizer said. Its sales grew 10 percent in 2005, from $3.5 billion to $3.9 billion. At a multiple of two times its sales last year, the unit would be worth about $8 billion. At a more aggressive multiple, like 2.5 times sales or 15 times operating profit, it could be worth $10 billion.


Robots to Guard Your Home

Abstract: When Robert Oschler, a programmer, leaves his home, he knows it is secure. And if he ever has cause for concern, he can open his laptop and survey the house through the eyes of his watchdogs. “I don’t have any pets. I just have pet robots, and they’re pretty well behaved,” Mr. Oschler said. “Fortunately I’ve never logged in and seen a human face.” His robot, a modified version of the Rovio from WowWee, has a camera, microphone and speakers atop a three-wheeled platform. From anywhere with a Net connection, he can send his robot zipping around the house, returning a video signal along the way. “As creepy as it sounds, you could even talk to the guy and say, ‘Get out of there. There’s nothing valuable. I’m calling the police,’ ” he said. For all its power and ability, the Rovio is usually found in a store’s toy section for about $170. Other robots from toy makers, like Meccano, are there as well. Outfitting a house with a fleet of robot guards is no longer just for those with the wealth of Bond villains. Home security is blossoming for toy makers who can match the technical power and flexibility of the computer industry with the mass-market prices that come from large production runs. Low prices are a trade-off, however, because many people find that the reliability of the lower-priced robots is adequate for home experimentation but far from ready for a task like guarding Fort Knox. “You should buy two,” said Mr. Oschler, who lives in South Florida. The off-the-shelf unit is ready to explore after a simple installation involving the computer, but Mr. Oschler added a few enhancements to the software, which he distributes at robodance.com . His version improves the audio and video quality and offers more sophisticated programming options that create routines and paths for the robots to follow. Mr. Oschler has even wired his robot to a headset that picks up the subtle electrical activity produced by his brain. “When I tilt my head, the robot goes left. When you do that, it’s a Matrix-like moment,” he said proudly. Other robot owners have modified their guard-bots, too. Peter Redmer, of Illinois, a online community manager at robocommunity.com , said his site gathered the collective wisdom of the toy robots. One hobbyist in China, Qiaosong Wang, posted pictures of his Rovio after he added a small fire extinguisher and software that can detect the shape of fire. “One of the goals is to create something that the consumer can enjoy without pricing it at $5,000 or $10,000 with military-grade technology,” Mr. Redmer said. Others have experimented with adding software for aiming the camera or enhancements like better lights for patrolling at night. Mr. Redmer said he was most interested lately in the Parrot AR.Drone , a flying robot priced at $300. “It flies. How much cooler does it get?” he asked. Not all of the innovation is attached to something that moves. Several companies are matching sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms with video cameras. These systems monitor the video feed and sound alarms when objects of a certain shape appear. I tried some software called Vitamin D that lets me watch my office. It raises flags — by beeping — whenever anyone walks in. It requires a computer and detects video signals from attached cameras. (A single-camera version is free, and the cost can rise to $199, at vitamindinc.com .) Archerfish makes surveillance cameras with sophisticated filters for detecting and distinguishing people, vehicles and other random movement. The models, at myarcherfish.com , include either one or four cameras for $400 to $1,400. I also spent some time with a Spykee, a robot made by the French company Meccano that sells toys in the United States under the brand name Erector. Several models of Spykee robots are at spykeeworld.com , for $110 to $300. The company, perhaps best known for its Erector sets, designed the Spykee as a kit that required some basic assembly. The essential gears and electronics come in a prebuilt base, and attaching the arms takes an hour or so. “It’s a toy, but many people use it as surveillance robot,” said Jennifer Briand, the product manager for Spykee. By aiming at children, Ms. Briand said, “We wanted a product that they could drive on their own like a spy, play jokes on their brothers and sisters, and protect their bedroom because at that age they don’t like their sister coming in.” Still, she said the use as a surveillance robot was a bit of a surprise. “At the beginning we thought that very young adults would be very interested in the product, but today we know that we have a lot of adults from 25 to 55 that like to play with Spykee. When you ask them what the favorite function is, they say they really like to drive it when they’re out of the home.” She is right. It was fun to drive the robot throughout the first floor of my home, chasing the cats and seeing if anything was somehow different. And when I was done checking on the living room, it made sense to check on the kitchen. No one ever broke in, but the cats seemed to move around more. While everything worked correctly, there were definite physical limits. The Spykee cannot go up or down stairs. Small bumps like the edge of a carpet do not cause trouble, but taller ones can be a brick wall. The engineering is quite good, but it’s not easy to trust it with serious responsibility. It can be difficult, for instance, to dock the device with the recharger. The wheel treads seemed to become uncalibrated and the robot would curve to one side. Steering something only a foot tall takes some adjustment. I bumped my robot’s head on a low overhang because I overestimated the headroom, and it tipped over. I tried yelling for help remotely, but no one heard me. There was no choice but to wait until I got there to pick it up. My wife and I started dreaming up work for Spykee. When she suspected the cats were not using the litter box in the basement, the robot was sent below to watch. The battery ran out long before we spotted any wayward cat. The robot could also look for basement flooding after a big storm. Many users are starting to use the word “telepresence” to describe controlling the robot remotely, a word that some videoconferencing companies use to describe high-resolution connections from well-lighted rooms. After looking at the image and driving around the real world, it is easy to start imagining that you are really there. My children, aged 10 and 7, loved driving the robot, and even started asking for the robot to meet them at the door after school. Now if only the robot could pay college tuition.

Robots
Computers and the Internet
Security and Warning Systems


Persecuted to Powerful: Exhibiting a History of New York’s Catholics

Abstract: Hundreds of years ago, there was a tiny religious minority so despised and persecuted that it was forced to build its own educational, social-welfare and political infrastructure just to survive in the city of New York. Improbably enough, this subculture ultimately seized power from the entrenched majority, became the city’s largest Christian group, created institutions that affected everyone in the five boroughs and permanently changed what it meant to be a New Yorker. Yet a museum has never devoted a major exhibition to the history of this transformational group — that is, until Friday, when “Catholics in New York, 1808 to 1946,” opens to the public at the Museum of the City of New York . The show, with some 400 objects and images, includes political banners, parochial school report cards, yearbooks going back to the 19th century, vestments, school uniforms, trophies, academic medals and a pew rental receipt. There are holy cards, ceremonial swords, parade sashes and a first communion outfit from 1941. And there are more than 100 family photographs, as well as oral histories on audio and video conducted for the exhibition. “They started as a tiny group, yet changed the city for New Yorkers who were not Catholic, changing the nature of politics, social welfare and public life,” said Sarah M. Henry, the museum’s chief curator. The city’s Roman Catholics have been troubled lately by controversy after controversy, and the exhibition makes it clear that their religion has drawn criticism from its earliest years. Through the generations, negative characterizations of the church changed along with the power of the church — from nativist xenophobia about “the Catholic Menace” to more modern conflicts: anti-Communist fervor, school closings, sexual abuse of children by priests, and the censuring of politicians who favor abortion rights. Though the show coincides with the bicentennial of the founding of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the exhibition was conceived and curated independently by the museum, which received no financing from the archdiocese, it said. The archdiocese and its archives, churches and religious orders lent more than 20 objects to the exhibition, and Cardinal Edward M. Egan is expected to attend the invitation-only opening reception on Thursday. In addition, museum curators took out advertisements in diocesan publications asking for historic artifacts and documents for the 4,000-square-foot exhibition, which will be on view until Dec. 31. Previously, in both historical circles and popular discussion, “for the most part there has been a focus on discrete ethnic groups — the Irish, Italians and Germans, for example — forgetting that most of them had one thing in common: They were Catholic,” said Terry Golway, an exhibition adviser who directs the Kean Center for American History at Kean University in Union, N.J. In recent years, historians have offered new insights about the complex diversity of the Catholic experience in the city, as well as its highly localized organization, its painful accommodation of successive waves of immigrants, and the tremendous differences in Catholic identity within neighborhoods and parishes. Given the reality that New York was the point of entry for so many immigrant Catholic groups, “other cities did not have the mosaic experience of Catholic life that we did in New York,” said Mr. Golway, the editor of the exhibition’s companion publication, “Catholics in New York: Society, Culture and Politics 1808 to 1946.” He added: “Though many immigrants moved on, they left their residue. This is what gave the Catholic community in New York its flavor and complexity.” Among the various Catholic groups worshiping in the city were African-Americans, Slovaks, Czechs, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Ukrainians and Hispanics (on view is an 1842 Spanish Bible), including an influx of Puerto Rican Catholics after the Spanish-American War in 1898. In the end, Mr. Golway said, “all of these groups were of a communion — they were Catholics, and shared the sacraments and other hallmarks of Catholic spirituality.” Catholics were united, too, he added, by “discrimination and the oppression they experienced.” A persecuted minority in colonial New York, Catholics were denied all religious and civil liberties except for the few years in the 1680s when the Catholic Stuart monarchs ruled England. But during the American Revolution they gained religious freedom, and by 1785, the small band of Catholics had established the city’s first parish, St. Peter’s. Of the 70,000 New Yorkers in 1806, 10,000 were Catholic. But starting in the 1840s, immigration swelled the population so rapidly that by the end of the Civil War nearly half of all New Yorkers were Catholic. On view are objects that helped fuel anti-Catholic fervor, like best-selling, luridly fictionalized tales of life in convents, including the 1836 “Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk, of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal.” The author, a prostitute, was eventually exposed as a fraud and died in 1849 in a New York prison. The show offers a celebrated relic of 19th-century life, the so-called Children’s Chalice, a gilded silver chalice that was a gift from Archbishop John Hughes to the 1,400 children of St. Bridget’s School in 1862. As the first archbishop of the newly named Archdiocese of New York, he battled anti-Catholic nativists and initiated the construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, which “became the physical symbol of the powerful presence of the church,” said Deborah Dependahl Waters, the lead curator. He also pushed for separate Catholic institutions to protect his flock from an often hostile environment. The exhibition chronicles the creation of a social welfare system spanning health, education and family care. It included schools, hospitals, colleges and seminaries, as well as asylums for the abandoned, poor and elderly — and cemeteries. Ultimately, many served non-Catholics as well. The exhibition traces the influence of Catholics far beyond such public rituals as St. Patrick’s Day and the San Gennaro Festival to the advent of Catholics’ force in city politics. That chronicle is framed by William R. Grace, who was elected in 1880 as the first Catholic mayor of New York City, and Alfred E. Smith, who became governor and then the first Catholic to be nominated for president by a major political party. Ultimately, aside from their role in building the city’s infrastructure, many Catholics found positions in the human infrastructure, the uniformed municipal services. Six generations of one family documented in the exhibition — the Schiaffos of the Bronx — won appointments to the New York City Department of Sanitation, from 1906 to 2001. The grandness of the Catholic political hegemony is illustrated in the exhibition by a 6-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide “testimonial of appreciation” presented by other aldermen to Thomas Coman, president of the city’s Board of Aldermen, in 1869, in a mammoth carved and gilded walnut frame. There has always been tension between old Catholic arrivals and newer waves of Catholic immigrants. “English-speaking Irish long dominated the Catholic Church, and other ethnicities chafed under that situation,” Mr. Golway said. “The Italians and the Poles and other groups demanded their own churches with priests who appreciated their own ethnic traditions.” Ultimately, a profound difference developed between “territorial” parishes, bound by geography, and “national parishes,” defined by churches that served ethnic groups, said Dr. Waters. “The geography of Catholic New York was different than the geography of New York,” she added. “Catholics navigated an alternative map of the city, a map of the parishes.” So, when speaking of St. Brendan’s, Transfiguration, St. Teresa’s, St. Charles Borromeo and St. Rita’s, New York’s Catholics were actually referring to neighborhoods like Norwood, Little Italy, Woodside, Brooklyn Heights and Willowbrook, respectively. The exhibition ends in 1946, when “the familiar prewar Catholic world was remade,” Dr. Henry said. The G.I. Bill became the gateway to higher education, spurring migration to the suburbs. Historical judgment has not yet coalesced on the postwar Catholic presence in New York, Mr. Golway said: the era of liturgical reforms, declining vocations and ever-new immigrant Catholic groups. “That change is only beginning to manifest itself,” he said, adding: “We don’t know how that story will end.”

Museum of the City of New York
Christians and Christianity
Roman Catholic Church


For Every Character, a Different Storm Story

Abstract: ED SHEVLIN looked out over a mountain range of soggy trash in the parking lot of Jacob Riis Park in Queens and proclaimed it “an tubaiste mor” — a big disaster. The words were in Irish, the language that survives in parts of Ireland. Few people in New York City are as immersed in the language as Mr. Shevlin, 52, a New York City sanitation worker who picked up phrases growing up in a heavily Irish-American neighborhood the Rockaways. He began to study it and banter with Irish immigrants on his trash route through familiar blocks. And now few people are as deeply immersed in the damage wreaked upon the neighborhood as Mr. Shevlin, who for the foreseeable future is assigned to the immense cleanup: clearing battered sections of the boardwalk where he played as a child, and carting away contents of friends’ houses. It is all hauled to the parking lot: a temporary dump with the remnants of people’s lives piled several stories high in two wide dunes stretching for a quarter mile. “If these piles could talk, they’d be screaming,” said Mr. Shevlin, whose own apartment on Beach 103rd Street stayed dry, if without power as of Thursday. His parents’ apartment, and his brother’s house, were both flooded and severely damaged. “I like to think I’m a strong guy, but this devastation has really gotten to me,” said Mr. Shevlin, who wears his green Department of Sanitation uniform proudly. “I’ll be wearing this uniform every day for months,” he said. “We were the first boots on the ground and we’ll be the last to leave.” Mr. Shevlin was profiled a year ago in this space, as the subject of the inaugural Character Study column. Hurricane Sandy ’s effects seem to have permeated New York City so deeply that nearly every one of the 50 or so New Yorkers who followed Mr. Shevlin in the column has had a telling hurricane experience. There was good fortune for A. J. Gogia , who runs a school for taxi drivers in Queens and kept gas in his tank because students who work at gas stations brought him cans of it, like apples for the teacher. There was the wistful resiliency of Otto Mond , the 80-year-old Manhattan man who planned on running his 19th New York City Marathon . With the race canceled, he went for a casual four-mile jog and vowed to “get ’em next year.” There was worry, as in the case of Helen Hays , who monitors the tern populations on Gull Island, off the tip of Long Island, where the battering waves destroyed part of the dock (she remained on the comparatively safer island of Manhattan). There was the sly resourcefulness practiced by Pete Caldera , the sportswriter and Sinatra singer. His apartment in Murray Hill lost power, so he had to write his articles at a local bar, something Ol’ Blue Eyes would have endorsed. In Queens, Mike Greenstein, the old-time strongman known as the Mighty Atom Jr., who at 91 can still pull his car with his teeth, lived two blocks from Mr. Shevlin. After the storm, he and his girlfriend hopped in that car and drove to Florida to escape the misery, his neighbors said. To the west, Breezy Point was reduced to a surreal wasteland by fire and floodwaters. Billy Mackay lived there and worked summers as a cabana boy at the Silver Gull Beach Club, which first opened in 1963 and was used for the filming of the movie “The Flamingo Kid.” The club was devastated by the storm, though the owners plan to rebuild. As for Mr. Mackay, a phone call to his home number yielded only an automated message saying, perhaps appropriately, “All international circuits to the country you are calling are busy right now.” To the east, in the Rosedale neighborhood on Jamaica Bay, Kim Zatto , 46, a fifth-generation bait seller in the Seaman clan, the city’s last eeling family, watched floodwaters envelop her house, and her father’s and her uncle’s on either side. The family’s curbside bait store, out front, was nearly submerged in water that also ruined the family’s packing sheds and freezers. The frozen bait had to be discarded. Of the live bait, only the eels survived, in an underwater pen in the creek out back. Doris V. Amen , a flamboyant funeral director in Brooklyn, stayed busy during the storm, which left her condominium in Brighton Beach without electricity. She spent more than a week in a room above her business, the Jurek-Park Slope Funeral Home near Green-Wood Cemetery, and several days cleaning up from her annual Halloween party in the funeral home’s basement, held, as usual, on Saturday night. She had used one coffin for a buffet table and another to hold the beer. She had dressed as Lady Gaga and belted out rock ’n’ roll songs with her band. While she was cleaning up, the day after the hurricane hit, a new client called. The caller, Aris Ziagos, said he was having trouble recovering the body of his mother, Virginia Ziagos, 70, who had just died at Bellevue Hospital Center. Ms. Amen said she hopped into her 1978 silver Cadillac hearse — which had also been a party prop — and barreled through flooded streets into blacked-out Lower Manhattan, only to be told by hospital officials that the body was not available. “Apparently they did not know who they were dealing with,” said Ms. Amen, who can haul coffins while wearing a tight dress and high-heel pumps, all without chipping her purple nail polish or disturbing the long electronic cigarette she keeps clenched in her teeth. She told a rollicking tale of how, armed with a flashlight and her outsize Brooklyn moxie, she went to three city morgues in search of the body and finally picked it up at the one in Queens later that night. Never one to waste a good opportunity for self-promotion, Ms. Amen arranged for the wake to be filmed by a German television crew. The storm’s surge up the East River flooded streets in Long Island City, Queens, where Stanley Wissak , 85, owns a cab company called 55 Stan. It washed into his garage and lot and destroyed some of his fleet of 140 yellow cabs. But there was Mr. Wissak at 4 the next morning at the garage, which lost electricity. “If you’re the man with the keys, you can’t lay down — you got to keep going and make the best of it,” said Mr. Wissak, who settled into the cramped booth behind the bulletproof glass and dispatched drivers for the day shift, as he has done since the 1940s. “With the subways shut down, the drivers made up to $400 a day,” he said. “One of my guys made 600 bucks driving someone to Stamford — biggest fare I’ve ever seen.” Through the gas shortage, Mr. Wissak kept his cabs fueled from his private gas pump. He rebuffed drivers offering him $10 for a gallon, he said, and potential thieves were deterred by the police officer the local precinct assigned to guard the pump. Catherine Kendrick , 78, dock master and lifeguard-at-large for the City of Yonkers, evacuated her office on the city pier, where she has kept watch for 60 years, even after her lifeguard husband, Frank, died while rescuing a woman during a storm 10 years ago. Ms. Kendrick’s health is shaky and over the past year, while sitting sentry at the pier, she had been crocheting a “going-away blanket” to cover her coffin when she dies. She rescued the blanket, which took on new meaning for her after she spent nearly 10 days with no power and sleeping on a lawn chair in her dank, dark apartment. “The storm changed my mind,” she said on Wednesday. “I’m going to redo my apartment in pastel colors to match the blanket, and I’m going to use that blanket in life, not death.” Lois Kirschenbaum , 79, New York City’s longest-standing opera buff, clung tight to her battery-operated radio while going without electricity for five days in her longtime rent-controlled apartment in the East Village. “I survived on QXR and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches,” said Ms. Kirschenbaum, who is legally blind but has been going almost nightly to ballet and classical music performances in New York since the early 1950s (and to the stage door afterward). She continued her streak during the blackout, she said. With a flashlight and help from strangers on the street, she took two buses nearly every night to Lincoln Center, she said. “This storm brought so much tragedy, it could make an opera,” she said. “But I certainly wouldn’t want to write it.” Nearby, on East Ninth Street, the Rev. Patrick Moloney , 81, known as “the I.R.A. priest” for his championing of Irish republican causes, also lost power for five days in the brownstone he has run for 50 years as a shelter for troubled teenagers and illegal immigrants. Father Moloney worked with the Black Panthers and spent four years in federal prison in the 1990s in connection with a $7.4 million Brink’s armored car robbery in Rochester, which authorities said he helped pull off to fill I.R.A. coffers. He managed to get gas to keep his generator going — “God works in mysterious ways” — and he put out extension cords so that neighbors could charge their phones and other devices. He said he cooked a big Irish stew and dispensed meals and sermons to neighbors. “I told them, “This is an act of God, not just an act of nature,’ ” he recalled. Shane Baker , 44, the gentile champion of Yiddish theater, went around checking on all his elderly friends who are veterans of the bygone Yiddish stage. He also made the rounds with the actor Fyvush Finkel and swapped stories at local coffee shops. Then there was Harvey Bennett , 61, the owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, on Long Island, who has spent his life optimistically throwing bottled messages into the sea. He lost his roof to the hurricane winds, but not his hope. “When all this is over, I’m going down to the ocean to throw another bottle in,” he said.


Officer Figoski’s Killer Gets 45 Years to Life

Abstract: First, the slain officer’s mother told the court how it felt to know she would never get a kiss from her son again. Then came the officer’s ex-wife. Finally, his four daughters, ages 15 to 21, filling the whole prosecution table, delivered a tearful, four-part elegy of loss and extinguished dreams. “A tough act to follow,” the judge declared. But the law said that the defendant, Lamont Pride, must have a chance to speak before being sentenced on Thursday afternoon for the murder of Officer Peter J. Figoski on a cold night in Brooklyn in 2011. And so Mr. Pride stood up in his orange prisoner’s jumpsuit to express remorse. “I just want to apologize to my family for putting them through this,” he said. He paused for a moment. “And I want to let my two brothers know, as long as I got you in my corner till the end, we’re going to stand tall.” Then he sat back down, without a word or a glance for the family of the veteran 47-year-old New York City police officer whose life he took as he fled the basement of a house where he had gone to rob a drug dealer. Justice Alan D. Marrus did not seem much inclined toward mercy after that, though by the tenor of his remarks he had pretty well made up his mind before he put on his robe that day. He handed Mr. Pride, a 28-year-old ex-convict who had served time for robbery, the maximum prison term available under the law: 45 years to life — emphasis on life. Image Officer Peter J. Figoski Credit New York Police Department, via Associated Press “I want to make crystal clear,” Justice Marrus said, “that it is my intention that the defendant serve his sentence and never get out of prison.” The remarks by Officer Figoski’s family at the sentencing provided an alternative narrative to the one in the official reports. On Dec. 11, 2011, said the oldest, Christine, 21, the four Figoski sisters, who lived with him in West Babylon, on Long Island, got their customary “I love you” text from their devoted father , who worked the midnight shift in one of the city’s most violent precincts, the 75th, in East New York, Brooklyn, where he had spent his 22-year career. They went to bed, she said, “with the worries of your average teenage girl.” They were awakened by a call from their mother who told them their father had been in an accident. Prosecutors said it was no accident. Officer Figoski and his partner had been dispatched to 25 Pine Street in Cypress Hills around 2:15 a.m. on Dec. 12 on a report of a robbery in progress. In the basement apartment, Mr. Pride had pistol-whipped a tenant and stolen $770 from him, Mr. Pride later told detectives. Officer Figoski headed into the building as Mr. Pride and an accomplice tried to flee. In a brief confrontation, Mr. Pride fired his gun once into Officer Figoski’s face. “Peter was an obstacle to him,” Officer Figoski’s mother, Mary Ann Figoski, told the court on Thursday, “so he eliminated him and fled into the night.” Officer Figoski’s partner sprinted after Mr. Pride and caught him several blocks away. At the hospital, said Paulette Figoski, Officer Figoski’s ex-wife, “he had blood dripping from the back of his head and he was lifeless, and my children had to witness this unbearable sight.” Image Mr. Pride, center, being handcuffed in court Thursday. Credit Pool photo by Charles Eckert Christine Figoski told the court, “Nothing at that moment felt real, and up to this day it still doesn’t.” Officer Figoski’s youngest daughter, Corinne, 15, told the judge, “Our dad was our world, our everything.” “He made everything better, and Lamont Pride stole that from us,” said Caitlyn Figoski, 19, picking up the thread. “Our father will never be able to walk us down the aisle at our weddings, something that every father and every daughter dream of.” Mr. Pride’s lawyers argued at trial that Mr. Pride, who has a prior felony robbery conviction in North Carolina and two misdemeanor convictions, pulled the trigger by accident. He was convicted of second-degree murder , burglary and manslaughter but acquitted of first-degree murder, which in these circumstances would have carried a mandatory life sentence. Outside the courtroom, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick J. Lynch, backed by dozens of uniformed police officers, said that while Mr. Pride might have stolen from the Figoski family’s future, there was a future nonetheless. “This family, as they grow, as their children grow, the next generation of Figoskis will be at the victim impact statement” to make sure that Mr. Pride does not receive parole. “The battle is not over,” he said. Then Officer Figoski’s family filed out of the courthouse, tight-faced and silent, as a hallway full of officers applauded.

Lamont Pride
Murders
Peter J Figoski
NYPD
Criminal Sentence
NYC
Alan D Marrus
Attacks on Police


North Korea’s Nuclear Blasts Keep Getting Stronger

Abstract: North Korea said it conducted its fifth underground nuclear test on Friday. Since the first test , almost a decade ago, the size of the resulting earthquakes from the country’s test site have increased, indicating that the devices are becoming increasingly powerful. The device detonated on Friday looks to have had a force equivalent of 10 kilotons of TNT, according to the South’s Defense Ministry. In contrast, the last device tested by the North, in January, had a force equivalent of six kilotons of TNT, the South’s intelligence agency said. The aboveground Trinity Test in New Mexico in July 1945, which ushered in the nuclear age, had a yield of 20 kilotons. But power is not the only measure of a device’s lethality. The weapon must also have a way to be delivered. South Korean, American and Japanese officials want to determine whether the North Koreans are capable of building a miniaturized nuclear device that can be mounted on a ballistic missile and successfully detonated at a target hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the launch site. In the past decade, South Korean and American experts have said that the North appears to be closer to achieving that goal. Here is a timeline of how North Korea built up the capability of its nuclear weapons. The earthquake magnitudes are from the United States Geological Survey, which differ from those measured by the South Korean authorities. They may also be slightly revised from numbers reported immediately after the events. Oct. 8, 2006: 9:35 p.m. E.T. Magnitude of Earthquake : 4.3 Device : United States officials said at the time that the weapon used plutonium and had a yield of less than one kiloton. Missiles : Three months before the nuclear test, North Korea fired a barrage of missiles into the Sea of Japan, including a Taepodong 2 intercontinental missile designed to be capable of reaching Alaska. The Taepodong 2 test was a failure, with the missile falling into the sea before its first stage burned out. Image A screen showing the seismic waves on Friday. The device detonated on Friday appears to have been the equivalent of 10 kilotons of TNT, according to South Korea’s Defense Ministry. Credit Ahn Young-Joon/Associated Press May 24, 2009: 8:54 p.m. E.T. Magnitude of Earthquake : 4.7 Device: Chinese scientists estimated that this bomb had a yield of 2.35 kilotons. Missiles : A failed satellite launch using a Taepodong 2 missile in April 2009 sent its payload into the Pacific Ocean. On July 4, 2009, North Korea launched three missiles into the sea, with none apparently flying more than 300 miles. Feb 12, 2013: 9:57 p.m. E.T. Magnitude of Earthquake : 5.1 Device: North Korea said this bomb, stronger than the first two tests, was miniaturized. After the launch, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency estimated with “moderate confidence” that North Korea had learned how to make a miniaturized nuclear weapon capable of being delivered by a ballistic missile. But the report said the weapon’s “reliability will be low.” Military officials in the United States and South Korea publicly expressed doubt that North Korea had actually developed such a warhead. Missiles : In May 2013, North Korea launched three short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan. Jan. 5, 2016: 8:30 p.m. E.T. Magnitude of Earthquake : 5.1 Device : North Korea claimed this device was a hydrogen bomb . In May, American and South Korean intelligence officials concluded that North Korea was now able to mount nuclear warheads on short- and medium-range missiles that would be capable of hitting Japan and South Korea. Missiles : In April, North Korea launched a missile from a submarine . Sept. 8, 2016: 8:30 p.m. E.T. Magnitude of Earthquake : 5.3 Device : South Korean officials said this was North Korea’s most powerful device to date. Missiles : In June, North Korea successfully launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile into high altitude after five consecutive failures. The missile may be capable of reaching American forces based on Guam, in the Pacific Ocean.

North Korea
Earthquake
South Korea
Nuclear weapon
Missiles and Missile Defense
Nuclear weapons testing


Gas Leaks From North Sea Rig for Third Day

Abstract: LONDON — Total, the French oil producer, said that natural gas leaked from a North Sea platform off the coast of Scotland for a third day on Tuesday, prompting nearby rigs to be evacuated. Total evacuated 238 workers from the area and a rival, Royal Dutch Shell , said it closed its nearby Shearwater platform due to the risk of an explosion. Total, which is continuing to investigate the cause of the leak, said that it might need to sink an emergency well to stop the gas, a process that could take six months. “All necessary measures are being taken to respond appropriately to the situation and to minimize its impact,” Total said in a statement. “Preliminary assessments indicate no significant impact to the environment and dispersants are not considered necessary at this stage.” Total said it had temporarily stopped all production in the Elgin, Franklin and West Franklin fields. The company’s shares fell 6 percent in Paris on Tuesday. The incident brought back memories of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, even though no injuries were reported and any environmental impact from a gas leak is considered likely to be smaller than that of an oil spill. Following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the authorities responsible for regulating drilling operations in the North Sea said they would review their safety rules. The gas started to leak Sunday from Total’s Elgin platform, which is about 240 kilometers, or 150 miles, east of the Scottish city of Aberdeen. The leak began after work was carried out to plug and abandon a well that was no longer producing gas. Remote monitoring of the well then revealed that gas continued to be released, according to a statement by the British Department of Energy and Climate Change. Total said a surveillance airplane spotted a sheen on the water close to the platform. The sheen is believed to consist of drilling mud or light condensate from the gas. Shell said it evacuated 52 of the 90 workers on its Shearwater platform, which is about seven kilometers from Total’s Elgin platform. Shell said it also moved another 68 personnel to the mainland from the nearby Hans Deul drilling rig. The evacuation was “purely precautionary,” Shell said. The Department of Energy and Climate Change said the priority was to “plan an appropriate response to contain the leak and minimize the impact to the environment.”

North Sea
Total S.A
Royal Dutch Shell Plc
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline


Michigan State Embraces Role of Underdog as It Prepares to Meet Alabama

Abstract: EAST LANSING, Mich. — Perhaps it is appropriate that Michigan State’s opponent in a College Football Playoff semifinal will be Alabama, the one program that makes pretty much everyone look like an underdog. Throughout the Spartans’ rise under Coach Mark Dantonio, they have been fueled by an unyielding sense that no matter what they accomplish, there will always be doubters. Sometimes the disrespect toward Michigan State is obvious for everyone to see, and other times it feels a bit contrived — but there’s no denying that Dantonio’s players feed off it. “I would rather be the underdog, I guess,” Spartans defensive back Demetrious Cox said. “It’s a better feeling when you have to prove people wrong.” To understand Michigan State’s attitude, the perpetual chip on the program’s shoulder, you must first look about 65 miles down the road at the university’s biggest rival. Michigan, with all its tradition and national prestige, dominated its series with the Spartans for about 40 years, and the Wolverines do not even consider Michigan State their top rival. That distinction belongs to Ohio State. Image Get the latest tweets from @NYTSports , including breaking news, analysis and live updates. After Dantonio took over in East Lansing, he lost his first meeting with Michigan, in 2007. After that game, Wolverines running back Mike Hart compared Michigan State to a “little brother” — and the Spartans have won seven of eight in the series since. “When you come here, and you’re an out-of-state guy, you really don’t know about the Michigan rivalry like that,” said Cox, who is from Pennsylvania. “You know about it, but you don’t really know until you get here and you see the ‘little brother’ video, and you see all the videos that they play in meeting rooms.” Last year, after the Spartans beat the Wolverines, 35-11, Michigan State was upset because a Michigan player had driven a tent stake into the ground before the game in an effort to fire up his teammates. The gesture went largely unnoticed until the Spartans made a big issue of it. When the Wolverines are involved, there may be no slight too small to get Michigan State’s attention. Now the Spartans have to beat Alabama, the national champion in 2009, 2011 and 2012. Dantonio has played down his team’s penchant for using an opponent’s lofty reputation as motivation. “Everybody keeps saying we have a chip on our shoulder all the time,” he said. “Maybe it’s because I don’t smile up here often enough. The chip on our shoulder is relative to us, how we play, how we respond. Has nothing to do with who we are playing against, because we have a great deal of respect for everybody we play against. But the chip on our shoulder is for — it’s just, we need to get ourselves ready to play.” But Michigan State can always find critics to silence. This is a team that has won 38 of its last 42 games, yet nobody needs to remind the Spartans who is supposed to contend for national championships and who is not. For example, Michigan State’s last five recruiting classes were ranked 27th, 37th, 47th, 19th and 18th by Scout .com. Alabama’s were ranked seventh, second, fourth, first and second. So even though the Spartans have earned plenty of respect this year as Playoff participants, do not expect all this glamour to change Michigan State’s approach. “We weren’t recruited that way, so that mind-set never kind of set in for us — to think that we’re owed anything,” defensive lineman Joel Heath said. “I think you’ve got to be aware of that with younger guys, guys coming in thinking that they’re entitled to something, but as of now, we don’t really have that mind-set.” True to form, Michigan State has done some of its best work this season as an underdog. The Spartans won at Michigan when the Wolverines botched a punt on the final play, and beat Ohio State despite an injury that prevented their star quarterback, Connor Cook, from playing. After winning as a favorite in the Big Ten title game against Iowa, third-ranked Michigan State is back to being the underdog against second-ranked Alabama in Thursday night’s Cotton Bowl matchup in Arlington, Tex. Back in September, there was a bit of a stir when Georgia was installed as a slight favorite over the Crimson Tide — Alabama had not been an underdog since the 2009 Southeastern Conference title game against Florida. The Tide responded by drubbing Georgia, 38-10. Against Michigan State, Alabama opened as a 9 ½-point favorite. Business as usual for the Tide. And for the Spartans. “We love that role; we embrace it,” Cook said. “It’s kind of who we are as a program with the chip on our shoulder. No matter who we’re facing, if we are the underdog, if we are the favorite, no matter what, we go into each and every game trying to prove something.”

Michigan State
College football
Playoffs
University of Alabama


Johnny Depp and Australia’s Agriculture Minister in a Feud With Legs

Abstract: An international feud between a celebrated Hollywood actor and an Australian government official, already a strange spectacle, keeps getting stranger. In one corner is the actor, Johnny Depp, who said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live ” on Monday that the official looked as if he had been inbred with a tomato. In the other corner is Barnaby Joyce, Australia’s deputy prime minister and agriculture minister. He said on Wednesday that he was “inside” Mr. Depp’s head, like Hannibal Lecter, the killer cannibal in the movie “The Silence of the Lambs.” Why, a fair person might wonder, would a high-ranking Australian official and a cooler-than-thou actor descend into name-calling across oceans? Why did it lead to perhaps Mr. Depp’s worst acting performance ever, in the form of a video apology? Does it have something to do with a threat to kill healthy dogs? Valid questions, all. Let’s catch you up. Who Let the Dogs In? Mr. Depp, 52, known for playing such offbeat roles as Hunter S. Thompson, Edward Scissorhands and Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, was in Australia last year to film the fifth installment in the franchise. The trouble began when his wife, Amber Heard, 30, arrived in Australia on April 21, 2015, with their two Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, to visit him. The actress had disembarked from her private jet without declaring the dogs, who were supposed to be placed in quarantine upon arrival. Her lawyer, Jeremy Kirk, later said that Ms. Heard believed that Mr. Depp’s staff had taken care of the pets’ paperwork. They had not. The Australian authorities were not happy, and set down the conditions for the couple to make things right. Mr. Joyce had strong words about Mr. Depp: “It basically looks like he sneaked them in,” he declared in May 2015 . “Mr. Depp either has to take his dogs back to California or we’re going to have to euthanize them.” That struck Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard as a tad extreme. Sympathetic observers started a hashtag, #WarOnTerrier , and created a petition asking for canine leniency. But celebrities aren’t above the law, Mr. Joyce maintained. “If you start letting movie stars, even though they’ve been the ‘sexiest man alive’ twice, to come into our nation, then why don’t we just break the laws for everybody?” Mr. Joyce said. In the end, Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard agreed to send the pups back to the United States. Then, on Wednesday night, word came that she had filed for divorce, after 15 months of marriage. A Fine, and That Video In April, Ms. Heard pleaded guilty to providing false information on her passenger card. Prosecutors dropped the more serious charges, which could have led to two years in jail and a fine of 20,000 Australian dollars (about $15,350). Video The actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard acknowledged their transgressions to Australia after Ms. Heard pleaded guilty to illegally bringing two dogs into the country last year. Credit Credit AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AND WATER RESOURCES, via Associated Press Ms. Heard and Mr. Depp made a video apology, which the Australian government uploaded to YouTube. The video, to put it bluntly, is awkward and quite excruciating to watch. “Australia is free of many pests and diseases that are commonplace around the world,” Ms. Heard says without enthusiasm. “That is why Australia has to have such strong biosecurity laws.” Mr. Depp continues, with the energy of a man who hadn’t had his espresso yet: “And Australians are just as unique, both warm and direct. When you disrespect Australian law, they will tell you firmly.” “I am truly sorry that Pistol and Boo were not declared,” Ms. Heard says. “Protecting Australia is important.” Mr. Depp closes with a passionless word of advice: “Declare everything when you enter Australia. Thanks.” Mr. Joyce was unimpressed, mocking the couple’s video by saying it looked as if Mr. Depp was “auditioning for ‘The Godfather.’” “I don’t think he’ll get an Academy Award for his performance,” he said, according to the BBC . A War of Words On “ Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Mr. Depp revisited the whole saga, dryly criticizing “the choice they made to utilize the taxpayers’ dollars to globally chase down a couple teacup Yorkies and give them 50 hours to live.” Mr. Kimmel asked who had written the video apology, and Mr. Depp dodged by replying: “A genius.” He said he didn’t watch the iPhone-produced video before it was released “because I didn’t want to kill myself.” Then he turned to the subject of Mr. Joyce, saying: “He looks somehow inbred with a tomato. It’s not a criticism, I was a little worried. He might explode.” Mr. Joyce lobbed his own barbs the next day, telling reporters, “I’m inside his head.” “I’m pulling little strings and pulling little levers. Long after I’ve forgotten about Mr. Depp, he’s remembering me,” he said, according to The Associated Press. “I’m turning into his Hannibal Lecter.” But Mr. Joyce said the case had serious implications, and he thanked Mr. Depp for the publicity given to biosecurity laws. “We can’t have rabies coming into the country,” he said, according to T he Sydney Morning Herald . “Who does the fella think he was?”

Johnny Depp
Australia
Barnaby Joyce
Dog
Amber Heard
Environment


John Cashin Jr., Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 82

Abstract: John L. Cashin Jr., a civil rights campaigner who was the first black candidate for governor of Alabama since Reconstruction, mounting an unsuccessful challenge in 1970 to the arch-segregationist George C. Wallace, died on Monday in Washington, where he lived in recent years. He was 82. The cause was kidney failure, said his daughter, Sheryll Cashin. A dentist, Dr. Cashin came from a family that had long fought for social justice. Their struggle was chronicled by Ms. Cashin in her recent book, “The Agitator’s Daughter,” published by PublicAffairs in 2008. The book also relates her father’s later troubles with the law. In 2009, The Huntsville Times in Alabama called Dr. Cashin “one of the most ferocious civil rights lions in Alabama back in the day.” Dr. Cashin founded the National Democratic Party of Alabama in 1968 and was its chairman until it disbanded in 1976. A predominantly black splinter party, it was conceived in opposition to the fervently anti-integrationist Democratic Party embodied in the region by Wallace, who had been governor from 1963 to 1967 and by 1970 was seeking a second term. As expected, Wallace won the governorship in a landslide in the 1970 general election, with 74.51 percent of the vote. Dr. Cashin, with 14.68 percent, finished second, ahead of several independent and minor-party candidates. (There was no Republican candidate.) Wallace, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency four times, was later elected to third and fourth terms as governor. Paralyzed from the waist down as a result of an assassination attempt in 1972, he publicly moderated his views on segregation toward the end of his life. He died in 1998. The party Dr. Cashin founded did succeed in changing the face of local offices throughout the state. In 1968, after Alabama refused to place its candidates on the ballot for the general election, the party sued. The case was ultimately heard by the United States Supreme Court, which ordered the state to put them on. In November, 17 of the splinter party’s candidates won local offices in Alabama’s Black Belt, the region, named for its rich, dark soil, comprising 17 counties in the central and western part of the state. But in Greene County, near Tuscaloosa, a judge defied the high court’s order and refused to place six of the party’s candidates on local ballots that fall. The case returned to the Supreme Court, which voided the results of the general election in the county and mandated a special election there. In that election, held in July 1969, the six candidates, all African-American, prevailed. Their victory — four seats on the county commission and two on the school board — was the first time since 1819 that Greene County’s government had not been controlled by whites. John Logan Cashin Jr. was born in Huntsville on April 16, 1928. His father, John Logan Sr., a dentist, and his mother, the former Grace Brandon, a junior high school principal, were active in civil rights work. His paternal grandfather, Herschel V. Cashin, had served in the Alabama Legislature during Reconstruction. After attending Fisk University , John Cashin Jr. received a bachelor’s degree in natural science from Tennessee State University . He earned a D.D.S. from Meharry Medical College , a historically black institution in Nashville, and joined his father in practice. In the 1950s, he served with the Army Dental Corps in France. The younger Dr. Cashin ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Huntsville in 1964. A licensed pilot, he took to the air in his single-engine plane each election season for years to drop campaign leaflets in the state’s black districts. Partly because of his civil rights activities, Dr. Cashin’s life had no small share of turmoil. As his daughter’s memoir recounts, he was long monitored by the F.B.I. The Internal Revenue Service pursued a case against him for years, saying he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. (The amount was later greatly reduced.) Although Dr. Cashin had been “moderately wealthy,” as The New York Times wrote in 1970, he poured nearly all of his personal resources into the party he founded, leaving his family in vastly reduced circumstances, Ms. Cashin wrote. In April 1982, Dr. Cashin was convicted of perjury in federal court in New York. He had been charged with giving false statements to a judge while trying to arrange bail for a narcotics dealer. He was sentenced to four months in prison. Later that April, Dr. Cashin pleaded guilty in an Alabama court to two counts of second-degree theft for having cashed his mother’s Social Security and pension checks for at least several years after her death. As The Huntsville Times reported, he served 17 months in a minimum-security prison. Dr. Cashin’s first wife, the former Joan Carpenter, whom he married in 1957, died in 1997. He is survived by their three children: his daughter, Ms. Cashin, and two sons, John M. and Carroll; his second wife, Louise White Cashin; and five grandchildren.

Blacks
Alabama
Civil Rights and Liberties
Deaths (Obituaries)
Cashin John L. Jr.


Sweden Edges United States

Abstract: Linus Soderstrom made 46 saves, Alexander Nylander scored, and Sweden defeated the United States, 1-0, in a Group A round-robin game at the world junior hockey championship in Helsinki.


Catholics Mobilize After Setback Over Reproductive Law

Abstract: MANILA — After a stinging, high-profile defeat in December, Catholic groups in the Philippines are organizing an effort to influence congressional elections that could put the church’s political power to the test. “We haven’t had a reason to come together and vote as Catholics,” said Lorna Melegrito, the executive director of Pro-Life Philippines. “We have a reason now.” In December, lawmakers in the Philippines passed a reproductive health law — despite vocal opposition by the Roman Catholic Church — that mandates sex education in schools, provides free or subsidized contraceptives for poor women and puts government family planning officers in remote parts of the country. Ms. Melegrito said her organization was one of many Catholic groups around the Philippines that were organizing a grass-roots campaign in preparation for the May elections, in hopes of unseating members of Congress who supported the reproductive health measure, popularly known as the R.H. law. “It is going to be a difficult campaign for the politicians who supported the immorality of the R.H. law,” she said. Another organization, Catholic Vote Philippines, which was formed in December in reaction to the new law, is compiling a database of locally elected candidates, including members of the House of Representatives, and listing how their positions align with Catholic beliefs, said Dr. Ricardo B. Boncan, the group’s executive director. On Tuesday, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines issued a statement outlining the church’s position on various political issues, including its continued opposition to the reproductive health law, and encouraged Catholics to be politically active. “We commend and support lay initiatives to form circles of discernment to choose worthy candidates and even to run as candidates in order to bring the values of God’s kingdom into the public discourse,” the statement said. The church’s fight against the reproductive health bill was long successful; the measure was introduced in every new Congress for 13 years but until recently never came to a vote. President Benigno S. Aquino III identified the bill as a priority not long after his election in 2010, to help address the country’s poverty and high birthrate. After it passed the House of Representatives on Dec. 12 on a second reading — a crucial hurdle — the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines responded with a strongly worded pastoral message titled “Contraception Is Corruption!” To legislators who voted against the measure, the letter said, “The church will remember you as the heroes of our nation, those who have said no to corruption and who care for the true welfare of the people, especially the poor.” To those who voted for it, it warned, “God knows and sees what you are doing.” However, the measure passed and was signed into law on Dec. 21. Harry Roque, an associate professor at the University of the Philippines College of Law, said the defeat showed that the church did not wield the political power in the Philippines that some claimed it did. He said its influence had been diminished by its inability to deliver a “Catholic vote,” and he noted that Philippine law generally followed that of the United States on the separation of church and state. Mr. Roque argued that the church’s influence depended on who was president. Past presidents embraced and empowered the Catholic Church to seek legitimacy, he said. “The PNoy Aquino administration does not need any legitimizing from the church because it has a huge popular mandate,” he said, using the president’s nickname. “The influence of the church depends upon who is in power and if that person needs the backing of the church.” By all accounts, mustering a unified Catholic vote in the Philippines will be difficult. Aurea Abrera is an example of that challenge. Ms. Abrera, 57, recently rode by bus for seven hours through the night from the northern province of Quezon to join more than 500,000 jostling, mostly barefoot Catholic devotees at a predawn procession here in the capital. “I am a believer,” she said, looking frail and exhausted as she stood in Rizal Park in the intense afternoon sun. But she is opposed to her church’s position on contraception. “We needed this law,” she said. “We have so many poor children scattered around our streets,” she added, gesturing to a group of street children foraging in a trash can. “The church doesn’t tell me what to think.”

Philippines
Election
Catholic Church
Sex education
Legislation
Separation of church and state
Birth control
Benigno S Aquino III


Afghan President Demands Pakistan Take Military Action Against Taliban

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — After courting Pakistan for more than a year, President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan changed course on Monday and warned that he would lodge a complaint with the United Nations Security Council if Pakistan refuses to take military action against Taliban leaders operating from its soil to wage an increasingly deadly insurgency across Afghanistan. Mr. Ghani has tried to persuade Pakistan’s leadership, particularly its powerful military, to bring the insurgent leaders to the negotiating table. But an increase in Taliban violence, including a brutal attack last week in the heart of Kabul that killed at least 64 people and wounded more than 300, has forced the Afghan president to effectively end the negotiations, which have been a cornerstone effort of his troubled time in office. “I want to make it clear that we do not expect Pakistan to bring the Taliban to talks,” Mr. Ghani said Monday in a rare joint session of the two houses of the Afghan Parliament. “If we do not see a change, despite our hopes and efforts for regional cooperation, we will be forced to turn to the U.N. Security Council and launch serious diplomatic efforts.” In quadrilateral talks over the past year that also involved the United States and China, Pakistan had pledged “in writing” to go after Taliban leaders who refused to join the peace process, Mr. Ghani said. That is what Mr. Ghani said he has asked Pakistan to do: “Take military action against those who have their centers in Pakistan.” Despite promises from Pakistan to bring Taliban leaders to talks in the hopes of ending the long conflict, the peace efforts seem to have gone nowhere . The insurgency has begun another spring offensive, which promises to be bloodier than in years past. More Than 14 Years After U.S. Invasion, the Taliban Control Large Parts of Afghanistan At least one-fifth of the country is controlled or contested by the Taliban. In his address on Monday, Mr. Ghani broke with the former administration’s tactic of describing the Taliban as discontented brothers in the hopes of urging them to talks. Mr. Ghani called the insurgents terrorists who “take pleasure in the torn-up bodies of our innocents,” and their leaders “slavelike” and involved in narcotics mafias. He also declared the end of “amnesty without cause” for arrested Taliban, many of whom had in the past returned to the battlefield after release from prisons. The Taliban were quick to respond; a spokesman posted messages on Twitter during Mr. Ghani’s address. “The nation is not blind — it realizes who is a slave, and who is a hireling,” said Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, posting a picture of senior government officials listening to the former commander of NATO and United States forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John F. Campbell. “We will continue fighting until the occupation is ended.” Although the door for peace talks is not completely shut, officials now say Mr. Ghani, under enormous pressure because of stagnation on every other front, was forced to take a tougher stance as Pakistan repeatedly failed to fulfill promises. Mr. Ghani’s advisers are nevertheless encouraged that during the quadrilateral process, Pakistan has come out of a long-held denial about Taliban sanctuaries on its soil, both in private discussions as well as in public. Satraj Aziz, the adviser on foreign policy to Pakistan’s prime minister, said last month that his country had influence over the Taliban, but not control. “We have some influence on them because their leadership is in Pakistan, and they get some medical facilities, their families are here,” he said. “So we can use those levers to pressurize them to say, Come to the table.” Haroun Mir, a political analyst based in Kabul, said he did not see Afghanistan capable of rallying the kind of international pressure to isolate Pakistan, which has displayed more skill at dealing with such pressures in the past. “The fact that this process occurred in the presence of China and the United States, at least these two nations will now know that Afghanistan tried with honesty,” Mr. Mir said. “Whether the capacity is there to follow up — that is early to tell.”

Pakistan
Taliban
Afghanistan
Ashraf Ghani
UN


City Council Speaker Opposes Plan to Raze St. Vincent’s Hospital Buildings

Abstract: The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn , said on Tuesday that she opposed the demolition of the large number of hospital buildings called for by a controversial new development proposal for St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan. “I cannot support the proposal as it appears before you today,” Ms. Quinn said in a statement that an aide read at a public hearing of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Ms. Quinn represents the city’s Third Council District, which includes Greenwich Village, where the hospital is situated. In an interview after the hearing, Ms. Quinn said that as speaker, she usually waits until landmarks commission issues are before the Council to comment on them. “But I thought it was important for myself and my office to weigh in at this point,” she said. Her statement was read by the aide “because it was too early for me to be there at this stage of the process.” Under the plan, the hospital would move from its current buildings, on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets, to the West Side of Seventh Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets, occupying a new $800 million, 21-story building on the site of its current O’Toole Building, which would be razed. Eight other hospital buildings would be sold to the Rudin Management Company for $301 million; St. Vincent’s would use that money to reduce its debt and to pay for part of the new hospital. The Rudin Company would then demolish the old hospital buildings and construct an $800 million complex that would include a 21-story condominium tower on Seventh Avenue and new town houses on 11th and 12th Streets. Ms. Quinn said that “while I fully recognize the need for a new state-of-the-art hospital,” St. Vincent’s application to demolish the eight buildings “would have an impact that I think would be unfortunate.” She added: “What we want to do is to find a way for a 21st-century world-class hospital to coexist with historic Greenwich Village. We think there is potential here to make changes to the plan that would allow the hospital to move forward while preserving the historic context of the neighborhood.” At the hearing, some neighborhood residents said that large residential and hospital towers would blight their neighborhood. Hospital officials, however, testified that a new building was essential to maintain modern health care for more than a million people who live in, work in or visit the area it serves on the West Side.

Landmarks Preservation Commission
St Vincent's Hospital
Historic Buildings and Sites
Quinn Christine C


Glaxo Starts Investigating Possible Iraq Misconduct

Abstract: The British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline said on Sunday that it was investigating claims of improper conduct related to its business in Iraq, less than a year after China accused Glaxo of engaging in a bribery scheme aimed at increasing drug sales there. Glaxo issued its statement after a report in The Wall Street Journal that the company had been warned about the practices in Iraq late last year by a person familiar with Glaxo’s operations there. The person contended that Glaxo was violating United States and British antibribery laws by hiring government-paid physicians to promote its products in Iraq and paying for them to attend international conferences, The Journal reported. United States law prohibits companies from paying foreign government officials — including doctors — to promote their products, and at least a dozen large pharmaceutical companies have come under investigation in recent years in connection with that law. Stephen Rea, a Glaxo spokesman, said in a statement that the company employed fewer than 60 people in Iraq and that the claims related to a “small number of individuals.” “Operating in emerging markets is challenging given the issues many of these countries face with funding and maturity of their respective health care systems,” Mr. Rea said. But he said Glaxo’s presence in such markets was important to improving access to medicine. Last summer, the Chinese government detained several Glaxo employees and contended that the company was funneling illegal payments to doctors and government officials in an effort to improve sales in China, including compensating them for travel to conferences and lectures that never took place. The investigation is continuing. Glaxo’s sales in China fell significantly last year as a result of the investigation, but they have since begun to recover. In December, Glaxo said it would change the way it compensated doctors by no longer paying them to promote its products. The move, a first for a major drug company, was to be completed worldwide by 2016. “We believe these changes will eliminate any perception of conflict of interest and ensure incentives for our employees are aligned with the best interests of patients,” Mr. Rea said.

Iraq
GlaxoSmithKline
China
Wall Street Journal
Pharmaceuticals
Fraud
Bribery and Kickbacks
Ethics Misconduct Malfeasance


Spectators to War, West Bank Residents Hail the Hamas Fight Against Israel

Abstract: AL AMARI REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — Maher al-Naden, a street cleaner, said he had stopped buying Tapuzina, a popular Israeli orange-flavored drink, and Israeli dairy products. “This is the least we can do,” he said this week, expressing frustration as a West Bank Palestinian who is essentially a spectator of the war in Gaza. Across the alley from where he stood, in this teeming refugee camp abutting Ramallah, a small Internet cafe called Facebook bore a new-looking sign with a silhouette of a masked, armed fighter. More than two weeks into the deadly fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, here in the realm of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, daily life has continued more or less as normal, punctuated by nighttime clashes at friction points around the West Bank between stone-throwing youths and Israeli forces. On Thursday night, thousands of Palestinians marched from Al Amari to the Qalandia checkpoint that separates Ramallah from Jerusalem, many carrying Palestinian flags and wearing black T-shirts with the slogan, “We are all Gaza.” Some middle-class families came with children; in the front lines, dozens of masked young men hurled stones and firecrackers and clashed with Israeli security forces, roaring, “With our soul and blood, we will redeem Gaza.” Two protesters were reported killed, bringing the total number of protesters killed in the West Bank in the last week to five. But for many in the West Bank, the geographical separation has only underscored the deep emotional bonds and the desire for closer political unity with Gaza, which is dominated by Hamas, the Islamic militant group — a demand that would further complicate relations with Israel. Just three months ago, Hamas, financially strapped and diplomatically isolated, agreed to a reconciliation deal with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and his secularist Fatah faction after a bitter, seven-year division, on minimal terms that analysts said reflected the Islamic group’s weakness. Now Hamas — which refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist and is considered a terrorist organization by much of the West — is being hailed in the West Bank as the champion of armed resistance, while Mr. Abbas, who leads the alternative camp advocating a negotiated peace deal with Israel, is being excoriated for having failed to achieve a Palestinian state after 20 years of intermittent and fruitless Israeli-Palestinian talks. Israel has long supported Mr. Abbas as a peace partner, but it suspended the troubled American-brokered negotiations with the Palestinians in April after Mr. Abbas reached the reconciliation deal with Hamas. Hamas’s rise in popularity in the West Bank, however temporary, further undermines Mr. Abbas and makes Israel’s demand for a cancellation of the unity deal less likely. “I give my children to Hamas,” said Mr. Naden, describing himself as “just one of the people,” and not a member of any political faction. “We’ve been in this camp nearly 70 years.” He noted with pride that Hamas had forced foreign airlines to cancel flights to Tel Aviv after a rocket from Gaza struck near the airport on Tuesday. “My son, who is 10, is asking how he can join these people,” he said. The Toll in Gaza and Israel, Day by Day The daily tally of rocket attacks, airstrikes and deaths in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Mr. Abbas, who met in Ramallah on Wednesday with Secretary of State John Kerry as part of an international effort to broker a cease-fire, has been maneuvering to redeem some lost credit as one of the few mediators who can talk directly to all involved parties, including Hamas, the Egyptian leadership, the Obama administration, Qatar and Turkey. In a strong speech on Tuesday night that analysts said brought him closer to Hamas’s conditions, Mr. Abbas assailed the “brutal Israeli offensive in Gaza.” He called for a cease-fire that would lead, among other things, to an opening of Gaza’s borders; the eradication of the Israeli-imposed buffer zone; the release of Hamas prisoners who were freed by Israel in 2011 in exchange for Gilad Shalit, a captive Israeli soldier, then recently rearrested; and a donor conference for the rebuilding of Gaza. “To our people in Gaza: Your pain is our pain,” he said. A follow-up statement from the Palestinian leadership called on the Palestinian “masses” to hold prayers in the mosques on Friday for Gaza’s dead to be followed by marches all over the Palestinian territories. Another resident of Al Amari, Muhammad Abu Leila, who owns a grocery store, said of Mr. Abbas, “The people do not wait for his permission to demonstrate.” Mr. Abu Leila, whose store still stocks Israeli products, noted that many Palestinian families had members who support rival factions. “There may be a political division,” he said, “but there is no division among the people.” Mustafa Barghouti, an independent politician who helped negotiate the reconciliation deal, said Mr. Abbas “is trying to catch up because the people are way ahead of the leadership; the people are in total support of Gaza.” “Right now, we are seeing a transitional moment,” Mr. Barghouti added. “The events oblige all of us to get unified.” He was speaking at a demonstration on Wednesday organized by the Ramallah municipal authorities. Hundreds of Palestinians carried 600 mock coffins wrapped in Palestinian flags through the city and laid them in front of the United Nations headquarters, labeled with the names and ages of Gaza’s dead. At a main junction, a huge screen ran a loop of pictures of death and destruction from Gaza. In a bustling street near Manara Square where crowds were shopping for Ramadan, a souvenir store selling music CDs and Palestinian paraphernalia was blasting out Hamas songs and doing a brisk trade in kaffiyehs, the traditional black-and-white checkered head scarf that has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance, going for about $4 apiece. Rama Shaheen, 12, came in to buy one “for the demonstration” on Thursday. Her aunt Dina Shaheen, who lives in Dallas and is visiting relatives in Jerusalem and Ramallah, said at least 25 members of the family were planning to attend the march. “Everybody is going,” she said. Elias Saa, the owner of the store, said he had sold 300 CDs of Hamas songs since the beginning of the war, with lyrics like “Attack Jews in every piece of the land,” the music punctuated by the sound of automatic gunfire. Mr. Saa said it was a “best seller.” A nearby toy shop said its most popular item was its line in plastic guns and grenades. In Nablus, in the northern West Bank, one entrepreneur was selling rocket-shaped balloons, according to a Palestinian newspaper report. “Either we live in dignity or we die in dignity,” said Jafar al-Najajirah, 26, a civil engineer from the West Bank city of Bethlehem. Like many young West Bank residents, he has never been to Gaza, a trip that requires special permission from Israel. “Even among ordinary people like myself, the camp of resistance now has the upper hand.” Ayed Thawabteh, a stone cutter and Fatah activist from Hebron in the southern West Bank, said thousands of residents joined marches in that city every night. “We are like brothers,” Mr. Thawabteh said of Fatah and Hamas. “We can fight, and we can reconcile.”

West Bank
Hamas
Israel
Palestinians
Palestinian Authority
Gaza Strip
Al Fatah


Club Fitting: Finding the Perfect Clubs for Your Imperfect Swing

Abstract: Imagine if there were a one-size-fits-all suit store. Imagine if the suits were made of expensive and technologically advanced materials. Imagine if there were many brands and colors, but again, all the same size. Then imagine if these suits were pivotal to your happiness, or discontent, every time you wore them. And you wore them often. One size for all the populace. This would put a lot of pressure on anyone not of medium build and average height, wouldn’t it? And if you had long, or short, arms? Forget it. This is how golf clubs were sold for most of the last century. In fact, a vast majority of golfers still buy drivers and sets of irons off the rack, as if the clubs were one-size-fits-all. Sure, a golfer might choose between a regular or a stiff flex shaft, but even that decision was probably predicated on a guess and not any practical measurement. No wonder the average score of the average golfer, which is about 100, has not changed in 40 years. We’re playing with average clubs, and come on, we know that most of us are not average. Fortunately, the revolution that could change everything is well on its way. More golfers than ever are having their clubs custom fitted to their physiques and the dynamics of their swings. The spread of club-fitting centers is one of golf’s true growth sectors. And the reason is obvious: you and your 6-foot-8 cousin, Kurt, are not supposed to wear the same suit or play with the same clubs. Golf professionals have always known about club fitting, but until this century, the process was not a precise science. It mostly involved trial and error, which made it so costly it was reserved for elite players. Then came the high-speed cameras, motion-capture sensors, three-dimensional imaging and computer software designed for club fitting. “Now, in a couple of hours, we can prove that the clubs you have in your trunk are all wrong for you,” said Herb Meistrich, the president and chief executive of TaylorMade Performance Labs . “It’s pure physics. We can build a set of clubs that make you a happy golfer.” Bringing average golfers into the mix is driving the growth of club fitting. Golf Galaxy , a chain of golf stores, expects to do more than 50,000 fittings this year. That’s just one retailer. Despite the prevalent impression that fitting is only for serious players with consistent swings, it is now recommended for beginners as well. Why? Even hackers tend to have something in common: they execute the same basic swing fault over and over. The right clubs can minimize the deleterious outcomes. “If you’ve taken up golf and plan to keep playing, you should get at least a rudimentary fitting,” said Joe Hallett, the director of the P.G.A. Center for Learning and Performance . “Traditionally, the beginning golfer is playing with hand-me-downs. Those clubs are probably holding him back.” Many local P.G.A. pros will do club fittings, and the service is free with the purchase of a set of irons or a driver at many retail outlets. The cost without a purchase usually runs from $50 to $80. A more elaborate and advanced approach is offered by most of the major club manufacturers, which have fitting centers around the country. The cost at those centers ranges from $150 to $400, with discounts. Because all manufacturers now offer several models of irons and drivers aimed at different ability levels, they can provide a set specifically suited to your game. Of course, each manufacturer’s fitting process is designed to sell you its clubs. At Hot Stix Golf , which has three locations in Arizona and four more across the nation, a sophisticated fitting process is combined with years of testing and measuring of all brands and models of clubs and shafts. So the recommended bag of clubs for golfers visiting Hot Stix is likely to be a mix of brands. Hot Stix, which does a half-day fitting for all 14 clubs for $795, says it has fitted nearly 300 players from the pro golf tours. Yet its chief operating officer, Mike Helfrich, said: “Without question, we can help higher-handicap players more than low-handicap players. The higher handicaps have the most room to improve.” Good club fitting, like a lot of good instruction, helps the average golfer get out of his or her own way. We tend to choose clubs for the wrong reasons. “Golfers like to blame themselves,” said Randy Peterson, Callaway Golf ’s director of instruction and fitting for its 14 performance centers. “They say, ‘I stink, it’s not my clubs.’ But the right clubs will make you play better.” For instance, he said, many golfers use drivers with too little loft and too much shaft flex. “A lot of it comes down to ego and using what they see tour players use,” Peterson said. “But we look at realistic shaft lengths, shaft weights and shaft flexes, and the lie angle. And we find the ideal specifics for you. And that gives you the best chance to hit the ball in the center of the club face.” Meistrich, of TaylorMade Performance Labs, said club fitting was about helping the golfer “make better misses.” “Even pro golfers slightly mis-hit 95 percent of their shots,” Meistrich said. “You can imagine what the percentage is for a 15 handicap. So we build you a club that has taken into consideration your tendencies. “Say you slice, like most golfers. If we close the club face one degree and make a few other flex, kick-point and shaft-weight changes, the result will be a tee shot that ends up on the right side of the fairway instead of in the lake on the right side of the fairway. “That will change a golfer’s mood a lot when it happens 12 times in a round.” Obviously, learning to swing more efficiently would be a constructive goal in any effort to improve, and almost all club-fitting centers are staffed by P.G.A. teaching pros who may offer some element of instruction. There are other considerations, too. Golfers in Texas , where the ground is generally harder, may be fitted for wedges with less bounce than those in Florida . But in the end, will custom-fitted clubs keep you from losing money to your friends during your regular matches? The answer could be as simple as looking around at your regular foursome. Would you all wear the same suit? Is anyone else playing with fitted clubs? Probably not. So go get some clubs tailored for you, not them.

Golf
Herb Meistrich
Joe Hallett
Hot Stix Golf
Callaway Golf