Oscar Pistorius Murder Trial Verdict Is Due

Abstract: LONDON — More than 18 months after he shot and killed his glamorous girlfriend, Oscar Pistorius, a onetime track star on a gilded trajectory of triumph and success, is set to face judgment on Thursday when the judge in his trial on murder and firearms charges pronounces her verdict. Mr. Pistorius’s case has unfolded with drama and histrionics, transfixing a global audience for whom sports and celebrity fuse in the glare of media coverage. Every word of his trial has been broadcast and Twitter feeds have chronicled every argument and counterargument. Mr. Pistorius, 27, has wept, wailed and retched, confronted by a prosecutor, Gerrie Nel, nicknamed the Pitbull , who has been bent on destroying the athlete’s credibility. He has been sent for psychiatric assessment , and found well enough to stand trial. He has been depicted, by the prosecution, as a jealous, trigger-happy, anger-prone egotist and, by the defense, as a young man burdened by the anxieties and insecurities of disability stemming from the amputation of both his legs below the knee as an infant. From beginning to end, the case came down to this: in the early morning of Feb. 14, 2013, did Mr. Pistorius kill his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, 29, a model and law-school graduate, in a jealous rage? Or did he, as he asserts, open fire on the locked bathroom door, behind which Ms. Steenkamp died, in the belief that an intruder was about to emerge from it? Either way, the months of hearings have focused on those moments when Mr. Pistorius, walking on his stumps and brandishing a 9 mm handgun loaded with hollow-point ammunition, fired four rounds in his darkened home. Only two people were present and, as Mr. Nel has said, only one survived to tell the tale. The other, the prosecutor repeatedly reminded Mr. Pistorius, is dead. In perhaps one of the most brutal collisions of the trial in April , Mr. Nel demanded that Mr. Pistorius look at a grisly photograph of the shot-open head of Ms. Steenkamp. “That’s it — have a look, Mr. Pistorius!” the prosecutor snapped. His voice breaking and rising on a wave of emotion, Mr. Pistorius recalled the moments after he discovered her body in the bathroom. “As I picked Reeva up, my fingers touched her head. I remember,” he said. “I don’t have to look at a picture. I was there.” The trial reached far beyond the arguments of the case. The judge, Thokozile Matilda Masipa, is a black former social worker and journalist , presiding inscrutably over a court in which lawyers, defendants and most of the witnesses are white. Mr. Nel, the lead prosecutor, and Barry Roux, the main defense lawyer, are both from the country’s Afrikaner elite that once codified racial supremacy in the body of law that underpinned apartheid. South Africa’s unfinished racial journey, thus, has been on trial as much as Mr. Pistorius or the legal system that seeks to bring justice to a tangled case. That point was not lost among the many foreign observers of the trial. “It is an irony lost on no one that in a country with such a prominent history of racial tension, the world will be watching on Thursday as a black woman who grew up in the poor townships of South Africa sits in judgment of a white man of class, privilege and wealth,” wrote Lisa Davies in the Sydney Morning Herald . If Mr. Pistorius, a Paralympic champion and Olympic sprinter, is found guilty of premeditated murder, he faces a mandatory life sentence with a minimum 25-year jail term before he is permitted to seek parole. But sentencing could be more complicated. William Booth, a South African defense lawyer, told the Cape Town Press Club this month that there was “quite a significant risk” that Mr. Pistorius could be convicted of murdering the intruder he thought was in his home. Anyone firing into such a confined space must have known the risks, Mr. Booth said. Mr. Nel has derided Mr. Pistorius’s version of events and accused him of lying and inconsistency in his defense . State prosecutors, however, must prove Mr. Pistorius’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt, Mr. Booth said, and, if the judge accepted his version, other factors would weigh in the balance, such as his emotional state and South Africa’s high levels of violent crime. Mr. Booth said an alternative charge of culpable homicide, carrying a lesser prison term and offering the judge greater discretion in sentencing, could also be considered. Since there are no jury trials in South Africa, Judge Masipa, assisted by two assessors, will decide the case. Some South African legal analysts said her summing-up of the testimony could run into Friday, delaying the pronouncement of the verdict. The judgment may not, however, be the last word since the case could still go to a higher court on appeal, South African legal experts said. From other perspectives, the trial has been depicted in South Africa as a morality tale — a saga that began with triumph in the face of adversity as Mr. Pistorius competed in both the Olympic and Paralympic Games in London in 2012 , and ended just a few months later in anguish and bloodshed.

Oscar Pistorius
Murders
Thokozile Matilda Masipa
South Africa


The Mortgages of the Future

Abstract: IN this time of economic crisis, help for troubled homeowners often arrives late, when it arrives at all. All too frequently, families are going into default on their mortgages, facing foreclosures and evictions that may have traumatic consequences. It doesn’t need to be this way. Mortgages could be structured differently, so that adjustments in payments would be made as a matter of routine — systematically, automatically and continuously — starting even before any distress is perceived by borrower or lender. By avoiding thousands and even millions of individual family crises, we might also make institutional crises, like the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, less likely. We need to innovate, with the creation of “continuous-workout mortgages.” Such mortgage contracts, when originally signed, would specify a program for steady adjustment of the balance and payment schedule over the life of the mortgage, enabling most homeowners to continue to afford to make payments and maintain some home equity, even in harsh economic circumstances. These contracts might become the standard, with automatic adjustments based on shifts in national housing-cost indexes and futures markets (I’ve been involved in creating both), as well as economic indexes like the unemployment rate. Continuous-workout mortgages would be privately offered. They would not be bailouts; the cost of workouts would be priced into the original mortgage rate. This transparency has a great advantage: when the actual risk to the investor is explicit from the beginning, mortgages are less likely to be initially overvalued in the market, and so the kind of financial crisis we are experiencing now would be less likely. It is, after all, the rapid decline in value of subprime mortgages, and of derivative financial instruments based on them, that has wreaked such havoc in the global financial system. The cost to mortgage lenders of providing continuous-workout mortgages may actually be negative . That’s because the workout provisions would help prevent the costs of forced sales of homes, associated litigation, inadequate home maintenance and damage to the properties, and associated neighborhood collapse, which can create serious losses for mortgage lenders. Anticipating lower costs on these fronts, originators of continuous-workout mortgages may be willing to offer more attractive terms to borrowers from the beginning. A major innovation like this would need government help. Earlier this year, Congress passed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, which promised to bail out as many as 400,000 homeowners who could not pay on their mortgages. But the act made no fundamental reform of the mortgage market and included no plan to prevent more of the same problems from appearing. In the past, Congress has been more inventive. During the housing crisis of 1933, for example, Congress created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to force some fundamental shifts in mortgage institutions. The HOLC swapped its own debt, which was guaranteed by the government, for mortgages of defaulting homeowners, and it reissued mortgages with some important new features. The new loans had a 15-year term and were self-amortizing — that is, the homeowner made the same fixed payment each month until there was nothing more to pay. This was a huge change. Until 1933, home mortgages in the United States generally had terms of three to five years, and homeowners had to go back regularly to refinance them. If a mortgage could not be refinanced — because the homeowner was unemployed or because the price of the home had fallen too much relative to the loan amount — a homeowner had to pay back all principal, typically a huge payment, or lose the house. The HOLC changed this, effectively establishing a new conventional mortgage that the private mortgage lending industry then embraced. To this day, long-term mortgages are the norm, and, in fact, 20- and 30-year mortgages have become commonplace (although the popularity of adjustable-rate mortgages with artificially low initial “teaser” rates have exacerbated our housing problems). The government did not finish the job of improving mortgages in the 1930s, even though some had begun to see what should be done then. In a 1931 article, for example, Professor Irving Fisher of Yale argued that more flexible instruments should be substituted for conventional debt. “The principle of sharing risks must be extended,” he said, adding: “Bonds and debts are rigid. We need more elasticity. Then there will be less of ‘breaks’ and ‘crashes’ and ‘crises.’” But neither Congress nor the private sector took his advice then. We might not have today’s financial crisis if they had grasped back then how to provide such elasticity and had established even better mortgage conventions. We have the intellectual tools to do so now. NEITHER presidential candidate has announced a plan to transform our mortgage institutions so they work better for our people. Such plans may not be fodder for election campaigns. They might be implemented after further discussion at the beginning of a new Congress and a new administration. It is time to set the stage for a better mortgage contract.

Mortgages
Foreclosures
Housing
Credit
Senate
House of Representatives
United States Economy


Yemen Deaths Test Claims of New Drone Policy

Abstract: WASHINGTON — In some respects, the drone strike in Yemen last week resembled so many others from recent years: A hail of missiles slammed into a convoy of trucks on a remote desert road, killing at least 12 people. But this time the trucks were part of a wedding procession, making the customary journey from the groom’s house to the house of the bride. The Dec. 12 strike by the Pentagon, launched from an American base in Djibouti, killed at least a half-dozen innocent people, according to a number of tribal leaders and witnesses, and provoked a storm of outrage in the country. It also illuminated the reality behind the talk surrounding the Obama administration’s new drone policy , which was announced with fanfare seven months ago. Although American officials say they are being more careful before launching drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere — and more transparent about the clandestine wars that President Obama has embraced — the strike last week offers a window on the intelligence breakdowns and continuing liability of a targeted killing program that remains almost entirely secret. Both the Pentagon and the C.I.A. continue to wage parallel drone wars in Yemen, but neither is discussed publicly. A Pentagon spokeswoman declined to comment about the Dec. 12 strike, referring a reporter to a vague news release issued last week by the government of Yemen, written in Arabic. It remains unclear whom the Americans were trying to kill in the strike, which was carried out in a desolate area southeast of Yemen’s capital, Sana. Witnesses to the strike’s aftermath said that one white pickup truck was destroyed and that two or three other vehicles were seriously damaged. The Associated Press reported Friday that the target of the strike was Shawqi Ali Ahmad al-Badani, a militant who is accused of planning a terrorist plot in August that led to the closing of more than a dozen United States Embassies. American officials declined to comment about that report. At first, the Yemeni government, a close partner with the Obama administration on counterterrorism matters, said that all the dead were militants. But Yemeni officials conceded soon afterward that some civilians had been killed, and they gave 101 Kalashnikov rifles and about 24 million Yemeni riyals (about $110,000) to relatives of the victims as part of a traditional compensation process, a local tribal leader said. Yemeni government officials and several local tribal leaders said that the dead included several militants with ties to Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, but no one has been able to identify them. Some witnesses who have interviewed victims’ families say they believe no militants were killed at all. The murky details surrounding the strike raise questions about how rigorously American officials are applying the standards for lethal strikes that Mr. Obama laid out in a speech on May 23 at the National Defense University — and whether such standards are even possible in such a remote and opaque environment. In the speech, the president said that targeted killing operations were carried out only against militants who posed a “continuing and imminent threat to the American people.” Over the past week, no government official has made a case in public that the people targeted in the strike posed a threat to Americans. Moreover, the president said in May, no strike can be authorized without “near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured” — a bar he described as “the highest standard we can set.” At the time, administration officials said that authority over the bulk of drone strikes would gradually shift to the Pentagon from the C.I.A., a move officials said was intended partly to lift the shroud of secrecy from the targeted killing program. Video At the National Defense University, the president delivered the first major speech on counterterrorism of his second term and announced a shift in his administration’s use of drones. Credit Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times But nearly seven months later, the C.I.A. still carries out a majority of drone strikes in Yemen, with the remote-controlled aircraft taking off from a base in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon strikes, usually launched from the Djibouti base, are cloaked in as much secrecy as those carried out by the C.I.A. “The contradictory reports about what happened on Dec. 12 underscore the critical need for more transparency from the Obama administration and Yemeni authorities about these strikes,” said Letta Tayler of Human Rights Watch, who has done extensive research in Yemen about the drone strikes. The very fact that the drone strike last week targeted an 11-vehicle convoy — a much larger group than Al Qaeda would typically use — suggests that the new American guidelines to rule out civilian casualties may not have been followed in this case. And the confusion over the victims’ identities raises questions about how the United States government gathers intelligence in such a contested region and with partners whose interests may differ sharply from those of the Obama administration. The area where the strike occurred, in the central province of Bayda, is almost completely beyond the control of the Yemeni government, and is populated by tribes whose recurring feuds can easily become tied up in the agendas of outsiders. Over the past two years, the Saudi government — which for decades has used cash to maintain a network of influence in Yemen — has increased its payments to tribal figures in Bayda to recruit informers and deter militants, according to several tribal leaders in the area. This shadowy system appears to contribute to the secretive process of information-gathering that determines targets for drone strikes, a process in which Saudi and Yemeni officials cooperate with Americans. But Saudi and American interests diverge in important ways in Yemen. Many of the militants there who fight in Al Qaeda’s name are expatriate Saudis whose sole goal is to bring down the Saudi government. Because of the program’s secrecy, it is impossible to know whether the American dependence on Saudi and Yemeni intelligence results in the killing of militants who pose a danger only to Arab countries. Some Yemeni officials have also hinted that the timing and target of the drone strike last week may have been influenced by a devastating attack two weeks ago on the Yemeni Defense Ministry in which 52 people were killed, including women, children and doctors at the ministry’s hospital. That attack ignited a desire for revenge in Yemen’s security establishment and also damaged Al Qaeda’s reputation in Yemen, leaving the group hungry for opportunities to change the subject. Both parties, in other words, may have had reasons to manipulate the facts, both before and after the drone strike. American officials will not say what they knew about the targets of the strike last week. But in the past, American officials have sometimes appeared to be misinformed about the accidental deaths of Yemeni civilians in drone strikes. In one example from Aug. 1, a drone strike killed a 28-year-old man who happened to hitch a ride with three men suspected to have been Qaeda members. According to a number of witnesses, relatives and local police officials, the man, Saleh Yaslim Saeed bin Ishaq, was waiting by a gas station late at night when the three men stopped in a Land Cruiser and agreed to give him a ride. Mr. Ishaq’s ID card and belongings were found in the burned wreckage of the vehicle, and the local police — who confirmed that the other three dead men were wanted militants — said he appeared to have been an innocent person whose presence in the car was accidental. When contacted about the strike, American officials said they were aware only of the three militants killed. Yet the details of Mr. Ishaq’s death, and an image of his ID card, were published at the time in newspapers and on websites in Yemen.

Yemen
Drones
Targeted Killings
Al Qaeda
Civilian casualties
US Military
Terrorism
Barack Obama
CIA


Maimonides Medical Center Grapples With Health Care Uncertainty

Abstract: Giant aquariums now soothe pediatric patients at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. It has added welcome signs in 10 languages, a state-of-the-art cardiac operating room and programs to keep chronically ill adults safely at home. But as Pamela S. Brier, the chief executive, was walking to the main entrance last week, she spotted a rain-soaked plastic bag on the front steps. Millions of dollars in revenue now depend on improving patients’ perceptions of the hospital. “I can’t stand it,” Ms. Brier muttered, and she darted over, her cream chiffon dress fluttering, to scoop up the litter herself. It was the first Monday in June, counting down to a United States Supreme Court decision that could transform the landscape of American health care. But like hospitals across the country, Maimonides is not waiting around for the verdict. Win, lose or draw in court, administrators said, the policies driving the federal health care law are already embedded in big cuts and new payment formulas that hospitals ignore at their peril. And even if the law is repealed after the next election, the economic pressure to care differently for more people at lower cost is irreversible. “If the Supreme Court overturns this law — I pray it won’t — the world will go on changing,” Ms. Brier said. “In some ways, we’ve changed ahead of it.” But she added, “Trying to manage all these different aspects of the health care system as they are changing does make you crazy.” The century-old hospital, at the Borough Park crossroads of Hasidic, Asian, Caribbean and Hispanic neighborhoods, is often cited by state regulators as an example of good management and community service. It has been in the black since 1996, after Ms. Brier took charge of operations, and has increased patient volume every year while achieving some of the nation’s best clinical outcomes, including exceptionally low mortality rates for pneumonia, heart failure and heart attacks. Yet even in a city with notoriously cranky consumers and cramped spaces, Maimonides’s patient satisfaction scores are abysmal — especially in its maternity units, which deliver 8,000 babies a year. And starting next year, under “value-based purchasing” contracts mandated by the health care law and already entrenched in Medicaid and Medicare rules, failure to improve the satisfaction of surveyed patients will cost hospitals. Some hospitals have resorted to hiring outside consultants who coach nurses to recite a script praising the care — a strategy resented by short-handed staff members and denounced by their unions. Maimonides (pronounced my-MON-eh-deez), a 711-bed hospital that recently added valet parking and free Wi-Fi, instead asked labor-management teams in every unit to invent their own improvement projects. In one initiative, nurses are making hourly rounds to offer patients extra help. Last Monday, a new father spoke with heartfelt gratitude of the night nurse who had explained that the chair where he was dozing upright opened into a bed. “They treated us like family,” said the father, Iftekhar Aslam, 23, an American citizen born in Pakistan, beaming under his baseball cap at his wife, Sobia Khanum, and their newborn son. He had not minded sharing the room, divided by a curtain, with another pair of new parents — “Israel people,” he said, adding joyfully, “That’s New York — it’s freedom here!” Ms. Khanum, 26, was pleased, too, but mentioned that her husband had been so ill with fever before her due date that she had feared he would miss the birth. As a contractor without insurance, she said, “he didn’t go to the hospital because they send a huge bill.” In theory, if the health care law works as intended, Mr. Aslam could become part of an influx of newly insured patients, offsetting government cuts in payments to hospitals that treat a disproportionate share of the poor and uninsured. But no one at Maimonides is counting on it. “Quite frankly, if everything goes perfectly and everything is upheld, there’s a lot of confusion and a lot of uncertainty here,” said Dominick Stanzione, the hospital’s chief operating officer. “We also have an election coming up.” The cuts, on the other hand, seem inexorable, and not only because Medicaid and Medicare budgets are strapped. The policy thrust in health care financing, private as well as public, is to abandon reimbursements to hospitals according to the number of days patients spend in a bed, in favor of models that use a fixed sum per patient or set of patients over time, regardless of where care is delivered or how little it costs. Maimonides’s own successes have helped sell policy makers on the idea. Its collaboration with a state psychiatric hospital a few years ago, for example, put medical-mental health teams in storefront offices to manage the care of low-income patients with serious mental illness. Such patients, who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare, are among the health system’s most expensive and tend to have the worst outcomes. The program cut hospitalizations in half and reduced emergency-room use by 30 percent. “When the State Health Department people saw our data, the little dollar signs danced in their heads,” Ms. Brier said. Now, under a government contract, Maimonides is gambling on a bigger version of that program in partnership with 50 community agencies and Lutheran Medical Center, its closest competitor, to care for 15,000 mentally-ill people in what policy makers call a Health Home. Such models immediately mean fewer visits to the emergency room, which is still a hospital’s “cash cow,” said Dr. Karen R. Nelson, executive director of the Health Home consortium. But ways for hospitals to reap part of the government savings are still in development, and patients excluded from the Affordable Care Act as illegal immigrants will still require costly emergency care. “For a hospital to undertake this when A.C.A. is uncertain is very scary,” Dr. Nelson said. At the same time, Maimonides is competing on the old fee-for-service turf by recruiting surgical and cancer specialists, partly to woo more commercially insured patients. There, too, pitfalls abound: a growing share of the hospital’s unpaid medical bills are for patients who have private insurance but have been pushed into high-deductible plans, administrators said. Moreover, such plans typically do not reimburse care in the collaborative models the hospital is working so hard to develop — a problem that could intensify, they said, if the court rejects the individual insurance mandate but lets the rest of the health care law stand. The gulf between model and reality was evident last week in the emergency room, which had more than 114,000 visits last year, up from 83,000 eight years ago. In a section where triaged patients are seated to save space for more stretchers, one of those known as “frequent fliers” was back for the seventh time in six months, covered by Medicare. The man, Lewis Rosen, 62, who said he had to come in for a psychiatric visit anyway, was unhappy with the rate of healing of an incision in his leg, despite treatment at an outpatient wound care center and home visits by a nurse. “We’re our own worst enemy,” said Dr. Kenneth Sable, head of the emergency department, scrolling through Mr. Rosen’s electronic medical record. “Instant gratification is what people have come to expect.” An older man hunched on a stretcher began to cry. It was his third visit in three days with a complicated story about a dental problem that he said had affected his mobility. After tests, he had been referred to a neurologist, but had not gone. “I don’t want pain medication,” cried the man, Salvador Monduori, 68. “I don’t want to go home.” Seven hours later, when doctors concluded that there was nothing more to do, they had to call security to make him leave, Dr. Sable said. On a gurney at the other end of the room, Luis Velecela, 36, a construction worker, was confused but stoic after a diagnosis of stomach cancer. He had no insurance, he said, and had been treating his pain and nausea with antacid pills until an endoscopy at Maimonides revealed the tumor. “All hospitals in the country are facing the same changes,” Dr. Howard L. Minkoff, head of obstetrics, said later. “We are doing it without a net.”

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010)


In Gaza, French Foreign Minister Is Pelted With Eggs

Abstract: GAZA — Several dozen Palestinians confronted France ’s foreign minister as she entered Gaza from Israel on Friday, throwing eggs and shouting angry slogans at her armored motorcade over a comment falsely attributed to her about an Israeli soldier being held in captivity here since 2006. The minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, had met in Jerusalem on Thursday with the parents of the abducted soldier, Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit , after which a statement by Sergeant Shalit’s father accusing the captors of a war crime was misreported as hers. The protesters were bused to the Erez crossing point by Waed, a Hamas-affiliated group focused on freeing Palestinian prisoners in Israel, and they intercepted the motorcade as it entered Gaza. Eventually, the Hamas police dispersed the protesters at the crossing, but they then followed the motorcade to a United Nations building and later to a hospital that France is helping rebuild from damage sustained during Israel’s three-week war here two years ago. At one point, Ms. Alliot-Marie was nearly hit in the head with a shoe as she ducked into her heavily armored Jeep. A member of her entourage received an injury that required an examination later at an Israeli hospital. In keeping with European Union policy, Ms. Alliot-Marie did not meet with any Hamas officials during her visit. At the French Cultural Center, the last stop of the Gaza visit, she called on Israel to lift its blockade of Gaza, saying it had increased poverty and fed violence. A Foreign Ministry spokesman, Bernard Valero, told reporters in Paris that France “strongly supports the Gazan population,” and that the protests were based on “an erroneous attribution to Michèle Alliot-Marie, for remarks she never made.” The trip was Ms. Alliot-Marie’s first to the region as foreign minister, having just taken up the post from her predecessor, Bernard Kouchner. Last summer, Israel eased the blockade on Gaza imposed in 2007 to isolate Hamas, and agreed to a limited number of construction projects, like the rebuilding of the French-sponsored Al Quds Hospital. But the Gazan economy remains virtually frozen. Negotiations to exchange the captured Israeli soldier for hundreds of Palestinians held by Israel have broken down numerous times over the years.

Palestinians
France
Alliot-Marie Michele
Gaza Strip
Shalit Gilad


Global Image of U.S. Improves Slightly

Abstract: PARIS — There is good news and bad news for President Bush as he pursues his valedictory tour of Europe this week, according to a new worldwide study by the Pew Global Attitudes Project. The image of the United States has improved slightly in many countries over the past year, the poll results show. But the new optimism appears to be driven largely by the fact that Mr. Bush will soon be leaving office. Meanwhile, the survey showed that many across the globe blamed the United States at least in part for slumping economies and global warming . “There has been no sea change in worldviews of the United States,” Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center , said of the results, which were released Thursday. “Europeans are still much more negative than they were at the beginning of the decade, and highly negative views prevail in the Muslim world. But there are some indications that the world sees the possibility of change with the prospect of a new president.” The 24-nation survey, conducted in March and April, shows that many people who have been following the presidential race have greater confidence in Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, than in his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, “to do the right thing regarding world affairs.” This feeling is strongest in Europe, Australia, Japan and Tanzania, which borders Kenya, the homeland of Mr. Obama’s father. Meanwhile, the survey found perceptions that China was ascendant in world affairs. Many people — including 3 out of 10 Americans — think that China will eventually replace the United States as the world’s leading superpower. But people are also critical of China, according to the poll, which was conducted shortly after civil unrest broke out in Tibet this spring. China’s overall favorability ratings have slipped over the past year, and China is seen by many as ignoring the interests of other countries and is faulted on matters related to the environment and human rights. Anxiety about the economy was reported as widespread. “In three-quarters of the countries Pew surveyed (18), a majority now say that their national economic conditions are bad — far more than just one year ago,” the report said. Notable exceptions are India, Australia and China, where 82 percent see the current economic situation as good. Over all, majorities in 18 of the 24 survey countries are generally dissatisfied with the way things are going at home. The big exception is again China, where 86 percent express satisfaction, up from 83 percent last year. In the United States, where 70 percent are dissatisfied with the way things are going, pessimism extends beyond the economy to the country’s chief foreign policy challenge: only a minority of Americans (40 percent) now think efforts to establish a democratic government in Iraq will definitely or probably succeed. In 2006, a majority (54 percent) still believed that success was likely. Concern about global warming has increased since last year in 11 of the 20 countries for which trends are available, Pew found. “When asked which country is ‘hurting the environment the most,’ majorities or pluralities in most countries surveyed cite the United States,” the Pew report said. “But people are increasingly pointing fingers at China.” The United States and China are among the 10 countries where majorities do not define global warming as a very serious problem. The survey of 24,717 people is the seventh major study conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project since 2002. Although opinions of the United States had been in steady decline since the invasion of Iraq, there was a significant increase in positive views this year in 10 of the 21 countries for which comparative data was available, including Poland and Indonesia. Despite the upward trend, there are still just eight survey countries where majorities now have a favorable view of the United States: Britain, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, Poland, South Africa, South Korea and Tanzania. In fact, in one-third of the survey countries, more respondents see the United States more as an enemy than as a partner. This view is especially strong in Turkey, a NATO ally, and in Pakistan, a partner in Washington’s efforts to fight terrorism. Pew also asked respondents how they felt about Iran, and the reply was negative in all but four countries: Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria and Russia. The surveys were conducted from March 17 to April 21. The margin of sampling error ranges from two to four percentage points. Interviews were conducted by telephone and in person by local survey firms.


Suicide Bomber in Suruc Is Said to Be a Turk With Possible Ties to ISIS

Abstract: ISTANBUL — The suicide bomber who killed at least 32 people at a cultural center in southeastern Turkey has been identified as a Turkish citizen who is believed to have had ties to the Islamic State, a senior government official said Wednesday. The bomber, Seyh Abdurrahman Alagoz, a 20-year-old university student who had recently returned from Syria, was identified through DNA testing, according to reports in the Turkish news media. Image A woman and child watched the funeral from a window. Credit Yasin Akgul/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images “The investigation is ongoing, but we have evidence that the suspect was linked to Daesh,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with government protocol and using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL. The government was criticized after the attack, and access to Twitter was temporarily blocked Wednesday after a court imposed a ban on the circulation of images and videos from the suicide bombing. The service was restored a few hours later, after Twitter took down the images. The bomber struck the Amara Cultural Center in the town of Suruc on Monday as a group of young activists gathered in the garden to discuss rebuilding the predominantly Kurdish town of Koba ni , just across the nearby border with Syria. Image The riot police clashed with protesters on Tuesday in Istanbul after a deadly suicide attack the day before in Suruc, Turkey. Credit Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Kobani was recently the scene of fierce fighting between the Islamic State and Kurdish fighters, and the militants lost control of the town in January. Some members of the opposition in Turkey have accused government leaders of failing to put in place sufficient measures to curb the rise of the Islamic State in the country. Demonstrators took to the streets of Istanbul on Monday, with some accusing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of collaborating with the Islamic State. Others contended that the focus of the governing Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., on toppling President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had facilitated the growth of Islamist militants in the region. Image Left-wing militants in a group that was attacked by the bomber escorted the coffins. Credit Yasin Akgul/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images President Obama spoke with Mr. Erdogan on Wednesday by telephone, with the leaders agreeing to work together to address the terrorist presence in Syria and to advance a political solution to the conflict in Syria, the White House said in a statement. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu denied the critics’ accusations that Turkey had not done enough to challenge the Islamic State and he vowed to increase security measures along Turkey’s 500-mile border with Syria. Separately, two police officers were shot and killed in their homes in the border town of Ceylanpinar on Wednesday, the district governor said. Responsibility for the attack was claimed by a military organization affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., a Kurdish separatist group that is in a fragile peace process with the Turkish government after a 30-year conflict that claimed over 40,000 lives. The group, the People’s Defense Forces, said on its website that the attack was in retaliation for “the massacre in Suruc.” It also accused the police of cooperating with jihadists.

Bombs
Suruc
Turkey
Seyh Abdurrahman Alagoz
Syria
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Terrorism
Censorship


Big Lead Evaporates, but Yankees and Rivera Win Duel

Abstract: ANAHEIM, Calif. — For eight superb innings, it looked as if the Yankees would salvage the final game of their trip with ease, gliding to the end of a challenging West Coast swing with a blowout win to help soothe their mounting anxiety. But in the ninth inning, as the Angels batted around and threatened to complete what was developing into a remarkable comeback, the game and the trip came down to one of the more captivating matchups any sport could provide. Mariano Rivera, the career saves leader, would face Albert Pujols, perhaps the greatest hitter of his generation, to decide it. It was Wilt Chamberlain against Bill Russell, Joe Montana versus Lawrence Taylor. The Angels had loaded the bases and the Yankees’ lead, which was six, had dwindled to a run. With one successful swing by Pujols, the 11th batter the Angels sent to the plate in the inning, even a bloop over an infielder’s head would have turned an already awkward trip for the Yankees into a calamity. “That would have been one of the toughest games of the season if we would have lost,” Vernon Wells said. “But Mo prevailed.” Rivera, who made his major league debut in this stadium in 1995 and earned his first save against the Angels a year later, struck out Pujols on three pitches — all two-seam fastballs — to earn his 632nd save. Image C. C. Sabathia pitched into the ninth inning and allowed two runs. Credit Michael Nelson/European Pressphoto Agency The Yankees held on with their fingernails to win, 6-5 , and spare themselves a season-high sixth straight loss; instead, they finished the trip on a high note, with a 4-6 record. The westward journey began in Seattle, where the Yankees won three of four against the Mariners. Combined with their three-game sweep of the Cleveland Indians at home, it gave the Yankees a 37-26 record over all. But things changed drastically when they arrived in Oakland. The Yankees lost all three games in that series, culminating with Thursday’s agonizing 18-inning loss. On Friday they arrived in Anaheim, lost Kevin Youkilis to a recurring back injury, and then scored two runs in each of the first two games to extend their losing streak to five games, matching their season high. They had lost six straight games only once in the last six seasons. On Saturday, Mark Teixeira flew back to New York because his injured right wrist was bothering him. (Tests revealed inflammation, and he will miss a few days, the Yankees said.) This was the background as C. C. Sabathia took the mound, looking to will the Yankees to a victory despite the recent stagnation of the offense, which had scored two runs or fewer in six of the Yankees’ previous eight games. Sabathia was up to the task, pitching marvelously through eight scoreless innings. And the offense broke through, too. Travis Hafner hit a three-run homer against Jered Weaver in the third inning, relaxing his teammates, who scored twice more in the inning. They added one more run in the eighth on a sacrifice fly by Wells, a run that proved decisive. Lyle Overbay, playing in place of Teixeira, also had a hit, a run batted in and scored a run as the B Squad Yankees, so nicknamed by the hitting coach Kevin Long, came through. Sabathia came within three outs of his first shutout of the season and second complete game. But he was replaced by Dave Robertson after allowing a leadoff double to Mike Trout in the ninth and then walking Pujols. Image Lyle Overbay scored on a Jayson Nix single. It was one of the Yankees’ five runs in the third. Credit Chris Carlson/Associated Press As he walked off the mound with two runners on base, Sabathia put his glove to his mouth to cover whatever he was about to utter, then brought his hand down and let loose with a two-fisted expression of disgust. “I was just frustrated with myself,” he said. But Manager Joe Girardi said it was one of three huge performances by Sabathia this year, and one the Yankees really needed. Mark Trumbo hit a line drive off Robertson that deflected into right field, scoring Trout. Robertson got only one out before Rivera was called upon with the tying run on deck. In one of his least sharp outings of the season, Rivera gave up a two-run single to Alberto Callaspo and a run-scoring single to Peter Bourjos. Then he walked Trout, bringing Pujols to the plate while fans of both teams roared. Even the players in the field said they appreciated the moment. “It’s the greatest closer ever against one of the best hitters of our generation,” Wells said. “You definitely take in those moments, and we were glad our guy won.” Suspecting Pujols was looking for his signature cut fastball, Rivera instead threw him all two-seam fastballs, or sinkers, which dive in the opposite direction as his cutter. Pujols took the first pitch for a called strike, fouled off the second, and then went down as he tried to check his swing on a pitch up and in. After Rivera had saved the inning, the game and the trip, he was typically modest. “That’s why baseball is so special and unique,” he said. “Just when you think you’ve figured it out, something always happens.”

Yankees
Mariano Rivera
Baseball
Los Angeles Angels
C C Sabathia


Ackerman Endorses Grace Meng in House Race

Abstract: Representative Gary L. Ackerman , who unexpectedly announced in March that he would not seek re-election to Congress, is venturing into the primary contest to succeed him, backing the candidate he says best embodies his values: Assemblywoman Grace Meng . Mr. Ackerman ’s decision, to be announced Tuesday morning at the Pomonok Senior Center in Flushing, Queens, was hardly assured, given his reputation as an eccentric politician not known for regularly making endorsements. And while some political analysts assumed that Mr. Ackerman favored Ms. Meng, the choice of Representative Joseph Crowley and the Queens Democratic establishment, his pledge to campaign vigorously on her behalf could help sway constituents who have supported him during his nearly 30-year career. Mr. Ackerman, in an interview, praised Ms. Meng’s chief competitors in the June 26 primary, Assemblyman Rory I. Lancman and City Councilwoman Elizabeth S. Crowley . Indeed, Mr. Ackerman said that all three were “philosophically close to the same place” on key issues like Israel and economic advocacy for the middle class. But in what could be viewed as critiques of Mr. Lancman, an aggressive legislator who once mulled challenging Mr. Ackerman, and Ms. Crowley, whose candidacy has soured her relationship with her cousin, Congressman Crowley, Mr. Ackerman, 69, said that Ms. Meng’s self-effacing style and background as a fellow child of immigrants had won him over. “Looking at the candidates, there was only one choice,” he said. “It’s not a matter of being the most flashy or the most self-promoting, but the ability to bring people together. She’s a very likable person and she’s a very quick study. She understands that it’s not about her, but the people who sent her there.” Ms. Meng, 36, is vying to be the first Asian-American member of New York’s Congressional delegation. The primary (which also includes a libertarian-leaning long shot, Dr. Robert Mittman) will probably hinge on turnout in what is expected to be light voting. Whoever prevails will most likely be favored, based on demographics, in the November general election against the Republican candidate, City Councilman Daniel J. Halloran III. The victor will represent eastern and central Queens in what will be known as the Sixth Congressional District, which is about 40 percent Asian-American. Mr. Lancman, 43, has collected many key labor endorsements, including unions representing health care aides and municipal workers, and the vocal backing of former Mayor Edward I. Koch. He has also performed strongly in candidate forums. Ms. Crowley, 34, chairwoman of the City Council’s Fire and Criminal Justice Services Committee , has the support of several police and fire unions. Ms. Meng, whose father, Jimmy Meng, was an assemblyman in the early 2000s, has picked up crucial support from groups like teachers’ and hotel workers’ unions. In an interview, Ms. Meng said that she was grateful for Mr. Ackerman’s support, and vowed, if elected, to continue his work on transportation, infrastructure and issues affecting older New Yorkers. She said Mr. Ackerman had always been a presence in her home while she was growing up, in Corona, then Bayside and Flushing, because of the annual calendar he sent to constituents featuring tidbits about American history. “He just gives the impression that he’s so patriotic and so proud of American history,” Ms. Meng said. “As a daughter of a first-generation, middle-class family, that was really special.”

Endorsements
Ackerman Gary L
Meng Grace
House of Representatives
Crowley Elizabeth S
Halloran Daniel J
Lancman Rory I
New York State
Elections House of Representatives


Fannie Mae Wins Cheers Despite Loss

Abstract: Fannie Mae , the nation’s largest buyer of home loans, gave investors little reason to cheer Tuesday, announcing a $2.2 billion quarterly loss and a dividend cut, and warning of steeper losses ahead. But investors celebrated anyway, bidding up the stock 9 percent, to close at $30.81. Their optimism stemmed from the belief that Fannie Mae is in a position to pick and choose among the best and safest loans currently in the marketplace. The company, which buys mortgages from banks and other lenders, announced it would raise $6 billion in new funds to purchase additional loans and shore up a listing balance sheet. “As the market recovers, we will be a prime beneficiary,” Fannie Mae’s president, Daniel C. Mudd, said in a conference call with analysts Tuesday morning. When the housing market finally stabilizes, the company will “feast” on the mortgages it is currently buying, he added. Those sentiments were bolstered by Fannie Mae’s regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight , which announced Tuesday that the company had been released from growth limits put in place in 2006 when audits showed that the company had been manipulating its books. The regulator also cut the capital reserves that Fannie Mae must hold, in essence betting that the safest course, for both the company and the housing marketplace, is for Fannie Mae to invest more aggressively and with a thinner cash cushion. But some lawmakers continue to express long-held concerns about Fannie Mae’s financial health. “Regulators need all the tools they can get to make sure these companies don’t fail, especially since we’re talking about entities that have over $5 trillion in financial commitments and debt,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee. “Six billion dollars looks like a pretty paltry sum, and if we get into a further housing downturn, that capital can go pretty fast.” Fannie Mae, along with Freddie Mac , are essential lubricants in today’s housing marketplace. The companies buy more than 80 percent of all home loans made by banks and lenders, providing fresh financing for more home mortgages. At the end of 2007, the firms had a combined cushion of $83 billion, underpinning a colossal $5 trillion in debt and other financial commitments. But the companies are being pushed in opposite directions. Some regulators and lawmakers want them to buy more and riskier loans to jump-start a revival in the housing market. Others worry that if the companies spend too freely, they will suffer even greater losses, which could require a taxpayer-financed bailout. If that were to occur, it could ripple through the entire stock market and economy, creating a crisis of confidence about the trillions in mortgages the company owns and has guaranteed. To offset those concerns, regulators and lawmakers have pushed the companies to raise additional capital. Last year, both companies raised $13 billion from investors. Regulators have pushed them to go even further this year, but some shareholders have complained that raising too much additional money will drive down stock prices and dilute investors’ stakes. Those complaints come as the companies also face a worsening housing marketplace. Mr. Mudd, Fannie Mae’s president, said in Tuesday’s call with analysts that home prices might fall by 7 to 9 percent this year, and that the company would experience losses of as much as $4.4 billion. Mr. Mudd said that as the company takes losses on bad loans made in previous years, however, it is also buying new loans held by borrowers with much better credit. And because Wall Street has largely abandoned the mortgage marketplace, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can charge higher fees because of decreased competition. Some analysts, however, are less optimistic. “These guys have been confident on their conference calls for the last couple of quarters, but then they come up with bigger and bigger losses,” said Paul Miller of the Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group in Arlington, Va. “Wall Street wants to be bullish about something, and they think Freddie and Fannie are going to lead the way. But at some point, investors are going to wake up and realize these guys are losing real money.” As part of Tuesday’s conference call, Mr. Mudd revealed that falling home prices and rising foreclosures that started in the subprime marketplace had spread to the higher-quality loans that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac traditionally buy. And though Fannie Mae expects profits down the road, the loss announced on Tuesday follows a record $3.6 billion loss in the fourth quarter of last year. In an effort to preserve cash, Fannie Mae said on Tuesday that it would cut its common stock dividend to 25 cents a share, from 35 cents. That announcement, however, did not dissuade Moody’s Investors Service from downgrading the company’s financial strength by one notch. Other ratings agencies have warned they may follow suit. Freddie Mac is also expected to post a significant loss when it reports its first-quarter results next week. The company will have to answer questions regarding its accounting, which its regulator has said shows “internal control weaknesses.” And both firms still face Congressional scrutiny, which is increasing as lawmakers consider proposals to increase regulators’ powers over the companies. A bill changing how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are policed has passed the House, and negotiations over the legislation are continuing in the Senate, according to Democratic and Republican staff members. Lawmakers say they believe a bill may pass as soon as in the next two months.


A Review of Peter’s Clam Bar in Island Park

Abstract: When Peter’s Clam Bar first opened in Island Park, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in the White House, Hitler was menacing Europe, “The Wizard of Oz” was in movie theaters and Island Park’s homegrown politician, former Senator Alphonse M. D’Amato, was a toddler. It managed to stick around for 73 years, until it was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. In June, Peter’s reopened, under new ownership. The business was bought by Butch Yamali and his company, the Dover Group , which owns several catering halls and restaurants, including Hudsons on the Mile in Freeport and Maliblue Oyster Bar, part of the Malibu Shore Club (another Dover holding) in Lido Beach. When Peter’s opened in 1939, it was just a humble clam shack. Today it has two identities: a casual clam bar and a restaurant, Peter’s Clam House. The two establishments have separate entrances, practices and policies, but a joint kitchen. The restaurant accepts credit cards, has waitress service, features white tablecloths and offers an outdoor dining space on the water. Image Offerings include baked clams. Credit Barton Silverman/The New York Times The cash-only clam bar has bare tables and outdoor, roadside seating. Menus are printed on the walls and diners place their orders at a window, claiming their food when their number is called. Most dishes are a few dollars cheaper than in the restaurant next door; this review is based on visits to the restaurant, not the clam bar. Servers there were young, enthusiastic and cheerful, but inept. One night, service resembled a comic opera. Uninvited appetizers were delivered to our table before we had even placed our order. Later, our actual appetizers were offered to two nearby tables before landing with us. It was the same story at entree and dessert times. The dining room has mounted fish on the walls, and the patio overlooks Barnum Inlet, which seems lovely until the refuse disposal station across the water comes into focus. Still, on a recent balmy evening, our meal outside was appealing. There is live music on the patio on weekends, so intimate chitchat could prove difficult. Restaurants that receive a “good” rating generally fall into two categories. In the first, most of the dishes are just O.K., nothing great, nothing horrible. Peter’s is in the second category, where some offerings are excellent, some disastrous. Known for its baked clams, Peter’s doesn’t disappoint. The chopped clams, mixed with crumbs, herbs and garlic, differ sharply from the usual mushy, bready travesties. The clams are numerous, the crumbs few and the tops crunchy. Image Dishes include the lobster special. Credit Barton Silverman/The New York Times The soups are also impressive. The lobster bisque, a smooth, tasty brew with nubbins of lobster, was a hit, but the New England clam chowder was even better. It delivered abundant clams, bacon, potatoes, herbs and flavor in a creamy but not overly thick or goopy broth. Additionally Peter’s salad, a bed of mixed greens in a dill dressing crowned with a big mound of crab and shrimp salad, would make a lovely light entree. But avoid the dull, filler-laden crab cakes, as well as the dry grilled salmon sandwich and all fried seafood. The fisherman’s platter of fried flounder, sea scallops, shrimp and clam strips was undermined by the overly thick, weighty coatings. The same was true of a special of fried soft shell crabs. Instead, go for the lobster roll, which has plenty of seafood on a potato roll, accompanied by excellent French fries and a flavorful side salad of halved cherry tomatoes, basil and red onions, or the linguine in white clam sauce, which was flavor-packed and rife with tender clams. We also gave high marks to a lobster special, a one and a half pounder that was a bargain at $24.95. It arrived with an ear of sweet corn and a bowl of creamy coleslaw. Desserts are made elsewhere and got mixed notices. We liked the rich chocolate mousse cake and the coconut custard pie, but the New York cheesecake was not nearly creamy enough. With careful ordering and a bit of luck, diners can have a marvelous meal at Peter’s. But they can also strike out.

Hurricane Sandy
Restaurant
Island Park NY
Peter's Clam Bar


Samsung Takes Low-Key Approach on Cellphones After Reaching the Top

Abstract: BARCELONA — Samsung Electronics, which sells more cellphones than any other company — and, at times, more smartphones than Apple — is on top of the industry. But despite its ranking, the South Korean consumer electronics giant lacks a critical element that usually accompanies success: the lucrative brand mojo of an Apple. After all, you don’t hear anything about Samsung fanboys, right? But this year, here at the Mobile World Congress, the industry’s largest convention in Europe, Samsung appears to be taking a page from Apple. In the mobile telephone phone business, success seems to breed reticence. Apple has never exhibited its products at the Barcelona event. Now, Samsung is becoming less visible. In the vast, blue-and-white Samsung stand in Hall 3 of the Fira de Barcelona convention center, there are rows and rows of digital cameras, laptop computers, notepads, audio docking stations and even car infotainment systems. As what seems like an afterthought, there a few smartphones. Anneka Patel, a public relations executive who represents Samsung, said the company was consciously taking a low profile with its line of mobile phones, preferring to promote its other products. And instead of seeking publicity, the company was declining interview requests to discuss its phone business, she said. David Ffoulkes-Jones, the chief executive of WDS, a unit of Xerox in Poole, England, that provides technical support for Samsung smartphones in Australia and other markets, said Samsung was intent on honing its brand image, creating the same lasting, indelible connection Apple has with its consumers. The new low profile that Samsung is seeking for its smartphone line appears to be more a reflection of the company's growing self-confidence, but it could also be the first step toward building a more exclusive image for its devices. “Samsung’s challenge is to have a broader, deeper relationship with their customers than they now do,” Mr. Ffoulkes-Jones said. One analyst said Samsung, which had preferred brash product introductions in Barcelona attended by dozens of employees, was reverting to its introspective, engineering roots. “My theory is that Samsung never enjoyed having to promote its mobile phone business,” said John Delaney, an analyst at the market research firm International Data Corp.in London, who said he had also noticed Samsung’s soft-sell approach. “Now that they’re on top of the business, they don’t have to.” Overt or covert, the company’s success in mobile devices has enhanced its global luster. In a 2012 ranking of brands by the consulting firm Interbrand, Samsung climbed to No. 9, ahead of Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Disney, and up from No. 17 a year earlier. Apple was No. 2, up from No. 8 and trailing only Coca-Cola. Apple’s brand value, estimated at $76.6 billion by Interbrand, was more than double that of Samsung’s, at $32.9 billion. Indeed, while the maker of the iPhone sells only about 6.5 percent of smartphones around the world, it takes 71 percent of the industry’s profit, according to Canaccord Genuity, an investment bank. Senior executives at mobile network operators, the companies that sell the bulk of Samsung and Apple phones around the world, said Samsung’s rise to the top had not been an accident but the product of a methodical, long-term strategy to offer a more affordable, accessible alternative to Apple. “I think one of the reasons Samsung is very big is because Samsung has been very adaptive and very flexible,” said Olaf Swantee, the chief executive of EE, the largest British mobile operator and a joint venture of France Télécom and Deutsche Telekom. “They haven’t driven one strategy. They are working with operators. They are working in different markets. I think their flexibility has been one of the key reasons for their success.” Vittorio A. Colao, the chief executive of Vodafone, the largest mobile operator in Europe, said he had clinched a wide-ranging deal a few years ago with Samsung at the Barcelona convention to sell Samsung cellphones through Vodafone’s operator network. That network includes Verizon Wireless, the U.S. market leader, in which Vodafone owns a 45 percent stake, and fully owned subsidiaries across Asia and Europe. “We made an agreement and set targets, and we reached those targets — exceeded them, in fact,” Mr. Colao said. One example of Samsung’s ability to work with a range of partners is its cooperation with General Dynamics, a U.S. government contractor, to develop a line of smartphones with the highest existing levels of software and hardware security. The security software the two companies designed for Samsung Galaxy smartphones, which incorporate GD Protected software, are approved for use by the highest levels of U.S. government and military officials. Samsung also produced a set of enhanced software security controls with General Dynamics’ support for Galaxy smartphones intended for the general public. The phones will run the Samsung Knox platform, which protects data stored on the smartphone and data sent and received by the device. The Knox platform, announced by Samsung on Monday in Barcelona and developed with support from General Dynamics, will be available in some Galaxy models in the second quarter of the company’s business year, which runs from April through June. Samsung’s cooperation with General Dynamics, which began a little more than a year ago, is the most extensive by the U.S. company with any maker of cellphones, said Mike Guzelian, a vice president in General Dynamics’ C4 Systems division, which is in charge of secure voice and data products. Tony Cripps, an analyst in London at Ovum, a research firm, said Samsung’s collaboration with General Dynamics could give the South Korean company an edge in distinguishing its smartphones, most of which run the Google Android operating system, from other Android vendors. “This could be an important differentiator,” Mr. Cripps said. Samsung similarly seeks to create win-win propositions for operators, offering to help pay for joint marketing campaigns for its phones and giving operators a relatively free hand to sell the devices as they see fit, said Kjell-Morten Johnsen, head of European operations at Telenor, a Norwegian operator with networks across Europe, Russia and Central Asia. He said Apple tended to control the marketing of iPhones tightly, in some cases obtaining a percentage of operators’ revenue from data generated by the devices. “It is pretty much a win-win with Samsung because it comes pretty much with no obligations, so people are betting that it will be a good product and they can push that into the market,” Mr. Johnsen said. But the same executives cautioned that the company’s tenure at the top of the industry was not guaranteed, in part because of the fickle nature of consumer tastes and the resilience of Apple. Even in some Central Asian countries where the iPhone is unavailable, the phone makes its way in through resellers and the gray market, said Mr. Johnsen, the Telenor executive. “The reason the iPhones are there is because people simply want them,” he said. But Samsung is competing more effectively now with Apple, he said. “I don’t think they are a company that will peak and fall from the top,” Mr. Johnsen said. “But over the long term, who knows?”

Samsung
Barcelona
Smartphone
Apple
Mobile phone
iPhone
advertising,marketing


Supreme Court Barely Touches On Religion in Argument Over Cross

Abstract: WASHINGTON — A Supreme Court argument on Wednesday about the fate of a cross in a remote part of the Mojave National Preserve in southeastern California largely avoided the most interesting question in the case: whether the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion is violated by the display of a cross as a war memorial. The cross in the desert was erected in the 1930s by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to honor fallen service members. Ten years ago, Frank Buono, a retired employee of the National Park Service, objected to the cross, saying it violated the establishment clause. In the intervening decade, Congress and the courts have engaged in a legal tug of war. Congress passed measures forbidding removal of the cross, designating it as a national memorial and, finally, ordering the land under the cross to be transferred to private hands. Federal courts in California have insisted that the cross may not be displayed. At Wednesday’s argument, only Justice Antonin Scalia appeared inclined to reach the establishment clause question. Other justices were interested in the narrower issue of whether the land transfer would be proper. Still others asked whether Mr. Buono had suffered an injury concrete and direct enough to give him standing to sue. Mr. Buono, who is a Roman Catholic, has said he objects to the display of any permanent religious symbol on government land. Most of the argument in the case, Salazar v. Buono, No. 08-472, concerned the tangled history of Mr. Buono’s lawsuit. A federal judge in California in 2002 ordered the government to stop displaying the cross, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed that decision in 2004. The government chose not to appeal it to the Supreme Court. The case before the court arose from a second round of litigation concerning whether the law transferring the land under the cross violated the original order. Much of the argument concerned which issues were still before the court. The question of the meaning of a cross in the context of a war memorial did give rise to one heated exchange, between Justice Scalia and Peter J. Eliasberg, a lawyer for Mr. Buono with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California. Mr. Eliasberg said many Jewish war veterans would not wish to be honored by “the predominant symbol of Christianity,” one that “signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins.” Justice Scalia disagreed, saying, “The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead.” “What would you have them erect?” Justice Scalia asked. “Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David and, you know, a Muslim half moon and star?” Mr. Eliasberg said he had visited Jewish cemeteries. “There is never a cross on the tombstone of a Jew,” he said, to laughter in the courtroom. Justice Scalia grew visibly angry. “I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead,” he said. “I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.” There was a second testy exchange, this one between Mr. Eliasberg and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Mr. Eliasberg said the veterans’ organization was unlikely ever to tear down the cross if the transfer called for by Congress went through, citing a plaque that Congress ordered to accompany the cross. The chief justice asked for the text of the plaque. “ ‘This cross’ — in big letters — ‘erected in honor of the dead of foreign wars,’ ” Mr. Eliasberg responded. A couple of minutes later, Chief Justice Roberts returned to the subject and corrected Mr. Eliasberg. The actual text on the plaque, the chief justice said, was more elaborate: “The cross, erected in memory of the dead of all wars, erected 1934 by members of Veterans of Foreign Wars, Death Valley Post 2884.” “That’s a big difference,” the chief justice said, explaining that the longer version made clear that the cross was not a government memorial. Mr. Eliasberg apologized and said he had answered in the context of the question of whether the veterans’ group would “feel constrained to keep the cross up” in light of a plaque referring to a cross. “The context of my question,” Chief Justice Roberts shot back, “was, ‘What does the plaque say?’ ” Mr. Eliasberg apologized some more, saying he had not meant to mislead the court.

Supreme Court
Freedom of Speech and Expression
Suits and Litigation


Death Toll Rises from Cyclone in India

Abstract: NEW DELHI — The death toll from the powerful cyclone that ripped through the eastern coast of India rose to 25 on Tuesday, with most of the deaths caused by falling trees and collapsing buildings, according to a government official in Andhra Pradesh. The devastation was particularly acute in the port city of Visakhapatnam, where the eye of the cyclone passed on Sunday, and where 15 people died. Nearly 400,000 people had been evacuated from their homes in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, though a relief official in Odisha said Tuesday that most people there had returned to their homes. In Visakhapatnam, the roughly 120-mile-per-hour winds of the storm, called Cyclone Hudhud, had mangled and destroyed electric and telephone poles, according to disaster officials. “Communication is completely paralyzed,” said M. Jagannadham, the Andhra Pradesh additional commissioner for disaster management, who said that three districts in the state were badly affected. Television reports aired on Tuesday showed crowds in Visakhapatnam swarming a gas station and one of the only working ATMs. Residents said that the lack of electricity had made it impossible to take out money, and that a shortage of some food items was driving up prices. Channels also showed locals in the state surrounding relief trucks bearing food and being fended off by police officers with sticks. Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Visakhapatnam on Tuesday to assess the damage. In Odisha, 80,000 mud homes belonging to tribal people were destroyed by heavy rains, according to P. K. Mohapatra, the special relief commissioner in the state. Officials in Andhra Pradesh said that the scale of the destruction there had not yet been calculated.

Cyclone
India
Andhra Pradesh
Hurricanes
Fatalities,casualties
Odisha India


Alf Pike, Member of Rangers’ 1940 Stanley Cup Team, Dies at 91

Abstract: Alf Pike, one of the last two surviving members of the Rangers ’ Stanley Cup-winning team of 1940 and later a Rangers coach, died March 1 in Calgary, Alberta. He was 91. His death was confirmed by his family. Pike was a 22-year-old rookie center when the Rangers beat Toronto in the 1940 Cup finals. His goal halfway through the third period of Game 6 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto capped a comeback from a 2-0 deficit. Bryan Hextall scored in overtime, clinching the Stanley Cup for the Rangers. It was their last until 1994. In the dressing room between the second and third periods, Pike, for good luck, had spat on the backhand side of Hextall’s stick, said John Halligan, a former public-relations executive for the Rangers, recalling Pike’s account of the episode. “I’ll get the tying goal, and you get the winner,” Pike said to Hextall in Halligan’s telling. “That’s just what happened.” Nicknamed the Embalmer for his off-season job at a funeral home, Pike played six seasons in the National Hockey League, all with the Rangers. In 234 regular-season games, he scored 42 goals and had 77 assists. He missed two seasons during World War II serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force. His death leaves Clint Smith, 95, as the last living member of the 1940 Rangers. Alfred George Pike was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and as a boy attended the hockey school run there by Lester Patrick, the Rangers’ longtime coach and general manager. The Rangers signed Pike in 1937, when he was 19. He played for two seasons with the New York Rovers, the minor league team whose games preceded Rangers games at the old Madison Square Garden. After his N.H.L. career ended in 1947, Pike coached a Rangers affiliate in Ontario. The Hall of Fame defenseman Harry Howell, who played for Pike in Ontario and in New York, said Pike was a demanding coach. “We were a bunch of kids who’d never had coaching before,” Howell said of his first year under Pike. “I was 16 and had a habit of skating around with one hand on my stick, so he taped both hands to my stick in practice for about a month. After that, I always used two hands.” Pike was hired to coach the Rangers early in the 1959-60 season and held the job through the next season. His Rangers teams had a record of 36-66-21. After coaching minor league teams in the West, he retired in 1970. Pike is survived by five daughters, a son and 13 grandchildren. In 1990, the Rangers presented Pike with a Stanley Cup ring to commemorate the 50th anniversary of their championship year. “He always wore that ring,” his son, Rick, said. “I’m wearing it now.”

New York Rangers
Hockey Ice
Deaths (Obituaries)


Ivory Coast: Newspapers Stopped

Abstract: Ivory Coast’s press council has suspended all six newspapers allied with former President Laurent Gbagbo for up to two weeks for publishing content deemed “contrary to national reconciliation.” The United States Embassy in Abidjan and Reporters Without Borders expressed concern over the suspensions, with the embassy saying the country “is best served when a diversity of opinions are freely expressed through the media.” Raphael Lakpe, chairman of the National Press Council, said the newspapers were suspended for publishing photos of officials whom Mr. Gbagbo tried to name to his cabinet after he lost the November 2010 election to the current president, Alassane Ouattara. During Mr. Gbagbo’s 10-year rule, newspapers that were allied with Mr. Ouattara, then the opposition leader, were frequently harassed. Many had hoped that when Mr. Ouattara came to power the intimidation of the news media would stop.

Ivory Coast
Newspapers
Gbagbo Laurent
News and News Media


Billionaires Received U.S. Farm Subsidies, Report Finds

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The federal government paid $11.3 million in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies from 1995 to 2012 to 50 billionaires or businesses in which they have some form of ownership, according to a report released Thursday by the Environmental Working Group , a Washington-based research organization. The billionaires who received the subsidies or owned companies that did include the Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen; the investment titan Charles Schwab; and S. Truett Cathy, owner of Chick-fil-A. The billionaires who got the subsidies have a collective net worth of $316 billion, according to Forbes magazine. The Working Group said its findings were likely to underestimate the total farm subsidies that went to the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list because many of them also received crop insurance subsidies. Federal law prohibits the disclosure of the names of individuals who get crop insurance subsidies, the group said. The report is being issued as members of the House and Senate are meeting to come up with a new five-year farm bill. The authors of the report said it is timely, given that lawmakers are debating a House proposal that would cut nearly $40 billion over 10 years from the food stamp program, which helps provide food for nearly 47 million people. A Senate provision would cut $4.5 billion over the same period. A report released Wednesday by the Center for American Progress , a left-leaning research group, found that food stamps kept about five million people above the poverty line last year. The food stamp program was cut by about $5 billion on Nov. 1 when a provision in the 2009 stimulus bill that added funding for the program expired. “The irony is that farm subsidies are going to billionaires at the same time that there are proposals to kick three to five million people off of food stamps,” said Scott Faber, vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “This clearly highlights the need for reform to our farm programs.” Some of the company officials identified by the Working Group said they were surprised to find their names in the report. Don Millican, the chief financial officer at the Kaiser-Francis Oil Company in Tulsa, Okla., which is owned by the oil and banking magnate George Kaiser, said he did not know why the company was shown as receiving crop subsidies. The Working Group report shows the oil company received about $17,500 in subsidies for wheat, sorghum and barley from 1996 to 2003. Forbes puts Mr. Kaiser’s net worth at $10 billion. “It’s possible we could have gotten the surface rights to land that was being farmed and that’s why we were listed as getting subsidies,” Mr. Millican said. “It’s rare, but it happens.” Other companies listed in the report declined to discuss its findings. Allen D. Israel, a lawyer for Kona Residence Trust in Seattle, which is owned by Mr. Allen, said the company would not comment on its farm subsidies. Mr. Allen’s net wealth is estimated at $15.8 billion, according to Forbes. The trust received about $14,426 in crop subsidies for barley from 1996 to 2006, the Working Group’s report said. Mr. Faber said that one of the proposals he found most disturbing in the farm bill would shift money from farm subsidy programs like direct payments, which have income limits, to those like crop insurance, which do not. Other measures would subject food stamp recipients to drug testing, work requirements and income means-testing. Unlike traditional farm subsidies, crop insurance premium subsidies are not now subject to income requirements, payment limits or conservation compliance, the Working Group found. “So basically the bills would allow billionaires to get even more in subsidies, all without taxpayers knowing who they are, while imposing draconian requirements on low-income people,” Mr. Faber said. According to the Working Group’s analysis, more than 40 billionaires own properties where crops are grown that are among the most likely to be insured through the federal program, including corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and sorghum.

Environmental Working Group
Microsoft
Charles Schwab
Center for American Progress
Crop Subsidies
Agriculture
Chick-fil-A
Paul G Allen
Federal Aid


At Le Mans, More Acceleration and Fewer Pit Stops

Abstract: LE MANS, France — For most of its 90-year history, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the world’s most prestigious and grueling endurance auto race, was known for being the ultimate long-distance test and for not requiring the fastest of drivers. The 24-hour drive around the 13.6 kilometer, or 8.4 mile, track, one of the trickiest and most punishing in the world, was more about preserving the car — its engine, tires, chassis — than about driving at top speed. Today, however, with the high stakes it represents for car manufacturers and the improvements in car technology, Le Mans has become more like a 24-hour sprint. The drivers seek to maintain qualifying-lap speeds throughout and to minimize time lost passing other cars or parked in the pits. “Before, when you took part in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, you knew you would spend a certain amount of time in the pits and your rivals would stop at the pits; today, that no longer exists,” said Hugues de Chaunac, the founder and director of the Oreca team, which has raced in Le Mans for decades and now underpins the Toyota team. “Today, if you talk about race strategy, you know that you have to do 24 hours without spending any time in the pits. If you stop in the pits, your race is dead.” But he said technological evolution was equally important for speed. In 2011, the two main teams in the highest of the four classes that participate in the race finished the race just 13.8 seconds apart, with Audi winning just ahead of Peugeot after the 24-hour duel. That makes for a great show for spectators — and for drivers while not they are not driving. “From a spectator’s perspective, I enjoyed watching last year massively when Toyota and Audi were fighting after a few hours and overtaking each other on the grass and really pushing for the limit,” said Nick Heidfeld, who drives for the Rebellion team in the highest category, LMP1, and who finished fourth last year, “That shows how competitive it is.” For most drivers, the constant qualifying-lap speed is thrilling. “I love just being able to drive the car on the limit all the time you’re in it, that’s when it’s the most fun,” said Mike Conway, a driver for the Delta-ADR team in the second-highest class. “I love to be able to get out of the car and just be completely spent. That’s what drivers love to do, and especially me, anyway. That’s when it’s most rewarding.” This new sort of ultimate 24-hour Grand Prix race is also, therefore, changing the kind of driver the event requires, according to de Chaunac. “You need a young driver who can really fly,” he said. For much of its history, the 24 Hours of Le Mans had the reputation of being the playground of rich, old amateur gentlemen drivers and retired Grand Prix racers. The last time Mario Andretti raced, for example, was in Le Mans in 2000 at the age of 60. But now, while there are still some older drivers, the paddock comprises mostly drivers in their early 20s. And today, even the retired Formula One drivers are mostly in their mid-30s — like Heidfeld, 36. Because the physical and mental strain is much stronger than it once was, it takes a younger man to rise to the challenge. “We used to have to spare the material, but today we know that if the mechanics have done a good job, we don’t have to worry, we will be able to take the curbs and go flat out from beginning to end,” said Franck Mailleux, 28, of the Morand team in the second-highest category. “But physically, and in terms of the concentration, it takes a lot more. Because we are always on the limit. “You also take more risks in the traffic, because it is flat out, and that’s why you may see more accidents,” he added. “You cannot lose two, three or four seconds behind a slower car.” There used to be just two drivers per car, but even the three drivers today are barely enough to cover the stints at full speed. Because the cars can no longer afford to spend time in the pits, the stints can last for up to three hours rather than the hour or so of the past. The demands are such that training for the race has changed, said Alexander Wurz, who won Le Mans in 1996, before entering Formula One, and then again in 2009, after retiring from Formula One. “You are now facing stints that are up to three hours, and for three hours you are driving on your maximum brain and body capacity, but you only have a drink bottle in your car, so you need to train your body to cope with long distance,” said Wurz, 39. “Because after 45 to 60 minutes, your carbohydrate reserves are gone and your body needs, without you getting too tired, to switch to fat burning, and to live from the other resources, basically from the proteins and fat it burns. That is something every endurance athlete has to do and be good at and we have to do the same in the car.” “At home I am doing longer distance training, quite hard, making sure that I’m not training all the time with energy bars, but shifting over from carbohydrate burning into fat burning and getting the body functioning on proteins,” he added. “Because our brain is the highest consumer of sugar and if you then have difficulties of transforming your proteins from muscles or fat into the energy it needs, you get a little tired, you lose concentration, you will be slower, it will be tougher, your recovery is longer.” Still, not all of the drivers are young, nor does everyone think Le Mans is only for the swift. Tracy Krohn, 58, owner of the Krohn team in the amateur class, said that while it was true that most of the drivers these days are like “grandchildren,” it was not just a sprint race. “It feels like a sprint race, but the reality is that the cars have gotten better, they are more dependable, they are quicker every year,” he said. “But if you approach it as a sprint race, then good; then I’m going to beat you. We are not going to approach it as a sprint race, you’ve got to stay out of trouble and if that means you power back a little bit, then that makes sense.” Still, the consensus is that it is faster than it used to be, and the reliable cars put the emphasis where it should be. “Now every second counts, and I think it’s great,” said Scott Tucker, a driver at the Level 5 team in the second-highest class. “Always having to mess around with the equipment was a big problem. The strategy now changes. We are planning on the equipment being flawless and it becomes much more about the drivers.”


Promising Freedom, Hamas Pressures Journalists

Abstract: GAZA CITY, Sept. 4 — During the first Fatah protest rally at Friday Prayer here late last month, a number of Palestinian journalists trying to cover the event were beaten by the Hamas police force. Some journalists were arrested and their cameras seized, prompting complaints from the Gaza branch of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. The next night, at about 10 p.m., Hamas police officers entered Sakher Abu El Oun’s courtyard, preparing to arrest him. Mr. Abu El Oun, a reporter for Agence France-Presse and head of the union here, telephoned a colleague. “I called one journalist who sent out an SMS,” he said, referring to a text message, “and within minutes, about 70 journalists and some human rights activists came to my house and prevented them from taking me away. My kids were crying. It was a very ugly picture.” The police told him, he said, “that they had instructions to arrest me, I had refused, and I would be responsible” for any consequences. Hamas seems confused about how to quash Fatah protests and simultaneously deal with the news media. Trying to nurture a reputation for honesty and legal behavior since they conquered Gaza in bloody fighting in June, Hamas’s leaders promise journalists freedom of action while the police intimidate them. One result is a kind of self-censorship, local journalists say, that goes beyond what they traditionally practiced under Fatah, which also tried to pressure, manipulate or own the Palestinian press. Mr. Abu El Oun, 42, is a good case in point. The immediate crisis for him ended when a Hamas government spokesman, Taher el-Nounou, a former journalist, arrived at his house with a message from the former Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, telling the police to leave. Later, speaking for the union, Mr. Abu El Oun talked about the broader problems journalists were facing. “We are asking for the freedom to cover the protests,” he said. “They can prevent the demonstrations, but not the right of journalists to cover them. We are under self-censorship because we don’t know what is allowed, what isn’t. There is no clear policy. All the journalists are worried, scared.” He has since been asked by his employer not to speak to journalists. One Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, called Mr. Abu El Oun “one bad guy” in an interview and accused him of “presenting himself as a Fatah leader,” in part because of his role in what was a Fatah-dominated union. But in 2001, Mr. Abu El Oun was badly beaten with an iron bar by members of the Fatah-dominated Preventive Security Force and nearly died. He underwent significant reconstructive surgery but returned to work. Palestinian journalists describe a confusing situation, in which Hamas, as a fundamentally religious organization new to politics and used to obedience, is putting undue pressure on the news media, especially with regard to the use of television images and photographs. Hamas is in a fierce political struggle with Fatah, and both factions are using the media at their command — the official Palestinian television and radio by Fatah, which also has its own outlets and newspapers, and Hamas’s newspapers, radio and sophisticated television channel, Al Aksa, which is modeled on Al Minar, which is run by Hezbollah. Each accuses the other of being infidels and in the service of outsiders — Fatah says Hamas serves Iran; Hamas says Fatah serves Israel and America. In addition to children’s shows urging war against Israel and the Israeli occupation, praising martyrdom and attacking Jews, Hamas television runs a news scroll underneath devoted entirely to Hamas-flavored news. The official Palestinian Authority television, hard to see now in Gaza, is only a little more balanced. Fatah in the West Bank has closed Hamas-affiliated media outlets and charities and prevented Hamas-supported newspapers from circulating or Hamas television from broadcasting. Equipment has been confiscated or destroyed, and six Hamas journalists have been arrested, Mr. Nounou said, and 12 more beaten. But here in Gaza, Hamas has done the same to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority-controlled media. At least eight outlets were closed, including three newspapers, and many Fatah journalists have fled. Ahmad Odeh, of Maan news agency, said: “This government came into power by a coup, and in Ramallah, there is an emergency government that rules by decree. There’s no democracy on either side. What do you expect?” Local reporters, including those working for international news agencies, have been pressured, as they used to be pressured under Fatah, but now with a degree more menace. Yet Hamas leaders say they are committed to freedom of speech, while demanding that journalists report “objectively.” After the first Fatah rally, Mr. Nounou, the government spokesman, said in an interview that the police were ordered to leave journalists alone unless they engaged in the protest themselves. A few days later, Hamas said it would no longer work with the Palestinian journalists union that Mr. Abu El Oun leads because it was supposedly pro-Fatah, dissolved it and threatened to prosecute its leaders. Similarly, Hamas at first said the prayer protests were fine if peaceful, but then decided to ban them, causing further clashes. As some protesters were beaten, some more journalists were beaten and arrested, too, before being released. One policeman told reporters, according to The Associated Press, “If a single shot is on TV, you know what will happen,” then drew a finger across his throat. Mr. Zahar said, “There have been mistakes, but they are decreasing.” Mr. Nounou has been an important mediator between police and journalists and has usually secured their release. “We follow every complaint,” he said. “We respect freedom of expression and even allow Fatah here to hold press conferences and demonstrations, which Hamas cannot in the West Bank.” Under Fatah, “the rules were essentially clear,” said another local journalist working for a different news agency. “Don’t attack Yasir Arafat or Muhammad Dahlan or Rashid Abu Shbak,” all prominent Fatah figures, “and don’t touch the issue of corruption. That was basically all. Now, of course, it’s Abbas and a few other figures.” But Hamas, he said, “isn’t used to criticism and doesn’t like it.” While Fatah is essentially a broad, secular movement and disorganized, “Hamas is less accepting of advice or criticism, and it’s less experienced and open to the world.” Since June, he said, Gaza is under a kind of military rule, and everyone is wary. “People aren’t sure what the boundaries are, and Hamas tries to reassure them, but people feel a little afraid,” he said. “Self-censorship is more devastating than censorship laws. And the self-censorship, especially for journalists, is more depressing and complicated than before.”

Hamas
Palestinians
Gaza Strip
Freedom of the Press
News and News Media


Jobless Rates Decline in 34 States in April

Abstract: WASHINGTON (AP) — Unemployment rates fell in a majority of states last month as improved economic conditions spurred hiring. The Labor Department said Friday that 34 states and the District of Columbia reported lower jobless rates in April. Six states reported higher rates, while unemployment held steady in 10. That was an improvement from March when 16 states and the District of Columbia reported declines in unemployment, 22 states had increases and 12 had no change, according to revised figures. South Carolina’s rate fell to 11.6 percent in April, from 12.2 percent in March. That was the largest monthly drop of any state. After cutting their work forces during the recession , companies are starting to increase hiring as their sales and profits improve. Nationwide, employers added a net 290,000 job in April, the most in four years, the department reported earlier this month. The unemployment rate in the United States, though, rose to 9.9 percent as hundreds of thousands of job hunters — feeling more confident about their prospects — resumed or started searches. Even as the employment picture is less bleak in many states, and the nation as a whole, many economists predict it will take years for the job market to return to normal. A normal nationwide unemployment rate typically hovers around 5.5 to 6 percent. It is going to be a long slog because economic growth is not robust enough for companies to ramp up hiring and quickly drive down the jobless rate. Michigan, whose manufacturing base was clobbered by the recession, once again recorded the highest unemployment rate of any state — 14 percent. The rate dipped from 14.1 percent in March. Nevada was close behind. Its rate rose to 13.7 percent last month, the highest on records dating back to 1976. California rounded out the top three with a rate of 12.6 percent, unchanged from March. Nevada and California — states at the heart of the housing boom — have been slammed by the market’s bust and have been swamped by a wave of foreclosures. North Dakota again had the lowest jobless rate — 3.8 percent. That is down from 4 percent in March. It was followed by South Dakota, whose rate dipped to 4.7 percent in April, from 4.8 percent in March, and Nebraska at 5 percent, unchanged from the previous month. Friday’s report also said that a majority of states saw employers bolster jobs in April. The top three gainers: Ohio, where payrolls grew by 37,300 in April, from March; Pennsylvania, with 34,000 net new jobs; and New York with 32,700.

Unemployment
Labor Department
United States Economy
Labor and Jobs


Hornets Land Top Pick in N.B.A. Draft

Abstract: Anthony Davis ended his lone season of college basketball by cutting down the nets in the Louisiana Superdome after helping Kentucky win the national championship. Now, it looks as if he will make New Orleans his permanent home as the Hornets won the No.1 pick in the N.B.A. draft lottery on Wednesday night in New York. The 6-foot-10 Davis, who has drawn comparisons to Bill Russell and Marcus Camby, is a defensive stalwart and shot-blocking sensation with a 7-4 wingspan and a promising offensive game ripe for development. “It’s a difference maker, for sure,” Hornets Coach Monty Williams said. The Hornets also have the 10th pick in the draft, to be held June 28 in Newark. The Nets , headed to Brooklyn next season, did not break into the lottery and as a result sent their selection, No. 6, to the Trail Blazers. The pick had been traded to Portland in a March deal for Gerald Wallace, but the Nets would have kept it if they had been in the top three of the lottery. Without a lottery pick, the Nets may not be able to retain point guard Deron Williams, an impending free agent. “I guess, going in, I didn’t expect to get the pick,” Nets General Manager Billy King said. “So it’s not a disappointment in my eyes.” In defending the Wallace acquisition, as he has before, King said, “We’re trying to win right away.” The Charlotte Bobcats landed the second pick, after a season in which they finished with the worst win percentage in league history (.106). The Washington Wizards will pick third. The Hornets and the Trail Blazers each have two lottery picks to go with promising young coaches. New Orleans should also have a healthy Eric Gordon next season. The Blazers, equipped with the scoring of LaMarcus Aldridge and the solid all-around play of Nicolas Batum, will also draft at No. 11. Other projected top picks include Andre Drummond, the raw Connecticut center; the explosive Kansas power forward Thomas Robinson; Michael Kidd-Gilchrist of Kentucky; Bradley Beal, a top shooter from Florida; and Harrison Barnes, a North Carolina scoring guard. Along with potentially trading for a pick, the Nets may look to Europe to pry away Bojan Bogdanovic, whom they drafted last year with a second-round pick they acquired from the Timberwolves, from Fenerbahçe of the Turkish league. The Nets were also said to be interested in signing the high-scoring Mirza Teletovic, who played for Caja Laboral in Spain last season. Irina Pavlova, the president of Onexim Sports and Entertainment, represented the Nets at the lottery. She is the bridge between the owner Mikhail Prokhorov and the rest of the Nets’ organization. Other representatives included players (Brandon Knight of the Detroit Pistons and Chandler Parsons of the Houston Rockets), coaches (the Hornets’ Williams and Dwane Casey of the Toronto Raptors) and children of team owners (Zachary Leonsis, representing the Wizards, and Nick Gilbert, last year’s good luck winner, representing the Cleveland Cavaliers). Adrienne Maloof-Nassif, whose family owns the Sacramento Kings, represented the team.

Basketball
Draft and Recruitment (Sports)
New Orleans Hornets
Brooklyn Nets