Making Over the Mall With Parks and Sermons

Abstract: Cleveland ’s Galleria at Erieview, like many malls across the country, is suffering. Closed on weekends because there are so few visitors, it is down to eight retail stores, eight food-court vendors and a couple of businesses like the local bar association. So part of the glass-covered mall is being converted into a vegetable garden . “I look at it as space, I don’t look at it as retail,” said Vicky Poole, a Galleria executive. “You can’t anymore.” Malls, over the last 50 years, have gone from the community center in some cities to a relic of the way people once wanted to shop. While malls have faced problems in the past, the Internet is now pulling even more sales away from them. And as retailers crawl out of the worst recession since the advent of malls, many are realizing they are overbuilt and are closing locations at a fast clip. The result is near-record vacancy rates at malls of all kinds, both the big enclosed ones and the sprawling strips. Sears Holdings is closing up to 120 stores, Gap Inc. 200 stores and Talbots 110. Abercrombie & Fitch closed 50 stores last year, Hot Topic, almost the same number. Chains that have filed for bankruptcy in recent years, like Blockbuster , Anchor Blue, Circuit City and Borders, have left hundreds of stores lying vacant in malls across the country. Most cities, looking at shrinking budgets, cannot afford to subsidize or knock down ailing malls, and healthy retailers that are expanding — like H&M and Nordstrom Rack — generally will not open at depressed locations. So, as though they were upholstering polyester chairs from the 1960s with Martha Stewart fabric, urban planners and community activists are trying to spruce up and rethink the uses of many of the artifacts. Schools, medical clinics, call centers, government offices and even churches are now standard tenants in malls. By hanging a curtain to hide the food court, the Galleria in Cleveland, which opened in 1987 with about 70 retailers and restaurants, rents space for weddings and other events. Other malls have added aquariums, casinos and car showrooms. Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus , Ohio , arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park. Even at many malls that continue to thrive, developers are redesigning them as town squares — adding elements like dog parks and putting greens, creating street grids that go through the malls, and restoring natural elements like creeks that were originally paved over. “Basically they’re building the downtowns that the suburbs never had,” along with reworking abandoned urban malls for nonshopping uses, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology . The efforts reflect a shift in how Americans want to shop today: rather than going to big, overwhelming malls, many prefer places where stores can be entered from the street, featuring restaurants, entertainment and other Main Street mainstays. Also, as commuters in urban areas shift to public transportation, the giant parking lots are no longer needed. The Simon Property Group , a large mall operator, is remodeling 15 to 20 malls a year, said its chief operating officer, Richard Sokolov. It is adding amenities like electric-car charging stations and stadium-seating theaters, and scheduling 20,000 events a year, like cooking demonstrations. Malls today have to “provide a unique set of shopping, dining and entertainment experiences,” Mr. Sokolov said. Westfield, another large operator, has added dog runs and ice rinks, and, in Toledo, Ohio, the Wait Room, a lounge where customers can drink a beer and check their e-mail “while their significant other shops,” said Katy Dickey, a Westfield spokeswoman, in an e-mail. While some malls can afford to change with the times, many cannot, and over all, there are too many malls today, urban planners say. The vacancy rate at shopping centers and strip malls was 11 percent in the last quarter of 2011, the highest level since 1991, according to the research firm Reis. Larger regional malls fared better, with a vacancy rate of 9.2 percent. There are about 108,000 shopping centers in America, according to a 2009 survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers. Just a few years ago, developers competed to build malls, betting that continued growth would support them, but the recession threw those plans off course. A new enclosed mall has not opened in the United States since 2006, according to Professor Dunham-Jones, and many ambitious projects, like New Jersey ’s Xanadu just west of Manhattan , have lain half-finished for years. “In the aggregate, we have more than we need at this point, and it can have a blighting influence on communities,” said Patrick Phillips, chief executive of the Urban Land Institute. “You see that all over the country, these endless commercial strips that are completely underutilized.” That is leading to a variety of creative solutions that “would help make ’60s and ’70s suburbia a bit more sustainable,” said Rob Shields, director of the City-Region Studies Center at the University of Alberta, which held a design competition over the last several months that attracted the Detroit and Buffalo proposals. But putting the theory into practice is requiring unusual city-developer liaisons. Mall owners often need regulatory clearance or financing help from a city to make major changes, and cities can sometimes seize malls that they believe are a hindrance to economic development. And malls were usually built at busy intersections with good access to public transportation — a combination that still works, even if the mall itself doesn’t. In Seattle , city planners are looking at reworking a still-thriving mall as a focus point for more development. “We’re at this interesting moment, because in cities, land is very scarce,” said Marshall Foster, city planning director for Seattle, which is trying to make Northgate Mall, a popular mall built in 1950, a center for urban life. “We can’t afford to overlook these opportunities any longer.” The city is adding transit and trying to increase jobs and living space there. It has restored a creek originally covered by a parking lot, and is pushing the mall owner and retailers to add a street-grid layout and remodel stores so they are accessible from the street. Cleveland, too, has given over some plots of land to the greenhouse effort at the Galleria mall. The shift to gardening began with the carts that used to sell jewelry or candles, where Ms. Poole, the director of marketing events, had herbs planted in the disused retail carts inside the mall. She learned how quickly aphids proliferate indoors (solution: release 1,500 ladybugs into the mall). The garden now produces lettuce, strawberries, basil and other crops, which are sold to visitors and used for the mall’s catering business. An unexpected benefit has been an influx of visitors, which has prompted related retailers to open in the mall, like a company that sells rainwater collection barrels. “This has been sustaining us throughout these hard years, but now we’re looking at the potential of turning things around,” said Ms. Poole while preparing kale and spinach seeds for spring planting.

Retail
Shopping mall
Commercial Real Estate
Economy
Urban Planning


Rex Tillerson, Exxon C.E.O., Chosen as Secretary of State

Abstract: WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday officially selected Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, to be his secretary of state. In saying he will nominate Mr. Tillerson, the president-elect is dismissing bipartisan concerns that the globe-trotting leader of an energy giant has a too-cozy relationship with Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia. A statement from Mr. Trump’s transition office early Tuesday brought to an end his public and chaotic deliberations over the nation’s top diplomat — a process that at times veered from rewarding Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of his most loyal supporters, to musing about whether Mitt Romney, one of his most outspoken critics, might be forgiven. Instead, Mr. Trump has decided to risk what looks to be a bruising confirmation fight in the Senate. In the past several days, Republican and Democratic lawmakers had warned that Mr. Tillerson would face intense scrutiny over his two-decade relationship with Russia, which awarded him its Order of Friendship in 2013, and with Mr. Putin. The hearings will also put a focus on Exxon Mobil’s business dealings with Moscow. The company has billions of dollars in oil contracts that can go forward only if the United States lifts sanctions against Russia, and Mr. Tillerson’s stake in Russia’s energy industry could create a very blurry line between his interests as an oilman and his role as America’s leading diplomat. Donald Trump’s Cabinet Is Complete. Here’s the Full List. A list of appointees and nominees for top posts in the new administration. Mr. Tillerson has been publicly skeptical about the sanctions, which have halted some of Exxon Mobil’s biggest projects in Russia, including an agreement with the state oil company to explore and pump in Siberia that could be worth tens of billions of dollars. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said on Saturday that Mr. Tillerson’s connections to Mr. Putin were “a matter of concern to me” and promised to examine them closely if he were nominated. “Vladimir Putin is a thug, bully and a murderer, and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying,” Mr. McCain said on Fox News. Mr. Trump has fanned speculation about his choice for secretary of state for weeks. In the end, he discarded not only Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Romney, but also an endlessly changing list that at times included Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee; David H. Petraeus, the former Army general and C.I.A. director; and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor and presidential candidate in 2012. Mr. Romney, Mr. Petraeus and Mr. Corker, the three leading runners-up, all received calls late Monday informing them of Mr. Trump’s decision, according to people familiar with the president-elect’s final choice. He settled on Mr. Tillerson, a deal maker who has spent the past four decades at Exxon, much of it in search of oil and gas agreements in troubled parts of the world. A native of Wichita Falls, Tex., who speaks with a strong Texas twang, Mr. Tillerson, 64, runs a company with operations in about 50 countries, and has cut deals to expand business in Venezuela, Qatar, Kurdistan and elsewhere. If confirmed as secretary of state, Mr. Tillerson would face a new challenge: nurturing alliances around the world that are built less on deals and more on diplomacy. That could prove to be a special test when it comes to Russia, where Mr. Tillerson has fought for years to strengthen connections through business negotiations worth billions of dollars. Under his leadership, Exxon has entered into joint ventures with Rosneft, a Russian-backed oil company, and donated to the country’s health and social programs. In his new role, Mr. Tillerson would have to manage the difficult relationship between the United States and Mr. Putin’s Russia, including the economic sanctions imposed after Moscow intervened in Ukraine and occupied Crimea. Last month, President Obama and European leaders agreed to keep sanctions in place until Mr. Putin agrees to a cease-fire and to the withdrawal of heavy weapons from front lines in eastern Ukraine. Other Republicans who have challenged Mr. Tillerson’s potential selection include Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who expressed concern in a Twitter post on Monday about his relationship with Mr. Putin. Mr. Trump favored Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, initially, but quickly grew weary of his penchant for drawing outsize media attention. Mr. Trump was also troubled by reports of Mr. Giuliani’s business entanglements overseas. And some of the president-elect’s closest advisers, including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, saw Mr. Giuliani as a poor fit for the job. That led to interest in Mr. Romney, who had called Mr. Trump a “fraud” and a “phony” during the campaign. Mr. Romney had also highlighted Russia as a danger to United States interests during the 2012 race. Outsiders, Insiders and Multimillionaires in Trump’s Cabinet President-elect Donald J. Trump’s cabinet and top staff are shaping up to be a mix of wealthy Washington outsiders, Republican insiders and former military officers who have been critical of the Obama administration. Mr. Trump and Mr. Romney made peace , meeting twice and speaking periodically by phone. But some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including his last campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, warned publicly in a series of television interviews that some of his supporters would quickly drift away if Mr. Romney were chosen for the job. Mr. Tillerson emerged as a contender on the strong recommendations of James A. Baker III, the secretary of state under President George Bush, and Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, according to a person briefed on the process. Mr. Kushner and Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, argued strongly for Mr. Tillerson, and the president-elect was intrigued. Mr. Trump met with Mr. Tillerson for more than two hours on Saturday at Trump Tower in Manhattan. To his aides, Mr. Trump described Mr. Tillerson as in a different “league” than his other options. Mr. Romney acknowledged late Monday night in a Facebook post that he had been passed over, writing, “It was an honor to have been considered for Secretary of State of our great country.” “My discussions with President-elect Trump have been both enjoyable and enlightening,” Mr. Romney wrote.

Russia
Donald Trump
Vladimir Putin
Rex W Tillerson
State Department
US Politics
US Foreign Policy


No Football Team at Cigna U, but the Finals Can Be Fun

Abstract: A campaign from a giant insurance company seeks to school consumers on health care by offering them a chance to attend a virtual institution of higher learning with no campus, sports teams, classrooms or fight song. Best of all, there will never be letters from the alumni office dunning graduates for donations. The insurance company is Cigna, which has introduced Cigna University with an interactive “e-learning” curriculum. The program is part of a brand campaign that carries the theme “It’s time to feel better,” which provides the address for the educational Web site . “We can’t fix the entire health system overnight,” say newspaper and magazine ads that are meant to help drive traffic to the Web site. “But we’re doing everything in our power to make it better for you.” The curriculum on the Web site is also available on Facebook, flickr.com and YouTube and as podcasts on iTunes. It is composed of three courses: “Back to the Basics,” the equivalent of Health Insurance 101; “What’s Your Plan,” outlining the ins and outs of health care plans; and “Take Action Now,” examining the health care platforms of the Democratic and Republican Parties. And since few universities are all work and no play, visitors to the Web site can try their luck at a game about issues related to health. As an incentive to play, Cigna is making donations to an organization called Water for People for each three questions that computer users answer correctly. The brand campaign includes, in addition to the print ads, three television commercials, one of them 60 seconds long. The shops collaborating on Cigna University are Doremus, an advertising agency owned by the Omnicom Group, and an Omnicom public relations agency, Fleishman-Hillard, along with the Fleishman-Hillard digital health care practice. The budget to develop the online health courses and the game is estimated at $400,000. The “It’s time to feel better” campaign, which Cigna intends to run for several years, has a multimillion-dollar budget. “One of our main objectives is for consumers to be empowered,” says Sheila McCormick, director for consumer education at the Chicago office of Cigna, adding that company executives “recognize it’s difficult for people to act if they don’t understand” how the health care system — and health insurance — work. Research shows that “only 8 percent say they understand all they need to know about health care,” she adds, which is “worse than we thought.” Ms. McCormick acknowledges the widespread skepticism — even cynicism — about efforts to improve health care in the United States as well as the health insurance system. “The industry is not perceived as positively by consumers as we would like,” Ms. McCormick says, and as a result “it’s very difficult to engage people.” To counter that, the courses “are not branded Cigna and the Cigna logo is not all over them,” she adds, to underline that the initiative is “not to sell product but to educate people” Howard Sherman, president of Doremus in New York, says a goal is to “stake out a leadership position” for Cigna, which is beginning to “think of itself as less of a health insurer and more of a health service company.” “It’s more about that service mentality,” he says of Cigna University, assisting “members and employers to more easily navigate what’s a pretty complex system and get the benefits they need when they need them.” One way to do that, Mr. Sherman says, is by “moving away from the jargon of health care,” so the courses are presented in as straightforward a fashion as was possible. For instance, the educational programs are in a section of the Web site labeled “Its time to know stuff.” A demonstration of claim processing appears as “The life of a claim” in a virtual theater. “This is very much about a company that recognizes it’s in its own best interests to change,” Mr. Sherman says, “to make it easier for employer customers and member customers.” Part of making it easier is the widespread presence of the courses in the new media outlets like Facebook, iTunes and YouTube. “It was a great opportunity to try a host of things we’ve never utilized before,” says Karen Kocher, chief learning officer at Cigna, who is also based in Chicago. “It recognizes the way learning tends to permeate,” she adds. Erin Enke, a managing supervisor at the Fleishman-Hillard office in New York specializing in digital health care public relations, says the game was included in the curriculum because such content tends to be “more sticky” — that is, encouraging computer users to stay on Web sites longer. “If you’re playing the game and enjoy it,” Ms. Enke says, “it automatically updates your Facebook page to show you’ve been playing.” The presence of Cigna University on Facebook and the other Web sites is “not just because we can use them,” she adds, but rather to enable those consumers who consider visits to those sites as integral parts of their daily routines to “become familiar with Cigna.” So far, the strategy seems to be working. As of last week, a month into the campaign, Cigna tracked 52,500 visits to the courses and the game, according to a spokeswoman for the company, Gloria Barone Rosanio, and 85 percent of the traffic to the Web site had come from Facebook and other “online referrals” that included blog posts and online articles. And the donations to Water for People that Cigna is making for correct answers to game questions reached more than 52,300 as of last week, meaning that game players had answered more than 150,000 questions correctly. (The game informs players that for each three questions they get right, a child in a developing country gets a day of clean water.) Cigna has agreed to donate $50,000 to Water for People through the end of the year, Ms. McCormick says.  If you like In Advertising, be sure to read the Advertising column that runs Monday through Friday in the Business Day section of The New York Times print edition and on nytimes.com .

Health Insurance and Managed Care
Online Advertising
Computers and the Internet


At Least 5 Children Die in School Bus Crash in Chattanooga

Abstract: CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — At least five children were killed on Monday afternoon when a school bus carrying nearly three dozen elementary school students overturned and crashed into a tree in Chattanooga, according to local officials. About two dozen of the 35 Woodmore Elementary School students on the bus were taken to hospitals here after the accident, which occurred before 3:30 p.m. about a mile from the school, Chief Fred Fletcher of the Chattanooga Police Department said on Monday night. The police arrested the bus driver, Johnthony Walker, 24, on Monday night and charged him with five counts of vehicular homicide, as well as reckless endangerment and reckless driving, the police chief said. “Our thoughts, our prayers and all of our efforts are with the families of these children and others impacted by this tragedy,” said Chief Fletcher, who described the accident as a single-vehicle crash. Information on the conditions of the children who were taken to hospitals was unavailable. An earlier report from the Hamilton County district attorney general’s office had said at least six children died. Road conditions at the accident site, at Howard Avenue and Talley Road, appeared to be “clear and dry,” Chief Fletcher said. He added that officials were investigating whether speed or alcohol had played a role in the crash. “Certainly speed is being investigated very, very strongly,” he said, noting that the investigation was continuing. The National Transportation Safety Board was sending a team to investigate. Emergency crews worked for hours to remove the children from the bus. Students who were not taken to the hospital walked away “looking dazed with cuts on their faces,” The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported . On Monday night, more than a dozen cars filled the parking lot of Woodmore Elementary School, where school district employees had gathered to prepare the school for a day of grief. Sometime after the accident, a woman went to a nearby store and bought every stuffed animal in stock, about 50. She told employees at Woodmore, where an orange crate of plush Fuzzy Friends sat in the school office after nightfall, that she planned to return with an animal for every student by day’s end on Tuesday. Blood Assurance, a nonprofit regional blood center, extended its hours at three locations in Chattanooga, a city of about 175,000 in southeastern Tennessee. At 9 p.m., there was still a line out the door at one site. “The response has been enormous,” said Mindy Quinn, a spokeswoman for the center. Representative Chuck Fleischmann, who represents the state’s Third Congressional District, which includes Chattanooga, turned to Twitter to express his condolences to the victims. “I am absolutely heartbroken over this tragedy,” he said, “and I will pray for the children and their families.”

Bus
Johnthony Walker
Car Crash
Chattanooga Tennessee
Fatalities,casualties
K-12 Education
Murders and Homicides


Turkish President Returns to Istanbul in Sign Military Coup Is Faltering

Abstract: ISTANBUL — A military coup attempt plunged Turkey into a long night of violence and intrigue on Friday, threatening its embattled president, leaving nearly 200 dead and injecting new instability into a crucial NATO member and American ally in the chaotic Middle East. The coup attempt was followed hours later by an equally dramatic public appearance by the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan , whose whereabouts had been unknown for hours after the plotters claimed to have taken control. Flying into Istanbul Ataturk Airport from an undisclosed location early Saturday, Mr. Erdogan signaled that the coup was failing. “A minority within the armed forces has unfortunately been unable to stomach Turkey’s unity,” Mr. Erdogan said after the private television channel NTV showed him greeting supporters. Blaming political enemies, Mr. Erdogan said: “What is being perpetrated is a rebellion and a treason. They will pay a heavy price for their treason to Turkey.” Mr. Erdogan suggested that the plotters had tried to assassinate him, referring to a bombing in the Turkish Mediterranean resort town of Marmaris after he left on Friday. “It would appear that they thought I was there,” he said. Supporters of Mr. Erdogan responded to his call to take to the streets in Istanbul, and by Saturday morning, the coup appeared to be unraveling. The state-run Anadolu Agency reported that about 200 unarmed soldiers had surrendered to the police in Ankara. CNN Turk showed video of soldiers abandoning tanks in Istanbul, and by morning, civilians were climbing onto the tanks and waving flags, according to images posted on social media. Anadolu said more than 1,500 members of the armed forces linked to the plot had been detained across Turkey, including a brigadier general in the country’s northeast. Nonetheless, the abrupt turn of events in Turkey left Mr. Erdogan’s grip on power uncertain. The country has been reeling from a wave of deadly extremism by the Islamic State, struggling to accommodate hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war in neighboring Syria and fighting a resurgent Kurdish rebellion in the Turkish southeast. Mr. Erdogan, an Islamist who has dominated politics for more than a decade, has also alienated many Turks with his increasingly autocratic behavior. Turkey’s acting chief of general staff, Gen. Umit Dundar, said on Saturday that 194 people had been killed, and he called 104 of them “coup plotters.” Of the 90 others killed, 47 were civilians, the general said at a news conference in Ankara, the capital. Seventeen police officers were killed in a military helicopter attack by coup plotters on a police special forces headquarters outside Ankara, Anadolu Agency had reported earlier. CNN Turk reported that 12 civilians had died in an explosion at the Parliament building. Martial law was declared after the coup attempt in the country, which has been convulsed by military takeovers at least three times in the past half-century. Before he made his televised remarks from the airport, Mr. Erdogan was forced to use his iPhone’s FaceTime app from a secret location to broadcast messages beseeching the public to resist the coup attempt. “There is no power higher than the power of the people,” he said amid contradictory accounts of who was in control. “Let them do what they will at public squares and airports.” After Mr. Erdogan spoke, many followers obeyed his orders to go into the streets, and mosque loudspeakers urged his supporters to protest the coup attempt. Video Prime Minister Binali Yildirim of Turkey said Friday that a faction of the country's military had attempted to overthrow the government. As military forces occupied Istanbul’s Taksim Square, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged citizens to take to the streets. Credit Credit Gurcan Ozturk/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The United States Embassy said in a statement that “shots have been heard in Ankara” and urged Americans to take shelter. Social media outlets worked intermittently or were blocked. The events began unfolding around 10 p.m. Friday as the military moved to stop traffic over two of Istanbul’s bridges, which cross the Bosporus and connect the European and Asian sides of the city. There were reports of gunfire in Taksim Square, in central Istanbul, where pro-Erdogan supporters had gathered, but there were no reports of injuries, and it appeared that security forces were acting with restraint. On the Bosporus Bridge, closed earlier in the evening by the military, there were reports of gunfire as protesters approached, and according to NTV, three people were hurt. Some military officials spoke out against a coup, including the commander of the First Army, Gen. Umit Guler, who issued a statement, carried by a pro-government news channel, saying, “The armed forces do not support this movement comprised of a small group within our ranks.” Leaders of opposition political parties, who have otherwise worked against Mr. Erdogan’s government, also spoke out against a seizure of the government by the military. “This country has suffered a lot from coups,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main secular opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, known by its Turkish initials, C.H.P., said in a statement quoted by The Hurriyet Daily News. “It should be known that the C.H.P. fully depends on the free will of the people as indispensable of our parliamentary democracy.” By 2 a.m., a large group of protesters had gathered at Istanbul Ataturk Airport, and the military had begun withdrawing, according to CNN Turk. In the back streets of Istanbul’s European districts, bars and restaurants were showing footage on television of scenes at the bridge, while partygoers were glued to their mobile phones trying to learn what was happening. “Some people illegally undertook an illegal action outside of the chain of command,” Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in comments broadcast on NTV. “The government elected by the people remains in charge. This government will only go when the people say so.” After Mr. Yildirim spoke, factions of the Turkish military issued a statement, according to the news agency DHA, claiming they had taken control of the country. “Turkish armed forces seized the rule of the country completely with the aim of reinstalling the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms, to make rule of law pervade again, to re-establish the ruined public order,” the statement quoted by DHA said. “All the international agreements and promises are valid. We hope our good relations with all global countries goes on.” Senior Pentagon officials in Washington said they were still trying to determine what was happening in Turkey. They said the United States had not adjusted its military posture in the region. The Defense Department has roughly 2,200 uniformed military personnel and civilians in Turkey. About 1,500 of them are based at Incirlik, an air base in southern Turkey near Syria. The United States has used the base to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State. Since March, Incirlik has been on an “elevated force protection level” amid concerns that militants were targeting it. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter in May ordered all family members of military personnel based at Incirlik to leave the country. Mr. Erdogan placed blame for the coup attempt on followers of Fethullah Gulen , a Muslim cleric who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and who was once an ally before the two had a bitter falling-out in 2013 over a corruption inquiry that targeted Mr. Erdogan and his inner circle. Over many years, followers of Mr. Gulen built up a presence in Turkey’s police and judiciary, and Mr. Erdogan blamed them for the corruption inquiry. Mr. Erdogan and his allies then purged the judiciary and the police of those linked to Mr. Gulen, going so far as to call him the leader of a terrorist organization and seeking, unsuccessfully, to have him extradited from the United States. Mr. Gulen denied any role in the attempted coup, saying he condemned it “in the strongest terms.” “As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt,” he said in an emailed statement. “I categorically deny such accusations.” Since the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, the military has staged coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, and has intervened in 1997. The military had long seen itself as the guardian of the secular system, established by the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. But in recent years, a series of sensational trials had pushed the military back to its barracks, which analysts said had secured civilian leadership over the military. Across Istanbul on Friday night, rumors swirled and evening plans were upended. In the Arnavutkoy neighborhood, people flooded out of bars and restaurants, hailing taxis and urging loved ones to get home to safety. “There’s a coup,” one man shouted in the street. “There’s a coup, and blood will be shed.” Mr. Erdogan attracted a wide-ranging constituency in the early years of his tenure, including many liberals who supported his plans to overhaul the economy and remove the military from politics. But in recent years, he has alienated many Turks with his increasingly autocratic ways, cracking down on freedom of expression, imposing a significant role for religion in public life and renewing war with Kurdish militants in the southeast. “The people tried to stand up against President Erdogan, but they couldn’t, they were crushed, so the military had no choice but to take over,” said Cem Yildiz, a taxi driver. Mr. Yildiz said that recent terrorism in the country attributed to Islamic State militants, including an attack on Istanbul Ataturk Airport that killed dozens, was “the tipping point” for him. He blamed Turkey’s policy on Syria for the terrorist attacks. Early in the civil war there, Turkey supported rebel groups fighting the Syrian government. Many of the fighters who traveled through Turkey to Syria joined the Islamic State, and critics have blamed Mr. Erdogan for enabling its rise. “He has destroyed this country, and no one will stand up to him but the military,” Mr. Yildiz said. “There was no choice but this.” Seyda Yilmaz, a teacher who was out in Istanbul on Friday when the news broke, said: “The country is in chaos, and Erdogan needs to be put in his place, but I’m afraid. I’m very afraid because in the past a lot of innocent blood was shed in these coups. I’m anxious. I don’t know what to say at this point. We are all in shock.”

Military
Turkey
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Coups D'Etat


Global Stock Markets React to Uncertainty in Asia and Europe

Abstract: PARIS — Volatility weighed on global stock markets on Thursday as a roller coaster trading day in China added to the grinding uncertainty about the debt crisis in Greece. A rout in European bonds continued. The Shanghai composite index closed nearly 1 percent higher, despite having slid more than 5 percent in the course of trading on Thursday. The index has gained a remarkable 53 percent thus far in 2015. That fluctuation carried into Europe, where the Euro Stoxx 50 index of eurozone blue chips fell 1.5 percent in midday trading only to rally to roughly unchanged in the afternoon, while the FTSE 100 index in London had given up 0.7 percent by the afternoon. In New York, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 0.2 percent in midmorning trading. The S.&P. 500 had gained about 0.4 percent the day before. While the wild ride in Chinese stocks was the most visible sign of market volatility on Thursday, uncertainty over Greece’s negotiations with its creditors also weighed on European stocks. The creditors — the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank — “have been kicking the can down the road for a very long time,” Philippe Gijsels, chief strategy officer at BNP Paribas Fortis, said on Thursday. “But they don’t seem to have made much progress, and there are some deadlines ahead.” Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, may have contributed to the market turmoil when he said on Wednesday that the central bank would not try to manage bond markets or react to short-term fluctuations in prices. “We should get used to periods of higher volatility,” Mr. Draghi said at a news conference in Frankfurt. Big swings in prices, he said, are to be expected when interest rates are very low. And he emphasized that the central bank would continue a plan announced in March to buy 60 billion euros, or about $67 billion, of government bonds and other debt each month through September 2016 as part of an economic stimulus program. Investors on Thursday were selling off European bonds. Bond yields, which move in the opposite direction to bond prices, reached astonishingly low levels this year in the eurozone, as investors sought safe assets amid expectations of poor growth and fears that deflation would take hold in the euro currency bloc. But the bond rally has reversed as the eurozone economy has gathered momentum faster than many market watchers had expected, and as deflation fears have ebbed. The yield on German government 10-year debt, the eurozone benchmark, is back around 0.8 percent, after having fallen almost to zero. Investors who bought 10-year Italian and Spanish bonds, so-called peripheral eurozone debt, pushed yields down to lows of around 1.1 percent in March. On Thursday, those bonds had yields closer to 2 percent. “You can no longer justify yields near zero on 10-years,” Mr. Gijsels said. As a result, investors who bought in at a time of low yields are now rushing for the exits to avoid losses. Mr. Gijsels said investors were also nervous about the May jobs report for the United States, due to be released Friday morning in Washington. Because recent data has not given a clear indication of the direction of the American economy, he said, markets will be closely watching the unemployment report for indications of how soon the Federal Reserve plans to begin raising interest rates from their current levels, near zero. “We’re in a perverse world where bad news is good news for the market,” he said, because a weak jobs report “would mean that rates stayed low.” The dollar fell early Thursday against most other major currencies but recovered slightly in afternoon trading. The euro was a touch higher at $1.1283. The dollar was steady against the Japanese currency at around 124.5 yen.

Eurozone
European Central Bank
Mario Draghi
Euro Crisis
SP 500


Eddie DeBartolo Jr., a Gifted but Flawed Human Being, Seeks a Spot Among the Immortals

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Eddie DeBartolo Jr. is nervous. So nervous that he often can’t sleep past 2:45 a.m. His mind is racing as he wonders how this Super Bowl weekend will turn out. He is not thinking about the game. No, DeBartolo, known to fans around here as Eddie D, the former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, is worried about something bigger than that: the Pro Football Hall of Fame vote, which takes place on Saturday. Eddie D is one of the candidates who could enter the Hall this year. Three times before, the voters have passed on him. Now, so many years after he built one of the N.F.L.’s greatest dynasties, will they finally let him in? DeBartolo, 69, wants it so much that it makes him ache. On a recent teleconference, he said, “The people that are in the Hall of Fame, those men are immortals.” He is actively trying to minimize his expectations. “That’s it, I’m cooked, it’s over,” he told Carmen Policy, the former 49ers president and chief executive, who remains close to DeBartolo. “I just know I’m not getting in. This is it for me. I’m done.” Policy told me Thursday that he and DeBartolo had been talking a lot about DeBartolo’s Hall chances. DeBartolo is, after all, the only owner who presided over a team that won five Super Bowls. “Without Eddie, those five Super Bowl wins wouldn’t have happened,” Policy said. “He’s the one that held the team together. He’s the one who created that culture of winning and the culture of treating players like family. The team really responded to him.” DeBartolo ensured that his teams always traveled in style and in comfort, on large, wide-body planes, and each player had his own hotel room, when that mentality of luxury hadn’t yet set in leaguewide. He instituted a minority coaches fellowship program, back when that sort of thing did not exist. He acknowledged the players’ effort by handing out towels at the locker room door. “Players don’t trust people in suits and can smell a phony in seconds, but they accepted Eddie right away because they knew he was genuine,” Policy said. But Policy and his old friend both know that DeBartolo’s football résumé is not what has kept him out for all these years. The wee problem with DeBartolo’s candidacy is that, well, he is a felon. Don’t be so fast to judge him, at least according to the low bar that football sometimes sets for behavior. DeBartolo didn’t physically harm anyone, or gamble on his team’s games. He was indicted for failing to report an extortion attempt by the former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards. In trying to secure a riverboat gambling license, DeBartolo had agreed to pay Edwards $400,000, in crisp $100 bills . In Louisiana, some might say that was business as usual back then. DeBartolo avoided prison, but he was fined $1 million and suspended for a year by the N.F.L. That was the beginning of the end for Eddie D. He never did return to his beloved 49ers; to conclude a bitter intrafamily legal battle, he handed the franchise to his sister, Denise DeBartolo York, and took over the real estate part of the family’s business. These days, DeBartolo’s nephew Jed York runs the team. On Thursday, York posted a photo on Twitter of DeBartolo standing in front of the 49ers’ five Lombardi Trophies. “Great picture,” he wrote. “Would go well with a Gold Jacket.” Some Hall of Fame voters might not support DeBartolo’s candidacy because of his criminal record. But according to the selection rules, they are not supposed to consider anything but a candidate’s contributions to the game. Nothing off the field can come into play. So, considering Lawrence Taylor made it to the Hall of Fame even though he had been suspended for drug use, there is no reason DeBartolo should not be in, too. This isn’t baseball, which self-importantly considers its Hall of Fame sacred and its members nothing short of noble. That sport goes out of its way to ensure that the people entering it aren’t dopers like Barry Bonds or gamblers like Pete Rose (though it is happy to include accused racists and noted cheapskates ). But remember, DeBartolo’s sport is football, which already has a dark shadow over it. And I’m not just talking about football’s concussion problem or its problem with domestic violence. I’m also talking about the fact that the game was founded by gamblers and high rollers, and has been — and continues to be — overseen by owners with connections with gambling . It has a past that is not so noble. Tim Mara, the bookie who founded the Giants , and Art Rooney, who founded the Pittsburgh Steelers, were proud gamblers. Charles Bidwell, whose family now owns the Arizona Cardinals, was a gambler and a racetrack owner. These days, the New England Patriots’ owner, Robert K. Kraft, and the Dallas Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, have invested in companies that run Internet fantasy football games, businesses that several states now deem illegal gambling. Does that mean voters will have to think extra hard when deciding if Kraft and Jones should be in the Hall of Fame one day? Maybe. Will they? Probably not. That is why it’s past time for DeBartolo to slip on one of the Hall of Fame’s gold jackets, especially now that there is an entirely separate category for contributors to the game. The good news is that his chances are good; the vote on Saturday will be held in the region that he put on the Super Bowl map, and he is the sole contributor candidate this year. “He was an important figure who really revolutionized what a franchise could mean in terms of connectivity to a city and a place and made it more relevant on a national scale,” said Robert A. Boland, a sports law expert who teaches a professional sports franchises class at Ohio University. “He did all the things that made the franchise the paradigm of what a good franchise should be. I think the N.F.L. would have been far richer if he were allowed to remain in the game.” Policy, of course, is pushing for DeBartolo to be elected. “He deserves it,” he said. Many former 49ers also are pushing for their old friend. Joe Montana. Ronnie Lott. Jerry Rice. They want DeBartolo in the Hall alongside them. “It’s time,” Rice said. He’s right.

49ers
Pro Football Hall of Fame
Football
Edward J Debartolo Jr


Manny Pacquiao, 37, Refuses to Retire, or Even Take it Easy

Abstract: LAS VEGAS — The last time Manny Pacquiao was preparing to fight, it was impossible to escape the hype. It was the hottest ticket in Las Vegas. Hotels tripled their rates, nightclubs threw lavish parties, and the wrangling over his bout against Floyd Mayweather Jr. dominated newscasts. That is not the case now. Pacquiao has not fought since May, when he lost a unanimous decision to Mayweather in a fight that had all the thrill of a staring contest. More recently, he has received about as much attention for his fight against Timothy Bradley Jr. for a welterweight world title on Saturday night as he has for his Senate run in his native Philippines and for his negative remarks about gays. Pacquiao, 37, has said he will retire after this fight. Many people — Pacquiao included — are not sure whether to believe him. Yet the fact that Pacquiao is not attracting the hoopla he previously has may be an indication that his career is winding down. “The craziness, particularly among Filipinos, hasn’t been there in this one,” Bob Arum, Pacquiao’s promoter, said in a rare display of playing down by a man whose art is to manufacture buzz. “When you listen to him talk, it’s less about fighting and more about politics in the Philippines. That doesn’t really necessarily inspire the base.” Arum has turned to an unlikely place to generate more attention for his show on Saturday night: politics. He has called the fights before the main event the “No Trump” undercard. Dismayed by the Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump’s position on Mexicans, Arum put Mexican fighters on all of the undercard fights in an effort to rebut Trump’s negative statements about people from Mexico. For Arum, Pacquiao’s mental drift and diminished skills — gone are those furious left hands — are enough for him to support the retirement of a fighter who had been his most lucrative in recent years. “Enough is enough,” Arum said. “Boxing is a hurt business. There’s a limit to what his body can take.” Some, however, cannot imagine Pacquiao (57-6-2) going out like this. “This is not a big enough fight to go out on,” his trainer, Freddie Roach, said. Yet Arum cautions against judging this fight before it happens. Sure, there are other up-and-comers and big-name fighters whom Pacquiao could have faced in bouts that might have drawn more attention from the news media and the public. But the Bradley fight could have more action and excitement than the other options, Arum said. Bradley (33-1-1) emerged with a contentious split-decision victory the first time he fought Pacquiao in 2012. Pacquiao got revenge with a unanimous decision win two years ago. Now both fighters say they have something to prove when they meet at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. For Bradley, it is that he can actually beat Pacquiao; few people thought he was victorious in the first fight. “I just think that having his name on my résumé, and everyone believes, everyone knows that I won, I think that’s very important for me to have,” Bradley said. And Pacquiao is out to prove that he is still a dominant figure. “I want to win convincingly,” he said. And then? “My family needs more time from me,” Pacquiao said, explaining his decision to retire. He also wants to devote more time to his duties as an elected official. He won a seat in Congress in the Philippines in 2010 and is now running for the Senate. Pacquiao slipped in the polls after recently calling people in same-sex relationships “worse than animals.” Still, should he win the seat, it is difficult to say whether that would satisfy him enough that he would not want to return to the ring. “I’m not there yet in that situation — what’s the feeling when you retire?” he said. A Pacquiao retirement would come eight months after Mayweather (49-0) stepped away from the ring following a bout against Andre Berto that also drew underwhelming levels of attention. Mayweather, 39, and Pacquiao are linked as the best fighters of their generation. But their dull matchup last year may have hurt their marketability to the casual fan, stunting the excitement for their subsequent fights. Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer, said, “I’d love to see him go with Mayweather one more time.” Although that would seem like a long shot, it could be the most lucrative option if they decided to come out of retirement. Pacquiao said that in their previous fight, he was hampered by a right shoulder injury. He has not taken a layoff this long since Juan Manuel Márquez knocked him out in December 2012. He is healthy and looking fresh after this break, Roach said. Pacquiao, with 38 knockouts in his career, has not stopped an opponent since his technical knockout of Miguel Cotto in 2009. Though Pacquiao is undoubtedly past his prime, Roach said he was seeing signs of the tornado-like force that regularly used to leave opponents bloodied and broken. The last two days of sparring, Roach said, Pacquiao tried to knock out his partners. “Was good to see old, aggressive Manny,” Roach said.


Facebook Acts to Restore Trust After Overstating Video Views

Abstract: Facebook is moving to restore confidence among advertisers and publishers that it is accurately measuring how often and how long users see videos, news articles, ads and corporate messages on its social network. The steps, announced on Wednesday, followed the company’s apology in September for an error that resulted in considerably overstating how long, on average, users spent watching videos on Facebook. Facebook said that it would increase its use of outside measurement services for display and video ads. The company said it is expanding its use of metrics services like comScore, Moat, Nielsen and Integral Ad Science, and looking to add others. Facebook said it would form a “measurement council” of ad agency executives and marketers to develop metrics suited to the needs of advertisers. To communicate more openly, Facebook established a blog, Metrics FYI , to post regular updates on the metrics it uses and what its analysts have found. “This is an important evolution for Facebook,” said Randall Rothenberg, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group of media and technology companies, including Facebook. “This is Facebook saying, Yes, we know that we need to be and are getting more involved in advertising transparency.” In the first blog post, Facebook, after a lengthy internal audit, said it had uncovered a few more “bugs.” One such miscalculation involved double counting of repeat visitors to view what are known as marketers’ organic messages — regular Facebook posts by companies rather than paid ads, the post said. Correcting that problem, it said, would have reduced the measurement of the number of unique users seeing the marketers’ messages by 33 percent on average over a seven-day period, and by 55 percent over the 28-day span. The Facebook data analysts also found that the time spent on what are known as instant articles — fast-loading news items tailored for easier reading on smartphones — was overstated on average by 7 to 8 percent, the blog said. But another bug resulted in undercounting a video metric. The Facebook research found that the number of people viewing video ads from beginning to end was 35 percent higher than it had previously calculated. Facebook emphasized that that newly uncovered flaws involve only a few of the more than 220 metrics Facebook deploys. The impact of the disclosure of further calculation miscues, after the September apology, is uncertain. Advertisers and publishers have little choice but to embrace Facebook given its huge audience and its dominance, with Google, of online advertising. Early this month, Facebook reported that its third-quarter profits surged 166 percent from a year ago to nearly $2.4 billion. But analysts said concerns about the accuracy of Facebook’s metrics could prompt some to question whether they should invest so much time, money and resources with the company. “It’s not like you can not use Facebook as an advertiser or as a publisher,” said Brian Wieser, a media industry analyst at Pivotal Research. “But it is a question of who do you prioritize and how many resources do you send that way?” The moves Facebook has taken are intended to quell such doubts and restore its credibility among advertisers and publishers. “Our goal going forward,” Facebook said in its web post, “is to communicate more regularly about our metrics, so that our partners can focus on doing what they do best — servicing their customers — with the best insights possible.” Yet a more skeptical view of digital advertising is emerging, not only for reasons of measurement but some major advertisers wonder if it is as effective as they had assumed. “The ascendant view had been ‘if it’s digital, it’s better,’ ” Mr. Wieser said. “And I think with every passing incident, those who have not been appropriately skeptical or appropriately critical have come down to earth a bit.”

Facebook
Online advertising
Ratings
Video Recordings
Downloads and Streaming
Social Media
News media,journalism


Federer Reaches Semifinals in German Tennis Championships

Abstract: Top-seeded Roger Federer beat Florian Mayer, 7-6 (4), 3-6, 7-5, to reach the semifinals of the German Tennis Championships in Hamburg. He will play Federico Delbonis. Fabio Fognini will face Nicolas Almagro in the other semifinal. ■ Serena Williams dismantled Lourdes Dominguez, 6-1, 6-1, to reach the semifinals of the Swedish Open in Bastad. She will play Klara Zakopalova. Johanna Larsson will play Flavia Pennetta in the other semifinal. (AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)


Liberty Look to Bill Laimbeer to Help Forge New Identity

Abstract: GREENBURGH, N.Y. — Bill Laimbeer turned 56 on Sunday, but his identity in basketball has not changed. Since arriving in New York last October to become the head coach and general manager of the Liberty, Laimbeer has been approached by more than one fan who has said, “When you were with Detroit, God, I hated you.” The next line would be, “But I’m so glad you’re here.” Although he is two decades removed from his playing days as a core member of the Detroit Pistons’ Bad Boys teams of the 1980s, Laimbeer is still remembered as a bully and an agitator, but also as a tenacious rebounder and a rugged interior force who provided instant credibility to the frontcourt. The Liberty have sorely lacked an identity in recent years, playing .500 in a temporary home in Newark. Laimbeer is determined to put his stamp on the organization, which has never won a W.N.B.A. title. The Liberty are set to open the season Saturday night against the Connecticut Sun. “The last couple of years they weren’t very fun to watch,” said Laimbeer, who won three championships as coach of the Detroit Shock from 2002 to 2009. “They were actually kind of boring for a multitude of reasons we don’t need to get into, but that has to change.” The Liberty and their fans were ready for a change after a 34-34 record the last two seasons under John Whisenant. Ticket sales were noticeably down as the team played its home games at the Prudential Center while Madison Square Garden was being renovated. This season is the team’s last in Newark. During a recent preseason practice, Laimbeer was back in his familiar home in the paint. With sweat dripping from his brow and soaking his gray T-shirt, Laimbeer elbowed up against center Kara Braxton in the post, dictating how to pivot to the basket and swing the ball low across her body to explode toward the goal. Despite the early good vibes, Liberty fans have reason to wonder how long Laimbeer will be committed to rebuilding the team. By the end of his eight-year run with the Shock, Laimbeer’s focus was elsewhere, looking toward a coaching job in the N.B.A. When the Pistons fired Lawrence Frank on April 18, fans took to Internet message boards and began clamoring for Laimbeer. Asked if he still wanted to coach in the N.B.A., Laimbeer said: “I’d be a liar if I said no. It’s the pinnacle of professional basketball.” By the 2009 season in Detroit, the coaches on his staff were well aware he was ready to move on. “The great thing about Bill is, we knew his intentions all along the way,” said Cheryl Reeve, an assistant with Detroit from 2006 to 2009, now the coach of the Minnesota Lynx. “He told us each year to get ready to be hit by a bus, to be ready for what’s next. “If he had a do-over, I think he’d do it differently. I think he may have been in a different place. He really wanted to pursue the N.B.A. side of things. That’s how Bill operates. He’s about as straightforward as it gets.” Image Bill Laimbeer working with Kelsey Bone, a 6-4 center taken fifth over all in this year’s draft. Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Laimbeer did not give any indication that the Liberty job was a placeholder for his next career step, and he said he was enjoying the expanded role as general manager. Among the perks, his sister and a number of family friends live in the area. “The familiarity of having people around was one of the positives,” Laimbeer said. “And hey, everyone’s got to experience New York once in their life.” Laimbeer also has many familiar faces surrounding him at work, on the court and in the front office. Braxton and Plenette Pierson, both former Shock players, were already on the roster, but the Liberty also brought in Katie Smith, who played with the Shock from 2005 to 2009 and was the 2008 finals most valuable player. Laimbeer also persuaded Cheryl Ford to sign with the team after three years away from the league; Ford played her first seven years with Detroit, from 2003 to 2009. “I’m a unique kind of coach,” Laimbeer said. “I have my own personality. I’m relentless and I’m sarcastic and I just don’t go away, I’m always on players. The players that played for me before understand that. They can smooth those waters, and say, ‘Don’t worry about it, that’s just him.’ “They can also help with the culture of winning. It takes a certain mental approach to the game to get to that level — attention to detail, execution, and a certain mind-set of we’re not going to lose. That can be contagious with the right number of people.” With the fifth overall pick in the 2013 draft, the Liberty selected Kelsey Bone, a player that fits into Laimbeer’s style of play. Bone, a 6-foot-4 center, averaged 16.6 points and 9.3 rebounds per game last season at Texas A&M, but Laimbeer was also impressed by her ability to pass the ball and her desire to play in New York. Bone will be looked upon to fill minutes left behind by Kia Vaughn, who was traded to the Washington Mystics in February. “I want a commitment of this is who we are, this is New York, and this is what we’re going to do, we’re going to compete for a championship,” Laimbeer said. “If you want to go to Washington, they were in last place last year, O.K., go ahead.” Teams around the league are already expecting a different Liberty. Reeve said recent Liberty teams coached by Whisenant largely relied on a weakside help defense and the playmaking abilities of Cappie Pondexter. “You knew you were playing against a white line defense, a great player in Cappie, but not much else,” Reeve said in a telephone interview. “If you stopped Cappie, you had a good shot at winning the game. “If you know anything about Bill, he wants to be bigger, faster, stronger, tougher. That goes into every move that he made.” Reeve said the league was better off with Laimbeer back on the sidelines. “I spent a lot of time as an opponent really hating the guy; he brought out the worst in you,” said Reeve, who coached against Laimbeer with the Cleveland Rockers and Charlotte Sting before coming to Detroit. “I didn’t think that I could ever see him as a friend or a mentor. But he’s a tremendous guy, an extremely loyal guy. “He doesn’t get enough credit for how smart he is and he’ll tell you that. He knows the game. The W.N.B.A., we’re thrilled to have him and the N.B.A. is a bunch of knuckleheads for not seeing that.” Laimbeer, too, was content to be back. “If it’s not to be, it’s not to be and no big deal,” Laimbeer said of the N.B.A. “This is a lot of fun. This is a great, competitive atmosphere, the players are fun to be around. I enjoy doing what I’m doing.”

Bill Laimbeer
Basketball
Pistons
Detroit Shock
New York Liberty


Cooking to Earn Respect, 600 Dinners at a Time

Abstract: Montauk ON the same midsummer Saturday the faux police blotter in Dan’s Papers, the Hamptons’ über-blog, reported the issuance of 725,432 parking tickets to the moth-to-flame types swarming Montauk to mingle at the Surf Lodge, Sam Talbot, its celebrity chef, estimated his microscopic kitchen turned out a whopping 608 dinners. Maybe it was actually 618. Mr. Talbot, a good ole North Carolina boy — educated by nuns and raised in Charlotte, where he broke in as a busboy at age 13 and was a production chef at Dean & Deluca by 16 — with a knack for interjecting pickled cherries and marinated nectarines into dishes where they might seem unwelcome, does not claim to be a math whiz. He does not claim to be sexy, either, but that’s what publicists are for. The parting shot of the compact bio provided by Steve Kasuba, a publicist and one of the five partners who gave Montauk’s icky Lakeside Lounge a $5 million makeover to transmogrify it into a hangout of terminal hipness, proclaims Mr. Talbot, 30, one of New York’s sexiest chefs. Tracked down at the Lodge’s driftwood-and-surfboard-themed bar, Mr. Kasuba also described Mr. Talbot, whose rendition of tuna poke with sea beans and coconut mascarpone with a citrus tuile earned him finalist status on the second season of “Top Chef,” as “sort of like a rock star.” Arguable whether those attributes are helping Mr. Talbot conquer a sweaty string of Saturday nights in the hottest kitchen in the Hamptons. “It’s flattering and all, but at the end of the day, what counts is if this supposedly good-looking guy can cook,” said Mr. Talbot, who is single but taken (his fiancée is Paola Guerrero, a model/entrepreneur from Colombia), and lives upstairs at the Lodge with two large dogs. “Marilyn Monroe had an amazing quote about this stuff. She said something like, ‘A sex object is a thing, and I don’t want to be considered a thing.’ I’d rather someone said, ‘Hey, he’s sexy, but he can cook a darn good meal.’ ” But dinner for 600? Yipes. Mr. Talbot, a string bean with multiple tattoos — several are a religious-themed homage to his late dad, an amateur chef — who appears not to overindulge in his creations, cooked until he ran out of food that steamy July night. “I was on the line cooking like I do every night,” recalled Mr. Talbot, shrink-wrapping his 6-foot-5-inch frame around a deck chair overlooking Fort Pond Bay, “and at one point late in the night, Jeremy, my sous-chef — he’s actually from Montauk — looked at me and did a double-take. I’d gone totally pale, was shaking like I was about to drop, and he said, ‘Come on man, hang in there, this is what it’s all about.’ ” Mr. Talbot, who has been diabetic since childhood and keeps an insulin pump strapped to one leg, hung in there. “Your sweat equity is a great selling point with owners and customers,” Mr. Talbot observed. So is his laid-back attitude; there are no meltdowns in his kitchen. “After the dinner service ended,” Mr. Talbot continued, “I looked into the cooler and where there had been 68 tuna entrees and 58 striped bass and like, the entire thing stocked, now there was ... nothing. It was an incredible feeling.” Half a summer into what he expects to be a long-term affiliation with the Surf Lodge, the chef had already developed paternalistic feelings toward the place. “This is the baby,” Mr. Talbot said, taking a moment to approve the evening’s ice cream selections. “I think even the locals are liking the food. At least, I haven’t heard anyone express hostility. The guys at the hardware store? Really nice to me.” The local food critics, not so nice: the $24 lobster salad sandwich was swamped by mayo (a favorite ingredient); a $14 mushroom escabeche was dreadful. “You can’t please everyone,” said Mr. Talbot, suppressing a wince. “One thing I learned from being on ‘Top Chef’ was you have to be able to take criticism.” Potentially some of the criticism can be traced to a case of guilt by association. There is a substantial Montauk contingent that perceives the Surf Lodge as the harbinger of a certain evil: resort-style gentrification. Carl G. Fisher failed, in 1925, to transform honky-tonk Montauk into the Miami Beach of the Hamptons; concern abounds that the Surf Lodge is a harbinger of Montauk’s becoming the South Beach of the Northeast. “I would not allow that; can’t happen,” said Mr. Talbot, whose restaurant accepts no reservations and includes a children’s menu (his Dr. Seuss-ian mac and cheese with ham and peas has received only kudos). “There are no velvet ropes here. I’m not snooty. My food’s not snooty. So why would I want to work at a place that’s snooty?” Mr. Kasuba drifted over just in time — his real mission was to remind Mr. Talbot to hit the kitchen for the early dinner rush — to weigh in on the local hostilities. “We own the building, so it would be foolish to make enemies,” he said. “And if what we represent to some people is” — time out for dramatic eyebrow calisthenics — “evil, hey, don’t come here for dinner on a Saturday night.” For anyone worried that Mr. Talbot is all style and no substance, before cooking in New York City at the Black Duck, Williamsburg Cafe and Punch, he did indeed do an extended cameo at culinary school — Johnson & Wales University — and gained a mentor, James Burns, a Charleston restaurateur, who taught him why a perfect veal stock matters. Among other things. “Culinary school is sugar-coated,” said Mr. Talbot. “James made me get a clue about what it means to spend 17 hours a day cooking in a restaurant.” Mr. Talbot’s “Top Chef” adventure temporarily removed him from the restaurant grind and enabled him to become a food consultant. Lucrative but superficial. “Now, instead of being known around the business as Sam from ‘Top Chef,’ it’s Sam from the Surf Lodge, which is what I wanted to accomplish. When Eric Ripert celebrated his 10th wedding anniversary here, he ordered EVERYTHING,” said Mr. Talbot, referring to the Frenchman who runs seafood-centric Le Bernardin. “When you’re cooking for someone like him, your hands are shaking. But later on he pulled me aside and told me that while he’d expected to be satisfied with what he ate, he hadn’t expected to be thrilled. That made my summer.” Well, that and hitting the Atlantic in a rental boat and bagging the 125-pound mako shark that’s the special on tonight’s menu. A cooperative local! So far, so good.

Surf Lodge
Food
Restaurants
Talbot Sam
Hamptons (NY)
Cooking and Cookbooks


Mirror, Mirror in the App: What’s the Fairest Shade and Shadow of Them All?

Abstract: As any lipstick shopper knows, deciding between tropical coral, peony pink and fairest nude is not a straightforward choice. And without being able to apply new colors, to pucker or smile in a shade unknown, it is quite easy to buy a fashion mistake. Now, one beauty company has come up with a high-tech way to figure it out, and others are experimenting with bringing a virtual makeup counter to their customers. On Thursday, L’Oréal will introduce an app that turns the front-facing iPhone and iPad camera into a makeup mirror that allows customers to virtually try on more than 300 cosmetic products and see immediately different looks or complete makeovers on their own faces. They can pout, sneer, move in and out of changes in lighting or shadows, and the virtual makeup stays as if it had been painted on. (A recent test confirmed that the virtual makeup will move with expressions, although vigorous head-shaking seemed to dislodge some heavy eye shadow a bit.) The app, called Makeup Genius, was developed in partnership with Image Metrics, a company known for its facial mapping in movies and video games. The app is yet another manifestation of a race among businesses to be connected to the consumer on every device, a competition that has left cosmetic companies far back in the pack. But it also is a notable advancement toward the concept of an “interactive mirror” that has long fascinated some in the beauty and fashion industries. “There is some good history on this one,” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, who wrote about the idea of a “magic mirror” and says he has been contacted by many health and beauty companies since then. Most efforts to date, he said, have not been truly successful. Still, companies keep trying. The notion of being able to see what the dress or sunglasses or sandals you are about to order really would look like on you — not the willowy model shot at just the perfect angle with who knows how much retouching — seems to be the ultimate in consumer convenience and empowerment. It also holds the possibility of a substantial savings boon for all those companies shouldering expensive rapid shipping and returns costs. Warby Parker, the online glasses retailer, has a try-on function that lets consumers upload a picture of themselves to see what various frames look like on their faces. A competitor, glasses.com, which was recently purchased by the eyewear giant Luxottica, has an app that creates a 3-D model of shoppers’ faces for virtual try-ons and lets them adjust the glasses on their faces by touching the screen. Cisco and others have developed virtual dressing room technology, though it has not been widely adopted. There is also a growing genre of makeup (or makeover) apps, including Perfect 365 , FaceTune and Visage Lab , that make it possible for people to touch up their photos, eliminating a pimple here, a wrinkle there, putting a flush in cheeks, even shaving off a pound or two — the better for posting on Instagram and elsewhere. But the new L’Oréal app deals strictly in reality — how its products look on a potential customer’s untouched face — for better or worse. It also offers a chance to virtually try 16 “curated looks,” like “smoky eyes” devised by the celebrity makeup artist Billy B. To accomplish the virtual mirror effect, the L’Oréal app had to be intuitive enough to discern between, say, the skin of lips, cheeks and other facial features. Developers said they tested lip, eye and cheek products on hundreds of people of numerous ethnicities in 400 different lighting conditions and conducted extensive studies, including how a product dries on the skin. The company would not say how much money it invested in the effort. “While we provided the facial mapping technology, working with L’Oréal to ensure what consumers ultimately see in the app — in terms of color, texture, opacity, shine and overall look — that was tremendous,” said Ron Ryder, the chief executive of Image Metrics. The app is the first major project to come out of a high-tech incubator that the beauty company opened a year and a half ago in a suburban office building in Clark, N.J., about 30 minutes outside New York City. There, a team of Ph.D.s, physicists, computer scientists and others is working to help the company develop a high-tech relationship with the consumer in a field that doesn’t naturally lend itself to connectivity. “The reason why we started it is we see the beauty consumer has changed in terms of what they actually want in a product and an experience,” said Guive Balooch, global director of the company’s Connected Beauty Incubator, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and came to L’Oréal from the pharmaceutical field. “We are moving more and more toward service, personalization, toward customization.” Though L’Oréal plans to unveil the Makeup Genius app this week in New York and Cannes, France, during the annual Cannes Film Festival, it won’t be available to consumers until June, and this first phase will not be available on Android devices. Products won’t be for sale on the app itself — at least not yet.

Image Metrics
Retail
L'Oreal SA
Mobile Apps
Cosmetics and Toiletries


Wisconsin and Kansas Advance; Beasley Exits

Abstract: OMAHA — Although the specifics are rarely discussed in public, some of Wisconsin Coach Bo Ryan’s rules of defense can be inferred from watching his team play. No layups, especially not in transition. Stay with your man. Look out for one another. Make the other team work for every shot. Ryan playfully says that anyone interested in learning the rules can buy his DVD. Anyone unwilling to spend the money can refer to how the Badgers throttled Kansas State, 72-55, on Saturday in the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament. The Kansas State standouts Michael Beasley and Bill Walker combined for 41 points at the Qwest Center, but none of their teammates scored more than 4 as the Badgers packed the lane and dared Kansas State to beat them from outside. The Wildcats could not. For the first time in 348 games since 1996, Kansas State did not make a 3-pointer, with Beasley missing four of his team’s 13 attempts. Wisconsin’s unheralded starting guards — the sophomore Trevon Hughes and the senior Michael Flowers — outscored Kansas State’s backcourt, 40-4. Hughes, who scored only 42 points last season as a freshman, matched his career high with 25 points as the Badgers advanced to the Round of 16. “That’s what makes this so special,” Flowers said. “We didn’t do this against a so-so team. We did this against Kansas State, and that goes to show how competitive we are.” The third-seeded Badgers (31-4) will face the winner of Sunday’s game between Georgetown and Davidson in the Midwest Regional on Friday in Detroit. That is an improvement over last year, when Nevada-Las Vegas stunned the Badgers in the second round. Top-seeded Kansas also advanced, with a 75-56 victory against U.N.L.V. It will play the winner of Sunday’s Siena-Villanova game Friday in Detroit. Beasley, a 6-foot-10 freshman and a probable N.B.A. lottery pick, had 23 points and 13 rebounds for Kansas State (21-12), an 11th seed that surprised Southern California in the first round. Walker added 18 points. Kansas State fans, believing they were seeing Beasley in a Wildcats uniform for the final time, gave him a standing ovation when Coach Frank Martin took him out with 53.9 seconds to play. Martin embraced him. Beasley, who was held to 6 points in the second half on 2-for-6 shooting, offered no hints about his future. “I’ve had no time at all think about my decision,” he said. “I’m not going to start contemplating what I’m going to do for another couple of weeks.” But leave it to Ryan to gripe about Beasley and Walker hitting a combined 15 for 30 from the field, ignoring that everyone else was 6 for 23. “We’re not real happy about that,” Ryan said. “You know if you give up that to two players, if anybody else starts hitting, then you’ve got some problems. So fortunately, in this game there wasn’t another player that was giving them the numbers.” Wisconsin, which led the nation in scoring defense, allowing 53.8 points a game, won the Big Ten title without a player averaging as many as 13 points. But on Saturday, several Badgers showed themselves capable of more. One of them was Greg Stiemsma, a 6-11 senior backup center, who contributed a career-high 14 points and 6-for-9 shooting in 14 minutes. Stiemsma twice made baskets after Beasley mistimed his leap going for rebounds. “I guess it was my night,” Stiemsma said. The Badgers countered Beasley’s 17 first-half points by making seven 3-pointers and shooting 52 percent from the field to take a 39-33 lead. Hughes then scored 5 of Wisconsin’s 7 consecutive points to open the second half, 3 on a scoop layup and free throw, for a 13-point margin. Kansas State came as close as 58-49 with nine minutes to play. But Hughes hit a 3-pointer and two free throws in a 14-2 run, the last 11 points consecutive, to put the game out of reach, 72-51. “Today this felt good, the ball in my hand,” Hughes said. “Any given day, I feel like anybody on this team could go out there and score 20 points.” In the late game, Kansas (33-3) overcame the Rebels’ pressure by going with a small lineup, relying on its guards to drive the ball to the basket. The Jayhawks shot 58 percent from the field, and Mario Chalmers led four Jayhawks guards in double figures with 17 points. “They pressured out so far that it just opened up lanes for us to drive,” said guard Sherron Collins, who had 10 points. U.N.L.V. (27-8) made only four field goals in the second half, none in a stretch of nearly nine minutes while the Jayhawks put together a 18-9 run to lead, 60-44. Rebels guard Wink Adams scored 15 of his 25 points from the free-throw line. “We haven’t played small much at all this year,” Kansas Coach Bill Self said. “It was encouraging to me to see us play a different way and still have success.”

Basketball
NCAA Basketball Tournament
Kansas State University


At Fast-Food Outlets: Premature Sticker Shock for the Weight Conscious

Abstract: David Pearl was polishing off a crossword puzzle while sitting in the Starbucks at 17th Street and Union Square on Monday — the things elementary school teachers do to indulge themselves on a day off. The crumbs of the 460-calorie banana nut cake he had already polished off were still on the table. He knew the banana nut cake was an indulgence. Or, to put it more precisely, he knew exactly how much of an indulgence it was because across the store, in the brightly lighted case from which a Starbucks barista had plucked it, was a little card with the calorie count. All three digits. “It didn’t stop me,” he said. “I mean, I kind of figured it had a lot of calories anyway.” So it went at some coffee shops and fast-food restaurants on Monday as the city awoke to what amounted to an accidental pilot program to post calorie counts. It was accidental because city regulations requiring calorie counts to be posted in more than 2,000 restaurants — regulations that had been scheduled to take effect on Monday — did not. A federal judge ordered them delayed until at least Saturday amid more legal maneuvers by a restaurant association that wants them thrown out altogether. But some of the restaurant chains that would be covered by the regulations, if they took effect, did not wait for the court case to be decided — they posted the calorie counts. And word of the judge’s delay apparently did not reach some television and radio stations. City officials said they went on the air telling viewers struggling with that oh-how-I-hate-to-get-up-in-the-morning feeling — on a Monday, no less — that the rules had taken effect. All this made for bleary-eyed double takes and confusion at places like Starbucks, which posted the calorie counts last week, expecting the regulations to take effect. But, truth be told, the Monday-morning confusion had more to do with how many calories are in the sweets that people order every morning than with whether the city’s regulations had survived the latest legal challenge. “Wow, the blueberry scone is 480 calories,” said Helena Hungar, a customer at a Starbucks on Columbus Avenue at 73rd Street. “It makes me not buy, for sure.” For the record, the raspberry scone next to the blueberry one was only 470 calories. Ms. Hungar was still not tempted. The regulations are being challenged by the New York State Restaurant Association. It lost a round in its fight against the city’s health department last week, when Judge Richard J. Holwell of United States District Court in Manhattan rejected the group’s claims. Instead he issued a 27-page opinion that agreed with one of the city’s main arguments for posting calorie counts — that doing so would help reduce obesity. The association is filing an appeal. But without waiting for the case to be decided, chains like Starbucks posted the calorie counts on their menu boards. The Subway fast-food chain prints calorie counts on napkins and cups and posts them on counters and menu boards. Other chains, including Quiznos, Chipotle and Jamba Juice, also put the numbers in plain sight. “Good for them,” said Chuck Hunt, a spokesman for the restaurant association. “That’s just fine. We don’t object to the information being provided. We’d like to work out a way for restaurants to provide this information in a manner that’s most appropriate for their customers. These aren’t military secrets here, and restaurants are happy to provide the information. The disagreement is about how it should be done.” If the city wins the case, the rules will apply to fewer than 10 percent of the city’s 23,000 restaurants — only those run by chains with more than 15 outlets nationwide. Judge Holwell, who ruled in favor of the regulations on Wednesday, issued a second opinion on Friday after the restaurant association asked for a delay in the start of the rules while it pursued its appeal. He said the association had not demonstrated a “substantial possibility” of winning the appeal. He also said that the city “has a strong public interest in enforcing a regulatory scheme to address serious health issues.” But he delayed the start of the regulations until at least Saturday and told the city not to impose fines before June 7 at the earliest. In chain restaurants that had already posted the tallies, the calorie counts got the attention of customers like Jeannie Soto, an academic coordinator for the neurology department at Beth Israel Medical Center who was at the Starbucks at 17th Street and Union Square. “I’m surprised, especially about the Iced Lemon Loaf,” she said, referring to something that looked like a slice of lemon pound cake with frosting. “It’s 500 calories. That’s like a Big Mac. It’s like a meal.” Diana Perez, a home health care worker, wanted a meal at the Chipotle restaurant at Broadway and 18th Street. But she ordered a salad because she is trying to lose weight. “I do appreciate that they are posting the calories,” she said. “They are making you aware of what you’re eating. You know what’s fattening and what’s not.” She said she has a dream of opening a gym in her neighborhood near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx — a gym with day-care facilities and a restaurant that would serve inexpensive, healthy food. “There’s nothing like that now, not where we live,” she said. “All I see is fast food, everywhere I go.” Not everyone was calorie-conscious. “I was not concerned about calories when I was 22 — why should I be concerned now?” said Howard J. Moll, 83, a tourist guide sitting in the Subway restaurant at 47th Street and Eighth Avenue. Bruno Mastropasqua, an investor who was buying a five-calorie cup of regular coffee at the Starbucks on Columbus Avenue, said that posting the calorie counts would not be good for business. He added, however, “They put warnings on cigarettes, and people still smoke.” And Ralph Arend, a 22-year-old video journalist at Friction.tv, an online debate forum, took issue with the premise of listing calories where customers could not miss them. “The posting of the calories is just a craze to make us feel better,” Mr. Arend said as he ate a Chipotle burrito that with the extras, he estimated had at least 1,000 calories. He dipped a nacho into the burrito. “I firmly believe that if you go out to eat, it’s fair game to serve you fattening food,” he said. “If you’re really concerned, you can cook for yourself.” Calories: Just Part of the Picture The city health department’s push for rules requiring some restaurants to post calorie counts — and the New York State Restaurant Association’s court fight against those rules — raises a question: How many calories should an average person eat on an average day? “Every single person has different caloric needs,” said Rebecca Solomon, the nutrition coordinator of the Program for Surgical Weight Loss at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “Just because you know the Rice Krispie treat is 430 calories doesn’t mean you have an understanding of how that fits into your caloric requirements.” She estimated that an “average-size person”— someone who weighs about 150 pounds — would need 1,700 to about 2,050 calories for “weight maintenance.” That would mean the person would neither gain nor lose weight. A more detailed analysis would take into account other factors, including whether the person exercised. She said that calories alone “don’t tell you about nutritional content.” But the basic calculations are revealing. “Knowing that your 300-calorie frappuccino, and that’s probably on the low end of frappuccino expenditure, and your Rice Krispie treat could be close to half of the calories you need,” she said, “no wonder we’re in an obesity crisis.”


Earlier Terrorist Screening to Begin for Flights Into U.S.

Abstract: WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 — By early next year, passengers on flights bound for the United States will have their names checked against terrorist watch lists before departure, instead of after takeoff, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Thursday. The change is part of a slowly unfolding shift to put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of the watch-list screening for all commercial flights, foreign and domestic. Last year alone, 87 million passengers flew into the United States from abroad. Airlines do not have to transmit final passenger manifests on foreign flights until after planes have taken off, which is one reason flights are sometimes diverted before reaching the United States but after Homeland Security officials have learned that a terrorism suspect is on board. The new rules will require that final manifests be transmitted no less than 30 minutes before departure, or that the information, which is collected from passports, be sent one piece at a time as soon as passengers check in, until a plane’s doors are closed. “As the London plot demonstrated, we need to do everything in our power to identify potential threats before that airplane takes off,” Mr. Chertoff said Thursday, referring to last year’s effort to carry liquid explosives aboard planes bound to the United States from Britain. Separately, Mr. Chertoff announced that the department was close to formally taking over watch-list checks for all domestic flights. That long-delayed step will probably not be complete until 2009 or 2010, but the government has started the transition by announcing proposed rules for the new program, which will be called Secure Flight. Currently, airlines use government-supplied watch lists to determine whether to bar certain passengers or, more frequently, whether to subject them to further screening at a security checkpoint. For domestic flights, the program will require airlines to transmit passenger data, based on advance reservations, starting 72 hours before departure. To reduce the likelihood of false matches, airlines are to ask passengers for their date of birth and sex, although providing such information will not be required. Once the government takes over this task, checks are expected to be based on more up-to-date watch lists and more sophisticated software. The changes should also significantly reduce the number of people wrongly interrogated because of erroneous matches and give the government more time to react to a potential plot, said Kip Hawley, the assistant secretary for the Transportation Security Administration, which will operate Secure Flight. “It gives us a much better handle on identifying who the real people of concern are,” Mr. Hawley said Thursday.

Terrorism
Homeland Security Department
Airlines and Airplanes
Security and Warning Systems


Illinois Moves to Ease Chicago Pension Woes

Abstract: CHICAGO — The Illinois legislature on Tuesday approved a plan to start easing Chicago’s crippling pension problems by requiring some city workers to pay more for their retirement benefits and by granting smaller increases in those benefits. The move is part of an effort put forth by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to shore up the pension system and presumably would include a proposed property tax increase for Chicago residents, a tax subject to City Council approval. The experience of Detroit’s bankruptcy seemed to loom over the Illinois legislative negotiations. “They’re on that path right now, it seems to me,” State Representative David Harris, a Republican, said of the possibility that Chicago might someday find itself in circumstances similar to Detroit’s, which last year became the largest city to seek bankruptcy protection . But even with these changes to the pension system, Chicago, the third-largest American city by population, would be far from overcoming the troubles that threaten its annual budget and that have led to repeated cuts to its credit ratings. Chicago still needs to figure out how it will meet a requirement next year to contribute nearly $600 million more to some of its workers’ pension funds. And while the revisions this week will affect two of the city’s pension funds, covering about 56,000 workers and retirees, they do not help solve the problems with several other pension funds, including those for retired firefighters, police officers or public schoolteachers. “What’s the plan?” said State Senator Matt Murphy, a Republican, who described the pension changes before state legislators as “a piecemeal approach” that left a far larger problem ahead and no vision for how to fix it. The current measure would put two of the city’s pension funds — one for tens of thousands of municipal workers, the other for a far smaller group of laborers — on a path to being 90 percent funded in 40 years, city officials said. “This is unpleasant,” said State Senator Don Harmon, a Democrat, who voted for the changes. “But we are saving the state. We are saving the city. And perhaps most importantly, I truly believe we are saving pensions for the folks to whom we’ve promised them, the folks who are relying upon them, the folks who are sitting home nervous that we are going to take them away.” The pension liabilities are sizable here: One city analysis found at the end of 2012 that the system had assets to cover only about 36 percent of its liabilities. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts last year found that Chicago had put aside the smallest portion of pension obligations among the nation’s five largest cities. Still, Chicago is hardly alone. In bankruptcy court, Detroit has cited pension liabilities among its $18 billion in debt. And the financial futures of a long list of seemingly more healthy cities are also threatened by significant pension liabilities. The Emanuel administration had worked intensely to push the matter through the state legislature, which is controlled by Democrats. “For the sake of our city, we asked a lot of our residents, our employees and our retirees to accept change, and that’s never easy,” Mr. Emanuel said. “I believe that the certainty we are now providing will make the change worth it.” The changes come at a politically complicated time — an election year for lawmakers and Gov. Pat Quinn and the year before Mr. Emanuel faces re-election — and in a state where Democratic leaders have long drawn support from labor unions. Mr. Quinn, a Democrat facing re-election, has yet to say whether he will sign the changes. He criticized an earlier version of Mr. Emanuel’s proposal because it would require a property tax increase for Chicagoans. A revised version removes references to a property tax increase, leaving it to Chicago officials, not state lawmakers, to decide how to raise more money for pensions. On Tuesday, the House voted 73 to 41, the Senate 31 to 23. The plan would require employees to contribute 11 percent of their salaries to pensions by 2019, compared with 8.5 percent now. Annual cost-of-living increases would no longer grow at a 3 percent rate, compounded each year, but would typically rise more slowly. While unions have regularly objected to the prospect of pension cuts, aides to Mr. Emanuel say the changes here grew out of conversations with the unions themselves. At least one union has said publicly that it will remain neutral on the plan, but several others have criticized the overhaul as a violation of the Illinois Constitution, which includes a protection of pensions, and called on Mr. Quinn for a veto.

Illinois
Chicago
Rahm Emanuel
Property tax
Detroit
Bankruptcy
State legislature
Pensions and Retirement Plans
Patrick J Quinn
Civil service


M.T.A. Fails to Honestly Rate Contractors’ Work, Report Says

Abstract: Outside contractors working on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority ’s biggest projects are routinely given positive evaluations despite mediocre work, in part to preserve business relationships, an investigation by the authority’s inspector general has found. A system to evaluate contractors’ performance, in place for 12 years, was intended to help the authority keep inadequate contractors from landing future jobs, many of which are worth upward of a million dollars in public funds. But fewer than 5 percent of the 2,579 contractors evaluated between 2006 and 2008 received a grade of marginal, and fewer than 1 percent were graded unsatisfactory, the lowest mark, according to the report, which was released Tuesday. In several instances, evaluators reported feeling pressured by upper management to raise their ratings, apparently to avoid hampering the authority’s ability to deal with vendors in the future. “Managers sometimes allowed what they perceived to be agency ‘business decisions’ to override their true assessments of contractor performance,” the report found, noting that there is “an institutional reluctance, for a variety of reasons, to rate contractors’ work as ‘unsatisfactory,’ even when such ratings are the most appropriate.” The authority is constantly under fire for rampant delays and ballooning budgets on its major construction projects, including the Second Avenue subway, which are often handled nearly entirely by private contractors. Jay H. Walder, the authority’s chairman, admitted last month that some vendors told him they build an “M.T.A. premium” into their bids, because of the perceived difficulty of working on projects with the authority. “Too often we have let our contractors slide when they fail to perform, and that is why we have accepted the I.G.’s recommendations and are working to implement them,” Mr. Walder said Tuesday in a prepared statement. The report, issued by Barry L. Kluger, the authority’s inspector general, found that the lack of accuracy in the evaluation process led to vendors’ receiving contracts worth tens of millions of dollars despite poor past performance. “Transparency is lost when evaluations are deficient or late, and when vendors are overrated,” the report said. Mr. Kluger characterized the authority’s aversion to assigning low ratings as “a pervasive mindset, amounting to an institutional culture.” In one instance, managers at the Long Island Rail Road waited more than nine months to grade one vendor, DMJM & Harris, as unsatisfactory, after the firm’s work on a 2005 environmental consulting contract was deemed deficient. In the interim, that vendor received five more contracts worth nearly $25 million from New York City Transit, Metro-North Railroad, and the authority’s bridges and tunnels division; none of those other agencies were aware of any problems with the firm. (More than half of the evaluations at the Long Island Rail Road were filed late between 2006 and 2008.) In 2006, Siemens, the technology company, contracted with New York City Transit to update subway signals so the signals could communicate with a central control center. An auditor found that the technology installed by the company consistently failed tests or inexplicably went off-line. Under official guidelines, Siemens should have received an unsatisfactory rating. But a top official at New York City Transit instructed managers to instead assign a rating of “marginal,” a higher mark, because of business considerations. The official did not want to jeopardize Siemens’s ability to work with the agency in the future, the report said, and he apparently was unaware that an unsatisfactory rating does not strictly preclude contractors from bidding on other projects. A similar rating upgrade occurred with a second Siemens contract in 2007, the report said. In response to the report’s findings, the authority agreed to institute spot checks of the evaluations to ensure accuracy; prohibit the upgrading of unsatisfactory ratings in cases where certain reporting technicalities have not been met; and speed up the submission of the evaluations, among other measures. But citing legal concerns, the authority declined to introduce a similarly strict evaluation system for subcontractors, who perform about three-quarters of its capital workload. Such a system is already in place at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “Despite the troubling aspects of what we found, we are encouraged that the MTA accepted all of the major findings in our reports, and has expressed its eagerness to work with us regarding our recommendations,” Mr. Kluger said. “A number of these meetings have already taken place.”

Metropolitan Transportation Authority
New York City
Transit Systems
Second Avenue (NYC)