Cincinnati Stays Grounded After Turbulent Summer

Abstract: CINCINNATI, Jan. 6 - After the coach resigned, the power forward transferred, the alumni protested and the ticket sales stalled, it only figured that the plane would not fly. The Cincinnati Bearcats could not catch a break, much less a ride. In a span of six months, they lost Coach Bob Huggins, lost forward Ivan Johnson, lost a loyal fan base and lost two home games in a row for the first time in the history of their arena. They were best left on the side of the road. And so, in the middle of a December blizzard, with their plane grounded and their pride battered, the Bearcats bused nine hours through the snow to a nonconference game against Vanderbilt in Nashville. Forward Eric Hicks remembers telling teammates on the way, "We're like men going to get a paycheck to feed our families." It was the kind of exhortation, raw and desperate, that Cincinnati basketball is famous for. The night of Dec. 10 in Nashville, the Bearcats defeated an undefeated Vanderbilt team, and they have not lost since. Their style of play -- for those fans still refusing to watch, even after a nine-game winning streak -- is rugged and relentless, just as Huggins would have wanted. "O.K., they took our coach," Hicks said. "Then players left. Then the fans didn't come. But we have a lot of guys who've been in worse situations in our lives." No one ever said Cincinnati kids were not tough. Sometimes, they might have seemed too tough, their fists clenched and their elbows flying. But this season, as the Bearcats enter the Big East with an interim coach and a freshman point guard, with no starter over 6-foot-7 and no overwhelming home-court advantage, their toughness is exactly what makes them endearing. "Growing up, Cincinnati was tough, bad, in your face," said Devan Downey, a 5-foot-10 freshman point guard. "We're getting it back. Back to the old days." When Huggins was hired in 1989, he had only four designated starters (the fifth one came from the football team) and still managed to coax 20 victories. When he was forced out in August -- the university president, Nancy Zimpher, declined to offer his rollover extension in part because of the program's renegade image -- Cincinnati was between athletic directors and did not have time for a full-scale search. The job went to Andy Kennedy, a Huggins assistant, in hopes that he could be as resilient as his mentor. Kennedy cannot recruit because of the interim tag, but he is 12-2, piecing together a roster with rubber cement. Power forward Cedric McGowan had never played Division I basketball before this season. Ronald Allen, a front-line reserve, transferred from Xavier University in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Allen may be the only player who considers Cincinnati a peaceful haven. "It can feel like controlled chaos here," Kennedy said. "But it's really nothing new for us. Some things that may seem abnormal to most are just part of our lore." When Huggins was arrested for drunken driving in June 2004, it gave rise to the movement for his eventual dismissal and Kennedy's promotion. Then, when the assistant Keith LeGree was arrested for drunken driving in November, it prompted his resignation and the hiring of Corie Blount. Having played two years at Cincinnati and 10 years in the N.B.A., Blount spent his first day on the job giving a locker-room lecture about the program's high standards. Blount's career coaching record is 9-0. "When they first called about the job, I told them no way," Blount said. "I didn't like how the situation with Huggs was handled. But at the end of the day, it was important to remember that it's not about me and it's not about Huggs. It's about Cincinnati. So everybody, come back home and get behind these kids." He is pleading. Attendance is down by about 3,000 a game to 8,300, the public's way of remembering Huggins and jabbing Zimpher. Kenyon Martin, who plays for the Denver Nuggets, asked to have his jersey unretired. Nick Lachey, a pop singer from Cincinnati, criticized the university in a letter to the local newspaper. "A huge part of our contingent," Kennedy said, "is still healing." Kennedy is a hard-driving disciple of Huggins, but his touch is a tad gentler. He is willing to lighten the practice load during difficult stretches. He changes strategy to suit personnel. When Huggins resigned, many anticipated an exodus, but only one player left. If some Bearcats seem especially confident and relaxed on the court these days, perhaps it is because their coach is not going ballistic on the bench like Huggins often did. Those still boycotting Fifth Third Arena are missing some quality basketball, and they may be starting to realize it. Although Cincinnati is bracing for a couple of severe challenges -- the team plays at Marquette on Saturday and at Connecticut on Monday -- the next home game, Jan. 14 against Syracuse, is expected to sell out. Nothing quashes a mass protest quite like an extended winning streak. The Bearcats will inevitably lose more games in the Big East than they did in Conference USA. Their fans will probably find more reasons to stay off campus. But Cincinnati is back in position to make the N.C.A.A. tournament for the 15th year in a row, and as Huggins taught his followers, that is always a cause worth supporting.

BASKETBALL
UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
HUGGINS BOB
KENNEDY ANDY
COACHES AND MANAGERS
COLLEGE ATHLETICS


As Amazon Stretches, Seattle’s Downtown Is Reshaped

Abstract: SEATTLE — Often a corporation with a grand dream to reshape a city wants tax breaks in return. Not Amazon. When Amazon executives showed up last year for the first meetings about their proposal to build a new headquarters here — three towers that would draw thousands of workers downtown — city officials were taken aback. Not by the scope of the plan, but by the simplicity of the discussion. The executives said they were ready to break ground immediately on what would be one of the biggest development projects in city history. “It was not a hard-boiled negotiation,” said Marshall Foster, the director of city planning. “They basically walked in and said, ‘We think this is the site.’ ” A shovel-ready company that clear and confident, and with the cash to back it up, “doesn’t happen very often,” Mr. Foster added. Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, has a reputation for the grand gesture, a knack for seizing an opportunity that can remake a landscape. His purchase of The Washington Post this month for $250 million cash, a bet that others might have shied away from, is a case in point. Here, in his company’s hometown, Mr. Bezos has put his chips on the idea of Seattle and urban America itself. The first headquarters tower is already under construction, and the company currently occupies 14 smaller buildings nearby. The result in South Lake Union, previously a low-rise, low-rent warehouse district with ties to the city’s gritty maritime past, is a flood of cash, construction detours and dust. Increases to the city’s tax base aside, some people are apprehensive about whether the growth could outstrip the city’s ability to keep up. “South Lake Union was a place that people drove through, not to,” John Schoettler, Amazon’s director of global real estate and facilities, said in an interview. “Once we started development there, everything started to spring up around us.” The once-empty streets are flooded at lunchtime with Amazon workers, easily identified by their blue employee badges. Fleets of food trucks have arrived, offering Thai, tacos and other fare. On a nice day, workers take their lunches to a park next to the Museum of History and Industry, which was recently renovated with a $10 million contribution from Mr. Bezos. Image Other businesses are moving near the new Amazon offices. Credit The New York Times The company already has about 15,000 employees in Seattle, mostly highly paid engineers, managers and programmers, out of a global work force of about 97,000, according to people familiar with its head count who were not authorized to discuss a figure that the company does not share publicly. The new towers have a capacity for 12,000, giving the company room for nearly 30,000 workers in Seattle, which has a population of 635,000. “Nobody else in the downtown area has ever had this kind of impact,” said Matt Griffin, a 35-year veteran of the Seattle economic scene and the managing partner at the Pine Street Group , a real estate marketing and development company. But the Amazon effect only starts with its own big numbers. The thousands of new employees, recently hired or anticipated, have also caught the attention of apartment developers. Last year, Seattle issued more new residential building permits than in any year since at least 1984, when the current system of record-keeping began. Many of those new apartments are within walking or biking distance of Amazon. Service businesses and start-up technology companies, meanwhile, have sought nearby addresses. Northeastern University, based in Boston, set up a remote campus last year across the street from Amazon’s current buildings. “I think they’ve single-handedly defined a whole region,” said Bryan Trussel, the chief executive of Glympse, an Internet start-up with offices next to Amazon. “Now everyone wants to be there.” The setting is significant. In casting its lot in the center of a congested, bustling city, Amazon has rejected the old model of the suburban company campus that is typical of Silicon Valley and the technology ring road around Boston. The old way is perhaps most vividly exemplified by Microsoft. Its offices, and most of its 42,000 local employees, are about 18 miles from downtown Seattle, in the suburb of Redmond. But it was, perhaps paradoxically, Microsoft money that made Amazon’s torrid growth in the neighborhood possible. In the early 1990s, Paul Allen, Microsoft’s billionaire co-founder, agreed to help finance the creation of a 61-acre public park starting in South Lake Union, a project that was eventually killed by voters. As a result, Mr. Allen’s investment firm, Vulcan, ended up being a big landowner in the area, eventually selling or leasing many of its buildings to Amazon. Other technology companies are moving into urban spaces. Twitter and Dropbox, the social networking and online storage services, have made San Francisco home, while Tumblr and Etsy, blogging and shopping sites, are in New York. Google has huge urban spaces from Paris to Pittsburgh. The appeal of cities to potential employees is part of the reason for the shift. An urban setting, with access to good restaurants, nightclubs and cultural attractions, has become as important a recruiting tool as salary or benefits for many companies. Image Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s founder, has a reputation for grand gestures. Credit Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times But most of those urban pioneers are still small, at least in their real estate and staffing needs. Twitter, one of the largest, employs about 1,500 workers in San Francisco. Amazon, by contrast, is both local and global. By encouraging its employees to live within walking distance, it could help Seattle meet its goals for energy efficiency and conservation, city officials said. As part of its development agreement, Amazon also plans to buy a new streetcar for the light rail line that runs past its properties and pay for a stretch of dedicated bicycle lane. Mr. Schoettler, Amazon’s real estate director, said environmental considerations were an important factor in the company’s decision to remain in Seattle, along with the type of employee that an urban location attracts. “The energy and excitement from employees being in an urban environment — I hear it daily,” said Mr. Schoettler, who walks to work. “A lot of people don’t even have a car. They want that urban experience right there.” By contrast, Microsoft’s private bus line, called the Connector, is a common sight snaking through neighborhoods in Seattle and other local communities. Of the company’s 42,012 employees in the Puget Sound region, nearly half are registered to ride, a spokeswoman for the company said in an e-mail. Amazon’s transformative rush presents challenges for Seattle. Officials must manage the de facto city-within-a-city that is emerging around the company, with a surge of new restaurants, apartment complexes and commercial buildings. The new headquarters has limited parking, putting pressure on mass transit, which was crimped this year by a financing stalemate in the State Legislature. The city wants low-cost housing in the Amazon zone, but soaring rents and real estate prices, city officials said, will make that goal difficult to achieve. The company’s business model, and tactics in avoiding state sales taxes in many states, also presents a challenge to retailers. And the company’s mostly young work force may want to raise children here, requiring a new public school where none exist. The city has allocated $5 million for an elementary school, but planners are wrestling with a chicken-or-egg dilemma. A school built now could sit empty, they said, but waiting until the need arises might be too late if young families start moving elsewhere. “As the city grows — and again, it’s a good problem to have, one that other cities don’t — we have to keep investing in all of our places,” Mayor Mike McGinn said. “How do we make sure we preserve the things that make the city special?”

Amazon
Seattle
Jeff Bezos
Commercial Real Estate
Urban Planning


Weather History Recorded at Mohonk House Offers Insight Into Global Warming

Abstract: NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — It is probably a good thing that the Mohonk Mountain House, the 19th-century resort, was built on Shawangunk conglomerate, a concrete-hard quartz rock. Otherwise, the path to the National Weather Service’s cooperative station here surely would have turned to dust by now. Every day for the last 112 years, people have trekked up the same gray outcropping to dutifully record temperatures and weather conditions. In the process, they have compiled a remarkable data collection that has become a climatological treasure chest. The problems that often haunt other weather records — the station is moved, buildings are constructed nearby or observers record data inconsistently — have not arisen here because so much of this place has been frozen in time. The weather has been taken in exactly the same place, in precisely the same way, by just a handful of the same dedicated people since Grover Cleveland was president. For much of that time, those same weather observers have also made detailed records about recurring natural events, like the appearance of the first spring peeper or the first witch hazel bush to bud in the fall. Together, these two sets of data, meticulously collected in the same area, are beginning to offer up intriguing indicators about climate change — not about what is causing it but rather how it affects the lives of animals, plants, insects and birds. It all starts with the daily ritual of “doing the weather,” which is what people at Mohonk House call the process of recording temperatures. One day in late summer, it was the turn of a gentle 61-year-old botanist turned naturalist named Paul C. Huth. As he has done most days for the last 34 years, around 4 p.m. Mr. Huth scrambled up the conglomerate outcropping in the shadow of Mohonk House, a National Historic Landmark about 90 miles north of New York City that has retained its 19th-century sensibility. Signs along the resort’s roads plead: “Slowly and Quietly Please.” Mr. Huth opened the weather station, a louvered box about the size of a suitcase, and leaned in. He checked the high and low temperatures of the day on a pair of official Weather Service thermometers and then manually reset them. Besides the thermometers, the box contained a small flashlight, a can of lubricating oil and a plastic magnifying glass. Those thermometers can be hard to read in the rain. If the procedure seems old-fashioned, that is just as it is intended. The temperatures that Mr. Huth recorded that day were the 41,152nd daily readings at this station, each taken exactly the same way. “Sometimes it feels like I’ve done most of them myself,” said Mr. Huth, who is one of only five people to have served as official weather observer at this station since the first reading was taken on Jan. 1, 1896. That extremely limited number of observers greatly enhances the reliability, and therefore the value, of the data. Other weather stations have operated longer, but few match Mohonk’s consistency and reliability. “The quality of their observations is second to none on a number of counts,” said Raymond G. O’Keefe, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Albany. “They’re very precise, they keep great records and they’ve done it for a very long time.” Mohonk’s data stands apart from that of most other cooperative weather observers in other respects as well. The station has never been moved, and the resort, along with the area immediately surrounding the box, has hardly changed over time. Rain and snow are measured in the original brass rain gauge issued in 1896 by what was then known as the United States Weather Bureau. Mr. Huth also checks the temperature and pH of Mohonk Lake daily, and he measures the level of the lake according to its distance from the top of an iron bar that was bolted to the Shawangunk conglomerate in 1896. The record shows that on this ridge in the Shawangunk Mountains, about 20 miles south of the better-known Catskills, the average annual temperature has risen 2.7 degrees in 112 years. Of the top 10 warmest years in that time, 7 have come since 1990. Both annual precipitation and annual snowfall have increased, and the growing season has lengthened by 10 days. But what makes the data truly singular is how it parallels a vast collection of phenological observations taken at this same place, and by many of the same observers, since 1925. Phenology is the science of natural occurrences, yearly events like the first snow, the first blooming of hepatica and the arrival of the first whippoorwill. Keeping diaries of such occurrences was a hobby of counts and lords in Europe, and there are records in Kyoto, Japan, of the flowering of cherry blossom trees dating back 900 years. Among the most notable American phenological records were those kept by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. Today, phenology is recognized as an important, even critical, approach to understanding climate change. The National Phenology Network, with financing from the National Science Foundation and other agencies, has started an field campaign, called Project BudBurst ( www.budburst.org ), in which volunteers record the way 500 native plants are responding to climate change. The phenology records at Mohonk House are, in many ways, a model for such observations. They were compiled, in large measure, by Mr. Huth and the naturalist he succeeded, Daniel Smiley Jr. Mr. Smiley, who died in 1989, was a beloved descendant of the two Quaker brothers who founded Mohonk House in 1869. He dedicated much of his life to keeping lists of everything he saw and heard on the mountain, collecting whatever was of interest to him and labeling it carefully for future use. Mr. Smiley kept his phenology records as meticulously as he “did the weather” for more than 50 years, for which he earned the National Weather Service’s highest award, named for Thomas Jefferson. He walked the extensive grounds of the resort making notes about every bird call he heard, every animal he saw, every budding flower and flowering tree. Back in his office, he transcribed those notes onto 3-by-5 cards (many early ones were written on the reverse side of the hotel’s old menu cards). Over time, he amassed more than 14,500 cards with notations like this one, from March 28, 1929, filed under “partridge”: “Near Duck Hawk ledge on Sky Top saw one ‘treading’ another, with great commotion down in a brush pile in a crevice, while a third looked on. Too dark for a picture.” In 1978, the Smiley family carved out 6,500 of its acres around the hotel to form the Mohonk Preserve, the largest nonprofit nature preserve in New York State. In 1980, the preserve created a research center that was named for Mr. Smiley after he died in 1989. Mr. Smiley was an old-school amateur naturalist, but his observations have proved to be solid scientific evidence. For instance, when the hotel’s chlorination system started acting up in 1931, he began taking water temperature and acidity readings. He was surprised to find that the water was unusually acidic, a pH of around 4.5, but he did not know why and just filed away his notes. Jump ahead 40 years to the early 1970s, when acid rain became a concern. Mr. Smiley dug up his old notes and sent them to the Environmental Defense Fund, which used the data as a baseline for extended studies of acid rain. Similarly, in the 1950s Mr. Smiley found on his walks that the use of DDT to control gypsy moths was killing all kinds of insects, and that the peregrine falcon had nearly disappeared from the Shawangunks. He ordered all spraying stopped on Mohonk land. Of course, DDT spraying was later banned. Last year, Benjamin I. Cook, a climate modeler and post-doctoral fellow at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and his father, Edward R. Cook, a tree-ring specialist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who met Mr. Smiley in 1971 when he was a military policeman at West Point, published a study in The International Journal of Climatology. They analyzed Mohonk House data to determine how some overwintering birds, insects, animals and 19 species of plants had changed their habits in accord with changes in temperature. The results showed how sensitive species can be to climate change, even though the climate data itself is mixed. Benjamin Cook said hepatica, bloodroot and red berried elder tended to show the strongest trends toward earlier flowering. And despite a general warming trend, there was no significant increase in the length of the frost-free season. Nonetheless, there were significantly more days without frost. “This is more than just a normal January thaw,” Mr. Cook said. The increase in warmer days in winter sends false signals to plants and animals whose seasonal changes can be set off by the temporary warmth. Intrigued by that initial dip into Mr. Smiley’s data, Mr. Cook next intends to look at migrating birds. Mr. Smiley observed that by the early 1980s many migrating species were arriving about a week earlier than they did in the 1920s, and many American robins had stopped migrating altogether. As a climate modeler, Mr. Cook said he was used to having to correct for inconsistencies in weather records and biases in phenological observations. But he said the Mohonk records were so consistently reliable that there was little need for corrections. “It was a kind of perfect storm of the Smiley family, with this strong ethos about the land and land preservation, and Dan Smiley himself, with that same ethos but a scientific mind,” Mr. Cook said. “We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. We were all just incredibly lucky.”

Weather
History
Global Warming
Mohonk Mountain House
Temperature
Historic Buildings and Sites
Environment
New Paltz (NY)


Resurrection Is Often Misunderstood by Christians and Jews

Abstract: As Christians in most of the world approach the celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection, it is startling to find three distinguished scholars, all known for scrupulous attention to theological tradition and biblical sources, agreeing that the very idea of resurrection is widely and badly misunderstood. Misunderstood not just by those whose contemporary sensibilities restrain them from saying much more about resurrection than that it symbolizes some vague (and probably temporary) victory of life over death. But also misunderstood by many devout believers who consider themselves thoroughly faithful to traditional religious teachings. Kevin J. Madigan is a Roman Catholic who teaches Christian history at Harvard Divinity School. Jon D. Levenson, a colleague at Harvard, is a Jew who teaches Jewish studies. Together they have written “Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews.” The book, which will be published next month by Yale University Press, argues that the idea that God will raise the dead to life at the end of time is central to both Jewish and Christian traditions. N. T. Wright is a noted New Testament scholar who has continued to churn out academic and popular works, even after moving from Oxford in 2003 to become the Anglican bishop of Durham. Last month he published “Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church” (HarperOne). These two books are different in tone and agenda. Professors Madigan and Levenson are particularly interested in countering the assumption that resurrection is solely a Christian belief, rather than one deeply rooted in the Judaism from which Jesus emerged. Bishop Wright has written a more popular and pastoral book, with practical proposals for church renewal. But both books converge in challenging several widespread notions. Resurrection, they maintain, does not simply mean going to heaven or life after death. Resurrection is not a belief that divides an other-worldly Christianity from a this-worldly Judaism. Nor is resurrection something that refers only — or even primarily — to the individual’s survival after death. Instead, both books emphasize that in classic Jewish and Christian teachings, resurrection refers to a collective resurrection of people and renewal of all creation at the end of time. Resurrection was linked to the expectation of judgment and a final triumph of justice. This was the idea of resurrection that had evolved as Jews returned from exile and struggled under foreign domination in the period before Jesus. It was this idea of resurrection that Christians had in mind when they declared that what occurred on Easter was the “first fruits” of what was to come. If there is a key to the convergence among these authors, it lies, first of all, in their insistence on the bodily and communal character of resurrection, a view that has long competed with a Hellenistic philosophical and especially Platonic dualism, in which an individual disembodied intellect or spirit could be saved from its corruptible and corrupting body. Even as great a Jewish sage as Maimonides seemed to be tempted in this direction, and Bishop Wright sees the legacy of this dualism in the storehouse of Christian images, from Dante to classic hymns, in which souls shorn of bodies find their final destiny in a heavenly region quite elsewhere than on earth. This Hellenistic dualism had earlier reached its apogee in Gnosticism, which almost always taught the incompatibility of spirit and matter and sought salvation in the shucking off of the material body. Professor Madigan, Professor Levenson and Bishop Wright view the anti-Gnostic stances of early church fathers and rabbinic sages alike as a proper defense of their traditions’ core beliefs and not, as recently argued, a tactic in religious power politics. Unlike Gnosticism, Judaism and Christianity, in different ways, held to the goodness of creation and the flawed nature of humans. This equips both traditions, in these writers’ opinions, to avoid the illusion that humans can build a perfect world on their own while yet instilling in humans the confidence that the good they do will finally be affirmed and completed by the God of Resurrection. Both these books build on their authors’ previous works. In “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel” (Yale University Press, 2006), Professor Levenson argued that belief in resurrection was much more deeply rooted in the Hebrew scriptures and Jewish tradition than many Jews today realized. Five years ago, Bishop Wright, whose important contributions to the scholarly debate over the historical Jesus have emphasized Jesus’ place within Judaism’s expectations for a divine restoration of Israel, published “The Resurrection of the Son of God” (Fortress). Although both books emphasize resurrection as the final expression of divine power, vindicating those faithful to God’s promises and regenerating all creation, neither is indifferent to the question of the immediate destinies of the departed. Professors Madigan and Levenson do not think that their explanation of resurrection entails “a disbelief in the immortality of some aspect of the person or in the notion that the departed righteous even now enjoy a blissful communion with God.” And though Bishop Wright can be rather impatient with much of the talk of “souls” and “immortality” and “heaven” thoroughly embedded in Christian prayer and ritual, he has no problem when heaven as a “postmortem destination” is seen as a “temporary stage on the way to eventual resurrection of the body.” This eventual resurrection, he writes, is not “life after death” so much as “life after life after death.”

Jews
Easter and Holy Week
Christians and Christianity
Wright N T
Madigan Kevin J.


Leicester and York Debate Where Richard III Should Be Reburied

Abstract: LEICESTER, England — Just days after the yellowed bones found in a municipal parking lot here were declared to be those of King Richard III, a less-than-seemly tug of war has broken out between the cities of Leicester and York to claim the remains. While others have revived the centuries-old dispute about Richard — whether he was Shakespeare’s “poisonous, hunchbacked toad” and ruthless murderer of two princely nephews he imprisoned in the Tower of London, or champion of the common man and author of reforms that channeled charity to the poor — it took Leicester and York little time to compute the benefits in having him buried in their precincts, generating revenues from tourists eager to see the burial site and tour the visitors’ centers the two cities have planned. Though barely 100 miles apart, Leicester in the English Midlands and York in the country’s northern reaches have widely differing claims. Leicester notes that it is a couple of hours away by horse from where Richard was killed in 1485, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and that he lay for centuries in a shallow grave in the heart of the city. York’s riposte has been to depict Leicester as little more than a way station in Richard’s life. The city’s officials have noted, edgily, that Richard’s ancestral roots lay in the House of York, a protagonist in the Wars of the Roses that lasted 30 years and pitted the Yorkists against the House of Lancaster in rival claims to the Plantagenet monarchy, which disappeared into history with Richard’s death. It was in York, the city’s champions say, where Richard spent much of his youth, and where he told contemporaries that he wished to be buried. As matters stand, Leicester seems likely to win, since it is where the skeleton now affirmed by a team of scientific and historical experts to be Richard’s was discovered last fall, in a corner of the parking lot of the city’s social services department. The sheer mundanity of the location has, if anything, elevated Leicester’s profile and given rise to a feast of newspaper cartoons and lame Twitter jokes, many about the size of the unpaid parking ticket awaiting Richard’s heirs. The king’s remains were buried in a corner of the chapel of a Franciscan monastery, the Greyfriars Priory, that like Richard fell victim to the Tudor kings when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and seized their wealth about 50 years after Richard’s death. Long before there was a parking lot, the priory had disappeared, its stone walls and tiled floors looted, until all that remained were the trace foundations that were discovered when the dig supervised by a team of experts from the University of Leicester uncovered Richard’s bones in September . Leicester’s case for retaining the bones and reburying them at the city’s Anglican cathedral, a stone’s throw from the parking lot, is anchored in a provision in the exhumation license granted last summer by the British government, which specified that the reburial take place at the cathedral, as the university proposed. Perhaps anticipating a challenge, Leicester’s mayor unveiled plans this week for the excavated corner of the parking lot to become part of a larger visitors’ site, including the new burial plot in the cathedral precincts and an exhibition on Richard’s life, already opened temporarily, in an old school building the city has acquired for the purpose. The cities have lost no time in starting their campaigns. By midweek, York had drawn 7,000 signatures to an online petition for the government to support its bid; Leicester’s petition lagged with only 2,000 signatures. Leicester, though, could celebrate that Chris Grayling, the justice minister in Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet, had affirmed in the House of Commons that the exhumation license required the reburial to take place in Leicester. But even that cut little ice with the Yorkists. “Let’s not have another war on this matter,” said Kersten England, chief executive of York’s City Council, who said she would write to Queen Elizabeth II asking for support. “Possession may be nine-tenths of the law,” she said, referring to Richard’s bones, now under tight guard in Leicester. “But we definitely have the moral high ground.” She was backed by Paul Toy, an official at York’s Richard III Museum , which has long existed in the Monk Bar gatehouse at the entrance to the old city. “It’s purely by chance that Richard III was in Leicester, because he got killed at Bosworth,” he said.

York
Bone
King of England Richard III
Leicester England


David Cameron and Ed Miliband Enter Final Straight in British Election

Abstract: LONDON — They are a remarkable contrast: David Cameron , 48, the red-cheeked toff who went to Eton and belonged to snooty clubs; and Ed Miliband, 45, the gawky, adenoidal, agnostic son of a Marxist Jewish refugee and historian. Yet both are part of the English elite — the Tory clan of the southeast countryside in the case of Mr. Cameron, the incumbent prime minister, and the Labour clan of North London intellectuals for Mr. Miliband, his challenger in Thursday’s general election. Both went to Oxford University, both had early political mentors and a quick rise through party politics and government. In some ways, their similarities signify the limits of their parties’ reach and help explain why British politics has become so fragmented even as it confronts an array of defining issues, from whether to maintain the Conservatives’ path of budget austerity to the place of Britain in the European Union and the place of Scotland in the United Kingdom. Polls suggest that neither of their parties is likely to get much more than a third of the vote in Thursday’s election, with the big change being an expected near-wipeout of the Labour Party in Scotland by a resurgent Scottish National Party. The process of forming a government afterward seems almost certain to be messy and protracted, and to leave whichever man ends up in Downing Street severely constrained in carrying out the agenda he promised voters. Both Mr. Cameron and Mr. Miliband, though part of a younger generation of leaders, have pulled their parties back to the past, toward older ideologies. Mr. Cameron and his pal George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, have embraced the main tenet of Thatcherism — the belief in a smaller state that leaves more room for individual enterprise and the workings of the market. Through their continuing emphasis on deficit reduction and austerity, they have left the Tories open to charges of favoring the rich, of indifference to inequality and of abandoning the poor. Mr. Miliband, by contrast, has turned his back on the “New Labour” of Tony Blair, who managed to win three elections with his move toward a market-oriented center-left. Mr. Miliband, whose first mentor was the prominent leftist Tony Benn, won the Labour leadership with the support of the trade unions, not the members of Parliament or the party membership, and he is considerably more to the left than Mr. Blair was. That has opened him up to charges of indifference to budget deficits, distaste for business and the wealthy, and a love of further state intervention in nearly every possible field, from energy and rail prices to the housing market. This is a campaign that has been more personal and poisonous than compelling, in part because, Scotland aside, the opinion polls have moved very little, and the outcome seems so murky. And while both men are intelligent and articulate, they have both campaigned at a safe distance from most ordinary Britons, emphasizing television and radio interviews, set speeches and events in friendly locales with vetted audiences and a few carefully managed “walkabouts.” Mr. Cameron has been criticized for seeming too calm, too pleasant and even lazy, a smoothness his critics ascribe to his cosseted upbringing and nearly a decade of work in public relations for a media company. He admits he has been urged to show more passion on the campaign trail. After Mr. Cameron misspoke on Friday and called the election “career-defining” rather than “country-defining,” Mr. Miliband joked that Mr. Cameron has “finally found something he’s passionate about — it’s his own career.” Accused of not caring about the disadvantaged and wanting to gut the National Health Service, Mr. Cameron often tells the story of his first child, Ivan, who was born with a congenital disease and died in 2009, age 6, while getting excellent care from the health service. Mr. Cameron’s father, Ian, was a stockbroker who was born with severely deformed legs, and Mr. Cameron first experienced Conservative politics as a researcher for his godfather, a member of Parliament. Mr. Cameron was an excellent student, described by his Oxford tutor, Vernon Bogdanor, as “one of the ablest” he has ever taught. Aides describe him now as polite, if sometimes insincere, and quick to make decisions — so quick that they sometimes ask him to think again. Mr. Miliband, who fluffed a major speech to his party conference in September when he did it from a few notes, now uses a white lectern nearly everywhere he goes, with a teleprompter for speeches, to look more prime ministerial. He has worked on his voice and delivery with a debate coach and is wearing noticeably more expensive suits. And he only very rarely pairs them with a traditionally red Labour necktie, favoring midgray, blue and purple, just like Mr. Cameron. Image Opposition Labour Party leader Ed Miliband. Credit Stefan Rousseau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More important, Mr. Miliband has shown resilience in the face of mockery from Britain’s largely right-wing press, which has featured photographs of him struggling to eat a bacon sandwich, questioned the patriotism of his father , accused him of fratricide for beating out his brother for the party leadership and compared him to the toothy character Wallace, from the “Wallace and Gromit” series of animated films. Mr. Miliband has displayed a grasp of his material, some passion about inequality and a quickness of wit that has impressed voters, at least in England. If Mr. Cameron is too quick to decide, Mr. Miliband is said to be indecisive, getting down into the weeds of every policy. But during the campaign, he has tried to suppress his inner wonkiness, has stopped using phrases like “predatory capitalism” and even survived a Madonna-like stumble over a platform during a live television question-and-answer show. And he made a risky effort to reach out to younger voters by traveling to the London flat of the comedian Russell Brand for an interview, to argue that politics and voting bring about change. In defense of Mr. Miliband, young supporters have created a Twitter hashtag, #Milifandom , which portrays him instead as a superhero — brave, bold and sexy. Mr. Miliband, who would become the first Jewish-born prime minister since Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century, has spoken movingly of his family’s flight from the Nazis and the welcome they found in Britain. But he has been a sharp critic of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza and has pushed the party to recognize Palestine . Similarly, he has an affection for the United States, where he lived at times when his father, Ralph Miliband, had various teaching jobs. He is a fan of the Red Sox and spent nearly two years as a visiting scholar at Harvard, where he got to know John Kerry, now secretary of state. But Mr. Miliband has emphasized his policy distance from Washington, especially in military matters in contrast to Mr. Blair’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he has stressed the importance of Britain’s membership in the European Union in the face of Mr. Cameron’s promise, if still in office, to have a referendum on British membership by the end of 2017. It is possible, said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics, that Labour under Mr. Miliband may even win more votes in England than the Tories. Image British Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron. Credit Stefan Rousseau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Neither Mr. Cameron nor Mr. Miliband, however, appears to have been prepared for the way in which the resurgent nationalist movement in Scotland would upend the elections. In Scotland, long a Labour stronghold, Mr. Miliband is less popular than even Mr. Cameron, and Labour is expected to lose most of its 41 seats there to the Scottish National Party and its new leader, Nicola Sturgeon, who is not even running for the British Parliament. (The Conservatives have only a single seat in Scotland.) Based on the latest polling, Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party is widely expected to win the most seats nationwide in Parliament, but fall well short of a majority. Mr. Miliband is expected to have the most options for cobbling together a coalition with smaller parties, and so may end up prime minister anyway, after a tricky dance with the Scottish nationalists. If Mr. Miliband’s hopes for victory have been undermined by his party’s collapse in Scotland, Mr. Cameron’s have been damaged by the rise of the U.K. Independence Party, which wants to leave the European Union and put strict controls on immigration. UKIP will win only a few seats, but might come in second in many constituencies, which could deny victory to Tory candidates and re-election to Mr. Cameron. A renewal of the current two-party coalition looks unlikely, because Mr. Cameron’s partners, the Liberal Democrats, have been badly hurt by their junior status in government, and the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, could even lose his seat. But given the weaknesses of both Labour and the Tories, the Liberal Democrats are likely to be part of the next government no matter who is prime minister. Still, days before the election, no one is sure of anything except a hung Parliament and a period of coalition negotiations, during which Mr. Cameron will remain prime minister and try to hold on to his job. The process promises to be bitter, which will only add to the enmity between Mr. Cameron and Mr. Miliband, who have faced each other in sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions, the fierce and theatrical battle of wits in Parliament, on scores of occasions. Now the battle will have politically fatal consequences — the man who loses out is almost sure to be discarded as leader of his party, and given the unsentimental nature of British party politics, pretty quickly, too.

David Cameron
Election
Voting
Scottish National Party
Conservative Party
Great Britain
Edward S Miliband
Legislature
Labour Party Great Britain
United Kingdom Independence Party


Englewood: Five Shot at Restaurant

Abstract: Five people were wounded late Sunday night after an argument at a restaurant erupted in gunfire, the authorities said yesterday. Three were hit directly and two were grazed, said Detective Lt. Steven Sabo, who did not identify the victims. A 35-year-old man shot several times was in stable condition following surgery, as was a 28-year-old woman who also required surgery, he said. A 30-year-old-woman hit directly and two women grazed by bullets, ages 40 and 15, did not require surgery. Police were still searching for the gunman and a motive in the shooting, which happened about 11:30 p.m. at Ashanti International Cuisine during the restaurant’s customer appreciation party. There were 200 to 500 people at the party, the authorities said.

Restaurants
Crime and Criminals
New Jersey


Long Island Sound Proposal Awaits Crucial Ruling

Abstract: FEDERAL approval for the liquefied natural gas plant that Broadwater Energy has proposed for Long Island Sound got closer this month when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff concluded that the project, with 86 recommended changes, would have limited environmental impact. Still, the road to acceptance has had some bumps in the past month. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation called Broadwater’s application for various permits incomplete and rejected it, and a report by the General Accountability Office, Congress’s auditing arm, said the Coast Guard lacked the resources to protect liquefied natural gas terminals and ships carrying the gas. Now, what could be either a project-ending roadblock or an even more significant green light is just ahead: a decision by New York’s Department of State, due Feb. 12, on whether the $700 million project is consistent with the state’s federally approved coastal zone management plan. That decision — which Broadwater, energy analysts and project opponents in New York and Connecticut regard as crucial — will be followed by a formal statement from Gov. Eliot Spitzer that will reveal his position on the project for the first time, a spokesman for the governor said. If the state finds the project inconsistent with its coastal plan, Broadwater could appeal to the federal secretary of commerce. If the secretary were to override that finding, New York could appeal in federal court, setting off a legal struggle. Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut has said her state would challenge any approval for the terminal in court. In a letter dated Jan. 16, she told Mr. Spitzer that the plant would diminish the Sound. The release on Jan. 11 of the regulatory commission’s report, its final environmental impact statement, was preceded by less-favorable announcements. In a letter dated Dec. 21, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation said that company submissions for air, water and hazardous material storage permits lacked required details and that the project, as proposed, “presents significant adverse impacts to the Long Island Sound aquatic environment and fishery.” The department also said Broadwater had failed to look at Atlantic Ocean sites as part of a required assessment of alternatives. Then, on Jan. 10, the General Accountability Office released its report on the Coast Guard’s ability to provide security for the terminals and ships serving them. John Hritcko Jr., the Broadwater senior vice president, remained optimistic, although he said a planned opening in December 2010 had been pushed back. He said the project clearly fit within New York’s coastal plan. He also said the company was providing information requested by the Environmental Conservation Department, part of what he called normal give-and-take. Energy analysts said that states, not federal regulators, were most often the key players in determining whether liquefied natural gas plants are built. Michael T. Rieke, the managing editor of Platts LNG Daily in Houston, said that with one exception, in Providence, R.I., the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had approved all natural gas terminal applications. Philip L. Dodge, an energy analyst for the Houston-based Stanford Group, said that obtaining state permits and approvals was a more daunting challenge. California has blocked an offshore project, he said. Forty-seven liquefied natural gas terminals are currently proposed in the United States, Canada and Mexico, including two others in the region. As the New York decision approaches, Broadwater opponents, including Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, and United States Representative Timothy H. Bishop of Southampton are urging Mr. Spitzer to support BlueOcean Energy, a liquefied natural gas plant that ExxonMobil recently proposed in the Atlantic. It would be 20 miles off the New Jersey coast and 30 miles from New York. “That would be a reasonable alternative,” Mr. Bishop said. MR. BLUMENTHAL has argued that the BlueOcean project would be safer and less environmentally damaging and deliver more natural gas than Broadwater. He is urging New York to deny Broadwater another key approval, a lease for the seabed where its mooring yoke would be erected. BlueOcean would provide 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day to New Jersey and New York and be in operation by 2015, ExxonMobil said. Another LNG terminal backed by private investors, Safe Harbor Energy, is proposed for an artificial island 13.5 miles off Long Beach, and its sponsors say it would deliver two billion cubic feet of natural gas a day. Broadwater contends that its plant, which would provide a billion cubic feet of natural gas to New York City, Long Island and Connecticut each day, is needed, economically advantageous, environmentally benign and safe. Its proposed site is nine miles off Wading River and about 10 miles from Connecticut. Broadwater’s positions are upheld in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff’s report. The staff rejected opponents’ arguments that the 1,215-foot-long, 10-story terminal would industrialize the Sound. The report also agreed with Broadwater that the plant and tankers that supplied it would be unlikely targets of terrorism because they would be far from population centers. Giuliani Partners, a consulting company in which Rudolph W. Giuliani holds an equity interest, remains the security consultant for the project, Mr. Hritcko said. Before announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Giuliani supported Broadwater as being desperately needed. Sunny Mindel, a company spokeswoman, said Mr. Giuliani had taken no part in its day-to-day operations since June and received no salary. She said the company had no comment on the G.A.O. report or the regulatory commission’s environmental impact statement. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, a Democratic presidential candidate, has opposed the project as unsuitable for the Sound. Senator Charles E. Schumer has also opposed it, as have Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, and a number of other elected officials on Long Island and in Connecticut. Connecticut opponents of the project said they recognized that New York holds the key. “We have and continue to look to New York State to stand up for Long Island Sound and the citizens of New York and Connecticut,” said Leah L. Schmalz, the director of legislative and legal affairs for Save the Sound in New Haven. “Because the final environmental impact statement proves that FERC will not.”

Long Island Sound
Broadwater Energy
Energy and Power


Brazilian Tapped to Lead World Trade Organization

Abstract: PARIS — Roberto Carvalho de Azevêdo of Brazil will be the next leader of the World Trade Organization, a Brazilian official said Tuesday, and will take the reins at a time when the group is fighting to remain relevant. Representatives of the 159 W.T.O. member states, meeting in Geneva, reached consensus on Mr. Azevêdo late Tuesday afternoon, a spokeswoman for the Brazilian foreign ministry said. The organization was scheduled to make an official announcement on Wednesday. Mr. Azevêdo, a career diplomat and Brazil’s permanent representative to the W.T.O., would be the sixth person and the first Latin American to lead the global trade body since its creation in 1995. He beat out seven other candidates for the position, including the other finalist, the former Mexican trade minister Herminio Blanco Mendoza, who had the backing of the European Union. Mr. Azevêdo has said that his goal at the organization is “to build bridges among my peers in Geneva.” In the end, his candidacy appealed to a number of developing countries, which saw his final opponent, Mr. Blanco — who holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago — as a favorite of the United States and other wealthy nations. Image Roberto Carvalho de Azevêdo Credit Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The current chief, Pascal Lamy, took office in 2005 and will step down after his second four-year term expires Sept. 1. Petros Mavroidis, a professor of trade law at Columbia University in New York, noted that Mr. Azevêdo had an insider’s knowledge of how the W.T.O. worked, something he said might help him work out “a face-saving compromise” over the deadlocked Doha round of trade negotiations. But Mr. Mavroidis also said he was surprised that the group, facing existential doubts, had not chosen someone with more political weight, “someone like Bill Clinton.” “They haven’t delivered anything for years,” Mr. Mavroidis said. “Mr. Azevêdo is a skillful ambassador, but I think you need someone to shake the place up. And I don’t know if he’s the one to do it.” Mr. Azevêdo takes over at a time when the W.T.O. — established as a forum for setting global trade rules, reducing barriers to commerce and settling disputes — appears to have lost its way. Early optimism about the Doha round, which began in 2001 and which many had hoped would be the organization’s crowning achievement, has long since faded. Mr. Lamy, a Frenchman, initially earned high marks for his efforts on the Doha round, but nations’ disagreements on agricultural subsidies, tariffs on manufactured goods and developing countries’ access to global markets, coupled with the onset of the global financial crisis, effectively killed the appetite for a global pact. Instead, major trading nations have been bargaining over deals at the regional and bilateral levels. Image Pascal Lamy will be replaced by Roberto Carvalho de Azevêdo in September as chief of the World Trade Organization. Credit Pool photo by Bertrand Langlois One of the most ambitious regional proposals is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to link the United States, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Japan and others. More recently, the United States and the European Union have also signaled interest in a free trade agreement. The technical complexity of both proposals, as well as opposition from numerous special interests, probably means that years of negotiations lie ahead before either yields fruit. Some economists argue that the rapid growth of developing nations like China, Brazil and India has left the W.T.O. hopelessly out of date. Michael Punke, the U.S. ambassador to the W.T.O., called last month for its members to make an all-out effort to take at least a small step toward regaining momentum for a multilateral deal at a trade ministers’ meeting set for Bali in December. “Absent a course correction, the current path of talks would lead directly to failure at Bali,” Mr. Punke warned. “And if Bali fails, it is hard to imagine how Doha can succeed.”

Brazil
World Trade Organization
Pascal Lamy
International trade
Appointments and Executive Changes
Roberto Carvalho de Azevedo


Diana Barnato Walker, Acclaimed Pilot, Dies at 90

Abstract: LONDON — Diana Barnato Walker, an heiress to a South African diamond mining fortune who took up flying in the 1930s and became a celebrated aviator as one of a group of women who delivered new fighters and bombers to combat squadrons in World War II, died on April 28. She was 90. Her son, Barney Walker, said that Mrs. Walker died in a hospital near her sheep farm in Surrey, and that the cause was pneumonia. Mrs. Walker, a granddaughter of Barney Barnato, a co-founder of the De Beers mining company in Johannesburg, was 18 years old when she discovered her calling in 1936. Seeking a break from the social whirl of a young debutante in London, she paid £3 for a flying lesson in a Tiger Moth biplane at the Brooklands Motor Racing Circuit and never turned back. In 1941, after serving as a nursing auxiliary with the British expeditionary force, which had been driven from France by the German invasion the year before, she passed rigorous tests and became a member of what The Times of London described in 2005 as “the pluckiest sisterhood in military history,” the women’s arm of the Air Transport Auxiliary. Only a little over five feet tall, Mrs. Walker often needed a special cushion to allow her to reach the controls of the aircraft she flew. Known as the “Atagirls,” the transport auxiliary pilots — 108 by the war’s end in 1945 — joined more than 500 male pilots in delivering many of the most renowned aircraft of the war to squadrons across Britain. Mrs. Walker, like the other women in the group, flew Spitfire, Hurricane and Mustang fighters, as well as Wellington and Hampden bombers, though not heavy bombers; only male pilots were judged to have the physical strength to handle those. Mrs. Walker alone delivered 260 Spitfires during her four years in uniform, according to wartime records. In one month, September 1944, she delivered 33 aircraft of 14 types. Pilots were often asked to fly in poor weather, without instruments, without combat weaponry and frequently without radios. A total of 16 women piloting the ferry runs were killed in the war, nearly one in six, a ratio that aviation historians say was worse than that suffered by the Royal Air Force’s wartime fighter pilots. Mrs. Walker, who survived many brushes with death, wrote in her 1994 autobiography, “Spreading My Wings,” that she owed her survival to a “guardian angel.” Twice the unarmed planes she was flying came were attacked by German aircraft, and she emerged uninjured. There were light moments. The incident that amused her most occurred when she tried aerobatic maneuvers in a Spitfire and found herself flying upside down, unable to right the aircraft. “While I was wondering what to do next, from out of my top overall pocket fell my beautifully engraved silver powder compact,” she wrote. “It wheeled round and round the bubble canopy like a drunken sailor on a wall of death, then sent all the face powder over everything.” After she managed to right the plane and land, a “very tall and handsome” R.A.F. pilot hopped onto the wing and told her that he and his fellow pilots had been told to expect “a very, very pretty girl” at the controls, but that “all I can see is some ghastly clown.” Born on Jan. 15, 1918, Diana Barnato Walker was the daughter of Woolf Barnato, a London-based financier who, as chairman of the Bentley car company, won the Le Mans 24-hour race in France three times in succession from 1928. In 1942 she became engaged to a Battle of Britain fighter ace who later died in a Spitfire crash. In 1944, she married another decorated Spitfire pilot, Derek Walker, and flew alongside him, each in a Spitfire, to a honeymoon in Brussels. He was killed in a flying accident six months after the war ended in 1945. She subsequently began a 30-year relationship with Whitney Straight, an American-born graduate of Cambridge University who was a grand prix racing driver in the 1930s and a Battle of Britain fighter ace. Barney Walker, her survivor, is their son. Mrs. Walker continued to fly after the war, when she flew her own light aircraft around Britain encouraging young women to take up careers in aviation through an organization known as the Women’s Junior Air Corp. She bought the sheep farm in Surrey and became master of the local fox hunt. In 1963, at the age of 45, she became the first British woman to fly faster than sound when she piloted a two-seat R.A.F. Lightning fighter at a speed of 1,262 miles an hour over the North Sea. That made her, briefly, holder of the world air speed record for women; it was broken in 1964 by Jacqueline Cochran Odlum, one of more than a dozen American women who had flown with the Air Transport Auxiliary during the war. In 1964, Mrs. Odlum, flying an F-104G Starfighter, raised the record to 1,429 miles an hour.

Pilots
Women
History
Deaths (Obituaries)
De Beers Group
Airlines and Airplanes
World War II (1939-45)
London (England)
South Africa


JetBlue Names New Chief After Months of Speculation

Abstract: The chief executive of JetBlue Airways, Dave Barger, will step down in February and be succeeded by the company’s president after months of speculation about leadership at the airline, which is profitable but has lagged its rivals. The new chief, the third in JetBlue’s 14-year history, will be Robin Hayes, 48, a former British Airways executive who joined JetBlue in 2008. The change was announced after a meeting of the airline’s board. Mr. Barger, who has been chief since 2007, said the decision to leave was mutual between himself and the board. “You just kind of know when you need the next level of ideas, innovation, evolution,” he said in an interview. Mr. Barger credited Mr. Hayes with pushing recent changes at the airline, including Mint, its premium seats on some transcontinental flights. JetBlue has been profitable but has made thinner profits than many rivals.

JetBlue
Robin Hayes
David Barger
Appointments and Executive Changes


Atlanta Pitted Against Neighbors in Battle Over Water

Abstract: ATLANTA — The residents of the economic engine of the South, as they like to call this comparatively gleaming and rapidly expanding state capital, have always suspected that they are the objects of resentment from their more rural neighbors. Now they are certain of it. A recent court defeat has left Atlanta howling that its enemies, including Alabama and Florida, are trying to choke off the city’s prosperity, if not out of sheer spite then at least the misguided notion that jobs and money would flow to them instead. The conflict is the timeworn rural-versus-urban enmity writ large, a battle over water that has pitted Atlanta against its neighbors in and out of Georgia. “The only motivation is political,” Charles Krautler, the director of the Atlanta Regional Commission , said of the fight. “We don’t have as good of spin doctors as they do. It’s easy to point the finger at big bad Atlanta.” Ostensibly, the war among the three states is about a river basin that supplies the taps of 3.5 million people in metropolitan Atlanta before it flows down the Alabama-Georgia state line and into the Florida Panhandle. Each state says the others are demanding too much water. But many experts say there is no actual scarcity — the system, managed properly, could meet the needs of users along the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers, including power companies, farmers and oystermen. Still, the three states have spent nearly 20 years battling over the allocation of the water. And now, no matter their motive, Alabama and Florida have the law squarely on their side. On July 17, Judge Paul A. Magnuson of Federal District Court agreed with their argument that supplying water to Atlanta was not an authorized use of Lake Sidney Lanier , the federal reservoir northeast of the city at the headwaters of the river basin. For decades, Judge Magnuson ruled, the Army Corps of Engineers had illegally managed the Buford Dam, which created the lake beginning in 1956, to provide the Atlanta region with drinking water. He said Congress built the dam only for navigation, flood control and hydropower. The 97-page ruling largely faults the corps for overstepping its authority but also suggests that Georgia knew for decades that Congressional approval was needed. Govs. Charlie Crist of Florida and Bob Riley of Alabama, both Republicans, hailed the decision. “Atlanta has based its growth on the idea that it could take whatever water it wanted, whenever it wanted it, and that the downstream states would simply have to make do with less,” Mr. Riley said. After the court’s ruling, he added, “this massive illegal water grab will be coming to an end.” Alabama officials say that they are not trying to prevent Atlanta from growing but that they want the city to pay for the infrastructure that growth requires. In 1948, the mayor of Atlanta declined to contribute money to the construction of the Lake Lanier dam, arguing that the city would not need the water. Atlanta has responded with a major public relations offensive, painting the city as a good steward that has carried out a water plan, treats its sewage until it is drinkable and, during the recent drought, put conservation measures in place when downstream users did not. (Environmentalists concede these points but say that they are half-hearted at best and that the metropolitan area could save millions of gallons through more aggressive conservation.) Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia, a Republican who is not normally an Atlanta ally in intrastate battles over rural and urban priorities, has recently begun to defend its water use. Mr. Perdue cites figures showing that the city’s net water use is less than 1 percent of the river basin’s water flow when it reaches the Florida-Georgia border. At that point in the basin, the minimum water flow maintained by the corps is 5,000 cubic feet per second, compared with 750 in Atlanta. Mr. Perdue argues that the real goal of Florida, in suing for more water under the Endangered Species Act, is to protect the fishing industry in the Apalachicola Bay. And he says that while Alabama has argued for better navigation, it really wants water to cool power plants. Neither goal is an authorized use of Lake Lanier, and neither, Atlantans say, is as crucial as their own needs. “What happens in metro Atlanta and Georgia doesn’t hurt either of those states,” said Pat Stevens, chief of the environmental planning division for the Atlanta Regional Council, blaming Georgia’s opponents for the many failed efforts at negotiations over the years. “But if their goal is to hurt metro Atlanta and Georgia, they could achieve that. I always just thought they never had a reason to come to an agreement.” If that is true, they have less reason now. Judge Magnuson did not order the spigots shut off immediately, nor did he say that the system could never be used for drinking water. Instead, he said he would allow three years for the corps to receive approval from Congress to use the lake for that purpose. Several members of Congress have said they will not act unless the three states make a deal. But Georgia’s hand is now far weaker than it was before the ruling. “Why didn’t they go to Congress for approval 20 years ago?” asked Sally Bethea, executive director of the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper , an environmental organization. “It was obvious that this was a gamble to say well, the corps gave it to us so we get to keep all this water. There’s no insurance policy in that.” Instead of taking a conciliatory approach, though, Mr. Perdue has vowed to “fight to the death,” accused his opponents of hypocrisy and pointedly brought up a 150-year-old Supreme Court decision declaring the Chattahoochee River to be on Georgia’s side of the state line. Mr. Perdue is hoping to find allies among other states where reservoirs built for other purposes are used for drinking water. The governor has also talked about building reservoirs and is planning to appeal the decision, although even his allies say a successful appeal is unlikely. Mr. Riley has engaged in theatrics of his own. When Mr. Perdue appointed Mike Garrett, the chief executive officer of Georgia Power, to work with Congress on the water issue, Mr. Riley warned the power company’s parent, Southern Company, to stay neutral. He did not mention that Alabama Power, another subsidiary of Southern Company, has been a party to the lawsuit for years. Seeking Congressional authorization would be a tricky matter for Georgia, whose delegation is outflanked by Alabama and Florida combined, both in size and influence, though all three states are led by Republicans and lack firepower in the Democratic leadership that controls Congress. Representative John Lewis, a Democrat from Atlanta and the senior member of the Georgia delegation, said members of Congress would become more involved in negotiations among the states. “It would be our hope,” Mr. Lewis said, “that the three states and the members of Congress from the three states would work it out, and if not we will take it up at the Congressional level.” One of Mr. Perdue’s goals, meanwhile, is to go back to the negotiating table. To show his enthusiasm, on July 30 he sent a letter, which he made public, to Governors Crist and Riley, listing 40 possible dates for a meeting. They are both still reviewing their schedules.


Pandora Signs Music Rights Deal With BMG

Abstract: The latest step in the music industry’s slow-motion revolution over licensing came on Thursday, when Pandora Media announced that it had struck a direct deal for music rights with BMG, the world’s fourth-largest music publisher. BMG’s deal with Pandora is for the portions of its catalog that have been represented by Ascap and BMI, the two giant licensing groups that have long handled the performing rights — the royalty payments for whenever music is played on the radio, online or in concert — for millions of songs in the United States. Even though BMG remains a part of Ascap and BMI, it bypassed them by making the direct deal with Pandora, for what analysts believe is a higher royalty rate than those organizations — which are governed by decades-old federal regulation — are able to obtain on their own. In exchange, the deal gives BMG and its songwriters unspecified “marketing and business benefits,” according to a statement issued Thursday by Pandora. BMG’s large roster includes songwriters who have written hits for performers like Adele, One Direction, Beyoncé and Frank Sinatra. The company is part of Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate. As the music industry goes digital, and listeners flock to streaming services like Pandora, YouTube and Spotify, its biggest powers have grown increasingly dissatisfied with its old licensing system. Ascap and BMI are asking the Justice Department to update their consent decrees, and some record labels and artists have been making special deals with online outlets to get higher royalty rates or other benefits. Last month, for example, Pandora struck a deal with Merlin , a group that represents thousands of independent record companies in digital licensing negotiations. That deal is believed to pay the record labels slightly better royalty rates than would be available through the compulsory licensing terms available to Pandora under United States copyright law, and also give the labels access to valuable marketing insights from Pandora’s vast trove of user data. Pandora is by far the most popular Internet radio service, with about 76 million users every month. Licensing costs have been a major concern for Pandora, and these deals may lead to higher rates. But some analysts view them as beneficial given the history of strife between Pandora and the music industry. “In general, we believe that direct deals with labels offer better content cost visibility in the longer term, and we think they improve relations between Pandora and the artists,” Anthony DiClemente, an analyst at Nomura in New York, wrote in a research note on Thursday. The effect of such deals on Ascap and BMI, however, is unclear. They already face defection by their largest publisher members, like Sony/ATV and Universal, if the government does not make the regulatory changes they want. Those changes are opposed by companies that rely on Ascap and BMI for music, like radio broadcasters and Pandora itself, out of fears that it could lead to even higher rates and anticompetitive behavior by the publishers. In a rate-setting trial this year between Pandora and Ascap, a federal judge found evidence of “troubling coordination” between Ascap and its publishers, and said that this behavior “implicates a core antitrust concern.” But even though BMG has bypassed Ascap and BMI, it does not mean it has left those groups, which under their rules can represent publishers only on a nonexclusive basis. In fact, in the Pandora announcement on Thursday, Laurent Hubert, BMG’s North American chief, reaffirmed its membership in both groups, saying that he wanted to “emphasize our strong, continuing relationship with the U.S. performing rights organizations as they play a vital role for songwriters and music publishers alike.”

Music
Pandora Media
Royalties
Radio
Bertelsmann
BMG Entertainment
American Society of Composers
Authors and Publishers
SONY/ATV Music Publishing
Broadcast Music


School Bus Strike Poses Challenge for Special-Needs Students

Abstract: At 7:30 a.m. on Friday, Kiana Humble tried to nudge her caretaker across the street toward the bus stop near her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, confused about why she was not headed to the stop for the familiar yellow bus that normally picks her up. They went instead to the G train platform, where Kiana stood moaning, jabbing at the air and rocking while her caretaker held her wrist with what she calls her “tight grip.” It took nearly an hour on a short subway ride, a city bus and a few minutes of unsteady walking for Kiana, a severely autistic 15-year-old, to make it to Public School 77 — just 1.6 miles from her home. Even getting up the steps of the bus was “rocky,” her caretaker, Renee Wellington, said. Colder weather is expected next week, and should a strike by New York City’s school bus drivers continue, she said, “that’s going to be a whole other situation.” More than 110,000 children have had to find new ways to class since most drivers walked out on Wednesday in a dispute between their union and the city. None have been more profoundly affected than the tens of thousands of special-needs children and their parents, who tend to travel the longest distances, and for whom even walking out the door can be a challenge. “This is catastrophic,” said Rachel Howard, director of Resources for Children with Special Needs, a nonprofit organization. “The more vulnerable and severely disabled the child, the more catastrophic it is.” While attendance at most schools is at normal levels, some special-education programs are half empty. The city’s Education Department said 62 percent of special-education students showed up on Friday, compared with 49 percent on Thursday. A program at Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Westchester County for 61 New York City students with long-term illnesses had only four children present on Wednesday, 9 on Thursday and 7 on Friday. “The overall impact is devastating,” said Dr. Ellen Bergman, the superintendent of the Mount Pleasant Blythedale school district, which runs the program. Only about one-third of the children who receive bus service in the city are in special-education programs, but they account for most of the busing costs because of limitations on how long they can ride and how many other children they can ride a bus with, as well as requirements for extra attendants and door-to-door escorting. The Education Department spends about $13,000 a year to bus each special-education child, more than four times what it spends for other students. To reduce costs, the Bloomberg administration wants to solicit bids for new contracts for 1,100 special-education routes, without job protection for current members of the drivers’ union, who earn from $14 to $29 an hour. They could be laid off if their companies do not win the new contracts. The city said a decision by the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, prohibited the job guarantees. The main drivers’ union, Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, said the city was misinterpreting the decision. Bus drivers standing on a picket line in Queens described a route that involves taking one student from Manhattan to a program in New Jersey, where the driver waits until the student is ready to go home. “My route looks like one of those newly constructed election districts,” said Ilya Bdil, who has been driving a bus for 21 years. He logs 90 miles traveling across Queens to pick up five children, four of them in wheelchairs. Andrew Doherty, a developmentally disabled 17-year-old, goes from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to the Hawthorne Country Day School in Westchester, where only a third of its 90 New York City students arrived on Friday. He missed school on Wednesday, and his father spent hours in the car on Thursday and Friday dropping him off, then turning around four hours later to pick him up. “I don’t know what I’m going to do next week,” his mother, Laurie Abramowitz, said. Some parents said the city offered to reimburse them up to $200 a day for car services, but many said they did not have the money to lay out. Worse still, they said the Education Department would pay for only the time the child was in the car — which meant that parents like Ms. Abramowitz, who must take a taxi to the school to pick up her son, were responsible for those expenses. Children like Andrew cannot ride in cars alone. “It’s $160 round trip,” Ms. Abramowitz said. “I’m an attorney, I make money, and I can’t afford that.” Her son, she said, is “confused and upset.” Camille Harding, a nursing student with two sons who are autistic — George, 18, and Christopher, 15 — has been taking them both to school on the subway for the past few days. She takes the No. 5 train from her Crown Heights apartment and drops Christopher off at his school in Downtown Brooklyn. Then she gets on the No. 3 toward Park Slope with George, who pushed and leaned on others. “I see the frustration build on people’s faces,” Ms. Harding said. Nadine Marques, the PTA president at P.S. 77, the special-needs school in Park Slope that Kiana attends, said it could be embarrassing for parents and scary for passengers when children with autism slap themselves, bite and groan. Many of those children are unable to talk and can be rattled by fluorescent lighting and physical contact. “A lot of our kids don’t adapt well to change and can be really bothered by subway noise or train lights,” she said. “If they are expecting a yellow bus and you say, ‘Oh, let’s go get the train,’ it can be upsetting.” When school let out on Thursday afternoon at P.S. 396 in Brownsville, where all of the children have physical or mental disabilities, some students had tantrums. One writhed on the ground while many families waited for taxis. For Sherley Janvier, 24, the strike meant taking the week off from her job as a home health aide to take her severely disabled son Nelson back and forth on Access-A-Ride, the public transit service for disabled people and older passengers. Missing work will cost her $450. “I guess we’re just going to be behind on the rent,” she said. Some private schools, like Hawthorne, said they were not waiting for the Education Department to come up with alternatives and were planning to make their own transit arrangements. “There are parents who are afraid of losing their jobs,” the school’s director, Tina Covington, said. “We are going to see a lot of regression in the kids. We can’t wait for the city to come up with a solution.” The city said that 30 percent of its special-education routes whose drivers are not members of the striking union were still running and that it was trying to get more buses on the road. But for now, many children like Kiana will be riding city buses and trains, punching the air, groaning and rocking. “Everyone,” her mother, Sheila Humble, said, “is scared.”

Bus
Amalgamated Transit Union
Strikes Labor
K-12 Education
Special education
NYC Department of Education
NYC


Federal Reserve Caps Its Bond Purchases; Focus Turns to Interest Rates

Abstract: WASHINGTON — In a series of sweeping campaigns to revive the American economy, the Federal Reserve has spent much of the last six years purchasing trillions of dollars of bonds. Now it is done. The Fed said on Wednesday that the economy no longer needed quite so much help. It is the third time since 2008 the Fed has announced such a move, but this time officials and analysts say the decision is more likely to stick, signaling an important milestone in the nation’s painfully slow recovery from the Great Recession. The central bank still plans to keep short-term interest rates near zero for a “considerable time,” it said in a statement after a two-day meeting of its policy-making committee. And it said it would replace maturing bonds to keep its holdings at about $4.5 trillion. The bond-buying campaign has helped to fuel one of the longest bull markets in American history. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has risen 131 percent since the Fed started its first round of purchases in November 2008. The campaign has also helped to suppress borrowing costs. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury has declined from 2.96 percent to 2.32 percent over the same period, even as economic conditions have improved. The impact on the rest of the economy is much harder to assess. The Fed and its supporters say the purchases have held down the cost of mortgage loans and corporate debt, contributing to faster job growth. Other economists dismiss the purchases as inconsequential. And some say the Fed has exacerbated economic inequalities by helping to lift financial markets while the rest of the economy languishes. The Fed critics’ dire predictions, however, have clearly failed to materialize. Some Fed officials and economists warned that the bond purchases, often referred to by experts as quantitative easing, or Q.E., would devalue the dollar and drive up inflation. So far the opposite has happened. The American economy has outperformed other developed parts of the world, helping to strengthen the dollar, while inflation has remained so sluggish that the greater worry is now whether prices are rising too slowly. Kim Schoenholtz, an economics professor at New York University, said the Fed’s bond purchases were particularly effective and important in stabilizing the financial system and stimulating the broader economy in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis. But he said that the impact of the purchases had diminished as conditions improved, and that it now made sense to end the program. Image Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman who engineered the quantitative easing program, with Janet L. Yellen, the current Fed chief, in 2013. Credit Alex Wong/Getty Images “I applaud the Fed’s willingness to be aggressive, especially early on in the crisis, and it has made sense for the Fed to run a very accommodative policy,” Mr. Schoenholtz said. “But we should not be surprised that monetary policy has diminishing returns.” Mr. Schoenholtz added that the Fed’s quick and strong response helped to explain why the Fed was nearer to achieving its economic objectives than the European Central Bank or the Bank of Japan, both of which are now battling to avoid deflation. On Monday, the E.C.B. disclosed the first purchases in a planned campaign to buy private sector assets, a kind of entry-level quantitative easing. But the amount the central bank bought — 1.7 billion euros, or $2.16 billion, worth — was considered a drop in the bucket by analysts and fueled speculation that the E.C.B. would soon be forced to take larger steps. Many House Republicans regard the bond purchases as a form of reckless meddling, and they have passed legislation to constrain the Fed’s flexibility during future downturns. “I’m afraid the long-term legacy of the policy will reflect the harm it has done to our nation’s seniors, savers and all Americans faced with greater uncertainty and the possibility of a Q.E.-induced bubble,” Representative Randy Neugebauer, a Texas Republican, said on Wednesday. Nonetheless, some experts say the economy remains weak, the purchases remain an effective medicine and the Fed is retreating prematurely. Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, cast the sole dissenting vote on Wednesday, arguing that inflation was rising too slowly to stop buying bonds. The Fed started buying bonds for the first time in modern times because it had run out of other options. Under Ben S. Bernanke, then the Fed’s chairman, the central bank cut its benchmark short-term interest rate to zero in December 2008, maxing out its primary means of influencing economic conditions. Mr. Bernanke had argued years earlier that central banks could further reduce borrowing costs by purchasing long-term bonds. The idea was that reducing the supply would force investors to accept lower interest rates from borrowers. Under Mr. Bernanke and then under his successor, Janet L. Yellen, the Fed proceeded to expand its holdings of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities to $4.5 trillion, from less than $1 trillion. Looking back on the results earlier this year, Mr. Bernanke, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, quipped, “Well, the problem with Q.E. is it works in practice, but it doesn’t work in theory.” Image Narayana Kocherlakota, the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis president, cast the sole dissenting vote on ending quantitative easing. Credit Tim Gruber for The New York Times Michael Woodford, an economist at Columbia University and a leading monetary policy theorist, is among the doubters. “There seems little reason to believe that purchases of long-term Treasuries should be an effective way of lowering the kind of longer-term interest rates that matter most for stimulating economic activity,” he said in 2012 at the Fed’s annual economic policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo. This was less a research finding than a statement of principles. Mr. Woodford is the creator of a widely used macroeconomic model that basically assumed the purchases would have no effect. The consequences of ending the campaign are also in dispute. Federal Reserve officials generally argue that the impact comes mostly from the size of the Fed’s holdings. In this view, the end of purchases is a minor event. Much more important is the Fed’s intention to maintain the portfolio at its current size until after it starts to raise rates. Others, however, see the flow of purchases as more important. A third view saw the purchases primarily as a means of reassuring markets that short-term rates would stay low. So far, events have tended to support the Fed’s view. The tapering of bond purchases has not shaken the conviction of investors that the Fed is unlikely to raise interest rates before the middle of next year. Barbara J. Cummings, director of fixed income at Boston Private Wealth Management, said the low rates highlighted the relative impotence of Fed policy. “I really believe that rates will continue to stay low because I think that there are other factors that are larger than what the Fed was doing,” she said, citing concerns about Europe that are driving flows of money into Treasuries. The Fed has not ruled out a resumption of bond purchases. But the progress of the economic recovery makes that seem increasingly unlikely. Through September, employers this year have added an average of 227,000 jobs a month, and the unemployment rate has fallen faster than expected, to 5.9 percent. The Fed upgraded its appraisal of labor market conditions in its statement on Wednesday, saying that “underutilization of labor market resources is gradually diminishing.” The Fed also sought to play down concerns about the slow pace of inflation, saying that the likelihood of persistently low inflation has actually diminished since earlier this year. When the Fed first hinted that this day was coming in the summer of 2013, investors panicked and markets convulsed. But it avoided a repeat by loudly announcing a schedule for the retreat and then adhering to it with absolute fidelity. Carl R. Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust, said he hoped the Fed would emulate the clarity of its retreat from bond-buying as it moved toward raising interest rates. “I do think this has been a success story,” he said. “I’m hoping that when the time comes to raise interest rates, that they’ll do an equally clear job of foreshadowing that.” But a voice from the past, the former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, warned on Wednesday that the next phase of the Fed’s retreat would not unfold so smoothly. Asked whether the Fed could avoid turmoil, he responded, “I don’t think it’s possible.”

Federal Reserve
Interest rate
Jobs
Quantitative easing
US Economy


Jake Plummer Rekindles His Love for the Game He Left

Abstract: On the eve of the N.F.L. season, inside a modest, newly purchased home in East Boulder, Colo., the former Denver Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer mounted a photograph of himself breaking free for a touchdown for Arizona State in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, 1997. This was a big step. His previous home did not have any signs of his achievements as an athlete. Five years ago, Plummer could not pack up the mementos from his successful college career and his 10 seasons in the N.F.L. quickly enough. Plummer went 39-15 as a starter for the Broncos, but he was benched and then traded the season after taking them to within a game of the Super Bowl . Instead of honoring the trade and taking $5.3 million to play for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Plummer retired at 32 and essentially disappeared from public view. A quarterback known for his daring decisions and scrambling abilities, Plummer moved away with his wife, Kollette, a former Broncos cheerleader, to a remote pocket of northern Idaho. “I had to get away; I wouldn’t say I had social anxiety, but the common fan or the regular person would probably not understand it,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s everyone’s dream to be famous,” he said, but when you are in a public restroom “and the guy wants to shake your hand, it’s like, O.K.” Now, Plummer is tepidly toeing the edge of the spotlight that shines on football-crazed Denver, incited all the more by Peyton Manning’s arrival. He wants to reclaim a part of himself that he once left behind. “I was out of it for so long, I guess purging the game from my system,” he said. Plummer signed with the Broncos in 2003 after six seasons with the Arizona Cardinals. He led Denver to the playoffs three times, but in a city where John Elway became a legend, Plummer was never fully embraced. Plummer feuded with Coach Mike Shanahan and had troubles off the field, including cursing at a gossip columnist and making an obscene gesture toward a fan. Plummer says he is still irked by the way Broncos fans booed when the offense struggled early in games. “It’s like, what is wrong with you people?” he said. “This is a four-quarter game.” In the playoffs, Plummer lost to Manning’s Colts in consecutive years and then to Ben Roethlisberger’s Steelers in the 2006 A.F.C. championship game. Plummer’s affinity for improvisation and throwing on the run clashed with Shanahan’s offensive philosophy, and toward the end of the 2007 season, Shanahan benched Plummer in favor of the rookie Jay Cutler. The trade to the Buccaneers offered a fresh start, but the fun of the game was gone. “A lot of guys would do it just for the money,” Shanahan said. “Jake Plummer wasn’t that type of guy. He had strong convictions in what he believed in, and I respect him for it.” In retirement, Plummer could be more Huck Finn and less Johnny Unitas. Rather than dissecting a playbook in training camp, Plummer hiked with his brother for six days through the Sawtooth Range in Idaho without a map. Plummer drank beer, attended reggae concerts and passed time at his lake house. Yet he still had a craving for competition. So he devoted himself to a family tradition: handball. Plummer’s father picked up the game while working at a lumber warehouse and taught it to his sons. In the past 10 years, Plummer’s older brothers, Brett and Eric, have combined to win six Idaho singles titles. Jake was part of a team that won the 2010 Idaho doubles championship. Plummer loved the game so much that in October 2008, he started his own leg of the American professional tour called the Helluva Handball Bash in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “Handball is kind of cliquey,” said David Vincent, the executive director of the World Players of Handball, a nonprofit organization that runs the pro tour in the United States. “He was able to within two years create a tradition in a city that never played handball. I’ve never seen that.” Plummer says he wants to play handball into his 70s. So in April, he began an 18-month hiatus to have surgery to repair his hips, injured from drop-stepping for a decade in the N.F.L. While sidelined, however, he realized he still missed football. “Like my wife told me, ‘There’s opportunities and you never do them, but start living your life, start doing this stuff,’ ” Plummer said. “ ‘One day, you’re going to be dead and gone and not have these opportunities anymore. Or you’re going to be so far gone from the game and such an old has-been that they’re not going to want to have you around.’ ” His mind drifted back to Colorado, where his wife had family. Their return was clinched when he spotted a house for sale within 10 minutes of the most pristine outdoor handball courts in the state. A few weeks after the move, Plummer attended the Broncos’ season opener against the Steelers by himself, with a ticket given to him by the Broncos’ owner, Pat Bowlen. When parachutists descended into the stadium for a pregame celebration, Plummer saw that the crowd was distracted. He left the owner’s box, walked down to the mezzanine and stood inside a walkway at the 45-yard line. Plummer said fans did double-takes when they saw him. But as the game continued, he reminisced with longtime security guards, talked with a young fan whose parents had told him not to bother Plummer, high-fived a mascot and was treated to a few beers by fans who said they remembered him fondly. Plummer later slipped down to the sideline to watch Manning and Roethlisberger, who had each ruined his postseason hopes. But Plummer did not dwell on that. He cheered on the Broncos’ defense, the way he used to as a player, when he wanted to get back out onto the field as quickly as possible. After the Broncos won, 31-19, Plummer sat on a patch of grass outside and watched jubilant fans exit the stadium. “I used to play a big part of that,” Plummer said. “Sending people out of the stadium ecstatic and full of energy.” At 37, Plummer is trying to play a part in the N.F.L. again, perhaps on television. He was recently in New York City for a fantasy football promotion. The bushy beard he often wore during his playing days was gone. He was clean-shaven and “dressed up,” wearing a gray golf shirt, jeans and black boots. “I’ve been — not irrelevant — but on sabbatical, out of the limelight,” Plummer said while standing in front of a Times Square hotel before the promotion. “I’d like to get back into, well, not the limelight, but the game.” It may not be that easy to avoid the glare. Seconds after Plummer left the hotel, he was approached by an autograph seeker in a Patrick Ewing jersey. “The Snake!” he exclaimed. “I’m a big fan.” Plummer signed an autograph and posed for a photograph. He then flipped on his sunglasses and walked away, trying to avoid any more attention.