Indoor Karting: Grand Prix New York and Pole Position Raceway

Abstract: Drivers in New York have two choices: slow bumper-to-bumper traffic and fast bumper-to-bumper traffic. Everyone knows Option 1. It is an existential condition in the city. That leaves the lesser-known Option 2, which takes a little effort. You have to pay, you have to put on a helmet and you have to sit about six inches off the ground while being propelled through space on a miniature vehicle at speeds approaching 45 miles per hour. Indoor karting is the name of the sport. When winter closes the outdoor tracks scattered across Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, the action moves to cavernous warehouse-size buildings that somehow accommodate multiple tracks and sideshows like arcade games and bowling alleys. There are four in the area, one each in New Jersey and New York and two in Connecticut. In the line of reportorial duty, I once tested a high-performance outdoor kart. After cranking it up to the hair-raising speed of 70 m.p.h. and watching my life flash before my eyes, I exited the kart, my knees wobbly and my heart skittish, and vowed to hang up my helmet. I was too old for this. And that was eight years ago. But the need for speed recognizes no age limit. One too many trips through the Midtown Tunnel whetted my appetite for foot-to-the-floor, hell-on-wheels driving, a therapeutic hour or two to drain years of pent-up road rage. So I headed out on a recent Sunday to test the track at Grand Prix New York in Mount Kisco. I had help. Since Grand Prix, like every kart track, offers junior racing, I enlisted a couple of willing drivers from Suffern, N.Y.: Tillie Lewis, 6, and her brother, Anders, 12. Grand Prix serves two categories of customer. There are those who book track time for special events, like corporate team-building exercises or big birthday parties, and those who simply turn up for some fun. It is critical to consult the track’s daily schedule, posted online, to see which tracks are available when. Allow 30 minutes or so for registration and orientation. First-time karters must enter personal data, sign waivers and pick a racing name before watching a short safety video that explains the dos and don’ts, as well as the meaning of the five different flags that track employees use to communicate with drivers. Then it’s on to the changing room, to suit up in a snazzy-looking one-piece, not unlike the flight suit that Sam Shepard wore in “The Right Stuff.” A helmet and neck brace complete the ensemble. At 6, Tillie was too young to operate her own kart. Chandler Lewis, also known as Dad, acted as her chauffeur in a two-seater, while Anders and I stooped and slid into our vehicles, gas-powered Formula K karts that emit a throaty roar but top out at about 15 m.p.h on the kids’ track, one of four basic configurations Grand Prix offers. My wife, Nancy, stood by the sidelines, a conscientious objector after looking at the helmet-and-jumpsuit outfit. Yes, I looked ridiculous, but kiddie speed seemed about right for my first race. The race felt like a merry-go-round with sudden detours. The twists and turns were fun. Even at 15 m.p.h. you can get a taste of the real thing in a six-minute tour, the thrill of calibrating a hairpin turn precisely, of opening it up on the straightaway, of deftly slipping inside a rival driver’s kart — a 9-year-old driver, but still — and moving up one position toward the leaders. Actually, I did not do too much of that. “You were terrible,” my wife said as I returned to the pit. “Everybody was passing you.” I should point out that this was not the message I had gotten driving up the Saw Mill River Parkway. As I got into my kart for the second race, Nancy sent me off with encouraging words, “Drive carefully,” she said, “but don’t embarrass me.” It went O.K., I thought. More on this later. Tillie, filing a postrace report, said that the kart seemed plenty fast to her. “I didn’t like the sharp turns but I did like when there was a straight road,” she said. “It made me more relaxed, like I was in a cloud.” She said she was pretty positive that, if called on, she could race the kart solo. Anders deemed the racing too tame. He was primed for a faster test, the Brownstone Track. The Brownstone, so named because of a photographic mural showing classic New York brownstones next to a walled slice of Central Park, takes a faster kart, the Sodi RX7, which can reach a zesty 25 m.p.h. Two quarter-mile courses, the Uptown and Downtown tracks, accommodate the even speedier Sodi GT5, with a top speed of 40 m.p.h., but those were reserved. After a couple of tentative laps Anders began putting his foot to the floor and the race was on, with Dad setting the pace and looking pretty determined to pass the checkered flag in first place. I plodded in third, but in my defense I will say this: that mural distracted me. As one lap blended into the next I became interested in the brownstones and started wondering if I could identify the street. Also, it was disorienting to see a Brooklyn streetscape imposed on Central Park West. Nancy shot me a look when I exited the pit. When I got home I found an e-mail from Grand Prix with my results from the second kiddie race. I had finished up the track, my best lap nearly four seconds slower than the fastest child — no doubt one of those relentless overachiever types who used to haunt me in elementary school. Worse news was to come. Out of the 159,284 karts that had raced on the track, I ranked 152,465. Since I cannot achieve peak performance under withering criticism, I decided to go it alone at Pole Position Raceway in Jersey City. Pole Position , which has several tracks around the United States, uses its own karts. They are electric, something new to me. I expected the easy, silent performance of an electric golf cart, but the karts turned out to be quite peppy, with quick pickup and enough motor noise to make the experience feel like actual racing. The accelerator is sensitive, making the brake almost superfluous. Under an 80,000-square-foot roof, drivers negotiate two quarter-mile tracks, named after their corporate sponsors. The Monster Track, named for the energy drink, offers corkscrew turns and an abbreviated straightaway, making it a technical challenge to shave tenths of seconds off your time. The Coca-Cola Track has a sweeping turn leading to a long straightway that propels the kart, at top speed, into a punishing series of very tight turns. Juniors and adults compete in separate heats, but they use the same karts, whose top speeds — 30 m.p.h. for juniors, 45 m.p.h. for adults — are set by remote control. Let me tell you, 45 m.p.h. feels pretty fast when your rear end is just about scraping the pavement. Two buddies from Ridgewood, N.J. — Andy Kerwin, 10, and Michael Taboada, 9 — were pushing the limits on their second visit to Pole Position, ripping the turns and shredding the straightway on the Coca-Cola Track. They admitted that the karts caught them by surprise the first time. “I was shocked at how fast they were,” Andy said. Now they were refining their technique. I competed on the Monster with the track’s manager, Gabe Aiello. Or rather, I toiled in his wake, desperate to avoid being lapped. It is virtually impossible to flip a kart — I kept reminding myself of this — but not too hard to spin out on the turns. There were a lot, and I found it difficult to memorize the configuration, one more piece of evidence pointing to my mental decline. Every hairpin came as a fresh surprise. Again and again, my rear tires slid ominously sideways, forcing me to let up on the accelerator and lose precious time. By the time the two of us switched to the Coca-Cola Track, method began to encroach on madness. I found it easier to swing wide, shave the corners before blasting into the long straightaway and then snaking my way through the ensuing baroque twists. It was invigorating. It felt good. As I reached the pit Eyal Farage, who owns Pole Position with Karen Davis-Farage, his wife, handed me a slip of paper with my stats for each lap. Then he presented me with a small trophy in honor of my second-place finish. I brandished it in front of Nancy when I got home, enjoying her look of disbelief. Slow but steady, I reminded her. Slow but steady.

Grand Prix New York
Pole Position Raceway
Go-Karts (Automobiles)
Mount Kisco (NY)
Jersey City (NJ)


Tribeca Enterprises and Lionsgate to Team Up on Subscription Video

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — Tribeca Enterprises and Lionsgate said on Monday that they would start an online video-on-demand service focused on “curated” prestige titles drawn from their libraries, along with a selection of foreign films. The service, called Tribeca Short List and offered as a subscription, will be introduced by June, the companies said. It is another effort by entertainment companies to capitalize on the Netflix-dominated and fast-growing business of subscription video on demand. Last week, HBO and CBS each announced their own online subscription channels . Tribeca Short List selections will be updated weekly and chosen by Tribeca, which operates the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The partners did not announce any films to be included or say how much the service would cost. Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca’s chief executive, said in a statement that the goal was a “highly curated experience that disrupts the ‘more is more’ model in today’s streaming on-demand landscape.” In some ways, Tribeca Short List can be considered Ms. Rosenthal’s modern-day answer to the Sundance Channel, a cable network introduced in 1996 by Robert Redford, who founded the Sundance Film Festival. Tribeca and Lionsgate are at first glance an unlikely pair. Lionsgate is increasingly home to worldwide blockbusters like “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent.” Tribeca focuses entirely on arty, independent filmmaking; movies released through its Tribeca Films unit have included “Detachment,” a drama starring Adrien Brody, and “Palo Alto,” the directing debut of Gia Coppola . But Lionsgate’s turn toward more overtly commercial movies has been a relatively recent one. Its library also includes “Monster’s Ball,” “Crash” and “Precious” — films that could benefit from availability on the new service. Lionsgate also owns a stake in Roadside Attractions, an indie film operation known for releases like “Mud” and “Margin Call.” Jon Feltheimer, Lionsgate’s chief executive, said in a statement that the partnership reflected his company’s desire to “collaborate with blue-chip partners around the world to deliver premium content to online audiences.” Tribeca, co-founded by Robert De Niro, has a history of experimentation that has at times been longer on ambition than on results. The company, which sold a 50 percent stake to the Madison Square Garden Company in March, had high hopes for its Tribeca Films distribution effort, for example. But the division has struggled, releasing 41 movies since 2011 to combined box-office sales of roughly $2 million. Still, that effort could finally be turning a corner: “Palo Alto,” released in May, was by far the biggest Tribeca Films release to date, taking in about $770,000, according to the site Box Office Mojo .

Tribeca Enterprises
Tribeca Film Festival
Jane Rosenthal
Movies
Lions Gate Entertainment
Video Recordings
Downloads and Streaming


Once Again, a Killing Unsettles a Quiet Town

Abstract: Montclair IT took only a few minutes. But within that span of time, a young woman would lose her life, two children would lose their mother and a town would once again be traumatized by a killing. Monica Paul, 31, was fatally shot at the Montclair Y.M.C.A. family center on June 26 as she and other parents watched their children take swimming lessons. Ms. Paul’s 11-year-old daughter was with her at the time. Last week, the police were searching for the children’s father, who they said was a suspect in the killing. “Clearly, this is a tragedy for the children and the family and the entire community,” said former Deputy Mayor Joyce Michaelson, whose term expired last week. “It’s terrible that such a safe place like the new Montclair family center was violated in this way. We need to provide safe places like that so that children don’t grow up thinking that anger and guns can solve their problems.” It was not the first time recently that an act of violence has unsettled this quiet town, where many people move, especially from New York City, seeking the insularity from crime and violence that many think of as part of the suburban bargain, like lawns and two-car garages. The recent shooting occurred almost a year, to the day, after another violent event here, when a man who had been separated from his wife drowned his two young daughters in a bathtub, and then hanged himself in the attic of his rented home. In a community of 37,000, with schools that bring together children from all parts of town, occurrences like these resonate broadly. “It’s a great social upheaval to experience something like this so close to home,” said Paul Hirschfield, a criminologist in the sociology department at Rutgers University. “You question what’s normal and what’s real. Those reactions are a natural part of the shock of the event. But those feelings don’t have any grounding in reality. Montclair is probably as safe as ever.” The shooting at the Helen and Bill Geyer Y.M.C.A. Family Center in Montclair, which has been open a year, was witnessed by dozens of parents, children and staff members. Paul Modiano was there with his two sons, ages 5 and 3, who were in the same swimming class as Ms. Paul’s 4-year-old son. “I was standing there watching my children swim when I heard what sounded like a balloon popping,” Mr. Modiano recalled. “Then I heard it again. Then a sea of people came running and screaming and panicking and knocked me over.” He got up and ran to find his kids, eventually locating them in a courtyard out back, he said. Megan Blumenreich was also there to watch her 4-year-old daughter in the class. “I thought it was going to be another Columbine,” she said. “That was my fear.” Ms. Blumenreich said she was knocked over by people fleeing the gunshots. She got up and ran to the men’s locker room and got into a locker, where she waited until she felt it was safe to go find her daughter. She found her out back, in the arms of a teacher. When the gunman shot at Ms. Paul, the bullets shattered the window that divided the pool from the viewing area, sending shards of glass and at least one bullet into the pool where the children were swimming, according to the Essex County prosecutor’s office. “Afterwards, I was thinking I moved to Montclair for the feeling of peace and security,” said Mr. Modiano, who previously lived in Queens. “This is not supposed to happen here. But it does happen here. We moved here because it had elements of the city — the social and racial diversity. It’s silly to fool oneself into thinking that this faux urban life can be had without a measure of its negative aspects, too.” The Montclair Y.M.C.A. planned to reopen the family center on Monday, said its president, Thomas E. Boyton. “I hope people will look at the Y.M.C.A.’s 117 years of service in this town and will entrust their children to us as they have over the years,” Mr. Boyton said. “I hope they understand that this was an isolated domestic violence issue.” Mr. Hirschfield, the Rutgers criminologist, said the first step in healing is to help those who were directly harmed by the shooting. The second is for people to take part in activities that bring the community together, like vigils or church services. “That can help to rebuild the lost sense of trust,” he said. “And if any town is capable of healing those rifts, it would be Montclair. I know that this community will come together and affirm what is great about this town — that sense of safety and harmony that Montclair is known for.”

Montclair (NJ)
Murders and Attempted Murders


Axe Hires Subway Musician to Promote Its Products

Abstract: IT took 30 years of playing guitar in Grand Central Terminal and on New York City streets, but Luke Ryan finally landed a corporate sponsor. Mr. Ryan, 58, usually plays a couple of mornings a week at Grand Central, making him a fixture there, whether commuters notice or not. On Thursday, Mr. Ryan had set up his microphone and speakers in front of where the Times Square shuttles scoot in and out, and there were near constant lines of people heading in both directions. Some people glanced at the source of the sound, some even tugged at their pockets as they passed as though retrieving a dollar, but no one dropped in any change. “Hey, what happened, everyone looks cranky today. Is it a boyfriend? Is it a girlfriend? Is it the economy?” Mr. Ryan said into his microphone, after finishing a growling version of “Piano Man.” “If you need any help with being poor, ask me. I’ve been doing it forever.” His leather vest was coming apart at the seams, and his black T-shirt with a skull on it had seen a few wearings. (He says he likes buying Salvation Army T-shirts because they are cheap and weird, like the one he bought that says ‘I was driven wild at David’s bar mitzvah.’) Mr. Ryan was going to have fun that morning, even if his audience was not. “This is New York. Do not make eye contact with anyone. We’re all thugs and murderers,” Mr. Ryan said to the crowd. That got the attention of a young guy in several layers of sweatshirts and coats, holding onto a baseball cap, who waved and grinned. “Amen!” And the morning seemed to turn a little more profitable. A woman dropped in a dollar, and a guy chewing on a straw, loping toward the train, doubled back to drop in a coin and give Mr. Ryan an approving fist bump. “Hundreds and hundreds of people have passed me by for years and never dropped a penny in my case,” Mr. Ryan said in an earlier interview, “but you try not to focus on that, because right after you start thinking about them, someone will come down and drop a dollar in your case when you’re just standing there, scratching your head, because they appreciate what you’re doing.” His legs set wide, Mr. Ryan leaned back against a railing and began picking his next tune. About an hour into his set, Mr. Ryan’s guitar case held a littering of dollar bills. (He had put some in himself to help the morning along, he said.) He had patched the guitar case with green and black duct tape and had jammed into it a cardboard sign that read “Pimp My Case,” a few of his CDs for sale — and a sign for Unilever , the multibillion-dollar global consumer product giant. Mr. Ryan had found some commercial work.  Unilever owns Axe, the personal care line that goes after young men using unusual marketing tactics, like taking over a Hamptons club for a summer. To introduce a leather-scented deodorant called Axe Instinct, Axe sought out about 20 street musicians and college bands in several cities, using Craigslist, MySpace and other Web sites. In exchange for an estimated $1,000, Axe asked the musicians to put up “Axe Instinct” signs, offer free deodorant samples when they play and, a few times a day, sing a ditty “Look Good in Leather” that Axe is using in its commercials. The musicians’ stints started in September and run through the end of the year. “Our biggest thing is not about what they look like but the authenticity of them,” said Jay E. Mathew Jr., marketing director for deodorants at Unilever USA. “We want people that, this is what they do every day.” Asked if it was authentic to have street performers singing a corporate jingle, Mr. Mathew said he thought it was. “The song itself is a song that was created in 2002 and not something we created for just the ad — it was an existing, organic type of music. We thought it fit perfectly with the campaign.”  Mr. Ryan had once sworn never to sell out, after he watched a documentary where Neil Young said the same thing. “I said, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of integrity. That’s me, too.’ Then I realized two things. First is, Neil Young’s a millionaire. And second, nobody’s ever asked me. So as soon as they asked me, I said, ‘Well, why not?’ ” The song wasn’t bad, anyway, he said. And he was no longer able to support himself from subway singing alone. Maybe it was the iPods plugged into people’s ears, maybe it was the economy. “It just seems like people have lost a little bit of the humanity that they had years ago,” he said. Back in the subway station, Mr. Ryan was singing John Prine’s “Paradise” : “Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River where paradise lay? Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking, Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.” A guy with a backpack dropped in a dollar and walked off smiling, and a man in an old-fashioned train conductor’s cap carefully placed a brochure in the case as if it were a $20. If people noticed the Axe sign, they didn’t say anything or appear to do double-takes. “You know, when I’m playing in the middle of the subway, I’m noticing how there’s so much commercial branding all over the subway now, the stairs have products on it, logos, every single space in the subway is kind of a big commercial now,” Mr. Ryan said. Maybe the Axe effect was supposed to be subliminal, he shrugged. At least he supported the cause of deodorant use. “If there was more of that stuff going on in the subway, it’d be a better place,” he said.

Subways
Music
Advertising and Marketing
Unilever N.V


Los Angeles Angels Benefit From Surprise Contributors

Abstract: The Los Angeles Angels arrived at Fenway Park on Monday in a tie with the Oakland Athletics atop the American League West. After four victories in a row, they left on Thursday alone in first place before their weekend matchup at Oakland. But they also left without Garrett Richards, their most reliable starting pitcher. Richards tore the patellar tendon in his left knee while covering first base and was expected to miss six to nine months. As the Angels began their scramble to find a replacement on Thursday, another starter, Matt Shoemaker, fired seven and two-thirds shutout innings to beat the Red Sox, allowing only one hit while improving to 12-4. Shoemaker, 27, undrafted out of Eastern Michigan University, represents the kind of surprise contributor most winning teams need to have. He had pitched just one major league game before this season, but in 22 games (15 starts) this season, he has a 3.56 earned run average and has recorded more than five strikeouts per walk, by far the best ratio in the Angels’ rotation. “In my first big-league appearance last year, I just told myself, ‘Hey, man, I can do this,’ ” Shoemaker said recently. “Especially not being drafted — in anything you do, whether it’s baseball or something else — if you believe you can do it and keep working hard, it can definitely happen.” The problem for Shoemaker, at first, was getting the chance. He threw 138 innings in three years at Eastern Michigan, with a 6-7 record and a 4.83 E.R.A., mostly in relief. After his redshirt junior year, he had a degree in business and was ready to play professionally. But scouts told him they wanted to see him pitch another year in college. “After the draft came and went, I was like, ‘I guess I’m going back to school,’ ” Shoemaker said. “I was going to play my last year and start my master’s program.” An impressive performance in the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League caught the Angels’ attention, and they offered him $10,000 to sign. Shoemaker eagerly accepted and began his climb through the farm system, competing mostly against prospects with greater standing in the organization. “The early-round guys, they’ve got all that money invested in them, so they’re going to have a lot more chances,” he said. “Sometimes it’s tough, but it makes sense. They gave them all that money, and it’s an investment. The way I looked at it was like a driving force. I’ve got to work my butt off to keep getting better. Use that as fuel.” Shoemaker has succeeded partly because of his splitter, which he throws more than 20 percent of the time, according to FanGraphs . The pitch can be hard on elbows — the Yankees’ Masahiro Tanaka threw it 25 percent of the time before a partial tear of his ulnar collateral ligament — but Shoemaker said he had thrown it since he was 14, turning to it after he struggled to find a consistent changeup. Shoemaker is not the only Angel who is far outperforming initial expectations. Efren Navarro has done a solid job as a reserve first baseman and outfielder, hitting .257 entering the Oakland series, seven years after the Angels chose him in the 50th round of the draft, which now includes only 40 rounds. Navarro, though, has only himself to blame for his low selection. “The Angels actually called me in the 27th round and said they were going take me in the 28th round,” said Navarro, who attended Nevada-Las Vegas. “They were like, ‘Are you willing to sign for slot money?’ — whatever it was. I said no, instead of just saying yeah and working something out. Then after I hung up the phone, I was beating myself up over it. I called my parents, and they were like, ‘Why didn’t you say yes?’ ” Navarro went back to his summer league team, the Rochester Honkers of the Northwoods League, and learned from a television reporter that the Angels had chosen him anyway, with their last selection. He was choice No. 1,450 over all (out of 1,453) but said the Angels gave him the same $15,000 bonus they would have given him if he had simply said yes at first. “I just felt like if I had a jersey, I had a chance to compete,” Navarro said. “Then I had a chance to make the move and make things happen for me.” Shoemaker, his teammate and now a pivotal part of a depleted rotation, can relate. “You’re always fighting the uphill battle,” he said. “But once you have the uniform, that’s all you want. You just want the chance to play.” Howard Holds Steady Ryan Howard spent his day off on Thursday in South Williamsport, Pa., site of the Little League World Series. He surprised the players at practice, hit a few whiffle balls, played table tennis and reconnected with his roots. Major league players generally love the Little League World Series, which often plays on clubhouse televisions during the downtime before night games. Howard, the Philadelphia Phillies’ first baseman, who played Little League in St. Louis, is no exception. “It takes you back to when you were that age,” said Howard, whose visit was part of a promotion for Subway. “The purity of the game, the fun, the camaraderie with your teammates. Baseball’s supposed to be a game that’s all about fun.” In Howard’s early years with the Phillies, it was. He was the National League rookie of the year in 2005 and the N.L. most valuable player in 2006. In 2007 he began a run of five consecutive trips to the postseason, including a championship in 2008. But the Phillies are in last place now, their third losing season in a row, and Howard, 34, has two years remaining on a five-year, $125 million contract. He is part of a homegrown core of players over 30 who have grown old together at Citizens Bank Park. Some of those players have stayed productive and reached milestones with the team; shortstop Jimmy Rollins became the Phillies’ career hits leader in June. Howard was hitting .220 with a career-low .372 slugging percentage entering Friday, although he was tied for fourth in the N.L. with 77 runs batted in. Through it all, even as attendance has declined, the Phillies have remained steadfast in their pursuit of as many victories as possible in the moment, hesitant to tear down in hopes of a better tomorrow. Some organizations have embarked on large-scale rebuilding projects, like the Chicago Cubs and the Houston Astros. But the Phillies have not given in. They made no moves at last month’s nonwaiver trading deadline, retaining veterans like Antonio Bastardo, A. J. Burnett, Marlon Byrd and Jonathan Papelbon. They shipped starter Roberto Hernandez to the Los Angeles Dodgers this month, but they have otherwise resisted trading for prospects. Howard endorsed the team’s mind-set. “It’s about trying to win and win now, and win today,” he said. “You always feel confident the front office is going to go out and try to help the team and put us in the best position to go out there and win. You can’t really be mad at that.” Howard’s career seemed to turn at the precise moment the Phillies’ postseason streak ended. He tore his left Achilles’ tendon while grounding out to finish a 2011 division series loss to the St. Louis Cardinals and missed the first three months of the next season. He missed the second half in 2013 with left knee inflammation. The encouraging news now, Howard said, is that he has been healthy all season and can train this winter without having to concentrate on rehabilitation. In true team fashion, he was trying not to look too far ahead. “Why not next year?” Howard said when asked if the Phillies could return to contention in 2015. “Not to say this year is over. It’s a long shot, but crazy things have happened. It’s not over until you’re ruled out. You definitely want to go out and play every game hard.” A Formula for Shorter Games If Major League Baseball is serious about reducing the average time of games, the Yankees and the Astros offered an example Thursday of the best way to do it: avoid all walks and pitching changes. The starters, Brandon McCarthy of the Yankees and Dallas Keuchel of the Astros, pitched complete games with no walks, with McCarthy finishing a victory in 2 hours 7 minutes. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, it was the first nine-inning game in which both starters pitched a complete game with no walks since July 17, 2010, when the Minnesota Twins’ Carl Pavano beat the Chicago White Sox’ Mark Buehrle. That game took just 1:52.

Los Angeles Angels
Garrett Richards
Matt Shoemaker
Baseball
Efren Navarro
Ryan Howard
Phillies


Fossil’s Unusual Size and Location Offer Clues in Evolution of Mammals

Abstract: Four years ago, while searching for fish fossils on Madagascar, paleontologists came upon what proved to be a well-preserved cranium of a mammal that lived about 66 million to 70 million years ago, in the closing epoch of the mighty dinosaurs. Such a discovery, expected to provide new and important insights into early mammalian evolution, is rare anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. The fossil record of primitive mammals there is frustratingly thin. Only two other mammal skulls — both from Argentina and not as large — have been found from the age of dinosaurs in the entire Southern Hemisphere. In a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature, David W. Krause , a paleontologist at Stony Brook University on Long Island and leader of the research team, announced that the fossil mammal is a distinct new genus and species, Vintana sertichi. Vintana means luck, which was smiling on Joseph Sertich , then a graduate student of Dr. Krause’s and now a curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, in finding the slab of sandstone that held the skull. “No paleontologist could have come close to predicting the odd mix of anatomical features that this cranium exhibits,” Dr. Krause said in a statement. The cranium, measuring almost five inches long, is twice the size of the one from the previously largest known mammal from the age of dinosaurs on the southern supercontinent known as Gondwana. At that time, nearly all primitive mammals were no bigger than shrews and mice, cowering in the shadows of hulking reptiles. Vintana is estimated to have weighed 20 pounds, twice or even three times the size of an adult groundhog today. Though the researchers sometimes described the specimen as groundhog-like, Dr. Krause said Vintana belonged to a lineage without any known living descendants. “It’s an entirely extinct lineage, an early experiment in mammals that didn’t make it,” he said in an interview. “And I doubt Vintana was any better at predicting seasonal weather change than Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania.” Image A reconstruction of Vintana sertichi and a cast of the cranium, studied at Stony Brook University, that was the basis for it. Credit Stony Brook University The researchers determined that Vintana belonged to a group of early mammals known as gondwanatherians, the only previous evidence for which were a few teeth and jaw fragments. These mammals, in turn, were closely related to the multituberculates, an evolutionarily successful group of early mammals known almost exclusively from Northern Hemisphere fossils. All these relationships, scientists said, had been uncertain before now. In a commentary accompanying the Nature paper, Anne Weil , an anatomist at the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, said the new findings offered “a cornucopia of data not only to solve” the mystery of the mammalian family tree “but also to reveal further astonishing morphological diversity among early mammals.” Other researchers independent of the discovery team endorsed the interpretation of the findings. The study is “a remarkable achievement,” and the cranium “is exceptional,” said Guillermo W. Rougier , a specialist in the early evolution of mammals at the University of Louisville. An anatomist at the University of Chicago who is also an expert in mammalian evolution, Zhe-Xi Luo , called Vintana “the discovery of the decade for understanding the deep history of mammals.” He said the study “offers the best case of how plate tectonics and biogeography have impacted animal evolution — a lineage of mammals isolated on a part of the ancient Gondwana had evolved some extraordinary features beyond our previous imagination.” The first person at Stony Brook to see the CT image of the cranium embedded in the sandstone was Joe Groenke, a technician working with Dr. Krause. The specimen had wide eye sockets. Later analysis revealed teeth of a plant eater, and a nasal passage and inner ear of an animal with keen senses of smell and hearing. “When we realized what was staring back at us on the computer screen, we were stunned,” Mr. Groenke said. He spent the next six months extracting the skull from the surrounding rock matrix, one sand grain at a time.

Fossil
Evolution
Mammal
Madagascar
Dinosaur
David W. Krause
Joseph Sertich
Groundhog
Paleontology
Nature Journal


Texas Vote-Buying Case Casts Glare on Tradition of Election Day Goads

Abstract: DONNA, Tex. — In this Rio Grande Valley town of trailer parks and weedy lots eight miles from the Mexico border, people call them runners or politiqueras — the campaign workers who use their network of relatives and friends to deliver votes for their candidates. They travel around town with binders stuffed with the names and addresses of registered voters, driving residents to and from the polls and urging those they bump into at the grocery store to support their candidates. Despite rumors that some politiqueras went over the line in encouraging voters, the tradition continued in Donna and other border towns and cities, and campaigns for nearly every local office or seat have paid politiqueras to turn out the vote in contested races. But in recent weeks, the suicide of the school board president here and accusations of vote buying against three politiqueras have rocked the system. The charges may threaten the existence of politiqueras in Donna, an impoverished community of 16,000, where politics and jobs are inseparable. The school system is the largest employer, and city government is the second largest; local politics rivals high school football as a favored pastime. Three women working as politiqueras in the 2012 elections in Donna were arrested by F.B.I. agents in December and accused of giving residents cash, drugs, beer and cigarettes in exchange for their votes. According to court documents, the typical payment to a voter was $10, a sign of the extreme poverty in the Rio Grande Valley, which is home to some of the poorest counties in America. Two of the three women — Rebecca Gonzalez and Guadalupe Escamilla — are accused of paying some voters as little as $3 for each of their votes. One voter was given a pack of cigarettes. Others were taken to buy drugs after they received cash for voting for a politiquera’s candidate. Ms. Gonzalez, Ms. Escamilla and the third woman, Diana Castaneda, said the candidates and their campaign managers would give them the cash and instruct them to use it to pay voters in the 2012 primary and general elections, the F.B.I. said in court documents. The three women worked for several candidates running for seats on the board of the Donna Independent School District , though court documents do not identify any candidates or campaign managers. No candidates have been arrested, although the investigation continues in an area that, unlike most of Texas, is overwhelmingly Democratic. Days after the three women were arrested in December, one of the four Donna school board members who won re-election in 2012 — Alfredo Lugo, the board’s president and a former administrator at a nearby school district — committed suicide at his home. Officials have declined to talk about the motive, and a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. said she could not comment on whether Mr. Lugo had been a focus of the investigation. Lawyers for Ms. Gonzalez and Ms. Escamilla declined to comment, and several candidates who ran for seats on the school board in 2012 did not respond to requests for comment. Ms. Castaneda, 48, the widow of a former Donna police chief, said in a statement that the allegations were not as clear-cut as they appeared. “Not all politiqueras do illegal or inappropriate payments to buy votes,” Ms. Castaneda said. “There are many who walk a straight line. People know me as a people person who would take pennies out of my pocket to help those in need.” After the arrests, politiqueras have become a tricky issue for many of the elected officials in the Rio Grande Valley. Some officials are reluctant to discuss their past involvement with politiqueras, or they say their campaign managers were responsible for hiring them. Other politiqueras have been accused of various forms of voter fraud over the years — including acquiring and filling out the mail-in ballots of elderly or disabled voters — but the arrests were one of the first times that politiqueras were accused of paying cash directly to voters. Last year, Sonia Leticia Solis, a politiquera in the Rio Grande Valley city of Brownsville, pleaded guilty to voting more than once in a 2012 primary runoff, by obtaining mail-in ballots using forged absentee-voter applications and casting five votes. Image A screen shot from a campaign video for Alfredo Lugo, whose suicide in Donna, Tex., added to criticism of turnout practices. “In Donna, we’ve always had suspicions that some people were not running clean campaigns,” said René Guerra, the district attorney in Hidalgo County, which includes Donna. He said that if a shady practice could be part of school board elections, “I’m sure it happened in the county election.” Mr. Guerra said that vote buying was hard to prove, and that he lacked the manpower to investigate the 2012 elections. The allegations of vote buying, as well as the death of Mr. Lugo, have made people in Donna rethink the central role that politiqueras play. “In South Texas politics, you have to have them,” said Mayor David S. Simmons, who has used politiqueras in his campaigns. “There are good ones that really are sincere and try to really help, but the majority of them are leeches,” said Mr. Simmons, 60, who is also the city’s volunteer fire chief and the school district’s director of custodial services. “They get ahold of you, and they know how to play you.” Mr. Simmons, who was a friend of Mr. Lugo’s, said the recent events might finally put an end to the politiqueras. “Now, we don’t have to hire them anymore,” he said. “People are not going to trust them. I think it’s going to do away with them. You’re not going to see them in this next election.” Others are more skeptical. “Until we have candidates who pay for this service who go to jail, they’ll keep paying for votes,” said Mary Helen Flores, the founder of Citizens Against Voter Abuse, in Cameron County, which includes Brownsville. “It’s infuriating that we’re at this point. The voter apathy here stems from the knowledge that votes are paid for.” Dozens of politiqueras worked for various campaigns in Donna in recent years. Most of them are women — mothers, grandmothers and neighborhood gadflies who work as runners to earn extra money. A woman who worked as a politiquera in Donna said paying cash or trading drugs for votes had been common in recent elections. She estimated that in the 2012 elections, 2,000 votes were bought with cash or drugs. Low-income voters, she said, had come to expect a payment in exchange for their vote. “People are asking to get paid because they already know,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified out of fear of retaliation and because of the investigation. “People look forward to it. You have to understand the poverty. So if they can make an extra buck, they’re going to make an extra buck.”

Texas
Election
Fraud
Donna TX
Rio Grande Valley TX
Voter registration


Asian Art Auction Sets Records for Artists

Abstract: HONG KONG — Auctions by Sotheby’s are setting new records for Asian artists, exceeding presale expectations, and raised a total of $41 million Monday alone. It is a sign that the market has returned full force from the downturn that followed the global credit crunch in 2008. Although bidding in the auctions in Hong Kong came from around the world, the sales are also testimony to the growing spending power of buyers in Asia, a region that mostly escaped the worldwide economic downturn last year. Both Sotheby’s and a rival auction house, Christie’s, say Asian buyers have emerged in recent years as a major force in sales not only of Asian arts and antiques but also in other categories like gems and ultrahigh-end wines. On Monday, a work by Liu Ye, a contemporary Chinese artist, went under the hammer for $2.45 million, almost three times the pre-auction estimate. The painting, “Bright Road,” which shows a smiling, dancing couple with a blazing object in the sky behind them, also set a record for the artist. Sotheby’s held three auctions Monday, and “Bright Road” was part of a sale of contemporary Asian art that brought $18.7 million — topping Sotheby’s preauction estimate of as much as $16.3 million. Hit hard by the global credit crunch after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the international art market began to recover last year, hand in hand with the global economic recovery. The amount raised at Sotheby’s previous Hong Kong sales series in October — which included art, jewelry, watches and other categories — was up nearly 90 percent from the spring 2009 series, for example. The results Monday showed that the rally was continuing. Evelyn Lin, head of Sotheby’s contemporary Asian art department, said by telephone Tuesday that the latest sales demonstrated a strong return for blue-chip contemporary Chinese artists. “There is no question that these results show pent-up demand for great art,” she said. Buyers of Asian art, she said, “have become much more mature, more sophisticated, more discerning,” helping lift prices for such works. At the same time, the market remains a long way away from overblown, analysts say. Sharp property price increases in mainland China, Hong Kong and elsewhere have raised fears that bubbles are developing in those markets. The Asian modern art market, however, “still has a long way to go,” Ms. Lin said. “There is no bubble. Prices are still low, compared to what some Western contemporary artists’ works can command.” Analysts at Nomura echoed that assessment in a research note last week. “In terms of scale, China still has a long way to go to touch the Japanese exuberance of the 1980s,” they wrote. “Total sales between 2000 and 2009 for Chinese arts amount to a little over $4 billion. This is in stark contrast to Japan, which experienced a massive investment of around $19 billion on art in just three years between 1987 and 1990.” “As China enters the sweet spot of economic growth and more and more wealth is created, the art market should maintain its momentum,” they continued. “We believe that the recent correction could actually drive out the speculators and make the market more widely accessible.” Demand for Asian art extended to the two other categories at Sotheby’s on Monday. Those sales, of 20th-century Chinese art and modern Southeast Asian paintings, also topped pre-auction estimates. An Asian collector bought Lee Man Fong’s “Bali Life” for $3.24 million, more than tripling the previous record for the artist and making this the most expensive Southeast Asia painting ever auctioned. Sotheby’s sale of jewels and gems Wednesday is expected to raise more than $47 million. The highlight of that sale is a flawless 5.16-carat, pear-shaped, vivid-blue diamond, estimated by the auction house to be worth as much as $5.9 million.

Art
Auctions
China
Sotheby''s
Economic Conditions and Trends
Subprime Mortgage Crisis


U.N. Drafts Agreement on Refugees and Migrants

Abstract: More people are forcibly displaced from their homes today than at any time since the end of the Second World War. But the plight of these people is so politically contentious that after days of intense negotiations over an international agreement, the nations of the world on Tuesday adopted a draft that contained virtually no concrete commitments to make their journeys better or safer. Nor does it have any force of law. Western European countries, along with Russia, resisted what many had hoped would be a pledge to resettle one-tenth of all the people fleeing war and persecution. And the United States balked at language that would have committed all countries to not detain undocumented children who arrive at their borders. What emerged late Tuesday was a 22-page draft “outcome document” that all 193 countries of the United Nations could abide. The document will serve as the basis for a meeting at the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly next month. Decisions on specific commitments on what countries should do to protect refugees and migrants were deferred until 2018. The draft agreement comes at a time when refugees and migrants have become a divisive issue in European and American politics. In the presidential campaign in the United States, Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, has proposed barring Muslims from entering the country. Refugees and migrants will be the biggest issue at the gathering of world leaders at the United Nations next month. President Obama plans to lead a meeting at the General Assembly in an effort to nudge countries to take in more refugees and contribute to countries that have taken them in for years. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, also plans to hold a meeting on the plight of refugees and migrants. The document under negotiation will be the centerpiece of his meeting. While the draft text has no force of international law, every sentence has been negotiated. The resulting language is sometimes so vague that it is likely to bring little comfort to the millions who are seeking safety and opportunity abroad. Eritrea, for instance, recently complained that the many references to human rights in the document were “redundant.” (A United Nations committee earlier this year accused Eritrea of atrocities against its own citizens.) Russia resisted a sentence that called for countries to share in the “burden” of taking in refugees. (Russia takes in very few, except lately from parts of Ukraine.) The United States suggested a phrase asserting that detention is “seldom” good for children. Activists for immigrants and refugees found that suggestion so appalling that they fired off a letter on Friday to President Obama. They argued that any international agreement should make clear that detention is “never in the best interests of children” and should commit to ending the practice. (The United States detains children who arrive from Mexico without legal papers.) The Center for Migration Studies said in a statement that the draft “falls short of creating a new framework for the protection of refugees and migrants around the world. Instead, it reaffirms the status quo, and, in some areas, weakens current protections for these vulnerable populations.’’ According to the United Nations, 24 million people worldwide left their home countries because of war or persecution in 2015. More than 10 times that number — 244 million — were considered migrants, living somewhere other than the country of their birth. This draft agreement sets out a long list of principles, most already enshrined in existing laws. It says refugees deserve protection and should not be sent back to places where they could face war or persecution. It urges countries to allow refugees to work and to let their children attend school, though it stops short of saying refugees have a right to either jobs or schools. It asserts that migration can be good for the world, which is wording that migrant-sending countries wanted. It also calls for countries to take back their citizens if they travel illegally and fail to get asylum, which is what migrant-receiving countries, especially in Europe, wanted. An early draft had proposed a global compact to allocate where refugees could be permanently resettled, but that proposal failed. African and Latin American countries wanted to know why the compact was on refugees alone, according to diplomats involved in the negotiations. Why not also have a compact on the rights of migrants? The latest draft sets a 2018 deadline for two compacts: one for refugees, a second for migrants. The draft text also says nothing about the rights of the 40 million people who are displaced in their own countries, or about those who are leaving their homes because of climate change. “This is a document very much about the present,” said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, a former official at the United Nations refugee agency who is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “This is not a document that prepares us for the future.”

Immigration
UN
Refugees,Internally Displaced People
Arab Spring


A Long Route From War to Davis Cup Final for Serbian Tennis

Abstract: BELGRADE — You need only a short taxi ride to see how far Serbian tennis has come. In one section of New Belgrade, a far-from quaint zone of wide boulevards and high-rises in various states of repair, sits the Jedanaesti April 11 Sports Center. Once inside, you walk underneath two huge photographs of the Serbian tennis stars Janko Tipsarevic and Ana Ivanovic and through an archway that leads to courts unlike any I have seen in 40 years of playing and covering the game. They are in the bottom of what, until 1993, was an Olympic-size swimming pool. Although Tipsarevic and Ivanovic have moved on to places like Wimbledon and Roland Garros, plenty of other Belgrade youngsters continue to shout and swat groundstrokes at each other in a sunken space that was converted during the war years when resources in Serbia were almost as scarce as indoor tennis facilities. “There was no money to run the pool anymore, so I had the idea with a couple of friends to use it for tennis,” said Pavel Tipsarevic, Janko’s gravel-voiced father, with a large mug of beer parked in front of him. Today, the former pool contains two singles courts without doubles alleys whose sidelines run within one pace of the high walls, which makes a wide kick serve an unfair advantage and a running passing shot a hazard to the runner’s health. Those two singles courts share precious room with a mini-tennis court and another half court that is used for serving practice. The green carpet — a surface no longer seen on the pro circuit — is torn in multiple places. Contrast that with the indoor tennis scene a few minutes away in Belgrade Arena, where the younger Tipsarevic will be part of the Serbian team trying to win its first Davis Cup on Friday, Saturday and Sunday in a modern facility officially opened in 2004 that is grand enough — with its 16,200 seats for the final — to leave Guy Forget, the captain of the visiting French team, sounding jealous. “We wish we would have a big stadium like this in France; our biggest is smaller than this one,” Forget said in a news conference this week. “I think it’s made for big moments like this one. So, no, it’s wonderful. You’re very lucky.” Not too many outsiders have called Serbians “very lucky” in recent years (and even now that their small country is no longer a pariah, they find themselves short of foreign investment in the midst of the global economic slump). But then Forget is surely feeling diplomatic with no desire to inflame passions any further than they will already be inflamed in a country where sporting events have turned ugly. Extra security precautions have been taken this week, but both the United States and Czech Republic teams visited for Davis Cup play without major incident earlier this season. A tennis crowd is still not the same as a soccer crowd in Serbia, even if the Serbians — who once considered tennis a minor sporting pursuit — are increasingly proud of becoming a tennis superpower. The French will have support, too: a traveling bloc of about 1,500 fans along with hundreds of guests of the Davis Cup sponsor, BNP Paribas, which happens to be a French bank. But there can be no doubt that there will be an epic Serbian celebration if the team of Novak Djokovic, Tipsarevic, Viktor Troicki and Nenad Zimonjic manages to prevail over the French team of Gaël Monfils, Gilles Simon, Michael Llodra and Arnaud Clément. Only the Serbs are at full strength, with Forget missing both Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Julien Benneteau because of injuries. But the French players who did make it to Belgrade for France’s first final since 2002 have been in fine form this autumn, with Monfils reaching the final of the prestigious Paris indoor tournament last month and with Llodra beating Djokovic on his way to the semifinals in the same event. The indoor hard court that captain Bogdan Obradovic and his players have chosen this week will not be nearly as quick as the surface in Paris, which may mean limited singles action for the flashy, net-rushing Llodra. “I think I never played on a faster surface except grass,” Djokovic said of Paris. The combination of home-court advantage and Djokovic, the former Australian Open champion now ranked No. 3 in the world, makes the Serbs rightful favorites this week. But whatever the outcome, it has been a remarkable journey for the Serbian players, none of whom had the creature comforts and financial support from their federation that top French juniors like Monfils enjoyed. To make it, the Serbians had to rely on their families and private benefactors and expatriation or extensive training abroad. None has been through as much as Zimonjic, the goateed 34-year-old doubles specialist from Belgrade who is the team’s senior member and who was struggling to become a professional during the difficult years when simply getting a visa was a major challenge. With the embassies closed in Belgrade, Zimonjic often had to take a bus to Budapest in the 1990s to apply for visas, waiting in line for hours with no guarantee of approval. “When we were Yugoslavs, we had one of the best passports and were welcomed anywhere we wanted and then all of the sudden from that, you are not welcome anywhere and everybody looks at you like you are a killer or some crazy person,” ZImonjic said. “It’s then that you realize it’s not true everything you see on television.” Yugoslavia never reached a Davis Cup final, settling for three semifinal appearances. After the country began breaking apart in 1991, Croatia and its star, Goran Ivanisevic, were allowed to take over Yugoslavia’s high-ranking slot in the extensive Davis Cup pecking order. Yugoslavia — what remained of it — was initially banned from competing altogether. When it returned to the Cup in 1995, it was sent to Group Three, the competition’s fourth division, and obliged to play against tennis minnows like Togo and Moldova in a multiteam event in San Marino. Zimonjic was part of that 1995 squad and later became a player-captain in 2003 and 2004 before Serbia, playing on its own, rejoined the elite World Group in 2008. Slobodan “Bobo” Zivojinovic, the former Yugoslavian star who is now president of the Serbian Tennis Federation, remembers very well when no Serbian network was interested in even televising the team’s Davis Cup matches, which were played in tiny venues. How the numbers and circumstances have changed. “We could have sold 200,000 tickets for this, and I mean it,” Zivojinovic said.


Complaint Over Doctor Who Published Rorschach Images

Abstract: The doctor who helped Wikipedia publish the 10 inkblots of the Rorschach test is being investigated by his local doctors’ organization after it received complaints that his actions were unprofessional. In a letter Wednesday from the group, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan, the doctor, James Heilman, who works in an emergency room in Moose Jaw, was notified that two psychologists had filed complaints. One of them, Andrea Kowaz of the College of Psychologists of British Columbia, complained that by including the inkblots on Wikipedia, Dr. Heilman was violating the test’s secrecy and that if he were a psychologist his behavior would be “viewed as serious misconduct.” The other letter, from Laurene J. Wilson, a psychologist at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, echoed the concern about the test’s security but added that Dr. Heilman “shows disrespect to his professional colleagues in psychology and disparages them in the eyes of the public.” Dr. Wilson said she had read interviews with Dr. Heilman in which he “refers to psychologists as undertaking practices akin to a magic show with smoke and mirrors.” In light of those complaints, an official from the Saskatchewan organization wrote, there was “a responsibility to investigate the matter.” Dr. Heilman, 29, who is working temporarily in Penticton, British Columbia, said in an interview that he considered the complaints an attempt to punish him for trying to demystify the psychological profession. The Rorschach test, a series of inkblots created by a Swiss psychiatrist in the 1920s, is intended to reveal insights into how subjects think depending on how they describe unclear images. Many psychologists say they fear that the inkblots will not be as effective if they have been seen before, or perhaps even that subjects will prepare their answers. “These are intimidation tactics,” Dr. Heilman said. “They are trying to close the doors to scientific discourse. They don’t want anybody other than themselves involved in a discussion about what they do.” He added that he was preparing a response. “I assume it is frivolous,” he said, “but anytime someone makes a complaint through one’s college of physicians and surgeons, one has to take it seriously.” Bryan Salte, the associate registrar of the Saskatchewan doctors’ organization, said in an interview that investigations were typically completed in fewer than 60 days. If the college takes no action, it never publicly addresses the matter, he said. Bruce L. Smith, a psychologist and president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods who has been arguing on Wikipedia’s forums that the inkblots should be taken down, wrote “because the issue was discussed so fully on Wikipedia, it is doubtful that one can really assign primary responsibility to a single individual.” “At the same time,” he added, “we must remember that actions have consequences, and hiding behind the group and vague principles such as ‘freedom of information’ will not allow someone to evade these.” That argument carried little weight at Wikipedia. Since the issue has become widely debated, the images have become more prominent on the article (they formerly appeared at the bottom of the page) and include even more detail for each inkblot about what research has found to be the most typical answer. “It was me who moved them to the middle,” Dr. Heilman said. “I won’t back down.”

Wikipedia
Psychology and Psychologists
Medicine and Health
Tests and Testing


‘Barefoot Bandit’ Pleads Guilty to 2-Year Theft Spree

Abstract: SEATTLE — Colton Harris-Moore , the teenage fugitive who became known as the Barefoot Bandit during his two-year crime spree, pleaded guilty here on Friday to seven federal charges, including stealing airplanes, a boat and firearms and transporting them across state and sometimes national boundaries. He faces up to six and a half years in prison. Mr. Harris-Moore, who inspired Facebook tribute pages and supportive T-shirts (“Momma Tried,” one said) for his remarkable ability to elude law enforcement over the years , smiled occasionally in court but said little beyond “Yes, sir” to Judge Richard A. Jones of United States District Court, and “guilty” seven times. For all of the spectacle surrounding his case, Mr. Harris-Moore reached a plea deal with the government in part by pledging that he would not profit from publicizing it in the future. A Seattle entertainment lawyer, Lance Rosen, said Friday that he was negotiating the sale of rights to Mr. Harris-Moore’s story but that any proceeds would go toward the more than $1.4 million in restitution Mr. Harris-Moore owes for the planes, boat and other items he stole. After Mr. Harris-Moore entered his plea in federal court, Jenny Durkan, the United States attorney for Western Washington, told reporters, “Should one dime cross palms, it comes to the government.” Mr. Harris-Moore grew up poor and a victim of abuse on Camano Island, north of Seattle in Puget Sound. He was charged with his first crime at 12 and began his spree after escaping from a juvenile halfway house in April 2008. Over the next two years, Mr. Harris-Moore broke into banks, stole Cessna airplanes, a 34-foot powerboat, semiautomatic pistols and a stream of Ford trucks and Cadillacs before finally being caught after crash-landing a plane on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas on July 4, 2010. He had no formal flight training. He is scheduled to be sentenced in October. But before then, state prosecutors in four Washington counties are expected to pursue as many as 40 charges, included first-degree burglary in which a handgun was involved, a charge that could keep him in prison longer than the federal charges do. Asked in court how many years of school he completed, Mr. Harris-Moore, now 20 and a high school dropout, replied, “10 years.” His lawyer, John Henry Brown, told reporters after the hearing that Mr. Harris-Moore hoped eventually to attend college to study aviation and engineering.

Harris-Moore Colton
Robberies and Thefts
Sentences (Criminal)
Seattle (Wash)


Without David Villa, New York City F.C. Falls to Sporting K.C.

Abstract: The atmosphere was different on Saturday at Yankee Stadium for New York City F.C.’s second home game. The buzz outside the stadium before the club’s March 15 home opener was missing this time, and with the upper deck closed and the stadium in its reduced soccer configuration, the match against Sporting Kansas City hardly felt like a special event. Just before the start, the news filtered out that N.Y.C.F.C.’s star player, David Villa, was out the lineup because of a strained abductor muscle that has been bothering him all season. Without Villa, the home team fell to its first M.L.S. loss, 1-0, before an announced crowd of 27,545, a soccer sellout. N.Y.C.F.C. had been 1-0-2. N.Y.C.F.C. Coach Jason Kreis said the team knew after practice Friday, when Villa declared himself unfit, that it would not have him for the game. “Every single game, we’ve come down to a point where he was very questionable about whether he was going to be available for that match,” Kreis said. “But he’s managed through the pain and swelling, and we’ve been doing treatments with him, pretty much nonstop, to give him the best opportunity to play. Every time, every week, the prior three weeks, the day before the game, he said: ‘Yep. Feels good. I’m going to go.’ And yesterday was the first time he was like: ‘No. The pain is too unbearable this time.’ ” Villa watched his teammates lose without him, and so did Frank Lampard, the Englishman who was supposed to be the face of the club. Lampard, who was originally expected to be in New York for the start of the season, will not join the club until the summer because N.Y.C.F.C.’s parent club, Manchester City, is keeping him in England until the end of the Premier League season. With the Premier League on a break to allow for international games, Lampard had flown to New York to visit his future teammates and perhaps do some house hunting. He watched the game from a suite in the stadium but was not made available to the news media, at his direction. A team spokesman said that Lampard did not want to take attention away from the players currently suiting up for the club. With Villa unavailable, Kreis inserted Javier Calle, a 23-year-old Colombian who is on loan from Independiente Medellín, into the starting lineup. Calle created little and was substituted in the 59th minute. Kreis was asked how much talent his team was missing with Villa and the Slovakian forward Adam Nemec, who is on international duty, out of the lineup. “I was really proud of the effort the guys put in, and I don’t know that there was a moment that it falls to somebody’s foot where I say, ‘Oh, if that was Villa, that’s a goal,’ ” Kreis said. The visitors took the lead in the 12th minute on a goal by defender Ike Opara, who rose above everyone to head home a long throw-in by defender Matt Besler from the right sideline. N.Y.C.F.C. appeared to have a golden opportunity to tie the score in the 68th minute, when the referee, Edvin Jurisevic, ruled that Sporting K.C. defender Seth Sinovic had handled the ball inside the box, and awarded N.Y.C.F.C. a penalty kick. But after a long conversation with his assistant, Jurisevic reversed his decision. Television replays showed that the reversal appeared to be correct; while Sinovic’s arm did come up, it did not seem to make contact with the ball. Kreis said he had spoken to the officials after the game, and he said he accepted that the decision was correct. “At the end of the day, I’m a proponent, always, of referees doing everything they can to try to get the call right,” he said. “If that means taking their time and discussing it with people in order to get it right, I have to be a proponent of that. Certainly, it went against me today — I would have loved for him to just make the call and ignore everybody else, the whole world, but my hope would be that that would come to our benefit sometime later in the season.”

David Villa
Soccer
Jason Kreis
Matt Besler
MLS
New York City Football Club Soccer Team
Sporting Kansas City Soccer Team
Yankee Stadium NYC


CERN Collider Begins Subatomic Exploration

Abstract: PASADENA, Calif. — After 16 years and $10 billion — and a long morning of electrical groaning and sweating — there was joy in the meadows and tunnels of the Swiss-French countryside Tuesday: the world’s biggest physics machine, the Large Hadron Collider , finally began to make subatomic particles collide. After two false starts due to electrical failures, protons that were whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to record-high energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece raced around a 17-mile underground magnetic track outside Geneva a little after 1 p.m. local time. They crashed together inside apartment-building-size detectors designed to capture every evanescent flash and fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to hold insights into the beginning of the universe. The soundless blooming of proton explosions was accompanied by the hoots and applause of scientists crowded into control rooms at CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research , which built the collider. The relief spread to bleary-eyed gatherings of particle physicists around the world, who have collectively staked the future of their profession on the idea that the collider will eventually reveal new secrets of the universe. Among their top goals are finding the identity of the dark matter that shapes the visible cosmos and the strange particle known as the Higgs boson , which is thought to imbue other particles with mass. Until now, these have been tantalizingly out of reach. “We’re expecting some answers,” said David Politzer, a Nobel laureate and professor at the California Institute of Technology , where a conference room overflowed with Los Angeles -area physicists attending a midnight remote viewing, with refreshments including matzos, chips and pizza. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, speaking from Japan , said the new collider “opens a new window of discovery and it brings, with patience, new knowledge of the universe and the microcosm.” “It shows what one can do in bringing forward knowledge,” he said, adding, “It will also bring out an army of children and young people who will get into the private sector and academia.” “We are all proud and so happy,” Fabiola Gianotti, a spokeswoman for CERN, said of one of the giant particle detectors at the collider, known as Atlas. Guido Tonelli, spokesman for a rival detector called C.M.S., said, “We are really starting physics.” The success in producing proton collisions represents a remarkable comeback for CERN, but the lab is still only halfway back to where it wanted to be. Only a year and a half ago, the first attempt to start the collider ended with an explosion that left part of its tunnel enveloped in frigid helium gas and soot when an electrical connection between two of the powerful magnets that steer the protons vaporized. A subsequent investigation revealed that the collider was riddled with thousands of such joints, a result of what Lucio Rossi, head of magnets at CERN, said was a “lack of adequate risk analysis,” in a recent report in the online journal Superconductor Science and Technology. As a result, the collider, which was designed to accelerate protons to seven trillion electron volts, then smash them together to reveal particles and forces that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of time as we know it, can only be safely run for now at half power. CERN physicists say that operating the collider for a year and a half at this energy level should allow them to gather enough data to start catching up with its American rival, the trillion-electron-volt Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois . The Tevatron is smaller but has been running for years and thus has a head start in data. After that, the CERN machine will be shut down for a year so that the connections can be rebuilt. Particle colliders get their oomph from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy — denoted in the physicists’ currency of choice, electron volts — that these machines can pack into their little fireballs, the farther back in time they can go, closer and closer to the Big Bang, and the smaller and smaller are the things they can see. The first modern accelerator was the cyclotron, built by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley , in the 1930s. An early version was a foot in diameter and accelerated protons to energies of 1.25 million electron volts. Over the last century, universities and then nations leapfrogged each other, building bigger machines to peer deeper into the origins of the universe. But the race ended in 1993, when Congress canceled the Superconducting Supercollider, a 54-mile, 20 trillion-electron-volt machine being built underneath Waxahachie, Tex., after its projected cost ballooned to $11 billion. The following year, CERN approved its own big collider. CERN, a 20-nation consortium that grew from the ashes of World War II, has provided a template for other pan-European organizations like the European Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory. With a budget and dues established by treaty, the organization enjoys a long-term stability that is the envy of American labs. Last winter, Europe took the lead for good when test collisions at the Hadron collider achieved energies of 1.18 trillion electron volts. The collider first ramped up its beams to 3.5 trillion electron volts two weeks ago, but the engineers took pains to prevent them from colliding so as not to steal the thunder from what was billed as First Physics Day on Tuesday. Because of the defective joints and some mysteriously underperforming magnets, it will still be three years at least before CERN’s collider runs at or near full strength. According to theoretical models, that would stretch out the time it should take to achieve the collider’s main goals, like producing the Higgs boson and testing more exotic ideas like extra dimensions. Until then, the Tevatron will chase CERN for big goals like the Higgs boson, physicists say. The CERN experimenters will spend the next four to six months learning how their detectors work and rediscovering known physics. Then, anything is possible. “It’s very exciting because we are entering a new energy range,” said Harvey Newman, a Caltech professor who works on the C.M.S. experiment. “We’re looking at all kinds of exotic things,” he said, including signs of extra dimensions. The possibilities begin between the middle and end of this year.” Michael Barnett, a physicist from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said that he had worked on an experiment for the Superconducting Supercollider for 10 years until the project was canceled by Congress, and later spent 16 years on the Atlas experiment at the CERN collider. “We are on this planet and in this universe a short time,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “The dreams of a lifetime are waiting, and hopefully not much longer.”

CERN
Physics
Magnet
Particle accelerator


Labor Headed for Victory in Norway Vote

Abstract: OSLO — Norwegian voters appear to have returned their Labor-dominated government to office, narrowly endorsing Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg ’s pursuit of expanded public services and rejecting angry demands by some of his opponents to crack down harshly on immigration . According to official results with 99 percent of the votes counted early Tuesday, Mr. Stoltenberg’s three-party left-wing coalition won 86 seats in the 169-seat Parliament. That would give it just enough margin to continue as the only left-of-center government in Scandinavia and one of the few remaining in western Europe. Though Mr. Stoltenberg declined to claim victory early Tuesday, he sounded optimistic, saying voters showed a clear desire “to renew, strengthen and improve the Norwegian social welfare.” A short time later, he told reporters, “I’m going home to bed.” All major news media organizations called the election in his favor. “The prime minister can take this as a personal victory and a victory for the Labor Party,” said Harald Stanghelle, political editor of the newspaper Aftenposten. Norway has sailed through the financial crisis without serious disruption thanks to its collective oil wealth. Analysts said voters seemed cautiously determined to expand social benefits that already include broadly available public day care, free college tuition and extensive mass transit. “This election, like the three previous ones, was all about schools, higher education, children, families, health care, the elderly and the environment — everything that touches on quality of life,” said Tor Bjorklund, a professor of political science at the University of Oslo. If the nearly complete results hold, Labor will have boosted its representation in Parliament by three seats, to 64. Its partners, the Socialist Left and Center parties, collected about 22 seats between them, a slight decline from the election in 2005. Practically absent from the campaign were questions of foreign policy, such as the sitting government’s refusal to allow the 500 Norwegian soldiers serving under NATO command in Afghanistan to fight in the south of that country, where the Taliban insurgency is strongest. All four opposition parties favored removing the restriction, which NATO’s leadership has complained about, but none of them made it a campaign issue in deference to popular sentiment. No one on either side of the political divide raised the issue of joining the European Union, which Norwegians rejected by referendum in 1994. The biggest party on the conservative side remained Progress, led by the country’s most strident politician, Siv Jensen. Her outspoken opposition to immigration and foreign development aid — which she called “aid for corrupt dictators in Africa” — was coupled with a populist call to slash taxes and spend more of Norway’s oil revenue on government operations. That helped her party win about 23 percent of the vote, giving it an estimated 41 seats. But opinion polls as recently as a week ago had suggested an even stronger showing. “Many voters want Progress to be there as a protest party, but they don’t want to see them in office,” Mr. Stanghelle of Aftenposten said of the apparent drop in support for the party. The Progress Party’s rise in recent years has come mostly at the expense of the moderate Conservative Party, which traditionally has been the main counterweight to Labor. Monday’s tentative result gave the Conservatives 30 seats, an increase of eight but still well below the party’s heyday in the 1980s.

Norway
Politics and Government
Stoltenberg Jens


Brooklyn Bridge Park Expected to Announce Developers of a New Hotel Complex

Abstract: The Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation is expected to vote on Tuesday to select Toll Brothers and Starwood Capital Group as the development team for a new hotel and residential complex that will be built in the park next to Pier 1, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, according to an official with knowledge of the deal. The 1.3-mile-long park , which stretches along the East River on the Brooklyn waterfront, is being built on several piers in phases and, under terms of its development agreement, must be self-sustaining financially. The hotel complex is crucial to the city’s vision of how to pay for maintenance of the park. With an aging waterfront infrastructure, and elaborate landscaping and other amenities, upkeep is expected to cost about $16 million annually when all 85 acres are complete. Toll Brothers City Living and Starwood, which were two of the three finalists for the $295 million complex project, combined elements of their plans late in the process. Construction on the buildings will begin next summer, with completion expected in 2015. Crain’s New York Business first reported the expected selection on Thursday. The complex will consist of a 200-room hotel and 160 condominium units. In addition, there will be 32,000 square feet of restaurant and banquet space, as well as a 6,000-square-foot spa. Three more apartment buildings, one at John Street and two next to Pier 6, are also planned for the park. Starwood plans a 1 Hotel — one of its newer luxury brands — for the site. Under the development guidelines for the park, the hotel building and a connecting residential building cannot exceed 100 feet in height, and a separate residential building cannot be more than 55 feet tall. Rogers Marvel Architects designed the complex with a stepped facade of stone and metal, thus maximizing the views of the park and of New York Harbor. The buildings will also feature roofs with green technologies. Under the deal, the project will generate $119.7 miilion in rent and payments as part of a 97-year ground lease.

Brooklyn Bridge (NYC)
Infrastructure (Public Works)
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc
Toll Brothers Inc
Brooklyn Bridge Park (NYC)
Brooklyn (NYC)


Comedian, All Serious, Takes Stand

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — Chris Rock , the actor and comedian, headlined the Hollywood wiretapping trial on Friday, fully inhabiting the role of a witness who found absolutely nothing funny in being called to testify. Dressed in black and speaking mostly in hushed monosyllables, Mr. Rock described himself as the victim of a 1999 shakedown attempt by a model who he said had falsely accused him of paternity. He acknowledged having hired Anthony Pellicano , the private detective on trial here for wiretapping and racketeering, to investigate her. And he confirmed the authenticity of a lengthy phone call in which he and Mr. Pellicano discussed the woman — a call that Mr. Pellicano secretly recorded and the F.B.I. later seized. Mr. Rock’s 15-minute standing-room-only appearance, including cross-examination, was the first and most likely the only one in the trial by a star still at the top of his entertainment career. It led off a day when jurors also heard extended testimony about illegal work by Mr. Pellicano on behalf of two billionaires — Alec Gores, a Los Angeles investor, and Taylor Thomson, a Canadian media heiress — neither of whom has been prosecuted. Like other former Pellicano clients with boldface names or entries on the Forbes list, Mr. Rock was treated gingerly by prosecutors, though his put-upon look and almost surly tone did not suggest gratitude. They did not ask him to describe the extramarital affair that led to a paternity claim by the model, Monika Zsibrita; they did not ask about the details of her accusation that he had assaulted her sexually (no charges were ever brought); and they did not play even a one-minute excerpt of the recorded call until Mr. Rock had left the courtroom along with his small entourage. Taking the stand at 8:05 a.m., Mr. Rock gave his name so quietly that Judge Dale S. Fischer admonished him, saying: “Mr. Rock: project!” But the assistant United States attorney, Daniel A. Saunders, did not ask his occupation, a note of deference not shown to the comedian Garry Shandling or the actor Keith Carradine earlier in the trial. Mr. Saunders instead briskly led Mr. Rock through 25 questions, highlighting evidence that Mr. Pellicano had paid a police officer, Mark Arneson, to run illegal checks of the criminal and motor-vehicle histories of Ms. Zsibrita and of a friend of hers, who Mr. Pellicano suspected was her child’s biological father. Mr. Rock’s replies scarcely exceeded “yes,” or “no.” On cross-examination, Mr. Arneson’s lawyer, Chad Hummel, gave Mr. Rock the opportunity to describe Ms. Zsibrita’s effort to shake him down, asking if he thought her claim was false. “I didn’t believe the claim was false; DNA tests proved the claim was false; so this was not a ‘belief’ of mine,” Mr. Rock said. “Someone who was not pregnant with my child claimed to be pregnant with my child, and requested large sums of money for this.” Asked by Mr. Hummel about the assault claim, Mr. Rock said: “I’m here as a free man, and I didn’t do anything. You know I didn’t do anything.” After Mr. Rock’s exit, Mr. Gores, a wealthy buyout executive, took the stand and testified to having hired Mr. Pellicano in December 2000 to confirm his suspicions that his wife then, Lisa, was having an affair with his brother, Tom Gores. Mr. Gores said he paid Mr. Pellicano nearly $300,000, plus an all-expenses-paid Hawaiian vacation for his family, for his work. The Gores case is important because prosecutors have introduced only one recording that they say is an actual telephone intercept: a call between Lisa and Tom Gores after a rendezvous at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Another colorful witness Friday was Pamela Miller, once the nanny for Ms. Thomson, heir to the Thomson media fortune. Still simmering, Ms. Miller said she was fired in April 2002 — and that Mr. Pellicano investigated her illegally — after she gave an affidavit to the father of Ms. Thomson’s toddler daughter to help him in his custody fight. For example, Ms. Miller recalled, she had been told not to feed carbohydrates to the 18-month-old girl because “the mother wanted her to be very thin.” In a recording made days after her affidavit and played in court, Ms. Thomson could be heard telling Mr. Pellicano to do whatever it took. “I’m not going to ask any questions,” she said. “If you need information, just get the information.”

Wiretapping and Other Eavesdropping Devices and Methods


In BP Indictments, U.S. Shifts to Hold Individuals Accountable

Abstract: HOUSTON — Donald J. Vidrine and Robert Kaluza were the two BP supervisors on board the Deepwater Horizon rig who made the last critical decisions before it exploded. David Rainey was a celebrated BP deepwater explorer who testified to members of Congress about how many barrels of oil were spewing daily in the offshore disaster. Mr. Vidrine, 65, of Lafayette, La., and Mr. Kaluza, 62, of Henderson, Nev., were indicted on Thursday on manslaughter charges in the deaths of 11 fellow workers; Mr. Rainey, 58, of Houston, was accused of making false estimates and charged with obstruction of Congress. They are the faces of a renewed effort by the Justice Department to hold executives accountable for their actions. While their lawyers said the men were scapegoats, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said at a news conference, “I hope that this sends a clear message to those who would engage in this kind of reckless and wanton conduct.” The defense lawyers were adamant that their clients would contest the charges, and prosecutors said that the federal investigations were continuing. Legal scholars said that by charging individuals, the government was signaling a return to the practice of prosecuting officers and managers, and not just their companies, in industrial accidents, which was more common in the 1980s and 1990s. “If senior managers cut corners, or if they make decisions that put people in harm’s way, then the criminal law is appropriate,” said Jane Barrett, a University of Maryland law professor and former federal prosecutor. She noted that it was unusual for the Justice Department to prosecute individual corporate officers in recent years, including in the 2005 BP Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 workers, where only the company was fined. BP said on Thursday it would pay $4.5 billion in fines and other payments , and the corporation pleaded guilty to 14 criminal charges in connection with spill. The $1.26 billion in criminal fines was the highest since Pfizer in 2009 paid $1.3 billion for illegally marketing an arthritis medication. The crew was drilling 5,000 feet under the sea floor 41 miles off the Louisiana coast in April 2010 when they lost control of the well during its completion. They tested the pressure of the well, but misinterpreted the test results and underestimated the pressure exerted by the flow of oil or gas up the well. Had the results been properly interpreted, operations would have ceased. Mr. Vidrine and Mr. Kaluza were negligent in their reading of the kicks of gas popping up from the well that should have suggested that the Deepwater Horizon crew was fast losing control of the ill-fated Macondo well, according to their indictment, and they failed to act or even communicate with their superiors. “Despite these ongoing, glaring indications on the drill pipe that the well was not secure, defendants Kaluza and Vidrine again failed to phone engineers onshore to alert them to the problem, and failed to investigate any further,” the indictment said. The indictment said they neglected to account for abnormal pressure test results on the well that indicated problems, accepting “illogical” explanations from members of the crew, which caused the “blowout of the well to later occur.” In a statement, Mr. Kaluza’s lawyers said: “No one should take any satisfaction in this indictment of an innocent man. This is not justice.” Bob Habans, a lawyer for Mr. Vidrine, called the charges “a miscarriage of justice.” “We cannot begin to explain or understand the misguided effort of the United States attorney and the Department of Justice to blame Don Vidrine and Bob Kaluza, the other well site leader, for this terrible tragedy.” Several government and independent reports over the last two years have pointed to sloppy cement jobs in completing the well or the poor design of the well itself as major reasons for the spill. But none of the three was indicted in connection with those problems. Mr. Rainey was a far more senior executive, one who was known around Houston and the oil world as perhaps the most knowledgeable authority on Gulf oil and gas deposits. According to his indictment, Mr. Rainey obstructed Congressional inquiries and made false statements by underestimating the flow rate to 5,000 barrels a day even as millions were gushing into the Gulf. The indictment contended that he relied on a Wikipedia entry for spill-testing methodologies. One method he found produced an estimate of as much as 92,000 barrels a day, but Mr. Rainey withheld that possible estimate, it said. BP did not rely on Mr. Rainey’s estimates as it plotted various engineering responses to the accident, according to the indictment. Around April 22, 2010, the indictment said, only two days after the accident, BP engineers prepared estimates of potential flow rates that ranged as high as 146,000 barrels a day. A BP team on May 11 estimated a range of 14,000 to 82,000 barrels a day. But when a university professor publicly released an estimate of 70,000 barrels a day in May 2010, based on video footage of the leak, the indictment said, BP continued to defend the 5,000-barrel-a-day estimate and Mr. Rainey prepared a memo for the unified command handling the disaster justifying the 5,000-barrel estimate. He did not include his own higher possible estimates or others by BP. In presentations to Congressional committees, Mr. Rainey stuck to his 5,000-barrel estimate, the indictment said, even while he was receiving information that contradicted the figure. “Rainey withheld such information from other BP employees and from BP in-house and outside lawyers with whom he was working,” the indictment said. The charges against Mr. Kaluza and Mr. Vidrine carry maximum penalties of 10 years in prison on each “seaman’s manslaughter” count, eight years in prison on each involuntary manslaughter count and a year in prison on a Clean Water Act count. Mr. Rainey faces a maximum of 10 years in prison. In a statement on behalf of Mr. Rainey, his lawyers said: “We are profoundly disappointed that the Department of Justice is attempting to turn a tragic accident and its tumultuous aftermath into criminal activity. We are even more disappointed that BP has succumbed to the pressure and agreed to this extortionate settlement.” John Levy, a lawyer with experience in catastrophic accident cases, said the Justice Department was “clearly sending a message to all corporate executives that they have to be superdiligent, and I think it’s a growing trend.” He added, “You can’t put a corporation in jail.”

Justice Department
Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (2010)
BP Plc
Offshore Drilling and Exploration
Vidrine Donald J
Fines (Penalties)
Kaluza Robert
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Rainey David


Cisco’s Lesson for Oracle

Abstract: Empires built through acquisitions can run into problems as they sprawl. That’s doubly so in technology, where obsolescence is a risk. Oracle has used profits from its database stronghold to expand. Its acquisitions have worked well so far — that’s one reason its German archrival SAP has become more active itself, buying SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion on Saturday. But the sad experience undergone recently by Cisco Systems suggests that Oracle’s boss, Lawrence Ellison, needs to stay on his toes. Oracle tends to buy relatively slow-growing firms that sell software and lucrative maintenance contracts, cut costs, and then let profits roll in. In October, Mr. Ellison’s company bought a cloud computing firm, RightNow Technologies, for $1.5 billion. Oracle’s revenue has grown at a 20 percent annual clip over the last five years. Yet Cisco’s recent rethink shows the hangover that can follow acquisitiveness. The networking company bought firms in loosely related markets and the managers lost focus. Investors became skeptical that profits were durable and slashed the valuation multiple they attached to forecast earnings from 18 times in 2006 to just over 10 times today. After several profit warnings, Cisco this year reset strategy to focus on defending the networking business. Oracle continues to invest — expenditures on research and development are rising faster than sales — and operating margins, at more than 40 percent, remain high. That is evidence the firm is working to maintain its edge. Oracle’s sales of licenses, an indicator for new business, are still rising, although acquisitions flatter that figure. And customers tend to be locked into maintenance contracts with fees that rise each year. So that 40 percent chunk of Oracle’s business could grow even if it gets fewer new customers. There’s little sign of decline as yet. Even so, Oracle is getting more aggressive with its acquisitions. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, a big hardware maker, for $7.4 billion in 2009, and paid a whopping seven times revenue for RightNow. Meanwhile, investors have squeezed the premium out of the company’s price-to-earnings multiple, which at around 13 times is now in line with the broader market. Those trends could be viewed as early danger signs. Mr. Ellison will be aware of Cisco’s missteps, and know that Oracle’s moment in the sun can’t last forever. Bolder Courts Courts are growing bolder about second-guessing Wall Street. They typically tread softly over corporate financial disputes and settlements for fear of ruffling markets. But the rejection of the Securities and Exchange Commission ’s recent $285 million deal with Citigroup shows that times are changing. In the late 1970s, an anxious economy led courts to say they wanted to avoid throwing credit markets into confusion or creating “undefinable instability” or “untold and unknown consequences.” So they respected private agreements and refused to rule, for example, that lenders had any obligation to disclose onerous credit terms to borrowers. That approach has left some investors feeling cheated. Several federal courts in the last year alone have stretched to find technical reasons for dismissing complaints about how collateralized debt obligations were sold. But other judges are starting to raise questions. In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy — far from a wild-eyed liberal — berated his colleagues for approving Kentucky’s higher tax rate on out-of-state bonds, arguing it was unconstitutional despite the majority’s desire not to “upset the market.” Last September, a federal judge shocked creditors by refusing to bless their reorganization with the bankrupt Washington Mutual. And in August, an appeals court forced investors, against precedent, to cough up gains from Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme . But no jurist has lately upset the status quo more than Judge Jed Rakoff. In bouncing the S.E.C.-Citigroup C.D.O. settlement last week, he defied legal precedent by refusing to defer much to the regulator’s judgment. His opinion showed little fear of creating market uncertainty, arguing that the public interest is better served by holding companies’ feet to the fire than by quietly settling disputes without admission of wrongdoing. The financial sector has been successful at pressuring Congress and regulators to blunt rule-making under the Dodd-Frank Act and other financial reforms. And aside from a few larger settlements, not much blame for the economic crisis has been attached to the industry and even less to the people in it. It’s not surprising that some in the judiciary are now keen to see more of the sector’s machinations exposed to scrutiny. ROBERT CYRAN and REYNOLDS HOLDING

Securities and Exchange Commission
Oracle Corporation
Ellison Lawrence J
Cisco Systems Inc
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures
Stocks and Bonds
Citigroup Inc