Pentagon Halts Efforts to Claw Back California National Guard Bonuses

Abstract: Amid a furor of criticism, the Pentagon announced on Wednesday that it would suspend efforts to force thousands of California National Guard soldiers to pay back enlistment bonuses and other incentives that were improperly given during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “There is no more important responsibility for the Department of Defense than keeping faith with our people,” Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter said in a statement on Wednesday. “That means treating them fairly and equitably, honoring their service and sacrifice, and keeping our word.” Nearly all of the soldiers took the bonuses in good faith and were unaware of the misspending until notices arrived in the mail years later. Some had to repay more than $20,000 and a few more than $40,000. Many had wages garnished and racked up penalties and other debt trying to pay back the bonuses. A report on their hardships in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend provoked broad criticism from top lawmakers and major veterans groups. “It is unthinkable to me that the Department of Defense’s first reaction is to punish service members who fulfilled their end of the deal,” Brian Duffy, the national commander of the 1.7-million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars, said in a statement. “This is how you destroy all faith in a Pentagon that is supposed to have your back.” Mr. Carter said Wednesday that he had ordered his department “as soon as practicable” to temporarily cease all efforts to collect on the debts. The Pentagon plans to set up a finance team by January to review cases. The team would offer “a streamlined, centralized process that ensures the fair and equitable treatment of our service members and the rapid resolution of these cases,” Mr. Carter said. “Ultimately, we will provide for a process that puts as little burden as possible on any soldier who received an improper payment through no fault of his or her own,” Mr. Carter added. “At the same time, it will respect our important obligation to the taxpayer.” The National Guard initially said nearly 10,000 soldiers were affected, but the Pentagon said Wednesday that the number was closer to 2,000. The botched bonuses stem from the 2000s, when the military was under pressure to meet recruiting goals. During that time, the California Guard sent troops through an assembly-line-style re-enlistment process at mass meetings, where bonuses were approved in minutes. The re-enlistments were overseen by a master sergeant, Toni L. Jaffe, who lavished troops with bonuses and forgiveness of student loans. She pleaded guilty in 2012 to approving more than $15 million in fraudulent claims. Audits prompted by the criminal case turned up thousands of soldiers who had improperly received cash incentives. But many of the cases were technicalities, such as a sergeant who had received a bonus for re-enlisting as a biomedical repair specialist, but was then involuntarily deployed as a supply specialist and was stuck repaying a $10,000 bonus. Guard members began receiving collection notices in 2012. Some refused to pay. Some sued. Still others were pushed into financial distress by payment notices demanding more than $1,000 a month, and racked up late fees and interest. In 2014, the National Guard asked Congress to pass a law forgiving some of the debt, but Congress balked at the cost. Since the Los Angeles Times article was published, however, top lawmakers have lined up to demand a fix. Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, who served in the Marine Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan, called the repayment policy “disgraceful and insulting.” In a letter to Mr. Carter, he added, “I ask that you utilize your authority to influence a solution, including a possible legislative fix if determined necessary, that’s in the best interest of the individuals and families impacted.” Major veterans groups demanded that the Pentagon not only stop collecting on the bonuses, but also reimburse what soldiers had repaid. “It is unthinkable that these brave Americans who stepped forward when others did not after the 9/11 attacks are being left high and dry by their leadership,” said Paul Rieckhoff, the chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “The fact that our government would ask for it to be repaid with interest is simply unacceptable.”

Pentagon
California
National Guard
Bonuses
Veteran
US Military
Afghanistan War
Iraq War


On Mangini’s Jets, Hamstring Injuries Aren’t Up for Discussion

Abstract: FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Anatomically speaking, Kris Jenkins could easily forget that the arm bone is connected to the shoulder bone — on any given Sunday, his might not be. But ask Jenkins, the Jets ’ 349-pound nose tackle, the difference between a hamstring and a thigh, and he breaks into a virtual dissertation. “The thigh is made of two major muscle groups,” said Jenkins, a former kinesiology major at Maryland. “You’ve got your quadriceps, which is really four muscles, and you’ve got your hamstring muscles, you’ve got your adductors, you’ve got your hip flexors at the top, you go from there.” Jenkins really knows his thigh from his hamstring. That is not necessarily the case with his employers. True to his Belichickian roots, in which misdirection plays actually decrease come Sunday, Jets Coach Eric Mangini is one of the most cloak-and-dagger wielders of the National Football League’s injury list. The phenomenon peaks with one of the league’s most common injury areas — hamstrings — which have been pulled, strained or otherwise aggrieved 1,154 times among the league’s 32 teams since 2006. Amazingly, the Jets have apparently had only one hamstring injury in Mangini’s three seasons. It belonged to the former receiver Tim Dwight, whose malady was listed less specifically as “thigh” almost every week of the 2006 season except for Week 4, when it snuck in as “hamstring” before scampering back. Asked after Wednesday’s practice whether his current thigh injury was in fact his hamstring, receiver Laveranues Coles pointed to the trainer’s area and replied, “You have to ask them that.” Kicker Mike Nugent, whose upper right leg has been hampering him all season, smiled at the same question and said, “I’m just going to have to stick with the whole thigh thing.” Most teams take the opposite approach. The Cincinnati Bengals have reported 114 hamstring injuries and just five thigh injuries since 2006, according to research conducted by Bill Barnwell of Pro Football Prospectus. Even Giants Coach Tom Coughlin, not known for spoon-feeding information to opponents, has listed 41 hamstring injuries and not one thigh injury. Asking Mangini why he handles the injury list the way he does is a lesson in football tautology. “It’s something that I believe in philosophically,” he explained once this year. But he cracked open a window to that philosophy this week, when the competitiveness of his sport was cited. “We try to give the information that’s required,” Mangini said, nodding and offering a playful grin. The N.F.L. has required its teams to report players’ injuries since the late 1940s, when the influence of gamblers became a heightened concern. The league worried that bettors would seek out members of the teams’ medical staffs to learn whether a star player was hurting. So all injuries were listed publicly. The thrice-weekly list has evolved in specificity. Teams must list players as probable or doubtful and the like, and even missed practices must be noted. The list is so closely monitored that if it includes a star player, gamblers and fantasy league players are sent into a frenzy. Coaches, of course, will devise plays to attack a gimpy defensive back or sore-shouldered lineman. “We spot-check practice tapes to verify that they’re reporting this information accurately,” the N.F.L. spokesman Greg Aiello said. “We have fined teams for violating the injury report over the years.” The National Hockey League, long mocked for coaches’ flouting of the league’s injury list, instituted a policy in June that said clubs need not disclose a player’s specific injury but must tell the league if he might not suit up. This was done to prevent players from becoming targets for board-smashing punishment in specific body parts. As a result, Devils defenseman Paul Martin was recently listed as having “upper body soreness,” a malady afflicting roughly 94 percent of the N.H.L. Giving unnecessary details in football could indeed be costly. Players listed with thigh injuries wind up playing 69.2 percent of the time, according to Barnwell’s research; those with hamstring injuries play just 54.8 percent, the lowest among all injury types. So listing someone with a hamstring injury could telegraph his likelihood of playing. Because the N.F.L. does not require teams to indicate which part of the thigh — generally the hamstring (back) or quadricep (front) — why not keep the opponent guessing? “I don’t want specifics on my list,” Jets offensive lineman Alan Faneca said, referring to the issue of opponents’ attacking injuries on the field. “We spend all week gathering information, learning our opponents, what their strengths are, what you need to do. So yeah, if you found out a piece of information that would aid you in playing the game in a legal way, yeah, you’d use it.” Two teams, the Carolina Panthers and the Baltimore Ravens, join the Jets in almost never mentioning hamstring injuries — they have had only five such injuries the last three years compared, with 116 less-specific thigh injuries. On the other side, the Jets’ opponent on Sunday, the Miami Dolphins, has listed 22 hamstring but no thigh injuries, and appears to have a different interpretation of injury etiquette. “You have to give as much information as you possibly can during the course of the injury deal,” Dolphins Coach Tony Sparano said. “If it’s a hamstring injury, it’s a hamstring injury. If it’s a thigh injury, it’s a thigh injury.” Aiello said league rules did not require such specificity. For example, a dislocated kneecap, strained ligament or blunt contusion can all fall under the knee umbrella, and only kickers and quarterbacks must show which knee is actually hurt because of the heightened implications. (This led to a seminal Mangini moment last year, when he refused to disclose which knee linebacker Jonathan Vilma had hurt, even after Vilma had had season-ending surgery.) As for the hamstring-thigh distinction, Aiello said that while the league preferred specificity, he was not exactly bracing for an off-season battle. “A hamstring is in your thigh, isn’t it?” he said. “What is a thigh? The thigh is comprised of what? Collectively, is that your thigh? It sounds like it’s in the rules.” Even Jenkins, the Jets’ resident lineman-kinesiologist, could not quite keep it straight. Asked whether he had ever had a hamstring injury, he sat back in his folding chair and gave it some thought. “I’ve had a hamstring injury before,” Jenkins said, “but I’ve never had a thigh injury.” Which pretty much clears that up.

Football
Mangini Eric
Sports Medicine
New York Jets


David Sweat Sentenced in Dannemora Prison Escape

Abstract: PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. — A convicted killer who was already serving life behind bars was ordered on Wednesday to pay restitution and sentenced to additional prison time for his escape in June from a maximum-security prison in far northern New York State. The killer, David Sweat, was shot and captured near the Canadian border after a three-week manhunt. On Wednesday, he was shackled and surrounded by guards in Clinton County Court. Judge Patrick McGill ordered Mr. Sweat, 35, to pay $79,841 in restitution and serve three and a half to seven years in prison for the escape, and a similar consecutive sentence for prison contraband. Mr. Sweat pleaded guilty in November to three charges. He was already serving life in prison without parole for murdering a Broome County sheriff’s deputy in 2002, after the burglary of a gun shop in Pennsylvania. Mr. Sweat and another inmate, Richard W. Matt, cut their way out of Clinton Correctional Facility with saws that a prison worker, Joyce E. Mitchell, smuggled to them. Andrew J. Wylie, the Clinton County district attorney, said that should Mr. Sweat be paid for an interview or otherwise come into money, the state would claim it as restitution for damage to the prison. If the federal or state courts sometime reject life without parole as a punishment, Mr. Wylie said, the sentences on Wednesday would then be available.

David Sweat
Dannemora
Prison escape
Clinton Correctional Facility
Richard Matt
Murders and Homicides


Replicating the Sensitive Sides of Spiders’ Legs

Abstract: One of the most sensitive vibration sensors in the natural world is the lyriform organ, located in the legs of many spiders. The organ has a series of parallel slits of different lengths, much like the strings on the harplike instrument called the lyre, and helps spiders detect prey. Now, researchers from South Korea have developed a highly acute sensor, made of a thin platinum-coated polymer, that was inspired by the organ. “The polymer is very flexible, so we can bend it,” said Mansoo Choi , a mechanical engineer at Seoul National University and an author of the research , which appears in Nature. “And depending how much you bend it, you can generate controlled cracks.” Vibrations cause slits in the sensor to come together or move apart. The researchers measured these changes to detect vibration characteristics like variations in frequency and size. The sensor, just two-tenths of an inch by four-tenths of an inch, could be worn on the wrist to monitor and gather health information, Dr. Choi said. Attached to the neck, it could recognize simple spoken words — go, jump, shoot, stop — that might be used in a computer game. The current prototype is 100 times as sensitive as the best commercially available sensor of its kind, he said. SINDYA N. BHANOO

Spider
Sensor
Mansoo Choi
Nature Journal


Gilles Muller Continues His Surprising Ride

Abstract: When the last shot of a long and hot afternoon slapped against the top of the net and fell back to his opponent’s side, Gilles Muller did not scream, as he had when he won each of the first two sets. He just stood for a moment near the umpire’s chair, basking in his own sense of relief. For once, Muller, an improbable qualifier for this United States Open, did not need five sets to dispatch an opponent. He did it in four grueling ones, defeating the No. 5 seed, Nikolay Davydenko, 6-4, 4-6, 6-3, 7-6 (10), advancing to face the No. 2 seed, Roger Federer, in the quarterfinals. Muller, ranked No. 130 in the world, became the first player from Luxembourg to advance this far in a Grand Slam event. But the milestones do not stop with his nationality. He is the lowest-ranked quarterfinalist at the Open since 1999 (when Nicolas Escude, No. 136, became the only other qualifier to advance this far), and he is the lowest-ranked quarterfinalist at any Grand Slam tournament since 2003, when No. 198 Alexander Popp made it that far at Wimbledon. Muller seemed as stunned as anyone. He won his previous two matches after falling behind two sets to none, and he has made it this far despite also playing in the qualifying tournament. That heavy pounding took its toll during the third set on Tuesday, when Muller, who said his left knee was hurting “when I put pressure on it,” stopped the match to have a trainer wrap it. After that, he said, the pain was “pretty much gone.” By the time the fourth-set tie breaker arrived, it was clear that adrenalin had taken over. Muller led by 5-4 when Davydenko hit a brilliant return that Muller called “the shot of the tournament.” But even after Muller fell behind by 6-5, and by 7-6, and by 9-8, he managed to hang on. “I’m really surprised about myself, the way I feel,” Muller said. “Because, I mean, I’m feeling tired, but it’s not, like, that bad.” For Davydenko, a Russian who said he broke four rackets during the match, this was the latest setback in the most difficult year of his professional career. But the cloud that has hovered over him may be about to lift: The Times of London reported Monday that within the next two weeks, Davydenko would be cleared of allegations of match-fixing that had trailed him since 2007. SERVE-AND-VOLLEY REVIVAL It has been six years since Pete Sampras played in the United States Open, and with his retirement went the last vestige of a tennis style that dominated the sport for decades: the serve and volley. Since then, the men’s game has been ruled by hard-hitting baseliners who treat the terrain north of the service line like a demilitarized zone: to be entered infrequently, and only as a last resort. But the lost art may be having a bit of a resurgence. No one keeps statistics on serve-and-volley points specifically, but Leo Levin, the head statistician for I.B.M. and the Open, said he had seen evidence of it. “There is a slight upward trend this year,” he said, although he added that he was not sure why. Mardy Fish, the American journeyman who has never made it past the second round here, served-and-volleyed his way into the quarterfinals. He came to net 69 times — including a John McEnroe-like 41 advances in the first set alone — to upset No. 32 Gaël Monfils. After the match, Fish said his attacking strategy was the only way he saw to win against a grinder like Monfils. “He wants to keep the points as long as possible and run the guys down,” Fish said. “I don’t intend to let him do that.” In the second round, Michael Llodra of France came to the net 97 times and nearly took the sixth-best player in the world, Andy Murray, to five sets. The Australian Chris Guccione pushed the 28th-seeded Radek Stepanek to four sets behind his big serve and steady volleys, approaching the net 65 times. Still, those examples do not suggest a return to the attacking style of Sampras and McEnroe. Nick Bollettieri, the coach who practically invented the power baseline game, was blunt: “No, it’s not coming back. It’s a different game now.” ARON PILHOFER NASTASE STILL A SHOWMAN Novak Djokovic was playing in Arthur Ashe Stadium, juniors and doubles matches were sprinkled across the grounds, and yet Ilie Nastase was still drawing attention. On Court 4, he was playing with his partner, Hana Mandlikova, against Anne and Stan Smith in the Mixed Doubles Champions Invitational. The stands were about two-thirds filled on the large outer court when Nastase, now 62, went onstage. During the match, which he and Mandlikova lost, 6-3, 3-6, 11-9, Nastase tried to let his partner do most of the running. When he was forced to run down a lob, he took as much time as he could before serving the next point. The umpire signaled he was taking too long by saying, “Time.” Nastase looked up and intentionally bounced the ball on his foot. Nastase has been refining his act on the hit-and-giggle circuit since retiring in 1985. It is a mix of the humorous and angry, the comical and the profane. He jokingly asked for a replay after a questionable call. He sent a ball into the park after missing a serve because he lost his toss in the sun. And after he double-faulted to lose the first set, he dropped his shorts, though with that act he did show one sign of mellowing since his days on the tour: He was wearing underwear. RAY KRUEGER


Starr Saphir, Bird-Watching Guide in Central Park, Dies at 73

Abstract: When Starr Saphir looked up at the star-speckled night sky, she thought of the multitude of moths, mosquitoes and other insects being pursued by swooping nighthawks. She shared this observation with the thousands of people who followed her through Central Park on the tours she led four times a week for nearly four decades, starting at 7:30 a.m. and continuing until she thought there were no more species to see that day. A tour might not end until dusk. Along the way, people might see wonders like the olive-sided flycatcher , the ruby-crowned kinglet and the black-throated blue warbler . It was not uncommon to see 35 species of birds, and not unusual to see 50. But the most compelling attraction was often Ms. Saphir herself, in her trademark blue scarf, binoculars in hand, translating chirps into the names of species and even specific behaviors. She was renowned among birders, as bird-watchers prefer to be called, for both her eyes and ears, spying birds in distant treetops and detecting them in the brush through the slightest rustle or the tiniest tweet. Last year, a national audience came to know her through an HBO documentary about the birders of Central Park. Ms. Saphir (pronounced sapphire) was still leading birders until several months ago, despite having metastatic breast cancer, cataracts, a bad back, a limp and arthritis. She died of complications of the cancer on Tuesday at a hospice in the Bronx, her daughter Shawna Leigh said. She was 73. Ms. Saphir identified her first bird 67 years ago and began leading the tours in the 1970s. She became an institution among birders because of her avian acuity and eagerness to share observations and knowledge. But she was the first to acknowledge that the star of the show was not her, despite the nickname Starr, which she acquired as a girl and kept from an earlier career as an actress. (Her given name was Muriel.) The real star, she said, was Central Park. Major flyways converge over the city, making the 843 acres of the park an oasis for migrating birds eager for a green place to rest and feed. More than 280 bird species have been identified in the park. Birders mention it along with places like the Everglades and Yosemite National Park as a birding mecca. The 200 or so hard-core birders of Central Park share information in a big notebook kept in the park’s Boathouse. Unlike fishermen who zealously guard a fishing hole’s location, birders can increase their lifetime sightings — a holy grail for many — by sharing. It is the number of watchful eyes, as much as the number of birds, that have accounted for the impressive list of species recorded in the park. Ms. Saphir, who left 80 notebooks of her daily sightings, identified 259 species in the park. Those who took her tours were rewarded by her solicitude: if someone glimpsed a particular warbler, she would spend hours finding it, or another, for the others. She kept her guide’s fee low — most recently $8 — because she wanted more people to appreciate birds, particularly as their populations decrease. Her expertise came from experience and research. “The reason she was so good was because she worked very hard at it,” said Jeffrey Kimball, who produced and directed the 2012 HBO documentary “Birders: The Central Park Effect.” In the film, Ms. Saphir, one of the main characters, explained her motivation. “Looking at birds really takes away sadness in a lot of us,” she said, alluding to her illness. “Looking at birds takes you out of yourself into the real world.” Muriel Theodora Saphir was born on July 21, 1939, on Long Island. She grew up in Brooklyn. She traced her enthusiasm for birds to the time her grandfather’s car broke down, when she was 6. While waiting for help, she spotted an intriguing bird and later studied copies of old Audubon prints to identify it. It was a black-and-white warbler . She began birding in Prospect Park. Ms. Saphir graduated from American University with a theater degree. Her marriage to Michael Henisse ended in divorce. She was legally separated from her second husband, Stephen Gussman. She acted in Off Broadway and traveling theatrical productions. In 1975, when no one showed up to conduct a guided walk in Central Park, she volunteered to take over. “I found out I could teach,” she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year. “I had never known that, and I found out what a joy that was.” Ms. Saphir, who is also survived by another daughter, Lara Willis, counted 2,582 different species of birds in her lifetime. Her favorite was the cerulean warbler , and she asked that people contribute to the protection of its habitat in Colombia instead of sending flowers to her funeral.

Starr Saphir
Central Park
Birdwatching
Obituary


With a Split Second to Spare, Lillard Puts Away the Pistons

Abstract: Damian Lillard’s spinning fadeaway with one-tenth of a second left in overtime gave the visiting Portland Trail Blazers a 111-109 victory over the Detroit Pistons on Sunday night. Lillard was guarded well by Rodney Stuckey as he tried to drive to the basket, but he was able to hit a tough fadeaway from about 8 feet for the win. Detroit couldn’t get off a shot before the buzzer. LaMarcus Aldridge scored 27 points for Portland, which rallied from a 13-point deficit in the fourth quarter. Lillard finished with 23 points. Josh Smith scored 31 points, his most since signing with the Pistons as a free agent in the off-season. SUNS 106, WARRIORS 102 Eric Bledsoe scored 7 of his 24 points in the fourth quarter, and Phoenix won its fifth straight game, holding off Stephen Curry and visiting Golden State. Bledsoe added eight rebounds and eight assists, Goran Dragic scored 21 points and Channing Frye added 20 for the Suns. Image Portland’s Damian Lillard hitting a winner in overtime. Credit Tim Fuller/USA TODAY Sports, via Reuters Curry scored 30 points, including 20 in the second half for the Warriors. NUGGETS 102, PELICANS 93 J. J. Hickson had 19 points and 11 rebounds, and host Denver overcame a slow start to beat New Orleans. Wilson Chandler added 19 to help the Nuggets bounce back from a rare home loss Friday. They’re now 7-3 at Pepsi Center this season after going a franchise-best 38-3 in 2012-13. Ryan Anderson scored 26 and Austin Rivers chipped in a season-high 17 for the Pelicans. THUNDER 101, MAGIC 98 Kevin Durant had 28 points, 9 rebounds and 5 assists, and Oklahoma City won its 12th straight home game to open the season, holding off Orlando. Russell Westbrook added 20 points, 12 rebounds and 6 assists for the Thunder, who have won six straight over all and 14 of their past 15. KINGS 106, ROCKETS 91 Rudy Gay scored 26 points in his first home game since coming over in a trade from Toronto, leading host Sacramento past Houston. Gay added five rebounds and four assists. He shot 10 for 20 in a dazzling home debut for the Kings, who had lost eight of their past 10 games. T’WOLVES 101, GRIZZLIES 93 Kevin Love had 30 points and 9 rebounds, Minnesota hit a season-high 12 3-pointers and the visiting Timberwolves earned a victory over Memphis. Love was 11 of 21 from the field, including 4 of 8 from outside the arc.

Pistons
Damian Lillard
Trail Blazers
Basketball


At 17, a Folk Artist on the Rise

Abstract: Croton-on-Hudson THE first thing you notice are the sideburns. Not that they stand out in a goofy, 1970s lamb-chop-like way on the otherwise smooth, youthful face. It’s just that they make sense: Take them away, and nothing about 17-year-old Anthony da Costa says folk musician. At least not until you hand him a guitar. Mr. da Costa, a nominee for the Memphis-based Folk Alliance’s emerging artist of the year award, was the winner in the “new folk” category last year at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Kerrville, Tex., and was the artist voted “most wanted to return” at the 2007 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Hillsdale, N.Y. — all coveted honors among certain types of acoustic-guitar-toting singer-songwriters. Now a junior in Pleasantville High School, he’s been the talk of the Westchester music scene since 2004, when as a 13-year-old he started playing open-mike shows in churches and basements around his Pleasantville home. “I remember as an eighth grader I played Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ ’ and Neil Young’s ‘Helpless’ at a church in Pleasantville,” said Mr. da Costa, who learned the songs after teaching himself guitar at age 10 and discovering crates of his father’s old LPs in his family’s attic. “The people in the room, there must have been 30 or 40, loved it. They thought it was great that a kid so young knew those songs, because nobody my age listens to that. They listen to Top 40 radio.” “I was very encouraged — I felt a lot of support,” said Mr. da Costa during a break from a recording session last Monday at Woody’s House studio here, where he was working on his seventh self-released album, tentatively titled “Bad Nights, Better Days,” with Abbie Gardner, a folk singer based in Stony Point. Mr. da Costa started writing his own songs at age 10; at last count, he had written more than 200. Most of them are precocious meditations on girls, including many of the tracks on his January release, “Typical American Tragedy.” “I tend to fall in love pretty easily,” he said. Mr. da Costa’s mother, Liliana da Costa, signed him up for piano lessons as a 3-year-old, and he remembers her playing records around the house by Joni Mitchell and Nanci Griffith, early but faint musical influences. His father, Dennis da Costa, not only led him to Mr. Dylan by way of his dust-gathering record collection, he has also helped with bookings and promotion after that first open-mike show at St. John’s Episcopal Church. “It’s not like we were the von Trapp family or anything,” said Mr. da Costa, who has an older sister, Kristen, 18, and a younger brother, Gianni, 13. “But my parents always loved music. It was always around.” They also understood the difficulties of a musical career. Taking their advice, Mr. da Costa plans to study music production, or something related to the music business, in college while continuing to perform. Among his other mentors is Fred Gillen Jr., a folk artist on the Hudson Valley open-mike circuit, the producer of several of Mr. da Costa’s CDs and the proprietor of Woody’s House. “Fred played the same open-mike as me when I first started out, but he went on later, and he had me floored with one of his songs, ‘Witness,’ ” Mr. da Costa said. “I saw this weird guy with a shaved head and chrome glasses, and I thought, ‘I didn’t know you could be cool and do this.’ ” Ever since, Mr. Gillen has been quick with advice and the kind of levelheadedness a 17-year-old needs when he is being compared to Mr. Dylan and John Lennon by Louis J. Meyers, executive director of the Folk Alliance, in publications that fans of the genre pay attention to. “Sometimes I worry about him being so young, because I know in my own life it can be hard to find balance,” Mr. Gillen said. “So I want to say to him, ‘Hey, instead of going to Folk Alliance, why don’t you find some girl to make out with?’ But when you come across people as talented as he is, you have to let them take risks. Even if he got burned out and walked away for six months, he’d still come back. He has the hormones and energy of a 17-year-old, but he’s wise beyond his years.”

Music
Folk Music
Westchester County (NY)
Art


Looking to Norwegian, 22, to Revive Image of Chess

Abstract: On Saturday, Magnus Carlsen , a 22-year-old Norwegian, and Viswanathan Anand, a 43-year-old Indian, will stride to the center of a stage in a hotel in Chennai, India, shake hands and sit down at a chess board to begin a match for the world championship title. At stake is more than the roughly $2.5 million in prize money. In many ways, the future direction of the game is on the line. Mr. Carlsen, the world’s top-ranked player , is a rock star in the chess world. He models for the clothing company G-Star Raw and has appeared on “Charlie Rose,” “60 Minutes” and “The Colbert Report.” Mr. Anand, the reigning world champion, is a celebrity in his home country. But his star power pretty much stops at India’s border. Despite a record number of chess players worldwide, the game has lost the spotlight it basked in when Bobby Fischer, an American, defeated Boris Spassky, a Russian, to claim the world championship title in the international sensation known as the Match of the Century in 1972. Chess enthusiasts say the game needs another big personality to energize it, and they are pinning their hopes on Mr. Carlsen. “I think that it is fairly clear that chess is not at the height of its popularity,” said David Shenk, the author of a book about the history of chess. “All it takes is one guy to come along and electrify the world.” An estimated 600 million people play chess worldwide, more than ever before, according to the research firm YouGov. It has also been added to school curriculums in many countries. But the World Chess Federation , the game’s governing body, has struggled to attract big corporate sponsorships and, other than chess fans, most people would probably be unable to name a single top player today. In the recently completed Grand Prix series of contests, held to select the next challenger for the world championship, sponsors were scarce and the tournaments were often held in remote or obscure locations. Image Magnus Carlsen, right, is the world’s top-ranked chess player. Viswanathan Anand, left, is the reigning world champion. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images In recent years, chess “just doesn’t have and really hasn’t had any great personalities driving it,” Mr. Shenk said. The last dynamic force in the chess world was Garry Kasparov, a Russian who became the world champion in 1985, at 22, the youngest player ever to win the title. But he retired in 2005, and there has been a void since. Mr. Kasparov said finding corporate sponsors should be possible. “They love chess already,” he wrote in an email. “Countless banks, insurance companies, car companies, TV shows, etc., use chess images in their marketing and stories.” But the World Chess Federation and chess fans “gain nearly nothing from this positive image because the current state of the professional sport is so poor,” he added. What did Mr. Kasparov think was the best way to make chess popular again? “My best one-word answer: Carlsen!” To be sure, Mr. Anand is one of the greatest players in history, and has been the undisputed champion since 2007. He is sponsored by the Indian company NIIT, one of the world’s largest information technology companies, and together they have opened chess academies across the country. Mr. Anand successfully defended the title in matches in 2008, 2010 and last year, but Mr. Carlsen is his greatest threat. The Norwegian has been ranked No. 1 almost continually since January 2010, and he now has an edge in the ratings system used to calculate the rankings that is the widest between two competitors since Mr. Fischer beat Mr. Spassky in 1972. If Mr. Carlsen wins, he will become only the second Westerner since World War II to be world champion. Even in Mr. Anand’s backyard, Mr. Carlsen is a celebrity. When he went to Chennai in August to check out the location of the match, he was greeted by hundreds of screaming young women in a mall. Mr. Shenk said he would not put all of his money on Mr. Carlsen’s ability to repopularize chess. But could he do it? “Yeah, potentially, yeah,” Mr. Shenk said. “He does seem like a very appealing guy.”

Chess
Magnus Carlsen
Viswanathan Anand
Chennai
World Chess Federation


AIBA Reassigns Official Overseeing Olympic Boxing Judges

Abstract: RIO DE JANEIRO — The federation running the boxing tournament at the Olympics reassigned its executive director on Thursday, a day after a handful of judges were sent home for making questionable rulings in a few bouts. The decision by the federation — the International Boxing Association, known as AIBA — to remove its executive director, Karim Bouzidi, seemed to be the latest move to stanch criticism of judges who have been accused of making dubious decisions to favor boxers from certain countries. Michael Conlan, an Irish boxer who lost a quarterfinal fight on Tuesday to a Russian fighter, went so far as to accuse the federation of corruption and suggest that Russia had bribed judges. He also denounced President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Twitter. Conlan, a gold medal winner at the world championships last year, said that the sport’s officials were “ paying everybody ” and that “they’re known for being cheats, and they’ll always be cheats.” AIBA did not say why Bouzidi was being moved to a different position, although the supervision of referees and judges were under his purview. Bouzidi, an Algerian, was named AIBA’s executive director last year. He was also the general manager of the World Series of Boxing, a semiprofessional tournament put on by AIBA. A U.S. First, and the Usual for Jamaica 17 Photos View Slide Show › Image Doug Mills/The New York Times Franco Falcinelli, the most senior vice president at AIBA, will oversee the operations of the remainder of the tournament, which runs through Sunday. Falcinelli, an Italian, supervised the amateur boxing world championships in Doha, Qatar, last year. He is also the president of the European Boxing Confederation. AIBA said in a statement Thursday that it would not “shy away from its responsibilities and will continue to ensure a level playing field and a fair and transparent sport.” The organization, reiterating a sentiment from a statement on Wednesday, also said that it was of “paramount importance” to protect the referees and judges “whose integrity is constantly put into question.” AIBA has been plagued by questions about its judging, particularly at the Olympics, over the years. At the Seoul Games in 1988, the light middleweight final appeared to have been dominated by the American Roy Jones Jr. But three of the five judges awarded the victory to his South Korean opponent, Park Si-hun. One judge later confessed to voting for Park to appease the Korean crowd. In a 1984 semifinal, Evander Holyfield, a future world champion, knocked out Kevin Barry of New Zealand, but the punch was ruled a late hit, and Holyfield was disqualified. Because Barry had been knocked out, he was not allowed to fight in the final. Both the referee and the boxer who went on to win the gold, Anton Josipovic, were from Yugoslavia. Before the Rio Games, AIBA made a number of changes to professionalize the Olympic version of the sport. Male boxers no longer had to wear head guards, and professional boxers were allowed to compete for the first time. AIBA also abandoned a scoring system that awarded one point for each hit. Now, boxers win or lose entire rounds, a system that relies more on the subjectivity of the judging. To avoid disputes after fights, AIBA no longer allows fighters to protest results. This, however, has not quieted boxers who feel they should have won their bouts.

AIBA
Boxing
International Boxing Association
Karim Bouzidi
Referee
Franco Falcinelli
2016 Summer Olympics


Judge Could Be Suspended on the Day She Is Sworn In

Abstract: The New York Court of Appeals notified Judge-elect Nora S. Anderson on Thursday that it may consider suspending her until criminal charges against her are decided. The court also offered her an opportunity to oppose suspension. A day earlier, Ms. Anderson, who was elected last month to the Manhattan Surrogate’s Court, was indicted on charges that she had concealed the source of $250,000 worth of contributions to her campaign. Manhattan prosecutors also charged Seth Rubenstein — the head of the Brooklyn law firm where Ms. Anderson works, and her campaign adviser — who they say funneled the money to Ms. Anderson’s campaign account. Ms. Anderson is to officially assume her judgeship on Jan. 1. But the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, which has the authority to suspend a judge charged with a felony, could act before the end of the year, said David Bookstaver, a spokesman for the Office of Court Administration. If the court does decide to suspend her, its action would not take effect until Jan. 1. Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye will not participate in the discussions because she is retiring Dec. 31, before any decision involving Ms. Anderson would take effect, Gary Spencer, a Court of Appeals spokesman, said. A letter, signed by Stuart M. Cohen, the court clerk, notifying Ms. Anderson of the possibility of suspension, gives Ms. Anderson until Dec. 22 to offer “reasons or arguments why suspension action should not be taken.” The letter also said that the Commission on Judicial Conduct, which has the authority to remove a judge from the bench, may present its views. Such letters are standard when judges face suspension, Mr. Spencer said. If Ms. Anderson is suspended, Ann Pfau, the state’s chief administrative judge, would assign a temporary replacement. John Reddy, one of the candidates Ms. Anderson beat in the Democratic primary in September, said he would reserve judgment because the truth remained uncertain. Justice Milton Tingling of State Supreme Court, another candidate who lost to Ms. Anderson, said sitting judges could not comment on active cases. Ravi Batra, Justice Tingling’s campaign finance chairman, who called for an investigation into Ms. Anderson in July, said it might be best for her to resign. Ms. Anderson’s lawyer, Gus Newman, said Ms. Anderson “is not going to resign the post.”

Judges
Courts
Anderson Nora S
Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations


Court Says Chevron Can Be Pursued in Canada Over Ecuadorean Damage

Abstract: The Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Friday that a group of Ecuadoreans can use an Ontario court in an attempt to collect billions of dollars from Chevron for environmental damage. The ruling is the latest step in a 13-year legal battle over the contamination of a rain forest in Ecuador, where Texaco had oil operations. The lawsuit has pitted Ecuadorean villagers in the region of Lago Agrio against Chevron, which bought Texaco. While a trial court in Ecuador initially awarded the villagers $17.2 billion, an appeals court reduced the damages to $9.5 billion. It was one of the largest judgments imposed by a court for environmental contamination. But Chevron has not paid the group and has waged a vigorous legal battle against the Ecuadoreans, as well as against their American lawyers in the United States, where it argued that the original judgment had been obtained through fraud. The company has declined to accept responsibility for polluting the rain forest, drawing the condemnation of international human rights and environmental activists. In Canada, the Ecuadoreans are fighting to seize the assets of Chevron’s subsidiary. Chevron countered that the Ecuadoreans should not be allowed to collect their debt in Canada because they have no direct link to the country. The Canadian court sided with the Ecuadoreans, saying the local courts were obliged to respect the decisions of foreign counterparts. “Canadian courts, like many others, have adopted a generous and liberal approach to the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments,” the Supreme Court ruled. “To recognize and enforce such a judgment, the only prerequisite is that the foreign court had a real and substantial connection with the litigants or with the subject matter of the dispute.” Alan Lenczer, the lead Canadian lawyer for the Ecuadorean farmers, said the decision “clears the way” to a trial over the claim. “You’ve got to be able to collect somewhere and that’s what the court is saying.” He added, however, that “we still have a road ahead of us.” In a statement, Chevron dismissed the significance of the ruling. “Today’s decision has no bearing on the legitimacy or enforceability of the fraudulent Ecuadorean judgment,” the company said. “Instead, the Supreme Court of Canada has simply decided that the Ontario trial court has jurisdiction to entertain further proceedings in the action.” The Ecuadorean farmers insist that Texaco, before it was bought by Chevron, spilled millions of gallons of toxic wastewater into waters of the Ecuadorean Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s and left unlined waste pits filled with toxic sludge. The contamination, they argued, ruined the lives and culture of several indigenous groups. Chevron says Texaco cleaned up its mess. It has argued that most of the pollution was caused by the Ecuadorean national oil company that originally partnered with Texaco and eventually took over the fields. Two years ago, the National Court of Justice, Ecuador’s highest court, reduced the fine to $9.5 billion, although it upheld the original decision despite Chevron’s cries of fraud. The Ecuadorean government has strongly supported the case against Chevron, waging its campaign on social media and encouraging protests of the company in Europe. Last year, Chevron won a major victory when a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that a long legal effort to punish the company was marred by fraud and corruption. Still, the decision did not prohibit enforcement of the Ecuadorean judgment in courts in Canada, Brazil and Argentina, where lawyers representing indigenous Amazonian farmers have sued Chevron to seize assets. While opening Canada’s courts to Ecuadoreans and their debt collection efforts, the Supreme Court noted that they might not be successful. “That the plaintiffs in this case may ultimately not succeed on the merits of their recognition and enforcement action, or that they may not succeed in successfully collecting from the judgment debtors against whom they bring this action, are not relevant factors,” the court ruled. “A party may bring an action for all kinds of strategic reasons, recognizing that their chances of collection on the judgment are minimal. It is not the role of the court to weed out cases on this basis.” Mr. Lenczer, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he expected Chevron to raise the same fraud and corruption allegations at a Canadian trial. But he hoped the company would have a change of heart. “Nobody’s challenging that there was widespread contamination and pollution here, so the question is: Why not remediate it?” Morgan Crinklaw, a spokesman for Chevron, said, “The government of Ecuador and Petroecuador, the state-owned oil company, are responsible for the current environmental and social conditions in Ecuador.”

Chevron
Ecuador
Lawsuits
Oil and Gasoline


Storm Delayed $1 Billion in Shopping, Report Says

Abstract: The snowstorm that swept through the Northeast kept shoppers home on Sunday and Monday and delayed about $1 billion in postholiday spending, according to a report released Wednesday. Still, retailers will probably reclaim much of that amount. “Just like they played football on Tuesday night,” said Bill Martin, the founder of ShopperTrak, referring to the Eagles-Vikings game that was rescheduled from Sunday because of the snow, “shoppers will be back in the stores Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.” ShopperTrak, which estimates foot traffic and retail sales, said in a report on Wednesday that consumers around the country spent about $10 billion on retail goods on Sunday and Monday but that an additional $1 billion was lost because of the snowstorm that struck much of the East Coast. In regions other than the East Coast, visits to retailers continued to rise. In the Midwest, South and West, foot traffic to retailers rose 38.6 percent on Sunday compared with Sunday a year earlier, which was on Dec. 27. In the Northeast, foot traffic declined 6.1 percent. Many of the after-Christmas sales are driven by people who want to exchange or return gifts, or use up gift cards, and stores often put in new merchandise or special discounts to get them to spend extra while they are in the store. In the Northeast, that demand “will be pent up for a couple days until they dig out, so we probably can anticipate some reasonable to good numbers on Thursday and Friday of this week,” Mr. Martin said. Up until Christmas Eve, the holiday shopping season was the best since before the recession. Retail sales (including gasoline, restaurants and food) rose 5.5 percent for the 50 days through Dec. 24 compared with the same period last year, according to MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, which tracks overall spending. And in some categories, like apparel, spending was above where it was in 2007, before the economic crisis hit. ShopperTrak reported Wednesday that retail sales for Christmas week dropped 4.1 percent compared with a year ago, while foot traffic fell 6.8 percent. Almost all of that decline, however, was the result of a calendar shift, Mr. Martin said. In its counting, ShopperTrak starts each week on a Sunday. Last year, Dec. 26 was included in the Christmas week numbers as it fell on a Saturday; this year, it was on a Sunday, so it was pushed into the next week’s numbers. Last year, Dec. 26 was the second-highest-performing sales day of the holiday season, which gave all of Christmas week a boost. Speaking of this year’s Christmas-week sales, Mr. Martin said, “They’re sort of expected to be soft, and they’re not terribly soft.” The main challenge for retailers with snowstorm-related delays in shopping is that many report sales by the calendar month, and analysts follow those closely. If some shoppers do not get to stores until January, that will affect the December sales numbers, though it will probably have little impact on sales over all. A snowstorm before Christmas can mean real problems for retail sales, but one after Christmas is not as terrible, said Joel Bines, a director in the global retail practice at the consulting firm AlixPartners. “The folks that were going to go and redeem their gift cards or return their gifts” will do it later in the week, he said. “The weather has some impact, but it’s marginal.” “The good thing about Dec. 26 and beyond is there isn’t an artificial deadline looming over anyone,” Mr. Bines said. On Sunday in Columbus, Ohio, which was not paralyzed by the storm, Lisa Watford, 46, went to Polaris Fashion Place so her daughters could return several gifts. “Oh, I bought them a lot of stuff,” Ms. Watford said. “I thought they’d love it all. I thought I was very tuned in. And they didn’t like any of it. So we’re here returning most of it.” “Well, it’s not my fault that the sweatpants were awkward,” a daughter, Jordan, 16, said. “They just didn’t fit right.” The three had already gone to Macy’s, Buckle and Forever 21 to exchange gifts. Now, at American Eagle Outfitters, Jordan had picked out a jean skirt that was more than half off and a long-sleeve T-shirt. Her sister Taylor, 14, was giggling by the jeans racks as they browsed. “Well, at least they’re having fun,” Ms. Watford said. “That makes two out of the three of us.”

Weather
Shopping and Retail
Consumer Behavior


Jets Activate Holmes, Who May Make Opener

Abstract: Santonio Holmes was removed from the physically unable to perform list and added to the active roster Friday, a sign that he could be available for the Sept. 8 season opener. If Holmes is able to return then — or soon after — he will provide a lift to an unproven receiving corps, as well as to the quarterback, whoever wins that job. Holmes, recovering from two operations after sustaining a serious foot injury Sept. 30, has been coy, if not evasive, all training camp when discussing his status. When told on Wednesday that he looked sharp while running routes before last Saturday’s preseason game against Jacksonville, he said, “Looks can be deceiving.” He added, “I’m not able to be at Santonio Holmes’s level of competition.” It will take some time for Holmes to get into playing shape, but it is possible that he will reach that level in time to appear in the Jets’ first game, against Tampa Bay. PITTSBURGH TRADES FOR RUNNING BACK The Pittsburgh Steelers bolstered their injury-plagued backfield, acquiring running back Felix Jones from the Philadelphia Eagles for linebacker Adrian Robinson. Jones was chosen by the Dallas Cowboys as the 22nd overall pick in the 2008 draft. Robinson made the Steelers as an undrafted rookie free agent last season. (AP) SUSPENSION UPHELD Houston Coach Gary Kubiak said the N.F.L. had upheld Texans defensive end Antonio Smith’s three-game suspension. Smith was suspended Wednesday for the last two preseason games and Houston’s season opener for hitting Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito with Incognito’s helmet in a preseason game. (AP) SEAHAWKS WIN The rookie Christine Michael ran for 97 yards in the visiting Seattle Seahawks’ 17-10 preseason victory over the Green Bay Packers. (AP)

Jets
Santonio Holmes
Steelers
Felix Jones
Philadelphia Eagles
Antonio Smith
Football
Sports injury
Houston Texans
Adrian Robinson Jr


Several Hundred at Bank of America Are Said to Face Layoff

Abstract: Echoing the slowdown in activity that has hit Wall Street’s biggest institutions, Bank of America plans to cut several hundred jobs in its investment banking unit this week, according to employees. With its acquisition of Merrill Lynch at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Bank of America has evolved into one of Wall Street’s biggest firms. But according to interviews with several employees, all of whom insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, the cuts stem from the weak trading environment as well as a desire to weed out underperforming workers as the year winds down. “You want to trim your least productive, weakest players to preserve the bonus pool for everyone else,” said one banker. “We know things haven’t been great in the spring or summer.” Like many other firms on Wall Street, Bank of America’s New York-based investment bank expanded in the first half of the year, hiring more than 1,000 employees amid hopes that the nascent economic recovery would pick up speed. But as the broader economy has slowed, so has Wall Street . In the current quarter, New York Stock Exchange volume is running roughly 25 percent below the pace in the second quarter of 2010. Nasdaq volume is down 18 percent over the same period. The layoffs are expected to affect several parts of the investment banking unit, including areas like equity and fixed-income trading as well as investment banking. Another executive added that management intended to periodically review business performance and make cuts. The job reductions at the investment bank come at the same time as a broader refocusing in Bank of America’s retail banking operations, said Richard X. Bove, an analyst with Rochdale Securities. In addition to closing some branches, the bank, based in Charlotte, N.C., is also shifting some workers from full-time status to part time. “The headcount cuts are only one part of it,” said Mr. Bove. “Both on the capital markets side and on the traditional banking side, B. of A. is under pressure.” Now the nation’s biggest bank, the company has grown through many mergers. But at an investor conference last week, the company’s chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, said it was time to focus on internal growth rather than more acquisitions. “Our franchise is complete,” Mr. Moynihan said. “We don’t need to acquire anything. We don’t need to use capital for acquisitions.”

Bank of America Corp
Layoffs and Job Reductions
Banks and Banking
Merrill Lynch & Co


Debt Talks May Be Defining Moment for Greece, and for Angela Merkel

Abstract: BERLIN — With Greece embroiled in civil war and the shadow of Soviet domination looming over Europe in 1947, President Harry S. Truman called for “immediate and resolute action,” putting up hundreds of millions of dollars to keep Greece in the Western camp. A failure to aid Greece “in this fateful hour,” Mr. Truman warned, would have repercussions “far-reaching to the West as well as to the East.” Almost 70 years later, the present bears echoes of the past. Its politics deeply divided, Greece is mired in a terrible depression, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is doing his best to fan the embers of a new East-West standoff. But this time, the critical player is Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany . As the de facto leader of the European Union , she is a crucial voice in deciding whether, in 2015, Greece is worth the cost — 240 billion euros, or about $270 billion, and counting in bailout money — to keep it in the European fold. The brinkmanship over Greece’s finances is now entering what officials on all sides say is a decisive phase, with a meeting late Wednesday of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels and a two-day summit meeting beginning on Thursday of European Union leaders, where Ms. Merkel will once again be first among equals. Beyond finances, the outcome of those negotiations will have lasting ramifications for European unity and security, raising profound questions about Ms. Merkel’s leadership and about her legacy as a primary driver of five years of austerity policies that Greeks blame for pushing them to a precipice. It is a signature moment that may well define Ms. Merkel’s nearly a decade in power, and reveal whether her vision for the bloc transcends Germany’s penchant for rules and its domestic politics, and even whether Berlin is prepared to play a leadership role on the global stage. Some financial experts say that Europe could absorb a Greek exit from the eurozone, despite the many questions that departure would raise for creditor nations forced to write off hundreds of billions of euros. But, political analysts warn, a Greek exit from the euro could set off a chaotic switch to a largely devalued currency. That could almost instantly create a disgruntled and impoverished Greece, run by a far-left government already friendly with Mr. Putin, providing the Russian leader with an even firmer handhold to divide Europe. “Russia uses every opportunity to divide and weaken the European Union,” Rosen Plevneliev, the president of Greece’s northern and poorer neighbor, Bulgaria, said in an interview on Wednesday. “What is happening in Greece is geopolitical as well as economic,” he added. “Of course we worry. We follow very closely what is happening.” Ms. Merkel is also no doubt worried. Germany “is being forced to widen the prism through which it looks at the crisis,” said Mark Leonard, head of the London-based European Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s not just about the economic rules anymore.” Portraits From Greece as It Endures a Crisis From a small island to the capital in Athens, here is a glimpse into some of the lives of Greeks as their country struggles to repay billions in debt. Ms. Merkel finds herself confronted with at least three crises in Europe: a potential exit from the euro currency by Greece, the danger that Britain might leave the European Union, and a newly assertive Russia. Often accused by critics of preferring tactics over strategy, or a cool approach over emotional commitment to Europe, Ms. Merkel is trying to bolster European unity in each case. Keeping Greece in Europe has been a strategic consideration since 1947, when Mr. Truman declared his commitment — as NATO was being formed — to Greece and Turkey in what became known as the Truman Doctrine. Greece went through a brutal three-year civil war that erupted after World War II . In the late 1960s and early ’70s, it was ruled by a military junta. In 1981, the country was readmitted into the European fold, joining what was then called the European Community. In 2001, it entered the eurozone without European, German or other officials raising serious questions about what Athens acknowledged in 2009 were cooked figures. At a conference last weekend in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, Greece found its way onto an agenda originally focused on threats to the post-Cold-War order, like Russian muscle-flexing and the rise of the Islamic State. Asked about the risk of Greece’s leaving the eurozone, and possibly even the European Union, Alexander R. Vershbow, deputy secretary general of NATO, said: “This could have repercussions for us. We are worried about this.” The United States and NATO, he added, “are not putting on blinders and seeing this as only an economic issue.” Since taking power in January, Greece’s leftist government has played up the wider stakes involved in the debt crisis, a move that some dismiss as a negotiating tactic but that others see as an indication of the readiness of Syriza, the party of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, to tilt away from the West. “Nowadays, the role of geopolitics is more important than before,” the Greek foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, said in a recent speech at the University of Oxford in England. He accused the European Union of abandoning its “culture of compromise” and evolving “into an empire in which the bureaucracy in Brussels, the financial markets and Berlin — the so-called New Rome — play a special role.” The European bloc, he added, must look beyond narrow financial calculations and at the bigger geopolitical picture. “It needs to learn to see beyond the end of its nose, as we say in Greece,” Mr. Kotzias said. François Lafond, the executive director of EuropaNova, a research group based in Paris, said that European countries were particularly concerned that failure to stabilize Greece could unleash a torrent of migrants, both Greeks and refugees from the Middle East who continue to flood into the country. Germany has consistently said that Greece and others must abide by European Union rules, and that exceptions in themselves fray the bloc’s unity. But, seemingly to give herself some political cover, perhaps for a compromise, Ms. Merkel has left much of the haggling to her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble. She has also emphasized that Greece’s troika of creditors — the other eurozone countries, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank — must sign off on any deal. If Greece eventually tumbles out of the eurozone, however, Ms. Merkel would suffer the blow, not only to her legacy, but also potentially to a range of other policies aimed at preventing the unraveling of European unity, so painstakingly assembled since 1945. Not least, without a new Greek deal, Ms. Merkel’s leadership on sanctions against Russia, and on keeping Britain in the European Union, could also wobble significantly. Emmanuel Macron, the French economy minister, made clear in an interview this week that Ms. Merkel had an eye on the geopolitical landscape. “The chancellor is completely aware of the situation and the consequences, both politically speaking and economically speaking, of a Grexit,” he said, referring to a Greek exit from the eurozone. “I think the Germans now will push with us to find a compromise in the coming days if the Greeks decide to accelerate and work for a credible package,” he added. But there is still no certainty of a deal this week that would allow the Europeans to release €7.2 billion in credit to enable Greece to pay the International Monetary Fund the €1.6 billion it owes by June 30. Even then, Ms. Merkel needs the German Parliament to approve a deal — just as Mr. Tsipras needs the Greek legislature to do the same. Approval is not certain in either case. The stern line of Mr. Schäuble, Ms. Merkel’s finance minister, reflects the skepticism of scores of deputies in the Christian Democratic bloc who will need to be brought on board for any deal. German and other European politicians feel they have been treated brusquely by Athens, whose harsh speech has forced European Union officials out of their usual mode of woolly compromise forged in closed-door debate. Norbert Röttgen, head of the foreign affairs committee in Parliament and a deputy for Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said, “The whole way the Greek government has behaved has really damaged the mood” in Berlin. Still, he expressed confidence that “a large majority” in the German Parliament would vote for a new Greek deal, if one could be reached, though amid much dissent. The geopolitical worries could tip that balance. Mr. Lafond, of EuropaNova, said such concerns had prodded even European leaders thoroughly fed up with what they see as the broken promises and histrionics of Greek negotiators to keep pushing for a deal to keep Greece in the eurozone. “If it were not for the geopolitical context,” Mr. Lafond said, “they would have let them leave long ago.”

Greece
Angela Merkel
US
Germany
European Central Bank
EU
Euro Crisis
IMF
Vladimir Putin


Eagles’ Loss to Lions Adds to Run of Struggles and Doubts

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — Not much has come easily for the Philadelphia Eagles this season. Not holding on to the ball, not scoring points and certainly not winning. On Sunday, all of those struggles came together in what might be the Eagles’ most troubling loss of the young season, a 26-23 overtime defeat to the Detroit Lions , after leading by 10 points with a little more than five minutes left in regulation. The loss dropped the Eagles to 3-3, and with two consecutive losses heading into their bye week, it has cast doubt on what had seemed to be their supremacy of the N.F.C. East after a victory over the Giants in Week 4. “We put ourselves in the position to win games and we don’t finish,” quarterback Michael Vick said. “I can’t pinpoint what’s going on in the moment.” The final few minutes might suggest that the Eagles’ greatest problems are on defense, and certainly that unit cannot be excused from blame. The Eagles have not generated a sack in three games; on Sunday. they allowed a Lions offense that was inept in the third quarter to roar to life in the fourth, when quarterback Matthew Stafford was able to rifle critical passes to Tony Scheffler, Nate Burleson and Calvin Johnson. But it was also the defense that kept the Eagles from falling into an early hole, when the offense was struggling — again — with turnovers and with pressure on Vick. The defense kept Johnson in check in the first half, when he caught one pass, and Stafford managed just six completions. But for a while, it was fair to wonder if Vick would make it through the game. If an injury did not take him off the field — Vick was crunched by Detroit defenders repeatedly in the first half, as the offensive line crumbled around him — then perhaps Coach Andy Reid would be forced to. The Eagles have scored one touchdown in the first quarter this season and this was the fourth straight game in which the Eagles were scoreless at the two-minute warning before halftime. “We’ve got to learn how to win football games as coaches and players,” said Reid during a brief, largely monosyllabic news conference. “There are times and places where everybody has to go look themselves in the mirror and get better, me included. We can’t start the way we’re starting and we can’t finish the way we’re finishing offensively and defensively.” Vick has accounted for a disproportionate number of the Eagles’ turnovers this season, with five lost fumbles and eight interceptions. He has fumbled so often that he carried a football around last week to get more comfortable holding it tightly; and as the Eagles have struggled to score, Vick’s hold on the starting job seemed as slippery as his one on the football. Vick fumbled a snap once in the first half, but managed to recover it. He was intercepted twice in the game, but the Lions managed no points from either of them. But in the second half of a sloppy, penalty-riddled game, Vick and the Eagles offense reminded everyone what they can look like on their best days. Vick scrambled, passed after shorter drops and stayed upright more often, throwing for 193 of his 311 yards after halftime until he was finally able to hit what had seemed likely to be a game-sealing 70-yard touchdown pass to Jeremy Maclin late in the fourth quarter. “Honestly, yeah, I know our team,” Vick said quietly, when he was asked if he thought that pass had put the game away. “After the touchdown to Maclin, I thought it was a great position for us to be in. Before I knew it, we was in a fight. It’s very frustrating because we’re digging holes for ourselves.” The greatest hole came at the end, when the Eagles won the coin toss in overtime. Vick, who had begun to get rid of the ball more quickly in the second half, reverted to his old form, holding the ball while the pocket collapsed around him. He was sacked first for a 7-yard loss. Then again for a 14-yard loss. On third-and-31 from the Eagles 4-yard line he heaved a ball incomplete. The Lions received the punt at midfield and needed just four plays to move into position for Jason Hanson’s winning 45-yard field goal. Before the season began, the Eagles owner, Jeffrey Lurie, made it clear that another 8-8 season was unacceptable, a strong signal that should the Eagles miss the playoffs, it could be the end of Reid’s tenure in Philadelphia after 14 seasons. Reid undoubtedly has more immediate concerns. He singled out nobody in particular after the game, and that, of course, is part of the problem. This was a systemic failure, calling into question the blocking of the offensive line, the defensive philosophy that is failing to apply pressure and the quarterback who is battling his own foibles. In the meantime, one of the dozens of people waiting for the players to emerge from the quiet locker room summed up the difficult, not-terribly-relaxing days ahead. “There goes our bye week,” she said.

Philadelphia Eagles
Detroit Lions
Football


For ‘EcoMoms,’ Saving Earth Begins at Home

Abstract: SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — The women gathered in the airy living room, wine poured and pleasantries exchanged. In no time, the conversation turned lively — not about the literary merits of Geraldine Brooks or Cormac McCarthy but the pitfalls of antibacterial hand sanitizers and how to retool the laundry using only cold water and biodegradable detergent during non-prime-time energy hours (after 7 p.m.). Move over, Tupperware. The EcoMom party has arrived, with its ever-expanding “to do” list that includes preparing waste-free school lunches; lobbying for green building codes; transforming oneself into a “locovore,” eating locally grown food; and remembering not to idle the car when picking up children from school (if one must drive). Here, the small talk is about the volatile compounds emitted by dry-erase markers at school. Perhaps not since the days of “dishpan hands” has the household been so all-consuming. But instead of gleaming floors and sparkling dishes, the obsession is on installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, buying in bulk and using “smart” power strips that shut off electricity to the espresso machine, microwave, X-Box, VCR, coffee grinder, television and laptop when not in use. “It’s like eating too many brownies one day and then jogging extra the next,” said Kimberly Danek Pinkson, 38, the founder of the EcoMom Alliance, speaking to the group of efforts to curb eco-guilt through carbon offsets for air travel. Part “Hints from Heloise” and part political self-help group, the alliance, which Ms. Pinkson says has 9,000 members across the country, joins a growing subculture dedicated to the “green mom,” with blogs and Web sites like greenandcleanmom.org and eco-chick.com . Web-based organizations like the Center for a New American Dream in Takoma Park, Md., advocate reducing consumption and offer a registry that helps brides “celebrate the less-material wedding of your dreams.” At an EcoMom circle in Palo Alto, executive mothers whipped out spreadsheets to tally their goals, inspired by a 10-step program that urges using only nontoxic products for cleaning, bathing and make-up, as well as cutting down garbage by 10 percent. “I used to feel anxiety,” said Kathy Miller, 49, an alliance member, recalling life before she started investigating weather-sensitive irrigation controls for her garden with nine growing zones. “Now I feel I’m doing something.” The notion of “ecoanxiety” has crept into the culture here. It was the subject of a recent cover story in San Francisco magazine that quotes a Berkeley mother so stressed out about the extravagance of her nightly baths that she started to reuse her daughter’s bath water. Where there is ecoanxiety, of course, there are ecotherapists. “The truth is, we’re not living very naturally,” said Linda Buzzell, a therapist in Santa Barbara who publishes the quarterly EcoTherapy News and often holds sessions in her backyard permaculture food forest. “We’re in our cars, staring at the computer screen, separated most of the day from the people we love.” “Activism can help counteract depression,” Ms. Buzzell added. “But if we get caught up in trying to save the world single-handedly, we’re just going to burn out.” Like many young women, Ms. Pinkson’s motherhood — her son Corbin is now 6 — coincided with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and the advent of treehugger.com and grist.org . A favorite online column is “Ask Umbra,” whose author weighs in on whether it is better to buy leather shoes or “pleather” ones that could contain solvents. Shaina Forsman, a 13-year-old daughter of eco-mother Beth Forsman, said the alliance branch in San Rafael helped her mother take action at home. Her mother turned the thermostat down so low that Shaina sometimes wore a jacket inside, she said proudly. She was also monitoring time spent in the shower, so as not to waste water. Shaina said she tried to get her mother to compost, but “we got ants.” One of the country’s wealthiest places, Marin County, is hardly a hub of voluntary simplicity; its global footprint, according to county statistics, is 27 acres per person, a measure of the estimated amount of land it takes to support each person’s lifestyle (24 is the American average). Members of the EcoMom Alliance “are fighting a values battle,” said Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., and the author of “The High Price of Materialism.” “They are surrounded by materialism trying to figure out how to create a life more oriented toward intrinsic values.” Wendy Murphy, 41, a member of EcoMoms in San Anselmo, became an activist after she noticed that the new tablecloths in her children’s preschool contained polyvinyl chloride. She and a fellow mother, working with the Green Schools Initiative, a nonprofit in Berkeley, developed green guidelines for shopping, like buying chlorine-free cleaning products, low-formaldehyde furniture and toys made of natural materials. The matter of toys is particularly thorny. At the EcoMom party in San Rafael, women traded ideas about recycled toys for birthday presents and children’s clothing swaps. Then there is the issue of the materials used in imported toys. “It’s ‘Mom, these come from China,’ ” Pam Nessi, 35, said of her daughters’ recent inspection of two of their dolls. “It can be overwhelming. You don’t want them to freak out.” At last year’s Step It Up rallies, a day of environmental demonstrations across the country, the largest group of organizers were “mothers concerned about the disintegrating environment for their children,” said Bill McKibben, a founder of the event and author of “The End of Nature.” Women have been instrumental in the environmental movement from the start, including their involvement in campaigns a century ago to save the Palisades along the Hudson River and sequoias in California and, more recently, Lois Gibbs’s fight against toxic waste at Love Canal. In public opinion surveys, women express significantly higher levels of environmental concern than men, said Riley Dunlap, a professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University. Lately “local lifestyle activism,” much of it driven by women, has been on the rise and is likely to continue, Dr. Dunlap said. “Just belonging to a national environmental organization, which seemed effective in the 1970s and ’80s, doesn’t work anymore, particularly in an era of government unresponsiveness,” he said. Ms. Pinkson and her colleagues are well aware of “the mom demographic,” as they call it, in which, according to surveys for the Boston Consulting Group, women say they “influence or control” 80 percent of discretionary household purchases. Thus far, their thrust has been more about being green consumers than taking political action. The eco life can occasionally spawn domestic strife. Julie DeFord, a 33-year-old mother in Petaluma, said the high cost of organic produce prompted serious “conversations” between her and her husband, Curt, a lawyer, especially after seven nights of chard. And ecomotherhood is not always sisterly. At the EcoMom party recently, some guests took the hostess, Liz Held, to task for her wall-to-wall carpeting (potential off-gassing), her painted walls (unhealthful volatile organic compounds) and the freshly cut flowers that she had set out for the occasion (not organic). Their problems with the S.U.V. in the driveway were self-explanatory. All the new eco-perfectionism did not seem to faze her. “I look around my house and think, ‘I haven’t changed all my light bulbs,’ ” she said. “But it doesn’t fill me with guilt. I think about all the things I’ve done so far. I just try to focus on the positive.”


A Review of 2hopewell in South Glastonbury

Abstract: It is a welcoming sight on a cold winter’s eve — a country house, brightly lit, on a country corner. This is 2hopewell Bistro and Bar. Inside you find a cozy basement tavern, and above it dining rooms with ax-hewn posts, flickering candlelight, white walls and wide pine floorboards. Potted palms and Rothko-like prints by the artist Anne Hebebrand, illuminated on the walls, add an apt touch of color. The restaurant is intimate and quiet, with expert service timed perfectly to deliver a luxurious evening. There’s no hurry here. The menu, a collaboration between the chef, Christopher Crotti, and Bill and Adam Driggs, the brothers who own 2hopewell, offers an eclectic New American array of meats and seafood with Italian and Asian accents. At least one of the collaborators has a sweet tooth. For instance, the dessertlike wedge salad includes candied bacon, pistachios, copious blue cheese dressing and an aged balsamic reduction, sweet and thick, drizzled on top like chocolate sauce. Two other salads also hit conspicuous sweet notes, like the apple jam in an arrangement of red and white beets with mixed greens and goat-cheese mousse, and the sliced poached pears and maple Dijon vinaigrette in an excellent spinach salad. Image The menu at 2hopewell includes a grilled swordfish steak with butternut-squash risotto and a romesco sauce with capers. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times Many dishes deftly pose sweet against savory or sour, like the teriyaki dipping sauce for spring rolls of pulled pork, kimchi and chorizo, or the tangy caper-laden romesco sauce, thickened with crushed croutons, that balances the butternut-squash risotto accompanying grilled swordfish. An enormous portion of rigatoni in marinara with chunks of sweet homemade sausage plays off the bitterness of broccoli rabe and salty wafers of shaved aged Parmesan. The starters excelled. I particularly liked a duet of Bomster scallops and bits of pork belly, both pan-seared, that surrounded a scoop of mashed potatoes, with a dollop of apple chutney and a pear-and-black-pepper jus studded with whole peppercorns. The piping hot arancini were four perfect orbs of cheesy, fried deliciousness containing peas and prosciutto — a nice play on carbonara — and decorated with dabs of walnut-arugula pesto below and garlic-truffle aioli on top. Another winning appetizer offered two pairs of large grilled shrimp precariously balanced in yin-and-yang configurations on black bean cakes and served with a peppery New Orleans-style rémoulade. Not everything succeeded. A Caesar salad was overdressed and limp. An entree of seared sea bass was flaky and buttery, but it made for a monotonous ensemble, in taste and color, partnered with fregula, cauliflower, parsnip purée and crisp-fried leeks. The sauce on an otherwise superb bone-in rib-eye was too heavy on the cream and too light on the black pepper and rosemary. A jaw-droppingly large appetizer of calamari — piled high on a rectangular plate almost a foot long — was tasty but oily and too salty, and its sriracha aioli was overpowering. Image The homemade desserts include a chocolate mousse parfait with mixed berries. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times Other dishes made it easy to forgive these flaws, such as a bone-in stuffed pork chop, oozing mozzarella and sweet roasted red bell peppers, in an intensely flavored tomato demi-glace, accompanied by sautéed zucchini and carrots and mashed potatoes. Best of all was a braised short rib, fall-apart tender and unctuously fatty, in a lavish welter of black-pepper gnocchi mixed with bits of chorizo, halved grape tomatoes and fried onions in a rich mushroom beurre rouge — an unimprovable dish, but not for the calorie counter. Neither were the desserts, all homemade, which included a slice of cheesecake that conveyed the essence of pumpkin; a chocolate mousse parfait with mixed berries, which lacked the ideal airiness but was delicious nonetheless; and an irresistible chocolate and espresso bread pudding surrounded by swirls of crème anglaise. The elegant ambience and well-executed, slightly expensive fare at 2hopewell left me wondering: Why is the restaurant called a “bistro”? The word evokes something more casual, both on the plate and in the setting, than what is on offer here. Maybe in America, “bistro” has come to mean simply “a place where you will eat well and feel comfortable.” Fair enough. Call 2hopewell what you will. I call it a fine place to spend an evening.

Restaurant
Christopher Crotti
Adam Driggs
South Glastonbury CT
Bill Driggs


Lindsey Vonn Captures 40th World Cup Win of Her Career

Abstract: Lindsey Vonn showed that she was back to her best by winning a downhill race Saturday in Are, Sweden, three weeks after a concussion curtailed her world championships. It was the 40th World Cup victory of her career, extending her American record for men and women. Vonn finished in 1 minute 40.93 seconds for her seventh victory this season. “It’s still hard to believe I have 40 victories,” Vonn said. “It’s a big number, so I’m incredibly happy. I feel lucky that I’m able to do what I love every day.” Vonn was followed by Tina Maze of Slovenia, who trailed by 0.13, and the World Cup leader Maria Riesch of Germany. Stacey Cook of the United States was fifth, and her teammate Julia Mancuso finished 11th. Vonn, 26, withdrew from the late stages of the world championships Feb. 14 because of the lingering effects of a concussion. She crashed during training Feb. 2 in Austria. On Friday, she finished sixth in the super combined, her first race since the worlds. Vonn was 0.04 behind Maze on her second time split but accelerated strongly in the middle section and made a clean jump into the bottom slope. She clenched her fist and threw back her head as she crossed the finish line at the Swedish resort, then waved to the crowd. “I did my best, and I think it was a good, aggressive run,” Vonn said. She did not perform well in her opening events at worlds. She finished seventh in the super-G, pulled out after the downhill portion of the super combined and took silver in the downhill. She said she felt as if she were “skiing in a fog,” unable to maintain her concentration for an entire run. Vonn, the defending World Cup overall champion, passed a series of concussion protocol examinations each day during worlds but drew criticism for competing so soon after a head injury while still reporting symptoms. “No one was really listening to what I was saying, either,” she said. “It was definitely a really hard time for me. Some people were saying that I shouldn’t race because it’s too dangerous, and some people were saying that I’m just making it up, that it’s not even true.” Vonn leads by more than 100 points in the downhill standings but trails Riesch by 176 in the overall race. It was Vonn’s third downhill win this season after victories at Val d’Isère, France, and Altenmarkt-Zauchensee, Austria. ITALIAN WINS SUPER COMBINED Christof Innerhofer of Italy skied a strong super-G to win the World Cup super combined in Bansko, Bulgaria, edging Felix Neureuther of Germany by 0.01. Ted Ligety of the United States was fourth, matching his career best in the super combined. Innerhofer, who won the super-G world title two weeks ago, finished 11th in the slalom earlier Saturday, but rallied to win in 2:23.87. Thomas Mermillod Blondin of France was third, 0.33 back. Jean-Baptiste Grange of France led after the slalom but crashed early in the super-G and did not finish. Ivica Kostelic of Croatia, who has already wrapped up the World Cup title for the discipline, was fifth. AMERICAN TAKES MOGULS EVENT Hannah Kearney of the United States won the dual moguls events in a freestyle skiing World Cup in Marianske Lazne, Czech Republic. Kearney defeated Jennifer Heil of Canada. Chloe Dufour-Lapointe of Canada was third. Kearney leads the World Cup overall standings with three events remaining. The Olympic champion Alexandre Bilodeau defeated his fellow Canadian Mikael Kingsbury to win the men’s event.

Vonn Lindsey
Alpine Skiing
World Cup (Skiing)
Innerhofer Christof


Steven A. Ballmer Speaks Loudly and Carries a Big Wallet

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — Speaking last month to a few hundred M.B.A. students at the University of Southern California, Steven A. Ballmer, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers , broke into verse. He recited a snippet of a song from the Broadway musical “Pippin”: “Rivers belong where they can ramble. Eagles belong where they can fly. I’ve got to be where my spirit can run free. Got to find my corner of the sky.” Ballmer sensed his audience was more attuned to cloud computing, which he seeded while running Microsoft, than to Stephen Schwartz’s “Corner of the Sky.” And so he supplied some context, explaining how Pippin, the son of King Charlemagne, had engaged in a lifelong quest for fulfillment. Ballmer might have been talking about himself. Retired from Microsoft, where he was employed for 34 years, the last 14 as its chief executive, Ballmer has spent the first several months of his retirement pondering how to build a personal legacy through philanthropy. “What is it like to be rich beyond belief?” a student asked him. Ballmer, a billionaire, answered: “It’s sort of a privilege, sort of a duty, sort of a burden. How do I make a difference?” Eleven months ago, Ballmer won a bidding war for the Clippers. He bought the franchise for $2 billion in what was considered part business transaction, part act of beneficence, after the Clippers’ longtime owner, Donald Sterling, incurred a lifetime ban from the N.B.A. for making racist comments that were recorded and made public. The official transfer in August of the team to Ballmer, whose Swiss-born father worked for the United States Army as an interpreter in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, was seen as a clean break from the Clippers’ desultory past. In Ballmer, 59, the team acquired a loud and proud leader. He was more inclined to show his enthusiasm than his navel, unlike Sterling, who at Ballmer’s age was still wearing shirts unbuttoned to his waist. Phoenix Suns forward Reggie Bullock said Ballmer drew attention in his own way on game nights. “He has a very distinctive voice,” said Bullock, who was a Clipper until a trade in January. “It sounds like he’s howling at the moon.” With his manic enthusiasm and deep pockets, Ballmer was going to swoop in and pry Los Angeles from its decades-long love affair with the Lakers. That was the plan, anyway. But even though the Clippers finished with 35 more victories than the Lakers, they trailed their fellow Staples Center tenants in the local regular-season ratings. The Clippers are a reflection of their new owner, all right. But it is not the goofy, giddy guy seen gyrating like a giant inflatable tube man near his baseline seat — most memorably during a January halftime performance by the singer Fergie that prompted the real estate mogul Donald Trump to describe Ballmer as “an embarrassment to rich people.” Ballmer emphasized to the U.S.C. students the need to be “tenacious and hard-core” in the pursuit of their goals. It is a message his team seems to have absorbed. Matt Barnes and Blake Griffin were fourth and fifth in the N.B.A. in technical fouls in the regular season with a combined 25. Nine Clippers had more technical fouls than any single player on the San Antonio Spurs, their first-round playoff opponent. The Clippers beat the Spurs, the defending N.B.A. champions, in the opening game of the series. Game 2 is Wednesday night. Image Ballmer with Chris Paul this month. Ballmer commutes to games from his home in Seattle, traveling by private jet in one of his few outward displays of wealth. Credit Danny Moloshok/Associated Press Ballmer commutes to games from his home in Seattle. He travels by private jet, explaining, “Time is our most precious commodity, and there are conveniences that wealth brings to essentially get you more time.” It is one of Ballmer’s few outward displays of wealth. His wardrobe is more J. C. Penney than J. Crew. The security guard standing outside the Clippers’ locker room during one homestand marveled at how effortlessly Ballmer blended into the crowd on game nights. For the mathematically gifted Ballmer, sports have always served as his main medium of communication. In high school, he said, the first varsity letter he earned was in track. “The coach gave me one in 10th grade,” he said, “because a guy had made a scoring error and deprived us of a point. I was helping out as the manager and I discovered the error, and the coach said, ‘I guess you scored a point for us in a meet,’ and gave me a letter.” Helping Out at Practice Harking back to his days as the manager of his high school basketball team, Ballmer sometimes attends Clippers practices and retrieves basketballs for the players during drills. “I didn’t know what to expect,” Doc Rivers, the Clippers’ coach, said. “The guy’s worth $24 billion. I have to think if I had $24 billion, I probably would be different. I hope not, but I probably would be. He’s the most normal $24 billion guy I know.” At Microsoft, Ballmer was known as a charismatic speaker, the P. T. Barnum of the techie set. During one company meeting at Safeco Field, he saw an employee snapping a picture with an iPhone from Apple, a competitor. He confiscated it and playfully pretended to stomp on it in a scene caught on the baseball park’s giant video screen. In front of a roomful of people, Ballmer is at his communicative best: funny, engaging, expressive. In a sit-down interview in January, Ballmer rocked back and forth in his chair with his arms held stiffly at his sides as he answered questions. Ballmer refused to make his wife, Connie, or their three sons available to be interviewed. He also declared his youngest son’s high school basketball games off-limits to a reporter. “Sports is the easiest thing for me to bond with the kids over,” he said. “Academically, I probably grind them a little more.” After games, Ballmer said, there is what he described as “the debrief,” a sacrosanct part of the drive home. He said: “I’ll ask, Where do you want to start? Are we going to start with the team’s performance, or your performance? Offense or defense? Then we go through the team, we go through him, every kid, how we think he did.” Image Ballmer introduced products in 2012 as Microsoft’s chief executive. He bought the Clippers after their longtime owner, Donald Sterling, incurred a lifetime ban from the N.B.A. Credit Brendan McDermid/Reuters Ballmer added, “The debrief of the game in our family is always as important as the game itself.” With the Clippers, Ballmer took a more hands-off approach. “He’ll say, ‘Is it all right to come in and say hi?’ ” Rivers said. “And I say: ‘You’re the owner. You can barge in.’ And I mean that. I tell him all the time, he made an incredible commitment. I want him to enjoy it. I want him to come and do whatever he wants. I want to hear his opinion. He’s smarter than me.” Rivers said he had first crossed paths with Ballmer in 2008, during the SuperSonics’ last season in Seattle. Ballmer, a SuperSonics season-ticket holder, had seats next to the visitors’ bench. When Boston came to town, Rivers, then the coach of the Celtics, said he had turned to Ballmer and said, “Hey, you need to buy this team and keep it here.” “Only if you coach the team,” said Ballmer, Rivers recalled. “Well, that’s not going to happen,” Rivers said. “That was our introduction to each other.” Ballmer did not remember the meeting. He clapped gleefully as the story was relayed to him. “Doc doesn’t make things up,” he said. “That’s not his style.” Locking In an Asset One of Ballmer’s first moves as owner was to award Rivers a $50 million contract extension that runs through the 2018-19 season. Amid the chaos created by Sterling’s racist remarks, Rivers emerged as a calming presence. From his days at Microsoft, Ballmer recognized that he had a strong brand asset in Rivers. “You’ve got to build an interesting product, have a brand that people can understand, try to build a product that can be successful,” Ballmer said. He added: “There’s a natural shorter product cycle because players get older. I think the notion that you have to be tenacious and hard-core really applies. You can’t be ripping things up and starting over again.” Ballmer was raised outside Detroit, where his father, Frederic, was a manager at Ford. “When he was up, he was up,” Ballmer said of his father. “When he was mad, you knew it.” He chuckled and added: “I think I’m a little like my dad. When I’m up, I’m up. When I’m down, I’m down.” His family lived comfortably, he said, but was not well-off. He said he had been able to attend private school with the help of academic scholarships. “My dad was an immigrant who came here with nothing and worked his way up as a payroll clerk for Ford,” Ballmer said. “I’m going to guess he probably maxed out around $45,000 a year.” Image Ballmer, 59, the Clippers’ loud and proud leader, is retired from Microsoft, where he was employed for 34 years, the last 14 as its chief executive. Credit Danny Moloshok/Associated Press Ballmer said he did not believe his father had finished high school. “He never told us for sure whether he graduated or not,” he said. “Even in his last days, my sister and I tried to get him to ’fess up.” Ballmer said his father had rarely spoken of his interactions with the Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg. “He saw a guy get hanged,” he said. “That did come back to him later in his life. When he was sort of older and closer to his own death, the visualization of seeing this guy hang. ...” His voice trailed off. Ballmer earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard, where he lived down the hall from Bill Gates. Ballmer attended the Stanford Graduate School of Business for a year before dropping out to join Microsoft, which Gates had founded with Paul Allen. “When I joined Microsoft we were not an ‘A’ team,” Ballmer said. “We were doing some ‘A’ work because we had three ‘A’ players. We weren’t very deep. We had three or four guys, all guys who were amazing, and then we had a bunch of people who were mediocre or worse.” A History in Los Angeles The same could be said of Ballmer’s Clippers, who have an M.V.P.-caliber player in point guard Chris Paul, a multifaceted offensive player in Griffin and a tough matchup in center DeAndre Jordan. The drop-off in talent after that is precipitous. “We’re trying to get better,” Ballmer said. “We’ve got some of the most exciting players in the league. Our team is better than it was at the beginning of the year, no question.” The Clippers are not Ballmer’s first flirtation with Los Angeles. Before he enrolled at Stanford, Ballmer, a cousin of the comedian Gilda Radner, who died in 1989, came here with the notion of breaking into the movie business. “I thought it would fit well with my personality,” Ballmer said. A summer spent reading scripts and parking cars at private functions for meal money convinced him otherwise. “I got enough of a flavor to know the movie business probably wasn’t going to be a compelling enough thing for me to not go ahead and go back to Stanford,” he said. At U.S.C., a student stepped to the microphone, produced a billed cap and said: “Hi, Steve. How are you doing? I’m going to put this hat on real quick.” Squinting from the stage, Ballmer said, “It looks good, but what is it?” “It’s a Warriors hat,” the student smugly replied, referring to the Golden State team, which led the Western Conference in the regular season with 67 wins. “Next!” Ballmer bellowed. “Go, Clippers! Go home, Warriors!”

Clippers
Basketball
Doc Rivers
Steven A Ballmer