Gazprom Objects to European Antitrust Inquiry

Abstract: BRUSSELS — Reacting to the latest attempt by the European Union to loosen its hold on energy supplies, Gazprom , the Russian gas export monopoly, said Wednesday that it would strongly contest an antitrust investigation and insisted that its pricing practices were in line with the rest of the industry. In a statement, Gazprom also said it had the “status of a strategic organization” in Russia — an apparent reminder that the company, the world’s largest gas exporter, is controlled by the Kremlin. The European Commission announced Tuesday that it had begun a formal investigation into whether Gazprom violated E.U. antitrust laws by restricting European buyers’ right to sell gas to one another, and by unfairly raising costs by linking gas prices to oil prices. The case is another sign that the Union is trying to fulfill a long-held goal of reducing its reliance on Russia, which supplies about a quarter of its needs. But the commission is also running the risk of provoking the ire of President Vladimir V. Putin, since much of Russia’s wealth relies on revenue from gas and oil exports, particularly to Europe. “It’s not clear why this suddenly has become a subject for investigation,” Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, told Bloomberg News on Wednesday. Mr. Peskov said Gazprom has for years applied a widely used price formula, an apparent reference to the link between gas and oil prices. The E.U. authorities can fine companies found in breach of antitrust laws 10 percent of their global annual sales, and they can order companies to change their business practices so they comply with European standards. The commission has in the past successfully levied fines against foreign companies that do business in Europe, notably against Microsoft. The commission has also won concessions from Gazprom in similar cases involving contracts in Western Europe. Shares of Gazprom suffered their biggest drop in five weeks Wednesday, closing down 2 percent at 155.21 rubles, or $4.81, on the Moscow Exchange. Andrius Kubilius, the prime minister of Lithuania, said the commission was right to begin an investigation. He said his country had “repeatedly spotlighted” the issues raised by the commission and had made a formal complaint early last year. Lithuanian officials have complained that because the country has tried to open up its energy market, Gazprom had punished Lithuania with the highest gas prices in Europe. The initial focus of the commission’s investigation would be on deals between Gazprom and buyers in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. “We are interested in the long-term contracts between Gazprom and the companies who they supply,” Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia, said during a regular news conference Wednesday. The investigation “does not concern Russia,” he said. The investigation follows raids the commission made last year on natural gas companies across Europe, including Gazprom affiliates, that were suspected of anti-competitive practices. Mr. Putin, who was then prime minister, said at the time that his government would follow the case with “very close attention.” Gazprom has already sparred with the commission over its contracts in Western Europe and agreed to fundamental changes nearly a decade ago. As part of a series of settlements with Gazprom between 2003 and 2005, the commission ensured that companies, including Eni of Italy, OMV of Austria and Ruhrgas of Germany, would no longer be prevented from reselling gas to buyers in other countries. Since then the Union has stepped up efforts to diversify its gas supply, particularly after disputes between Gazprom and Ukraine, a transit point for European gas, led to severe winter shortages, notably in 2006 and in 2009. The commission also has continued to push for development of the Nabucco pipeline , which would deliver natural gas to Europe from the Caspian region, bypassing Russia. Russia is backing a competing project called South Stream, a pipeline that would run underneath the Black Sea and deliver huge amounts of Russian gas to the Union, bypassing Ukraine. South Stream could go into operation in the second half of this decade. E.U. officials said Wednesday that they were aware of reports suggesting that the Bulgarian government would sign a deal with Gazprom before the end of the year to help develop the South Stream pipeline in exchange for a discount on gas prices. But they declined to say whether that was part of their investigation. Last year the commission proposed methods to discourage E.U. member states from striking bilateral deals with energy suppliers, including Russia, arrangements that weaken the Union’s efforts to develop a unified energy policy. Commission officials said Wednesday that the legislation was still being considered by European lawmakers.

Gazprom
European Union
European Commission
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Antitrust Laws and Competition Issues
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)


After ’78 Fumble, Giants’ Pisarcik Found Another Chance, With the Eagles

Abstract: The sequel to the Joe Pisarcik story is seldom told in the New York area. He fumbled the ball, set his legacy in stone. What more did the haunted Giants fan ever want to know, or recall? What did it matter that, two years later, Pisarcik moved on, went to Philadelphia, of all places, and got the ball back? For his sake, he began his recovery from the botched handoff to Larry Csonka that handed a last-minute victory to the Eagles on Nov. 19, 1978, and symbolized years of Giants futility with a bit of unrehearsed Eagles frivolity. “I remember it clearly, even though it’s 30 years ago,” said Herman Edwards, who scooped up the fumble and ran 26 yards for a touchdown that was as shocking to the old Giants Stadium as DeSean Jackson’s 65-yard punt return on Sunday was to the New Meadowlands Stadium, which is likely to be haunted by the play for at least the next 32 years. “Dick Vermeil had told us that he had signed Joe to be our backup quarterback and he was going to be bringing him into the locker room,” Edwards said in a telephone interview. “There were these swinging doors coming into the room, and we all gathered around. When Joe walked in, Bill Bergey picked up a ball, dropped it in the middle of the floor and said, ‘Play it again, Sam.’ I picked it up and handed it to Joe. “And he said, ‘Oh, boy, this is going to be fun.’ ” As it turned out for Pisarcik, Philadelphia — where the fans once booed Santa Claus — was Disneyland compared with the North Jersey swampland where his reputation was buried. “Maybe if Joe had gone to a place where he would have started, he would have been able to break away from that game,” Edwards said. “But being a backup, not playing much, it kind of defined him. And that was too bad because Joe was a heck of a guy, and I’ll tell you something, he could spin the ball pretty darn good.” For those looking for omens in the wake of another shocking Giants defeat to the Eagles on Sunday, Edwards and Vermeil said unequivocally that the Pisarcik fumble was the impetus that drove their young but developing team into the 1978 playoffs with a 9-7 record. The Giants, by comparison, fell apart and did not make the playoffs until 1981. They released Pisarcik after the 1979 season, and he was welcomed in Philadelphia as Ron Jaworski’s backup. Pisarcik spent five years in the role, and had the immediate gratification of suiting up for Super Bowl XV in New Orleans on Jan. 25, 1981, when the Eagles lost to the Raiders. “The thing is, Joe had played against us in an earlier game and threw the ball really well,” Vermeil said in a telephone interview. “So we had a lot of respect for him. Yes, he took some kidding about the play, but none of it was offensive, as far as I can recall.” Recently, the 1980 Eagles had a reunion, Vermeil said, but only about 25 former players turned out, and Pisarcik was not one of them. “He’s been around the community for a long time, a respected guy who does a lot of charity things,” Vermeil said. Asked if he thought Pisarcik identified himself more as an Eagle than as a Giant, Vermeil said, “I would think so, but you’d have to ask him that.” Pisarcik had not shied away from discussing the decision to hand off the ball instead of taking a knee, killing the clock with the Eagles out of timeouts. The call was reportedly made by Bob Gibson, the offensive coordinator, who took Pisarcik to task for changing his play calls the previous week. (Gibson was fired the day after the Eagles game and never worked in pro football again.) “Quarterback falls down and we would have been out of there,” Pisarcik told The Daily News in 2008, the 30th anniversary of the so-called Miracle of the Meadowlands. Reached Monday at his job in financial services, Pisarcik was reluctant to join in the latest revival and speculate on what impact Sunday’s events might have on the Giants-Eagles rivalry. “I’ve talked about this stupid thing so much,” he said. “It was what it was. I’m just letting things go by the wayside.” For his part, Edwards said it was unfortunate that Pisarcik became the face of the folly. Besides the coaches’ accountability, he recalled the center, Jim Clack, looking up at the 40-second clock and snapping the ball before Pisarcik expected it, setting the disaster in motion. “I was so sure the game was over, I was telling Doug Kotar, one of their guys at the line of scrimmage, congratulations,” Edwards said. “But what can you do? Things happen you would never believe could happen.” He watched Sunday’s drama unfold and had visions of 1978 the second he saw Jackson break into the clear. “All the Giants can do is move on, go to Green Bay and get a win,” Edwards said. “What else can they do — blow up the stadium? Can’t do that. It’s brand new.”

Football
Pisarcik Joe
Philadelphia Eagles
New York Giants


TV Dinners in a Netflix World

Abstract: SOLON, Ohio — The pizza arrived, mozzarella melting on a red crushed tomato blanket dotted with brilliant green spinach aboard a crispy, irregularly shaped crust dusted here and there with ash. The only hint that it had emerged from the freezer rather than the nearby wood-fired oven in the culinary kitchen at Nestlé’s new research and development center here? A faint, raised ring around the edge of the crust, a telltale sign that it was stamped out of a sheet of dough in an industrial process. Nestlé has sunk $50 million into the center, which opened in July, in a bold effort to reinvigorate its frozen foods business, which has been in the doldrums in the United States together with other stalwarts of the frozen aisle. “We test more than 2,500 recipes every year here, using more than 800 raw materials, and it typically takes 100 recipes to get to a single product,” said Sean Westcott, director of the center. It is not the only one pumping money into its frozen offerings, either. ConAgra Foods is revamping its frozen food brands, which include Marie Callender’s and Banquet. Atkins Nutritionals started a new frozen line in 2013, and when Christine Day left the C.E.O. chair at Lululemon, she invested in Luvo, a relatively new line of frozen foods. “I was looking for convenient food options that my dad, who has taken over the cooking, could make easily for my mother, who has diabetes,” said Ms. Day, who is now Luvo’s chief executive. “But standing in the frozen food aisle looking at what was available, I wasn’t impressed.” Other consumers have apparently shared her disappointment. According to data from Nielsen, sales of frozen food in the United States have bumped along, growing at a rate of less than 1 percent on average over the last four years. On a unit basis, sales have declined 2 percent. According to a 2014 report from Jeffries, an investment bank, established companies have lost more than 5 percent of their share of the revenue generated by frozen entrees, while smaller and private label brands increased their share. Traditional brands of frozen vegetables showed similar losses to smaller competitors. Todd Hale, a consultant for Nielsen, said only time will tell whether efforts to revive traditional frozen food brands will pay off. “They’ve lost their way in terms of keeping up with the latest flavor and other trends and now are trying to catch up,” Mr. Hale said. “I’m not saying it will work for every segment of the business out there, but there’s certainly a lot of effort going into driving growth again.” Frozen foods’ malaise isn’t so surprising. Consumers today are seeking out foods with intense flavors, no gluten, high protein, minimal and fresh ingredients, turning their backs on the frozen section at a time when frozen food executives have been working feverishly to reduce sodium and sugar, eliminate additives and otherwise improve their products. “There’s been a lot of baggage in this industry with consumers thinking we use a lot of preservatives,” said Rob McCutcheon, president of ConAgra’s frozen business. “But we usually don’t need to add preservatives to our frozen products, because freezing is like nature’s pause button.” Image A Luvo frozen dish of chicken chile verde with black beans and polenta. Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times But Nestlé and ConAgra, as well as other top producers of frozen food like General Mills , which owns the Green Giant brand, and Pinnacle Foods Group, which is behind Mrs. Paul’s and, in the United States, Birds Eye, no longer dominate the freezer cases the way they once did. Established frozen brands like Lean Cuisine and Marie Callender are facing stiff competition from smaller, nimbler competitors like Luvo, Amy’s Kitchen and Simple Truth. Atkins Nutritionals saw an opportunity, for example, to exploit a gap in the frozen food cases that no big company seemed to have spotted: There were few options for adherents of low-carb diets like Atkins. So the company came up with a frozen line that has a low-carb pizza and breakfast sandwich — and sales in the first year hit $68 million and have just kept growing, according to Scott Parker, the company’s chief marketing officer. Only two of Luvo’s meals have more than 1 teaspoon of added sugar, and none contain more than 500 milligrams of salt. Its products are packed in patented paper pouches that consumers can open onto their own plates. “No one likes eating out of a black plastic tray,” Ms. Day said. She said research by the Hartman Group showed that consumers shop the frozen aisle the way they choose what to eat off a menu, and so Luvo designed its products with that in mind. “Most meals in that aisle traditionally have been designed around price, the value shopper, and that’s not what’s coming out in our research at all,” she said. Products like Luvo’s are helping reinvigorate a category that still generates a handsome piece of grocery store sales. Frozen foods accounted for more than 6 percent of $810.8 billion in sales in the 52 weeks that ended June 27, according to Nielsen — or more than four times the revenue generated by the deli department. Image Workers make and examine lasagna noodles for the trademark Stouffer's ridges. Credit Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times Judson Wells, manager of Kroger’s frozen food business, said its frozen sales had actually grown, thanks to such new brands. “With everybody promoting fresh and local, there’s a lot of noise out there for those type of items and not a whole lot of noise about frozen foods,” Mr. Wells said. “A lot of the traditional suppliers of frozen food kind of let the conversation get away from them, and now they’re having to catch up.” Jeff Hamilton, president of Nestlé Prepared Foods, agreed that Nestlé had been “slow to catch on to what was going on.” When he took over the division in March 2014, sales of Lean Cuisine, Nestlé’s biggest frozen brand, were in a free fall. “We’re not making subtle changes,” Mr. Hamilton said. “We want to be making radical changes.” A little more than a year later, Nestlé introduced new and reformulated versions of a dozen Lean Cuisine products and put the entire line in new, more contemporary packaging that proclaims attributes like “gluten-free” and “22g protein” out front. Mr. Hamilton treated a visitor to a lunch that sampled several of Nestlé’s retooled frozen products, including Lean Cuisine’s Vermont White Cheddar Mac & Cheese (“made with organic pasta” and “No GMO ingredients”) that is made with Cheddar from a single Vermont supplier and ridged noodles to help the cheese cling. Another item on the tasting menu was Cilantro Lime Chicken blanketed in a tomatillo sauce and served with black beans and corn, one of several items in a new, protein-rich frozen line called Stouffer’s Fit Kitchen. “What the consumer today wants is foods that are indulgent but healthy,” said Lucien Vendôme, director of strategy and innovation for Nestlé Prepared Foods. Image A researcher tests microwaved food temperatures at the new Nestlé facility in Solon, Ohio. Credit Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times ConAgra has identified “pockets” of growth in frozen food and is working to capitalize on them. Sales of its potpies, for instance, have grown by more than $100 million over the last four years, and 10 months ago, the company added a family-size potpie that has already generated $10 million in retail sales. Soon it will introduce a vegetarian potpie and a chili potpie, hoping to draw even more consumers to the category. “When you think about millennials who are just learning how to cook, building that skill set, frozen foods are perfect for them,” said Bob Nolan, senior vice president for insights and analytics at ConAgra. Rob Dickerson, an investment analyst at Consumer Edge Research, estimates that sales of frozen processed food will grow at a compound annual rate of 4.6 percent globally over the next five years, representing additional revenue of $32 billion, similar to the growth rate of coffee. There is a lot of investment activity in frozen foods, too. This summer, Nomad Foods, an investment company backed by William Ackman, who has also invested in Burger King and Mondelez, snapped up Iglo and Findus, two large European frozen foods businesses. And investment analysts have speculated that Pinnacle may sell Birds Eye’s United States business to Nomad, which already controls the brand in Europe, and General Mills is reportedly in negotiations to sell Green Giant to a French food company. “I don’t think frozen is dead or even under so much pressure as the big guys would have you believe,” Mr. Dickerson said. “In my mind, it’s really more of a branding issue, and the question really is: Can they renovate those big brands? I think the jury is still out on that.”

Frozen food
ConAgra Foods
General Mills
Nestle
Amy's Kitchen
Supermarkets


Tibet Protesters Are Held in China After Riot

Abstract: SHANGHAI — Nearly 100 people, most of them monks, were being held in a Tibetan area of northwestern China after a crowd attacked a police station there on Saturday, according to the state-controlled media. The authorities, who said they had restored order in the region, said 6 people were arrested and 89 others had “surrendered” to the police. The attack involved monks from the Ragya Monastery in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Golog in Qinghai Province. The riot was the latest and biggest skirmish this month between ethnic Tibetans and Chinese authorities and comes as Tibet and adjoining areas face growing tensions amid a series of historically delicate anniversaries. China’s Tibetan region consists largely of Tibet and several bordering provinces that have large Tibetan populations. The police said the unrest broke out Saturday after rumors spread in the region about a man being investigated by the police and then disappearing after he broke Chinese law by advocating Tibetan independence. China has sent thousands of troops to Tibetan areas in the northwest part of the country to guard against a repeat of the anti-Chinese riots that occurred last March, when Tibetans rioted in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, killing some Han Chinese. While China is celebrating the 50th anniversary of what it calls the liberation of Tibet from serfdom this March, many Tibetans are calling for independence and marking the date when China took control over the region and forced its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, to flee into exile in India. Much of the region is closed to journalists and independent observers, making it difficult to verify the government reports. Several journalists who have entered the region have been detained or forced to leave. In recent weeks, China has released a series of papers on how its rule has created a safer and more prosperous Tibet. Beijing has also repeatedly accused the Dalai Lama of advocating independence for Tibet. He insists he is seeking only autonomy, not secession. But in Tibetan areas, where there remains a great deal of support for the Dalai Lama, there are frequent reports of small uprisings. Last Monday, a bomb was set off in a government building in a Tibetan part of western China’s Sichuan Province. About a week earlier, a police car and a fire truck were damaged by minor explosions in a Tibetan part of Qinghai. Last week, the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala, India, released a seven-minute video, which is being shown on YouTube, that purports to show Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans last March following the riots in Lhasa. There has been no independent confirmation that the footage is authentic.


A Review of ‘Prints by Mary Cassatt,’ at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum

Abstract: NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — In an 1890 letter famous among scholars of the period, Mary Cassatt urged the painter Berthe Morisot , her friend, “You must see the Japanese — come as soon as you can.” The Japanese she was referring to was an exhibition of 725 woodblock prints and albums at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. But Cassatt was writing from a particular perspective: she was obsessed with prints and printmaking. “In the Company of Women: Prints by Mary Cassatt,” an exhibition of 23 prints at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum here, offers a snapshot of Cassatt’s engagement with the medium. Cassatt (1844-1926) wasn’t always partial to prints. Painting was the premier form in Europe and America during her lifetime. Trained in Philadelphia before moving permanently to Paris in 1874, she devoted her early career to mastering it. But in the 1870s, she experienced a shift. A table in the current exhibition laid out with books and catalogs provides some context. In one essay, the art historian and curator Nancy Mowll Mathews argues that Cassatt was influenced by an etching revival driven by artists like James McNeill Whistler and by the interest in prints among her inner circle of artists, which included Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro . But there was also the “semicommercial” impulse to create works that were cheaper than paintings, easier to distribute and would “stimulate the sale of the larger, more expensive pieces,” according to Ms. Mathews. Image “Tea.” Credit Collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University And then there were the Japanese, whose ukiyo-e woodblock prints had inspired painters from Manet to Degas. Ms. Mathews describes another conduit for Cassatt’s fascination with Japanese prints: French literature. In the novel “Manette Salomon” (1867), by the Goncourt Brothers, there is an artist-character who, confronted with a gray winter day in Paris, picks up an album of Japanese prints and loses himself in their bright colors and bold compositions. The show at the Zimmerli starts with black-and-white drypoint prints that Cassatt made in the late 1880s before pursuing what she considered the Holy Grail of printmaking: color. The most significant “work” on view is actually a series of 12 drypoint prints — a rare, intact version held in the Zimmerli’s collection of what is called the “Set of Twelve” (1889-1890). “Tea” from the “Set of Twelve” shows a young woman sitting at a table with a teapot and cup, a large fan in her hand. More significant than the title subject, however, is the young woman’s gaze, which is fixed on something (or nothing) outside the picture frame, and establishes her as a thinking subject — no longer a mere object to be portrayed by an artist. Mothers and children were becoming a signature theme for Cassatt. “Mrs. Gardner Cassatt and Her Baby Seated Near a Window” (1889) features the artist’s sister-in-law and nephew in the first visit in which Mary Cassatt met the baby, who had suffered health problems in his early months of life. From the “Set of Twelve,” “The Stocking” and “The Mirror” show other interactions between mothers and young children. But “Nursing” feels particularly relevant for our age, in which breast-feeding has become a stage for political battles — about doing it in public, but also about its value in comparison to formula and bottle-feeding. In Cassatt’s image, a mother with bared breast stares off into the distance as she nurses her child, suggesting the boredom of a repeated chore. And yet, in her right hand she cradles the foot of the nursing baby, underscoring the emotional, as well as the physical, connection between mother and child. The show of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts opened in April 1890, and by that time Cassatt was already deeply invested in her own printmaking — and headed toward color. Morisot had made some color lithographs in 1888, and Cassatt bought a printing press in 1889, which she installed in her apartment-studio in Paris. She started making color intaglio prints first, then a series of aquatints that she exhibited in April 1891. Image “Reflection." Credit Collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University “In the Omnibus” (1890-91), a drypoint and aquatint from that series, is a rare outdoor scene that shows two women and a child — and the flat application of color and sharp divisions of space familiar from Japanese woodblock prints. “The Fitting” (1890-91) includes patterns and a line cutting diagonally across the lower portion of the picture that echoes ukiyo-e prints, but also looks forward to Art Nouveau and pattern-obsessed painters like Matisse. Two of the later works in the show, “By the Pond” (1896) and “Under the Horse-Chestnut Tree” (1896-97), depict mothers and children, but also reveal a deeper saturation of color in their process, as well as Cassatt’s approach to printmaking, derived from painting, which Ms. Mathews describes as “a love of the manipulable surface and variety of tone and texture.” Accompanying the works is a complicated story of economics and politics. Cassatt’s art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel , did not support her printmaking; she also objected to his putting her work in shows devoted to female artists. So she ended up selling her prints to Ambroise Vollard , a young, upstart dealer who would go on to represent Picasso and other modernists. In 1911, Cassatt’s eyesight began to decline, and her production waned. However, in this show, you see a significant aspect of her oeuvre that is often overlooked. For if Cassatt is known as a unique figure among 19th-century artists — both as a successful female artist and the only American to exhibit with the French Impressionists — she also worked in a medium that was marginal and ripe for revival and experimentation. What she learned from other artists and passed on to younger ones can be seen here, even in this small selection of 23 prints on the wall at the Zimmerli.

Mary Cassatt
Zimmerli Art Museum
Art
New Brunswick NJ


Arkansas Hires John L. Smith to Replace Petrino

Abstract: John L. Smith has run with the bulls in Pamplona, skydived from 14,000 feet and climbed a peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. In the football world, he is known as an eccentric, whose legacy as a head coach ranges from being an innovator of the spread offense to telling his Louisville team at halftime of a bowl game that he was leaving for another job. Smith is no stranger to bizarre situations. And on Monday, he joined another one, agreeing to take over as the Arkansas football coach for 10 months to replace the fired Bobby Petrino. Smith, 63, who will make $850,000 for this pinch-coaching hitch, quit as head coach at Weber State before coaching a game. For a coach known for his extremes — in comebacks and in squandered leads — the move offers a high risk-reward. Arkansas, where Smith was an assistant for the previous three seasons, has enough talent and a schedule so favorable that there are visions of a national title in Fayetteville. But if things do not go as planned, Smith could be back looking for work next spring. The only thing that is certain with Smith is that his stint will not be boring. “I think what he’ll bring is an attitude of: ‘We’re not here to play it safe. We’re here to try and win the game and do it aggressively,’ ” said Smith’s brother, Doug Smith, who is a former high school coach and the father of the N.F.L. quarterback Alex Smith. After Petrino’s firing this month amid a scandal, Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long faced a conundrum. He could hire from the outside, a safer long-term move, or bring in a temporary coach so the program could attempt to retain its momentum from 2011, when it went 11-2. In a move an on-field gambler like Smith could relate to, Long doubled down on the short term. Because Smith coached with Petrino at Louisville and Idaho before joining him at Arkansas, few significant changes are likely to be made schematically. With Heisman Trophy contenders in quarterback Tyler Wilson and tailback Knile Davis, Long decided not to overhaul an offense that led the Southeastern Conference in scoring per game last season (36.77). “Coach Smith understands the commitment our players have made to building upon that success and meeting the goals that have been set for the upcoming season,” Long said. “I also have a tremendous amount of confidence in our assistant coaches and believe that under Coach Smith’s leadership they will be able to continue to flourish in their current roles.” Smith has a career record of 132-86 and coached six conference champions. But he is remembered more for quirks like a halftime interview while coaching at Michigan State in which he excoriated, in colorful language, his assistants for botching a field-goal attempt. Incidents like that stand out with Smith, but Doug Smith predicts that his brother will be more dull with the news media and boosters. “He probably won’t be as interesting,” Doug Smith said. But Smith is the coach who led Michigan State on a historic comeback from a 35-point deficit against Northwestern in 2006 and went on to lose his job that year, in part, because the Spartans squandered too many leads. With Smith, the only surprises will be if there are no surprises. Doug Smith said that his brother cut his salary by more than half to leave Arkansas as an assistant in December to return to Weber State , his alma mater, to be the head coach. Doug Smith said that his brother was the type of hands-on coach whom he could see finishing his career at a high school. “He wanted to get back to doing what is fun about being in this profession,” Doug Smith said. “Working with kids on the field and coaching football. Obviously, too, once you become a head coach, you do have a passion for being the guy that makes the decisions.” John L. Smith has found himself in that position once again, in a job with national title stakes. And now, he will be running with the bulls in the SEC, and it should not be boring to watch.

Smith John L
Petrino Bobby
University of Arkansas
Football (College)
Coaches and Managers
Appointments and Executive Changes


People Have Been Dyeing Fabric Indigo Blue for 6,000 Years

Abstract: Indigo and cotton made a fine pair long before bluejeans ever existed. A new study , published this week in Science Advances, reports the earliest known use of indigo dye to date, found in 6,000-year-old cotton textiles from Peru. Before these findings, archaeologists attributed the earliest use of indigo to ancient Egypt, where indigo-dyed linens have been found wrapped around mummies from about 4,400 years ago. In the new study, researchers found traces of blue pigment woven into fabrics from an ancient temple on the north coast of Peru. The dry weather there and the hard, concrete-like material of the temple, located in a prehistoric settlement called Huaca Prieta, preserved the fabrics exceptionally well, said Jeffrey Splitstoser , an assistant research professor of anthropology at George Washington University and an author of the paper. He studied hundreds of textile samples that were found alongside gourds, baskets and mats in the temple. Microscopically examining the fabrics, he found that most had been altered in some way. Often it seemed they had been cut or torn and then had liquid poured over them. Dr. Splitstoser says he thinks the people of Huaca Prieta possibly used the textiles to wrap up offerings to the gods. In addition, Dr. Splitstoser suspects that the fabrics may have been part of an early communication system, which used features like colors and weaving patterns in textiles to encode information. Along with indigo blue, the textiles from Huaca Prieta also featured red, gold, white and tan stripes.

Dye Textile Peru Mummies Archaeology,Anthropology


As Open Goes Public, Many Players Do, Too

Abstract: It is midafternoon on a Friday, and the fairways and greens of the Blue Hill Golf Course 30 miles north of New York City are alive with golfers. In their faces, you see excitement, even glee. It is an 80-degree June day, and cars are streaming up the driveway to Blue Hill’s century-old stone clubhouse. The parking spaces fill one by one, the car trunks immediately popping open. And beside those trunks, in a chorus line of sorts, golfers perform that inimitable dance: the one-legged, putting-on-the-golf-shoe hop. It’s as funny as it is soothing. There are a lot of mores in golf, and this custom is not appropriate in every setting. But here, it is a welcome sight. At moments like these — parking lot teeming, golf course busy and restaurant grill awaiting a happy hour onslaught — you wonder if anyone is in the office complexes that line the nearby roads. Is anyone at work? There has been much hand-wringing lately about a decline in the number of golf rounds played in America. And indeed, some high-end golf clubs and resorts are doggedly in pursuit of the recreational golfer who doesn’t seem to have the free time to hang around the country club the way the golfers of a generation ago did. But the affordable, quality municipal golf courses, as measured by those I surveyed in the metropolitan New York area, are alive and well. Torrey Pines Golf Course, the public facility in San Diego that is hosting this year’s United States Open, has been a symbolic location for a tournament sometimes referred to as the People’s Open. The event will return to the municipally owned Bethpage Black on Long Island next year. Golf in much of America, meanwhile, may be more open to more people than ever before. If, for example, you live in Orangetown, N.Y., the sprawling municipality that owns Blue Hill, and purchase an annual park permit for $50, it will cost you $25 to play 18 holes on weekdays and $30 on weekends (without a cart). Nonresidents pay about $20 more. But these rates are typical. Indeed, in other parts of the country, public golf is probably a better bargain. Still, within 50 miles of New York City are dozens of golf courses that represent a good value. If you are a New York State resident, you can play at Bethpage Black for $50 on weekdays and test its respected companion layout, the Red Course, for $36. Not far away, the greens fees for the Red Course at Eisenhower Park are roughly the same if you are a Nassau County resident (though the course is closed until July 1 because it is host to a Champions Tour event June 26-28). Connecticut is home to a number of publicly owned courses that are similarly economical, like the quirky but entertaining Oak Hills in Norwalk and the oft-honored Richter Park in Danbury. In New Jersey, it is more of the same at two scenic courses: Sunset Valley in Kinnelon and Hominy Hill in Colts Neck. New York City, not surprisingly, offers an assortment of good choices, like Dyker Beach in Brooklyn, La Tourette in Staten Island and Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. There is no secret to their success. Go walk their fairways — they are fun to play, accessible and full of people happily tugging on their pull carts. The golf hazards are penal but not treacherous. If you hit a ball into the woods, you will probably find it and have a way out of trouble. That is usually by design. “We make sure the woods are more sparse and not dense,” said James Stewart, the head P.G.A. professional at Blue Hill. “And we manicure the areas under the trees so the rough is not too high. It helps the speed of play. It keeps everyone moving instead of spending all their time looking for the ball or trying to figure out how to get out of the woods.” Blue Hill, once a private estate, has big, old trees and wide greens that are not as forgiving as they seem. There are sweeping views of Lake Tappan and the Hudson Highlands. The demographic is decidedly mixed: men, women, children and seniors. Together, on Blue Hill’s 27 holes, they will play nearly 70,000 rounds of golf this year. “The value golf courses are supporting golf right now,” said Jay Mottola, the executive director of the Metropolitan Golf Association. “Those places are still very busy.” Players are lucky to have all styles of golf courses, from high-end resorts to traditional clubs, and newer spectacular sites that continually impress with their architectural beauty. Together, they make up golf’s delightfully varied universe. It remains a privilege to play the exclusive, top-ranked golf courses, just as there are specific advantages to belonging to a golf club — advantages that millions, myself included, enjoy. But there is something about the local, quality municipal layouts that are close to golf’s heart. Every player should visit one regularly. It’s a refresher course in what gives the game its appeal. Because it’s not really about the makeup of the sand in the bunkers or the Stimpmeter reading of the greens. It’s about getting the ball in the hole and trying to do it with a bunch of other people inspired by the same goal. When finished, you sit back in a restful bar, probably with a window onto the final green, so you can watch others trying to do the same thing. By the way, when you visit, you can change your shoes in the locker room or restroom if you like. It’s perfectly acceptable. But your legs — and your sense of humor — won’t be warmed up when you stand on the first tee. A Tip That Involves Choking? One Pro Swears by It The teaching pro Del Snyder, who has been helping golfers play better since the 1950s, has an easy cure for short-game woes. It’s not what club you hit, but where you grip that club. “Not enough players, even good players, choke down on the golf club handle when hitting a shot from 50 yards and in,” said Snyder, who is in his 32nd year as a club pro at the Golden Horseshoe Golf Club in Williamsburg, Va. “The closer your hands are to the ball, obviously the more control you have over where that ball is going. You can reduce the size of the swing and feel the club head better. It just makes sense. “But day after day, I see amateurs standing very upright hitting chips and pitches and wondering why they don’t have any touch. It’s simple: shorten the club, get more touch.” A Good Work Out Spoiled Golf is good for your health and can extend your life by five years, according to a recently released Swedish medical study. And better golfers seem to live the longest. Data collected from 300,000 Swedish golfers showed that the death rate in golfers was significantly lower than it was for the rest of the population. The lowest death rates were reported among those with the lowest golf handicap. Researchers reasoned that because the game is good for you, playing it more often (typical behavior for better golfers) yields even more benefit. Leaders of the study said the health advantages were linked to players’ being outside in fresh air for several hours and walking briskly between shots. And therein lies the rub for many North American golfers who like to ride in a golf cart or are required to use one at a cart-only golf course. Two studies released last week, in Alabama and Ohio, reported that injuries sustained while riding in a golf cart were on the rise. The moral of the story is that golfers should walk if possible. Or perhaps that they should move to Sweden. The actor Bill Murray, a golfing comedy icon, was stopped by the police while driving a golf cart in downtown Stockholm late one night last year. The police apparently feared for his safety. Five Welcome Comments 1. After your first tee shot: “You been working out?” 2. On each tee: “You’re still up.” 3. With wonder: “It looked like it went in the hole!” 4. On the 18th tee: “Is that the same ball you hit off the first tee?” 5. With some disgust: “You know that the winner buys the first round.”


Trenton: Committee Will Investigate Legislator

Abstract: Colleagues of a member of the State Senate agreed yesterday to investigate whether he violated ethics rules in connection with his job at the state’s troubled medical university, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. The senator, Wayne R. Bryant, recently resigned as chairman of the budget committee as federal and state authorities investigated. Senator Bryant could not be reached for comment yesterday, and his lawyer told the ethics committee he had advised Mr. Bryant not to comment. A report from a federal monitor this year said the university received a substantial increase in state aid about the same time it hired Mr. Bryant to a $35,000 job. Mr. Bryant has disputed the report.

Senate
Ethics
New Jersey
Legislatures and Parliaments


Size of Blast and Number of Injuries Are Seen as Rare for a Rock From Space

Abstract: The meteor that exploded over Russia on Friday set off the largest explosion of its kind in more than a century, at least according to Western scientists. And even more unusual for a meteor, it caused numerous injuries, mostly from flying glass, as the shock wave violently jolted the city of Chelyabinsk below. It hit on the same day that astronomers were watching another larger rock miss Earth by just 17,200 miles, and experts scrambled to understand the two rare cosmic events. Some initially speculated that Earth was passing through a swarm of asteroids, but the Russian meteor came from the other direction. “There is no relation there,” said Paul Chodas, a scientist with NASA’s Near Earth Object Program . “It seems like we’re in a cosmic shooting gallery here. There were two very rare events happening on the same day. Pure coincidence.” Based on preliminary calculations, the solar system interloper that shook Chelyabinsk weighed about 7,000 tons and was about 50 feet in diameter when it entered the atmosphere at 40,000 miles per hour at about 9:20 a.m. local time, said Peter G. Brown, a professor of physics at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Brown based his calculations on low-frequency sound waves that traveled as far as Alaska. A worldwide network of such sensors listens for these vibrations, too low to be heard by humans, to verify the ban on nuclear tests. Russian experts estimated a much smaller size, of just 10 feet across and 10 tons. The asteroid streaked across the sky for about half a minute, unleashing thunderous sonic booms. (Asteroids are orbiting rocks usually between Mars and Jupiter; they are called meteors when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere and begin burning up.) The meteor was likely made of stony materials and not solid metal, so as pressure from the atmosphere increased, it exploded at an altitude of 12 to 15 miles above the surface. It released the equivalent energy of 300,000 tons of TNT, Dr. Brown said, although he said that estimate could be revised higher, perhaps to 500,000 tons of TNT. The atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima during World War II was the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. “This is the largest recorded event since the 1908 Tunguska event ,” Dr. Chodas said. On June 30, 1908, the explosion of a meteor, believed to be an asteroid, flattened millions of trees over 800 square miles in a remote, largely unhabited area of central Siberia about 1,200 miles away from Friday’s event. At a NASA news conference Friday afternoon, Bill Cooke, who leads the Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said the orbital path of the meteor showed that it was an asteroid, not a comet. At its farthest point from the Sun, it was 2.5 times as far away as the Earth, before its elliptical path took it closer, and the Earth got in its way on Friday. Other large meteors could have splashed unnoticed in an ocean in decades past, but nowadays military satellites on the watch for missile launches would certainly notice an incoming meteor this bright. The asteroid was impossible to detect, Dr. Cooke said, because it was approaching from the dayside. “And as you know, telescopes can’t see things during the daytime,” he said. Clark R. Chapman, a senior scientist at the Southwest Research Institute’s Department of Space Studies based in Boulder, Colo., said this was the first time a crashing meteor is known to have injured a large number of people. “That’s basically never happened before,” he said. Within the emptiness of space, billions of rocks, from dust to those miles across, zip around the inner solar system, and collisions with the Earth’s atmosphere are frequent. Most are mere grains, burning up high in the atmosphere. Larger ones — the size of peas — can be spotted streaking across the night sky as “shooting stars,” but those also never reach the ground. “Small objects the size of a basketball hit the Earth almost every day, once a day on average, and car-size objects hit every month or two,” Dr. Chodas said. “Little stuff hits the Earth all the time. We just don’t know about it. It’s all burning up in the atmosphere.” Scientists estimate that these tiny meteoritic bits add up to 80 tons of material falling on Earth from outer space each day. Giant impacts have changed the course of life on Earth, notably 65 million years ago when an object several miles wide slammed off the coast of Mexico and killed off the dinosaurs. Collisions with objects the size of the Russian meteor or 2012DA14, the asteroid that did not hit Earth on Friday, occur perhaps once a century. NASA surveys had cataloged 95 percent of near-Earth asteroids 0.6 miles wide or wider, but fewer of the smaller ones. A year ago, a telescope in Spain discovered 2012 DA14, a 150-foot-wide asteroid just after it made a somewhat close pass to Earth, missing by 1.6 million miles. With an orbital period of 366 days, it made a return visit on Friday, at a much closer distance of 17,200 miles. That is closer than many telecommunications satellites. But despite needless anxiety that it would hit Earth, its passing was uneventful, and it will not come that close again until at least 2080. If 2012 DA14 had collided with Earth, it would have released the energy of 2.5 million tons of TNT, NASA scientists estimate, or nearly 10 times as much energy as the meteor in Russia. Some estimates put the Tunguska event even bigger, perhaps 20 million tons of TNT. The makeup of an asteroid can vastly change the damage. With Tunguska, the asteroid also exploded in the air. But in Arizona, an asteroid of similar energy, but made of nickel and iron, slammed into the ground about 50,000 years ago, leaving a crater 4,000 feet wide. Occasionally, astronomers do find the very small asteroids. Astronomers also had fortuitous luck in 2008 when they discovered an asteroid, smaller than the Russian one, and were able to track it as it entered the atmosphere over Sudan 20 hours later. But most of the time, near misses of objects that small are missed. “It is detectable, but only if we are looking at the right place at precisely the right time,” Dr. Chodas said.

Russia
NASA
Outer space
Meteors and Meteorites
Chelyabinsk Russia


Justices to Decide on U.S. Release of Detainees

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to decide whether federal courts have the power to order prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay to be released into the United States. The court’s decision to hear the case adds a further complication to the Obama administration’s efforts to close the prison at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A measure in Congress that would allow detainees to be admitted to the United States just to face trial had to overcome strong resistance before winning final passage on Tuesday. The administration has met with only fitful success in persuading foreign allies to accept prisoners cleared for release. The Supreme Court is unlikely to hear arguments in the case before late February, a month after the administration’s deadline of Jan. 22 for closing the prison, though there have been recent signals that the deadline may not be met. The case concerns 13 men from the largely Muslim Uighur region of western China who continue to be held although the government has determined that they pose no threat to the United States. Last October, a federal judge here ordered the men released into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area. But a federal appeals court reversed that ruling in February, saying that judges do not have the power to override immigration laws and force the executive branch to release foreigners into the United States. That appeals court ruling has tied the hands of judges considering challenges from other prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. According to the Justice Department, trial judges have granted petitions for writs of habeas corpus from 30 Guantánamo prisoners. Of that group, 10 have been transferred to foreign countries. None have been admitted to the United States. The case presents the next logical legal question in the series of detainee cases that have reached the Supreme Court. Last year, in Boumediene v. Bush , the court ruled that federal judges have jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus claims from prisoners held at Guantánamo. Lawyers for the Uighur prisoners say the Boumediene ruling would be an empty one if it did not imply giving judges the power to order prisoners to be released into the United States if they cannot be returned to their home countries or settled elsewhere. A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said the administration had been working diligently to release or try prisoners held at Guantánamo. “This administration remains as committed to closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, which has served as a prime recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and strained our alliances overseas, as it was on the day the president signed the executive order” to close the prison, Mr. Boyd said in a statement, adding that nine detainees had been transferred to foreign countries since President Obama took office in addition to those ordered released by the courts. Sabin Willett, a lawyer for the Uighur detainees, said in a statement that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case demonstrated that courts also have an important role to play. “We hope this will result in a ruling that confirms that the writ of habeas corpus guarantees to the innocent not just a judge’s learned essay but something meaningful — his release,” Mr. Willett said. The appeal from the Uighurs has been pending in the Supreme Court since April, and it is not clear why the court acted on it now. The Obama administration has sent four of the Uighur prisoners to Bermuda, and Palau has said that it will accept most of the rest. But at least one prisoner apparently has nowhere to go. The Uighur prisoners have said they fear they will be tortured or executed if they are returned to China, where they are viewed as terrorists. The new case, Kiyemba v. Obama, 08-1234, may turn out to be moot if the administration is successful in settling all of the Uighur prisoners abroad. Even if that happens, however, other cases presenting the central issue in the case are likely to follow so long as prisoners cleared for release with nowhere to go remain at Guantánamo. The new case pits a fundamental judicial function, that of policing unlawful imprisonment through writs of habeas corpus, against one entrusted to the political branches, that of enacting and enforcing immigration laws. In ordering the Uighur prisoners released, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina acknowledged that this conflict creates a difficult separation-of-powers question. But Judge Urbina said that time weighed in favor of the Uighurs in the constitutional balance. “Because their detention has already crossed the constitutional threshold into infinitum and because our system of checks and balances is designed to preserve the fundamental right of liberty,” the judge wrote, “the court grants the petitioners’ motion for release into the United States.” The appeals court ruled that Judge Urbina had overstepped his constitutional authority. “An undercurrent of petitioners’ arguments is that they deserve to be released into this country after all they have endured at the hands of the United States,” Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote for the majority of a three-judge panel. “But such sentiments, however high-minded, do not represent a legal basis for upsetting settled law and overriding the prerogatives of the political branches.” In urging the Supreme Court not to hear the new case, the Justice Department said the Uighurs were “free to leave Guantánamo Bay to go to any country that is willing to accept them, and in the meantime, they are housed in facilities separate from those for enemy combatants under the least restrictive conditions practicable.” But, the Justice Department’s brief continued, “there is a fundamental difference between ordering the release of a detained alien to permit him to return home or to another country and ordering that the alien be brought to and released in the United States without regard to immigration laws.” Lawyers for the Uighurs, who were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, argued that the appeals court’s ruling rendered the writ of habeas corpus an empty gesture. It made courts “powerless to relieve unlawful imprisonment,” the Uighurs’ brief argued, “even where the executive brought the prisoners to our threshold, imprisons them there without legal justification, and — as seven years have so poignantly proved — there is nowhere else to go.”

Detainees
Supreme Court
Habeas Corpus
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba)
Uighurs (Chinese Ethnic Group)


2 Men Get $18 Million Each in Wrongful Conviction Case

Abstract: Thirty years ago, a 16-year-old girl, Theresa Fusco, was found raped and strangled near the roller skating rink on Long Island where she worked. Not long afterward, prosecutors charged three men, who were convicted and went on to spend 18 years in prison. On Thursday afternoon, a federal jury awarded two of those men, John Restivo and Dennis Halstead, $18 million each for a wrongful conviction by Nassau County and for the years they lost. The county dismissed charges against the three men in 2003 after DNA evidence indicated that the rape had been committed by someone else, who has never been identified. One of the three men, John Kogut, was eventually retried and acquitted, but he lost his wrongful conviction lawsuit and is appealing. In arguing the Restivo-Halstead case, Nick Brustin, who represented the two in their lawsuit against the county, produced evidence that he said showed that a county detective, Joseph Volpe, planted hairs in Mr. Restivo’s van to impugn him and hid other evidence that might have stopped a conviction. Lawyers for the county disputed the evidence’s scientific value. “Today, a jury finally acknowledged what the county never has — that its own officers’ intentional misconduct robbed these innocent men of eighteen years of their lives,” Mr. Brustin said in a statement. Mr. Volpe died in 2011 at age 63. Louis M. Freeman, a lawyer for the county, said he would appeal the verdict to the federal Court of Appeals in New York. He said there had been an earlier wrongful conviction trial at which a jury rejected Mr. Restivo and Mr. Halstead’s claims, but the judge, Joanna Seybert, granted a retrial on the grounds that her instructions might have negatively impacted the jury. Theresa Fusco’s murder in 1984 in the village of Lynbrook received widespread attention, partly because it took place around the same time that two other teenage girls vanished. The three men contended the charges against them had been based on a coerced confession and unreliable testimony from inmates.

Theresa Fusco
Rape
John Restivo
Dennis Halstead
Joseph Volpe
False arrest
Ethics Misconduct Malfeasance
NYPD
Nassau County NY


The Secret World of a Well-Paid ‘Donor Adviser’ in Politics

Abstract: A constellation of left-leaning nonprofits and “super PACs” are raising tens of millions of dollars to pave the way for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign — and nearly all of them have paid Mary Pat Bonner a cut. Over the past several years, the groups, which include American Bridge 21st Century, Media Matters for America and the super PAC Ready for Hillary, have paid Ms. Bonner’s consulting firm in excess of $6 million to help them cultivate wealthy donors and raise money, according to tax filings and campaign disclosures. Ms. Bonner’s contracts give her firm a commission, typically 12.5 percent, on any money she brings in. Her tenacity, ties to wealthy givers and mastery of making donors happy have made Ms. Bonner, 48, among the most successful practitioners of a trade that is virtually invisible to voters but has taken on immense power and influence in the post-Citizens United world. Almost every candidate for high office must now court ultrarich donors to finance super PACs. And with each party more reliant than ever on networks of outside groups to supplement its advertising and opposition research, fund-raisers like Ms. Bonner hold the keys to the big-money kingdom. “The Bonner Group gets us the best fund-raising product for the lowest cost,” said David Brock, the founder of the monitoring group Media Matters and the super PAC American Bridge. “In my experience, the commission incentivizes the fund-raiser to meet the ambitious goals we set.” But the growing influence of paid fund-raisers has angered donors in both parties, who are skeptical of Washington’s consultant class and the secret, often lucrative deals they reach with campaigns. Some organizations, like Freedom Partners, overseen by the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch, emphasize their reliance on salaried staff members to raise money. “I want my money to go to the candidate, to get them elected; I don’t want it to go to middlemen,” said Andrew Sabin, a prominent Republican donor. Several Republican presidential contenders are now courting Spencer J. Zwick, Mitt Romney’s finance chairman in 2012. But some former donors grumble about the fund-raising fees paid by Mr. Romney’s campaign committees to limited liability companies established by Mr. Zwick: about $34 million, according to campaign disclosure reports. In an interview, Mr. Zwick declined to describe his own fee. But he said that the bulk of the payments collected by the companies were in turn paid out to more than 50 other fund-raisers employed by the campaign. “We raised more money than has ever been raised before at a better cost of fund-raising than has ever been done before,” Mr. Zwick said. But few fund-raisers seem to command commissions as generous as Ms. Bonner’s. Political fund-raisers are typically paid monthly retainers, which can reach $25,000 a month during campaigns. The Bonner Group is paid almost exclusively on commission, a practice that is legal but frowned upon by some fund-raising consultants, who say it leads to fights with clients and other consultants over credit. It is considered unethical by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, partly because it can encourage abuses and, in the charity world, places self-gain over philanthropy. “I think it’s a breach of fiduciary responsibility to pay fund-raisers on commission,” said Cindy Darrison, a professor at the George H. Heyman Jr. Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising at New York University. Allies say Ms. Bonner and her 20-member firm are worth the expense. The Bonner Group maintains a database of 70,000 donors and collects detailed information on their past giving, their families and their political relationships. Many praise her energy and personal touch: thank-you notes, for example, or tickets to Broadway shows. “Without Mary Pat, we would never be where we are today,” said Craig T. Smith, a senior adviser to Ready for Hillary. Mr. Smith said the group had paid Ms. Bonner and some other fund-raisers a single-digit percentage of money raised. Ms. Bonner, who cut her teeth as a campaign aide and fund-raiser for former Vice President Al Gore, is also known among colleagues for her aggressive tactics. During the 2012 campaign, Ms. Bonner, who was raising money for American Bridge, clashed repeatedly with other Democratic super PACs over joint fund-raising efforts. Early in the cycle, American Bridge wanted a larger portion of shared fund-raising so it could begin tracking and researching Republican candidates. The other groups thought that Ms. Bonner was seeking to establish her client as a central financial clearinghouse for other Democratic groups. Several recalled attending a meeting at American Bridge where they glimpsed a half-erased whiteboard diagram, showing money flowing into American Bridge and then back out to their super PACs. Opacity surrounds political fund-raising. Priorities USA Action, a Democratic super PAC that is now preparing to back Mrs. Clinton, employed several consultants to bolster its fund-raising efforts in 2012. But a scan of the group’s disclosure reports shows mostly regular, round-number payments to them. After The New York Times asked about payments to several specific fund-raisers, a spokesman confirmed that the payments constituted commissions to three of them. One, Andrew Korge, a Florida fund-raiser, was paid a 10 percent commission on a single million-dollar check. Another, Janet Keller, based in California, was paid a 5 percent commission on checks from a few wealthy donors totaling more than $2 million. Irwin M. Jacobs, the billionaire co-founder of Qualcomm, said in an email that Ms. Keller had merely helped arrange for him to meet with two Priorities officials. “I was not aware that consultants might be paid a percentage of the political contributions that they raise,” Mr. Jacobs wrote. In an email, Ms. Bonner said she routinely disclosed to donors that she was being paid on commission. “We charge all of our clients the same way, so there is no incentive for anyone in the firm to focus on one client more than another,” Ms. Bonner said. But there is little question who her biggest client is. Mr. Brock’s growing empire, now composed of about 10 interlocking PACs and nonprofits, uses the Bonner Group for all of its development efforts. Two years ago, reflecting her expanding role in Mr. Brock’s enterprises, Ms. Bonner moved her company and staff into his headquarters, though she continues to serve other clients. She and Mr. Brock have adjoining offices and even share a summer rental in the Hamptons. Mr. Brock credits Ms. Bonner with helping persuade donors that news media monitoring and opposition research deserve large-scale financial support. His groups brought in more than $28 million in 2014, entitling Ms. Bonner’s firm to about $3.5 million in fees. Her commission represented his entire fund-raising overhead, Mr. Brock said, which compared favorably with that of other nonprofit groups. He also emailed a statement from 40 donors attesting to the value her firm provided. Not everyone seems convinced. Ms. Bonner’s fees have been a perennial source of controversy in the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy progressive donors, each obligated to contribute money to a select roster of liberal research and advocacy organizations. Ms. Bonner originally worked there as a consultant, helping recruit new members. Later, when she moved to take on some of the funded organizations as clients, the alliance asked that contributions earmarked by its donors be exempt from Ms. Bonner’s commission. Eventually, the Alliance ended her consulting arrangement. But an Alliance official said that there was no formal policy in place and that its staff had no way of tracking Ms. Bonner’s commissions. Ms. Bonner said in an email that she abided by the request. She continues to attend the alliance’s private donor conferences, however, as an unpaid “donor adviser” to Marcy Carsey, a prominent Hollywood producer. Current and former executives at liberal nonprofits complain about a perception that hiring Ms. Bonner would improve their chances of being included in the Alliance’s investment portfolio. One Alliance donor, the billionaire Boston investor Vin Ryan, said that he had not been informed of Ms. Bonner’s commission before donating to Media Matters and later demanded a written guarantee from the group that his contributions would be exempt. “I don’t know what her role in the D.A. is at this point, nor do I know who she actually is a donor adviser to, nor do I know what organizations she represents within the group of organizations who we are supporting,” Mr. Ryan said. “I think it’s outrageous.”

PACs
Mary Pat Bonner
American Bridge 21st Century
Bonner Group
David Brock
Democracy Alliance
Campaign finance
Assn of Fundraising Professionals


Pirates Break With Past by Playing; Cardinals Relive It by Winning

Abstract: ST. LOUIS — If Tuesday night was a raucous party, with Pittsburgh hosting Cincinnati in the Pirates’ first playoff game in 21 years, the St. Louis Cardinals countered Thursday with stately tradition. Clydesdales clip-clopped around the warning track before the game, and Busch Stadium was awash in its familiar sea of red. The Cardinals then flexed their muscle on the field, battering the Pirates, 9-1, to take the first game of their best-of-five National League division series. St. Louis, making its 10th appearance in the playoffs in the last 14 seasons, knocked out 10 hits and scored an N.L.D.S.-record seven third-inning runs. The Cardinals were led by two postseason veterans, a commodity in short supply in the Pirates’ dugout, with Carlos Beltran hitting a three-run homer to open the scoring and a nearly unhittable Adam Wainwright pitching seven innings of one-run ball. “We never undervalue experience,” Cardinals Manager Mike Matheny said. “It comes back to a pretty simple approach: they’re going to do what they know is best and what they’ve been doing all season long.” The underdog Pirates had captured the imagination of baseball fans across the country by ending their long playoff drought and reaching the division series with a 6-2 win over the Reds on Tuesday night. But in Game 1 here, they committed three errors, mustered only four hits and generally looked more like the bumbling Pittsburgh teams of the last two decades than the squad that won 94 games during the regular season. “It was a rough Game 164,” Pirates Manager Clint Hurdle said. A nightmarish third inning doomed the Pirates’ chances Thursday. A. J. Burnett, the Pirates’ starter, walked Wainwright to start the inning, and Matt Carpenter followed with a single. That brought up Beltran, who entered the game with a 1.250 on-base plus slugging percentage in the playoffs, the best mark in baseball history. He turned on a fastball and blasted it into the second deck in right field. The home run, the 15th of Beltran’s career in the postseason, seemed to shock the Pirates out of their October glee like a cold, hard slap. After Matt Holliday doubled to right-center field, Burnett completed his self-destruction. He hit Matt Adams and walked Yadier Molina and Jon Jay to force in a run. He then allowed a two-run single to David Freese, and an errant throw from right fielder Marlon Byrd allowed Jay to score as well. With that, Burnett was done for the game. Two weeks ago, Hurdle mapped out his starting rotation to ensure that Burnett would start Game 1 of the division series. On a team on which only six players had postseason experience, Burnett had two World Series rings and seven playoff starts, even if his postseason earned run average exceeded 5.00. “That’s how important it was to us,” Hurdle said. “We planned it out a while ago.” Burnett, though, did not make it out of the third inning, allowing six hits, four walks and seven earned runs in his worst playoff outing since Game 5 of the 2009 World Series, when he played for the Yankees. “My sinker was cutting, and I had no hook,” Burnett said. “I was anxious.” Wainwright pitched like a cool veteran. His devastating curveball — the same pitch that froze Beltran, then a Met, to end Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championship Series — left Pirates hitters either flailing or buckling. Wainwright did not allow a base runner until the fourth inning and struck out nine, his only blemish being a solo home run by Pedro Alvarez. “He had a lot of swing and misses on his curveball,” the Pirates’ Andrew McCutchen said. “If we were to let go of that pitch, it might have been a different ballgame.” The Cardinals and the Pirates, N.L. Central Division rivals, were evenly matched during the regular season. The Pirates won 10 of their 19 meetings but lost six of nine at Busch Stadium. What appeared to separate the teams most was recent history. While the Pirates are strangers to meaningful autumn games, the Cardinals have won 11 World Series — including the 2006 and 2011 titles — and make regular appearances on baseball’s biggest stage. Hurdle had talked at length about the legacy of winning and the atmosphere his team would find in St. Louis. “It drips with tradition, with respect, with integrity, with professionalism,” he said. Those qualities were on display again Thursday. Freese made a diving catch in the third inning to rob Clint Barmes of an extra-base hit. Later in the game, Cardinals reliever Carlos Martinez made a terrific play by throwing out Russell Martin on a roller up the third-base line. Meanwhile, a Barmes throwing error helped the Cardinals score their eighth run, and McCutchen overran a ground ball in center field that led to St. Louis’s ninth run. Before the game, Matheny was asked about the momentum the Pirates seemed to be riding. “We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them,” he said. After a Game 1 blowout, the Pirates will have plenty to think about themselves.

St. Louis Cardinals
Carlos Beltran
Adam Wainwright
Baseball
Pittsburgh Pirates
A J Burnett


Modern Twist to an Age-Old Idea

Abstract: A spiral-shaped vessel made of interlocking sections of reddish-brown mahogany flooring catches the eye in “Enclosures,” a new exhibition at the Grounds for Sculpture. Beautiful in appearance, innovative in its use of materials and skillful in its execution, this intriguing-looking object by Foon Sham stands as a symbol for the more than two dozen artworks in this delightful group show. It could also stand as a symbol for a strand of contemporary art. Though it has no name, its chief characteristics are familiar: artwork exhibiting skill and careful hand finishing. Everywhere you look these days, artists are returning to the idea of craftsmanship as the foundation for art. It is an encouraging sign after years of formless conceptual nonsense. At any rate, “Enclosures” offers many beautiful and well-made sculptures by four mid-career artists — Jon Isherwood, John Ruppert, Wendy Ross and Mr. Sham — who deal in one way or another with ideas of enclosed spaces. This is a modern twist on an old notion, for sculptural vessels and containers of various kinds have been at the heart of art-making since the dawn of time. The show opens with a selection of Mr. Isherwood’s carved marble forms. Though abstract, the forms are sensual and even occasionally erotic, for somehow Mr. Isherwood manages to make marble look as if it were soft and fleshy. In short, what is peculiar and astonishing about Mr. Isherwood’s sculptures is the way they make the viewer think of the human body without directly resembling it. Partly, I think, it is a result of the shapes — squat, bloated-looking forms spilling and sprawling all over the place. They provoke associations with a pudgy stomach or the rolls of dimpled flesh on a voluptuous woman. Then there is the artist’s use of fine vertical carved lines to contour the marble, creating the illusion of stretched skin. The overall result looks like a cross between a beanbag and a water balloon. Other artists in the exhibition make more conventional-looking enclosures. Mr. Ruppert makes baskets out of galvanized steel and aluminum chain-link fencing. These are monumental works of assemblage art, the baskets sometimes more than 10 feet high and 12 feet wide. They are really more like cages than baskets, containing and visualizing for viewers a sense of empty space. Mr. Ruppert writes in a statement in the exhibition catalog that the use of chain-link fencing was influenced by the urban environment of his studio; he is the chairman of the art department at the University of Maryland in College Park and lives in Baltimore. This connection hints at other kinds of meanings, specifically a darker, more dangerous world that pulses beneath the clean, shiny surface of the sculptures. Ms. Ross also works with coiled steel, though to very different ends. She is interested in the simple aesthetic pleasures of primary shapes and forms, like tubes and spheres. Many of her sculptures are made of little cones of coiled steel welded together to take on the appearance of old-fashioned translucent glass. The cones also give her works a pleasing sense of volume, density and weight. Ms. Ross’s sculptures, primarily concerned with issues of surface and form, don’t fit all that neatly within the exhibition theme, enclosures. By contrast, Mr. Sham’s wood constructions are all about the relationships between interior and exterior space. They are also transparently complicated, consisting of idiosyncratic structures with intriguing openings. They look like jerry-built children’s playhouses. Mr. Sham patterns and layers the surface of his sculptures using woods of contrasting stains, textures and natural colors. That is clever, for it renders visible something we often take for granted in art: it makes us understand structure as material, or how surface and form connect. This may seem like a small thing, but it is part of what makes Mr. Sham’s artworks stand out.


Gates Tightens Rules for Military and the Press

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Nine days after a four-star general was relieved of command for comments made to Rolling Stone magazine, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued orders on Friday tightening the reins on officials dealing with the news media. The memorandum requires top-level Pentagon and military leaders to notify the office of the Defense Department’s assistant secretary for public affairs “prior to interviews or any other means of media and public engagement with possible national or international implications.” Just as the removal of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal from command in Afghanistan was viewed as President Obama’s reassertion of civilian control of the military, so Mr. Gates’s memo on “Interaction With the Media” was viewed as a reassertion by civilian public affairs specialists of control over the military’s contacts with the news media. Senior officials involved in preparing the three-page memo said work on it had begun well before the uproar that followed Rolling Stone’s profile of General McChrystal . But they acknowledged that the controversy, and the firing of one of the military’s most influential commanders, served to emphasize Mr. Gates’s determination to add more discipline to the Defense Department’s interactions with the media. “I have said many times that we must strive to be as open, accessible and transparent as possible,” Mr. Gates wrote in the memo, which was sent to senior Pentagon civilian officials, the nation’s top military officer, each of the armed-services secretaries and the commanders of the regional war-fighting headquarters. “At the same time, I am concerned that the department has grown lax in how we engage with the media, often in contravention of established rules and procedures.” The memo by Mr. Gates, a former C.I.A. director, also demanded greater adherence to secrecy standards, issuing a stern warning against the release of classified information: “Leaking of classified information is against the law, cannot be tolerated and will, when proven, lead to the prosecution of those found to be engaged in such activity.” A copy of the unclassified memo by Mr. Gates was provided to The New York Times by an official who was not authorized to release it. Douglas B. Wilson, the new assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, and Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, verified its content. Mr. Gates’s memo “is based primarily on his view that we owe the media and we owe ourselves engagement by those who have full knowledge of the situations at hand,” Mr. Wilson said. Mr. Gates was particularly concerned that civilian and military officials speaking to reporters sometimes had only a parochial view of a national security issue under discussion. The new orders, Mr. Wilson said, were devised to “make sure that anybody and everybody who does engage has as full a picture as possible and the most complete information possible.” The repercussions of the Rolling Stone profile have included heightened concerns that military officers will become warier of the press — and it is expected that many officers will read the new memo as an official warning to restrict access to reporters. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Morrell rejected those assumptions, saying Mr. Gates would remain committed to having the Pentagon work closely with reporters. “From the moment he came into the building, this secretary has said that to treat the press as an enemy is self-defeating,” Mr. Morrell said. “That attitude has been reflected in his tenure: he has been incredibly accommodating, incredibly forthright and incredibly cooperative with the news media. That said, he thinks we as a giant institution have become too undisciplined in how we approach our communications with the press corps.” But correspondents who cover national security issues, a realm that routinely requires delving into the classified world, have come to rely on unofficial access to senior leaders for guidance and context — and for information when policies or missions may be going awry. Officials involved in drafting Mr. Gates’s memo cited several recent developments as central to his thinking. They included disclosure of the internal debate during the administration’s effort to develop a new policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, similar public exposure of internal deliberations over the Pentagon budget and weapons procurement, and, among others, an article in The Times describing a memorandum on Iran policy written by Mr. Gates and sent to a small circle of national security aides. On behalf of the military, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was consulted during the drafting of the memo on media relations and “fully supports the secretary’s intent,” said Capt. John Kirby, the chairman’s spokesman. He cited Admiral Mullen’s visit to Kabul, Afghanistan, last weekend, in which the admiral told American military officers and embassy personnel that “we must continue to tell our story — we just need to do it smartly, and in a coordinated fashion.” Mr. Gates’s memo also orders senior civilian and military leaders to coordinate their release of official Defense Department information that may have national or international implications, and to ensure that their staff members have the experience and perspective “to responsibly fulfill the obligations of coordinating media engagements.” The memo is expected to reanimate the professional public-affairs cadre among the Pentagon’s civilian and military staffs, who have made no secret that they have felt challenged by the growing numbers of contractors hired for “strategic communications” issues. It was one such contractor who brokered Rolling Stone’s profile of General McChrystal.

United States Defense and Military Forces


A Mets Fan for Life, an Ecstatic One for a Day

Abstract: Once again I have come to realize that a Mets win over the Yankees makes my heart sing and that four such wins could awaken me from the dead. On the day after my Mets took four straight from them , I suppose I feel bad for the beaten, injured and rapidly aging Yankees. Except not really, not at all. Mariano Rivera? It was a shame your cutter did not cut. Phil Hughes? Let’s take that underperforming fastball of yours and let David Wright deposit it deep in the stands. And Travis Hafner, well, really? Crunch time at Yankee Stadium, the Death Star itself, and Travis Hafner trundles to the plate? My Mets, amid their most hapless run since their last most hapless run, just slipped a knife into that team from the Bronx. We dealt our ace, the oh-so-intense Matt Harvey, and he didn’t disappoint. He has the most preternatural command of pitches since Dwight Gooden, circa 1985. Baseball requires a 25-man squad, and the Mets are at least a dozen short. But if you have to start with one, Harvey’s not bad. More surprising, though, is what happened when we marched out Jon Niese and Jeremy Hefner and Dillon Gee. This pitching phalanx, I acknowledge, conjures no memories of Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and Nolan Ryan. Hefner was winless and a phone call away from the minor leagues. Then he struck out five Yankees and got a win. Gee, a likable kid with a 6.34 earned run average and a recently repaired wing, marched out and rang up another 12 strikeouts. And to begin it all, Niese pitched a nice little gem and was promptly found to have shoulder tendinitis (he’ll miss at least one start). So where does this leave us? Ecstatic, for now. After the Mets’ first two victories, I received an e-mail from a good friend, Peter Kurz, who lives in Israel, where he has become the secretary general of the Israel Association of Baseball. Decades ago, Kurz and I played catch at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park in Manhattan, my imagined Tom Seaver to his imagined Jerry Grote. “To all those Yankee fans who are crying this morning into their cereal,” Kurz e-mailed, “and to all those Met fans who are now on Mount Everest at least for the next 12 hours before the Mets collapse once again, beating the great Mariano and the Evil Empire could not be sweeter.” By the final game of this series, Kurz had upped the ante, forecasting a championship — this year. He may require psychiatric care, but can you blame us for our hallucinations? These annual showdowns with the Yankees have loomed as annual beat-downs. In 2000, the Yankees beat us in a badly uncompetitive World Series. To add insult to injury, pitcher Roger Clemens, surfing a cresting wave of adrenaline, ferocity and who knows what else, tossed a broken bat at Mets catcher Mike Piazza. We muttered that we would exact revenge the next year. Alas, the role of McGurk the enforcer fell to Shawn Estes, a mild-mannered aesthete of a pitcher. Clemens came to the plate in 2002 at Shea Stadium. Estes, looking deeply uncomfortable, reeled back, and tossed an 87-mile-per-hour dying quail that went behind Clemens’s thigh. Baseball fined Estes $750; we assumed it was for missing Clemens. In June 2009, Luis Castillo, a rotund Mets second baseman of unlamented memory, settled under a routine pop-up in what would be the third out of a satisfying interleague win over the Yankees. He dropped the ball. Two Yankees scored. “I slid across the plate, jumped into Jeet’s arms and said, ‘What happened?’ ” Mark Teixeira said at the time. “You don’t expect that to happen.” No, you really don’t. I’ll concede this to the Death Star: To say that the Yankees are banged up is to say General Custer lost a few men at the Little Bighorn. Their middle-of-the-order hitters had last intimidated pitchers in 2007. They could use Derek Jeter, who even I acknowledge is a classy Hall of Fame shortstop. My sympathies, though, are a trickle quickly dried up. Yankees fans want to claim that the injured Kevin Youkilis, a 34-year-old who hit .235 last season, is the savior? Really? And what of the cryogenically frozen Alex Rodriguez, with the contract that extends until 2038 or so? Unless C. C. Sabathia’s fastball picks up another 5 miles per hour in the gathering heat and humidity, this could be a long year for the Yankees. We can only hope. (Mets/Yankees mutual loathing is one of many behavioral tics that render us incomprehensible to non-natives. At my first newspaper job, in Vermont, I tried to explain to the sportswriters that possibly the only thing in baseball that made me happier than a Mets win was a Yankees loss. They said that was perverse. They were probably right.) Can the Mets sustain this? To ask is to cringe. This series started with Jeff Wilpon, the often clueless Mets chief operating officer, talking about the poor prospects of his own underfinanced, Madoff-crippled team. Even the Great Mariano advised him, politely, to man up. There are weeks when Harvey and Wright look like islands of excellence in a sullen, garbage-strewn lake. We have an outfield that would not put a fright into a Class AAA opponent. Ruben Tejada, our shortstop, was modestly talented but heady last year. He has lost the heady part this year. Our first baseman, Ike Davis, has an elegant power swing when he is going right. Unfortunately, he last went right in September. Still, Bobby Parnell has put a jiggle in what was once the straightest 98 m.p.h. fastball in baseball, and looks like a proper closer. We’ve got that golden-armed kid, Zack Wheeler, about ready to fly in from Las Vegas, and would it be too much to ask that he perform as Koosman to Harvey’s Seaver? There are good arms in the minors. If we just hold on to our own — Howard Megdal of Capital New York worries we could let Parnell walk — we just might cause the Yankees more agita. This year almost certainly holds far more existential screams than cheers. That’s O.K. Being a Mets fan might be drained of meaning without those. And did I mention we beat the Yankees four straight times?

Mets
Yankees
Matt Harvey
Baseball
Jon Niese
Jeremy Hefner
Dillon Gee


An Inaugural That Spelled Evolution

Abstract: NEW YORK — For a measure of how the United States has changed in two generations, think about this: Most of the eminences who spoke or performed at President Barack Obama’s inauguration would probably not have been able to land an advertising job at the fictional agency portrayed on the television series “Mad Men.” Not Mr. Obama, since he’s black and his middle name is Hussein. Not Senator Charles E. Schumer, who’s Jewish. Not Myrlie Evers-Williams, who gave the invocation, or Beyoncé Knowles, who sang, because they’re both black and female. Speaking of female, not Kelly Clarkson, the singer — nor Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the Supreme Court, who, as a Hispanic, would have been doubly problematic. Speaking of Hispanic, not the Rev. Luis Leon — nor the inaugural poet, Richard Blanco, who is both Cuban-blooded and gay. Reactions to the inauguration have dwelled on Mr. Obama’s ringing defense of modern liberalism. But the theater of the day was at least as telling as the speeches. The ceremony seemed designed to expand, complicate, tie-dye the very definition of American, while suggesting an underlying unity. It celebrated, without explicitly announcing, a changing of the cultural guard — the transition to a country no longer lorded over by the white, the male, the heterosexual, the Protestant, the native-born and the native English-speaking. Many things about the day evoked a nation passing into new hands — the people onstage and Mr. Obama’s address, to be sure, but also the smaller gestures and moments. You could see it in the faces on the National Mall, packed with people who, at the nation’s founding, would have been thought, on account of their pigment, fit for little more than hard labor or slavery. You could hear it when Mr. Obama became the first president to utter “gay” at an inauguration, and spoke of a 1969 raid on a gay bar in sanctifying language normally reserved for battlefields like Lexington and Normandy. You could feel it when Justice Sotomayor, a hero to many Hispanics, received the kind of cheers that Supreme Court justices simply don’t get. Or when the gay poet said that Americans live beneath “one sky” and switched his accent to pronounce “Colorado” in Spanish. As data from the election last November showed, if you are a woman, or black or brown, or gay, or not Christian, you’re more likely to take to this vision of America as multiplicity. But, as the country has seen time and again, millions of people will not take to it, will instead feel threatened and excluded by all the talk of inclusion. In parts of America where demographic and social change have been slower in coming, that inaugural stage can symbolize an ominous future: the United States as an increasingly centrifugal nation, made up of tribes spinning ever further from a center of shared culture and values. On the political right, there is an anxiety about its becoming a nation defined by “victimization” and by “lifestyle choices” — by the 47 percent who don’t pay federal income tax, by Americans arbitrarily deciding what heritage to claim, gender to identify as, sexuality to pursue, religion to practice and family structure, if any, to adopt. (That many of these may not, in fact, be choices is considered irrelevant.) The rainbow coalition, as so many called it this past week, has its internal contradictions, too. Mr. Obama’s coalition is, in some ways, a coalition of the insufficiently enfranchised. But shared exclusion doesn’t resolve the many tensions among the members: between religious African-Americans and gays, who want to frame their cause as the next civil rights struggle; between union workers and the Hispanic immigrants whom they regard as depressing their wages; between the young, who’d benefit from investment in education and new industries, and the old, who want scarce federal money to shore up their pension funds. A further complication is that this massive internal shift in demographics — the very real arc from “Mad Men” to that inaugural stage — coincides with the realities of a globalizing era, in which jobs flee to far-off places and a former Communist backwater like China is suddenly called a replacement superpower. Globalization has a tendency to make people feel acted-upon by distant, intangible forces. If you’re among those who feel alienated by that colorful inaugural stage, you might find yourself projecting your frustration over all the changes you can’t see onto people like Mr. Obama, who embody those changes that you can. About globalization Mr. Obama spoke only passingly at the inauguration. It might seem a curious omission, given the immense challenge of competitiveness that the United States faces. But he did argue that a society that protects its people nourishes the most avid risk-taking, while calling for the kind of education system that allows a country to find and harness its best talent. As citizens of a tolerant, hardworking, many-hued country, the president said, “We are made for this moment.” But the plain emphasis was on social justice, not economic dynamism. Whether that pursuit of justice fosters such dynamism or inhibits it, whether it unites America or intensifies its divides — these are things we’ll know only when Mr. Obama, already grayer after four years, is all salt and no pepper up there. Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly and follow on Twitter.com/anandwrites

Inauguration
Barack Obama
Sonia Sotomayor
US Politics
Beyonce Knowles
Race and Ethnicity


Thabo Sefolosha, Atlanta Hawks Player, Spurns Lenient Plea Bargain

Abstract: Thabo Sefolosha, the basketball player, was offered a lenient plea bargain on Wednesday to resolve criminal charges against him arising from a scuffle with the police in Manhattan: Do a day of community service, stay out of trouble for six months and the charges would be dismissed. It was the sort of deal most defendants would pounce on. But Mr. Sefolosha, a forward for the Atlanta Hawks, refused the offer from prosecutors and insisted on going to trial instead. His lawyer, Alex Spiro, said his client was standing on principle, because he believes four police officers arrested him for no reason, breaking a bone in his right leg and causing him to miss the N.B.A. playoffs. At the same appearance in Manhattan Criminal Court, the district attorney’s office announced it was dropping charges against another Hawks player, Pero Antic, who was arrested with Mr. Sefolosha. An assistant district attorney, Francesca Bartolomey, requested that Judge Kevin McGrath dismiss the charges against Mr. Antic “in the interests of justice,” but did not elaborate. Asked outside the courthouse why he had turned down the prosecution’s plea deal, Mr. Sefolosha said, “It’s a complicated answer.” Mr. Spiro interjected, “He’s innocent and he wants to be vindicated.” Judge McGrath set Oct. 5 as the trial date. Mr. Sefolosha, 31, and Mr. Antic, 33, were taken into custody in the early morning of April 8 during a commotion outside the 1Oak nightclub on West 17th Street in Chelsea, a spot favored by celebrities and athletes . A few minutes earlier, Chris Copeland, a former Knick who had been traded to the Indiana Pacers, was stabbed in a fight with another clubgoer. Though the two Hawks players were not involved in the stabbing, the police accused them of interfering with the investigation. They were both charged with obstructing governmental administration and disorderly conduct, and Mr. Sefolosha was charged with resisting arrest as well. In a criminal complaint, one of the officers said Mr. Sefolosha ignored a half-dozen orders to move away from a crime scene the police had established outside the club and ran at one of the officers from behind “in an aggressive manner.” When other officers tried to arrest him, he flailed his arms and kicked at the police, the complaint said. But Mr. Spiro said in court papers that the two Hawks players had followed the officers’ directions to clear the area and were more than 100 feet away from the crime scene when they were arrested. He said they had done nothing illegal to provoke the arrest. A video of the incident , shot by a bystander, showed Mr. Sefolosha being surrounded by several officers and then struggling as they forced his arms behind his back and wrestled him to the ground. One officer flicked open a telescoping baton but did not appear to use it. Mr. Sefolosha was limping after the police handcuffed him and hauled him to his feet. He later underwent surgery to repair a broken right fibula and torn ligaments; the injuries sidelined him for the rest of the regular season and kept him out of the Eastern Conference finals. (In his absence, the top-seeded Hawks were swept in four games by the Cleveland Cavaliers.) The Police Department’s internal affairs division and the Civilian Complaint Review Board are both investigating Mr. Sefolosha’s arrest, officials said. The officers involved in the incident remain on active duty. Prosecutors said on Wednesday they would turn over to the defense the recorded statements that the four officers, all from the 10th Precinct, made to the review board. A lawyer for the police union said the officers would not respond publicly to Mr. Sefolosha’s allegations. Mr. Sefolosha, a nine-year veteran of the N.B.A. from Switzerland, declined to say on Wednesday if he intended to file a civil suit against the city and the Police Department. An acquittal in criminal court would lay a strong foundation for a lawsuit, lawyers who handle police brutality cases said.

Thabo Sefolosha
Atlanta Hawks
Basketball
Pero Antic
Chelsea
Lawsuits
NYPD
1 Oak