Activists Ask Obama to Shed Light on Shell Companies

Abstract: Anticorruption activists have urged President Obama to back a plan to publicly register the owners of shell companies in the United States and around the world, a move they say is essential to thwart corrupt government officials, tax evaders and money launderers who rely on an opaque financial system. The plan, backed by Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain this year, was outlined in letters sent to Mr. Obama last week by two groups of current and former prosecutors and activists. The issue is set to be raised again at the Group of 8 summit meeting of industrialized countries this month. “Corrupt politicians, tax evaders, and organized criminals all use complex webs of shell companies to hide and launder stolen money,” said 19 prosecutors and activists in one of the letters. The group calls for “governments to require existing company registers to collect information on the ultimate owners of all companies” and for that information to be publicly available. France and Italy are also thought to back the proposal, said Stefanie Ostfeld, a senior policy adviser for the anticorruption research group Global Witness , but while the United States has expressed an interest in such information being made available to law enforcement officials, it has appeared reluctant to make it public. Opponents of the measure say it would be expensive, increase bureaucracy and discourage business. “These anonymous shell companies are used by everybody who steals money,” said Jack A. Blum, a lawyer and the chairman of Tax Justice Network USA , who was among those who signed the letters. Tens of thousands of shell corporations have been set up within the United States, he said, primarily in four states — Delaware, Montana, Nevada and Wyoming — that have loose regulations. “We know that the bad guys are selling the U.S. as a place to set up companies,” Mr. Blum said, citing its “aura of legitimacy.” While activists say the issue is pressing because of the need to ensure that poorer nations with natural resources are not exploited by unscrupulous officials, it is not a new problem. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network , a bureau of the Treasury Department, estimated in 2005 that as much as $18 billion in suspicious transactions were made using international wire transfers that used shell companies in the United States. Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, has introduced legislation that would require states to collect information on the “beneficial ownership” of companies incorporated within their borders. It has failed to pass three times since 2000. On one of those occasions, it was co-sponsored by Mr. Obama, at the time a senator. The White House did not immediately return a call and an e-mail seeking comment on the letters or on Mr. Obama’s position. In Britain, Mr. Cameron’s championing of the issue was prompted in part by a series of revelations in recent months that celebrities and other public figures were avoiding taxes using elaborate loopholes. And as a wave of protests and revolutions swept the Arab world in 2011, it became clear that the region’s dictators had safeguarded their plundered wealth through intricate accounting practices.

Financial Crimes Enforcement Network Treasury Department


2 U.S. Agencies, 2 Different Accords With Wachovia

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department sit a little more than a mile apart in this city. But they are light-years apart in how they deal with lawbreakers on Wall Street. The two law enforcement agencies, together with other federal and state regulators, announced Thursday that they had wrested a $148 million settlement from Wachovia Bank, now part of Wells Fargo , on charges that the bank reaped millions of dollars in profits by rigging bids in the municipal securities market. The settlements are curious because they seem diametrically opposed. In the Justice Department settlement , Wachovia said it “admits, acknowledges and accepts responsibility for” manipulating the bidding process in the sale of derivatives on tax-exempt bonds to institutional investors like cities, hospitals and pension plans over a six-year period ending in 2004. But in fashioning a settlement with the S.E.C. for the same actions, based on the same facts, Wachovia agreed to settle the charges “without admitting or denying the allegations.” Why the S.E.C. would allow a company to avoid admitting conduct that it has already admitted elsewhere is at the center of a continuing debate over how the agency polices Wall Street. The S.E.C. has settled three previous cases involving municipal bond bid-rigging in the same way over the last year. Other federal and state agencies, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and a group of state attorneys general, settled cases on Thursday with Wachovia on the same terms. The “neither admit nor deny” practice, which has been in use for years, has attracted renewed criticism recently. A federal judge in New York last month rejected an S.E.C. settlement with Citigroup over securities fraud charges, saying that the “neither admit nor deny” language deprived him of the facts necessary to determine if the punishment was adequate. Wachovia’s settlement, like Citigroup’s and dozens of other S.E.C. agreements with Wall Street firms in recent years, also includes an injunction against future violations of the antifraud provisions of federal securities laws. Wachovia has agreed not to violate the same law three times in the last seven years, including in April of this year. The failure to admit conduct that has already been admitted has some legal experts baffled. “It just doesn’t compute,” said Cornelius Hurley, the director of the Boston University Center for Finance, Law & Policy and a former counsel to the Federal Reserve’s board of governors. “I think an explanation is deserved from the S.E.C. as to why there is this apparent discrepancy.” John Nester, an S.E.C. spokesman, said these settlements should be viewed as a package, not separately. “This is a joint state and federal resolution that includes an admission and compensates victims.” Robert Khuzami, the commission’s director of enforcement, said in a recent interview that the S.E.C. fashions its settlements using the “neither admit nor deny” language because it believes it often results in the same penalties it thinks it would achieve in a lengthy, expensive court trial. In addition, he said, companies demand the language for fear that an admission of securities fraud could then be used against them in class action or shareholder lawsuits seeking damages. Yet that could be the case for Wells Fargo, according to three former S.E.C. lawyers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they now represent clients before the S.E.C. In interviews, the lawyers said that the admission in the settlement with the Justice Department could probably be used to support evidence of fraud in private civil lawsuits against Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo, which said the case involved employees who were no longer at the company, declined to comment on the discrepancies between the two settlements. The differences between the two settlements include a nonprosecution agreement signed by the Justice Department with Wells Fargo in which the bank admitted that several former employees had committed criminal violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Justice settlement says simply that Wachovia “entered into unlawful agreements to manipulate the bidding process and rig bids.” The S.E.C., which has the authority to bring only civil charges, forged an agreement in which Wachovia neither admits nor denies that it violated Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, which forbids fraud in securities offerings. The S.E.C. complaint gives six pages of detail on “representative fraudulent transactions” — implying it could supply much more. Mr. Khuzami, the S.E.C.’s enforcement director, defends the “neither admit nor deny” settlements in part by saying that because the S.E.C. lays out such detail in its complaints, there can be no doubt what occurred. “I think that people looking at the entirety of that package,” he said, “would be hard-pressed to come away with a conclusion other than, ‘They did something wrong here.’ ” Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the United States District Court in Manhattan disagrees. He rejected the S.E.C.’s recent settlement with Citigroup, saying it “is neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest” because it does not provide the court “with any proven or admitted facts upon which to exercise even a modest degree of independent judgment.” Judge Rakoff will not rule on the adequacy of the Wachovia settlement, which the S.E.C. filed in federal district court in New Jersey.

Securities and Exchange Commission
Justice Department
Securities and Commodities Violations
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry
Wells Fargo & Company
Banking and Financial Institutions


Jayson Werth Delivers Big Hit for Nationals

Abstract: WASHINGTON There is no feeling in baseball quite as helpless as standing on deck when the season ends. Jayson Werth understands that exquisite agony. Two Octobers ago, Werth was one pitch from a chance at glory. His Philadelphia Phillies were down in a playoff series, facing elimination, striving for another tomorrow. There were two on and two outs with a full count on Ryan Howard with the Phillies losing by a run. One more ball and the season would come down to Werth. One more strike and it would be over. Howard struck out looking to clinch the pennant for the San Francisco Giants. Werth headed into free agency. The Washington Nationals made him $126 million richer, but he often wondered what might have been. “A lot,” Werth said softly at spring training with the Nationals the next March. “A lot. That was the situation you live for. I’ve ran that situation through in the backyard, in the batting cage, on the sandlot, since I was 5 years old. Almost had it. Almost got to get in there. It wasn’t meant to be.” On Thursday at Nationals Park, it was meant to be. Werth got his chance, and he did not waste it. Facing the St. Louis Cardinals ’ Lance Lynn, Werth led off the bottom of the ninth with the score tied and the Nationals needing to win to stay alive in their division series. Thirteen — yes, 13 — pitches later, he lashed a fastball into the left-field bullpen for a 2-1 victory. It was the first home postseason win for a Washington baseball team since Game 3 of the 1933 World Series. The Nationals, who had played so poorly this week, got an early homer from Adam LaRoche, a strong start from Ross Detwiler and overwhelming relief from Jordan Zimmermann, Tyler Clippard and Drew Storen. They will live for a decisive fifth game on Friday. “To me, there’s nothing more fun to watch than a playoff baseball game, because of the drama drawn out over such a long period of time,” the Cardinals veteran Lance Berkman said. “A night like tonight was just a great competition. Nobody made any mistakes. There was great pitching on both sides, and they had two big swings.” Facing elimination against Texas last fall in Game 6 of the World Series, Berkman singled with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the 10th inning. The Cardinals won the game and the series, capping an extraordinary postseason for baseball. This one is shaping up the same way. Berkman is injured now, a spectator soaking up the majesty of October. In the early innings Thursday, he found himself sneaking back to the trainer’s room to peek at Game 5 of the other National League division series. The Reds fell behind early, then brought the tying or go-ahead run to the plate in each of the last four innings. But they could not overtake the Giants. Even so, baseball had a stretch of four gripping games — the last two on Wednesday and the first two on Thursday — in which three were decided on game-ending hits. The Yankees’ Raul Ibanez homered to beat Baltimore. Oakland’s Coco Crisp singled to cap a comeback against Detroit. The sport rested, briefly, before the Giants held on in Cincinnati and Werth connected here. “I watched all the games last night and the walk-offs, and baseball this time of year is the best time for sports,” Werth said. “I love October baseball. I was sitting at home and watching what Raul did, and I probably texted him 20 times last night, congratulating him. That was awesome. Here we are a day later, and I got an opportunity and came through.” Werth said Ibanez texted back a few times Thursday as Werth made his way to the ballpark. They were teammates for two years with the Phillies, who had won the last five N.L. East titles until Werth and the Nationals took over this season. Werth’s seven-year contract rattled the industry when he signed it. He had made just one All-Star team and was considered a complementary player, not a leading man. But the Nationals, who were coming off three last-place seasons, already had a rising core of young, less expensive players like Ryan Zimmerman, Ian Desmond and Bryce Harper. They needed a veteran to buy in. Now Werth’s image, in front of a giant curly W, covers three stories of a parking garage above the left-field bleachers. He is more scruffy than cuddly, but with one swing he has buried the contract issue, probably for good. “Jayson comes across as a gritty — I don’t want to say not likable — but he’s a gamer,” Zimmerman said. “He’s in there all the time, no excuses. For him to go through everything he went through last year, obviously signing a big deal and people kind of feeling negative toward him — they don’t really value him as we do. They should now.” Werth broke his wrist this May and missed half the season. Shortly after he returned, he found himself hitting leadoff, an unusual spot for a player who once hit 36 homers in a season. “He embraced it,” Desmond said. “If he had started leading off and said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it,’ he wouldn’t have been hitting in that situation. Somebody else would have been hitting in that situation.” Instead, when the lineup turned over for the bottom of the ninth, Werth was the one striding to the plate. There was nobody in front of him. It took two years, but the stage was his.

Baseball
Washington Nationals
St Louis Cardinals
Playoff Games
Werth Jayson


Griffin Dix’s Long Battle Against Guns Began With His Son’s Death

Abstract: Scott James is a columnist for The Bay Citizen. Kenzo Dix was named for the Japanese characters for “health” and “creativity,” and at age 15 he embodied those attributes, playing on the Berkeley High School basketball team and enjoying school art projects. After finishing a class assignment — a graffiti-style display on a school handball court — he called his father for permission to go to a friend’s house. A few hours later, his father received another call: Kenzo was at Children’s Hospital in Oakland. “The bullet went through my son’s shoulder and into his heart,” Griffin Dix said, “and killed him.” The date was May 29, 1994. The friend, 14, said he only wanted to show off his father’s Beretta 92 Compact L handgun. He had taken the precaution of removing a clip of live rounds to replace it with an empty one, but there was still a bullet in the chamber when he pulled the trigger to show Kenzo. Mr. Dix, a soft-spoken retired professor, now 67, has never fully recovered from that day. Sitting in his Kensington home, his face filled with pain as he recalled the tragic event. But for 17 years, he has channeled his grief into a crusade. Joined by other victims who publicly testify at the state and local level about how guns derailed their lives, Mr. Dix has helped transform the dialogue about guns in California from being centered on Second Amendment rights, as it was 20 years ago, to one focused on personal tragedies and consequences. And lawmakers are listening. Last week, for the fourth year in a row, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence — the nation’s leading gun safety advocacy group — ranked California first among all 50 states for “laws that can prevent gun violence.” These include requiring background checks, permits and legislation curtailing illegal gun sales. California received a score of 80 out of 100 points. Arizona, Alaska and Utah received no points in the rankings. The Brady Campaign says the laws make a difference, pointing to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that place California 33rd in the nation for gun deaths per 100,000 people. Brian Malte , director of state and local mobilization for the Brady Campaign, said Mr. Dix was “one of the early pioneers. His leadership and that of others have really made victims’ voices heard.” Chuck Michel , a gun advocate and lawyer who has represented the National Rifle Association and the California Rifle and Pistol Association, said the effort to reframe the debate to focus on victims had been an effective public-relations campaign and persuasive with lawmakers, especially Democrats. But Mr. Michel disagreed that the gun laws adopted in California were responsible for the decrease in gun deaths. Instead, he credited other factors: gun safety education campaigns, which have received greater distribution with the Internet; new safety technologies like quick-access gun safes that keep weapons locked away; and longer prison sentences for violent gun criminals, as with California’s three strikes law. Mr. Michel derided the Brady rankings as intended to reward states that follow the group’s marching orders. “If you do what we say, you get an A,” he said. Stories like Mr. Dix’s are “very, very sad,” he said, but too often blame guns and their manufacturers, rather than those who pull the trigger. “You can have a gun on a table for years, and it’s not going to get up and shoot by itself.” Indeed, Mr. Dix does blame the gun in the death of his son — had there been a better indicator that a bullet was in the chamber, perhaps his son would be alive. To that point, Mr. Dix has sued Beretta three times, ultimately losing . The irresponsible behavior, jurors decided, could have happened no matter how the gun was designed. But Mr. Dix said his lawsuits, and those of others, had pushed manufacturers to come out with safer gun designs. He remains stalwart in his views, even though they continue to exact a personal toll. Since he began advocating for gun safety, Mr. Dix says, he has been harassed by phone calls and letters — including death threats. On the Web site Calguns.net , a poster wrote “know your enemies” in reference to Mr. Dix. “That happens a lot online,” Mr. Dix said. Just one more opponent in a battle that goes back to that day in 1994, a battle he wishes he didn’t have to fight.

Gun Control
Deaths (Fatalities)
Law and Legislation
Berkeley (Calif)


The Refugee Crisis in Europe: How Is Asylum Granted?

Abstract: The New York Times has been asking readers for their questions on the refugee crisis in Europe. We have already answered some questions , here are some more: Q. Is there any discussion of settlement programs in the Eastern European countries suffering huge out-migrations and population losses, like Bulgaria and Romania, where the younger generation has left for the West? — Dardis McNamee, Vienna A. The question arose soon after the migrants began arriving in Europe in large numbers: Why don’t the countries in Europe suffering debilitating population losses , many of them former communist states in the financially struggling East, make up for it by welcoming and resettling new migrants from Syria and elsewhere? Several forces quickly stalled any such discussions: • Officials in many of the countries, including Bulgaria and Hungary, insisted that their economies were so anemic, their unemployment rates so high that any fresh arrivals would be more likely to end up on the public dole than bolstering a sagging economy. • Public opinion throughout the region has been steadfastly against welcoming large numbers of migrants, with some residents arguing that the newcomers’ customs and Muslim religion would transform their own national cultures in ways they don’t want. Others said that the migrants would sap precious national resources needed to care for the region’s own poor population. • Political leaders in the region have been more likely to exploit the crisis to foster nationalist and sometimes xenophobic attitudes than use it as an opportunity to diversify their nations. The countries are much more focused on keeping their young people at home, and convincing those who have already left to return. RICK LYMAN Q. How are Europeans and other prosperous countries going to prevent refugee status from being extended to virtually all labor migrants, including West Africans, East Africans, Afghans and Pakistanis? — David Stoll, Middlebury, Vt. A. To receive asylum, a migrant must show “a well-founded fear of persecution” in the country he or she fled on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, political conviction or membership in a social group. If that person is coming from a war zone like Syria, it can be easier to make that case. These standards were first established in the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, which nearly all countries in Europe have signed. Asylum seekers are entitled to a full and fair hearing, no matter where they come from, and their claims should not be rejected in what the United Nations recently called “summary proceedings.” If a migrant can’t establish his or her claim for asylum, he or she could be deported. There are migrants looking for better jobs, more promising economic opportunities or generous public benefits in Europe. They can be denied asylum, and if they come from a country that is on the official list of “safe countries,” it is almost certain they will be. They can also be denied asylum and lose protected status as refugees if they are found to have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. One way to stop deportation even if asylum has been denied is for the asylum seeker to show that she or he has a medical condition that cannot be treated at home.

Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis


Mining Contract Details Disclosed in Afghanistan

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — Enmeshed in a bruising political battle over new mining rules seen as vital to Afghanistan’s economic future, the country’s mining minister on Sunday disclosed about 200 previous mining contracts for the first time, portraying the move as an attempt to bring transparency to a process vulnerable to corruption. In the process, he appeared to take a swipe at a brother of President Hamid Karzai , citing as flawed the awarding of a contract in 2006 for a cement company in which he was a partner. The action, by Mining Minister Wahidullah Shahrani, was likely to please his supporters in the West, including the United States, who made greater openness in the Afghan government’s financial dealings a condition of billions of dollars in development assistance and aid money pledged earlier this year. But the move also comes at a precarious time for Mr. Shahrani. He is embattled politically and a target of critics for his shepherding of a proposed new mining law, vital to attracting foreign investment, which was blocked by the Afghan cabinet in July with President Karzai’s support. Mr. Shahrani is to resubmit the law in the coming weeks. Developing Afghanistan’s potentially rich deposits of iron, oil, gold, copper, lithium and other natural resources is regarded as crucial to the country’s economic prospects, transforming it into a state that can begin to pay its own way and allowing the international community to cut back its financial and, ultimately, military support. But there are persistent concerns that any resource boom could be jeopardized by corruption, worsening security and political instability. “From now on every contract will be made public,” Mr. Shahrani said at a news conference here. “No contract will be kept secret.” However, Mr. Shahrani did not release the contract for one of the country’s biggest and most lucrative mining concessions, the 2007 agreement for the Aynak copper deposit in Logar Province near Kabul struck with a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, China Metallurgical Group Corporation. Accusations of bribery and a sweetheart deal for the mining concern have swirled for years, but without proof. Mr. Shahrani said this agreement was made under a previous minister when nonpublication was subject to a legal deal with the Chinese. He said he had written to the Chinese with a request to make the contract public. Almost all of the other contracts published on the ministry Web site, struck as far back as 2002, covered an array of much smaller marble, coal and other mines, and until the details of the Aynak contract are released, analysts questioned whether the new initiative had full force. “This is a start,” said Yama Torabi, director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan, an anticorruption watchdog based in Kabul. Mr. Shahrani said the ministry had discovered “financial, legal and technical flaws” in some of the contracts, and held up as an example at the news conference the operating rights for the country’s only cement factory, which was awarded at the time to a partnership of investors, among them Mahmoud Karzai, one of President Karzai’s brothers. Mahmoud Karzai has been accused of using his brother’s position for financial gain, and the cement factory had been controversial, not least among local provincial leaders who said the investors had cut jobs and paid low salaries. The contract was only four pages long, for an agreement that under proper international standards would normally be far longer, Mr. Shahrani said. “Look at the contract of Ghori Cement,” he said. “Nobody remembers a 30-year contract being signed in four pages.” He said that the shortcomings reflected a lack of capacity and experience among officials in the ministry when the agreement was put together, and that the flawed contracts would be revised. A spokesman for President Karzai, Aimal Faizi, said on Monday that the decision to publish the contracts had been made in a cabinet meeting and had not been taken unilaterally. He said that in the meeting Mr. Shahrani had raised concerns that some of the contract holders might object to the publication of the details, but that President Karzai had argued for disclosure. “The president said, ‘No, there is nothing to hide and let’s make it public, it should be transparent,’ ” he quoted the president as saying. He said that he could not speak for Mahmoud Karzai but that the government wanted every contract to be public — “whether it is Mahmoud Karzai’s or anybody else’s contract.” Mahmoud Karzai did not respond to messages seeking comment. Afghan and Western officials in Kabul, along with technical experts who advise the government, have said that the initial rejection of the new mining and oil drilling law in part reflected the minister’s political weakness. Mr. Shahrani, who took over in 2010, had expected the new law to breeze past the cabinet, yet instead found himself pitted almost alone against a range of more experienced and better-connected politicians — from those seen as pro-Western reformers to former communists and the religiously conservative who, among other things, objected to the proposals as being too generous to foreign mining interests eager to exploit Afghanistan’s natural resources. President Karzai publicly sided with those lined up against the new law, sending it back for revisions over Mr. Shahrani’s objections. Some Western officials fear the maneuvering reflects attempts by political rivals to snatch control of the Mining Ministry, a coveted post that oversees millions of dollars in contracts. “A lot of groups, a lot of people in the government, want to be part of the mining now that it is seen as a way to generate large sums of revenue,” said one senior European diplomat in Kabul who follows the mining deliberations. The diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the announcement Sunday could be seen as an attempt by Mr. Shahrani to address his political vulnerability by bolstering his standing among Afghans and the international community. The Mes Aynak mine has been delayed by deterioration in security and the discovery of Buddhist ruins and artifacts. But Mr. Shahrani said that archaeologists preparing the site now had a deadline of the end of this year to finish their survey, and that he was confident that the Chinese could begin mining extraction in 2014. Since he took over the ministry two years ago, Mr. Shahrani has been collecting details of agreements struck on natural resource deals going back over the past 10 years. Earlier this year, fulfilling concerns raised by Western governments at the Tokyo Conference, where for the first time donors made it a condition that the Afghan government reduce corruption before receiving all of the money, President Karzai issued a decree calling for full details of natural resource contracts to be published, giving further impetus to his efforts.

Foreign Investments
Mines and Mining
Corruption (Institutional)
Afghanistan War (2001- )
Metals and Minerals
Karzai Hamid


Pakistan Rage at Girl Shooting Gives Way to Skepticism

Abstract: RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — The smartly dressed Internet entrepreneur basked in the sun outside a McDonald’s, down the road from Pakistan’s military headquarters, considering the furor over Malala Yousafzai , the schoolgirl who had taken on the Taliban only to be shot in the head . “We have mixed feelings about Malala,” said the man, Raja Imran, 30, his eyes shaded by sunglasses, fiddling with a pack of Marlboros. “Was it the Americans who shot her or was it Al Qaeda? We don’t know. Some people think this is all an American publicity stunt to make their point against the Taliban.” And what did he himself think? Mr. Imran shrugged. Several young customers at the restaurant were similarly ambivalent. Others asked: What about the other two girls wounded in the shooting? “And what about Aafia Siddiqui?” asked one young woman, referring to the Pakistani woman convicted on charges of trying to kill American soldiers and F.B.I. agents by a New York court in 2010 and sentenced to 86 years in prison. “Nobody mentions her,” said the woman, who gave her name as Maria, with a pointed glance before darting away. Such conspiracy-laden skepticism about Ms. Yousafzai, who was shot by a Taliban gunman inside her school bus, is only one strand of public opinion here; others have expressed unqualified anger at the attack. But it does suggest something dispiriting: that Pakistan’s “Malala moment,” and the possibilities it briefly excited, has passed. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 9 assault, some Pakistanis hoped it could set off a sea change in their society. For years, the country’s ability to resist Taliban militancy has been hamstrung by a broad ambiguity that undermined a national consensus against Islamist violence. Religious groups hesitated to challenge the Taliban for religious reasons. Politicians feared speaking out on safety grounds. And the military, which has a history of nurturing Islamists to fight its proxy wars in India or Afghanistan , equivocated by tacitly supporting selected militant outfits, known among militancy experts as the “good Taliban.” But after Ms. Yousafzai was shot, heart-rending images of the wounded child bounced against coldblooded Taliban statements that the militants would shoot her again , if they had a chance. The country suddenly spoke with a unified, furious voice . Politicians and religious leaders condemned the Taliban with unusual passion. The army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, visited Ms. Yousafzai’s bedside and released a rare public statement that the military would “refuse to bow before terror.” Writers compared the teenage blogger to Anne Frank. Conservative politicians came under harsh scrutiny. Just two days before the attack, Imran Khan, the former cricket star whose political star has soared in the past year, had led a honking motorcade of supporters to the edge of the tribal belt, where they mounted a protest against C.I.A. -directed drone strikes in the nearby mountains. They received largely favorable news media coverage. But after the shooting, Mr. Khan came in for sharp criticism, partly because he favors negotiating with the Taliban instead of fighting them, and partly because he refused to condemn the militants in a television interview, citing safety concerns for his followers in the tribal belt. “If today I start shouting slogans here against Taliban, who will save them?” Mr. Khan asked. Commentators said the episode hurt Mr. Khan’s credibility. “There had been latent fears about his Taliban policies,” said Fahd Husain, a television presenter. “This thing suddenly reminded people that he is not really clear on this subject.” Mr. Khan, for his part, is sticking to his guns. “Our liberals support military solution despite them being counterproductive,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Each military operation leads to more militancy and fanaticism.” A military operation, however, is exactly what was being speculated about early this week, when the country’s top generals held a secretive two-day meeting that stoked speculation they were planning a long-anticipated assault on the Taliban stronghold of North Waziristan — a major demand of the Obama administration. By then, however, the backlash against Ms. Yousafzai had already started in earnest. The religious right attacked the wounded schoolgirl, circulating images on the Internet that showed her meeting senior American officials and implying that she was an American agent. Other politicians showed little conviction. With the exception of the Karachi-based Muttahida Qaumi Movement, no party organized mass street rallies against the Taliban — a stark contrast with the violent riots that seized the country weeks earlier in reaction to an American-made video insulting the Prophet Muhammad. In Parliament on Wednesday, a government motion in favor of a “military operation” against the Taliban was blocked by the opposition. Most commentators now say a military drive into North Waziristan is unlikely anytime soon. Whatever window had been opened — for military action, or a new unity against the Taliban — now appears to have closed. “It was a golden moment,” said Mr. Husain, the journalist. “But that’s what it was — a moment.” Others doubted the moment ever existed. “Remember that we are a confused and psychologically divided society,” said Ayaz Amir, an outspoken opposition politician. “So it is too much to hope that our national thinking could turn in the other direction so quickly.” In some senses, the clearest policy comes from the Taliban. This week the militants published a seven-page justification for their violence against Ms. Yousafzai — “Malala used to speak openly against Islamic system and give interviews in favor of Western education, while wearing a lot of makeup,” it read — and threatened to kill journalists who criticized its tactics. Others, however, see a silver lining: that Pakistanis have drawn one major red line when it comes to Taliban aggression. “You can be a devout Muslim, hate America and be more upset than Imran Khan about drones,” said Nusrat Javed, a television commentator. “But if you have daughters who want to go to school, there is universal condemnation of something like this.” The whole episode shows that Pakistanis have an urgent need to “be clear” about the Taliban, said Mr. Amir, the politician. “There needs to be an intellectual consensus that we have gone far enough,” he said. “We must draw a line.”

Pakistan
Taliban
Afghanistan
Muslims and Islam
Yousafzai Malala
Central Intelligence Agency
United States
Murders and Attempted Murders


Brooke Henderson Tops Lydia Ko in Playoff to Capture Women’s PGA

Abstract: SAMMAMISH, Wash. — Brooke Henderson beat top-ranked Lydia Ko with a birdie on the first hole of a playoff Sunday in the Women’s P.G.A. Championship after overcoming a three-shot deficit on the back nine. Henderson, an 18-year-old Canadian ranked No. 4 in the world, closed with a bogey-free six-under-par 65 — the best round of the week at Sahalee Country Club — to match Ko at six-under 278. Ko, who led by a stroke entering the final round, finished with a 67. In the playoff on the par-4 18th, Henderson hit her second shot from 155 yards to three feet, while Ko’s second left her with a 20-foot putt. Ko missed to the left, and Henderson tapped in to cap a week that started with a hole-in-one on her fourth hole of the tournament and ended with her first major championship. Ko was seeking her third straight major title. In regulation, Henderson saved par on 18 with a 12-footer moments before Ko missed a 4-foot birdie try on the par-3 17th. Henderson also made a long eagle putt on the par-5 11th and birdied the par-3 13th. Henderson became the second-youngest winner of a women’s major championship, with Ko the youngest last year at the Evian Championship in France.


Murdoch’s Appetite for Los Angeles Times May Depend on F.C.C. Changes

Abstract: In weighing a bid for The Los Angeles Times, Rupert Murdoch finds himself in a familiar role: waiting for rule changes from the government. With the resignation last week of Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, he may have to wait a little longer. Mr. Murdoch, who has never shied away from a regulatory battle, has been beefing up News Corporation’s lobbying efforts in Washington in the last few months to urge regulators to revise a media ownership rule that would prevent the company from acquiring The Los Angeles Times and other newspapers in markets in which it already owns television stations. “He wants it,” one person close to Mr. Murdoch said of The Los Angeles Times. “They’re working on getting a waiver now,” added this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. But another person close to Mr. Murdoch said he currently considered a potential deal more trouble than it is worth given the regulatory hurdles in Washington. The resignation of Mr. Genachowski, a Democrat, could further stall a plan favored by the departing chairman that would relax a longtime ban on consolidation between television stations and newspapers in local markets. The F.C.C. signaled on Friday that a vote on easing media ownership rules would move forward despite Mr. Genachowski’s departure. Initially expected to be presented for a vote early this year, the measure has already faced several setbacks. Last month, Mr. Genachowski said there would be no vote until the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council , a Washington-based nonprofit, completed a study of the impact of cross-ownership on news gathering. That process could take several weeks, potentially pushing a vote to the summer. In a series of letters sent to the F.C.C. late last year, Maureen A. O’Connell, News Corporation’s senior vice president for regulatory and government affairs, and Jared S. Sher, a vice president and associate general counsel at the company, argued that regulators should dissolve the cross-ownership rule. “There can be little debate today that the newspaper industry faces existential threats,” Ms. O’Connell wrote in a Dec. 7 letter documenting a meeting with agency officials. “We urged the F.C.C. to eliminate the cross-ownership rule as a relic from a bygone era.” Any easing of the media ownership rule would face fierce opposition from groups that say too much consolidation threatens a free press. If Mr. Murdoch owned a major Hollywood studio and a newspaper known as the paper of record for the entertainment industry, it could spark additional skepticism. Mr. Murdoch has given mixed signals about his interest in The Los Angeles Times, which is being put on the market by the Tribune Company, along with its other seven newspapers. A longtime reader of the paper, Mr. Murdoch is weighing whether a bid would be worth the headache and regulatory battles, said several people close to him who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. (The Tribune Company has indicated that it may prefer to sell its newspapers as a bundle.) Under the Obama administration, Mr. Murdoch has lost some of his muscle in Washington. Even Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, considered a Murdoch ally, recently supported shelving the Stop Online Piracy Act, which News Corporation and other media companies had lobbied to pass. “It won’t get through with the Democratic administration in place,” Mr. Murdoch told a Los Angeles Times reporter when asked at the Golden Globes in January whether he wanted to buy the paper. This summer, News Corporation will separate its newspapers into a smaller, mostly publishing-based company. Even if regulators were to grant a waiver of the cross-ownership rule, The Los Angeles Times would need significant investment that could strain the new company, said one of the people close to Mr. Murdoch. Image Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation is weighing whether a bid for The Los Angeles Times would be worth the headache. Credit Josh Reynolds/Associated Press News Corporation spent $6.3 million on lobbying last year, working mostly with the Washington firms Fritts Group, Glover Park Group, Cormac Group and Quinn Gillespie & Associates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. A spokeswoman for News Corporation declined to comment. Under Mr. Genachowski’s proposal to modify media ownership rules, a company or an individual could own both a television station and a newspaper in the same top-20 market as long as the station was not in the top four in audience size based on Nielsen ratings. News Corporation owns the Los Angeles stations KTTV and KCOP, and KCOP rates between fourth and fifth among local stations. A spokesman for the F.C.C. has said the proposed rules would make it more difficult to acquire a waiver. “The assertion that the F.C.C.’s order would make it easier for a top-four TV station — or for a TV station that moves between fourth and fifth in the rankings — to acquire a newspaper is simply false,” the spokesman, Justin Cole, said in a statement last month. Craig Aaron, president and chief executive of Free Press, an advocacy group that supports diverse media ownership, agreed that there was “very little wiggle room” in the current rules. But if the rules change, he said, “the opportunity to obtain a waiver becomes much closer to reality.” Cross-ownership rules were first put in place in 1975, when the media landscape was drastically different. From Nov. 26 to Dec. 5 last year, officials from News Corporation’s government affairs office met with all five F.C.C. commissioners to discuss cross-ownership and other issues affecting the media industry, according to documents filed with the commission. The company and many of its competitors have long argued that local television stations and newspapers should be able to share resources. In 1993, after threatening to shut The New York Post, Mr. Murdoch received a permanent waiver from the F.C.C. to own the tabloid and the local television station WNYW. Ms. O’Connell, a company lobbyist who specializes in the cross-ownership issue, pointed out in News Corporation’s letters to the F.C.C. that The New York Post’s daily circulation declined 42 percent from 2002 to 2011, to less than 345,000. “In an era of profound distress for the newspaper industry, the commission should embrace the ways in which television stations and newspapers can share resources and realize economic efficiencies,” she wrote. Analysts said the coming split could help News Corporation’s chances of receiving an F.C.C. waiver, because the Los Angeles stations will be part of the Fox Group, along with the company’s cable assets and Hollywood studio. Mr. Murdoch will be chairman of both companies. In 2014, the Fox Group is expected to have to renew the stations’ licenses with the F.C.C. “If their TV stations are going to be spun off from the larger conglomerate, then they might be given a waiver on the instance that they won’t directly own newspapers and stations in those particular markets anymore,” said Justin Nielson, an analyst at SNL Kagan. News Corporation’s publishing company will receive a $2.6 billion infusion of cash and have no debt when it separates from the cable channels, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. (In 2007, News Corporation paid $5.6 billion for Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal. That deal was not subject to F.C.C. cross-ownership rules because The Journal is considered a national newspaper.) The F.C.C. cannot rule specifically against Mr. Murdoch or News Corporation; it must instead create broad regulations that apply to all media companies. But Mr. Aaron of Free Press said the continuing investigation into phone hacking at the company’s British tabloids would complicate a deal. “We’re talking about Murdoch owning more newspapers in a year when people are still being arrested at the News of the World,” he said.

Los Angeles Times
Rupert Murdoch
Julius Genachowski
Lobbying
News Corp
Mergers and Acquisitions
FCC


Amateur Sleuths on the Dinosaur Trail

Abstract: COMANCHE NATIONAL GRASSLAND, Colo. — On a dry, chilly morning in the Southern Colorado grasslands, Bruce Schumacher led a group of AmeriCorps volunteers across the narrow, shallow Purgatoire River to an out-of-place bump in the landscape. He pushed aside loose, reddish dirt with his hands, revealing a bone the size of a microwave oven — the limb of a sauropod dinosaur, said Dr. Schumacher, a paleontologist. The workers were surprised that the fossil was just sitting out on the plains, unguarded. Two of them joked about coming back at night to pull it out of the ground. A two-hour ride down a dirt road, far from cellphone service or any other signs of human life, Picketwire Canyon is a dinosaur lover’s dream, largely because of hundreds of hubcap-size theropod and sauropod footprints pressed into a nearby layer of limestone, which abuts the river. Dr. Schumacher, 48, who lives in La Junta, Colo., is one of two field paleontologists employed by the United States Forest Service . They are responsible for protecting and promoting dinosaur remnants scattered across the agency’s 193 million acres, primarily in the Rocky Mountain states. The fossil site to which Dr. Schumacher led the volunteers is just one of many in the Morrison Formation , layers of rock lining 100-foot-tall mesas alongside the canyon. The site was discovered months beforehand, but because there were too many dinosaur bones and too few people to excavate them, it was reburied, for protection against thieves and the elements. For months, these bones lay undisturbed in the grasslands like buried treasure. The two stewards of the Forest Service’s dinosaur bones are far outnumbered by the approximately 350 archaeologists employed to manage the traces of human life, though the dinosaurs were around far longer than humans have been. “It all goes back to the laws and the homocentricity of those laws,” Dr. Schumacher said of the disparity. The National Historic Preservation Act requires strict protection of human structures built 50 or more years ago on federal lands. With the requirement comes funding for archaeologists. While Dr. Schumacher and his Forest Service counterpart do team with academic researchers and museums, which provide some outside funding for protection of bones, there is no law that protects paleontological resources to the same degree. Image Picketwire Canyon's theropod and sauropod footprints have made the site a dinosaur lover's dream. Credit Matthew Staver for The New York Times So to get dinosaur bones from Picketwire Canyon to museums and scientists, Dr. Schumacher has developed a creative strategy. Twice a year, for a week at a time, these bones and footprints are uncovered by a group of about two dozen volunteers, many in their 70s and 80s, whom Dr. Schumacher has been training for the last 15 years. Because of the program’s popularity, he no longer advertises it. Most of the volunteers have devotedly returned for every project and become a highly skilled team. During their first week, in 2001, volunteers searched along the lower edges of the canyon walls that frame the valley for the bluish-white fossils that stand out among the brown and gray rocks and bright yellow grasses — “developing their bone goggles,” Dr. Schumacher calls it. By the second-to-last day, they’d found nothing. So one volunteer took from his knapsack some petrified wood he had brought back to show his dejected partners. “That’s not wood,” Dr. Schumacher recalled telling the volunteer, who led the team back to where he had found the fossil. There, over the next several seasons, the crew spent a week or two every year uncovering a Camarasaurus that they named Woody. In all, they pulled out about 15 percent of the skeleton, now on display in the Sternberg Museum of Natural History at Fort Hays State University in Kansas. Most of the volunteers are amateurs interested in paleontology, like a retired meat cutter, a retired secretary of an oil and gas company and a retired aerospace engineer. Some did their own bone hunting before they found the program. Others were looking for opportunities for travel-oriented post-retirement volunteer work; many have worked on similar archaeological projects around the world. Ruthann White, 80, says she remembers racing back, goose-bumped, to what she referred to as her bone — a big, pork-chop-like pelvic bone — after months away. She has been part of 23 of the group’s 24 expeditions. Image Only two field paleontologists are employed by the United States Forest Service, so they work with volunteers to protect the site. Credit Matthew Staver for The New York Times Bigger bones often require several weeks of tedious work, spread out over seasons, as the volunteers delicately coax them out of clay or mudstone. In October 2014, resting on his side in a safari hat, Ms. White’s husband, Allen, 80, carefully brushed dirt from a bone lodged in the Riverside Quarry wall. Nearby, a mutton-chopped volunteer named Leroy Frazier, 62, (license plate: BONEDGR) carefully reassembled what looked like a football-size vertebra. “This is Sunday’s jigsaw puzzle,” he said, laughing. Up the river from the quarry, on another day of prospecting for dinosaurs, less seasoned volunteers pushed brooms across the dry limestone riverbed. Every couple of minutes someone uncovered new tracks made by theropods (bipedal carnivores whose prints show three talonlike toes) or sauropods (plant eaters that walked on all fours, leaving circular prints like potholes). The footprints stretch for yards, disappearing and reappearing over the years, as floods and the river itself alter the landscape. “It’s always been called the longest track site in North America,” said Dr. Schumacher, adding that with recent discoveries by his volunteers, it may be the biggest collection of tracks in the world. A Forest Service tractor scooped dust off the riverbed, leaving about six inches to be more gently removed by volunteers. ‘Hey, Fat Boy’ Theropod tracks in the riverbed follow, and sometimes overlap, those of sauropods. For this reason, some at the site speculated that the tracks might be a game trail: theropods stalking their sauropod prey. “This is where the big boy started getting in trouble,” said Sonny Fernandez, 77, resting by sauropod tracks that get deeper with each step and appear to be angling erratically left. “All those young ones seen him coming, said, ‘Hey, fat boy.’” All signs suggest that this substantial trackway continues well beyond the berm of dirt where the volunteers stopped at the end of the week. And the group’s recent discovery of adult sauropod tracks alongside previously uncovered juvenile tracks lends support to an emerging theory that these dinosaurs traveled as a family. Image Kevin Lindahl, a part-time Forest Service employee, measuring dinosaur tracks. The agency's volunteer program was so popular that it is no longer advertised. Credit Matthew Staver for The New York Times But the prints still buried are almost certain to remain mysteries until the volunteers return. Fortunately for Dr. Schumacher’s mental health, he is in no rush to see the 150-million-year-old prints exposed. Still, he says that with more resources, the Forest Service could replicate the type of educational programs that currently exist. Before joining the Forest Service, he had worked on Sue, the best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, as part of a team hired by the Field Museum in Chicago. The fossil’s discovery, in South Dakota, led to a major legal dispute involving the landowner, the finders and the federal government. In 1997, the Field Museum paid $8.36 million for Sue at auction. “At that time the Forest Service got this sense that fossils are worth a lot of money,” Dr. Schumacher said. In particular, Toadstool Geologic Park in Nebraska was seeing a lot of small-scale thefts, he said — old mammal bones being flipped for nickels and dimes on the black market. Back then, he added, the position of the Forest Service was: “People are stealing stuff. We don’t really know how to manage it. We’re not going to manage it. But we’re not going to let them steal it.” “That was the impetus of the whole program,” he said of the Forest Service’s ’s paleontology effort. In the early 1990s, the agency hired its first paleontologist, Barbara Beasley, to identify Forest Service resources worth protecting. Dr. Schumacher was brought on a couple of years later. Since then, thefts of fossils and bones have decreased, Dr. Schumacher said, and interest in preservation has grown. Still, funding is hard to come by. The agency’s two-person field paleontology program is part of the minerals department, which is primarily concerned with valuable coal and oil deposits. The Forest Service’s archaeology program and the Bureau of Land Management ’s paleontology program, by contrast, are placed in their agency’s heritage departments. The heritage departments are geared toward education, rather than commodities like oil and gas, and are therefore more equipped to fund educational and preservation efforts. Image Volunteers cleaned an area with dinosaur tracks as Dr. Schumacher, bottom right, looks on. Many of the volunteers, amateurs with an interest in paleontology, are in their 70s and 80s. Credit Matthew Staver for The New York Times “The academic history of paleontology in the United States has traditionally placed it within the realm of geosciences,” Denise Ottaviano, an agency spokeswoman, said in an email. “Most academic institutions place archaeology as a subdiscipline of anthropology and paleontology as a subdiscipline of geology.” When the Forest Service created its paleontology program in the 1990s, it followed that model, placing it in the minerals department, where it remains today, a misfit: an education-based program among a bunch of commodity-based programs. In the 23,000-acre Picketwire Canyon alone, Dr. Schumacher knows of a half-dozen substantive bone sites in addition to the covered track site. Some are untouched, and others have been only surveyed by the small groups of volunteers working two weeks each year. He lauds the Rocky Mountain region of the Forest Service, the only region that employs field paleontologists. He says he does not expect dozens of new colleagues but he would like the Forest Service to hire a third paleontologist so that the volunteer program can be replicated in other parts of the country. “The real value comes from education and talking with kids learning about the history of the earth,” he said. “That’s not a commodity that you’re going to sell and burn.” His wish may be granted. Regulations directing the Forest Service to carry out the National Paleontological Resources Preservation Act of 2009 — which seeks to curb the theft or collection of fossils on public lands but does not contain specific preservation mandates like those in the National Historic Preservation Act — were established in April, Ms. Ottaviano said, adding that the agency was considering additional staffing. Comrades in Digging Meanwhile, the volunteers in Picketwire Canyon keep digging. At the end of another day’s work, they ate dinner together, sharing beer and wine. They reminisced about digs from a decade ago, asking Dr. Schumacher for progress updates on their big finds, which are showcased in academic papers and in museums throughout the Southwest. A group of bearded men stayed up late, talking paleo shop, but the next morning, everyone was up early, eager to get back to their sites along the Purgatoire River. Back at the track site, volunteers were digging excitedly toward the back wall, hoping to learn what would come of the erratically angling sauropod. Because the animal appeared to have lost its footing, the location of its next tracks were becoming harder to guess. “You dinosaurs need to straighten out,” Mr. Fernandez said, shovel in hand, addressing the pile of dirt covering the track. Dr. Schumacher admired a deep track and wondered about the prints beyond the volunteers’ reach beneath the berm. “The bones in the back wall are always the most interesting,” he said.


Knicks’ Anthony, With Stage to Himself, Scores 50 in Win Over Heat

Abstract: MIAMI — Carmelo Anthony decided to try to beat the depleted Miami Heat single-handedly Tuesday night, and he succeeded. Anthony scored 50 points, his career high with the Knicks, going 18 of 26 from the field, including 7 of 10 on 3-pointers, in a 102-90 win at American Airlines Arena. “It’s a feeling that you just have when you’re out there on the court,” Anthony said. “Sometimes, you get off to a good start and then you get cold throughout the game, but tonight wasn’t one of those cases.” The Knicks, who extended their winning streak to nine games, took three of four meetings from the Heat to win the season series for the first time since the 2007-8 season. This is also their longest win streak since 1994 (15 games). Miami played its second consecutive game without LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Mario Chalmers. Wade and Chalmers are nursing ankle injuries and James has a sore hamstring. “We beat a great team tonight,” Knicks Coach Mike Woodson said. “Their supporting cast, I have a great deal of respect. Most of these guys were a part of that championship team, and you can’t take them lightly. To me, we beat a great team tonight, minus three of their top players, but hey, they’re a team. That’s why they won the title last year, and we’re trying to chase that.” Image Carmelo Anthony, who set his Knicks career high with 50 points, was 18 of 26 from the field, including 7 of 10 on 3-pointers. Credit Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images Anthony, who scored 50 points twice with the Denver Nuggets, including once against the Knicks, scored 8 of the team’s first 11 points and was in double figures less than four minutes into the game. He finished the first half with 27 points. “That is a game that drives the analytics guys crazy,” Heat forward Shane Battier said. “He didn’t attempt a shot within 15 feet of the basket. Most nights, we would take that every single time. He made a ton of shots. There were some we had poor rotations on and he had really clean looks and that was just breakdowns in our defense. A lot of shots you would take 11 times out of 10, and he just had it rolling.” J. R. Smith added 14 points and Raymond Felton chipped in 10. The Knicks, who are tied with the Indiana Pacers for second place in the Eastern Conference behind Miami, received a boost with the return of Tyson Chandler, who missed the last 10 games with neck and knee injuries. He played 24 minutes and was matched against Chris Bosh, who led the Heat with 23 points. “I was a little stiff out there, obviously fatigued,” said Chandler, who does not know whether he will play Wednesday night against the Hawks in Atlanta. “This was my first time stepping on the court in three weeks and running up and down the floor. I really just wanted to get the win. No serious pain but obviously some stiffness and soreness, which hinders me a little bit, but some things I’m confident will get better each game.” Anthony went cold early in the fourth quarter before scoring 5 straight points to stretch the lead to 7 and reached 50 points with a jumper with 16.9 seconds remaining. His teammates were hounding him down the stretch to take more shots. “I knew I was close and they were telling me to come get the ball,” Anthony said. “I was trying to get the ball over with, but Ray yelled at me, Tyson yelled at me, so I came up there and got it.” Woodson did not change his approach to the game, especially after seeing Miami beat the Spurs in San Antonio on Sunday without James, Wade and Chalmers. Image LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, kept out of the game because of injuries, cheering on their Heat teammates. Credit Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images “Every game is important for us no matter who plays,” Woodson said before the game. “They are a big piece of Miami’s puzzle, but they are still pretty good without them. They go into San Antonio and win without those three guys, so I say they’re pretty good.” As for Miami Coach Erik Spoelstra’s decision to hold James, Wade and Chalmers out, Woodson said: “Obviously, they are hurt. I believe that. If he is holding them out for those reasons, then so be it. I can’t worry about guys who are not playing; I have to worry about the guys that are in uniform playing.” The Knicks were able to play better defense in the second half after letting Mike Miller get loose for 18 points on 4-of-8 shooting from beyond the arc. He was held scoreless the second half. Ray Allen finished with 16 points, while Norris Cole, starting in place of Chalmers, added 14 points. On Sunday, Miami still managed to pull out an 88-86 victory over the Spurs on a last-second 3-pointer by Bosh. What Spoelstra did with James, Wade and Chalmers was thought to be an anomaly and more of a statement in response to what Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich did Nov. 29. San Antonio was fined $250,000 by Commissioner David Stern after Popovich sent the starters Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Danny Green and Manu Ginobili home before the Heat-San Antonio game in Miami. Tuesday morning’s shoot-around showed that Spoelstra had more of a method to his madness with the playoffs around the corner. There was quite a bit of energy spent by every Heat player during the 27-game winning streak and the tightness in James’s hamstring only proved that, according to Spoelstra, “he’s human.” Miami plans to be careful between now and the start of the postseason. “We’re not panicked about it,” Spoelstra said. “We’re being very proactive and aggressive with the treatment and rehab, just to make sure we can contain their injuries where they are. You get into 70-plus games, where we are right now, we feel very fortunate.” He called them minor things “that happen over the course of a long season.” He added: “These are minor things right now. Minor things can turn into much bigger things if they’re not addressed.”

Knicks
Carmelo Anthony
Miami Heat
Basketball


Explosion at Venezuela Refinery Kills at Least 39

Abstract: CARACAS, Venezuela — At least 39 people were killed on Saturday and dozens more were injured in a giant explosion that set off a raging fire at Venezuela’s largest oil refinery, according to officials who rushed to the scene on the Paraguaná Peninsula. Rafael Ramírez, the energy minister, who is president of Pétroleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil company that runs the refinery complex, said the blast occurred at 1:15 a.m. and was caused by a gas leak. Shortly before the explosion, workers at the Amuay refinery detected the buildup of a cloud of gas and began to respond, Mr. Ramírez said, but it was already too late. “All this happened very fast, and the explosion occurred almost immediately,” Mr. Ramírez said in televised remarks. The national oil company, also known as PDVSA, has been plagued by accidents and oil spills in recent years, which critics say are the result of poor management. On Saturday, television images showed dark smoke billowing from the refinery, and photographs taken earlier showed a huge mass of flames leaping into the night sky. The fires continued to burn on Saturday night, but officials said they were under control. Venezuela is a major oil supplier to the United States. Mr. Ramírez said that the explosion occurred in a storage area near the edge of the vast compound and did not damage the main processing area, so he expected work at the refinery would resume within two days. Vice President Elías Jaua said 39 people had been killed, including 18 members of the National Guard, who maintain a post at the site that was heavily damaged. He said 15 of the victims were civilians, many of them family members of the National Guard soldiers and were staying at the guardsmen’s compound. Six of the bodies had not been identified, he said. Officials said a 10-year-old boy was among the dead. Many area homes were evacuated. President Hugo Chávez called the accident “sad and painful” and declared a national mourning period of three days. “We don’t have anything to hide,” Mr. Chávez said, vowing to investigate the accident. “We have to overcome this tragedy.” The Amuay refinery is part of the Paraguaná refinery complex, one of the largest in the world. The complex can process about 900,000 barrels of crude oil a day. In 2010 there was a large fire at a PDVSA fuel terminal on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. The same year, a fire on a dock at Paraguaná interrupted fuel shipments. Also in 2010, a natural gas exploration rig, the Aban Pearl, sank in the Caribbean. José Bodas, an oil union leader, said that the company had failed to invest in maintenance. “This has as a consequence the increase in accidents and tragic deaths like what we are seeing today,” he said in a telephone call to Globovision, a television channel associated with the political opposition to President Chávez.

Explosions
Venezuela
Refineries
PDVSA
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Ramirez Rafael


Memories of Dennis Holt, Who Championed Brooklyn and Reported on It

Abstract: I FIRST met Dennis Holt at Keens Steakhouse in 1981, which seems appropriate, for Dennis usually seemed at least as old as Keens, with its countless clay pipes hanging from the ceiling, its naughty odalisque over the bar, and its banquet rooms named for Teddy Roosevelt and Lillie Langtry. Dennis, who died last month at the age of 77, was, over the course of his career, a longtime reporter for Brooklyn community newspapers, a Congressional chief of staff, a devoted family man and a good friend. But as we came to discover, he was also something much more — something few of us expected. With his brush mustache, his round glasses, and his largely bald, prodigious head, Dennis did not look quite like anyone alive nowadays. He resembled more a reporter or maybe a ward heeler from the 19th century. Tall and gangly, he had long, tapered fingers that were usually busy firing up another of his awful, mentholated cigarettes, which he spent more time gesticulating with than actually smoking. When he stood with his jacket pushed back and a hand on his hip — a characteristic pose — you half-expected to catch a glimpse of a watch fob. He was someone who had the gift of being perpetually amazed or outraged by life, expressing himself in colorful gusts of astonishment. Even his profanity was wonderfully antiquated, his favorite exclamation, “Jesus jumped-up Christ!” He loved many things, first and foremost his children, and Susan, his dauntlessly cheerful, extremely understanding wife of 40 years. He was a fiercely partisan Democrat, and utterly devoted to the borough of Brooklyn. His spare time was spent poring over local street directories from the 1880s, inventing political board games and reading about the Civil War. He enjoyed his pleasures. The cigarette habit stretched to three packs a day, and for a thin man he had a remarkable capacity for alcohol. When I worked for him at a Wall Street trade association he would take me out to lunch, where I would have one gin and tonic and be on the floor for the rest of the afternoon. Dennis would have two or three martinis, which just seemed to make him perky. HE was, in short, a classic New York eccentric, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Such individuals tend to stick with the city through the hard times, when more sensible people might be tempted to abandon it. Dennis was employed for many years as a public relations man for Union Carbide, but when the company moved to Connecticut he stayed behind. The family lived in a ramshackle old brownstone in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. The neighborhood was going through some dark days, and their home was broken into more than half a dozen times. One evening, a burglar made his way brazenly up to the second floor and flipped on the light in the room where the Holts’ 4-year-old son was sleeping. Dennis, clad only in his pajamas, grabbed a Civil War dress sword off the wall and chased the intruder down the stairs and into the street, waving the sword over his head and bellowing at the top of his voice. “You couldn’t have buttered toast with that thing,” Susan remembered of his weapon, but it did the job. When a responding police officer asked, “What are people like you doing in a place like this?” Dennis told him, “We’re crazy!” Rather than give up, he worked tirelessly to promote and beautify his adopted borough. He preached the gospel of Brooklyn’s revival to anyone who would listen — even when they had stopped listening. All of us who knew him loved him. Then, in 1993, a book came out that made us see him in a whole new light: E. Culpepper Clark’s superb history of the long fight to integrate the University of Alabama , “ The Schoolhouse Door .” It begins with the effort to enroll a young black woman named Autherine Lucy at the university in February 1956. And there, to our surprise, was Dennis Holt. The appearance of the incredibly courageous Ms. Lucy triggered wild rioting by Alabama students, considerably augmented by outside agitators. The mob roamed freely about the campus for hours, screaming racial epithets, setting fires, attacking a passing black motorist, and even pelting the wife of the university president with eggs and rocks when she tried to appeal for calm. Ms. Lucy was fortunate to escape with her life. Dennis, we discovered, was president of the arts and sciences college council of Alabama at the time, “brilliant, eloquent and popular,” and the national college debate champion. Along with a handful of other brave students, he turned away a group of drunken rioters seeking to break into the university president’s residence. Dennis and his companions told them, “You’re not going anywhere.” The next day, Alabama’s board of trustees gave in to the mob, and voted to ban Ms. Lucy from campus for her own safety. It was a dishonor that Dennis and his fellow student leaders were not willing to share. They held a public meeting, in which Dennis described the people he had kept from entering the president’s mansion as “two high school boys and a man so drunk he could barely lurch.” Turning them back wasn’t hard: “That’s all it took — just a little resistance.” “America has been called to greatness and we, too, have been called,” Dennis continued. “We have a chance to tell the world that this, our student government, is not run by vandals, goons or thugs. Let us say here this evening that we live by democratic means and democratic methods and that we’re opposed to mob violence and mob rule.” He offered a resolution “that mob violence be denounced at the University of Alabama and that means be found to protect the future personal safety of the students, white or Negro — and the faculty and the reputation of the university.” “And then he was finished, and they applauded him for 35 seconds, which is too long to be quite proper for 60 people,” wrote the newspaperman Murray Kempton, covering the meeting for The New York Post. “They seemed to keep it going out of some need to affirm what they had waited so long to hear someone say loud and clear.” BEFORE we read this, so many of us who liked Dennis so much had no idea that he had done any such thing. We had no idea that he’d ever been the national debate champion. He had never mentioned it, and he had little enough to say about it once we found out, reminiscing only about how swell his friends on the Alabama football team had been, forming an ad hoc bodyguard for him around campus because they feared for his life. Time would work its ways with Dennis, as it does with all of us. But he went on working, went on enthusing over Brooklyn as Boerum Hill turned again into a lovely neighborhood, and artisanal mayonnaise shops began to replace the burglars. Then, very suddenly, came a collapsed lung and a bad fall. Dennis lapsed into a coma from which he did not emerge. It is hard to believe that he could have been around near the start of the modern civil rights movement, or that all that hatred and insanity could have afflicted us such a short time ago. The obvious lesson of Dennis’s life is how a likable, colorful individual — someone who might be described as comical at times — could stand up and do the right thing when it counted the most. But then, aren’t these really the same parts to the man? He did what he believed in, he did it passionately, and he did it without worrying too much what other people thought. And if in the end he was well before his time in believing that racism was hideous nonsense, or that Brooklyn would revive and prosper, who was really the eccentric? My favorite memory of him will always be of one Sunday when my wife and I brought over a box of St. Joseph’s Day zeppoli from a Little Italy bakery to cap one of Susan’s sumptuous dinners. These are a fantastic cream pastry, made once a year, and they bear about as much resemblance to your summer street-fair zeppole as a stromboli does to a cheese sandwich. Late on that balmy, spring afternoon, Dennis sat at the head of the table in his now flourishing home, with his family and his friends beside him, and gazed at this marvelous concoction on his plate. “Isn’t life wonderful!” he exclaimed with his usual enthusiasm. “Isn’t life wonderful!”

Newspapers
University of Alabama
Blacks
Holt Dennis
Civil Rights and Liberties
Brooklyn (NYC)
Colleges and Universities
Segregation


U.S. Morality Cop Who Can’t Take a Political Frisk

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Thirty-six years ago, the director of the liberal Republican caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives urged me to see a promising young congressional candidate from Georgia; reluctantly, I did. That was Newt Gingrich . He did not disappoint. Bright, energetic, effusive, he spent a couple of hours extolling the need to transform his party, embracing Linwood Holton, the progressive Republican governor of Virginia who was opposed to Richard Nixon, as a role model and civil rights as a central cause. It took him two more elections to finally prevail. It was not much longer before Mr. Holton and civil rights were in his rear-view mirror. This flashed back as the remarkably durable Mr. Gingrich leads the protests against building a Muslim cultural center and place of worship two blocks from the site where terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in New York. On Fox News, where Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker, is a contributor, and with more than a dozen postings on Twitter, he has savaged the project to erect a mosque near ground zero . Mr. Gingrich, 67, says it is analogous to allowing the Nazis to put a sign next to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; the New York imam leading the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, Mr. Gingrich charges, is a “radical Islamist.” This is a perfect issue for Mr. Gingrich’s latest cause: religion, a commitment to God and country. That in turn is a centerpiece of a plan to run for president. His most recent book, “To Save America,” is subtitled “Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine.” Secular politicians, led by President Barack Obama and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, Mr. Gingrich charges, want to take God and religion out of the public square, are corrosively corrupt and oppose American values like the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. This is no idle fear, Mr. Gingrich warns in his book: “The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” In his anti-mosque crusade and other critiques, Mr. Gingrich wraps himself in spirituality, castigating the morals and values of opponents. As in his long-ago celebration of civil rights, the clever Georgia Republican counts on a short attention span. For this self-styled morality cop is on his third marriage, no big deal by itself. Except he handed his first wife — his high school geometry teacher — her walking papers while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. Two decades later, he divorced his second wife not long after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. During that marriage, he carried on an affair with a junior House staffer even as he served as speaker while impeaching President Bill Clinton for lying about sex. The staffer is now his third wife. In a profile in the latest issue of Esquire magazine, with which Mr. Gingrich cooperated, the second wife, Marianne, said, “He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected.” Mr. Gingrich has played the religious card before. Fifteen years ago, at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, he said that the core of the United States’ travails was a lost “personal relationship with God.” In response to a question from a young Richmond Times Dispatch reporter — Mike Allen, now a Washington journalist — he admitted that he seldom attended services because redistricting by Democrats had placed his church outside his congressional district. The man who assails Democrats’ ethics and the White House’s “corrupt, Chicago-style political machine,” is the only speaker of the House to be officially sanctioned by his colleagues. He was ordered to pay a record $300,000 penalty after the House ethics committee determined he had deceived investigators and used tax-exempt funds he had raised for disadvantaged kids for political purposes. He has long had a penchant for linking opponents with Hitler or Nazis. In the 1980s, he likened a proposal on Nicaragua by a Democratic congressman, Lee Hamilton of Indiana, to the horrors of Auschwitz; he said that the Democrats’ actions in a recount of an inconclusive Indiana House race reminded him of the dictum by the German Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller that the failure of his countrymen to speak out when Hitler went after the Jews and other groups meant that when “the Nazis came for me, there was no one left to speak up.” Mr. Gingrich, usually interesting as well as provocative, reinvents facts and himself. The imam of the proposed New York mosque is not the radical he describes; Mr. Abdul Rauf is a harsh critic of Islamic extremists, an apostle of interfaith dialogue and was a consultant to the F.B.I. Mr. Gingrich regales party activists and younger journalists with tales of his critical role in the economic successes of the 1990s. The realities: the 1993 budget measure, with tax hikes, which he opposed, contributed more to deficit reduction than any deals he negotiated during his four years as speaker; the overhaul of welfare was about 80 percent the doing of Mr. Clinton, who consistently rolled the hapless Mr. Gingrich, a major factor in the Republican move to oust their speaker after the 1998 elections. Still, he is a remarkable survivor. Periodically, he eschews vitriol and embraces someone across the political aisle, as he did with Mr. Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, on school reform. He converted to Catholicism last year, petitioned to annul his marriage and several bishops showed up for his baptism. Shortly after, he lambasted the University of Notre Dame for giving the president of the United States an honorary degree. He knows how to stay in the public limelight he passionately craves. His views, on subjects ranging from civil rights to the New York cultural center, are situational. He would love to be president because he would love the attention. He is unlikely to run. Over more than three decades, unlike any other national aspirant, Mr. Gingrich has never run for an office outside of a small congressional district: He cannot take a political frisk.

House of Representatives
Mosques
Gingrich Newt
United States Politics and Government
Park51


Entrepreneur Lets Fingers Do Walking

Abstract: Forgive Joseph Walsh for gloating. As president and chief executive of Yellow Book USA, Mr. Walsh, 42, relishes his role as David to the Goliath in the $15 billion yellow pages industry: the Bell phone companies. Historically, the Bells have dominated the business, but mainly in their own regions. That has changed significantly in the last decade with the rapid growth of the independent publishers, led by Yellow Book. In December, Verizon Communications announced that it was considering selling or spinning off its directories business for about $17 billion to concentrate on wireless, data and phone services. Here's where the gloating comes in. "We're very excited about it," Mr. Walsh said during a recent interview. "It's certainly a victory for competition. We've been locked in this Armageddon battle with the phone companies, Verizon in particular." But snatch up his competitor's business? Thanks, but no thanks, he says. "I go to church on Sunday and being a monopolist is not my idea of fun," he said. "We're not interested in buying the Verizon business at all. We already have, in many cases, the strongest directory in the markets where we compete with Verizon, so it's sort of too late. If we were going to look at that, it would have been a long time ago." Mr. Walsh discussed acquisitions that do interest him, including the $1.6 billion deal last year that brought TransWestern Publishing into the fold, online searches and the shelf life of his company's ubiquitous directories. Following are excerpts: Q. You've been on a bit of a spree. A. Well, over a long period of time. About a decade of steady progress. In fact, we have another one we're getting ready to close. We just fairly recently acquired Clarke Directory Publications in California. Q. Is this an effort to broaden your footprint? A. We have a stated goal of building Yellow Book USA to be a national directory publisher. Q. Don't you already feel that you're national, with 900 directories in 46 states and the District of Columbia and over 100 million circulation? A. Oh we are, but there are still holes, and we're still filling in those holes. Q. Who gets Yellow Book? Anyone and everyone, or only non-Bell customers? A. Yellow Book is hand-delivered to every home and business where we publish a directory, and to everyone who moves into the area throughout the year. It doesn't matter if they are Bell customers or not. Q. In the move toward online, from a consumer point of view, why would you need the book? A. We're sort of agnostic. We take the view that we're channel-neutral. Our role is to put the consumer or the buyer together with the seller who can meet their needs. We'll do that through the printed Yellow Book, through yellowbook.com and we'll do that through the broader Web through a product that we call Web Reach. We're O.K. with however they want to search. Our business is going to react to the market -- as opposed to tell the market what to do. Q. Obviously, one channel is cheaper than the other? A. We're working pretty hard in our business model to make sure we're truly agnostic, not just that we're saying that we are, that we have economics in each of those areas that are similar. I think we're there. The printed directory still has the vast majority of lookups -- 15 billion annual references -- and that number is holding in there pretty steady; it hasn't declined. It's not vinyl records. The printed directory won't go away overnight. Q. Do you have a relationship with Google or Yahoo? A. We do business with most of the major search outfits, both on their behalf, channeling ads to them, and in some cases buying keywords ourselves. It's interesting, some people ask, jeez, aren't they your competitor? In a sense they are, but I think of them more as the man who puts the phone book on the door of your house. They are a delivery mechanism for our information. Q. What keeps you up at night? A. I think that the development of local search is moving quickly. I feel great about our assets and about the position we've taken in the market. But deep down in your heart you're always asking yourself: Do we have it right? Is there a missile coming at us that we don't see? Or will people adopt this in a different way, that they don't need us somehow? And you're concerned about that.

YELLOW BOOK USA
YELLOW PAGES
VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS
DIRECTORIES
WALSH JOSEPH
MERGERS ACQUISITIONS AND DIVESTITURES
TELEPHONES AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS
COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET


Russian Tycoon Loses Multibillion-Dollar Case Over Oil Fortune to Kremlin Favorite

Abstract: LONDON — In a legal battle between two Russian oligarchs that became a window on the sometimes murderous carve-up of the Soviet Union’s vast resource wealth, a High Court judge here rejected a $5.1 billion claim on Friday brought by Boris A. Berezovsky , a London-based émigré, against Roman A. Abramovich, a Kremlin favorite who owns London’s Chelsea soccer club. Mr. Berezovsky had accused Mr. Abramovich of acting in concert with the current Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, to bully and blackmail him into selling his shares in the Russian oil company Sibneft and other assets in 2001 for a fraction of their value, under threat that the Kremlin might expropriate his holdings. The case had been billed as the world’s largest private lawsuit since it began more than four years ago. It culminated on Friday with a stunning victory for Mr. Abramovich, 45, and a harsh repudiation for Mr. Berezovsky, 65, who was characterized by the judge in the case, Elizabeth Gloster, as an “unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness,” and at times a dishonest one, during the four months of testimony that ended in January. Justice Gloster contrasted Mr. Berezovsky’s testimony starkly with Mr. Abramovich’s, saying Mr. Abramovich had been “a truthful, and on the whole reliable, witness.” While Mr. Berezovsky was in court for the ruling, Mr. Abramovich was in Monaco to watch a game involving Chelsea, which rode his billion-dollar investment in the club to victory this spring in Europe’s Champions League, the most coveted club trophy in soccer. Mr. Berezovsky, hugely wealthy but a financial minnow compared with Mr. Abramovich, a multibillionaire, emerged from the case with nothing to show for the lavish sums that he, like Mr. Abramovich, spent on recruiting some of Britain ’s most expensive legal talent. The judgment on Friday deferred until the fall a ruling on an estimated $200 million to $250 million in legal and other costs, much of which could be assessed against Mr. Berezovsky, and left the loser to ponder the hazards involved in a possible appeal. Mr. Berezovsky, in a gray suit and open-collar white shirt, sat glumly through the reading of Justice Gloster’s 38-page judgment, at times shaking his head. He emerged, smiling stoically, from the packed courtroom in the modern building that houses the commercial division of the High Court, where litigants are required to pay for the court’s operating costs as well as their own legal fees. But by the time he reached the throng of reporters and news cameramen on the sidewalk outside, he had recovered his pugnacious style, saying he was “absolutely amazed by what’s happened today,” and accusing Justice Gloster of rewriting Russian history and glossing over the intimidation he had faced from Mr. Putin. He said he had made no decision on whether to appeal the judgment, which he said “could have been written by Putin.” He said, “Life is life,” before driving off in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. The case had strong reverberations in the Kremlin, where Mr. Abramovich, who remains at least formally a Russian resident, retains the political and personal ties to Mr. Putin that were crucial to his success in amassing a fortune estimated at more than $12 billion by Forbes this year. Mr. Berezovsky has been cast as an embezzler and turncoat in recent years by the Kremlin, which has also accused him of links to Chechen terrorists. He was forced to flee Russia in 2001 after the Kremlin connections he built under former President Boris N. Yeltsin turned to ashes under Mr. Putin. With a worth estimated recently by The Sunday Times of London to be around $800 million, Mr. Berezovsky, who gained political asylum in Britain in 2003, has lived a reclusive if extravagant life in Britain and at homes he has acquired elsewhere in Europe. Surrounded by bodyguards, he has claimed that he lives under permanent threat of assassination by Kremlin-assigned agents. The two businessmen, once close enough to be photographed in a beaming embrace aboard a gleaming yacht in the Mediterranean, became synonymous with the extravagant lifestyles of the oligarchs who acquired their fortunes from the privatization of state assets, particularly in oil, gas and minerals, after the Soviet Union collapsed. It was an era of lawlessness, corruption and intimidation, with almost unimaginable rewards available to those able to muster the muscle, cunning and patronage to outflank their enemies. Russian chroniclers say few men worked the system better than Mr. Berezovsky and Mr. Abramovich, only to have their relationship founder on the personal but ultimately vengeful chemistry they had ridden to success. It was thus that the court, in London’s steel-and-glass Rolls building , became the forum for an unsparing exposure of the murky business underworld where Mr. Berezovsky and Mr. Abramovich made their fortunes. Mr. Berezovsky, the court learned, had migrated from his earlier job as an academic mathematician to become the owner of Russia’s largest car dealership and an intimate of Mr. Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet president. Mr. Abramovich, a former Soviet Army conscript, garage mechanic, street trader and toy duck importer, brought his business acumen and cash to the deal, while Mr. Berezovsky used his Kremlin influence to gain control of valuable Siberian oil holdings and to transform them into a new company, Sibneft. The core of the case rested on the roles played by Mr. Berezovsky and Mr. Abramovich, with Mr. Abramovich claiming Mr. Berezovsky’s part had been that of “the godfather,” providing the “krysha,” or protection, that eased the way for the Sibneft deal. But he denied that Mr. Berezovsky had ever been a major stakeholder in Sibneft, and said that Mr. Berezovsky’s role had been limited to providing what he called “political clout.” Mr. Berezovsky and his lawyers belittled Mr. Abramovich’s business competence and intelligence, saying he had been menaced into accepting $1.3 billion from Mr. Abramovich in 2001 for his Sibneft holding, while Mr. Abramovich sold his own share in the company in 2005 for $11.9 billion. But it was Mr. Berezovsky, not Mr. Abramovich, who took the brunt of Justice Gloster’s verdict. She was unsparing of Mr. Berezovsky, saying that he had come across as a man who “regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be molded to suit his current purposes.” “At times,” she said, “the evidence which he gave was inherently dishonest; sometimes, he was clearly making his evidence up as he went along.” She added, “At other times, I gained the impression that he was not necessarily being dishonest, but had deluded himself into believing his own version of events.”

Russia
Sibneft
Berezovsky Boris A
Abramovich Roman A
Decisions and Verdicts
Suits and Litigation
Great Britain


Woodmen Didn't Spare Those Trees

Abstract: The streets of Brooklyn Heights are a little less tree-lined lately, in the absence of four ginkgoes and a London plane tree that stood for decades outside a co-op at 75 Henry Street. A crew from the Parks Department cut the trees down on Jan. 17, and now the city and the building's management are pointing fingers at each other. The trouble, first reported in The Brooklyn Eagle, began in November, when the Parks Department received a complaint that a contractor repairing the sidewalk had damaged the trees' roots. The department ordered the trees removed, citing "major root damage." In response, the contractor, York Restorations, consulted a certified arborist, who deemed the trees healthy, with less than an inch of damage to only one tree. The arborist prescribed a dose of fertilizer and a re-examination in the spring, but the city disagreed, as became apparent when the removal crew arrived this month. "They just showed up and started cutting trees down -- it was really amazing," David Grillo, the building's manager, said last week. "We can't understand what would be the motivation of the Brooklyn forestry division to do this and not wait until April. There was nothing wrong with these trees." Liam Kavanagh, the first deputy commissioner of the Parks Department, agreed that the trees were alive when they were cut down, but said live trees could fall if their anchoring roots were compromised. Protecting trees is the department's job, he added, but public safety must come first. As for the arborist's report, Mr. Kavanagh said that the head of the forestry division was an arborist, and that photographs of the damage suggested greater injury than the contractor's arborist had concluded. The two sides are at an impasse. The Whitman Owner Corporation, which controls the co-op, said the city should replace the trees as soon as weather permits. Mr. Kavanagh, meanwhile, said the contractor should pay or face legal action. "Basically," he said, "we'll sue." JAKE MOONEY

PARKS DEPARTMENT
BROOKLYN (NYC)
TREES AND SHRUBS