Dave Checketts Reflects on Tenure With Knicks and Spots Similarities

Abstract: NEW CANAAN, Conn. — The distant view from the northern suburbs stirs memories, emotions and the imagination. It opens a mind’s portal to many a 1990s Midtown Manhattan night when Madison Square Garden was the center of the pro basketball universe. When the Knicks — Dave Checketts’s Knicks — last owned New York. Twenty-one years after seeing the Knicks fall one victory short of the franchise’s first N.B.A. championship since 1973, 16 years removed from trying to lure Phil Jackson to coach the team on the eve of an improbable second run to the finals, Checketts watches with fascination — and as a fan, he said — as Jackson tackles the daunting challenge he once met, and can admit to missing. Even when he rose from team president to Garden president, Checketts said, “I missed the Knicks, being right in there.” On an unseasonably warm afternoon recently, he lowered his 6-foot-5 frame into a chair in a small conference room at the temporary offices of Rhone Apparel, a fast-growing 18-month-old men’s premium active wear company founded by his entrepreneurial son Nate. Checketts had just returned from a round of golf with a friend who had lost his job. Over the years, Checketts has moved up or on from his fair share of high-profile positions — none of them, Checketts said, as provocatively gratifying as the daily operation of a professional sports team. “It’s much more than running a bank or restaurant,” he said. “Success or failure is based on the performance of human beings that you selected. Nothing else like it.” Image Checketts, in 1997, as head of Madison Square Garden. Credit Vic DeLucia/The New York Times Seated nearby, Nate Checketts, who bears a fair resemblance to his father with his light eyes and athletic boyishness, wore the work uniform of the digital generation: casual slacks and shirt, backward baseball cap — a very different look from his father’s coiffed, corporate image. A favorite of the former N.B.A. commissioner David Stern’s, Checketts had a startling rise as a bright, ambitious Mormon from a Salt Lake City suburb, Bountiful, Utah. At 28, he was the team president of the N.B.A.’s Jazz. At 35, he accepted the same position with the Knicks in 1991. The deposed (as general manager) Al Bianchi — a native New Yorker and basketball lifer — said then that Stern and the Garden suits had “put this kid in, Checketts. You think he knows anything about basketball?” Who knew? But Checketts, antithetical to Bianchi, had presence, was attuned to the business of basketball, smooth in the spotlight. He hired Pat Riley as coach and presided over the team’s best run since the 1970s glory days that produced the franchise’s two titles. A few years later, he was running the expanding Garden operation, until 2001, or one year after James L. Dolan, at the head of the ownership table, praised him for increasing profits and restoring to the building “a grandeur now that it had when I used to go to events in the early 1970s.” Checketts smiled wistfully at the mention of the mercurial Dolan. He could probably write a book but settled for summary. “More than anything else, I felt that Jimmy just wanted to run that show,” he said. The smile turned to a sigh as he added, “Jimmy’s a complicated guy.” The same might be said of Checketts, who evinced charm and poise but combined it with a Darwinian shrewdness that produced the occasional public relations stumble. His wife, Deb, once told him he lacked the urban edge to work in New York, but Checketts fired Ernie Grunfeld — his Knicks general manager and friend — over dinner not long before the 1999 run to the finals. It was a coldblooded move, however necessary to pacify Dolan that something was being done to motivate a floundering team. Image Dave Checketts, left, in 2013 at One World Observatory, where he oversaw construction of that Manhattan tourist attraction. Credit Stan Honda/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Weeks later, Checketts denied the pursuit of Jackson to a reporter from The New York Times. He soon after called a news conference to admit the story was true. Checketts created another firestorm in 2009 when Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host, tried to partner with his company that owned the N.H.L.’s St. Louis Blues and Major League Soccer’s Real Salt Lake in an unsuccessful bid to buy the N.F.L.’s St. Louis Rams. That was also when Checketts’s direct involvement in competitive pro sports began to unravel, along with the American economy. “The world fell apart,” he said. “I was the owner of two teams, and my largest shareholder was Lehman Brothers, 55 percent, and that made for a miserable four years, working our way out of that financial mess.” Traversing Around Bends Retaining a youthful countenance, Checketts remains hopeful of another opportunity before he is ready for a rocker. He turned 60 in September, when his four sons — Spencer, 37; Nate, 32; Andrew, 30; and Ben, 28 — gave him the trip he took each of them on for their 16th birthdays: walking the Grand Canyon, rim to rim. “The best birthday gift I ever received for two reasons,” he said. “One, we spent a lot of great time together. Two, I actually crawled out the other side.” He said this with the relief of a man who must occasionally wonder if his peak career years have passed while sounding at times like a patriarch ready to cede the stage to his sons, who have all endeavored or aspired to work in something sports related. Image Checketts, second from left, in a family photograph taken during his birthday trip to the Grand Canyon in September courtesy of his sons, from left, Nate, Andrew, Spencer and Ben. “What you’re seeing in him is a shift — not necessarily back, maybe to the side,” Ben Checketts said. The Checketts children grew up at the Garden when it could better justify the self-proclamation as the world’s most famous arena. In 1994, the Rangers won their only Stanley Cup since 1940. Checketts at the time was affiliated only with the Knicks, who lost Game 7 of the finals in Houston that year but throughout the decade electrified New York in epic battles against Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls and Reggie Miller’s Indiana Pacers. “I used to go to school living and dying on the Knicks,” Nate Checketts said. “Those playoff games, if there was a loss, even the teachers would say, ‘Why couldn’t they pull it off?’ ” “Or ‘Why didn’t they pull Starks?’ ” his father cut in, conjuring up John Starks’s 2-for-18 shooting nightmare in Game 7 in Houston. Checketts got into a car after that game at the old Summit arena to face his disconsolate children. “What a great run that was,” he told them, the family frontman knowing this was no time to reveal his own anguish. There were other agonizing memories, Checketts said, including the 1993 Eastern Conference finals loss to Jordan and the Bulls after Jordan was set off by an article in The Times about his between-games gambling escapades in Atlantic City; and a 1997 brawl in Miami against the Heat — coached at that point by Riley — that cost the Knicks multiple suspensions and the series. Dolan, Checketts said, showed up at the team’s training base in Charleston, S.C., the next fall, eager to assert himself, requesting a lunch with Coach Jeff Van Gundy and his staff. Image Knicks Coach Jeff Van Gundy, sprawled on the court, grabbed Alonzo Mourning's leg during a brawl between the Knicks and the Miami Heat in a 1998 playoff game at Madison Square Garden. Credit G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times “He told them that the brawl in Miami had cost us a championship,” Checketts said. “If it happened again, he was holding them personally responsible.” Sure enough, in the 1998 playoffs, the brawling between two hard-hat teams continued. When the Knicks’ Larry Johnson fought Miami’s Alonzo Mourning at the end of Game 4 at the Garden, Van Gundy rushed into the middle of it and wound up photographed, clutching onto Mourning’s leg, seemingly floating horizontally above the court. “I’m sitting there thinking, well, he did listen,” Checketts said. He paused and added, “I can drive myself crazy about all of that during those years.” The Knicks were so close and the family was emotionally tethered in a visceral way that sports cannot replicate without a professional connection, Nate Checketts said. The athletes were the stars. Their father ran the show. “I’m 28 now,” Ben Checketts said. “At 28, he was taking over an N.B.A. franchise. That was probably unheard-of until you had someone like Theo Epstein with the Red Sox. So we had two options growing up: trying to use that as a measuring stick, or just revering it for how unique it was. I just saved myself a lot of grief.” Ben Checketts works with Nate at Rhone , a company determined to challenge the giants of the men’s active wear field. Spencer is a sports radio personality in Salt Lake City. A daughter, Katie, has set aside coaching women’s lacrosse to raise a family; another daughter, Elizabeth, is pursuing a career in broadcast journalism. Only Andrew, finishing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, has ambitions to become a team sports executive. His father will not discourage or encourage him. Image From left, the former Knicks president Dave Checketts at home in New Canaan, Conn., with his sons Nate, Ben and Andrew. Credit Tim Clayton for The New York Times “I don’t know how Andrew will end up getting to it, because owning an N.B.A. club requires a billion or two,” Checketts said. “So we’re not going to outright own a club, our family.” One way back for Checketts would be as a franchise fixer, the role Jerry Colangelo, 76, recently assumed in Philadelphia — though Checketts said he would prefer to own some part of any team he runs. The more conventional path would be to organize a group as he did for the Blues and Real Salt Lake. “The problem is to find sellers — there just aren’t that many, and Steve Ballmer’s purchase of the Clippers made everybody think their franchise is worth $2 billion,” he said. “I don’t think they are. But people have high expectations. The good news is that I can afford to be patient, find the right situation.” Vindicating a Visionary Among other business interests, Checketts sits on the board of JetBlue, which he has been involved with since leaving the Garden. He had a nearly three-year run starting in 2012 as the chairman and chief executive officer of Legends Hospitality Management L.L.C., a concessions, merchandising and management-services company owned by the Yankees, the Dallas Cowboys and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Checketts left after overseeing the construction of One World Observatory, the tourist attraction run by Legends at the top of the Freedom Tower in New York. He said his decade at the Garden changed him in one permanently meaningful way. The man from Bountiful became a stalwart New Yorker, one who frequented downtown Manhattan as a volunteer, post 9/11. “The views from the observatory are the same views we thought we’d never see again,” he said. His last visit to the World Trade Center was for a party to celebrate the retirement of Wayne Gretzky from hockey and the Rangers. It was the spring of 1999, the revelation of the Jackson recruitment soon to dull Checketts’s corporate shine after Van Gundy’s Knicks slipped into the playoffs and stunned Miami, the conference No. 1 seed, on Allan Houston’s series-clinching runner. Yes, Checketts had interviewed Jackson and right in his New Canaan home. Being caught in the falsehood was enough to send him to the family dinner table to explain to his children why he was being roasted in the papers, on the airwaves. And why he deserved it. “That, for me, was a very uncomfortable time,” he said, explaining that he had wanted to spare Van Gundy the scrutiny in season, and wound up martyring him instead. The more the Knicks won, the more the Garden crowds rhythmically chanted Van Gundy’s name, Checketts playing the antihero in the developing drama, even if the pursuit of Jackson — before the Knicks made the playoffs — had made much sense, under the circumstances. “The first thing I did when I was appointed Knicks president was to have a four-hour sit-down with Red Holzman at his house in Cedarhurst,” Checketts said, referring to the coach of the championship Knicks teams. “He understood more than anyone what made the Knicks go, what made them relevant to the city. That’s why I went after Phil. He had been a Knick in the championship days. He had the same understanding of the variables.” Checketts soon came to suspect that Jackson was using the Knicks to leverage and land in Los Angeles with the Lakers, which was why, he believed, the surreptitious talks were leaked. “But that’s way in the past,” he said. What goes around has come around, Jackson’s return in the spring of 2014 providing Checketts the incentive to feel obliquely vindicated, even visionary, and again follow the Knicks after years of receding interest during years of mismanagement. The drafting of Kristaps Porzingis aside, there are no guarantees, he knows, but, he said, “Phil understands what it takes — the values in New York, the nature of the ups and downs, the media and fans.“ Checketts went on: “I think he knows that if you’re a rock about it all, you can build a team that can really be admired in a way like nowhere else. I think he’s on the right path. I’m rooting for him.” Unless, or until, he can score another team of his own.


A Classified Matter at the White House: Obama’s Star-Studded Galas

Abstract: WASHINGTON — There are plenty of perks to being president of the United States. One of them is glamorous birthday parties. For the past seven years, from the ages of 48 to 55, President Obama has celebrated the annual occasion with a growing collection of celebrities, sports stars, business executives, movie moguls and politicians — all dancing into the small hours of the morning. On Friday night and well into Saturday, Mr. Obama did it again, celebrating his 55th birthday — his last as commander in chief — with a big White House party. East Wing staff members were told to expect to be working until 4 a.m. Guests were asked not to tweet pictures (some did anyway) or spill any details. One birthday guest, who normally has a very good memory, insisted late Saturday that he had imbibed too much to remember a thing. (It’s not clear what the guest was drinking, but Mr. Obama favors extra-dry Grey Goose martinis.) Another birthday friend recalled only seeing Alonzo Mourning, a retired Miami Heat basketball star, and watching Stevie Wonder perform. Magic Johnson tweeted a picture of himself and his wife on Friday evening. “Cookie and I getting ready to go to President Obama’s birthday party!” he wrote. The Rev. Al Sharpton tweeted at 1:10 a.m.: “Leaving the White House after the celebration of President Obama’s birthday. His last birthday as President.” Others spotted at the White House before the party included the talk show host Ellen DeGeneres; Grant Hill, a former N.B.A. star; George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars”; and a collection of former Obama aides and media celebrities. The singer-songwriter Nick Jonas tweeted afterward : “Tonight was a night I will never forget. #BarackObama #happybirthday.” Paul McCartney was also a guest. The president has demonstrated little interest in the political schmoozing and official social life of the nation’s capital and spends hours each weeknight largely alone , working in his private office in the White House Treaty Room. It is safe to say that more than a decade ago, when he was a little-known state senator in Illinois, he would not have expected one of the Beatles to sing him “Happy Birthday.” But like the Kennedys, the Reagans and the Clintons, the Obamas have reached outside Washington and embraced an elite, moneyed stratum of American life. In his second term, Mr. Obama has been going to, or hosting, small dinner parties with actors, intellectuals, scientists, tech giants and billionaires. Two years ago in Rome, the architect Renzo Piano, the particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti and the chairman of Fiat, John Elkann, were at his table . The Obamas have also insisted on keeping the partying as secret as possible. Names of those invited to nonofficial parties at the White House are never made public, and what does come out is usually from tweets from guests, like Mr. Johnson and Mr. Sharpton. In June 2015, Mr. Obama had a private party at the White House for 500 people, including Wall Street executives, Washington lobbyists, movie stars, members of his cabinet and others. Prince performed at the weekend bash, 10 months before his death from an accidental drug overdose . The White House had not provided notice of the party on Mr. Obama’s public schedule, and when word leaked out — through a tweet by Mr. Sharpton that said, in part: “Awesome to see Prince and Stevie Wonder on keyboards together. Unbelievable experience.” — there was an outcry from the White House press corps. The White House was unmoved. “The president and first lady are going to reserve the right to host private parties at the White House,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said at the time. This time, the White House made a formal announcement of the birthday party a few hours before it started. “This evening the first lady is hosting a 55th birthday celebration for the president at the White House,” a statement said. “The guest list includes a large number of family members and friends to mark the occasion. The private event will be paid for with the family’s personal funds.” White House officials say all similar private events are paid for by the Obamas, though it is unclear whether those costs include security and staff workers, who would be on hand at the White House anyway. But one thing is certain to change: The address for Mr. Obama’s next birthday party won’t say 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

White House
Birthday
Party
Barack Obama
US Politics


Champions Aren't Made With Money

Abstract: NEW YORK — The World Series finished this week, leaving baseball fans — maybe even fans of the victorious San Francisco Giants — feeling a certain melancholy. It happens every year. The end of baseball ushers in a kind of damp November of the soul. We have to make it through winter before a new season starts. The end of the season this year brought at least one unprecedented sight. Two former presidents — the 41st and the 43rd, both named Bush — came out at the start of the fourth game between the Giants and the Texas Rangers to throw out the ceremonial first ball. This is something that presidents and ex-presidents have been doing for decades, though not two at the same time, demonstrating that baseball still deserves to be called the national pastime. New York didn’t have a dog in the hunt this year, the Yankees having been eliminated by the Texas Rangers in the playoff finals, while the Mets finished a pathetic fifth in their division. Still, some of us who wanted to watch the series were stymied when a very public dispute between News Corp. and Cablevision led the first two games to be blacked out on the sets of some three million local customers. News Corp., which broadcast the games on its Fox Five station, wanted more money from Cablevision, and when Cablevision refused to pay, Fox pulled the World Series off the sets of millions of Cablevision subscribers, until, finally, the matter was resolved by the third game. Still, the dispute, fought out in almost daily full-page newspaper ads taken out by both companies, was a reminder, if such were needed, that while baseball may be the national pastime, it’s still mostly about money. Shocking. Shocking. Who would have suspected it? But if that’s old news, the World Series this year contained within it a moral lesson, which is that while money certainly helps a team win the big prize, it doesn’t always triumph over other elements in the game like pluck, desire and even luck — and this relates to the absence of either of the current New York teams in the event this year. One not much noted statistic is striking in this regard: The American League team in the series this year, the Texas Rangers, had a combined payroll totaling about 30 percent that of the Yankees — about $62 million for the Rangers, $206 million for the Yankees. But poorly paid as they were (though only in the comparative sense; the Ranger salaries ranged from about $400,000 to $13 million), the Rangers walloped the heavily favored Yankees in the playoff. What does it mean? Well, maybe over the long run not that much, given that historically speaking, the Yankees have been both the richest and the winningest team in Major League Baseball. Since the Texas Rangers were established in the 1972 season, the Yankees have won eleven American League pennants and seven World Series. With their loss in World Series 2010, the Rangers have now won one pennant and no World Series. So, the fact that the Yankees lost and the Rangers won in the American League Championship series was something of an aberration. Indeed, the Texas player who gets the greatest share of credit for defeating the mighty Yankees, the pitcher Cliff Lee, will be a free agent after this season, and, given the amount that the Yankees will be able to pay for him, it’s entirely possible that he’ll be wearing a Yankee uniform when the new season starts in April. Still, let’s take some comfort from the fact that money doesn’t always win. There’s some sign of that in the example of the World Series winner, the Giants, whose total payroll was ninth among the 30 Major League Baseball teams. Altogether, the Giants spent $44 million less than the team they beat in the National League Championship series, the Philadelphia Phillies — $99 million to $143 million. The Phillies, the National League champions last year and the World Series winners in 2008, were widely expected to crush the Giants, but they lost four games to two. Let it be noted in this that the Giants pitcher who performed most spectacularly, 26-year-old Tim Lincecum, who won two of the games against Texas, has a two-year contract with the Giants worth a total of $23 million, so he’s not exactly underpaid. But the other Giants pitcher who has emerged as a star so far — he shut out both the Phillies and the Rangers in the games he pitched — is Matt Cain, and his 2010 salary was a somewhat more modest $4,583,000. But perhaps the biggest proof that money doesn’t determine absolutely everything in baseball is the New York National League team, the New York Mets, who have underperformed for much of the past decade, despite being one of the league’s richest teams. This year, for example, the Mets payroll was $136 million, fifth among baseball teams, way more than the Giants and just a shade less than the Phillies, but the Mets finished in next-to-last place, 18 games behind the Phillies in their National League division. And they do that with what, for those of us who root for the Mets (and I am among them) can only be described as distressing regularity. Since the Mets were formed 49 years ago, they have won the World Series twice, and the National League championship four times. This is certainly not an abysmal record — until this year, for example, the Giants hadn’t won single World Series since they moved to San Francisco from New York in 1958 — but especially in recent years, the Mets have poured money into well-known players, many of whom have faltered as soon as they donned the team’s uniform. It’s the curse of the Mets. Their great nemesis in their league, the Atlanta Braves, have beaten them year after year, even as they spend substantially less money, this year being no exception — $136 million for the Mets, a mere $84 million for the Braves. And yet the Braves finished 12 games ahead of the Mets in the 2010 standings — more evidence worth contemplating as we’re enveloped in the chill of two seasons without baseball that money is very helpful, but it takes something more than a big payroll to win.

World Series
Baseball
San Francisco Giants
Texas Rangers
New York Mets
New York Yankees


Shhhh Salvage Makes Dumpster Diving Fashionable

Abstract: A life spent in the wings of theaters has made Janet D. Clancy an authority on the mechanics of illusion. She has rigged sets, wired lights and run the technical end of circuses, ballets, plays, art projects. It has also made her a witness to mass squander, long after the audiences have left. Tons of perfectly good materials, worth millions of dollars — fabrics, wood, ropes — are just heaved into Dumpsters at the end of shows and events. It is staggering: during Fashion Week in Bryant Park, about 75 shows are staged. Runways and sets are built, usually covered in great bolts of fabric or hundreds of yards of Plexiglas and plywood. The shows last about 20 minutes, and everything — in pristine condition — is thrown out so that the next designer can start fresh. “I just got sick of the waste,” Ms. Clancy said. “We can make it rain indoors. We can hold a circus underwater. We’ve got to do something about it.” Most cosmic folly exists for a reason. In the case of discarded theatrical materials, finding a new home for them is simply not worth the trouble to producers, who don’t have the time or financial incentive to put a notice on Craigslist and hope that people show up as promised. To fight the waste, Ms. Clancy set up a business last year called Shhhh Salvage ( www.shhhh-projects.com ). It is a nimble, one-woman hub: through a network of contacts with people who work on shows, Ms. Clancy finds out when sets will be struck, then puts the word out to artists who can use stuff that would otherwise end up in a landfill. She gets the discards, then sells them for a fraction of their value. “I’m trying to make salvage part of the preproduction process,” she said. “And to be invisible. Basically, I’ll haul your trash.” On Friday afternoon, she scampered down a tall ladder that was behind a giant screen at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center on West 21st Street in Manhattan. The artist Reid Farrington was working on a video project that includes taking apart a classic film and projecting it in pieces simultaneously along multiple screens. Some of the screens were made of black muslin that Ms. Clancy had salvaged from a fashion show. Others were made from an ivory shade of voile, a lightweight fabric that had been installed for a wedding in a ballroom at 55 Wall Street last summer. “They draped the entire room for one night, and then they were going to throw it out,” she said. She kept some; an artist from the Water and Light Project , who goes by one name, Daniel, collected the rest. “It was incredible that someone had used that much money to cover an incredible space for just a few hours and at that point it had no value,” Daniel said. “I just got a phone call from Janet, ‘Do you want some fabric right away?’ It was $3,000 worth of fire-approved material. I made a gigantic screen to wrap the Castle Williams on Governors Island. It let us do projects that we would otherwise never have been able to do.” He has also shipped some of it to Aomori, Japan, for another project, and some has gone to Colorado. Tom Williams, the senior production manager for Bernhard Link Theatrical , oversees the main tent during Fashion Week, and in a long career in theater has found ways of reusing materials through contacts with college drama programs. During the Fashion Week sprint, it is hard to keep up. He and several other scenery makers have steered tons of materials to Ms. Clancy. “I had 45 4-foot-by-8 sheets of taxicab yellow plexiglass,” Mr. Williams said. “Used once. What we were going to do with them? Janet was able to find a gallery in Jersey City that was interested in them.” For well-established arts groups in New York, an organization called Materials for the Arts offers membership in a useful warehouse program, but its tax incentives are often not worth the trouble for producers to deliver the leftover goods. Ms. Clancy will arrange pickups. Reusing materials has a long, honorable history among people who are not afraid to climb into Dumpsters. Ms. Clancy recalls that when she moved to New York more than 20 years ago and was working on a low-budget film in a loft on Van Dam Street, her group would barter set materials for food from a neighbor, the director David Cronenberg . She regularly scavenged the Dumpsters outside television studios in Midtown. “I found the set for a bathroom, and I called — ‘You know that scene in the kitchen? Do you think we could have it in a bathroom?’ ” After Fashion Week this year, she wound up with a roll of pink spangly vinyl that had been the runway for a Barbie show. “I still have it,” Ms. Clancy said. “I’m hoping to find someone who does fetish clothing.”

Art
Waste Materials and Disposal
New York City
Fashion and Apparel


Marc La Vorgna to Replace Stu Loeser as Bloomberg Press Secretary

Abstract: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Monday that Marc La Vorgna would take over as press secretary next month when Stu Loeser leaves that position. Mr. La Vorgna, 33, has been Mr. Loeser’s chief deputy since April 2011 and the primary mayoral spokesman on issues related to the Police, Fire and Transportation Departments, and to the city budget. He began working in the mayor’s press office in 2008. His salary as first deputy press secretary was $130,000. Before joining the Bloomberg administration, Mr. La Vorgna worked as a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and for the New Jersey Transportation Department. Mr. La Vorgna is a native of Paterson, N.J., and was an intern in the Washington office of Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., a former Paterson mayor, while studying government and playing cornerback at Georgetown University. Mr. Loeser, 39, has served as press secretary since January 2006, after working previously on Mr. Bloomberg’s first re-election campaign. No one else in city history has worked as a mayoral spokesman for as long as Mr. Loeser, according to a city review of archives. He is starting a communications firm in August that will advise corporate clients in finance, technology and other industries.

Loeser Stu
Bloomberg Michael R
New York City
La Vorgna Marc


Tidal, Music Streaming Service, Seeks Footing After a Stumble

Abstract: As a celebrity-studded, headline-grabbing product release, Jay Z’s unveiling of Tidal was about as big as could be. Standing on a Manhattan stage with Madonna, Kanye West, Jack White, Nicki Minaj and nearly a dozen other stars, Jay Z introduced Tidal on March 30 as a streaming music service to challenge Spotify, Apple and Google. In a twist to the usual ownership of music apps, the artists — not Silicon Valley financiers or big entertainment studios — would control a majority of the company, and they promised fair economics for all musicians. For an industry struggling with the value of music in the digital age, it was an audacious pitch. But from the very start, Tidal’s debut was ridiculed as grandiose and out of touch. A teaser video had showed Tidal’s stars plotting in secret and toasting with Champagne. Jay Z and Beyoncé, his wife, called Tidal a “movement” that would “change the course of history,” drawing complaints that they were appropriating the language of civil rights. And the news conference itself was bombastic but short on details, with Alicia Keys quoting Nietzsche and the artists signing a declaration to “reestablish the value of music.” Tidal’s fumbled introduction led to weeks of negative news coverage, as bloggers trumpeted its apparent plunge in Apple’s app rankings and other artists accused Tidal of being primarily a vehicle to benefit music’s elite. “I think it was naïve of them to think they could speak for the common man,” said Errol Kolosine, an assistant professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. “Especially in today’s economic climate, people aren’t ready to feel anything close to sympathy for people who are much better off.” This week, a humbled Tidal began to mount its response. In a Twitter spree on Sunday, Jay Z declared that “Tidal is doing just fine” with 770,000 subscribers, but he also acknowledged mistakes. “We are human,” he wrote. “We aren’t perfect — but we are determined.” In an interview, Vania Schlogel, Tidal’s chief investment officer and a former executive at the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, took responsibility for Tidal’s troubled introduction, and said that the story taking shape around the streaming service was inaccurate. “If I gave myself a grade, I would probably give myself a D,” Ms. Schlogel said. “It was frustrating because we knew in our hearts what the intent was and that we didn’t do a good enough job telling the story for ourselves. It allowed other people to jump in and tell our story for us, which wasn’t helpful.” For Tidal — which Jay Z bought this year for $56 million as part of his acquisition of the Swedish technology firm Aspiro — the strategy of using A-list celebrity power was a double-edged sword. While technology companies usually release new products quietly, letting them work out early kinks away from the spotlight, Tidal capitalized on its artists’ fame. That led to a wave of media coverage rare for a small player, but also invited withering scrutiny. Music and technology executives say that it is far too early to judge Tidal, particularly given the specter looming over all music apps this year: the expected arrival of Apple’s new streaming service, perhaps as early as June. While Tidal’s unveiling may have been rocky, the company has also taken steps to distinguish itself in a crowded market. It has released exclusive videos by Beyoncé, Mr. White and Erykah Badu, who used the platform to present a 50-minute Western . On May 13, Jay Z will perform a “B-Sides” concert in an undisclosed New York space, with tickets available to Tidal users who submit playlists. Behind Tidal’s celebrity power is a broader concern — common among all artists — that the digital economy is spinning out of control, resulting in a world where technology interests are all-powerful and content is an often cheap and ubiquitous commodity. Yet Tidal’s introduction, analysts and executives say, offers lessons in some of the missteps of marketing in the digital era. One is that no matter how famous the pitchman, the product must have a clear relevance for ordinary customers. “The whole announcement seemed geared toward other artists,” said Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of SurveyMonkey and former general manager of Yahoo Music. “What is the consumer value proposition? Why should I sign up for Tidal when I can sign up for Spotify?” Part of Tidal’s implied answer to those questions was a promise to pay artists better than other digital services do — currently a particular issue of debate in the music industry. Last year, for example, Taylor Swift withdrew her music from Spotify because the service would not restrict it to its paid tier. (Ms. Swift is not involved with Tidal.) Tidal offered few details of its economic plan. On Sunday, Jay Z posted on Twitter , “Tidal pays 75% royalty rate to ALL artists, writers and producers.” In an interview, Ms. Schlogel said the company would pay 75 percent of its revenue for royalties, slightly more than the 70 percent that is standard among Spotify, iTunes and many other digital outlets. Amy Thomson, a manager of D.J. acts like the duo Axwell and Ingrosso, who this week wrote a detailed open letter to Jay Z about Tidal, said in an interview that the company had simply misjudged consumers’ interest in the issue of fair royalties for artists. “It felt like a bit of a lecture,” Ms. Thomson said. “If you choose to make such a big point about how artists are paid, you should make sure that the person on the other side of that debate cares.” For Ms. Schlogel, the bad publicity for Tidal has been a distraction, but she said that the company would continue to push forward. “I just hope people are willing to at least open their eyes and ears and say, ‘Hey, this company has been out for a month and they are already executing on all the things they said they would,’ ” she said. “Maybe there weren’t details of royalty splits and whatnot during the press conference,” she added, “but that press conference was meant to state the mission, and then very quickly after that to let our actions speak for themselves.”

Tidal
Music
Jay Z
Royalties
Video Recordings
Downloads and Streaming


Kohlberg Kravis Roberts to Go Public Next Week

Abstract: Henry R. Kravis, the dealmaker who symbolized the merger mania of the 1980s and became one of the most powerful figures on Wall Street, is cashing in. Mr. Kravis’s firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company , is set to go public next week, capping a three-year effort that was thwarted by the financial crisis and the market downturn. Mr. Kravis will control a 13 percent stake of the new company, contributing roughly $800 million to a fortune estimated to be more than $4.2 billion. The offering, on the New York Stock Exchange , underscores Wall Street’s remarkable comeback since the depths of the financial crisis in 2008. It also brings new prominence for Mr. Kravis, who first won fame with his daring leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco in a 1988, a deal that in many ways defined the era. He has since become a prominent figure in New York’s social and philanthropic scenes, endowing a wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Last year, Mr. Kravis earned $22 million from K.K.R., as did his cousin, George R. Roberts, a co-founder of the firm. Like Mr. Kravis, Mr. Roberts will own 13 percent of the new firm, giving their stakes a combined value of $1.6 billion, based on the valuation of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts shares that now trade in Europe. The third partner, Jerome Kohlberg, left the firm in 1987. Over the years, K.K.R. swallowed the likes of Toys “R” Us, the Texas utility TXU, and HCA, the health care chain. Now, it will command a market value of roughly $6 billion. If the offering is successful, the value accorded to Mr. Kravis’s stake in the firm will top the $684 million windfall earned by Stephen A. Schwarzman, whose private equity giant, the Blackstone Group, went public in June 2007. By going public, K.K.R. has a valuable currency it can use to lure talent and make acquisitions, while also enabling the firm to expand into areas like asset management, as Blackstone has done. It also will make Mr. Kravis’s fortune more liquid, allowing him to eventually sell his shares and diversify his portfolio. But while Mr. Schwarzman’s timing was nearly perfect — the first ripples of the credit crisis came shortly after Blackstone’s offering — Mr. Kravis had to settle for a listing of a European branch of his firm on the Euronext exchange last fall. In this deal, the K.K.R. units that trade in Europe will effectively be switched to the Big Board. While still in their 20s, Mr. Kravis and Mr. Roberts joined Bear Stearns, where they met Mr. Kohlberg. The three men pioneered the strategy of using a company’s own balance sheet to help support the debt necessary to buy it, which came to be known as a leveraged buyout. Leveraged buyouts have been controversial, especially since layoffs and other cost-cutting frequently followed the buyout. Nevertheless, they emerged as one of the most profitable transactions on Wall Street. Founded in 1976, K.K.R. now has nearly $55 billion in assets and more than 600 employees. It has also had its ups and downs as a private company. After the huge deals of the 1990s, it struggled as holdings like Regal Cinemas went bankrupt. It later bounced back, buying TXU for $45 billion. But TXU is now groaning under its debt, echoing the larger challenge facing K.K.R. Like other private equity firms, K.K.R. has wrestled in recent years with companies it acquired using large amounts of borrowed money. Still, it managed to earn more than $849 million last year, a reversal from a loss of $1.2 billion in 2008. Its reach extends around the globe, with 42 percent of its investments in Europe, while 47 percent are in the United States and 10 percent are in Asia. K.K.R.’s holdings are similarly diversified; its portfolio includes energy, health care, manufacturing, retail. The offering discloses new details about Mr. Kravis’s fortune, which has only been speculated about, since K.K.R. is a private firm. He will now lose that anonymity, with details like his use of company limousines — $98,771 worth last year, according to the offering statement — will be available to the public. Mr. Roberts, 66, meanwhile, spent $158,413 for his car and driver. Besides the donations to the Metropolitan Museum, Mr. Kravis, 66, and his wife, Marie-Josée, gave $15 million to establish the Center for Cardiovascular Health at Mt. Sinai Hospital, and $10 million to Columbia Business School in 2006. He also founded the Henry Kravis Leadership Institute at his alma mater, Claremont McKenna College, in Claremont, Calif.

New York Stock Exchange
Private Equity
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co
Initial Public Offerings


I.B.M. Shows New Mainframe Computer

Abstract: I.B.M. said yesterday that it had developed a low-price mainframe computer that it intends to market to small and midsize businesses and emerging markets. The Z9 Business Class mainframe computer was introduced in Beijing, said Shen Xiaoyi, a spokesman for I.B.M. in China. It will sell at a starting price of $100,000, he said. Mainframe computers, which have larger storage and computing capacities than servers and personal computers, have been used mainly by large corporations because of their high prices. "This lower-priced mainframe should help I.B.M.'s sales in China, India and other emerging markets, which are a huge opportunity for them," said Wang Tao, an analyst with Analysys International, a Beijing-based research company. It has not yet been determined when the new server will go on sale, Mr. Shen said.

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORP
PRICES (FARES FEES AND RATES)
COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET


Trump’s Focus on Generals for Top Jobs Stirs Worries Over Military’s Sway

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump ran for president boasting that he knew more about fighting terrorists than America’s generals. But now that Mr. Trump is the president-elect, he is spending a great deal of his time with retired generals, and those of a particular breed: commanders who, when they served, were often at odds with President Obama. One has been named as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser , and several others are candidates for coveted positions in his cabinet or are advising him on how to confront the world’s greatest threats. They would give his foreign policy a far more aggressive cast than Mr. Obama’s. Turning to the retired officers reflects Mr. Trump’s preference for having strong, even swaggering, men around him. But it worries national security experts and even other retired generals, who say that if Mr. Trump stacks critical jobs purely with warriors, it could lead to an undue emphasis on military force in American foreign policy. “If you have too many generals in the kitchen, the dish is likely to be baked with even more military instruments inside,” said John A. Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and an expert in counterinsurgency strategy. “I’m not sure that’s the recipe the United States needs for every foreign policy meal.” Mr. Trump’s inclination toward generals in top jobs also runs counter to the credo of civilian control of the military — a constitutionally enshrined principle that some say safeguards the United States from becoming another Pakistan or Turkey, where the military is a political player. In the last week, Mr. Trump has met with James N. Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, who has emerged as a leading candidate for secretary of defense; John Kelly, another retired Marine general, who is in the running for secretary of state; Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff, who said he had turned down an offer from Vice President-elect Mike Pence to run the Pentagon; and Admiral Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, who, of those under consideration, is the only job candidate still on active duty and is a prospect for director of national intelligence. Image Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn is President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for national security adviser. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times Mr. Trump’s closest foreign policy adviser is Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was named as national security adviser on Friday. Mr. Trump’s aides also sounded out Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, a former commander in Afghanistan, for defense secretary, according to people briefed on the transition process, and they briefly mulled David H. Petraeus, a former director of the C.I.A. who also served as commander in Afghanistan, for secretary of state. What several of these generals share is a rocky history in the Obama administration. The White House forced General Flynn out of his last job, citing poor management of an agency with 20,000 employees. General Mattis, who oversaw military operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia from 2010 to 2013, had his tour cut short by the Obama administration, which believed he was too hawkish on Iran. General Kelly opposed the administration’s plan to shut down the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Mr. Obama fired General McChrystal after he disparaged other officials in an interview with Rolling Stone, while Mr. Petraeus, as C.I.A. director, failed in his effort to persuade Mr. Obama to supply arms to moderate rebels in Syria. Mr. Obama eventually did provide the weapons, and Mr. Petraeus’s resignation in 2012 was prompted by an unrelated scandal involving his disclosure of classified material. For Mr. Trump, the strained history of these generals with his predecessor is less a liability than a credential. “He is sticking his tongue out at the prior administration,” said Richard H. Kohn, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has written about civilian control of the military. “He is inherently distrustful of the military people that the system throws up at him. He thinks they’re not strong people. They are Obama’s generals.” Mr. Trump might also view generals in his administration as a political asset. At a time when trust in institutions like Congress and the news media is eroding, the military remains enduringly popular. General Mattis, in particular, commands wide respect from uniformed men and women — especially Marines, who revere him as one of their own. On Sunday, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that General Mattis was a “true General’s General.” Stephen K. Bannon, the president-elect’s chief strategist, said the incoming administration was looking at potential cabinet officials with combat experience so that people who had fought in wars would be making decisions about whether to commit the country to more of them. “The generation that has fought in these wars is now coming into leadership,” said Mr. Bannon, a Navy officer earlier in his career. “These people, all patriots, come with a shared experience that is incredibly important.” How Hard (or Easy) It Will Be for Trump to Fulfill His 100-Day Plan He can accomplish some of his promises entirely on his own, but others require Congress or pose other significant obstacles. But General Mattis’s appointment — because he would oversee the department where he used to serve — would raise legal and political questions. He would need a congressional waiver because the law requires a seven-year waiting period between active duty and serving as defense secretary, and he retired from the Marines only in 2013. The last time a waiver was used was in 1950, when Gen. George C. Marshall, then five years out of service, received one to be defense secretary for President Harry S. Truman. There is little doubt that General Mattis, who is well liked by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, will be able to obtain that waiver. Mr. McCain himself appeared to try to hasten the process, issuing a statement on Monday in which he said he was “pleased that the president-elect found General Jim Mattis as impressive as I have.” Some experts said that installing a general at the top of the Pentagon could muddy the principle of civilian control of the military. “The president and the secretary of defense are the two leading figures in the chain of command,” said Peter D. Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University who served in the George W. Bush administration. “When they are civilians, that embodies that principle.” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the retired head of the United States military’s Africa command, said the question of whether General Mattis was qualified to lead the Pentagon was a “slam dunk — he absolutely is.” But the reason the waiver “was put into law is that we are not a militaristic society, nor do we want to be,” he said. “The idea of senior military officers assuming senior positions in the civilian government — that is worthy of debate.” Beyond the constitutional issues, there are bureaucratic hurdles that could stymie a military officer. The defense secretary must navigate the politics of the White House and Congress while balancing — and in some cases, resisting — the views of his former colleagues. In a famous example, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates overruled his many senior generals, forcing through the development and purchase of more maneuverable and heavily armored mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, to stem a rising tide of casualties from roadside bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq. People close to Mr. Trump said they were sensitive to the dangers of having too many military officers. They noted that there were other candidates for defense secretary, including Jim Talent, a former Republican senator from Missouri. The goal, they said, is to end up with a mix of people.

John Kelly
Jim Mattis
US Politics
US Military
Donald Trump
Appointments and Executive Changes
Michael Flynn


Martial Law Is Rescinded in a Philippine Province

Abstract: MANILA — Stung by severe criticism and faced with a possible rebuke by the Supreme Court, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo lifted martial law on Saturday in a strife-torn southern Philippine province. Maguindanao Province, where 57 people were killed last month in the country’s worst election-related violence, will remain under a state of emergency as the police and the military continue to investigate a powerful political family whose members are accused of carrying out the massacre and then fomenting rebellion to prevent family members from being arrested. Mrs. Arroyo had imposed martial law there after the massacre, allowing the government to make arrests without warrants. It was the first time martial law had been imposed in the Philippines since the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, which ended in 1986. Eduardo Ermita, Mrs. Arroyo’s executive secretary, said the president decided to lift the Dec. 4 decree after murder and rebellion charges had been filed against the suspects in the massacre, including members of the Ampatuan clan, close allies of Mrs. Arroyo’s who had ruled the province for much of this decade. “The local government is back and functioning,” he said. “We can say rebellion has been addressed and the purpose for which it was called has been achieved.” During the eight days of martial law, the authorities arrested dozens of suspects, among them members of a militia controlled by the Ampatuans, and raided a number of houses and properties that yielded more than 1,500 weapons that the government said were being used in a rebellion. Prosecutors previously said they had identified at least 161 people who were to be charged with the massacre. Lt. Gen. Raymundo Ferrer, the military administrator of Maguindanao during the martial law period, said Saturday that the end of martial law would not affect the operations to go after the suspects in the massacre and the rebellion. “We shall continue with the military and police operations against the remaining suspects and strengthen even more our checkpoints to ensure that people are insulated against hostile acts,” he said. The massacre on Nov. 23 appeared to have been an effort by members of the Ampatuan family to prevent a rival from filing papers to run for governor, the authorities said. The dead included family members and supporters of the rival politician, Esmael Mangudadatu, as well as 30 journalists who were covering the event. Andal Ampatuan Jr., a local mayor who was also running for governor, was accused of leading the killings. At least 25 murder charges have been filed against him, with others to follow, prosecutors said. Mr. Ermita said that 247 others faced charges for taking part in the massacre and that 24 people, including the clan patriarch, Andal Ampatuan Sr., had been charged with rebellion. Mrs. Arroyo’s martial-law declaration had been met with intense criticism in a country still smarting from the Marcos era. While there was no question of a massacre, there is much debate about whether a rebellion existed, and critics have questioned whether the Arroyo administration made the claim a pretext for imposing martial law. Under the Constitution, martial law can be declared only if there is an invasion by a foreign power or a rebellion. Critics contended that neither requirement was present. Several individuals and members of the political opposition had filed petitions before the Supreme Court demanding the order be overturned. The court had asked the government to submit its response to these petitions by Monday. Jejomar Binay, an opposition leader and vocal Arroyo critic, called the government’s decision to lift the decree “a face-saving gesture.” The Ampatuans have denied involvement in the massacre or leading a rebellion.

Martial Law
Maguindanao (Philippines)
Arroyo Gloria Macapagal


After Hurricane Irene, Markets Plan Business as Usual

Abstract: The nation’s stock exchanges, after consulting with the Securities and Exchange Commission, said Sunday that they planned to open as usual on Monday morning. Wall Street banks said they, too, would be open for business as usual, and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association said bond markets were on schedule as well. The New York Stock Exchange, in a statement, said the decision to open on schedule followed a detailed review with New York City officials “of the operational readiness of metro area safety, power, water and transportation systems, in addition to a readiness assessment of our own trading and data center facilities.” With negligible physical damage from Hurricane Irene , the question for Wall Street was whether mass transit would be able to get people onto the trading floors in Manhattan. But even without subways and buses, the New York Stock Exchange and the companies that employ the traders on the floor of the exchange have contingency plans to help them function with minimal staff. Many of their employees live in Manhattan or expect to drive into the city, while others were put up in hotels over the weekend. The New York Federal Reserve also was unaffected by the storm and was expecting employees to make transportation arrangements or to work remotely Monday if mass transit was still disrupted. Exchanges like the N.Y.S.E. and Nasdaq, BATS Trading and Direct Edge, the nation’s big electronic exchanges, have their computer centers based in New Jersey, where they also have robust backup centers that survived the storm. Nasdaq said it had moved some staff members to alternative sites ahead of the storm but was now ready to open its market as usual Monday. Rather than force employees to commute into Manhattan, however, it would start by operating its exchange from one of its parallel centers in an undisclosed location. The New York Stock Exchange was last closed for a weather-related reason in 1996 because of a snow storm. It was also closed for a day in 1985 during Hurricane Gloria. Before the weekend, Wall Street’s banks were putting in place contingency plans, talking to regulators and asking employees to check systems they could use for trading from home. Many have offices around the country and said they were prepared to switch more of their operations there if necessary. Many of New York’s largest investment banks have their headquarters in Midtown Manhattan and thus fell outside the city’s designated evacuation zones. They were planning on opening for business as normal on Monday, although some were still looking at ways to transport staff into New York if mass transit was not functioning. The banks reported no damage to their facilities, including Goldman Sachs, whose Battery Park City headquarters was included in Mayor Bloomberg’s evacuation order. A Goldman spokesman added that “people who need to work from home will be able to.” After closing some of its operations over the weekend, American Express, based in the World Financial Center, said its office would be closed Monday and was asking people to work from home. Credit Suisse said it was ready to open on Monday because of its contingency planning, including “the provision of accommodations and transportation for essential New York staff.” Citigroup also said it was looking at alternative transportation to help staff. A spokesman from Deutsche Bank said that the bank would decide later Sunday whether employees would work from its 60 Wall Street headquarters or an alternate facility, depending on the state of mass transit.

New York Stock Exchange
Hurricane Irene (2011)
Banking and Financial Institutions
Stocks and Bonds


Layoff Fears Rise as the Economy Sputters

Abstract: Not again. That is the plea of many Americans fearful about their jobs as the economy falters. “I don’t have any more savings or anything like that,” said Terrance Myricks, 21, who was dismissed for the second time in less than three years on Sept. 1. “I’ll probably have to rely on unemployment, which I’d really rather not do. And that’s assuming I can even get it.” Job growth halted entirely in the nation last month. And as Europe’s debt crisis acts as a drag on global growth and Washington debates another jobs bill, the possibility of a second recession is increasing in the United States along with the prospects of corresponding layoffs. Mr. Myricks’s tale of pain the second time around, economists fear, could become all too familiar. With headlines like the 30,000 layoffs planned at Bank of America and the United States Postal Service asking Congress to cut 120,000 workers, it is perhaps not surprising that workers’ concerns about job security are near the peak they reached during the last recession, according to a recent Gallup survey . At least one anecdotal study found that layoff announcements were greater in August than a year earlier. The last workers in the door are often the first out the door. That could make the Americans who have already depleted their support networks and unemployment benefits most vulnerable to layoffs. “Employers are likely to target the employees who are more junior, as they usually do,” said Daniel S. Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas, Austin. “If you’ve already exhausted your benefits for that benefit year — and Congress has said they want to shorten the duration of benefits — you’re up the creek. That’s one of the most severe worries about all this.” Right before Labor Day, Mr. Myricks, of La Palma, Calif., near Los Angeles, lost his position as a factory machine operator, a job hard-won after a long spell without work. That painful loss was an echo of July 2009, when a supermarket eliminated his position as an assistant manager. Mr. Myricks joined the 28 percent of teenage men in the work force — 39.7 percent of black teenage men — who were idle and looking for a job then. He spent over a year looking for work, and moved into a cheaper home with his wife, Briana, 20, to help make ends meet. After a few months delivering pizzas part time for Pizza Hut, he finally secured a full-time job in April 2010 at a box factory where his brother is an assistant manager. “It is a very, very dangerous job,” Mr. Myricks said of his work at Georgia-Pacific . “There are operators in my plant who are missing fingers, or missing legs. They’re still working there, though.” (James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia-Pacific, said that the plant adhered to all federal and state safety regulations.) Still, the young worker felt lucky to find a job that paid $14.34 an hour (plus benefits), enough to pay the bills and help support his father, who is battling leukemia. One reason he took the job was that so little else was available in California and across the country. There are still more than four workers for every job opening, according to United States Department of Labor data, and in some areas the competition is even stiffer. “It used to be that you’d be compared against a few résumés, but now you’re competing with a thousand applicants for that one job,” said Teresa Cannady, 53, of Fountain Inn, S.C. She lost her job as an office manager for an Allstate insurance agency in May 2009, and spent 15 months looking for work. Then in September 2010, when the economy seemed to be turning, her old boss asked her to come back — only to lay her off again on Sept. 9. During Mr. Myricks’s first month at Georgia-Pacific, he worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Then he pulled back to five- and six-day weeks. The work, he said, was not only dangerous, but exhausting: he spent his days lifting 50- to 100-pound wooden slabs with razors that cut shapes into cardboard, as well as giant printing plates used to stamp the cardboard. An old back injury flared up, and he developed sharp pains in his shoulder and ankles. He began looking for other work but was unsuccessful. Over the summer his doctor told him to cut back on his hours. Soon after, the company gave him no choice. When customer orders started to drop off, Georgia-Pacific began announcing furlough days in August. Other companies appear to be cutting back as well. The average workweek has not recovered to the level before the last recession, and in the last four months it has either been flat or fallen. The decline, which suggests employers do not have enough work for their existing employees, has led economists to worry that broader layoffs may be next. At Mr. Myricks’s factory, 26 employees out of 187 were let go at the beginning of the month, according to Mr. Malone, the Georgia-Pacific spokesman. Under the union agreement, the layoffs were aimed at workers with the least seniority — including Mr. Myricks. Such practices are common even in companies that are not unionized, economists say. “If you’ve invested 10 years in a worker, you’re going to be reluctant to lay him off,” said Robert Shimer, an economics professor at the University of Chicago. “But if there’s a new guy who hasn’t been there that long, and you haven’t had as much time to invest in him, it’s less costly to let him go.” Though he was told that he would be recalled in about five weeks, Mr. Myricks is doubtful. “My father worked in this business for 42 years,” he said. “He used to get told he’d be laid off for a few weeks and then he’d be off for half a year.” Because he has been earning wages for the last year, Mr. Myricks is receiving unemployment benefits nearly equal to his pay at Georgia-Pacific. The money could be a lifeline for the young couple, because his wife, lost her job as a social media coordinator in January. Their only other income comes from the freelance blog posts she writes for personal finance sites, at $20 a post. "It’s really competitive,” she said. “Some of these sites can find somebody in the Philippines who may be willing to work for a third of what I may be asking for.” The road ahead for both of them could be steep. Many employers prefer — or even require — job applicants to already be employed. A second bout of unemployment could be a bigger stigma. “Everyone knows that in a bad recession like this there’s a lot of unemployment,” said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and the Urban Institute. “You’d think employers would take that into consideration, but they don’t always.” The Myricks want to get bachelor’s degrees to help give them better job opportunities. But the poor health of Mr. Myricks’s father and Ms. Myricks’s mother’s heart problems led them to interrupt their schooling to help support their parents. Now that Mr. Myricks’s father is on the mend, they were hoping to return to college in the coming year. “I haven’t talked to her specifically about that yet,” said Mr. Myricks about whether they can afford to return to college. For now he is trying to appreciate having a break — even if it’s mostly unpaid — from a year and a half of strenuous labor. He says he has been spending his newfound free time hunting for a job, visiting with family and doing work around the house. “I even got a chance to play some video games,” he said. “I hadn’t done that in a really long time.”

Layoffs and Job Reductions
United States Economy
Labor and Jobs


Killer Whale Shows Restricted at SeaWorld Orlando

Abstract: MIAMI — The electrifying in-water duet between trainer and killer whales at SeaWorld will never be quite the same after a judge ruled recently that animal trainers must be better protected from the fearsome mammals during performances. The animal trainers — who not so long ago kissed, rode on, hugged and were thrust into the air by the killer whales — must either remain at a greater distance from them, stand behind a physical barrier or use other devices to keep them safer during performances. The ruling last week by Ken S. Welsch, a federal administrative law judge for the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, came more than two years after the death of Dawn Brancheau , a trainer who was dragged underwater and killed by a killer whale, or orca, at the SeaWorld park in Orlando . Visitors who were leaving the “Dine With Shamu” event watched the terrifying scene unfold. The death forced SeaWorld to suspend in-water interactions between whales and trainers during shows and prompted the company to erect a physical barrier for trainers standing poolside. But executives at SeaWorld have pushed to reinstate its “waterworks” performances, which it views as the park’s most thrilling and best loved shows, contending that safety protocols were sufficient to keep trainers safe. Judge Welsch disagreed, saying the protocols had failed to protect Ms. Brancheau. Tilikum, the whale who killed her, ignored slaps in the water and other signals devised to bring him under control. It took 45 minutes to recover Ms. Brancheau’s body, after he scooped her into his mouth. “Once a trainer is in the water with a killer whale that chooses to engage in undesirable behavior, the trainer is at the whale’s mercy,” the judge wrote in his ruling. “All of the emergency procedures, nets, underwater signals and hand slaps are useless if the whale chooses to ignore them.” After Ms. Brancheau’s death, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration spent six months investigating the Orlando park’s killer whale shows and the safety of its trainers. The agency issued several citations, saying barriers and other precautions were needed for the shows. SeaWorld appealed the violations, and a hearing was held last November. Last week, the judge sided mostly with OSHA, delivering a stinging assessment of what he said was the company’s inclination to blame trainers when something went wrong and the faith the park placed in the predictability of an orca’s behavior. Judge Welsch said the park should have done more to protect its trainers. The park’s claim that orcas, when properly conditioned, exhibit behavior that can be predicted with more than 98 percent accuracy was not based on science, he said. The judge also said it was implausible that SeaWorld — the leader in the training of killer whales — did not know, as it had claimed, that the orcas could pose a hazard to employees. Killer whales have been involved in the deaths of four people at marine parks. Before he killed Ms. Brancheau, Tilikum, who weighs 12,000 pounds, was involved in the death of a trainer at a marine park in Canada in 1991. The next year SeaWorld bought Tilikum and brought him to Orlando. But trouble appeared to follow. In 1999, park employees found a dead man draped across Tilikum’s back in the pool. The man had hidden from security personnel after the park closed and entered the pool somehow. He died of hypothermia , and Tilikum’s role in the death was undetermined. Captured in the wild, Tilikum, who resumed performing at the park 13 months after Ms. Brancheau’s death, has long been handled very carefully by trainers; they did not interact with him in the water, only outside. When new trainers arrived, they were immediately given a “Tili Talk,” warning them to remain alert around the whale. But the ruling was not all bad for SeaWorld. Judge Welsch downgraded one major violation from willful to serious and reduced the fines SeaWorld must pay to $12,000 from $75,000. “We have maintained all along that the allegations of ‘willful’ were meritless and are vindicated that the judge agreed,” said Jim Atchison, president and chief executive of SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment, in a statement. “The judge also unequivocally states that SeaWorld is a ‘safety-conscious employer’ with a ‘highly detailed and thorough’ safety training program,” the statement said. The new type of show that SeaWorld introduced after Ms. Brancheau’s death, which keeps trainers out of the water, has not hurt ticket sales. SeaWorld had record earnings in 2011. The marine park is working on other safety features, like a pool floor that can be raised to beach a whale and compressed-air breathing devices for trainers, in the hope that trainers can get closer to the orcas again.

Whales
Dawn Brancheau
Accidents and Safety
Ken S Welsch
Amusement park


At Queen Sofia Spanish Institute’s Gala, a Missed Opportunity

Abstract: On the rarest of occasions, Nocturnalist messes up. It started out perfectly at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute’s Gold Medal Gala on the Upper East Side on Tuesday night. Trumpet-shaped gowns in lime green and buff fluttered across the floor, booby traps daring passing heels to pierce them. The train of the socialite L auren Santo Domingo was trampled by unwary wingtips. We stood behind her as a line formed to meet Queen Sofia of Spain but didn’t repeat the faux pas. It was a receiving line, a chance to greet the queen and the men being honored for their work promoting Spanish culture. But what greeting? A bow? A curtsy? (Ms. Santo Domingo quasi-crouched.) This was not the place to test-drive our first-ever curtsy. We shook hands and complimented the queen’s — royal — blue velvet gown. We were hustled down the line to greet Oscar de la Renta, the fashion photographer Mario Testino and Ferran Adrià, the famed El Bulli chef. At the end, hip cocked, was Javier Bardem, one of the only men not in black — or any — tie. “I’m a waiter,” he said, when we shook hands. (No, Mr. Bardem; the waiters, at least, wore tuxedos.) But as we were shouldered away from the queen, it dawned on us. Had we just used our interview opportunity to tell the queen of Spain she looked pretty? We asked a publicist if we could have an audience with the queen. Yes, of course, she said. We just had. Former President Bill Clinton ambled into the anteroom with the royal entourage, then Barbara Walters , then Anna Wintour . Forced upstairs and slumped at our table, we sent a text message to Prince Alexander of Serbia , complaining of how stuffy this event was compared with his parties. The queen of Spain, he texted back, was his godmother. We slumped some more. Onstage, Mr. Clinton rambled about Neanderthals. Ms. Wintour presented Mr. Testino with his award and thanked him for not flirting with her “for once.” And then the queen took the stage. All was not lost; we could quote her speech! She spoke. We put our pen back in our purse. Most of the speech was in Spanish. Building Confidence “Where can I get a vodka martini?” a woman urgently asked Nocturnalist’s correspondent on Wednesday evening as we stood next to the red carpet at the Women’s Media Center’s awards ceremony in TriBeCa. At the bar, we suggested. She bowled past us and moments later shoved us aside again, holding aloft a martini, one olive — and placing it in Jane Fonda ’s waiting hand. Ms. Fonda told us of a schedule so packed that she had earned that drink. “We had a board meeting this morning, and tomorrow I’m doing the TED conference, and we rehearsed all day. ...” She stopped herself, turned to our correspondent and said three words that will forever be seared into his soul: “You’re so handsome.” Seconds later, we wished we had packed a defibrillator along with our notebook: Ms. Fonda took our hand. We remember little else of what transpired, save for a tense pause when Ms. Fonda realized a waiter had absconded with her martini. Floating away, we bumped into Gloria Steinem . A friend told her she looked thin, stylish and beautiful before flouncing off. “You get old enough,” said Ms. Steinem, 77, “you get points for hanging in there.” The event’s M.C., the comedian Wanda Sykes , said she hadn’t prepared remarks. What would she say about Ms. Steinem, we asked. “Can you spell that?” she replied. “Does she have a perfume or something?” Flip the Lights We huddled at the base of a 53-foot-tall Douglas fir on Tuesday night, waiting for someone to flip the switch on its thousands of LED lights. When it was done, there was a smattering of wan applause. We were at the city’s junior varsity of tree-lighting ceremonies, in Bryant Park. But that didn’t stop the Olympic figure skaters John Zimmerman and Kyoko Ina from flicking their blades across the Citi Pond ice with ferocity better merited for the Winter Games. Once, Mr. Zimmerman said, he misjudged an angle while lifting Ms. Ina. “Kyoko did a 12-foot body-slam onto the concrete steps in the crowd,” he said. What type of injuries had she sustained, we asked. “Everything,” she said. We headed backstage (narrowly avoiding a Zamboni) to chat with the singer Sarah McLachlan , who shared none-too-fond memories of that other tree-lighting ceremony up the street when she was pregnant. “I barely remember trying to find a poinsettia to throw up into,” she said. Ms. McLachlan told us she loved animals. “We used to have dogs; now we have a dog,” she said. “One of them was eaten by a coyote.” She took to the stage, and midway through her song “Angel,” a man turned and whispered, “This song makes me want to cry and adopt a puppy.” Just don’t take it to Ms. McLachlan’s house.

Queen Sofia Spanish Institute
Spanish Institute
Awards Decorations and Honors
Fonda Jane
McLachlan Sarah
TriBeCa (NYC)
Upper East Side (NYC)
Bryant Park (NYC)
Parties (Social)


Cleveland Streets Are Calm, but Anger Lingers Day After Officer’s Acquittal

Abstract: CLEVELAND — The 10 a.m. service at Elizabeth Baptist Church should have been a joyous occasion. It was Pentecost Sunday. The weather was beautiful. Worshipers applauded schoolchildren who received A’s and B’s on their report cards. But 24 hours before the congregants gathered to sing hymns and take communion, a judge had acquitted a Cleveland police officer of manslaughter for his role in a car pursuit that ended with two unarmed black people fatally shot. The not-guilty verdict sparked demonstrations Saturday that began in orderly fashion but ended with dozens of arrests and prompted conversations at Elizabeth and across Cleveland about the city’s racial disparities. Cleveland’s streets had calmed by Sunday morning, but many at Elizabeth suggested that the verdict had only exacerbated tensions between the justice system and this city’s African-American population. The Rev. Richard M. Gibson, the church’s pastor, said from the pulpit that the acquittal had left him angry, and eager for systemic change to the police and the courts. “We cannot allow what has happened to go forward on our watch,” Pastor Gibson told his mostly black congregation. Elizabeth is among roughly 40 faith groups that are part of Greater Cleveland Congregations , an organization that has called for drastic changes in how the law is administered here. Many members of Elizabeth say they live in a city where the system is rigged against black people, a perspective that has received increased attention amid heightened scrutiny of the Cleveland police and officer-involved shootings. The verdict came as the city awaits a decision from prosecutors on whether to charge the officer who last year shot and killed Tamir Rice , 12, who was playing with a replica gun near a playground, and the officer who restrained Tanisha Anderson, 37. Ms. Anderson, who suffered from bipolar disorder and heart disease, died after she was restrained face down on the pavement. Image The congregation on Sunday at Elizabeth Baptist Church, where the verdict was discussed. Credit Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times Those cases have also drawn national attention, and Tamir’s name was chanted repeatedly Saturday. Many critics of the police say they fear that the verdict bodes poorly for the chances of convictions in the other cases. Cleveland is also in negotiations with the Justice Department for a consent decree that would mandate changes to the city’s police. A federal report found last year that Cleveland officers engaged in a pattern of “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force.” Officer Michael Brelo, the patrolman acquitted on Saturday, was one of several officers who fired a combined 137 shots at Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in a car chase on Nov. 29, 2012. Police said they believed gunfire was coming from Mr. Russell’s car during the pursuit, but he and Ms. Williams were later found to be unarmed. Officer Brelo was singled out for the manslaughter charges because he climbed onto the hood after the pursuit ended and fired at least 15 rounds into the car, which prosecutors claimed was unjustified. In his acquittal, a judge ruled that Officer Brelo had feared for his life and that his actions were protected by law. Though Cleveland’s population has a black majority, and though the mayor and the police chief are black, many African-Americans here say racial tensions and mistrust of law enforcement are common. Some speak of “two Clevelands” — a mostly white city with a bustling downtown and increased commercial development, and a mostly black one where schools are struggling and crime rates are high, and the police are not trusted. That dichotomy was on display Saturday night as more than 100 protesters, many of them black, blocked traffic and chanted downtown about the verdict and broader perceived injustices. As the police followed the march, the protesters passed group after group of patrons dining outside at fashionable restaurants. Most of the diners were white, and many had come downtown for a Cleveland Indians baseball game. The protesters walked past many such places without incident, but at one point, the police said, a protester threw a sign at a restaurant patron. At other times, baseball fans loudly suggested that the protesters go home. As the evening progressed and tensions rose, officers ordered demonstrators to leave. Most did not do so, and the police said 71 were arrested, many on charges of aggravated rioting and obstruction of justice. “We only moved in to make arrests when things got violent and protesters refused to disperse,” Police Chief Calvin D. Williams said. “We want people to understand we’re going to help you in this process, but if things turn violent in this situation, we will take action.” Image Protesters gathered outside the Cuyahoga County Justice Center in Cleveland. Credit John Minchillo/Associated Press Despite Saturday’s flare-ups, Cleveland has mostly avoided the violent unrest seen in Ferguson, Mo., where a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black man last year, and Baltimore, where a black man died after being injured in a police van. Cleveland officials have worked with clergy members and other community leaders in hopes of staving off violence, and the efforts seem to have worked so far. Greater Cleveland Congregations, the group Elizabeth belongs to, released a statement after the verdict, seeking broad changes to the region’s justice system. The statement mentioned high incarceration rates, racial disparities in arrests and felonies for nonviolent offenders. The congregations group, which is a local chapter of the national Industrial Areas Foundation , also seeks a consent decree between the Justice Department and the Cleveland police. “I am certain that things are going to change in this community,” Pastor Gibson said from the pulpit Sunday. “I am certain that there will be leadership change in this city.” But after the service, Pastor Gibson said he was unsure that the city’s leadership was truly committed to change. In news conferences over the weekend, Mayor Frank Jackson repeatedly said that the city welcomed peaceful protests, and that he believed demonstrations could lead to meaningful changes. Through a spokesman, he declined an interview request Sunday seeking further details. Some protesters have spoken in support of an effort to recall the mayor. In the case involving Officer Brelo, the city has settled wrongful death lawsuits brought by the couple’s families for $3 million. Seventy-five officers have been disciplined for their roles in the chase and the shooting. An internal review that was paused during the trial was expected to resume after the verdict. Officer Brelo will remain on unpaid leave until the review is completed. After church on Sunday, many at Elizabeth Baptist said they were disappointed in his acquittal, but far from shocked. That lack of surprise, they said, hinted at a deeper problem. “Leading up to the verdict, there was already conversation about preventing rioting because the assumption was, in fact, that he was going to get off,” said Jacqueline Gillon, a church member and lifelong Cleveland resident. “That’s troubled me from the beginning, that there was never a general belief that justice would be done. It’s another smack in the face for our humanity.”

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


Britain Asks if Tone of ‘Brexit’ Campaign Made Violence Inevitable

Abstract: LONDON — As the shock of the brutal murder of a young member of Parliament began to subside on Friday, there was a growing sense in Britain that something ominous had been unleashed in the country. The increasingly ugly anti-immigrant tone to the campaign over next week’s referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union, coupled with the violence of English fans at the European soccer championships and now the killing of a lawmaker on the streets of a small town, has left many here feeling that the boundaries of acceptable behavior are breaking down. “What we are just seeing generally is a very disturbing shift in British politics,” said Simon Tilford, the deputy director of the Center for European Reform, which favors British membership. “It is quite upsetting to me what is happening.” With next Thursday’s vote on the referendum only days away, campaigning was suspended as a gesture of mourning and respect for the victim, Jo Cox, 41, a rising star in the opposition Labour Party who, not coincidentally, was a strong backer of Britain’s remaining inside the bloc. While it is still too early to say how the attack will change the dynamics of the campaign, it has unquestionably shifted the focus from the growing momentum of those in favor of leaving to the anti-immigrant tactics they have employed as the vote has drawn closer. Image A convenience store in Canvey Island, England, was decorated with English flags and those of other countries competing in the European soccer championships this month. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times The suspect arrested in the killing, Thomas Mair, 52, has a history of mental illness. But he was also reported to have been in contact with far-right groups in the United States and Britain, and to have said, “Britain first!” several times as he attacked Ms. Cox. Britain First, a far-right nationalist group, denied any links with Mr. Mair, but a United States civil rights group said he had been associated with an American neo-Nazi organization called the National Alliance. In a widely distributed piece written for the magazine The Spectator, which favors leaving the European Union, Alex Massie drew a connection between the “Leave” campaign, which has featured outlandish assertions, xenophobia and Islamophobia, to the death of Ms. Cox. “Sometimes rhetoric has consequences,” Mr. Massie wrote. “If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realize any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.” Mr. Massie cited a poster that had been issued earlier on Thursday by one of the campaigns for British exit led by Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, which has been strongly anti-Europe and anti-immigration from its inception and won 13 percent of the vote in the national election in May 2015. In the last stages, opponents say, the Leave campaign has essentially become a UKIP campaign on the putative dangers of immigration — given that membership in the bloc means freedom of travel and work for all its citizens — softened around the edges by Conservatives who say that as a great nation, Britain will be truly sovereign only away from Brussels. The poster showed a long line of Middle Eastern refugees waiting to cross a European border. The text said: “BREAKING POINT. The E.U. has failed us all. We must break free from the E.U. and take control of our borders.” Never mind that the border in question was that between Croatia and Slovenia, and that Britain as an island nation is largely insulated from the immigration crisis that roiled the Continent last year. ‘Brexit’: Explaining Britain’s Vote on European Union Membership Britain will hold a referendum on Thursday on whether to leave the European Union, a decision nicknamed “Brexit.” The message, Mr. Massie said, was not subtle: “Vote Leave, Britain, or be overrun by brown people. Take control. Take back our country. You know what I mean, don’t you: If you want a Turk — or a Syrian — for a neighbor, vote Remain.” The official and unofficial Leave campaigns have suggested that Turkey and its 77 million Muslims are soon to join the European Union, which is untrue, and that despite Britain’s restrictions on free travel for European citizens, membership in the European Union has made Britain more vulnerable to waves of refugees and terrorism. While the claims may be unsubstantiated, pollsters suggest that the focus on Turkey and on regaining “control” over immigration was behind the movement toward a British exit, or Brexit, which is now narrowly leading most polls. “When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks,” Mr. Massie wrote. “When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.” Some observers, like Mr. Tilford, say there is blame to be spread across the political spectrum. While the tenor of the Leave campaign “is pretty xenophobic,” he said, both of the major mainstream parties, Labour and the Conservatives, now regularly discuss the potential menace of foreigners. “That has made it socially acceptable to voice anti-immigrant or xenophobic sentiment in a way that it wasn’t 10 years ago,” he said. The more practical question is whether the murder of Ms. Cox will alter the trajectory of the campaign. Some analysts, like Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group, said it “will hurt the momentum of the ‘Leave’ campaign, which has been gaining steadily in recent polls.” But others drew the opposite conclusion. “Until it’s clear who was responsible and what their motivation was or might have been,” said John Curtice, a political scientist from Strathclyde University, “all it does is stop the campaign when the Remain side probably would not want it to be stopped.” Polly Toynbee, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper, said that the murder of a public official could not be seen as an isolated episode. “It occurs against a backdrop of an ugly public mood in which we have been told to despise the political class, to distrust those who serve, to dehumanize those with whom we do not readily identify,” Ms. Toynbee wrote. Of course, many who are campaigning to leave are honorable democrats, she said. “But there are others whose recklessness has been open and shocking. I believe they bear responsibility, not for the attack itself, but for the current mood: for the inflammatory language, for the finger-jabbing, the dog whistling and the overt racism.” Ms. Cox herself wrote a column in The Yorkshire Post, published just a few days before her death, in which she sympathetically discussed people’s concerns about immigration. “This doesn’t mean to say they are racist or xenophobic,” she said, but concerned about pressures on health and social services and competition for jobs. She added, “Most people recognize that there are positive sides of migration too.” But the benefits of European Union membership are “huge” and far outweigh the costs, Ms. Cox wrote, explaining that “I strongly believe that concerns about immigration — as legitimate as they are — are not a reason to vote for Brexit,” in large part because leaving itself would not solve the problem. “Please don’t fall for the spin prior to June 23 that the only way to deal with concerns about immigration is by voting to leave — that simply is not the case,” she concluded. Her husband, Brendan Cox, issued a statement after her death, saying that his wife “would have wanted two things above all else to happen now — one, that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her.”

Brexit
Immigration
Referendum
Jo Cox
Thomas Mair
Great Britain
EU
Murders and Homicides
Fringe Groups


Mother and Son Reunite Only to Face Her Cancer Diagnosis

Abstract: YONKERS — Miguel Ramos’s mother, Mirna, set off for the United States when he was almost 4. She was both running away from a violent domestic situation and running toward the same opportunities that have drawn generations of immigrants toward America’s borders. Left behind, Mr. Ramos bounced between aunts and uncles in his native Honduras and in Guatemala. At 10 he was forced to sell clothes door to door; at 14, he milked cows and did farm chores starting at 3 a.m. But all along, he managed to stay in school, and he even attended college for a few years. And while he saw his mother just twice for brief visits in the 17 years after she left for the United States, he would talk to her nearly every day as he grew older. In October, Mr. Ramos finally came to the United States to be reunited with his mother. A new program aimed at Central American minors provides young people from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador with a safe, legal alternative to the perilous journey by car, by foot and over rivers that many make to reach the United States. He settled into her simple apartment building here, about five miles north of the Bronx in Westchester County. The stairs leading to the second floor list to one side. Ms. Ramos, 47, also has a 17-year-old son, Denilson Gonzalez, who was born in the United States. Her two sons share a bedroom. “It was worth the wait,” Mr. Ramos said through a translator. Smiling broadly in his Mickey Mouse T-shirt, he added, “Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be with her.” But the joyous reunion was bracketed by tragedy. A few months before Mr. Ramos arrived, Ms. Ramos’s husband — Denilson’s father — died unexpectedly of an aneurysm. Two months after Mr. Ramos moved in, his mother was told that she had Stage 4 cancer, which had started in her breast and spread to her lungs and liver. Now, instead of taking a crash course in English — Mr. Ramos speaks almost none — and trying to get a job, he is caring full time for his mother. She is on a three-month leave from her job in the meat department of the Stew Leonard’s food store in Yonkers, and recently began receiving chemotherapy. She is too tired and nauseated to cook, clean or do laundry, so those tasks have fallen to Mr. Ramos. And his mother is visibly frustrated that her son has put off his goals on account of her. (While he studied computer science for three years at a university, he hopes to pursue a degree in psychology.) “I want him to study and really learn English and prepare for life in the United States,” she said, sitting on a day bed and rubbing her leg, which was in pain. “I want him to have a career.” Soon after arriving in the United States, Mr. Ramos was helped by Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York , one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. The group’s immigration department processed his application to the Central American Minors program and helped acclimate him to American life. It led him through the process of applying for Medicaid and for food stamps, among other benefits. Catholic Charities also helped him enroll in an English language class, but because of his mother’s illness, Mr. Ramos has put it off for now. Yet he knows that learning English — and quickly — is critical to finding a job to support his family and eventually attending college. For now, he is doing what he can to study English on his own. To help, Catholic Charities used $249 in Neediest Cases funds to buy him an online Rosetta Stone course in English and an additional $246 to buy a Chromebook. Money is a constant worry. His mother pays $1,300 month in rent and has only enough savings to cover the family’s expenses through the end of February. If Ms. Ramos, who earned $26,000 a year as a butcher, is not well enough to return to work, they do not know how they will pay the rent. They also have monthly bills — $130 for phone service and $180 for electricity. “As long as we have the rent and food, we’ll be O.K.,” said Ms. Ramos, trying to stay positive. Her younger son, Denilson, is a senior at Saunders Trades and Technical High School . An honors student, he is now applying to college and plans to study engineering. “I feel very weird not being able to bring something to the table,” Mr. Ramos said about his lack of income. “It’s stressing me out because I don’t know English. I don’t even know how to order food when I go out.” Nonetheless, he says that being with his mother these past few months has been transformative, despite the uncertainty and hardship. “Living with her is the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “There’s a connection. She understands me, supports me and is proud of me.” Perhaps it is his mother’s faith in him that allows Mr. Ramos to imagine a future in which he chases not only a career in psychology, but other passions. He envisions creating a foundation someday to assist others. “I would like to help people with cancer through psychology, maybe even financially,” he said. He also aspires to travel. And he yearns to dance. “I love meringue, hip-hop and salsa,” he said, the anxiety etched on his face melting at the thought. “I would like to dance for someone famous. Maybe Ricky Martin or Lady Gaga.” Nearby, his mother beamed.

Immigration
Catholic Charities
New York Times Neediest Cases Fund
Philanthropy
Yonkers NY