Readers Respond to Success Academy’s ‘Got to Go’ Student List

Abstract: Readers were divided in response to an article about the creation of a “Got to Go” list of students at a Success Academy charter school, part of New York City’s largest charter network. Last December, the principal at Success Academy Fort Greene, in Brooklyn, singled out 16 students he said were disruptive and hoped to see leave. Although the principal was quickly chastised, nine of the students later left, and the list seemed to validate claims that the network achieves its high test scores by weeding out weak or difficult students. Some readers thought Success was right in trying to remove these students, so that they did not prevent other children in the school from learning. Others said that Success should have tried harder to meet their needs. Still others asked whether it was fair to compare the results of charter schools and neighboring district schools, which cannot as easily remove difficult students. There were more than 1,200 comments on nytimes.com. Here is a selection, edited for length and clarity: Disruptive Students Should Go “Disruptive students who endanger other students and teachers must, first, be instructed, with their parents, about expected acceptable behavior, then disciplined within school, with appropriate counseling and updates to parents, and, if the disruptive and endangering behavior continues, then suspended, and, finally, expelled. Yes, such persistently disruptive students have ‘got to go.’ The education of our children requires a safe and respectful learning environment.” Ronald B. Alexander, 67, Oakton, Va. “Keep in mind how successful sports teams operate: they pick the best players they can, and cut those who aren’t succeeding. Coaches provide some inspiration and planning, but the problem with the Cleveland Browns is not that their coaches are lazy incompetents who are unable to teach their players football skills. The same principle applies to schools. Give them good students and they will do well.” Jim Stahl, 66, Orange Village, Ohio “These kids will now wind up, of course, in the public schools, which will be expected to work miracles. I know no one wants to think about this, but maybe, just maybe, the kids left behind when the disruptive students are taken out of the classroom will now be able to get the education they and their parents signed up for.” A.C. Willment, 60, Ridgewood, N.J. “My daughter attends Success Academy for kindergarten. I, too, was concerned about the rigid nature of the program but I could not be more pleased with the results. Our school has 400 students. From a statistical perspective, it doesn’t make sense that Success Academy could be manipulating its test scores by forcing out students. Even if 10 percent (40 students) had failed on the state math test, the school would still have a 90 percent ranking and been one of the top schools in the district. What Eva Moskowitz has really stumbled onto is that removing the distractions from the classroom and enforcing strict behavioral policies creates an environment where the vast majority of the students can excel. The behavioral policies force the parents to be involved in their children’s education. It is not for every student or family but clearly it is bringing an otherwise unattainable education to a large percentage of students that wouldn’t have a chance otherwise.” James Manchester, 46, New York City Removing Disruptive Students Isn’t the Answer “If a student is ‘moving furniture, running away from staff’ they are endangering themselves and others. This is unacceptable in any kind of school. Writing ‘Got to Go’ lists only inflames the public. It does nothing to help us understand how to best meet the needs of all students, which is goal of education in any form.” Ellen Stoneman, 63, Phoenix “As a parent of one of these children who was mistreated by Success Academy, I can assure you that they are even more concerned about strict control and discipline than they are about test scores. The lowest priority to them is the psychological and developmental health of individual students.” Jeffrey Feola, 49, Brooklyn On the Idea of Charter Schools “Teaching all students is a job of the charter schools, too, no matter how much parents think their child is being harmed by another student’s presence. If they want exclusivity in schools, they shouldn’t use other people’s tax dollars for it.” Mark Stevens, 30, Cambridge, Mass. “The problem is neighborhood public schools and charter public schools are judged by the same metrics even though they have very different populations. If charters want public funds, let them take all who arrive at the door just like neighborhood schools.” Regina Flannery, 57, Staten Island “Success Academy and Rikers Island are simply two elements of the same system of control that we have created in this country for the poor, the brown, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised.” Walter P. Bruckner, 54, Cleveland “The fact that public schools are the schools of last resort is one of the main reasons we are seeing such a decline in performance and teacher burnout despite heroic efforts to support all children. It’s abundantly clear to me that not all children will learn in a traditional-school setting.” Pat Bindrim, 61, Blue Bell, Pa.

Success Academy Charter Schools
Charter school
School discipline
NYC


Taking a Bow Won’t Stop Fans From Booing

Abstract: There is a school of thought that says if baseball fans insist on a curtain call, they get one. Carlos Delgado, thankfully, did not attend that school. On Sunday, Mets fans, who have booed Delgado without mercy for the first four weeks of the season, asked for a curtain call after he hit his second home run of the game against the Atlanta Braves. The feeling, apparently, was that this was a special moment, a time to kiss and make up. Delgado wasn’t having it. He refused to play along and stayed in the Mets’ dugout. The cheers turned to boos when it became apparent that Delgado was not coming out. After the game, Delgado repeated that no one likes being booed, and he also said: “There are moments, and there are moments. I don’t think that was the moment.” The nerve. There were no curtain call requests for Delgado on Tuesday night. He went 0 for 5, although the Mets beat Pittsburgh, 5-4, in 11 innings. The pendulum has swung too far in favor of indulging fans; players are expected to accept a certain amount of verbal abuse. With the proliferation of video games and reality television, everything has become an interactive plaything — including athletes. It’s as if players are not real and don’t really have feelings. They are like Simone, the computer-generated actor who catapults Al Pacino’s character to fame in the movie “S1mOne.” High salaries and ticket prices give fans an inalienable right to hiss and boo, then in an instant, demand that the object of their scorn come out for a curtain call. The fan needs to be reeled in. Delgado did a neat bit of reeling Sunday. He could have come out and tipped his cap and waved and smiled in a gesture that said, All is forgiven. But all is not forgiven and won’t be until the Mets reach the World Series under Manager Willie Randolph. Things are not warm and fuzzy at Shea Stadium. Instead, there seems to be a day-by-day, game-to-game truce, one that can be broken by a loss, a bad inning, a bad outing or — in Delgado’s case — even a good outing. Delgado has made it clear throughout his career that he doesn’t play to the crowd. A few years ago, in a quiet protest over the war in Iraq and the military presence in Puerto Rico, Delgado refused to come out of the dugout during the playing of “God Bless America.” He weathered that; he will weather this as well. How much worse can it get for Delgado? Will fans boo him louder? They can’t boo him any worse than they have for the first four weeks of the season. One trip to the top of the dugout steps and a tip of the hat isn’t going to wash away the bitter taste. You can argue that Mets fans were attempting to open the door, to extend an olive branch to Delgado. Until when? The next inning? The next game? If Delgado continues to struggle, fans are going to boo, regardless of whether he took a curtain call. Delgado could have gone to the top of the dugout steps and tipped his cap, violating his own code and indulging the fans. He didn’t budge. The general wisdom in the front office is that players who choose to survive should not alienate fans or the news media. So players curry favor, owners turn ballparks into veritable petting zoos and everyone indulges the curtain call. Yet when Delgado was introduced for his first at-bat Tuesday, the cheers clearly outweighed the boos. The boos were reserved for Johan Santana, who allowed some more home runs. Who needs the fickle fans? If Delgado has a strong series against Pittsburgh, he will chip away at fan resentment. But fan resentment goes beyond Delgado. It extends to last season and the season before that. “I think there’s still a carry-over effect over the way the season ended last year, but at some point in time, that carry-over effect has to end,” General Manager Omar Minaya said. “The players were just as disappointed as the fans and they care as much about winning this year. I hope at some point in time we can all understand that we’re in this together.” What is unfolding at Shea is an unusually frank dialogue between Mets players and Mets fans: Fans boo, players push back. It’s as if they’re saying to each other, at this early juncture of the season, You don’t like us, we don’t like you. “All of us are disappointed with what happened last season,” Minaya said. “But at some point, you have to move on. And if we’re going to move on, we really need the fans on our side.” What positive can come out of this? Mets fans will mature and turn the emotional corner and embrace the new season. There’s a ton of cheering and a ton of booing to go. On Sunday, Delgado passed up a chance at reconciliation, a chance for fans and players to bury the hatchet. That hatchet is still in view.


The G.O.P. Campaign Message in a Word: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Abstract: For President Obama and his party, last week brought another stiff dose of pain: the announcement of 263,000 more jobs lost, while unemployment ticked up to 9.8 percent. And by all indications, Democrats must endure that form of political torture for at least several more months. Whatever the fate of health care legislation, persistently high unemployment has made “Where are the jobs?” the most potent Republican campaign argument as next year’s midterm elections come into view. Publicly, White House aides and Congressional leaders have responded with incessant attempts to highlight benefits from the $787 billion economic stimulus package they enacted earlier this year. Privately, Mr. Obama’s economic advisers are sifting options for a new package of tax cuts and other job creation measures to be unveiled in next year’s State of the Union address — or earlier if pressure for action becomes irresistible. Republicans entered the age of Obama with hope in the traditional pattern of midterm election losses by a president’s party. But now unemployment trends have heightened their confidence that their political luck has turned more sharply and rapidly than most Republicans had expected. “It is the Democrats’ turn to go through the historical meat grinder,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a Republican strategist who says he sees his party on track to gain 15 to 25 House seats. “So far they don’t have much to brag about, and the political clock is ticking.” Pointing to Good News Democrats girded for the last week’s bad news in typical fashion. Two days before the Labor Department’s jobs report, Mr. Obama appeared at the National Institutes of Health in suburban Maryland with the local Democratic congressman, Chris Van Hollen, to promote the award of $5 billion in stimulus money to finance biomedical research. That research will spur high-quality employment, the president said, rebutting adversaries’ portrayal of the stimulus package as larded with wasteful projects. “It’s not just about creating make-work jobs, it’s about creating jobs that will make a lasting difference for our future,” he said. Mr. Van Hollen, who leads the Democrats’ midterm election effort as chairman of the party’s House campaign committee, sees two critical factors in withstanding the Republican jobs assault. One is Democrats’ ability to point to signs of economic recovery, like improving real estate, credit and stock markets; the other is avoiding premature declarations of “mission accomplished” on the economy. “Most of our guys have gone home and talked to their constituents about how this is going to be a long, tough recovery,” Mr. Van Hollen said. “The main test is, did the economy turn around, and who was on your side?” Obama advisers also count on voters’ memories of the unpopular Bush administration and of the badly wounded economy they inherited. But Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton discovered that economic recovery programs Americans ultimately judged successful did not protect their parties in midterm elections. “ ‘It could have been worse’ is of little utility in politics,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s top political adviser, acknowledged. Moreover, even Mr. Obama’s economic team now concedes that unemployment, which they once hoped to keep from exceeding 8 percent, will get worse through the end of the year. One outside economist, Mark Zandi, predicts the economy will shed 750,000 more jobs over the next six months, with unemployment peaking at 10.5 percent in June. Republicans say the trends will only magnify voters’ doubts about the effectiveness of the administration’s anti- recession policies. “For a lot of people, the ‘whether it’s working or not’ is filtered through jobs,” said a Republican pollster, Bill McInturff. All in the Timing Those doubts help explain why Mr. Obama said in a recent interview that he was strongly inclined against a second infusion of economic stimulus money. But Democrats are considering other steps in addition to the extension of unemployment benefits now moving through Congress. Mr. Zandi recommends that the administration extend existing measures, like a tax credit for homebuyers and accelerated depreciation for businesses. Yet even if those steps succeed economically, the political question is how quickly they could help Democratic candidates. The prototype for bad timing was in Reagan’s second year in office, when Republicans lost 26 seats in the midterm elections weeks after unemployment topped 10 percent. If unemployment begins declining by next summer, Mr. Van Hollen reasoned, voters will see Mr. Obama’s strategy as successful. But Mr. McInturff said voters’ attitudes about the economy tend to harden by summer of an election year. “They are running out of the window between now and 2010” to change them, he said.

Unemployment
Elections
Obama Barack
Republican Party
United States Economy
Economic Conditions and Trends
House of Representatives
United States Politics and Government


Rabbi David Lieber, Scholar and University President, Dies at 83

Abstract: Rabbi David L. Lieber, a leader of Conservative Judaism in the United States and the editor of a controversial book of Torah translation and commentary that called into question the historical accuracy of some of the primary accounts found in the Old Testament, died Monday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 83. The cause was a lung ailment, said Iris Waskow, a spokeswoman for American Jewish University, in Los Angeles. For 29 years, until 1993, Rabbi Lieber was president of the University of Judaism, which was renamed American Jewish University last year, when it merged with the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. From 1996 to 1998, he was president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis. A renowned biblical scholar, Rabbi Lieber had for more than 20 years contemplated the compilation of a volume of commentary on the Torah that would provide a modern interpretation for Conservative Jews. Finally, in 2002, with essays by 41 prominent rabbis and scholars, “Etz Hayim” (Hebrew for “Tree of Life”) was issued by the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents the 1.5 million members of the movement in North America. “Etz Hayim” offers the standard Hebrew biblical text, a parallel English translation and, at the end, essays on topics ranging from the Torah scroll and dietary laws to ecology and eschatology. The essays — incorporating findings from archaeology, philology, anthropology and the study of ancient cultures — raise contentious questions about things like the existence of Abraham and Moses, the accuracy of the Exodus story, whether there were walls that tumbled at Jericho and whether David, far from being a mighty king, was more likely a provincial leader whose stature was later enhanced. One essay, “Biblical Archaeology,” by Lee I. Levine, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, states, “There is no reference in Egyptian sources to Israel’s sojourn in that country, and the evidence that does exist is negligible and indirect.” The few pieces of evidence, it continues, “are far from adequate to corroborate the historicity of the biblical account.” Professor Levine also wrote that excavations showed there had been no walls at Jericho. Another essay, “Ancient Near Eastern Mythology,” by Robert Wexler, who is now president of American Jewish University, states that it is unlikely that the Genesis story originated in Palestine . More likely, the essay says, it arose in Mesopotamia, as evinced in the story of the flood, which, it says, probably grew out of the periodic overflowing of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Until the 1,560-page “Etz Hayim” was introduced, the commentary of Joseph Hertz, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth in the 1930s, was the basis for Conservative Torah interpretation. Rabbi Hertz’s work countenanced no doubt that the Torah was the literal word of God. And that is the immutable view of Orthodox Jews, many of whom raised objections to “Etz Hayim.” There was even discomfort among Conservative Jews, including Rabbi Susan Grossman, an “Etz Hayim” co-editor. After the book was released, Rabbi Grossman told The New York Times that the “basic historicity” of the Torah “is valid and verifiable.” “The real issue for me is the eternal truths that are in the text,” she continued. “How do we apply this hallowed text to the 21st century?” Rabbi Grossman was among those who had successfully advocated that the new text refer less frequently to God as “he.” Such issues had led Rabbi Lieber to tell the Jewish newspaper Forward in 1999, while he was still editing the book, “There’s a need always for a new Torah commentary to reflect the age in which it is made.” David Leo Lieber was born in Poland on Feb. 20, 1925, the son of Max and Gussie Yarmush Lieber. Two years later, the family came to the United States. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1944 while at the same time obtaining another bachelor’s degree, in Hebrew literature, from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He received a master’s in philosophy from Columbia in 1947 and a year later was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 1951, he received a doctorate in Hebrew literature from the seminary. From 1950 to 1954 he was a rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. He was named dean of students at the University of Judaism in 1956 and, in 1964, appointed president. Rabbi Lieber is survived by his wife of 63 years, the former Esther Kobre; two daughters, Deborah and Susan; two sons, Michael and Daniel; and 11 grandchildren. Though soft-spoken, Rabbi Lieber was not one to mince words. In 1997, a small group of Orthodox rabbis issued a statement declaring that the Reform and Conservative movements were “not Judaism,” and urged Jews not to attend synagogues affiliated with them. Rabbi Lieber called the statement “sheer chutzpah.”

Rabbis
Torah
Jews
Lieber David
Deaths (Obituaries)
Colleges and Universities


Oracle Buys Agile Software

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO, May 15 (AP) — The business software maker Oracle made yet another acquisition on Tuesday with a $495 million deal to buy Agile Software. After the deal, an all-cash purchase, closes in July, Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., will have spent more than $25 billion since 2004 snapping up smaller software makers in a challenge to SAP of Germany, the leading provider of business applications used to automate a wide range of administrative tasks. Agile, based in San Jose, Calif., specializes in software that helps companies manage crucial products. Although its target market is relatively small, Agile Software could help Oracle sell more software to hundreds of SAP customers, said Bruce Richardson, an analyst at AMR Research.

Oracle Corp
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures
Agile Software Corporation
SAP AG
Computer Software
Computers and the Internet
Stock Options and Purchase Plans
San Francisco (Calif)
Silicon Valley (Calif)


Philippines: Americans Are Found Dead

Abstract: The bodies of a married American couple were found in a well in the central Philippines in a case suspected to be linked to robbery, the police said Monday. The body of Kevin Fleischauer, 58, was retrieved Sunday and that of Lolly Mangilaya Fleischauer, 60, the next day in a well near their home in Murcia, a town in Negros Occidental Province, Senior Inspector Lawrence Gerald Bathan said. The police responded late Sunday to a report of a robbery in their home and found a group of church members already looking for the couple. The Fleischauers had not been seen for about two weeks, investigators said.

Philippines
Robbery
Murders and Homicides
Filipino American
Fatalities,casualties


Snowden Says He Reported N.S.A. Surveillance Concerns Before Leaks

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents revealing the agency’s surveillance operations, said he raised his concerns to more than 10 officials, “none of whom took any action to address them,” before he decided to give the documents to journalists. Mr. Snowden’s comments, in written answers to questions by members of the European Parliament that were released on Friday , amplified previous assertions that he initially tried to raise concerns internally about surveillance collection he believed went too far. An N.S.A. spokeswoman declined to comment, but the agency has previously said its internal investigation, including interviews with co-workers, found no evidence that he had brought concerns to the attention of anyone. But in his written testimony, Mr. Snowden insisted that he had, adding that his efforts had elicited two types of responses. Some people, he said, responded with “well-meaning but hushed warnings not to ‘rock the boat’ ” for fear of retaliation like being investigated by the F.B.I. as a suspected leaker. “Everyone in the intelligence community is aware of what happens to people who report concerns about unlawful but authorized operations,” he wrote. Other people, he said, told him to “let the issue be someone else’s problem.” “Even among the most senior individuals to whom I reported my concerns,” he continued, “no one at N.S.A. could ever recall an instance where an official complaint had resulted in an unlawful program being ended, but there was a unanimous desire to avoid being associated with such a complaint in any form.” The Justice Department has charged Mr. Snowden with violating the Espionage Act. He is living in asylum in Russia. Some of his critics, like the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, have suggested he may be working with the Russian intelligence service, without offering evidence. In his testimony, Mr. Snowden said he has “no relationship” with the governments of Russia or China, but he acknowledged that he was approached by Russian intelligence officers when he arrived in Moscow. He reiterated his previous claims that he took no documents with him to Russia after turning over archives to several journalists in Hong Kong. “I didn’t take any documents with me from Hong Kong, and while I’m sure they were disappointed, it doesn’t take long for an intelligence service to realize when they’re out of luck,” he said. “I would also add, for the record, that the United States government has repeatedly acknowledged that there is no evidence at all of any relationship between myself and the Russian intelligence service,” Mr. Snowden said. He said that he did not want to stay in Russia but that his efforts to obtain asylum in various countries in Europe had not succeeded, and he blamed diplomatic pressure from the United States. Mr. Snowden also took issue with the contention by some officials that whistle-blower laws would have protected him if he had gone through official channels. President Obama, for example, has pointed to an executive order he issued that extended protections against retaliation to employees of intelligence agencies, saying, “So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.” But Mr. Snowden noted that Mr. Obama’s directive covers only intelligence agency employees, not outside contractors, so “individuals like me were left with no proper channels.” On Monday, Mr. Snowden is scheduled to appear in a live video feed from Russia at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Tex., to discuss communications privacy issues.

Russia
Government Surveillance
US Military
Spying and Intelligence Agencies
NSA
Edward Snowden
US
Classified Information


It Was a Dark Afternoon for the Daydreaming Mets

Abstract: There was a man standing in shallow left field when a ball that had zipped down the third-base line toward the corner was retrieved and tossed back into the infield. This man was slim, and he was wearing a No. 7 jersey. That is the corporeal evidence that José Reyes was playing shortstop for the Mets against Pittsburgh during the second inning of their game Wednesday. It is harder to quantify where Reyes’s mind had drifted off to when he neglected to cover second base as part of the ensuing botched rundown, the nadir of the Mets’ embarrassing 13-1 loss at Shea Stadium. The Pirates went on to score two more runs in a seven-run inning, though it was all cosmetic. Others vying for the lowlight of the afternoon included Oliver Pérez, whose predictable unpredictability resulted in five walks and seven runs before he was yanked with two outs in the second inning; an inept offense that managed two hits — one fewer than the number of errors committed — and received a mock standing ovation after Ryan Church’s sixth-inning double ruined the shutout and drew the Mets to 12 runs behind; and a listless defense, as Luis Castillo, David Wright and Ángel Pagán mangled balls that led to nine unearned runs. All told, it was not quite the way the Mets had dreamed of ending their homestand, not with a series coming in Arizona against the Diamondbacks, baseball’s best team, and games against three pitchers — Micah Owings, Brandon Webb and Dan Haren — who are a combined 14-1. “I think when you have games like this, it’s very easy to say, ‘Hey, you’re going to have these games,’ ” Mets closer Billy Wagner said. “You will have these games when there’s not a lot of effort and a lot of desire. That’s when you worry. You definitely want to play a little better than we did. I know everybody’s out there doing what they can. As a pitching staff, we have to show up. We can’t go out and get beat, 13-1, by a Pittsburgh team.” The Mets enter May at 14-12 — “We’re very fortunate to be 14-12,” Wagner said — but satisfactory enough to place them in the thick of the division. The greater issue is their maddening inconsistency, their penchant for winning five in a row, then losing three. No one embodies that streakiness more than Reyes, who has his good days and his bad ones. His attitude and play improved a bit two weeks ago, when Reyes returned to his cheery self by resuming his choreographed dugout celebrations. But over the last eight games he is batting .152 and has committed three of his five errors. In all, Reyes is batting .250 with a .307 on-base percentage and 6 stolen bases. “I don’t like the way I’ve played defense so far,” Reyes said. “Five errors in one month — I don’t like that. I have to do better. That’s way too much. I know I can do better than that.” Manager Willie Randolph said he had not detected a pattern, adding that Reyes’s error total could be misleading because two came on bad hops. But the mental gaffe he made Wednesday, like one he committed last week in Chicago, is reminiscent of the second half of last season, when his head did not always seem to be in the game. “That’s something that you have to focus on yourself,” Randolph said. “If it becomes something that’s consistent, then you address it.” On this particular play, Ryan Doumit lashed a ball past Wright and into the left-field corner. With two men on base, Reyes ran into left field so he could retrieve a relay throw from the left fielder, Pagán, and then fire home. But the Pirates’ Freddy Sanchez stopped at third, so Pagán instead tried to throw out Doumit at second base. When he saw Doumit caught between first and second, Castillo, who took the throw from Pagán, ran him back toward first, throwing the ball to Carlos Delgado. Reyes did not rotate to second and was about 40 feet from the base when Doumit, seeing no one covering, bolted to the open base. Given an extra out, the Pirates added two runs on a single by Xavier Nady, pushing their lead to 7-0. From where he was standing, Reyes said it was too late to reach second in time for a play on Doumit. Sandy Alomar, the third-base coach, who works with the infielders, said Reyes should have been moving toward the open base, and that he was not closer because he was not expecting a rundown. But, Alomar added, “If the communication would have been there, he could have gotten back.” The Mets, if they are to increase their winning streaks and limit their losing ones, will look to Reyes, their leadoff hitter and primary source of energy, for inspiration. They need him to get on base more regularly, to steal more bases, to be, in short, the player he was at this point last season, when he and the team were playing much better. “I know I can do better than this — way better than this,” Reyes said. “I don’t feel like this was a good month for me. I know I can do better. Compared to last year at this time, this is nothing. I’ve done nothing so far.” INSIDE PITCH Brian Schneider, released from the hospital Wednesday after spending six days receiving treatment for a staph infection in his left thumb, said he was feeling better but that he did not know when he could resume playing. “It’s just whether I can take the pounding of catching,” Schneider said. The Mets, who will make a roster move with a catcher to activate Moises Alou, must decide whether to put Schneider on the disabled list or to demote Gustavo Molina. ... The start of Wednesday’s game was delayed by 40 minutes because a water main break on nearby 126th Street, caused by a worker at Citi Field, decreased water pressure to the upper levels of Shea.

Baseball
New York Mets
Pittsburgh Pirates
Reyes Jose


In Tehran, Shades of Tiananmen

Abstract: NEW YORK — It’s not a much noted anniversary, but it’s worth recording, especially in light of the recent events in Iran, that the arrest and humiliation of Xiao Bin took place 20 years and a couple of weeks ago. Xiao Bin was a 42-year-old unemployed factory worker who, the day after China’s violent crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, graphically described to ABC News how Chinese soldiers had shot unarmed protesters, putting an extra bullet in them after they were dead, he said. Mr. Xiao’s description, which was consistent with other eyewitness testimony, came at the wrong moment, just as China’s vast propaganda machinery was dropping the Tiananmen massacre down Orwell’s memory hole, blanketing the airwaves and the newspapers with the message that the crackdown, which resulted in the deaths of perhaps a thousand people, had never taken place. “Not a single student was killed,” an army commander said on Chinese television, contradicting Mr. Xiao’s testimony, reports from Beijing’s hospitals, and the bitter experience of parents whose children were dead. Mr. Xiao was arrested and forced to apologize for spreading “rumors” and sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp. The army commander’s statement quickly became the required belief of all of Chinese society. The Chinese have succeeded in the 20 years since in suppressing public comment about the massacre, so that young people growing up in China today are taught only the official version: that the only people who died on that day were the soldiers who bravely took back the streets from what were termed “hooligans” at the time. One senses that this success has probably not been lost on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranian security forces who have been using tear gas and truncheons to suppress the demonstrators in Tehran. It’s impossible to say, of course, how the Iranian case will unfold, and whether the public will come to accept the official version of the recent election, which is that it was won in a landslide by Mr. Ahmadinejad and that reports of voter fraud were themselves fraudulent. For that matter, it’s impossible to know whether he actually was preferred by 62 percent of Iranian voters. Even so, the Iranian handling of the election looks more and more like a repeat of the Chinese model — violent suppression followed by a concerted propaganda effort to shape the way recent events will be perceived. The foreign press has been expelled; efforts to control Internet communications continue, the mass demonstrations are being blamed on pernicious foreign and Zionist plots, and the deaths of protesters are being attributed not to the paramilitary Basijis or other security forces but, as Mr. Ahmadinejad himself put it, to unnamed “terrorists” and “vandals” — a bit like the “small number of hooligans” that, in China’s official view, were responsible for the violence at Tiananmen. Over the years scholars have written a great deal about the propaganda techniques invented in the early and mid-20th century by the totalitarian regimes of Germany and the Soviet Union — the Big Lie, unforgettably lampooned by Orwell in “1984,” being the most blatant among them. China used it, and still does. And so the question arises whether the Iranian government’s response to the mass post-election protests isn’t another example of a regime resorting to the same methods. Certainly there is plenty of evidence that it is. Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose past expressions of Holocaust denial certainly qualify as a big lie, last week called for an investigation into the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose last moments were viewed by millions around the world on YouTube. You think Neda was killed by the militia? Well, word has been put out in Tehran that actually a British journalist working for the BBC organized hooligans to murder her, presumably in order to frame the innocent Iranian security services. Years ago, the Polish-born philosopher Leszek Kolakowski explained the remarkable adherence of totalitarian dictators to the big lie, which Mr. Kolakowski distinguished from the ordinary political mendacity — an excellent recent example of which was the claim by Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina that he was enjoying a respite by hiking in the Appalachian Mountains when he was with his mistress in Argentina. The ordinary political lie, in Mr. Kolakowski’s view, didn’t seek to erase “the distinction between truth and falsity,” while the totalitarian big lie does. It defines truth as what the holders of power say it is, and, in this sense, as Mr. Kolakowski wrote in an 1983 article in Commentary Magazine, it is “the very core of a political system, the heart of a new civilization.” “By training people in this confusion,” Mr. Kolakowski wrote, “and by inoculating them to believe that nothing is true in itself” it will “produce a new ‘socialist man,’ devoid of will and of moral resistance.” That would seem to describe what was happening in China with the arrest of Xiao Bin in 1989. But does it describe what is taking place in Iran, which may be becoming a dictatorship but is decidedly not a totalitarian or a socialist state? “The Iranians are telling medium-sized lies,” Timothy Snyder, a professor of East European history at Yale said in a conversation this week. The main thrust of the Iranian propaganda is to blame external enemies for internal problems, a practice, Mr. Snyder said, that was first used on a grand scale in mid-19th-century Europe, well before the era of total thought control. Still, there seem to be more than faint echoes of the classic big lie in the case of Mr. Ahmadinejad and the actions of the security services. “One reason the lie has to be big,” Mr. Snyder said, “is that people will feel that if their leaders must have a lot of confidence to tell a lie that big, they are either crazy or they have a powerful security force behind them.” This doesn’t mean that the lies Iran’s leaders are telling are going to work. Indeed there are plenty of signs that they won’t. At the same time, events in Iran have proved that the leaders are eager to control information and they do have a powerful and ruthless security force behind them.

Iran
Xiao Bin
China
Propaganda
Elections
Tiananmen Square (Beijing)


Albertsons Plans to Raise Up to $1.9 Billion in I.P.O.

Abstract: Albertsons, one of the biggest supermarket chains in the United States, set the price range for its initial public offering on Friday, saying it plans to raise as much as $1.9 billion. The supermarket chain expects to sell 65.3 million shares in the offering, pricing its stock at $23 to $26 a share, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The company initially said it planned $1.84 billion in a filing last week. The offering, first announced in July , paves the way for Albertsons to exit years of ownership by a consortium led by the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management and came just months after its owners completed a deal to acquire rival Safeway. The company’s stock is expected to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ABS. Albertsons said that it intended to use the proceeds from the offering to repay debt. The company was founded by Joe Albertson in Boise, Idaho, in 1939 and sold itself in 2006 to a group that included Supervalu, CVS and a partnership made up of Cerberus and several real estate firms. The Cerberus group later bought several grocery store chains , including Albertsons, from Supervalu in 2013 for about $3 billion. Cerberus and a group of investors agreed to buy Safeway for more than $9 billion last year and completed the deal in January. In its most recent fiscal year, which included January to account for the Safeway acquisition, Albertsons reported $27.2 billion in sales and a $1.2 billion loss. By comparison, it reported $20 billion in sales and a $1.7 billion profit in 2013. The company operates more than 2,200 stores in 33 states under a variety of supermarket brand names, including Albertsons, Jewel-Osco, Safeway, Tom Thumb and Vons. It employs about 265,000 people. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Lazard are leading the offering.

Albertsons
Supermarkets
Cerberus Capital Management
Safeway
Idaho
SUPERVALU
IPO
Private equity
SEC


Cartoon of Obama Is Condemned as Anti-Semitic in Spain

Abstract: Jewish associations in Spain and the Israeli Embassy in Madrid condemned a cartoon used by a Spanish far-left political party to protest President Obama’s planned visit, saying on Friday that the cartoon was anti-Semitic. The cartoon shows Mr. Obama hugging a caricature of a Jewish man and slipping dollars into the man’s pocket, with explosions in the foreground. It was posted on Twitter by the United Left party along with a call for protesters to gather in front of the American Embassy in Madrid on Sunday. Mr. Obama was scheduled to arrive in Seville on Saturday night and spend Sunday sightseeing and visiting an American military base in southern Spain. He was scheduled to have lunch on Monday in Madrid with King Felipe VI and the leaders of Spain’s main political parties. But White House officials said Friday that because of the shooting deaths of five police officers in Dallas, the president would be skipping the visit to Seville. He will meet with the king and speak to the troops and then return to the United States. In a statement on Friday , the Israeli Embassy deplored the United Left cartoon. “Nothing can justify the usage of anti-Jewish caricatures, and silence shouldn’t be maintained in the face of this flagrant expression of anti-Semitism,” the embassy said. United Left said that the demonstration on Sunday was in protest of American and Israeli policies. The party said it opposed Mr. Obama’s visit because in its view his administration was promoting “neocolonialist international relations” based on war, destabilization and interference. Mr. Obama’s visit to Spain, his first as president, comes at a time of political limbo in the country after inconclusive national elections last month. The Popular Party, led by the acting prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, won the most seats in Parliament but not a majority on its own, and has been in protracted talks to try to assemble a workable governing coalition.

Cartoons
Spain
Barack Obama
Antisemitism


Germans Win and Americans Crash

Abstract: Maximilian Arndt drove to gold and Francesco Friedrich piloted his sled to silver on Saturday as Germany dominated a World Cup four-man bobsled race on one of its home tracks, in Winterberg. The American pilots Steven Holcomb and Cory Butner crashed, with Holcomb’s second-run topple probably costing him a medal. Arndt and his teammates Marko Huebenbecker, Alexander Rödiger and Martin Putze finished two runs in 1 minute 49.97 seconds. Friedrich and Jannie Baecker, Gregor Bermback and Thorsten Margis were timed in 1:50.14. BRITON WINS SKELETON RACE Britain’s Lizzie Yarnold outdueled Noelle Pikus-Pace of the United States in the second run to win a World Cup skeleton race in Winterberg, extending her lead in the series standings. Yarnold’s two-run time was 1:57.53. Pikus-Pace was 0.57 seconds back for silver, after being tied for the lead after one run. Sarah Reid of Canada was third, another 0.39 seconds back. FIRST VICTORY FOR SWISS Tim Hug of Switzerland took advantage of a weakened field in Chaykovskiy, Russia, to claim the first Nordic combined World Cup victory of his career. Hug was 10th after the ski jump portion on the normal hill but worked his way up the field in the 10-kilometer cross-country race to finish in 27:44.9. Björn Kircheisen of Austria was 5.7 seconds back in second place. Many top medal contenders for the Sochi Olympics skipped the meet. WIN AT HOME FOR RUSSIAN Irina Avvakumova of Russia ended Sara Takanashi’s unbeaten streak this season by earning her first women’s ski jump World Cup victory on home soil in Chaykovskiy. Avvakumova had jumps of 100 and 101.5 meters for a total of 249.2 points to beat Carina Vogt of Germany by 4.3 points. Takanashi, the 17-year-old defending overall champion from Japan, had won all four previous World Cup events this season but had to settle for third with 243.1 points. TOUR STOP CUT SHORT Anssi Koivuranta of Finland won the third stop of the Four Hills Tour in Innsbruck, Austria, after the final round was canceled because of strong winds. According to International Ski Federation rules, the first round counted as the final result. Koivuranta led the competition after the first round with a jump of 132.5 meters, ahead of Simon Ammann of Switzerland and Kamil Stoch of Poland. Thomas Diethart of Austria leads the Four Hills standings going into Monday’s final event in Bischofshofen, Austria. CELSKI LEADS AT SHORT TRIALS J. R. Celski dominated the 500 meters at the United States Olympic speedskating short trials in Kearns, Utah, clinching his second event for Sochi. Jessica Smith led all the way in winning the women’s sprint, ensuring that she would skate in at least two events in Sochi. Both will also skate in the 1,500 there. Eddy Alvarez, a former in-line skater from Miami, earned his first Olympic berth after finishing second to Celski in both 500 A finals. Emily Scott of Springfield, Mo., was third in the first women’s 500 A final and came back to finish second in the second final, ensuring her one of three available spots on the women’s team. NORWEGIAN SKIS TO WIN IN ITALY Petter Northug revved up his preparations for next month’s Sochi Olympics by winning the next-to-last stage of the Tour de Ski in Val di Fiemme, Italy, cutting into the overall lead of a fellow Norwegian, Martin Johnsrud Sundby. Northug clocked 24:45.6 over the 10-kilometer classical stage. Sundby crossed second, 9.7 seconds behind, and Chris Jespersen, another Norwegian, was third. The top American was Noah Hoffman, in 31st. VONN’S STATUS UNCLEAR Lindsey Vonn has not skied for two weeks and will “most likely” skip next weekend’s World Cup speed races in Austria, her head coach said, leaving her status for the Sochi Olympics up in the air. Vonn remains in the United States after aggravating her surgically repaired right knee at a downhill race in Val d’Isère, France, on Dec. 21. Alex Hoedlmoser, the United States Ski Team women’s head coach, said he would have no problem putting her on the Olympic team even if she had not competed for six weeks by the time of the Feb. 7 opening ceremony. “Well, it’s Lindsey Vonn,” he said. “She doesn’t have to prove anything to anybody. So if she’s ready to go, we’re going to bring her. And if she’s not, then not.” CANADIAN TOPS MOGULS FIELD Mikael Kingsbury, the world champion, won a World Cup moguls competition at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary, Alberta, and his Canadian teammate Justine Dufour-Lapointe topped the women’s field. Kingsbury finished with 86.5 points. The Olympic champion Alex Bilodeau of Canada was second at 84.76, and the American Patrick Deneen finished third at 78.16.

Nordic combined
Bobsleigh
World Cup Skiing


Egypt Extends Its Crackdown to Journalists

Abstract: CAIRO — The three men, wearing white prison scrubs in metal cages reserved for criminal suspects, listened to the list of explosive charges accusing them of aiding a plot to undermine Egypt’s national security. They had links to terrorists, the prosecutors contended, and before their court appearance on Thursday, the men were detained for weeks among prisoners whom the government considers its most dangerous opponents. The charges could bring up to 15 years in prison. But the three suspects are all seasoned journalists. Their crime was filing news reports for their employer, Al Jazeera English, before state security officers came to the hotel suite they used as a makeshift studio in December, ultimately rounding them up and throwing them in jail. The charges against the men, branded the “the Marriott cell” by government-friendly news outlets, are the most serious against journalists here in recent memory, rights groups say, part of a widening crackdown by Egypt’s military-backed government that has ensnared scores of reporters, as well as filmmakers, bloggers and academics. What began months ago with mass arrests and repression of the government’s opponents in the Muslim Brotherhood has steadily broadened into a campaign against perceived critics of all stripes. In all, thousands of people — mostly Islamists, but also some of the best-known activists from the uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak — have been put in jail, many of them still awaiting trial. At least 60 journalists have been detained since the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi last July, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists , with nine of them still in custody, including a Yemeni blogger arrested after interviewing attendees at a book fair. “This is a dangerous decision,” Peter Greste, one of the journalists from Al Jazeera English, wrote about his arrest in a letter from prison. “It validates an attack not just on me and my two colleagues, but on freedom of speech across Egypt.” Beyond Mr. Greste and his two colleagues from Al Jazeera English — Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Baher Mohamed — 17 other people are charged in the same case, including several students who appeared in court on Thursday as well. The allegations include possessing materials promoting a terrorist organization — presumably, the banned Brotherhood — and broadcasting images that the government says distorted Egypt’s image by suggesting that “the country is undergoing a civil war.” The trial reflects a particularly intense struggle between the Egyptian government and Qatar, which owns Al Jazeera. Egypt accuses Qatar of harboring Islamist leaders, including wanted men, and complains that the channel provides a platform for Egypt’s enemies. The network’s Arabic language news service, like the Qatari government, strongly supports the Brotherhood, the Islamist group that had become Egypt’s governing party until the military takeover last summer. Afterward, Egyptian officials shuttered the station’s news bureaus and detained reporters and staff members. One of its journalists, Abdullah Elshamy, has been imprisoned since August and is on a hunger strike. Journalists with the English-language service, which takes an independent editorial line, have continued to work in Egypt. When Mr. Fahmy joined the network just last September, he assured his family that the English channel was looked upon more favorably in Egypt. Mr. Fahmy, an Egyptian and Canadian citizen, has worked for the some of the world’s biggest news organizations, including CNN, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, and was an author of a book on the uprising in his Egyptian homeland. The job at Al Jazeera English made him a bureau chief for the first time, and provided a dose of stability as he was preparing to get married after years of bouncing around on assignments, often in war zones like Iraq and Libya. His co-defendant Mr. Mohamed comes from a family of Egyptian journalists and had worked as a freelance producer for Al Jazeera for about seven months, his brother Assem said. Mr. Greste, an Australian correspondent who had worked for the BBC and Reuters, did not even live in Egypt. He was based in Nairobi, Kenya, and had been filling in over the Christmas holiday in Cairo when security officers came for him and his colleagues. A video leaked to an Egyptian news channel after their arrest showed officers interrogating Mr. Fahmy and Mr. Greste, who both looked bewildered. Mr. Mohamed was arrested later that night. During the raid on his house, officers shot Gatsby, the family dog, his brother said. When pressed about their handling of the news media, some Egyptian officials said it was not so different from the Obama administration’s crackdown on leakers in national security cases. And in Al Jazeera English’s case, they have repeatedly emphasized that the men were working without press credentials in Egypt, a point their employer has conceded. “We were wrong,” said Heather Allan, the head of news gathering for the channel, who attended the trial on Thursday. But officials had also told her that the channel was not banned, she said. “We were not operating clandestinely,” she added. The official explanations shed little light on why a Dutch journalist who did not work for Al Jazeera was named as a suspect in the case, and forced to flee Egypt: Her crime, it appeared, was meeting with Mr. Fahmy. And the relatively simple matter of credentials did not seem to explain the treatment the Al Jazeera English journalists received after their arrests, which they detailed in harrowing letters and messages from prison. In the first weeks, Mr. Greste was treated the most kindly, allowed an exercise session after being “locked in my cell 24 hours a day for the past 10 days, allowed out only for visits to the prosecutor for questioning.” Around him, at Tora prison in Cairo, “authorities routinely violate legally enshrined prisoners’ rights, denying visits from lawyers, keeping cells locked 20 hours a day,” he wrote. “But even that is relatively benign compared to the conditions my colleagues are being held in.” Mr. Fahmy and Mr. Mohamed were sent to a wing known as Scorpion, where their neighbors were Islamist political detainees and hardened jihadists. In a message to his family, Mr. Fahmy described a cell “infested with insects, freezing cold, with access to little food and no sunlight at all.” Privileges — like a blanket — were granted and then snatched away. An arm broken before his arrest was left untreated and grew worse, he said. He and Mr. Mohamed relied on work to preserve their sanity, hosting evening discussions with other prisoners through the grates of their cells. They called it the “Scorpion Live Talk Show.” The three colleagues were eventually moved together to a less secure wing, and placed in the same cell, with improved conditions. In court on Thursday, they appeared buoyed by the attendance of more than two dozen diplomats and journalists. Mr. Fahmy translated the proceedings, which were in Arabic, for Mr. Greste, who was not provided with an interpreter. During breaks, the journalists shouted answers to questions from their colleagues in the gallery, struggling to put on a brave face. They spent 23 hours a day in their shared cell, they said, with no access to news or reading materials. Their next court date is set for early March. From the cage, they asked journalists to pass on greetings to absent relatives: to Mr. Greste’s parents, and Mr. Mohamed’s wife, who is pregnant and whom he begged to “take care.” Mr. Fahmy smiled and asked that word be sent to his fiancée, who was barred from the courtroom, to prepare for a “big wedding” when he got out.

Egypt
Cairo
Al Jazeera English
Qatar
News media,journalism
Arab Spring
Muslim Brotherhood Egypt
Freedom of the press


As Ebola Retreats, Obama Urges Vigilance and Preparation in West Africa

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Now that the Ebola crisis in West Africa finally appears to be petering out, President Obama on Wednesday called for renewed international efforts to rebuild the shattered health systems in Liberia , Guinea and Sierra Leone , to shore up the response to future pandemics in the region. Appearing at the White House alongside the presidents of the three countries, the hardest hit by the latest outbreak, Mr. Obama said the global response must continue, even as the number of new Ebola cases has dropped to zero in Liberia and about 30 in Guinea and Sierra Leone. “We have to be vigilant, and the international community has to remain fully engaged in a partnership with these three countries until there are no cases of Ebola,” Mr. Obama said. “Health systems also have to be rebuilt to meet daily needs — vaccines for measles, delivering babies safely, treating H.I.V./AIDS and malaria.” Mr. Obama made his remarks while flanked by Presidents Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone and Alpha Condé of Guinea, in a scene that was far different from the widespread panic seven months ago amid calls for the United States to close its borders to travelers from the affected countries. Anxieties have settled down since then. In Liberia, there have been no new Ebola cases since March 20; if that number remains at zero, the country will be declared Ebola-free at the beginning of next month. The United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response reported that as of April 10, there were 21 confirmed new cases in Guinea, compared with 52 the previous week, and nine new cases in Sierra Leone, which had 25 the week before. Since the outbreak began more than a year ago, there have been 26,611 confirmed, probable and suspected cases of Ebola, with 10,611 reported deaths, the agency said . Even though the threat of further infection has declined significantly, all three presidents and their entourages were issued temporary cellphones and thermometers upon arrival in the United States and, like all visitors from their countries, must take their temperatures daily while in the United States and report them to American authorities. Mr. Obama shook hands with all three presidents, aides said. About 3,000 American troops went to Liberia as part of the American effort to combat the disease, and about 100 remain. The United States military officially ended a mission to build treatment facilities in February, months earlier than expected. The race to get to zero cases is crucial, Obama administration officials said on Wednesday, because the porous borders between the three worst affected countries means that all three would remain at risk until the virus was gone from neighboring countries. A health official in Liberia said Wednesday that the authorities there were focused on providing care and help for survivors who need chronic care services for post-Ebola syndrome , which includes vision loss, joint pain and psychological trauma. The World Health Organization has been urging Ebola survivors to have protected sex, with condoms, until global health officials can figure out just how long the virus remains in semen, after a case in Liberia in which a man’s semen tested positive for the virus six months after he was considered free of Ebola. An Obama administration official said Wednesday that efforts were underway to revamp the struggling health systems in the three countries so that any future outbreaks would not spiral out of control. Even before Ebola, all three countries had struggled with a host of public health maladies common in the developing world, including malaria and measles. The challenge now, administration officials said, is to figure out how to retool the massive Ebola response infrastructure to adapt to other health concerns.

Ebola
Liberia
Guinea
Sierra Leone
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Ernest Bai Koroma
WHO
Barack Obama
Alpha Conde
International relations


Carmakers in Asia and Europe Also Look for Help

Abstract: PARIS — Even as the bailout package for Detroit’s automakers remains a question, automakers in Europe and Asia are lining up for handouts. “It’s a foregone conclusion that governments around the world are going to aid these companies,” Dennis DesRosiers, an independent auto analyst in Toronto, said. “It’s just a matter of working through the politics.” In the European Union , carmakers have sought 40 billion euros, or $52.5 billion, in support. While they may not get that much, governments are planning several initiatives. Much of that support, as elsewhere, is meant to accelerate the development of fuel-efficient vehicles. The European Investment Bank will provide the industry with 4 billion euros in low-interest loans in 2009 and 2010 as part of an initiative to develop cleaner cars. Along those same lines, the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, will spend 5 billion euros over two years. National governments, including France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Romania, plan to provide hundreds of millions more in research and development, tax breaks and loans. On Thursday, Sweden announced support valued at more than $3 billion for its auto sector. “We’re not talking about bailouts,” Sigrid de Vries, a spokeswoman in Brussels for the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, said of the proposed measures. “We’re talking about low-interest loans and measures to stimulate the market.” Ms. Vries noted that manufacturers were facing significant costs associated with meeting tougher regulations on air pollution, chemicals and safety at a time when the market is struggling. “All of those things add to the cost of a car,” she said, “and you can’t just pass along that cost to consumers at the present time.” The industry is indeed in dire shape. North American vehicle production fell by more than 34 percent in November from a year earlier, according to Ward’s Automotive Group, while new car registrations for October fell 14.5 percent in Europe from the month a year earlier, according to the European manufacturers’ group. Demand from Brazil, China, India and Russia — which many had expected would pick up the slack — is also fading. Brazil said on Thursday that it would cut car taxes to revive sales after Fenabrave, which represents the auto dealers, predicted registrations would fall 19 percent next year. Among major manufacturing nations, Japan’s output rose 4.2 percent year-to-year in September, the latest month for which data are available from the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association. But Toyota Motor and others have announced production cuts. Yukari Maruo, a spokeswoman in Tokyo for the Japanese association, said that so far the only measures under discussion by the government were tax breaks to encourage car purchases. Even the Chinese auto industry, facing flat or declining demand for the first time, is looking for help. Executives said last month that they were asking Beijing for government measures like lower taxes on new cars, lower fuel prices and increased grants for research into hybrid cars and other technologies. The government has since cut gasoline and diesel prices, and the state-owned Export-Import Bank of China agreed several days ago to lend more than $1 billion to Chery, a big Chinese automaker. The French appear to have the most fully formed plan. President Nicolas Sarkozy announced last week that consumers would receive a 1,000 euro incentive for replacing any vehicle more than 10 years old with a new car that meets tougher carbon dioxide emissions standards. Mr. Sarkozy’s plan also calls for 400 million euros of government support for research and development over four years, 300 million euros to establish a fund for restructuring the sector and a billion euros in refinancing for automotive loan companies. Daniel Schwarz, an auto analyst at Commerzbank in Frankfurt, said refinancing help could be crucial. Volkswagen applied this week to the German government for debt guarantees, and BMW has said it is considering doing so. The industry had for years been able to finance its operations with asset-backed securities, but that market has dried up. Daimler’s finance unit recently paid 9 percent on bonds to refinance its debt, well above the rate it had to pay before the financial crisis struck. “If this continues, finance and leasing costs will be much greater next year,” Mr. Schwarz said, “and this would have a significant negative effect on sales volumes.” The Canadian units of the American automakers could also be in line for a handout. The Canadian government agreed to provide help as soon as the United States does the same. But market stimulus plans have a fairly poor track record, Mr. Schwarz added. Measures like France’s incentive plan may not have much impact when potential buyers are worried about keeping their jobs. “Consumer confidence is collapsing,” Mr. Schwarz said, “and that’s more important in my view than the government aid to the industry.” Nonetheless, he said it was much more likely that the European governments would be repaid than the United States government would be, because the European automakers are in a lot better shape than their American counterparts. In the end, it may be up to the market to sort things out. In an interview published Monday in Automotive News Europe, Sergio Marchionne, Fiat’s chief executive, predicted that only six big players would be left when the smoke cleared from the current crisis. “In the next 24 months, as far as mass producers are concerned,” he told the newspaper, “we’re going to end up with one American house, one German, of size; one European-Japanese, probably with a significant extension in the U.S.; one in Japan; one in China; and one other potential European player.” “To have any chance of making money,” makers need sales volume of at least 5.5 million to 6 million cars a year, he said. “Fiat is not even halfway there.”

European Union
Automobiles
China
Japan
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
International Trade and World Market


Plan to Tax the Rich Could Aim Higher

Abstract: Bill de Blasio has made New York’s “Tale of Two Cities” a centerpiece of his Democratic campaign for mayor. “One New Yorker is rushing past an attended desk in the lobby of a majestic skyscraper,” Mr. de Blasio said in a speech at the New School earlier this year, while “a few miles away, a single mother is also rushing, holding her two young children by the hands as they hurry down the steps of the subway entrance.” But Mr. de Blasio’s point was only partly correct. Relatively few wealthy owners of ultraluxury apartments are rushing through their buildings’ lobbies, because they’re rarely, if ever, there. To address the inequities of the two cities, Mr. de Blasio has proposed raising taxes on the wealthy, whom he defines as those making more than $500,000, to pay for prekindergarten and after-school care. This may be a laudable goal, but people making $500,000 who are actually living and working in the city already pay high federal, state and local income taxes as well as property taxes. They’re not the ones buying apartments in places like One57, where two penthouses have sold for more than $90 million each. Places like One57, 15 Central Park West and Plaza Hotel are another New York entirely, one for the ultrawealthy with a primary residence elsewhere, for whom a $55 million condo is a pied-à-terre and just another place to park their wealth. Mr. de Blasio’s proposal would have little, if any, effect on them. They pay no city income tax and comparatively low property taxes even as the city’s services prop up the value of their trophy real estate. Tax law in New York City is determined by New York State, not the city, so the mayor has only the power of persuasion. But the mayor can be a strong advocate. A tacit goal of the Bloomberg administration seems to have been to woo the world’s superrich with generous tax treatment, in what seems to be a continuing global competition with London, Hong Kong and Singapore. That’s not all that surprising, considering that Mr. Bloomberg is a billionaire himself, with a primary residence in New York City, a $20 million apartment on London’s Cadogan Square and a getaway in Bermuda. Attracting the superrich may well bolster some tax revenue and confer benefits on the city and its more ordinary residents, but the question remains, can and should they be asked to pay more? “It certainly might be more palatable for a new mayor, subject to the approval of the Legislature, to inflict pain on those whose resident status is purely a fiction of the law, rather than on real residents, meaning those who are domiciled in New York and vote there as well,” said Robert Willens, the president of a tax and accounting service in New York City and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. “I can see this sort of a change as one that a new mayor would seriously consider.” Ultrawealthy nonresidents who own property in New York City certainly make a ripe target for potential revenue. People who spend fewer than half the year in New York City don’t pay any city income tax, even if they generate much of their fortune in the city. Many have elaborate systems for keeping track of their whereabouts. Since even one minute in a 24-hour period may count as a day for residency purposes, there’s often a frantic, Cinderella-like dash to cross the city line before midnight, although it’s black limousines ferrying the passengers rather than horse-drawn carriages. In one multiyear case, the hedge fund manager Julian Robertson avoided paying $26.7 million in New York City income tax after a judge ruled that he had proved he was outside the city for 183 days in 2000, the year challenged by the state’s division of finance. Mr. Robertson’s primary residence was in Locust Valley, on Long Island, but he owned an apartment on Central Park South, and his office was on Park Avenue. He also owned places in Australia, New Zealand and Sun Valley, Idaho, and he rented a place each summer in Southampton. Nonresidents who spend at least 183 days outside New York City and state — who live, for example, in Alpine, N.J., or Greenwich, Conn. — pay no New York City income tax. And foreign residents who spend at least 183 days outside the country, pay no United States income taxes. Nonresidents are an enormous potential source of tax revenue. According to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, in 2010, the most recent year available, there were 820,000 nonresident tax returns reporting $273 billion in income from all sources. Nonresidents appear to be disproportionately affluent. Their total income represents 33 percent of the total income of residents and nonresidents combined, but just 8.6 percent of the 9.5 million returns filed in those categories. (The state doesn’t break out nonresident filings by city or county.) Tax experts said there was nothing sacred about the half-year rule, and the state could impose a much more stringent test for nonresidents. A spokesman for the Department of Taxation and Finance said, “This has been in the statute for a very long time and aligns with the time frame used in many other states and by the I.R.S.” Before 1999, nonresidents who earned income in New York City did pay income tax on that income — the so-called commuter tax — but that requirement was repealed at the behest of suburban lawmakers. Image The One57 tower, another property that caters to the ultrawealthy who have a primary residence elsewhere. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times London, which seems to have experienced an even more dramatic Tale of Two Cities, earlier this year tightened its eligibility standards for nonresident status. Individuals may be subject to income tax there if they spend as few as 16 days, if they also have four “ties” to Britain, one of which is maintaining a residence there. Not only do wealthy nonresidents escape income tax liability in New York, but their property taxes are extremely low compared with the value of their real estate, and they end up paying a much lower rate than owners of much more modest homes, as The New York Times reported last year . That’s because ultraluxury buildings are assessed at ludicrously low percentages of their actual value under the arcane state laws that set real estate valuations for tax purposes. Apartments in 15 Central Park West, for example, are valued for tax purposes at an average of just $332 a square foot, even though actual sales there have averaged more than $7,000 a square foot. An apartment that sold for $88 million to a Russian billionaire (which amounted to nearly $11,000 a square foot) was valued at a mere $2.97 million for tax purposes. Property taxes were only $59,000 in 2012, thanks to the low valuation and a tax abatement. The same article revealed that an apartment at the Plaza Hotel that sold for $48 million last year was valued for tax purposes at $1.7 million, or 3.5 percent of its sale price. A condominium at 80 Columbus Circle that sold for $30.55 million last summer was valued at $2 million, or 6.5 percent. “You could structure the property tax to have a much more progressive rate,” said Daniel N. Shaviro, a professor of taxation at New York University School of Law. “Property tax rules would be a great way to get at the issue of the nonresident billionaire.” A spokesman for Mr. de Blasio said he hadn’t taken a position on tax policy toward nonresident property owners. A spokeswoman for the Republican candidate, Joseph Lhota, didn’t respond to requests for comment. But Mr. Lhota has called for tax cuts, and said at a recent debate, “If you’re in the middle class, hold onto your wallet, because no one has ever been able to just tax the rich.” Mr. de Blasio is far ahead in polls. The idea that nonresidents should pay little or no tax has long rested both on notions of fairness, since they’re not around much to use city services, and pragmatism, because of the fear that higher taxes will drive them away. Fred Feingold, a founder and tax expert at the New York law firm Feingold & Alpert, who successfully represented Mr. Robertson, said that higher property taxes on luxury residences might depress real estate values, discourage construction and have a ripple effect throughout the local economy. And “the so-called rich have the resources and means to go elsewhere and are more likely to do so if they thought the rules to be less than fair,” he said, adding that many of his wealthy clients are extremely tax-sensitive. But no one knows for sure how many billionaires would leave, especially if tax increases were relatively modest. “I’ve always been skeptical of the assertion that higher taxes might cause the victims of those levies to flee the locality in which the higher taxes are imposed,” Mr. Willens said. “I think there are many other factors of surpassing importance, which do not involve taxes, that go into the decision of where to live and, except at the margin, my experience as a tax practitioner tells me that the imposition of higher taxes would not cause a noticeable exodus of wealthy people from the city or from the state.” Professor Shaviro, of N.Y.U., agreed. “Look at how they’re bidding up real estate prices,” he said. “They’re obviously willing to pay a very high premium to live in New York City. That suggests that New York has some leeway to tax the very wealthy. If you could figure out exactly how much they’d be willing to pay without leaving, it could be an incredible bonanza for New York City. And if they’re willing to pay so much for those empty apartments, maybe they should also do something to help make everyone else better off.” Still, the logistics of any changes in tax policy are daunting. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has sounded cool to Mr. de Blasio’s proposal for higher taxes on wealthy residents of New York City. Mr. Feingold said he thought it was “a very long shot that there would be legislation enacted in the near term and signed into law.” Professor Shaviro said that “there’s not much any mayor can do” to make a fundamental difference in income inequality in the city. “New York City is a cork bobbing on the waves of the global economy,” he said. Even so, it might be worth trying. “If you’re lucky enough to be a destination city, you don’t want to blow it,” he said. “But why not try to use that to your advantage?”

Bill de Blasio
Income tax
Real Estate
HNWI,Wealth,Billionaires,1 Percent
NYC
Housing


The Steelers’ Defense Has Struggled This Season

Abstract: Forget that Pittsburgh Coach Mike Tomlin may have a fissure to fix in his locker room over the players’ confusion about the decision not to play quarterback Ben Roethlisberger against the Baltimore Ravens. The Steelers ’ more difficult job may be fixing their defense. The most shocking thing about the Steelers’ slump —three losses in a row, to put the defending champions on the brink of missing the playoffs — is that the defense has done the damage. It was especially glaring Sunday night when the defense wasted the backup quarterback Dennis Dixon’s out-of-nowhere effort and surrendered a fourth-quarter lead with a chance to steal an entirely unexpected victory without Roethlisberger. Of the Steelers’ five losses this season, four of them came after they held a lead in the fourth quarter. That simply does not happen in Pittsburgh, where Dick LeBeau has crafted a merciless defense that last season confounded Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco. So, what is the problem? Safety Troy Polamalu, who is so talented and instinctive that LeBeau once said he let him move around almost at will, is out with a bad knee . That surely has had an effect on a defense that last season was ranked first in total and pass defense. It is hard to imagine that the Steelers would have yielded four passes for 20 yards or more to Flacco or five passes for 20 yards or more to the Kansas City Chiefs last week if Polamalu was able to play. Would Derrick Mason have been open in the middle of the Steelers’ defense for a 17-yard catch on third-and-22? Would Ray Rice have created a carnival of missed tackles on his fourth-and-5, 44-yard catch-and-run? Probably not. But the former Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy, who played for the Steelers and is now an analyst on NBC’s “Football Night in America,” said that blaming Polamalu’s absence would be a crutch. “That’s overrated — we played a lot of games without Bob Sanders,” Dungy said of the Colts’ often-injured safety. A greater problem, Dungy said, is that the Steelers have had a bit of an identity crisis this season, eschewing their traditional mentality of using the run to set up the pass for a pass-heavy attack. “We’re going to be 500 yards of offense,” Dungy said, describing the Steelers’ thinking. That approach has set up the defense for trouble. With a lead, the offense has struggled to run and eat up the clock as it tries to give the defense rest and limit how long it has to hold off the opposing offense. Against Kansas City, the Steelers attempted 42 passes and ran 31 times . Against Cincinnati, they passed 40 times and ran just 18 times . In their last victory, against Denver, the Steelers were perfectly balanced, with 29 passes and 29 rushes . Not surprisingly, with Roethlisberger out, the offense relied more on the run, with 38 rushes and 26 throws . “They’re just going through a slump,” Dungy said. “We went through that in our Super Bowl year. You’re not going to play perfect every week, but your hope is you’re playing your best in December. They’re playing all these games in prime time; they’re a red-letter game for everybody. They’re on the road, a night game, the schedule is a little off. Kansas City was waiting for them all year. It’s a combination of scheduling and other teams being ready for them.” The schedule may start to help the Steelers next week: victories will assuage the players’ frustration, as expressed by Hines Ward on NBC, at not having Roethlisberger against the Ravens. The division title is probably out of reach, but with games against Oakland, Cleveland, Green Bay, Baltimore and Miami, the Steelers can reasonably expect to win four of them, including against Baltimore at home, assuming Roethlisberger returns. Last year Tomlin quoted Robert Frost as his team went to the Super Bowl, talking about their miles to go before they rested. On Sunday night, Tomlin, the William & Mary graduate, took a darker turn, reaching for Dylan Thomas’s meditation on death , vowing that the Steelers would not go gently. The light is apparently not dying on this season quite yet. “Don’t talk to me about moral victories and things of that nature,” Tomlin said. “We didn’t get the job done. Everybody that’s around us has the same problems that we have. I just acknowledge that we’re going to be in attack mode.” Hochuli in Spotlight, Again Whoops, he did it again. Ed Hochuli, the high-profile official who made headlines last year with his blown call of a Jay Cutler fumble , made a nearly costly error Sunday night. As the clock wound down in the final minute of regulation in the Steelers-Ravens game, the Ravens were driving when Joe Flacco was sacked and fumbled at Pittsburgh’s 42. The ball was recovered by Baltimore at the Steelers’ 37. The Ravens’ field-goal team then raced onto the field and attempted a 56-yard field goal. Good thing for Hochuli that Billy Cundiff missed because on Monday morning the N.F.L. released a statement acknowledging that the ball should have been spotted at the 42, adding 5 yards to the kick. The rule book describes the rules pertaining to a fumble by either team after the two-minute warning. Item (c) states that “if the recovery or catch is by a teammate of the player who fumbled, the ball is dead, and the spot of the next snap is the spot of the fumble, or the spot of the recovery if the spot of the recovery is behind the spot of the fumble.” New Life for the Titans It is safe to assume Matt Leinart hopes he never sees Vince Young again. Young finished the Tennessee Titans’ 99-yard drive to win the game over Arizona with a fourth-down touchdown pass (the Titans’ third fourth-down conversion of the drive) as time expired — winning the way almost nobody thought he could, with his arm. Young’s presence has spawned a more balanced offense because Coach Jeff Fisher does not want to rely on Young’s arm. Running back Chris Johnson has had six games this season of at least 125 yards rushing, putting him in the company of Eric Dickerson and Earl Campbell. He is on a pace for a 2,000-yard season. And if the Titans beat the Colts on Sunday, they will be back to .500 with wild-card hopes again. Falcons Playing Survivor Remember when it seemed that Michael Vick’s return to Atlanta on Sunday would be one of the major story lines of the season? Vick has been virtually invisible with the Eagles, completing three passes for 6 yards and rushing 15 times for 65 yards. With Atlanta’s season hanging by a thread, Matt Ryan dealing with turf toe and Michael Turner having aggravated his high ankle sprain, this game will be much more about the Falcons’ survival than Vick’s. Favre M.V.P. Talk Heats Up Another preseason prognostication gone awry: Brett Favre’s arm will fall off. Still waiting? Favre is playing better than he did in his 20s. He has thrown 24 touchdown passes (three Sunday against the feeble Chicago Bears) versus only three interceptions (none on Sunday). That’s an 8-to-1 touchdown-to-interception ratio, the second best in N.F.L. history through 11 games behind Tom Brady, whose ratio was 9.7 to 1 (39 touchdowns, 4 interceptions) in 2007. Favre’s previous best ratio was 3 to 1 (39 touchdowns to 13 interceptions) in 1996, 13 years ago, when he was 27. If he keeps up the pace, he will have the best ratio in N.F.L. history for a quarterback with at least 20 touchdown passes. Only six quarterbacks have ever had a ratio above 4.0 — Brady is tops at 6.25 in 2007. His off-season dithering was irritating, but Favre may be the league’s most valuable player. Peterson’s Fumbles Paging Tiki Barber; Adrian Peterson needs your advice. Peterson may be the best running back in football, but he had two more fumbles Sunday. That made it 15 in the last two seasons, the most by an N.F.L. running back in that time. Barber, a former Giant, lost six fumbles in 2002 and in 2003 until Coach Tom Coughlin taught him to carry the ball vertically instead of horizontally. Peterson’s issue seems more rudimentary: his viselike handshake is legendary, so his grip is not the problem. But he often holds the ball in his right arm, leaving it exposed when he runs to the left side of the field, where both of his fumbles occurred Sunday. Kubiak Needs a Turnaround Welcome to the hot seat, Gary Kubiak. Squandering a 17-0 lead in the second quarter to lose to the Colts again is no way to assure the Houston Texans’ owner, Robert McNair, that progress is being made toward the team’s first playoff berth. McNair was bemoaning his team’s inconsistency in October. With Kubiak in his fourth season and the Texans still having trouble closing out games even against an injury-ravaged Colts defense, they need only look in their division to the Titans, who are now tied with the Texans at 5-6, for the N.F.L.’s latest example of a fast turnaround. After this season McNair may want to start one of his own.

Football
Pittsburgh Steelers
National Football League


U.S. Routed in Under-20 World Cup

Abstract: Spain showed why it is favored to win the Under-20 World Cup, beating the United States, 4-1, in Istanbul on Friday behind two goals each from the star strikers Jese and Gerard Deulofeu. The Americans’ lone goal came from Luis Gil just outside the penalty area in the 77th minute.


Nova Makes Solid Return in Loss, Leaving Yanks With Tough Decision

Abstract: The bewildering twists and turns of Ivan Nova’s season have taken him from the major league rotation to the minors to the bullpen and, finally, to a spot start on Old-Timers’ Day. Sunday had begun as a celebration of past stars and memorable names, but for Nova, starting against the Tampa Bay Rays was an audition of sorts. Nova, who has been inconsistent this season, is seemingly pitching for his job nearly every time he takes the mound. On Sunday morning, Nova arrived in the Yankees’ clubhouse and shook hands with several teammates he had not seen in almost a month because he had just returned from Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Nova would be making a quick return there unless he could do something Sunday to convince Yankees Manager Joe Girardi that he merited another chance. Even then, it might not be enough. The only reason Nova, who began the day with a 5.16 earned run average and had not started a game since April, was recalled was that the Yankees were forced to play a doubleheader Wednesday against the Los Angeles Dodgers after Tuesday’s game was rained out. Image The Yankees' Ivan Nova had his longest outing of the season (six and two-thirds innings) and a season-high seven strikeouts on Sunday. Credit Barton Silverman/The New York Times Nova’s first inning was reminiscent of most of his outings this season. Matt Joyce led off with a single. He was sacrificed to second base by Desmond Jennings and scored on Ben Zobrist’s single. Nova then walked Evan Longoria. Nova appeared to be on the brink of another implosion. But in an instant, Nova, with some deft glove work, managed to save his outing and perhaps his season, despite the Yankees’ eventual 3-1 loss . The Rays had runners on first and second, one out and one run already in during that opening inning, when James Loney hit a line drive up the middle. But Nova snagged the ball and threw to second base to begin an inning-ending double play. From that moment, Nova became a different pitcher. He commanded his fastball, walked only two more batters and was quick and efficient. “I was pleased with what I saw,” Girardi said. Girardi said the Yankees had not made a decision about where Nova would pitch next. But that decision must come soon. Image James Loney had a two-run single in the seventh inning among his three hits. Credit Barton Silverman/The New York Times “You saw the way he pitched,” Girardi said. “He made it real hard.” It was not until the seventh inning that Nova lost his command again. With two outs and the score tied, 1-1, he hit Jennings and Zobrist and was removed from the game. Reliever Boone Logan gave up a bases-loaded single to Loney for the deciding runs. But in the big picture, what Nova accomplished Sunday was immense. He had his longest outing of the season (six and two-thirds innings) and a season-high seven strikeouts. He was a vastly different pitcher from the one who was sent down to Scranton last month. “It wasn’t easy to go back to AAA, but I also know that I wasn’t pitching that good,” Nova said. “You don’t want to get sent down, but once in a while, it helps in order to get back to where I need to be.” Where this leaves Nova in the Yankees’ plans is unclear. With a scheduled day off Monday, the Yankees will not have a need for Nova to start again this week. The Yankees are also eagerly awaiting the arrival of starter Michael Pineda (shoulder surgery), who is continuing his rehabilitation assignment in the minor leagues. Pineda, who gave up two runs in four innings for Class A Tampa on Thursday, must come off the disabled list in early July after his 30-day assignment ends. The Yankees can option Pineda to Scranton, which would create more competition for Nova. Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium 9 Photos View Slide Show › Image Barton Silverman/The New York Times Another possibility is that Nova could start in place of the slumping Phil Hughes, who has a 5.40 E.R.A. in his last four starts. Hughes’s next start was moved to Thursday, and Girardi did not discount that Hughes was also pitching for his job. “This is a game where you have to prove yourself over and over,” Girardi said. Nova certainly complicated — in a positive way — the Yankees’ plans. “I opened my own eyes,” Nova said when asked if he thought he had impressed the Yankees. “That got me a little bit more confidence in myself. This is a decision they’ll make, and I have no control over it.” Perhaps Nova could have been saved from a loss if not for the anemic Yankees offense. The Yankees managed only a run in the first against Tampa Bay starter Chris Archer. They had only three extra-base hits, two by the rookie Zoilo Almonte, who is hitting .583 (7 of 12) with two doubles, a home run and four runs batted in since making his major league debut Wednesday. Nova desperately wants to remain with the Yankees, even if it means continuing in a relief role. But Girardi said that Nova would not go back to the bullpen. Nova will stay in the rotation or return to the minors. “You don’t want to be there, man,” Nova said of the minors. “You see old teammates who you played with in the minors, and you’re happy to see them, but you don’t want to be there.”

Ivan Nova
Tampa Bay Rays
Yankees
Baseball


U.S. Wins World Junior Hockey Title

Abstract: UFA, Russia (AP) — The United States won the world junior hockey championship on Saturday after Rocco Grimaldi scored twice and Vincent Trocheck added an empty-net goal for a 3-1 victory over Sweden in the final. Filip Sandberg put Sweden, the defending champion, ahead on a power play early in the second period, but Grimaldi scored twice in a three-minute span to swing the game in favor of the United States. Grimaldi, a freshman forward for the University of North Dakota team, was chosen by the Florida Panthers in the second round of the 2011 N.H.L. draft. He powered from behind the net to score his first goal, then redirected Jacob Trouba’s slap shot from the blue line midway through the second period. Sweden pulled its goalie for an extra player with 1 minute 42 seconds left but failed to capitalize. Instead, Trocheck scored for the United States with 16.7 seconds left. John Gibson, an Anaheim Ducks draft pick who plays for Kitchener of the Ontario Hockey League, made 26 saves and was named the most valuable player of the tournament. Niklas Lundstrom had 31 saves for Sweden. It was the third title for the United States, which also won in 2004 and 2010. In the bronze medal match, Valeri Nichushkin scored in overtime to give Russia a 6-5 victory over Canada.


In Fiesta Bowl, Boise State Holds Off Arizona

Abstract: Jay Ajayi ran for 134 yards and three touchdowns, and No. 21 Boise State made a late defensive stand to hold off No. 12 Arizona, 38-30, in the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Ariz. N.C.A.A. Fan Map: How the Country Roots for College Football We’ve published maps showing where fan support for one team begins and another ends for baseball and basketball. Now we’re pleased to offer another one: the United States according to college football fans. Boise State (12-2) raced to a 21-0 lead in the first 10 minutes. The Wildcats marched down the field in the game’s closing seconds, but Kamalei Correa sacked Anu Solomon at the 10 on the final play. Grant Hedrick threw for 309 yards and a touchdown, helping the Broncos cap their first season under Coach Bryan Harsin with their third Fiesta Bowl victory. The Wildcats (10-4) had trouble finishing drives, settling for three field goals after driving deep into Boise State’s end. Solomon threw for 335 yards and a touchdown but had two interceptions that led to touchdowns for Boise State.

Fiesta Bowl
College football
Boise State University
University of Arizona