Brewers’ Braun Embraces the Team and the Town

Abstract: MILWAUKEE — The savior of the Milwaukee Brewers was born in California in 1983, the first of 28 consecutive years in which the franchise has not won a playoff series. He grew up playing shortstop, following players like Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, whom he met on a recruiting trip to the University of Miami, where he enrolled and starred for three seasons. He is Ryan Braun, and when the Brewers chose him with the fifth pick in the 2005 draft , he knew almost nothing about them. To Braun, the Brewers meant Robin Yount and Paul Molitor, the Hall of Famers who led the team to its only pennant. What else was there to know? “Most of the fans, until this team started doing well, still kind of thought that was the Brewers, you know what I mean?” said Craig Counsell, a 40-year-old infielder who attended every game of the 1982 World Series , tagging along with his father, who worked for the team. “Yount, Molitor, Jim Gantner — those were the Brewers. Other guys were playing here, in a sense, but nobody was going to remember that.” The Brewers had a losing record in each of the 12 seasons before they drafted Braun, who now plays left field. But already, there were hopeful signs. They had drafted impact players like Prince Fielder, Rickie Weeks and Yovani Gallardo. They had built a stadium with a retractable roof. Braun was the National League’s rookie of the year in 2007, and the next year, Milwaukee captured the wild card. The Brewers, who hold a three-game lead in the N.L. Central, will play in the Bronx on Tuesday for the first time since 1997, their last season in the American League. They arrive with a strong sense of urgency. Fielder will be a free agent after the season, and the Brewers have been unable to reach an agreement with his agent, Scott Boras. “This is definitely the best team we’ve had so far,” Fielder said. “I’m hoping for a return, but it is a business and you never know.” Fielder’s departure would break up a devastating tandem with Braun, who in April became the second player in the majors — after Colorado’s Troy Tulowitzki — to sign a contract through 2020. The Brewers added five years and $105 million to Braun’s existing eight-year, $45 million deal. The day Braun signed, fans at Miller Park gave him a standing ovation each time he came to the plate. “I didn’t know how to respond,” Braun said. “I didn’t want to disrespect the other team or take away from the fact that I was competing, but I wanted to tell the fans how much I appreciated that gesture. I stepped out and tipped my hat, just kind of said thank you. But it was amazing, man. It’s stuff like that that makes me want to be here. They’ve just been incredibly supportive, not only of me but of our entire team.” The Brewers never averaged 25,000 fans a game in their final 17 seasons at County Stadium, where they played until 2001. Now they average more than 34,000 a game, ranking sixth of 16 N.L. teams, even though the Milwaukee market, with a population of just over 1.5 million, is the smallest in the majors. “They just have an insane, insane passion for their teams here,” Brewers closer John Axford said. “It’s a smaller city, people recognize you, and they’re in love with it. It’s fantastic.” The Brewers have kept the heart of the team together. They have secured Gallardo and Weeks through 2015, outfielder Corey Hart and starter Randy Wolf through 2013 and starters Zack Greinke and Shaun Marcum, both acquired in off-season trades, through next season. The franchise has been building to this, with high draft picks in the last decade and trades to supplement the core. But those deals have thinned the farm system, and with minimal television rights, the Brewers have little room to add. “In markets like ours, you only have short windows,” General Manager Doug Melvin said, adding later, “We’re starting to max out with our payroll because we have star players.” Because of that reality, perhaps, the specter of Fielder’s departure does not seem to weigh on Brewers fans. They know Braun and others will be here for a while, even if Fielder leaves, as C. C. Sabathia did after the 2008 playoffs. “Fans are more educated now,” Counsell said. “They’re pretty well aware of the situation Prince is in, and they’re pretty well aware that the team made a huge commitment to Ryan. I think fans know the deal, and that’s why it hasn’t been that big a deal for anybody.” Braun’s new contract brings his average annual salary to more than $15 million. But Melvin said Braun had never complained about his previous deal, which was viewed as team-friendly. After Braun and his agent suggested an extension, Melvin advised the owner, Mark Attanasio, that players like Braun rarely come along more than once a decade. Ron Roenicke, the new manager, said Braun stood out immediately at spring training this year. In all the subtle phases of the game — pitch recognition, bat speed, even self-confidence — Braun was just better than the rest. “I was watching his batting practice, going, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” Roenicke said. “It was way different, and it was obvious. He was hitting balls opposite way and they were going out by about 50 feet. You don’t do that. And then the first game, I watched him run, and I had no idea this guy was that fast. He’s not just fast, he can fly.” Braun has 17 stolen bases this season, three shy of his career high, with 16 home runs, 59 runs batted in and a .308 average. He extended a hitting streak to 17 games Sunday. He worked out last winter with Gabe Kapler, a well-built former outfielder, and said he felt more athletic and explosive. Braun is listed at 6 feet 1 inches and 210 pounds, but he seems smaller, especially compared with the hulking Fielder and other power hitters. “I’ve never been a big guy,” he said. “I probably weigh 20 or 30 pounds less than anybody else that hits home runs, so for me to be able to consistently drive the ball, I need to get as much as possible out of the little size I do have.” Voters for the All-Star Game have noticed. Braun led all N.L. players in the latest balloting update, and he seems certain to start for the fourth summer in a row. If he holds his lead in votes, Braun will become the first Brewer to lead his league. Braun said he was grateful, humbled and surprised, but he has been steadily building his brand , at least locally. He has lent his name to two restaurants, has his own line of designer T-shirts and endorses an energy drink . “There’s really a lot of dimensions to him,” said Trevor Hoffman, a former Brewers reliever. “For all his accolades on the field, which he deserves as a great player, he’s a much more rounded individual.” Because Braun’s grades were so high at Granada Hills High School in California, he attended Miami on an academic scholarship, even though he was a top prospect. He had to maintain a B average, which must have been fairly easy; in high school, Braun said, he got only one B, in advanced-placement chemistry. Braun said the business ventures allowed him to leverage his name and reputation without investing his money. They also satisfy his intellectual curiosity. “I would feel like I’d wasted my time having always focused so much on my academics if I wasn’t able to apply it to anything,” he said. “But at the same time, I realize all these things are a result of me having success on the baseball field, carrying myself the right way and staying out of trouble off the field.” Braun lives in California in the winter, but nobody seems to blame him; even Yount escaped to Arizona after the baseball season. Braun is as local as a superstar gets, eager to update the reputation of an organization desperate to win. “He knows what he wants to do with his life — I think that’s the bottom line,” said Bob Uecker, the longtime Brewers broadcaster. “He wants to be here.”


Citing Weather Forecast, U.S. Postpones Transfer of Authority for Anbar Security to Iraqis

Abstract: BAGHDAD — As funerals were held on Friday near the site of a suicide bombing in Anbar Province the day before, the American military delayed plans to transfer authority over security in the province to Iraqi forces. The final death toll in the suicide bombing was placed at 20. American officials said forecasts of dusty weather compelled them to delay the ceremonial handing over of power. Helicopters cannot fly during dust storms because of limited visibility, and many of the dignitaries planning to attend were to arrive by helicopter. The suicide bomber struck during a meeting of the leading sheiks of the Awakening movement near the city of Garma, decimating the movement’s ranks there. Garma was one of the last towns in Anbar to escape the grip of Sunni extremists. “This is considered a major boost for the insurgency,” said Abu Ahmed, a leader from Garma. “If Al Qaeda tried to assassinate all those who were killed, it would need months to do so. But they did it with one operation. They achieved what they were dreaming of.” The police and witnesses said the man who detonated the bomb was wearing a military-style uniform, although there were some disagreements about whether he was dressed as a police officer or a member of the Iraqi Army. Many of the bodyguards of the sheiks in attendance wore military uniforms. Rather than being searched, people attending the meeting were required to leave their guns at the door, said Faruq Taleb, who lost two uncles in the blast. “The searching of the people was not a priority,” Mr. Taleb said. “The American forces who attended the meeting depended on the Iraqis to search the attendees.” Three marines died in the explosion. In Baghdad, an appeals court judge was assassinated Thursday evening, a court spokesman said. The judge, Kamel al-Shuwayli, 55, was shot as he returned to his home in Sadr City from work. A 20-year veteran of the court system, Judge Shuwayli was the 40th judge to be assassinated since the American invasion in 2003.

Weather
Anbar Province (Iraq)
Bombs and Explosives
United States Armament and Defense
Iraq


Facing Congress, Clinton Defends Her Actions Before and After Libya Attack

Abstract: WASHINGTON — In one of her final appearances as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday vigorously defended her handling of last September’s attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans and prompted a scathing review of State Department procedures. “As I have said many times, I take responsibility, and nobody is more committed to getting this right,” she said, reading a statement during a day of testimony before Senate and House committees. “I am determined to leave the State Department and our country safer, stronger and more secure.” But Mrs. Clinton, whose appearance before Congress had been postponed since December because of illness, quickly departed from the script. She jousted with Republican lawmakers over who deserved blame for the security problems at the compound, and choked up as she described being at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington when the bodies of the Americans killed in the assault arrived from Libya. “I stood next to President Obama as the Marines carried those flag-draped caskets off the plane at Andrews,” she said. “I put my arms around the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters.” The continuing controversy over the attack, which resulted in the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, has cast a cloud over Mrs. Clinton’s final months at the State Department. It also has enormous political implications for Mrs. Clinton, the former New York senator who is already regarded as the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination if she chooses to run. It was the first time she had faced extensive questioning about her role in the episode. In essence, Mrs. Clinton’s approach was to accept the responsibility for security lapses in Benghazi but not the blame. “I feel responsible for the nearly 70,000 people who work for the State Department,” Mrs. Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the morning. “But the specific security requests pertaining to Benghazi, you know, were handled by the security professionals in the department. I didn’t see those requests. They didn’t come to me. I didn’t approve them. I didn’t deny them.” Image Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arriving for a House committee hearing on Wednesday after testifying in the Senate. Credit Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency When the question of her role was taken up again in the afternoon hearing by Representative Ed Royce, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that she had been briefed on a series of events that indicated that security in Benghazi was deteriorating in the months before the attack. They included the placement of a bomb at the outer wall of the compound in June and an ambush that month on the British ambassador. But she said she had gone along with a recommendation from subordinates that the Benghazi post be kept open and assumed that they would take the necessary steps to protect it. Mrs. Clinton first publicly took responsibility for the Sept. 11 attack in an Oct. 15 interview with television reporters. Since then, she has committed herself to putting in place all of the recommendations of an independent review that was led by Thomas R. Pickering, a former American ambassador, and Mike Mullen, the retired admiral who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For all of the hours of testimony, the hearings did little to clarify the role of the White House in overseeing the American presence in Libya before the attack or explain why the Pentagon had few forces available on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to respond quickly to any assault on diplomatic outposts in the region. One of the sharpest exchanges of the day came when Mrs. Clinton responded to questions from Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, by saying there was too much focus on how the Benghazi attack had been characterized in its early hours and not enough on how to prevent a recurrence. Republicans have repeatedly charged that Obama administration officials deliberately played down the attack, focusing much of their criticism on Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations and once Mr. Obama’s choice to succeed Mrs. Clinton. “Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?” Mrs. Clinton said, her voice rising. “It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, began his questions by saying, “It’s wonderful to see you in good health and as combative as ever,” and then proceeded to complain that she had failed to answer lingering questions. Mr. McCain asserted that the Obama administration’s aversion to nation-building had precluded it from providing the kind of training and assistance that would have helped the fledgling Libyan government in Tripoli confront growing security threats from militants. “We did not give them the kind of assistance that would have been necessary to help dismantle these militias that still, to this day, remain a challenge to democracy in Libya,” he said. Video Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she moved quickly to improve the security of American diplomats after last year’s deadly attack in Benghazi. Mrs. Clinton responded that Congress had delayed aid to Libya and said she would provide a list of steps that had been taken to train and equip Libyan forces. A persistent line of questioning by Republican lawmakers concerned the initial comments from Ms. Rice that the attack might have resulted from a protest, over an anti-Islamic video, that spun out of control. Mrs. Clinton defended Ms. Rice even as she appeared to distance herself from Ms. Rice’s comments. “I told the American people that heavily armed militants assaulted our compound, and I vowed to bring them to justice,” Mrs. Clinton said. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s chairman, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, has been nominated to succeed Mrs. Clinton and is scheduled to appear before his committee on Thursday for a confirmation hearing. To avoid the perception of a conflict of interest, the hearing on Wednesday was led by Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, the incoming chairman, and Mr. Kerry did not attend. In a rare criticism of the committee by one of its members, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the ranking Republican, complained that the panel Mr. Kerry led had failed to conduct proper oversight of security and other State Department issues. “This is an opportunity for this committee to finally do the work that it should have been doing for years,” Mr. Corker said. Mrs. Clinton sought to put the events in Benghazi in a regional context, noting the presence of a group in northern Mali affiliated with Al Qaeda. “Benghazi didn’t happen in a vacuum,” she said. “The Arab revolutions have scrambled power dynamics and shattered security forces across the region. And instability in Mali has created an expanding safe haven for terrorists who look to extend their influence and plot further attacks of the kind we saw just last week in Algeria.” “We are in for a struggle, but it is a necessary struggle,” she said. “We cannot permit northern Mali to become a safe haven.”

Libya
Benghazi
State Department
Hillary Clinton
Diplomats Embassies and Consulates
Benghazi Attack 2012


Fitbit Shares Surge 48 Percent in Market Debut

Abstract: Shares of Fitbit soared in their trading debut on Thursday, even after the company priced its initial public offering above an already heightened range. The shares opened at $30.40 on Thursday morning, up 52 percent from the I.P.O. price of $20. They closed up 48.4 percent, or $9.68, at $29.68. The company, which sells popular wearable fitness-tracking devices like the Fitbit Surge bracelet, raised the price above its previous range of $17 to $19 a share and increased the size of the deal to 36.6 million shares from 34.5 million. The company raised $732 million for itself and its selling stockholders. The I.P.O. price valued Fitbit at $4.1 billion. The shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FIT. The strong market debut reinforces the company’s bet that consumers will continue to buy fitness bands even as other, more complex smartwatches like the Apple Watch and various Android competitors hit stores. In addition to tracking users’ heart rates and steps, the newer devices offer access to email, text messages and other applications. James Park, Fitbit’s chief executive, is confident that the company can maintain its leadership role in the industry. “We are the clear market leader with 85 percent market share,” Mr. Park said in a interview. “Fitbit is synonymous with health and fitness tracking, and that gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace.” He also pointed to what he called the company’s powerful user base and its value as a social network. Mr. Park said the cash from the I.P.O. would help the company continue to expand. “It gives us a lot of capital to grow the business,” Mr. Park said, adding that it would allow for investments in software, hardware and perhaps even acquisitions, like its purchase earlier this year of FitStar, the developer of fitness apps. Fitbit’s sales more than tripled last year, to $745.4 million. The company earned $131.8 million, reversing a nearly $52 million loss in the previous year. Growth in the sector appears to show few signs of slowing in the near term. The number of wearable fitness devices used by customers is expected to triple by 2018, to more than 70 million, according to a report by Juniper Research in November. The stock market has generally been receptive to popular consumer electronics companies. Among the strongest debuts last year was that of GoPro, the maker of action video cameras, which as of Thursday was trading at more than double its initial public offering price. Fitbit’s stock sale was run by Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.


General Electric’s Days as Wall Street’s Golden Goose May Be Numbered

Abstract: Wall Street will probably have to bid farewell to its fee darling, General Electric. The conglomerate has been the best corporate client for investment bankers over the last 15 years, spending some $5.1 billion for advice and assistance. Shrinking GE Capital will keep M.&A. practitioners busy for a while. Borrowing by that financial operation, however, has been the biggest moneymaker. Selling bonds, for example, accounted for roughly $150 million in fees — or about half the total that G.E., led by Jeffrey R. Immelt, paid to financial middlemen in each of the last three calendar years, according to Thomson Reuters data. Loans take the overall total up to almost 70 percent of fees in one of those periods. GE Capital supplies most of that business. Between 2012 and 2014, the unit accounted for some three-quarters of G.E.’s bond sales. Most of that activity could be at risk even before any more assets are sold. The finance unit announced on Friday that it was paring its commercial paper issuance to just $5 billion this year and that it would not need to raise any long-term debt for the next five years. What’s more, many of the potential buyers for pieces of GE Capital are banks. United States lenders, broadly speaking, have a surfeit of deposits and therefore may not need to finance any G.E. lending businesses in the bond markets. Private equity and other so-called shadow banks would be more in need of wholesale funding. Cheaper deposit funding, however, gives traditional lenders an edge in the bidding. The silver lining for Wall Street is deal-making. First, selling the finance businesses should generate some huge fees for banks. The boutique shop Centerview Partners and the bigger institutions JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America already have the edge, having advised G.E. on the breakup. And the conglomerate’s industrial concerns probably have more deals to do. That could keep the company as a lucrative client for bankers. But its position at the top of the charts, and in the hearts and pockets of advisers — especially bond underwriters — may soon be a casualty of this GE Capital whopper.

General Electric
GE Capital
Banking and Finance
Mergers and Acquisitions
Stocks,Bonds


A Talk Magazine Party That Presaged the Decline

Abstract: Ten years ago Sunday, on an island off an island off the coast of America, something impossibly glamorous took place. Partygoers took boats from Manhattan to the home of the Statue of Liberty to plop pashalike on pillows and blankets and munch on lamb chops while Macy Gray sang, their faces illuminated with multicolored Chinese lanterns and fireworks curated and narrated by George Plimpton . “That was a silver-flanged fleur-de-lis,” said the voice, highly recognizable but disembodied by darkness. This was the Talk magazine launch party on Aug. 2, 1999 — simply called The Party at the time — and it seemed as if a new era of media fabulousness had been christened. The Hearst Corporation and Miramax, owned by Disney , decided to finance a new general interest magazine led by Tina Brown , fresh off her triumphs at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker , that would lead the national conversation. It was all kicked off with the kind of lavish party that would seem unthinkable in the current context. Sponsored liquor flowed, women teetered about on heels in deep grass, and the A-list guest list — Mr. Kissinger, please meet Miss um Ms. uh meet Madonna — was a testament to the power of the synergized word. Content was king and Ms. Brown was its queen. “Now you’re not exactly the tired masses, the huddled masses, but then again, I’m an immigrant who toiled here on the Concorde,” she said to the crowd after being introduced by Queen Latifah . “But I just want to say, here’s to Lady Liberty tonight.” Too bad nobody saw the sharks circling in the harbor. Rather than the culmination of a century of press power, the Talk party was the end of an era, a literal fin de siècle. Flush with cash from the go-go ’90s and engorged by spending from the dot-com era, mainstream media companies seemed poised on the brink of something extraordinary. But that brink ended up being a cliff. “It seems like that happened in the 18th century,” said Ms. Brown by phone last Friday. Magazines are on pace to book little more than half of the advertising pages that the industry did 10 years ago, and dozens of longtime titles have disappeared. The last big magazine introduction — Portfolio at Condé Nast Publications — flamed out this spring after two years at a cost of more than $80 million. Now even Condé Nast Publications, the world headquarters of printed luxury, has brought in the bean counters from McKinsey with an eye toward further cuts. There may never be another large magazine launch ever, and certainly not one that was accompanied by the fanfare of Talk. I’m still ashamed to admit that I wasn’t one of the lucky 1,000 people invited to the party — old prerogatives die hard — so I was trapped on shore, covering it secondhand with a nose pressed up against the glass. But it is worth thinking about how this future, or lack of one, arrived so unforeseen. Ten years ago, journalists, long the salarymen of the publishing economy, began gorging on big contracts and options from digital start-ups like shrimp at a free buffet. With coveted writers commanding $5 for every typed word into magazines that were stuffed to the brim with advertising, there was a fizziness, some would say recklessness, in the air. The industry was drunk on its own prerogatives, working a party that seemed as if it would never end. Peter Kaplan, the former editor of The New York Observer , attended the party and oversaw coverage of the event. “Tina, for all the excellence of her antenna, was scratching the air, and like many of us, was unable to pull in the new signal,” he said. “She failed to see that it was probably already over and that there was something slightly hollow about that event.” Most of us who covered media did not fully understand the implications of the new technology that could publish and distribute information at zero marginal cost. The Web was viewed as a niche, as a way to supplement and enhance the printed product, certainly not a threat that would make many of those publications obsolete. “Most of the talk at the Talk party was about the party itself,” said Kurt Andersen, a novelist, radio host and founder of Spy magazine. “It was weird and interesting because you were sort of wandering around in the dark out there and bumping into people. There was a meta quality to the thing, a self-consciousness, that in retrospect was probably telling.” At least Ms. Brown did not compose a rap ode to the new magazine. That fell to Mr. Big, Ron Galotti, the former Condé Nast publisher who managed to get a flock of advertisers to buy the hype and commit to the first four issues of a magazine they had never seen. After Talk closed, Mr. Big quit Manhattan media and moved to a farm in Vermont . Maybe he knew something we didn’t. (He did not return a call.) “It was the end of something extraordinary, but none of us knew it at the time,” Ms. Brown says now. “What followed was a very turbulent odyssey, not just for me, but for all of us. There has been a volcanic realignment that none of us foresaw.” After Talk closed early in 2002, Ms. Brown hosted a television show on CNBC and wrote a book about Princess Diana . Demonstrating a nimbleness that has characterized her entire career, she is now running The Daily Beast, a scrappy but promising digital media site owned by Barry Diller ’s InterActiveCorp. She pays her writers, increasingly an exception these days, but there are no huge contracts or boat rides to sylvan lawns full of impossibly famous people. The Daily Beast has 1.5 million unique visitors a month, according to Quantcast, and has kicked up some notice, but its opening party of a hundred or so took place at the very much land-locked Pop Burger on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. There was no Sarah Jessica Parker , no Robert De Niro and no Hugh Grant in attendance. There were a lot of bloggers instead. Modern media success is enabled by brutal cost control and using hard, fast numbers to convince advertisers they will get a return for their spending. Once stalwart magazines like BusinessWeek are up for grabs and entire formerly lucrative categories have been wiped out. The magazine canard of associative glamour, of selling aspiration by the bucket-load with page after page of pricy merchandise, is all but dead but for a few exceptions. Ms. Brown once wrote the book “Life as a Party” and on that night, it was. “I was aware it was a historic night,” Ms. Brown said. “We were on a boat and I was with Natasha Richardson . We were talking and laughing, looking at the lights of the twin towers. And then a big wave came over the side of the boat and soaked us both. Now Natasha is gone, the towers are gone. It’s very, very sad, but I am very excited by this new world we are heading into.”

Magazine
Tina Brown
Computers and the Internet
News media,journalism


Inspection Notes Errors in Terror List

Abstract: WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 — The government’s principal terrorist watch list is rife with errors and fails to include significant information about known terrorists, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Thursday in an audit report. The report found that the Terrorist Screening Center, the F.B.I.-run agency that compiles the list, was “unable to ensure that consistent, accurate and complete terrorist information is disseminated to frontline screening agents in a timely manner.” The report, by the department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, raises the possibility that known terrorists could be granted visas or could enter the country undetected at border crossings because of errors in the list. “A single omission of a terrorist identity or an inaccuracy in the identifying information can have enormous consequences,” the report said. It cited some 20 instances in which records on known terrorists and suspects “were not watch-listed properly.” The Terrorist Screening Center was created in 2003 in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and by the discovery by outside investigators that the government did not have a centralized terrorist watch list. The center was assigned to create a master list to integrate the information from at least a dozen terrorist watch lists that had been maintained by different agencies before the 2001 attacks. Information from the watch list is distributed throughout the government, including to immigration and customs agents, to State Department consular officials overseas who review visa applications, and to state and local law enforcement agencies. While it did not reveal the number of names on the list, the report suggested that the number has grown substantially. It noted that 700,000 individual records on terrorists and terrorist suspects were maintained in the database as of this spring, four times as many as three years ago. Despite its criticism, the inspector general’s report said that there had been improvements in management of the list since a similar audit two years ago. The new report praised the screening center for increasing the number of employees assigned to quality assurance and establishing an office to deal with complaints from people who contend that they are on the list in error. Leonard C. Boyle, the center’s director, in an interview on Thursday, agreed with the broad conclusions of the report. “I think it’s a fair and accurate report that properly reflects the strides that the T.S.C. has made, and it identifies areas where we have to make improvements,” Mr. Boyle said. But he said the center had made remarkable progress. “I do not agree that the system is riddled with errors,” he said. “When you’re now talking about 800,000 records, there are going to be errors as a result of human mistakes and technological glitches.”


Playoff Contract Could Stand in the Way of Conferences Considering a Split

Abstract: In recent weeks, the commissioners of three of the most prominent conferences in college sports have publicly mused about how the five most powerful leagues might soon be forced to create their own division in order to govern themselves. The commissioners — Mike Slive of the Southeastern Conference, John Swofford of the Atlantic Coast Conference and Bob Bowlsby of the Big 12 Conference — say the needs of those leagues, along with the Big Ten and the Pac-12, are so different from the rest of Division I that they may need their own set of rules. When it comes to football, however, the commissioners of the other five conferences in the Football Bowl Subdivision — the Mid-American, the American Athletic, the Mountain West, the Sun Belt and Conference USA — do not seem eager to see a split. “We are business partners; that C.F.P. contract will be honored, or there will be tremendous legal implications,” Craig Thompson, the commissioner of the Mountain West, said, referring to the new college football playoff. “We’re not going anywhere.” The 10 conferences in the F.B.S. signed a 12-year, $5.5 billion deal late last year agreeing to a playoff format that begins next season, and have dozens of contracts for regular-season games between teams from the top five conferences and those from the bottom five. Ryan Rodenberg, an assistant professor of sports law analytics at Florida State, said in the natural evolution of college athletics a “superdivision” might be created, but it was difficult to envision it happening soon. “There are five and half billion reasons why, and that’s the contract that was just signed among all 10 conferences for the football playoff,” Rodenberg said. “The money is too good. They just entered this deal. Why mess with it now?” Thompson said the high-revenue schools could form a division with their own set of N.C.A.A. bylaws — allowing stipends for players, for example. But those leagues are not likely to be doing business only with themselves. “We developed access that we agreed upon, and we developed revenue sharing that we agreed upon,” said Britton Banowsky, the commissioner of Conference USA. “We signed a contract for 12 years committing our resources and team inventory. That is pretty substantial glue.” It is not just the postseason that binds the 10 conferences. Mike Aresco, the commissioner of the American Athletic Conference, said teams from his league have contracts with opponents like Wisconsin, South Carolina, Notre Dame, North Carolina State and Oklahoma. “I have talked to the commissioners of those five conferences, and they all want to play the other conferences,” Aresco said. “Financially, it would be better for everyone if there was broader scheduling.” Thompson said the big universities want seven home games to meet their budgets, which would be difficult to do without playing teams from the other five conferences. Some observers say that part of the charm of college football is the fact that an Appalachian State can beat a Michigan or a Louisiana-Monroe can defeat an Arkansas, but Nick Saban, the coach of two-time defending national champion Alabama, said he would not be opposed to a superdivision of high-revenue conferences playing one another. “I’ve said this before, nobody wants to hear this, but I was in the N.F.L. for eight years, where every team you played was in the N.F.L.,” Saban said at SEC Media Days. “So if somebody wants to take the leadership and say, O.K., here are the five conferences that are the top conferences, and we’re going to play all our games amongst those people, I’d be fine with that.” The comments by Slive, Swofford and Bowlsby may have created the perception that high-revenue universities wished to break from the rest of college football, but Dr. Jon Steinbrecher, commissioner of the Mid-American Conference, said the comments had more to do with how college sports were governed. “Bob Bowlsby’s own words were ‘this is a last resort,’ ” Steinbrecher said. “They are passionate about some issues. A lot of it stems from frustration of how some things have bogged down as we try and legislate. They did not necessarily advocate that we are going to pull away and do this Division IV thing. That is not their intent.” Indeed, many of the bigger universities cannot agree on legislation among themselves. For instance, the Southeastern Conference is in favor of paying stipends to athletes, but the Atlantic Coast Conference is not. Ohio State did not want deregulation of recruiting, but Alabama did. “What you may see is the 10 conferences participating in the College Football Playoff for the next 12 years with different operating standards,” Thompson said. Thompson said the larger significance of the comments by the three commissioners is that the N.C.A.A. is being pushed to change significantly. “Virtually everyone has issues with the governance model, so what this has done is lit a fire,” Thompson said. “The president of the N.C.A.A. sent out a save the date for everyone to attend the N.C.A.A. convention next January. It’s a call to arms, and it is long overdue.”

College Sports
College
Southeastern Conference
Atlantic Coast Conference
Big 12 Conference
College football
NCAA


Revenue Soars at Lego in First Half of Year

Abstract: The Danish toymaker Lego said revenue soared 11 percent in the first six months of 2014, mostly because of the success of “The Lego Movie.” The privately owned company’s chief financial officer, John Goodwin, said Thursday that “ ‘Lego Movie’ products provided a significant boost to our sales during the first half of 2014.” Net profit in the period was up 14 percent compared with the first half of 2013, at 2.7 billion kroner ($480 million), on sales of 11.5 billion kroner.


Tented Walls and Family-Style Korean Dishes at Pocha 32

Abstract: If many customers don’t fully remember their evening at Pocha 32, where dinner frequently begins after 2 a.m. and nearly always includes the Korean spirit soju, they can at least leave behind proof that they were there. The walls of Pocha are draped with green fishnet, which has slowly accumulated hundreds of paper wrappers from diners’ wooden chopsticks, most inscribed with cartoonish self-portraits or a reason to celebrate. (“It’s my b-day!”) The first note appeared in the netting one night about four years ago, said Kyungsoo Jang, a manager and longtime server. Today the netting has become a shrine to Koreatown memories, forming a cozy tent around the diners, who squeeze in at tables made from repurposed oil drums. The rough décor is meant to evoke the tented carts and makeshift taverns in South Korea called pojangmacha — “covered wagon” — or pocha for short. “It really reminds me of Seoul bars,” said Karen Doh, 22, a regular who came with her boyfriend, Myungjin Kim, 24, on a recent Friday and ended up running into friends. “I think that’s why a lot of us come here,” Ms. Doh said of her Korean-American tablemates, who were finishing off a deep-fried pork cutlet called donkatsu and a pot of kimchi jjigae, a quintessential Korean stew. They were also well into several bottles of soju designated for drinking games. Nearly every other table — from young Korean-Americans who knew everything on the K-pop soundtrack to those who seemed awed by the setting — had ordered the watermelon sawa, a hollowed-out half watermelon filled with ice, fruit purée, soju and Sprite, accompanied by bowls and a ladle. “Everybody wants to see the watermelon,” said Cage Brewer, 27, an Upper East Side resident who had come with more experienced friends to sample his first. Everything at Pocha 32 is served family style: a whole grilled squid, sizzling and stuffed with pork belly; and tteokbokki, a dish of spicy rice cakes. There are also bubbling metal kettles of budae jjigae, or army base stew. “This one has a history,” Mr. Jang said. The stew, a product of the Korean War, was developed when South Koreans boiled Spam and hot dogs brought by the United States Army with kimchi and chile paste, later adding ramen, rice cakes, vegetables and various pastas. At Pocha 32, fistfuls of shredded mozzarella are also tossed in. If the dish seems a little retro, that’s part of its appeal, and part of the establishment’s spirit. A decade ago, Joung H. Lee — who owns three other restaurants in Koreatown — decided to start a pojangmacha that looked like the improvised original pochas, not the modern versions that had sprung up in Korea and the United States. “Americans and also Koreans will like it,” said Mr. Lee, 51, “or at least that’s what I thought.” He was right. Pocha 32, at 15 West 32nd Street, is now so popular that it needs a security guard on weekends to help manage the diners who snake up the restaurant’s stairs to wait for a table until the wee hours. On a recent Friday, those patrons included Amber Martello, 24, who had traveled from New Jersey with three friends and spent 30 minutes on the stairway. They planned to try the tofu stew and “definitely the watermelon,” she said, adding, “It’s worth at least half an hour.” Some diners wait twice that long, especially on Fridays and Saturdays, when the kitchen stays open until 5 a.m. and a surge of diners arrives as bars close. “When you come that late,” Mr. Kim said of the crowd, “it’ll be all Korean.”

Restaurant
Midtown Area Manhattan
Korean Food
Manhattan


Using Virtual Reality to Create a New Corporate Headquarters

Abstract: SANTA CLARA, Calif. — In the heart of Silicon Valley, you can slip on a virtual reality headset and fly through a photo-realistic three-dimensional building that will soon be the new corporate home for the chip maker Nvidia . The building is still under construction, visible today as a large white frame with an undulating roof that is evocative of both an airplane wing and a circus tent. Scheduled to open in late 2017, the $380 million project will house 2,500 employees. A second building is also on the drawing board. The virtual reality demonstration has been integral to Nvidia’s design and construction of the new building — it is powered by Nvidia products. Nvidia makes computing chips that were originally used to accelerate computer graphics in video games . Today, the chips are increasingly being used in engineering visualization and high-performance computing, including the architectural design of the company’s future headquarters. This year, Nvidia also began offering a highly interactive rendering software technology intended to complement its graphical processors. Known as Iray , the software has made it possible to quickly alter everything in the company’s architectural design simulation, from the location, size and transparency of triangle-shaped skylights to material surfaces and colors. “We have never been able to capture the fidelity we are able to reach today,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia. “The rug has to be precisely like the rug in the real world and the paint has to be the paint.” Nvidia harnessed its graphics chips and rendering software to help create its new headquarters largely because of Mr. Huang, who established Nvidia in 1993 and has built it into a company with $5 billion in annual revenue. He began with a vision for the new structure where thousands of employees could collaborate under the canopy of a sky-high tree, with the light filtering through onto their work spaces. Mr. Huang hired the design firm Gensler for the project, working with the architect Hao Ko to capture Nvidia’s culture of being open, collaborative and flexible in the building design. To make real the notion of light filtering from above, they began with a scattered array of triangle-shaped skylights. The triangle is emblematic of the basic graphical component of modern software rendering systems that create 3-D graphical images that the Nvidia hardware generates. Other architectural elements soon fell into place: The building would be surrounded by a park, and parking would be hidden in an underground garage. To foster collaboration, the designers also effectively created a choke point in the building — people entering from the underground parking structure will emerge onto a broad central staircase. The headquarters are also reconfigurable, based largely around Wi-Fi, not cables. Walls are largely movable. And in a nod to Nvidia’s flat corporate hierarchy, there will be no discernible executive suite. Nvidia’s technology soon began to help with the process. The company used more than 100 of its graphical processors to create what Mr. Huang described as the “world’s largest simulator of photons.” “We simulated every light beam for every hour of the day for every day of the year,” he said. As a result, software made it possible to find hot spots in the new building. That enabled the designers to move people away from the heat and yet maintain a warm work setting. With virtual reality headsets becoming available this year through makers like HTC, Nvidia decided to use the tools for its construction project. The headsets have made it possible for the architects from Gensler to see things that would not easily have been visible in a 2-D model. For example, they discovered a visual obstruction at the top of the entry staircase that would have been tough to detect before the building was actually constructed. The Iray software has also discouraged the designers from creating a large skylight at the building’s center. Viewed in a 3-D simulation, it was easy to see that it would flood the building with too much light. “We used our computational power and our technology to model the inside of the building,” said Debora Shoquist, Nvidia’s executive vice president for operations. “Iray allows you to model how the light comes in and how it reflects. Reflection, refraction, absorption — it’s just math.” In one sense, the new design tools are the realization of the original Sketchpad, an interactive computing drafting system first envisioned by the computer scientist Ivan Sutherland in his doctoral thesis in 1963. In 1968, as a professor at Harvard, Mr. Sutherland followed that with a pioneering virtual and augmented reality simulator called a head-mounted display. Four decades later, this form of interactive visual design is likely to rapidly become a standard tool for architects. “I was pretty much like a kid in the candy store when they first gave me access to a cluster of processors running Iray,” said Scott DeWoody, a visualization artist for Gensler who has worked on the project. “I stayed up until three in the morning.”

Virtual reality
NVIDIA
Construction
Architecture
Gensler
3-D
Workplace


What Happened in Room 2806: Three Possibilities

Abstract: Even as the criminal case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn erodes with each new example of his accuser’s crumbling credibility , the central question remains unanswered: What actually happened in Room 2806 of the Sofitel New York on May 14? Certain facts are not in dispute. As the illustration above shows, electronic evidence reveals what time the accuser, a 32-year-old hotel housekeeper from Guinea , entered Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s suite. Physical evidence indicates that a sexual encounter took place. The housekeeper has characterized the encounter as a sexual assault. Lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, have said any sexual act was consensual. Others have offered other theories. Here is a look at three possible sequences of events, and how the available evidence — physical, electronic and witness testimony — could support each of them. A Forced, and Brief, Encounter The housekeeper has told police officers, prosecutors and hospital officials that Mr. Strauss-Kahn forced her to perform oral sex. Law enforcement officials believed that her account , offered in graphic detail, was credible: Mr. Strauss-Kahn, naked, emerged after she entered to clean the room. He locked the door, pushed her to the bed and began to assault her. She got away, but then he grabbed her, pulling her toward the bathroom. She fell and he forced her to perform oral sex; she told a hospital counselor, among others, that she spit on the carpet after he was done. Prosecutors have said in court that forensic evidence was consistent with the housekeeper’s account, but they did not provide specifics. The woman’s lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson, however, offered more details last week. He said there was evidence that his client had spit semen onto the wall and the floor of the suite, consistent with the notion that she was an unwilling participant. The woman also suffered bruising to her vaginal area (she told investigators Mr. Strauss-Kahn grabbed her there), and she tore a ligament in her shoulder, Mr. Thompson said. Prosecutors have not publicly confirmed whether the woman had those injuries. A law enforcement official has also said that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s semen was found on the housekeeper’s clothes. The short period in which Mr. Strauss-Kahn and the woman were both in the suite might also indicate “something other than a consensual act,” Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, the lead prosecutor on the case, said. According to a law enforcement official, the housekeeper’s card-key data suggests she was in the room with Mr. Strauss-Kahn for no longer than 20 minutes. Prosecutors may also suggest that surveillance footage of Mr. Strauss-Kahn leaving the hotel — he checked out at 12:28 p.m. — speaks in their favor. A prosecutor has said in court that Mr. Strauss-Kahn appeared to be in a hurry. And although the accuser’s credibility has come into question , law enforcement officials have said that her account of what happened in the hotel suite has been largely consistent. A Consensual Act Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers have suggested in court that the encounter that he had with the housekeeper was consensual. The piece of evidence that they might find the most compelling in making this argument is Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s body. After his arrest, he was taken for an examination at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn. He did not have any physical injuries, according to two people briefed on the defense’s case, which his lawyers may use to suggest that there was no struggle. The defense would also probably argue against a forcible encounter by pointing out that the woman is larger than Mr. Strauss-Kahn, though experts in sexual assault say that such an attack does not always require physical strength, a weapon or a struggle. The woman’s actions after the encounter could also indicate a consensual act. According to a hospital report, the woman said that after the attack, Mr. Strauss-Kahn got dressed and “left the room, and that he said nothing to her during the incident.” Defense lawyers may use that to suggest that the woman remained in the room during this time, something that a woman who was just attacked would seem unlikely to do. Electronic card-key records show that after the encounter, the housekeeper left Room 2806 and entered Room 2820 — a sequence that differed from what she had told the police, and possibly more suggestive of a woman not under duress. People familiar with the defense’s investigation would also focus on Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s actions after the encounter; they say that he had a leisurely lunch with his daughter at McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurant. If that is the case, defense lawyers would see if surveillance cameras at the restaurant captured that, and suggest that such behavior was not indicative of a man who had just committed a crime. After the lunch, Mr. Strauss-Kahn told security personnel at the Sofitel that he believed he had lost his cellphone, and that he was at Kennedy Airport. His lawyers have said in court that if he had committed a sexual crime, he would not have volunteered his whereabouts. A Misunderstanding While both sides agree that a sexual encounter took place inside the hotel suite, one question is whether some misunderstanding between Mr. Strauss-Kahn and the housekeeper led to whatever transpired. Under this theory, the oral sex began as a consensual act, but something later drove the housekeeper to press criminal charges. All of the evidence that points to a consensual encounter would apply to this sequence of events. Any DNA evidence would be seen as inconclusive as to whether the sexual act was forced; the absence of injuries to Mr. Strauss-Kahn also would argue against an attack. But to accept the encounter as truly consensual would require envisioning a 32-year-old woman spontaneously deciding to engage in oral sex with a man nearly twice her age whom she had never met before. Defense lawyers are likely to question the woman’s motives by highlighting a recording of a conversation the woman had with a man in an Arizona jail about a day after she said she was attacked. The woman said something to the effect of, “Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing,” according to a law enforcement official. (The woman’s lawyer has disputed the translation.) The woman’s movements after the encounter may also be a point of focus for the defense. While she originally told prosecutors that she waited in the hallway for Mr. Strauss-Kahn to leave, she later said that she cleaned a nearby room before re-entering Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s suite and reporting the attack to a supervisor. The defense is likely to question why the woman returned to the suite before reporting the episode to her supervisor. Card-key data shows that the woman first entered Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s room at 12:06 p.m. At 12:26, she entered a nearby room, 2820 — which she had cleaned earlier that morning — and returned to 2806, Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s room, in the same minute, according to her card-key information, a person who has seen the records said.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Rape
Sofitel Hotels


Republicans’ 4-Step Plan to Repeal the Affordable Care Act

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Vice President-elect Mike Pence and the top Republicans in Congress made clear on Wednesday, more powerfully and explicitly than ever, that they are dead serious about repealing the Affordable Care Act. How they can uproot a law deeply embedded in the nation’s health care system without hurting some of the 20 million people who have gained coverage through it is not clear. Nor is it yet evident that millions of Americans with pre-existing medical conditions will be fully protected against disruptions in their health coverage. But a determined Republican president and Congress can gut the Affordable Care Act, and do it quickly: a step-by-step health care revolution in reverse that would undo many of the changes made since the law was signed by President Obama in March 2010. Step 1: Defang the filibuster The Senate intends to pass a budget resolution next week that would shield repeal legislation from a Democratic filibuster. If the Senate completes its action, House Republican leaders hope that they, too, can approve a version of the budget resolution next week. Whether they can meet that goal is unclear. The resolution contains seemingly innocuous language, instructing four committees that control health care policy — two in the Senate, two in the House — to draft legislation within their jurisdiction that would cut at least $1 billion from the deficit over 10 years. But that language has real teeth. The legislation produced to meet those instructions can pass the Senate with a simple majority — 51 votes if all senators are present — obliterating the power of the Democratic minority to block it. Those four committees would have just a few weeks, until Jan. 27, to produce legislation repealing major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. House Republicans have some practice at this, because they have voted more than 60 times since 2011 to repeal some or all of the law. The budget blueprint will guide Congress but will not be presented to the president for a signature or veto. Step 2: Add the details The committees — House Energy and Commerce, House Ways and Means, Senate Finance, and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions — will quickly assemble legislation intended to eviscerate the health care law. The repeal legislation will be in the form of a reconciliation bill , authorized by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Such bills can be adopted under special fast-track procedures. But Senate rules generally bar the use of those procedures for measures that have no effect on spending or revenue. So the legislation, as now conceived, would probably leave the most popular provisions of the health law intact, such as the prohibition on insurers’ denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Instead, the legislation would: ■ Eliminate the tax penalties imposed on people who go without insurance and on larger employers who do not offer coverage to employees. ■ Eliminate tens of billions of dollars provided each year to states that have expanded eligibility for Medicaid. ■ Repeal subsidies for private health insurance coverage obtained through the public marketplaces known as exchanges. It could also repeal some of the taxes and fees that help pay for the expansion of coverage under the Affordable Care Act. But some Republicans have indicated that they may want to use some of that revenue for their as-yet-undetermined plan to replace the health care law. The 2010 law imposed taxes and fees on certain high-income people and on health insurers and manufacturers of brand-name prescription drugs and medical devices, among others. Republicans have not said for sure which taxes they will scrap and which they may keep. Republicans say they will delay the effective date of their repeal bill to avoid disrupting coverage and to provide time for them to develop alternatives to Mr. Obama’s law. They disagree over how long the delay should last, with two to four years being mentioned as possibilities. Step 3: The new president’s role Within days of taking office, President-elect Donald J. Trump plans to announce executive actions on health care. Some may undo Obama administration policies. Others will be meant to stabilize health insurance markets and prevent them from collapsing in a vast sea of uncertainty. “We are working on a series of executive orders that the president-elect will put into effect to ensure that there is an orderly transition, during the period after we repeal Obamacare, to a market-based health care economy,” Mr. Pence said at the Capitol on Wednesday. He did not provide details, and Trump transition aides said they had no information about the executive orders. But some options are apparent. The federal government could continue providing financial assistance to insurance companies to protect them against financial losses and to prevent consumers’ premiums from soaring more than they have in the last few years. Step 4: Find a replacement Even as they move full speed toward gutting the existing health law, Republicans are scrambling to find a replacement. At the moment, they have no consensus. Mr. Pence said on Wednesday that the replacement would probably encourage greater use of personal health savings accounts and make it easier for carriers to sell insurance across state lines. Also, he said, it would encourage small businesses to band together and buy insurance through “association health plans” sponsored by business and professional organizations. Some type of subsidy or tax credit for consumers, to help defray the cost of premiums, is also likely. States would have more authority to set insurance standards, and the federal government would have less. Mr. Trump has also endorsed the idea of state-run “high-risk pools” for people with pre-existing conditions who would otherwise have difficulty finding affordable coverage. Many experts have said that repealing the health law without a clear plan to replace it could create havoc in insurance markets. Doctors, hospitals and insurance companies do not know what to expect. Without an effective requirement for people to carry insurance, and without subsidies to buy it, supporters of the law say many healthy people would go without coverage, knowing they could obtain it if they became ill and needed it. Democrats in Congress say they will do everything they can to thwart Republican efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. They plan to dramatize their case by publicizing the experiences of people whose lives have been saved or improved by the law. In the Senate next week, Democrats will demand votes intended to put Republicans on record against proposals that could protect consumers. Defenders of the law also hope to mobilize groups like the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association to speak up for patients. The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, and the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, are encouraging their colleagues to organize rallies around the country on Jan. 15 to oppose the Republicans’ health care agenda. And to buttress their case, Democrats are compiling statistics from the White House and from researchers at liberal-leaning groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Commonwealth Fund and the Urban Institute, which warn of catastrophic consequences if the law is repealed.

Republicans
Congress
Congress
Senate
Health Insurance
Obamacare,Affordable Care Act
US Politics
House of Representatives
Donald Trump
Barack Obama


Hague Court Orders Retrial for 2 Aides to Milosevic

Abstract: PARIS — United Nations appeals judges on Tuesday ordered a new trial for two top aides of former President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, saying that they had been wrongfully acquitted in 2013. The appeals panel said that the judges in the original case had made legal errors and misinterpreted international law. The panel barred the two men from returning to Serbia and ordered them to be detained at the court’s prison in The Hague. It was a rare moment in the two-decades-old criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The court, created by the United Nations Security Council, has seen many defendants convicted and others acquitted and several have died or took their lives in prison. But it has only once before had to retry a case. The two former Milosevic aides, Jovica Stanisic, the former chief of the Serbian secret police, and Franko Simatovic, his deputy, who opted to travel to The Hague for the hearing, had entered the courtroom on Tuesday looking confident. But they seemed taken aback by the verdict, lowering their heads as the decision was read out. During the 1991-95 war that broke up Yugoslavia, the two men were among the country’s most powerful figures, and prosecutors had called them pivotal players in Mr. Milosevic’s strategy of seizing lands for Serbs and violently driving non-Serbs from large stretches of neighboring Bosnia and Croatia. Their three-year trial in The Hague laid bare much of the inner workings of the Milosevic era, during which the government often trusted the secret police more than the military. The two men ran covert operations, including training and deploying paramilitary combat units that terrorized and killed civilians as they moved from village to village, often ahead of the military, looting and burning homes and mosques and forcing tens of thousands of people to flee. The judges in the original trial acknowledged that many murders and other crimes resulted from that campaign. But the judges acquitted both police commanders , saying there was not enough evidence that they had issued “specific directions” to commit crimes, or that they were part of a “joint criminal enterprise,” the tribunal’s term for criminal conspiracy. The unexpected acquittal drew intense criticism from legal experts and from survivors of the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. A majority of the judges on the appeals panel, led by the presiding judge, Fausto Pocar of Italy, said they had found errors in law on crucial points. For example, they said that to find someone liable for aiding and abetting crimes, international law did not require proof of “specific directions” to commit crimes. Judge Pocar said that the earlier finding was in “direct conflict” with prevailing jurisprudence. He said the panel could not send the case back to the original chamber because two of the judges were no longer there. The chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, said that he was “satisfied with the outcome, because we had asked for a conviction or a retrial.” He said that the question of “specific direction” was fundamental. He and others have said that maintaining that element could make it nearly impossible to establish liability in the case of large-scale crimes where those responsible are leaders or commanders who often do not issue written orders and are likely to be far from the scene.

War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity


Quiet Engines That Evolve Over a Season Add Suspense to Formula One

Abstract: Never before in the history of Formula One had so much noise been made over so little noise as last year , with the outcry over new “silent” hybrid engines. Hailed as the greatest technological jewels ever produced by the series, the engines addressed many concerns of our modern world, with the emphasis on environmentally friendly “power units” that would not only would consume little fuel but would also find new, clean ways to produce more power. Dropping from 2.4-liter, eight-cylinder, normally aspirated engines to the new 1.6-liter, six-cylinder, turbo-charged, part-electric, kinetic, heat-consuming engines that produce less horsepower and fewer r.p.m. and consume a third less fuel than their predecessors, these new Formula One engines also addressed one of the most frequent complaints about the series: noise. The new engines were so quiet that people could talk in the paddock behind the garages at most racetracks without noticing there were racing cars on the track. But rather than receiving plaudits and congratulations, these technological marvels, created by the finest minds in mechanical engineering from around the world, were met with a much bigger kind of noise: From within and outside the series came complaints about how quiet the engines had become and how much excitement they had therefore removed from the series, once characterized by the ear-shattering racket of V8 engines. The new turbos were so efficient that they ate up the noise and heat in the exhaust to recycle it as energy to power the engine. Ultimately, however, nothing has been done to change this state of noiselessness, since the engineers who create the cars care about only one thing: winning. “It’s not of interest; noise is wasted energy,” Pat Symonds, the technical director of the Williams team, said this winter. In fact, even the Formula One promoter, Bernie Ecclestone, who was among the most vocal critics of the change, saying the series had lost some of its excitement through the lack of aggressive attack of spectators’ eardrums, should have been happy with the new formula for the immediate effect on the business. Not only did the new environmentally relevant engines keep the major manufacturers Renault and Mercedes involved in the series — Renault had made it a stipulation for their staying — but in 2015 the hybrid technology has also brought the return of Honda. After leaving the series in late 2008 amid the global financial crisis, the Japanese company has returned in 2015 to learn to develop and to show off a technology that is relevant in selling passenger cars. And it chose to rejoin McLaren, the team where it achieved its greatest successes, in the 1980s and 1990s. “McLaren Honda is a partnership focused on performance, technology and innovation, and there’s no better example of that than the results achieved in our first collaboration in the 1980s and 1990s,” said Ron Dennis, who still directs the McLaren team. “While I don’t tend to like looking back to the past, our previous record of sustained success was certainly instrumental in creating the confidence to make the decision to partner with Honda again,” Dennis added. “Now, there’s real hunger to demonstrate the capabilities of the huge talent pool we share between us, and I’m totally committed to driving progress and achieving further success.” Although the introduction of the new engines raised costs significantly for the manufacturers and the teams — customer teams pay about $30 million per season for their engines — the rules were set to limit spiraling engine costs by freezing their development once the engines were introduced last year. Such an engine-development freeze had existed since the previous generation of engines, which had nearly stagnated on a fixed design for half a decade. At the turn of the century, engine development was nearly unlimited and the engine manufacturers and teams spent millions per season in developing the engines from race to race. But after Mercedes dominated the series last year, and gave an advantage to other Mercedes-powered teams — like Williams, McLaren and Force India — the competing manufacturers, Ferrari and Renault, fought the other teams and the International Automobile Federation, the governing body for the series, to open up the regulations to allow for engine development. Over the winter, the federation, known by its French abbreviation, the F.I.A., and the teams agreed to allow for engine development throughout the season, but within a system that limits it through a series of so-called tokens, with each engine manufacturer being able to use the same number of 32 tokens for development, whenever they want to. Previously, they had the right to make minor changes before the season started, but had to live with whatever they had throughout the season. This new rule was at first limited to Ferrari, Mercedes and Renault, the companies that had already introduced their engines last year. Honda was told it had to begin under the same rules as the latter companies in its first year, but could then develop the engine next year. After much negotiating, however, Honda — whose engine has had a sluggish start in winter testing — has now been allowed to develop its engine like the other manufacturers throughout the season. In the end, this system should help not only by allowing the manufacturers to catch up to Mercedes, but also by making the show more exciting for spectators, who might otherwise be resigned to another season of complete domination by the German manufacturer and the teams that use its engines. But as with just about every rule change in Formula One, this opening up of engine-development rules has created a new strategic crisis for the manufacturers: Deciding precisely when during the season is the best time for them to do their development and use their tokens. Cyril Abiteboul, who runs the Renault engine program, said the group was looking closely at when and how to use the rest of the development program to best profit by it next year. “I think that there is a bit of strategic thinking to employ for this decision and therefore for the in-season development strategy for 2015,” said Abiteboul, adding that Renault might wait until near the end of the season to make most of the engine developments. “We have options,” he added. “We have to see how we play with the resources we have to develop this year’s engine or bring forward a bit of next year’s engine regulations.”

Formula One
Cars
Honda
Ferrari
Car Racing
Mercedes-Benz
McLaren Racing


Stocks Rise as European Debt Fears Ease

Abstract: Indexes on Wall Street resumed their rally Wednesday after a successful auction of Portuguese government debt eased concerns about Europe’s financial system. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 46 points, and broader indexes also rose. European markets reversed their losses after the bond auction. Major indexes fell back from their highs in afternoon trading after the Federal Reserve said that more regions of the country had slower growth late in the summer. The Fed’s report on regional economic activity , known as the beige book, showed that five of the 12 regions it tracked showed mixed or slowing economic activity. In the July report, only two regions reported mixed or slowing activity. JPMorgan Chase & Company and other banks led the market higher, reversing a downturn from the day before. Stocks had fallen on Tuesday, breaking a four-day winning streak, after reports that European banks held larger amounts of risky government debt than had previously been disclosed. Energy stocks rose after Fitch Ratings raised its credit rating for the oil giant BP. BP also released an internal report that spread blame for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the rig owner Transocean and the contractor Halliburton, as well as itself. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 46.32 points, or 0.5 percent, to close at 10,387.01. The Dow had been up as much as 86 points earlier in the day before the Fed’s regional report. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 7.03 points, or 0.6 percent, to 1,098.87, while the Nasdaq rose 19.98 points, or 0.9 percent, to 2,228.87 The two-day swing based on the ebb and flow of European debt fears fitted a pattern of jittery trading in recent weeks tied to economic news. “There seems to be a fixation on the latest news and data,” said E. Michael McGervey, president of McGervey Wealth Management. Mixed economic news has helped keep stocks stuck in a tight range. European markets rose. Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.4 percent, Germany’s DAX index gained 0.8 percent, and France’s CAC-40 rose 0.9 percent. A report Tuesday that the stress tests of 91 European banks in July understated some lenders’ holdings of potentially risky government debt was the catalyst behind Tuesday’s sell-off. But news on Wednesday that Portugal raised 1.04 billion euros ($1.3 billion) in a bond auction that drew strong investor interest helped ease some of those concerns. In addition to Greece, Portugal is widely thought to have the shakiest public finances of the 16 euro zone countries. The Portuguese government, though, had to pay higher interest rates in a sign that investors were again worried about investing in potentially risky assets. Those lingering fears kept stock rallies in check, especially as official figures from Greece showed the economy shrinking by 1.8 percent in the three months that ended in June, compared with the previous quarter. On Tuesday, the finance ministers of Europe agreed to give Greece a second installment of emergency loans valued at 9 billion euros ($11.5 billion) after the Europe and the International Monetary Fund praised the country for the efforts it had made since the bailout plan, valued at 110 billion euros ($140 billion) was agreed to in May. Volume on the Wall Street indexes remained thin on Wednesday, which indicated that many traders were avoiding stocks altogether. Many investors are waiting to get a better sense of the pace of recovery and the results of November’s elections. Rick Fier, an equities trader at Conifer Securities, said traders were assuming that the recovery would be slow and uneven, but that growth would remain in place over the next few months. Uncertainty about potential tax increases and the costs associated with health care and financial regulatory changes have helped to keep businesses from hiring, which in turn has slowed the recovery. The results of the elections should provide businesses and investors with a clearer sense of those issues. BP shares rose $1.18, or 3.2 percent, to $38.37. Halliburton rose 37 cents, to $30.21. JPMorgan Chase rose 84 cents, or 2.3 percent, to $39.12. The Treasury’s benchmark 10-year note fell 16/32, to 99 24/32, and the yield rose to 2.67 percent, from 2.59 percent late Tuesday.


The Migrant Crisis in Europe: Readers’ Questions Answered

Abstract: As thousands of migrants seek refuge in Europe, and governments continue to struggle with how to receive them, The New York Times asked readers for their questions on the crisis. Here are some answers, and a way for you to submit your questions. Q. Will the migrants be allowed to work once they settle, or will they be stuck in camps, as they are in Jordan? — Megan Lasswell ( @RocketCatGo on Twitter ), Long Beach, Calif. A. It depends on where the migrants settle. Refugees have a right to work under the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, which nearly all countries in Europe have signed. But not every country honors this obligation, said Madeline Garlick, of the Migration Policy Institute. Some countries have tried to find jobs for asylum seekers as a way to satisfy demand for labor and more quickly assimilate refugees into the country. In Germany, which expects 800,000 migrants this year alone, Chancellor Angela Merkel and the country’s biggest businesses have started a campaign to find jobs for migrants — preferable to letting them become the responsibility of the state. In the United States, refugees are allowed to work, and many get assistance from aid groups in finding a job. Jordan has not signed the 1951 convention, and it does not allow refugees to work, though for more than five years it has allowed them to live in towns and cities in Jordan, not just in refugee camps. SOMINI SENGUPTA Q. Why are so many coming now? War and droughts have been going on for years. Where is the U.N. in all of this? — Roxan Pierson, Philadelphia A. The largest group of migrants entering Europe through Turkey and Greece are Syrians, followed by Iraqis and Afghans, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Those who are fleeing war zones have a strong claim to being refugees, rather than economic migrants. There are a number of reasons there has been a recent surge. First, the collapse of Syria is continuing and that has increased pressure on people to leave , even those who live in areas that until now had been considered relatively safe. As Syrian government forces and other groups take heavy casualties, Syrian men are faced with increasingly aggressive conscription, and many families who nominally support the government have become unwilling to send their sons to serve. Instead, many of them are pooling resources to send these young men abroad. New battlefield dynamics have brought fighting between government forces, rebel groups and Islamic insurgents closer to places that were once far from it. And perhaps more than anything else, Syrians say, there is a sense of lost hope. One Syrian journalist describing his own feelings and those of many compatriots recently told me that they despair of a political solution to the war. Now, many suspect that even if there is a solution, Syria will not be a place where they want to raise their children — it will have grown more divided and sectarian — and so they might as well start a new life now. Second, the United Nations humanitarian efforts are woefully underfunded , receiving less than half of what is needed from the world’s nations that provide financing. Benefits have been cut for the seven million displaced people in Syria, and for the four million Syrian refugees, most who fled to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. So people who had just managed to feed their families in those places feel new pressure to move on. Image Migrants arrived Friday on the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing from Turkey in a rubber raft. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Third, a new route to Europe has been discovered that is less expensive and less risky than long sea routes across the Mediterranean. Going from Libya to Italy or Malta was a much longer and more dangerous journey than the short hop from Turkey to Greek islands; despite the drownings that have grabbed headlines, tens of thousands make it safely. And for people from the main countries sending migrants, Libya was much harder to reach than Turkey. Some people in places that have been in deadly conflict for years without resolution or significant economic recovery — like Iraq — appear to have simply decided that this is the best opportunity they will have to try for a new life. ANNE BARNARD Q. Is there any kind of incentive to encourage countries to provide asylum? — Sarah Odell, Ithaca, N.Y. A. The plan agreed on Tuesday by justice and home affairs ministers of the European Union to redistribute 120,000 migrants, most now in Greece and Italy, becomes European Union law. That means member states failing to comply with the redistribution system can be taken to court by the European Commission , the union’s executive arm based in Brussels. (A separate decision this month to relocate 40,000 people from Greece and Italy remains voluntary.) There are some incentives for member states to participate. Countries such as France and Germany that are taking in migrants will receive 6,000 euros, about $6,700, for each arrival, and Greece and Italy will receive €500 per migrant to cover the cost of moving them to their new locations. But an earlier proposal to force member states to pay a small percentage of their gross domestic product — 0.002 percent — to help finance the efforts of neighboring countries if they cannot participate was not included in the final text. The member states that have not been formally allocated migrants include Britain and Ireland. They have opt-outs from European Union initiatives on justice and home affairs. Ireland, however, has chosen to participate and has said it is ready to host 4,000 people in need of international protection. European officials expect that offer from Ireland will reduce the number of migrants that other member states must host. Britain will not be part of the relocation scheme, but has already agreed to take 20,000 migrants directly from countries bordering Syria over the next five years. Denmark, which is barred under domestic law from participating in European Union initiatives in the areas of justice and home affairs, has said it will take 1,000 refugees. JAMES KANTER Q. How many refugees are the Eastern European countries like Romania and the Czech Republic being asked to accept? — Dave N., Rochester, N.Y. A. The European Union plan approved early last week to distribute 120,000 asylum seekers across the 28-nation bloc was passed over the objections of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The opposition from Eastern European members was strong, but two days later, European Union leaders meeting in Brussels said they had calmed divisions. The specific quotas — even suggested targets — remain controversial, but the European leaders were able to agree to increased funding for Syrian refugees in the region from which many migrants are fleeing; greater dialogue with border states, like Turkey; and increased financing and authority for Europe’s border agency. JEFFREY MARCUS Q. Why does Europe permit boats full of illegal immigrants to land on its shores? Why don’t the European navies stop the boats? — Si Campbell, Deland, Fla. A. The number of migrants making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa — Libya, mostly — surged from the last year through spring. By May, more than 1,800 migrants had drowned attempting to make it to Europe. That is when the European Union decided to militarize its response to stop desperate migrants from attempting the sea route. European foreign and defense ministers agreed May 18 to use naval forces to intercept and disrupt ships used by smugglers before or shortly after they leave North Africa. Those efforts to stop boats and the inherent dangers of the trip forced migrants and human traffickers to find new, safer and cheaper routes to Europe. A shorter voyage from Turkey across the Aegean Sea to Greece has become the preferred route for migrants , where they travel over land through the Balkans to Hungary and, ultimately, to Austria, Germany and other countries in Northern Europe where they prefer to seek asylum. JEFFREY MARCUS

Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis


Big East Likely to Lose 7 Colleges That Want to Focus on Basketball

Abstract: After looking on as realignment diluted and marginalized the Big East Conference, the seven universities in the league that are not part of the Football Bowl Subdivision are expected to depart in the coming days and form a league revolving around basketball. Villanova, Georgetown, St. John’s, Marquette, Providence, Seton Hall and DePaul are expected to exit, according to an ESPN report, pending the resolution of legal and semantic details, and barring any last-minute maneuvering by Big East Commissioner Mike Aresco. The complexity of the situation, with seven colleges leaving at one time, may delay an official decision or announcement. “The judgment on the part of the seven schools, they probably feel they can generate more dollars per school as a basketball conference than to share the revenues they would be getting from a combined football-basketball deal” with the current Big East, said Neal Pilson, a television consultant and a former president of CBS Sports. “The Big East isn’t the same conference it was 12 months ago,” he said. But, he added, “basketball economics don’t equal football.” In the last 15 months, the longtime Big East members Syracuse, Pittsburgh and West Virginia announced they were leaving the conference for better football leagues — the Atlantic Coast Conference for Syracuse and Pittsburgh, the Big 12 for West Virginia — and the more lucrative TV contracts that come with them. Then Notre Dame announced it would take its basketball team to the A.C.C., and last month Louisville said it would soon follow. Rutgers is leaving for the Big Ten. While the Big East, which started as a basketball conference, scrambled to maintain a certain number of members, those colleges that did not compete at the F.B.S. level in football were essentially left to watch as the conference became a very different version of itself. Next year, Houston, Southern Methodist, Central Florida and Memphis will join the conference for all sports, and Boise State and San Diego State will for football. To replace Louisville and Rutgers, the Big East added Tulane for all sports and East Carolina as a football-only member, beginning in 2014. Navy is joining as a football-only member in 2015. Aresco, a former executive with ESPN and CBS, has tried selling the Big East as a conference with a national reach, with an equal emphasis on its elite basketball and improving football. “I didn’t want to neglect basketball,” Aresco said in an interview this month. “So much of the realignment had been focused on football, I felt that when you had basketball, as good as the Big East has it, with the quality schools, the brands, that basketball has to be a significant part of the conversation.” Instead, four months into his tenure, the seven so-called basketball colleges, all Catholic institutions, are moving toward an official consensus to control their future. They could form a basketball conference with like-minded schools. ESPN quoted Notre Dame Coach Mike Brey as saying that the discussion among the seven colleges was to form a national conference of Catholic universities with Xavier , St. Louis , Dayton , Creighton , Gonzaga and possibly St. Mary’s . The seven Big East basketball colleges met with Aresco on Sunday to discuss their concerns about the conference’s future, which is tied to the TV rights deal the league is shopping. The value of a new deal was diminished by the string of departures, starting with Syracuse and Pittsburgh last year. A few months before that, the Big East turned down an offer from ESPN similar to the $155 million deal the A.C.C. had recently signed. The Big East would not attract that type of deal now. Other details will need to be worked out before the seven colleges leave, including the fate of the Big East tournament, held each year at Madison Square Garden. Would the seven colleges, all Catholic institutions, retain the Big East name? What would become of the Big East’s remaining members? This week Aresco has pushed to appease the seven colleges, but after adding too many universities with too little appeal, it may be too late.

Big East Conference
College Athletics
Basketball (College)
Football (College)
Georgetown University
Villanova University
St John's University
Marquette University
Seton Hall University
DePaul University


Giants Coach Becomes a Zinger Magnet on His Way to the Playoffs

Abstract: EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — In four short months, Ben McAdoo, a quiet man from a tiny town in western Pennsylvania who had never been a head coach at any level in any sport until taking over the Giants this season, has become something of a cult figure. And it has little to do with football. On social media, especially during Giants games, nothing about him seems to go unnoticed — not his retro hairdo, baggy sweatshirt, bushy mustache, outsize headgear or the multicolored sheet the size of a New Jersey diner menu that he holds over his face when calling plays. For all this, McAdoo is extravagantly praised, teased, glorified, impersonated and parodied. Why? “I’m not really sure,” said McAdoo, who is better known on Twitter as McAdeity, McAdauntless, McAdozy, McAdaring (he likes to gamble on fourth down). It being Twitter, he’s also been called McAdope and McAdork. But the greatest proof of relevance is imitation. At the Giants’ final regular-season game last week at FedEx Field, Washington’s home, a 12-year-old boy showed up in the first row dressed like McAdoo. He also had on a fake mustache and was holding an extra-wide play-call sheet complete with an attached yellow Post-it (because the real McAdoo likes to add six or seven sticky notes as an addendum). The impostor was Peter Costigan, a sixth grader from Wayne, Pa., who comes from a family of Giants fans. When an ESPN reporter, Jordan Raanan, tweeted a picture of Costigan, calling him “Little Ben McAdoo,” the post was liked or retweeted thousands of times. Fox Sports, which was broadcasting the game, trained its cameras on Costigan as well and put up several comparisons of Costigan and McAdoo. McAdoo, who has a good sense of humor, had high-fived Costigan before the game. “The fact is Peter does look like Ben McAdoo, and we thought we’d create a fun memory,” Peter Costigan’s father, Mike, said in a telephone interview. “It was a way to celebrate the Giants being in the playoffs, and we knew the players would get a chuckle out of it.” And indeed several Giants approached Peter. “Players kept coming over and saying, ‘Coach McAdoo, why aren’t you on the field?’” Peter said Thursday. The McAdoo costume was made of a $7 toy mustache bought on the internet, black duct tape molded to look like a headset mouthpiece, headphones that came with the family minivan and, to resemble the play-call sheet, a poster board decorated with items snipped from a diner menu. Before the game, in the stadium parking lot, Peter counted 93 Giants and Redskins fans who stopped him to take selfies. “It didn’t matter which team they were rooting for, they would just say, ‘Hey, it’s mini-McAdoo,’” Peter said. Inside FedEx Field, it seemed as if every security guard took a picture of Peter. At least one high-profile person, however, probably won’t be dressing as McAdoo. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey recently asked on WFAN radio in New York, “Do you think Ben McAdoo will get a real haircut if they make the playoffs?” Odell Beckham’s Hands Are Great, But His Feet Are Lethal Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. has compiled a highlight reel of spectacular grabs. But what sets Beckham apart is not that he holds onto the football. It’s what happens after the ball is in his hands. Later, Christie, who is a Dallas Cowboys fan, referred to McAdoo’s “haircut and cheesy mustache.” McAdoo, 39, whose team will face the Green Bay Packers in a wild-card game on Sunday, tends to brush off talk, good or bad. He says he works from 16 to 18 hours a day devising game plans and practice regimens, yet he seems aware of what is said and written about him, at least in mainstream news media outlets. He also has a dry wit and is not easily rattled. When he was asked about Christie a day after the critique, as the Giants were preparing for a game against the Detroit Lions and their quarterback Matt Stafford, McAdoo paused and deadpanned: “Again, Matt Stafford does a nice job.” “Is Stafford your stylist?” a reporter pressed. McAdoo did not flinch. “They’re playing well up front on defense,” he said of the Lions. “They can get after the quarterback.” (The Giants won, 17-6.) The social media community has not been drawn exclusively to McAdoo’s sideline presence. Since all Giants post- and pregame news conferences can now be viewed on multiple websites, it has been easy for fans to chronicle a collection of McAdoo-isms. McAdoo’s proclivity for referring to a football as the Duke, as in “We’ve got to protect the Duke,” became a rallying cry painted on banners at tailgate parties. The phrase got more notice when McAdoo’s players began parroting it in daily briefings with reporters. This most likely happened because McAdoo, who regularly instructs his team in football history, knows that N.F.L. footballs are embossed with “The Duke,” in homage to the former Giants owner Wellington Mara, whose boyhood nickname was Duke. McAdoo also speaks of a desire for the team to be “heavy handed,” and likes players who “get their jersey dirty.” He encourages his charges to keep their focus on what they can control, or as McAdoo characteristically puts it: “Farm your own land.” And as almost every Giants fan, or McAdoo fan, must know by now, almost any question to McAdoo, regardless of the topic, might elicit this response: “We want a team that is sound, smart and tough, and committed to discipline and poise.” With the Giants’ record a surprising 11-5 this season, by next year there may be several McAdoo copycats on N.F.L. sidelines. They won’t be 12 years old, but newly hired, first-year head coaches who will be, so to speak, in McAdoo’s image. If the internet can handle that.

Giants
Coaches
Playoffs
Ben McAdoo
Football


An Uproar on the Web Over $2 Fee by Verizon

Abstract: The Web lit up with howls of protest on Thursday as word of a planned new Verizon Wireless fee spread wildly — and somewhat inaccurately. The $2 fee, which takes effect Jan. 15, will apply to people who make a one-time credit or debit card payment of their monthly bill on the phone or online. Subscribers who write checks or have the company charge their credit or debit cards or deduct from their bank accounts each month will not have to pay the new fee. But Verizon customers nonetheless flooded Twitter with denunciations of the company, setting up online petitions and vowing to use paper to cost the company more money than it would raise through the new fee. Others noted that the people who tended to pay at the last minute were often those who lived paycheck to paycheck. The outsize reaction in many ways reflects the year that is now concluding. The economy has not improved much, consumers are fresh off their victory in getting Bank of America to rescind its own move to levy a small new monthly fee and airlines and other companies continue to ask customers to pay à la carte for goods and services that were once part of the standard price. Then there was Verizon, making the announcement in the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s and calling its new charge a “convenience” fee. “These fees are going to cover the costs of those last-minute payments,” said David Samberg, a Verizon spokesman. “We don’t want anyone to have to pay this.” So how can customers avoid it? In addition to using a check, automated bank transfer and credit or debit card, Verizon customers can also pay at a Verizon store, by money order, or by using a bank or other company’s online bill payment service. They may also use a Verizon gift or rebate card, or make a last-minute, one-time phone or Web payment by handing over their bank account number and their bank’s routing number. Verizon Wireless followed other Internet service providers, including Comcast, that have decided to charge fees to customers for certain phone payments. AT&T, Verizon’s biggest rival, has not announced plans to impose charges for electronic payments and a company spokesman declined to speculate on whether it might do so. Gerry Purdy, a principal analyst with MobileTrax, a market research firm, said it made sense that Verizon was charging for over-the-phone payments, because carriers typically must pay a third-party service to handle those transactions. But Internet payments do not require a third party, he said. “That’s the one that surprises me, because most people won’t charge you for paying on the Internet,” Mr. Purdy said. “When you book a plane ticket online, you don’t get charged a fee.” Verizon may be imposing a $2 fee on one-time online payments to pressure customers to enroll in an automatic payment option, Mr. Purdy said, because it creates a higher probability that the payments will come in on time. Mr. Samberg would not say how many people would have paid the fee this month if it existed now. A study conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research, a firm that focuses on financial services and payments, found that 23 percent of adults make a last-minute payment to a biller once a month. Those who would pay it today are people like Grace Lusich, an administrative assistant in San Jose, Calif. She no longer has a bank account after bad experiences with what she believed were unfair overdraft charges. Now, she uses a prepaid debit card from Walmart called the MoneyCard. “A lot of people in America who are having a hard time paying their bills need a little leeway to wait for the money to come in,” she said. She said she called Verizon each month once she knew her paycheck had been direct-deposited onto her card. Then she makes the payment without ever talking to a human being. “If you go into their store and an associate helps you, they’re not charging you for that,” she said. “But with the phone, no one is helping me. It’s all automated. And they’re going to accept personal checks, which will cost them more in the long run?” Mr. Samberg, the Verizon spokesman, said he did not have a breakout of Verizon’s costs for processing various payments. Those one-time payments cost Verizon money since it must pay merchant fees to card companies and others. The amount it costs Verizon to accept cards in stores could be less because of quirks in how the card companies set fees. It may also be willing to swallow the costs of accepting cards in its stores in exchange for the opportunity to sell upgrades to people who come in to pay their bills. “They are punishing people who need to wait until the last second,” said David O’Neill, who recently lost his job at a Borders bookstore that closed. He is a former Verizon Wireless customer but took to Twitter anyway on Thursday to argue that the company’s move helps the 1 percent get richer, since it rewards Verizon shareholders. “We hope it’s not the case that people are forced into paying this,” said Mr. Samberg. “You look at all of the options and choose the one that is best and easiest for you.”

Verizon Communications Inc
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Customer Relations
Wireless Communications