Northwest Looks to Delta to Revive Merger Talks

Abstract: Northwest Airlines has asked Delta Air Lines if it would like to restart merger talks, despite the inability of the carriers’ pilots to agree on how to merge their all-important seniority lists. The latest discussion between Northwest and Delta was tentative, a person with knowledge of the situation said, and it appeared Friday that the ball was in the court of Richard H. Anderson, Delta’s chief executive. A Delta spokeswoman, Betsy Talton, declined to comment. Merging without the approval of pilots could anger the airlines’ most powerful work group and make it difficult to run a combined airline efficiently. But the threat might help push the pilots back into negotiations. Dave Stevens, chairman of the Northwest chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association, said in a statement late Friday: “In order for any airline merger to be successful, the pilots of both groups must be involved and agree to the terms. We will reserve our judgment and support until the economic and contractual elements of an agreement have been negotiated.” Delta and Northwest had hoped to obtain a new contract covering the roughly 11,000 pilots and an agreement on merging their two seniority lists before going forward with a merger. In exchange, the managements had offered higher pay and a stake in the combined carriers. The terms called for the combined airline to be known as Delta, to be based in Atlanta and to be run by Mr. Anderson. Douglas M. Steenland, Northwest’s chief executive, had agreed to step aside if the carriers combined. Some airline investors, hoping merged carriers would be more profitable, started urging combinations even before Delta and Northwest emerged from bankruptcy last year. Seniority governs pay, schedule and many other elements of a pilot’s career. Merging two lists is always divisive. More than two years after US Airways merged with America West Airlines, pilots are still fighting over a combined list. That has prevented the company from operating as a single airline. The person knowledgeable about the new discussion said Northwest essentially asked Delta, “Hey, do we still want to do this? Is there still an appetite?” Whether to proceed without pilot cooperation “would have to be part of the discussion,” the person said. Mr. Anderson has promised that any merger would improve job security at Delta and that he would not do a deal unless “the seniority of our people is protected.” Proceeding without cooperation from pilots could invite their opposition. Some in Congress already oppose big airline mergers, concerned that they will reduce competition and lead to higher fares. Together or alone, carriers face difficult times. Lawrence W. Kellner, chief executive of Continental Airlines, warned workers a week ago that airlines’ furious efforts to raise fares in recent weeks were not going very well. Carriers need higher fares to cover increased fuel costs. “Unfortunately, recent ticket price increases haven’t been matched by low-cost carriers, meaning that recent domestic price hikes have resulted in very little revenue to us,” Mr. Kellner told workers in a weekly voice-mail message. The slowing economy, meanwhile, could soon damp demand for air travel. Some analysts are expecting billions of dollars in airline losses this year after two years of profits at most carriers. United Airlines and Delta each announced plans this month to ground 15 to 20 planes to reduce capacity, and Delta said it would reduce employment by 2,000. Northwest is also looking at reducing its fleet.

Pilots
Northwest Airlines Corp
Delta Air Lines Inc
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures
Labor
Airlines and Airplanes


2 Dead in Shooting at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas

Abstract: Two airmen were shot to death on Friday at an Air Force base in San Antonio, in what officials described as a murder-suicide, putting the base on lockdown for almost two hours as law enforcement agencies made sure there were no other shooters or victims. The shooting at Lackland Air Force Base prompted a swarming response from base personnel, local law enforcement agencies and the F.B.I., demonstrating the vigilance learned in the wake of terrorist attacks and other mass shootings, like the killing of 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009 by an Army major. The F.B.I. said Friday that its initial conclusion was that the killings at Lackland were not an act of terrorism. Brig. Gen. Robert D. LaBrutta, commander of Joint Base San Antonio, a collection of installations that includes Lackland, said the base was basically safe, but added, “We have some one-offs, and that’s what I would consider this, a one-off.” Officials said the dead airmen were male, but declined to identify them, give their ranks, offer a motive or say what the relationship was between them. They said more information would be released 24 hours after the next of kin had been notified. The Associated Press and other news organizations reported that the gunman killed his commander and then himself. At a news conference, General LaBrutta said that at Lackland, like many military bases, people are not allowed to carry firearms unless they are using them for training, or are part of a security force. He said two Glock pistols were found at the scene. The military generally does not use Glock handguns; the standard Air Force side arm is made by Beretta. General LaBrutta would not say whether the guns belonged to one or both of the men who were killed. All newly enlisted airmen go to Lackland for basic training. The shooting occurred in what is known as the Medina Annex, a short distance from the main body of the base, in a building that houses classrooms, a theater and offices. The first 911 call about the shooting was made at 8:40 a.m. local time, and base security officers “were in that building within three minutes of that call,” and had found the bodies within eight minutes, General LaBrutta said. The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, the San Antonio police and fire departments, and other agencies soon descended on the base. Even after the agencies were confident that the only shooter had been found, the base remained on lockdown as officers completed a room-by-room search.

San Antonio
Joint Base San Antonio
Military Bases
Murders and Homicides
US Military
Suicide
Lackland Air Force Base San Antonio


Myanmar: 47 Government Troops Killed by Rebels

Abstract: Clashes between Myanmar troops and ethnic Kokang rebels near the Chinese border have left 47 government soldiers dead and 73 wounded, state news media said Friday. The newspaper The Global New Light of Myanmar said Friday there had been more than 13 clashes in the last several days between government troops and Kokang rebels near Laukkai close to the border, with the government carrying out five airstrikes. The number of rebel casualties was not immediately known. The newspaper said the fighting was serious enough for the government to inform China, which is concerned because clashes force civilians to flee across the border. The report said a Kokang renegade group led by the former Kokang leader Phone Kya Shin attacked military stations with the objective of capturing Laukkai, capital of the self-administered Kokang zone near the border more than 500 miles northeast of Yangon. The newspaper quoted local residents as saying that Kokang rebels had infiltrated the area by working in plantations and had attacked with rocket launchers and antiaircraft guns.

China
Myanmar,Burma
Murders and Homicides


China’s Non-Communist Parties Lend an Air of Pluralism

Abstract: BEIJING — For those accustomed to the partisan jousting that frequently paralyzes Washington, the feel-good unity displayed last week by the leaders of China’s eight so-called democratic parties was eye-opening. One after another, the men and women who head political organizations with names like the China Democratic League and the China Association for Promoting Democracy took turns extolling the nation’s economic progress, the leadership’s unswerving commitment to environmental protection and, above all, the perfection of single-party rule. “We will strive to construct a beautiful China, to contribute wisdom and strength for building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and achieve a new victory for socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Chen Zhu, chairman of the Chinese Peasants and Workers Democratic Party, said during a news conference. It coincided with the opening of the National People’s Congress, the annual gathering of 3,000 handpicked delegates who invariably approve the legislation put before them by the Communist Party leadership. Largely invisible much of the year, China’s non-Communist parties are thrust to the fore each March for a display of what the official news media calls China’s system of “multiparty cooperation and political consultation.” The news conference, held in a gilded meeting room in the Great Hall of the People, is an Orwellian affair, with party leaders referring to the wonders of “democratic centralization,” heaping praise on the Communist Party and then answering fawning questions from the state media. The parties, some created by Communist strategists during the civil war of the 1940s, bear little resemblance to political organizations elsewhere. For example, they cannot field candidates for public office. Their activities, which include banquets, conventions and the occasional overseas state visit, are wholly financed by the Communist Party. “They are fake parties, just a mirage created for the benefit of ordinary people, although most people are not fooled,” said Jin Zhong, editor in chief of Open Magazine, a Hong Kong political journal. “People who join them have a fantasy that they can influence the Communist Party.” Such sentiments are vehemently rejected by the organizations’ leaders, who say the system works just fine, providing the government with detailed proposals and measured advice from those outside the Communist Party. Asked whether he hoped China might one day embrace multiparty elections, Wan Exiang, chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, said such questions betrayed a Western fixation with electoral democracy. The Chinese people, he said, crave the growth and stability that have accompanied single-party rule — or at least the last three decades of relative placidity that followed the 30 years of social chaos and economic stagnation wrought by the Communist Party under Mao Zedong. “We once had more than 300 parties in the early stage of the Republic of China, and the consequences were rivalry among political parties and warlords, and national disintegration,” he said. “China could never have obtained such brilliant economic success today if we followed that kind of political system.” The parties are not entirely empty shells. They raise money for college scholarships, study social problems and issue detailed reports that are submitted to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the advisory body that meets alongside the National People’s Congress, which ends on Sunday. Recent proposals that party delegates have offered include a call to save historic wartime relics in Chongqing and a call to improve ophthalmological care for residents of China’s far west. Zhou Zhongxiao, 30, an executive at an online dating site in Beijing, said his participation in the China Democratic League had provided an outlet for promoting his pet project: the preservation of traditional wedding rituals. “We provide a useful service by helping the ruling party govern the country,” he said, adding with impatience, “Why does a party always have to be seeking political power?” Managed and financed by the Communist Party, the alternative parties are in some ways an ingenious attempt to neutralize would-be opponents among the educated urban elite while parrying critics who describe China as a single-party dictatorship. Like China’s state-run trade unions and officially sanctioned religious organizations, the parties are the handiwork of the United Front Work Department, the party apparatus that seeks to co-opt segments of society that could one day congeal into an organized opposition. Just to be safe, the Communist Party “lends” some of its members to the eight democratic parties. In recent years, those daring to try to establish truly independent political parties were promptly jailed on charges of subversion. Formed in the years before the Communists came to power, the parties fought against the Japanese and later sought a peaceful resolution to war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army and Mao’s rebels. When a victorious Mao called on the eight parties to join his inaugural consultative conference, they obliged, only to be swiftly subsumed by the Communist leadership. The arrangement has had its hiccups. In 1957, after Mao encouraged public criticism during his Hundred Flowers Campaign and then persecuted those who took the bait, the parties were viciously suppressed. Revived after Mao’s death in 1976, the parties have grown to more than 700,000 members, up from 170,000 in the mid-1980s. The Communist Party’s membership, by contrast, exceeds 80 million. Joining one of the democratic parties is not easy. Prospective members must be recommended by at least two current party members, but more important they must hail from the so-called intelligentsia — academics, scientists and artists — or China’s growing entrepreneurial class. In addition to providing the Communist Party with a vehicle for assimilating would-be adversaries, the parties give their members an ego boost, opportunities for career advancement and perhaps a chance to hobnob at the annual consultative congress in Beijing, said Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong. said Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong. “For a segment of the political elite that does not want to join the Communist Party, it can be an attractive way to get ahead,” he said. Many members agree. Wang Tongchun, 37, an advertising executive from the coastal Jiangsu Province, said his time as a member of the China Democratic National Construction Association had been a networking bonanza. “It gives you social status and a sense of belonging,” he said, all for dues of about $16 a year. Others have found the experience less fulfilling. Liu Ming, 33, a lawyer and self-described liberal dreamer from the city of Changsha in Hunan Province, said he wanted to get involved in politics but had avoided the Communist Party “because I wanted a clean conscience.” Still, he complained that membership in the China Association for Promoting Democracy had yet to provide any opportunities for advancing his passion for judicial reform. “I still feel like I’m a lone voice in the wilderness,” he said.

China
Beijing
Democracy
Mao Zedong
Chiang Kai-shek
National People's Congress China
Communist Party of China
Economy
Communism


Dellin Betances and Andrew Miller Are Competing for Yankees’ Closer Spot

Abstract: TAMPA, Fla. — Whoever ends up in the closer’s role for the Yankees, the shadow of Mariano Rivera, constructed over 17 nearly impeccable seasons, still looms. That is not to say, though, that the team’s two leading candidates, Dellin Betances and Andrew Miller, are not capable of casting shadows of their own. The right-handed Betances and the left-handed Miller, who are expected to pitch the eighth and ninth innings for the Yankees between them, stand large when they stand on the mound: Betances is listed at 6 feet 8 inches while Miller is a shade less imposing at 6-7. Whether or not the Yankees’ embrace of the outsize is an organizational ethos, it seamlessly extends to their pitching staff. Miller and Betances are joined by starters C. C. Sabathia and Michael Pineda, each standing 6-7. Among the relievers in camp hunting for a roster spot are Chris Martin, a 6-8 right-hander who pitched for Colorado last season, and Tyler Webb, a 6-6 left-hander. “I was taught the bigger, the better,” General Manager Brian Cashman said. “It doesn’t always play out that way, but I like big power pitchers, so I do have a lot of those types, and I’ve always gravitated to those types.” Taller pitchers have the advantage of throwing with an atypical arm angle and releasing the ball closer to home plate, and a sharper downward plane leaves less room on the bat for contact. The one disadvantage is that bigger men are typically less agile, making it challenging for them to repeat their deliveries. “It might take us a little longer for us to figure out our bodies,” said the 210-pound Miller, who is gangly compared with the 260-pound Betances. “But if you can find a way to get over the plate often enough, it’s something that’s going to work for you.” The competition between Betances, 26, and Miller, 29, is interesting in part because their height, as well as the fact that they began their professional careers in 2006, is about all they have in common. Betances, a Yankees fan while growing up in Manhattan and an eighth-round draft pick, blossomed unexpectedly last year, his first full season in the majors. Miller, a native of Gainesville, Fla., had a stellar collegiate career at North Carolina and was selected by Detroit sixth over all in the 2006 draft, one pick before the Los Angeles Dodgers chose Clayton Kershaw. Miller made his major league debut that year. Image Andrew Miller was the premier free-agent reliever this off-season. Credit Lynne Sladky/Associated Press Miller struggled to establish himself as a starting pitcher, bouncing to Florida and Boston, where he was moved to the bullpen and began to flourish. He developed into an excellent setup man for the Red Sox and then solidified Baltimore’s bullpen when the Orioles acquired him last summer on the way to winning the American League East. The Yankees landed Miller , the premier free-agent reliever on the market this off-season, with a four-year, $36 million offer, although Houston is thought to have offered him $40 million and others made competitive bids. “Obviously, I got to play in Boston the last few years,” Miller said. “Playing in front of these fan bases and the history and the expectations are situations that I not only thrived in but I’ve also really enjoyed. The Yankees offer that as much as anybody anywhere in any sport. So an opportunity to play for this organization, an opportunity to play at home in spring training and to stay on the East Coast, as well as they offered me a great contract.” He added with a smile, “I’d be lying to say that wasn’t part of it.” Manager Joe Girardi indicated he would have plenty to consider over the next six weeks, one possibility being interchangeable roles for Miller and Betances, with a game’s circumstance dictating when to use the left-hander or the right-hander. “It would not be my first choice, but it’s something you can definitely think about,” Girardi said. “I would like to have it ironed out before we leave.” For 20 years, the back of the Yankees’ bullpen has been the least of their managers’ worries. John Wetteland, the closer when the Yankees won the World Series in 1996, gave way to Rivera, whom David Robertson succeeded superbly last season. But Cashman said the Yankees did not want to pay Robertson’s price on the free-agent market, which they expected to be $12 million per year. ( Robertson ended up signing a four-year, $46 million contract with the Chicago White Sox, and the Yankees gained a draft pick as compensation.) Pitching meaningful innings in Yankee Stadium can be an unforgiving proposition for players who turn out to have thin skin. That makes Betances grateful to have had a miserable 2012 season in the minor leagues, when he had a 6.44 E.R.A., almost entirely as a starter. He went to the Arizona Fall League and discovered a new role — reliever — and a new joy for the game. “I had never struggled the way I did that year, and it was hard,” said Betances, who was 5-0 with a 1.40 E.R.A. last season and made the All-Star team as a rookie. “You have to have a short memory, which is something that I’ve learned and I’m still learning. It’s hard sometimes when you give up the lead and you dwell on that overnight.” Miller has taken some steps to prepare for his transition to New York. The bushy beard he had in Boston is gone, as are the long hair and the soul patch he wore in Baltimore. He is now cleanshaven, with a buzz cut. The more daunting expectations concern the ninth inning. Although Rivera has been retired for a year, Miller and Betances said they understood that he had left a standard, even if it is not an entirely realistic one. “He might be the best that ever was, and nobody wants to be compared to that,” said Miller, who in high school did not like being compared to Randy Johnson, the model for tall, left-handed pitchers. “The fans get spoiled in a sense when a guy is so good and makes it so automatic. We’re human, and not everybody can be as good as those guys who make it seem automatic. They’re special people, and we have a special place for them — the Hall of Fame.” Still, with so many what-ifs, the Yankees could clearly use someone able to fill Rivera’s shoes with more than big feet. They will need someone to stand tall.

Dellin Betances
Yankees
Mariano Rivera
David Robertson
Baseball


At Milky Way’s Center, Scientists Find Big Bubbles of Energy

Abstract: Something big is going on at the center of the galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they don’t know what it is. A group of scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The bubbles, they said at a news conference and in a paper to be published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal , extend 25,000 light years up and down from each side of the galaxy and contain the energy equivalent to 100,000 supernova explosions. “They’re big,” said Doug Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of the team that discovered them. The source of the bubbles is a mystery. One possibility is that they are fueled by a wave of star births and deaths at the center of the galaxy. Another option is a gigantic belch from the black hole known to reside, like Jabba the Hutt , at the center of the Milky Way. What it is apparently not is dark matter , the mysterious something that astronomers say makes up a quarter of the universe and holds galaxies together. “Wow,” said David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who was not involved in the work. “And we think we know a lot about our own galaxy,” Dr. Spergel added, noting that the bubbles were almost as big as the galaxy and yet unsuspected until now. Jon Morse, head of astrophysics at NASA headquarters, said, “This shows again that the universe is full of surprises.” One of the most surprised was Dr. Finkbeiner. A year ago he was part of a group led by Gregory Dobler of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., that said it had discerned the existence of a mysterious fog of high-energy particles buzzing around the center of the Milky Way . The particles manifested themselves as a haze of extra energy after all the known sources of gamma rays — the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation — had been subtracted from Fermi data that had recently been made public. At the time, Dr. Finkbeiner and his colleagues speculated that the haze was produced by dark matter. The center of the galaxy is home to all manner of wild and woolly high-energy phenomena, including a gigantic black hole and violently spinning pulsars, but cosmological theories also suggest that dark matter would be concentrated there. Collisions of dark matter particles, the theory goes, could produce showers of gamma rays. But in the follow-up analysis, the haze — besides being bigger than Dr. Finkbeiner and his colleagues had thought — turned out to have sharp boundaries, like, well, a bubble. Dark matter, according to the prevailing theory, should be more diffuse. “Dark matter has been there billions of years,” Dr. Finkbeiner explained. “If something has been going on for billions of years, you wouldn’t expect a sharp edge.” He and the other scientists said this did not mean that dark matter was not there clogging the center of the galaxy, but that it would be harder to see.

Milky Way Galaxy
Stars and Galaxies
Dark Matter (Astronomy)
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Science and Technology


For Casual Crowds, Long Island Vintners’ Second Labels

Abstract: When the number of guests at a party or a barbecue threatens to overwhelm the wine budget, second labels can come to the rescue. A few Long Island vintners sell their second-best wines under second-label programs, generally for under $20. I customarily equate second labels, which vintners sometimes call second wines, with restaurants’ carafe wines. Second labels usually signify wines that for various vineyard and cellar reasons fail to meet producers’ highest standards for quality and style, but are suitable for early, casual consumption. They are for drinking, not thinking. At a minimum, they should be serviceable, pleasurable and, if possible, not too far in quality from their superior siblings. Earlier this month I tasted Bridge Lane wines from Lieb Cellars , in Mattituck and Cutchogue; Collina wines from Macari Vineyards , in Mattituck; and the Richmond Creek series from Osprey’s Dominion , in Peconic. Lieb’s standout was the charming, flavorsome 2012 Bridge Lane cabernet franc rosé ($19). (Bridge Lane is a small street bordering a Lieb vineyard.) Its 2011 Bridge Lane chardonnay ($15) was vivacious. The 2011 Bridge Lane merlot blanc ($17) was amiable — a white blend of merlot and pinot blanc for late-afternoon sipping. And the 2007 Bridge Lane merlot ($15) was soft and voluptuous. Macari’s light nonvintage Collina chardonnay was lemony and refreshing ($13), and the rustic Collina nonvintage merlot ($13) had a punch. (Collina — Italian for “hill” — takes its name from the Mattituck Hills, the bluff above Long Island Sound, on the north side of Macari’s property.) Osprey’s Dominion’s spicy 2009 Richmond Creek merlot ($14), offering a sweet aroma, was easy-drinking. (Richmond Creek borders Osprey’s Dominion’s southern edge.) The quite-light 2011 Richmond Creek cabernet franc ($13) was extra pleasant when slightly chilled. At $12, the fresh, smooth, satisfying nonvintage Red Blend was a best buy.


A Rocky Mountain Low

Abstract: ENCAMPMENT, Wyo. — We do not have to own land because, collectively with our fellow Americans, we possess millions of acres. Much of it is in the romantic West, where deer, elk and antelope can be harvested. For me this year, the quarry was mule deer. From my home in southern Illinois, it is a two-day drive, uphill, to Laramie, Wyo., at the base of the Rockies. Well west of there from my camp near the Continental Divide, I intended to pluck a deer from my domain by bow or gun, all the while loving the lonely solitude and magnificent vistas of the mountains. The plan worked well, and after unsuccessful stalks on two nice bucks during the bow-hunting portion of my hunt, a large doe literally dropped into my path as I was leaving the timber on my last day. A close-range rifle shot, a short drag to the truck, and a quick self-processing back in camp sent me home after 10 days hunting with delicious table fare, double freezer-bagged and chilling in my cooler. Another exhilarated but contented hunter left the Rockies with that mixture of regret and longing for home so familiar for those of us who go there. But as wonderful as the high mountain hunt was, all was not good out West. I came here to see the beautiful aspen, so yellow they seem to emit sunlight on the endless deep-green slopes. They were here, but the green palette was marred with rusty brown blotches of death. In the areas I hunted in southeastern Wyoming, near the Colorado border, and in Colorado as well, a pine bark beetle epidemic was effectively destroying the lodge pole pines and spruce that make up the mountain forests. More than a million acres in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming have been affected. A wide view of any slope in this area portends a bleak future for the Rocky Mountain forests. Dead trees stand next to living ones, but on almost every trunk are the small, telltale protrusions called pitch tubes that indicate beetle infestation. The trees are producing the defensive, sticky resin that, in younger, more vigorous trees, would repel the boring invaders. But these trees are not young or vigorous. Kim Vogel, public information officer for the United States Forest Service in Steamboat Springs, Colo., is in the middle of the fight. But she does not consider it a fight — she says it is nature. “We were due for one of these,” Vogel said. “Our forests are old, and natural history evidence suggests that these events occur every 100 to 300 years.” Additional culprits are the warmer winters and the drought conditions recently afflicting the inner ranges of the Rockies, allowing the beetles to proliferate in numbers that can simply overwhelm the forests and render the trees defenseless. Even some of the young ones that normally have plenty of sap to repel the pests cannot survive because the soil lacks adequate moisture. On its Web site for the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests, the Forest Service states: “This epidemic cannot be stopped.” In areas with high tourism, like resorts and campgrounds, officials are spraying trees in an effort to control the infestations, but at nearly $30 a tree, it is unworkable for widespread control. Because of the massive size of the affected areas, nature will take its course. The next hazard may be fires. With enough heat and wind, fires could damage the forests’ future by wiping out the seedlings on the forest floor. Vogel said officials were already bracing for fires and their impact on human communities. “We are going to clear forests areas to create ‘speed bumps’ for control and enact large-scale removal of trees to protect human habitation and other valuable areas,” she said. The next few years will be a time of dynamic change for the Western forests. But change may not necessarily mean tragedy. It may simply be nature running its course. And who knows, the alterations may even make the hunting better.

Wyoming
Colorado
Forest Service
Forests and Forestry
Insects
Hunting and Trapping


Student, 21, With Autism Dies After She Chokes at Brooklyn School

Abstract: The investigator for the city schools is investigating the death of a 21-year-old student with autism who choked on a muffin at her school in Brooklyn at lunchtime on Tuesday. The student, Dyasha Smith, was nonverbal and wore diapers, according to her mother, Catherine Smith, 70, who took Dyasha in as a foster child when she was 3 and later adopted her. She said her daughter was supposed to have full-time supervision on the bus and at her school, Star Academy in Cobble Hill. She said she had told the school’s staff members that they needed to cut up her daughter’s food, because otherwise she would put too much in her mouth at once. “She will take a handful of something and put it in her throat and swallow it at once,” she said, adding, “She’s like a child, like a baby child.” After a school safety agent called 911 at 12:11 p.m., paramedics were called to the school, where they found a nurse performing CPR, according to a Fire Department employee who insisted on anonymity because he had not been given permission to speak. It was not clear if anyone performed the Heimlich maneuver. She was declared dead at New York Methodist Hospital. “If somebody was with this child, they could have been able to save her from choking,” Ms. Smith said, saying that she believed the school staff had been careless. “This child went to school healthy,” she added. It is the second time in a little over a year that the special commissioner of investigation for the school system has had to investigate the death of a student with autism. In October 2013, Avonte Oquendo , 14, slipped out an open door at his school in Queens, leading to months of searching. His remains were found in January. A report by the special commissioner of investigation found that Avonte’s mother had warned his teacher that he should be watched at all times because he “likes to run,” but that that information had not been shared with administrators. Ms. Smith said her daughter’s “individual education program,” the official document describing what a school should provide a student, called for one-to-one supervision. But a spokeswoman for the department declined to answer questions about what care was supposed to be provided, saying that it would be the subject of an inquiry by the special commissioner of investigation. Ms. Smith said that around lunchtime on Tuesday, she heard from another parent at the school, which is in the same building as the School for International Studies, that something had happened to her daughter. Ms. Smith said she started frantically calling the paraprofessional who was assigned to Dyasha Smith, who did not answer her phone. After about half an hour, a vice principal called her and told her that Ms. Smith had choked and that paramedics were trying to resuscitate her. Soon after, he called her again to tell her that her daughter was being taken to New York Methodist Hospital. When she got to the hospital, she was told that Ms. Smith had died. She said that her daughter’s neck was twisted and her hair and clothes were covered with vomit. Students at schools in the building said that when people in the basement-level cafeteria realized that something was wrong with Ms. Smith, someone ran to the first floor to get the nurse. On Wednesday morning, students said, a guidance counselor on the public address system asked for a moment of silence for Ms. Smith. Then two cards were passed through the school for students to sign, one for her family and another for the nurse.

Autism
Choking
Dyasha Smith
Star Academy
K-12 Education
Special education
Cobble Hill Brooklyn
NYC


Jamaican Sprinter Fails Drug Test

Abstract: Sherone Simpson, a Jamaican Olympic sprinter, was barred from her sport until Dec. 20 after testing positive for a banned stimulant. Simpson, a gold and silver medalist in the 4x100 relay, said she never intentionally took the stimulant, oxilofrone.

Sherone Simpson
Track and field
Doping
Jamaica


Haitian Family Gets Help From Neediest Cases Fund

Abstract: Last fall, Lou Louse Polynice, her two daughters, her father and eight other relatives slept on the floor of their Harlem apartment, wrapped in blankets and huddled together to stay warm. “It was freezing,” she said. “Sometimes I just cried.” The family, from Haiti, had thrown out almost everything they had, including their furniture, because of a bedbug infestation. Besides that, the smell of marijuana seeped under the door, and sounds of arguments echoed through the halls and through their thin walls. “I couldn’t raise my children there,” Ms. Polynice, 34, said. Now she and her relatives live in another apartment, in the Polo Grounds Towers in Harlem. But their problems are far from over. Her husband, Steve Gabriel, is still in Haiti, the efforts to secure a visa for him unsuccessful seven years after Ms. Polynice left the country. She is also trying to get a visa approved for her sister Laurianne and her daughter. Laurianne’s son died in the earthquake when their home in La Plaine, north of Port-au-Prince, was buried in rubble. Laurianne and her daughter were injured. Ms. Polynice was in the process of completing paperwork and paying fees for her husband, sister and niece, but, after the quake, with the American Embassy overrun with requests, everything seemed to come to a halt. Ms. Polynice’s efforts to get the process moving again have not been without cost, but money was already tight just for living expenses. Then there was the looming expense of buying new furniture. With her father, Wancite Polynice, 69, on disability and her sister Marie Wanta recovering from an illness, Ms. Polynice, who works at a check-cashing and small-loan company, is one of the household’s few sources of income. Ms. Polynice is also looking for another job to supply more income. “I ask for overtime,” she said. Anything extra to clothe and feed her daughters, Cinthia Destinville, 6, and Sabrina Georges, 13, she said, and to bring them closer to their father. (The number of people living in the apartment has declined to eight, after one of Ms. Polynice’s brothers and one sister, and two of her children, moved out.) Ms. Polynice’s father, Wancite Polynice, is a naturalized American citizen, and that helped ease the process by which she and three brothers and three sisters were able to leave Haiti, from 2000 to 2003. For now, she communicates by phone and text message with her sister and husband, whom she married in 2004. With tears in her eyes, she looked at her phone and recalled her husband’s most recent text: “Tu me manques,” he wrote, which means “I miss you” in French. “I didn’t reply back,” she said. “I couldn’t. I want him here to build our relationship.” In November, she flew to Haiti to visit them and to work on speeding up their move to America. But still, she said, “I feel like I’m not moving fast enough.” She did get help from one quarter, though. A social worker from the Children’s Aid Society , one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, used $1,380 in Neediest Cases money to buy two sets of bunk beds and three full-size mattresses for the Polynice family. Now each room is filled with beds: two of the three bedrooms have bunk beds for the children that sit no more than a foot away from a full-size bed for each mother. Mr. Polynice sleeps alone in a third room. And yet, Ms. Polynice said, their home remains empty without their relatives still in Haiti. “Our lives would be better with them,” she said. “They belong here.”

New York Times Neediest Cases Fund
Children's Aid Society
Philanthropy


Obama (as TV Salesman) Pushes Home Refinancing

Abstract: WASHINGTON — He is not a mortgage broker. But for a time on Thursday, President Obama seemed to be playing one on television, urging Americans not to miss out on rock-bottom refinancing rates. From his perch in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, the president donned his salesman’s hat and pitched the benefits — for you, and of course, for the American economy — of home mortgage rates at their lowest levels in 35 years. Seldom has the president sounded so much like the host of a late-night infomercial, stopping just shy of imploring people to call the toll-free number at the bottom of their television screens. “There are seven to nine million people across the country who right now could be taking advantage of lower mortgage rates,” Mr. Obama said, promising savings to average American families of $1,600 to $2,000 a year. “That is money in their pockets.” Having just returned to Washington from his first overseas presidential trip, where he negotiated with other world leaders over how to contain the global economic crisis and rewrite international banking rules, Mr. Obama pivoted to the domestic economy. The focus, vastly narrowed from his talks last week, was intended simply to draw attention to a government Web site that tells people if they are eligible to refinance their mortgages. “We hope that everybody takes advantage of it. The Web site is Makinghomeaffordable.gov — is that right?” Mr. Obama said, repeating the address five times in five minutes, in case his audience did not hear it the first few times. “So get on the Web site, find out what’s available.” The housing crisis is one of the critical fronts in the battle to steer the nation through its deep recession. Mr. Obama said new housing programs would be presented soon, after last month’s plan to provide $275 billion to help distressed homeowners, of which $75 billion would subsidize the mortgage industry to help borrowers avoid foreclosure. But he offered no details on Thursday as he reminded Americans to look into refinancing. To make his point, Mr. Obama invited eight people to the White House, all of whom live in the Virginia or Washington area. Their stories of refinancing were intended to serve as testimonials for the masses who have not already called their mortgage broker, whether they are in danger of foreclosure or simply looking for extra money. The Cruz family, Pedro and Luz, said they were at risk of losing their Virginia home after Mr. Cruz’s work as a mechanic began to fall off in the slumping economy. By refinancing, they said, they saved $700 a month. Similarly, the Haggray family, Jeffrey and Shelby, said they were able to consolidate a first and second mortgage on their Washington home by refinancing. They said they were able to reduce their monthly household expenses by $1,200, in part because they paid off a car loan and other credit card debt. “Everybody here represents families who have saved hundreds of dollars a month — thousands of dollars a year in some cases,” Mr. Obama said, looking at the guests he invited to the White House. The average rate on 30-year fixed mortgages was 4.87 percent on Thursday, slightly higher than the 4.78 percent last week. Still, it was the lowest level since 1971, which the president used to bolster his two-pronged argument for why refinancing is so important. First, families will have more money to spend, which will help the economy. If that happens, the values of homes is likely to rise, which will begin rehabilitating the beleaguered housing market that contributed significantly to the economic collapse. Fannie Mae reported refinancing $77 billion of mortgages in March, administration officials said, which was nearly twice the February amount. But in the flood of refinancing opportunities, Mr. Obama issued a warning for opportunists who were trying to make a quick buck. “We’re starting to see some scam artists out there who are contacting people,” Mr. Obama said. He added, “I just want everybody who is watching today to know that if somebody is asking you for money up front before they help you with your refinancing, it’s probably a scam.” The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, acknowledged the somewhat unusual presidential sales pitch. But he said drawing attention to refinancing had helped drive down mortgage rates to nearly record lows. When asked at his daily briefing whether the administration had further plans to encourage refinancing, Mr. Gibbs wondered aloud, saying: “Little snappy refinancing commercials you see late night?” There’s always the Home Shopping Network.

Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan


Joan Hinton, Physicist Who Chose China Over Atom Bomb, Is Dead at 88

Abstract: Joan Hinton, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, but spent most of her life as a committed Maoist working on dairy farms in China , died on Tuesday in Beijing. She was 88. The cause has not yet been determined, but she had an abdominal aneurysm, her son Bill Engst said. Ms. Hinton was recruited for the Manhattan Project in February 1944 while still a graduate student in physics at the University of Wisconsin. At the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., where she worked with Enrico Fermi, she was assigned to a team that built two reactors for testing enriched uranium and plutonium. When the first atom bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945, she and a colleague, riding a motorcycle, dodged Army jeep patrols and hid near a small hill about 25 miles from the blast point to witness the event. “We first felt the heat on our faces, then we saw what looked like a sea of light,” she told The South China Morning Post in 2008. “It was gradually sucked into an awful purple glow that went up and up into a mushroom cloud. It looked beautiful as it lit up the morning sun.” Ms. Hinton thought that the bomb would be used for a demonstration explosion to force a Japanese surrender. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she became an outspoken peace activist. She sent the mayors of every major city in the United States a small glass case filled with glassified desert sand and a note asking whether they wanted their cities to suffer the same fate. In 1948, alarmed at the emerging cold war, she gave up physics and left the United States for China, then in the throes of a Communist revolution she wholeheartedly admired. “I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to kill people,” she told National Public Radio in 2002. “I wanted to figure out how to let people have a better life, not a worse life.” In China she met her future husband, Erwin Engst, a Cornell-trained dairy-cattle expert, who went on to work on dairy farms as a breeder while she designed and built machinery. During the Cultural Revolution, they were editors and translators in Beijing. Ms. Hinton applied her scientific talents to perfecting a continuous-flow automatic milk pasteurizer and other machines. For the past 40 years, she worked on a dairy farm and an agricultural station outside Beijing, tending a herd of about 200 cows. Joan Chase Hinton was born on Oct. 20, 1921, in Chicago. Her father, Sebastian Hinton, was a patent lawyer who invented the jungle gym in 1920. Her mother, Carmelita Chase Hinton, founded the Putney School, a progressive coeducational secondary school in Putney, Vt., which Joan attended and where she excelled as a skier, qualifying for the United States Olympic Team that would have competed in the 1940 games had they not been canceled. After earning a bachelor’s degree in natural science from Bennington College in 1942, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a doctorate in physics in 1944. At Los Alamos, teams were assigned to theoretical and practical work. Ms. Hinton, assigned to practical work, piled beryllium blocks around the core of the site’s first reactor and constructed electronic circuits for the counters. According to Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg, the authors of “Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project,” she then helped design and construct the control rods for a second reactor. In her spare time, she played violin in a string quartet whose members included the physicists Edward Teller and Otto Frisch. After the war she studied with Mr. Fermi as a fellow at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago and then left for China, where she met and married Mr. Engst, who had been in the country since 1946 teaching agriculture and dairy-herd management. Mr. Engst died in 2003. In addition to her son Bill, of Marlboro, N.J., she is survived by another son, Fred Engst of Beijing; a daughter, Karen Engst of Pau, France; and four grandchildren. During the McCarthy era, Ms. Hinton’s name surfaced as a possible spy and spiller of nuclear secrets after she spoke at a peace conference in Beijing. Rear Adm. Ellis M. Zacharias denounced her in a 1953 article for Real magazine titled “The Atom Spy Who Got Away.” An illustration depicted her as a furtive blonde in a trench coat, taking notes as she observed a nuclear test. There was never any evidence to show that Ms. Hinton passed secrets or did any work as a physicist in China. She and her husband remained true believers in the Maoist cause. “It would have been terrific if Mao had lived,” Ms. Hinton told The Weekend Australian in 2008 during a trip to Japan. “Of course I was 100 percent behind everything that happened in the Cultural Revolution — it was a terrific experience.”

China
Manhattan Project
Hinton Joan
Deaths (Obituaries)
Communism (Theory and Philosophy)


Downpours Flood the Camps of Sri Lankan Refugees

Abstract: NEW DELHI — Downpours in northern Sri Lanka have flooded camps housing more than 250,000 people displaced by the fighting between the government and the Tamil Tigers, according to aid officials. The rain, which fell heavily for much of the afternoon on Saturday, sent rivers of muck cascading between tightly packed rows of flimsy shelters, overflowed latrines and sent hundreds of families scurrying for higher ground. The flooding raised fears for the safety of the displaced, who are being held in closed camps guarded by soldiers. Monsoon rains are expected to begin in little more than a month, and many aid groups worry that the hastily built camps will not survive the inundation. “If only three or four hours of rain cause this much chaos, only imagine what a full monsoon can cause,” said David White, country director for Oxfam. The camps occupy vast tracts of formerly forested land near the northern town of Vavuniya. Because the ground on which many of the camps were built was cleared of trees recently, the soil is soft and porous. It turns into mud almost instantly, making it nearly impossible to get trucks through to deliver food, water and medicine, aid officials said. Life in the camps was already tough, but the rain has made it almost unbearable, according to people who have visited the camps in the last 24 hours. The pegs holding down plastic tents have come loose, leaving some families without shelter. Latrines have collapsed, sending waste spilling into nearby rivers. Silt has clogged water treatment plants that are essential for providing drinking water and preventing the spread of waterborne disease. Groundviews, a citizen journalism Web site in Sri Lanka, published photographs that showed a grim scene of mud and squalor. Aid workers said that they were able to restore some services, like food deliveries, and get temporary shelters for families that lost their tents. The people in the camps are displaced ethnic Tamils. Most were trapped, along with the last fighters of the Tamil Tiger separatist group, on a narrow strip of land in northwestern Sri Lanka. Government troops wiped out the senior leadership of the rebel group after a fierce battle in May. Thousands of civilians died alongside the fighters, according to the United Nations. Those who survived fled to camps around Vavuniya, where they have been held ever since. The government has said it cannot allow the displaced people to go home because the areas they fled are sown with land mines, and because Tamil Tiger fighters remain hidden among them. Human rights organizations and several Western governments have criticized the government’s handling of the displaced, calling it tantamount to internment. As the heavy rains approach, the government will need to move much faster to get displaced people out of the camps, Mr. White said. The government has pledged to get most of the displaced out of the camps by the end of the year. “Really, we have run out of options and the only option that is left is to speed up the resettlement process,” Mr. White said.


In an Age of Terror, an Early Start on the Presidential Transition

Abstract: WASHINGTON — At a luxurious hilltop estate with sweeping vistas of the Hudson River, an adviser to President Obama began meeting on Wednesday with aides to the candidates vying to replace him to make the first, early preparations for the day when Mr. Obama leaves office. During a two-day gathering on the grounds of Kykuit , the manor built by John D. Rockefeller, they will attend breakout sessions, working lunches and dinners, and white-board-assisted discussions on how to execute a seamless transfer of power in an age when the threat of a terrorist attack like the one on Sept. 11, 2001, requires a fully functioning White House at all times. That need was brought home forcefully to President George W. Bush after 9/11, and his concern that his successor lose no time in taking the reins of power led to what is regarded as a model transition when it was time for him to leave office. Now, in an acknowledgment that its time is running out, the Obama White House has begun planning for the next transition, a task akin to a giant corporate merger, but one that involves the federal government’s 4,000 senior executives and a $4 trillion budget. And it will all be compressed into the 72 days between the election on Nov. 8 and the Jan. 20, 2017, inauguration. “It is the most complex, most difficult takeover on the planet today, and probably in history,” said Max Stier, the founder and president of the Partnership for Public Service, the nonprofit group that is hosting the retreat and has established a Center for Presidential Transition to guide the process from the outside. Mr. Stier declined to discuss the details of the meeting, including its participants, saying it was designed to provide a “safe space” for frank and confidential discussions about the transition process. But he said it was vital that the preparations begin now, removed from the chaos and rancor of the presidential campaign and the pressures of a White House bent on pressing Mr. Obama’s agenda while there is still time. “Campaigns were always loath to do early or aggressive pre-transition planning for fear that they will be accused of measuring the drapes or being presumptuous, so they ended up doing it at the last minute,” said Mr. Stier. “And the White House doesn’t want to be viewed as lame duck, but they also, as stewards of our government, really need to ensure that the handoff is as thorough and clean as possible.” Image Kykuit, the manor built by John D. Rockefeller, in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., in September 2007. Credit Alan Zale for The New York Times Mr. Obama began pressing his senior advisers to begin planning for the transition late last fall, telling them he wanted to take the process seriously and match or exceed the job done by Mr. Bush, to whom he and his team give high marks for a well-executed handover in January 2009. “He indicated that he wanted this to be a serious process,” Anita Decker Breckenridge, Mr. Obama’s deputy chief of staff for operations and the point person on the process, said in an interview. Ms. Decker Breckenridge was herself the beneficiary of memorandums, briefing books and other materials prepared by Mr. Bush’s departing staff members that she called invaluable when she began work on Mr. Obama’s first day in office as the chief of staff at the National Endowment for the Arts. The president “wants to do the same, if not better, for the next administration,” Ms. Decker Breckenridge said he told her. “This is just, at its core, good democracy, good government, and it’s critical.” Denis McDonough, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, convened a meeting of the cabinet last month to begin thinking through plans for the transition, and Ms. Decker Breckenridge has begun meeting weekly with Andrew Mayock, a senior adviser at the Office of Management and Budget, to compare notes and go through task lists. Mr. Mayock will attend this week’s meetings in New York. Fear as a Motivator It was fear that drove Mr. Bush to plan early and carefully for an effective transition after terrorist attacks disrupted his presidency less than eight months after he took office, according to the former senior officials who executed the transition plan. “We talked about 9/11 and, ‘Thank goodness it was Sept. 11 and not Feb. 11 because we would have been completely incapable of dealing with it then,’ ” said Clay Johnson III, a top Office of Management and Budget official in Mr. Bush’s White House who was a central player in his 2000 transition into office and his 2008 handover to Mr. Obama. “There are just so many more things that a new president has to be prepared for and say grace over now, it’s just the nature of our world.” Image Mr. Obama told senior advisors he wanted the transition process to match or exceed the job done by his predecessor, George W. Bush, right, on Inauguration Day in 2009. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times In its 2004 report, the independent 9/11 commission noted that Mr. Bush did not have his full complement of senior officials in place until six months after he took office, creating a dangerous situation that could be exploited in the future. Mr. Bush took the issue to heart, telling his top advisers as early as 2007 that they were to begin planning for the handover. “He told me this is the first transition in modern American history when the homeland has been under threat, and we need to make sure that it’s as good as it can possibly be,” said Joshua B. Bolten, his chief of staff at the time. Mr. Bolten, who had been a low-level aide to the elder President George Bush, recalled how his transition out of office in 1993 — like those of his predecessors — had been relatively “thin” and poorly planned. “It’s different now because we’re vulnerable, and we are essentially under attack here at home from terrorist elements,” Mr. Bolten said the younger Mr. Bush indicated. “There’s a particular moment of vulnerability as we switch over that terrorists may want to try to take advantage of.” Planning Ahead Mr. Bush’s advisers handed Mr. Obama’s aides detailed memorandums on policy issues and agency work plans after the election. They also collaborated on a tabletop exercise one week before Mr. Obama’s inauguration in which they postulated several simultaneous explosive attacks on American cities, and sat side by side in the Situation Room gaming out how the government would respond. Since then, Congress has enacted legislation to codify some elements of the Bush-Obama transition process. Mr. Obama signed the most recent revisions into law without fanfare last month, and they are guiding Ms. Decker Breckenridge’s lengthy to-do list. Image Anita Decker Breckenridge, left, the point person on the transition process, and Josh Earnest, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, departed the White House on Tuesday. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times The measure sets an early May deadline — six months before Election Day — for the president to create a transition coordinating council at the White House and a transition directors council for federal agencies, each of which must appoint a senior career employee to manage the handoff. Well before those dates, the National Archives and Records Administration — which by law must take custody of all the departing president’s records by 12:01 p.m. on Jan. 20 — has to begin copying a vast amount of digital material to its servers. The job has grown exponentially larger in recent years as the White House has become increasingly wired and data driven. (When Mr. Obama took office, there were fewer than a dozen laptops in use at the White House; now, nearly every employee has one.) While the Clinton administration produced roughly three terabytes — or trillions of bytes — of records, including 20 million emails, the Bush administration eight years later had to transfer about 80 terabytes, including 200 million emails. The archives administration projects that this president will turn over two and a half times as much: 200 terabytes. Recognizing the magnitude of the job, the White House resolved to begin the process, which involves copying the large files of email records, photographs and videos that have become a staple of White House communications during Mr. Obama’s term, several months earlier than in the past. It is expected to commence this month. Cautionary Tales A smooth transition has not always been a priority, and there are cautionary tales. In 2002, the General Accounting Office reported that “ damage, theft, vandalism and pranks ” had occurred at the White House during the transition from Bill Clinton to Mr. Bush, including several instances of computer keyboards missing their “W’s.” But presidents and candidates have a powerful interest in an effective transition. “You want to protect the presidency as an institution, and you also want to use transition as part of your legacy — you want to go out well,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, whose 2015 book, “Before the Oath,” dissects the 2008 transition. “For the campaigns, the impetus comes from wanting to be able to govern on Day 1. The beginning of an administration is when you have the greatest opportunity to bring about change but the least capacity to figure out how to do it.” Being Ready It is not yet clear, however, how much the presidential campaigns are prioritizing the transition. Hillary Clinton, who has not yet selected anyone to lead transition planning, sent a midlevel policy staffer to this week’s meetings. Bernie Sanders tapped Michaeleen Crowell, his Senate chief of staff, among others, to participate. Gov. John Kasich of Ohio dispatched Kerry Knott, who served as chief of staff to Dick Armey, a former House majority leader, to attend and serve as the point person for transition preparations. Michael Glassner, Donald J. Trump’s national political director, was also planning to attend. Officials for Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Ted Kaufman, a former senator of Delaware, who introduced legislation enacted in 2010 governing presidential transitions and who helped design the 2016 law, said savvy candidates would take the issue seriously. “It was clear to me that you couldn’t wait until Election Day and leave yourself with basically two months to do this — you had to plan way in advance,” he said. “Anybody who is running knows that your first term is when you’re going to get done 90 percent of what you’re going to get done — second terms are to be survived — and the first 100 days is when you are going to accomplish most of it. So you have to be ready.”

Terrorism
White House
President of the United States
2016 Presidential Election
Barack Obama
George W Bush
Appointments and Executive Changes


Citizenship for Polish Hero of American Revolution

Abstract: WASHINGTON (AP) — Gen. Casimir Pulaski finally became an American citizen, 230 years after he died fighting in the Revolutionary War. President Obama signed a joint resolution of the House and the Senate on Friday that made Pulaski, a Polish nobleman, an honorary citizen. Pulaski’s contribution to the American colonies’ effort to leave the British Empire began with a flourish. He wrote a letter to Gen. George Washington with the declaration: “I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it.” Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, had been pushing for the honorary citizenship since 2005. “Pulaski made the ultimate sacrifice for this country, and he deserves nothing but the highest honor and recognition for his service,” Mr. Kucinich said then. Washington had heard of the young Pole from Benjamin Franklin, who had been his first ambassador to France. Franklin told him that Pulaski’s exploits had made him “renowned throughout Europe for the courage and bravery he displayed in defense of his country’s freedom.” Washington let Pulaski join the fight against the British, and he made a name for himself as a skilled horseman. He would eventually be known as the “father of the American cavalry.” Pulaski died before the British were driven away. In October 1779, he led a cavalry assault to save the important Southern port of Savannah, Ga. He was wounded and taken aboard the American ship Wasp. He died at sea two days later. Americans have honored Pulaski throughout the last two centuries. A number of counties and streets, as well as the skyway between Newark and Jersey City, are named for him. The Continental Congress suggested that a monument be erected in his honor, and in 1825 it was finally installed in Savannah. In 1929, Congress declared Oct. 11 Pulaski Day in the United States, a largely forgotten holiday in much of the country.

Citizenship
Revolutionary War American (1775-83)
Pulaski Casimir


Scientists Hope to Unravel Neanderthal DNA

Abstract: Researchers in Germany said Thursday that they planned to collaborate with an American company in an effort to reconstruct the genome of Neanderthals, the archaic human species that occupied Europe from 300,000 years ago to 30,000 years ago until being displaced by modern humans. Long a forlorn hope, the sequencing, or decoding, of Neanderthal DNA suddenly seems possible because of a combination of analytic work on ancient DNA by Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a new method of DNA sequencing developed by a Connecticut company, 454 Life Sciences. The initial genome to be decoded comes from 45,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found in Croatia , though bones from other sites may be analyzed later. Because the genome must be kept in constant repair and starts to break up immediately after the death of the cell, the material surviving in Neanderthal bones exists in tiny fragments 100 or so DNA units in length. As it happens, this is just the length that works best with the 454 machine, which is also able to decode vast amounts of DNA at low cost. Recovery of the Neanderthal genome, in whole or in part, would be invaluable for reconstructing many events in human prehistory and evolution. It would help address such questions as whether Neanderthals and humans interbred, whether the archaic humans had an articulate form of language, how the Neanderthal brain was constructed, if they had light or dark skin, and the total size of the Neanderthal population. The project is still at an early stage, but much groundwork has been laid. Most Neanderthal bones contain no Neanderthal DNA at all, but almost all are heavily contaminated with the DNA of the many people who have handled the bones. Dr. Paabo has developed stringent methods to address this contamination problem. Even with the DNA that is known to be ancient, some 95 percent of that in the Neanderthal bones belongs to ancient bacteria, said Michael Egholm, a vice president of 454 Life Sciences. But bacterial sequences can be recognized and discarded, he said. Because Neanderthal DNA is so scarce, Dr. Paabo and the 454 Life Science researchers developed their methods on ancient DNA from cave bears and mammoth. Turning to Neanderthal bones, they have already recovered considerable amounts of DNA sequence, which are derived from every chromosome in the Neanderthal cell, as judged by matching the Neanderthal DNA to the human genome sequence that was first fully decoded in 2003. The first goal of the project will be to sequence three billion units of Neanderthal DNA, corresponding to the full length of the Neanderthal genome. This will require decoding 20 times as much DNA, because so much of the DNA in the Neanderthal bones belongs to bacteria. Genomes usually must be decoded several times over to get a complete and accurate sequence, but the first three billion bases of Neanderthal should “hit all the essential differences,” Dr. Egholm said. The researchers’ hope is to recover the entire sequence of the Neanderthal genome, but that will depend on whether they can recover enough DNA. From sampling so far, no particular gaps in the sequence are apparent. “We are hitting all the chromosomes and getting good coverage,” Dr. Egholm said. If no single specimen yields a full sequence, the genome might be recovered by combining DNA from several individuals. One of the most important results that researchers are hoping for is to discover, from a three-way comparison of chimp, human and Neanderthal DNA, which genes have made humans human. The chimp and human genomes differ at just 1 percent of the sites on their DNA. At this 1 percent, Neanderthals resemble humans at 96 percent of the sites, to judge from the preliminary work, and chimps at 4 percent. Analysis of these DNA sites, at which humans differ from the two other species, will help understand the evolution of specifically human traits “and perhaps even aspects of cognitive function,” Dr. Paabo said. The degree of resemblance between humans and Neanderthals is fiercely debated by archaeologists, and even issues like whether Neanderthals had language have not been resolved. Dr. Paabo believes that genetic analysis is the best hope of doing so. He has paid particular attention to a gene known as FOXP2, which from its mutated forms in people seems to be involved in several advanced aspects of language. A longstanding dispute among archaeologists is whether the modern humans who first entered Europe 45,000 years ago, ultimately from Africa, interbred with the Neanderthals or forced them into extinction. Interbreeding could have been genetically advantageous to the incoming humans, says Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, because the Neanderthals were well adapted to the cold European climate — the last ice age had another 35,000 years to run — and to local diseases. Evidence from the human genome suggests some interbreeding with an archaic species, Dr. Lahn said, which could have been Neanderthals or other early humans. So far no specific evidence of human-Neanderthal interbreeding has been found, Dr. Egholm said. But it may require analysis of almost the full Neanderthal genome to rule out all possibility of genetic interchange. Dr. Stephen O’Brien, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, said that having the Neanderthal genome would be “a very exciting prospect” because it would serve as a reference point for deciding which genes had been selected for in recent human evolution. The chimpanzee, with which humans shared an ancestor who lived some five million years ago, is one such reference point but the Neanderthals, who split from the modern human lineage some 500,000 years ago, would provide a much more helpful signpost to recent evolutionary events, Dr. O’Brien said, like adaptations as modern humans dispersed from their African homeland and the genetic differences between the three major human ethnic groups of Africans, Asians and Europeans. Analyzing ancient DNA raises huge problems, Dr. O’Brien said, but “if there is anyone who can solve them, it’s Svante Paabo.” If Dr. Paabo and 454 Life Sciences should succeed in reconstructing the entire Neanderthal genome, it might in theory be possible to bring the species back from extinction by inserting the Neanderthal genome into a human egg and having volunteers bear Neanderthal infants. This might be the best possible way of finding out what each Neanderthal gene does, but there would be daunting ethical problems in bringing a Neanderthal child into the world again. Dr. Paabo said that he could not even imagine how such a project could be accomplished and that in any case ethical concerns “would totally preclude such an experiment.” Dr. Lahn described the idea as “certainly possible but futuristic.” The most serious technical problem would be creating functional chromosomes from Neanderthal DNA. But ethical questions may be less surmountable. “My first consideration would be for a child born alone in the world with no relatives,” said Ronald M. Green, an ethicist at Dartmouth College. The risk would be greater if, following the plot line of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” a mate were created as a companion for the lonely Neanderthal. “This was a species we competed with,” Dr. Green said. “We would not want to recreate a situation of two competing advanced hominid species.” But Dr. Green said there could be arguments in the future for resurrecting the Neanderthals. “If we learn this is a species that was wrongly pushed off the stage of history, there is something of a moral argument for bringing it back,” he said. “But the status quo is not without merit. Curiosity alone could not justify what could be a disaster for both species.”

Germany
Evolution
Croatia
DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)
Archaeology and Anthropology
Genetics and Heredity


India Finds New Methods to Punish U.S. Diplomats

Abstract: NEW DELHI — India’s diplomatic corps, still seething over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York, continued its tit-for-tat campaign against American diplomats this week, revoking privileges, beginning tax investigations and issuing new consular identity cards that say the card holder can be arrested for serious offenses. Although top Indian politicians are no longer denouncing the United States daily for the arrest and strip search of the diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, 39, foreign service officials are not letting the matter drop. The continued hard feelings suggest that the dispute could have a long-term impact on a relationship both sides say is crucial. “We are in touch with you,” Syed Akbaruddin, the spokesman for the Ministry of External Affairs, said in a lengthy interview Thursday, addressing his remarks to his American counterparts. “You pick up the phone all the time. You clearly knew this arrest was coming. “After all, we have a strategic partnership and cooperate on a range of issues, yet you can’t tell us a thing while doing all this stuff behind our backs?” Ms. Khobragade, the deputy consul general in New York, was arrested on Dec. 12 on charges that she fraudulently obtained a work visa for her housekeeper, forced her to work longer hours than agreed to and paid her far less than the minimum wage. Anger among Indians intensified after they learned that the United States had flown the maid’s husband and children out of India on visas meant for use in cases of human trafficking two days before Ms. Khobragade’s arrest, saying the family had been threatened. The human-trafficking designation deeply offended Indian officials, who termed the threats exaggerated and said the Americans should have discussed the matter with them, particularly since they had informed their American counterparts repeatedly about their concerns after the maid, Sangeeta Richard, left Ms. Khobragade’s employment in June. A spokesman for the United States Embassy in New Delhi refused to comment on Thursday. Outrage in India’s tiny diplomatic corps is particularly acute because those who deal with the United States often feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of communications. India has just three senior diplomats on its North America desk, who deal with scores of counterparts from the United States and Canada. And the issue of the treatment of domestic help does not resonate in India as it does in the United States; nearly all officials in New Delhi have maids working dawn to dusk six or seven days a week, and generally earning even less than Ms. Richard did. India has undertaken punitive measures that it believes puts American diplomats in India on par with Indian diplomats in the United States. It withdrew passes that allow American diplomats to meet important guests, like members of Congress, at airport gates, and canceled the diplomatic identity cards given to consular officials and their families, reissuing cards only to officials. The cards instruct police officers that the holder may be arrested for serious offenses. In addition, India is investigating whether spouses and employees of American officials are paying taxes on earnings made in India, particularly at the American schools in New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. India has canceled the United States Embassy’s import privileges for food and alcohol. And security barriers that surrounded the embassy in New Delhi have been permanently removed. Indian officials say the barriers were unnecessary and in some cases impeded traffic. Image Devyani Khobragade, a diplomat in New York, was arrested on charges connected to her treatment of her housekeeper. Credit Mohammed Jaffer/SnapsIndia, via Reuters “We would not do anything to adversely affect the security of the U.S. Embassy,” Mr. Akbaruddin said. “To suggest otherwise is unfair.” There are 14 other Indian maids working for Indian diplomats in the United States, and India is negotiating over their status with the State Department. To India, these maids should be considered Indian government employees whose employment does not fall under American wage and hour laws. A little-noticed aspect of the uproar has been India’s unhappiness with American officials of Indian descent. The federal prosecutor on the case, Preet Bharara, is of Indian descent, as are many officials on the South Asia desk of the United States State Department. India has a fraught relationship with members of its own diaspora. Commercials and Bollywood films often treat such people with mild contempt, and in the Khobragade case, Indian officials have said they believe that their counterparts in the United States treated India poorly in an excessive show of loyalty to the United States. American officials quietly say they bent over backward to heal bruised feelings. On Dec. 19, Secretary of State John Kerry tried to get in touch with the Indian minister of external affairs, Salman Khurshid, but Mr. Khurshid did not take his call for reasons he has not explained. So Mr. Kerry called Shivshankar Menon, the Indian national security adviser, to express his “regret” over the matter. Top Indian politicians instead demanded an official apology and a dismissal of all charges against Ms. Khobragade. On Dec. 20, Mr. Khurshid continued to express outrage over the affair and said he expected to hear from Mr. Kerry soon. But by then, American eagerness to resolve the impasse had evaporated. That same day, a deputy State Department spokeswoman said Mr. Kerry had not spoken to Mr. Khurshid and had no plans to do so. India is seeking permission from the State Department to transfer Ms. Khobragade from the Indian Consulate, where she gets limited diplomatic immunity, to its United Nations mission, where her protection against prosecution would be far stronger. Indeed, Indian officials say Ms. Khobragade was consulting with her United Nations counterparts as early as last summer, which they say should give her immunity for the entire period. But American officials so far insist that whatever immunity Ms. Khobragade earns from the switch will not be retroactive. “Receiving diplomatic immunity does not nullify any previously existing criminal charges,” said Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman. “Those remain on the books.” Ms. Khobragade could leave the United States for India, never return and never face another day in court, but that seems unlikely because her husband, a professor of philosophy, was raised in the United States and has family there.

India
Devyani Khobragade
US Foreign Policy
Diplomats Embassies and Consulates
Domestic worker


Inefficiency in Airports Irritates an Expert - Frequent Flier

Abstract: I’M a problem-solver and pattern-recognizer. Traveling as much as I do is always an adventure. I have to admit that a lot of the time, I’m wondering how we actually make it from Point A to Point B since everything is so inefficient. I went to Chennai, India, to meet with Indian business partners and also to meet with women executives at I.B.M. India. It was a great trip, and we got a lot accomplished. But I started to come down with a bad case of laryngitis. At the end of the trip, I headed back to the airport with a colleague who was traveling with me. In India, you have to have your travel papers printed out to get into the airport, which is really a very antiquated procedure. My colleague had our papers with her since we had changed flights on the way to India at the last minute, and she just had one copy of the paperwork for the both of us. We hit horrible traffic on the way to the airport, so we were running late. When we finally arrived, she sprinted ahead of me, to make sure we wouldn’t lose more time. As I tried to enter the airport, I got stopped by airport security and military personnel. My voice was so raw that I could barely speak to them and explain what was going on. I tried pantomiming the fact that my colleague had the papers. That sure didn’t work. My colleague finally realized that I wasn’t with her. She came back to look for me, and found me waving my arms around at the officials. She showed them the paperwork, and I was allowed to make my way to my flight. Throughout this ordeal, I kept thinking, I’ve got this information in my BlackBerry, why can’t I just show it to the airport personnel? Or why don’t they just have a system that checks my passport number to see whether I’m approved for the flight? Delays are inevitable. But at Heathrow, a delayed flight forced me to go through three different security checkpoints, re-scanning the same baggage again and again. There were bottlenecks of people everywhere, including the terminals, the tunnels between terminals and at every security checkpoint. The passengers, with their baggage and take-along animals, couldn’t even form a queue. I have no idea why things were organized like this, but it made absolutely no sense. Because I do like to work when I’m waiting for a flight, wireless hot spots come in handy. I was waiting hours for a delayed flight at Kennedy Airport. I found a wireless hot spot that was advertised throughout the terminal. But you couldn’t connect to the network. Terminal and airline personnel were clueless about how to help and that was really frustrating. But sometimes a kind stranger can help. I was passing through Hong Kong on the way to Singapore at the beginning of a seven-country tour of “smarter buildings” in Asia. The problem was I had a dislocated foot. But this young airport aide, who couldn’t have weighed more than 35 pounds, came to my rescue. I had tennis shoes on, and I tried to explain about my foot. But she was completely oblivious. She literally rushed me through the airport and through security checkpoints, pushing and shoving me, as I’m lurching alongside her. I figure we clocked about two miles. By the time we made it to the gate, I thought I was going to die. But on a positive note, I think I lost a few pounds, which was a nice bonus.


Students’ Dreams Ended in Rush of Morning Fire

Abstract: WILMINGTON, N.C., Oct. 30 — They were athletes, homecoming queens, aspiring lawyers and future doctors who took a few days off for a chance to spend a weekend with their closest college pals. But a fire that erupted as they slept took them by surprise, and many of the students did not make it out alive. They included Allison Walden, a 19-year-old pre-med student who left a small town in Ohio for the warm weather and sorority life at the University of South Carolina. Ms. Walden’s father said she spent her last night listening to music and partying with her friends. She was one of seven fraternity and sorority members — most from the University of South Carolina, and at least one from Clemson University — who died early Sunday when a fire consumed the beach house where they were staying in Ocean Isle Beach, a small resort community in North Carolina . “It sounded like they were having a good time,” Ms. Walden’s father, Terry Walden, told The Associated Press. “Unfortunately, the fire didn’t show any mercy. They probably never woke up.” Six students escaped with minor injuries, including smoke inhalation. One, Tripp Wylie, a University of South Carolina student, said he woke about 7 a.m. to the sounds of crackling and popping, then opened a window and saw flames shooting from the front of the house. “You knew you had to jump at some point,” Mr. Wylie said Tuesday in an interview on “Good Morning America.” “That was the only option.” It is unclear what started the fire, which spread rapidly and nearly gutted the two-story house. Investigators have found signs that the flames began on a rear porch and moved to the upper level, where most of the bodies were found in several bedrooms. The authorities have said that the identities of the seven students killed will not be released before Wednesday, but friends and relatives of most of the victims have been notified. Anna Lee Rhea said two of her brothers were in the house. One, Andrew, made it out; a younger one, William, did not. Ms. Rhea said William was a star basketball and baseball player in high school. At the University of South Carolina, he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity who liked playing golf and loved rooting for the football team. “Everybody loved him,” she told The A.P. “Everybody really misses him. You couldn’t help but love him.” Many of the victims were members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon or the Delta Delta Delta sorority. Lauren Mahon, a sorority sister from Simpsonville, S.C., was known for her shopping obsession and ability to talk “90 miles per hour,” said Amanda Palacio, her friend and roommate. “She’d always say: ‘If you listen closely, I make perfect sense. Sometimes I just have a hard time expressing my thoughts,’ ” Ms. Palacio told The A.P. “She was a great girl. She still is.” On a profile Ms. Mahon created on Myspace.com , she said she loved going to church with her family, listening to country music and “feeling sand between my toes.” She planned to be a lawyer.

Fraternities and Sororities
North Carolina
Fires and Firefighters
Wilmington (NC)
Colleges and Universities
Education and Schools


A Tour With Kerry Kennedy of an Exhibition on Human Rights Activists

Abstract: All but one of the quotations painted on the walls at the Museum at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts for an exhibition of photographs of human rights activists are from Robert F. Kennedy. But Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of Senator Kennedy, had turned her attention elsewhere as she led a recent tour of the show for 25 visitors. She was focused on the 50 black-and-white photos that had been hung at eye level, and her memories of the people who told her their stories before posing for them. “If you listen to the tapes of the interviews, I’m laughing my head off in almost every single one,” Ms. Kennedy, 55, said. “Having a sense of humor is a part of being courageous. It’s a source of strength.” “Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World” is on loan from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights in Washington, of which Ms. Kennedy is president. The exhibition is derived from Ms. Kennedy’s 2000 book of the same title, a collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Eddie Adams , who died in 2004. Image Kerry Kennedy, on whose book, with photographs by Eddie Adams, the show is based. Credit Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times The show describes the achievements of an international cast of human rights defenders and the often grim situations that propelled them. Subjects include Juliana Dogbadzi, a former sex slave from Ghana who escaped imprisonment and went on to denounce a cultural and religious practice in which young girls are sent into a life of servitude, and Bruce Harris, Central America’s foremost advocate for so-called street kids, who risked his life to expose a baby-trafficking ring in which women were tricked into giving up their newborns for adoption. (Mr. Harris died in 2010.) Also included are better-known figures like Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, the Dalai Lama, and Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, sentenced to four and a half years of hard labor as a result of his efforts to hobble communism in his country. (Mr. Havel died in 2011.) The show gathers the portraits by Mr. Adams and the text from Ms. Kennedy’s interviews and transforms them into an arresting gallery of images. The Cambodian children’s rights activist Kek Galabru, for example, is shown surrounded by skulls in Mr. Adams’s portrait. And a Sudanese human rights figure called simply Anonymous is depicted in a long black robe and a face-concealing hood. “Aren’t they rich, and just incredibly beautiful?” Ms. Kennedy said earlier, during a private tour with this reporter. “It’s a challenge to take so many portraits and have each of them be interesting, to keep the viewer’s attention with something fresh. But he did a magnificent job.” “These people are the Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings of our time,” she added. “To be able to share their stories in this format is really meaningful.” Image A photo of Freedom Neruda, foreground, an Ivory Coast journalist. Credit Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times Since the 1990s, Ms. Kennedy, the former wife of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, has led human rights delegations to Haiti, Kenya, South Korea and other countries. Ms. Kennedy met Mr. Adams in the early 1980s, just after she graduated from college. “I was working as an editor at a news photography agency in New York,” she recalled. “They gave me a loupe and mounds of his photos. They were always affecting. He doesn’t have any bad pictures.” Mr. Adams was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, for his photograph of a police chief executing a Vietcong prisoner on a Saigon street. He covered 13 wars as a photojournalist and was also acclaimed for his celebrity portraits. The Bethel Woods museum discovered his work four years ago, when his widow, Alyssa Adkins Adams, of Jeffersonville, N.Y., helped organize an exhibition of his Vietnam War photographs. The current show, which opened on Aug. 28 and will close on Dec. 31, was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. “It also just happens to align very closely with our mission, which is all about the ideals of the ’60s,” the museum’s director, Wade Lawrence said. Ms. Kennedy, who lives in Westchester, has seen the exhibition dozens of times, most recently at the Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport and, before that, in Italy. Since its opening in Washington in 2000, it has traveled to 25 American cities and four continents. “Speak Truth to Power” is a continuing project, with new individuals occasionally added. Some museums and exhibition spaces modify the content. The Bethel show stays true to the book’s original subjects, but Mr. Lawrence and his staff have added an “interactive lounge,” where visitors are invited to join a “conversation wall” by filling out a card expressing their thoughts on human rights. Dozens of cards, with messages like “common decency: be an advocate,” have been clothespinned to a series of wires since the opening. Also in the interactive lounge is a video screen with “Speak Truth to Power: Voices From Beyond the Dark,” a 2000 play by Ariel Dorfman , on loop. Its stars, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus and John Malkovich, adopt the voices of the activists. Image Ms. Kennedy with, rear right, a portrait of the Sudanese activist known as Anonymous. Credit Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times Ms. Kennedy said that both the conversation wall and another element of the interactive lounge, a screen displaying a Twitter feed about “Speak Truth to Power,” were new to her. “It’s always fun to see what different venues do,” she said, adding that the Bethel location was an especially compelling one for her. “Having it here is special,” Ms. Kennedy said, “because it’s close to my home and it’s also right next to Jeffersonville, where Eddie had his famous yearly photo workshop, which I went to for many years. We’ve also done a lot of work with farm workers in Liberty, which is right down the street.” During the tour with the museum visitors, Mr. Lawrence said, he felt as though Ms. Kennedy had been channeling her father, speaking with the same sort of measured cadence that he had used. “Her mannerisms are so much like his,” he said. One of her father’s quotations on the wall at the Bethel exhibition reads: “Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.” Pausing in front of the portrait of Elie Wiesel, the author and concentration camp survivor, Ms. Kennedy offered an observation of her own. “In a sense, all of us have the capacity to be courageous,” she said. “I think the quest here is to remind people of that.”

Kerry Kennedy
Human Rights
Bethel Woods Center for the Arts
Eddie Adams
Photography
Robert Francis Kennedy
Bethel NY