The Refugee Crisis: What It Means for Europe

Abstract: As Europe continues to struggle with a steady flow of migrants and the challenges of how best to receive asylum seekers from war zones , The New York Times asked readers for their questions about the refugee crisis. We have addressed some issues and used other questions to help inform our reporting. Here are answers to some recent questions. Q. How will the cultural and religious aspects of so many (primarily Muslim) migrants impact E.U. society, especially at the local community levels? — Joe, London A. The answer I got from most politicians, planners and business people in Stuttgart and Berlin was that, at a community level, it is crucial to integrate the new migrants , especially the young ones, as swiftly as possible. That means providing not only language, education and job training, but also access to the social and athletic clubs that bind many German communities. They can be the quickest route to integration. That did not happen in the 1970s and ’80s with Turkish guest workers in cities such as Berlin, where for various reasons communities avoided mixing for years, and the consequences are still obvious. Image A refugee family on the Serbian-Croatian frontier last month. Many migrants are not highly skilled, but underpopulated areas need all kinds of labor. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times The president of the chamber of commerce for the state of Baden-Württemberg, which includes Stuttgart, was not very optimistic when he talked to me recently about the prospects for integrating so many people all at once. Many of the asylum seekers in Germany are not skilled workers, or are not trained to German labor standards, and they come from a very different culture. But nearly everyone else I spoke with pointed out that the rapidly declining German population has created an urgent need for skilled labor. The influx of migrants could be a gift, especially in underpopulated areas like Brandenburg and parts of eastern Germany, where workers are scarce and businesses are desperate. Daimler may not be hurting for job applicants, but many companies in places that are less affluent than Stuttgart do need workers. A newly trained work force, welcomed and integrated into German schools, neighborhoods and social clubs, might bring prosperity. Companies can help provide training. Cities still have to find housing that suits extended families so they can mix with the existing population, and avoid creating ghettos. MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Q. What are the reasons for Angela Merkel ’s decision to welcome refugees? How much is humanitarian, how much a need for younger people (taxpayers), how much a desire for labor — cheap and otherwise? How much is prestige, how much World War II guilt? — Isa Mara Lando, Rio de Janeiro A. You have correctly identified the various motives; all of them likely play a part in Ms. Merkel’s decisions. In addition, I would note aspects of her biography: Ms. Merkel is the daughter of a Lutheran minister and she grew up in communist East Germany. Image Refugees rode a train through Macedonia, from its southern border with Greece to its northern border with Serbia, in August. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times The tone of her remarks since Germany received thousands of asylum seekers trapped in Hungary in early September has reflected a particular German obligation to offer asylum to those in danger that was not offered to Jews and other victims of the Nazis. But Ms. Merkel’s words also reflect a concern and sympathy for her fellow humans that was surely part of her upbringing. ALISON SMALE Q. Are all the refugees arriving in Europe illegally, dealing with smugglers using unsafe boats? Is there no legal, safe way for them to reach Europe? Do countries who feel an obligation to accept them also have an obligation to provide one? — David Barnert, Albany, N.Y. A. Nearly all asylum seekers arrive illegally, in the sense that they do not have official entry visas. But the United Nations refugee convention states that people who face a clear danger of persecution or threat to their lives have a right to seek protection in another country, even when they do not have prior approval to enter that country. All asylum seekers can, in theory, apply in their home country for visas at the embassy of the country that they want to enter, but this is a long and laborious process. It also tends to weed out people who do not have a legitimate case for asylum; migrants who are seeking better economic opportunities usually prefer to take their chances and pay smugglers to get them to Europe before applying. Some of these migrants might believe that once they are in a country, it will be very difficult for that country to get them to leave if they are not granted asylum. Lots of people are rejected, but few are deported. And the process can take years. Countries that are party to the United Nations convention are obliged to examine the asylum claim of anyone who shows up at their border asking for refuge, but they are not obliged to provide safe passage to that border. It is up to the refugee to get to wherever he or she wants to go. ANDREW HIGGINS

Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis


A Few Findings of Britain’s Nudge Unit

Abstract: A few findings of Britain’s nudge unit. Retirement Savings Since the government switched pension plans from opt-in to opt-out at large companies, the proportion of employees with a workplace pension has risen to 83 percent from 63 percent. Organ Donation The most effective question to nudge people to join the organ-donor register is: “If you needed an organ transplant, would you take one?” Scaled up to the whole population of Britain, this could add 96,000 extra organ-donor registrations a year. Court Fines Sending a letter to people who haven’t paid court fines gets a compliance rate of only about 5 percent. A personalized text message raises the amount they pay by more than 40 percent. Charitable Giving Simply asking people whether they want to leave money to charity when they are drafting their wills doubles legacy giving. First telling them that many people do leave money to charity, and asking what causes they care about, triples it.

Organ donation
Philanthropy
Pensions and Retirement Plans
England


Garbage Trucks Will Help Protect New York for New Year’s Eve

Abstract: When revelers begin arriving at Times Square on Saturday to ring in the new year, they will hear the familiar sound of police helicopters overhead, go through the mandatory bag screenings and see the usual mass of police officers. But they will also be greeted by something that has only recently become a regular feature of the city’s security infrastructure: strategically positioned garbage trucks loaded with sand. The Sanitation Department bills itself as New York’s Strongest, and its hulking vehicles have made the agency a key ally as the Police Department and other law enforcement agencies seek to guard against truck attacks like those in Nice , France, and Berlin . Trucks have been deployed outside Trump Tower on Election Day and along the route of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade . The trucks weigh about 16 tons, and nearly double that with a full load of sand, according to Vito A. Turso, a spokesman for the Sanitation Department. “They’re pretty immovable,” he said. And that is the point, the police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said at a news conference on Thursday in Times Square with Mayor Bill de Blasio. While there are no specific threats related to the event, he said, the sand-filled trucks serve as a deterrent to the type of truck attacks in France and Germany that killed dozens of people and injured hundreds more. President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has been at his estate in Florida, is not expected to be in Manhattan for New Year’s Eve, but the Police Department said Thursday that it expected close to two million people to converge on Times Square on Saturday for the annual ball drop. “We’re going to have one of the most well-policed, best protected events at one of the safest venues in the entire world, given all the assets that we’ve employed here,” Mr. O’Neill said. “And all of this will ensure that New York City has yet another safe and enjoyable New Year’s Eve celebration, as we do every year.” Sixty-five of the Sanitation Department trucks are part of a security plan that involves close to 7,000 police officers, assigned to guard against crime and terror by land, sea and air, as well as in the subway. Beyond Times Square, some of the sanitation trucks will be stationed near a planned fireworks display in Central Park. Similar blockades will be put in place on the streets leading to the Coney Island Boardwalk as well as on the promenade itself. More than 100 police vehicles will also be positioned to restrict access to event sites. The police will be watching from many vantage points. There will be helicopters hovering, observers on rooftops and plainclothes officers among the crowds. Their views will be complemented by hundreds of police cameras across the city. On the waterways, the department’s Harbor Unit will mingle among the dinner cruise ships and ferries plying the waters around Manhattan. And back on land, houses of worship will receive special attention for New Year’s Eve services. But Times Square remains the biggest draw, and Chief Carlos Gomez, the department’s top uniformed official, said those seeking to watch the ball drop would be required to go through several screenings before they would be allowed into one of the 65 pens set up for spectators between Times Square and West 59th Street. “We’ll use metal detectors to scan individuals entering the observation areas,” he said. “We will also deploy our full complement of explosive-detecting K-9s, both at the event and throughout our transit system.” “This will be a very well-protected event, probably our most-protected event,” Chief Gomez said. Many of the same measures will be deployed underground, where officers will be riding trains and inspecting bags and containers. Gradual street closings between 33rd and 59th Streets were expected to snarl traffic in Midtown, and the police strongly urged people to use the subway. Mr. de Blasio reminded visitors that umbrellas and large bags would not be allowed in Times Square. “I want to be real clear up front,” the mayor said. “Just don’t do it.” But demonstrators, he said, are free to bring signs, so long as they do not use them to block the view.

Trucks
New Year
Police
Terrorism
NYPD
Sanitation Department NYC
Times Square and 42nd Street Manhattan
NYC


City Claims Final Private Island in East River

Abstract: South Brother Island, seven acres of dense forest, bittersweet vines, flocks of wild birds and little else, is a speck in the East River — and a glimpse of what the rest of the city might have looked like thousands of years ago. Historically overlooked and unwanted, it changed hands for $10 in 1975, despite being located in the middle of New York City. But South Brother, the last East River island of any significant size to remain in private hands, will finally get its due today when it is formally transferred to the city as part of a complex $2 million deal brokered by the Trust for Public Land and financed with federal money secured by United States Representative José E. Serrano. “The idea of buying an island — I mean, how many people get to buy an island?” said Mr. Serrano, whose district includes South Brother. South Brother, situated between the Bronx and Queens and within sight of the Rikers Island guard towers, will most likely be left as it is, officials said, preserved as a nature sanctuary and administered by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. The island — the smaller sibling of the better known North Brother Island, which is 500 feet to the north and once the quarantine home of Typhoid Mary — suddenly became a desirable property precisely because it had been unwanted for so long. Neighboring islands, including North Brother, became sites for hospitals that treated infectious diseases like typhus and tuberculosis and for mental hospitals, power plants, jails, homeless shelters and cemeteries for the indigent. But South Brother, neglected by humans, turned into a prime nesting spot for birds and a migration stopping point for such New York City exotica as the great blue heron. “It is a natural jewel,” said Clark Wallace, project manager for the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit conservation group. In addition to several types of herons, the island’s bird population includes ibises, oyster catchers, cormorants and egrets. In its forest are locust, white mulberry and black cherry trees, covered by thick tangles of oriental bittersweet vines that cover trees and ground alike. Because there are no predators on the island, many birds build their nests on the ground. K. Jacob Ruppert, whose great-great-uncle Jacob Ruppert Jr. owned the island and was a co-owner of the New York Yankees in the early 1900s, said South Brother was a bird paradise when he paid his only visit in 2004. “There’s no beautiful lagoon,” he said. “It’s a mound of bird poop. But there are beautiful birds. I never thought I could walk up to a swan on her nest. The ground is nothing but bird droppings and broken egg shells.” But humans, even if few have ever set foot on the island, have had an impact. During New York City Audubon’s annual surveys of the island, volunteers have found dead birds entangled in fishing lines and other debris. Adult birds have been found dead on or near nests that contained unhatched eggs, and Mr. Ruppert said he spotted a television set that had washed ashore. Maria Torres, president and chief operating officer of the Point, a nonprofit group that is working to revitalize the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, and Mr. Serrano said they had been interested in buying South Brother for the public since 1997. But the owner, Hampton Scows, a Long Island sand and gravel company, had not been interested in selling until recently. Official with Hampton Scows declined to comment, as did the company’s lawyer, Michael McMahon. But once Hampton Scows signaled its willingness to sell, the Point and the Bronx-based Wildlife Conservation Society, which had received federal money through Mr. Serrano’s efforts to buy private land along the Bronx and East Rivers for public use, agreed to pool their money to come up with the $2 million asking price. Unlike better-known East River islands like Randalls, Roosevelt and Rikers, South Brother’s past is murky. Both North and South Brother Islands were claimed by the Dutch West India Company in 1614, according to “The Other Islands of New York,” a book by Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller, and both were originally named “De Gesellen.” (The term was translated as “the companions.”) The islands soon passed into the hands of the English, but remained undeveloped for almost two centuries because of the treacherous currents surrounding them, according to the book. South Brother may have been a base for Union soldiers during the Civil War, and in about 1894, it was purchased by Jacob Ruppert Jr., a brewing magnate who bought the Yankees with Col. Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston in 1915. (Mr. Ruppert’s tenure in baseball included the purchase of Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox, the opening of Yankee Stadium and eight World Series titles.) Mr. Ruppert built a yacht house on South Brother, and amateur baseball games were held on an adjacent field. Legend has it that Ruth would occasionally show up to practice his swing, swatting balls far into the East River. After Mr. Ruppert’s summer home burned down in 1909, South Brother went through another long fallow period. The island changed hands several more times until 1975, when Hampton Scows bought it for $10.

South Brother Island
Trust for Public Land
East River (NYC)


Piazza Isn’t Looking to Buy Part of the Mets

Abstract: PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — With all the money the Mets paid Mike Piazza over the years, he might one day decide to buy a chunk of the team back from them. Piazza said Saturday that he would like to get involved in owning a team eventually, but said he was not currently pursuing that option with the Mets. “Would I be interested in possibly getting involved in a group to buy a team someday?” Piazza said. “Probably. I’ve been thinking about it. I think that would probably suit my desire to get into the game.” Piazza was in Port St. Lucie on Saturday working as the hitting coach of the Italian national team, which was playing a Mets minor league team. When asked if he had been contacted about being in a group to buy a share of the Mets now, Piazza joked that he could “neither confirm nor deny it.” He said: “As far as anything on the forefront? Nothing. Down the line, we’ll see.” The Mets announced in January that they planned to sell up to 25 percent of the team, citing a $1 billion lawsuit brought by the trustee for the victims of Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme . Since then, it was revealed they had taken a $25 million loan from Major League Baseball, suggesting they have liquidity problems independent of the lawsuit. Piazza, who earned $91 million in base salary over his seven-plus years as a Met, offered moral support to the owners of the team, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, and most of all to the fans. “I’m definitely in their corner, hoping that this thing gets ironed out,” Piazza said. “At the end of the day, I hope the fans can concentrate on baseball.” The Mets’ minor leaguers beat Italy, 8-1, led by starting pitcher Matt Harvey, the Mets’ No. 1 draft pick last year. But the Italians have made progress over the last few years, winning the European Championships last year. With the help of Piazza, the Italian team is preparing for the World Cup in Panama in September. Two of the team’s players in particular, Alex Liddi of the Seattle Mariners and pitcher Alex Maestri of the Chicago Cubs, have shown real promise. MARINERS’ OLIVO INJURED Mariners catcher Miguel Olivo strained his groin in Seattle’s 7-2 victory over a Cleveland Indians split squad in Peoria, Ariz. He was scheduled for a magnetic resonance imaging test, and there was no timetable for his return. Olivo was running lightly down the third-base line on a sacrifice fly when he pulled up and fell on his stomach near home plate. He managed to reach out and touch the plate to score. “Whatever the best-case scenario is, that’s what we’ll hope for,” Mariners Manager Eric Wedge said. Olivo, 32, signed as a free agent in January and was brought in to take over the brunt of catching duties for a relatively young Mariners pitching staff. (AP) PHILLIES PROSPECT HURT Domonic Brown, regarded as the Phillies’ top prospect, broke his right hand while swinging a bat during Philadelphia’s 4-3 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates in Clearwater, Fla. If he needs surgery, it could open a spot in the outfield. Brown, who has been playing right field, stayed in the game and singled up the middle, then later came out. An X-ray revealed a fracture, General Manager Ruben Amaro Jr. said. Brown will be re-evaluated Monday or Tuesday, Amaro said. “If he has to have some type of surgery on it, it would be anywhere from three to six weeks of recovery time,” Amaro said. Ben Francisco, who could take Brown’s spot, hit his second home run in six games. (AP) CLOSE CALL FOR AN INDIAN Cleveland Indians third baseman Jason Donald sustained a badly bruised left hand when he was struck by a pitch from Chicago White Sox starter Gavin Floyd in Goodyear, Ariz. X-rays were negative, but the hand was swollen, and Donald will probably miss a few games. (AP)

Baseball
Suits and Litigation
New York Mets
Piazza Mike


Europe’s Economy Grew Less Than Expected in 4th Quarter

Abstract: FRANKFURT — The European economy grew more slowly than expected in the fourth quarter of 2010, a sign that some countries are still suffering from too much debt and not enough competitiveness. Gross domestic product in the euro zone, which included 16 countries in 2010, grew an estimated 0.3 percent in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter, Eurostat, the European Union statistics agency, said Tuesday. Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast euro area growth of 0.4 percent. The three biggest countries — Germany, France and Italy — also expanded more slowly than expected. “In a climate of strong global demand and very low interest rates, the region should in fact be achieving far stronger growth,” economists from Commerzbank said in a note. The data again highlighted the differences between faster-growing countries in Northern Europe like Finland, the Netherlands and Austria, and countries in the south that are struggling to get debt under control and regain the ability to compete on world markets. “The latest G.D.P. data confirm the worrying lopsided nature of the recovery across the single currency area,” said Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, a data provider in London. Germany, which has been the Continent’s growth locomotive, grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, down from 0.7 percent growth in the third quarter of 2010. The construction industry accounted for all of the slowing in the rate of growth, analysts said, as exceptionally cold and snowy weather hampered activity at building sites. German growth will snap back and reach 3 percent in 2011, Commerzbank analysts predicted, in part because the country is benefiting from low interest rates aimed at helping weaker countries like Spain. “The European Central Bank’s key interest rate of 1 percent is far too low for the rapidly expanding economy” of Germany, Commerzbank’s chief economist, Jörg Krämer, said. “In setting interest rates, the bank no longer considers just the euro zone average but is giving greater weighting to the ailing countries on the fringes of the region.” Greece continued to be the worst of those countries, suffering a decline in output of 1.4 percent, while the Portuguese economy shrank 0.3 percent. Recession in those nations, fed by government austerity programs, makes it even more difficult for them to solve their debt problems. Spain’s 0.2 percent growth, while not exactly torrid, was an improvement over the third quarter, when growth was zero. The country continues to suffer the aftereffects of a housing bubble, as well as government spending cuts. Italy grew just 0.1 percent from the previous quarter, while France grew 0.3 percent. Some of the fastest growth rates were in Eastern European countries, which are recovering from severe recession. Estonia grew 2.3 percent, while Bulgaria and Lithuania each grew 1.7 percent. Marie Diron, an economist in London who advises Ernst & Young, the consulting firm, said there was a danger that government austerity programs could hurt growth more than policy makers expect. “There is a real risk that fiscal restraint has a more negative effect than we — or the E.C.B., or governments — currently envisage,” she said in a note.

Gross Domestic Product
European Union
Economic Conditions and Trends


Christian McCaffrey Dazzles as Stanford Runs Away With Rose Bowl

Abstract: PASADENA, Calif. — On Friday, Christian McCaffrey presented an argument to extend the Heisman Trophy voting beyond the regular season, and Stanford made the case that defeats suffered way back on Labor Day weekend should be discounted when ultimately evaluating teams for bowl games and in year-end polls. McCaffrey, the Heisman Trophy runner-up who based his candidacy on toppling a single-season record for all-purpose yardage, outran even his sterling reputation. A master of many trades, McCaffrey amassed 368 yards by almost every conceivable means — rushes, receptions and punt and kick returns. Stanford (12-2), which tumbled from the top 25 after a baffling loss to Northwestern before hoisting itself all the way to fifth, hammered sixth-ranked Iowa, 45-16, in a Rose Bowl lacking suspense apart from imagining what wondrous feat McCaffrey would pull off next. Asked if he believed the tour de force performance established McCaffrey as the nation’s premier player, Stanford Coach David Shaw said: “I think he was the best player in America before this game. This is just icing on the cake to us.” He could not resist a dig at the Heisman electorate, adding, “Apparently our games were on too late.” From film study, the Hawkeyes (12-2) became acutely aware of McCaffrey’s brilliance but were often left clutching air in his vicinity. “He’s a very, very special player,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said. “It’s impossible to duplicate that on the practice field. We don’t have anybody like that.” The yardage total was achieved on 24 touches, including just one kickoff return and one punt return. The 105 for receiving was impressive enough but dwarfed by 172 on the ground. For the hordes of Hawkeyes devotees on hand, seeing McCaffrey repair to the locker room after two periods did not provide relief. The irreverent Stanford marching band added to the torment by mocking their rural roots with a cow-tipping routine during the halftime show. This 102nd edition of the Rose Bowl, the so-called Granddaddy of Them All, shaped up as a bowl that your granddaddy would recognize. As postseason games of a certain vintage usually did, it paired programs with contrasting cultures and familiarity with the setting. Stanford’s roster is saturated with Californians who were reared on the Rose Bowl as part of the New Year’s Day routine, and Friday’s engagement marked the Cardinal’s third here in four years. Iowa, laden with players from the heartland who were wide-eyed upon arrival, last partook in the game in 1991 — before any of the current Hawkeyes were born. The matchup also convened two teams whose fidelity to a rushing attack was the standard — not the exception, like nowadays — of a bygone era. But no span of football history has experienced a player quite like the sophomore McCaffrey, and he took center stage at the earliest opportunity. Iowa’s defense was anticipating a run on the game’s initial snap. Stanford crossed it up when McCaffrey, who claimed to have drawn no extra incentive from running back Derrick Henry’s landslide Heisman support, slipped strangely unaccounted for out of the backfield and turned a short reception into a 75-yard touchdown. He had required only 11 seconds to outgain Henry in 60 minutes of game time during Alabama’s equally convincing win the day before. “I’m someone who believes in having motivation at all times,” McCaffrey said. On the Cardinal’s subsequent possession, he accepted handoffs and caught passes on five of the first seven snaps, netting 65 yards. Then, with the Hawkeyes’ attention focused on McCaffrey, quarterback Kevin Hogan faked to him in the backfield and cantered into the end zone. McCaffrey was catching his breath minutes later when Stanford cornerback Quenton Meeks darted in front of a foolhardy across-the-field pass by Iowa quarterback C. J. Beathard and returned it 66 yards for a score. No longer winded, McCaffrey gathered in a punt soon after and floated 63 yards to a score. With less than a minute gone in the second quarter, victory was fait accompli for Stanford, given its No. 1 status nationwide for time of possession and its opposition, a team that hews to the ground. Soon after, McCaffrey was off and running again, 73 yards for an apparent touchdown. A holding penalty on Hogan deleted it and reduced McCaffrey’s gain on the play to 26. The flag delayed the inevitable. Hogan unfurled a 31-yard touchdown pass that increased Stanford’s count to 35, a Rose Bowl record for an opening half, on some trickery in which McCaffrey played a bit role. While retreating to throw, Hogan feigned a fumble. McCaffrey leaned over slightly, as if to reach for the ball, but it remained in Hogan’s grip. McCaffrey, the human highlight film, resumed his act in the third period with a 30-yard jaunt memorable for dizzied Hawkeyes who were juked out in the open field. A field goal ensued, and some scoring by Iowa justified McCaffrey playing long enough to hurdle the bowl’s record for all-purpose yards. The game’s Granddaddy tag was fitting this year. Dave Sime, McCaffrey’s grandfather, once was designated the World’s Fastest Human as holder of the global 100-yard dash record. (Their generations are bridged by the ex-N.F.L. receiver Ed McCaffrey.) Going back two stages on Beathard’s family tree is Bobby Beathard, a retired front-office executive for four Super Bowl champions. Only one grandson lived up to his athletic heritage.

Christian McCaffrey
Stanford
College football
Rose Bowl Game
University of Iowa


Marshawn Lynch Can Be Himself on Pete Carroll’s Seahawks

Abstract: The ranch-style house where Pete Carroll grew up sits on a suburban cul-de-sac near San Francisco in Marin County, one of the wealthiest counties in the country. It was a gathering place for friends, with a pool table inside and football games out front. The door was always open. “It literally was, because they had a screen door,” said Henry Diaz, one of Carroll’s boyhood friends. “You could walk in and say hello to his parents, even if he wasn’t there, and Jim and Rita would tell you to come in.” Across San Francisco Bay, the house where Marshawn Lynch grew up sits next to a freeway in Oakland, one of the most crime-ridden cities in the country. It was a hiding place from deadly shootings, drug deals and prostitutes out front. The gate was always locked. Carroll, the 63-year-old coach of the Seattle Seahawks , is the gregarious face of the franchise, an energetic and talkative ambassador who speaks in paragraphs and exclamation points. Lynch, the team’s 28-year-old star running back, represents the team’s attitude. He lets his legs and a wake of empty-handed opponents do the talking while he cultivates a public persona of brooding detachment and distrust. At Tuesday’s Super Bowl media day, Lynch sat at a podium for five of the session’s 60 minutes, answered more than 20 questions with the same sentence — “I’m here so I won’t get fined” — and left. Carroll spent the hour cheerfully answering queries of all kinds, including many about Lynch. “I don’t think he’s being misunderstood,” Carroll said. “I think people are starting to learn about who he is and what he’s all about. He’s a treasure.” Image In three seasons at California, Marshawn Lynch gained 3,230 yards, a faithful following and a place in program lore by commandeering an injury cart after a wild victory. Credit Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images Carroll and Lynch make a strange, perfect pairing, forming one of the great odd-couple partnerships in sports. As the Seahawks sit on the verge of a second consecutive Super Bowl title, each is indebted to the other for his own N.F.L. career makeover and for Seattle’s current run of success. Before arriving in Seattle in 2010, Carroll had middling success as an N.F.L. coach with the Jets and the Patriots and a stellar, if scandal-tinged, run in college football at Southern California. He inherited an aging Seahawks team that had won nine games the previous two seasons under Mike Holmgren and Jim Mora. Carroll wanted to build an offense around a powerful running back. Lynch, a first-round draft choice in 2007 and a Pro Bowl selection in 2008, was in his fourth season with Buffalo, but the match never felt right. He was sometimes in trouble and felt persistently out of his element in the cold of western New York. The Bills sent Lynch to the Seahawks during Seattle’s bye week in October 2010. Seattle paid with fourth- and fifth-round draft picks. Video Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson said that running back Marshawn Lynch should not be fined for refusing to answer questions at Super Bowl media day on Tuesday. Credit Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Among the first things Carroll told Lynch was that he had no interest in changing him. We don’t have to be the same, a Seahawks axiom goes, but we have to play as one. Lynch made his first big impression in that season’s playoffs, when his tackle-breaking, ground-shaking, game-clinching 67-yard touchdown run against New Orleans announced a new era in Seattle. In the four seasons since, Lynch has 1,181 regular-season carries for 5,357 yards and 48 rushing touchdowns — leading the N.F.L. in all of those categories in the span since 2011. When the Seahawks trailed the Green Bay Packers by 16-0 midway through the third quarter of the N.F.C. championship game, Lynch took over. He gained 120 of his 157 rushing yards after halftime as the Seahawks won in overtime, 28-22. Image Pete Carroll endured the traditional dousing after the Seahawks won the Super Bowl last year. Credit Ben Solomon for The New York Times “He was just alive — ripping,” Carroll said last week. “He had a couple catches, too. It’s been an extraordinary season that he’s put out here because he’s been so consistent for so long and he’s been so physically right for so long. He looked explosive again. He looked fast. His attitude is always there. He was able to take advantage of space and, sometimes, no space.” No back strikes fear into defenders the way Lynch does. His ability to shake tackles and carry opponents is a metaphor for his background and the foundation for his Beast Mode nickname. He attended and starred at Oakland Technical High School, then accepted a scholarship at California, just a few minutes from home, in Berkeley. In three seasons there, he gained 3,230 yards, a faithful following and a place in program lore by commandeering an injury cart and driving it around the field after a wild victory. He has attained folk-hero status in Seattle, too, with his bruising runs and his in-game penchant for Skittles — a flashback to childhood, when Lynch’s mother, Delisa, fueled him with the “power pellets” during games. After the Super Bowl last year in East Rutherford, N.J., he danced through the locker room while wearing a ski mask, a hood and a towel over his head. Image Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman showing off his dance moves Tuesday during the Super Bowl’s media day at US Airways Center in Phoenix. Seattle is set to play New England on Sunday. 1 / 12 Lynch avoids reporters more than he does opposing linebackers. He has been fined at least $100,000 by the N.F.L. for not fulfilling requirements with the news media, and he sometimes answers every question with the same response . At last year’s Super Bowl, he appeared at the mandatory media day and lasted for six of the session’s 60 minutes before leaving. “I heard he did a great six minutes,” Carroll joked at the time. “Some comedians make a career out of that.” It has earned him a reputation as an eccentric, something that friends and teammates argue is a misinterpretation. Lynch is an icon in Oakland, where he spends much of his off-season, running a football camp for hundreds of children and building a foundation . Last fall, reports said that the Seahawks might cut Lynch after this season to avoid paying the $7 million in salary he is due in 2015. Lynch could consider retirement, though a few more seasons like the past couple would most likely elevate him to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Image Marshawn Lynch’s childhood neighborhood in Oakland, Calif. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times It has people in Oakland imagining a homecoming, with Lynch giving the rebuilding Raiders a marketable mass of hometown attitude. But could Lynch thrive without Carroll? Could Carroll win championships without Lynch? Like Lynch, Carroll exudes the personality of his childhood surroundings. He was born in San Francisco, and his family moved across the Golden Gate Bridge to the open spaces and tranquillity of Marin County in the 1950s. “It was pretty idyllic,” said Diaz, a close friend of Carroll’s since they were 14. At Redwood High School in Larkspur, as part of the class of 1969, Carroll was an undersize football player — and a classmate of the actor and comedian Robin Williams’s. He played at the local community college, the College of Marin, and then at the University of the Pacific before he climbed into coaching. One of Carroll’s great strengths over the years has been relating to players of all backgrounds. On Monday, he was asked how he had maintained that connection as he grew older. Image Marshawn Lynch rushed for 157 yards and a touchdown against the Packers in the N.F.C. championship game. Credit Kyle Terada/USA TODAY Sports, via Reuters “Just kind of naturally,” he said. But he works at it. He makes a point of staying tuned into trends — popular YouTube videos, for example — so that he understands the jokes and the lingo his players use. While Marin County was home to many aging rockers of the 1960s and 1970s, Carroll was a fan of Motown as a teenager and is now a fan of rap, which he cranks to high volume during Seahawks practices. His rules are more relaxed than other coaches’ — be yourself, but be a team — which allows players, like Lynch or the outspoken cornerback Richard Sherman, to be themselves. “I’ll say this, and let me say it again,” Carroll said Monday when asked how he handled Lynch. “We still celebrate the uniqueness of our players. We celebrate the way that they see the world as they fit in with our football team.” There may be no football coach better able to communicate with men one-third his age than Carroll. Much of that comes from acting a bit like one of them. “When I see him running around the sideline, I think: That’s the kid I’ve known almost all my life,” Diaz said. Diaz plans to be at the Super Bowl on Sunday as one of Carroll’s guests. It is appropriate. Along with several others from the neighborhood, they watched the first Super Bowl together 48 years ago at Carroll’s house. The door was open.

Marshawn Lynch
Pete Carroll
Seahawks
Football
Super Bowl


California Drought Is Said to Have Natural Cause

Abstract: Scientists who have analyzed California’s extreme drought have concluded that it is a result of natural climate variability over the past three years and that climate change caused by humans has played little role. The analysis, in a report prepared for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and released Monday, found that the main driver behind the drought was patterns of water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. They increased the likelihood that ridges of high-pressure air would form off the California coast, blocking winter storms. But there was nothing extraordinary about the temperature patterns, the report concluded. “The drought is consistent with what can happen with natural variability,” said the study’s lead author, Richard Seager, a professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. Warmer temperatures in the state due to climate change “may have done a little bit of an add-on,” Dr. Seager said, by causing more water to evaporate. But some scientists, including Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said the report had understated the impact of warming. “The authors pay only the slightest lip service” to higher temperatures, Dr. Mann said in an essay for The Huffington Post. California has been gripped by severe drought since 2011, with officials reporting this fall that water storage in the state was about half of normal levels. Although climate change is expected to lead to more instances of extreme weather, including droughts, the issue of a link to any specific weather event or episode has been debated by scientists for years. In September, a series of papers on a drought that hit Australia last year unanimously agreed that it was a direct consequence of climate change. But three papers on the California drought — which, like the ones about Australia, were published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society — were divided on a link to climate change, with only one seeing a clear connection.


David Wright’s Slam Powers United States Past Italy

Abstract: PHOENIX — For an understated star like David Wright, it was a telling display of emotion. Wright had crushed a ball toward the left-field seats at Chase Field, and he skipped — just for a moment — on his first steps out of the batter’s box. He had earned the right to let loose, in his own way. Wright’s grand slam broke a tie in the fifth inning Saturday and carried the United States to a 6-2 victory over Italy in the World Baseball Classic. It was the first lead of the tournament for the Americans, who lost to Mexico on Friday and now face Canada on Sunday with a clear calculus. The stakes are simple: the winning team advances to the next round in Miami, and the losers go back to their spring training camps. The cryptic run-differential tiebreaker rules will not be needed. “This way, if you win it, you earn it; if you don’t, you don’t earn it,” United States Manager Joe Torre said. “You don’t have to be checking numbers or anything like that.” Italy played Saturday’s game knowing it had already clinched a spot in the second round. The Italians, who edged Mexico on Thursday and walloped Canada on Friday, grabbed a 2-0 lead off Ryan Vogelsong on Saturday. But Vogelsong, who won a World Series game for the San Francisco Giants last fall, settled into a groove after the second inning. Relievers Jeremy Affeldt and Ross Detwiler thwarted Italy after Wright’s blast, which came off Matthew Torra, a minor leaguer for the Washington Nationals. “It’s definitely a postseason atmosphere,” said Vogelsong, who lasted into the fifth. “It was a great feeling, great adrenaline rush.” Maybe so, but the game — on a Saturday night, with tourists in town for spring training — drew just 19,303 fans, fewer than an average Cleveland Indians home crowd last season. One of the fans in attendance was the Angels’ Mike Trout, probably the game’s best all-around player, who declined to play in the tournament. Yet the event has some prominent believers, especially Wright, who also played in 2009. Wright, who often plays before smallish crowds at Citi Field, said the atmosphere energized him. “You hear the U.S.A. chants, you look up in the stands and see the flags, you look in the dugout and you see U.S.A. across the front of guys’ chests and on the hats — yeah, you get caught up in the game, you get a little emotional,” Wright said. “I’ve experienced what it was like in the last W.B.C., making it to the semifinals, and how much fun that is. It only gets better from here. I want to experience that and more this time around.” The United States will start the Texas Rangers’ Derek Holland on Sunday against Jameson Taillon, a top Pittsburgh Pirates prospect who was born in Florida but whose parents are from Canada. The Canadian team brawled with Mexico on Saturday afternoon. “They have the same thing at stake as we do, fight or no fight,” Torre said. “You don’t need to get motivated to win a Game 7, and that’s what, basically, this is.”

David Wright
World Baseball Classic
Ryan Vogelsong


Manhattan D.A.’s Office Appeals Goldman Programmer Case

Abstract: The criminal case against Sergey Aleynikov, the former Goldman Sachs programmer, just will not die. Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney for Manhattan, announced on Monday that his office was appealing a state judge’s ruling that overturned a jury’s conviction of Mr. Aleynikov on a charge he had stolen some of the Wall Street bank’s high-speed trading source code in 2009. The decision by Mr. Vance’s office was a bit of a surprise given the long legal odyssey Mr. Aleynikov has navigated, first in federal court in New York and more recently in state court in Manhattan. Mr. Aleynikov, a Russian-born American citizen, first managed to get a federal appeals court to throw out his conviction in 2012, only to have prosecutors from Mr. Vance’s office indict him several months later on charges of violating a different set of state criminal laws. In May, a state jury convicted Mr. Aleynikov after more than a week of deliberation of a single count while acquitting on one charge and deadlocking on another count of the indictment. A few weeks after the jury verdict, Justice Daniel P. Conviser, in a 72-page ruling on July 6 , said the jury’s verdict could not stand. He found that the decades-old statute under which Mr. Aleynikov was convicted did not apply to the facts of what he had been charged with doing when he downloaded copies of Goldman’s trading code. Justice Conviser said Mr. Vance would be better off pushing state lawmakers to amend the state’s criminal law to cover the kind of action that Mr. Aleynikov was charged with carrying out. Mr. Vance’s office is taking the case to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York. Kevin Marino, a lawyer for Mr. Aleynikov, wasted no time in criticizing Mr. Vance for deciding to keep the legal battle alive. In an emailed statement, he said Mr. Vance’s decision to appeal Justice Conviser’s ruling was “inexcusable.” Mr. Marino added that the initial decision by Mr. Vance to prosecute his client, after a federal appeals court threw out an earlier conviction, “was reprehensible.” As he has done for several years now, Mr. Marino accused Mr. Vance of doing the bidding of Goldman in pursuing his client. Mr. Marino’s defense strategy has been to argue that his client did not break any criminal laws when he downloaded some of the Wall Street bank’s source code as he was preparing to leave for a job with a high-frequency trading firm. Mr. Marino has said that, if Mr. Aleynikov did anything wrong, it was to violate his obligations to his employer. In such a case, the matter should have been treated as a civil dispute between his client and Goldman rather than a criminal case, he contends. Over the years, Mr. Aleynikov, whose case has drawn attention to the rise of high-frequency trading, has become something of a folk hero on Wall Street given his success in beating back both federal and state prosecutors.

Sergey Aleynikov
Cyrus R Vance Jr
Goldman Sachs Group
High Frequency Trading Flash Orders
NYC


Rockies Have One Last Rally in Them

Abstract: DENVER, Oct. 1 – With only brief respites, the sellout crowd of 48,404 at Coors Field spent all 13 innings of Monday's National League wild-card tiebreaker game clapping, chanting, hooting, and imploring the Colorado Rockies complete a breathtaking burst to their first postseason since 1995. Finally, in the bottom of the 13th, the Rockies gave them what they wanted. After San Diego took a two-run lead on Scott Hairston's homer in the top of the inning, the Rockies rallied for three runs off Trevor Hoffman, the major league career saves leader, for a dramatic 9-8 victory that sent the crowd into an ear-splitting frenzy. It completed a stunning finish to the season by the Rockies (90-73), who won 14 of their last 15 games to overtake San Diego (89-74) for the wild card. Colorado opens its National League Division Series on Wednesday in Philadelphia. For the second time in three days, Hoffman blew a save to keep the Padres from clinching. Back-to-back doubles by Kazuo Matsui and Troy Tulowitzki to start the 13th cut the lead to one run, and Matt Holliday, to chants of "M-V-P!", tripled off the scoreboard in right to tie it. The hit, Holliday's second in six at-bats, gave him the NL batting title (.340) over Atlanta's Chipper Jones (.337). Hoffman then intentionally walked Todd Helton to pitch to Jamey Carroll, who pinch-ran for Garrett Atkins in the seventh and stayed in at third base. With the infield in and the outfield shallow, Carroll lifted a fly ball to Giles in right. The throw appeared to beat Holliday to the plate, but catcher Michael Barrett couldn't handle it, and Holliday barreled in headfirst for the run. "We easily could have laid down, but we didn't," said Tulowitzki, a rookie shortstop who had four hits and missed the cycle by a home run. "Some guys put together some nice at-bats, and we beat the best closer ever in baseball." Said Atkins: "I think I was more nervous watching those last four guys bat than when I was out there playing." Meanwhile, the one victory San Diego needed to clinch the wild card and its third consecutive postseason berth eluded it for the third straight day. Saturday in Milwaukee, with Hoffman on the mound and the Padres one strike away from a 3-2 victory, Tony Gwynn Jr. tripled in the trying run. The Brewers went on to win 4-3 in 11 innings. On Sunday the Brewers won again, 11-6. The Padres had cases of Champagne ready to celebrate with at Miller Park, but left it with visiting clubhouse attendants when they flew here Sunday night. So Monday, San Diego entrusted its season to 19-game winner Jake Peavy on full rest. Peavy seemed loose in the clubhouse before batting practice, strumming a bat like an air guitar to Kenny Chesney's "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem." But he wasn't effective enough, allowing six runs on 10 hits in 61/3 innings. Josh Fogg, the Colorado starter known as the "Dragonslayer" for beating big names like Brandon Webb, Curt Schilling and Roy Oswalt this season, wasn't much better, lasting four-plus innings and giving up five runs on eight hits. The Rockies took an early 3-0 lead before the Padres stormed back with the five-run third, when Fogg allowed Adrian Gonzalez's first career grand slam. The Rockies would use 10 pitchers. The Padres had plenty of chances to win it in extra innings, putting two men on the 10th and 11th and one in the 12th against reliever Matt Herges without scoring. The Rockies stranded two in the 11th when lefty Joe Thatcher struck out Brad Hawpe, the Rockies' hottest hitter the last two weeks, whom the Padres had already intentionally walked twice. Colorado could have avoided extra innings, but was victimized for the second time in less than a month by a questionable call on an apparent home run. With the Rockies leading 6-5 in the seventh, Atkins appeared to homer over the left-field fence. The ball caromed off an empty wheelchair back onto the field, but was ruled a double. Colorado did not score, and San Diego tied the game at 6-6 on a Giles double in the eighth. The Rockies had seen this before. On Sept. 10 in Philadelphia, Yorvit Torreabla's deep drive to right with the bases loaded was touched by a fan in the front row and ruled a ground-rule double instead of a grand slam. Only two runs scored instead of four, and the Rockies went on to lose in 10 innings, 6-5. Mike Cameron (torn thumb ligament) made his first appearance for San Diego since Sept. 23, pinch-running in the 10th and staying to play center. The Padres played the last week without Cameron and Milton Bradley (torn knee ligament); Hairston was Bradley's replacement. The Rockies were in fourth place and 61/2 games back in the NL West as late as Sept. 16, but forced this game with a remarkable final two weeks of the season. In an 11-game winning streak that started with a victory over Florida, they swept the Dodgers twice – four games at home, then three at Dodger Stadium – sandwiched around a three-game sweep at San Diego. A 14-inning, 2-1 victory at Petco Park Sept. 21 in that series opener, decided by a Hawpe homer, proved one of the most important in the streak. That started the Padres, who had won seven straight, on a four-game losing streak that tightened the wild-card race even further. Holliday had a monster September, batting .367 with 12 homers, 30 RBI and 29 run scored. Equally effective in the late rush was Hawpe, who hit .467 with 20 RBI in the last 11 games, and Helton, a .386 hitter in the final 14 games with three homers and 13 RBI. Helton had a hit in all but one of those games, and that was the Rockies' only loss, 4-2 to Arizona last Friday. Good pitching, especially by the bullpen (2.49 ERA, .212 opponents average), and outstanding defense also keyed the Rockies' run. The Rockies committed a major league-low 68 errors and accrued the best fielding percentage of any team in major league history (.98925, slightly better than the 2006 Red Sox.)

Colorado Rockies
Baseball
San Diego Padres
Hoffman Trevor
Matsui Kazuo
Tulowitzki Troy


Foreign Investment in City Is Growing, Report Finds

Abstract: More than one-tenth of all the goods and services produced in New York City and 1 of every 20 jobs are supplied by companies controlled by foreign investors, according to a report scheduled to be released on Friday by the Partnership for New York City. Those contributions have been growing in the past several years as companies from emerging markets like China and India have expanded and as the American dollar has weakened, the report’s authors found. Proponents of free trade, like the large corporations that the partnership represents, say that foreign investment is good for the city because it creates high-paying jobs and attracts skilled workers. But they also say that those gains could be threatened by a rising tide of protectionist sentiment that has led to tighter immigration policies in Washington and opposition to some takeover attempts by foreign companies. “Everybody complains about offshoring and outsourcing and the negative side of globalization of the economy,” said Kathryn S. Wylde, the partnership’s president. “We’re trying to quantify the benefits of globalization. New York is a great example of how our economy can flourish if we welcome and use foreign investment.” Opponents like the United States Business and Industry Council counter that acceptance of foreign investment is short-sighted and will ultimately lead to the loss of American jobs as companies shift operations out of the country. Ms. Wylde said she believed the report, prepared by a consultant hired by the partnership, was the first attempt to measure the economic impact of direct investment in the city by foreigners. It counted only controlling investments in job-generating enterprises, excluding minority stakes in companies and passive investments in real estate. The report estimated that businesses in the city that were controlled from abroad accounted for about $58 billion of the city’s total economic output of $570 billion in 2006. Those enterprises employed nearly 200,000 workers, or more than 5 percent of the city’s total employment, the report said. Ms. Wylde cited as an example the purchase last year of Key-Span Energy, the Brooklyn-based utility, by National Grid, a British company that now owns power companies across the Northeast. Another is the Plaza Hotel, which is owned by companies from Israel and Saudi Arabia and managed by a Canadian company. The flow of foreign money into the city has risen by almost 50 percent since 2002 up to 2006, according to the report. It estimated that direct investment in the city by foreign companies had climbed at a rate of more than 10 percent annually from $39 billion in 2002. In that time, the foreign-financed share of the gross city product rose to 10.2 percent from 9.2 percent, the report said. At that level, the role of foreign-owned companies would be significantly bigger in New York City than in the rest of the country, said Matthew J. Slaughter, an associate dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Mr. Slaughter said foreign investment accounted for about 5.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Mr. Slaughter said he would expect New York to attract a lot of foreign companies that wanted to be close to Wall Street or to compete in other professional services that are concentrated in the city. Its international reputation as a center of American business gives it more to gain from globalization, but potentially more to lose if the United States tries to stem the flow of foreign capital. Supporters of free trade have been troubled by a growing backlash against cross-border trade agreements and acquisitive foreign companies. In Washington, some members of Congress have opposed a proposed buyout of Anheuser-Busch, the brewer based in St. Louis, by a Belgian company. There was also some opposition to the recent shoring up of Citigroup and other big New York-based banks by state-owned investment funds from Asia and the Middle East, infusions that the city says totaled about $40 billion. “I just don’t get that,” said Robert C. Lieber, the deputy mayor for economic development, referring to the opposition to foreign investments in New York banks. “The money that’s coming in is coming in big bags and is taking very passive positions. We should be much more welcoming of this kind of an investment and not fearful of it.” The Bloomberg administration has supported foreign investment in the city and the country, both through the creation of American subsidiaries and the injections of capital into domestic companies. Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, said the city “depends on the free flow of people, ideas, goods and money.” Referring to Barack Obama’s statements that he might support opting out of the North American Free Trade Agreement under certain circumstances, Mr. Moss added, “Any effort to impose protectionism hurts us.” Mr. Slaughter said that federal data showed that on average, foreign-owned companies paid wages about one-third higher than their American-owned competitors. He said foreign-owned companies provided more than five million jobs in the country.

Foreign Investments
New York City
Economic Conditions and Trends


Steelers Hold On Against Chiefs to Reach A.F.C. Championship

Abstract: KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The playoffs within the A.F.C. playoffs concluded Sunday night at Arrowhead Stadium, and the winners afterward received not a glistening trophy or pristine new caps to wear but a more urgent, less tangible distinction. They earned a coveted title, the Team Most Equipped to Face the New England Patriots, and a chance to assert their legitimacy once more. The Pittsburgh Steelers won last week in the afternoon chill of their home stadium. They won Sunday night in the ceaseless mist and din of a stadium craving its first postseason victory in 23 years, defeating the Kansas City Chiefs by 18-16. Behind a postseason-record six field goals by Chris Boswell, the Steelers advanced to play top-seeded New England for the conference championship next Sunday at Gillette Stadium, where they will tote the following credentials: a nine-game winning streak, a snarling defense and a running back, Le’Veon Bell, who, with 30 carries for 170 yards Sunday, surpassed the franchise’s single-game postseason rushing record — a record that had stood for 42 years — for the second time in two weeks. “I’ve never really felt this way about a team,” guard David DeCastro said, adding: “With everyone healthy for the most part, I’d just be disappointed if we didn’t keep winning. That’s just kind of the expectations I have.” There are similar expectations in New England, where the Patriots defeated Houston on Saturday by 18 points — and seethed and smoldered afterward at their mistakes. That attitude — never satisfied, always unfulfilled — has forged their dominance this era, with six consecutive berths in the A.F.C. title game. “There’s a lot of things we’ve got to do to be successful against them,” quarterback Ben Roethlisberger said. “They’re the best in the world for a reason.” The Steelers, though, present a worthy adversary. If over the years New England has thrived by adapting to its personnel — featuring a downfield passing game one season, two tight ends another — Pittsburgh these last few months has demonstrated its own resourcefulness. Even with Bell flattening the Chiefs’ defense and his comrade Antonio Brown exceeding 100 receiving yards yet again, the Steelers’ offensive performance Sunday night bore little resemblance to the splendor against Miami last week, when they scored touchdowns on their first three drives. Against Kansas City, they went 0 for 4 in the red zone, where Roethlisberger threw his only interception. Fending off the Chiefs, in what Roethlisberger called the loudest stadium in the league, demanded a different formula. It demanded a defensive showing that contained the speedster Tyreek Hill, who had only 45 yards from scrimmage and fizzled as a returner, and thwarted one final comeback. And it demanded the conviction in Roethlisberger to make the correct call on the decisive play. After scoring on a 1-yard run by Spencer Ware with 2 minutes 43 seconds left, the Chiefs, trailing by 18-16, attempted a 2-point play and converted it — or so they thought. A holding penalty on tackle Eric Fisher — which drew the wrath of tight end Travis Kelce, who afterward said that the official who made the call should not even be permitted to work at Foot Locker — pushed the attempt back to the 12-yard line. This time, safety Sean Davis atoned for the illegal hit on Chris Conley that extended the drive by reading Alex Smith’s eyes and knocking away the pass intended for Jeremy Maclin. On the Steelers’ ensuing possession, facing third-and-3 at their own 12, Roethlisberger convened with his offensive coordinator, Todd Haley, on the sideline. Haley asked Roethlisberger what play he liked. Roethlisberger selected one with crossing patterns, figuring that his offensive line could give him enough time to throw and one of his receivers to slip free. Rolling right, Roethlisberger found Brown for 7 yards and a first down, securing the victory and shoving the best Chiefs team in nearly 15 years into the abyss. “You want the ball in your hands,” Roethlisberger said. “I love that situation.” The Chiefs have advanced as far as the conference championship game only once since 1969, when they won the Super Bowl, and this team was considered the franchise’s best chance to return. Instead, they have lost their last five home playoff games, a streak of ignominy that has now touched four coaches and five quarterbacks, the latest being Coach Andy Reid and Smith, who finished 20 of 34 for 172 yards, one touchdown and an interception. “It takes a lot to believe what is happening,” Maclin said. “This is the best football team I have played on, by far. We have nobody to blame but ourselves.” Entering Sunday, Reid’s teams were 19-2 after a bye, and he acknowledged that he and his staff had used a bit of the extra time to study more film. The Chiefs did need it, every second, to prepare for the unorthodox style of Bell, whose combination of strength, balance and acceleration torments even the most experienced defensive gurus. Upon taking the handoff, Bell approaches the line of scrimmage as if groping for a light-switch in darkness. He takes a small step, extends his hand, reads the block and then surges through an opening the approximate size of a two-by-four. Usually, at least. Every so often, he does get stopped, as he did on third-and-1 from the Steelers’ 11-yard line late in the third quarter. Taking over at the Pittsburgh 46 after a punt, the Chiefs converted on a third-and-20 but managed only a field goal, a 48-yarder by Cairo Santos that drew them to within 15-10. Asked last week how the Steelers would approach kicking to Hill, Coach Mike Tomlin quipped, “Very thoughtfully.” Their defensive coordinator, Keith Butler, asked about his unit’s plans, offered a less subtle response: “We have to make him feel it.” Pittsburgh undoubtedly would have, if only Kansas City had complied. Exploiting the Steelers’ fixation with Hill, the Chiefs often deployed him as a decoy. They ended an opening drive that began on their 45-yard line, after Pittsburgh squib-kicked away from him, with a fake sweep to Hill and a nifty 5-yard touchdown pass from Smith to Albert Wilson. Trailing by 7-3, the Steelers reacquainted themselves with a Chiefs defense that toughened when tested. Pittsburgh penetrated as deep as Kansas City’s 27 on its five series before halftime but did not score a touchdown, coming away with four Boswell field goals and a Roethlisberger interception off a tipped pass. The Steelers’ 275 first-half yards produced all of 12 points. For other teams, in other games, that total might portend regret or doom. Not the Steelers, not on Sunday. Their defense, so ferocious against Miami, limited the Chiefs to 227 total yards, 61 on the ground. The next challenge, against Tom Brady and his band of deadly options, figures to be tougher. But the Steelers, one victory from the Super Bowl, are grateful for that opportunity.


Monmouth Gets Top Seed In the N.I.T.

Abstract: Monmouth, which won the regular-season Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference title, earned a top seed in the National Invitation Tournament on Sunday, along with St. Bonaventure, South Carolina and Valparaiso. Monmouth lost the MAAC tournament championship game to Iona, but regular-season conference champions that do not make the N.C.A.A. tournament are guaranteed spots in the N.I.T. One notable absence will be Louisiana State and its freshman sensation, Ben Simmons, considered the nation’s top N.B.A. prospect. Tigers Coach Johnny Jones announced that his team would not participate in any postseason tournament after it was left out of the N.C.A.A. field. The first four teams left out of the N.C.A.A. tournament automatically receive No. 1 seeds in the N.I.T. San Diego State and St. Mary’s of California were among other teams falling to the N.I.T. With the N.C.A.A. selection committee favoring power-conference programs over midmajors that were also on the bubble, a record 15 automatic qualifiers made the 32-team N.I.T. field.


An Upside to Envy, and a New Reason for That Commandment

Abstract: Why envy? It seems to be the most useless of the deadly sins: excruciating to experience, shameful to admit, bereft of immediate pleasure or long-term benefits. To an evolutionary psychologist, there’s a certain logic to seducing thy neighbor’s wife or stealing his goods, but what’s the point of merely coveting them? Philosophers have offered theories, but empirical evidence has been in short supply, maybe because envy is such an uncomfortable topic for everyone, including psychologists . Now, though, thanks to some experiments with envious students at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and the University of Texas at Austin, we can see an upside of coveting — along with one new reason to have a commandment against it. The researchers were looking for quintessential envy, which is distinct from jealousy. Envy involves a longing for what you don’t have, while jealousy is provoked by losing something to someone else. If you crave a wife like Angelina Jolie, you’re envious of Brad Pitt; if you’re upset about losing your wife to him, you’re jealous. The psychologists in Texas began, mildly enough, with an experiment dredging up past feelings of envy. Some of the students were asked to write about occasions on which they’d envied a friend or acquaintance. Then these students, along with a control group not asked to recall envious experiences, read interviews with a couple of people who were purportedly enrolled at their university. In these two interviews — which were fictions concocted by the researchers — the respondents answered questions about their studies and goals but didn’t say anything that would elicit envy. Compared with the control group, the students who’d just finished describing their past envy spent more time studying the interviews and were better at recalling details about these two people. Merely reliving their envy of past rivals apparently caused them to pay more attention to current peers, even though there was nothing obviously threatening about these two people. If past envy sharpened the mind, what would be the effect of brand-new envy? That was the next experiment for the researchers, Sarah E. Hill and Danielle J. DelPriore of Texas Christian, and Phillip W. Vaughan of the University of Texas. They showed college students a half dozen bogus newspapers interviews and photographs of other purported students at their school. Female students saw photos of other young women, while male students saw photos of other men. Both sexes saw a similar mix of people, including some described by the researchers as “advantaged peers.” In the photographs, some of the fictitious students were hot and some were not. The interviews revealed clear disparities in wealth. One mentioning owning a new BMW; another drove an old clunker. One had a parent on the board of trustees of the school; another received financial aid. As the real students went through each of these profiles, the researchers asked them about their own emotions and measured how long they spent studying each one. Sure enough, they spent more time contemplating the ones toward which they expressed envy: the good-looking students with new BMWs and rich parents. And afterward they were better able to recall the names and other details of these “high-envy targets.” The results show that envy can “evoke a functionally coordinated cascade of cognitive processes,” as the researchers put it in the October issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In an interview, Dr. Hill compared it to another less than lofty cognitive experience: rubbernecking. “It’s much like a car crash we can’t stop looking at,” she said. “We can’t get our minds off people who have advantages we want for ourselves.” By paying more attention to these people, we might learn to emulate some of the strategies that yielded their advantages. Or we might notice something that we could use to embarrass and hinder them — again, not a terribly exalted cognitive experience, but potentially useful in winning struggles for status and resources. To test evolutionary explanations for envy, Dr. Hill and her colleagues looked for differences between men and women in their reactions to the photos and the interviews of peers of their own sex. It turned out that women were more likely than men to be envious of a physically attractive peer, a result that jibed with evolutionary psychologists’ theories about beauty being more important to women for reproductive success. Wealth is supposed to be more important to men’s reproductive success, but in this experiment there was no gender gap regarding money. Women envied a woman with a BMW as much as men envied a guy driving one. You might interpret this as evidence that the gender gap on money is narrowing as more women work outside the home. Or it might demonstrate, as the researchers note, that the “fungible nature of money” makes it valuable for both sexes’ reproductive success. “I wasn’t terribly surprised that women were just as envious as men about wealth,” Dr. Hill said. “After all, from an evolutionary perspective — or any other perspective, for that matter — men wouldn’t be so concerned with resource acquisition if women didn’t like resources so much.” The new evidence from the Texas experiments is important because it clearly demonstrates that memory and attention are linked with envy, said Richard H. Smith, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky and the editor of “Envy,” a 2008 compendium of research on the subject. The Texas study also supports a very old notion about this vice. “Traditionally, envy is linked with the eyes,” Dr. Smith said, noting that the word comes from the Latin “invidere,” which mean to look at with malice, or cast an “evil eye.” Just as an invidious comparison is by definition bad, so is envy defined by some psychological researchers to be inherently malign. But other researchers, like the Dutch psychologist Niels Van de Ven, define envy in two different ways. There’s “benign envy,” in which you pay attention to superiors in order to emulate them, so as to raise your own standing. That’s different from “malicious envy,” in which you pay attention to superiors to find weaknesses that will lower them toward your level. “With benign envy, the eyes are probably wide open and eager,” Dr. Smith said. “With malicious envy, they are squinting and resentful.” By any name, envy requires mental effort, as the Texas researchers found in yet another experiment testing envious students. This time, after contemplating a wealthy, attractive peer, the students were asked to work on puzzles. Compared with a control group, they gave up sooner. They were apparently victims of what psychologists call “ego depletion,” a state of mental fatigue originally documented in people whose energy was depleted by performing acts of self-control. Now it looks as if envy depletes that same resource. It may sharpen your eye and improve your memory, but the benefits come at a cost. Coveting thy neighbor’s goods is hard work.

Research
Jealousy
Psychology and Psychologists


Tour de France 2014: Kristoff Passes Bauer on Final Stretch to Win Stage 15

Abstract: NÎMES, France — The contrast could not have been greater. Jack Bauer was slumped against a railing, apparently in tears, teammates patting his back. Nearby, Alexander Kristoff was receiving hugs of congratulations for his second stage win of this year’s Tour de France. Bauer, a New Zealander who rides for Garmin-Sharp, was part of a two-man breakaway for almost the entirety of Sunday’s 138-mile Stage 15, which cut across southern France from Tallard to Nîmes. Having endured a fierce rainstorm and been pushed along by fierce winds, Bauer dropped the other rider in the breakaway, Martin Elmiger of Switzerland, in the final run to the finish line. But at just about the point when riders typically start thinking about zipping up their jerseys for the victory photos, the Tour showed it has no pity. Bauer looked to his side and saw a group that included Kristoff and three other sprint experts, Peter Sagan, André Greipel and Heinrich Haussler. After seven more surging pedal strokes by Kristoff, Bauer went from dreams of a stage victory to 10th place. Even Kristoff, who finished first in 4 hours 56 minutes 43 seconds, seemed surprised by the final turn of events. “It was a little bit too late for comfort,” Kristoff, who rides for Katusha and is the only Norwegian competing at the Tour, said of his sprint effort. “I thought it might be for second place.” For Bauer, who slumped to the ground, crying, with his hands on his helmet, there was little in the way of a consolation prize. Even the largely subjective award for most combative rider, which allows its winner to wear a special red and white race number the next day, went to Elmiger, of IAM Cycling. Bauer’s job normally is to support Garmin-Sharp’s star riders — a domestique, in cycling jargon — rather than chase wins. But on Sunday, his orders from his team were to join the first break, which turned out to be much smaller than he expected. “I am normally in the service of others, so this was my first chance to really be up the road,” Bauer said. “It was just a dream that didn’t quite come true today. But that’s bike racing. That’s sport.” Many of the riders in the pack, however, were more focused on surviving than fulfilling their dreams. The stage, which took the Tour out of the Alps and set it on its way to the Pyrenees, included a series of twists and turns in the streets of Nîmes leading to the finish that created chaos for the chasing pack and for teams setting up their sprinters for their final moves. And a cross tailwind aided the breakaway riders but made the stage a struggle for many in the pack. Several teams, BMC among them, forced the pace in the hopes of breaking up the main group into diagonal lines of riders seeking to draft, known as echelons. That prospect, which could have benefited Tejay van Garderen, BMC’s leader, who is in fifth, concerned Vincenzo Nibali, the overall race leader. “I was scared of possible echelons,” he said after the race. “I didn’t want to be caught by surprise.” BMC failed to break up the pack, although Nibali, just to be sure, zipped to the front and rode with the BMC riders. Many at the back of the pack were less fortunate. Ji Cheng, the first Chinese rider to enter the Tour, repeatedly came on and off the group. Eventually there was no return. Ji, who rides for Giant-Shimano, finished the day last, in 171st place, crossing the finish 12:20 after Kristoff. More embarrassing, Richie Porte, the Australian leader of Team Sky, became detached with about 40 miles left. He finished 70th, 16 seconds behind the main pack of riders, who were given the same time as Kristoff. Nibali finished in the main pack to head into Monday, the Tour’s final rest day, with his 4:37 lead intact. The race has already featured some unexpected twists, but teams will most likely spend that time working out strategies for earning a stage win rather than plotting Nibali’s downfall.

Tour de France
Jack Bauer
Alexander Kristoff
Biking
Vincenzo Nibali


Proof Needed to Enroll in Health Plan Post-Deadline

Abstract: WASHINGTON — People who want to buy health insurance in the federal marketplace outside the annual open enrollment period will now have to provide documents to show they are eligible, the Obama administration announced on Wednesday. In the last two years, insurers say, many people went without coverage and then signed up under the Affordable Care Act when they became sick and needed care. Insurers say that people who sign up after the deadline tend to generate more claims and more costs, raising premiums. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, representing state officials, complained recently that “consumers are not required to provide documentation to substantiate their eligibility for a special enrollment period.” The new policy requires people to submit documents like a birth or marriage certificate if they want to sign up after the deadline using any of the most common special enrollment periods. These are available after a marriage or the birth or adoption of a child. They are also available when people move permanently to a new address or lose coverage provided by an employer, a government program or other source. The administration has created more than 30 special enrollment categories and sent emails to millions of Americans last year urging them to see if they might be able to sign up after the open enrollment deadline. It is unclear how rigorous the government will be in checking eligibility. Consumers who appear to qualify for a special enrollment period will be allowed to obtain insurance while the government tries to confirm eligibility based on the documents provided, federal officials said. Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal marketplace, said Wednesday that the new requirements would apply to people who want to enroll or change health plans midyear in the 38 states that use the federal website, HealthCare.gov . “We are committed to making sure that special enrollment periods are available to those who are eligible,” Mr. Counihan said. “But it’s equally important to avoid misuse or abuse.” If consumers do not provide the required documents, he said, “they could be found ineligible to enroll in marketplace coverage and could lose their insurance.” Insurers welcomed the new policy. Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, said the documentation requirements were “a much-needed step in the right direction.” Justine G. Handelman, a vice president of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, said the policy could help stabilize the federal insurance marketplace. The insurer Aetna said that, on average, people who signed up in a special enrollment period kept their coverage for about half of the time of regular enrollees. Consumer advocates who usually support the White House denounced the administration’s action. Rachel Klein, the director of organizational strategy at Families USA, a consumer group, said, “We should be making it easier for people to sign up for health insurance, not harder.” Consumers, she said, are still learning how to navigate a complex enrollment process, so the administration should not be putting “bureaucratic roadblocks” in their path. Judith Solomon, a vice president at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning research and advocacy group, said she was disappointed because the government was imposing the new requirements without clear evidence of abuse. “There is evidence that special enrollment periods are underutilized,” Ms. Solomon said. “We fear that requiring more paperwork will exacerbate that trend and keep people out of coverage.” The new policy was announced a few hours after the Government Accountability Office , an investigative arm of Congress, questioned another aspect of HealthCare.gov. In a report to Congress, the investigators said that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “has assumed a passive approach to identifying and preventing fraud” by people who bought insurance and obtained subsidies through HealthCare.gov. The Obama administration waived certain document filing requirements, did not always verify income and citizenship, and thus “allowed an unknown number of applicants to retain coverage, including subsidies, they might otherwise have lost,” the report said.

National Assn of Insurance Commissioners


Suspects in Video Assault Cases Identified

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — It started with an anonymous package mailed to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, full of some of the most gruesome evidence investigators had ever seen: 100 hours of video footage that showed men sexually assaulting severely disabled women. Some assaults took place at residential care centers. For months, the videos remained a ghastly mystery for investigators, who could barely make out the suspects’ faces on grainy security tapes. But just one day after the Sheriff’s Department released images and composite sketches of four suspects from the videos, officials announced on Friday that they had identified two of the men. A Los Angeles Police Department detective saw the sketches on Thursday night’s news, and recognized one of the suspects as Bert Hicks, 42, who is already in prison for a sexual assault. The police helped identify another suspect from the videos as well, but his name has not been released. Still, most of the suspects remain unidentified. In the videos, at least eight men can be seen assaulting at least 10 physically and mentally disabled women, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Investigators believe most of the assaults occurred at residential care centers around Los Angeles. At least one suspect was an employee at a center where one of the videos was made, and another appears to be disabled himself. The Sheriff’s Department is working with the Police Department to identify other facilities where abuses occurred. Because of what the Sheriff’s Department called the “extremely disturbing” nature of the videos, they were not released to the public. But detectives described graphic scenes, like one video that showed a paraplegic man sexually assaulting a woman wearing a diaper. Sgt. Dan Scott said the videos were among the most disturbing things he had seen in 23 years of investigating sex crimes. “These are horrendous crimes,” Sergeant Scott said. “We hear the stories verbalized to us every day, but to actually have to sit down and see it is shocking.” The video itself was extremely low-quality, shot mostly on security cameras and, in at least one case, on a hand-held camera, which made it difficult to determine how many attackers were involved. Sergeant Scott said it took months to digitally enhance the images. “We had such minimal information,” he said. “It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.” The suspect identifications are the first break in the case since the videos were mailed to the Sheriff’s Department last March, with a note from an anonymous person who identified himself as a computer technician hired to wipe the hard drive of a computer, according to a Sheriff’s Department spokesman. The man said he found the files and, before deleting them, copied them to DVDs, which he sent to the Sheriff’s Department. Despite pleas from the department to make contact again, even anonymously, the source of the DVDs has yet to come forward.

Assaults
Sex Crimes
Handicapped
Women and Girls


A Weird Way of Thinking Has Prevailed Worldwide

Abstract: CORTES, CANADA — Imagine a country whose inhabitants eat human flesh, wear only pink hats to sleep and banish children into the forest to raise themselves until adulthood. Now imagine that this country dominates the study of psychology worldwide. Its universities have the best facilities, which draw the best scholars, who write the best papers. Their research subjects are the flesh-eating, pink-hat-wearing, forest-reared locals. When these psychologists write about their own country, all is well. But things deteriorate when they generalize about human nature. They view behaviors that are globally commonplace — say, vegetarianism — as deviant. Human nature, as they define it, reflects little of the actual diversity of humankind. This scenario may sound preposterous. But if a provocative new study is to be believed, the world already lives in such a situation — except that it is American undergraduates, not flesh-eating forest dwellers, who monopolize our knowledge of human nature. In the study, published last month in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan — all psychologists at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver — condemn their field’s quest for human universals. Psychologists claim to speak of human nature, the study argues, but they have mostly been telling us about a group of WEIRD outliers, as the study calls them — Westernized, educated people from industrialized, rich democracies. According to the study, 68 percent of research subjects in a sample of hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals came from the United States, and 96 percent from Western industrialized nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology — making a randomly selected American undergraduate 4,000 times likelier to be a subject than a random non-Westerner. Western psychologists routinely generalize about “human” traits from data on this slender subpopulation, and psychologists elsewhere cite these papers as evidence. In itself, such extrapolation is hardly fatal. Freud built his account of human behavior from his work on patients in Vienna and generalized for the world. So many great analysts of human nature, from Aristotle to the Buddha, reached for transcendent human truths despite limited contact with the range of humanity. The Canadian study’s claim is not to invalidate all extrapolation so much as to suggest that American undergraduates may be especially unsuitable for it. The study’s method was to analyze a mountain of published, peer-reviewed psychology papers. It found evidence both of a narrow research base and of the eccentricity of that base. Among the many peculiarities of the usual subjects who serve as “universal man” are these, the study found: American subjects disproportionately prize choice and individualism. In a survey of six Western societies, only Americans preferred a choice of 50 ice creams to 10. Studies have found that Americans are all but alone in giving newborns their own room. Americans are also peculiar in the so-called Ultimatum Game, in which a subject receives money and must make an offer to share it. The second subject can accept or reject the offer, but if it is rejected, neither subject gets paid. Americans playing the game are fair in the extreme, making higher offers than most. But they are also outliers in another way. In various places, including Russia and China , psychologists observe the rejection of excessive generosity — a demurring when offered too much. This behavior is absent from American undergraduates. The study’s list goes on and on. Westerners tend to define themselves by psychological traits, and non-Westerners by relationships. In some languages, including English, directions are built around the self (“Take a right after the church”), while in other languages, they refer to immovable objects (“It is behind the church”). Americans are worse than many at overcoming common optical illusions about the length of lines. But they are better than East Asians at recalling an object when the background changes, perhaps because the latter focus on context. The data on these differences are patchy, the study’s authors acknowledge. Not enough work has been done on human variation. The Canadian attempt was simply to synthesize the existing research and to establish with their synthesis that psychological sameness is an implausible assumption. Some critics of the study have suggested that there are universals underlying surface differences, and that the WEIRD variables may not be the right ones. But there has been little dispute about the premise that psychologists have extrapolated from an outlying few the ways of the global many. It is an extrapolation with consequences. Democracy promoters tell us that all humans feel the same way about authority, despite evidence of diversity. Economists say that all humans are self-interested rational actors, though many succumb to selfless and irrational pursuits. Abstract rights are proclaimed for all humans, overlooking the fact that many prefer their ethics in more grounded, context-specific ways. China, India and many other societies shy away from such universalizing. Their thinkers avoid proclaiming that all humans do this or do that simply because the Chinese or the Indians do. If they began to do so, how might things change? For now, those outside the West continue to feel a certain pressure from beyond to think in ways not their own. The television sitcoms they watch, the books they read, the superheroes they grow up with, the PowerPoint presentations they give — these were often designed with someone else’s psychology foremost in mind, on the hope that they fit universally. One response to the WEIRD study, by the psychologist Paul Rozin, is that extrapolating from Americans is acceptable because the world is Americanizing. “The U.S. is in the vanguard of the global world,” he said, according to Science magazine, “and may provide a glimpse into the future.” But it is also possible that people around the world are not simply in the process of becoming like American undergraduates, and relying on WEIRD subjects can make others feel alienated, with their ways of thinking framed as deviant, not different. Among the less-examined facets of globalization is its psychic pressure: a force that makes people feel that they are playing by others’ rules, that makes their own home turf feel like an opponent’s stadium. In this WEIRD people’s world, so many only know away games. Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly .

Far East South and Southeast Asia and Pacific Areas


Univision to Start UVideos, Its First Digital Network

Abstract: Univision and other Spanish language networks have long attributed their high ratings among Latinos to the fact that viewers watch their programming live. But while many Latinos still flock to television sets to watch the network’s plot-heavy telenovelas, live sporting events and news, a growing segment of the population is also viewing media on mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and on mobile applications. Figures from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project show that almost half of Hispanics in the United States own a smartphone, while 20 percent own a tablet device. On Monday, Univision will officially start its first digital network, UVideos, which will offer more than 1,500 hours of long-form programming and about 200 short clips a day free to users. The content will be available as a mobile application for smartphones and tablets and online at UVideos.com . In an effort to go beyond its traditional Spanish-only format, Univision will also make the content and the user interface on UVideos available in English, with subtitles on many of the network’s shows. In January, Univision began adding English subtitles on some of its television programming. Advertising on the UVideos platform will also be available in English and Spanish and will include commercials for Microsoft, Wendy’s and Allstate. Social media will also be integrated into the UVideos platform. Users can log into the platform through Facebook or Twitter. Comments that come through social media will be time-coded and available to viewers of those programs at any time to mimic a live experience. Randy Falco, the president and chief executive of Univision, said that while 93 percent of all viewing is live, the UVideos platform will give viewers content on their terms. “I think this is more about accessing consumers in a way that they want to consume,” Mr. Falco said. “The strategy for us is we have to reassemble the audience, be in front of that audience wherever they are, with a Univision piece of content on a Univision platform.” Viewing habits of younger consumers are shifting, Mr. Falco said, referring to them as a “YouTube generation” whose attention spans are shorter. “They like their information quick and fast, they like it in bits that they can share,” he said. Shorter bits of video, especially in news programming, will be important, he said. “People like to digest that in 2 1/2- to 3-minute segments,” he said. Not coincidentally, Mr. Falco said the network was discussing creating channels with YouTube. Univision will promote UVideos with an advertising campaign that will run on the network and online, including sites like Facebook, Yahoo and Pandora. The campaign, created by the Blanco Lorenz agency, will be rolled out in three phases, said Jennifer Ball, the senior vice president for distribution marketing. The first phase will focus on introducing the consumer to UVideos, and will include talent from Univision like Don Francisco of Sábado Gigante and the news team of Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas. The other phases will highlight the social media aspect of the platform and user authentication, the idea that users will have to access the content by signing in through their paid television provider, Ms. Ball said. In conjunction with the debut of UVideos on Monday, Univision will show the premiere of the network’s fourth Web-only telenovela, “Te Presento a Valentín.” The telenovela is the first digital-only co-production of Univision and its content partner, Televisa. Fifteen episodes, each about six minutes, will be available on UVideos starting Monday. A Univision official described the show as a “romantic comedy with a twin-brother twist.”

Univision
Spanish Language
Television
Mobile Applications
Web-Original Programming
Computers and the Internet


Guo Boxiong, Ex-Top Military Official in China, Gets Life Sentence for Graft

Abstract: BEIJING — Guo Boxiong, the most senior Chinese military commander ever tried for corruption, was sentenced on Monday to life in prison after a military court found him guilty of taking “huge” amounts in bribes in return for giving military promotions and transfers. General Guo rose as high in the People’s Liberation Army as a career military officer can go, serving as a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission for a decade until 2012, when he retired. By then, he was second in rank seniority only to the chairman of the commission, who is always the Communist Party’s leader. But as a drive by President Xi Jinping against graft in the party and military gained momentum, rumors grew that General Guo and his family were under scrutiny by anticorruption investigators. In speculation online, he was called “the wolf of the northwest,” a nod to the region where he served early in his career and to his reputation for greed. An explanation of the verdict from the military court issued by the state news media on Monday confirmed that there was some truth to that reputation. “Guo Boxiong exploited his posts to obtain promotions or transfers in posts for others, and — singly or in consort with others — illegally accepted wealth and assets,” said the explanation, issued by the news agency Xinhua . “Guo Boxiong accepted exceptionally large amounts in bribes, and the circumstances of his crimes were especially grave.” The court said that General Guo, who turned 74 this month, “sincerely admitted and repented his crimes.” He also pledged not to appeal the verdict. The announcement from the court did not specify how much General Guo had taken in bribes. Long before the verdict was announced, party and military officials and news outlets had already brandished General Guo’s alleged misdeeds as proof of why Mr. Xi had to take aggressive action to stamp out graft. The official commentaries suggested that deep corruption in the People’s Liberation Army, especially buying and selling promotions, had sapped the preparedness of officers, and even their loyalty to the Communist Party. The commentaries often lumped General Guo with Xu Caihou, another former military commander placed under investigation for corruption . Both served in the Politburo, one of the Communist Party’s highest rungs of power. “The problems of graft and corruption of Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou are staggering,” said an excerpt from a military indoctrination book published in People’s Liberation Army Daily in May. “But this was not the crux of their problems. That crux was that they had violated a political bottom line.” General Xu died in March last year , before he could stand trial. The secret trial of General Guo began in May this year, after the Communist Party leadership expelled him from the party nearly a year ago and handed his case over to the military for a criminal investigation. The military court that announced the verdict said other suspects associated with General Guo’s misdeeds would also be tried. They may include his son, Guo Zhenggang, a former major general in the People’s Liberation Army who has also been under investigation for graft .