James Q. Wilson Dies at 80; Originated ‘Broken Windows’ Policing Strategy

Abstract: James Q. Wilson , a wide-ranging social scientist whose “broken windows” theory of law enforcement laid the groundwork for crime reduction programs in New York, Los Angeles and other cities, died on Friday in Boston. He was 80. The cause was complications of leukemia, his son, Matthew, said. Mr. Wilson, who taught government at Harvard for more than two decades, was the author of disquisitions on politics, the family, the nature of bureaucracies, virtue and vice that both countered and steered intellectual trends. But he was best known for his research on the behavior of police officers and lawbreakers. Probably his most influential theory holds that when the police emphasize the maintenance of order rather than the piecemeal pursuit of rapists, murderers and carjackers, concentrating on less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life like street-corner drug-dealing, graffiti and subway turnstile-jumping, the rate of more serious crime goes down. Such a strategy became a cornerstone of the “quality of life” crime-reduction program in the 1990s of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and his first police commissioner, William J. Bratton . Mr. Bratton had earlier adopted techniques complementary to Mr. Wilson’s ideas. They included more officers on foot patrol and a system known as CompStat that held police captains accountable on a daily basis for spikes in crime and disorder in their precincts. During Mr. Giuliani’s tenure, from 1994 to 2001, the rate of violent felonies plunged, amplifying his reputation as a crime-fighter — he had been a prosecutor — and increasing his popularity. Mr. Bratton left New York to become commissioner in Los Angeles, where crime also fell. But Mr. Wilson’s theory and its application have had their critics. Some accused Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Bratton of waging an overly aggressive campaign against panhandlers and the so-called squeegee men, who confronted motorists. And some researchers have questioned the efficacy of the program, saying that other factors, including the waning of the crack epidemic, were more responsible for the declining crime rate than the “broken windows” approach. The theory was first espoused by Mr. Wilson and George L. Kelling, a criminologist who had studied foot patrols in Newark, in 1982 in an article in the magazine The Atlantic. The approach is psychologically based. It proceeds from the presumption, supported by research, that residents’ perceptions of the safety of their neighborhood is based not on whether there is a high rate of crime, but on whether the neighborhood appears to be well tended — that is, whether its residents hold it in mutual regard, uphold the locally accepted obligations of civility, and outwardly disdain the flouting of those obligations. In Mr. Wilson’s metaphor — Mr. Kelling gave Mr. Wilson credit for it — when a window is broken and someone fixes it, that is a sign that disorder will not be tolerated. But “one unrepaired broken window,” they wrote, “is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” The authors argued that acts of criminality are fostered by such an “untended” environment, and that the solution is thus to tend it by being intolerant of the smallest illegalities. The wish “to ‘decriminalize’ disreputable behavior that ‘harms no one’ — and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order — is, we think, a mistake,” Mr. Wilson and Mr. Kelling wrote. “Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community.” “A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases,” they added. “It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.” Mr. Bratton said in an interview on Friday that he had become interested in the “broken windows” theory independently, when he was working in Boston, where residents living in high-crime areas told him that what they worried most about was prostitution and graffiti. “The importance of what Wilson and Kelling wrote was the emphasis not only on crime committed against people but the emphasis on crimes committed against the community, neighborhoods,” Mr. Bratton said. James Quinn Wilson was born on May 27, 1931, in Denver, and grew up mostly in Long Beach, Calif. His father, Claude, was a salesman; his mother, Marie, a homemaker. He graduated from the University of Redlands in the San Bernardino Valley, east of Los Angeles, then served in the Navy during the Korean War (not in combat). He then pursued advanced degrees at the University of Chicago, where he earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. He arrived at Harvard in 1961. He later taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Pepperdine University. Mr. Wilson, who lived in North Andover, Mass., for the past three years after more than 20 years in Southern California, met his wife, the former Roberta Evans, in high school; they married in 1952. Besides his son, Matthew, he is survived by his wife; their daughter, Annie Gilbert; a sister, Diane Gray; and five grandchildren. Mr. Wilson’s first book, “Negro Politics” (1960), was among the first serious sociological analyses of the role of blacks in urban politics. Since then, in dozens of articles for publications that included Commentary, The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in several books, he explored individual behavior and its relationship to institutions and to society as a whole. In “Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It” (1989), he analyzed the inner workings of agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as prisons and schools, pointing out the general disconnect between the people at the top who make the policies and the people at the bottom who do the work. The largest percentage of his oeuvre, however, was devoted to the issue of crime. An early book, “The Varieties of Police Behavior,” led to an invitation to serve on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Commission on Crime and the Administration of Justice. On the issue of crime and punishment, as in other areas, Mr. Wilson was an avowed conservative, arguing, for example, that strict punishment for criminals, including the death penalty, has a deterrent effect on crime. But even his critics acknowledged that he was less an ideologue than a scientist; he supported the war in Iraq and wrote that marriage should be defined by the union of one man and one woman, but he dismissed criticism of Darwin and suspicion of the theory of evolution. “I know my political ideas affect what I write,” he acknowledged in a 1998 interview in The Times, “but I’ve tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I’ve written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn’t know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.”

Police
Crime Rates
Wilson James Q
Crime and Criminals
Deaths (Obituaries)
Bratton William J
Giuliani Rudolph W
New York City


Rodrigo Duterte’s Talk of Killing Criminals Raises Fears in Philippines

Abstract: DAVAO CITY, Philippines — The police warned 14-year-old Bobby Alia that there would be consequences after he was accused of stealing a cellphone in November 2003, the boy’s mother said. A few days later he was dead, stabbed in the back with a butcher knife. He was the third of Clarita Alia’s sons to die in Davao, the southern Philippines’ largest city, in killings that remain unsolved. A fourth was killed in 2007. All had been accused of crimes, all were stabbed and all, Ms. Alia said, had received similar warnings from the police. For years, rights groups have called for an investigation into whether Davao’s mayor, Rodrigo Duterte — the tough-talking politician who next month will become president of the Philippines — was complicit in the killings of hundreds of people in Davao since the 1980s by what they describe as government-sanctioned death squads. The Davao police say they have not found evidence that such organizations exist. Investigations by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and the Philippines’ own Commission on Human Rights, however, have found evidence that they do exist and that police officers and other government officials had been involved in the killings. The victims, the investigations found, included people suspected of committing crimes or using drugs, street children and, in some cases, people who had been mistaken for someone else. While Mr. Duterte has denied any direct knowledge of death squads, he has long called for addressing the Philippines’ severe crime problem by killing suspected criminals. In 2009, he said they were “a legitimate target of assassination.” Image A poster of Rodrigo Duterte in a huge market district surrounded by slums in Davao this month. For years, rights groups have called for an investigation into whether Mr. Duterte was involved or complicit in the killings of hundreds of suspected criminals, drug users and others in Davao since the 1980s by what they call government-sanctioned death squads. Credit Jes Aznar for The New York Times During the presidential campaign this year, he uncorked a running barrage of murderous boasts. He claimed to have personally killed armed criminals while mayor, though no evidence has emerged to support those stories. Asked to respond to a report that he killed 700 people, he replied, “No, it is not 700, but 1,700.” Mr. Duterte promised if elected to deploy the police and the military in an all-out assault on criminal gangs. “It is going to be bloody,” he told a business group in April. “I will use the military and the police to go out and arrest them, hunt for them. And if they will offer a violent resistance, and thereby placing the lives of the law enforcers and the military whom I would task for a job to do, I will simply say, ‘Kill them all and end the problem.’” Mr. Duterte promised to kill 100,000 criminals in his first six months in office and dump so many bodies in Manila Bay that the “fish will grow fat.” The claims may strike some as outlandish. But the evidence of killings on Mr. Duterte’s watch as mayor of Davao has led to fears of a nationwide explosion of extrajudicial killings during his presidency. “There’s a danger that Duterte’s electoral victory may be seen as a symbolic victory for a notion that’s already spreading in the Philippines: that extrajudicial vigilante-style killings of suspected criminals is a legitimate approach to crime control,” said Phelim Kine, deputy director of Human Rights Watch for Asia. Mr. Duterte’s hard-line stance on crime is wildly popular in Davao. Raul Tolentino, 82, who has practiced law here since the 1960s, said that popularity stemmed from the 1980s, when Communist insurgents plagued the region and the city was notorious for bloody mayhem . Mr. Tolentino recalled armed rebel groups entering the city at will, and criminal gangs engaging in shootouts in broad daylight. Video The Filipino presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte is no stranger to controversy. Here are some of his provocative comments. Credit Credit Bullit Marquez/Associated Press “It was terrible,” he said. “If someone had a grudge against you, they could just kill you. It was a lawless state. Even policemen were not safe walking alone on the streets. They would end up on a stretcher.” Mr. Duterte, then a hard-charging prosecutor, was elected mayor in 1988 on a law-and-order platform. Around the same time, citizens’ groups formed that some called anti-crime organizations and others simply called vigilantes . Mr. Tolentino said that a combination of those armed groups and Mr. Duterte’s tough policies brought order to the city. Others say the citizens’ groups evolved into organized death squads that are still active. “Usually, there is a list of names kept at the village level,” the Rev. Father Amado Picardal, a priest who has investigated the groups, said in an interview. “The death squads are well organized, supported by the local government, and they follow a pattern. They usually issue a warning, though now sometimes there isn’t even a warning. If you are on the list, you are killed.” In a 2009 report , Human Rights Watch said the killers included former Communist rebels as well as street criminals and others who were subjected to threats and coercion. Their orders often came from current or former police officers who provided training and weapons, and in some cases coordinated the timing of the murders, according to the rights group, which said it had investigated 28 such killings. The Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights, a semiautonomous government agency, found in 2012 that death squads had killed 206 people , including 19 children, in Davao from 2005 to 2009. The panel said that lists of suspected criminals were kept by village officials, and that many of the people on the lists were killed. Edmundo R. Albay, the director of the agency’s office in Davao, said that another investigation into the death squads was underway but that he could not provide details about it. In its 2012 report, the commission recommended that Mr. Duterte be criminally investigated for failing to take action to stop the killings, but it did not say that he had had direct knowledge of them. He has never been charged with a crime in connection with the killings. Philip Alston, then the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, interviewed Mr. Duterte for a 2008 report on the death squads, which Mr. Alston said operated with such impunity that the killers did not bother to wear masks. Asked whether he was responsible for their activities, Mr. Duterte “insisted that he controls the army and the police, saying, ‘The buck stops here,’ ” Mr. Alston wrote. “But, he added, more than once, ‘I accept no criminal liability.’ ” Image A member of the Task Force Davao security personnel at a park in Davao City, overlooking the resort island of Samal. The police in Davao City deny that death squads operate in the city. Credit Jes Aznar for The New York Times Mr. Alston said he found that position contradictory and untenable. “He dominates the city so thoroughly as to stamp out whole genres of crime, yet he remains powerless in the face of hundreds of murders committed by men without masks in view of witnesses,” he wrote. Mr. Alston wrote that Mr. Duterte “freely acknowledged that he had publicly stated that he would make Davao ‘dangerous’ and ‘not a very safe place’ for criminals, but he insisted that these statements were for public consumption and would have no effect on police conduct: ‘Police know the law. Police get their training.’ ” The police in Davao have denied that death squads operate in the city. The police chief inspector, Andrea dela Cerna, said that many of the killings in question were probably gang-related, and that the issue had been exaggerated by opponents of the mayor. Mr. Tolentino, who has been practicing criminal law in Davao for 56 years, said he had never come across a case involving a member or a victim of a death squad. “If there is such a group, they are only going after the bad people anyway,” he said. Mr. Duterte and his supporters say his policies have made Davao one of the safest places in the Philippines. But data from the Philippine National Police show that from 2010 to 2015, the city of about 1.5 million had 1,032 killings, more than any other city in the country. Quezon City, a suburb of Manila with a population of 2.7 million, was second, with 961 killings during the same period. In light of the reports about the death squads, Mr. Duterte’s violent rhetoric as a candidate has raised concern that extrajudicial killings will become a nationwide phenomenon. For Clarita Alia, whose sons’ killings remain unsolved, that prospect raises a personal concern. “If they are killing people all over the country, then they will forget about the cases in Davao,” she said in an interview at her home here, a wooden shack behind a vegetable stall. “They will forget about my sons.”

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


Gerald Roush, 68, Fount of Ferrari Knowledge

Abstract: In 1958, Gerald Roush, a teenage auto enthusiast in Birmingham, Ala., picked up a copy of Sports Cars Illustrated, the magazine that would later become Car and Driver. On the cover was the race driver Phil Hill, the winner that year of the Le Mans 24-hour road race, and an Italian sports car, the Ferrari 4.9 Superfast. In that moment, an obsession was born. Mr. Roush, who died in Atlanta on May 21, became a Ferrari historian, a collector of Ferrari memorabilia and photography, an amasser of a Ferrari library, and, most important, the keeper of perhaps the most complete and detailed database of Ferrari information in the world. The cause of death was a heart attack, Mr. Roush’s son, Chris, said. His father had had a stroke in March, he said, on his way to a car collectors event in Florida. He was 68 and lived in Lilburn, an Atlanta suburb. Ferrari, which built its first car in 1947, was still a small company when Mr. Roush picked up the magazine 11 years later — a boutique shop for speed freaks that had produced only about 2,000 vehicles, including both racers and street cars. Indeed, the company’s founder, Enzo Ferrari, was primarily interested in racing, and the company created passenger vehicles largely to finance the design and construction of race cars. Inevitably, because the cars were so stylish and rare, demand for them increased, and in 1969 Enzo Ferrari sold 50 percent of his company to Fiat. (Fiat later assumed controlling interest.) The company now produces about 6,000 cars a year. Still, Ferraris remain elite, and the vintage models especially fuel an international collectors market. Mr. Roush, a former history professor who left academia to immerse himself in auto arcana, spent much of his life aswim in this circumscribed pool of distinguished automobiles. In 2008, the number of Ferraris ever built was estimated at 130,000, and Mr. Roush’s database held the factory specifications, ownership lineages and repair histories of just about all of them. “Obsessed is a pretty good word,” Mr. Roush’s son said of his father. “I think he loved Ferraris as much as he loved his family.” He was an invaluable resource for Ferrari dealers, collectors and first-time buyers, especially with regard to the early models. If you were thinking of spending, say, $600,000 on a 1964 250 GT Lusso , you might want to know if that metallic blue is the original paint, or whether the car once belonged to Marlon Brando, as the current owner claims. Mr. Roush was the guy who could tell you. Beginning in 1976, every two weeks Mr. Roush published the Ferrari Market Letter , a compilation of classified ads for Ferraris, the parts and the accessories, along with articles, usually written by Mr. Roush, about specific Ferrari models or individual cars or other matters of interest to Ferrari aficionados. By this year, it had nearly 5,000 subscribers, who pay $130 annually. “The man was an institution, a legend, an icon,” said Al DiLauro, president of the Ferrari Club of America. Gerald Lee Roush was born in Durango, Colo., on Oct. 5, 1941. His father worked as an accountant for International Harvester, and the company, now known as Navistar, moved him often so that young Gerald grew up in several locales — Walsenburg, Colo.; Tulsa, Okla.; Chicago; and Birmingham, where he went to high school and bought his first car, a 1953 Austin A40, a British import. He earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in history from Auburn University, and while in college he began attending Ferrari road races and vintage car shows. He recorded information about individual cars, denoted by their vehicle identification numbers, on five-by-seven file cards. He subscribed to the Sunday editions of dozens of major American newspapers, perusing the classified ads for Ferraris for sale, many of which included the identification numbers, allowing him to start a file on a given car and to track its whereabouts. From 1974 to 1976 he taught history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Ga., but he left after two years to work in the parts department of the Ferrari dealership in Atlanta, where customers provided more fodder for his growing files. The first issue of the Ferrari Market Letter, in January 1976, went to 131 subscribers, and two years later he left the dealership to concentrate on the publication. Eventually, virtually any Ferrari for sale in the United States and many overseas were listed in the newsletter. Mr. Roush made it a requirement that to be listed, an ad had to supply the vehicle identification number. “The Market Letter is the gold standard for how to sell Ferraris,” said Michael Sheehan, a Ferrari historian and the proprietor of an Internet exotic-car brokerage, ferraris-online.com . “You can’t service, sell, paint, collect — you can’t do anything that has to do with Ferraris without getting the Letter.” In addition to his son, Chris, who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., Mr. Roush is survived by his wife, the former Carol Jane Whitley, whom he married in 1960; a sister, Elouise Chapman, of Fairhope, Ala.; a daughter, Catherine Tarallo of Suwanee, Ga., and three grandchildren. Ms. Tarallo is to take over publishing the Letter. Mr. Roush was often hired by car collectors to inspect Ferraris they were thinking about buying, and he testified at court hearings in which the value of individual cars was being contested. Though he drove vintage Ferraris — other people’s — in road races, Mr. Roush owned only three in his lifetime. One, a 1959 250 GT LWB California Spyder passed through his hands briefly in 1972. The other two — a 166 Mille Miglia Barchetta , a race car from 1951, and a 250 GT Pininfarina Coupe , a street car built in 1958 — were in dreadful shape when he bought them, and he got each for $2,500. He sold them both, for a total of $30,000, in 1985, and decided against buying others because he didn’t want readers to think he was using the Market Letter for his own gain. For many years he drove a Jaguar.

Automobiles
Roush Gerald
Ferrari SpA
Deaths (Obituaries)


China Orders Highest Alert for Olympics

Abstract: BEIJING — Chinese officials have thrown an almost smothering blanket of security across this capital of 17 million in preparation for the start of the Olympic Games on Friday. Above all else, Chinese leaders say, these Olympics will be “safe.” They warn that terrorism is a constant threat, particularly from Muslim separatist groups in the Xinjiang region of western China. On Monday morning, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported what appeared to be the deadliest attack against Chinese security forces in recent memory: 16 policemen were killed and 16 others injured when attackers threw two grenades into a police station in the desert oasis town of Kashgar, in the far west, after driving a truck into the station at 8 a.m. Two men were arrested. Even before that raid, Chinese officials had transformed Beijing into a giant fortress. Surface-to-air missiles take aim at the sky above the Olympic stadiums here. Surveillance cameras mounted on light poles scan sidewalks. Police officers search thousands of cars and trucks entering the city. Even civilians have been called on to strengthen the motherland: Tens of thousands of middle-age and elderly residents wearing red armbands, reminiscent of the zealous Red Guard youth from decades ago, now patrol neighborhoods looking for even a slightly suspicious act or person. But human rights advocates accuse the Chinese government of using the pretext of terrorism to silence dissent and clamp down on ethnic minority groups that chafe at rule by ethnic Han Chinese, who dominate the Communist Party leadership. Some security experts say many of the surveillance measures will probably stay in place after the Games, to bolster the reach of the authorities. To hear Chinese officials tell it, the threats come from a dizzying array of malcontents: groups advocating independence in the western autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, followers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, Al Qaeda, and unstable individuals. “I believe that Beijing’s Olympics are now facing real threats from terrorist attacks,” said Li Wei, a counterterrorism expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a research organization that advises the government. “I think the Olympics are the most important international sports event in four years,” he said, “and it’s the biggest focus of the international media in four years, so this might draw some attention from terrorist groups.” The specter of terrorism has fallen over every Olympics since the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed by a Palestinian group. Experts on terrorism say the extensive preparations are among the most comprehensive of any Games and may be enough to discourage any attacks in the capital. But China still faces a risk of terrorist attacks elsewhere during the Games, particularly after the raid on Monday and a recent series of bus bombings outside Beijing. Terrorism experts inside and outside China say the biggest threat to this Olympics comes from violent separatists from Xinjiang, a region historically dominated by the Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic group, but now governed by Han Chinese. In the first half of 2008, 82 people were arrested in Xinjiang in connection with terrorist plots aimed at the Olympics, the police say. Chinese officials say the greatest risk of an attack comes from a shadowy group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, which promotes independence for the region’s Uighurs. The State Department listed the group as a terrorist organization in 2002. Scholars of Xinjiang debate the potency and makeup of the group, and some question whether such a group even exists. Some outside experts say the organization is fairly small and includes a group called the Turkestan Islamic Party, which released a video on July 23 showing a masked man identified as Commander Seyfullah claiming responsibility for recent bus explosions in Kunming and Shanghai that killed five people and wounded at least 26. Mr. Li and Chinese officials say the explosions were the acts of disgruntled individuals and not terrorist attacks, though several outside terrorism experts suspect the East Turkestan Islamic Movement was involved. Steve Vickers, a longtime head of Hong Kong criminal intelligence who is now the chief executive of International Risk, an Asian security consulting firm, said “the threat remains moderate but slightly elevated because of the Olympics.” Although he is one of the experts who say the greatest threat comes from ETIM or offshoots of the group, he said that “the Chinese have been on these people a long time” and have contained them well. Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said an ETIM attack outside Beijing was likely. Such attacks could be expected to spread fear and disrupt the Olympics. Mr. Gunaratna estimated that the group has about 40 members based in the mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan who intend to carry out operations. Uighurs trained in Afghanistan before the American invasion in 2001, though their ties with ETIM or other groups are unclear. ETIM now survives in Pakistan under the protection of Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, and it has in recent years adopted the ideology of global jihad espoused by Al Qaeda, Mr. Gunaratna said. He added that China lacked an understanding of these groups and that harsh tactics adopted against the Uighurs would turn more Uighurs into radicals. Chinese officials are warning of at least one other group fomenting unrest among the Uighur. Xinhua has reported that an international Sunni group called Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation, whose goal is to re-establish an Islamic empire across Asia, was responsible for organizing protests in late March in the western city of Khotan that involved hundreds of people. The new security measures in Beijing include increasing scrutiny in places where Muslims gather. In late July, after the bombings in Kunming, police officers were seen sitting across from a mosque in the Russian quarter of Beijing. The owner of the Xinjiang Kashgar Restaurant near the main Olympic venue said he shut down Tuesday after repeated visits from officials who cited health concerns. He said several other Muslim restaurants nearby had received similar visits. The owner, a Uighur, asked not to be identified by name for fear that he would be further harassed by the authorities. Not only Uighurs are being singled out. A British woman of Tibetan ethnicity who was living in Beijing, Dechen Pemba, said she had been taken to the airport last month and deported without warning or reason. In Xinjiang, an extra layer of security screening has been added to 13 airports, according to Xinhua. Certain liquids, including alcohol, are banned from trains in Xinjiang, and a security inspector has been put on board each of the 4,000 buses in Urumqi, the region’s capital. Here in Beijing, the city is edging toward war footing. More than 34,000 military personnel and 74 airplanes, 47 helicopters and 33 navy ships have been deployed, said Col. Tian Yixiang, director of the military affairs department in the Olympic security command center. The Chinese government has also been installing tens of thousands of surveillance cameras on lamp poles and in Internet cafes and bars. Critics of the measure say the cameras can be used not only to track potential terrorists, but also anyone who opposes the nation’s one-party rule. Western companies like I.B.M., General Electric, Honeywell and United Technologies have been shipping their latest computer tools to automatically analyze video images from thousands of cameras and alert computer operators to patterns that might indicate a threat. The Security Industry Association, a Washington-based trade group for security companies around the world, said in a study last year that from 2001, when Beijing was awarded the Olympics, China spent as much as $6.5 billion on security in the Beijing area alone. The bulk of the spending is for extensive video monitoring systems that will stay in place after the Games. “The surveillance system deployed by China for the Olympics, which includes key pieces of Western technology, is the most comprehensive and sophisticated surveillance system ever,” said James C. Mulvenon of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington, a private group that does classified work for the American government. Largely separate from the Olympics, China is moving to install video monitoring systems in its 600 largest cities, and some are already far along. Dr. Mulvenon said the sales from foreign companies raised the risk that Western equipment would be used to spy on Chinese dissidents after the Olympics. “The longer-term implications are less positive,” he said. “Whereas the legacy of previous Olympics was sports stadiums, the legacy of the Beijing Olympics will be a high-tech police state.”

China
Terrorism
Police
Cameras
Olympic Games (2008)
Security and Warning Systems
Surveillance of Citizens by Government
Politics and Government
Bombs and Explosives


As Driver Collapses, a Lever Makes a Train Stop

Abstract: They call it the dead-man feature. In the spartan, phone-booth-size motorman’s cab in a subway train, there is a metal arm a few inches long called the controller. To set the train in motion, the operator presses down on the controller arm with several pounds of pressure, swivels it and holds on. If he lets go, for whatever reason, the emergency brakes are applied. This is the dead-man feature. It has been part of every New York City subway train for as long as there have been New York City subway trains, according to New York City Transit. On Wednesday, it worked. At 8:08 a.m., at the Long Island City-Court Square Station in Queens, the northern terminus of the G line, Domenick Occhiogrosso turned a lever on the ancient-looking black console, depressed the controller and eased the crowded train out of the station. His first stop was to be 21st Street, barely a quarter-mile away. The train was not even completely out of the station when it ground to a halt. The conductor walked to the front car and found Mr. Occhiogrosso — who had spent the past 23 years of his working life in a train cab — unconscious. The conductor radioed for help. The train was rolled back into the station. Mr. Occhiogrosso, 50, of Bath Beach, Brooklyn, was pronounced dead, apparently of a heart attack, at Elmhurst Hospital Center at 9:20 a.m., officials said. Because of the dead-man feature, no one else on the train was injured.

Subways
Accidents and Safety
Queens (NYC)


N.F.L. Said to Be Closer to Testing for H.G.H.

Abstract: The N.F.L. ’s owners and players have figured out how to divide up their money, and have spent a busy week reconstituting rosters and renewing rivalries. But there is still unfinished business in their labor standoff, and the most important issue remaining could be the question of drug testing. The N.F.L., whose new collective bargaining agreement is expected to be completed and ratified by Thursday, could begin blood testing for human growth hormone as soon as September, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly, making it the first major North American sports league to conduct such testing on its top players with the union’s consent. Players had long resisted blood testing under the former union president Gene Upshaw, and negotiators are still determining ways to make the program acceptable to current players. Details to be worked out include how many players will be tested for performance-enhancing drugs and how they would be randomly selected when drug testing resumes. There was no drug testing of any kind conducted during the lockout. But Commissioner Roger Goodell and DeMaurice Smith, the players union executive director, were said by people briefed on negotiations to have long seen the need for growth hormone testing and to want to cast the N.F.L. as a leader in combating drugs in major sports. They have pointed to the joint actions of Upshaw and the former commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who moved to start the steroid testing program in the late 1980s. “I think both sides have a commitment to being leaders in this area and to having the best possible program and they recognize that having testing for growth hormone is part of having the best program,” Jeff Pash, the N.F.L.’s general counsel, said Tuesday. As of Tuesday, though, the union was adamant that a deal on drug testing had yet to be reached, and its officials would not express an opinion on how confident they were that testing for H.G.H would be part of any final agreement. “The players have not agreed to any comprehensive drug testing proposal,” the union spokesman George Atallah said. Among the things being discussed as part of a new drug testing program is a novel process that will allow players to appeal the findings of tests to a third party who is mutually agreed upon by the union and the league. That would eliminate one of the players’ biggest complaints about the old process: that their appeals were heard and decided by the commissioner’s office. It is also possible that the union could be more involved in administering the drug program, and it could perhaps be involved in operating the hot line that players can call to find out if a supplement is allowed under the program. That, too, could ease concerns by players that stem from the StarCaps case that began in 2008, in which players accused the league of failing to warn them about the presence of a diuretic in a supplement, even though the league had known StarCaps contained the banned substance. Major League Baseball moved last year to begin growth hormone testing on minor league players, the majority of whom are not members of the players’ union, allowing Commissioner Bud Selig to make the decision without the baseball union’s consent. Expanding that testing to the major leagues is now the subject of negotiations between Major League Baseball and its players union. The other issues being addressed in the final days of negotiations include the personal-conduct policy, which is likely to remain solely in the hands of the commissioner’s office despite complaints among players that Goodell has sometimes acted rashly and unevenly in administering punishment for off-the-field behavior. But Goodell is said to believe strongly in having the final say on personal conduct. There are not expected to be any stumbling blocks in the way of having the collective bargaining agreement completed by Thursday, with work already said to be about 80 percent complete on the final issues. Player representatives would then probably vote on a conference call as soon as the agreement is done, but no later than Thursday. The league year would begin after the deal is ratified. But if it is not ratified until Thursday night, players who have signed new contracts and are unable to start practicing until the league year begins would not be allowed on the field until Friday.

Human Growth Hormone
Football
Tests (Drug Use)
National Football League
Goodell Roger
Smith DeMaurice
Doping (Sports)
Organized Labor


Big Banks, Systemic Risk and Global Change

Abstract: Big banks are getting separation anxiety. They don’t want to spin off their lucrative derivatives desks, even into subsidiaries. The idea, which is part of financial reform legislation being debated in the Senate, has merit. It would rid the derivatives market of perceived taxpayer support and discourage risky speculation. But international cooperation will be critical. Some $30 billion of revenue is at stake, so the concern from Wall Street isn’t surprising. The proposal may not survive Senate horse-trading. Even if it does, it’s not clear whether it would require completely severing the derivatives apron strings, or only a loosening by way of separately capitalized derivatives subsidiaries. Either way, banks have sounded the alarm. The separation would require lots of new capital — more than $100 billion by one industry estimate. There also would be uncomfortable unwinding pains, including ones related to technological infrastructure and ending the one-stop financial shop. Yet Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas and the champion of the provision, says that there should be a clear division between banking activities that the government should support or at least provide liquidity to, and riskier business that it should not. This makes some sense in many ways. Stand-alone swap desks would inevitably make derivatives more expensive, and thereby discourage excessive speculation. The setup also would give banks cover, whether they think they need it or not, from accusations that taxpayers are backstopping risky trading. If banks find excising swaps desks alone too difficult for clients who want a suite of trading services, they could always return to a full separation of traditional and investment banking functions. A major problem with the proposal is that it would send much derivatives business to banks based outside the United States. That is, if other jurisdictions do not follow suit. American banks might be safer, but at the expense of their competitiveness. Without overseas cooperation, the problem of global systemic risk wouldn’t be fully addressed either. For banks to successfully be separated from their derivatives, both American lawmakers and their international counterparts would need to work together. No Family Feud The Pritzker family appears to be cashing out in unusually amicable fashion. The sale of a majority stake in the credit reporting firm TransUnion is the latest step by the Chicago clan to unwind its $15 billion empire. Earlier squabbles over the spoils looked ominous for the plan. But it seems to have gone relatively well compared with the trouble many rich families face. American dynasties tend to resemble, well, “Dynasty.”Selling off the family silver often turns nasty, or at best clumsy. The Koch brothers fought a bitter battle for ownership of the family oil services business. The Dorrances, of Campbell Soup, watched their franchise deteriorate, and then wrangled over whether to exit. In 2007, the Bancrofts tripped all over themselves when it came to selling Dow Jones to Rupert Murdoch. The Pritzkers have had their soap opera moments, too. In 2002, Liesel and Matthew Pritzker accused relatives of looting their trust funds. The lawsuits resulted in $450 million settlements for the pair, no small hiccup in the proceedings. But since that resolution, the rest of the family has moved along smoothly to execute its agreement to divide the fortune by 2011. The results have been fruitful. Conwood, a smokeless tobacco company, went to Reynolds American for a robust $3.5 billion in 2006. Then, Warren E. Buffett’s company paid $4.5 billion for 60 percent of Marmon Holdings, giving the Pritzkers nine times operating income for their industrial conglomerate. Most recently, the Pritzkers floated a quarter of Hyatt Hotels for $950 million, a price that translated to 13 times earnings even though the family would retain control. The TransUnion deal appears to follow this solid trend. The sale of 51 percent to the private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners looks likely to value the company at north of $2 billion. That’s in line with its rivals, Experian and Equifax. Younger generations often struggle with their corporate inheritances. But heirs elsewhere would do well to stop watching the growing number of their wealthy peers turning up on reality TV and pay closer attention to how the Pritzkers have moved past the drama. AGNES CRANE and ROLFE WINKLER

Derivatives (Financial Instruments)
Banks and Banking
United States Politics and Government
Law and Legislation


Richard Poff, Who Declined Supreme Court Nomination, Dies

Abstract: Richard H. Poff, a former Republican congressman from Virginia who surprised official Washington in 1971 by withdrawing from consideration for a seat on the Supreme Court rather than submit to the harsh scrutiny he feared his anti-civil-rights voting record would arouse, died Tuesday in Tullahoma, Tenn. He was 87. His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by his family. Mr. Poff was a decorated World War II bomber pilot and a respected lawyer who rode Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential coattails in 1952 to become one of the few Southern Republicans in Congress since Reconstruction. He was widely viewed as President Richard M. Nixon’s first choice to fill the so-called Southern seat on the bench when Justice Hugo Black died in September 1971. As ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Poff was the point man Nixon chose to translate his law-and-order agenda into legislation. He had waged what The New York Times described at the time as a “low-key but persistent personal campaign” for a Supreme Court nomination since Nixon was elected in 1968. Mr. Poff was said to have told friends that he would rather be a member of the Supreme Court than president of the United States. In June 1971, when he was being mentioned as a possible nominee, the usually private and press-shy Mr. Poff gave an extended interview to a Virginia newspaper in which he voiced regret over his segregationist record. In the interview — taped, transcribed and widely circulated in Washington — he made a remarkably unvarnished admission about why he had signed the so-called Southern Manifesto in 1956, which condemned school desegregation, and why he had voted against every landmark civil rights bill of the 1960s. He did so, he said, because he feared losing his seat in Congress, representing a district in western Virginia. Mr. Poff explained himself with the literary formality not uncommon among Southern lawyers of his generation: “I can only say that segregation is wrong today, it was wrong yesterday,” he said. “Segregation was never right. But it is one of the most lamentable frailties of mankind that when one’s wrong is most grievous, his self-justification is most passionate, perhaps in the pitiful hope that the fervor of his self-defense will somehow prove him right. But this doesn’t make it so. And he doesn’t fool himself.” On Sept. 24, 1971, Nixon hinted during a nationally broadcast news conference in Detroit that Mr. Poff was among the top contenders for the nomination. The N.A.A.C.P. and Senate liberals quickly raised objections. On Oct. 2, Mr. Poff announced unexpectedly that he had asked the president to drop him from consideration. “It appears that the confirmation process would be protracted and controversial,” he said. Nixon, whose press secretary said Mr. Poff’s decision had been “entirely his own,” instead nominated Lewis F. Powell, a prominent Virginia lawyer, who served from 1972 until 1987. Seeking to explain the withdrawal, some in the press guessed that having witnessed the exhausting and unsuccessful bids of Nixon’s first two choices, Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. and G. Harrold Carswell, who were both rejected by the Senate, Mr. Poff was simply convinced he would never make it. The columnist Jack Anderson wrote that Mr. Poff had feared that a messy confirmation process would somehow uncover the fact that his 12-year-old son, Tom, had been adopted — a “scoop” that forced the Poff family to reveal this information to the child immediately, years before they had planned to, according to a 2001 book by the former White House counsel John W. Dean III, a friend of Mr. Poff’s. He never publicly discussed his decision. In a 1988 interview with The Richmond Times-Dispatch, he described the episode as “a very painful time for my family that I don’t care to revisit.” After almost 20 years in the House, Mr. Poff, was appointed to the Virginia State Supreme Court in 1972 and served there until his retirement in 1988. Richard Harding Poff was born on Oct. 19, 1923, the son of a railroad worker and part-time barber, in Radford, a small town in southwest Virginia. He graduated from Roanoke College and received his law degree from the University of Virginia Law School. During World War II, he flew 35 missions as a B-24 bomber pilot and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Mr. Poff and his first wife, the former Jo Ann Topper, were married in 1948. They had three children. She died in 1978. In 1980, he married Jean Murphy, who died in 2007. Complete information about his survivors was not available. Despite his voting record, Mr. Poff’s brief career as a Supreme Court contender drew unlikely support from several civil rights stalwarts in Congress, including Abner J. Mikva, an Illinois Democrat who became a federal judge and President Bill Clinton’s White House counsel. “The appointment of Poff to the Supreme Court,” he said as Mr. Poff’s name was being floated, “would probably be the best appointment Nixon has made. He’s a good man, a fair man, a hard worker.”

Supreme Court
Poff Richard H
Deaths (Obituaries)


Rare Giants Takeaway Alters Game

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — Giants defensive back Terrell Thomas saw the football dangling there, like an apple hanging from a limb — said limb being Matt Barkley’s extended right arm. Barkley, the Eagles’ rookie quarterback, thought he had eluded Thomas with a pump fake, and for a moment he had. But Thomas recovered. “I just kept trying to close on him,” Thomas said. “I knew he was hanging the ball.” Barkley, scrambling to the left, did not see Thomas bearing down on him the second time, from behind, to shake that tantalizing apple free. The ball skipped on the ground and was scooped up by linebacker Jacquian Williams for a game-changing turnover that the Giants desperately needed in their 15-7 victory on Sunday. “It was one of the biggest plays we’ve made this season,” defensive end Justin Tuck said. Considering that the Giants have not forced many turnovers, or won many games, Tuck was hardly overstating anything. In an ugly offensive day for both teams, the Eagles were threatening late in the second quarter, behind Barkley, who had just replaced Michael Vick and pumped life into the Eagles’ offense. Trailing by 12-0, Philadelphia had managed only two first downs behind Vick. Barkley entered and picked up four first downs on his first drive, carrying the Eagles to the Giants’ 2-yard line. On first down, though, the Eagles called a naked bootleg and Thomas did not bite. He raced toward Barkley, whose pump fake momentarily caused Thomas to leave his feet. But Thomas managed to track Barkley from behind. “He almost stiff-armed me and got away,” said Thomas, who, like Barkley, attended Southern California. “I was happy I was able to get there and make a score for our defense.” Barkley said later that he was just about to throw the ball away. “I was going through my second progression,” Barkley said. “He just got there a second too early.” The ball skittered toward the sideline with three Giants in pursuit. Williams actually leapt over Barkley and dived to save the ball before sliding out of bounds. His left elbow touched down in fair territory at the 12. “I knew it was crunch time and we needed it,” Williams said. The play seemed to demoralize the Eagles, whose offense never returned within 25 yards of the end zone. It was also the fourth consecutive drive by Barkley — the first four of his career — that ended with a turnover. “Matt’s been thrown in twice in some tough situations,” Kelly said, defending his young quarterback. “There are a couple throws he wants back, but there are a couple times he gave us a little spark.” The Giants prepared for the possibility that Vick, nursing a sore left hamstring, would not play a complete game. It happened the last time these teams met, on Oct. 6, and the backup quarterback Nick Foles made a seamless transition for a 36-21 win. This time, however, Foles was inactive with a concussion, and the Eagles seemed more hesitant to turn the reins over to Barkley, their fourth-round pick in the latest draft. Even as Vick struggled, Barkley remained on the sideline, tossing passes occasionally. But after a seven-play drive fizzled at the Eagles’ 36-yard line midway through the second quarter, and boos intensified, the switch was made (Vick was said to have aggravated his hamstring injury). Barkley connected on his first three passes and put the Giants on their heels. In an instant, though, that enthusiasm came crashing down. “It was the first time they drove it all the way down, and they didn’t score,” Williams said. “In the red zone, and they didn’t even get a field goal. It was a great play.” The Giants finished with four sacks — they had six in their first seven games — and the Eagles wound up with five fumbles. Philadelphia gained 201 yards, its lowest output of the season. “There is a lot to be said for the way we are playing defense right now,” Giants Coach Tom Coughlin said. Foremost, players said, the Giants were successful in their plan to frustrate Philadelphia running back LeSean McCoy, the league’s leading rusher. “The D-line did a great job keeping McCoy bottled up,” Thomas said. “When we needed the secondary to come up and the backfield to make plays, we did that.” No play was bigger than Thomas’s on Barkley. “Everybody told me I should give a ‘Fight On,’ ” Thomas said, referring to the U.S.C. battle cry. “I was too tired. I was just trying to get to the sideline.”

Giants
Terrell Thomas
Football
Matt Barkley
Philadelphia Eagles


Varied Pleas as Candidates Press Cases at Conservative Forum

Abstract: GREENVILLE, S.C. — Gov. Scott Walker, eager to jump-start a flagging campaign, expressed support for a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding and likened his fights with lawmakers in Wisconsin to the movie “Braveheart.” Jeb Bush reveled in the weeds of his tax plan and federal discretionary spending, appearing grateful for the chance to address a policy forum — until a discussion of his long-held support for Common Core education standards inspired hearty boos. “Hang on a second,” he pleaded. “You’re going to like the ending of this story.” And Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon ascending in recent weeks toward the top of the polls, brandished the understated charm that has powered his rise: He entered to a standing ovation, thanked his hosts for inviting him on the day he was turning 64, and was promptly serenaded by the crowd with a full rendition of “Happy Birthday.” “People think doctors only know medicine,” he said later, defending his qualifications as far-reaching. “They’re nuts.” Two days after their second televised debate scrambled the race anew — perhaps most notably elevating the profile of Carly Fiorina — nearly all the Republican contenders for president descended on South Carolina on Friday for a conference organized by the conservative group Heritage Action for America. (The group is the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 and transformed in recent years from a staid policy incubator to an organizing engine fueled by the Tea Party movement .) Image Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin addressed the crowd at the Heritage Action for America forum on Friday. Credit Sean Rayford/Getty Images The most striking exception was Donald J. Trump, who had been scheduled to appear. His campaign said that a pending business transaction had forced him to cancel, a development that Heritage Action called “unfortunate.” (Mr. Carson joked that the news of Mr. Trump’s dropping out was the “best birthday present.”) In his absence, Mrs. Fiorina, propelled on Wednesday by a memorably steely exchange with Mr. Trump over his disparaging comments about her looks, moved to build her case as a top-tier candidate. (One of Heritage Action’s moderators, Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, quipped of Mrs. Fiorina, “This is what a smart, intelligent face looks like.”) In her own comments, Mrs. Fiorina cited her history as an executive, including her history interacting with China, in a forceful call to action that earned several sustained ovations. “Pressure applied by citizens on their representatives will move the system,” she said. “President Fiorina will call on you as citizens of this great nation to take our government back.” Mr. Bush, who was generally received warmly, cast himself as “a disrupter in Tallahassee” during his time as governor, suggesting his peers had comparatively thin résumés. “There are people who have been elected to Congress who have done a good job fighting President Obama, but they’ve never actually passed a law,” he said, urging people to “look at the governors” for records of true accomplishment. In her questioning, Ms. Haley spoke particularly warmly of a fellow governor, Mr. Walker, and his bruising battles with union leaders in Wisconsin. Mr. Walker, who again complained of his limited speaking time during the debate, drew sustained cheers during a discussion of Planned Parenthood. He said he supported attempts by Republicans in Congress to try to strip the group of federal funding, even if that leads to a government shutdown. Mr. Walker emphasized what he described as his battle-ready toughness, hyperbolically likening his fight with members of his own party in the Wisconsin State Legislature to the bloody Mel Gibson biopic. “It was kind of like I had the face paint on,” he said. “I had the battle charge ready.” Yet few candidates could claim the reception earned by Mr. Carson from the several thousand people who attended the gathering in the Bon Secours Wellness Arena here. In contrast to several of his competitors, whose appearances on stage were preceded by slick introductory videos, Mr. Carson prepared a segment of ostensibly low production value: chiefly, Mr. Carson speaking into a single camera. Once on stage, he described, at Ms. Haley’s urging, a youthful indiscretion: identifying as a liberal long ago, after spending formative years in Detroit and Boston and at Yale University. “I was a radical Democrat, and I believed all this stuff that they believed, including that Republicans were horrible racist people,” he said, to laughs. “And then I started listening to Ronald Reagan.” The tone shifted sharply at the entrance of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who assailed Republican leaders for failing to fight sufficiently for conservative causes. “We have met the enemy, and they is us,” he said, paraphrasing a famous comic strip. He marveled that, in the era of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans had managed in 2012 to nominate a candidate, Mitt Romney, who had overseen similar efforts as governor of Massachusetts. “Literally there are 7 billion people on the face of planet Earth,” he said, suggesting the party would have been better off approaching one of them at random. Mr. Cruz accused many Republicans in Washington of seeking to become “bosom buddies” with their peers, though he stumbled over the line, emitting something resembling “boosy buttoms.” The crowd laughed. “Freud’s going to have a field day with that,” he said.

Jeb Bush
Heritage Action for America
Ted Cruz
2016 Presidential Election
Conservatism in the United States
Donald Trump
Greenville SC
Ben Carson,Benjamin S. Carson
Carleton Fiorina,Carly Fiorina


In a Place of Solace, Finding Faith Among the Sorrow

Abstract: PISCO, Peru , Aug. 19 — Rita Cabrera stood in front of a statue of a seated Christ and stroked its hands, patted its beard and fought back tears. Her chin quivered through her hospital mask as she prayed quietly at a makeshift outdoor church here. The church, which doubles as a medical clinic, is nothing more than a collection of 22 blue plastic chairs and a few religious artifacts rescued from the Church of San Clemente across the street. That church was the single deadliest spot in the powerful earthquake that rocked southern Peru last week. At least 200 worshipers were inside Wednesday evening for a funeral Mass. Most were in the pews when the walls and floor began swaying violently and chunks of adobe and stones began to rain down from the roof, witnesses said. More than 60 worshipers were killed, a tragedy that has shaken members of the Roman Catholic congregation here but has not shaken their faith. “It doesn’t matter that we don’t have the temple anymore,” Ms. Cabrera said. “We will rebuild again. The only thing we can do now is pray and give thanks to God.” The magnitude 8.0 quake killed more than 500 people and left thousands homeless. About 34,000 homes were destroyed, about 16,000 of them in and around Pisco. But the town’s residents have drawn faith from what they see as small miracles. The Christ statue that presides over the church’s front entrance somehow survived intact. It is now strapped to a tree in the plaza, where it sits next to another rescued artifact, a statue of the Virgin Mary. They now serve as centerpieces in the makeshift church. Tall candles have been placed in front of the plaza. The church leader, the Rev. Alfonso Berra de Urralburu, said he escaped death when the walls crumbled all around him but somehow left him unscathed. Three of the church’s five priests survived. But the loss of so many of the church’s faithful — and the continuing aftershocks of the quake — have rattled the congregation’s nerves and emotions. For her part, Ms. Cabrera said she lost an aunt in the church collapse, but said she felt blessed that the rest of her family, including three children, had survived. On Sunday afternoon, a dozen rescue workers continued to comb through the rubble, searching for bodies and candlesticks and other religious items. Saturday night, workers recovered the body of an elderly woman in debris six feet deep. The woman had tried to escape through the back of the church, according to Rodolfo Padilla, the emergency squad leader of the national police. She was within a few feet of an open garden when two large stones cut her down. “She was so close to making it,” Mr. Padilla said. Powerful aftershocks continued to slow the painstaking search for victims and valuables. The Rev. Luis Díez Canseco, one of San Clemente’s three surviving priests, was meeting in a church office on Sunday that had been damaged but not destroyed, when he suddenly shot up. “There’s another one,” the diminutive Father Canseco said as the floor began to shake violently. A church worker screamed his name from down the hallway. “Calmly, calmly,” Father Canseco said, as he shuffled out of the church. Inside Father Urralburu’s office, deep cracks crisscrossed the wall where a framed black and white print of the congregation’s patron saint, San Clemente Romano, hung. Since the quake, the church’s Masses have continued at their usual times. On Sunday evening, soldiers turned the priest and a few dozen worshipers away from the plaza, saying that security could not be guaranteed. The plaza is still being used as a depository for unidentified bodies, which are laid in black vinyl bags on one side of the square. A large rub-off board had been placed against a truck that was being used to store some of the bodies. Late Sunday, the board contained the descriptions of two unidentified bodies, men in their 50s and 60s. Undeterred, Father Urralburu led his flock a few yards down a dusty road off to the side of the church and began the Mass between large piles of debris. He and the worshipers wore hospital masks to avoid the thick cloud of dust that hovered over the town. At one point a man carrying four chairs pushed his way through the throng as the people prayed aloud. Behind Father Urralburu, city workers banged stakes into the ground trying to reach power lines to restore electricity to street lights, which could take up to a month. The building itself is not what is important, Father Urralburu said moments after the improvised service had concluded. “It is a place to worship, to celebrate and to adore.” “We will use this as a chance to modernize,” he said. “These things have a way of purifying us.”

Peru
Rescues
Earthquakes
Religion and Churches


What Area Is Considered Upstate New York?

Abstract: Q. Living in a New York suburb, I’d like to know what people mean by “upstate New York.” Just how far do you have to be from the city to be upstate? Also, what are the boundaries of two upstate areas, the North Country and the Southern Tier? A. In 2011, when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo created 10 regional councils to develop plans for economic growth across the state, each council got a map for planning purposes. The state regions were defined largely by how residents there defined themselves, as well as by maps from the state’s Labor Department and Empire State Development Corporation. The North Country’s regional council map follows the Canadian border from Lake Ontario to Lake Champlain, and includes Watertown, Plattsburgh, Saranac Lake and Lake Placid. It covers Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Franklin, Clinton, Essex, Hamilton and Lewis Counties. The Southern Tier lies along the Pennsylvania border and includes Elmira, Ithaca, Corning and Binghamton. It comprises the counties of Steuben, Schuyler, Chemung, Tompkins, Tioga, Broome, Chenango and Delaware on the regional council map. Albany’s working definition of upstate New York is based on what lies outside the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s commuter rail area. Besides New York City and Long Island, it excludes Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam and Dutchess Counties. Image Albany’s working definition of upstate New York is based on what lies outside the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s commuter rail area, like the Adirondack Mountains. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times As with New York City neighborhoods, these regional boundaries can provoke local arguments. Should the Catskills be considered entirely upstate? Should the Southern Tier extend farther west, and does all of Delaware County belong in it? Should Rochester, listed in the Finger Lakes region, be part of Western New York? Some argue that Albany, while in the Capital Region, is so influenced by New York City and suburban lawmakers that it should not be considered upstate. Q. As a kid driving along the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn I remember seeing a few rows of Quonset huts, which are of course long gone. Can you please provide some history on who was living in them and why? A. Thank you to Ron Schweiger, the Brooklyn borough historian, and Ira Kluger-Wyckoff, the president of the Canarsie Historical Society, for the following: The Belt Parkway opened on June 29, 1940. Robert Moses, the New York director of the Works Progress Administration, the city parks and much else, had championed the new parkway, and he was able to acquire the land on its north side in Canarsie. His goal was to make it into parkland. His plan ended with the conclusion of World War II. New York City, Mr. Schweiger noted, was faced with a big housing shortage for returning soldiers. The Army constructed 535 surplus housing barracks, or Quonset huts , on the parkland at Seaview Avenue between East 102nd and 108th Streets. Canarsie Circle, near the huts at the end of Rockaway Parkway, was renamed Canarsie Veterans Circle. The huts were used until around 1955, when the 23 buildings of the Bay View Houses, with more than 1,600 apartments, were built on 36 acres at the site. Ball fields later took over other parts of the land.

New York
Brooklyn
Housing
Veteran
Real Estate


McGriff’s Numbers Look Better With Perspective

Abstract: ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Before batting practice at Tropicana Field on Tuesday, the televisions in both clubhouses showed a replay of the 1998 Home Run Derby on the MLB Network. It was a time capsule from a discredited era, with sluggers tainted by the steroids scandal — Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Alex Rodriguez — launching missiles deep into the seats. Those players — and others like Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez and Sammy Sosa — have all surpassed 500 home runs and been linked to performance-enhancing drugs. The player who came closest to 500 without making it was a peer of those hitters, and he was in the Tampa Bay Rays’ dugout on Tuesday. He was Fred McGriff, 45, who retired in 2004 after 19 seasons with 493 homers, now tied with Lou Gehrig for 26th on the career list. McGriff will make his first appearance on the Hall of Fame ballot this winter, and as a player who was never suspected of steroid use, he will be a compelling candidate. “I think even without those guys being accused of this and that, my numbers stack up pretty good against those guys,” McGriff said. “It’s not like they were that much better. If you really start to look at the numbers, I was still right there.” McGriff, a Tampa native who works in television here, ranked sixth in the majors in homers over the 15 seasons from 1988 through 2002, with 458. The five ahead of him are Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro and Ken Griffey Jr. In the same time frame, McGriff trails only Bonds and Palmeiro in runs batted in (1,460) and extra-base hits (890). McGriff did his best work on the cusp of what has come to be known as the steroids era. He led the American League in homers for Toronto in 1989, with 36. Playing for San Diego three years later, he led the National League with 35. No player since has led either league with a lower total. “They started saying, ‘What’s wrong with Fred?’ ” McGriff said. “Other guys were hitting 50 or 60 and I was hitting 30. It was like, ‘You’re getting old.’ ” In fact, McGriff continued to produce. In his prime years, 1988 through 1996, he led the majors in homers with 296. He had better on-base and slugging percentages than fellow first basemen Tony Perez and Eddie Murray, who are in the Hall of Fame, and he hit .303 in the postseason. Some voters who endorsed the candidacy of the newly inducted Jim Rice cited Rice as the most feared slugger of his era. McGriff may not hold that title for his time, but he said he was proud of a mention in Joe Torre’s book “The Yankee Years.” Torre used a profanity to describe how scared he was of McGriff in the 1996 World Series, when McGriff played for Atlanta. That kind of reputation, and numbers that look stronger with time, give McGriff at least a chance at Cooperstown. It is an honor he believes he earned. “I was quiet,” McGriff said. “I just went out there and played the game. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. But when I look at the numbers, I think I deserve to go in.” ACEVES TAKES A REST Reliever Alfredo Aceves was held out of his third game in a row as he deals with shoulder fatigue. Aceves’s status seems to be the reason the Yankees have stuck with 13 pitchers since Sunday, when outfielder Brett Gardner went on the disabled list. Aceves, a dependable middle reliever for the Yankees, had perhaps his worst game of the season Saturday, allowing three hits and two runs in a third of an inning against Oakland. He acknowledged the shoulder issue but said he was not concerned. “The last three days, I rest,” Aceves said. “But for four or five days before that, it was a little fatigued. I just need a few days off. I know what kind of pain lets you pitch and what kind of pain don’t let you pitch. We’re going to play catch tomorrow.” Another reliever, the left-hander Damaso Marte, has missed more than three months with left shoulder inflammation. He allowed two home runs in one and two-thirds innings for Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on Tuesday. RESULTS FOR SWISHER The Yankees won 9 of 10 games on their homestand after the All-Star break, but Nick Swisher did not feel like much of a contributor. He hit .200 in those games, with no homers and three runs batted in. On Monday at Tropicana Field, he worked for a half-hour with the hitting coach Kevin Long. Swisher lowered his hands a bit and saw instant results, hitting homers from the left and right sides of the plate and driving in another run with a groundout. “I felt like I had a little bit more whip with the bat,” Swisher said.


Settlement Reached in Crash Deaths

Abstract: SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — The Santa Fe Opera and the estate of an employee have reached a settlement with relatives of a family killed in a drunken, wrong-way Interstate crash caused by the worker, who was returning from a business trip. A lawyer for the opera, Michael W. Brennan, characterized the settlements reached this year as “substantial” but said the amount was confidential. The opera employee, Dana Papst, drove the wrong way on Interstate 25 south of Santa Fe in November 2006 and crashed into a minivan. He died the next day. The crash also killed the van’s driver, Paul Gonzales of Las Vegas, N.M.; his wife, Renee Collins-Gonzales; and three of their children. Arissa Garcia, then 15, survived. Tests showed Mr. Papst’s blood-alcohol content was four times the legal limit for driving. Mr. Papst had been seen drinking on a US Airways flight to Albuquerque that day, and other passengers said he had appeared to be drunk. The police have said that after the flight landed, Mr. Papst bought a six-pack of beer in Bernalillo and set off.


Another Papandreou Promises to Get Greece’s Fiscal House in Order

Abstract: People who lie to join a club may not prove to be very good members. That is one lesson of the current fiscal mess in Greece, where there are — again — fears that the country will be unable to pay its debts. Those particular worries are almost certainly overdone, at least for the near term. But Greece is suffering mightily from having joined the euro zone — something it was able to do only because it used what could kindly be called creative accounting to get its budget deficits down far enough to qualify a decade ago. To be sure, there are unquestioned benefits for Greece from the euro. Interest rates are far lower than they would otherwise be, even if they have risen during the financial crisis. Having one currency for much of Europe facilitates tourism and encourages trade. But Greece, like Italy, has lost competitiveness within the euro zone — so much that two bond rating agencies have reduced the country’s rating and a third, Moody’s , says it may follow suit. Inflation has been higher than in other parts of the euro zone, and the country finds it hard to match prices of other exporters. Moreover, notes Arnaud Marès, an analyst at Moody’s, the country has a reputation for having a slow and expensive bureaucracy that makes it costly and difficult to do business in the country. If Greece still had its own currency, it would have chosen, or been forced, to devalue, and thereby gotten a quick boost to competitiveness, albeit at the cost of raising inflation as imported goods would have cost more. But that is not possible within the euro zone. The euro remains a great experiment. Can a common currency exist forever without political union? Will its existence provide the impetus for needed reforms? Or will countries get into the same problems they used to get into, but without the safety valve of currency adjustments? Those issues were all understood when the euro was created. Some hoped it would lead to political union. Others hoped it would force countries like Greece and Italy to keep their fiscal houses in order and to introduce reforms to make their economies more efficient and competitive. So far, little of that has happened. Germany has sent conflicting signals about whether, in the end, it would bail out a fellow euro country, but since Greek bonds can be used as collateral for loans at the European Central Bank , there is at least some institutional support. Still, worries about Greece have helped to renew fears of contagion in other parts of Europe where foreign exchange reserves are scarce and debts are high. The comfortable belief that the world weathered the storms of 2008 and is now recovering could be challenged by a new wave of defaults. At a minimum, we are being reminded that an incredible amount of capital was simply wasted during the late boom, whether in American commercial real estate or Middle Eastern skyscrapers, and a lot of those losses have yet to be realized. Dubai may yet replace Iceland as the record holder for capital destruction, measured on a per capita basis. Unfortunately, Greece, like a number of other countries, has proved to be much better at announcing economic reforms than at putting them into effect. In a major speech this week, Greece’s new prime minister, George A. Papandreou, promised economic changes. But Mr. Papandreou, who is the head of Greece’s Socialist party and the president of Socialist International, a grouping of national Socialist parties, did not follow what has become the standard of comparison for euro countries in trouble: unlike Ireland, he did not promise to cut the pay of civil servants. Instead, he said he would rely on attrition, hiring only one new civil servant for every five who retired. He promised that civil-service salaries would not be reduced, and that lower-level employees would get raises to offset inflation. Euro countries are supposed to maintain budget deficits of less than 3 percent of G.D.P. — something that Greece did not do in the late 1990s but said it did in order to join the euro club. Mr. Papandreou promised to meet that goal, but not until 2013. Moody’s estimates the deficit will be above 12 percent in 2010. Still, the speech included some parts that seemed remarkable given the times and the speaker. “We must change or sink,” he said. “Our biggest deficit is the deficit of credibility. Markets want to see action, not words.” Here is a Socialist speaking after a world crisis that is generally blamed on capitalist excesses, citing the international market as requiring sacrifices at home. Mr. Papandreou became prime minister only this fall, and so bears little responsibility for recent decisions. But he is hardly a new face, having served as education minister and foreign minister in the 1980s and 1990s. And he is certainly not a new name. By Papandreou standards, not even the Bush family of the United States — with one senator and two presidents over three generations — can compare. His grandfather, also named George, was prime minister of Greece three times, the first term beginning in 1944 and the last one ending in 1965. Two years later, a military coup overthrew the civilian government and he was put under house arrest. He died in 1968. The current prime minister’s father, Andreas, was thrown in prison by the colonels who carried out the coup. A former chairman of the economics department at the University of California, Berkeley, he was released to go into exile after the American government applied pressure on the junta. He returned after the military government was overthrown and served two stints as prime minister. Thus a Papandreou was Greek prime minister in the ’40s, ’60s, ’80s, ’90s and now in the ’00s, or whatever this decade should be called. As such the family bears more than a little responsibility for the course of Greek democracy, in which government payrolls have often risen to deal with any social unrest. In his speech this week, Mr. Papandreou said “the state is hostage to vested interests that hamper the fair management of state funding,” and vowed “to clash with these interests.” There is more than a little doubt he can, or will, do so. Mr. Marès, the Moody’s analyst, pointed out that the previous government promised to hire one person for every two who left. “Instead,” he said, “in 2009 there were two hired for every one that retired.” The bond market is again voicing doubt, with Greek bonds trading at a yield premium of more than two percentage points over German bonds. In the heady days of 2005, that margin almost vanished. That costs Greece money when it borrows, and makes it even harder to get the budget under control. As with many countries, it has a public pension system with major problems. But it cannot make a new start by devaluing its currency, and it is unwilling to impose salary cuts. If this Papandreou can deliver on the changes he is promising, he will become by far the most successful prime minister in his family, if not in Greek history.

Greece
European Central Bank
Euro (Currency)
Politics and Government
Moody's Corporation


Banned Group’s Leader Given Pakistani Parliament Seat After Vote Dispute

Abstract: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s electoral commission has granted a parliamentary seat to the leader of a banned sectarian group that has long been accused of inciting violence against minority Shiites. At the conclusion of a dispute that started with last year’s general election, the commission ruled that Maulana Muhammad Ahmed Ludhianvi, the leader of the banned group Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, should represent the Jhang district in Punjab Province. Jhang has a long history of sectarian violence, and Mr. Ludhianvi’s group, formerly known as Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, is considered the ideological umbrella organization behind much of the violence against Shiites in recent decades. Mr. Ludhianvi lost the seat during the May 2013 election by a margin of 4,000 votes but appealed on the basis that the incumbent, Sheikh Muhammad Akram, had rigged the vote and defaulted on bank loans. On Wednesday, the national election commission upheld Mr. Ludhianvi’s appeal and granted him the seat. Mr. Ludhianvi says he has renounced violence and embraced electoral politics, but his supporters continue to stir up anti-Shiite sentiment in a country where militant groups — some with links to Sipah-e-Sahaba — have killed hundreds of Shiites in recent years. Younas Qasmi, a close aide of Mr. Ludhianvi’s, said that the party’s parliamentary priority would be to pass anti-Shiite legislation and to distance Pakistan from Iran, a majority-Shiite nation. “The whole city of Jhang is jubilant for this victory,” he said. In 2002, Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s leader, banned Sipah-e-Sahaba. It later resurfaced under its new name, Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, and Mr. Ludhianvi fielded 130 candidates in last year’s election. None of them were elected. But Mr. Ludhianvi has found some favor, analysts say, with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who also comes from Punjab Province and may be using Mr. Ludhianvi in peace negotiations with the Pakistani Taliban. “It is unlikely that these two developments are coincidental,” said Arif Rafiq, an adjunct fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, a nonpartisan research group. “The Sharifs appear to have renewed their relationship with Ludhianvi, who has reportedly been playing a role in peace talks with the T.T.P.” Mr. Rafiq was referring to Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the formal name of the Pakistani Taliban. Sectarian politics have long played a central role in Jhang, the impoverished district in which Sipah-e-Sahaba was founded. Mr. Ludhianvi’s rival, Mr. Akram, said that he would appeal the election commission’s decision in the Supreme Court. Also on Wednesday, an antiterrorism court in Rawalpindi granted bail to Malik Ishaq, the leader of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the country’s most notorious sectarian militant outfit. Mr. Ishaq has been under house arrest in southern Punjab on charges of hate speech and inciting violence. Mr. Ishaq’s group has claimed responsibility for some of the worst atrocities against Shiites in recent years, particular in the western city of Quetta where minority Hazaras, who are mostly Shiites, have been attacked repeatedly.

Pakistan
Election
Shiite
Maulana Muhammad Ahmed Ludhianvi
Legislature
Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat Pakistan
Punjab Pakistan


Out of Office, Bloomberg Says, He’ll Stay Mum on Successor

Abstract: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has never been shy about voicing his opinion, often unflattering , about world leaders, cities, journalists or even animals. Mr. Bloomberg reportedly told Rupert Murdoch that President Obama was the “most arrogant” man he had ever met (something that Mr. Bloomberg, who endorsed Mr. Obama in 2012, later denied). He wondered why anyone would want to go to Buffalo because of its problems; he later called that city’s mayor to apologize. And two years after his hand was treated as a Groundhog Day hors d’oeuvre by the city’s best-known groundhog, Staten Island Chuck, the mayor referred to the groundhog using an unkind epithet. So what, then, might Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent, be expected to say once Bill de Blasio — whose campaign in the Democratic primary he once referred to as “racist” — takes the helm as mayor? Nothing. Or so he vowed on his Friday morning radio show, when he was asked about the transfer of power to Mayor-elect de Blasio, which will take place on Jan. 1. “I will not criticize,” he said on WOR-AM (710). “These jobs are tough enough without an extra voice criticizing you.” He added, “The first year in particular, when you’re new, you just don’t need a previous mayor criticizing, or their staffs.” Mr. Bloomberg suggested that his pledge was inspired by his predecessor, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. He said that even though some of Mr. Giuliani’s lieutenants “probably said something” negative about the Bloomberg administration, “Rudy never once did.” He added, “The way he conducted himself after the new administration took over says a lot about his character.” During the interview, Mr. Bloomberg was also asked about his meeting on Wednesday with Mr. de Blasio at City Hall. He said that the mayor-elect did not ask for advice, though he noted that the conversation might have been affected by the fact that there were plenty of reporters watching. He expressed confidence that Mr. de Blasio, who he noted was “not a novice” in government, was well versed in the issues. And to make things easier, Mr. Bloomberg said that Mr. de Blasio had agreed to allow the Bloomberg administration to plan most of the logistics for the inauguration, including “putting the platforms up and the chairs — Bill can decide who to speak and where he wants to sit people.” “Everybody says, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a difficult transition,’ ” Mr. Bloomberg added. “No, it isn’t.”

Bill de Blasio
Mike Bloomberg
Mayoral races


Roddick Leaves Drama to Serena Williams at French Open

Abstract: PARIS — It was a Saturday at the French Open in which Andy Roddick finally made his way into the fourth round and Novak Djokovic, surprisingly, did not. Roddick reached the Round of 16 for the first time in eight appearances here, defeating the unseeded Frenchman Marc Gicquel, 6-1, 6-4, 6-4. Djokovic, the world’s second-best clay-court player this season, was later stunned, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4, by 29th-seeded Philipp Kohlschreiber. But an eventful afternoon’s play on the clay soon veered into more familiar territory as Serena Williams scrapped and slugged her way to a three-set victory in a match rich in subplots and acrimony. “I don’t mean for this stuff to happen; it just kind of happens,” Williams said after her 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 victory in the third round over María José Martínez Sánchez of Spain. But Williams has long been a headline waiting to be written. Her career has included an improbable comeback, major injuries, blown calls that sparked the introduction of electronic line calling, her family’s boycott of a marquee tournament in Indian Wells, Calif., and enough costume changes and mood swings to populate a season at La Scala. “I’m like one of those girls on a reality show that has all the drama, and everyone in the house hates them because no matter what they do, like, drama follows them,” Williams said. “I don’t want to be that girl.” Maybe so. But on Saturday, what could have been a routine victory for the second-seeded Williams over an unseeded opponent turned accusatory early in the first set. Serving at 2-2, 30-40 in the opening set, Williams chased down a drop shot and ripped a backhand in the direction of the onrushing Martínez’s head. Martínez reached up to protect herself with her arms, and the ball glanced off her right arm and landed on the other side of the net. Williams immediately apologized to Martínez, but the chair umpire Emmanuel Joseph did not see the ball hit her. Thinking that Martínez had made the shot with her racket, he awarded the point and the break of serve to the Spanish player. The rules of tennis state that if a ball hits any part of a player’s body or equipment other than the racket, that player lose the point. Although the sport’s etiquette and tradition call for a player to admit touching the ball, nothing in the rules obliges a player to admit it. Williams later accused Martínez of cheating. “I looked at her dead in the eye, I said: ‘Why? Just be honest if the ball hit you or not,’ ” Williams said. “I mean, hello, it totally hit her. She was just, like, she wouldn’t even look at me. She looked down, and I just have no respect for anybody who can’t play a professional game and just be really professional out here.” Martínez said that she believed the ball in question had touched her racket. “People said it was the body, but if it hit my body, I didn’t feel it,” she said. Williams contended otherwise. “I’m going to get you in the locker room for that; you don’t know me,” she said on court. After an extended discussion with Joseph, she then said, “She better not come to the net again.” Williams was apparently unaware that on-court microphones had picked up that comment. “You guys heard that?” she said at a news conference, looking sheepish. The tournament referee Stefan Fransson said that a chair umpire could ask a player if she touched the ball. “It’s a difficult one, that one,” Fransson said. “There are two things involved. Even if she says it hit her, she also needs to concede the point.” None of that occurred and, as it turned out, Martínez, a left-hander with a compact throwback of a game, came to the net regularly without further incident. She saved a match point at 2-5 in the third before Williams eventually secured victory after 2 hours 11 minutes. Williams’s next opportunity to generate drama will come in the fourth round against the 24th-seeded Aleksandra Wozniak of Canada. The other Round of 16 matches in their half of the draw will match Svetlana Kuznetsova of Russia against Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland, Jelena Jankovic of Serbia against the unseeded Sorana Cirstea of Romania, and Samantha Stosur of Australia against the unseeded Virginie Razzano of France. Stosur, a net-rushing Australian, benefited from Saturday’s warm, dry conditions, which tend to help attacking players with big kick serves. She upset Elena Dementieva, the No. 4 seed, 6-3, 4-6, 6-1. Cirstea, a 19-year-old clearly at home on clay, stopped No. 10 seed Caroline Wozniacki in straight sets. Wozniacki, an 18-year-old Danish player who reached the final in Madrid, has had a shoulder problem that has limited her serve and was also treated on court for back pain late in the match. Roddick’s win was much less eventful. He never lost his serve against Gicquel, a 32-year-old Frenchman, and consistently got the better of the baseline rallies. “It was a goal of mine to get to the second week of this tournament when we sat out at the beginning of this year and laid out kind of what we wanted to do,” said Roddick, who will next face the 11th-seeded Gaël Monfils of France. “Anytime you accomplish a goal it’s nice, but my tournament is not over. You know, I’d like to keep going. I don’t even have anything else to do next week.” Roger Federer, the No. 2 seed still chasing his first French Open title in the age of Rafael Nadal, will still be here. Federer beat yet another Frenchman, Paul-Henri Mathieu, 4-6, 6-1, 6-4, 6-4, on Saturday and will now face the German veteran Tommy Haas. But Federer no longer has to worry about Djokovic in his half of the draw. The fourth-seeded Djokovic reached the semifinals here the last two years, but he could not muster a set against Kohlschreiber, a German with a sweeping, one-handed backhand. “I didn’t find the rhythm, that’s all,” said Djokovic, who nearly beat Nadal in the semifinals in Madrid. “It was not physically anything. I think it was more mentally just to find that zone, but I couldn’t.”

Tennis
French Open (Tennis)
Williams Serena
Roddick Andy


Obama Weighs Quick Undoing of Bush Policy

Abstract: CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama is poised to move swiftly to reverse actions that President Bush took using executive authority, and his transition team is reviewing limits on stem cell research and the expansion of oil and gas drilling, among other issues, members of the team said Sunday. As Mr. Obama prepared to make his first post-election visit to the White House on Monday, his advisers were compiling a list of policies that could be reversed by the executive powers of the new president. The assessment is under way, aides said, but a full list of policies to be overturned will not be announced by Mr. Obama until he confers with new members of his cabinet. “There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for Congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” John D. Podesta, a top transition leader, said Sunday. “He feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set.” Throughout his presidency, Mr. Bush has made liberal use of his executive authority, using it to put his stamp on a range of hot-button policy issues. In January 2001, on his first full day in office, Mr. Bush reinstated the so-called global gag rule, initiated during the Reagan administration and overturned by President Bill Clinton, which prohibited taxpayer dollars from being given to international family planning groups that perform abortions and provide abortion counseling. After Mr. Obama’s victory last week, the Center for Reproductive Rights delivered a 23-page memorandum to his transition team, calling for “bold policy change,” including a repeal of the gag rule. On Sunday, in a sign that the presidential campaign had definitively ended and that the fast-forming administration had become the focal point, the faces of Mr. Obama’s new team appeared across the spectrum of Sunday talk shows, a changing of the guard more than two months before he officially assumes power. Mr. Obama’s new chief of staff, Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, said the federal government should provide aid to the automobile industry to help the major automakers and their suppliers survive the financial crisis. General Motors, the largest American automaker, said last week that it had been losing more than $2 billion a month recently from its cash cushion and could face bankruptcy. Mr. Emanuel told the CBS News program “Face the Nation” that the industry was “an essential part of the economy,” echoing remarks that Mr. Obama made at his first post-election news conference last week. Restating Mr. Obama’s points, Mr. Emanuel said the Bush administration should accelerate $25 billion in federal loans provided by a recent law to help automakers and suppliers retool to build more energy-efficient vehicles. He said that the Bush administration had the power to do more and that Mr. Obama’s economic team, once chosen, would devise options for helping the industry in ways that had the added benefit of being “part of an energy policy, going forward, where America is less dependent on foreign oil.” The idea of turning the auto industry’s crisis into a chance to enact changes with energy and environmental benefits is one that Mr. Emanuel has promoted in Congress. But he said that Mr. Obama had yet to settle on his proposals or whether he would announce them before he was sworn in. “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview on Sunday. “They are opportunities to do big things.” Mr. Podesta, who for months has been preparing for the transition, said in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” that Mr. Obama was considering Democrats, Republicans and independents for key cabinet positions. While previous presidents have not announced such appointments until December, Mr. Podesta suggested that officials with responsibility for the economy, national security, health care and energy portfolios could be named sooner. “I think he intends to move very quickly,” Mr. Podesta said. “And you know, he’s beaten a lot of records during the course of the campaign.” Mr. Obama does not intend to name any cabinet officials this week, aides said Sunday, but could announce additional White House decisions on senior staff members as early as Tuesday as he begins building his administration, from the Oval Office to other positions in the West Wing and other parts of the government. Mr. Emanuel said Congress needed to extend unemployment insurance benefits and offer states a lift in paying for health care bills. When the new Democratic Congress convenes in January, he said, it should tackle a wider economic stimulus package that includes the middle-class tax cut that was a centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign. “You cannot have a strong and resilient economy that does not have a strong and resilient middle class,” Mr. Emanuel said on “This Week” on ABC. “They have been squeezed over the last number of years, and it is essential to have an economic strategy that strengthens them going forward.” Mr. Emanuel said an economic stimulus package in Congress should not be linked to a free-trade agreement with Colombia, as some Republicans have sought to do. Democrats have resisted those efforts, saying it does not provide enough labor protection. The executive orders of the Bush administration are among the many items being reviewed by the new Obama team. The transition operation that was set up in August, even before Mr. Obama was formally nominated at the Democratic convention, included a plan to scrutinize the policies that could be reversed through executive orders. The Bureau of Land Management is poised to open about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling, a plan that the Bush administration has argued would not harm the land. Environmentalists have opposed the idea, a sentiment echoed by Mr. Podesta on Sunday. “I think across the board, on stem cell research, on a number of areas,” Mr. Podesta said on “Fox News Sunday,” “you see the Bush administration even today moving aggressively to do things that I think are probably not in the interest of the country. They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah that they’re going to try to do right as they are walking out the door. I think that’s a mistake.” Mr. Bush used his first prime-time address, on Aug. 9, 2001, to announce his decision (technically a policy pronouncement and not an executive order) to permit federal financing for human embryonic stem cell research, albeit with strict limitations. Scientists and patient advocates have spent years pressing him to loosen the restrictions; Mr. Bush has twice vetoed legislation that would have done so. “It will have been eight years that we have been operating in a limited funding environment,” said Larry Soler, a board member of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, an umbrella group representing 100 organizations. “I think everyone in the scientific community and the patient community is geared up and expecting this and excited to make this happen. It’s been a long struggle.” Responding to questions about how Michelle Obama intends to shape her time as first lady, Valerie Jarrett, a close adviser to Mr. Obama and a longtime family friend, said Mrs. Obama would first concentrate on getting her daughters, ages 7 and 10, adjusted to a new city and a new school. She said Mrs. Obama would forge her own style, dismissing a question about whether she would be more like Hillary Rodham Clinton or Laura Bush. “Her model will be Michelle Obama,” Ms. Jarrett said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “She’s going to be her own first lady. There’ll be nothing like it. Having a seat at the table and being a co-president is not something that she’s interested in doing.”

Stem Cells
Automobiles
Executive Orders
Obama Barack
Bush George W
Presidential Election of 2008
United States Politics and Government
Offshore Exploration and Installations