Motorcyclists in an Uproar About Keeping It Down

Abstract: THE clubhouse of the Dirty Ryderz, a Brooklyn-based motorcycle club with 63 local members (plus 27 in Virginia), is in a featureless brick building in East Flatbush with a security gate out front and tall, colorful trophies lying flat along a wall in the basement. Winter weather is not motorcycle weather, so no cycles were to be seen outside last week. But on Wednesday evening, the clubhouse buzzed with activity. It was nearing time for a meeting of the Concerned Citizens for Motorcycle Safety , an umbrella organization for several local clubs that has had its hands full lately fighting a proposed city law aimed at controlling cycles’ noise. In particular, members were preparing for a third City Council hearing on the bill, to be held in the next few weeks, and for the international motorcycle show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center this weekend. The bill, which was the subject of two Council committee hearings late last year but was delayed for further study after motorcyclists and their supporters raised objections, is intended to curb common modifications to the exhaust pipes that make cycles noisier.  On new motorcycles, exhaust pipes bear a stamp from the manufacturer certifying that they meet state and federal laws limiting noise to 80 decibels, comparable to the level of a vacuum cleaner or an alarm clock. The law, as proposed, would give police the power to ticket the drivers of cycles that are missing the factory stamp — presumably cycles with excessively noisy or improperly modified pipes. The bill’s main sponsor, Councilman Alan Gerson, who represents Lower Manhattan, said the police would not have to chase noisy motorcycles but could simply look for the stamp on a parked cycle. “We’re not talking about street noise,” said Mr. Gerson, noting that motorcycle noise was a leading complaint from residents of his district. “We’re talking about noise that reaches into apartments, bedrooms, living rooms, places where people live. It’s so loud it’s like a physical assault. It’s jarring.” Especially, he said, in warm weather. “Elsewhere in the world, the birds come back and start chirping,” Mr. Gerson said. “And in these neighborhoods, the motorcycles come back and drive everyone crazy.” In the East Flatbush clubhouse, though, bikers complained that they were being misunderstood. Among the benefits of a loud exhaust system, they said, is that it alerts drivers, many with their radios on in soundproof cars, to a motorcycle’s presence. “Every person that rides a bike can give you several stories of how that loud pipe saved them from potentially being killed,” said Jermaul Holloman, the Dirty Ryderz’s round-faced, large-bellied president, who rides under the nickname Naughty. “They don’t respect the dangers that we go through. Anyone that says loud pipes don’t save lives has never rode a bike.” (In response, Mr. Gerson said that the noise from a legal, unmodified exhaust system was enough to announce that a motorcycle is nearby.) Ellen Patterson, a member of the concerned citizens’ group who was with Mr. Holloman this day, said the organization hopes to one day get federal decibel limits raised. In the meantime, she said, the bikers, who have a powerful ally in Councilman Leroy Comrie of Southeast Queens, plan to turn out in force to testify at the next Council hearing. Their worry, Ms. Patterson said, is that under the law, police would punish riders whose legal exhaust pipes have stamps that are hard to see.  If the stamp is hidden, as it often is, she said, “do you really think that they’re going to get on the ground to try to see it? No, he’s going to ticket you.” For riders like Derick Coard, a city bus driver who attended the meeting, that is a scary prospect, especially because multiple citations could lead to a biker’s losing his cycle. A nice Japanese sport bike can cost $10,000, he said, and a Harley-Davidson several times that. There is, of course, another reason some people have loud motorcycles: the adolescent joy in producing a deafening noise and bothering the neighbors. That, Mr. Coard emphasized, is not what he is defending. “We sponsor a Little League team, for God’s sakes,” he said. “How rogue can you be? There’s corrections officers in my club; there’s police in my club; there’s nurses. Why should the few have to suffer for those that are living outside the law?”

Motorcycles Motor Bikes and Motorscooters


Calif. Voting Change Could Signal Big Political Shift

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — The time for tinkering is done. That was the message Californians sent when they voted Tuesday to radically rejigger elections in the nation’s most populous state. Under Proposition 14, a measure that easily passed, traditional party primaries will be replaced in 2011 with wide-open elections. The top two vote-getters — whatever their party, or if they have no party at all — will face off in the general election. Supporters argue that without parties picking candidates for the general election, moderates and independents will move to the fore, and voters will pay more attention to the electoral process. Critics of the measure say it will give a huge advantage to candidates who have the most money or the widest name recognition. That no one actually knows what the real effect of Proposition 14 will be seems almost beside the point to frustrated voters. What mattered, supporters said, is that something fundamental about politics — anything fundamental — had been changed. As supporters celebrated, they promised to bring the so-called “top two” system to a state near you, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the charge — though his second term, plagued by budget meltdowns and plunging popularity, was, analysts said, one of the leading motivators for the measure. Whether the measure will empower more independent voters — who were already allowed to vote in Democratic or Republican primaries, provided they requested a ballot — remains to be seen. But what did seem certain was that California was again poised to capture the mood of the country, just as it did in 1978 with Proposition 13, which distilled widespread antitax sentiment into a cap on property taxes . This time, it is the anger of the electorate that Californians have bottled, experts said, even if they are not totally sure what they are doing. “I don’t know that people really knew what they were voting for,” said Bruce Cain, director of the University of California Washington Center, based in the District of Columbia. Mr. Cain said the state of the state — high unemployment, record foreclosures and a palpable anger at legislators — had primed the pump. “When people get mad,” he said, “they lash out.” But just as with Proposition 13 — which required a two-thirds majority for the Legislature to increase revenue through new taxes — Proposition 14 could come with a raft of unintended consequences, opponents say. They cited a potential rise in fringe candidates as well as the marginalization of small parties. “Big business and big government won yesterday,” said Christina Tobin, chair of StopTopTwo.org , a leading opponent of the measure, which was heavily outspent by the “Yes” side. One probable impact was an increase in litigation; both major parties suggested that they were weighing how to stop the implementation of Proposition 14 before its scheduled start in 2011. Proposition 14 is based on a system in place in one other state, Washington, which the Supreme Court upheld in 2008. Louisiana uses a similar open system, but requires state and local candidates to gain a majority in primaries to win election or face a runoff. On Wednesday, Mr. Schwarzenegger was being hailed by backers as a political winner and an agent of change, as he trumpeted Proposition 14’s promise of encouraging moderates — who, the argument goes, are shunned by highly partisan primary voters. He also acknowledged the rising role of independents, who now make up one in five voters in the state. “We in California have said we’ve got to come to the center, we’ve got to bring everyone together in order to solve problems,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said at a news conference in Los Angeles . “And I think the rest of the nation eventually will find out this is exactly where the action is.” What is also certain is that voters liked Proposition 14; it won in 56 of the state’s 58 counties, with the only two detractors coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Orange, the conservative bastion in the south, and San Francisco , the liberal paradise in the north. Despite that mandate, Ron Nehring, the chairman of the Californian Republican Party , which opposed the proposition alongside the state’s Democrats and four smaller parties, said the measure would actually take power away from the mass of primary voters and hand it instead to a smaller group of party leaders and loyalists who would decide their candidates in conventions and caucuses. A single handpicked candidate would then get support, he said, while challengers would be shunned. “Ninety-nine percent of the Republicans that were involved in choosing our candidates are now excluded from choosing our candidates,” Mr. Nehring said. “In the future this decision will be made by no more than a few thousand and, in most cases, a few dozen.” California voters may not be finished with their shake-up. The November ballot, after all, will include a measure to tax and regulate marijuana , as well as possibly including proposals to eliminate the two-thirds majority for passing a budget and further limit legislators’ time in office. (California was one of the first states to adopt term limits in 1990.) All of those elections will likely pivot on the ability to draw independents, who were ecstatic about Proposition 14’s passage. “There is now a new political force in California,” said Royce D’Orazio, a stand-up comic who works as the Los Angeles chapter organizer for the group independentvoice.org , who spoke at the governor’s side on Wednesday. “To all our brothers and sisters in states across this country, help is on the way.” For his part, Mr. Schwarzenegger seemed pleased by his victory — “this is, by the way, national news,” he said — but still tried to temper expectations for an electorate hungry for anything new. “It will not solve all the problems,” the governor said. “But it will change a lot.”


Civic Masterpieces, and Nightmares, Unrealized

Abstract: Most nonfiction books these days are emblazoned with audacious titles that demand an explanatory underline. “Never Built New York” (Metropolis Books, $55) doesn’t need one. In his foreword, the architect Daniel Libeskind describes this imaginative picture book for adults by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell as “nostalgia, regrets or opportunities missed” — a catalog of dashed dreams and dodged nightmares. Most of the what-ifs were culled by the authors, both of them architectural critics and historians, from 19th- and 20th-century and contemporary blueprints. They will be featured at the Queens Museum next year in an exhibition (with, one hopes, a more welcoming typeface). Among them: James E. Serrell’s ambitious 1865 plan to expand Manhattan by rerouting the East River to a new canal farther east. Gustav Lindenthal’s gigantic engineering vision of 1887 linking Manhattan to mainland America across the Hudson River, from West 23rd Street. McKim, Mead and White’s grandiose 1893 Beaux-Arts design for the Brooklyn Museum, crowned with 128 statues. Ernest Flagg’s shriveled reverie from 1904 that would have reduced Central Park to an 800-foot wide green ribbon running between Christopher Street and the Harlem River. Mayor William J. Gaynor’s suggestion in 1910 to cleave a new avenue between Fifth and Sixth. New Yorkers were spared Robert Moses’ Lower Manhattan Expressway and the extension of Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park, but blundered into losing the fiberglass geodesic domed stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers, which was designed by Norman Bel Geddes and R. Buckminster Fuller near what is now the Barclays Center. Each visionary scheme collapsed under its own weight, or was doomed by an economic depression (ground was actually broken for the bridge) or, in Mr. Gaynor’s case, by his attempted assassination. The Brooklyn Museum’s ambitions were thwarted by rival Manhattan art patrons after the once-sovereign city of Brooklyn was subsumed into Greater New York. The powerful legacy of these unbuilt works, Mr. Libeskind writes, lies in “the beholder’s imagination,” much as Beethoven’s final works must have reverberated in the composer’s mind’s ear after he went deaf. “In a city where ambition, power and talent are in endless supply,” the authors conclude, “space, patience and grace are not.” — Getting a head start on holiday gifts? Consider “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: A New York City Holiday Tradition” (Rizzoli New York, $29.95) with photographs by Matt Harnick and The Macy’s Archives, and text by Stephen M. Silverman. On the eve of the parade’s 90th anniversary, this colorful book celebrates the spectacular fall classic, from an early controversy over whether the event undermined traditional holiday worship, to the inner workings of the 72,000-square-foot shop and warehouse in Moonachie, N.J., where the balloons and floats are designed and built. You remember “Goodnight Moon.” Now comes “Good Morning, City” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.99) and who better to welcome the dawn in New York than Pat Kiernan, the author, who regularly does just that as the morning news anchor on NY1. This charming children’s book is illustrated by Pascal Campion.


More Doctors in Texas After Malpractice Caps

Abstract: HOUSTON, Oct. 4 — In Texas , it can be a long wait for a doctor: up to six months. That is not for an appointment. That is the time it can take the Texas Medical Board to process applications to practice. Four years after Texas voters approved a constitutional amendment limiting awards in medical malpractice lawsuits, doctors are responding as supporters predicted, arriving from all parts of the country to swell the ranks of specialists at Texas hospitals and bring professional health care to some long-underserved rural areas. The influx, raising the state’s abysmally low ranking in physicians per capita, has flooded the medical board’s offices in Austin with applications for licenses, close to 2,500 at last count. “It was hard to believe at first; we thought it was a spike,” said Dr. Donald W. Patrick, executive director of the medical board and a neurosurgeon and lawyer. But Dr. Patrick said the trend — licenses up 18 percent since 2003, when the damage caps were enacted — has held, with an even sharper jump of 30 percent in the last fiscal year, compared with the year before. “Doctors are coming to Texas because they sense a friendlier malpractice climate,” he said. Some experts say the picture may be more complicated and less positive. They question how big a role the cap on malpractice awards has played, arguing that awards in malpractice lawsuits showed little increase in the 12 years before the law changed. And some critics, including liability lawyers, question whether the changes have left patients more vulnerable. With doctors facing reduced malpractice exposure, they say, many have cut back on their insurance, making it harder for plaintiffs to collect damages. Moreover, the critics say that some rural areas have fewer doctors than before. The measure changing Texas’ malpractice landscape, Proposition 12, was narrowly approved in a constitutional referendum on Sept. 12, 2003. It barred the courts from interfering in limits set by the Legislature on medical malpractice recoveries. For pain and suffering, so-called noneconomic damage, patients can sue a doctor and, in unusual cases, up to two health care institutions for no more than $250,000 each, under limits adopted by the Legislature. Plaintiffs can still recover economic losses, like the cost of continuing medical care or lost income, but the amount they can win was capped at $1.6 million in death cases. All but 15 states have adopted some limits on medical damage awards, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But the restrictions in Texas go further than in many states, where the limits are often twice as high as they are here. “Other states have passed tort reform, but Texas implemented big changes all at once,” said Lisa Robin, a vice president for government relations at the Federation of State Medical Boards, a national umbrella group based in Dallas. Some experts say that the lack of a state income tax, combined with what William M. Sage, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin, called a “relatively rapid transition in its tort reputation as a plaintiff-friendly state,” has contributed to the state’s appeal to doctors. Dr. Timothy George, 47, a pediatric neurosurgeon, credits the measure in part with attracting him and his sought-after specialty last year to Austin from North Carolina. “Texas made it easier to practice and easier to take care of complex patients,” he said. The increase in doctors — double the rate of the population increase — has raised the state’s ranking in physicians per capita to 42nd in 2005 from 48th in 2001, according to the American Medical Association. It is most likely considerably higher now, according to the medical association, which takes two years to compile the standings. Still, the latest figures show Texas with 194 patient-care physicians per 100,000 population, far below the District of Columbia, which led the nation with 659. The Texas Medical Board reports licensing 10,878 new physicians since 2003, up from 8,391 in the prior four years. It issued a record 980 medical licenses at its last meeting in August, raising the number of doctors in Texas to 44,752, with a backlog of nearly 2,500 applications. Of those awaiting processing, the largest number, after Texas, come from New York (145), followed by California (118) and Florida (100). In some medical specialties, the gains have been especially striking, said Jon Opelt, executive director of the Texas Alliance for Patient Access, a medical advocacy group: 186 obstetricians, 156 orthopedic surgeons and 26 neurosurgeons. Adding to the state’s allure for doctors, Mr. Opelt said, was an average 21.3 percent drop in malpractice insurance premiums, not counting rebates for renewal. To help state officials monitor the influx of doctors, the medical board recently got money to hire six more employees, said Dr. Patrick, the director since 2001. It now has 17 lawyers, compared with no more than four when he arrived, he said. Since 2003, investigations of doctors have gone up 40 percent, patient complaints have gone up 25 percent, and disciplinary actions about 8 percent, said Jill Wiggins, a board spokeswoman. But the figures may reflect greater regulatory diligence rather than more misconduct, Ms. Wiggins said. Of the 10,878 physicians licensed since 2003, she said, 14 have been the subject of disciplinary actions, on charges as diverse as addiction problems and record-keeping infractions, with none accused of harming patients. But there are those who are skeptical about the caps on malpractice. “We’ve lost our system of legal accountability, said N. Alex Winslow, executive director of Texas Watch, a consumer advocacy group. “Just having more doctors doesn’t make patients safer. It remains to be seen who is coming to our state.” Demian McElhinny, 33, a former hospice pharmacy technician in El Paso, recently settled claims against a neurological surgeon for spinal surgery that left him disabled and his family impoverished; he said he emerged with “pennies on the dollar.” His wife, Kelly, found work as a school bus driver, he said, while “I’m at home being a housewife to my two boys.” Mr. McElhinny’s surgeon, Dr. Paul Henry Cho, later admitted to the medical board that he was addicted to a narcotic cough syrup and had written fraudulent prescriptions. Dr. Cho’s license to prescribe drugs was suspended, although it was soon restored, and he moved from El Paso to a hospital in Fort Worth. He did not return a call to his office, and his lawyer declined to comment. Paula Sweeney, a leading Dallas liability lawyer and a past president of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, said, “A lot of legislators are aware they went too far in ’03.” Texas Watch, in a report last February, questioned the decline in malpractice insurance rates, saying they must be seen in light of increases of as much as 147 percent before the 2003 referendum. And Bernard S. Black, a law professor at the University of Texas, has published studies showing little increase in Texas insurance awards from 1990 to 2002, casting doubt, he said, on the “malpractice insurance crisis.” Professor Black also said that data was too scant to attribute the rise in the number of doctors to the damage caps. “I don’t doubt there’s an effect,” he said, “but I think it’s a small one.” Texas Watch also contends that many poor rural areas of Texas remain underserved, and rural West Texas has actually lost several physicians since 2003. But Dr. James Baumgartner, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, is among many doctors who believe the new malpractice caps have helped. Dr. Baumgartner said it was now far easier to recruit doctors to a state where close to 30 percent of children lack health insurance and Medicaid reimbursements are low. Dr. Keith Hill, a recently discharged Army doctor with a specialty in foot and ankle reconstruction, said the change in state law was the reason he moved from Georgia to open a practice in Beaumont, a poor city in East Texas long seen as plaintiff-friendly. Had it not happened, said Dr. Hill, 40, “I can say I would not have considered Texas.”

Doctors
Texas
Malpractice
Suits and Litigation


The Murky Business of College Football Rankings

Abstract: ANN ARBOR, Mich. — This time last year, there were three undefeated teams in the Power 5 conferences. This year, there are 10. It is difficult to say how meaningful this is. By this time last year, two pairs of teams that play every year had already met — Baylor and Texas Christian, and Florida State and Clemson — eliminating two potential perfect teams. But what the statistic does allow is a reflection on the fact that in college football, a win is not everything. It is a truism that further complicates the always messy business of ranking teams among disparate conferences. College football fans are asked to embrace the chaos even while they follow a sport so committed to control that the coaches wear headsets as if they were directing air traffic. The notion that victories are overrated should be heresy in a sport that gave us the quotation — commonly attributed to Vince Lombardi — that “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” 2015 Heisman Trophy Watch A look at the top players in contention for college football’s highest honor. But it ought not to be considered a particularly postmodern insight. Not after a game like the one here on Saturday in which Michigan State beat Michigan after recovering a botched punt attempt for a go-ahead touchdown as the clock ticked to zero. Only an elaborate conspiracy of circumstances — a low snap, an inability to fall on the ball, an extremely unlucky bounce — permitted a Spartans victory. The teams played a close game in which the defenses dominated. Divvying up one win and one loss is less precise than calling it even and perhaps adding the caveat that Michigan State was on the road. Associated Press voters seemed to recognize this: They dropped Michigan only from No. 12 to No. 15 and kept Michigan State at No. 7. In recent years, college football has been rife with teams at the top whose win-loss records did not tell their whole stories. In 2012, Notre Dame received the top Bowl Championship Series seed by virtue of its perfect record, only to be predictably demolished, 42-14, by one-loss Alabama. Last season, 13-0 Florida State secured the No. 3 seed in the final College Football Playoff rankings despite barely beating several so-so teams, and then one-loss Oregon blew them out in the Rose Bowl, 59-20. Such debates will become extremely relevant two weeks from now, when the playoff selection committee will release its first rankings. The 13 members delve deeply into teams’ performances for two days in a conference room near Dallas before releasing their colored smoke (look for purple, green and multiple shades of red). But for all the committee’s talk last year of “the full body of work,” “game control” and other jargon, winning percentage ended up the strongest predictor of final ranking. Among major conference teams, the undefeated team led all but two one-loss teams; all 12-1 teams led 11-1 teams; all one-loss teams led two-loss teams; and all two-loss teams led three-loss teams. So what to do with this season’s crop, which includes No. 1 Ohio State (7-0, 3-0 Big Ten), No. 2 Baylor (6-0, 3-0 Big 12), No. 3 Utah (6-0, 3-0 Pacific-12), No. 4 Texas Christian (7-0, 4-0 Big 12), No. 5 Louisiana State (6-0, 4-0 Southeastern Conference), No. 6 Clemson (6-0, 3-0 Atlantic Coast Conference), No. 7 Michigan State (7-0, 3-0 Big Ten), No. 9 Florida State (6-0, 4-0 A.C.C.), No. 12 Iowa (7-0, 3-0 Big Ten) and No. 14 Oklahoma State (6-0, 3-0 Big 12)? There is at least one in each conference. Just one of Iowa’s previous and future opponents is currently ranked — No. 25 Pittsburgh. Florida State has played no teams that have been ranked. The combined record of Oklahoma State’s Football Bowl Subdivision adversaries is 12-20. Such quandaries — and not simply the small number of games — are what college football fans find so exasperating about the four-team playoff. Teams spend most of their seasons playing within the closed confines of their conferences and divisions. This will only become more prevalent in coming seasons as Big Ten teams join those in the Big 12 and the Pac-12 in playing nine conference games, not eight. Then they will be measured against teams that, in many cases, they not only did not play but with whom they shared no common opponents. In the end, four conference championship games and the Big 12’s round-robin schedule will ensure that each conference produces a maximum of one undefeated team. This situation should diminish, if not eliminate, the number of fan bases who feel monumentally snubbed come December. Of course, this assumes that midmajor teams in the so-called Group of 5 conferences are unworthy of the playoff. Technically, they may qualify, too. And four are undefeated — three in the competitive American Athletic Conference. Who knew that No. 18 Memphis’s games at No. 21 Houston and at No. 22 Temple in November could have such weighty implications? And, as Vince Lombardi probably never said, Holy (No. 19) Toledo!

College football
Michigan State
University of Michigan


Memories of a Former Resident of Grey Gardens

Abstract: East Hampton LOIS WRIGHT arrived at Grey Gardens on May 7, 1975, with a green canvas cot, cooking pots, a couple of hats and a heavy stick, in case she “had to hit a raccoon.” Her mother had just died, and Ms. Wright was going to stay with her close friends Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Big Edie, and her daughter, Little Edie, at their home here on Lily Pond Lane. “Little Edie loved my mother, and Big Edie and my mother were very congenial,” Ms. Wright, 79, recalled. She stayed with the Beales, the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, for 13 months, leaving when she could not stand the fleas anymore. The Beales, who had once led a privileged life in Manhattan, resided in squalor, amid raccoons and dozens of cats in a shingled house near Georgica Beach. Ms. Wright, an artist, palm reader, tarot card reader and member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, was a kindred free spirit, setting up her easel in the kitchen, using that “studio” to paint and write, chronicling the lives of her hosts. The Beales cooked on a hot plate in Big Edie’s room and didn’t use the kitchen, Ms. Wright said. In her cluttered two-room cottage apartment nearby, Ms. Wright now paints about her time at Grey Gardens from memory. The walls are covered with paintings of Little Edie and Big Edie and their spirits, self-portraits, the cats and the characters who populated a place where, Ms. Wright said, “the world cannot intrude.” Her work will be on display as part of a tribute to Grey Gardens at the Gallery Sag Harbor from June 7 to June 30, with a Champagne brunch on June 14. A memoir based on the copious journals Ms. Wright kept, “My Life at Grey Gardens: 13 Months and Beyond,” was published last year. Rebecca Cooper, the gallery’s owner, said that Grey Gardens had “a whole cult following.” She said Ms. Wright’s paintings “fall into the school of fantasy realism or visionary art; they are about the spirit, and they capture the soul.” The paintings will be priced from $750 to $2,000, Ms. Cooper said. Ms. Wright thought that the famous recluses had found “a perfect way for people to live.” Ms. Wright, an East Hampton resident since age 12, had visited Grey Gardens often as a child; her maternal uncle, Dr. John F. Erdmann, a surgeon, had a big summer place down the block. Wandering on the property on a recent afternoon, Ms. Wright said that Grey Gardens, now owned by Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, looked as if it were “straight out of a magazine” and had lost the “ramshackle charm” of the Beale days. Stories about the Beales’ ragtag lifestyle were splashed across the tabloids after a Suffolk County Health Department raid in 1971, and it was immortalized in a 1976 documentary by David and Albert Maysles that will be shown on June 14 at the Bay Street Theater in conjunction with the art show. The Beales also inspired a 2006 Broadway show and a forthcoming HBO film starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. Ms. Wright appears in the documentary as a guest at Big Edie’s birthday party. She presented Ms. Beale with an index-card box. Ms. Wright said she slept in a room overlooking the broad front porch that was preferred by “a captain” who was “definitely the Grey Gardens ghost” and had previously used the room. She recalled that Little Edie asked her to do an oil portrait of Julius Krug, who was the secretary of the interior under President Truman and was known as Cap. Ms. Wright said that Little Edie never got over Cap, who was married. “Edie and Big Edie loved my paintings, and they were very encouraging about my paintings,” she said. To earn money, Ms. Wright read palms at the estate and at a cocktail lounge nearby. “Bette Davis said I read her palm better than anyone from Hollywood to East Hampton,” she said. For the last 20 years, Ms. Wright, whose formal schooling ended in the sixth grade, has been the host of her own cable television show on LTV, the local access channel, interviewing area guests. Ms. Wright said reports of the filth at the 28-room mansion were exaggerated, though she lived there long after Mrs. Onassis had paid for a cleaning that required 40 gallons of disinfectant. “The floors were mopped all the time,” she said. The raccoons “were the practical ones,” constantly trying to open the icebox door, she said, and the cats “were mystical.” Still, Ms. Wright said, she wore a hat to protect her head from raccoons and noted that “Edie said that the fleas came from the hedges up front.”


A FedEx Cup Prize Well Worth the Wait

Abstract: With more than $117 million in career PGA Tour earnings between them, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson know a lot about cashing big winner’s checks. So it’s no wonder that they whined a bit recently that the $10 million winner’s prize for the four-tournament FedEx Cup playoff will land in the victor’s deferred-compensation Tour retirement account and will be inaccessible until he is at least 45. Such an inconvenience. Deferred compensation is such a dull phrase that it makes you want to rush to the offices of the ubiquitous TV advertiser J. G. Wentworth to trade your guaranteed future payments for a discounted wad of upfront cash. But Woods and Mickelson miss the point in their desire to collect their cash as they always have, unless their financial manager is Warren Buffett, which is entirely possible. Deferring the payments and taxes on the $10 million, and investing it wisely, could be worth far more than cashing a check and coming away with $6 million or so after taxes.  This looks like a dandy version of a 401 (k) plan, assuming the PGA Tour doesn’t go belly up and well-heeled folks don’t start hating golf. And it is just the luck of pro golfers that in the privileged sanctum of the PGA Tour, such a retirement plan is possible and a sponsor like FedEx is financing it. The plan was approved last November by the Tour’s policy board, five months after the particulars of the FedEx Cup were announced. “This was a decision made in the best interest of the vast majority of the players,” said Ty Votaw, an executive vice president of the PGA Tour. “But we recognize that some players would prefer to be paid upfront.” He added, “Players were encouraged to speak to their accountants.” For players who love their cash upfront, there’s plenty in the FedEx playoffs — $28 million of it — with $1.26 million for each of the four tournament winners. It’s only the $10 million bonus (and those for second place and lower) that is deferred. The catch is that the money cannot be collected any sooner than age 45. If a golfer then plays at least 15 tournaments a year, he can delay being paid until he’s 60. But any year he plays fewer than 15, the five-year payout starts. At age 60, payouts must begin, and they’re a lot bigger than Social Security checks. This might have sounded riveting to the closet accountants on the Tour; I doubt that on Sunday, when Steve Stricker won the first FedEx event, the Barclays, he shouted, “Yippee, I’m leading the race to get $10 million in deferred compensation!” He was just happy to win after a six-year drought. Perhaps it’s the nomenclature. Had it been the FedEx Gobs of Green payment, it might have sounded more alluring. The pending $250 million Mega Millions jackpot sounds real hot. A spokesman for the New York State Lottery said that if the state’s Lotto prize were that big, the pretax annual payment — a form of deferred compensation — would be $9.6 million. That’s mighty hot. The lump-sum payment for a jackpot that big would be $146 million. That’s smokin’. But the notion of having 15 options in your PGA Tour retirement account with which to invest the $10 million bonus sounds a smidgen dry. It definitely isn’t. If Woods wins and cashes in at 45, and the $10 million gets an annual return of 8 percent, he would get a $29.4 million parting gift. Mickelson, seven years older, would come away with $18.5 million. If Vijay Singh, who is No. 6 on the FedEx Cup points list, wins the playoff, then sharply reduces his schedule or retires, he could get his $10 million quickly. He turns 45 in February, one day before Stricker turns 41. Let’s say a youngster like Hunter Mahan, 25, wins it all. If he collects his deferred prize at 45, and he has received an average return of 8 percent over 20 years, he’ll have $46.6 million in his account. Now let’s let compound interest run wild. If Mahan plays until age 55 and his $10 million earns a smashing 12 percent annual return, he’d have $299.6 million. Such a prospect makes the Champions Tour look like essential estate planning.  The Nascar driver Jimmie Johnson couldn’t imagine turning the taxable $6.8 million check he received for winning last year’s Nextel Cup points championship into nearly $300 million in tax-deferred wealth. Mahan isn’t likely to find himself with such riches, but the PGA Tour plan allows for such projections. Joseph E. Godfrey III, a managing director at the Cowan Financial Group, said, “The PGA Tour is doing these guys a real favor by giving them an unlimited I.R.A.” By letting the prize money accrue in Tour-overseen accounts, he said, the golfers are “protected from creditors, predators and tax collectors.”

Retirement
Golf
PGA Championship
Woods Tiger
Mickelson Phil
Pensions and Retirement Plans
Athletics and Sports
PGA Tour Inc


Record Prices Mask a Tepid Market for Fine Art

Abstract: A few weeks ago, a triptych portrait by the British modernist painter Francis Bacon sold for $142.4 million, a record for a work of art at auction . The next night, a silk-screen print, “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster),” by the American pop artist Andy Warhol brought $105.4 million . And this week, “Saying Grace,” by the American illustrator Norman Rockwell, sold for $46.1 million . The art market would seem to be going through the roof. But is it? Despite the headlines and the hyperbolic enthusiasm of many auctioneers and dealers, the broad market for fine art is in the doldrums, according to experts who track sales data. Many works are selling near or below their low estimates or failing to sell at all. As measured by the Mei Moses World All Art Index, a widely cited benchmark, the market for fine art declined 3.3 percent in 2012, and gained 2.2 percent through November, even with the recent record-setting sales. Strip out traditional Chinese art, the value of which has been surging for years thanks to the interest of wealthy Chinese buyers, and the performance would be much worse. By comparison, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index gained 13.4 percent in 2012 and is up more than 27 percent so far this year. At Sotheby’s, where “Silver Car Crash” set a record for Warhol, another image of a car crash, this one in green called “5 Deaths on Turquoise,” sold for barely over $7 million. A Warhol portrait of Liz Taylor with a yellow background went for $18 million (not counting commissions), below its $20 million to $30 million estimate. And at Sotheby’s, another Rockwell with a religious theme, “Walking to Church,” sold for just $2.8 million before the buyer’s commission, below its $3 million to $5 million estimate. (Estimates don’t include commissions.) But at least they sold. Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Civil War masterpiece, “Sunday Morning in the Camp of the Seventh Regiment,” which was on loan to the White House and had hung in the Oval Office for over 20 years, didn’t sell at this week’s auction at Christie’s, which must have come as a shock to New York’s Union League Club, which had owned the painting since 1871. It was estimated to fetch $3 million to $5 million. A Christie’s spokeswoman said afterward that “there was steady client interest” in the painting before the auction, “given the painting’s exceptional rarity and historical significance.” But at the auction, the bidding “simply did not meet the reserve price.” The spokeswoman, who declined to be named, citing Christie’s policy, added that interest in the work was still “very much alive.” What explains the sharp gap between perception and reality? “What we’ve seen is that the explosive prices represent only a tiny, tiny subset of lots,” said David Kusin, a former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator who also worked on Wall Street and now runs Kusin & Company, a consulting firm in Dallas that specializes in the economics of the art market. “They get all the press, but we’ve seen relatively stable hammer prices in most categories over the past few years.” And just two categories have pushed up the averages. “Postwar, contemporary art — artists active from 1950 to the present — which includes Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, has been doing extremely well for the past 25 years,” Michael Moses, a retired professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a co-founder of the Mei Moses Art Index, told me this week. “And traditional Chinese art — works created before 1900 — has been doing even better.” Mr. Moses said his data indicated that traditional Chinese art had gained a compounded annualized rate of return for the 10 years ending in 2012 of 15.5 percent. Postwar and contemporary art gained 11.6 percent. By contrast, old master paintings gained only 3.3 percent and American paintings just 1 percent. And the overall index gained 7.4 percent. Some find the whole notion of an art market to be distasteful. Michael Findlay, author of “The Value of Art,” and a director at the Acquavella Galleries in New York, said: “What I believe in is the social and aesthetic value of art. We live in a society where everything is so monetized, the only way people can talk about art is in terms of money.” Image Norman Rockwell’s “Walking to Church” sold for $2.8 million, which was below expectations. Credit Saturday Evening Post Illustration, owned by SEPS. Licensed by Curtis Licensing Like many art professionals, Mr. Findlay is a critic of the Mei Moses index, which doesn’t account for private sales at galleries like Acquavella. Mr. Moses acknowledges that his index, like any index, including the Dow Jones industrial average, has its limitations. By definition, it takes what are unique objects and combines them into broad patterns. The art market is “like real estate,” he said. “No two objects are exactly alike.” Take the disparate results for the Bacon “Triptych” (a record) and the Warhol “Liz” (disappointing). Both feature what would seem to the untrained eye to be yellow as the dominant color. At Christie’s, that was a major selling point of the Bacon work: “The juxtaposition of radiant sunshine yellow contrasting with the brutal physicality and immediacy of the brush strokes in this celebrated life-size triptych is what makes Bacon’s art so remarkable,” the auction house said. But when I asked a major collector why the similarly hued “Liz” hadn’t fared better, he said: “Did you see it? It’s the color of your urine.” As for the failure of the Gifford to sell, and for the weak performance of American paintings in general, “You’re not going to see many American paintings breaking the $10 million mark,” Mr. Moses said. “Americans just don’t seem to view their national treasures the way the Chinese do. It’s almost like Americans have an inferiority complex.” Mr. Kusin added: “The hedge fund managers aren’t interested in 19th-century American. The people who buy American paintings are solid, rational people with lots of money and good taste. They’re not buying as an investment. There are some stupendous works coming up for sale, and in my view, they have a very good future ahead of them.” What the hedge fund managers — not to mention many of the world’s billionaires and sovereign wealth funds — are interested in tends to be contemporary and postwar art. Why they would all be flocking to the same handful of artists is, like many aspects of the art market, something of a mystery. But there’s nothing new in the phenomenon. People I spoke to pointed out that the robber barons tended to collect old masters, and during the booming 1990s, Impressionist works were all the rage. Theories abound, from the supposed scarcity of masterpieces in other genres to a herd mentality. “Contemporary is so popular with this set of very rich, newly rich collectors,” Mr. Kusin said. “They can hang anything they want in their Manhattan co-ops or in Aspen and nobody can say that’s ugly because contemporary art has not been subjected to sustained critical appraisal. There are no markers of good or bad taste that have yet been laid down. It’s a safe place to park your money. And if you leave the price tag dangling from the frame, so much the better.” Mr. Moses said that it shouldn’t be all that surprising that a few trophy paintings were selling for more than $100 million, even as the broad market languished. “There are over 2,000 billionaires,” he said. “If they’re putting together an art collection for 10 to 15 percent of their assets, they can invest at least $600 million in art. And a lot of them have many billions. So when they look for a centerpiece for their collections, they’ll reach for over $100 million. That’s not unusual given their relative wealth.” “People have always shown off their wealth with the size of their edifice and what art they put in it,” Mr. Moses said. “Many very rich people are collecting modern paintings. They should be buying Turner” — the record for the British old master is $45 million for a painting sold to the Getty Museum in 2010. “He’s the father of it all. If you put the Turner on your wall, it will make everything else look bleak. But they’re just not into it. Their friends may not know Turner, but they know Warhol and Bacon.” The upshot is that the art market may not be nearly as inaccessible for people of more limited means as the headline prices suggest. Even at auction, most lots sell for under $100,000, and there are many that sell for less than $10,000. Contrary to the almost universal claim by art dealers and auctioneers that it’s impossible to overpay for quality art, “our research shows dramatically that high-purchase-price paintings underperform low-purchase-price paintings over time,” Mr. Moses said. “Art is very democratic. There’s a painting for every purse.” When I asked Mr. Kusin what categories he’d recommend, he ticked off old master drawings, 19th-century European and American paintings, 18th- and 19th-century American furniture, and 20th-century decorative arts. “They’re rationally priced, stable stores of value and lovely to live with,” he said. Mr. Moses warned that art was illiquid, and buyers shouldn’t expect to recoup their money anytime soon. He also urged collectors not to get swept up in the excitement of bidding. “Our research shows that the more you pay over the estimate, the lower your future returns will be.” And he noted that there were worse things than losing an auction for any one object. “The beauty of art is that there is a lot of it.”

Price
Art
Auction
Collecting
HNWI,Wealth,Billionaires,1 Percent


Private Aid Will Help Chicago With $7 Billion Plan

Abstract: Chicago is embarking on a $7 billion plan to transform the city’s infrastructure from the skies above to the pipes underground. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is planning to announce the initiative Thursday. It includes projects to expand the city’s largest airport and improve its streets, water system, schools, community colleges, parks and commuter rail network. The city estimates that these initiatives will create 30,000 jobs over the next three years. At a time when the nation is only beginning to pull itself painfully and delicately out of a deep recession, and when cities and states are cutting essential services and wondering how to keep the courthouses open and the lights on, an infrastructure proposal for a single city with an estimated cost in the billions — with a “b” — is audacious. Mr. Emanuel, in an interview, suggested that nothing less than this “integrated, comprehensive approach” will do for what he calls “building a new Chicago.” With the plan, Chicago is taking a leading role among cities and states struggling to keep their infrastructure from crumbling further but frustrated with legislative gridlock in Washington, said Robert Puentes, director of the metropolitan infrastructure initiative at the Brookings Institution . “There is tremendous interest in doing something different — people aren’t waiting for the federal government to raise the gasoline tax or pass the carbon tax and have money raining down,” he said. He cited successful campaigns in “can-do states” that include Colorado , Washington, Arizona and Virginia to finance economic development projects with public-private partnerships, and Los Angeles ’ vote in support of a major transportation referendum in 2008. Mr. Emanuel, who served in the White House in two administrations and as a member of Congress, said “I will not tie this city’s future to the dysfunction in Washington and Springfield .” In the speech, to be delivered at the Chicagoland Laborers’ Training and Apprentice Center, Mr. Emanuel will describe the financing for the sprawling plan. Some of it will come from the newly created Chicago Infrastructure Trust, an initiative announced this month by Mayor Emanuel and former President Bill Clinton , who has long had an interest in infrastructure and energy efficiency. The fund, a nonprofit corporation, pools outside investment and applies it to a wide range of possible projects. Other funds will come from cost cutting, some from the savings in energy and water use from retrofitting buildings, and some from user fees, but “none of these funds will come from an increase in property or sales taxes,” according to the speech. A copy was provided to The New York Times through the mayor’s office. Depending on the project, some of the investment would be paid back through interest on loans , others through profit sharing. Still, economic development efforts in the past have tended to disappoint, Mr. Puentes noted, because they tended to pay businesses to relocate or threw money into projects like stadiums. Some public-private partnership projects have been criticized as giveaways to the private businesses that take them over — including two prominent cases in Chicago itself, the privatized Chicago Skyway and the city’s parking meter system, which obligate the city to leases that span generations. Mr. Emanuel says that the city has learned an important lesson, and that “I am not leasing anything,” or selling off the city’s assets, he said in an interview. “I’m using private capital to improve a public entity that stays public.” The investments, by any measure, are enormous, and they are intended to tackle enormous problems for this aging city. “You can’t have a 21st-century economy on a 20th-century foundation without holding yourself back,” Mr. Emanuel said. The projects include $1 billion for the Chicago Transit Authority to renovate more than 100 stations and eliminate “slow zones” that cost riders an estimated 11,000 hours of delays every day. O’Hare International Airport will receive $1.4 billion over the next three years to expand capacity. Underground, the city will take on the challenge of fixing its water system, which suffered 3,800 leaks last year. That means replacing 900 miles of pipe that is more than 100 years old and replacing or relining 750 miles of sewer lines, among other projects estimated at $1.4 billion. Projects would be coordinated so that a street dug up to repair pipes could get broadband cables and other work done at the same time so that the streets would not be resurfaced only to be dug up again soon after. Mr. Emanuel is also planning to spend nearly $300 million to buy 180 acres of new parkland and to build playgrounds, basketball courts and sports fields, as well as nature trails and bike and running paths. Jorge Ramirez, the president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, said he applauds the plan as an official concerned with jobs, but also as an investor in the trust through union pension funds. Instead of investing pension funds outside the city, “you bring it back here,” creating jobs locally and getting a good rate of return. “Smart,” he said. Some suggest that the initiative will have to prove itself to overcome the skepticism that comes naturally to longtime observers of the Chicago political scene. “It’s totally within reason for Chicagoans to be skeptical,” said Celeste Meiffren, field director for Illinois PIRG, an advocacy organization. “That being said, it does seem that a lot of these projects are pretty worthwhile. If the mayor provides a lot of information to us as residents and taxpayers, gives us an opportunity to weigh in on these projects and involves our aldermen too — and makes sure we receive a fair value — it’ll address a lot of the concerns we have here.” In his speech, Mr. Emanuel evokes the Great Fire of 1871, which left 100,000 people homeless, and which led to what he calls the city’s “second birth”: $50 million in new buildings completed a year after the fire and a building boom that put the city back on the map and saw it host a Republican National Convention just nine years later. “Chicago’s identity was not forged by the Great Fire,” he said, “but by the great fortitude of its people in its aftermath.” Rebuilding now, he suggested in an interview, is just as important: “The decisions we make in the next two or three years determine what Chicago will look like in the next 20 or 30 years.” And not just Chicago, said Mr. Puentes of Brookings. If the program is successful, it will be imitated, he said; “This is not just a Chicago story.”


Riot Police Break Up Protest by Opposition in Georgian Capital

Abstract: MOSCOW — An opposition protest in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi was violently broken up by riot police officers late Wednesday, scattering about a thousand demonstrators who had occupied a viewing stand where President Mikheil Saakashvili was scheduled to preside over a military parade on Thursday. As the crowds were dispersing in clouds of tear gas, a car in a three-car motorcade fleeing the violence ran down and killed a policeman, according to news agencies. The news agencies reported that the car was carrying Georgia ’s most prominent opposition leader, Nino Burdzhanadze, or her bodyguards. Rustavi 2, a pro-government television channel, reported the death of the policeman, citing Interior Ministry officials. Aides to Ms. Burdzhanadze could not immediately be reached for comment. Some 20 protesters were hurt in the police action. The organizers of Georgia’s protest movement had been modeling their demonstrations on popular uprisings in the Middle East, and were demanding the ouster of Mr. Saakashvili. A former defense minister living in exile, Irakli Okruashvili, had called on supporters to come out in force on Wednesday in what he called a “day of wrath.” But on Tuesday, he canceled the demonstration after he had a falling out with Ms. Burdzhanadze. Then, of some 2,000 who came out anyway, rain in the late evening on Wednesday sent many home. The protest blocked Tbilisi’s central thoroughfare, Rustaveli Avenue, but the police action came as a surprise to those who remained in the street after a rally permit expired at midnight. Riot police officers swept into the crowd, grabbing those who did not run, witnesses said. Two local journalists left bleeding. Several protesters said the police beat them as they lay on the ground. Police officials could not immediately be reached for comment. The authorities had stressed that they would allow the protest but would clear the street for the parade once the rally permit expired.

Georgia (Georgian Republic)
Demonstrations Protests and Riots
Saakashvili Mikheil
Defense and Military Forces


Possible Property Bubble Has Singapore Officials Worried

Abstract: SINGAPORE — The Singapore central bank warned Monday that more measures could be needed to curb the risk of speculation in the country’s property market, which has been bolstered by low borrowing costs. The comments underscored a growing concern among policy makers in Asia, who are worried about the possibility of a bubble in residential markets in financial centers like Hong Kong, Singapore and Seoul. “As Singapore emerges from recession and with the market expecting low interest rates to persist for some time, the risk of a renewed escalation of speculative momentum cannot be discounted,” the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the country’s central bank, said in its annual Financial Stability Review. “More measures might then be necessary.” In September, Singapore moved to cool the property market by releasing more land and making it harder for home buyers to defer payments. Last month, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority said it would lower the mortgage limit for luxury property to 60 percent from 70 percent and limit loan values. The South Korean central bank has warned that it would have to raise rates if property prices continued to soar. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said property market activity had taken on dynamics of its own, despite the lingering economic uncertainties in the island-state and around the world. The authority also warned that a rally in global financial market had outpaced economic fundamentals, and that any perception that the economic recovery was stalling could bring a repricing of financial assets. It said the rally in Asian asset prices since the first quarter of 2009 had been supported by extensive stimulus policies around the world, but asset prices might prove weak once those policies were scaled back. “Such market volatility could prompt capital outflows from Asia and, in turn, exchange rate volatility,” the authority said. Asian stocks, as measured by the MSCI index of Asian shares traded outside Japan, have climbed 60 percent this year, outperforming a 27 percent increase in the MSCI world equity index. The authority said some Asian economies might need to tighten monetary policies before policies were changed in the world’s largest economies, particularly the United States, but the central bank expressed concern about doing so before any significant change of direction by the Group of 3 economies — the United States, Japan and the euro zone. It said such a development could entail “a risk of asset price bubbles.”


Near Fenway, a $500 View of the Bar TV

Abstract: BOSTON — The game, of course, was sold out. The fanatics of Red Sox Nation have filled every seat at home games at Fenway Park since May 2003. But when it is opening day (or night, as was the case on Sunday), when all teams start out equal, and the air is unseasonably warm, and the opposing team is Boston’s fiercest rival, and that rival happened to have won the World Series last year, there is barely room to stand. Some Red Sox fans are so devoted, they are willing to shell out $500 to watch the games from a bar outside the park. The view from the bar is of the back of Fenway’s grandstands, with no glimpse of the field. Trading on the popularity of the team, and the intensity of its fans, Jerry Remy , a local broadcasting legend, has taken on a new gimmick in restaurateuring. Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar and Grill, a block from Fenway, is selling a “season pass” for $500, guaranteeing buyers their own table in the restaurant for all 81 home games and providing one free beer and $25 worth of food per game. Another $500 buys a season pass for the 81 away games, but as the restaurant claims, “there is never an away game.” As of Sunday night, Remy’s had sold out its 150 passes for home games and still had about 60 available for away games. But, perhaps not surprisingly, many of those pass holders had also bought tickets for the game — after all, the opener was against the New York Yankees, a resumption of the most enduring rivalry in baseball. (Boston fans went home celebrating, having won 9-7.) Kimberly Scirpo, 38, who lives in Merrimack, N.H., and deals in rare coins, was the first person to sign up for the home season pass. She and her friend Shiela Gardner, 42, got to the restaurant around 3:30 to eat before the 8:05 game against the Yankees. She said she bought a season pass because she wanted to support Mr. Remy, a Boston institution, and liked the idea of a guaranteed table, “to have a place that you can always call home.” But Ms. Scirpo also spent $700 for two tickets that will put them on top of the Green Monster, Fenway’s iconic left-field wall — not great seats, but good for bragging rights. The $5 million restaurant, with its brick and wood interior and exposed concrete columns, is meant to evoke Fenway, the oldest baseball park still in use and one that, with a seating capacity of only about 37,000, cannot accommodate the team’s swelling congregation. Mr. Remy and his partners are hoping Fenway die-hards will help build a year-round fan base of their own, and they intend to sell season passes for Boston’s other professional teams, the Celtics, the Patriots and the Bruins. The most striking feature inside the restaurant is the view — on television. Two outsize high-definition televisions, measuring 11 feet long and costing $225,000 each, hang above the bar. Even the men’s room is outfitted with three 32-inch screens. (The owners said there were no televisions in the ladies’ room because a woman perched inside a stall would not be able to see them.) John Mascia, a managing partner at the restaurant, said season pass holders would be treated royally because “they are our ambassadors to the brand.” The brand is Mr. Remy, 57, a former second baseman for the Red Sox who is beginning his 23rd year as the team’s color announcer on the New England Sports Network. He and his partners are counting on his continued popularity in New England — and on the demand for Fenway seats to continue to outstrip the supply — to allow them to expand the franchise. “There’s no question that we’re looking at more places, probably not on the scale of this, but the same idea,” Mr. Remy said before the game. The season pass concept is partly intended to attract fans who have been priced out of the live game experience, in which tickets, parking, food and merchandise can set a family back hundreds of dollars per game. Sunday night, Remy’s official opening night, was the first test of the restaurant’s marketing strategy. It was full starting in midafternoon, and it was full for dinner. Don Bailey, the restaurant’s general manager, said he was not surprised that some pass holders left for the game, nor was he disappointed. He views each pass holder, who can bring any number of friends, as an “ambassador.” One was bringing 17 friends — 17 potential new customers in Mr. Bailey’s eyes — and staying for dinner. When pass holders left for the game, they created space for the people without passes who were lining up to get in. Mr. Bailey said the passes would help protect Remy’s from the pattern at other sports bars in the neighborhood, which are generally full before the game then drop to about 20 percent capacity during the game and increase afterward. Among those who said they loved the idea of a season pass were four Yankees fans, who had driven almost six hours from Syracuse to watch their team go up against its most bitter rival. “Fantastic,” Russ Prince, 34, a law school student, said upon hearing about the passes. He predicted that he and his friends would spend $600 on food and drinks before the night was over and that a season pass would have cushioned the blow. Quickly doing the math, he also predicted that by next year, the season passes would cost three times what they do now.

Bars
Baseball
Fenway Park (Boston)
Boston Red Sox
Boston (Mass)
Remy Jerry


The Phone-Hacking Scandal Should Not Taint All Journalists

Abstract: LONDON — As Britons navigate the unrelenting judicial inquiry into phone hacking and related scandals of the press, the temptation has arisen — even more than usual in this journo-phobic land — to tar all reporters with the dark and glutinous brush associated with those in Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid empire accused of voice mail interception, corruption and cover-up. But a coincidence of events has illuminated a divide between that image of the news media and a different reality of what journalists have done and continue to do elsewhere, not only in pursuit of news or of early versions of history’s truths, but also in weighting the scales of justice. Last Monday, Rebekah Brooks , the former chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of News Corp., Mr. Murdoch’s company, was charged along with her husband and four onetime subordinates of conspiring to pervert the course of justice — a heady accusation, which she denied, that could technically earn a sentence of life imprisonment. Then, on Wednesday, hundreds of friends, relatives and colleagues assembled in the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Field on Trafalgar Square in central London for a memorial service to commemorate the death of Marie Colvin, an American war correspondent working for The Sunday Times of London, also a Murdoch newspaper, who was killed in Syria almost three months ago. On that same day last week, Ratko Mladic , the former Bosnian Serb military commander, finally went on trial before an international tribunal at The Hague to face an 11-count indictment on war crime and genocide charges encompassing the siege of Sarajevo and the bloody massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. And the strand that linked the three was this: The actions of journalists had become entwined with the question of how justice is done, not simply in the strict legal sense of crime and punishment, but in the related and complex questions of how survivors come to terms with loss, and how reporters themselves become part of the events they cover. Of course, journalists as a breed tend to inflate their importance, propel themselves to the center of a stage that belongs to those condemned to play out real tragedies, who cannot simply fold their metaphorical tents — their laptops and cameras and satellite phones — when the mood suits them or when news budgets run low. But, perhaps more than ever with the phone hacking scandal drawing in not only journalists but police officers and politicians, reporters have themselves become the center of their own stories, obsessively charting every development in the interlinked police, parliamentary and judicial inquiries into the actions of their own colleagues. Ms. Brooks, a former editor of two of Britain’s most influential tabloids, and her associates were themselves the accused — the first to face criminal charges after the months of scandalous disclosure about the way some journalists went about their business. But that is not the defining story of their trade, or craft. When Ms. Colvin perished in the city of Homs, she had just been interviewed on British television stations speaking in wrenching tones of the death of a child. Far more than securing a byline or credit or kudos, she had borne witness — and paid the same grisly price as a tally of others who have fallen during the Arab Spring, to bombs, bullets or, in the case of Anthony Shadid of The New York Times, an asthma attack that felled him as he headed out from Syria after a clandestine visit along a smugglers’ trail. In covering those stories, journalists fulfilled a role as chroniclers as old as war itself. Consider for instance the Balkan conflicts in which Mr. Mladic was accused of orchestrating some of the worst atrocities. Perhaps one of the most telling themes at his trial was that the events behind the indictment were not even in question: Reporters had either been there or had pieced together in detail what had happened in places they had not reached, such as Srebrenica. “This case,” said a prosecutor, Peter McCloskey, “will be primarily about one issue: the individual criminal responsibility of Ratko Mladic.” But it went beyond that. My colleague, Marlise Simons, who covered the trial, told me that survivors had approached her in The Hague to tell her of their feelings as they watched video images from the 1990s, transporting them back to moments and tragedies that have haunted them ever since, even as Mr. Mladic sat in court before them reviewing the same footage. “It is like a torture chamber for them,” she said. “When they want to unburden themselves, I cannot walk away. The fact that people are listening provides some relief.” That sentiment may not form part of the curriculum of Journalism 101, but it is familiar to any reporter who has covered the trauma humans inflict on one another. None of this is to say that reporters are more than they are. Contrary to what their critics might argue, journalists are, after all, human. As the phone hacking scandal has shown, some are frail, insensitive, driven by the desire for scoops, fearful of offending bosses. For every courageous reporter, another has different motives and standards. Yet, as the veteran correspondent Jon Swain wrote in The Sunday Times in an article about Ms. Colvin’s memorial service: “Despite the cost, there will always be people of courage prepared to face danger to tell us what they see” in the crucibles of conflict and suffering, and, in the process, help “us all to understand better what our action — or inaction — does in these precarious parts of the world.”

Newspapers
Cowell Alan
News Corporation
Brooks Rebekah
Mladic Ratko


Hungary’s Migrant Stance, Once Denounced, Gains Some Acceptance

Abstract: BUDAPEST — Like most members of Hungary ’s liberal intellectual elite, George Konrad, a distinguished novelist, loathes his country’s stridently illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orban . “He is not a good democrat and I don’t believe he is a good person,” said Mr. Konrad, a veteran of communist-era struggles against dictatorship. All the same, he thinks Mr. Orban, the self-declared scourge of mainstream elites across Europe, was right and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was wrong about how to respond to the chaotic flood of migrants seeking refuge from war and poverty — perhaps Europe’s most serious crisis since World War II . “It hurts to admit it, but on this point Orban was right,” Mr. Konrad, 82, said, lamenting that in the absence of a joint European effort to control the flow, Hungary was wise to seal its borders and sound the alarm over the perils of allowing hundreds of thousands of migrants, mostly Muslims, to enter Europe willy-nilly. Quietly, and often with similar misgivings, a growing number of people in Hungary and beyond are wondering whether, despite his shrill and often bigoted message, Mr. Orban had a clearer view of the scale of the migration crisis and its potential hazards than technocrats in Brussels and leaders in Berlin and other European capitals. In fact, Mr. Orban’s prescriptions — notably the need to secure Greece’s porous coastline and seal Europe’s outer borders — have slowly been embraced by other European Union leaders, who vowed on Thursday, at their final summit meeting of 2015, to “ regain control ” of the Continent’s frontiers. Speaking in Brussels at the end of the summit meeting on Friday, Mr. Orban said that “it has taken us a long time” but that there was now “an absolute consensus among the prime ministers on the issue of protection and control of the external borders.” With a big grin, he added, “Actually it was Hungary’s point of view since the beginning that we should start here.” While repelled by much of the hate-mongering that has accompanied Mr. Orban’s positions, European leaders have nonetheless begun to echo him on many points, albeit without his nasty snarls. The shift reveals just how far the debate around migrants and asylum seekers has turned, particularly since revelations that a few of the terrorists who killed 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13 had entered Europe in the tide of refugees. In a recent interview with European newspapers, Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, the body that presides over European Union summit meetings, described Ms. Merkel’s welcoming approach to migrants as “ dangerous ” and endorsed the view long promoted by Mr. Orban — that most of the asylum seekers entering Europe were not Syrians fleeing war but economic migrants seeking jobs. Image Migrants in Roszke, Hungary, in September. In often harsh terms, Mr. Orban has pushed Europe to seal its outer borders. Credit Marko Djurica/Reuters Emphasizing the need to secure Europe’s external borders, another longstanding Hungarian demand, he suggested that asylum seekers be detained for up to 18 months to give the authorities time to identify and send back economic migrants. “This shows how far the European mainstream is now moving in another direction,” said Peter Kreko, director of the Political Capital Institute in Budapest, an independent research organization. “It is moving closer to what Orban represents.” As proof, he pointed to the recent election victory in Poland of the ultraconservative and conspiracy-minded Law and Justice Party, the strong showing of France’s far-right National Front in the first round of regional elections and the crumbling across Scandinavia of a pro-migrant consensus. Peter Szijjarto, Hungary’s foreign minister, said that in his meetings with fellow European ministers the tone had changed drastically since the summer, when Hungary was repeatedly denounced for building a fence to seal off its southern border to migrants hoping to get to Germany. Fences and other obstacles have since become the norm across much of Europe, with even Sweden, traditionally Europe’s most welcoming country for refugees, announcing tough border controls. “It is more and more obvious that what we kept on saying for the last six months turned out to be right,” Mr. Szijjarto said in an interview. “This is acknowledged more and more: Some say it openly, some say it behind closed doors and some don’t say it but act accordingly.” Open support for Mr. Orban and his approach, which has mixed effective practical measures to slow the flow of migrants with bizarre conspiracy theories tinged with racism and anti-Semitism, remains mostly limited to Europe’s political fringe. On a visit this month to Estonia, for example, Mr. Szijjarto heard lavish praise for his boss, Mr. Orban, from the Conservative People’s Party, a nationalist opposition outfit with a simple message for nonwhite migrants: “If you are black, go back.” The most that mainstream politicians will say is that “Orban wasn’t completely wrong,” as Reinhold Mitterlehner, Austria’s Conservative vice chancellor, remarked recently. Officials in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union, acknowledge in private that Mr. Orban got many things right, but they say that he and his supporters undermined their case with belligerent tirades that variously cast the influx of asylum seekers as a Muslim invasion, a conspiracy by European socialists to import future left-leaning voters and a plot by the Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist George Soros to undermine European nation states. At a congress over the weekend of the governing Fidesz party, Laszlo Kover, an Orban loyalist and the speaker of the Hungarian Parliament, thundered against multiculturalism as “some kind of experiment” to turn Europe into a “territory for rootless barbarian hordes.” Closing the Back Door to Europe In recent months European nations have worked to block the main route taken by migrants fleeing war and upheaval. Tamas Lanczi, the director of the Center for Political Analysis at Szazadveg, a Budapest research group tied to Hungary’s governing party, said: “The European elite is very angry with Orban because he spoiled their game. He called out the name of the emperor who is naked.” Mr. Orban, he added, has been demonized “as the Devil himself,” but his views are “now becoming the mainstream” because he “refuses to walk down the one-way street of political correctness.” Istvan Gyarmati, a retired Hungarian ambassador who dislikes his country’s illiberal direction under Mr. Orban, said the shift in mood stemmed in large part from the manifest failures of the European Union to get a grip on the migrant crisis and its tendency to put wishful thinking ahead of realistic policy. “There is a shift to the extreme right because the left, or what is left of the left, and the moderate center right were offering answers that were wrong,” said Mr. Gyarmati, who heads the International Center for Democratic Transition, a group that promotes democracy. “Now we are in a situation where the answers are unpleasant to say the least.” The centerpiece of Europe’s common response to the migrant crisis has been a well-intentioned but so far utterly unworkable plan to spread 160,000 migrants who land in front-line states like Greece around the Continent under a quota system. Introduced seven months ago with strong backing from Berlin by the European Commission, the union’s executive arm in Brussels, the plan has relocated only 208 people, stirred months of divisive recrimination and left the 28-nation union in disarray. Even as it has moved closer toward his policies, the European Commission, fed up with Mr. Orban’s mocking of its impotence, announced in early December that it would take Hungary to court over legislation it adopted in September that made it difficult for asylum seekers to appeal speedy rejections of their applications and other alleged violations of European rules. Mr. Szijjarto, the Hungarian foreign minister, dismissed the move as “revenge” for Hungary’s own decision to challenge the quota-based relocation plan at the European Court of Justice. The recent disclosure by the Belgian authorities that Salah Abdeslam, a suspected participant in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks , traveled to Hungary to collect two accomplices who entered Europe on the migrant trail has unleashed another burst of “told-you-so” comments in Budapest. The Hungarian government distorted what happened, claiming against all evidence that the accomplices picked up by Mr. Abdeslam were themselves refugees. But the fact that terrorists appear to have entered Europe concealed among asylum seekers still vindicated repeated warnings by Mr. Orban that the uncontrolled flow of so many people posed serious security risks. “Whenever Hungary made an argument the response was always: ‘They are stupid Hungarians. They are xenophobes and Nazis,’ ” Zoltan Kovacs, a government spokesman, said. “Suddenly, it turns out that what we said was true. The naïveté of Europe is really quite stunning.”

Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis


At a Jewish Gala, de Blasio Skips His Cue to Speak Out

Abstract: Tests of courage are found in unexpected places. On Tuesday night, Mayor Bill de Blasio attended a gala for Agudath Israel of America, a premier event for the black-hat leaders of the ultra-Orthodox Jews of New York. The mayor is a gregarious fellow, and as my colleague Sharon Otterman reported, he chatted and joked on the dais with numerous rabbis, some of whom endorsed his mayoral campaign. Let’s assume the best. Perhaps the mayor was enjoying himself too much to listen as Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, a top rabbi with Agudath Israel, delivered keynote remarks laced with Yiddish and Hebrew words. Rabbi Perlow offered a shower of condemnation for Reform and Conservative Jews, who he said were among those who “subvert and destroy the eternal values of our people.” These movements, he said, “have disintegrated themselves, become oblivious, fallen into an abyss of intermarriage and assimilation.” “They will be relegated,” he added, “to the dustbins of Jewish history.” This was a striking statement because a majority of the Jews in this city identify as non-Orthodox. The mayor himself proudly celebrates his own mixed-race marriage. When Mr. de Blasio stood to speak a minute later, he offered no whisper of demurral. (In the audience, the organization said, sat congressional representatives and a representative for Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller; they did not pipe up, either.) The mayor praised the growth of the ultra-Orthodox “community” and said he had crafted his universal prekindergarten program so that yeshivas would receive taxpayer dollars. “Our pre-k program is going to have a strong yeshivot element, and I am proud of that fact,” he noted. Mr. de Blasio offered warm words for Agudath — “it gets better every year.” Its executive vice president, David Zwiebel, he said, is “someone I deeply respect and listen carefully to.” New York City is a ship sailing in a cacophonous sea, and mayors must navigate communal shoals. Mr. de Blasio is fond of emphasizing his respect for communities. Which sounds excellent, except sometimes leadership demands more chutzpah. Mr. Zwiebel was a key figure in the last decade as hundreds of child sex abuse cases were reported in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community. Mr. Zwiebel told the authorities that his ultra-Orthodox leaders were offering this advice to their followers: If a rabbi tells a follower not to go to the authorities, under religious law, that follower must follow that ruling. The lack of moral clarity was striking, and time did not enrich Mr. Zwiebel’s perspective. Two years ago, he talked of the ultra-Orthodox dissidents who spoke up on sexual abuse. This, he said, is “it’s rechilus, lashon hara, and bittul zman.” This means malicious gossip, evil tongue and waste of time, all prohibited by the Torah. As a councilman and public advocate, Mr. de Blasio expended few words on the Orthodox sexual abuse scandals. He did, however, prove an able point man in pushing for day care vouchers tailored for Orthodox families. Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had ended this program, but Mr. de Blasio has pledged to restore it. Mr. Bloomberg also regulated the practice of metzitzah b’peh, in which a Jewish practitioner, after circumcising a baby, sucks the blood from the wound to clean it. The city’s health department found that since 2000, 12 babies circumcised in this fashion had contracted herpes and two had died. At a mayoral forum in Brooklyn last year, Orthodox residents asked if candidates would overturn this policy. Mr. de Blasio offered a mumble. The city, he said, should talk with “community leaders.” Which brings us back to the mayor’s too crabbed definition of community. In crafting his prekindergarten program, the mayor allowed tax dollars to go to yeshivas, madrassas and church-based programs, if instruction was secular and religious imagery removed. A de Blasio aide acknowledged on Wednesday that yeshivas likely would “draw on kids from their community.” And these schools will not be forced to hire teachers of different religions. A mayoral spokesman noted that Mr. de Blasio may not agree with every word of every speech. But as Mr. de Blasio told Agudath on Tuesday: “I appreciate the theme of stand up and speak up. It means stand up for what is right for the community.” You wonder how the larger community of New York City fits in this conception.

Bill de Blasio
Agudath Israel of America
Yaakov Perlow
David Zwiebel
Judaism
Religion and Belief
NYC


De Blasio Administration Says It’s Ahead of Schedule on Affordable Housing

Abstract: When Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014, he made affordable housing the centerpiece of his administration, vowing to build or preserve 200,000 units over a decade in a city where the cost of shelter was rocketing past the grasp of many residents. Now, despite skepticism from many housing experts and a feud with the governor that has derailed one of the major programs used to subsidize development, the de Blasio administration announced on Monday that it was ahead of schedule in meeting its goals, having financed the creation or preservation of nearly 53,000 affordable apartments so far. Just in the fiscal year ending June 30, more affordable housing units — 23,284 — had been built or preserved than at any time since 1989. “This engine is in full gear, financing enough affordable homes for 130,000 people in just two and a half years,” Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, said in a statement on Monday. Image “This engine is in full gear, financing enough affordable homes for 130,000 people in just two and a half years,” Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said in a statement on Monday. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times “By any measure, the de Blasio administration has blown this out of the water,” said Alicia Glen, the deputy mayor for housing and economic development. “We’re ahead of schedule and slightly under budget.” Affordable for whom, of course, remains a question. Some housing activists have complained that the administration has not done enough to create homes for the poorest New Yorkers, focusing instead on moderate-income residents. But according to the city’s housing commissioner, Vicki Been, one-quarter of the affordable units created during Mr. de Blasio’s administration are reserved for tenants making less than $31,100 for an individual and $40,800 for a family of three; of those, half are for tenants who earn less than $19,050 for an individual or $24,500 for a family of three. Nearly a quarter of affordable apartments preserved with city financing last year were in two Manhattan projects, both devoted to middle-class tenants: Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, on the East Side between 14th and 23rd Streets, and the Riverton Houses, in East Harlem. Both complexes were built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company for veterans returning from World War II, and both had been sold to investors who sought to rapidly replace existing residents with new tenants at sharply higher rents, only to have their plans upended by the 2008 financial crisis. The new owners of the complexes got tax breaks and other subsidies from the de Blasio administration to keep apartments affordable. At Stuyvesant Town, 4,500 units are reserved for middle-income families. A family of three earning up to $128,210 a year, for instance, would pay a rent of $3,205 per month. At Riverton, in exchange for subsidies worth about $100 million, 975 apartments will be kept affordable for working- and middle-class families for 30 years. Those projects are far larger than the typical complex in the city’s affordable housing programs. When it comes to building new units, the mayor’s task has been made more difficult by his tense relationship with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, who has his own ambitious agenda for building housing. At times, the state has threatened to reduce authorization for tax-free financing. This year, when the governor denounced a compromise that would have extended an important city housing program known as 421-a, which gave developers tax breaks for including affordable units within their developments, the Legislature let the program lapse. Still, Ms. Glen and Ms. Been said that the administration’s housing machinery — technology, programs, budgets and developers — was now in place, and that the city should begin to feel its impact. Projects approved in 2014, like the Domino Sugar complex in Brooklyn , are coming to fruition. Eventually, Domino will include 2,800 apartments, 700 of which will be affordable. But in a city where about 58,000 people are homeless , that can seem like a drop in the bucket. “We are pleased to see that the administration has increased the pace of production of housing for low- and extremely-low-income New Yorkers,” said Barika Williams, deputy director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a nonprofit advocacy group. “But the need and demand for that kind of housing has only increased. And it won’t be met by the administration’s housing plan.”

Affordable housing
Housing
Bill de Blasio
Real Estate
Andrew Cuomo
NYC


Fateh Singh Rathore, the ‘Tiger Guru,’ Dies at 73

Abstract: Yes, there was that day in June 1976 when, after years of roaming the hills, valleys, lakes and gorges of Ranthambhore National Park in northwest India , Fateh Singh Rathore stopped in his tracks as the orange blur of a tigress glided through the forest, trailed by four prancing cubs. It seemed a harbinger that the great striped beasts that once reigned over a wilderness held by the maharajahs of Jaipur might finally be spawning a whole new generation. But his optimism was premature. Tigers are not yet extinct, but neither are they flourishing; the struggle to stem the extinction of Ranthambhore’s, and the world’s, tiger population continues. Mr. Rathore, who fought that fight for four decades and was known among environmentalists as the Tiger Guru for his understanding of the majestic cat, died on March 1 at 73 on his farm outside the 116-square-mile tiger preserve he did so much to create. The cause was cancer, his son, Goverdhan, said. Last month, when the World Wildlife Fund presented Mr. Rathore with a lifetime achievement award , the president of its India chapter, Divyabhanusinh Chavda, said that largely because of Mr. Rathore, “Ranthambhore became the place which brought the tiger to the consciousness of people the world over.” Mr. Rathore was a forest ranger, a wildlife warden and, from 1978 to 1988, the field director at Ranthambhore, perhaps the best known of more than 30 tiger preserves in India. It attracts more than 60,000 tourists a year, many of whom wander the trails that he and his staff cut. Often it was Mr. Rathore who guided Jeeps full of visitors. One was President Bill Clinton, who in 2000 got to see a huge male lying imperiously under a tree and a tigress stalking a deer. The tours would have been far less possible in 1969, when Mr. Rathore first came to Ranthambhore, which is named for a vast stone fortress built there about 1,000 years ago. The area had not yet been designated a national park. Villages and farms had been carved into its landscape. Perhaps 10,000 head of cattle denuded its fields. It became Mr. Rathore’s mission to reverse the encroachment. The Indian government banned tiger hunting in 1969, and three years later started Project Tiger to create the preserves. Persuading villagers to move “was one of my most difficult assignments,” Mr. Rathore told Sanctuary Asia magazine, which is published by a nongovernmental organization of the same name. “The people hugged the trees and wept,” he said. “I was crying with them because, inside me, I knew they were paying the price for something they may never understand.” The government compensated them with money and land, but there were violent confrontations. In 1981, a mob armed with clubs fractured Mr. Rathore’s skull and kneecap. His commitment was summed up in the 1993 book “Tiger-Wallahs: Encounters With the Men Who Tried to Save the Greatest of the Great Cats,” by Geoffrey C. Ward, the principal writer of PBS documentaries like “The Civil War,” and Diane Raines Ward. “The forest and all its creatures were the creation of the gods, he argued over the village fires,” the Wards wrote. “Did not the goddess Durga , the slayer of demons, herself ride a tiger? No man had a right to disturb that divine creation. The forest must be left to grow back.” It did at Ranthambhore, where tigers now number 25; there were none in the 1970s. But environmental groups estimate that the tiger population worldwide has declined to 3,000 today from 100,000 in 1900. Fateh Singh Rathore was born in a village in Rajasthan in 1938, the eldest of 10 children of Sagat and Inder Singh Rathore. His grandfather was the thakur, or feudal ruler, of the village. His father was a farmer. Besides his son, Mr. Rathore is survived by his wife, Khen; two daughters, Padmini and Jaya; four brothers; four sisters; and four grandchildren. After working as a store clerk and selling coal, Mr. Rathore was offered a job as a park ranger by an uncle who had become deputy minister of forests in Rajasthan. He found his calling after completing training at the Wildlife Institute of India in 1969. He also became a photographer, his pictures of tigers appearing in the book “Tigers: The Secret Life” (1990), with text by Valmik Thapar. They show tigers lounging at the gate of the fort, standing on the parapet of a crumbling mosque and striding among the roots of a giant banyan tree. “Both the author and his photographer-teacher profoundly want the tiger to survive,” John Seidensticker, a curator of mammals at the National Zoological Park, wrote in a 1990 review in The New York Times Book Review . “But the lingering sense running through the book is that its position is desperate.”

Tigers
India
Deaths (Obituaries)
Endangered and Extinct Species
Rathore Fateh Singh


Atop TV Sets, Cable Boxes and DVRs Drain Power

Abstract: Those little boxes that usher cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator and even some central air-conditioning systems. There are 160 million so-called set-top boxes in the United States, one for every two people, and that number is rising. Many homes now have one or more basic cable boxes as well as add-on DVRs, or digital video recorders, which use 40 percent more power than the set-top box. One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found. These set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are generally running full tilt, or nearly so, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use. The recent study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council , concluded that the boxes consumed $3 billion in electricity per year in the United States — and that 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. That is more power than the state of Maryland uses over 12 months. “People in the energy efficiency community worry a lot about these boxes, since they will make it more difficult to lower home energy use,” said John Wilson, a former member of the California Energy Commission who is now with the San Francisco-based Energy Foundation. “Companies say it can’t be done or it’s too expensive. But in my experience, neither one is true. It can be done, and it often doesn’t cost much, if anything.” The perpetually “powered on” state is largely a function of design and programming choices made by electronics companies and cable and Internet providers, which are related to the way cable networks function in the United States. Fixes exist, but they are not currently being mandated or deployed in the United States, critics say. Similar devices in some European countries, for example, can automatically go into standby mode when not in use, cutting power drawn by half. They can also go into an optional “deep sleep,” which can reduce energy consumption by about 95 percent compared with when the machine is active. One British company, Pace , sells such boxes to American providers, who do not take advantage of the reduced energy options because of worries that the lowest energy states could disrupt service. Cable companies say customers will not tolerate the time it takes to reboot the system once the system has been shut down or put to sleep. “The issue of having more efficient equipment is of interest to us,” said Justin Venech, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. But, he added, “when we purchase the equipment, functionality and cost are the primary considerations.” But energy efficiency experts say that technical fixes could eliminate or minimize the waiting time and inconvenience, some at little expense. Low-energy European systems reboot from deep sleep in one to two minutes. Alan Meier, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said of the industry in the United States, “I don’t want to use the word ‘lazy,’ but they have had different priorities, and saving energy is not one of them.” The Environmental Protection Agency has established Energy Star standards for set-top boxes and has plans to tighten them significantly by 2013, said Ann Bailey, director of Energy Star product labeling, in an e-mail. The voluntary seal indicates products that use energy efficiently. But today, there are many boxes on the list of products that meet the Energy Star standard that do not offer an automatic standby or sleep mode. “If you hit the on/off button it only dims the clock, it doesn’t significantly reduce power use,” said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the natural resources council. Energy efficiency is a function of hardware, software, the cable network and how a customer uses the service, said Robert Turner, an engineer at Pace, which makes set-top boxes that can operate using less power while not in active use. Sometimes energy efficiency can be vastly improved by remotely adjusting software over a cable, Mr. Turner said. In this way, Pace reduced the energy consumption of some of its older boxes by half. Cable boxes are not designed to be turned completely off, and even when in deep sleep mode, it takes time to reconnect and “talk” with their cable or satellite network, though that time is highly variable depending on the technology. Mr. Wilson said he routinely unplugged his set-top boxes at night and waited only 45 seconds for television in the morning. But Dr. Meier said that when he tried to power down his home system at night, it took “hours” to reboot because the provider “downloaded the programming guide in a very inefficient way.” Cable providers and box manufacturers like Cisco Systems, Samsung and Motorola currently do not feel consumer pressure to improve box efficiency. Customers are generally unaware of the problem — they do not know to blame the unobtrusive little device for the rise in their electricity bills, and do not choose their boxes anyway. Those devices may cause an increase of as little as a few dollars a month or well over $10 for a home with many devices. In Europe, electricity rates are often double those in the United States, providing greater financial motivation to conserve. Cisco Systems, one of the largest makers of set-top boxes, said in an e-mail that they would offer some new models this year that would cut consumption by 25 percent “through reduced power used in ‘on’ and standby states.” There will be no deep sleep or fully “off” setting. But Cisco said that taking advantage of the potential energy savings for a box would also depend on “how it is operated by the service provider.” Cable and satellite providers will have to decide whether the boxes can automatically go to standby, for example, and whether customers will be able to adjust their own settings. Currently, providers often do system maintenance and download information at night over the cable, so an ever-at-the ready cable box is more convenient for them. Cable companies can become Energy Star “partners” if they agree to install or upgrade boxes so that 25 percent to 50 percent of the homes they serve have “energy star qualified” equipment. The E.P.A. merely encourages providers to use units that can automatically power down at least partly when not in use. But as of Sept. 1, typical electricity consumption of Energy Star qualified products would drop to 97 kilowatt hours a year from an average of 138; and then by the middle of 2013, they must drop again to 29 kilowatt hours a year. Companies have fought the placement of the “Energy Star” seal on products and the new ambitious requirements, which may still be modified before enacted. Mr. Wilson recalled that when he was on the California Energy Commission, he asked box makers why the hard drives were on all the time, using so much power. The answer: “Nobody asked us to use less.” The biggest challenge in reducing energy use is maintaining the rapid response time now expected of home entertainment systems, Mr. Turner said. “People are used to the idea that computers take some time to boot up,” he said, “but they expect the TV to turn on instantly.”

Digital Video Recorders
Energy Efficiency
Television Sets
Cisco Systems Inc
Cable Television