Treasury Auctions Set for This Week

Abstract: In observance of Columbus Day, bond markets will be closed on Monday. Stock markets will be open for trading. The Treasury’s schedule of financing this week includes the weekly auction of new three- and six-month bills on Tuesday and an auction of four-week bills on Wednesday. At the close of the New York cash market on Friday, the rate on the outstanding three-month bill was 0.10 percent. The rate on the six-month issue was 0.14 percent, and the rate on the four-week issue was 0.10 percent. The following tax-exempt fixed-income issues are scheduled for pricing this week: TUESDAY Fontana, Calif., Unified School District, $87.9 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. WEDNESDAY Montgomery County, Md., $295 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive. South Carolina Transportation Infrastructure Bank, $432.3 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. ONE DAY DURING THE WEEK Alabama Incentives Financing Authority, $119.1 million of special obligation bonds. Raymond James. California Association of Bay Area Governments, $61 million of debt securities. Bank of America. California Wetlands Water District, $84 million of refinancing revenue bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. California, $315 million of taxable hospital debt securities. Citigroup Global Markets. Centre County, Pa., Hospital Authority, $108 million of medical center debt securities. Bank of America. Clear Creek, Tex., Independent School District, $131.5 million of general obligation refinancing bonds. Morgan Stanley. Cleveland, $77 million of water revenue bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. Colorado Health Facilities Authority, $50.5 million of revenue refinancing bonds. Ziegler. Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission, $86.9 million of university enterprise refinancing bonds. RBC Capital Markets. Denver, $700 million of aviation airport system revenue bonds. Barclays Capital. Fort Bend, Tex., $127 million of debt securities. Bank of America. Greenville County, S.C., $51.1 million of debt securities. Wells Fargo Securities. Illinois Finance Authority, $61.5 million of revenue bonds. Morgan Stanley. Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority, $50 million of health care facilities revenue refinancing bonds. Ziegler. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, $300 million of power system revenue bonds. Morgan Stanley. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, $350 million of power system revenue bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. Los Angeles, $350 million of revenue bonds. Citigroup Global Markets. Massachusetts School Building Authority, $725 million of debt securities. Jefferies. Minnesota Port Authority, $51 million of debt securities. Bank of America. Mississippi Development Bank, $163 million of highway construction project debt securities. Raymond James. Nassau County, N.Y., Local Economic Assistance Corporation, $92.1 million of hospital revenue bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. New Orleans, $198.6 million of taxable limited tax refinancing bonds. Raymond James. New York Dormitory Authority., $887 million of personal income tax revenue bonds. Bank of America. Ohio, $175 million of highway debt securities. Wells Fargo Securities. Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development, $231.2 million of city service agreement revenue bonds. Goldman Sachs. Rhode Island, $82 million of general obligation bonds. Barclays Capital. San Antonio, $519.5 million of public facilities improvement revenue refinancing bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities. South Dakota Health and Educational Facilities Authority, $120 million of revenue bonds. Cain Brothers. University of Colorado, $130.8 million of university enterprise refinancing bonds. RBC Capital Markets.

Stocks and Bonds
Banking and Financial Institutions
Treasury Department
Tax Credits Deductions and Exemptions


In Pursuit of Couric, ABC Made the Best Pitch

Abstract: On Feb. 8, executives from NBC , including Steve Burke, the new chief executive, and Steve Capus, the president of news, made their way to the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan , prepared to make a pitch to bring their one-time news star, Katie Couric , back into the network fold. Ms. Couric, who was seeking a new direction in her career in the form of a syndicated afternoon talk show while also maintaining a continuing role in a network news division, arrived a short time later with her agent, Alan Berger. They had requested a meeting “off the radar,” because they knew how closely Ms. Couric’s future was being tracked. Her contract as anchor of “ CBS Evening News” had only four months to run. As they walked in, both Ms. Couric and Mr. Berger were struck by how unsettled the NBC team appeared. They soon learned why. The NBC executives had just bumped into Al Gore , the former vice president, who was there to announce the hiring of Keith Olbermann for his cable channel, Current TV . Mr. Olbermann, the one-time star of MSNBC, had left the network acrimoniously just two weeks earlier, and he and the Current retinue were in the meeting room directly next to the one NBC had rented for the Couric negotiations. “It was awkward,” a senior NBC executive said. NBC had hoped for better luck with Ms. Couric. But although the Couric team said it believed the network had made a strong effort to woo her, including use of an elaborate Power Point presentation of the virtues of its syndication proposal and a video urging Ms. Couric to “come home to NBC,” the effort foundered. Instead, Ms. Couric, in one of television’s worst-kept secrets, is set to announce on Monday that she will sign with ABC, which was not even a serious contender the morning she slipped into the St. Regis . The negotiations over Ms. Couric’s future in television unfolded over the last few months and involved three of the four broadcast networks, as well as CNN. They also featured top media executives including Mr. Burke, Robert Iger of Disney , Leslie Moonves of CBS and Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner . Perhaps unexpectedly, because Ms. Couric had not succeeded in stemming the long ratings descent at “The CBS Evening News,” she remained something of a hot property. At a time when Oprah Winfrey , syndicated television’s biggest star, has just left the stage, the courtship of Ms. Couric suggested that the networks, looking to cash in on the enormous revenue potential of syndication, were still willing to make a big bet on stars — even ones like Ms. Couric who have taken their share of blows in the media. The details of Ms. Couric’s impending deal with ABC have not been disclosed, but as co-owner of the show Ms. Couric will claim a share of the profits. Syndication has such a great financial upside because successful shows make money from both station fees and advertising revenue — and they are generally inexpensive to produce. One of the chief negotiators in pursuit of Ms. Couric, speaking anonymously last week because of the confidential nature of the talks, said, “We all know what we’re looking at with a successful syndicated show — $100 million to $300 million a year” in revenue. As host and co-owner, Ms. Couric’s own take each year could be tens of millions of dollars. For years, Ms. Couric deflected efforts to interest her in a syndicated show. “But looking at the landscape, I thought it would be a good time for a show like this,” she said in an interview by phone. “It just gives me a lot of creative freedom and allows me to be me.” One reason it made more sense now was because the dominant star of daytime talk, Ms. Winfrey, has left the arena. “I never wanted to compete with her,” Ms. Couric said, “because no one could.” The Couric group was seeking a situation that would get her back to discussing a range of subjects as she had while on the “ Today ” show, where by all accounts she had more fun. From the start, Ms. Couric made clear that her full partner in the syndicated show, both on the production and business side, would be Jeff Zucker , the former chief executive of NBC, who wanted to make his return to television in a control room as executive producer of the talk show. That was his role on “Today,” when he and Ms. Couric, along with Matt Lauer, steered the NBC program to ratings dominance that continues unabated. Mr. Zucker’s presence as the other central player (and profit participant) led to some suspicion that two of his former adversaries, Mr. Burke, who ousted him at NBC, and Mr. Moonves, who always competed ferociously with him at CBS, might have resisted a deal with Ms. Couric because of him. But both men told Ms. Couric and her team they had no problem with Mr. Zucker’s involvement. In the St. Regis meeting, Mr. Burke told Ms. Couric that he “would be all for that.” But the NBC opportunity fell apart over what the network believed were excessive demands — including the insistence that NBC guarantee that its stations would free up the 4 p.m. hour for Ms. Couric — and what Ms. Couric’s team viewed as NBC’s inexperience in the syndication business. CBS made an impressive push, Ms. Couric said, led by Mr. Moonves, who remained a strong supporter of Ms. Couric through her tenure on the evening news. But CBS wanted Ms. Couric to focus on the syndicated show, not a continuing role with its news division. She could have worked for “60 Minutes” during the year until the start of the syndicated show in 2012. But under the deal CBS was proposing, that opportunity would have ended with the premiere of the syndicated show. ABC began to make a serious push in the talks in March. After initially offering Ms. Couric only a network-based show in the early afternoon, ABC and its president, Anne Sweeney, sweetened the offer with a continuing role in the news division. In April, all the chief members of Ms. Couric’s support group — Mr. Berger; her publicist, Matthew Hiltzik; and her lawyer, Craig Jacobson — met at Mr. Zucker’s apartment in Manhattan to thrash out the options. While Mr. Zucker struggled to figure out how to make coffee for the group, he led the discussion, writing down pros and cons on a large easel. The cases for ABC and CBS were extremely close, and though members of Ms. Couric’s team said ABC had taken a slight edge in everyone’s opinion, they said they believed CBS remained interested right until the end. That conviction was not reflected in CBS’s moves, however. The network let out word in early May that it had withdrawn its offer, though privately the network also made clear that it was retaining its right to match any deal until the end of Ms. Couric’s contract on June 4. NBC, meanwhile, was taking its own steps to distance itself from any suggestion that it had lost out on Ms. Couric. Its executives underscored that they had never made an offer to Ms. Couric (a point her side acknowledged) and emphasized privately that their internal research showed her to be too unpopular. Henry Schafer, the executive vice president of Q Scores, which monitors the popularity of personalities, said Ms. Couric’s score had declined since she began on the CBS five years ago, but it remained above the average for television news figures. Whether that will translate to success in syndication is the big question. Much will depend on which stations agree to buy Ms. Couric’s show and at what hour they choose to run it. Stations have made commitments to other shows in the old “Oprah” time period. Ms. Couric’s negotiators did not exact a guarantee that ABC’s stations would carry her show in the 4 p.m. time slot, as they had tried with NBC. The Couric team conducted market research that persuaded them that time periods would open up on enough stations for the syndicated show to gain more than a toe-hold when it made its nationwide debut in the fall of 2012. Her team settled on a simple formula for success: if the show is good, people will watch it. Her choice of ABC brings Ms. Couric to her third network address. She said she was happy with how the long negotiating process had worked out. “It is very gratifying that so many people were willing to meet with me and were interested,” she said. “It made me think maybe a show like this could do reasonably well. We’ll see.” Ms. Couric says she wants to build the show around conversations with newsmakers — she mentioned Michelle Obama and Lady Gaga . Ideally, she said, her work for ABC News would include opportunities to conduct interviews on “Nightline” and perhaps some political reporting. “I just want to be a utility player,” she added.

ABC
Katie Couric
TV
News media,journalism


R.B.S. to Bolster Capital Position After Failing Stress Test

Abstract: The Royal Bank of Scotland said on Wednesday that it would further bolster its capital position after failing regulatory stress tests that measure the ability of large banks to weather a financial crisis. The annual stress test, by the Bank of England, also identified capital inadequacies at Barclays and Standard Chartered. But the central bank did not require them to issue revised capital plans, given actions they had already taken to strengthen their balance sheets. The weaknesses point to the continuing troubles for Britain’s banking industry, which has struggled to get back on its feet since the global financial crisis that came to a head in 2008. Along with the general economic malaise, the industry has faced a string of scandals. The Bank of England, in a separate assessment about the financial system’s stability, pointed to the potential issues for banks after Britain’s vote in June to leave the European Union, as well as the United States election in November, which has prompted a sharp move in global asset prices. Both political developments could create economic ripples. The banking industry’s profitability has been hurt, particularly in Europe, by low interest rates, which are expected to remain so in Britain and on the Continent for the foreseeable future. The industry, and R.B.S. in particular, also continues to face an overhang of potential fines and litigation costs from past misconduct. The stress test modeled the potential impact of a severe recession globally and in Britain, with associated shocks to financial market prices. “Today’s stress tests are the next stage of our efforts to maintain the resilience of our financial system as the U.K. economy adjusts to the U.K.’s new relationship with the E.U. in an environment of elevated global and domestic risks,” Mark Carney, the Bank of England’s governor, said at a news conference in London on Wednesday. The test covered seven of Britain’s largest lenders based on their balance sheets at the end of 2015. Those banks account for about 80 percent of lending in the country. HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide Building Society and Banco Santander’s British business were deemed to have adequate capital under the stress test conditions, the Bank of England said. R.B.S. faces the most acute issues. The lender, which is 73 percent owned by the British government since a bailout during the financial crisis, announced plans last year to dismantle its global investment bank and to focus on retail and corporate banking in Britain and Ireland. The bank has struggled to return to profitability as it faces ballooning litigation costs from past misconduct — including potential fines by the United States authorities related to its sale of mortgage-backed securities — and a difficult business environment. “The stress test demonstrates that R.B.S. remains susceptible to financial and economic stress,” the Bank of England said in its report . “This assessment includes stressed projections of misconduct costs. R.B.S. faces a range of costs and risks over the projected period, as it continues to execute its strategy to reshape its balance sheet.” R.B.S. also has faced difficulties as it tries to unload Williams & Glyn, a branch network that it must divest by the end of 2017 as a condition of its bailout. The bank abandoned plans to spin off the business in August and is instead focusing on a possible sale of Williams & Glyn. Jason Napier, a UBS analyst, said that R.B.S.’s revised capital plan was likely to be a “formal inclusion of measures planned and known by the market,” and he expects further cost cuts and restructuring measures to be announced by the bank next year. “We think R.B.S. remains under pressure to deliver on core profits, principally by achieving further significant cost cuts,” Mr. Napier said in a research note. R.B.S., which is based in Edinburgh, said its revised capital plan would include further cost cuts, reductions in so-called risk-weighted assets and the sale of loan portfolios that the bank does not consider core to its business. The bank said that it expected the updated capital plan to address the shortfall identified by the Bank of England, but that “additional management actions may be required until R.B.S.’s balance sheet is sufficiently resilient to stressed scenarios.” In a news release , Ewen Stevenson, the R.B.S. chief financial officer, said, “We are committed to creating a stronger, simpler and safer bank for our customers and shareholders.”

Royal Bank of Scotland
Bank of England
Barclays
Mark Carney
Lloyds Banking Group
Ewen Stevenson
Banking and Finance
Standard Chartered Bank


Split on Accord on Iran Strains U.S.-Israel Ties

Abstract: WASHINGTON — To the Israeli government, the preliminary deal with Iran that the Obama administration is trying to seal this week is a giveaway to a government that has spent two decades building a vast nuclear program. It enshrines the status quo — at a time when the Iranians are within reach of the technical capability to build a bomb — and rewards some unproven leaders with cash and sanctions relief. President Obama and his top aides see the same draft deal in sharply different terms. To them, it is a first effort to freeze the Iranian program, to buy some time to negotiate a more ambitious deal, and to stop two separate methods of developing a bomb, one involving uranium, the other plutonium. In return, the Iranians get modest relief from sanctions, but not what they desperately desire, the ability to again sell oil around the world. That would come only later as part of a final agreement that would require the Iranians to dismantle much of their nuclear infrastructure. Those two divergent views have deeply politicized the question of whether the accord that the United States and its European allies are considering should be termed a good deal or a bad one. It is a fundamental disagreement that has left in tatters whatever halfhearted efforts Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel have made over the past five years to argue that they are on the same page when it comes to Iran. Every time Mr. Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, ask for a little time and space to test the new Iranian leadership’s claims that it is ready for a new approach, and for compromise, Mr. Netanyahu responds that the proposed agreement is “a very bad deal,” “extremely dangerous,” “a mistake of historic proportions” or, as he said in an interview with CNN on Sunday, “an exceedingly bad deal.” And he has often raised the specter of an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities even if a deal is signed, something the Obama administration believes would split apart the global coalition it has built to squeeze Iran. Yet the disagreement is about far more than negotiating tactics. In interviews, both American and Israeli officials conceded that the terms of the preliminary accord reflect a difference in fundamental goals. Mr. Obama speaks often of his determination to prevent Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon; Mr. Netanyahu sets a far higher bar of preventing Iran from gaining, or keeping, the capability to ever build one. Mr. Netanyahu “will be satisfied with nothing less than the dismantlement of every scrap of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure,” one administration strategist said the other day. “We’d love that, too — but there’s no way that’s going to happen at this point in the negotiation. And for us, the goal is to make sure that we are putting limits and constraints on the program, and ensuring that if the Iranians decided to race for a bomb, we would know in time to react.” The White House, alarmed by Mr. Netanyahu’s outspoken opposition and by an effort in Congress to enact a new round of sanctions on Iran that Israel supports, is trying to shore up its own arguments. Mr. Obama is bringing the leaders and ranking members of the Senate foreign relations, intelligence, armed services and banking committees to the White House on Tuesday to make the case that if Iran is going to be coaxed into a deal, the country’s new leaders must go home with some modest appetizer of sanctions relief — as an indication that the United States is ready to deal. Two of the most eminent members of the foreign policy establishment, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, issued a joint statement on Monday that “should the United States fail to take this historic opportunity, we risk failing to achieve our non-proliferation goal and losing the support of allies and friends while increasing the probability of war.” They repeated Mr. Obama’s central argument: “Additional sanctions now against Iran with the view to extracting even more concessions in the negotiations will risk undermining or even shutting down the negotiations.” The details of the proposed agreement have been closely held by the administration — and, the Israelis claim, from Jerusalem — but what is known about the deal gives both sides plenty of talking points. While the Americans say it “freezes” the Iranian program and rolls it back, the fact is that only some elements are frozen, and the rollbacks in the initial agreement are relatively minor. For example, Iran would continue adding to its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, meaning uranium enriched to reactor grade, or less than 5 percent purity. But the United States maintains that under details of the agreement it cannot yet disclose, the overall size of Iran’s stockpile would not increase. The reason appears to be that Iran would agree to convert some of its medium-enriched uranium — fuel enriched to 20 percent purity, or near bomb grade — into an oxide form that is on the way to becoming reactor fuel. But that process can be easily reversed, notes Olli Heinonen, the former chief inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Mr. Netanyahu’s camp and some Israeli analysts say the Israeli leader’s unstinting opposition is both substantive and political. He truly believes that a deal lifting sanctions without fully halting enrichment and dismantling centrifuges is a terrible mistake. But he has also staked his premiership on fighting the Iranian nuclear threat, and the change in approach by his closest allies leaves him a bit rudderless. “The situation has changed and everybody else except Israel understands that a deal means to be more flexible,” said Giora Eiland, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “Netanyahu speaks only about a good deal. The Americans are speaking about a reasonable deal, which is better than having no deal at all.” For his part, Mr. Kerry has questioned publicly whether Mr. Netanyahu is aware of all the details in the agreement. And in some cases, Israeli officials appear to have distorted what Iran would get in return. At a briefing with international journalists on Wednesday, Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, said the deal would directly erase $15 billion to $20 billion of what he estimated was the $100 billion the current sanctions are costing Iran annually, and lead to relief of up to $40 billion because of indirect effects. The State Department immediately debunked those numbers, noting the sanctions relief would be for only six months, not a year. And the Americans put the figure at under $10 billion. But Israeli leaders have continued to cite the higher estimates. There are also different accounts of what would happen to a heavy-water nuclear reactor now under construction near the town of Arak. The facility is critical to Iran’s plans because, if operating, it could provide it with a steady supply of plutonium, the fuel North Korea and now Pakistan have used for their arsenals. France stepped into the negotiations 10 days ago complaining that the draft accord would allow Iran to get too close to being able to insert fuel into that reactor — at which point it could not be bombed by Israel without risking a radioactive, environmental disaster. The proposed agreement has since been modified, American officials say, to make sure that Iran is months to a year from being able to put fuel in the reactor. To the United States, that is plenty of warning time but the Israelis want the plant taken apart, and the parts shipped out of the country. “We want an outcome more like Libya, less like North Korea,” Mr. Steinitz said during a recent visit to Washington. He was referring to the 2003 deal in which Libya turned over every element of its nuclear program to American and international inspectors, who flew the parts out of the country. North Korea, in contrast, disabled its plutonium-producing reactor five years ago and now appears to have just restarted it, without a public condemnation from the White House. But at the more basic level, this is an argument about more than just what the Iranians give up, and what they get in return. “In order to get into sync on the strategy, you need trust, and the trust has been eroded,” said Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who has just returned from Israel and is lobbying vigorously against the preliminary deal. If the trust is falling apart, it is not for lack of communication: Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu talked for 90 minutes in one call last week. “It went about as you might expect,” said one official briefed on the call. When it was over, the Israeli prime minister denounced the deal more loudly than ever, though on Sunday he told his cabinet that “I would like to make it clear that there can be disagreements even among the best of friends, certainly on issues related to our future and our fate.”

Iran
Israel
Sanctions
Benjamin Netanyahu
Nuclear weapon
US Foreign Policy
Barack Obama


In a Lab in Poland, Plastic That Can Crawl

Abstract: It’s about half an inch long, a few millimeters wide and no thicker than a human hair, and it usually just sits there like a discarded strip of red cellophane — until a specific shade of green laser light strikes it. Then the University of Warsaw’s new robot caterpillar shows what it can do. It can move across a surface by itself, scrunching into a series of undulating shapes that run down its length in wavelike spasms. And it can even carry 10 times its weight while in motion. “The idea is just starting in science that robots can be something without wires and batteries and motors,” said Mikolaj Rogoz, a researcher in the Photonic Nanostructure Facility at the university’s Institute of Experimental Physics. “It can be just fragments of plastic and energy, and the energy source can be provided from outside the robot.” The institute unveiled its new invention in late August in the scientific journal Advanced Optical Materials to much fanfare in Poland. The news came just a few weeks after researchers in Italy unveiled their own soft robot — an octopus — that they intend to use to explore the Mediterranean seabed. The Warsaw caterpillar is made of a kind of plastic known as liquid crystalline elastomers , Mr. Rogoz said. The laser light powers the robot by pinpointing and changing the shape of specific molecules in the plastic. Other types of soft robots may draw energy from ordinary visible light or electromagnetic fields instead of lasers. Why would anyone need a robot caterpillar? “It’s always a hard question how to use scientific inventions,” Mr. Rogoz said. “But maybe, after a dozen years’ research, we can insert this kind of robot into the human body to transport medicines to the right organs.” Of course, strong laser light couldn’t power the robot inside the body. Some other energy source would be needed. “In the meantime, it is important that scientists change their thinking about robots,” Mr. Rogoz said.

Poland
Robot
Inventions and Patents
Science and Technology


Wozniacki Wins Family Circle Cup

Abstract: Caroline Wozniacki, the world’s No. 1 player, beat Elena Vesnina, 6-2, 6-3, in the final of the Family Circle Cup in Charleston, S.C. In capturing her third title of the season, Wozniacki lost only one set in her five matches. ¶Top-seeded Victoria Azarenka won her second straight title, beating Irina-Camelia Begu, 6-3, 6-2, in the final of the Andalucia Tennis Experience in Marbella, Spain. ¶Ryan Sweeting, 23, held off Kei Nishikori, 6-4, 7-6 (3), to win the United States Men’s Clay Court Championship in Houston. It is his first ATP World Tour title. (AP) ¶No. 2-ranked Kim Clijsters is a major question mark for the French Open next month after injuring her ankle at her cousin’s wedding. Clijsters was already facing four weeks out because of a painful shoulder and wrist. (REUTERS)


N.B.A. Game of the Week: Rockets at Hawks

Abstract: Every week, The New York Times will choose one essential game to watch, highlighting hot teams, winning and losing streaks and statistical intrigue in the N.B.A. Houston at Atlanta, Tuesday, 7:30 p.m. Eastern, NBATV Entering February, the Atlanta Hawks had won 19 games in a row, part of a 33-2 stretch since Nov. 28. But last month was tougher for the Hawks: They started off on the wrong foot with a 15-point defeat against the New Orleans Pelicans and lost several other seemingly winnable games, one of them to the mediocre (if improving) Boston Celtics and another to the slumping Toronto Raptors. The Hawks still have the most wins in the N.B.A. and should be considered the class of the Eastern Conference, especially now, with the Raptors and the Washington Wizards playing poorly and the Chicago Bulls having lost Derrick Rose yet again. But even as the competition drops off, the specter of LeBron James and the rising Cleveland Cavaliers remains. Atlanta’s regular season has defied all reasonable expectations. But can this unorthodox, unproven team — one with plenty of All-Stars but no superstars — keep playing this well when it faces the league’s best in April? There were some ominous signs for the Hawks in their February losses. In three of their four defeats, the team shot poorly from beyond the 3-point line, including a woeful 8-for-38 performance against the Raptors. The Hawks were also often badly outrebounded, suggesting the team is overly reliant on its shooters and may have trouble competing inside when its 3-pointers are not falling. The Hawks are modeled in large part after San Antonio, and their passing and movement on offense are reminiscent of the Spurs, the defending champions. But the Hawks’ big men are not always as consistent as San Antonio’s Tim Duncan, who at 38 remains a top defender and a steady option in the post. Atlanta’s starting center, Al Horford, has played well this year — well enough to be chosen as one of the team’s four All-Stars. But Horford is not a reliable scorer when his team is struggling; in three of the four February losses, he scored fewer than 10 points. Image Atlanta guard Kent Bazemore, left, and forward Paul Millsap, right, during a game against Orlando. The Hawks have the most wins in the N.B.A. Credit Todd Kirkland/Associated Press The Hawks’ other starting big man, Paul Millsap, is their leading scorer, but he averaged only a little more than 10 points per game in the four losses. While the Hawks’ offense looks great when it is working, the team lacks an alternate plan when it is not making many of its shots. Like the Hawks, the Houston Rockets rely on 3-pointers above all else. They take, and make, more 3s than any other team in the league. But unlike the Hawks, the Rockets do have a reliable scoring option inside. Or at least they usually do, in the form of center Dwight Howard, who has been out with knee problems since the end of January. It is not clear when he will return. Still, the Rockets are rolling without Howard. They have won five games in a row, including a barnburner against the Cavaliers on Sunday, and eight of their last 11. James Harden is having a season worthy of a most valuable player award, leading the league in scoring while averaging seven assists and almost six rebounds and two steals a game. He has become nearly unstoppable, with his ability to knock down shots from deep and beat defenders off the dribble. Harden’s penetration makes the Rockets an inside-outside threat even when Howard is not playing. Harden will put his head down and drive, forcing defenses to collapse on him, and then kick the ball out (often to Trevor Ariza) for a 3-pointer, or throw it deeper inside to a player like Josh Smith. Harden also goes to the free-throw line far more than any other player. He had taken 550 free throws entering Sunday’s game (nearly 150 more than Russell Westbrook, who had taken the second-most). The Rockets are also succeeding without Howard because of their bench’s depth: Eight players on the roster are averaging at least 10 points per game this season. Several bench and role players have been impressive, including the 7-footer Donatas Motiejunas and a fellow third-year player, Terrence Jones. Even with Howard in the lineup, the Rockets could not beat the Hawks when the teams met back in December, and Houston will be looking for revenge this time around. Last week, the Cavaliers beat the Golden State Warriors in a possible preview of the N.B.A. finals. The matchup between the Hawks and the Rockets this week may be less highly anticipated, but they could be just as likely to make the finals as their more glamorous conference counterparts.

Atlanta Hawks
Derrick Rose
Paul Millsap
Houston Rockets
Dwight Howard
James Harden
Basketball


Baltimore County Police Release Shooting Video

Abstract: BALTIMORE — The Baltimore County police on Friday released a video that shows a man suspected of using a forged drug prescription aggressively moving toward an officer before the officer shot and killed him. Jim Johnson, the Baltimore County police chief, showed the video to reporters. It shows part of Wednesday’s shooting in Reisterstown, northwest of Baltimore. The officer, identified as Officer Earomirski, is seen pointing a gun at Keith H. McLeod, 19. Mr. McLeod moves quickly toward him, then reaches behind his back before swinging his arm toward the officer, who fires three times. No weapon was recovered at the scene, the police said.

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


San Francisco Giants' Bullpen Catcher Bill Hayes Remains Invaluable

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Bill Hayes held out his hands to examine them, side by side. His left wrist was heavily taped, and his left thumb, left middle finger and left ring finger were taped as well so his joints wouldn’t bend back when he went to do his catching in the bullpen. See, he said, his left index finger was plump compared with his right. He doesn’t wear an extra glove under his mitt and hasn’t done so for years. His hands didn’t hurt, though, he added. His back felt fine enough, too. Just sometimes getting around, he feels a sharp pain in his knees, as if he had just been kicked there. It was torn cartilage, from years of crouching. He said he had put off surgery because it would cut into the hunting season. Such is life for Hayes, who is 57 years old and has served as the San Francisco Giants’ bullpen catcher for the last 12 years. The job, in numerous ways, is thankless and meant for younger men, not someone with all the mileage Hayes has on him. But Hayes keeps going. He is there to help throw batting practice before games and then to catch pitchers at a moment’s notice when they need to warm up. He has done it for so long now that he is one of the oldest, and longest-tenured, bullpen catchers in baseball and, in effect, a deputy to the team’s official bullpen coach, Mark Gardner. As a reward for all the aches and pains he feels, there is this: He finds himself within reach of his third World Series ring in five years, something not many other current members of the always-evolving Giants roster can say. “The game can’t beat me down, I guess,” Hayes said with a shrug as the Giants prepared for Game 3 of the World Series on Friday night. The Giants say that Hayes, despite his unglamorous job title, has been an invaluable component in all the success they have achieved in recent years, with World Series titles in 2010 and 2012 and another strong run this October. They say that Hayes may be relatively anonymous but that he is, in fact, something of a franchise institution, right there with Buster Posey and Pablo Sandoval and the manager, Bruce Bochy, who, like Posey and Hayes, was once a catcher, too. On a normal day, Hayes throws batting practice to the first group of hitters, which usually includes Posey, Sandoval and another of the team’s best offensive weapons, Hunter Pence. Someone else, someone younger, catches the first bullpen sessions of the day. Then, after he’s done throwing, Hayes might approach Posey with advice. The two of them have worked closely since Posey made his major league debut in 2009 at the age of at 22. As a high first-round draft pick out of Florida State, Posey was more polished than most young catchers. But Hayes was there to give some tips. For example, early in his career, Posey’s hands were so quick he would try blocking pitches by just snatching them with his glove. Hayes showed him how to lead with his hands but to get his body down as well. He was always demonstrating. “He’s easy to talk to and has a good feel,” Posey said. “He’s somebody to bounce stuff off of. If I ever need anything extra, he’s always there. He’s been huge for me.” Once, Hayes was a first-round draft selection himself, selected by the Chicago Cubs with the 13th pick in 1978 after he caught their attention with his play at Indiana State. He went one pick after Kirk Gibson was taken by the Detroit Tigers. But unlike Gibson, or Posey, Hayes’s major league career lasted all of nine at-bats, over two seasons. He spent a few more years in the minors, shifted to coaching and then spent 14 years as a minor league manager. He served as the bullpen coach for the Colorado Rockies for one season, but his first extended shot at the majors came in 2003, when the Giants gave him the job he still holds. By then, he was 45, but in many ways, the best part of his baseball career had just begun. During games, Hayes sits with the relievers in the bullpen and catches for them when the call comes from the dugout to get ready. He passes the time — and there is often a lot of time to kill in the bullpen — telling baseball stories or hunting stories, or just sharing jokes. He has the ease that comes with so much baseball experience, that lets him ad-lib when he feels the urge. Once, when the left-handed reliever Jeremy Affeldt was warming up, Hayes turned to a fan sitting nearby and said, “Would you put him in if he’s throwing like that?” When he’s not joking, and often enough he’s not, Hayes offers relievers the insights he inevitably gathers as he catches them in the bullpen. He knows that the pressure increases on the relievers as the postseason arrives and that it is his job to calm them down and help them focus, or maybe just leave them alone. “He’s a comforting person to have down there,” Affeldt said. Brian Sabean, the Giants’ general manager, said players gravitated to Hayes because of his long experience in the game and because they genuinely enjoyed his company. Like Hayes, many of the Giants’ pitchers like to hunt. Recently, Jake Peavy gave Hayes a pair of cowboy boots, an appropriate gift, perhaps, for an old hand whom the players like to call Wild Bill. Actually, Hayes noted, “they call me a bunch of things.” Not all of them, he added, were printable. Friday happened to be Hayes’s 57th birthday. The players hadn’t done anything special for him, he said, and he didn’t exactly want anything. (He already had those cowboy boots.) He was busy preparing for the game, and he had a few notes on the Royals’ running attack that he wanted to share with Posey. He said his knees felt fine, knock on wood.

San Francisco Giants
Bill Hayes
Baseball
World Series
Buster Posey
Kirk Gibson
Brian Sabean
Kansas City Royals


Downstream Drugs

Abstract: Q. Have any studies been done on possible environmental risks from drugs used for chemotherapy after they pass through the body? A. At least one study, a 2008 opinion paper by British scientists, assessed the discharge of a commonly used cancer drug , 5-fluorouracil, and raised concern about possible contamination of the water supply. Chemotherapy agents to fight cancer can pass through the body unaltered and enter the water supply through the sewer system. The drugs are easily soluble in water. Like many cancer drugs, 5-flourouracil acts by killing dividing cells, and its toxicity to cells makes even small concentrations potentially risky. The study, published in The Journal of Hydrology, focused on a water treatment project on the Aire and Calder Rivers in northern Britain. According to the study’s statistical model, measurable concentrations, 5 to 50 nanograms per liter of water, could be expected on long stretches of the catchment area at low flow. The study concluded that it was “unclear to what extent the predicted low concentrations would affect flora and fauna in receiving waters,” but added that there may be an additive effect from a mixture of cell-killing drugs. It also said that exposure of pregnant women and their fetuses to such drugs through drinking water should be minimized. Water treatment technology gives grounds for optimism about the removal of such compounds, the study said, but there is not enough data to be sure.

Chemotherapy
Drugs (Pharmaceuticals)
Water Pollution
Medicine and Health
Science and Technology


Poll Finds Voters in Both Parties Unhappy With Their Candidates

Abstract: On the eve of the major party conventions, voters are grudgingly rallying around the nominees while expressing broad misgivings about the candidates, the campaign and the direction of the country, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. More than a third of Republicans say they are disappointed or upset that Donald J. Trump , who crashed the party’s nominating process, will represent them in the fall campaign; an equal number say he does not represent the values the party should stand for. Democrats are only marginally happier with Hillary Clinton as their party’s candidate. A quarter of Democratic voters say they are disappointed in her as the nominee; an additional seven percent say they are upset. More promisingly for her, three-quarters say Mrs. Clinton stands for the core values and principles of the Democratic Party. The broad discontent is reflected in the head-to-head contest, which has Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton tied at 40 percent. Mr. Trump’s standing has held steady for weeks at around 40 percentage points, while Mrs. Clinton has polled in the mid-40s in most public surveys. The latest Times/CBS News Poll was conducted after the F.B.I. rebuked her for her email practices but before Bernie Sanders, her persistent primary rival, embraced and endorsed her this week. So the dip in her standing could be temporary and reverse sharply if the Democrats, who are far more united as a party than the Republicans, pull off a successful convention in Philadelphia. Image Donald J. Trump during an appearance in Raleigh, N.C., earlier this month. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times In a development not seen in any modern presidential contest, more than half of all voters hold unfavorable views of the two major party candidates and large majorities say neither is honest and trustworthy. Only half of voters say Mrs. Clinton is prepared to be president, while an astonishing two-thirds say that Mr. Trump is not ready for the job — including four in 10 Republicans. Peter Lieb, 54, a middle school history teacher in West Palm Beach, Fla., voted for Gov. John Kasich of Ohio in the Florida primary and said in a follow-up interview that he was only reluctantly planning to vote for Mr. Trump in November. Why Mr. Trump? “Honestly?” Mr. Lieb said. “Last man standing.” “I am not a full-throated supporter of Donald Trump, but given the alternatives that I’m presented with, he is the best person for the task at hand,” he said. “And the task at hand in my opinion is regaining economic stability and regaining America’s stature in the world. I don’t see Hillary Clinton doing a constructive job in either.” The nationwide poll was conducted July 8-12 on cellphones and landlines among 1,358 registered voters. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all voters. Preconvention polls are often erratic, and political analysts and campaign managers put more stock in polls taken after both parties have formally nominated their candidates. And national polls, while useful as a gauge of broad sentiment, are less reliable than state polls in predicting the ultimate outcome. Mrs. Clinton enjoys strong advantages in many of the swing states she will need to secure victory in the Electoral College. Mrs. Clinton still leads in averages of recent polls, though her margin has narrowed since late June. The latest Times/CBS News poll could be an indication of an even tighter race. Yet Mr. Trump has not led a national poll that meets The Times’s polling standards since mid-May, just after he won enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination. A New York Times/CBS News Poll on Voters’ Opinions Heading Into the Conventions On the eve of their party conventions, Democrats and Republicans are grudgingly rallying around their nominees while expressing broad misgivings about the candidates, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. While the race may be narrow, the gloom appears broad. Rachel Woolard, 20, of Jacksonville, Fla., supported Mr. Sanders in the primary but now says she will, with misgivings, probably vote for Mrs. Clinton. “Bernie seemed to be more transparent than her,” said Ms. Woolard, a college student. “She definitely has the stereotypical politician approach to things, so that makes her feel a little disingenuous.” Ms. Woolard is not yet fully committed to voting for Mrs. Clinton. But she knows whom she is voting against. “I know for a fact that I’m not voting for Trump.” Laura Schrock, 36, a homemaker and political independent in Greenwood, Del., said she will not vote for Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton. “At this point, the plan is to vote for the Libertarian candidate,” she said, referring to Gary Johnson. “I highly value being real and being very honest. And I’m just not getting that from either one.” In a three-way contest, Mr. Johnson has 12 percent, while Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton are tied with 36 percent. Latest Election Polls 2016 Get the latest national and state polls on the presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump. Republicans and Democrats are divided by more than political philosophy and their choice of presidential candidates. They hold very different views of the state of the nation, the Times/CBS News poll found. For example: ■ 86 percent of Trump supporters disapprove of the job President Obama is doing; 90 percent of Clinton backers approve. ■ More than nine in 10 Trump supporters say the country is on the wrong track; fewer than half of Clinton supporters agree. ■ About three-quarters of Trump supporters favor building a wall along the Mexican border; only 13 percent of Clinton’s backers do so. ■ Four of five Trump supporters do not like the way the nation’s values are changing; only about half as many Clinton supporters agree. Voters of all persuasions share one sentiment, however. Six in 10 Republicans, Democrats and independents say they are not looking forward to the next few months of the campaign.

Polls
Voting
Republicans
Democrats
Hillary Clinton
Donald Trump
2016 Presidential Election


The Mystery of a Long-Missing Relic Is Solved and Returned to the Public

Abstract: No one, it seems, had been actively looking for it. Still, the disappearance of a lamppost that had sat at the Manhattan entrance to the Queensboro Bridge for decades had been somewhat of a local mystery. “It’s part of the transportation history of New York,” said Judith Berdy, president and historian of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society , which for nearly four years had been fighting to get what remains of the lamppost — just its base — back on public view. “It’s important to save these relics, you know, these beautiful articles,” she said. “It’s part of our heritage. It’s a beautiful piece of architecture.” The lamppost base was moved to Roosevelt Island late last year and will be rededicated to the public by local officials and community leaders at a ceremony on Tuesday. The lamppost was originally part of a set that stood on either side of the Manhattan entrance to the bridge on Second Avenue — one at 60th Street, the other at 59th Street. They are believed to have been designed by the same architect who designed the bridge, Henry Hornbostel. Alex Herrera, director of technical services at the New York Landmarks Conservancy, which provided a $10,000 grant to help move the lamppost base to Roosevelt Island, said that Mr. Hornbostel had studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. “This was the great school in Paris that a lot of American architects went to to become familiar with a lot of the European high style,” Mr. Herrera said. The same French influences of the bridge, which was completed in 1908, were evident in the twin lampposts. “Like the bridge, it’s influenced by French classicism,” Mr. Herrera said. The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission noted that both lampposts had been removed in 1974, when it designated the bridge a landmark, to make room for the Roosevelt Island Tramway. Image Henry F. Hornbostel Credit Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh “The tram simply would have knocked over the lamppost,” Janet Falk, of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, said. In 1976, the 59th Street lamppost was reinstalled in its original spot; it is unclear if the 60th Street lamppost was ever reinstalled. But the city’s Department of Transportation, which maintains the Queensboro Bridge, had it in storage for a considerable amount of time — and had no idea it was there. An agency spokesman said in 2001 that the department had no record of the lamp. In January 2011, Mitch Waxman of Astoria, Queens, discovered the lamppost base while walking near the Transportation Department’s Street Lights Yard on 37th Avenue in Woodside, Queens. “I was wandering around in some deep snow, just trying to get some exercise,” said Mr. Waxman, 47, who earns his living retouching photos for advertising production companies. “It immediately drew my attention.” He posted photos of the base on his blog. “Something about this object is familiar to me,” he wrote in one post, “and its identity eludes me, although my thoughts keep drifting toward mental catalogs of midtown Manhattan transportation centers. Grand Central perhaps?” He also noted that it appeared to be “some sort of ornamental base for a streetlight, but I can’t imagine where in Queens it would go.” Within 24 hours, his blog readers suggested an answer: the Queensboro Bridge. Later that year, he happened to bump into Ms. Berdy at a social gathering. After the lamppost came up in conversation, Ms. Berdy wanted to restore the lamppost base to public view. The society reached out to the city in early 2012, but Transportation Department officials said it would be best to give the lamppost to a public agency rather than the historical society. In turn, the historical society approached the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation , a state entity, to have the lamppost transferred under its authority. It took two years for the corporation to agree. “It was disappointing that it took a long time,” Ms. Falk said. “It’s part of the process of the wheels of government turning slowly.” After the corporation approved, the historical society had to raise money for a base to hold the lamppost’s base. “We couldn’t just put it on a sidewalk somewhere,” Ms. Berdy said. Now, the base sits on Roosevelt Island, almost parallel to its original home on 60th Street. While for many this episode solves the mystery of where the 59th Street lamppost’s twin ended up, it also prompts another question: Where is the rest of the 60th Street lamppost? “I have no idea,” Ms. Berdy said.

Queensboro Bridge
Henry Hornbostel
New York Landmarks Conservancy
Roosevelt Island Manhattan
Historic preservation


Cyber-Rain XCI, A Sprinkler System Controller

Abstract: The name may sound like science fiction meets the Weather Channel, but Cyber-Rain XCI is actually a control system for outdoor sprinklers that turns the chore of watering the lawn over to the home computer. The Cyber-Rain kit includes a wireless controller (for your existing sprinkler system) that can irrigate up to eight lawn zones, and a wireless access point that lets the controller communicate with the PC. Software to configure the zones and set a sprinkling schedule is also included. The controller checks the weather through the PC’s Internet connection and modulates the watering cycle based on forecasts. The company says the system can save 30 percent to 70 percent on the water bill by sprinkling only when needed. Cyber-Rain sells for about $350 and works with Windows XP or Vista and a broadband connection. More details are at www.cyber-rain.com , and the system can also be purchased at www.smarthome.com . The PC does not need to be on all the time to control the sprinklers and, thanks to the wireless connectivity, it stays nice and dry indoors. J. D. BIERSDORFER

Lawns
Computers and the Internet
Wireless Communications


Wheeler’s Potential Is on Display in His First Spring Start

Abstract: PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Only one of the Mets’ three young power arms will be pitching for the team when the season starts. Noah Syndergaard will probably be called up around midseason, and Matt Harvey could return by September. In the meantime, Zack Wheeler, the 23-year-old right-hander, will try to further establish himself. On Tuesday, in his first start this spring, Wheeler reminded everyone of his immense talent. Wheeler threw 40 pitches over three scoreless innings against the Houston Astros, striking out three and allowing two hits. His fastball touched 96 miles per hour. As of now, Mets Manager Terry Collins said Wheeler could be the opening-day starter. After the game, Wheeler said his goals this season were to attack hitters, get ahead in counts and pitch deeper into games. He wanted to try to get hitters out in three pitches or fewer, perhaps because last season he averaged just under six innings a start. Wheeler made his debut on June 18 and went on to post a 7-5 record with a 3.42 earned run average over 17 starts the rest of the season. The Mets surely hope he improves as much as Harvey did during his first full year in the majors. Harvey blossomed from a talented prospect into one of the best pitchers in baseball. “He’s got to realize how good he can be,” Collins said. “There’s going to be times, as we talked about last year, where he can just take over a game. And he knows that. What we’ve seen so far is, this guy has a good feel for pitching. I mean, this guy can pitch at 93, 94, yet he knows he can reach back for some extra if he needs it.” In support of Wheeler, the Mets’ offense also showed life, in an eventual 6-2 win. In the first inning, Eric Young Jr. drew a leadoff walk, Chris Young doubled to the left-field gap, scoring Young, and Curtis Granderson lifted a two-run homer to right field. Granderson homered again in his next at-bat. PAYROLL DRAWS ATTENTION Tony Clark, the new executive director of the baseball players’ association, visited the Mets on Tuesday and, while meeting with members of the news media, was asked about the Mets’ payroll, which at around $87 million is among the lowest in baseball. Clark avoided getting specific but said he was monitoring the situation. He said he was unaware of any outside entity, like a bank, capping the Mets’ payroll. “Let me offer you this: If there are concerns, what often ends up happening is we have an opportunity, along with Major League Baseball, to sit down and discuss perhaps what the game plan might be or could be going forward,” Clark said. He added: “Is New York one of the marquee franchises? Yes. Will they always be? Yes. Are we paying attention in general? Yes.” NAGGING INJURIES Three of the more intriguing Mets, Ike Davis (calf tightness), Lucas Duda (hamstring) and Ruben Tejada (hamstring), will all be sidelined in the coming days. Terry Collins indicated that Davis and Tejada could be playing again by Friday, while Duda indicated he could possibly only miss a day or two. SANTANA’S MINOR LEAGUE DEAL Johan Santana, a two-time American League Cy Young Award winner, agreed to a minor league contract with the Baltimore Orioles as he tries to come back from a second major operation on his left shoulder. Santana would get a one-year, $3 million deal if he were added to the 40-man roster and would have the chance to earn an additional $5.05 million in roster and performance bonuses. He would receive the full amount for 120 days and 25 starts. The left-handed Santana, 34, became a free agent after completing a six-year, $137.5 million contract with the Mets, who declined a $25 million option and paid a $5.5 million buyout. Santana, 139-78 with a 3.20 earned run average in 12 seasons with the Minnesota Twins and the Mets, missed the 2011 season after shoulder surgery on Sept. 14, 2010, returned to pitch the Mets’ first no-hitter on June 1, 2012, then missed last season after an operation on April 2. (AP) KINSLER EXPLAINS COMMENTS Ian Kinsler was expecting this kind of reaction, even if he did not agree with the way his comments were portrayed. Kinsler, who was traded from the Texas Rangers to the Detroit Tigers in the off-season, said Tuesday that some critical statements attributed to him in an ESPN The Magazine story had been taken out of context. Kinsler was quoted as calling Rangers General Manager Jon Daniels a “sleazeball.” “I’m not happy about it,” Kinsler said. “I think that the story was written for drama, and taken a little out of context. I understand there were some things directed at the G.M., but as far as my teammates and the fans, there’s nothing negative to say about that, and I think the quotes taken about the general manager were taken a little out of context.” In the ESPN story, Kinsler blamed Daniels for the departure of Nolan Ryan, the Rangers’ chief executive, who left the organization in October. (AP) TIGERS’ DIRKS OUT 3 MONTHS Detroit outfielder Andy Dirks is expected to miss three months because of a back problem that requires surgery. Dirks, 28, was expected to share the left field spot with Rajai Davis, whom the Tigers signed in the off-season. (AP)

Mets
Zack Wheeler
Baseball
Tony Clark
Johan Santana
MLB


Iran Takes Spy Drone Complaint to Security Council

Abstract: Iran said Friday that it had formally complained to the United Nations Security Council about what it called the hostile and aggressive behavior of the United States in sending a sophisticated radar-evading spy drone over Iranian territory, one that Iran’s military said it had intercepted and captured last weekend. The complaint, which appeared to have been made more for its propaganda value than for any Iranian hope of Security Council action, was announced a day after Iran showcased what it described as the captured drone on national television, as if it were a war trophy. Members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were shown displaying a bat-winged aircraft on a platform bedecked with anti-American slogans and a mock American flag with skulls instead of stars. American officials reviewing the footage have declined to confirm or deny that it showed the same model as the RQ-170 Sentinel surveillance aircraft that they have acknowledged was lost recently by C.I.A. controllers based in Afghanistan, a lapse attributed to an unspecified technical malfunction. But military experts have said privately that the Iranians appear to have an RQ-170, one of the Pentagon’s most technologically advanced reconnaissance drones. How that happened remained unclear. Iran has asserted that it captured the aircraft via a cyberattack, saying its armed forces detected the drone on Sunday over northern Iran and were able to guide it to a safe landing about 155 miles from the Afghanistan border. The loss of the drone is a potentially significant intelligence setback for the United States and has further elevated tensions with Iran, which were already high over Western suspicions that the Iranians are secretly developing a nuclear weapon despite their denials. Iran’s complaint, submitted to the Security Council by the Iranian ambassador, Mohammad Khazaee, denounced what he called “the provocative and covert operations against the Islamic Republic of Iran by the U.S. government, which have increased and intensified in recent months.” In the complaint, which Iranian news agencies reported, the ambassador said that as part of the trend “an American RQ-170 unmanned spy plane, bearing a specific serial number, violated Iran’s airspace.” He said Iran “strongly protests such hostile and aggressive moves and warns about harmful consequences of the repetition of such actions.” It was considered highly unlikely that the Council would punish the United States, one of the five permanent members with veto power. Iran’s Islamic hierarchy also sought to exploit what it considered the propaganda value of the showcased drone by making it the subject of the Friday Prayer address at Tehran University, often used to send messages to Iran’s foreign adversaries. The cleric who led the service, Kazzem Sediqi, praised the armed forces for capturing “the United States’ most advanced spying tool,” according to the semiofficial Fars News Agency. American officials have said the use of the RQ-170 was part of a stepped-up operation to monitor Iran’s suspect nuclear sites. Western suspicions about Iran’s uranium enrichment program grew after the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nonproliferation arm of the United Nations , last month issued an incriminating report that said Iran needed to explain evidence that it may be working on a nuclear weapon. Iran has repudiated the report as fiction. The drone footage on Iranian television on Thursday coincided with a diplomatic protest lodged with the ambassador from Switzerland, who represents American interests in Iran. The State Department confirmed on Friday that Iran’s Foreign Ministry had summoned the ambassador from Switzerland, but a department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, declined to specify what had been discussed.

Iran
United Nations
United States
Security Council (UN)
Drones (Pilotless Planes)
Espionage and Intelligence Services
Defense and Military Forces
United States International Relations
Central Intelligence Agency
Defense Department


13 Suspected Militants Killed in Yemen

Abstract: SANA, Yemen — An airstrike killed 13 people suspected as Qaeda militants in the central Yemeni province of al-Bayda on Saturday, a security official and tribal representatives said. Three civilians in a nearby car were also killed, they said. “An airstrike targeted cars that suspected Al Qaeda militants were in and killed 13 of them in the Sawma’a area of al-Bayda,” a security official said. The tribal members said a drone had been circling al-Bayda for days and on Saturday struck two cars the suspected militants were in. Yemen has been fighting Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — regarded by Washington as one of the most lethal branches of the group — but it still carries out significant attacks against security forces in the country. The United States conducts drone strikes as part of a campaign against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based in Yemen. The country is among a handful where the United States acknowledges using drones, although it does not comment on the practice.

Yemen
Drones
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
Terrorism


Celtics Topple Heat but Lose Rajon Rondo for Season

Abstract: BOSTON — The official word did not come until the second half, but when it did, the prospects for the Boston Celtics’ season, already shaky at best, took an even darker turn: Rajon Rondo will not play again this season. Rondo, the Celtics’ All-Star point guard, was a late scratch from Sunday afternoon’s nationally televised game against the Miami Heat with what the team called a hyperextended right knee. He was taken to a hospital, where a magnetic resonance imaging test revealed a torn anterior cruciate ligament. Rondo will have an operation and miss the remainder of the season. After Friday night’s double-overtime loss to the Atlanta Hawks, Rondo told the Celtics he had hurt his knee in the fourth quarter but thought it was nothing serious. He played in both overtimes of that game without noticeable discomfort. After the M.R.I., he returned to TD Garden and watched some of the Celtics’ 100-98 double-overtime victory over Miami seated at a table near the team’s locker room, greeting his teammates as they came off the floor after the game. Sunday’s game was the sixth that Rondo has missed this year, three of them because of league-imposed suspensions. Boston is 3-3 in those games. Celtics Coach Doc Rivers said he received the news about Rondo before the game but decided not to tell the players. At that point, Rondo was still expected to be in the starting lineup. He had already participated in the team’s pregame walk-through. “I just didn’t think it was any time to tell any of our guys that,” Rivers said. “I told them after the game. Pretty emotional in the locker room.” Rivers continued: “I like the team, still. Obviously, this is a blow. It’s a huge blow for us. When something like this happens, someone that’s already in our locker room is going to play terrific. And I have no idea who it is.” The loss of Rondo on Sunday did not immediately affect a resilient Celtics team. Miami Coach Erik Spoelstra said the Celtics, who had lost six in a row heading into the game, “played like a desperate team without their engine.” He was not aware that Rondo was going to miss the rest of the season. After the game, Miami’s Dwyane Wade said of Rondo: “You never want to see anyone go down with any kind of injury, especially a season-ending injury. So it’s very unfortunate. He’s a great player, and he really is the leader of their team. Obviously, guys are going to have to step up.” Wade and Rondo were to have been the starting backcourt for the Eastern Conference in the All-Star Game on Feb. 17. Rondo’s injury overshadowed the other compelling story line of the day, the return of the former Celtics All-Star Ray Allen to Boston. As had been the case with other players from their 2008 team, the Celtics played a video tribute to Allen during a first-quarter timeout. There were some boos at first, but then the capacity crowd gave Allen a standing ovation, which he acknowledged. “When you see something like that, all the emotions come out and go back to the great things we did here,” Allen said. “I’ve always said that there is always going to be a part of me that’s a Celtic.” Allen finished with 21 points, 2 shy of his season high, while playing more than 38 minutes. He hit a 3-pointer near the end of regulation that helped the Heat send the game into overtime. He was also booed during the game when he had the ball, which he called “interesting.” “I didn’t expect that,” he said. But even after their stirring victory over the defending N.B.A. champion Heat, the Celtics (21-23) remain in eighth place in the Eastern Conference and face an uncertain future over their final 38 games. The loss of Rondo will make it much more difficult for them to contemplate a serious run at the Knicks or the Nets for the Atlantic Division title, which they have won for the past five years. There is no designated replacement for Rondo; his backup duties fell to Courtney Lee or Leandro Barbosa. Rivers said: “Well, you can write the obituary. I’m not. We’re going to stay in there.” Paul Pierce will also take over some of the playmaking duties. He did that Sunday, recording a triple-double (17 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists). Barbosa, coming off the bench, had an energetic game (9 points, 4 assists, 3 rebounds), as did Jeff Green. But Rondo is almost irreplaceable, given his confidence and comfort at the position, his role as a team leader and his singular style and game. Asked about the loss of Rondo, Allen said: “It forces a team to circle their wagons. It puts the onus on the guys on the bench and everyone has to reprioritize. It shows what kind of team you really are.”

Celtics
Rajon Rondo
Miami Heat
Basketball


What Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ and Other Earworm Songs Have in Common

Abstract: You should stop reading this now. No really, just don’t. You’re still reading. O.K., you asked for it: “ Rah rah ah-ah-ah!/ Ro mah ro-mah-mah!/ Gaga ooh-la-la!” There’s your “ Bad Romance .” Like the “ugly” “disease” Lady Gaga sings about wanting in this song, an earworm has likely just lodged itself deep inside the auditory cortex of your brain. There it will sit, sucking up your precious brain energy, for the next hour, day, month or even a whole year. ( I had Hall and Oates’ “Maneater” in my head for most of 2005.) You are not alone. “That’s all I can really think about right now,” said Kelly Jakubowski , a music psychologist at Durham University in Britain, about “Bad Romance.” In a study published Thursday in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, she and her colleagues compiled lists of earworms from around 3,000 participants to see why some pop songs wiggle their way into people’s heads and stay there. The Lady Gaga hit, which is always at the top of people’s lists, has been developing its own toxic relationship inside the mind of Dr. Jakubowski, who hasn’t heard it in months: “It’s been persisting for two days straight,” she said. Lady Gaga - Bad Romance Credit Credit Video by LadyGagaVEVO Dr. Jakubowski and her colleagues at Durham University , Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of Tübingen in Germany looked for structural patterns in the melodies of earworm songs. They also compared them with other popular songs by similar artists and chart rankings that had not been listed as earworms in their research, like Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance.” They found that earworm songs tended to be fast, with a common, simple melodic structure that generally went up and down and repeated, like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” But the earworm songs also had surprising, unusual intervals, like the chorus in “Bad Romance” or the opening riff of Deep Purple’s “ Smoke on the Water .” This study is the largest yet to dissect what makes an earworm and adds to a body of research that began in 2001 when James Kellaris , a marketing researcher and composer at the University of Cincinnati translated the German word for earwig, Ohrwürmer, into that “cognitive itch” he called an “ earworm .” He found that about 98 percent of people experience this phenomenon at some point in time. While it may feel like earworms exist only to annoy you, researchers say they may actually serve a purpose. Dr. Jakubowski said earworms could be remnants of how we learned before written language, when information was more often passed through song. When we learn a song, we use our eyes, ears and even the muscles used for playing or singing it, to stamp it into our brains. This means there are many pathways for the song to take into the brain and later be retrieved. This can be good and bad. It’s good, because earworms are examples of spontaneous cognition — thoughts we entertain despite their relevance to the task at hand, like daydreaming or mind wandering , which have been associated with better planning and creativity. But musical imagery like earworms can also develop into obsessions or hallucinations that disrupt daily life for some people . Understanding earworms isn’t just about identifying catchy songs, it’s harnessing a small window into the mind. If we better understand why and how some songs stick in particular brains, not only do we better understand memory and help patients live better lives, but we possibly can improve memory, mood and marketing (if that’s what you’re into) said Dr. Jakubowski. So, what’s your earworm? It doesn’t have to be a pop song. Last week I woke up to the nagging theme song from the 1985 sitcom “ Growing Pains .” Now that you’re infected, tell me if you’re too annoyed to “ show me that smile again .”

Brain
Kelly Jakubowski
Music
Psychology
Psychology of Aesthetics
Creativity and the Arts
Memory
Pop Rock Music


Death Toll Climbs in Rio Landslides

Abstract: RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — The death toll from floods and landslides around the Rio de Janeiro area this week reached 205 on Friday and was expected to rise as searchers continued looking for bodies, authorities said Friday. Morning and afternoon downpours threatened to set off new landslides as emergency crews used excavating equipment to search for victims at the most devastated site, a slum built atop a garbage dump that was buried under rubble and mud. Crews have pulled 27 bodies from the debris so far at the site in Niterói, a Rio suburb. Authorities fear the death toll from the landslide there could be as many as 200, though it was not clear exactly how many people were buried beneath the mud. The latest confirmed death toll of 205 was released in a statement by Rio de Janeiro State’s civil defense department. It said 161 people were injured.

Landslides and Mudslides
Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
Disasters and Emergencies


Downfall of ITT Technical Institutes Was a Long Time in the Making

Abstract: Doors were bolted shut and parking lots emptied at ITT Technical Institutes around the country this week after the chain of for-profit colleges announced it was closing for good. At some campuses, though, this was not the first time students and employees found themselves locked out. More than a decade ago, in 2004, federal agents, search warrants in hand, swooped into the company’s offices in eight states, closing schools briefly as they hunted for evidence of fraud related to student recruitment, enrollment, dropout rates, grade inflation, loans, and reported job placements and salaries. The collapse of ITT, one of the nation’s largest for-profit educational chains, may have seemed sudden, coming less than two weeks after the Education Department — citing financial instability and the likely loss of accreditation — barred the parent company from enrolling new students using federal funds. But the unraveling stretches further back, to a time when ITT was a Wall Street darling, raking in record profits. “It has been a long time coming,” said Carrie Wofford, president of the nonprofit Veterans Education Success and the former senior counsel to a Senate committee investigating for-profit colleges . There was “a lack of fair play that was particularly true at ITT and some others.” Founded at the end of World War II as part of the original International Telephone & Telegraph, the career schools operation split off into an independent, publicly traded corporation in the mid-1990s. The switch came as liberals and conservatives began a wholehearted embrace of privatization on the theory that professionally managed, profit-oriented businesses could do a better job of delivering public services than nonprofits or the government. Investors, thinking that the for-profit education sector was the next big thing, swarmed. With transformations in the economy, more and more working adults were turning to training programs where factory hands could learn to use computers or home health care aides could earn a nursing degree. Providers like ITT Technical Institutes held out the promise, not just of a good job for eager young prospects, but of steady growth in enrollment and revenue as well. From 2000 to 2003, the sector outran every other on Wall Street. Publicly traded post-secondary-education shares climbed 460 percent, according to one analysis, compared with a 24 percent loss for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. Some mutual fund managers boasted that the schools’ owner, ITT, had been their most profitable stock. Yet even as business was booming, troubling accusations of abusive practices in the industry like the ones that resulted in the 2004 federal raid bubbled up. That investigation, brought initially by the United States attorney’s office in Houston, was ultimately closed, but suspicions continued to trail ITT and other for-profit giants. The next year, ITT agreed to a $725,000 settlement with California after employees revealed that the company inflated grades to qualify students for state financial aid. Several investors, convinced company officials had lied to them, filed securities fraud lawsuits. A major grievance was that the industry was overselling programs that left enrollees with deep debt and degrees that had little value in the job market. Students weren’t the only potential victims; so were taxpayers. The company said it was more concerned with the present than the past. “We’re involved in the complicated and heart-wrenching process of closing our academic institutions after approximately 50 years of outstanding service to students and employers who hire them,” said Nicole Elam, a spokeswoman for ITT Technical Institutes. “When students have been abruptly forced into the streets and employees’ livelihood ripped from them,” she added, “regurgitating unproven allegations as a means to justify this horrific end is shameless.” For-profit colleges were a magnet for billions of dollars in federal student loans and grants to low-income students. In 2010, they gobbled up more than $32 billion, a quarter of all federal financial aid, nearly double their share less than a decade earlier, the Senate committee inquiry found. Hundreds of millions more flowed in from the Pentagon and veterans’ programs through the G.I. Bill. For ITT, the total haul in federal dollars that year equaled $1.1 billion. Absent that steady stream of public funds, these privately managed businesses would collapse. Image Rodney Lipscomb, former dean of academic affairs at an ITT campus, said he was disturbed by aggressive recruitment. Credit Cooper Neill for The New York Times With Wall Street demanding steady growth, the pressure on the company’s managers was relentless. The chain was adding eight to 10 new campuses a year, according to the Senate committee. Former employees said recruiters pushed to enroll more and more students — regardless of their preparation, chances of graduating or ability to repay their loans — even as the company pared instructional costs and raised tuition to increase profits. Although the investigations temporarily depressed ITT’s stock, within a few years, the company was soaring to new heights thanks to an otherwise disastrous development: the Great Recession. As employers shed workers, many more people returned to school, taking on enormous debts in the hope of bolstering their credentials and skills and improving their chances on the job market. Profits took off, but so did disenchantment with the industry. Aggrieved students, graduates who found their degrees of little value, even insiders who became whistle-blowers turned to online websites and watchdog groups. Many filed complaints with state prosecutors and regulators, the Education Department and lawmakers. They reported deceptive marketing; strong-arm recruitment tactics; misleading information about costs, courses, graduation and job placement rates; inflated enrollment numbers; bait-and-switch schemes; subpar instruction; and more. Ms. Wofford of Veterans Education Success said that every time the government tried to clamp down on an abuse, some for-profit colleges would come up with a scheme to circumvent the rule, like a private loan program set up by ITT to keep the pipeline of federal funds flowing. “There’s a perniciousness that’s disturbing,” Ms. Wofford said. Some employees tried to change company practices. Rodney Lipscomb, the former dean of academic affairs at an ITT campus in Tallahassee, Fla., said he was on the job six months, “when I really started to say something’s not right.” Hired in the spring of 2011, he was disturbed by the aggressive recruitment, something he had never seen during his two decades at public educational institutions. Former students returned to the school, stunned by letters demanding payment for high-interest loans they knew nothing about. Worst of all, he said, staff members would then persuade those same students to re-enroll in unrelated programs and take on even more debt as a way of deferring the loans that were already due. He started filing reports, detailing his concerns. “I really believed at that time, I could fix it if I got to the right folks,” said Mr. Lipscomb, who now works for a community college in Texas. “But the higher I reported up the chain, the worse the environment got for me.” Finally he was told a lawyer from the company’s headquarters in Indiana and the district manager were coming to Florida to meet with him. “I was very happy,” he said. “I thought they were going to take action.” Instead, Mr. Lipscomb said, they told him that if he continued to report his complaints, he would be fired. In 2015, he was. He has since filed a whistle-blower suit against ITT Technical Institutes in federal court, accusing the company of defrauding the government of money and wrongful termination. Beyond the spate of private lawsuits, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and 19 states have either investigated or sued ITT. The Education Department actively monitored the company’s finances starting in 2014. But it was last month’s ban on enrolling new students with federal funds that delivered the death blow. Now many current as well as former students have been left stranded. “This has a huge impact on my life,” said Chris Blank, a 31-year-old former Marine who was studying electrical engineering at an ITT campus in California. “I relied on G.I. benefits. They are all basically wasted and I can’t get any of those back.”

Closings
For-profit education
Student loan
ITT Educational Services
US Department of Education


Russia: Suspects in Bombing Arrested

Abstract: Russia’s federal Antiterrorist Committee said Friday that it had detained six men suspected in a bombing in the southern city of Pyatigorsk last month that killed three people and added to security fears ahead of the Winter Olympics. Russia is on security alert as it prepares to open the Olympic Games on Feb. 7 in the southern Black Sea resort of Sochi, about 170 miles west of Pyatigorsk. The committee said the six men, including one Azerbaijani citizen, have admitted that they carried out the bombing and that they were planning another attack on a larger scale.

Russia
Bombs
Terrorism
2014 Winter Olympics


Ronaldo’s Extra Time Header Gives Real Madrid a Trophy

Abstract: Cristiano Ronaldo headed home the winning goal in extra time as Real Madrid ended an 18-year Copa del Rey trophy drought with a 1-0 victory over Barcelona , its biggest rival, on Wednesday in Valencia, Spain. It was the second of four games the teams are playing in 18 days. They have two Champions League matchups to come. Ronaldo guided Angel Di Maria’s 103rd-minute pass past the outstretched hand of goalkeeper José Manuel Pinto as Real Madrid won a trophy for the first time since its 2007 league title. Madrid ended a six-game winless run against Barcelona.

Real Madrid
Ronaldo Cristiano
Soccer
FC Barcelona
Barcelona (Soccer Team)
Real Madrid (Soccer Team)


When Turkey Plays at World Championships, Dancers Are Absent

Abstract: ANKARA, Turkey — A team that takes the court during timeouts is the one that is stirring up the most controversy at the basketball world championships . A dance squad from Ukraine , known as the Red Foxes, has performed at Ankara Arena during a majority of the games involving the six teams in Group C. But in each of Turkey’s past three games, one of which was attended by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and another by the country’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, the dancers have disappeared. The speculation here is that the scantily clad dancers were pulled to avoid performing in front of Turkish government officials, but no one can agree as to why. The dance team’s coach, Elena Rozhkova, said her team was pulled from the past three Turkey games for a “political” reason. And FIBA, basketball’s international governing body, admits to making cultural adjustments. But the Turkish Basketball Federation said the dancers were not scheduled to perform. “I would like to assure you that the decision had no influence from either the government or the federation itself,” Sancar Sonmez, the Turkish federation spokesman, said. In a country that is almost entirely Muslim , where Asia and Europe intersect, and where secular Western and more devout Muslim cultures mingle, the issue has become divisive. Muslim women are often expected to dress more modestly. “I think it was planned, it was not coincidence,” said Nagehan Alci, a columnist for Aksam, a prominent daily newspaper here. “But it was also not something that the prime minister would be happy with. He’s a conservative, but he’s also a democrat. It would be harmful if he was involved in limiting people’s freedom of expression.” FIBA was adamant that the decision for the dancers not to appear did not come from it. “This is not FIBA’s decision, and the dancers will continue to perform at other games in Ankara involving other countries,” FIBA said in a statement. “The dancers bring much fun and joy to fans watching games and help to create a vibrant, happy atmosphere in the arenas.” There has been open speculation in the news media here that pressure came from the government to eliminate the dancers from Turkey’s games. Others say that Turgay Demirel, the Turkish Basketball Federation president, made the move to gain favor with government officials. After dancing during games between Russia and China and Greece and the Ivory Coast on Wednesday, the Red Foxes did not appear for the finale between Turkey and Puerto Rico. “It’s a political question,” Rozhkova, the director of the Red Foxes, said during the Turkey game. “I have no comments about it.” Alterations made for the dance routines at different arenas of the world championship in Istanbul cast a doubt on the Turkish Basketball Federation’s explanation. The FIBA secretary general, Patrick Baumann, said that “special arrangements” were made for the dancers during the United States-Iran game in Istanbul on Wednesday. In previous games, the dancers had been scantily clad and featured one routine in which a dancer pulled her legs through the basketball hoop and did a split over the rim while hanging upside down. The Iranian political delegation appeared bothered by this. During timeouts, when the dancers appeared, people stood in front of them in the V.I.P. area to block views. On Wednesday, however, the dancers were much more covered up out of respect for the Iranians. They wore black tights to cover their legs and oversize white T-shirts with black wristbands. They later came out in tights and tank tops. That was a stark contrast from the miniskirts and bare legs and midriffs that had been a staple of their previous routines. “It is a balance between respecting the culture and making sure basketball delivers all the pace, excitement and entertainment that goes with the world championship,” Baumann said. He added, “If it needs a little bit of adjustment, that is fine with us.” In Turkey, the decision has been hotly debated. “It’s crazy,” said a former Turkish national team member, who did not want to be named for fear of retribution by the government. “In a secular country like Turkey, they shouldn’t have to do that.”

Turkey
Dancing
Basketball World Championships
Basketball
Ukraine
Red Foxes
Islam
International Basketball Federation
Uniforms


In Two New Books, Investment Advice for Tough Times

Abstract: THE old saying that “a rising tide lifts all boats” is absolutely correct when the stock market is steadily moving higher. In that case, it doesn’t much matter where you invest: the underlying trend will make you richer. Well, it’s been a long time since the tide has been in on Wall Street. So what’s an investor to do? Two new books offer suggestions. “It’s About More Than the Mone y” (FT Press, $19.99), by the Merrill Lynch financial adviser Saly A. Glassman, argues that these days you — and not paid professionals like her — need to be in absolute control of your investments. And “The Cheapskate Next Door” (Broadway Books, $12.95), by Jeff Yeager, suggests that the simplest solution is to live substantially below your means. Let’s deal with Mr. Yeager’s book first, because it is the better of the two. One reason is that Mr. Yeager, a former executive with a nonprofit association who now writes about saving money and runs Ultimatecheapskate.com , is so amusing. Here’s one quick example: Conceding that he may have taken the idea of skimping on new clothing too far, Mr. Yeager tells what he says is a true story about arriving early for a book signing to which he had traveled by bicycle. (Driving costs you money in gasoline and depreciation.) “I was dressed as I usually am when I am cycling, in ratty-looking shorts and a faded T-shirt,” from a 1978 rock concert, as it turns out, he says. “I decided to take a few moments to relax before the signing, so I sat down on a park bench outside the bookstore with my trusty but tattered 10-speed” next to him. “A nicely dressed older woman walked up to me, opened her purse and tried to hand me a $10 bill, saying, ‘You poor man, you look you could use some help.’ ” Mr. Yeager was at that book signing promoting his previous book, “ The Ultimate Cheapskate’s Road Map to True Riches” (Doubleday, $12.95.) In that one, he offered his personal money-saving tips like these: Never spend more than $1 a pound for meat at the supermarket — advice that leads him to eat such things as beef hearts and kidneys — and always rummage around in couch cushions at hotels for loose change. (“Those things are like upholstered A.T.M.’s.”) This time around, he talks to his fellow cheapskates, a moniker they wear with pride, about their money-saving ideas. Many of their tips are clever twists on the conventional. For example, cheapskates always refinance their homes — when it makes sense. First, they make sure the length of the new mortgage is less than the years remaining on the old one. If they have 19 years to go on their old mortgage, for example, they get a 15-year mortgage when they refinance. That way, they will own the house free and clear four years earlier. And it goes without saying that they buy substantially less house than they can afford. Not only is the purchase price less, but so are the taxes and the upkeep. But some of the suggestions are unsettling. Mr. Yeager introduces us to people who don’t think twice about grabbing uneaten food off the adjacent restaurant table, once those diners have paid their check, and people who find nothing wrong with “Dumpster diving” for food that supermarkets have thrown away. Mr. Yeager doesn’t judge. He uses all the examples to support his “heartfelt belief that most Americans would be happier, and the quality of their lives would actually increase, if they would spend and consume less.” MS. GLASSMAN gets philosophical as well. She emphasizes repeatedly that money is a means to happiness, not an end. You need to determine what is most important to you, she says, and then make sure you have enough money to cover your priorities. If financial security is your No. 1 goal, she says you should be saving aggressively for retirement and have money set aside for emergencies. If family is at the top of the list, ask if your children’s college education is provided for and whether you can cover potentially devastating health care costs. All of this is good, as is her extensive checklist for hiring a financial adviser. One important suggestion: Have advisers put into writing what they are going to do for you — to ensure that you are comfortable with their approach and that they understand what’s important to you. But two things about this book are frustrating and ultimately disappointing. Ms. Glassman gives many examples — I stopped counting after the first half dozen — of financial advisers who stopped their clients from doing something stupid, got them back on track if they did, or opened their eyes to profitable possibilities. That could have been O.K. — there is nothing inherently wrong in being proud of your profession — if she provided substantial amounts of investment advice. She gives surprisingly little. Instead, we get sentences like these: “Following investment rules doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t lose sometimes. However, using the rules as a general, meaningful guideline, even if you have to be flexible at times, is wise.” So, you should follow the rules, except when you shouldn’t? If that is what she means, it would be helpful to give many examples of both the rules and when deviations are warranted. Still, her fundamental premise that you are ultimately responsible for your money is sound. And if you act on that, along with Mr. Yeager’s advice about living below your means — Dumpster diving optional — you will be on solid ground as you wait for the financial tide to come in.

Books and Literature
Personal Finances
It’s About More Than the Money (Book)
Cheapskate Next Door The (Book)


Gunmen on Motorcycles Kill 2 Yemeni Army Officers

Abstract: Gunmen on motorcycles fatally shot two Yemeni Army officers in the capital, Sana, on Tuesday, and clashes between the military and tribal fighters loyal to Al Qaeda killed at least 3 soldiers and 11 tribesmen in the northeast, officials said. The two army officers were gunned down in separate parts of the capital, security officials said. The government has blamed Al Qaeda for similar attacks this year that have killed several senior military and intelligence officials. Military officials said the tribesmen and soldiers had died in clashes between the army and a tribe affiliated with Al Qaeda in the province of Marib.

Al Qaeda
Murders and Attempted Murders
Defense and Military Forces
Yemen


Brock Lesnar Returns to the U.F.C. Against Mark Hunt

Abstract: Back in the days when mixed martial arts was still a vaguely disreputable spectacle that had not yet moved toward the sports mainstream, its biggest star was a former professional wrestler, Brock Lesnar. Now after an absence of almost five years, he is returning to the sport, at least for one night. Lesnar brought the sport some razzle-dazzle from World Wrestling Entertainment, where he had been a star after an N.C.A.A. champion amateur wrestling career at the University of Minnesota. Though his W.W.E. fame would have been enough to earn him a mixed martial arts career, he turned out to be an accomplished fighter in the Octagon, winning the heavyweight title in his third Ultimate Fighting Championship bout over the legend Randy Couture. His success in a sport that was not fixed struck a blow for wrestlers as legitimate athletes, not merely bulked up showmen. Lesnar defended his title twice, but his career was derailed by bouts of diverticulitis. He lost the U.F.C. title to Cain Velasquez in 2010, then after a year away lost a comeback fight to Alistair Overeem. He immediately announced his retirement and soon returned to the colorful, and predetermined, world of professional wrestling. But “that decision has haunted me,” Lesnar told ESPN on Monday. “I never lost to an opponent; I lost to diverticulitis.” So Lesnar will return to face Mark Hunt as part of the U.F.C. 200 card in Las Vegas on July 9, he announced Monday. (A reporter for mmafighting.com, Ariel Helwani, broke the news of Lesnar’s return on Saturday and was later ejected from a U.F.C. card at the Forum in Los Angeles. A U.F.C. spokesman told The Los Angeles Times that reporting the news was not the only factor in Helwani’s ejection and said he should have sought a comment from the U.F.C. on the story. Helwani tweeted , “Did nothing unethical. I reported fight news. That’s it.”) Lesnar was always a huge draw for the U.F.C., whose fans are often followers of professional wrestling as well. His title defense against Frank Mir in 2009 remains the biggest selling pay-per-view in U.F.C. history. Though champions like Daniel Cormier and Miesha Tate are on the July 9 card, Lesnar is likely to drive sales again, despite his long absence. Lesnar is 38, but mixed martial arts has often been kind to older fighters. The current heavyweight champion, Stipe Miocic, is 33, and the light-heavyweight champ, Cormier, and the new middleweight champ, Michael Bisping, are both 37. Hunt, Lesnar’s opponent, is even older, at 42. He is ranked eighth among heavyweights, with a U.F.C. record of 7-4-1, and brings a reputation as a hard hitter. In contrast, Lesnar is better wrestling on the ground. The contrast in styles could add more intrigue to the bout. For now, Lesnar’s return is just for one fight, with permission of the W.W.E., which still has him under contract. Lesnar was noncommittal about future U.F.C. appearances, but did admit to ESPN, “I’m making a boatload of money.”

Brock Lesnar
Mixed martial arts
Ultimate Fighting Championship