Seton Hall to Hire Gonzalez

Abstract: SOUTH ORANGE, N.J., April 6 - Bobby Gonzalez, the energetic, raspy-voiced Manhattan College basketball coach who has made a name for himself by pounding countless miles on the recruiting trail, will be introduced as the new Seton Hall coach at a news conference Friday at Walsh Gym, according to a person with knowledge of the agreement. The Seton Hall athletic director, Joseph A. Quinlan Jr., and Gonzalez did not return telephone calls seeking comment. The hiring of Gonzalez was confirmed by a Seton Hall official who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to comment until the hiring was made official. Gonzalez, 42, has coached at Manhattan for seven seasons, compiling a 129-77 record. The Jaspers have won 20 games or more in four of the past five seasons. Manhattan finished this season with a 20-11 record and beat Fairleigh Dickinson and Maryland in the National Invitational Tournament before losing to Old Dominion. Gonzalez will replace Louis Orr, who was fired March 24 after the Pirates lost to Wichita State in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament. Although Orr had an 80-69 record in five seasons at Seton Hall, his job had been thought to be in jeopardy since the Pirates finished 12-16 in the 2004-5 season. Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim was one of several vocal supporters of Orr, who had two years left on his contract. Orr was a player and an assistant under Boeheim. Before being hired at Seton Hall last September, Quinlan was the deputy director of athletics under Robert E. Mulcahy III at Rutgers. Upon dismissing Orr, Quinlan said he wanted a coach with a higher recruiting profile. Gonzalez interviewed twice with Quinlan, the second time at the Final Four in Indianapolis last weekend. Quinlan also interviewed Ohio University Coach Tim O'Shea twice, as well as the former Seton Hall assistant John Carroll, Davidson Coach Bob McKillup and the Pittsburgh assistant Barry Rohrssen. George Mason University had granted permission Wednesday for Quinlan to interview its coach, Jim Larranaga, who led the Patriots to the Final Four, where they lost to the eventual champion, Florida. Larranaga said through a university spokeswoman Thursday that he did not want to be considered for the Seton Hall job. Gonzalez will bring something to Seton Hall that Orr did not -- tight connections to high school coaches in New York City, a half-hour train ride from the Seton Hall campus. The Pirates' 13-player roster this season included only one player from a city high school: Brian Laing, a sophomore swingman from St. Raymond's in the Bronx. Besides coaching two traditionally powerful city Amateur Athletic Union programs -- Riverside Church and the New York Gauchos -- Gonzalez was an assistant coach at Rice High School and St. Nicholas of Tolentine before he joined Coach Pete Gillen's staff at Xavier. Gonzalez moved with Gillen to Providence in 1994, then to Virginia in 1998. Gonzalez spent one season at Virginia before Manhattan hired him in April 1999. Although Gonzalez had virtually no time to recruit, he signed five players who helped the Jaspers finish 12-15 in his first season. In 2002-3, Manhattan made the N.C.A.A. tournament for the first time since 1995. The 2003-4 team finished 25-6, won a second consecutive Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference championship and earned a No. 12 seeding to the N.C.A.A. tournament, where the Jaspers upset fifth-seeded Florida in the first round, 75-60. That victory seemed to certify Gonzalez as a candidate for top-level Division I jobs. He was interviewed for open coaching positions at St. John's and Miami. St. John's hired Norm Roberts to be its coach, but Gonzalez earned a contract extension from Manhattan on Aug. 5, 2004, that was to extend through the 2009-10 season. WATERS TAKES CLEVELAND STATE JOB -- Gary Waters, who twice took Kent State to the N.C.A.A. tournament but could not get Rutgers there in five seasons, was hired Thursday at Cleveland State. Waters will replace Mike Garland, a former assistant at Michigan State, who resigned last week after winning just 23 games in three seasons at Cleveland State. The C.S.U. athletic director, Lee Reed, said details on Waters's contract still need to be finalized and approved by the university's board of trustees. "I am happy to be back coaching in northeast Ohio," Waters said. "This is where I received my head coaching start 10 years ago and I look forward to adding to my coaching memories in this area." The 54-year-old Waters resigned from Rutgers on March 1. In five seasons, he took the Scarlet Knights to the N.I.T. three times and compiled a 79-74 record. (AP)

MANHATTAN COLLEGE
BASKETBALL
SETON HALL UNIVERSITY
GONZALEZ BOBBY
APPOINTMENTS AND EXECUTIVE CHANGES
COACHES AND MANAGERS


Building a Smarter Bar Code

Abstract: LOOK closely at recent supermarket coupons, and you may see some new markings on them near the traditional bar code: sets of neat black bars stacked in two rows. The new symbols, called GS1 DataBars, can store more data than traditional bar codes, promising new ways for stores to monitor inventory and for customers to save money. One use of the symbols will be in sophisticated coupon offers that combine deals on multiple products, said Jackie Broberg, who leads coupon control management at General Mills in Minneapolis. A single coupon, for example, could offer discounts on three separate items like eggs, bacon and biscuits, all in one transaction. Another use of the new symbols is already helping to streamline operations for a common speed bump in the checkout process: loose produce. During the past three years, for example, the Loblaw Companies, the big Canadian supermarket chain, has gradually switched to scannable, miniaturized DataBar labels pasted onto some fruits and vegetables. Instead of entering a 4- or 5-digit number to look up a price, cashiers scan the DataBars on the produce, said Eric Biddiscombe, senior director of planning in Cambridge, Ontario. “It’s quicker and far more accurate,” Mr. Biddiscombe said. But the system is valuable not only for speeding checkout times and for keeping track of different varieties of bulk vegetables and fruits sold. It also prevents another checkout problem: cashiers mistaking organic vegetables for less expensive, conventionally grown ones, and ringing them up for the lower price. “The price difference between organic and field tomatoes may be 40 cents a pound or more,” he said. “When they aren’t rung up as organic, that bites into our profit margins.” Kelly Kirschner, senior marketing manager at Sinclair International, a company in Fresno, Calif., that makes labeling for produce, said DataBars were gradually becoming popular because of limitations of the standard bar code. The standard code, she said, “takes up too much space to be used on loose produce, plus it is for fixed-weight items” — for example, 12-ounce boxes of cereal. The DataBar, by contrast, allows stores to scan for variable weight information. The labels help stores keep better records, she said. If retailers are receiving Red Delicious apples from three separate suppliers at prices of $8 to $10 a carton, and all the apples are dumped into a single bin, retailers can still tell how many they sold of each lot, as each DataBar is tied to a purchase record. The next use of DataBars at the supermarket will probably be for goods bought at the delicatessen counter, and for fresh meats and poultry, said Stephen Arens, director, industry development, at GS1 US in Lawrenceville, N.J. GS1 US is the trade organization working to move the DataBar standard forward in the United States. A poultry DataBar, for example, might contain not only the price and product category, but also a sell-by date. If a consumer chose an outdated package, the label would alert the cashier at checkout. In the future, coupon bar codes will probably be read less from strips of paper, and more from cellphones that people hold out for scanning by the cashier. Samplesaint Inc., a mobile marketing company in Chicago, for example, has developed technology that lets supermarket scanners pick up the image of a coupon bar code directly from the display on a cellphone. In Samplesaint’s system, coupons are sent directly to consumers’ cellphones by text message. The coupon’s bar code is small enough to fit on the screen of any mobile phone, said Walid Johnson, director of research and development. Samplesaint erases the coupons from the cellphone after they are scanned at the supermarket, an action that reduces coupon fraud, he said. “Once coupons are used, they can’t be forwarded or sent on to anyone else,” he said. “We remove them from the phone.” The Samplesaint system will be used this month in a joint trial with Unilever, the consumer products company, at a ShopRite supermarket in Hillsborough, N.J. Consumers can register for coupons from their computer at www.samplesaint.com from their computer or at m.samplesaint.com from their mobile phone Web browser. They can also text from the supermarket to receive a coupon, he said. In the test, supermarket checkers will be scanning the traditional bar codes. But Samplesaint is prepared to handle the new DataBars, too, when supermarkets are ready. “Our technology can generate the old symbols and the new ones,” Mr. Johnson said.

Bar Codes
Supermarkets
DataBar
Shopping and Retail


Killer With Low I.Q. Executed in Texas

Abstract: HOUSTON — Bobby Wayne Woods was executed Thursday evening in Texas after his lawyers lost a battle to persuade the courts that he was too mentally impaired to qualify for capital punishment. Mr. Woods, 44, was convicted of raping and killing an 11-year-old girl in 1997. He received a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 6:48 p.m. in the death chamber at a state prison in Huntsville, Tex., after the United States Supreme Court denied a request from his lawyers to stay his execution. His last words, at 6:40, were: “Bye. I am ready.” Tests administered to Mr. Woods over the years placed his I.Q. between 68 and 86, prompting a bitter debate between his lawyers and the state over whether he was too impaired to face execution. The state and federal courts repeatedly sided with prosecutors. The debate reflects the gray area left by the Supreme Court in 2002, when it ruled that the mentally impaired were not eligible for the death penalty but left it up to state courts to interpret which inmates qualified as impaired. Mr. Woods’s lawyers argued that his intelligence scores were low enough that he should be spared because of the Supreme Court ban in Atkins v. Virginia . Maurie Levin, a University of Texas law professor who represented Mr. Woods, said in a pleading that “his I.Q. hovers around 70, the magical cutoff point for determining whether someone is mentally retarded.” “He’s transparently childlike and simple,” she said before the execution. “It’s a travesty.” In its 2002 ruling, the Supreme Court said that to demonstrate that someone is mentally retarded, one must prove that the person has had low I.Q. scores and a lack of fundamental skills from a young age. The court said a score on intelligence tests of “around 70” indicated mental retardation. But that standard has been applied unevenly by state courts, according to a study by Cornell law professors. Some state courts in Alabama, Mississippi and Texas have held that inmates with scores as low as 66 are not impaired, while an inmate in California with a score of 84 was declared mentally retarded. Courts in Texas repeatedly rejected Mr. Woods’s claims of impairment, although the state’s highest criminal court halted his execution last year to allow more hearings. That reprieve was lifted in October, and this week, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to reject a clemency request. As a child, Mr. Woods struggled in school and dropped out in the seventh grade. He was barely literate and had to copy words from a spelling list to write the simple notes he sent his family. His intelligence was tested twice in grade school, and he received scores of 80 and 78, but defense lawyers argued that those scores should be adjusted downward to account for the age of the tests. As an adult, he was tested just before his trial and scored 70. A second full-scale test done in prison in 2002 showed him with an I.Q. of 68. He scored higher on two short-form tests. Still, the Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, argued in a motion before the Supreme Court that the only times Mr. Woods had scored under 70 was when the test was administered by an expert for the defense. He also pointed out that Mr. Woods had successfully held jobs as a short order cook and a roofer. “The only experts to ever conclude that Woods was mentally retarded did so after he had committed this murder and had motivation to underperform,” Mr. Abbott wrote in his brief. Mr. Woods was convicted of killing his former girlfriend’s daughter. A jury determined he had abducted the 11-year-old girl, Sarah Patterson, along with her brother, Cody, from the family’s home in Granbury, Tex.. The girl was raped before her throat was slit. The boy was severely beaten and left for dead, but he survived.

Texas
Capital Punishment
Mental Retardation
Woods Bobby Wayne
Sentences (Criminal)
Prisons and Prisoners


Florida State Releases Documents in Fraud Case, Prompting Appeal by N.C.A.A.

Abstract: Florida State has released nearly 700 pages of documents about an academic fraud case at the university after an appeals court ruled that the records should be made public, revealing fresh details and shedding light on the normally secret process by which the N.C.A.A investigates violations of its rules. The 695-page transcript of an N.C.A.A. hearing released Wednesday by Florida State included the testimony of the university president, T. K. Wetherell, who apologized for the actions of a “rogue tutor” and an instructor while minimizing the culpability of athletes, who were found to have received answers to test questions and allowed tutors to type and write their papers. “The student-athletes didn’t start off with the idea of this is how I am going to cheat,” Wetherell told the N.C.A.A.’s Committee on Infractions last October. “We don’t really believe they cheated. They got inappropriate help.” The fraud took place in 2006 and 2007 and involved 61 athletes across 10 sports , including football and men’s basketball. In March, the N.C.A.A. placed Florida State on probation, reduced scholarships, and stripped the university of all wins in which the affected athletes participated. Florida State has accepted most of the sanctions, but it is appealing the vacating of the wins. Florida State released the transcript after an appeals court ruled Monday in favor of The Associated Press and other news-media outlets that had argued that records relating to the case should be made public. At issue were records that were maintained by the N.C.A.A. on a secure read-only Web site that was accessible to outside lawyers for Florida State. Despite the release of documents, the N.C.A.A. appealed Wednesday to Florida’s Supreme Court and said in a statement that it intended to seek all “legal remedies associated with this case.” “We feel strongly that our private documents are not subject to public records laws,” Bob Williams, an N.C.A.A. spokesman, said in the statement . “The enforcement process and indeed the normal course of our business relies on confidentiality to ensure compliance of N.C.A.A. rules, as directed by our membership.” The appeals court ruling was praised Wednesday by Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, which supported the lawsuit. She said the association’s reluctance to release documents, combined with privacy laws governing student records, “makes it very, very difficult for anyone who covers education or college sports to find out what’s going on.” Josephine R. Potuto, who attended the Florida State hearing and served on the infractions committee until last year, said secrecy was necessary because the N.C.A.A. does not have the power to subpoena witnesses. “One of the few things that the N.C.A.A. has is a promise to try to keep information private,” she said, while declining to discuss details of the Florida State case. The issue is an emotional one at Florida State because a final decision could erase as many as 14 victories from the record of the longtime football coach Bobby Bowden. He is in a race with Penn State’s Joe Paterno for the most victories by a major college football coach, and has come under fire this season for the team’s 2-4 record. Wetherell, who earlier this year announced plans to retire, played football for Florida State when Bowden was an assistant coach in the 1960s. The transcript released Wednesday offered an unflattering portrait of Florida State’s professors and administrators defending themselves before the Committee on Infractions. Committee members asked many questions about what help the five dozen student-athletes received; whether that assistance broke university and N.C.A.A. rules; and how Florida State’s administrators questioned athletes about the help they received. Wetherell said the university was embarrassed by the cheating, but had learned from the incidents. “This is not something that we are proud of, and it is not necessarily our finest hour,” he said, paraphrasing a famous quotation about Apollo 13’s failure to reach the moon. The university’s investigation was messy, Wetherell said. Students who cooperated with the investigation were ultimately penalized more than those who were evasive or uncooperative. Some students hired lawyers, while others answered questions alone. “We had the probability of the race card being played by some athletes, saying different students were getting different priorities,” Wetherell said. “We had the gender card being played. We had major sports versus minor sports, all involved in that process.” Yet Wetherell made clear that the student-athletes were not culpable, only the university. He blamed a “rogue tutor” who made copies of a test in a “contaminated course” and gave some answers to students for the infractions, which Florida State reported to the N.C.A.A.. Brenda Monk, a learning specialist hired to work with athletes who had learning and physical disabilities, was accused of improperly helping students type, edit and write their papers. Monk, who testified that some of those athletes had a second-grade reading level, was accused of committing academic fraud. In one case, she was said to have let students use a study guide that had answers to exam questions for an online music course. Monk has left the university and filed a defamation suit against Florida State. Monk’s lawyer, Brant Hargrove, said that the committee restricted his ability to adequately defend his client because he could not subpoena records. During the investigation, “we kind of had our hands tied behind our backs, because we have not been able to get at some of the issues that we ultimately would like to get at just because of the forum we are in,” Hargrove said.

Cheating
Football
Basketball
Florida State University
Colleges and Universities
College Athletics


Born in Brazil, but Representing Someone Else

Abstract: The influx of Brazilian-born soccer players in domestic leagues around the world could endanger the geographic integrity of future international tournaments, said Joseph S. Blatter, the president of FIFA. More than 1,000 players who have left Brazil are playing this year for clubs in far-flung places like Moldova, Russia and Japan. An increasing number of those players, who might not be good enough to play for Brazil, are setting down roots in those countries and joining their adopted national teams. “If we don’t take care about the invaders from Brazil, not only toward Europe but toward Asia and Africa, then the next World Cups in 2014 and 2018 out of the 32 teams — you will still have national teams — but we will have 16 full of Brazilian players,” Blatter said Sunday in South Africa before the preliminary draw for the World Cup. “It is a danger, a real, real danger.” Brazil has more than 60 million registered players. Disparate national laws that govern naturalization have often been bent to enable expatriate Brazilians to play in their adopted lands through marriage or a naturalization process that can take as little as two years. For example, Deco was born in Brazil but is a naturalized citizen of Portugal and a key player on its national team; Antonio Naelson, little-known at home, was granted Mexican citizenship and was on the team’s roster for the 2006 World Cup; Alessandro Santos plays internationally for Japan; José Clayton plays for Tunisia; and Eduardo da Silva, who moved to Croatia when he was 15, became a citizen in 2002. ¶If the United States defeats either Barbados or Dominica in the first round of World Cup qualifying next June, it will advance to a semifinal group that is likely to include Cuba. The Americans have a 5-1-1 record against Cuba, but have never played there and would be expected to make the trip in the six-nation round-robin regardless of the United States government’s economic embargo that bars most travel to the Communist nation. “We haven’t played Cuba away,” Sunil Gulati, the president of the American federation, said Sunday. “That would pose some new challenges. But they are soccer challenges, and we’ll deal with all those other issues at the time.” Major League Soccer After Houston won its second straight M.L.S. Cup, most reports mentioned that the club, which moved from San Jose, Calif., at the start of the 2006 season, had won four league championships (2001, ’03, ’06 and ’07) this decade. Not so fast. According to M.L.S., the expansion San Jose Earthquakes, which will begin play next season as the third incarnation of a team with that nickname (the original Earthquakes were part of the North American Soccer League from 1974-84), will reclaim the club history. In the league’s eyes, the Dynamo has only two years of history, even though several of its players (Dwayne De Rosario, Eddie Robinson, Brian Mullen, Craig Waibel, Richard Mulrooney and Pat Onstad played in both the 2003 and 2007 title games) are part of the history of both clubs. So far, only one player, defender Ryan Cochrane, will return to San Jose from Houston. He played for the Earthquakes in 2004-5, went to Houston with the club and was picked in last week’s expansion draft by San Jose. The N.F.L. made the same decision to leave the Cleveland Browns’ storied history in Ohio when the owner Art Modell moved the team to Baltimore after the 1995 season and renamed it the Ravens. In 1999, when the Browns were reborn, the Ravens had five players (Rob Burnett, Stevon Moore, Matt Stover, Bennie Thompson and Larry Webster) who still had entries in the media guide of the new Browns, according to the N.F.L. ¶A survey of 1,000 soccer fans in the United States between the ages of 13 and 24 asked, “How interested are you in Major League Soccer?” and found that more than 40 percent of the respondents showed at least some level of interest in M.L.S. The survey was conducted by the European Football Group, an affiliate company of EFG Research/MV2 Group, a market research and polling company. According to the poll, 43 percent of female fans and 41 percent of male fans surveyed are interested, while 45 percent of female fans and 35 percent of male fans are very interested in M.L.S. Only 10 percent of the male sample and 4 percent of the female sample said they were not interested at all. ¶The league’s board of governors has proposed raising each club’s salary budget to $2.3 million, an increase of 4 percent, according to SportsBusiness Journal. Germany There have been few tangible results from the strategic partnership between the Bundesliga and Major League Soccer, which was announced last spring. But Christian Seifert, the chief executive of the German league, who was in Washington for the M.L.S. Cup, said that was about to change. “Right now we have 12 teams that do preseason training in Spain, which is not a big help for us because we see the U.S. as one of our strategic markets with Russia, China and India,” Seifert said in an interview. “We would like to send one or two teams to the U.S. in our preseason to a good facility to play games against U.S. clubs and against each other.” The Bundesliga season begins in early August. Seifert also said he would like to see a German club play in the M.L.S. All-Star Game, which featured Glasgow Celtic and Chelsea the past two years. “We are not about sending one club to the U.S. to get a check,” Seifert said. “We want to put out our message that the Bundesliga is entertaining and exciting, we do our own TV production in high-definition, and we want to share our expertise.” Notes ¶South Africa, the host of the 2010 World Cup, qualifies automatically for the tournament, but will still have to compete in a qualifying group (with Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea) because the games count toward qualification for the 2010 African Nations Cup. ¶Tony Henry’s mangled rendition of the national anthem of Croatia before last week’s 2008 European Championship qualifying game against England at Wembley Stadium has been given credit for inspiring the Croatian players to a victory that eliminated England. ¶During ABC/ESPN’s halftime show of last Saturday’s Kansas-Missouri college football game, the former coach Lou Holtz was asked which of the many vacant coaching jobs he found most appealing. “England,” Holtz said, with a laugh. ¶Name of the week: The 20-year-old striker Robert Acquafresca (Freshwater) scored Cagliari’s only goal in a 2-1 loss to A.C. Milan on Sunday. ¶In Mexico, Santos Laguna, Atlante, U.N.A.M. and Chivas Guadalajara advanced to the semifinals of the Apertura (opening) tournament.

Brazil
Soccer
World Cup (Soccer)
Athletics and Sports


At Louisville, Athletic Boom Is Rooted in ESPN Partnership

Abstract: LOUISVILLE, Ky. — In February, the president of the University of Louisville, James R. Ramsey, traveled to Florida to meet with donors and alumni. Dr. Ramsey is an economist, and he led off on the dismal side of the ledger, from the challenges facing the economy to dwindling government financing for higher education, including a sharp drop in aid from the State of Kentucky. But about halfway through his PowerPoint presentation , Dr. Ramsey declared that for all the gloom, things were not so bad at Louisville. Average test scores for incoming freshmen were way up, as was the university’s graduation rate. The research budget had quintupled since 1998. Louisville’s athletic department was on a roll, too, what with a recent invitation to join the Atlantic Coast Conference, the football team’s victory in the Sugar Bowl and its coach’s decision not to pursue job opportunities with rival universities. “U. of L. is on an upward trajectory,” one of Dr. Ramsey’s slides proclaimed. “Even ESPN is talking about us!” What ESPN was not saying was that Louisville’s rise, both academically and athletically, was in large part the product of its partnership with the sports television giant. Over the past dozen years, to feed its unending appetite for live football, ESPN has made Louisville Cardinals midweek games a mainstay in prime time. In turn, Louisville has made exposure on ESPN the centerpiece of a campaign to rise above its commuter-school roots and become a powerhouse in college sports. “If it wasn’t for ESPN, we would be a fraction of what we are today,” Tom Jurich, Louisville’s longtime athletic director, said in an interview in his office on April 1 as the university savored its latest basketball success: the men’s and women’s teams were each on the way to the Final Four. The men went on to win the N.C.A.A. title. Image Tom Jurich, Louisville’s longtime athletic director, gave ESPN much of the credit for the university's turnaround. “If it wasn’t for ESPN, we would be a fraction of what we are today,” he said. Credit Christopher Gregory/The New York Times “We owe them so, so much,” Mr. Jurich said of ESPN. “They were willing to take a chance on us.” Louisville’s ascent is a case study of how an institution of higher learning can become all but inextricably conjoined with ESPN, an institution of higher profits. It illustrates not only ESPN’s power to make kings among athletic programs, but how profoundly its presence can affect an entire university and its institutional priorities. Some people on campus wonder if those priorities have become a bit skewed. “We worry that the university gets too much identified with the athletics,” said Tom Byers, an English professor and a self-described big fan of Louisville sports. “I would love it if we competed with professors with the same kind of financial resources. But that’s not the world we live in.” What ESPN offered Louisville, beyond millions of dollars in fees for television rights, was prime-time exposure on the leading sports network, putting Cardinals football in front of national audiences of fans, donors, recruits and prospective students. The cost to Louisville? It had to be ready to play whenever ESPN could fit the Cardinals into its schedule. “Louisville came to us and said, ‘We’ll play anyone, anywhere, anytime,’ ” said Mark Shapiro, a former head of programming and production at ESPN. Indeed, “anytime, anywhere” became Mr. Jurich’s motto in his early years as athletic director. When he took over in 1997, the athletic department struggled on an annual budget of about $14 million and attracted little outside attention for sports other than men’s basketball. Today, the budget has swollen to about $77 million, and it will increase significantly with the move to the A.C.C. in 2014. The arrangement has also been a boon to ESPN. The Cardinals’ prime-time games quickly became ratings winners, convincing others that playing at midweek, while unconventional, could be a blessing in the form of exposure. “It was a programmer’s dream,” Mr. Shapiro said. “We already had N.F.L. on Sunday nights, N.H.L. and M.L.B. on multiple nights, Thursday night college football. We were all filled up. So I said, ‘How about Tuesday nights?’ They seized it, and over time their results have been spectacular.” Football as a Foundation When John W. Shumaker became president of Louisville in 1995, he met with the university’s trustees to chart a way forward. While the university was “respectable,” they agreed, it could be much more. It could be a player. And sports could be its window to the world. Image Deon Rogers (43) and Lamar Atkins before a Louisville home game last season. In 2010, a $72 million renovation of Papa John's Cardinal Stadium added 13,000 seats and rows of lucrative suites. Credit Austin Lassell/The Louisville Cardinal Louisville was still a youngster as far as public universities went, having shed its roots as a small, private college to join the Kentucky state system in 1970. Even its academic strengths in medicine, business and engineering were not widely known beyond a campus bordered by brownfields and railway ruins. On the sports side, the men’s basketball program was running on the fumes of its two national championships won in the 1980s under the Hall of Fame coach Denny Crum. The athletic department, which had recently joined the new Conference USA, was vastly underfinanced, its teams housed in outdated facilities. Some teams were saddled with penalties because of N.C.A.A. infractions. Mr. Shumaker’s grand plan, in a nutshell, looked like this: If the athletic program took hold, Louisville could move to a bigger, better conference with a better television deal, putting the whole university — academics and athletics — on a wider national stage. The key to the whole thing was football. In the economics of big-time college athletics, football is the alpha and the omega — generally by far the most profitable sport, because of the size of the crowds, the sponsorships and the lucrative television agreements. Perhaps two dozen elite universities make enough money from football, and to a lesser degree basketball, to subsidize their entire athletic departments. What Louisville had to do first, Mr. Shumaker decided, was replace the “not very attractive” and decidedly second-tier Cardinal Stadium, which opened in 1957, just after the graduation of Johnny Unitas, Louisville’s greatest football star. By the time Mr. Jurich arrived from Colorado State in late 1997, Louisville was in the final stages of building a $63 million, 42,000-seat, state-of-the-art stadium, with naming rights sold to the Papa John’s pizza chain, a prominent Louisville-based business. Mr. Jurich’s task was to put together a better, more watchable football team to go with it. The 1997 team had gone 1-10, finishing last in Conference USA. The university had only five postseason bowl appearances in its history. Mr. Jurich quickly hired a new coach — John L. Smith, known for his high-scoring, pass-happy offense. “First to 49 points wins,” Mr. Smith liked to joke. It was fast-break football, made for television. And it was just what ESPN was waiting for. In the early 2000s, the network, ever expansive, was looking to broaden its college football offerings beyond the traditional Saturday and the increasingly, if grudgingly, accepted Thursday. Most big-name, major-conference universities, though, were not interested in hosting midweek games, given the extensive setup and the disruption to classes and campus life. What ESPN needed for a new Tuesday night franchise were teams that craved exposure but knew they would not get it on Saturday afternoons flooded with more than 100 games. Conference USA jumped. Before the 2001 season, it signed an eight-year ESPN agreement, reportedly worth about $80 million, that included at least 10 televised games each year, including games on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Universities were not required to participate, and some bristled at the scheduling as sacrilege that took away from the “purity” of the game. Image John L. Smith, center, Louisville's coach from 1998 to 2002, introduced a powerful, up-tempo offense that was made for television. Credit Andy Lyons/Getty Images But Louisville, with its national ambitions and with little campus life to disrupt — only about 2,000 of nearly 15,000 undergraduates lived in dormitories — was more than happy to play at midweek. On Oct. 16, 2001, Southern Mississippi visited Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium for what was billed as the first regular-season college football game on a Tuesday night. Louisville won, 24-14. “I think that tonight, with two of our marquee teams playing on national television, it gave our conference very significant national exposure and gave Southern Miss and Louisville great national exposure,” Mike Slive, the Conference USA commissioner at the time, told The Clarion-Ledger, in Jackson, Miss. Mr. Slive is now the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference. That game was one of five regular-season contests that Louisville played on ESPN or ESPN2 in 2001. The next year, the Cardinals appeared six times during the season, including a Tuesday game, three Thursday games and a Saturday game starting at 9:30 p.m. “They loved putting John L. Smith on,” Mr. Jurich said of the coach, who led the Cardinals to a 41-21 overall record and bowl games in each of his five seasons. There were inherent challenges in running a football program that rarely played on Saturday. To keep the Cardinals tuned up, Mr. Smith, a believer in regimen, essentially banished the regular calendar and created his own. No matter when his team played, he decreed that the next day would be Sunday, with signs in the locker rooms to reinforce the point. “It was really crazy, but it was fun and exciting,” Mr. Smith said. “From where we started to where we left, it was well worth it.” True, alumni grumbled about having to go to the campus on weeknights. “Some of the fans and the press were critical and thought we were violating all the norms,” recalled Mr. Shumaker, who left the university in 2002. But while the new calendar unsettled some hometown fans, it also won new ones across the country. “We became America’s team at midweek,” Mr. Jurich said. That familiarity also created a far wider, and deeper, pool of recruits. “All of a sudden we were able to recruit the Deion Branches and Elvis Dumervils and those types of guys,” Mr. Smith said, referring to two players he coached at Louisville who went on to the N.F.L. Image Receiver Andrell Smith, right, helped Louisville defeat North Carolina, 39-34, en route to an 11-2 record last season. The Cardinals were ranked 13th in the final Associated Press poll. Credit Austin Lassell/The Louisville Cardinal In 1999, Stefan LeFors, a high school quarterback in Louisiana, saw the Cardinals play a wild overtime game against Army on ESPN and decided to send a tape of himself to the Louisville coaches. “That was my only reason Louisville was on my list,” said Mr. LeFors, who ended up as the starting quarterback under a new coach, Bobby Petrino, who was hired after Mr. Smith left for Michigan State after the 2002 season. Under Mr. Petrino, the new weeknight tradition continued, and so did the team’s ascent. On Nov. 2, 2006, Louisville fans, wearing black in solidarity, packed Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium for what was then the biggest football game in modern Cardinals history: a Thursday prime-time clash with West Virginia. The Cardinals were undefeated and ranked No. 5 nationally; the Mountaineers were No. 3. Louisville won, 44-34. A week later, the Cardinals traveled to Rutgers for another Thursday night game. They lost in the closing moments, but by season’s end, the reversal was complete: in less than a decade, Louisville had gone from near-winless obscurity to a 12-1 season, including a conference championship and an Orange Bowl victory. Without question, ESPN’s investment had paid off. The back-to-back November games still rank among the top 20 in total viewers for a college football game on ESPN. No longer did the network have to entreat schools to play on weeknights. “As we cleared more homes, bigger conferences saw more dollars and better exposure,” said Loren Matthews, a former ESPN executive who died in March. He added: “Schools would say: ‘We’ll play on any night. Do you want us to start at 9, or do you want us to start at 6?’ ” Better Conferences, Bigger Venues Central to Louisville’s transformation plan was the belief that success on the field and brand recognition on television would make the university a highly sought prize in the wave of realignment sweeping college athletic conferences. The Big East, a “better” conference, eventually came calling, and in 2005, Louisville moved up. Last year, with the Big East crumbling, Louisville moved up yet again, to an even better conference, the A.C.C. Better mostly meant richer. Last year in the Big East, Louisville received about $4 million from television rights. The move to the A.C.C., which becomes effective next summer, is likely to quadruple that, with roughly $16 million from the conference’s agreement with ESPN. Television revenue is only part of it, though. The re-engineered football team and a reinvigorated basketball program under Rick Pitino, who arrived in 2001, have allowed Louisville to press local corporations and other private donors for larger sums to support the athletic department and help finance what university promotional materials describe as a $256 million “athletic building boom.” (Those 2012 promotional materials also catalog Louisville’s achievements during seven years in the Big East, including 53 conference championships, 122 all-Americans, 10 Olympians and a College World Series.) Image Mr. Jurich arranged to have a banner put up along Interstate 65 welcoming visitors to “The Ville, the Best College Sports Town in America. Credit Luke Sharrett for The New York Times “Anytime a donor base is feeling good, you’ve got to capitalize on that excitement,” said Mark Jurich, the athletic department’s chief fund-raiser, a former Louisville baseball player and the athletic director’s son. Louisville has capitalized to the extent that swaths of campus can seem a bit like a corporate-branded sports theme park. First came Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium, built on the site of the old South Louisville Rail Yard and renovated in 2010 at a cost of $72 million, with 13,000 new seats and rows of lucrative suites. For its workouts, the football team has the Trager Indoor Center (Republic Bank). The baseball team plays at Jim Patterson Stadium (local entrepreneur and philanthropist). There are the Musselman Golf Center, the G. Garvin Brown III Rowing Center and the Ralph Wright Natatorium. The men's and women's basketball teams play at the $238 million KFC Yum Center in downtown Louisville. The arena, which is owned by the state and the city, opened in 2010 and would rank among the largest N.B.A. venues. The building continues: next year, the men’s and women’s soccer teams will move into a $16.2 million stadium and training complex. A major donor to the complex is Dr. Mark Lynn, the owner of a chain of optometry practices whose four children attended the university. “When I see the University of Louisville on ESPN and getting the name recognition, it makes you proud,” said Dr. Lynn, who has committed $5 million to the project. “It is not just good to see and fun to watch. You feel very proud you are a part of that university.” Athletic acclaim, of course, was never supposed to be an end in itself at Louisville. The idea was to jump-start a transformation of the university as a whole. These days, the 30-second advertising spots shown during ESPN telecasts of Cardinals games announce the university’s academic advances to the world: the students who perform better, graduate more often and more readily choose to live on campus. The 36 total Fulbright scholarships in 2010, 2011 and 2012 — more, university officials point out, than the total at Dartmouth or M.I.T. The swelling research budget and the fivefold increase, since 1998, in the number of endowed professorships and chairs. All of this helped by the donations that have increasingly poured in, about $1 billion since 2004. In the annals of ESPN and college sports, Louisville’s story is clearly the story of a winner. Still, the national debate about the role of college athletics is hardly silent here. There are those who are ambivalent, who love their Cardinals but are disquieted by the growing professionalization, the way sports can seem to suffuse the place. Partly, it is an optics problem — all the new buildings in an era of relentlessly declining state subsidies and rising costs. (To be fair, that new construction is financed by donations, and the athletic department, a separate nonprofit entity, brings in enough revenue to largely pay for itself, aside from a few million dollars from students and the university. Lately, the department has also sent money back to the university — $350,000 annually, plus a one-time $2 million donation to finance a pay raise for the faculty and staff, whose salaries had been frozen.) Image ESPN's Chris Fowler interviewing Coach Charlie Strong after Louisville defeated Florida, 33-23, in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans on Jan. 2. Credit Matthew Stockman/Getty Images “Like many academics, I’m a little uneasy about the big business of college athletics,” said Mr. Byers, the English professor. Mr. Byers has been here for 33 years. He remembers carrying his young son outside to celebrate after the men’s basketball team won the N.C.A.A. championship in 1986. He says the people in the athletic department, particularly Mr. Jurich, are among the best at what they do and seem to care deeply about the student-athletes. Still, he said: “It is a little frustrating that when that side seems to be thriving, we on the other side are so dependent on the state and are dealing with cutbacks. I’d love it if the academics side could go to the athletics side, just once, and shake them and get some of that money.” Others on campus point out that the construction boom has left some campus buildings behind. Last October, mold spores were found in one of the dorms, Miller Hall. “You’ve got all this construction money going to athletics,” said Rae Hodge, a recent editor of the student newspaper, The Louisville Cardinal. “But the mold condition was so bad students had to move out.” Joseph Steffen, a biology professor for 30 years and the chairman of the faculty senate, said there had been a “bifurcated response” among his colleagues. Some, he said, “clearly see this as detracting from the academic side.” Others, he said, understand that athletic success, televised nationally on ESPN, “gets our name in the news, gets us into places where perhaps others don’t go, and gets us recognition from nonathlete students who might want to come here.” He added: “You see the student groups and student activity and the band. All of that gets a little extra revved up when they know they are going to have that national exposure.” Ten years ago, when Louisville was just beginning to see the fruits of its partnership with ESPN, Mr. Jurich arranged to have a 60-foot-long banner put up next to a row of abandoned soybean silos facing Interstate 65, welcoming visitors to “The Ville, the Best College Sports Town in America.” To a lot of people, even a lot of people in Louisville, it was magical thinking. With the University of Kentucky down the road in Lexington, Louisville was not even the best sports town in the state. Today, it looks more like a prophecy fulfilled. Said Mr. Jurich, “I don’t think anyone could have looked at the crystal ball and said that would have happened.”

ESPN
University of Louisville
College
College football


Myanmar Ethnic Groups Hope for Peace, but Prepare for Battle

Abstract: LAIZA, Myanmar — The Kachin tribesmen who inhabit the hills along Myanmar’s border with China have a reputation as stealthy jungle warriors, famous for repelling Japanese attacks in the Second World War with booby traps and instilling terror by slicing off ears to tally their kills. Now, as they have many times in their war-scarred history, the Kachin are hoping for peace but are prepared for battle with Myanmar’s central government. “Whether or not there will be war again, we have to be ready,” Maj. Zauja Nhkri, the head of an officer’s training school that is part of the Kachin Independence Army, which has around 4,000 men under arms. “If our army is strong, we can maintain the peace.” As Myanmar’s military government prepares to adopt a new and disputed Constitution next year, a fragile patchwork of cease-fire agreements between the central government and more than a dozen armed ethnic groups is fraying. The new Constitution would nominally return the country to civilian rule after four and a half decades of military government and, in theory, could formally end the now dormant civil war that has plagued the country since it gained independence from Britain in 1948. But as a precondition for what they portray as a fresh start, Myanmar’s ruling generals are ordering the Kachin and other groups to disarm and disband their substantial armies. So far, the answer is no. “There is no good road map for the future of Burma,” said Gen. Gam Shawng Gunhtang, the chief of staff of the Kachin Independence Army, which has fought the government on and off since its founding in 1961. Myanmar used to be known as Burma. The ethnic groups control large pockets of territory in the northern and eastern borderland areas, and, if they disarm, they risk losing control over their lucrative trade in timber, jade, gems and, in some cases, heroin and methamphetamines. They are loath to give up their hard-won autonomy to the Myanmar military, which is dominated by the Burman ethnic group they have long resented. “We ethnic peoples are trying to form a federal union,” Gen. Gam Shawng Gunhtang said. “They don’t want to hear about it.” The demands to disarm are “not acceptable,” he said. The volatile and remote northern reaches of Myanmar are rarely reported on in the Western news media because of the difficulty accessing the armed groups. The visit by this reporter to Laiza was the first by a foreign newspaper correspondent in several years. By the tumultuous standards of Myanmar’s six decades of independence, the country has been relatively peaceful over the past decade and a half, thanks to the cease-fire agreements. Myanmar captured the world’s attention when the government quashed the uprising of Buddhist monks in September 2007 and when it refused to allow some international assistance after a deadly cyclone last May. But those events only served to underline the firm grip that the generals have over the low-lying parts of the country, where the majority Burman population is concentrated. It is a very different picture in the upland regions, where the government’s control has always been tenuous. A resumption of civil war in the north and east is by no means a foregone conclusion — the generals could back down from their demands to disarm, or the ethnic groups might relent and decide to fully adopt the new Constitution. But if the conflicts re-ignite, which some analysts say is likely, it could resonate well beyond Myanmar’s borders, resulting in outflows of refugees into neighboring countries like Thailand and China and a resurgence of the heroin business, which in the past has thrived under the cover of war. “I think you will hear a lot of gunfire next year,” said Aung Kyaw Zaw, a former soldier in the now defunct Burmese Communist Party who is in contact with leaders of the ethnic groups. “The Burmese government is unwilling to give autonomy.” The largest borderland groups, drawn from ethnic groups like the Wa, Shan and Kokang, are united in their bitterness over their historical domination by the Burman. During the Cold War, China, Thailand and the United States supplied arms and other assistance to some borderland groups. Now commercial interests, including many shady businesses, have replaced ideological ones. The Kachin hills are home to the world’s most lucrative jade mines. The area inhabited by the Shan has the largest and best-quality rubies found anywhere. All the territory controlled by the ethnic groups has prized varieties of tropical hardwood. And drug syndicates, many of them with ties to the ethnic groups, profit handsomely from the trafficking of both illegal and counterfeit drugs. Adding to the complexity of the situation, Myanmar, by the nature of its location between India and China, is now the focus of a geopolitical contest for influence by the region’s big powers increasingly hungry for natural resources. Chinese companies are building a series of hydroelectric dams on northern tributaries of the Irrawaddy River (despite Kachin objections) and have helped finance and build roads inside Myanmar, facilitating both the sale of Chinese electronics and clothing in Myanmar and the export of timber and other commodities into China. China recently beat India in securing a 30-year concession on natural gas from Myanmar, and construction will reportedly start soon on twin pipelines crossing Myanmar from the Bay of Bengal and connecting to the southern Chinese city of Kunming. In March, China and Myanmar signed a “cooperation agreement” on the oil and gas pipelines, but key details are vague. The strategic objective for China is access to the Bay of Bengal, thus avoiding having to ship oil through the Strait of Malacca, a costly detour and a security threat if that choke point is ever blocked. But the project is seen by many as a risky venture. “Burma is not a stable place when you get out into these remote areas that the pipeline is going to have to traverse,” said Priscilla A. Clapp, a former American diplomat who spent three years as the chief of the U.S. mission in Myanmar. “It’s going to have to go over mountains and through remote areas of the country that are barely controlled by the military. It could very easily be blown up, and then you’re out of luck.” Gam Shawng Gunhtang, the Kachin general, is worried that the pipeline will marginalize the borderland ethnic groups and give the upper hand to Myanmar’s junta, also known as the State Peace and Development Council, or S.P.D.C. “The S.P.D.C. is trying to convince the Chinese government that the borderland armed groups are not political groups — just insurgents or terrorists,” the general said. “The pipeline will be a tool and an opportunity for the S.P.D.C. to eliminate the armed groups.” The Constitution, which Myanmar’s generals say was adopted by more than 90 percent of voters in a referendum last year and will take effect after elections next year, prescribes “genuine multi-party democracy” and recognizes what it calls “self-administered” areas. But ethnic leaders say this falls short of the autonomy they want. They also point out that the document preserves a dominant role for the military, including the right of the commander in chief of the armed forces to appoint a quarter of the Parliament and to remove the president. And because the Constitution mandates that only the national armed forces provide defense and security, the junta is demanding that all other groups disarm. The most heavily armed group along the Chinese border is the United Wa State Army, which has about 20,000 soldiers and new armaments including field artillery and anti-tank missiles, according to Bertil Lintner, an expert on Myanmar’s ethnic groups and co-author of the book “Merchants of Madness,” which deals with the drug trade among ethnic groups. Very few of the armed groups will accede to the government’s demands to disarm, Mr. Lintner believes. “Some of the smaller groups might hand in their weapons, but they don’t matter anyway,” he said. In Laiza, it is easy to see why the Kachin want to maintain their autonomy. Residents escape many of the deprivations so common in other parts of Myanmar, one of the world’s poorest countries: Electricity from a nearby hydroelectric dam is reliable, cellphone service provided by Chinese communications towers across the border is cheap (obtaining a cellphone number inside Myanmar typically costs $2,000), and the local administration even stamps out its own vehicle license plates, skirting Myanmar’s highly restrictive car ownership policies. In addition to its own army, the Kachin have a police force, schools, a teacher’s training college and their own customs agents, who monitor the border crossing with China. Laiza is no Shangri-La — the town struggles with drug addiction and other social ills common to many border areas — but it feels more free than the military-controlled areas in Myanmar, where dissidents are repeatedly rounded up and sentenced to long jail terms. “The S.P.D.C. has one last chance to win the hearts of the people,” said Thar Kyaw, a jade dealer now based in the southern Chinese city of Ruili. “But we are not very hopeful.”

Myanmar
Minorities
Politics and Government
Civil War and Guerrilla Warfare


NASA Spacecraft Closing In on Dwarf Planets Pluto and Ceres

Abstract: It is small. It is round. It was once a planet, but is now cast off as too diminutive. In March, a NASA spacecraft will arrive there to begin the first close-up examination of a dwarf planet. It is not Pluto. It is instead Ceres, 600 miles wide, the largest of the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. “We’re going to reveal the fascinating details of a giant world of rock and ice,” said Marc Rayman, the chief engineer for NASA’s Dawn spacecraft . “It’s not like we’re just going out to visit a chunk of rock the size of one of those mountains,” he said, pointing to the San Gabriel Mountains outside the windows at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Ceres has 38 percent of the area of the continental United States. It’s actually the largest body between the sun and Pluto that a spacecraft has not yet visited.” A year ago, the Herschel Space Observatory discovered water vapor rising off two spots on Ceres, possibly a sign of ice volcanism. “Ceres may have subsurface ponds or lakes or even oceans of water,” Dr. Rayman said. Later in the year, the bigger and much more famous dwarf planet Pluto will have its close-up when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zips past. Image NASA launching the New Horizons spacecraft in January 2006. The craft is to start photographing Pluto on Sunday and make its closest approach, 7,800 miles, on July 14. Credit Gary I. Rothstein/European Pressphoto Agency These missions, years in the works, are expected to let loose a flood of data that will help paint clearer pictures of Ceres and Pluto and uncover clues on the origins of our solar system. They will also rekindle the debate over what constitutes a planet. The encounter phase of the New Horizons mission officially began Thursday, 180 days before the spacecraft’s closest approach July 14. New Horizons, launched in 2006 on a three-billion-mile trip to Pluto, came out of hibernation in December and is still 135 million miles away, closing in at a speed of more than 30,000 miles per hour. It will start photographing Pluto on Sunday, and by May, those photographs will be sharper than the sharpest taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. “From there on in, it gets dramatically better, week by week,” said S. Alan Stern , the principal investigator for New Horizons. At closest approach, 7,800 miles above the surface, the images will have a resolution of about 70 meters per pixel. If New Horizons were passing over Manhattan instead of Pluto, “we could count the ponds in Central Park,” Dr. Stern said. Pluto’s demotion from planethood in 2006 left fuzzy notions of what a planet is and is not. The International Astronomical Union , the organization in charge of astronomy nomenclature and names, invented a new category, dwarf planets, to place Pluto and Eris, an object discovered a decade ago that is a virtual twin of Pluto in size. More controversially and confusingly, the group decreed that dwarf planets — Ceres was promoted from asteroid at the same time — were not planets. NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Maps the Surface of Ceres Dawn is mapping the dwarf planet Ceres, a Texas-size ball of ice and rock. Dr. Stern is not shy about calling the current definition stupid, saying the “I” in “I.A.U.” actually stands for “irrelevant.” “They got it really wrong,” Dr. Stern said. Marc W. Buie , a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and a member of the New Horizons team, agrees with Dr. Stern but wishes the issue would go away. Years ago, people would be fascinated to hear the scientific puzzles about Pluto. Now, conversations usually start with “Is Pluto a planet?” “It’s a very annoying, distracting issue,” Dr. Buie said. “You have to get past this wall of this nonscientific issue before you get to the good things.” There are plenty of good things for scientists to figure out. Why did Pluto, which had had a consistent reddish hue since Clyde Tombaugh spotted it in 1930, suddenly turn redder from 2000 to 2002? It has stayed the redder color since then. Why, as Pluto moves away from the sun, has the atmosphere not frozen and fallen to the ground as many scientists thought it might? How many moons circle Pluto? Could it have rings like Saturn? For decades, astronomers knew of only one moon, Charon, but Hubble has spied four more: Hydra, Nix, Styx and Kerberos. Scientists already have ideas about what is going on at Pluto. Dr. Buie said the color change could be the result of the northern pole now being in continual sunlight of summer, burning off the shiny veneer. Computer models have suggested how the surface of Pluto is retaining enough heat to keep its air from freezing. Image Can you come up with a better way to update the mnemonic, “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas,” to include the dwarf planets than reporter Kenneth Chang? Submit yours here. Even the simple question of Pluto’s size does not have a precise answer yet because the atmosphere bends light. The exact size is crucial to working out the dynamics of the atmosphere. Eris, farther out and colder, does not have an atmosphere, and its size was measured when a star passed behind it in 2010 — 1,445 miles wide, give or take four miles. Dr. Buie said that estimates for Pluto’s diameter range from 1,429 miles to 1,454 miles. “It’s all going to be fantastic,” Dr. Buie said. “I’m interested in seeing every single result, every measurement, every byte of information that’s going to come out of that spacecraft.” When Ceres was discovered, in 1801, it was added to the roster of planets. Within six years, three more objects were spotted in the region — Pallas, Juno and Vesta — bringing the number of planets to 11. (In the outer solar system, Neptune and Pluto had not yet been discovered.) But as astronomers found more and more asteroids, they thought it was ridiculous for every little rock between Mars and Jupiter to be called a planet. The rocks became asteroids, not planets. Ceres lingered for decades on some drawings of the solar system, but it was eventually forgotten, even by most astronomers. Almost no one cared much that Ceres was round and not a planet until round Pluto suddenly became a nonplanet, too. Images of Pluto From NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft The New Horizons probe flew past Pluto and its moons early Tuesday morning. The common notion of planet is “a big thing orbiting the sun.” When Pluto was discovered, it was thought to be larger than Earth, but turned out to be just 1/450th the mass of Earth — smaller than our moon. The International Astronomical Union attempted to codify the “big” aspect by stating that a full-fledged planet “has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit,” while a dwarf planet needs only to be large enough that its gravity has pulled it into a roundish shape, what physicists call hydrostatic equilibrium. Even many scientists who like the notion underlying the “cleared the neighborhood” clause — essentially that a planet is the gravitationally dominant object in its orbit — said that the I.A.U. did not explain itself very well. “It’s trying to be right, but it’s written terribly,” said Michael E. Brown , the California Institute of Technology astronomer who found Eris, setting off the events culminating in Pluto’s demotion. Dr. Brown is not shy about expressing his opinions, either. His 2010 book is titled “ How I Killed Pluto, and Why It Had It Coming .” Conversely, Dr. Stern and Christopher T. Russell , a planetary scientist at U.C.L.A. who is the principal investigator for the Dawn mission, focus more on the intrinsic properties rather than gravitational interactions with other bodies. Once a body is large enough to become round, heavier elements like iron sink to the core. Image Alan Stern is the chief investigator for NASA’s New Horizons craft, which is to investigate Pluto. Credit NASA Vesta, which Dawn studied before heading to Ceres, has some planetlike features, although it is more potato than sphere in shape. “If all of the scientific community starts referring to Vesta and Ceres and Pluto as planets, then eventually everyone will come along,” Dr. Russell said. “We’re going to let the bodies speak for themselves.” A simple change advocated by many Pluto fans would be to eliminate the “cleared the neighborhood” requirement. That would add not only Pluto and Ceres, but also two other icy worlds discovered beyond Neptune by Dr. Brown — Haumea and Makemake — that are large enough to be roundish. Dr. Stern goes further. If a planet is defined by its physical properties, not its dynamical ones, then anything round but not a star, is a planet regardless of where it is. “Some of them orbit other planets,” he said. “Get over it.” In a widely mocked video clip that circulated last week, Isaac Mizrahi, the fashion designer, and Shawn Killinger, a host on the QVC shopping channel, discuss the colorful patterns of a blouse — “It almost kind of looks like what the Earth does when you’re a bazillion miles from the planet moon,” Ms. Killinger says, then reverses to say that the moon is not a planet — and they end up squabbling over the astronomical definitions of moon, planet, sun and star. Image NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will examine the dwarf planet Ceres in March. Credit George Shelton/NASA “The moon is such a planet I can’t even stand it,” Mr. Mizrahi says, exasperated. “Well, what else is it if it’s not a planet?” Under Dr. Stern’s definition, Mr. Mizrahi would win the argument. “I am happy to defend him,” Dr. Stern said via email Sunday. “I see no logical reason why large moons that are in hydrostatic equilibrium should not be considered planets too, and I call them that.” Dr. Stern’s classification system distinguishes moons as “secondary planets,” while “primary planets” directly orbit around the sun — pushing the number of planets in the solar system to more than 20. But even some New Horizons scientists who agree Pluto should be a planet disagree with Dr. Stern. “No, I don’t count the moon as a planet,” said Catherine Olkin, the deputy project scientist. “I guess, where do we stop?” There is no indication that the I.A.U. will revisit the planet question when it meets in Honolulu in August. Astronomers there could propose a new definition, but Thierry Montmerle, the general secretary of the organization, said, “The vast majority of the international planetary community has clearly accepted this definition.” Indeed, passions seem to be cooling over all. Dr. Brown said he rarely heard Pluto complaints these days, but about a decade ago, he regularly received vulgar phone calls. “They were generally calling me names that were sufficiently rude that I can’t say them,” Dr. Brown said, “and some of them were sufficiently rude that I didn’t know what it meant, and I had to ask my grad students, and they often wouldn’t tell me, because they were too busy rolling on the floor laughing.” Related : My Very Educated Readers, Please Write Us a New Planet Mnemonic

NASA
Space
Planet
Pluto
New Horizons
Ceres Planet
Eris Planet


A Name Awaiting a Bridge

Abstract: Gov. Eliot Spitzer is understood to be mulling ways to honor some famous people. He got the ball rolling this month by asking lawmakers to rename the Triborough Bridge for Robert F. Kennedy , the New York senator who was assassinated while running for president in 1968. Predictable metaphors have filled the air, about how Kennedy built bridges among different groups. (That he also burned bridges in his day has gone largely unremarked.) One comment in particular landed on the ear with a thud. In making the case in his State of the State address for renaming the Triborough, the governor said, “it is only fitting that we honor a leader who did so much to build the New York we love today.” Oh? And who might that be? It certainly wasn’t Bobby Kennedy. With total respect for his memory, how can anyone say that he “did so much to build” New York? Nearly his entire public career was shaped elsewhere. He was senator for a mere three and a half years — hardly time enough for the heavy-duty building that Mr. Spitzer suggests. To Michael Miscione, Manhattan’s borough historian, the proposed new name for the bridge underscores a fundamental weakness in how we go about remembering and honoring our roots. He means this in no way as a political statement or an anti-Kennedy slight. For Mr. Miscione, the issue is simply this: “Are we going to be leaders or are we going to be followers in our civic memory-making?” “Are we going to name things after people that people already know about, and sort of follow the mass consciousness?” he said. “Or are we going to pique people’s consciousness by naming things after deserving people that the crowds don’t necessarily know about? I think we should be leading, not following.” To his mind, the Kennedy suggestion falls into the category of following. He raises an interesting point. We have a tendency to slap the names of popular figures on places that have nothing to do with the lives they led. It is an easy, if somewhat unthinking, approach. It’s why ballplayers like Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio and Gil Hodges end up on New York highways and bridges. Mr. Miscione isn’t alone in not getting it. If it were up to him, the Triborough would be renamed for Andrew Haswell Green, a giant of 19th century urban planning who has been almost entirely forgotten. For years, Mr. Miscione has been on a mission to win proper civic recognition for Green, who died in 1903 at the age of 83 (having been shot in a case of mistaken identity). How important was he? Consider what we have, in good measure because of his influence: Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bronx Zoo, the New York Public Library, plus Riverside and Morningside Parks. Modern New York owes its very being to Green. He guided a movement that led in 1898 to the consolidation of independent cities and towns into the five-borough city. Whose name, in Mr. Miscione’s view, is better to put on the roadway network that connects three of those boroughs: Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx? Granted, the borough historian is far from neutral. Preserving Green’s memory is a passion with him. He laments that the only New York monument to this visionary planner is a stone bench on a northern hill of Central Park. You have a better chance of finding an empty taxicab in the rain during rush hour than you have of finding this bench on your own. Mr. Miscione wants something grander, and the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, agrees. As possible bearers of the Green name, Mr. Benepe has proposed two small but pleasant parks in Manhattan and — a more novel thought — the bicycle path that runs along the Hudson River. The decision rests with Mr. Miscione because this is his “crusade,” Mr. Benepe said. Interesting ideas, Mr. Miscione said, especially the one involving the bike path. But frankly, he said, “I’m holding out for something better. And, boy oh boy, the Triborough Bridge would be better.” It would. But that change is not about to happen. “You never know,” Mr. Miscione said. Indeed, you don’t. But you can have reasonable hunches, including that the political class will do what it will do. Still, his larger point is well-taken: Perhaps a civic structure should reflect the comparable civic influence of the person whose name it carries. Not that there is anything wrong with leaving the Triborough as it is. That name has the virtue of saying what the bridge is about.

History
State of the State Message (NYS)
Kennedy Robert Francis
Miscione Michael
Spitzer Eliot L


Praise the Lord and Pass the Joystick

Abstract: The battle is on for souls and Troy A. Lyndon refuses to lose. As non-Christians wander Manhattan in Mr. Lyndon's new video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces, they are recruited to join the side of God or be judged following the rapture. "People who don't care about Christianity love these stories," said Mr. Lyndon, chief executive of Left Behind Games, as he demonstrated the game in New York recently. "You recruit the neutrals and persuade them to come to your side." Mr. Lyndon might well be talking about the Christian gaming business. The company is releasing its Left Behind game, which contains biblical messages and lessons, later this year after almost four years in development. It hopes to convert non-Christians into fanatical players. "With 20 million readers of 'Left Behind' books, even if we sell to just 2.5 percent" of those readers, "that's 500,000 copies," Mr. Lyndon, who has raised more than $1 million so far to build his game, said. "We'll have $4 million in earnings the first year." By 2008, he says, the game, which is designed for PC's, will be available for the Microsoft Xbox and the Sony PlayStation. Whether readers who love the "Left Behind" books will gravitate to its video games, of course, remains to be seen. Left Behind's battle lies in convincing consumers that Christian video games can be just as enjoyable as mainstream titles. Mr. Lyndon's company, based in Murrieta, Calif., is not alone. The number of Christian game developers is growing every year, albeit slowly. When Tim Emmerich, president and owner of GraceWorks Interactive, a Christian gaming company in Corvallis, Ore., formed the Christian Game Developers Conference five years ago, he expected 10 people to show up. Thirty came. The next year that number tripled. This year, he expects more than 100. "This past year, five continents were represented by those attending," he said. An increase in religious gaming companies reflects a growing interest among consumers for such games, Christian game developers say. Consumers who are tired of the extreme violence in some video games, and who are generally more conservative politically, want more family-friendly Christian titles, game developers say. Still, the developers recognize they have a long fight ahead; their revenue accounts for less than 1 percent of the $10.5 billion video game market in the United States, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, N.Y., that tracks video games sales. But Christian ventures are gaining traction. When the game developer Digital Praise introduced the first two games of its Adventures in Odyssey series in March 2005, the titles sold more than 1,000 units each in the first few weeks through Christian retailers. Since then, the company has added five more games and sold 70,000 units. The company's most popular game, Dance Praise, where players sing and dance to songs on the screen, sold 30,000 copies alone, pulling in $1.5 million. Those numbers look paltry, however, next to the industry's best sellers like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, by Rockstar Games, which NPD Group says sold 5.1 million units in 2005. Still, the sales of Adventures in Odyssey, in which players must answer questions about Biblical principles or learn values-based lessons to advance, and subsequent titles were enough to grab the attention of the Navarre Corporation, a large distributor. A partnership with Navarre formed last July, has since helped Digital Praise sell software at Circuit City and CompUSA stores and at Amazon.com -- a coup for Christian game developers whose less popular and often unknown games usually fail to gain the interest of national big-box retailers. Instead, their games are most often sold through company Web sites or through Christian book stores. "We just reach out and try to touch as many people as we can," said Tom Bean, president and chief executive of Digital Praise, which is based in Fremont, Calif. Christian game developers see themselves as pioneers, much as Christian musicians were 20 years ago. They hope Christian video games will enjoy a rise in consumer interest similar to that of Christian music, which now accounts for 7 percent of all industry sales. And in films, Christian game developers can point to the success of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "The Passion of the Christ." Video games, specialists say, succeed or fail based on the level of excitement -- not the message -- they deliver to players. In that sense it's similar to the music and film industries, said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon, Calif., which tests dozens of video games a year. "You either get a hit or you die." It can be tough to survive in such a hit-or-miss market, especially for small business ventures that have perhaps $500,000 to spend on a game that has to compete against the technology and sophistication of a $10 million game produced by an industry giant like Activision. Many Christian game developers, like Mr. Bean and Mr. Lyndon, have mortgaged their homes -- more than once. With limited financing, they are adopting more thoughtful approaches to running their companies. For example, Christian developers are buying the licenses of popular books that already have a mass following. Mr. Lyndon is trying to capitalize on the success of the "Left Behind" novels, which have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. As a result, Left Behind is a much-anticipated game, Mr. Lyndon said. To keep production costs low, Mr. Lyndon hires game developers in Ukraine and other eastern European countries whose salaries average $700 a month -- much less than companies pay developers based in the United States. Still, Christian game developers must find a way to enter the console market. Christian games are made exclusively for the shrinking PC gaming market, where sales dropped 14 percent, to $953 million, in 2005 compared with the year before, according to NPD. And a big stumbling block may be the Christian designation itself. Christian games "have a redeeming social value," said Michael Pachter, a research analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities in Los Angeles. "But it's not good to be a Bible thumper." And finding the balance between conflict -- an element crucial to every game -- and good clean fun is not easy. "I think by and large most of us feel like we're doing the Lord's work," said Robert Anderson, president of Cactus Game Design, a Christian gaming company in Hayesville, N.C. "We're willing to make sacrifices to do it."

LEFT BEHIND GAMES
GRACEWORKS INTERACTIVE
DIGITAL PRAISE
NAVARRE CORP
COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAMES
CHRISTIANS AND CHRISTIANITY
COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET


At Davos, Foreign Funds Add Tension to the Talks

Abstract: DAVOS, Switzerland — Huge pools of state-controlled cash have rescued American and European banks from their own mistakes in recent months. And the people who run those funds want some respect. The behavior of such sovereign wealth funds , a fringe issue last year at the World Economic Forum , has become a prime topic. Many participants are speculating on the extent to which the funds are seizing control of strategic assets or using investments to cloak a political agenda. Bader Al-Saad, managing director of the Kuwait Investment Authority, grew increasingly testy during a panel discussion at suggestions that his nation’s fund wanted to do anything other than earn a good return. “It’s all about ‘if’ and ‘suppose,’ ” Mr. Saad said. His fund helped recapitalize the banking giants Citigroup and Merrill Lynch this month after heavy losses linked to financial market turbulence. “It’s as though sovereign wealth funds are guilty before proven innocent.” Western officials, thankful for the cash in times of crisis, say they want to encourage the free flow of investment. But they are worried that, as skepticism about the benefits of globalization rises in Europe and the United States, investments from funds controlled by Russia, China and Middle East nations will ignite irresistible political demands for restrictions on investment. That has created a palpable tension, as Western leaders try to pre-empt a crisis that has not yet come — and may never arrive — by demanding that the funds be more open about their investments. Western officials have cited Norway’s $380 billion fund, called the Government Pension Fund-Global, as a model for the rest of the world. The fund publishes detailed statistics on its holdings and insulates itself from politics by using asset management firms to make investments. It cannot own more than a 5 percent stake in a company, and the average stake is 0.5 percent. But Kristin Halvorsen, Norway’s finance minister, questioned whether China, Russia or even Kuwait could suddenly adopt Norwegian openness. “Our transparency is very connected to the transparency of Norwegian society,” Ms. Halvorsen said. “It is a part of our tradition that other countries do not have.” Mere talk of new rules clearly grates on Russian officials. Alexei L. Kudrin, Russia’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, who was also in Davos, pointedly reminded the audience that his country, during an extended bout of weakness in the 1990s, had no choice but to welcome Western investment. “When there was a period when traditional economies had strong funds, and though several funds moved into markets and bought industries, we did not speak of restricting capital,” Mr. Kudrin said. The investor George Soros pointed out that the funds, which now have $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion in assets, were diverse, and that generalized sets of rules would be hard to formulate and apply. “I think we have to distinguish between different kinds of wealth funds,” Mr. Soros said. “Gulf states are one kind. China is another. Singapore is yet another. Russia is also different. So I don’t think you can make any general rules.” Indeed, the funds operate in very different contexts. Singapore’s funds, the Government Investment Corporation and Temasek Holdings, plow government savings into investments with a long track record, since the 1970s, of serving the twin goals of diversification and return maximization. Funds based in the Persian Gulf operate in a volatile region where the United States is a strategic power. China’s new China Investment Corporation has raised concerns in part because Chinese companies are believed to be eager for access to Western technology. And Gazprom, the Russian state-owned natural gas giant, has flexed its muscle to such a degree — notably in a dispute over supplies to Ukraine — that Europeans are worried that the Russian sovereign fund, not yet operational, will operate in the same way. The example of DP World in Dubai, which is not a sovereign fund but a state-owned company, has lingered in the minds of people like Mr. Saad, the Kuwaiti fund manager. After DP World was blocked from taking over management of American ports in 2006, much of the world asked whether there was a new litmus test for investment in the United States. Mr. Saad insisted that any new rules should also apply to large private investors, like hedge funds. Western nations in general, he said, should become more transparent about what they define as strategic or critical sectors, areas where American and European officials say they need to preserve the right to block capital flows.

Sovereign Wealth Funds
World Economic Forum
Politics and Government
International Relations
Davos (Switzerland)


Christie Stands by His Decision to Cancel Trans-Hudson Tunnel

Abstract: Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey defended on Tuesday his decision to cancel a train tunnel long planned to relieve increasing congestion across the Hudson River, saying it was a matter of principle. Responding to a report by the Government Accountability Office that found he had overstated the cost of the tunnel to New Jersey, the governor also derided the tunnel plan, though he had said when he canceled the project in October 2010 that he believed in its merits. While the tunnel would have expanded the number of subway lines available to those who commute to Pennsylvania Station in New York City, he characterized it on Tuesday as a dead-end to a department store. “So when they want to build a tunnel to the basement of Macy’s, and stick the New Jersey taxpayers with a bill of three-to-five billion dollars over — no matter how much the administration yells and screams, you have to say no,” he said in a speech at a conference on taxes and the economy in Manhattan held by the George W. Bush Institute. “You have to look them right in the eye, no matter how much they try to vilify you for it, and you have to say no,” the governor told an audience that included Mr. Bush, Karl Rove and other prominent Republicans and business executives. “You have to be willing to say no to those things that compromise your principles.” The tunnel would have doubled capacity for commuters on New Jersey Transit and Amtrak trains, which now share two 100-year-old single track tunnels to cross the Hudson. The tracks are at capacity, and commuter demand is expected to rise 38 percent by 2030. While the governor forcefully defended on Tuesday his decision to scrap the tunnel plan, he did not directly mention the report or address its specifics. Mr. Christie said in 2010 that his steering committee for the project, known as ARC for Access to the Region’s Core, had told him that the tunnel would cost at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion. But the report by the Government Accountability Office, an independent, nonpartisan Congressional investigative agency, found that New Jersey and federal officials had agreed that the costs would be from $9.5 billion to $12.4 billion. New Jersey Transit officials, who led the governor’s steering committee, said the tunnel would cost no more than $10 billion, the report found. Mr. Christie also said in 2010 that the state would pay 70 percent of the cost; the report said the state’s share was 14.4 percent. And he said the federal government was requiring the state to pay any cost overruns; the report said that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had offered to help pay with grants, loans and public-private partnerships. The report prompted criticism of Mr. Christie from several New Jersey Democrats. Assemblyman John S. Wisniewski, the chairman of the transportation committee and of the state’s Democratic Party, said the decision was “shortsighted and politically driven,” because the governor directed money from the tunnel to fill the state’s transportation trust fund, allowing him to keep a campaign promise not to raise the gasoline tax. “This was a tunnel that benefited New Jersey, for which New Jersey had a small share of the cost, in which we had the ability to negotiate cost overruns,” he said. “The governor seized upon incorrect facts and followed the old saw that says if you repeat something often enough, it becomes the truth.” In defending the decision, the governor and his office this week cited an initial cost of $8.7 billion for the tunnel. That was the figure that state and federal officials agreed upon in 2009 as the basis of the first federal grant to the state. Mr. Christie has said that the costs were expected to rise $2 billion to $5 billion above that, and in an interview in January, Mr. Christie told “Meet the Press” on NBC that the tunnel would cost “an additional $8 billion.” But federal and state officials had always known there was a range of costs. Mr. Christie’s office said Tuesday that federal officials had “confirmed” that the tunnel would cost from $10.8 billion to $13.7 billion. But New Jersey officials had disputed that estimate a day after federal officials made it, according to the Government Accountability Office report, saying the tunnel would cost no more than $10 billion.

Trans-Hudson Passenger Rail Tunnel (ARC Tunnel)


Pakistan Edgy as Ex-Premier Is Exiled Again

Abstract: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan , Sept. 10 — Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf , faced the prospect of fresh clashes with a newly independent Supreme Court after deporting a former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif , as he tried to return from exile on Monday. Pakistan’s military government moved harshly against Mr. Sharif, deporting him within four hours of his arrival and arresting almost the entire leadership of his party as they tried to travel to the airport to greet him. The government action appeared to flout a recent Supreme Court ruling ordering that Mr. Sharif be allowed to return to Pakistan unhindered, and it immediately ignited street protests among Mr. Sharif’s supporters. The Supreme Court could order an investigation into who was responsible for the deportation. Mr. Sharif, 57, a bitter rival of General Musharraf, who ousted him in a coup in 1999, has spent much of his last seven years in exile in Saudi Arabia under an agreement to leave Pakistan for 10 years in return for having his jail sentences for corruption and hijacking commuted. The government has insisted that he should fulfill the agreement and remain in Saudi Arabia, where he was sent on Monday. In Washington, Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said that Mr. Sharif’s deportation “runs contrary to the Supreme Court ruling.” But, he added, “it’s still a pending legal matter, and we would want all parties to act in accordance with the law.” One Bush administration official, declining to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue, said the deportation was “not necessarily the worst thing that could happen.” While the United States is loath to appear publicly as if it is interfering in Pakistan’s politics, the Bush administration has been urging General Musharraf to agree to a power-sharing deal with another former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. The power-sharing pact was viewed within the Bush administration as a way to both shore up General Musharraf’s rapidly flagging support in Pakistan and stop him from exercising emergency powers, as hard-liners within his party have urged. A deal appeared close two weeks ago but stalled as some of General Musharraf’s backers in Pakistan balked at the idea, American and Pakistani officials said. The Bush administration official said that one hope now was that General Musharraf’s strong move against Mr. Sharif would enable him to stand up to Mr. Sharif’s allies in Pakistan and go ahead with the power-sharing deal. Mr. Sharif’s return had been expected to further upset Pakistan’s political scene and galvanize the political opposition, which has been led by a lawyers’ movement that has already declared General Musharraf’s continued rule unconstitutional. Without his presence, the opposition may center on the courts, rather than political rallies. In an interview during the flight from London, Mr. Sharif, the strongest opponent of military rule in Pakistan, had warned that he might be arrested. He nevertheless looked shocked as he was served with a warrant for his arrest on money laundering charges, and then was pushed and pulled by police officers and plainclothes intelligence officials through which the throng of his supporters and journalists who had accompanied him. “I am amazed by this fabricated case,” Mr. Sharif said as he was shoved through the crowd. “I’m amazed, I’m shocked.” Azhar Mahmud Qazi, a retired lieutenant colonel and a court official representing the National Accountability Bureau, which is the main corruption investigation body, said he served an arrest warrant on Mr. Sharif, charging him with money laundering. He said that the charges were the results of a three-year investigation surrounding a paper mill owned by Mr. Sharif, and that the amount involved was about $21 million. Government officials who arrested him said he would be sent to prison. But later, Tariq Azim Khan, the state minister for information, said Mr. Sharif, given a choice, had decided to go to Saudi Arabia instead. “While he was being taken to detention, he was offered, if he wanted, to avail the opportunity to go to Saudi Arabia as per the agreement,” Mr. Khan said. “He opted to go to Saudi Arabia. We arranged a special flight and he flew out of Islamabad.” Mr. Sharif’s lawyers condemned his arrest and deportation as illegal, and warned that the repercussions would be felt in the courts and across the country. “The whole episode was very unlawful and was a clear contempt of court,” said Amjad Malik, a British lawyer accompanying Mr. Sharif. “It is a violation of the law of Pakistan. It is a criminal offense to kidnap someone and take them out of the country.” He added, “It is a sad day — they have really treated the man contemptuously.” The court has found new independence under the recently reinstated Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, whom General Musharraf tried, and failed, to remove this year. “It is a spot on the Musharraf regime,” Mr. Malik said. “It shows they have not learnt.” The National Accountability Bureau had last week refused to issue an arrest warrant for Mr. Sharif, in view of the Supreme Court ruling, deciding instead that Mr. Sharif should be allowed to return and could then be called to attend a court hearing, Mr. Malik said. After Mr. Sharif arrived, lengthy negotiations finally succeeded in having the police withdrawn from around the plane. Mr. Sharif then emerged waving to the crowd and boarded a bus to the V.I.P. lounge in the airport terminal. There, before he passed through immigration , he was arrested and taken back out onto the airport tarmac an hour later. The government took stringent security measures before Mr. Sharif landed. Army rangers cordoned off the airport perimeter and stood on rooftops. The police closed down all traffic within a distance of four miles around the Islamabad airport and manned a series of five search points on each of the approach roads. Only passengers having tickets for domestic flights were allowed to pass through the barricades after boarding on special buses. No private vehicles were allowed inside the airport. Supporters of Mr. Sharif clashed with the police on the main Islamabad highway leading to the airport and in different parts of the nearby garrison town of Rawalpindi. Clashes were also reported in different cities across Punjab, the most populous province. The police used tear gas and baton charges to disperse the supporters. Mr. Sharif heads the All Parties Democratic Movement, a recently formed movement of opposition parties, which has called for a conference of all political parties to agree to an interim government and conditions for free and fair elections. He has criticized the prospect of a power-sharing deal between General Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto, which has largely been negotiated in secret, as proof of the lack of democracy in the country, and won quick support from a public weary of military rule, deteriorating law and order and rising prices. In an interview on the plane from London, Mr. Sharif said his mission was to get General Musharraf removed from power. “It’s a final battle now between dictatorship and democracy,” he said. “Civil society is there now struggling for the restoration of the rule of law. The judiciary is today independent. I think it is about time that we put an end to this menace of dictatorship because it had inflicted so much damage to my country.” He warned that any attempt by the government to prevent his return would amount to contempt of court. “Mr. Musharraf does not believe in the rule of law,” he said. “He tries to bulldoze everything that comes in his way.” He called on the Bush administration to stop propping up General Musharraf. “President Bush is somehow supporting an individual who today has become a symbol of hatred in Pakistan, a man whom everybody in Pakistan wants to get rid of,” he warned. “I don’t know why Mr. Bush is still supporting this man. He must not equate Pakistan with Mr. Musharraf. He should have his friendship with the people of Pakistan, not with an individual who is becoming more and more unpopular in the country.” He said he planned to mobilize public support to end General Musharraf’s rule in the same way that Chief Justice Chaudhry used countrywide rallies after he was suspended in March, finally winning back his job in July.

Pakistan
Sharif Nawaz
Musharraf Pervez
Politics and Government
Decisions and Verdicts