Islamist Militants Storm Hotel in Somalia, Killing at Least 6

Abstract: NAIROBI, Kenya — Islamist militants stormed a hotel in central Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, on Saturday afternoon, killing at least six people in what has become a well-established tactic to sow terror. Image A man with blood on his shirt ran from the scene of the attack, which killed at least six people. Credit Mohamed Abdiwahab/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images According to witnesses and government officials, the attack started around 4 p.m. with a car bomb at the gates of the Naso Hablod Hotel , before fighters ran in and shot at guests. The Shabab militant group, which has been terrorizing Somalia for nearly a decade and claimed responsibility for the attack, has struck at least four other hotels in Mogadishu in the past year. A deafening car bomb at the hotel gates is typically how such attacks begin. American-trained commandos from Somalia’s security services killed all four attackers after a shootout that lasted several hours, said Abdikamil Moalim Shukri, a spokesman for Somalia’s Internal Security Ministry. Witnesses said the attackers appeared to be tactically proficient, fighting their way into the hotel and then firing on government security forces from the rooftop. Image Somalis helped a man who was wounded. All four attackers were reported killed. Credit Farah Abdi Warsameh/Associated Press Mohamed Mohamud, the hotel’s bookkeeper, said he was locking up his office and about to perform evening prayers when he heard a huge explosion outside. He looked up to see several gunmen rush into the hotel, and he hid near his office. “I’m shocked but thank God I’m safe,” he said. Somalia has been synonymous with chaos and bloodshed since the central government collapsed in 1991, sending the country into a tailspin of clan violence and widespread destruction. The government controls little territory and struggles to maintain security even inside the capital. Many security specialists had predicted that the Shabab militant group, an affiliate of Al Qaeda, would step up attacks during the holy month of Ramadan, which began in early June and continues until early July. In previous years, Shabab fighters staged suicide missions and offensives against government positions during Ramadan, believing that it was especially auspicious to be martyred during the Muslim month of fasting.

Somalia
Mogadishu
Terrorism
Ramadan
Al Shabab


Kittel Is First to Capture Two Tour Stages

Abstract: Marcel Kittel of Germany won the 10th stage of the Tour de France on Tuesday in a sprint finish, and Chris Froome stayed out of trouble to keep the leader’s yellow jersey. Kittel held off Andre Greipel and Mark Cavendish in a dash to the line to win his second stage of the Tour. The 122-mile flat ride started from St.-Gildas-des-Bois in northwest France and finished in St.-Malo on the north coast of Brittany. Kittel won the opening stage and is now the first rider to capture two stages in this year’s race. Peter Sagan, who won the green jersey for best sprinter in last year’s Tour, finished fourth. He holds a commanding 83-point lead over Greipel in this year’s green jersey race.

Marcel Kittel
Tour de France
Biking
Christopher Froome


U.N. Fears Serbs Will Disrupt a Free Kosovo

Abstract: PRISTINA, Kosovo , Dec. 9 — As Kosovo moves closer to declaring its independence, fears are rising that Serbia and Serbs in Kosovo’s north could take steps to try to disrupt the province’s shaky economy and scare off countries ready to recognize it as a sovereign state. Senior United Nations officials say they are particularly worried that the Serbian government will direct Kosovo’s Serbs to disrupt most of the province’s power supply and assert partial control of the north by having Serb police officers break away from the province’s police force. Such moves could further inflame tensions between the province’s ethnic Albanians and Serbs, possibly leading to violence. Kosovo, which has a majority of ethnic Albanians, has been trying to break away from Serbia, but Serbia has vehemently fought to keep the province. Negotiations between Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leaders and Serbia over the province’s fate have gone nowhere, and the United Nations — which administers Kosovo and is trying to broker an agreement — has said the talks should not drag past Monday. The United Nations is then expected to begin deliberations about its next possible step. Western diplomats in Brussels and Pristina suggest the United Nations will invite the European Union to replace the United Nations mission in the province, and leave it to individual countries to decide if they should recognize Kosovo as an independent nation. Aid agencies, including the United Nations High Commission for Refugees , have already drawn up contingency plans for an exodus of 5,000 to 100,000 refugees, many of which they expect will be ethnic Serbs.. While the Serbian government has repeatedly emphasized that it wants to avoid any violence in the province, it has promised to stop trade with Kosovo and begin economic sanctions if it declares independence. United Nations officials say a trade cutoff would not be especially damaging because Kosovo already does most of its trading with Macedonia. But they are worried that economic sanctions could include disrupting the supply of electricity, which could cause major problems in an economy that already is one of Europe’s poorest. The province’s main power plant, which supplies 75 percent of Kosovo’s electricity, runs on water supplied from the north, where Serbia still retains substantial control. In addition, Serbia could cut some of the province’s other power by stopping the transmission of electricity from Europe, which runs on power lines through Serbia. Even more alarming, United Nations officials say, is the possibility that ethnic Serb members of Kosovo’s police force could quit and adopt Serbian uniforms, a move that might provoke attacks from hard-line ethnic Albanian groups. “I have no information that that kind of thing will happen, but we have to address it,” said Steven Schook, the principal deputy representative of the United Nations administration. “It would be irresponsible not to.” He declined to say what steps the United Nations was taking to try preventing a split in the police force, although NATO troops have increased patrols in the northern region. Some foreign observers are worried Kosovo could declare independence as early as Monday, but Mr. Schook said he expected the province to wait until next year, and the likely leader of the region’s next government, Hashim Thaci, recently said he had the same expectation.


Thiel-Gawker Fight Raises Concerns About Press Freedom

Abstract: The story of Gawker versus Hulk Hogan — or, perhaps more accurately, Peter Thiel — has some asking whether press freedom in the United States is in peril if a scorned billionaire can help deliver a crippling blow to a media company. But since Mr. Thiel spoke to The New York Times on Wednesday about his reasons for funding the lawsuit against Gawker, the debate surrounding the dispute has expanded to encompass ideological battles in media, technology and politics. A variety of observers, including other billionaires and figures involved in GamerGate, have entered into the fray to address themes like Mr. Thiel’s political motivations, and the wider issue of Silicon Valley power players and their involvement with the news media. A Dangerous Precedent for the Press? Several journalists felt that Mr. Thiel’s political views and connection with Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, could be worrisome based on Mr. Trump’s previous comments about changing libel laws to make it easier to sue media outlets . Jane E. Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota and the former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that the Gawker case may raise the stakes for press freedom. “It’s often the scrappy, unconventional news outlets that challenge conventional wisdom, and in doing so, they serve an important purpose,” Ms. Kirtley said. “But they are also very vulnerable financially. It’s expensive to defend suits like this.” Clara Jeffery, the editor in chief of Mother Jones, a left-leaning political magazine that recently won a long and costly defamation case filed by Frank VanderSloot, an Idaho billionaire and major Republican donor, said that the case was unsettling. (Mr. VanderSloot said, in a statement made last October at the time of the court decision, that he would “help pay for the legal expenses of people who have been defamed by Mother Jones,” pledging a million dollars to the cause.) “Combined with press consolidation, or ever-greater influence among the 0.0001 percenters, it is a little unnerving,” she said in an interview. “The circumstance that brought on the lawsuit could not be more dissimilar,” Ms. Jeffery said, referring to her magazine’s case. “But what is similar is the pattern of press intimidation.” Many New York Times readers debated what the case meant for the news media in the 21st century. “It sends a message to other media outlets to watch who and what they’re writing stories about,” Superamerickson of Minneapolis wrote . “Don’t investigate rich people or you’ll get shut down.” Video Nick Denton challenged the financier, Peter Thiel, who has bankrolled lawsuits against Gawker, to a debate about journalism. Credit Credit CNBC Venture Capitalists Weigh In Well-known figures in Silicon Valley began to dissect Mr. Thiel’s political motivations publicly and debate whether it was appropriate for outside parties to fund lawsuits like the one brought against Gawker. Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, wrote on Twitter that “Greenpeace and Sierra Club, among many other progressive groups, routinely fund other plaintiffs’ lawsuits,” and linked to a post from the economics blog Marginal Revolution. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay who in 2013 created First Look Media, a studio and digital media company, drew a connection between Mr. Thiel’s actions and past comments from Mr. Trump. Jack Doppelt, a media ethics professor at Northwestern University, called Mr. Trump a “great example” of a wealthy figure who has used the civil legal system to his advantage, and added Mr. Thiel to that group. “Donald Trump knows that if he sues somebody for something, it will drown the other side,” Mr. Doppelt said. “He’s got the resources to be able to do that. It’s a real distortion of what we want our civil legal system to be about.” Some New York Times readers argued that the case was the latest example of a flawed justice system. “This is nothing short of terrifying,” a reader identified as CL wrote . “Gawker has definitely crossed the ethical line at times ... but the idea that powerful billionaires can essentially launch a crusade against a media outlet they don’t like is not good.” Hugh Nations, a reader in Austin, Tex., wrote that the case “starkly illustrates the most fundamental flaw in our ‘system of justice.’” “Whether the case is civil or criminal, the key to the courthouse door is the dollar bill.” A Hero for the New Right? Mr. Thiel’s involvement in the Gawker case and his apparent support of Mr. Trump place him at an extraordinary intersection of American political currents. The Hogan case had become a cause for online groups like GamerGate, a loose movement that started in opposition to perceived problems in video game journalism but has since become a broad and often aggressive campaign against the news media and what members refer to as “social justice warriors.” Disdain for the media, but especially for Gawker, is a theme in online communities supporting Mr. Trump, less for controversial reporting than for perceived promotion of an agenda of social justice and “political correctness” — a subject Mr. Thiel has written about extensively. (Mr. Thiel wrote a book with David O. Sacks, a former PayPal colleague and now chief executive of Zenefits, titled “The Diversity Myth,” about his time at Stanford University.) Mr. Thiel has written extensively about his particular brand of libertarian politics, giving new supporters a rich array of material to engage with. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in a 2009 essay. In a 2012 interview with Francis Fukuyama, author of “The End of History and the Last Man,” Mr. Thiel said , “Properly understood, political correctness is our greatest political problem,” citing the writings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss.

Gawker
Lawsuits
Silicon Valley
Freedom of the press
Donald Trump
Peter A Thiel
Gawker.com
HNWI,Wealth,Billionaires,1 Percent


Steven McDonald, Paralyzed Officer Who Championed Forgiveness, Dies at 59

Abstract: Steven McDonald, a New York City police officer who was shot by a 15-year-old boy in Central Park in July 1986 and paralyzed from the neck down, but who forgave his assailant, hoped for the youth’s redemption and remained in the public eye for his spirit in the face of adversity, died on Tuesday in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 59. His death, at North Shore University Hospital, was announced by Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill. Officer McDonald was hospitalized on Friday after having a heart attack . He lived in the village of Malverne in Nassau County with his wife, Patricia Ann Norris-McDonald, the mayor of the village and his caregiver. A plainclothes police officer when he was shot, Officer McDonald remained on the Police Department’s payroll afterward as a first-grade detective, at times appearing at roll calls and offering support for wounded officers. Image Mr. McDonald in 1986, the year he was shot and paralyzed. His son, Conor, who was born six months after the shooting, is a sergeant with the New York Police Department and represents the fourth generation of the family to serve in the department. “No one could have predicted that Steven would touch so many people, in New York and around the world,” Commissioner O’Neill said. “Like so many cops, Steven joined the N.Y.P.D. to make a difference in people’s lives. And he accomplished that every day.” Officer McDonald was 29 with two years on the police force when he and his partner were on patrol on July 12, 1986. About 4:15 p.m., they stopped three boys who had been reported to be loitering near the boathouse at the northern end of Central Park. Officer McDonald began speaking with one of the boys, Shavod Jones. Seconds later, Mr. Jones pulled out a handgun and shot him three times . Image Mr. McDonald was taken to Bellevue Hospital on July 12, 1986, after he was shot. Credit David A. Cantor All three boys were arrested. The shooting drew wide publicity because of the grievousness of Officer McDonald’s injuries, the young age of the gunman and the callousness of the act. President Ronald Reagan phoned the officer when he was recovering at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan to wish him well. At his son’s baptism in a chapel at Bellevue in early 1987, Officer McDonald wrote of Mr. Jones in a statement that was read by his wife. “I forgive him,” he said, “and hope that he can find peace and purpose in his life.” Mr. Jones was convicted of attempted murder . In the summer of 1988, Officer McDonald sent stamps and a box of stationery to Mr. Jones along with a note saying, “Let’s carry on a dialogue.” He later met with Mr. Jones’s mother and attended services at a Baptist church in Harlem with his grandmother. The correspondence continued for a while but ended after Officer McDonald turned down a request from Mr. Jones’s family to seek parole. The officer said he was not knowledgeable or capable enough to intervene. Image Mr. McDonald, left, at the baptism of his son, Conor, in 1987. Conor was born six months after the shooting, and is now a sergeant with the Police Department. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Mr. Jones was paroled in 1995 after eight and half years in prison, having faced up to 10 years under guidelines for sentencing juvenile offenders. Four days after coming home, Mr. Jones died of head injuries he sustained the previous day when a speeding motorcycle on which he was a passenger crashed into parked cars while performing wheelies in East Harlem, his old neighborhood, the police said at the time. One of the cars carried a police officer from the department’s parole division who was monitoring Mr. Jones because of the case’s notoriety and his troubled record while in prison. The officer received minor injuries. Officer McDonald, who was able to speak, albeit haltingly, and breathe with the help of a respirator, made many public appearances over the years, telling of his faith as a Roman Catholic and saying that if people wanted forgiveness, they had to show it to others. He also said he was grateful to God for sparing his life. Image Mr. McDonald made many public appearances, including this one in 2011 at City Hall in New York, where mayors from several cities spoke about gun violence. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times He made trips to Northern Ireland in the cause of reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants, accompanied by the Rev. Mychal F. Judge, the chaplain of the New York City Fire Department. Father Judge was killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center when debris rained down on him while he was ministering to victims. After the Central Park shooting, Officer McDonald told of his struggle to cope in the book “ The Steven McDonald Story ” (1989), written with his wife and the writer E. J. Kahn III. Citing the support he received from fellow police officers, Mayor Edward I. Koch and the religious and business communities, Officer McDonald wrote that “there is more love in this city than there are street corners.” Officer McDonald’s life also touched the New York sports scene. Mets relief pitcher Jesse Orosco gave him the glove he was wearing when he got the final out in the team’s 1986 World Series victory over the Boston Red Sox. And he appeared on the ice at Madison Square Garden annually to present the Rangers’ Steven McDonald Extra Effort Award to a player who had demonstrated special grit. Steven McDonald, a native of Queens Village, was born on March 1, 1957, and grew up in Rockville Centre on Long Island, one of eight children of David McDonald, a police sergeant, and his wife, Anita. He spent four years as a medical corpsman in the Navy before joining the Police Department. Image Police Officer Steven McDonald and Shavod Jones met only once for a few seconds, but the echo of those moments stayed with Mr. McDonald for a lifetime. Read the full story, written nine years after their encounter. (Sept. 14, 1995) He was living with his wife in Manhattan when he was shot, and they moved to Malverne soon afterward, buying a home there outfitted for his needs. His wife and son and his father, David, a retired New York City police sergeant, survive him, but complete information on survivors was not immediately available. A funeral mass will be held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Friday, with Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan the main celebrant. Officer McDonald’s efforts to support others who surmounted disabilities drew national attention. In August 1996, though he was a Democrat, he addressed the Republican National Convention in San Diego in support of Senator Bob Dole’s nomination, citing the serious wounds Senator Dole sustained in World War II and had overcome. The senator “raised himself up out of a chair not unlike the one I sit in tonight,” Mr. McDonald said, “and he proved that the promise of America is not a cruel deception, but a dynamic reality.”

Steven McDonald
Police
Manhattan
Obituary


Charges Upgraded in Brooklyn Crash That Killed Couple

Abstract: A grand jury has indicted the driver accused in a fatal hit-and-run crash this month on new charges of second-degree manslaughter, the Brooklyn district attorney said on Tuesday. The new charges are more severe than those that prosecutors had leveled against the driver, Julio Acevedo, for his behavior behind the wheel in the high-speed crash that killed a man, a pregnant woman and, a day later, their prematurely delivered son. At his arraignment, prosecutors had charged Mr. Acevedo, 44, with criminally negligent homicide, a low-level felony. But the district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, said an inquiry by his office led to more serious charges after it learned “additional information” about the driver’s conduct leading up to the crash. On Tuesday, three counts of second-degree manslaughter, each of which carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years, were added to an indictment filed last week against Mr. Acevedo for leaving the scene of an accident that caused the deaths of the couple, Nathan and Raizy Glauber, both 21, and their newborn son. If convicted, Mr. Acevedo could face life in prison because of prior felony convictions, including for a 1987 killing, prosecutors said. While the charge of manslaughter carries a stiffer maximum penalty than criminally negligent homicide, a judge has the discretion to opt for no jail time at all. However, such an outcome in this case appeared unlikely given Mr. Acevedo’s prior convictions and the added charges of leaving the scene. The case will most likely center on the speed he was traveling at the time of the crash and the degree to which he was aware that his speed was dangerous. In order to obtain a conviction for second-degree manslaughter, prosecutors must show a jury that Mr. Acevedo not only was driving fast, but also disregarded the serious risk such driving could pose in a way that went far beyond normal standards. Investigators said Mr. Acevedo was going just over 69 miles per hour down Kent Avenue — over twice the legal limit — when the borrowed BMW that he was driving slammed into the side of a livery cab carrying the couple. Witnesses told prosecutors that the BMW sped past cars recklessly and, as it passed a fire truck, could be heard accelerating. Before turning himself in to the police three days after the crash, Mr. Acevedo told reporters that he was the driver of the BMW. Scott Brettschneider, a lawyer representing Mr. Acevedo, said he would analyze the speed and traffic data at the time of the crash, as well as the behavior of the cabdriver as he entered Kent Avenue from Wilson Street, where there is a stop sign. “Somebody needs to scrutinize what this livery cabdriver did and didn’t do,” he said.

Brooklyn
Julio Acevedo
Raizy Glauber
Nathan Glauber
Hit and Run
Car Crash
NYPD


Sotomayor’s Blunt Style Raises Issue of Temperament

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Judge Sonia Sotomayor , President Obama’s Supreme Court choice, has a blunt and even testy side, and it was on display in December during an argument before the federal appeals court in New York. The case concerned a Canadian man who said American officials had sent him to Syria to be tortured, and Judge Sotomayor peppered a government lawyer with skeptical questions. “So the minute the executive raises the specter of foreign policy, national security,” Judge Sotomayor asked the lawyer, Jonathan F. Cohn, “it is the government’s position that that is a license to torture anyone?” Mr. Cohn managed to get out two and a half words: “No, your hon—— .” Judge Sotomayor cut him off, then hit him with two more questions and a flat declaration of what she said was his position. The lawyer managed to say she was wrong, but could not clarify the point until the chief judge, Dennis G. Jacobs, stepped in, asking, “Why don’t we just get the position?” To supporters, Judge Sotomayor’s vigorous questioning of the Bush administration’s position in the case of the Canadian, Maher Arar, showcases some of her strengths. She is known as a formidably intelligent judge with a prodigious memory who meticulously prepares for oral arguments and is not shy about grilling the lawyers who appear before her to ensure that she fully understands their arguments. But to detractors, Judge Sotomayor’s sharp-tongued and occasionally combative manner — some lawyers have described her as “difficult” and “nasty” — raises questions about her judicial temperament and willingness to listen. Her demeanor on the bench is an issue that conservatives opposed to her nomination see as a potential vulnerability — and one that Mr. Obama carefully considered before selecting her. Judge Sotomayor’s colleagues on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit say her tough and direct questioning reflects engagement and, sometimes, an effort to persuade her colleagues. Those qualities, coupled with a gregarious personality, they said, make her a powerful force behind the scenes, where she has used her mastery of the cases to change minds, improve opinions and forge consensus. Those skills, some observers say, could make her an able politician on the Supreme Court and allow her to serve as an intellectual counterweight to Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative who is known for his acerbic questioning. “In some ways she could match, well, the other New Yorker on the court, Justice Scalia,” said Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University. “He expects people to give back as good as he gives, and I expect that when Justice Sotomayor is on the court, his wish will be fulfilled.” Both colleagues and lawyers who have argued before her agree that her style is assertive. “They call it a hot bench when a judge asks a lawyer a lot of questions — well, she isn’t afraid of running a hot bench,” said H. Raymond Fasano, a Republican immigration lawyer who has appeared before her 24 times, mostly in asylum cases, and is a fan. “When a judge asks a lot of questions, that means she’s read the record, she knows the issues and she has concerns that she wants resolved. And that’s the judge’s job.” Other lawyers, though, are not so enamored. In the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which conducts anonymous interviews with lawyers to assess judges, she has gone from generally rave reviews to more tepid endorsements. Among the comments from lawyers was that she is a “terror on the bench” who “behaves in an out-of-control manner” and attacks lawyers “for making an argument she doesn’t like.” “I felt she could be very judgmental in the sense that she doesn’t let you finish your argument before she jumps in and starts asking questions,” said Sheema Chaudhry, who appeared before Judge Sotomayor in an asylum case last year. “She’s brilliant and she’s qualified, but I just feel that she can be very, how do you say, temperamental.” Gerald Lefcourt, a New York defense lawyer, has dealt with Ms. Sotomayor since she was an assistant district attorney and later a federal district judge. Mr. Lefcourt said she was “more strident and much more vocal” than some of her colleagues in his most recent appearance before her, involving an appeal of a securities fraud conviction. “She used her questioning to make a point,” he said, “as opposed to really looking for an answer to a question she did not understand.” Judge Guido Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School who taught Ms. Sotomayor there and now sits with her on the Second Circuit, said complaints that she had been unduly caustic had no basis. For a time, Judge Calabresi said, he kept track of the questions posed by Judge Sotomayor and other members of the 12-member court. “Her behavior was identical,” he said. “Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman,” Judge Calabresi added. “It was sexist, plain and simple.” He said Judge Sotomayor’s forceful and lucid arguments had persuaded him to reconsider his position in a number of instances. “And I’m a tough act,” he said. Other colleagues said Judge Sotomayor frequently sent unusually detailed, closely reasoned and helpful memorandums critiquing their draft opinions. “She will offer substantive suggestions,” said Judge Jon O. Newman, “but she will not be tenacious in making sure the language comes out exactly her way.” Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard law professor who served as an adviser in the process that led to Judge Sotomayor’s selection for the Supreme Court, said the White House had found concerns about her temperament unfounded, concluding instead that her background and her concern with the consequences of court rulings would be a “healthy antidote” to more formalist legal theories advocated by the Supreme Court’s conservative wing. “The president’s inquiries into the way she interacts with others,” Professor Tribe said, “convinced him that she would be a positive force in the chemistry of the Supreme Court.” Judge Sotomayor’s outgoing demeanor presents a contrast to that of the justice she hopes to replace, David H. Souter, who is retiring in both senses of the word. Judge Calabresi said that Judge Sotomayor could quickly transform the atmosphere at the Supreme Court. “I would think she would try to make it a place where people got along more, talked to each other more,” he said. Judge Richard C. Wesley, another colleague, agreed. He said his interactions with Judge Sotomayor had been “totally antithetical to this perception that has gotten some traction that she is somehow confrontational.” Judge Wesley said that in cases like the terrorism claims involving the Canadian man, Mr. Arar, whose case is still pending, there were “tough and important issues” that needed to be addressed, and that questioning could be intense. “And sometimes, judges themselves get involved in the argument,” he said. “You press a bit, and sometimes some of your colleagues may think you pressed too hard. But let’s be fair. I think there is a difference between tough questioning and demeaning questioning, and I haven’t seen that line crossed by any of my colleagues.” Mr. Cohn, the government lawyer in the Arar case, said he had not been taken aback by Judge Sotomayor’s volley of inquiries. “I thought her questions and demeanor were reasonable and fine,” he said.


Cold Advice: Layer Up, Get Below Ground ... or Embrace It

Abstract: It’s Warm, Below Ground CHICAGO — As temperatures in this city suddenly, mercilessly, plunged into single digits this week, a whole separate world was flourishing underground. Chicago’s Pedway , a maze of almost balmy tunnels beneath this city’s downtown, was jammed on Friday morning. People marched purposefully down long, winding halls, through revolving doors, and on and on — ascending into the world once more at City Hall or Macy’s or to the courtrooms at the Richard J. Daley Center. “Winter makes you want to stay in and do nothing — and I guess this is one way to do that,” said Marcy Garcia, 20, who works inside the Pedway at a dry cleaning store, not far from a grilled cheese sandwich shop, a store crammed with Cubs jerseys and a fitness center, where clients could be seen through glass swimming laps in a pool or dozing on lounge chairs. “The colder it gets above, the more busy we get down here,” she said. Down here, you can walk between more than 50 buildings over more than 40 blocks, arrive at L Train stops, or see a display of stained glass. Smells shift as you twist through new corridors: incense, fresh popcorn, waste. Signs are small and it is easy to feel lost, but everyone seems to know where they are going, experts in their hidden city. Along with layers, down and stoicism, plenty of Midwestern cities rely on these sorts of passages as answers to winter. There are the skyways of St. Paul , Minneapolis and Fargo, N.D. and the skywalks of Des Moines and Duluth, Minn . Shops emerge along these routes, and downtown workers wander them in shirt sleeves at lunch. “What is there to freak out about?” Christian Sullivan, a lawyer, said of the weather, as he typed away on his laptop inside a coffee shop along Chicago’s Pedway on Friday morning. Mr. Sullivan comes through here a lot — even in nice weather. His train arrives here, and the walk to court could not be simpler. Image Chicagoans took advantage of the city’s underground Pedway system on Friday to avoid the freezing temperatures. Credit Lyndon French for The New York Times “A lot more people come down here in this kind of weather, for sure,” he said, glancing around at the crowds, marching on toward offices. By his calculations, though, things may quiet down a little soon in this underground world. His phone showed the temperatures predicted to rise, he said, maybe even into the 20s. MONICA DAVEY Extra Cold, Extra Worries RUTLAND, Vt. — It was six degrees below zero when Richard Thomas left for his job at the dairy plant here, inside a deep red building at the base of snow-covered hills. Mr. Thomas, 71, is no stranger to this weather, and the plant seemed ready: The cracks in the walls were meant to be sealed, the heat was working. The wash line, which carries water outside, was drained so it would not freeze. But cold this deep creates new problems and magnifies existing ones, and that was exactly what happened on Friday morning. A frigid draft prevented some labels from sticking to the milk bottles. The bitter cold that descended on New England, closing schools and delivering wind chills well below zero, brought unique complications to this state’s farms. “You think you got everything covered, then you find out you haven’t,” said Mr. Thomas, who was standing next to a 500-gallon tank of eggnog, as a metal machine popped lids onto bottles of cream and milk frothed inside a pasteurizing machine. Ryan Yoder’s worry? That his brussels sprouts and carrots might freeze inside the unheated barn where they were kept. “There’s basically a lot that can go wrong with the cold,” said Mr. Yoder, who raises chickens and grows produce in Danby, Vt. Image Lisa Kaiman, the owner of Jersey Girls Dairy in Chester, Vt., prepared on Friday for her afternoon chores. She said she keeps her cows inside during frigid weather. Credit Cheryl Senter for The New York Times On Friday, Mr. Yoder’s farm was running heat lamps near the brussels sprouts. “How expensive do they have to be to justify it?” he said of the sprouts. On the other side of the Green Mountains, in Chester, Vt., Lisa Kaiman said she feeds her milking cows extra food in this kind of cold — which allows them, she said, to generate their own heat through rumination. Ms. Kaiman said she was spending her day adding hot water to the cows’ water supply to keep it from freezing. Normally, Ms. Kaiman begins her work day at 5 or 5:30 a.m., but she let the cows sleep in until about 6 o’clock on Friday morning in the cozy beds they made for themselves in the sawdust. “I knew they wouldn’t want to get up,” said Ms. Kaiman. “You pick your battles.” JESS BIDGOOD A Frozen Way of Life MILWAUKEE — This is Wisconsin, a place where the pro football stadium is known as the Frozen Tundra, where people build 66-foot ice sculptures just because they can and where cheese brine has been used to de-ice the roads . Before facing the cold here, you bundle yourself with three layers and still feel the wind’s sting. Unshoveled snow becomes like permafrost, barely crunching when you walk across it. When wind chills plunged below zero this week, a few hardy souls were still ice-skating at the outdoor rink near City Hall. And when an out-of-towner whined about the freeze, a resident professed his love for winter, noting cheerily that it will be snowmobile season soon. Image The town of Rutland, Vt., on Thursday. Credit Jacob Hannah for The New York Times In Milwaukee, this first blast of extreme cold is simply a fact of life, an inevitability. People put on a scarf, scrape the ice off their windshields and mostly just move on. “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas everywhere you go. Or: Here we go again,” said Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, who noted that his city had endured two snowstorms already this season. There are precautions, of course: Salt for the sidewalks; warming centers for the elderly; travel warnings when the highways get clogged with snow. But the drama, the hand-wringing and the panicked shovel purchases that accompany winter in southern climes are mostly absent here. In West Allis, Wis., a Milwaukee suburb, Gregg Malkowski was salting the roads on Friday afternoon and checking for slick spots. Mr. Malkowski, a city worker, grew up in this town and said he has no plans to leave. He said warm clothing and patience on the roadways were among his tips for surviving the Wisconsin winter. “You’ve got to love snow, and you’ve got to like cold,” Mr. Malkowski said, as residents walked their dogs through snowy sidewalks and the drivers of even the tiniest cars navigated slippery roads with confidence. “If you don’t, you better go to Florida.” MITCH SMITH Shelter at the Station NEW YORK — When a big freeze descends here, some among the homeless seek warmth inside shelters, but others find relief in the waiting areas of Penn Station. Image Commuters walked through a brief snow along 34th Street in New York on Thursday morning. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times But demand is high and space is tight. And so on Friday, an elaborate and gloomy competition began for a slice of marble floor, an edge of a staircase or, for a lucky few, an actual seat. Timing is key. Plans are made. Penn Station is either the departure or arrival point for hundreds of thousands of daily passengers aboard Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, or Long Island Rail Road trains. It also serves as a makeshift shelter for the homeless. “You got to arrive early, it’s cold out there,” said Lorenzo Bell, 56, a homeless man who hugged his shoulders for warmth as he held a seat in a waiting area for train riders bound for New Jersey. The best time to arrive to get a good spot? Mr. Bell advised 3 p.m. Arturo Aponte and his girlfriend, Juanita Porterfield, employed a different strategy. They arrived at 11 a.m. and planned to casually stroll around Penn Station until they felt they had to claim a spot to bed down for the night. “We’re scouting it out,” said Ms. Porterfield, 55, who rifled through garbage bins for recyclable cans and bottles, which she can turn in for at least a five-cent deposit on each. Some of the homeless said the hassles of sleeping in Penn Station remained far preferable to checking into an overcrowded city shelter, as a few social workers buzzing through the station tried to encourage them to do. Early Friday afternoon a few people were already sleeping on Penn Station’s floors, as businessmen with satchels and visitors with gift bags stepped around them. One homeless man who declined to give his name washed his clothes in a mop bucket marked “men’s bathroom.” As the afternoon wore on, Penn Station flooded with both travelers seeking clear paths to trains and homeless people seeking quiet corners. The supply of both dwindled. It made Julius Winn nostalgic for summer days. “If it was nice outside I’d probably be in a park,” he said. “But anything below 30 degrees is too cold. It’s warm in here.” NATE SCHWEBER

Chicago
Winter
Weather
Milwaukee
Snow Snowstorms
Vermont
NYC
Rutland VT


State and City Feuding Over Cost of Subsidizing Day Care

Abstract: A bitter financing battle that could threaten day care programs serving thousands of poor families in New York is brewing between the city and state governments over a year-old state order to increase the amount the city pays providers of subsidized day care to make it closer to market rate. Since October 2007, when the mandate went into effect, the city has refused to increase the rates for the 24,000 home-based providers because, according to the Administration for Children’s Services , the state’s one-time grant of $27 million is not enough to cover the increase, which it estimates would be as much as $53.4 million a year. “The city simply cannot afford to pay for the cost of this increase,” John B. Mattingly, commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services, which administers day care, said on Wednesday at a City Council hearing. With no other money in the budget for the higher subsidy, city officials say they would be forced to discontinue subsidies for 6,300 children. More than 50,000 children in home-based day care and 70,000 in child-care centers or Head Start programs qualify for the subsidies. But state officials are not backing away from their threat last week, which was reported in The Daily News, to cut off the entire state and federal subsidy — a loss of about $40 million a month — unless the city adheres to the increase, which they say is required under federal law. “We wanted to get their attention,” said William T. Gettman Jr., executive deputy commissioner of the State Office of Children and Family Services. Mr. Gettman sent a letter to city officials on Dec. 8 warning that “unless the corrective action plan is received by Dec. 31, 2008, all state and federal reimbursement to A.C.S. for child care subsidies and the associated administrative costs will be withheld.” The fight caps a multiyear battle over day care financing, while the severe financial downturn has carved a $62 million deficit in the city’s $800 million child care budget. City officials complain that they have had to underwrite an increasing share of the subsidized care for poor families; state officials say that is because the city’s expansion of such child care programs has outpaced state and federal contributions. How much providers are paid varies by children’s age and type of care. In 2007, the subsidy for a low-income preschooler attending a licensed day care center for a full-day program went to $224 a week from $180 in 2005. The rate for the same child in a licensed home center went to $150 a week from $125. The city has paid the increases to providers at day care centers, with which it has contracts, but has refused to do so for the home-based providers. State officials say that if the city doesn’t comply, the entire state could suffer a loss of federal block grants, pointing out that other areas have made tough choices: Suffolk County, for example, has stopped accepting new applicants for certain kinds of child care, and Monroe County, which includes Rochester, has raised private funds. Councilman Bill de Blasio of Brooklyn questioned Mr. Mattingly on Wednesday at a hearing of the General Welfare Committee, which he heads. “It was a little disconcerting to find out how far A.C.S. is from solving this problem,” said Gwen E. Rocco, Mr. de Blasio’s communications director. “You can’t wait until two weeks from doomsday to come up with a plan.”

Child Care
Day Care Centers
Children and Youth
Administration for Children's Services


Even With the Crowd Behind It, Iowa State Trails From Start to Finish

Abstract: CHICAGO — A typical road game in the Atlantic Coast Conference can build a steely resilience for teams that regularly travel that circuit. A good squad must weather raucous arenas in places like Durham and Chapel Hill, in North Carolina, in order to prosper. Virginia has certainly done that. The No. 1-seeded Cavaliers (29-7) were one of the A.C.C.’s best teams this season, and when they took the floor on Friday, they were prepared to be the unpopular road team, even wearing white uniforms. Normally, crowds in the later rounds of the N.C.A.A. tournament are not so one-sided. But United Center, home of Chicago’s Bulls and Blackhawks, was overrun with the cardinal and gold colors of Iowa State fans, who had made the five-hour drive up from the university’s campus in Ames. They cheered and exhorted the No. 4-seeded Cyclones (23-12) with deafening roars at times, but aside from a few isolated moments, Virginia was unmoved. The Cavaliers cruised to an 84-71 victory in the Midwest Regional semifinal. Virginia, which advanced to its second regional final in three years, will play Syracuse, which defeated Gonzaga, 63-60, on Friday. The Cavaliers are seeking their first appearance in the Final Four since 1984. That team, led by Rick Carlisle and featuring Olden Polynice and Othell Wilson, lost to Hakeem Olajuwon and Houston in the semifinal. These Cavaliers look motivated to match their forebears. With their so-called pack line defense and their strong inside game, the Cavaliers never trailed on Friday. Iowa State’s last, best charge came with 6 minutes 6 seconds left, when Deonte Burton hit a 3-pointer, pulling the Cyclones to 68-58 behind. But Virginia pulled away after that, to the dismay of the heavily partisan crowd. “It was like a home game for them more than anything,” said the Virginia senior guard Malcolm Brogdon. “But that’s something that fires us up as competitors. We got to the point where we were playing well during away games towards the end of A.C.C. play, so we embraced it. It was a challenge, and we were able to overcome it.” Anthony Gill led the Cavaliers with 23 points and 8 rebounds, Mike Toby had 18 points on 8-for-12 shooting, and London Perrantes added nine assists, controlling the tempo virtually throughout. Georges Niang, the 6-foot-8 senior guard from Methuen, Mass., had 30 points and 8 rebounds for the Cyclones, and left the floor with 25 seconds left in the game to a standing ovation and a hug from Coach Steve Prohm. “My teammates did a good job of encouraging me,” said Niang, who was saddled with four fouls, “and I’m just bummed that we couldn’t continue this run.” The Cavaliers can. But before they even left their hotel for the United Center on Friday, Bennett spent a few minutes with his father, Dick Bennett, the highly respected former college basketball coach. The elder Bennett, who coached his son at Wisconsin-Green Bay and is considered the architect of the pack-line defense, reflected on how the day before had been the 20th anniversary of his own father’s death. That prompted Tony Bennett to ask his father what his grandfather would have said before such a big game. Bennett noted that his father’s father, a steelworker from Pittsburgh, had not been highly educated, but had been full of wisdom, nonetheless. “You know what your grandfather would tell you?” Tony Bennett recalled. “He’d tell you: ‘Don’t tiptoe into this one. No tiptoeing.’ I shared that with our guys. I said, ‘Do not tiptoe in this game,’ and I shared that story, and that meant a lot, because you have to go into these games. You can’t tiptoe.” With those words in their ears, Virginia stormed out in the first half, shot 60.7 percent shooting from the field (17 for 28), and seized control of the game. The Cavaliers protected a double-digit lead through much of the game. Perrantes, Virginia’s junior point guard, led the way in the half with seven of his assists, including a handful of picturesque passes to his big men. Late in the half Niang began to show life. He finished the half with 15 points and had a chance to draw the Cyclones to within a dozen points going into intermission. With the clock running down, he took the ball on the right wing and made a forceful drive to the basket, directly in front of the Virginia bench. But Gill slid over and swatted the ball out of bounds at the buzzer. It gave momentum back to Virginia and quieted the many Iowa State fans, and not for the last time. “Today was probably three quarters Cyclone fans,” Prohm said, “and you’re disappointed for them. You’re obviously more disappointed for your players, but you’re disappointed for every part of Cyclone Nation and Iowa State today.” SYRACUSE 63, GONZAGA 60 Syracuse shot just 31 percent from the field in the first half (9 for 29), and Gonzaga built an 11-point lead, but the 10th-seeded Orange (22-13) shot their way back and managed to prevail in the final seconds in their improbable run to the round of 8. Michael Gbinije scored 20 points for Syracuse, including the go-ahead basket with just over 20 seconds to play. Kyle Wiltjer scored 23 for 11th-seeded Gonzaga (28-8), and Domantas Sabonis, the son of the former N.B.A. center Arvydas Sabonis, grabbed 17 rebounds for the Bulldogs. Gonzaga led by 9 (57-48) with 6:30 to play, but Syracuse finished the game with a 15-3 run. The next fight will be between Syracuse and Virginia, two orange-themed A.C.C. programs. “I know them; that’s the problem,” Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim said. “They know us, and we know them, and what I know about them, I don’t like. They’ve got a great team. I’m going to try not to think about that for another 10 or 15 minutes.” On Friday night, with only 88 seconds remaining and Gonzaga leading by 2, Syracuse forced a 10-second violation but missed its ensuing shot. Sabonis missed a layup at the other end, and Syracuse grabbed the rebound and pushed the ball up the floor, where Gbinije scored on a follow-up layup with 21 seconds remaining to give Syracuse a 61-60 advantage. After a timeout, Gonzaga inbounded with 19.8 seconds to play. Following a scramble, Trevor Cooney appeared to have stolen the ball, but he was ruled to have stepped out of bounds. The referees reviewed the play and upheld the call. With two seconds left, the freshman guard Josh Perkins drove the lane, but Tyler Lydon blocked the shot, grabbed the loose ball and was fouled. He hit both free throws, Sabonis’s heave at the end missed the mark, and the Orange were left to celebrate. Few expected Syracuse to advance as far as it has, but Lydon said the Orange’s run should not be considered a fluke. “We’ve been confident the whole year,” he said. “We believe in our ability and we’ve just come together as a team.”

Iowa State
College basketball
University of Virginia
NCAA Men's Basketball,March Madness


Tiger Woods and Golf Digest End Long-Running Deal

Abstract: Tiger Woods and Golf Digest parted company Thursday, ending a 13-year relationship between the world’s most visible golfer and the world’s largest golf magazine. The breakup was announced in a statement by Jerry Tarde, the chairman and editor-in-chief of Golf Digest, a Conde Nast publication with a circulation of 1.65 million that has run monthly articles with Woods’s byline since 1997. Tarde said that Woods’s column in the February issue of Golf Digest would be his last. Woods, whose deal with the magazine was his second-longest after his ongoing 14-year endorsement deal with Nike, will have his name removed from the magazine’s masthead. “We appreciate the insights Tiger has provided to our readers,” Tarde said in the statement. In a statement released by the magazine, Woods said: “I enjoyed my relationship with Golf Digest. But we have decided it’s now time for a break. I wish my friends at Golf Digest continued success.” Unlike other business relationships that soured after the scandal that accompanied Woods’s well-publicized affairs, the parting with Golf Digest was amicable. During lengthy talks aimed at renewing the agreement, the two sides were unable to come to terms on the expanding amount of time the magazine was requesting from Woods. Woods’s agent, Mark Steinberg, told Bloomberg News that, “Tiger is not in a position to commit to more time, so we cordially parted ways.” Coming off the only winless year of his professional career, Woods has made no secret about his desire to spend as much time as possible working on his game in hopes of returning to form this season and resuming his quest to dominate the golf record book. He has 14 major championship titles among his 71 PGA Tour victories, 4 shy of the record 18 majors won by Jack Nicklaus. The monetary terms of Woods’s contract with Golf Digest were never publicly disclosed, but it was known to be modest in comparison to his other endorsement deals, which added up to $74.2 million last year. The primary value of the magazine deal was the exposure available through the 30 international Golf Digest affiliate editions published in the native language of every major country where golf is played.

Golf Digest
Magazines
Endorsements
Woods Tiger


Forget ‘Pat the Bunny.’ My Child Is Reading Hemingway.

Abstract: Alice Hemmer’s favorite part of Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road” doesn’t involve the drug-addled cross-country road trips, encounters with prostitutes in Mexico or wild parties in Manhattan. Alice, who is 5 and lives in a Chicago suburb, likes the part when Sal Paradise eats ice cream and apple pie whenever he feels hungry. She hasn’t actually read Kerouac’s 320-page, amphetamine-fueled, stream-of-consciousness classic. (Alice is a precocious reader, but not that precocious.) Instead, her father read her a heavily abridged and sanitized illustrated version of “On the Road” designed for six- to 12-year-old children. “She didn’t love it,” said her father, Kurt Hemmer, an English professor at Harper College and scholar of the Beat Generation, who noted that even some college students failed to appreciate the novel’s subtle spiritual message. “To really grasp it, you need to be a bit more mature.” “On the Road,” with its recurring references to sex, drugs and domestic violence, might not seem like an ideal bedtime story for a child. But that’s precisely the point of KinderGuides , a new series of books that aims to make challenging adult literary classics accessible to very young readers. Along with “On the Road,” KinderGuides recently published picture book versions of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and Truman Capote’s melancholy novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” (It skipped over the awkward question of whether Holly Golightly is a prostitute.) In one of its most ambitious and bizarre efforts, it released a cheerful take on Arthur C. Clarke’s opaque, mind-bending science fiction novel, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” an allegory about the evolution of human consciousness that many adult readers find impenetrable. With their bright illustrations and breezy language — “Sal is ready for an adventure!” pretty much typifies the tone of “On the Road” — the books almost seem like parodies, or the perfect gag gift for the hipster parent who has everything. But the creators of the series, the graphic designer Melissa Medina and her partner, the writer Fredrik Colting, insist they aren’t joking. They’re already working on the next four titles in the series — versions of Paulo Coelho’s best-selling novel “The Alchemist,” Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (minus the rape charges, Ku Klux Klan rallies and racial slurs). “The goal of all of this is to get them really psyched about these books now, so that they’ll want to read the originals later,” Ms. Medina said. Though the premise of their project may strike some as absurd — does a first grader really need to be introduced to Kerouac or Capote? — kiddie lit has become a surprisingly lucrative and crowded niche. Anxious parents who played Mozart for their babies in utero and showed them Baby Einstein educational videos have snapped up children’s books that promise to turn their offspring into tiny literature lovers. BabyLit, an imprint that publishes board books for babies based on “Anna Karenina,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Don Quixote” and other classics, has sold more than 1.5 million copies of its 24 titles. Next fall, the company will introduce a series of picture books based on classic novels geared toward older children, which will include more of the plot, starting with “Moby-Dick” and “Pride and Prejudice.” “It’s a more educational approach than just Spot the dog,” said Suzanne Gibbs Taylor, the creator of the BabyLit series. Another popular series, Cozy Classics, which was created by the twin brothers Jack and Holman Wang, reduces great works of literature to 12-word stories, illustrated with photos of handmade felt figurines. (Their rendition of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” can be rattled off in a single breath: “Soldier-Friends-Run-Dance-Goodbye-Hug-Horse-Boom!-Hurt-Sleep-Snow-Love.”) Their titles, which include “Jane Eyre,” “Emma” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” are designed for babies and toddlers, but include some arch visual jokes directed at the parents, like a felt figurine of Miss Havisham flailing about in flames in “Great Expectations.” Even with the adorable fuzzy figures, the books can be overwhelming. “My daughter started crying hysterically 3 pages into it,” one reader wrote of her 18-month-old in an Amazon review of “Moby-Dick.” Another reviewer questioned whether a toddler is ready for “Jane Eyre,” and called the Cozy Classics version “weird, dark and not the most appropriate for kids who are reading board books.” Holman Wang said he and his brother wanted to preserve the sometimes grim and complex tone of the originals, rather than conforming to the “fluffy bunny aesthetic” of most contemporary picture books. “It’s not about saying, ‘My 2-year-old has read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’” he said. “We try not to cheaply capitalize on these brand-name stories by sanitizing them and losing the themes.” Some educators are skeptical of efforts to spoon-feed complex literary works to small children, especially when there’s such a rich body of classic children’s literature. “It’s ludicrous to take great works that are clearly for adults and reduce them for children,” said Monica Edinger, a fourth-grade teacher at the Dalton School in Manhattan, who dismissed KinderGuides as a disingenuous attempt to exploit parents’ insecurities. Still, some parents counter that children can absorb the bigger themes, like the idea of resilience in “The Old Man and the Sea” or adventurousness in “On the Road.” Brent Almond, a graphic designer and parenting blogger who lives in Maryland, said his 7-year-old son, Jon, had responded enthusiastically to some of the books. “A lot of these books are melancholy or outright depressing, but it’s been cool to see how he reacts to them,” Mr. Almond said. Jon likes the book based on “2001” the best, because “it’s in space and it’s kind of creepy,” Mr. Almond said. (Jon didn’t seem especially bothered by one of the more chilling scenes, when the ship’s computer, Hal, turns on the astronauts and sends one of them out of the spaceship to his death, Mr. Almond said. ) Ms. Medina and Mr. Colting got the idea for KinderGuides about a year ago, when they were visiting her family in Kansas. Mr. Colting was reading “The Old Man and the Sea,” and Ms. Medina’s 6-year-old niece asked him what it was about. He realized the story was easy to summarize, and saw a market opportunity. Mr. Colting, a native of Sweden, already had a background in publishing, albeit a somewhat checkered one. In 2009, he was sued by the Salinger estate for publishing an unauthorized sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye.” He settled the lawsuit and withdrew copies from North America. Despite that earlier legal entanglement, Mr. Colting had no qualms about repurposing famous novels as picture books, including “The Catcher in the Rye.” He argues that because they function as study guides as well as entertainment, the KinderGuides books don’t infringe on copyrighted works. Some copyright experts dispute that logic. “If you are literally taking a book and trying to translate it for children, taking what makes it literature and copying that, that sounds like infringement,” said Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. This year, Mr. Colting and Ms. Medina started an independent publishing company out of their home in Los Angeles, and began making a list of beloved classics to recast. After choosing their first few titles, they read the original works and highlighted the central themes and characters, and consulted study guides like CliffsNotes and SparkNotes. Mr. Colting wrote the text, and Ms. Medina created storyboards pairing the texts with sketches or descriptions of images. They hired a different illustrator for each book, and printed 20,000 copies in total for the first four titles. They aim to publish 50 books, though not every classic novel seems feasible. James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” for instance, was considered but ultimately rejected. “We couldn’t in good faith do it,” Mr. Colting said, “because we haven’t read it.”


Wal-Mart’s Environmental Report Card

Abstract: Officially, Wal-Mart Stores released a “comprehensive report of its sustainability efforts” yesterday. But the much-anticipated document could more accurately be described as a citizenship report. The report did provide many facts and figures about the progress the company has made since October 2005, when it promised to sharply reduce the environmental effects of its operations and of the products it sells. But Wal-Mart used sustainability as a catch-all phrase that encompasses areas as disparate as health care plans for employees, charitable giving, diversity and promotion policies, even corporate governance issues like the structure of its board and the way it pays executives. It even listed the number of miles employees said they had walked, swam or biked as part of a Personal Sustainability Project the company introduced last year. And Wal-Mart detailed savings from sustainability, both to itself in areas like reduced energy use, and to its customers, through $4 prescription drugs and energy savings from compact fluorescent bulbs. “There is no conflict between our business model of everyday low costs and everyday low prices and being a more sustainable business,” H. Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s chief executive, said in a statement. Wal-Mart did offer many nuggets that would hearten environmentalists. It said it had increased the energy efficiency of its buildings and its fleet of trucks by 15 percent since 2005. It said it had committed to use solar energy at 22 sites and to increase its use of light-emitting diodes, an energy-efficient lighting technology. It said it had sold 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs in the 12-month period from Sept. 30 last year. It also said it was helping to conserve an acre of wildlife habitat for every acre it occupied or would develop through 2015. And it said it would reduce the amount of solid waste generated by its stores by 25 percent by next October. The report also added detail to Wal-Mart’s new program to encourage suppliers to reduce the carbon footprint of their products and mentioned the increase in sales of concentrated detergents as an example. But the report did not appease Wal-mart’s critics. A coalition of 23 nonprofit groups immediately issued their own “Civil Society Critique,” which said Wal-Mart was doing too little too late. “Wal-Mart’s dependence on imports and unsustainable factory farming is highly destructive,” said Mark A. Kastel, who spoke for the Cornucopia Institute, one of the counter-report’s sponsors. Nor did Mr. Scott’s emphasis on cost savings please the group. “Wal-Mart’s ‘cut prices at all costs’ business model is the very essence of the problem,” said David Groves, speaking for another sponsor, the Environmental Investigation Agency. Other nonprofits were less sharply critical, but still expressed disappointment. “We’re pleased to see some improvements in the company’s behavior, but we can and should expect more from the world’s largest, most innovative company,” said David Nassar, executive director of Wal-Mart Watch, who dismissed Wal-Mart’s report as a public relations effort. Gwen Ruta, director of corporate partnerships at Environmental Defense, also had reservations. While she praised Wal-Mart for “moving in the right direction, and learning as it goes,” she said that many of the report’s contentions were hard to put in context. For its part, Wal-Mart readily conceded that its sustainability programs are works in progress. “Our carbon footprint is growing slower, but it is still growing,” Mr. Scott said. “Much work remains to achieve the goals we set for ourselves.”

Citizenship
Wal-Mart Stores Inc
Environment
Retail Stores and Trade


Coal in Poland Lowering Life Spans

Abstract: MYSLOWICE, Poland — The children Karolina Zolna knows huff and puff after a few minutes of exercise. Two years ago, her infant daughter spent four months in the hospital with pneumonia. The doctors did not identify a cause, but to Ms. Zolna, the reason for the baby’s illness was obvious. She blames the pollution that hangs heavy in the air of her gray hometown in Poland’s coal heartland, Silesia . In the still-chilly early days of spring, thick smoke wafted from most of the chimneys in Myslowice, wreathing the town in a haze that is a constant reminder of residents’ reliance on coal for heat. A few kilometers away, visible from the town’s main street, stands the tall red and white smokestack of Elektrownia Jaworzno III, a coal-fired power plant. Clouds of white steam billow from its concrete cooling towers. “It’s definitely too close to people’s houses,” Ms. Zolna, 30, a school secretary, said of the plant. “If you read about this, you know that pollution is not good for health . And if you have children, you know that it affects your children . And there are more and more kids” with breathing troubles, she said. “Both my children have had problems with their lungs.” Poland has the highest levels in Europe of the tiny pollution particles that are strongly linked to serious health problems like heart attacks, strokes, cancer and even dementia, said Martin Adams, an air quality expert at the European Environment Agency. Poland is home to six of Europe’s 10 most polluted cities , the agency’s figures show. That filthy air is largely a result of Poland’s heavy reliance on both hard coal and lignite, which is also known as brown coal. With energy policy on the agenda as the Group of Seven leaders meet this week, clean power is still in its infancy in Poland, where a tangle of political and economic forces have kept coal secure in its place as the dominant fuel. About 85 percent of electricity and 43 percent of heat come from the fuel some call “Polish gold,” the government estimates. The European Commission has opened infringement proceedings against Poland for violating particle pollution levels and is investigating reports that it has also exceeded limits on nitrogen oxides. The health consequences are severe. In addition to its role as a major source of climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions, coal burning releases a bevy of dangerous pollutants, including, in the low-tech home heating systems that are common in Poland, toxins like benzo(a)pyrene. More than 43,000 Poles died prematurely because of air pollution in 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, the European Environment Agency estimated . “It’s a myth in Poland that coal is cheap, and energy from coal is cheap,” said Julia Michalak, an energy expert at demosEuropa, a Warsaw research group. “We pay for it a very high price.” Poland’s government is among the European Union’s staunchest defenders of coal, leading opposition to measures that would restrict its use. Despite troubles that have roiled the country’s mining sector this year, officials see coal as key to avoiding dependence on Russian natural gas. Coal’s backers also say it is an affordable option for a nation that cannot afford a quick transition to cleaner alternatives. Image Two years ago, Karolina Zolna's daughter spent four months in the hospital with pneumonia. Ms. Zolna blames the pollution in their hometown of Myslowice, in Silesia, Poland. Awareness of the severity of the air problem has just begun to dawn. Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz’s government declared 2015 to be the Year of Improving Air Quality and is backing a proposal to empower regional authorities to clamp down on pollution from vehicles and from the burning of coal and wood in homes. Officials are focused on the contributions of home heating, known as low-stack emissions, which are severe and very visible. Millions of Poles burn coal, often the cheapest, most polluting grades, in old furnaces with poor filters. Some add plastic or other garbage to the mix, making for an even more toxic brew. Thick black smoke billows out of chimneys for nearly half the year, stinging throats and eyes and shrouding whole neighborhoods. Environmentalists say the government’s plans for addressing that pollution are feeble. Many also argue that any serious attempt to clean Poland’s air must also confront coal-fired electricity generation, an area officials do not see as a problem. Pollution from coal-fired power plants in Poland causes about 5,300 deaths per year, Greenpeace said in a report commissioned from Stuttgart University. The sector creates health costs ranging from 3 billion euros to 8.2 billion euros, or $3.3 billion to $9 billion, each year, said the Brussels-based Health and Environment Alliance, or HEAL. Krzysztof Bolesta, an adviser to Environment Minister Maciej Grabowski, said that the power sector, while not pollution-free, is not a significant contributor to Poland’s air quality problem. Emissions from coal-fired plants are covered by tough European regulations, he said. “You can’t really find a robust study on health issues attributed to just one particular source of combustion,” he said. Coal-fired plants “will never be zero emission, of course,” he said. But “they meet the legislation, so it’s off the radar, because they are sufficiently tackled, if you will.” Enrico Brivio, a spokesman for the European Commission, said the body did not have details on individual plants’ compliance with its rules, since enforcement is the responsibility of national governments. Polish power plants have been granted extensions for meeting European requirements, so their pollution caps are higher than those imposed elsewhere. Monika Morawiecka, a member of the management board of the Polish Electricity Association, an industry body, said coal-fired plants had cut emissions drastically since 1989. The utility PGE, which generates about 40 percent of Polish power, has reduced particle pollution by 98 percent, sulfur dioxide by 89 percent and nitrogen oxides by 46 percent in that time, with further declines expected, she said. “Compared to what it was 25 years ago under Communism, the improvement is tremendous,” said Maciej Bukowski, the president of the Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies. “We are living in a different world.” But Meri Pukarinen, the head of the climate and energy unit at Greenpeace Poland, said the government focus on home heating and transportation was indicative of an approach that is “quite skewed, not appreciating the health impact of the high-stack and energy production industry at all.” “It’s a first step to focus on low-stack emissions, because it’s the most evident for people and they can feel it, they can see the smoke coming out of the chimneys,” said Weronika Piestrzynska, a spokeswoman in HEAL’s Warsaw office. “It’s harder to confront” the power industry, she said. In Myslowice, as a pungent cloud of smoke drifts from the chimney of a nearby apartment building, it is clear to Ms. Zolna, the school secretary, that both sources contribute to the foul air choking the town. “It’s not only because we use coal stoves,” she said. “We do not use them year round. It has to be these power plants.” Coal’s share of Poland’s power base is slowly declining and is expected to continue doing so, as tougher European Union rules kick in. But new plants and upgrades and expansions to existing ones are still going forward. Shifting from a coal-based economy to one built on cleaner fuels will take vision, said Ms. Michalak, the demosEuropa expert. “What we need here is not incremental change, what we need here is a big decision about where we will go and how we will get there, and this is something that Polish politicians don’t have an appetite for,” she said. The country’s leaders, shaped by its move from Communism to democracy, she said, “are not ready for another big transformation.” This article was financed in part by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.


Bratton to Lead New York Police for Second Time

Abstract: William J. Bratton was named police commissioner of New York City for the second time on Thursday. But it is a different place than the crime-ravaged city he came to in 1994. And he said he was going to be a different kind of commissioner, overseeing a different kind of policing. “In this city, I want every New Yorker to talk about ‘their police’, ‘my police,’ ” Mr. Bratton said after his appointment was announced by Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, before reading from a children’s book about police work he said he had cherished since he was 9. In 1994, the message was different: “We will fight for every house in the city; we will fight for every street; we will fight for every borough,” he said at the time. “And we will win.” Back then, the hard-driving, press-savvy Mr. Bratton could be found dining out among city luminaries, and on the covers of newspapers and national magazines. He received a lot of credit for historic drops in crime rates, even as the trends in New York coincided with those around the country. Such prominence drove a very public wedge between him and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former prosecutor, who pushed him out just two years after appointing him. The mayor has the full authority to hire and fire the commissioner. On Thursday, Mr. Bratton, 66, said he had “learned a lot” since the last time he ran the New York department, the largest in the country, and people familiar with his thinking suggested that significant changes were in store. Before making the decision to bring him back, Mr. de Blasio said he had been reassured by conversations with others who had worked with Mr. Bratton, especially in Los Angeles, where he lead the police from 2002 to 2009. Mr. Bratton said: “I report to the mayor. I am not the mayor.” But his is perhaps the single most important and visible appointment to be made by Mr. de Blasio, who was elected partially because of his criticism of the police’s aggressive use of the stop-and-frisk tactics. Mr. Bratton has been in law enforcement for four decades, including stints as commissioner in Boston as well as Los Angeles, but this may be his biggest challenge: keeping crime at historic lows — just more than 300 murders so far this year — while mending the relationship with minorities, and not upstaging his boss. In January, Mr. Bratton will replace Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner since 2002. A bright mood reigned at a community court in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where Mr. de Blasio made the announcement, which had been widely anticipated. The mayor-elect referred to an old headline calling Mr. Bratton “America’s Top Cop” before allowing him to take the microphone. “Welcome back,” Mr. de Blasio said. “You would bring that magazine cover up,” Mr. Bratton replied. It was a moment of glory light years from the day Mr. Bratton began his policing career in Boston in 1970. He still speaks with the city’s accent. Image William J. Bratton as the head of the Los Angeles Police Department in 2009. Credit David McNew/Getty Images He first came to New York to lead the transit police in 1990, going after fare-beaters and other low-level offenders in broad sweeps that also caught more serious criminals. The approach was derived from the “broken windows” theory of policing, which holds that by cracking down in troubled neighborhoods on small but highly visible crimes of disorder such as turnstile jumping and prostitution, more serious crimes fall as well. It is a theory that Mr. Bratton has long espoused. Some researchers over the years since have questioned the efficacy of the theory, but Mr. de Blasio said he was a firm believer that it worked. From the transit police he moved on to lead the Boston Police Department briefly before returning to New York City as commissioner in 1994. It was at a time when murders were around 2,000 a year, when squeegee-men were a fixture on the streets, and drug-dealers and prostitutes flourished in the open. It was also a time of widespread corruption in the department. In his first weeks back in New York, Mr. Bratton made headlines by personally ejecting a panhandler from a subway car. Soon after, he went to Harlem’s 30th Precinct — which would later be called the “Dirty Thirty” — and, with television cameras rolling, confiscated the shields of officers who had been accused of corruption. He gave more authority to precinct commanders and used a computerized crime-tracking system known as CompStat to provide detailed feedback on both crimes and the police response. Crime fell, even in the most crime-ridden precincts, such as the 75th Precinct in East New York, Brooklyn. As arrests shot up, so did the number of complaints against the department — complaints that received scant attention in a city overwhelmed by crime. Mr. Bratton’s national profile began to rise. Criminologists have long debated how much of New York’s crime decline can be attributed to the changes he put into place, and they have struggled to explain the strong downward trends across the country through the 1990s. “If we can’t explain that it in Toledo, we can’t explain it in New York either,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law School who has written on New York City’s crime decline. But, he added, “A lot of the long term success of policing in New York is something that is properly credited” to Mr. Bratton. As Mr. Bratton became known as the crime-fighter who calmed America’s toughest city, his persona began to grate on Mayor Giuliani, who watched his own role in the story of New York’s declining crime seemingly eclipsed. Mr. Bratton appeared to have his eyes on becoming mayor himself one day (he writes of his strong poll numbers in his memoir, “Turnaround,” published in 1998) exacerbating tensions. Behind-the-scenes disputes between the Police Department and City Hall were routine. A plan for a police parade on Mr. Bratton’s birthday was scuttled by Mr. Giuliani, who forced Mr. Bratton out in 1996. On Thursday, Mr. Bratton acknowledged “differences” between himself and Mr. Giuliani and allowed that “some of those differences were created by me.” Image Mr. Bratton in 1995 with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who appointed him commissioner in 1994. Credit James Estrin for The New York Times (For his part, Mr. Giuliani recently had warm words for Mr. Bratton, describing him at a Thanksgiving Day event as an “exceptional law enforcement officer.”) After leaving the Police Department in 1996, Mr. Bratton took a number of security positions, including as president and chief operating officer at Carco Group, a fraud investigating company on Long Island. In 2002, Mr. Bratton sought and won the top job at the Los Angeles Police Department, a shrinking and distrusted force that had entered a federal consent decree the year before, largely because of a corruption scandal that involved reports of abuse of suspects, evidence tampering and perjury. He reached out to the department’s critics early in his tenure. By the time Mr. Bratton was reappointed five years later, relations between minorities and the police had improved, leaders there said. “He helped transform the L.A.P.D.’s relationship with the community it serves while bringing crime down to historic lows,” Antonio R. Villaraigosa, the mayor during Mr. Bratton’s tenure, said in a statement. But police stops in Los Angeles doubled under Mr. Bratton, according to a 2009 analysis by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Even with a federal consent decree, racial disparities persisted during that time. For those who trace the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics, and the ensuing troubles, back to the policing strategies Mr. Bratton put into place in the 1990s, it is a sign that he had softened his image over the years, but not his approach. “Given his record in L.A., the question then becomes, if this is the mayor who is going to stop the stop-and-frisk era, why is he going to bring in the person who increased stops in Los Angeles?” said Norman Siegel, who led the New York Civil Liberties Union from 1985 to 2000. In recent years, Mr. Bratton traveled regularly to speak as a kind of management consultant for law enforcement officials worldwide. After riots in London in 2011, David Cameron, the British prime minister, publicly entertained bringing in Mr. Bratton to lead the police there. He returned to New York in recent years as the chairman of Kroll, a corporate security and investigations company, before leaving that position to start up his own consulting business. In the last year, he began building a social media site for police officers. He is married to Rikki Klieman, a lawyer, and has one adult son, David Bratton, by a previous marriage. At the announcement, Ms. Klieman sat with Chirlane McCray, Mr. de Blasio’s wife and confidant on policy. “Over the years, he’s come to see the importance of dealing forthrightly with issues of race and police-community relations,” said Jeremy Travis, who worked for Mr. Bratton at the Police Department in 1994 and is now president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “He is very open to learning from his own experience.”

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


Surprise, Your Rival Is Spitzer. Reaction? Oy.

Abstract: The calls and text messages starting rolling in around 8 p.m., just as Scott M. Stringer was putting his young son to bed, a baffling deluge of support and sympathy. “Let me know how I can help,” a councilman from Park Slope said. “We’re with you,” a lawmaker from Flatbush declared. Then his mother called. “Oy,” she moaned. They all seemed to know what he did not: Eliot Spitzer had emerged from political exile to lay claim to the job — New York City comptroller — that Mr. Stringer thought was his. Until then, Mr. Stringer, 53, a policy maven with a passion for parrots, was a little-known local politician coasting toward higher office with the blessing of the Democratic establishment and every major union in the city. Now he is the only thing standing between Mr. Spitzer, who resigned as the state’s governor in 2008 after patronizing prostitutes, and a return to political power. Overnight, Mr. Stringer, the diminutive, wisecracking Manhattan borough president, has become an accidental celebrity, courted by cable television news shows, but also an uncharacteristically confrontational candidate, eager to neutralize Mr. Spitzer with a series of attacks on his record. On Friday, Mr. Stringer leveled his most stinging critique of Mr. Spitzer, mocking him for his combative, go-it-alone style. At a campaign stop in Downtown Brooklyn, Mr. Stringer faulted Mr. Spitzer for a “failed governorship” and “anger management issues.” It has been a dizzying and deflating journey for Mr. Stringer, whose grand ambitions have repeatedly collided with harsh political reality over the past year. He started out as a liberal candidate for mayor, but that plan crumbled when he and his advisers realized he could not distinguish himself in a field of better-known Democratic rivals. When one poll showed him with support from just 4 percent of voters, Mr. Stringer said he jokingly asked his wife, Elyse Buxbaum, whether she was still supporting him. “I was not even sure where my mother was, at that point,” he said dryly. Image Mr. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, has begun leveling attacks at Mr. Spitzer. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times He dropped out of the mayoral race and entered the campaign to become comptroller, the city’s chief financial officer and pension fund manager. All but uncontested, he seemed confident enough of victory that he began interviewing comptrollers around the country about their practices and printed custom campaign T-shirts for his sons, Max, 19 months, and Miles, 7 weeks, that read “Stringer Comptroller.” “It was a nice moment,” Mr. Stringer said, recalling with relish how the tame campaign allowed him to spend time at home on the Upper West Side with his sons. “But now here we are.” Mr. Stringer can now barely conceal his frustration with Mr. Spitzer, who jumped into the race four days before the deadline to qualify for the ballot without so much as a phone call to his opponent. “I don’t hate him,” he said of Mr. Spitzer. “If he had bothered to call, I wouldn’t have hung up.” Those close to Mr. Stringer variously describe Mr. Spitzer as a “nightmare” and “earthquake” for the Stringer campaign. Mr. Spitzer, whose family has a real estate fortune, can afford to finance his own campaign, and has a national reputation as a warrior against Wall Street from his tenure as the state’s attorney general. “I feel badly Scott has to go through all this,” said Richard Ravitch, a former lieutenant governor of New York who has tutored Mr. Stringer on the intricacies of the comptroller’s office. “He will have to work much harder than he might have otherwise wanted to.” In the days since Mr. Spitzer’s decision to challenge him, Mr. Stringer is moving swiftly to revamp his campaign. He hired a powerhouse political consulting firm, vowed to put together a potent team of field operatives to drum up votes and has started aggressively responding to Mr. Spitzer’s every move. (After learning that Mr. Spitzer would travel to Los Angeles on Friday to tape an appearance on Jay Leno’s show, a Stringer aide instantly criticized him for “skipping town four days into his campaign.”) Campaign workers at Mr. Stringer’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan are suddenly toiling into the wee hours, and the candidate himself, whose campaign had been largely ignored, is granting as many interview requests as he can schedule. Mr. Stringer’s mother has canceled her summer vacation, pledging to baby-sit so the candidate can spend more time on the trail. Mr. Stringer now faces a delicate balancing act. He is determined to malign Mr. Spitzer for using his wealth to buy his way onto the ballot, but is hesitant to use the Democratic political machine — of which he is a product — to bully Mr. Spitzer out of the race. Party leaders have quietly discussed plans to use the city’s complex elections rules to deprive Mr. Spitzer of a spot in the Democratic primary. But on Friday, Mr. Stringer opted not to challenge the 27,000 signatures that Mr. Spitzer had hastily collected to qualify for the Sept. 10 primary, and urged allies not to do so either. “Don’t waste your time,” he said. Without Mr. Spitzer in the race, Mr. Stringer’s pitch to voters had been simple: He vowed to reimagine and re-energize the office of comptroller in the same way he had the borough president’s office. He brought muscle to that languishing post by focusing on bread and butter issues like fixing malfunctioning elevators in public housing and building new public schools. Video Some women say the former governor’s sex scandal gives them pause in picking a candidate; others say it’s irrelevant. But Mr. Stringer’s pitch is now overshadowed by Mr. Spitzer, who has promised to turn the comptroller’s office into a hothouse for pathbreaking urban policy. “By the way, he is late to that,” said Mr. Stringer, who pointed to his own, well-documented plans for shaking up the comptroller’s office, like slashing the $400 million a year paid to outside investment managers and using the purchasing power of the pension funds to push for environmentally sustainable corporate policies. Mr. Stringer said that with his own reputation for collaboration, he stood a far better chance of achieving those aims. In a thinly veiled swipe at Mr. Spitzer, who once described himself as a “steamroller,” Mr. Stringer described the far-reaching potential of “working together, not a lone ranger, not a steamroller.” On the campaign trail, Mr. Spitzer has monopolized the news media spotlight over the past week, as the political world digested the possibility that the man once called the sheriff of Wall Street now wanted to hold a lesser post known for auditing the Sanitation Department. But aides to Mr. Stringer said he had captured something less fleeting: the attention and affection of voters who are repelled by Mr. Spitzer’s lawbreaking. Since Mr. Spitzer entered the race, the Stringer campaign has been flooded by e-mails and calls from would-be supporters and volunteers. “This city deserves better than leftover frauds,” wrote one woman, who mocked Mr. Spitzer in an e-mail shared by the Stringer campaign. At a subway stop in Harlem a few days ago, several women approached Mr. Stringer unprompted and urged him into battle against Mr. Spitzer, making clear that, for them, there were lines in politics that should not be crossed. Stephanie Brade, 53, offered to work for the campaign on the spot, citing Mr. Stringer’s service and Mr. Spitzer’s “poor judgment.” A governor openly flouting the law “just made no sense to me,” she said. A few feet away, Mr. Stringer leaned in to shake a new hand. “Listen,” the woman said. “You’ve got to beat Eliot.”

Comptroller race
Office of the Comptroller NYC
Scott M Stringer
Eliot L Spitzer
NYC


Chinese Artist, Ai Weiwei, to Repay Donations

Abstract: Ai Weiwei , the artist who was accused of tax evasion, said he will begin paying back the $1.4 million he collected from thousands of supporters, some of whom tossed money over the wall of his home studio to help him pay the bond for his tax appeal. Mr. Ai has described his 81-day detention and the subsequent fine of $2.4 million as a desperate attempt by the government to silence him. Mr. Ai has always said he considered the donations to be loans, but decided to begin repayment after losing a final appeal of the tax case last month, he said Thursday. “We are really thankful for what people did, which is remarkable in today’s China,” he said by phone. “It’s one thing to have sympathy for our cause, but it’s another to act and send money.”


Talk in G.O.P. Turns to a Stop Donald Trump Campaign

Abstract: Quiet conversations have begun in recent weeks among some of the Republican Party ’s biggest donors and normally competing factions, all aimed at a single question: How can we stop Donald Trump ? Republican strategists and donors have assembled focus groups to test negative messages about Mr. Trump. They have amassed dossiers on his previous support for universal health care and higher taxes. They have even discussed the creation of a “ super PAC ” to convince conservatives that Mr. Trump is not one of them. But the mammoth big-money network assembled by Republicans in recent years is torn about how best to defuse the threat Mr. Trump holds for their party, and haunted by the worry that any concerted attack will backfire. In phone calls, private dinners and occasional consultations among otherwise rivalrous outside groups, many have concluded that Mr. Trump’s harsh manner and continued attacks on immigrants and women were endangering the party’s efforts to compete in the general election. Yet after committing hundreds of millions of dollars to shape the Republican primary contest and groom a candidate who can retake the White House, the conservative donor class is finding that money — even in an era of super PACs and billion-dollar presidential campaigns — is a devalued currency in the blustery, post-policy campaign fashioned by Mr. Trump, driven not by seven-figure advertising campaigns but by Twitter feuds and unending free publicity. “People are somewhat perplexed by the whole Trump phenomenon,” said Ray Washburne, a Dallas businessman who is Gov. Chris Christie’s finance chairman. So far, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group and a Republican media buyer, there has barely been any advertising targeting Mr. Trump. Out of $90 million worth of ads reserved or bought in the Republican primary, just $1,300 has been spent attacking Mr. Trump — an ad in Spanish that ran briefly in California that was sponsored by a Spanish-language television network. The Club for Growth , which has spent millions of dollars on feisty intraparty campaigns attacking Republican candidates who deviate from conservative economic orthodoxy, appears closest to moving against Mr. Trump, soliciting advice from among its members and researching potential lines of attack. The group helped torpedo the populist presidential bid of Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, in 2008, and has long been a thorn in the side of Republican leaders — making it, many Republicans believe, a credible foil to Mr. Trump. Which Presidential Candidates Are Winning the Money Race See how the latest fund-raising numbers from the campaigns and outside groups stack up. But the club’s president, David McIntosh, said his group was still grappling with how to handle the protean Mr. Trump, whose appeal is based less on policy positions than on tapping into the raw anger of Republican voters against Washington leaders. Mr. McIntosh said some members had told him they agreed with Mr. Trump’s critique of Washington’s ineffectual establishment even if they did not regard him as very principled. “Part of our research has been why would a conservative Republican voter find this appealing,” Mr. McIntosh said. “A wonkish explanation that trade is actually good for the country probably won’t assuage them.” In interviews, several savvy and typically confident Republican donors and strategists seemed puzzled about how to topple Mr. Trump, increasingly worried about the feelings he has stirred among the activist base and uneasy about the consequences for the party. Andy Sabin, a New York supporter of Jeb Bush, said the question of what to do about Mr. Trump had come up repeatedly on the Hamptons fund-raising circuit this summer, as what seemed like a summer romance by disenchanted conservatives blossomed into a full-blown insurgency. “He’s been a topic, and he obviously disgusts a lot of people, because he’s been vile,” said Mr. Sabin, who is also a donor to American Crossroads, the party’s leading super PAC. “But he’s also been able to bring out what people feel about their government.” The cost of an anti-Trump campaign would be daunting: Reshaping opinions about Mr. Trump, a candidate with universal name recognition and a knack for garnering free airtime and column inches, could cost as much as $20 million. A sustained campaign aimed at Fox News viewers could cost $2 million a week, one Republican consultant working for a rival candidate estimated, while a more targeted effort, aimed at Iowa caucus-goers later this fall, would require as much as $10 million. And there is no certainty of success: A group identified with the Republican establishment would risk ending up in a war with Mr. Trump, while a new group — such as a political nonprofit to which other donors and organizations could secretly funnel cash — would play into Mr. Trump’s comments about lobbyists and corporations scheming to prop up his rivals. Mr. Trump also has begun to preview such attacks. This week, he lambasted both Karl Rove, a Crossroads co-founder, and the Club for Growth, which he said once asked him for a million-dollar contribution. (A club spokesman said that Mr. Trump asked for the meeting with Mr. McIntosh, which took place in May.) “Many Super Pacs, funded by groups that want total control over their candidate, are being formed to ‘attack’ Trump,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday on Twitter. “Remember when u see them.” Some Republican Party leaders continued to hold out hope that the improvisational Mr. Trump would prove unable to convert his popularity and name recognition into a campaign organization capable of winning primaries next year, as the lazy summer months give way to a grinding ground campaign in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. But several donors and strategists acknowledged that their earliest hope — that Mr. Trump would fade away on his own — was looking less likely every day. “Obviously the discussions have changed to say, ‘He’s someone who’s going to be there right to the end,’ ” said Ronald Weiser, a real estate developer and former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. While many Republican leaders and donors are convinced that something must be done to stop the billionaire Manhattan developer, few seem ready to take him on directly, given Mr. Trump’s tendency to counterattack viciously. Allies of Mr. Bush, arguing that Mr. Trump helps the former Florida governor by stealing voters and attention from other anti-establishment candidates, remark that perhaps donors to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, or Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, might take the lead in financing a Trump takedown. Mr. Walker’s supporters, in turn, suggest that the work might best be handled by a super PAC with plenty of cash but an underperforming candidate — like Rick Perry, the former Texas governor. “Everybody’s got different agendas and different conflicts,” said Austin Barbour, an adviser to a group of super PACs, known as Opportunity and Freedom, that have raised more than $17 million to back Mr. Perry, whose own campaign is floundering and bankrupt. “Our No. 1 priority is to go take this fight to support Governor Perry. There’s a lot of time here.” The biggest outside groups not tied to a specific candidate — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the political network of Charles G. and David H. Koch and the Rove-founded American Crossroads — are for now staying clear, although the Koch organizations have conspicuously snubbed Mr. Trump in several ways, declining to invite him to their policy forums or give him access to their state-of-the-art voter database. Among Republican strategists not working for the campaign, the emerging consensus was that voters would need to be persuaded by the candidates themselves, not by super PACs. Yet candidates like Mr. Cruz have not only avoided criticizing Mr. Trump, but have praised him, hoping to position themselves to pick up his supporters should Mr. Trump falter. One Republican strategist described “a sigh of relief around town that the Bush campaign finally did something,” referring to Mr. Bush’s decision this week to release a video of Mr. Trump looking askance at Iowa , describing himself as “very pro-choice,” and calling for tax increases on the rich.

Donald Trump
Republicans
2016 Presidential Election