In Battle Over Malibu Beaches, an App Unlocks Access

Abstract: MALIBU, Calif. — The battle between Malibu beachfront homeowners and a less privileged public that wants to share the stunning coastline has been fought with padlocks, gates, menacing signs, security guards, lawsuits and bulldozers. There seems little question who is winning: 20 of the 27 miles of Malibu coastline are inaccessible to the public. Yet this month, the homeowners — including some of the wealthiest and most famous people in the country, but also a hearty colony of surfers, stoners and old-fashioned beach lovers — are confronting what may be the biggest threat to their privacy yet. The smartphone. Jenny Price, an environmental writer who has pressed the battle to open hidden beaches, has developed an iPhone app offering a beach-by-beach battle plan for anyone wishing to explore what are, by design, some of the most secluded beaches around. It has maps to often hidden entry gates, house-by-house descriptions showing public property boundaries and spine-stiffening advice on dealing with counterfeit no-parking signs (“feel free to enjoy and then ignore”) and threatening property owners (“they’re welcome to call the sheriff”). This latest escalation in a seemingly never-ending battle is stirring questions of land use, property rights and privilege that have long been a source of tension in Southern California, a fight made all the more alluring because long stretches of beachfront are owned by well-known Hollywood figures, including David Geffen , Michael D. Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg . Image Forbidding signs sprout along the Malibu coast, some legitimate, some not. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times By state law, California beaches are public property, though the dividing line between private property and public beach is as changeable as the high-tide mark and the easements a homeowner is granted for development rights. And the beachfront homes in Malibu tend to be crammed together, making it impossible to catch even a glimpse of long stretches of the beach, much less walk onto it. “I sort of see this as one of the most egregious problems we have with public space in a region that’s plagued with problems with public space,” Ms. Price said as she walked along Carbon Beach, lined with glistening estates, the only sign of life being the clip-clip-clip of the occasional landscaper. Later, strolling along Malibu Road Beach as the sun cracked through the morning marine layer, Ms. Price stopped in front of a house that had seven variations of a “no trespassing” sign. “You need to stand behind the tide line,” she said. “Last time we were here, the owner called the sheriff.” The release of the “Our Malibu Beaches” app has set off waves of anxiety among homeowners here, fearful that a high-tech weapon in a long-fought war will open the gates on what has been a largely secret world. The despair cuts across demographic lines. Malibu is a more complicated place than is commonly portrayed, a mixture of the very wealthy and people who bought relatively modest homes and cabins here a generation ago and hung on. “There are plenty of places that have bathrooms, lifeguards, parking,” said Wendy Ledner, who grew up on Malibu Road Beach. “There are none of those facilities at these beaches. People come through, they urinate, defecate, they leave their garbage — there are no garbage pails. They can’t park; there is no parking, so they block driveways.” Image Jenny Price developed a smartphone app that identifies the counterfeit signs and the hidden gates to public beaches. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times Arnold G. York, the publisher of The Malibu Times, said the uproar was feeding long-held and incorrect stereotypes about the community. “One of the things that makes for a wonderful story is how Malibu is elitist and we don’t want anyone here,” he said. “The reality is we get 15 million people coming out each year to the beaches. The biggest problem is not access but parking.” He said he understood the concern of homeowners that these remote and often small beaches, some with rough surf and jagged rock formations, were not made to accommodate large influxes of sun-seekers. A drive through Malibu testifies to the utility of such a guide. Although there are some parking spaces, particularly along the Pacific Coast Highway, there are not many, and beachgoers have to compete with homeowners and people who work on the estates. And wily homeowners drop orange cones on the street or build fake garage doors to block off what are, in fact, legal parking spots. One beach access gate was mostly obscured by hedges planted by property owners. The gates are often weighted down with all kinds of signs, some legitimate, some not. “Right to pass by permission and subject to control of owner,” a sign at Lechuza Beach, fell in the latter category. There are 17 public access ways to the Malibu coastline. Under state law, there should be more than 100. The last time one was opened was in 2005. Image A view of the Malibu beaches app. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times “There is a lot of resistance to opening new access ways; there are 15 additional easements that have yet to be opened,” said Linda Locklin, who leads the coastal access program for the California Coastal Commission . “Our record is frankly not so good. It takes us forever to open them.” Much of the information in the Malibu beach app has been available to the public, but in the form of bulky, 300-page regional coastal guides, which cost $25 apiece. Ms. Locklin called the app “a big deal” that would greatly advance the commission’s goal of making these beaches more accessible. It is easier to use than the books and, at least for now, free. (An Android version of the app is expected to be released in the fall and cost $1.99.) This tug of war has always had overtones of class warfare. One of the beaches is known as Billionaires’ Beach, and Ms. Price has named the access way to that beach “Hurray for Hollywood.” Still, she said she resisted any attempt to frame the battle along those lines, even as she stood in front of the home of Mr. Geffen, who at first fought the coastal commission when it tried to open a public walkway by his home. “Even Geffen, despite his fake garages, he’s been a decent neighbor, and I don’t call him out,” Ms. Price said. “It’s not about who lives down here. It’s not a take-down-the-billionaires project. This is not a political statement. People are constantly asking us, ‘Can you show us Pierce Brosnan’s house?’ Yeah — but no.” Ms. Price cast her arm across Billionaires’ Beach. “This is one of the premier beaches, and look how many people have come,” she said, pointing to a largely empty swatch of beach. “The hordes have not descended.”

Beach
Malibu CA
Mobile Apps
Jennifer Price


Hunter-Reay Claims Alabama IndyCar Race

Abstract: Ryan Hunter-Reay coasted to his second straight IndyCar victory at Barber Motorsports Park in Birmingham, Ala., when the rain-shortened Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama finished under caution. A full-course caution came out for the final seven minutes of the timed race after the rookie Mikhail Aleshin lost control and left the track.

Ryan Hunter-Reay
Car Racing
Indy Racing League,IndyCar


A CBS Newsman’s Serenade: Give My Regards to Mr. Redstone

Abstract: Two singers who owe their success, in part, to the media mogul Sumner M. Redstone paid tribute to him at a gala given in his honor last week in New York by the Paley Center for Media. One, Tony Bennett, the 81-year-old singer, sang “Fly Me to the Moon” and thanked Mr. Redstone for changing the path of his career. Also performing was Bob Schieffer, best known as the host of “Face the Nation” on CBS News. And in contrast to Mr. Bennett, Mr. Schieffer wrote his own material. Singing “Mr. Redstone” to the tune of “Mr. Goldstone” from the musical “Gypsy,” Mr. Schieffer sang about the boss splitting up CBS and Viacom in 2006. “You are the guru, and who would know but you what a little change in Viacom’s name would do. Have an éclair, Mr. Redstone, buy some networks, make a movie, play a tune. Take a break now, Mr. Redstone, ’cause another deal will come along real soon.” Other verses mentioned more painful memories, including a fire in 1979 that Mr. Redstone barely survived: “Your life’s been filled with dramas, you lost your good pajamas in that fire in Boston, oh so long ago. It woulda done in most men, but you survived because you hung in.” The last verse recounted a more recent situation, Mr. Redstone’s controversial 2006 decision that Paramount sever its longstanding ties with Tom Cruise: “Nickelodeon’s a hit, you built the whole thing bit by bit. With hard work and a little hoop de doo, you got rid of one Tom Cruise, but you kept CBS News. Mr. Redstone, thank you, Mr. Redstone, we thank you.” Mr. Schieffer, who was backed by Honky Tonk Confidential, a country and western band in Washington he regularly sings with, said he was invited by the Paley Center to write the song as a surprise for Mr. Redstone; he collaborated on it with Diana Quinn, a founder of Honky Tonk Confidential who is also the weekend assignment editor in the Washington bureau of CBS News. “We just wanted to be celebratory and funny,” Mr. Schieffer said. Despite — or perhaps because of — the reference to Mr. Cruise, Mr. Redstone evidently approved. Mr. Schieffer said he was contacted by a member of Mr. Redstone’s staff the day after the gala, who asked for a copy of the lyrics.

CBS News
Schieffer Bob
Redstone Sumner M
CBS Corp
Viacom Inc
Television


$81 Million for Reserve of Teachers

Abstract: New York City is paying $81 million over two years in salaries and benefits for teachers without permanent teaching jobs, according to a report being released on Tuesday. The teachers are part of the so-called reserve pool, which holds teachers whose positions have been eliminated, but who have yet to secure a new permanent teaching position at another school. The reserve is an outgrowth of the city’s contract with the teachers’ union, which ended seniority rights in staffing decisions as well as the automatic transfer of teachers who had been cut because of shrinking enrollment, the closing of large schools or the elimination of particular programs. At the time, Chancellor Joel I. Klein said he would rather absorb the cost of the teachers in the reserve pool than saddle principals with teachers they did not want. Under the contract, teachers whose positions have been eliminated from one school and cannot find another to hire them, or who simply do not look for a new job, are assigned to schools to fill in as substitute teachers or temporary replacements. They collect full teacher salary and benefits. Teachers at those schools are required to show up every day at regular school hours and are available for principals to use as substitutes, but the principals are not required to do so. Officials at the Education Department said they did not track how often the principals used the assigned substitutes, or whether they did at all. Since 2006, when the contract took effect, more than 600 teachers have been placed in the reserve after failing to find new positions, according to the report by the New Teacher Project, which recruits and trains teachers for school systems across the country, including New York City. The report found that nearly half the reserve teachers had not applied for any vacancies through the city’s new online job posting system. Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project and the lead author of the report, called the elimination of automatic transfers a resounding success that enjoyed widespread support among teachers who chose to switch schools. But he said the payments to the reserve pool were a flaw in the system. “I don’t think anybody thinks that the system can keep paying for this in the long term,” he said. “It would undermine all the good stuff that is happening.” The report drew praise from city officials. But Randi Weingarten , the president of the United Federation of Teachers , dismissed it, calling the New Teacher Project a “wholly owned subsidiary” of the Education Department. The New Teacher Project runs the city’s Teaching Fellows program under a $4 million contract that expires in 2010. It also has relationships with other cities and has studied staff systems in several districts, including Portland, Ore., Milwaukee and Chicago. “The most repulsive part of this report is that the D.O.E. is abdicating its responsibility to help the teachers who, through no fault of their own, have lost their positions,” Ms. Weingarten added. “It’s the quintessential blame-the-victim strategy.” In the past, Mr. Klein has suggested that most teachers in the reserve pool are so undesirable that no principal would hire them or that they simply do not try to find a job. The report said reserve teachers who had not found a permanent place were six times as likely as other teachers to have received an unsatisfactory rating sometime in their careers, although that rating had nothing to do with why their prior jobs had been eliminated. More than 90 percent of the roughly 2,700 teachers whose positions were cut in 2006 found jobs at other schools within several months, the report said. “This shows how well the open-market system has worked,” said Dan Weisberg, the schools’ chief executive for labor policy. “We’re able to retain more talented teachers, and principals are extremely happy to be choosing their own teams.” The report said veteran teachers were not “inherently disadvantaged” in finding new spots. But recently the union filed a lawsuit accusing the schools of age discrimination, pointing to the new policy, coupled with a new system that makes veteran teachers more costly for principals to hire. When the teachers’ contract was revised in 2005, many veterans of the school system, including union officials, warned that it would be extremely difficult to place teachers in new assignments. Ms. Weingarten said Monday that those fears had come true. She said Mr. Klein had broken apart the structures that once efficiently reassigned teachers. Local district offices that could balance the changing needs of different schools no longer exist, and principals in many cases are effectively operating on their own, as chief executives of their schools, she said. During a conference call with reporters, Ms. Weingarten had four teachers in the reserve at Evander Childs High School in the Bronx speak of their experiences. Each said they had applied for several jobs, though not all had used the new online system. The report comes as the city and the union are preparing to battle further over school budget cuts. In recent weeks, the relationship between Ms. Weingarten and Mr. Klein has soured even more as they have increasingly clashed over the cuts as well as teacher tenure rules. The teachers’ contract is scheduled to expire in October next year, on the eve of the mayoral election — making it unlikely that a deal will be struck with the Bloomberg administration. “The danger here is that at some point these excess teachers will be forced into vacancies and into schools,” Mr. Weisberg said. “There’s no question what’s the most efficient thing to do. Obviously it’s very tempting, but it would be an awful thing for kids.” Also on Monday, the union released an analysis suggesting that the city had misspent some of the $152.7 million in new state money meant to lower class sizes. The analysis found that 48.5 percent of 390 elementary and middle schools that received state class size reduction money did not lower class sizes, and that the average class size at more than a third of the schools had increased over the past year. William C. Thompson Jr. , the city comptroller and likely mayoral candidate, said he would conduct an audit to determine where the money had been spent. The state also is planning to monitor the spending.

United Federation of Teachers
Teachers and School Employees
Wages and Salaries
Education Department (NYC)
Education and Schools
New York City Teaching Fellows
Klein Joel I
Weingarten Randi
Thompson William C Jr


Paterson Raised $3.2 Million in Two Months for Re-election

Abstract: Gov. David A. Paterson ’s campaign committee said on Sunday that it had raised $3.2 million in the last two months, surprising political observers in Albany and attesting to the governor’s determination to get re-elected in 2010. But the Paterson administration’s prodigious fund-raising since taking office in March is liable to rekindle concerns among good government groups that he is opening the floodgates to special interest groups and their money. His previous campaign account, when he was lieutenant governor, had slightly more than $100,000 in January. The governor has already waded into a feud with good government groups by rejecting the voluntary campaign contribution limits adopted by his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, and by putting campaign finance reform on the back burner during the legislative session. What is not yet clear is who is donating to the governor. In announcing the figure on Sunday, his campaign said only that the money had come from 600 donors since May 5. Details of their identities and donations were to be revealed later this week; campaign finance filings are due at the State Board of Elections on Tuesday. “Whoa, where did that money come from?” said Barbara Bartoletti, the legislative director of the League of Women Voters of New York State, when told the figure. “The thing that bothers us a little bit is we don’t really know what his reform agenda is.” “Nothing is going to change until you get real campaign finance change and reform,” she added. “The status quo works for them.” Jonathan Rosen, a spokesman for the governor’s campaign, said the governor had raised the money through a series of small fund-raisers rather than a large event. He said the amount should reinforce the governor’s determination to get elected in his own right. “It’s named ‘Paterson for Governor’ for a reason,” Mr. Rosen said of the governor’s campaign account. As for the broader concerns raised by Ms. Bartoletti and others, Mr. Rosen said, “The governor said he’s committed to campaign finance reform, but in order to compete on a level playing field, he’s going to compete under the limits set under current law.”

Elections
Finances
Paterson David A
Politics and Government
Reform and Reorganization
Albany (NY)


Tide to Make Its Super Bowl Debut

Abstract: THEY say time and tide wait for no man, but Tide has waited a long time to be advertised on the Super Bowl. Soon, Tide, the biggest detergent brand in America — sold by the biggest advertiser in America — will appear for the first time on the biggest day for advertising in America. Procter & Gamble , the maker of Tide, has bought time during the Fox Broadcasting coverage of Super Bowl XLII on Feb. 3 for a commercial for the Tide to Go instant stain remover. The 30-second spot, by Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, part of the Publicis Groupe, is scheduled to appear in the game’s second quarter. Procter joins two dozen or so marketers, both well known and would-be, that are paying Fox a record or near-record amount to run commercials in the game. The average cost of each 30 seconds of commercial time is estimated at $2.7 million, compared with $2.6 million for spots in Super Bowl XLI in February 2007. Among the other advertisers are Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, FedEx, General Motors, PepsiCo, Toyota Motor and several movie studios. Fox Broadcasting, part of the News Corporation, has sold all but one of the 63 30-second commercials that it plans to run in the game, a spokesman for Fox Sports, Lou D’Ermilio, said Thursday. Demand for commercial time in Super Bowl XLII was strong even before the writers’ strike upended the prime-time schedules of the major networks and cast into doubt the fate of popular fare like “C.S.I.,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and the broadcast of the Academy Awards ceremony. As early as the end of October, Fox had only about seven of the 30-second spots in the Super Bowl left to sell. Usually at that time of year, there are two or three times that many slots still unsold. One reason for that appeal is robust demand for commercial time in all sports programming, Mr. D’Ermilio said, on Fox or not. High demand during the Major League Baseball season last year continued through the spate of college football bowl games that ended Monday with the Bowl Championship Series title game.  Another reason for the ardor for Super Bowl spots is the magnitude of recent changes in the media marketplace. The Super Bowl is one of the few so-called big events that remain available to marketers eager to reach tens of millions of consumers at the same time; more than 90 million Americans typically watch each game. “It’s the last bastion of mass marketing, with incredible reach,” said Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer at Cymfony, a research company that is part of the TNS Media Intelligence unit of Taylor Nelson Sofres. “If you’ve got to sell a lot of beer or chips, or you have something big to announce, it’s a great venue,” he added, despite steep costs that otherwise may be “really hard to justify.” Viewers also respond to Super Bowl spots much differently than to commercials in most other TV shows. Ever since a spectacular Apple commercial called “1984” turned up during the 1984 Super Bowl, consumers have come to expect superior commercials, stuffed with celebrities, special effects, surprise endings, hit music, anthropomorphic animals and other enticements to pay attention. As a result, rather than change the channel or leave the room for a beer when the selling starts, the audience sticks around, talks about the spots the next day and even goes to Web sites like AOL and YouTube to watch them again. At every Super Bowl party, there is usually someone “who says, ‘Shhhhhhh! Here comes this cool commercial,’ ” Mr. Nail said. It is that buzz factor Procter is hoping to capitalize on. “The Super Bowl is the one time you watch a show and don’t want to miss the commercial breaks,” said Suzanne Watson, Tide brand manager for North America at Procter in Cincinnati. “Given the wide appeal for Tide to Go and the broad audience for the Super Bowl,” she added, “it’s a perfect fit.” Tide to Go, which was introduced in 2005, is particularly fitting for a Super Bowl berth, Ms. Watson said, because of its properties as a quick stain remover. “There are thousands of parties that night,” making Super Bowl Sunday “the biggest stain-based occasion of the year,” she added. “With Tide to Go right there, you don’t have to get up to clean your shirt or pants.” One reason this year’s Super Bowl has become more desirable for Procter than Super Bowl X or even XX is the growing number of women who tune in the game. In some years, more women have watched the Super Bowl than the Oscars, a show with such potent female appeal that it has been nicknamed on Madison Avenue “the Super Bowl for women.”  Another reason is that Procter has started seeking Tide buyers beyond the traditional market of women, adding pitches aimed at men and students of both sexes. The Tide to Go commercial will be supported by a wide-ranging marketing campaign, Ms. Watson said, that will include the Internet, public relations and promotions. Such nontraditional elements “can really connect with consumers outside the laundry room,” she added, “and in their daily lives.” Ms. Watson declined to discuss details of the campaign or the commercial because, she said, it was too soon. The Tide to Go commercial is only Procter’s third in the Super Bowl. The first, for Charmin bathroom tissue, ran in 2004. The second, in 2006, was for Gillette, which Procter had acquired months before. The initial Procter foray into the Super Bowl — in a commercial created by another Publicis agency in New York, Publicis Worldwide — drew mostly negative reviews. It was one of only two spots that Bob Garfield, the ad critic for the trade publication Advertising Age, slighted with 1.5 stars; he gave lower scores to just two spots and higher scores to 31. “We haven’t been focused on how this TV spot will measure relative to others,” Ms. Watson said. “We just want to do the best in communicating with our consumers.” Translation from marketing-speak: The pressure is on.

Super Bowl
Saatchi & Saatchi
Advertising and Marketing
Procter & Gamble Co


Poor Economy Slams Brakes on Women's Workplace Progress

Abstract: Across the country, women in their prime earning years, struggling with an unfriendly economy, are retreating from the work force, either permanently or for long stretches. They had piled into jobs in growing numbers since the 1960s. But that stopped happening this decade, and as the nearly seven-year-old recovery gives way to hard times, the retreat is likely to accelerate. Indeed, for the first time since the women’s movement came to life, an economic recovery has come and gone, and the percentage of women at work has fallen, not risen, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Each of the seven previous recoveries since 1960 ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began. When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many suggested that the pullback from paid employment was a matter of the women themselves deciding to stay home — to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households. But now, a different explanation is turning up in government data, in the research of a few economists and in a Congressional study, to be released Tuesday, that follows the women’s story through the end of 2007. After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while. “When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids,” Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which did the Congressional study, said in an interview. “We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.” Hard times in manufacturing certainly sidelined Tootie Samson of Baxter, Iowa . Nine months after she lost her job on a factory assembly line, Ms. Samson, 48, is still not working. She could be. Jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour are easy enough to land, she says. But like the men with whom she worked at the Maytag washing machine factory, now closed, near her home, she resists going back to work at less than half her old wage. Ms. Samson knows she will have to get another job at some point. She and her husband still have a teenage daughter to put through college, and his income as a truck driver is not enough. So Ms. Samson, now receiving unemployment benefits, is going to college full time — leaving the work force for more than two years — hoping that a bachelor’s degree will enable her to earn at least her old wage of $20 an hour. “A lot of women I know, all they did was work at the Maytag factory,” said Ms. Samson, who joined Maytag’s assembly line 11 years ago. “They can’t find another job like it and they deal with this loss by dropping out.” The Joint Economic Committee study cites the growing statistical evidence that women are leaving the work force “on par with men,” and the potentially disastrous consequences for families. “Women bring home about one-third of family income,” said Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York and vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. “And only those families with a working wife have seen real improvement in their living standards.” The proportion of women holding jobs in their prime working years, 25 to 54, peaked at 74.9 percent in early 2000 as the technology investment bubble was about to burst. Eight years later, in June, it was 72.7 percent, a seemingly small decline, but those 2.2 percentage points erase more than 12 years of gains for women. Four million more in their prime years would be employed today if the old pattern had prevailed through the expansion now ending. The pattern is roughly similar among the well-educated and the less educated, among the married and never married, among mothers with teenage children and those with children under 6, and among white women and black. The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of the men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today. But while men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out. “A woman gets laid off and she stays home for six months with her kids,” Ms. Boushey said. “She doesn’t admit that she is staying home because she could not get another acceptable job.” The biggest retreat has been in manufacturing, where more than one million women have disappeared from payrolls since 2001. Like men, many have not returned to jobs in other sectors. Wage stagnation often discourages them from pursuing new jobs, says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard . “While pay was rising solidly in the 1990s, you had women continuing to move into the work force,” Mr. Katz said. Pay is no longer rising smartly for women in the key 25-to-54 age group. Just the opposite, the median pay — the point where half make more and half less — has fallen in recent years, to $14.84 an hour in 2007 from $15.04 in 2004, adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute . (The similar wage for men today is two dollars more.) Not since the 1970s has that happened to women for so long a stretch — and because this is a new experience for them, “women may be even more reluctant than men to accept declining wages,” said Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts . Joyce Call, 39, of Howell, Mich., near Detroit , certainly fits that description. She took an accounting job in January 2006 at Forming Technologies, which supplies plastic to auto companies. The pay, $14 an hour — more than $25,000 a year — was acceptable, she said, but not the raises, which came to only 28 cents an hour over two years, or the Christmas bonus: $150 the first year and nothing the second. “I was treated poorly,” she said, explaining her departure. For the moment, Ms. Call is home-schooling one of her two sons, falling back on her husband’s $70,000 income as a plumber, and looking for another job, to return to a work force she has seldom left since finishing high school in 1988. “People are just not hiring in Michigan ,” she said. What’s more, she is reluctant because of the high cost of gasoline to commute more than an hour each way to the next job. “It would be a tough decision to accept a job that required me to go farther,” she said, adding that she and her husband were cutting back on discretionary spending until she is employed again. What helped drive up the percentage of women in the work force were the thousands who came off welfare and took jobs in the 1990s, pushed to do so by the welfare-to-work legislation. A strong economy eased the way. So did tax credits and more subsidized child care. Now as the economy weakens and employers shrink their payrolls, many of these women struggle to find work. Lisa Craig, 42, is among them. Raising three sons in her native Chicago , she had worked only occasionally since high school and started receiving welfare benefits in 1993. For the next seven years she took courses in office skills, was a volunteer in a day care center and served for a while as an unpaid intern for a college vice president. And then in 2000 she went to work. For most of that year she earned $10 an hour as a salesclerk at a duty-free shop at O’Hare Airport, selling luxury items, but left the job to move to Milwaukee with her children to be near her sister. “I was in a bad marriage,” she said, “and I was getting a divorce.” Over the last eight years in Milwaukee she has worked only sporadically although, as she puts it, she has applied for hundreds of jobs, struggling to supplement a $628-a-month welfare check that goes almost entirely to rent, plus $500 a month in food vouchers. The longest tenure, 11 months, was as a salesclerk earning $7.75 an hour at a Goodwill Industries clothing store. She lost that job last November, but is volunteering at the Milwaukee office of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, hoping to draw a modest salary soon as a community intern. Ms. Samson, the former Maytag worker, says she can afford not to work because she qualified under the terms of the plant closing for two years of unemployment benefits as long as she is a full-time student. She lost health insurance but shifted to her husband’s policy. His $40,000 income as a truck driver and her $360 a week in jobless benefits gets them by while she takes an accelerated program at a William Penn University campus near her home. Graduation is scheduled for January 2010. “If I were a single parent or did not have benefits,” Ms. Samson said, “I would have had to find a job. I could not have gone back to school to get my degree and the promise it holds of a better job.” That for Ms. Samson is a good reason to drop out. Just working, which she has done nearly all of her adult life, is unappealing, she says. Even interior design, for which she once earned an associate’s degree, does not excite her anymore, she says, mainly because people can no longer afford to fix up their homes. “A business degree will put me in a position to work for any company,” Ms. Samson said, “and put me in a position to work up into a well-paid human resources job.”


For Valentine’s Day, Adore Me Takes On Victoria’s Secret and Other Bigger Lingerie Rivals

Abstract: In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, the headquarters of Adore Me , a lingerie start-up, are frantic with activity, for good reason: Its daily sales in this period are more than 20 times the typical volume and nearly double those of Black Friday or Cyber Monday. So significant is Valentine’s Day for this three-year-old company, in fact, that a flat screen mounted on a wall in the company’s offices, in the heart of New York’s fashion district, counts down the days, hours and seconds until Feb. 14. There is more to the lingerie business than meets the eye. These garments are complex to design and size — bras have up to 20 different components — and manufacturing them requires long lead times and large minimum orders. “If you want to start a brand with, say, 100 different styles, and you need to purchase 5,000 to 10,000 units of each, that’s a $10 million to $15 million investment before you’ve made any sales,” said Adore Me’s chief executive and co-founder, Morgan Hermand-Waiche. “It’s a hard problem to crack,” and it is the reason, he said, that Victoria’s Secret has been the dominant player. The market is top-heavy, to say the least, with L Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret and Pink, accounting for about 42 percent of the $13 billion United States lingerie market, according to the research firm IBISWorld. The next largest competitors, Frederick’s of Hollywood and American Eagle Outfitters’ Aerie brand among them, have market shares in the low single digits. “VS changed the game for the lingerie market,” said Britanny Carter, industry analyst for IBISWorld. “A lot of stores try to sell sex, whereas VS is more of a lifestyle brand.” Rather than tiptoe into the market, Mr. Hermand-Waiche has raised close to $12 million in funding, hired a former design director from Victoria’s Secret and charted an ambitious plan to make Adore Me a household name. In 2014, it tripled its revenue from a reported $5.6 million the previous year. The company introduces a collection every month and offers a broad range of sizes, from petites to plus. Like many start-ups today, Adore Me has used online advertising, social media and referrals to build its brand, but it is also using old-school tactics. In January, it began a television campaign, with spots on networks like Bravo, Lifetime and MTV. The lingerie business has unique advantages and challenges, said Shikhar Ghosh, a co-leader of Harvard Business School’s entrepreneurial manager program and an investor in the company. Image Helen Mears, Morgan Hermand-Waiche and Gary Bravard of Adore Me, an online lingerie start-up. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times “This is one area where the fashion doesn’t change quickly, and it is dominated by a single large competitor,” he said. Unlike many start-up businesses today, however, this one demands a high initial investment. “You don’t want to aim low and miss,” Mr. Ghosh said. The inspiration behind Adore Me resembles that of Victoria’s Secret, which was founded by Roy Raymond in 1977 after he went shopping for lingerie for his wife and decided there had to be a better alternative to the department store. Mr. Hermand-Waiche started thinking about the lingerie business in 2010, when he was a second-year M.B.A. student at Harvard and went shopping for a gift for his girlfriend. He couldn’t afford the lingerie he liked and was unimpressed with the lingerie he could afford. Mr. Hermand-Waiche, who was born in France, used the remainder of his time in business school researching the industry, fine-tuning his plan and talking with investors. Soon after graduation, he teamed up with a Frenchman, Gary Bravard, who oversees supply chain management and operations. The fashion industry was not a huge reach for Mr. Hermand-Waiche. His family owns and operates clothing stores throughout France. Before business school, he worked as a junior associate with McKinsey & Company, spending much of his time working with manufacturers in Asia. Rather than hire a designer and wait up to a year for the merchandise, he started a website in January 2012 with garments designed by suppliers. The logic is not unlike that of a winemaker who sources grapes from another grower until his own crop is ready. To work around the problem of high-volume minimum orders, Mr. Hermand-Waiche negotiated with suppliers to stagger deliveries over several months. Meanwhile, he went to work recruiting his own designer to help shape the Adore Me brand. As luck would have it, Helen Mears, a former design director for Victoria’s Secret and, later, a division of Wacoal Corporation, was looking to do something more entrepreneurial. A lace manufacturer introduced Ms. Mears and Mr. Hermand-Waiche. “I hired her the same day I met her,” he said. Today Ms. Mears and another designer have a hand in every garment sold by Adore Me. This is no small undertaking, given that the company unveils 30 to 40 new styles every month. There are more than 400 items on the Adore Me site . Like many retail start-ups now, the company helps consumers select items by having them take a style quiz and by selling all of its bras and panties in sets. Image An employee working in Adore Me’s Manhattan offices. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times The company offers a wide range of sizes, from 30A to 42G. Women who wear plus and petite sizes account for roughly a third of the United States market, Mr. Hermand-Waiche said, and that share is growing. Yet these groups are underserved by traditional lingerie brands. (An online petition is currently on Change.org asking Victoria’s Secret to offer larger sizes.) Adore Me encourages users to sign up for a free V.I.P. membership. Members are sent a new set of lingerie each month at a discounted price of $25 for the first order, then a $10 discount on sets, which typically sell for $50. Every sixth set is free. Members can opt out of monthly orders or cancel any time. Shipping is free, as are returns — and everything can be returned; the policy, commonplace among online sellers, is a benefit to online shoppers who like the option of trying on styles and sizes at home. Still, the return rate is just 6 percent, according to Mr. Hermand-Waiche, versus 20 percent to 40 percent for other e-commerce companies. Mr. Hermand-Waiche said he planned eventually to sell Adore Me products in department stores or through stand-alone locations. For now, however, the company is exclusively online and mobile — with the latter accounting for 60 percent to 70 percent of Adore Me’s traffic. Customers who follow Adore Me on social media receive the usual promotions, such as free items and express shipping, but they also have the opportunity to give feedback or vote on new styles or lines the company is considering. “We can develop styles and have prototypes made, put them on the site and see how the customer reacts even before we place the order,” Ms. Mears said. Similarly, Adore Me photographs the same styles on different models in different settings, then uses what’s known as A/B testing to see what sells best. The technique involves showing one group of users one picture and another group a second picture and seeing which image has the better response. Online companies use this for all kinds of things, whether it’s two different web pages, different copy or different pictures. “It blows me away how much of a difference it can make in sales,” Ms. Mears said. As a rule, customers do not respond as well to blond models or scenes that are too suggestive. When Adore Me began its television campaign — a bold move for any start-up — it used some of the information it had gleaned from social media and its testing to determine what ads to show on what networks, and when. Expensive television advertising may seem to be an anomaly for a lean online start-up aimed primarily at younger customers, but Mr. Hermand-Waiche said it made a difference. “With online advertising, there comes a saturation point, where if people see an ad one more time, it’s not going to help,” he said. “It took almost a year of research, but so far the results have been very good.”

Adore Me
Morgan Hermand-Waiche
Helen Mears
Lingerie and Underwear
Small business
Startup


Obama Will Need His Oratory Powers to Sell Globalization

Abstract: WASHINGTON — When President Obama travels to North Carolina and Europe this week, he will press an argument that could define foreign policy in the last six months of his presidency: that Americans and Europeans must not forsake their open, interconnected societies for the nativism and nationalism preached by Donald J. Trump or Britain’s Brexiteers. Few presidents have put more faith than Mr. Obama in the power of words to persuade audiences to accept a complex idea, whether it is the morality of a just war or the imperfect nature of American society. Yet countering the anti-immigration and anti-free-trade slogans in this election year will require all of his oratorical skills. Mr. Obama road-tested his pitch over the last two weeks in two friendly venues: Silicon Valley and Canada . This week, he will take the case to North Carolina , a swing state that has been hard hit by the forces of globalization, and to a NATO meeting in Poland, where the alliance members will grapple with the effects of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union , known as Brexit. In Warsaw, Mr. Obama will sit next to Britain’s lame-duck prime minister, David Cameron , whose political career was ended by his miscalculation over holding the referendum on European Union membership. But first, in Charlotte, N.C., he will campaign with Hillary Clinton, his former secretary of state and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who reversed her position on Mr. Obama’s Asian trade deal, formally called the Trans-Pacific Partnership , after many in her party turned sharply against free trade. “President Obama has made a valiant attempt to build support for freer trade,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University. “But the arguments in favor of free trade lack rhetorical and political resonance, especially amidst a heated political campaign.” The case for ambitious trade deals, Dr. Prasad said, is that they allow the United States to set the rules for its dealings with other countries, and to wield greater geopolitical influence. Yet those arguments are easily overshadowed by the simple, if dubious, assertion that the losses to the American economy from these deals are greater than the benefits. “Obama’s ability to sway the debate about free trade has been hampered by those in his own party feeling the heat from constituents who are up in arms about weak employment and wage growth,” Dr. Prasad said. White House officials said Mr. Obama would not hesitate to make a strong case for the Trans-Pacific Partnership on the campaign trail. But Josh Earnest, the press secretary, said the president’s remarks on Tuesday in Charlotte would probably focus more on areas where he and Mrs. Clinton agreed. Then, in Europe, Mr. Obama may find a more receptive audience, given the deep misgivings over the British vote. “His timing is pretty good,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “If he arrived the week before, the party would have been rip-roaring. Now everybody is sitting there with an ice pack on their forehead. They might be ready to listen to some sensible advice.” The departure of Britain from the European Union is likely to have significant, if not immediate, effects on Europe’s security. Some experts express fear that it will weaken the response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, for example. At the Warsaw meeting, a senior administration official said, Mr. Obama plans to emphasize the need for the European Union to cooperate more closely with NATO. This has long been a goal of the United States, but the exit of Britain from the union makes it more urgent, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in advance of the NATO meeting. NATO and the European Union could collaborate in countering cyberattacks, coordinating military exercises and patrolling the central Mediterranean. But Britain’s departure could pose problems for NATO. European diplomats said they expected France and Germany to consider closer military integration within the European Union — something Britain and the United States have resisted because they view it as competing with the alliance. Mr. Obama spoke out publicly against a “leave” vote when he visited Britain in April, and the outcome of that debate was perhaps a harbinger of the challenges he faces in resisting antiglobalism at home. In his speeches, he emphasizes that leaders must recognize the fears and resentments that people feel because of economic dislocation. “For them, globalization is inherently rigged toward the top 1 percent,” Mr. Obama said in an address to the Canadian Parliament . “I understand that vision. I know why it’s tempting.” The problem, the president said, is that it is too late to turn back. “Restricting trade or giving in to protectionism in this 21st-century economy will not work,” Mr. Obama said. “Even if we wanted to, we can’t seal ourselves off from the rest of the world. The day after Brexit, people looked around and said: ‘Oh! How is this going to work?’” By recognizing people’s fears while making the case for an interconnected world, Mr. Axelrod said, the president has found the “sweet spot” in the debate. But telling people that they can do nothing to stem the tide of globalization is not a particularly appealing message. At times, it seems that Mr. Obama has suffered his own dislocation. In Ottawa on Wednesday, he took part in a news conference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico that was dominated by questions about Mr. Trump and the British vote. While Mr. Trudeau was talking about whether Canada would export more hydroelectric power to the United States, Mr. Obama began scribbling notes. When it was his turn to speak, he abruptly veered into a discussion of the meaning of populism, a term often used to describe the political appeals made by Mr. Trump or the pro-Brexit campaigners. “I’m not prepared to concede the notion that some of the rhetoric that’s been popping up is populist,” Mr. Obama said. He described his own agenda as populist, in that he wanted to help ordinary people get economic opportunities, working mothers get child care and children get access to education. A candidate who has never worked on behalf of social justice or the interests of the poor, he said, could not be a populist. “That’s not the measure of populism,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s nativism. Or xenophobia. Or worse.” When he had finished, an obviously worked-up Mr. Obama apologized for the digression, saying that as he neared the end of his presidency, he felt entitled to go “on these occasional rants.” The next day, Mr. Earnest was asked if the president planned any more of these rants. “Considering we’ve got another six and a half months to go before the end of the presidency,” he replied, “I think it’s likely we’re all going to get to enjoy at least one more.”

Europe
Brexit
Protectionism
International relations
International trade
US Foreign Policy
Barack Obama
Donald Trump
Great Britain


Zap! Pow! With Xbox’s Help, Mets’ Black Battles Stress of Spring Training

Abstract: PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — After a long day of throwing and fielding drills, Mets reliever Vic Black retired to his hotel room Sunday afternoon, slouched in a chair directly in front of the television and started playing Destiny, a first-person-shooter video game. Black was stuck on one stage of the game that required defeating what looked like a giant robot. The task would have been easier if he were playing with other people, and he kept running out of ammunition. But he kept trying — for more than an hour. “Ah-ha!” Black finally shouted at the TV, bouncing in his chair. He had passed the stage. “I get so worked up sometimes,” he said. “I get a lot of tongue action going, too. “David does it when he fields ground balls,” he continued, referring to third baseman David Wright. “I do it when I play video games.” This is how Black, 26, relaxes during spring training, with what he calls mindless entertainment. For a few hours each day, he can sink into his chair and forget about finding his delivery, forget about the pressure, the expectations and the natural anxieties that come with his job. For Black, spring training is typically a mental battle, a time when he becomes obsessed with perfecting his delivery to the point that he may be a detriment to himself. Black has been invited to three big league spring training camps now and has pitched in the majors for parts of two seasons, but he has yet to make an opening day roster. Black used to warn his coaches, “I’ve never had a good spring training.” Black calls himself a feel pitcher, meaning that for him to be his best, the rhythm and the timing of his delivery have to be in accord. His foot has to land at the right moment. His arm has to be in the right spot. When it all feels right, he does not give it any thought. Everything flows freely and smoothly. But that generally takes time to achieve. Black lost sight of that at some point over the last few years. He tried hastening the process in spring training, tinkering with his mechanics, forcing the issue. He was impatient, constantly wrestling in his mind with how he could fix himself. When the Pittsburgh Pirates left Black off their opening day roster in 2013, his anxiousness grew. His concerns blended together. Was he tinkering to solve his problems? Or was his tinkering causing his problems? During spring training last year, his first camp with the Mets, the team had high hopes for him. The Mets had acquired him as part of a trade that sent John Buck and Marlon Byrd to Pittsburgh. But Black was a mess. He allowed, on average, more than two base runners per inning. His spring E.R.A. was 5.79. He did not make the opening day roster. Eventually — as usual — he recovered the feel of his delivery. With it came peace of mind. Black suddenly became perhaps the Mets’ best reliever under pressure. The team often put him into games in the middle of an inning, with runners on, and he thrived. He inherited 26 base runners after he was called up and allowed only one to score. That rate was the lowest among National League relievers who inherited more than 10 runners, according to Stats L.L.C. Image Black last month. He has pitched in the majors for parts of two seasons but has yet to make an opening day roster. Credit Brett Carlsen for The New York Times Black joked that he felt more comfortable with runners on. “In those situations, his focus, his concentration, is as good as anybody’s,” said Dan Warthen, the Mets’ pitching coach. Warthen made one mechanical tweak in late June that helped put Black at ease, telling him to lower his arm slot and fix his posture. That gave Black better control and also helped him develop a two-seam fastball, which, with its sinking action, produced easy ground balls. Now, if Black ever feels off or needs to regroup, he can rely on that pitch. It did not seem to be a coincidence that Black reported to camp this year with a smile fixed to his face, saying he was taking a new, calmer approach to spring training. Black also seems more self-assured. He is not tinkering anymore. He trusts that his delivery will come. It helps that he had success last year. It appears he will not only make the roster, but also have an important role in the bullpen. Manager Terry Collins has indicated Black could be a closer someday. On Monday, Black pitched a perfect inning. He did not feel the way he usually does midseason, but, he said, it was the closest he had come during spring training. “When your mind speeds up, everything else wants to go faster,” Black said. “Once I got my mind to calm down, I was in the right acceleration process throughout the whole delivery. Also, your muscles relax. I think people take for granted how much your thoughts play a role in how your body feels. I’m learning how to trim out the bad thoughts, embrace the good ones and fill it up with more good ones.” Playing video games, like Destiny, Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty, helps him maintain that mind-set. He plays for a few hours each day after leaving the ballpark. Last month, he sent out a Twitter post that essentially invited Mets fans to search out his Xbox One user name, UncleBlack38, and play with him online. He does not know any of the fans beyond their brief conversations online and during the games, but they ask all kinds of questions. How is Matt Harvey doing? What does Jacob deGrom put in his hair? Who is Black’s favorite teammate? (Carlos Torres.) Black is happy to answer. He is one of the more open and friendly players on the team. Some other young Mets play Destiny together — Noah Syndergaard, Zack Wheeler, Jack Leathersich, Erik Goeddel, Cory Mazzoni and Tyler Pill. They play the PlayStation version, and they have pressured Black to switch consoles. Black is content, though, with his current setup. “I feel like I’ve got a pretty strong core of online gamers that I can hang out with on the regular,” he said. INSIDE PITCH Josh Edgin, the Mets’ top left-handed reliever, said he felt discomfort in his left elbow, which will receive a magnetic resonance imaging test. In his appearance on Monday, his pitch velocity had noticeably decreased.

Mets
Vic Black
Baseball
Computer and Video Games


Ryan-Trump Breach May Be Beyond Repair

Abstract: WASHINGTON — To many Republicans, Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s proclamation on Thursday that he was not prepared to support Donald J. Trump seemed to be an opening bid. In truth, it was more like the final word. Although party leaders furiously brokered a meeting between the two men at the Capitol next Thursday, it is likely that only substantial changes in Mr. Trump’s language and tenor, not just minor calibrations on policy positions, will be needed to bring Mr. Ryan to his camp. Mr. Ryan has become increasingly depressed about the tone of the race within the Republican Party, several people who have talked to him in recent weeks said. He could not bring himself to give even nominal support to Mr. Trump, despite pressure from more conservative House Republicans, after the candidate disparaged various ethnic groups and accused Senator Ted Cruz’s father of conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald, among other inflammatory comments. Those remarks determined Mr. Ryan’s course far more than the considerable differences on policy between the men. Mr. Ryan’s stance may lead to the remarkable scenario of a convention chairman presiding over the nomination of a man he does not support, but it basically comes down to three things. First, and most important: he can do it. Unlike former Speaker John A. Boehner, who had to fight to cling to his gavel almost from the moment he took it in 2011, Mr. Ryan was drafted into his job by the majority of his conference. And unlike Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, who says he supports Mr. Trump, Mr. Ryan is largely impervious to criticism from the right. Agree or disagree with Mr. Ryan, at this point his members need him more than he needs them, at least to prevent unmitigated chaos in their ranks. It is notable that House conservatives often derided Mr. Boehner for not “sticking to conservative principles” in negotiating with Democrats on legislation, but now are chafing that Mr. Ryan, whose conservative principles have in many ways been rejected by Mr. Trump, is not getting behind the presumptive nominee. Video A look at how the Republican speaker of the House and the party's nominee for president differ on issues including immigration, entitlements, and trade. Credit Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times; Doug Mills/The New York Times “Isn’t it a principle that the G.O.P. speaker would support the G.O.P. nominee?” said Representative Mick Mulvaney, Republican of South Carolina and a frequent scold of House leadership, discussing the party’s conundrum in an email exchange. (Rock: Meet hard place, over at the Speaker’s Balcony.) Second, Mr. Ryan sees the value in protecting Republican House members up for re-election in swing districts where Mr. Trump may well be a drag on the rest of the ticket. “I thought it was helpful,” said Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania. “I believe that Paul expressed feelings that many of us have. Trump’s attacks on Muslims, the Hispanics, that David Duke fiasco, the abortion exchange with Chris Matthews, all these issues are just really unsettling.” He added, “Donald Trump has to convince many Americans, including me, that he is ready and able to lead this great country, and at the moment I am not convinced.” Representative Ann Wagner, Republican of Missouri, made similar remarks to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The third reason is that nothing Mr. Ryan has said compels him to change his current course as speaker, which is largely focused on developing an alternative Republican policy agenda and shoring up vulnerable members with money and help campaigning. He plans to develop that agenda with House members, even if election politics may well prevent any of it from becoming actual legislation. This is perhaps the weakest reason for withholding support from Mr. Trump, since without a Republican in the White House, there will probably be no Ryan agenda. But for Mr. Ryan, Mr. Trump’s conduct appears to loom larger than the speaker’s policy dreams. So even if the candidate shows up at the Capitol next week and says “I fully support this agenda,” it would almost certainly not be enough, Ryan aides say. Do not expect Mr. Ryan to join Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, who has taken to penning letters to America by the riverbanks and searching for an alternative to Mr. Trump. The speaker will probably just keep doing what he is doing: raising money for Republicans, talking — both amorphously and perhaps later more substantively — about policy ideas, and looking, with hope and some desperation, for that change in tone from the presumptive nominee. Mr. Trump so far has not signaled that this is in the offing. On Twitter on Friday morning, he wrote: “Paul Ryan said that I inherited something very special, the Republican Party. Wrong, I didn’t inherit it, I won it with millions of voters!”

Republicans
US
Donald Trump
Paul D Ryan Jr
2016 Presidential Election
House of Representatives
Congress


Jury Selection in Ex-Lawmaker's Trial in Tennessee

Abstract: Jury selection began in the trial of a former state lawmaker charged in a federal corruption sting. The former state senator, Roscoe Dixon, Democrat of Memphis, was indicted with four sitting state lawmakers in May 2005. He is on trial in Federal District Court in Memphis on charges of extortion and accepting bribes, accused of taking $9,500 from a bogus company created by the F.B.I. John N. Ford, a Memphis Democrat and uncle of Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., resigned his State Senate seat and will go on trial in the fall. Trial dates for two other state senators have not been set. Former State Representative J. Chris Newton, Republican of Cleveland, pleaded guilty and is serving a one-year prison sentence.

Ford John N
Bribery
Federal Bureau of Investigation


Charlotte Smallwood-Cook, Pioneering District Attorney, Dies at 90

Abstract: Charlotte Smallwood-Cook, who is believed to have been the first woman elected a district attorney in New York State, died on Jan. 26 in Batavia, N.Y. She was 90. The cause was lung cancer, her daughter, Susan Grossman, said. Ms. Smallwood, as she was then known, was 26 in November 1949 when, running as a Republican in a conservative region, she won a landslide victory (with 65 percent of the more than 12,000 votes cast), earning a three-year term as district attorney in rural Wyoming County, southeast of Buffalo. Albert M. Rosenblatt, a former judge on the state’s Court of Appeals who has written a history of New York’s District Attorneys Association , said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that he was confident Ms. Smallwood was the first woman elected district attorney in the state, and that she was almost certainly the first to have achieved the post by any means. Of the 62 current district attorneys in the state, 13 are women, including one acting district attorney. During her tenure, Ms. Smallwood successfully prosecuted the county’s first capital murder case in 40 years and argued the case before the Court of Appeals, which affirmed the verdict, all during a period of personal turmoil. Image Charlotte Smallwood-Cook She had a 5-year-old son when she took office, and in 1951 her daughter was born on the day before a manslaughter trial was to open. Her husband and law partner, Edward Smallwood, died in 1952. She did not run for re-election but returned to private practice, from which she retired only last year. Her prosecutorial stint, she said in an interview with The New York Times in 2001, “showed a lot of male attorneys that their daughters could be good lawyers and not turn into monsters.” She was born Charlotte Licht in Union Springs, N.Y., on Cayuga Lake, on Jan. 24, 1923. Her father was a doctor, her mother a nurse. She graduated from Cornell, where she met her first husband. When he went to work in New York City, she went to Columbia Law School, after which the couple moved to Warsaw, N.Y., Mr. Smallwood’s hometown, in Wyoming County. Ms. Smallwood later married Frederick S. Cook, a construction worker. He died in 1987. In addition to her daughter, who is known as Suki, she is survived by a son, Edward C. Smallwood; five grandchildren; a great-granddaughter; and numerous stepchildren, step-grandchildren and step-great-grandchildren. In a passage she wrote for Judge Rosenblatt’s book, Ms. Smallwood-Cook recalled that she had to defy the county party bosses to run in a primary, in which she defeated the incumbent, and that in the general election she had to overcome the smear tactics of the opposition. “The Democrats circulated rumors and even announced in the press that my purpose in running was to close bars and liquor stores and ‘dry up’ the county,” she wrote. “My husband, Ned, and I talked it over. He sent me out to the county bars during the quiet hours. I would sit at the bar and talk to the bartender while sipping a brew. I was not a drinking woman, so covering many bars a day with a few sips at each was perilous, but it achieved its purpose. The bartenders squelched all talk of my tea-totaling ambitions.”

Charlotte Smallwood-Cook
District attorney
New York
Obituary
Women and Girls


Albany Weighs Tuition Plan for CUNY and SUNY

Abstract: For decades, leaders of the City University of New York and the State University of New York have chafed under the whims of state lawmakers who approved double-digit tuition increases in some years and none in others, leaving administrators struggling to make ends meet with little ability to plan ahead. But in what some university officials and faculty members are hailing as a major victory, legislative leaders in Albany agreed on Tuesday to a policy that would, for the first time, set a fixed rate for tuition increases: $300 annually for the next five years. In the first year alone, the increase is expected to create an additional $50 million in revenue for CUNY, and $40 million for SUNY. “The last thing you want in higher education is large, unexpected increases that families cannot anticipate,” said Jay Hershenson, senior vice chancellor for university relations at CUNY. The agreement, which the full Legislature must vote on before it becomes law, would require that all of the money raised from the tuition increases go directly to the universities, according to lawmakers and their aides. In the past, some of the revenue from tuition increases has been used for other state programs. The agreement also calls for state aid to the universities to be maintained at current levels, unless the governor declares a fiscal emergency. “Across the country, states have been cutting their university systems,” said Assemblywoman Deborah J. Glick, a Democrat from Manhattan and chairwoman of the Assembly Higher Education Committee. “I think this will stanch the bleeding and begin the rebuilding of what is two great university systems.” Ms. Glick said the new policy would promote stability not only in the universities, but also in the surrounding communities. “This is investing in our human capital,” she said. “People who go to SUNY and CUNY overwhelmingly remain in the state.” The increase would affect 136,084 CUNY undergraduates on 11 campuses, including the City College of New York and Hunter College in Manhattan, as well as 909 students taking online classes, CUNY officials said. The current tuition is $4,830 annually for full-time New York residents. CUNY last raised tuition, by $230, in January, to help offset a nearly $300 million reduction in state aid since 2008 — a loss that brought state financing down to about $1 billion annually, according to university officials. At SUNY, the increase would affect more than 220,000 students at 29 four-year colleges across the state, including campuses at Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, Old Westbury, Purchase and Stony Brook. The current tuition is $4,970; it was last increased, by $310, in 2009. SUNY officials have said the additional money would be used to decrease class sizes, hire more full-time faculty and maintain existing classes and programs. Leaders at CUNY and SUNY said they would seek to help students eligible for state tuition assistance by covering all or part of the increase, based on the amount of aid each person currently receives. But some students worried that a $1,500 increase over five years would put college out of reach for many people. “I think it’s ridiculous,” said Cory Provost, a recent Brooklyn College graduate who is chairman of CUNY’s Student Senate. “Families and students are in a bind because of the economy, and trying to fix the state budget by forcing students to pay more money isn’t going to fix the problem.” But Kaitlyn Beachner, president of the SUNY Student Assembly, said the unpredictable tuition increases in past years had also been difficult for students. While some students are opposed to any increase, she said, the Student Assembly passed a resolution in 2008 calling for a rational tuition plan that would allow increases of no more than 5.5 percent per year. “We want students to know freshman year how much they would be paying for their education,” she said.

Tuition
City University of New York
State University of New York
Law and Legislation
New York State


F.A.A. Chief on Leave After Arrest

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The head of the Federal Aviation Administration has been placed on leave after he was arrested over the weekend in Virginia on a drunken driving charge. J. Randolph Babbitt, 65, the F.A.A. administrator, was pulled over at 10:30 p.m. Saturday after an officer saw him driving on the wrong side of the road, two blocks from the police station in Fairfax, said Capt. Mike Artone, a spokesman for the police department. The officer arrested Mr. Babbitt after discovering that he was “under the influence of alcohol,” Captain Artone said. Transportation officials put Mr. Babbitt on leave Monday after he requested it and “are in discussions with legal counsel” about his employment status, the Transportation Department said in a statement. His deputy, Michael Huerta, will manage the aviation agency for now, the statement said. On Monday afternoon, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said the White House had just learned about the case. He declined to say whether President Obama would ask Mr. Babbitt to resign and directed questions to the Transportation Department. Mr. Babbitt was charged with driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor that carries a penalty of up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine, said Captain Artone. Mr. Babbitt did not have a passenger in the car and was not involved in a crash, he said. Captain Artone said he could not discuss Mr. Babbitt’s blood-alcohol concentration. However, under state law a minimum 0.08 blood-alcohol concentration is sufficient to charge a suspect with driving while intoxicated. Mr. Babbitt was released on a $1,000 personal recognizance bond Sunday morning, according to jail records. He is scheduled to appear in court Feb. 2. Mr. Babbitt did not return phone calls to his home in Reston, Va. Mr. Babbitt, a pilot for 25 years at Eastern Air Lines and later the head of the Air Line Pilots Association, became head of the aviation agency in June 2009. The job has a five-year term.

Federal Aviation Administration
Drunken and Reckless Driving
Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations
Babbitt J Randolph


Minnesota: Nurses Stage One-Day Walkout

Abstract: More than 12,000 nurses began a one-day strike Thursday at 14 Minneapolis area hospitals in a dispute over nurse-patient ratios and pension benefits. Nurses say they are being asked to care for too many patients at a time. The hospitals say that patients are safe and that the walkout is a headline-grabbing stunt to build membership and clout for a national nurses' union. The hospitals hired 2,800 replacement nurses, called in extra non-unionized staff, reduced patient levels and some hospitals rescheduled elective surgeries. (AP)


Maze Wins Giant Slalom

Abstract: Tina Maze of Slovenia won the season-opening women’s World Cup giant slalom in Sölden, Austria. Maze, the runner-up to Lindsey Vonn in the overall standings last year, finished in 2 minutes 31.41 seconds. Kathrin Zettel was 0.42 of a second behind, and her Austrian teammate Stefanie Köhle trailed Maze by 1.71 in third. Vonn went out in the second run after hooking a gate with her left arm and sliding off the course but escaped injury. ¶ Julia Clukey ended Erin Hamlin’s five-year reign as USA Luge’s national women’s champion, finishing off a narrow victory for the title in Lake Placid, N.Y. Clukey finished four runs down the Mount Van Hoevenberg track in 2 minutes 59.953 seconds, 0.088 of a second ahead of Hamlin. (AP)

Alpine Skiing
World Cup (Skiing)
Maze Tina
Skiing


After 7-Year Makeover, Bronx Links of Legend Try to Reclaim the Past

Abstract: When William Larkin, a hip-hop producer-turned-golf pro, accepted the position of general manager of the Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course in the North Bronx in 2007, it was because he thought the course could live up to its history. Opened in 1895, the first public golf tournament in the country was held there, and the Edwardian locker room was once a postgame hangout for Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson and the Three Stooges. But the course was, well, not up to par. Inept management, unkempt grounds and a proliferation of prostitutes and drug dealers operating much too close for comfort plagued the grounds. In other words, Mr. Larkin said, “It was a dump.” With $5 million in funds from the Forest Park Golf Corporation, Mr. Larkin, 47, has overseen a seven-year renovation of the course, which is now just weeks away from completion. The renovation included the construction of seven new greens and a new drainage system, among other improvements. But the most significant work has been done to the clubhouse. Image The Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course underwent a $5 million renovation of the clubhouse and grounds. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times “This club has such a wonderful history, and my whole project is really a celebration of that,” said Susan Arann, a designer enlisted by Mr. Larkin to fine-tune the clubhouse interior. Repurposing relics found in storage spaces and diving into the archives of the Parks Department, Ms. Arann added subtle touches to highlight its legacy. There is a mantelpiece display of vintage photographs, including one of Jim Barnes teeing off, and a collection illustrating the evolution of the golf ball, from an early leather-bound and feather-stuffed model to today’s compressed rubber version. But it’s the future that Mr. Larkin is most concerned with, specifically how to survive in a borough with four public golf courses and Westchester County, which he refers to as “the golf mecca,” a short drive away. And so Mr. Larkin expanded the clubhouse, widening the lobby and adding an extended deck overlooking the Van Cortlandt Lake, to accommodate live entertainment. He plans to rely on his connections to deliver events that will inspire city dwellers to ride the No. 1 train to the line’s last stop in the Bronx. In the growing hip-hop scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s, Mr. Larkin, who was raised in Soundview, in the Bronx, worked as a producer and sound engineer for Strong City Records, a now-defunct record label that helped start the careers of Brand Nubian and A Tribe Called Quest. Mr. Larkin said his first experiences with golf came after long nights he ended with 18 holes on the Mosholu Golf Course near the studio on Allerton Avenue. Image William Larkin, the general manager of the Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course in the North Bronx. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times “My friends thought I was crazy,” he said. He reversed their opinion by turning a hobby into a short stint as a professional golfer and nine years as a golf pro at the Chelsea Piers Golf Club. “If this were a regular golf course, I would be bored to death,” said Mr. Larkin, resting his elbows on a newly finished bar top, surveying the expanse of the Van Cortlandt clubhouse. “It is such an underdog that you have to be creative to make it work; that’s what keeps me interested.” Coming off the greens on a recent Saturday were James Hullah, 33, and Maria Persson Gulda, 30, both from Manhattan. “I pretty much refused to play here last year,” said Mr. Hullah, between sips of beer on the deck. “It was an eyesore and there was nowhere to eat or drink.” He decided to give the course one more shot when he heard about the addition of a bar and grill. “Generally, after 18 holes, you want to sit down, have a beer and sort out any cash,” he said, pausing to look at Ms. Gulda, a former collegiate golfer who lost a bet to Mr. Hullah by failing to put her ball closer to the second hole pin than he had. “You owe me a dollar by the way,” he said.

Bronx
William Larkin
Golf
Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course
Van Cortlandt Park Bronx
Restoration and Renovation


Braves’ Chipper Jones Is Back on Disabled List

Abstract: The Atlanta Braves placed third baseman Chipper Jones on the 15-day disabled list with a bruised left leg. Jones, who at 40 has said this will be his final season, had missed seven straight starts through Friday. ¶ St. Louis reliever Fernando Salas, who led the team with 24 saves last season, was sent to Class AAA Memphis after starting 0-2 with a 6.32 earned run average in 18 games. ¶ After five relief appearances, Francisco Liriano will have another chance in the Minnesota Twins ’ starting rotation Wednesday against Oakland. Liriano was demoted to the bullpen May 9 after going 0-5 with a 9.45 E.R.A. in six starts. He is replacing Anthony Swarzak, who gave up six runs in three and two-thirds innings Friday against Detroit.

Atlanta Braves
Minnesota Twins
Baseball
Jones Chipper
Liriano Francisco


St. John’s Gives Basketball Fans Something to Remember

Abstract: It was plenty loud inside Madison Square Garden on Monday night when Dwight Hardy of St. John’s electrified the 8,897 fans in the final seconds of a 1-point game with a stutter-step move that could have shaken the common cold. Even with more than 10,000 seats empty, the building sounded a little like 1985. Hardy, a senior guard, didn’t know much about St. John’s, Georgetown and the good old conference days of the Ronald Reagan presidency. He hadn’t been born yet. Chris Mullin might as well be Sonny Dove. Outside the locker room after Justin Brownlee’s putback of Hardy’s driving layup was the decisive play of St. John’s 61-58 upset of the No. 13 Hoyas, Hardy said that his earliest recollection of Red Storm basketball while growing up in the Bronx was the Marcus Hatten era, if that was such a thing. Hatten played his last game in 2003. That is the simultaneous curse and charm of college basketball. The players never get older; they only live in the now. Those of us more likely to mourn the passage of time can’t help reminiscing about when Big East basketball was a manageable scrum of mostly Catholic colleges within driving distance of one another. But do we really pine for the past because big-time college sports have become so geographically unrecognizable, or because the mind’s highlight reel always creates the impression that life was much better in the old neighborhood? “Sometimes I think people do tend to distort it all,” said the St. John’s athletic director, Chris Monasch, a 1981 graduate of the university. “I think in ’85 we only played about four regular-season games in the Garden, but to hear people talk about it, you’d think it was sold out that season for every game. “We also didn’t go to the Final Four every year. There were plenty of times we won a game in the N.C.A.A. tournament and all of a sudden we ran into some SEC team. It gets overblown sometimes.” Overblown, perhaps, but no doubt the yearning has some relation to the bloating of the league in the interests of holding it together, mostly by worshiping at the altar of football. The recent addition of Texas Christian, adding a Texas power to a conference that is struggling to justify its contractual claim to a Bowl Championship Series game, was no doubt a coup for the core Big East football alliance. This is what growth looks like in the 21st century: zoning anarchy, as the notion of regional supremacy slides into charming obsolescence. Come see the Big East basketball final in 10 years, when the Horned Frogs from Fort Worth take on the DePaul Blue Demons from Chicago. No problem. On ESPN, everyone is local. To be fair, it is not quite accurate to characterize the original Big East as the corner candy store of the old college sports landscape. All those league games didn’t just pick up and move from the campuses into the big-boy arenas. There were television networks to serve, handsome revenues to be generated, even before the fateful foray into football. “The reality is that the football school and football are very important, and so UConn, Pitt and Syracuse have to be in a good league,” Monasch said. “Obviously, we have good rivalries with those schools. We think it’s the best basketball conference in the country, we want it to stay together and we have to do what we have to do to accommodate the football schools’ interests.” But if T.C.U. is territorially acceptable to the Big East, who, exactly, is not? And should the college football fault lines continue to move and the Big East football schools deem it necessary to expand further to compete on the national scale, how much dilution of its original charter can the basketball schools stand? Monasch said he did not believe college football would eventually transmogrify into four superconferences. But if the recent history of American business is our guide, who wants to bet that the powers will know when to stop? As a basketball conference, the soon-to-be 17-team Big East will never be too big to fail. The good news for St. John’s and Georgetown is that there are plenty of quality basketball schools, on the East Coast and beyond, to go back to the future with should the need ever arise. In the meantime, Monasch foresees a return to prominence under the new coach Steve Lavin and more games with bigger Garden crowds. The senior-laden Red Storm, 3-0 in the league after beating the Hoyas, has a strong recruiting class on the way next season. The most credentialed expert and fan in the building wasted little time Monday night in declaring the program back. “I don’t want to put the horns on them, but a game like this will be good for them in the N.C.A.A.’s,” Lou Carnesecca, the old coach, said on his way out. Carnesecca said this Storm team reminded him of the 1998-99 team, which featured Ron Artest and Bootsy Thornton. “The way they handle the ball, don’t get rattled,” he said, recalling how that team pushed second-ranked Duke into overtime in the Garden. For Dwight Hardy, who is St. John’s leading scorer this season, there are few such memories. Like Mullin, Artest at St. John’s was before his time, a chapter in a history book. He only knows what he hears. Monday night sounded good. “I never heard the Garden so loud,” he said. He hasn’t heard anything yet.

Madison Square Garden
College Athletics
NCAA Basketball Tournament (Men)
St John's University
Big East Conference
Georgetown University
Mullin Chris
Carnesecca Lou


China’s Antigraft Enforcers Take On a New Role: Policing Loyalty

Abstract: BEIJING — The investigators descend on government agencies and corporate boardrooms. They interrogate powerful officials and frequently rebuke them for lacking zeal. Most of all, they demand unflinching loyalty to President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party. They are the inspectors from the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, and the humbling displays they have orchestrated recently in many of China’s most influential government agencies and largest corporations are the most prominent sign of their expanding authority. Best known as the country’s anticorruption agency, the commission has lately assumed a growing role as political inquisitor, investigating the loyalty and commitment of cadres to Mr. Xi and his agenda, while cementing the commission’s role as his chief political enforcer. “It’s not just anticorruption, but more powerfully about central control,” said Jeremy L. Wallace , a political scientist at Cornell University who studies Chinese politics. Mr. Xi will press his demands for top-down obedience at an annual meeting of the party’s Central Committee in Beijing starting Monday. The committee is expected to issue new rules for “comprehensive and strict management” of the party, especially its top ranks, giving the discipline commission even more leverage to police and punish officials. The move reflects Mr. Xi’s ambitions and fears as he prepares for a second five-year term as national leader, and has confirmed the rise of the commission and its formidable secretary, Wang Qishan, a longtime ally of Mr. Xi now seen by many as the second-most powerful official in China. But nothing has illustrated the new order as bluntly as the commission’s intimidating inspections, which the commission calls “political health checks.” They have scrutinized prominent agencies like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs , the Ministry of Finance , the party’s Department of Propaganda and the nation’s biggest state companies. The commission’s investigators have shown a taste for chastening displays of power in what has become a ritual of rebuke and repentance. At the Ministry of Public Security headquarters in Beijing this month, for instance, hundreds of officers were marched into a cavernous auditorium to listen to investigators excoriate senior ministry officials for lacking “political judgment” and demand greater loyalty to Mr. Xi and the party. Then their boss, Guo Shengkun, the minister of public security, rose to offer contrition, vowing to make his officers “even more steadfastly and conscientiously” obedient to Mr. Xi and other party leaders. “Loyalty to the party is the top political imperative,” he acknowledged . Mr. Wang, the commission secretary, has pointedly warned officials that under his commission, “being red-faced and sweating will be the norm.” Image Mr. Xi, left, and Wang Qishan, who oversees the antigraft agency, honoring the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing in September. Many see Mr. Wang, a longtime ally of Mr. Xi, as the second-most powerful official in the country. Credit Andy Wong/Associated Press Another notable target was the Propaganda Department, which the commission censured in June, saying that it “lacked vigor” and that “the political awareness of some leading officials has not been high.” The criticism of such a powerful arm of the party fueled speculation of a factional rift at the top of Mr. Xi’s government. But dozens of other party and government agencies have faced similar reprimands. The discipline commission has even taken a role in enforcing Mr. Xi’s economic policies, including efforts to cut back gluts of coal, steel and other industrial products. But the core of its work is about loyalty to the party and its top leadership, referred to as the party center. “The entire party must safeguard the authority of the party center,” Mr. Xi said in remarks featured recently on the commission’s website . “There can absolutely be no outwardly shouting that you’re in lock step with the party center while actually you’re not really paying attention.” Underlying the push for stricter loyalty is fear, the leadership’s nagging nightmare of the Communist Party’s crumbling in a Soviet-style collapse. “Rebuilding a disciplined hierarchical party organization is about avoiding the collapse Xi and other leaders observed in the Soviet Union,” said Melanie Manion , a political scientist at Duke University. “I think Xi views the stakes for China as very high, but the stakes for Xi as a leader are also high.” The campaign appears to be timed to reinforce Mr. Xi’s grip on power as the Central Committee is about to set plans in motion to give him another five-year term as party leader. Some officials have been publicly swearing to uphold his “absolute authority.” “Resolutely defend General Secretary Xi Jinping as the leading core of the party’s center,” Li Hongzhong, the party secretary of the port city of Tianjin, vowed at a meeting to respond to criticism of the city by discipline commission inspectors. “Resolutely defend the absolute authority of the leading core.” For Mr. Xi, the commission has proved a versatile mechanism for fighting corruption, with its ancillary ability to take down or intimidate potential political opponents, and now to enforce loyalty. Its leader, Mr. Wang, is a trusted friend he has known since the 1960s, when the two were sent as youths to labor in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution . The commission has long had the power to secretly detain officials without court approval, a contentious and feared tool. But past leaders lacked the authority to take on the corruption and abuses that have flourished since the economic liberalization of the 1990s. Mr. Wang, with Mr. Xi’s backing, has freed the commission of organizational shackles that once allowed local officials to stymie it, and he has taken to the task with enthusiasm. Image Souvenirs in Beijing featuring Mao Zedong, Mr. Xi and Peng Liyuan, who is married to Mr. Xi. The anticorruption campaign appears to be timed to reinforce Mr. Xi’s grip on power as he anticipates another five-year term as party leader. Credit Wu Hong/European Pressphoto Agency “The challenge that worries us most comes from within, from within the People’s Republic of China and from within our own party,” he said in a closed-door speech to his inspectors last year that was leaked on the internet . He told them that the pressure would not let up. “I’ve said there’ll be no end to this, because if there’s a backlash, there’ll be big problems,” he said. The dual missions go hand in hand. Mr. Xi and Mr. Wang see corruption as a symptom of a breakdown of control in the party that also spawned disloyal cliques , resistance to policies and disillusionment. They worry that those undercurrents could undermine Mr. Xi and his plans to revive party power. On a practical level, the anticorruption campaign has deprived thousands of local officials of illicit income, eliciting discontent that the loyalty campaign aims to eradicate. “The anticorruption campaign has created a lot of resentment and disincentives among public officials,” Ling Li , a lecturer at the University of Vienna who has studied the commission , said in an email. “Political discipline is to repress that resentment and to recreate an incentive for public service.” So far there have been no signs of public backlash to the campaign. But there are fears that it risks undermining Mr. Xi’s efforts to rejuvenate the economy. As the discipline commission has taken a role in enforcing economic policies, censuring state-controlled companies and banks, foreign investors have become worried about the effects on their Chinese business partners and clients. The number of Chinese corporations under investigation by the commission grew to at least 60 last year, from six in 2013, said James M. Zimmerman , the chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. American businesses should not tolerate corruption, he said, but “we are very much concerned about the expanding scope and uncertain duration of C.C.D.I. investigations, which appears to have extended nationwide and to practically every sector of the economy.” More broadly, the centralization of power, incessant inspections and demands for conformity have sapped the morale of government officials, experts and investors said. China’s past spurts of economic rejuvenation often came from letting officials take risks, but the relentless pressure for loyalty to the top has instilled caution. Even the state-run news media and some supporters of Mr. Xi have begun to obliquely acknowledge that the pressure on the officials is taking a toll. “Since last year, our politics have become very anxiety-ridden, and President Xi is facing passive resistance across the country,” Jin Canrong, a political scientist at Renmin University in Beijing, said in a recent speech . “There is widespread inaction from local elites and local governments,” he said. “Nobody opposes, but nobody does anything.”

Central Commission for Discipline Inspection Communist Party of China