More Bodies Found at Cleveland Home

Abstract: CLEVELAND (AP) — More remains were discovered Tuesday at the Cleveland home of a convicted rapist, raising to 10 the number of bodies that has been found there, the authorities said. Four more bodies and a skull were found at the home, where the remains of six women were removed last week, said the police chief, Michael McGrath. Anthony Sowell, 50, who lives in the home, is in jail and was charged Tuesday with five counts of aggravated murder. “It appears that this man had an insatiable appetite that he had to fill,” Chief McGrath said. He said the additional bodies were found buried in the backyard. The skull was found in a bucket in the basement. The authorities do not know whether the skull belongs to an 11th victim, said a police spokesman, Lt. Thomas Stacho. The search was to continue Wednesday, with Fire Department crews planning to search in the walls of the home, Chief McGrath said. Last week, investigators said they found one body in a shallow grave in the backyard. The rest were inside the house: one in the basement, two in the third-floor living room and two in an upstairs crawl space. The police discovered the first six bodies Thursday and Friday after a woman reported being raped at Mr. Sowell’s home, and Mr. Sowell was also charged Tuesday with rape, felonious assault and kidnapping related to her complaint. The Cuyahoga County coroner is trying to identify those women through DNA and dental records. All six were black, and five had been strangled. The bodies could have been there for weeks or months or years, said Powell Caesar, a spokesman for the coroner. On Tuesday, detectives brought in cadaver dogs and digging equipment to scour the home and backyard, Lieutenant Stacho said. A crowd of about a hundred people milled about and chatted near the home Tuesday evening. One of those in the crowd, Antoinnette Dudley, 29, lives a few houses away. Ms. Dudley said that all summer, she had smelled a terrible odor that suggested something was dead. Mr. Sowell is a registered sex offender and required to check in regularly at the sheriff’s office. Officers did not have the right to enter his house, but they would stop by to make sure he was there. Their most recent visit was Sept. 22, just hours before the woman reported being raped. For the last few years, Mr. Sowell’s neighbors thought the foul smell enveloping their street had been coming from a business in a brick building where workers churned out sausage and head cheese. The smell had become so overpowering that the owners of the business, Ray’s Sausage, replaced their sewer line and grease traps. City Councilman Zack Reed, whose mother lives in the area, said he had called the city health department several times. “What happened from there, we don’t know,” Mr. Reed said. “It was no secret that there was a foul odor. We don’t want to point fingers, but clearly something could have been done differently.” Mr. Reed called for an investigation into whether the police and health inspectors missed any signs that could have tipped them off to the bodies inside the house.

Cleveland (Ohio)
Sex Crimes
Sowell Anthony
Serial Murders


6 Charged in Queens Kidnapping and Rape

Abstract: In January, with a team of contractors renovating his three-family home in Ozone Park, Queens, Tsung Chen came by to inspect the work. What he saw surprised him: the locks had been changed. Mr. Chen, 63, remembered thinking that perhaps some Occupy Wall Street types had made their way out to Eastern Queens. So he put in new locks. They, too, were removed. Finally, on Feb. 5, when he noticed a light on in the building’s second floor and heard voices, Mr. Chen called the police. Squatting turned out to be the least of the alleged crimes that he had discovered. In what the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, has called “a horrific case” and a “nightmarish ordeal,” prosecutors alleged that a 15-year-old girl was kidnapped on Jerome Street in Brooklyn in early February and then driven several miles to Mr. Chen’s unoccupied house on 101st Avenue, where she was drugged, raped and forced into prostitution over six days. The girl, from Long Island, ultimately escaped, but only, prosecutors say, after the defendants posted nude photographs of her on the Internet and forced her to have sexual intercourse and oral sex, in exchange for money, with numerous men inside the 101st Avenue home. Prosecutors say the money was given to Gary Council, 22, of Ozone Park, whom they have called the lead defendant. On Thursday, Mr. Council and five co-defendants were arraigned before Justice Fernando M. Camacho of Queens Supreme Court on charges of rape, kidnapping, sex trafficking and burglary, among other crimes. Each was held in bail. Mr. Chen said through an interpreter that his initial discovery of the locks having been changed did not unduly concern him. “I wasn’t really scared,” he said. “I was just thinking about my house being renovated so beautifully.” But even after it became clear that Mr. Chen had unwanted guests in his home, the defendants managed to remain there for several days, despite what Mr. Chen said were repeated visits from the police. According to prosecutors, the occupants showed Mr. Chen and the police lease agreements — documents that Mr. Chen insists were fabricated. The name of the supposed leaseholder was Raymond Kelly, who the occupants claimed had sublet the building to them. Mr. Chen added that Mr. Council had ordered him to pay a “nonnegotiable” fee of $6,000 to Mr. Council and several of his co-defendants in exchange for their vacating the premises. Mr. Council faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted, while four of the other defendants, Andrea Furlonge, 21, of Ozone Park, and Junior C. Goldring, 23, Omari A. Millington, 21, and Renardo Williams, 22, each from Brooklyn, face sentences of up to 25 years. A fifth defendant, Roy McMillan, 24, of Brooklyn, faces up to 15 years in prison. Laura Ibarra, 39, who lives with her husband and three young children in the building adjacent to Mr. Chen’s, said one of the defendants had offered to sell marijuana to her brother-in-law. She said other neighbors had complained that the tenants had been loud and “had parties all the time,” but, she added of the charges, “You didn’t think it was going to be like that.” “You thought it was normal because they were new people,” Ms. Ibarra said, adding that the defendants “were nice guys” who “didn’t seem to be nasty.” But, she added, she was happy to have been reassured by Mr. Chen on Wednesday that “these bad men are gone.” The charges also surprised and disturbed Carmella D’Agostino, 68, who has lived all her life across 101st Avenue from the home. She had a different picture of the defendants. “Boy oh boy were they bad!” she said of Mr. Council and his co-defendants, adding that they had “kept to themselves” until their arrests several weeks ago. “They looked nightmarish,” said Ms. D’Agostino, who had witnessed the arrests. A lawyer for Mr. Council could not be reached for comment on Thursday evening. He and the other defendants are scheduled to return to court on May 1.

Kidnapping
Tsung Chen
Prostitution
Ozone Park (NYC)
Sex Crimes
Council Gary


L.I. Hospital Is Issued 17 Violations by the State

Abstract: New York State health officials have cited Stony Brook University Medical Center for 17 violations, including administering incorrect drug dosages and overlooking symptoms in a patient involved in a traffic accident who later died of head injuries, hospital officials confirmed yesterday. The hospital, which has 504 beds and is the largest in Suffolk County, issued this statement: “Most of the concerns expressed by the Department of Health relate to administrative processes, such as policy development. We take them very seriously. In some cases, the instances date back several years. We have been working, and continue to work, in full cooperation with the D.O.H. to address its concerns.” The state inspection process allows the hospital to respond and requires corrective actions. Fines are also possible. In May, the Health Department found 19 violations in pediatric surgery at the hospital, citing three patient deaths. One patient was found to have received a drug dose 27 times what is normal, the state said. Another patient had not been properly screened before surgery and a third died while awaiting surgery for days. In the latest review, several violations cited by the state were procedural, including failing to ensure the privacy of patient records, ignoring credentialing requirements in appointing doctors and authorizing them to practice specialties. In making reappointments, the state said that the hospital also failed to check its records for problems and that one doctor was reappointed without a review of complications in his patients, one of whom died. In the case of the traffic injury, the state said proper care was delayed about 20 hours, despite worsening symptoms. The patient complained of vomiting and a headache. Later a nurse found the patient restless, agitated and pulling out his intravenous tubes. The patient vomited three times and then was noted as being lethargic and nonresponsive with the left pupil fixed and extremities flaccid. Still, the plan remained to prepare the patient for discharge and rehabilitation. Sometimes the nurses and doctors skipped checking on the patient or observed only from the doorway. Eventually the patient’s condition deteriorated so much that a brain scan was ordered, the state said. By then both pupils were fixed and dilated. During the scan, the patient lapsed into respiratory distress, requiring a ventilator and intensive care. The scan found a large hemorrhage requiring emergency operation, but it was too late to save the patient. In addition, the report said, the hospital failed to report the case to the state as required. The report also found the hospital relied on an obsolete AIDS care manual, dating to 1987, which lacked provisions on testing, discrimination, infection control, counseling, confidentiality and coordinated care. Staff members were unaware that the hospital was designated by the state as a specialized AIDS center and were not alert to possible AIDS complications for patients coming in for other problems, the report said. The state faulted the hospital’s quality assurance program, which is supposed to improve care by learning from mistakes. Of nine cases with adverse results reviewed by the state, the hospital had not properly investigated seven of them, the report said. Drug problems cited included missed medications, a drug overdose of morphine for a child 10 times the normal amount and an overdose of an incorrect medicine for another patient. The review did not report adverse reactions in those cases. Other violations included failure to track a hepatitis infection resulting from a blood transfusion; having 12 beds in the pediatric intensive-care unit when only 7 were authorized by the state; confusion over the role of dentists in the emergency department; a lack of procedures for the hospital’s trustees; and failure to require the chief executive to report to the trustees.

Hospitals
Health Department
Malpractice
Long Island (NY)


Yankees Are Foiled by Indians’ Tomlin in His Debut

Abstract: CLEVELAND — Josh Tomlin last pitched in Durham, N.C., handling a Class AAA lineup that included J. J. Furmaniak, Angel Chavez and Jose Lobaton. His assignment at Progressive Field on Tuesday was a bit more challenging: to subdue the mighty Yankees , the highest-scoring team in baseball. In a sense, he already held the advantage. The Yankees, for reasons they cannot pinpoint, often succumb to pitchers they have never faced before. Add to the list Tomlin, who in his major league debut outdueled C. C. Sabathia to lift the Cleveland Indians to a 4-1 victory . As Sabathia labored, Tomlin shined over seven-plus innings, allowing three hits and a run. None of those hits were by Alex Rodriguez, whose penchant for theater set up a dramatic moment, if not ending. Batting with two runners on and two outs in the ninth — “Seemed like a pretty ideal time to me,” Sabathia said — Rodriguez grounded out to shortstop, capping an 0 for 4 night on his 35th birthday to remain stuck on 599 career home runs. In his previous at-bat, in the seventh, Rodriguez gave the crowd of 27,416 a thrill when he drove a long fly ball to right-center field, but Shin-Soo Choo caught it on the warning track to end the inning. The ball might have left Yankee Stadium, Manager Joe Girardi speculated, but Rodriguez said he was not sure. What Rodriguez did know was that, after going 0 for 8 over his last two games to run his homerless streak to 21 at-bats, he has at times let the milestone affect his at-bats. “A few times over the last three or four days, I’ve kind of come out of it a little bit, trying to swing a little too hard or maybe get a little pull-happy,” Rodriguez said. “As long as I swing at strikes and use the big part of the field, like that ball to right-center, then good things are going to happen.” Tomlin would not allow as much on Tuesday, working quickly and throwing strikes — especially with his cutter and sinker — to challenge the Yankees. They had video of his starts, but only Juan Miranda, who started at first, had experience against Tomlin, a 25-year-old right-hander who was a late addition to the Class AAA All-Star Game, after Chris Tillman was promoted to the Orioles. The Yankees, whose lead over second-place Tampa Bay shrunk to two games in the American League East, were stymied this season by Kyle Kendrick, Hisanori Takahashi and Sean O’Sullivan in their first meetings, and they have also lost six straight games to pitchers making their debut. “For the most part, I don’t think we had any good swings off of him,” Rodriguez said. Tomlin retired the first nine hitters and through six innings faced the minimum 18 batters. His only blemish was a fourth-inning single by Derek Jeter, who was thrown out trying to steal second base with Rodriguez batting. Nick Swisher doubled off the left-field wall with one out in the seventh, and Robinson Cano led off the eighth with a double, knocking out Tomlin. Cano scored on Colin Curtis’s pinch-hit groundout off Joe Smith, but it was only one run. It could not offset a rare rocky start from Sabathia, who had been 9-0 with a 2.22 earned run average over his last 10 starts dating to June 3. Throwing a season-high 123 pitches over seven innings, Sabathia allowed four runs, nine hits and three walks, one of which was to the No. 9 hitter Chris Gimenez that forced in the Indians’ final run. Sabathia was pleased with the movement on his fastball and his changeup, if not the location, and was undermined by two unearned runs in the fourth inning. With runners on second and third and no outs, Austin Kearns bounced a broken-bat grounder toward Rodriguez, who threw home. Francisco Cervelli tagged Asdrubal Cabrera on the left leg, but the ball squirted free when his glove hit the dirt, and Cabrera was ruled safe. After Shelley Duncan popped out, Sabathia induced what he thought was an inning-ending double play when Jhonny Peralta poked a liner that Jeter fielded behind second base. He flipped to second for the force, but the umpire Jerry Meals ruled that Cano’s foot was off the bag when he caught the ball, and Peralta beat the relay throw to load the bases for Matt LaPorta, whose sacrifice fly made it 2-0. “I just assumed that he was out,” Sabathia said. “I was worried about the runner at first. I thought he was out, too.” So did Girardi, who suppressed his frustration with the call at first base enough to heap praise on Tomlin. “He shut us down,” Girardi said. INSIDE PITCH Jorge Posada was a late scratch from the lineup because of soreness behind his left knee, a problem that flares up from time to time. Posada said it bothered him when he squats but that he hoped to be the designated hitter Wednesday. ... Andy Pettitte told The Associated Press in Tampa, Fla., that he was “feeling good” after rehabilitating his strained left groin during a workout at the Yankees’ complex.

Baseball
Cleveland Indians
New York Yankees


Female Scientists Turn to Data to Fight Lack of Representation on Panels

Abstract: One day in August 2015, the Princeton University neuroscientist Yael Niv saw an email notice of a conference on deep brain stimulation , a hot topic in treatment for depression and other mental disorders. Dr. Niv noticed that none of the 21 scientists scheduled to speak were women. This was not the first time Dr. Niv had lamented a skewed lineup. For years, she had tried to persuade other conference organizers, sometimes successfully, to invite more women to speak. But something about this particular conference, perhaps that the organizers were women, pushed her and about 20 other female scientists to take action. Over a series of furious emails that night, they decided that the best approach they could take was scientific: They would collect data — irrefutable evidence — on the numbers of male and female speakers. The very next day, they started a website called BiasWatchNeuro , with an inaugural post on the conference. Since then, they have posted gender ratios among speakers at more than 60 conferences in various areas of neuroscience, and compared them with the base rates — the proportion of female scientists in that particular field. The base rates are estimated from the number of women in grants databases. If anything, Dr. Niv said, the site errs on the side of underestimating the base rates. At about half of the conferences listed on the site so far, the number of female speakers matches or surpasses the base rate in that field in general. But what fuels the project, Dr. Niv said, is how many conferences continue to fall not just a little, but far short, of the proportion of women in that field. For the gender ratio of panelists to mirror the base rate in that particular field, assuming the site’s estimates are accurate, the dark blue dots, above, would have to turn pink and the dark red dots would have to turn blue. There were a total of just 11 women (compared with 213 male speakers) at 13 conferences that fell in the egregious offender category — those that were more than two standard deviations below the base rate. You can also see that six conferences on the left had no female speakers at all, and that few conferences reached the 50 percent gender mark. Dr. Niv said that she and her colleagues believed that the gap between the ratio of the women in the field and on panels was primarily the result of implicit bias, which some of them have studied. “Implicit bias is just that — implicit: We are not aware of it,” she said. “We are not saying that conference organizers are bigots and purposefully discriminating; they just can’t help it.” Some conference organizers have been receptive to the criticism, adding more women to their lineups. But others in the world of neuroscience have taken issue with the mission. Panels should be organized based strictly on the speakers’ merit, they say, and not on any notion of fairness. Veerle Visser-Vandewalle, one of the organizers of the deep brain stimulation conference, said she was “puzzled by the gender issue” and had never experienced any bias. In selecting speakers for the conference, “it was not our goal to have an equal distribution between, for example, European and American lecturers, or black and white, or male and female,” she said. “Their scientific excellence was the criterion.” Among the defenders of the project, however, is Anne Churchland, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who studies how people make decisions. In 2001, she started Anne’s List , a directory of 170 women in computational neuroscience, intended to silence claims that no good female scientists existed in that field. Her research suggests that someone you recently had lunch with or someone from your hometown might spring to mind when selecting a speaker, even though neither has anything to do with science. “It doesn’t feel like irrelevant information influences our judgment, but it does,” Dr. Churchland said. Being invited to speak on panels is more than a matter of prestige; it’s how your peers come to know who you are, Dr. Niv said. “When you’re not known in science, you’re basically doomed, because when your papers are reviewed, they’re less likely to be accepted,” she said. “Your grants are less likely to be funded.” When less than 50 percent of a field is made up of women, and then they are barely represented on panels, their ideas may never be heard by their colleagues, Dr. Niv said. “Science should not be biased,” she said. Addressing that, she added, “should be everybody’s priority.”

Princeton
Yael Niv
Brain
Discrimination
Women and Girls
Mental Health
Science and Technology


Iran's Release of Academic Puts Spotlight on French-Syrian Ties

Abstract: PARIS — France’s efforts to win the freedom of a young researcher who was arrested as she tried to leave Iran on July 1, and who was released on hundreds of thousands of dollars in bail over the weekend, have underscored Paris’s readiness to see Syria in a regional mediation role and bolstered hopes the woman will be found innocent and allowed to return home soon. Clotilde Reiss, 24, who had held a temporary lecturing job at a university in Isfahan, was released from Evin prison in Tehran on Sunday after France, using Syria as an intermediary, reached agreement with Tehran to pay her bail. She is now at the French Embassy in Tehran awaiting a verdict in a mass trial of more than 100 people who participated in protests after Iran’s disputed presidential election in June. A French Foreign Ministry spokesman, Romain Nadal, said Tuesday that France had not been given a date for a verdict. The agreement presents Iran with a chance to deflect attention from domestic affairs while potentially bolstering its image abroad, analysts said. It also underscores the effort by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to strengthen ties with Damascus. “It works out well for the authorities in Iran, and helps to legitimize Syria’s role as a regional intermediary,” said Fariba Adelkhah, an Iran expert at the Center for International Studies and Research at Sciences Po in Paris. France on Sunday thanked Syria in particular for its “solidarity” and “support.” Last January, Mr. Sarkozy met with President Bashar Assad of Syria as part of an international bid to stop an Israeli offensive in Gaza. The agreement also demonstrated Mr. Sarkozy’s desire to play a greater role in foreign policy, particularly the Middle East, the analysts said. Mr. Sarkozy interrupted his vacation to negotiate the release on bail. He has in the past played direct roles in the release of hostages, like Ingrid Betancourt, freed last year in Colombia. Mr. Sarkozy’s office did not return calls on Tuesday seeking more details on his role. Ms. Reiss was arrested July 1 when trying to return to France and was charged with acting against Iranian national security “by participating in street riots, collecting news and information and pictures from the riots and sending them to the scientific attaché of the French Embassy in Tehran,” the semi-official Fars news agency reported. Mr. Sarkozy and Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, have said that the charges are unjustified. Mr. Kouchner confirmed Monday on LCI television that Paris had paid “around €200,000” in bail, or $280,000, adding that it hoped to recoup the money. Fars said Tuesday that Ms. Reiss, who was in court on Aug. 8, had “admitted to her crimes and asked the court and the Iranian people for clemency.” A French official, declining to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that Ms. Reiss had participated in demonstrations after the election and had taken photographs, but drew a distinction between that and the charges of spying and fomenting unrest. He declined to comment on whether she had pleaded guilty in court or forwarded the pictures. Mr. Kouchner has said he hoped a verdict would come soon. A French Embassy employee, Nazak Afshar, who faces similar charges, was conditionally released Aug. 11. She is also staying at the French Embassy awaiting a verdict. The case comes at a sensitive time for Iran. Opposition spokesmen say that at least 69 people were killed during a crackdown after the election. The election was won by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but critics say it was rigged. Ms. Adelkhah, the Iranian expert, said that until the escalation of Iran’s nuclear program, Paris had relatively good relations with Iran. Tehran, she added, is seeking post-election legitimacy and wants to loosen economic sanctions, which are hobbling its oil-dependent economy. It also wants to present a positive image for “internal consumption,” she said. France has been playing a stronger role in the region under Mr. Sarkozy. It has rejoined the military command of NATO, has sent troops to Afghanistan and has joined the international effort at protecting shipping lanes in the Gulf. In May, France opened its first military facilities in the Gulf in the United Arab Emirates, just 225 kilometers, or 140 miles, from Iran.

Iran
Syria
France
Elections
Reiss Clotilde
Prisons and Prisoners


‘On the Brink’, New York Must Cut, Paterson Says

Abstract: ALBANY — Gov. David A. Paterson took the rare step on Monday of addressing a joint session of the Legislature during its traditional off-season and used the speech to underscore New York’s deepening financial crisis. Mr. Paterson repeatedly used stark language to describe the gravity of the state’s economic health as he prodded lawmakers to make cuts he has proposed to programs long considered sacrosanct. “I will mortgage my political career on this plan,” Mr. Paterson told lawmakers as he warned that New York was rapidly running out of cash to meet its obligations. "We stand on the brink of a financial challenge of unprecedented magnitude in the history of this state,” he added. “This is a historic moment. We’re going to have to make historic decisions.” The state’s budget crisis and the negotiations between the governor and lawmakers over how to confront it have raised a fundamental question: Can New York, which is more generous in its social welfare programs than any other state, afford to continue to finance its expansive health care safety net and generous education spending? New York spends $2,283 per capita on Medicaid , far more than any other state and twice the national average, according to statistics compiled by the state budget division. Second is Rhode Island, which spends $1,659. The state also spends $14,884 per pupil on school aid, more than any other state and well above the national average of $9,138. Mr. Paterson’s speech came a day before lawmakers will reconvene for an extraordinary session called by the governor to take up his proposed budget cuts and potentially other issues, including legislation to legalize same-sex unions and overhaul the state’s public authorities. A growing number of budget experts believe that New York can no longer afford to spend so much in the wake of the economic crisis, rising unemployment, the collapse of the stock market and the travails on Wall Street — the state’s main fiscal engine. While the state faces a deficit of more than $3 billion for the remaining four and a half months of this fiscal year, the greater worries among state officials are the unprecedented deficits the state faces in 2011 and 2012, after the expiration of federal stimulus financing and a temporary tax increase on the wealthy. “We’re going to fall off a cliff unless we get our revenues and our expenditures in true sync,” said Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch, the administration’s point man in budget negotiations with the Legislature. He said that the state could no longer rely on its usual strategy of turning to an array of short-term solutions or ask more of the state’s taxpayers, adding, “We’re at the outer limits of the elasticity of our tax system.” The governor’s budget director, Robert L. Megna, met with top legislative staff members Monday to discuss the state’s long-term prospects, and after listening to an hour of gloomy projections and data, he was not encouraged. “I didn’t think it was possible,” he said, “but I’m more depressed than when I walked in.” Education and health care advocates have angrily opposed proposed cuts to Medicaid and school financing, the two largest parts of the state’s budget, and the powerful labor unions that dominate debate in the capital are determined to fight them. They have a ready ally in Senate Democrats, who have balked at the governor’s proposed cuts, making the prospect of any deals to address the state’s long-term problems uncertain. “Our goal all along has been to close the gap without burdening New York State residents with additional taxes or service cuts, and to turn back midyear reductions to education and health care services,” the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Carl Kruger, said in a statement Monday morning. He added in an interview Monday that cutting education “is never the answer.” The Senate’s plan relies on so-called one-shots that would do little to change the state’s underlying financial situation. While the governor’s spending plan includes significant midyear cuts in school aid along with Medicaid cuts, the Senate plan relies far more heavily on raiding funds from public authorities and would increase New York’s debt burden by restructuring the state’s tobacco bonds. The Senate is also proposing to expand the hours that gambling is allowed in the state. “If that’s all they do tomorrow, it would be terribly irresponsible,” said Elizabeth Lynam, deputy research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit organization. “It’s 75 percent one-shots.” Education advocates on Monday did not rule out waging another court battle against the state if cuts are made to education. “We’re taking a look at things, we’re thinking about what the ramifications of all these things are,” said Geri Palast, the executive director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity , an educational advocacy group that in 2006 settled a long-running lawsuit with the state over the distribution of school aid, particularly in New York City. Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education , another advocacy group, said “school aid has to be off limits because of the constitutional obligations that are going unmet.” But a number of prominent Democratic politicians with liberal records said that cuts to education and health care were inevitable. “To do nothing is not a solution,” said Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, a Long Island Democrat and former assemblyman. “The only way to try to get ahead of it, which we haven’t done for many months now, is to deal with the cuts. Everything has to be on the table.” The comptroller’s office numbers are more pessimistic than those from Mr. Paterson’s budget office. They project that the deficit for the remainder of the current fiscal year stands at $4.1 billion, with deficits of $7.8 billion and $15.7 billion in the succeeding years. Mr. Ravitch, who helped steer New York City through its financial crisis in the 1970s, said, “The numbers are real and my own personal view is that they’re going to get worse.”

New York State
Paterson David A
Budgets and Budgeting
State Legislatures


U.S. Soccer and Women’s Team Union Argue in Court Over C.B.A.

Abstract: Lawyers representing the United States Soccer Federation and the union for the women’s national team faced off in federal court in Chicago on Thursday, moving their dispute over the validity of the team’s collective bargaining agreement closer to a resolution. Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman reserved ruling in the case at the hearing, increasing the chances that the federation and the players’ union could go to trial, perhaps about the time the team is set to defend its Olympic gold medal at the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. In February, U.S. Soccer sued the union representing the women’s team, which won the World Cup in Canada last summer, in an effort to hold the players to their contracts. At the time, U.S. Soccer said that it had brought the action “reluctantly” and only after the executive director of the union, Richard Nichols, threatened to repudiate the agreement — which includes a no-strike clause — during a negotiating session over a new one. Nichols, who took over as executive director of the players’ union in 2014 and has pushed aggressively in contract negotiations for better pay for the women’s team, said he had made no threats, though he and the union contend that the agreement expired in 2012. In its lawsuit, U.S. Soccer acknowledged that the collective bargaining agreement had expired, but it argued that the deal lived on in a memorandum of understanding that was signed in March 2013. That memorandum was scheduled to expire at the end of 2016. To support its position, U.S. Soccer has entered into evidence emails from John B. Langel, a former lawyer for the players’ union, including one in which he wrote that “the general principle we are working under is that items we have not specifically covered in the M.O.U. would remain the same as under the prior C.B.A.” But there was no evidence that the players themselves agreed with or disputed that understanding, or that Langel had the authority to approve a collective bargaining agreement on their behalf. On Dec. 24, Nichols informed U.S. Soccer that the players’ union considered the memorandum of understanding invalid as a collective bargaining agreement. Nichols said that if a new agreement was not in place in 60 days — by Feb. 24 — the players would no longer be bound by its terms. U.S. Soccer, fearing a walkout that would affect scheduled national team games, the start of the National Women’s Soccer League season and possibly even the players’ participation in the Summer Games, went to court seeking clarification on the agreement’s validity. The dispute intensified in March when five of the top players on the women’s team, saying they were acting on behalf of the entire team, filed a wage discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In that complaint, the women contended that they were being shortchanged by U.S. Soccer — in violation of federal law — on matters including pay, bonuses and per diem expenses in relation to the men’s national team, which operates on a different salary structure . Thursday’s arguments will have no bearing on that complaint, which may not be resolved until 2017. While Coleman’s decision on the collective bargaining agreement dispute is not expected until next month, negotiations toward a new agreement have continued. Representatives of U.S. Soccer and the players’ union met twice recently in New York, on May 9 and 16. Preparations for the Olympics also continue unabated. The United States will play Japan in two warm-up games, on June 2 and 5 , and on Thursday the federation announced that the team would face South Africa on July 9 in Chicago in the first of two pre-Olympic send-off games .

United States Women's National Soccer Team


In Japan, You Get a Tax Break and a Side of Lobster and Beef

Abstract: HIRADO, Japan — Tax breaks come in many forms. Charitable gifts. Health care expenses. Mortgage interest payments. In this small fishing village, they come in a cooler. It is part of the great tax giveaway happening across Japan. Taxpayers who donate money to Hirado get a nice deduction and a shipment of slipper lobsters, spiral-shelled mollusks and oysters. Don’t like seafood? Hirado has hundreds of other thank-you gifts, like a monthly vegetable delivery, a fold-up electric bike or a wedding photo shoot with formal wear and hotel stay included. Donors — 36,000 in one year — now outnumber residents. “I think of them as neo-citizens,” said Hirado’s mayor, Naruhiko Kuroda. Exploiting a quirk in the country’s tax system, scores of towns with dwindling populations are supplementing revenue by courting outside donors. The result is a sort of adopt-a-forest program for rural communities — albeit one where the forest reciprocates with gifts. Local governments are offering things as diverse as marbled Wagyu beef and hot-spring vacations. Last month one city in central Japan, Bizen, attracted 56 million yen with a deal on tablet computers. The tablets were available for a donation of 100,000 yen, or about $800. After the tax rebate, the cost to donors was just 2,000 yen. This year, Japan sweetened the tax benefits. The government views it as a way of addressing stubborn wealth disparities between cities and the countryside. Critics, though, say the system has come untethered from its initial purpose, which was to allow city dwellers to support their ancestral towns. The system is known as furusato nozei, or “hometown taxation.” But there is no requirement that donors have any connection to the places, and today few actually do. Image A woman packing dried fish, a thank-you gift for donors who have helped finance the small village of Hirado. Credit Ko Sasaki for The New York Times The cost of thank-you gifts is also rising steadily as local governments compete to attract patrons — leaving less to spend on civic projects. Urban areas, where most donors live, end up bearing the cost, according to Takero Doi, a professor at Keio University, since donors’ tax write-offs subtract from other cities’ revenue. “Ultimately, it’s a zero-sum game.” Playing the game has been a boon for Hirado. The town’s heyday was four centuries ago, when it was a bustling trading hub that drew cloth and silver merchants from as far away as Europe. Today it has a cluster of aging tourist hotels, built by overly hopeful developers in the 1970s and ’80s, that sit mostly empty. The population has dropped by half since the 1950s. While Hirado began accepting donations soon after the program began in 2008, it only recently started to earn serious money. Taking cues from online shopping, it set up a website where donors can choose gifts and a point system to claim rewards. It takes a donation of 10,000 yen, or $84, to get the seafood delivery. The town earned 1.46 billion yen in donations in its latest fiscal year, which ended in March, or about $12 million — 7 percent of its annual budget. That was the most of any local government in Japan. Some taxpayers are enjoying a windfall, too. “My wife saw something about it on TV and said it would be a good way to save on taxes,” said Shigeki Kanamori, a wealthy real estate developer in Tokyo. Mr. Kanamori gave 3 million yen, or $25,000, to a total of about 200 municipalities. In return, he received gifts worth roughly half that amount. Out of pocket, the haul cost him just 2,000 yen, about the price of lunch at a Tokyo restaurant. “My biggest problem is that my refrigerator’s full,” he said. He has written a book about where to find the best deals. Mr. Kanamori expects to do even better this year. The government doubled the upper limit on tax deductions on April 1, to 20 percent of the value of the donor’s municipal tax bill. That, combined with increasingly assertive soliciting, could spur a big increase in donations, which hit 14 billion yen nationwide last year, about $113 million. Some are concerned that the escalating extravagance of the thank-you gifts could hurt public support for the initiative. “We want this to be a permanent fixture of the tax system, not just a kind of short-lived festival,” said Mr. Kuroda, the Hirado mayor. “I’m happy about our success, but I’m also worried.” Hirado’s gifts cost the city a little less than half the money it receives, Mr. Kuroda said. All are from local producers, he said, for an additional economic boost. Image Donor thank-you gifts also include fresh vegetables, like asparagus. Credit Ko Sasaki for The New York Times But some towns are pouring 70 or 80 percent of the value of donations back into thank-you gifts, and are less focused on using local goods. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, which supervises local governments, recently issued a directive calling for “self-restraint” in the selection of gifts. A few towns have opted for whimsy as a way of standing out at lower cost. Higashi Kagawa, on the island of Shikoku, sends donors a selection of exotic beetles. Kuwana, in central Japan, offers a solo ride on a local train. Corporations have become involved, too. Toyota City, home to the carmaking giant, is luring people with free use of Toyota’s Mirai hydrogen-powered car. Most donors give a modest amount. Mutsuko and Yuzo Sarashina, a retired couple from Saitama, a suburb of Tokyo, said they recently gave 10,000 yen to the town of Genkai, near Hirado. The town, in southwestern Saga prefecture, ranked second to Hirado in donations last year, thanks in part to the popularity of its Wagyu beef. “I had no idea where Saga or Genkai were,” Mutsuko Sarashina said. “I was happy to get such high-quality beef so cheaply, but I also like the idea that my contribution could help a small town in the countryside.” Defenders of the system say its merits more than make up for its flaws. Japan’s regions already depend heavily on outside subsidies — like revenue transfers from the central government, farm supports and public spending on rural roads and bridges. Much of the money is opaquely handled and poorly spent, experts say. In contrast, furusato nozei is more personal and transparent, according to supporters. Recipients provide a list of proposed uses for donors’ money upfront and let them choose which ones to pay for. Hideo Kishimoto, the mayor of Genkai, said the competition it fostered was healthy and was spurring local innovation. “It’s like crowdfunding,” he said. Popular causes include child care subsidies and computers for local schools. Takayuki Fukuoka, an asparagus farmer in Hirado, said he was earning about 30 percent of his income from gift requests. He said he hoped the program would open farmers’ eyes to new ways of marketing their produce, instead of relying on the monopolistic wholesale system that dominates Japanese agriculture. “This has been a very closed-off place until now,” he said. Hirado town officials keep innovating. They are working on a smartphone-based system that would turn reward points into a virtual currency donors could spend at local businesses. “We know we won’t be on top forever,” said Mr. Kuroda. “We have to get people invested in Hirado, and strengthen the Hirado brand.”

Tax Credits Tax Deductions Tax Exemptions


Arizona: Lawyer Paid to End Suit Against Homeland Security

Abstract: The Department of Homeland Security has reached a settlement with the top lawyer in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in Arizona, who sued the department in 2014 claiming discrimination. The lawyer, Patricia M. Vroom, said she was bullied and harassed by officials in Washington because she raised concerns about an Obama administration policy applying prosecutorial discretion to spare some immigrants from deportation. Ms. Vroom will be paid $399,999 to end the suit, and a recent annual performance rating will be revised upward to “achieved excellence.” She had said top legal officials lowered her rating after she moved cautiously to allow the release of some undocumented immigrants with criminal records, a rebuke she said amounted to age and sex discrimination. Her lawyer said that as part of the agreement, Ms. Vroom would retire on Oct. 1 after 30 years working for the federal government. Homeland Security officials did not admit wrongdoing.

Arizona
Homeland Security
Discrimination
Immigration and Customs Enforcement,ICE
Patricia M Vroom


Police Swarm Willsboro, N.Y., in Search of Escaped Killers

Abstract: WILLSBORO, N.Y. — A dayslong manhunt for two escaped killers prompted a burst of police activity on Tuesday as investigators combed acres of remote, swampy terrain about 35 miles from the prison where the men had been incarcerated. But after a flurry of anticipation of a resolution to the high-profile chase, the authorities had still not located the fugitives, who have been hiding since Saturday from what has been described as a nationwide manhunt. The prisoners, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat, were discovered missing from their cells at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., 25 miles from the Canadian border. On Tuesday, law enforcement officials swarmed Willsboro, a town of about 2,000 near Lake Champlain, after a sighting of two men on foot late Monday or early Tuesday near Middle Road, a rural road at the southern end of the town. How Two Prisoners Escaped From A Maximum Security Prison See images and maps of the N.Y. prison escape. “The police reacted to it immediately,” Shaun Gillilland, the town supervisor in Willsboro, said, though he added that officials had not yet confirmed that the two men were the escaped prisoners. Neighbors said they believed the two men had fled into the woods, which grow in thick nests amid rolling field. George Sayward, a farmer with about 300 acres of land off Middle Road, said law enforcement officers had arrived at his property around dawn and subsequently conducted a search across his land, moving closely together to the west, across railroad tracks that run roughly parallel to the lake. The search area also included soggy lowlands — populated by geese, cows and tractors — and pocked by ponds, puddles and ruts. “It’s not going to be an easy walk, I’ll tell you that,” Mr. Sayward said. Still, by midafternoon, Capt. John H. Tibbetts of the New York State Police confirmed that the area near the potential sighting was being “flooded with police,” and residents hoped that the hunt for Mr. Matt and Mr. Sweat might be coming to an end. Roads were closed, and corrections officers in body armor and armed with high-power rifles lined a country highway, while others kept watch with binoculars and peered through weapon scopes. One armed officer was seen in full jungle camouflage, and black armored vehicles were stationed on roads. Officers moved slowly across fields and entered empty buildings and barns en masse with guns drawn, again and again, before shouting, “Clear.” But by early Tuesday evening, with a torrential rain pouring on fields and swamps near Willsboro, scores of corrections officials emerged from the woods empty-handed. Law enforcement ranks have slowly grown as days have passed, with nearly 450 corrections and law enforcement officers now in the region, according to the State Police — a vast force including federal agents, customs and border agents, and forest rangers. Image A forest ranger talks on the radio during a search near Essex, N.Y. Credit Jacob Hannah for The New York Times On Tuesday afternoon, the State Police confirmed that they were focusing on tips from along the Clinton and Essex County border, which is near Willsboro. They said that “residents will notice an increased police presence in this area,” with door-to-door searches of residences and summer homes. Mr. Matt and Mr. Sweat were both serving lengthy terms for murder. They are believed to have used power tools to cut through the walls of their adjoining cells, escaping onto an internal catwalk. They then snaked their way down through the bowels of the prison and into a two-foot pipe they had cut a hole in. They crawled under the prison’s soaring concrete walls and emerged onto the streets of Dannemora from a manhole several hundred feet from the prison. On Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that the evidence in the escape increasingly pointed to an inside job. “I don’t think they could have acquired the equipment they needed to do this without help,” said the governor, who visited the prison. A woman who works at the prison, though not as a guard, was being questioned in connection with the escape and has been removed from duty, according to a person who had been briefed on the investigation. On Tuesday, the State Police confirmed that several employees of the prison, both civilian and uniformed, had been interviewed in the investigation, but they cautioned that no arrests had been made. Around nightfall, many of the police officers who had rushed to Willsboro appeared to be regrouping. The sight of heavily armed men in such a remote location, however, surprised some local residents. “We’re just not used to this kind of thing,” said Theresa Borden, who lives across from the area that was searched. “We want them caught.”

Willsboro
David Sweat
Clinton Correctional Facility
Dannemora
Prison escape
Richard Matt


Wisconsin: String of Deaths Continues With Suspect’s Suicide

Abstract: A Milwaukee man took his own life after inadvertently killing his teenage nephew in connection with a traffic accident that killed a younger nephew, the police said Thursday. The man, Ricky Chiles III, 27, shot himself Thursday morning as the police and federal marshals closed in on him at a motel in the Chicago area, the authorities said. He was sought in the deaths of Archie Brown Jr., 40, and Rasheed Chiles, 15. The string of deaths began in Milwaukee on Sunday as Mr. Brown struck Damani Terry, 2, when he apparently dashed out into the road in front of Mr. Brown’s van. He jumped from his vehicle to attend to the toddler, as Damani’s brother Rasheed also ran to the scene. The police believe Mr. Chiles decided to exact revenge. He fired his gun, aiming to shoot Mr. Brown. He hit his target, but his teenage nephew was caught in the crossfire. The United States Marshals Service said Mr. Chiles killed himself around 9 a.m. Thursday.

Suicide
Milwaukee
Ricky Chiles III
Archie Brown Jr.
Damani Terry
Murders and Homicides
Rasheed T. Chiles
Car Crash


South Carolina Tops Florida to Repeat at C.W.S.

Abstract: OMAHA (AP) — Michael Roth pitched seven and two-thirds innings on three days’ rest, and South Carolina won its second straight national championship with a 5-2 victory Tuesday night in Omaha that completed a two-game sweep over Florida in the College World Series finals. South Carolina (55-14) became the first team to go 10-0 in an N.C.A.A. tournament and the first since Oregon State in 2007 to go unbeaten in a Series. The Gamecocks’ streaks of 16 N.C.A.A. tournament wins and 11 straight in the C.W.S. are records. “We’re not the most talented team, and we don’t have the best players position for position,” Roth said, “but we go out and stick together as a team.” After giving up four runs in the first inning of their opener against Texas A&M, the Gamecocks allowed just six in their other 50 innings here. “They earned this one,” Florida Coach Kevin O’Sullivan said. “They were a little bit better than us in all phases.” Roth (14-3), who pitched seven innings against Virginia on Friday, gave up five hits and two runs before leaving in the eighth. Among pitchers who have worked 30 innings at the Series, Roth’s 1.17 earned run average over 381/3 innings the past two years ranks second behind Ohio State’s Steve Arlin, who had a 0.96 E.R.A. over 47 innings in 1965-66. “Mike has the biggest heart of anyone I’ve seen on the field,” said South Carolina’s Christian Walker, who played the last two games with a broken left wrist. “You want him out there even if he’s not 100 percent.” South Carolina second baseman Scott Wingo was named most outstanding player. He had the winning hit in the bottom of the ninth against Texas A&M and made two great plays at second base to keep Florida from scoring late in Game 1 on Monday. “He’s been so valuable to this program,” Gamecocks Coach Ray Tanner said of Wingo. “He loves this program. He has fun. That’s how you have to play this game.” Three of South Carolina’s first four wins in the Series came in its last at-bat and included strong pitching and defensive performances in the late innings. But none of that was necessary on Tuesday. Peter Mooney doubled to start a three-run third inning in the matchup of Southeastern Conference rivals and hit the Gamecocks’ first home run of the C.W.S. in the sixth. “You have to be a little lucky to win this game,” Tanner said. “We were living a charmed life.” Roth came in with an 0.98 E.R.A. for the season and held Florida without a run after it got leadoff men on base in the fifth, sixth and seventh innings. Roth left with two outs in the eighth after giving up a double to Mike Zunino, who later scored on a single off John Taylor by Josh Adams. Matt Price worked an inning and a third for his 20th save. Florida starter Karsten Whitson (8-1) came out strong, mixing in his mid-90s fastball to strike out three of the first six batters. But South Carolina scored three runs in the third after Mooney’s leadoff double into the left-field corner. Mooney scored on a sacrifice fly by Wingo, Evan Marzilli came home when shortstop Nolan Fontana swiped at and missed a grounder hit by Walker, and Brady Thomas brought in another run with an infield single. Whitson, a freshman who was the No. 9 overall draft pick by the San Diego Padres in 2010, left with the bases loaded and two outs in the fifth. Tommy Toledo came on to strike out Jake Williams. The Gators made it a two-run game when Zunino hit his 19th homer of the season, and first off Roth since April 22. South Carolina has the distinction of winning the last C.W.S. played at Rosenblatt Stadium and the first at TD Ameritrade Park. “Just the fact we can stay loose in situations like this,” Walker said. “These guys have an unbelievable amount of love for each other.”

South Carolina
College World Series
Baseball
College Athletics
Roth Michael
University of Florida


OPEC Says It Will Cut Oil Output

Abstract: VIENNA — Stung by what it called “a dramatic collapse” in crude prices, the OPEC cartel said on Friday that it would reduce output by a steeper-than-expected 1.5 million barrels a day. But that action failed to brake the price decline, and oil dropped 5 percent more by the end of the day. The oil cartel swiftly agreed to the cut in an emergency meeting at its headquarters here, and its president suggested afterward that still more production cuts were coming as OPEC struggled to get ahead of an economic slowdown so severe it could leave the world awash in oil. The stunning decline of oil prices in recent weeks has left oil-exporting countries fearful that they will have to cut government budgets, including the popular social programs that cement many leaders’ hold on power. Oil dropped to $64.15 a barrel on Friday, from a high close of $145.29 on July 3, a 56 percent decline in 16 weeks and one of the steepest in the oil markets. If prices keep falling, OPEC’s president, Chakib Khelil, said the cartel would “definitely” reduce its production again in coming months, either when it meets in Algeria in December, or sooner. “The fundamentals are not good,” Mr. Khelil, who is also Algeria’s oil minister, said in an interview after the meeting. “This is a crisis situation.” In a rare appeal that highlights the urgency of the situation for producers, the cartel is also starting to look beyond its ranks for help in stabilizing the market. OPEC called on other oil-producing countries to “contribute to efforts to restore prices to reasonable levels, and eliminate harmful and unnecessary fluctuations.” OPEC’s members control 40 percent of the world’s oil exports. Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries face their toughest test in years. The slowing global economy has depressed the consumption of oil in the United States, Europe and Japan, and the global economic turmoil risks spreading to emerging economies like China, long the main engine of growth in oil demand. OPEC members said they had little choice but to reduce production to avert a glut. “OPEC has been slow to grasp the full impact of the financial crisis on the real economy, and it dawned on them all of a sudden,” said Vera de Ladoucette, an energy analyst based in Paris at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, of Cambridge, Mass. “There is definitely a new sense of urgency.” Despite OPEC’s ability to forge a rapid consensus on Friday, members of the cartel know they are navigating perilous seas. For consumers, falling commodity prices have been one of the only positive developments in a profoundly depressed economic landscape. If OPEC’s cut eventually sends oil prices higher, that would be another blow to the global economy. “They are walking a very, very fine line,” said Jan Stuart, an energy economist at UBS in New York. The cut was criticized by the White House, which called it “anticompetitive,” and by the British prime minister, Gordon Brown. Many analysts expect global oil consumption to fall this year, for the first time since 1983. Oil consumption in developed countries has dropped for the last three years, and there are signs that the growth in energy demand from developing nations is beginning to slow. OPEC’s action comes just as domestic gasoline prices, for the first time this year, are lower than they were last year. They now average $2.78 a gallon, down from their peak of $4.11 on July 17. In some states with low taxes, gasoline has dropped below $2.50 a gallon. Despite the lower prices, gasoline consumption is still down. Retail sales fell 6.4 percent last week compared with the same week a year earlier, according to a national survey by MasterCard Advisors. OPEC meetings have often been contentious, daylong affairs with fierce divisions between rivals like Saudi Arabia and Iran. Before the session on Friday, experts predicted the cartel would cut 1 million barrels a day. Venezuela and Iran were pushing for a bigger daily reduction, of 2 million barrels. But Mr. Khelil said this time, members agreed on the 1.5-million-barrel reduction with little argument. That cut, to take effect Nov. 1, amounts to about 5 percent of OPEC’s output and nearly 2 percent of global consumption. Mr. Khelil said exporters were having trouble locating buyers for their crude, with some countries finding that normally reliable customers could not obtain letters of credit to finance their purchases because of the financial crisis. “This slowdown in oil demand is serving to exacerbate the situation in a market which has been oversupplied with crude for some time,” OPEC said in its statement. “Moreover, forecasts indicate that the fall in demand will deepen.” The drop in prices is affecting exporters and importers in unexpected ways. With fewer petrodollars now flowing to the Gulf, Russia and other regions, a major source of global liquidity and investment in places like the United States and Europe is beginning to shrink. Even the Saudis, who argued for keeping the markets well supplied at the last OPEC meeting, seemed to have been struck by the speed of the price drop. When prices spiked this summer, the cartel’s leaders attributed the jump to speculation, and Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer and OPEC’s most powerful member, opened the taps and increased production to a record of 10 million barrels a day. The Saudis have since pared their output to around 9.5 million barrels a day, according to analysts. As the lowest-cost producer, Saudi Arabia can afford to let prices fall for a while without hurting its budget. Most analysts estimate that the Saudis could live with oil at $55 to $65 a barrel. But other producers need higher prices. Nigeria’s oil minister said his country would be more comfortable with $80, Qatar has set a range of $70 to $90, and Iran’s representative said that prices below $90 a barrel would hurt. For Iran and Venezuela, the drop in prices is particularly painful, because both have been spending freely on the assumption that prices would stay high. A continued drop in oil prices, and a tough domestic economy, could jeopardize the position of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected on a populist platform and who faces re-election next year. Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chávez, has forced out several foreign oil companies, and the state-owned oil company is struggling to keep production from falling. Some analysts believe Mr. Chávez needs $100 a barrel to finance his expensive social programs and continue his international activism. “Venezuela doesn’t have many options if prices fall,” said William H. Brown III, an independent oil analyst who has consulted for Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Saudi Aramco. “That’s why they’re so desperate to keep prices up.” OPEC’s secretary general, Abdalla Salem el-Badri, sought to portray the cut as an effort to avoid repeating what happened a decade ago, when prices plunged and investments in oil exploration slowed significantly. This echoes the view of some petroleum executives, who have warned that declining prices would lead to lower spending and delays in new projects. “If prices are too high, it will damage the market,” Mr. Badri said. “If prices are too low, we will not be able to invest.” In particular, he said the group was concerned that inventories would build sharply in the first half of 2009 if cuts were not made now. Mr. Badri did not cite a specific price target, a signal that producers were aware that their decision was politically delicate, especially with a protracted global recession looking more likely, and stock markets nose-diving on Friday. But privately, cartel members say they would be happy within a band of $80 to $90 a barrel. So far, no sign has emerged that independent producers like Norway and Mexico, which have cooperated with OPEC when prices have collapsed, are ready to step in with production cuts. But this week, Mr. Badri visited Russia, the world’s second-biggest oil producer, to discuss ways of cooperating. A deputy prime minister for Russia, Igor I. Sechin, who oversees the country’s energy sector, said the government wanted a bigger influence on oil markets. OPEC’s members have frequently ignored the group’s quotas. But Mr. Khelil, OPEC’s president, said this time would be different. “Unless they meet their commitments, they will be worse off than they are now,” he said. “The market is going to test whether we are committed.”

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries


Baghdad Church Attack Hits Iraq’s Core

Abstract: BAGHDAD — Blood still smeared the walls of Our Lady of Salvation Church on Monday. Scraps of flesh remained between the pews. It was the worst massacre of Iraqi Christians since the war began here in 2003. But for survivors, the tragedy went deeper than the toll of the human wreckage: A fusillade of grenades, bullets and suicide vests had unraveled yet another thread of the country’s once eclectic fabric. “We’ve lost part of our soul now,” said Rudy Khalid, a 16-year-old Christian who lived across the street. He shook his head. “Our destiny, no one knows what to say of it.” The massacre , in which 58 people were killed by an affiliate of Al Qaeda, paled before the worst spectacles of violence in Iraq . Since the American invasion, tens of thousands have died here — Sunni and Shiite Muslims — and few of the deaths generated the outrage expressed Monday. Iraq was once a remarkable mélange of beliefs, customs and traditions; the killings on Sunday drew another border in a nation defined more by war, occupation and deprivation. Identities have hardened; diversity has faded. Nearly all of Iraq’s Jews left long ago, many harassed by a xenophobic government. Iraq’s Christians have dwindled; once numbering anywhere between 800,000 and 1.4 million, at least half are thought to have emigrated since 2003, their leaders say. “They came to kill Iraq, not Iraqis,” said Bassam Sami, who huddled in a room for four hours before security forces managed to free him. “They came to kill the spirit of Iraq. They came to kill the reason to live, every dream that you want to make true.” Down the street was Mr. Khalid, as upset as he was anxious at a country that seems to grasp at the mirage of normalcy, fleeting as it might be, only to turn away in disgust at the resilience of violence. “No one has any answers for us,” he said. On the morning after security forces stormed the Syrian Catholic church, freeing hostages but leaving far more dead and wounded behind, there were no answers. Not in the statements of outrage from Iraqi leaders, themselves blamed for the dysfunction of the Iraqi state. Not from Pope Benedict XVI, who condemned the “absurd and ferocious violence.” Not from security officials, whose accounts contradicted one another’s and prompted suggestions they might have inadvertently worsened the carnage. Most of all, not from the survivors, one of whom said the gunmen who seized the church on Sunday evening had only one task in mind. “They came to kill, kill, kill,” Mr. Sami said. Not even the police who stood guard at the church, its doors barricaded with barbed wire and its walls lined with roses, orange trees and a plant Iraqis call “the ears of an elephant,” knew quite what to say. One discouraged anyone from entering the shattered doors, under a portico that celebrated the glory of God “on the land of peace.” “Blood, flesh and bones,” he described the scene. “You can’t bear the smell.” Knots of survivors, as well as their friends and relatives, stood in the street amid bullet casings and bandage wrappers, some of them crying. The Rev. Meyassr al-Qasboutros, a priest, was among them. His cousin, Wassim Sabih, was one of the two priests killed. Survivors said Father Sabih was pushed to the ground as he grasped a crucifix and pleaded with the gunmen to spare the worshipers. He was then killed, his body riddled with bullets. “We must die here,” Father Qasboutros said defiantly. “We can’t leave this country.” Some survivors echoed his sentiments. “If we didn’t love this country, we wouldn’t have stayed here,” said Radi Climis, an 18-year-old who wore a floppy bandage on his forehead, where he was wounded by shrapnel from a grenade thrown by the gunmen. But many others looked in disbelief when asked whether they would stay in a place still so unsettled, so dangerous. “Why? That’s no question to ask,” said Stephen Karomi, who had come to Baghdad a day before from Qaraqosh, a troubled Christian town in the north. “Everyone wants to leave for one reason: to protect ourselves and to keep our sanity.” Confusion still reigned Monday over what precisely happened in the attack, in which an affiliate of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia , a homegrown group led by Iraqis, claimed responsibility. An American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said security forces made the decision to storm the church after believing that the assailants had begun killing the hostages. Had they not, he said, the toll would have been even worse. “Our information was the hostage takers had begun to systematically execute hostages,” he said. But Interior Ministry officials and survivors offered other accounts. One official said that 23 of the hostages were killed when two of the gunmen detonated suicide vests as security forces stormed the church. Another confirmed that account, but said that many hostages were killed soon after the gunmen, thought to number between 6 and 15, seized the building. “We received orders to raid the church, so when we did, they blew themselves up and killed many, but they had already killed a number of civilians before the raid, those cowards,” said Jihad al-Jabiri, a senior official in the Interior Ministry. Several survivors said that many of the casualties occurred when the gunmen entered and began firing randomly — at people, church icons and even windows. They described a ferocity on the part of the gunmen, some of them speaking in dialects from other Arab countries, as though the very sight of the church’s interior had enraged them. “They seemed insane,” said Ban Abdullah, a 50-year-old survivor. Her daughter, Marie Freij, was shot in the right leg as the gunmen entered. She lay in a pool of her own blood for more than three hours. “I thought I would make it, but even if I didn’t, I was in the church, and it would have been O.K.,” she said from her bed at Ibn al-Nafis Hospital. Before the gunmen entered, Rafael Qutaimi, a priest, had managed to herd many of the other survivors into a back room, where they barricaded themselves behind two bookshelves. “Peace be upon you, Mary,” some prayed. “God in heaven, help us,” others muttered. In time, the gunmen learned they were there. Unable to break in, they hurled four grenades inside through a window, killing four and wounding many more, survivors said. Mr. Sami was lucky. He escaped from the back room without any visible wounds. But on Monday, he listed his friends who had died the day before. Raghda, John, Rita, Father Wassim, Fadi, George, Nabil and Abu Saba. “A long list,” he said simply. He shook his head, growing angry. “Why was Father Wassim killed? I don’t know. Why was Nabil killed? I don’t know.” He turned silent, and his eyes softened with the trace of tears.

Iraq
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia
Terrorism
Christians and Christianity


El Salvador: Murder Rate Soars

Abstract: Homicides in El Salvador jumped by 56 percent this year as a truce between its most powerful street gangs crumbled, the authorities said Tuesday. The National Civil Police reported 3,875 murders as of Tuesday, compared with 2,490 last year. El Salvador’s police chief said in a news conference that a 2012 truce between the Mara Salvatrucha and its rival Barrio 18 fell apart early this year as turf wars escalated between them. The government blamed Barrio 18 for breaking the accord. El Salvador is one of the world’s most violent countries, according to a recent United Nations report.


Oklahoma: Senator’s Son Dies in Crash Near Tulsa

Abstract: Dr. Perry Inhofe, the son of Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, was killed in a plane crash on Sunday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel confirmed Monday. Aaron Sauer, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a briefing on Monday that only one person was on board the twin-engine plane when it crashed in Owasso,. The plane had taken off from Salina, Kan., and was approaching the Tulsa airport for landing at the time, he said.

Oklahoma
Perry Inhofe
James M Inhofe
Plane Crashes and Missing Planes


Cartoonist Fired From Farm News for Pro-Farmer Cartoon

Abstract: Rick Friday was not immediately available on Wednesday to explain why he was fired after two decades working as a cartoonist for Farm News. That is because he was feeding the cows on his Iowa farm, as he does early every morning before most people have gone to work. But the cartoon that got him into trouble last week had already spoken for him, circulating online well beyond the audience of the thousands of Farm News readers of his weekly “It’s Friday” column, which has been published since 1995. The cartoon shows two farmers, in overalls and skewed baseball caps, chatting at a fence. “I wish there was more profit in farming,” one farmer says. “There is,” the other replies. “In year 2015 the C.E.O.s of Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer and John Deere combined made more money than 2,129 Iowa farmers.” After the cartoon was published last Friday, Mr. Friday said he was told in an email from an editor the next day that the cartoon would be his last for Farm News because a seed company had withdrawn its advertising in protest. For Mr. Friday, 56, the termination came as a shock. He has not only lived the farm life since he was a child, but has also used it as his muse in illustrations for just as long. He is a self-taught artist who picked up a No. 2 pencil when he was growing up on a 300-acre livestock and grains farm in Lorimor, Iowa. As a child, he sold sketches to other children on the school bus for a nickel or a dime. So when he was contacted by a reporter on Wednesday after he posted the news of his firing on Facebook and it was picked up by local media , Mr. Friday had a good reason for not being able to chat right away. It was still early, before 9 a.m. Iowa time, and he was being interrupted while feeding corn to the animals on his 200-acre cattle farm. When he paused to talk, he revealed he was leaning against a fence, and the heifers were staring at him, hard. “They are going, How come you are not feeding me right now?” Mr. Friday said. “And I have got some bulls around the corner that are patiently waiting for me to feed them, too.” “I am a little bit behind, because my phone has been ringing off the hook.” He agreed to talk after the cows were fed. Later, Mr. Friday, who sometimes answers to “Ricky,” (which is what the older women in town call him) said that the rural life had inspired the 1,090 cartoons he had drawn in pen in the 21 years he had been illustrating his Farm News column. As with the others, he had sketched the offending cartoon at his kitchen table. Then, as always, he scanned it, emailed it off to an editor and asked for confirmation that it had been received. It had been. Usually, Mr. Friday said, he receives a reply with typical editor feedback. An apostrophe goes here or a word is spelled wrong there, he said. But the cartoon was published online, with little else said. But on Saturday, an email from a news editor landed in his inbox. Mr. Friday, quoting the email, said that the cartoon “had caused a storm here” and that “in the eyes of some, big agriculture cannot be criticized or poked fun at.” He was told his run with the Farm News, for which he said he had been paid “embarrassingly low” wages on a freelance basis, was over, per instructions from the publisher. Farm News is read in print and online by 24,000 households in 33 Iowa counties, according to its website. On Wednesday, a woman who answered the phone at the company said, “No comment” when asked about the end of the publication’s relationship with Mr. Friday. Calls to Farm News’s publisher, The Messenger in Fort Dodge, Iowa, were not returned. Mr. Friday said he had never intended to make fun of anyone. He said that as an editorial cartoonist, he was illustrating news. The plight of farmers was evident last year, when commodity prices took a dive, he said. “We are kind of dictated what our wages are going to be somewhat on the stock exchange,” he said. Asked why he had singled out Monsanto, DuPont and John Deere, Mr. Friday said he wanted to illustrate the differences between what a year in agriculture can look like for individual farmers and big agribusiness. He said he drew his inspiration and research from a report in The Des Moines Register and from whatever he could find on the Internet about the salaries of the chief executives of those companies. “In agriculture, you need chemicals, herbicides, seed companies and equipment,” he said. “I just used reputation. It was not trying to pick on anybody in this industry; it is just common knowledge. “The point of my cartoon, and I hoped that it would be self-explanatory, is that one farmer said he wishes there was more profit — and who wouldn’t?” he added. “But someone complained about it, and this is the philosophy I use when I explained it to my children: They were being fed by two hands,” Mr. Friday said, referring to Farm News and its relationships with him and with its advertisers. “They knew they had to chose one, and they chose the hand that they knew would hurt the least,” he said. “After 21 years, that is what really bothered me.” Monsanto said it had no role in the decision to fire Mr. Friday. It said that it first heard about it when The Des Moines Register wrote an article on May 2. “This is not the first time we’ve been the subject of a joke or political cartoon and it probably won’t be the last. It is much easier to laugh at ourselves than it is to stifle humor,” the company said in a blog post.

Cartoons
Farm News
Rick Friday
Monsanto
DuPont
John Deere
Agriculture
advertising,marketing


Patricia Derian, Diplomat Who Made Human Rights a Priority, Dies at 86

Abstract: Patricia Derian, a civil rights veteran who tangled with repressive dictators as President Jimmy Carter’s chief advocate on behalf of human rights abroad, died on Friday at her home in Chapel Hill, N.C. She was 86. Her husband, Hodding Carter III, assistant secretary of state for public affairs during the Carter administration, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease. Ms. Derian had been deputy director of Mr. Carter’s 1976 presidential race. The president appointed her in 1977 to coordinate what was then a small State Department bureau that had been created by Congress the year before. With a bare-bones staff, the bureau was supposed to keep Congress informed of human rights abuses by nations receiving aid. But with the support of the secretary of state, Cyrus R. Vance, and to signal how seriously the administration would treat human rights, the job was elevated to the level of assistant secretary of state. The White House at the time was beginning a campaign to use foreign aid as a lever to persuade countries to respect human rights. Ms. Derian, who had trained as a registered nurse and admitted on her appointment that she knew little about diplomatic protocols, earned a reputation for angering despots as well as career State Department diplomats, many of whom viewed her as well-meaning but unsophisticated. Nevertheless, by most accounts, thousands of lives may been spared because of her work. One big success came during Argentina’s “Dirty War,” when teachers, lawyers, labor leaders and others were being seized by the country’s ruling junta, held without charges and in some cases executed as part of a so-called antiterrorism campaign. Ms. Derian outraged Argentina’s military leaders when she brushed aside their denials of involvement in the abductions and murders of civilians. In one meeting with the military, in 1977, she whipped out a floor plan of a government building. “You and I both know that as we speak, people are being tortured in the next floors,” she was quoted as saying in documents provided by the National Security Archive . Jacobo Timerman , an Argentine journalist who was tortured by the junta, said in 1977 that Ms. Derian had saved him from certain execution. In the Philippines, under the authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos, the condemned dissident Benigno Aquino was allowed to leave the country in 1980 in no small measure because of the publicity Ms. Derian had generated on his behalf. Two years earlier, she pointedly left a dinner being held in her honor by President Marcos to visit Mr. Aquino in his death-row prison cell. She wore her evening gown. Mr. Marcos and his wife, Imelda, were scandalized. (Mr. Aquino, who lived in the United States for three years after his release from prison, returned to the Philippines in 1983 and was promptly assassinated.) Ms. Derian was unsuccessful in her efforts to free the South Korean dissident Kim Dae-jung, who was imprisoned under the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan during her tenure. However, after Mr. Kim was elected president in 1997, he invited her to his inauguration as a special guest. She had frank confrontations with a number of heads of state, warning them that American aid would end unless they granted due process to political prisoners and stopped killing political rivals. Some leaders were receiving opposite signals from others in the government, according to later disclosures, and were furious about it. Her critics said Ms. Derian was calculatingly selective, restricting her human rights efforts to countries with no strategic national security value, most of them in South America. She herself expressed frustration with the limits on her agency’s reach in Eastern Europe, pre-revolution Iran, the killing fields of Cambodia and the Middle East. Ms. Derian’s battles with high-ranking State Department colleagues were widely publicized. She threatened to quit so often, she kept cardboard moving boxes lined up along a wall in her office. Toward the end of her tenure — she left the administration in January 1981, after Mr. Carter had been denied a second term — she described her conflicts with her colleagues. “You got the argument that, ‘These were cultural standards,’ ” she said referring to human rights abuses. “That you can’t expect other countries to accept our values. All those mindless arguments.” Charlie Clements, who worked with Ms. Derian in Central America and is a lecturer at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, said in an interview in 2012 for this obituary that President Carter had undoubtedly known that his appointing Ms. Derian, who was known as Patt, would cause tension in the State Department. But Mr. Carter, he said, “wasn’t looking so much for diplomacy as moral fiber.” “Patt,” he said, “had moral fiber in excess.” Patricia Sue Miriam Murphy was born in Manhattan on Aug. 12, 1929, and raised in Danville, Va., by her parents, Robert Thomas Jeremiah Murphy and the former Ruby Hardiman. A twin sister died shortly after birth. After graduating from the nursing school at the University of Virginia in the early 1950s, Patricia Murphy married Dr. Paul Derian, a prominent surgeon who was known as Mike, and moved with him in 1959 to Jackson, Miss. By the mid-1960s she was the mother of three when she started volunteering at a local Head Start program serving black children. Though ostracized by her neighbors, Ms. Derian, who was white, became progressively more involved in local civil rights efforts. By the late 1960s she had become involved in state politics by helping to organize the Loyalist Democrats, a faction that challenged the state party’s all-white official delegation. She was elected as a Mississippi delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In the 1970s she was president of the Southern Regional Council, which champions racial equality and voting rights, and a member of the executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union. She and Dr. Derian divorced in 1976. She married Hodding Carter III in 1978, when he was the State Department spokesman. She had known him since the 1960s in Mississippi, where he, a member of prominent newspaper family, was publisher of The Delta Democrat Times for a time and was co-chairman of the Loyalist Democrats in 1968. Besides her husband, Ms. Derian is also survived by two sons, Michael and Craig, and a daughter, Brooke Derian, from her first marriage; three stepdaughters, Catherine Sullivan, Finn Carter and Margaret Joseph; a stepson, Hodding Carter IV; a sister, Michael Perkins; two grandchildren; and 10 step-grandchildren. In a statement issued by the Carter Center in Atlanta, Mr. Carter called Ms. Derian “a champion of oppressed people around the world.” “Because of her determination and effective advocacy,” he said, “countless human rights and democracy activists survived that period, going on to plant the seeds of freedom in Latin America, Asia, and beyond.” Roberta Cohen, a Brookings Institution fellow who worked with Ms. Derian in the Carter years, said Ms. Derian had a single-minded sense of purpose. “She did not have any other objective than human rights,” Ms. Cohen said. “She had no client states. She was not interested in advancing her career. She was just doing everything she possibly could in the time she had.”

Patricia Derian
Human Rights
Jimmy Carter
State Department
Obituary


As Tour Nears, Cycling Attempts to Push Past Scandals

Abstract: BREST, France — When 180 riders from 20 teams line up for the start of the 95th Tour de France in this coastal city in Brittany on Saturday, they will embark on a 2,212-mile journey of uncertainty: for themselves as riders, for the Tour as an event and for cycling as a sport. Twelve months ago, the Tour limped to the finish line in Paris, seemingly on the verge of imploding over doping scandals. In its final week, the race leader, Michael Rasmussen, was expelled by his team for lying about why he missed drug tests during training, and two other teams dropped out after each had a rider fail a drug test. Last year’s winner, Alberto Contador, will be absent this year because the team he joined in the off-season, Astana, was excluded from this year’s race after being enmeshed in doping scandals the past two years. The champion two years ago, Floyd Landis, had his title revoked after failing a drug test and is serving a two-year suspension. The sport itself is in danger of fracturing into two leagues amid an escalating feud between the Amaury Sports Organization, which owns and organizes the Tour de France and several other major races, and the International Cycling Union, the sport’s governing body. To Christian Prudhomme, the tour director, this is the moment of truth. “Cycling is judged over three weeks in July,” Prudhomme told The Associated Press this week. “I hope everyone has this in mind. Without doubt, it’s an important year for the image of cycling.” Tour officials have made several cosmetic changes, with two of them likely to affect the results in the first week, if not the entire outcome. For the first time since 1967, the race will not start with a short prologue time trial. Rather, the riders will set out on a rolling, 121-mile trip from Brest to Plumelec. Prudhomme has also eliminated time bonuses, meaning that the first three finishers in each stage and the winners of the on-route sprints used to allocate points for the best-sprinter competition will no longer benefit from having seconds shaved off their overall times. Together, those adjustments mean that there could be several more lead changes than normal in the first week, at least until the fourth stage, an 18-mile individual time trial Tuesday in Cholet. This year’s Tour is also likely to bring to the fore several new contenders for the overall victory, because only three riders in this year’s race have ever finished on the top-three podium in Paris. One of them, Cadel Evans, a 31-year-old Australian rider for the Silence-Lotto team who finished second to Contador last year, is widely considered the favorite. He is likely to be challenged by Alejandro Valverde, a 28-year-old Spaniard riding for the Caisse d’Epargne team. Neither rider, however, has a lock on victory. Evans is known for his conservative — not to say boring — riding style, and Valverde has had bad luck with crashes in previous Tours. His sixth-place finish last year could have been better had he not lost nearly eight minutes to Evans in the two time trials. Another contender will probably emerge from the CSC-Saxo Bank team, although it is unclear who that will be. The designated team leader, Carlos Sastre, finished third in 2006 (after Landis was excluded and everyone moved up a place) and fourth in 2007. But he can also lose time in the time trials. His teammates Frank Schleck, who won the stage to Alpe d’Huez two years ago, and his younger brother Andy could emerge as threats to Sastre and the entire peloton. Other riders who have a shot at finishing on the podium in Paris are Denis Menchov of Rabobank, Damiano Cunego of Lampre and, in a long shot, Christian Vande Velde, an American with Garmin-Chipotle. Each of those riders, as well as the rest of the peloton, will be subject to intense scrutiny from antidoping officials during the three-week Tour. On that score, Prudhomme said he believed a vast majority of riders had embraced an antidoping stance. “There is a real change in mentality within the teams, the riders, to ensure that cycling recovers its credibility,” he said. Unlike in past years, however, that effort will not be overseen by the International Cycling Union, which has no official presence here because of its dispute with the Tour organizers. Instead, the French Anti-Doping Agency will conduct the drug tests, a task it has performed at other races but rarely on a scale like that required by the Tour de France. The antidoping agency collected blood and urine samples from 60 to 70 riders during the weeks leading up to the Tour and has drawn samples from each rider after the arrival of the teams here this week. In addition, the stage winner, the overall race leader and two to four other riders will be required to submit samples after each stage. Those samples will be tested at the World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland. The lab has also been working with cycling officials this year on the development of the so-called biological passport, a record of each rider’s baseline physiology that can be compared against results from individual tests. Jonathan Vaughters, the director of the Garmin-Chipotle team, one of two United States-based teams in the race, said he believed Tour officials would benefit from a strict testing regimen and have access to the riders’ baseline results despite the cycling union’s absence. Vaughters praised the French agency’s testing as “top notch.” He added, “It’s been challenging for them, but I think the final result is going to be fairly seamless.” To be sure, there are some signs of life in cycling. Two American teams announced new sponsors in recent weeks, one year after Lance Armstrong’s former team folded after being unable to attract a new sponsor. Garmin, the American maker of Global Positioning System devices, increased its role to title sponsor of what was known as Team Slipstream, and Columbia Sportswear Company signed on as title sponsor of what was known as Team High Road. That team had moved to the United States this year after T-Mobile, the German telecommunications company, ended its sponsorship. Bob Stapleton, the owner of Team Columbia, said last month that he believed the sport’s intramural disputes could result in a division of cycling into two leagues over the next year — one overseen by the union and the other a conglomeration of the organizations that run the major tours of France, Italy and Spain. Notably, the Amaury Sports Organization recently bought 49 percent of the company that owns the Tour of Spain and announced a partnership with the company that manages the Tour of California. Beginning Saturday, though, the focus will be on the riders, where most people at the Tour hope it will stay. “I’m extremely hopeful that this is going to be a fun Tour de France and that you guys in the press corps are going to get to write stories about tactics and strategy and equipment and technology,” Vaughters said. “And that the story isn’t going to turn into a negative quagmire.”

Doping
Tour de France (Bicycle Race)
Bicycles and Bicycling
Contador Alberto
Rasmussen Michael


De Blasio Backs Wage Bill, in Challenge to Quinn

Abstract: With the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn , courting business leaders as she prepares to run for mayor, Bill de Blasio , the public advocate and one of her chief rivals, has thrown his support behind a much-disputed bill that would increase wages for workers in city-subsidized development projects — a move that could force Ms. Quinn to take a position on the issue. In a letter that he sent to both Ms. Quinn and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Sunday evening, Mr. de Blasio wrote that New York City was not doing enough to expand economic opportunities and that the so-called living wage bill represented an “immediate and important” step the city could take. “The desperate state of New York City’s middle class, the experience of other localities, and improvements made to the bill in recent months have collectively convinced me that the time has come to pass a living wage bill that uses the power of our economic development dollars to reduce income inequality ,” Mr. de Blasio wrote in the letter. The legislation would require that employees who work in projects that receive aid from the city be paid at least $10 an hour with benefits, or $11.50 an hour without benefits. The state minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. The bill is supported by a majority of the City Council, as well as by labor unions and members of the clergy, but opposed by business groups and by Mr. Bloomberg. Ms. Quinn, who can effectively kill legislation by not bringing it to a vote, has not said if she supports the measure. The wage debate has put her in something of a political vise. She began her career as a housing advocate, but as she prepares a mayoral campaign, she has tried to convince leaders of the business community that she will be a centrist, pro-business mayor in the mold of Mr. Bloomberg. In a statement late Sunday night, Jamie McShane, a spokesman for Ms. Quinn said, “We’ve received the public advocate’s letter late this evening. We’re going to review it and we appreciate his input.” Apart from John C. Liu , the city comptroller, whose mayoral prospects are seen as having been dimmed by an investigation into his fund-raising practices, Mr. de Blasio is the only one of Ms. Quinn’s likely Democratic primary opponents so far to come out in favor of the wage bill. In an interview, he said he was swayed not by political calculus, but by discussions over two months with both advocates and opponents of the measure. Among the things that struck him most, he said, was that opponents did not offer any ideas on how to address income inequality. The wage measure, while imperfect, at least represented a step in that direction, he added. Mr. de Blasio in the letter did urge one change to the bill — increasing the amount of annual revenue, from $5 million, that a business must earn to cause the requirement to kick in. That, he said, would protect smaller businesses. In recent weeks, two powerful labor unions, 1199 SEIU, which represents health care workers, and the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, have expressed support. Ms. Quinn held a hearing last month on the bill, but has not yet scheduled a final hearing or a vote. “I think it’s time to move it forward,” Mr. de Blasio said.

Mayors
New York City
de Blasio Bill
Quinn Christine C
Wages and Salaries
Law and Legislation
Elections