Always Thank Your Star Players, Chegg’s C.E.O. Says

Abstract: This interview with Dan Rosensweig, president and chief executive of Chegg, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant . Chegg rents textbooks online and by mail. Q. Tell me about some important leadership lessons. A. One of the blessings I’ve had, really for my entire career, is working with founders of companies, whether it was Bill Ziff at Ziff Davis or with Jerry Yang and David Filo at Yahoo. What I love about that culture is the energy, enthusiasm and the unbridled passion for what’s possible, as opposed to spending a whole lot of time trying to figure out the obstacles. In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you’ll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet. Founders simply ask what needs to be done and what’s the best way to do it. And that’s fun. It’s had a significant impact on the way I think, the way I lead, the way I manage, and the opportunities I seek out. I like being surrounded by people who have very little fear and very little respect for the past — not in a negative way, but in a positive way. They appreciate everything that’s been done, but they constantly look for how to do it better. When you lead with what’s possible, and how you create value for people, it’s energizing. Being around that kind of energy and inspiration has allowed me to think bigger than I probably ever would have thought. Q. You just started at Chegg this year. What was your first-day speech to the staff? A. I articulated why I came. What’s the opportunity we see? How do we want to define success? What’s the bigger dream? Many people work really hard every day, but they’re incrementalists. When you are in a growth company, you have to really open people’s eyes to the bigger possibilities, so they think differently. Once they understand how to define success and what their role is in success, they make better decisions and you can push decision-making down. Stylistically, I try very hard to be descriptive about how we want to define success and not necessarily prescriptive on telling them exactly how we want to do it — because, frankly, many of them are a lot smarter than me at what they do. Q. So how did you define success with the group? A. One of the things you just have to appreciate is that nobody has all of the answers to anything, particularly in a growth company that’s breaking new ground. I think having a lot of humility is important in a C.E.O. role. You have to have confidence, but also humility. You have to know that you can pull off what you say you are going to do, but you really need to solicit opinions from inside the company and, frankly, from outside the company. Inside the company, we spent the first month with the management team and we asked every one of them to come in with the 10 most important priorities that they thought that the company should have and order them in terms of importance. It took about a month to debate these points, to articulate these points, to have people have their say. What I did was coach them to communicate them clearly, as opposed to saying we should do this, this or this. These sessions go three or four hours once a week, and people come back and then you assign an order toward the end. Then you define success and reportable metrics, put them together and the team votes and agrees. And it’s not just having 10, it’s having them in the right order. What you get is a much more focused company with a clear definition of success, and a real enthusiasm from people knowing what to do. One of the biggest problems employees have is when management fails to communicate to them what’s a good decision and what’s a bad decision. Where should they spend their time? So we say, if you are not doing something that contributes to one of these 10 priorities, stop doing it. If your manager tells you to keep doing it, see me. And it’s amazing how people rally behind it. And it’s fun. Q. How do you run meetings? A. Probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned over the past couple of years is to be present, because it’s so easy to get distracted in the worlds of BlackBerrys, iPhones, Twitter, Facebook and 500 e-mails a day. So with our management team, when we’re in a meeting, it starts on time, it ends on time, no technology. It’s just, let’s stay focused, and we have a much more healthy conversation. People really listen and contribute and we move on. It works well in your personal life as well — wherever you are, be all in. Also, one of our rituals that we start every executive staff meeting with is sharing one personal and one professional thing occupying our minds. The goals are for the team to get closer, build trust and to help understand anything that might be distracting us. I think the way to get employees all in is to listen to them. Every six weeks, I meet with small groups by their function. The rules are, it’s their meeting. They can ask anything, they can communicate anything as long as it’s about how to improve Chegg’s business or our relationship with our customers. Q. What are some other leadership lessons for you? A. One inflection point was from selling advertising. You learn that the money doesn’t come to you — you have to go get it. If you sit back and wait, you are going to be waiting a long time. So you have to go to where people are and you have to listen. You have to make sure you are able to learn to communicate differently with different people. You have to study and prepare. Hopefully it will look effortless, but a whole lot of effort goes into preparation. Q. How would you say your leadership style has evolved? A. It’s more being present and overcommunicating. I try to be more descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive. And I want to create a culture where the best performers don’t have to work hard to let you know they are performing well. We spend a lot of time in all of the companies that I run or work in making sure we know who the star performers are, rather than forcing them to send an e-mail or come see you or brag about themselves, which they are really uncomfortable doing. I call them and say: “How are you? I understand that you are a star performer. You’re doing great and here are the two or three things that you are doing. You are knocking the cover off the ball. I just want to say thank you and let you know you have an open dialogue if there is other stuff that you think we need to be doing.” So I do a lot more of that because I know I would appreciate it. I’ve learned that they appreciate it because they then can focus on doing the job and not worry about whether people are noticing. Q. Let’s talk about hiring. What do you look for? What questions do you ask? A. By the time they get to me, they’ve been vetted in enough ways that I know functionally they should be able to do the job. So I spend a lot of my time doing two things. I ask them very few questions, mostly around, how do they approach a situation? How do they personally define success for themselves? What do they want for this company? What attracts them here? What do they need to be successful? How do they want to be managed? And then a lot of the conversation stems from there. And then I really turn it over to them and say: What questions do you have? What do you think you need to know to decide whether this is the right environment for you? Whether we can utilize the talents you bring to bear? Whether we are the right place at this moment in your career? And that dialogue generally leads to a really great outcome. Q. What are the most important qualities you’re looking for? A. One is attitude. Some people spend a lot of time focusing on how difficult things are. You don’t get jobs like these unless the situations are difficult. So I like to hear people talk about how they love to approach a challenge, and that’s the thing that gets them excited. I’m also looking for people who appreciate the fact that the definition of success is the company and not an individual. I’m looking for people who can communicate. I mean, quite frankly, most of the things that break down when you are running a business are transparency and communication. If you have people who are reluctant to share information with their peers, particularly in a very small company, it’s not a healthy dynamic. And I look for people who generally, as I said earlier, think big, want to achieve big, aren’t afraid. They have that level of humility to know it’s entirely possible we may not succeed, but, man, it’s worth trying. Q. And if you could ask somebody only one or two questions in a job interview, what would you ask? A. What matters to you in your professional career in the next five years? And the second would be, what do you think you need to be successful in that goal? Q. What about feedback? What’s your approach to difficult conversations? A. I have found in my career that once you know that someone isn’t doing the things that they need to do or they are not going to be successful, then every day you wait it’s really your fault rather than theirs. And the first thing I ask is, did I ask somebody to do something that they weren’t capable of doing? There’s nothing worse than somebody you like and respect doing something you know they can’t be successful in and knowing that you were the one that did that to them. I try very hard to understand, before I approach the person, why they may not be successful in that particular role. Because, normally, the people I work with have been extremely successful in their careers, so the expectation is that they are going to be successful. But the longer you wait, the worse it gets. Very few problems correct themselves. And the philosophy of sticking your head in the sand and hoping it goes away has never been that effective for me. So you sit down and have an honest conversation. I think people respect honesty without attitude. Q. And what about getting feedback? A. I ask employees, “If you had my job, other than giving yourself more vacation and a raise, what’s the first thing that you would do that you don’t think we’re doing yet?” I try to make it comfortable when you do the review process by asking people: What do you need more of from me? What do you need less of from me? What is it that I’m doing that you would like me to stop doing completely? And what is it that I’m not doing enough of that you’d like some more of? From there, it becomes a much more comfortable conversation.

Rosensweig Dan
Chegg Inc
Executives and Management
Hiring and Promotion


A Revolution of Machines Quietly Hums

Abstract: NEW YORK — If you want to get a finger-tip feel for one of the most important transformations in our world today, read “The Fear Index,” Robert Harris’s new thriller. Mr. Harris has been widely praised for his adept portrayal of the hedge fund universe in which his novel is set. “The greatest pleasure of this book is that it gets the finance right,” cooed Felix Salmon, the Reuters finance blogger whose keyboard often oozes acid. He is right that Mr. Harris’s hedgies are a welcome and realistic departure from the Masters of the Universe of most popular fiction. For one thing, these are the alpha geeks, the nerdy doctorate-holders whose testosterone is channeled into equations instead of frat-house swagger. And Mr. Harris knows his super-rich. As they are being wooed to make a billion-dollar investment over a 1995 Latour in a fine Geneva restaurant, an international group of investors energetically discusses the ways that their national governments oppress them. Dr. Alex Hoffmann, the billionaire hedge fund manager protagonist who is making the pitch for their cash, reflects: “He was remembering now why he didn’t like the rich: their self-pity. Persecution was the common ground of their conversation, like sport or the weather was for everyone else.” But the most valuable intellectual take-away from this riveting novel is the element that has been widely dismissed by reviewers as familiar and unpersuasive: VIXAL, the intelligent machine at the heart of the story that torments its human creator and may be trying to rule the world. Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, gave “The Fear Index” a thumbs up, but deemed the machine takeover “silly and contrived.” VIXAL, the evil genius computer, “seems less like a plausible villain than like a metaphor for the greed and heedlessness that overtook Wall Street,” she wrote. Ms. Kakutani’s dismissal of VIXAL as an unoriginal and uncompelling reworking of the Frankenstein template misses the most important point. VIXAL and the parallel world the computer program creates by interacting with other machines is worth reading about — but not for the usual pulp fiction pleasure of entering a vividly rendered imaginary world. “The Fear Index” is fun to read because Mr. Harris is a great novelist, but VIXAL is worth getting to know not as a fictional character, but because so much of what it does is already happening in real life. Futurists and fantasists have been dreaming about the rise of intelligent machines for centuries. Now it is actually starting to happen. For a drier but in many ways even more astonishing account of what is going on, read “The Second Economy,” an essay in McKinsey Quarterly by W. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher at the Intelligent Systems Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center in California. Mr. Arthur’s contention is that a second, machine-to-machine economy is emerging and that it will bring deep economic, social and political change comparable to the transformation wrought by the Industrial Revolution. “Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically,” Mr Arthur writes. “They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. On the surface, this shift doesn’t seem particularly consequential — it’s almost something we take for granted. But I believe it is causing a revolution no less important and dramatic than that of the railroads. It is quietly creating a second economy, a digital one.” Mr. Arthur describes this economy as “vast, silent, connected, unseen and autonomous (meaning that human beings may design it but are not directly involved in running it).” The second economy is manifest in transactions as quotidian as checking in for a flight with a machine and as esoteric as the algorithm hedge funds of Mr. Harris’s thriller, which use information produced by machines to trade with other machines. Economists and novelists aren’t the only people musing about the rise of the machine-to-machine economy and its transformative potential. Yuri Milner is one of the savviest technology thinkers in the world; he was a pioneering investor in Facebook, a bet that was wildly vindicated last week. Mr. Milner has a presentation in which he describes the nine most important changes in the world today. Three of them are about what Mr. Arthur has dubbed the second economy: the rise of what Mr. Milner calls “the Internet of things,” or the machine-to-machine economy; the growing power of artificial intelligence; and the emergence of a “global brain,” which is the network of all of the people and the machines in the world and their connections to one another. The one aspect of “The Fear Index” that is tired and familiar is its depiction of the rise of the machine-to-machine economy as murderous and menacing. That time-worn worry that the smart machines will turn on their creators isn’t one I share. I am a fan of the machine-to-machine economy and of all the ways it makes my human life cheaper and easier. But I am concerned about something Mr. Harris only hints at. At the end of “The Fear Index,” VIXAL changes its hedge fund’s mission statement. The first lines of the new, machine-written version, read: “The company of the future will have no workers.” I’m not afraid our smart machines will try to exterminate us, but I do worry that the second economy may be a jobless one. Mr. Arthur doesn’t offer much comfort on that score. In an exchange with a reader after his essay was published, the economist wrote: “Since the second economy began, in the early and mid-1990s, we’ve had wave after wave of downsizing and layoffs, and now we have ongoing structural joblessness. I hope jobs will be created, and maybe they will. More likely, the system, as so many times before in history, will have to readjust radically. It needs to find new ways to distribute the wealth.” Chrystia Freeland is global editor at large at Reuters.

Economic Conditions and Trends
Computers and the Internet


The Introvert on the Podium

Abstract: Editors’ note: Here’s one of our favorite stories from the archives, now being featured in our Smarter Living collection. I was in college when I first learned how awful public speaking could be. Having written an op-ed article for the student newspaper about sweatshops — a big campus controversy in 1999 — I rose from my seat at a debate to say a few words about the subject. I hadn’t prepared anything. The ease with which I had written my ideas disappeared with the realization that 100 sets of eyes were locked on me. I stumbled through something. People stared blankly. My heart raced and my face flushed. After what seemed like an eternity, I slunk back to my seat, vowing not to repeat the experience. Jump ahead 15 years. I’m still writing about business and economics topics in articles and books — these days with a focus on time management and productivity. You’d think that book writing would be a solitary endeavor, a perfect career for an introvert like me. But, as it turns out, a big part of book writing is speaking. Blogging isn’t good enough. To sell books, you have to talk to people about your ideas. At first, I thought this was something to be endured. But a few books in, I can honestly say I enjoy it. Last spring, I got up on stage for an hour in front of 700 women at a private event, and it was a highlight of my year. They seemed to like it, too; in the post-event feedback, 98 percent gave me positive marks for delivery. Backstage, someone even said, “This is easy for you, right?” Umm, no. Few people are naturals at public speaking. Here’s how I learned to love it anyway. First, I have realized that being “natural” comes from being practiced. I don’t know why this should be surprising. Maybe it’s because many of us assume that we must project proficiency in all work-related matters. This belies the messy nature of learning new skills. The first time you got on a bicycle, you might well have fallen off; only later did it seem intuitive. Likewise, the more you get up in front of people, the better you are at it. In the last five years, I’ve given so many speeches that it no longer feels nerve-racking. It just feels like Tuesday. While some people have learned to be eloquent about almost anything at the microphone, most of us are asked about just a few topics. The good news is that after enough practice, you can know those topics cold. You can write speeches about them, do drills on the delivery and hone your ideas into phrases that sound good. Then you can memorize those phrases. It took me a long time to get there. For a few years, I’d ask for lecterns where I could keep notes. Then a conference organizer pushed me not to rely on this crutch. In my hotel room the night before, I suddenly wondered what would happen if my slides didn’t work, either. I’d be standing in front of hundreds of people with nothing to lean on. So I tested myself to see whether I could give my basic speech from memory. The answer turned out to be that you can wind me up and drop me into the middle of a corporate retreat, and I’ll give you an hourlong talk on time management. Once I had my material memorized, I realized that I could focus on the part that’s fun: feeding off the energy that is always in an audience, and that can be harnessed if you try. Most introverts like myself enjoy one-on-one interactions. For my speeches, I have the organizers put me in touch with a few audience members beforehand. I ask them to keep track of how they spend their time for several days, then have them send me their logs. This exercise shows me the challenges that my audience faces. But a secondary benefit is that I get to know these people. I talk on the phone with them, often multiple times before we meet. When I say hello before the talk, they become friendly faces, nodding and smiling in seats near the front. Even if a conference doesn’t lend itself to this format, I make sure to get there early enough to introduce myself to enough people so that the audience won’t be all strangers. Someone, at least, will be rooting for me. Laughter is energizing, too — and, over time, I have experimented to find lines that make people chuckle. Just as stand-up comics try out their material in small clubs, I try a new observation in each speech to see how people react. If they react well, I add it permanently, because there is little that is more thrilling than hearing hundreds of people chortle at something you’ve just said. Laughter is approval; it certainly beats blank faces. Finally, from watching other speakers, I’ve learned strategies like giving audience members opportunities to talk with one another, since most people come to conferences to network anyway. I can’t say that all my speeches go perfectly. I still struggle when I draw the post-lunch, nap-inducing time slot. Yet even this can be helpful: It makes me realize that sometimes you connect with other people and sometimes you don’t. It makes any given speech less fraught. I can take it in stride — in contrast to that red-faced walk back to my seat in college. I’ll be trying again with new faces soon.


The Secret Recipe for Baking Cookies Is to Add Sprinkles Liberally

Abstract: I’M going into the city today,” I say. “What for?” my husband asks. “Sprinkles.” I admit it: I am obsessed with sprinkles. I began to suspect as much when I went shopping for storage containers to hold my jars of jimmies, nonpareils, sanding sugars, edible glitter, and three different sizes of silver and gold dragées. I could barely fit them all into two of those large plastic drawers from Bed, Bath and Beyond. This is not a cupcake obsession. I know cupcakes are a hot item these days, but I’m talking about cookies — rollout cookies in shapes to suit any occasion. My neighbor says she’s having a Western-themed party, and I have visions of cacti bristling with emerald-green jimmies, cowboy hats in white or blue-black sanding sugar, boots, jalapeños, and silver stars shining with dragées. Before the thought has jelled, I hear myself say, “Want me to make cookies?” Then my husband forwards an e-mail message from two guys in his office, announcing plans for a department picnic, and I fire back, “Tell them I’ll make cookies.” I’m thinking fish and suns and T-shirts — maybe I could find sunglass shapes. ... It all started a dozen or so years ago as I pulled together the menu for a post-Christmas dinner party and racked my brain for an easy do-ahead dessert. O.K., maybe not easy, but certainly do-ahead. My mother-in-law, who was visiting, suggested rollout cookies. “Oh, I can’t do those,” I told her. She didn’t know how the rolling-out business made me crazy. I can never keep the dough from sticking to the rolling pin. And I hate getting it under my fingernails — I don’t like touching goopy things. Though I love to cook, I put on rubber gloves when making meat loaf or rinsing chicken. “Put the dough between two sheets of floured waxed paper,” she said. “It’s easy that way.” It was an epiphany. I’ll admit that even with the waxed paper, it took me several rounds of practice before I got the technique down; but once over the initial hurdle, I rolled wild and free. Over time, I’ve come to know this dough: the proportion of butter to Crisco that maintains flavor yet keeps the shapes intact in the oven; the warm smell of vanilla tweaked with a bit of lemon; the firmness of the properly chilled dough. I can tell at a glance if I need to be more liberal in dusting the waxed paper, and once, the mushy texture was the clue that told me that our refrigerator was dying. Now I haunt kitchen stores for interesting cookie-cutter shapes the way my husband might look for a vintage port, the way my dog might sniff out an errant scrap of food on the kitchen floor. It’s the decorating that really gets me into trouble. I’m not terribly artistic, but like a magpie, I love shiny things. So I spread just enough powdered-sugar icing to cover a cookie before adding red crystal sugar on the jalapeños, with the finer green sanding sugar on the stems. I top off the cacti with dabs of yellow icing and large gold dragées for flowers. I sprinkle the boots with black or brown edible glitter, and pipe on designs with those little tubes of colored icing from the grocery store. Any season, any occasion, I find myself contemplating cookie shapes and the decoration thereof. Halloween brings black bats and cats and witches’ hats, white ghosts, and orange pumpkins. I have shapes for back to school, Oscar night, New Year’s Eve, and most other major holidays. And at Christmas, I barely have time to shop for presents between the annual inventory of sprinkles and my trip to West 22nd Street and the hallowed halls of New York Cake and Baking, where tables piled high with nonpareils, sanding sugars and dragées await. Ah, the dragées. In the world of sprinkles, dragées are the ne plus ultra. Those little silver and gold balls that look like BBs or rifle shot, in containers that say “Not suitable for eating.” (Because of the minute amounts of metal on dragées, the Food and Drug Administration recommends that they be used for decoration only.) The recipients of my cookies are welcome to pick them off, but make no mistake about it: dragées will be present. In gold or silver and in sizes from the diminutive two-millimeter pin-dots to the hefty seven-millimeter orbs, they become the bubbles on my champagne glasses, the balls on my Christmas trees, the eyes on my black cats. Cookie mania can easily be an all-night undertaking — often until 4 or 5 a.m. Maybe it would take less time if I didn’t have the companion compulsion to watch HGTV while I work. The mindless parade of “Divine Design,” “Color Correction” and “House Hunters” is oddly comforting as I mix up another batch of green icing. The stripes that run together on my T-shirt cookies aren’t nearly as hard to repair as the tired siding on Chris and Najim’s house. “We’re going to do a whimsical ceiling graphic,” says Candice Olson on “Divine Design,” and I add blue stripes to my green fish. We’re all creating together. On his way to bed, my husband wanders through the kitchen with a hopeful look on his face. “So, how’s it going?” he says. “Any disasters?” He’s not really curious about my success — he’s just trolling for discards. I’m not creating masterpieces; I’ve never learned how to pipe frosting from a pastry bag, and I can barely draw a straight line with a ruler. I rely mostly on cookie shapes that communicate quickly and clearly, without the need for me to draw anything with the icing. Squiggles of frosting can be wool on a sheep or hair on an angel; dragées can form the clapper on a bell or the face on a snowman. All it takes is imagination — and time. My friends think I go to all this trouble for them. But the truth is that I do it for myself, as a sort of celebration. With two or three kinds of decorating sugar as well as dragées on a single cookie, each one looks as if it’s having a party. Perfection is not an issue, and while a plate of cookies all in a single shape and the same color can be beautiful, variety is more fun. As in life, the beauty is in the mix of colors and shapes, all sparkling and smiling together.


Pope Names Cardinals to Oversee Vatican Bank

Abstract: ROME — Pope Francis continued shaking up the Vatican on Wednesday as he named new cardinals to an oversight commission for the troubled Vatican Bank, replacing all but one of the appointees made by his predecessor, Benedict XVI, in another example of how the new pope is consolidating power. Since becoming pope less than a year ago, Francis has shifted personnel in important Vatican departments, placing his picks in key positions while signaling that he intends to crack down on the intrigues and disarray that plagued the Vatican bureaucracy under the shy, aloof Benedict. The Vatican Bank , officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion, has been under scrutiny for years, amid suspicions that some accounts might be fronts for illegal interests. European regulators are pushing the secretive bank to become more transparent and adhere to international banking standards, a process that began under Benedict. Shortly after he announced his surprise resignation last February, Benedict approved new five-year terms for the existing five-man committee overseeing the bank, including Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, then the secretary of state, the Vatican’s second-ranking official. On Wednesday, Francis retained only one of those five — Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran — while replacing Cardinal Bertone with Pietro Parolin, the man who also replaced him as secretary of state. “It is not surprising,” said one Vatican official familiar with the bank, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It has been in the works. It is a normal turnover. It is good for the working of the institution.” Francis’ move comes a month before cardinals from around the world will come to the Vatican for a consistory to witness the formal appointment of new cardinals and discuss church affairs. On Sunday, Francis designated his first group of new cardinals, with a majority coming from outside Europe. Francis has paid close attention to the bank, having named a direct liaison during the summer after the job had remained vacant for more than a year. He has also appointed a separate special commission to scrutinize the bank’s activities. One of Benedict’s last acts was to appoint Ernst von Freyberg, a German industrialist, as the bank’s first non-Italian president. Mr. von Freyberg has focused on bringing the bank into compliance with international norms and has hired a forensic accounting firm to vet the bank’s 19,000 accounts for problems or suspicious transactions. In December, Moneyval , a European monitoring agency, commended the Vatican for making significant efforts to comply with international laws to combat terrorism and money laundering, but added that more improvement was needed. Moneyval criticized officials as still having inadequate controls to protect against financial crimes at the bank, and at the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, which oversees the Vatican’s real estate holdings and financial assets. Carlo Marroni, a journalist and expert on Vatican financial affairs, said Francis might also decide eventually to replace Mr. von Freyberg and the other members of the bank’s board of directors, though as yet he has given no indication of doing so. The board answers to the supervisory committee appointed on Wednesday. “It’s a surprise move on the eve of the consistory,” said Mr. Marroni, who writes for the Italian financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore . “It’s a strong signal of change in the management of the pontifical finances.” The new supervisory committee consists of five men: Secretary of State Parolin; Cardinal Tauran; Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna; Cardinal Thomas Christopher Collins, archbishop of Toronto; Cardinal Santos Abril y Castilló, archpriest of the Papal Basilica of St. Mary Major. The four cardinals who were removed are Cardinal Bertone; Odilo P. Scherer of Brazil; Telesphore P. Toppo of India; and Domenico Calcagno of Italy.

Vatican Bank
Pope Francis
Appointments and Executive Changes
Catholic Church


Boeing Looks Around, and a State Worries

Abstract: EVERETT, Wash. — Riveters once ruled here, as Boeing airplanes rolled off the line and into the sky from giant factories where rivers of aluminum were pounded into form and function. And Boeing, founded in nearby Seattle in 1916 in the era of the Sopwith Camel, returned the favor, building up the Puget Sound region as a blue-collar powerhouse from the 1940s through the commercial jet age. Almost half of the company’s 171,000 employees still call Washington State home. But the next chapter of that old relationship has become a cliffhanger of politics, economics and perhaps, some suspect, brinkmanship and bluff. Where the company will assemble its next generation of commercial airplane, the 777X — which only a few months ago looked locked-down certain to be right here — is now up for grabs, with a national scramble of states and cities bidding for Boeing’s hand with tax breaks, incentives and promises of labor congeniality. With a deadline looming this week for best offers, and a decision promised by the company early next year, tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in wages and taxes are at stake, along with the identity of a region that long ago claimed the jet age as its symbol, in Seattle’s revolving Space Needle. “It would be the death spiral of aerospace in Washington State,” said Ray Stephanson, Everett’s mayor, contemplating the possibility of Boeing’s building the 777X in some other state. As he spoke in his office, a scale model 777-300, angled as though in takeoff, sat by a window. “There’s a tremendous amount of anxiety.” Boeing had conditions from the beginning on the 777X: big incentives from the State of Washington and big givebacks by its largest union here, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The state came through, delivering in a special session of the Legislature a package worth $8.7 billion through 2040. But union members balked , voting down a contract extension last month that would have frozen their pensions. So Boeing began sending out requests for proposals to more than a dozen states and cities around the nation. State legislators in Missouri last week delivered a $1.7 billion Christmas gift should Boeing come their way. Economic development officials in Alabama, Kansas, North Carolina and Utah — Boeing has declined to provide a full list of suitors — were putting together bids, too, and bragging about their respective environments of can-do optimism. Image Boeing employees marched to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union hall on Nov. 13, where they voted to reject a contract that would have frozen their pensions. Credit Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com, via Associated Press “It’s our job to sell them our area and tell a story,” said Thomas M. Battle Jr., the mayor of Huntsville, Ala., one of the places Boeing contacted as a possible new partner. “They’ve asked for a good community, one that works with you, one that has a high level of education, that supports their work force and makes it easy for them to recruit.” Spokesmen for Boeing and the machinists’ union both said that no talks were underway to reopen negotiations or reconsider last month’s contract vote. But state officials said they believed the region had aces in the hole that would ultimately prevail: experience in producing airplanes under deadline conditions and closer proximity than most of the competition to Asian suppliers and customers, an important consideration for ocean-borne freight shipment. Boeing has $95 billion in orders and commitments for 777Xs, and has pledged its first deliveries by 2020, which does not leave the company enough time, state officials said, to consider any place not ready for prime time. Boeing has not said how many jobs the 777X program would produce, but it employs about 20,000 people here in Washington now building wide-body 777s — a production line that will be phased out as the 777X takes over. “The one place in the world that knows how to build a plane like this is Washington,” said Alex Pietsch, the director of the office of aerospace for Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat. “This is where the company can build with the least risk.” Corporate shopping for the best deal, the lowest taxes and the sweetest incentives is a multibillion-dollar enterprise in America — often with outcomes that do not fully materialize or cannot be accurately measured even for the winning contenders. An investigation by The New York Times last year found that more than $80 billion a year in incentives are given by states, cities and counties to companies that often pit local officials against one another to get the most lucrative packages. Boeing’s courtesan dance has also spurred worried analogies between the Seattle region and another city that suffered dearly from industrial flight: Detroit. Image A woman walked out of the City Hall in Everett, Wash., on Monday. Credit Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times Industry experts say that like the dispersal of automobile manufacturing from Michigan, aircraft making is becoming less and less an assembly-line business of the sort Seattle workers thrived at, and more like a symphony where highly technical components — a wing, a floor assembly — are fabricated in far-flung places, often by lesser-trained and lower-paid workers, and by lots of robots. A spokesman for the machinists’ union, Bryan Corliss, said that the union was open to further discussions, but that members “have spoken pretty loudly and clearly that they’re not interested in tearing down our current contract — so anything going forward would be building on what we have.” Boeing has already moved thousands of jobs away from Washington in recent years and has said that diversification is a long-term corporate strategy. Its new 787 Dreamliners are built in South Carolina, and the company, in 2001, moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago. “Puget Sound is probably going to face a reality not unlike what Michigan faces: ‘You guys have to come in at a reasonable price, because we can move our stuff to other places,’ ” said David Gillen , a professor of economics and the director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of British Columbia. But in other important ways, Seattle is no Detroit — if it ever was. Technology companies like Microsoft and Amazon have staked a major claim on the culture and the job base in recent years. Those companies have created new diversity in the economy that is likely to keep the region stable even if Boeing moves its assembly line elsewhere. But they have also created fears that blue-collar workers could be squeezed by the high-rent, high-wage technopolis that increasingly dominates life in Seattle and its suburbs to the east. In Everett, a low-rise waterfront city of brick and wood 25 miles north of Seattle, the ups and downs of aviation history dictate for many people a practical attitude toward Boeing and its future. Older people like Art Taft, 70, remember well hard times like the 1970s when nothing went right and layoffs by the thousands struck fears that Boeing might not survive at all. Like many other people here, he seems to be taking the threats of departure in stride. Mr. Taft, a retired machine repairer for a company that sold components to Boeing, said the constellation of contractors that cluster now in proximity to the factory — the world he worked in — needed Boeing to survive. Even if it means moving production-line jobs to other states. And if the 777X plant is somewhere else, it just means suppliers will “ship somewhere else,” he said. Simple as that. As long as suppliers have Boeing as a customer, he said, “I don’t think it will affect them.”

Boeing
Seattle
Washington
Manufacturing
Everett Washington
Relocation
Labor Unions


For Widely Used Drug, Question of Usefulness Is Still Lingering

Abstract: When the Food and Drug Administration approved a new type of cholesterol -lowering medicine in 2002, it did so on the basis of a handful of clinical trials covering a total of 3,900 patients. None of the patients took the medicine for more than 12 weeks, and the trials offered no evidence that it had reduced heart attacks or cardiovascular disease, the goal of any cholesterol drug. The lack of evidence has not stopped doctors from heavily prescribing that drug, whether in a stand-alone form sold as Zetia or as a combination medicine called Vytorin. Aided by extensive consumer advertising, sales of the medicines reached $5.2 billion last year, making them among the best-selling drugs in the world. More than three million people worldwide take either drug every day. But there is still no proof that the drugs help patients live longer or avoid heart attacks. This year Vytorin has failed two clinical trials meant to show its benefits. Worse, scientists are debating whether there is a link between the drugs and cancer . Researchers reported last month that patients in three clinical trials had a 40 percent higher chance of dying from cancer if they took Vytorin instead of a sugar pill or another medicine, although the leader of that study says the finding might be due to chance. Now some prominent cardiologists say that the evidence has swung so decisively against the drugs that they should not be sold. “The only place people should be taking it is in a clinical trial,” Dr. Allen J. Taylor of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center said of Zetia. (Vytorin is a single pill that combines Zetia with a statin, an older form of cholesterol-lowering medicine whose effectiveness and safety are not in question.) On Tuesday, in a sign of the high level of interest among doctors that Vytorin and Zetia have generated, the New England Journal of Medicine will publish online two articles and an editorial about the trials that raised the potential cancer concerns. Merck and Schering-Plough , which jointly make Vytorin and Zetia, strongly defend their medicines. The companies say that ezetimibe, the generic name for Zetia, showed no cancer risk in animal trials and argue that the cancer finding is probably a result of chance. Some independent scientists agree with the companies, saying that they are dubious of a link to cancer and that ezetimibe is a valuable treatment no matter which brand it is sold under. About the only point on which both sides agree is that no one can judge ezetimibe’s safety and benefits for certain without more data, ideally from a clinical trial covering more than 10,000 patients and lasting several years, long enough to show that the drug actually helps patients live longer or avoid heart attacks. But patients and doctors will have to wait years more for those results. Merck and Schering did not begin such a trial until October 2005, three years after ezetimibe was approved. And the completion date for the trial has been repeatedly postponed. Now the companies estimate that it will not be finished until at least 2012. By then tens of millions of people will have taken ezetimibe. “I don’t think the answer on Zetia is in,” said Dr. Robert J. Temple, director for the office of medical policy at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which is part of the F.D.A. The lack of data about ezetimibe highlights an aspect of the drug approval system that even sophisticated patients may not understand. Many medicines are approved on the basis of what scientists call surrogate endpoints, like proof that they lower cholesterol, rather than because they have been shown to reduce the risk of death or disease. For example, a cancer drug might be approved because it causes tumors to shrink, not because its manufacturer can prove that patients live longer after taking it. Using these measures makes sense in certain circumstances, researchers say. If no treatments exist for a disease, the F.D.A. may approve a drug based on its promise in short-term trials and hope that the medicine succeeds later in larger trials where its potential to reduce death and disease will be examined directly. But several drugs approved this way have recently proved ineffective or even dangerous. In 1999, for example, the F.D.A. approved the diabetes drug Avandia on the basis that it reduced blood sugar. Sales of Avandia and two related medicines reached $3 billion in 2006. But in 2007, an analysis of 44 clinical trials of Avandia showed that it could increase heart attacks. Since then, prescriptions for Avandia have plunged, although the drug remains on the market. Ezetimibe is in a similar situation. The medicine has been proved to lower patients’ LDL, or bad, cholesterol by 15 to 20 percent. Decades of research links lower cholesterol to a reduced risk of heart attacks. And cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, including Lipitor and Crestor , have been proved to reduce heart attacks. But statins work very differently than ezetimibe, and no one has proved that ezetimibe offers the same benefits as statins. “The F.D.A. set the bar too low on the initial approval,” said Dr. Steven Nissen, chairman of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic. “It would have been a lot better if the agency had said, ‘Show us that you do more than lower LDL a little bit, show us evidence of effectiveness.’ ” Further, when the F.D.A. approved Zetia, several statins were already on the market, giving patients other options to lower their cholesterol. So the agency’s decision to approve Zetia without requiring larger trials is especially puzzling, Dr. Nissen said. Dr. Temple said the link between LDL cholesterol and heart disease was so strong that the agency was comfortable approving drugs on the basis that they lowered cholesterol alone. “We accept LDL cholesterol as a valid surrogate,” he said. But the failure nearly two years ago of torcetrapib, an experimental drug from Pfizer , spotlighted the risks of using drugs without long-term data. Torcetrapib raised HDL cholesterol — the so-called “good” cholesterol, which is known to reduce the risk of heart problems. But the F.D.A. chose not to approve torcetrapib on the basis of its effects on HDL. Instead, the agency required that Pfizer first conduct a large trial. In December 2006, the trial revealed that torcetrapib raised patients’ risk of death by 60 percent, forcing Pfizer to discontinue development of the drug. Dr. Curt D. Furberg, an epidemiologist and drug safety expert at Wake Forest University , said that before approving drugs the F.D.A. should require that drug companies conduct large trials on whether they reduce death and disease, except in rare cases where no alternatives exist. If the agency approves drugs without such data, that fact should be noted prominently on a drug’s label, Dr. Furberg said. Pharmaceutical companies argue against changing the current approval system. Determining whether a drug reduces death or disease can require a trial that enrolls 10,000 or more patients and lasts four years or more. Requiring longer and costlier trials might discourage the development of new medicines, said Ken Johnson , senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. He said the current system enabled patients “to access life-saving and life-enhancing remedies more quickly.” The F.D.A. does seem to be taking a harder line on new diabetes and heart medicines. In April, the agency turned down an HDL-cholesterol-raising drug from Merck that did not have long-term trial data. And in July, an F.D.A. advisory panel recommended 14-2 that companies conduct long-term trials on new diabetes medicines. But for drugs already on the market, no such requirement exists. So ezetimibe remains heavily prescribed despite questions about both its effectiveness and whether it is linked to cancer. In January, Merck and Schering announced that Vytorin — the combination of ezetimibe and a generic statin called simvastatin — had failed a clinical trial meant to show that it could slow the growth of arterial plaque that could cause heart attacks. Then, in July, Norwegian researchers reported that another trial showed that patients taking Vytorin died from cancer more often than those taking a placebo, or sugar pill. In two other clinical trials still going on, patients taking Vytorin have also been more likely to die from cancer than those not taking it. In all, 136 of about 11,000 people taking Vytorin in the three trials have died of various kinds of cancer, compared with 95 out of 11,000 who took placebo or simvastatin alone. With little long-term data about ezetimibe’s risks, scientists are scrambling to find an explanation for the seeming cancer link. Some oncologists agree with Merck and Schering that the cancer findings are probably due to chance. But other scientists say they have a plausible explanation for why ezetimibe may cause cancer. Ezetimibe works by blocking the intestine from absorbing cholesterol. But it also blocks the absorption of closely related compounds called plant sterols, which are found in nuts and vegetables. Some studies have shown that people who eat large amounts of plant sterols have lower cancer rates than those who do not. Dr. Peter G. Bradford , a pharmacologist at the University of Buffalo who has extensively studied plant sterols, said that in laboratory tests, sterols promote cell death in a way that could make them valuable anti-cancer agents as weapons against tumors. By blocking sterol absorption, ezetimibe could be promoting cancer , he said. “One might envision that link,” he said. “This is a very large question.” Merck and Schering noted that the drug showed no carcinogenic effects in mice. In addition, the link between sterols and cancer remains hypothetical and has never been proved in a clinical trial. Further, cancer typically takes many years to develop in humans, so the theory that ezetimibe could cause cancer in a year or two is not plausible, they say. Some leading cancer researchers agree. Dr. Tyler Jacks, director of the Koch Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , said Merck had asked him to examine the results of the Norwegian trial and he concluded it was probably a false signal. If ezetimibe causes cancer, its effects should have become more pronounced as the trial went on, Dr. Jacks said. Instead, the gap between patients who took Vytorin and those who took a placebo did not widen over the length of the trial, he said. Dr. Terje Pedersen, the Norwegian cardiologist who conducted the trial, said he also doubted that Vytorin caused the excess of cancers seen in the study. Even very dangerous carcinogens — like cigarettes and radiation — typically require several years, even decades, to cause cancer. Given that fact, ezetimibe would have to be extraordinarily and implausibly carcinogenic to have noticeable effects in a three-year trial, he said. “The duration of the trial is not long enough to believe that the treatment would cause cancer,” Dr. Pedersen said. Still, the concerns about ezetimibe’s potential risks and lack of effectiveness have discouraged some patients from using the medicine. In the United States , prescriptions for Vytorin and Zetia have fallen 40 percent this year. Dr. Jacks said Merck and Schering could not easily resolve the questions about ezetimibe’s potential risks. “The answer is to get more data,” he said.

Cholesterol
Heart
Zetia
Vytorin
Cancer
Statins
Pharmaceuticals
Medicine and Health
FDA


Company Is Scolded for Mistakes at Fukushima

Abstract: TOKYO — In an unusually public scolding, Japan’s nuclear watchdog agency criticized the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant on Friday for making mistakes that allowed radioactive water to leak into the Pacific Ocean, and ordered it to fix the problems quickly. The agency, the Nuclear Regulation Authority, summoned the president of the operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, to explain the accidents and spills that have plagued the cleanup of the Fukushima Daiichi plant since it suffered a triple meltdown two years ago. In the most recent mishap, workers spilled 114 gallons of contaminated water this week while trying to fill an already overflowing tank, said the company, known as Tepco. It said some of the water might have run into the ocean. In a public hearing, an official at the regulatory agency, Katsuhiko Ikeda, dressed down Tepco’s president, saying the problems raised serious questions about the company’s ability to operate its other nuclear plants, like the huge Kashiwazaki-Kariwa facility, which Tepco wants to restart. “That these leaks occurred due to human error is very regrettable,” Mr. Ikeda told the president, Naomi Hirose. “The failure to make rudimentary checks reflects a clear deterioration in the ability to manage the site.” Mr. Ikeda said Tepco should consider emergency measures like bringing in workers from its other nuclear plants to help improve the cleanup. Such blunt and direct criticism is rare in confrontation-averse Japan. Bowing toward his antagonist, Mr. Hirose apologized, saying his company would try to end the problems by “deploying people, materials, money, everything we can to respond.” Tepco has struggled to handle the technically complex task of stabilizing the stricken plant, and beginning the process of cleaning up the melted nuclear fuel. In particular, it has scrambled to build enough tanks to hold millions of gallons of radioactive water produced by groundwater that has flowed into the cracked reactor buildings, and must be removed before it overwhelms makeshift systems for cooling the damaged reactor cores. One of the biggest recent spills came in August, when Tepco discovered that 80,000 gallons of water laced with radioactive strontium and cesium had leaked out of one of the huge tanks, with some reaching the Pacific. The repeated problems at the plant, which have also included blackouts and failed efforts to stop the flow of contaminated groundwater into the sea, prompted Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to order the national government to take a more direct role in running the cleanup. Critics have faulted the government for leaving the plant in the hands of the same operator that many blame for failing to sufficiently fortify it before the earthquake and tsunami that struck in March 2011, knocking out vital reactor cooling systems.

Japan
Tokyo Electric Power
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster
Nuclear energy


A Bidder Sheds Light on Mets’ Process

Abstract: On Friday, May 20, just six days before the Mets disclosed they had come to an agreement with David Einhorn to buy part of the team, Ray Bartoszek’s accountant received a call from Terry Morris at Allen & Company, the firm retained by the Mets to facilitate the sale. Bartoszek, a wealthy oil trader and passionate Mets fan from Pelham, N.Y., had already made a bid that clearly grabbed the Mets’ attention, and they were coming back with a counteroffer. It was not readily acceptable, but it contained elements that made it worth considering. Bartoszek would think it over with his people and get back to the Mets. The next time Bartoszek heard from anyone in the process was the following Wednesday, when Morris and Steve Greenberg, the point man in the sale, told him they had come to an agreement with someone else. “They said I came in second place,” Bartoszek recalled. “I guess I was the bridesmaid, for whatever good that does. “ Three weeks have passed since the Mets chose Einhorn in a process that was veiled in secrecy from the January day the Mets announced they had to sell part of the team to address financial pressures. Bartoszek’s experience, which he described as positive throughout, provides insight into what occurred. The 46-year-old Bartoszek, who made his fortune trading oil for Glencore International, remembered staying up late in 1979 to watch the Mets’ only All-Star, Lee Mazzilli, hit a home run in his one at-bat in the game. A few years later, he became the starting second baseman for the United States Merchant Marine Academy’s varsity baseball team. Now retired and serving as a consultant for Glencore as well as a shortstop for his Greenwich, Conn., softball team, Bartoszek heard about the Mets’ interest in finding a minority partner during a vacation overseas. When he returned, he called Allen & Company and told the firm he was a worthy candidate. After some quick research into his background, Bartoszek was moved to the next step: he was vetted and cleared by Major League Baseball. During this stage, Allen & Company was dividing the proposed bidders into three categories. The lowest ranking included people who seemed more interested in publicity than in owning a share of the Mets. The second group included wealthy Mets fans who might be willing to invest $5 million to $10 million and who could conceivably be grouped into a conglomerate. The primary group included men like Bartoszek, Einhorn and Steve Cohen, all from the financial world and all able to do the deal by themselves, or by leading small groups. The Mets insisted the bids be for at least $200 million for a minority share. Bartoszek would not divulge the details of his bid, which was formally submitted in writing April 1, but confirmed it sought a 10 percent share of SNY, the Mets’ profitable television network. Like Einhorn’s bid, it contained a path to majority ownership, which he felt was a distinct possibility. “You never know,” he said. “I really got along well with the Wilpons and felt we could be great partners. But things change in life. Sure, it was a possibility.” After the Mets reviewed his bid, Bartoszek, who had taken on the investor Anthony Lanza as a partner, was invited to meet with Fred Wilpon , the Mets’ principal owner. The meeting went well, and in the first week of May Bartoszek was invited back to Citi Field, this time for a full-day session with the Mets’ top officials. He met with Wilpon; Sandy Alderson, the general manager; Dave Howard, the vice president of business affairs; and Jeff Wilpon, Fred Wilpon’s son and the chief operating officer of the team. For weeks after the meeting, Bartoszek did not hear a word, until May 20, when his accountant relayed the Mets’ counterproposal. It included the share of SNY that Bartoszek sought, but other issues remained. “We were still pretty far off,” Bartoszek said. “But we thought the fact that SNY got to the table was a really good sign.” On the following Monday, Bartoszek was named in a story in The New York Post saying the Mets had chosen him as their new partner. Bartoszek became excited, only to find out two days later that the chosen one was Einhorn. Bartoszek said that, over all, he was satisfied with the process. He also praised Einhorn, saying he was beaten out in a fair competition. Naturally, he thinks his offer was strong and fair, and says the only information he has about the Einhorn agreement is what he has read in published reports — that Einhorn is giving the Mets $200 million for a minority share below 35 percent, which would increase to 60 percent if the Wilpons continue to suffer financially and cannot pay back the $200 million back within several years. “Einhorn is a very successful guy and it seems to me that he must be smarter than all the rest of us because he figured out how to basically short this team as he’s shorted a lot of stocks in the past,” Bartoszek said. “I wouldn’t bet against him,” he added. “It’s just that I feel like it’s awkward, a trader taking on a position where he is rooting for the team to fail? I don’t like that. I would not do that deal because I would not feel right about having that attitude every day I went to work.” Despite the disappointment, Bartoszek is rooting hard for the Mets. He loves how they are playing now, clawing back to .500 on Wednesday at Atlanta despite numerous injuries. And he is enamored with the play of Jose Reyes. So much so that, if his bid had won, Bartoszek said, he would have worked hard to make Reyes the Mets’ shortstop forever. “I’ve got to say yes to that,” he said, laughing. “The guy is amazing, isn’t he?” Almost wistfully, he said he wished he could have been part of Mets ownership a year ago. “It’s Monday morning quarterback, but I would like to say I would have done whatever it would have taken last year to pay Reyes,” he said. “But I can’t say I’m that smart.”

Baseball
New York Mets
Bartoszek Ray
Wilpon Fred
Einhorn David
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures


Hollywood Producer Set to Make Shows for Xbox

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — Microsoft , seeking to expand offerings on its Xbox 360 console, has reached an agreement with a company headed by Peter Safran, the veteran Hollywood producer and talent manager, to produce original shows for distribution on the system. Through his Safran Company, Mr. Safran represents clients like the actor and producer Sean Combs (“Monster’s Ball”), the actor and writer Nia Vardalos (“My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) and the filmmakers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (“Epic Movie”). Mr. Safran founded the company in 2006 after leaving Brillstein-Grey Management. Speaking by telephone last week, Scott Nocas, global marketing manager for programming of the Xbox Live entertainment service, said he expected similar deals to follow. “We definitely look at this as the first of many,” said Mr. Nocas. In an interview at his office in Los Angeles last week, Mr. Safran said his first round of programs would all be scripted, as opposed to reality shows, and would probably run under 10 minutes. He said he planned initially to focus on genres, like comedy and horror, that appeal to the Xbox 360 audience, which is heavily concentrated from the ages of 14 to 34, and tends to be more male than female. The first shows are expected to be available to viewers by the fall. Microsoft’s previous forays in digital entertainment include a two-year-old initiative, MSN Originals, to provide original shows for the Web, and an ill-fated foray more than 10 years ago in which it poured about $100 million into Internet shows like the comedy “475 Madison,” about an advertising agency, then quickly canceled most of them. “The Xbox is unique. It operates at a level outside of what we generally consider Web entertainment,” Mr. Safran said, referring to the system’s tight demographic base, which is defined by the appeal of signature games like the Halo series. The new shows will be available exclusively via the Xbox 360 for a time, then may appear elsewhere, Mr. Safran said. Mr. Nocas said at least some of the shows would be supported by advertising. Current programming on the Xbox 360 includes movies and selections from cable networks like the Sundance Channel and Spike TV. Viewers pay for access to films with points that can be purchased for cash or accumulated through activities on the system. Mr. Nocas said that about 10 million people had signed up for the Xbox Live service. Roughly 18 million of the game systems have been sold worldwide, he said. The Xbox 360 is up against PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Wii from Nintendo in a hotly competitive gaming marketplace. Mr. Safran is the latest in a growing line of Hollywood players who are seeking to tap into the digital entertainment market, where revenue still falls far short of that from traditional movie and television distribution outlets. Filmmakers like Joel and Ethan Coen and stars like Will Ferrell have recently become involved with Web-based companies like FunnyOrDie.com or 60Frames Entertainment. Mr. Safran and Jake Zim, chief operating officer of the Safran Company’s Safran Digital Group, said they expected to recruit established filmmakers for their new productions, but did not plan to seek involvement by major movie stars.

Television
Microsoft Corp
Safran Peter
Computer and Video Games


‘Completely Different’ Giants Eager for Rematch With Cowboys

Abstract: EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — The Giants enter their rematch against Dallas at MetLife Stadium believing that their season-opening 36-31 loss to the Cowboys proved nothing about the superiority of either team. “As long as we go out there and put our best foot forward, I’m quite sure we’re going to come out on top,” said running back Andre Brown, who was on injured reserve for the opener. The Giants outgained Dallas, 478-331, only to self-destruct with six turnovers: three interceptions of Eli Manning and three fumbles. Manning’s first pass was picked off by defensive end DeMarcus Ware; the Giants committed turnovers on their first three possessions. When Brandon Carr’s 49-yard interception return for a score with less than two minutes left sealed the fate of his bumbling team, Coach Tom Coughlin treated the outcome as one of the most exasperating defeats of his 10-year tenure. “We had, quite frankly, just kind of wrapped it up and handed it to them, and that was the devastation of it for me,” he said of the Sept. 8 opener. The team watched film from that ignominious beginning throughout the week as Coughlin, who always makes ball security a top priority, hammered the point home. The sloppy opener snowballed into a mistake-filled 0-6 start. The Giants followed that with a four-game winning streak. Manning and his supporting cast are playing more crisply; the defense is suddenly creating crucial turnovers while limiting opponents to two touchdowns in the last 18 quarters, albeit against mediocre quarterbacks. “I think we’re a completely different team from that first game,” said Victor Cruz, one of the few Giants who have played consistently well throughout the wildly uneven season. “I think we understand how to take care of the ball. I think we understand how to maintain our focus offensively and defensively and maintain ourselves and be able to focus in on our game plan and do what we have to do to win.” Manning equaled last season’s total when he was intercepted 15 times during the first six games. He has been picked off only twice since. Poor communication with receivers who cut one way while he threw another played a major role in the offense’s woes. “We’re constantly working at that because we can’t have a mistake,” Coughlin said. “We had a couple of mistakes last weekend.” One of them, when the reserve Louis Murphy Jr. broke in a direction Manning was not anticipating, resulted in a pickoff. But the Giants produced three interceptions of their own against Scott Tolzien, who was making his first N.F.L. start in place of the injured Aaron Rodgers. The Giants’ N.F.C. East hopes were revived when defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul snagged a pass that had barely left Tolzien’s hand and returned it 24 yards to clinch a 27-13 victory at home last Sunday. The Giants expect such ball awareness from Dallas, who come off a bye at 5-5. The Cowboys are tied for fourth in the league with 22 takeaways: 12 interceptions, 10 fumble recoveries. The Cowboys are tied for second with a plus-11 in turnover differential; the Giants are tied for 29th at minus-11. “We’ve made a positive impact on games on defense, with the takeaways in particular,” Cowboys Coach Jason Garrett said. “That, obviously, gives your offense more opportunities and, really, some better opportunities with field position.” Weather conditions are likely to pose as much of a challenge to ball carriers as the prying hands of defenders are. The forecast calls for freezing weather, with winds whipping at 24 miles per hour. Kevin Gilbride, the Giants’ offensive coordinator, conceded that that might rein in his aggressiveness. “You are probably going to be judicious in the amount of deep balls you are going to throw,” he said. EXTRA POINTS The Giants listed HAKEEM NICKS, who has an abdominal strain, and BRANDON JACOBS, who has knee and hamstring problems, as questionable. Nicks expects to play. Jacobs said of his status, “We’ll keep them guessing.” COREY WEBSTER, a cornerback who has groin and ankle injuries, is out. ... SEAN LEE, Dallas’s outstanding middle linebacker, is out with an injured left hamstring.

Giants
Eli Manning
Tom Coughlin
Victor Cruz
Football
Dallas Cowboys


Turkey Considering Patriot Missile Deployment Near Syria

Abstract: BEIRUT, Lebanon — Turkish officials said Wednesday that they were considering the deployment of Patriot missile batteries along the Turkey- Syria border, a move that could effectively provide protection for Syrian rebels by creating a no-fly zone over northern Syria. The development, coming only hours after President Obama had won re-election, raised speculation that the United States and its allies were working on a more robust plan to deal with the 20-month-old conflict in Syria during the second Obama administration term. Further reinforcing that speculation, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said he was prepared to open direct lines of communication with Syrian rebel commanders. Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, was quoted by Turkish news media as saying Turkey, as a NATO member, may seek Patriot missiles to install along its southern border with Syria, which could protect Syrian insurgent safe zones. But the missiles, which have a range of at least 40 miles, could also create the basis for a no-fly zone over parts of Syria, giving an important protection to the rebels who are fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad from power. Mr. Cameron of Britain, on a visit to Jordan, said his country, along with other allies opposed to Mr. Assad, should do more to help the opposition, including the establishment of direct contacts with rebel forces inside Syria. Mr. Cameron was quoted by news agencies as saying the allies should “help them achieve their goal, which is our goal of a Syria without Assad.” He spoke as Syrian insurgents escalated attacks on targets within earshot of PresidentAssad’s hilltop Damascus palace, blowing up a judge in his car and lobbing mortar shells at a neighborhood that houses central government offices and a military airfield. The assassination of the judge, reported by the official news agency, SANA, was the second high-profile killing of a top Assad loyalist in the Syrian capital in two days and added to the impression that the Syrian insurgency had intensified in the face of sputtering international diplomacy aimed at resolving the conflict. SANA said the judge, Abad Nadhwah, died instantly when a remotely detonated bomb exploded under his car. On Tuesday, SANA said gunmen assassinated Mohammad Osama al-Laham, a prominent agricultural expert and brother of the Syrian Parliament speaker, in a central Damascus neighborhood while he was driving to work. The news agency attributed both assassinations to terrorists, the government’s catchall term for Mr. Assad’s opponents. Activist groups said the judge’s assassination was part of a particularly violent day in the capital, during which at least four mortar attacks shook the Mezze 86 neighborhood, a hilltop enclave populated by Mr. Assad’s minority Alawite sect near the presidential palace. Activists said the attackers had been aiming for the palace but the mortar shells hit the administrative offices of the prime minister and a military airfield. It was unclear whether there were casualties. Still, the ability of rebels to strike so close to Mr. Assad’s center of power, despite his repeated efforts to rout them, appeared to reflect the tenacity of the insurgency, which began in March 2011 as a peaceful pro-democracy uprising. The Houran Freemen Brigade, a unit of the Free Syrian Army, the main armed insurgent group in Syria, took responsibility for the mortar attacks on Mezze 86. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain with contacts inside Syria, reported on Wednesday that three civilians had been killed and more than two dozen wounded by shelling in the Hajar al-Aswad district in the Damascus suburbs, where clashes have been raging between rebel fighters and government forces helped by fighters from pro-government Palestinian groups. Two rebel fighters were also killed, the observatory said. The latest fighting to convulse Damascus came a day after a top United Nations official, Jeffrey D. Feltman, warned the Security Council in a briefing that the situation inside Syria was “turning grimmer every day, and the risk is growing that this crisis could explode outward into an already volatile region.” Underscoring that threat, over the weekend, Israel accused Syria of moving tanks into a demilitarized zone of the disputed Golan Heights region captured by the Israelis in the 1967 war, an area that had remained relatively quiet since the Syrian uprising began. On Monday, Israel asked Security Council members to address what it called “this alarming development.” Mr. Feltman, the under secretary general for political affairs, told reporters at the United Nations that he was concerned about the new Golan tension and called it “another example of spillover from areas that had been previously immune from fighting.” Mr. Feltman also expressed hope that “the Security Council can come together and act in a unified fashion on Syria, as this would be critical to any peace effort.” There was no sign of that. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, held talks on Tuesday in Jordan with the highest-ranking defector from the Syrian government, former Prime Minister Riyad Farid Hijab, who attacked Moscow’s enduring support for Mr. Assad as unworkable for a political transition. Remarks on Tuesday by Mr. Cameron, the British prime minister, that Mr. Assad might be granted safe passage out of his country as a means to end the fighting also caused a stir, with his office quickly stressing that he did not mean that Mr. Assad should not be prosecuted. Mr. Assad, whose family has dominated Syrian politics for four decades, has shown no intention of resigning or seeking to leave Syria. Lakhdar Brahimi , the international envoy to the conflict representing both the United Nations and the Arab League, warned that unless there was a greater international effort, Syria risked becoming another Somalia — which, as a failed state, became a font of international piracy and other terrorist problems for 20 years. In an interview with the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat, Mr. Brahimi said the main effort should be a binding Security Council resolution on a political transition. The lack of a cohesive Syrian opposition has been partly blamed for preventing a more robust international effort on Syria. Efforts to create a more unified coalition of anti-Assad groups sputtered along this week in Doha, Qatar, where a meeting was scheduled for Thursday to try to implement an American-backed plan to broaden the opposition to include more factions, including more representatives of the military units doing the fighting.

Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )


Connected N.Y.C. Lawyers Reap Foreclosure Benefits

Abstract: In 2009, a judge in Manhattan had a lucrative appointment to hand out: oversight of a diamond district building that was drifting into foreclosure. Nearly 600 people in Manhattan had been approved for such work. But the job went to a lawyer named Mark D. Lebow , who is the husband of Patricia E. Harris , Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ’s most trusted aide. Since then, Mr. Lebow has earned $352,000 in fees, more than $5,000 a week, according to court records. The foreclosure crisis has caused a surge in the number of court-appointed receivers for distressed properties in New York, and politically connected lawyers are benefiting. Yet even as the fees mount, totaling millions of dollars, it remains unclear why judges are selecting some of these lawyers, and whether the fees are being well spent. The court system in New York State has long been criticized for fostering a system of patronage appointments that enriches lawyers and others with ties to influential politicians. Court officials defend the process of selecting receivers for distressed properties, saying judges are looking for people who they know have done good work. Over all, the number of receivers appointed by judges to oversee distressed properties in the city jumped to 284 last year from 47 in 2007, records show. Paul Vallone, a scion of one of Queens ’s most powerful political families, earned nearly $17,000 for one assignment. Howard R. Vargas, a former commissioner of the Taxi and Limousine Commission , was awarded $28,000 for three cases. Marc Landis, a Democratic district leader and member of the transition team of the new state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman , was compensated $22,000 for supervising three buildings. And those were for assignments that were given out earlier in the foreclosure crisis and that have already yielded fees. The newest appointments, with the billing to come, are filled with even more lawyers with ties to the powerful. Dominick Calderoni, a law partner of State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein, a Bronx Democrat, was handed six receiverships. William C. Thompson Sr., the father of William C. Thompson Jr. , the former city comptroller and mayoral candidate, got six. Gregory C. Soumas, a member of the city’s Board of Elections, received two, though he said one property went into bankruptcy, ending his involvement. When a building goes into foreclosure, a judge appoints a lawyer as a receiver who acts a property’s temporary landlord during the process. Receivers are entitled to fees that typically amount to 5 percent of a property’s revenues. Judges can award less than 5 percent, but usually do not. The court-appointed lawyers in turn usually hire property managers and other lawyers to assist in overseeing the properties. The receivers do not pay out of their own pockets for the costs of the property managers and other lawyers. That money comes from the properties’ revenues. “This is why mortgagees hate foreclosures,” said Harold Shultz, a senior fellow at the Citizens Housing and Planning Council , a nonprofit research group. “During this process all these people are sucking money out of the building.” With complaints about the quality of receivers growing, city officials said they were considering state legislation to require people seeking to become receivers to be vetted by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Receivers are now vetted only by the courts. Not all receiverships come with high fees, or go to lawyers with ties to politicians. Some lawyers are handed cash-poor and dilapidated buildings, and are hamstrung by a lack of resources. Some appointments can be low paying and time consuming. Other lawyers, though, have won plum appointments. The receivership obtained by Mr. Lebow, the husband of Ms. Harris, the first deputy mayor, was one of the highest-paying in the city recently. In court papers, the judge did not explain why she gave Mr. Lebow the work. There are now 605 people eligible to be receivers in Manhattan, according to court records. Mr. Lebow is a partner in his own law firm, Lebow & Sokolow, and has served on the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority since 2002. Mr. Bloomberg recommended him for the authority position. Mr. Lebow did not respond to six telephone and e-mail messages left over a month seeking comment on the receiver appointment. Stu Loeser, a mayoral spokesman, would not comment. The judge in the case, Marylin G. Diamond of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, has recently retired, and did not respond to requests for comment. State Supreme Court judges, who appoint most receivers in these cases, are elected. Justice Diamond appointed Mr. Lebow as receiver for the 11-story building in the diamond district, at 576 Fifth Avenue and West 47th Street, in 2009. Mr. Lebow noted in court papers that his experience included work as a receiver, broker and member of the Real Estate Board of New York . Mr. Lebow is not overseeing the building himself. A management company and another lawyer were hired to handle the building’s day-to-day affairs. Yet Mr. Lebow estimated in court papers that he devoted about 30 percent of his time to the building. His compensation, he wrote, roughly equaled his regular billing rate of $650 an hour. One full-time building employee said he had never seen Mr. Lebow there. Still, tenants in the building, which houses diamond wholesalers and jewelry booths, said conditions had improved since Mr. Lebow hired a new property manager. The bathrooms and lobby are cleaner, one tenant said, though another said appeals to fix a leak had been ignored. Court officials noted that the state adopted reforms in 2002 intended to reduce patronage. Some court employees and political leaders are barred from appointments, and people cannot receive new appointments if they earned more than $75,000 from appointments the previous year. Asked about the appointment of politically connected lawyers, Ann T. Pfau, the state’s chief administrative judge, said: “To some degree, it’s human nature. When you have a property that’s vulnerable, you want to appoint somebody that you have faith in, or someone maybe you were familiar with.” Mr. Vallone, whose father was speaker of the City Council and whose brother serves on the Council, said that he had been appointed as a receiver just four times in two decades, and that the receivership that paid him $16,600 lasted from 2008 to 2010. “It looks like a lot,” Mr. Vallone said, “but if you spread it out over three years, it’s not.” Mr. Landis, the Democratic district leader, said that as a receiver he fought to force lenders to pay for repairs. “The compensation was a fraction of the effort involved,” he said. Mr. Soumas and Mr. Thompson said their appointments would pay little. Mr. Thompson said he became a receiver as a public service. “To make sure people don’t lose their houses,” he said. Perhaps the most profitable recent receivership went in 2009 to a retired judge, Seymour Boyers, 84. He was paid $760,000, or roughly $7,800 a week, to oversee the case of the sprawling Riverton apartments in Harlem . Mr. Boyers has specialized in medical malpractice and product liability while in private practice. Members of his law firm donated $1,000 to the campaign of the judge, Richard F. Braun , who appointed him as a receiver. A court spokesman, David Bookstaver, said Justice Braun was not aware of the campaign contributions. Mr. Boyers “is a highly respected former jurist with outstanding credentials," Mr. Bookstaver said. At Riverton, the state’s housing division ordered rent reductions during Mr. Boyers’s tenure because repairs were not completed. Mr. Boyers said he was not aware of the request for repairs, which he said were sent to the property manager, until months after they were issued. “Any call I received, I always acted on, and I never heard any criticism,” he said. “I worked many, many hundreds of hours, that’s for sure.”


The Drake Relays: a Big-Time Meet in a Small-Town Atmosphere

Abstract: Compared with Philadelphia’s Franklin Field, the double-decked home of the Penn Relays, Drake Stadium in Des Moines is as cozy as a fuzzy slipper. The single-level stadium — the site of this week’s 100th edition of the Drake Relays — seats approximately 14,500, about 3,500 fewer than it did before a $15 million renovation in 2006. And that is the key to the meet’s charm. Drake University , with an undergraduate enrollment of about 3,200, and Des Moines, a city of 200,000, support track and field the way only a handful of places in the United States do. Saturday’s final session of the Drake Relays is a sellout, for the 44th consecutive year. Despite taking place the same weekend as the Penn Relays, it has consistently drawn track and field’s biggest names, from Jesse Owens to Wilma Rudolph to Carl Lewis to Michael Johnson. But it is also a weeklong celebration that once included a bellhop relay between hotels and still features a bulldog fashion show. The knowledgeable fans and intimate setting have proved an irresistible combination for world-class athletes, who mingle with the high school and college competitors making up most of the meet’s entries. Forty-three Olympians are expected to compete this weekend, including the former 400-meter gold medalist Jeremy Wariner , the reigning women’s discus gold medalist champion, Stephanie Brown Trafton, and the American mile record-holder, Alan Webb. “I talk to elite athletes all the time, and the one thing they’re shocked by is, how does Des Moines, Iowa, host one of the best meets in track and field?” said Lolo Jones, the 2008 Olympic hurdler who grew up in Des Moines. “They just don’t get the concept.” Jones, the outstanding performer at the Drake Relays last year, is back this week to try for her fifth consecutive title in the 100-meter hurdles. “It’s one of the very few track meets in the U.S. where elite athletes can experience the atmosphere we have when we go to Europe,” Jones said in a telephone interview. Often, Jones said, American athletes compete in mostly empty stadiums. Not so at Drake, where the track is so close to the stands that fans can offer high-fives to runners in the outside lane. Because of that intimacy, Jones said she felt more nervous running at Drake than she did in the Olympic Stadium in Beijing. She said fans know the athletes’ histories and root for their favorites. “Jeremy Wariner has no affiliation with Iowa at all, but he’s a household name here,” Jones said. “It’s so great.” The athletes reciprocate the affection. Thursday night, the Relays honored 20 Athletes of the Century, among them Owens, Johnson, Lewis and Jones. Fifteen of the 17 living honorees attended, with the middle-distance champion Mike Boit flying in from Kenya. So it’s no wonder that Drake and Des Moines figure strongly in the USA Track and Field chief executive Doug Logan’s vision for reviving the sport’s national visibility. He hopes to establish six to eight track and field sites across the country where elite and developing athletes will be based and will compete as teams in dual meets against other sites. He likens it to the World Team Tennis concept. Des Moines and Chicago, he said, could be possible locations in the Midwest. He said others include the Eugene-Portland area in Oregon; Los Angeles; New York; and Fayetteville, Ark. “Not only do we have a great facility and a fast track,” Logan said of Des Moines and Drake, “but we have a great forum to attract track fans from the high school, college and elite levels.” The Drake Relays grew from modest beginnings in 1910. The Drake Relays historian Paul Morrison, the university’s former athletic business manager, will attend his 71st Relays this year. In the years after World War II, Morrison said the university invited high school bands to fill out the crowd. “Every year,” he said, “we started doing a little bit better.” Reid Allen, a former Relays official, recalled a grade-school shuttle relay — Allen was an alternate for Greenwood Elementary in 1951 — and he said the Des Moines public schools let students out early to watch the Friday races. Spirited race calls by Jim Duncan, the Relays’ public-address announcer from 1951 until his death in 1989, also contributed to the meet’s popularity. Over the years, the Relays evolved into a weeklong celebration, beginning with a parade on Sunday. Gone is the bellhop relay among downtown hotels, with a suitcase substituting for a baton, but there still is the annual Beautiful Bulldog contest, in which owners dress up their dogs, and themselves, for walks down a runway. (Drake’s athletic teams are known as the Bulldogs.) This year’s field of 50, drawn from eight states, filled up the first week of February, according to Dolph Pulliam, a former Drake basketball star and the contest’s master of ceremonies. A waiting list drew a record 50 more. “We’ve created ourselves a bulldog monster out there,” Pulliam said, “which is a nice problem to have.”

Drake University
Track and Field
USA Track and Field
Jones Lolo
Lewis Carl
Wariner Jeremy
Logan Doug
Duncan Jim


D.A.’s Office Denies It Pushed Plea Deal in Abuse Case

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia district attorney’s office on Tuesday challenged a claim by lawyers for a convicted Roman Catholic monsignor that prosecutors had persuaded another priest, now defrocked, to falsely admit to sexually abusing a 10-year-old boy in order to obtain the conviction. Lawyers for Msgr. William J. Lynn, a former senior official in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia who was convicted in June of child endangerment, filed a motion Monday in Pennsylvania Superior Court claiming that Edward V. Avery, the former priest, had not in fact abused the boy but had been pressured by prosecutors into signing a plea deal saying he had done so, in return for a lighter prison sentence than he might otherwise have received. Monsignor Lynn was found guilty of endangering children by failing to stop abuse by priests under his supervision. He is the most senior official of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States to be convicted of charges relating to sexual abuse of children by priests. The conviction was for lax oversight of Mr. Avery, who spent six months in a church psychiatric center in 1993 after an abuse episode. Doctors said he should be kept away from children. But Monsignor Lynn sent him to live in a rectory and did not warn parish officials. Mr. Avery’s alleged abuse of the boy was central to the conviction of Monsignor Lynn, whose lawyers are asking the court to reconsider its previous denial of bail. The lawyers said in the motion that they received evidence in late August that Mr. Avery denied assaulting the boy, or even knowing him, and that he had passed a polygraph exam testing whether he was lying about the abuse. In their motion, they said that prosecutors had refused to accept Mr. Avery’s offer to plead guilty to assaulting another boy and that they would only accept a plea that included admission of a conspiracy with Monsignor Lynn. “It doesn’t do the commonwealth any good to get Edward Avery to plead on something other than conspiracy with Lynn,” Thomas Bergstrom, a lawyer for Monsignor Lynn, said in an interview. But Hugh Burns, chief of the appeals unit in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, said Mr. Avery had freely pleaded guilty to abusing the boy, as shown by his own testimony during his sentencing. Mr. Burns also rejected the defense claim that prosecutors had “compelling reasons” to doubt the plea’s veracity. “That’s just false,” Mr. Burns wrote in an e-mail. “Avery swore under oath that he was guilty, and as far as the record shows, he decided to plead because he knew what the evidence would show and how the jury would react to it.” Monsignor Lynn is serving three to six years in a Pennsylvania prison. Results of the polygraph test, according to the motion, were provided to the district attorney’s office by Mr. Avery’s lawyer, John P. Donohue. But the filing said prosecutors failed to share that information with Monsignor Lynn’s defense. “This newly discovered information leads to the disconcerting conclusion that the commonwealth was driven by a zealous and single-minded desire to try Appellant and obtain a conviction despite information that put into question the justice of pursuing that outcome,” the document said. Mr. Bergstrom said the allegations are based solely on a conversation he had with Mr. Donohue in late August; that he had not seen the results of the polygraph test, and could not provide any documentation to verify the claims. Mr. Donohue declined to comment because a judge imposed a ban on lawyers talking to journalists ahead of the trial of Charles Engelhardt, another priest, at which Mr. Avery is expected to testify. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia is still conducting an internal investigation into abuse allegations against 11 of 26 priests placed on administrative leave after a scathing 2011 grand jury report charging it had spent years covering up reports of abuse. On Tuesday, lawyers for nine people who say they were abused by priests filed a total of eight civil suits against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, former cardinal, Justin Rigali, and Monsignor Lynn, according to Marci Hamilton, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs. The suits also name seven priests. They bring to 18 the total number of civil suits filed in Philadelphia by those who have accused clergy members of sexual abuse, Ms. Hamilton said.

Priests
Roman Catholic Church
Lynn William J
Avery Edward V
Philadelphia (Pa)
Child Abuse and Neglect
Sex Crimes


In Tehran, Thousands Rally to Back Government

Abstract: Tens of thousands of pro-government demonstrators took to the streets of Tehran on Wednesday shouting support for their leaders, three days after government security forces clashed with opposition members who staged one of their largest protests in months. The government had called on its supporters to stage the rally on Wednesday to protest what it said had been an “insult to religious sanctities” on Sunday. A witness said many demonstrators on Wednesday were taken to protest sites by dozens of buses and were given free chocolate milk, and The Associated Press said the government had given all civil servants the day off to attend the rallies. The chants of the crowds on Sunday and Wednesday spoke to the depth of the schism in Iranian society since the presidential election in June that the opposition claims the government stole from reformist candidates. On Sunday, protesters shouted, “Death to Khamenei,” referring to the country’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. On Wednesday, protesters countered with cries of “Death to Moussavi,” referring to Mir Hussein Moussavi, the man the opposition believes was the rightful winner of the election. Sunday’s protests seemed to deepen the country’s divisions, in part because police officers fired into crowds of protesters, shocking many Iranians by breaking a taboo against violence on Shiite Islam’s holiest day. On Wednesday, the vitriol continued, with protesters chanting, “No reconciliation, no surrender, we die for our leader,” and “Assassination, riots and attacks are plots by the United States,” according to the ISNA news agency. And a speaker at the demonstrations, Ayatollah Ahmad Alam Olhoda, the Friday Prayer leader of the city of Mashhad, called opposition leaders “Mohareb,” meaning enemies of God, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported. People convicted of being an enemy of God can be punished by death. But Ayatollah Alam Olhoda appeared to leave some room for reconciliation, urging opposition leaders to “ask for forgiveness.” ISNA ran a statement from Ayatollah Khamenei that seemed to suggest an acknowledgment that the government had lost some supporters during months of political upheaval, although he put a positive spin on it. “Realities in society show that despite the loss of support there is twice more fresh support,” he was quoted as saying. He also blamed “Zionist media” for Sunday’s protest. Also on Wednesday, the IRNA news agency reported that Mr. Moussavi and another opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, had “escaped” from Tehran to Mazandaran Province in northern Iran . But Mr. Karroubi’s son, Hussein Karroubi, denied the report in a telephone interview and said both his father and Mr. Moussavi were at their homes in Tehran. “None of them have plans to go anywhere,” he said, “and no one has come after them, either.” He confirmed reports that Mr. Moussavi’s nephew, Ali Moussavi, whom the opposition said was assassinated Sunday, was buried Wednesday morning at Tehran’s Behesht-eh Zahra cemetery. He said the funeral was held amid heavy security and in the presence of 40 family members, including the opposition leader. The body of the younger Mr. Moussavi had earlier been taken away by the authorities in what was widely believed to be an effort to prevent a large funeral that could grow into another antigovernment protest. Since the protest on Sunday, the government says it has arrested about 1,400 people. Although the government says just eight people died in the violence, the opposition says the toll was probably significantly higher.

Iran
Demonstrations and Riots
Politics and Government