Pakistani Ex-Intelligence Officer Is Killed

Abstract: ISLAMABAD — A former Pakistani intelligence officer with deep connections to the Taliban and Al Qaeda was found dead in the western tribal area of Pakistan on Friday, after being kidnapped by militants a month ago. The body of the former officer, Khalid Khawaja, was found on a road between the towns of Mir Ali and Miranshah in the militant-controlled North Waziristan area, Pakistani news outlets reported. He had been shot in the head and the torso, according to Pakistani television, which broadcast a photograph of what appeared to be Mr. Khawaja’s body. His son, Osama Khalid, confirmed the death. The killing of Mr. Khawaja, 58, highlights just how complex the snarl of militant networks has become along Pakistan’s western border with Afghanistan. Mr. Khawaja, a fast-talking former air force officer, had long been a link between the Pakistani military and militant networks in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the United States was funneling money to the networks to fight the Soviets there. But as years passed, militants once under the control of the Pakistani state began to turn on it, forming a dangerous patchwork of tribal, ethnic and sectarian alliances. It appeared to be Mr. Khawaja’s role as a negotiator in a battle between Pakistan’s military and a militant mosque in Islamabad in 2007 that got him into trouble. The siege enraged militants all over Pakistan and was the turning point for many groups, including Jaish-e-Muhammad, a group based in Punjab Province that split, with half moving to Taliban-controlled Waziristan and declaring war on the state. A religious leader familiar with the kidnapping said the militants, who called themselves the Asian Tigers, were part of the Jaish-e-Muhammad splinter group. Pakistani television reported that a note had been left with his body, stating that he had been killed because he had sided with the government in the siege of the mosque. Reports stated that the militants spoke Punjabi. Mr. Khawaja was believed to have persuaded one of the militant leaders to sneak out in a burqa to allow the military to arrest him. A video of Mr. Khawaja in captivity showed him in a red cap looking grim, speaking in Urdu and saying that he had been a spy for the United States and Pakistan. An earlier report stated that he had claimed to be on a negotiating mission for the state. A spokesman for Pakistan’s intelligence agency, known by its initials, ISI, denied that Mr. Khawaja had gone to the area on the agency’s behalf. A Western diplomat in Islamabad said this week that state sponsorship would have been highly unlikely. Pakistan did not cut ties with militants until after 2001, though it was unclear how long Mr. Khawaja remained associated with the military. He surfaced in 2002, in the case of the killing of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, to whom he reportedly gave militant contacts. He was adamantly anti-American, and an outspoken opponent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Though he did not have a law degree, he was a self-appointed member of the defense team for the five Americans who were detained last year on suspicions of seeking to wage jihad in Afghanistan. “We don’t like Americans,” he declared in his house in Islamabad in December. “Our government is in their hands, and there is a mess because of it.” He deplored a situation in which the United States was not “judged for its bombs,” and said that suicide bombers “carry a message — of injustice, revenge, and belief,” which had built up because society had ignored them. He claimed to be housing an Arab family whose father had been killed in Afghanistan. “He was fond of martyrdom,” Mr. Khawaja’s son said. “And now he is lucky because he has it.”

Pakistan
Jaish-e-Muhammad
Espionage
Khawaja Khalid


Libya: 7 Iranians Are Kidnapped

Abstract: Seven Iranian aid workers were abducted Tuesday by an unknown armed group in the eastern city of Benghazi, in the biggest operation of its kind against foreigners since the start of a revolt that toppled the longtime ruler Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi . The seven men, from an Iranian Red Crescent relief mission, were taken from their vehicle on their way to their hotel, security officials said. The Libyan Red Crescent Association confirmed the kidnapping, and said the seven had arrived in Benghazi on Monday as official guests to help with relief work.

Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )


Team Record Is Often the Key Statistic for Pro Bowl Candidates

Abstract: The N.F.L. announced its Pro Bowl teams Tuesday, naming the top players as determined by the votes of fans, players and coaches. Not surprisingly, players on the best teams tended to fare better than players on weaker teams, particularly at positions where few individual statistics are recorded. Two “special teamers” were selected to represent the best special-teams players aside from punters, kickers and return specialists. The two selections this year happen to play for the New England Patriots (Matthew Slater) and the Arizona Cardinals (Justin Bethel), teams with two of the three best records in the N.F.L. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Bobby Rainey leads all players in special-teams fumble recoveries (with four), and the Cleveland Browns’ Johnson Bademosi leads all players with 16 special-teams tackles. But it is easier to argue that special-teams players on a good team are more valuable than those on a bad one. The 86 Pro Bowl players play on teams that have an average winning percentage of .640. That is based on an average winning percentage of .612 for offensive players, .685 for defensive players, and .580 for special teams. Since fewer statistics are recorded for defensive players than offensive players, and defensive stars are more likely to accumulate the few statistics that they can achieve when playing with a lead (such as sacks and interceptions), it makes sense that voters chose defensive players on better teams. At a position like running back, it is easier for a player to stand out on a losing team. The Buffalo Bills’ LeSean McCoy, the St. Louis Rams’ Todd Gurley and the Buccaneers’ Doug Martin were three of the six running backs named to the Pro Bowl, and all three play on teams with 6-8 records entering the weekend. A fourth, Devonta Freeman, plays for the 7-7 Atlanta Falcons. Perhaps more interesting is that the teams of the players selected at offensive tackle have an average winning percentage of .417; the only position with a worse average winning percentage was punter. Part of this is because offensive tackles cannot make an offense: An elite left tackle is not going to help a team win games if the quarterback or receivers are below average. In some ways, a top-notch offensive lineman is only as valuable as the players he is protecting. Another reason, though, is that offensive tackles are routinely selected year after year based on reputation. The six offensive tackles selected to the Pro Bowl were the Browns’ Joe Thomas (nine Pro Bowls), the Philadelphia Eagles’ Jason Peters (eight), the San Francisco 49ers’ Joe Staley (who made his fifth straight Pro Bowl), the Washington Redskins’ Trent Williams (fourth straight Pro Bowl), the Dallas Cowboys’ Tyron Smith (third straight Pro Bowl) and the Cincinnati Bengals’ Andrew Whitworth (second career Pro Bowl, but a second-team All-Pro selection in 2014). The 49ers, the Eagles and the Cowboys are having down years, but that did not stop Staley, Peters, and Smith from receiving their customary Pro Bowl nods. As for Thomas, he has made the Pro Bowl in each of his nine seasons in the league, but the Browns have never made the playoffs during his career. At quarterback, the six selections play on teams with at least nine wins. It is never quite clear which way the causation arrow runs (are they great quarterbacks because their teams win, or do their teams win because they are great quarterbacks?), but no position is judged by wins and losses quite like quarterback. The only offensive position with a higher average winning percentage than quarterback was tight end. There, the Patriots’ Rob Gronkowski and the Carolina Panthers’ Greg Olsen were obvious choices, but players like Delanie Walker (76 receptions, 935 yards, six touchdowns for the Tennessee Titans) and Gary Barnidge (68 receptions, 930 yards, nine touchdowns for the Browns) were passed over for tight ends on winning teams: the Bengals’ Tyler Eifert (48/564/12) and the Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce (65/822/4).


Germans Play for Time in the Debate on Drones

Abstract: BERLIN — With just two months left before Germany’s federal election, the opposition Social Democratic Party is struggling to reverse its poor standing in the opinion polls. Trailing at least 15 percentage points behind Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, the party’s leadership is trying to tap into any issue it believes could win votes. One such issue is the public’s opposition to armed drones. Last month, the executive board of the Social Democrats decided “to oppose the acquisition and use of armed drones and to outlaw weapons systems that are fully automatic.” It hoped this would be a highly popular issue. “You can see why,” said Elizabeth Quintana, head of military technology and information studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “There is a knee-jerk reaction to armed drones in Germany. Germans are against the use of force.” There is another reason why the Social Democrats are latching onto the drone issue. The party wants to embarrass the government, particularly Thomas de Maizière, the defense minister and one of Ms. Merkel’s most loyal lieutenants. Mr. de Maizière had recently become embroiled in a scandal over the development of the Euro Hawk armed drone system, a version of the American Global Hawk drone. After Germany’s armed forces had spent more than €600 million — or $790 million — on the project, it turned out that the Euro Hawk lacked certain technical capabilities that the Americans were not prepared to share. Furthermore, the drones had not been certified to fly in European civilian or military air space. As this story broke, it became clear that the German military had pursued its drone program with minimum transparency on costs and viability. Mr. de Maizière has so far withstood the calls for his resignation. The scandal, however, has galvanized public opposition against the use of drones. Yet the controversy disguises several issues that will have to be dealt with, regardless of which party wins in September. “One is the technological aspect,” said Markus Kaim, head of research and a security analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. “Germany is being left behind. Apart from the United States and Israel, many countries have or are developing armed drones, such as Britain, China and India.” In practice, this means that the technological gap between most NATO countries that do not have drones, and the United States will widen even further, adding more strains to the alliance, experts say. Another issue is the lack of discussion in Germany over the differences between combat and surveillance drones, and what each should be used for. “On the armed-drone issue, no German government has any intentions of using drones the way the U.S. does,” Mr. Kaim added, referring to how the Obama administration had used combat drones to target and kill terrorism suspects in Pakistan and Yemen. But while defense experts in the German Parliament accept that armed drones could be used to protect German troops, for example in Afghanistan, the public is desperately afraid that the use of drones would reduce a deep-seated reluctance to use force. Oliver Meier, researcher at the Institute of Peace Research and Security Policy at Hamburg University, argues that soldiers operating the drones from afar might have fewer inhibitions against using them than if they were exposed to danger. Implicitly, he questions if drones might make it easier for Germans to accept using force. “This is a new way of waging war which could have far-reaching consequences,” Mr. Meier said recently. But as drones become part of modern warfare, the Social Democrats could be calling for a European legal framework to regulate their use. It has failed to do that — as have Ms. Merkel’s center-right government and other European governments. European countries “have remained essentially disengaged as the era of drone warfare has dawned,” said Anthony Dworkin, author of a new report on drones for the European Council for Foreign Relations research group. One reason is that the Europeans are divided over the use of drones. Another is that if the European Union did have a debate about the use of armed drones, it would mean criticizing the Obama administration. “The Europeans are torn between a reluctance to accuse Obama of breaking international law and an unwillingness to endorse his policies, divided in part among themselves and in some cases bound by close intelligence relationships to the U.S.” Mr. Dworkin said. Security analysts say such reluctance to forge a common stance is shortsighted. If the European Union bases its foreign policy on human rights and the rule of law, then the member states should agree that a legal framework is needed rather than a free-for-all system. Moreover, this could be the time to engage the United States. President Barack Obama recently announced tighter regulations for the use of drones in a major speech on the war on terrorism. The Europeans — and Germans in particular — could have used that speech to begin a trans-Atlantic debate over the use of armed drones, experts said. But they didn’t. Instead, analysts believe Germany is playing for time before broaching the issue. “The drone issue is an election issue,” Mr. Kaim said. And once the election is over? If Ms. Merkel’s coalition is re-elected, Mr. de Maizière has already announced a new armed drones program. But none of the problems that appeared over the Euro Hawk have been solved — least of all the public’s hostility to this new class of weapons. Judy Dempsey is editor in chief of Strategic Europe at Carnegie Europe. ( www.carnegieeurope.eu )


For Women Under ISIS, a Tyranny of Dress Code and Punishment

Abstract: KHAZER CAMP, Iraq — By the time the jihadists had finished, not even a woman’s eyes were legal. Showing them was a punishable offense. The dress code imposed on the women of Mosul started soon after the Islamic State overran the city more than two years ago. It was carried out gradually, until every part of the female body was erased, starting with the face, then the rest of the body — including the hands, which had to be covered with gloves, as well as the feet, which had to be hidden by socks. It ended with an announcement blared over loudspeakers, telling women to wear a film of black cloth over their eyes. Halima Ali Beder, 39, said she had resentfully made each new addition to her wardrobe, starting with the niqab to cover her face, and the abaya , also known as a jilbab, a loosefitting gown. Yet she still ran afoul of the Islamic State’s increasingly harsh enforcement of its codes when she stepped into the lane outside her home, planning to pop over to her neighbor’s house. “I put on everything — the niqab, the abaya , the gloves, the socks. All I forgot to do is cover my eyes,” said Ms. Beder, one of a dozen women from recently liberated neighborhoods of the city who recounted their experiences in interviews at the Khazer refugee camp, about 45 miles from Mosul in northern Iraq. Video A woman who recently fled the Islamic State in Mosul demonstrates its dress code, one that became increasingly restrictive, was meticulously monitored and harshly enforced. Credit Credit Rukmini Callimachi/The New York Times Ms. Beder had taken only a few steps when the morality police spotted her, and officers began shouting at her, castigating her. “They said: ‘Where is your husband? Does he accept that just anyone can see your face?’ I said: ‘But I wasn’t showing my face. Only my eyes!’” More than two million people lived in Mosul when it fell to the Islamic State on June 10, 2014. It was a conservative city where most women already covered their hair with a scarf and their arms with long sleeves. But as in other places where the militants imposed their creed, the new rules took enforced modesty to such an extreme that it riled families in Mosul, who described how they quickly began to feel suffocated. Three days after seizing the city, the militants began going door to door to distribute the “Bill of the City,” laying out how they planned to govern, according to a study by a researcher, Rasha Al Aqeedi, a native of Mosul and now a fellow at the Al Mesbar Studies and Research Center in Dubai. “To the virtuous women,” the bill said, “in modesty and the wide, loose jilbab, stay in your homes and leave them only in cases of necessity.” Image Mona Mohamed, who recently escaped from Mosul and is now living in a refugee camp in northern Iraq, demonstrated how to wear the headscarf, one of six items of clothing required by the Islamic State’s extreme dress code. By the time she was dressed to ISIS code, not even her eyes were showing. Credit Rukmini Callimachi/The New York Times All over territory controlled by the Islamic State, billboards were going up showing a picture of a woman looking like a black silhouette, completely covered in concealing clothes. It laid out the new look in seven bullet points, including that a woman’s gown should be “thick and not reveal what is beneath” and should “not draw attention.” For at least a month, obedience to the new rules was not enforced. Then at the end of July, thousands of niqab sets were distributed to shops. The first of numerous decrees was issued, ordering women to don the niqab as well as gloves. Around the same time, residents began seeing vehicles painted with the logo of the Islamic State’s morality police , Ms. Aqeedi said. Opposite the university, they opened the police unit’s headquarters, known as the Diwan al-Hisba. Its enforcement officers fanned out across the city, carrying books of numbered citations. When the police caught a woman straying from the dress code, they issued a notice in exchange for her husband’s ID card. He then had to appear at a hearing before a judge. Depending on the offense, he was forced to pay a fine, or else either he or his wife was sentenced to a whipping, recent escapees said. When the Islamic police barged into the home of Ms. Beder, they demanded her husband’s ID. Then when he appeared before them, he was forced to pay a fine of 50,000 dinars — around $40, a sizable portion of the family’s monthly income. Women say the minders multiplied each month, until residents had the impression that the morality police were omnipresent. Officers loitered near shops and beside market stalls. One woman, Zeena Mohamed, 27, described how she lifted her flap just enough to see the cream-colored dress she was considering buying. She couldn’t be sure of its hue through the black film, she said. Straightaway she heard a man shouting, and looked up to see the officer, who expelled her from the shop. Others described not being sure of the amount of money that shopkeepers handed back to them, afraid to lift up the veil to check. Tripping, even falling, became a regular occurrence, they said. Image Veiled women in Raqqa, Syria, in 2014. Early in the Islamic State’s reign there, women could show their eyes and their hands. Soon, though, the terror group made an announcement calling for women to be enveloped in black cloth, with their hands, feet and eyes concealed. Credit Reuters Throughout areas controlled by the terror group in Iraq, as well as in Syria and Libya, the Islamic State’s hisba became a bureaucracy of virtue, its offices filling up with binders of receipts for the various violations it had issued. It prosecuted a list of offenses, fining and flogging men for incorrect beard length, for failure to pray at the sanctioned time, for possession of cigarettes and alcohol and for a long list of other perceived moral failings. On letterhead bearing the group’s black flag, the Islamic State released fatwas detailing each new restriction and outlining penalties, according to documents obtained by the researcher Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, who agreed to share several unpublished examples with The New York Times. One fatwa discussed the appropriate color women should wear, concluding that red was illegal. Another stresses the importance of covering the entire face “because it is the place of captivation and temptation.” One woman was stopped because her sock had a hole in it, revealing the skin on her ankle. A middle-aged secretary recounted how the gloves made it hard for her to hold a pen, which kept slipping. When she tried taking off the glove of her writing hand, she was spotted and threatened. Because the dress code applied to what women should wear in public, Wafa, a 39-year-old woman, did not bother putting on the attire when she went to bake flatbread in the earthen oven inside her family’s compound. Image The receipt the Islamic Police gave Wafa, stating her offense. She was whipped for having shown her eyes while trying to lift a face veil so that she could put a spoon full of food in her mouth at a picnic. Though the compound is encircled by a wall, it was low enough for people to peer over, which is how the hisba saw her. Officers immediately came to demand her husband’s ID. “I told them if you plan to start interfering even inside our homes, then you need to start bringing us propane, and groceries and the things we need, so that we don’t have to go out,” she said. “You’re making us live in the Stone Age.” They let her go with a warning, but the next time, she was punished. Wafa, who asked that only her first name be used, said she had been at a picnic with her children. She lifted the khimar, the fabric over her face, just enough to bring her spoon to her mouth, when she noticed the black car with the green logo of the morality police, she said. This time, they confiscated her husband’s ID and gave him a notice to appear. “Reason for detention,” says the receipt, numbered 4715. “Wife outside without khimar .” Image A billboard in Raqqa in 2014 carried a verse from the Quran urging women to wear a hijab. Credit Reuters They then drove Wafa to their office, where a long-bearded judge jotted down her punishment: 21 lashes. “I tried to protest. To explain. How can I eat if I don’t lift up the khimar? But they didn’t listen,” she said. They delivered her to a room where a Syrian woman ordered her to kneel. In the woman’s hand was a cable that had metal spikes on the end. “It’s indescribable the pain I felt,” Wafa said. “I was screaming, crying — begging — reciting prayers.” Her back shredded, she spent two nights at a hospital and for weeks afterward she could sleep only on her stomach, she said. It eventually became clear that the aim of the rules was to keep women cloistered inside their homes. “This was the entire purpose. The essence of their Islamic jurisprudence is to make women melt away. To make them invisible,” Ms. Aqeedi said. She gave the example of a woman she keeps in touch with who is still in Mosul and has not left her home for more than two years. A small number tried to rebel. Ms. Mohamed said she was among them, routinely talking back to the morality police, an account confirmed by her mother and sisters. Not long before their neighborhood was liberated, Zeena Mohamed and her sister Mona went to a store that sold women’s intimate wear. Among the customers were two wives of Islamic State fighters, “and they were buying the raciest lingerie in the entire shop,” Zeena said. When the sisters left the shop, they passed the two Islamic State husbands, loitering in the hallway outside the shop. One saw that Zeena had forgotten to pull down the flap over her eyes and began loudly admonishing her. “Your wife is upstairs buying racy panties,” she recounted saying, “and you’re concerned about me showing my eyes?”

Mosul
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Women and Girls
Muslim Veiling


Dispatches From the Final Dash of Presidential Candidates in Iowa

Abstract: After hundreds of campaign stops and tens of thousands of television ads, candidates are crisscrossing Iowa this weekend on a final, frantic dash, cajoling the last undecided voters and energizing supporters to head to Monday night’s caucuses. Fending off drowsiness with Red Bull and Katy Perry songs, they are racing through a mind-muddying 55 events, from Dubuque in the northeast to Council Bluffs in the southwest, in a blur of speeches and handshakes. The sprint is on. _____ Image The North Star Restaurant and Lounge in Fenton, Iowa. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Ted Cruz | Two Sides of a Campaign EMMETSBURG, Iowa — Senator Ted Cruz of Texas stood in a corner of a library here, bleary-eyed but hiding it well, three stops into a five-stop day in a furious sprint to reach the last of the state’s 99 counties before voting begins. Maybe his supporters sensed exhaustion. Maybe they were restless themselves. Maybe the candidate cannot help but inspire song — scrawled on photocopies distributed by a fan before the event. “Ted! Ted! He’s the man! He’s the man to lead this land! Ted! The voice of sanity! In these times of calamity!” The audience that had gathered Friday afternoon cheered, and the candidate smiled. “Thank you for that,” he said later. “That was awesome.” For a while, it has felt at times as though there were two Cruz campaigns, warring daily over his fate: the buoyant enterprise, rumbling from town to town on a well-decorated bus, and the anxious one, revisited when Mr. Cruz returned to the vehicle to see what Donald J. Trump had said now. On the ground, for months, it has been clear that something is happening — the medley of crowds, yard signs and sleep-starved door-knocking that has long spun caucus magic. It has visited unheated barns and calorie-rich Pizza Ranches, overstuffed church pews and saloons in unincorporated towns. It has filled a dormitory in Des Moines called Camp Cruz, where volunteers from as far as Idaho have bunked at their own expense. And yet the doubt wrought by Mr. Trump, a rival who defies precedent and decorum, is real. After the last debate on Thursday, the disparate strands of Cruz world seemed to come together in a hotel conference hall. Mr. Cruz thanked his wife, lost track of her — “Where is Heidi? Heidi Cruz?” — and embraced her before a grateful room. (“That’s a real marriage!” someone shouted twice.) The leader of a pro-Cruz “super PAC” cradled a Budweiser; some campaign staff members reached for stiffer spirits as a Fox News focus group playing overhead ruled Marco Rubio the debate winner. Volunteers wore Cruz football jerseys and held Cruz memorabilia aloft for the man to sign. “Always stand for liberty,” he wrote on one teenager’s poster board. His father, Rafael, watched quietly. A few feet away, the senator’s young daughter played with the children of supporters, taking a pen to a Cruz coloring book. A staff member, turning back, seemed to wonder how anyone could worry. “I only see perfection,” she said. MATT FLEGENHEIMER _____ Image Bev’s on the River in Sioux City, Iowa. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times Marco Rubio | Looking for the Bump CLINTON, Iowa — A man in a bright red skullcap here walked up to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and offered a little spiritual advice. “You need a bump to win the Iowa caucuses,” the man told him. “I’m going to give you this bump right now.” “O.K.,” Mr. Rubio replied, a bit warily. The man handed Mr. Rubio a skullcap emblazoned with “Marco 2016” and told him to place it on his head. Then the man hit record on his cellphone. “Say ‘ Gut Shabbos ,’” the man instructed the candidate, using the Yiddish greeting for the Sabbath. Mr. Rubio looked confused. “Boot Shabbos?” he asked sheepishly. The man corrected him. Mr. Rubio tried again. “Hi, I’m Marco Rubio. Gut Shabbos!” Then he held up both thumbs in an all-American salute. So it went on Friday, and so it goes for Mr. Rubio in the final days of the Iowa campaign: Almost everyone he meets is eager to help, and almost everyone he meets is mystified about why he is trailing Ted Cruz and Donald J. Trump in the polls. Despite his supporters’ anxiety, the mood inside his campaign is unmistakably confident: Its status as thoroughbred underdog, prepared to outperform but not to win outright in Iowa, seems to suit him. Sustained by Clif Bars and Red Bull and emboldened by steadily improving internal poll numbers, Mr. Rubio has taken greater risks on the campaign trail in the past 48 hours, revealing a playful side that defies his reputation for robotic, careful, sound-bite-ready campaigning. “Is it true,” he asked the crowd here, “that it’s illegal to be a vegetarian in Iowa?” The crowd laughed. “I hear there is a minimum meat consumption requirement.” As he concluded a speech in a rural event hall, he encouraged voters to stick around and speak with him. “I can do whatever you want,” he said dryly. “Almost.” He waited for laughs. “I don’t dance. And I don’t sing.” Then he went in for the comedic kill. “Only on Saturday nights.” MICHAEL BARBARO _____ Image Grand View University in Des Moines. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Hillary Clinton | A More Personal Politics ABOARD THE CLINTON PRESS BUS — Hillary Clinton started her campaign in Iowa 10 months ago with small events, talking to a half-dozen Iowans about policy. She is ending it with raucous rallies across the state alongside her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea. With Mrs. Clinton’s fate resting in the hands of Iowans who delivered her a third-place finish in 2008, the candidate has seemed upbeat and even, at times, sort of Zen. She has lingered longer after events and showered voters with personal attention. (“That is pretty. Is that attached?” she asked one woman, noticing her scarf. “It’s really pretty.”) Mrs. Clinton’s traveling aides now include old hands from Arkansas and the White House years who know her preferences — from the slow fade of Katy Perry’s “Roar” when she comes on stage to the spread of crudité on the plane used to shuttle between events. Mrs. Clinton’s crowds might be bigger than the six-person round-table discussions that defined her early candidacy, but she still dispenses policy proposals at almost every stop. “It’s called an IN-VER-SION, but it might as well be called a PER-VER-SION,” she has been saying lately, describing the relocations companies use to lower their taxes. She is hoping to win over Iowa caucusgoers by stressing her experience and policy knowledge. But she is also unabashedly showing some heart. A few days ago in Newton, a widow stood up to talk about her struggle to support herself on Social Security. Mrs. Clinton, often a distant presence shrouded by Secret Service agents and aides, interrupted. “You lost your husband? Come on up here,” Mrs. Clinton said, putting an arm on the woman’s shoulder. After the event, another woman, Scheryl Kleckner, 55, fought her way to the front of the rope line. Mrs. Clinton gave her a hug. “I just want to say one thing to you,” Mrs. Kleckner told Mrs. Clinton, addressing her decision between Mrs. Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “I almost jumped the fence for Bernie, but I am back with you tonight.” AMY CHOZICK _____ Image Outside Danceland Ballroom in Davenport, Iowa. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times Bernie Sanders | A Family in Motion DUBUQUE, Iowa — Accompanied by his wife and a half-dozen staffers, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is in constant motion, delivering hourlong speeches through a hoarse voice and proclaiming to anyone who will listen that his campaign has the momentum to win in Iowa. His days are jammed with rallies and pep talks for volunteers who are fanning out across the state to plead with people to vote for him. Between events, he snacks on tangerines, chocolate chip cookies and red apples and washes down his rushed bites with red Gatorade and water. Willie Nelson, Abba and, predictably, Simon and Garfunkel, the folk duo whose song “America” he used in a campaign ad, provide the soundtrack for the large campaign bus covered with his name in which he crisscrosses Iowa. “There’s been no time to sit down and plan, except on the bus,” said Jane Sanders, the senator’s wife. She said she was incredibly proud that Mr. Sanders had kept “going and going and going.” But she lamented that the couple were also “eating way too late,” often at Johnny’s Italian Steakhouse, which has several restaurants in Iowa, or the Drake Diner in Des Moines, where they are on a first-name basis with the waiters. Their four adult children are joining them for the final days before the caucuses. Ms. Sanders described watching them swim in their hotel pool, too tired to jump in with them but glad to spend time together. “It’s made us even closer than we were,” she said, “and we are a pretty close family.” Mr. Sanders seemed increasingly chipper as his bus tour made its way along the Mississippi on Friday, sometimes waving to journalists as they photographed him running into events. His staff members also seemed upbeat, as they announced that his speeches had been attended by nearly 63,000 people in Iowa and 507,100 nationwide. In Muscatine on Friday, Mr. Sanders urged on his volunteers. “My request to you, in the next three days, is beg, borrow, kidnap,” he said, and the crowd laughed. “Do whatever you have to do.” YAMICHE ALCINDOR _____ Image Outside the home of George Davey, a supporter of Donald J. Trump, in Des Moines. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times Donald J. Trump | Signs of Confidence DES MOINES — Seven months ago, Donald J. Trump’s campaign seemed a lark. The news media did not know what to make of it. By August, when he survived his first, rocky debate appearance and drew tens of thousands of people to a rally in Mobile, Ala., it was clear that something significant was happening. This weekend, he will hold five events across Iowa as he seeks to clinch a victory after several weeks running neck and neck with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in the polls. On Saturday, he was headed south along the Mississippi from Dubuque to Clinton to Davenport. Nearly his entire family is traveling with him. His wife and pregnant daughter, Ivanka, flew home to New York with him after a Thursday night rally for veterans, hastily thrown together after he boycotted the Republican debate . His eldest sons stayed behind in West Des Moines, where Mr. Trump’s state campaign headquarters is. Mr. Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric took reporters and photographers on a pheasant-hunting trip on Friday, but their father was not in Iowa, a sign of renewed confidence. Always looking just around the corner, he was instead in New Hampshire, the state where he holds a commanding lead in polls and that he hopes will be his safety net should he fail to win in Iowa. He seemed electric during a rally in Nashua. But his mood is almost always buoyant. In a small news conference aboard his plane at the Des Moines airport on Thursday, the night of the debate he skipped, Mr. Trump sounded thrilled with his decision. And watching Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio struggle, as they were faced with lengthy video montages of past statements that they have since disavowed, only affirmed his choice to skip the debate, he said on Friday. “Boy, did they go after them,” Mr. Trump said in a radio interview, referring to the debate’s moderators from Fox News. “I think I did a smart thing.” MAGGIE HABERMAN _____ Image Signs for Jeb Bush at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post in Clear Lake, Iowa. After a strong debate performance, Mr. Bush and his team set out for a three-day swing though the state. Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times Jeb Bush | A Few Bright Days CARROLL, Iowa — Jeb Bush is not going to win the Iowa caucuses. He is not expected to finish second, and probably not even third. Nonetheless, Mr. Bush has had some bright days lately. Fresh off a strong debate performance in Des Moines, he and his team set out for three town-hall-style events Friday in the rural, western part of the state — the first batch in a three-day swing across Iowa. Mr. Bush’s dark S.U.V. passed the red barns and glinting windmills that rose up from the sheets of snow, a confectionary white crust across the plains. It dropped Mr. Bush at Greasewood Flats Ranch here, where he jogged into a crowded room, already mid-applause. The energy from the previous night’s debate hung over the ranch, from the eager crowd — which packed in close below the gaze of taxidermied fowl and deer — to Mr. Bush himself. Pointing to one of his supporters, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who often appears on the morning shows after debates to vouch for the former Florida governor, Mr. Bush said, “Today was a little easier for him than the previous debates.” Minutes later, another supporter, former State Senator Curt Kiser of Florida, went off message to criticize Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, then joked that he never lets a question get in the way of his answer. “We’re learning this in the debates, too,” Mr. Bush said, to laughter. The normally accessible governor did not hold a news conference. Still, there were signs he was connecting. Afterward, Liz Baker, 59, who had driven from Chicago, turned to a friend and gestured toward Mr. Bush: “He’s got some momentum,” she said. “It’s good to see some momentum from him.” ASHLEY PARKER

Iowa
Ted Cruz
Hillary Clinton
Jeb Bush
2016 Presidential Election
Primaries
Donald Trump
Bernard Sanders,Bernie Sanders


Syrians Seeking Asylum in South Korea Find Only a Cold Shoulder

Abstract: YANGJU, South Korea — Surrounded by salvaged used-cars parts bound for Syria, Ahmad Khalifa has worked 12 hours a day for three years in one country that does not really want him while longing for another that war has destroyed. In junkyards in South Korean towns like Yangju, north of Seoul, there are hundreds of young Syrian men like Mr. Khalifa, who often worked, ate and slept at job sites with no health insurance in pursuit of a dream for a better future. But now, with the Syrian civil war in its sixth year, their dream is evaporating, and they are stranded in South Korea, where the authorities have become increasingly wary of Muslim immigrants after a spate of terrorist attacks in Europe . The Syrians’ bosses, who paid the wages of the workers, no longer need their labor, but these military-age men are too scared to return home. South Korea, however, does not recognize them as refugees, despite appeals from the United Nations refugee agency to embrace more displaced Syrians with wider benefits. Image Abdul Razzak, left, and his brother, Ahmad al-Othman, in Yangju. Credit Jean Chung for The New York Times Instead, it is letting 670 Syrians like Mr. Khalifa stay here only on a so-called humanitarian visa, an annually renewable document that limits their ability to find work and bars them from many benefits open to recognized refugees, like health care and the opportunity to have family members join them. “Bombs could drop on my wife and two sons in Aleppo anytime,” said Mr. Khalifa, 29, referring to his hometown in Syria. “I am desperate to get them out and here but just don’t know how.” South Korea helps more than 1,000 refugees from North Korea who arrive from third countries resettle here annually with subsidies. Last year it joined a resettlement program sponsored by the United Nations refugee agency, and accepted 22 people from Myanmar who were living in refugee camps in Thailand. But South Koreans, proud of their country’s ethnic homogeneity, have not been eager to receive non-Korean asylum seekers. South Korea recognized its first non-Korean refugee, an Ethiopian, in 2001. So far, it has granted asylum to only 600 non-Korean refugees out of 18,800 applicants. In 2014, President Park Geun-hye promised that South Korea would pitch in to help resettle millions of refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war. By then, hundreds of Syrians had requested asylum in South Korea, most of them junkyard workers who were already here or friends and relatives who joined them after the war broke out. But South Korea’s initially welcoming attitude soon waned. Image Ahmad Barro, left, and Ahmad Khalifa showed photographs of their children left in Aleppo. Credit Jean Chung for The New York Times The government has granted asylum to only three Syrians. The rest were given humanitarian visas. “The point of the policy is to ensure that these Syrians will return home once the civil war is over, so not to make their life here too comfortable,” said Kim Sung-in, secretary general of Nancen , a refugee advocacy group in Seoul. “It essentially leaves them to fend for themselves.” Even while South Korea was handing out humanitarian visas at home, its embassies abroad and its airports tightened their screening. Last October, Abdul Wahab Al Mohammad Agha, a Syrian doctoral student in Seoul, took his younger brother to the South Korean Embassy in Turkey to appeal for a visa. The 22-year-old brother had fled their hometown, Raqqa , to avoid having to join the Islamic State’s army. But for the embassy, that was an insufficient reason to give him a visa. “They made us feel humiliated and small,” said Mr. Mohammad Agha, 32. In a survey of asylum seekers last year, the Korean refugee advocacy group Refuge pNan cited the story of a Syrian woman with children who was denied a visa at the South Korean Embassy in Turkey, and had to travel 14 days through four countries before reuniting with her husband in South Korea. She requested asylum at the Incheon airport and was admitted. She was lucky. Twenty-eight Syrians who claimed asylum there after the Paris terrorist attacks in November languished in crowded, windowless rooms at the airport for up to eight months. They were allowed to enter South Korea in July to apply for refugee status, but only after human rights lawyers intervened and publicized their plight. “They told us to go elsewhere,” said Ahmad, 23, one of the 28, who asked to be identified by his given name only. “But we had nowhere else to go, so we just waited and waited.” To Korean immigration officials, fleeing war is not sufficient grounds for asylum, said Chae Hyun-young, a legal officer at the United Nations’ refugee office in Seoul. Applicants must also be at risk of persecution. “And they focus on whether the applicant has suffered persecution in the past, rather than whether they would suffer in the future if returned home,” Ms. Chae said. Ban Jae-yeol, an immigration official at the Incheon airport, said almost all Syrian asylum seekers were allowed to enter the country until the Paris attacks spawned a fear of refugees in South Korea. In January, the government had to scrap its plan to build a complex to produce and export halal food to Arab countries, after local Christian groups protested that it would help draw Muslims, and terrorism, to South Korea. The Justice Ministry promised more assistance for the holders of humanitarian visas, including job placement services. But officials were also taken aback by a sudden increase in asylum applicants, from 423 in 2010 to 5,711 last year, mostly from Pakistan, Egypt, Syria and China. In June, Kim Woo-hyun, the country’s top immigration official, called for a revision of South Korea’s refugee law to deal with economic migrants, including those overstaying their visas, who he said did not qualify as refugees but applied for asylum as a means to extend their stay. Asylum seekers are protected from deportation, and the legal process to screen them can take years, officials said. Image Mohamad Barro, left, and his younger brother, Ahmad Barro, in an area of Dongducheon, South Korea, where restaurants cater to foreigners. Credit Jean Chung for The New York Times Ha Yong-guk, a Justice Ministry official, said four of every 10 people who applied for asylum last year did so while staying in the country illegally. Anxiety over a slowing domestic economy also led many South Koreans to suspect asylum seekers of stealing jobs, said Shin Heinn, a spokeswoman in Seoul for the United Nations refugee agency. On a recent Sunday, seven Syrian men gathered at an apartment in Yangju. They all came to South Korea in the past decade to work in junkyards. After the violence in Syria forced an end to shipments of auto parts from South Korea last year, they found themselves out of work. Local employers balked at hiring them because they held only temporary humanitarian visas. The Syrians all wished to be recognized as refugees, a status that they felt would be more secure and also better understood by local employers. With few legal resources and dwindling savings, all they could do was worry. Ahmad al-Othman, 29, worries about his younger brother, who was detained on charges of entering South Korea on a fake passport 18 months ago. Ahmad Barro, 27, worries about his wife in Aleppo , who was expecting their third child soon. And while Mr. Khalifa still has a job, he is worried because back pain has reduced his workload and wages. “But all these problems are minor, compared with my fear for my family still in Aleppo,” he said, looking at his two sons smiling from his cellphone screen.

Syria
South Korea
Refugees,Internally Displaced People
UN


Hoosick: Man and Three Children Die in Fire

Abstract: A fire tore through a home here late Wednesday, killing three children and their father, who had rushed back into the flames to try to save the youngsters, the authorities said. The blaze broke out in a two-story home outside Hoosick Falls, a village about 30 miles northeast of Albany. Brian Decatur, 41, and his wife, Cheryl, 38, escaped, but Mr. Decatur ran back into the house to try to save the children, the authorities said. They identified the children as Cade May and Haley Decatur, both 8, and Gardin Decatur, 2. The couple each had a child from a previous relationship and had Gardin together. Sixteen marijuana plants were found in the basement. The cause remains under investigation.


Transit Board Candidates Press Ahead, Off the Radar

Abstract: AC Transit , the bus agency that serves Oakland, Berkeley and much of the East Bay, is facing a financial crisis. The district, with an annual budget of more than $300 million and a daily ridership of 210,000, is confronting a $56 million budget shortfall over the next two years. It is at war with the drivers union. Widespread service cuts are pending. Now, 24-year-old Mark Williams is stepping into the breach as a candidate for the powerful AC Transit Board. A student at Laney College, Mr. Williams lives with his parents in Castro Valley. His opponent for the seat — which became open when Rocky Fernandez decided last month not to seek re-election — is Gavin Wilgus, 31, a graduate student. It is a race that is not on the radar of most people except for the labor union members. When Mr. Williams and a half-dozen other board candidates filed into the Alameda Labor Council offices Wednesday for their endorsement interviews, Mr. Williams arrived early. “My father taught me two things,” he said. “Always shake a man’s hand firm, and always keep your word. Show up when you say you’re going to show up.” The platform for Mr. Williams — who sits on the Accessibility Advisory Committee for AC Transit — includes reducing the carbon footprint of AC Transit, making buses more accessible to the elderly and easing tensions with the drivers union, which has endorsed him. Mr. Wilgus, who is studying public administration at California State University, East Bay, said he would like to increase ridership by marketing the bus line and improve communication with the union. Four of the board’s six seats are being contested. Board members serve a four-year term and are paid about $1,000 a month. In the waiting room, none of the candidates had entourages of reporters or campaign consultants. “It doesn’t have the same sexiness as City Council or mayor,” said Elsa Ortiz, a lawyer and an incumbent in the district that represents San Leandro and Oakland. “People don’t pay that much attention to it. As far as campaigns go, it’s low-hanging fruit — but don’t say that!” James Sajadi, 63, a retired AC Transit mechanic, outlined his campaign plan: talking to people he knows. “I don’t campaign; I don’t have a penny to spend,” said Mr. Sajadi, a challenger in the Newark and Fremont district. “Not a sign, not a flier, nothing.” Still, the issues are important. As they waited to be interviewed, Mr. Sajadi questioned Ms. Ortiz about how the situation had deteriorated on her watch. And she explained that with low tax revenue, and less state and federal financing, the board had been forced to make difficult decisions. After the 30-minute labor council interview, Mr. Williams spoke excitedly about having known some of his questioners from political campaigns he had worked on. He said he had a good feeling. “I hype everything up like it’s going to be the end of the world, but it was fine,” he said. “It was just like a discussion, and some of them told me they liked what I had to say.”

Buses
California
Elections
Budgets and Budgeting


Stephen Curry Is Not Likely to Play Game 3 at Portland

Abstract: Stephen Curry is unlikely to play for the Golden State Warriors on Saturday in Game 3 of the Western Conference semifinals at Portland, as he has not yet practiced on his sprained right knee. While the Warriors practiced Thursday, Curry did work on the side. He did not participate in any scrimmaging, which the medical staff and coaches want to see before he is cleared to return. “He’s gotten better and better each day,” Coach Steve Kerr said. But when asked whether Curry would play on Saturday, Kerr replied, “probably not.” Game 4 on Monday is still a possibility if Curry keeps making progress. “Everything has gone very smoothly,” Kerr said. “He hasn’t had any setbacks. He’s ramping up things in the weight room.” The Warriors will practice again in Oakland on Friday before flying to Portland in the afternoon. Kerr said that even on a game day, when the team has only a shootaround, Curry could work two-on-two with assistant coaches. Golden State, the defending champion, leads the best-of-seven series against the Trail Blazers, two games to none.

Stephen Curry
Golden State Warriors
Trail Blazers
Basketball
Playoffs
Sports injury


Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan Wins Nobel Prize for Study of ‘Self-Eating’ Cells

Abstract: Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for his discoveries on how cells recycle their content, a process known as autophagy, a Greek term for “self-eating.” It is a crucial process. During starvation, cells break down proteins and nonessential components and reuse them for energy. Cells also use autophagy to destroy invading viruses and bacteria, sending them off for recycling. And cells use autophagy to get rid of damaged structures. The process is thought to go awry in cancer, infectious diseases, immunological diseases and neurodegenerative disorders. Disruptions in autophagy are also thought to play a role in aging. But little was known about how autophagy happens, what genes were involved, or its role in disease and normal development until Dr. Ohsumi began studying the process in baker’s yeast. Why did he win? The process he studies is critical for cells to survive and to stay healthy. The autophagy genes and the metabolic pathways he discovered in yeast are used by higher organisms, including humans. And mutations in those genes can cause disease. His work led to a new field and inspired hundreds of researchers around the world to study the process and opened a new area of inquiry. “Without him, the whole field doesn’t exist,” said Seungmin Hwang, an assistant professor in the department of pathology at the University of Chicago. “He set up the field.” Who is he? Dr. Ohsumi, who was born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1974, floundered at first, trying to find his way. He started out in chemistry but decided it was too established a field with few opportunities. So he switched to molecular biology. But his Ph.D. thesis was unimpressive, and he could not find a job. His adviser suggested a postdoctoral position at Rockefeller University in New York, where he was to study in vitro fertilization in mice. “I grew very frustrated,” he told the Journal of Cell Biology in 2012. He switched to studying the duplication of DNA in yeast. That work led him to a junior professor position at the University of Tokyo where he picked up a microscope and started peering at sacks in yeast where cell components are degraded — work that eventually brought him, at age 43, to the discoveries that the Nobel Assembly recognized on Monday. Dr. Ohsumi later moved to the National Institute for Basic Biology, in Okazaki, and since 2009, he has been a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. “All I can say is, it’s such an honor,” Dr. Ohsumi told reporters at the Tokyo Institute of Technology after learning he had been awarded the Nobel, according to the Japanese broadcaster NHK. “I’d like to tell young people that not all can be successful in science, but it’s important to rise to the challenge.” What’s he like? “He is a quiet man,” said Dr. Beth Levine, director of autophagy research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. But he also is quietly daring. “Unfortunately, these days, at least in Japan, young scientists want to get a stable job, so they are afraid to take risks,” he told the Journal of Cell Biology. “Most people decide to work on the most popular field because they think that is the easiest way to get a paper published.” As for himself, he said: “I am not very competitive, so I always look for a new subject to study, even if it is not so popular. If you start from some sort of basic, new observation, you will have plenty to work on.” Reactions Dr. Ohsumi’s Nobel Prize “was inevitable,” Dr. Levine said. Dr. Ohsumi, she said, “is venerated in the autophagy field.” Autophagy researchers around the world were delighted by the recognition. “This is an exciting day for all of us,” said Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo, an autophagy researcher and co-director of the Institute for Aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. “His work is some of the most elegant you can imagine for the knowledge and the beauty of how cells work.” Kay F. Macleod, a cancer researcher at the University of Chicago, said, “It is super exciting that autophagy has been recognized in and of itself.” Even more so, she added, because Dr. Ohsumi’s work was basic research. When Dr. Ohsumi and his colleagues began, she said, “I doubt they for one moment thought that this fundamental process would ultimately be shown to be so important in disease mechanisms and potential therapies.” Dr. David H. Perlmutter, dean of the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, said Dr. Ohsumi’s work opened a field that has now exploded, with implications that are “the stuff of science fiction.” If the autophagy system is knocked out, he said, the result is premature aging, with ailments like cardiovascular disease, skeletal weakness, glucose intolerance and cognitive decline. Now drugs that stimulate this system are being studied. “If you take a drug and stimulate the system, you will make the organism live longer in a cancer-free way,” he said. The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe , called Dr. Ohsumi to congratulate him, saying “your research gave light to the people who suffer from serious diseases.” Nobel Prize Winning Scientists Reflect on Nearly Sleeping Through the Life-Changing Call How eight winners got the word. Who was overlooked for the prize? Speculation had it that the Nobel would go to researchers whose work was instrumental in developing new treatments that unleash the immune system to attack cancer cells. The list is long. Front-runners had included James P. Allison at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center; Craig B. Thompson of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York; Gordon J. Freeman of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University. Another scientist often mentioned as a Nobel contender is Jeffrey Bluestone of the University of California, San Francisco, who works on the immune system in disorders in which it attacks normal cells. Who won the 2015 Physiology or Medicine Nobel? William C. Campbell, Satoshi Omura and Tu Youyou were recognized for their use of modern laboratory techniques to discover anti-parasitic drugs long hidden in herbs and soil. When will other Nobels be announced? Five more will be awarded in the days to come: ■ The Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced on Tuesday in Sweden. Read about last year’s winners , Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald. ■ The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced on Wednesday in Sweden. Read about last year’s winners , Tomas Lindahl, Paul L. Modrich and Aziz Sancar. ■ The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Norway. Read about last year’s winners , the National Dialogue Quartet of Tunisia. ■ The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science will be announced on Monday, Oct. 10, in Sweden. Read about last year’s winner, Angus Deaton . ■ The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday, Oct. 13, in Sweden. Read about last year’s winner, Svetlana Alexievich .

Yoshinori Ohsumi
Nobel Prize
Anatomy and Physiology
Biology and Biochemistry
Medicine and Health


Michael Flynn Is Harsh Judge of C.I.A.’s Role

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Long before Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn became Donald J. Trump’s choice for national security adviser , he believed that the Central Intelligence Agency had become a political tool of the Obama administration — a view now echoed by the president-elect in his mocking dismissals of C.I.A. assessments that Russia sought to tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor. “They’ve lost sight of who they actually work for,” Mr. Flynn said in an interview with The New York Times in October 2015. “They work for the American people. They don’t work for the president of the United States.” He added, speaking of the agency’s leadership: “Frankly, it’s become a very political organization.” Mr. Flynn’s assessment that the C.I.A. is a political arm of the Obama administration is not widely shared by Republicans or Democrats in Washington. But it has appeared to have been internalized by the one person who matters most right now: Mr. Trump. In the past few days, Mr. Trump has sought to portray reports of the agency’s assessments that Russia actively tried to interfere in the election as a desperate attempt by sore losers to taint his presidency before it begins. His denigration of C.I.A. officials as “the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction” has opened up an extraordinary rift between the president-elect and the nation’s intelligence community that is unlikely to be bridged anytime soon. Although it is unclear how much Mr. Flynn, 57, is responsible for Mr. Trump’s response to the C.I.A. assessment, during the presidential campaign he had substantial influence on the president-elect. He brought to the campaign views on Muslims and national security that tended to hew far closer to the right-wing fringes than the mainstream of the Republican Party. Mr. Flynn also appears to have helped set the tone for Mr. Trump’s testy relationship with the intelligence community. In August, when the Trump campaign received its first intelligence briefing, Mr. Flynn was so combative with the briefers that another person in the room had to urge him to settle down, according to a person familiar with the episode who was told about it in confidence. Donald Trump’s Cabinet Is Complete. Here’s the Full List. A list of appointees and nominees for top posts in the new administration. On any number of issues — from the Obama administration’s failure to foresee the rise of the Islamic State to Mr. Flynn’s ouster as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Defense Department — he has made it clear in recent years that he sees the political hand of the C.I.A. at work. As director of the D.I.A. from 2012 to 2014, he pushed hard for his agency, long treated as second-rate by the C.I.A., to be given greater access to the trove of documents and other materials seized during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011. The C.I.A. controlled the material, and Mr. Flynn became convinced that the agency was refusing to share or declassify much of it because of fears that it would undermine the administration’s narrative about Al Qaeda’s waning strength at the time Bin Laden was killed. “It’s all political with” the C.I.A. leadership, Mr. Flynn said in the 2015 interview, which focused on the rise of the Islamic State and American national security. “If they put out what we knew, then the president could have not said, in a national election, ‘Al Qaeda’s on the run and we’ve killed Bin Laden,’” he said, referring to Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. “Even today, he talks about Bin Laden as though that was a stroke of genius.” Mr. Flynn also questioned the decision to kill Bin Laden. “Killing Bin Laden was the wrong thing to do,” he said. “They could have captured him.” In killing Bin Laden, he said, “we created a new version of Allah.” “What we should have done is shown him to be a decrepit old guy, put him in a freaking cage, in a cell, and put him on trial,” Mr. Flynn added. “Make it a big messy trial, make it global.” Mr. Flynn has also said that the C.I.A., at the urging of the White House, was playing down warnings from the D.I.A. about the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which would later become the Islamic State. “I’m telling you, the C.I.A. has a lot to reflect on because of this,” he said. A number of current and former officials dispute Mr. Flynn’s account, saying concerns about the resurgence of Islamist militants in the midst of Syria’s civil war were widespread in the intelligence community. Mr. Flynn, who was fired from the D.I.A. after serving only two years of a three-year appointment, has described his dismissal as an act of political retribution by the C.I.A. and Obama administration officials who did not want to hear what he was saying. Other officials, including some with direct knowledge of the decision to dismiss Mr. Flynn, said he was forced out for a more straightforward reason: He was not a good manager, and his efforts to reform the agency left it in chaos. It was not Mr. Flynn’s first run-in with the civilian intelligence community. The ill will stretches back years, current and former officials said, and it transformed into open hostility when Mr. Flynn was running military intelligence under Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal in Afghanistan. In January 2010, after less than a year on the job, Mr. Flynn released a paper, “ Fixing Intel ,” that was highly critical of American intelligence work in Afghanistan. It bluntly stated that “the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” and said that it had only itself to blame because it had failed to understand Afghanistan’s cultural complexities. The paper was widely praised in defense circles as insightful. But at the C.I.A., officials were furious at what they saw as a direct attack on the aptitude and professionalism of the roughly 1,000 agency personnel who were serving in Afghanistan at the time. They were also incensed at the timing of the paper, which became public five days after a suicide attack that killed seven C.I.A. officers at a base in eastern Afghanistan. Mr. Flynn’s searing critique was seen at the agency as the height of insensitivity. Mr. Flynn has been unapologetic about his views of not only the C.I.A. but other national security agencies, including the D.I.A. under his leadership. “They’ve really been lying to the American public,” he said in the interview, referring to the Obama administration and much of the national security and intelligence establishment. “The Department of Defense and those of us that have allowed this sort of a happy talk — ‘We’re moving in the right direction, things are working.’ It’s not. The Taliban are going to come back into power, or ISIS is going to come back into power.”

Michael Flynn
Russia
Donald Trump
CIA
Classified Information
US Politics
Cyberwarfare
2016 Presidential Election


Deutsche Bank to Face British Lawsuit Over High-Speed Trading

Abstract: FRANKFURT — Deutsche Bank, already troubled by lawsuits and official investigations, faces another challenge. A group of lawyers said on Monday that they planned to sue the company in British court, accusing the bank of using high-speed trading software to profit in foreign currency markets at the expense of customers. The lawsuit is to be filed later this year on behalf of companies, investors and even some central banks that frequently buy and sell currencies. The lawsuit would mirror one filed in New York last month by some of the same law firms. That lawsuit asserts that Deutsche Bank used a software platform known as Autobahn to take advantage of millisecond changes in exchange rates to give clients worse prices than they were entitled to. Deutsche Bank denied the claims in the lawsuit, saying in a statement Monday: “We disagree with the allegations and will be defending ourselves in court.” The lawsuit was filed last month against Deutsche Bank in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. The class-action lawsuit attracted little notice in the media until the German magazine Der Spiegel reported it on Sunday. In November, the British bank Barclays agreed to a settlement with the New York State Department of Financial Services on claims very similar to the ones made against Deutsche Bank. Barclays agreed to pay $150 million and to fire an employee held responsible for the wrongdoing. Christopher Rother, a Berlin lawyer involved in the lawsuit against Deutsche Bank, said on Monday that it was impossible to quantify the financial damage to the bank’s clients because the trading system was so opaque. “I would say in the billions,” said Mr. Rother, who is head of the Berlin office of Hausfeld, a law firm with offices in Washington and other locations that filed the New York lawsuit in conjunction with several other firms. Mr. Rother said that the complainants would ask the court to compel Deutsche Bank to turn over records that would shed light on the scale of the potential losses. In recent years, Deutsche Bank has battled a long list of accusations of wrongdoing in financial markets. In November, the bank agreed with the authorities in the United States to pay a fine of $258 million in connection with allegations it conducted transactions with countries subject to American sanctions, including Iran, Libya, Syria, Myanmar and Sudan. In April, Deutsche Bank agreed to $2.5 billion in penalties related to accusations it was among banks that manipulated global interest rates underpinning trillions of dollars in mortgages, student loans and other debt. The bank is also among those accused of colluding to rig benchmark rates for currencies, and it faces separate lawsuits from companies and other investors who say they lost money as a result. Anshu Jain resigned as co-chief executive of Deutsche Bank in June amid complaints by investors that he had not done enough to infuse a greater sense of ethics in the London-based investment bank, which was at the center of most of the wrongdoing. The latest accusations present another distraction for Mr. Jain’s successor, John Cryan, the former chief financial officer at the Swiss bank UBS, who is in the middle of a broad reorganization of Deutsche Bank designed to make it less complex and more profitable. The currency lawsuits also illustrate the perils of high-speed trading and the potential for abuse by sophisticated market players. Trades in the huge foreign currency market can be executed by computer platforms in milliseconds. The lawsuit claims that Deutsche Bank’s Autobahn platform delayed transactions sometimes by hundreds of milliseconds — an eternity in the world of currency trading. If prices in that period moved in Deutsche Bank’s favor, it executed the trades, according to the New York lawsuit. If not, the bank refused the trades, the lawsuit claims. “Deutsche Bank exploited its superior bargaining position and superior knowledge” of the market, the lawsuit says. The trading systems were devised to defend banks from attempts to exploit them in their role as intermediaries between currency buyers and sellers. Barclays had a currency trading system known as BARX that could delay trades slightly to detect and foil so-called toxic flows — attempts by hedge funds or others to game the system using their own sophisticated software. But Barclays did not distinguish between toxic flows and normal trading, according to the settlement with the New York State Department of Financial Services, which detailed the circumstances of the case. Instead, Barclays used the trading delays to profit from ordinary clients, the settlement said. When some clients complained that the software was causing them to miss opportunities to trade at better rates with other banks, Barclays senior managers instructed the bank’s traders and information technology specialists to give misleading answers, according to the settlement agreement. Traders were told to “just blame it on the weekend IT release and say it’s being fixed,” the settlement agreement said. The lead plaintiff in the class-action suit in New York is Axiom Investment Advisors, a small hedge fund. Mr. Rother said that his firm had been hired to represent several central banks that believed they had lost money because of the trading system. He would not name the central banks, but said they did not include the European Central Bank or the Bundesbank, the German central bank. Hausfeld also represents clients in Africa, Asia and Europe who believe they were victims of currency-trading manipulation. Mr. Rother said the case against Deutsche Bank would be filed in London, the center of global currency trading, around the middle of the year.

Deutsche Bank
Lawsuits
Currency
Europe
High Frequency Trading Flash Orders
Banking and Finance
Great Britain


At Linn State Technical, a Fight Over Required Drug Tests

Abstract: Linn State Technical College in Linn, Mo., informed students this semester that they would be required to submit to a urine test that would be checked for illegal drugs as a condition of studying at the college. Almost immediately, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued on behalf of several dissenting Linn State students and have won a temporary injunction. The A.C.L.U. says Linn State is the first public college in the country to require all adult students to submit to mandatory drug tests. Linn State officials however, say the policy is legal and was developed in the interest of their 1,200 students. The tests, which require a $50 fee per student, would be used to determine the presence of the following, according to the university: cocaine; amphetamines and methamphetamines ; marijuana ; opiates; PCP; benzodiazepines; barbiturates; methadone; methaqualone; propoxyphene; and oxycodone. A hearing on the case is scheduled for Oct. 25. Kent Brown, the college’s lawyer, discusses. QUESTION Why did Linn State decide drug testing was necessary? ANSWER There are several reasons that culminated in the decision. It was a progression, I would say. Several of the programs have been drug tested previously, either because there’s a federal or state law or regulation that requires it. The school has advisory councils that are made up of businesses that would be potential businesses to hire our graduates that support the program with their expertise, and those advisory councils have been surveyed and the majority of their comments is that drug testing is pretty well becoming the norm in their industries so there was that vector also that was moving toward drug testing. And the third thing that I would identify: the college has been moving toward its mission, which is preparing students for profitable employment and a lifetime of learning. And there was a feeling that the college wasn’t properly stepping up to prepare the students for getting jobs in industries where drug testing was becoming the norm and an unavoidable barrier to getting and keeping the good jobs in the industry. There was an educational motivation as well. And that, and other miscellaneous things, I think motivated the adoption of the policy. Q. How many students had been tested prior to the injunction? A. About 540. It was all of the incoming freshmen and any student who had not been involved for a semester. Q. Did any students refuse to take the test? A. No. People showed up and took the test and no one objected. Q. Would they have been expelled otherwise? A. That’s not accurate. They would be administratively withdrawn if they refused to participate in the drug screening program. The drug screening program is more than just a drug test. There are several ways where students can actually avoid giving a test and continue going to school. They, for example, can petition the president of the college and if they have a valid reason why they should not be required to participate — that’s one reason to be excused from the test. The program applies to all students. Any concerns that they had would be answered. They would talk to school counselors, and if they just flat-out refused to participate in this, I guess, ultimately, if they did this they would be administratively withdrawn or they could withdraw themselves. Q. What would be a valid excuse for opting out of a test? A. The policy does give some valid examples, and I would certainly not speak for Dr. Claycomb, the president of the college, and the board. But for example, I would assume, you know, if someone had an extraordinarily confidential blood problem that would be disclosed or would be shown by this testing — and I don’t think anything would — if that’s a possibility, that would be a good reason for them to be excluded. Q. Is there precedent for this? A. There is certainly precedent for drug testing, which is a much more punitive screen then what we’re doing. The industries that we train students for, for example, I believe there’s a federal regulation that over-the-road truckers are randomly drug tested. So our students who are applying for a commercial driver’s license have to do drug testing under the federal regulation or they can’t get their license. There is precedent in the industries that the students will be applying to work in. And I think a lot of notoriety has arisen from the fact that there’s a perception we are testing an entire student body. Well, the student body at Linn State is very different from, for example, the University of Missouri or Harvard or some place like that. We are a technical college. We do heavy equipment operations. The vast majority of our training programs deal with either high-voltage electricity or heavy equipment operations, for dangerous, caustic chemicals or combinations of the above. All of these things are things we need to guard against for the safety of the students. Q. What would the punishment be if someone tested positive? A. We don’t view it as a punishment, but the response would be, well, they’d of course have appeal rights if they think something was wrong with the test, But assuming everyone agreed, they’d have to meet with a counselor and then they can participate in an online program designed to avoid drug abuse and dependence. There are options for education. And they would retest, and originally, it would have been about 45 days later. So there’s no adverse action from a positive initial test. It would not be until a second or even a third bad test that they would seriously be considered to be forced out of the college. Q. Did graduates have problems with failed drug tests at their jobs? Is that the reason for this? A. I probably need to answer that this way: I can’t give you specific examples, but it would not surprise me at all if some students encountered difficulties with drug tests after they graduated. The members of our advisory councils for various programs were some of the initiators of this idea and I doubt they would have brought it up if it hadn’t been a problem. We don’t have any statistics once they graduate.

Linn State Technical College
American Civil Liberties Union
Tests (Drug Use)
Freedom of Speech and Expression


Jungle Camp in Malaysia Yields Graves and Signs of Migrant Abuse

Abstract: BUKIT WANG BURMA, Malaysia — Among the debris of wood, bamboo and plastic tarpaulin at an abandoned camp in the dense jungle here lies a coffin-size cage made from sticks tied together with rusted barbed wire. Next to it, an enclosure that could have held scores of people also bristles with barbed wire. And over a ridge, the police have started unearthing bodies from shallow graves. The police in Malaysia have said little about the grim discoveries at desolate camps like this one on a hillside near the country’s border with Thailand . But what was left behind here suggests that the camps were busy holding stations for migrants under the control of ruthless, sophisticated human smuggling rings. The Malaysian government on Tuesday took reporters on a two-hour trek through a buzzing jungle to view this camp in the state of Perlis, in the country’s far north. It is one of several where investigators say they have identified a total of 139 graves believed to hold the bodies of migrants, including members of the Rohingya minority fleeing religious persecution in Myanmar. Not far across the border, in Thailand’s Songkhla Province, the Thai authorities have uncovered graves containing at least 36 more bodies. A crackdown in southern Thailand on these smuggling networks is believed to have set off the regionwide crisis this month in which thousands of migrants were abandoned by smugglers and stranded at sea. More than 3,000 have landed in Malaysia and Indonesia in recent weeks, and the International Organization for Migration appealed on Tuesday for $26 million to help them. Muhammad Bahar, a detective with the police in Perlis, said officers had exhumed a body on Tuesday from one of 37 primitive graves discovered near this camp in Bukit Wang Burma. He said it was too early to draw any conclusions about the identity of the dead person or the cause of death. “Another forensic team will confirm later,” he said, standing near the exhumation site, where other officers worked with shovels and hoes. “We have to let forensic do their job.” But the scene appeared to add weight to reports that migrants transported across Southeast Asia by smugglers had suffered extreme brutality. The lower part of the camp was dominated by what appeared to be a holding pen made from wooden poles crisscrossed by barbed wire. On higher ground, a dilapidated watchtower looked over the settlement, which also had a trash pit and a large water tank, suggesting that the site could have been used to hold hundreds of people. Those who have studied human smuggling said the syndicates often supplemented their smuggling operations with ransom and extortion schemes. Relatives of those smuggled into Thailand are often called and ordered to transfer large sums in exchange for the freedom of their relatives, according to advocates for the migrants and the migrants themselves. “They beat you and tell you to call home and come up with the money,” Jeffrey Labovitz, chief of mission at the International Organization for Migration in Thailand, said by telephone. “It’s a ruthless business mentality.” Image A Malaysian forensics team examining human remains from one of the 37 shallow graves discovered at the camp near the border with Thailand. Credit Mohd Rasfan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The smuggling rings demand payments as high as $3,000 to release their clients, who are sometimes starved and abused to put pressure on relatives to come up with the money, according to Alistair D. B. Cook, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “Extortion isn’t the word for it,” Mr. Cook said. “The alternative is death. It’s worse than extortion.” The camps are out of the way, but they sit along a major trading route that links Singapore and the Malaysian peninsula with the rest of mainland Southeast Asia. The route is a hub of legitimate trade as well as a transit point for illicit drugs, smuggled fuel and Malaysians seeking libertine pleasures in freewheeling Thailand. The Malaysian home minister, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, said on Tuesday that investigators were examining whether forestry rangers in the densely wooded border region had colluded with smugglers, according to Bernama, the Malaysian news agency. Some forestry officers have already been detained, he said. Khalid Abu Bakar, the inspector general of the police in Malaysia, said Monday that the camps were believed to have been occupied since 2013 and that two of them were abandoned only two to three weeks ago, according to Bernama . He said the public disclosure of the suspected graves “proves that the Malaysian government is transparent and not hiding any information involving human trafficking issues.” Understanding Southeast Asia’s Migrant Crisis About 25,000 migrants left Myanmar and Bangladesh on rickety smugglers’ boats in the first three months of 2015, according to a United Nations estimate. But some advocates for Rohingya migrants said the abuses had been largely ignored. “We hear about families waiting for people to come here who they never hear about again,” Zafar Ahmad bin Abdul Ghani, the president of the Myanmar Ethnic Rohingyas Human Rights Organization Malaysia , said in a telephone interview from Kuala Lumpur. “Malaysia needs to investigate Rohingya who have died on the border with Thailand,” he added. “Maybe they also need to investigate the enforcement departments in Malaysia. Have they done enough to enforce and investigate? How can the traffickers cross the border in this area?” In Wang Kelian, a nearby settlement of paddy fields, some residents said the migrants sometimes appeared and begged for food or cash before moving on by foot. “We know they come through to Malaysia for work, for safety, for family,” said a resident who gave only her family name, Halimah. “But it is shocking for us, too, to learn about how they are treated in the camps.” Malaysian officials have said little about how these camps and smuggling networks could have existed, undisturbed, for years. But investigators on the Thai side of the border say the camps operated with the help of local officials, Thai law enforcement officers and residents. Nearly 70 Thai police officers have been transferred from their posts as part of the crackdown. Last week, a former government official whom the authorities described as a kingpin in the smuggling operation surrendered to the Thai police. The former official, Patchuban Angchotipan, who had evaded capture for more than a week, is the former chairman of the provincial administration in Satun, a Thai province where smuggling camps were discovered this month. Image A coffin-sized cage was found at the camp. Credit Mohd Rasfan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images In what the police say is a measure of the money involved in smuggling, the authorities froze more than $2 million of Mr. Patchuban’s assets. Among other businesses, Mr. Patchuban owned companies that ran speedboat and ferry services in the Andaman Sea, which were believed to have been used to transport migrants. Mr. Patchuban, who is known by his nickname, Ko Tong, has been charged with colluding in human smuggling, illegal detention and abduction for ransom. In an interview on Tuesday, Police Gen. Aek Angsananont, the deputy commissioner of Thailand’s police force, said the smuggling rings generally smuggled Bangladeshi and ethnic Rohingya migrants on boats into Thailand and brought them over land to Malaysia. General Aek, who is leading the investigation into the smuggling rings, said the police had obtained arrest warrants for 77 suspects. Of those, 46 have been arrested, he said, and the rest are “on the run.” He added that the crackdown had the support of the highest levels of Thailand’s military government and that the police were “clearing the mountains” along the Malaysian border of smuggling operations. The crackdown began this month when a Rohingya man filed a complaint at a police station in southern Thailand, saying his nephew was being held for ransom. The police investigating the case discovered the mass graves on the Thai side of the border. The authorities have not disclosed how the people found in the graves died, and some bodies were so badly composed that the cause of death may never be known. A doctor at Songklanagarind Hospital in southern Thailand said that medical workers were close to completing autopsies and that the police would soon reveal the results. Increasingly, the Rohingya leaving Myanmar have included women and children. And clues amassed by the Malaysian police from the border camps suggested that children had been among the inmates. Among photos of items recovered from the camps, one showed a pair of mildewed, pink children’s sandals.

Malaysia
Thailand
Smuggling
Rohingya
Human trafficking
Human Rights
Kuala Lumpur
Refugees,Internally Displaced People


Whitey Ford, a Six-Time Champion, Can Add a Title: Greatest Living Yankee

Abstract: Who is now the Greatest Living Yankee? For 16 years, Yogi Berra wore that honor, and he wore it well, and humbly. He would show up in spring training and patter around the clubhouse, a little old man amid the modern-day behemoths. Berra, who died Tuesday at the age of 90, seemed most comfortable with the Guidrys and Gossages, spring advisers from more recent glorious eras. Presumably, most of the new breed, crowded into narrow aisles of lockers, had some clue that this was the very same Lawrence Peter Berra who once terrorized pitchers from April to October, swinging at anything that moved. (I have a friend, Big Al, who likes to torment me in midwinter with a totally unsolicited email that asks, “Just how great was Yogalah, anyway?” Sometimes, just to be cruel, Big Al reminds me that Berra hit eight of his 12 World Series homers against my Brooklyn Dodgers.) On no other North American sports franchise is there the same cachet to the hypothetical ranking of Greatest Living. Undoubtedly fans and writers perform the same mental exercise for the Montreal Canadiens or the Boston Celtics or the Dallas Cowboys, but the Yankees lead the league in monuments and plaques and retired numbers and special “days,” some of it blatantly extraneous, to sell tickets and memorabilia. Still, the Yankees have nearly a century’s worth of excellence, starting with Babe Ruth’s arrival in 1920. At some point, people began playing with the concept of Greatest Living Ballplayer for the entire major leagues. I recall debates about Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams in their old ages — Stan Musial was always third in that exercise — and now it is probably Willie Mays. Admittedly, these mental gymnastics have a morbid side because they involve the passing of the mantle — never worn by Mickey Mantle , by the way. Whether or not anybody had invented the category in his lifetime, Babe Ruth was surely the Greatest Living Yankee almost immediately upon lofting home runs at the Polo Grounds, allowing the Yankees to build their own palace across the Harlem River. Lou Gehrig came later and died young. When the Babe died on Aug. 16, 1948, he was surely the Greatest. Was there any debate that DiMaggio became the Greatest Living Yankee as he morphed from classic center fielder to pitchman for coffee machines and perennial guest at banquets? Mantle, who inherited the superstar role after 1951, lived longer than he had ever imagined, but he died on Aug. 13, 1995, at the age of 63. DiMaggio lived until March 8, 1999, and was honored in a funeral in the cathedral in his hometown, San Francisco. Outside, in the plaza, dozens of people performed tai chi in the brisk sunshine. Then, with all due respect to the Scooter, Phil Rizzuto , the title went to Berra, with his .285 batting average and 358 homers (12 more in 75 World Series games), his exemplary catching and his versatility that allowed Casey Stengel to station “Mr. Berra” in the outfield to make room for that great Yankee Elston Howard. (Two stars who treated Howard — the first African-American on the Yankees — with particular acceptance were Musial and Berra.) Berra was a taut competitor (he took his cues from DiMaggio) and saved his so-called Yogi-isms for his spare time, unscripted. (Perhaps his final Yogi-ism came on Aug. 27, when Marty Appel, the Yankee historian, visited him at an assisted living home. “He asked the nurse what time 3:30 Mass is,” Appel reported fondly on Wednesday.) Now the title moves on. Personally, I think it is a no-brainer. The Greatest Living Yankee is Whitey Ford , who came out of Aviation High School, which was then in Manhattan, and helped pitch the Yankees to victory in the 1950 World Series when he was 21. In those days, there was no Tommy John surgery and there were no pitch counts or innings limits, but Stengel did minimize the smallish Ford — 5 feet 10 inches, 175 pounds — to some degree, and Ford prospered. When Ralph Houk managed from 1961 through 1963, Ford pitched 810 innings, winning 66 games and losing 19. He lasted 16 seasons, with a 236-106 record, and was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1974. Ford is now 86 and spends his time between Florida and Long Island. On Wednesday he was out to the doctor and then seeing friends for lunch, according to his wife, Joan, who said her husband was saddened by the death of his battery mate, his pal. Ford had often brought out the humor in Berra as he had for his moody friend Mantle. Ford was a witty presence in the clubhouse, available win or lose. When his body began to fall apart, along with the Yankee franchise in 1965, I referred to him as “the game lefty.” He smiled and suggested a word change — to “gamy.” Decades from now, somebody else can parse the lineage that will include Reggie Jackson , who played for three other teams; and Alex Rodriguez, who played for two others and once tried to jump to the Red Sox; as well as Don Mattingly, Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, beloved Yankee lifers. As far as I am concerned, Whitey Ford, nicknamed the Chairman of the Board by Howard, is now the Greatest Living Yankee.

Whitey Ford
Yankees
Yogi Berra
Babe Ruth
Joe DiMaggio
Lou Gehrig
Baseball


Italian Earns First Super-G Win

Abstract: Dominik Paris of Italy won his first career World Cup super-G, and Alexis Pinturault of France dominated the combined event in Kitzbühel, Austria. Bode Miller, who is returning from surgery on a herniated disk, said he was not ready to compete in the downhill on Saturday. ■ Claudia Riegler of Austria won the parallel giant slalom world championship in Lachtal, Austria, for her first major snowboarding title at 41, and Andrey Sobolev of Russia took the men’s gold.

Dominik Paris
Skiing
World Cup Skiing
Alpine skiing


Weighing Prospects for H.P.

Abstract: SHAREHOLDERS of Hewlett-Packard reacted instantly and almost violently to their company’s plan to acquire Electronic Data Systems . Hewlett’s stock began to plummet on May 12, just before the takeover was announced, and the selling continued the next day. All told, Hewlett’s market value fell by nearly $16 billion over the course of a few trading hours. An overreaction? It looks that way. The deal values E.D.S., a provider of technology services outsourced by other businesses, at $13.9 billion. If Hewlett’s chief executive, Mark V. Hurd , had blown that much in Las Vegas, the sellers seemed to be saying, it would have had a less malignant impact on the company’s intrinsic worth than absorbing E.D.S. Not that he would ever be so wasteful. In his three years on the job, Mr. Hurd has been an exemplary steward of Hewlett’s capital. He is credited with improving the company’s profitability not just by resorting to Plan A — firing people — but also by integrating activities more tightly. “Mark Hurd has done a spectacular job running Hewlett,” said Robert E. Turner, chief investment officer of Turner Investment Partners. “He has done a great job of streamlining and combining different aspects of the business that had been separate and distinct.” The result is a more productive, cost-effective operation that has been rewarded on Wall Street. Hewlett-Packard’s stock has more than doubled under Mr. Hurd, compared with a gain of less than 20 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. The stock closed at $44.96 Friday. That price represents a modest bounce from the May 13 low and the stock traded higher before the broad market sank this week, so some attitude readjustment about the acquisition must have occurred. Still, what made investors react as though E.D.S. would be less than worthless to Hewlett-Packard, and who is closer to the mark, the initial sellers or the more recent bargain hunters? IT isn’t hard to build a case against E.D.S. Its earnings and revenue growth are slower, and its profit margins smaller, than would seem possible for a company that has electronic, data and systems in its name. Managing back-office technology is a costly, labor-intensive activity. That is why companies turn the task over to specialists like E.D.S., but even when it is a company’s bread and butter, it is still a hard way to make a living. “The more business you have, the more people you have to hire, and there’s a lot of turnover,” Mr. Turner said. “A service business is kind of tricky.” But Mr. Hurd has shown he can make disparate business lines work together harmoniously, so it may be unwise to bet against his doing it again. Though it may be a plodder today, E.D.S. could be a linchpin in Hewlett’s effort to adapt to changes afoot in business computing. Sales of servers and other big pieces of hardware are likely to slow as more organizations turn to outsiders to meet technology needs. Having E.D.S. in the fold should ease the damage to Hewlett by allowing it to offer customers a range of options: providing services at the customers’ facilities or at a Hewlett data center — using Hewlett equipment in each case, of course — or selling them the hardware outright. Mr. Turner has faith in Mr. Hurd’s ability to move Hewlett toward “the whole cloud computing thing,” as he called Internet-based technology systems, but he would prefer some concrete evidence of success before he buys the stock. “I’m inclined to own it,” he said. “These guys at Hewlett are pretty smart, but it could be six months” before he takes the plunge. Mark Mowrey, editor of the newsletter TechValue Report and a portfolio manager at Al Frank Asset Management, sees no need to wait that long. His portfolios own Hewlett, although he advises holding out for a slightly better price, perhaps $43. “Because of the progress he’s made so far, I’m willing to give Mark Hurd the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “I trust the guy. This stuff isn’t easy, integrating companies, but he has a sense of what it takes to become a diversified hardware and services company.”

Hewlett-Packard Co
Electronic Data Systems Corporation
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures
Stocks and Bonds
Hurd Mark V
Computers and the Internet


Islanders Top Senators in Shootout

Abstract: Frans Nielsen scored the tying goal in the third period and then scored the only goal of the shootout as the visiting Islanders beat the Ottawa Senators, 5-4. The Islanders (5-5-3) outshot the Senators by 57-31 and got goals from Matt Martin, John Tavares and Pierre-Marc Bouchard in regulation.