Sparring in Albany Over Raising Wages to Build Lower-Cost Housing

Abstract: Two seemingly like-minded political allies — labor unions and nonprofit developers of lower-cost housing — have taken opposing sides in Albany over a bill that would require the developers to pay construction workers the prevailing wage, essentially a union-level wage far higher than nonunion pay. The developers, many of whom rely on government subsidies to build housing for low- and moderate-income families, say the bill would cut the production in half and increase rents at a vulnerable time for the industry, when the economic downturn has hampered the financing of low-cost housing. Supporters, however, argue that a prevailing-wage law would ensure quality construction and a decent standard of living for workers. The bill, introduced in the Assembly in January and in the State Senate in April, would require developers of government-subsidized residential housing projects to pay the prevailing wage. It will be debated as part of committee hearings in Albany on Tuesday. Another bill in the Assembly and the Senate would require prevailing wages on projects financed by industrial development agencies. Under state law, laborers on public works projects must be paid the prevailing wage, which varies according to the trade and location. The proposed legislation would expand the definition of public works to include all government-subsidized building projects by for-profit and nonprofit developers. Most workers who build subsidized low-cost housing in New York City are not currently required to be paid the prevailing wage. Projects receiving federal subsidies are required to pay it, under federal law. “There is always arguing about what is public work and what is not public work,” Assemblywoman Susan V. John of Rochester, chairwoman of the Assembly’s Labor Committee, who introduced the bill, said in a phone interview on Monday. “This is an effort to try to clear it up.” A report released last year by a nonprofit policy research group found that imposing prevailing wages on low- or moderate-cost housing projects could increase total development costs by about 25 percent and increase rents in a typical apartment by about $400 a month. The report was prepared by the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, which is made up of housing developers, construction company executives, bankers and academics. The median nonunion wage for New York City construction workers in selected trades was $13.50 an hour in 2007, and the union median wage was $19.57, according to the report. Because of the increased costs associated with paying the prevailing wage, developers would need larger government subsidies to build the same number of units, according to the report. “It will mean a lot of projects will not be feasible, or in order to make them feasible, they would be feasible for higher-income residents,” said Michael D. Lappin, president of the Community Preservation Corporation, a nonprofit lending consortium that has financed about 125,000 low-cost units around the state. “It will really have a direct impact on all the affordable housing being done. Much of that affordable housing is what has rebuilt New York’s urban neighborhoods.” The New York State Building and Construction Trades Council of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. , an influential labor group that represents the state’s major construction unions, has been pushing lawmakers to expand the prevailing-wage requirements for years. “Is the cost of construction higher? Yes it is,” said Edward J. Malloy, president of the group. “But I think we deliver a better product, on time and in budget.” Phillip Morrow, president and chief executive of the nonprofit South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation , which builds low-cost units, said the financial impact of paying the prevailing wage was only one concern. Mr. Morrow said he also worried that the nonunion, largely black and Hispanic work force that builds these projects would be replaced with mostly white union labor. “The unions don’t have the best record for employing minority workers and workers from the community,” he said. Mr. Morrow said that if he had to pay the prevailing wage, his options would be limited. “We’re going to ask for more public dollars. In the Bronx, we don’t have the option of raising the rents. The market is not going to support these higher rents. We have to get more subsidy per unit.” Opponents of the bill said federally financed projects receive additional money in order to pay the prevailing wage, but the proposed state legislation includes no extra financing. They said that because many of these projects receive private financing, they should not be considered public works, like schools or roads. “It’s absurd,” Mr. Lappin said. “Who thinks of public works as a 40-unit apartment building in the Bronx that needs some public help to keep it affordable?” Assemblywoman John said developments such as Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, a residential and commercial project for which the city and the state have agreed to provide subsidies, were clearly public works. “I do believe that it’s important that we uphold the provisions of our State Constitution that say that when we’re spending tax money, people are paid prevailing wage,” she said.

American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations


Speak Up, a Computer Is Listening

Abstract: Of all the high-tech fantasies that sci-fi movies tantalize their escapist audiences with, surely that bit about giving your computer spoken orders is one of the most alluring. Ever since “Star Trek,” we’ve dreamed of being able to say, “Computer, display all known sources of dilithium crystals in the Kraxon Nebula!” So far, the closest we can get is strapping on a headset and dictating, using a program like Dragon NaturallySpeaking to do the typing. This software is great for anyone who can’t type or doesn’t like to. And it lets you speak the names of menu commands and “click” links on a Web page. But that’s not the same as telling the computer what to do in conversational English. NaturallySpeaking 10, available Thursday, takes some baby steps in the right direction. It doesn’t turn your computer into the “Star Trek” mainframe; it doesn’t know what you mean by, for example, “Make this document shorter and funnier.” But in its timid, conservative way, it takes voice control unmistakably closer to that holy grail of computing. NatSpeak’s principal mission, though, is to type out, into any Windows program, whatever you say. And in version 10, its maker, Nuance, claims to have eked out yet another 20 percent accuracy improvement. I installed the program, donned the included headset and clicked “Skip initial training.” (In the early days of speech recognition, you had to read a 45-minute sample script to train the program to recognize your voice. Today, the software is so good, you can skip the training altogether.) As a quick test, I read aloud the first 1,000 words of “Freakonomics” into Microsoft Word. Impressively enough, NatSpeak effortlessly transcribed words like “Ku Klux Klan” and “Punic war.” It did, however, mistype seven easier words (“addition” instead of “edition,” for example, and “per trail” instead of “portrayal”). Accuracy tally with no training: 99.3 percent. Not too shabby. Then I tried a second test: I read one of the five-minute training scripts (a Kennedy speech), which is recommended for even better initial accuracy. I again read the first 1,000 words of “Freakonomics,” and the program mistyped five words. Accuracy this time: 99.5 percent. In both cases, the number of spelling mistakes was zero. People who use NaturallySpeaking never make typos, only wordos. As you correct the mistakes with your voice — a speedy, streamlined procedure — the program learns. Whether you skip initial training or not, accuracy inches toward perfection over time. One way that Nuance has improved accuracy is by acknowledging, for the first time, that not everyone speaks alike. Version 10 recognizes eight accents: general (none), Australian, British, Indian, Great Lakes (Buffalo to Chicago), Southeast Asian, Southern United States and Spanish. If you don’t specify, the program will identify you automatically. Isn’t that somehow politically incorrect? Should a software program treat you differently depending on how you sound? Ah, the heck with it. It’s dictation software. A little stereotyping can go a long way. Speed is another virtue in version 10. The program still waits for a pause in your talking before it types, so that it can use context to choose, for example, the correct homonym (there/they’re/their). But that waiting period has been halved; text appears almost instantaneously at each pause. Second — and here’s where things start to get Star Trekky — the program understands more “natural language” commands. For example, italicizing something you’ve already typed, say, the phrase “gas prices,” used to require three separate commands. First, “Select gas prices.” Then, “Italicize that.” Finally, to move your insertion point back where you stopped, “Go to end of document.” In version 10, a single command does the trick: “italicize ‘gas prices.’” The program makes the change and returns to where you stopped, all in a blink. The same trick also works with the verbs “bold,” “underline,” “delete,” “cut” and “copy.” (Yes, “bold” is a verb now.) You can speak a series of new Search commands, beginning with “Search computer for ...,” “Search the Web for ...,” “Search e-mail for ...” and so on. For example: “Search maps for Chinese restaurants near Hoboken.” Or “Search Wikipedia for Bay of Pigs.” Or “Search images for Gwyneth Paltrow.” These shortcuts work 100 percent reliably and do truly save you time and typing. Next version: more of them, please. And now, the NatSpeak Frequently Asked Questions: “Does NaturallySpeaking work on a Mac?” Yes, but only when the Mac is running Windows and you’re using a U.S.B. headset adapter. It works fantastically in Boot Camp and fast enough in VMware Fusion, an emulator program. Of course, it might be simpler just to buy MacSpeech Dictate, a Mac program that uses the same Dragon recognition technology. The current version is fast and accurate, but it lags behind NatSpeak in features and power; it doesn’t even let you make corrections by voice, and therefore the accuracy never improves. But a 1.2 version, with voice correction and voice spelling, is in testing now. “Can I transcribe interviews with it?” No. NatSpeak knows only one person’s voice: yours. It also requires a clean audio signal, like the one from a headset mike half an inch from your mouth. “Can I dictate with a wireless Bluetooth earpiece?” Yes. In fact, version 10 greatly expands the number of compatible earpiece models (18 so far, listed at nuance.com ). Accuracy may take a hit, though. “Can I dictate into a pocket recorder and transcribe it later?” Yes. The setup is more involved, though: only some recorders are compatible, and you have to record 15 minutes of training. “Doesn’t Windows Vista come with speech recognition?” Yes, and it’s really good — quite similar to NatSpeak, actually. But Nuance says that, oddly enough, Vista has had virtually no effect on NatSpeak sales. I’m guessing that obscurity is part of the reason; most people aren’t even aware that Vista offers such a feature. Vista doesn’t come with the required headset, either. Nor does the Vista version offer the same accuracy, features or power of NatSpeak, and it isn’t available in other languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch and so on). NatSpeak is available in a number of versions. The Standard edition ($100) has the same accuracy as the others, but it’s just for bare-bones dictation. To get the more advanced goodies described in this review — the natural-language commands, Bluetooth mikes and recorders — you need the Preferred edition ($200). It also lets you set up voice macros that type out boilerplate text. For example, you can say, “Buzz off,” and it will type: “Thanks for thinking of me! Unfortunately, I’m afraid I’m unable to accept your kind offer at this time.” There are also medical and legal editions ($1,600 and $1,200, yikes), as well as a Professional edition ($900) for corporate administrators who want to manage many NatSpeak installations from a central server. The Pro version also recognizes natural-language commands for Microsoft Outlook, like “Send e-mail to Mom” or “Schedule a meeting with Barack Obama and John McCain.” Apart from Vista, NatSpeak really has no competition. Philips has dropped out of the American market. I.B.M.’s own ViaVoice hasn’t been updated since 2003, and its sole distributor is, get this, Nuance. Maybe that’s why Nuance makes only small, confident changes from one version of NatSpeak to the next. Without any rivals, why add bells and whistles that risk mucking up the program’s virtues? As a result, existing NaturallySpeaking owners can usually afford to skip a generation between upgrades. Version 10 is a healthy leap ahead of version 8, but version 9 owners shouldn’t feel compelled to upgrade. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some real work to do: “Search maps for dilithium crystals near New York City. ...”

Computers and the Internet
Voice Recognition Systems
Wireless Communications
Science Fiction
Bluetooth Wireless Technology


Syria Peace Hopes Dim Further as Opposition Rejects Moscow Talks

Abstract: BEIRUT, Lebanon — As the world focused last week on the attacks by Islamist extremists in Paris, hopes were fading for the latest effort to wind down the war in Syria , a conflict seen as driving radicalization among Muslims worldwide. For months, Russia has been working to persuade government and opposition figures to attend preliminary talks in Moscow on Jan. 26 that are aimed at starting a new peace process. But in recent days, several leading opposition figures, apparently doubting Russia’s credibility as a mediator, said they would not attend, undermining the initiative. Chief among them was Moaz al-Khatib, a cleric from Damascus who is one of the few exiled figures who retains credibility among opposition fighters inside Syria, and who had earlier urged colleagues to take the talks seriously. But he declared on his Facebook page that he would not attend, saying, “We don’t have the conditions for the success of this meeting.” The only other international proposal on the table — a freeze in fighting in the contested city of Aleppo proposed by the United Nations envoy, Staffan de Mistura — has yet to gain momentum, though officials continue to meet with the dozens of players who would need to agree even to that modest, incremental plan. As Syria increasingly becomes the world’s problem, all sides in the conflict have reason to re-evaluate their positions. Falling oil prices are putting stress on Russia and Iran, the main backers of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad . Another Assad ally, the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, faces the prospect of a large population of Sunni refugees from Syria becoming permanent, altering the country’s sectarian balance of power. On the other side, the United States, though it has long called for Mr. Assad’s ouster, increasingly appears to see checking the growth of the Islamic State extremist group as a higher priority. Turkey, a major backer of the revolt against Mr. Assad, faces a growing burden from a refugee crisis that will only deepen as the conflict goes on. Inside the country, relatively moderate Syrian insurgents are losing ground to extremist groups like the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in the northern regions that were long their center of gravity. The government is depleting its manpower and increasingly relying on foreign Shiite militias and irregular forces. Yet these predicaments do not seem to have moved major players closer to compromise. The Syrian government seems to believe the world has decided that Mr. Assad is staying in power. “The hard days in Syria are gone, and now we are getting out of the tunnel,” Bouthaina Shaaban, a presidential adviser, told Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen television last week. At the same time, many armed opposition groups, as well as the main exile opposition coalition, refuse to discuss any political solution that does not involve Mr. Assad leaving. Many ordinary Syrians, on the other hand, while mistrustful of international powers they see as having abandoned them to their fate, are willing to try almost anything. Nasser al-Hariri, a top official in the Syrian opposition coalition based in Istanbul, said he had been surprised on a recent visit to southern Turkey to find many people involved in the opposition interested in exploring Moscow’s proposal. The coalition has been vociferously critical of the initiative. “People were saying: ‘We’ve been trying the American approach for years, and we’ve gotten nothing. Let’s try Moscow,’ ” even at the expense of angering the United States and its allies, he said. Despite Russia’s alliance with Mr. Assad against the nearly four-year insurgency, some Assad opponents initially said they were ready to try out Moscow’s approach — a measure, they said, of the desperation that many Syrians on all sides feel over a war that has displaced nearly half the population and killed more than 200,000 people, with no end in sight. The momentum was lost, diplomats familiar with the planning say, when it became apparent that Moscow was allowing the Syrian government to cherry-pick its interlocutors, issuing invitations to individuals rather than to the various opposition groups. That led to the withdrawal of Mr. Khatib, as well as of a group led by Louay Hussein, an opposition figure from inside Syria who was recently arrested by the government. For now, the Moscow meeting is expected to go ahead, though its chances of making even modest progress currently appear limited.

Syria
Russia
Staffan de Mistura
Bashar al-Assad
Bouthaina Shaaban
Sheik Ahmad Moaz al- Khatib
International relations


Southwest Ends Open-Boarding Policy

Abstract: Southwest Airlines abandoned its longstanding first-come-first-served approach to seating yesterday, giving business travelers, who pay the highest fares, first choice in boarding. Those travelers will also receive extra frequent-flier credits and a free alcoholic beverage, in a move the airline expects to bring in an additional $100 million a year. Southwest, which for 36 years has competed with low fares and a simple business approach, is becoming a more complex company. The number of fares it might offer on a single flight, for instance, is increasing to as many as 15, from the current 8. The changes are prompted by increased competition from traditional carriers like United Airlines and American Airlines, which have reduced their costs in recent years and can now profitably offer many fares equivalent to Southwest’s. Rising fuel prices, meanwhile, have forced the airlines to increase fares. For Southwest, attracting more business travelers is crucial in seeking more revenue per ticket. While Southwest will be competing more aggressively for business travelers, its changes could actually help other airlines by generally lifting fares. The changes are intended “to create a reason for people to give us more money,” the chief executive, Gary C. Kelly, said in a telephone interview. “We’ve not done that in the past very well.” Starting today, a new class of Southwest fares, called “business select,” will cost $10 to $30 more than the airline’s recent highest fares, which were typically purchased at the last minute. Passengers paying the extra money will receive “A” boarding passes, allowing them to line up in the first group; in the past, all passengers, regardless of how much they paid, had a more or less equal opportunity to get an “A” pass by checking in online, beginning 24 hours before a flight. Preboarding for families and others who need more time, which used to occur before “A” group boarding, was recently switched to after “A” boarding. The change brings Southwest more into line with conventional airlines, which have long showered perks on their highest-paying passengers. Anyone who makes 16 round trips on Southwest in 12 months will automatically receive “A” boarding passes. Southwest also changed its Web site, which will now show only three fares a flight: “business select”; a separate refundable fare known as “business” that comes without the perks; and “wanna get away,” the cheapest fare available, which is not refundable. For people who think of Southwest as primarily a leisure-class airline, Mr. Kelly said, “We violently disagree.” It has the frequency of flights between many major markets that are expected of a business-class airline, he said, though in the past perhaps it “hasn’t really told that story.”

Southwest Airlines
Airlines and Airplanes
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)


Qaddafi Forces Spreading Land Mines in Misurata

Abstract: MISURATA, Libya — Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi scattered antitank land mines on the port of this besieged city late Thursday night, threatening once more to close the city’s only route for evacuation and supplies, according to accounts of witnesses, photographs and physical evidence collected on the ground. The land mines were delivered by a Chinese-made variant of a Grad rocket that opens in flight and drops mines to the ground below, each slowed slightly and oriented for arming by a small green parachute, according to an identification of the sub-munitions by specialists who were provided photographs and dimensions of the weapons. The mines hit the port at 9 or 10 p.m. Thursday, after rockets were heard being fired on the city from the southeast. A short while later, a truck driven by rebels who were patrolling the harbor struck two of them. Both men inside were wounded, according to a port supervisor and one of the victims, Faisal el-Mahrougi, the driver. Officials and guards said more than 20 mines were distributed in the attack, and remains of at least 13 were observed firsthand. It was not possible to verify an exact number, as many had been destroyed by rebels who, to clear the mines, shot them with rifles, causing them to explode. By nightfall on Friday, the port appeared to have been cleared. The use of mine-distributing rockets echoed the documented use of cluster bombs here, and underscored anew the Qaddafi government’s efforts to deny the use of the port to the rebels and to international aid organizations. Regarded as highly indiscriminate weapons, land mines are widely banned by the international community, though several nations, including the United States and Libya, have not signed the international convention prohibiting their production and use, and they retain land mines in their arsenals. The convention covers antipersonnel land mines, not land mines designed to destroy vehicles. However, the mine used in this attack, a Chinese Type 84 Model A, shares many of the indiscriminate characteristics of many banned mines. The use of such mines also introduces a new menace to the city. The Type 84 Model A is fired by a mobile multiple-rocket launcher system that can carry up to 24 rockets containing 8 mines each. The system’s range is slightly more than four miles, according to a publication of Jane’s Information Group. For months the port in Misurata, on the Mediterranean Sea at the city’s eastern edge, has been essential to the survival of the city. It has been the sole means of resupply and the only point of evacuation for migrant workers and hospital patients, who have been carried to safety by ships, tugs and fishing vessels that have dared enter its channel, at risk of facing a gantlet of fire. The introduction of what are known as scatterable land mines also marked a fresh escalation of the munitions used by the Qaddafi forces in this siege. Last month, during the ferocious urban battle for one the city’s main boulevards, the loyalists repeatedly struck the city with Spanish-made cluster munitions. And the city has been pounded by mortar shells, artillery and ground-to-ground rockets throughout. Rebels have repeatedly spoken of their fears that through shelling or ground attack the loyalists will seize the harbor and try to strangle the city. This newest threat from Chinese-made mines had not been seen before in this war. After being released from a cargo canister while the rocket carrying them is in flight, these mines, each weighing roughly seven pounds, fall from the air with legs that extend and join underneath each mine’s body like a spike. This is designed to drive the mine into the soil and stand it roughly vertically — with a shaped charge facing upright. Each mine has a magnetic proximity fuse set to blast the charge upward into the bottom of any metallic vehicle that passes over it. Each also has an anti-handling device, to prevent removal, and time fuse that causes the mine to self-destruct up to three days after being armed. The identification was made using a photograph of one of the unexploded mines, along with images of parts of the remnants of several others that were destroyed either by detonating against the truck or by being struck by the rebels’ bullets. These images were shared with several private organizations, including Human Rights Watch, and with a private-sector ordnance specialist who distributed the photographs to a network of colleagues, who confirmed the munitions’ identification. The rebels who discovered them said they initially did not know what they were, and they said the mines had been hard to see at night, with their dark green paint. Mr. Mahrougi, the driver whose truck passed over two mines that had settled onto one of the port’s roads, does not remember seeing them as they exploded in rapid succession. He emerged in stable condition from surgery Friday night for treatment of third-degree burns, a broken left foot and extensive fragmentation wounds to his left arm, leg, abdomen, chest and face. Mr. Mahrougi had been examining the port’s warehouses and roads after an odd-sounding rocket strike, and amid reports that Qaddafi helicopters had been heard over the city. “We saw some rockets, and our guards where checking,” a port supervisor said. “And then one of our trucks hit them.” The official asked not to be identified to protect his relatives in Tripoli from retaliation from the Qaddafi government. According to the lot number stenciled in black paint on one of the mines, the munitions were manufactured in 2009. Arms sales between China and Libya are not transparent. How and when the weapons were obtained was not immediately clear.

Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )


Home Prices Seem Far From Bottom

Abstract: The American housing market, where the global economic crisis began, is far from hitting bottom. Home prices across much of the country are likely to fall through late 2009, economists say, and in some markets the trend could last even longer depending on the severity of the anticipated recession. In hard-hit areas like California , Florida and Arizona , the grim calculus is the same: More and more homes are going up for sale, but fewer and fewer people are willing or able to buy them. Adding to the worries nationwide are rising unemployment, falling wages and escalating mortgage rates — all of which will reduce the already diminished pool of would-be buyers. “The No. 1 thing that drives housing values is incomes,” said Todd Sinai, an associate professor of real estate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania . “When incomes fall, demand for housing falls.” Despite the government’s move to bolster the banking industry, home loan rates rose again on Tuesday, reflecting concern that the Treasury will borrow heavily to finance the rescue. On Wednesday, the average rate for 30-year fixed rate mortgages was 6.75 percent, up from 6.06 percent last week. While banks are moving aggressively to sell foreclosed properties, the number of empty homes is hovering near its highest level in more than half a century. As of June, 2.8 percent of homes previously occupied by an owner were vacant. Nearly 1 in 10 rentals was without a tenant. Both numbers are near their highest levels since 1956, the earliest year for which the Census Bureau has such data. At the same time, the number of people who are losing jobs or seeing their incomes decline is rising. The unemployment rate has climbed to 6.1 percent, from 4.4 percent at the end of 2007, and wages for those who still have a job have barely kept up with inflation. In New York and other cities that rely heavily on the financial sector, economists expect that job losses will increase and that pay heavily tied to year-end bonuses will decline significantly. One reliable proxy of housing values — the ratio of home prices to rents — indicates that in many cities prices are still too high relative to historical norms. In Miami , for instance, home prices are about 22 times annual rents, according to analysis by Moody’s Economy.com . The average figure for the last 20 years is just 15 times annual rents. The difference between those two numbers suggests that a home valued at $500,000 today might be worth only $341,000 based on the long-term relationship between prices and rents. The price-to-rent ratio, which provides one measure of how much of a premium home buyers place on owning rather than renting, spiked across the country earlier this decade. It increased the most on the coasts and somewhat less in the middle of the country. Economy.com’s calculations show that while it remains elevated in many places, the ratio has fallen sharply to more normal levels in places like Sacramento , Dallas and Riverside, Calif. The current housing downturn is much more national in scope and severe than any other in the postwar period, partly because of the proliferation of risky lending practices. Today, foreclosures are running ahead of the downturn in the economy, a reversal of previous housing slumps. “We are in uncharted waters,” said Brian A. Bethune, an economist at Global Insight, a research firm. Colleen Pestana, a real estate agent in Orange County in California, said many people losing their homes in Southern California used to work at mortgage and real estate companies. Many of them bet heavily on real estate by upgrading to bigger houses every few years. Now, many are losing their homes. At the same time, Ms. Pestana said, her clients who are looking to buy are having a harder time lining up financing. One of her clients recently had to give up on a home after the lender that had offered a pre-approved loan changed its mind — a frequent occurrence, according to real estate agents and mortgage brokers. “I am working harder than I have ever had to work to get a deal together and keep it together,” said Ms. Pestana, who has been a real estate agent for seven years. To cushion themselves from potential losses if homes lose value, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , the mortgage finance companies that the government took over in September, have increased fees on loans made to borrowers who have good but not excellent credit records, even those who are making down payments as big as 30 percent. Those higher fees are generally invisible to borrowers because banks factor them into mortgage interest rates. While the national average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is now 6.75 percent, according to HSH Associates, mortgage brokers say the rates for many borrowers in the Southwest or Florida can be as high as 8 percent, especially for so-called jumbo loans that are too big to be sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (Those loan limits vary by area from $417,000 to roughly $650,000.) Higher interest rates result in bigger monthly payments, pricing some potential buyers out of the market. For example, monthly payments are $2,700 on a 6 percent 30-year, fixed-rate loan of $450,000. If the interest rate rises to 7 percent, those monthly payments jump to $3,000. All things being equal, when rates rise prices generally fall. This month, Fannie and Freddie canceled a fee increase that would have applied to markets where home prices are falling, but the companies still have many other fees in place. In an effort to help drive down rates, the Treasury Department has announced plans to buy mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie and Freddie. The government also recently increased the amount of loans the companies can buy and hold. Still, those efforts will take time to have an impact and it is not clear whether they will be sufficient to get banks to lend more freely, especially in areas where jumbo loans make up a bigger percentage of lending, like New York and parts of California and Florida. Economists say that prices in those places will probably fall further. In some of those places, price declines are being driven by a sharp increase in sales of foreclosed homes. Hudson & Marshall, a Dallas-based auctioneer that holds sales for lenders, reports that banks are accepting prices that they refused to consider just 12 months earlier. In a recent auction of 110 foreclosed homes in the Las Vegas area, for instance, the auctioneer’s clients accepted 90 percent of the bids submitted by buyers, up from 60 percent a year earlier, said David T. Webb, a co-owner of the company. Single-family home prices in Las Vegas have already fallen 34 percent from their peak in the summer of 2006, according to the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home price index . Prices in San Diego have fallen 31 percent since late 2005. While those declines have been painful to homeowners in those cities, economists said the quick decline might help the markets reach bottom faster than in previous housing cycles, said Edward E. Leamer, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles . In a previous boom, home prices peaked in the Los Angeles area in 1990 but did not hit bottom until 1996. Prices remained near that low for more than a year before starting to climb again. “In some areas of California, we are really at appropriate levels,” Mr. Leamer said of current home prices. But he added: “The risk is that we are going to get some overshooting, meaning that prices will be lower than they ought to be.” In Florida, Jack McCabe, a real estate consultant, said that while some cities, like Fort Myers , are showing tentative signs of a rebound, others like Miami and Fort Lauderdale are still under pressure. Two homes on his street in Fort Lauderdale that sold for about $730,000 apiece in 2005 recently sold for $400,000 — a 44 percent decline. “The rocket has run out of fuel, and now it’s plunged back down to earth,” he said.

Subprime Mortgage Crisis,2008 Financial Crisis


Montero Leads Yankees’ Display of Power

Abstract: The Yankees unleashed another onslaught on Monday afternoon as the stars of their relentless offense pounded the overmatched Baltimore Orioles . There was Mark Teixeira hitting another home run. There was Robinson Cano blasting his third grand slam of the season . There was Curtis Granderson smacking a two-run double. There were all three adding to their triple-digit runs-batted-in statistics. But the heart of the Yankees’ lineup, intimidating as it is, was suddenly pushed aside in the middle of the game when the team’s top prospect, the imposing-looking Jesus Montero, emphatically announced his arrival in the major leagues with a loud swing of the bat, a trot around the bases and a curtain call from the roaring crowd. And then, having swatted his first major league home run, the 21-year-old rookie Montero did it all over again two innings later, hitting another opposite-field blast into the right-field stands that landed almost exactly where the first drive did and led to an encore wave to the crowd from the dugout steps. The display of power by the 6-foot-3, 235-pound Montero gave the Yankees the three extra runs they needed to hold off the Orioles, 11-10, and widen their division lead over the suddenly struggling Boston Red Sox to two and a half games. It also prompted everyone associated with the Yankees — players, coaches, the manager and fans already ruminating about a 28th championship — to think about what Montero might mean for the Yankees this October and in years to come. Complicating all the projections about Montero, of course, is that he does not have a clear-cut position to play, with many in baseball somewhat skeptical of his abilities as a catcher. For the moment, he is a designated hitter, and on Monday that was certainly good enough to get everyone’s attention. “I’m really happy right now,” Montero said after the game. “It was an amazing day today.” Montero’s home runs ended up overshadowing Freddy Garcia’s poor start, Mariano Rivera’s shaky ninth inning, the contributions by the other Yankee hitters and the return of Scott Proctor, who pitched two innings of relief in his first appearance as a Yankee since 2007. The Yankees had eight runs by the end of the second inning, but the Orioles had seven after the top of the third, all of them charged to Garcia. When Montero came to the plate in the bottom of the fifth, the Orioles had tied the score, 8-8. Having been called up on Sept. 1, Montero had fewer than a dozen major league at-bats under his belt at that point, but he proceeded to propel an 0-1 fastball from Baltimore’s Jim Johnson. Two innings later, he victimized Johnson again. Montero caught in 88 games at Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre this season — over all, he hit .288 with 18 home runs — but whether he can be a defensively competent catcher in the majors is still open to question. He was not overly impressive in spring training, when he seemed to have a shot at being the Yankees’ backup catcher behind Russell Martin. But Montero cannot be switched to first base, where Teixeira will reside for years to come, and the designated hitter spot — not a traditional place for a very young player anyway — is probably the future home of Alex Rodriguez, who is signed through 2017 and has been increasingly hampered by injuries. That leaves catcher, if Montero can actually master the position. Or even a trade, if he can help bring a top-flight pitcher in return. “I don’t know what they’re going to do with me, but I’m trying to be a catcher,” Montero said. “Whatever the decision they’re going to make, I’m fine with that.” Manager Joe Girardi reiterated after Monday’s game that he was reluctant to put Montero behind the plate at this point of the season because of his lack of familiarity with the Yankees’ pitchers. Still, Girardi, a longtime catcher himself, said the Yankees continued to project Montero as a player whose future is behind the plate. “But right now with where we are, with what we’re fighting for, it’s tough to put him back there,” Girardi said. “He’s kind of preparing like he would be if he was playing a game. At some point, I’d like to put him back there, but we’ll have to see where we’re at.” The Yankees managed to retrieve each of Montero’s home run balls, with the fans who caught them getting baseballs autographed by Montero in exchange. Not exactly the largesse that another fan, Christian Lopez, received from the Yankees when he ended up grabbing Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit — a homer to left — and then returning the baseball to the Yankee captain. But Jeter is Jeter and Montero has plenty of time to carve out his own career, impressive as the first glimpses already are. “I showed a little bit to the fans and the people,” Montero said. “Now there’s more to come. I hope everything keeps going good. I’m not going to say tomorrow I’m going to hit two home runs again. But I’m going to try to.” INSIDE PITCH Mariano Rivera gave up a run in the ninth inning but earned his 597th career save, moving him closer to Trevor Hoffman, the career leader with 601. ... In his first game as a Yankee in four years, Scott Proctor pitched two innings and gave up a game-tying home run in the fifth. Proctor was a workhouse reliever for Joe Torre’s Yankees in the middle part of the last decade, although it was widely felt that he was overused. He was picked up by the Yankees after being released by the Atlanta Braves last month.

Baltimore Orioles
Baseball
New York Yankees
Montero Jesus
Cano Robinson


Boston Police Weren’t Told F.B.I. Got Warning on Tsarnaev

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. did not tell the Boston police about the 2011 warning from Russia about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers accused in the Boston Marathon bombings, the city’s police chief said Thursday during the first public Congressional hearing on the terrorist attack. Boston’s police commissioner, Edward Davis, said that though some of his officers worked with the F.B.I. on a Joint Terrorism Task Force, they did not know about the Russian tip or the bureau’s subsequent inquiry, which involved an interview with Mr. Tsarnaev and his parents. Had his department learned about the tip, in which Russian officials said that Mr. Tsarnaev had embraced radical Islam and intended to travel to Russia to connect with underground groups, “we would certainly look at the individual,” Commissioner Davis told the House Homeland Security Committee. He noted that F.B.I. officers found no evidence of a crime and closed the case. He said that he could not say whether he would have reached a different conclusion, but that his officers would “absolutely” have taken a second look at Mr. Tsarnaev. Commissioner Davis said he recognized the sensitivity of intelligence received from other countries. “But when information is out there that affects the safety of my community, I need to know that,” he said. In a statement later on Thursday, the F.B.I. said that the squad that carried out the assessment of Mr. Tsarnaev in 2011 included some Boston Police Department officers, and it suggested that they could easily have read the information collected about him in a database that every member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force has access to. But the statement also noted that the Boston task force conducted about 1,000 assessments in 2011, a workload that made it unlikely that each assessment could get close attention from every task force member. Also, Mr. Tsarnaev lived in Cambridge, not Boston. The committee’s chairman, Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who is a former federal counterterrorism prosecutor, said he was concerned that a decision not to share information among agencies — widely blamed for the failure to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — might have been a factor in the Boston bombings. “We learned over a decade ago the danger in failing to connect the dots,” Mr. McCaul said. “My fear is that the Boston bombers may have succeeded because our system failed. We can and we must do better.” Mr. McCaul said he also had concerns that the “emerging narrative” about the Boston plot “downplays the spread of the global jihadist movement.” “From the attack at Fort Hood to the tragedy at Benghazi, the Boston bombings are our most recent reminder that we must call terrorism really for what it is in order to confront it,” Mr. McCaul said. “You cannot defeat an enemy you refuse to acknowledge.” Some Republicans have accused the Obama administration of playing down the threat from radical Islam and of exaggerating the administration’s success in reducing the threat from Al Qaeda. On Wednesday, at a politically charged hearing that lasted for almost six hours, Republicans accused the administration of initially trying to cover up the true nature of the attack last September on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. The F.B.I.’s investigation of the Boston attack is continuing, but officials have said that so far the evidence suggests that Mr. Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed in a shootout after the bombings, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, 19, who awaits trial on terrorism charges, were radicalized in the United States and got their instructions in bomb making from the Internet. But agents are currently in Dagestan, a turbulent area of southern Russia where Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent six months last year. The agents are looking into reports that Mr. Tsarnaev was trying to connect with Islamist militants who have carried out a campaign of terrorism against Russian forces.

Boston
Police
Tamerlan Tsarnaev
Boston Marathon Bombings
Edward Davis
FBI
Dzhokhar A Tsarnaev


U.S. Soldiers Find Surprise on Returning to Afghan Valley: Peace

Abstract: NANGALAM, Afghanistan — The Americans arrived under cover of night, the static electricity from their helicopter blades casting halos of blue in the pitch black. It was their first return to the Pech Valley — a rugged swath of eastern Afghanistan so violent they nicknamed it the Valley of Death — since the American military abruptly ended an offensive against the Taliban here in 2011 after taking heavy casualties. But the Americans, from the First Battalion of the 327th Infantry, had not come back to fight. Instead, their visit this summer was a chance to witness something unthinkable two years ago: the Afghan forces they had left in charge of the valley then, and who nobody believed could hold the ground even for weeks, have not just stood — they have had an effect. The main road leading in the Pech is now drivable, to a point, and rockets no longer rain down constantly on the base the Americans had left the Afghans. Local residents said they felt safer than they had in years. “Man, you couldn’t walk this road without getting lit up,” said Staff Sgt. Benjamin Griffiths, amazed as he and about a dozen soldiers surveyed one area the day after their arrival. No one is exactly sure how the Afghan forces have managed to make some gains that eluded the Americans for so many years in the Pech Valley. But it presents a sketch portrait of what Afghan-led security might look like in some places after the international military coalition is gone next year. Interviews with American and Afghan officials and local residents paint the progress as an amalgam of many things: the absence of foreign troops as an irritant, the weakening of the Taliban and an improved Afghan Army. Officials also noted the beginning of de facto agreements in some areas between Afghan soldiers and militants about what is and is not off-limits — not a particularly positive sign, but still an indication of how the battle might change when it is Afghan fighting Afghan. The insurgents long promised that if Americans left, the violence would subside — a narrative American commanders seized on at the time. The thinking went like this: Foreign fighters drawn to Afghanistan would lose interest, or go elsewhere, like Syria, and locals who were not so much pro-Taliban as anti-outsider would ease their militancy. That seems to mostly be the case in the Pech now; locals say the insurgents have been more reluctant to attack fellow Muslims, though they are still far from docile. “When Americans were here and were driving around or patrolling the area, nobody looked at them as friends or liberators,” said Hajji Yar Mohammed, a tribal elder in nearby Manogai District. “Everyone in the villages was trying to fight them for the sake of jihad.” The combination of Taliban determination, local hostility and dauntingly rugged terrain made the valley particularly deadly for Americans, who over all lost more than 100 dead during the last offensive here. When it started in 2009, the Pech offensive was billed as a critical chance to bloody the Taliban in a place they had kept in their grip for years. But by the time the mission was called off, in early 2011, there were open assertions that the valley was not worth the losses being inflicted . Some American soldiers quietly expressed the view that their Afghan successors were being given a suicide mission. So the Americans left, and the Afghan forces moved into the outposts the troops left behind. No one gave them much chance. After U.S. Exit, Afghan Army Tames a Valley 8 Photos View Slide Show › Image Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Two years later, the commander of the American battalion’s overall brigade combat team decided to orchestrate the trip to Pech to show that, instead, the Afghans had made good on American sacrifices. Whatever amount of success the Afghans have had, however, has not been without at least some American help. An aggressive campaign of American drone strikes in the Pech over the past year and a half has been instrumental, Afghans and American officials say. They assert that the strikes have devastated the insurgent networks, focusing on Qaeda leaders and their facilitators. The recent targeted killing of the Nuristan shadow governor, Dost Muhammad Khan, considered one of the top Taliban leaders in the country and a crucial asset for Al Qaeda, was a high point of the campaign. More than American air power, with its looming expiration date next year, is in effect here, though. Analysts and officials also say that the Afghan approach to policing the area has been a strong point. While the Americans consolidated on one main base and a few outposts, the Afghans have set up more than a dozen new outposts and checkpoints farther into the valley. Their aim is focused: securing the main road that runs through the Pech through Nangalam and keeping it open for the first time in nearly 10 years. The Afghan National Army has also notably improved in the intervening two years, the visiting Americans noted. “The A.N.A. we left in this valley are not the A.N.A. here right now,” said Sgt. Merle Powell, who, like others, believed the Afghans would be overrun in a matter of weeks after the American departure. What is less clear is how big a role deals worked out with the insurgents might play in pacifying the area. While most Afghan officers were reluctant to talk about any such compromises in the Pech Valley, one general — Gen. Nasim Sangin, the executive officer of the Second Brigade of the Afghan Army’s 201st Corps — briefly discussed a larger example of restrained military ambition, in the nearby Korangal Valley. General Sangin said the army had decided not to mount operations there because it lacked the resources and the loss of life would hardly be worth it. “The Korangal, it is a good place for the insurgents,” he said. “It is not a good place for us.” The Americans say they have no evidence of arrangements between the security forces and the insurgents, but recognize that the Afghans may not have the capacity to go after particularly remote areas. “Some of these places inflict too much pain for too little gain,” said Col. J. P. McGee, the commander of the First Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division. As the visiting Americans continued their foray around their old base in the Pech Valley, they snapped pictures and talked about how much had changed. Sometimes, they stumbled on mementos they had left behind. One soldier plucked a picture of two women in bikinis that American troops had long ago taped to the wall. “I bet this picture has made many an Afghan soldier happy,” he told his colleagues. Capt. Ramone Leon-Guerrero pointed out sites of rocket attacks, noting the damage and offering a few words of context like some grim tour guide. “I had to do crater analysis on every single one,” he explained. Reminders of loss lurked everywhere, but the tone was more nostalgic than sad. Some men even acknowledged they missed it — the action, the camaraderie, the shared struggle. “I told myself if I got a chance to come back I would,” Captain Leon-Guerrero said. “It’s one of those things you always want to look back on. Like going back to your old neighborhood and driving past your old house.”

Taliban
Al Qaeda
Afghan National Army
Afghanistan War
Pech Valley Afghanistan
US Military
Terrorism


Fast-Rising Connecticut Has the Inside Track to Big East Title

Abstract: Connecticut’s basketball season opener is nine days away, but Coach Jim Calhoun’s Huskies are not the talk of campus. Neither is UConn ’s women’s team, also a perennial national power. For perhaps the first time at the university, the buzz at UConn is about football, after the Huskies defeated No. 11 South Florida, 22-15, on Saturday for the program’s first victory over a ranked opponent. UConn is ranked 16th in the Associated Press poll, its first time in the top 25. South Florida (6-2, 1-2 Big East), with its second consecutive road loss, fell to 20th, after being ranked second two weeks ago. UConn (7-1, 3-0) has a one-game lead in the conference standings but faces a tough schedule the rest of the way, starting Saturday at home game against Rutgers (5-3, 2-2). The Huskies then travel to Cincinnati (6-2, 1-2), play host to Syracuse (2-6, 1-2) and end the regular season at No. 6 West Virginia (7-1, 2-1), a team they have never beaten. If UConn wins its final four games, it will clinch its first berth in a Bowl Championship Series game. Not bad for a former N.C.A.A. Division I-AA team that started playing in Division I-A in 2000 and did not become eligible for the B.C.S until 2002. The Huskies cracked the Associated Press poll faster than any team but Marshall after moving from the lower division to B.C.S. eligibility. “It’s been a long process,” Coach Randy Edsall said yesterday in a teleconference. “It was something that we had a plan for in terms of how we were going to go about it and how we were going to do it. I think all the pieces to that plan got put in place.” Edsall, whose first season at UConn was in 1999 after serving as defensive coordinator at Georgia Tech, is 48-52 with the Huskies. An early riser who arrived at his office yesterday at 4:30 a.m., he said a key to Connecticut’s rise had been its improved facilities. The Burton Family Football Complex and the Mark R. Shenkman Training Center, which cost a combined $50 million, opened in the summer of 2006. Before that, the program operated out of a dilapidated 50-year-old building and several rental trailers. “I think we see the dividends that it’s paid in terms of having everything under one roof for our kids,” Edsall said, noting that the players eat, lift weights and receive academic tutoring at the complex and training center. Edsall added: “It’s just helped them from time management. It’s also helped, I think, with our team chemistry and the relationships that everybody has with each other.” Before the opening of the complex and training center, Edsall said, his team’s facilities were “worse than poor.” Robert G. Burton, who gave $2.5 million for the football complex and whose son Mike was a captain of the Huskies’ 1999 team, said he always believed in Edsall. He described him as a well-rounded coach with a knack for recruiting. “This is not a surprise,” said Burton, who lives in Greenwich, Conn., and is the chief executive of Cenveo Incorporated, a printing company. “A lot of people didn’t give UConn credit when it first started because of the background and the basketball reputation. It’s almost like a fairy tale, but it’s a real one. It’s a real basic story that took a lot of hard work and a lot of people pulling in the right direction.” UConn’s arrival on the football scene has not gone unnoticed. Akron Coach J. D. Brookhart, whose team lost to the Huskies, 44-10, last month, praised Edsall’s perseverance. “It starts with him,” Brookhart said. “He spent a number of years cultivating his program. As most coaches know, when you take a program at a lower echelon, it takes time and patience to build that up. The culture you’ve got to create doesn’t happen in three or four years.” Nationally, UConn is 10th in total defense at 293.3 yards a game, third in scoring defense at 13 points and second in turnover margin at 1.5. Still, Brookhart said, the Huskies’ defense did not appear to be overwhelming on the video he watched before the game. “We didn’t think it was something that scares you to death by any means,” Brookhart said. “They just play as a football team and they feed off each other very well.” Calhoun said he was proud of Edsall and his team. He said that he and Edsall had a good relationship and that they last spoke the Wednesday before the Huskies played South Florida. In that conversation, Calhoun said, Edsall told him he was praying for rain against South Florida to slow the Bulls. It rained in the first quarter. “He’s done a fabulous job,” Calhoun said of Edsall. “He’s a no-nonsense guy. He’s a throwback. I really, really have great respect for what he’s done. The university has backed him wonderfully and the state has, but he’s been the guy, no question.” The Huskies’ success in football has Calhoun optimistic that UConn can become a power in basketball and football. He cited Michigan and Texas as models. “There’s no reason why you can’t have a great basketball and football program,” Calhoun said. “Maybe some year in the near future we can win championships in men’s and women’s basketball and a national football championship all in one year. I love total athletic programs.” Calhoun also said he was enjoying not being in the spotlight. “It’s nice to have months where I can watch Randy sweat and it’s just not me throughout the whole season,” he said.

Football
University of Connecticut
College Athletics


How Older Adults Can Keep Up With Technology

Abstract: HERE is the problem with typical “elder tech” products: there’s not enough “tech” in a phone that uses an oversize keypad but offers limited features, for one example. Advancing age can rob people of their abilities, and products that help mitigate that are good things indeed. But what if the need for that kind of assistance is still decades away? Today’s baby boomers are just now crossing the retirement line, but that does not render them incapacitated. Far from it. It may, however, render them out of touch. “What’s developing is a digital divide,” said Ken Dychtwald, the chief executive of Age Wave, a research and consulting organization that focuses on population aging. “New technologies are largely oriented to people under the age of 50,” Mr. Dychtwald said. “If you’re older than that, you have to muster the courage to ask your family how things work.” New technologies are most commonly encountered through co-workers or as part of a corporate system. “The workplace is a breeding pool for learning about and sharing new technologies,” he added. “If you’re home, you don’t have that environment around you.” But many mainstream technologies become even more valuable when people leave the office. There are products available to help 18-year-olds and 80-year-olds alike stay active, informed and entertained, and help keep them in touch with family and friends. Getting familiar with some of these products will help ensure that technology, much like youth, is not wasted on the young. Here are some easy picks: WANT TO STAY ACTIVE? Buy a video game console. Forget about first-person shooters and psychedelic mazes. Gaming systems like the Nintendo Wii , the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony PlayStation 3 all have accessories that get gamers out of their chairs and moving on the floor, whether it is in a virtual dance competition, an exercise program or a sports simulator. In addition to the benefits of simply moving around, recent studies have shown an improvement in balance among some older people who used the Wii (around $180) and its fitness programs like Wii Sports (around $24). The Xbox Kinect ($300) from Microsoft is the most advanced gaming system available, with built-in cameras and motion sensors that can see a player’s body and its position. Using a fitness program like Your Shape ($50), Kinect can not only show you what exercise moves to do, but can also see if you are doing them correctly and offer tailored advice to improve your form. WANT TO STAY IN TOUCH? Get a webcam. While nothing replaces in-person visits, videoconferencing gets pretty close. If your computer does not have a built-in webcam, get an external one. Logitech makes a wide range of cameras, but its C310 model, for around $30, is suited to chats with friends and grandchildren. In addition to the hardware, you will need an account with Skype , Gmail , iChat , AIM or another service. Placing and receiving video chats is simple and costs nothing. As long as your loved ones have accounts on the same network, you can talk face to face for as long as you like. WANT TO STAY INFORMED? Pick up a tablet or e-reader. The intuitive interface of a touch-screen tablet can suit anyone who dreads a traditional keyboard and mouse. Among the growing number of tablets, Apple’s iPad (starting at $499) remains the best choice. It is easy to use, and its wealth of apps makes it the perfect digital companion. Also, the iPad’s pinch-and-pull zooming feature turns any text — whether from an e-book, Web site or e-mail — into large type in seconds. If a tablet seems like a step too far, for either financial or technological reasons, consider an e-book reader. Amazon’s Kindle ($139) is the leader here. Its “always on, never pay for it” wireless Internet connection means you can download books most anywhere within seconds. You can also subscribe to Kindle versions of newspapers and magazines (and adjust type size as well). Furthermore, the Kindle is light, weighing only half a pound, and you can store up to 3,500 books on it. WANT TO STAY PRODUCTIVE? Get some apps. When you were at work, you had some structure. You had some organization. If you want to maintain those things in retirement, there is software that can help. Evernote is one such application. It bills itself as a personal digital assistant, but it is actually the world’s greatest file cabinet. Evernote allows you to copy and paste almost anything you find online into searchable “notebooks.” Find a picture you like online? Copy and paste it into Evernote. Highlight a portion of an e-mail and store it in Evernote. Post a link your friend sent you to your Evernote account. It is easily accessible from almost any device with an Internet connection (and some devices can even store data offline as well, thanks to things like the Evernote iPhone app). There is a free version of Evernote, and a premium version for a $45 annual fee, which has no ads and some expanded features. Another piece of software worth considering is the Dragon Dictation program from Nuance. Available for Windows computers (for $100) and Macs (for $200), Dragon employs industrial-strength voice-recognition technology to accurately transcribe whatever you say. You can speak naturally, adding spoken punctuation, and dictate an e-mail. The application can also execute voice commands for your computer, so saying “search Amazon for Stieg Larsson” will automatically direct a browser to Amazon.com and search for those words. You can tell your computer to open and close programs, scroll up and down the screen and select words and lines to copy, delete or paste. WANT TO BE ENTERTAINED? Stream movies right to your TV. Movie rental stores are losing appeal, and the costs of pay-per-view/on-demand cable programming can add up. But $60 will buy a Roku box , and that opens a world of inexpensive video programming. When combined with a monthly $8 subscription to Netflix , you get access to the company’s library of thousands of movies and TV shows with a click of the remote. Other subscription services, like Amazon Instant Video and Hulu Plus , are also available. AppleTV , at $99, also offers Netflix, and includes access to Apple’s iTunes library of shows and films. It also features a more current selection — Netflix does not have current TV shows; iTunes has them the day after they are broadcast. Apple’s service also has more current movies. Unlike Netflix, iTunes is not a subscription service, but works on an à la carte basis: TV shows can be rented for 99 cents and bought for $2 or $3. Movies can also be rented or bought at a range of prices. WANT TO SEE WHO’S DOING WHAT? Get a digital photo frame. Digital photo frames are not new, but the growth of wireless connectivity gives the years-old technology some worthwhile new features. A good example of the latest advances can be found in Pandigital’s Photo Mail digital photo frame, for $180. At first glance, it looks like many other digital picture frames — a simple dark rectangle surrounding an eight-inch display. And like other digital frames, this model can display photos from a camera’s memory card. But what sets this frame apart is its ability to receive new photos, wirelessly, from friends and family. The Photo Mail frame, like Amazon’s Kindle, has an always-on, no-cost wireless connection to AT&T’s wireless network. The frame also has its own e-mail address. That means that anyone who has the address can send pictures to the frame, where they will appear instantly (a note on the display indicates when new photos have arrived). If the grandchildren are at the beach, their parents can e-mail photos as they take them, and they will show up on the frame at home. And unlike other picture frames that have a similar function but require a Wi-Fi network, getting the Photo Mail frame set up takes almost no time at all. These products and services are not radical departures from everyday life, but they can make measurable improvements, allowing people to be more connected, efficient and informed. And since those goals are not age-restricted, neither should the products that help attain them.

Retirement
iPad
Computers and the Internet
Tablet Computers
Amazon Kindle
Electronic Books and Readers
Handheld Computers
Elderly


New Leads Explored in Teenager’s Killing

Abstract: The grapevine in the new, small high school carried the news: The mother of a dead classmate, Jennifer Negron, was visiting. Even now, almost 22 years later, Cindy Morales remembers seeing her. “She was standing near the security guard’s table, by the front door,” Ms. Morales said in an interview last month. “I went over to hug her and tell her how sweet Jennifer was. I remember that I caught her at the end of the day, right at dismissal.” Ms. Morales also recalled what the mother, Elsie Jimenez, said to her and a few others who had stopped to say hello. Jennifer, 16, had been murdered on New Year’s Day in Brooklyn, and the rumor at school was that a boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend was responsible. “I don’t remember that the mother told us that it was the boyfriend, but what she said was consistent with it,” Ms. Morales said. “She told us, ‘Girls, always remember who you trust. Be careful what boys you trust. You never know.’ ” Two men, who have always insisted on their innocence, were convicted of dragging Jennifer into a car outside her home in East New York and driving her off to be killed. The men, Everton Wagstaffe and Reginald Connor, said they had never met until they were arraigned for the murder. Mr. Connor, then 24 and living in the same neighborhood as Jennifer, said he had spoken casually a few times with her but they did not have a relationship. Mr. Wagstaffe, then 23, said he had never met Jennifer. Mr. Connor had been arrested previously for robberies and Mr. Wagstaffe for selling marijuana. During the trial, no evidence was presented about a boyfriend, nor did the prosecution offer any motive for either Mr. Connor or Mr. Wagstaffe to abduct Jennifer and kill her. The only evidence of their involvement came from the confused account of a troubled woman with drug addiction problems. (A jury convicted them of kidnapping; the judge dismissed murder charges because of a lack of evidence.) Image Jennifer Negron in a 1993 yearbook memorial from Richard R. Green High School. Two men were convicted of kidnapping her. But in recent interviews , Mario Cabrera, a neighbor of Jennifer’s, said he saw her arguing with a boy on the sidewalk on the night of her death. He said the boy, a would-be boyfriend of Jennifer’s, was about her age, and 40 to 60 pounds lighter than either of the two men convicted. He also said he heard the boy screaming at her and saw him try to pull her into a car. After her death, Mr. Cabrera said, he learned that the boy had been supplying Jennifer’s mother with drugs, and that he came that night with two others to collect payment. The mother, who knew she was in trouble, was not home, he said. The sources of his information, he said, were other members of Jennifer’s family and her mother, who has since died. At school, Jennifer confided that she was having disputes with a boyfriend and family difficulties, according to Marisiel Rivera Acevedo, who was in the same small homeroom class — called a family group — at the Richard R. Green High School, then on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The boyfriend did not attend the school. “She would say she was having problems with her boyfriend at the time,” Ms. Acevedo said Tuesday. “It was an on-and-off thing with him. During family groups, she would come in and say something with regards to that.” As for the family, Ms. Acevedo said, “She would come in upset every once in a while. I know she was responsible for her siblings. She took care of things in the house. ‘I have to run home and get some shopping in.’ Or there was homework of a younger sibling that was not getting done.” In April, I spoke with Joann Butler, who was living with Mr. Wagstaffe at the time. She said he had been home with her on that New Year’s Eve. Although Mr. Wagstaffe told the police about Ms. Butler when he was arrested, she said she was never interviewed. Neither the prosecution nor the defense called her at trial. She has not been in touch with Mr. Wagstaffe since his conviction. About three weeks ago, she said, two detectives from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office visited her at her home on Long Island. They were following up on the interview she gave me. “At first they were suspicious about why I had come forward,” Ms. Butler said on Tuesday. “They thought I was still in contact with Everton, but I told them you contacted me out of the blue.” Those detectives are working with the Integrity Conviction Unit in the office of Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney. “It is apparent the case merits further investigation,” John P. O’Mara, a deputy district attorney, wrote to the defense lawyers. There was little evidence of a thorough investigation in 1992. Alan Lentin, the first principal of the high school, remembered learning of Jennifer’s death when he found students weeping in the halls. “The police never came to the school,” he said.

Jennifer Negron
Murders
Brooklyn
Everton Wagstaffe
Reginald Connor
NYC


Narratives With No Need for Translation

Abstract: NEW YORK — Why do we claim things “taste like chicken”? Why do television folk frame pitches like: “Imagine ‘Mad Men’; now put it on a plane”? Why are new companies promoted as “a mash-up of Twitter, YouTube and Instagram”? The old is so often our bridge to the new, the familiar our escort to the unknown. Sure, there is distortion involved, because frogs have a taste of their own, or else they would be chickens. But these distortions are the price of a convenience: Without translation, we would often lack the courage or wherewithal to encounter the unfamiliar. Metaphors and similes are bridges. This is especially true for writers, filmmakers, reporters and other storytellers, who seek to interpret places for other places. They stand between an audience who feeds them, with its own reality and language and understandings, and subjects who supply them their grist, with their own version of these things. It is a perilous endeavor, this ferrying of the subject’s reality across that gradient and into terms the audience can grasp. All too often, the subject ends up, rightly or not, feeling abused or exploited, his world translated into what he believes it is not. The social structure that seems to him to work just fine becomes someone else’s “caste system.” His religion is said to require a “Reformation.” His country, despite pulling hundreds of millions from poverty, is called a violator of human rights, by people who imprison a vast proportion of their population and regularly invade other nations to get their way. It is a particular problem that so much of this translation is still performed by so few. To steal language from the aviation sector, the narration of the human story still works more on a hub-and-spoke model than a point-to-point one. A handful of translators — paid by the publishing and media empires of the West — fan out around the world and send its stories home. Nigeria’s realities, and South Korea’s and Cuba’s and New Zealand’s, travel to the hub of the Western storytelling complex; and when a South Korean wants a story about Nigeria, or a Cuban about New Zealand, they are very often compelled to make do with content assembled not on their soil, nor on the subject’s, but in London or New York. But the world and its power equations are changing. Countries once on the margin are moving toward the center. And the technologies by which we find, publish and spread stories have broken open who gets to speak and what they might say. Imagine the future of storytelling in a point-to-point, not a hub-and-spoke, world. What happens when hundreds of Chinese correspondents are poking around America’s prisons? And Egyptian filmmakers are investigating the situation of Muslims in Chechnya? And South Koreans are looking through the prism of their own experience at South Africa’s democratic experiment? These notions stirred as I was reading Katherine Boo’s devastating, exhilarating first book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.” The book has already received extraordinary praise, and the goal of this column is not belatedly to add to it. Instead, it is to suggest that Ms. Boo has done something much more interesting and subversive than write a terrific book: Though a product of the Western storytelling apparatus, she has pointed toward a new world in which writing about places is not an act of writing for somebody, but an act of writing from somebody. Forget her bullet-train narration, her vividly painted characters, her achingly sad tale. Dwell on something much simpler, and infinitely harder: her metaphors, similes — the way she seeks to move the reality of her subjects into your mind. Writing about slum dwellers in Mumbai, she tells us of two neighbors who, for a time, lived divided only by a sheet. It is not long before she refers to this time as “the sheet days,” seeing it more from her subjects’ perspective than ours. She writes of an audacious woman’s “gold-flecked, unlowering eyes,” without the usual (tedious) foreign correspondent explanation of why women in India might lower their eyes. “Some days the lips were orange,” Ms. Boo, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, writes in another description, “other days purple-red, as if she’d climbed the jamun-fruit tree by the Hotel Leela and mouthed it clean.” The clause that begins “as if” is at once for our benefit and not: It explicates, or at least elaborates; and yet many of her readers will not know what jamun-fruit is. And so January becomes “the month of treed kites and head colds.” A slum dweller with a recycling business finds “a shiny oval belt buckle of promising recyclable weight.” A canny local politician has “enough oil in his hair to fry garlic.” My favorite of Ms. Boo’s similes is her description of the well-dressed women who work in Mumbai’s five-star hotels. She sees them “carrying handbags as big as household shrines.” In that little simile are wondrous new possibilities for literature and storytelling of every kind. Instead of the unfamiliar bent into what we know, the familiar here is complicated. A handbag, which we understood perfectly well before this passage, becomes something we understand less. Our mind becomes, for a moment, an Indian mind; and a shrine becomes, if fleetingly, more normal to us than a giant purse. This literature without italics may hint at the storytelling future. Translation, explication, falls away. Places become at once subject and audience. Life on the planet is chronicled from every angle — from hub to spoke, spoke to hub, from point to point to point. The fiduciary obligation of the storyteller is no longer to us who read her translations. It is to the people whose lives she witnesses. She writes from them, not for us. Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly ; Follow on Twitter.com/anandwrites


Twins to Enter Draft

Abstract: The twin brothers Marcus and Markieff Morris announced that they were leaving Kansas after their junior season and heading to the N.B.A. They led the Jayhawks in scoring, rebounding and blocked shots last season, when the Jayhawks went 35-3, won the Big 12 regular-season and tournament titles, and advanced to the regional finals as a No. 1 seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament.

Markieff Morris
Basketball
Sports Drafts and Recruits
College Sports
College basketball
Marcus Morris


Boom in the Mountains Creates a Housing Shortage

Abstract: BIG SKY, Mont. — The Big Sky region, just north of an entrance to Yellowstone National Park, has boomed in recent years, attracting skiers and other outdoor enthusiasts and fueling a construction and employment boom. But soaring land prices and building costs have put the price of housing far beyond the reach of many new resort and construction workers. Faced with a severe housing shortage for its workers, at least two resorts, the Yellowstone Club and Big Sky Resorts, picked an unusual solution. Each bought a motel it intended to continue operating for travelers, as well as for housing workers and contractors. With its purchase of the Whitewater Inn, formerly a Comfort Inn, Big Sky Resorts picked up 56 rooms. “We’re a growing resort with 900 staff, and we want to attract the best staff,” said Dax Schieffer, public relations manager for Big Sky Resorts, which is owned by Boyne U.S.A. “The plan is to have the employees stay here during peak season.” The Yellowstone Club is the new owner of Buck’s T-4 Lodge, a 72-room motel just up the road from the Whitewater Inn. The owner of the Yellowstone Club, Tim Blixseth, said his company had 500 employees and 1,000 subcontractors. Using Buck’s to help house them will help reduce the “couple of million” dollars a year that the company spends for buses and mileage. “It was a good strategic buy for us,” Bob Sumpter, vice president for real estate development for the company, said. “We do not plan to change the operation one iota.” Both companies said workers would receive discounts on rooms, which rent for $100 to $150 a night depending on the season. Who gets those discounts and how much they amount to depend on what a worker’s “job is and how much we need them,” Mr. Schieffer said. Many workers are choosing to double or triple up to save money, which can make for lively, if cramped, quarters. Isabella Silva of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, lives in a Whitewater Inn room with three young male co-workers from Brazil. Each pays $230 a month for the crowded living space that is mostly taken up by three beds and a mattress on the floor. Ms. Silva and her roommates do most of their cooking in microwave ovens; they have wireless Internet and access to the motel pool and waterslide. “These boys, oh my,” Ms. Silva, 21, said shaking her head and smiling. “But it’s O.K. We work most of the time. So we don’t spend much time in the room.” Mr. Schieffer said he did not think that guests would mind sharing space with employees. “I’d like to think everyone can get along,” he said. “You don’t say, ‘Employees, don’t go here,’ or, ‘Don’t go there.’ ” Instead, he said: “It’s self-segregating. It works itself out.” Lots that sell for more than $200,000 today were going for a fifth of that three years ago, and construction costs run $700 or more a square foot, compared with $100 to $200 in most Montana cities. Compounding the problem is the region’s location, which is awkward to accommodate the boom. Big Sky is 32 miles southwest of Bozeman. But the two-lane road between the two runs through a narrow canyon that is ice covered and treacherous in winter. An estimated 1,500 cars commute back and forth each day. “They all have to drive from Bozeman every morning and back,” Cathy Gorman, a real estate broker here, said. “It’s bizarre, and it’s dangerous. We’ve had a lot of deaths on that road.” Public transportation is infrequent. The Yellowstone Club runs four or five buses a day between here and Bozeman. Ms. Silva said she and many other workers took the ski bus to Bozeman at the end of a day and shopped all night at the Wal-Mart store there because there was no bus back until morning. As a result, housing at the mountain resorts is the best option for many. Kyle Zimmerman, born in Chicago, just moved from a two-bedroom condo crammed with skis, clothes and furniture that he shared with four other people. The monthly rent was $1,300 plus utilities, and Mr. Zimmerman, who has two jobs, including one at a pizzeria, paid $200 for the right to sleep in a closet. “To make it affordable, you have to cram people in,” Mr. Zimmerman, 22, said. “It was all right for a year.” His replacement in the closet? “The guy that had the couch.” Not surprisingly, Mr. Zimmerman applauded the resorts’ buying the motels. “Every year, I hear there’s going to be new employee housing, but it never happens,” he said. “You’ve got to put them somewhere.”


Media Executives Plan Online Service to Charge for Content

Abstract: Three longtime media executives are building an automated system to allow newspapers and magazines to charge for online access, including an “all you can read” subscription that would allow access to multiple publications, the executives said on Tuesday. Their company, Journalism Online L.L.C., aims to supply publishers with ready-made tools to charge Internet fees, an idea that has gained currency as advertising revenue plummets, but whose prospects of success are doubted by many media analysts. The company, which says it may have a product ready by the fall, says the advantages are that publishers would not have to develop their own systems and readers could use a single system for many different publications. Their plan might not draw much attention save for the stature of the people involved. The founders and investors are Steven Brill, creator of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, among other ventures; L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers to charge online; and Leo Hindery Jr., who has headed communications companies like Tele-Communications Inc., Global Crossing and the YES Network, and now runs InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in media. The company has a board of advisers that includes two of the nation’s most prominent lawyers, David Boies and Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general of the United States. No publishers have signed on as yet as clients, but several major newspaper and magazine publishers have been in active talks with Journalism Online about how such a system should work. As the company envisions the system, a nonpaying reader on a magazine or newspaper site would reach a certain point and see a page asking for payment — the Journalism Online system, operating within the publication’s Web site. But a reader who wanted a subscription to multiple sites would go directly to the new company’s own site. “The most important thing is it’s simple to use,” Mr. Brill said in an interview. “Much of the barrier to charging online is the transaction friction, as opposed to the actual cost. With this system, you’d have a single password, give your credit card number just once.” He said that for the unlimited subscriptions, “we’re playing with a figure of $15 a month.” Building an online payment and billing system “is complex and costly,” said Mr. Crovitz, who has experience in that. He said publishers would also need a lot of trial and error to decide what material to charge for, “and we will gather best practices and data to help them make those decisions.” Each publisher would be free to set its own policies, like determining which items are free and which are not, setting its own prices, and deciding whether to use a pay-per-click system or a daily, weekly or monthly subscription rate. “There are all these religious debates going on about how to do this, and it’s too early for anyone to be making those decisions,” Mr. Brill said. “No one knows which approach is going to work. So we’re offering all of them.” The company also plans to negotiate licensing and royalty fees with search engines and news aggregators for the use of the publications’ work, and has retained Mr. Boies’s law firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner, for that work.

Newspapers
Computers and the Internet
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)
Brill Steven T


Tempting the Fates of Flight

Abstract: I MIGHT run a network that focuses on science fiction and the extraordinary, but I’m a very practical guy. For example, I don’t believe in jinxes. But everyone thinks that I’m jinxed when it comes to business travel . Maybe they are right. My experiences have been quite bizarre recently. Last month, I was traveling back from a press event with several of my staff members and talent from some of our shows. A few of us were sitting in a bar waiting to go to the airport to catch various flights. For some reason, Josh Gates, who hosts our show “Destination Truth,” and I started talking about preflight safety instructions. I think they are a complete waste of time. I was on a roll and so was Josh, who was telling horror stories about various plane trips. One of my staff members told us to stop talking about that stuff. She was convinced that we were tempting the fates. I don’t believe in the so-called fates. Besides, she was taking another flight, so on the off chance that there are the fates, I was sure they would be kinder to her than to me. I got on my flight and settled in. Five minutes after takeoff, I smelled something strange. I’m used to strange smells on airplanes, especially American airplanes that are so old that everything smells. I figured this was just that obnoxious diesel-like scent you have to endure right after takeoff. I took a sleeping pill and figured I’d just nod off. But then the captain announced there was smoke in the cockpit. We were turning around and heading back to Vancouver. That was a problem. This was a red eye, and I had another meeting I had to get to early in the morning. But that was less of a problem than the fact that the plane stopped making a turn that would get us going back to Vancouver. I couldn’t help but think of my colleague’s warning. For a split second, I thought that maybe the pilots passed out or the controls seized up. Of course, none of that happened. But we were grounded, and couldn’t get another flight until the next morning. Then a very strange thing happened. My staff member, the one who told me to stop tempting fate, called me. She had injured herself at the airport terminal. She tripped over a scale and cut her foot quite badly. She also passed out. She was being carted out of the airport in a wheelchair. Apparently, the rest of my team wasn’t faring any better. Their flights were canceled or delayed or were miserable because of turbulence. They blame me. I blame Josh. Now, my staff doesn’t want to be anywhere near me at an airport. Neither does my boss. Both of us are frequent fliers, and she’s never had any problems when I’m not there. But every time we booked the same flight, there was a problem, mostly delays or cancellations. It became a running joke between us that I’m cursed and flights with me are bad news. Delays and cancellations are one thing, though. A bomb threat takes that “curse” thing up a whole level. Yes, we took a flight together last year, which did indeed receive a bomb threat. We immediately landed, and the plane taxied to a very remote location at the airport. I told her they wanted us far away from people so on the off chance the threat was real, the explosion would be contained and deaths and injuries would be minimized. In retrospect, perhaps that was the wrong thing to say. My boss will no longer fly with me. My staff still doesn’t have a choice.

Airports
Airlines and Airplanes
Executives and Management