Brands to Ad Agencies: Diversify or Else

Abstract: The advertising industry has tried for decades with little success to shed its “Mad Men”-like reputation as a profession dominated by white men. Now, some of the world’s biggest brands are viewing that lack of diversity as a liability. In the last two months, three major brands have publicly put pressure on the agencies they work with to hire more women and minorities. The latest was Verizon, which joined General Mills and HP Inc., formerly a part of Hewlett-Packard, in telling agencies that a failure to do so could drive its business elsewhere. The efforts reflect a growing concern among marketers that Madison Avenue’s largely white, male leadership may be hindering their efforts to connect with American consumers. Diego Scotti, chief marketing officer for Verizon, sent letters to 11 of the agencies the company works with on Sept. 16, describing diversity as “an explicit business objective.” He gave the firms a month to submit details on how many women and minorities they employed across different roles and in senior leadership and asked for “action plans” describing how they would increase those numbers in the future. “Marketers are expected to have a deep understanding and insight about their markets, about decision makers and about customers,” Mr. Scotti said in the letter, which has not been made public but was provided to The New York Times by Verizon this week. “We are more likely to create solutions that amaze our customers if our work force and suppliers represent the communities we serve.” Verizon borrowed some of the language it used from letters HP sent to its agencies in August, urging them to hire more women in part because women buy about half of its computers and printers. General Mills, in seeking a new creative agency this summer, made headlines for saying it wanted creative departments it worked with to be staffed 50 percent by women and 20 percent with minorities. “You don’t need to be a mom to make some Cheerios ads, but if we have more moms on the team making Cheerios ads, maybe we increase the probability we do work that connects with moms in a richer, deeper, more powerful, meaningful way,” Michael Fanuele, the chief creative officer of General Mills, said this week during an onstage discussion at an event hosted by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, known as the 4As, for Advertising Week. “That’s really where our drive for diversity came,” Mr. Fanuele added. “It wasn’t some sort of moral high-horse stance about the failing ad industry.” Ad agencies have already been grappling with accusations of racism and sexism and the sense that the industry’s approach to diversity is retrograde. In the last year, the chief executive of the J. Walter Thompson agency resigned after a lawsuit accused him of racist and sexist behavior, and dismissive remarks about gender equality were made by other top industry executives. Several sessions held this week as part of Ad Week, the annual industry gathering in Manhattan, touched on those concerns, with panels on subjects like “Our Challenge to Erase Gender Stereotypes In Ads” and “Sexism in Advertising and What Brands Should Do.” But the prospect of losing marketing dollars could drive change in a way that societal pressure has not. Verizon, for example, is one of the biggest advertisers in the United States, spending $1.3 billion on ads in both 2014 and 2015, according to Kantar Media. “In order to push yourself to have a more diverse work force or a more humane work force, you have to be intentional about it — and nothing will drive intent faster than a client’s dollar,” Nancy Hill, president and chief executive of the 4As, said in an interview. Women now make up nearly 50 percent of those working in the advertising industry, but only 11 percent of creative directors, according to a survey by the 3 Percent Conference, which supports female creative leadership at agencies. Mr. Fanuele, when describing the dominant creative “wizards” in the industry, described them as “a bunch of middle-aged white guys with baseball caps and funny beer jokes up their sleeves.” “We’re still in a very male-dominated and nondiverse industry,” Mr. Scotti, who is from Argentina, said in an interview. “In order for us to create work that’s more connected with the consumer, it needs to come from a deeper connection to what’s going on in society and what’s going on in culture.” Mr. Scotti said the commitment to diversity was “an important requirement” of doing business with Verizon, but that the company was not setting specific goals, quotas or penalties for the agencies it works with. HP, in its Aug. 30 letter, said it expected agencies to “make good” on formal plans for hiring more women within 12 months. General Mills said the percentages it mentioned were “meant to be directional” and that the company was focused on “the importance of working toward diversity goals over time.” However, perhaps illustrating the challenges of enacting change in the industry, even those pushing for it can struggle to articulate how they respond to attempts to diversify. Mr. Fanuele, answering a question during Tuesday’s event about how agencies pitched General Mills after learning about its diversity goals, said at times it felt “tokenistic” to him. “Some show up with all the right people around the table and it almost does feel like a quota of tokenism; it’s like ‘Oh, thank you. You found the, you know, Southeast Asian transgender woman who works somewhere in your network to come to our meeting to talk,’” he said. “And then other times it just looks beautiful and diverse and it’s very genuine and real and you’re not even, even though this has been a criteria, you’re almost not even conscious that it’s happening.” It has been particularly exciting, he said, when the traditional creative directors arrive “looking like they look” and express a “genuine commitment to building teams and building departments that want to be magnets for more diverse talent.” “When you see their eyes sparkle about the possibilities of teaching and mentoring and being taught and mentored by people who don’t look like they do, that’s been cool,” he said.


Avalanche Top Red Wings

Abstract: Semyon Varlamov made 43 saves, and Blake Comeau scored in the third period and the shootout to lift the visiting Colorado Avalanche to a 3-2 victory over the Detroit Red Wings. ■ David Backes, Jaden Schwartz and Robby Fabbri scored in the first period, and the St. Louis Blues cruised to a 5-3 win over the host Florida Panthers. ■ Kris Letang scored on the final shot of a shootout, Marc-Andre Fleury made 29 saves, and the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins beat the Carolina Hurricanes, 2-1, for their eighth win in 10 games. ■ Marcus Foligno scored twice, once on a penalty shot, and the host Buffalo Sabres hung on to end a four-game losing streak by topping the Montreal Canadiens, 6-4. ■ Steven Stamkos came up with the tying goal late in the third period, and Tyler Johnson scored 1 minute 4 seconds into overtime as the Tampa Bay Lightning overcame the Nashville Predators, 4-3, for their ninth straight home win.


For Their Children, Many E-Book Fans Insist on Paper

Abstract: Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books. This is the case even with parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto Kindles, iPads, laptops and phones. They freely acknowledge their digital double standard, saying they want their children to be surrounded by print books, to experience turning physical pages as they learn about shapes, colors and animals. Parents also say they like cuddling up with their child and a book, and fear that a shiny gadget might get all the attention. Also, if little Joey is going to spit up, a book may be easier to clean than a tablet computer. “It’s intimacy, the intimacy of reading and touching the world. It’s the wonderment of her reaching for a page with me,” said Leslie Van Every, 41, a loyal Kindle user in San Francisco whose husband, Eric, reads on his iPhone . But for their 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Georgia , dead-tree books, stacked and strewn around the house, are the lone option. “She reads only print books,” Ms. Van Every said, adding with a laugh that she works for a digital company, CBS Interactive. “Oh, the shame.” As the adult book world turns digital at a faster rate than publishers expected, sales of e-books for titles aimed at children under 8 have barely budged. They represent less than 5 percent of total annual sales of children’s books, several publishers estimated, compared with more than 25 percent in some categories of adult books. Many print books are also bought as gifts, since the delights of an Amazon gift card are lost on most 6-year-olds. Children’s books are also a bright spot for brick-and-mortar bookstores, since parents often want to flip through an entire book before buying it, something they usually cannot do with e-book browsing. A study commissioned by HarperCollins in 2010 found that books bought for 3- to 7-year-olds were frequently discovered at a local bookstore — 38 percent of the time. And here is a question for a digital-era debate: is anything lost by taking a picture book and converting it to an e-book? Junko Yokota, a professor and director of the Center for Teaching Through Children’s Books at National Louis University in Chicago , thinks the answer is yes, because the shape and size of the book are often part of the reading experience. Wider pages might be used to convey broad landscapes, or a taller format might be chosen for stories about skyscrapers. Size and shape “become part of the emotional experience, the intellectual experience. There’s a lot you can’t standardize and stick into an electronic format,” said Ms. Yokota, who has lectured on how to decide when a child’s book is best suited for digital or print format. Publishers say they are gradually increasing the number of print picture books that they are converting to digital format, even though it is time-consuming and expensive, and developers have been busy creating interactive children’s book apps. While the entry of new tablet devices from Barnes & Noble and Amazon this fall is expected to increase the demand for children’s e-books, several publishers said they suspected that many parents would still prefer the print versions. “There’s definitely a predisposition to print,” said Jon Yaged, president and publisher of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, which released “The Pout-Pout Fish” by Deborah Diesen and “On the Night You Were Born” by Nancy Tillman. “And the parents are the same folks who will have no qualms about buying an e-book for themselves,” he added. That is the case in the home of Ari Wallach, a tech-obsessed New York entrepreneur who helps companies update their technology. He himself reads on Kindle, iPad and iPhone, but the room of his twin girls is packed with only print books. “I know I’m a Luddite on this, but there’s something very personal about a book and not one of one thousand files on an iPad, something that’s connected and emotional, something I grew up with and that I want them to grow up with,” he said. “I recognize that when they are my age, it’ll be difficult to find a ‘dead-tree book,’ ” he added. “That being said, I feel that learning with books is as important a rite of passage as learning to eat with utensils and being potty-trained.” Some parents do not want to make the switch for even their school-age children. Alexandra Tyler and her husband read on Kindles, but for their son Wolfie, 7, it is print all the way. “Somehow, I think it’s different,” she said. “When you read a book, a proper kid’s book, it engages all the senses. It’s teaching them to turn the page properly. You get the smell of paper, the touch.” There are many software programs that profess to help children learn to read by, for example, saying aloud a highlighted word or picture. Not all parents buy in; Matthew Thomson, 38, an executive at Klout, a social media site, has tried such software for Finn, his 5-year-old. But he believes his son will learn to read faster from print. Plus the bells and whistles of an iPad become a distraction. “When we go to bed and he knows it’s reading time, he says, ‘Let’s play Angry Birds a little bit,’ ” Mr. Thomson said. “If he’s going to pick up the iPad, he’s not going to read, he’s going to want to play a game. So reading concentration goes out the window.”

Children
Books
Parenting
EBooks EReaders


Police Investigate Suicide of Chicago Schools Chief

Abstract: CHICAGO — The president of the Chicago Board of Education, who had served in a variety of prominent posts here over three decades, was found dead early Monday morning on the banks of the Chicago River, in what the medical examiner ruled a suicide. The body of the 60-year-old official, Michael W. Scott, was discovered around 3 a.m. near the Merchandise Mart, a historic commercial center and office building downtown. Mr. Scott died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, according to the office of the Cook County medical examiner. A handgun was found under or near the body, said Jody Weis, the Chicago police superintendent. Although the death was ruled a suicide, Supt. Weis said the police would investigate. On Tuesday, Roderick Drew, a police spokesman said investigators were looking for security camera video from near where Mr. Scott’s body was found, and were tracking the registration of the gun found at the scene. Ron Huberman, chief executive of the Chicago public schools, said: “We are heartbroken and saddened by the unspeakable tragedy. Michael Scott’s commitment to Chicago public schools, and especially to our schoolchildren, was longstanding.” Mr. Scott had a long career in Chicago government. In addition to his three separate tenures as school board president, he served at various times as the city’s director of special events and as president of the board of the Chicago Park District. He came under scrutiny this year for two local controversies. In August, he told reporters that he had received a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury investigating whether there had been improper preferential admissions to the city’s top public schools. Around the same time, news accounts concerning his role as a member of the Chicago 2016 Olympic Committee suggested that he had engaged in a conflict of interest by helping a group of ministers develop land near a proposed Olympic site. Later coverage said the committee had concluded that he had realized no financial gain from the project but should have told the committee about his involvement. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who worked with Mr. Scott in their functions as community leaders and was a friend of his, said those problems had not weighed heavily on him. “He had the toughness to take those hits and keep on walking,” Mr. Jackson said. Mr. Scott visited his sister at an assisted living center on Sunday, Mr. Jackson said, and his family reported him missing that evening. His body was found hours later on the scenic waterfront.

Scott Michael
Education and Schools
Chicago (Ill)


New Solar Process Gets More Out of Natural Gas

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Energy Department is preparing to test a new way for solar power to make electricity: using the sun’s heat to increase the energy content of natural gas. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., hope by this summer to carry out the test, which entails a process that could cut the amount of natural gas used — and the greenhouse gasses emitted — by 20 percent. “We can reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and the consumer doesn’t get hit,” said Robert Wegeng, the researcher in charge of the project. The system is a marriage of chemical engineering and mechanical engineering. The process will work anywhere it is sunny, according to researchers, although it might be more valuable in places where natural gas is relatively expensive, or where a company making electricity would be paid for generating less carbon dioxide. Image Energy from the sun is focused by mirrors onto a device that changes natural gas into a more efficient fuel for making electricity. Credit Pacific Northwest National Laboratory The project, financed with $4.5 million in federal stimulus money, is still in development, and experts say the technology’s costs have yet to be established. The process also is several major steps away from commercial viability. Using the sun’s heat to make electricity is hardly new; as far back as 2007, companies were building plants with parabolic mirrors to boil water into steam and turn a turbine. In Australia, Areva built a plant that helps reduce the amount of coal needed to make electricity by using solar power to preheat the water that the burning coal boiled into steam. The new system captures solar energy in a chemical form, using the sun’s heat to break open the molecules of natural gas (four hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom) and water (two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom) and reshuffle them into something that burns better: carbon monoxide and pure hydrogen. The result also has carbon dioxide, which is inert. The mixture, called synthesis gas, is a common building block in the chemical industry, but it requires energy to make it, usually from burning natural gas. In the Pacific Northwest design, that energy comes from the sun. Sunlight falls on a mirrored dish that looks a bit like an upturned umbrella, and focuses on a spot where the umbrella handle would be. It heats water and natural gas to 700 degrees Celsius, about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. A catalyst breaks the molecules up and the atoms are reassembled. Laboratory officials say they have improved the efficiency of the process. But they also have introduced a second innovation: before the synthesis gas is sent to a turbine for burning, a new kind of heat exchanger extracts some heat from it. That heat is added to the chemical reactor, further improving the efficiency of the solar side of the process. Image Close-up of the combined reactor-heat exchanger device. Credit Pacific Northwest National Laboratory If the system starts with one million B.T.U.’s of natural gas, the standard unit for pricing, then the synthesis gas has a value of about 1.25 million B.T.U.’s That means turning $4 of gas into $5. Michael E. Webber, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-director of the clean energy incubator there, cautioned that there were still a lot of “engineering kinks to sort out.” He called the resulting gas “a wonderful fuel, but it’s a pain in the neck to make.” The technology might be economical in a place like Japan, where natural gas prices are higher, he said. “We might as well master the technology and sell it to them,” he said. Researchers hope they can find other improvements that will probably be necessary to win commercial acceptance of the technology in North America, where gas prices are low. Mr. Wegeng also said that mass production would drive down prices of the necessary components. Unlike other forms of solar energy, the hybrid solar/gas plant is intended to supply steady levels of electricity. “When the sun is shining, you get this solar augment to the fuel,” said Mr. Wegeng. If clouds roll in, or if the sun sets, then the turbine can burn ordinary natural gas and produce the same amount of electricity. “You’re just using more natural gas,” he said.

Natural gas
Energy Department
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Solar energy
Greenhouse gas
Electric power


In New York, Best-Selling Books Vary by Ethnic Group

Abstract: The Chinese immigrants in Flushing, Queens, devour books with titles like “Romantic Flower” and “The Heart With a Million Knots.” The Russian women in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, clamor for a diet guide advocating plenty of meat. In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a bookseller cannot keep a tell-all by the wife of an adored Polish politician on the shelves. Serialized romance digests are popular in Jackson Heights, Queens, in languages spoken by the area’s Indians and Pakistanis. So, too, are books on Muslim topics. Khursheed Hassan, the owner of Mansoor Book Store, has arranged the two inventories so the religious books are high on upper shelves, and the romances in a row along the floor, to keep the two genres’ very different readerships from taking offense. In the Babel that is New York City, where nearly 200 languages are spoken and read within the public school system and nearly 40 percent of the population was born abroad, literary tastes among immigrant cultures turn out to be as different as their cuisines. But what is popular in foreign languages is not always what is selling well back home in Bahrain or Bucharest. Sometimes they are books that are contraband under authoritarian regimes. Sometimes readers far from home seek out the classics as comforting reminders of their roots. Still others delve into their new culture with translations of school staples like “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that were never on the curriculum back home. Though American best sellers are often reprinted in many languages, many times the accompanying buzz does not translate with it. For example, on Monday there were 1,120 holds, or requests, for the entire New York Public Library ’s 121 English-language hard copies of “ Fifty Shades of Grey ,” the erotic novel and runaway best seller. But there was no waiting list for the library’s 20 Spanish-language e-books. (Fifty hard copies of the Spanish edition have been ordered.) “There are very different cultural tastes,” said Jason Baumann, the coordinator of world languages for the New York Public Library, which serves Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island. Scanning the usual industry indicators like Publishers Weekly magazine will not reveal what will be popular for New Yorkers from say, Mali or Nepal. Mr. Baumann relies instead on the expertise of foreign-language booksellers based in the United States to figure out what is hot in a particular country. As the city has exponentially diversified, so have the foreign-language stacks, which now include 60 languages spread across the New York Public Library’s 87 branches. In the Queens Borough Public Library system, the number of foreign-language books has doubled over the last decade and now includes Bengali, Croatian and multiple languages spoken in Afghanistan. The Brooklyn Public Library caters to cardholders in about 30 languages, according to its Web site, and has a special multilingual center at the main Grand Army Plaza branch. As the compositions of the city’s immigrant populations have changed, so, too, have the books that are carried. Mr. Baumann increasingly buys books in French as the city’s population of Francophone Africans has increased. Harlequin Romances are their top request. A Lower East Side branch, once in the heart of Little Germany, has a longstanding endowment to buy books in German, now little used. At Saint Petersburg Trade House in Brighton Beach, where each supermarket along Brighton Beach Avenue carries caviars from Russia’s Bering Sea priced by grade like gasoline, classical Russian literature, like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in Russian are requested daily, said Violet Lazareva, 48, the store’s literary consultant. “All the parents teach their children that they should read Russian classics in Russian,” she said. “They’re better in Russian, really.” (Also wildly popular is a French diet book by Pierre Dukan translated into Russian, roughly titled, “I Don’t Know How to Lose Weight.”) Many children of immigrants do not read their parents’ languages, said Andrzej Szymanik, the owner of Polish Bookstore and Publishing in Greenpoint. He stocked Polish translations of the “Twilight” series, but the books hardly budged. “It was a big sensation in the States,” he said, but in his Java Street store, “there wasn’t any craze about it.” Even his own daughter gobbled up the vampire trilogy in English. “Teenagers don’t come to the store,” he said. “They don’t read in Polish if they live here. They forget. That’s the fact of life.” But Chinese-speaking teenage girls come out in force in the Flushing branch of the Queens library, as do their mothers and grandmothers and some men. Every weekend, legions of them cram into an aisle along the far wall of the top floor. They lean on shelves or sit cross-legged on the floor, thumbing through hundreds of slim volumes of highly addictive serial romance novels from Taiwan. Long a craze in China, and, many readers admit, somewhat schmaltzy, the romances are some of the hottest items in the city’s libraries. The scene is similar at the New York Public Library’s Chatham Square branch in Chinatown, where, Mr. Baumann said, “you’ll have people just tearing through the shelves searching for the most recent Taiwanese romance novel.” The most popular serialized Chinese-language romance was checked out about 300 times in the library system in June. The library’s most popular English-language fiction book, “The Help,” which has sold over five million copies, was circulated only about 195 times in all 87 branches that month. (Foreign language books also tend to last twice as long in the library system; they rarely return dog-eared or food-splotched.) Also popular are contentious or scandalous books, as New Yorkers seek to keep up with books that have relatives back home talking. At Mansoor it is the autobiography of Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistani president; at the Polish bookstore in Greenpoint, it is an autobiography by the wife of Lech Walesa that exposes the cracks in their family life. At Slovak-Czech Varieties , a tiny store at the Queens-side foot of the Pulaski Bridge, there are books by Jozef Heriban , stocked because of the sensation he caused in Slovakia as one of its first authors to use homosexual protagonists, said Barbora Mina, 26, an employee. Many request books that are censored in their homelands. Mr. Baumann said that at a Chinatown bookstore that supplies many of the New York Public Library’s Chinese-language books, visiting tourists often asked for books that were considered subversive or anti-Communist and therefore not available at home. But as the readership of physical books is replaced by tablets and e-readers and the Internet’s myriad distractions, the foreign-language book industry has also been affected. Three years ago, Mr. Szymanik of the Greenpoint bookshop said, he turned to selling Polish foods over the Internet from his base at the store, because book sales slumped. The bookstore’s current best seller, he said, is kielbasa .

New York City
New York Public Library
Libraries and Librarians
Book Trade and Publishing
Immigration and Emigration
Language and Languages
Books and Literature


Trying to Limit Outside Influence in Prescribing Drugs

Abstract: As sales representatives for pharmaceutical companies brought doughnuts and lunch over the years to physicians at the 20 Kelsey-Seybold medical clinics in the Houston area, Patrick Carter worked to limit the representatives’ presence. Dr. Carter, a family physician and managing director of care coordination for Kelsey-Seybold, said he wanted to remove the appearance that drug representatives influenced the decisions made by doctors when writing prescriptions. Since 2012, pharmaceutical representatives have not been able to visit Kelsey-Seybold clinics or meet with its 370 doctors unless the physicians request an appointment for guidance in prescribing certain drugs. (Kelsey-Seybold has been a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.) While the rule banning drug representatives from visiting with doctors has been embraced at the clinics, it is not standard procedure at most practices in Texas. But advocates for improving medical ethics say it is a step in the right direction, and that more doctors and medical facilities are imposing a ban throughout the state and across the nation. It even has some support from the pharmaceutical industry, which is looking to help improve ethical standards in health care while maintaining some aspects of the physician-drug representative relationship. Since Kelsey-Seybold instituted the rule, Dr. Carter said he had heard from other doctors who are considering similar actions. Stephen Brotherton, a Fort Worth physician and outgoing president of the Texas Medical Association, said no specific figures exist on how many Texas practices have approved such bans. But he said that the direct physician-drug representative relationship is becoming less common because medical practices are trying to reduce disruptions to patient care while emphasizing the need to obtain medical information on pharmaceutical drugs from scientific sources instead of “trade sources.” “It’s probably a little more unusual for a clinic or group to say, ‘Don’t come at all unless we call you,’ but it’s quite common for people to be saying we’re going to reduce our contact with the pharmaceutical reps,” Dr. Brotherton said. (The T.M.A. is a corporate sponsor of the Tribune.) As more medical practices adopt similar rules, pharmaceutical companies have worked to help with the medical industry’s transition away from having drug representatives in doctors’ offices, Dr. Brotherton added. The pharmaceutical industry has also taken action to negate the appearance that gifts to doctors provide companies with special influence. In 2009, it set a voluntary moratorium on giving branded merchandise — including pens and notepads — to doctors. The moratorium was reflected in a revised set of guidelines from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a Washington-based industry group that represents research-based pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. But the guidelines do not forbid all interactions with health care professionals. Drug representatives are permitted to provide physicians with “modest meals,” but only if they are accompanied by an “informational presentation.” Robert Zirkelbach, senior vice president of communications for PhRMA, said in a statement that the organization respects “the independence of Texas physicians and entities involved in clinical research” who want to ensure that medical information is “interpreted fairly.” But he added that representatives for biopharmaceutical companies do serve a purpose in doctors’ offices by helping to keep physicians up-to-date on changes in medical treatments. “Patients rely on advances in medicines to help them live better, healthier lives,” Mr. Zirkelbach said. “And achieving this medical progress requires collaboration between biopharmaceutical research companies and physicians.”

Pharmaceuticals
Doctor
Texas
Ethics Misconduct Malfeasance


Syrian Gets 12 Years in Terror Case

Abstract: Jamal Yousef, a former member of the Syrian military who pleaded guilty in May to conspiring to provide material support to a Colombian terrorist organization, was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Thursday in Manhattan. Mr. Yousef, 54, became ensnared in an international sting operation run by the Drug Enforcement Administration; an indictment charged that he had agreed to provide weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in exchange for hundreds of kilograms of cocaine.

Terrorism
Colombia
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
Drug Abuse and Traffic
Yousef Jamal
Syria
Sentences (Criminal)
Arms Trade
Cocaine and Crack Cocaine


Floyd Landis Admits Doping, And Implicates Top U.S. Cyclists

Abstract: VISALIA, Calif. — The cyclist Floyd Landis was once a commanding presence at the Tour of California , an eight-day race that attracts some of the world’s top riders. With keen skill and unmatched toughness, he won in dominating fashion four years ago and went on to become the Tour de France champion — a title that was stripped from him for doping. Now, with a reputation as a pariah and his personal life and career at a low, Landis has unexpectedly returned to the sport’s spotlight at the race, which began Sunday. This time, it is for saying that he and many top American cyclists — including several racing here — were involved in systematic doping. Until now, the 34-year-old Landis vehemently denied using performance-enhancing drugs, but in e-mail messages in recent weeks to cycling officials, he not only detailed his own doping practices, but he also said he watched Lance Armstrong and others inject the blood-booster EPO and use blood transfusions for increased endurance. He said some riders also took steroids and human growth hormone . Landis did not return phone messages left for him. He acknowledged to ESPN.com that he had no documentation to prove his claims, but said he had kept a journal. He said he wrote the e-mail messages because “I want to clear my conscience,” adding, “I don’t want to be part of the problem anymore.” It all put a pall over Stage 5 of the Tour of California, which was further darkened when Armstrong crashed, injuring his elbow and requiring eight stitches for a cut below his left eye. He abandoned the race. Before racing began on Thursday, Armstrong described Landis as a broken man with no credibility. “I would say I’m surprised, but I’m not,” Armstrong said as he stood with the team manager, Johan Bruyneel, at his RadioShack bus. “He has no proof,” Armstrong said. “It’s just our word against his, and we like our word. We like where we stand.” Armstrong said Landis had been sending him e-mail and text messages for the past couple of years suggesting that he would go public with accusations about him, and that the messages recently reached “a fever pitch.” Bruyneel, who was also implicated in the e-mail messages, said Landis had asked him “for money, basically a lot of money” and a job on the team in exchange for his silence. He added that Landis was looking for money to pay legal bills that were accumulating after he tested positive at the Tour de France. “Threatened, blackmailed, whatever you want to call it,” Bruyneel said. When asked if he contacted the police about the threats, Bruyneel said no. He said that Landis had a volatile personality and that he should “seek professional help, and by that I don’t mean lawyers.” Landis, who now races with the lower-level OUCH-Bahati Foundation Pro Cycling team, has struggled to keep his life on track since testing positive for a synthetic form of testosterone at the 2006 Tour de France . Not only was Landis’s cycling career crumbling, but less than a month after the Tour, his father-in-law, a close friend, committed suicide . Landis campaigned for donations from fans to help finance his $2 million fight against the United States Anti-Doping Agency , only to end up losing. He served a two-year suspension. His marriage fell apart. No top team would sign him. This February, a French court issued an arrest warrant for him in connection with a computer hacking case involving the national antidoping lab. Landis, known as a wisecracking eccentric, moved into a cabin in the Southern California woods, said two former teammates, who didn’t want their names published because they had been told not to talk to reporters. Some of Landis’s friends had not spoken to him in years, said Allen Lim, an exercise physiologist on Armstrong’s RadioShack team. In his e-mail messages, first reported by The Wall Street Journal , Landis said Lim had helped him cheat; Lim called the allegations “crazy,” and said he would never work with a rider who used performance-enhancing drugs. Some of Landis’s closest friends in the sport were those he implicated: Armstrong; the United States road-racing champion George Hincapie; the three-time Tour of California champion Levi Leipheimer; and the five-time United States time trial champion David Zabriskie, who is second over all at the Tour of California. In a statement sent by his team, BMC Racing, Hincapie said he had “earned the respect of my peers and a reputation for working hard, honestly and honorably.” He added, “I’m really disappointed to hear these accusations.” Jonathan Vaughters, the manager of Zabriskie’s Garmin -Transitions team, said Landis “had his demons,” but he could not explain why Landis made his allegations. Armstrong said he saw Landis every day of last month’s Tour of the Gila in New Mexico , and “not a word” was said. But away from the race, Landis was sending e-mail messages to Steve Johnson, the chief executive of USA Cycling, telling him, “It’s up to you to demonstrate your true colors.” Johnson did not return phone and e-mail messages. In his messages, Landis echoed what the retired United States Postal Service rider Frankie Andreu and an anonymous teammate told The New York Times in 2006 when they admitted using the blood-booster EPO leading up to the 1999 Tour de France, Armstrong’s first of seven Tour victories. Landis said he began doping in 2002, with Bruyneel instructing him how to use testosterone patches. That year, he said, the Italian sports doctor Michele Ferrari — who worked closely with Armstrong — helped Landis execute blood transfusions, a practice that boosts oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Landis said he and Armstrong had discussions about the need for doping. The next season, Landis said Armstrong asked him to keep an eye on his apartment in Girona , Spain , where he said bags containing his blood and that of Armstrong and Hincapie were kept in a refrigerator. “I was asked to stay and check the blood temperature every day,” Landis wrote, adding that Armstrong asked Landis to make sure the electricity did not go out so the blood would not go bad. In the 2003 Tour, Landis said, he had transfusions and saw Hincapie, Armstrong and another Postal Service teammate, José Luis Rubiera, receive the same treatment. Every two to three nights, he said, he and Hincapie used a syringe containing olive oil and an ingestible form of testosterone. Landis said he and his teammates received a transfusion on the team bus in 2004. “The driver pretended to have engine trouble and stopped on a remote mountain road for an hour so the entire team could have a half liter of blood,” he wrote. Landis’s messages recounted helping Leipheimer and Zabriskie use EPO before the Tour of California several years ago. Among the others Landis implicated were Andy Rihs, the former owner of the Phonak racing team who now runs BMC Racing; Jim Ochowicz, president of BMC Racing; John Lelangue, team director of BMC Racing; Matt White, a race director of the Garmin-Transitions team; and Michael Barry, a rider on Team Sky. Antidoping officials are trying to corroborate the information through interviews with athletes and trainers. They will retest frozen blood and urine samples taken at the time, said people briefed on the matter. Federal authorities have also taken interest in Landis’s e-mail messages. They want to talk to distributors, particularly trainers and doctors, who may have provided drugs. The federal agent Jeff Novitzky , who led the investigation in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative steroids case, has been briefed and has spoken with Landis, people with knowledge of the situation said. Landis has agreed to cooperate, they said. Pat McQuaid, president of the International Cycling Union, said he felt sorry for Landis. “The fact is that we caught Floyd Landis and, at the end of the day, we continue to catch guys that beat the system,” he said. “It strikes me that with Landis, it’s just a last roll of a desperate man. It’s unfortunate. He’s turned on us.”

Floyd Landis
Doping
Tour de France
Lance Armstrong
George Hincapie
Levi Leipheimer
Jeff Novitzky
Biking


After Metro-North Train Crash, Investigators Piece Through ‘Utter Chaos’

Abstract: The driver behind her at the crossing could not understand, backing up to create more space as the warning siren sounded. The train operator, barreling toward her, slammed the brakes, the obstruction in his path coming into view at least a moment too late. And on Wednesday, as witnesses, survivors and federal investigators strained to make sense of the fatal Metro-North Railroad crash in a suburb of New York City, the question persisted 24 hours after the inferno had engulfed the first car on Train No. 659: What was her sport-utility vehicle doing on the tracks? The crash killed six people and injured more than a dozen on Tuesday — setting off a roaring fire and a frantic rescue effort marked by broken bodies and unthinkable gore after the electrified third rail tore through the front of the train, leaving a tangled mess of twisted metal. It was the deadliest episode in the history of a railroad that has experienced a series of recent calamities, including a fatal derailment in December 2013 . The S.U.V.’s driver, identified as Ellen Brody, 49, and five passengers on the train died. At a briefing on Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board shed little light on Ms. Brody’s actions, and officials could not meaningfully address the other query at the heart of their efforts: understanding how a train-on-car crash — not entirely uncommon in the American transportation system — had imperiled passengers on the train. “Usually it is not endangering the occupants of the train,” Robert L. Sumwalt, a member of the safety board, told reporters. “We intend to find out what makes this accident different.” Mr. Sumwalt said the intensity of the blaze owed to the force of the impact between the train and S.U.V., combined with the gasoline from the vehicle. The train plowed the car 1,000 feet down the tracks, pulling up 400 feet of the third rail, he said. “The entire interior of the first rail car was burned out,” he said, and part of the second car was breached as well. Video Steven Lichtenthal, of Bedford Hills, N.Y., rode in the back of a middle car involved in the fatal Metro-North crash on Tuesday. He described how the accident unfolded. Credit Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times Moments before the crash, there was little sign of trouble on the Harlem line of Metro-North. The northbound train, which left Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan around 5:45 p.m., reached Valhalla, N.Y., around 6:30 p.m., rolling beside one of the cemeteries that line the route through Westchester County. Riders had settled into the relative calm of their evening commute — texting, reading, listening to music. Chris Gross sat in the front car, watching a Mel Brooks movie on his laptop. Nearby, on Commerce Street, a line of cars had clustered at the crossing gate for the tracks, a fit of traffic that stemmed from an earlier crash on the Taconic State Parkway. At the front of the line, the authorities said, was Ms. Brody, a Greenburgh resident and mother of three children. She had left the jewelry store where she worked around 6 p.m. and was en route to Scarsdale to meet a friend, co-workers said. It was dark, fellow drivers recalled, and perhaps she did not know at first that she had passed the gate. The gate struck the back passenger side edge of Ms. Brody’s vehicle, said Rick Hope, the driver behind her, then slid down farther and came to rest pressing in on the top of a window. Mr. Hope said the vehicle, a Mercedes, appeared to be short of the tracks but inside the gate before the crossing alarm began to blare. “As soon as I see the gate go down, I back up,” Mr. Hope said outside his Yorktown Heights home on Wednesday. “I say, ‘She’s going to back up as soon as she sees what’s going on.’ ” But instead, he recounted, Ms. Brody calmly got out of her car. She walked around the back, pushed up against the gate and found it wedged firmly in place. Mr. Hope said he began to panic, knowing a train would come through in seconds. He said he motioned with his hands at Ms. Brody to come toward him. Knowing his headlights were on, possibly blocking her from seeing him, he backed his car up more, thinking she might follow his lead. Video Passengers aboard the train and bystanders captured the chaotic scene unfolding after a Metro-North train crashed into a sport-utility vehicle on Tuesday, killing six people. Credit Credit Youtube.com/Anabolicapple For a split second, he said, she looked at him. He thought she might walk away from the car. Instead she walked back to the driver’s seat and climbed in. There was a pause, he said, as if she were buckling her seatbelt. “The thing’s dinging, red lights are flashing, it’s going off,” Mr. Hope said. “I just remember going, ‘Hurry up.’ I just knew she was going to back up — never in my wildest dreams did I think she’d go forward.” She drove forward. The train operator, Steven Smalls, seeing the obstruction in front of him, applied the emergency brakes, his union representative, Anthony Bottalico, said. The train slowed, but not quickly enough. “It was just instantaneous,” Mr. Hope said. “She was gone.” In a flash, rail passengers tumbled into the aisle, flames whipping all around them. The front car filled with smoke and screams. The third rail, ripped from its moorings, tore through the train. The fire was visible from the second car, sending travelers into a mad retreat to the back of the eight-car train, where others were unaware of the horror at the front. In the front car, Mr. Gross tried to regain his bearings. “Utter chaos,” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. He turned over and looked. The man in front of him appeared to have lost his leg below the knee. Mr. Gross said another man, with burns on his hands, managed to open an emergency latch so they could escape. The man plunged his hands into the snow, seeking relief. As the fire raged, emergency responders poured in, trying to crack open the doors. Passengers jumped from windows. The train operator moved through the front car, in a bid to evacuate riders amid the carnage, before smoke inhalation forced him to leave. Investigating the Metro-North Crash Details from the preliminary report on what happened in the Metro-North crash that killed six people on Feb. 3. “He hung in there as long as he could,” said Mr. Bottalico, who saw him at the hospital. Among the first to arrive on the scene was Roger King, resident commander of the Valhalla Fire Department. He called ambulances to help transport bloodied survivors. The team, he said, used sleds to move passengers across mounds of snow. “It was the only way we could get to them,” he said on Wednesday. The train engineer, Mr. King said, had told him that the third rail pierced into the train car’s floor, just to the right of him. At the rear of the train, there was less intense panic, at first. Riders were told over the intercom that the train had hit a car and were asked to stand by. Then the intercom went out. Riders in the front shouted at other commuters to move back. “But we couldn’t,” recalled Steven Lichtenthal, from Bedford Hills. “We didn’t want to evacuate without official word because we didn’t know if the tracks were still electrified or cause mass panic or craziness.” Passengers from a middle car exchanged names and pleasantries, at one point discussing the Seattle Seahawks’ play-calling choices in the Super Bowl last Sunday. But word of the smoldering scene spread quickly. Westchester Medical Center had received a notice about the crash at 6:44 p.m. Three minutes later, it was declared a “mass casualty incident.” Hospital staff members rushed to clear 40 patients out of its emergency department. They prepared for a crush of victims. They received a dozen. The survivors’ injuries included burns, smoke inhalation, fractures, lacerations, contusions and some crush injuries. In the early hours, the authorities said seven people were killed. The number was later corrected to six. The authorities also revised their description of Ms. Brody’s vehicle, which they had initially said was a Jeep Cherokee. When Ms. Brody did not return home, one of her daughters called Virginia Shasha, her mother’s colleague, asking where she might be. Around 11 p.m., Ms. Shasha said, the authorities reached Ms. Brody’s husband. His wife, he was informed, had been killed in the crash.

Ellen Brody
Westchester
Steven Smalls
Train wreck
Metro North
Valhalla NY


Coyotes Top Penguins, Boosting Playoff Bid

Abstract: The Pittsburgh Penguins’ spot in the postseason is all but assured. The Phoenix Coyotes are living much more dangerously. For long stretches during Phoenix’s 3-2 win Tuesday night in Pittsburgh, it certainly appeared the other way around. Pouncing on a series of sloppy mistakes by the suddenly erratic Penguins, the Coyotes picked up 2 vital points in the chase for the eighth seed in the Western Conference playoffs. Thomas Greiss stopped 23 shots — including all 15 he faced over the final two periods — and received plenty of help as Phoenix rebounded a night after losing the starting goaltender Mike Smith indefinitely with a right leg injury in a loss to the Rangers. David Moss, Antoine Vermette and Mikkel Boedker scored for the Coyotes, who never trailed while dropping the Metropolitan Division-leading Penguins to 6-6-2 since the Olympic break. “It gives confidence that if you can win in Pittsburgh, you can win anywhere,” Phoenix forward Shane Doan said. Jussi Jokinen and Taylor Pyatt scored for the Penguins. Marc-Andre Fleury made 26 saves, but the Penguins failed to clinch a playoff berth and looked lifeless at times without center Evgeni Malkin, who is out two to three weeks after hurting his foot in a loss to St. Louis on Sunday. “I don’t think injuries had anything to do with today or what you saw on the ice,” Penguins Coach Dan Bylsma said. KINGS 5, CAPITALS 4 Anze Kopitar and Jeff Carter scored in the shootout, and Los Angeles came back to win at Washington after allowing Alex Ovechkin’s two early power-play goals. The Capitals’ Evgeny Kuznetsov had tied the score with 41.5 seconds left in regulation with his first goal. BLUE JACKETS 4, RED WINGS 2 Cam Atkinson scored a goal confirmed by video replay in the third period, and Ryan Johansen added an empty-netter for his second of the game to lead Columbus over Detroit. The host Blue Jackets pulled even with the Red Wings with 80 points in the tight Eastern Conference race. BLUES 5, MAPLE LEAFS 3 David Backes completed a hat trick with an empty-net goal as St. Louis sent host Toronto to its sixth straight loss. The Blues passed Boston for the most points in the N.H.L. with 105. BLACKHAWKS 4, STARS 2 Andrew Shaw and Duncan Keith each had a goal and an assist, and Chicago defeated Dallas. ISLANDERS 5, HURRICANES 4 Colin McDonald had two goals and an assist, and Matt Martin also scored twice for the Islanders, who held on to beat host Carolina. McDonald scored both of his goals in the Islanders’ four-goal first period. CANADIENS 2, SABRES 0 Carey Price made 24 saves and Max Pacioretty and Daniel Briere scored third-period goals as Montreal earned a victory at home against Buffalo. PANTHERS 3, SENATORS 2 Vincent Trocheck and Brandon Pirri scored in a shootout to lift Florida past visiting Ottawa. AVALANCHE 5, PREDATORS 4 Gabriel Landeskog scored two goals in regulation and then netted the winner in the shootout to lead Colorado to a win in Nashville. KREIDER WON’T FACE FLYERS Chris Kreider will not play for the Rangers on Wednesday night when they host the Philadelphia Flyers, the team said. The statement was released in response to reports that Kreider injured his hand in Monday’s 4-3 overtime victory over the Coyotes and could be out as long as a month. Kreider has 17 goals and 20 assists in 66 games this season. JEFF Z. KLEIN

Pittsburgh Penguins
Phoenix Coyotes
Ice hockey


A Town Reborn Faces a New Threat

Abstract: BEACON, N.Y. — On a refrigerator in the back of the Cup and Saucer Tea Room here, the owner, Shirley Hot, keeps a calendar filled with notes like “Giants playoffs” or “pumpkin soup.” She also makes little pictograms of each day’s weather and writes a number, lately too often a single digit, indicating how many customers were served. Ten people lunched, perhaps on Waldorf salad or Cottage Pie on Feb. 20. Seven sampled Dutchess egg salad or maybe Queen V’s Quiche the day before. There were two lonely diners on Feb. 5, and two on Jan. 8. On March 9, according to Ms. Hot’s 2008 calendar, it was about 40 degrees in Beacon, and the Cup and Saucer served not a single scone, not a pot of Oolong, no crepes nor cheese platters nor Portobella Clubs. Zero. That is how many people came in that day besides Ms. Hot. “All I can see are the bills piling up,” she recalled feeling as the hours passed and the door stayed closed. “I have to have the oven on, I have to have the lights on, and nobody’s here. I feel like it’s draining me.” Ms. Hot, 54, who worked at the Cup and Saucer for five years before taking out a home equity loan to buy it in May 2007, is one of dozens of small-shop owners struggling through the recession here in Beacon, a faded factory town on the Hudson River that had been somewhat reborn through retail. As in so many other abandoned small towns and former industrial capitals, art galleries and knickknack emporiums over the last decade reinvented the charming exposed-brick storefronts along Main Street, supported both by locals and by tourists visiting Dia:Beacon, a progressive museum that opened in the former Nabisco factory in 2003. But in the last six months, many of the gewgaw parlors and antiqueries have seen their balance sheets follow the broader economy down, down, down. Some have succumbed. Next door to the Cup and Saucer used to be Finders Keepers, an antique store; the sign in front of the empty storefront now says just Finders. Geppetto’s Wood Works is gone, along with Objectiques. And Allium, a lovely trove of hand-picked treasures that won a local award for its winter windows — but that also deserves the Bad Timing Award. It opened in May 2008, only to suffer through a season of people who realized they could do without beeswax candles and $90 vases. Those who remain are getting creative. Van Brunt, one of the best-known galleries here, recently moved from a 2,600-square-foot showpiece to a 900-square-foot cubbyhole, cutting the rent by two-thirds. Jacqueline Weissner has started “grab bag discounts”: everyone who walks into her hat-and-handbag salon, Jacqueline, picks a slip of paper from a bowl reading 20, 30 or 40 percent off (she swears there is an equal number of each). Hudson Beach Glass is filling its shelves with smaller pieces like a votive candle holder ($32) and a rice bowl ($50) rather than items priced above $100. And Ms. Hot is doing, well, everything she can think of to increase those numbers on her calendar. Feb. 13 featured Dinema, three courses plus a screening of “The Enchanted Cottage” for $25 (it drew 29). The second Saturday of each month is Tea and Jam, with live music (attracting 16 in February, 7 in January, 32 in December). There are Murder Mystery Teas, Jeopar-Tea and, coming soon, Pictionar-Tea. “One month I’ll pay the bills here and the next month I’ll pay the bills at home,” she said, admitting that she was two months behind on her second home-equity loan and a month behind on her health insurance (she has already dropped prescription coverage). “I don’t know how much longer I can juggle.” About 60 miles north of New York City in Dutchess County, Beacon was once known as the hat capital of the United States. Through much of the 20th century, it remained a three-shift town where, as Mayor Steve Gold likes to tell it, you could get fired from one factory in the morning, drink your lunch at one of the many 23-hour-a-day taverns and be hired at another factory by afternoon. The mills started closing in the 1970s; by the 1990s, three-quarters of the city’s commercial spaces were empty. The former bank that now houses the Piggy Bank Restaurant was a flophouse, and the grand firehouse that became Hudson Beach Glass was a soup kitchen. When Paul Newman made the 1994 film “Nobody’s Fool” in Beacon, it was branded, as the movie’s publicity put it, “a town where nothing ever happens.” “It was bad. It was rough. It was nasty,” said Leonard Behney, 31, who grew up here and now owns an outdoors store, Mountain Tops, on Main. “There was your gas station, there was a drug store, at some point there was a hardware store — just sort of the essential stuff.” Kringle’s Christmas House was among the first of the modern retailers to arrive, 15 years ago. Slowly, antiques stores took advantage of the cheap rents. The renaissance began in earnest with the 1999 announcement that Dia would open an outpost in Beacon, which already had a convenient Metro-North Railroad stop. The City Council banned first-floor apartments along Main Street, where galleries soon multiplied, followed quickly by trattorias and tchotchke shops. There was an annual hat parade, a dog parade, the Hocus Pocus Parade (for Halloween ). People came, they bought. And then. This fall, the developer planning a 133-room eco-hotel that was supposed to break ground in January lost $45 million in financing. The city government borrowed $1 million from its $3 million reserves to make up for missing sales tax revenue in its $18 million budget. Heavy snows kept people away for several weekends — Veryal Zimmerman of the Back Room Gallery said that between Thanksgiving and Christmas, she “sold three pairs of earrings, two on layaway.” Lauren Whyte, a paralegal and a corporate compensation analyst, opened Allium as a 50th birthday present for herself, filling the place with lovingly selected housewares and gifts — “stuff that, in the end, Pottery Barn copies” — like Beatriz Ball platters, medina bags made in Morocco, silk scarves by “a woman from a goat farm in California.” Ms. Whyte never expected the store to break even the first year; she planned to get a weekday administrative job to support it. Then, the economy sputtered. “It was quite clear by October it wasn’t happening.” The store’s revenue tumbled from $3,238.55 in July to $2,604.20 in August to $1,962.08 in September. The first weekend in November, receipts were $175.53. She couldn’t pay the $850 rent. “You just start asking the question to yourself a lot: What is going on with the economy that I can somehow work with?” Ms. Whyte recalled. “And there’s no answers. When foot traffic stops, you really can’t do anything.” Those who are still open are holding their breath in hopes that the slow winter was more about the weather than the market. A couple of brave entrepreneurs, including Poppy’s, a grass-fed burger shack, and Isamu, which serves sushi and Chinese food, have even opened in recent weeks. There are a couple of bright spots: At Homespun Foods, where everything on the menu is under $10, sales rose 12 percent in January (“People are still going out for that chocolate chip cookie,” said Jessica Reisman, the chef-owner.) and Artisan Wine Shop has sold 10 percent more bottles in 2009 than at this point last year (though the average bottle price is down 8 percent). “People do continue to purchase alcohol in a downturn,” said the owner, Tim Buzinski. “They come in and say, ‘I don’t want anything too expensive,’ or, ‘I want something less expensive,’ but they’re still coming in to buy wine, which is all we ask for.”

Beacon (NY)
Economic Conditions and Trends
Shopping and Retail


Female Afghan Police Commander Is Shot

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — An outspoken female police commander in southern Helmand Province was shot and wounded by two gunmen on Sunday, the third such attack on a female officer since July, the authorities said. The commander, identified as Second Lt. Nigara, was shot in the neck and was in critical condition at a hospital in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital. The regional medical director, Enayatullah Ghafari, said initial indications were that she had been paralyzed. Lieutenant Nigara, who goes by only one name, had just walked out of her home when two gunmen on a motorcycle shot her from behind. No one has claimed responsibility, but the authorities blamed drug traffickers or Taliban insurgents. In the two previous attacks, the policewomen were killed. All three episodes involved unknown gunmen who attacked during daylight hours in the provincial capital. There are 30 female officers still in the province. “The policewomen were active and discovered drugs and foiled terrorists’ plots, and that’s why they are on the top of their targeting lists,” said Ahmad Zwak, a spokesman for the provincial governor. In an interview this month, Lieutenant Nigara said she was undeterred by the deaths of her two colleagues. She told of living with constant death threats and in near poverty after her brother, also a police officer, was shot and paralyzed. She had been caring for him and his four children, in addition to doing her job. “I’m living in a ramshackle house, and whenever I come back there from duty, I smile to my husband that I am alive,” she said. She added: “I love this job, and I see my countrymen in trouble and the country in a critical situation, and I feel women’s role is important in policing.” Lieutenant Nigara originally joined the force during the Communist era in the early 1990s, and she returned after the fall of the Taliban. She recounted how in 2006 she stopped a would-be suicide bomber, who was wearing an explosive vest, by throwing her arms around him in a bearhug. She apprehended insurgents and drug smugglers several times, even though they were disguised in burqas. And she said she once climbed onto a rooftop to capture an insurgent sniper. “I am receiving threats on a daily basis,” she said. “The smugglers and terrorists are threatening me, saying I should give up, but I tell them that I am an Afghan woman, and I won’t leave the job as long as there is blood in my veins.” Mr. Zwak, the provincial spokesman, said the latest attack would not deter the other female officers. “We have a lot of courageous women in the police, and they won’t give up,” he said. But a police official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject, worried that the shooting of Lieutenant Nigara would serve as a deterrent. “She was the one encouraging female staff to continue working,” he said. “The policewomen were all terrified when the two policewomen were killed.” In July, Third Lt. Islam Bibi, who was in charge of the female recruiting department for the Helmand police and was a seven-year veteran of the force, was fatally shot in the back while on a motorcycle with a male relative. She left a husband and seven children. Also in July, Sgt. Shah Bibi, a six-year veteran of the force whose husband, also a police officer, was killed earlier, was shot while shopping in the bazaar. She left four children. “These recent assassinations really have had a negative impact on how the policewomen feel,” Lieutenant Nigara said in the interview earlier this month. “I am giving them courage and boosting their morale.” She added: “They are really courageous women. None quit their jobs, and I am sure none will, even if things become even worse.”

Afghanistan
Helmand Province
Taliban
Attacks on Police
Murders
Afghan National Police
Afghanistan War
Women and Girls


Georgia Says It Fired on a Military Craft Violating Airspace

Abstract: MOSCOW, Saturday, Aug. 25 — Georgian police forces fired machine guns at an unidentified military aircraft that violated a remote area of Georgian airspace on Wednesday, a senior Georgian official said early on Saturday. Shortly after the shooting, residents of an isolated mountain village reported hearing an explosion and seeing forest fires raging, the official said. The official, Shota Utiashvili, head of the analysis department for Georgia ’s Interior Ministry, said that the nationality and type of plane were unclear, but that he presumed that it was either Russian or piloted by the region’s Russian-backed separatists. “In theory, it could be either Russian or the Abkhaz,” he said by telephone. Mr. Utiashvili’s comments, which followed a diplomatic dispute over a previous Georgian accusation that a Russian military plane had dropped a missile near another Georgian village, drew sharp and swift criticism from Moscow. Aleksandr Drobyshevsky, a Russian Air Force spokesman, labeled the accusation “one more provocative piece of information directed against us,” according to the Interfax news agency, and insisted that no Russian aircraft had been in Georgian airspace or were missing. “All force aircraft are currently on airfields, and the pilots are having a rest,” he said. Mr. Utiashvili said an unidentified military jet was flying from south to north through the Kodori Gorge. It had crossed into Georgia from Abkhazia, a territory controlled by separatists, and was heading to the Russian border at the Caucasus ridge when a police unit fired on it, he said. He emphasized that it was not clear that the police had shot a plane down. He said that perhaps the plane had fired ordnance that started the fires, which he said were reported by residents of the mountain village of Omarishara. Abkhazia also denied having a plane in Georgian airspace, and said it had fired at a Georgian plane that had intruded on its forces’ military exercises. Relations between Georgia and Russia have soured since late 2003, when a bloodless revolution in Georgia toppled a corrupt, post-Soviet government. In the years since, a pro-Western president and Parliament have sought access to NATO and the European Union. Georgia has accused Russia of providing military support to separatists in two Georgian regions, and has said Russia has violated its airspace with military helicopters and jets. The claims have intensified this year, and Georgia has accused Russia of conducting two separate missile attacks with aircraft. Moscow has denied any role. Mr. Utiashvili said that a fire was still burning in the area where the explosion was heard, and that Georgian forces hoped to visit the charred area on Saturday to search for signs of aviation ordnance or a downed plane.

Military Aircraft
Russia
Georgia (Georgian Republic)
International Relations


Missouri River Communities Plan for Flood

Abstract: KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Adding to an already brutal season of flooding, another major waterway — this time, the Missouri River — is rising because of record rain and snow, meaning major flooding is likely from the headwaters in Montana to where it flows into the still-swollen Mississippi River. The sharp rise of the upper Missouri has forced officials to release unprecedented amounts of water from a series of dams that normally control the flow of the river, leading to the evacuations of homes and the construction of emergency levees in downriver communities, including the capital cities of North Dakota and South Dakota. The river is expected to remain at high levels for at least six weeks. “Many communities along the river will experience flooding in proportions they haven’t seen,” said Jody Farhat, chief of the Missouri River Basin water management division of the Army Corps of Engineers . Navigated by the explorers Lewis and Clark as they journeyed west through the middle of the country, the Missouri River remains a vital economic and recreational hub for the Great Plains region. The flooding, especially if it lasts as long as predicted, threatens to swamp freshly planted cropland, displace thousands of residents and define a summer normally spent celebrating events like the Prairie Rose State Games in Bismarck, N.D. Floods, like the record one that soaked communities along the Mississippi River last month, are often slow, unfolding disasters. Despite its magnitude, this one is provoking less suspense because the release of water is being regulated by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has warned leaders as far away as Omaha and Kansas City as to the likely impact. “It’s very unusual to deal with a predicted flood,” said Gov. Dennis Daugaard of South Dakota, where a number of cities have been scrambling to prepare. Mr. Daugaard said the warning had given state and local leaders more time to build earth and sandbag barriers, like those put up around Pierre, Fort Pierre and Dakota Dunes. He called for voluntary evacuations of affected areas in all three towns. “They don’t call it the Mighty Missouri for nothing,” he added. There are six major dams along the upper stretch of the river that allow federal officials to slow down the sometimes violent rush of water that accompanies the melting snowpack in the region. This year, though, torrential rains unexpectedly filled the reservoir to levels that had been reserved for a record-breaking snowpack, forcing the dams to begin releasing water to make room for the coming melt. “We still have snow, lots of it and it’s just now starting to melt,” said Kevin Low, a river forecaster with the National Weather Service. Mr. Low said the entire river was likely to remain “above to well above flood stage” for weeks. Each of the dams has begun releasing more water than at any time since the system was built more than a half century ago, and is scheduled to continue increasing the discharge in the coming days to the maximum level. That influx of water, which represents as much as a fivefold increase over the normal flow into the river, is scheduled to remain at the maximum level for at least six more weeks. More rain or a fast melt would aggravate the risk. “Even though we have these historic releases, the dams are continuing to provide some flood-risk reduction,” Ms. Farhat said. The threat from the river provoked a mix of reactions in the states that it passes through. Al Berndt, the assistant director of the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency , said his many concerns included charts that showed that 10 of 14 levee systems could be topped, as well as the possible impact on two nuclear power plants along the river, both of which are taking protective measures. Mayor Jim Suttle of Omaha, however, was confident that a local levee system that reaches well above the highest predicted levels would keep the city dry, particularly given the advance notice that has allowed workers time to fortify the wastewater treatment plant. “It let us plan,” Mr. Suttle said. “Plan the work and work the plan. That’s why I can say, in all candor, we’re going to proceed with business as usual.” Even as the Missouri continued to rise, the experience along the Mississippi River offered reason for both fear and hope. In southern Louisiana, evacuation orders were lifted and residents were returning; some found their homes destroyed, others undisturbed. The flooding threat is not over — and waters have been slow to recede in parts of the Delta — but it has been far less damaging than initially feared.

Missouri River
Rivers
Floods
Levees and Dams


Court Rules Against Finra on Enforcement Actions

Abstract: A federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled on Wednesday that Finra, an important regulator of Wall Street for more than 70 years, does not have the right to take its members to court to enforce its disciplinary actions. The surprise decision curbs the powers of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, formerly the National Association of Securities Dealers , at a time when it has been under pressure to impose greater accountability on its licensed brokers and brokerage firms. The ruling came after a 14-year fight waged by Fiero Brothers, a tiny penny-stock brokerage firm, and its owner, John J. Fiero. In December 2000, after legal disputes that lasted several years, Finra accused Mr. Fiero and his firm of violating federal fraud statutes — specifically, engaging in a manipulative activity known as naked short-selling. Besides expelling the firm, the regulator imposed a $1 million fine. The firm was shuttered and its owner was barred from the market — but both refused to pay the fine and, ultimately, Finra wound up in federal court trying to collect the money. But Finra had no right to do that, according to a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which encompasses Wall Street. In an opinion written by Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr., the panel unexpectedly overturned a lower court and ruled that neither the nation’s foundational securities laws, adopted in 1934, nor a “housekeeping” rule adopted by Finra in 1990 gave it the right to pursue its monetary sanctions in court. “The principal issue is whether the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. has the authority to bring court actions to collect disciplinary fines,” Judge Winter wrote. “We hold that it does not and reverse.” T. Grant Callery, Finra’s general counsel, said the organization would “continue to review the ruling and weigh our options.” But he insisted the decision would not affect the self-regulatory group’s “ability to enforce Finra rules and securities laws, to discipline firms or protect investors.” But some securities law experts predicted that the ruling could have both practical and psychological effects. “The decision neuters Finra,” said John C. Coffee Jr., a securities law professor at Columbia who has been a consultant both to regulatory agencies and to private defendants appearing before them. “It has been trying to show that it has teeth and could hold its members more accountable — now, those teeth have been surgically removed.” Martin H. Kaplan, a lawyer for Mr. Fiero and his firm, agreed that the ruling “changes the regulatory landscape in a profound way.” He said the decision vindicated those who had complained for years that Finra was exceeding its statutory power and abusing the rule-making process. “Not only did the court find that Finra/N.A.S.D. never had authority to enforce fines using the courts, but it also highlighted Finra/N.A.S.D.’s failure to follow rule-making procedures and its frustration of Congressional intent,” Mr. Kaplan said. At a practical level, Finra still retains its most potent weapon: the power to suspend or expel misbehaving brokers from the financial industry, what the appeals court called a “draconian” power. But Susan Merrill, a securities lawyer and a former head of enforcement at Finra, said the decision cast an adverse light on the process Finra used to adopt the 1990 rule and, potentially, other “housekeeping” rules. The court said the 1990 rule should have been given a more formal review, with an opportunity for public comment, because it did not deal with mere housekeeping matters. Rather, the rule “affected the rights of barred and suspended members to stay out of the industry and not pay the fines imposed on them in prior disciplinary proceedings.” Analyzing whether other Finra rules may be affected by the decision is something “people will be wrestling with in days to come,” Ms. Merrill said. The court’s criticism will also sting a bit at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The commission oversees Finra’s rule-making, and the chairwoman and chief executive of Finra during much of the time it pursued the Fiero case in court was Mary L. Schapiro, the current head of the commission. The Fiero case has been a colorful one since it began in the mid-1990s, and regulators blamed Mr. Fiero and other “naked shorts” for bringing down a small clearinghouse that served 41 other small brokerage firms. Clearinghouse failures are rare and potentially dangerous, since they can greatly magnify the consequences of a single firm’s failure. Since banned brokers cannot return to the industry unless they pay any unpaid fines, it has been extremely rare for Finra to sue to recover unpaid penalties. Until now, both Finra and its members assumed that it had the power to do so if necessary. If it does not, its misbehaving members need no longer fear that a stiff fine will follow them into Wall Street exile.

Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
Fiero Brothers
Decisions and Verdicts
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry
Financial Brokers
Securities and Commodities Violations
NASD
Fiero John J.


Hall of Famer Whose Pen Charted Path for Jackie Robinson

Abstract: Jackie Robinson had a stellar 1945 season with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro leagues but was virtually unknown to most of America. That fall, he picked up a pen to write a letter to the sportswriter Wendell Smith, whose name he spelled with one L. “I want to thank you and the paper for all you have done and are doing in my behalf,” Robinson wrote in near-perfect Palmer Method cursive script, referring to The Pittsburgh Courier, a prominent black newspaper. “As you know, I am not worried about what the white press or people think as long as I continue to get the best wishes of my people.” The letter was written eight days after Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, announced that he had signed Robinson for the team’s farm club in Montreal, and a year and a half before Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color line. Decades later, the film “42” illuminated Smith’s vital role in Robinson’s story. “Wendell Smith was the man,” Vernon Jordan, a former executive director of the United Negro College Fund and former president of the National Urban League, said in a telephone interview. “He was the pioneer guy. And he gave Jackie Robinson the advice he needed.” He also gave advice to Rickey. Sometimes subtly, sometimes urgently, always respectfully, Smith pressed Rickey on the issue of blacks in the major leagues, and the exchanges between them, now tucked away in the Baseball Hall of Fame library in Cooperstown, N.Y., make up some of the most riveting and significant correspondence in the history of the civil rights movement, Smith asked Rickey where Robinson would stay during spring training in Daytona Beach, Fla., where beaches were segregated as late as the 1960s. Rickey, the letters show, eventually invited Smith to camp a few days early to “see to it that satisfactory living conditions” were provided. Smith also alerted Rickey to the possibility that Robinson would not be allowed to travel easily with the Montreal club; he suggested private automobile accommodations. Smith also steeled Robinson’s courage as his major league debut approached. “All you have to do is to keep a cool head, play the kind of ball you are capable of playing and don’t worry about anything,” Smith wrote to Robinson. “As you know, Rickey is no dummy. He is a very methodical man and will see to it that you are treated right. All you have to do is take care of Jackie Robinson on the playing field, and he will do the rest.” Although Smith made his living as a reporter, his most significant writing was in private correspondence to Rickey. “Now, Mr. Rickey, I want you to feel as though the publishers of The Pittsburgh Courier and I are a distinct part of this undertaking,” Smith wrote. “We do not want you to take all of the responsibility with regards to help to strengthen these boys spiritually and morally for the part they are to play in this great adventure.” Smith was raised in a white corner of Detroit, where he witnessed racial prejudice from a pitcher’s mound. He hurled a masterpiece in his American Legion team’s 1-0 playoff win, but the Tigers scout who was present signed Smith’s catcher and the losing pitcher, who were white, to contracts. At that moment, a sports career was born, in the newsroom and in the press box. Image Branch Rickey, right, with Robinson as he signed a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945. Credit Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times Although his catcher, Mike Tresh, played 12 years for the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Indians, Smith changed Major League Baseball forever. He thrust Robinson into Rickey’s sights and helped broaden Rickey’s vision. Smith helped propel Robinson into the Hall of Fame but did not join him there until 1993, when he posthumously received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award for baseball writing. “Acknowledged as the most skilled writer of his time, ‘Smitty’ has been overlooked simply because he was black,” wrote Brian Carroll, the author of a book on the black news media and the integration of professional baseball. As early as 1937, Smith found in his own rudimentary polls that three-fourths of National League players and managers favored baseball integration. He sensed an opening and pushed a Boston politician to withhold support in the annual City Council vote to permit Sunday baseball unless the Red Sox and the Braves offered a tryout to black players. Disappointed that neither team agreed to sign the Negro leagues stars Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson after one-hour tryouts, Smith met with Rickey, who was at the time contemplating a third Negro league. Soon the two were referring to Robinson conspiratorially as “that young man from the West.” Embedded in this story is the remarkable history of The Pittsburgh Courier, an important voice when American news was as segregated as American ball fields. It had a circulation of 347,000 nationally in 1947, when Robinson broke in with the Dodgers. Only 15 newspapers in the United States today have bigger circulations, all but three concentrated in a local area. The Pittsburgh Courier’s prominence — and its ambition — led it to agree to pay Smith’s expenses as he traveled with Robinson. In a 1946 letter to Rickey, Smith wrote, “We are trying to render the cause of Democracy in this country, so ably championed by you.” Later, in a reminiscence for the Hall of Fame, Smith wrote: “The Courier always had some kind of a program going, a crusade for something of consequence. I suggested a campaign for the admittance, an inclusion, of Negro ballplayers in the big leagues. The paper picked up on it.” Rod Doss, the editor and publisher of The New Pittsburgh Courier , as the paper is now known, is proud of its legacy. “The Courier allowed reporters to bring home a very important story and to celebrate the athletes in the Negro leagues and black colleges down South,” he said. “It is part of the story of how blacks gained entry into sports.”

Jackie Robinson
Wendell Smith
Branch Rickey
Brooklyn Dodgers
Baseball
Black People,African-Americans


Dietitians Group Negotiating to End Labeling Deal With Kraft Singles

Abstract: The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics said it was working with the Kraft Foods Group to end part of a deal that allowed the food company to use one of the academy’s logos on packages of Kraft Singles. After the deal was announced by Kraft this month , the organization faced a mutiny among some of the 75,000 registered dietitians and other food professionals who are its members. “The academy and Kraft are in discussions to terminate the contract for our pilot program,” the organization said in its email. “This will take a short period of time to complete.” But the organization said the program was already so advanced that it could not be changed immediately. Kraft Singles with the new logo will begin appearing on retail shelves on Wednesday. “We are working with Kraft to limit the time it remains on shelves,” the academy said in its email. Ryan O’Malley, a spokesman for the academy, did not comment further. As part of the original deal, Kraft agreed to pay for scholarships, research and public awareness campaigns in exchange for the right to use the academy’s Kids Eat Right label and website address on packages of Kraft Singles. After The New York Times published an article about the deal, some of the nutrition organization’s members expressed outrage that it would lend its imprimatur to a highly processed food. Kraft Singles packaging describes the product as a “pasteurized prepared cheese product” made with milk, Cheddar cheese, whey, milk protein concentrate, milk fat and sodium citrate. Kraft intended for the label to be the starting point for a broader campaign to educate parents about the importance of calcium and vitamin D in children’s diets. Some 80 percent of girls and 75 percent of boys ages 4 to 18 do not get enough calcium, while almost half of all children do not consume enough vitamin D. “Although we stand by our decision to work together to shine a light on this issue and not to serve as a product endorsement, we believe misperceptions are overshadowing the campaign,” Jody Moore, a Kraft corporate spokeswoman, said in a statement. “As such, both organizations have agreed it is best not to proceed as originally planned.” Andy Bellatti, a founder of Dietitians for Professional Integrity, a group started by dietitians who questioned the academy’s strong ties to the food industry, said he was pleased that it was working to change its deal with Kraft. “Hopefully, this is the beginning of much-needed and much-overdue dialogue on the academy’s corporate sponsorships,” Mr. Bellatti said. “Dietitians need to continue advocating for an organization that represents us with integrity and that we can be proud of, rather than continually have to apologize for.”

Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
Nutrition
Kraft Foods Group
Cheese
Vitamin


E.P.A. Issues Standards on Boiler Air Pollution

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday issued long-delayed new air pollution standards for industrial boilers , incinerators and cement kilns. The rules provide significant concessions to industry and allow several additional years for full compliance in an effort to minimize job and economic impacts, officials said. The new standards for the first time set numerical limits on emissions of mercury, acid gas and small-particle pollution for a small subset of the nation’s 1.5 million industrial boilers . The agency, which has come under withering criticism from Congressional Republicans for what they contend is regulatory overreach, emphasized that the standards were drafted after extensive consultation with industry groups and local officials. The agency said that the rules would affect fewer than 1 percent of industrial boilers, and that the others either would not be covered by the regulations or can meet the standards by performing routine maintenance. The agency said that the rules would prevent as many as 8,100 premature deaths and 52,000 asthma attacks a year by limiting emissions of lung-scarring particles and toxic pollutants. The agency is giving boiler operators at least three years to meet the standards. The boilers are generally small-scale power and heat plants found at refineries, chemical plants, manufacturing facilities, hospitals, universities and paper mills. Despite the weakening of the rule and the additional time for compliance, industry complained that the regulation would cripple the economy. The National Association of Manufacturers estimated that compliance with the rules would cost industry as much as $14 billion and eliminate tens of thousands of jobs. The environmental agency estimates the compliance costs at about $2 billion, however. “The onslaught of regulations from the E.P.A. means manufacturers will continue to see rising energy prices and skyrocketing compliance costs, which translate into few opportunities for growth and even few jobs,” the association said in a statement on Friday. “Any confidence manufacturers had that the E.P.A.’s next four years will be different is quickly eroding.” The new boiler rules are the subject of continuing litigation by industry and environmental groups. Those challenges are expected to continue. The agency also issued a new rule governing emissions from the country’s roughly 100 cement plants. The rule, issued under a court-ordered deadline, had been in litigation for more than a decade and faced fierce opposition from House Republicans last year. The agency said the regulation would cut emissions of mercury by 93 percent, hydrochloric acid by 96 percent and particulate matter by 91 percent. But environmental advocates said that the 10-year delay in imposing the rule and the additional two or three years granted industry to comply with it would have devastating health and environmental impacts. “The two-year delay has real health effects,” said James Pew, a lawyer with Earthjustice , which filed suit in 2011 on behalf of communities near cement plants. “Using the E.P.A.’s estimates, these new rules would save 960-2,500 lives a year. Every year of delay is one more year communities suffer.” The Portland Cement Association , which represents the industry, said it welcomed the new environmental rule — a rare expression of approval for regulatory action by a Democratic administration. “E.P.A.’s revised rule strikes the right balance in establishing compliance limits that, while still extremely challenging, are now realistic and achievable,” the association said in a statement. “P.C.A. and E.P.A. agreed that the revised standards and reset compliance period are essential to preserving jobs at domestic cement facilities, providing direct support for an American manufacturing industry that is critical to our nation’s infrastructure.”

Air Pollution
Environmental Protection Agency
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry
Factories and Manufacturing


Volunteer for Andrew Cuomo Is Calm Under Fire

Abstract: THE phone calls roll into Andrew M. Cuomo ’s campaign headquarters all day long, each one a tinder box: Why do no African-Americans live in Westchester? How dare Mr. Cuomo take his daughters to a gay pride parade? Does Mr. Cuomo know that hydrofracking will destroy upstate New York, and what is his position? Now someone on the line — he is 81 and persistent — wants to talk to the attorney general, whom he calls Andy. He is a case for Marilyn Thornton, the doyenne of the volunteer corps by dint of maturity, experience and temperament. She can sweet-talk a daisy into bloom on a snowy day — a phone conversation that begins with a duel often ends in a truce, or better. “If you want to volunteer, sir, give me your name and telephone number and someone will call you back,” Mrs. Thornton told the man patiently. “Mr. Cuomo is actually upstate.” The man mentioned Mario and Matilda, Mr. Cuomo’s parents. “My name is Marilyn,” she continued. “My dad actually worked at the racetrack in Belmont. You know the gate the horses run out of. He was the one who put it on the track.” And so it went. She hung up, having extracted the man’s name and phone number with a promise to call him back. Above all, she believes she has made him feel valued and has secured his vote. For the past month, Mrs. Thornton has spent many weekdays trying to help get Mr. Cuomo elected governor, usually juggling calls in the campaign’s sleek reception area in a Manhattan high-rise. A 60-year-old, sing-it-loud churchgoer who seldom lets her advanced breast cancer slow her step, she stands out among the students in skinny jeans who set up for events, work phone banks, do research, cheer for the candidate and prod New Yorkers to vote. It is the first time she has volunteered for a political campaign. She retired at the end of August after working for six consecutive state attorneys general since 1968: she started out in the steno pool making $2,965 a year under Louis J. Lefkowitz, a Republican, and rose to become a special deputy for administration — and unofficial office historian — with a $130,000 salary under Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat. Mrs. Thornton outlasted just about everyone in the office, mostly by staying far away from politics, regardless of who was at the helm. “In my mind, I squared it this way: I worked for the people of the state of New York,” she said. “I was loyal to Bob Abrams until the new guy came in, and then I was loyal to him. It made it easy for me to go Republican to Democrat to Republican to Democrat.” But she promised herself that one day she would volunteer for a candidate so she could peer behind the campaign scaffolding. In September, she picked up the phone. “All I was doing was sitting around,” she said, “reading the mail, paying the bills and watching TV — ‘Law & Order’ and ‘NCIS,’ ” she said. So here she is, allegiance unmuffled, supporting her former boss, not as an ideologue but more like a mother (she has seven grown children). Her doctor ordered rest and a respite from commuter germs. She sees his point. On the other hand, what’s a few weeks? “Of course, I say Andrew is the best choice because I’m here,” Mrs. Thornton said. “I do believe that. He’s always passionate about what he speaks about. He speaks with no notes. That impresses me. He’s not just about being a politician. He really believes.” But what of those callers who criticize Mr. Cuomo for seeming entitled? “Each one of us is something because of the life you were born into,” Mrs. Thornton said. “His father was a governor. He grew up in it. So people will call him a political machine. I don’t think his being a political machine is all bad; I have a feeling it will bode well for him.” MR. CUOMO’S campaign headquarters sit inside the old AT&T building on Broadway in the financial district, an early 20th-century behemoth that stretches a block wide and 29 stories high across the street from St. Paul’s Chapel at ground zero. This is not the campaign of an insurgent. This is serious, modern politics with a controlled soundtrack: tapping keyboards, an occasional lunch ruffling open, the conversation of campaign workers who know they must stay organized and energized despite Mr. Cuomo’s comfortable lead in pre-election surveys. The vibe is corporate casual, people hunkered over laptops in their cubicles. “Andrew Cuomo 2010,” Mrs. Thornton says into the ringing phone over and over. She chose answering phones because she loves helping people, which explains her knack for whipping up giant bowls of homemade macaroni and cheese to share with neighbors. It is a role that puts her in constant contact with the public, which means she has grown used to snarls, shouts, rambles and rude contradictions. When they happen, Mrs. Thornton searches for neutral ground — children, for example. When supporters of Carl P. Paladino, Mr. Cuomo’s Republican opponent, go on tirades, she resists the bait (although she sometimes stretches the phone far away from her ear). And when all else fails, she repeats this mantra: “Just send an e-mail to info@andrewcuomo.com , and someone will get back to you.” Lately, from Mrs. Thornton’s perch, it seems that hydrofracturing — extracting natural gas from shale — has captured the attention of voters across New York. “Every other word out of someone’s mouth is about hydrofracking,” she said, using the shorthand term. Some upstate residents are in a tizzy about it, afraid it will pollute the water supply. Mr. Cuomo has not taken a position, which is clearly not comforting. “I can’t answer that question and don’t want to put information in his mouth,” Mrs. Thornton told one woman who was adamantly opposed to hydrofracturing. “I suggest you go to the Web site. I know there was a report coming out, but that’s all I know. I understand, I understand. I see that, too. He is studying the issue. Just vote, that’s all I have to say.” Anika Ostin, 21, a college student who sometimes answers the phones alongside Mrs. Thornton, is not a lover of the job. “I can’t deal with these crazy people who call,” she blurted, then laughed. “They are driving me crazy. Why do they call?” “Some people call and say, ‘May I please speak with Mr. Cuomo?’ ” said Ms. Ostin, who gets academic credit for volunteering. “No. You can’t.” Some callers are frustrated with government. They see a broken political system. Professional campaigns, including this one, are an industry. They are tired of party politics; of the tidal wave of money it takes to elect people who, they say, will do little, if anything, of significance; of stances and words that get spun so many ways that it’s impossible to keep track. So they scold Mrs. Thornton. “They want to see change, and it’s just not happening fast enough,” Mrs. Thornton said. “They feel this is their opportunity to vent. It’s a campaign office, and voting is just not enough. They want their voices to be heard. I can’t get angry with them.” She tells callers that “you have to start somewhere to fix it,” and that Mr. Cuomo is a good place to start. OPTIMISM is Mrs. Thornton’s shield. Her cancer, which claimed one of her breasts the first time around, in 2001, returned in 2007 and has spread to her hip bone. Only the slightest limp gives it away. “It has changed me a lot,” she said. “I had never been sick before. Every day that I get up and put my clothes on, it’s a blessing. I am happy every day. I help people by being open about it. I want to have a positive approach to this.” In the Long Island suburb of Hempstead, she is surrounded by her “home family and her church family.” She goes to church often to “get fed for the week.” She and her husband, Alfonso, have been together since 1976; they and five other church families have built houses on a plot of land in Texas, where they vacation together and plan to eventually all retire. Her husband wants to go yesterday. Mrs. Thornton is waiting for her two college-age daughters to get a little older. For now, her internal life list is all but put to rest: career; great husband (he cooks, cleans, irons and did the girls’ hair when they were young); nice car (a Chrysler 300); and a five-bedroom house built from the ground up (with three ovens, heated granite floors, temperature control in the tub and closets to spare). Mrs. Thornton likes her clothes, and they like her. On Wednesday, she and Meredith Weber, 28, a graduate student in a no-nonsense suit, were assigned to check the credentials of journalists jostling to get into Mr. Cuomo’s rally with former President Bill Clinton at New York City College of Technology in Downtown Brooklyn. Earlier, Mrs. Thornton had made a snap wardrobe decision: The leather-ish skirt and jacket she had on “wasn’t right.” She ducked into four stores and emerged with a brown skirt, a white top flecked with sparkles and hoop earrings. Nothing cost more than $12, fashion trickery at its best. “Press IDs, please. Press IDs. Do you have a press ID? Do you have a business card? You’re going to have to wait a second.” When Mr. Cuomo took the stage, Mrs. Thornton rose to her feet and cheered wildly, waving a placard. Afterward, she changed out of her high-heeled boots into Baby Phat sneakers. She and her husband folded up chairs and threw away litter. With one eye on the time, she announced: “I need to be at church at 7:45. I’m on the choir line tonight.”

Elections
Politics and Government
Cuomo Andrew M
Democratic Party
New York State
Governors (US)
Volunteers and Community Service