U.S. Open Has Proved Elusive for Phil Mickelson

Abstract: The first came 15 years ago, when he lost a Sunday duel to Payne Stewart but within hours gained a baby girl. The worst came seven years later when he lost his mind at Winged Foot’s 18th, not to mention his grip on the big silver trophy. Sunday charges that fell short. A 54-hole lead not closed out. A week when he simply was the next-best guy as someone else cruised. No one does United States Open runner-up like Phil Mickelson. At least not so painfully often. Consider that his six occasions finishing second are not only the Open record, but are two more than anyone else. Now the Hall of Famer’s greatest frustration has become his biggest obstacle. After his British Open triumph last year, the only thing standing between him and a full set of major trophies is the one that has scarred him most. “I would look at my career,” Mickelson said, “in a whole different light if I were able to get that fourth one.” Only five men have achieved the modern grand slam over their careers: Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Tiger Woods. Now the spotlight falls on Mickelson as the United States Open returns to Pinehurst’s acclaimed No.2 course — the place where all those close calls began. In a perfect world, the script gets to come full circle. But golf — and life — are rarely perfect, and Mickelson’s quest isn’t exactly coming from strength. At 43, the big lefty is suffering through his worst season since turning pro 21 years ago. Not only has he not won a tournament, he has yet to record a top-10 finish. He missed the cut at the Masters and The Players Championship. And those conversations he has had with federal agents looking into insider-trading allegations can’t be helpful as time grows short to fix the flaws. “He hasn’t been playing well, and now this is on top of him,” the two-time Open champion Curtis Strange, now an ESPN analyst, said, referring to the investigation. “It’s not good timing for Phil Mickelson.” It’s still good company Mickelson keeps among those who have won three of golf’s four major crowns. Arnold Palmer never won the P.G.A. Championship, nor did Tom Watson. Byron Nelson never won the British Open — playing it only twice in an era when travel was prohibitive. Lee Trevino perpetually was left flummoxed by the Masters. Sam Snead never won the United States Open, his four runner-up finishes setting the standard before Mickelson came along to smash it. The void ate at Snead until his dying days. And why not? In 1937, he was accepting congratulations on a brilliant 283 — then the second-lowest total in Open history — until Ralph Guldahl eagled No.18 to break the record. Snead needed only a final par to win the 1939 edition, but thought he needed birdie — and the risky play resulted in a double bogey. He lost a 1947 playoff against Lew Worsham with a closing bogey. Likewise, Mickelson’s pursuit has taken a similar hard-luck theme. With his wife nearing delivery of their first child and his caddie wearing a beeper, he led Stewart by one in 1999 with three to play at Pinehurst. But Mickelson missed a 6-foot par putt at No.16 to fall even and watched Stewart birdie the 17th after missing his own 8-foot birdie try. Stewart memorably punched the air after his winning par, then took Mickelson’s face in his hands. “You’re going to make a great father!” he told Mickelson. Less than 24 hours later, Amanda Mickelson came into the world. At least that one had a happy postscript. In 2002, Mickelson finished three shots behind Woods at Bethpage Black, then fell two years later to Retief Goosen when he three-putted No.17 from five feet at Shinnecock Hills. Video The world’s best golfers will compete for the U.S. Open at Pinehurst. The resort’s landmark course recently got a makeover, and its new look is anything but manicured and green. Credit Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times Needing only a final par to win the 2006 crown at Winged Foot, Mickelson reached for a driver and made a mess of the 18th. He bounced his drive off a hospitality tent, clipped a branch with a risky 3-iron, plugged his third in a bunker and staggered off with double bogey. “I am such an idiot,” he famously said afterward. Back at Bethpage, a spectacular charge in 2009 moved him into a tie for the lead only to miss short par saves at Nos.15 and 17. When a three-way tie for second left the United States Golf Association short of runner-up medals, Mickelson deferred. “I’ve got four of those; I’m good,” he quipped. Lastly, he found that a 54-hole lead provided no cushion last year at Merion. He limped home with a 74, undone by bogeys at Nos.13 and 15 as Justin Rose emerged from a jumbled leaderboard. Mickelson hardly got out of bed for three days after that one, and admits it might have been longer if his family hadn’t planned a trip to Montana. Four weeks later, he was clutching the claret jug at Muirfield. “I was able to come to the conclusion that I’m playing really good golf,” he said, “and don’t let it affect the potential outcome of some of the upcoming events. That’s what really got me to refocus on the future and the upcoming majors.” The difference now is that Mickelson hasn’t produced much good golf in 2014. Injuries have forced him to withdraw from two starts — Torrey Pines (back) and San Antonio (ribs). He fluctuated wildly in Charlotte. From March 1 to June 1, he posted more scores of 75 or higher (six) than in the 60s (four). “He hasn’t played very well, for whatever reason,” Strange said. “I really think your current form has a large part to do with how you finish in a U.S. Open. You don’t go to a U.S. Open and find your game.” Ask Mickelson what needs fixing, and different days he gives different answers. One day it’s iron play, another it’s mid-length putting. Or short game. “I don’t feel like the parts are off,” he said recently, “but the score has been off. I’ve got to just stay sharp, salvage shots, fire through each round and see if I can finish strong.” Then there’s the distraction aspect. Federal agents sought a few minutes of Mickelson’s time after his first round at the Memorial Tournament, part of an investigation also involving the maverick investor Carl Icahn and the Las Vegas gambler Billy Walters. “I’m not going to talk much more about it,” Mickelson told reporters. “But I’ve been cooperating in every way I can.” On golf matters, though, Mickelson has been far more open about embracing the challenge at Pinehurst. “I just think it’s easier to be honest and up-front about what I’m feeling and going through than it is to try and deny it,” he said. Strange admires that, having gone through a similar crucible when he sought a third straight Open title in 1990. “He’s taking the questions,” Strange said. “He talks about it. There’s no other option, to be honest with you, because it’s a story. It’s a big story — embrace it.” But the ESPN analyst Paul Azinger notes that Mickelson’s play has rarely blossomed under the spotlight’s glare. “When the focus has really, truly been on Phil, he’s always struggled,” said Azinger, the 2008 United States Ryder Cup captain. “Whether he’s trying to win the U.S. Open or trying to become No.1 in the world, whatever it is, it’s always been difficult for him.” Back in North Carolina’s sandhills, Mickelson can bring things full circle. Pinehurst will be his 24th Open; none have loomed larger. “Some people view it as, He’s come close and he’s never done it,” Mickelson said. “I see it as I’ve finished second six times in this event. I’ve played some of my best golf in this event.” “I should have an opportunity — and more than one opportunity — to close one out here in the future,” he added.

Phil Mickelson
Payne Stewart
British Open
Golf
US Open Golf


Avonte Oquendo Remains Found in Queens

Abstract: First there was the disappearance: a 14-year-old boy with autism last seen walking out of his school by the Queens waterfront last fall. Then there were the months of searching, the posters of a fresh-faced teenager that a city came to know simply as Avonte. With the discovery last week of a body in pieces on the shoreline of the East River, and clothes that appeared to match those last worn by the teenager, hopes dimmed that the boy, Avonte Oquendo, would turn up alive. Those days of uncertainty ended Tuesday as the results of DNA testing confirmed what many had feared: Avonte would not be coming home. The city medical examiner’s office said that remains found along the rocks in College Point, Queens, had been matched to DNA samples provided by several members of Avonte’s family on Friday, when the police began gathering pieces of a body and the telltale articles of clothing — a striped shirt, size 5 ½ Air Jordan sneakers — worn by Avonte. Image Posters seeking information about Avonte Oquendo's whereabouts were placed around the city in the fall. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times “Avonte’s family searched, really searched,” David H. Perecman, a lawyer for Avonte’s relatives, said on Tuesday. “The people of the city of New York searched.” In the days and weeks after Avonte went missing on Oct. 4, the Police Department fanned out, scouring the city by every available means: Divers searched in the waters of the East River; officers went around train stations; bloodhounds were put on possible scents. On the subways, riders saw posters of his face and heard announcements describing the teenager and urging anyone with information to come forward. The city’s efforts were amplified by teams of volunteers mounting an aggressive effort to locate Avonte, who because of severe autism could not speak. They erected a makeshift command center in Long Island City, Queens. Leads came in; none panned out. A chance discovery, by a young woman who first told her mother before they phoned the police, began a grisly process of collecting pieces of a body. That evening, officers cordoned off an area of the riverbank along Powells Cove Boulevard, several miles northeast of Avonte’s school. It was not clear how his body had come to rest there, the police said. Over the next few days, they gathered a collection of bones, each of which would be tagged separately, placed in a paper evidence bag and eventually tested to confirm its connection to Avonte. Some were as small as fragments, others as large as an arm or a leg. By Tuesday, the police said investigators had collected what was believed to be about 90 percent of the boy’s body. Image David H. Perecman, a lawyer for the family of Avonte Oquendo, held a news conference on Tuesday. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times As the police planned more searches on Tuesday, the medical examiner’s office gave grim finality to the hopes of a family and a city that had wondered for months what had happened to the boy. The medical examiner’s office said a cause of death had yet to be determined. Forensic experts said it was not common for bodies found in the water to be so severely dismembered. The police said that the investigation into his death would continue. “The big finding is going to be if they come up with a cause of death,” said Stephen Davis, the Police Department’s top spokesman. “And that is a big ‘if’ in a case like this, where the body is in the water for so long.” He added that investigators were working on the premise that the body had been in the water “virtually from Day 1.” Last year, Avonte’s family began the process of suing the city over his disappearance, casting blame on the city, the Education Department and the Riverview School on 51st Avenue, where video captured Avonte leaving.

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York


Super Bowl — Joe Flacco’s Precision Typical of Elite Quarterbacks

Abstract: NEW ORLEANS — Neither of Joe Flacco’s two brothers was on the field in the Super Bowl on Sunday night. Flacco, the Baltimore Ravens’ quarterback, was not part of any pregame controversies involving deer antler spray, and he did not turn this game into a much-publicized finale of his retirement tour. At this point, there is no such thing as Flacco-ing. So yes, most of the Super Bowl’s story lines had little to do with Flacco. But this was nothing new for Flacco, who, despite his own professions of self-confidence, has rarely been seen as a member of the N.F.L.’s coterie of top quarterbacks. After the Ravens’ victory over San Francisco, however, the facts can no longer be ignored: at 28, Flacco now has the same number of postseason wins (nine) and Super Bowl titles (one) as Peyton Manning, who happens to be one of the three explosive quarterbacks that Flacco outplayed during the Ravens’ magical run to their franchise’s second Super Bowl championship. First, Flacco beat Manning on a bitterly cold day in Denver. Then he knocked off New England’s Tom Brady on the road two weeks ago in the A.F.C. championship game. Finally, after taking down two icons, Flacco beat the wunderkind Colin Kaepernick, whose read-option versatility may well be the wave of the future but was not the style of the moment here Sunday night. Quite simply, Flacco was better: he completed 22 of 33 passes for 287 yards and 3 touchdowns and, perhaps most important, did not throw an interception. Flacco, whose contract expires after this season, was named the game’s most valuable player in what might be the best start to a player’s free agency in the history of professional sports. “Joe was phenomenal,” Ravens Coach John Harbaugh said. “He’s got the guts of a burglar. He was doing it all night making plays.” Last April, Flacco was almost universally mocked when he said he did not think he was among the top five quarterbacks in the league, but rather, that he was the best quarterback of all, better than Brady and Manning and Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers. “I don’t think I’d be very successful at my job if I didn’t feel that way,” he said. Now, the sentiment does not seem so absurd. Flacco made every kind of throw on Sunday, from in-the-pocket strikes to on-the-run heaves. There was the 30-yard pass to Anquan Boldin in the first quarter where Flacco slipped out of San Francisco linebacker Aldon Smith’s flailing grasp. There was the 56-yard touchdown pass to Jacoby Jones in the second quarter in which Flacco flung the ball 50 yards in the air. Then there was, finally, the critical fourth-quarter third-and-1 completion to Boldin on a perfect back-shoulder throw that moved the Ravens into position for their final field goal. Image Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis and quarterback Joe Flacco after Baltimore beat the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl. Flacco was named the game’s most valuable player. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times “I don’t think it’s going to settle in for a while,” Flacco said afterward. “We’ll have this thing forever.” When it was over, and the Ravens poured out on to the field, Flacco’s typically understated personality was on display. While linebacker Ray Lewis and safety Ed Reed pranced and preened, sprinting up and down the field, Flacco stayed mostly low-key. He exchanged a few hugs and high-fives and embraced the Ravens’ owner, Steve Bisciotti. In a rare moment of candor for him, television cameras appeared to catch Flacco utter an exuberant expletive, but otherwise he was mostly at ease. Of course, this is Flacco’s style. He generally deals in platitudes and bromides, leaving the visible signs of leadership to other players. Before the game, Lewis was the one in the middle of the Ravens’ huddle, shrieking and swaying, whipping his teammates into a frenzied lather. After the game, too, Flacco seemed content to stay in the background. When the Ravens gathered on the stage for the presentation of the Vince Lombardi Trophy, Jim Nantz of CBS had to call Flacco up to the front for the typical interview with the game’s M.V.P. and, after giving a short answer to one question, Flacco again made way for Lewis to step up to the microphone. “It’s just who I am,” Flacco said of his personality. “I don’t really know if your demeanor off the field impacts that but it may.” Certainly it did not hurt Flacco, who thrived during a season in which he saw negotiations on a new contract break down and had to adapt to a new offensive coordinator after Harbaugh fired Cam Cameron and moved Jim Caldwell into the play-calling role in December. Then, on Sunday, he did not allow the Ravens to break after a power failure seemed to spark the 49ers to a late-game rally. Unruffled, Flacco shone when it mattered most. He did not throw an interception in the postseason (his last one was on Dec. 16) and he threw 11 touchdown passes in the Ravens’ four playoff wins. “The moment doesn’t get too big,” Flacco said. “We are comfortable. We’ve been there before. We’ve failed before. We’ve succeeded before. We are not worried about the outcome. We just go out there and play football, execute and we believe that if we do that, and do that to our ability, then eventually it is going to work out.” Is he the best quarterback in the league? Some will surely continue to say no. But it is impossible to deny what Flacco accomplished this season. And even though history may remember Sunday as Lewis’s last ride or the Harbaugh brothers’ reunion, it may also have been the true beginning of Flacco’s legacy.

Super Bowl
Joe Flacco
Ravens
49ers
Football


NATO Chief Presses Afghan Drug Fight

Abstract: BERLIN — NATO will remain within international law when it proceeds with new measures to kill drug traffickers in Afghanistan and bomb drug processing laboratories to deprive the Taliban of its main financing, the alliance’s secretary general said Wednesday. The official, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said that “a number of buffers and filters” had been put in place to safeguard the legality of combating what he termed the nexus between the insurgency and narcotics. “It is according to international law,” he said. “And if nations at a certain stage think that they would rather not participate, they will not be forced to participate.” Two weeks ago, the alliance was embroiled in controversy after Gen. John Craddock, the NATO commander who is also chief of American forces in Europe, said troops in Afghanistan would fire on individuals responsible for supplying heroin refining laboratories with opium without need for evidence. In a letter to Gen. Egon Ramms, a German who heads the NATO command center responsible for Afghanistan, General Craddock said that “it was no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective.” General Ramms questioned the legality of the proposal, warning that it would violate international law and rules governing armed conflict. General Ramms’s letter was leaked, provoking a debate within NATO about the conditions and circumstances under which troops could attack drug laboratories. Mr. de Hoop Scheffer ordered an investigation into the leak. “Our enemies and opponents in Afghanistan are reading this leak,” he said. “They are not stupid.”

Afghanistan
Taliban
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Drug Abuse and Traffic


What the E.C.B. Did

Abstract: Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, announced on Thursday what he described as a “comprehensive package” of measures aimed at spurring the eurozone economy and raising inflation. The moves include cuts to interest rates, the expansion of a bond-buying program and loans to commercial banks that would pay banks to lend to businesses and consumers. “It’s a fairly long list of measures,” Mr. Draghi told reporters, “and each one of them is very significant and devised to have the maximum impact.” The steps include: Dissuading Banks From Hoarding Cash The central bank cut its benchmark interest rate, the main refinancing rate, to zero, from 0.05 percent, and also lowered its deposit rate — the interest commercial banks receive for their holdings at the European Central Bank — to minus 0.4 percent, from minus 0.3 percent. By charging banks more to keep deposits at the central bank and less to borrow from it, Mr. Draghi and his colleagues hope to make it less attractive for commercial banks to hoard cash, spurring increased lending. Encouraging Borrowing to Stimulate Growth and Inflation Starting in April, the European Central Bank will buy 80 billion euros, or $88 billion, worth of government bonds and other assets on a monthly basis, as part of a program that will continue until March 2017. That not only expands an existing program that involves the purchase of €60 billion of assets a month, but it also includes for the first time the purchase of corporate bonds. Bank bonds, however, will be excluded from the asset-buying plan. The program, which is a form of quantitative easing, is similar to ones undertaken by the Federal Reserve in the United States and the Bank of England in Britain. It is meant to lower interest rates and encourage borrowing, in that way helping economic growth and inflation. Paying Banks to Borrow Money Starting in June, the European Central Bank will offer four-year loans to commercial banks every three months until March 2017. It was not clear how many banks would be eligible for the program. Banks could, under special circumstances, be paid to take out the loans, meaning they would effectively receive interest both from the European Central Bank for borrowing the money and interest from the customers they lend the money to.

European Central Bank
Eurozone
Quantitative easing
Banking and Finance


Greenland - Global Warming - Glaciers - Melting Ice, Swelling Seas

Abstract: The ancient frozen dome cloaking Greenland is so vast that pilots have crashed into what they thought was a cloud bank spanning the horizon. Flying over it, you can scarcely imagine that this ice could erode fast enough to dangerously raise sea levels any time soon. Along the flanks in spring and summer, however, the picture is very different. For a lengthening string of warm years, a lacework of blue lakes and rivulets of meltwater have been spreading ever higher on the ice cap. The melting surface darkens, absorbing up to four times as much energy from the sun as unmelted snow, which reflects sunlight. Natural drainpipes called moulins carry water from the surface into the depths, in some places reaching bedrock. The process slightly, but measurably, lubricates and accelerates the grinding passage of ice toward the sea. Most important, many glaciologists say, is the breakup of huge semisubmerged clots of ice where some large Greenland glaciers, particularly along the west coast, squeeze through fjords as they meet the warming ocean. As these passages have cleared, this has sharply accelerated the flow of many of these creeping, corrugated, frozen rivers. All of these changes have many glaciologists “a little nervous these days — shell-shocked,” said Ted Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., and a veteran of both Greenland and Antarctic studies. Some fear that the rise in seas in a warming world could be much greater than the upper estimate of about two feet in this century made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year. (Seas rose less than a foot in the 20th century.) The panel’s assessment did not include factors known to contribute to ice flows but not understood well enough to estimate with confidence. All the panel could say was, “Larger values cannot be excluded.” A scientific scramble is under way to clarify whether the erosion of the world’s most vulnerable ice sheets, in Greenland and West Antarctica, can continue to accelerate. The effort involves field and satellite analyses and sifting for clues from past warm periods, including the last warm span between ice ages, which peaked about 125,000 years ago and had sea levels 12 to 16 feet higher than today’s. The Arctic Council , representing countries with Arctic territory, has commissioned a report on Greenland’s environmental trends, to be completed before the 2009 climate-treaty talks in Copenhagen, at which the world’s nations have pledged to settle on a long-term plan for limiting human-caused global warming . Konrad Steffen , a University of Colorado glaciologist who has camped on the shoulders of Greenland’s ice sheet each year since 1990, is the lead author of the chapter in the report on Greenland’s climate. Last August, he and a team focusing on the ways meltwater might affect ice movement dropped a camera 330 feet down a water-filled moulin to explore whether the plumbing system can be mapped. Research on alpine glaciers shows that as more water flows through such apertures, ice can shift more quickly. But eventually large sewerlike conduits form, limiting the lubrication effect. The camera drop was only an initial test. Alberto Behar , a NASA engineer who designed the camera, said some unconventional methods were being considered to chart the flow of such water. “We had ideas to send rubber ducks down and see if they pop out in the ocean,” he said. “They’d have a little note saying, ‘Please call this number if you find me.’” The changes seen in Greenland may turn out to be self-limiting in the short run; surging glaciers can flatten out and slow, for instance. Or they may be a sign that the island’s ice — holding about the same volume of water as the Gulf of Mexico — is poised for a rapid discharge. Scientists are divided on that question, and on whether there is a near-term risk from a Texas-size portion of West Antarctica’s ice sheet that is also showing signs of instability. This split divides those foreseeing a rise in the sea level of a couple of feet this century from water added by Greenland, West Antarctica and mountain glaciers, and a few experts who speak of a couple of yards in that time. Those holding a more conservative view of Greenland’s near-term fate include Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University, who noted that ice cores and tests of organic material from beneath the ice implied that the main mass of the Greenland ice sheet clearly endured thousands of years of warming in the past without vanishing. “It’s basically a big lump of ice sitting on this bedrock,” Dr. Alley said in describing Greenland’s behavior in warm conditions. “What it tries to do is snow more in the middle and melt more on the edges. If it pulls its edges back, then there’s less area to melt, and that helps it survive. That’s why you can have a stable ice sheet in a warmer climate.” But there is no significant debate on the long-term picture anymore. Should greenhouse-gas emissions follow anything close to a “business as usual” rise, the resulting warming and ice loss at both ends of the earth would cause coasts to retreat for centuries. While it was circumspect about near-term changes, the intergovernmental panel was confident about that long view. The prospect of having no “normal” coastline for the foreseeable future has many scientists deeply concerned. “What is at stake is the stability we have always taken for granted” both for coasts and climate itself, said Jason E. Box, an associate professor of geography at Ohio State University. Dr. Box presented fresh findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting last month showing that several Greenland glaciers accelerated sharply in direct response to warming, both in a warm spell starting in the 1920s and now. Eric Rignot, a longtime student of ice sheets at both poles for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , said he hoped the public and policymakers did not interpret uncertainty in the 21st-century forecast as reason for complacency on the need to limit risks by cutting emissions. Dr. Rignot recently proposed that unabated warming could result in three feet of global sea rise just from water flowing off Greenland, three feet from Antarctica and 18 inches as the remaining alpine glaciers shrivel away. This is similar to projections by the most prominent NASA climate scientist, James E. Hansen , but more than twice the three-foot rise that many glaciologists seem to agree on as an outer bound for what is possible by the end of the century. “It is too early to reassure that all will stabilize, and similarly there is no way to predict a catastrophic collapse,” Dr. Rignot said. “But things are definitely far more serious than anyone would have thought five years ago.”


Russia Lets China Tap Resources in Siberia

Abstract: BIROBIDZHAN, Russia — The Kimkan open pit mine in Siberia is a muddy square mile surrounded by birch and cedar forests so vast they seem to stretch to the ends of the earth. As with many places in Siberia, it is nearly impossible to drive here. Yet just under the surface, Russian geologists say, lies enough iron ore to build hundreds of millions of cars. That is why Chinese government officials and business executives are interested, despite a decades-old legacy of bilateral distrust along this stretch of Russia - China borderland. This year, a delegation from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China made its way to Kimkan by helicopter to gaze at the bulldozers peeling back topsoil and to chat with the mine foreman, Viktor M. Ryabov, who explained the scale of the underground riches. “I’m standing on a billion tons of iron ore,” Mr. Ryabov said he told the Chinese visitors. They were impressed, he recalled. “They said, ‘Hurry up; we’re ready.’ ” The encounter was emblematic of a business frenzy in this foreboding region, as Russian companies clamor to sign deals over Siberian resources — including iron, coal and timber — to sell into the insatiable Chinese market. Russian oil , too, is an increasingly sought-after commodity passing through Siberia to China. For resource-starved China, overland supply of Russian metals and oil is an important diversification away from seaborne shipments. The transborder commerce in this region helped China surpass Germany to become Russia’s largest trading partner early last year, with $39.5 billion in goods and services passing between the two countries in 2009. Last year the Russian Far East was the only region in Russia for which investment grew, rather than contracting. As a further sign of Russia-China interdependence, on Thursday, the two nations’ presidents, Dmitri A. Medvedev and Hu Jintao, plan to meet in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for a conference of their regional security alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. All this has been shaking up the grim reputation of places whose names — Siberia and Manchuria — in the past were synonymous with exiles, prisoners and interminable swamps. “Russia and China make a perfect couple,” Kingsmill Bond, the chief strategist at the Moscow investment bank Troika Dialog, wrote in a research report. “Russia has resources that China needs, while Russia needs capital and China has excess savings.” The Chinese bank whose delegation stood on the lip of the Kimkan pit is in advanced negotiations for a $400 million loan to enable the developer, the Petropavlovsk mining company, to begin excavating ore. The reserves Mr. Ryabov spoke of are in Kimkan and a sister mine to the north, and would require 100 years or so to extract. Petropavlovsk, whose shares trade on the London Stock Exchange, plans to transport ore directly south from the Kimkan mine by train to Chinese steel mills that now import iron ore from as far away as Brazil. Mine managers say they will have no trouble beating the Brazilians on price — although pricing of commodities may prove one of the sticking points in this emerging transborder trade, some analysts predict. Skeptics of further economic development between the countries also point to deep mistrust dating to border skirmishes fought on Damansky Island in the Ussuri River in 1969 that put the Soviet Union in a defensive crouch along the border and froze all development for decades. It was not until 1987 that Aleksandr A. Vinnikov, then the local communist party chief and now the governor of the Jewish Autonomous Region, a province in Siberia with a peculiar history, persuaded Moscow to allow a ferry crossing at a riverside village on the Amur. Mr. Vinnikov has today become a staunch supporter of the biggest modern trade venture across the Amur — a planned railway bridge at Nizhneleninskoye village that is intended primarily to carry Kimkan iron ore to Chinese mills. The bridge, whose construction is to be paid for by Petropavlovsk and the two governments, is another emblem of the new prospects in the region, as well as the deep freeze that came before. It would become the lone year-round border crossing along a 2,038-mile stretch of the Russian-Chinese frontier — stretching from Grodekovo, near Vladivostok, and Zabaikalsk, near Lake Baikal. For comparison, the United States’ border with Mexico spans 1,969 miles and has 42 border crossings. The bigger cross-border event now planned, though, could be the trans-Siberian oil pipeline, which is being laid through the region’s dense forest, or taiga, and is scheduled to reach China in 2012 and begin carrying a million barrels a day. By then, about a quarter of Russia’s crude will be exported to Asia, including fuel from Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell developments on Sakhalin Island. Completion of the pipeline would free up Siberian railroad capacity now used by tanker wagons carrying 400,000 barrels of oil a day to China, enabling more goods of other types to be shipped. Already, the Russian government is floating a grand plan for an overland freight service along the trans-Siberian railway from China to Europe. For China, oil now transported overland from Central Asia today, via a pipeline from Kazakhstan, and planned to flow from Russia in two years, is meant to further a policy goal: diversifying petroleum supplies now heavily dependent on the Middle East and shipments through the Malacca Straits chokepoint between the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia. Chinese companies, meanwhile, are renting vast swaths of agricultural land in the Russian Far East left fallow by the shrinking population of ethnic Russians, and are encouraging Chinese migrants to work there as seasonal laborers. Chinese companies have rented 850,000 acres so far. Still, mining and petroleum will form the backbone of the trade, as long as China’s economy remains strong in the face of softening demand in Europe — and as long as the trading partners can strike mutually satisfying deals on pricing of oil, natural gas and iron ore. The Chinese are pressing for discounts from world prices because of the remoteness of the border region. They argue that the Russian commodities should be cheap because of their abundance — and because without China as a near and ready buyer, the vast reserves in eastern Siberia would be far less valuable. The Russians, on the other hand, argue that without their commodities, buyers in northeast China would have to pay much higher prices to suppliers from farther away. Indeed, pricing disputes have for a year delayed a natural gas pipeline deal between China and the Russian company Gazprom. And price haggling could slow down deals even for highly fungible commodities like iron ore. Steel mills in Manchuria now pay about $170 a ton for iron, according to the Petropavlosk company, while the Kimkan mine will be able to produce at about $80 a ton. “They’re not going to give us the whole difference,” Martin Smith, a mining engineer with Petropavlovsk, acknowledged in an interview. Still, on the Russian side, the China trade holds the promise of a new era of prosperity, compared with the modest incomes of fishing, agriculture and the military industry that came before. The autonomous region was controversially created by Stalin in 1934 as a Jewish homeland in Siberia. By the mid-1980s it was clear that the area’s economic base as Jewish agrarian communes had no future. Many of the area’s Jews emigrated to Israel. Of the estimated population of about 185,000 people, only about 4,300 now identify themselves as Jewish on census forms. There are nearly as many migrant Chinese laborers — about 3,500 — working on leased soybean fields. Petropavlovsk is cooperating with the Russian government on a program to attract ethnic Russians from former Soviet countries, including mining engineers from Kazakhstan, and has filled 14 vacancies this way already. The Russians have long harbored fears that broadening economic contact with China would lead to a wave of Chinese immigrants taking over the sparsely populated Far East. But for mining companies the benefits of border trade typically outweigh concerns about who might end up living on these vast, largely empty lands. Aleksey Y. Karskanov, who directs a Petropavlovsk-operated gold mine near the border, bounced along a red dirt road in a jeep giving a tour of the gigantic rock pit he oversees, which yields four tons of gold a year. He buys Chinese mining machinery and uses Chinese truck drivers under contract. “China is our neighbor,” he said. “If we have something our neighbor wants, why not sell it to our neighbor?”

Russia
China
Siberia
International Trade and World Market
Mines and Mining
Steel and Iron


At Meeting, Fed Likely to Again Cut Bond Buying

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve is tiptoeing away from its economic stimulus campaign, and so far the broader economy has barely noticed. The Fed’s policy-making committee, which meets on Tuesday and Wednesday, is widely expected to announce another $10 billion cut in its monthly bond purchases, to $45 billion, en route to ending the purchases this autumn. Fed officials, meanwhile, have focused on assuring markets that interest rates will remain near zero for the next year or so, and stay low thereafter. And after a rocky start to the Fed’s retreat last summer, investors generally have accepted the official line, to judge by the prices of financial assets. “We’re exactly on the right track,” John C. Williams, the centrist president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, told Bloomberg News last week. Things are going well enough that a management issue is rising up the list of the Fed’s concerns. The Fed’s seven-person board in Washington will be reduced to just three members at the end of May, for the first time in its hundred-year history, unless the Senate moves quickly to confirm two additions. A preliminary vote on the nominations of Stanley Fischer and Lael Brainard is scheduled for Tuesday morning. If the Senate does not act in time, three people will be left to do the work of seven. Moreover, the Fed’s chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, and her two remaining colleagues would be allowed to converse with one another only at scheduled public meetings, because any such interaction would involve a majority of the board. Other challenges are looming. Forecasters, including the Fed’s own staff and its officials, generally expect the economy to grow more quickly in the coming months, rebounding from a cold winter that suppressed first-quarter activity. An early indication will come Friday, when the government is scheduled to release an initial estimate of job creation in April. Faster growth could lead some investors to conclude that the Fed will decide to start raising rates sooner, or more quickly, than it has forecast. “The Yellen-led Fed has not yet been tested,” Vincent Reinhart, chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley, wrote in an analysis last week. “The data thus far in 2014 have been soft enough to make it plausible that the policy interest rate can be kept low for a considerable period, but not so soft as to raise significant concerns about the economic expansion. Fed officials, however, will be pressed to speak more clearly about policy sometime soon as economic data firm.” Image From left, Stanley Fischer, Jerome Powell and Lael Brainard, all of whom are nominees to the Federal Reserve Board. Credit Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images While this week’s meetings are likely to pass quietly — the Fed’s next round of economic projections will be released after its June meeting, which is also the next time that Ms. Yellen is scheduled to hold a news conference — officials are likely to discuss some of the issues that will determine the speed of their retreat from the extraordinary stimulus measures that followed the financial crisis. In a recent speech , Ms. Yellen named three considerations that will affect their timing: the extent of slack in the labor market, the outlook for inflation and downside risks to growth. The Fed has chosen to leave open the course of policy once it discontinues its huge bond-buying program. Ms. Yellen said that uncertainty was a consequence of its commitment to take the necessary steps to reduce unemployment and to restore inflation to a healthy pace. “Tying the response of policy to the economy necessarily makes the future course of the federal funds rate uncertain,” she told the Economic Club of New York. “But by responding to changing circumstances, policy can be most effective at reducing uncertainty about the course of inflation and employment.” Since the start of the Great Recession at the end of 2007, the Fed has had a full complement of seven governors just 20 percent of the time. During most of that period, it operated with only five governors. Since early March, there have been only four. And soon, there could be three. Jeremy C. Stein, who has raised concerns about the stimulus campaign, said earlier this month he would resign at the end of May, preserving his position as a tenured professor of economics at Harvard. Mr. Fischer, a former head of the Bank of Israel, and Ms. Brainard, a former Treasury official, are both expected to get the banking committee’s support, along with Jerome H. Powell, a board member since 2012 nominated to serve a new term. But they would then join a logjam of scores of presidential nominees for positions across the government who are awaiting action by the full Senate. While Democrats prevented indefinite delays by changing the Senate’s procedural rules last year, Republicans have responded by slowing each confirmation process. And even the confirmation of Mr. Fischer and Ms. Brainard would leave a pair of vacancies on the Fed’s board. The White House is under considerable pressure from community bankers and their political supporters to choose someone with small-bank experience to the board. Fifteen Democratic and Republican senators — including eight members of the banking committee, which screens nominees — sent a letter to President Obama this month requesting that Mr. Stein be replaced by someone who has served as a community banking regulator or an executive of a smaller bank. The administration also would like to nominate at least one more woman; the Fed’s board had three women when it was most recently at full strength. Two people involved with the issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations, said the White House was considering, among others, Diana L. Preston, a lawyer who recently left the American Bankers Association, where she worked on securities issues; Ann Marie Mehlum, an official at the Small Business Administration who ran a small bank in Oregon; and Rebeca Romero Rainey, chief executive of Centinel Bank of Taos in New Mexico.

Federal Reserve
Interest rate
US Economy
Debt
Quantitative easing
Government bond
US


D-League Graduate Sets New Path to N.B.A. Draft

Abstract: TULSA, Okla. — As the N.B.A. draft approached last year, perhaps the biggest subplot involved Brandon Jennings. After struggling to qualify academically for a college scholarship, he had played professionally in Rome for a season. On draft day, Jennings was selected No. 10 by the Milwaukee Bucks, and he then had a scintillating rookie season. Jennings arrived in the N.B.A. as a much-heralded pioneer, but a different basketball trailblazer who bypassed the traditional road to the N.B.A. will have his referendum Thursday. Only the most dedicated draft junkies know the name Latavious Williams , whose road through the N.B.A.’s Development League , instead of college, is being watched closely by league officials and front offices. He is the first American high school player to be drafted by a team in the Development League, and the experiment has been considered a success. After playing one season for the Tulsa 66ers in the D-League, Williams, 21, is a possible second-round pick Thursday, scouts and other basketball officials say. Where he is picked and how he does could determine whether future players take the inglorious road of the Development League. Williams, who is 6 feet 8 inches and 195 pounds, committed to Memphis out of high school but struggled to qualify academically. He said he chose a job making $19,600 in the D-League rather than a low six-figure salary in China because he thought he would get better experience. “It was a good decision,” Williams said. “I made the right choice. I feel like I learned a lot, and the coaches helped me be a better player over all.” As Williams spoke in a recent phone interview, the background noise of airport announcements filled the line. By the time of Thursday’s draft, Williams will have worked out for 15 or 16 teams, an unusually high number that shows the intrigue surrounding him. Last week, he had a final flurry of workouts in six cities in six days. Williams’s most N.B.A.-ready skill is as an instinctive rebounder. He projects as a so-called stretch 4, a power forward like Hakim Warrick who can play inside and out. Williams did not blow away the competition in the D-League, starting only nine games and averaging 7.7 points and 7.7 rebounds in a little more than 20 minutes a game. But he scored in double figures in 10 of the final 11 regular-season games. Jonathan Givony, the president of Draft Express , a Web site that analyzes the draft, said the D-League experience helped Williams develop. “He got to devote all his time and energy to improving his craft, which is essential for a young player,” Givony said. “I think he got a huge reality check in the first few months of the season when seeing how much more skilled and physically developed the guys in the D-League are and that he won’t be able to just get by on his athleticism anymore.” Givony advocates the D-League for players like Williams who have academic troubles. Williams said that after four years at Starkville (Miss.) High School, he had completed only 2 of the 16 core courses that the N.C.A.A. requires for eligibility for an athletic scholarship. Core courses include English, math and science. “Half the time, I wasn’t even going to school and stuff,” he said. “It was on me. I wasn’t into basketball like that. I never thought I would get that far with it. I didn’t go to school a lot.” When asked how he got to be a senior in high school with only two core courses, Williams said: “You know when you’re at a school and you’re the best player, they’re going to work something out. It was just like that.” After four years at Starkville High, Williams spent one year at Christian Life Center, a private school in Humble, Tex., where he said he completed the 14 other core courses he needed. But because of recent rule changes, the N.C.A.A. Clearinghouse probably would not have accepted the 14 courses passed in one year. So Williams chose the D-League, where players stay at Best Westerns in places like Reno, Nev.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; and Fort Wayne, Ind., while chasing the Ritz-Carlton lifestyle of the N.B.A. Williams received an education on and off the court. He learned from his roommate Marcus Lewis, a former Oral Roberts star, some life basics, like opening a bank account, using a credit card and cooking sweet chili chicken. On the floor, the learning curve was sharp. Williams had no idea how to decipher basic basketball jargon like “whiting” the post — fronting an offensive player — or how to defend a drag screen on a fast break. Although his coaches had to coax energy out of Williams, they said they enjoyed working with him. Williams is so quiet and yes-sir polite that 66ers Coach Nate Tibbetts joked, “The one thing we didn’t have to worry about was him talking back.” Tibbetts added: “This is a decision that he’s decided to make, and he’s approached it really, really well. I don’t think he sits up at night and says, ‘I wish I went to college.’ ” How Williams pans out will be closely watched by the N.B.A. teams that own D-League franchises. The Oklahoma City Thunder owns the Tulsa team, and that provided a big advantage for Williams, as he ran the same plays and learned the same terminology that the Thunder uses. (The Los Angeles Lakers and the San Antonio Spurs also own franchises.) For the Thunder, having its D-League team draft Williams helped it refine its development techniques. Brandon Barnett, Oklahoma City’s manager of minor league operations, said the experiment went well enough that it would consider taking another high school player for the D-League. “It gave us an opportunity to evaluate a player that’s going to be in the draft, get to know him as a person and a player for five and a half months,” Barnett said. “At the same time, we got to take all the development we do in Oklahoma City and practice on a really raw kid.” College coaches say they do not see the D-League route, especially with its low pay, as a threat to their system. Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo said he thought players guided to paths outside college were often misled by those not looking out for their best interests. But for Williams, a happy ending could come Thursday. And for high school stars without the grades to earn a college scholarship, if Williams can make the transition from the D-League to the N.B.A., he may have forged a new path in American basketball.

Basketball
National Basketball Assn
Draft and Recruitment (Sports)
Jennings Brandon (1989- )


High School Football Player Dies

Abstract: A Montclair High School football player who died Wednesday told a teammate that he still had postconcussion symptoms after he was cleared by doctors to return to play, the school’s interim principal said Thursday. Ryne Dougherty, a junior linebacker, died Wednesday night. He was 16. He had a brain hemorrhage Monday while making a tackle during a junior varsity game. Doctors cleared Dougherty to return Oct. 6, roughly three weeks after he sustained a concussion in a practice Sept. 18. He first returned to action Friday, participating in one play for the varsity team. Judith Weiss, the school’s interim principal, said that during a grief-counseling session with students Wednesday, one of Dougherty’s teammates said Dougherty had complained of postconcussion symptoms, specifically headaches, after he was cleared to play by his family physician and a neurologist. “That’s what we have heard from students, that he complained after Oct. 6,” Weiss said in a telephone interview. “I overheard them talking. We have had some grief sessions with the students and one of them said he felt guilty that he didn’t tell someone” that Dougherty was still experiencing postconcussion symptoms. Weiss said she was not aware of any school officials who knew whether Dougherty had not been feeling well even after he had received clearance to play. “From the time he came back, we did not believe there were any symptoms,” she said. At issue is whether Dougherty was fully recovered from his Sept. 18 concussion when he resumed playing. Established guidelines for concussion management state that athletes be free of symptoms, both before and after physical exertion, before they can return to competition. Those symptoms can include nausea, headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light or cognitive problems. Several studies have shown that, particularly among teenagers, sustaining another blow to the head before full recovery from a concussion can lead to second-impact syndrome — a condition in which arteries swell and pressure builds in the brain, often leading to coma or death. Montclair High School uses the ImPACT neurological-testing program, a computer-based protocol that helps determine whether an athlete has recovered from a concussion. In the program, an athlete is administered baseline cognitive testing, which, among other things, involves gauging short-term memory. Those baseline results are compared with cognitive tests administered after the concussion. However, Weiss said that not all of the school’s football players were administered baseline tests before the season and that Dougherty was among those who had not been tested. Dougherty is the third teenager to die in New Jersey in the last three months after participating in football activities; he is the second to die because of a brain injury. Dougherty is also at least the fourth high school player in the United States to die this year because of a head injury. In 2007, three high school players in the United States died of such injuries, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury at the University of North Carolina. After Dougherty was injured, he was rushed to the trauma center at the Hackensack University Medical Center. The hospital said Dougherty had had a brain hemorrhage and performed an operation to relieve pressure on the brain. Dr. Robert Cantu, a co-director of the Neurological Sports Injury Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, while noting that he had no direct knowledge of the Dougherty case, said there was typically little hemorrhaging in athletes with second-impact syndrome, but that there was often increased pressure on the brain. “You really just don’t know what happened until the medical examiner conducts tests and has findings,” Cantu said when asked about the possibility that Dougherty’s injury was a result of second-impact syndrome. “Regardless, if this kid really went back when he was symptomatic from the concussion, he never should have done that.” Earlier this week Weiss said that Dougherty had been administered a CT scan before doctors cleared him to return. It is not known if Dougherty underwent any other testing by his doctors before being cleared or what he told the doctors about his symptoms. Weiss said she did not know the names of the doctors who had treated Dougherty. At Montclair High, the flag flew at half-staff Thursday afternoon while students walked to classes quietly. One female student wore a sleeveless white T-shirt with “Ryne 44 Forever” painted in blue, one of Montclair’s school colors. Dougherty’s jersey number was 44. “He always worked hard — always worked hard,” said Devin McConnell, a senior defensive back on the Montclair varsity team. “Even when we weren’t practicing, he always wanted to be out there. He loved the game.” McConnell paused, then added: “He loved the game more than anyone on the team. He talked about football 24/7.” Montclair’s varsity game at Ridgewood, will be played at 1 p.m. Saturday as originally scheduled. It had been temporarily rescheduled for 2 p.m. Sunday, but then returned to its original date and time Thursday. When school was dismissed Thursday, football players, some lugging helmets and shoulder pads, walked down the hill to Woodman Field, the school’s home field, and gathered at the team bench to continue preparing for a game that may not be easy to play.

Football
Montclair High School
Concussions
New Jersey
Montclair (NJ)


Utah: Rope-Swinging on Rock Arches Is Banned

Abstract: Federal land officials on Tuesday announced new restrictions on the daredevil pursuit of rope-swinging from giant natural rock arches in the desert canyonlands outside the tourist destination of Moab. The Bureau of Land Management placed a two-year ban on activities including zip-lining, rope-swinging and rappelling. The move came after a handful of serious accidents and dozens of complaints from hikers and tourists, who said that the screams and whoops of swinging adrenaline junkies were ruining a tranquil natural setting.


Rafael Nadal’s Win Streak Ends at Gerry Weber Open

Abstract: Top-seeded Rafael Nadal was ousted from the Gerry Weber Open in Halle, Germany, on Friday, falling in the quarterfinals to Philipp Kohlschreiber, 6-3, 6-4. Roger Federer , a five-time winner of this grass-court Wimbledon tuneup, was taken to three sets but defeated Milos Raonic, 6-7 (4), 6-4, 7-6 (3). ¶ Sam Querrey reached his first semifinal in nearly two years, defeating Ivan Dodig, 7-5, 3-6, 6-3, at Queen’s Club in London. . (AP)

Tennis
Federer Roger
Kohlschreiber Philipp


Federal Climate Service Is Created to Aid New Businesses

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will create a new climate change office to gather and provide data to governments, industry and academia as part of a broad federal effort to prepare for long-term changes to the planet, officials said Monday. The new unit, to be known as the NOAA Climate Service , will assemble the roughly 550 scientists and analysts already working on the issue at the agency into a cohesive group under a single leader. The climate service is designed to be analogous to the National Weather Service , also part of NOAA, which celebrates its 140th birthday this month. Officials said they hoped the reorganization would shore up the profile of government climate science and perhaps drive the creation of new businesses like those that repackage and sell weather and census data. “By providing critical planning information that our businesses and our communities need, NOAA Climate Service will help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change,” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department oversees the atmospheric agency, said in a statement . “In the process, we’ll discover new technologies, build new businesses and create new jobs.” The agency has also created a Web site, www.climate.gov , to make it easier for people to find government climate change data and analysis. Jane Lubchenco , administrator of NOAA, said there was a growing demand for timely information from the government about variations in the global climate. “As the realities of climate change become more obvious to more people, farmers, businesses, government agencies and public health officials are going to be turning to us for credible, useful and relevant information,” Dr. Lubchenco said in an interview She said that planning for the new unit was not related to recent challenges to the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , a United Nations research unit that has been accused of inaccurate statements on how climate change could affect glaciers and rain forests . Dr. Lubchenco said her agency was committed to sharing all the information it gathered, including raw data and analytical reports, another area in which the United Nations panel has drawn some criticism. “We want to help build confidence in the science of climate change and give people an understanding of what is well established, as well as areas where there is more work to be done,” she said. Because the creation of the climate service involves shuffling money within the Commerce Department, approval will be required from Congressional appropriations committees.


Juno Halts Cancer Trial Using Gene-Altered Cells After 3 Deaths

Abstract: Three patients in a study testing the use of genetically engineered cells as a treatment for cancer have died from swelling in the brain, dealing a setback to one of the most exciting pursuits in oncology. Juno Therapeutics, the company conducting the clinical trial, said on Thursday that the Food and Drug Administration had temporarily halted the study. The deaths were “difficult and humbling for everyone involved,” Hans Bishop, the company’s chief executive, said in a conference call with securities analysts. Shares of Juno stock plunged 27 percent in after-hours trading. Mr. Bishop and other Juno executives said they believed that the problems resulted from a combination of the particular cells being used and a chemotherapy drug. The company proposed to the F.D.A. that the trial continue without the drug. It is not clear whether the agency will agree, or when it will make a decision, though Juno executives said it could be within 30 days. Juno is working on what is known as CAR-T therapy. This involves taking blood from a patient to extract immune cells, genetically engineering them to make them kill cancer cells, and then putting them back into the bloodstream to go to work. Early studies have shown some striking results in treating certain types of leukemia and lymphoma, generating excitement among oncologists, patients and investors. But the therapy can provoke severe side effects, particularly immune system overreactions and neurological toxicity, including swelling in the brain, known as cerebral edema. There have been several deaths from these side effects. Juno, which is based in Seattle, is in a three-way race to bring the first of these treatments to market, competing against Kite Pharma and Novartis. Juno executives said the setback would probably mean that its initial treatment would not get to market by the end of 2017, as it had hoped. That could clear the way for Kite to be the first, but the company’s shares fell about 10 percent after-hours Thursday. Investors were apparently concerned that Juno’s problems could portend more regulatory scrutiny or other difficulties for the entire field. Chemotherapy is used as part of the treatment to kill some of the patient’s immune system, making room for the genetically engineered cells that are put back into the body. Juno initially used only one chemotherapy drug for this, cyclophosphamide. But it more recently added a second drug, fludarabine, saying the dual chemotherapy could make the treatment more effective. All three of the deaths, two of them occurring last week, were among the six or seven patients so far who had received both chemotherapy drugs. There have been no such deaths among the 13 or 14 patients in the study who received cyclophosphamide alone, the company said. Juno executives said they had proposed to the F.D.A. that the trial, which was treating adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, continue using only cyclophosphamide. In an earlier study, about 80 percent of adults with that cancer had at least temporary complete remissions using cyclophosphamide alone. That would still represent a big advance for those patients, they said. Executives said Juno would continue to use fludarabine in other trials that have different genetically engineered cells.

Cancer
Genetic engineering
Clinical trial
Pharmaceuticals
FDA
Medical test


Communist Officials in Tibetan Region Punished for Separatism, China Says

Abstract: BEIJING — Fifteen Communist Party officials in central Tibet who were accused of taking part in separatist activities last year have been punished for violating party discipline, the Chinese news media reported on Wednesday. The officials in the Tibet Autonomous Region, which includes the capital, Lhasa, provided intelligence to the “Dalai Lama clique” and took part in activities that “would harm national security,” according to an article by China News Service, an official agency, that was published by several major news outlets, including Global Times, a populist newspaper, and the website of People’s Daily , the main party newspaper. The report cited officials with the party Commission for Discipline Inspection of Tibet. The report said there had been six cases of party members and civil servants violating party discipline and 45 officials who had abandoned their posts or neglected their duties. Those 45 officials were being “severely punished,” the report said, citing Wang Gang, a party discipline official. It was unclear from the report to what degree the cases of these officials overlapped with the 15 cases involving separatist activities. The report said the officials had assisted a Tibetan independence organization. China often accuses the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, of secretly advocating for Tibetan independence, though the Dalai Lama has insisted he supports only true autonomy for the region. He fled to India in 1959 and lives in a Himalayan hill station above the town of Dharamsala. The Chinese News Service article said the Tibet region’s party Commission for Discipline Inspection received 1,494 complaints last year from residents about misbehaving officials, an increase of 132 percent over the number in 2013. Of those, 329 cases have been investigated, an increase of 161 percent over 2013, the report said. A total of 240 people have been dealt with in some manner for violating “eight-point” rules issued in 2014 that were aimed at maintaining party discipline, the report said. The central government and the local authorities have been increasing the presence of security forces across Tibetan areas of China since 2008, when a mass uprising took place throughout the region. In recent years, scores of frustrated Tibetans have set themselves on fire to protestChinese Communist Party rule. The rate of self-immolations slowed for a period, but there has been a resurgence recently in Tibetan areas of Sichuan Province. More self-immolations have taken place in Sichuan and Qinghai Provinces than in the Tibet Autonomous Region, which is more tightly controlled.

Tibet
China
Dalai Lama
Communist Party of China


Justice Antonin Scalia Honored at Supreme Court

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Justice Antonin Scalia ’s body arrived at the Supreme Court on Friday morning and was carried up the courthouse’s grand marble steps, through two rows of men and women in dark suits, to its majestic Great Hall, not far from the courtroom where he dominated the court’s arguments for three decades and helped shape American law. Supreme Court police officers served as pallbearers, and some of Justice Scalia’s former law clerks were honorary pallbearers. Among them were Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton, of the federal appeals court in Cincinnati, and Paul D. Clement, a former United States solicitor general. His body was placed on the same catafalque, on loan from Congress, that once held President Abraham Lincoln’s coffin. He will lie in repose at the court until Friday evening. Video Justice Antonin Scalia’s casket was taken to the United States Supreme Court for a public viewing on Friday. It will remain there until his funeral on Saturday. Credit Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times The remaining justices lined up, somber and robeless, in an unfamiliar order to await the body of their departed colleague, reflecting the positions they will soon take on the bench. They stood in alternating order of seniority with the chief justice near the center: Justices Elena Kagan, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony M. Kennedy; Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.; and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. A private ceremony in the Great Hall followed. The Rev. Paul Scalia, Justice Scalia’s son and a Roman Catholic priest, offered a prayer over his father’s coffin. When he recited the Lord’s Prayer, family members, former clerks and court officials and staff members joined in, the words echoing in the hall. Afterward, as the justices filed out, Chief Justice Roberts paused for a moment before a 2007 oil portrait of Justice Scalia by Nelson Shanks . In the painting, Justice Scalia is surrounded by significant mementos: copies of The Federalist and Webster’s Dictionary, an image of Sir Thomas More and a wedding photograph of his wife, Maureen. The portrait was flanked by wreaths, one from the Senate and the other from the House. President Obama and Michelle Obama visited the coffin, which was covered in an American flag, in the afternoon. They stood before it with their heads bowed before they walked over to Justice Scalia’s portrait and quietly talked for a moment. How a Vacancy on the Supreme Court Affected Cases in the 2015-16 Term The empty seat left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death leaves the court with two basic options for cases left on the docket this term if the justices are deadlocked at 4 to 4. Mr. Obama will not attend Mr. Scalia’s funeral on Saturday, a decision that has spurred criticism from even some of the president’s allies. The White House argued that Friday’s visit was the appropriate place for Mr. Obama to pay his respects. On Friday, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Obama intends to spend much of his weekend digging through information about possible nominees to the Supreme Court. “The president’s team over the course of this week has spent a lot of time preparing materials for the president’s review,” Mr. Earnest said. Mr. Obama will spend a “significant portion” of his weekend reviewing those materials, he said. Mr. Obama shook hands with Chief Justice Roberts when he first entered the court building, and afterward the Obamas met with members of Justice Scalia’s extensive family. “The president and Mrs. Obama extended their personal condolences on behalf of the nation, and expressed gratitude for Justice Scalia’s decades of public service,” Mr. Earnest said. Image Pallbearers carried Justice Antonin Scalia’s coffin on Friday into the building where he helped shape American law. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Thousands of dignitaries, friends, local residents and tourists paid their respects to Justice Scalia, who was the current court’s longest-serving member when he died at 79 last Saturday at a Texas ranch. The line of those waiting to view the coffin stretched from the visitor entrance, along the sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court, and around the block. Emily Weatherspoon and Hannah Moore, 17-year-old seniors from St. Mary’s School in Raleigh, N.C., were the first in line, at 6:50 a.m. on Friday. They were two of a group of 13 students who, along with their teachers, woke up early to wait in below-freezing temperatures on the third day of their visit to Washington in the hopes of seeing history. “We disagree about a lot of things ideologically, but I have a lot of respect for him,” Ms. Weatherspoon said. “I think he has very strong opinions, and he really stands up for his beliefs. And I respect that a lot.” Rek LeCounte, 26, said he would miss Justice Scalia’s commentary, and he mentioned the justice’s dissent in June’s same-sex marriage decision . “I don’t even agree with his statement on Obergefell, but it was just still always delicious to read, whether you agree with it or not,” he said. Clutching a hand-lettered poster that read “Thank You, Justice Scalia” with his American flag mittens, Mr. LeCounte said he worried about what would happen in future decisions in Justice Scalia’s absence. “I think putting a liberal to replace a titan like Scalia would be a major setback for this country,” he said. Image People filed past a 2007 portrait of Justice Scalia. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times The court was closed for official business on Friday, and the justices canceled a long-scheduled private conference at which they were to consider requests to hear appeals. The dynamic at such conferences will for now be different, and not only because Justice Scalia was a lively and gregarious presence. It takes four votes to add a case to the docket, and now there are only eight available. What had been a four-member conservative bloc no longer has the unilateral power to grant review in a case. And the strategic calculations, generally involving an assessment of how Justice Kennedy was likely to vote, have shifted. It had been 11 years since a member of the court died in office. When President George W. Bush came to the court in 2005 to pay his respects to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, he was accompanied by Justice Scalia. The funeral Mass for Justice Scalia will be at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, in northeast Washington. The burial will be private.

Antonin Scalia
Funerals
Supreme Court,SCOTUS
Washington DC


The Best-Selling Sports Books

Abstract: Trying to decide what to read on the beach this holiday weekend? Here are the best-selling sports books in May 2015, according to the New York Times best-seller list. 1. THE BOYS IN THE BOAT by Daniel James Brown (Penguin). The University of Washington’s eight-oar crew and its quest for gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. 2. UNBROKEN by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House) . An Olympic runner’s story of survival as a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II; now a movie. 3. MY FIGHT / YOUR FIGHT by Ronda Rousey with Maria Burns Ortiz (Regan Arts) . An Olympic judo medalist and Ultimate Fighting Championship women’s bantamweight champion and Hollywood celebrity tells her story. 4. H IS FOR HAWK by Helen Macdonald (Grove/Atlantic Inc.) . A British woman who is also a lifelong falconer raises a fierce goshawk, rekindling the spirit of an Arthurian sport as she reflects and quotes from T. H. White’s book “The Goshawk.” Image 5. PEDRO by Pedro Martinez and Michael Silverman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) . Memoir from an eight-time All-Star, three-time Cy Young Award winner and World Series champion pitcher. 6. THE JOURNEY HOME by Jorge Posada (Dey Street/HarperCollins). A former Yankees catcher tells his story, from the ball fields of Puerto Rico to behind home plate at Yankee Stadium. 7. THE A SWING by David Leadbetter with Ron Kaspriske (St. Martin’s). A golf instructor shares the evolution of his swing theories. 8. NATURAL BORN HEROES by Christopher McDougall (Knopf). Scrutinizing historical and contemporary figures, the author of “Born to Run” discusses what makes a hero and what fitness techniques we can learn from some of them. 9. TY COBB by Charles Leerhsen (Simon & Schuster). A biography that takes another look at a controversial outfielder who died in 1961. 10. EVERY DAY I FIGHT by Stuart Scott with Larry Platt (Blue Rider) . A memoir by an ESPN anchor and commentator who died of cancer in January. And One . . . 11. BIG DATA BASEBALL by Travis Sawchik (Flatiron). The end of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 20-year streak of losing seasons came in 2013 when the team adopted big-data strategies.


Unrest in Egypt Unsettles Global Markets

Abstract: On Wall Street, it is what is known as an exogenous event — a sudden political or economic jolt that cannot be predicted or modeled but sends shockwaves rippling through global markets. Investors have largely shrugged off several of these unexpected developments recently, including the sovereign debt crisis in Europe , but the situation in Egypt has the potential to cause more widespread uncertainty, especially if oil and other commodities keep surging or the unrest spreads to more countries in the Middle East. While Egypt’s banks and stock market were closed because of the protests there, other Middle Eastern markets declined in trading Sunday, with shares falling by 4.3 percent in Dubai, 3.7 percent in Abu Dhabi and 2.9 percent in Qatar. By early Monday morning, Asian markets were also trending lower, with Japan’s Nikkei index falling 1.5 percent, while in South Korea, the Kospi index slid 1.4 percent. Last week, the Dow Jones industrial average nearly surpassed the closely watched 12,000 level, but fell 166 points in late trading Friday as the protests in Egypt intensified and oil prices jumped 3.7 percent to $89.34. With the United States economy seeming to gain a foothold only recently — government data released Friday showed the economy grew by 3.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010 — a sustained increase in oil prices could choke growth, analysts said. It could also undermine the more general optimism that lifted the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index by 1.5 percent in January, after a 12.8 percent jump in 2010. “A one-dollar, one-day increase in a barrel of oil takes $12 million out of the U.S. economy,” said Jason S. Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington research group. “If tensions in the Mideast cause oil prices to rise by $5 for even just three months, over $5 billion dollars will leave the U.S. economy. Obviously, this is not a strategy for creating new jobs.” In early electronic trading on the Nymex oil futures market Sunday night, prices edged higher to $90.23 a barrel. Until now, the stock market in the United States has defied several outside threats, including the rising risk of food inflation, interest rate increases in China, and sovereign debt troubles in Europe, said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist of Standard & Poor’s Equity Research. “But as is usually the case, a boxer never gets knocked out by a punch he’s looking for,” he said. “This could be what triggers the decline. Geopolitical events are very, very hard to model.” Egypt is not an oil exporter, nor is its stock market a regional heavyweight. As the home of the Suez Canal and the nearby Sumed pipeline, however, it is one of a handful of spots classified as World Oil Transit Chokepoints by the Energy Department, and events there can have an outsize impact on global energy prices. The 141-year-old canal is just 1,000 feet wide at its narrowest, and it cannot handle supertankers, forcing shippers to rely on the pipeline or smaller vessels to move the crude. Roughly 2.9 millions barrels of oil a day, 2.6 percent of global production, passed through the canal and the pipeline in 2009, the Energy Department said. As a percentage of world oil demand, that may not sound like much, said William H. Brown III, a former Wall Street energy analyst who consults for hedge funds and financial institutions. “But prices are determined at the margin and that’s a lot of oil in markets these days,” said Mr. Brown, who estimates global spare production capacity at 2.5 million barrels, the bulk of it in Saudi Arabia. While prices are set globally, the immediate impact of any interruption would be felt primarily in Europe, which relies heavily on jet fuel, heating oil and other distillates refined in the Middle East and shipped via the canal and pipeline. Israel is also a major importer of Egyptian natural gas under a pact that dates to the 1978 Camp David accords. Egypt is a major player in the global grain market, importing more wheat than any other country. Some analysts have speculated that Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries might increase grain purchases to placate angry consumers, which could eventually push wheat prices higher. Given the confrontations with authorities in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities, many analysts expect oil prices, and global markets, to remain volatile in the coming days, even as the opposition in Egypt rallies around Mohamed ElBaradei. “I would expect regional markets to remain very unsettled because we don’t look any closer to a political resolution than we did on Friday,” said Ann Wyman, head of emerging markets research in Europe for Nomura. “Instability in the Middle East makes global markets uncomfortable. We’ve entered a new and unpredictable phase of transitioning governments in the Middle East.” Still, a few investors are looking for opportunities in the Middle East and Egypt itself despite the declines there and the expected instability. Egyptian stocks are inexpensive compared with shares in other markets, said David Marcus, chief investment officer of Evermore Global Advisors. “This is one of the oldest economies on earth.” “We have to start doing our homework,” he added, noting that another troubled Mediterranean bourse, in Athens, has rallied sharply this year, after Greece’s near-default in 2010. “Egypt is pulling down the region because people panic and don’t ask questions. That makes us much more interested.”

Egypt
Stocks and Bonds
International Trade and World Market
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Demonstrations Protests and Riots
Mubarak Hosni


By Lending a Hand, Christie Gains Some Clout for 2016

Abstract: As the midterm elections neared, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey counseled the Republican candidate for governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, on how to land verbal punches against a female opponent without alienating women during televised debates. (Mr. Baker won.) Mr. Christie called in a favor from the chairman of the Republican National Committee to ensure a robust voter turnout operation for Larry Hogan, the Republican candidate in Maryland, whom the party had all but abandoned. (Mr. Hogan prevailed.) And Mr. Christie pleaded with wealthy donors to funnel last-minute contributions into Colorado, where a surging Republican candidate for the statehouse, Bob Beauprez, was poised to knock out an incumbent. (Mr. Beauprez lost, but by just two points.) For Mr. Christie, who started the year entangled in scandal and subpoenas that imperiled his chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association, the wave of Republican victories in statehouses is helping recast his image as a team player within a wary party. Once mocked as incorrigibly self-absorbed (for a keynote address at the 2012 Republican convention so self-referential it was labeled the “me-note”) and casually disloyal (for repeatedly upbraiding Republicans after Hurricane Sandy), Mr. Christie has now shown himself capable of delivering for fellow Republicans. After a year of aggressively promoting, advising and fund-raising for candidates in swings through three dozen states, Mr. Christie can claim a measure of credit for an Election Day outcome that few would have dared predict just weeks ago: Republicans will now control 31 governors’ offices, the most since 1998. (The party successfully defended 22 statehouses and won three more.) “There was a real level of skepticism given his past criticism of Republicans, which seemed self-serving,” said Kevin Madden, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential campaign. “But in this cycle, Christie put his head down and did the hard work for fellow governors that helped Republicans up and down the ballot.” In the process, Mr. Christie has endeared himself to Republican governors, campaign donors and political operatives who could prove vital to his presidential ambitions, and demonstrated, to a degree at least, that his model of blue-state Republicanism can prevail outside his home state. Republicans were in many cases shocked at how well the party’s candidates performed on Tuesday in Democratic-dominated states like Illinois, Massachusetts and Maryland, where the Republican Party prevailed despite long odds. Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican political consultant who has been critical of Mr. Christie, described himself as “stunned” by the Maryland win. “That knocked me over,” he said. Of Mr. Christie, he said, “I give him credit for that.” As chairman of the governors’ association, Mr. Christie authorized the group to run up a debt to invest in the Maryland race, said Phil Cox, the association’s executive director. As association chairman this year, Mr. Christie shattered fund-raising records, drawing in $106 million during his tenure — $6 million above his goal. Those efforts gave Republicans a war chest to pour into governors’ races this year, a campaign that, from the start, he envisioned as a chance to make a Republican stand in traditionally blue states. Did Someone Say ‘2016’? Presidential Contenders Circle Ready or not, the midterm elections signal the unofficial start of the next presidential campaign. Assessing the prospects of some likely candidates. For Mr. Christie, victories in those races serve as a blueprint for his own potential route to the White House. Mr. Christie and his advisers long viewed his post as head of the governors’ association as a high-profile test of his national leadership, and they paid careful attention to the thorny politics and diplomacy that could attend it. Soon after taking on the job, Mr. Christie heeded the advice of Mr. Romney, who believed that he had erred by trying to run the governors’ group while he also ran a political action committee dedicated to his own political future. The tactic was common enough but raised the suspicion of governors, who questioned his loyalties and priorities. Mr. Christie foreswore such entanglements, telling Republican governors at an annual meeting that their campaigns would be his sole focus. He proved, at times to his own political detriment in New Jersey, a dedicated campaigner, traveling to 35 states, many of them repeatedly. (He made eight separate trips to both Illinois and Florida.) He took several governors under his tutelage, speaking almost weekly to those, like Paul LePage of Maine, who were locked in tight or difficult races. Republicans occasionally groused that Mr. Christie’s Gulfstream jet kept finding its way into states like Iowa, a pivotal 2016 caucus state where a popular governor seemed to need little assistance. But party leaders said that Mr. Christie’s grinding schedule had silenced doubters. “When a man like Governor Christie is able to transfer his skills from the state level to the national stage, and achieve this kind of success, he serves notice that he is somebody to be reckoned with,” said Fred Malek, a major Republican donor.

Chris Christie
Republicans
US
2014 Midterm Elections
2016 Presidential Election


It’s All Systems Go for Martínez and Mets

Abstract: CINCINNATI, Sept. 4 — The Mets ’ rotation has changed. Pedro Martínez is officially a part of it. After waking up feeling no discomfort in his shoulder — or anywhere else — Martínez arrived at Great American Ball Park early Tuesday afternoon to prepare for Sunday’s start. “Thanks to God, perfect,” Martínez said when he was asked how he felt. Martínez, who pitched five innings Monday in his first major league appearance in nearly 11 months, said he knew he would be fine when his surgically repaired right shoulder allowed him to lift his arm above his head afterward. With an hourlong cardiovascular session completed but a lengthy stretch in the weight room awaiting, Martínez made a brief appearance in the clubhouse before Tuesday night’s game against the Reds. He said he must spend more time than he ever has to maintain his body between starts. “It’s a lot more work, a lot more to do,” he said. Manager Willie Randolph reiterated how impressed he was with Martínez’s performance Monday. “You always think about location when a guy comes back from surgery,” Randolph said. “He kept the ball away from the middle of the plate for the most part and made pitches when he had to. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had pitched a 72-pitch no-hitter. That’s just who he is. The only thing that you expect is that he can get stronger.” The Mets limited Martínez to 76 pitches Monday, but will probably let him throw in the 90-to-100 range Sunday. They will evaluate Martínez after his scheduled bullpen session Thursday to determine whether he will face any restrictions Sunday against Houston at Shea Stadium. “Being at home with the fans is going to be a little bit emotional, especially the way the fans are with me,” Martínez said. “They’re crazy with me, and I’m crazy with them.” WRIGHT IS ON A ROLL David Wright leads the Mets in doubles, runs batted in, on-base percentage and is second to Carlos Beltrán in home runs. His 94 runs rank second, and he is batting .317 after going 0 for 5 in last night’s 11-7 victory over the Reds. After an exceptional six weeks, Wright has vaulted himself toward the top of a crowded field in the race for the National League’s Most Valuable Player award, but he may not be the most valuable player on his team. So says his manager, Willie Randolph, who said that José Reyes, Beltrán and Billy Wagner could be just as deserving as Wright. “Corny as it sounds, it’s a team thing,” Randolph said. “You don’t need only one guy there for you. You need everyone.” But since Randolph started batting him third on Aug. 14, Wright entered Tuesday’s game batting .411 with 4 homers, 17 runs batted in, 5 stolen bases and a .511 on-base percentage. Wright had batted mostly fourth and fifth before the switch, but had proven to Randolph that he could handle the responsibility that comes with hitting higher in the order. “He’s ahead in understanding what he needs to do for this team,” Randolph said. “You can tell he’s maturing. He has to, when you play every day and have success. “I want my young players to prove and earn what they can do. I’ve felt like David has earned what he’s gotten.” HERNáNDEZ EXPECTED BACK Asked when he expected Orlando Hernández (sore right foot) to rejoin the rotation, Willie Randolph offered a somewhat vague response, saying that he will return “the week of the 10th,” which is Monday. Hernández has played catch, but has not resumed running. PLAYOFF TICKETS LOTTERY The Mets announced Monday that tickets for possible playoff games at Shea Stadium would be available in an online lottery. Fans who register at mets.com or at losmets.com are eligible to purchase tickets for the division series, National League Championship Series or World Series. Registration for the division series will close Monday at 11:59 p.m., and fans selected will be notified by Sept. 13. ALOMAR REJOINS TEAM Sandy Alomar Jr. rejoined the team as a third catcher. The Mets are unlikely to recall any more players until Class AAA New Orleans, which won its division to reach the playoffs, finishes its season.


Livery Drivers Are on Edge After Two Killings This Month in the Bronx

Abstract: Aboubacar Bah had just bought a security camera for his new livery car. He told friends at an early-morning service at the Futa Islamic Center in the Bronx last Tuesday that he was having it installed that night after work. But as Mr. Bah, 62, left the Islamic center on Third Avenue, he was approached by four men who wanted a ride. Two other livery drivers had turned them down, law enforcement officials said. Mr. Bah said yes. According to the officals, the men shot him in the head, dumped his body in the street in the nearby Hunts Point neighborhood and took off in his car. It was the second killing of a livery cab driver in New York City this month. The authorities are investigating whether the same suspects — identified as Takiem Ewing, 21; Tyrone Felder, 25; Kareem Martin, 26; and Tommy Smalls, 26 — shot Maodo Kane, 49, on Aug. 5 in the Co-op City section of the Bronx and used his car in a pair of armed robberies at a minimart and a Dunkin’ Donuts in Yonkers. The deaths raised the specter of the 1990s, when dozens of drivers were killed on the job in a single year and many more were assaulted or robbed. The suspects, all Bronx residents, have been charged in federal court in White Plains with carjacking, resulting in Mr. Bah’s death. If convicted, they could face life in prison or the death penalty. The killings this month have drawn an outcry from livery drivers and their supporters, and focused attention on an industry that is an indispensable part of life to those who rely on it to get around, but is all but invisible to those who do not. Some drivers say they worry every time they slide behind the wheel that it could be their last act. “You don’t know who is behind you,” said Mayor Gueye, 46, who recalled sharing his safety concerns with Mr. Kane, a fellow immigrant from Senegal, and with Mr. Bah when he saw them at African restaurants. “It’s not safe and people disrespect you all the time. You get that every day.” Mr. Gueye, who earns from $80 to $100 a day on average, said he had been cheated repeatedly by passengers who jumped out to avoid the fare or said they were going upstairs to get money and never returned. A young man, when asked to pay the fare, once threw a glass bottle at his car instead, he said. “I just let them go,” Mr. Gueye said. “If you go after them, you take a risk with your life doing that.” There are currently 63,571 for-hire drivers of livery cabs, green cabs, limousines and luxury sedans in the city, according to the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. These drivers must pass a background check and drug test, take a defensive driving course and pay $168 to renew their license every two years, among other requirements. Image Mayor Gueye, a livery cab driver for 24 years, said he knew both drivers killed in August. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times Leonel Santana is no longer among their ranks. Mr. Santana, 54, said he gave up driving a livery cab six years ago after he was held up at gunpoint for the second time. The first time, he lost $125. Two years later, $75. “I was shaking,” recalled Mr. Santana, who now owns an auto repair shop in the South Bronx. “You can’t believe somebody’s taking a weapon and holding it to your head.” Fernando Mateo, the founder of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, which represents 30,000 taxi and livery drivers, said attacks had declined sharply in the past 15 years as a result of legislative and law enforcement efforts and an increased focus on safety measures in cars. Mr. Mateo said livery cab drivers faced far more danger than yellow cab operators because they serve poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods outside Midtown and Lower Manhattan where yellow cabs are often reluctant to go. In the past three years, no yellow-cab driver has been killed on the job, as opposed to three livery drivers, and in the past, there have been significantly fewer reports of crimes against drivers of yellow cabs than livery cabs. “We were enjoying a much safer environment until these two murders, which brought us back to the 1990s,” said Mr. Mateo, who met with Police Commissioner William J. Bratton last week to discuss the industry’s concerns. “We must make sure, and reassure the drivers, that immediate action will be taken.” The city requires all livery cars to have either a bullet-resistant partition or a digital camera, and amber trouble lights that can be activated from the driver’s seat without being seen by a passenger. In 2000, amid protests by the taxi federation over attacks on livery drivers, city officials created a one-time $5 million fund to help pay for partitions or digital cameras. Today, drivers typically spend several hundred dollars on them, Mr. Mateo said. Some drivers take other precautions. Rafael Bordear, who began driving three years ago after being laid off from his job as a restaurant cook, said he avoided working at night and turned away anyone who gave him a bad feeling. “I worry because I’m by myself in the car,” said Mr. Bordear, 46, who spent $800 on a security camera for his Honda Odyssey. A sticker on a window warns occupants they will be photographed. Mr. Bah, an immigrant from Guinea, had lived in New York since the 1990s but could still seem like a newcomer at times, his friends said. Mamadou Bah, an imam at the Futa Islamic Center who is not related, said Mr. Bah would comment with awe on how much bigger the cars, bridges and buildings were in his adopted home. The imam said Mr. Bah had a wife and five children in Guinea, and supported them with money that he made driving the cab. To neighbors, he seemed to work all the time. Dahan Ali, the owner of a bodega in Mr. Bah’s building, said Mr. Bah would stop in for water or cookies between shifts. “A very quiet guy,” he said. “He’d come to get his things and go to work.” Mr. Bah spent his time off worshiping at the center or following soccer games on television or radio. Last week, he went to a soccer game between teams of West African immigrants. “He was a very good man, very peaceful,” Ibrahima Sow, a friend of Mr. Bah’s, said. “I was with him the day he died. He prayed to Allah.” At the red-brick Futa Islamic Center, where many of the members drive livery cabs, Mr. Bah, the imam, said that safety had been a concern. Mr. Kane, the first driver shot to death this month, was also a member. “Anybody driving a cab in New York City, they take big risks,” he said. “But if you have a job to do, you have to do it.”


Unturned Cobblestones on the City’s Grid

Abstract: In honor of the 200th anniversary of the Manhattan street grid, here are some facts that may have eluded even avid city history buffs: In 1811, John Randel Jr. produced three hand-drawn copies of the map laying out the grid. It was known formally as the Commissioner’s Map and Survey of Manhattan Island. Each copy is 105 by 33 inches, with 6.5 inches equaling a mile. One was delivered to the New York County clerk. (It resides atop a metal shelf on the seventh floor of the Surrogate’s Court building in Manhattan.) Another was sent to the mayor and aldermen. (It has been conserved by the New York Public Library in a secure, climate-controlled room under Bryant Park and will be lent this year to the Museum of the City of New York.) The third was sent to the secretary of state in Albany and is believed to have burned in the Capitol fire of 1911.  A few streets survived the imposition of the grid, typically because they were already developed and were home to prominent property owners. One was Stuyvesant Street (between Third Avenue and East 10th Street), among the few that actually run east-west according to the compass. East 11th Street between Broadway and Fourth Avenue was mapped but never opened because of the entreaties of Henry Brevoort and his heirs, whose legal fight inspired a poem by Gideon J. Tucker (excerpted below) and published in Harper’s in 1883: He fought all their maps, and he fought their reports Corporation, surveyors, commissioners, courts. He hired his lawyers well learned in the law; The plans and the statutes to fragments they tore. But before all was through, Mr. Brevoort expires, And calmly he sleeps at St. Mark’s with his sires. But this of the Dutchman’s good pluck we can say — Eleventh Street’s not opened through to this day.  Addresses on the avenues were never numbered uniformly. The crosstown system of 100 to a block dates from the 1860s (although beginning in 1886, buildings west of Central Park were renumbered beginning with 1).  In leveling Manhattan, Reuben Skye Rose-Redwood, a geographer and expert on the grid, calculated that a net 16 million cubic yards of earth and rock were removed from parts of the rugged West Side and nearly 8 million cubic yards were added to fill in valleys on the East Side. (By comparison, 1.2 million cubic yards were excavated to build the World Trade Center.) But when the excavators had finished, First Avenue at 41st Street had dropped nearly 40 feet below its natural elevation, and Eighth Avenue at 77th Street soared about 36 feet above its original height.  One consequence of the grid is that streets and sidewalks make up more of Manhattan than they do of the other boroughs. The Department of City Planning says they account for 4,275 acres or 29 percent of Manhattan’s acreage, 23 percent of the Bronx, 24 percent of Brooklyn, 25 percent of Queens and 15 percent of Staten Island.  In 1911, New York celebrated the centennial of City Hall, the Henry Street School and the births of Horace Greeley and Harriet Beecher Stowe. There appears to have been no public commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the grid.