Gut Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Report

Abstract: In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by bacteria. Each human being is host to thousands of different species of microbes. Yet a group of scientists now report just three distinct ecosystems in the guts of people they have studied . Blood type, meet bug type. “It’s an important advance,” said Rob Knight, a biologist at the University of Colorado , who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first indication that human gut ecosystems may fall into distinct types.” The researchers, led by Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg , Germany , found no link between what they called enterotypes and the ethnic background of the European, American and Japanese subjects they studied. Nor could they find a connection to sex, weight, health or age. They are now exploring other explanations. One possibility is that the guts, or intestines, of infants are randomly colonized by different pioneering species of microbes. The microbes alter the gut so that only certain species can follow them. Whatever the cause of the different enterotypes, they may end up having discrete effects on people’s health. Gut microbes aid in food digestion and synthesize vitamins , using enzymes our own cells cannot make. Dr. Bork and his colleagues have found that each of the types makes a unique balance of these enzymes. Enterotype 1 produces more enzymes for making vitamin B7 (also known as biotin ), for example, and Enterotype 2 more enzymes for vitamin B1 (thiamine). The discovery of the blood types A, B, AB and O had a major effect on how doctors practice medicine. They could limit the chances that a patient’s body would reject a blood transfusion by making sure the donated blood was of a matching type. The discovery of enterotypes could someday lead to medical applications of its own, but they would be far down the road. “Some things are pretty obvious already,” Dr. Bork said. Doctors might be able to tailor diets or drug prescriptions to suit people’s enterotypes, for example. Or, he speculated, doctors might be able to use enterotypes to find alternatives to antibiotics , which are becoming increasingly ineffective. Instead of trying to wipe out disease-causing bacteria that have disrupted the ecological balance of the gut, they could try to provide reinforcements for the good bacteria. “You’d try to restore the type you had before,” he said. Dr. Bork notes that more testing is necessary. Researchers will need to search for enterotypes in people from African, Chinese and other ethnic origins. He also notes that so far, all the subjects come from industrial nations, and thus eat similar foods. “This is a shortcoming,” he said. “We don’t have remote villages.” The discovery of enterotypes follows on years of work mapping the diversity of microbes in the human body — the human microbiome , as it is known. The difficulty of the task has been staggering. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes. (For comparison, the human body is made up of only around 10 trillion cells.) But scientists cannot rear a vast majority of these bacteria in their labs to identify them and learn their characteristics. As genetics developed, scientists learned how to study the microbiome by analyzing its DNA. Scientists extracted DNA fragments from people’s skin, saliva and stool. They learned how to recognize and discard human DNA, so that they were left with genes from the microbiome. They searched through the remaining DNA for all the variants of a specific gene and compared them with known species. In some cases, the variants proved to be from familiar bacteria, like E. coli. In other cases, the gene belonged to a species new to science. These studies offered glimpses of a diversity akin to a rain forest ’s. Different regions of the body were home to different combinations of species. From one person to another, scientists found more tremendous variety. Many of the species that lived in one person’s mouth, for example, were missing from another’s. Scientists wondered if deeper studies would reveal a unity to human microbiomes. Over the past few years, researchers have identified the genomes — the complete catalog of genes — of hundreds of microbe species that live in humans. Now they can compare any gene they find with these reference genomes. They can identify the gene’s function, and identify which genus of bacteria the microbe belongs to. And by tallying all the genes they find, the scientists can estimate how abundant each type of bacteria is. In the recent work, Dr. Bork and his team carried out an analysis of the gut microbes in 22 people from Denmark , France , Italy and Spain . Some of their subjects were healthy, while others were obese or suffered from intestinal disorders like Crohn’s disease . Dr. Bork and his colleagues searched for fragments of DNA corresponding to the genomes of 1,511 different species of bacteria. The researchers combined their results with previous studies of 13 Japanese individuals and 4 Americans. The scientists then searched for patterns. “We didn’t have any hypothesis,” Dr. Bork said. “Anything that came out would be new.” Still, Dr. Bork was startled by the result of the study: all the microbiomes fell neatly into three distinct groups. And, as Dr. Bork and his colleagues reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature, each of the three enterotypes was composed of a different balance of species. People with type 1, for example, had high levels of bacteria called Bacteroides. In type 2, on the other hand, Bacteroides were relatively rare, while the genus Prevotella was unusually common. “You can cut the data in lots of different ways, and you still get these three clusters,” Dr. Bork said. Dr. Bork and his colleagues found confirmation of the three enterotypes when they turned to other microbiome surveys, and the groups continue to hold up now that they have expanded their own study to 400 people.

Bacteria
Research
Intestinal Tract
Microbiology
Science and Technology
Medicine and Health


Blackstone Group Purchases Landmark Willis Tower in Chicago

Abstract: Jonathan D. Gray grew up in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, just a 40-minute drive from the Sears Tower, one of the most recognizable office buildings in the world. Now, Mr. Gray, the global head of real estate for the Blackstone Group, is betting that his hometown is due for growth — by buying the 110-story property, now known as the Willis Tower. Blackstone announced on Monday that it had purchased the 3.8-million-square-foot office building, the second-tallest building in the United States, paying roughly $1.3 billion to add a premier new property to its growing portfolio. Though Blackstone is perhaps best known for leveraged buyouts, its biggest business is its real estate unit, which has struck huge deals like the takeover of Hilton Hotels in 2007. The latest deal is also a bet that Chicago’s historically flat market for office space will show signs of growth. Nearly 20 percent of the Willis Tower, home to tenants like United Airlines, is now vacant. “We are bullish on Chicago as companies expand within and move into the city and look for first-class office space,” Jacob Werner, a managing director in Blackstone’s real estate group, said in a statement. Just four years ago, the building’s current owners, who paid $841 million in 2004, tried to sell the 42-year-old skyscraper, only to call off the process after finding no acceptable offers. The latest sales process went much better for the group, which includes the New York investors Joseph Chetrit and Joseph Moinian and the Illinois-based firm American Landmark Properties. “This is simply a unique asset in real estate in the United States and has been an excellent investment for us,” a representative for the sellers said in a statement. “We are very happy that Blackstone is buying it and know that they will continue to be an excellent steward of this world-famous building.” Though multibillion-dollar price tags for American buildings were once rare, sky-high prices have become more common in recent years. Last month, a Chinese investor paid nearly $2 billion for the Waldorf Astoria in Midtown Manhattan. But a Chicago skyscraper has not fetched over $1 billion until now. The previous record was held by the 60-story 300 N. LaSalle Street, which was purchased for $850 million last year. The Sears Tower opened in 1973, when Sears was at the height of its retail power. The building, then the tallest in the United States, served as its corporate headquarters and was an unmistakable sign of its might. But in 1988, the company sold it.. The tower passed through the hands of several investors, including AEW Capital Management, before the current owners bought control in 2004. When Blackstone officially takes over, the investment firm plans to spend an estimated $150 million to upgrade the tower’s retail space and its famous Skydeck, the 103rd-floor observatory that commands sweeping views of Chicago, particularly from the glass-cube “ledges” that jut out 4.3 feet from the building. Tourism has helped other skyscrapers draw additional revenue. The Empire State Building draws nearly half of its revenue from visitors. “We see great potential in further improving both the building’s retail operations and the tourist experience for one of the most popular destinations for visitors to Chicago,” Mr. Werner of Blackstone said. It is unclear if or when Blackstone will change the name of the building, which was rechristened the Willis Tower after the Willis Group, an insurance brokerage, bought the naming rights in 2009.

Blackstone Group
Chicago
Joseph Chetrit
Joseph Moinian
Commercial Real Estate


Greek Brothel Owner Rescues Larissa Soccer Club

Abstract: LARISSA, Greece — Her soccer club looked ragged. Strikers jumped up for headers only to miss the ball entirely. Players tumbled over one another, shouting out accusations that they had been fouled. But in the bleachers, Soula Alevridou, or “Madam Soula,” as she is known in these parts, watched intently, a petite woman in a man’s tie smoking ultra thin cigarettes. “Keep in mind that the home team is very good,” she said, explaining the difficulties that her team, Voukefalas, was having. Madam Soula, a former prostitute and now, at the age of 67, the owner of two luxury brothels here in Larissa, stepped in this fall to sponsor Voukefalas, a small amateur soccer team that like many others in Greece was having trouble coming up with the cash for uniforms, equipment and playing field fees. She considers her support a natural thing to do, maybe even a patriotic gesture, because her debt-mired country is in so much trouble that many of life’s extras, like amateur sports, are becoming out of reach. “A friend asked and I said, ‘I am here,’ ” she said. But local officials in this once-rich farming area are hardly thanking her for her efforts. In fact, her gift of about $1,300 so far, in part to buy bubble-gum pink training outfits — has caused something of an uproar as officials debate the appropriateness of having a brothel owner step in, even if it is to make up for a bankrupt state and an economy that leaves few businesses with the cash to help young men play sports. In an interview, Larissa’s mayor, Konstantinos Tzanakoulis, pointedly ignored questions about the matter. And the Larissa soccer league recently informed Voukefalas that team equipment bearing the name of Madam Soula’s brothels — Villa Erotica and House of the Era — would not be tolerated, though brothels are legal in Greece. The league warned that any infraction, not only in games but also during “training, warm-ups, interviews and friendly matches,” would land the team in disciplinary hearings for “defamation of the sport.” The team’s president, Ioannis Batziolas, 29, a backup goalie, calls the league’s decision hypocritical, and points out that Greece’s professional soccer championship is sponsored by the state-owned lottery and betting company OPAP, which is soon to be privatized. “What is the better idea to promote?” he asks. “Gambling or sex?” For a time, this city of 200,000 at the foot of Mount Olympus seemed to be weathering the Greek crisis better than most. But the years of recession are piling up and most businesses are suffering. Unemployment is over 20 percent, higher among young people. Madam Soula said her business had been hurt, too. But not that much. Customers sometimes even fly in from Britain, she said, drawn by Internet ads. Mr. Batziolas said he looked everywhere for team sponsors, but found nothing until Madam Soula came forward. His own travel agency, L.A. Travel, provided most of the money last year. But it just could not afford to any longer, he said. On top of that, he has not seen the government’s share of support in several years. “They owe me thousands,” he said. Mr. Tzanakoulis, who has been mayor here for more than a decade, says that the municipality is continuing to support sports, but that the central government has not been delivering, which leaves a great need. “Sports are important for young men,” he said. “It is a good activity that keeps them out of trouble.” But that is all he will say on the subject of Voukefalas (the team is named after Alexander the Great’s horse) and the team’s new sponsor. Voukefalas is not the only team to have been creative in looking for sponsors. Another soccer team got a funeral home to act as a sponsor and for a while wore black T-shirts with white crosses. But league officials did not like that either. Madam Soula tries to shrug off the hullabaloo over her sponsorship. “Do they have anyone else to give them the money?” she asks. In these needy times, she is simply trying to help, she said. She is clearly proud that as “a village girl” who grew up in extreme poverty in the aftermath of the Greek civil war, she is now in a position to help. She has a handful of homes, she said, including a small, tidy house beside one of her brothels. There she grows a vegetable garden and tends to a small dog and nine cats. But it is clear, too, that the public condemnation it has brought her is taking a toll. On a recent evening, she seemed crushed at times that her generosity should engender such hostility. She defends prostitution as a means of survival that allowed her to support much of her family over the years. Her son and two nephews work for her now. Last month, she tried to help an elementary school in the western port city of Patras, but was publicly rebuffed. The school had sent out an S O S asking for contributions for textbooks and a copy machine. She said that she quickly sent about $3,600, but that the school returned her check. At the mention of the copier, tears well up in Madam Soula’s eyes and she looks weary. “They should think about the children,” she said. “How would they know that it was me who sent it? I will be dead by the time they know.” The players on Voukefalas, which lost 6 of its first 10 games, are only too grateful to have a new benefactor. They defend Madam Soula as a generous woman running a legal business who often gives to charity without asking for any credit. “She has a character that does not compare to her job,” Mr. Batziolas said. The players have to put up with a lot of teasing. But mostly it amuses them, they said. “Her money was a very welcome thing,” said one of the players, Dimitris Pikoulis, 24, who is a driving instructor. “These are difficult times. “ “Now, we just have to concentrate on playing well,” he added, “because it was a very rocky beginning for us.” As unlikely as it seemed at the start, the day brought a victory for Voukefalas. And the president of the opposing team, Nikos Daglis, asked Madam Soula to pose for a picture with him. “I have no problem with her help,” he said.

Soccer
Greece
Prostitution
European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- )
Larissa (Greece)


To Deal With Obsession, Some Defriend Facebook

Abstract: Facebook , the popular networking site, has 350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world. Make that 9.9 billion and change. Recently, Halley Lamberson, 17, and Monica Reed, 16, juniors at San Francisco University High School, made a pact to help each other resist the lure of the login. Their status might as well now read, “I can’t be bothered.” “We decided we spent way too much time obsessing over Facebook and it would be better if we took a break from it,” Halley said. By mutual agreement, the two friends now allow themselves to log on to Facebook on the first Saturday of every month — and only on that day. The two are among the many teenagers, especially girls, who are recognizing the huge distraction Facebook presents — the hours it consumes every day, to say nothing of the toll it takes during finals and college applications, according to parents, teachers and the students themselves. Some teenagers, like Monica and Halley, form a support group to enforce their Facebook hiatus. Others deactivate their accounts. Still others ask someone they trust to change their password and keep control of it until they feel ready to have it back. Facebook will not reveal how many users have deactivated service, but Kimberly Young, a psychologist who is the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa., said she had spoken with dozens of teenagers trying to break the Facebook habit. “It’s like any other addiction,” Dr. Young said. “It’s hard to wean yourself.” Dr. Young said she admired teenagers who came up with their own strategies for taking Facebook breaks in the absence of computer-addiction programs aimed at them. “A lot of them are finding their own balance,” she said. “It’s like an eating disorder . You can’t eliminate food. You just have to make better choices about what you eat.” She added, “And what you do online.” Michael Diamonti, head of school at San Francisco University High School, which Monica and Halley attend, said administrators were pondering what the school’s role should be, since students used Facebook mostly at home, although excessive use could affect their grades. “It’s such uncharted territory,” Dr. Diamonti said. “I’m definitely in support of these kids recognizing that they need to exercise some control over their use of Facebook, that not only is it tremendously time consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling.” In October, Facebook reached 54.7 percent of people in the United States ages 12 to 17, up from 28.3 percent in October last year, according to the Nielsen Company, the market research firm. Many high school seniors, now in the thick of the college application process, are acutely aware of those hours spent clicking one link after another on the site. Gaby Lee, 17, a senior at Head-Royce School in Oakland , Calif., had two weeks to complete her early decision application to Pomona College. Desperate, she deactivated her Facebook account. The account still existed, but it looked to others as if it did not. “No one could go on and write on my wall or look at my profile,” she said. The habit did not die easily. Gaby said she would sit down at the computer and find that “my fingers would automatically go to Facebook.” In her coming book, “Alone Together” (Basic Books, 2010), Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , discusses teenagers who take breaks from Facebook. For one 18-year-old boy completing a college application, Professor Turkle said, “Facebook wasn’t merely a distraction, but it was really confusing him about who he was,” and he opted to spend his senior year off the service. He was burned out, she said, trying to live up to his own descriptions of himself. But Facebook does not make it easy to leave for long. Deactivating an account requires checking off one of six reasons — “I spend too much time using Facebook,” is one. “This is temporary. I’ll be back,” is another. And it is easy to reactivate an account by entering the old login and password. For Walter Mischel , a professor of psychology at Columbia University , who studies self-control and willpower, “what’s fascinating about this is that it involves spontaneous strategies of self-control, of trying to exert willpower after getting sucked into a huge temptation.” Professor Mischel performed a now-famous set of experiments at Stanford University in the late 1960s in which he tested young children’s ability to delay gratification when presented with what he called “hot” temptations, like marshmallows. Some managed to stop themselves; others could not. “Facebook is the marshmallow for these teenagers,” Professor Mischel said. Rachel Simmons, an educator and the author of “The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence” (Penguin Press, 2009), said Facebook’s new live feed format had made the site particularly difficult to tear oneself away from. “You’re getting a feed of everything everyone is doing and saying,” Ms. Simmons said. “You’re literally watching the social landscape on the screen, and if you’re obsessed with your position in that landscape, it’s very hard to look away.” It is that addictive quality that makes having a partner who knows you well especially helpful. Monica said that when she was recently in bed sick for several days, she broke down and went on Facebook. And, of course, she felt guilty. “At first I lied,” Monica said. “But we’re such good friends she could read my facial expression, so I ’fessed up.” As punishment , the one who breaks the pact has to write something embarrassing on a near-stranger’s Facebook wall. After several failed efforts at self-regulation, Neeka Salmasi, 15, a sophomore at Greenhills School in Ann Arbor , Mich., finally asked her sister, Negin, 25, to change her Facebook password every Sunday night and give it back to her the following Friday night. Neeka quickly saw an improvement in her grades. Still better, she said, is that her mother no longer visits her room “every half an hour to see if I was on Facebook or doing homework.” “It was really annoying,” she said. Last year, Magellan Yadao, 18, a senior at Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago , went on a 40-day Facebook fast for Lent. “In my years as a Catholic, I hadn’t really chosen something to give up that was very important to me,” Magellan said in an e-mail message. “Apparently, Facebook was just that.” In his follow-up work, Professor Mischel said he found that some of the children who delayed gratification with the marshmallows turned out to be higher achievers as adults. Halley said she and Monica expect their hiatus to continue at least through the rest of the school year. She added that they were enjoying a social life lived largely offline. “Actually, I don’t think either one of us wants it to end,” she said.

Facebook
Psychology
Teens
Computers and the Internet


Bahrain Sentences 8 Activists to Life in Prison

Abstract: CAIRO — A special military court in Bahrain convicted 21 mostly Shiite activists on Wednesday on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government during street demonstrations this year, sentencing eight to life in prison and the others to terms of up to 15 years. Ibrahim Sharif, a secular Muslim who was the only Sunni among the defendants, received a relatively short sentence of five years. The monarchy has accused the men of conspiring with the Shiite government of its increasingly powerful neighbor, Iran . A government spokesman, Luma E. Bashmi, released a statement saying the defendants had brought the country “to the brink of total anarchy” and that the long terms were sending the message that “law and order will be preserved and therefore reassuring the majority of the population of Bahrain that their security will not be allowed to be compromised by violence or attempts to overthrow the regime or by the calling for the establishment of an Islamic Republic.” Of the 21 sentences, seven were handed down in absentia, mostly to men thought to be in Britain . One, Ali Mushaima, 28, has been living in Britain; his father, the opposition leader Hasan Mushaima, was among those sentenced to life. “Our people will not give up,” the younger Mr. Mushaima said, adding, “Today in Bahrain, in every village, people must take to the streets.” After the sentencing, the police fired tear gas to stop marchers in Manama from reaching a central section of the city, Pearl Square, in one of the first demonstrations in months, The Associated Press reported, citing witnesses. In the courtroom in Manama, the capital, the defendants pumped fists in the air and shouted “peacefully” — a mantra from the protests — as guards dragged them away, according to witnesses who gave their accounts to Reuters. The protests broke out in the winter, as members of Bahrain’s Shiite majority, inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, mounted demonstrations to accuse the Sunni monarchy of discrimination in housing, education and employment, and call for justice. King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa responded with a crackdown in which more than 30 demonstrators were killed, according to human rights groups. In mid-March, he decreed a state of emergency and tamped down the protests with the aid of troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates . The Bahraini authorities insisted that the judicial process was legitimate and that the defendants had access to legal advice and representation. The prosecutor’s office said in a statement that the accused could appeal within 15 days , and that representatives of human rights organizations in Bahrain attended the trial, as did representatives of local and foreign news media and relatives of the accused. But human rights organizations condemned the proceedings as being purely political. Faraz Sanei, a researcher with Human Rights Watch , described the defendants as “prominent opposition figures and leaders,” people who have been known in Bahrain for years. The arrest and prosecution of Mr. Sharif, the leader of a political organization called Waad, had come as a particular shock, Mr. Sanei said. “Like the others, he was picked up by masked gunmen, in the middle of the night, held incommunicado,” Mr. Sanei said. “A lot of people were surprised he was arrested, and it seemed that the government’s motivation to do so was that he doesn’t fit the mold of the rabid Shiite opposition activist that they are always trying to present. He was part of an organization which wasn’t even outlawed.” International criticism over his arrest might help to explain Mr. Sharif’s relatively light sentence, Mr. Sanei said. Another defendant, Abduljalil al-Singace, had been imprisoned in August, along with more than 20 others. Mr. Sanei said the arrest of Mr. Singace, a member of Al Haq, a banned opposition movement, was “one of the catalysts for the protests that happened earlier this year.” “In fact,” he continued, “many of the same people arrested in August are the ones who were arrested again and charged in this case. As a gesture of good will, the king released them while protests were ongoing, in February.” Proceedings at the special military court “do not in any way satisfy international trial standards,” Mr. Sanei said, noting that while the government says the Court of National Safety is not a military court, a military judge presides and the military provides the prosecutor, though two civilian judges are present. The defendants did not have access to lawyers, he said, and were held incommunicado with no access to their families for weeks. “Quite a few of them have told us that they were subjected to torture in detention, as well,” he added. The king, who has called for dialogue and reconciliation, ended the country’s state of emergency on June 1, but the situation remains tense, with security checkpoints and a heavy police presence around the country. Meeting with President Obama last week, the Bahraini crown prince, Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, reaffirmed his father’s commitment to dialogue and reconciliation. Human rights groups say the trials are incompatible with those goals. Bahrain, an archipelago of 36 islands off eastern Saudi Arabia, is an important regional ally of the United States , serving as the base of the United States Navy ’s Fifth Fleet. In 2002, King Hamad promulgated a constitution promising democratic measures inspired by those of countries like Britain and Denmark , but opponents say he has failed to deliver.


Baseball Fans Choose Yankees or Mets on Opening Day

Abstract: There were perhaps a few hundred feet of unity in Grand Central Terminal on Monday, stretching from the subway entrance on East 42nd Street and Park Avenue to the trains bound for competing boroughs. The fans arrived to greet the same baseball season, gabbing with the same unblemished optimism. Some even shared a fashion strategy — pulling a team T-shirt over a work-approved button-down, once the boss was out of view. But in a two-team baseball town, on an Opening Day without precedent in the last half-century, the split took place. On the No. 4 train platform, Yankees fans boarded their ride due north, for a date with the Boston Red Sox. And one level below, beneath the pinstriped faithful — in a cruel bit of transit symbolism not lost on the city’s Mets fans — the No. 7 train to Queens awaited. Play ball! About 10 miles apart. Because of a scheduling oddity , the Yankees and Mets both began their seasons at home, on the same day, at the same hour, for the first in their history, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Though the quirk had little effect on the most loyal fans, it introduced a unique logistical wrinkle for many others — ticket scalpers, transit officials, bartenders holding television remote controls, even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Image A scheduling oddity had the Mets and Yankees both begin their seasons at home, on the same day, at the same hour. A fan at Citi Field showed loyalty to both teams. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times And so, on a day typically governed by the teams’ off-season choices — Who plays shortstop? Where does he hit in the order? What’s the going rate for a pretzel? — the most critical question was turned on the city itself before the games’ first pitches were thrown shortly after 1 p.m. Yankees or Mets? Mr. Bloomberg took care to appear evenhanded. His chief spokesman, Marc La Vorgna, wrote on Twitter before the games that “heavy calculations” were made to ensure that the mayor split his time equitably. These included research on the average game length for each team, specifically for the Yankees and Red Sox, whose marathon meetings are without peer. (The mayor took the subway to the Yankees game first, stayed until the fourth inning, then arrived by car at Citi Field for the sixth inning, Mr. La Vorgna said. He stayed until the end.) At a Modell’s on East 42nd Street, employees likewise arranged team apparel with an eye toward fairness, placing Mets and Yankees gear side by side near the entrance, though some of the Mets racks were banished to a well-obscured corner. Bar operators turned to the democratic process in determining which game to display most prominently. At Shorty’s , a bar in Midtown known as a haven for Philadelphia sports fans, the bartender, Catherine Tejada, said that all but two tables requested audio and big-screen treatment for the Yankees. (One wanted the Mets; the last asked for the Colorado Rockies.) Yankees fans also had their way in other corners of the city. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority provided a special nostalgia train to the Bronx, with cars from 1917 and nonstop service to the Stadium. The Mets received no such accommodations. “We don’t have the personnel to be able to run two nostalgia trains at once,” said Kevin Ortiz, an authority spokesman. He added that an old train would likely to run to Citi Field for this year’s All-Star Game and “hopefully to both stadiums come October.” Opening Day: Yankees and Mets 20 Photos View Slide Show › Image Barton Silverman/The New York Times Stephen Rozenfeld, 79, from New Rochelle, N.Y., is used to such slights. Wearing a shirt with the name and number of the Mets third baseman, David Wright, atop his collared button-down, Mr. Rozenfeld said he had cheered the team since its inception in 1962. “I call being a Mets fan the logical masochistic extension of being a Dodgers fan,” he said, signaling the start of a lengthy soliloquy on the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 1941 loss to the Yankees in the World Series. “Suffering is part of the game.” Outside the ballparks, it was clear which game the city’s hucksters preferred. In the Bronx, ticket scalpers held court beside a McDonald’s, lamenting that they could not work both games this year. Customer loyalty, some said, had tethered them to the Yankees. “I’ve worked here longer,” one scalper reasoned, “so I’ve got be here.” Nearby, a dog named Shaggy sat atop a security pillar in a Yankees hat, sunglasses and Converse sneakers. Tip money stuck out of the back left pocket of the dog’s denim jeans, though it would be scooped up soon enough by Ryan Legrier, 27, who had turned his Maltese-poodle mix into a small business. By afternoon’s end, though, Citi Field would prove the place to be. Hours earlier, as the scent of lighter fluid wafted over the parking lot’s tailgaters before the first pitch, Jason Kish, 37, had blessed Opening Day’s promise of a “fresh start.” He had attended about 20 season openers, he said, as a co-worker, John Keskin, a Turkish native, awaited his first. “Mets, baby!” Mr. Keskin shouted, tilting his head to the sky. Soon, their faith was rewarded. The Mets routed the San Diego Padres, 11-2. And all the ancient trains and bespectacled pooches in the five boroughs could not have saved the Yankees from an 8-2 loss.

Baseball
Yankees
Mets
Subway
Yankee Stadium NYC
Citi Field NYC
NYC


Kevin Harpham Gets Maximum Sentence in Bomb Attempt

Abstract: A man who admitted planting a bomb along a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade route in Spokane was sentenced Tuesday to 32 years in prison, the maximum penalty negotiated under a deal from which he tried to withdraw. The man, Kevin Harpham, told Judge Justin L. Quackenbush of Federal District Court that he only agreed to the deal to avoid a possible life sentence. Mr. Harpham, who has extensive ties to white supremacists, said he did not intend to injure people with the bomb, but wanted the shrapnel to hit a building as a protest against the multiculturalism celebrated by the parade. He likened himself to a Christian protesting same-sex marriage , “but a bit more dangerous or extreme.”

Parades
Sentences (Criminal)
Bombs and Explosives
Spokane (Wash)
King Martin Luther Jr
Harpham Kevin


Guinea: Border Closed Over Ebola Fears

Abstract: Guinea closed its border with Sierra Leone on Monday as part of new efforts to stamp out Ebola, an official said. The long-running Ebola outbreak in West Africa has killed more than 10,300 people, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Liberia has no Ebola patients at this point, and Sierra Leone has recently seen a fairly steady decline in cases. But the disease remains entrenched in Guinea. Guinea’s president, Alpha Condé, said over the weekend that emergency measures would be “reinforced” for 45 days in five districts, including some on the Sierra Leone border. Its closing was part of those measures, Cmdr. Mamadou Alpha Barry, spokesman for the national gendarmerie, said.

Guinea
Ebola
Sierra Leone
Liberia
Alpha Conde


A Wrench in the Works on Voting Laws

Abstract: Ross Ramsey, the executive editor of The Texas Tribune, writes a regular column for the Tribune. Behind the legal fights over the federal Voting Rights Act — whether Texas and other states ought to get federal permission before changing their election laws — is a fundamental question: Does Texas still discriminate? As of a year ago, a panel of three federal judges in Washington unanimously decided the answer was yes, and said in a footnote that “the parties have provided more evidence of discriminatory intent than we have space, or need, to address here.” That panel had been asked to “preclear” the Texas maps — to make sure, under the Voting Rights Act, that the State Legislature had drawn new maps without violating anyone’s rights. The state appealed the panel’s decision to the United States Supreme Court. That court never heard it. Instead, the justices vacated the Texas ruling after deciding in another case that Texas and other states with histories of racial discrimination no longer had to get federal permission before changing election laws. In that case, which started in Alabama, the court said the federal law still allows courts to require preclearance in places where it finds intentional discrimination. It also said, however, that the federal law’s formulas for including states with historic discrimination was unconstitutional. That last bit freed Alabama, Texas and a number of other places that have been under federal oversight for decades. In practical terms, the court’s ruling unsnarled a legal traffic jam that had tied up the Texas maps for Congressional and legislative districts as well as the state’s voter ID law, which requires people to carry photographic proof that they are who they say they are before they are allowed to vote. Still, there’s that pesky finding of intentional racial discrimination burned into the maps. The state’s lawyers saw that one coming. While the Texas maps were pending, a different federal court, this one in San Antonio, drew maps for use in the 2012 elections. And in the first special session this summer, Attorney General Greg Abbott finally got his wish, which was that the Legislature would adopt those court-drawn maps (with a few minor tweaks) and abandon the maps drawn earlier. Without that deft maneuver, the state would have found itself defending the old maps again, albeit in a different federal court, in a trial that would have revived the claims of discrimination. There is, after all, still another court in session, asked to decide whether minorities are fairly represented in the state’s redistricting maps. That San Antonio panel is looking at the status of things now that Texas has adopted new maps and the nation’s top court has issued its Shelby County v. Holder ruling. Because of that ruling, and the now-vacated finding of intentional discrimination in the Legislature’s 2011 drawing of new maps, the United States Department of Justice is asking the judges to pull Texas back under federal oversight. The federal law has a provision that allows voting jurisdictions — Texas, in this case — to be hauled back in for preclearance if a court finds it necessary. And there is this: The plaintiffs in the San Antonio case want the evidence from the Washington case admitted into their own proceedings, and have told the judges that would save everyone from having to reproduce the documents and testimony already completed there. That would have the effect of giving a second federal court a bite of the poisoned apple, with the plaintiffs obviously hoping to get the same result in San Antonio that they got in Washington almost a year ago. Their contention is that the Legislature’s first maps didn’t adequately reflect the growth of the state during the first decade of the century, when 89 percent of the growth came in minority populations, about two-thirds of it from Hispanics alone. For some of the plaintiffs, the court-drawn maps now adopted by the Legislature have some of the same problems. The federal oversight makes all the difference in how this gets argued. With preclearance, Texas has to prove that its actions lacked discriminatory intent, and the maps can’t be used until that is done. Without it, the plaintiffs have to prove that intent to discriminate was there, and the maps can be used for elections until the courts say otherwise. The judges have to answer the same question either way: Did Texas discriminate in a way that makes the maps illegal?

Texas
Voting Rights Act
Discrimination
State legislature
US Politics
Redistricting and Reapportionment
gerrymandering


4 Spitzer Aides Broke Ethics Law, Panel Says

Abstract: ALBANY — Four Spitzer administration officials violated the state’s ethics law when they used the State Police last summer to gather travel documents they hoped would tarnish Joseph L. Bruno , then the State Senate majority leader, according to a report released on Thursday by the State Commission on Public Integrity. The report drew on 3,000 pages of testimony and thousands of internal documents, and depicts an administration on a war footing, with Gov. Eliot Spitzer seething over attacks from Mr. Bruno and eager to strike back. It also describes an extensive — but ultimately fruitless — effort by the governor’s top aides to deny the commission e-mail messages and documents that could shed light on the administration’s actions last spring and summer, when internal discussions began about whether Mr. Bruno’s travels on state aircraft could pose a political problem for the senator. The commission brought no charges against Mr. Spitzer. But in its report, the commission left open the possibility of action, including taking steps against Mr. Spitzer, if additional evidence emerges. While separate investigations continue, the report had been perhaps the most eagerly awaited in Albany, and it offered one of the most thorough examinations of the conduct of the Spitzer administration as it gathered and released information about Mr. Bruno. The commission found that the Spitzer administration enlisted the State Police “in an effort to gather and publicize sensitive information about Senator Bruno’s travel. In doing so, Spitzer administration officials caused the State Police to contravene longstanding State Police procedures governing the disclosure of such travel administration.” It also affirmed the findings of previous inquiries that Mr. Spitzer’s communications director, Darren Dopp , and William F. Howard , a public safety adviser to the governor, asked the State Police to re-create travel itineraries for Mr. Bruno, hoping to show that he had used state aircraft to attend political fund-raisers. Though that would not necessarily have violated state policy at the time, such uses by other state politicians have drawn criticism in the past. The State Police superintendent, Preston L. Felton , who has since retired, worked with troopers to obtain the information, the report said, knowing it would be released to the news media. In some cases, the police reported the details of Mr. Bruno’s trips to Mr. Dopp “on a real-time basis,” according to the report, suggesting a continual, close monitoring of Mr. Bruno’s travel. Richard Baum , then the top aide to Mr. Spitzer, received e-mail messages about the travel records from Mr. Dopp, but failed to intervene to prevent any impropriety, the report says. Mr. Baum and Mr. Howard have already reached settlements with the commission. Both men admitted wrongdoing under a broadly worded section of the ethics law that governs state officials’ conduct, known as the Public Officers Law, that forbids any action that might “raise suspicion among the public” that an official might be involved in improper acts. Neither was asked to pay a fine. The other two officials are contesting the findings, which will require a public adjudication of the charges. If the commission’s findings are upheld, Mr. Dopp could be subject to a $10,000 fine and Mr. Felton to fines totaling $20,000. Even as it issued its report on Thursday, the commission itself was under attack, with critics saying that it shied away from a detailed examination of what role Mr. Spitzer may have played in the effort. The panel has emphatically denied the criticism. Mr. Dopp has accused the commission’s executive director, Herbert Teitelbaum, of seeking to paint him as a rogue operative who acted without direction from or approval of the former governor. The Albany County district attorney, P. David Soares, who released a report this year concluding that the governor had been deeply involved in the effort against Mr. Bruno, has said Mr. Teitelbaum sought to interfere with his investigation. In a statement, Mr. Dopp said that the commission had been “compromised from the beginning and after a year has produced a report that is more concerned with validating the improper conduct of the commission staff than getting at the truth.” In an interview, Mr. Felton said: “I look forward to the administrative hearing and to bringing some matters to light. I believe I have done nothing wrong, and that will be proven in the end.” The commission said that while Mr. Spitzer was at critical points apprised by Mr. Dopp about efforts to collect the travel records and generate negative news coverage about them, the governor believed that the documents had been requested by a reporter and that the information was being released in accordance with existing public records laws and procedures. It also said that Mr. Dopp’s testimony in Mr. Soares’s inquiry was at odds on some key points with his testimony to the commission, including his description of a June meeting with the governor, after which Mr. Dopp released Mr. Bruno’s travel records to The Times Union of Albany. In his testimony to the commission, Mr. Dopp said simply that Mr. Spitzer had told him to release to the newspaper whatever documents he had collected that were subject to Freedom of Information laws. In his testimony to the district attorney, however, Mr. Dopp said that Mr. Spitzer had given “a very, you know, pointed, angry response that left no doubt that he wanted the records released.” In an interview, Mr. Dopp said his statements were not inconsistent. The only difference, he said, was that Mr. Teitelbaum had not asked him exactly what Mr. Spitzer said. The report also strongly contradicts Mr. Spitzer’s contention, and that of his aides, that they cooperated fully with the investigation. According to the commission, the administration released information sporadically over the 10-month investigation, hampering the inquiry, and tried to exempt more than 100 documents through what the commission described as “spurious claims of privilege,” only to back down after the commission authorized its staff to seek a court order for the documents. In one e-mail message included in the report, Sean Patrick Maloney, an administration lawyer, noted to David Nocenti, Mr. Spitzer’s former counsel, and other colleagues that investigators had not yet thought to ask for e-mail from administration officials’ personal accounts. Mr. Maloney recommended that in their first response to a request for documents, Mr. Spitzer’s counsel include “a key adjective.” He suggested writing that “we have searched chamber records and produced herewith those chamber items responsive to your request,” to avoid being accused by investigators of not fully responding to their request at a time when the administration did not yet have access to aides’ personal e-mail. Nearly all of Mr. Spitzer’s e-mail messages included in the report appear to have been sent from a personal account. The commission declined on Thursday to discuss whether it is continuing to investigate Mr. Spitzer. The panel earlier sent the former governor a so-called 15-day letter notifying him that he was among the subjects of the commission’s inquiry, but it is not clear when the letter was sent. A lawyer for Mr. Spitzer, Michele Hirshman, said in a statement that there was no evidence that he had acted improperly, and that the investigation was concluded. “Nothing in the commission’s report suggests that Governor Spitzer’s conduct was anything other than proper, legal and obligatory,” Ms. Hirshman said. But the commission is required, if it determines that there is no violation by a person who has received a 15-day letter, to inform the person of that determination. Ms. Hirshman declined on Thursday to say whether Mr. Spitzer, who resigned in March, had received such a letter.

Ethics
State Commission on Public Integrity
Spitzer Eliot L
Bruno Joseph L
Dopp Darren
Felton Preston L
Baum Richard
Howard William F


In Age of Anywhere Delivery, the Food Meets You for Lunch

Abstract: Julio Diaz was hungry. The problem was that Mr. Diaz was sitting in his Mitsubishi S.U.V., had a great parking spot on the Upper West Side, and could not walk away from the car until the alternate-side parking period had passed. Anywhere else, breakfast might have had to wait. But, in a land where a bouquet of daffodils, a clubbing outfit or a box of Pampers can be summoned in the flicker of a smartphone screen, the solution was simple. Thus began Mr. Diaz’s habit of having his morning sustenance delivered directly to his car. “I have the whole works,” said Mr. Diaz, a shoe salesman. “Bacon, eggs, home fries, toast. I have a real breakfast in my car. It smells like a restaurant.” Perhaps nothing is dearer to New Yorkers than the idea that in this city, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it this year, “I order food, it’s at my door in 10 to 15 minutes. O.K.?” (Justice Sotomayor, who grew up in the Bronx, had unkind words for Washington restaurants, where “there isn’t a place I call where it doesn’t take 45 minutes.”) Now that the hungry can use cellphones and food-delivery apps to order anything their stomachs desire to the very spot where they stand, however, delivery is no longer confined to the apartment or the office — or even, for that matter, to a place with an address. “We go to the park all the time; we go to the beaches all the time,” said Robert Asmail, the manager at Due Fratelli Pizza in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “The police officers, they call on the corner, say, ‘We are outside patrolling.’ We go over there, we go anyplace! Doesn’t matter!” Mr. Asmail added that his deliverymen often make trips to the Red Hook piers to feed fishermen. “I don’t care,” he said. “They buy, we send it out.” Some requests are simple enough: bring a few pizzas to the neighborhood playground or a sandwich to the local gym, ready for its sweaty devourer. Others can tax a delivery person’s ingenuity, as when the call comes from within a crowd: the middle of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park on a sunny day, for instance, or any of the city’s myriad lines. Just ask any park-bound delivery person, who must rely on everything short of divining rods to find customers amid seas of picnickers. The lucky ones are told to look for colorful blankets or particularly loud T-shirts. Others must simply wander, and hope. “ ‘Yeah, we’re in between tree one and two.’ We don’t get a very precise location,” Danny Nasser, who works at Maya Taqueria in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, said, recalling the predicament of one deliveryman who spent nearly an hour searching Prospect Park. Do not get Mr. Nasser started on the time Maya’s was asked to deliver to someone working in a manhole. Though New Yorkers seem to feel nothing is worth having unless they have to wait for it — to judge by the lines for cronuts , free Shakespeare and new iPhones — nobody likes to wait hungry. Veterans of the Shakespeare in the Park line, which usually forms before 6 a.m., know to order bacon and eggs from Andy’s Deli on the Upper West Side. At least a few requests involve a touch of complicity. “We deliver everywhere, put it that way,” Danny Marino, who works at Johnny’s Pizzeria in Sunset Park, said, musing on the many calls the Brooklyn pizzeria has received from people in gentlemen’s clubs. “Well, they’re not actually gentlemen in there, but absolutely.” John Hackett recalled biking uptown from the Financial District four summers ago when he witnessed a police boat heading straight to the East River shore. “I thought they were going to be jumping off like a SWAT team or something,” Mr. Hackett said. But there was a man on the bicycle waiting. “The next moment, the boat kind of kissed the shore. There’s a policeman there reaching over the railing of the esplanade and getting this bag of evidently Chinese food, and handing money back to the delivery guy,” Mr. Hackett said. And then? “Everybody went their own way,” he said. Not that ingenuity in the service of hunger has been limited to the smartphone era. As a high school senior in Brooklyn in the 1990s, Joseph Sapienza, 33, devised a scheme with friends to sidestep what he said was an unsavory cafeteria lunch by ordering Chinese food to a certain side of the school building. A classmate would prop open the window in the boys’ bathroom on the first floor to hail the deliveryman. The lunches ended after administrators staged a sting operation. “We opened the restroom door and instead of finding our friendly delivery person, we were greeted by the dean of discipline, who happened to pay for our food and was enjoying our barbecue spare ribs right there in the restroom,” Mr. Sapienza said. But perhaps the most brazen delivery location of all is straight to the table of another restaurant. When Market Table , the West Village restaurant that Jules Auger’s friends had picked for dinner one night, ran out of the cheeseburger special, Mr. Auger, unwilling to commit to the prix fixe menu his friends had chosen — and apparently unmoved by the restaurant’s two-star review in this newspaper, its five-star raves on Yelp or its recommendation in the Michelin guide — pulled up Seamless on his smartphone. A cheesesteak place promised speedy delivery. Mr. Auger instructed the deliveryman to come to the restaurant and seek out the hostess, who — while not exactly amused — condoned Mr. Auger’s alternate dinner. “I think she thought it was a joke,” said Mr. Auger, an intern at an advertising agency. “Didn’t get kicked out, though.” More befuddled was the deliveryman who showed up outside, seemingly expecting an apartment building. Mr. Auger hurried outside to receive his cheesesteak (“quite mediocre,” he recalled), which he ate outside, he said, “out of respect.”


Somalia: Militants Kill Female Lawmaker

Abstract: Gunmen killed a female Somali lawmaker on Wednesday in a drive-by shooting in Mogadishu, the capital, a police official said, the fourth killing of a Somali lawmaker this year. The Shabab, an extremist militant group allied with Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the attack on Saado Ali Warsame, who was known for singing popular folk music. She was one of only a few women in Somalia’s Parliament and the first female legislator killed by the group.

Somalia
Mogadishu
Al Qaeda
Saado Ali Warsame
Assassination
Murders
Politics
Al Shabab
Terrorism


Lochte Adds to His Haul

Abstract: Ryan Lochte won three more events at the short-course world championships Sunday and headed home from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with an impressive haul of six golds and one silver. On the final night of competition, Lochte started off with personal victories in the 200-meter backstroke and the 100 individual medley, then pushed the United States ahead of Russia in the third leg of the 400 medley relay and celebrated as his teammate Garrett Weber-Gale held on for the win.

Swimming
Lochte Ryan
Dubai (United Arab Emirates)


Romney Bows Out of a Debate, and Others Follow

Abstract: And just like that, the seemingly endless series of Republican presidential debates may finally be grinding to a halt. A debate scheduled for March 1 in Atlanta was canceled after Mitt Romney ’s campaign announced that the candidate had no plans to participate in the event being sponsored by CNN and the Georgia Republican Party. Two other candidates, Rick Santorum and Representative Ron Paul , quickly followed suit. The debates held in the Republican nominating contest have been so frequent and omnipresent that they have become something of a running joke. The campaigns — especially Mr. Romney’s — like to grumble about them, and they have become such a feature of evening television that they have almost come to resemble just another TV reality show, albeit of a different bent. Some have even said that comedic takes on the debates, like those on “ Saturday Night Live ,” have not lived up to the theater of the actual events. For viewers suffering separation anxiety, there is still one more Republican debate, which CNN is sponsoring next Wednesday night in Arizona. For Mr. Romney and some other hopefuls, it will be the 21st of the race, seemingly some sort of record. (In fact, in 2008, both the Democrats and Republicans had an equally unending string of debates.) In an e-mail, the Romney campaign said that Mr. Romney was unable to make the debate because of scheduling demands before the series of primaries and caucuses on March 6, known as Super Tuesday. “Governor Romney will be spending a lot of time campaigning in Georgia and Ohio ahead of Super Tuesday,” wrote Andrea Saul, a campaign spokeswoman. “With eight other states voting on March 6, we will be campaigning in other parts of the country and unable to schedule the CNN Georgia debate. We have participated in 20 debates, including eight from CNN.” A spokesman for Mr. Santorum told a reporter for CBS News and The National Journal, which first reported the debate cancellation, that the candidate had “no plans of doing it right now.” Jesse Benton, a national campaign chairman for Mr. Paul, said that he, too, would be bowing out. “We have decided not to participate,” Mr. Benton said in an e-mail. One candidate did not seem to like the turn of events: Newt Gingrich . Upon being told that Mr. Romney would skip the debate, Mr. Gingrich, campaigning in Los Angeles, said he expected to participate, then offered a reason Mr. Romney would want to avoid confrontation. “The Romney model is to go to Wall Street and raise huge amounts of money to run negative ads,” Mr. Gingrich said, “and you can understand why having to defend that strategy is probably not something he’s very happy with.” Mr. Gingrich is perhaps the most debate-happy of the four remaining candidates. When Herman Cain, a pizza magnate, was still in the race, he and Mr. Gingrich sat down for a one-on-one, Lincoln-Douglas-style debate. And Mr. Gingrich, who is known for aggressively confronting the debate moderators to score points with the audience, saw his candidacy resuscitated by his verbal confrontations with Mr. Romney and debate moderators. He has challenged everyone from President Obama to Mr. Romney to join him in a more freewheeling debate format. (So far, they have declined.) But CNN, in a statement, said that “without full participation of all four candidates” it would not hold the March 1 debate.

CNN
Republican Party
Primaries and Caucuses
Debates (Political)
Presidential Election of 2012
Romney Mitt
Paul Ron
Gingrich Newt
Santorum Rick
Atlanta (Ga)


Venus vs. Serena: ‘A Williams Is Going to Win’ the Australian Open

Abstract: MELBOURNE, Australia — Venus Williams became the oldest Australian Open singles finalist of the Open era on Thursday, holding off her powerful 25-year-old American compatriot CoCo Vandeweghe in a three-set semifinal full of winners, errors and intensity. It was a bravura performance — reminiscent of her best tennis earlier in her career — and Saturday’s final will also be a flashback, because her opponent will be her younger sister Serena Williams. Serena advanced with a much more one-sided 6-2, 6-1 victory in Thursday’s second semifinal over Mirjana Lucic-Baroni, an unseeded 34-year-old Croatian ranked 79th. Venus Williams, the enduring 36-year-old star, was the more consistent, even-tempered and opportunistic player in her 6-7 (3), 6-2, 6-3 victory. She converted 5 of 9 break points against the big-serving Vandeweghe while Vandeweghe could convert just one of 13. Serena Williams said she did not watch her sister’s match but was well aware of the result before she walked on court. “She’s my toughest opponent,” said Serena Williams, who holds a 16-11 edge in their rivalry. “No one has ever beaten me as much as Venus has. She has a pretty good record against me, and we have a good record against each other. I just feel like, no matter what happens, we’ve won. She’s been through a lot, and I’ve been through a lot. And to see her come back and do so well is great.” “I look forward to it,” she said of the final. “A Williams is going to win the tournament.” All-Williams finals in major tournaments were once a tennis staple, but this will be the first since Wimbledon in 2009 when Serena Williams defeated Venus Williams in what was also Venus’s most recent Grand Slam singles final appearance. Image Serena Williams during her 6-2, 6-1 victory over Mirjana Lucic-Baroni in the second women’s semifinal. Credit Lynn Bo Bo/European Pressphoto Agency Venus Williams turned professional in October 1994 at age 14. More than 22 years later, she is still a contender, and she has remained one despite having to play with an autoimmune disorder that sent her plummeting out of the top 100 in 2012. It was the first Grand Slam semifinal in singles for Vandeweghe and the 21st for Williams, who reached her first and won her first nearly 20 years ago at the 1997 United States Open. Vandeweghe was 5 years old at the time and she grew up — like every other young tennis player of her era — watching the Williams sisters regularly contest major trophies. But Vandeweghe, despite her lack of experience at this level, did not look cowed by the moment, breaking Williams in an intense opening game that lasted six minutes. She did, however, get broken back immediately. From there, the servers took control. It was a strong first set, one in which neither player had a clear edge in pace, but Vandeweghe began to truly find her range on her own service games after the midway point. She carried that momentum into the tiebreaker, which she broke open at 2-2 by winning four straight points. It was the first set Williams had lost in the tournament. Image Vandeweghe was playing in her first Grand Slam semifinal. It was Williams’s 21st. Credit Quinn Rooney/Getty Images But Williams showed no outward signs of frustration, well aware of how precious this opportunity remained, and her experience and inner drive shone through in the second set while Vandeweghe, a volatile player in the past, began to drop hints of some turmoil within. Broken in the third game after making three straight errors, Vandeweghe flicked her racket onto the court, and her frustration would increase as she failed repeatedly to convert on break points. Vandeweghe — born in New York City but a longtime resident of San Diego — comes from a family of top-level athletes. Her grandfather Ernie and uncle Kiki both played in the N.B.A. Her mother, Tauna, was an Olympic swimmer. She grew up with N.B.A. players like Bill Walton dropping by the house, heard her grandfather tell stories about the celebrated U.C.L.A. basketball coach John Wooden and has long been exposed to top-level tennis coaching as well. She now works with Craig Kardon, who once coached Martina Navratilova when she won her ninth and final Wimbledon singles title in 1990. “It sounds so conceited to say, but I’ve been around superstars my whole life,” Vandeweghe said in an interview this week. “So to have a coach that is a top coach in his own craft isn’t like a ‘whoa’ sort of thing. It’s more like, O.K., I’m getting the best information that I can.” The best information Kardon has given her is that she needs to manage her emotions and manage risk, too. And after losing seven of her last 10 tour-level matches, she hardly arrived in Melbourne on a roll but managed to work her way into a much more intimidating place. She upset Angelique Kerber, the No. 1 seed and defending champion, in the fourth round and then overpowered Garbiñe Muguruza, the big-hitting Spaniard who is the reigning French Open champion. She won both those matches in straight sets but Williams proved a greater challenge.

Australian Open
Venus Williams
CoCo Vandeweghe
Tennis
Serena Williams


Na’s Scorecard Needs a Sidecar After 16 on One Hole

Abstract: Kevin Na scored a 16 at the ninth hole of the Texas Open in San Antonio on Thursday, the worst score on a par-4 hole in PGA Tour history. But it could have been worse. Na, an American who is ranked 64th in the world, could not remember how many strokes he had taken after he repeatedly slashed at his ball in a small forest of live oak trees during a seemingly futile attempt to extricate it from the dense undergrowth. He nearly signed for a 15 after the round, which would have disqualified him for signing an incorrect scorecard. A lengthy video review confirmed his actual score. After his 16 at No. 9, Na shot three under on the back nine for a round of 80. Given what he had been through, that was not too bad. He was 13 strokes behind the leaders , J. J. Henry and Stewart Cink. But he did beat three other players. Na’s record was two strokes less than the 18 that John Daly scored on the par-5 sixth hole at Bay Hill in 1998. Na’s problems began when he hit his tee shot way right on the ninth hole at the T.P.C. San Antonio. He declared his ball unplayable, picked it up and returned to the tee. But his second tee shot was no better. Thinking his ball might be lost, he hit a provisional into position in the fairway. He then had the misfortune of finding his tee shot among the vines. Had he not found it, he would have been hitting his fourth shot from the fairway. After the first drive, Na’s caddie, Kenny Harms, could be heard on videotape saying: “There’s nothing. You’ve got nothing. Go back to the tee.” Na declared his ball unplayable, returned to the tee and drove it to almost the same spot. “Re-teed and hit it in there again and then it was — then the rest you guys saw,” Na said. “I don’t really want to go through it again.” Who would? Examining his lie and thinking he could advance the ball with his fourth shot, Na took a swing and felt something hit him in the leg. It was his golf ball, ricocheting off a branch, forcing him to add a penalty stroke. Na, one of the most deliberate players on the tour, quickly took another drop, hit his ball almost immediately and started walking after it to hit it again. When he finally popped the ball out into the rough and emerged after what would later be counted as 13 strokes — one of them a whiff while swinging left-handed — Na received a smattering of applause. “I have no idea what you have,” Harms said. Na relied: “I don’t know. How are we going to count all the shots?” “I have no idea,” Harms said. “Uh, uh, I can’t keep track,” Na said. “Well,” Harms replied, “they’ve got it all on tape, so we’re just gonna have to go back and count them.” Na hit what he later determined to be his 14th shot on the fringe about 35 feet past the hole and two-putted for 16. Na was still uncertain what his score was until he and a PGA Tour official, Steve Carman, reviewed the tape in the NBC truck. “I shot three under after that, something like that,” Na said. “I played pretty solid after that. I feel like I’m playing somewhat decent and it was one shot — actually two, but one that started the whole thing. And it was one bad hole and that’s what’s crazy about this game: one bad hole can basically shoot you out of the tournament. That’s what I just did.” Na said he was pleased by the way he regained his composure on the back nine, but had he been given one mulligan, what would it have been? Rather than slash at his ball after hitting his second drive into the woods, he said, he would have gone back to the tee again. “I might have made 8,” he said.

Golf
PGA Tour Inc
Na Kevin
Texas Open (Golf)


Filipino Nurses, Healers in Trouble

Abstract: THEY are recruited in their homeland with perks like free airfare. Some have been offered thousands of dollars in bonuses to relocate. And in the process, they have become a mainstay of the New York area’s hospitals and nursing homes. They are nurses from the Philippines, and they are highly prized here because they speak English, are trained in American-caliber medicine and enjoy a reputation for tender care — the legacy of a society in which families tend to their own sick and aging relatives. “We’re honest, industrious and don’t complain a lot,” explained Elmer Jacinto, 32, a registered nurse. His voice, however, carried a palpable note of sarcasm. He and nine other Filipino nurses on Long Island did complain, and now they find themselves caught in what he called “a nightmare” — a disturbing new chapter in the upbeat story of one of this nation’s most successful immigrations. The 10 nurses are under indictment in Suffolk County on charges of endangering the welfare of five chronically ill children and one terminally ill man. They are accused of walking off their jobs at the Avalon Gardens Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Smithtown in April 2006 without providing sufficient notice for the nursing home to replace them on coming shifts. Although their resignations were prompted by a seemingly commonplace dispute with their employers over what the nurses say were broken promises and shabby working conditions involving a total of 26 Filipino nurses and a physical therapist, the 10 defendants could each be sentenced to a year in jail and lose their nursing licenses. Their trial was scheduled to start Monday, but it appears that it will be put off until March. The district attorney’s office conceded that the patients suffered no harm, and acknowledged that it could not recall a similar prosecution against nurses in the state. But it said the nurses’ crime was serious: four of the children they left behind were on ventilators that demand round-the-clock monitoring. “They walked off their jobs, and the critical care patients didn’t have the health professionals to attend to their needs,” said Robert Clifford, a spokesman for Thomas J. Spota, the Suffolk district attorney. The case has drawn wide attention and outrage in the Philippines, where legislators have held hearings into how the nurses were treated by the company that recruited them. Filipinos there and in the United States have rallied to support the nurses, joined by the American Nurses Association, which has said in a statement that “the real patient endangerment lies in the deplorable conditions that led the nurses to leave.” The pushback has even taken on a political tinge. Commentators in both countries, citing an investigation by Newsday, have questioned whether favoritism was shown the nursing home owners because of their political influence and campaign contributions, and because of letters written to the Philippine president and other officials by Senator Charles E. Schumer. The senator and the owners have denied exerting any unusual pressure. But what no one denies is that the case is a startling anomaly in what has been a remarkably successful migration of people seeking to work in a single occupation. More than half of American nurses trained abroad are from the Philippines, and they alleviate a perennial shortage of nurses in this country. Of the New York area’s 215,000 Filipinos, 3 out of 10 work as nurses or other health-care practitioners, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Susan Weber-Stoger, a Queens College demographer. Many of the rest are their spouses, children or aging parents. That migration explains the large colonies of Filipinos in places like Jersey City and Bergenfield, N.J., a middle-class suburb, where Robert C. Rivas, mayor from 1999 to 2003, claimed to be the only Filipino mayor in the Northeast. The indicted nurses pose a strange counterpoint to that success: the image of highly educated legal immigrants complaining about being exploited as green, overly trusting newcomers. “You were treated like dirt,” said Juliet Anilao, 36, a mother of two and another of the nurses indicted. “All we wanted to do was work and send money home.” MR. Jacinto, a soft-spoken native of a small Philippines island, saw medicine as his ticket out of poverty. He not only received a nursing degree, but also graduated from medical school in the Philippines in 2004 with stellar board scores. Deciding to leave one’s homeland is always wrenching, but American salaries were a large incentive. “You can earn here $3,000 a month in America while a doctor in the Philippines earns $400 a month and a nurse $200,” Mr. Jacinto said. He came to New York in November 2005 with 21 other nurses who had been recruited by a Filipino agency that works mainly for SentosaCare, a network of 16 nursing homes with headquarters in Woodmere, N.Y., and operated by Benjamin Landa of Brooklyn and Bent Philipson of Monsey, N.Y. Mr. Landa owns eight other homes independently, and together with SentosaCare, the network of 24 homes has more than 5,000 patients and 5,000 employees. The 22 nurses who came over here in November 2005 say they were promised they would earn the same pay as American nurses and would quickly receive green cards giving them the status of permanent residents. But Mr. Jacinto says he soon got some surprises: for two months, he was paid as a clerk, at a salary far below that of a nurse. It took more than half a year to get the green card. And he was not assigned to the SentosaCare-affiliated home in Queens that had sponsored his entry, but to Avalon, 40 miles east. For weeks, he said, he slept on a couch in a frigid living room of a nurses’ staff house in Smithtown where the only toilet was frequently clogged. When he finally received nurses’ pay, he said, it was $24 an hour instead of the $34 that federal law requires immigrant nurses be paid to prevent undercutting of American workers’ salaries. He did not receive the same health insurance and workers’ compensation benefits as other nurses, he said, and was not paid for sick days or holidays. Ms. Anilao said Avalon employed so few aides on the night shift that she regularly had to change soiled diapers and sheets and cart them away. The nurses complained that raises they were promised were wiped out by a reduction in work hours from 37.5 per week to 35. Howard Fensterman, SentosaCare’s lawyer, denied that the nurses were mistreated or shortchanged, and rejected complaints that staffing was inadequate. SentosaCare, he said, had successfully employed 350 nurses from the Philippines over the years and had never experienced a wave of resignations. The nurses say that when their complaints went unaddressed, they turned to the Philippines consulate in New York, which put them in touch with an immigration lawyer, Felix Vinluan. Mr. Vinluan concluded that their contract had been breached and on April 6, 2006, he filed a discrimination complaint with immigration officials in Washington. He also advised the nurses that one option was to resign. On April 6 and 7, 14 nurses in four SentosaCare homes other than Avalon submitted their resignations, and late on the afternoon of April 7, 10 Avalon nurses followed suit. They say they offered so little notice because they were worried that SentosaCare might drum up charges against them that could jeopardize their licenses. Still, the nurses say, they left confident that the elderly and the patients in a pediatric unit would be taken care of because they knew of nurses waiting for assignment in two other SentosaCare staff houses. According to the nurses and their lawyers, only one of the 10 indicted Avalon nurses was working at the time the resignations were handed in and only two were scheduled for 7 a.m. shifts 12 hours away. Some had as many as four days off before resuming work. “No patient was ever placed in jeopardy,” Ms. Anilao said. “Not a single shift was unattended.” Susan O’Connor, Avalon’s administrator, has said, associates say, that she had only 12 hours to rustle up replacements for five nurses who had resigned and were scheduled to start the 7 a.m. shift. In her 30-year career — enduring snowstorms, fires and strikes — the walkout created the single scariest night of her professional life, she has said. Ms. O’Connor is a major witness in the criminal case and has been advised by SentosaCare lawyers not to comment publicly. Mr. Fensterman has argued that finding substitutes was especially difficult because the replacements had to be experienced in monitoring ventilators for sick children. “If they vomit into the tubes and the tubes are not cleared, they can asphyxiate themselves,” Mr. Fensterman said. Sharon Bannon of Farmingdale, whose severely brain-damaged daughter Jodie, 24, is a patient in the pediatric unit and requires a breathing apparatus, said she was upset that the nurses resigned abruptly. “They left my child unattended and it could have been a potential hazard,” she said in a telephone interview. “Jodie is critical and she can’t be left. Luckily, the home was able to handle it.” THE case escalated. SentosaCare filed a civil suit charging the nurses with breach of contract and lodged a complaint with the State Department of Education. The nurses filed complaints against SentosaCare’s recruiting arm in the Philippines, and the government effectively suspended the company’s recruiting privileges. But in June 2006, the suspension was lifted, and last September Newsday reported that Senator Schumer had written four letters over two months to officials in the Philippines — including one to the president — to get the suspension reviewed. In the two months after the suspension was revoked, the newspaper reported, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, whose chairman is Mr. Schumer, received nearly $75,000 from investors, vendors and lawyers associated with SentosaCare. Josh Vlasto, a spokesman for Mr. Schumer, said all the senator asked for was due process, not “any outcome in any direction.” Mr. Schumer, he added, writes letters for many constituents and SentosaCare “was a major employer on Long Island and operates in an industry Schumer is active on.” Newsday also reported that the SentosaCare partners, allied investors and their lawyer, Mr. Fensterman, have donated $750,000 to Democratic and Republican campaign funds, though Mr. Fensterman said that the amounts lumped together the contributions from his associates in other industries. In 2003, Mr. Fensterman contributed $1,500 to the campaign of Mr. Spota, the district attorney prosecuting the nurses, the newspaper said. Mr. Fensterman is chairman of the Nassau County Industrial Development Agency, which awards leases and tax incentives, and is Mr. Schumer’s campaign finance chairman for Long Island. Mr. Landa was, during the governorship of George E. Pataki, a member of the state’s Public Health Council, which reviews proposals for new health care institutions like nursing homes. Mr. Fensterman and spokesmen for Mr. Schumer and the district attorney’s office deny that campaign contributions played any role in the prosecution of the nurses or the Philippine government’s actions. “Because I made a $1,500 contribution to Tom Spota four years before, does that mean that I’m disenfranchised from seeking the help of an elected official?” Mr. Fensterman asked. In September 2006, after two hearings, the New York State Education Department, which licenses nurses, rejected SentosaCare’s charge that the nurses had abandoned patients. (That finding has been buttressed by the results of a New York State Department of Health review, announced on Jan. 16. “The shifts were covered,” said a department spokesman, Jeffrey Hammond, “and the patients were not placed in jeopardy.”) But last March, the district attorney, who had met 10 months earlier with Mr. Fensterman, Mr. Landa and Mr. Philipson, secured the grand jury indictment, which also charged the nurses’ lawyer, Mr. Vinluan, with conspiring in the resignations. James O. Druker, a lawyer for the nurses, argues that the case should never have been brought. Mr. Vinluan, he said, was “indicted for giving the nurses legally correct advice” and his clients “were indicted for following his advice.” It took months for some of the nurses to find other jobs, they say, because every time they applied employers would Google their names and up would pop articles about the indictment. Mr. Jacinto and Ms. Anilao now work at a hospital in Queens. Something of a mystery still lingers: Why were matters allowed to reach such a state? Why would nurses who forsook their homeland to seek well-paying work risk those jobs? And why would SentosaCare’s owners risk their successful recruitment of Filipinos by seeking prosecution? Company officials say they sought to keep nurses from imperiling fragile patients. “A message needs to be sent,” Mr. Fensterman said, “that if nurses can simply walk out on patients with impunity, that is a danger for all Americans, whether in nursing homes or hospitals.” One nurse, Ms. Anilao, said some things were more important than a salary. “I wasn’t raised by my parents to bow down,” she said, “ and take all those things just for the money.”

Nursing and Nurses
Long Island (NY)
Wages and Salaries
Suits and Litigation
Immigration and Refugees


A Review of ‘Modernizing America,’ at the Heckscher Museum of Art

Abstract: A hundred years ago next month, a group of progressive artists who opposed the ideas and exhibition practices of the National Academy of Design organized a show titled simply “International Exhibition of Modern Art.” Composed of more than 1,300 works of art, it became famous for introducing European modernism to the United States and is remembered by the name of its locale: the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. This winter, the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington has mounted a show commemorating the Armory Show’s centennial. Image “Nude with Red Hair” by Arthur B. Carles. Credit The Collection of the Heckscher Museum of Art The exhibition, “Modernizing America: Artists of the Armory Show,” has been culled from the Heckscher’s own collection, which presents certain limitations. None of the works were actually shown or purchased at the 1913 Armory Show. And the artists who caused the greatest controversy — Marcel Duchamp’s Cubo-futurist painting “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)” (1912) was arguably the biggest offender, inspiring satirical newspaper cartoons like “Rude Descending a Staircase,” set in the subway at rush hour — are not here. Instead, the exhibition looks at the supporting cast: the artists who organized the show and made up the bulk of its exhibitors, since about two-thirds of the works in the show were by Americans. Among these, Walt Kuhn and Arthur B. Davies were key figures. In 1911, Kuhn and Davies, along with the artists Jerome Myers, Elmer MacRae and Henry Fitch Taylor, formed the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which would mount the Armory Show . In 1912 Kuhn traveled through Europe, securing loans from artists and dealers to represent Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the newer strains of art like Fauvism and Cubism. Image “Water Lily” by Joseph Stella. Credit The Collection of the Heckscher Museum of Art Inspired by these developments, Kuhn tried out Fauvism and Cubism for himself. You can see this in his vibrant woodblock print “Arts Ball” (1919), advertising a dance sponsored by the Penguin Club, which included many artists. Also here is Kuhn’s undated “Dancing Figure,” an angular wooden sculpture that served as the model for the dancing woman in “Arts Ball.” (Kuhn would later become an adviser to collectors like John Quinn and Lillie Bliss, a supporter of the Armory Show and later one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art.) Davies is represented by a simple, undated pencil and gouache on paper, “Girl in a Hammock,” and Myers by an undated painting titled “Italian Procession” that shows his affiliation with the Ashcan School of painting, with its somber colors and realist, immigrant subject matter. There are also two wonderful works by Myers’s wife, Ethel Myers , who gave up painting after marrying Jerome so that he could use her studio space, and began making small sculptures. The bronze “Flowered Gown” and glazed ceramic “Upper Corridor,” both undated, show her satirizing fashionable early 20th-century women — perhaps like those who would have attended the Armory Show. Image “Dancing Figure” by Walt Kuhn. Credit The Collection of the Heckscher Museum of Art In addition to those by Myers, a number of other works here are by artists associated with the Ashcan School, an early-20th-century group of American urban realist painters. A work by John Sloan , “Girl and Beggar” (1910), observed from city life, was among five etchings that he exhibited in the Armory Show. (It was not this exact print, however.) Another etching, “Jewelry Store Window” (1906), with a working-class couple window-shopping, is here, as well as George Luks’s painting “The Circus Tent” from around 1928-30, a nocturnal scene depicting an annual fair that Luks visited in Connecticut. Along with these are works by Childe Hassam , John Henry Twachtman and Julian Alden Weir , members of The Ten, an earlier group of breakaway painters identified with Impressionism who exhibited together from 1898 to 1918. Twachtman and Weir are represented by small pastels, and there is an etching by Hassam of “Cos Cob Dock” from around 1915. (Four of the 12 works Hassam exhibited at the Armory Show depicted Cos Cob, an artists’ colony on Long Island Sound favored by The Ten.) “The Promontory,” from 1907 to 1910, by Maurice Prendergast is an example of a piece by one of the earliest Americans to absorb Impressionism, while in Europe in the early 1890s. Approaching a 100th Anniversary, a Closer Look the Armory Show 9 Photos View Slide Show › Image Like Prendergast, the artists Abraham Walkowitz and Alfred Maurer were introduced to modernism while in Europe, and through a pedigreed source: the collection of Leo and Gertrude Stein , American siblings living in Paris who were early supporters of Picasso and Matisse. Maurer’s undated “Landscape” is an oil on paper with Cubist and Fauvist leanings, while Walkowitz’s “I Glorify New York: A Symphony in Lines,” circa 1910, shows the modernist connection of visual art with music, which was thought to be more purely abstract. Another American artist who lived near the Steins in Paris, Arthur B. Carles , is represented by an undated painting, “Nude with Red Hair,” that reflects the wild coloring of the Fauves, or the German Expressionists. Alongside these are modest works by Marsden Hartley, Oscar Bluemner, Stuart Davis, John Marin, Charles Sheeler and Joseph Stella, together creating a small, low-key version of what one might have encountered 100 years ago at the Armory Show. Wall labels tell the story of what happened after. Despite the success of the Armory, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors did not organize other exhibitions; instead, the group dissolved shortly afterward. But the Armory Show’s effect on American artists — and the viewing and buying public — was profound, leading to the founding of museums devoted to modern art and eventually New York’s role as a contemporary art center. If “Modernizing America” is not particularly exciting, and certainly not the definitive exhibition on the subject, it tells a piece of that story, through words but mostly through art.

Heckscher Museum
Museum
Art
Armory Show
Sculpture
Huntington NY


Former KBR Executive Pleads Guilty to Bribery

Abstract: HOUSTON — Albert J. Stanley, a former executive with a Halliburton subsidiary, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges that he conspired to pay $182 million in bribes to Nigerian officials in return for contracts to build a $6 billion liquefied natural gas complex. Mr. Stanley, 65, had been chief executive of KBR , Halliburton’s large engineering and construction unit, until December 2003. Halliburton cut off all ties with him in 2004 after he was accused of secretly enriching himself by as much as $5 million in the payment and kickback scheme. KBR was spun off from Halliburton last year. Some of the payments were made while Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive, but neither he nor Halliburton has been accused of being part of the scheme. Under a plea agreement entered in United States District Court in Houston, Mr. Stanley admitted that he authorized the hiring of two consulting companies to pay bribes to several Nigerian government officials while KBR entered into four contracts with a Nigerian liquefied natural gas company whose largest shareholder was the government-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Mr. Stanley pleaded guilty to paying $132 million to one consulting company and more than $50 million to the other. He said that he intended that the fees would be used to bribe Nigerian government officials. Mr. Stanley also admitted that he had received $10.8 million in kickbacks from a consultant he had hired. Under his plea agreement, Mr. Stanley faces a prison sentence of seven years and payment of $10.8 million in restitution. The plea agreement said that Mr. Stanley and other unidentified executives “met with three successive holders of a top-level office in the executive branch of the government of Nigeria ” to ask them to designate representatives with whom to negotiate bribes to Nigerian officials. The payments were made between 1995 and 2004 while KBR was working in a consortium with three companies from Japan, France and Italy. Mr. Stanley had been KBR’s senior representative on the joint venture’s steering committee for the project. “Today’s plea demonstrates that corporate executives who bribe foreign government officials in return for lucrative business deals can expect to face prosecution,” said Matthew Friedrich, an acting assistant attorney general. Mr. Stanley’s lawyer, Larry R. Veselka, said his client “entered into these agreements voluntarily.” He added, “Mr. Stanley has been cooperating with the government and will continue to cooperate with the government.” Mr. Veselka declined to say whom Mr. Stanley might identify to federal prosecutors for their involvement in the bribery scheme, but he said his client would answer all questions fully. The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a related civil action, charged Mr. Stanley on Wednesday with violating the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The payments began before Halliburton absorbed KBR through the acquisition of its parent company, Dresser Industries, in 1998, but they overlapped. Vice President Cheney retired from his position at Halliburton in 2000 and has not been connected to the case. Mr. Stanley continued to serve as a consultant at KBR after he left as chairman, until he was fired in 2004 by Halliburton along with another executive suspected of being involved in the scheme. Diana Gabriel, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, said in an e-mail statement, “Halliburton has not yet reviewed the plea agreement, so it would be premature to comment.” Halliburton found its association with KBR, formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, an embarrassing diversion from its primary business as an oil services company, until it spun off the company. KBR has faced numerous investigations into the mishandling of contracts, valued at billions of dollars, for housing, feeding and fueling United States troops and government officials in Iraq. The subsidiary agreed in 2006 to pay $8 million to settle claims that it overcharged the Army for construction and support services in the Balkans in 1999 and 2000. Heather L. Browne, director for corporate communications at KBR, said she could not comment on the plea agreement but added in an e-mail statement, “KBR does not in any way condone or tolerate illegal or unethical behavior.”

Bribery
Nigeria
KBR Inc
Suits and Litigation
Plea Bargaining
Building (Construction)


Security Law Suggests a Broadening of China’s ‘Core Interests’

Abstract: BEIJING — After China enacted a sweeping national security law this week, one official said the measure was intended to safeguard the country’s “core interests.” President Xi Jinping has repeatedly used the same term in speeches at international forums, inside and outside China. In recent years, foreign officials and scholars have been struggling to understand Chinese leaders’ evolving definition of this concept and what it means for policy toward China. The term the Chinese use when talking with foreign officials, and in public pronouncements, is hexin liyi; traditionally, it has meant critical issues on which there is very little room, if any, for negotiation. With the national security law, it has become even clearer that the term refers to what Chinese leaders see as three sacrosanct rights of the nation: maintaining the political system, with unquestioned rule by the Communist Party; defending sovereignty claims and territorial integrity; and economic development. That represents a considerable expansion of what China considers nonnegotiable. Until recent years, “core interests” was understood to refer only to Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang — specific sovereignty issues that China has always said are internal matters. But with China’s rising economic, diplomatic and military power has come a redefinition of the term. Zheng Shuna, deputy director of the legislative affairs commission of the National People’s Congress, a pro forma legislature, gave an unambiguous definition of the phrase at a news conference on Wednesday, while tying the national security law to the defense of those interests . “Our national security law is to maintain the core interests of the nation and other major interests,” Ms. Zheng said. “For safeguarding national core interests, China has repeatedly said that we adhere to a peaceful path of development but will never give up our righteous interests and sacrifice the core national interests.” She said the term was “restated in Article Two of the national security law ” and referred to “the political regime; the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of the nation; and people’s livelihoods, sustainable economic development of society and other major interests.” Ms. Zheng might assert that the definition of “core interests” is clear now, but it was murky for about five years. China’s initial definition was obvious — starting around 2004, Chinese officials, scholars and state-run news organizations increasingly used it to refer to sovereignty issues, according to a paper published in 2010 by Michael D. Swaine, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The first references were to Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing wants to bring under Communist Party rule. But around 2006, official use of the term began encompassing Tibet and Xinjiang in China’s west. That remained the case until July 2009, when Dai Bingguo, the top Chinese foreign policy official at the time, advanced a much wider definition in closing remarks at a session of the annual United States-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. A 2011 policy paper from China formally laid it out. It was the same definition that Ms. Zheng emphasized on Wednesday — one that she said was enshrined in Article Two of the new national security law, though the law does not explicitly mention the term. Since 2009, foreign officials have been asking themselves and their Chinese counterparts whether “core interests” still referred only to Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang, or whether it encompassed the larger, holistic issues that Mr. Dai and other Chinese officials were mentioning with growing frequency. In 2010, Chinese and foreign officials and scholars began debating whether the South China Sea was now a core interest. Under the new definition, as stated by Mr. Dai and reiterated by Ms. Zheng, the term does encompass the South China Sea and any other sovereignty issues of importance to China (think Arunachal Pradesh in India, and the islands in the East China Sea that Japan calls the Senkaku and China calls the Diaoyu). China’s increasingly broad use of the term was discussed in a 2013 paper by four researchers at the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which is overseen by the United States Congress. They wrote that “stating core interests broadly provides Chinese policy makers with the flexibility to highlight specific issues — including but not limited to Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang — as they become salient.” The authors said Chinese officials had invoked the term in talks with their American counterparts to “attempt to pressure U.S. officials to publicly acknowledge China’s core interests and elicit U.S. commitments to support, or at least not oppose, certain Chinese policies.” Some scholars say that the much wider, more abstract definition cited by Ms. Zheng has made the term increasingly meaningless in diplomatic talks. “ ‘Core interests’ is no longer a diplomatic term anymore,” said Zhu Feng, a foreign policy scholar at Nanjing University. “It is very vague, actually.” He added that Chinese officials were now using the terms “important interests” and “core interests” interchangeably, which he said diminishes the weight of the latter. The government and main political parties in Taiwan, China’s original core interest, expressed concern on Wednesday about references to the island in the new national security law . One clause says that preserving “national sovereignty and territorial integrity is a shared obligation of all the Chinese people, including compatriots from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.” Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, the body that handles the government’s interactions with China, said the new law “doesn’t squarely face up to the separate governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait or respect Taiwan people’s insistence on maintaining the status quo in the strait.” The “mainland’s unilateral decision cannot change the fact that the Republic of China is a sovereign country,” the council said, using Taiwan’s formal name. Taiwan’s two largest political parties, the governing Kuomintang and the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, or D.P.P., also protested the inclusion of Taiwan in the law. “Beijing’s course of action doesn’t respect the feelings of Taiwan’s people,” said the D.P.P. spokesman Cheng Yun-peng . He called on Taiwan’s government to respond sternly to “defend the national interest and dignity.” The Kuomintang issued a statement saying that “it holds fast to the Republic of China’s sovereignty and that under the framework of the Constitution, the future of the R.O.C. will be decided by its 23 million people,” according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency.

China
Xi Jinping
Taiwan
Tibet
Xinjiang
South China Sea
Senkaku Islands Diaoyu Islands
Arunachal Pradesh India
Communist Party of China
National People's Congress China