Accused of Shoeshine Arson but Still Shining Shoes

Abstract: The gentlest-looking person on an otherwise sharp-elbowed stretch of 42nd Street on Thursday seemed to be a short, sweet-faced man of 71 years, hunched over a little wooden shoeshine box. The man, John Swain, wore a cardboard sign around his neck, with the words “Shoe Shine” stenciled in black lettering. There he was, fresh from his arrest the day before on charges of burning down a nearby shoeshine stand — twice . There he was, back out there offering shines for $4 apiece. “Yep, that’s me,” Mr. Swain said when showed a photograph of himself in the morning newspaper, along with an article saying he was accused of setting fire to a three-seat stand near Bryant Park on March 22, and then torching a replacement stand on April 6. He was arrested by fire marshals on two counts of arson in the fifth degree, misdemeanors that can carry a fine or up to a year in jail. The fires, which both occurred during the early-morning hours, destroyed the stands and forced the shiners there to seek other locations or stop shining. Fire Department officials said the fires smelled of vengeance — that Mr. Swain confessed to setting them because he was apparently angry he was not permitted to work at the stand, on 42nd Street near Fifth Avenue, on the north side of the New York Public Library. The charges were denied by neither Mr. Swain nor his friend Don Ward, 44, who shares an apartment with Mr. Swain on Franklin Avenue in the Bronx and who shines shoes on Sixth Avenue and 47th Street. “John would never confess to something he didn’t do,” Mr. Ward said, adding that Mr. Swain believed the shiners at the Bryant Park stand were stealing his business and that the Bryant Park Corporation knew about this. Mr. Ward said Mr. Swain has nursed discontents going back 15 years, when he claimed to have been excluded from a stable of shiners permitted to do business at a formalized work spot in front of Grand Central Terminal, on 42nd Street. He has spent the past dozen years scuffling around at less profitable sites around 42nd Street, sometimes near Park Avenue, sometimes out of Francesco’s barber shop inside the terminal. But there is always a feeling of disenfranchisement from the growing organization of a once-freelance, fend-for-yourself profession. “The frustration has been building up for a long time,” Mr. Ward said. “You’ve got to understand something: Out here, the competition is cutthroat, dog-eat-dog. If the other guy is taking your customers, he’s stealing your livelihood, and you can’t let that happen.” At his sidewalk spot near Vanderbilt Avenue on Thursday, Mr. Swain said his lawyer, whom he would not identify, had ordered him to say nothing about the case. When told of Mr. Ward’s characterization of the situation, Mr. Swain nodded and said, “You heard him right.” He added that his image would improve when the facts came out at his next court appearance, on May 17. Then he simply resumed shining , his polish cans, spray bottles, rags and brushes spread neatly on a black mat on the sidewalk, between a pair of pay phones and a mailbox. As if nothing had happened, he stood and greeted the familiar faces of hustling commuters, and pointed out the absence of luster in their shoes. Daniel A. Biederman, the executive director of the Bryant Park Corporation, which set up the two stands that were burned, recalled Mr. Swain as a point man representing the shoeshine workers in 1995 when the Grand Central Partnership was working to organize shoeshine men into one stand outside the terminal. He said he lost track of Mr. Swain after that. “Maybe the seeds of this were sown 15 years ago,” Mr. Biederman said, adding that he knew of no particular slight toward Mr. Swain. “I’d think all kinds of rivalries develop among the shoe shiners.” Bernice Thomas, a panhandler who sits across from Mr. Swain’s shine spot with a cardboard sign — “Homeless, hungry, need help, bad heart, God bless” — said, “He’s a good man but he’s been losing it the past few months, talking to himself like crazy.” Dan Pisark, vice president of retail services at Bryant Park Corporation, said the slots at the Bryant Park stand were coveted spots and only vacated if a shiner died or moved on. Usually, the current shiners would nominate a replacement. When it was suggested that they might make the next stand fireproof, Mr. Pisark laughed and said, “We may have to.”


This Is as Good as It Gets, Paws Down

Abstract: When a dog trots around a show ring, what is he thinking? Does he know the thunderous cheers from the crowd are for him? Does hearing his name shouted make him shift his act into a higher gear? Does he bark at judges to seduce them into focusing intently on him? Uno, the 15-inch beagle, will never acknowledge what he knew as he took his star turn Tuesday night at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show , or whether shouts of “Go, Uno!” motivated him to historic greatness. But Uno, real name Ch. K-Run’s Park Me In First, vindicated the extraordinary adoration that enveloped him at Madison Square Garden and became the first beagle to win best in show at Westminster. “He’s the most perfect beagle I’ve ever seen,” the judge Dr. J. Donald Jones said afterward at a news conference. “If you saw him, you saw that perfectly smooth locomotion. Not one muscle went the wrong way. Look at his face, you melt right away.” Uno bayed at Jones as he was waiting to be judged and as he was being assessed for how well he matched the breed’s standard. Was he celebrating, or is he just a gabby canine? In triumph, he wanted nothing more than Jones’s water bottle. And perhaps he dreamed of returning home to play with his rubber duck. Jones said he could not explain why no beagle had won Westminster before Uno. In fact, he did not know until Tuesday night that beagles had been passed over since Westminster’s best in show was first awarded in 1907. “Maybe the others just didn’t have it,” Jones said. Before competing Tuesday, Uno won the hound group, the first time a beagle had won it in 69 years. That distinction transformed Uno’s profile, said his handler, Aaron Wilkerson, who lives with the beagle in Columbia, S.C. “Everywhere I stopped, people said: ‘Is this Uno? Is this Uno?’ ” he said. And when he heard the crowd roaring for Uno as they were introduced to the Garden crowd Tuesday night, “I said, ‘Whoa!’ ” Jones said that if he had scored the seven best-in-show finalists, he would have given Uno a 10 and the next-best dog a “nine-plus.” Like most handlers, Wilkerson was emotional about the victory by Uno, who is not yet 3. “He’s my best friend,” Wilkerson said.


Israeli Advocacy Group Begins Campaign to Help Palestinians Sue Over Settlements

Abstract: JERUSALEM — An Israeli leftist advocacy group said Friday that it was starting a campaign to help Palestinians sue the state of Israel for its use of their privately owned lands for Jewish settlement in the West Bank . The campaign by the advocacy group, Yesh Din, which fights for the rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories, follows the publication on Friday in the newspaper Haaretz of classified government data regarding the extent of construction in officially recognized settlements that is illegal by Israeli standards. The violations include private and public building carried out without the appropriate permits or outside of approved plans, as well as the construction of whole neighborhoods on private Palestinian lands in blatant contravention of Israeli policy and law. The information was published as President Obama’s special Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell, wound up his maiden visit to Israel and the West Bank, though individuals involved in the campaign said the publication was not timed to coincide with Mr. Mitchell’s trip. As chairman of an international fact-finding commission after the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, Mr. Mitchell was the first foreign official to equate Israeli security and settlement building, calling on Israel to freeze all settlement construction in return for Palestinian efforts to rein in violence. The leaked government data and any subsequent lawsuits could prove embarrassing and costly for Israel. Yesh Din estimates that the extent of the claims against Israel could amount to tens of millions of dollars or more. Michael Sfard, Yesh Din’s legal counsel, told reporters here on Friday, “Many Palestinian households now have a valid legal claim against the state of Israel” and can go to court to demand the removal of buildings from their property and reparations for the years the lands could not be used. And if Israel does not compensate them, Mr. Sfard said, they will eventually turn to foreign courts. Much of the world views all Israeli construction in the territories that were conquered in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war as a violation of international law. Israel argues that the settlement enterprise does not violate the law against transferring populations into occupied territories, but that it represents a voluntary return of individuals to places where they or their ancestors used to live. Some 285,000 Israelis now live in about 120 recognized settlements in the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem. Israel says their fate will eventually be decided through negotiations with the Palestinians. Settler leaders routinely say that the settlements are built on areas defined as state land. Israel says it carries out exhaustive checks to ensure that there is no building on private Palestinian land. But the official data published Friday showed numerous examples where Israel had not enforced its own laws. The information gathering on the construction began in 2004 as Israel came under increasing international pressure to carry out a settlement freeze. The defense minister at the time, Shaul Mofaz, asked a retired brigadier general, Baruch Spiegel, to compile a detailed database that would give the government an accurate picture of settlement construction. What emerged was a pattern of building violations, not only in the unauthorized outposts that have sprung up in recent years, but also in many of the established towns and villages deemed “official” by Israel that make up the cream of the settlement building. In Elon Moreh, which is a pioneer settlement set up in the 1970s near Nablus, the database shows that most of the construction has been carried out without properly approved plans, and that a northern neighborhood was built on private land. In Ofra, a flagship settlement near Ramallah that is home to members of the settler movement elite, “most of the construction” is on registered private land, according to the database. In Kfar Adumim, near the largest Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, new construction is said to trespass onto private land. Despite numerous requests by Peace Now, another leftist advocacy group, the Defense Ministry has refused to make the database compiled by the retired brigadier general public on the grounds that the release of the information could harm Israeli security and foreign relations. A petition to require the state to publish all the information has been pending for two years in the Tel Aviv District Court. In the meantime, some of the data has been obtained by nongovernmental groups and has already been published, including in The New York Times in 2006. But with the leak of all the official information to Haaretz, the details are now “uncontested,” Mr. Sfard said. An Israeli defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, dismissed the Haaretz report as “political” and “nothing new.” He noted that, in total, the settlements are built on 6 percent of the West Bank land, and that the issue of private land ownership is “complicated,” given the different administrations of the West Bank going back to the Ottoman Empire, the British mandate, Jordan and now Israel. Israeli officials add that some Palestinians sold their land to Jews but cannot admit it for fear of being labeled collaborators, while others have no papers to prove ownership of the land they claim. Another challenge Yesh Din is likely to face is the longstanding Palestinian reluctance to claim compensation from Israel for seized land, so as not to legitimize the loss. “It is a sensitive issue,” said Dror Etkes of the Settlement Policy Judicial Advocacy Project of Yesh Din. “Many Palestinians till today refuse to consider such a process. It takes time to explain.”

Palestinians
Israel
West Bank
Yesh Din organization


Names That Match Forge a Bond on the Internet

Abstract: From time to time Sam Blackman, a pediatric oncologist in Philadelphia , checks up on people other than patients. Namely, other Sam Blackmans. No stethoscope is needed to take the pulse of his namesakes, though — just a Google search. And while he has never met the men he refers to as Sam 2.0 and Sam 3.0, when one of those other Sam Blackmans posted a photograph of his wife on the Internet, Dr. Blackman, 39, couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pleasure. “I’m like ‘Oh! Sam Blackman got married,’ ” he said. “I felt like I should send a card or check his registry on Amazon .” Now that the telephone book has been all but replaced by the minutiae-rich Web, searching out, even stalking, the people who share one’s name has become a common pastime. Bloggers muse about their multiple digital selves, known as Google twins or Googlegängers (a term that was the American Dialect Society’s “most creative” word last year). In “Finding Angela Shelton,” a book published this month, a writer named Angela Shelton describes her meetings with 40 other Angela Sheltons. Keri Smith, an illustrator, has posted drawings of six of her Googlegängers on her blog. There are name-tally Web sites like SameNameAsMe, and Facebook coalitions including nearly 200 people named Ritz (their insignia is a cracker box logo) and a group aiming to break a world record by gathering together more than 1,224 Mohammed Hassans. But while many people are familiar with Googlegängers, a fundamental question has gone unanswered: Why do so many feel a connection — be it kinship or competition — with utter strangers just because they share a name? Social science, it turns out, has an answer. It is because human beings are unconsciously drawn to people and things that remind us of ourselves. A psychological theory called the name-letter effect maintains that people like the letters in their own names (particularly their initials) better than other letters of the alphabet. In studies involving Internet telephone directories, Social Security death index records and clinical experiments, Brett Pelham, a social psychologist, and colleagues have found in the past six years that Johnsons are more likely to wed Johnsons, women named Virginia are more likely to live in (and move to) Virginia, and people whose surname is Lane tend to have addresses that include the word “lane,” not “street.” During the 2000 presidential campaign, people whose surnames began with B were more likely to contribute to George Bush, while those whose surnames began with G were more likely to contribute to Al Gore . “It’s what we call implicit egotism,” Dr. Pelham, who is now a writer and researcher for the Gallup Organization , said. “We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt.” Jason Rodriguez, 30, an editor of comic and graphic novels in Arlington, Va., feels connected to another Jason Rodriguez, a stuntman who has worked on films (some inspired by graphic novels) including sequels to “Spider-Man” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” “He’s a really good stuntman,” Mr. Rodriguez said with a hint of pride. He likens himself and the stuntman — whom he has never met — to the physically incongruous brothers in the comedy “Twins” played by Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger . “We both sort of have this connection,” said Mr. Rodriguez, who casts himself in the Danny DeVito role. “We both support this nerd world.” A photo editor named Tim Connor, who saw a photograph of another man with his name, wrote on his blog that the image “made him intensely real to me. I felt in some way I already knew him.” Mr. Connor’s Googlegänger also provoked comparison and self-reflection. “I don’t feel the usual mixture of rage & shame knowing that my father would have understood and been comfortable with my Googlegänger’s career,” Mr. Connor wrote on Timconnor.blogspot.com , “and he never was with mine.” In studies that make believers in free will squirm, Dr. Pelham’s team asserts that names and the letters in them are surprisingly influential in people’s lives. In one experiment, participants of both sexes evaluated a young woman more favorably when the number on the jersey she was wearing had been subliminally paired with their own names on a computer screen. A feeling of connection between people with the same name is, in a way, little more than sharing an affinity for a brand — like two car owners who give each other friendly toots because they both drive Mini Coopers. “Self-similarity is really one of the largest driving forces of behavior of social beings,” said Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford University ’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “When someone is similar to you, you give them special privileges,” like buying something from them or voting for them. Social psychologists have found that people are more attracted to others with similar faces or identical birth dates. James Bruning, a trustee professor of psychology at Ohio University, said that people’s fascination with their Googlegängers might be an adult expression of the common childhood wish to be an identical twin. There are more prosaic reasons that people may feel connected to their Googlegängers, though. They may share a name because they belong to the same ethnic group, or their families may have had similar aspirations for them. “There’s a lot of soft evidence out there that parents largely give names based on a set of expectations,” Dr. Bruning said. “Parents who name a boy Bronco versus naming the child Cecil, you would expect one would be more likely to get a football on his next birthday and the other would get a book. That might be a starting point for one’s identity being associated with a name.” Skeptics of the name-letter effect question how strong the affinity really is between a person’s name and his or her destiny. “I’m willing to believe that such patterns exist,” said Stanton Wortham, a professor of education and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania . “But I’m not willing to grant that those sorts of patterns are going to explain or drive a substantial amount of behavior.” “Even Georgia who moved to Georgia,” he added, “she moved to Georgia for other reasons too.” For each of the studies Dr. Pelham and colleagues conducted showing a connection between names and behavior, they compared their results with random chance. The number of Virginias who move to Virginia, for example, is 36 percent higher than could be expected by chance. Of the 40 Angela Sheltons that Ms. Shelton, the writer, met with in researching her book, many of them were nurses. Only one voted for George W. Bush . Seventy percent, she said, reported they had been raped, sexually assaulted or abused. (Ms. Shelton’s book, subtitled “The True Story of One Woman’s Triumph Over Sexual Abuse,” was based on a documentary she made in 2001.) “I’ve always wanted to be more empowered,” Ms. Shelton said. “And searching for my name made me grow into my name. It introduced me to myself.” In addition to such feelings, there is also plenty of sibling, er, cyber, rivalry. People are increasingly aware of how to manage their identity online. As Jon Lee, a student and a Web developer who wants to be the first Jon Lee to turn up in a Google search, explained on his blog, “I have to top a recruitment firm, a washed-up pop star, a dead drummer and an I.B.M. guy.” Maureen Johnson, a writer of young adult fiction in New York, acknowledges on her Web site several Googlegängers, including a self-taught marine biologist known to some as “the Crab Lady of Cape Cod .” But for a while Ms. Johnson was “very annoyed” that another Googlegänger, a real estate agent, owned the domain name MaureenJohnson. Now, however, she’s just exasperated by the stream of “Rentheads” who send e-mail messages asking if she has anything to do with Maureen Johnson, the provocative performance artist character in the musical “Rent.” Children wonder if in fact she is the “Rent” character. “This is the bane of my existence,” said Ms. Johnson, the non-fiction version. “ ‘Are you a performance artist? Are you a bisexual performance artist? Are you a bisexual performance artist who lives on 11th Street?’ ” “On principle,” she said of the Tony-award-winning show, “I won’t go and see it.”

Google
Facebook
Computers and the Internet
Personal name


Old Fashioned, a Kentucky Derby Favorite, Could Have a Career-Ending Injury

Abstract: Old Fashioned, once the early favorite to win the Kentucky Derby , sustained what was perhaps a career-ending injury Saturday after finishing second to Papa Clem in a game stretch duel at the Arkansas Derby. The diagnosis was a displaced slab fracture of the right knee, which is not life-threatening. Old Fashioned’s trainer, Larry Jones, said he noticed that the colt was uncomfortable as he was cooling out after the mile-and-an-eighth Arkansas Derby. He led most the way and set rapid fractions but was unable to hold off Papa Clem, who won by a half-length. Old Fashioned is owned by Rick Porter, whose filly Eight Belles , the runner-up to Big Brown at last year’s Kentucky Derby, was euthanized on the racetrack at Churchill Downs after breaking her ankles. The loss was only the second in Old Fashioned’s six-race career, and Jones indicated the colt, the son of Unbridled’s Song, would probably be retired to stud. Jones, who also trained Eight Belles, said Old Fashioned was heading to Kentucky on Sunday. “We’ll look to having him surgically treated once we get there,” he said. “Horses with that kind of injury sometimes come back, but rarely at the level at which he competed.” Jones and Porter will be represented in the Kentucky Derby by Friesan Fire, who won the Louisiana Derby.


Afghan Election Rests on the Backs of Donkeys

Abstract: FAIZABAD, Afghanistan — In this remote corner of northern Afghanistan, distances are measured in days. The only paved road lasts for less than a mile, and travel often takes place on the back of a donkey. Apply those qualities to an area the size of South Carolina, add in the topography of Colorado, and you get an election official’s nightmare, which is about how Sayed Masood saw it on Sunday, as he frantically prepared for the presidential election runoff on Nov. 7 . “There is very little time,” said Mr. Masood, the top election official in Badakhshan Province. “I have to hire 130 district coordinators by tomorrow.” Now that Afghanistan’s runoff vote seems imminent, local election officials across the country are scrambling to get 15 million ballots to thousands of villages in Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Nowhere will that be more difficult than in Badakhshan, a mitten-shaped province here in northeastern Afghanistan that is nearly entirely covered by mountains. Aside from one short paved strip in the center of Faizabad, the provincial capital, the roads are dirt, with ruts and slants that make any car ride feel like a voyage at sea during a storm. Six districts have no roads that connect to the rest of the province, and ballots for those areas will be taken by helicopter, Mr. Masood said. But even in areas with roads, many villages can be reached only by footpaths. Those ballots will be delivered by brigades of donkeys, which election officials rent from local farmers. At the price of $60 per donkey — the monthly salary for a night watchman at a public school — there are many willing participants. Local election officials are embracing their responsibilities with vigor. A young official named Ezatullah spent seven hours in a minibus traveling 50 miles to pick up election materials. Like many Afghans, Ezatullah uses only one name. When asked why the drive to Faizabad took so long, he replied blandly: “It’s not a road.” Then there is the weather. Some of the highest passes in the district of Nusai now have as much as six feet of snow, said Taj Wali, a 22-year-old election official from there. The district, which borders Tajikistan, is one of the province’s most remote. To pick up his district’s election materials, Mr. Wali and a colleague walked four days to the nearest road. The distance is routine for people in the province, but not for other Afghans. A friend who came to visit took five hours to walk a distance that Mr. Wali said he could walk in an hour. The four-day walk to get election materials was a chance for Mr. Wali and his colleague to tell stories. They talked of their school days as they made their way along a narrow mountain path high above a river. They spent most nights with villagers, who fed them. Other nights they slept in mosques. Once they reached the road, they spent two more days jouncing in a packed minivan to Faizabad. “It would have been better to keep walking,” Mr. Wali said, grimacing. The donkeys may present the biggest challenge in what lies ahead. Some of the mountain trails are so narrow that the slightest step can become treacherous, particularly with giant loads on a donkey’s backs. In the previous round of voting in August, several empty ballot boxes were lost over the side of a cliff. Mr. Wali was worried about the snow. Some voters walked six hours to reach polling centers in August, he said, and slushy trails on Nov. 7 could be the last straw. He expected to make some polling centers mobile, to move them closer to more remote villages. “If you saw the area from the air, you would panic,” Mr. Wali said. “You wouldn’t even believe how difficult it is.” The first round of voting was riddled with fraud, with one of every three votes cast for the incumbent, President Hamid Karzai, rejected as fake . As a result, Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission announced that it would dismiss hundreds of workers. Even so, no one seemed in danger of being fired in Faizabad, where throngs of smiling election workers piled into rooms full of computers to fill out paperwork. Fraud came in many guises. In the Jurm District in the center of the province, mullahs were the main instruments for pressing people to vote for Mr. Karzai, local residents said. In the village of Ali Mughla, a mullah received $4,000 to take villagers to election centers, said Ezatullah, a night watchman in a school. It was something that Ezatullah, who is 58 and illiterate, insisted that he would never engage in. He was going to vote for Mr. Karzai’s opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, mostly because that is what his daughter did. “I don’t care if I’m hungry,” he said. “I would never take money for that.” But mullahs do not call all the shots anymore. More than 40 percent of Badakhshan’s voters in August were women, which reflects the fact that increasing numbers of girls are getting educations, something mullahs here have traditionally opposed. That seemed to thrill Ezatullah, the watchman. He gestured toward a tiny girl in a white scarf and shiny black shoes. “How can they tell her not to go to school?” he said.


After a Setback, a Season Watching From a Distance

Abstract: It was a year ago, and Tom Thibodeau was still coping with the reality that he was newly unemployed when his phone began to ring. “People know you’re not doing anything, so they’re like, ‘Come spend a few days with us,’” Thibodeau said. “You can tell they feel bad for you.” Many of those invitations came from fellow members of the N.B.A. coaching fraternity, and Thibodeau was glad to accept their offers. In fact, not long after his five-season run as coach of the Chicago Bulls came to an unceremonious end when he was fired in May 2015, Thibodeau set about deciding how he wanted to spend his time away from coaching. He knew he needed to recharge and reflect, he said. He figured the best way to do that would actually be to cram as much basketball into his life as humanly possible. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to treat it like a college professor taking a sabbatical,” he said. So Thibodeau attended training camp with the Houston Rockets. He sat backstage with the performance troupe known as the Golden State Warriors. He hit the road with the Sacramento Kings. He met with coach after coach, trading ideas and jotting notes on things like management principles and offensive strategy. All the while, Thibodeau was preparing for his next job — one that materialized in April, when the Minnesota Timberwolves made him their new coach. The Timberwolves, with their young core, were 6-14 before their game Tuesday night against the San Antonio Spurs. Thibodeau may want to take another sabbatical soon. “There’s a lot of room for growth,” he said. “If we’re doing the right things and we’re getting better, then eventually the wins are going to come.” The 58-year-old Thibodeau, who coached the Bulls to a 255-139 record and five straight playoff appearances, is known for his defensive prowess and for being a hard-charging workaholic. Tony La Russa, the Hall of Fame baseball manager, said the Bulls tried to mandate that Thibodeau take a two-week vacation after each season. Image From left: Tom Thibodeau, who was an assistant coach; Mike Krzyzewski, the head coach of the USA Basketball Men’s National Team; and Jim Boeheim, an assistant coach. on the first day of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. Credit Jamie Squire/Getty Images “And he told them, ‘You can put it in there, but I’m still coming into the office,’” La Russa recalled in a telephone interview. La Russa, now the chief baseball officer for the Arizona Diamondbacks, was among the many coaches (and managers) whom Thibodeau visited during his sabbatical. Thibodeau was a guest of the Diamondbacks for a few days at spring training, where he spoke with La Russa about leadership, among other topics. “Think about his choices,” La Russa said. “He could have sat around and felt sorry for himself. He could have learned to play a sport like golf. He could have taken a trip around the world. Instead, he knew that he had his career in front of him, and he did exactly what you would expect from Tom: He was going to use that time to learn.” It is not uncommon for coaches to get together and talk shop, or for those who are gainfully employed to open their doors to those who are between gigs. Coaching can be a lucrative profession, but also a demanding one. So there is commiseration and camaraderie, especially for those who have been fired and know what it feels like. “I think Thibs was really intent on taking a year to see some other things,” said Kevin McHale, who was coaching the Rockets when Thibodeau visited last season. “In our league, you can kind of get stuck in your own bubble if you hang around the same assistant coaches all the time.” McHale, now an analyst for TNT and N.B.A. TV, recalled spending time with Rick Carlisle, the coach of the Dallas Mavericks, after McHale was let go by the Timberwolves in 2009. McHale said he was struck by how Carlisle gave his players a sense of ownership: “This is your offense, not mine.” It was a message that resonated with him. “When I was with the Timberwolves, I overcoached them,” McHale said. “I talked too much. I didn’t give them enough leeway.” In Houston, McHale also gave his assistants more authority. McHale sensed that Thibodeau was surprised by their level of involvement when he watched the Rockets practice. McHale explained that he got tired of hearing himself talk, so he could only imagine how his players felt. He made certain that his assistants were delivering the same message. “But they had different voices,” McHale said. “As a player, I knew that after a while the coach just sounded like, ‘Blah blah blah blah blah.’’’ Thibodeau said that as he mapped out his travels, he wanted to visit teams in various stages of development. He had no clue what his next coaching opportunity would entail — total overhaul? on the verge of contention? — so the idea was to prepare as best he could for whatever came his way. In addition to seeing the Warriors, who were in the middle of an endless parade of record-setting excellence, Thibodeau took trips to observe teams like the Detroit Pistons, the Utah Jazz and the Charlotte Hornets, who were all in the process of becoming more competitive. Image Tom Thibodeau was coach of the Chicago Bulls for five seasons before he was fired in May 2015. Credit Lynne Sladky/Associated Press “When you don’t have your own team, your view of everything is so much broader,” Thibodeau said. “You’re not thinking about, ‘O.K., who’s our next opponent?’ You’re thinking about what’s going on in the league, and you’re seeing how different teams are handling different situations.” Thibodeau sometimes visited teams twice — once at the beginning of the season, then again as the playoffs were nearing — to gauge how those teams had evolved. In hindsight, he said, the Jazz offered a blueprint of sorts for how he would deal with the Timberwolves. “You could see the steps that they were taking,” Thibodeau said of the Jazz, who were particularly young last season. Over all, Thibodeau came away with an even greater appreciation for the value of analytics. (Minnesota is now in the process of building an analytics department, he said.) He also studied how coaches were working with staffs that have ballooned in size in recent years: more assistants and trainers, along with new positions for capologists and statisticians. “What used to be five to eight people has become 40 to 50 people,” Thibodeau said. “So how do you utilize all these people? How do manage all the information that you’re collecting, and then how do you use it in a purposeful way? How do you bring the best out of everybody? The communication has to be clear.” With the Kings, Thibodeau sought insight from George Karl, who was then the team’s coach, on his up-tempo brand of offense. “I think the one thing he was really interested in was how to play faster,” Karl said of Thibodeau. Karl described many of their conversations as mutually beneficial. As Karl was cracking open his playbook, he was asking Thibodeau to evaluate the Kings’ defense — a defense that Karl disparaged with profanity and said was likely beyond repair. But he had Thibodeau look under the hood anyway. “Not even Thibs could’ve saved it,” Karl said. They also talked about the state of the profession, about outsize expectations and about communicating with players, a task that Karl considers more daunting than ever. “How do you connect with these guys? There’s no way you can connect with all of them,” said Karl, whom the Kings fired in April. “Hopefully, you have good connections with seven or eight of them, and three or four are going to be your best players. But then how much time do you spend on Player 15?” Thibodeau carried those conversations with him to Minnesota, where the challenges are real again, rather than theoretical. He said he was glad to be back in the middle of it all, even if he appreciated his season watching from a safe distance. He kept his notes. “I enjoyed it a lot more,” he said, “than I thought I would.”


Sixers Bounce Back and Tie Series

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — Andre Iguodala recognized the reality: the Philadelphia 76ers entered Friday needing to even their Eastern Conference semifinal series by beating the Boston Celtics in Game 4. And to do that, all they had to overcome was a 15-point halftime deficit. After being dominated early, the 76ers rallied to earn an unlikely 92-83 win. “Being down, 3-1, is a total different mentality than being even at 2-2,” Iguodala said. “I feel like they gave us their best shot in the first half.” Iguodala hit a 3-pointer with 36.9 seconds left to give the Sixers a 5-point lead — their first two-possession margin of the game — and was key in the comeback. The series is tied at two games each, with Game 5 in Boston on Monday. Iguodala’s shot capped a furious 61-34 run for the 76ers in the second half. They trailed by 18 points in the third quarter and 76ers Coach Doug Collins said it looked as if there was no way that the 76ers would find a way to score. Suddenly, the bench came alive, the defense forced turnovers and the offense found easy baskets in the paint. “It’s a long game, and you got to find something good to happen to get you going,” Collins said. “And our defense was good in the second half.” The Celtics were limited to just 37 second-half points with an offense that stagnated and struggled with turnovers. Kevin Garnett, who has been dominant in the Celtics’ two wins this series, finished with 9 points and missed 9 of his 12 shots. The 76ers had five players who scored in double figures, and their bench combined to score 44 points. Both Iguodala and Evan Turner scored 16 points, while all five of Lou Williams’s field goals in his 15-point game came in the second half. The Celtics opened the game like a team that smelled blood, jumping to a 14-0 lead. But by the second half, Celtics Coach Doc Rivers admitted that his seasoned team lost its composure against the inexperienced 76ers. “Everything we did was the prescription of what you don’t do to beat them,” Rivers said. With the series reduced to a best-of-three battle, the advantage in talent and, especially, experience seems to belong to the Celtics. But Collins likes his team’s chances. “Going into the series, I think you’d probably say the advantage would be to Boston with their championship experience late in games,” Collins said. “But I think our guys have shown, in both Game 2 and Game 4, that we did a nice job closing those games out.”

Philadelphia 76ers
Boston Celtics
Basketball
Iguodala Andre
Playoff Games


The Sound and the Fury, and Possibly the Danger

Abstract: BRISTOL, Tenn., Aug. 25 — The roar of nearly 50 revving engines reverberated through the mostly empty stands Friday at Bristol Motor Speedway as Nascar ’s elite Nextel Cup teams took to the half-mile oval racetrack for practice. It was loud — painfully loud. That seemed fine with Josh Whitt, 28, a fan from Trussville, Ala., who watched from the infield a few yards from the track. “I think that the exciting part about Nascar is the noise,” Whitt shouted as the cars raced past. “It’s energy. Energy makes it that much better.” The noise also makes it more hazardous not only for fans, but also for drivers, crew members and everyone else who spends time at a racetrack during a Nascar event. That is the finding from two studies by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or Niosh, which reports that sound levels at tracks reach dangerously high decibel levels. The first study by Niosh, the government agency that conducts research on health and safety issues, was published by The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene in August 2005. It focused on tests conducted at Bristol Motor Speedway. A co-author of the studies, Dr. Luann E. Van Campen, said Niosh viewed Bristol as a worst-case situation for noise because of the bowl-like stadium track surrounded by stands that rise 21 stories. Chemical and noise exposures were measured at Bristol and at an undisclosed race team shop. The study found chemical exposure to be low but noise exposure high. “Employees involved in stock car racing are routinely exposed to extreme levels of noise, and auditory damage will ensue eventually,” according to the report’s conclusion. “More immediate concerns include the occupational risks posed by possible noise-induced fatigue, stress and miscommunication.” Chucri A. Kardous, a Niosh engineer and a co-author of the studies, said the noise level of 43 cars during a race was “equivalent to a jet engine.” “It’s higher than what we call here at Niosh an allowable limit,” he said. The second study, a follow-up that includes other tracks, was not available as it was being prepared for publication. But some of the results were presented last fall at a gathering of the Acoustical Society of America. As in the first study, peak sound levels exceeded 140 decibels during races; Niosh typically recommends having protection when levels exceed 85. An abstract of the second study also noted how quickly the noise reached that level: “in less than a minute for one driver during practice, within 2 minutes for pit crew and infield staff, and 7 to 10 minutes for spectators during the race.” That exposure could last for three or four hours, the duration of a race. Kardous said he could not find any other studies of noise at racetracks. The Nascar spokesman Jim Hunter said officials had not focused on the matter since the 1970s, when noise became an issue primarily among people living near racetracks. But the Niosh findings are hardly a shock to those who spend time at the track. The seven-time champion Richard Petty has blamed racing for his hearing loss and now wears a hearing aid. After 32 years of racing everything from go-karts to stock cars, including 14 seasons in Nascar’s premier Cup series, the driver Jeff Burton is a victim, too. “My hearing’s not great, but there’s a reason for that,” he said as teams arrived for the Sharpie 500 race Saturday night. “When I was younger, I didn’t worry a whole lot about it. But I do now. Maybe too late.” Many drivers use custom-molded plastic earplugs during races; Burton wears foam plugs. He said he did not know the Noise Reduction Rating for his ear protection. The rating indicates the number of decibels a protection device can block. Crew members and other Nascar staff members typically wear communication headsets during races. Nascar requires its employees to wear protection. The headsets protect the ears but lose some of their effectiveness when the volume is turned up to allow communication among staff and crew. Fans who use similar headsets to listen in on scanners of driver-crew conversations face the same loss of protection, Kardous said. There have been no studies conducted to determine the proper Noise Reduction Rating for drivers, crew members and fans at Nascar events. One of several recommendations from the first report included further studies on proper protection levels for earplugs and headsets. Those recommendations have not been followed. Thais Morata of Niosh, another co-author of the studies, said it would be up to Nascar, drivers or teams to approach the institute about further research. No studies are planned. There may be another option. Nascar could use mufflers to reduce the noise during races. “That’s the primary source of the noise, so obviously, that would be the top recommendation if we could make it,” Kardous said. But Hunter said that Nascar tried mufflers in the 1960s and that they did not have a significant effect on decibel levels. Besides, it would be a hard sell for fans like Whitt, who watched practice Friday without any hearing protection even though he had a headset in his backpack. “You know you should do it, but it takes away from it a little bit,” he said. “Just bring a lot of Goody’s headache powder. Never leave home without that.”

Engines
Noise
Automobile Racing
Ears and Hearing
National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing


U.S. Defense Officials Say Obama Reviewing Military Options in Syria

Abstract: WASHINGTON — President Obama has asked the Pentagon for military options on Syria , the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, told the Senate on Wednesday. But both General Dempsey and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said the administration still believed that diplomatic and economic pressure was the best solution for protecting Syrians from the Assad regime. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services committee, Mr. Panetta and General Dempsey fended off sharp questions from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, about why the administration was not considering American airstrikes in Syria. On Monday Mr. McCain became the first senator to call for airstrikes, describing them as “the only realistic way” to stop what he called a slaughter. The United Nations has said more than 7,500 civilians have been killed in the year-long uprising against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.But Mr. Panetta said intervention could expedite a civil war in the country and make an explosive situation worse. He said bluntly that the Obama administration recognized “that there are limitations of military force, especially with U.S. boots on the ground.” Both Mr. Panetta and General Dempsey said repeatedly that Syria was far different from Libya, where an American-led air campaign established a no-fly zone before the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi last year. General Dempsey told the committee that although “we can do anything,” Syria had five times the air defenses that Libya did, and because of that establishing a no-fly zone would take “an extended period of time and a great number of aircraft.” He said the early stages of an air campaign would “almost unquestionably” be led by the United States, as was the case in Libya, because of American electronic warfare capabilities. Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, tried to draw General Dempsey out on what he saw as a potentially protracted operation. “So from a perceptual view alone, the opening stages in any military operation would be an extended, almost exclusive air campaign by the United States against Syria, presumably supported politically by the Arab League, NATO, the E.U. and everyone else. But the kinetic part of the operation would be ours for several weeks before we actually decided even going in and effectively protecting Syrians. Is that a fair judgment?” “It is a fair judgment,” General Dempsey replied. Mr. Panetta and General Dempsey both predicted civilian casualties in an air campaign because forces loyal to President Assad are intermingled in dense urban areas with the general population. In addition, both said the opposition was so splintered that it was difficult to know whom the United States should potentially supply with arms. “In Libya, there were leaders who came to the front,” Mr. Panetta told the committee. But in Syria, “it’s very difficult to be able to know who we deal with in terms of an opposition.” General Dempsey said the opposition was composed of as many as 100 different groups. In the meantime, General Dempsey said the Pentagon was preparing options that had been requested by President Obama for review, ranging from humanitarian airlifts, naval monitoring, aerial surveillance of the Syrian military and the establishment of a no-fly zone. A further complication, General Dempsey said, is that both Iran and Russia are supplying Syria with weapons.

Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )


Libya Denies Execution Plans for Abdullah al-Senussi

Abstract: PARIS — Lawyers for the Libyan government on Monday said that Libya’s former intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, is expected to be tried by a civilian court in Libya in May at the earliest and will not face a summary trial and execution in the coming days as claimed by his defense lawyer . In a filing to the International Criminal Court , where Mr. Senussi is wanted on charges of crimes against humanity, the lawyers said that the government was planning to put him on trial together with other senior officials of the former government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, including the colonel’s son Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi. The international court had ordered Libya to report by Monday what its intentions were regarding Mr. Senussi. The request by the court was issued last Thursday after Mr. Senussi’s court-appointed lawyer had sent urgent letters to the judges, and to the British Foreign Office, saying that his client had been tortured and would face a military court and swift execution in Libya. As one of Colonel Qaddafi’s closest lieutenants for decades, Mr. Senussi has been a subject of great interest to American, British, French and Libyan investigators because he is believed to hold important information about the bombing of an American and a French passenger jet as well as many killings and disappearances in Libya. A diplomat familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter, said that American and French investigators had been allowed to interrogate him in Mauritania, where he was arrested last year . Mauritania has since extradited him to Libya. But Libya’s present rulers still appear to be divided about how to prosecute Mr. Senussi, one of the most notorious captives of the former government that was overthrown by the Libyan revolution more than a year ago. In their filing to the court on Monday, the lawyers dispelled any notion that Libya would hand him over to The Hague, where the court is based. But who will try him at home is apparently still in doubt. The Libyan filing said that although an earlier plan had called for Mr. Senussi him to be prosecuted in a military trial, “this no longer appears to be the case.” But, it added, “a final decision has yet to be made.” The filing also said there was no chance of an imminent trial, let alone a “summary execution.” It said the defense had made “sensationalist claims without a shred of evidence.” Ben Emmerson, who acts as Mr. Senussi’s court-appointed lawyer, said in an e-mail that a secret military trial was still possible. “The position is quite simple,” Mr. Emmerson wrote. “Libya is obliged to hand Mr. al-Senussi to The Hague immediately. Instead, they ‘bought’ him for $200 million from Mauritania, and have held him hostage ever since.” Referring to the court, he added, “I would expect the I.C.C. to treat these submissions with the skepticism they deserve.”

War Crimes,Genocide,Crimes Against Humanity


China’s Big Debt Worries George Soros. Should It Worry You?

Abstract: BEIJING — The global economy is full of risks right now. Growth is sluggish , and central banks seem powerless to fix it. Europe faces persistent challenges and division . In America, the election looms. But some say the biggest danger of all may be on the other side of the world, in China. China is in the midst of one of the biggest borrowing binges in recent history. Its debt load reached $26.6 trillion in 2015 — about five times what it was a decade ago, and more than two and a half times the size of the country’s entire economy. That huge increase has prompted some economists and even the prominent investor George Soros to compare China to the United States before the 2008 financial crisis. How big a danger does China’s fast-growing debt load present to the country, or the world? The traditional view is that rapidly rising debt eventually leads to an economic crisis. That can happen in several ways. In Greece, the culprit was the government, which built up more debt than it could handle. In the United States, the risks lurked in the finances of banks and households. In the case of China, the problem is primarily in the corporate sector. China’s big companies — especially those owned by the state — have done much of the borrowing. Higher debt means companies will have to spend more on interest and paying it back, and less on investing and hiring. That is where a vicious cycle could come in. Less spending on investing and hiring hurts the overall economy, hitting corporate bottom lines and making it even harder for companies to pay off debt. Bad loans rise. Banks freeze lending. Confidence in the financial system can be shaken, leading to a full-fledged banking crisis. China, which has the world’s second-largest economy after the United States’, plays a crucial role in generating global growth. Such a situation in China could ripple across the world. On the other hand, a number of economists say China’s mountain of debt is not as scary as it appears. Qu Hongbin, chief economist for Greater China at HSBC, and his team argue that China’s debt is simply a result of the way its financial system works. For a variety of reasons, China’s corporations and households stash more money away than their peers in other countries. That cash piles up in banks and is turned into loans, resulting in China’s high level of debt. Since the debt is backed by all that savings, it is not as risky, Mr. Qu contends. “Concerns about China’s debt levels reaching a critical threshold and posing a systemic risk are overblown,” the HSBC team wrote in April. Others argue that China’s debt is less of a threat because it is to a great degree backed by the government. Much of it comes from state-run banks, which are the primary lenders to China’s large state-run companies. That means Beijing can stop banks from pushing borrowers too hard and would be more inclined to shore up the financial system, preventing the crisis that a more free-market economy might suffer. Image Some experts contend that the risk of China’s debt is lessened because it is backed by the people’s savings. Credit Nicolas Asfouri/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The debt, too, is largely domestic, making China less likely to be pushed into a crisis by problems outside its borders, which have toppled debt-heavy emerging economies in the past. Other economies, furthermore, have debt similar to or even bigger than China’s. Debt in the United States, for instance, is roughly equivalent when compared with the size of America’s economy. Japan’s is much larger, at nearly four times the size of its national output. Still, there is ample evidence to suggest that a large expansion of debt almost always has disastrous consequences. Neil Shearing, chief emerging markets economist at the research firm Capital Economics, has studied more than 25 years of collapses in developing economies. He concludes that the pace of debt accumulation is more important than the overall level of debt in determining whether a country will face a financial crisis. China’s pace of debt accumulation is well above the threshold he identified as indicating the potential for crisis. Some economists say that even if China dodges a full-scale crisis, it may not be able to escape the damage caused by its rising debt. They fear that China could fall into a yearslong slump like Japan, which has regularly suffered little or even no growth ever since its own banking crisis more than two decades ago. In China’s case, the problems created by such an outcome would be much more painful, since it would enter that slow-growth period with its people at a much lower standard of living. There are already signs that China’s debt is beginning to hamper progress in its economy. China’s banks have increased their lending to try to stimulate the economy, but the actual rate of growth has not picked up. That is partly because China’s economy requires more and more debt to produce the same economic results . Brandon Emmerich, general manager for North America at Wind Information, a data provider, says $4 of new credit is necessary to generate just $1 of additional gross domestic product — the worst ratio since the depths of the last financial crisis. One reason, Mr. Emmerich recently wrote in a newsletter, is that “most new debt in China goes to pay off old obligations rather than invest in new value-creating projects.” After analyzing corporate bonds issued in China, he calculated that 42 percent of the money raised since 2015 was earmarked to pay off existing loans or expiring bonds, compared with only 8 percent in 2014. In an August report , the International Monetary Fund warned of “heightened downside risks” and the need for “decisive action” to reduce the economy’s reliance on credit, including reforming and even shutting down overly indebted companies. “Vulnerabilities are still rising on a dangerous trajectory,” it said. China has long defied predictions that it is heading for a crash, and perhaps it will prove the doomsayers wrong yet again. But Beijing’s policy makers must limit the increase in debt without inflicting a severe blow to growth. That delicate balancing act is hard to manage, but Beijing may be left with no other choice.


Analyst’s Longtime Skepticism on Euro Gains Traction

Abstract: LONDON — The euro zone was crumbling, just as he had long predicted, yet Bernard Connolly, Europe ’s most persistent prophet of doom, still faced a skeptical audience. “The current policy of lending plus austerity will lead to social unrest,” Mr. Connolly told investors and policy makers at a conference held this spring in Los Angeles by the Milken Institute, arguing the case that Greece , Italy , Portugal and Spain could not simply cut their way to recovery. “And one should not forget that of the four countries we are talking about, all have had civil wars, fascist dictatorships and revolutions. That is history,” he concluded, his voice rising above the chortles and gasps coming from the audience and the Europeans on his panel. “And that is the future if this malignant lunacy of monetary union is pursued and crushes these countries into the ground.” Mr. Connolly has been warning for years that Europe was heading for disaster. As a European Union economist in the early 1990s, he helped design the common currency’s framework, but then he was dismissed after he expressed turncoat views. In 1998, just months before the euro ’s introduction, he predicted that at least one of Europe’s weakest countries would face a rising budget deficit, a shrinking economy and a “downward spiral from which there is no escape unaided. When that happens, the country concerned will be faced with a risk of sovereign default.” Now, as the European debt crisis that began in Greece threatens to engulf even France along with Italy and Spain, Mr. Connolly’s longstanding proposition that the foisting of a common currency upon so many disparate nations would end in ruin is getting a much wider hearing. Hedge funds looking to bet on a euro zone breakup scour his research reports for insights. Longer-term investors who listened to his decade-long recommendations to steer clear of the bonds of Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain are congratulating themselves for not falling into the trap that bankrupted MF Global , the investment firm run until recently by Jon S. Corzine , the former Goldman Sachs executive and New Jersey governor. And central bankers outside the euro zone are among his most faithful readers. In 2008, Mark Carney, the governor of the Canadian central bank, cited the British-born Mr. Connolly, along with the far more prominent Nouriel Roubini of New York University and the Harvard economist Kenneth S. Rogoff, as having been among the few who foresaw the global financial crisis. Mervyn A. King, the governor of the Bank of England , has become more vocal about the euro zone’s problems and is also a longtime follower. Nicolas Carn, an independent research analyst and money manager who worked previously as chief investment strategist for the London-based hedge fund Odey Asset Management, is one of Mr. Connolly’s biggest fans. “Bernard has influenced me a great deal,” Mr. Carn said. “He has shaped my views on Europe and contributed significantly to my investment performance.” To be sure, Mr. Connolly was not the only analyst who raised early warning flags about the euro project. Economists like Martin Feldstein of Harvard and Paul Krugman, a Princeton economist who writes an Op-Ed page column for The New York Times , have been longtime critics, as were many experts in Britain , which has long been skeptical of the euro. But few have gone on to devote more or less their entire professional career to exposing Europe’s monetary fault lines. Unlike many critics of the euro, Mr. Connolly, 61, plies his trade mostly in private, eschewing cable television programs, opinion pages and policy journals. He represents a new breed of independent analyst that has come increasingly to the fore since the financial crisis broke in 2008. As investment banks have cut down on staff and remain constrained by their banking and government relationships, independent analysts like Mr. Connolly, who are mostly pessimistic in outlook, have become highly popular for hedge fund investors who wager large sums of money betting against the currencies, bonds and banks of countries headed for trouble. Mr. Connolly worked for AIG Financial Products, the banking arm of the insurance company American International Group , until it went into government receivership. He now operates out of a nondescript office in New York, where he is said to pound out as much as 20,000 words of analysis a week. His insights, like those of other such analysts scattered around the globe, do not come cheap. While the price Mr. Connolly charges is not public, analysts of his stature command, in some cases, as much as $100,000 for a full array of services, including regular meetings and phone calls along with written reports. And like many of them, Mr. Connolly — the Oxford -educated son of a bus driver from Manchester — guards his privacy zealously. He declined numerous requests to comment for this article. People who know him say that his public reticence is also fed by a lingering anxiety that officials in power will exact some form of revenge. The origins of that fear, as well as the anger and passion that drive him, date to 1995, when he took a leave from his job with the European Commission to write “The Rotten Heart of Europe.” The book was an excoriating history of the failure of the euro’s predecessor, the European exchange rate mechanism. In Britain, where suspicions of common European economic policy ran very high, the book was a hit for its attacks on the architects of the European common currency, including Jacques Delors, the former head of the European Commission, and Jean-Claude Trichet , the French finance official who would go on to run the European Central Bank for eight years. The book was greeted less enthusiastically in Brussels ; Mr. Connolly was told not to return from leave to reclaim his position. Moreover, the European Commission investigated whether he had disclosed any proprietary information in his book. Investigators found that he had not. In 2005, when Greek, Portuguese and Irish bonds were trading at rates barely higher than Germany ’s, Mr. Connolly’s work at AIG Financial Products persuaded a small group of hedge funds and independent investors to bet on a euro zone crackup. They did so by buying the credit-default swaps of what he saw as the most vulnerable European countries. When fears that those countries would default took off in 2008 and 2009, sending the values of those swaps skyward, they were able to sell — reaping large profits. “It took a while, but we finally were able to monetize Bernard’s views on Europe,” said James Aitken, who worked with him at AIG Financial Products and describes his job at the time as translating Mr. Connolly’s arcane musings into actual investment strategies. While other investors have also profited from following Mr. Connolly’s advice, Mr. Aitken says that the analyst’s true passion is to try to prevent the social and political train wreck he fears is just around the corner. “He is anguished,” said Mr. Aitken, who runs his own research service for investors, Aitken Advisors, from his home in London. “He sees where this is going and is warning against the human tragedy.” Yra Harris, a trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange , is another of Mr. Connolly’s supporters in the investment world. “Bernard is like no one I have ever met,” he said, citing his work as inspiration for some recent profits he made selling Italian bond futures. Mr. Harris concedes that Mr. Connolly’s reports can be hard going. Indeed, some exceed 70 pages, cite Hegel and John Stuart Mill and include footnotes that can run on for more than a page. But Mr. Harris is so convinced that Mr. Connolly’s views should find a wider audience that he and a colleague have offered to pay Mr. Connolly’s publisher $75,000 to reissue 25,000 paperback copies of “Rotten Heart,” now out of print. “I will pay out of my pocket because he has meant so much to me,” Mr. Harris said. “Each time I talk to him, it’s like I’ve been to Harvard for four years.”

Euro
Bernard Connolly
Economy
European Commission
Euro Crisis


Andrew Greeley, Outspoken Priest and Writer, Dies at 85

Abstract: Andrew M. Greeley, the Roman Catholic priest and writer whose outpouring of sociological research, contemporary theology, sexually frank novels and newspaper columns challenged reigning assumptions about American Catholicism, was found dead on Thursday morning at his home in Chicago. He was 85. His niece Laura Durkin confirmed the death, saying he had died overnight in his sleep. She said he had been in poor health and under 24-hour care since suffering severe head injuries in 2008 when his clothing caught on the door of a taxi as it pulled away and he was thrown to the pavement. In a time when the word “maverick” is often used indiscriminately, Father Greeley — priest, scholar, preacher, social critic, storyteller and scold — was the real thing. One could identify a left and a right in American Catholicism, and then there was Father Greeley, occupying a zone all his own. Exuberantly combative, he could be scathing about the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops; at one point he described them as “morally, intellectually and religiously bankrupt.” If the church wanted “to salvage American Catholicism,” he wrote, it would be well advised to retire “a considerable number of mitered birdbrains.” But he could be equally critical of secular intellectuals, whom he accused of being prejudiced against religion, and reform-minded Catholics, who he said had a weakness for political or cultural fads. He wrote more than 120 books, many published by university presses, and countless articles about Catholic theology in both sociological journals and general-interest magazines, often incorporating the latest scholarship. He wrote op-ed pieces and syndicated columns in both religious and secular publications. His greatest readership certainly stemmed from his scores of novels, many of them rife with Vatican intrigue, straying priests and explicit sex. At least 10 of them appeared on The New York Times’s best-seller list, including his first, “The Cardinal Sins” (1981), a tale of two Irish-American boys from Chicago’s West Side who enter the priesthood together, one of whom contrives to become the cardinal of Chicago, takes a mistress and fathers a child. “Sometimes I suspect that my obituary in The New York Times,” Father Greeley once wrote, “will read, ‘Andrew Greeley, Priest; Wrote Steamy Novels.’ ” Were they steamy? The question would probably not have even been raised if the author had not been a priest and if some of the steam had not been produced by fictional priests, in one case a cardinal, breaking their vows. In fact, most of the priests in his novels were virtuous, wise and hard-working. The big sex scenes were generally reserved for married couples rediscovering the redemptive healing of passion after trials and estrangement. “I suppose I have an Irish weakness for words gone wild,” Father Greeley once told The Times. “Besides, if you’re celibate, you have to do something.” No Use for Elites The books made him rich, though he gave his first million to charity and continued to give to various causes, including a donation, decades ago, to the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, then a fledgling advocacy group. Father Greeley had been an early and vehement advocate for victims of abusive priests at least since 1989, when he began writing articles in Chicago newspapers demanding that the church take action against pedophile priests. The public criticism angered the archdiocese and many fellow priests, but his outrage and proposals for reform were eventually recognized by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, among others, as prescient. Father Greeley was not shy about his politics, a New Deal liberalism grounded in an acute sense of family and neighborhood. (One of his recent books was titled with typical directness, “A Stupid, Unjust and Criminal War: Iraq 2001-2007.”) Nor did he hide his devotion to his hometown Chicago Bears, Bulls and Cubs. Image The Rev. Andrew M. Greeley Credit Jonathan Kirn He defended parochial schools, priestly celibacy, ethnic loyalties, Chicago politics and the vivid imagery of traditional Catholic piety. He deplored negative attitudes toward sexuality in the church and assailed church leaders for paying little heed to the views of the laity. He identified the controversy surrounding “Humanae Vitae,” the 1968 papal encyclical reasserting the church’s condemnation of contraception, as a turning point for the church — a time when attendance at Mass dropped precipitously and Catholics began to question church authority on an ever-growing list of topics. If there was anything tying Father Greeley’s torrent of printed words together, it was a respect for what he considered the practical wisdom and religious experience of ordinary believers and an exasperation with elites, whether popes, bishops, church reformers, political radicals, secular academics or literary critics. It was a thread that ran though his sociological research documenting the gap between what Catholics thought about sex and marriage — their more relaxed stance concerning artificial birth control, for example — and the more proscriptive positions of the church. His work with the distinguished sociologist Peter H. Rossi in the early 1960s revealed the strengths of parochial schools, then being viewed by secular educators as second-rate and authoritarian and by liberal Catholics as a questionable use of church resources. The failure of many public schools soon provoked a fresh appreciation for the Catholic educational tradition. In a 1972 book, “Unsecular Man: The Persistence of Religion,” Father Greeley marshaled evidence against the widespread intellectual assumption that religion was a fading force in the world. Developments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the United States and the Middle East later altered that perception too. Religion, he argued, “is the result of two incurable diseases from which humankind suffers — life, from which we die, and hope, which hints that there might be more meaning to life than a termination in death.” Before religion became creed or catechism, he said, it was poetry: images and stories that defy death with glimpses of hope, and with moments of life-renewing experience that were shared and enacted in communal rituals. “The theological voice wants doctrines, creeds and moral obligations,” Father Greeley wrote. “I reject none of these. I merely insist that experiences which renew hope are prior to and richer than propositional and ethical religion and provide the raw power for them.” This same concern for the religious experience of ordinary Catholics tied his sociological work to the fiction that he churned out with such energy. It was mostly about middle-class Irish-Americans from the same upwardly mobile milieu as the author’s, with an occasional foray into science fiction and thrillers about Vatican skulduggery. He was criticized for never having had an unpublished thought — or an unpublished fantasy, some added, faulting his fiction. Yet even his unpublished thoughts could cause trouble, as they did in 1981. Conspiracy Theory Materials from the 1970s found in Father Greeley’s papers by a young journalist working on an article about him led to accusations that Father Greeley had been plotting to write an exposé of his nemesis, Cardinal John Cody of Chicago, that would have shown the prelate guilty of financial misconduct and paved the way for his ouster. As part of the scheme, according to these allegations, Father Greeley wanted to see Cardinal Cody replaced by Cardinal Bernardin, then archbishop of Cincinnati, who, the thinking went, on becoming a liberal member of the College of Cardinals would be inclined to vote for a reform-minded successor to Pope Paul VI upon the pope’s death. In fact, Cardinal Cody’s conduct had raised alarms in the Vatican beginning in the mid-1970s and eventually led to a criminal investigation in Illinois, halted only by the cardinal’s death in 1982. And Archbishop Bernardin had long been considered the likely successor in Chicago. The archived materials, Father Greeley maintained, were speculative but reasonable scenarios developed for a book on the papal election that would follow Pope Paul’s death, which, as it happened, occurred in 1978. “This business of conspiracy is ridiculous,” Father Greeley said, adding, “I didn’t do it, but I wish I had.” Though the furor blew over, it momentarily appeared to create an obstacle to Archbishop Bernardin’s appointment to head the Chicago archdiocese, and it severely strained relations between the archbishop and Father Greeley. Image Father Greeley’s books included at least 10 best-selling novels. Credit Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images To be sure, Father Greeley had openly stated that battling Cardinal Cody was one of the chief “crusades” of his life. He was regularly and unsparingly critical of his leadership. After the cardinal closed a number of inner-city schools, Father Greeley denounced him as a “madcap tyrant.” Success and Setbacks Andrew Moran Greeley was born on Feb. 5, 1928, in Oak Park, Ill., the son of Andrew T. Greeley, a businessman, and the former Grace McNichols. His grandparents were Irish immigrants. Besides his niece Ms. Durkin, he is survived by a sister, Mary Jule Durkin; four other nieces; two nephews; and 18 grandnieces and grandnephews. From boyhood, Andrew Greeley wanted to become a priest. He attended Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago and then went to St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Ill. He was ordained in 1952. For almost a decade he worked as assistant pastor of Christ the King Church in an affluent area of Chicago, writing his first books on young Catholics and church life in the suburbs. In 1962 he earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago, adding it to earlier degrees in theology, and joined the staff of the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, serving as its senior study director until 1968. The group surveys American attitudes about religious, cultural and other issues. He never quite got over a string of setbacks. One was his failure to be granted tenure at the University of Chicago in 1973, though he had taught there for a decade and been widely published. He attributed the rejection at least in part to prejudice against a Catholic priest; others said it had more to do with his cantankerous nature. Another blow came when the American bishops repudiated a sociological study of Catholic priests that they had commissioned from him. A two-year project completed in 1972, the study found that American priests were widely dissatisfied with church leadership. Then there was the resistance among liberal Catholics to his positive findings about Catholic schools. His research debunked the received view at the time that Catholics had low college attendance rates. He found instead that white Catholics earned bachelor’s degrees and pursued advanced degrees at higher rates than other whites, and he attributed their success to the quality of education in parochial schools, a controversial assertion in a time of public-school ascendancy. Finally came the unwillingness first of Cardinal Cody and then Cardinal Bernardin to give him a parish of his own and appoint him its pastor. Father Greeley later felt that he had readers everywhere and allies nowhere. Sensitive to accusations that he was getting rich from peddling stories of Catholic failings in his novels, he gave large sums to charity, notably to aid Chicago Catholic schools that served minority populations and to endow a chair in Roman Catholic studies at the University of Chicago, a double-edged gesture to the university that had spurned him. A Parish of Readers The pugnacious style, sweeping generalizations and ad hominem attacks often found in his writing made him an alienating figure. “Andy Greeley shoots from the hip at practically everyone with whom he has some grievances,” Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, a leading advocate of improving relations between Judaism and the Catholic Church, complained to The Times in 1976. Father’s Greeley’s chip-on-the-shoulder attitude may have stemmed from a belief that he had been misunderstood and marginalized. Indeed, a second volume of memoirs, “Furthermore!,” published in 1999, suggests a man who even while striving for serenity could never quite shed a sense of being embattled and having scores to settle. This was particularly true when his fiction received poor reviews. He would never forget a bad one and would continue to denounce the offending reviewer for decades. It was easy for Father Greeley to dismiss critics of his novels as prudes, because some of them were. Other critics, however, found the sex not prurient but preposterous. Some feminists complained that it was too often brutal and his treatment of women condescending. The criticism stung Father Greeley, whose advocacy of women’s advancement in the church had earned him feminist defenders as well. Father Greeley knew well that he was writing genre novels, but he, like many of his readers, saw them as much more. They were theological parables and, for Father Greeley, something approaching sacramental ministrations. If he did not have a parish, he had a mailbox — and later an e-mail address. The faithful gathered there in huge numbers, thanking him for new insights into God and their church, adding their own tales of return and reconciliation. For critics, the novels were merely publishing successes or even wasteful diversions from sociological scholarship. For Father Greeley, they were “the most priestly thing I have ever done.” And priesthood was what, in Father Greeley’s eyes, held his life together. “I always wanted to be a priest,” he once wrote. “My core identity is priest. I will always be a priest.”

Books
Obituary
Catholic Church
Andrew M Greeley


2 Islands With Different Economic Climates

Abstract: BRUSSELS — Cyprus and Malta have a lot in common: Mediterranean islands enjoying 10 months of sunshine a year, they joined the European Union in 2004, use the euro and have banking sectors that dwarf their economies. There are so many similarities that some investors have wondered whether Malta might follow Cyprus in needing a bailout to survive the region’s economic crisis. But Malta’s risk profile is far different from that of Cyprus, which received an aid package of €10 billion, or $13 billion, last month that was aimed at preventing its collapse and a possible departure from the euro zone. On the basis of banking risk and its economy, it seems unlikely that Malta will be the next euro member — after Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain — to need rescuing. “The business model of the financial sector in Malta is not as shady and controversial as it was in Cyprus,” said Carsten Brzeski, an economist with ING in Brussels. “The picture is also different at the macro level.” He added that “Malta should be off the screens for quite some time.” The European Commission expects growth on Malta, an island economy of 450,000 people, to pick up this year and next, driven by rising domestic demand and increased net exports. The unemployment rate, at 6.4 percent, is around half that of the euro zone; debt as a proportion of gross domestic product is 72 percent, below the euro zone average; and the deficit is in check. All of Cyprus’s precrisis numbers were far less rosy. Nevertheless, Malta’s banking sector is eight times the size of its G.D.P., about the same as it was in Cyprus before the rescue. This leaves the economy exposed to financial shocks. But in Cyprus, the banking sector was dominated by two domestic banks, both of which relied heavily on foreign deposits, many from Russia, and invested those deposits in government bonds abroad, particularly in Greece. In Malta, the bulk of banking-sector assets belong to subsidiaries of foreign banks that would be responsible for bailing out the local units in case of trouble. The assets of domestic Maltese banks, which would not be allowed to fail because the economy would collapse, add up to the equivalent of about 200 percent of G.D.P. That is a large, but not terrifying, amount, and the ratio in Cyprus’s case was twice as high. Maltese domestic banks are highly capitalized, profitable and liquid. What is more, they fund themselves largely from the domestic retail deposit market, lend locally and hold securities issued in Malta, rather than taking on board risky assets like Greek government bonds. “I want to be very clear: There is no banking sector in the European Union that is comparable to the Cypriot one. Malta, Ireland, Luxembourg, they are not comparable to Cyprus,” Jörg Asmussen, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, told a European Parliament committee last week. “One has to look deeper at the structure of the assets and liabilities of the banking sector.” In a report last month, the ratings agency Fitch said Malta would be far more capable of handling a crisis than Cyprus was. “The contingent liability that potential bank support places on the Maltese sovereign — around 128 percent of G.D.P. — is significantly lower than in Cyprus,” Fitch said. The International Monetary Fund said in a report last year: “The sensitivity of the Maltese banking sector to sovereign risk events in Europe is low, given very low direct exposures to vulnerable countries, as well as domestic banks’ reliance on a traditional retail deposit-based banking model.” Some analysts say Malta is vulnerable to a sudden dip in confidence that could prompt investors to withdraw deposits, something that the hit on Cypriot bank customers could easily have prompted. The key risk “is that its international offshore investors begin to relocate in light of the policy uncertainty created by the Cypriot bail-in,” said Myles Bradshaw, a portfolio manager at Pacific Investment Management. “This would have significant negative economic effects that could in turn create a problem with domestic banks’ asset quality. Together with the deep recession, this could force Malta to seek external assistance.” In a recent assessment, the European Commission also expressed some macroeconomic concerns, noting Malta’s relatively high level of private debt, particularly home mortgages. But it said that despite some overvaluation and possible oversupply, there was no immediate risk of a property market crash. Martin Santa is a Reuters correspondent.


A Home in Florida That No One Wants

Abstract: “This could have been our stadium,” Eddie Einhorn said he was thinking last week, as he sat in a suite at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was watching his Chicago White Sox lose Games 1 and 2 of the American League division series to the Tampa Bay Rays . “They’re playing in our old place,” said Einhorn, the White Sox’ vice chairman. Almost. Twenty years ago, the White Sox nearly committed to moving to Florida. Local authorities were planning to build a domed stadium in hopes of attracting a major league franchise — Commissioner Peter V. Ueberroth warned against such audacity — but in the White Sox they found a willing target to fulfill their dreams. Their ancient home, Comiskey Park, “was starting to fall apart,” Einhorn said. Thus started one of the great flirtations in (attempted) team relocation history. Local government interests craved a major league team and were willing to provide the White Sox with a fully subsidized domed gift, with dandy lease terms. Why wait for baseball to expand if you could get an existing team? “This would be the first shot for baseball in Florida,” Einhorn said, except for spring training. He and Jerry Reinsdorf, the White Sox’ chairman, were ready to pack up for suburban Addison, Ill., or maybe Denver or Washington. But the team stayed put after a midnight vote in July 1988 by the Illinois General Assembly. Lobbying by Gov. James R. Thompson delivered the needed votes for state financing to build a stadium across the street from Comiskey. “He went down the aisle promising help to downstaters who saw nothing in the stadium for them,” Einhorn said. So, pork in the Land of Lincoln saved baseball on Chicago’s South Side. Florida Suncoast Dome (now Tropicana Field) opened in 1990; the Giants nearly left San Francisco for it in 1992. Six years later, the Devil Rays moved in. The White Sox moved into the new Comiskey (now U.S. Cellular Field) in 1991.  The Trop is not a lovely place, with its drab insides and slanted roof. It will be the only ballpark with a fixed lid when the Twins move into the new Target Field in 2010. “Hindsight is very good, but that stadium is not very esthetically pleasing,” Einhorn said “We don’t like a dome. It’s not pure baseball. Fans love to see grass.” He added: “I don’t know if it would have been the best place for us, but it looked better than what we were being offered in Chicago. We really didn’t want to stay on the South Side.” Tropicana Field is an antique that does not draw adequate attendance or generate substantial revenues, at least not enough to satisfy ownership. The Rays won the American League East this season with 97 victories after averaging 64.5 over the previous 10. But they drew just over 22,000 fans a game, up from 17,148 last year. The Rays want a new home after only a decade in their current one. In June, they withdrew a plan for voters to decide on a $450 million waterfront ballpark proposal that would have required public financing ($150 million was to come from the team). Now, a coalition of civic leaders and businesspeople is examining other sites in the region. “We stepped back because the obvious political support wasn’t there, which was partly a function of the economy, but we began to have questions about the location,” said Michael Kalt, the Rays’ senior vice president for development and business affairs. The economy, with its frozen credit markets, does not favor stadium financing, with or without public money. The Mets and the Yankees were fortunate to have financed their new ballparks, largely with tax-free bonds, long before the current meltdown. “I’d think that by the time the coalition makes its recommendations, the markets will have stabilized somewhat,” Kalt said. “If our deal is not financeable in two or three years, we have more problems than finding money for a stadium.”  The Rays are bound to their lease through 2027, but by 2016 the penalties for early termination are significantly reduced. Ideally, the team would prefer to have a new stadium by 2012. But until that goal becomes more realistic, the Rays want to expand their corporate support and attract more season-ticket buyers. Playing in their first postseason may increase next season’s revenues, but in an economy close to, or already in, a recession, winning the World Series might not be the bonanza it otherwise might be. “This market is challenging, because while it may look like Phoenix or Seattle with its population, it doesn’t act that way,” Kalt said. “It doesn’t have a downtown everybody identifies with. It’s really a market that is five separate towns, but each has little to do with each other. There’s a real issue in unifying the region.” That is a different problem for the team that almost took their pale hose to Florida. “We have to win to draw,” Einhorn said. “The Cubs just have to show up.”

Tampa Bay Rays
Baseball
Stadiums and Arenas


Roche Reports Mixed Results in Trial of an Alzheimer’s Drug

Abstract: Roche, the pharmaceutical company, on Wednesday reported mixed results in its latest trial of an Alzheimer’s drug. It said that while the drug did not slow progression of the disease over all, at the highest doses it did seem to delay a decline in mental ability in patients with mild cases of Alzheimer’s. The results of a clinical trial of the drug, crenezumab, were presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Copenhagen. The study is the latest test of the so-called amyloid hypothesis — a theory that a buildup in the brain of a protein called beta amyloid is responsible for dementia in Alzheimer’s patients. That hypothesis has taken a beating as one drug after another designed to reduce amyloid levels has failed in clinical trials. Still, the Roche results will allow proponents to say that the approach could still work, if only a drug can be given at high enough doses and to patients early enough in the course of their disease. “I do feel this is very encouraging for the field,” said Dr. Carole Ho, who runs an early clinical development group at Genentech, Roche’s California subsidiary. “We’re seeing movement on these cognitive endpoints with targeting of the amyloid pathway.” But Dr. Ho said the company had not decided yet whether to proceed with the additional trials that would be necessary for the drug to win approval. She said the company would further analyze the data and talk with regulators before deciding. Dr. Samuel E. Gandy, an Alzheimer’s expert who was not involved in the study, said the results were nowhere near good enough for approval. “Long story short, we are still a long way from anything that could be approvable as therapy,” Dr. Gandy, who is director of the Center for Cognitive Health at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, said in an email. The phase 2 study involved 431 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. They received either a low dose of the drug, a high dose or a placebo. After 73 weeks, the patients getting the high dose had experienced a 16.8 percent slower decline in cognition, based on a measure called ADAS-Cog12. But the difference was not statistically significant. However, among the patients with the mildest disease, there was a greater reduction, 35.4 percent, in the rate of cognitive decline. Even the high dose, however, did not show a consistent effect on a different scale that measured patients’ ability to function, including carrying out activities of daily living. Crenezumab, which Genentech licensed from AC Immune, a privately held Swiss company, is a type of protein called a monoclonal antibody that binds to beta amyloid so it can be cleared from the brain. Both Eli Lilly and the team of Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson suffered high-profile failures of similar drugs in larger phase 3 studies. But like Roche, Lilly said its drug, solanezumab, appeared to slow cognitive decline in patients with milder disease. So it is conducting new trials involving such patients. Dr. Rachelle S. Doody, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine who has been a consultant to Roche and many other companies developing Alzheimer’s drugs, said she was “a little bit relieved” by the results of Roche’s study because it was consistent with what Lilly found. Some experts say the anti-amyloid drugs might work best if used even earlier — before any symptoms appear. Such studies are now underway. One is testing crenezumab in people in Colombia who have a genetic mutation that leads to early Alzheimer’s disease. Initial results are expected in 2017, said Andrea Pfeifer, chief executive of AC Immune. Novartis announced this week that it would test two of its experimental drugs in healthy people with a genetic risk for the disease. Dr. Ho said crenezumab appeared reasonably safe, making it possible to raise the dose even further. There was only one case of vasogenic edema, a small swelling in the brain, a side effect that limited the dose of Pfizer’s drug. Five people getting crenezumab in the phase 2 trial and in a smaller study died, compared with none getting the placebo. The difference is not as great as it looks because twice as many people were getting the drug as the placebo. But it still might raise red flags. Dr. Ho said that the number of deaths was not out of the ordinary for such a population and that the deaths did not seem related to the drug.

Pharmaceuticals
Clinical trial
Alzheimer's
Roche Holding A G


Venezuela Expels 2 After Human Rights Report

Abstract: CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez ’s government expelled two employees of Human Rights Watch late Thursday night after chafing at their documentation of widespread political discrimination, intimidation of union members and a subservient judiciary. Armed men in uniforms apprehended José Miguel Vivanco, a Chilean citizen who is the Americas director for the New York-based group, and Daniel Wilkinson, an American who is deputy director for the Americas, and placed them on a flight to São Paulo, Brazil, where they arrived on Friday morning. “About 20 men, some of them in military uniform, intercepted us when we arrived at our hotel after returning from dinner Thursday night,” Mr. Vivanco said in a telephone interview from São Paulo. He said he struggled briefly with the security officials when he tried to send a message on his BlackBerry to The New York Times about the expulsion. The officials then disabled the BlackBerries of the two men and prevented them from contacting anyone in Venezuela, including diplomats from the embassies of Chile or the United States. “They informed us of our apprehension and told us they had entered our rooms and had packed our belongings,” Mr. Vivanco said. The expulsion, broadcast partly on state television here, comes at a time of increasingly erratic actions by Mr. Chávez. In the last week, he expelled the American ambassador, rounded up military officers and accused them of plotting to kill him and clashed with the Vatican over its granting of political asylum to a political opponent. The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Mr. Vivanco violated the law by entering the country on a tourist visa to do human rights work. The ministry also said that Human Rights Watch, which is an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, was acting in concert with the United States government in a campaign of aggression against Venezuela. “Accusing us of being part of a conspiracy is a distraction tactic used to attack the messenger,” Mr. Vivanco said. “We have never had this experience anywhere in this hemisphere.” The expulsion of the two men came after they released a long report here on Thursday documenting rights violations in Venezuela. They pointed to Mr. Chávez’s dismantling of judicial independence and his use of a 2002 coup that briefly ousted him from office as a pretext for consolidating power by weakening rights protections. The report also discussed the government’s intimidation of local human rights defenders and nongovernmental organizations, documenting the use of state television to carry out attacks on advocates doing work that criticized Mr. Chávez’s creation of a military reserve under his command. “Our expulsion reveals yet again the degree of intolerance of this government,” said Mr. Vivanco.

Venezuela
Human Rights Watch
United States
Freedom and Human Rights
Chavez Hugo