To Tug the Heartstrings, Music Must First Tickle the Brain

Abstract: The other day, Paul Simon was rehearsing a favorite song: his own “Darling Lorraine,” about a love that starts hot but turns very cold. He found himself thinking about a three-note rhythmic pattern near the end, where Lorraine (spoiler alert) gets sick and dies. “The song has that triplet going on underneath that pushes it along, and at a certain point I wanted it to stop because the story suddenly turns very serious,” Mr. Simon said in an interview. “The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.” An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another. The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool. Research is showing, for example, that our brains understand music not only as emotional diversion, but also as a form of motion and activity. The same areas of the brain that activate when we swing a golf club or sign our name also engage when we hear expressive moments in music. Brain regions associated with empathy are activated, too, even for listeners who are not musicians. And what really communicates emotion may not be melody or rhythm, but moments when musicians make subtle changes to the those musical patterns. Daniel J. Levitin, director of the laboratory for music perception, cognition and expertise at McGill University in Montreal , began puzzling over musical expression in 2002, after hearing a live performance of one of his favorite pieces, Mozart ’s Piano Concerto No. 27. “It just left me flat,” Dr. Levitin, who wrote the best seller “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton, 2006), recalled in a video describing the project . “I thought, well, how can that be? It’s got this beautiful set of notes. The composer wrote this beautiful piece. What is the pianist doing to mess this up?” Before entering academia, Dr. Levitin worked in the recording industry, producing, engineering or consulting for Steely Dan , Blue Öyster Cult , the Grateful Dead , Santana , Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder . He has played tenor saxophone with Mel Tormé and Sting , and guitar with David Byrne . (He also performs around campus with a group called Diminished Faculties.) After the Mozart mishap, Dr. Levitin and a graduate student, Anjali Bhatara, decided to try teasing apart some elements of musical expression in a rigorous scientific way. He likened it to tasting two different pots de crème: “One has allspice and ginger and the other has vanilla. You know they taste different but you can’t isolate the ingredient.” To decipher the contribution of different musical flavorings, they had Thomas Plaunt, chairman of McGill’s piano department, perform snatches of several Chopin nocturnes on a Disklavier, a piano with sensors under each key recording how long he held each note and how hard he struck each key (a measure of how loud each note sounded). The note-by-note data was useful because musicians rarely perform exactly the way the music is written on the page — rather, they add interpretation and personality to a piece by lingering on some notes and quickly releasing others, playing some louder, others softer. The pianist’s recording became a blueprint, what researchers considered to be the 100 percent musical rendition. Then they started tinkering . A computer calculated the average loudness and length of each note Professor Plaunt played. The researchers created a version using those average values so that the music sounded homogeneous and evenly paced, with every eighth note held for an identical amount of time, each quarter note precisely double the length of an eighth note. They created other versions too: a 50 percent version, with note lengths and volume halfway between the mechanical average and the original, and versions at 25 percent, 75 percent, and even 125 percent and 150 percent, in which the pianist’s loud notes were even louder, his longest-held notes even longer. Study subjects listened to them in random order, rating how emotional each sounded. Musicians and nonmusicians alike found the original pianist’s performance most emotional and the averaged version least emotional. But it was not just changes in volume and timing that moved them. Versions with even more variation than the original, at 125 percent and 150 percent, did not strike listeners as more emotional. “I think it means that the pianist is very experienced in using these expressive cues,” said Dr. Bhatara, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris Descartes. “He’s using them at kind of an optimal level.” And random versions with volume and note-length changes arbitrarily sprinkled throughout made almost no impression. All of this makes perfect sense to Paul Simon. “I find it fascinating that people recognize what the point of the original version is, that that’s their peak,” he said. “People like to feel the human element, but if it becomes excessive then I guess they edit it back. It’s gilding the lily, it’s too Rococo.” The Element of Surprise Say the cellist Yo-Yo Ma is playing a 12-minute sonata featuring a four-note melody that recurs several times. On the final repetition, the melody expands, to six notes. “If I set it up right,” Mr. Ma said in an interview, “that is when the sun comes out. It’s like you’ve been under a cloud, and then you are looking once again at the vista and then the light is shining on the whole valley.” But that happens, he said, only if he is restrained enough to save some exuberance and emphasis for that moment, so that by the time listeners see that musical sun they have not already “been to a disco and its light show” and been “blinded by cars driving at night with the headlights in your eyes.” Dr. Levitin’s results suggest that the more surprising moments in a piece, the more emotion listeners perceive — if those moments seem logical in context. “It’s deviation from a pattern,” Mr. Ma said. “A surprise is only a surprise when you know it departs from something.” He cited Schubert ’s E-Flat Trio for piano, violin and cello as an example. It goes from a “march theme that’s in minor and it breaks out into major, and it’s one of those goose-bump moments.” The departure “could be something incredibly slight that means something huge, or it could be very large but that’s actually a fake-out,” Mr. Ma said. The singer Bobby McFerrin, who visited Dr. Levitin’s lab and walked through several experiments, said in a video of that visit that “one of the things that I have found valuable to me in a performance, whether I’m performing or someone else is, is a certain element of naïveté,” as if “as we’re performing we’re still discovering the music.” In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.” She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash , “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.” “You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.” The Musical Brain The brain processes musical nuance in many ways, it turns out. Edward W. Large, a music scientist at Florida Atlantic University, scanned the brains of people with and without experience playing music as they listened to two versions of a Chopin étude: one recorded by a pianist, the other stripped down to a literal version of what Chopin wrote, without human-induced variations in timing and dynamics. During the original performance, brain areas linked to emotion activated much more than with the uninflected version, showing bursts of activity with each deviation in timing or volume. So did the mirror neuron system, a set of brain regions previously shown to become engaged when a person watches someone doing an activity the observer knows how to do — dancers watching videos of dance, for example. But in Dr. Large’s study, mirror neuron regions flashed even in nonmusicians. Maybe those regions, which include some language areas, are “tapping into empathy,” he said, “as though you’re feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage,” and the brain is mirroring those emotions. Regions involved in motor activity, everything from knitting to sprinting, also lighted up with changes in timing and volume. Anders Friberg, a music scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden , found that the speed patterns of people’s natural movements — moving a hand from one place to another on a desk or jogging and slowing to stop — match tempo changes in music that listeners rate as most pleasing. “We got the best-sounding music from the velocity curve of natural human gestures, compared to other curves of tempos not found in nature,” Dr. Friberg said. “These were quite subtle differences, and listeners were clearly distinguishing between them. And these were not expert listeners.” The Levitin project found that musicians were more sensitive to changes in volume and timing than nonmusicians. That echoes research by Nina Kraus , a neurobiologist at Northwestern University , which showed that musicians are better at hearing sound against background noise, and that their brains expend less energy detecting emotion in babies’ cries. Separately, the Levitin team found that children with autism essentially rated each nocturne rendition equally emotional, finding the original no more emotionally expressive than the mechanical version. But in other research, the team found that children with autism could label music as happy, sad or scary, suggesting, Dr. Levitin said, that “their recognition of musical emotions may be intact without necessarily having those emotions evoked, and without them necessarily experiencing those emotions themselves.” A Matter of Time The ability to keep time to music appears to be almost unique to humans — not counting Snowball the cockatoo , which dances in time to “Everybody,” by the Backstreet Boys, and became a YouTube sensation. Both the Levitin and the Large studies found that the timing of notes was more important than loudness or softness in people’s perceptions of emotion in music. This may be a product of evolutionary adaptation, said Dr. Kraus, since “a nervous system that is sensitive and well tuned to timing differences would be a nervous system that, from an evolutionary standpoint, would be more likely to escape potential enemies, survive and make babies.” Changes in the expected timing of a note might generate the emotional equivalent of “depth perception, where slightly different images going to your two eyes allows you to see depth,” said Joseph E. LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University . And musical timing might relate to the importance of timing in speech. “The difference between a B and a P, for example, is a difference in the timing involved in producing the sound,” said Aniruddh D. Patel, a music scientist at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego . “We don’t signal the difference between P and B by how loud it is.” Michael Leonhart, who played trumpet and produced for Steely Dan , said he thought “the ears of most people have started to become less sensitive to dynamics” as music recordings crank up the volume and “the world has become a louder place.” Subtle timing differences, on the other hand, are critical, Mr. Leonhart said, citing a triplet figure in the beginning of Steely Dan’s song “Josie.” “The tendency is to start rushing it, to get excited,” Mr. Leonhart said. But the key is “to lay it back, don’t rush, make sure it’s not ahead of the snare drum. It changes the slingshot effect of where things snap and pop.” Mr. Simon plays with timing constantly, surfing bar lines. He squeezes lyrics like “cinematographer” — six short notes — into the space of a two-syllable word, and will “land on a long word with a consonant at the end, so that you really hear the word,” he said. “My brain is working that way — it’s dividing up everything. I really have a certain sense of where the pocket of the groove is, and I know when you have to reinforce it and I know when you want to leave it.” Musicians like Mr. Simon consider slight timing variations so crucial that they eschew the drum machines commonly used in recordings. Dr. Levitin says Stevie Wonder uses a drum machine because it has so many percussion voices, but inserts human-inflected alterations, essentially mistakes, so beats do not always line up perfectly. And Geoff Emerick, a recording engineer for the Beatles , said: “Often when we were recording some of those Beatles rhythm tracks, there might be an error incorporated, and you would say, ‘That error sounds rather good,’ and we would actually elaborate on that. “When everything is perfectly in time, the ear or mind tends to ignore it, much like a clock ticking in your bedroom — after a while you don’t hear it.” Unknown, Maybe Unknowable Of course, science has not figured out how to measure other elements of musical expression, including tone, timbre, harmonics and how audience interaction changes what musicians do. While there may be some consensus about what makes music expressive, performers say it is hardly immutable. “Every day I’m a slightly different person,” Mr. Ma said. “The instrument, which is sensitive to weather and humidity changes, will act differently. There’s nothing worse than playing a really a great concert and the next day saying, ‘I’m going to do exactly the same thing.’ It always falls flat.” Ms. Cash, who on a recent road trip listened to multiple versions of Chopin nocturnes and quizzed herself on which pianist she preferred, learned a lot about musical flexibility after developing polyps on her vocal cords in 1998. “Because of these little polyps I’ve had to learn how to resing some of our songs, use breath where I used to use force, use force where I used to go delicate,” she said. “ The World Unseen ,” on her album “ Black Cadillac ,” “gained some curves and some sweetness that I didn’t realize was there,” she said. “We recorded that really late at night, a live track, and it wasn’t that good of a vocal. The producer said he wanted to get a better vocal so we did it a few more times, but we kept going back to that live version. I keep it in a certain part of my voice. If I do it too breathy it sounds cloying. If I hit it too hard, it sounds like rock.” But thinking things through goes only so far. For one melody, Mr. Simon started out using the words “going home,” he said. “But I said I’m not going to write ‘going home.’ Nothing interesting about that,” he said. “Then I stumbled on this word, ‘Kodachrome,’ which of course, had no meaning.” In Dr. Levitin’s lab, Mr. McFerrin gamely tried several experiments, including seeing how long he could hold his hand in ice water while listening to different types of music (an effort to find out if music can ameliorate pain). He described a story by Hermann Hesse in which a violinist, granted his wish to be the best musician he can be, vanishes as soon as he starts to play. “He completely disappears into the music,” Mr. McFerrin says on the video. “And I think that’s actually a big key to a successful creative moment for me, is when I disappear, and maybe the audience disappears into the music and becomes so engaged in the music that you forget that you’re even there.” As Ms. Cash put it: “Some things you can break down, and some things are ineffable. Some things are just part of that mystery where all creative energy comes from. It’s part of the soul. Music is an ever-moving blob of mercury.”

Music
Brain
Emotion
Research
McGill University
Science and Technology
Daniel J Levitin


You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love This Campaign

Abstract: As fans of “Something Sort of Grand-ish” from “Finian’s Rainbow” could tell you, “ish,” when used as a suffix, is meant to express everything from “roughly” and “somewhat” to “kind of” and “close to.” In an effort to get close to younger potential donors, a philanthropic organization is seeking to take the “ish” from “Jewish” and turn it into an expression of its own. In a campaign that began on May 6, the Jewish Federations of North America, which is based in New York, is asking, “What’s your #ish?” The “#” in front of the “ish” -- known as a hash mark, number sign, hash tag, pound sign or tick-tack-toe symbol -- signals that the campaign is centered in the social media like Twitter. The campaign lives on a special Web site, or microsite , where visitors are encouraged to share their “#ish” — that is, according to the Jewish Federations, what being Jewish means to them. The comments can be posted on the microsite or posted to Twitter or Facebook; the posts tagged with “#ish” on Facebook and Twitter will be fed back to whatsyourish.com . To encourage participation, the Jewish Federations is starting an #ish fund and donating 25 cents, up to $50,000, for each response. The microsite also contains an “#ish of the day,” humorous video clips and information about the Jewish Federations, which changed its name in October from the United Jewish Communities. The campaign, which is scheduled to run through July, is much more of a long-term branding campaign than a short-term effort to request donations. It is being handled by multiple agencies, as is frequently the case with campaigns that are based predominantly in the social media. In this instance, there are three agencies, including the New York office of Taxi, the unconventional Canadian shop. The budget to develop and promote the campaign is being estimated at $250,000 to $300,000. The efforts to drive traffic to whatsyourish.com include banners on Web sites, ads on Facebook and MySpace, promoted videos on YouTube and the use of Google AdWords to appear among the sponsored links that pop up next to search results on google.com . The campaign is indicative of increasing efforts by charities and nonprofit organizations to broaden their base of donors beyond their reliable current contributors, many of whom tend to be on the, er, um, old-ish side. “We did extensive research, branding research, market research, to understand much better what our brand stands for and who knows us,” says Adam Smolyar, senior vice president for strategic marketing and communications at the Jewish Federations, which oversees a network of more than 550 organizations that distribute more than $3 billion each year to support social services, social welfare and educational programs. The research “found that many 18-to-35-year-olds were less familiar with us” than the organization had hoped, Mr. Smolyar says. So a decision was made to come up with a campaign that would “tell our story,” he adds, “and tell our story in a way that’s interesting and relevant” to that demographic group. “The way this group communicates is very different from other groups,” Mr. Smolyar says, citing social networks as an example, so “we’re trying to engage this group with the tools they’re used to communicating with, with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube extensively throughout the central Web site.” The risk of the approach being taken by the Jewish Federations is that the organization could appear to be trying too hard to tailor the content and delivery of its messages to the intended audience — not unlike a grandmother, seeking to show her grandson how hip and with it she can be, dancing the Macarena at his bar mitzvah. Mr. Smolyar, laughing at that image, responds this way: “It’s about starting this authentic conversation among them, not imposing anything on them, not telling them what to say and think.” “There’s immediately a call to action, to post your ‘#ish,’ asking people what it means to them to be Jewish,” he says. “They can be humorous or light-hearted, or they can take it seriously, and be meaningful or thoughtful.” As of Monday morning, there were 877 “#ishs” posted on the microsite, although a grammarian might refer to the plural version of the word as “#ishes,” as in “loaves and #ishes.” Oops, sorry, wrong religion. Anyway, the 877 comments posted varied from sound to silly. “I think it’s worthwhile in and of itself for Jews to be thinking about their Jewishness,” wrote a poster under the name of sarahleah770. Another person posting, identified as Cubsgirlfan, riffed on the lyrics of the novelty song “Fish Heads,” beginning her post with “F#ish heads.” Siegel Lori wrote: “Synogogue-ish this morning. With the whole family = bonus time.” Pat E. offered this succinct comment: “Oy vey.” And the “#ish of the day” for Sunday, identified as coming from Jewlicious, was this: “The centrality of Israel in Jewish identity is my #ish today. What’s your #ish?” Among the video clips that can be watched on whatsyourish.com is one featuring the twin comics Randy and Jason Sklar, one featuring the actor Joey Slotnick and one featuring the musician and songwriter Josh Nelson. The Sklars offer a serio-comic riff on the Eliot Spitzer scandal, in particular the reaction to it among Jews, which they characterize as “This is bad for Jews everywhere” — even “bad for Rod Carew,” the star baseball player who converted to Judiasm. “As Jews, we all feel responsible for the transgressions of one Jew,” they explain, then praise the work of the Jewish Federations and finish by describing their #ish, which is “Feeling responsible-ish for everybody-ish.” Mr. Slotnick is at a table at Barney Greengrass, the quintessential Jewish delicatessen and restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He talks to the camera about foods like lox, chopped liver and horseradish, then compares how “there’s always a place for you at the table” at a Jewish Federations affiliate to the fact that there is always a place at the table “at your local Jewish deli.” “So, Jewish, haimish, home-ish, that would be my #ish,” Mr. Slotnick concludes, using a Yiddish word that means warm and comfortable, homey or folksy. Mr. Nelson’s video is wordless; he holds up to the camera a series of cards on which he calls himself “happy-ish” and encourages viewers to be happy, too, by contributing to the Jewish Federations. “Make your bubbe proud,” one card declares, using the Yiddish word for grandmother. (Hmmmm. Maybe the follow-up campaign can carry the theme “What’s your Yidd#ish?”) Before working on the campaign, the Taxi New York office created a logo for the Jewish Federations in connection with the name change. “We always knew when they first asked us if we were interested in the logo work that they would do a branding campaign,” says Rich Muhlstock, client services director at Taxi New York. The organization wanted “to figure out a way to communicate with young Jews who have not been active in the community, donating money or helping out,” he adds, because in many instances they wait to get involved until they are older, with children attending synagogue or taking religious lessons. Indeed, “I have two young children in Hebrew school now,” says Mr. Mulhstock, “and I’m starting to get involved.” Turning to social media makes sense because “you’re trying to break through and get to these people on their own terms,” he adds, and the “large social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are where some of these conversations” about what it means to be Jewish in the contemporary world “are already taking place.” Derek Shevel, creative director at Taxi New York, says it is important that the campaign “can’t feel too much like advertising,” because “you’ve got to open up a conversation where” the members of the target audience “feel they’re controlling it.” “You have to hand it over to them,” says Mr. Shevel, who, for the record, is Jewish, too. And if some of the comments are deemed provocative, “we have to let that happen,” he adds. Mr. Smolyar says the submissions will be monitored to make sure “the comments steer away from hatred, anti-Semitism or personal language.” According to Joe Berkofsky, communications director for the Jewish Federations, the goal regarding the discussion will be to “guide it in a sort of gentle way.” The other agencies involved in the campaign, in addition to Taxi New York, are also based in New York. They are Socialbomb, which worked on the social media aspects like the Facebook presence, and Little Minx; one of the Little Minx directors, Josh Miller, directed the videos. The ad banners to promote the campaign — both in standard format and in rich-media versions, which include video — are appearing on Web sites like Heebmagazine.com , JDate.com , Jewcy.com and Jewlicious.com . There is also a public relations effort to promote the campaign, which is being handled by Group Gordon in New York. • If you like In Advertising, be sure to read the Advertising column that runs Monday through Friday in the Business Day section of The New York Times print edition and on nytimes.com .

Jews and Judaism
Advertising and Marketing


At Troubled UBS, a Homecoming of Sorts

Abstract: LONDON — After some initial resistance, Peter Kurer, chairman of the troubled Swiss bank UBS , had agreed to meet Luqman Arnold, who had just acquired a minority stake in UBS and was publicly pushing for major changes, including the replacement of Mr. Kurer. During the meeting, which took place this year at the UBS headquarters in Zurich, Mr. Kurer was understandably apprehensive. “Are you going to destroy us in the media?” he asked, according to a person at the meeting, who asked not to be identified because it was private. But Mr. Arnold assured Mr. Kurer that all he wanted was his attention. “Well, now you got it,” Mr. Kurer replied. Even before that meeting, Mr. Arnold was no stranger to UBS or Mr. Kurer. A resident of Britain, he had been president of UBS in 2001, the first non-Swiss in the post. It was Mr. Arnold who hired Mr. Kurer as the group general counsel. But Mr. Arnold’s stint at the top of UBS was short-lived: he was out in eight months after clashing with Marcel Ospel, then the chairman. Now, Mr. Arnold, 58, is back to shake things up. And despite a rocky start, his relationship with his old colleague has improved during the last few months. Mr. Arnold paid visits to his former employer’s offices, where he still knows the doormen and cafeteria staff by name, to discuss his proposals. Those include shuffling the management and splitting off the investment banking business. A UBS spokesman said the bank and Mr. Arnold were in “regular contact.” “When pain comes, people get together and start working together,” said Guy de Blonay, a fund manager at New Star Asset Management in London. “The fact that he’s making noises about what should be done is comforting because it gives an idea that management is under pressure.” But those who worked with Mr. Arnold said his relationship with the board of UBS could quickly deteriorate again if things did not go his way. “It’s definitely easier when you’re on his side,” said a former colleague still at UBS, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. “He’ll make sure to let you know if he disagrees.” Mr. Arnold, who accumulated a 2.5 percent stake in UBS through his London-based investment firm, Olivant, wants to repair the UBS corporate governance by removing what he called “insiders” from the board of directors; to consider the sale of assets to strengthen the bank’s capital base; and to split the struggling investment banking unit from the lucrative wealth management business. Initially, he also asked that Mr. Kurer be replaced, saying that, trained as a lawyer, the UBS president lacked banking expertise. But such calls have subsided. UBS, with $38 billion in write-downs and a $10.9 billion first-quarter loss, is the European bank hardest hit by the turmoil in the subprime mortgage market in the United States. Trying to compete with larger Wall Street rivals, the once-conservative Swiss bank expanded into higher-yielding assets just when the market peaked. Now, UBS is forced to dismantle the empire built by Mr. Ospel, who resigned as chairman in April. In a first step, UBS abolished the office of executive chairman, an invention of Mr. Ospel, and said it would replace four directors. Mr. Arnold, who declined to be quoted for this article, applauded the step, in a statement on his Web site. Mr. Arnold set up his own investment firm at the end of 2006. He named it Olivant, after a legendary medieval ivory battle horn with a sound so loud it would make birds fall dead from the sky. From his offices across the road from the Harvey Nichols department store in the Knightsbridge district of London, he is on the lookout for troubled financial services firms he can invest in and help fix, according to the company Web site. When UBS shares fell below 30 Swiss francs, or $30, this year, he decided to get involved. “He obviously knows the company much better than the people from the outside,” said Florian Esterer, a senior fund manager at Swisscanto in Zurich. “He’s still perceived as a good manager and he still has a good reputation in Switzerland.” Mr. Arnold is widely credited with helping UBS get back on its feet after the merger in 1998 of Union Bank of Switzerland and the Swiss Bank Corporation, which created it. But his hands-on approach and outspokenness irritated Mr. Ospel, who felt his authority was being infringed upon. Mr. Arnold lost the power struggle but retained the reputation of a turnaround expert. He moved on to fix Abbey National, a struggling British mortgage lender, but his role there was controversial as well. Some investors said Mr. Arnold rescued a poorly managed bank from collapse by replacing senior managers and reducing the company to its core retail banking business. But others said that as an investment banker, he never understood retail banking; they accuse him of alienating customers with a new marketing campaign and then selling the bank below its true value. After selling Abbey to Banco Santander Central Hispano of Spain in 2004 for what was at the time $15.6 billion, Mr. Arnold founded Olivant while remaining an adviser to Emilio Botín, the Santander chairman. His first investment at Olivant was a 10 percent stake in the largest Russian bank, MDM Bank, a year ago. But he won more prominence this year when he tried to rescue Northern Rock, the British mortgage lender that was nationalized after collapsing as a result of the subprime fallout. Roger Lawson, director at the U.K. Shareholders Association, who met Mr. Arnold during discussions about Northern Rock, said Mr. Arnold had a “slightly mixed reputation” because of his role at Abbey National but came across “not as forceful as some other people in the banking sector.” Mr. Lawson added, “He seemed quite reserved and spoke in a language we understood.” Born in Calcutta to an English father and a Bengali mother, Mr. Arnold studied for his economics degree part time while helping his father run a dairy farm in Australia. He started his banking career at First National Bank in Dallas. But it really took off when he moved in 1982 to Credit Suisse, where he worked in investment banking. In 1996 he joined UBS, first as chief financial officer and then president. Now, as an activist investor, Mr. Arnold wants to again repair shareholder confidence in UBS, whose shares closed on Thursday at $20.87. “Olivant are a significant shareholder and they will continue to agitate for management and structural change,” Bob Parker, deputy chairman of Credit Suisse Asset Management in London, said. “They’re not a charity.”

UBS AG
Executives and Management
Arnold Luqman
Banks and Banking
Ospel Marcel
Kurer Peter
Zurich (Switzerland)
London (England)


The Top Steroids Investigator Is a Silent Presence

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Less than 10 yards away from Roger Clemens on Wednesday was the I.R.S. agent who literally dug through trash to start the government’s investigation into performance-enhancing drugs four and a half years ago and will most likely soon consider what to do about Clemens. Jeff Novitzky, a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service, sat with another I.R.S. agent and an F.B.I. agent in the second row of seats, directly behind chairs reserved for Brian McNamee, Clemens’s former personal trainer. The agents, all wearing dark black suits and black shoes, arrived 35 minutes early. They sat quietly through the hearing. The Department of Justice could decide to investigate Clemens’s denials of using performance-enhancing drugs, or it could respond to a referral from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Either way, Novitzky and the other agents and assistant United States attorneys in California who have worked with him on steroids cases are certain to be involved. They hold the syringes and bloody swabs that McNamee said would prove he injected Clemens with performance-enhancing drugs. Novitzky has also become the most expert agent in the Department of Justice on steroid investigations. He helped secure a conviction of Marion Jones for lying to federal agents, and his work led to perjury charges against Barry Bonds. Federal investigators are very likely to spend the next several months going through evidence and trying to find other distributors, if they exist, who may have been involved with Clemens. The investigators are also expected to dig deeply into Clemens’s testimony to the committee. Lying to Congressional staff members or to the Congress itself is a serious crime. They have not expressed any doubt about McNamee’s truthfulness, just his completeness. He keeps adding to his story. Thirty-five minutes before the Clemens hearing began, Novitzky entered the hearing room flanked by Irwin Rogers, an I.R.S. agent who has been involved in the investigation of steroid distribution, and Heather Young, an F.B.I. agent. Novitzky was bombarded with questions from reporters, and he replied, “I appreciate you asking, but I don’t have any comment.” At 6 feet 6 inches, with a shaved head, Novitzky’s presence was clearly felt at the hearings. His presence has also been felt in the continuing investigations into the distribution of performance-enhancing drugs to elite athletes. When law enforcement authorities in New York learned about a steroids distributor named Kirk Radomski, they called Novitzky. He led the raid on Radomski’s Long Island house and turned him into the biggest informant in any steroids investigation in professional sports. When Radomski tipped off Novitzky about McNamee, Novitzky led the interrogation that persuaded McNamee to cooperate with the authorities in return for a promise that he could be prosecuted only if he did not tell the truth. McNamee named Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch — all Yankees teammates at one point — as three players he supplied with performance-enhancing drugs. Pettitte and Knoblauch have acknowledged being supplied by McNamee. Clemens has denied the allegations. When Bonds denied using steroids in his grand jury testimony, the government already had coded records from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative indicating that he had, indeed, used the drugs. Bonds has pleaded not guilty to perjury charges. When Jones denied using steroids, the investigators plugged away for five years until an unrelated bank-fraud case gave them additional leverage against Jones. There is much less evidence against Clemens. McNamee has credibility problems. Pettitte’s recollection about talking with Clemens and McNamee about drug use bolsters McNamee’s account, but is entirely circumstantial. There is a five-year statute of limitations for charges of perjury or lying to federal officials. After the hearing Wednesday, Clemens and his entourage exited through one side door. McNamee’s group went through another. Novitzky left through the main door into the public hallway. He towered over the two other federal agents as they walked toward the building’s exit, but he remains virtually unknown — and he prefers it that way. He is an I.R.S. agent who likes surveillance and Dumpster diving — the gritty work of street-level law enforcement. The marbled halls in the Congressional office building were lined with dozens of people, many holding cameras, hoping for a look at Clemens. No one noticed Novitzky.

Steroids
Novitzky Jeff
Clemens Roger
Drug Abuse and Traffic
Decisions and Verdicts


Senate Approves a Bill to Revamp ‘No Child Left Behind’

Abstract: WASHINGTON — For the first time in 14 years, the Senate on Thursday approved a revised version of No Child Left Behind , the signature Bush-era education law that ushered in an era of broadly reviled, high-stakes standardized testing. But the passage of the bill on a vote of 81 to 17, coming just a week after the House narrowly passed its own version, sets up a showdown between the two chambers, and leaves the fate of a final measure in doubt. Both bills return some key power to local governments but differ over the role of the federal government and funding allocations. Congress has repeatedly failed in its efforts to rewrite the law over the last several years. At the heart of the debate between Democrats and Republicans is the appropriate role for the federal government in education programs, which are largely a function of state and local governments. Leaders from both sides insist they can come to an agreement that can make it to President Obama’s desk. “There are some important differences, and we’ll have to work this out,” Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said on the Senate floor Thursday. But he added, “I believe the president also sees the need to fix No Child Left Behind. He knows that there is confusion and anxiety in most of our 100,000 public schools that needs to be settled.” In the House, final passage of a bill last week came only after it was amended to include provisions that would decrease the role of the federal government in education — a central goal of many Republican lawmakers — and without the support of Democrats. The Senate bill, a product of intense negotiations between the parties with a series of amendment votes to please both sides, is less expansive in its scope and prescriptions. While both bills retain the annual reading and math tests required under current law, states would be given latitude to decide how those assessment tests are used to measure school and teacher performance. The Senate version would require states to continue to use the tests as a significant accountability factor; the House measure does not. Both versions would prohibit the federal government from requiring any specific set of academic standards, like the Common Core provisions deplored by many conservatives who see them as powerful evidence of federal intrusion. A central point of contention, sure to stoke negotiations between the House and Senate this fall, involves a provision in the House bill that would permit low-income students to transfer federal dollars between districts. An attempt to add that to the Senate bill failed, and the Obama administration strongly opposes such a provision for fear it might drain needed funds from districts in need. Two other amendments — one that would let parents opt out of federal testing requirements, and another that would do the same with Common Core — were among those added at the last minute to get Republican support for the House version; the House bill passed on a vote of 218 to 213 with almost no Democratic backing. Republicans, increasingly angered by the creep of the Common Core state standards, want to greatly reduce the federal footprint in classrooms. Democrats, while in accord that states need more power to decide how test results and other measures of success are used, still want schools to be accountable to some form of government, if for no other reason than to keep tabs on districts that primarily serve the poor. The Obama administration, while largely supportive of the Senate’s efforts, does not see it as going far enough. (The White House vowed to veto the House bill.) Senate Democrats attempted to set new standards for accountability through an amendment that failed, which they hope to leverage in a conference committee with House Republicans. “The president has made clear he can only sign a bill into law that strengthens the accountability measures” in the bill, Senator Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said on the Senate floor. “And that addresses inequality, where some schools are unable to offer the same opportunities as other schools do. And I agree this is a must.” Democrats and Republicans are also far apart on how the education funding is to be spent. The House version of the bill caps annual spending, while the Senate bill is silent on funding, leaving that crucial discussion — which is likely to be caught up in a broader government spending debate — for conference committee deliberations. Unlike the Senate bill, the House version does not include provisions requiring states to match certain levels of federal funding, allowing states and localities to possibly cut education funding and supplant it with federal dollars. The House bill also eliminates dedicated funding for school improvement; the Senate bill maintains it. The House bill would eliminate almost 70 federal education programs and replace them with block grants to states to create their own education agenda. In contrast, the Senate version adds some new programs, including more early-education programs favored by Ms. Murray, and it eliminates or consolidates some programs. Some lawmakers are hoping that a compromise can be found like the one reached in passing the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, a job training program that Mr. Obama signed into law last year. The same committee, grappling with similar political dynamics, found bipartisan ground, albeit on a far less controversial policy issue. “Every student in America will be better off under this legislation than the generation of students wronged by ‘No Child Left Untested’,” Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the president of the National Education Association, said in a prepared statement.

No Child Left Behind
Tests
Legislation
K-12 Education
US
US Politics


Grandiose Ideas for Donald Trump Inaugural Give Way to Traditional

Abstract: President-elect Donald J. Trump kicked around ideas for his inauguration in his office at Trump Tower on Tuesday with two of his oldest friends, Mark Burnett and Thomas Barrack Jr. The ideas spilled out from Mr. Burnett, a well-regarded showman best known for producing “The Apprentice”: a parade up Fifth Avenue, a helicopter ride to Washington from New York that could hold the attention of millions of people expected to watch from around the world. Mr. Trump recalled the conversation Wednesday morning to an audience of donors, lobbyists and supporters at Cipriani 42nd Street during a fund-raiser to help support his transition operation. The details offered a brief glimmer of a sprawling inauguration, full of the kind of showmanship for which Mr. Trump is famous, that could shake up what has become a relatively predictable affair for recent presidents. According to some of the people overseeing the events surrounding Mr. Trump’s swearing-in as the 45th president, they also bore little resemblance to reality. In fact, they said, Mr. Trump’s celebration would be a relatively subdued affair — marked by Mr. Trump’s own touches, to be sure, but in the mold of past affairs. “It’s going the opposite way,” Mr. Barrack, the private equity investor who is leading the presidential inaugural committee, said in an interview. “The president-elect wants this to be simple. He wants this to be about the people.” “It’s not about putting on the most expensive talent and spending that kind of money to ingratiate himself,” Mr. Barrack added. In many ways, the discussion between the three men in Mr. Trump’s office tower encapsulates the dueling impulses of the president-elect, a man who enjoys being at the center of attention, but who is also aware that he was elected on a strong populist message of “draining the swamp” of Washington cronyism and extravagance. In reality, Mr. Trump’s festivities are constrained by security concerns surrounding the modern presidency, making some gaudier displays impossible and other far-flung ones unrealistic. Each event under consideration must be vetted by the overlapping agencies responsible for securing the transfer of power, including the Secret Service, responsible for a president’s security, and the National Park Service, which controls the Mall in Washington. “You have five gigantic security groups that dictate what can and can’t be done,” Mr. Barrack said. For example, Mr. Barrack said that hopes to open the White House to visitors, as Andrew Jackson did during his 1829 “People’s Inauguration” (and as other presidents did afterward), had simply proven unrealistic. “Unfortunately, security concerns are different than they were in 1829,” he said. Despite the modest nature of the events under consideration, Mr. Barrack said Mr. Burnett was actively involved in producing the inauguration week festivities. He will have a large team to work with, as the committee’s staff in Washington is expected to swell to more than 300 people by Inauguration Day. “Mark is a genius, and the president-elect loves him,” Mr. Barrack said. Referring to the Tuesday meeting, he said, “This was about throwing stuff out if you are thinking in the frame of mind of what a global audience would see.” A schedule of inaugural festivities is expected to be completed by Monday. But after the committee rolled out a series of donor packages last week aimed at enticing wealthy contributors and corporations to open their checkbooks, a rough outline of the week has begun to emerge. It will include an opening “victory reception” for donors, as well as a series of more personal events with the incoming first family, Vice President-elect Mike Pence and members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet. Donors will be invited to candlelight dinners on the eve of the inauguration, and some will be able to attend one of two official balls planned for inauguration night. Whatever Mr. Trump and the committee ultimately decide, there likely will be plenty of resources at their disposal. Mr. Trump’s fund-raising team has already secured roughly $50 million in pledged donations since it began soliciting money in earnest last week, according to two people involved in the effort. The early success puts Mr. Trump in line to easily surpass President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, when his finance team raised a record $53 million to pay for the festivities. He should also easily meet or surpass the $65 million to $75 million fund-raising goal set by the committee. The event at Cipriani on Wednesday was a sold-out affair, featuring some donors who had vehemently rejected Mr. Trump’s candidacy, such as the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer , according to an attendee. Those raising money to support the inauguration said they have seen a similar pattern, securing early pledges from prominent Republican donors who did not support Mr. Trump during the campaign. Corporations, they said, have also been forthcoming. Yet, if Mr. Trump is looking forward to his presidency, he has not yet left the past behind, as was clear Wednesday morning. Another person at the fund-raiser said Mr. Trump delivered a kind of greatest-hits recollection of winning the primaries and his grim odds for the White House. Mr. Trump said that heading into Election Day, he and his wife, Melania, had planned a vacation in the expectation that they would be seeing an early night. He recalled Mr. Obama telling him privately that the president’s advisers had told him on election night, as the numbers looked grim, that North Carolina would be a firewall for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. The attendance at the fund-raiser spoke to Mr. Trump’s change of fortune since becoming president-elect. There were at least 850 people in the restaurant. Mr. Trump singled out those in attendance who had been part of the “Never Trump” movement, drawing a large laugh.


North Korean Diplomat Blames United States for Tensions but Calls for Peace Talks

Abstract: In a mix of diplomacy and bombast, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations called Friday for the United States to accept its recently revived proposal for direct peace talks, even as he blamed the Americans for all tensions on the Korean Peninsula starting with the war more than 60 years ago. The ambassador, Sin Son-ho, also exhorted all countries to ignore the litany of economic sanctions imposed on the North by both the Security Council and the United States for its nuclear and missile tests, which have left the North Koreans increasingly isolated. In a rare North Korean news conference at the United Nations, Mr. Sin demanded that the United States dissolve its military command in South Korea, which was created to oversee the 1953 armistice that halted the Korean War. He urged the Americans to agree to high-level talks aimed at easing the tensions, eventually denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and replacing the armistice with a peace treaty, a proposal the North first revived last Sunday. Mr. Sin said it was long past time to scrap the armistice, which he called “neither peace nor war.” His news conference , conducted in English and broadcast on the United Nations Web site, seemed aimed at a foreign audience, part of what appeared to be a broader North Korean effort to shift to a tone of dialogue instead of confrontation over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. “This is their idea of a diplomatic offensive,” said Jeffrey Lewis , director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “I think they’re saying they’re ready to come back to some kind of talks, but they’re making it clear that they are not going to talk about denuclearizing without the broader stuff.” The ambassador, who spoke for nearly an hour, took particular issue with the name of the American command in South Korea, the United Nations Command, although the United Nations plays no role. “The United States is dishonoring the United Nations by abusing the name of the U.N. Command, as if the United Nations is a warring party,” the ambassador said. “This is a shame and another unproductive anachronism.” The United States has always regarded the armistice as a central component of its Korea policy, and has repeatedly said the North must take concrete steps to show sincerity in relinquishing nuclear weapons before it would agree to direct talks. The Americans also have remained deeply wary of the alternating signals of aggression and conciliation that have been coming from North Korea under its new leader, Kim Jong-un, grandson of the country’s revolutionary founder and Korean War icon, Kim Il-sung. In Washington, the Obama administration had no immediate comment to the North Korean ambassador’s remarks. But a State Department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, told reporters at a regular press briefing that “our sanctions will continue.” Even as he called for talks with the Americans, Mr. Sin held his own country blameless for the tensions on the Korean Peninsula and said the North’s actions, including nuclear weapons development, were entirely for self-defense. “The most pressing issue in Northeast Asia today is the hostile relations between the D.P.R.K. and the United States, which can lead to another war at any moment,” he said, using the initials for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “The United States, as a signatory to the armistice agreement, is entirely responsible for the ever-worsening situation on the Korean Peninsula,” he said. He sidestepped questions on China, which has long protected the North but has grown increasingly unhappy over its provocations. Asked about the latest Security Council sanctions on North Korea, which China and the United States helped draft, Mr. Sin said: “I urge the nations which are members of the United Nations to not follow the sanctions and the blackmail policy of the United States blindly, because the United Nations Security Council resolutions on sanctions and the blackmails against us — that is unjustified, that is illegal.” Mr. Sin’s rare public display came as a top North Korean emissary, Kim Kye-gwan, a vice foreign minister, ended a three-day visit to China. Mr. Kim’s visit was notable partly because it preceded a visit to China next week by the South Korean president, Park Geun-hye. It was also the first public contact between North Korea and China since President Obama and China’s president, Xi Jinping, met in the United States, after which the Americans said the leaders had made progress on North Korea. American experts on North Korea said they believed its government was anxious to stop the Chinese from according Ms. Park a favorable visit, and to stop the Chinese and Ms. Park from calling for denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

North Korea
South Korea
Korean War
Nuclear weapon
UN Security Council


Cuts to Achieve Goal for Deficit, but Toll Is High

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The latest budget impasse ushered in a new round of austerity on Saturday, with the nation facing reduced federal services, canceled contracts, job furloughs and layoffs. But lost in the talk of Washington’s dysfunction is this fact: on paper at least, President Obama and Congress have reduced projected deficits by nearly $4 trillion over a decade — the widely embraced goal for stabilizing the national debt. The spending cuts that began to take effect Friday , known as sequestration and totaling about $1 trillion through 2023, come on top of $1.5 trillion in reductions that Mr. Obama and Congress committed to in 2011, mainly from the accord that averted the nation’s first debt default. Nearly $700 billion more will come from tax increases on wealthy Americans, the product of the brawl in December over Bush-era tax cuts, and another $700 billion is expected to be saved in projected interest on the reduced debt. If the latest cuts stick, the two parties will have achieved nearly the full amount of deficit reduction over the next decade that economists and market analysts have promoted. Yet the mix comes with substantial downsides. It does not add up to the “grand bargain” that the two parties had been seeking, because it leaves virtually untouched the entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that are responsible for projections of an unsustainably rising federal debt in coming decades. “This is not a result that deals with our long-term debt problem,” said Vin Weber, a Republican former congressman. “The fact we’ve gotten to a $4 trillion deficit-reduction deal without tackling entitlements is almost a bad thing,” he added, if it lulls the public and the politicians into thinking the problem is solved. The progress on deficit reduction over the past two years will also probably hamper job creation and the economic recovery. Private and government forecasters project that sequestration alone will cost about 700,000 jobs this year and will shave at least a half percentage point from economic growth. The Congressional Budget Office now forecasts a falling deficit but stubbornly high unemployment in coming years. Image Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, shown last month in Washington, said on Saturday that “spending was the problem.” Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images For Democrats, at least, the mix of spending cuts and tax increases in the package is another reason for disappointment. The deficit deals to date would yield $4 in spending cuts for every dollar of new revenue. Mr. Obama, as well as several bipartisan groups, including the commission led by Erskine B. Bowles and Alan K. Simpson, call for one dollar of tax increases for every $2 to $3 in spending cuts. It remains unclear how long sequestration will last: it was designed to be onerous to force a compromise on an alternative. But Mr. Obama and Republicans indicated on Friday that the cuts would probably remain in place at least until the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30. Democrats, led by the president, express confidence that in coming months public pressure will force Republicans to relent on revenue, especially as cuts to the military begin to be felt. But Republican leaders have said they will stand firm against tax increases, suggesting that they have won at least a temporary victory on reducing the size of the government. In his weekly address on Saturday, Mr. Obama said the Republicans had “decided that protecting special-interest tax breaks for the well off and well connected is more important than protecting our military and middle-class families from these cuts.” “I still believe we can and must replace these cuts with a balanced approach — one that combines smart spending cuts with entitlement reform and changes to our tax code that make it more fair for families and businesses without raising anyone’s tax rates,” Mr. Obama said. In the Republican response , Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State, said: “The problem here isn’t a lack of taxes. This year alone, the federal government will take in more revenue than ever before. Spending is the problem, which means cutting spending is the solution. It’s that simple.” According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, total government spending is falling compared with the size of the economy but will rise again in the next decade. That growth will be driven by the entitlement programs as more baby boomers retire, not by discretionary spending. And revenues, while reaching a high in dollar terms, remain below the average of the past 40 years as measured against gross domestic product. The Republicans’ decision to accept sequestration raises the question of whether Democrats miscalculated in the negotiations in December over the Bush tax cuts. At the time, Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders accepted $680 billion in higher taxes on top incomes, which is just half of the minimum revenue increase the president wants. Image G. William Hoagland, a former staff director at the Senate Budget Committee, is against more discretionary spending cuts. Credit Carol T. Powers for The New York Times Democrats had assumed that Republicans might agree to more tax increases, primarily through ending or reducing deductions, in exchange for Democrats’ support for canceling sequestration of military accounts. But Republicans shifted gears, to the surprise of the White House, and instead opted to accept the cuts, at least for now. The grand bargain that has eluded Mr. Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner was supposed to mainly curb entitlement spending and raise revenues. Lesser savings would come from the discretionary programs that cover almost everything else the government does for defense and domestic purposes. But Mr. Boehner’s speakership is on the line, given Republicans’ unhappiness with the December tax deal, and he vows that he will no longer negotiate with Mr. Obama on overhauling the tax code to raise revenue for deficit reduction. To date the revenue raised falls short of the amount Mr. Boehner proposed in previous talks. Nor will the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who faces re-election next year in a state with a strong Tea Party faction. He said on Friday, “I will not be part of any back-room deal, and I will absolutely not agree to increase taxes.” The president and Congressional Democrats will not agree to reductions in Medicare or Social Security spending except in return for at least $600 billion more in higher revenue over 10 years, from shaving tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations. That standoff has left the discretionary programs to bear the brunt of deficit reduction measures. Those domestic and military programs are so named because Congress has discretion to set spending levels annually in appropriations bills; entitlement benefits, in contrast, grow automatically unless changed by law. Even without counting sequestration, the budget office, in its annual 10-year outlook last month, appeared skeptical that political leaders would maintain the discretionary spending cuts mandated in 2011 given their scale. Robert Greenstein, the head of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the decline in such spending came even as some discretionary programs, like health care for returning war veterans, would have to rise. “That will squeeze core functions — from education, research and infrastructure to protecting the food and water supply to services for poor children and frail seniors,” he said. J. Keith Kennedy, a Republican former staff director of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said: “The annual discretionary money is where you make your investments. And you decide every year where do you want to put your money to invest in the future — whether it’s education, or health care or infrastructure or national parks, or sending another rover to Mars.” For two decades through the 1990s, G. William Hoagland, then the Republican staff director at the Senate Budget Committee, fought with Mr. Kennedy to get the Appropriations Committee to cut discretionary spending. But now, Mr. Hoagland said, “We have squeezed that turnip as far as we’re going to go, and that’s before sequestration. That is the component of the budget which, for all practical purposes, is the seed corn of the future.”

Congress
Republicans
Reform
Federal Budget
US National Debt
Health Insurance
Barack Obama
House of Representatives
US Politics


Justice Dept. Sues Michigan City After Mosque Plan Is Rejected

Abstract: The Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against a city in Eastern Michigan, saying it discriminated against a Muslim group by rejecting its application to build a mosque there. The government’s lawsuit , filed on Thursday, said the denial of the application from the group, the American Islamic Community Center, was the first time in a decade that the planning commission in Sterling Heights, about 16 miles from downtown Detroit, has denied a land use application for a house of worship. It noted that the city’s decision came after residents spoke in opposition to the mosque in public meetings. It quoted some who said “remember 9/11,” and others who claimed Christians would face difficulty in trying to build a church in Iraq. “We are alleging that Sterling Heights discriminated against the American Islamic Community Center on the basis of religion and placed a substantial burden on the community’s ability to exercise its religion by denying approval to build a mosque,” Barbara L. McQuade, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said in a statement published with a copy of the lawsuit. The department, through its civil rights division, based its lawsuit on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which is meant to prohibit religious discrimination and prevent unjustified burdens on people exercising their religion. Vanita Gupta, head of the civil rights division, said in the announcement of the lawsuit that the Justice Department would continue to “aggressively protect” the rights of communities to live, pray and worship. “We have definitely seen a spike in these cases, in problems when it comes to minority religions,” Azzam Elder, the lead lawyer for the community center, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “It is a sign of the times.” On Friday, a spokeswoman for Sterling Heights, Bridget Doyle, said in an email that there would be no comment beyond the statement released on Thursday that said the city was “surprised and disappointed” by the lawsuit. “The city welcomes the A.I.C.C. along with any other religious groups to Sterling Heights, and we will continue an open dialog to address areas of disagreement with respect to land use,” the city’s statement said. It said the city had a reputation for tolerance — with two mosques; Sikh, Buddhist and Hindu temples; and Christian churches. The city’s statement said the community center’s application for a new mosque was denied because it was incompatible with adjoining uses and offered insufficient parking and because of concerns over the size and height of the building. The city denied that “emotional feelings tied to religious beliefs either for or against the applicant” played a part. But the Department of Justice lawsuit claimed that the planning commission’s decision was “inconsistent” with others it had made on places of worship, and that the rejection was “based on anti-Muslim bias.” Last year, the community center, a nonprofit Muslim group in neighboring Madison Heights, had sought permission to develop 4.35 acres of land in Sterling Heights, because most of its members lived there and because its facility in Madison Heights was too small, the lawsuit said. The proposed building would have been approximately 20,500 square feet with 130 off-street parking spaces, a dome about 58 feet high and two 66-foot-tall spires — lower than features on nearby churches. Jaafar Chehab, a community center board member and trustee of the land, worked with city planners to address some of the concerns, including agreeing not to oppose liquor license applications in nearby areas, and agreeing not to have an external call to prayer, the lawsuit said. In August 2015, city planners held a heavily attended public meeting. Fifty people who spoke were opposed to the project, and seven were in favor, the lawsuit said. Many of the public comments were directed at Mr. Chehab’s religion, the lawsuit said, included a plea to “remember 9/11,” statements that Christians would not be allowed to build a church in Iraq and statements that property values would drop if the mosque were built. One resident held up a picture of a woman wearing a head covering and said he did not want to “be near people like this,” the lawsuit said. Another said the mosque might be used to store weapons, and another said Homeland Security should investigate the community center because “they’re cutting people’s heads off, they kill our soldiers,” the lawsuit said. The lawsuit noted that the mosque had become an issue in City Council elections. In September 2015, the application was denied, based on the size of the building, parking and lack of “harmony” with the neighborhood, the lawsuit said. The community center has its own lawsuit pending against the city’s decision, Mr. Elder said. “The politicians caved toward the loud voices,” he said. “All this came as a shock.”

Mosque
Lawsuits
Islam
Land use
Justice Department
Freedom of religion


Oracle Beats Wall Street’s Expectations for Quarter

Abstract: The Oracle Corporation , the business software company, reported a sharp rise in new licenses on Wednesday, soundly beating Wall Street’s projections for the second quarter. The strong results eased some concerns on Wall Street that the mortgage crisis and slowing demand for corporate software might take a toll on Oracle, the second-largest software company, after Microsoft. In fact, the company recorded some of its sharpest quarterly growth in a decade. Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., reported net income of $1.3 billion, or 25 cents a share, for the quarter ended Nov. 30, a 35 percent increase over $967 million, or 18 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue during the second quarter rose 28 percent, to $5.31 billion from $4.16 billion, beating Oracle’s own forecast of 18 to 21 percent growth. Excluding expenses, Oracle’s earnings were up 41 percent, to 31 cents a share, compared with the second quarter last year. On this basis, analysts had forecast average earnings of 27 cents a share on revenue of $5.04 billion, according to Thomson Financial. “We exceeded our guidance and our best-case forecast with strong revenue growth across all product lines and geographies,” Safra A. Catz, Oracle’s co-president and chief financial officer, said in a statement. New software license revenue, a crucial indicator of growth in the business of selling software to corporations, increased 38 percent, to $1.7 billion. Shares of Oracle jumped in late trading after the report was released, increasing $1.06, or more than 5 percent. The shares closed at $20.76, ahead of the report, a decline of 49 cents. Looking ahead, Ms. Catz said that profit, excluding stock-based compensation costs, would rise to 29 or 30 cents a share in the third quarter, and that sales would increase 20 to 23 percent. “These are outstanding results,” said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. “Larry’s strategy of making all these acquisitions was right on the money,” he said, referring to the buyout strategy of Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive. Mr. Barnicle said that the wide range of products Oracle had acquired over the last three years enabled it to sell more broadly than before. “Every deal now includes at least one acquired product,” he said. “They do a fantastic job at cross-selling.” The second quarter was helped by strong sales of products that were not in Oracle’s product line a year ago. Oracle, which makes computer database software and business applications for managing payroll, inventory and other operations, has spent more than $20 billion in the last three years to buy two dozen companies, most notably PeopleSoft, Siebel, Agile and Hyperion. On Oct. 12, Oracle made an unsolicited bid to acquire BEA Systems for $6.7 billion, an offer that BEA executives rejected as too low despite pressure from the company’s largest shareholder, Carl C. Icahn, to seek a buyer for the company. Two weeks later, BEA said it would agree to be acquired by Oracle for about $8.2 billion, a figure Oracle called “impossibly high.” Oracle has made no new offer since then, and in a conference call with analysts Wednesday Ms. Catz said that recent talks between the companies had not gone well. “We’ve concluded that no friendly deal can be done with the current BEA board at a price and terms acceptable to Oracle,” Ms. Catz said. She did not say whether that meant the company would pursue an unsolicited bid for the company or walk away. Acquiring BEA would establish Oracle as the largest player in middleware, the layer of software code between a company’s database system and the business programs that use the company data. In that market, Oracle faces intense competition from I.B.M. and Microsoft.

Software
Oracle Corp
Company Reports
Wall Street (NYC)


Reductions in Debt Help Lift Ford’s Results

Abstract: DETROIT — The Ford Motor Company earned bragging rights as the only American carmaker to avoid bankruptcy, but now its chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, faces a particularly difficult phase of his turnaround effort. Its domestic rivals General Motors and Chrysler are enjoying fresh starts after their Chapter 11 filings, leaving Ford with a greater debt load as it struggles to become profitable. The company showed more progress with its second-quarter results , announced Thursday, which beat expectations. But Mr. Mulally is not claiming victory. “We have more confidence than ever that our plan is working, but we’re still losing money,” Mr. Mulally said in an interview. Ford reported a loss of $638 million, before special items, in the quarter that ended June 30, compared with a $1.4 billion loss in the same period a year ago. The company said it remained on track to break even or post a profit by 2011. Ford also drastically reduced its cash burn rate in the quarter, to $1 billion, compared with $3.7 billion during the first three months of this year. “In its second quarter, Ford delivered exactly what we wanted to see — lower cash burn,” said an analyst, Shelly Lombard, of Gimme Credit in a research note. Ford’s market share improved to 16 percent through the first six months of this year, but the gains were achieved while G.M. and Chrysler were either pleading for federal loans or reorganizing in bankruptcy court. Earlier this year, Ford said it would be satisfied if it could stabilize its market share. Mr. Mulally said Thursday that he was now expecting the company to continue increasing its share through the rest of this year and beyond. Until this year, the automaker had been losing market share consistently for a decade. The goal will be more difficult to achieve as G.M. and Chrysler mount their own turnaround efforts with less debt and leaner organizations. The Japanese automaker Toyota is also formulating its own recovery strategy for the American market. “It’s not going to get any easier for Ford, and may get more challenging in the short term,” said John Wolkonowicz, an analyst with HIS Global Insight. “But I think they are on the right track, and they have some very good products coming.” Ford will soon introduce an update of its Taurus sedan, as well as some new small cars. A new line of fuel-efficient engines will also be available. Ford’s chief financial officer, Lewis Booth, said there was no chance that management would loosen the purse strings on its $21 billion in cash reserves. “We are all paranoid about cash,” he said. During the second quarter, Ford completed a series of actions that reduced its debt by $10.1 billion, and also raised $1.6 billion by issuing new stock. Mr. Booth declined to say whether more moves were in the works to further cut its debt, which now stands at about $26 billion. A crucial factor in Ford’s prospects will be how the overall vehicle market recovers. Sales of new cars and trucks have fallen this year to their lowest levels since the early 1980s. In the first half of 2009, the trend in sales has been below a 10 million annual pace. Mr. Mulally said Thursday that he believed that the market had bottomed out. Ford is now forecasting that 2009 sales will rise to an annual pace of 10.5 million to 11 million vehicles. “Ford is going to be all right, unless the market somehow gets worse,” Mr. Wolkonowicz said. “If that happens, they’ve got a problem.” Wall Street continued its support of Mr. Mulally’s strategies by bidding Ford’s shares up 9.4 percent on Thursday to a close of $6.98. The company’s shares have nearly tripled in value since early this year, when it became clear that Ford would not ask for government loans.

Ford Motor Co
Company Reports
Automobiles
Reform and Reorganization


Pakistan Showing Its Upset by Harassing U.S. Diplomats

Abstract: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Parts of the Pakistani military and intelligence services are mounting what American officials here describe as a campaign to harass American diplomats, fraying relations at a critical moment when the Obama administration is demanding more help to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda . The campaign includes the refusal to extend or approve visas for more than 100 American officials and the frequent searches of American diplomatic vehicles in major cities, said an American official briefed on the cases. The problems affected military attachés, C.I.A. officers, development experts, junior level diplomats and others, a senior American diplomat said. As a result, some American aid programs to Pakistan , which President Obama has called a critical ally, are “grinding to a halt,” the diplomat said. American helicopters used by Pakistan to fight militants can no longer be serviced because visas for 14 American mechanics have not been approved, the diplomat said. Reimbursements to Pakistan of nearly $1 billion a year for counterterrorism have been suspended because the last of the American Embassy’s five accountants left the country this week after his visa expired. “There’s an incredible disconnect between what they want of us and the fact we can’t get the visas,” the diplomat said. Pakistani officials acknowledged the situation but said the menacing atmosphere resulted from American arrogance and provocations, like taking photographs in sensitive areas, and a lack of understanding of how divided Pakistanis were about the alliance with the United States. American and Pakistani officials declined to be identified while speaking about the issues because of their senior positions and the desire not to further inflame tensions. The campaign comes after months of rising anti-American sentiment here and complaints by the military that the government of President Asif Ali Zardari has grown too dependent on a new $7.5 billion, five-year aid plan from Washington. It also appears to be an attempt to blunt the planned expansion of the United States Embassy to 800 Americans from 500 in the next 18 months, growth that American officials say is necessary to channel the expanded American assistance. “They don’t want more Americans here,” another American diplomat said. “They’re not sure what the Americans are doing. It’s pretty pervasive.” The harassment has grown so frequent that American officials said they viewed it as a concerted effort by parts of the military and intelligence services that had grown resentful of American demands to step up the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Though the United States has been sending large amounts of military assistance to the Pakistani Army, and helping its premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, the campaign shows the ambivalence, even “hatred” toward the United States in those quarters, the American official said. A Pakistani security official, who has kept a tally of many of the incidents, was not sympathetic, saying the Americans had brought on the problems. “Unfortunately, the Americans are arrogant,” the Pakistani security official said. “They think of themselves as omnipotent. That’s how they come across.” For instance, he said, the Pakistani police were not harassing American diplomats as they drove up to checkpoints, but rather were responding to provocations by American officials. He cited a recent report in some Pakistani newspapers that an American diplomat had been taking photographs in a military area of the city of Lahore. The reports were false, an American Embassy spokesman said. He said the suspected diplomat, a technical support officer, was not carrying a camera. In another instance, the Pakistani security official said, Americans in an S.U.V. last week fled after the police tried to search their car at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Islamabad, the capital. The embassy spokesman denied that Americans had fled the checkpoint. “Nonsense, diplomats don’t run away,” he said. The searching of American diplomatic vehicles at the many checkpoints in the cities has become one of the biggest irritants. Because diplomatic license plates registered to the embassy would provide an easy target for militants, the Americans reached an accord some time ago with Pakistan’s government that their official plates would be carried inside the car, the spokesman said. But the absence of plates left the American cars vulnerable to searches at checkpoints, he said. Under international conventions diplomatic cars are not subject to searches, and American diplomats were instructed not to permit searches beyond opening the trunk, the spokesman said. The Pakistani security official said, “We are in a state of war that calls for extraordinary measures.” His vehicle is searched every morning he goes to the office in Islamabad, and Americans should expect the same, he said. He also said the Americans should not be surprised about the visa problem. But the issue is now affecting Pakistan’s own interests, American officials said. At least 135 American diplomats have been refused extensions on their visas, the senior American diplomat said, leaving some sections of the embassy operating at 60 percent of capacity. One of the most harmful consequences, the diplomat said, is the scaling back of helicopter missions by the Frontier Corps paramilitary troops fighting the Taliban because of a lack of trained American mechanics. Much of the heightened suspicions about American diplomats appears to revolve around persistent stories in the Pakistani press about the presence of the American security company Blackwater, now called Xe Services, in Pakistan. The embassy has denied that Xe operates in Pakistan. But those statements have collided with reports that Xe operatives worked for the C.I.A. to load missiles onto drones used to kill Qaeda militants in the tribal areas. The public distrust toward American officials has led many American diplomats to keep a low profile, and adopt a bunker mentality, American diplomats acknowledge. Americans are warned by security advisers to steer clear of restaurants and shopping areas. The skittishness between the sides was put aside Wednesday when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, was taken on a helicopter tour of the South Waziristan tribal area by the Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to show what the Pakistanis had achieved against the Taliban. No Pakistani or American reporter was taken along, a sign the Pakistanis preferred to keep the American help there quiet.

Pakistan
United States International Relations
Foreign Service


Pilot in Crash Near Buffalo Had Failed 5 Performance Tests

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Almost every airline crash reveals holes in a safety net that was woven tighter after the previous one. The February crash of a Continental Connection commuter plane near Buffalo, which killed 50 people, appears to have found at least two new ones. As the National Transportation Safety Board prepares for three days of hearings on the crash beginning Tuesday, two gaps have become clear: A 1996 federal law intended to ensure that an airline hiring a new pilot would know about the pilot’s previous problems did not do the job; and the captain of the flight that crashed near Buffalo had never received hands-on training with a safety system that activated just before the plane went down. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the captain, Marvin Renslow, had failed five “check rides,” or hands-on tests, conducted in a cockpit or a simulator, before the Feb. 12 crash. Colgan Air, which operated the flight for Continental, said later on Monday that two of those tests had been conducted after Captain Renslow began working there, in September 2005. Colgan said it had known about one previous failure at the time, but the captain had not told the company about the two others. Airlines have historically had trouble ascertaining the performance histories of their pilots. In December 1994, for example, an American Eagle pilot crashed a twin-engine turboprop on the way to Raleigh-Durham International Airport, because he was confused about a minor warning light in the cockpit. The pilot was hired by American Eagle just days before he had been forced to quit by another airline because of poor performance, but American Eagle did not know that. After that crash, Congress passed a law requiring airlines to get the performance records of job candidates, waiving some privacy laws to make the information transfer possible. But Colgan said on Monday that the law did not cover the three tests Captain Renslow had failed before he was hired, because they were in general aviation, meaning non-airline flying. “Consistent with standard practice in the airline industry, Colgan did not attempt to access information on prior, general aviation check-ride failures,” the company said in a statement. It did not detail how Captain Renslow had failed the tests, and with the information released so far, their significance is difficult to judge. “It does raise a flag when you see five,” said one safety expert, Barry M. Sweedler, a 31-year veteran of the staff of the National Transportation Safety Board and now a safety consultant. But a vice president of the Regional Airlines Association, Scott W. Foose, said that while the number of failed tests raised questions, it was “not necessarily cause for alarm.” Captain Renslow’s job with Colgan was his first with an airline. The company said that after the failed tests, he passed six consecutive check-ride tests. The other hole in the safety net appears to be in pilot training. The Continental Connection flight crashed shortly after the activation of a safety system intended to prevent a condition called aerodynamic stall, in which the wings lose lift because the plane is flying too slowly or at too great an angle to the oncoming wind. The system consists of a “stick shaker,” a tactile warning that shakes the control column pilots use to adjust the plane’s nose-up or nose-down attitude, and a “stick pusher,” which forces the nose down if the pilot does not. The plane crashed after one of the two pilots jerked the stick back, forcing the nose too high, in what may have been an inappropriate reaction to the activation of the anti-stall system. Colgan said Monday that when it trains pilots in a flight simulator, the airline does not demonstrate how the safety system works — and that the Federal Aviation Administration does not require it to. “A stick pusher demonstration in an aircraft simulator is not required by the F.A.A. and was not part of the training syllabus,” the airline said.

Pilots
National Transportation Safety Board
Federal Aviation Administration
Continental Airlines Inc
Accidents and Safety
Airlines and Airplanes
Buffalo (NY)


Obama, on a Weekend March, Tries to Recapture His Mantle

Abstract: DUBUQUE, Iowa — If anything gets under President Obama ’s skin in the final, fraught days of this campaign, it is Mitt Romney ’s attempt to expropriate the “change” label, which Mr. Obama all but trademarked in his historic run for the White House four years ago. On a morning-to-midnight tour of Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Virginia on Saturday, Mr. Obama repeatedly scoffed at Mr. Romney’s effort to present himself as a change agent, calling him instead a “talented salesman” who was merely dressing up the failed policies of the George W. Bush administration for a new decade. Speaking to 4,000 supporters at a high school in Mentor, Ohio, Mr. Obama tried to square a circle, insisting he was both a familiar, trustworthy leader and an insurgent who could break the gridlock in Washington. “Back in 2008, when I was talking about ‘change we can believe in,’ I wasn’t just talking about changing presidents; I wasn’t just talking about changing parties,” he said. “I was talking about changing our politics. I ran in 2008 because the voices of the American people, your voices, had been shut out of our democracy for too long.” Despite the frustrations of his first term, for which he blamed “protectors of the status quo,” Mr. Obama said he could still upgrade the nation’s schools, keep college affordable, expand production of clean energy, and rebuild aging roads and bridges. Mr. Obama, in an echo of his post-partisan pitch in 2008, even encouraged supporters to vote for Republicans for Congress if they concluded that those candidates were “serious about putting people first instead of putting elections first.” It was not clear how that message would play with Democratic candidates down the ticket. The president also drew an obvious distinction with Mr. Romney, after accusing him of dishonesty in tying the Obama administration’s bailout of the auto industry to jobs lost to China. “You do want to be able to trust your president,” he said. “You want to know that the president means what he says, and says what he means. And after four years as president, you know me.” Among supporters, the mood mirrored the man: sobered by experience but searching for the old magic. “He’s going in the right direction, but he hasn’t had enough time to get it done,” said Susanne Dauler, 78, a retired teacher from Wickliffe, Ohio. “But I still believe in him.” Breaking Up the Band As Mr. Obama makes what is almost certainly his last campaign trip as a candidate, the charter group of advisers who worked for him in 2008 have begun packing the seats on Air Force One for what is turning into a nostalgic farewell tour — complete with a final gig in Des Moines. “It’s like the band is breaking up,” said David Axelrod, the senior strategist who functions as the group’s shaggy elder. Among the returning members: Robert Gibbs, the former press secretary; Reggie Love, the president’s former personal aide; Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser; Jon Favreau, the chief speechwriter; and Jennifer Psaki, the campaign’s press secretary. Superstition abounds. Mr. Favreau and Mr. Rhodes are growing beards that they said they would not shave until after Election Day. That day, the group plans to meet for lunch at the Gage , the Chicago restaurant where they ate on Election Day four years ago. “There is a sense on this trip of going all the way back to the beginning,” Mr. Rhodes said. In drafting the final version of the president’s stump speech, Mr. Favreau said Mr. Obama’s aides were reminiscing about his first stump speeches, many honed in Iowa. Now 31 and contemplating a future outside of politics, Mr. Favreau said, “Never in my life will I have another experience like this.” Help From Bill Clinton Bill Clinton has become the workhorse of the campaign, stumping tirelessly for the president across the battleground states, sometimes several each day. And Mr. Obama is showing his gratitude, heaping praise on the 42nd president in his stump speech. “For eight years, we had a president who shared our beliefs: his name was Bill Clinton,” Mr. Obama said in Lima, Ohio. “By the end of President Clinton’s second term, America had created 23 million new jobs. Incomes were up. Poverty was down. Our deficit became the biggest surplus in history.” For three days last week, when Hurricane Sandy kept Mr. Obama off the trail, Mr. Clinton served as his proxy and validator, standing in at rallies in Florida and Ohio. On Saturday, the two men were scheduled to appear together in Bristow, Va. Mr. Clinton’s support is all the more striking, given the well-publicized chill in their relationship after the 2008 campaign. While Mr. Clinton is solidly behind Mr. Obama now, he acknowledges it was not always so. “I am far more enthusiastic about him this time than I was last time,” he said Friday. Benghazi Protests The deadly attack on the American Mission in Benghazi, Libya, and the White House’s shifting account of it, has been a story mainly in Washington. But on Friday, it erupted on the trail in Ohio, when protesters lined the entrance to a high school in Lima, holding signs and shouting at Mr. Obama’s limousine. “When the president called the Navy SEALs, they killed Osama bin Laden. But when the Navy SEALs called the president, he let them die,” said one sign. A Tea Party group from Mansfield, Ohio, organized the protest, saying on its Web site that “the mainstream media is not covering this story, so it’s up to us to inform our fellow citizens.” At a rally for Mr. Romney on Friday evening in West Chester, Ohio, a line of prominent Republicans hammered Mr. Obama for the episode, with some accusing the White House of trying to cover up security lapses in Libya because of the election. “When I think about these last few days,” said Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, “I think about two words: budget and Benghazi.”

Presidential Election of 2012
Obama Barack
Romney Mitt


A Traveler’s Guide to Customs: When to Shake Hands, Hug or Kiss

Abstract: You’ve just landed in Beijing, Rio de Janeiro or Christchurch, New Zealand, and you’re greeted at the airport by a clutch of adoring locals. What is the polite way to greet them? Do you bow, or proffer your hand, or prepare to envelop the assembled strangers in an American-style embrace? More important: To kiss or not to kiss? The world may be increasingly globalized, but when it comes to greeting practices, local customs still prevail — and things can get awkward when, say, a hug-loving American businessman meets his Japanese counterpart for the first time. (Best just to bow.) If you find yourself facing a group of native Maoris in New Zealand, you’ll want to steel yourself for a traditional nose greeting, which involves touching snouts and foreheads. In Rio, local convention dictates three cheek kisses. But a few hours’ drive to the south in São Paulo, the single peck prevails. In Beijing, the locals prefer a nod and a smile. Image New Zealand: touching snouts. Credit Adrian Samson/Self Publish, Be Happy In the interests of international fellowship and peace, here is an incomplete guide to world greetings. Lips Together? In much of Latin America, Europe and the Middle East, air kissing between strangers is common, but each nation, and in some cases each region within a country, may have its own habits. Argentine men will cheek-kiss one another, but only if they are friends of friends. In most of the Arab world, a double air kiss is obligatory, though only between people of the same sex. Image Argentina: cheek kiss. Middle East and France: air kiss. Credit Adrian Samson/Self Publish, Be Happy Things can get complicated in France, as this map suggests: Expect anywhere from four kisses (in Nantes) down to two (in Toulouse) or just a single peck (in Brest). The general rule is that lips should never touch cheek, though a faint smooching sound is expected. In most of Northern Europe, a firm handshake will usually suffice between strangers, and a single kiss for friends. “Firm” doesn’t begin to describe the obligatory handshake between two unacquainted men in Russia, which can feel like a test of strength with near bone-crushing results. And there’s a taboo about shaking hands across the threshold of a home: Wait until you are both on the same side of the door. Image Northern Europe and Russia: firm handshake. Credit Adrian Samson/Self Publish, Be Happy When kisses are called for, where do you aim? In Portugal, the kissing usually progresses from left to right, but in Strasbourg, France, it’s right to left. Hands to Yourself Kissing or touching strangers is frowned upon in Asia. The customary greeting in Thailand involves a bow with the palms pressed together, as if in prayer; similar gestures are common from Cambodia to Indonesia. Image Thailand: bow with palms pressed together. Credit Adrian Samson/Self Publish, Be Happy In India, a limp handshake between men is fine, but don’t try it with a member of the opposite sex. The traditional way to greet an Indian elder is to bend down and touch his feet. Image India: bend down and touch the feet, when greeting an elder. Credit Adrian Samson/Self Publish, Be Happy Tibetans have one of the most unusual traditional gestures for greeting others: They stick out their tongues — though always from a safe distance. Image Tibet: stick out tongue. Credit Adrian Samson/Self Publish, Be Happy