A Network to Make an Environmental Point

Abstract: CAN the environment make for entertaining TV? Discovery Communications is about to find out. On Wednesday, Discovery will introduce Planet Green, a new cable brand promoted as the first 24-hour channel dedicated to eco-friendly living. It is the highest-profile cable channel introduction of the year, and an equally risky one. By wrapping itself in the planet, Discovery is betting that “eco-tainment” will appeal to viewers. Planet Green will replace the Discovery Home Channel in more than 50 million homes. Eyeing the public’s increased interest in environmental issues, Discovery is confident that it can attract more viewers with green-themed programming. “This is an eco-tainment channel,” said Eileen O’Neill, the general manager of Planet Green. “It’s a lifestyle and entertainment channel that’s designed to activate people in the green space.” It is also intended to engage advertisers, many of whom have green-themed marketing messages to share with viewers. “Green is a category companies want to be in,” said Gary Lico, the chief executive of CableU, an online service that analyzes cable networks. “Whether you’re an automaker or a bank or a petroleum company, somewhere in your marketing plan is something referring to the environment.” But some of Planet Green’s advertisers could raise eyebrows. General Motors, maker of the Hummer, is the “exclusive automobile sponsor” of the channel, Discovery announced last month. G.M.’s Chevrolet brand is a “premier sponsor” of “Greensburg,” a documentary series about a tornado-damaged town that is rebuilding with an eye to the environment. As part of the deal, G.M. vehicles will be integrated into some programs, and Discovery will produce short-form videos about the company. Ms. O’Neill said the company has “very thoughtful conversations” with any advertiser who shows an interest in the channel. “We’re thinking about everyone being better — not necessarily perfect,” Ms. O’Neill said, noting that G.M. sells a number of vehicles that address fuel efficiency or feature hybrid technology. David M. Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, added: “If the standard is perfection, we’ll all fail. The journey is to do a little bit better.” That attitude is in line with the channel’s mission, which is to “take green to the mainstream,” said Tom Carr, the senior vice president for marketing of the channel.  Discovery’s research, conducted last year, identified 40 percent to 50 percent of the United States population as “armchair environmentalists.” Mr. Carr calls the channel’s target audience “bright greens,” people who are motivated by the idea that they can help the planet. Several other cable networks introduced green-themed programming last year. HGTV had the debut of “Living With Ed,” a reality show starring Ed Begley Jr. (It is moving to Planet Green.) The Sundance Channel created “The Green,” a weekly environmental series. And Discovery received wide acclaim for the broadcast of the documentary “Planet Earth.” After that program, the network was inundated with viewer requests for more environmental programming, Mr. Zaslav said. “We’re pressing on the accelerator here,” he said. “We think it has a real chance to be a flagship brand for us.” But programs that are promoted as being good for you aren’t always good for ratings, Mr. Lico noted. Perhaps that’s why “Compost Tonight” didn’t find a spot on Planet Green. The channel’s schedule is star-studded, with the celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse hosting a cooking show featuring organic and locally grown foods, and the “Entourage” star Adrian Grenier living a green life. “Hollywood Green,” a weekly entertainment magazine, will showcase earth-conscious celebrities. The other programs will show every shade of green, from “G Word,” a daily series hosted by two news correspondents, to “Wrecklamation,” billed as “recycling on steroids.” The channel has almost all original programming — partly because there was not an available vault of entertaining environmental programming to tap into. “It’s been challenging at times,” Ms. O’Neill said, “in part because we’ve been educating the production community that may have had certain expectations of what green content is.” Namely, that it did not star Ludacris and Tommy Lee, at least not until now. On their new show, “Battleground Earth,” the celebrities participate in an eco-friendly reality competition. They were also the headliners of the channel’s premiere party in Los Angeles last week.  Timed to the switch from Discovery Home to Planet Green, Discovery marketers are conducting “Random Acts of Greenness.” At the Indianapolis 500 last month, they handed out T-shirts and beach balls to consumers who exemplified green living, and sponsored the cleanup day after the race. The giveaways will continue in New York this week. Similar promotions will occur at Major League Baseball games in Milwaukee; Washington; and San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., on Wednesday. Mr. Zaslav will throw out the first pitch in Washington, and the stadium’s JumboTron will count down to the channel’s 6 p.m. debut. Also that day, all the Discovery cable networks will show green logos. The New York Post is going green on Wednesday, too: the newspaper will turn its flag green that day and feature advertisements for the channel all week. The newspaper will also give away 250 bicycles with Planet Green branding. “This is a new genre,” Ms. O’Neill said. “People don’t have any set expectations of what green media is, and we’re defining it — as really funny, engaging, entertaining and definitely credible.”

Environment
Discovery Communications
Planet Green
Television
Cable Television
Advertising and Marketing


South Sudan Says Oil Will Flow Despite Sudan’s Threats

Abstract: KHARTOUM, Sudan — South Sudan will continue to pump oil for export through Sudan despite a threat by Sudan’s president to shut down the pipeline, a South Sudanese official said Monday. “Producing is still on,” said South Sudan’s oil minister, Stephen Dhieu Dau, according to Reuters. “We have not received any official communication from the government of Sudan, so we are still producing.” On Saturday, President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan said he would shut down a pipeline carrying South Sudan’s oil through Sudan, accusing South Sudan of supporting rebels in Sudan. But Sudan’s information minister, Ahmad Osman Bilal, said Sunday that the shutdown was “reversible” and that it would take 60 days to close the pipeline, suggesting that Sudan was giving both sides time for tensions to ease. President Salva Kiir of South Sudan denied that his country was supporting rebels in Sudan. “President Bashir is declaring war indirectly without saying it,” Mr. Kiir said. “We are not for war.” Mr. Kiir also accused Sudan of supporting rebels who are operating in South Sudan in the state of Jonglei. The State Department on Monday urged Sudan not to carry out its threat. “We deplore this action and urge Sudan to reverse this decision,” said a State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki. Mr. Bashir’s threat was the latest point of friction between the two countries since 2011, when after decades of war, the South voted overwhelmingly to separate. The move split Sudan’s oil industry, creating two deeply interdependent states: South Sudan ended up with most of the oil reserves, while Sudan had the refining and export facilities. The two have not been able to resolve several disputes over border areas and the accusations of support for rebel groups.

South Sudan
Sudan
Pipelines
Omar Hassan Al- Bashir
Salva Kiir Mayardit
Oil and Gasoline


In Slovakia, Real Lottery Prize Goes to Tax Man

Abstract: BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — When Jozef Lazarcik, a 35-year-old factory worker, heard his number called on national television here recently, he pumped his fists, hardly believing his luck. He had registered only nine receipts with Slovakia’s new tax lottery, and yet he had just won a new car. “It’s a heavenly feeling,” he said before leaving the studio, ready to encourage all of his friends to register their receipts, too — which is exactly what Slovakian officials were hoping for. Over the last 10 years, Slovakia’s revenue from value-added taxes, a type of sales tax, has declined. But hiring auditors and pursuing individual merchants and service providers in court is expensive and slow. So last fall, the government decided to put a lottery in the mix. The idea is to enlist average citizens to collect receipts from their purchases and register them with the government, creating a paper trail for transactions and forcing restaurant and shop owners to pay the sales taxes they owe. As Slovakians register their receipts for the lottery, a computer will also tell them if a merchant has issued a receipt with a fake tax identification number, so they can report suspected fraud. For any purchase worth more than 1 euro, or about $1.38, Slovakians can enter their receipts in a monthly lottery to win €10,000, a car or a chance to be a contestant on the Slovakian version of “The Price Is Right.” Tax officials say the lottery is already having a big impact, and other European countries that are also struggling with the collection of value-added taxes have considered it — including Portugal, which started its own tax lottery on Thursday. In Slovakia, about 450,000 people have taken part, registering about 60 million receipts, officials said. Complaints about merchants who will not give receipts have skyrocketed. In the six months before the lottery began, the government received about 300 such complaints, officials said. In the first few months after it started, that number rose to 7,000. “It has been a huge success so far,” said Peter Kazimir, Slovakia’s finance minister. Value-added taxes are an important source of income for European countries, but collecting them has grown more and more difficult during the economic crisis. A recent report for the European Commission found that uncollected value-added taxes in the European Union — a measure known as the value-added tax gap — amounted to about $267 billion in 2011. Across the bloc, that gap increased by five percentage points on average since the onset of the debt crisis in 2008. But for some countries — especially Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain — the problem has been particularly acute. A decade ago, Slovakia was able to collect about 80 percent of taxes due, said Peter Golias, the director of Ineko, a nonprofit economic research group here. That figure is now about 60 percent, putting Slovakia in a league with Greece for the poorest record on the collection of value-added taxes. Mr. Golias said some people had been inspired to play the lottery because they were tired of tax cheats. “They really want to help,” he said. For others, it is more about winning. Sylvia Skanderova’s father once won about $11,000 in a lottery. That has made him an eager participant in lotteries of all kinds, she said, but particularly this one, because it costs nothing to play. He spends three hours every Sunday registering receipts. Image Michal Hudak, right, hosts Slovakia’s version of "The Price Is Right," which is a lottery partner. Credit Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York Times “The neighbors, they know my father does this, so they bring him receipts,” said Ms. Skanderova, 26. “Every Sunday his eyes are bloodshot. We have huge plastic bags in the basement with receipts.” Zuzana Candikova, a manager at Planetka Restaurant here in Bratislava, the capital, is hoping to win a cash prize that she would use to help buy an apartment. She collects receipts that her customers leave behind, but she has a friend who does the registering. If they win anything, they will split it, Ms. Candikova said. The lottery is not Slovakia’s only push to increase its tax collection. In the last few years, under pressure from the European Union to improve its finances and attack corruption, the government has also run a “name and shame” campaign against tax cheats, raised the salaries of tax inspectors and stopped political appointments in the tax office, among other measures. Tax collection began to increase early in 2013 and rose more sharply after the lottery began. Officials say they collected about $512 million more in 2013 than in 2012. How much of that is a result of the lottery may never be clear. But Mr. Kazimir said that it was surely a big factor, and that it had cost only about $276,000 to get the lottery going. He said the new influx of complaints had already proved that it was not just small businesses that were cheating: Chain stores have also been caught giving fake receipts. In Portugal, too, the value-added tax gap has grown since the start of the economic crisis. Having asked for a bailout of about $108 billion in 2011, it is under pressure from its creditors to do better. Portuguese officials believe their tax lottery will be especially effective because gambling is popular among Portugal’s 10 million inhabitants, who are already among the biggest participants, in terms of spending per capita, in the EuroMillions lottery shared by nine European countries. Over the past decade, the Portuguese have spent an average of about $1.2 billion a year on EuroMillions. Paulo Núncio, the Portuguese secretary of state for tax affairs, said the government was counting on the new lottery to raise its tax revenue by about $830 million to $1.1 billion. Even before the start of the Portuguese tax lottery, it was generating excitement. In the food court of the Amoreiras shopping mall in Lisbon recently, customers ordering hamburgers joked that their lunch order could result in a new car. The lottery project has drawn criticism from some Portuguese opposition politicians who say it is a capitalist tool to turn citizens into tax inspectors. Diogo Ortigão Ramos, a partner at the law firm Cuatrecasas, Gonçalves Pereira in Lisbon, said the lottery also raised “questions of compatibility with E.U. law.” For the time being, though, the European Commission has not addressed this issue. Portuguese merchants say they have already seen a change. João Raposo, a restaurant owner, said customers were increasingly asking for a full tax receipt, when “five years ago nobody would have bothered.”


Mahlon Hoagland, RNA Expert, Dies at 87

Abstract: Mahlon Hoagland, who as the co-discoverer of the molecule called transfer RNA helped unlock the mystery of how DNA is translated into the proteins that carry out its genetic instructions, died Sept. 18 at his home in Thetford, Vt. He was 87. He had been battling kidney failure and heart problems and died nine days after choosing to forgo food and water, said his daughter Robin Hoy. After the discovery of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick, the new holy grail of biology research in the mid-1950s was understanding how the information encoded in DNA is translated into a protein in the cell. Dr. Hoagland, working in the laboratory of Paul C. Zamecnik at Massachusetts General Hospital, discovered a critical piece of this puzzle when he described transfer RNA, a family of molecules that shuttle activated amino acids to the cell’s protein factory, called the ribosome, where they are joined to form a protein chain. In “The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology” (Simon & Schuster, 1979), Horace Freeland Judson detailed how Drs. Zamecnik and Hoagland used radioactive labels to track the exchange of molecular fragments. They showed that the building blocks of protein, called amino acids, become activated when they acquire energy through a process mediated by enzymes, which act as catalysts. This discovery explained a crucial step in protein synthesis. They were able to study these reactions outside of cells using an innovative cell-free system that they had created from components of rat liver. They then used this cell-free system to reveal what Dr. Zamecnik described as “a direct-line intermediate in the pathway from free amino acid to peptide,” or chain of amino acids. This intermediate was called transfer RNA, or tRNA. It was the elusive adaptor molecule that Dr. Crick had proposed to account for the step in which amino acids are transported to the ribosome. These findings “transformed the area of how the DNA is read,” said Thoru Pederson, Vitold Arnett professor of cell biology at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine, a colleague and friend of Dr. Hoagland. Born in Boston in 1921, Dr. Hoagland studied at Williams and Harvard, and in 1948 earned a medical degree from Harvard Medical School. A bout with tuberculosis derailed his plans to become a pediatric surgeon, and he turned instead to research, beginning in 1948 in the laboratories of Massachusetts General. In 1970, Dr. Hoagland moved to the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts, which his father, Hudson Hoagland, a physiologist, helped found in 1944 as the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. The foundation merged with the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1997. Dr. Hoagland retired in 1985, after serving as scientific director of the foundation for 15 years. His career included a year of research at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in England, working with Dr. Crick, who later received a Nobel Prize for his role in the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. Dr. Hoagland was also an associate professor in microbiology at Harvard Medical School and head of the microbiology department at Dartmouth Medical School. His marriage to Elizabeth Stratton, now Elizabeth Loomis, with whom he had four children, ended in divorce. He later married Olley Hoagland, who died in 2009. In addition to his daughter Robin Hoy of Brunswick, Ga., his survivors include another daughter, Judy Hauck of Wilmot, N.H.; a son, Mahlon Hoagland Jr. of Rockport, Me., who is known as Jay; five stepchildren, Jeff, Jonathan, Jim and Jeremy Robbins and Jennifer Mason; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Susan, died in 1973. “Mahlon went on to become an extremely skillful exponent of the joy of basic scientific discovery for lay audiences,” writing books, newspaper columns and lectures, Dr. Pederson said. As an author, he was best known for his book “The Way Life Works: The Science Lover’s Illustrated Guide to How Life Grows, Develops and Reproduces, and Gets Along” (Three Rivers Press, 1998), a collaboration with the illustrator Bert Dodson. Dr. Hoagland was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In the mid-1970s Dr. Hoagland gathered a group of distinguished scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, called the Delegation for Basic Biomedical Research. The group went to Washington to impress on Congress “that allowing brilliant people to follow their curiosity in their laboratories is the most proven investment for success in both knowledge and medical applications,” Dr. Pederson said.

Genetics and Heredity
RNA (Ribonucleic Acid)
Hoagland Mahlon
Deaths (Obituaries)
DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)
Science and Technology


Jets’ Revis Says He Learned From Trying Season

Abstract: FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Near the end of his fourth and longest season, Darrelle Revis feels older than 25. He is back in the Pro Bowl, back in the playoffs, back rendering receivers invisible at cornerback for the Jets . To that end, life has returned to normal. But Revis and those close to him think the events of this season changed him, added maturity, perspective, growth. From his prolonged training camp holdout to the worst hamstring injury he ever sustained to the regular-season finale Sunday against Buffalo where he could rest, Revis looks forward to 2011. Because 2010 was rough. “This feels like a lifetime, all the stuff that happened in the last six months,” he said recently. “This year was the worst. Nothing’s going to top this.” Last month, Revis finished the installation of a recording studio in his New Jersey home. He filmed a Google commercial with Knicks forward Amar’e Stoudemire in which Revis dunked on Stoudemire. He has endorsement deals with Google, Nike, Motorola and Range Rover. His face graced billboards in San Francisco and Times Square. He owns a T-shirt company. This is all part of a detailed plan developed by his inner circle when Revis starred at the University of Pittsburgh and implemented when he turned professional a year early. But lately, Revis has taken a greater interest in his business affairs, part of his personal renovation, the growth spurred by two unlikely events: the holdout and the hamstring. “Truly, it has changed him, the way he acts, the way he looks at life,” said Diana Gilbert, Revis’s mother. “I see a whole different person this year.” The low point? Pretty much all of August. Revis described that month as a whirlwind. His body sensed it needed to be somewhere, at training camp, on practice fields. Instead, he worked out and watched movies and played catch with a football in his pool. Revis never once spoke publicly during his holdout, even when negotiations turned acrimonious. An uncle, the longtime N.F.L. defensive end Sean Gilbert, said last week that “the situation got a little bit out of hand.” Revis heard all of it, the Me-vis nickname, those who labeled him greedy, selfish. At one point, his mother looked into his eyes and thought: “Oh, no. He can’t take it.” Revis reached a resolution shortly before the season started on a four-year deal worth $46 million, $32 million guaranteed. He arrived to a hero’s welcome, captured by HBO’s cameras as he walked slowly onto the practice field. Two weeks into the season, he pulled his hamstring against New England. He struggled with the same injury throughout college, but never to this degree. He missed two games, but in hindsight said that he should have sat out more. Looking back, Revis said he would not change anything. He said he represented his family well. He learned not to read news reports or watch television. He learned that the public would recognize him even wearing an Afro-style wig. He learned how quickly perceptions shifted. He learned patience. From such struggle came change not even Revis had anticipated. Diana Gilbert said her son stopped going to nightclubs, asked more questions about his finances, tightened his inner circle. He spent more time with his two children, more time planning his future. “Darrelle has matured,” Sean Gilbert said. “It’s like he’s smelling the air for the first time. I always told him, don’t live in a surreal world. Smell the air. Feel what’s going on. Know what’s happening to you and around you. Then do something about it.” At present, Revis’s closest confidants include his mother, his uncle (Sean), his agents (Neil Schwartz and Jonathan Feinsod), his best friend (John Geiger) and another uncle (Mark). Each serves a specific role in what is essentially the Darrelle Revis Corporation. Mark understands the stock market and works on the finances. Geiger handles the bulk of myriad requests. The agents have turned down more than 100 potential business deals, focusing on the quality of their partnerships. Offers and proposals (some marriage, some business) arrive six times each month, or more often. Diana Gilbert said the family sometimes sat around and laughed at the contents. Asked for an example, she said one prospective company wanted Revis to invest $500,000, for which he would have owned nothing, not even 1 percent. Sean Gilbert said the circle functioned in large part to dissolve perception, to balance what is real and what is not. But Revis gives more input lately. For example, even though Gilbert also works in music production, Revis and Geiger built the home studio without his help. Gilbert was leery until he saw the finished product, which was top of the line and not overly outfitted with unnecessary and expensive equipment. And Gilbert said Revis did not pay “athlete’s dollars” for the project. That is the “heightened attention to detail” Gilbert sees. “No doubt, Darrelle Revis is a $100 million corporation,” Feinsod said. “He has to be handled as such. His mom, his uncle, the plan, it all came together, and it all starts with Darrelle, on the football field.” Revis and his uncle speak regularly, by phone, and Sean Gilbert remains both his biggest critic and his biggest fan. When Coach Rex Ryan last year labeled Revis’s 2009 effort among the best in a single season for a cornerback, Gilbert warned Revis of football’s “ebb and flow,” that “it’s not like, wow, look at you, every season.” More recently, Gilbert called to congratulate Revis on his Pro Bowl nod, then started on a critique of recent games. Gilbert said he ended with, “You can’t possibly think you’re playing good football.” Revis does not have the statistics he compiled last season. His tackles (54 to 32), interceptions (6 to 0) and passes broken up (31 to 10) all dropped significantly. But teams have also changed their tactics, avoiding not only Revis but his side of the field. He chooses to view this as a sign of respect, even if it sometimes bores him. The turning point came in early November at Detroit. With his hamstring healed, Revis was assigned to Calvin Johnson, one of the N.F.L.’s top receivers. Johnson caught one pass for 13 yards, his lowest output of the season. As the calendar turned to 2011, Revis wanted to put the previous year behind him. Ten years from now, he hoped to be looking back on his roughest season, on the hamstring and the holdout, as the impetus for growth. Perhaps 2010, for all its frustration, will be the year Revis became the man he wanted to become. “Whatever happens in the future won’t erase this year,” he said. “I’ll always remember what happened. The holdout. The hamstring. The adversity. It was a weird season.”

Football
Revis Darrelle
New York Jets
Gilbert Sean
Ryan Rex
Johnson Calvin
National Football League


India Undertakes Ambitious ID Card Plan

Abstract: MUMBAI, India — One of India’s most successful technology entrepreneurs was tapped by the government on Thursday to lead an ambitious project to give every citizen an identification card within three years. The entrepreneur, Nandan M. Nilekani, a founder and former chief executive of Infosys Technologies , will leave his post as a co-chairman of the board to take on the ID card project. In his new job, he will have the rank of a cabinet minister, giving him significant autonomy within the government. Mr. Nilekani’s appointment is a coup for the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh , which has made a series of big promises about economic development and reform since it was re-elected in May to a second five-year term. While many Indian executives serve on public advisory boards and committees, few have joined the government and headed such big public projects. The appointment of someone with no political or a civil service background suggests that the government may be more willing and able than it has been in the past to tap the expertise of the country’s successful business sector in executing difficult endeavors, many of which have languished under career politicians and bureaucrats. Policy makers see a national ID card as critical to improving the delivery of social services, subsidies and other government programs while also strengthening national security. The Indian government and outside observers have shown that the majority of aid earmarked for the poor does not reach them, and it is hard for the government to detect embezzlement and misuse of funds. If administered properly, experts say a universal ID card could help ensure that most of the billions India and other organizations spend on aid reaches the people for whom it was intended. Today, Indians use a variety of documents to prove their identities, like state-issued driver’s licenses, ration cards used for food purchases at government-run stores and a tax identification card that is akin to the American Social Security card. Many people here have expected Mr. Nilekani, 54, to take on a public service role. Last year, he published a book, “Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century,” that dissected a range of political, economic and social issues confronting the country. He has not been involved in the day-to-day operation of Infosys since he stepped down as chief executive two years ago. Mr. Nilekani will join a government led by the same party, Congress, that carried out most of the socialist policies that he has criticized for stifling the country’s growth and democracy in the early decades after India gained independence from the British.

India
Identification Devices
Nilekani Nandan M
Politics and Government
Singh Manmohan
Infosys Technologies Ltd


Giuliani Above the Fray as McCain and Romney Skirmish

Abstract: The contrast could hardly be more striking. Senator John McCain and Mitt Romney have been mixing it up on the trail with increasing intensity ever since their feisty exchange at the last Republican debate. This week their arguments over immigration prompted Mr. McCain to suggest acidly that Mr. Romney’s solution might be “to get out his small-varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his lawn.” Standing on the sidelines, safely out of the line of small-varmint-gun fire, has been Rudolph W. Giuliani , the Republican who is still leading in most national polls. If Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney have been skirmishing, Mr. McCain and Mr. Giuliani have something between a nonaggression pact and a mutual admiration society going. When they both appeared at a fund-raiser last week in New York, Mr. McCain praised Mr. Giuliani’s debate performance, and Mr. Giuliani went so far as to say of Mr. McCain that “if it weren’t for another candidate, I might actually be supporting him.” It is an unusual dynamic, to have the candidates placing second and third in most national opinion polls engaging one another fiercely, while allowing the front-runner a wide berth. But campaign officials and outside political consultants said that Mr. McCain’s willingness to engage Mr. Romney directly appeared to stem from a combination of tactical, political and, to a lesser extent, personal considerations. Tactically, Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney are in direct competition because they have both invested enormous resources to compete in the early nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Mr. Giuliani, though, seems to be leaning toward competing more heavily in the more populous states, including California and New York, holding their primaries on Feb. 5. Several state-by-state polls have shown Mr. Romney gaining ground — even holding leads, in some — in Iowa and New Hampshire. That, some consultants said, could make Mr. McCain more likely to criticize Mr. Romney by name in an effort to stem his progress. “I think it’s a New Hampshire strategy, more than anything else,” said Edward J. Rollins, a Republican consultant. On top of that, Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain are competing for conservative support. To some extent, that base of voters is up for grabs because of Mr. Giuliani’s current support of abortion rights, Mr. Romney’s former support of abortion rights and the distrust with which many conservative groups view Mr. McCain because of his sponsorship of campaign finance legislation and his initial opposition to President Bush’s tax cuts. In recent days Mr. McCain’s role in negotiating the current immigration proposal has galvanized many conservatives who fiercely oppose it, creating an opening for Mr. Romney. The issue prompted the first big Romney-McCain skirmish, at the May 15 debate in South Carolina. Mr. Romney referred to an old immigration proposal that Mr. McCain supported with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, not a name that engenders love among many Republican primary voters. “My fear is that McCain-Kennedy would do to immigration what McCain-Feingold has done to campaign finance and money in politics,” Mr. Romney said. Mr. McCain has taken more and more to pointing out Mr. Romney’s conversions, in an effort to portray him as a flip-flopper. At the debate Mr. McCain responded that he had not changed his position “because of the different offices that I may be running for.” As the new Senate accord on immigration was criticized by conservatives, Mr. Romney created an immigration television commercial last week, and Mr. McCain stepped up his response, calling the current immigration system “unacceptable.” Then he used the line about the small-varmint gun and the Guatemalans. That was a reference to Mr. Romney’s recent efforts to portray himself as a lifelong hunter, despite his lack of hunting licenses, by saying that he hunted “small varmints” and to a report that Mr. Romney had used a lawn company that employed illegal immigrants from Guatemala. Brian Jones, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, said, “Senator McCain is highlighting what he sees as an example of political opportunism.” “The race is mature enough now, and evolved enough now, where you can begin to draw clear distinctions between you and your opponents,” Mr. Jones said Add to that the personal factor. Mr. McCain and Mr. Giuliani have something of a political friendship. Mr. Giuliani, after all, bucked much of New York’s Republican establishment in 2000 when it tried to keep Mr. McCain off the primary ballot. The two men have taken in a number of ballgames together, not to mention meals in New York’s Little Italy. And while Mr. Giuliani has adjusted his positions somewhat on major issues, with months to go before the first votes are cast, it is still early for them to begin squabbling. The McCain-Romney relationship, though, seems downright frosty. Nelson Warfield, a Republican consultant who worked as the press secretary for Senator Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996, said he saw Mr. McCain’s recent remarks as more evidence that he says what he wants, when he wants. “I think with John McCain there is no three-second delay,” Mr. Warfield said. Mr. McCain’s attacks are not without risks. To some extent, they elevate Mr. Romney, who still places third in many national polls. And they have already renewed questions about Mr. McCain’s temper and temperament, something the Romney camp clearly relished. Kevin Madden, a spokesman for Mr. Romney, said that while Mr. Romney was raising “substantive” questions about the immigration proposal, “other campaigns have spent the last couple of days lashing out in anger and taking shots.” Asked on the trail yesterday about Mr. McCain’s varmint-gun salvo, Mr. Romney laughed it off, telling The Associated Press, “I have respect for Senator McCain, and I guess it just shows that even when he’s wrong, he’s amusing.”

McCain John
Romney Mitt
Giuliani Rudolph W
Presidential Election of 2008


Pakistan Government Site Is Attacked

Abstract: LAHORE, Pakistan — A suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden truck into the main gate of a safe house used by one of Pakistan ’s security agencies for the interrogation of suspects in Lahore early on Monday. The explosion killed at least 15 people, including guards, hospital officials said, and flattened the building. At least 83 people were wounded in the explosion, nine of them critically, according to doctors from a nearby hospital where the victims were taken. The blast left a crater 12 feet deep and was heard across the city, witnesses said. Rescue workers dug through the rubble of the destroyed building looking for people trapped in the debris. The police said Monday afternoon they had found the head of the bomber. A number of prominent politicians, including a former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, live in the neighborhood, known as Model Town. Several schools and religious institutions, including the Quran Academy, also are in Model Town. Muhammad Mateen, a local resident, said a number of parents were wounded after they had dropped off their children at the neighborhood schools. A man and his son were killed when a wall collapsed and crushed their car. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, which came after a lull of several months in attacks on military and security targets in Pakistan’s main cities by militants from Al Qaeda and their affiliates in the Pakistani Taliban. The attack came as the Pakistani military announced it had completed an offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan, the major base of the militants in the remote tribal area. Installations of the security forces in Lahore, the cultural heart of Pakistan and a cosmopolitan city of more than six million, have been a particular target of the militants. Last March, eight people were killed in Lahore in a commando-style assault on the Sri Lankan cricket team. Later that month, militants hit several hundred police cadets during a morning drill at their academy in a village near Lahore, killing at least eight recruits and instructors. Two months later, after an attack on a police building in Lahore, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said militants were probably striking in reprisal for an army campaign against the Taliban in the northwestern Swat Valley. In that episode, suicide attackers spraying gunfire rammed a carload of explosives into a building housing a police emergency response unit, killing 23 people in what officials said was a failed attempt to strike at the nearby provincial headquarters of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency. More than a dozen police officers were killed and almost 300 people were wounded in the assault, which took place in broad daylight in one of the busiest districts of Lahore.


Chargerback Is a Web-Based Lost and Found for Hotels.

Abstract: ON a business trip a few months ago, I lost a little electronic device called a Fitbit that hooks onto a belt, measures physical activity and keeps daily records online. It had cost around $100, and I realized with dismay that it was missing only after I got home. But I didn’t make any effort to ask my airline or hotel if they found it. Cynically, I figured, why bother? Wrong. Actually, airlines all have links to lost-and-found services on their Web sites. I don’t know how well they perform. Do you? But hotels, it seems, have always made at least an effort to get lost items back to customers. The problem has been that the internal systems are usually haphazard. “It’s always been a major chore to store them,” said Jean-Pierre Patay, the director of the Silver Legacy Resort Casino, a hotel with 1,710 rooms in Reno, Nev. A hotel employee has to put the items found on a list and store it somewhere. Sending something back to a guest can be logistically daunting. “Lost and found is the hot potato that nobody at a hotel really wants to deal with,” said Mr. Patay, 47, who has been in the hotel business since he was a teenager. Somebody at a hotel has to handle the initial inquiry, retrieve and package the item, calculate the postage and ship it back to the guest. “Sometimes you’d just go down to the loading dock to find a box,” he said. “You might be returning anything from a lost hearing aid to a giant six-foot-tall stuffed animal.” So it figures that somebody would come up with a way to better manage hotel lost-and-found procedures. A company called Chargerback has developed a Web-based system — now used by the Silver Legacy and 29 other hotels — that provides a standard method for hotels to manage found items, initiate or reply to e-mail inquiries, print out shipping labels and send items back to guests in an orderly manner. “What we discovered looking at the lost-and-found process in hotels, most of them depend on a manual system,” said Ranson Webster, the chief executive of Chargerback. The company was started in 2011 by Internet entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity in devising an easy-to-use Web-based system to replace the improvised procedures hotels often employ. At most hotels, lost and found is “very disjointed,” based on handwritten logs compiled daily in housekeeping or security offices, Mr. Webster said. Image Credit Brian Taylor The company hopes to expand more widely in the domestic hotel industry and has plans to extend into systems for airlines and airports, car rental companies and other places where travelers forget things. Chargerback calculates that travelers leave behind about 46 million possessions each year in hotels alone. The average value of a lost item (cellphones and other electronic things are among the top things forgotten) is $94, according to Wakefield Research. But nearly half of the respondents in a recent survey by Wakefield said they had not tried to retrieve lost items because they thought it would be futile or too much trouble, or because the lost-and-found process was unclear. Travelers forget amazing things in hotels — beyond the obvious wealth of mobile devices and chargers, eyeglasses, books, clothing, jewelry and children’s toys. Someone forgot a wooden leg at one hotel, Mr. Webster said. A couple reported that they had left a boa constrictor in the bathtub when they checked out. “I remember seeing that report, thinking this has got to be a mistake, it must be a plastic snake,” Mr. Webster recalled. “But it was an actual snake. The people who left it were very embarrassed.” With just 30 hotels signed up, Chargerback has been shipping 600 to 1,000 items back to guests each month, Mr. Webster said. Hotels do not pay Chargerback. Customers pay shipping costs, which he said averaged $10 to $12 an item. Chargerback’s revenue comes from a percentage of the shipping fees, he said. Chargerback provides a simple online system for hotels to keep inventory of found items. A hotel typically places a link on its lost-and-found Web page, where customers enter the Chargerback system to search for an item. If they find it, they can click on the tab to have it shipped back. Incidentally, how much does it cost to ship a snake home? “Well, more than 10 bucks, certainly,” Mr. Webster said. Having a Web-based, standardized system like Chargerback for managing the headaches of lost and found is invaluable, said Mr. Patay at the Silver Legacy. “You can’t imagine over the course of a year how much stuff can accumulate,” he said. “At many big properties, they have these little nooks and crannies where they just shove this stuff in, and it’s basically forgotten about till some guest calls and says something like, ‘Hey, I think I left my dentures there about three months ago, but I can’t remember the date. Can you find them for me?’ ” Some studies indicate that 12,000 laptops are left behind at airports each week. The number of cellphones left in places like airplanes, rental cars, hotels and taxicabs runs into the hundreds of thousands. We are forgetful people on the road, it seems — and that’s the basis of a business plan for Mr. Webster’s company as it expands. “We think the overall lost-and-found market is a half-billion items a year,” he said.


Group Battles Corruption in Indian Sports

Abstract: NEW DELHI — For more than a month now, India has been hammered with daily reports about the delays, shoddy construction, filthy conditions and other problems plaguing the country’s preparations for the Commonwealth Games, which start Sunday. But those are not the only problems involving sports management in India, which was dealing with a rash of other scandals even before construction faults and unsanitary conditions in the Games village prompted the local news media to call the long-delayed preparations “a national shame.” The volume and scale of these scandals, when taken together, have many Indians shaking their heads and demanding change. Men’s field hockey, a favorite sport here, continues to struggle without an official governing body two years after its existing federation was stripped of recognition by the Indian sports ministry and Olympic association after a pay-to-play scandal. Indian Premier League cricket — which has been around only since 2008 but which is already beloved by hundreds of millions in this cricket-obsessed nation — was rocked by allegations of extensive kickbacks and bid-rigging in the awarding of franchises. The coach of the national women’s field hockey team resigned in July after members of the squad accused him of sexual harassment. And, just this month, a doping scandal sidelined eight athletes, including swimmers and wrestlers from the Indian Commonwealth Games squad. Problems with corruption and governance are endemic in India. The country ranks 84th out of 180 nations in Transparency International’s annual corruption perception survey. So it is perhaps not surprising that similar problems have crept into sports as well. “You know it has been happening for a long while, but to this proportion and to this level and to these heights is sincerely shocking,” said Anil Singh, the chief executive of ProCam Sports, which organizes amateur and professional sporting events throughout India. In June, a group of former athletes, including four Indian Olympians, announced they were forming a group called Clean Sports India to wipe out corruption in the management of the country’s sports teams. Among the group’s chief complaints is the number of politicians who have no background playing sports but head India’s sports governing bodies. The group has also singled out the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Indian athletes, a practice that Clean Sports India says is prevalent. “When Pierre de Coubertin founded the Olympic movement, his vision was of no politics, no camps, no leaders from outside the sports world,” said Biyyala V.P. Rao, a former Indian civil servant and equestrian competitor who is one of the founders of Clean Sports India. “What do we have in India today? It is all politics and camps.” As a civil servant, Rao led a government initiative in the 1980s to identify and groom Indian children for success in Olympic sports. To highlight his point, Rao pointed to a chart of the 26 major sports associations in the northeastern state of Assam, all of which are headed by current or former politicians, almost none of whom have any background playing any sport — let alone the sports that their governing bodies administer — at a national or international level. Just two of Assam’s state ministers head 10 of the state’s Olympic sports associations. Rao said the situation in other Indian states and at the national level was similar. Critics accuse politicians of using Indian sports associations as personal marketing tools and suspect that they have misappropriated money from sporting associations and competitions. They also say politicians often unfairly manipulate the selection process for international competitions. Former athletes say that when they were competing, they were too intimidated to challenge that system, fearing they would be passed over for participation on Indian national teams if they spoke out. “Athletes won’t say anything because there is a fear of losing the chance at selections,” said Vandana Shanbhag, a former Olympic sprinter and a member of the Clean Sports India board. Among those who draw the most ire is Suresh Kalmadi, a member of the governing Congress party in the Indian Parliament. Kalmadi has been president of the Indian Olympic Association for 14 years and also heads India’s Commonwealth Games Organizing Committee, where he has come under fire over the delays, bloated spending and mismanagement that have so far plagued preparations for the 2010 Games. “A person like Kalmadi — what is he without sports?” said Reeth Abraham, a former Indian long jump and heptathlon champion who is also a founding member of Clean Sports India. “What kind of politician is he? No one would know him without sports. He has done nothing.” During a recent tour of Commonwealth Games facilities for the foreign news media, Kalmadi denied involvement in corruption, saying he had done nothing wrong. He said he was not responsible for delays in construction and shoddy building practices at the Games venues, laying the blame instead on contractors hired by the Delhi government. And he defended his 14-year tenure as head of the Indian Olympic Association. “Who says it is too long?” he said. “I say it is too short. I have no plans to step aside, not at all.” Kalmadi also reiterated his belief that Indian athletes are unfit to head the country’s sports governing bodies. “In India, running a sport, an Olympic sport, is not easy,” he said. “You have to collect money. Can a player collect money? You need to knock heads with the government to get an athletic delegation permission to go abroad for competitions. “Can a sports person do that?” he said. “No, only a businessman or a politician can do that.” The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has demanded that Kalmadi step down from the Commonwealth Games Organizing Committee over charges of corruption and mismanagement. But Clean Sports India, which has attracted about 300 members, has so far stopped short of formally calling for Kalmadi’s resignation. Rao said he did not want to do anything that would be seen as further disrupting the Commonwealth Games, whose organizational problems have already damaged India’s international sporting reputation and become a source of national embarrassment. The Games are the first major international sporting event to be held in the country in more than a quarter-century. The group did, however, send an open letter to the International Olympic Committee ’s president, Jacques Rogge, in which it wrote that while Rogge himself was limited to no more than three four-year terms in office, Kalmadi was now on his fourth consecutive term. So far, Clean Sports India can record at least one success. In July, pressure brought by the group helped persuade an Indian minister of state for defense to back out of contesting an election for the Equestrian Federation of India. The majority of the federation’s members come from the Indian armed forces, and Clean Sports India had claimed that many of them would be unduly influenced to vote for a candidate who could in essence be considered their boss. But the group also suffered a setback in August when its president, Pargat Singh, a former Indian men’s field hockey captain, lost his bid to become president of Hockey India, one of two federations competing to become the country’s official governing body for the sport. He was defeated by Vidya Stokes, an 83-year-old Congress party politician who has never played field hockey.

India
Commonwealth Games
International Olympic Committee
Athletics and Sports
Cricket (Game)


Jason A. Spencer-Edwards Brings His Novels Directly to Young Readers

Abstract: Janis Flores, 10, moved to Brooklyn from Mexico three years ago and quickly became fluent in English. But she had never read a chapter book all the way through — they just did not hold her interest — until she came across Jason A. Spencer-Edwards. Now, she has read all of his novels: “Jiggy,” about a 13-year-old boy who moves from a poor urban neighborhood to the suburbs; “I’ve Got It Made,” about a boy who finds that sudden wealth can lead to trouble; and “Patrol Boy,” whose hero becomes a gang lookout and has a scary brush with the juvenile detention system that leads to a moral epiphany. Mr. Spencer-Edwards, a self-published author who lives in Laurelton, Queens, does not show up in the canon of young-adult literature. But with a combination of viral marketing and community service — he convinced the city’s Department of Education to approve his books for reading lists, then barnstormed schools around the city, dropping off sample books and offering to speak to classes — he has built enough of a market to quit his day job as a paralegal and branch out to publishing other authors. In the past two school years alone, New York schools bought more than 50,000 copies of his books, in the middle to high range of purchases from new authors, school officials say. On Friday, Janis and her fifth-grade classmates at Public School 18 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, clustered around his chair as if they were meeting a literary god. Mr. Spencer-Edwards, 38, visiting as “principal for a day,” presided in a pinstripe suit over classes that had spent months reading his books and writing responses to them. Classroom walls were covered with moral aphorisms drawn from his works and written in felt-tip marker: “Family is more important than money,” for example. Children questioned him on minute plot points, career advice and whether art imitates life: “Are any of the lessons in your books lessons from your own life?” “You can hear a pin drop when we work on his books,” said Kelly Sabbagh, Janis’s teacher. Mr. Spencer-Edwards’s stories of young black teenagers struggling with peer pressure, poverty and the temptations of money and crime have captivated students who have trouble relating to the white middle-class suburban world of Judy Blume or Sweet Valley High, said Karen Ford, the school’s principal. At P.S. 18, the student body is 85 percent Hispanic and 14 percent black, and about 90 percent qualify for free lunch. “If you go to where they are — give them a story about a child similar to them — that is a springboard for them to be able to walk in another child’s shoes,” Ms. Ford said. Walter Dean Myers’s classic books about growing up in the 1970s are among a tradition of young-adult fiction that depict urban minority teenagers. But Mr. Spencer-Edwards has followed leaders of the adult urban fiction industry, like Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, who sprang from self-publishing into commercial success. Mr. Spencer-Edwards subtracts the racier aspects of those books and adds moral lessons and portraits of strong, strict families like his own. “We wanted to publish books that make a difference,” he told the P.S. 18 students. Born in London to Jamaican parents, he moved as a child to Laurelton, attended public schools and graduated from York College in Jamaica, Queens. In 2001, he and a fellow paralegal, Kateline Gresseau, each put up $25,000 to found JASP Publishing and put out “Jiggy.” He sold a few thousand books at fairs. But sales jumped after he was approved as a vendor by the Department of Education. He and Ms. Gresseau — whose book, “The Journey: Solo,” features a young girl debating whether to join a gang in Brooklyn — also teach creative writing workshops in the schools. On Friday, the children treated Mr. Spencer-Edwards and his works with an air of affectionate ownership, demanding that he write sequels about this or that minor character. In answer to the art-imitating-life question, he confessed that he had once stolen a pair of sneakers — he did not get caught, but he felt terrified — but that more serious trouble he writes about happened only to people he knew. “If you can learn from someone else’s mistakes, you’re smarter than that person,” he said. “That’s where literature comes in.”

Spencer-Edwards Jason A.
Books and Literature
Education and Schools
New York City
Writing and Writers


A Review of Sichuan Pepper in Vernon

Abstract: So here’s a dining situation that brims with promise. You’re at a restaurant devoted to a particular regional cuisine, and every patron except you is from that region — as is the waiter, who’s attempting gently to steer you away from Menu Item X toward something you will “like more.” Game plan? Order X, of course! In this case, the cuisine was Sichuan, and X was a mala pot of fresh frogs. The word “mala” is a combination of two Chinese characters meaning “spicy numbing” and designates the Sichuan version of the classic hot pot. Its complex sauce combines dried chilies with Sichuan peppercorns, which contain a chemical that creates a slight tingly numbness in the mouth. Image The restaurant’s traditional specialties are prepared as in China, attracting mostly Chinese diners. Credit George Ruhe for The New York Times Maybe my server thought it would be too fiery or I would be squeamish about eating frogs. Maybe I had “General Tso’s” written all over my face. Yet I persisted until he relented. And it was terrific, chunks of remarkably tender frog meat bathed in brilliant red oil and mixed up with celery, bamboo shoots and pickled peppers. The broth was infused with cloves, garlic, cardamom, fennel, ginger and other spices, and ground-up fermented black beans created an underlying hearty thickness. Sichuan Pepper’s shrine to its eponymous main ingredient begins with a small roster of appetizers: pickled cabbage, mixed together with chunks of carrot and celery; diced rabbit meat showered in peanuts and scallions; and an enormous plate of salty, garlicky pork belly sliced into bacon-like sheets. Coated in chili-infused oil, these dishes are real mouth-warmers, albeit served cold. For a dish both hot and warm, we ordered dan dan noodles — the name refers to the pole that street vendors traditionally used to carry the dish — piled in a square bowl with sesame paste, chili oil and minced pork buried like treasure underneath. The hot pots are the main attraction of this cuisine. Some are listed under “mala pot,” some under “dry pot,” but I couldn’t tell much difference in the preparations; apart from slightly differing accompaniments, the dishes varied mostly by the type of meat. Thin-sliced lamb came in a welter of celery, onions, cabbage and leeks. Jumbo shrimp, very lightly battered and fried, were smothered in onions, red and green bell peppers, and slices of tofu. Bite-size, bony chunks of rabbit meat were larded with bamboo shoots, sliced shiitakes and garlic. And always those abundant crushed peppercorns. Image A mala pot of fresh frogs cooked with pickled chili pepper. Credit George Ruhe for The New York Times This food is not punishingly hot. The pepper oil doesn’t obliterate the flavors, but spreads and intensifies them; it’s like a beat that brings the melody forward. And if you don’t want heat, the menu can take you in other directions altogether. I was fascinated by a Sichuan specialty with the exotic name tea-smoked duck. Marinated in a mix of herbs and spices that includes gan cao (licorice root), it is then smoked for an hour over black tea and camphor leaves, and finally flash-fried, creating a crust that seals in juices. All in all, it’s a fabulous preparation, the skin a deep crispy brown, the meat moist and dark, emanating an elusive sweet smoky herbal aroma and flavor. More nonfiery but traditional dishes are to be found in an array of meat stews, seemingly simple presentations whose subtle spicing makes the broth the main event. A brisket “casserole” was a sliced-up pot roast in a soup redolent of ginger and containing shiitake caps and big shoots of bamboo. A pork “stew,” said to be Mao Zedong’s favorite dish, turned out to be a huge portion of opulently fatty pork belly cubes, browned on the top and then braised in a salty broth, scented with black pepper and star anise, which improved in flavor as it cooled. These stews are highly meat-centric, so we augmented them with a side of crisp sautéed green beans. Sichuan Pepper puts out serviceable kung pao chicken, General Tso’s and the like, but its signature dishes are the reason to go. My companion one night, a friend who lives part time in China, was astonished to find authentic Sichuan food in Connecticut and kept whipping out his cellphone to show me how closely our dishes resembled what he had eaten on a recent visit to Chengdu . Such faithfulness might confound diners accustomed to the glossy creations served at your typical pan-Asian venue. Do you really want to eat as they do in China? The stews are brothy, the meat isn’t always the tenderest, the fat isn’t sculpted perfectly away, and you have to cope with a lot of bones. How much authenticity are you up for? If your answer is, “As much as I can find!” then Sichuan Pepper is definitely your place.


HCA Must Pay Kansas City Foundation $162 Million

Abstract: HCA, the nation’s largest profit-making hospital chain, was ordered on Thursday to pay $162 million after a judge in Missouri ruled that it had failed to abide by an agreement to make improvements to dilapidated hospitals that it bought in the Kansas City area several years ago. The judge also ordered a court-appointed accountant to determine whether HCA had actually provided the levels of charitable care that it agreed to at the time. The ruling came in response to a suit filed in 2009 by a community foundation that was created when HCA acquired the hospitals. Among other things, the foundation was responsible for ensuring that HCA met the obligations outlined in the deal. The dispute in Kansas City is the second time in recent years that HCA has come under legal fire from officials in communities that sold troubled nonprofit community hospitals to HCA. In another dispute in New Hampshire in 2011, a judge ruled in HCA’s favor, deciding that Portsmouth Regional Hospital would remain part of HCA after community leaders tried to regain control. During testimony in a 2011 trial, a former hospital official claimed he had difficulties getting HCA to pay for what he and others described as critical equipment and facility upgrades. In an e-mailed statement, a spokesman for HCA said the company was disappointed in the court’s ruling and intended to appeal. He also added that the two cases were “rare exceptions” and that the company had enjoyed positive relationships with communities across the country. The suit is among several problems for HCA. The company disclosed last year, for example, that the United States attorney’s office in Miami had subpoenaed documents as part of an inquiry to determine whether unnecessary cardiology procedures had been performed at HCA hospitals in Florida and elsewhere. At stake in that case is whether HCA inappropriately billed Medicare and private insurers for the procedures. HCA has denied any wrongdoing. Financially, Thursday’s judgment is a slap on the wrist for HCA, which posted net income of $360 million in just the third quarter of last year. But the ruling may reverberate beyond HCA as communities across the country put their troubled nonprofit hospitals up for sale. In many cases, the buyers with the deepest pockets have been profit-making hospital chains that want to convert the community hospitals to profit status, typically agreeing to spend money to fix them and to maintain certain levels of charitable care in the community. In 2011, for instance, Vanguard Health Systems, which went public that year and has as its largest shareholder the private equity firm Blackstone Group, bought eight hospitals in Detroit. As part of that deal, Vanguard Health agreed to spend $850 million over five years to fix and maintain the hospitals. Image A hospital owned by HCA in Kansas City, Mo. The company was sued by a local foundation for not abiding by a deal it made in 2003. Credit David Eulitt/The Kansas City Star The trouble in the Kansas City area began a year after HCA acquired a dozen hospitals from Health Midwest in 2003 for $1.125 billion. As part of the deal, HCA agreed to make $300 million in capital improvements in the first two years and an additional $150 million in the following three. The hospital chain also agreed to maintain the levels of care that had been provided to low-income individuals and families in the area for 10 years. But when the members of the Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City, a nonprofit created from the proceeds of the sale of the hospital, received their first report from HCA in 2004 they discovered the hospital was already way behind. Of the $300 million it was supposed to spend in the first two years, its own documents showed it had spent only about $50 million, according to Mark G. Flaherty, one of the founding members of the foundation and its general counsel. HCA’s reports to the foundation also indicated that the level of charitable care it provided at the system’s large inner-city hospital had fallen while charitable care provided at the more affluent suburban hospital had risen sharply, Mr. Flaherty said. “That was a big red flag to us,” he said. After repeatedly asking HCA executives for explanations but receiving none, the foundation sued HCA in 2009. The case went to trial for several weeks in 2011. HCA argued in the trial that it had met its obligation to spend money on hospital facilities by building two new hospitals at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than repairing older facilities. But Judge John Torrence of Jackson County Circuit Court ruled that the agreement called for improvements to existing hospitals. He said HCA still owed $162 million of the $300 million it had agreed to spend between 2003 and 2005. He then named a court-appointed forensic accountant to determine whether HCA had met its other capital commitments and whether it provided the charitable care it had said it would. HCA’s own written statements claimed “differing amounts,” the judge wrote in his ruling. One HCA report said it provided $48 million in charitable care to the area in 2009 while another report on its Web site said it provided more than $87 million. The annual report to the foundation claimed it provided $185 million in uncompensated and charity care that year, the judge wrote. During the trial, when asked about the widely differing numbers, the president of HCA’s Midwest division and other HCA executives had no explanation. The money will be paid to the foundation, which will use it to create grants to provide care for uninsured or underinsured families in the area. It is unclear whether the spending on improvements will occur. Depending on what the court-appointed accountant discovers, HCA may owe even more money, said Paul Seyferth of Seyferth Blumenthal & Harris, which represents the foundation. “We think they’re going to have a tremendously difficult time convincing anybody that they spent what they claim they spent,” Mr. Seyferth said.

Hospital
Decisions and Verdicts
HCA Holdings
Kansas City MO
John M Torrence


AirBlabNBore

Abstract: I feel horribly disloyal telling you this, but I have been having a glorious long-distance love affair, and this weekend I finally had to admit I was having doubts. This relationship has involved some of the sweetest spots imaginable: a riverside house w/views; stately property w/rolling hills; sheep in the pastures; four-poster beds; and homemade breakfasts. There was excitement, delight, generosity of heart. Oh, Airbnb , I am not ashamed to proclaim it before the world: I was crazy about you. Then, this weekend, after an unsuccessful attempt to find an Airbnb in Pennsylvania, this guy I’d been going out with and I checked into a Hampton Inn. And as we were walking to our room, it just slipped out. “You know, it is kind of nice to be able to go to your room without having to have a conversation with anyone,” I said to him. A nerve had been struck. He went into a rant about an Airbnb owner who’d shown us her two horses, explaining how lonely the older one had been before she’d gotten it a friend. “‘The horse was standing out there in the pasture alone, it was so depressed,’” he said. “Horses have stood in pastures alone for centuries. It’s what they’re supposed to do, they’re horses . You know what I love about this place? For miles around there are farms with horses standing alone in pastures, and I do not have to hear one word.” I was amazed. “I thought you liked that place,” I said. “That woman was great. I loved that woman.” “Her bedroom was right across from us,” he said. Horrible, right? To have doubts at this point in our relationship. I’m sure it’s me, not them, because the people I have met through Airbnb have been terrific. There were the owners of an Airbnb outside Troy, N.Y., who took me to dinner and gave me a tour of the city. There was the host in the Maryland countryside who was so concerned that I would get lost on my way to a medical appointment she led me there in her car. But you can’t help your feelings, as the therapists used to say when we had hopes they could fix us, and these dreadful ones about Airbnb have been begun popping up: Boy, it’s depressing hearing how the taxes are killing him and he’s not sure he can carry this place. I miss being able to throw all the towels on the floor. Why am I making the bed? I wouldn’t make the bed in a Hilton. It’s because the bed is in somebody’s house. She would have accent pillows. Where did this hexagonal one go? On the left or the right? The somebody’s-house thing is of course the crux of the problem. It doesn’t matter that you have paid for the room. Airbnbs are homes in a way that the old bed-and-breakfasts were not. There’s not that commercial demarcation line, the sign out front. The dog’s drooling on you; the cat’s scratching at your door. You’re in the bedroom of the kid who’s at college and his books are still there. Then there’s the matter of your grades. Host and guests get to review one another at Airbnb. Do you want your review to read, “Could barely hide her indifference when I spoke of our depressed horse”? (That was just an example, by the way. I was extremely empathetic when I met that horse and it sensed it; that horse liked me so much I am surprised it didn’t hop in my car and try to come back to New York.) And because Airbnb is so personal, you have to consider the hosts’ emotional needs. Sure, they may say they’re doing it to make a little extra money, but the truth is they’re often also lonely or bored. The tipoff, in my experience, is the cheese plate. The more impressive the cheese plate, the longer it’s been that the host hasn’t been able to get in to the city. If the cheese plate has three kinds of crackers and cute little sprigs of grapes, they’re going to want to hear all about the latest production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and you won’t be having dinner till 10. You’ve been driving for five hours, you want to shower, but faced with a cheese plate you cannot beg off. It is unspeakably rude in any culture. You remember that scene in “Lawrence of Arabia” when a British officer declines a cheese plate offered by his desert host and his hand — his cracker-eating hand, that is — is chopped off? No matter, my point is that with Airbnb it is not all about you. You must be sensitive to the needs and feelings of others. You cannot imagine how well I slept at that Hampton Inn.


In World Cup Opener, United States Defense Rises to the Occasion

Abstract: NATAL, Brazil — In the days leading up to the United States national team’s game against Ghana on Monday, not one American player said a word about the past. No one talked about how Ghana had knocked the United States out of the past two World Cups, or how it had the psychological edge at this tournament. Not one sentence was spoken about the need for a victory in the team’s first game of this World Cup so the United States could finally break free from Ghana’s spell. But, in the corners of the players’ minds, those thoughts simmered. “In those quiet moments, it creeps into your head,” goalkeeper Tim Howard said on Monday, finally admitting his anxieties. “I think you worry about that, and you have to put that right.” Image Ghana’s Jordan Ayew jumping for the ball against United States goalkeeper Tim Howard, who had five saves Monday night. Ghana had eliminated the United States from the past two World Cups. Credit Stefano Rellandini/Reuters Howard felt comfortable admitting those feelings because he and his team finally put right what for so long — eight years, in fact — had been so wrong. They finally defeated Ghana, 2-1, with Howard shining as the stabilizing force for a defense that had been thought of as the team’s weak link. Howard — one of the Premier League’s top goalkeepers — deserved the victory, after staying so positive and faithful. From up close, he had seen Ghana crush the United States team’s hopes before. He was on the 2006 World Cup team, and also was one of only four American starters on this team who had started in 2010. This chapter of his career, however, had a happier ending. After Clint Dempsey scored less than one minute into the game, Howard was in charge of keeping the fleet-footed Ghanaians at bay from his spot in what could very well be the loneliest place in all of sports — the one between two white goal posts. As Ghana shot the ball toward him again and again, he did his best to create an impenetrable force field. He leapt high and wide. He rolled low and fast. He scrambled out of the box to meet oncoming shots with so much power and speed that he seemed like a freight train gone off its rails. He did everything he could to stop Ghana because there was no way, not this time, that Howard was going to feel the heartbreak he felt four years ago. United States vs. Ghana From the Stands A panoramic view of Monday’s game at Estádio das Dunas in Natal, Brazil where the United States scored two goals to win. Back in 2010, when the United States team played Ghana in the World Cup, it lost in extra time, 2-1. A shot by Asamoah Gyan sped by Howard and flew into the net, knocking the Americans out of the round of 16. He and his entire team seemed to go breathless. On Monday night, in front of a nearly packed crowd at the Arena das Dunas, Howard saw the ball rocket by him once again. It came in the 82nd minute — so close to the end of the match. The next sound he heard was that familiar one of ecstatic, eardrum-rattling Ghanaian fans celebrating a goal. Ghana had tied the match, 1-1, but Howard didn’t sulk. Between those white posts, he bounced right back, fighting off the negative voices in his head. That mental toughness is partly what makes him so great. “You think, if it goes 2-1 here, that’s catastrophic,” he said, adding that he did his best to silence those thoughts. Image Watching the game on a large-screen television at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach, American soccer fans cheered their team as it played Ghana. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images In the end, Howard — at 35, the oldest United States player — did what he has always done. In his bright green uniform that glowed under the lights, he shouted and waved his hands, organizing the defense in front of him. He yelled at players to be in the right position, and turned on his force field. The team had lost Matt Besler and Jozy Altidore to injuries, but it hadn’t lost its leader on the field. “He’s our cheerleader and we rely on him to keep us together,” midfielder Michael Bradley said. “In big games, he comes through for us.” For the United States, which is struggling to find World Cup success, this game could not have been bigger: It marked the moment it was no longer an also-ran in Ghana’s shadow. Image Jozy Altidore being treated after straining his hamstring in the 21st minute. Credit Carlos Barria/Reuters When John Brooks scored the winning goal, Brooks collapsed to the ground, face first, as his teammates piled on and the fans in the stands chanted, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” At the other end of the field, Howard looked on, pumping his fist and smiling. His premonition before the game had turned out to be true. Several hours before the game, before he fell asleep for the entire second half of Germany’s victory over Portugal — that’s what happens when you’re the team’s old man — he said in one Twitter post: “I believe that we will win!” And after eight years of waiting, Howard finally got his wish: the American team, not Ghana, was the one to cast a spell.

Ghana
Tim Howard
US
Soccer
2014 World Cup
US Men's Soccer Team


Bullets, Not Beating, Killed Rookie Officer, Autopsy Finds

Abstract: The city medical examiner's office has ruled that a rookie police officer who was shot three times by a colleague last month outside a Bronx White Castle restaurant died from those bullet wounds and not from a beating he suffered moments before the shooting. The officer, Eric Hernandez, lost vast amounts of blood and died last week at St. Barnabas Hospital, 11 days after the Jan. 28 shooting. He was buried on Monday in his hometown, White Plains. At his funeral, Officer Hernandez was praised as a brave and benevolent officer, and police officials and union leaders, revolted by the ferocity of the attack on him inside the White Castle, had been suggesting that the beating he suffered might have caused his death. They were awaiting the autopsy results to see if murder or manslaughter charges could be brought against the men accused of attacking him. But the findings announced yesterday, that the beating was not a contributing medical factor in the death, seemed all but certain to close the door on that possibility. The autopsy found that two bullets hit Officer Hernandez in the right side of his abdomen, while a third pierced the outside of his right leg, said Ellen S. Borakove, a spokeswoman for Charles S. Hirsch, the chief medical examiner. Officer Hernandez died of complications of gunshot wounds to his torso and right leg, with injuries to blood vessels, she said. On Jan. 28 before dawn, Officer Hernandez stopped at the White Castle, at 1831 Webster Avenue, after visiting at least one local bar following his night shift at the 52nd Precinct. A confrontation began between the officer, who was in street clothes, and a group of men. After they kicked and punched him, Officer Hernandez crawled away. In the parking lot, the officer, apparently dazed from the beating and intoxicated, pulled his gun on a man he mistakenly believed to be one of his attackers. An officer responding to a 911 call about the fight, Alfredo Toro, shot Officer Hernandez three times after he failed to drop his weapon. A preliminary investigation indicated that Officer Toro, of the 46th Precinct, was justified in the shooting. Mark Jay Heller, the attorney for one of the men arrested in the attack, Edwin Rivera, 25, embraced the medical findings as "very significant" news. He said they would most likely insulate his client from further charges and serve as an antidote to city officials trying to "put the blame on the people inside the restaurant" and protect the city from a lawsuit. But Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said yesterday that regardless of the medical findings, "The cowards who assaulted Officer Hernandez are ultimately responsible for his death." Six men have been arrested in the attack and four of them have been indicted on charges of first-degree attempted gang assault, said Steven Reed, a spokesman for the Bronx District Attorney, Robert T. Johnson. In a written statement, Mr. Johnson said the autopsy results, along with evidence of any injuries that may have come from the beating, would "be presented to the grand jury for a final determination of charges." Officer Hernandez's father, Efrain Hernandez, said he felt that although the bullets might have killed his son, the chain reaction that led to his death began with the attack. "There would have been no shooting if there was no incident inside the White Castle," he said yesterday, speaking in the living room of his home in White Plains. "If he didn't get attacked, Eric would have walked out and gone home." Mr. Hernandez said that the family has been talking to lawyers about its legal options, but he was waiting to see how the case evolved in criminal court. Asked if he planned to sue the Police Department or the city, he said, "At this point we have not decided to sue anybody."

POLICE
WHITE CASTLE
ASSAULTS
NEW YORK CITY
BRONX (NYC)
KELLY RAYMOND W
HERNANDEZ ERIC
TORO ALFREDO
ATTACKS ON POLICE


Lottery Numbers

Abstract: Sept. 29, 2008 Midday New York Numbers — 005; Lucky Sum — 5 Midday New York Win 4 — 1639; Lucky Sum — 19 New York Numbers — 871; Lucky Sum — 16 New York Win 4 — 7968; Lucky Sum — 30 New York Take 5 — 14, 24, 26, 29, 32 New York Pick 10 — 3, 10, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 26, 35, 37, 51, 53, 54, 55, 59, 62, 64, 65, 75, 80 Midday New Jersey Pick 3 — 538 Midday New Jersey Pick 4 — 1440 New Jersey Pick 3 — 381 New Jersey Pick 4 — 4965 New Jersey Cash 5 — 9, 11, 12, 24, 26 New Jersey Pick-6 Lotto — 14, 19, 23, 33, 44, 46 Connecticut Midday 3 — 600 Connecticut Midday 4 — 1190 Connecticut Daily — 707 Connecticut Play 4 — 1204 Connecticut Cash 5 — 10, 13, 25, 28, 31 Sept. 28, 2008 New York Take 5 — 1, 8, 10, 16, 19 Connecticut Daily — 221 Connecticut Play 4 — 0974 Connecticut Cash 5 — 14, 17, 24, 25, 33


Taking Stock After Gene Patents Are Invalidated

Abstract: Many biotechnology stocks fell on Tuesday as investors struggled to understand the impact of a ruling that threw out parts of two gene patents and called into question thousands more. Stock market losses were muted, with two major indexes that track the shares of the industry falling by less than 1 percent each. In part, that was because biotechnology executives hastened to reassure their investors that the ruling would not necessarily undermine their businesses, at least in the short run. But the executives themselves were struggling on Tuesday to figure out what the long-term impact would be. Biotech companies spend billions every year trying to develop new tests and treatments based partly on genes they have isolated and patented. In a far-reaching ruling, Judge Robert W. Sweet anticipated a negative reaction from the industry. In a footnote of his 152-page ruling, he discounted fears that invalidating such patents would decimate the industry. Some executives and lawyers who were interviewed on Tuesday disagreed with the judge’s legal reasoning. They also said that the ruling, even in the worst case for them, would take years to have a significant effect. Eventually, if the judge’s reasoning is upheld on appeal, the invalidation of genetic patents could hit diagnostics companies, agricultural biotechnology companies and perhaps even traditional drug makers, though drugs are often protected by patents on their own chemical composition. But the industry is already moving to a period of somewhat less dependence on DNA patents for its sustenance. Diagnostic laboratories, for instance, are shifting from testing individual genes to testing multiple genes or even a person’s entire genome. When hundreds or thousands of genes are being tested at once, patents on each individual gene can become a hindrance to innovation rather than a spur. On Monday, Mr. Sweet, a United States district judge in Manhattan, ruled that parts of patents held by Myriad Genetics covering two breast cancer genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, were invalid. Myriad analyzes those genes in an expensive test that predicts whether a woman is at a high risk of getting breast or ovarian cancer . The plaintiffs in the case, which included various medical groups, said the patents on DNA were illegal and impeded access to the testing. The decision invalidating the gene patents stunned many lawyers who follow such issues. “It’s really quite a dramatic holding that would have the effect of invalidating many, many patents on which the biotechnology industry has invested considerable money,” said Rebecca S. Eisenberg, a law professor at the University of Michigan who has written widely on gene patents. The Genomics Law Report, an Internet journal, called the decision “radical and astonishing in its sweep.” It headlined its article, “Pigs Fly.” Although patents are not granted on things found in nature, the DNA being patented had long been considered a chemical that was isolated from, and different from, what was found in nature. But Judge Sweet ruled that the distinguishing feature of DNA is its information content, its conveyance of the genetic code. And in that regard, he wrote, the isolated DNA “is not markedly different from native DNA as it exists in nature.” The immediate impact will be limited in part because the decision, made in a district court, does not apply to gene patents other than the ones it considered, and its value as precedent for other courts is limited. Moreover, Myriad said Tuesday that it would appeal, and several lawyers said they expected the ruling to be overturned. Professor Eisenberg said “there isn’t a whole lot of doctrinal support” for considering DNA as information rather than as a chemical. Even before an appeal is decided, the landscape could change in a way that would render the Myriad case moot. A ruling is expected soon from the Supreme Court in the so-called Bilski case. That case does not directly concern gene patents — it is about a fight over a method of hedging risk in commodities trading — but it gives the Supreme Court a chance to set new standards on what is patentable. “We are still waiting, holding our breath for the Bilski case,” said Kari Stefansson, head of research at DeCode Genetics, which sells disease risk tests similar to those sold by Myriad. If Judge Sweet’s decision were upheld on appeal, the impact could be more far-reaching. The biggest impact would be on companies like Myriad and Athena Diagnostics that offer diagnostic tests based on genes. Some biotechnology investors and executives say that lack of patent protection for DNA could diminish investment and remove incentives to develop tests. That could slow the move toward so-called personalized medicine, in which genetic tests are used to determine which drugs are best for which patients. James P. Evans, a professor of genetics at the University of North Carolina, said that would not necessarily be the case. There is thriving competition in areas like testing for mutations that cause cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease , even though no company has exclusivity. “It’s quite demonstrable that in the diagnostic area, one does not need gene patents in order to see robust development of these tests,” he said.

Biotechnology
Myriad Genetics Inc
Inventions and Patents
DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)
Sweet Robert W
Genetics and Heredity
Decisions and Verdicts
Stocks and Bonds
Myriad Genetics Incorporated


Trade Agreements Clear Way for Industry Suits Against Government

Abstract: SAN ISIDRO, El Salvador — When a Central American gold rush brought a Canadian mining company here a few years ago, the company promised to stake a claim that would be as green as the lush hills. The copious amounts of water needed would come only from the rain, not from the nearby Rio Lempa that is this country’s lifeline, the company said. Cyanide, a toxic chemical used to extract gold embedded in rocks, would be dispersed naturally, dried by sunlight in vast double-lined pools. Several hundred jobs could be created here, in one of the country’s poorest regions. “No other mine in North America has gone to this level of environmental protection,” said Tom Shrake, the chief executive of the Canadian company, Pacific Rim , which is seeking to tap a vein that it says could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But when the government of El Salvador , facing mounting public concern over the consequences of mining, failed to grant the company the final permit it needed, Pacific Rim sought to extract a different kind of green: $77 million from the nation’s treasury as compensation for lost profits. Pacific Rim is suing the Salvadoran government in an international investment court , one of scores of cases in recent years in which frustrated oil , gas and mining investors, using provisions of trade agreements, have sought to recoup losses from mostly developing countries. Pacific Rim has cited as a precedent a landmark case from Mexico in 2000 in which the government was sued under the North American Free Trade Agreement and forced to pay a California company, Metalclad, $15.6 million in damages. The company sued after it said local authorities had thwarted its efforts to build a hazardous waste treatment plant despite assurances from the Mexican government that it would get the needed permits. Since then, environmental advocates say, corporations have increasingly taken nations to court under regional trade agreements. One of the biggest payouts occurred last year, when an arbitration panel awarded Chevron $700 million in a dispute with Ecuador over what it considered a delay in settling lawsuits over oil contracts, even as the company lost a much larger environmental ruling in Ecuador’s own judicial system. In another example, a Malaysian firm, MTD Equity, used provisions of an investment treaty between Malaysia and Chile to win a $10.8 million case against Chile in 2004 over a residential and commercial development that government authorities ended up opposing. The Pacific Rim case, now before a World Bank court in Washington, is the first of its kind to come under the Central America Free Trade Agreement that was approved in 2005, all sides in the dispute say. Though the company went to court to ensure the level playing field for foreign businesses that it says the treaty guarantees, the case has angered Salvadoran officials, who consider it an attack on the sovereignty of a nation still struggling to fortify its institutions nearly 20 years after a brutal civil war. “They are using the tribunal to dictate El Salvador’s environmental policies,” said Marcos Orellana, a lawyer for the Center for International Environmental Law in Washington, which has filed a brief supporting El Salvador. In the court hearing the case, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes , Latin American governments make up 9 percent of the court’s 155 members but about 55 percent of the cases, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning research group in Washington. The imbalance of cases in the region arises both from the bounty of natural resources there and political candidates who are making good on campaign promises to rein in foreign corporations or more closely examine their projects, the institute said. With gold prices at record highs , companies are scouring the earth for every last deposit, and a run of new mines in Central America, particularly in Guatemala and Honduras, as well as a legacy of contamination from old ones is making the region a focal point for the fight. “Past experience with mining companies has demonstrated to us that the country has been, in the past, not very careful in verifying that these projects were developed within acceptable parameters for the environment and our water resources,” said El Salvador’s attorney general, Benjamín Pleités Mazzini. Pacific Rim began exploring an existing mine just north of San Isidro at El Dorado in 2002 and eventually discovered a new, potentially lucrative vein. Right-leaning governments initially appeared on course to grant the mine final approval but stalled amid signs that public sentiment was turning against the project. By 2005, community members who rely on tributaries of the Rio Lempa for their farms complained that the water was drying up during the exploration phase. Mr. Shrake said that river water was used only briefly and that the company’s activities did not account for the problem. The left-leaning government now in power has refused to sign off on the project. Because Canada is not a party to Cafta, Pacific Rim filed suit in 2009 through a United States subsidiary. Conflict has shadowed the case. Heated demonstrations have occurred, as both sides claim they have the will of the people. Pacific Rim says some of its employees have been threatened, while those on the other side say several mining opponents have been killed or gone missing in the past few years. This month, the body of a university student who disappeared while posting antimining fliers was found. Local investigators have chalked up the cases to common crime in a region with its share of gang and other violence, but residents say the episodes have not been thoroughly investigated and hearken back to the darkest chapters of the war. “People are worried about the lack of capacity to monitor these mines,” said Andrés McKinley, former El Salvador director for Oxfam America, the nongovernmental organization that has taken the lead in organizing opposition to mining here. “People need jobs, but not jobs at any cost.” El Salvador’s environment, he said, is fragile. It has the second-worst deforestation in the hemisphere, after Haiti, and 96 percent of its surface water is contaminated, mostly with agricultural and industrial runoff, he said. “Can this country sustain an industry in mining?” Mr. McKinley said. It appears El Salvador, the only country in Central America to experience a decline in foreign investment last year, was preparing to answer yes. It has issued 29 licenses for mining exploration since 1999. But Mr. Pleités, the attorney general, suggested new permits would not be issued until investors, environmental groups, outside experts and others came together to write a plan to more closely regulate the industry. Mr. Shrake countered that the government stands to scare off investors if it cannot even approve a project as environmentally clean as Pacific Rim has sought to make it. “We raised the bar for environmental protection,” he said, touring the remnants of the ranch where the gold would be tapped. Neto Mendez Murillo, 49, a driver for Pacific Rim, said he and other local residents are counting on the final approval of the mine for badly needed jobs. The only options for work now, he said, are low-paying jobs in the corn, bean and sugar cane fields, or in the United States. “We are waiting for the gold jobs to change our lives,” he said. But Francisco Pineda, a farmer who has led raucous protests against the mine, jumping on machinery at one rally, said he doubted the company could contain all the cyanide it would use. “We don’t believe what they say,” he said. “The river is too important for us, and they already tampered with it. We are fighting for survival here.”

El Salvador
Pacific Rim Mining Corporation
Mines and Mining
International Trade and World Market
Suits and Litigation


Jerzy Kluger, Pope John Paul II’s Jewish Confidant, Dies at 90

Abstract: For a half-century, Jerzy Kluger refused to set foot in Poland, where most of his family, including his mother and sister, had died in Nazi death camps. Then, in 1989, an old friend begged him to do an errand. The friend was Pope John Paul II , and he asked Mr. Kluger — a Jew and a businessman who died on Dec. 31 at 90 — to take a letter to Wadowice, the town in southern Poland where both men had grown up. John Paul wanted to bless a plaque that was to be placed where the town’s synagogue, destroyed by the Nazis, had stood. Mr. Kluger, after hard thought, agreed. Traveling from his home in Rome, he arrived to attend the plaque’s dedication in Wadowice and, speaking to a crowd, read a letter bearing a papal seal that had not been used on a personal document in 400 years. “That trip was not easy for him,” John Paul wrote. It was not the only task Mr. Kluger did for the pope. More than a trusted friend who played table tennis with John Paul, took long walks with him and traded stories of the old days, Mr. Kluger was a sounding board and a go-between for him as the pope pushed the Roman Catholic Church to heal relations with Jews. When John Paul was recovering from an assassination attempt in 1981, he asked Mr. Kluger to help the Vatican explore the possibility of opening, for the first time, diplomatic relations with Israel. Mr. Kluger set up meetings and arranged for the pope to send Jewish New Year’s greetings to Israel’s president. Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, used Mr. Kluger as a channel to Rome. In 1994, those ties were established , ending centuries of Catholic-Jewish estrangement. Mr. Kluger became the pope’s confidant as well on Jewish sensibilities, and he was not afraid to disagree with his friend. He was quoted as being sharply critical when the pope met the Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat. Mr. Kluger’s death, in Rome, was announced by the archbishop of Krakow, Poland. He had been treated for Alzheimer’s disease, his wife, Irene, told The Associated Press. Mr. Kluger, who was called Jurek as a boy, met John Paul, then Karol Wojtyla and nicknamed Lolek, before they were 5. They skied, hiked and played sports together; young Karol played goalie on Wadowice’s Jewish soccer team. They helped each other with homework, made devilish fun of teachers and visited each other’s homes almost daily. More important, they entered each other’s places of worship in the shared belief that every person is a child of God. Mr. Kluger would later pray with cardinals. Not that Wadowice was free of prejudice in the 1920s. In his 1997 book, “Man of the Century: The Life and Times of John Paul II,” Jonathan Kwitny wrote that the cry “Get the Jew!” was sometimes heard on the town’s soccer field. Catholic leaders advocated boycotts of Jewish businesses. Anti-Jewish comments were common enough that Mr. Kluger remembered the fierceness with which the future pope denounced them. John Paul went on to cite his early friendships with Mr. Kluger and other Jews as the wellspring of his efforts to improve Catholic-Jewish relations. The first pope to visit a synagogue, he repudiated the ancient idea that Jews had killed Jesus, and he affirmed that the Christian revelation had grown from Jewish Scripture. He called Jews “our elder brothers.” After John Paul became pope in 1978, he granted his first audience to Mr. Kluger and his family. “Anti-Semitism,” the pope wrote in 1994, “is a great sin against humanity.” Jerzy Kluger was born in Krakow in 1921. He grew up in Wadowice, then a town of 10,000 Catholics and 2,000 Jews. His father, Wilhelm, a prosperous lawyer and the president of the Jewish community, mixed Jewish and secular identities. He was religiously observant, lighting Sabbath candles and walking to the synagogue. But he refused to let his family speak Yiddish and sent his children to public, not religious, schools. Karol Wojtyla enjoyed listening to Wilhelm’s string quartet, composed of two Catholics and two Jews. The young Mr. Kluger loved to hear his friend’s father tell tales of Polish kings and castles in front of his coal -fired stove. He did not love his grandmother’s repeated question: “Why can’t you be more like Lolek?” World War II destroyed this world. Jerzy and Wilhelm were captured by the Russians, then fought with the Allies. John Paul risked his life attending an underground seminary as priests he admired were killed with the Jews. The friends lost touch. Mr. Kluger studied engineering in England; married Irene White, a Catholic; and settled in Rome. In 1965, he heard a news report about a Polish archbishop named Wojtyla speaking at the Second Vatican Council. He left a phone message, but thought an archbishop was too important to respond. Lolek called right back. In addition to his wife, Mr. Kluger is survived by his daughter, Linda Kluger; a granddaughter; and two great-grandchildren. His granddaughter was baptized by the pope. Mr. Kluger was with John Paul at important moments. In 1994, he stood next to him at the ceremony welcoming the first Israeli ambassador to the Holy See. Before his appendectomy in 1996, the pope told the nursing staff that he had one more task before his surgery: “I must write Jurek.” The last picture taken of the pope dining before his death in 2005 was with Mr. Kluger. Both hard of hearing, they shouted at each other. Mr. Kluger said his renewed friendship with his boyhood chum had changed his life. “I became somebody,” he said. “I was nobody before.”

John Paul II
Kluger Jerzy
Jews and Judaism
Deaths (Obituaries)