Children and Guns: The Hidden Toll

Abstract: The .45-caliber pistol that killed Lucas Heagren, 3, on Memorial Day last year at his Ohio home had been temporarily hidden under the couch by his father. But Lucas found it and shot himself through the right eye. “It’s bad,” his mother told the 911 dispatcher. “It’s really bad.” A few days later in Georgia, Cassie Culpepper, 11, was riding in the back of a pickup with her 12-year-old brother and two other children. Her brother started playing with a pistol his father had lent him to scare coyotes. Believing he had removed all the bullets, he pointed the pistol at his sister and squeezed the trigger. It fired, and blood poured from Cassie’s mouth. Just a few weeks earlier, in Houston, a group of youths found a Glock pistol in an apartment closet while searching for snack money. A 15-year-old boy was handling the gun when it went off. Alex Whitfield, who had just turned 11, was struck. A relative found the bullet in his ashes from the funeral home. Cases like these are among the most gut-wrenching of gun deaths. Children shot accidentally — usually by other children — are collateral casualties of the accessibility of guns in America, their deaths all the more devastating for being eminently preventable. They die in the households of police officers and drug dealers, in broken homes and close-knit families, on rural farms and in city apartments. Some adults whose guns were used had tried to store them safely; others were grossly negligent. Still others pulled the trigger themselves, accidentally fracturing their own families while cleaning a pistol or hunting. And there are far more of these innocent victims than official records show. A New York Times review of hundreds of child firearm deaths found that accidental shootings occurred roughly twice as often as the records indicate, because of idiosyncrasies in how such deaths are classified by the authorities. The killings of Lucas, Cassie and Alex, for instance, were not recorded as accidents. Nor were more than half of the 259 accidental firearm deaths of children under age 15 identified by The Times in eight states where records were available. As a result, scores of accidental killings are not reflected in the official statistics that have framed the debate over how to protect children from guns. The National Rifle Association cited the lower official numbers this year in a fact sheet opposing “safe storage” laws, saying children were more likely to be killed by falls, poisoning or environmental factors — an incorrect assertion if the actual number of accidental firearm deaths is significantly higher. In all, fewer than 20 states have enacted laws to hold adults criminally liable if they fail to store guns safely, enabling children to access them. Legislative and other efforts to promote the development of childproof weapons using “smart gun” technology have similarly stalled. Technical issues have been an obstacle, but so have N.R.A. arguments that the problem is relatively insignificant and the technology unneeded. Because of maneuvering in Congress by the gun lobby and its allies, firearms have also been exempted from regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission since its inception. Even with a proper count, intentional shooting deaths of children — including gang shootings and murder-suicides by family members — far exceed accidental gun deaths. But accidents, more than the other firearm-related deaths, come with endless hypotheticals about what could have been done differently. The rifle association’s lobbying arm recently posted on its Web site a claim that adult criminals who mishandle firearms — as opposed to law-abiding gun owners — are responsible for most fatal accidents involving children. But The Times’s review found that a vast majority of cases revolved around children’s access to firearms, with the shooting either self-inflicted or done by another child. Image Jodi Sandoval's 14-year-old son, Noah McGuire, was accidentally killed last year with a handgun left accessible by the grandfather of a friend. Credit Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times A common theme in the cases examined by The Times, in fact, was the almost magnetic attraction of firearms among boys. In all but a handful of instances, the shooter was male. Boys also accounted for more than 80 percent of the victims. Time and again, boys could not resist handling a gun, disregarding repeated warnings by adults and, sometimes, their own sense that they were doing something wrong. When Joshua Skorczewski, 11, took an unloaded 20-gauge shotgun out of the family gun cabinet in western Minnesota on July 28, 2008, it was because he was excited about going to a gun safety class that night and wanted to practice. But for reasons that he later struggled to explain to the police, Joshua loaded a single shell into the gun and pulled the hammer back. He decided he should put the gun back, but his finger slipped. It fired, killing his 12-year-old sister, Natasha, who was standing in the kitchen with him. When his mother called from work to check on them, a shaken Joshua told her he had just called 911: “Mom, I shot Tasha.” Christina Wenzel, the mother of Alex Whitfield, had tried to make sure he did not visit anyone’s house if guns were present. What she did not know, when Alex went to his father’s apartment last April, was that a family member had stored three loaded guns there. “I always thought I had Alex protected from being killed by another child by a gun that was not secured,” Ms. Wenzel said. “Unfortunately, I was mistaken.” Undercounting Deaths Compiling a complete census of accidental gun deaths of children is difficult, because most states do not consider death certificate data a matter of public record. In a handful of states, however, the information is publicly available. Using these death records as a guide, along with hundreds of medical examiner and coroner reports and police investigative files, The Times sought to identify every accidental firearm death of a child age 14 and under in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio dating to 1999, and in California to 2007. Records were also obtained from several county medical examiners’ offices in Florida, Illinois and Texas. The goal, in the end, was an in-depth portrait of accidental firearm deaths of children, one that would shed light on how such killings occur and might be prevented. In all, The Times cataloged 259 gun accidents that killed children ages 14 and younger. The youngest was just 9 months old, shot in his crib. In four of the five states — California, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio — The Times identified roughly twice as many accidental killings as were tallied in the corresponding federal data. In the fifth, Minnesota, there were 50 percent more accidental gun deaths. (The Times excluded some fatal shootings, like pellet gun accidents, that are normally included in the federal statistics.) The undercount stems from the peculiarities by which medical examiners and coroners make their “manner of death” rulings. These pronouncements, along with other information entered on death certificates, are the basis for the nation’s mortality statistics, which are assembled by the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Choosing among five options — homicide, accidental, suicide, natural or undetermined — most medical examiners and coroners simply call any death in which one person shoots another a homicide. “A homicide just means they died at the hands of another,” said Dr. Randy L. Hanzlick, the chief medical examiner for Fulton County, Ga. “It doesn’t really connote there’s an intent to kill.” These rulings can be wildly inconsistent. In Bexar County, Tex., for example, the medical examiner’s office issued a finding of homicide in the death of William Reddick, a 9-month-old who was accidentally killed on May 17, 1999, when his 2-year-old brother opened a dresser drawer while in the crib with him, grabbed a pistol and pulled the trigger. But the next year, when Kyle Bedford, 2, was killed by his 5-year-old brother, who had found a gun on a closet shelf, the same office classified the death as an accident. Image Lucas Heagren with his father, Joshua, on Christmas 2011, holding a .22 rifle that was a present. The family photograph was evidence in Mr. Heagren’s negligent homicide trial after Lucas shot himself. Even self-inflicted shootings that are clearly accidental, like that of Lucas Heagren in Ohio, can wind up classified as homicides. Lucas’s father, Joshua Heagren, had tried to teach the 3-year-old to respect firearms. The boy had gotten a .22 rifle for Christmas, and his father showed him how to fire it. But he also warned him to handle it only when an adult was present. “He never even attempted to touch guns when Josh wasn’t around,” Lucas’s mother, Kaitlin Campbell, testified at Mr. Heagren’s trial, where he was convicted of negligent homicide and endangering children. “He knew.” On the day of the accident, Mr. Heagren had been planning to go out shooting, so he took his pistol from the bedroom, where he normally kept it in a holster between the mattress and the box spring, according to his court testimony. When Ms. Campbell and Lucas returned from buying an inflatable swimming pool, Mr. Heagren slid his gun under the couch before heading outside to set up the pool. At some point, with his mother distracted by her phone a few steps away, Lucas discovered the gun, grabbed the butt and squeezed the trigger with his thumbs, according to the authorities. “Our thought process was, parents have a duty to keep their child safe,” said Dr. Lisa Kohler, the Summit County medical examiner, whose office classified the case as a homicide. “Leaving a loaded weapon in an area where the child can easily access it is neglect in our mind. Therefore parents have failed to keep a child safe, and therefore it’s a homicide.” Dr. Kohler said that because of the neglect issue, her office would almost never classify a firearm-related death as accidental, but added, “Different jurisdictions are going to handle things differently.” Bob Anderson, the chief of the mortality statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, explained that the federal data on firearm deaths are “only as good as the information that comes in.” “I try to tell people when they look at the accidental data, particularly for children, you have to recognize it’s an underestimate,” he said. A few public health researchers have noted the undercount in the past, based on their own academic studies. (One study found the opposite phenomenon — an overcount — among fatal gun accidents involving adults because of a different quirk in the data.) To get more accurate information about firearm deaths, researchers have pushed for the expansion of the National Violent Death Reporting System. The effort first started in the 1990s at the C.D.C. but was shut down shortly afterward when Congress, at the urging of the N.R.A., blocked firearms-related research at the centers. The project was revived in 2002 after researchers decided to expand its scope beyond guns, but it is up and running in only 18 states. President Obama has called for increased financing for the program, part of a package of gun-related proposals made after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., last December. Another important aspect of firearm accidents is that a vast majority of victims do not die. Tracking these injuries nationally, however, is arguably just as problematic as tallying fatalities, according to public health researchers. In fact, national figures often cited from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site are an estimate, projected from a sampling taken from hospital emergency departments. Nevertheless, in 2011, the most recent year with available data, the agency estimated that there were 847 unintentional nonfatal firearm injuries among children 14 and under. More concrete are actual counts of emergency department visits, which are available in a small number of states. In North Carolina, for instance, there were more than 120 such visits for nonfatal gun accidents among children 17 and under in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available. Image Noah McGuire, 14, was shot by a friend who thought the gun was unloaded. A Failed Lock On a hot and humid August afternoon last year in Hinesville, Ga., Matthew Underhill, a staff sergeant in the Army, was mowing the lawn while his wife, Tessa, was in the house watching television with their 5-year-old son, Matthew. Their other son, Tristan, 2, was scampering down a hallway toward the bedrooms. It had been a good day for Tristan. He had used the potty for the first time. He and his mother had danced a little jig. Down the hall, Tristan entered the bedroom where his father had been staying because of quarrels with his wife. She had chided her husband in the past for forgetting to safely store his .45-caliber handgun. But he had recently put a lock on his door to keep out his wife and children. He thought he had locked the door before going out to cut the grass. The lock, though, had failed to catch. Tristan found the loaded gun under the pillow on his father’s bed. He pointed it at his own forehead and pulled the trigger. Hearing the gunshot, Sergeant Underhill sprinted inside to find Tristan face down on the bed, the gun beneath him. When he called 911, the sergeant was screaming so hysterically that the dispatcher initially mistook him for a woman. “My 2-year-old just shot himself in the head,” he said breathlessly. “He’s dead.” Tristan’s death underscored several themes running through the cases examined by The Times. While about 60 percent of the accidental firearm deaths identified by The Times involved handguns as opposed to long guns, that number was much higher — more than 85 percent — when the victims were very young, under the age of 6. In fact, the average handgun victim was several years younger than long gun victims: between 7 and 8, compared with almost 11. Over all, the largest number of deaths came at the upper end of the age range, with ages 13 and 14 being most common — not necessarily surprising, given that parents generally allow adolescents greater access to guns. But the third-most common age was 3 (tied with 12), a particularly vulnerable age, when children are curious and old enough to manipulate a firearm but ignorant of the dangers. About a quarter of the victims shot themselves, with younger children again especially susceptible. More than half of the self-inflicted shootings involved children 5 or under; the most common age was 3. About half of the accidents took place inside the child’s home. A third, however, occurred at the house of a friend or a relative, pointing to a potential vulnerability if safe-storage laws apply only to households with children, as in North Carolina. In opposing safe-storage laws, some gun rights advocates have argued that a majority of accidental shootings of children are committed by adults with criminal backgrounds. The Times’s review found that was not the case — children were most often the shooters — and that the families involved came from all walks of life. On Dec. 1, 2006, Beth Dwyer was getting her two boys, ages 5 and 8, ready for school. Her husband, Daron, the minister of music at the family’s church in Gastonia, N.C., was not home because he had enrolled in a seminary several hours away. The night before, Ms. Dwyer had taken the family’s .25-caliber handgun from the top drawer of a dresser and placed it next to her on the bed. In the morning, she forgot to put it away. Her 8-year-old found the gun. He initially tried to cock it and pulled the trigger, pointing the gun at the bathroom floor, but nothing happened, according to the medical examiner’s report. Evidently thinking the gun was empty, he tried again, pointing the gun at his brother, Matthew, who was crouched on the bathroom counter, having just finished brushing his teeth. This time, with a live round in the chamber, the gun went off, and Matthew toppled to the floor, shot through the forehead. Even in accidental shootings where criminals were in some way involved, they usually were not the ones pulling the trigger. Rather, they — like many law-abiding adults in these cases — simply left a gun unsecured. As a felon, Anthony Wise was not supposed to have a firearm. But he was able to buy a .38 Special revolver on the street for $30. He had it in his ex-girlfriend’s apartment in Venice, Ill., on Jan. 29, 2007, when he left it next to a computer in the living room and went to another room. Within minutes, a 4-year-old boy, one of several small children in the apartment, picked up the gun and pointed it at his 2-year-old cousin, Timberlyn Terrell. The gun fired. The boy later told an investigator what happened next. Image Matthew Dwyer, 5, was shot by his brother with a pistol his mother had left out. “Blood came out of her forehead,” the boy said, according to a transcript of the interview. He then said he did not want to talk about it anymore and asked for “my mama.” Timberlyn died. Mr. Wise was convicted of felony firearm possession, but his 10-year federal prison sentence was based in part on the judge’s determination that he had also endangered a child with his negligence. “Wise would have been a felon in possession even had he possessed the gun in a more responsible way — say, if he had kept it unloaded in a locked cabinet, or if he had kept it unloaded with a trigger lock,” an appellate judge wrote in rejecting his bid for leniency. “More than likely, though, responsible possession would not have endangered the lives of children.” Safety vs. Self-Defense The impact of the undercount of accidental gun deaths emerges in stark relief in the statehouse battles over gun-storage laws. In state after state and often with considerable success, gun rights groups have cited the federal numbers as proof that the problem is nearly inconsequential and that storage laws are unnecessary. Gun Owners of America says on its Web site that children are “130 percent more likely to die from choking on their dinner” than from accidental shootings. In February 2012, the rifle association issued a member alert about a proposed safe-storage law in Washington State, arguing that shootings are “at the bottom of the list of causes of accidental harm to children.” The group accused State Senator Adam Kline, who introduced the measure, of being interested only in “making life miserable for law-abiding gun owners.” The legislation never made it out of committee. Under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, in fact, gun accidents were the ninth-leading cause of unintentional deaths among children ages 1 to 14 in 2010. (The agency reported 62 such killings that year.) If the actual numbers are, in fact, roughly double, however, gun accidents would rise into the top five or six. Gun rights groups have certainly called on gun owners to safely store their firearms. The National Shooting Sports Foundation says that it has distributed 36 million free firearm safety kits and that manufacturers have shipped 60 million locks with guns sold since 1998. But the groups argue that requiring gun owners to lock up their weapons could make it harder to use them for self-protection. The rifle association and its allies also often note that studies on the impact of safe-storage laws have found mixed results. But those studies are based on the flawed government statistics. “When we’re evaluating child access laws, we’re using total trash data,” said Catherine Barber, a researcher at the Injury Control Research Center of the Harvard School of Public Health. Getting a definitive count of the number of states with a safe-storage law is difficult, but The Times identified only 18, using information from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and researchers who have studied the laws. And in most of those states, charges can be brought only if the child uses the weapon in a threatening manner, injures someone with it or displays it in public. Even so, in one state, North Carolina, where the law is narrowly drawn to apply only to adults with minors living at home, the authorities charged about 150 people between June 2006 and June 2011, an analysis of court records shows. Jodi Sandoval of Ohio discovered the limits of her state’s laws after her 14-year-old son, Noah McGuire, was accidentally killed on July 5, 2012, in a suburb of Columbus. Image Tristan Underhill, 2, found a loaded gun under the pillow on his father’s bed. Noah had slept over at the home of his close friend Levi Reed, who lived with his grandparents. In the morning, with no adults around, the boys went looking for a lighter to set off some fireworks. Instead, they found a .45-caliber handgun behind a television in a bedroom, one of three guns that Levi’s grandfather later told the police he had kept there for protection. Though his grandfather had always admonished him never to handle the weapons, Levi, 14, removed the magazine, pointed the gun at his friend and pulled the trigger. He did not realize that a round had remained in the chamber. Levi was recently sentenced in juvenile court to 12 months of probation for reckless homicide, a felony. Ms. Sandoval strongly opposed the prosecution, telling the court at Levi’s sentencing that the adults who failed to properly secure the gun were the ones who should be punished. But there is no safe-storage law in Ohio. “There are no accidents,” Ms. Sandoval said. “There are simply irresponsible, stubborn, cowardly adults unwilling to stand up against the gun lobby and those who support it.” A safe-storage bill was introduced in the Ohio legislature in February, prompted by a shooting that killed three students at a high school in suburban Cleveland. But the measure, which would prohibit storing a firearm in a residence in a place readily accessible to a child, has encountered skepticism from the Republicans who control the legislature. “The tenor was, somebody breaks in, do I have time enough to get to my gun?” said State Representative Bill Patmon, a Democrat who introduced the bill. A similar measure introduced in Louisiana this year also went nowhere. The N.R.A. has long argued that better education is the key to preventing gun accidents, citing its Eddie Eagle GunSafe program, which teaches children as young as 3 that if they see a gun, they should “stop, don’t touch, leave the area and tell an adult.” The association, which did not respond to a request for comment, says its program has reached more than 26 million children in all 50 states and should be credited for the deep decline in accidental gun deaths shown in federal statistics dating to the mid-1980s. Beyond the unreliability of the federal data, public health experts have disputed the N.R.A.’s claims, pointing to other potential explanations for the decline, including improvements in emergency medical care, along with data showing fewer households with firearms. They also highlight research indicating that admonishing children to stay away from guns is often ineffective. “I have no problem with that message, and I would hope every child in America could follow it,” said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, a co-author of a study published in 2001 in the journal Pediatrics. “I just know that they won’t.” As part of Dr. Kellermann’s study, researchers watched through a one-way mirror as pairs of boys ages 8 to 12 were left alone in an examination room at a clinic in Atlanta. Unknown to the children, an inoperative .38-caliber handgun was concealed in a cabinet drawer. Playing and exploring over the next 15 minutes, one boy after another — three-quarters of the 64 children — found the gun. Two-thirds handled it, and one-third actually pulled the trigger. Just one child went to tell an adult about the gun, and he was teased by his peers for it. More than 90 percent of the boys said they had had some gun safety instruction. Other research has found that simply having a firearm in the household is correlated with an increased risk of accidental shooting death. In one study, published in 2003 in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, the risk was more than three times as high for one gun, and almost four times as high for more than one. As a solution, many behavioral researchers advocate greater emphasis on child-proofing firearms, along with safe-storage laws. But requiring, or even encouraging, efforts to introduce “smart gun” technology remains unpopular with the gun lobby, which has worked to undermine such research and attempts to regulate firearms as a dangerous consumer product. Image Alex Whitfield, 11, was killed with a gun found in his father’s apartment. In 2000, after President Bill Clinton proposed spending $10 million to help develop a gun that could be fired only by its owner, the rifle association ran derisory radio ads. One, called “Mad Scientist,” featured a Clinton impersonator and a bumbling scientist “deep in the White House laboratory,” trying in vain to get the new technology to work. A commercially successful smart gun has, in fact, proved difficult to develop. Hurdles include creating fail-safe user-recognition technology, integrating delicate electronic components that can withstand shock from repeated firings, and allaying concerns of manufacturers fearful of liability if a supposedly safe gun was to fail. Technologies exist, but a lack of research financing has hobbled their progress to the market, as have questions about whether consumers would actually want them. The opposition from gun rights advocates has certainly not helped. Some gun control advocates, meanwhile, fear that such technologies would lead to greater acceptance of firearms in the home. In the mid-2000s, an Australian defense technology company called Metal Storm teamed with the gun maker Taurus International Manufacturing and the New Jersey Institute of Technology to develop a gun in the United States that would have fired only when gripped by its owner. New Jersey became the first state to require that handguns use smart-gun technology within three years after it is deemed safe and commercially available. But Taurus backed out within a few months, citing competing priorities, and the project fell apart. Charles Vehlow, Metal Storm’s chief executive at the time, said that while he did not know exactly what pressures Taurus faced, there was a general wariness of smart-gun efforts among manufacturers and pro-gun groups. “There was no question that the N.R.A. was very sensitive and was aware of what we were doing,” he said. The Colt’s Manufacturing Company and Smith & Wesson experienced a backlash against their own smart-gun programs, which were abandoned amid financial problems caused, in part, by boycotts from gun groups and others in the industry. So unpopular was the whole smart-gun concept that Colt’s Manufacturing later could not even find a buyer for its patents, said Carlton Chen, a former lawyer for the company. “I think people looked at Colt’s, they looked at the boycott and they looked at Smith & Wesson, and they thought, ‘Do we really want to go it alone?’ ” Mr. Chen said. “Gun companies have to be fairly careful about what they do.” Gun rights lobbyists have also helped keep firearms and ammunition beyond the reach of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has the power to regulate other products that are dangerous to children. The N.R.A. argues that the commission would provide a back door for gun control advocates to restrict the manufacture of firearms. Proponents of regulation say guns pose too great a hazard to exclude them from scrutiny. “We know in the world of injury control that designing safer products is often the most efficient way to reduce tragedies,” said Dr. Kellermann, the co-author of the boys-and-guns study, who is a dean at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. “Why, if we have childproof aspirin bottles, don’t we have childproof guns?” A Complex Relationship A few months ago, Daron Dwyer took his 14-year-old son shooting for the first time, six years after he accidentally killed his brother with the gun he found in his parents’ North Carolina bedroom. Mr. Dwyer had removed all the guns from the house, sending them to his father. But about a year ago, his son started asking if he could learn to shoot. Mr. Dwyer said he would think about it. It was a question that Mr. Dwyer, who now works as a fitness director at a Y.M.C.A., knew would come. Relatives would often go shooting together during family gatherings. His son was fascinated by all things military. Guns were simply a part of life where they were from. “In my context, there’s a part of a young man’s growing-up experience that includes exposure to firearms,” Mr. Dwyer said. “That’s one of the responsibilities, like learning how to drive a car.” Video Noah McGuire, 14, was accidentally shot by his friend, with a gun that had been stashed behind a television. Mr. Dwyer also saw an opportunity for forgiveness. “It’s kind of a tangible expression of the reality of ‘I do not hold this against you,’ ” he said. So, alone in the Tennessee woods with his son this past spring, Mr. Dwyer watched him fire a .22 rifle a few times, and a 12-gauge shotgun. In the shattering of the stillness of the forest clearing, both sensed the import of the moment. “I’m a quietly emotional person usually,” Mr. Dwyer said. “And so I didn’t burst into tears or anything, but inside that’s exactly what it was, mostly in the sense of me wanting him to realize this whole thing of forgiveness, to really feel the impact of the weight lifted, which I think he did.” Mr. Dwyer’s feelings on guns today are complicated. He still firmly believes in “the right for people to defend themselves.” At the same time, he said: “It is also right to protect children from danger. Those are things you have to hold in tension.” Under North Carolina law, his wife could have been charged for failing to keep the gun that killed their younger son stored safely. But she was not. Mr. Dwyer described her mistake as a momentary mental lapse, not blatant negligence. And he said that while he agreed with the law in principle, he also had sympathy for the objections to it. “For defense at night,” he said, “I don’t think you should have to have a lock on it because you’re going to have to access it quickly.” The deep hold that guns have on American culture also emerges in interviews with several other parents who lost children to firearms accidents. In the summer of 2009, Joshua Skorczewski finally completed the gun safety classes he had been planning to attend a year before, the night he accidentally killed his sister in Minnesota. His parents thought that it would be good for him to be schooled on safety, that the training would be helpful, “so he would not be afraid of guns,” said his mother, Wendy Skorczewski. Ms. Skorczewski had once planned to go through the classes too, but later decided against it. “I don’t want nothing to do with them anymore,” she said. For two years after Joshua went through the training, the family’s rifles and shotguns remained locked away. Joshua and his father returned to bowhunting, but it was not until 2011 that they took out the shotguns again to hunt pheasants. Ms. Skorczewski explained that in her part of the country, hunting is “in your blood.” She knew she could not ask her husband to get rid of his guns. He needs the escape that hunting provides, she said: “You got to have something to do in your life other than work.” Tessa Underhill, whose son Tristan was killed last year in Georgia, has also struggled over where to draw the line. As a former corrections officer and Army veteran, she is no stranger to firearms. She used to enjoy going out shooting. Now she is finished with guns, refusing to allow them in her house. “My child living is more important to me than somebody stealing my flat screen,” she said. She knows, however, that her husband, whom she is in the process of divorcing, still has a rifle. Her other son, Matthew, now 6, is therefore still exposed to firearms. When asked if she would want Matthew to go shooting with his father one day or be a gun owner himself, she paused. “That’s a hard question,” she said. “I know that’s something men do, that fathers and sons do.” “You need to know how to use one,” she added. “Do I want him to have a gun case full of guns? If he keeps them unloaded and is safe about it.”

Children
Guns
Legislation
Gun Control
Accidents and Safety
NRA
Fatalities,casualties


Program to Cover Major Illnesses Is Extended

Abstract: A special health insurance program for people with cancer, heart disease and other serious illnesses will be extended for two additional months, through March, so patients can continue treatment while they search for other coverage, the Obama administration said Tuesday. About 30,000 people are now in the program, known as the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan. The program, which is essentially a high-risk pool sponsored by the federal government, was to have ended on Dec. 31. Congress had assumed that it would no longer be needed because private insurers would have to accept all applicants and could not charge higher premiums because of a medical condition or history. But chaos in the federal health insurance exchange frustrated many people trying to shop and sign up in October and November. So the Obama administration decided on Dec. 12 to extend the program through January. With some people still having difficulty using the federal exchange and some state-run marketplaces, federal officials said Tuesday that the program would continue until March 31, the last day of the open-enrollment period for people seeking coverage under the Affordable Care Act. To avoid a gap in coverage, consumers need to enroll in a new plan by March 15, the deadline for coverage that takes effect on April 1. Steven C. Weiss, a spokesman for the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, welcomed the action by the administration. The extension, he said, gives extra time to cancer patients and others who had no health insurance options before they enrolled in the high-risk pool. When the pool started in the summer of 2010, the administration predicted that up to 400,000 people would enroll. Since then, the program has served about 135,000 people. The cost of their claims far exceeded White House estimates, exhausting most of the $5 billion provided by Congress. In February 2013, with funds running low, the federal high-risk pool announced that it was suspending the acceptance of new applications. On Tuesday, the administration posted a notice on a government website saying that the high-risk pool would be available through March to people already enrolled.

Health Insurance
Cancer
American Cancer Society
Barack Obama
Obamacare,Affordable Care Act


For HSBC, Questions of Vitality

Abstract: LONDON — Through more than a year of giant bailouts and bankruptcies, HSBC was one of the few big banks to emerge with its reputation largely intact. HSBC, the global financial giant, did bet on subprime mortgages — and lost. But it nonetheless managed to maintain a robust market value compared with its diminished peers, lending it an aura of unrivaled durability. So much so that during a recent parliamentary debate in Britain, where HSBC is based, an opposition politician scorned the government’s borrowing policies by asserting that Britain’s creditworthiness had fallen behind that of HSBC. Now, as the bank faces a sharp slowdown in the emerging markets where it earns the bulk of its profit, many investors are questioning HSBC’s ability to maintain this exalted standing. Last week, HSBC shares listed in London sank more than 17 percent, hit by several analysts’ reports contending that the bank would be required to raise money or to cut its dividend sharply. On Monday, HSBC shares in Hong Kong fell 3.3 percent, after falling more than 9 percent late last week. In addition, there was the acknowledgment that HSBC might have lost the $1 billion it had invested with Bernard L. Madoff, the New York money manager who authorities say has confessed to running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme . As banks throughout the world face uncertain futures amid the worst financial crisis since the Depression, HSBC — which spans the globe from its original home in Hong Kong to the Middle East, Latin America and North America — offered a vivid counterpoint. Its share price outpaced the main indexes and still trades near its book value. Its assets are growing, with the $2.3 trillion on its books expected to grow by almost 20 percent this year. Not only has the bank spurned government money, it has been — at least so far — one of the few financial institutions of size not to be required to raise capital. But with the recent drop in its shares, HSBC’s critics are raising questions about the bank’s globe-girdling strategy, particularly its insistence on sticking with its struggling consumer finance unit in the United States. HSBC gets three-quarters of its profit from emerging markets, which have underpinned its recent success. But three-quarters of its loans are still exposed to the stricken markets of the United States and Britain, which some investors argue will hold it back, after the global economy recovers. HSBC became the world’s top subprime lender when it bought Household International in the United States in 2003. According to Knight Vinke, a small asset manager in Monaco that owns less than 1 percent of the bank’s shares, the parent group has injected $60 billion into HSBC Finance — including the purchase price of $15 billion — in a so far fruitless bid to turn around this flagging business. According to its research, the money would be better deployed in faster-growing emerging markets. A spokesman for HSBC disputed the figure, saying the total amount was about $20 billion. Knight Vinke argues that HSBC should leave this business and focus on its core area of expertise in Asia. “There are steps to be taken, but if all else fails, you may have to walk away from it,” said Glen Suarez, an executive at Knight Vinke. “We see HSBC’s comparative advantage being in developing its business in Asia,” he said. “We have always felt that subprime and Household International was a problem.” In a report produced this year, Knight Vinke said that HSBC had been overly optimistic in assessing the risk of its subprime exposure and that if the bank were to take a write-down reflecting the full reality of its potential losses, it could total as much as $30 billion — a number that would require the company to raise cash. HSBC declined to address Knight Vinke’s assertions publicly, saying the firm’s small investment position undermined its credibility. Still, bank executives and board members have met with Knight Vinke as it pressed its position. HSBC’s position is that its subprime loans, while substantial, are different from those of most other banks because they are not bundled into complex — and at this point nearly worthless — securities like those that forced Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and others to take large losses. As a result, management argues, HSBC is not obliged to write down these assets as long as they produce a cash flow. The bank has also said that it is a global institution, with a need to be in markets from Shanghai to St. Louis, and that it considers the United States housing market to be a crucial part of its strategy. It also said that writing off its investment in HSBC Finance would do lasting damage to its reputation. As its rivals took their lumps, HSBC maintained a healthy cushion against losses of about 8 percent, a conservative position compared with the greater leverage of other banks. But now that troubled institutions like Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Citigroup have raised large sums of equity to bolster their balance sheets and enjoy the explicit or implicit support of national governments, HSBC no longer looks so secure. What is more, the advancing slowdown in HSBC’s core emerging markets franchise is putting additional pressure on its earnings. HSBC has said that its capital position was strong, but declined to comment on the recent reports predicting that it would seek a capital increase, which would dilute the value of existing shares. It has been careful to leave open the possibility of raising new funds in conjunction with a deal, or a major investment in a business. For all the new questions, Julian Chillingworth, chief investment officer at Rathbones in London, said HSBC remained a refreshing contrast to an industry that seemed to lose its head in the housing bubble. “It may well be that they have to raise capital, but there’s a much better chance for them to get support,” he said. “They didn’t commit the sins of others of relying on the wholesale markets, and they’ve been quite prudent.” HSBC executives are by and large an austere, conservative lot, compared with their more expansive counterparts. Their attitude toward the banking excesses has been one of polite disdain as they turned down opportunity after opportunity to buy into the American investment banking market. It is an approach that conveys a degree of rectitude not often seen in bankers these days. The self-denying tone flowed from the top, conveyed by the bank’s former chairman, John Bond. His successor, Stephen Green, spare and unobtrusive, carries on this tradition, serving as an ordained priest in the Church of England. He is also the author of a book titled “Serving God? Serving Mammon?” that wrestles with the idea of being a man of faith in the City of London. Still, the bank has not been immune to temptation — witness the $1 billion it is likely to have lost from extending loans to funds that invested with Mr. Madoff’s firm. There are signs, too, that the bank may be on the verge of some major decisions — particularly with regard to its troubled American business. John Thornton, the former president of Goldman Sachs and a man known for his aggressive strategic thinking, joined the group board this month. He will also serve as nonexecutive chairman of HSBC North America — a position that will require him to work two days each week and will pay him $1.5 million a year. It is not clear what, if any decision will be taken. Even with its recent troubles, the firm’s position is strong enough to support a midsize deal, especially for a bank with a strong position in the American Hispanic market, an area that has long been of interest for HSBC. And analysts say that even HSBC cannot stay above the troubles around it. “I’m surprised the shares have done so well in relative terms,” said Daniel Tabbush, an analyst at Crédit Lyonnais Securities, who wrote one of the reports that precipitated the stock sell-off. “Now, we’re looking at the exposure to commercial U.K. real estate, the unsecured loan book, credit cards. Many banks around the world said they don’t have to raise capital, and then they do.”

HSBC Holdings PLC
Banks and Banking
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Economic Conditions and Trends


Demand May Give Commodities a Long-Run Edge

Abstract: COMMODITIES investors have had a much easier time of it this year than people who have endured the white-knuckle ride of the stock market. Natural resources mutual funds, which buy shares in companies with business focused on oil, coal or gold, fell by an average of 1.8 percent this year through March, according to Morningstar, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index slid more than 9 percent. Natural resources funds have excelled over the last five years, as well, with annualized returns of 29.3 percent through March, compared with 9.3 percent for the S.& P. 500, Morningstar said. Despite a downturn in the middle of last month, commodity prices are likely to remain strong, many analysts and fund managers say. They point to strong global demand for resources, including iron ore and copper as well as oil, coal and precious metals. In addition, many resources are either in short supply or the infrastructure needed for delivery, like railways or ships, is insufficient to meet demand. There is also a speculative reason for the high prices. Short-term traders have flocked to resources like crude oil and gold as a play involving the dollar, which has been weak. “They are shorting the dollar, and to protect themselves, they are going into commodities,” said Michael Hoover, manager of the Columbia Energy and Natural Resources fund. While prices of commodities have been robust, they have also been extremely volatile, and they are potentially subject to some of the same credit troubles that have afflicted the stock, mortgage and derivative markets. Hedge funds with enormous sums at their disposal are active players in commodities markets, and big brokerage firms may handle their trades. Regulation of commodities markets is still evolving, and many advisers warn that small investors should proceed cautiously. Still, over the long run, demand for a range of commodities is likely to be high because of the rapid industrialization of China, India and other nations, as well as continued demand by markets including the Middle East. The Middle East “is growing just as fast,” as China and India, said John Segner, manager of the AIM Energy fund. Some investors say they believe that these trends will continue to play out. “We have yet to see any material slowdown in international demand for commodities,” said John Dowd, manager of the Fidelity Select Natural Resources, Fidelity Select Energy and Fidelity Select Energy Services funds. Moreover, Mr. Dowd said stocks of companies in businesses tied to oil, coal and natural gas were trading at low price-to-earnings ratios. “These stocks don’t have bubble-like valuations,” he said. “This is a healthy commodity price environment driven by the difficulty in expanding production more than anything else.” With $2.4 billion in assets, Fidelity Select Natural Resources had an annualized return of 31.6 percent in the five years through March, putting it nearly in the top quarter of natural resources funds. For energy-focused investors, high oil prices will probably persist as long as supplies are tight and demand is strong. Domestic demand is just beginning to be damped by high prices at the pump, and by an economic slowdown. But in countries that buy oil in currencies other than the dollar, the price does not hurt as much. “They aren’t paying $110 a barrel,” said Mr. Segner at AIM Energy. Because of the high prices, energy-focused investors most prefer exploration and production companies. Mr. Segner’s strategy is to seek stocks of fast-growing companies with attractive valuations, and to hold them for a long time. The fund’s biggest holding is Occidental Petroleum, an exploration and production company that he said would increase production by 9 percent this year; it was trading at only 12 times earnings at the end of the first quarter. AIM Energy, with $1.95 billion in assets, had an annualized return of 31.7 percent the five years through March, ranking it in the top quarter of natural resources funds. The higher prices that production companies receive for selling oil and gas can be offset by rising costs for extraction. But Mr. Hoover at Columbia said independent companies like the Devon Energy Corporation and the Southwest Energy Company, which are extracting oil from shale, countered rising costs by bolstering productivity. “So even though costs are rising, you are drilling more per year,” he said. Columbia also finds attractive valuations in mining companies that are benefiting from China’s demand for copper, iron ore and nickel. Mr. Hoover owns shares of Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold and Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, a Brazilian producer of iron ore. He also likes gold stocks and has shares of the Canadian gold mining companies Kinross Gold and Goldcorp. “As long as the dollar stays under pressure, I think gold will increase in value,” Mr. Hoover said. Columbia Energy and Natural Resources, with assets of $745 million, had an annualized return of 32.2 percent in the five years through March, ranking it in the top quarter for the category. Investors say coal is another commodity they expect to keep rising in price. Demand for coal is growing in step with worldwide electricity demand, which Daniel Rice, manager of the BlackRock Global Resources fund, says is growing much faster than demand for gasoline. Coal prices have doubled worldwide in the last six months, Mr. Rice said. As of March 28, spot prices for Central Appalachian coal in the United States were $85.80 a ton, up from $45.75 on Sept. 28, according to the Energy Information Administration. Prices of coal company stocks reflect continued price growth for coal, but in Mr. Rice’s view, the valuations remain low. “I think stocks will double from today on what I think is a reasonable assumption,” said Mr. Rice, who invests 25 percent of his portfolio in coal stocks like Consol Energy, Massey Energy and Peabody Energy. BlackRock Global Resources, with $1.1 billion in assets, had a return of 39.4 percent, annualized, in the five years through March. That puts it in the top 3 percent in the natural resources fund category. NATURAL resources funds aren’t a pure way to buy commodities. Some, like BlackRock’s fund, track commodity prices more closely than others and can be volatile in the short run, while others, like Columbia Energy and Natural Resources, balance the bumps by investing in metals as well as energy stocks. The purest way to own commodities without buying them outright is to invest in an exchange-traded fund such as iPath S.& P. GSCI Crude Oil Total Return Index, the Market Vectors Steel E.T.F. and the PowerShares Deutsche Bank Commodity Index Tracking fund. When investing in actively managed funds, says Michael Herbst, a Morningstar analyst, investors should buy funds that have experienced managers and should jump in if they believe growth in the sector will continue or if they want to diversify their investments. “Sometimes when the market zigs, these funds will zag,” Mr. Herbst said.

Mutual Funds
Coal
Gold
Metals and Minerals
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)
Stocks and Bonds
Copper Brass and Bronze
Economic Conditions and Trends
Morningstar Incorporated
Standard & Poor's Corp


Indiana: Remarks on Blacks Criticized

Abstract: The secretary of state asked forgiveness for using a slavery reference to describe black voting trends, a remark that drew criticism from several black lawmakers. In a speech Thursday at a party event, Todd Rokita, a Republican, said 90 percent of blacks vote Democrat. “How can that be?” Mr. Rokita said. “Ninety to 10. Who’s the master and who’s the slave in that relationship? How can that be healthy?” State Representative William Crawford, who is black, said the statement suggested blacks were ignorant and uninformed. Mr. Rokita said his comments were intended to encourage Republicans to continue efforts to diversify. “The word choice that I used in one part of those remarks was poor, and if I offended anyone then I ask their forgiveness,” he said.


Home Depot to Buy Interline Brands for $1.6 Billion in Cash

Abstract: Home Depot said on Wednesday that it had agreed to acquire Interline Brands, a supplier of maintenance and repair products to businesses, property managers and contractors, for $1.6 billion in cash. The deal is expected to bolster Home Depot’s sales to the professional building and repair market. Home Depot, which is based in Atlanta, will acquire Interline from a consortium of investors that include Goldman Sachs’ private equity arm, P2 Capital Partners and Interline’s management. Goldman and P2 Capital acquired the company as part of a management buyout for $1.1 billion in 2012. “Addressing the needs of our pro customers is a top priority for the Home Depot,” Craig Menear, the Home Depot chairman, chief executive and president, said in a news release . “With their seasoned leadership team, we will enhance our ability to serve the pro – both in the store and at any desired location outside of the store – driving significant value for our customers and shareholders.’ The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to be completed in Home Depot’s fiscal third quarter, which ends on Nov. 1. Interline Brands, which is based in Jacksonville, Fla., serves more than 175,000 customers in the commercial, multifamily housing and residential contractor markets and has a distribution network of more than 90 locations in the Canada, Puerto Rico and the United States. It has more than 1,600 sales and support staff. The company reported sales of $1.6 billion for the 2013 fiscal year. Separately, Home Depot said that Bill Lennie, the president of its Canadian operations, had been named to the newly created position of executive vice president for outside sales and service. Mr. Lennie will oversee the company’s maintenance repair and overhaul, professional and installation services businesses, including the integration of Interline, Home Depot said. He will continue to head the Canadian business until a successor is chosen. Bank of America Merrill Lynch and the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton advised Home Depot on the Interline transaction. Interline was advised by Goldman Sachs and Barclays and the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson.

Home Depot
Interline Brands
P2 Capital Partners
Craig Menear
Goldman Sachs Group
Mergers and Acquisitions


White House Sides With C.I.A. in Turf Battle

Abstract: WASHINGTON— After a months-long turf battle between America’s top spies, the White House has sided with the Central Intelligence Agency in the dispute over who has the power to appoint the top spy in each country overseas, according to intelligence officials. The decision is a blow to Dennis C. Blair , the director of national intelligence, who had used the issue as a litmus test of the power of his office, created in 2004 to enhance cooperation among intelligence agencies and put an end to persistent squabbling among American spies. Yet the recent dispute is further evidence that the intelligence overhaul five years ago did little to end longstanding rivalries or clearly delineate the chain of command within American’s intelligence bureaucracy. For decades, C.I.A. station chiefs in embassies around the globe have been the senior American intelligence officers in each country, charged with running clandestine operations and meeting regularly with the heads of foreign spy services. In May, however, Mr. Blair issued a classified memorandum announcing that it would be his office that selected the top American spies in each country. One day later, Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, sent a memorandum telling the C.I.A. workforce to disregard Mr. Blair’s message because the matter had yet to be resolved. According to several intelligence officials, Mr. Blair was furious at what he saw as Mr. Panetta’s insubordination, and was sure that the White House would recognize his authority. Top lawmakers weighed in on Mr. Blair’s behalf. Yet Mr. Panetta, a former White House chief of staff with close ties to some members of President Obama’s inner circle, in recent months has pled his case to maintain C.I.A. supremacy overseas. A stalemate resulted, as the issue was taken up by Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and eventually by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The White House finally ruled in the C.I.A.’s favor. The White House decision, made in recent days, was first reported Thursday by The Associated Press. Current and former C.I.A. officials argued that the matter is not just about bureaucratic turf. They said that the C.I.A. for years has cultivated relationships with foreign spy services — relationships that could be thrown into confusion if foreign spymasters were forced to deal with different American liaisons. Some of Mr. Blair’s aides dismissed these concerns as petty, and pointed out that in the vast majority of cases, the C.I.A. station chief would remain the top American representative abroad. But they said that in some instances it might make sense to for a representative from another agency to be the senior intelligence representative. An often-cited example is Britain, where the National Security Agency operates a large listening post. Some argue that it would make sense for an N.S.A. official to be the top American intelligence representative in Britain, a close ally and a country where the C.I.A. does not carry out clandestine intelligence collection. Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Mr. Blair, said that the decision by the White House included matters that were decided in the favor of the director of national intelligence. “This agreement, which addresses several key authorities, reinforces the D.N.I.’s important mission of advancing an intelligence community team that is greater than the sum of its parts,” she said.

Central Intelligence Agency
Espionage
Intelligence Services
United States International Relations
Reform and Reorganization
White House (Washington DC)
Blair Dennis C


Solid-State Computing, Without a Whirring Drive

Abstract: SHERMAN BLACK, a senior vice president at Seagate Technology, a leader in hard drive manufacturing, lies awake at night worrying that his teenagers are part of a new generation of computer users who don’t care if their data is stored locally or in the Internet “cloud.” It matters to the hard drive industry, because a growing number of consumers are eagerly eyeing a new wave of solid-state drives. Made from arrays of flash memory chips, these new drives are smaller and many times faster than traditional hard drives that read and write magnetic 1s and 0s on a rotating disk or platter. They are also, of course, more expensive. Small 2-, 4- and 16-gigabyte solid-state drives are now already standard components of the so-called netbook laptops being sold by Dell, Hewlett-Packard and others, and a 128-gigabyte drive now sells as a $500 upgrade to the MacBook Air from Apple. This shift in storage technology is now possible because of the growth in flash chip usage. They are now ubiquitous in hand-held devices like digital cameras and MP3 players. The other reason the shift is happening now is that these solid-state drives (so called because, unlike magnetic-disk drives, they have no moving parts) are being designed to fit in the same space in laptops currently used by the industry-standard 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch disks used in hard drives. There are many benefits to this newer technology. Information can be stored permanently in flash chips even when power is turned off, and the chips can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. They make no noise, give off little heat and consume far less power, while transferring data on average many times faster than rotating hard disks. Of course, there are caveats. While solid-state drives can read information more quickly than hard drives, some models write information more slowly. That means that, on average, performance comparisons may depend on a particular manufacturer’s design or running a specific application or style of computing. There are also big differences in quality within the solid-state market, and there can be extreme differences among drives in the number of times that 1s and 0s can be stored and erased. Because individual transistors can fail over time, flash chips come with extra transistors that can be turned on automatically in the event of failure. Perusing the reviews on Web sites like Amazon.com and Buy.com suggest a wide range of consumer satisfaction — from awestruck to angry. Caveats aside, a properly designed solid-state drive can make a world of difference. Windows can boot in just seconds, and switching to a solid-state disk can add roughly 30 minutes to the battery life of a common laptop computer. The need for speed in the laptop market is now being satisfied by more than 40 manufacturers, including chip-making giants like Intel , Samsung and Toshiba. Storage capacities have now soared to 256 gigabytes — although currently at a staggering cost. Such a drive from Axiom is currently selling online for $7,426 to $9,125. Prices, however, are collapsing. For example, it is now possible to buy a 128-gigabyte, 2.5-inch internal drive from the consumer electronics reseller OCZ for as little as $299. Although that price might be twice as much as a comparable hard drive with rotating storage, the combination of faster speed, lower power consumption and heat generation — as well as potentially better reliability — is enticing. Such a drive might not be just for executive road warriors looking for eye candy in the form of an ultralight MacBook Air. (A 64-gigabyte solid-state drive was $999 extra when the computer was first announced in January.) It is now worth considering as a performance boost on an existing, long-in-the-tooth laptop. And next year, when 128-gigabyte solid-state drives become even more affordable, they will increasingly be offered by laptop makers at a more reasonable add-on price. In addition to making a play at the high end of the laptop market and as an upgrade option, solid-state drives are sweeping the new consumer-friendly market for so-called netbooks, the under-10-inch portables selling for $300 to $600 that have become the rage in the past six months. These machines come with as little as two gigabytes of solid-state drive storage, helping to fortify the new generation of cloud-oriented computing that Mr. Black of Seagate is concerned about. “I don’t think they care about having their data with them,” he said of the younger computing generation like his teenagers. “They have faith that the cloud will always be accessible.” Laptop makers are making the process of swapping drives easier, which makes the idea of upgrading even more tempting. Turn over one of the new aluminum Apple MacBooks and a single lever opens a compartment revealing a disk that is held in place by a single screw. I had already upgraded the standard MacBook 250-gigabyte drive with a faster (but still old-fashioned magnetic) 300-gigabyte Hitachi drive for which I paid just $99. However, for the purpose of testing the speed of the new solid-state category, I chose an 80-gigabyte Intel X25-M SATA. The Intel drive is expensive — about $540 online — but comes with higher performance specifications and a three-year warranty. Swapping drives was easy; it took less than a minute. The hard part was cloning all of my programs and data to the solid-state drive before swapping it in for my mechanical Hitachi hard disk. For that I used another peripheral — a hard-disk USB docking station made by Thermaltake (around $33 at Amazon). With this device, you simply snap the new hard drive into a dock and connect it to your PC via a USB cable. You can then copy all your software and data — a time-consuming proposition, to be sure, but many backup programs can make this a straightforward procedure. I used SuperDuper, a $28 Macintosh utility program made by Shirt Pocket that can be used to make bootable drives. The process was made simpler because I had partitioned my original Hitachi drive (that is, created a digital “wall” between different kinds of files) into two spaces: one for work and one for music, video and images. That division may suggest what is likely to become a standard computing style for many home computer users in the future: a laptop with a fast solid-state drive and an external high-capacity standard hard drive for storing media and other large files. (Unless, of course, you belong to the new generation of computer users who have come to trust the cloud of Internet computer servers to store their personal data.) In any case, the results were impressive. Using a standard Macintosh performance measurement utility called Xbench, the Intel solid-state drive increased the computer’s overall performance by almost half. Disk performance increased fivefold. The computer started more quickly and applications seemed to open nearly instantaneously. Most laptops do have small fans, but the computer was definitely quieter; gone was the telltale whirring of the drive motor. Solid-state drives are obviously an expanding niche in the world of laptop computers. Still, there is apparently no reason to mourn the hard drive industry. The explosion of digital data is so overwhelming that even if our notebook disks become smaller, we will still have to keep our data somewhere. “I rest easier every time I hear that someone buys one of those netbooks,” said Mr. Black of Seagate, whose company is focusing in part on drives for large corporate data centers. “I know all of that data will be stored in the cloud.”

Laptop Computers
Computers and the Internet
Intel Corp
Computer Chips
Cloud Computing


On Trial, Ex-Oil Magnate Finally Speaks

Abstract: MOSCOW — For a year, Russia ’s most famous prisoner, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky , sat in a glass cage in a dingy, third-floor courtroom and listened while prosecutors sought to prolong his time behind bars by charging that he embezzled billions of dollars worth of oil . On Tuesday, Mr. Khodorkovsky finally got a chance to speak in his own defense in the politically tinged case. The former oil magnate used his testimony to quickly contend that the new charges against him — like those that put him in prison the first time — are motivated by politics and corruption. Speaking from notes passed by lawyers into his cage, he portrayed the long, winding legal proceedings against him and a business partner as “legal schizophrenia,” saying he was being accused of stealing oil he had already been convicted of failing to pay tax on. Arrested in 2003 , Mr. Khodorkovsky became an early and vivid example of the policies of Vladimir V. Putin — then Russia’s president and now its prime minister — to consolidate control of the petroleum industry and crack down on opposition parties Mr. Khodorkovsky had been funding. Mr. Putin said at the time he was prosecuting a tax evader, and has recently been stepping up the criticism, comparing Mr. Khodorkovsky to Al Capone and telling a national television call-in show that the oil executive had ordered contract murders. Mr. Khodorkovsky faces another 14 years behind bars if he is convicted on the new charges. In a meandering trial that began in March 2009, prosecutors accuse the tycoon and a business partner, Platon Lebedev, of misappropriating crude oil from the publicly traded Yukos Oil Company before its main assets were taken over by the state oil company Rosneft. Prosecutors say the two embezzled about 2.5 billion barrels of crude between 1998 and 2003, or about a third of the United States’ entire annual consumption of oil. The defense has pointed out that Yukos did not pump that volume over those years. Mr. Khodorkovsky pointed out Tuesday what he said was a hole in the prosecution’s case: that the government could not argue both that he failed to pay taxes on oil profits at Yukos and also that he had embezzled the oil from the company. Karinna A. Moskalenko, a lawyer representing Mr. Khodorkovsky in an appeal of the tax evasion case at the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France, filed a motion this week with the Moscow court noting the contradiction and arguing that standard legal practice would prohibit prosecutors from taking different positions on fact in different proceedings. The Russian prosecutor, Valery Lakhtin, said the defense was misconstruing the case. “Mr. Khodorkovsky didn’t read the accusations against him carefully,” he said. Though the vast majority of Russians have long since abandoned any interest in the particulars of Mr. Khodorkovsky’s trial, the outcome will surely be seen as something of a political litmus test for the country. An acquittal or eventual pardon would be seen as a sign of the ascendancy of President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who has advocated an overhaul of the legal system that developed under Mr. Putin, his predecessor and mentor. In this light, even the trial’s languid pace is significant, suggesting some drift in political direction. In fact, it has become one of the longest in Russian history, according to the defense lawyers. The prosecutors stretched out their arguments from March 31, 2009, until March 29 this year. For a good part of that time, through the summer months from April until September, they merely read aloud from their 60,000 pages of case material to enter it in the court record.

Russia
Khodorkovsky Mikhail B
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline


With Players on the Move, No Team Is in Top Form

Abstract: LONDON — The one thing above all else that made the Olympics such compelling viewing was the certainty of seeing the athletes strive, in their own catch phrase, “to be the best I can be.” Hubris was permissible, provided it was backed up by performance. Big-time soccer does not always get that. From FIFA down, there is a notion that the public is gullible, a cash cow that can be relentlessly milked, even for half-baked displays in midsummer. Most European leagues have either just kicked off or are about to kick off their 10-month seasons. Some star players are coming back from vacation after the Euro 2012, and some are resting after the Olympics. Others are trying to introduce themselves to new colleagues after transferring from teams in other leagues — in some cases in other cultures. To be the best they can be, they would need a period of familiarization and integration. They will get very little, because hundreds of them are scattered across four continents, called up by their national federations to play in friendly matches. The clubs that pay the players’ salaries have no choice. FIFA, the world governing body, mandates that the clubs must release the players if the federations call upon them. There is common agreement, shared by the national team coaches as well as the clubs, that the so-called August friendly fixture date serves no good sporting cause. FIFA fought for it because the federations want the money those games can make, and because the federations vote in the FIFA presidential race. The August round of glorified exhibitions will be dropped, but not until 2014. So players leave their preseason training camps with their clubs and fly off to give what often turns out to be half a match in a distant continent. Shinji Kagawa is a prime example. The 23-year-old rising son of Japan moved this summer from Borussia Dortmund to Manchester United. He has been on the move ever since, clocking up the air miles in United’s preseason tours to South Africa, China, Scandinavia and Germany. All of that is productive time because, as United’s most important players come back from their various national team commitments and their snatched holidays, traveling together and training toward peak fitness together serves a common purpose. But right now, Kagawa is winging it to Sapporo, where Japan has a one-stop game against Venezuela on Wednesday. Among his new Manchester colleagues, Javier “Chicharito” Hernández is in Mexico City, preparing to take pot shots at the Everton goalie Tim Howard when Mexico takes on the United States in the Azteca Stadium. We should not doubt that the players want to be involved in that game. Mexico versus the United States always has meaning, and the Americans would sure love to end a record that amounts to 19 defeats, one draw and no victories. But this is midseason for the U.S. clubs, some of which also have games to play this week in Major League Soccer. Meanwhile, the world champion, Spain, travels to play in Puerto Rico, without many of the stars who will be on duty in the Spanish league this weekend — always assuming that La Liga goes ahead as scheduled. It would not be Spain if the clubs were not threatening to go on strike over Real Madrid and Barcelona’s making billions from private TV deals while the rest get a relative pittance from broadcasters. And it will not be the Spanish lineup that so imperiously dismantled Italy in the Euro 2012 final last month, because the national coach, Vicente Del Bosque, quite reasonably understands that he cannot go on picking the Barcelona and Real Madrid players who have barely had time to wind down from the summer excess and gear back up for the long season ahead. “Xavi Hernández is very important for us, even more important than the coach,” Del Bosque said of the 32-year-old play maker. No disrespect to Puerto Ricans, but the last thing that Xavi, and others, need right now is another long-haul flight for an exhibition appearance against players they would never normally meet in competition. Perhaps even more ridiculous is England playing Italy one month after Italy knocked England out of the Euro on penalty kicks. FIFA hypes this game — played, incidentally, in Bern because London remains Olympic territory, with the Paralympic Games still to come — as a chance for “revenge.” It might have been such a chance, if either side were at anything like full strength. Italy has traveled to the Swiss capital with 12 uncapped players on its squad, and England was up to six uncapped players at the last count. This game is counterfeit. Not only is its timing a nuisance to clubs preparing for the season, but the Italian soccer federation made a mockery of the fixture. In July, Cesare Prandelli took the national squad, the Azzurri, to the Euro final. He gave Italy a fresh style, a new belief and some decent values. His reward? The Federation sent half his players off to Beijing last weekend so that Juventus could play Napoli in the so-called Supercoppa Italiana while the London Olympics were in full swing. Prandelli had no option but to leave out the travel-weary Juventus and Napoli players and move on to Bern with a shadow squad. England, meanwhile, received the customary August rash of doctors’ notes excusing players from national duty on the basis of minor strains or tweaks. If the good folks of Switzerland get lucky, they might get to see a new star arising from the pretense on which they were persuaded to buy their tickets. If Kagawa shines in Sapporo and makes it back to England to play some part in Manchester United’s game at Everton, all might be forgiven. But some fans, somewhere, are going to feel they have paid dearly for a glimpse of players who are in no position to be the best they can be.

International Federation of Association Football (FIFA)


Yen-Pinching Undercuts Japan’s Push Against Years of Deflation

Abstract: TOKYO — The loose change in Yusa Nishimura’s purse could be undermining Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic recovery plan for Japan. As often as she can, Ms. Nishimura tucks away 500-yen coins, worth a little under $5. Ms. Nishimura, 23, even has a folder that displays them so Japan’s highest-denomination coins are easier to count. Cash nest eggs like Ms. Nishimura’s made sense in slow-growing Japan, where during 15 years of deflation her money was worth more as time went on. The spa getaway she planned to splurge on was likely to get cheaper if she waited longer. But as Mr. Abe faces pressure to show results in his fight to lead Japan out of deflation, he is urging cash hoarders like Ms. Nishimura to change their modest mind-sets — for the economy’s sake, as well as for their own. Ms. Nishimura, like many Japanese, is unconvinced. “I’ve never experienced inflation. It doesn’t seem real to me,” said Ms. Nishimura, who works at a technology company in the port city of Kobe. The result of this uncertainty could be a sputtering economic recovery in Japan, which has experienced a resurgence of sorts under Mr. Abe. Just as Europe’s investors are getting nervous because of the rising possibility of deflation, more people are doubting Japan’s much-trumpeted fight to escape it. These concerns have been heightened by recent data suggesting unexpectedly weak economic growth in the fourth quarter. On Monday, the government said the economy had grown even more slowly than estimated, just 0.7 percent on an annualized basis, hurt by weaker-than-expected consumer spending and capital expenditures. If more people expected a future of rising prices and wages instead of falling ones, Mr. Abe’s reasoning goes, they would spend now before goods became more expensive. To beat rising prices, they would also invest their money in higher-yielding investments. Companies, confident of a new era of higher sales and profits, would raise prices and wages, completing a positive economic cycle. A big obstacle in Japan’s path, Mr. Abe says, has been the entrenched attitudes and behaviors in the country after so many years of falling prices. “It is not easy to alter a deflation mind-set that has been in place here for over 15 years,” Mr. Abe told Parliament last month. For most countries, moderately rising prices are a normal part of life. A Big Mac hamburger in the United States, which went for about $2.50 in 1998, now costs over $4.50. Since the turn of the century, American consumer prices have risen from 1.5 to 4 percent a year. But in Japan, overall prices have not risen since the late 1990s. The Big Mac still costs about the same here as it did in 1998: about 300 yen, or almost $3. The price of another popular fast-food offering — the beef-and-rice bowl from the Yoshinoya restaurant chain — has fallen from 400 yen in the late 1990s to 280 yen today. During that time, average worker incomes have also fallen. Mr. Abe hopes his policies will change that. Since coming to power in late 2012, he has pursued aggressive economic and monetary policies to bring an end to deflation. His first measure, a blast of monetary policy that has doubled the country’s money supply, has already elevated prices by weakening the yen and pushing up the cost of energy and food imports. Signs of a broader rise in prices are mixed. Japan’s Consumer Price Index rose just 0.4 percent in 2013. Discounting energy and food prices, the index actually fell 0.2 percent compared with 2012. Both are far below the Bank of Japan’s target of a 2 percent inflation rate by next year. The central bank voted Tuesday to keep its policy on hold. Image Cash nest eggs like Ms. Nishimura’s made sense in slow-growing Japan, where during 15 years of deflation her money was worth more as time went on. Credit Kentaro Takahashi for The New York Times But even that creep upward in prices has been greeted with shock and incredulity. Businesses across the country that are raising their prices are issuing long, apologetic notes. “It truly pains our hearts to announce that we will soon revise our prices,” the Kidoizumi brewery, which has made sake for 135 years in Chiba, east of Tokyo, said recently in an announcement, blaming rising energy and input costs for its price increase. The slow progress in beating deflation reflects the difficulties of overcoming entrenched expectations and behaviors, especially among younger Japanese who have never experienced rising prices, said Taro Saito, senior economist at the NLI Research Institute in Tokyo. Older generations still remember the “oil shocks” of the 1970s, which sent consumer prices soaring, as well the country’s asset bubble of the 1980s. More recently, they remember how Japan fell into deflation after its bubble economy burst in the early 1990s. But with deflation the norm for years now, younger Japanese tend to expect far less inflation than their seniors, according to a survey taken last year by the Cabinet Office. This helps makes younger Japanese more cautious spenders, as well. A government survey of households last year highlighted stark intergenerational disparities: Households headed by people between 60-69 years increased spending by 2.7 percent, while households headed by under-30-year-olds spent 0.8 percent less. Economists worry that a planned sales tax increase here in April will further dampen consumer sentiment. “It’s possible that long-term personal experiences with prices are affecting individual inflation expectations,” Mr. Saito said. Some economists are beginning to question whether the obstacles to beating deflation lie with Mr. Abe’s policies, and not with consumers. “Inflation should be driven by actual demand for goods and services,” said Shinya Imura, an economics professor at Chuo University in Tokyo. “But what’s happening now is something else. Businesses are raising prices because they’re being squeezed by higher input costs. That means businesses are unlikely to have the means to raise wages soon, and consumers aren’t going to buy more.” This dynamic is clear at the Manrai ramen shop, a Tokyo institution loved by locals for its pork and leek broth and a longstanding commitment to rock-bottom prices. When Manrai recently raised the price of its cheapest bowl of ramen for the first time in over two decades, to 250 yen from 200, it caused consternation. “I can’t believe it,” said Ryo Kobayashi, a recruitment agency worker and Manrai regular. “If prices start rising everywhere, I’m not going to be able to eat out anymore.” Such reactions call into question Mr. Abe’s rosy vision of rising prices, profits and incomes. Manrai raised prices not because it was confident of future sales but because it was squeezed by higher input costs, including electricity, gas, pork and noodles made from imported flour. In fact, by raising prices, Manrai risks losing customers like Mr. Kobayashi. (“I’ll fry up cheap vegetables like bean sprouts,” he said.) Rather than start an economic revival, this “cost-push” inflation, as economists call it, could become a rising threat to Japanese stuck in a deflationary mind-set. Such people could see their hard-earned savings eroded by rising prices, warned Yukio Sakurai, a housing analyst based in Tokyo. And choices that made sense under deflation — renting, for example, instead of investing in property — could saddle them with mounting costs, erode their standard of living and shut them out of any benefits of a stronger economy, experts warn. “Younger Japanese need to change their mind-sets now, or get left behind,” Mr. Sakurai said. “They would do well to talk to their parents and grandparents.”

Japan
Deflation
Shinzo Abe
Economy
Consumer behaviour


U.S. Is Preparing for a Long Siege of Arab Unrest

Abstract: WASHINGTON — After days of anti-American violence across the Muslim world, the White House is girding itself for an extended period of turmoil that will test the security of American diplomatic missions and President Obama ’s ability to shape the forces of change in the Middle East. Although the tumult subsided Saturday, senior administration officials said they had concluded that the sometimes violent protests in Muslim countries may presage a period of sustained instability with unpredictable diplomatic and political consequences. While pressing Arab leaders to tamp down the unrest, Mr. Obama’s advisers say they may have to consider whether to scale back diplomatic activities in the region. The upheaval over an anti-Islam video has suddenly become Mr. Obama’s most serious foreign policy crisis of the election season, and a range of analysts say it presents questions about central tenets of his Middle East policy: Did he do enough during the Arab Spring to help the transition to democracy from autocracy? Has he drawn a hard enough line against Islamic extremists? Did his administration fail to address security concerns? These questions come at an inopportune time domestically as Mr. Obama enters the fall campaign with a small lead in polls. His policies escaped serious scrutiny in the initial days after the attack that killed four Americans in Libya last week, in part because of the furor over a statement by Mitt Romney accusing the president of sympathizing with the attackers. White House officials said they recognized that if not for Mr. Romney’s statement, they would have been the ones on the defensive. As of Saturday night, the worst of the crisis appeared to have passed, at least for now. The Egyptian government, responding to administration pressure, cracked down on protesters in Cairo on Saturday, and in Libya the government rounded up suspects in the violence that killed four Americans on Tuesday. Leaders in Saudi Arabia and Tunisia appealed for calm. Still, images from the past week of American flags being torn down and burned, an Islamic flag being raised and embassies being overrun by angry mobs introduce a volatile element into a re-election effort in which foreign policy has been a strength. Some critics and commentators were already evoking the images of the Iranian hostage crisis that doomed another presidency. “After Obama’s success in killing Osama bin Laden, in killing Qaddafi and in not blowing up Iraq, I think Obama and his aides figured, ‘We’ve got this box pretty well taken care of,’ ” said Michael Rubin, a Middle East scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Bush administration official, referring to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. “Now that gets thrown up into the air,” he said. “Instead of Obama being the successful guy that got Bin Laden, we’re talking about Obama as the second coming of Jimmy Carter, and that’s not something the campaign wants to see.” Mr. Obama came to office vowing to recalibrate America’s relationship with the Muslim world after the Iraq war and gave a high-profile speech in Cairo outlining a new era of fraternity. Caught off guard by cascading revolutions in the Middle East, he eventually supported rebels who overthrew Egypt’s longtime president and ordered airstrikes that helped bring down Colonel Qaddafi, who was later killed. But his administration has struggled to find a balance between supporting democracy and guarding national interests in the region as authoritarian governments have been replaced by popular Islamist parties much less tied to Washington. To the extent that the United States supports greater democracy, it may not defuse anti-American rage in a region with no real history of popular rule, and with deep economic troubles. His citing of Libya as a model of transition now looks suspect, and the United States has been powerless to stop a bloody crackdown in Syria. Administration officials say they are acutely aware of the risks, and they worry that the violence could rage for a while, because with every new protest more people are exposed to the inflammatory American-made anti-Islam video that has fueled so much anger. Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen on Saturday called for further attacks against American embassies. “The reality is the Middle East is going to be turbulent for the foreseeable future and beyond that,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former State Department official in the Bush administration. “It’s going to present the United States with any number of difficult choices. It’s also going to be frustrating, because in most instances our interests are likely to be greater than our influence.” Administration officials say the people in the streets are not the ones who won the elections, but those who lost, and that the new governments largely have condemned the violence. Mr. Obama’s outreach, they said, has improved the position of the United States in the Muslim world. “We have made significant inroads in demonstrating that the U.S. is not at war with Islam, and isolating Al Qaeda as an element within Islam,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “But it clearly remains the case that there are persistent challenges in parts of the Arab world. It’s been building up for a very long time.” The twin challenges of dealing with the crisis overseas and the politics of it at home overlap in complicated and uncomfortable ways. Just hours after mourning in the Rose Garden last Wednesday for American victims of a Libyan attack, Mr. Obama flew off to a Las Vegas campaign event. After meeting their flag-draped coffins at Joint Base Andrews on Friday, he headed to Democratic headquarters for campaign meetings and then to an evening fund-raiser. In his weekly address on Saturday, Mr. Obama referred to American anxieties about the unrest. “I know the images on our televisions are disturbing,” he said. “But let us never forget that for every angry mob, there are millions who yearn for the freedom and dignity and hope that our flag represents.” During marathon meetings at the White House since the killings of American diplomatic officials in Benghazi, officials have tried to anticipate the next developments and contemplate a response. But they were surprised when an American-run school was ransacked in Tunisia, which they considered a successful transition. Even as more Marines are sent to diplomatic missions, and two Navy destroyers patrol nearby, Mr. Obama has reached out to leaders like Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and aides asked YouTube to review its posting of the video. More broadly, the Obama team is confronting the very nature of America’s presence in the Middle East. With embassies already fortified after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials are asking whether they can be further secured or whether some activities need to be curtailed, like assistance and public diplomacy programs that leave Americans more exposed, though there are no plans at the moment to do so. The State Department said Saturday that it was evacuating all family members and nonessential personnel from embassies in Tunis and Khartoum. The trade-offs of such choices are stark. Pulling back on American involvement in these countries would undercut the ability to build cultural bridges that in theory diminish the sort of hostility now vividly on display. Yet officials said continuing with business as usual seemed untenable as well, and they recognize that foreign aid, already a tough sell in a rigid fiscal environment, may become even tougher to extract from Congress. At home, the challenge is political but no less daunting. Republicans have had a hard time putting up a fight on foreign policy but believe the uprisings provide a new opening. Mr. Romney characterizes Mr. Obama’s approach to the Arab Spring as naïve and apologetic, and his campaign has criticized the president as not being supportive enough of Israel. In recent days, Republican critics like former Vice President Dick Cheney have opened up a new line of attack by accusing Mr. Obama of not paying enough attention to intelligence briefings. Mr. Obama receives the briefing in writing every day, but does not always sit down for an oral presentation, as President George W. Bush did. “The hubris of a president who believes he does not need to meet regularly with them is astounding,” Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush, wrote in The Washington Post. The White House says the president receives plenty of briefings and meets repeatedly with security advisers. “The president’s record, when it comes to acting on — interpreting correctly and acting on — intelligence in the interest of the security of the United States is one that we are happy to have examined,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. As for the broader debate, Mr. Obama’s defenders argue that the legacy of American support for Arab autocrats complicated the situation. “Obama did his best, in a very difficult situation, to get the United States on the right side of history,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel in the Clinton administration. “But we had a good 40 years of U.S. policy backing regimes that the people in the street overthrew.” Some analysts pointed to his failure to make progress between the Israelis and the Palestinians . “You didn’t have a track record to use with these Arab elites to say, ‘We’re doing the right things,’ ” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former ambassador to Egypt and Israel who teaches at Princeton. Over the last week, Mr. Rubin said, Mr. Obama suffered from an intelligence breakdown, much as Mr. Bush did before the Iraq war. “That’s not Obama’s fault,” he said, “but it’s going to make him look weak because he’s the one sitting in the Oval Office.”

Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )


ISIS Destroys Historic Arches in Palmyra, Syria

Abstract: BEIRUT, Lebanon — Another landmark structure in Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra has been deliberately destroyed by Islamic State militants , according to local antigovernment activists and Syrian officials. The building involved this time was a set of arches, erected in the second century. Since seizing Palmyra from government forces in May, Islamic State fighters have destroyed some of the most beautiful and historically significant monuments in the sprawling oasis city in Syria’s central desert, one of the world’s most renowned archaeological sites. The latest to fall was the decorative triple arch built by the Romans, which bore ancient inscriptions and stood at the entrance to a grand colonnade. The Strategy Behind the Islamic State’s Destruction of Ancient Sites As it expanded across Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State destroyed many archaeological sites, looting them for profit and damaging some for propaganda. Militants of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, had already blown up the temples of Baalshamin and Baal , in keeping with their stated belief that such structures are idolatrous. But the arch was not a religious structure. Its destruction was first reported on Sunday by an antigovernment activist who uses the nom de guerre Khaled al-Homsi and who has long monitored the destruction of antiquities in Palmyra by all parties in the multisided war. Mr. Homsi fled Palmyra after the Islamic State takeover, in which his uncle Khalid al-Asaad , a former antiquities official, was killed by the group. Residents of Palmyra have also suffered under intensified bombardment by government warplanes over the past month, some of which did their own damage to the archaeological site, Mr. Homsi and others said. The Palmyra branch of the Local Coordination Committees — antigovernment activist cells set up early in the uprising that now primarily serve to document events around Syria — recently issued an infographic showing the toll from all sides for September alone. Image The ancient oasis city of Palmyra, a Unesco World Heritage site, last year. The ruins have been in jeopardy since the Islamic State seized the city in May. The now-destroyed Arch of Triumph, right, was erected in the second century. 1 / 7 It said that there were 222 air raids, using rockets as well as naval mines, gas cylinders and barrel bombs, that killed 97 people and destroyed 239 houses and three ancient structures. The government says it is aiming at terrorists. Residents who can afford transportation are fleeing the attacks by the government and by the Islamic State, while those who cannot are cowering in basements under heavy government airstrikes, according to a Syrian from Palmyra who took refuge in Turkey but remains in regular contact with relatives there. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect family members still in Syria. But flight is no guarantee of safety, the person from Palmyra added, corroborating accounts from other residents. Residents may be stopped on the road to government-held territory, they say, under suspicion of ties to the Islamic State or simply because government forces do not want more displaced people from restive Sunni areas moving west to areas like the provinces of Latakia and Tartus, which are already bursting with them. Video The ruins of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra are shown in a video from March 2014, before the Islamic State took control. Credit Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times They can flee in the other direction, to Islamic State-held Raqqa , but there they still face the harsh rule of the militant group, as well as airstrikes by the United States-led coalition, the government and now also Russia. Some are going all the way to Turkey, potentially joining the flow of refugees from there to Europe, while others remain displaced in outlying areas around the city. On Monday, Palmyra residents and activists circulated images. One was a vintage photograph of the site with a man in traditional dress in the foreground; with a black stripe across the corner like a funeral ribbon. Another was from 2011, months into the Syrian uprising, when peaceful protests were still common. It shows protesters calling for the ouster of Mr. Assad, with a sign that seems to allude to the city’s role in history: “Here are the free men of Palmyra, renewing and rewriting history once again.”

Syria
Islam
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Palmyra Syria
Assyrian Civilization
Archaeology,Anthropology
Historic preservation
Terrorism


City (Manchester) in the City (N.Y.)

Abstract: What do Brooklyn Bridge Park, the High Line, Yankee Stadium and Rucker Park have in common, besides being part of the fabric of New York City? On Monday, the day before Orlando City became the 21st team in Major League Soccer, Manchester City, the parent club behind the league’s 20th team, New York City F.C., posted a video on its website that features a handful of Manchester players happily juggling and passing a ball as they travel around New York. Orlando City and New York City F.C. will begin play in the M.L.S. in 2015. The video — entitled, "Join the Movement” — was filmed during Manchester City’s North American tour last summer, which included a match against Chelsea at Yankee Stadium . The clip features the Manchester players Vincent Kompany, Gaël Clichy, David Silva and goalkeeper Joe Hart — one YouTube commenter cracked, “This has got to be edited, Joe Hart caught a ball” — as they travel around New York, soccer ball tethered to their feet. New York City F.C. is a partnership between Manchester City and the Yankees. As part of the lead-up to the team launch (City has been silent on the publicity front since the official announcement earlier this year), fans can go to the club’s website and enter a contest to win tickets (including plane fare and hotel accommodations) to the team’s first M.L.S. home game (at Yankee Stadium?) in March 2015.

Soccer
Manchester City Soccer Team
MLS
New York City Football Club Soccer Team