U.S. Overtures Find Support Among Cuban-Americans

Abstract: MIAMI — Anger and pain used to drive Rafael Diaz when he spoke about Cuba. A home builder with muscular arms, he denounced all contact with the island he left 48 years ago, seeking to suffocate the government he hated. But at 53, with Fidel and Raúl Castro still in power, Mr. Diaz has reversed course, praising the new White House plan to end restrictions on visits and remittances for Cuban-Americans — and insisting that travel should be open to all Americans. “From Key West, we should have six ferries going out during the day and six coming back,” he said. It is a stunning change of heart now shared by a wide majority of Cuban-Americans. A poll released Monday by Bendixen & Associates has found that 67 percent of the community now supports the removal of all restrictions for travel to Cuba, an 18-point increase from three years ago, when the same question was asked. Even among older, so-called historic exiles like Mr. Diaz, the survey shows that support for a new approach to Cuba has grown. “This is across the board,” said Fernand Amandi, an executive vice president at Bendixen, which has been polling Cuban-Americans for more than 25 years. He added, “We’re at the end of a 50-year stalemate period, calling for a new dawn on U.S.-Cuba relations.” The nationwide telephone survey of 400 adults — the first gauge of Cuban-American opinion since President Obama announced his new policy last week — was conducted April 14-16, and the margin of sampling error is plus or minus five percentage points. It suggests that Mr. Obama has become a catalyst for openness, accelerating a political shift here that first became visible after the furor in 2000 over whether to send a young Cuban rafter, Elián González, back to his father on the island. Indeed, despite this community’s reputation for loyalty to Republicans, the poll found widespread approval for Mr. Obama: 64 percent supported his new policies on travel and money sent to relatives. An even larger majority, 67 percent, said they had a favorable or somewhat favorable opinion of Mr. Obama, the highest rating among Cuban-Americans for a president in a Bendixen poll since Ronald Reagan in the mid-’80s. “For the first time since the beginning of Kennedy’s presidency,” Mr. Amandi said, “they are aligning with a Democratic president in his engagement policy with Cuba.” The poll did not include a breakdown by voter registration, and may not be a predictor of election results. In 2008, Mr. Obama received 47 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Florida, according to an exit poll by Edison/Mitofsky. But what seems clear, from the poll and more than 20 interviews with Cuban-Americans in South Florida, is that support for the confrontational approach to Cuba of the last 50 years has given way to something far more fluid. In Cuban-American homes, the new travel and remittance rules have led to dinner-table chatter about when to go or what to send. The phones now ring regularly at charter agencies that offer direct flights from Miami to Havana for around $500 round-trip, and for many here, limiting travel to Cuban-Americans looks like a half-step that should lead to a fuller stride. At the Guayabo Laundry in Hialeah, Pedro Garcia, 67, and Lucia Hernandez, 68, said in separate interviews that Cuba should be open to all travelers, not just to Cuban-Americans. “The people in Cuba need to wake up and see how other people live,” said Ms. Hernandez, who came to Miami in 1996. Even on Calle Ocho, in the heart of Little Havana, it is no longer difficult to find Cubans like Olga Fernandez, 46, who said she had returned only days ago from Havana and planned to go back as often as she could. “They really need the help,” Ms. Fernandez said, in an office providing services to new immigrants. “It’s the only way things are going to change.” For many, contact has come to be seen as a tool of change — an argument running counter to the sanctions of the 1962 trade embargo — even as politics have become less central to “Cubanidad,” or Cuban identity. Newer arrivals have long tended to sidestep the hard-line tradition in Miami; in Cuba itself, politics is often seen as the problem, not the solution, and many prefer to avoid the topic after they leave. But that viewpoint seems to be spreading. Cuban-Americans here are no longer so singularly focused on Fidel and Raúl Castro; filial and cultural ties to Cuba now compete for attention as the Castro brothers and their oldest enemies move closer to death, said Alfredo Duran, 73, a Miami lawyer and former state chairman of the Democratic Party. Mr. Duran said he knew of several exiles at or near retirement who now say they want to receive their Social Security checks in Cuba. A veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion who was one of the first prominent exiles to call for engagement, in the 1990s, Mr. Duran said he had been surprised by how quickly opinions had shifted. “They used to call me left wing,” Mr. Duran said. “Now I’m a right-wing moderate because people are going further to the left than I am.” For older Cubans, in particular, reconsideration has inspired conflicting emotions. The Bendixen poll found that 54 percent of Cubans who arrived in the ’70s or earlier favored letting all American citizens travel to Cuba, but that many did so with caution, dreading a surprise from the Castros. Mr. Diaz said he feared another Mariel boatlift, when Cuba sent 125,000 rafters — many of them convicted criminals — to Florida’s shores in 1980, after years of rapprochement with President Jimmy Carter. And if Cuba does retrench, conservative hard-liners in Congress and Miami will be ready to pounce. On Monday, at Versailles, a restaurant on Calle Ocho, a crowd of graying men gathered around Emilio Izquierdo Jr., 61, as he yelled that President Obama had already erred by “giving Castro everything without demanding anything.” But Mr. Diaz, who left Cuba when he was 5, said that even without certainty of success, a new approach was needed. The 47-year-old embargo that he once supported “hasn’t worked,” he said, a view shared by 43 percent of Cuban-Americans in the Bendixen poll, up from 36 percent three years ago. Just as importantly, Mr. Diaz misses home. He said he began to reconsider his position on travel while listening to the young Cubans he hired at his construction company. They described an island that he still craved but no longer recognized. “They’re telling me all these stories about all these great places in Cuba,” he said. “And I said, ‘Man, I don’t know any of them.’ ”

Cuban-Americans
Travel Restrictions
Polls and Public Opinion
Embargoes and Economic Sanctions
Obama Barack
United States International Relations


Fish in Small Tanks Are Shown to Be Much More Aggressive

Abstract: Tropical fish hobbyists will tell you their tanks are a source of relaxation, but recent research suggests the fish might disagree. Nearly 13 million American households contain a fish tank, and the average tank size is less than 10 gallons. Yet a study comparing the behavior of common freshwater fish in a variety of habitats found that those kept in such small tanks were considerably more aggressive than those in larger ones — more likely to fight, flare their gills and guard whatever tiny alcoves they could find. “In larger tanks, the fish were not in continuous eyesight of each other, and were swimming around checking everything out rather than beating the heck out of each other,” said the study’s author, Ronald G. Oldfield, a professor of biology at Case Western Reserve University. The fish in question were Midas, or “red devil” cichlids, a species popular among hobbyists for their brilliant colors and active swimming habits. Dr. Oldfield used only very young fish to eliminate aggressive behaviors associated with mating. Dr. Oldfield concedes that the emotional well-being of fish may not tug many heartstrings. “It’s probably not the end of the world,” he said in a telephone interview. Even the Humane Society, which routinely has commercials featuring slow-motion video of abused pets, does not offer guidelines for the treatment of pet fish. “We work on almost every animal issue under the sun,” a spokesman said by e-mail, “but I don’t think this is one of them.”Still, Dr. Oldfield noted that the average household tank was only one-tenth the size of the smallest tank in the study to yield docile fish. “If people kept dogs in these conditions, they’d be put in prison,” he said. “It’s something we should think about.” The study consisted of two experiments conducted side by side. In one, Dr. Oldfield tested the effects of overcrowding by keeping tank size constant while increasing the number of fish. In the other, he tested environment by placing three fish in consistently larger and more complex tanks. He then recorded their behavior at least two hours after feeding, to eliminate competitive behaviors related to food. While aggression seemed to remain constant regardless of the number of fish in a tank, Dr. Oldfield observed that it dropped off considerably once the fish were placed in a 100-gallon tank with several plants and rocks to form alcoves. The findings confirmed what he found when observing Midas cichlids in the wild. “If you go out and observe these fish swimming in a river,” he said, “they’re not aggressive at all, really.” This is not the first study to suggest that water-dwelling creatures can become aggressive in small tanks. Biologists at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, recently found that sea urchins turned to cannibalism when kept in small, overcrowded tanks. The researchers were trying to recreate typical farming conditions for sea urchin, a delicacy in Japanese cuisine. Nor is the idea news to Justin Muir, the owner of City Aquarium, a luxury fish tank business in Brooklyn. “It just goes back to behavioral exercises,” said Mr. Muir, who has designed tanks for the Yankees pitcher C. C. Sabathia and the Dream Hotel in Manhattan. “More volume of water is always the better bet. It basically keeps the fish healthier, and the tank is more stable.” In that way, he said, fish are like any other pet kept in a small enclosure. But a major difference between fish and, say, Rottweilers is that aggressive behavior in small swimmy things can be entertaining, at least to humans. “That’s why these fish sell,” Mr. Muir said, “because people like the way they act.” Indeed, hobbyists who probably don’t view themselves as diabolical gleefully exchange online tales of clashing cichlids. Describing a case of “road rage” between two of her fish, a visitor to Fishchannel.com wrote: “The two would stand in front of the other twitching their lower fins as in sign language, yelling at the other with ‘You almost hit me you blind fool. Didn’t you see me coming? I had the right of way!’ ” Overcrowding has also become an issue on fish farms, where salmon or trout are sometimes packed into high-density pens, just as chickens or pigs are on industrial farms. The danger there is less about the happiness of the fish than about their health, said Alan Duckworth, a research scientist with the Blue Ocean Institute in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. “Some species do better at high densities,” he said, “but the majority of species could be affected by overcrowding. It likely would stress them out, which could increase the amount of disease.” One frequently cited problem with farmed fish, particularly salmon, is sea lice, whose spread has become such a problem in Scotland that the government is considering a ban on coastal fish farms. For Dr. Oldfield, the welfare of fish is a concern that dates to when he was 6 years old and won a goldfish in a small bowl at a county fair. He says he understands that a 100-gallon tank is beyond the means of the typical tropical fish hobbyist, but people who love their fish should be aware of the damage they may be doing by keeping them in small, bland environments. “I’m not saying people need to stop keeping fish as pets,” he said, “but they do need to look at the ecology of animal aggression.” As for goldfish won at carnivals, he said, “they should never, ever be kept in those bowls.”

Fish and Other Marine Life
Animals
Science and Technology
Aquariums


In Twist, Nonprofits Honor Technology’s Failures

Abstract: WASHINGTON — At a gathering last month over drinks and finger food, a specialist at the World Bank related the story of how female weavers in a remote Amazonian region of Guyana had against all odds built themselves a thriving global online business selling intricately woven hammocks for $1,000 apiece. The state phone company had donated a communications center that helped the women find buyers around the world, selling to places like the British Museum. Within short order, though, their husbands pulled the plug, worried that their wives’ sudden increase in income was a threat to the traditional male domination in their society. Technology’s potential to bring about social good is widely extolled, but its failures, until now, have rarely been discussed by nonprofits who deploy it. The experience in Guyana might never have come to light without FailFaire , a recurring party whose participants revel in revealing technology’s shortcomings. “We are taking technology embedded with our values and our culture and embedding it in the developing world, which has very different values and cultures,” Soren Gigler, the World Bank specialist, told those at the FailFaire event here in July. Behind the events is a Manhattan-based nonprofit group, MobileActive, a network of people and organizations trying to improve the lives of the poor through technology. Its members hope light-hearted examinations of failures will turn into learning experiences — and prevent others from making the same mistakes. “I absolutely think we learn from failure, but getting people to talk about it honestly is not so easy,” said Katrin Verclas, a founder of MobileActive . “So I thought, why not try to start conversations about failure through an evening event with drinks and finger foods in a relaxed, informal atmosphere that would make it seem more like a party than a debriefing.” There is also a prize for the worst failure, a garish green-and-white child’s computer nicknamed the O.L.P.C. — for One Laptop Per Child — a program that MobileActive members regard as the emblem of the failure of technology to achieve change for the better. When Ms. Verclas held it up during last month’s party, the room erupted in laughter. (Jackie Lustig, a spokeswoman for O.L.P.C., said the organization did not consider its program a failure.) With the prize in his sights, Tim Kelly, a technology specialist at the World Bank who had just flown in from South Africa, found himself in front of a screen displaying what looked like a line drawing of a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs but in fact was an effort to explain the roles and relationships of the many partners in the Global Capacity Building Initiative, a program aimed at building strong policies and regulatory environments to foster the expansion of the Internet in developing countries. “This is the point in the evening where I’m suddenly asking myself why I let myself be talked into this,” Mr. Kelly said. He nonetheless gamely continued. One big problem with the project is that three groups raising money for it were more interested in raising money for themselves, Mr. Kelly said. “One raised money and when it finished doing that, took the money and went off and did its own work,” Mr. Kelly said. The initiative had too many “players,” he continued. Donor countries wanted vastly different things. It was way too complex, he said, gesturing at the spaghetti bowl. Next time, he said, he would advocate for an initiative that matched specific donors to specific projects and not work so hard to be all things to all people. His eight minutes of torture over, Mr. Kelly returned to his chair, looking somewhat relieved. Mr. Kelly’s employer, the World Bank, sponsored the event here last month. “The idea is that not only should we be open about what we’re doing, but we should also be open about where we learn and our mistakes,” said Aleem Walji, practice manager for innovation at the World Bank. “The cost of not doing so is too high.” Mr. Walji said he was surprised to find, when he joined the bank from Google last fall, that mistakes were rarely discussed, so different from the for-profit world, where failures are used to spur innovation. Google, for example, has blogged about the failure of its Google Wave application on Aug. 4., saying that while it had “numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” “Wave has taught us a lot,” wrote Urs Hölzle, senior vice president for operations at Google. Mr. Walji pointed out that “the private sector talks about failure freely and candidly,” while the nonprofit world “has to worry about donors who don’t want to be associated with failure and beneficiaries who may not benefit from admissions of failure.” Next up, after Mr. Kelly, was Mahad Ibrahim, a researcher whose work was approved by the government of Egypt as part of a Fulbright Scholarship, helped assess an Egyptian government program to roll out telecenters across the country to increase access to the Internet. The program has grown to more than 2,000 such centers, from 300 in 2001. But numbers alone can be deceiving. Mr. Ibrahim started his research by calling the centers. “The phones didn’t work, or you got a grocery store,” he said. He headed for Aswan, where government records showed 23 telecenters. He found four actually working. Mr. Ibrahim concluded that the program had failed because it did not take into account the rise of Internet cafes in Egypt and because the government had, in most cases, picked as partners nonprofit groups whose primary mission had little or nothing to do with the Internet, communications or technology. The failure, in other words, was in not understanding the ecosystem in which the telecenters would be operating. “We dump hardware down and hope magic will happen,” said Michael Trucano, senior information and education specialist at the World Bank, whose offering to FailFaire was a list of the 10 worst practices he had encountered in his job. His presentation clearly resonated with the attendees, who voted him the winner of the O.L.P.C. “I guess it’s a dubious distinction,” Mr. Trucano said later, “but I thought it was an enjoyable evening and a useful way to talk about a lot of things that civil servants don’t like to talk about.”

Nonprofit Organizations
Computers and the Internet
Third World and Developing Countries
Philanthropy


Taking Young Readers on a Magical History Tour

Abstract: GOSHEN WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART has been hanging around Goshen lately. And, as long-dead historically significant figures go, he’s in good company. Ever since Mary Pope Osborne moved to town seven years ago, William Shakespeare has decamped here, along with an assortment of Civil War heroes, deep-sea adventurers, vikings, dragon-slayers and Olympic athletes. They are apparitions, sure — visitors who come to inform the “Magic Tree House” books, which Ms. Osborne has been writing for Random House since 1992 — but sometimes they become more than that. “The book I love most is the Shakespeare one,” Ms. Osborne said while sipping tea recently at the woodsy, treehouse-like home that she and her husband, Will Osborne, an actor, built three years ago, nestled among stately old trees on the edge of Woodridge Lake. She was referring to “Magic Tree House #25: Stage Fright on a Summer Night,” published in 2003. “By the end of that book, I felt I had a private relationship with William Shakespeare,” she said. “I went to the Globe. l got really close to that reality. And already I can tell that’s the way it’s going to feel when I finish this book on Mozart.” Millions of 6- to 10-year-olds are devoted to Ms. Osborne’s books, which revolve around Jack and Annie, siblings whose backyard treehouse transports them to dramatic times and places. “Jack is more based on my personal qualities — he wants to learn, but he’s cautious,” said Ms. Osborne, who has no children of her own. (“I got too busy,” she said.) “But it’s Annie who I wish I was like. She’s so bold and impulsive.” The “Magic Tree House” series has been licensed in 29 international markets and 26 languages, and nearly 53 million copies have been sold worldwide. After the 40th book, “Eve of the Emperor Penguin,” comes out in September, the as-yet-untitled Mozart installment will make its way to market. “I work on ‘Magic Tree House’ 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” Ms. Osborne said. “And for me it’s the most fun part of my life.” If that makes Ms. Osborne, 58, sound bookwormish, her pre-“Tree House” existence suggests otherwise. After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1971, she spent years traveling the world; she lived in a cave in Crete briefly and stopped roaming only when, after a trek through Asia, she developed blood poisoning in Nepal. In 1976 she married Mr. Osborne, the object of a fan-like crush; after she watched him play the role of Jesse James in a musical from the balcony of a Washington, D.C., theater, she said, she had to meet him. By the late 70s, the Osbornes moved to Greenwich Village, determined to succeed in creative careers. “We made a pact when we were 30 that we would never let the other one do anything but write or act,” said Ms. Osborne, who settled on writing after the idea for a young-adult novel started tugging at her. “A year after our pact I wrote ‘Run, Run as Fast as You Can,’ ” her first book, about an 11-year-old girl’s struggles in the wake of her brother’s terminal illness. It was published in 1982 by Dial Press. “I got it sold before I really knew how to write,” she said. “They wanted me to rewrite it, so I literally went to the library and read books on how to write. I studied how Hemingway wrote. I practically memorized ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ I took away excess modifiers, that sort of thing.” That style, simple and direct, is at work in the “Magic Tree House” books; it’s what makes them page-turners. But it was only after publishing a steady stream of fiction and nonfiction (“Favorite Greek Myths,” for example, put out by Scholastic in 1989) that Random House approached her about doing the series in 1990. “It took forever to do the first one — I wrote seven books before we found one that worked,” Ms. Osborne said. Now, though, her editor and fans count on her to pump out two new installments a year. But that doesn’t mean she’s too busy for other projects. In September, she and Mr. Osborne cast 11 locals in “Magic Tree House: The Musical,” a 12-person show written by Mr. Osborne, at the Warner Theater in Torrington. Later this year the musical will make its way across national stages. “We have a real estate agent, the manager of a CD store, someone who’s just graduating high school. They’re all changing their lives to go on the road,” Ms. Osborne said. The show will come back to Torrington in September. For a writer who spends much of her time traveling to imaginary times and places, the musical has been a real-life introduction to the charms of the here and now: “All our actors could be on Broadway,” she said. “We never knew it, but there’s so much talent in Litchfield County.”

Writing and Writers
Books and Literature
Children and Youth


Fewer Miners Die on the Job in 2009, U.S. Reports

Abstract: FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — The number of miners killed on the job in the United States fell for a second straight year, to 34, the fewest since officials began keeping records nearly a century ago. That was down from the previous low of 52, in 2008. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration documents show 18 of the deaths occurred in coal mines, down from 29 in 2008; 16 were in gold, copper and other types of mines, down from 23 in 2008. Most involved truck accidents on mine property, though some resulted from rock falls and workers’ being struck by machinery. The Obama administration’s mine safety chief, Joe Main, said that the numbers were encouraging, but that he would not be satisfied until no miners were killed on the job. “I think that’s accomplishable, if you look at where we came from, and where we’ve come to,” Mr. Main said. The latest statistics are vastly improved, he said, from a century ago when hundreds, sometimes thousands of miners were killed each year. The deadliest year recorded in United States coal mining history was 1907, with 3,242 deaths. That year, a mine explosion killed 358 people near Monongah, W. Va. Mr. Main credits the decrease in deaths in the past year to increased enforcement and stricter regulations in the wake of several mining disasters over the last four years in Kentucky, Utah and West Virginia. In 2006, 73 miners were killed, including 12 in a methane explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia and five in a similar explosion at the Darby Mine in Kentucky. In 2007, 67 miners died, including six in the Crandall Canyon collapse in Utah. Coal states revamped their mine safety laws, and Congress toughened federal rules that brought a variety of advances.

Mines and Mining
Accidents and Safety
Deaths (Fatalities)
Coal
Mine Safety and Health Administration


Bloomberg Added Home No. 11 in 2011, Records Show

Abstract: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg may rule New York City, but he is also expanding his empire in Westchester County. For a modest — by billionaire standards — $4.55 million, Mr. Bloomberg bought a 33-acre estate in North Salem last year, according to tax returns and public records reviewed on Friday. The new property is likely to be combined with an adjacent 20-acre estate that Mr. Bloomberg has owned in North Salem since 2001 for the use of his daughter, Georgina, an accomplished equestrienne. Mr. Bloomberg now owns three properties in Westchester — in addition to the two in North Salem, he owns property in Armonk — and 11 homes around the world. He has three in Manhattan, including his primary residence on East 79th Street, a Park Avenue condominium and an East 78th Street town house where his foundation and Willett Advisors, the firm that invests money for the mayor and his foundation, operate. He also owns homes in Bermuda; London; Southampton, N.Y.; Vail, Colo.; and Wellington, Fla. The Hamptons home — a 35-acre estate — was also acquired in 2011. Details about Mr. Bloomberg’s real estate holdings were among the more intriguing tidbits in his 2011 tax returns and financial disclosure documents, which the mayor allowed reporters to inspect. Politicians are not obligated to disclose their tax returns, but many elected officials, including President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., do so. Mr. Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg L. P. and one of the richest men in the country, has chosen a different route — each year, he allows reporters to review, but not copy, his federal and state tax returns at the Midtown offices of his accountant, Geller & Company. The mayor limits access to his finances because he believes that too much information could aid corporate competitors of his privately held company, according to his spokesman, Stu Loeser. The mayor pays a federal tax rate of 34.69 percent, just shy of the highest possible rate, before deducting for his significant charitable contributions. He also pays more than $1 million a year in city property taxes, Mr. Loeser said. Mr. Bloomberg owns 85 percent of Bloomberg L.P., and the company is the source of much of his wealth, Mr. Loeser said. To review Mr. Bloomberg’s financial records is to understand just how much his company has recently prospered, with nearly 100 subsidiaries listed, almost double the number in 2005. In 2011, Mr. Bloomberg helped his ex-wife, Susan, with at least two financial transactions: He provided a bridge loan of more than $500,000 so she could buy a new apartment, while she waited to close on the sale of her previous one, and he transferred more than $500,000 into a trust in her name. Mr. Bloomberg created an entity called Hilltop Stables L.L.C. — the name a nod to its possible use for equestrian purposes — to buy the property in North Salem, at 39 Hilltop Drive. The property was once an exercise ground for elephants, several of which were imported to the town for a circus in the mid-1800s, according to Cynthia Curtis, the president of the North Salem Historical Society. The mayor bought the property from Joseph J. Pinto — the same man from whom he purchased his first North Salem property, on Titicus Road, in 2001. In 2011, Mr. Pinto paid Mr. Bloomberg between $100,000 and $250,000 in rent to remain in the contemporary 4,400-square-foot house at 39 Hilltop Drive. It is not clear whether Mr. Pinto still lives on the property, which includes a barn, a free-standing three-car garage, an additional cottage and a horse-riding rink, according to records at the town’s assessment office. Property taxes are about $56,000 a year. It is also unclear if the mayor plans to keep the existing house, or tear it down to create more open space. No work permits have been submitted to the town since the mayor bought the property. But he paid between $5,000 and $44,000 in repairs, and as much as $5,000 on landscaping, according to his tax returns. Residents of the town said it was common for landowners to buy adjoining plots to prevent any unwanted encroachments on their properties. The Bloomberg family usually keeps a low profile, said one neighbor, Bill Wilson. But they regularly hold a Fourth of July fireworks party, he said. Ms. Curtis, of the historical society, said Mr. Bloomberg has hosted cocktail parties and fund-raisers for local groups on his Titicus Road property; at one, the mayor greeted guests as they came in from the driveway. Ms. Curtis said the mayor had been “very gracious” with the locals. “He’s maintained his property to perfection,” she said. “It’s an asset to the town; it’s absolutely beautiful.”

Bloomberg Michael R
Real Estate and Housing (Residential)
Federal Taxes (US)
North Salem (NY)


In a Good Sign, Alex Rodriguez Hits a Home Run

Abstract: LAKELAND, Fla. — As Alex Rodriguez rounded first base on Friday, his eyes fixed on right field, he turned back toward the bag, uncertain where to go. Rodriguez was hesitant because he saw the ball bounce back onto the field, not realizing that it had ticked off the top of the wall, hit a light standard and ricocheted back. But it would be easy to guess that Rodriguez was simply stunned by the result — a home run. The hit ended a 1-for-14 skid for Rodriguez, and it came off an upper-90s fastball from Tigers reliever Bruce Rondon, the type of high-velocity pitch that Rodriguez had been struggling to connect with even before his yearlong suspension from baseball. “It’s a real good sign,” Manager Joe Girardi said after the Yankees’ 11-2 exhibition win over Detroit. Rodriguez, his recent slump notwithstanding, has showed indications through the first month of spring training that he could provide a productive bat for the Yankees this year. Playing primarily as a designated hitter, he is batting .269 with two home runs and a double. He was also pleased to have played a day game on the road Friday, which included a 45-minute bus ride, after getting three at-bats the previous night at home. Two games in less than 24 hours was a good challenge, he said, and his body held up fine. As for gaining encouragement from the home run, he said: “I laugh when people say you can’t hit the ball in the mid-90s. I couldn’t hit it in my prime when I was 28, certainly not consistently.” Rodriguez declined to comment on the decision of his cousin, Yuri Sucart, to drop his not-guilty plea in the Biogenesis drug scandal, the case that led to Rodriguez’s banishment from baseball last year. According to court documents, Sucart is now scheduled to plead guilty to drug-distribution charges next week. If the case had gone to trial, Rodriguez would presumably have had to testify. Now he will not. Back on the field, shortstop Brendan Ryan, who injured his back just before spring training, played in his first exhibition game. Adam Warren, a valuable cog in the Yankees’ bullpen, made his case for a spot in the rotation by allowing four hits scattered over five innings. He allowed one run.

Baseball
Alex Rodriguez
Joe Girardi
Detroit Tigers
Yankees


After a Difficult Start, a Jets Receiver Prepares, Stays Alert and Rises

Abstract: FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Kenbrell Thompkins wakes up at 5 a.m. on weekdays. He dresses, reads some Bible passages and arrives at the Jets’ complex here by 5:45. When he enters the locker room, none of his teammates are inside, not even his fellow receiver Brandon Marshall, who was astounded to discover that someone could beat him there. After stretching and soaking in a hot tub, Thompkins runs routes in the field house with the backup quarterback Geno Smith. Until he catches 300 passes, Thompkins does not leave. “Just to get my hands ready for the day,” he said. Thompkins finds comfort in the routine, and the routine gives him purpose. It centers him. He receives few snaps with the first-team offense but prepares as if he will start. If he plays, he will be ready. That is what he promised himself, and it is what the Jets have learned about him. N.F.L. Playoff Picture: Every Team’s Remaining Paths to the Postseason Tree diagrams representing the full range of outcomes for teams that are in or have a shot at the N.F.L. playoffs. In the first half last week against Dallas, Thompkins identified a coverage he felt he could exploit. He told quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick about it, then hoped the Cowboys would show that look again. They did, with about a minute remaining and the score tied, and when Dallas defensive back Byron Jones turned inside, Thompkins zoomed past. The Jets are 9-5 and chasing a playoff spot because of Fitzpatrick’s resurgence and Marshall’s brilliance and Muhammad Wilkerson’s dominance, but also because they have maximized the bottom of their roster. The backup safety Rontez Miles’s interception near the goal line Dec. 6 against the Giants, which facilitated a fourth-quarter comeback, was the defensive equivalent of Thompkins’s 43-yard reception, which set up the winning field goal against Dallas. “If he drops that ball, I mean, he could potentially never play again for the Jets,” Marshall said by his locker the other day. “That’s what happens when you’re fourth, fifth on the depth chart. That’s just reality.” He went on: “For me, I drop 10 balls a year, they’re going to keep throwing to me. A guy like Kenbrell, you drop that ball, it could be your last.” Image Thompkins (10) and Eric Decker after Decker scored. Credit Michael Ainsworth/Associated Press Thompkins’s role in that victory, the Jets’ fourth straight, not only affirmed his place on the team — he had been inactive three of the previous four games — but afforded him some measure of satisfaction heading into their rematch Sunday against the Patriots, twice his former squad. Although plenty of figures in the rivalry have switched from one team directly to the other, from players (Darrelle Revis and Curtis Martin) to coaches (Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells), New England has had far more success squeezing production out of players discarded by the Jets — Danny Woodhead, Jermaine Wiggins, Bobby Hamilton among them — than the other way around. Thompkins, for the Jets, is a welcome exception. “You go back and look at his history, a rookie playing in New England, he was able to come in and make an impact so fast because he’s so smart,” Marshall said. “We’ve seen that high football I.Q. throughout the weeks he’s been here, since Day 1.” The new beginning for Thompkins, 27, came in the first week of October, when he joined the Jets’ practice squad a few days after the Patriots released him from theirs. It was a job in the N.F.L., and he was grateful for it. The 2015 N.F.L. Playoff Picture: Simulate the End of the Season for Any Team How can my team make the N.F.L. playoffs? It’s a simple question, but answering it can be devilishly complicated. This interactive simulator walks you through the scenarios. What surprised the Jets at first was his speed. He was faster than the offensive coordinator Chan Gailey thought. The more time Gailey spent around Thompkins, he said, the more he came to recognize, and appreciate, another trait: Thompkins’s awareness. Fitzpatrick respects quick studies, players who are alert and instinctive and sharp, and he trusted what Thompkins told him last week because he had seen examples during practices and games. In meetings, Thompkins pays almost closer attention, he said, to plays in which he is not involved. “I know there’s a possibility I could be in that spot,” said Thompkins, who was elevated to the active roster on Oct. 20. “I’m going to take that note. I’m going to write that down. And when my opportunity comes, they’re like, ‘K. T. was listening, K. T. heard what I said.’ They see that. That builds their confidence in me.” Despite catching six passes at Oakland in his first game and four more the next week against Jacksonville, Thompkins faded as coaches worked to integrate the rookie Devin Smith. Sitting out that stretch, Thompkins leaned on his experience as an undrafted rookie with New England in 2013, when he built a strong rapport with New England quarterback Tom Brady — four touchdowns, including a game-winner against New Orleans, in the first six weeks — but played sparingly in the second half. He was released a month into the 2014 season. Image Get the latest tweets from @NYTSports , including breaking news, analysis and live updates. “In my mind, I felt like I was working hard, doing all the right things,” Thompkins said. “But you learn.” He did, but it took him years to achieve that serenity. Growing up in Liberty City, a crime-ridden section of Miami, Thompkins looked for trouble, and it found him. As a boy, he accidentally shot himself in the arm. He sold drugs. He was expelled from high school three times. He was arrested seven times. He spent about a month in jail. He also fully expected to play in the N.F.L. He just doubted he would make it out of Liberty City. “Just making mistakes that a young guy would do in the inner city with no guidance,” Thompkins said. What spurred Thompkins was his younger brother, Kendal, who committed to play at the University of Miami. If Kendal could do it, so could he. A circuitous journey led him, after a two-year stop in junior college in California, to Cincinnati, where Thompkins benefited from a family connection: A cousin, the Steelers all-pro receiver Antonio Brown, vouched for him to his former college coach Butch Jones, who had moved on to the Bearcats. “A lot of guys who come up with nothing, they’re a little more serious because they know they can lose whatever they worked for,” T. J. Weist, Thompkins’s position coach at Cincinnati, said in a telephone interview. “He knew not to mess around.” As an example, Weist mentioned how Thompkins, as a junior, spent his spring break in Florida working out with Brown and his N.F.L. friends, a group that included receivers Santonio Holmes, Andre Johnson and Chad Johnson. Academically ineligible at first, Thompkins raised his grades and graduated with a degree in criminal justice that, he said, he hoped not to need for a while longer. When Weist talks now to his receivers at Michigan, where he is a senior offensive analyst, he often evokes Thompkins. Weist relays what N.F.L. scouts always ask him about a prospect: Does he take care of his body? Does he work hard in the off-season? Does he learn his craft? He cites Thompkins as the paragon. “My Plan B is to execute Plan A,” Thompkins said. “My Plan A is doing what I’m doing right now.” That means rising before dawn to begin the regimen that has revived his career, that avenged his release from the Patriots, that has helped save the Jets’ season. “If you ask me,” Thompkins said, “I feel like I’ve got a lot more in store.”


Donald Trump Praises Newt Gingrich for His Exchange With Megyn Kelly

Abstract: Donald J. Trump interrupted a promotion for his new hotel in Washington to shower praise on Newt Gingrich for confronting the Fox News host Megyn Kelly on Tuesday night, when the former House speaker said in an interview that she was “fascinated with sex” in her reporting on Mr. Trump’s treatment of women. Speaking at a gold-gilded lectern at the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue on Wednesday, Mr. Trump pointed a finger toward Mr. Gingrich, who was in the audience at the hotel ribbon-cutting. “Congratulations, Newt, on last night — that was an amazing interview,” Mr. Trump said. “We don’t play games, Newt, right? We don’t play games.” Ms. Kelly has been a frequent target of Mr. Trump ever since she was a moderator at the first Republican primary debate in August 2015 and asked him about his past misogynistic comments. The video of Ms. Kelly interviewing a hostile Mr. Gingrich went viral on social media within hours of airing. During the exchange, Mr. Gingrich repeatedly rebuked Ms. Kelly for covering accusations from more than 10 women that Mr. Trump groped or sexually assaulted them. “You are fascinated by sex and you don’t care about public policy,” Mr. Gingrich said. Ms. Kelly seemed taken aback, and chuckled: “Me? Really?” Mr. Gingrich then tried to shift the discussion toward sexual assault accusations that have been made against former President Bill Clinton over the years. But when Ms. Kelly pointed out that Mr. Clinton is not running for president, Mr. Gingrich excoriated her. He urged her to say, “Bill Clinton, sexual predator.” He went on: “I dare you. Say ‘Bill Clinton, sexual predator.’” Ms. Kelly said that she had covered those accusations as well. Eventually, she cut Mr. Gingrich off, saying, “You can take your anger issues and spend some time working on them, Mr. Speaker.” A short while later, Dan Scavino Jr., Mr. Trump’s campaign social media director, posted on Twitter about the exchange. Mr. Gingrich, a Fox News commentator, also went on Twitter on Wednesday, saying that this was an example of “media bias.” He told reporters covering the hotel ceremony that the exchange was merely part of “the business.”

2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Newt Gingrich
Megyn Kelly
Fox News Channel


Richard Ebers, the Ticket Man for Elite Events

Abstract: “HEY, boobie, talk to me,” the Ticket Man said. The Ticket Man, whose name is Richard Ebers, was on the phone. He is always on the phone. The best way to speak to the Ticket Man is to call him, even if you’re standing next to him. His wife has trouble getting a word. Often, he is juggling three calls. “Allman Brothers? What’s the date?” “Robbie? Hi, boob. Tell me what you want.” “Yeah, babe, what do you need?” The Ticket Man’s business is the resale of premium tickets to sporting events and concerts. By premium ticket, he means “the best in the house.” Mr. Ebers sells tickets to all the elite events: the World Series, Daytona 500, Triple Crown horse races, Grand Slam tennis tournaments, the four golf majors, the Olympics. He does rugby in England, the Cricket World Cup, the Westminster dog show, the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. All the New York games and any out-of-town game a customer wants. Plays, operas, ballets, “ American Idol .” Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Jay-Z. Among the more than 90,000 people attending the Super Bowl on Sunday in Arlington, Tex., 136 of them got their seats from Mr. Ebers, paying $2,250 to $9,500. The Ticket Man counts 6,000 clients, 500 of whom are his core; a big-spending individual might buy 250 seats a year, a company 1,500. These are people who can afford the best in the house: heads of hedge funds and real estate companies, successful lawyers. Mr. Ebers sells to Goldman Sachs, Chase, Barclays, Morgan Stanley. Of the many maxims by which he operates, perhaps the most vital is one a longtime customer conveyed: “I never want my competitor sitting in front of me.” If a client asks, the Ticket Man will arrange hotel reservations, restaurant bookings, party invitations and celebrity meet-and-greets, whereby clients can duck backstage and shake hands with Lady Gaga for a nanosecond. “If you paid me enough money,” Mr. Ebers said, “I’d wait in line at the car wash for you.” The so-called secondary market where tickets are resold is a cluttered and controversial landscape. These days, most purchases unfold online, where customers click through diagrams of stadium layouts and deal with layers of hidden fees. Many consumers view it with derision. Its legality has been much contested, and its societal value is something that can keep academics talking for eons. While they converse, the Ticket Man keeps selling, not online but on the phone. He figures he sold $10 million last year. That’s a blip in a sprawling multibillion-dollar industry, but Mr. Ebers thinks he may sell more premium seats than any other person in New York. When the economy roared in the late 1990s, he said, he eclipsed $20 million a year in sales. He said he would never obtain tickets illegally, though he acknowledged he didn’t know how some of his suppliers built their inventory. “I sell pieces of cardboard,” he said, summarizing his existence. “I’m obnoxious enough to think that once people see me, they love me,” he added, unblushingly. “My friends kiss me on my lips because they love me.” The Ticket Man considers himself to be “electrifying.” “I send out an electrifying vibe,” he said. He stuck out his arm. “You can touch me, though, and you won’t get shocked.” Mr. Ebers is a stout, animated man of 59 whose hair has long retreated to the balcony, and who struggled with his weight for decades, until gastric bypass surgery in May. He has a point-blank gaze and seems to be in motion even when he’s not. He’s up around 4 a.m. and often asleep by 8:30 p.m. Since every chirp could mean a sale, he sleeps with his BlackBerry parked on his chest, set to vibrate in deference to his wife, Harriet Ebers, who still objects. The Ticket Man attends about 20 events a year, far fewer than when he started selling tickets 24 years ago, and he is always checking to see where clients are sitting and whether they look happy. Crowds rattle him, so he rarely stays until the end of events: at concerts, he gets the playlist in advance and heads home with several songs left. If you ask him if he’s a big sports fan or a Broadway buff, his answer is always the same: “No, I’m a ticket fan. I’m the biggest ticket fan in the world.” THE phone rang, rang, rang, rang. Mr. Ebers works out of the echoing offices of Inside Sports and Entertainment , a ticket and event agency on East 33rd Street with a staff of 20. He is chief sales officer. He said he earned in the high six figures — or low seven — a year. He sits at the head of the ticket equivalent of a commodities trading desk, flanked by jabbering young men and women. The business boils down to risk arbitrage, scooping up tickets that one hopes to sell for more than what was paid. On this day, the hot ticket was the next night’s Knicks-Heat game. LeBron James would be making his first appearance in New York since spurning it for Miami. A broker had two great seats, face value $240. Did Mr. Ebers want them for $1,500 each? He snapped them up and sold them four hours before tipoff to an advertising executive for $1,750 apiece. A real estate guy wanted four tickets for a Linkin Park concert. Mr. Ebers had never heard of Linkin Park. He bought the tickets for $650 each, sold them for $775, with backstage access. Then Lady Gaga tickets. Then Spider-Man. Then the Rangers. Another broker offered him two Knicks seats at $6,000 each. Mr. Ebers hiked his eyebrows and said he would see if he had a customer. After he hung up, he said: “I’m not even going to call anybody. It’s an obnoxious price.” Mr. Ebers assembles much of his sports inventory from season-ticket holders with whom he has relationships or from other brokers. Concert tickets usually arrive from wholesalers or sponsors, and with them, Inside Sports may do swaps: Masters badges, say, for Taylor Swift tickets. He relies on Web sites like TicketNetwork and EventInventory, which consolidate the offerings of brokers across the country. He likes to sell for a little less than what someone could find online. Even on vacation, the Ticket Man sells. He was in St. Maarten recently and sent an e-mail: “Just sold 2 tix behind magic bench to ceo of internet payment processing company for orlando tonight.” Mrs. Ebers must have loved that. Secondary-ticket sales is business long scarred by dishonorable behavior: resellers gouging customers with delusional prices, spurious tickets being hawked by scalpers outside stadiums, brokers gobbling up prime seats with software programs known as “bots,” insiders illegally slipping tickets to brokers in return for bribes known as “ice.” Many consumers hate brokers and are convinced that they lock up the good seats, though the Internet has certainly made access easier and prices more transparent. Innumerable Web sites, led by the giant StubHub — which is owned by eBay — ply the market: Razorgator , Vividseats , GreatSeats . The demarcation between primary and secondary sellers can blur. Ticketmaster, the king of primary ticket sales, owns TicketsNow , the second-biggest reseller. In this splintered world, a doorknob salesman in Utica, N.Y., who lays his hands on front-row seats to a World Series game and wants to flip them on StubHub becomes a competitor to Richie Ebers. New York State has regulated the business of ticket reselling since the 1920s, requiring brokers to be licensed and to keep records of purchases and sales. Until 2007, the government imposed caps on resale prices. They were widely flouted anyway, including by Mr. Ebers. “You broke the law every day,” he said. A report on ticket reselling released last year by the New York Department of State , which handles the licensing of brokers, concluded that price caps never had much effect. It found that illegal acquisition of tickets through “ice” and other means remained a problem, but did not suggest the government was doing much to stop it. A spokesman for the department said 51 resellers currently held licenses; Mr. Ebers and others said they believed many more operated without them. In fact, Inside Sports, Mr. Ebers’s company, has not had a license for the past two years, though its president said it was applying for one again. Mr. Ebers said he usually charged 10 percent to 25 percent above what he paid for tickets; it could be 100 percent for seats having unappeasable demand. The original ticket holder, he said, often pockets the fattest profit. Prices for sporting events have dropped probably 20 percent to 30 percent over the past five years, he estimated, because of intense Internet competition and the weak economy. The Ticket Man isn’t a Big Thought person. He does not dwell on the socioeconomic fallout from his work. He sees a need among his high-octane clientele for someone to get them into places where they want to be, and he’s happy to oblige. Once in a while, perhaps 5 percent of the time, he loses money: he bought too high, or he needed to please a customer. Years ago, a cherished client had to attend that night’s showing of “Phantom of the Opera.” Superior seats were gone. Mr. Ebers sped to the theater, buttonholed someone content to take hundreds of dollars more than the seats cost, then passed them on to his client at a loss. BORN in Brooklyn, his father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker. He has a sister. He went to St. John’s University but left in his second semester to join the Navy, then completed college through correspondence at Old Dominion University, earning a degree in meteorology. Weather work failed to materialize. Mr. Ebers took a telemarketing position at a company that sold floor wax, light bulbs and other maintenance products. He developed a rapturous relationship with the telephone. It made him something he wasn’t. What he was, for most of his life, was fat — at one point weighing 330 pounds. (His high school nickname was “Fats.”) But the other person on the phone didn’t know his dimensions. This emboldened him. He found he had a knack for making people buy. Mr. Ebers sold so much that he acquired significant equity in the company. Then he grew weary of maintenance products. One of his duties at the company was to buy tickets as rewards for the week’s top seller. Tickets enthralled him: they were the doorways to amazing experiences. So, in 1987, he became a broker. At first, he would sell anything to anyone. “I would have sold your tickets to your kid’s high school play,” he said. Steadily, Mr. Ebers focused on the high-end market, where it was possible to sell more to fewer customers. For the 1991 Super Bowl (Giants vs. Bills, in Tampa), he sold 100 tickets to Boeing, which the company distributed to its big customers. Half of the tickets were for seats on one side of the field, half for the other. Boeing officials wanted it that way, he said, so that if a bomb exploded, it would not decimate airplane sales. That same year, Mr. Ebers bought a commanding number of tickets to “Miss Saigon,” which became a sizzling Broadway show. The Ticket Man has worked independently and as a partner in other agencies, but joined Inside Sports in November. Working at an agency has allowed him to draw on more inventory and to face less risk. One of his aspirations is to sell and create more “experiences” extending beyond the pieces of cardboard that have been his lifeblood. Inside Sports, for instance, can arrange to get a pro hockey player to teach how to take a slap shot. “Like maybe I could get you to sing the national anthem before a game,” Mr. Ebers said. “I haven’t done it. I think it’s possible.” THE Ticket Man was having drinks with Stephen Siegel, chairman of global brokerage at CB Richard Ellis, a large commercial real estate firm. He’s an old friend and a big customer. Sipping his martini, Mr. Siegel mentioned he had not renewed his Yankees season tickets; Mr. Ebers said he would get him whatever he needed. They talked about the Mets, tennis. “I love this man,” Mr. Siegel said. “He’s Mr. Yes instead of Mr. No. Anything I need, he gets.” Once, while he was out of town and his housekeeper needed cash to pay someone, Mr. Siegel called Mr. Ebers, who went over at 3 a.m. to drop off the money. StubHub can’t pay your nanny. Most ticket men are disembodied voices on the phone. Not Mr. Ebers. Three or four nights a week, he’s out with clients, taking them to dinner, playing poker. He has cultivated relationships with high-demand restaurants and gets tables for clients when they can’t — gratis. Now, drinks at the New York Palace with David Robin, senior vice president at Newedge, a brokerage house. Mr. Robin wanted the U.S. Open tennis as usual, and he might want to take his children to Wimbledon. And, of course, don’t forget the Allman Brothers. Mr. Robin wanted to go three times. Mr. Ebers had him covered. Mr. Robin articulated why he relied on Mr. Ebers: “I don’t want to use a machine, because I’ve got 8,000 other things to do.” To keep visible, Mr. Ebers also donates tickets to charity events, which he attends, and goes to industry banquets. His son, Jake, who is planning to go to law school, was born with a club foot corrected by the work of the New York University Hospital for Joint Diseases . Because of Mr. Ebers’s contributions and fund-raising, the hospital now has the Ebers Center for Foot Deformity. HE unlocked the door, said, “Hi” to his wife. His BlackBerry squealed furiously. The Ticket Man lives in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. Sports memorabilia bought mainly at charity auctions festoon his son’s room: a seat back from Yankee Stadium signed by Derek Jeter, a third base signed by Wade Boggs, a $450 check made out to a bakery from Wayne Gretzky that Mr. Ebers found in the lobby of his old building. The acquisitions were for Jake. Mr. Ebers has no hobbies of his own. “People should have a hobby,” Mrs. Ebers said. “This one does not have one except being on the phone.” “I know, I know,” Mr. Ebers said. She said, “My friends always say all the pictures from vacations are Richie on the phone.” He is not star-struck. He does not see great worth in shuffling down a line of oglers to simply pump Justin Bieber’s hand or to ask Shakira how’s it going, especially at what could be $1,500 a pop. Is there anyone he would like to meet and greet? “I’d like to meet Eric Clapton and sit and watch him play a guitar,” Mr. Ebers said. “I’d like to sit in a room with Barbra Streisand.” Mrs. Ebers began to say something. Then the phone rang.


Former F.B.I. Agent Sues, Claiming Retaliation Over Misgivings in Anthrax Case

Abstract: WASHINGTON — When Bruce E. Ivins , an Army microbiologist, took a fatal overdose of Tylenol in 2008, the government declared that he had been responsible for the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, which killed five people and set off a nationwide panic, and closed the case. Now, a former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remains secret. The former agent, Richard L. Lambert, who spent 24 years at the F.B.I., says he believes it is possible that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax mailer, but he does not think prosecutors could have convicted him had he lived to face criminal charges. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee last Thursday, Mr. Lambert accused the bureau of trying “to railroad the prosecution of Ivins” and, after his suicide, creating “an elaborate perception management campaign” to bolster its claim that he was guilty. Mr. Lambert’s lawsuit accuses the bureau and the Justice Department of forcing his dismissal from a job as senior counterintelligence officer at the Energy Department’s lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in retaliation for his dissent on the anthrax case. The anthrax letters were mailed to United States senators and news organizations in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, causing a huge and costly disruption in the postal system and the federal government. Members of Congress and Supreme Court justices were forced from their offices while technicians in biohazard suits cleaned up the lethal anthrax powder. Decontamination costs nationwide exceeded $1 billion. At least 17 people were sickened, in addition to the five who died. The bureau’s investigation, one of the longest-running and most technically complex inquiries in its history, has long been seen as troubled. Investigators initially lacked the forensic skills to analyze bioterrorist attacks. For several years, agents focused on a former Army scientist and physician, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who was subsequently cleared and given a $4.6 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit. Reviews by the National Academy of Sciences and the Government Accountability Office faulted aspects of the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the case. Image The late Bruce Ivins in 2003, when he was a microbiologist at Fort Detrick, Md. Credit Sam Yu/Frederick News Post, via Assocaited Press Mr. Lambert, who was himself criticized for pursuing Dr. Hatfill for so long, has now offered, in his lawsuit and in an interview, an insider’s view of what hampered the investigation. “This case was hailed at the time as the most important case in the history of the F.B.I.,” Mr. Lambert said. “But it was difficult for me to get experienced investigators assigned to it.” He said that the effort was understaffed and plagued by turnover, and that 12 of 20 agents assigned to the case had no prior investigative experience. Senior bureau microbiologists were not made available, and two Ph.D. microbiologists who were put on the case were then removed for an 18-month Arabic language program in Israel. Fear of leaks led top officials to order the extreme compartmentalization of information, with investigators often unable to compare notes and share findings with colleagues, he said. Mr. Lambert said he outlined the problems in a formal complaint in 2006 to the F.B.I.’s deputy director. Some of his accusations were later included in a report on the anthrax case by the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” infuriating bureau leaders. The F.B.I., which rarely comments on pending litigation, did not respond to requests for comment on Mr. Lambert’s claims. Although the lethal letters contained notes expressing jihadist views, investigators came to believe the mailer was an insider in the government’s biodefense labs. They eventually matched the anthrax powder to a flask in Dr. Ivins’s lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland and began intense scrutiny of his life and work. Image The police in Frederick, Md., spoke with a woman they identified as Diane Ivins, the wife of Bruce E. Ivins, 62, at the couple's home in Frederick, Md., in 2008. Credit Rob Carr/Associated Press They discovered electronic records that showed he had spent an unusual amount of time at night in his high-security lab in the periods before the two mailings of the anthrax letters. They found that he had a pattern of sending letters and packages from remote locations under assumed names. They uncovered emails in which he described serious mental problems. The investigators documented Dr. Ivins’s obsession with a national sorority that had an office near the Princeton, N.J., mailbox where the letters were mailed. They detected what they believed to be coded messages directed at colleagues, hidden in the notes in the letters. As prosecutors prepared to charge him with the five murders in July 2008, Dr. Ivins, 62, took his own life at home in Frederick, Md. Days later, at a news conference, Jeffrey A. Taylor, then the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said the authorities believed “that based on the evidence we had collected, we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.” But Mr. Lambert says the bureau also gathered a large amount of evidence pointing away from Dr. Ivins’s guilt that was never shared with the public or the news media. Had the case come to trial, he said, “I absolutely do not think they could have proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry. After retiring from the F.B.I. in 2012, Mr. Lambert joined the Energy Department. But an F.B.I. ethics lawyer ruled that because Mr. Lambert had to work with F.B.I. agents in his new job, he was violating a conflict-of-interest law that forbade former federal employees from contacting previous colleagues for a year after they had left their government jobs. That ruling led to his dismissal, Mr. Lambert said, and he has not been able to find work despite applying for more than 70 jobs. His lawsuit asserts that several other former F.B.I. agents were able to take identical intelligence jobs with the Energy Department and that he was singled out for mistreatment.

Anthrax
FBI
Richard Lambert
Bruce E Ivins
Whistleblower
Lawsuits
Threat
Terrorism
Murders and Homicides


Webb Leads in Singapore

Abstract: Karrie Webb of Australia shot a two-under-par 70 to take a one-stroke lead over Angela Stanford of the United States through the third round of the HSBC Women’s Champions in Singapore. Webb had an 11-under total of 205. ■ Ross Fisher of England increased his lead to five strokes in the Tshwane Open, shooting a five-under 67 to reach 18 under in Centurion, South Africa. (AP)


Arsenal Survives in First Playoff Leg

Abstract: Arsenal held on to beat Udinese, 1-0, on Theo Walcott’s early goal in the first leg of the Champions League playoff round. Walcott struck just four minutes into the game, and then host Arsenal had to withstand intense pressure from the Italian visitors to protect the victory. ¶ Major League Soccer will lower the charge against the salary cap for young designated players after hearing from teams about their reluctance to sign young international players at such a high price. International designated players 20 or younger will now be charged $150,000 against the cap. Players 21 to 23 will count $200,000. Both numbers are down from the $335,000 for all other designated players. ¶ M.L.S. announced that the American national team striker Eddie Johnson was returning to the league from Fulham in England. His team is to be determined.

Soccer
UEFA Champions League (Soccer)
Arsenal Football Club
Arsenal (Soccer Team)
Udinese Calcio (Soccer Team)


U.S. Barred From Hearing of Xue Feng in Beijing

Abstract: BEIJING — The United States Embassy was denied access to an appeal hearing for an American geologist sentenced in July to eight years in prison for buying a database on China ’s oil industry , an American official said here Tuesday. The hearing began in the morning, and no result had been announced by the evening. Robert Goldberg, the embassy’s deputy chief of mission, said outside the courtroom in Beijing that the embassy had made a formal request to attend the hearing of the geologist, Xue Feng. The Beijing High People’s Court denied the request, he said, even though Dr. Xue is entitled to consular representation under the 1980 United States-China Consular Convention. “Regardless of the outcome of today’s hearing, we urge the High Court and the Chinese government to ensure fairness and transparency in the process of Dr. Xue’s appeal,” Mr. Goldberg said. “We urge the Chinese to grant Dr. Xue humanitarian release and immediate deportation, so that he can return home to the U.S. and reunite with his family.” Mr. Goldberg said the embassy had filed a formal protest with the Foreign Ministry over the denial of consular representation. Asked about the complaint at a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, a ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said, “The Chinese judicial authorities will handle the case according to law and continue to fulfill our obligations according to the China-U.S. treaty on consular affairs.” Dr. Xue was detained three years ago and later charged under a vague state secrets law. He had signed a purchase contract on behalf of an energy consulting company based in Colorado, IHS Energy, for a database on the Chinese oil industry. A court sentenced him on July 4 to eight years in prison and immediate deportation afterward. It also fined him $30,000. American officials were present at his first trial. Dr. Xue was born in China but received citizenship in the United States before returning here as a businessman. The White House had lobbied Chinese leaders on his behalf, and American officials had visited him in jail nearly 30 times. The American ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, has called for his release. The harsh sentence imposed on Dr. Xue reveals China’s sensitivities to business dealings related to natural resources. In March, an Australian businessman born in China, Stern Hu, was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a Shanghai court partly on charges of stealing commercial secrets involving Chinese purchases of iron ore. As in Dr. Xue’s case, that trial called attention to the opacity of China’s justice system.

China
Xue Feng
United States International Relations


Calpers’s Disclosure on Fees Brings Surprise, and Scrutiny

Abstract: Earlier this year, a senior executive of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System , the country’s biggest state pension fund, made a surprising statement: The fund did not know what it was paying some of its Wall Street managers. Wylie A. Tollette, the chief operating investment officer, told an investment committee in April that the fees Calpers paid to private equity firms were “not explicitly disclosed or accounted for. We can’t track it today.” It was an unusual disclosure. In the world of public pension funds, Calpers is a big fish. It manages $300 billion in retirement funds for 1.6 million teachers, firefighters, police officers and other state employees and is generally credited with being the most sophisticated investor in the pension world. For J. J. Jelincic, a member of the Calpers board, the disclosure raised a red flag. “I am disturbed that we don’t disclose the carry,” Mr. Jelincic said, referring to carried interest, the industry term for private equity performance fees. “I am appalled and, actually, I’m not sure I believe the staff when they say they don’t know what the carry is,” he added. It also caught the attention of Edward A. H. Siedle, a pension fraud investigator and a former lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Siedle, who has investigated public funds like those in North Carolina, Alabama and Rhode Island, and corporate retirement plans for Walmart, Caterpillar and Boeing, is seeking to investigate Calpers with the help of crowdfunding. He wants to determine, among other things, how much Calpers pays in private equity fees. He plans to pay for his project by raising $750,000 from the public through the online platform Kickstarter . “The money manager knows to a penny what the fees are,” Mr. Siedle said. “The only explanation is that the pension fund has chosen not to ask the question because, from an accounting and legal perspective, those numbers have to be readily available. They are intentionally not asking because if the fees were publicly disclosed, the public would scream.” Calpers paid $1.6 billion in fees to Wall Street in 2014, according to its annual report. The figure, however, does not include how much it paid in carried interest. Both Mr. Siedle and Mr. Jelincic say that figure could be as much as an additional $1 billion a year. Private equity firms typically charge investors a management fee of 1 to 2 percent of assets and about 20 percent of any gains each year. But fees for transactions, costs for monitoring investments and legal fees are not readily disclosed. Those undisclosed fees result in a substantial weight on returns, according to a recent study by CEM Benchmarking. Faced with ballooning deficits and lackluster performance, state pension funds nationwide are beginning to examine more closely how much they are paying Wall Street to manage their investments. Calpers for the first time this year will begin to make more payments to retirees than it receives from contributions and its investments. Pennsylvania is facing a $50 billion shortfall in its pension fund. In New York City, the comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, commissioned a study of the city’s five pension funds that showed external managers fell more $2.5 billion short of benchmark returns over 10 years. Image Edward A..H. Siedle Mr. Siedle’s firm, Benchmark Financial Services, recently published a crowdfunded investigation into Rhode Island’s public employee pension fund. In an 81-page report, Mr. Siedle outlined how the pension fund had incurred $2 billion in preventable losses from investments in outside real estate, private equity and hedge funds. Seth Magaziner, Rhode Island’s treasurer, has disputed the report. “Treasurer Magaziner strongly agrees with the need for greater transparency and lower fees by alternative investment managers doing business with public pension funds,” Shana Autiello, a spokeswoman for Mr. Magaziner, said. In addition to wanting to examine the fees that Calpers pays, Mr. Siedle also wants to scrutinize the relationship its executives and placement agents — middlemen it hires to help it find money managers — have with Wall Street to determine whether any conflicts of interest exist. He plans to spend nine months sifting through Calpers’s public disclosures and will also comb through the private offering documents that external money managers give to consultants who advise Calpers. Calpers said it was trying to address the lack of transparency around fees. In April, Mr. Tollette, the chief operating investment officer, told the investment committee that Calpers planned to require greater disclosure from the private equity firms it invests in, adding that this was an industrywide problem. Calpers is also working on a reporting program that would track data from each external firm with which it has investments. “Calpers has long been a leader in advocating for fee economies and transparency, including in private equity,” Joe DeAnda, a spokesman for Calpers, said. “A necessary element in that effort is additional disclosure and reporting from the general partners managing the funds,” he added. The public scrutiny comes as Calpers seeks to simplify what it has called a complex and expensive portfolio. This month, Ted Eliopoulos, the chief investment officer, said that over the next five years, Calpers would cut by more than half the 212 external money managers it invests with for private equity, real estate and global equity funds. It will reduce the number of private equity firms to 30 from 98, giving those firms $30 billion to manage. Calpers has put its money with some of the biggest private equity firms in the world, including TPG, Blackstone, Carlyle and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Last year, as part of its move to slim down its external investments, Calpers decided to liquidate $4 billion of hedge fund investments. The S.E.C. has started to look more closely at private equity firms to understand how they value their assets and charge fees. The agency, which has conducted examinations of private equity firms, found that more than 50 percent of the time there were violations of law or weaknesses in a firm’s controls. Mr. DeAnda, the Calpers spokesman, said fund officials had been “actively engaging with some of our private equity partners to help improve the disclosure and data available and have been closely monitoring the regulatory announcements and attention around this subject.” Mr. Siedle’s investigation will not be the first for Calpers. In 2009, it hired the law firm Steptoe & Johnson to look at its use of placement agents as part of a wider pay-to-play scandal across the industry. The investigation, which cost Calpers $11 million, uncovered evidence of bribery and corruption. The S.E.C. accused Federico R. Buenrostro Jr., the Calpers chief executive from 2002 and 2008, and Alfred J. R. Villalobos, a former board member turned placement agent, with fraud. The United States attorney in San Francisco charged the two men with criminal fraud. Mr. Buenrostro pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit bribery and fraud. Mr. Villalobos, who pleaded not guilty, committed suicide this year. Seeking to put the controversy behind it, Calpers adopted new policies and disclosure requirements. It continues to use placement firms.

CalPERS
Price
Private equity
Edward A. H. Siedle


Strasburg at Citi Field This Season? Unlikely

Abstract: Mets fans hoping to see Stephen Strasburg pitch in person may have to wait until next season or hit the road. The Washington Nationals have already made two of their three trips to Citi Field this season, and their last visit is not until the final weekend of the regular season, from Oct. 1 to 3. By then, the Nationals are likely to have shut down Strasburg for the season to avoid overworking him. Of course, if the Nationals can find a way to contend for a playoff spot, then the calculations might change. In that case, Strasburg’s workload may be rationed so that he can keep pitching right through the end of the 2010 campaign. But the odds are that will not happen. And thus far, Mets fans seem to making the same bet. The resale price of tickets to see the Mets play the Nationals at Citi Field in October were unchanged on Wednesday, according to FanSnap.com , which surveys online ticket resellers. But that final weekend aside, the Mets are likely to face Strasburg at some point this season because they still have seven games remaining against the Nationals in Washington. They play four games there from July 1 to 4, and then return on Sept. 6 for a three-game series. On Wednesday, Mets Manager Jerry Manuel said he was impressed with the highlights he saw of Strasburg’s debut on Tuesday night, when he struck out 14 Pittsburgh Pirates batters in seven innings. He said, with his customary laugh, that he looked forward to having the Mets face Strasburg “when we’re hot, swinging the bats well.” For now, it appears the Cleveland Indians will be next to take on Strasburg. They are scheduled to face him on Sunday, in Cleveland, during an interleague series with the Nationals. The price of tickets for that game has now jumped dramatically, with the average cost of tickets being resold online above $75, or nearly twice as much as tickets for the other two games in that series, according to FanSnap. VAZQUEZ ON STRASBURG Javier Vazquez turned on the television after Tuesday’s game because he wanted to see if reality matched the expectations. As Stephen Strasburg flaunted his repertory — 98-mile-per-hour fastballs, unhittable curves, an unheard-of low-90’s changeup — it did not take long for Vazquez to reach his conclusion. “Wow, he’s got some unbelievable stuff,” Vazquez said. “Most guys who throw that hard, they don’t have the secondary pitch like he does. You just hope he stays healthy.” Strasburg struck out 14 in his major league debut for Washington, becoming the first member of the Nationals/Expos franchise to strike out that many hitters since Vazquez himself did so on April 9, 2003. Playing for the Expos, Vazquez set a career high in a 3-0 loss against the Cubs. His opponent that day in Chicago was Mark Prior, whose career has served as a cautionary tale for Strasburg. Also a right-handed strikeout machine from San Diego, Prior went 18-6 for the Cubs in 2003, his second season, before a series of injuries wrecked his promising career. “This kid reminds me of Prior a little bit,” Vazquez said. “The only thing I saw yesterday was that Strasburg throws harder.” During Prior’s rookie season in Chicago, in 2002, Yankees Manager Joe Girardi caught him. He remembered there being considerable attention surrounding Prior’s ascent, but nothing comparable with the attention being showered on Strasburg. “Kerry Wood had that type of stuff, but I’m not sure Kerry Wood had the type of command that Strasburg has,” Girardi said. “Mark Prior was more of a command guy but didn’t have the velocity that this kid has.” BEN SHPIGEL STRASBURG RATINGS Stephen Strasburg’s Tuesday night was the highest-rated program on the MLB Network since Nielsen recently began measuring the 18-month-old channel’s performance. The game generated a national 0.84 rating, or 462,000 television households, in all markets except for Washington and Pittsburgh, where the teams’ local cable outlets carried the game exclusively. The MLB Network rating peaked from 7:45 to 8 p.m. Eastern, with a 1.17 rating, or 648,000 television households. The Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, which carries the Nationals, posted a record 7.1 rating, the equivalent of 165,000 television homes. In Pittsburgh, the 5.6 rating on FSN Pittsburgh added 64,800 households to the overall audience. RICHARD SANDOMIR FAMILIAR NAMES DRAFTED The Yankees and the Mets both indulged in some family ties in the 42nd round of the Major League Baseball draft on Wednesday. The Mets, with pick No. 1,262 of the draft, drafted shortstop J. J. Franco from Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn. He is the son of the former Mets closer John Franco. Twenty-three picks later, the Yankees took Michael O’Neill, an outfielder from Olentangy Liberty High School in Ohio. He is the nephew of the former Yankees right fielder Paul O’Neill. (NYT)

Strasburg Stephen
New York Mets
Washington Nationals
Baseball


Cost of Oil Dulling the Shine of a Global Air Show

Abstract: LONDON — The barons of civil and military aviation converging for the Farnborough International Air Show should have plenty to talk about. Many airlines around the world are battling insolvency. The price of oil has shot up to as high as $147 a barrel. European governments are weighing new environmental taxes to limit the industry’s contribution to global warming . And Washington has decided to reopen bidding on a $35 billion air tanker contract for the Air Force. “This is the most uncertain time I’ve known in the industry for 29 years,” said Doug McVitie, founder and chief consultant at Arran Aerospace in Dinan, France. “The whole stability of the business has been upset by the oil price.” The air show, which starts Monday, is usually a time for the industry to dazzle customers with gleaming new planes, the latest technology and military might. This year, however, oil prices are likely to preoccupy the representatives of 1,500 companies from 35 countries at aviation’s showcase event, which alternates each year between Farnborough, outside London, and Paris. Those soaring costs have driven home the need for more efficient jet fleets — particularly in the United States, where some airlines are still flying two-decade-old MD-80s and first-generation 737s. But efforts to modernize fleets face a headwind. The big manufacturers have production delays for their next-generation jets, like the superjumbo Airbus A380 and the midsize 787 Dreamliner from Boeing. And many airlines are struggling as higher airfares and softening economies have cut demand. Last month, the International Air Transport Association forecast global airline losses of $6.1 billion for 2008 if oil prices average $135 a barrel. Many airlines are culling fleets, dropping flights, charging for checked bags and adding surcharges to ticket prices to offset fuel outlays. “For many of them, buying new, more fuel-efficient planes to combat the doubling of fuel costs can be no part of their agenda,” said Howard Wheeldon, a strategist at BGC Partners, a brokerage firm in London. The Air Transport Association, which represents American carriers, thinks business will be even worse for the domestic companies. It forecasts a loss of at least $7.2 billion — and as high as $13 billion if oil prices keep climbing. The American industry’s worst year was 2002, when airlines lost $11 billion as air travel was devastated after 9/11. Already airlines are starting to reassess, postpone and cancel their orders, and that looks likely to continue as long as oil prices stay stubbornly high. “It’s inevitable we will start to see a few wanting to defer,” said Rupinder Vig, an aviation analyst at Morgan Stanley in London. Adding to carriers’ strain is a decision by the European Union last month to require all airlines using European airports to buy pollution credits starting in 2012. Airlines see that as yet another tax they can ill afford, particularly since the timing of new innovations to make aircraft greener is unclear. “If you want to make a new plane, it needs to have a sufficient jump in fuel consumption and overall economic performance to be worth the investment,” said Barbara Kracht, a spokeswoman at Airbus. “You need the technology, particularly engine technology, and that won’t be ready before the second half of the next decade,” she added. Nor can the airlines expect quick breakthroughs from engine makers like Rolls-Royce, General Electric and Pratt & Whitney just because the price of oil has skyrocketed, given the time needed for leaps in technology. Plane manufacturers face tough times, as well. “After 2010 they are going to be hit by a fierce down cycle,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va. He projects that business could shrink as much as 40 percent. Still, they have big order lists that should see them through the next two years. “They have just enough cushion in their backlog and from Middle Eastern demand to make them look better than they are,” Mr. Aboulafia said. Analysts are predicting an order at Farnborough from Etihad Airways, based in Abu Dhabi, for about 100 aircraft, and they see more coming from Qatar Airways, Air Arabia and Emirates. Carriers in the Middle East are benefiting as high oil prices bolster their region’s economies.

Airlines and Airplanes
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Farnborough Air Show (GB)


U.S. Says Killings Won’t Affect Iraq Mission

Abstract: BAGHDAD — The killing of two American soldiers by an Iraqi soldier at a military base north of Baghdad was a “deliberate act” but would not undermine the new American mission to advise Iraq ’s security forces, the American military said in a statement on Wednesday. The deaths — the first American casualties here since President Obama declared the official end to American combat in Iraq last week — appeared to have stemmed from an argument that escalated into gunfire, according to Iraqi officials and a relative of the Iraqi soldier involved. The Iraqi soldier, identified as Soran Rahman Falih Wali, was killed in the firefight that erupted Tuesday afternoon at a small base described as a commando compound near the city of Tuz Khurmato, in Salahuddin Province. Nine American soldiers were wounded. A joint American-Iraqi force detained the soldier’s brother, Marwan Abdul Rahman Salih, according to Iraqi officials, as part of what the American military said would be a “detailed investigation” of the firefight, which marred the steady transfer of all combat operations to Iraq’s army and police forces. A police commander in Tuz Khurmato, Capt. Daham Abdullah, identified the brother as a police officer, though it was not clear whether he had any connection to the attack itself. The joint force also raided Mr. Wali’s house, not far from the base, but his family had left, Captain Abdullah said. A relative, Zargan Kfoor, described Mr. Wali as a dedicated soldier who had recently married and become more devout. Only hours before the attack, he and an official on the base said, Mr. Wali had escorted eight detainees to a police operations room on the base. “At the time, he was not angry about anything, and his attitude was good,” said the official, Awni Abdul Hussein. Mr. Kfoor, however, said that Mr. Wali had been teased by some of the Americans he worked with, possibly because of his religious views. “His reactions were very strong,” he said. The American military provided few additional details, and as a matter of policy did not release the names of those killed, pending notification of their families. “Though this incident is tragic and our first concern is for our comrades and their families, it doesn’t affect our strong commitment to the mission of advising and assisting the Iraqi security forces as they continue to sacrifice each day for security and stability in their nation,” said the senior military spokesman in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Jeffery Buchanan. The attack underscored the risks still facing the nearly 50,000 American troops remaining in Iraq as they work beside Iraqi security forces, who themselves face daily attacks from insurgents. In Tarmiya, on Baghdad’s northern edge, a suicide car bomb exploded near a gas station on Wednesday, killing 3 people, including an Iraqi soldier, and wounding 10 others, 5 of them soldiers. It was the largest of a series of attacks across Baghdad that killed at least three others and wounded two dozen. In Mosul, in northern Iraq, a television journalist was shot and killed on Wednesday, the second killed in two days. The journalist, Safaa al-Din Abdul Hamid, anchored a program called “Our Mosques” for a provincial television network. The day before, an anchor for the state Iraqiya network, Riyadh al-Saray, was shot to death on a street in Baghdad. A report by Reporters Without Borders, released Tuesday, said that 230 journalists and other employees of local and international media organizations had died here since the American invasion, making it the deadliest war for the news media since World War II. Insurgents have often attacked journalists, and bombed the Arabiya television network’s headquarters in Baghdad in July. Muayad al-Lami, the secretary general of the main union of journalists, said the government needed to increase security for news organizations and prominent journalists. “We have demanded that they provide real protection and have made proposals to the security authorities and to the Parliament,” he said, “but we didn’t get a response.”

United States Defense and Military Forces


It Doesn't Pay to Be in the A.M.T. Zone

Abstract: AFTER President Bush and Congress cut tax rates on dividends and long-term capital gains to a top rate of 15 percent in 2003, many investors bought stocks that make big cash payouts, expecting to benefit from lower taxes. For many people, it has not worked out that way. That is because your actual tax rate may not be the one that the politicians talked about or that the Internal Revenue Service prints on its tax forms. The culprit is the alternative minimum tax, which runs parallel to the regular income tax system. The A.M.T. has its own rules, including fewer deductions and just two tax rates, 26 percent and 28 percent. If the alternative tax is higher than the one you would owe under the regular tax system, you pay the higher bill. Taxpayers subject to the alternative system pay the 15 percent rate on dividends and long-term capital gains unless they fall into a netherworld known as the phase-out zone. In 2005, that zone included married couples with annual incomes of $150,000 to $382,000, and single filers making $112,500 to $273,000. Taxpayers in the phase-out zone pay even higher rates on wage income than other people trapped by the A.M.T. -- as much as 35 percent on each additional dollar of income. For people whose income exceeds the phase-out zone limits, the statutory rates apply and any additional wages are taxed at 28 percent and dividends and long-term gains are taxed at 15 percent. But those unfortunate enough to dwell in the zone must pay an effective tax rate on dividends and long-term gains of 21.5 percent or 22 percent, instead of 15 percent. This extra tax is just one of the many painful features of the alternative levy. Under the alternative tax, people cannot deduct property taxes, for example, so their cost of homeownership climbs. But the interaction of the alternative tax and the 2003 Bush tax cuts directly affect the taxation of investments in stocks. Imposing higher taxes on people at such incomes was not part of the original intent of the alternative tax. Congress created it in 1969 to make sure that those making more than $200,000 -- the equivalent of more than $1 million in today's dollars -- could not live tax free by making unlimited use of exotic tax breaks like the oil depletion allowance. Over time, Congress has excluded most of these tax breaks from the alternative levy. And in 1986, Congress revised the list of tax deductions that would push a taxpayer into the alternative system to include those routinely taken by most Americans. They include the standard deduction; personal exemptions for the taxpayer, spouse and children; deductions for state income and local property taxes; and even some medical deductions for the severely ill or injured. The White House has said repeatedly that it will take measures to mitigate the impact of the alternative tax on people of moderate income, and restore at least some of the benefits of the Bush tax cuts that were taken back by the alternative tax. In his State of the Union address, President Bush again called for making his tax cuts permanent, but he said nothing about overhauling or repealing the alternative minimum tax. The A.M.T. has become such a money maker that by 2008 its repeal would cost more than repealing the regular income tax, according to the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, two research institutions in Washington. Over the next decade, the alternative tax will cost Americans $1.1 trillion in additional taxes, of which $739 billion is a result of the Bush tax cuts not being integrated into the levy, according to a report by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. Those hit hardest are couples with two or more children who own their homes, invest and make $75,000 to $500,000 a year, according to the Tax Policy Center computer model. WHILE the administration has never proposed a specific plan to change the alternative minimum tax or to exempt dividends and long-term gains from the phase-out range, Congress initiated a small adjustment five years ago. It exempted the first $58,000 earned by married couples ($40,250 for singles) from the alternative tax calculation for 2001 through last year. This patch was not renewed for 2006, dropping the exemption to $45,000 for couples ($33,750 for singles) unless a new patch is voted into law. Investors who have fallen into the phase-out zone face a quandary. Should they buy high-dividend stocks, even though they will not get the full benefit of reduced tax rates? The short answer is this: if it makes sense to buy the shares for other reasons, the extra tax probably should not deter them. Rich Carreiro is one of those rare taxpayers who knew before he invested that he would not get the 15 percent rate on dividends. Mr. Carreiro, 38, takes a keen interest in the tax code, which is as complex as the code he works with as a software engineer in Arlington, Mass. "To move out of dividend-bearing stocks just because I am paying 22 percent instead of the promised 15 percent would cause more harm than good," he said. "The idea in investing is not to minimize your tax; it is to maximize your after-tax return. After all, you can pay no tax by living off money you've stuffed in your mattress, but that doesn't make good sense." One investing change that Mr. Carreiro and his wife did make because of the alternative tax was to avoid money market and bond funds that buy private activity bonds -- those whose proceeds are used by private entities. Under the alternative system, income from these bonds is subject to taxes at the higher rates applied to wages. Ed Grogan, a financial planner in Gig Harbor, Wash., says he tells clients not to let the extra tax deter them from buying stocks that they believe have a good future just because they will not qualify for the 15 percent rate on dividends. "Stick with your investing fundamentals," he said. STEPHEN J. ENTIN, a proponent in Washington of the supply-side theory of taxation that favors eliminating most taxes on capital, said last year that denying the 15 percent tax rate to some investors "poisons the tax cut." Mr. Entin, the president of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, said in an interview last month that "you should be a little more ticked off at the world" if you are in the phase-out range and, like Mr. Carreiro, pay higher tax rates on dividends. In a report, Mr. Entin wrote that investors are still better off under the 2003 tax rate cuts even if they are in the phase-out range. That is because the phase-out rates are still significantly lower than the tax rates in effect before the 2003 tax cuts. Investors who are stuck in the phase-out range and avoid dividend-paying stocks may find that they still have a vexing tax problem. That is because the higher tax rates that apply to taxes on dividends also apply to long-term capital gains. If you are in the zone, you must pay the higher tax on capital gains, and you cannot take a federal deduction for state and local income taxes on them. Of course, if the stocks pay no dividend, no tax is due until they have been sold. By that time, your income could be above or below the phase-out range, so you could qualify for the 15 percent tax rate on their gains. By then, though, Congress may have made the tax code even more complicated.

UNITED STATES
BUSH GEORGE W
CAPITAL GAINS TAX
TAXATION
TAX CREDITS DEDUCTIONS AND EXEMPTIONS
ALTERNATIVE MINIMUM TAX
FINANCES
LAW AND LEGISLATION
SPECIAL SECTIONS