Drought in Russia Ripples Beyond the Wheat Fields

Abstract: MOSCOW — Early reports from Russia’s harvest indicate that yields of wheat and barley are down sharply, as predicted after a major drought here this summer that has helped send global wheat prices up sharply since June. Despite the implications for Russian consumers and the global market, the crop failures may translate to a relatively minimal financial effect on the country’s agricultural companies, which before the drought were just catching their stride after an overhaul of Soviet-era collective farms. The higher prices, in fact, made one company profitable, according to an earnings report released Friday. Nationally, the harvest has been diminished by more than 30 percent, according to the ministry of agriculture. Russia will certainly produce less grain than it consumes for the first time since 2004, and may import wheat for the first time in a decade. Last year it was the world’s third-largest wheat exporter, behind the United States and Canada. On Friday, wheat for delivery in December was trading on the Chicago Board of Trade for $6.95 a bushel — up more than 40 percent from its low in June before the drought but down from its high of $8.68 on Aug. 6 after Russian announced an export ban. On Russia’s domestic market it is now selling at about $6.20 a bushel. Expressing anger over the higher bread prices in Russia that have accompanied the rise in grain, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said Friday, “Someone is simply cashing in on the circumstances.” Prosecutors have recently raided bakeries in Moscow on accusations of price gouging. A bad harvest used to mean heads would roll in the Communist Party. But the spread of corporate farming in Russia in recent years now means investment portfolios are on the line, instead. The drought “has been a watershed event for the industry,” Michael Schneyderman, chief financial officer for Black Earth Farming , an operator of fields in central Russia that is listed on the Stockholm stock exchange, said in a telephone interview Friday, after the company released second-quarter earnings showing a profit of $1.4 million. That profit, coming amid the drought, was in contrast to the company’s persistent losses of the last few years. “It’s a silver lining,” Mr. Schneyderman said. With the harvest about half over, most investor-financed farming operations that took over from the collective farms over the last decade appear to be poised to lose some money. Mikhail V. Krasnoperov, an analyst at Troika Dialog bank, said Russian farmers would collectively earn about $1 billion less than they expected in the spring, according to a calculation based on the lower harvest forecast and factoring in current wheat prices. Yet, of perhaps longer-term importance for Russian agriculture, several of the largest private companies, including Black Earth, are saying that rising prices will more than make up for their yield losses from the drought. Black Earth Farming reported Friday that yields of winter wheat, usually the most bountiful crop, fell to 1.9 metric tons per hectare, compared with 3.5 tons last year. But other crops, including sunflowers and soybeans, fared better. Over all, Black Earth Farming says wheat prices are up 71 percent since spring, while yields are on average down 30 to 40 percent from forecasts before the drought. “Whatever we’ve lost in the yield, we sincerely hope to compensate by way of rising price,” Mr. Schneyderman, the chief financial officer, said. In fact, shares of Razgulay, a grain producer listed on the Micex stock exchange in Moscow, rose by 23 percent in July. Shares in another Russian producer, Pava, rose 28 percent. Shares in Black Earth did not fare as well, rising 1.8 percent over the month ending Aug. 16, the height of the drought, as the company’s fields are in the hardest-hit regions. The stock activity, analysts say, shows that the market mechanisms that lured investors into the sector are for the most part working, despite efforts at price controls that included a ban on wheat exports announced by Mr. Putin in early August. Analysts say the ban, to remain in effect through Dec. 31, has been largely ineffectual in reducing domestic wheat prices — pleasing farmers but driving angry officials, including Mr. Putin, to pursue other efforts to control potentially destabilizing food inflation. Bread prices rose 16 percent from the beginning of July through mid-August, according to the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti. For Russians, particularly the poor or the elderly who recall the privations of the Soviet era, the price of bread is a deeply emotional issue. But analysts say the high domestic grain prices — a root cause of the higher food prices — will have the virtue of keeping the Russian grain producers afloat, and able to invest in next year’s sowing. Black Earth said in its filing Friday that it expected to fetch prices of $176 to $208 a metric ton from wheat from the 2010 harvest. By comparison, Russian domestic wheat prices had been languishing around $116 a metric ton before the drought. Policies pursued here ripple far beyond Russia’s borders, to countries in the Middle East that rely on wheat imports, now more expensive, as well as to American breadbasket states where rising prices are elevating the incomes of farmers. (In the United States and other developed countries, the price of grain is a relatively small cost component of processed foods.) Russia is something of a wild card in global agriculture as it possesses the world’s largest reserves of fertile but fallow fields, with vast potential to raise production. After a series of downgrades this year, the Russian harvest is now forecast at 60 million to 63 million tons, compared with 97 million tons in 2009, according to the ministry of agriculture. So, it is already clear the harvest will fall short of internal demand for food and fodder of 73 million to 75 million tons of grain. What remains uncertain is whether the government will disburse its roughly 9.6 million tons from state grain reserves this year, to largely cover the shortfall and dampen domestic prices, or hold onto some in the event of another bad harvest next year. If state reserves are withheld, Russian millers and livestock farmers would be compelled to import large quantities of grain for the first time since the late 1990s. If the country becomes an importer, domestic grain prices will certainly remain roughly in the range of global prices, despite Mr. Putin’s ban on exports, according to Ulyana O. Lenvalskaya, a consumer sector analyst at Renaissance Capital bank. Domestic producers like Black Earth will be able to match the prices charged by international grain traders. The decision on the reserves, like so much else, is expected to rest on whether enough rain falls in the next few weeks to moisten the soil for winter-wheat sowing in central Russia. Rain would improve chances of a better harvest next year, and allow the government to release reserves over the winter.

Grain
Russia
International Trade and World Market


Obama Marks Genocide Without Saying the Word

Abstract: ASHEVILLE, N.C. — President Obama , who as a candidate vowed to use the term genocide to describe the Ottoman mass slaughter of Armenians nearly a century ago, once again declined to do so on Saturday as he marked the anniversary of the start of the killings. Trying to navigate one of the more emotionally fraught foreign policy challenges, Mr. Obama issued a statement from his weekend getaway here commemorating the victims of the killings but tried to avoid alienating Turkey, a NATO ally, which adamantly rejects the genocide label. “On this solemn day of remembrance, we pause to recall that 95 years ago one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century began,” Mr. Obama said in the statement, which largely echoed the same language he used on this date a year ago. “In that dark moment of history, 1.5 million Armenians were massacred or marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire .” When he was running for president and seeking votes from some of the 1.5 million Armenian-Americans, Mr. Obama had no qualms about using the term genocide and criticized the Bush administration for recalling an ambassador who dared to say the word. As a senator, he supported legislation calling the killings genocide, and in a statement on Jan. 19, 2008, he said that “the Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact.” Two years later, as president, he used none of that sort of language, though as he did a year ago, he hinted to Armenians that he still felt the same way. “I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed,” he said. “It is in all of our interest to see the achievement a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.” His statement came as the issue has grown as a source of tension between the United States and Turkey, and as a reconciliation effort between Turkey and Armenia that Mr. Obama has championed has seemingly stalled. In March, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted narrowly to condemn the killings as an act of genocide, defying a last-minute plea from the Obama administration to forgo a vote because it would threaten the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation efforts. Turkey briefly recalled its ambassador from Washington in protest. Armenia announced Thursday that it would suspend ratification of peace accords with Turkey, apparently because it was angered that Turkey was making new demands. Armenia insisted that it was not altogether abandoning the peace process, but analysts indicated that the Armenian government believed Turkey was trying to pressure it to reach a separate peace treaty with another neighbor, Azerbaijan, a close Turkish ally. Although the president’s statement did not use the term “genocide” on Saturday, it was strong enough to provoke a sharp statement from the Turkish Foreign Ministry, which called the language a reflection of a one-sided political perception. “Third countries neither have a right nor authority to judge the history of Turkish-Armenian relations with political motives,” the statement said. Meanwhile, the Armenian National Committee of America, an advocacy group based in Washington, condemned the “euphemisms and evasive terminology” in Mr. Obama’s statement and called it “yet another disgraceful capitulation to Turkey’s threats.” “Today we join with Armenians in the United States and around the world in voicing our sharp disappointment with the president’s failure to properly condemn and commemorate the Armenian genocide,” said Ken Hachikian, the committee’s chairman. He added that Mr. Obama’s failure to follow through on his campaign pledge was “allowing Turkey to tighten its gag rule on American genocide policy.”

War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity


New York City ID Holders Aren’t a Threat, N.Y.P.D. Official Says in Court

Abstract: The New York Police Department’s highest-ranking counterterrorism official said in court on Thursday that records associated with the city’s municipal ID card program could be destroyed without increasing the risk of terrorism. John Miller, the department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, was testifying in the courtroom of Justice Philip G. Minardo of the State Supreme Court on Staten Island in a case brought by two State Assembly members from the borough who are seeking to block the destruction of the records; plans to destroy them were built into the legislation that created the ID program, known as IDNYC . “In the course of two years, we have not seen New York City IDs surfacing in a rampage of terrorism threats or other matters,” Mr. Miller said. For six hours, Justice Minardo questioned city officials and the Staten Island lawmakers, Ronald Castorina Jr. and Nicole Malliotakis, both Republicans, and then agreed to hear more witnesses for the plaintiffs next week. In the meantime, the city must continue to retain the documents, which were to have been destroyed on Dec. 31. The IDNYC card, which had been given to 1,029,618 New Yorkers as of 2016’s end, has been a boon for undocumented immigrants, as well as homeless or transgender individuals, in gaining access to city services and, in some instances, opening bank accounts. Undocumented immigrants can use a combination of foreign passports or consular documents, which are scanned by the city during the application process, to prove their identity to obtain the cards. Mr. Castorina has said the suit was not about immigration, but after the court session he said undocumented immigrants should not be eligible for the card. “It’s a violation of law,” he said, adding that they were in the country illegally. When questioned by Justice Minardo, Mr. Castorina was dismissive of Mr. Miller’s testimony. “What I heard was political mumbo jumbo,” Mr. Castorina said on the stand. Mayor Bill de Blasio has made IDNYC a signature of his administration, and Mr. Castorina said later that Mr. Miller was beholden to the mayor. Image John Miller, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counter-terrorism, who testified on Thursday in a lawsuit over the IDNYC program. Credit Alex Wong/Getty Images Immigrant advocacy groups want the city to go ahead with the document destruction because they fear that the information could be used by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has said he would deport two to three million undocumented people with criminal convictions. Under the law that created the ID program in 2014, records of the documents used to apply were to be kept for two years and made available only through a judicial warrant or subpoena . Applicants were promised privacy. The law was negotiated with the Police Department, and Mr. Miller admitted that the police department had wanted a longer period of document retention, but negotiated the two years. “We wanted a period of time to establish a baseline — to take the temperature of the potential criminal implications of what might emanate from the IDs,” he said. On Dec. 7, the city said it would no longer retain the documents submitted with the applications, but would still retain the applications. Mr. Miller said that out of the more than one million applications, there had been only four cases involving identity theft. From January 2015, when the program started, to Dec. 7, 2016, law enforcement officials obtained the personal information of nine applicants. A total of 102 applications were shown to have some evidence of fraud. Mr. Miller said that there was actually a greater risk of “massive identity fraud” in retaining the scanned documents, leaving them open to hacking. Ravi Batra , a lawyer recently retained by Mr. Castorina and Ms. Malliotakis, argued that the city’s “compassion” toward the underprivileged came at the expense of the security of all New Yorkers. Both Nisha Agarwal, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, and Steven Banks, commissioner of New York City’s Human Resources Administration, whose agency administers the program, testified to the strict security measures in place to ensure documents were authentic, and Mr. Banks cited the work of fraud investigators.

Illegal Immigration
NYC
ID
NYPD
Ronald Castorina Jr.
Nicole Malliotakis
Philip G. Minardo
Terrorism
John J Miller


For Moyer, a Slow Build and a Quick Hook

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — It was no surprise that the histrionics in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series started as soon as Jamie Moyer left the mound Sunday night. Moyer is a gentleman, a father of seven, better known for his charity work than for starting bench-clearing brawls. Intimidation is not Moyer’s game anyway. He has the slowest fastball in the majors, and he was hit hard by the Los Angeles Dodgers, allowing six runs and recording just four outs in a 7-2 Phillies loss. “I’ve pitched too many innings and pitched too many years — one game doesn’t make or break my career,” Moyer said. “Obviously it’s the playoffs and it’s magnified now. But we are all professionals and we have to handle it professionally.” The Phillies still lead the series, two games to one, but for Moyer, the timing of his shortest start in more than a decade could not have been worse. He has never pitched in the World Series, and he is trying to help the Phillies make it there for the first time since 1993. Moyer pitched for the Baltimore Orioles that season, having weathered a career crossroads that might have discouraged others. That he was even pitching on Sunday, at age 45, was an achievement in itself. “It shows a lot of heart, a lot of character, a lot of fight, a lot of will,” said Greg Maddux of the Dodgers. Like Moyer, Maddux was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 1984 and made his debut two years later. Maddux quickly vaulted to stardom. Moyer was nearly a has-been. After the Cubs cut him from their minor league camp in March 1992, they made Moyer this offer: batting-practice pitcher and bullpen coach for their Class A team in Peoria, Ill. Moyer was 29 and had not won a major league game in 18 months. He did not win another for 15 more. The Cubs did not think he could help them as a pitcher, but they valued his intellect. “He would have done a great job,” said Steve Roadcap, the Peoria manager that year. “I’m sure he would have helped me out tremendously, because of the way he studies the game.” But for Moyer, it was easy to reject the offer. He said he knew he could not throw much harder than batting-practice speed, but he also knew pitching was more complex than that. He had a healthy left arm and did not want to waste it. “I wasn’t ready to say, I can’t play anymore,” Moyer said. “And I’m still not.” At 45 years 329 days, Moyer was the second-oldest pitcher to start a postseason game, behind Jack Quinn, who was 46 years 103 days in 1929 as a member of the Philadelphia Athletics. Moyer is the oldest active player in the majors. He has more victories after turning 40 than any pitcher in the last 75 years except Phil Niekro, the Hall of Fame knuckleballer. Moyer has 82 wins since his 40th birthday — and 212 since turning down Peoria to be a starter for the Toledo Mud Hens. That job was only marginally more glamorous, but after a full season there — and eight starts in the Orioles’ farm system — he was back in the majors for good. Moyer went 16-7 with a 3.71 earned run average for the Phillies this year, retaining a serious work ethic and boyish enthusiasm. “Everybody’s made differently,” said Cole Hamels, the Phillies’ 24-year-old ace. “Maybe he was made to throw 80 miles an hour but have more energy than most people.” Hamels was 2 in 1986, when Moyer made his major league debut for the Cubs and beat his childhood idol, Steve Carlton. Moyer had grown up in the Philadelphia suburb of Souderton, Pa., and cut school to see the Phillies’ victory parade after the 1980 World Series, when he was a high school senior. “I remember saying it would be pretty awesome someday to be sitting on those floats as they go down Broad Street,” Moyer said. “So to see where we are, each time we win a game we get a step closer to that, that’s still part of a dream.” This is Moyer’s third trip to the championship series; he was with Seattle for the other two, in 2000 and 2001. The first of those he missed after breaking his left kneecap during a simulated game on the eve of the series. Before the injury, Moyer would jog on the warning track for 20 minutes before almost every game, part of a strict workout program. He still works strenuously, arriving six hours before most night games for daily exercise on an underwater treadmill. “I tell you what, there’s not a harder worker in baseball,” said Ruben Amaro Jr., the assistant general manager for the Phillies, who is two years younger than Moyer and has been retired as a player for a decade. “Let me put it this way: He puts all of us to shame.” It was not always that way for Moyer. When his career came to the early crossroads, in 1992, he threw a bullpen session with Roadcap, the Peoria manager, before his tryout with Toledo. Roadcap had been a minor league teammate of Moyer’s, and they talked about his preparation. Moyer still kept meticulous journals on the tendencies of every hitter he faced. But he was not pushing himself between starts the way he had done to reach the majors. “It’s no different than what I tell my players today,” said Roadcap, now the manager of the Phillies’ Class A team in Lakewood, N.J. “Those little things add up to big things, and I think he got away from that a little bit. Now, he takes care of the little things and he’s still pitching at 45.” Moyer’s example is not lost on Hamels. Hamels said he worked as hard as he could but was embarrassed by how little he did compared with Moyer. Yet the off-field example is only part of Moyer’s influence. On July 20, Hamels’s arm felt stiff as he faced the Florida Marlins. Instead of whistling to the plate, his fastball chugged. He had always thrown an exceptional changeup, as does Moyer. Suddenly, Hamels had Moyer’s fastball, too — and the feeling was sheer terror. “I was extremely scared,” Hamels said. “I was panicked. I was afraid I was going to give up a home run every pitch.” Moyer kept Hamels calm between innings, telling him to relax and concentrate on hitting his spots. Nobody else could have sounded so credible, Hamels said, but Moyer makes a living doing just what he said. Hamels tossed eight innings that day, allowing two runs. “He provides a lot of leadership, not only when he pitches but when he’s not playing the game,” said the Phillies’ pitching coach, Rich Dubee. “He really doesn’t take a day off. He doesn’t take a pitch off. He’s a tremendous student of the game and always trying to help out in some area.” Moyer has never thrown 90 m.p.h. — “Two pitches added together, maybe,” he said, “but not one total pitch.” And as the years have gone by, his fastball has dipped closer to 80. He relies on getting ahead in the count and in expanding the strike zone, a strategy the Dodgers countered by swinging early in the count. With the bases loaded and two out in the first, Moyer threw a 2-2 pitch down the middle to Blake DeWitt, who ripped it into the right-field corner for a three-run triple for a 5-0 Dodgers lead. After Rafael Furcal homered on Moyer’s first pitch in the second, he lasted one more out. Moyer also lost his division series start at Milwaukee, lasting only four innings before leaving for a pinch-hitter. From the dugout, he tipped his cap to the plate umpire, as he does at the end of almost every start. It is part of a decidedly veteran approach, which includes the stirrups he wears and the extensive throwing he does between starts. He is unusual in this era, but he has no plans to stop. Moyer speaks hopefully about pitching until his age matches his uniform number — 50 — and it has always been foolish to doubt him.

Moyer Jamie
Philadelphia Phillies
Baseball
World Series
Age Chronological


A Camera With a Whole Lot of Lens Takes Wide Shots in Lower Light

Abstract: Zoom lenses on digital cameras are intended to zero in on distant faces. Few can also go really wide, though. And fast lenses for shooting in dim light are usually found only on single-lens reflex cameras. The Leica zoom lens on Panasonic’s $500 Lumix DMC-LX3, though, goes as wide as a 24mm lens on a film S.L.R. camera and opens up to f/2.0 — gathering twice as much light as an f/2.8. Photographers who like to use available light will also appreciate the camera’s high sensitivity, up to ISO 3200 at its full, 10.1-megapixel resolution, and ISO 6400 with 3-megapixel resolution. The camera will be available in late August from Panasonic.com and some retailers. Other toys and tools for creative photographers in this camera include six color and three monochrome film-simulation modes, provisions for double- and triple-exposure shots and a choice of three aspect ratios. It can also shoot widescreen video in high definition. The DMC-LX3’s lens does not retract completely, so it will not fit in your pocket without a noticeable bulge. But it is a lot of lens. IVAN BERGER


Police Say Steroids Dealer Shot Himself

Abstract: PLANO, Tex. — A preliminary examination by the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office found that David Jacobs, a convicted steroids dealer who had linked several N.F.L. players to the use of performance-enhancing drugs, committed suicide, according to the police. The police said that Jacobs had two self-inflicted gunshot wounds — one in the abdomen and the other in the head — and said no suicide note was found at the scene. Jacobs and his girlfriend, Amanda Jo Earhart-Savell, were found shot to death early Thursday morning at his home here. The police said they had not determined the precise circumstances surrounding Earhart-Savell’s death, but said she sustained multiple gunshot wounds. “Our investigation is consistent with murder-suicide,” Andrae Smith, a public information officer for the Plano police, said Friday. According to a report by the Dallas television station WFAA, the Plano police recovered 146 vials of steroids, 10 syringes, scales, bags with steroids and marijuana, several computers, a .22-caliber semiautomatic gun and ammunition from Jacobs’s home. The police also reportedly found 10 expended .40-caliber bullet casings, 6 expended bullet slugs and a bullet fragment. Jacobs, who was convicted on federal steroid distribution charges last year, began cooperating with N.F.L. officials shortly after he was sentenced to probation May 1. At a meeting last month, he provided the N.F.L. with documentary evidence and testimony that tied several players to performance-enhancing drugs. In an interview with The New York Times in April, Jacobs described how he provided two N.F.L. players with steroids and human growth hormone and said they supplied other players with the banned substances. He also said he counseled several players on how to exploit loopholes in the N.F.L.’s drug-testing program. Jacobs’s case received national attention because a Web site for a supplements store that Jacobs owned boasted that he had counseled players on the Dallas Cowboys and the Atlanta Falcons. In April, The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors — based on information developed from their investigation of Jacobs — were looking into whether Matt Lehr, an offensive lineman for the New Orleans Saints, had distributed performance-enhancing drugs. Lehr, who was suspended for testing positive for a banned substance in 2006, played for the Cowboys from 2001 to 2004 and for the Falcons from 2005 to 2006. Lehr’s lawyer has denied that his client sold banned substances and said Jacobs fabricated information about Lehr after he had refused to pay Jacobs’s legal fees. Jacobs said he never asked Lehr for money. Jacobs said he stopped using steroids in April 2007. Depression and suicide are symptoms of steroid withdrawal, but those effects normally last for several months at most, said Dr. Gary I. Wadler, an internist and a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency. “If he did indeed stop using steroids in April of 2007, then it is highly unlikely he would still have any significant psychiatric side effects of using steroids,” Wadler said in a telephone interview. “Because of the fact that he committed suicide, it raises the question, do we really know what the period of drug usage was?” Don Hooton, whose 17-year-old son, Taylor, a high school pitcher in Plano, committed suicide in 2003 after he had used steroids, said Jacobs’s death further draws attention to the problem of steroid use in Plano. “There’s just this tendency to want to deny that this problem is going on in a community,” Hooton, who started the Taylor Hooton Foundation to fight steroid abuse, said in a telephone interview.

Jacobs David
Steroids
Football
Drug Abuse and Traffic


Boston Marathon Deaths Reinforce Community Bonds

Abstract: BOSTON — In the days after the marathon bombings, the slogan “We are one Boston” became a rallying cry for this bleeding city. It flashes on L.E.D. signs that display route numbers on the front of city buses. It is echoed in the name of the One Fund Boston , a charity set up to aid victims of the attack, which killed three people and injured, at last count, 264. It is a fortifying call, unifying varied neighborhoods and groups around a theme of recovery, including two distinct communities that are now, in parallel, grappling with the death of one of their own: the Ashmont section of the city’s Dorchester neighborhood and the thousands of Chinese citizens who flock to Boston to study. For a week, the historic clock in the center of Ashmont was stopped at 2:50 p.m., the time the bombs went off on April 15 near the Boston Marathon’s finish line. “That was sort of the point where no one knew what was going on,” said Jeffrey Gonyeau, the only person with keys to the clock, who made the decision to halt it. “Time sort of stopped, not only for us but also for the Richard family.” By the next morning, residents knew that one of the victims was from Ashmont: Martin Richard, an 8-year-old boy who was at the finish line with his family. His mother, Denise, and his sister, Jane, were grievously injured. The clock sits at the center of Peabody Square, the main intersection in Ashmont, a neighborhood that has undergone a rejuvenation — thanks in part to Martin’s father, Bill Richard, one of its dedicated civic activists. As a former president of St. Mark’s Area Main Street , a civic group, he played key roles in a renovation of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority train station here and the development of the Carruth Building, whose shops and condominiums brought a much-needed economic boost. Parts of Ashmont are known for near-constant social activity, and the Richards play a central role in that, too. “From feeding hot dogs to the volunteers after our annual neighborhood cleanup day in April to hosting a summer ice cream social for kids, the Richards are the go-to people,” said Pat O’Neill, who is the president of the neighborhood association for the Ashmont-Adams enclave, where the Richards live. Martin’s death, and the injuries of his mother and sister, left the community wondering how and where to direct its ample energy to give back to the family, which also includes another son. “They’re super type-A personalities,” said Chris Douglass, the owner and executive chef of two Ashmont restaurants — one of which, Tavolo, has become an informal meeting place for people to grieve and find ways to help the family. “We’re going to have a blood drive and fund-raiser, and they want to break the record for the biggest blood drive in the history of the state.” Mr. Gonyeau said, “This is a neighborhood of planners and doers,” adding, “Everybody is just getting ready, laying groundwork for when the family needs our help.” Image The service for Lu Lingzi at Boston University, where she was a student. Credit Pool photo by Dina Rudick On Monday, with the two suspects in the bombings accounted for and plans to help the Richards beginning to percolate — for instance, a group of neighbors intends to provide the family with as many meals as possible — Mr. Gonyeau restarted the clock. But in some ways, it is difficult to imagine moving forward here with some aspects of the community’s life — especially those in which the Richards would normally play a role. Like the float that they and others had planned to create for the Dorchester Day parade on June 2 out of the colorful Ashmont booth that had been built for Dorchester’s annual chili cook-off. “Those plans are on hold now,” Mr. Douglass said. “I just don’t think that we have the spirit right now to sort of do what our plan was. It was kind of, I don’t know, silly, and we’re just not ready to be silly, I guess.” As Ashmont began to reckon with the Richards’ loss last week, a group of Chinese students studying at Boston University, 20 minutes north, was frantically trying to find Lu Lingzi, 23, a graduate student in statistics who had gone to the marathon with friends. Shuang Guo, a senior, learned that Ms. Lu could not be found after the blasts, so she dispatched members of the club she runs, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, to look for her. “We sent out a group to search at all of the hospitals in Boston,” Ms. Guo said. Eventually, they heard from the dean’s office, which had a message from Boston University’s Police Department. “B.U.P.D. has found a girl that might have been Lingzi Lu,” Ms. Guo said, describing the message, “but they found her at the examiner’s office.” Many of the students in the association, including Ms. Guo, had never met Ms. Lu. But she was also among 2,065 Chinese students at Boston University. “There’s a huge Chinese community in Boston. Whatever happens, we stick together, even though we don’t know this girl,” Ms. Guo said. “We understand because we all have families waiting for us at home. We’re so alike.” China sends more students to study in the United States than any other country. They are drawn by the prestige of the American education system and, for some, the possibility of long-term work. According to the International Institute of Education, there were 194,029 in the United States in the 2011-12 academic year, a 23 percent increase over the previous year. Ms. Lu had long wanted to be one of those students, her father, Lu Jun, said at a memorial held for her at Boston University on Monday night. “Lingzi used every opportunity and made every effort to learn about international acceptance requirements,” he said in Chinese in a tearful eulogy. The memorial drew more than 850 people, many of them Chinese citizens who said they saw their own stories in her. “I’m also am an only child, and my parents are back in China,” said Boayuan Tian, 28, of Cambridge. “I couldn’t imagine if that happened to me, how my parents would react.”

Boston Marathon Bombings
Fatalities,casualties
Grief
BU
Martin Richard
Lu Lingzi
China
Boston
College


Helping the M.T.A., Ravitch Takes a 3rd Turn as Fiscal Savior

Abstract: Richard Ravitch insists that the fight has not been as lonely as it often looked. Public transit advocates, environmentalists, labor unions, regional planners, building contractors, editorial writers, chambers of commerce and civic groups, he says, have also gotten on board. But if the Legislature finally agrees this month to spare New York City’s subway and bus systems from draconian service cuts and fare increases — by imposing a regional payroll tax and levying tolls on bridges over the East and Harlem Rivers — most of those involved in the issue agree that the single-minded Mr. Ravitch would be entitled to much of the credit. “He has been a force of nature throughout this process,” said Kevin Sheekey, New York City’s deputy mayor for government affairs. About nine months ago, Gov. David A. Paterson enlisted the 75-year-old Mr. Ravitch, a successful builder and businessman, to help rescue the Metropolitan Transportation Authority . There may be few second acts in American lives, but Mr. Ravitch gamely agreed to reprise the mission he successfully undertook three decades ago for the state’s bankrupt Urban Development Corporation and shortly thereafter for the transportation authority as its chairman. In December, after public hearings, Mr. Ravitch’s commission concluded that the tax and tolls, coupled with a much more modest fare hike than the transportation authority was proposing, represented the most equitable long-term fix. He faced a dauntingly heavy political lift, but nonetheless believed his assignment would be finished by now, well before Albany confronted the state’s own gaping deficit for the fiscal year that begins April 1. The political climate he has encountered, however, is very different from the one he found in the 1970s when he helped Gov. Hugh L. Carey deliver the state from an even worse fiscal crisis. These days, the consensus is that Albany has been hobbled by less bipartisanship and weaker leadership. Until recently, Mr. Paterson, an unelected governor, appeared to be more consumed by filling Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate seat. As for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, his political capital seemed depleted by his fight to extend term limits, and by the legacy of losing a battle in Albany last year to impose congestion pricing , a fee on drivers entering Manhattan. And though Democrats control the Legislature for the first time in decades, they hold a bare majority in the Senate. In the Assembly, Speaker Sheldon Silver had been reluctant to corral recalcitrant Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx legislators; he depends on them for his leadership post, and many of their constituents object to the tolls on bridges into Manhattan that are now toll-free. Last week, Mr. Silver offered a compromise . He suggested that all the new tolls equal the base subway fare of $2. In the first few years, the lower tolls might not raise as much as Mr. Ravitch had envisioned, but an agreement to impose tolls would offer the potential for more revenue for the transportation authority in the future. As Mr. Silver explained it: “This plan is partially in response to hours and hours of hearing objections to prior plans and is an attempt to bring about a compromise. That’s the role of leadership.” On Friday, the Senate majority leader, Malcolm L. Smith, said his fellow Democrats would seriously consider Mr. Silver’s compromise. But on Monday, he called for a full accounting of the transportation authority’s finances to ensure that the latest plan would indeed result in a smaller fare increase and minimal service cuts. Since issuing the commission’s recommendations, Mr. Ravitch has relentlessly wooed individual legislators, attended town meetings in their districts, conferred with them in person and made repeated trips to Albany. “Dick’s put a lot of time into this and has a lot of street cred up there,” said Gene Russianoff, a staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a mass transit advocacy group that supports the Ravitch Commission proposals. “There’s a night-and-day difference between this and congestion pricing. The reaction of the political class to Bloomberg and to Dick is 180 degrees.” As he headed to Albany last week on another lobbying mission, Mr. Ravitch said, “I do have a good personal relationship with the Legislature, and I’ve known these people a long time. Shelly has given me every opportunity I could have to make this case,” Mr. Ravitch added. Mr. Silver hinted at a comparison to Mr. Bloomberg, with whom he has often clashed, when he described Mr. Ravitch’s approach. “His style is not confrontational,” Mr. Silver said. “He recognizes, more than most people, the importance of the members of the Legislature and speaks with the appropriate tone to them. “One of the big difficulties with the M.T.A. is a credibility gap — a history of two sets of books, of hiding surpluses,” said Mr. Silver, who became close to Mr. Ravitch during his chairmanship of the transportation authority and through their involvement in Jewish civic affairs. “I’ve known Dick for over 30 years. It’s not a big leap for me when I can have confidence that these are the numbers that are necessary, when someone with Dick’s credibility talks about a very simple equation here: fare hikes and service cuts or more revenue.” To help the authority close a projected $3.4 billion deficit through next year and avoid sharp service cutbacks and a 23 percent increase in fare revenues, the Ravitch commission proposed a long-term solution: a payroll tax, coupled with charging the same tolls on the East River bridges as drivers pay at the authority’s major crossings, like the Robert F. Kennedy (formerly Triborough) Bridge. Tolls on the Harlem River bridges would match the subway fare. The tolls would take at least 18 months to implement. Meanwhile, any fare increases and reductions in service would be much smaller than those that the authority initially proposed. At Mr. Ravitch’s urging, the governor issued a statement last week urging legislators to reach agreement this week and warning that “the fare increases and service cuts that will happen without this legislation will do further damage to our fragile economy.” On Friday, Mr. Sheekey, the deputy mayor, credited Mr. Ravitch and Mr. Silver for advancing the proposal this far. Mr. Silver expressed doubt that the proposal would have survived even this long without Mr. Ravitch’s lobbying. “I don’t believe so, not from my perspective,” he said. For his part, Mr. Ravitch was self-effacing. “It isn’t about me,” he said, listing others who have supported the commission’s recommendations. “If it were just me, it wouldn’t make one whit of difference.”

Ravitch Richard
Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Transit Systems
Finances
Tolls
Politics and Government
New York City


Theory and Experiment Meet, and a New Form of Boron Is Found

Abstract: Boron is a simple atom: five protons, five or six neutrons, five electrons. It is not as ubiquitous as hydrogen. It does not, as helium does, make your voice sound like Donald Duck. It is not as famous as carbon, its neighbor to the right on the periodic table. Perhaps it is held back by its name — sounds like boring. Yet it remains an element of mystery. For more than two centuries, boron has confounded scientists, resulting in what Artem R. Oganov, a professor of geosciences at Stony Brook University, calls “a stream of discoveries and misdiscoveries.” Now researchers led by Dr. Oganov have added to the actual discoveries. They have found a form of boron that is nearly as hard as diamond. This discovery even illustrates the power of the idea of evolution, using a so-called genetic algorithm to decipher the structure of the new boron crystal. “This work is a beautiful example of cooperation between theory and experiment,” said Aitor Bergara, a physicist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. Dr. Bergara was not involved with the research, which was published online by the journal Nature. Boron has a long history. Mentions of boron compounds like borax date back millennia. In 1808, within a week and a half of each other, two research efforts, led by the great chemists Sir Humphrey Davy in London and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis-Jacques Thénard in Paris, announced that they had isolated boron. They had not. Another great chemist, Henri Moissan, later showed that the two earlier groups had made a compound consisting of 60 percent boron. Moissan also claimed to have isolated boron. He too was wrong, although he did do better: a compound with 90 percent boron. Not until 1909 was a sample of 99 percent pure boron produced. Just as pure carbon can come as diamond or graphite, boron comes in multiple forms — as many as 16 have been reported. But even tiny amounts of impurities can alter the structure, and it seems that the element has only four pure forms, Dr. Oganov said. One, known as alpha boron, is a dark but transparent red. Beta boron is black and looks like coal. Even today, scientists do not definitively know which of these two forms is the stable form. (It is probably beta boron.) The third form is a horrendously complicated structure known as T-192. The fourth form is the newly discovered one. Boron’s unusual properties come from the three electrons in its outer electronic layer. For similar elements like aluminum, one row down on the periodic table, the three outer electrons are easily torn away, and the element behaves as a metal. But boron is smaller, and so its nucleus holds on to the electrons tighter, more like an insulator. “Boron is a truly schizophrenic element,” Dr. Oganov said. “It’s an element of complete frustration. It doesn’t know what it wants to do. The outcome is something horribly complicated.” Two of the collaborators on the Nature paper , Jiuhua Chen of Florida International University and Vladimir L. Solozhenko of the National Council for Scientific Research in France, independently produced the new boron phase in high-temperature, high-pressure experiments in 2004. But they were not able to deduce what exactly they had produced. For that, they turned to Dr. Oganov, who employed a computational technique that encodes parameters of the crystal structure in a string of data. Starting with a number of trial crystal structures, the program calculates the energy needed to hold each together, and discards the versions that do not pack together comfortably. Then, as occurs in biological evolution, the crystal parameters are tweaked (the equivalent of mutation) and portions of the structure swapped (the equivalent of recombination). After generations of calculation, the answer converges on the stable form. This algorithm had previously revealed new phases of iron sulfide, calcium carbonate, sulfur and even a superconducting form of oxygen, subsequently confirmed by experiment. The form of boron is stable at super-high pressures — more than 100,000 times the normal atmospheric pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch — and consists of two substructures. One is a spherical shape of 12 boron atoms. The other is a dumbbell shape of a pair of boron atoms. These two sub-substructures stack together in the same way that table salt (sodium chloride) does. When the high pressures were eased, the boron remained in the new configuration. Subsequent experiments confirmed that the material had the properties predicted by the algorithm. Although gamma boron is not quite as hard as diamond, it is more heat-resistant, which could make it attractive for certain industrial uses.

Chemistry
Science and Technology
Diamonds
Boron


Panetta Pleads for No More Cuts in Defense Spending

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta effectively told Congress on Thursday to raise taxes and cut Social Security and Medicare before taking another swipe at the Pentagon budget beyond defense cuts already called for in the debt-ceiling deal. In his first Pentagon news conference, Mr. Panetta, a former budget director in the Clinton White House, lent his voice to the Obama administration’s strategy of putting pressure on Congress to consider raising revenues when a special committee meets this fall to recommend $1.5 trillion in additional deficit-reduction measures. Mr. Obama signed a debt-ceiling deal on Tuesday calling for an initial $1 trillion in cuts. Mr. Panetta’s argument was that defense had given up enough — about $350 billion of that $1 trillion over 10 years — and that further cuts would have dire consequences. He then segued into a brief discourse on “discretionary” federal spending, like defense, and “mandatory” federal spending, like Social Security and other entitlements. “Let me for a moment put a budget hat on,” said Mr. Panetta, who is a month into his job as defense secretary. “You cannot deal with the size deficits that this country is confronting by simply cutting the discretionary side of the budget. That represents less than a third of the overall federal budget . “You’ve got to, as the president’s made clear, if you’re going to look at those size deficits, you’ve got to look at the mandatory side of the budget, which is two-thirds of the federal budget. And you also have to look at revenues as part of that answer.” Mr. Panetta made his comments on the second straight day of a Pentagon pushback to hundreds of billions of dollars of budget cuts potentially coming its way, the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that it has faced shrinking spending. Both Mr. Panetta and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, who joined Mr. Panetta at the news conference, used words like “disastrous” and “unacceptable” to describe across-the-board cuts that would automatically kick in if the new committee failed to agree on reductions this fall. Mr. Panetta also took the position that the committee should make no further defense cuts, either. The White House, however, has not ruled out further defense reductions. The committee, to be composed of six Democrats and six Republicans, would also be unlikely to take them off the table. At one point Mr. Panetta was asked, given the intensity of his language, if he would resign if the across-the-board cuts, called a “sequestration” of government spending, kicked in. Mr. Panetta chortled and replied, “I didn’t think it was going to sequester me.” Then he added, “I didn’t come into this job to quit, I came into this job to fight.” Mr. Panetta declined to say where about $350 billion in defense budget cuts over the next 10 years would come from. But defense officials say there could be reductions in major weapons programs, cuts in the size of the armed forces, and increased premiums for the military’s health care system, Tricare.

United States Defense and Military Forces


A Farewell to Jimmy McElroy, Gangster of a Lost Era

Abstract: The man and woman unfolded themselves from a cab at the corner of Ninth Avenue and 42nd Street, then stood blinking in the sunlight for a few seconds, searching for a familiar piece of ground, a bearing. So there: the bus terminal across the street. But their gazes lingered on tall buildings that had risen in the last two decades or so. It was nearly 10:30 on Tuesday morning. They shuffled down the street and melted into a small crowd on the sidewalk outside the Church of the Holy Cross. These were delegates from the five-story-tenement past, gathered for the funeral of a gangster who had been gone from the streets of the West Side for nearly 25 years. Jimmy McElroy, 66, died in California last week, where he had been sent to serve a federal sentence of forever and a day as the third-ranking person in the Westies . They were an Irish-American gang that ruled and ran the rackets in Hell’s Kitchen from the 1960s through the 1980s. For kicks, they butchered the bodies of people they had killed over debts or insults. Mr. McElroy was not known to have wielded the knife, but drove what the group called the “meat wagon,” a red van used to deliver body parts for disposal on Wards Island. A bagpiper in a kilt, waiting on the top step of the church, warmed up by sending a few test wails that somehow managed to pierce the midmorning din of 42nd Street. You could tell that “Amazing Grace” would soon be unleashed. There was, however, a slight delay. The funeral could not begin promptly because the church already was filled with students from the parish elementary school, a small army of fresh-faced boys and girls, who were at a Mass to celebrate the distribution of graduation rings to the eighth-grade class. They sang popular songs, like “This Little Light of Mine,” adapted for the occasion with religious lyrics. Some of the younger children held up posters from a pew toward the back of the church: “Congratulations 8th Graders!” There was no trace of an Irish-American past in the names of the students — Arce and Baizar, Ramirez and Ruiz. The past had to wait its turn. There were pictures to be taken on the steps of the church. At last, the way was cleared, and a silver coffin was slid out of the back of the hearse. The church’s pastor, the Rev. Peter Colapietro, shifted his attention from the merry schoolchildren to the promise of a merciful God, always a subject of interest at funerals. Jimmy McElroy himself had once been an eighth grader, but not a ninth grader. He dropped out of school to work with a friend, Jimmy Coonan. Their first jobs were as administrators of a beating. — Mr. McElroy would say that they had punched someone in the face and broken his jaw, and received $50 for their work. He was a pretty good boxer, and could be intimidating, said T. J. English, author of “The Westies,” a definitive history of the gang. “McElroy was more on the brawn side than the brains,” Mr. English said. Mr. McElroy got a job as a doorman at the Plaza. As he would tell the story, two very wealthy “Arab sheiks” heard that he was a boxer, and invited him up to their suite on the promise of $100. His assignment was to beat up one of the men, both of whom viewed it as a bargain-basement thrill. The regular working life was not for Mr. McElroy. He could not get enough cocaine and pills. He worked as a principal enforcer for Mr. Coonan. After an argument with a friend named Billy Walker, Mr. McElroy took him to the 79th Street boat basin and shot him in the mouth. On another occasion, a man who was thought to be skimming money from a union, without properly sharing it with the Westies overlords, was driven by Mr. McElroy to New Jersey. Someone in the back of the car shot the accused thief five or six times — but failed to use a silencer or open the windows, causing Mr. McElroy to complain that his ears were ringing for days. They were clumsy and resorted to working as an outsourcing operation for the Gambino crime family, but before long they were all rounded up, and the betrayals began. They went away to prison, with the exception of the leading informer, Francis Featherstone, who transferred into the witness protection program. After Mr. McElroy was sent away for racketeering, he took a shot at being a stool pigeon but was no good at it; a jury did not believe him when he testified that John Gotti had sent him to shoot a carpenter’s union official. He got no break on his sentence of 60 years. Halfway through the Mass, the “Ave Maria” was sung; the truck traffic heading for the Lincoln Tunnel chimed in with a blaring chorus. “My father was no saint,” Ryan McElroy, one of Mr. McElroy’s three children, said in a eulogy. “But people said he could light up a room. He’s been away 15, 20 years, and you still felt protected by him.” As he stepped down from the altar, the congregation burst into applause. The coffin was carried out the front of the church. The family got into cars, the friends drifted off, a lost world dissolved.

Westies
McElroy Jimmy
Hell's Kitchen (NYC)
Organized Crime
Funerals
Irish-Americans


‘Deadpool’ Technology Lands in Patent Fight

Abstract: The patent wars have come to the cinemaplex. If you marveled at the facial animations of the current hit movie “Deadpool” or last year’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” you probably didn’t realize you were watching technology called Mova. Mova captures every facial tick and motion of a human actor and places it on an animated figure. And it won an Academy Award last year. Now the technology we can assume helped the Hulk have a berserk twinkle in his eye as he smashed his way through the Avengers film is the center of a nasty fight between a San Francisco company called Rearden and a Chinese company called the Shenzhenshi Haitiecheng Science and Technology Company. Shenzhenshi, which is affiliated with the Hollywood visual effects company Digital Domain , sued Rearden last February. The tangle over animation technology comes at a relatively quiet period in the tech industry’s patent battles. Over the years, big tech companies have collected stock piles of patents and copyrights, both to protect their assets and sue other companies. Oracle sued Google. Apple sued Samsung. So-called patent trolls — companies that own patents, but don’t actually build products based on them — have sued scores of little and big companies. Industry complaints that lawsuits were sucking innovation out of tech — and scaring people away from creating start-ups — led to calls in Washington for patent reform. But so far those efforts have gone nowhere. Rearden has asked a judge to award it financial damages and block the distribution of movies and other entertainment that it claims have been made using infringing Mova patents and trademarks. Lawyers say the suit could be a longshot. As for “Deadpool,” its box-office receipts are hovering somewhere around $500 million.

Digital Domain
Inventions and Patents
Movies
Lawsuits


Ex-Premier Brown Disputes Murdoch’s Testimony

Abstract: LONDON — Starting four days of testimony by political leaders about the sway of Rupert Murdoch ’s newspapers over public life here, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday denied Mr. Murdoch’s depiction of some of their most contentious exchanges and accused a leading Murdoch newspaper, The Sun, of undermining Britain ’s war effort in Afghanistan. He also rejected assertions by a former editor of The Sun that Mr. Brown’s wife, Sarah, had approved a story in 2006 on the medical condition of the Browns’ infant son, whose cystic fibrosis was diagnosed at 4 months. Mr. Brown said The Sun had caused “huge damage to the war effort” in Afghanistan, where British troops have been the main allies of American forces in the international coalition, by publishing articles suggesting that his government, in office from 2007 to 2010, “didn’t care about our troops.” He referred specifically to an article in 2009 that disclosed that Mr. Brown had misspelled the name of a British soldier killed in Afghanistan and aspects of what he called a “campaign” by The Sun over Afghanistan. “The whole focus of their coverage was not what we had done,” he said, “but that I personally did not care about our troops.” Mr. Brown said Mr. Murdoch had told him in a private letter that he disagreed with Britain’s “management of the war effort.” In response to Mr. Brown’s allegations, a spokeswoman for Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, based in New York, said Mr. Murdoch “stands by his testimony.” The former prime minister was the first in a series of past and present political heavyweights to appear this week before the judicial inquiry led by Lord Justice Brian Leveson into the phone hacking scandal that engulfed Mr. Murdoch’s British tabloids last summer. As the inquiry has inched forward, so, too, has a parallel police investigation in which around 50 people have been arrested and released on bail in connection with phone intercepts; bribery of public officials, mainly the police; and e-mail hacking. Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said Monday that it had received files from the police relating to five unidentified journalists in the phone hacking investigation to assess whether they should face criminal charges. The prosecution service declined to provide further details. Mr. Brown’s testimony, delivered in his hallmark Scottish burr, seemed among the most emphatic in contradicting sworn testimony by Mr. Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of The Sun who became chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of News Corporation. She resigned as the hacking scandal escalated last July. Ms. Brooks has testified to the Leveson inquiry that Mr. Brown’s wife, Sarah, gave permission for the article on their son to be published, but the former prime minister denied that. “I don’t think any child’s medical information should be broadcast,” he said. “There was no question ever of implicit or explicit permission.” Rather, he said, he and his wife had been presented with a “fait accompli” that the story was to be published. In messages on Twitter, journalists at The Sun rejected Mr. Brown’s version of events relating to the newspaper’s Afghanistan coverage and to its source for the article about his son. In her own testimony to the inquiry in May, Ms. Brooks said the information for the article had come from the father of another child with cystic fibrosis. Scottish health authorities who dealt with the case said in a statement on Monday that although there had been “no inappropriate access to the child’s medical records,” it was “highly likely” that a local employee “spoke, without authorization, about the medical condition of Mr. Brown’s son, Fraser.” In a statement, News International said it welcomed the Scottish authorities’ statement that “said that they believe there was ‘no inappropriate access’ to the medical records of Gordon Brown’s son.” The Sun stood by its previous rejection of Mr. Brown’s complaints, the statement said. Robert Jay, the inquiry’s lead counsel, pressed Mr. Brown about a conversation that Mr. Murdoch testified had taken place between them in which the former prime minister had threatened to “make war” on Mr. Murdoch’s company after its tabloids had switched their support to the Conservatives in late 2009. In April, Mr. Murdoch told the Leveson inquiry that Mr. Brown had said, “Well, your company has declared war on my government, and we have no alternative but to make war on your company.” Mr. Murdoch also said that Mr. Brown did not seem to be in “a very balanced state of mind.” “This conversation never took place,” Mr. Brown said. “I’m shocked, surprised, that it should be suggested.” He also said, “I couldn’t be unbalanced on a call that I didn’t have.” Mr. Brown said that although he respected Mr. Murdoch’s business acumen, he rejected suggestions that the tycoon had influenced his thinking. “The idea that I followed his views is absolute nonsense,” Mr. Brown said. The concentration of high-ranking figures at the inquiry this week has provoked speculation that the testimony could be among the most significant so far in the investigation, which began last year. George Osborne — the chancellor of the Exchequer and a close ally of David Cameron , the current prime minister — appeared at the inquiry after Mr. Brown. Much questioning centered on Mr. Osborne’s role in the Conservatives’ decision to hire Andy Coulson, a former editor of The News of the World, a Murdoch-owned Sunday tabloid that is now defunct, as director of communications. The Conservatives hired Mr. Coulson after he was forced to resign as editor of The News of the World in 2007. At the time, the full extent of the hacking scandal was not widely known. His association with The News of the World later cost him his job as Mr. Cameron’s director of communications after the Conservative victory in the 2010 election. Like Ms. Brooks, Mr. Coulson has been charged in recent weeks with criminal offenses. They have both denied any wrongdoing. “It was an issue that he had resigned at The News of the World,” Mr. Osborne said, acknowledging that he had been aware of the hacking controversy. But he said Mr. Coulson had assured him that the issue was resolved. Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids supported the Conservatives for many years, but switched to Labour before the 1997 election that brought Tony Blair to power. Mr. Blair testified before the inquiry in late May. Shortly before the 2010 election, which produced a coalition led by Mr. Cameron and Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat, as junior partner, the Murdoch tabloids switched back to the Conservatives. Mr. Osborne said the Conservatives had sought the endorsement of The Sun as “one of a range of things.” But, he added, “I certainly think you can win an election without the endorsement of The Sun.” Mr. Osborne rejected any suggestion that he the government, or the Conservative Party had supported News Corporation’s $12 billion bid to take over the 60.9 percent of British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, the British satellite broadcaster, that it did not already own. The company withdrew the bid last summer at the height of the phone hacking furor. Far from wanting to help News Corporation secure approval for the takeover, Mr. Osborne said, he regarded the bid as “politically inconvenient” in that however it was resolved, someone would be angry. The four days of hearings will culminate on Thursday with a daylong appearance by Mr. Cameron.

News International Ltd
Sun The (British Newspaper)
Labour Party (Great Britain)
Murdoch James R
Murdoch Rupert
Brown Gordon
Cameron David
Great Britain


Manuel Stars in Senior Bowl

Abstract: Florida State’s E. J. Manuel passed for a touchdown and rushed for another on the South’s first two drives in a 21-16 victory over the North in the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala.

E J Manuel
College football
Florida State University


The Stock Market Bell Rings, Computers Fail, Wall Street Cringes

Abstract: Problems with technology have at times roiled global financial markets, but the 223-year-old New York Stock Exchange has held itself up as an oasis of humans ready to step in when the computers go haywire. On Wednesday, however, those working on the trading floor were left helpless when the computer systems at the exchange went down for nearly four hours in the middle of the day, bringing an icon of capitalism’s ceaseless energy to a costly halt. The exchange ultimately returned to action shortly before the closing bell, and stocks continued trading throughout the day on other exchanges, like the Nasdaq and BATS Global Markets. The disruption nonetheless rattled investors, who already had reason to be on edge, considering the Greek debt crisis and an overnight market rout in China. The benchmark Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks ended the day down 1.7 percent. Wednesday provided other reminders of the fragility of automated systems that are doing jobs people once handled. An apparently unrelated technical problem grounded United Airlines flights for nearly two hours on Wednesday morning. The homepage of The Wall Street Journal was also down for part of Wednesday. “When we traded physically we didn’t have these problems, but this is the world that we live in,” said Ted Weisberg, a trader with Seaport Securities who has been on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for nearly 50 years. A History of Stock Exchange Failures Stray squirrels, security breaches and, more commonly, technical glitches have caused exchanges around the world to halt. Computer technology has revolutionized the trading of stocks in recent decades, making it faster and more efficient. New powers have emerged, including the Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, a commodities and derivatives trading platform based in Atlanta that acquired the New York Stock Exchange for $8.2 billion in 2013. But there have been hiccups along the way. The Nasdaq stock market went down for three hours in 2013 because of a software bug. The year before, software at Knight Capital Group went awry, leading to errant trades that resulted in losses of $440 million. The problem Wednesday at the New York Stock Exchange is likely to revive a debate about how regulators can make the markets more resistant to computer failings. At the same time, technology has created alternatives that allow trading in the United States to go on, even when its most prominent exchange does not. Stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange were traded on Wednesday in the New Jersey and Chicago data centers of upstart exchanges like BATS, which is based in Lenexa, Kan. “There are 11 exchanges in the U.S. and one of them went down — I had 10 other places to go,” said Ryan Larson, the head of stock trading at RBC Global Asset Management. “The fragmentation of the market helped us today.” Indeed, the overall volume of stock trading on Wednesday appeared to be largely consistent with the amount of daily trading earlier in the week. Other exchanges owned by the New York Stock Exchange, like its options exchange, operated normally on Wednesday throughout the shutdown. The problems at the New York exchange emerged soon after the opening bell rang at 9:30 Wednesday morning, when orders for several smaller stocks failed to go through, traders on the floor said. The initial malfunctions affected only a small number of stocks, and the exchange appeared to get the problem under control, but the difficulties reappeared, on a more widespread basis, later that morning, traders said. On a call with other members of the industry, as the problem grew worse, N.Y.S.E. employees expressed “panic” and a recognition that they had “lost control of the system,” according to a person on the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Not long after that call, at 11:32 a.m., the exchange announced that it was shutting down all trading, and said on its website that “additional information will follow as soon as possible.” On the floor, traders said the exchange gave them no warning before making the move. “I was about to order my lunch and when I turned around the screens all went blank,” said Peter P. Costa, a trader on the floor with Empire Executions. In the silence that followed, traders on the floor, looking for information, flocked to a ramped area of the huge complex on Wall Street where employees of the exchange are located. The traders were told that the exchange had been updating software before the trading day began, and that the software had contained a bug that could not be fixed without shutting down the system. The exchange’s employees on the floor proceeded to manually cancel around 700,000 trades that were in the system when it was shut down, according to Mr. Costa. Once they had finished, the exchange rebooted its system, a process that took around 45 minutes, Mr. Costa said. Trading ultimately resumed around 3:10 p.m., less than an hour before the closing bell. Several hours later, the exchange put out a statement with few details on what happened, other than to attribute blame to a “configuration issue.” Image Traders wait on a nearly empty floor at the New York Stock Exchange during the shutdown. Credit Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America Throughout the day, federal regulators and law enforcement agencies monitored the situation for any sign of an outside attack and ultimately saw nothing indicating anything other than an internal software error. President Obama was briefed on the exchange shutdown, a White House aide said, adding that officials there and at the Treasury Department were monitoring the situation. Mary Jo White, the chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission , which oversees the nation’s securities markets, said in a statement, “We are in contact with N.Y.S.E. and are closely monitoring the situation and trading in N.Y.S.E.-listed stocks.” The New York Stock Exchange and its new Atlanta owner, the Intercontinental Exchange, are likely to face questions after the shutdown. ICE, which makes most of its money from automated derivatives trading, has been reducing staff at the New York exchange after stating a goal of cutting $450 million in expenses from the joint company. Recent cuts have hit the exchange’s technology and communications teams, which came under pressure on Wednesday. After the failure began, it took over half an hour for the exchange to broadcast even basic information about the shutdown, to allay concerns that it might have been caused by a malicious attack. An ICE spokeswoman, Sara Rich, denied any suggestion the cuts had an effect. “Since the acquisition, we have been investing to build new systems and technology expertise, and the new trading platform will begin rolling out later this year,” she said.

NYSE
Computers and the Internet
Tech Industry
Network Outages
Stocks,Bonds


Islanders Fall to Lightning

Abstract: Valtteri Filppula scored twice in the final three minutes of regulation and then converted in the shootout to rally the visiting Tampa Bay Lightning past the Islanders, 3-2. Kyle Okposo and Frans Nielsen scored for the Islanders. ■ Joe Pavelski scored the first of three straight goals by San Jose to lead the Sharks to a 4-2 road win over the St. Louis Blues. ■ Kevin Dineen became the coach of Canada’s women’s hockey team for the Sochi Olympics, a month after his firing by the Florida Panthers.

Ice hockey
Islanders
Tampa Bay Lightning


Chelsea, Manchester City and Wigan Knock Out Opponents

Abstract: Chelsea, Manchester City and Wigan scored four times each to knock out lower-league opponents in England’s F.A. Cup. Held to a 2-2 tie by third-tier Brentford three weeks ago, Chelsea got goals from Juan Mata, Oscar, Frank Lampard and John Terry to win the replay, 4-0. (AP)

Soccer
Wigan Athletic Soccer Team
Manchester City Soccer Team
Chelsea Soccer Team
Juan Mata
Frank Lampard


Republicans Pick Wendy Long to Challenge Chuck Schumer in Senate Race

Abstract: BUFFALO — New York Republicans on Friday nominated Wendy E. Long to challenge Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat. It will be the second Senate bid for Ms. Long, 55, a New York City lawyer who was chosen at the Republican’s nominating convention here. She was beaten decisively by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, a Democrat, in 2012. Ms. Long, who once clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court, was a press secretary to two senators, William L. Armstrong of Colorado and Gordon J. Humphrey of New Hampshire, both Republicans. On Monday, New York Democrats nominated Mr. Schumer to run for a fourth term. He has $24 million in his campaign account and is heavily favored in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one.

New York
Wendy E Long
Chuck Schumer
Senate races
Republicans


Detective Admits Spying on Colleagues

Abstract: A New York City police detective pleaded guilty on Friday to arranging to hack into dozens of email accounts and gaining access to a federal law enforcement database to gather information on his colleagues, said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan. The detective, Edwin Vargas, gained access to at least 43 email accounts and one cellphone, belonging to 30 people, including 20 current or former police officers and a Police Department administrator, Mr. Bharara said in a statement . Mr. Vargas, 42, a 20-year veteran of the department, was prompted by a “bad relationship,” his lawyer, Peter E. Brill said. Those familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Vargas had sought information on colleagues whom he considered romantic rivals. Between April 2010 and October 2012, Mr. Vargas hired hacking services to pry into the email accounts, at a cost of over $4,000, Mr. Bharara said. Mr. Vargas, who has been suspended, pleaded guilty to one count of computer hacking and one of conspiracy. He faces a one-year sentence for each count and is scheduled to be sentenced in March. “This is an isolated incident in an otherwise good career,” Mr. Brill said. “I think he’d like to move on, and help raise his family.”

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding’s Love Life

Abstract: WASHINGTON — She was denounced as a “degenerate” and a “pervert,” accused of lying for money and shamed for waging a “diabolical” campaign of falsehoods against the president’s family that tore away at his legacy. Long before Lucy Mercer, Kay Summersby or Monica Lewinsky, there was Nan Britton, who scandalized a nation with stories of carnal adventures in a White House coat closet and endured a ferocious backlash for publicly claiming that she bore the love child of President Warren G. Harding. Now nearly a century later, according to genealogists, new genetic tests confirm for the first time that Ms. Britton’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was indeed Harding’s biological child. The tests have solved one of the enduring mysteries of presidential history and offer new insights into the secret life of America’s 29th president. At the least, they demonstrate how the march of technology is increasingly rewriting the nation’s history books. The revelation has also roiled two families that have circled each other warily for 90 years, struggling with issues of rumor, truth and fidelity. Even now, members of the president’s family remain divided over the matter, with some still skeptical after a lifetime of denial and unhappy about cousins who chose to pursue the question. Some descendants of Ms. Britton remain resentful that it has taken this long for evidence to come out and for her credibility to be validated. “It’s sort of Shakespearean and operatic,” said Dr. Peter Harding, a grandnephew of the president and one of those who instigated the DNA testing that confirmed the relationship to Ms. Britton’s offspring. “This story hangs over the whole presidential history because it was an unsolved mystery.” Image President Warren G. Harding Credit Library of Congress, via Reuters The Nan Britton affair was the sensation of its age, a product of the jazz-playing, gin-soaked Roaring Twenties and a pivotal moment in the evolution of the modern White House. It was not the first time a president was accused of an extracurricular love life, but never before had a self-proclaimed presidential mistress gone public with a popular tell-all book. The ensuing furor played out in newspapers, courtrooms and living rooms across the country. While some historians dismissed Ms. Britton’s account, it remained part of popular lore. Pundits raised it as an analog after revelations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Ms. Lewinsky. HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” made it a subplot a few years ago. The Library of Congress effectively recalled it last year when it released Harding’s love letters with another mistress, Carrie Phillips. Ms. Britton, who was 31 years younger than Harding, had a harder time proving her relationship when she revealed it after his death because she had destroyed her own letters with him at his request and because his family insisted he was sterile. As a boy growing up, Peter Harding said he believed the family line. “My father said this couldn’t have happened because President Harding had mumps as a kid and was infertile and the family really vilified Nan Britton,” said Dr. Harding, now 72 and a physician in Big Sur, Calif. After finding Ms. Britton’s book, “The President’s Daughter,” among his father’s belongings, though, he concluded that the man described in it resembled the writer of the letters to Ms. Phillips, an expressive romantic who doted on women. Dr. Harding and his cousin, Abigail Harding, decided to pursue the matter and made contact with James Blaesing, a grandson of Ms. Britton and son of the daughter she claimed to have conceived with the president. Testing by AncestryDNA, a division of Ancestry.com, the genealogical website, found that Mr. Blaesing was a second cousin to Peter and Abigail Harding, meaning that Elizabeth Ann Blaesing had to be President Harding’s daughter. Image Abigail Harding, the grandniece of President Warren G. Harding, at her home in Worthington, Ohio, on Wednesday. Credit Andrew Spear for The New York Times “We’re looking at the genetic scene to see if Warren Harding and Nan Britton had a baby together and all these signs are pointing to yes,” said Stephen Baloglu, an executive at Ancestry. “The technology that we’re using is at a level of specificity that there’s no need to do more DNA testing. This is the definitive answer.” The testing also found that President Harding had no ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, answering another question that has intrigued historians. When Harding ran for president in 1920, segregationist opponents claimed he had “black blood.” Abigail Harding, 72, a retired high school biology teacher in Worthington, Ohio, said the Nan Britton question is resolved. “I have no doubts left,” she said. “When he’s related to me, he’s related to Peter, he’s related to a third cousin — there’s too many nails in the coffin, so to speak. I’m completely convinced.” Still, other relatives withheld judgment. “I’m not questioning the accuracy of anybody’s tests or anything,” said Dr. Richard Harding, 69, another grandnephew and a child psychiatrist in Columbia, S.C. “But it’s still in my mind still to be proven.” If the tests are valid, he added, he welcomed the new family members. “I hope they’ll find their new place in history is meaningful and productive for them.” James Robenalt, who wrote a book on Harding’s affair with Carrie Phillips that was skeptical of Ms. Britton’s claims, said he accepts the new evidence. “I’m very pleased that that’s the result just because that family deserves to be recognized,” he said. Warren Gamaliel Harding was a newspaper publisher in Marion, Ohio, who won a Senate seat in 1914 and captured the presidency in 1920 promising to restore “normalcy” after World War I. He is often ranked low among American presidents because of the Teapot Dome corruption scandal that ensnared top advisers. But advocates argue he is underrated, noting that he advocated equal rights for African-Americans, created the Bureau of the Budget and led international disarmament efforts. Image A photo provided by the family of Nan Britton and her daughter, Elizabeth, in 1927. Nan Britton grew up in Marion, where her father knew Harding and Harding’s sister was her schoolteacher. She was consumed with Harding, who was married but had no children and was seen by women of the time as attractive. Ms. Britton hung pictures of Harding on her bedroom wall and sought his help finding a job. Harding agreed to meet her in New York. In July 1917, at age 20, she “became Mr. Harding’s bride,” as she put it, during a New York hotel room assignation. For six and a half years they maintained their affair, meeting wherever possible, including in Harding’s Senate office, where Ms. Britton wrote that they conceived Elizabeth Ann, born in October 1919. Harding never met his daughter but provided financial support. He and Ms. Britton continued their relationship after he became president, repairing to “a small closet in the anteroom” in the West Wing where, she wrote, they “made love.” Ms. Britton was devastated when he died in office in 1923 at the age of 57 and more so when she discovered there was no provision to support their daughter. In need of money and shut out by Harding’s family, she wrote “The President’s Daughter” in 1927, inciting a fierce backlash from his supporters. James Blaesing, her grandson, said Ms. Britton’s relationship with Harding was a love story and her family always believed her. “She loved him until the day she died,” he said. “When she talked about him, she would get the biggest smile on her face. She just loved this guy. He was everything.” Mr. Blaesing said the family lived with scorn for decades. They were followed, their house was broken into and items were stolen to try to prove the relationship was a lie. “I went through this growing up in school,” said Mr. Blaesing, 65, now a construction contractor in Portland, Ore. “They belittled him and her.” The tests, he said, finally vindicate his grandmother. “I wanted to prove who she was and prove everyone wrong,” he said.

Warren Harding
Adultery
Nan Britton
Elizabeth Ann Blaesing
DNA
Carrie Phillips
Ancestry.com
Genealogy
US Politics


In Democratic Debate, Hillary Clinton’s Focus Is on G.O.P.

Abstract: Hillary Clinton largely looked past her Democratic rivals in Saturday night’s debate, instead repeatedly assailing the Republican field, led by Donald J. Trump. She called Mr. Trump a threat to the nation’s safety, saying he was fast “becoming ISIS’ best recruiter.” Deflecting persistent attacks from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland over gun control, Wall Street and foreign military entanglements, she accused Mr. Trump of undermining the fight against terrorism. Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state, sought to frame next year’s election as a choice between her cleareyed approach to national security and the recklessness of Republicans who have demonized Muslims since the recent attacks on Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. “I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here in the United States, and literally around the world, that there is a clash of civilizations,” she said, “that there is some kind of Western plot or even war against Islam, which then, I believe, fans the flames of radicalization.” Mrs. Clinton defended herself forcefully when she came under assault from Mr. Sanders and Mr. O’Malley. But from her opening statement on, she took every opportunity — and even created some — to ignore her adversaries onstage and go after what she suggested was the true opposition. Her above-the-fray posture in the debate, held at St. Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., signaled Mrs. Clinton’s confidence, just weeks before the first votes in Iowa, that neither of her Democratic rivals would prove a significant obstacle on her march to the nomination. “Bringing Donald Trump back into it,” she said at one point, “you don’t want to alienate the very countries and people you need to be part of the coalition” — referring to the Muslim nations that would be sought as military allies in fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Mr. Sanders and Mr. O’Malley both did their best to anger Mrs. Clinton. Mr. O’Malley claimed that she changed her views on guns “every election year,” and Mr. Sanders reminded viewers of her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq. “Our differences are fairly deep on this issue; we disagreed on the war in Iraq,” Mr. Sanders said, accusing Mrs. Clinton of being overly hawkish in embroiling the United States in overseas conflicts. “Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be.” Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Sanders for his previous opposition to bills backed by supporters of gun control, but was at her fiercest after he challenged her on national security. Fact Checks of the 2016 Election The New York Times will be checking assertions made throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. “With all due respect, senator, you voted for regime change with respect to Libya,” she said, before mentioning the former Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. “You joined the Senate in voting to get rid of Qaddafi, and you asked that there be a Security Council validation of that with a resolution.” Both her rivals argued that the United States needed to fight the Islamic State, but not necessarily to depose President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. “It is not Assad who is attacking the United States,” Mr. Sanders said. Mr. O’Malley agreed. “We shouldn’t be the ones declaring Assad must go,” he said. “We have a role to play, but it is not the role of traveling the world looking for new monsters to destroy.” Mrs. Clinton all but accused her rivals of naïveté. “I think it’s fair to say Assad has killed, by last count, about 250,000 Syrians,” she said, adding that she had wanted to arm the moderate Syrian opposition years ago to avoid the creation of a dangerous power vacuum. “I wish it could be either-or,” she said. Mr. O’Malley, who has been lagging badly behind both of his rivals, proved an irritant to Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton. He faulted them both for being insufficiently courageous on gun control and made a point of noting his relative youth next to Mr. Sanders, 74, and Mrs. Clinton, 68. “May I offer a different generation’s perspective on this?” Mr. O’Malley, 52, interjected at one point. Later, in an exchange about assault weapons, he said, “ISIL training videos are telling lone wolves the easiest way to buy a combat assault weapon in America is at a gun show, and it’s because of the flip-flopping political approach of Washington that both of my two colleagues on the stage have represented there for the last 40 years.” Mrs. Clinton has spent much of this year repositioning herself to appeal to her party’s progressive base, but she bypassed the best chance she had Saturday to embrace the sort of populism that is Mr. Sanders’s calling card. When she was asked, “Should corporate America love Hillary Clinton?” — a reference to a magazine article during her 2008 presidential campaign — she spread her arms. “Everybody should,” she said, grinning. “I have said I want to be the president for the struggling, the striving and the successful.” She spoke at length about wanting to strengthen the economy and offered praise for responsible employers, noting that her father had been a small-business man. Mr. Sanders, finally stepping in after Mrs. Clinton was finished, was blunt about his views but only glancingly criticized her ties to corporate interests. Image With just six weeks until the Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Clinton’s two rivals are running out of time to blunt her momentum. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times “They ain’t going to like me,” Mr. Sanders said of the business community. “And Wall Street is going to like me even less.” Mr. O’Malley did criticize Mrs. Clinton for her Wall Street connections, recalling that at the Democratic debate last month in Iowa, she defended her fund-raising from the financial industry by suggesting those donors supported her efforts to rebuild Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mrs. Clinton said again on Saturday that donations from Wall Street made up a small percentage of her contributions, then turned the question around by noting that Mr. O’Malley had gladly raised money from Wall Street as head of the Democratic Governors Association. There were a few such tense moments, but the disputes were tamer than those that have become routine on the Republican debate stage, and were entirely on policy grounds. Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Sanders for proposing expensive government programs without providing details of how to fund them. She estimated that his proposals to make health care and college free would require a 40 percent increase in federal spending, or $18 trillion to $20 trillion. “I think we’ve got to be really thoughtful about how we’re going to afford what we propose,” she said. “Which is why everything I propose, I explain exactly how I’m going to pay for it.” Mr. Sanders said his plans would help middle- and working-class families and likened them to Social Security and the New Deal. Pressed repeatedly on how he would pay for them, Mr. Sanders cracked a wry smile and said, “Now, this is getting to be fun.” Mr. Sanders said his plans would require an increase in taxes but would ultimately save working Americans money. He said a three-month family leave for working families would amount to only $1.61 a week in higher taxes. Mr. O’Malley also would not rule out potentially raising taxes. Mrs. Clinton, casting an eye toward tax-averse general election voters, made a firm pledge not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year. At another point, Mr. Sanders attacked Mrs. Clinton’s ties to Wall Street. But he also pointed to the policies of the presidential administration of her husband, Bill Clinton, including the dismantling of part of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, leading to the commingling of commercial and investment banks. “I led the effort,” Mr. Sanders said, “against Alan Greenspan, against a guy named Bill Clinton — maybe you know him, maybe you don’t.” But Mrs. Clinton scarcely wanted to engage her rivals, except when sharply attacked, and the three Democrats found much to agree on. Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton both, for example, proposed building a coalition of Muslim countries to help fight the Islamic State. “Tell Yemen, go to war against ISIS,” Mr. Sanders said. “I would tell Qatar, instead of paying $200 billion on the World Cup, spend it on fighting ISIS, which is at your doorstep.” Where the Candidates Stand on 2016’s Biggest Issues See what the candidates are saying about gun control, immigration and more, and how their positions align with the American people. There were even moments when undiluted comity broke out. Asked whether it was time for the role of the presidential spouse to be redefined, Mrs. Clinton said that her husband would not, as first gentleman, pick out the china or flowers for state dinners, but would offer advice on policy issues, particularly “how we’re going to get the economy working for everybody, which he knows a little bit about.” Mr. Sanders used the question to heap praise on Mrs. Clinton, saying she “not only did an outstanding job as our first lady but redefined what that role could be.” At the outset, Mr. Sanders was asked about the revelation that at least one of his aides had gained access to and copied information about Mrs. Clinton’s supporters from the Democratic Party’s voter database. But neither he nor Mrs. Clinton showed any appetite to relitigate it. Asked by the ABC News moderators whether Mrs. Clinton, who looked on icily as Mr. Sanders explained the data breach, deserved an apology, Mr. Sanders said, “Yes, I apologize.” “I very much appreciate that comment, Bernie,” Mrs. Clinton said. “It really is important that we go forward on this.” Mr. Sanders called for an independent investigation of the breach, which prompted the Democratic National Committee to bar his campaign temporarily from the party’s voter file. He noted that one campaign worker had already been fired and said he would fire any other aide found to have acted improperly. (After the debate, his spokesman, Michael Briggs, said two other aides had been suspended Saturday in connection with the data breach.) But Mr. Sanders said that his aides might not have been the only ones viewing information they should not have seen. “I am not convinced that information from our campaign may not have ended up in her campaign,” Mr. Sanders added. Yet even the unsubstantiated suggestion of impropriety by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was not enough to lure her into a back-and-forth on the subject. As in the first two debates, Mrs. Clinton was the focal point throughout — even when she was not actually on stage. As the moderators resumed after a long commercial break, both her opponents returned to their places to answer questions about the economy, but Mrs. Clinton’s podium stood empty. “Sorry,” she said with a grin as she returned. Both Mr. Sanders and Mr. O’Malley used their closing statements to compare the Democratic trio favorably with the Republican field. “I think we have a lot more to offer the American people than the right-wing extremists,” Mr. Sanders said. But Mrs. Clinton, emerging from another debate unscathed, seemed to acknowledge that much of the American public was probably more absorbed, on the Saturday night before Christmas, by the return of the “Star Wars” franchise. “Thank you, good night, and may the force be with you,” she said, beaming.

2016 Presidential Election
Hillary Clinton
Bernard Sanders,Bernie Sanders
Martin J O'Malley
Political Debates
Democrats
New Hampshire


Mortar Bombs Kill Six in Shiite Village in Iraq

Abstract: BAGHDAD — At least 17 people were killed in violence across Iraq on Saturday, including in car bombings and a mortar attack on a Shiite Muslim village, police and medical officials said. The deadliest attack took place in a village near Baquba, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad, where three mortar bombs killed six people, the police said. A woman and a child were among the victims, five of whom belonged to the same family, the police said, adding that the assailants might have been aiming at a nearby police station. Violence in Iraq climbed to its highest level in five years in 2013, when nearly 9,000 people were killed, mostly civilians, according to the United Nations. No group immediately claimed responsibility for any of the latest attacks, but Sunni Islamist militants, some linked to Al Qaeda, have been regaining momentum in Iraq, emboldened by the conflict in neighboring Syria.


Judge Sets Restrictions for Apple on E-Books

Abstract: As punishment for engaging in an e-book price-fixing conspiracy, Apple will be forced to abide by new restrictions on its agreements with publishers and be evaluated by an external “compliance officer” for two years, a federal judge has ruled. But the judge, Denise L. Cote of Federal District Court in Manhattan, rejected some of the measures sought by the Justice Department, including extensive government oversight over Apple’s App Store. In a filing this week, Judge Cote issued her final ruling on the penalties to be imposed on Apple after the long-running lawsuit against the technology giant filed by the Justice Department in April 2012. The government accused Apple, along with five major book publishers, of illegally colluding to raise the price of e-books and of trying to curb Amazon’s influence in the publishing industry as Apple prepared to introduce its iPad in 2010. All five publishers, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Penguin Group USA, have since settled, while saying that they did nothing wrong. Random House, which was not named in the lawsuit, merged with Penguin earlier this year. But Apple, confident of its innocence and with the financial resources to fight in court, went to trial this summer. It defended itself with testimony from a string of high-ranking Apple executives, including Eddy Cue, the company’s senior vice president for Internet software and services, who led the negotiations with publishers . Image A federal judge found that Apple colluded with publishers to thwart Amazon.com on e-books before the iPad’s introduction. Credit Monica M. Davey/European Pressphoto Agency In July, Judge Cote ruled against Apple in a nonjury trial, saying there was compelling evidence it had violated antitrust laws by conspiring with the publishers. In her ruling this week, Judge Cote said that Apple may not enter into any agreement with the five settling publishers that “restricts, limits or impedes Apple’s ability to set, alter or reduce the retail price of any e-book.” The ruling also said that Apple would be prohibited from discussing with any publisher its contractual negotiations with another publisher. In addition, Judge Cote ordered that Apple cooperate with an external monitor who will evaluate and report on the company’s training reforms and antitrust compliance. William J. Baer, the assistant attorney general, said in a statement on Friday that the Justice Department was pleased by the court’s ruling. “Consumers will continue to benefit from lower e-books prices as a result of the department’s enforcement action to restore competition in this important industry,” he said. “By appointing an external monitor to ensure future compliance with the antitrust laws, the court has helped protect consumers from further misconduct by Apple. The court’s ruling reinforces the victory the department has won for consumers.” Apple has said that it will appeal Judge Cote’s July ruling. “Apple did not conspire to fix e-book pricing,” Tom Neumayr, an Apple spokesman, said in an e-mail on Friday. “The iBook- store gave customers more choice and injected much-needed innovation and competition into the market.” At a hearing in United States District Court in Manhattan last week, Judge Cote said that she wished to “intrude as little as possible” on Apple’s business.

Competition law
EBooks EReaders
Apple
Denise Cote
Publishing