Seahawks Dismiss Lynch Allegation

Abstract: The Seattle Seahawks said accusations that their star running back Marshawn Lynch was involved in an assault and damage of personal property were “bogus.” In a statement Tuesday, the team said it had “the utmost respect for the investigative process,” but after speaking with Lynch, the team concluded the allegations were without merit. The police in Bellevue, Wash., released a statement Monday saying they were investigating an incident reported to have taken place at a downtown apartment about 2:30 a.m. Sunday and that Lynch might have been involved. QUARTERBACKS TO SPLIT TIME Cleveland Browns Coach Mike Pettine said he expected Brian Hoyer and Johnny Manziel to get an equal number snaps with the first-team offense on Monday night against Washington. Manziel played with the first-team offense during Tuesday morning’s practice, but Pettine said afterward that no decision has been made about who would start the Browns’ second preseason game. F.C.C. OPPOSITION TO BLACKOUTS A commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission said it is time to repeal N.F.L. TV blackout rules. The commissioner, Ajit Pai, said that the F.C.C. needed to “be on the side of sports fans” regarding league rules that prevent games that are not sold out from being broadcast in the home team’s market. Pai was in Buffalo on Tuesday to make the announcement with Representative Brian Higgins, Democrat of New York, who has urged the F.C.C. to change the rules. Image Brian Hoyer, left, and Johnny Manziel at practice on Monday. Credit Mark Duncan/Associated Press N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell has said that there is no reason to change the blackout policy put in place in 1975. COWBOY APOLOGIZES Dallas cornerback Orlando Scandrick apologized to his family, teammates and organization for failing a drug test that resulted in a suspension for the first four games of the season. The N.F.L. announced the suspension Tuesday, a day after the Dallas owner Jerry Jones first acknowledged the penalty. BRONCOS’ TREVATHAN SIDELINED Denver’s leading tackler, Danny Trevathan, will be out six to eight weeks after fracturing his left knee during practice Tuesday. CARDINALS SAFETY TO RETURN Arizona Coach Bruce Arians said that safety Tyrann Mathieu was “pretty close” to coming off the physically unable to perform list, perhaps within a week. Mathieu, known as the Honey Badger, was having a strong rookie season when he tore two ligaments in his left knee against St. Louis on Dec. 8. HENNE TO START FOR JAGUARS Jacksonville quarterback Chad Henne will play the entire first half Thursday’s at Chicago. Coach Gus Bradley said he was leaning toward giving the rookie Blake Bortles the entire second half. Henne completed 4 of 7 passes for 30 yards in the team’s preseason opener against Tampa Bay last week. Bortles, the third overall pick in May’s N.F.L. draft, was 7 of 11 for 117 yards. Receivers dropped three of Bortles’s passes.

Football
Marshawn Lynch
Seahawks
Browns
NFL
Super Bowl
Super Bowl 2015
FCC
Jacksonville Jaguars
Tyrann Mathieu


A Device in Your Pocket to Call the Phone in Your Purse

Abstract: If you could cross a mobile phone and a wireless earpiece, you might get a hybrid like the LG Style-i, a device that is something more than an earpiece but something less than a cellphone. It is, in essence, a remote control for your phone -- or phones. At 4.3 inches long and weighing four-fifths of an ounce, the Style-i is shaped something like a pen and works in concert with up to three phones through a Bluetooth wireless connection. It has a blue backlighted keypad for dialing and a blue display showing caller ID information and the last number dialed. The Style-i has a small speaker at the top and a microphone at the bottom, and you hold it like a traditional phone handset to talk. A wired headphone can be attached through a 2.5-millimeter jack. The rechargeable battery can provide up to 8 hours of use and 200 hours of standby, LG says. The company says the Style-i will become available the first week of April at www.lgusa.com, at a price below $150. Get ready for the sight of neighbors, motorists and co-workers chattering into their pens. ROY FURCHGOTT

LG ELECTRONICS
CELLULAR TELEPHONES
TELEPHONES AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS
REMOTE CONTROL SYSTEMS


My Son, the Blogger: An M.D. Trades Medicine for Apple Rumors

Abstract: For eight years, Arnold Kim has been trading gossip, rumor and facts about Apple , the notoriously secretive computer company, on his Web site, MacRumors.com . It had been a hobby — albeit a time-consuming one — while Dr. Kim earned his medical degree. He kept at it as he completed his medical training and began diagnosing patients’ kidney problems. Dr. Kim’s Web site now attracts more than 4.4 million people and 40 million page views a month, according to Quantcast, making it one of the most popular technology Web sites. It is enough to make Dr. Kim hang up his stethoscope. This month he stopped practicing medicine and started blogging full time. “In some ways I’ve neglected the site for so long,” he said in a telephone interview. “Now that I actually have a chance to work on it full time, there’s a good chance it can grow more.” Dr. Kim epitomizes the home-grown publishers whose wealth has been enabled by the Internet. Although few of the millions of blogs ever make their creators rich, the ones that do provide all the incentive necessary to fuel the medium. A question Dr. Kim often fields from friends and associates is, “How does that make money?” He answered the question in an entry on his personal blog last month. It can all be “boiled down to one simple accomplishment: building traffic,” he wrote. “That’s it. If you have a site that attracts a lot of visitors, you will be able to make money. On the Internet, traffic equals power, which subsequently equals money.” When Dr. Kim, who lives just outside Richmond, Va., began blogging about Apple in 2000, the word blog had not entered the lexicon. Creating anything beyond a bare-bones Web site required programming skills and tech knowledge. Dr. Kim, a computer science major at Columbia University, had the know-how. He also knew that almost everyone enjoys an advance look at future products. He envisioned MacRumors as an aggregator of all the rumors and hints that appeared on message boards and other Web sites. “The rumor reports have probably been more right than wrong over the years,“ he said. Given Apple’s penchant for secrecy, the company inspires a lot of speculation in the technology industry. Apple enthusiasts dissect every product rumor the way political pundits do political sound bites. As one of the original Web sites about Apple, MacRumors was well positioned to become a destination for users and a clearinghouse for gossip. MacRumors “knows more about Apple than Apple management does,” the blog 24/7 Wall St. declared last spring. The site placed MacRumors No. 2 on a list of the “25 most valuable blogs,” right behind Gawker Media and ahead of The Huffington Post, PerezHilton.com, and TechCrunch. Two of the other tech-oriented blogs on its list, Ars Technica and PaidContent, were sold earlier this year, reportedly for sums in excess of $25 million. Ars Technica reaches an estimated three million people a month, according to Quantcast. PaidContent and its three associated blogs reach about half a million people, but earn additional revenue through conferences and seminars. Since MacRumors attracts a far larger audience, those valuations would suggest Dr. Kim has created a very valuable piece of Web real estate. Dr. Kim is not a millionaire blogger yet, and given the slumping online advertising market, he faces some hurdles as he expands the site. But he has reason to be optimistic. Stepping away from medicine felt somewhat strange, he admits. Dr. Kim was bringing home a six-figure income as a doctor, but he recognized that blogging was becoming more lucrative. He says the site also yields a six-figure income for him. About three years ago, through a combination of Google text advertising, banner ads and commissions on product sales, MacRumors started turning a substantial profit. While Apple is obviously not an advertiser, other technology-oriented companies are, including Verizon, the online audio-book store Audible.com and the information technology products company CDW. Still, he hesitated to make it a full-time job because he enjoyed medicine — and he had invested almost $200,000 in his education. But he finally concluded that “on paper, it was an easy decision.” He also had a practical reason for wanting the ability to work from home. Her name is Penelope, and she is 14 months old. When he told his father, also a doctor, about the decision, Dr. Kim was pleased that “he was very supportive of it, which was sort of surprising to me.” For Dr. Kim, figuring out which rumors are real and which are mere dreams is the fun part. “It is sort of a gut feeling,” he acknowledged, adding that most of the images of future Apple products that circulate on message boards are fakes. Sometimes he will post suspicious images with a caveat about their authenticity. On one memorable occasion, he said, Apple accidentally raised the curtain on a new Mac on its Web site a week ahead of the official announcement, leading to a free-for-all on MacRumors’ message boards and some urgent phone calls from the company. Dr. Kim has worked in relative anonymity. For many years, readers knew him only by his user name, “arn.” (“If I really wanted to hide, I could have done a better job,” he said. He eventually added his full name so he could receive media credentials for conferences.) Dr. Kim is branching out beyond MacRumors. He helps run a spinoff Web site, Touch Arcade, that tracks the new games available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. But he is remaining coy about his other expansion plans. Apple, it seems, is not the only company trying to keep secrets.

Apple Inc
Blogs and Blogging (Internet)
Computers and the Internet
Gossip
Kim Arnold
MacRumors.com


Court Allows Scientists to Work at NASA Until Trial Over Background Checks

Abstract: A group of scientists working at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory won a round in federal court on Friday in their challenge to a Bush administration requirement that they submit to extensive background checks or face losing their jobs. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in California , issued an opinion allowing the scientists to continue working until the question of their privacy challenge can be addressed at a full trial. They had sued the administration over a new domestic security requirement that all contract workers at the laboratory, which is run jointly by NASA and the California Institute of Technology, undergo background checks and identification requirements. The 26 scientists and engineers filing the suit, whose jobs the government classifies as “low risk,” argued that the background checks, which could include information on finances, psychiatric care and sexual practices, constituted an unacceptable invasion of their privacy. The government, which is requiring the upgraded security review at every federal agency, argued that the contract employees be held to the same standard. A lower court had denied the scientists’ request for an injunction to block the background checks; in the opinion released Friday, the court of appeals reversed that decision and sent the case back to the lower court. “This is truly a vindication for these scientists and engineers,” said Dan Stormer, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “They’ve been loyal and hard-working and committed to science and this country — and they’ve been threatened with the loss of their jobs simply because they stood up for their constitutional rights. Any way you address that, it’s wrong.” The government, Mr. Stormer added, had taken a “talismanic use of the word ‘terror’ to overcome constitutional protections.” The court’s language was strong, stating that the questions asked on the government’s forms for the background checks were so “open-ended and highly private” that it was “difficult to see how they could be narrowly tailored to meet any legitimate need” and there were “absolutely no safeguards in place to limit the disclosures to information relevant to these interests.” NASA, the court ruled, had proved no damage that would come to the agency if it could not carry out the background checks. Michael Cabbage, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said, “NASA will, of course, comply with any rulings from the court of appeals.”


Myanmar Political Shift Revives Debate on Sanctions

Abstract: YANGON, Myanmar — The Burmese tycoon Zaw Zaw, who has been subject to American economic sanctions for nearly seven years , thinks it is time for them to end. At least in his case. His conglomerate, Max Myanmar Group, which has interests in construction, gems, timber and tourism, had been placed on the United States sanctions list for his ties to the army generals who have governed Myanmar, formerly Burma, for five decades. But he has tried to distance himself from the military and has cultivated a relationship with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the nation’s pro-democracy leader, whose party, the National League for Democracy, won landslide elections last month . “I expected the N.L.D. would win in a landslide, and I am very happy for it,” he said. “And I hope the U.S. will consider lifting the targeted sanctions on Myanmar, particularly for those who aren’t involved in drug trafficking or arms trading.” The success of the Nov. 8 elections, a crucial step in the country’s transition to democracy, has rekindled the debate about the effectiveness of American sanctions and whether to lift those that remain. Unfortunately for Mr. Zaw Zaw, they may not go away any time soon. The United States says it wants to maintain leverage to encourage a transition that is still far from certain. “Our priority is to support the N.L.D.’s political and economic transition into an actual government,” a senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Eventually there will be a broader Burma policy discussion, depending on how events unfold. At this point there are no significant changes to our sanctions policy.” Still, the sanctions have already been adjusted as the country’s polity has evolved. After Myanmar shifted from a military government to a quasi-civilian one and allowed parliamentary by-elections to go forward in 2012, the United States and other Western countries dropped broader sanctions that prohibited most trade with Myanmar. But the United States continued to enforce prohibitions against Americans doing business with more than 70 officials and businesspeople with ties to Myanmar’s former military government. On Monday, the United States said it was relaxing some of those restrictions to fix what it called an “unintended consequence.” Two international banking associations had discovered that one of the main port terminals in Yangon was owned by Asia World, a company on the sanctions list. The New York Times reported in June that the company, founded by one of the country’s premier heroin kingpins, had built not only the port, but roads, dams and a major hotel in Yangon, making its projects difficult to avoid. The banks feared that they could be liable for financing trade that passed through the port. The change made on Monday would allow trade to pass through a facility owned by a person on the sanctions list, as long as the transaction is not on their behalf. But officials insisted that the move was an adjustment to allow the flow of approved commerce and not a loosening of the remaining sanctions. “This general license is not in any way a reaction to the election and not in any way a change to overall Burma sanctions policy,” the senior official said. “Rather it is a technical fix to address something that was clear to us is an unintended consequence of our sanctions.” But Representative Ed Royce, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, criticized the move, saying the United States needed to do more to combat oppression and drug trafficking in Myanmar. “Rather than responding to human rights abuses or narcotics trafficking, the administration is further lifting sanctions,” he said in a statement. The broader question, though, whether the sanctions are effective, remains open to debate. President Obama has trumpeted his administration’s diplomatic efforts, which include sanctions, as an important factor in the country’s transformation. Priscilla A. Clapp, former head of the United States Mission in Myanmar, said that American policy had some influence, but that it should not be overstated. “The economic effect was minimal,” she said. “We weren’t doing business with Burma anyway.” The real credit for the country’s shift, she said, “goes to the people in the country,” including the military leaders who have managed the transition and the democracy activists who have pressed relentlessly for it. Sean Turnell, an economist at Macquarie University in Australia, said the sanctions did have an effect, but not in the way most people think. The sanctions pushed Myanmar “into the arms of China,” he said, an awkward arrangement for the military leaders, many of whom had fought China or Chinese proxies. And many Burmese fear China’s influence and interference. “This circumstance then, of being pushed into an uneasy Chinese embrace, was the direct result of sanctions, and it was the anxiety to precisely break free from it that was the trigger for the changes that have taken place since 2010,” he said. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, once a staunch advocate of sanctions, has said they played an important role. But recently she has suggested that they may no longer be needed. “With a genuinely democratic government in power, I do not see why they would need to keep sanctions on,” she told The Washington Post in November. She did not elaborate, but at some point, if Myanmar continues its path toward democracy, American policy makers will have to decide if the sanctions’ goals have been met. Those goals, initially, were that Myanmar honor the results of the 1990 election, which the N.L.D. won and the military rejected. Next month, the N.L.D. will be seated as the majority party in Parliament. The sanctions were premised on the demand that “the N.L.D. be given its rightful place in government, and that’s happening now,” said Ms. Clapp, now a senior adviser to the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Asia Society. “The U.S. government needs to rethink its policy.”

Myanmar,Burma
Aung San Suu Kyi
Embargoes Sanctions
US Foreign Policy
Election
Democracy
Human Rights
Military


North Korea Is Sign of Chilled U.S.-China Relations

Abstract: BEIJING — President Obama and President Hu Jintao of China talked by telephone on Monday about North Korea , culminating 13 days of effort by the White House to persuade China’s leaders to discuss a crisis that many experts fear could escalate into military action. Administration officials say they have no evidence Mr. Hu was ducking the call, which the Chinese knew would urge them to crack down on their unruly ally, a step Beijing clearly is highly reluctant to take amid a leadership succession in North Korea. White House officials insisted that the long delay was simply the result of scheduling problems. But in Beijing, both Chinese and American officials and analysts have another explanation: the long silence epitomizes the speed with which relations between Washington and Beijing have plunged into a freeze. This year has witnessed the longest period of tension between the two capitals in a decade. And if anything, both sides appear to be hardening their positions. “The issues that used to be on the positive side of the ledger are increasingly on the negative side of the ledger, starting with North Korea,” Bonnie Glaser, a China scholar at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview last week. “I don’t think this is easily repairable, and I think we’re going to have a fairly cold relationship over the next two years, and potentially longer.” Mr. Obama came into office seeking just the opposite: a new rapprochement with a rising power whose deep economic ties with the United States all but demand closer diplomatic ones. But the days when the White House spoke of a “G-2” that would manage the world economy and more, a phrase that preceded the first meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu in the depths of the financial crisis in early 2009, are long over. Instead, he faces a problem very similar to the one Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described in March 2009 during a lunch with Kevin Rudd, a China expert who was then Australia’s prime minister, according to a cable recounting their conversation that was in a newly released trove of WikiLeaks documents. Mrs. Clinton was said to have asked Mr. Rudd, “How do you deal toughly with your banker?”‘ The latest bad sign is that cooperation on managing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, which began with considerable promise in 2009, appears to have disintegrated. On Monday, Mrs. Clinton was scheduled to convene an emergency meeting in Washington with her Japanese and South Korean counterparts about both the North’s shelling of a South Korean island last month, and its recent disclosure of a new nuclear facility that potentially expands its nuclear arsenal. China, the only nation with real sway over the North Korean leadership, will not be there. To the contrary, China’s strategy on North Korea is at odds with that of Washington and its allies. In Monday’s telephone call with Mr. Hu, the White House said, Mr. Obama said North Korea’s new enrichment facility flouted commitments it made during the six-party talks on curbing its nuclear program, and urged China’s help in sending “a clear message to North Korea that its provocations are unacceptable.” One former Chinese official with close ties to the government dismissed the American approach last week as characteristically legalistic. The former official, who would not be named because he is not authorized to speak on the topic, said China’s strategy is to reassure the Koreans about their security, not lecture them about diplomatic obligations. Indeed, China’s strongest public reaction to last month’s shelling of South Korea has not been to condemn the North, but to criticize Washington’s response — joint war games with South Korea that put the American carrier George Washington and its strike force in the Yellow Sea, off China’s borders. After Mr. Obama’s national security team met last Tuesday night, administration officials began saying that the United States would conduct more military exercises near North Korea and China should the North engage in further provocations. It was an unmistakable message to Beijing that failing to rein in its ally would only increase an American military presence that China loathes. But the lack of cooperation on North Korea only hints at the deterioration in the U.S.-China relationship. In another leaked diplomatic cable, the American ambassador to Beijing, Jon Huntsman, wrote last January that the United States faced “a challenging year ahead” in relations with China, adding: “We need to find ways to keep the relationship positive.” Instead, two successive meetings between Mr. Obama and China’s top leaders in recent months have yielded little change in China’s management of its currency. A China-based attack on Google computers early this year riveted attention on Beijing’s potential for cyberwar, and provoked nasty exchanges on the two nations’ concepts of free speech. In public and private, China bitterly accuses the United States of engineering the award in October of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, in an effort to undermine its government. And those are but lowlights of a year in which Chinese officials have railed loudly and publicly against what they consider to be American efforts to smother their rightful emergence on the global stage. No outsiders can peer inside the black box where Chinese policies are made. But rumors abound that Beijing’s leadership decided in the last year that the United States’ faltering after the 2008 economic crisis had handed Beijing an opportunity to seize the global initiative. “They feel the ball is at their feet,” one well-connected Chinese political analyst, who did not want to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said in an interview. “The economic crisis was the main thing. China could really say ‘no’ to the U.S.” By comparison, he said, Washington has little leverage over Chinese policies. There are doubtless other factors at work. China’s domestic Internet is being bombarded by ardent nationalists whose sheer volume of comments may sway official policy. The government faces a difficult succession in 2012 — one in which the safe route for every contender for power is to hew to solidly pro-China ideology. Nor are Americans ready to accept a world in which their top-dog status is at considerable risk. “A lot of America hasn’t caught up with the fact that China now can say no more often,” said Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based analyst of China’s leadership. “When you’ve got a 6-year-old and he throws a whiffle ball against a window and it bounces off harmlessly, nobody thinks anything of it. “But when he’s older, and he throws a hardball, you’ve got a broken window.” The difficulty in connecting Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu is reminiscent of the last moment of deep tension between the two countries in early 2001, after a Chinese fighter collided with an American spy plane trailing just off the Chinese coast, sending the American plane and its crew into an emergency landing on Chinese soil. President George W. Bush spent more than a week trying to get his counterpart, Jiang Zemin, on the phone. The Chinese — clearly trying to sort out how to handle the crisis — declined to take the call until their internal debate was over. The American crew was eventually returned; the Chinese sent the plane back in a box, after disassembling and inspecting every component. Several current and former American officials, as well as foreign diplomats, say they suspect that this time, the Chinese leadership is still debating how to balance its interest in propping up North Korea with their interest in preventing more incidents or another nuclear test, which would be North Korea’s third. But the outside world may never know, particularly after candid discussions about North Korea between American and Chinese officials have been revealed in WikiLeaks documents. “The Chinese don’t like talking about this stuff,” one senior American official put it two weeks ago, after the North revealed its new nuclear site. “And they certainly don’t like talking about it over the phone.”

United States International Relations
China
North Korea
Hu Jintao
Obama Barack


Morgenthau Says Rumors of His Quitting Are False

Abstract: Robert M. Morgenthau , facing a swirl of rumors that he was retiring after 33 years as Manhattan district attorney, met with reporters on Tuesday and said the speculation was untrue. “I’m too old to retire,” Mr. Morgenthau, 88, said when asked about his plans after the news conference. “My grandfather used to say, you know, opportunity knocks at everybody’s door at least once. The trick is to recognize the knock. So the opportunity to retire knocked on my door and I missed it.” Mr. Morgenthau said he was not declaring now whether he would run for re-election in 2009, when he will be 90. “I don’t cross bridges until I come to them,” he said. “But I expect to.” After declining to comment on his plans for almost a week, Mr. Morgenthau held an impromptu year-end briefing for reporters who regularly cover his office. He celebrated his achievements over the past year (tackling white-collar crime as violent crimes decline, and returning $43 million in penalties to state and city coffers). And perhaps to convey a sense of youthfulness, he brought along his 17-year-old daughter, Amy, from his second marriage, the youngest of his seven children. “That’s Amy Morgenthau,” the district attorney said, gesturing toward his daughter, in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, perched on the windowsill of the office of James Kindler, the chief assistant district attorney and Mr. Morgenthau’s top aide. Amy, a junior in high school, smiled. The latest round of speculation about Mr. Morgenthau’s plans flared a week ago after The New York Post, in its Page Six column, reported that he was considering stepping down before the end of the year to make room for a handpicked successor, Cyrus Vance Jr., a trial lawyer and the son of President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state. After the item ran, lawyers close to Mr. Morgenthau said that there had been whispers that he had thought about it, though it was not clear if he would retire before or after the 2009 election. “There were only two things that were true in that Post gossip column,” Mr. Morgenthau said on Tuesday. “One was that I was the district attorney; the other was that Cy Vance had been an assistant district attorney.” Mr. Morgenthau was elected in 1974 and took office in January 1975, to fill the remaining term of Frank S. Hogan, who had resigned because of ill health after 32 years as district attorney. Reviewing the year, Mr. Morgenthau said that there had been 65 murders in Manhattan, a 40 percent drop from last year, and that the borough was on track to having a quarter of the murders it had in 1963. He said the decrease in violent crimes had allowed his office to focus more on financial crimes, like tax evasion, hiding income in offshore accounts, unlicensed money transmission and bid-rigging. “One murder is one murder too many,” Mr. Morgenthau said. “But it has enabled us to attack and investigate some of the economic crimes which undermine the social and economic viability of the city.” Explaining his daughter’s presence, Mr. Morgenthau said later, “She was just checking up on me.” He said he took her to lunch at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, where he is chairman of the board. “They have a very nice store,” he said, adding that he bought Amy a necklace and a bracelet, and earrings and a bracelet for his wife, Lucinda Franks. Mr. Morgenthau also laid to rest any concern about his health. “I’m knocking on wood,” he said, “but my health is excellent. If it were not, I wouldn’t think of running. My doctor has told me I can do anything I want to do, except fall down. He’s forbidden me to fall down.”

Morgenthau Robert M
District Attorneys
Appointments and Executive Changes


Epstein’s Cubs Beat His Former Red Sox

Abstract: CHICAGO — On a day of divided emotions at Wrigley Field, Theo Epstein’s present got the better of his past as his new team, the Cubs, beat his old one, the Red Sox , 3-0. A game that had only nine hits and little action failed to match the pregame buzz starring Epstein, the Cubs’ president of baseball operations. Epstein met the news media from Chicago and from his hometown, Boston. He spoke about the future of the Cubs, who hired him in October, and looked back at his nine-year tenure as general manager of the Red Sox, which included two World Series titles. “There’s a connection that will never go away,” Epstein said. “I care about a lot of the people there.” During batting practice, Epstein shook hands and chatted behind the backstop with some of the Red Sox players he drafted (Dustin Pedroia) and signed (Carl Crawford) and traded for (Adrian Gonzalez). “He was the first guy to give me an opportunity, and I always wanted to play for him because he was the first one to do that,” Pedroia said. “So I guess it was a little tough to see him go.” The Cubs scored all three runs in the first two innings off Daisuke Matsuzaka, another of Epstein’s marquee free-agent signings during his Boston tenure. The Cubs scored on a Steve Clevenger bloop double with the bases loaded and a David DeJesus R.B.I. single. Red Sox fans were out in full force, but there was little for them to cheer in Boston’s first visit to Wrigley since 2005. The Red Sox loaded the bases in the ninth inning, but Pedroia grounded into a forceout, ending the game. Ryan Dempster was the winning pitcher, extending his scoreless innings streak to 22, but his performance only served to highlight the Cubs’ — and Epstein’s — long-term plans. Faced with questions after the game about his future in Chicago with trade rumors flying, Dempster said, “I’m not oblivious to what’s going on.” The Red Sox dropped to 31-33, still struggling to find their way this season after last September’s collapse. “I take responsibility for the team not getting where it was supposed to go,” Epstein said of last year’s 7-20 finish. Boston may still wear Epstein’s fingerprints, and his ties to the city and organization remain strong. But, he said, it is also time to move on. “I don’t feel like it’s my team, so to speak,” he said of the Red Sox. “The game’s hard enough with one team.”

Baseball
Chicago Cubs
Epstein Theo
Boston Red Sox


Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist Expects to Play This Weekend

Abstract: The Rangers have been on a roll with goalie Cam Talbot in net, winning 17 of 24 games since he became their starter in early February. But even with Talbot’s success, Henrik Lundqvist is still the Rangers’ unquestioned No. 1 goalie, and they are close to getting him back. Lundqvist took shots against his teammates for the first time since he was placed on injured reserve with a vascular injury in his neck Feb. 6, and said he hoped to return to game action this weekend. Lundqvist was cleared last Tuesday to return to practice, but he had not taken the ice with his teammates because of the Rangers’ hectic game schedule, with four games in seven days, and the birth of his second child Friday. “It felt really good,” Lundqvist said. “It’s been a long wait for me to get out there. It was a lot of fun to see the guys, get out on the ice and work on my game.” Talbot started against the Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday night in a rematch of the Stanley Cup finalists, his 22nd start since Lundqvist’s injury. But at the morning skate, Lundqvist was across the ice, battling shots, both high and low. Center Derick Brassard said he was hesitant to fire a high shot at Lundqvist out of fear for the goaltender’s well-being, but that sentiment quickly waned. “If he wasn’t fine, they wouldn’t have him on the ice with us in a full practice,” Brassard said. “Obviously, he’s fine, and he made some good saves there, and after that the guys were trying a little harder and shooting a little higher.” Image Lundqvist sustained a neck injury against the Hurricanes on Jan. 31. Credit Mary Altaffer/Associated Press Lundqvist reiterated that sentiment. “I’m fine,” he said. “They can go high and hard, and I’m not worried about it.” Lundqvist said his goal was to return either Saturday in Boston against the Bruins or Sunday at home against the Washington Capitals. Rangers Coach Alain Vigneault said that “it would be a stretch” for Lundqvist to play Thursday against the Ottawa Senators, but that he would face live shots again Wednesday in practice. “For Hank to find his rhythm and his style of play, he doesn’t think it will be a long time,” Vigneault said. “I don’t exactly know the exact time frame.” Lundqvist said he thought he was close to where he needed to be physically, but needed a few more skates to work on his timing and his mental state. “I feel like, for the last four weeks, it has been really good,” Lundqvist said. “The fact that I have been able to skate and stay in shape — that’s going to help me speed up this process. For each practice, I feel more and more comfortable. The first practice I had last week, just a couple of coaches shooting, it was a little uncomfortable. But for each day that goes by, you get more and more comfortable with the high shots and the speed and everything. “Playing goal, the biggest part is the mental aspect — to have your focus right and to see the game the right way.” To support his neck, Lundqvist has been wearing a brace while skating since he returned to the ice four weeks ago. He said he was unsure whether that would be part of his equipment whenever he retook the ice for games. “I might use it, I might not,” Lundqvist said. “I think I’ll keep it for the next few days, and we’ll see how that goes.” Lundqvist was confident he could play a full game, adding, “This time of the year, I’m probably in better shape than a long time.” But a baby girl in the house is also affecting his focus. “I’m working on it,” Lundqvist said with a laugh when asked about how his sleep had been. “It’s been great. Everybody is healthy, and that’s the most important thing.”

Ice hockey
Henrik Lundqvist
Cam Talbot
Rangers


ThinkFilm, a Short-Lived but Wily Distributor, Still Influences Industry

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — In two weeks, the feisty operatives of an ever tighter, tougher independent film business will gather at the annual Sundance Film Festival. Perhaps the toughest of the lot are the survivors of ThinkFilm. ThinkFilm, a small, short-lived movie distributor, briefly took the indie world by storm with provocative fare like “Half Nelson,” about a drug-addicted high school teacher, and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” a documentary about the use of torture in the American war on terror. When it closed most operations in 2008, as financial carnage hit the independent film business, it seemed destined to become just another relic of the art-house movement. Yet ThinkFilm’s influence lives on. Its alumni have become a force in an industry that has been learning to think smaller, make do with less and live more by wit than a fat bankroll. Nearly a dozen companies, many of which will be wheeling and dealing at Sundance, are rooted in the diaspora created by ThinkFilm’s demise. Some, like Long Shot Factory, are in the vanguard of a digitally sophisticated do-it-yourself movement. Others, like Tajj Media, run by a co-founder of ThinkFilm, Jeff Sackman, have narrowed their focus to an audience segment or business niche; Tajj Media, for instance, helps filmmakers find government subsidies. These companies’ vigor underscores the maturing of the independent film business. Once populated by young film school graduates turning out productions on the fly, the industry now includes experienced filmmakers and entrepreneurs. As Sundance turns 30, it is these survivors who are forming the backbone of a more seasoned indie community. “It feels like the world somewhat caught up to where we were,” said Michael Baker, a former ThinkFilm executive. Last year, he and a fellow alumnus, David Hudakoc, formed their own distribution company, levelFilm, based in Toronto. “We were never bound by traditional thinking,” Mr. Baker added. Among the most prominent of the new companies is A24, based in New York and aimed at both young and arty viewers with movies like “Spring Breakers” and “The Bling Ring.” A coming release, “Locke,” starring Tom Hardy, will be at Sundance. Another standout is Oscilloscope Laboratories, which recently bought rights to “Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns” — at 95 seconds, the shortest documentary in this year’s festival. David Fenkel and Daniel Katz, two of A24’s three co-founders, are ThinkFilm veterans. Daniel Berger and David Laub, co-presidents of Oscilloscope, both started as interns at ThinkFilm. Less visibly, an array of firms founded by ThinkFilm refugees have brought lessons from their alma mater to film distribution businesses that operate with little overhead, yet manage to put movies on the map. They include Paladin, run by Mark Urman; Variance Films, led by Dylan Marchetti, and Long Shot Factory, founded by Erin Owens in 2011. “You are talking to some of the most media-savvy people in the independent film industry,” Ms. Owens said of her former colleagues, who were early adopters of low-cost web promotion. Short on capital, but long on attention-getting ideas, ThinkFilm was started in September 2001 by executives based in Toronto who had previously worked at a then-young Canadian studio, Lionsgate. Several of the founders — Mr. Sackman, Marc Hirshberg and Randy Manis, each of whom now has a company of his own — were quickly joined by Mr. Urman, who led the film operation from New York. The group then assembled a mostly young staff that operated much like a dot-com start-up, with little hierarchy and a bootstrap ethic. Mr. Manis recalls even allowing employees to vote on a critical decision affecting “Murderball,” a Sundance documentary about wheelchair rugby. “I’m not sure it was the right outcome, but that’s what we did,” he said. A former publicist, Mr. Urman had a gift for the outrageous. “The Aristocrats,” a documentary about comedians telling the same dirty joke, took in $6.3 million at the box office in 2005, and signaled that ThinkFilm was a home for pictures that others would not touch. “Half Nelson” received an Oscar nomination for its star Ryan Gosling in 2007. “Born Into Brothels,” about the children of Calcutta prostitutes, was named best documentary in 2005, and “Taxi to the Dark Side” won that honor in 2008. But ThinkFilm had been sold by then, and after having released almost 90 films, was shuttered that year. (Its assets were later collapsed into a complicated bankruptcy proceeding.) “We put off the belt-tightening a lot longer than we should,” Mr. Marchetti said of an industrywide reckoning that ultimately closed or sharply downsized many other small film companies. Among the resulting castaways, ThinkFilm’s proved remarkably buoyant. That owes much to their comfort with an emerging business model under which filmmakers keep ownership of films while cobbling together money to book their own theaters or land digital deals — all with help from paid advisers, many of whom learned guerrilla tactics at ThinkFilm. “In the old days, you would have a small distributor buy the film,” said Michael Tuckman, a ThinkFilm alumnus who now operates mTuckman Media. “You can do better if you own it yourself.” While Mr. Sackman steers producers toward government funds, Mr. Hirshberg’s Evra Media Solutions, founded in 2011, trades on his ThinkFilm experience by concentrating on troubled companies. “I don’t know how people do it,” Mr. Hirshberg said of an independent landscape that finds more films competing for fewer cash bids, and fleeting viewer attention. “That’s why I’m not in the distribution business, I’m in the distressed space,” he added. Predictably, there is camaraderie — and shared business — among the ThinkFilm alumni. And, of course, the tribe will converge in Park City, Utah, for the Sundance festival, which begins on Jan. 16. “We still do work together on some level, which speaks volumes for how close-knit we all were there,” said Alex Klenert, who became a co-founder of Prodigy Public Relations after leaving ThinkFilm. Some of those survivors will be buying at Sundance. Others, like Mr. Tuckman, will be watching movies, scouting for clients and scratching their itch for a changing indie game. “I’m still addicted,” Mr. Tuckman said.

ThinkFilm
Movies
A24
Sundance Film Festival


A City Split Over the Mixture of Church and Sausage

Abstract: MADISON, Wis. — Tim Metcalfe, the organizer of an annual, meaty bacchanal called the World’s Largest Brat Fest, had a few innocent ideas for shaking up the festival this year. He added a free Sunday-morning worship service to the lineup. One outdoor stage would be devoted to bands playing Christian music. And he invited Bob Lenz, a gregarious motivational speaker, to talk about teen suicide prevention. But this month, a local newspaper noted that Mr. Lenz had ties to anti-abortion groups, particularly one called Save the Storks, which parks buses in front of abortion clinics and offers ultrasounds to pregnant women, a practice that some people consider harassment. Many liberal-leaning residents of Madison (and there are a lot of them) publicly said they would rather skip the Memorial Day weekend festival and its four-day extravaganza of bratwurst and beer. “My reaction was, this doesn’t have a very Madison feel to it,” said Lisa Subeck, a member of the City Council, who declined to attend. “It really will turn many people off.” With Mr. Lenz appearing as a speaker, she said, “you really have to think, this isn’t reflective of our values.” Within days, Mr. Metcalfe called Mr. Lenz to deliver a message: You are no longer invited. Now some residents of Madison, a picturesque college town and state capital, are wondering how a humble festival has been turned into a debate over abortion rights, evangelicals, free speech and the crowd-pleasing qualities of Christian rock. Perhaps nerves are still a little frayed here, three years after angry protests over a collective-bargaining law shook the Capitol, and the failed attempt to recall Gov. Scott Walker the year after that. Some longtime residents said they missed the time when Wisconsin seemed more politically easygoing, a place where voters kept a Republican governor, Tommy G. Thompson, in office from 1987 to 2001. (Mr. Thompson might not fit in with today’s Republican Party, given his dreams of high-speed rail and his embrace of health care for the poor.) These days, being utterly divided feels like the new normal. “People have gotten way too sensitive,” said Ruth Agnew, a 56-year-old secretary who said she leans conservative. She was one of the first people to stream onto the festival grounds on Friday on the first morning of the event. “Whatever happened to freedom of speech?” chimed in her companion, Bea Hernandez, a retired nurse. Other people attending Brat Fest were exasperated that the organizers would take a secular event and introduce a religious element. “This isn’t the venue for that,” said Angie Ouverson, who was at the festival celebrating her 49th birthday, sipping a local Ghost Ship ale from a plastic cup. “We’re here for the fun and the food. It’s not about religion.” Image This year’s Brat Fest in the Wisconsin capital was marked by disputes over some of the events. Credit Ben Brewer for The New York Times Nearby, vendors hawked Brat Fest hats, T-shirts, shot glasses and baby bibs, all emblazoned with drawings of brats. Couples and families lined up under the blazing sun, 30 people deep, for freshly grilled brats ($3), roasted corn on the cob ($2) and local craft beer ($6). The debate over Brat Fest all started mildly enough, with a headline in the Wisconsin State Journal reading, “ Brat Fest Takes a Big Turn Toward Religion This Year .” The article pointed out Mr. Lenz’s ties to anti-abortion activism, particularly to Save the Storks, which abortion-rights supporters say intimidates pregnant women. That delicate issue happened to be on a lot of people’s minds: In February, the Madison City Council took aim at the group’s buses by unanimously passing an ordinance establishing a “buffer zone” around health care facilities. Only days after local legislators began to protest the inclusion of Mr. Lenz, Mr. Metcalfe, the owner of a small grocery-store chain, posted on Facebook, “After learning that suicide is one of the leading causes of deaths for teenagers, I invited a motivational speaker who was going to focus on teens, suicide and prevention. It was brought to my attention that the speaker’s affiliation caused some concerns and as a result, I respectfully rescinded the offer. Our goal is to make Brat Fest a great experience for all who attend.” Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Metcalfe declined to comment further. In blog posts and letters to the editor, conservatives accused liberals of being intolerant of opposing viewpoints. Liberals said they had every right to protest the appearance of a speaker who, in their view, did not respect women’s access to health care. The opposition to a stage devoted to Christian music prompted Chris Rickert , a columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal, to wryly suggest parsing what he considered the misogynistic lyrics of other musicians appearing at the festival, like Bret Michaels of the band Poison. Ms. Subeck, the City Council member, said the free-speech argument did not hold up, since this was a private event. “There’s nothing that prevents him from speaking out in other venues,” she said of Mr. Lenz. Facing a possible boycott, Mr. Metcalfe may have been making a “wise business decision” in canceling Mr. Lenz’s appearance, she added. Mr. Lenz, in an interview on Friday, said there were no hard feelings. “Tim felt bad,” he said. “He’s a great guy. I still have nothing but love for him. He was put in a hard position.” He said he had no plans to attend the festival. “I’m not going because I don’t want to pour fuel on the fire,” he said.

Abortion
Madison WI
Festival
Religion and Belief
Freedom of speech
Memorial Day
Wisconsin
Bob Lenz


Rivals of ISIS Attack U.S.-Backed Syrian Rebel Group

Abstract: BAGHDAD — A Syrian insurgent group at the heart of the Pentagon’s effort to fight the Islamic State came under intense attack on Friday from a different hard-line Islamist faction, a serious blow to the Obama administration’s plans to create a reliable military force inside Syria . The American-led coalition responded with airstrikes to help the American-aligned unit, known as Division 30, in fighting off the assault, according to an American military spokesman and combatants on both sides. The strikes were the first known use of coalition air power in direct battlefield support of fighters in Syria who were trained by the Pentagon. The attack on Friday was mounted by the Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda. It came a day after the Nusra Front captured two leaders and at least six fighters of Division 30, which supplied the first trainees to graduate from the Pentagon’s anti-Islamic State training program. In Washington, several current and former senior administration officials acknowledged that the attack and the abductions by the Nusra Front took American officials by surprise and amounted to a significant intelligence failure. While American military trainers had gone to great lengths to protect the initial group of trainees from attacks by Islamic State or Syrian Army forces, they did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front. In fact, officials said on Friday, they expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the Islamic State. “This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” said one former senior American official, who was working closely on Syria issues until recently, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments. The Nusra Front said in a statement on Friday that its aim was to eliminate Division 30 before it could gain a deeper foothold in Syria. The Nusra Front did much the same last year when it smashed the main groups that had been trained and equipped in a different American effort, one run covertly by the C.I.A. A spokesman for the American military, Col. Patrick S. Ryder, wrote in an email statement that “we are confident that this attack will not deter Syrians from joining the program to fight for Syria,” and added that the program “is making progress.” Division 30’s leaders expected to play a role in an ambitious new joint push by the United States and Turkey to help less radical Syrian insurgent groups seize territory from the fundamentalist militant fighters of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS , ISIL or Daesh. But the unit had no known plans to fight the Nusra Front, and the attacks on Thursday and Friday seemed to catch the unit off guard. Though the Nusra Front is allied with Al Qaeda, it is seen by many insurgents in Syria as preferable to the Islamic State, and it sometimes cooperates with other less radical groups against both the Islamic State and Syrian government forces. A senior Defense Department official acknowledged that the threat to the trainees and their Syrian recruiters had been misjudged, and said that officials were trying to understand why the Nusra Front had turned on the trainees. The defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence reports, described what he called “silver linings” to the attack on Friday: that the trainees had fought effectively in the battle, and that coalition warplanes responded quickly with airstrikes to support them. Witnesses described the attack as an all-out assault, with medium and heavy weapons, on a Division 30 encampment west of the town of Azaz in Aleppo Province, near the border with Turkey. Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi Efforts to stem the rise of the Islamic State. In a statement on Friday, Division 30’s leaders called on all nationalist Syrian insurgents to “stand firm and proactively” against what they called an unprovoked attack, and asked “the brothers in the Nusra Front” to “stop the bloodshed and preserve the unity.” Yet witnesses to the attack on Friday and insurgent leaders said that most of the other groups in the area failed to come to Division 30’s aid. By staying out of the fight, they may have signaled that they have not accepted a central feature of the Pentagon’s program: that it be directed only at the Islamic State and not at the Syrian government forces of President Bashar al-Assad, against whom the rebels originally took up arms. At a minimum, it appears that other insurgent groups were not ready to directly take on the Nusra Front, one of the strongest and best-financed forces on the ground in Syria. Neither did they join in the Nusra Front’s attack on Division 30, perhaps because of the coalition airstrikes. The Islamic State does not have a significant presence in that area. Ahrar al-Sham, another powerful Islamist insurgent group, stayed on the sidelines, according to a spokesman, Ahmad Kara Ali. Ahrar al-Sham has often aligned with the Nusra Front, but it has been at odds with the group in some places lately over power and over how to govern areas they have conquered. One group that apparently did side with Division 30 was Jaysh Al-Thuwar, a coalition based west of Azaz that includes several Arab and Kurdish factions. The group said in a statement that it, too, had come under attack after Division 30 fighters had fallen back to areas under its control, and that it tried to assist Division 30 during the battle. Division 30 said in a statement that five of its fighters were killed in the firefight on Friday, 18 were wounded and 20 were captured by the Nusra Front. It was not clear whether the 20 captives included the six fighters and two commanders captured a day earlier. Division 30 was formed from a number of smaller groups to streamline the recruitment and training of fighters by the Pentagon to fight the Islamic State. The program has produced only a handful of graduates so far, in part because of a screening process to root out suspected extremists that Division 30’s leaders say is too stringent. Its first contingent of trained fighters — just 54 in all — recently re-entered Syria to join the rest of the division. An American official said that none of those 54 were among the eight captured on Thursday by the Nusra Front. But the captives did include Nadeem Hassan, a defector from the Syrian Army who helped organize Division 30’s 1,200 fighters, and Farhan Jasem, a deputy who commanded the 54 trained fighters, according to a statement from Division 30. The Nusra Front’s statement offered its view of the American role in Syria. Referring to the C.I.A. program, the group said that when the United States tried to “plant its hands inside Syria,” the Nusra Front “cut those hands off,” and that Division 30 was merely another proxy “aiming to advance the projects and interests of America.” Sunni Arabs have formed the backbone of the revolt against Mr. Assad’s rule, which exploded into civil war after his security forces cracked down on protesters. As the conflict has dragged on, more groups have come to frame it the way the Nusra Front does, as a sectarian struggle. The group’s statement said Sunnis would not hand the sacrifices of four years of war “on a plate of gold” to the United States “for it to establish its feet in the region over the graves of hundreds of thousands of the people of Syria.” The war has killed at least 230,000 Syrians, wounded more than a million and displaced more than nine million, half the country’s population.

ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Syria
Al Nusra Front
US Military


Norway Gives More to Fight Ills Overseas

Abstract: Norway , whose 4.7 million people already contribute almost $4 billion a year to aid developing countries, will give $1 billion on top of that in the next 10 years to reduce deaths of millions of mothers and children from preventable causes, its prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, announced last week at a Clinton Foundation conference in New York. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands pledged at the same news conference that his country would give $175 million for child and maternal health in the next three years. As Norway and the Netherlands, two of the five most generous nations in aid to the developing world, raised their financial commitment in one conference room, Bill Frist , the former Republican senator who now works with Save the Children, stood up in another room at the conference to lead a panel on child and maternal health. Several influential groups, including Save the Children, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the rock star Bono’s One Campaign, are pushing the United States, next to last among rich nations in aid to developing countries as a share of gross national product, to increase its giving to improve the survival odds of mothers and children. Financing from the United States to combat malaria and AIDS, killers of children in poor countries, has grown, but spending to fight many other childhood illnesses has stagnated. Mr. Stoltenberg first weighed in on child health in 2000 when his oil-rich nation made a $1 billion, 10-year commitment to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which has since helped prevent the deaths of millions of children from measles and other diseases. “I am a father,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “I see how important it is to give vaccines to my own children, and I see how unjust it is that many children do not receive this magic shot. And I am an economist. I see how cheap it is to save lives.” Norway’s new $1 billion commitment will strengthen basic health systems that serve women and children, he said, noting that after mothers die their children often perish or become ill. Some 500,000 women die each year of pregnancy-related causes worldwide, about one each minute. In Norway, Mr. Stoltenberg said, only one in 30,000 women die in connection with childbirth, while it is one in seven in some of the poorest countries. Mr. Stoltenberg, who has made child and maternal health a personal cause for years, recruited other heads of state from Africa and Asia to campaign with him on the issue. The presidents of Tanzania, Mozambique and Indonesia joined him onstage Wednesday. The gathering was part of the Clinton Global Initiative, in which leaders of political, business and nonprofit organizations are brought together to address issues of global poverty and climate change . It is administered by the William J. Clinton Foundation, which was founded in 2002 by former President Bill Clinton. Norway plans to spend much of the money in the early years through the World Bank to give individuals and hospitals incentives to improve the care of women and children, for example giving village health workers small bonuses for taking women to give birth in health centers that have skilled health workers on duty. In India, Norway has financed a project in Rajasthan State that pays poor women from urban areas $20 and from rural areas $40 to give birth in a health facility. Those are sizable sums for the very poor, and help cover the cost of riding a bus, a motorbike or an ox cart to the hospital. Since the program began, the percentage of women giving birth in health facilities has soared, along with their chances of surviving the complications of childbirth, said Tore Godal, an adviser to Mr. Stoltenberg. When Mr. Clinton praised Mr. Stoltenberg on Wednesday before the 1,300 people attending the Clinton Global Initiative he said: “A billion dollars will save the lives of two million children. These people have done a great thing today.”

Norway
Foreign Aid
Third World and Developing Countries
Medicine and Health
United States
Save the Children
Gates Bill and Melinda Foundation
Frist Bill


Sony Recalls Vaio Laptops Because of Overheating

Abstract: TOKYO — Sony , the consumer electronics company, said Thursday that it was recalling 440,000 units of Vaio laptop computers worldwide because of faulty parts that could trigger overheating. The company said Thursday that the recalls involved 19 models of Vaio TZ laptop series manufactured between May 2007 and July 2008, including three export models. The company said a faulty wiring connecting the main body of the laptop and its display could cause overheating near a power plug or the rim of the screen, sometimes distorting the shape of the computer.

SONY Corporation
Laptop Computers
Recalls and Bans of Products


Gingrich Takes Georgia, Leaning on a Southern-Based Strategy

Abstract: ATLANTA — With a decisive victory in Georgia, Newt Gingrich saved a campaign that seemed teetering on the precipice of disaster two weeks ago. Polling then suggested that he might achieve no better than a squeaker victory in his home state, an embarrassment that could have led him to withdraw. But after a single-minded focus on barnstorming around Georgia leading up to the Super Tuesday contests, Mr. Gingrich is poised to gain a substantial share of the state’s 76 delegates to the Republican convention. “In the morning, we are going on to Alabama,” Mr. Gingrich told an enthusiastic crowd here on Tuesday night, some waving “Newt-a-Mania” signs. “We’re going on to Mississippi. We’re going on to Kansas. And that’s just this week.” Alabama and Mississippi, which hold the next primaries on the calendar next Tuesday, both figure into Mr. Gingrich’s grand strategy for reanimating his candidacy by carrying Super Tuesday momentum into other victories in the South. So does Kansas, which holds its caucuses on Saturday. But Mr. Gingrich failed to gain a strong enough finish in Tennessee and Oklahoma to displace Rick Santorum as the leading alternative to Mitt Romney . In Oklahoma, Mr. Santorum won a commanding victory, with Mr. Romney second and Mr. Gingrich third. In Tennessee, where Mr. Gingrich seemed to have closed some of the gap with Mr. Santorum in recent days, he was on his way to a disappointing third-place finish, exit polling showed. Mr. Gingrich lumped Mr. Santorum with all the other candidates who had surged earlier in the campaign only to drop out: Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. “And now it’s Santorum,” Mr. Gingrich said on Tuesday night. “There’s lots of bunny rabbits that run through. I’m the tortoise.” As Mr. Gingrich visits Alabama and Mississippi in the next two days, he will be shadowed by Mr. Santorum, who is turning his own sights to the Deep South. Mr. Gingrich was feeling confident enough of his Georgia victory on Tuesday to risk another round of “Newt Skywalker” jokes by detouring to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. But once out of Georgia, he will not be able to count on the “native son” sentiment that fueled no small part of his win. According to exit polls, more than a third of Georgia voters said Mr. Gingrich’s ties to the state, which he represented in the House for two decades, were important in their choice of candidate. Four out of five voters said the rise in gas prices (up 6 percent in the state in the past month) was an important factor in their choice. Mr. Gingrich has focused intensely on energy in the past few weeks, promising to lower the price of gasoline to $2.50 a gallon by aggressive drilling. Many energy economists said the claim was simplistic, and Mr. Romney called it “pandering.” Much of Mr. Gingrich’s speech on Tuesday night was spent on a recitation of how “Wall Street” money, meaning Mr. Romney’s wealthy supporters, had been dedicated to undermining his earlier surges with negative advertising. “I hope the analysts in Washington and New York, who spent June and July explaining our campaign was dead, will watch this tonight and learn a little bit from this crowd and from this place,” he said. Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, said Mr. Gingrich had most likely also won support by attacking a favorite target, the “elite” news media, which he took to task for creating a controversy over Rush Limbaugh’s verbal attacks against an advocate for contraception. Mr. Gingrich repeated the criticism on Tuesday, calling the issue over Mr. Limbaugh “the last desperate effort of the elite media to smother an uprising by diverting us into any possible fight.” Mr. Black said Mr. Gingrich could win all 14 of Georgia’s Congressional districts, giving him a vast majority of the state’s delegates. “It’s certainly a surprise from what he looked like a couple of weeks ago,” Mr. Black said. But even if Mr. Gingrich went on to win the states in play next week, his path to the nomination remains improbable. “He’s got to win something outside the South,” Mr. Black said. “Where’s he going to go? Where’s he going to show strength?”

Presidential Election of 2012
Gingrich Newt
Politics and Government
Romney Mitt
Santorum Rick
Georgia
Primaries and Caucuses


Watch Industry Quarrels Over Swiss-Made Labels

Abstract: BASEL — Lest anyone doubt that the watches it makes are Swiss, Swiss Mountaineer emblazons Switzerland’s national flag on the dial of each timepiece. Does it matter that except for their Swiss movement, the watches’ components are made at a factory in Shenzhen, China? Or that Swiss Mountaineer is owned by a Hong Kong company called Golden Hawk? Under Swiss rules that are as precise as its clockworks, Golden Hawk can label its watches Swiss-made as long as at least 50 percent of the value of the movement comes from Switzerland. But as part of a growing national “Swissness” movement, the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry and its most powerful member, the giant Swatch group, are out to change those rules. They want to tighten the labeling requirements, which they see as necessary for protecting the value and quality reputation for an industry that is a pillar of the Swiss economy. “More and more foreign companies, particularly from Asia, have realized how easy it is to call a watch Swiss-made and in effect mislead clients and sell at higher prices than what they could otherwise justify,” said Jean-Daniel Pasche, president of the watch federation. Vincent Chan, Golden Hawk’s director, makes no apologies for Swiss Mountain’s methods, or its watches, whose top-of-the-line model sells for $450. “Even if everybody in Switzerland isn’t perhaps happy about what we do, there’s nothing they can do about it because we follow the rules,” Mr. Chan said in an interview last month at Baselworld, the world’s biggest watch fair. “I would personally be interested to know whether all the smaller Swiss companies respect the rules as well as us.” Most of the approximately 500 members of the watch federation support the demand for tighter rules, which would raise the percentage of Swiss-made components to 80 percent of a watch’s total value — not just the movement, or time-keeping mechanism, covered by the current rules, which were established four decades ago. But some smaller Swiss companies oppose the proposed rules change. They warn that the country’s watch sector risks undermining itself by wiping out smaller Swiss players that buy components from China and elsewhere to remain competitive. The small companies say they can probably not afford to invest more in local production because of Switzerland’s strong currency and high labor costs. Mr. Pasche predicted the opposition could be overcome. “We’re aware that stricter rules could hurt some of our companies,” he said. “But the problem can be limited if a transition period is provided for them to adjust to new rules.” Swatch, based in Biel, is the world’s biggest watch maker, with revenue last year of $7.8 billion. Its products include its ubiquitous Swatch watches and luxury brands like Breguet, Blancpain, Omega and Longines. Almost all of the company’s production is in Switzerland. Swatch does produce some watch components in China, Thailand and Malaysia, but the company says they are only minor parts. “I’ve got no problem with the Chinese and others buying in Switzerland,” said Nick Hayek, the chief executive of Swatch, “as long as everybody plays by the rules and helps protect the value of what is being made in Switzerland.” The watch federation draws inspiration from the so-called Swissness bill that passed in one of Switzerland’s two parliamentary houses in March and is meant to protect virtually everything produced in the country — whether machine tools or Emmentaler cheese — against counterfeiting or misleading use of the Swiss brand. A vote in the other legislative chamber is expected before the end of the year. Parliamentary endorsement of the Swissness bill would be “a good first step,” Mr. Pasche said. But updating the 50 percent rule would require the Swiss government to approve a new decree specifically for the watch sector. There is little question that few manufactured products derive more value from their association with a specific country than do Swiss watches. Switzerland makes only about 3 percent of the world’s watches, but it so dominates the luxury end of the industry that Swiss watches account for more than half of the monetary value of the $40 billion global watch market, according to René Weber, an analyst at Bank Vontobel. Some smaller Swiss companies argue that the one certain outcome of stricter labeling rules would be increasing Swatch’s dominance. They say that Swatch is already cutting back the supply of movements — where its manufacturing market share is about 70 percent — and the sale of other components to smaller rivals. “I think this Swiss-made campaign is more about weakening rivals within Switzerland than about protecting against a Chinese invasion or unfair competition from outside,” said Laurent Alaimo, chief executive of Technotime, a privately held Swiss maker of movements. The company sells part of its production outside Switzerland and has a Chinese shareholder, Chung Nam, that owns 80 percent of its equity. China is both a rising rival and a growing market. A surge in Chinese consumer demand helped the Swiss watch industry report record exports last year of 19.3 billion Swiss francs, or about $21.2 billion. Exports to China and elsewhere by Swiss component makers have climbed 37 percent in the last three years, with most of that increase attributable to rivals of Swatch. Chinese investors have recently acquired a handful of Swiss watch companies, like Eterna and Emile Chouriet, which are still members of the Swiss industry federation. Jean Depéry, the Geneva-based director of Emile Chouriet, said his company had long relied on some components from China. What the new Chinese ownership has done, he said, is “completely carve open their consumer market for us.” As a result, Emile Chouriet plans to make 70,000 watches next year — selling 90 percent of them in China — compared with only 9,000 watches in 2010. “Everybody proudly displays Swiss-made on its facade, but if you scratch below the surface, you will often find a lot of surprises,” Mr. Depéry said. “If everything in a watch really had to be Swiss-made, a large part of the Swiss industry would already have been destroyed.” Several companies that exhibited their watch wares in March at Baselworld also displayed inventive ways to tap into the value of being associated with Switzerland. One was Xetum, a San Francisco company started in 2009 by Jeffrey Kuo, a former management consultant and a full-time watch aficionado. Xetum, he said, sells “California-designed but Swiss-made watches.” Because the company buys its movements from ETA, a subsidiary of Swatch, Xetum watches can be labeled Swiss-made. “For a new brand, it really helps to have the quality associated with Switzerland,” he said. “But of course we’re not in any way trying to out-Swiss the Swiss.”

Watches and Clocks
Switzerland
China
Economic Conditions and Trends
International Trade and World Market
Trademarks and Trade Names


Pockets of Misery Persist 2 Weeks After Hurricane Sandy

Abstract: In Coney Island, a 67-year-old man sleeps with plastic bottles from the bodega, filled with hot water, tucked in his armpits. Toilets unflushed by modern means for a fortnight have created a stench in the Rockaways that is so bad that one man keeps incense burning in his apartment day and night. On Staten Island , people sit in “warming buses,” cozy and, like time itself these days, going nowhere. In a town in New Jersey where wells do not pump because the power is out, residents collect rainwater in empty jars. In Long Beach, on Long Island , a couple bicycles through the autumn chill to the charging station at City Hall to keep their cellphones powered. Two weeks. Monday was the 14th day since Hurricane Sandy upended lives on the Eastern Seaboard, the longest two weeks of many people’s lives. Plastic bottles. Warming buses. Charging stations. These are just a few of the signposts in a changed world. Help is coming, the people are told, but some have lost the desire to trust. “I don’t believe,” said Lioudmila Korableva, 71, a resident of a darkened Coney Island building project filled with older people. “In the wall goes water,” she said, describing the humid conditions with her Russian accent. There is just too much moisture in the air. “The blanket is wet.” Power companies in New York and New Jersey worked on Monday to free these remaining communities from the stubborn blackout. There was progress, with housing projects in Coney Island and the Rockaways flickering to life on Saturday and Sunday. There was light, if not heat. Families that had warmed their apartments with stovetop burners could now use the electric oven, with its door wide open. A woman used the burner for its intended purpose on Monday morning, handing her granddaughter a pancake on a paper plate. New Jersey announced an end to gas rationing. Long Island Rail Road service returned to nearly prestorm timetables. Progress was everywhere, it seemed, but for the man getting his news from a radio with batteries, not here. “I talk to God,” said Mark Kremer, the Coney Island man whose bedtime routine includes the hot water bottles. “What I did, to suffer like this?” A former home health attendant, he climbs from his second-floor apartment up the pitch black stairs to the 12th floor, to check on his friend Asya Kaplan, 82, who fell in the hall a few days ago and opened up a gash at her hairline. In the Ocean Village Apartments at the Shore in the Rockaways, there now exists a dividing line at the 10th floor. Below, there is running water. Above, none. A resident on the 14th floor, Lola Idowu, straps on her miner’s helmet with its flashlight and treks down to 10 for buckets of water, four times a day. The older residents have stopped flushing their toilets, neighbors said, and they gather in the lobby, bringing their apartments’ odors with them. Only small children have accepted this new life in the Rockaways without complaint. Very small: Jayleb, a boy now one month old, has lived half his life this way. He sleeps in a duffel coat, inside a baby blanket that is under two quilts. “To even change his Pampers is an ordeal,” his mother, Tonya Ranero, 35, said. In Long Beach on Long Island, a mother, Evelyn Hogarth, 32, frightened by the conditions in a shelter, returned home with her three children and ailing mother. “There are roaches everywhere,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” Nearby, Michael Hardy and Denaya Hardy, both 38, celebrated their 16th wedding anniversary in the dark, between trips to the basement to fill a bucket with floodwater, to flush the toilets. “We celebrated by eating rations and drinking water,” Mr. Hardy said. Elsewhere in Long Beach, as he spoke, the National Guard handed out water at a shopping center. People brought dead cellphones to a charging station at City Hall, near the portable toilets. In the Silverton section of Toms River, N.J., the surge and the wind knocked out the 10-foot windows from Wayne Whitall’s home. His pool table had become a floating battering ram, knocking through a wall and landing in a yard. The boat was across the street, where he was trying to free it from debris on Monday. In Seaside Heights after two weeks, a first: residents were allowed to visit stricken parts of the town for a few hours on Monday morning. Wayne Cimorelli, an owner of Coin Castle Amusements and two restaurants in a three-story building on the Boardwalk, said his expectations had been raised when he saw a picture of the area before he returned. Then he entered his 21,000-square-foot basement and found six feet of sand and debris. Equipment was ruined. A $14,000 ice machine lay on its side. “This is the nightmare that doesn’t want to end,” he said. “The longer we wait, the more disgusting it gets. I would imagine we are up against maggots and whatnot.” A mile north, Danielle Feigenbaum, 49, sat outside the house her grandfather had built 60 years ago, the scene of countless Thanksgivings and celebrations. Now the house carried a bright orange sticker on the door. Condemned. “It’s just devastating to think that my mother grew up here, I grew up here, my daughter grew up here, but her kids won’t,” she said, yet tried to sound hopeful. “Well, we just don’t know.” In the township of Tewksbury, N.J., with its 12-acre lots, stone walls, horses and wells, the notion of suffering is relative. But it is present. Jon and Angela Holt, partners in both marriage and a small public relations firm, cannot pump water from their well until power is restored, a service traditionally late in arriving to the area. They collect rainwater from the downspout in empty kitty-litter jugs for the toilet. The world around them showers, and they do not, so they canceled a meeting on Monday, aware of their appearance. They felt lucky compared with others facing so much destruction, but now, after two weeks, they find it difficult to explain how they remain in the dark. “It is a struggle, whether you’re of means or poor,” Mr. Holt said. Hours later, his power was returned. A mile or two away, on Burrell Road, John and Tracy Rosendahl arranged to leave their powerless home to stay at yet another motel room. One of their young sons was urinating against the house Monday afternoon, as he had been instructed to do in the absence of a working toilet. “They’re turning feral,” Mr. Rosendahl said. In Coney Island, in the building for older tenants, a surprise: the lights snapped on at 1:08 p.m., according to Mr. Kremer’s clock. Just as quickly, the man who had asked God why he was being punished went from aggrieved to compassionate. “It says on TV not everybody has power,” he said. “I feel sorry for them.” Then, after Mr. Kremer had spent three hours and one minute in the new world, the power went out again. Aggrieved once more: “Now I have to take everything from refrigerator again, put again near my window.” Another resident in the building, Angelita Torres, 72, paused on her journey from the 14th floor, which took the better part of an hour because of her weak heart. Asked how she was doing, her face lit up like the flashlight her home attendant carried beside her. “I feel good,” she said. “Thank you, God.” She paused, and added, still smiling, “I’m freezing.”

Hurricane Sandy
Water
Long Beach NY
New Jersey
NYC


Woman Arrested at Kennedy Airport With Marijuana and Guns, Officials Say

Abstract: A 24-year-old woman was arrested at Kennedy International Airport on Sunday morning after the authorities discovered two handguns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and 33 pounds of marijuana concealed in her luggage. Nyesha McPherson, of Scarborough, Ontario, was traveling on a Canadian passport and had a ticket to Barbados when she was taken into custody at around 6:30 a.m. at Terminal 5. Transportation Security Administration officers first became suspicious when Ms. McPherson’s checked luggage set off an alarm on a baggage-screening machine. When an agent picked up the bags, they seemed strangely heavy, according to the authorities. The bags were stuffed with a seemingly benign assortment of household items, including boxes for baby wipes, coffee, floor-dusting sheets, lemonade mix, iced tea mix and a box of cat litter. “But, none of those boxes or cans contained the products on the labels,” according to a statement from the T.S.A. “Instead, T.S.A. officers detected two disassembled .40-caliber handguns, 350 rounds of ammunition, four magazines for the guns and 58 bricks of marijuana totaling 33 pounds, all artfully concealed in the boxes, tubs and cans of everyday household products,” according to the statement. The agents alerted the Port Authority police, who found Ms. McPherson in a passenger screening area and took her into custody. She has been charged with first-degree criminal possession of marijuana, third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, criminal possession of a firearm, possession of high-capacity magazines and possession of ammunition. Ms. McPherson was awaiting arraignment on Monday afternoon and it was unclear if she had a lawyer.

Marijuana,Pot,Weed
Guns
Airport security
JFK Airport


Divorce Trial of Dodgers’ Owner Begins

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — A man walked through Los Angeles County Superior Court on Monday morning wearing a gleaming white Dodgers jersey with Matt Kemp’s name and his number 27 on the back. Alas, it was not the Dodgers’ center fielder, but if it was, who would be surprised? These days, when the soap operas being produced across town have a hard time matching the hairpin plot turns of the local baseball team, anything is possible in As the Dodgers Turn. On Monday, when the owner Frank McCourt’s bitter divorce trial got under way, the team he owns — at least for the moment — allowed Manny Ramirez , the team’s erstwhile savior, to leave for the Chicago White Sox on a waiver claim. The White Sox will pick up the $4 million remaining on Ramirez’s contract. That may or may not be enough to cover McCourt’s legal fees. If the Ramirez deal, with the Dodgers six and a half games out of the wild-card lead entering Monday, was the proverbial white flag being raised above Chavez Ravine, there was no such peacemaking gesture two miles south in a downtown courthouse, where McCourt, in a charcoal suit, and his wife, Jamie, in a white dress, each strode into the wood-paneled Room 217 with phalanxes of lawyers in tow. Nearly a year of scorched-earth court filings have drawn back the curtain on how the McCourts operated the franchise they purchased in 2004. The records have revealed that the McCourts employed an astrologer as a six-figure consultant, paid no state or federal taxes, used the team as a multimillion-dollar A.T.M., and schemed about Jamie’s running for the White House one day. All while slashing the payroll by nearly $30 million. The trial, and whether Frank McCourt will be forced to sell the team, is expected to come down to a piece of paper. That is, whether a 2004 marital property agreement that hands the Dodgers to Frank and their seven properties to Jamie will be enforced. If not, then under California law, all assets are considered community property and must be divided equitably. Complicating matters is that there are two versions of the property agreement — one that gives the Dodgers to Frank, the other that says they both own the team. Three copies of each were signed, but when the discrepancy was discovered, the document giving the team to Frank was swapped in for the ones giving them joint ownership. Frank’s lawyers said it was an innocent mistake or a clerical error. Jamie’s lawyers said it was a duplicitous act. In their opening arguments Monday, lawyers for each side laid out their cases. Dennis Wasser said that Jamie was deceived and that she had not had independent counsel in Frank’s lawyer, Lawrence Silverstein. “At its best, it was the blind leading the blind,” Wasser said. “At its worst, it was the blind misleading the blind.” Stephen Susman, representing Frank, later fired back that it was Jamie who wanted the assets separated to protect her from Frank’s highly leveraged business deals. Susman wondered how a woman who had practiced family law, was the general counsel of the McCourt Foundation, who had a law degree and an M.B.A., and was the chief executive of the Dodgers could possibly be duped. “She wants to be the first divorce lawyer to claim she didn’t understand her own postnuptial agreement,” Susman said. In person on Monday, the McCourts were at least more civil than Ramirez. His last act as a Dodger was to come to the plate as a pinch-hitter with the bases loaded Sunday against the Colorado Rockies, take a called strike and then be ejected. Somewhere in Boston, the polite fans nodded knowingly. Others probably laughed heartily. Ramirez’s exit here was similar to his one there, which he hastened in July 2008 by taking three called strikes from Yankees closer Mariano Rivera with the go-ahead run at third base in a nationally televised game at Yankee Stadium. White Sox General Manager Kenny Williams did not appear to be under many illusions about Ramirez. He noted that Ramirez was a funny guy and excited about the move. But at one point during a conference call, he answered a question about Ramirez fitting in with one of his own. “Is there a good fit anywhere for a personality like Manny?” Williams said with a laugh. The giggles were like the ones that were so abundant at Dodger Stadium two years ago, when baseball’s resident flake found adoration in a like-minded audience. Soon there were dreadlocks in the concession stands and the left-field pavilion was dubbed Mannywood. During the final month, he lifted the Dodgers from a .500 club to one playing for a trip to the World Series. But the relationship soured when Ramirez was suspended for 50 games last year for violating baseball’s policy on performance-enhancing drugs, and his success on the field dipped. This season, he has been on the disabled list three times, and the Dodgers faded without him, going 18-21 since the All-Star break. Asked during a break in the trial if he would comment on the Ramirez deal, McCourt said: “No. Now is not the time.” Ramirez, though, has not been the Dodgers’ only problem. General Manager Ned Colletti has called out Kemp for not hustling, shortstop Rafael Furcal and catcher Russell Martin have been injured, and questions abound about whether Manager Joe Torre will return next season. All those travails, on the field and in the courtroom, have made it difficult for Dodgers fans, whose affection for their team is being tested. For richer or poorer? For better or worse? They are about to find out.

Los Angeles Dodgers
McCourt Frank
Baseball
Divorce Separations and Annulments
Ramirez Manny


Unbeaten Knicks Stress Experience Instead of Age

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — Knicks fans are just getting to know the team Coach Mike Woodson has put together. What the Knicks showed their fans Monday night was how an experienced team can win on the road against a divisional opponent. They played gritty defense — never letting their lead dwindle in the second half — made 19 of 19 free throws and, as in their two previous games, spread the ball, for an impressive 24 assists. It added up to a second straight convincing win over the Philadelphia 76ers , 110-88. Led by Carmelo Anthony, who had a game-high 21 points, the Knicks moved to 3-0 for the first time since the 1999-2000 season. Even though this season is in its infancy, Woodson said he enjoyed playing Philadelphia two days in row. “Our schedule is testing us early, and we have to be ready,” he said. Woodson gave his team a chance to respond to its first type of adversity early in the game. He thought about calling a timeout when the Knicks fell behind by 10 points in the first quarter but chose not to. Woodson said he wanted to see how his veteran team would respond. What he saw was his team straightening out its problems on its own. “He understands that we’re a different team and we’re not going to get rattled by a situation like that,” Tyson Chandler said. “With every bucket, I could hear Jason Kidd and Carmelo saying: ‘Stick to the game plan. Nobody get rattled.’ Slowly, we got comfortable.” Once the Knicks ran effective sets, they handled the 76ers with ease. By the end of the first quarter, they led by 4 points. They stretched their advantage to 13 by the first timeout of the second half. “We knew they were a kind of team that was going to let us back in the game,” Anthony said. “Once we slowed them down and got them in the halfcourt, we played some defense and made some shots.” To have another dominant performance against the 76ers, whom they beat by 16 points on Sunday at Madison Square Garden, the Knicks made some adjustments. One of the biggest changes on offense was finding Ronnie Brewer in the corner for open 3-pointers. He made 3 of 4, and finished with a season-high 13 points. “He’s done a great job considering he hasn’t played much since the surgery,” Woodson said of Brewer, who had knee surgery seven weeks ago. The Knicks cut their turnovers (7) in half from Sunday’s game, too. That was the statistic that seemed to please Woodson the most. “You can’t turn it over on the road and think you’re going to beat anybody,” he said. “We took care of the basketball, and the ball moved freely again.” Chandler was also better. Woodson said Chandler had looked sluggish Sunday because of flulike symptoms. On Monday, Chandler played more minutes (28) and seemed to have his stamina back. His improved presence caused more problems for the 76ers. Chandler (14 points, 6 rebounds) controlled the lane and altered a number of shots. “I felt much better tonight than I did last night,” he said. “When I have my legs under me, I can do more offensively and defensively.” Spencer Hawes, the only Philadelphia player capable of guarding Chandler, was in foul trouble throughout the second half. That only highlighted how Philadelphia is not a complete team without Andrew Bynum, who has not played this season because of a bruised right knee. Bynum was the 76ers’ biggest acquisition in the off-season, and his debut with his teammates will create the type of inside-out play that Coach Doug Collins wants. Chandler and Bynum, when healthy, might be the best centers in the Eastern Conference. “It’s going to change their team,” Chandler said of Philadelphia’s adding Bynum. “It will change their offense. Right now, they are more perimeter-oriented. I think a lot of that will change and they will slow it down and look for him on the block.” The next time the Knicks face the 76ers will be here Jan. 26. When the teams play again, maybe the final minutes will be more dramatic. For now, the Knicks’ experience, at home and on the road, has served them well. REBOUNDS Marcus Camby (left calf) did not play on Monday. Mike Woodson said he hoped Camby would be ready when the Knicks host the Dallas Mavericks on Friday. “I like to see guys practice a little bit and see how they feel,” Woodson said of Camby, who has yet to even scrimmage this season.

Basketball
New York Knicks
Philadelphia 76ers


Aroldis Chapman Unlikely to Be Barred During Yankees’ Preseason

Abstract: TAMPA, Fla. — Any suspension of Yankees reliever Aroldis Chapman by Commissioner Rob Manfred under Major League Baseball’s domestic violence policy would be unlikely to begin before opening day, according to a baseball official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. While Major League Baseball can suspend Chapman from participating in spring training — as it did with Colorado Rockies shortstop Jose Reyes, who was barred Tuesday at least until his criminal case is adjudicated — Manfred is not expected to do so. The Yankees’ first spring training game is March 2 against the Detroit Tigers. Manfred is reviewing reports that baseball investigators have prepared on Chapman and Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig, each of whom faced domestic-violence accusations during the off-season. Manfred said Monday that he expected to resolve the cases soon. The cases of Chapman, Puig and Reyes are the first tests of a policy that was developed with the players’ union and instituted in August. A key difference between Reyes and Chapman is that Chapman is not facing criminal charges. Prosecutors declined to bring charges against him because of conflicting accounts and uncooperative witnesses after the Davie, Fla., police reported that Chapman had fired eight shots into his garage after a physical altercation with his girlfriend. On Tuesday, Yankees Manager Joe Girardi said he thought that Chapman could be suspended from games during spring training, adding that he thought Chapman would be able to participate in workouts during such a suspension.

Baseball
Aroldis Chapman
Domestic violence
Yankees