Filly Can Add to Storybook Rise at Breeders’ Cup

Abstract: ARCADIA, Calif. — Princess of Sylmar’s pedigree changed with one well-placed kick, and her roots were not promising to begin with. She was born at Sylmar Farm in Pennsylvania, a state that is not known for producing high-caliber thoroughbreds. She made an inauspicious debut last October, when she took fourth at Penn National Race Course, off the beaten path in central Pennsylvania. And yet, from these odd and humble beginnings, a runner that seemed to lack promise blossomed into the leading 3-year-old filly in North America and the potential horse of the year if she wins the $2 million Breeders’ Cup Distaff on Friday and other results fall her way. Princess of Sylmar’s confrontation with Royal Delta, the race’s two-time defending champion, is among the highlights of the 30th Breeders’ Cup World Championships, which offer 14 races with purses and awards totaling $27 million at Santa Anita Park here. The Breeders’ Cup culminates Saturday in the $5 million Classic. Ed Stanco, an actuary in the reinsurance business, could never have projected that the first horse he bred — he calls her the Princess — would earn four consecutive Grade I triumphs leading to the Distaff. (The name of the race was restored by popular demand after the tradition-rich mile-and-an-eighth contest for fillies and mares was known as the Ladies’ Classic the last five years.) “She is a blessing; she is a gift,” Stanco said. “How we got her, I have no idea.” Stanco intended to send Storm Dixie, an undistinguished mare, to be bred to Grand Slam, a well-regarded stallion. That plan was scrapped on short notice when Grand Slam was kicked the day before by an unreceptive mare, causing him to briefly fall out of the mood. Storm Dixie was hastily paired with Majestic Warrior, a son of the 1992 horse of the year A.P. Indy but an unproven sire. Once Princess of Sylmar was ready to compete, Stanco emphasized to the accomplished trainer Todd Pletcher that he did not want to push her to do too much too soon. “We put this plan in place early on, and we learned this from the ‘Seabiscuit’ movie,” Stanco said. “Teach them how to win, not to lose.” His tendency to be overprotective perhaps stems from another factor. He and the five partners who form King of Prussia Stable do not have any other horses in competition. That aspect appeals to Pletcher. “One of the great things about horse racing is a guy like Ed Stanco, who had limited ownership, limited horses, can breed his first mare and the result would be Princess of Sylmar,” Pletcher said. “That’s kind of a cool story.” With every race after her forgettable debut, it became clear that this Pennsylvania-bred could fly. She jumped from five and a half furlongs to the more suitable distance of a mile for her second start and outdistanced the competition by 19 lengths at Penn National last Nov. 8, proving she was ready for brighter lights. Pletcher typically sends his finest stock to Florida for the winter. He kept Princess of Sylmar at Aqueduct, where cheaper horses typically struggle to pay their way amid blustery winds and bitter temperatures. She thrived, winning an allowance race and two ungraded stakes by a combined 19 ¾ lengths before placing second to Close Hatches, another formidable Distaff rival, in the Grade II Gazelle. Pletcher decided she was worthy of starting in the Kentucky Oaks, a prestigious race for 3-year-old fillies run at Churchill Downs the day before the Kentucky Derby. Stanco’s skepticism grew when he saw her odds: 38-1. Pletcher, a four-time winner of the Eclipse Award as the leading trainer in North America, knew better. The Princess, forced four wide, closed powerfully to beat Beholder, the 2-year-old champion filly, by a half-length. Beholder, winner of five of six starts at Santa Anita, represents another challenging opponent in the six-horse Distaff. The Oaks triggered a four-race winning streak: Princess of Sylmar swept the Coaching Club American Oaks by six lengths and the Alabama by two and a half lengths, and she blew past Royal Delta to take the Beldame by two lengths under a hand ride from Javier Castellano. Her career earnings stand at $1,607,220. Royal Delta has strung together brilliant workouts since the Beldame for the Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott, who admits he underestimated Princess of Sylmar. “She doesn’t seem to be an impressive-looking filly,” he said, “but there is a lot of run in the tank.” Because Princess of Sylmar was not nominated to the Breeders’ Cup, Stanco consistently said his modest group would not pay $100,000 to supplement her. The Beldame changed his mind. If the heavily favored Game On Dude is upset for the second consecutive year in the Classic, and if the reigning horse of the year, Wise Dan, falls short in the Mile, the Princess may be in line for the horse of the year throne.

Breeders Cup
Horse racing
Todd Pletcher
Javier Castellano
Bill Mott


Honors for ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Modern Family’

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — On Sunday, a mere seven days before its very last episode, AMC’s “Breaking Bad” finally earned the outstanding drama Emmy award that it had been denied for years. As Bryan Cranston, who plays Walter White, the show’s lead character, applauded behind him onstage, the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, said he “did not see this coming.” Mr. Gilligan rattled off the names of the other nominees, including “Mad Men,” the AMC sibling that beat “Breaking Bad” in 2009, 2010 and 2011, and “Homeland,” the Showtime series that beat both of them last year, making sure to mention every competitor. “I thought this was going to be ‘House of Cards,’” he admitted, mentioning the Netflix series that has been credited with ushering in a new age of online television. But no, it was not Netflix’s night. It was Mr. Gilligan’s, whose show made its debut in 2008 and had been nominated for the top drama prize three times since, but had never won. Mr. Gilligan did not mention the impending finale next Sunday, but he did not have to — the award was a free advertisement before an anticipated audience of at least 10 million viewers. “I’m just so happy for Vince,” AMC’s president, Charlie Collier, said as he exited the Nokia Theater. Until Mr. Gilligan’s acceptance speech at the very end of the Emmys on Sunday, it looked as if “Breaking Bad” might come away almost empty-handed. There were audible gasps of “Whoa!” and “What?” in the auditorium here as Jeff Daniels of HBO’s “The Newsroom” won the annual outstanding actor in a drama award, besting Mr. Cranston, who had won three times before and was widely expected to win again. Mr. Daniels sounded as surprised as anyone when he accepted the award; he had not expected to win. Neither had Bobby Cannavale, of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire;” in fact he had not even written an acceptance speech. But he beat two “Breaking Bad” actors, Aaron Paul and Jonathan Banks, in the supporting actor category. “I can’t believe I get to get mentioned with these other really incredible actors,” Mr. Cannavale said. But “Breaking Bad” did pick up one acting award, for Anna Gunn, who plays Walter White’s wife, Skyler, and was recognized as best supporting actress. (“Bryan Cranston just told me to breathe,” she said as she came on stage.) To the surprise of many Emmy observers, the two stars of “House of Cards,” Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, came away without awards. The filmmaker David Fincher, who directed the first episode of “Cards,” won an Emmy for best directing, but he was not there to accept it. (A Netflix spokesman said he was filming “Gone Girl.”) But the wins for “Breaking Bad” might be seen indirectly as wins for Netflix, too: five prior seasons of the AMC series are available on the streaming service. Minutes after “Bad” won the best drama award, the widely followed Netflix Twitter account congratulated the show — “All hail (this year’s) king” — and reminded subscribers that they could catch up online. Earlier in the evening, Showtime’s “Homeland,” which last year took home the Emmy for outstanding drama and was nominated again this year, won two awards, one for the actress Claire Danes and another for Henry Bromell, a writer on the series who died of a heart attack in March. Mr. Bromell’s widow, Sarah, accepted his award. Ms. Danes, accepting her award later, paused to acknowledge Mr. Bromell. “We think of him every day as we continue to work on the show that he helped define,” she said. It was a night of upsets — with all-too-numerous remembrances of stars who had passed away in the past year — from the very first award, when Merritt Wever won for her supporting actress performance on Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie,” beating the three-time winner Julie Bowen of “Modern Family” as well as Ms. Bowen’s co-star, Sofia Vergara. On the Red Carpet at the Emmys 18 Photos View Slide Show › Image From left: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images; Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associatd Press; Frazer Harrison/Getty Images; Mario Anzuoni/Reuters Later, in the reality competition category, the winner for nine out of the last 10 years, CBS’s “The Amazing Race,” fell to “The Voice,” the two-year-old NBC singing show. And in the variety series category, the winner for 10 straight years, “The Daily Show,” was dethroned by the show that follows it on Comedy Central, “The Colbert Report.” (Backstage, Mr. Colbert told reporters, “Jon Stewart’s streak is not broken” because Mr. Stewart has an executive producer credit on “The Colbert Report.”) Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon Cooper on CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory,” won the lead actor in a comedy award, his third such win. In the comedic writing category, Emmy voters recognized the very last episode of “30 Rock,” which ended last spring after more than six critically acclaimed years, giving the show’s creator and star Tina Fey a final chance to say thank you to her colleagues. Among the many comedy winners on Sunday, HBO’s “Veep” stood out by earning two statues, one for supporting actor Tony Hale, who plays a groveling assistant to the vice president, and another for Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the V.P. While she accepted the best actress in a comedy award, Mr. Hale stood behind her and pretended to feed her lines, just as he does on the show, which had its premiere last year. Mr. Hale beat out three actors from “Modern Family,” Ed O’Neill, Ty Burrell and Jesse Tyler Ferguson. But the three-year-long streak by “Modern Family” as outstanding comedy was not broken: at the end of the night, it emerged as the champion. The executive producer, Steven Levitan, in a reference to the elegiac tone of the telecast, said, “This may be the saddest Emmys of all time, but we could not be happier.” There was no sweep in the miniseries or made-for-TV movie categories: the writer Abi Morgan won for BBC America’s “The Hour,” the supporting actor James Cromwell won for FX’s “American Horror Story: Asylum,” the supporting actress Ellen Burstyn won for USA’s “Political Animals,” and the lead actress Laura Linney won for Showtime’s “The Big C: Hereafter.” But it was HBO’s “Behind The Candelabra,” about the last decade of Liberace’s life, that fared best, picking up a directing award for Steven Soderbergh, a lead actor award for Michael Douglas, and the overall best miniseries Emmy. Mr. Douglas looked to his co-star, Matt Damon, who was also nominated, and said wryly, “You really deserve half of this — so — you want the bottom or the top?” Early on, there were references to the changing nature of television. When the show’s host, Neil Patrick Harris, first uttered the word “television,” he added as an aside to younger viewers, “That’s the thing you watch on your phones.” Of all the awards handed out for television each year, the Emmys are the most coveted — not because they can change the fortunes of the winners, necessarily, but because the winners are selected by thousands of their peers. For shows like “30 Rock” and “Mad Men,” early Emmy wins were validating and attention-grabbing; both were high on critical acclaim but low on viewers when they were first awarded statues several years ago. Neither show subsequently became a breakout hit, however, which brings up two persistent criticisms of the Emmys: that the awards don’t bolster the ratings of big winners, and that they overlook most of television’s highest-rated shows altogether. Of course, there has always been a divide between the shows that most excite Hollywood and the shows intended for mass appeal. As cable channels like HBO and more recently AMC have claimed top Emmys, the big four broadcast networks have tended to trumpet their nominations as much as their actual wins. But in a sign of the times, three of the networks picked up fewer nominations this year than they did in 2012. (NBC was the exception, gaining a bit of ground from last year.) This year’s presentation had a futuristic feel thanks to the nominations for Netflix, the online streaming service that introduced “House of Cards” in February and “Arrested Development” in May. The “House of Cards” star Mr. Spacey made a cameo in the show as his conniving character congressman, Frank Underwood; Mr. Harris mentioned another Netflix series, “Orange Is The New Black”; and he cracked a joke about a behavior that the streaming service has stoked, binge-viewing of multiple episodes. (He said he had “binge-watched an entire season of television” to get ready to host.) Yet despite all the talk about Netflix’s best drama nomination, most oddsmakers said that AMC’s “Breaking Bad” was the favorite in the category, and they turned out to be right. “Breaking Bad” was thought to have an advantage because the final few episodes of the series were televised by AMC while academy members were casting their ballots in August. In interviews on the red carpet on Sunday, Mr. Cranston called next week’s ending “perfect.” Backstage after the telecast, he clutched his statue and said to a room of reporters, “What a way to go out.” Left unmentioned was this fact: the episodes that are captivating viewers now will be eligible for Emmys next year.

TV
Emmy Award
House of Cards
Homeland
Mad Men


Universal Plans to Expand Harry Potter Theme Park

Abstract: ORLANDO, Fla. — Forget the long lines for the rides at Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter here. Nearly four years after opening, the attraction is still so popular that visitors routinely wait more than an hour just to get into a shop that sells wands. Moving to ease the gridlock — and shower its corporate parent, NBCUniversal, with more profits — Universal Orlando Resort on Thursday unveiled details for a huge Harry Potter expansion. There will be two major new rides, eight new stores (expect a second Ollivanders wand shop) and a sprawling Leaky Cauldron restaurant, all part of a new section called Diagon Alley, one of the marquee spots in J. K. Rowling’s fiction. A June opening is planned. Analysts estimate the cost to be $400 million. But a question hangs over Hogwarts: With no new Harry Potter books from Ms. Rowling and three years having elapsed since the last blockbuster film, can the boy wizard really power this much added theme park capacity? Rivals like Disney and SeaWorld privately predict that the big pop Universal got from adding Harry Potter in 2010 — a 30 percent year-on-year rise in attendance — will be followed by a much smaller bump this time. Theme park experts say Universal also faces the challenge of higher expectations among consumers. The first Harry Potter world was so compelling that it will be difficult to wow visitors a second time. But Universal is confident about its plans. “One plus one will equal six,” Mark Woodbury, president of Universal Creative, said of the addition of Diagon Alley to the original Wizarding World. Alan Gilmore, an art director for the Harry Potter films who has worked closely with Universal on design, said the theming of the new section “absolutely raises the bar.” The new area is “a maze crisscrossing itself,” Mr. Gilmore said as he led reporters on a tour of the Diagon Alley construction site, with narrow, winding streets lined by five-story buildings and a train trestle running overhead. There is also Gringotts Wizarding Bank, replete with goblins at work, a ride plunging through its dark vaults and a fire-breathing dragon on the roof. “We say that about the dragon, and people think we’re goofing around,” Mr. Woodbury said. “We’re not. This one blows a giant ball of fire.” Ms. Rowling collaborated with Universal to add new elements to Diagon Alley, including a large souvenir-selling space called Carkitt Market. As a sign of increased pressure to produce something dazzling, Universal employed 60 designers on the sequel, compared with 18 on the original. The goal is not only to please Harry Potter fans but to make cash registers ring. Aside from the mountain of added merchandise the resort hopes to sell, Universal Orlando — made up of two theme parks — has carefully designed the expansion to increase the sale of more expensive multipark and multiday tickets. Wizarding World opened in 2010 at Islands of Adventure, the newer of Universal’s two parks. Diagon Alley is in the abutting Universal Studios. To ride the Hogwarts Express connecting the two properties, visitors must buy multipark tickets. NBCUniversal has added attractions to its older Studios park over the last couple of years, including a “Despicable Me” simulator that turns riders into Minions. But the Universal Studios property is climbing out of a deep hole created by years of underinvestment by the resort’s previous owners, the Blackstone Group and General Electric. There are still attractions themed around fading movies like “Twister” and characters like Betty Boop. Comcast’s NBCUniversal paid $1 billion in 2011 for full control of the resort. Islands of Adventure has annual attendance of about eight million; Universal Studios has a bit more than six million. (To compare, the Magic Kingdom at Disney World annually attracts 17.5 million guests, according to the Themed Entertainment Association.) Theme parks, while vulnerable to the economy and requiring expensive and continuous upkeep, represent one of the few areas of growth outside of cable TV for entertainment companies. For the first nine months of last year, NBCUniversal recorded $747 million in operating cash flow, a 5.6 percent increase. In comparison, the company’s broadcast television business had operating cash flow of $205 million, a 23.4 percent decline, according to financial filings.

Amusement park
Harry Potter
NBCUniversal
Universal Studios


Cadmium-Tainted Rice Discovered in Southern China

Abstract: HONG KONG — Government officials in southern China sought on Wednesday to calm public ire about toxic substances menacing the region’s main food staple, rice, after the city of Guangzhou said that nearly half the rice tested at restaurants this year held excessive cadmium, a heavy metal that can cause cancer and other illnesses. Chinese citizens have become increasingly irate about food and beverages tainted with pesticides, illegal preservatives and additives, as well as industrial waste and heavy metals from polluted land and air. The news that this mainstay of the kitchen may also be toxic drew a vehement outcry. “Now before every meal must we all first wonder: Does this rice have too much cadmium? Are the vegetables laced with pesticide?” one Chinese Internet user wrote on the popular Tencent microblog service. Another wondered whether he was expected to quit rice the same way he quit smoking. The alarm was set off by the Food and Drug Administration of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province. The agency revealed last week that 8 out of 18 samples of rice tested from canteens and restaurants in the first three months of this year had cadmium levels surpassing national limits. The administration tried to explain on its Web site two days later that the finding used a small, skewed sample and was not representative. By then, however, news reports and apparently many residents had concluded that half the rice in the city could be tainted with too much cadmium. On the Internet, many citizens accused the government of concealing the risks from unsafe food to avoid political damage. The Southern Metropolitan Daily, a popular and sometimes outspoken newspaper based in Guangzhou, said on Tuesday that the uproar was a lesson in candor for officials. “There is not enough transparency in information concerning the public’s own interests,” it said in an editorial. Officials said the tainted rice came from the adjacent Hunan Province, an area where expanding factories, smelters and mines jostle with paddy fields. Cadmium is often found in zinc ores, and it is used in coatings and batteries for cellphones, cameras and computers — products that China makes in abundance. If too much accumulates in the body, cadmium harms the liver, the kidneys and the respiratory tract, and can dangerously weaken bones. It has also been linked to a variety of cancers. Cadmium is the latest culprit in a succession of food safety scandals in China. In 2008, public anger erupted after the government reported that tens of thousands of children were at risk of kidney stones and other organ damage from milk powder mixed with melamine, a chemical used to deceive protein tests. At least six infants died from illnesses linked to the tainted powder, which sickened more than 300,000 children. This month, Chinese police officials said they caught traders in eastern China who had made fake mutton using rat, fox and mink flesh adulterated with chemicals. Guangdong Province officials have sought to convince residents that they are stopping the trade in any toxic rice. After the public outcry, the Guangzhou Food and Drug Administration disclosed the names of the restaurants and canteens found to have rice with excessive cadmium. One seafood restaurant served rice with an average 0.4 milligrams of cadmium per kilogram, double the maximum permitted by government standards. The administration said that tests at Guangzhou’s major shopping chains, where most residents buy their food, did not find any cases of rice with cadmium exceeding the official limit, a city newspaper, the Yangcheng Evening News, reported on Wednesday. Inspectors in Shunde, a city near Guangzhou, also told local news outlets that they had uncovered nine cases of “cadmium rice.” Police in You County, in Hunan Province, also led inspections to track down errant suppliers and mills and to recall any suspect batches. Nervousness among officials about the anger over tainted food extends to the top of the Chinese government. Prime Minister Li Keqiang has vowed to strengthen government scrutiny to stamp out food safety hazards, and he told officials this month that the problem was a source of widespread dissatisfaction. “We can never allow another crisis of confidence like the milk powder problem,” Mr. Li said, according to the state-run news agency, Xinhua. “People eat meals three times a day. Food is fate for them.”

China
Guangzhou
Rice
HazMat
Food Safety
Restaurant


Despite Risks, G.O.P. Seeks to Stop Trump Before Convention

Abstract: When House Speaker Paul D. Ryan released a video laying out his familiar theme that politics should be fought on ideas and issues, the Drudge Report’s headline was: “Paul Ryan launches his first campaign ad.” A dream of some Republicans is that Mr. Ryan will rescue them from a fiasco in the presidential election. That is unlikely. As states assemble delegates for the party convention, there are already demands that no votes be cast for someone who did not run. It would be rational to turn to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio or Mr. Ryan, who might win the election, but neither the season nor the Republican grass roots seem to reward rationality. If Donald J. Trump goes into the Republican convention in July with close to the 1,237 delegates required to win the nomination, denying him would be hard. It is likelier that he will be about 100 votes shy. That is why in the days leading up to the gathering, to be held in Cleveland, all eyes will be on the rules and credentials committees, most of whose members have not yet been chosen by state delegations. These panels can come up with procedures to thwart Mr. Trump. The temptation to do so will be great, despite the havoc he could wreak. It is a myth that the Republican anti-Trump movement is just the establishment. It includes prominent officeholders and donors, but also movement conservatives and leading economic and national security advisers. They are convinced that Mr. Trump would be an electoral disaster — polls show that he is the most unpopular political figure in modern times — and that he would splinter the party. Already some Republicans say they will not back him — “I will not support a nominee so lacking in the judgment, temperament and character,” Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia said — and more indicate privately that they expect to follow. The substantive schisms are deep. Recent foreign policy pronouncements by Mr. Trump were derided by Senator Lindsey Graham as a “complete disaster.” His pledge to force Mexico to pay for a wall along the southern border by withholding all remittances to that country is legally dubious, experts say, and would be an enormous expansion of executive power even as the party, and Mr. Trump himself, accuse President Obama of overreaching his authority. On economics, Mr. Trump breaks with much Republican orthodoxy, except for his support for huge tax cuts for the wealthy. Mr. Trump would not go quietly. He might try to sway delegates with inducements, perhaps even hold out the vice presidency — his new top campaign adviser, Paul J. Manafort, was a player for President Ford in the 1976 convention and saw the challenger Ronald Reagan almost succeed by picking a running mate before the delegates gathered. Some Trump backers raise the threat of violence. With the possibility of a disruptive end, Republicans are pondering how to protect incumbents at the congressional and state level. Some even contend that the best result might be to nominate someone else with Mr. Trump running as a third-party candidate, calculating that the votes he brought in would support Republicans in down-ballot contests. That someone else would probably be Senator Ted Cruz, who will come to Cleveland as the runner-up. Smart and tough, Mr. Cruz, a self-proclaimed right-winger, would draw a sharp ideological divide with Hillary Clinton. Yet as Mr. Cruz, a freshman lawmaker from Texas, gets more scrutiny, his electoral liabilities might rival Mr. Trump’s. He advocates a huge tax cut, but it would include a value-added, or national sales tax, which is not politically popular. He opposes all abortions without an exception for rape, and wants to reduce rights for same-sex marriage. But unlike Mr. Trump, he is a lifelong Republican, and while he might lose as Barry Goldwater did in seeking the presidency in 1964, the recovery might be easier. Even as Republicans openly discuss damage control, some wistfully recall last April: They had their strongest field since 1980, the deepest bench, a favorable historical cycle against a mediocre Democratic field. That seems a lot longer than a year ago.

2016 Presidential Election
Republican National Convention,RNC
Donald Trump
Ted Cruz


Violent Trail Adds 2 Victims, Officers Linked by Friendship and Dedication

Abstract: The violent overnight trail carved through Greater Boston by the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings has left in its wake two more victims, both young police officers who became friends as classmates in a police academy. Now one officer is dead, and the other is hospitalized, fighting for his life. The tragic intertwining of these four lives began around 10:20 Thursday night, when, according to law enforcement officials, the police at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received reports of gunfire on the Cambridge campus. Responding officers soon found their colleague, an M.I.T. officer, Sean A. Collier, 27, dead from multiple gunshots after possibly being ambushed in his police vehicle. As investigators were determining that two men — believed to be the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19 — had shot Officer Collier, word came from another part of Cambridge of a carjacking of a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle at gunpoint by two men who would release its owner a half-hour later. Within two hours, some of the officers who had responded to the shooting at M.I.T. were racing to Watertown, about five miles to the west, where the local police had tried to pull over the carjacked vehicle. In the ensuing shootout, the older Mr. Tsarnaev was shot dead, and a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority police officer, Richard H. Donohue, 33, was seriously wounded. Throughout the night and into the day, most of the nation focused its attention on the search for the younger Mr. Tsarnaev, a dragnet that had the Boston area in a nerve-jangling lockdown. Meanwhile, friends and family members of the two officers mourned and worried on the sidelines of an unfolding international event. Image Officer Collier, 27, had yearned to join the police. Credit Middlesex District Attorney's Office, via Associated Press Officer Collier was a compact man with a crackling intellect who seemed born to be a police officer. “People come into police work for a lot of reasons,” the M.I.T. police chief, John DiFava, said. “He was one of those who came on because it was really what he was meant to do with his life.” Sean Collier grew up in Wilmington, a leafy town of about 22,000 people less than 20 miles north of Boston. After high school, he graduated from Salem State University with a degree in criminal justice and eventually began working as an information-technology employee for the Police Department in Somerville, a congested blue-collar city hard against Cambridge. According to Somerville’s mayor, Joseph A. Curtatone, everybody in the city seemed to know Mr. Collier, even though he was a kid from Wilmington. In addition to vastly improving the Police Department’s Web site, he immersed himself in the community, volunteering, for example, with the Somerville Boxing Club, a youth-outreach program, the mayor said. “It’s like he was a lifer here,” Mr. Curtatone said. But he yearned to shed civilian garb for a police uniform. When Mr. Collier applied for a job with the M.I.T. police, Chief DiFava had already received high recommendations for this young man from the chief’s neighbor, a Somerville deputy police chief, and a cousin, a Somerville police officer. In January 2012, Mr. Collier joined the ranks of nearly 60 M.I.T. police officers, all armed with semiautomatic pistols. Their job is to keep safe a small city of 11,000 people, many of them foreign graduate students who, Chief DiFava said, “come from places where the cops are not their friends.” Image Officer Richard H. Donohue, 33, was seriously wounded. Credit Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, via Associated Press But the chief said Officer Collier won over many students, in part by joining the Outing Club, whose members hike, ski and explore the New England outdoors. “And I’ll tell you, they loved him,” Chief DiFava said. That affection is reflected in many online reminiscences from students who recalled his easygoing but protective nature. Among the outdoors crowd, he was known for his willingness to yodel, for sharing his pepperoni snacks, and for making the most of every moment, as when he wrote a note inviting people to hike a part of the White Mountains on the anniversary of an ascent of Mount Everest by the Polish mountaineer Krzysztof Wielicki: “... so feel free to bring any Polish dishes, wear Poland’s colors (red and white), bring a Polish flag (because you know you have one laying around your apartment), or just actually be from Poland (cool!) to commemorate this awesome feat.” But Officer Collier harbored his greatest passion for police work. An M.I.T. colleague, Officer Robert Molino, recalled that the young officer arrested a “bad egg” shortly after he was hired, so impressing some Boston police officers that they called him Cobra, a nickname that stuck. Officer Collier recently bought a Ford pickup truck, and he was hinting to friends that he was about to leave M.I.T. for another job. Mayor Curtatone of Somerville confirmed that the city was about to hire Officer Collier as a police officer. “He would have been a superstar for us,” the mayor said. On Thursday, Officer Collier once again donned the light blue shirt and dark blue trousers of an M.I.T. police officer. Toward the end of his shift, the officer who had a way of putting foreign students at ease was shot and killed, the police say, by brothers from another country. Image The M.I.T. Police Department hung black bunting in mourning for Officer Collier, who had won the affection of many students. Credit Evan McGlinn for The New York Times A few hours later, Officer Donohue — Officer Collier’s friend from the M.B.T.A. Transit Police Academy’s 25th Municipal Police Officers Class, in 2010 — was shot once during a gunfight with the two brothers. He was taken to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, where he was listed Friday night in critical but stable condition. Officer Donohue grew up in Winchester, a pleasant suburb several miles north of Boston. After high school, he attended the Virginia Military Institute, where a schoolmate, Jake Copty, remembered him as “a fun and laid-back cadet with a wicked sense of humor.” According to The Boston Globe, Officer Donohue and his wife have a 7-month-old son and live in Woburn, where neighbors say he is a good athlete and runner. The Globe also reported that his former neighbors in Winchester had honored him by lining their yards with small American flags. Just three months ago, the M.B.T.A. transit police chief, Paul MacMillan, awarded Officer Donohue a certificate of commendation for rushing to the aid of a man stabbed in the throat in Boston’s Chinatown station. On Friday, Chief MacMillan was honoring the officer again. “Facing extraordinary danger, Officer Donohue never hesitated in fully engaging the terrorists in order to protect the citizens of the commonwealth,” the chief said in a statement. “I am extremely proud of him, and cannot say enough about his heroic actions.” Meanwhile, the Collier family members issued a statement of their own, expressing heartbreak over the loss, and saying the only solace is in knowing that their Sean had died doing what he had committed his life to do, and bravely.


Regulator in Europe Proposes a Superagency to Wield Power Over Its Phone Markets

Abstract: BERLIN — After its success cutting mobile phone roaming fees, the European Commission is weighing a plan that could force some former phone monopolies in Europe to open their networks to greater competition. According to a person in Brussels who has direct knowledge of the plan, the European commissioner for telecommunications, Viviane Reding, wants to create a European Union agency called the European Telecom Market Authority, with power to override national regulators and pry open domestic markets. One of the most potent weapons wielded by the agency, which would consist of the directors of 27 European national telecommunications agencies, would be the ability to force former monopolies to separate legally from their transmission networks to give competitors equal access. The European Competitive Telecommunications Association, a group representing competitors to the former phone monopolies, said that 90 percent of voice calls in the European Union and 80 percent of broadband Internet traffic traveled at least partly over networks of former monopolies. “We support functional separation as a possible remedy because although we’ve seen how positive effective regulation can be for consumers, we’ve also seen how difficult it can be to enforce,” said Ilsa Godlovitch, an economist who is director of regulatory affairs for the association. The plan, circulating this month among analysts in the European Commission, will be presented to the commissioners in November. If the commissioners endorse the proposal, it will be forwarded in 2008 to the 27 European telecommunications ministers and the European Parliament for their approval. But while broad consumer support helped push political passage of the mobile phone roaming limits, a plan to create a Brussels superagency that could intervene in domestic markets lacks natural consumer appeal and faces formidable industry opposition. “We believe that competition is more vibrant than ever, and that functional separation would be a terrible idea,” said Michael Bartholomew, director of the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association, which represents 41 operators in 34 countries. He also questioned the motivations of the plan and how well it would work. “Why would the commission want to consider this?” he said. “There’s no successful experience with this anywhere in the world.” In the European Union, such separation has been used in Britain only, where national regulators forced British Telecom in 2005 to create separate network and services subsidiaries. Supporters of the move said that the separation helped triple the number of phone lines in Britain, which were later leased by competing telecommunications companies. Opponents said the separation created market uncertainty and led to record low levels of investment in British telecommunications networks. Ms. Reding raised the idea of separating dominant former monopolies from their physical networks during a speech to a German industry group in Brussels in June 2006. The impetus for her comments was Germany’s plan to defy European Union law by barring Deutsche Telekom competitors from its new high-speed V.D.S.L. (very high bit-rate D.S.L.) broadband network, financed partly by government money. Since then, German lawmakers have excluded competitors from V.D.S.L., and Ms. Reding has started a lawsuit against Germany in the European Court of Justice. During a June 13 speech this year in Düsseldorf, Ms. Reding repeated her plans to centralize decision-making in Brussels, saying that a new Brussels regulator should be able to impose changes in any European Union country that decides to thwart the union’s law. “Where effective infrastructural competition has little prospect of taking root over the medium to long term,” Ms. Reding said at a seminar sponsored by the German financial newspaper Handelsblatt, “national regulators could, in close agreement with the commission, make use of this new remedial measure.” With national interests and jobs at stake, European Union laws are often ignored or slowly adopted by member states, where national regulators are often appointed by the same governments that own stakes in former telephone monopolies. In Germany, for example, the telecommunications regulator took more than four years to conduct a study that concluded that Deutsche Telekom, still 31 percent owned by the German government, had illegally barred competitors from leasing access at reasonable rates to its network in rural areas. France completed the same study, ordered by the European Union, within two years. Even the German regulator’s belated finding this year that Deutsche Telekom must lease competitors access to its backbone network is still expected to take months, if not years, to carry out, said Ms. Godlovitch of the telecommunications association.

Telephones and Telecommunications
Europe
Wireless Communications
Law and Legislation
Cellular Telephones
Politics and Government
Computers and the Internet


With New Homes, Town Makes Amends for Discrimination Decades Ago

Abstract: HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — Even though more than 50 years have passed since Sallie Sanders was a confused little girl wondering why her family was kicked out of their house for being on the wrong side of the color line here, the pain seems fresh. “Just abruptly, we had to end up staying with relatives and friends,” said Ms. Sanders, a retired state worker who is black and who, at age 60, still has trouble recounting the ordeal without breaking into tears. “It was kind of devastating. My parents tried to protect us quite a bit, but I knew something was wrong.” And something was. In 1971, a federal judge found that this old manufacturing town, five miles from downtown Detroit, had deliberately used urban renewal projects throughout the 1950s and ’60s to obliterate black areas from its two square miles, displacing hundreds of families. Although the judge, Damon J. Keith, ordered a remedy, and Hamtramck agreed to build new housing, it did not. For decades. Now, though, in a time of deep recession and a housing slump in one of the most economically depressed states in the country, Hamtramck (pronounced ham-TRAM-eck) is at last fulfilling its legal — and what officials now call moral — obligation to provide affordable housing to the mostly poor families who were dislodged generations ago. And if the plaintiffs in the original class-action lawsuit are no longer living, as in Ms. Sanders’s case, children and grandchildren are eligible. About 100 houses have been completed for rent or sale, and another 100 are on the way, paid for by a mix of local and state money. In the last five years, the town began building the new houses, but the project stalled because of the recession. It is only now approaching the final stages of construction, thanks to a recent increase in federal stimulus money. The homes, mostly two- and three-bedroom models, cost $140,000 to $160,000, and subsidies can reduce the price to $100,000; most rentals are in the $400-a-month range, after government assistance. But beyond the building, Hamtramck has changed in another way, too. According to the Census Bureau, it is now Michigan’s most international and diverse city, having evolved from a town that was 90 percent Polish just 40 years ago. With the changes came new attitudes about how to deal with the past. Just weeks ago, Ms. Sanders moved into a new ranch-style house on the same street where her family once lived, and Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm personally handed over the keys. As a young lawyer, Ms. Granholm was a clerk to Judge Keith in the late 1980s. “We went full circle, and it’s pretty wonderful,” said Ms. Sanders, whose parents, now dead, were among the 250 plaintiffs who sued the city. “To acknowledge that, O.K., they were wrong, that gives me a little satisfaction because my parents were mistreated so. I just wish they were here to see it.” The home building is also what experts call a bittersweet finale to one of the longest-running housing discrimination suits to weave its way through court, having begun in the civil rights era. Beyond its age, the case is also distinctive in that it happened at all. While Hamtramck may be an extreme example, experts said housing discrimination against blacks in the mid-1900s was common, but class-action lawsuits were rare because of their expense and complexity. Some contend that urban renewal projects were routinely used to demolish black areas, and that most of the housing was never replaced. “This case is unusual in a good way,” said Victor Goode, a lawyer with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Michael Barnhart, an expert on fair-housing law and the lead lawyer in the Hamtramck case, agreed. “This kind of discrimination happened all over the country,” Mr. Barnhart said, citing Chicago, Detroit and other cities. Over the last 10 years, as the settlement appeared to be coming to fruition, Mr. Barnhart and a local minister, the Rev. Joseph R. Jordan, met with surviving plaintiffs and their families just about weekly, spending hours trying to work out the details of moving hundreds of families back to town, most from Detroit. “We had tried several times over the years to get something started, but really couldn’t find the funding,” Mr. Barnhart said. Judge Keith, who now sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, called the case “difficult” and “depressing” in an interview. But, he added: “I was there to see Sallie Sanders get the keys. It was meaningful to me as a human being.” Charnita Monday, 64, is renting one of the new houses. She moved to Hamtramck from Bessemer, Ala., looking for factory work in the late 1960s. The home she bought was among those condemned. “The judge just kept hammering on the case, and all those years, they wouldn’t let it go,” said Ms. Monday, who is black. “I think an injustice has been righted.” “I had gotten physically tired, mentally tired and even tired of praying,” she said. “But now, it’s like you got a new life, you know?” In his 1971 opinion, Judge Keith wrote that testimony showed that Hamtramck officials were well aware of the difficulties their actions caused for blacks, but that they “ignored their requests for assistance, failed to investigate complaints and in no way compensated such displacees for the loss suffered.” He also chastised the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development for approving Hamtramck’s plans and failing to protect the plaintiffs’ rights. After decades, Hamtramck has an opportunity, however painful, to come to terms with itself. “Nobody with a conscience wants the burden of this enormous charge of racial discrimination to be hanging over them and who they are,” said Mayor Karen Majewski. “It’s important that we do whatever we can to redeem ourselves, our history and reputation.” “And it’s been very hard to find a way to do that,” Ms. Majewski said, “because you know what this economy is like.” Hamtramck, despite its size, has always had a large sense of self and pride — so much so that it refused to be annexed by Detroit like so many other small towns were in the early 1900s, forcing the city to grow around it. As a result, Hamtramck, originally a homogenous village, is now a city within a city, and in the last few decades it has become a first stop for immigrants from Bangladesh, Yemen, Albania and Lebanon, among a host of other countries. As of the 2000 census, 41 percent of Hamtramck’s population of 23,000 was foreign-born. Alongside church bells, the Muslim call to prayer is broadcast by loudspeakers every day. Twenty-five languages are spoken in the public schools. To Mr. Jordan, the minister, Hamtramck is almost unrecognizable as the same place that tore down his friends’ neighborhoods. “We have made tremendous progress,” he said. Ms. Monday said she had been distraught after her house was demolished and she had to move her five young children into a small apartment in Detroit, where she lived until her new home became available in 2008. “When I left, I was bitter,” she said. “It’s a different place now. It’s been good to me, and I’m happy.”

Discrimination
Housing and Real Estate
Michigan


Gehrig’s Beaning Caused Concussion and Maybe More

Abstract: When I sat in the right-field bleachers of Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, to listen to Lou Gehrig ’s poignant farewell speech, I had no idea he would die in less than two years. Now that we have learned that repeated concussions might have been a factor in Gehrig’s death , I am reminded of an incident that could have contributed to his demise. In June 1934, when Gehrig’s streak of consecutive games had reached 1,414, the Yankees traveled by boat from Washington for an exhibition game with their Norfolk Tars farm club in Virginia. A promising young right-hander named Ray White, who had pitched for Columbia University in the Eastern Intercollegiate League, when it also had featured the future Yankees pitchers Charlie Devens of Harvard and Johnny Broaca of Yale, was scheduled to face the Yankees, including Gehrig, who also had attended Columbia some years before. Although Gehrig had not been entirely happy there as a student, he still felt a strong enough connection to Columbia to pay periodic visits to Coach Andy Coakley, a former major league pitcher. On a few of these visits, Gehrig had met briefly with White, who was also Columbia’s baseball captain. White thought that Gehrig seemed uninterested in him, a feeling that he expressed to some of his teammates. Sadly, White might have misinterpreted Gehrig’s shyness — the great first baseman was not gregarious. During spring training in 1934, White, then pitching for Newark, another powerful Yankees farm team, faced Gehrig for the first time and yielded two long home runs to him. At the time, Gehrig gave little thought to one White pitch that grazed his head. But in the locker room after the game, the backup catcher Joe Glenn, who had frequently been Gehrig’s roommate, needled him about the pitch. He also asked Gehrig why he had not been friendly toward White. Gehrig’s response was harsh. “That guy can go to hell!” he said with a snarl. So the stage was set for the June game in Norfolk, where White had been sent to try to recover from a bad back. In the first inning, Gehrig blasted a home run into the right-field stands, pleasing many fans who turned out to see a fading Babe Ruth and the Iron Horse, Ruth’s teammate. When Gehrig came to bat for the second time, White, a 6-footer with a muscular build, reared back and threw a pitch that struck him near the crown of his head, which was unprotected because players did not wear batting helmets in those days. The ball bounced high behind home plate, then banged against the side of the press box. Gehrig dropped as if he had been shot at close range, and Yankees Manager Joe McCarthy shrieked, “My God, there goes the pennant!” Yankees players joined McCarthy around Gehrig’s still body as the Norfolk team doctor, S. B. Whitlock, bent over him. After some five minutes, Gehrig struggled to his feet, obviously in pain and quite shaken. In short order, he was taken to the local hospital. With Gehrig removed from the scene, the next Yankees batter, the tempestuous Ben Chapman, screamed an epithet at White, then hit a scorching line drive back through the mound, coming close to knocking down White. X-rays showed that Gehrig’s skull had not been fractured, though he did have a concussion. After what they had just seen, most of his teammates figured he would be hospitalized for at least a couple of days. But that had never been the way Gehrig, the Yankees’ captain , played the game. He had been beaned before. He left the hospital and, despite McCarthy’s reservations, insisted on playing the next day in Washington. With a large bump on his head, he borrowed a cap from Ruth (then in his final season with the Yankees) and cut the seams to fit his head into it. Despite a severe headache, Gehrig put on an amazing display against the Senators. In the first five innings, he banged out three triples, something he had never done before. When a sudden squall hit in the bottom of the fifth inning, however, the game was called — and with it went Lou’s three triples. Years later, when questioned about his decision to play after an almost calamitous beaning, Gehrig acknowledged it might have been “a dumb trick” on his part. Because he had rejected a doctor’s advice, Gehrig said it was probably “foolhardy.” But, he added: “It’s just that I wanted to prove myself right away. I wanted to make sure that big whack on my head hadn’t made me gun-shy at the plate.” White became a manager in the Yankees’ farm system, then the president of Royal Crown Cola. He acknowledged that he had a grievance against Gehrig going back to their meetings. “He might have shown some interest in me as a fellow Columbian and a potential Yankee,” he told me years later. “But he always seemed cold and unfriendly. He just didn’t seem to give a damn about me — that’s the impression that I got.” But White also insisted that the brushback pitch at Norfolk was an instinctive pitcher’s reaction to Gehrig’s first-inning home run, not a rebuttal to past slights. “I was glad he wasn’t hurt seriously,” White told me, “because I’d been hit in the head myself and I knew what it was like.” More than 75 years after the beaning, we are left to wonder what effect this seeming act of retribution — legal by the longtime mores of baseball — could have had on Gehrig’s ultimate fate, before he was 38 years old.

Gehrig Lou
Baseball
New York Yankees
Concussions


Bond Yields Continue to Climb After Tax Cut Deal

Abstract: Investors sold Treasuries for a second consecutive day on Wednesday, sending interest rates higher in response to the tentative deal to extend Bush-era tax cuts even as the Federal Reserve was trying aggressively to keep borrowing costs low. The frenzy on the bond market was set off on Tuesday after President Obama announced his tax-cut agreement with Republican lawmakers. Financial markets interpreted the development as likely to hasten the economic recovery but also increase the budget deficit. The deal on taxes, which would be paired with new cuts to payroll taxes and business taxes, effectively opened up a new channel to stimulate the economy with fiscal policy. At the same time, it appeared to run headlong into the Federal Reserve’s program, begun last month, to buy $600 billion in Treasury bonds in an effort to keep borrowing costs low and encourage spending by consumers and businesses. Yields on the benchmark 10-year bond have been steadily rising since Oct. 7, when they were 2.39 percent. On Tuesday, after President Obama’s announcement, yields shot up, and by Wednesday afternoon they were up 19 basis points from the day before, to 3.318 percent. They retreated to 3.259 percent on Wednesday after the Treasury Department reported positive results from its $21 billion auction of new 10-year notes. The yield on the 10-year note ended at 3.27 percent, the highest level since mid-June. The price tumbled again Wednesday, falling 1 5/32, to 94 17/32. That tax deal “is having the opposite effect to what the Fed wants to do on yields,” said Jonathan H. Wright, a former Federal Reserve economist who is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University. “But the end objective is being supported. The Fed objective was to provide stimulus to the economy through bonds.” The government’s auction attracted almost three times as many buyers than bonds sold, a ratio characterized as fairly typical. The Treasury plans a $13 billion auction of 30-year notes on Thursday. Ajay Rajadhyaksha, head of fixed-income strategy at Barclays Capital, said that the tax deal had altered the conditions under which the Fed had devised its bond purchasing program, a move known as quantitative easing . “Those purchases were meant to push real rates down and inflation expectations up,” he said. “Instead the reverse has happened. Real rates are rising and inflation expectations have not risen much since October. I think the Federal Reserve will be a little concerned.” Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist for the Economic Outlook Group, said the economy can still function with Treasuries at 4 percent, but if they rise to 5 percent the recovery could stall. “What this means is that the Federal Reserve is facing a dilemma,” he said in a research note. An increase in quantitative easing, rather than lowering yields and holding down the cost of capital, could have the opposite effect, Mr. Baumohl wrote, as bond investors increasingly worry about the prospect of higher inflation. In an interview broadcast last weekend, the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, left open the possibility of expanding the central bank’s bond purchases. He defended the purchases as a way to stimulate a sluggish recovery and said the fear that they would cause inflation was “way overstated.” For consumers, the increase in bond yields could mean higher rates for home mortgages, which have already been rising in recent weeks. “Watch mortgage rates soar and housing activity and prices dive even more in the aftermath of this bond market action,” said David Rosenberg, the chief economist for Gluskin Sheff. The fiscal expansion announced by Mr. Obama appeared to have caught the Fed by surprise, though supporters of the Fed’s purchasing program argued that bond yields would be even higher had the Fed not been buying up debt. Mr. Wright said that one consequence of the tax cut deal could be a curtailing of the Fed’s program that was originally planned to last into next summer. “Fiscal policy is presumably going to have some stimulative effect on the economy, and it lessens the need for further quantitative easing,” he said. But if quantitative easing is, indeed, cut short, the risk premiums on long-term bonds will probably rise even further, because once the Fed is sidelined as a major purchaser, investors will need stronger inducements to hold the securities. “The cleanest interpretation here is investors are going to demand a higher return on Treasuries in order to compensate them for the greater supply,” Mr. Wright said. European bond yields also rose on Wednesday as their prices dropped. The sale of bonds by the German government received a weak response. European officials exchanged pointed comments about the need to create euro bonds as a way to pay for more bailouts of struggling countries on the Continent. While global markets have been unsettled by the financial troubles in the euro zone in recent weeks, some deficit hawks are now turning their attention to the United States. “This is more worry for the bond market,” said Laura LaRosa, the director of fixed income at Glenmede. “The deficit problem needs to be addressed. It makes yields go higher because we are adding to the deficit and fears of inflation, and the creditworthiness of the United States comes into question.” Some analysts said fixed-income investors were taking profits in a Treasury market that had become overpriced in reaction to the Fed’s quantitative easing program, which started as they priced in the program before the Nov. 3 announcement, and were possibly rebalancing portfolios. “The market was overextended,” said Robert S. Gay, the managing partner for Fenwick Advisers and a former Fed economist. “It is evidence that the market was overbought.” In the equity markets, stocks wavered within a narrow range. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 13.32 points, or 0.12 percent, to end regular trading at 11,372.48. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index gained 4.53 points, or 0.37 percent, to 1,228.28, while the Nasdaq composite index increased 10.67 points, or 0.41 percent, to 2,609.16. The FTSE 100 in Britain was down 13.92 points, or 0.24 percent. In Frankfurt, the DAX lost 26.04 points, or 0.37 percent, while the CAC 40 in Paris was up 21.48 points, or 0.56 percent. The dollar firmed against a range of currencies.

United States Economy
Interest Rates
Credit and Debt
Government Bonds
Stocks and Bonds
Treasury Department


Shopkeeper Fatally Shot in Robbery

Abstract: Wednesday was another slow day at Elgudzha Koyenishvili’s liquor store in a strip of shops on Lincoln Avenue in the small-town Staten Island neighborhood of Grant City. At noon, Mr. Koyenishvili locked up and went around the corner to Josef’s Barber Shop. “On the sides a little bit shorter, on the top a little bit trim, and that’s it,” said Yuriy Bababekov, who had been cutting Mr. Koyenishvili’s gray hair for five years. “Not too short.” In front of his store, Lincoln Liquors, Mr. Koyenishvili, 67, shot the breeze with Miguel Aponte, a street mechanic. He asked him to check the brakes on his Toyota. “He heard squeaks,” Mr. Aponte said. Just before 8 p.m., Mr. Koyenishvili made a sale. Kevin Greene, a retired grocery seafood clerk, came in for a bottle of Bacardi rum. “I was talking to him — ‘How was your day?’ — just making conversation,” Mr. Greene said. “He said it was O.K.” Another man came in a few minutes later, the police said, but he was not a customer. He pulled a gun. There was a struggle, the police said, but Mr. Koyenishvili, who had a baseball bat, was outmatched. The man shot Mr. Koyenishvili at least twice in the chest, ran out with the cash register, and sped off in a blue pickup truck, said Detective Joseph Cavitolo, a police spokesman. Mr. Koyenishvili was pronounced dead at Staten Island University Hospital. That was Wednesday. Thursday unfolded differently. In the morning, the police found the pickup truck in Midland Beach, about a mile from Mr. Koyenishvili’s store. Its owner told them she had lent the truck to a neighbor, John Lanorith, 40, whose prison record includes at least two terms for burglary. Mr. Lanorith, who neighbors said worked as a plumber or possibly a mechanic, was picked up by the police at his home on Kiswick Street, a narrow run-down bungalow with a sagging roof and an old Chevrolet Monte Carlo in the yard. By lunchtime, he was charged with Mr. Koyenishvili’s murder. Later, the police said he was also charged with criminal possession of a weapon. They said they did not know how much money was taken in the robbery. Mr. Koyenishvili’s friends and relatives were at a loss to make sense of his death. “He gave his whole life for his family,” said a man who identified himself as Mr. Koyenishvili’s nephew at the Koyenishvili house a few neighborhoods west in New Springville. “And for what?” He burst into tears. Mr. Koyenishvili left a wife, two children and two grandchildren, neighbors said. Mr. Koyenishvili had run Lincoln Liquors for at least 10 years and always worked alone, surrounded by bottles of spirits and photographs of his grandchildren and an extensive display of wines from his native country, Georgia. He did not seem to mind the leisurely pace. “He said he liked to get out to work, even if he just sat in his store,” said Eddie Castella, a regular at Partners Pub down the street. “He said, ‘I want to keep busy. It makes me happy.’ ” David Tepper, who owns a pizzeria nearby, stopped in regularly. “Every time you went in he was either playing solitaire or reading a book,” Mr. Tepper said. “If he had $40 in the register I’d be surprised.” That did not stop people from trying to hold up the store. “There were three guys who came in to rob him and he locked them in the store and fought with them,” said Dan O’Byrne, the manager of Partners Pub. He said there had been at least three other attempts in the last couple of years. “He caught a beating a couple of years ago,” Mr. Tepper recalled. “He got hit with a couple baseball bats.” In Midland Beach Thursday afternoon, Mr. Lanorith’s house was guarded by a police car. Up the street, a woman at the home where the blue pickup truck was registered declined to answer questions. “We don’t know nothing,” she said. “Take your cameras and get out of here.” In New Springville, Mr. Koyenishvili’s son was in no mood to talk, either. “I don’t want an interview, please,” he said. “I just want to bury him.”

Murders and Attempted Murders
Robberies and Thefts
Staten Island (NYC)
Koyenishvili Elgudzha


GTT ★

Abstract: Our quirky, discerning picks for the most interesting things to do around the state this week. DALLAS Jingle Bell Pop “It’s time for some new Christmas songs that people can call their own,” said Tim DeLaughter, the frontman for the Polyphonic Spree, the Dallas chorale-pop band that has just released the single “It’s Christmas.” And while it may not look like winter outside, it will be a wonderland inside at the Spree’s ninth annual Holiday Extravaganza , with manufactured snow blasted into the air. The benefit concert will include a set of Christmas songs and a set of secular songs. Let Mr. DeLaughter’s zeal for the season take you back to when you still believed in Santa Claus. (To gauge his holiday cheer, check out the photo he posted to the Twitter page of Preteen Zenith, his side band, of an eight-foot wreath he transformed into a peace sign.) “I plan to experience Christmas through my children’s spirited enthusiasm,” Mr. DeLaughter said, “for anything can happen at this time of year.” Lakewood Theater, Dec. 10, 6 p.m. theholidayextravaganza.com GALVESTON Big Bird Lands Instead of trying to beat the next level of Angry Birds on your new smartphone, step outside and see one of the state’s most captivating acts of avian behavior in real life: the migration of cranes to the coast. Breakfast With the Cranes, hosted by the Galveston Island Nature Tourism Council , is a car-pool tour of some of the marshes and upland areas in Texas that harbor hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes, the species that bears a crimson mask, makes a rattling sound and stands about four feet tall. (Whooping cranes, the endangered, other species in North America, tend to populate Port Aransas.) “People who live on the west end of Galveston have been watching sandies for years,” said Sue Reed of the tourism council. “It’s Galveston’s best-kept secret.” Galveston Country Club, Dec. 10, 8 a.m. galvestonnaturetourism.org HOUSTON Luck of the Mouse-Click The random fortune of the Internet assures a good laugh, if not wild-eyed consternation, at the Tube-Off Tournament , where contestants have 30 seconds to find Christmas-themed videos on YouTube to match subjects generated by the audience. The video that excites the “applause-o-meter” the most wins. “You see so much media through the Internet,” said Mary Magsamen, the curator of Aurora Picture Show and host of the friendly competition. “And so much of it is really bad, and so much is really funny.” Expect the unexpected. Type “Santa dogs,” a subject offered by Ms. Magsamen, into YouTube’s search box and three of the top results include a promotion for the book “I Am Santa,” in which dogs are washed by a little boy who thinks he is Santa; a skit of the Amazing Tuppy Dog pining for a new play rope while Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” plays; and news footage of the trend in Tokyo to stylize dogs like Santa. Take notes so you can remember which video links to send your friends in lieu of holiday cards. El Dorado Ballroom, Dec. 15, 7 p.m. aurorapictureshow.org GRANBURY To Give or Receive In the early 1900s, people anticipated short stories by William Sidney Porter, otherwise known as O. Henry, as much as Ralphie in “A Christmas Story” looked forward to “Little Orphan Annie” dispatches. But that all changed when Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the other modernists arrived, downgrading O. Henry to shtick. The staging of “Gifts of the Magi,” as part of Christmas Treasures , the three-play, community-theater production, is an ideal occasion to honor the writer, illustrator and musician who lived a third of his life in Texas. “Gifts,” which has one of the finest examples of an O. Henry twist ending, is the story of a poor New York couple who make great sacrifices to buy Christmas presents for each other. Attention, last-minute shoppers: The universal message here (it’s the thought that counts) is worth the price of admission. Granbury Opera House, Dec. 11, 15-16, 18, various times. granburyoperahouse.net NACOGDOCHES Each Flag’s Story A certain amusement park makes it seem as though there should be six flags flying over Texas, but Nacogdoches, the oldest town in the state, claims there should nine, and you will learn why at the Nine Flags Christmas Festival . Downtown, Dec. 9-10, various times. visitnacogdoches.org DALLAS Cheeseburger Paradise You won’t have to gladly pay your friend on Tuesday for a hamburger today, because it will already be Tuesday when Burger House offers 60-cent cheeseburgers at all of its locations as part of its 60th anniversary. Burger House, Dec. 13, 11 a.m., burgerhouse.com

Christmas
Birds
Computers and the Internet
Theater
Texas


US Airways Flight’s Rescue From Hudson Helped Marine Unit

Abstract: Capt. Richard Johnson and Firefighter Tom Sullivan were having coffee in the kitchen with six other members of their fire company, Marine 1, on that frigid Jan. 15 afternoon two years ago when the electronic alarm blared insistently through the firehouse on the pier. Seconds later came the computerized call to get up the Hudson River. A small plane, at least according to initial reports, had crashed in the water. Upon hearing it was a jetliner, Captain Johnson quickly did the math. He split his eight men onto two crafts: three on Marine 1 Alpha, a 27-foot, two-year-old fast-response boat, and five on the John D. McKean, a 55-year-old, 129-foot fireboat. Firefighter Sullivan, Captain Johnson and Helmsman John Rizzo all jumped in Marine 1 Alpha, and as Firefighter Sullivan put on his gear, the boat raced 45 miles per hour north toward the Intrepid Museum. Five minutes and 40 blocks later, Firefighter Sullivan was throwing life preservers off the small deck to shivering, shell-shocked passengers standing on the partly submerged left wing of US Airways Flight 1549 . Then he hoisted Beverly Waters, a 47-year-old businesswoman, onto the bow, the start of his boat’s involvement in the epic rescue. The entire event, seen as a miracle at the time, turned into a defining moment for the New York Fire Department. The speed of the first responders underscored the importance of a plan already developing in the department: upgrading its marine unit with faster, more diverse and more agile boats. “You got to get there fast,” said Firefighter Sullivan, 44, a 17-year veteran of the Fire Department who traces his experiences in the Hudson to when he scraped barnacles off boats as a teenager in Stony Point, N.Y. “Whether you are going to do just recon or whether you get your hands in there to help them, you got to get there fast,” he said. “You get control of the situation, and call for help if needed. That was one of the reasons we were so effective that afternoon.” After some deft maneuvering by Helmsman Rizzo, passengers from the plane’s left wing were on the boat — about 10 in the bow and another 10 or so in the stern and cabin — even though the craft is supposed to hold only 16. Some 20 minutes after arriving on the scene, the overloaded Marine 1 Alpha safely left them at a triage center at the Circle Line terminal. Emergency Medical Service recorded 20 people from Marine 1 Alpha being treated. Firefighter Sullivan then infused a little humor into the proceedings. “Welcome to New York,” he told them. “What do you mean?” one male passenger shot back. “We just left New York,” the man added with a grin and an expletive thrown in for good measure. The Fire Department, Coast Guard and Police Department marine operations, and most of all those on the jetliner, were fortunate that day. The harbor was swarming with ferries from NY Waterways ready for commuters when the plane crash-landed about 3:30 p.m. Commercial boats, Captain Johnson estimated, probably rescued about 85 percent of the 150 passengers and 5 crew members on the flight. Captain Johnson still marvels at the chain of events. One of his men, Lt. Thomas Piambino, had reported early to work, giving him just enough people to launch two boats. “Had the other officer not been there, I probably wouldn’t have made that decision,” Captain Johnson said on Thursday. “It would have been one boat or the other.” He weighed the ability to handle mass casualties against the immediacy of the rescue. “I knew we needed speed,” he said. Seven people usually work the large fireboat, not five, he explained. Two more would have also helped the fast-response boat, Firefighter Sullivan said. The John D. McKean, churning at 14 miles an hour, focused on securing the tail of the sinking plane after the passengers had been rescued, and towing it to shore before it would sink in the middle of the channel. “Both boats responding simultaneously, that’s what we’d like to get to at some point,” said Captain Johnson, 53, a 29-year veteran of the department. “That day, the big boat was needed greatly. The situation would have been totally changed at 9 o’clock at night after commuting hours, when you wouldn’t have had the commercial vessels out there.” But it turned out Marine 1 Alpha was the perfect boat for the job. Helmsman Rizzo had to navigate against the plane’s wing even while the current was flowing swiftly at nearly 3 m.p.h. He had to shut down the engines when two passengers suddenly jumped off the wing, fearing that they would not be rescued in time, and started swimming toward the motors. Captain Johnson had to help Firefighter Sullivan lift passengers from the icy wing to the icy deck, with spilled oil floating in the water below, all while listening to radio dispatches and sending his own. “We’re firefighters,” Captain Johnson said quietly on Thursday at Marine 1 headquarters in Lower Manhattan. “We’re used to working with what we’ve got.” But with the department’s new fleet and an order to have backup boats at all times, staffing issues could become more of a concern. The department’s new crown jewel, the Three Forty Three, replaced the McKean on Sept. 11, and is docked near Marine 1 Alpha outside the fire company’s temporary headquarters, at Pier 40. (A new marine firehouse is being built at Pier 53). The Three Forty Three is a state-of-the-art, 140-foot craft, with 10 computer operating systems, the capacity to pump 50,000 gallons of water from its hoses and a cruising speed of 20 m.p.h., its engines as calm as a lullaby. It also has counterterrorism features like a chemical safe room. Every morning, the seven men on the day shift take it out for a tour up the Hudson. Aboard the Three Forty Three on Thursday, the Hudson sparkled in memory near where Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III splash-landed Flight 1549. “I’ve had two memorable days in my career, and this,” Firefighter Sullivan said of Jan. 15, 2009, “is No. 2 on the list.” The most memorable was Sept. 11, 2001, when he was on the McKean, rescuing people fleeing from the World Trade Center towers. Rescuing the US Airways passengers, he said, “was a totally different story, heartwarming.” Beverly Waters, the first person he rescued, remembered clutching her seat cushion while shivering in knee-deep water on the wing. She saw the hulking ferries nearby and could not, in her shock, figure out how she would climb into one. “Then I see this little boat coming around,” she recalled by telephone from her home in Charlotte, N.C., on Thursday, “and I said, ‘I hope that’s the one that’s coming over here.’ ” When the little boat approached, Firefighter Sullivan helped women and children first, then others without lifejackets. “He pulled me up,” Ms. Waters said, “like it was nothing for him.”

Fires and Firefighters
Accidents and Safety
Airlines and Airplanes
Fire Department (NYC)
Johnson Richard
Sullivan Tom
Hudson River


A Backyard Fight Club as an Alternative to Gun Violence

Abstract: HARRISONBURG, Va. — Chris Wilmore was devastated after his close friend was shot to death on Christmas Eve in 2013, in a dispute over a woman. Mr. Wilmore, known in his Harrisonburg, Va., neighborhood as Scarface, has his own history with weapons and crime, but he began thinking of ways to squash the gun violence plaguing his community. He started actively recruiting people with “beefs” to put on boxing gloves and take their arguments off the streets and into his backyard fight club, where he films the action and a referee calls a winner. He says that most of the disputes are settled once and for all there, with most fighters developing a new respect for the other. “There’s certain people, that’s how they’re wired,” he says. “They’re gonna fight no matter what I do. The only difference is at least with me, they are fighting in a yard with gloves, a referee and regulations.” Mr. Wilmore says his method of conflict resolution appeals to a lot of people in his community, many of whom feel alienated by the legal system. Officials with the Harrisonburg Police Department say they have not received any reports of problems from the fight club, although the department does not consider Mr. Wilmore’s strategy to be a viable violence reduction solution nor does it condone his homegrown approach. In this short documentary, “Guns to Gloves,” video journalists Stuart Harmon and Matteo Minasi ride along with Mr. Wilmore over a weekend as he tries to convince two men to settle their dispute over money. As he searches the streets looking for the men, he worries, “These two, out of everybody that I’ve ever solved a beef with, these will be the two that it needs to get solved with. Because they will hurt each other.”

Murders and Homicides
Documentaries
Chris Wilmore
Harrisonburg


Putin Supports Project to ‘Secure’ Russia Internet

Abstract: MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin appeared on Wednesday to throw his support behind a plan to isolate the Internet in Russia from the rest of the World Wide Web, but said the Russian government was “not even considering” censoring Internet sites. In a speech to the Russian National Security Council, Mr. Putin said the plan was intended to build a backup system to keep websites in the Russian domains — those ending in .ru and .rf — online in a national emergency. Mr. Putin said other countries had taken to using the Internet “for not only economic, but military and political goals” and said information security was a priority for the country. The Russian news media has labeled the plan, some details of which were reported last month by Vedomosti, a Russian daily, a “kill switch” for the Internet, or Russia’s answer to the “Great Firewall” put up by the Chinese. “It’s important to secure the Russian segment of the Internet,” Mr. Putin said, according to a transcript posted on the Kremlin website. “We do not intend to limit access to the Internet, to put it under total control, to nationalize the Internet. “We need to greatly improve the security of domestic communications networks and information resources, primarily those used by state structures,” he added. The Russian goals appear for now distinct from those of the Chinese, experts on Internet policy say, and inspired partly by a revelation this summer in Wired magazine by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, who lives in Moscow, that United States government hackers inadvertently crashed the Syrian web in 2012. Russia has recently promulgated policies to censor the Internet through laws banning extremist content and requiring social networking and financial companies to base their data servers in Russia. The goal of the new system, however, appears not to block foreign content, but rather to keep Russia’s own news and information machine online in times of crisis. Oleg Demidov, an authority on Russian Internet policies at the PIR center in Moscow, said that Russia wanted to create a “double channel” for the Internet. The backup channel would of course be under government control. “In normal times, it would work like it does now,” he said of this Russian vision of the Internet. “But in an emergency, the reserve system would come alive.”

Russia
Computers and the Internet
Tech Industry
Vladimir Putin
Freedom of the press
Wired
Computer security
Censorship


A Trove of Tablets for Young Hands

Abstract: Parents take note. For approximately the price of a child’s bicycle — about $200 — you can purchase what may be the 21st-century equivalent: a tablet computer. Children take their tablets, a term defined loosely, as seriously as they do their bikes. So if you are going to buy one that is for them — not you — you had better involve them in the process. They understand that this single device is a million-channel TV, music collection, game machine, camera and e-book library, and a way to socialize with friends. They may not understand — but you will — that in addition to the first $200 or so you lay out for a tablet, you will be paying for music, books, movies and apps far into the future. So, what to get? The 21 tablets I reviewed for this article each have strengths and weaknesses. Here’s a crash course. ANDROID TABLETS Android-based tablets for children are the newest versions on the block. Each is on a mission to distract children from the iPad and other mainstream tablets, and choices abound. For about $150, you can get the Kurio 7 , MEEP or Tabeo . The Nabi 2 costs a bit more ($200) but has a noticeably better screen. The Nabi Jr. ($100) is smaller and can double as a baby monitor. Though tricky to turn on, these tablets have colorful silicon bumpers for child-proofing. They also are slower, which I discovered when loading the same app on each one. This is a great test. Angry Birds starts in 10 seconds on the iPad Mini, vs. 33 seconds on the Tabeo. Look at how much storage the devices have. It can be limited to just four gigabytes. This is important because apps and movies take space. One full-length HD video — about two gigabytes — can use half the storage space on the Tabeo, which means you’ll need to invest more in a micro-SD card. The best overall option was the four-inch, $150 MG . Pocket-size and powerful — it loaded Angry Birds in 15 seconds — the MG is built around the Google Play app store. The MG comes with a preapproved digital allowance system, so children can do their own shopping. You supply the USB cable and Wi-Fi. Beware that some of these devices — the Tabeo, MEEP and Kurio — are intended to sell you apps, music, e-books and movies purchased in their special stores. By the time you add in a micro-SD card to increase memory, you may be better off investing in the MG with easy access to mainstream app stores, or the Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire HD . MAINSTREAM TABLETS My young testers, ages 3 to 12, kept reaching for the iPad first for good reason. They could find the apps they wanted, and the entire experience was familiar. But who wants to pay $300 for the iPod Touch 5, $329 for an iPad Mini or $400 for the lowest-priced iPad 2? The good news is that the Android options are improving, in terms of app selection and overall quality. Android tablets cost far less, too. Both the Kindle Fire HD, from Amazon, and Google’s Nexus 7 offer power, apps and parental control features at a price near those for children’s tablets. The testers were also attracted by the detachable keyboard on the Microsoft Surface ($500 plus $100 for the keyboard). They saw it as a replacement for a laptop they use for homework. But the best non-Apple option I could find was the Kindle Fire HD, a choice made easier thanks to Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, a fixed-price subscription-based service ($5 per child) that lets children shop on their own for books, apps, games and movies, without surprise bills. If price is your sole determining factor, consider turning your iPhone 3s, 4 or 4s into an iPod Touch. With an Internet connection but no cellphone service, they serve as great mini iPad Minis. If you have a dead iPod Touch 4, you can get new batteries for $80 from Apple. Make sure to fully explore the built-in parental controls on both Apple and Android operating systems. TOY OPTIONS These educational game tablets provide the lowest point of entry, at least in terms of initial cost. VTech’s MobiGo 2 ($50) and the LeapsterGS ($70) are both solid options, considering they come with a suite of onboard activities. VTech’s InnoTab 2 ($80) and Leapfrog’s LeapPad 2 (about $100) take a step closer to the tablet format. You might take this option if (a) your child has never used a multitouch screen, which they will prefer once they’ve used one; (b) you’re just not ready to part with $150 to $200; or (c) you want to ensure your child stays offline. Downloading new content is difficult, and plug-in game cartridges cost $20 to $25. Once you consider the initial purchase, plus four AA batteries, plus games, you’ve already spent enough more than the cost of a mainstream Android tablet, with a limitless supply of apps. VIDEO GAME CONSOLES Major contenders this holiday include the clunky, expensive PlayStation Vita ($250) and three better designed options from the company that pioneered the hand-held computing category — Nintendo. These include the Nintendo DSi ($100), the Nintendo 3DS ($170) and its new big-screen edition, the Nintendo 3DS XL ($200). Most software cartridges for those are games like Mario Tennis Open. But look at it another way: there is content you’ll never find in iTunes or Google Play, like highly coveted Pokémon White Version 2 ($35). You can find more educational titles like brain teasers and Art Academy, where your child can learn to draw in step-by-step tutorials. If you happen to share a home with two or more children, it’s hard to beat the Nintendo DS local play feature, where multiple players can share the same game, as long as they’re in the same room. Based on price, power and app availability, the Nintendo options make more sense, and the DS clamshell design negates the need for a protective silicone bumper. Explore the robust parental controls that are built into the Nintendo DS system. This includes the ability to lock the 3-D options behind a PIN, as well as the ability to control purchases. You will find Angry Birds but not Cut the Rope, and you generally cannot use the DS players to get access to the Web, but you can download arcade classics like Donkey King Jr. for $4. There’s a modified version of Hulu for TV viewing, provided there is Wi-Fi access. When it comes to children’s tablets, hardware is only as good as the software it can run. Your child wants the same thing in a tablet that you do — easy use and access to lots of apps so it always contains a fresh experience. All things considered, the iPad or iPad Mini is still the best children’s tablet, but Android options are closing the gap.


Rejected by Colleges, SAT and ACT Gain High School Acceptance

Abstract: The SAT and the ACT, bugaboos of generations of college applicants, were supposed to shrink in significance as more colleges and universities moved away from requiring standardized test scores for admission. Instead, the companies behind them have pushed into the nearly $700-million-a-year market for federally required tests in public schools, offering the SAT and the ACT even to students who do not plan to go to college. Prompted by a recent change in federal education law, they are competing — and increasingly winning — against exams funded by the Obama administration to become mandatory high school tests, used for ranking school performance. “The testing companies are making a land grab,” said Scott Marion, the executive director of the Center for Assessment, a nonprofit that helps states design and evaluate tests. Long fierce rivals, the testing companies are seizing an opportunity created by political fights over the Common Core, and the exams based on it. But their moves are raising questions about how well the ACT and the SAT measure what students are supposed to be learning in high school, and about equity and fairness. No state illustrates the changing and sometimes contradictory dynamic quite like Delaware. In January, the state board of education announced that it would use the SAT to meet the federal requirement to test high school students. Those students will no longer take Smarter Balanced , one of two national tests the federal government financed to measure how well states were teaching the Common Core, standards for kindergarten through high school that almost every state adopted. The next month, the University of Delaware announced that it would no longer require in-state students to submit SAT scores , citing research that high school grades better predict college success. Delaware’s decision came on the heels of Montana’s announcement in December that high school students would take the ACT instead of Smarter Balanced, and Colorado’s decision to have high school students take the SAT instead of the other federally funded Common Core test, known as Parcc , for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. At least seven other states, including Connecticut and Michigan, have said they will use the SAT or the ACT to meet the federal requirement to test high school students. Legislators in Illinois, Tennessee, Florida and West Virginia have proposed requiring or allowing high school seniors to take the college admissions tests instead of ones tied to common standards. “It’s a little like the Gold Rush,” Mr. Marion said, adding: “For the SAT and ACT, the way they can really compete is getting a whole state to buy in. Berkeley can do what it wants, but if the SAT is in 50 states, guess what, kids are going to take it.” It is hard to calculate the size of the market the testing companies are fighting over. Matthew Chingos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, added up what states spent to satisfy federal testing requirements in 2012 and came up with a total of $669 million. Adding how much they spent on additional tests, he estimated overall spending at $1.7 billion. Some researchers argue that states would have saved money by sticking with the national tests, which the Obama administration paid about $350 million to develop — making them free to states in the early years. But Delaware, for instance, was already paying to provide the SAT to high school students, so it says it will save $100,000 by dropping Smarter Balanced. In a few states like Delaware that were already giving the SAT or ACT to all high school juniors, getting rid of the Common Core test is, in part, an attempt to address complaints about too much testing. In most states, though, it amounts to replacing one test with another. But those states are betting that high school students will see the SAT or ACT as more relevant to their lives than the Common Core tests — that they are more interested in looking ahead to college than back on whether they have mastered what they were supposed to learn in elementary and secondary school. For state politicians, the SAT and ACT are also much less politically fraught. The Common Core has come up against parents who complain of overtesting, students opting out of the tests last spring and conservatives objecting to the standards as a federal intrusion into what they said should be a local issue. Those battles have left only about half the states using one of the national tests. The reauthorization of the federal law regulating public schools, which President Obama signed in December, still requires states to test students annually in Grades 3 through 8, and once in high school, and to test at least 95 percent of all students. But it allowed them to use what the law termed “nationally recognized” assessments, “such as ACT or SAT exams,” for the high school tests. Most of the students opting not to take Common Core tests are in high school, and many high school students were already taking the SAT or the ACT. So states are betting that by switching to those tests, they can have higher participation rates — and stem complaints about onerous testing. “In another time, no one would have raised an eyebrow if kids took both the SAT and the state test in one year,” said Michael Cohen, the president of Achieve, which helped develop the Common Core. “In this political environment, that’s much more complicated. People are running from federally funded tests, and the SAT and ACT look like convenient places to run to.” Even before states fled the national tests, the SAT and the ACT were aggressively moving to gain state contracts. The states paid to offer one of the tests free to all high school juniors, which helped increase the number of students taking them, even as colleges move away from requiring their scores. “They’re selling wholesale instead of retail,” said Bob Schaeffer, the public education director for FairTest, which favors reducing the number of tests in schools. “Instead of dealing with hundreds of thousands of parents or kids one on one with credit cards, you go to Albany or Hartford or Trenton, you deal with a couple of bureaucrats and suddenly you’ve got 100,000 kids or more.” In Florida, the legislator behind the bill that would allow students to take the SAT or the ACT instead of the existing state test said the testing companies had helped write the proposed legislation. Edward Colby, a spokesman for the ACT, said it had “offered support for flexibility” in the new federal law, but did not “actively lobby” for the change. Some states using the ACT or the SAT in high school will continue to use the federally funded Common Core tests for students in Grades 3 through 8. But the push by the college testing companies has undermined the national exams. In February, Parcc, left with only a handful of states using its test, announced that it would reconsider its mission, trying to diversify to attract more states. The shift in the state market opens up opportunities for the college testing companies to sell products beyond the SAT and the ACT. This month, the ACT announced a competitor to the College Board ‘s longstanding Preliminary SAT exams, saying it was intended to be sold to states and school districts looking to prepare students for the ACT. The move toward the college tests has revived longstanding complaints that they favor white students from more affluent families. Also, Mr. Cohen, at Achieve, said it was unclear how well the SAT and the ACT measured the new standards. The ACT says it remains focused on the original purpose of the college tests, which is to predict how well students will do as freshmen; the College Board says the new SAT is more aligned with state standards. The secretary of education for Delaware cited the SAT’s move away from “obscure vocabulary words” in explaining the decision to use it. “Our community was clear that this was in the best interest of our high school juniors,” said the secretary, Steven Godowsky. “And the sooner we could make the switch, the better.”

Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers Parcc