Legal Strategy Fails to Hide Khmer Rouge Torturer’s Pride

Abstract: PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — He is deceptively unassuming, a small man in a neat white shirt, sometimes wearing reading glasses as he studies the stack of legal documents he brings with him every day from his cell to the courtroom. He gives the judges a humble greeting, both palms pressed together, an obsequiousness that has begun to be annoying to some who once suffered at his hands and now sit across the courtroom from him. But in nearly three months of trial proceedings, a harder man has emerged — alert, vigorous, with a self-confidence that has begun to shade into condescension as he corrects a lawyer or a witness about details of his life as the chief torturer of the Khmer Rouge . This is Kaing Guek Eav , 66, known as Duch (pronounced DOIK), the first person to go on trial in the deaths of 1.7 million people from 1975 to 1979 when the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia. Slow progress and other problems surrounding the United Nations-backed tribunal have opened the possibility that Duch may be the only person ever to be tried in one of the worst episodes of mass killing in the past century. If convicted, he would face a possible life sentence for crimes against humanity and war crimes as well as homicide and torture. He is a man who chose his revolutionary name, Duch, to emulate an obedient schoolboy in a children’s book, and he reached the peak of his career overseeing a prison staff that tortured more than 14,000 people and sent almost all of them to their deaths. “I wanted to be a well-disciplined boy,” Duch told the court, “who respected the teachers and did good deeds.” Four higher-ranking leaders await their turns in prison cells, but they are ill and growing older. Both money and political will are in question for a long process that has become shadowed by allegations of corruption and of political interference by the Cambodian government. In the courtroom, Duch has clearly taken pride in the efficiency with which he ran the prison, called Tuol Sleng, or S-21, and he seems to relish his role as the public face of the Khmer Rouge, whose leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998. Talking to journalists before his arrest 10 years ago, Duch said he had decided to confess in order to prove that Tuol Sleng really did exist, rebutting a claim by Pol Pot that it had been only a propaganda fiction created by enemies of the Khmer Rouge. “I could not bear what Pol Pot said so I had to show my face,” he said in court. “For S-21, I was the chairman of that office. The crimes committed at S-21 were under my responsibility!” Under the guidance of an experienced and nimble French lawyer, François Roux, Duch has constructed a complicated bait-and-switch defense since the trial opened in March. It began on his first day on the stand, when, reading a statement in what seemed a rote manner, he took responsibility for the torture and killings, saying, “I would like to express my regret and heartfelt sorrow.” But the culpability he admits to has become more and more nuanced as he distances himself from the worst brutality of the regime and places himself within a chain of command where disobedience often meant death. “The horrendous images of the babies being smashed against the trees, I didn’t recognize it at first,” he testified recently. “But after seeing the photographs I recalled that it had happened. It was done by my subordinates. I do not blame them because this was under my responsibility.” Court analysts say Duch and his legal team will not be able to avoid a conviction and are working to soften his image to produce something less than the maximum penalty of life in prison. “He is winning the case, even though he’ll be convicted,” said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has compiled much of the evidence against him. “He has managed not to let his brutality show,” Mr. Youk Chhang said. “I feel so frustrated. It’s all collective responsibility. ‘Forgive me. I’m sorry.’ It’s well prepared and the public buys it.” A former high school math teacher, Duch seems to have approached the trial with a well-prepared lesson plan and with little patience for those who disagree with him or fail to grasp his version of the material. At one point a judge reminded him that laughter was not an appropriate response to a question. He seems to find satisfaction in evading questions with long, pedantic answers, correcting witnesses and sometimes taunting those who seek to pin him down. “Please do not interrupt me,” he said to one lawyer as he embarked on a new digression. “Since you are asking a question which has already been asked, I am not required to answer.” At a pretrial conference with investigators, Duch seemed almost cocky, according to a former prison guard named Him Huy, who is expected to testify against him. As he left the room, Mr. Him Huy said, Duch looked back and raised one fist, as if to say, “I’m O.K. I will prevail.” This is the complicated, defiant man who is revealing himself in the courtroom — the only one of the defendants to acknowledge guilt, and yet seemingly all the prouder of it. “It raises questions for all of us about how human beings become a part of a project of mass murder,” said Alex Hinton, director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University. According to a psychological profile that formed part of the indictment, the defendant is “meticulous, conscientious, control-oriented, attentive to detail and seeks recognition from his superiors.” Like the good schoolboy who is his namesake, Duch said, “In my entire life, if I do something, I’ll do it properly.” He taught himself how to torture, he said, picking up some beating techniques from Cambodian and French police manuals and improvising the rest through trial and error. He said he frequently had to instruct the young farm boys he recruited as torturers not to get carried away and kill the prisoner. Once the confession was extracted, death was all but inevitable. “Whoever was sent to S-21 was considered to be already dead,” Duch said. But then, to the surprise of the courtroom, Duch said he did not believe most of the confessions his torturers worked so hard to obtain. Some ran to as many as 200 pages, which Duch meticulously annotated like a schoolteacher and sent to his superiors. “I never believed that the confessions I received told the truth,” he said. “At most, they were about 40 percent true.” As for the long lists of supposed accomplices the prisoners were forced to name, Duch said he believed that only 20 percent were genuine. These lists — whether he believed them or not — fed the prison’s killing machine with more arrests, followed by the extraction of more names, followed by more arrests, in a widening purge that spread to top members of the party. “The work expanded, people were arrested illegally, right or wrong,” Duch said. “I considered it evil eating evil eating evil.”

War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity


Computers Abort Private Rocket Launching to Space Station

Abstract: CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The launching of a privately owned cargo rocket heading to the International Space Station was aborted at the last second on Saturday morning. The rocket’s nine engines had ignited, but computers detected a high pressure in the chamber of the center engine and shut them down The rocket is held down during the final engine checks and never left the launching pad. The rocket and its cargo capsule, both built by the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif., represent an important step in NASA ’s evolution to rely more heavily on commercial companies for its human spaceflight program. If the capsule, the Dragon, reaches the space station, it will be first commercial spacecraft to dock there. All previous vehicles, like NASA’s space shuttles and Russia’s Soyuz capsules, were government operated. In the evening, SpaceX officials said they had identified a faulty valve as the problem and said the next launching attempt would be on Tuesday at 3:44 a.m. The flight will be a second test in a $396 million program by SpaceX to develop the cargo ship. If successful, SpaceX will then enter a $1.6 billion contract for a dozen cargo flights to the station. The SpaceX flight is carrying 1,000 pounds of nonessential cargo, mostly food and clothing. NASA signed the development agreement with SpaceX in 2006 as part of an effort to encourage new commercial space ventures and to reduce launching costs for the space agency. A second company with a NASA cargo contract, the Orbital Sciences Corporation of Vienna, Va., hopes to get its first test flight off the ground in the second half of this year. The space agency now also wants to turn to commercial companies for the launching of its astronauts. SpaceX hopes an upgraded Dragon will capture at least some of that business. After the retirement of the space shuttles last year, NASA astronauts currently must ride on Russian Soyuz rockets to get into space.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration


Russians to Shut Reactor That Produces Bomb Fuel

Abstract: MOSCOW — Russia ’s state nuclear energy corporation is expected to switch off a nuclear reactor on Sunday in a closed city in Siberia. The reactor has been producing weapons-grade plutonium for four decades, a senior American nonproliferation official said Saturday. The reactor, ADE-4, is one of two in the city of Seversk that have been extraneous remnants of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program since the cold war. For 15 years, they produced plutonium that the Kremlin neither needed nor wanted. Opened in secret in the 1960s to feed the arms race, the reactors have continued to operate because of their peculiar construction as defense-industry suppliers. The Defense Ministry stopped purchasing plutonium in 1993, rendering the reactors’ primary purpose obsolete. But the reactors could not be closed, and plutonium was still produced, because the reactors were also a primary source of heat and power to the bitterly cold regions along the Tomsk River, where no equivalent utility sources had been built. Russian energy officials said switching off the bomb-fuel reactors, which are powered by uranium and produce plutonium as a byproduct, would have meant cutting off a large fraction of the utilities for the cities of Seversk and Tomsk. The cities have a combined population of about 600,000. “That is obviously critical when you are facing temperatures of 40 below,” said William H. Tobey, deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency in the Department of Energy that coordinates nonproliferation programs. Under a cooperative program between the Russians and the Americans, the United States has provided $285 million to underwrite the refurbishment of a coal plant to provide an alternate utility service to the region, Mr. Tobey said. The plant has been refurbished enough to switch off the first reactor this week. It is expected to be completed and in full service by June, allowing the second reactor, ADE-5, to be turned off as well. Although an agreement on the program was reached in 1997 and work on the coal plant began in 2005, Russia notified the United States of its plans to turn off the reactor only on Friday, two American officials said. It had been expected to close later this year. Officials at Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy corporation, could not be reached Saturday. Mr. Tobey declined to say how much plutonium the reactors had produced, saying that Russia had opposed the public release of data related to its nuclear programs. But closing the reactors, he said, would prevent “tons of plutonium” from being produced, he said, enough to make hundreds of nuclear weapons. Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand have also donated money, about $30 million, to replace Russia’s remaining plutonium-producing reactors with fossil-fuel plants, Mr. Tobey said. The country’s only other plutonium-producing reactor, in Zheleznogorsk, is scheduled to be switched off and replaced with a fossil-fuel plant in 2010.


2011 U.S. Open: In Game of Physical Prowess, the Mind Matters

Abstract: Jo-Wilfried Tsonga was talking about how a tennis match is won between the ears as much as between the lines. “My game, you know, is very good when I have nothing in my head, when I just play my game,” he said Monday after defeating Mardy Fish in five sets at the United States Open . Off to the side, a photographer was working away, his camera’s motor drive making a sound as if crickets were invading the room. The noise caused other journalists to turn their heads in his direction, but Tsonga kept talking. He said that being “really, really strong in the head,” as he put it, meant he was not thinking “about other things like the wind, people in the box.” Tsonga’s voice trailed off as he joined the others in looking at the crouching photographer. He smiled and added, “All this stuff.” Some players in the Open draw have faster serves than others or more penetrating ground strokes or better touch at the net. But at the elite level, those differences are negligible. Those who succeed are the ones who are really, really strong in the head. “Physically, there is not much difference between No. 78 in the world and Nos. 2, 3, 1, 5,” said Novak Djokovic, the top-ranked men’s player, who has lost two matches all year. “Everybody’s working hours and hours on the court.” He added, “It’s a mental ability to handle the pressure, to play well at the right moments, and that’s why I think there is a certain difference with top-10 players.” Djokovic’s fourth-round victory against Alexandr Dolgopolov, the No. 22 seed, was a case in point. Extended to a tie breaker in the first set, he weathered four set points by Dolgopolov and prevailed, 16-14, when Dolgopolov hit a forehand out after a long rally. “I think mental strength you get over the years playing on the tour, getting experience, and using that experience in a right way,” said Djokovic, who turned professional in 2003. The brain, like a muscle, gets stronger when pushed to the point of failure. In “Rafa,” his recently published autobiography, Rafael Nadal articulated what becomes patently obvious to anyone at the Open who watches the parade of players hitting on the practice courts. “If you watch the No. 10 player in the world and the No. 500 in training, you won’t necessarily be able to tell who is higher up in the rankings,” Nadal wrote. “Without the pressure of competition, they’ll move and hit the ball much the same way.” But in the caldron of competition, cooler, clearer heads prevail. Consider No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki’s three-set, three-hour match against 15th seeded Svetlana Kuznetsova. Wozniacki’s backhand brought her back from a 4-1 deficit in the second set, but her 13 winners off that wing do not tell the whole story of her 6-7 (6), 7-5, 6-1 victory. Her tactical adjustments, which included stepping closer to the baseline to become more of an aggressor, would have mattered little without her ability to play the right shot at a critical moment, to stay relaxed on the tensest points, to believe she was going to win even when she was eight points from defeat. “It’s important to stay positive,” Wozniacki said, adding: “Tennis is a funny sport. You have to just keep going.” Nobody at this Open has shown more staying power than Samantha Stosur, whose 7-6 (5), 6-7 (5) 7-5 victory against Nadia Petrova was the longest women’s match in tournament history, clocking in at 3 hours 16 minutes. She needed another two and a half hours to dispatch Maria Kirilenko in the fourth round. Their match included a 32-point tie breaker in the second set, the longest for women in tournament history. Stosur came out on the losing end in the tie breaker but stormed back to advance, 6-2, 6-7 (15), 6-3, outlasting her reputation for being physically buff but mentally fragile. “I haven’t always been known for my competitiveness out there, to really fight hard,” Stosur said. She added: “It’s definitely very rewarding. I know now I can do it.” Which comes first, self-belief or success? It’s the chicken-egg question of sports. For Janko Tipsarevic, lighting his pilot light of certainty has led him, at 27, to a career-high ranking of No. 20. “My mental strength is better this year because of the determination that I want to improve,” Tipsarevic said. “When you have certain goals, good things are happening to you because you’re making the right decisions without making an effort.” Mardy Fish made the effort to get physically fit and found that the discipline required to lose 30 pounds carried over to the court. He sticks to his game plans the way he does to his diet and has diligently pursued intermediate goals, which is how he found himself the top-ranked American, at eighth over all, in the Open. In the fourth round, Fish ran into Tsonga, who did a better job of ignoring the gusty winds, the loud crowd and the cumulative fatigue of another endless summer. He removed the clutter from his head, clearing his path to success.

United States Open (Tennis)
Tennis
Tsonga Jo-Wilfried
Djokovic Novak
Wozniacki Caroline


When Office Technology Overwhelms, Get Organized

Abstract: HOW do you think most workers would respond if you asked them, “Do you feel more productive now than you did several years ago?” I doubt that the answer would be a resounding yes. In fact, even as workplace technology and processes steadily improve, many professionals feel less productive than ever. It may seem a paradox, but these very tools are undermining our ability to get work done. They are causing us to become paralyzed by the dizzying number of options that they spawn. Is there a way out of this quandary? Yes, but it’s not going to come from the usual quarters. To be successful in the new world of work, we need to create a structure for capturing, clarifying and organizing all the forces that assail us, and to ensure time and space for thinking, reflecting and decision making. Most professionals are still using their subjective, internal mental worlds to try to keep it all together, but that’s a poor way to navigate the new work environment. It results in unclear, distracted and disorganized thinking, and leaves frustration, stress and undermined self-confidence in its wake. Workers need a set of best practices that is sorely lacking in the professional world. Without it, we are seeing a growing angst — even a sense of desperation — in the workplace, as more employees feel that there is no rest and no way out. (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see resurging interest in Sartre’s books and Beckett’s plays as a result.) These are the kinds of comments I hear in my work as a consultant: • “I’m overwhelmed, and with all the changes going on here, it’s getting worse. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do my job.” • “I have new responsibilities that demand creative and strategic thought, but I’m not getting to them.” • “I have too many meetings to attend, and I can’t get any ‘real’ work done.” • “I have too many e-mails, and, given day-to-day urgencies, the backlog keeps growing.” • “I feel like I’m not giving the right amount of attention to what’s most important.” And here’s a common kicker, for those willing to admit it: “I just can’t keep going like this.” One could argue that these kinds of complaints are as old as work itself, and that no matter how productive we are, we’ll always find something to grumble about. That’s human nature. But a closer examination of these grievances reveals that they all relate to a sense of suboptimal performance. The core message is, “I don’t feel good about what I’m not getting done.” TO better understand the realities of the accelerated work world, it helps to remember how far we have come. Imagine if you didn’t have a spreadsheet on your computer: How much effort would you need to produce the computations you can now perform in minutes? Fifty years ago, how many hours would you have spent wandering library stacks and poring over volumes of materials to find information you can now get in a few moments online? When there was no next-day delivery, e-mail or Web conferencing, how much energy would you expend traveling to meetings to discuss issues, make decisions and produce results now accomplished in short order, with people all around the world? Productivity gains have not been limited to technology and transportation. Over time, better understanding of business processes has allowed companies to accomplish more with less effort and resources, and with more focus on quality, creativity and innovation. And support for workers’ satisfaction continues to spread, in forms like flexible schedules, more comfortable office space, and a range of professional and personal development programs. Today, we really do live in a much cooler world in which to work, travel and communicate. So if we’re getting so much more bang for the buck, with this exponential leap forward in technology and support, why aren’t we reaping the benefits of productivity day to day as individuals? The problem is that better overall productivity in an organization may not translate into increased productivity for an individual worker. Though one person may now be producing the previous results of three, she’s not being paid three times as much. That’s the whole point of companies using technology and other improvements: fewer people are now needed for the same results. But the workers who remain also tend to have much more responsibility. And they can’t just comfort themselves with the notion that their companies are more efficient than they used to be, because all of their competitors have the same new tools, and are using them to gain any advantage they can. Cranking out widgets is one thing; deciding which widgets need cranking first, and in what quantity, is quite another — especially if you are now charged with continually improving the system, or determining whether you should even be cranking out those widgets at all. It can be a recipe for frustration, as employees feel overwhelmed by their companies’ very progress. And the problems and logistics of workers’ personal lives add yet another layer of complexity. So, given all the obstacles, how do you find your way to a productive state — the feeling that you’re doing exactly what you should be doing, with a sense of relaxed and focused control? What’s needed is a system that creates space to think, to reflect, to review, to integrate and to connect dots. As Dr. Nicolas von Rosty, head of executive development at Siemens, once told me, “You must be able to be present, not distracted, to be able to trust your inner wisdom and make quick decisions without others’ input or waiting for perfection.” How do you find the space needed to do that? By integrating all the chaos of the workplace and staying focused on the most important things, as they relate to your goals, direction, values and desired outcomes. You must constantly recalibrate your resources to generate the best results, and to say “not now” to what’s less important. WE are not born doing this. It’s a focus that must be learned. And its results won’t show up by themselves. You can, however, use a sequence of five events to optimize your focus and resources, whether you’re trying to get it together in your kitchen, your conversation, your contract, your company or your country. • Capture everything that has your attention, in your work and your personal life, in writing. Maybe it’s your departmental budget, a meeting with the new boss, an overdue vacation, or just the need to buy new tires and a jar of mayonnaise. For the typical professional, it can take one to six hours to “empty the attic” of your head. It may seem daunting, but this exercise invariably leads to greater focus and control. • Clarify what each item means to you. Decide what results you want and what actions — if any — are required. If you simply make a list and stop there, without putting the items in context, you’ll be stuck in the territory of compulsive list-making, which ultimately won’t relieve the pressure. What’s the next action when it comes to your budget? The next step in arranging your vacation? Applying this simple but rigorous model puts you in the driver’s seat; otherwise, your lists will hold your psyche hostage. And keep in mind that much progress can be made and stress relieved by applying the magic two-minute rule — that any action that can be finished in two minutes should be done in the moment. • Organize reminders of your resulting to-do lists — for the e-mails you need to send, the phone calls you need to make, the meetings you need to arrange, the at-home tasks you need to complete. Park the inventory of all your projects in a convenient place. • Regularly review and reflect on the whole inventory of your commitments and interests, and bring it up to date. As your needs change, what can move to the front burner, and what can go further back? Make these decisions while considering your overall principles, goals and accountabilities. Schedule a two-hour, weekly operational review, allowing space to clean up, catch up and do some reflective overseeing of the landscape, for all work and personal goals, commitments and activities. • Finally, deploy your attention and resources appropriately. Does our productivity really depend on this basic set of behaviors and thought processes? So it seems. Everyone is already half-trying to do all of this, all the time. But many people just haven’t identified the process, or applied it. I have never seen anyone apply these practices, with some degree of commitment and application, and not find significant improvement in focus, control and results. The technology, the organizational goals, the quirkiness and turbulence of external realities — these become things to manage, not a hoped-for source of productivity itself. I have found that most professionals take action based on whatever is the latest and loudest in their universe, as opposed to making a conscious, intelligent choice springing from the model I’ve described. This day-to-day, minute-to-minute arena of “reaction versus pro-action” is where the scales tip to “productive” or “unproductive.” ONE possible path to that feeling of control is to return to a make-it-or-move-it existence. Find work that requires little if any thinking, but merely reacts and responds to what presents itself. That’s a real option: I once met a senior vice president in a global pharmaceutical company who, after taking an early retirement package, became a duck at Disney World. In such a job, it was probably much easier to have a good day at work, and then leave it behind. But most people won’t choose that path, partly because such jobs seldom pay what the figure-it-out-yourself ones do. And we need this second kind of job if we are to afford the children, education, hobbies, clothes and urban lifestyles whose options are themselves contributing to life’s overwhelming complexities. And even if you tried to downgrade your work to something simpler, you’d probably bring along the itch to make it something more. I’ve often made the point in my seminars that having a “bait shop in the Berkshires ” is always an option for making life less stressful. But a client once told me that a friend of his had actually done that — by cashing out of Wall Street, going to the Berkshires and buying a fishing camp. When my client visited him, the guy was wrapped around his computer, on the Internet, trying to find the right baits to buy and sell, trying to figure out how to advertise his camp, and so on. In other words, our attraction to a world of infinite possibility, information and complexity is here to stay. The challenge is how to participate productively in this new and turbulent world, and not be paralyzed by it.


British Retailers Accused of Fixing Bra Prices

Abstract: LONDON — Three of the biggest British department store chains were accused Friday of colluding on prices with a maker of sports bras. The Office of Fair Trading, a British competition regulator, alleged that the chains — John Lewis, Debenhams and House of Fraser — were involved in price-fixing with a bra manufacturer, DB Apparel, in violation of competition law. DB Apparel, a private company based in France, entered into several agreements with the stores to set a minimum resale price for its Shock Absorber brand of sports bras between 2008 and 2011, the O.F.T. alleged. “The O.F.T. takes allegations of price-fixing seriously,” Ann Pope, a senior director at the regulator, said in a statement. “Resale price maintenance limits competition between retailers and can lead to consumers paying higher prices.” DBA’s Shock Absorber sports bra range, which in 2000 featured the tennis player Anna Kournikova in an advertising campaign with the slogan “Only the ball should bounce,” was one of the top-selling brands in Britain, with a market share of 15 percent during the years in question, the O.F.T. said. The four companies have until November to reply to the accusations. The O.F.T. is then expected to reach a final decision next year and could impose fines of up to 10 percent of the companies’ worldwide revenue. The British underwear market grew 1.5 percent to about 2.7 billion pounds, or $4.3 billion, last year, according to the market research company Mintel. Growth continues to be subdued and competition high “as a result of the wide availability of low-priced” goods, Mintel said in a report in June. DB Apparel said it rejected any allegations by the O.F.T. “We have been transparent with U.K. authorities since the beginning of this process and will continue to defend ourselves vigorously in this investigation,” the company said. A statement from John Lewis said the company would cooperate fully in the investigation. Clotilde Gros, a spokeswoman for House of Fraser, said it was cooperating and was “confident that we have been operating within all laws and regulations.” Debenhams said it rejected the O.F.T. findings but would not comment further. “The matter is being dealt with by its external lawyers,” the company said. DB Apparel manufactures and distributes branded underwear mainly in Europe but also in Russia and Africa. Its other brands include Wonderbra, Fila and Unno. The department stores sell clothes, personal-care products and some furniture and electronics to Britain’s middle class. All three have multistory flagship stores on London’s Oxford Street, the capital’s main shopping avenue. Debenhams, which started as a haberdashery in London in 1778, now has 240 stores in 28 countries. It said earlier this week that year-over-year sales for the 12 months that ended on Aug. 31 rose 2 percent. The company is to report more detailed earnings next month. Its shares fell 1.4 percent by midday on Friday in London. House of Fraser has 61 stores in Britain and Ireland and annual sales of 1.2 billion pounds. The company, which is privately held, reported a loss for the 12 months that ended on Jan. 26. John Lewis is mainly owned by its employees through a partnership structure and is the smallest department store chain of the three by number of stores. The company, which was founded by John Spedan Lewis in 1864, also owns Waitrose, a relatively upmarket grocery store chain. The 39 John Lewis shops and 297 Waitrose stores had annual sales of more than 9.5 billion pounds last year.

Lingerie and Underwear
Competition law
Office of Fair Trading Great Britain


More Jobs to Be Cut at Alcatel After Loss

Abstract: Alcatel-Lucent , the troubled telecommunications equipment maker, said yesterday that it would cut 4,000 more jobs to reduce costs and announced the departure of its chief financial officer in the wake of its third consecutive quarterly loss. The company also said it would reorganize its core business of selling equipment to network operators. The job cuts, equal to 5 percent of Alcatel-Lucent’s work force, come on top of 12,500 cuts already announced. The results deepened the crisis at the company, formed by the acquisition of Lucent Technologies, based in New Jersey, by Alcatel of France for about $13.4 billion 18 months ago. Instead of increasing its competitive advantage, cultural battles and turf wars threaten to leave it behind in a highly competitive industry, current and former employees said. “The problem is cultural,” said Johann Günther, a former board member of Alcatel Austria. “The French and the Americans have hugely different ways of doing business. Within Alcatel-Lucent, there is resistance to making the tough decisions to rationalize the business because each side is protecting its own turf.” The slow transformation of an organization with 79,000 employees in 130 countries has benefited competitors like Ericsson, Cisco Systems and the newly formed Nokia Siemens Networks, which have gained market share since Alcatel acquired Lucent, according to Synergy Research, an American company that tracks the industry. The company said its loss for the quarter that ended Sept. 30 was 258 million euros, or $372 million. Sales fell 11 percent, to 4.35 billion euros ($6.27 billion). Under pressure from shareholders, Patricia F. Russo , Alcatel-Lucent’s chief executive, said yesterday that the company’s chief financial officer, Jean-Pascal Beaufret, would leave the company. She said the additional job cuts would save 400 million euros ($576.4 million), bringing the company’s total cost savings to 2.1 billion euros ($3 billion) by 2009. In a conference call, Ms. Russo rejected contentions that the company’s merger so far had been confusing and ineffective for its employees, saying critics have failed to reflect on the success of efforts so far. In some cases, critics simply were on the losing end of the merger, she said. “There may be a few areas where there is a lack of clarity about rules and responsibilities,” she said. “But we are working hard to make sure there is real clarity.” Ms. Russo announced yesterday the most concrete changes in company management since the merger began. The chief financial officer, Mr. Beaufret, a 29-year Alcatel veteran, is being succeeded by Hubert de Pesquidoux, the head of Alcatel’s enterprise business and the former head of Alcatel’s North American business. In a conference call with investors, Ms. Russo called Beaufret a “terrific professional who has done a yeoman’s job in this first phase of the transition.” Ms. Russo also appointed a seven-member management committee to oversee the merger and take personal responsibility for cost-cutting goals. The previous leadership team had 21 members. Also, Alcatel-Lucent is reducing its geographic divisions from four to two, creating a unit for the Americas and one for the rest of the world. In the company’s core carrier group, which sells equipment to network operators, Alcatel-Lucent is reducing 11 business divisions to seven. “I think that knowing what I know now, and assessing the situation, I think I wasn’t moved to simplify and streamline areas of our organization earlier in the year,” Ms. Russo said. “If I knew what I know now, I would have moved to do that earlier in the year.” Alcatel-Lucent managed to maintain its market share in the second quarter at 9.7 percent, according to Synergy Research. Price cuts by competitors, combined with restrained spending by United States telecommunications operators, are raising pressure on Alcatel-Lucent. Technological advances also threaten to undermine Alcatel-Lucent’s position. Spending on wireless broadband networks and optical fiber-based systems is rising faster than investment in traditional copper-based, fixed-line DSL networks, where Alcatel-Lucent has been the market leader, according to Synergy.

Layoffs and Job Reductions
Executives and Management
Alcatel-Lucent
Russo Patricia F


Big East Pays the Price for Not Embracing Football

Abstract: Beginning Tuesday, teams and fans will converge on Madison Square Garden for the 32nd Big East Conference men’s basketball tournament. Since the conference began using the Garden for its annual carnival in 1983, the tournament has become a popular launching pad for March Madness. Last year, a record 11 men’s teams were invited from the Big East to the N.C.A.A. tournament, and Connecticut went on to win the national title. But this year’s tournament takes place amid volatile conference shifts that make a mockery of geography and threaten the conference’s integrity and possibly its very survival. The Big East was formed as a basketball-only conference in 1979, and it had a great Plan A. Plan A was Dave Gavitt’s dream of creating a superconference on the East Coast — Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Washington — that would dominate college basketball. Gavitt’s dream became the Big East and the Big East tournament, which continues to sell out the Garden 29 years later. There was no Plan B — rather, no Plan F, for football. Now the conference is paying the price for ignoring the implications of not having big-time football in its portfolio. The conference has become a bad-luck ship, losing crew members and passengers left and right. Miami left, Boston College left. West Virginia is leaving, Pittsburgh is leaving. The most crushing blow of all is that Syracuse is leaving. West Virginia will play in the Big 12, Pitt and Syracuse in the Atlantic Coast Conference. No conference has played better basketball than the Big East; other conferences have played college basketball longer, but none better. In 1985, the Big East had three teams reach the Final Four, and two played for the national championship, with Villanova winning the title. Success invariably breeds overconfidence. This may be why the Big East founders were so opposed to having Plan B. Who needed Plan B when Plan A was working so fabulously? They did not contemplate a situation in which the Big East would be scrambling, in which basketball wouldn’t be enough to sustain the conference. “I think that people for the most part didn’t understand how big and important football was,” the former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese said in a recent interview. “It really drove the cart.” If the architects of the conference had known then what they know now, what would they have done differently? Tranghese said: “In hindsight, you say the league had 20-something pretty good years when you look at it, but now with what’s going on — you look at it in hindsight, I think the question is pretty interesting. I don’t know how to answer it.” For all of the league’s success, it now realizes, perhaps too late, that football is king. No matter how many cheering fans, no matter how many teams are invited to the N.C.A.A. tournament, without a hefty television contract for football, the Big East will fall from the ranks of the 1 percent of the college sports elite. Tranghese tried to tell the Big East’s university presidents and athletic directors as much as early as 1989 when he was Gavitt’s assistant. Gavitt thought the conference needed to bring Penn State into the fold. Penn State was an independent at the time, looking for the security of a conference. The membership voted no, with St. John’s, Villanova and Georgetown leading the resistance. At the end of the meeting, Gavitt asked Tranghese what he thought about the decision. “I said, ‘We will all rue the day about this decision,’ ” Tranghese said. “I understood how big football was. I didn’t understand how big it was going to become. “At that point, the Big East had so much success in the ’80s, everybody sort of forgot about it. But I felt looking back on the history of the Big East, that was probably the biggest mistake we made.” Penn State joined the Big Ten in 1989, and the move immediately set off a tidal wave that in many ways continues today: the Southeastern Conference began talking expansion, the A.C.C. began talking expansion and for the first time, Syracuse and B.C. began talking about leaving the Big East to find a home in a strong football conference (they were independents in the sport). Tranghese was hired to follow Gavitt in 1990. In 1991, the Big East began playing football. The league had no choice. It had to look at football or break up. The conference presidents commissioned a study to determine whether the Big East should stay intact or disband. The turmoil in the college football establishment was cresting — you were in or you were out. The Big East had taken in Miami to get the big-name football program it desperately needed. Now there was pressure to take on more football-playing universities: Rutgers, West Virginia, Virginia Tech. The study recommend that the Big East stay together. Tranghese had misgivings even then. “I don’t think they envisioned any idea of all this jumping around taking place,” he said. “I thought at that point, our league should have given very serious consideration to separating,” Tranghese said. “From where I was sitting, the difficulty of keeping everything together — some people playing football, some people not playing football — was a challenge.” The Big East added Rutgers and West Virginia in 1995, Virginia Tech in 2000. Big East basketball remained solid, but football was mostly a quagmire of mediocrity — as it is today. When the conference began to negotiate a new television contract, Miami was on probation, “so we got hammered,” Tranghese said. Miami and Boston College decided to leave in 2003. Their departures, and eventually that of Virginia Tech, were devastating. “For me, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever been through,” Tranghese said. “It wasn’t fun. I saw a lot of people who were hurt by it. People’s existence in athletics was being threatened, and I just wasn’t willing to go through that again.” Tranghese retired in 2009. He knew there would be more expansion and didn’t want to go through it. “I knew it was coming; the handwriting was on the wall,” he said. “I didn’t know if it was going to be a day, a week or a month, but I knew it was coming and I just refused to sit there and go through it again.” The Big East will negotiate a new television contract next year. Even before Pittsburgh and Syracuse announced that they would be leaving for the A.C.C., the Big East’s TV contract lagged behind the A.C.C., Pacific-12, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC packages. The losses of Syracuse and Pitt were more devastating than the Boston College and Miami departures. “That was a tremendous blow,” Tranghese said. “Syracuse has been at the heart of Big East basketball. “I have watched Jim Boeheim coach, and I can’t even comprehend Jim coaching in the A.C.C. It’s like a foreign thought. To be honest with you, my fondest hope is I’d love to see Syracuse win the national championship and Jim get the heck out because I hope he never coaches a game in that league.” Not only that, Boeheim may be on the bench in Madison Square Garden as an A.C.C. coach. There was talk among A.C.C. officials about holding a future tournament at the Garden. Who knows how much of that is trash-talking — dancing on the Big East shield — and how much is legitimate market share now that Boston College, Syracuse and Pittsburgh are in the A.C.C. fold. What a nasty business. While the adults who oversee this multibillion-dollar enterprise preach sportsmanship to young athletes, the backroom business is more predatory than ever. “Maybe eventually, there will be a backward revolution where people wind up being with people where there is some geographic sense to it all,” Tranghese said. “It just seems that there’s this arms race to get bigger and more powerful.” Sports mirrors real life.

Big East Conference
Basketball (College)
Football (College)
Tranghese Mike
Gavitt Dave
Syracuse University
University of Pittsburgh
NCAA Basketball Championships (Men)


Yankees Reach Goal Set by Torre

Abstract: TORONTO, Sept. 11 — The path to the playoffs is now in front of the Yankees . It took the bulk of the season, but they finally reached a goal Manager Joe Torre had emphasized since the team was struggling. With a 9-2 thrashing of the Toronto Blue Jays on Tuesday, the Yankees lifted their record to 20 games over .500, at 82-62. They trail Boston by five games in the American League East, but with a four-game edge on Detroit in the wild-card race, they are just where they want to be. “That’s been my number — 20 and above,” Torre said. “When you’re at 20, then you have to be seriously considering playing in October. Right now, we’re in a situation where we have our fate in our hands. We don’t need any help. We just go out there and keep winning ballgames, and we’ll be playing next month.” Things are going so well now that the Yankees’ star slugger, Alex Rodriguez, managed two hits without getting the ball out of the infield. Rodriguez’s streak of five games with a home run came to an end, but that hardly stopped the Yankees’ momentum. The Yankees have not lost since Labor Day, running their winning streak to six. Phil Hughes sparkled for most of his six innings, and Jason Giambi snapped a 1-for-22 skid with a grand slam in the fifth inning. Jorge Posada also homered, reaching base four times and scoring three runs. Posada, whose contract expires after the season, has a .338 average and could become the first catcher in history over the age of 35 to hit .330 with at least 20 homers and 85 runs batted in. Considering his position, his age and the length of the season, Posada is holding up remarkably well. “Nobody’s fresh,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anybody here that’s fresh. You’ve just got to go out and play. These games mean a lot.” The Yankees were last at .500 on July 13, when they were 44-44 and just starting a soft portion of their schedule. They finish with 19 games against their four division rivals, including the sagging Blue Jays, who have lost six of eight and will not start their ace, Roy Halladay, in this series. Hughes had not won in five starts, but he pitched well in his last game, allowing only a two-run homer over six innings. This time, he struck out his first batter and then no more, but stayed aggressive with his fastball and used it for fly outs and pop-ups. “I didn’t have that swing-and-miss fastball tonight, but I was able to battle through and give us a quality start,” said Hughes, who allowed one earned run. “Sometimes I’ll pitch a little bit better when I don’t have it,” Hughes added. “I’ll tend not to overthrow as much, use my off-speed pitches and locate my fastball. Today was definitely a positive, because it showed I can go out there and pitch, not just throw and get away with stuff.” Hughes allowed all three of his hits and walks within the first 11 batters. He retired 13 of his last 14, and the only one who reached base did so on an error by Rodriguez. Hughes pitched with a lead for five of his innings. A bloop double by Posada started a three-run rally in the second, and in the third, Posada lined his 20th homer and boosted his R.B.I. total to 85. In the fifth, Posada walked with one out to bring up Giambi, who has 20 home runs at the Rogers Center, his highest total in any park where he has played only road games. Tuesday’s came on a 3-2 fastball on Shaun Marcum’s 90th and final pitch. Rodriguez, the runner at second, shifted a few steps off the base and turned to watch the ball’s flight toward left center. He bounced toward third until the ball cleared the wall, and then trotted home with the rest of the runners. Giambi had broken the game open, at 8-2, and given a reminder of how much more dangerous the Yankees can be when he is swinging well. “Jason could carry a team,” Damon said. “He’s done that in the past, and even last year, when things weren’t going well for us. People look at our team and the accomplishments of some of our players here, and they can kind of forget about how great a hitter Jason is. If he’s in the seven hole, that just makes our lineup so much better.” INSIDE PITCH Outfielder Shelley Duncan left the team to fly back to New York, where a team doctor will examine him. Duncan has discomfort in his lower abdominal wall, a feeling he attributes to a hard slide here last month, according to Joe Torre. ... Hideki Matsui went 0 for 4 with a sacrifice fly and has just five hits in his past 45 at-bats.

New York Yankees
Baseball
Toronto Blue Jays
Hughes Phil
Rodriguez Alex
Giambi Jason


Germany Begins to Shed Its Role as E.U. Integrator

Abstract: BRUSSELS — Resisting a bailout for Greece, digging in over economic policy and opposing parts of a strategy for Europe’s growth, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany will arrive Thursday at a European Union summit meeting ready to play an unfamiliar role: the bloc’s naysayer. Once the invisible glue that bound the Union, German policy is now being dictated by less idealistic priorities rooted firmly by national interests. The two-day meeting in Brussels will be shadowed by the Greek debt crisis, and Berlin is expected to agree to efforts to aid Athens only if it can impose strict conditions. Meanwhile, Germany may find itself under pressure over its refusal to help its neighbors by stoking domestic economic demand, and over its objections to parts of a new European Union strategy to prompt higher growth in the next decade. Berlin’s tough line over Greece, and a suggestion by Mrs. Merkel that a mechanism should be created to eject countries from the euro zone if they break the rules, has shocked its allies. “The debate in Germany over Greece is polluting the atmosphere and creating anti-European feeling,” said Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister and leader of the centrist group ALDE in the European Parliament. “In the space of a few weeks, we are destroying all our efforts to bring Europe closer together,” Mr. Verhofstadt said Wednesday, adding that, after the reunification of the country, “there is certainly a new Germany.” German analysts have noticed the change, too. Joachim Fritz-Vannahme, Europe director of the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German research organization that focuses on democratic reform, said that Mrs. Merkel “finds herself in opposition to more or less all of the E.U.” “In a very prominent way,” he added, “the German government is saying, ‘Our national interest comes first. We behave like all the others do.”’ Germany was historically a main motor of European integration, a project conceived as one of Franco-German reconciliation in the aftermath of World War II. But leaders of the largest economy in Europe, and therefore the biggest contributor to the Union, began to take a more assertive line more than a decade ago when Chancellor Helmut Kohl was replaced by Gerhard Schröder, a politician from a younger generation. At times during her period in office, Mrs. Merkel has asserted strong European leadership — on climate change, for example — but today’s crop of issues has prompted a different reflex. “This is certainly farewell to the Germany of Kohl, which was, at the end of the day, ready to pay with a check for stability within the E.U.,” Mr. Fritz-Vannahme said. Several factors are at play. Mrs. Merkel’s opposition to some of the targets proposed for the Union’s 2020 economic strategy is based on Germany’s constitutional arrangements. Education, one of the areas identified, is the responsibility of powerful regional administrators, whom Mrs. Merkel wants to consult before striking a deal. There are stresses, meanwhile, within the new coalition government that have led to deals apparently done by the country’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, then being undone in Berlin. But the deeper issues relate to Germany’s economic policy. Fearing that any bailout of Greece could break German constitutional or domestic law — and cost Berlin billions of euros — German support for any emergency mechanism is contingent on others meeting its tough terms. Those terms include a statement that intervention would be a last resort, that the International Monetary Fund would be involved and that there will be new rules to prevent any repeat of the crisis. One E.U. diplomat, who was not authorized to speak publicly, asserted: “The Germans are saying, ‘We have had 10 years of the euro. What has happened is proof that this is not working.”’ Nicolas Jabko, research director at the Center for International Studies and Research at Sciences Po in Paris, said that different approaches to the Greek issue from France and Germany highlight the two countries’ divergent economic models. While Germany pursues tight fiscal discipline, wage moderation, export and supply-side-driven growth, France has used more consumer demand and deficit spending to post its moderate growth rates. Mr. Jabko said that comments last week by the French finance minister, Christine Lagarde — during an interview in The Financial Times newspaper in which she criticized the German economic model — were unusually blunt and probably futile. The comments infuriated German officials by reviving memories of decades-old debates about which economic model Europe should follow. The stakes are high as European Union leaders prepare to discuss over dinner Thursday how to deal with countries that have “persistently large current account deficits,” Mr. Jabko said. “The future of European economic and monetary union is at stake, and it is futile to howl against German egotism or Greek laziness,” he said. Mrs. Merkel’s call for the right to exclude countries like Greece actually seems linked to domestic politics before an important regional election in North Rhine-Westphalia in May. Polls suggest that the governing coalition could lose to a liberal combination of Social Democrats, Greens and the Left party. “Many German electors, themselves constantly asked to do more for salary moderation, don’t see why Germany should aid a country that has never imposed fiscal discipline,” Mr. Jabko said. That widespread sentiment means that, though she may strike some deals in Brussels this week, Ms. Merkel will do so from a hard-nosed German perspective. “Her argument can be clearly defined as one of national interest,” Mr. Fritz-Vannahme said, “and our national interest is no longer defined as the same thing a Europe’s interest.”

Germany
Merkel Angela
European Union
Greece
Brussels (Belgium)


Ads Use Famous Figures to Put a Face on a Problem

Abstract: As a campaign for a school for students in grades 5 through 12 seeks to encourage parents to enroll their children, it also has a larger purpose: helping to change perceptions about students who are described with terms like learning disabilities, learning differences, special needs and special education. The campaign is for Bridges Academy, in the Studio City section of Los Angeles, which calls itself a school for the twice exceptional , or 2e — that is, students with high abilities who are judged to be talented, gifted or highly gifted and also dealing with conditions like dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, Asperger syndrome, dysgraphia and problems in processing audio or visual information. The campaign presents famous achievers from history — like Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Leonardo da Vinci, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, Michelangelo, Wolfgang Mozart and George Washington — who are identified as “believed to have been twice exceptional, or 2e.” “At Bridges Academy, we are completely devoted to the social, emotional, intellectual, academic and creative growth of our 2e students,” the ads declare. “After all, we could be teaching this generation’s Leonardo da Vinci” (or Darwin, or Emerson, and so forth). The campaign carries a theme -- “Educating the exceptional ²” -- that began as a phrase that appears numerous times on the website of Bridges Academy . The school also has a division called The 2e Center for Research and Professional Development. The campaign is being created pro bono by an agency in New York named the Terri & Sandy Solution . The campaign includes print ads, online ads, brochures and posters. There are also materials that will be used internally at Bridges Academy, like content for emails and signs to be posted on hallway walls. The total budget for the campaign through next year is estimated at more than $1.5 million. “For a lot of schools, teachers, the system of education, learning is based on a deficit model: ‘What’s wrong with you? Let’s try to fix that,'” says Carl Sabatino, headmaster of Bridges Academy. He estimates that about 2 percent of all students “suffer operating under a deficit model” because they are “capable of creating, producing, thinking” but that goes unrecognized. “Yes, they have these learning disabilities,” Mr. Sabatino says, “but they also have this potential that must be tapped.” “We have to make sure we help all of them,” he adds. The historical figures are meant to “personify the potential of these children,” Mr. Sabatino says, and help the campaign as it seeks to reach “a larger audience.” Image An ad for the Bridges Academy features Leonardo da Vinci. Each famous face “takes you from a label to a person to an icon,” he adds. How did a New York agency end up creating work for a school in Los Angeles? As is often the case in advertising, a personal connection figures in, in this instance involving the vice chairwoman of the board of Bridges Academy, Lori Lepler, who is a parent of a seventh grader at the school, her son, Eli. Ms. Lepler is a former New Yorker now living in the Los Angeles area who worked at New York agencies that included JWT, then J. Walter Thompson; Frankfurt Gips Balkind; and Ogilvy & Mather. When Ms. Lepler worked as a senior vice president and management director at Thompson, her counterparts on the creative side were the women who eventually founded the Terri & Sandy Solution, Terri Meyer and Sandy Greenberg. “Two years ago, when my son joined the school, I realized it was a small school with a huge idea of an education model,” Ms. Lepler says, adding that after she joined the Bridges Academy board, “as a board we developed, with Carl’s stewardship, brand positioning and strategy.” “And then I appealed to Terri and Sandy, whom I’ve known for 20 years, with whom I worked side by side,” to work on a campaign, Ms. Lepler says. She praises Ms. Meyer and Ms. Greenberg for what she calls “their strategic horsepower to problem-solve and their creative prowess.” After the agency came back with the campaign, Ms. Lepler says, “we immediately recognized, ‘Wow, this is us, and this is big.'” The strong point is that the ads are focused “on the end benefit” of an education at Bridges Academy, she adds, which is “to unlock the potential of each student. These kids are so full of potential, but you can’t fulfill it till you find it.” Ms. Greenberg says that she and Ms. Meyer, as they began to work on the campaign, decided to focus on how “Bridges is an environment that builds on strengths to help students overcome their challenges.” “There was this term on the website, ‘twice exceptional,’ which I’d never heard of,” Ms. Greenberg says, “and we started looking into it” as a way to convey the mission of the school along with featuring the historical figures who may “today be diagnosed as twice exceptional.” Ms. Meyer takes issue with a suggestion that the phrase will be dismissed as a euphemism, an attempt to soft-pedal a problem or an example of marketing jargon. “We didn’t make it up; we were not coining a phrase,” Ms. Meyer says. Rather, “it’s a term accepted in that community” of educators, she adds, which makes it “a term that’s acceptable.” “There are no universal words to explain how these children are,” Ms. Meyer says. “Something meaningful, something uplifting could make kids and parents feel better about themselves,” she adds, compared with what she deems “negative terminology” like “learning challenged” or “learning disabled.” ------- If you like In Advertising, be sure to read the Advertising column that appears Monday through Friday in the Business Day section of The New York Times print edition and on nytimes.com .

advertising,marketing
Special education
K-12 Education
Dyslexia
ADHD


N.J. Transit and Unions to Continue Negotiations as Strike Looms

Abstract: New Jersey Transit and its rail workers’ unions will continue negotiations on Monday in Newark, as both sides try to reach an agreement over wages and benefits before a threatened strike on March 13 . The discussions will come after eight hours of talks in Washington on Friday, where a federal mediation board tried to help break a monthslong impasse between the agency and its 4,200 rail workers. An official for New Jersey Transit declined on Sunday to offer details about the continuing talks. But at a rally in Woodbridge, N.J., on Saturday, Stephen Burkert, a spokesman for the 11 rail unions, called the daylong session “productive.” N.J. Transit Plans Park-and-Ride Locations In the event of a strike, the agency said it would add five park-and-ride locations throughout New Jersey. “Both sides are moving in the right direction, progressing toward an ultimate agreement,” Mr. Burkert said after a nearly 90-minute rally at which hundreds of sign-waving workers were joined by New Jersey labor leaders, state and federal politicians and union supporters from the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad. Democrats and union officials took aim at Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, arguing that ultimate control of the agency rests with him. Mr. Christie has been facing mounting criticism at home for ignoring New Jersey’s problems while campaigning unsuccessfully for president. Under its contingency plans for a strike , New Jersey Transit has said that it would be able to accommodate only about 40,000 of the 105,000 commuters who travel by train from New Jersey to New York City each weekday. The plans include extra service on more than two dozen New Jersey Transit bus routes, which would continue to be served during a strike, and the addition of five park-and-ride locations where commuters could ride a bus to the city, or to ferry and PATH stops. Officials have said rail tickets would be honored on buses, the light rail, private buses, PATH and New York Waterway ferries. Officials have also said commuters should plan to car pool, leave for work early or work from home. Rail workers have been working without a new contract since 2011. The unions have proposed wage increases of about 17 percent over six and a half years, with workers contributing a portion of their pay, up to 2.5 percent, toward health coverage. Agency officials have said the unions’ demands would amount to higher costs of about $183 million and could require fare increases. A presidential emergency board, created by President Obama last fall to help resolve the dispute, sided with the unions but the agency rejected the board’s recommendations.

New Jersey Transit
Strikes Labor
Railroads
Labor Unions
Commuting
New Jersey


Knicks Hit 19 3-Pointers And Run Up the Score

Abstract: MEMPHIS — Whether he was slashing, leaping or flinging shots from 25 feet, Wilson Chandler could hardly miss Wednesday night. The one time he did, the Knicks ’ bench doubled over in laughter, which said everything that needed to be said about their evening in downtown Memphis. The Knicks scored a lot, defended occasionally and rarely saw a stressful moment in a largely enjoyable 132-103 rout of the Grizzlies . Five Knicks scored in double figures, none with more flair than Chandler, the second-year forward and emerging star, who finished with a career-high 27 points and 7 rebounds. Chandler made 11 of his 12 field-goal attempts, scoring on driving dunks and runners and making four of the Knicks’ franchise-record 19 3-pointers. He also inadvertently provided some comic relief, with his only miss of the night — an attempted putback dunk early in the third quarter. Chandler jammed the ball into the front of the rim, then fell to the court as his teammates on the bench hooted. On a night when the Knicks could do little wrong, even that embarrassing moment turned out O.K. Chandler gathered the ball on the floor and flipped it to Quentin Richardson. The ball found its way to Jamal Crawford, who hit an off-balance 3-pointer and was fouled for a 4-point play. Chandler smiled sheepishly as he walked to the bench a few moments later for a timeout. It was the only shot he missed in 12 attempts, but he will be hearing about it for a while. “Unbelievable,” Richardson said of Chandler’s breakout performance. “Young boy killed it tonight. I’m real happy for him, real proud of him. His confidence is crazy right now.” Crawford added 25 points and 8 assists as the Knicks (5-3) bounced back from their loss in San Antonio to split their two-game road trip. Nate Robinson scored 21 points off the bench, making all eight of his field-goal attempts, including five 3-pointers. The Grizzlies (3-6) were led by Rudy Gay (20 points) and the rookie O. J. Mayo (17 points). The Knicks set season highs in points, field-goal percentage (59.1) and margin of victory. They also collected 28 assists on their 52 field goals. This was Chandler’s night, however. Making his fourth straight start, and fighting off flulike symptoms, Chandler showed how quickly his game and his confidence have grown as he adapts to Coach Mike D’Antoni’s up-tempo system. D’Antoni identified Chandler as a potential star during the summer league and has not been disappointed. “He’s important to us to be on the floor,” D’Antoni said. “He spreads the floor, he guards 4’s, he rebounds the ball well. Obviously, he can’t shoot like this every night — maybe he can — but he’s important.” The Knicks, who have not lost a game when scoring 100 points this season, crossed that mark 53 seconds into the fourth quarter, when Chandler hit a 3-pointer for a 101-78 lead. He hit another 3-pointer moments later to push the lead to 25 points. Anthony Roberson hit the Knicks’ final two 3-pointers. Although the Grizzlies have lately prided themselves on improved defense, they did not show it Wednesday. The Knicks had 60 points at halftime and led by as many as 32 in the fourth quarter. The game was never in doubt after the second quarter, when the Knicks built a 14-point lead. The Grizzlies are a work in progress, with a young roster and little foundation to work with. They won 22 games last season and were widely mocked for the trade that sent Pau Gasol, an All-Star, to the Los Angeles Lakers at midseason. But Memphis is starting to see some payoff from the deal, from another Gasol. Center Marc Gasol, a former Lakers draft pick and Pau’s younger brother, is anchoring a talented, albeit frightfully young, Grizzlies frontcourt. Gasol averaged 10.8 points and 8.3 rebounds in the Grizzlies’ first eight games and made a quick impact Wednesday against the Knicks. He scored the Grizzlies’ first 6 points, blocked a David Lee layup attempt and drew fouls on Lee and Malik Rose in the first quarter. He finished with 16 points and 4 rebounds. The Grizzlies are coached by Marc Iavaroni, D’Antoni’s former top assistant in Phoenix. Like his former mentor, Iavaroni is trying to change a losing culture. He has the added challenge of coaching one of the league’s youngest teams. Memphis is starting three rookies — Mayo, Gasol and Darrell Arthur — alongside a second-year point guard, Mike Conley, and a third-year forward, Rudy Gay. Their average age is 21.4 years. Nine members of the roster are 23 or younger. “He’ll be a better coach as the players get better,” D’Antoni said of Iavaroni. “It’s amazing how that happens. He’s getting some good talent.” REBOUNDS The Knicks’ previous record for 3-pointers in a game was 17, set April 17, 2005, in a loss to Atlanta.

New York Knicks
Memphis Grizzlies
Basketball


With Lincecum Pitching, Giants’ Lead Feels Insurmountable

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Tim Lincecum climbed atop a small stage Wednesday and sat down to answer questions from the news media, moments after Roy Halladay finished off his no-hitter in Philadelphia. Lincecum’s seat was barely warm when he was asked if he had seen Halladay’s gem. “Yeah,” Lincecum said. “I mean all the TVs were showing it, so yeah.” Lincecum may not have been motivated by Halladay’s near-perfect effort, but it seems as if he at least took notes. Lincecum, a two-time Cy Young Award winner who appeared to regain his lost form in September, was dominant Thursday night. He pitched a two-hitter, walking one and striking out 14, in a 1-0 victory over the Atlanta Braves in the opener of the National League division series. He was so dominant that once the Giants pushed across a run on in the fourth, with the help of another apparent missed call by an umpire, it seemed like a double-digit lead. The only Braves runner to reach base after that was Brian McCann, who laced a double to left field with one out in the seventh. But Alex Gonzalez tapped back to the mound, and Matt Diaz hit a lazy fly ball to center fielder Andres Torres. In the final innings, the capacity crowd of 43,936 rose to its feet, roared and waved orange towels each time Lincecum got two strikes on a batter. He also received a standing ovation when he came to the plate in the seventh inning, and another when he — and not closer Brian Wilson — came out to begin the ninth. Lincecum was ahead of the Braves hitters all night, and so confident of his command was Lincecum that in the ninth inning he struck out Jason Heyward with a 3-2 changeup. He then ended the game by throwing a 92-mile-per-hour fastball that Derrek Lee was unable to pull the trigger on. Lincecum’s performance was yet more proof that through the first two days of the playoffs that one truism of baseball rings true — good pitching will stop good hitting. And nobody has been better than the pitchers who have been the best in baseball over the last three years — Halladay, Lincecum and Cliff Lee, who on Wednesday stymied Tampa Bay. Their combined totals over 25 innings: 1 run, 7 hits, 2 walks and 32 strikeouts. Like Halladay, this was Lincecum’s first playoff appearance. But it went considerably smoother than the other times he has taken to a broad stage. Lincecum has made three All-Star Games, but twice he did not pitch: in 2008 at Yankee Stadium, he became ill before the game, and this year in Anaheim he was not called upon. When he did make it to the mound, last year in St. Louis, he allowed two runs as the National League starter. Lincecum said Wednesday that his All-Star experience might be useful. In that game in St. Louis, he was overly excited. “Going through that kind of amped atmosphere, a lot of fans, a lot of people there to see you do your thing — same kind of scenario here,” Lincecum said. “So it will help me a little bit. Just try to keep myself in check and just try to keep my heart rate down.” Another preternaturally cool playoff neophyte was Buster Posey, the rookie catcher who sparked the Giants’ resurgence in July. He had no first-timers jitters. He singled, stole second on a busted run-and-hit and blasted a double off the center-field wall. His work at the plate was the residue of patience — waiting until Atlanta starter Derek Lowe, who was working him away, left his sinker over the inner half of the plate. Lowe, who had established himself as impervious to the pressure of the playoffs while pitching for the Red Sox and Dodgers, might have kept the Braves even with San Francisco, but he was not helped by his defense. McCann, the Braves’ All-Star catcher, was unable to throw out Posey on a hit-and-run, when Pat Burrell swung through a 3-2 pitch. On the play, Posey appeared to be tagged out by Braves second baseman Brooks Conrad, but the umpire Paul Emmel called him safe. Then, after Lowe struck out Juan Uribe and intentionally walked Pablo Sandoval, Cody Ross grounded a single under the glove of third baseman Omar Infante, who tried to glove the ball from the side rather than get in front of it. Posey came home ahead of a strong throw by Diaz, the left fielder. The Giants had several other opportunities to give Lincecum a cushion. In the third, Ross was caught in a rundown between third and home, and the Giants could not bring home Posey in the sixth after he led off with a double and went to third on an error. San Francisco managed only five hits. But on this night, the Giants did not need to be too fine. That was left to Lincecum.

Baseball
Playoff Games
Atlanta Braves
San Francisco Giants
Lincecum Tim


Longhorns Fell Tar Heels at the Buzzer

Abstract: The ball bounced right to Javan Felix for an easy catch-and-shoot — and a win, an important one for Texas and its new coach, Shaka Smart. Felix’s uncontested jumper at the buzzer sent the Longhorns to a wild 84-82 victory at home over No. 3 North Carolina, giving Smart a signature moment a month into his tenure at Texas. “I just had a free walk-up to the ball,” Felix said. “I knew I hit it.” Felix was left unguarded as players from both teams watched a 3-point attempt by Isaiah Taylor in the final seconds bounce off the rim. The ball dropped straight to Felix, who calmly put it in. After a few minutes of reviewing video, the officials ruled the basket good. Felix finished with 25 points for Texas (6-3) and made five 3-pointers. Marcus Paige scored 20 points to lead the Tar Heels (7-2), who started the season ranked No. 1. U.C.L.A. 71, GONZAGA 66 Isaac Hamilton led U.C.L.A. with 20 points as the visiting Bruins (7-3) upset No. 20 Gonzaga (6-3). MICHIGAN ST. 58, FLORIDA 52 Denzel Valentine scored 17 points, and No. 1 Michigan State moved within one victory of matching the program’s best start, beating Florida at home to improve to 11-0. Only the 2000-1 Spartans had a better start, winning their first 12 games. The Gators (6-3) trailed by 4 when the Spartans lost the ball with about 30 seconds to play. Florida’s Dorian Finney-Smith took a 3-point attempt from the left wing, but he missed, and Michigan State was able to pad its margin with free throws. WICHITA ST. 67, UTAH 50 Zach Brown scored 14 points to lead a balanced Wichita State offense as the Shockers beat No. 25 Utah (7-2) at home. Markis McDuffie had 13 points, and Fred VanVleet added 10 for Wichita State (5-4). XAVIER 65, CINCINNATI 55 Myles Davis scored a season-high 17 points, and No. 12 Xavier (10-0) ran out to an 18-point lead and beat No. 23 Cincinnati (8-2), the Musketeers’ third straight win over the Bearcats, their crosstown rival. It was the first time the teams had played each other at Cintas Center since four years ago, when a brawl between the teams prompted the officials to end the game with 9.4 seconds left. KANSAS 82, OREGON ST. 67 Wayne Selden scored 22 points, Frank Mason had 18, and No. 2 Kansas (8-1) used a big second half to beat Oregon State (6-2) in its annual trip to Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo. KENTUCKY 72, ARIZONA ST. 58 Jamal Murray scored 12 of his 17 points in the second half, making two of Kentucky’s five 3-pointers, to help the No. 5 Wildcats (9-1) pull away from visiting Arizona State (6-3). BOISE ST. 74, OREGON 72 Anthony Drmic scored 19 points, and Boise State overcame a double-digit deficit in the first half, holding on to win at home against No. 24 Oregon. James Webb III had 12 points, and Mikey Thompson added 11 as the Broncos (7-4) beat the Ducks (7-2) for the first time in six tries. BUTLER 94, TENNESSEE 86 The reserve Kelan Martin had 25 points and 11 rebounds, and No. 18 Butler (8-1) outlasted Tennessee (4-4) at home. Women NOTRE DAME 88, T.C.U. 72 Kathryn Westbeld had 12 points and 14 rebounds as No. 3 Notre Dame beat Texas Christian in only the second game in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for the Fighting Irish. The Irish (9-1) trailed only after the game’s first free throw and went ahead to stay with an early 12-0 run. Zahna Medley had 22 points and Veja Hamilton 14 for T.C.U. (7-3), which had a 12-game home winning streak broken. Notre Dame’s only other game in the Dallas-Fort Worth area was a 64-63 loss at Southern Methodist on Jan. 15, 1984. OREGON ST. 69, IDAHO 44 Sydney Wiese had 16 points and 10 rebounds as No. 7 Oregon State (7-0) beat visiting Idaho (7-3).

College basketball
UNC
University of Texas at Austin


A Punchless Loss to the Marlins

Abstract: If and when Jose Reyes returns this weekend, the Mets might regain the energy and extra-base potential they seemed to lack Thursday night. And if and when Carlos Beltran comes back in May, the Mets might welcome back that powerful bat they also seemed to lack. Without Reyes and Beltran — two of their best hitters, who also missed much of last season — the Mets can look lethargic on offense, as they did Thursday in losing, 3-1, to the Florida Marlins at Citi Field. They managed seven hits, but only one for extra bases, and they put few of those hits together in dropping the second of three games in the season’s opening series. “This team’s not built around hitting home runs,” said David Wright, who has their only home run this season, which came in the first inning of the first game. “This team is built around manufacturing runs. We haven’t had that big hit.” Wright went 0 for 4 Thursday and struggled defensively. Reyes could come back from a thyroid problem as soon as Saturday. He played in a minor league game on Thursday night in Florida for Port St. Lucie and was expected to work out in New York before Friday’s game when the Mets begin a three-game series at home against the Washington Nationals. Wright predicted that Reyes would bring “a big lift both on the field and in the clubhouse; he brings a lot of energy.” Reyes played only 36 games last season because of a hamstring injury. The thyroid problem emerged this year in spring training. Beltran, who is recovering from knee surgery, played in only 81 games last season. He could return in May. In losing Thursday, the Mets wasted a respectable starting performance from Jon Niese (0-1), who gave up three runs on eight hits in six innings before 25,982 fans. “I wanted to go out there for the seventh, too,” said Niese, who threw 92 pitches and is coming back from a hamstring injury that shortened his 2009 season. “Even deep in the game, I felt good,” Niese said. “A pitcher’s job is to keep the team in the ball game. The hitters’ job is to produce runs. I’m here for a reason. I’m not looking to fail.” The Marlins took a 1-0 lead in the first inning thanks in part to two singles that could have been outs. The first was a hard ground ball by Cameron Maybin that got past Fernando Tatis at first base. The second, which scored Maybin from second base with two outs, was a hard ground ball by Dan Uggla that got past Wright at third base. Those plays helped turn the first inning into a 23-pitch affair for the left-handed Niese, who won the No. 3 spot in the rotation almost by default when Oliver Perez and Mike Pelfrey struggled in spring training. Rod Barajas, the catcher, said that Niese had a fastball, a cutter, a curve, a changeup and a two-seamer. “A variety of average to above-average major-league pitches,” Barajas said. “He’s going to be tough.” Also making their season debuts as starters for the Mets were center fielder Angel Pagan and Ruben Tejada, the rookie shortstop. Tejada is likely to be sent to the minor leagues if Reyes returns. But Manager Jerry Manuel said Tejada would play shortstop again Friday night with Alex Cora at second because second baseman Luis Castillo sustained a calf injury on Thursday. The Mets tied the score, 1-1, in the fourth on an infield hit by Jason Bay and a double by Jeff Francoeur. The Marlins took a 2-1 lead in the fifth when Jorge Cantu doubled home Maybin with a drive out of the reach of Pagan, who did not seem fluid in his position. Gary Matthews Jr. played center field in the first two games. Both Matthews and Pagan are playing in place of Beltran. The Marlins made the score 3-1 in the sixth, when Gaby Sanchez doubled home Ronny Paulino. The victory went to Nate Robertson (1-0), who worked five innings. Manuel said Robertson “kept the ball in on us” but conceded, “We’re going to have some challenges here” regarding hitting. “It’s difficult in the course of 162 games to scratch and claw all the time,” Manuel said. “You’ve got to have some power.” INSIDE PITCH Mike Pelfrey will start Friday night in the opener of a three-game series at Citi Field against the Washington Nationals. Pelfrey said he was anxious to try a split-fingered changeup he had developed as a contrast to his sinking fastball. “The splitty’s going to be the secondary pitch I’ve never had,” Pelfrey said. ... In the seventh, pitcher Ryota Igarashi made his major league debut for the Mets. He pitched a scoreless inning with one walk.


Cilia, an Antenna and Motor on Cells

Abstract: At first they cannot see at night. Then daytime vision fails, and by age 5 or 10, these children are blind. Some become extremely obese and develop diabetes and kidney disease. The crushing condition is known as Bardet-Biedl syndrome, and it is caused by inherited defects in the child’s primary cilia — solitary slivers that poke out of almost every cell in the body. These are not the wisps that wave Rockette-like in our airways. They are stiff, tiny, nearly transparent structures, sometimes as little as one-thousandth the size of the cell. Only one sticks out of each cell, and it acts as both an antenna and a machine to process signals essential for development and survival. Largely ignored for a century as vestigial, primary cilia are now emerging as pivotal players in the subtle shifts of signaling that shape the fetus and assure normal adult cell growth. Powerful genetic and imaging tools have opened a window into these machines, fueling a flurry of research intended to clarify their role in health and disease. “Primary cilia are turning out to be a kind of signaling machine that no one had appreciated,” said Matthew Scott, a geneticist at Stanford Medical School. “It’s as if there was a shed out back with all sorts of weird machinery, and hardly anyone had ever looked in. But the farm can’t work without it.” In the last few years, scientists have discovered that the single cilium on each cell receives and reconfigures the signals that form neurons, sculpt the body plan and organize the brain. In adults, cilia are required to heal wounds and grow cells, and when they malfunction, they can help cause cancer . Damage to primary cilia is now also linked to kidney disease, obesity and even the failure of adult neuron development. A quick succession of discoveries in the past 10 years has revealed an intricate architecture within each cilium that supports two-way trafficking of proteins up and down tubes that run the cilium’s length. Molecular motors push particles along the tubes. These motor proteins are linked to the cilium’s outer envelope, so they can move material up and down the membrane itself. More startling than the finding of this elaborate system was the discovery a few years later that traffic on the cilia highway includes the signals that switch on genes to drive development of the embryo. These signals are themselves proteins, like the highly important Sonic hedgehog. The cilia trafficking system, now known as intraflagellar transport, was discovered in the green algae Chlamydomonas, which has long, thin flagella, accessible to study. Flagella and cilia have the same structure, part of life’s toolkit for more than a billion years. In the mid-1990s, Keith Kozminski, a graduate student in the Yale laboratory of Joel Rosenbaum, placed small beads on the membrane of Chlamydomonas, and under a powerful microscope he saw that some of them moved along the surface of the membrane. He and Dr. Rosenbaum knew that meant motors must have been at work inside the cilium. Motor proteins had been discovered elsewhere in cells. Among other tasks, they are responsible for pushing paired chromosomes apart during cell division. “We were using the very best optics available,” Dr. Rosenbaum said. “Keith told me he could see particles under the membrane, moving up from the bottom to the tip of the cilium and back down again. My first response was, ‘Almost certainly that is an optical artifact.’ ” But it was for real. Douglas Cole in Dr. Rosenbaum’s lab and Gregory Pazour at the University of Massachusetts Medical School soon identified a number of flagellum genes needed for the architecture that made the transport system possible. In 2000, with George Witman of the University of Massachusetts, they found the first link between primary cilia and disease. They showed that a gene connected to transport within the Chlamydomonas flagellum was a close relative of a mouse gene that causes a severe kidney disease when it is defective. A mutated flagellum or cilium gene, then, could cause a serious, recognized illness. Polycystic kidney disease affects about 600,000 people in the United States. It is the most common life-threatening disease caused by a single gene mutation, and the reason for most of the need for dialysis . The disease develops when cysts grow in the kidney and block its filtering capacity. Cilia normally protrude into the kidney tubules and bend in the urine flow. If a mutation prevents cilia from bending, kidney cells needlessly divide, and cysts form. The connection of cilia to kidney disease extended the prevailing view that cilia were antennas capable of sensing the environment. But a few years later, the discovery of a far more pervasive cilia role startled developmental biologists and geneticists. In 2003, Kathryn Anderson of the Sloan-Kettering Institute and a graduate student, Danwei Huangfu, went on a kind of genetic fishing expedition. They were looking for genes that affect early development of mouse embryos, so they exposed the embryos to a chemical mutagen and found mutated genes that caused early neural defects. Some of the mutated genes were somehow connected to the pathways followed by Sonic hedgehog, an extremely important growth-promoting protein involved in embryonic development. And among these genes were two that affected the construction of cilia. The conclusion was that cilia were involved in an important way in the Sonic hedgehog system, which reaches into so many aspects of cell biology. “Kathryn Anderson’s discovery was astounding,” said Dr. Frédéric de Sauvage, the vice president for molecular biology at the biotech company Genentech. “Virtually all basal cell carcinomas — the most common form of skin cancer — have mutated genes involved in processing hedgehog signals. Mutations in components of the hedgehog pathway keep it turned on all the time.” Genentech is now running clinical trials of a compound that inhibits unrestrained signaling in the hedgehog pathway for potential treatment of basal cell carcinoma , colorectal cancer and ovarian cancer . Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, recently began studying how primary cilia affect the brain’s neural stem and progenitor cells. He suspects damaged primary cilia may cause some types of brain tumors . In related research, working with Young-Goo Han, a postdoctoral fellow, he discovered that neural stem cells that lack primary cilia failed to give rise to adult neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain required for memory formation. He sees strong evidence that cilia also help orient neuronal stem cells in tissues in the direction in which they will grow. Since Dr. Anderson’s discovery, reported in Nature, scientists have begun to decipher how the cilium’s Rube Goldberg-like mechanism, on the fringes of the cell, controls genes that are cradled in the cell’s nucleus. Bradley Yoder of the University of Alabama at Birmingham discovered that the protein units that ultimately deliver hedgehog’s commands to the genes actually reside in the cilium’s tip. Jeremy Reiter at the University of California, San Francisco, and Dr. Scott at Stanford have shown that hedgehog’s arrival — at a different site on the cilium — turns on this gene-switching protein. The protein messengers move down the cilium tube to the nucleus, where they light up or turn off dozens of genes. Scientists zeroing in on different diseases are encountering more cilia defects. For example, the hormone leptin circulates throughout the body, gauging fat deposition and docking onto neurons to convey that the body has adequate food. One of leptin’s targets is a class of neurons in the hypothalamus. Dr. Yoder and Val Sheffield at the University of Iowa have found in mice that when the lone cilium on each such neuron is disrupted, the animals seem unable to sense leptin as they normally would. They overeat and become obese. At a meeting in February in Italy focusing on the latest primary cilia research, Soren Christensen of the University of Copenhagen discussed cell culture studies showing that primary cilia are essential for wound healing. He studies a signaling molecule that, like Sonic hedgehog, diffuses to tissue to spur growth and division. In Italy, he reported that cells lacking cilia failed to migrate normally toward a wound, a process that usually is the first step in healing. He and Dr. Yoder have now confirmed this in live mice. “If you look at mutated cells that cannot make the primary cilium, they are blindfolded,” Dr. Christensen said. They cannot sense the signals from the wound. “They don’t migrate. They just run in place.” Other research reported in Italy focused on primary cilia’s effect on another signaling molecule, called Wnt, which orients cells in developing tissue and enables them to sense their three-dimensional location. Kimberly McDermott of the University of California, San Francisco, described research showing that primary cilia are essential for Wnt to control normal mouse mammary gland branching in puberty and pregnancy . Although the cilium appears to be far removed from the heart of the cell, it is tightly tied to cell division. As the cell prepares to divide, the cilium disassembles, and rebuilds only after division. “This little antenna is poking out of the cell surface and may well communicate when and in what orientation the cell should divide,” said Wallace Marshall at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Marshall recently helped clarify a classic discovery 10 years ago of how the embryo “knows” left from right. This sense enables normal placement and structure of the heart. Unlike most primary cilia, the subset of cilia involved in this process move. The original discovery had revealed that thousands of individual cilia in the week-old mouse embryo rotate from their base, similar to the way a stiff arm rotates around the shoulder. The net effect is a leftward flow of embryonic fluid that establishes left-right asymmetry. Dr. Marshall and his colleagues confirmed that each cilium projected out at a left-leaning angle to the cell surface, and they used fluid dynamics models to demonstrate that the angle and motion accounted for the flow observed in the embryos. Some scientists are exploring the possibility that cilia may do more than regulate master signaling molecules. They may actually coordinate protein signals for proper fetal development. Dr. Yoder said he was confident that cilia coordinated different signals. But what interests him most is homing in on the mutations affecting the cilia. “We need that to identify those genes so we can develop drugs to counter defective signals,” he said. “That could help us attack severe obesity, polycystic kidney disease, Bardet-Biedl syndrome and even cancer.”

Genetics and Heredity
Medicine and Health
primary cilia


Verdict for Silver Hill Hospital in Suicide Case Is Set Aside

Abstract: A jury verdict that cleared a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut of liability in a patient’s suicide has been overturned by an appeals court that said the judge should have tried to determine if jurors were prejudiced by a newspaper article published just before the trial began. The Connecticut Appellate Court ordered a new trial in a malpractice suit filed by the estate of Ruth Farrell, a 41-year-old librarian in Westport who hanged herself in January 2002 a week after checking into Silver Hill Hospital, a nonprofit institution in New Canaan known for its celebrity clientele. The suit charged that Silver Hill and a psychiatrist there, Dr. Ellyn Shander, were negligent in failing to appreciate Ms. Farrell’s risk of suicide and in their treatment of her. A Superior Court jury found in 2008 that neither the hospital nor Dr. Shander was liable. But in a ruling made public last week, the appeals court said the trial judge, David R. Tobin, should have asked jurors if they had read the article, which was published in The New York Times after the jury was impaneled but before it began hearing evidence. “The article here is extensive, factually detailed and so overtly inflammatory that it is difficult to conceive how a juror would remain impartial if exposed to its contents,” Judge F. Herbert Gruendel wrote. The appeals court did not question the article’s accuracy, but was rather suggesting it could appeal to the emotions and prejudices of jurors in a way that could unfairly influence their verdict. The article said the estate’s executor, David L. Kervick, met Ms. Farrell in 2001 when both were patients at the hospital. It said Ms. Farrell had directed that Mr. Kervick inherit half of her estate, valued at about $500,000. Ms. Farrell had tried to commit suicide numerous times, the article said, and told the hospital’s medical staff that Mr. Kervick had on one occasion used drugs in her presence, and had tied her to a bed and forced her to watch pornography — assertions he denies, he said by phone on Wednesday. Mr. Kervick said he was “obviously happy” with the ruling. “It was our position that the court had an obligation to ask whether or not anybody had read the article and depending on what their response was,” he added, “whether they could still be fair and impartial.” A hospital lawyer, Catherine S. Nietzel, said she believed her client would appeal. She said she did not believe that the article had unfairly prejudiced the jury, because much of its content was admitted as evidence at trial. Dr. Shander said she “absolutely” disagreed with the ruling, but declined further comment.

Farrell Ruth
Decisions and Verdicts
Malpractice
Silver Hill Hospital
Westport (Conn)


LinkedIn Stock Sinks After Revenue Falls Short

Abstract: LinkedIn’s shares plunged 43.6 percent on Friday, wiping out nearly $11 billion of market value, after the social network released a revenue forecast that fell far short of expectations. The stock sank to a three-year low of $108.38, registering its sharpest decline since the company’s well-publicized public listing in 2011. LinkedIn’s full-year revenue forecast of $3.60 billion to $3.65 billion was below the average analyst estimate of $3.91 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. “It’s not a great day to have reported tough guidance,” said Randle Reece, an analyst with Avondale Partners. “The mediocre employment report from the Labor Department just amplified the reaction of anything employment-sensitive today.”


Fujimori Family Requests Pardon for Former Peruvian President

Abstract: The four children of former President Alberto Fujimori, who is serving a prison sentence for human rights violations and corruption, submitted a request on Wednesday in Lima for a pardon for their father. Mr. Fujimori, 74, has tongue cancer and other health problems, and his family said the pardon was justified for medical reasons. The pardon would have to be granted by President Ollanta Humala. Mr. Fujimori’s eldest daughter, Keiko Fujimori, ran against Mr. Humala in the presidential election last year. Mr. Fujimori, who was president from 1990 to 2000, led the successful fight against the Shining Path guerrilla group, but his government was marked by authoritarianism and corruption. In 2009 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for overseeing death squads involved in two massacres that killed a total of 25 people.

Human Rights and Human Rights Violations