Rebuilding the Lions Is a Challenge for Martin Mayhew

Abstract: INDIANAPOLIS — Away from the football field, some athletes may conceal their nocturnal pursuits from team management. Some sins involve illicit drugs, alcohol abuse, gambling habits, risky gun use, dogfighting or visits to strip clubs. When Martin Mayhew played for the Washington Redskins two decades ago, he, too, moved about clandestinely after practice. His dirty little secret: he attended law school at night at Georgetown and did not want his bosses to know. “Some coaches might consider that to be a vice, a guy doing something other than devoting all of his energy and attention to football,” Mayhew said with a smile. “But it wasn’t a secret for a long time. It got out.” Mayhew spoke Thursday night at the N.F.L. scouting combine, which will end Tuesday. Recently promoted to general manager of the Detroit Lions to replace Matt Millen, Mayhew has one of the most challenging jobs in professional sports. He must rebuild the N.F.L.’s first 0-16 team and try to make a contender of a franchise without a championship since 1957. This would be difficult for even an experienced executive, and Mayhew has never held such a high position. His critics noted that Mayhew has worked in the front office of the Lions since 2001 and has been promoted while the team went 31-97 in that time. The team history is littered with failed general managers and coaches. Why should Mayhew be any different? “You know what? There’s nothing about it you can say,” Mayhew said. “The fans have heard it all before. The proof is in the pudding. I am self-confident. I also know where I need help sometimes. People can be overconfident. I’m not that person.” Mayhew will soon make major moves. He holds the first pick in the April draft and also the 20th, which he obtained from Dallas last season in a trade of receiver Roy Williams shortly after becoming the interim general manager. Quarterback Matthew Stafford of Georgia could be the top draft choice, so Mayhew dined with him and several Lions executives on Thursday. Stafford said he was impressed with the man who picked up the check. “He’s a very intelligent person,” Stafford said of Mayhew. “I think he’s more of a listener. He was listening to what other people had to say. He was very engaged in the conversation without maybe saying a whole lot.” Among those at the table was James Harris, a veteran executive and former N.F.L. quarterback recently hired by Mayhew as a top adviser. “He’s a great evaluator, he’s going to bring a lot to the table besides just being a mentor,” Mayhew said of Harris. Mayhew is 43 years old; Harris is 61. That they are both African-American — and Mayhew is one of only five black general managers in the league — is not worth headlines, Mayhew said. “It’s just part of where we are, we’ve progressed a lot,” he said. “Opportunities come, and you have to make the most of them. I plan on making the most of this.” Mayhew has always perceived opportunity, and people have often underestimated him. As a player, he did off-season humanitarian work in Africa and he bought his high school coach a new car. After retiring from Tampa Bay in 1996, he earned his law degree. Out of high school, Mayhew was a lightly recruited cornerback at 5 feet 8 inches and 154 pounds who grew up in Tallahassee, Fla., and showed up at hometown Florida State to earn a scholarship and play alongside Deion Sanders. Mickey Andrews, his position coach with the Seminoles then and the defensive coordinator now, called Mayhew “an overachiever, a very smart player who studied a lot, took the tools he had and developed them.” Andrews added, “The mental part is where he got his edge.” In the N.F.L. draft, Mayhew lasted until the 10th round, when Bill Polian — now the president of the Indianapolis Colts — chose him for the Buffalo Bills. After Mayhew missed his first year with an injury, he left for Washington as a free agent. Mayhew played there for four years alongside Darrell Green and won a Super Bowl ring. “I’ve always joked it was one of my biggest mistakes, not paying Martin the extra bucks to keep him,” Polian said. “He was an extremely smart player and a self-made guy.” Regarding Mayhew’s apprenticeship during Millen’s failed regime in Detroit, Polian said, “He’s had a long opportunity to see what worked and what didn’t work.” Mayhew said, “I learned a lot from seeing some of the mistakes that were made.” Charley Casserly, a former N.F.L. general manager and now a television commentator, scouted for Washington when Mayhew went there. He said Mayhew was “a smart guy and a hard worker” who would benefit from the patience of the Lions’ owner, William Clay Ford. After replacing Millen on an interim basis in September, Mayhew had, according to the team president, Tom Lewand, “essentially an extended interview with Mr. Ford” by meeting weekly with Ford and Lewand. Ford did not interview any other candidates, Lewand said, before giving Mayhew the permanent job at the end of the season. More than Millen, Mayhew has traveled extensively to scout players and interview them and study their personalities. In a change of policy for the team, Mayhew has contracted with a testing company to provide psychological profiles of potential players. “It’s one more piece of information,” said Mayhew, who said the lack of it had led to bad drafts. Of his own personality, Mayhew said he was not afraid of pressure. By playing opposite Sanders at Florida State and Green in Washington, Mayhew said he learned to blend with strong personalities and talent while accepting that quarterbacks would pick on him. “I don’t think I’ve ever been a big ego guy, which is why I think those combinations worked,” Mayhew said. “I’ve also dealt with the pressure of being in the spotlight and having that target on my back every week. It’s kind of the same way now.” Mayhew was the youngest of three children. His father, Ronald Mayhew, was an elementary and middle school principal. Ronald Mayhew, now retired, said he was a strict father who enforced discipline while encouraging education and religious faith. “I’m not bragging, but we had certain rules and standards to live by and it worked,” Ronald Mayhew said in a telephone interview. “There was no child abuse, but there was a lot of tongue-lashing. I said to him, ‘Think for yourself; don’t follow the crowd.’ ” Referring to Martin’s Detroit task, Ronald called it “quite a challenge, but if he gets the right support, he can accomplish it.” Mayhew works in a city where other professional teams — the Red Wings, the Pistons and the Tigers — have had recent success. Although the Lions failed to sell out five of their eight games last season at Ford Field, Mayhew said the fans would return for a winner. Of all sports, football is most conducive to quick revivals. After going 1-15 in 2007, the Miami Dolphins were 11-5 in 2008. The Arizona Cardinals, without a championship-game appearance since 1948, almost defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl this month. Mayhew said he would be patient and methodical about building his team but added, “It can turn quickly.”


Rikers Guards Accused of Passing Contraband to Inmate

Abstract: Two Rikers Island correction officers were fired on Wednesday after they were accused of smuggling marijuana, alcohol and tobacco to an inmate who is awaiting trial in the death of a police officer last July, officials said. Stephen J. Morello, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Correction, said it was not yet clear exactly when the two officers, Auguste Durand, 31, and Michael Santiago, 24, smuggled the contraband to the inmate, Lee Woods. Mr. Woods is housed in the punitive segregation unit of the George R. Vierno Center at Rikers Island. On Tuesday, jail officials were tipped off about the smuggling, and they discovered the items during a search on Tuesday night, Mr. Morello said. Officers Durand and Santiago had worked in the Correction Department since August, and they were still in a probationary period, Mr. Morello said. Their dismissal was reported on Wednesday by The New York Post. A representative from the correction officers’ union did not immediately return calls seeking comment. On Wednesday, Mr. Woods was prevented from attending a court hearing while prison officials tried to determine whether he possessed other illegal items, including a weapon, Mr. Morello said. On Thursday morning, Mr. Woods failed a magnetometer test, a search for metal on or inside a person. Officers did not find any visible sign of metal on Mr. Woods, and he was allowed to attend a court hearing but was required to wear mitts and remain shackled, according to a spokesman for Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney. Mr. Woods, Dexter Bostic and Robert Ellis are charged with firing from a car at Officers Russel Timoshenko and Herman Yan on July 9 during a traffic stop in Brooklyn. Officer Timoshenko died five days later. Also on Thursday, Mr. Bostic was taken to Elmhurst Hospital Center after complaining that he had fallen in the shower at the jail. He was treated and returned to custody.

Rikers Island Prison Complex
Smuggling
Guards
Prisons and Prisoners
Correction Department
Woods Lee


U.S. Marathoner Trying to Take London on His Way to Beijing

Abstract: LONDON — Like so many young athletes, Ryan Hall envisioned running for his country. Only, his Olympic dream came complete with props and a soundtrack. He played the Olympic theme song nonstop as a teenager in the Southern California town of Bear Lake, and now has the music on his iPod. His wife, Sara, made an Olympic torch lamp for him when they were at Stanford. Hall put that in his Olympic room in their house, where he also tacked his American flag to the wall. Hall, a 25-year-old marathoner with shorn blond hair and blue eyes, loves his corny collectibles but is eager for the real thing — an Olympic medal. He made the first step by winning the United States Olympic marathon trials in New York. On a chilly November day remembered more for the shocking death of his friend Ryan Shay than for Hall’s watershed performance, he steamrolled the field and the hills of Central Park in a trials record of 2 hours 9 minutes 2 seconds. With the Olympic marathon in Beijing not scheduled until Aug. 24, though, Hall needed a short-term goal to test himself against the world’s top talent, if not something to tone down his Olympic fever. “I needed something else to be excited about,” Hall said Wednesday in England, as he prepared to run in Sunday’s London Marathon, his last big race before the Olympics. “You could go crazy thinking about it for six months.” As the sun glistened off the Thames River during a morning photo shoot beneath Tower Bridge, Hall took his place beside the sport’s elite, including Kenya’s Martin Lel, the defending champion of the London and the New York City Marathons; the world half-marathon record holder Sammy Wanjiru; and the 2004 Olympic marathon champion Stefano Baldini. “I feel like I belong up there and with these guys,” Hall said. Baldini, 36, said of Hall: “This is an athlete who can win a lot of things, a lot of medals. He is able to read the race and react, so he is the future.” The London race will be only the third marathon for Hall. At this race last April, he made a grand debut by finishing seventh, in 2:08:24, after taking a brief lead at the 18-mile mark. That was the fastest debut marathon by an American, beating 2:09:41. Hall’s longest warm-up was the 2007 Houston half-marathon, where he won in 59:43 to break the 22-year-old national record. Hall has lived at altitude (7,000 feet above sea level at Big Bear Lake, in the San Bernardino Mountains) since he was 3, but he says he discovered his talent late. “My very first run was 15 miles around the lake,” Hall said. “You would think I would have known I could be a distance runner.” As an eighth-grader frustrated by sitting on the bench for his basketball team (he had not yet grown to the 5 feet 11 inches, 140 pounds he is now), Hall asked to accompany his father, Mickey, a recreational marathoner. “I told him, ‘No whining and no crying,’ ” Mickey Hall said in a telephone interview this week. “We stopped to get a drink near the end. After that, he was on fire.” With his father as coach, Hall twice won the California state cross-country championships and ran 3:42 for the 1,500 meters in 2000. But when Hall went to Stanford, leaving his close-knit family of five siblings, his Olympic dream seemed in jeopardy. He struggled with his results, gaining weight and becoming depressed. He quit Stanford for one academic quarter and regrouped on long forest runs with his father, drawing strength from his Christian faith and family. He returned to become the runner-up at the 2003 N.C.A.A. cross-country championships and won the 2005 championship at 5,000 meters. “I think what I’ve learned from having success in high school and losing it all in college, it taught me you can’t make your life successful based only on athletics,” Hall said. He learned that lesson painfully at the trials. He had trained with Shay in Mammoth, Calif., and he and Sara were teammates at Stanford with Shay’s wife, Alicia. Hall was ecstatic after crossing the finish line first. Fifteen minutes later, he was overcome with grief. “The headlines weren’t about Ryan Hall winning the Olympic trials, they were about Ryan Shay — and rightfully so,” Hall said. “His life is far more important.” He and Sara stayed with Alicia Shay in January in Flagstaff, Ariz., where they trained and coped together. Sara, a 5,000- and 1,500-meter runner, will compete at the track trials in June with Alicia. Hall keeps a photograph of him and Shay lined up together at the start of the Olympic trials in the Bible he carries with him. In the spring, Hall gained confidence in training. The 10-mile tempo runs that he ran at a five-minute pace before last year’s London Marathon he ran at 4:48 last month. “Can he win? Sure,” his coach, Terrence Mahon, said about Hall’s chances in London. “The potential is there. He’s going in with as good a shot as anyone based on his trials and his preparation.” Since winning the Olympic trials, Hall has become the most famous resident of Bear Lake, population 15,000. He passes under banners that read “Run Ryan Run!” and his dream, shared by a town, seems to be everywhere in front of him now.

Marathon Running
Olympic Games (2008)
London (England)
Beijing (China)


In New Election, Jeb Bush Stakes Out the Middle Ground

Abstract: WASHINGTON — When former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida quietly visited Senator John McCain in his Capitol Hill office this fall, discussion turned to a subject of increasing interest to Mr. Bush: how to run for president without pandering to the party’s conservative base. “I just said to him, ‘I think if you look back, despite the far right’s complaints, it is the centrist that wins the nomination,’ ” Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, said he told Mr. Bush. In the past few weeks, Mr. Bush has moved toward a run for the White House. His family’s resistance has receded . His advisers are seeking staff . And the former governor is even slimming down, shedding about 15 pounds thanks to frequent swimming and personal training sessions after a knee operation last year. But before pursuing the presidency, Mr. Bush, 61, is grappling with the central question of whether he can prevail in a grueling primary battle without shifting his positions or altering his persona to satisfy his party’s hard-liners. In conversations with donors, friends and advisers, he is discussing whether he can navigate, and avoid being tripped up by, the conservative Republican base. “It’s now about a realistic assessment of whether the journey he wants to travel is compatible with winning a primary,” said Al Cardenas, a longtime friend who was the Florida Republican Party chairman when Mr. Bush was governor. Though he is deeply conservative on some issues such as taxes and abortion, in other ways, Mr. Bush — culturally and philosophically — is out of step with the grass-roots activists who now animate the party. He has pushed Republicans to find consensus with Democrats, especially on fiscal issues. He has pushed for an immigration overhaul that would include a path to citizenship for people who are here illegally, and he has championed the Common Core educational standards, two incendiary issues among Republican activists, many of whom oppose both. The governor’s decision will have significant consequences for the Republican Party. If he goes forward with a campaign in which he avoids trying to appease the most conservative voters and wins the nomination as well as the presidency, it could reshape Republican politics for a generation. Should he take that approach and lose the nomination to a more aggressive conservative, however, it would send a powerful message that a more pragmatic approach has little appeal among the party’s primary voters. The party’s establishment elites and some longtime advisers to Mr. Bush are urging him to remain steadfast on his positions, especially on immigration, if he runs. They are convinced that Mitt Romney ruined his chance to win in the fall of 2012 by veering too far to the right during the primaries, turning off general election voters as a result. “I think that, unfortunately, we saw a lot of that in the last go-round,” said James A. Baker III, the longtime Bush family friend and former secretary of state, about Mr. Romney’s 2012 campaign. Did Someone Say ‘2016’? Presidential Contenders Circle Ready or not, the midterm elections signal the unofficial start of the next presidential campaign. Assessing the prospects of some likely candidates. “I think people are ready for somebody honest, frank and willing to tell them what they think,” said Mr. Baker, adding of Mr. Bush, “I think he could run in a primary where he’s true to himself, his values and policy positions.” That is the campaign Mr. Bush’s small inner circle is hoping he will run. “We often say, ‘Let Jeb be Jeb,’ ” is how Mike Murphy, a longtime adviser, put it. Mr. Bush seemed to be musing on such an approach last week before a gathering of chief executives in Washington, when he said that a Republican hopeful had to be willing to risk the nomination in order to remain competitive in November. “Lose the primary to win the general without violating your principles,” Mr. Bush said at the event, sponsored by The Wall Street Journal. But pursuing such an unapologetic bid — and not being pulled into “the vortex,” as Mr. Bush describes it — may prove easier in theory. And Mr. Bush, having watched politics close up since he was in his 20s working on his father’s 1980 presidential campaign, understands this reality. Speaking last month to a Republican donor, he discussed the difficulties posed by the early states in the nominating process, especially Iowa, where religious conservatives have won the past two Republican presidential contests. “He said he knows Iowa is going to be tough,” recounted the donor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a private conversation. “He even joked, ‘I could probably do better there not even visiting.’ ” But Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa, a six-term Republican from the establishment wing of the party, said Mr. Bush could do well in the state if he committed to it, and urged him to “run a primary campaign that focuses on the general election.” Still, Mr. Branstad suggested that Mr. Bush would have to make some calibrations to his message on an education overhaul. Many conservatives fear that the Common Core , the set of voluntary education standards devised by a bipartisan group of governors, could lead to a national curriculum drawn up by the federal government. A Gallup poll in September revealed that 58 percent of Republican parents had a negative view of the Common Core, up from 42 percent in the spring. The fall poll showed that just 19 percent of Republican parents view the standards favorably. “He’s got a great record on that, but he needs to keep the focus on the substance of what he accomplished and what he thinks should be accomplished for the country, and not be defending Common Core,” Mr. Branstad said. In a speech last month to his education foundation, Mr. Bush did not back down from his support of the education standards, but he did note that nobody in the debate “has a bad motive.” The question looming, should he run, is whether he would withstand pressure to move beyond that — and if doing so would undermine the sort of truth-telling campaign he would like to run. The former governor may be able to defuse the conflict over the Common Core if he is willing to embrace conservative positions on other issues, much as his brother George W. Bush did in 2000. Russell D. Moore, a senior leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, visited Jeb Bush at his Miami-area office this year and came away believing that Mr. Bush, who converted to Catholicism in the 1990s, “wasn’t embarrassed” about his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. “This is no Jon Huntsman,” he said, referring to the former Utah governor who ran as a moderate for the Republican nomination in 2012. “But it depends on what he’s planning to do,” Mr. Moore continued. “If he articulates the views he articulated to me on those issues, then that’s not backing away from social conservatism.” Mr. Bush also must grapple with his brother’s legacy, the challenge of which was illustrated this week with the release of the Senate report on the C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques. Mr. Bush has said that he will make a decision on whether to run by the end of this month. Yet even as he reaches out to donors and as his advisers contact potential strategists — including in early primary states like South Carolina — Mr. Bush’s business activities suggest that he is just as focused on making money as planning a campaign. Some of his supporters grumbled this week about a Bloomberg Businessweek article about his ties to private equity, fretting that it would worry donors about how serious he was about the race. Mr. Bush’s aides swiftly pushed back against the article, arguing that it overstated the political significance of Mr. Bush’s business activities. They pointed out that the main investment company where he is a partner was established in 2008. Many of the party’s leading officials believe that he is gearing up to run — and that assumption is beginning to shape the field. When Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and a longtime Bush family friend, announced last week that he would not run for president , it was in part an admission about how difficult a bid could be if Mr. Bush enters the race. Mr. Bush would benefit most if those Republicans who do run vie for the support of the party’s hard-liners. That would fracture the conservative base, leaving an opening for him among more moderate-leaning Republicans. “Lock up the center and let them fight it out on the right,” Mr. McCain said.

2016 Presidential Election
Jeb Bush
Republicans


Friends and Colleagues Remember Lives Lost in the Metro-North Crash

Abstract: The five men rode up front, whether out of preference or habit or for no good reason. They were going home from a day’s work. Finance work. Art work. Things like that. The commonness of their commute became nightmarish when the Metro-North Railroad train carrying them plowed into a sport-utility vehicle stuck on the tracks at a Westchester County crossing during the frigid Tuesday evening rush. The five men died, as did the woman driving the crumpled car. She, too, had finished a day’s work. The medical examiner was still in the process of definitively confirming the identities of the victims, so badly were the bodies burned. The driver, however, was identified by officials as Ellen Brody, a jewelry store worker, and one of the commuters was confirmed by friends as Eric M. Vandercar, a financial executive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art said Walter Liedtke , a curator of European paintings, was another victim. Robert Dirks, a research scientist, died in the crash, his father confirmed. Aditya Tomar, who worked at JP Morgan Asset Management, was also among those killed, according to Mayor Mark D. Boughton of Danbury, Conn. Image Ellen Brody Joseph Nadol, 42, of Ossining was also killed in the crash, said Rob Greenstein, town supervisor of New Castle, N.Y. Mr. Nadol worked at JP Morgan as a managing director of the U.S. aerospace and defense equity research group. “Our thoughts and support are with Joe’s family during this difficult time,” a JP Morgan spokesman said in a statement. Ms. Brody, 49, a married mother of three, worked at ICD Contemporary Jewelry, a shop in Chappaqua. She had been with the store for more than a decade, and was a bookkeeper and sales associate. Co-workers said she left work at 6 on Tuesday evening, closing time, and was on her way to meet a friend in Scarsdale. Ms. Brody lived in the Edgemont section of Greenburgh. When she did not arrive home, one of her three daughters called one of her mother’s colleagues. Her husband, Alan, learned at 11 p.m. why she had not gotten home. “She was the nicest, nicest person,” said Varda Singer, the owner of the jewelry store. “And she was a great mom, a great wife and a great worker. She was a person I called a saint. She was the most selfless person.” Image Eric Vandercar Virginia Shasha, one of Ms. Brody’s co-workers, spent the night at the house with her daughters and husband. One daughter is in high school, one is in college and another has graduated from college. “Their world has shattered,” Ms. Shasha said. She said of Ms. Brody that “she just loved people and always searched to bring out the best in them.” She said that one of the first things Ms. Brody’s husband said was how he was “devastated for everybody.” Ms. Brody was looking forward to celebrating her 50th birthday next month. His friends knew him as a first-car man. That was where you could be sure to find Eric Vandercar, 53, on the commuter train he took home from Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. “He was an orderly guy,” said Mark Rechler, a musician and architect who was a longtime friend. “He always sat in that first car. That was his car.” Image Walter Liedtke Credit Craig Ruttle/Associated Press He was a successful businessman, with expertise in municipal funding. Just last year, he moved from Morgan Stanley, where he had worked for nearly 27 years, to Mesirow Financial, a financial services firm based in Chicago. He was senior managing director and head of municipal funding. He kept his car at the Bedford Hills station for the short drive to his home, which he shared with his wife, Jill, and two children. “He was a super-kind, generous, quiet man,” said Michael Weschler, a photographer and a friend of Mr. Vandercar. “Just the nicest guy you would ever meet.” An abiding passion was music. “He lived large, and he was a huge music fan,” Mr. Rechler said. He was what is known as a taper, who recorded hundreds of the frequent live music shows he attended, making the tapes available free on archive.org , an Internet repository. Mr. Rechler said Mr. Vandercar had something like 300 shows on the digital archive. His favorite band was probably moe., a jam band, and he was a devotee of the Radiators, a New Orleans jazz band. He and his wife were regulars at venues like Brooklyn Bowl and B.B. King Blues Club, and they would attend the New Orleans Jazz Festival. He was also an avid skier, favoring Park City, Utah, and was a skilled scuba diver. Image Virginia Shasha, left, and Varda Singer worked with Ms. Brody at the jewelry store Ms. Singer owns in Chappaqua, N.Y. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times Mr. Vandercar’s wife did not want to comment on Wednesday. In the morning, she had had to tell her children that their father would not be coming home. Her eyes were red from weeping as she hugged mourners who stopped by the family home on the slope of a gentle, snowy ridge in Bedford Hills. A dozen cars clogged the long driveway. There was a basketball hoop out front, a white wooden fence in back that wound to the edge of a forest. A woman carrying a box of food down the slippery street had to rest it on her raised knee several times so that she could blot her tears. Walter Liedtke, 69, was a first-car man because, as he told friends, he found peace there. His life was always an interesting juxtaposition. His activities on Monday perfectly illustrated that. At 5:30 a.m., he sat behind the wheel of his pickup truck, plowing snow from the country lane in Bedford Hills where he lived with his wife, Nancy. Four hours later, he was leading a tour of Rembrandt paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He was a very elegant man; he loved his life,” said Ursula LaMotte, who for 33 years rented the Liedtkes a house near a horse stable behind her converted farmhouse. For many years, Mr. Liedtke and his wife kept a pair of horses in the barn. Some mornings he baled hay before heading to Manhattan to describe the textures of paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Image Robert Dirks “He was an intellectual,” Ms. LaMotte’s husband, Tom LaMotte, said. “He never mentioned retirement. He loved what he was doing.” Worldly as he was, he was always hungry to learn new things. He spent his time on the train reading. And so he had a firm preference. “He liked riding in the front of the train,” Ms. LaMotte said. “It’s the quiet car.” Robert Dirks, 36, a scientist at D.E. Shaw Research in Manhattan, was married with two young children, ages 2 and 5, his father, Michael Dirks, said. He was a smart student growing up in Spokane, Wash., and was valedictorian at his high school, his father said. He later received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. His company’s website said that he worked in the “development of novel computational chemistry methods,” but his father said he gave a more succinct description of his job. “He used to say — ‘Dad, just say I’m a scientist, then they can understand,’ ” his father said. Mr. Dirks was born in Bangkok, Thailand, where his mother was from, his father said. His wife also worked at D.E. Shaw until she decided to stay at home to raise the couple’s children. The Harlem line was the train he always took home. “You just don’t expect that you’re going to get on a train to go to work and not make it home,” Mr. Dirks said. Aditya Tomar, 41, of Danbury, Conn., was also among the victims, Mayor Boughton said. The mayor said he had spoken with Mr. Tomar’s family, who had asked for privacy. “Understandably,” he said, “they need some time to grieve and mourn the loss of their loved one.”

Metro North
Train wreck
Ellen Brody
Walter Liedtke
Eric Vandercar
Robert Dirks
Joseph Nadol
Aditya Tomar
Valhalla NY


Johnson & Johnson Posts Strong Results

Abstract: Johnson & Johnson showed resilience Tuesday in the face of an economic downturn, posting higher third-quarter sales and earnings. Because the large medical products company is more broadly diversified than many other drug and medical device makers, Johnson & Johnson’s report is not necessarily considered a bellwether for the entire health care industry. Hospitals, for example, tend to be retrenching, squeezed by the credit crisis and concerns about patients’ ability to pay their bills. But health care products, like the artificial joints made by Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy division, may be less subject to the economic winds buffeting most sectors of the economy. “Everything we’ve seen so far has shown that health care has been pretty defensive and volumes have not been affected by the downturn in the economy,” said David H. Roman, a medical devices analyst for Morgan Stanley. For example, up to 70 percent of hip and knee replacements, a large part of the medical device industry, are performed on Medicare beneficiaries — a group whose insurance coverage is guaranteed and who would be unlikely to delay surgery because of the economy. And, as Mr. Roman said, Medicare beneficiaries are growing in numbers. Another medical products company, Abbott, is set to announce its earnings Wednesday morning. Many analysts predict those numbers will also be strong, largely because of the company’s Xience drug-coated heart stent, a device that has become popular among interventional cardiologists, Mr. Roman said. Xience’s success is coming in part at the expense of Johnson & Johnson’s Cypher stent, which is one of the rare devices in the company’s portfolio that did not show solid growth. In Johnson & Johnson’s earnings call with analysts on Tuesday, Dominic Caruso, the chief financial officer, said that the company’s access to commercial paper had been unfettered and available at what he called “very, very good” rates. That could bode well for other health products company. “That’s important,” said Ronny Gal, a pharmaceuticals analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “The markets are not frozen for health care companies.” Mr. Gal said the news could mean that Teva, the Israeli maker of generic drugs, would have no problem completing its pending $7.5 billion acquisition of Barr Laboratories, another generic maker. To finance that deal, Teva plans to raise more than $2 billion, Mr. Gal said. Johnson & Johnson announced sales of $15.9 billion for the third quarter, up 6.4 percent from a year earlier. Excluding special charges, the company said it earned $1.17 a share in the third quarter, versus 88 cents a year earlier. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had been expecting earnings of $1.11 a share. Excluding special charges, the company’s net earnings for the quarter increased 7.6 percent compared with last year’s period. Johnson & Johnson, based in New Brunswick, N.J., also raised its guidance for the year.. The company increased its earnings guidance for full-year 2008 to $4.50 to $4.53 a share. Its previous forecast had ranged from $4.45 to $4.50 a share. Johnson & Johnson’s shares were up more than 2 percent Tuesday, closing at $64. The company said its results improved despite generic competition to its Duragesic painkiller patch and its schizophrenia medication Risperdal, as well as sales declines in Europe for its injectable anemia medication Epogen. The company’s acquisition in December 2006 of Pfizer’s consumer products division — which included the Listerine line of products — seems to be a successful move, with the company citing strength in that part of its business. Among strong sellers for Johnson & Johnson during the quarter was Zyrtec, an over-the-counter allergy treatment that the company introduced this year. Zyrtec was part of the Pfizer consumer products acquisition. Also in that acquisition was Listerine mouthwash, another strong seller. Consumer products generally are steadier and less risky than pharmaceuticals, with lower research and development costs, fewer regulatory demands, lower litigation costs and less impact from generic competition. Eli Lilly , for example, recently announced it would pay $70 a share, or $6.5 billion, for Imclone, the maker of the cancer drug Erbitux . The price was considered high, but the move was thought to be critical to Lilly, which faces the loss of patent exclusivity on its best-selling Zyprexa schizophrenia drug in 2011. Lilly “is between a rock and a hard place from the standpoint that it desperately needs to get new product into its portfolio,” Dr. Timothy Anderson, another pharmaceutical analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein, in a note to clients. Lilly reports its earnings on Oct. 23.

Johnson & Johnson Inc
Company Reports
Sales


Six Games. Seven Homers. One Hot Rockies Rookie.

Abstract: The rookie shortstop Trevor Story capped his remarkable first week in the majors by hitting his seventh home run, helping the Colorado Rockies beat the visiting San Diego Padres, 6-3, on Sunday. Story’s homer was one of five solo shots by the Rockies. Carlos Gonzalez went deep twice and Nolan Arenado and Ryan Raburn also connected for Colorado, which salvaged the finale of its three-game series. Story has 12 R.B.I. through six games. ROYALS 4, TWINS 3 Pinch-runner Terrance Gore streaked home on a wild pitch with two outs in the 10th inning, scoring with a headfirst slide to lift Kansas City to a win at home over Minnesota. The Royals rallied for two runs in the ninth to tie it, then dropped the Twins to 0-6. This is Minnesota’s worst start since the Washington Senators moved to the Twin Cities and were renamed the Twins for the 1961 season. CUBS 7, DIAMONDBACKS 3 Jake Arrieta homered and pitched seven innings, helping Chicago finish off an impressive first week by winning at Arizona. Arrieta (2-0) allowed three runs and eight hits, striking out six. He gave himself a boost with a two-out, two-run homer in the second inning off Shelby Miller (0-1). GIANTS 9, DODGERS 6 Joe Panik hit a tiebreaking two-run double in the sixth inning as San Francisco homered three times to overcome an early five-run deficit and beat visiting Los Angeles. Buster Posey, Brandon Belt and Angel Pagan all homered as the Giants rallied after falling behind, 5-0, before they even came up to bat. ATHLETICS 2, MARINERS 1 Coco Crisp hit a two-out homer in the 10th inning to help Oakland overcome a dominant outing from the Mariners’ ace, Felix Hernandez, and won at Seattle to sweep the three-game series. Hernandez struck out 10 over seven scoreless innings, allowing three hits and two walks. BLUE JAYS 3, RED SOX 0 Marco Estrada pitched seven shutout innings, Josh Donaldson hit a solo home run, and Toronto beat visiting Boston, avoiding a three-game sweep. Estrada (1-0) gave up five hits, walked two and struck out eight, helping Toronto win for the first time in five games. BREWERS 3, ASTROS 2 Jimmy Nelson struck out nine in six-plus innings, and Milwaukee took advantage of early wildness by Houston’s ace, Dallas Keuchel, to win at home. Keuchel walked four in the first inning and gave up a two-run single to Aaron Hill. Keuchel (1-1) left with two outs in the sixth with six walks — tying his career high — including an intentional pass to Ryan Braun in the fourth. ORIOLES 5, RAYS 3 Manny Machado went 4 for 4 with a two-run homer and Baltimore beat visiting Tampa Bay to remain the only undefeated team in the majors. The 5-0 start matches the 1970 team for the best in Orioles history. After sweeping Minnesota in three games to open the season, Baltimore completed the homestand by taking two from Tampa Bay in a rain-abbreviated series. CARDINALS 12, BRAVES 7 Brandon Moss and Matt Carpenter hit three-run homers and St. Louis won at Atlanta to keep the Braves as the only National League team without a win. The Braves (0-5) also lost the right-hander Dan Winkler, who suffered a fractured right elbow while throwing a pitch in the seventh. He left the mound in obvious pain after throwing behind Randal Grichuk. ANGELS 3, RANGERS 1 Jered Weaver pitched six effective innings in his injury-delayed season debut, and Los Angeles won at home over Texas to earn a split of the four-game series. Weaver (1-0) allowed a run and six hits en route to his 139th career win — passing Nolan Ryan for second on the franchise list behind Chuck Finley’s 165. REDS 2, PIRATES 1 Jay Bruce hit a run-scoring triple in the ninth inning, and Cincinnati capped a strong season-opening homestand by beating Pittsburgh. The Reds took two of three from the Pirates and are 5-1.

Baseball
Kansas City Royals
Minnesota Twins
Trevor Story
Rockies
Padres


Turkey Says Suicide Bombing Kills at Least 30 in Suruc, Near Syria

Abstract: ISTANBUL — A suicide bombing struck a cultural center in a Turkish town near the Syrian border on Monday, killing at least 30 and wounding more than 100 in an attack that Turkey’s prime minister suggested had been plotted by the Islamic State. The assault, in the town of Suruc, was the deadliest in Turkey in more than two years. If the Islamic State is confirmed to be behind the assault, it would be the organization’s first mass killing of civilians in Turkey and the worst spillover in deadly violence from Syria ’s civil war. It was carried out two weeks after Turkey intensified efforts to combat Islamic extremists by arresting hundreds across the country in a series of raids. On Saturday, Turkish security forces arrested nearly 500 people trying to cross from Turkey into northern Syria, where the Islamic State has firmly entrenched itself. Video Graphic video shows the aftermath of what officials say were suicide bombings in the Turkish town of Suruc, near the Syrian border, on Monday, which killed at least 28 people. Credit Credit Associated Press When Turkish authorities blocked access to several Islamic news websites last week, Islamic State sympathizers in Turkey threatened to carry out an unspecified retaliation. “For the first time, the war along Turkey’s borders moved within Turkey on Monday,” said Verda Ozer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council , a Washington-based research group, who was recently in Suruc. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, speaking about the Suruc bombing at a news conference in Ankara, the capital, said preliminary findings pointed to “a suicide attack carried out by Daesh,” the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. He said, however, that “we are not at a point to make a final judgment.” Turkish officials universally condemned the assault as an act of terrorism, and some suggested it was retaliation for the government’s crackdown. The Interior Ministry said the assault was a “terrorist attack targeting our country’s unity.” Image One of the victims held the hand of a mortally wounded woman. Credit Zeki Yavuzak/Depo Photos, via Associated Press The explosion was the deadliest attack inside Turkey since car bombings in May 2013 left dozens dead in the town of Reyhanli, right by the Syrian border. Turkish officials blamed supporters of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, for that assault. Relations between Turkey and Syria, which share a border of more than 500 miles, have steadily worsened during the Syrian civil war, now more than four years old. Turkey houses one of the largest populations of Syrian refugees. While Turkey has not gone as far as the United States and its Western and Arab allies with airstrikes against suspected Islamic State targets, the Turks have increasingly cooperated with the goal of degrading the group’s capabilities. United States officials said Monday that it was too early to attribute the Suruc attack to retribution for Turkey’s more assertive effort to combat the Islamic State, although that is a concern going forward. Image A wounded man after an explosion in Suruc, Turkey, on Monday. Credit Reuters “The Turks will be faced with this reality at some point,” said a senior American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments. “I don’t think they’ll backslide.” Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square late Monday to march in solidarity with the victims of the bombing. The police dispersed the crowds with tear gas and water cannons after some chanted slogans against the government, accusing it of collaborating with Islamic State militants. An official at the mayor’s office in Suruc said the explosion on Monday hit the Amara Cultural Center during a gathering of a youth group of Turks and Kurds meeting to discuss entering Kobani, the town across the border in Syria that has been ravaged by fighting and is in urgent need of rebuilding. Amateur video footage published by the Dogan News Agency showed a youth group chanting slogans and carrying a banner in the garden of the culture center before an explosion ripped through the crowd. Image Turks marched after an attack believed to be tied to ISIS killed at least 30 near Syria. Credit Adem Altan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Witnesses said two men had been seen carrying bags into the garden of the cultural center before blowing themselves up. “Bodies and body parts were scattered all over the place,” said Mustafa Ebdi, a Kurdish activist based in Suruc who arrived at the scene shortly after the blast. “Passers-by rushed to evacuate the wounded from the scene and then rushed them to the hospital.” Television footage showed dozens of people lying on the grass as plumes of smoke rose up from the ground. Ambulances and private cars arrived to pick up the wounded. Suruc is about eight miles from Kobani, which Kurdish fighters have defended from repeated attacks by the Islamic State as a military coalition led by the United States has carried out airstrikes. The Islamic State suffered a blow when it lost control of Kobani in January. Another explosion was reported in Kobani on Monday, but the cause was not immediately clear.

Turkey
Bombs
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Suruc
Syria
Ahmet Davutoglu


Conclave to Elect Pope Will Begin on Tuesday

Abstract: VATICAN CITY — The identity of the new pope fuels enormous anticipation, but the next most breathlessly discussed topic here has been when the cardinals will actually get down to choosing him. The answer is Tuesday. The cardinals, after five days of meetings and plenty of speculation, settled on the date within a half-hour of the start of an afternoon session on Friday. The news was transmitted by an e-mail from the Vatican press office. Cutting their discussions short suggests that they have moved closer to drawing up a list of candidates, or at least the qualities they want in a new pope — a pastoral communicator, a firm administrator, a reformer of the Vatican’s scandal-tainted bureaucracy. But the field remains wide open, with no one considered a heavy favorite. A two-thirds majority, or 77 of the 115 elector cardinals, is required to elect a pope. Given the record of conclaves in the past 110 years, it is likely that Catholics will have a new pontiff by the end of next week, in plenty of time for the beginning of Easter ceremonies, starting with Palm Sunday on March 24. The longest of those conclaves was in 1903 (ending in the selection of Pius X) and 1922 (Pius XI), each lasting five days. Three lasted two days, including the one that elected Benedict XVI in 2005. On Tuesday, the cardinals will first attend a special Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica for papal elections, and then in the afternoon they will file into the Sistine Chapel to begin their secret, anonymous balloting. They will hold one round of voting that afternoon and return to cast their ballots again on Wednesday. Image Cardinal Odilo Scherer of Brazil, center, and Cardinal Geraldo Agnelo of Brazil arrived for a meeting in the Synod Hall at the Vatican on Friday. Credit Dylan Martinez/Reuters The cardinals began meeting on Monday, four days after Benedict XVI left the Vatican forever as pope, the first man to resign the office in nearly 600 years. As part of the rules of papal transition, the cardinals take charge of the church, gather daily to discuss its future and share their hopes and expectations for the next vicar of Christ on earth. A logistical task comes next: the assigning by lot of rooms for the 115 cardinals at the Vatican’s Santa Marta residence for the duration of the conclave, where they will be denied contact with the outside world. The random assignments ensure a spirit of objectivity, said the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi. It ensures that cardinals cannot pick their neighbors, he added. At their daily briefing on Friday, Vatican press officials showed silent video images of the modest accommodations — a sitting room with a table and facing chairs, a single bed with a wrought-iron headboard, a small television (which will presumably be removed or deactivated), unadorned white walls. The officials also showed images of a luxury suite destined to house the new pope while his apartment in the Apostolic Palace is prepared. Father Lombardi said that slightly more than 100 of the 150 or so cardinals present had given short speeches about the state of the church and what was needed in the next pope, a subtle form of politicking and auditioning. Another session is scheduled for Saturday. Vatican analysts and Vaticanisti, those journalists who closely cover the Holy See and papal matters, have offered theories about the significance of the length of the meetings. One view is that Italian cardinals and insiders wanted to move quickly to a conclave to stave off too much scrutiny of the scandals that have washed over the Vatican in recent months. Another is that outsiders and foreign cardinals feel the need to explore questions of corruption and mismanagement more deeply, pushing to extend the talks. Video The Times’s Daniel J. Wakin reports from Rome, where the voting process to elect a new pope is set to start on Tuesday with no clear front-runner. Credit Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images But other factors are at play. The congregation meetings are the last opportunities for cardinals older than 80 — who are not eligible to vote in the conclave — to voice their views publicly about the direction of the church and the kind of pope who should lead it. A more prosaic cause for the timing of the conclave announcement is an interpretation of Vatican rules on declaring a conclave that requires all the elector cardinals to be present to do so. Cardinal Jean-Baptiste Pham Minh Man of Vietnam was the last to arrive on Thursday. The formal discussions have not been organized according to subject matter. The cardinals speak in the order of their requests. Normally, the conclave should start 15 to 20 days after the end of a papacy, a period intended to include preparations for a papal funeral and for mourning. But Benedict, in the days before he stepped down, revised the rules to allow an earlier start. Two of the 117 cardinals under 80 are not attending. They are Cardinal Julius Riyadi Darmaatmadja of Indonesia, who cited ill health, and Britain’s most senior cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who said he would not be attending after being accused of “inappropriate acts” with priests. He later acknowledged that he had been guilty of sexual misconduct. On Friday, the cardinals voted to accept the reasons given for the two absences, as they are required to do. The vote was a reminder of the need to choose a pope who is untainted by improprieties. “They’re very concerned about getting somebody clean,” said Robert Mickens, the Vatican correspondent for The Tablet, a London-based Catholic weekly. “The O’Brien scandal is right in their faces.”

Rome
Catholic Church
Cardinal Catholic
Pope


U.N. Official Cleared in Leak Inquiry

Abstract: The United Nations said Monday that an internal inquiry had cleared an agency official who leaked information to the French government in 2014 about an investigation into accusations that French soldiers serving as peacekeepers in the Central African Republic had sexually abused some of the children they were sent to protect. Farhan Haq, a United Nations spokesman, said the Office of Internal Oversight Services had told the official, Anders Kompass, that “the cases against him are now closed.” Mr. Kompass had been accused of breaching policy by not redacting the names of the children.

UN
Anders Kompass
Central African Republic
Child Abuse
Rape
France
International relations


Convicted of Kidnapping, Focused on Healing Arts

Abstract: SANTIAGO, Chile CLAD in a white medical robe, faded bluejeans and socks, Tomás Cassella gently glides his hands over his patient while New Age music plays softly in the background. With sweeping motions, Mr. Cassella, a mild-mannered reiki master, symbolically amasses any lingering negative energy, cups it into his hands and blows it away. “How do you feel?” he asks Gabriel, a 63-year-old engineer undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer. Gabriel, who withheld his last name because he said most of his friends were unaware he had cancer, simply smiled and nodded from underneath a thin blanket. He slowly got up off the cot, and the two men embraced. “Tomás has helped me so much, unconditionally, and has never charged me anything,” Gabriel said. “So when I learned about his past, I chose not to think about it. It just doesn’t make sense.” Last year, Gabriel said he looked up Mr. Cassella on Google to confirm the spelling of his last name. But what he discovered was that the warm, caring man who had helped him heal for over a year had been convicted on kidnapping charges. Mr. Cassella, 66, a former Uruguayan Army colonel, was extradited to Chile in 2006 with two other officers and prosecuted for the abduction of Eugenio Berríos, a former chemist for Chile’s secret intelligence agency during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Mr. Berríos was killed in Uruguay in the early 1990s. A criminal investigation established that once the Pinochet government ended in 1990, the army’s intelligence department began what it called “casualty control,” taking former agents wanted for human rights crimes clandestinely out of the country to evade justice. In 1991, Mr. Berríos and at least two other agents were escorted under false names to Argentina and then Uruguay with the cooperation of military officers in those countries. Mr. Cassella, the investigation found, was ordered to act as a liaison. But Mr. Berríos’s increasing emotional instability, depression and heavy drinking — and a scandalous episode in 1992 in which he ran to a police station claiming that his handlers were out to kill him — had made him a liability for his Chilean protectors and Uruguayan hosts, and he disappeared, the investigation found. His body was found buried on a Uruguayan beach in 1995, two bullet wounds to the head. In 2010, Mr. Cassella was sentenced to eight years for kidnapping and illegal association, and he is now in the appeal process. Although he acknowledges having known Mr. Berrios, he claims the charges are preposterous. “I didn’t know they were using false names, who they were or what they were doing in Uruguay,” he said of the Chilean agents. “Berríos was never kidnapped. He lived in a luxurious apartment, his wallet was full of money and he was free to move about. His wife used to visit him. There was no illegal organization. I was just their contact in case he needed anything.” For more than six years, Mr. Cassella has lived in a legal limbo in Chile, prohibited from leaving. All the while, he has pursued his healing therapies, claiming to help restore sight to blind patients, reduce tumors and get children up from wheelchairs. “I see these kind of cases all the time. Inoperable brain tumors, for example, shrink until they disappear, without chemotherapy or radiation,” he said. “I’ve done it.” MR. CASSELLA was familiar with Chile long before his legal troubles began. In 1975, while both countries were under military rule, he won a yearlong scholarship to the Chilean Army’s Parachute and Special Forces School in Peldehue, the site of political executions and anti-subversive commando training after the 1973 coup. There he first met Chilean intelligence agents later convicted of human rights crimes. Mr. Cassella returned to Uruguay to found its first parachute instruction center in 1976, under Infantry Battalion 14. It was in this battalion, two years later, that an antiterrorist squadron called Scorpion was trained, according to the army’s Web page. Over the past year, criminal inquiries into human rights violations have found the remains of two “disappeared” victims buried in a field next to Battalion 14. Mr. Cassella said he had no knowledge of executions or the burial of political prisoners in his unit. He has not been charged with any human rights crimes or the Berríos affair in Uruguay. Later, Mr. Cassella was appointed head of the Counterintelligence Company at the Army’s General Command, and he went to Chile once again to attend, in 1988, a monthlong course offered by the successor group to Chile’s secret intelligence agency. When in mid-1993 an anonymous source alerted Uruguayan legislators to Mr. Berríos’s presumed abduction, Mr. Cassella suddenly became front-page news. His life had changed forever, but not only because of the missing Chilean agent. Earlier that year, his brother-in-law learned he had an inoperable cancer. Mr. Cassella and his sister embarked on a desperate search for alternative treatments and heard about a Filipino healer who would be in Argentina for a weeklong healing congress. They signed up. “That’s when I first learned about reiki, working with energy, stones, aromatherapy, magnets,” Mr. Cassella said. “I was skeptical but open to the experience. A woman with severe multiple sclerosis offered a heartbreaking testimony. And there I was, a tough parachuter and commando, with tears streaming down my face.” His soul-searching began. In late 1993, with the Berríos case in full flare, Mr. Cassella took his first reiki class. His military comrades would jest that he had become “a little girl.” What was he searching for? “The purpose in life, the origins, why we are here, what we should do.” The Berríos affair impeded his promotion to general in 2000, so he retired from the army and set up a jewelry import business with his former wife. As the business boomed, a Chilean judge indicted him and two other Uruguayan officers in 2002 on the Berríos case. Four years later, they landed in Chile. “I DON’T believe in coincidence, but in causality,” he said. “So there has to be a reason I am in Chile now, and that reason has to be very important for keeping me here for so long.” By the time he got to Chile, he had mastered three levels of reiki and learned a number of other therapies. When he was released on bail after a five-month detention, the Uruguayan Army helped him rent an apartment. Next door was a yoga center with a sign offering reiki. The center put him in contact with reiki therapists and through them he became a volunteer at the Luis Calvo Mackenna public children’s hospital in Santiago. For six years, Mr. Cassella has been “devoted in body and soul” to reiki and syntergetics — a synthesis of conventional, homeopathic, Chinese and Hindu medicine, reiki, color therapy, flower essences, shamanism, magnet therapy and other healing techniques. Even friends and military comrades from Uruguay see him for treatment. Living off a generous military pension plan, Mr. Cassella is now in charge of all the syntergetic volunteer groups at the hospital and provides free reiki services for cancer patients on Mondays, syntergetics on Thursdays and reiki for bone-marrow transplant patients on Fridays. The rest of his time he treats patients from his home or a private center, all free, and teaches reiki. Mr. Cassella also coordinates “healing caravans,” in which therapists go to remote towns. Everyone in the medical and alternative therapy world knows who he is and why he is in Chile, he contends, but “no one has said a word, not ever.” “I don’t care about the Berríos case anymore,” he said. “I don’t read what the papers say about it, and I don’t participate in the court proceedings if I don’t have to. I’m not going to poison myself with it.” There are two Uruguayan syntergetics practitioners in the world; one lives in Spain, and the other is Tomás Cassella. That is the underlying purpose of his extradition, he believes. “I understand now why this happened to me, and I can let it go,” he said. “The Berríos case was a breaking point in my military career and in my life, but for the better.”

Chile
Tomas Cassella
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte
Uruguay
Alternative medicine
Eugenio Berrios Sagredo


The N.F.L.'s Biggest Overachievers and Underachievers of 2014

Abstract: Every year, Las Vegas projects the number of wins for each N.F.L. team. In most years, the majority finish within a couple of games of that projection; this year, 20 of 32 teams finished within two wins of their projected total. But each year there are also a few outliers. Below is a review of 2014’s two biggest overachievers and underachievers. Dallas Cowboys (Projected wins: 8. Actual: 12.) Projecting an eight-win season for the Cowboys seemed like a safe bet: Dallas finished with an 8-8 record in 2011, 2012 and 2013, and there was little reason for optimism in 2014. The defense allowed the most yards in the N.F.L. in 2013, then lost three of its best players: DeMarcus Ware moved on to the Broncos, Jason Hatcher signed with the Redskins, and Sean Lee tore an anterior cruciate ligament in May. The expectation was that the offense would be good, but that the defense could be one of the worst in history. But the defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli turned a unit short on talent into a respectable on-field product. Marinelli got the most out of linemen like Jeremy Mincey, Tyrone Crawford and Henry Melton. Inside linebacker Rolando McClain isn’t just a candidate for comeback player of the year: His production was one of the more shocking developments of the season. A former draft bust, McClain officially retired in May 2013 . More than a year later, the Cowboys traded a sixth-round pick to Baltimore for McClain and a seventh-round pick. But he was the Cowboys’ most dependable linebacker in 2014 and finished as a top 10 inside linebacker, according to Pro Football Focus. The defense needed only to approach average levels because the offense turned into one of the N.F.L.’s best. Consider: Tony Romo finished first in passer rating, DeMarco Murray finished first in rushing yards and Dez Bryant finished first in receiving touchdowns. That remarkable level of production speaks not only to their individual talents, but to the dominant offensive line that Jerry Jones and his staff have constructed. The Cowboys spent first-round picks on linemen in three of the last four years, and each of them — left tackle Tyron Smith (2011), center Travis Frederick (2013) and right guard Zack Martin (2014) — earned trips to the Pro Bowl. Arizona Cardinals (Projected wins: 7.5. Actual: 11.) The 2013 Cardinals were 10-6, but Vegas was down on the prospects of the 2014 team for several reasons. Arizona had one of the oldest rosters in the N.F.L. and also played in the toughest division. That combination could torpedo a team very quickly. In addition, the Cardinals had significant turnover on defense and entered with question marks at quarterback and on the offensive line. In the end, Arizona wildly exceeded expectations, with a caveat. The Cardinals finished only 22nd in Football Outsiders’ top metric , DVOA, an advanced measure of team quality and performance. Even by simpler metrics, the Cardinals look more like a 7.5-win team. Arizona’s offense scored only 27 touchdowns this year, and the defense allowed 31. So how did the Cardinals get to 11 wins despite losing their top two quarterbacks? Arizona was excellent in close games: 10 of the team’s wins came by 11 or fewer points. For some perspective, three of Arizona’s five losses were by at least 16 points. Arizona also scored five touchdowns on returns (while allowing one), and missed only two field-goal attempts (compared with seven by opponents). Image Coach Ken Whisenhunt and the Tennessee Titans ended the year on a 10-game losing streak. Credit David J. Phillip/Associated Press The Cardinals were not a great team, but they were extremely well-coached, and Bruce Arians deserves to take home coach of the year honors. Tennessee Titans (Projected wins: 7. Actual wins: 2.) Tampa Bay Buccaneers (Projected wins: 7. Actual wins: 2.) Both teams ended the 2013 season by firing their coaches. The Titans replaced the unexciting Mike Munchak with Ken Whisenhunt, who had just overseen the career revival of Philip Rivers (the 2013 comeback player of the year) as San Diego’s offensive coordinator. The Bucs were eager to distance the team from the toxic Greg Schiano era and hired the former Bears coach Lovie Smith, a man cut from a much different (and more player-friendly) mold. Things started well for the Titans, who pulled off an opening-day upset at Kansas City. Tennessee would also eke out a 2-point victory over the Jaguars in Week 6, but that was it. Whisenhunt was unable to get much out of Jake Locker (1-4) when healthy or his replacements Charlie Whitehurst (1-4) or Zach Mettenberger (0-6) when Locker was inevitably injured. The Tennessee offense struggled early (40 points in the first quarter of games, fewest in the N.F.L.) and late (47 points in the fourth quarter, second fewest) and scored fewer than 14 points in a league-high seven games. The team was praised for bringing in the renowned defensive coordinator Ray Horton, but Horton, a former Cardinals defensive coordinator, could not salvage a unit short on talent. Horton inherited a defense with two standouts — Jurrell Casey and Derrick Morgan — but was switching from a 4-3 to a 3-4 defense. And while Casey and Morgan had strong years, the rest of the defense struggled. The Buccaneers managed to win only two games despite facing a below-average schedule. (Tampa Bay won the tiebreaker with the Titans for the first pick in the 2015 draft because of its easier schedule.) After losing the first two games, the Bucs were embarrassed in front of a prime-time audience on a Thursday night, falling behind by 56-0 to Atlanta in the third quarter. Smith bounced between the veteran Josh McCown (1-10) and the second-year player Mike Glennon (1-4) at quarterback. Neither provided much of a spark, a constant criticism of Smith’s offenses in Chicago. The reason for hope with Smith was on defense, where stars like Gerald McCoy and Lavonte David were expected to lead a revitalized unit. And while McCoy and David had strong seasons when healthy, the rest of the defense was disappointing. Tampa Bay allowed opposing passers to complete a league-high 68.6 percent of passes, and the Bucs finished in the bottom quarter of the N.F.L. in points and yards allowed.

Football
Arizona Cardinals
Dallas Cowboys
Titans
Buccaneers
Jerry Jones


Guilty Plea in Drug Death at Electric Zoo Festival

Abstract: A 24-year-old Buffalo man pleaded guilty on Thursday to a narcotics charge in a prosecution that arose after an overdose death last year at a New York City music festival. The man, Patrick Morgan, pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Manhattan to one count of conspiring to distribute narcotics, saying he knew he was acting illegally when he agreed to obtain some Ecstasy pills for a friend in August 2013. The friend in turn distributed the pills to others, including Jeffrey Russ, 23, of Rochester, who collapsed and had a seizure at the Electric Zoo music festival on Randalls Island. His death was attributed to acute intoxication from the combined effect of the pills and hyperthermia. The authorities said Mr. Morgan had previously sold pills to Mr. Russ and two others. Under an agreement between prosecutors and a defense lawyer over sentencing guidelines, Mr. Morgan is likely to face less than a year in prison.

Drug Abuse
Patrick Morgan
Jeffrey Russ
Randalls Island
NYC


Rangers Fan Flight Makes Trip From La Guardia to Newark

Abstract: At exactly 10:19 a.m. on Saturday, three minutes after the free Delta- New York Rangers Fan Flight took off from La Guardia Airport ’s nearly deserted Marine Air Terminal and immediately banked hard left, an auburn-haired flight attendant turned on a loudspeaker and, with a slight Southern drawl, said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are beginning our final descent into Newark Liberty Airport.” Her winking tone helped salve some of the sting from my morning: up at 6 a.m., surviving a narcoleptic cabdriver and the esteem-building exercise of removing my shoes and belt, emptying my pockets, isolating my laptop, and chancing a T.S.A. frisk-date. All this so I could observe how a group of die-hard fans (and contest winners) would react under similar circumstances. I’m not afraid of sporting trips — three weeks ago, I flew to London to see Arsenal and Chelsea draw, 0-0, and I make Minnesota a regular destination during the N.F.L. season — but I have never made such an effort to get somewhere so close, to Newark to watch the Rangers play the Devils in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals. Curiosity aside, I also agreed to be a beta tester for the payoff of a wacky promotional contest — in which winners were culled through a variety of means, including online and live events — so I could watch some playoff hockey game that I was almost certain the Rangers (a team of which, full disclosure, I am a fan) were going to lose. Ahem. From door to door, it was a five-and-a-half-hour process — almost twice as long as the game itself. I could have gotten a tattoo of Chris Kreider’s head on my arm in less time, and I’m wondering, when all is said and done, if that might have been a little easier. Five minutes after the flight announcement, the airplane carrying the 80 or so rowdy Rangers fans — a mixture of husky guys yawning through clenched fists, a handful of women in Ryan Callahan and Henrik Lundqvist jerseys, the former Rangers greats Ron Duguay and the Hall of Famer Rod Gilbert, and a few slightly bewildered children — landed smoothly, scarcely having reached an altitude of 3,000 feet. It was if we had been shot from a slingshot over the Hudson, coming down harmlessly on the other shore. As the airplane taxied to what I had secretly hoped would be the arena, a man wedged in next to me. Wearing an Adam Graves jersey that was stained with what I prayed was ketchup or fruit juice, he leaned over and said, “Hey, buddy, you’re not a Devils fan flying incognito, are you?” I shook my head and buried my face back into my notebook, while the crowd began another “Let’s go Rangers!” chant and waved rally towels. We were finally ready to leave the airplane, having spent little more than 30 minutes onboard. Despite a second announcement from the flight attendant, we didn’t need to gather our personal belongings because, honestly, we scarcely had time to ungather them. On the tarmac in Newark, we boarded buses to take us the rest of the way. As I sat back and thought about my day, I realized that I may have taken part in one of the shortest commercial flights in history, or, at the very least, one of the silliest. All I do know for sure is that I greatly enjoyed hanging out with the Rangers fans, and kibitzing with the former players, and I would refuse the opportunity if it presented itself again. Not that it would. Just to say. For event organizers, the journey’s rigors did not seem to affect everyone as much as it did me. At least one man — Vinny Errigo, 36, from Ridgewood, N.J. — actually made a journey worthy of Ulysses, from the Garden State to Queens just so that he could fly back to New Jersey for the hockey game. (After the game, as part of the promotion, he was to have been shuttled back to La Guardia, where presumably, he would have reversed the process.) “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Errigo said. His cousin Phill Errigo, 35, from Staten Island, said, “It sounded like it would be a riot.” Well, it was, but at the same time, it wasn’t. “Let’s put it this way,” said David Sarosi, 35, from New York City, “if we have to go there to see our team play, we do. And hopefully in the future, we’ll fly there.” His wife, Elizabeth, also 35, had a slightly different take: “When I saw the e-mail, I thought it was spam, or even a joke. I said, ‘What idiot is going to fly from La Guardia to Newark?’ And Dave was like, ‘Surprise!’ ”

Newark Liberty International Airport (NJ)


Glen Sather Steps Down as Rangers’ General Manager

Abstract: Glen Sather, who has been at the helm of the Rangers since 2000, said Wednesday that he was relinquishing his role as general manager in favor of his assistant Jeff Gorton. Sather, 71, will remain team president. After missing the playoffs in Sather’s first four seasons, the Rangers have reached the postseason in nine of the last 10 years. They advanced to the Eastern Conference finals three times in the last four seasons, including a trip to the Stanley Cup finals in 2014, when they lost to the Los Angeles Kings in five games. The Rangers won the Presidents’ Cup, with a league-best 113 points last season, and advanced to the conference finals, losing to the Tampa Bay Lightning in seven games. Sather was a runner-up to Tampa Bay’s Steve Yzerman in this season’s voting for general manager of the year. Sather won five Stanley Cups from 1984 to 1990 as general manager of the Edmonton Oilers. He has been an N.H.L. general manager since the 1980-81 season. “It’s been a long time,” Sather said on a conference call. “I’ve pretty much spent my life doing this — playing, coaching and managing. I just felt it was time to move a little bit. The clock ticks for everyone. You look at the managers in the N.H.L., and they are all getting younger. I think it makes sense to have Jeff involved than me involved.” Gorton, 46, will be the 11th general manager for the Rangers. He has been the team’s assistant general manager for the past four seasons. He joined the Rangers as a scout in 2007 and served as assistant director of player personnel before becoming assistant G.M. Gorton spent 15 seasons with the Boston Bruins, including a stint as assistant general manager. “There’s not a lot changing other than I will have the final decision on players,” Gorton said. “We have a really good staff here. And we have Glen in our corner. That’s a benefit to me and everyone else here.” Gorton will be only the third general manager for the Rangers since 1989. Neil Smith took over for Phil Esposito in July of that year and held the position until Sather was hired in 2000. This is the second notable changing of the guard in local hockey circles recently. The Devils’ longtime general manager, Lou Lamoriello, relinquished that role in May and hired Ray Shero. Like Sather, Lamoriello remains team president. Sather’s role may be changing, but he is not planning to move from New York next season in his continuing role as team president. “You’re going to be stuck with me, I’m going to be right here,” he said. The Rangers, who traded forward Carl Hagelin and goalie Cam Talbot last week, were also active Wednesday, the first day to sign free agents. They added left wing Viktor Stalberg, minor-league forwards Brian Gibbons, Jayson Megna and Matt Lindblad, and the veteran defenseman Raphael Diaz, who played for the Rangers during the 2013-14 season. The 29-year-old Stalberg, a 6-foot-3 left wing, played for Nashville the past two seasons. He scored a career-high 22 goals for Chicago in 2011-12. Megna, a 25-year-old center, had 26 goals for Wilkes-Barre/Scranton of the American Hockey League last season. Gibbons, 27, split last season between the Columbus Blue Jackets and their A.H.L. team in Springfield, Mass. Lindblad, 25, had nine goals for A.H.L. Providence. Diaz, 29, played for Calgary last season and replaces Matt Hunwick as the team’s seventh defenseman. Hunwick agreed to a two-year deal with Toronto on Wednesday.

Ice hockey
Glen Sather
Jeff Gorton
Rangers


Melting Greenland Weighs Perils Against Potential

Abstract: NARSAQ, Greenland — As icebergs in the Kayak Harbor pop and hiss while melting away, this remote Arctic town and its culture are also disappearing in a changing climate. Narsaq’s largest employer, a shrimp factory, closed a few years ago after the crustaceans fled north to cooler water. Where once there were eight commercial fishing vessels, there is now one. As a result, the population here, one of southern Greenland’s major towns, has been halved to 1,500 in just a decade. Suicides are up. “Fishing is the heart of this town,” said Hans Kaspersen, 63, a fisherman. “Lots of people have lost their livelihoods.” But even as warming temperatures are upending traditional Greenlandic life, they are also offering up intriguing new opportunities for this state of 57,000 — perhaps nowhere more so than here in Narsaq. Vast new deposits of minerals and gems are being discovered as Greenland’s massive ice cap recedes, forming the basis of a potentially lucrative mining industry. One of the world’s largest deposits of rare earth metals — essential for manufacturing cellphones, wind turbines and electric cars — sits just outside Narsaq. This could be momentous for Greenland, which has long relied on half a billion dollars a year in welfare payments from Denmark, its parent state. Mining profits could help Greenland become economically self sufficient, and may someday even render it the first sovereign nation created by global warming . “One of our goals is to obtain independence,” said Vittus Qujaukitsoq, a prominent labor union leader. But the rapid transition from a society of individual fishermen and hunters to an economy supported by corporate mining raises difficult questions. How would Greenland’s insular settlements tolerate an influx of thousands of Polish or Chinese construction workers, as has been proposed? Will mining despoil a natural environment essential to Greenland’s national identity — the whales and seals, the silent icy fjords, and mythic polar bears? Can fishermen reinvent themselves as miners? “I think mining will be the future, but this is a difficult phase,” said Jens B. Frederiksen, Greenland’s housing and infrastructure minister and a deputy premier. “It’s a plan that not everyone wants. It’s about traditions, the freedom of a boat, family professions.” The Arctic is warming even faster than other parts of the planet, and the rapidly melting ice is causing alarm among scientists about sea-level rise. In northeastern Greenland, average yearly temperature have risen 4.5 degrees in the past 15 years, and scientists predict the area could warm by 14 to 21 degrees by the end of the century. Already, winter pack ice that covers the fjords is no longer stable enough for dog sledding and snowmobile traffic in many areas. Winter fishing, essential to feeding families, is becoming hazardous or impossible. It has long been known that Greenland sat upon vast mineral lodes, and the Danish government has mapped them intermittently for decades. Niels Bohr , Denmark’s Nobel Prize -winning nuclear physicist and a member of the Manhattan Project , visited Narsaq in 1957 because of its uranium deposits. But previous attempts at mining mostly failed, proving too expensive in the inclement conditions. Now, warming has altered the equation. Greenland’s Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum , charged with managing the boom, currently has 150 active licenses for mineral exploration, up from 20 a decade ago. Altogether, companies spent $100 million exploring Greenland’s deposits last year, and several are applying for licenses to begin construction on new mines, bearing gold, iron and zinc and rare earths. There are also foreign companies exploring for offshore oil . “For me, I wouldn’t mind if the whole ice cap disappears,” said Ole Christiansen, the chief executive of NunamMinerals , Greenland’s largest homegrown mining company, as he picked his way along a proposed gold mining site up the fjord from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. “As it melts, we’re seeing new places with very attractive geology.” The Black Angel lead and zinc mine, which closed in 1990, is applying to reopen this year, said Jorgen T. Hammeken-Holm, who oversees licensing at the country’s mining bureau, “because the ice is in retreat and you’re getting much more to explore.” The Greenlandic government hopes that mining will provide new revenue. In granting Greenland home rule in 2009 , Denmark froze its annual subsidy, which is scheduled to be decreased further in the coming years. But Greenland is also looking to leverage the power afforded by its newfound mineral resources to wield “political influence on issues that matter to us,” said Mr. Frederiksen, the deputy premier. Many residents say they resent that better-educated Danes tend to run the small country’s few businesses. The government also wants to persuade the European Union to lift its 2009 ban on imports of seal products , which has devastated a crucial business for the Inuit people and resulted in a backlog of 300,000 skins — roughly five for every resident. Here in Narsaq, a collection of brightly painted homes bordered by spectacular fjords, two foreign companies are applying to the government for permission to mine. “This is huge; we could be mining this for the next 100 years,” said Eric Sondergaard, a geologist with the Australian-owned company Greenland Minerals and Energy , who was on the outskirts of Narsaq one day recently, picking at rocks on a moon-like plateau rich with an estimated 10.5 million tons of rare earth ore. That proximity promises employment, and the company is already schooling some young men in drilling and in English, the international language of mine operations. It plans to build a processing plant, a new port and more roads. (Greenland currently has none outside of settled areas.) Narsaq’s tiny airport, previously threatened with closure from lack of traffic, could be expanded. A local landlord is contemplating converting an abandoned apartment block into a hotel. “There will be a lot of people coming from outside and that will be a big challenge since Greenlandic culture has been isolated,” said Jasper Schroder, a student home in Narsaq from university in Denmark. Still, he supports the mine and hopes it will provide jobs and stem the rash of suicides , particularly among his peers; Greenland has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. “People in this culture don’t want to be a burden to their families if they can’t contribute,” he said. But not all are convinced of the benefits of mining. “Of course the mine will help the local economy and will help Greenland, but I’m not so sure if it will be good for us,” said Dorothea Rodgaard, who runs a local guesthouse. “We are worried about the loss of nature.” Many important political decisions are pending for Greenland’s government. The national labor union wants it to ban the use of low-wage crews from abroad because it does not want local pay scales undermined or jobs lost to foreign workers. But there are not enough native workers to build mines without outside help. And for development to go forward, the government will have to revise a longstanding “zero tolerance” policy for the mining of radioactive material, an outgrowth of Denmark’s adamantly antinuclear stance. Rare earth metals are nearly always intertwined with some radioactive elements. Simon Simonsen, the mayor of South Greenland, which includes Narsaq, said that most residents of the area had overcome initial fears and accepted the levels of radioactive material involved. “If we don’t get this mine,” he said, “Narsaq will just get smaller and smaller.”

Greenland
Mines and Mining
Metals and Minerals
Fishing Commercial
Arctic Regions
Global Warming


And Even More on Climate Change

Abstract: Last week, the big news was that the Obama administration had unveiled a new Environmental Protection Agency regulation to cut carbon emissions from United States power plants 30 percent by 2030. But E.P.A. legislation aside, it has already been a banner year for climate news. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report confirmed once again that human-caused global warming is proceeding rapidly. Last month, scientists reported the irreversible disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and, closer to home, the National Climate Assessment asserted that the United States is already falling victim to severe, global warming-related droughts. In light of this, a new series from The New York Times called The Big Fix will examine potential solutions to climate change. In the first installment, Justin Gillis examines a worldwide experiment that may create economic incentives for companies to invest in emission-control projects. One such project takes Wisconsin dairy cows and extracts power from their excrement, which is paid for by California. See how that works in this slideshow . For latecomers to the global warming discussion, a new digital Flipboard called Temperature Rising showcases some of the Times’s best climate coverage to date. Once you’re all caught up, the Opinion section’s DotEarth blog offers continuous, breaking climate news and occasional analyses — did you know, for example, that Americans take the term “global warming” far more seriously than “climate change”? For a big-picture policy perspective, delivered in less than 2 minutes, the Times Minute crew offers ” The Politics of Obama’s Climate Move. " And for a more personal climate story, watch Vanishing Island , a video profile of one small Louisiana town that is already preparing for rising sea levels. On Twitter, @TheCaucus recently featured an open forum with the Times energy and environmental policy reporter Coral Davenport , who fielded questions about the new E.P.A. regulations. Join in on the broader climate discussion by tweeting @NYTimes and @NYTimesScience.

Climate Change
Global Warming
Greenhouse gas
EPA


Miami-Havana Yacht Race Begins

Abstract: Sailors with an eye on the finish line in Havana set off from Miami, kicking off the inaugural yacht race on the route amid warming ties between Cuba and the United States. The 46 boats, which ranged from 30 to 70 feet in length, carried about 350 sailors for the 210-mile event, simply called the Miami to Havana Race.


Halloween Marketers Going With Discounts

Abstract: FOR Halloween, what are consumers telling Madison Avenue they consider creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky, and altogether ooky? High prices. This Halloween is the third in a row for which marketers and retailers are playing up discounts, deals and bargains rather than goblins, ghosts and vampires. With the economy continuing to bewitch, bother and bewilder shoppers, the goal is to encourage purchases even if they take place at sale prices reminiscent of post-Halloween clearances. For instance, a circular for the Michaels chain of craft stores promises “monstrous savings” and “spooktacular buys on Halloween décor,” including prices that are 25 to 40 percent off. The Ultimate Halloween catalog from the Party City retail chain offers up to 50 percent off on costumes like piglets, cyborg aliens, punk creeps and Wednesday Addams. “Nobody has more Halloween for less,” the cover proclaims. Amazon.com sent e-mails to customers that also offered up to 50 percent off on Halloween costumes, along with free shipping. And ads for Target, introducing a line of Halloween costumes by Simon Doonan of Barneys New York, tell customers they can “look drop-dead gorgeous” at “a wicked va-va-value.”  The price-conscious pitches for Halloween reflect that “everything is about price now, everything,” said Candace Corlett, president at WSL Strategic Retail, a consultancy in New York. “Halloween is one of those holidays we went way overboard for” during the boom years, she added, which has turned it into “a symbol of excess.” “Now, we’re going back to Halloweens more like the 1980s, when it was a fun holiday but not a big-spending holiday,” Ms. Corlett said. Fortunately for consumers, she added, “Halloween is a holiday you can get by without spending a lot.” The Six Flags amusement parks are taking $10 or $20 off the admission prices for their annual Fright Fest events in various markets for customers who bring cans of Coca-Cola when they buy tickets. “Additionally, we’ve got a very aggressive season pass offer this year,” Brett Petit, senior vice president for marketing at Six Flags in New York, wrote in an e-mail. For example, patrons who buy passes for 2011 now will receive free admissions for the rest of this year, including Fright Fest. Six Flags has signed the Snickers line of candy bars sold by Mars to be the presenting sponsor of Fright Fest. That is not the only effort Mars is making to stimulate sales for Halloween. In addition to running television commercials and print advertisements with Halloween themes for M&Ms, which Mars has done for many years, the company is also, for the first time, using Halloween themes to hawk two other candy brands, Snickers and Milky Way. Candy sales have been increasingly lately, said Debra A. Sandler, chief consumer officer for the Mars Chocolate North America unit of Mars in Hackettstown, N.J., and “some of it is driven by the fact we remain an economical treat, something you can do for yourself that’s affordable.” “We see there’s still growth for our products,” she added, which explains the addition of the “Halloween-specific advertising” for Milky Way and Snickers. In the commercial for Milky Way, grown-up trick-or-treaters are greeted at a door by a skeptical girl. Challenged about their age, one adult explains that he had a “growth spurt.” An announcer ends the spot by saying, “You’re never too old for smooth Milky Way caramel,” and the words “Halloween’s better the Milky Way” appear on screen.  In the commercial for Snickers, a shopper in the candy aisle of a supermarket is greeted by a masked stranger. “Hellooooooooo, Mrs. Jensen, you don’t have any Snickers in your shopping cart,” the stranger says in an odd voice, adding: “The neighborhood kids love Snickers at Halloween. Let me help you.” The stranger tosses so many bags of Snickers into the cart that the shopper, rattled, runs off. The stranger, it turns out, is actually two children, one atop the other, hidden under an oversize coat. “This Halloween,” an announcer says, “nothing satisfies like Snickers.” The campaigns for the three candies are by BBDO New York, part of the BBDO North America unit of BBDO Worldwide, which is owned by the Omnicom Group. Another big marketer, General Mills, is dressing up its three so-called monster cereals — Boo Berry, Count Chocula and Franken Berry — in new boxes and putting them on sale at Target stores from Sept. 26 through Oct. 31 at a suggested price of $2.50 each — well below what cereals often cost these days. The reduced pricing is “because we wanted to make sure everyone can get in the spook-tacular fun of the season,” Susanne Prucha, marketing manager for the monster cereals at General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn., wrote in an e-mail. Beginning this year, the three cereals will be sold only for a limited time leading up to Halloween, Ms. Prucha said. “Historically, October accounted for half of all monster cereal sales throughout the year,” she added, “so we wanted to focus our efforts on this pre-Halloween period that is so important to the monster cereals consumer.” In another sign of the impact of the economy on Halloween, the selling season began early in many cities, a week before Labor Day weekend. “The idea is to make sure to find people when they feel they have a little money to spend,” Ms. Corlett said, regardless of what the calendar says. There is another potential benefit for sellers that peddle Halloween products so early, she added: “If it’s candy, guess what? It gets eaten before Halloween” and has to be replenished for the holiday.

Halloween
Shopping and Retail
Advertising and Marketing


Alabama Easily Tops Preseason Coaches Poll

Abstract: Alabama is No. 1 in the USA Today preseason coaches poll. The Crimson Tide were an overwhelming choice, receiving 58 of 62 first-place votes. Ohio State was second and received three first-place votes. Oregon was No. 3, Stanford was No. 4 and Georgia was No. 5. Half of the top 10 is from the Southeastern Conference, whose teams have won the last seven national championships.

College football
University of Alabama
Ohio State
Southeastern Conference


In Beijing, a Brand-New Old Quarter

Abstract: BEIJING — This is a city conspicuously unfriendly to pedestrians. Six-lane ring highways cut through old neighborhoods, making places that are rather close as the crow flies very far apart if you walk, since you’ve often got to navigate long cloverleaf intersections and widely spaced overpasses simply to cross the street. And that’s one of the things, in a city far more oriented toward the car than shoe leather, that makes the recent opening of a big pedestrian-only network of streets in the historic heart of Beijing so noteworthy. It’s in the area called Dashalar, which, during the Manchu-ruled Qing Dynasty, was the ethnic Chinese part of this city, the warren of streets and avenues that lay just outside the imposing city wall. Now, the only parts left of the wall — torn down at the order of Mao Zedong despite the entreaties of China’s leading architectural historian to preserve it — are two immense gates. The more famous of them is known as the Qianmen, for Front Gate, and beyond it, running in an arrow-straight line due south, is Dashalar’s main street, Qianmen Dajie, or Front Gate Big Street, where cars are now banned. Over the last decade or so, most of the old Dashalar neighborhood has been razed. Tens of thousands of residents, whose single-story courtyard homes were often models of dilapidation and obsolescence, were required, with payment of various amounts of compensation, to move out. This process is vividly recounted in a book published a year ago, “The Last Days of Old Beijing” by Michael Meyer. But while most of the old residential areas of Beijing that have been demolished were transformed into zones of high-rise hotels, shopping centers and office buildings, Dashalar has been converted, perhaps ironically, back into what it once was — or, more accurately, into an idealized, postcard version of what it once was, a shopping street lined by three-story traditional Chinese buildings, with balconies above the first floor, latticed balustrades, red columns, bright gold-leaf Chinese signs against backgrounds of black wood. “Western preservationists won’t like this,” said Chen Xiangming, a former Beijing resident who is professor of sociology and international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and the editor of a new book, “Shanghai Rising.” We were on a recent walk through the brand-new pedestrian mall. They won’t like it because creating a new copy of an old neighborhood fails to meet the standard of what is often called authenticity, which requires the preservation of the actual antique buildings. The opening of the Dashalar pedestrian district in this sense represents the completion of a strange sort of circle. In the past few years, even as a lot of Beijing’s old neighborhoods have been demolished, there’s been the realization that Old Beijing had value, if mostly for the city’s growing tourism industry. And so, a couple of weeks ago, after two years of construction that took place behind concealing high fences themselves decorated with idealized images of Old Beijing, Qianmen Big Street formally opened to pedestrians and shoppers. “It’s a sort of Disneyfication of Beijing,” Mr. Chen allowed, “and Disneyfication is the opposite of authenticity.” But Mr. Chen is less critical of this in the Chinese context than some others might be. In part this is because he remembers, having grown up in Beijing in the 1960s, how poor and drab the city was, and he appreciates the better and richer material life it has now. “I had the Communist experience,” he said, “which some of the critics of Beijing’s policy might not have had, and that can color their views.” But there’s another reason not to judge the theme-park aspect of Beijing too harshly, and that’s because it’s part of a global phenomenon. “The Disneyfication of cities is not happening only in China,” Professor Chen said. “Many deindustrialized cities are doing it to revitalize themselves through tourism. “This is local to China, but it’s also Western because it’s been Disneyfied,” he said. “The more nuanced counter-argument to the anti-Disneyfication argument is that you have to Disneyfy with a different twist, or else you don’t have anything special to attract tourists.” What might clash with this particular restoration is the presence in these replicated antique Chinese shops of the same global brands you find in the other shopping centers in this city. There’s a Swatch store about to open under a latticed terrace, the sign pointing down the street to an H&M (“Fashion heaven is straight ahead,” the sign says, in English.) Other foreign brands are reportedly on their way. One of the characteristics of China is that, contrary to repeated entreaties by the propaganda machinery not to “worship foreign things,” most of the prestige brands are foreign imports (though they are “imports” frequently manufactured in China under foreign license). Still, if the worship of foreign things is evidenced in Dashalar, there do seem to be more Chinese traditional products there than you would find in other shopping arcades, including some that have been in their locations in the old Chinese city for hundreds of years. There’s Duyiju, for example, making and selling dumplings since 1738, and several venerable silk shops, including Ruifuxiang, which, according to a sign in Chinese and English, has been on its current site “Since the eighth year of the reign of Emperor Xienfeng in the Qing Dynasty” — in other words, since 1862. There are slipper shops, clothing shops and Chinese medicine shops. Mr. Chen and I had a fine lunch at Quan Ju De, perhaps Beijing’s most famous roast duck restaurant, though we ate it off plastic plates made to look like Qing Dynasty tableware, and that seemed an especially ersatz touch. And then there’s Liubiju, Beijing’s most famous preserved-foods store, where porcelain vats contain dozens of preserved vegetables, sauces, condiments and pastes, a few of them vaguely recognizable for Westerners, most of them not. Given recent history, Beijing’s replica of itself certainly seems better than yet another grouping of high-rises, though the question certainly needs to be raised whether anything that could have been put in old Dashalar could be as fascinating to visitors as the neighborhood that was destroyed.

Historic Buildings and Sites
China
Beijing (China)