Texas Boy Known as ‘Copeland Crush’ and His Father Are Mourned

Abstract: AUSTIN, Tex. — Brodie Copeland, 11, one of the victims of the attack in Nice, France , was such a hard-hitting baseball player that teammates at his club in Texas called him the “Copeland Crush.” He played second base with the Hill Country Baseball Club , near Austin. The owner of the club, Jonathan Paiz, said Brodie got his nickname because he would “crush” it when at bat. “Basically he would get up there and hit the ball hard,” Mr. Paiz said in a telephone interview. Brodie and his father, Sean Copeland, 51, were two of the victims of the attack, which killed at least 82 others, including nine other children and teenagers, and wounded 202 people. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, noting that the attack occurred less than a year after the attacks in and around Paris , said that for the second time in nine months, the French flag was being flown over the Texas Governor’s Mansion in remembrance. “While every heinous attack like this is tragic,” he said in a statement, “this latest one hits close to home.” Video A State Department spokeswoman, Elizabeth Trudeau, confirmed that two American citizens, Sean Copeland and his son Brodie, 11, were killed in the attack in Nice. Credit Credit Associated Press The Copelands were the only two Americans who had been confirmed dead as of Friday night. Three students from the University of California, Berkeley, were among the wounded, according to a statement issued Friday by the university. Two of the students, Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, and Diane Huang, 20, were discharged after medical treatment and returned to their summer dormitories in Nice, the university said. Daryus Medora, 21, whose leg was broken, remained in the hospital. A fourth student, Nicolas Leslie, 20, was unaccounted for on Friday. They were among 85 students who were on a study abroad program with the university. The Copeland family lives in Lakeway, Tex., near Austin. They were on a vacation that began in Pamplona and Barcelona, Spain, before moving on to southern France. Image Brodie and his father, Sean. Brodie played second base on a team for boys his age with the Hill Country Baseball Club, near Austin. Credit Hill Country Baseball Club Mr. Copeland was traveling with his wife, Kim, whose 40th birthday celebration on Monday was part of the reason they went on the trip. In addition to Brodie, Mr. Copeland’s other children, his son Austin, 22, and daughter, Maegan, 29, from a previous marriage accompanied them, said Jess Davis, a family representative. On Friday in Lakeway, an affluent Hill Country community, many neighbors of the Copelands were stunned that an act of violence in Europe could reach thousands of miles across the Atlantic to invade their peaceful town. Image The Copeland family, from left: Sean, Maegan, Brodie, Austin and Kim. Credit Jess Davis, via Associated Press “It’s heartbreaking for everybody,” said Dianne Wood, who lives a few houses up the street from the Copelands and knows the family well. “The Copelands are a sweet family, and we just want to respect their privacy.” She described Brodie Copeland as “an incredible boy — so much life, so much personality.” Coleen Serfoss, Brodie’s fifth-grade teacher, remembered him as a “superstar” who stood out in class, on the baseball field and on stage. He aspired to become an actor and had performed in off-campus productions of “Cinderella” and “Peter Pan.” He was also in the school’s honor choir. As they said their goodbyes on the last day of class, Ms. Serfoss recalled, she told Brodie, “When you get your Academy Award, I hope you remember me.” Her principal called her Thursday night to tell her that Brodie had died. “When I woke up, I was hoping it was a dream until I turned the TV on,” she said at a news conference outside Lakeway Elementary School. Grief over Brodie’s death was palpable among Lakeway teachers. “He was just a very sweet, kind young man,” said Joy Crenshaw, a special-education teacher who often saw Brodie in the school cafeteria. “He always had a smile on his face.” Video Victims of the terror attack on Bastille Day were honored on Friday in Nice, Paris, Rome, New York and Moscow. Credit Credit Ian Langsdon/European Pressphoto Agency A tribute to the father and son was set up on the Facebook page of the Hill Country team, where Brodie had been playing baseball since 2014. It shows Brodie frolicking in the French Riviera waters. “Immediately, he made an impact on all of the coaches at HC,” said a fund-raising page set up by Mr. Paiz, the baseball club’s owner. Mr. Copeland worked at Lexmark, the printing and software company, which issued a statement after his death: “Sean was not only a terrific leader in the company, but a phenomenal person who will be dearly missed. Our hearts go out to Sean and his family, and for everyone who is suffering in France and elsewhere from this senseless violent act.” Two of Mr. Copeland’s brothers are set to fly to Nice with the State Department to pick up the family and bring everyone home, according to a statement provided by Ms. Davis. The baseball group’s Facebook page became a forum for remembrance and mourning. “No words can describe how we feel,” wrote Jeff Petry. “Sean and Brodie touched our lives in so many ways. Such a good man and a great kid and teammate.” “We will miss you #8,” wrote another man, Bill Bishop, referring to Brodie’s jersey number. “You will be missed but we know you were needed for bigger and better things.”

Nice Attack
Brodie Copeland
Sean Copeland
Austin
Nice
Terrorism
Texas


Congo Army Fails to Halt Rebels’ Offensive

Abstract: GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo — Congolese rebels beat back a government counteroffensive and slowly pushed toward another big city on Friday, while government forces sank deeper into disarray after an army chief was suspended over allegations that he had supplied ammunition to militias and elephant poachers. For the past week, a group of a few thousand well-disciplined rebel fighters, widely believed to be covertly supported by neighboring Rwanda , has captured a string of towns in eastern Congo , including Goma, a provincial capital, raising serious questions about the stability of this vast and often-troubled country. Congo’s Army, which has been notoriously corrupt and dysfunctional for decades, has been defeated in just about every recent battle. The government mounted a rare counteroffensive on Thursday on the rebel-held town of Sake, but by dawn on Friday it was clear that the rebels had repulsed the attack and were continuing their advance south toward Bukavu, one of the biggest cities in eastern Congo. Many residents here say they hope that negotiations now under way in Uganda will bring an end to the fighting. But the rebels have a long list of demands, and it is not clear if the Congolese government has the will — or the capacity — to deal with them. On Thursday, the Congolese government announced that it was suspending Gen. Gabriel Amisi, the chief of staff of ground forces, after a United Nations investigative panel found evidence that he ran a criminal network that supplied ammunition to elephant poachers and local militias with a reputation for brutality. Africa is in the midst of a widespread elephant slaughter , and conservation groups say poachers are wiping out tens of thousands of elephants a year, more than at any time in the previous two decades, with the underground ivory trade becoming increasingly militarized. According to a report written in 2010 by John Hart, an American scientist and one of the top elephant researchers in Congo, the “Congolese military are implicated in almost all elephant poaching,” making the military “the main perpetrator of illegal elephant killing” in Congo.

Congo Democratic Republic of (Congo-Kinshasa)


Is a Regifted Space Shuttle Enterprise in N.Y. a Good Deal?

Abstract: Imagine that someone offered to dump 1,100 busted washing machines onto a prime piece of riverfront property in Midtown Manhattan, pitching the idea as a potential tourist draw and educational attraction. New Yorkers are smart. Many — perhaps even most — of them would say: “Are you kidding me? You’re just looking for an easy way to get rid of 150,000 pounds of junk.” Same response if the offer was for 499,000 first-generation iPhones or 11,000 broken toaster ovens, all of which would also weigh about 150,000 pounds. Yet the other day, when the city got word that another 150,000-pound castoff was headed this way, moderate rejoicing broke out. The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum was awarded custody of the Enterprise , the space shuttle that, until now, had been on display at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington. The Smithsonian is going to get one of the newly retired space shuttles (one of the real ones; read on) and so is magnanimously regifting this one. It is to go on display near the great ship, which, come to think of it, is another federal hand-me-down. I’m not for a minute suggesting that the Intrepid, an aircraft carrier with a distinguished record of service in war and in peace, is anything less than a credit to Pier 86. The Enterprise, though, is a bit of a downgrade; it’s a prototype that never actually flew in space, never docked with anything and never harbored Sigourney Weaver and slimy parasitic aliens . From there it’s just a short step to federal junk with no historic value at all — misprinted tax forms, past-date hardtack, obsolete nuclear missiles. Nor am I saying that the thing won’t attract tourists, because, as 18 years’ worth of “Cats” proved, tourists will apparently pay to see just about anything. It’s just the precedent I’m worried about, especially now, when Washington politicians are eager to get rid of any evidence of their wasteful ways. But, you’re saying, 20 other suitors were going after the Enterprise and the three real shuttles ( which went to Cape Canaveral, Fla; Los Angeles; and Washington ). Could all of them really have been hoodwinked? Are the feds really smart enough to fool that many people into vying for the right to take government discards? Remember, this is NASA we’re talking about; these folks put men on the moon back when most Americans still had black-and-white televisions and thought that electric can openers were the pinnacle of technological achievement. Yeah, they’re smart enough. Not to worry, though. If the federal government is going to make a habit of dumping its castoffs here, we have people who can turn that into a positive. They’re called artists. Lots of artists create the old-fashioned way, by painting, taking a photograph or hiring models to stand naked in the Museum of Modern Art , but there’s a subset of them who make art out of other people’s throwaways. “Trash speaks to me,” Barbara Lubliner of Manhattan, one such artist, told me by way of explaining how to go about turning junk into art. “It says: ‘I’ve got potential. Give me new context. Keep me around until you can vision me in a new life.’ ” Ms. Lubliner is among more than 50 artists contributing to an exhibition opening this weekend at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn called “Art From Detritus: Upcycling With Imagination,” in which all the works are made from recycled materials and trash. Figuring that you’ve got to have a sense of humor to make artwork out of trash, I asked a few of these artists to ruminate both on what it takes to turn junk into something someone might want to look at and on what they would do with a used space shuttle if given one. “I’d use it as an art studio,” Ms. Lubliner said. Bernard Klevickas , a sculptor in Long Island City, Queens, whose work is also in the show, was equally utilitarian. “Start a community garden in it,” he said. “The bay doors could be removed and a greenhouse roof installed for the winter season. The shuttle would in essence become a giant planter.” And then there’s Chris Noel , who makes what he calls debris paintings using detritus of various sorts. He’s not part of the Williamsburg show and lives in Maryland. So what’s he doing in this column? He lived for years in Virginia, one of the states where New York has been dumping its trash for some time. And so, as an oblique what-goes-around-comes-around gesture, I’m giving him the last word, to relate what he’d do with a discarded shuttle. “Maybe I would convert it into a land yacht and tour the country,” Mr. Noel said. “Along the way, I would ask all those I came in contact with to make their mark on it in some way, no matter how large or small. I would travel until there was not a speck of unmarked space, and then I would park it and declare it finished. I don’t think an item as significant as this should be entrusted to any one individual. This should be the people’s art. Then you either park it or send it into space for its final voyage, never to return. “O.K., that’s kind of thick with peace, love and harmony,” he added, “but maybe that’s not so bad.”

National Aeronautics and Space Administration


Dr. Herbert L. Abrams, Who Worked Against Nuclear War, Dies at 95

Abstract: Dr. Herbert L. Abrams, a radiologist at Stanford and Harvard universities and a founder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War , which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its work in publicizing the health consequences of atomic warfare, died on Jan. 20 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 95. The death was confirmed by his son, John. In the late 1970s, Dr. Abrams became interested in the health implications of nuclear policy. “It began to dawn on me that these weapons of annihilation were being considered for use in the settlement of disputes between nations when I had honestly not thought that that was ever in the cards,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. With a group of American and Soviet doctors, he helped create International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, with the goal of publicizing the health risks of a nuclear exchange and countering theories that physicians might be able to save enough people to continue civilized life. He later called nuclear weapons and nuclear war “the central health issue of the 20th century.” Dr. Abrams served as founding vice president of the group, which was awarded the Unesco Prize for Peace Education in 1984 and the Nobel Peace Prize a year later. In announcing the award, the Nobel committee said the group had performed an important service “ by spreading authoritative information and by creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare.” Herbert Leroy Abrams was born on Aug. 16, 1920, in Brooklyn and grew up in Sheepshead Bay. His father, Morris , was an immigrant from Russia and ran a successful company that produced machinery and factory tools. His mother, the former Freda Sugarman, was also an immigrant from Russia. Image Dr. Herbert L. Abrams helped found International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War with a group of American and Soviet doctors. Credit Rod Searcey/Stanford University After graduating from James Madison High School, he received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1941. He earned a medical degree from Long Island Medical College (now the SUNY Downstate Medical Center) and completed his residency in internal medicine at Long Island College Hospital and Montefiore Hospital. He completed a residency in radiology at Stanford University’s school of medicine in 1952 and two years later joined the faculty, eventually becoming the school’s director of diagnostic radiology. An expert on cardiovascular radiology, Dr. Abrams published nearly 200 papers and wrote seven books on cardiovascular disease and health policy. His book “Angiography” (1961), the first comprehensive volume on the subject, is now, under the editorship of Stanley Baum, in its fourth edition under the title “Abrams’ Angiography: Vascular and Interventional Radiology.” For many years Dr. Abrams was editor in chief of the journal Postgraduate Radiology. He was the founding editor in chief of the journal Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiology. In 1967 he accepted a position as a professor and chairman of radiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Abrams returned to Stanford as a professor of radiology in 1985 but spent most of his time doing research at the university’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He was also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a director for many years of Physicians for Social Responsibility . In addition to his son, Dr. Abrams, who also lived on Martha’s Vineyard, is survived by his wife, the former Marilyn Spitz; a daughter, Nancy Abrams; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His older brother, Mason Adams , played Charlie Hume, the managing editor of the newspaper that was the setting of the television series “Lou Grant,” starring Ed Asner. Mr. Adams died in 2005. In the 1990s, Dr. Abrams began to focus on medical issues involving the American presidency and executive decision making. That interest led him to write “ The President Has Been Shot: Confusion, Disability, and the 25th Amendment in the Aftermath of the Attempted Assassination of Ronald Reagan” (1992).


The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism

Abstract: CHICAGO — In a meeting room under Holy Name Cathedral, a rapt group of black Roman Catholics listened as Barack Obama, a 25-year-old community organizer, trained them to lobby their fellow delegates to a national congress in Washington on issues like empowering lay leaders and attracting more believers. “He so quickly got us,” said Andrew Lyke, a participant in the meeting who is now the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s Office for Black Catholics. The group succeeded in inserting its priorities into the congress’s plan for churches, Mr. Lyke said, and “Barack Obama was key in helping us do that.” By the time of that session in the spring of 1987, Mr. Obama — himself not Catholic — was already well known in Chicago’s black Catholic circles. He had arrived two years earlier to fill an organizing position paid for by a church grant, and had spent his first months here surrounded by Catholic pastors and congregations. In this often overlooked period of the president’s life, he had a desk in a South Side parish and became steeped in the social justice wing of the church, which played a powerful role in his political formation. This Thursday, Mr. Obama will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican after a three-decade divergence with the church. By the late 1980s, the Catholic hierarchy had taken a conservative turn that de-emphasized social engagement and elevated the culture wars that would eventually cast Mr. Obama as an abortion-supporting enemy. Mr. Obama, who went on to find his own faith with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s Trinity United Church of Christ, drifted from his youthful, church-backed activism to become a pragmatic politician and the president with a terrorist “ kill list .” The meeting this week is a potential point of confluence. Image Mr. Obama's organizing job was paid for by a church grant, and he spent his first months in Chicago surrounded by Catholic pastors and congregations. Credit Joe Wrinn/Harvard University, via Associated Press A White House accustomed to archbishop antagonists hopes the president will find a strategic ally and kindred spirit in a pope who preaches a gospel of social justice and inclusion . Mr. Obama’s old friends in the priesthood pray that Francis will discover a president freed from concerns about re-election and willing to rededicate himself to the vulnerable. But the Vatican — aware that Mr. Obama has far more to gain from the encounter than the pope does, and wary of being used for American political consumption — warns that this will hardly be like the 1982 meeting at which President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II agreed to fight Communism in Eastern Europe. “We’re not in the old days of the great alliance,” said a senior Vatican official who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about the mind-set inside the Holy See. While Mr. Obama’s early work with the church is “not on the radar screen,” the official said, his recent arguments with American bishops over issues of religious freedom are: Catholic leaders have objected to a provision in the administration’s health care law that requires employers to cover contraception costs, and have sharply questioned the morality of the administration’s use of drones to fight terrorism. As in many reunions, expectations, and the possibility for disappointment, run high. A Fast Learner In 1967, as the modernizing changes of the Second Vatican Council began to transform the Catholic world, Ann Dunham, Mr. Obama’s mother, took her chubby 6-year-old son occasionally to Mass and enrolled him in a new Catholic elementary school in Jakarta, Indonesia, called Santo Fransiskus Asisi. At school, the future president began and ended his days with prayer. At home, his mother read him the Bible with an anthropologist’s eye. Image Working in Holy Rosary Church, Mr. Obama would sneak smoking breaks on the roof with the Rev. William Stenzel. Credit Taylor Glascock for The New York Times Pious he was not. “When it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room,” Mr. Obama wrote in his memoir “Dreams From My Father.” “Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words.” In 1969, Mr. Obama transferred to a more exclusive, state-run school with a mosque, but a development in the United States would have a greater impact on his future career. American Catholic bishops responded to the call of the Second Vatican Council to focus on the poor by creating what is now known as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development , an antipoverty and social justice program that became one of the country’s most influential supporters of grass-roots groups. By the early 1980s, when Mr. Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia University, the campaign was financing a project to help neighborhoods after the collapse of the steel mills near Chicago. The program’s leaders, eager to expand beyond Catholic parishes to the black Protestant churches where more of the affected community worshiped, sought an African-American for the task. In 1985, they found one in Mr. Obama, a fledgling community organizer in New York who answered a want ad for a job with the Developing Communities Project. The faith-based program aimed to unify South Side residents against unsafe streets, poor living conditions and political neglect. Mr. Obama’s salary was less than $10,000 a year. The future president arrived in Chicago with little knowledge of Catholicism other than the Graham Greene novels and “Confessions” of St. Augustine he had read during a period of spiritual exploration at Columbia. But he fit seamlessly into a 1980s Catholic cityscape forged by the spirit of Vatican II, the influence of liberation theology and the progressivism of Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago, who called for a “consistent ethic of life” that wove life and social justice into a “seamless garment.” Image Mr. Obama had a small office on the ground floor of the church. Credit Taylor Glascock for The New York Times On one of his first days on the job, Mr. Obama heard Cardinal Bernardin speak at an economic development meeting. He felt like a Catholic novice there, he wrote in his memoir, and later decided “not to ask what a catechism was.” But he was a quick study. “He had to do a power analysis of each Catholic church,” said one of his mentors at the time, Gregory Galluzzo, a former Jesuit priest and disciple of the organizer Saul Alinsky. Mr. Obama, Mr. Galluzzo said, soon understood the chain of command and who had influence in individual parishes. Mr. Obama had a small office with two cloudy glass-block windows on the ground floor of Holy Rosary, a handsome red brick parish on the South Side, where he would pop down the hall to the office of the Rev. William Stenzel, raise a phantom cigarette to his lips and ask, “Want to go out for lunch?” Besides sneaking smoke breaks with the priest on the roof, Mr. Obama listened to him during Mass. “He was on an exposure curve to organized religion,” Father Stenzel said. The future president’s education included evangelizing. Mr. Obama often plotted strategy with the recent Catholic convert who had hired him, Gerald Kellman, about how to bring people into the program and closer to the church. The effort to fill the pews “was what Bernardin really bought into,” Mr. Kellman said. Image Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin Credit Sue Ogrocki/Reuters To expand congregations as well as the reach of his organizing program, Mr. Obama went to Holy Ghost Catholic Church in South Holland, Ill., to ask Wilton D. Gregory, an African-American bishop and a rising star in the hierarchy, for a grant for operating costs. Archbishop Gregory, who now leads the Archdiocese of Atlanta, recalled Mr. Obama as a persuasive man who “wanted to engage the people of the neighborhood.” He recommended that Cardinal Bernardin release the funds. As the months went on, Mr. Obama became a familiar face in South Side black parishes. At Holy Angels Church, considered a center of black Catholic life, he talked to the pastor and the pastor’s adopted son about finding families willing to adopt troubled children. At Our Lady of the Gardens, he attended peace and black history Masses and conferred with the Rev. Dominic Carmon on programs to battle unemployment and violence. At the neo-Gothic St. Sabina, he struck up a friendship with the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger, the firebrand white pastor of one of the city’s largest black parishes. The two would huddle in a back room and commiserate about the liquor stores and payday loan businesses in the neighborhood. But even as Mr. Obama effectively proselytized for the church and its role in improving the community, and even as he opened meetings in the backs of churches with the Lord’s Prayer and showed a comfort with faith that put the people he hoped to organize at ease, Catholic doctrine did not tempt him. He was not baptized Catholic, priests said. But it was amid the trappings of Catholicism, according to his fellow organizers, that the future president began to express a spiritual thirst. As Mr. Obama helped expand the program from Catholic parishes to megachurches and Protestant congregations, he felt that need slaked by the prevailing black liberation theology, inspired by the civil rights movement and preached by African-American ministers like Mr. Wright of Trinity. The notion that Jesus delivered salvation to communities that expressed faith through good deeds suited Mr. Obama’s instincts — and perhaps his interests. Image Cardinal Francis George Credit Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters For an ambitious black politician, Mr. Galluzzo said, “it was not politically advantageous to be in a Catholic church.” Mr. Obama nevertheless maintained his Catholic connections, so much so that when he turned up in the basement of the Holy Name complex in 1987, “there was a need to clarify” that he was not a member of the flock, said the Rev. David Jones, who was at the meeting. And some members still tried to draw him in, in more ways than one. “He was a man of integrity, very much to my disappointment,” joked Cynthia Norris, then the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s black Catholics office, who found the young Mr. Obama appealing. The future president, who was dating another woman, did turn to Ms. Norris for a Harvard Law School recommendation, and kept in touch during a trip to Europe in 1988. “I wander around Paris, the most beautiful, alluring, maddening city I’ve ever seen; one is tempted to chuck the whole organizing/political business and be a painter” on the banks of the Seine, Mr. Obama scribbled to Ms. Norris, along with “Love, Barack,” on one side of a postcard. On the other was a picture of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Image Cynthia Norris, then the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s black Catholics office, wrote Mr. Obama a Harvard Law School recommendation, and kept in touch during a trip to Europe in 1988. Credit Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times A Partnership Falters Mr. Obama entered Harvard in 1988, the same year he was baptized at Trinity, the power church of Chicago’s black professional class. Trinity served Mr. Obama well through his dizzying political ascent, which coincided with a period in which black Catholic churches in Chicago closed and the hierarchy shifted away from the progressive social engagement that had characterized Mr. Obama’s early years here. In 1997, the year Mr. Obama was sworn in as an Illinois state senator, Cardinal Francis George succeeded Cardinal Bernardin as archbishop of Chicago. One of the church’s leading conservative intellectuals, called “Francis the Corrector” by local liberal priests, Cardinal George was emblematic of the bishops installed by John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI. Some of them looked with skepticism at the social justice wing that had financed Mr. Obama’s organizing efforts, and later sought to block his election as president by suggesting that Catholics could not in good conscience vote for a candidate who supported abortion rights. Mr. Obama still won the Catholic vote in 2008. In his campaign, he had held out the goal of finding common ground between supporters and opponents of abortion rights, chiefly by reducing unintended pregnancies and increasing adoptions. Cardinal George quickly dashed those hopes. “The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” he said in November 2008 in his opening address as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Mr. Obama, seeking to avoid confrontation with the church, invited Cardinal George to the White House in March 2009; said at a news conference that April that abortion rights were “not my highest legislative priority”; and told graduates at the University of Notre Dame in May, after some initial boos from the crowd, that Cardinal Bernardin had touched “my heart and mind.” He recalled his years in Chicago’s Catholic parishes and said that after branching out to work with other Christian denominations, “I found myself drawn not just to the work with the church; I was drawn to be in the church.” Image Mr. Obama sent a postcard to Ms. Norris when he visited Paris in the summer of 1988. Credit Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times Two months later, speaking to reporters from Catholic publications, he said again that the Campaign for Human Development and Cardinal Bernardin had inspired him. “I think that there have been times over the last decade or two where that more holistic tradition feels like it’s gotten buried under the abortion debate,” he said. Church leaders were unimpressed. A week after his session with Catholic reporters, Mr. Obama met with Benedict, who pointedly offered him a Vatican document on bioethics that condemned abortion and stem cell research. The relationship deteriorated further during Mr. Obama’s push for health care reform, specifically the provision on contraception, which will be argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. Still, Mr. Obama had not lost all his friends in the church. As the president’s relations with Catholic leaders reached their nadir, Father Stenzel, Mr. Obama’s old smoke-break friend, visited the White House. As they walked into the Oval Office, Mr. Obama joked to his staff that the priest had given him his first office in Chicago. Father Stenzel reminded him that his old surroundings were far humbler: “The office I gave you had two rows of glass-block windows!” Pope Francis’ Impression Mr. Obama’s parish days seemed far behind him when he won re-election in 2012 with a slimmer margin of Catholic votes. Not only did Catholic conservatives view him as a secularist forcing them to pay for contraceptives, but some of his old allies in the church’s left wing criticized his use of drones and lack of emphasis on the poor. But the election of Pope Francis last March seemed to breathe new life into the Catholic Church and, potentially, into the relationship between Mr. Obama and the institution that gave him his start. While far from an ideological progressive, Francis does sometimes appear cloaked in Cardinal Bernardin’s “seamless garment.” His de-emphasis of issues like abortion and same-sex marriage and his championing of the poor and vulnerable — articulated in his mission statement, “ The Joy of the Gospel ” — have impressed a second-term president who argues that income inequality undermines human dignity. “Whether you call that the ‘seamless garment’ or ‘the joy of the Gospel’ or what, I’ve said to the president I consider that a pretty Catholic way of looking at the world,” said Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, who is Roman Catholic. Mr. McDonough added that the community-organizer-turned-president had expressed admiration to him about “how important it is for the Holy Father to be so in the community.” Last month, Catholic activists made their case for social justice on Capitol Hill. Afterward, relaxing over beers and a buffet in the Russell Senate Office Building, they discussed whether Cardinal George, who is retiring as archbishop of Chicago, would be replaced by Archbishop Gregory, who helped secure Mr. Obama’s church grant application in the 1980s. Among them was Mr. Lyke, the man who had received coaching from Mr. Obama years earlier in the basement of Holy Name Cathedral. He characterized Francis and Mr. Obama as a match made in heaven. Mr. Lyke’s view is not universal. Vatican officials have made clear Mr. Obama will not get special treatment, and leaders of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, also gathered in the Russell Building, saw the coming papal audience as a chance for Mr. Obama to return to the church’s social justice values, not the other way around. Dylan Corbett, one of the Campaign for Human Development leaders, said the president was “welcome to the conversation” that the pope was driving about income inequality and poverty. He added with a grin, “We’re happy to have him back, actually.”

Barack Obama
US Politics
Catholic Church
Pope Francis
Trinity United Church of Christ
Chicago
Francis E George
Joseph L Bernardin


Victorious St. John’s Will Meet No. 1 Virginia

Abstract: Sean Hagan pitched into the eighth as St. John’s beat East Carolina, 2-0, in the Charlottesville Regional of the N.C.A.A. tournament, setting up a game with Virginia, the No. 1 national seed. Jon Prosinski threw a six-hitter in 101-degree heat, leading Seton Hall past Arizona, 4-0, in the College Station Regional. Princeton lost to Texas, 5-3, in the Austin Regional as Sam Stafford allowed two hits and one run in seven innings. Florida scored 16 runs in the first three innings in a 17-3 victory over Manhattan in the Gainesville Regional. Coastal Carolina routed Connecticut, 13-1, in the Clemson Regional.

St John's University
Baseball
NCAA Baseball Championships
East Carolina University
University of Virginia


Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee Ends in Mutual Appreciation

Abstract: LONDON — Saying she was touched and humbled by “countless kindnesses” shown to her, Queen Elizabeth II wound up a spectacular and closely scripted four-day celebration of her 60 years as monarch on Tuesday, seeming buoyed by an outpouring of support that is likely to cement her family’s place in British society for years to come. The queen, who is 86, completed the extravaganza with an address broadcast to the nation . “The events that I have attended to mark my diamond jubilee have been a humbling experience,” she said in the address, which lasted less than two minutes and was recorded in advance. “It has touched me deeply to see so many thousands of families, neighbors and friends celebrating together in such a happy atmosphere.” She added: “I hope that the memories of all this year’s happy events will brighten our lives for many years to come. I will continue to treasure and draw inspiration from the countless kindnesses shown to me in this country and throughout the Commonwealth,” she said, referring to the association of nations with historical links to Britain (mainly former colonies) that she formally heads. Apart from an annual message at Christmas, such broadcasts by the queen have been rare. One of the most portentous came in 1997 when she paid what some Britons saw as a belated tribute to Diana , the Princess of Wales, after the princess’s death in a car crash in Paris. At that time, Britons’ support for the monarchy had ebbed, but the response to the queen’s jubilee over the past four days has illustrated the extent of the royal recovery in popular esteem. The celebrations, with public holidays giving Britons a four-day break, included a dramatic pageant of 1,000 vessels on the River Thames through London on Sunday, a concert outside Buckingham Palace on Monday and a day of reverence and pageantry on Tuesday. The only departure from the tight choreography of the events was the illness of Prince Philip , Queen Elizabeth’s 90-year-old husband, who was taken to a hospital on Monday after spending hours in the biting cold atop the royal barge during the Thames procession on Sunday. Royal officials said he had a bladder infection and would be kept for observation for a few days. His youngest son, Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, visited him on Tuesday and told reporters that he was “getting better.” Prince Edward’s wife, Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, added: “He’s in good spirits. He’s on good form.” In Prince Philip’s absence, the queen attended events alone or with other close family members. Riding in an open carriage through central London on Tuesday with crowds lining the streets, she was accompanied by her eldest son and heir, Prince Charles, and his second wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. The prince’s sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, followed in another open carriage with Prince William’s wife, the former Kate Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge. In the finale to the jubilee, hundreds of thousands of people crammed the Mall, the broad avenue leading from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace, lofting British union flags and bright umbrellas against a spattering of rain, to await the queen’s appearance on the palace’s central balcony. For a better view, one held up a cardboard periscope emblazoned with the words “Thanks for the day off.” A military band played patriotic songs evocative of a time before the decline of imperial power during Elizabeth’s reign: “Land of Hope and Glory” and “Rule Britannia.” Vintage aircraft — a Lancaster bomber flanked by Spitfire and Hurricane fighters — roared overhead, followed by the Royal Air Force’s precision flying team, the Red Arrows, in jets. Much of the official praise for the queen has cited what has been described as her dedication to public service. In a sermon that she attended on Tuesday at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, inveighed against “the traps of ludicrous financial greed, of environmental recklessness, of collective fear of strangers and collective contempt for the unsuccessful and marginal.” But referring to the queen, he said: “We are marking today the anniversary of one historic and very public act of dedication — a dedication that has endured faithfully, calmly and generously through most of the adult lives of most of us here. We are marking six decades of living proof that public service is possible, and that it is a place where happiness can be found.” Prince Philip’s illness drew an unlikely public affirmation on Monday evening when Prince Charles asked the audience at the concert to shout its good wishes for his father, so that he might hear them from his hospital bed. The crowd responded by chanting an unusually affectionate accolade for a royal consort often seen as gaffe-prone and aloof: “Philip! Philip! Philip!”

Elizabeth II Queen of Great Britain
Philip Duke of Edinburgh
Great Britain
Royal Family
Buckingham Palace


Aid Group Sees Daunting Obstacles to Health Care for Afghans

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — The patients in the four hospitals run by Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan are the lucky ones, by all accounts, having arrived at well-stocked facilities that maintain international standards with high-quality free care. But when Doctors Without Borders, a French medical aid organization also known as Médecins Sans Frontières, surveyed 800 of those patients last year, the results showed a dismaying picture of unmet health care needs. Nearly one in five of the Afghan patients, 18.4 percent, had a close relative or friend who died last year because that person was unable to reach medical care — in some areas because of high costs, even though health care is supposed to be free in Afghanistan, and in other areas because the war posed an obstacle to getting to facilities. “As troops pack their bags, M.S.F. sees a war that still rages in many parts of the country and a failure to meet people’s increasing medical and humanitarian needs,” the group said in a report released on Tuesday. The report took issue with a widely quoted World Bank statistic that 85 percent of Afghans now have access to health care, compared with only 9 percent in 2001. If the patients at its hospitals reported such difficulties, the report reasoned, “Beyond M.S.F.’s reach, large numbers of people continue to suffer illness or injury without recourse to medical care.” Jessica Barry, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which supports two hospitals in Afghanistan as well as 44 Red Crescent Society clinics, said her agency had also seen similar problems. “We see and believe there is very difficult access to health care,” she said. An International Committee of the Red Cross survey issued in 2009 found that 68 percent of Afghans did not feel they had access to adequate health care. Of the Doctors Without Borders patients interviewed in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, where the organization runs a maternity hospital, 26 percent said they knew a close relative or friend who had died for lack of access to health care. Even in Kabul, 13 percent of patients said they knew someone who had died, and in Helmand Province 16 percent said they did. In the past year, a third of those in Helmand, in the south, said that fighting had prevented people they knew from receiving medical treatment. In Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, the percentage was 19. “Most people think 2013 was one of the most violent years, if not the most violent year,” said Benoit De Gryse, the Doctors Without Borders country director here. Even more people have been in need of emergency medical services, and reaching them safely has become harder. The report blamed both pro-government and antigovernment forces for impeding access to health care and criticized plans announced by the Afghan authorities to use many health clinics as polling places in the coming presidential election — making them targets of insurgents who have vowed to disrupt the vote. “This puts patients and the staff working in these health centers at increased risk, ultimately making it dangerous for patients to receive the care they need,” it said. The report also stated that many patients said they discovered that health care facilities they wanted to visit were unstaffed, unsupplied or, in some cases, closed or even nonexistent. In other cases, although public facilities were meant to be free, patients could not afford prices demanded of them for food and medicine. “Official accounts of Afghanistan’s health system, however, habitually emphasize achievements while neglecting unmet medical humanitarian needs,” the report said. Ahmad Zia Naiem, the deputy minister of health for Afghanistan, complained about the aid group’s report, saying it had not received permission from the ministry’s ethical review board before preparing the report. He also said a survey of 800 patients “cannot represent the entire sector in the country.” Mr. De Gryse was particularly critical of efforts by the American military coalition and its network of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, run mostly by the United States but also by its allies, which built many rural health care facilities. Most of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams were dismantled by last year, and many of the facilities and projects they funded soon disbanded. Because the teams were seen as part of the military mission, their efforts to hand over health care facilities to aid groups were largely spurned. “So now most of them are defunded, or have been closed,” Mr. De Gryse said. “That does not mean they have not treated a single patient, but they had no long-term vision.” The report said that “by using aid as a military tool, donors have often failed to adequately prioritize help for the most vulnerable first, provide effective assistance or place beneficiaries’ interests over their own political and military ones.” In many places in the country, Mr. De Gryse said, Doctors Without Borders workers have found shell facilities. Examples he cited included the Bost Hospital in the southern city of Lashkar Gah, which had a basement full of donated supplies when the organization took it over in 2009, but not a single doctor. Elsewhere they found donated ambulances with no way to fuel them, and donated high-tech equipment with no generators to run them and no one trained to operate them. The survey of the group’s patients also provided glimpses of how widespread an effect war has had on families. Roughly a fourth of the surveyed patients had seen a family member or neighbor killed in the past year.

Afghanistan
Doctors Without Borders
Afghanistan War
Humanitarian aid
Medicine and Health


In Queens, a Keeper of 40,000 Souls

Abstract: “I always say, this is the hidden jewel of New York City,” J .P. Di Troia said as he walked through the US Columbarium at Fresh Pond Crematory in Middle Village, Queens. The walls were lined with elegant old niches containing the powdered remains of New Yorkers, many of whom died in the late 1800s when Fresh Pond opened as one of the first crematories in the country. “When I leave here each night, I say goodbye to everybody,” Mr. Di Troia said, referring to the 40,000 cremated people in eternal rest at Fresh Pond. Many are in old cinerary urns displayed in glass-encased time capsules, along with displays of old photographs and keepsakes. “Some people have referred to us as keepers of souls,” said Mr. Di Troia, 68, who runs the business with his wife, Tina — he as president, she as vice president. Located just south of the Long Island Expressway, the crematory is a striking neo-Classical building. Inside, it retains a refined Old World charm, with marble floors and walls, stained-glass windows, Oriental rugs and antique furniture. Rising above the building is a tall smokestack, a grim reminder of its function in the incineration of bodies. But Mr. Di Troia is anything but grim, calling the niches at Fresh Pond a celebration of lives. “We are the warehouse of the memories of those who passed on,” said Mr. Di Troia, who added that cremation was an efficient and graceful alternative to burial. “You’re going out, so how do you want to go out?” he asked. “Do you want to go out in a pine box? A mahogany box? It’s really immaterial. It’s all in the presentation. It’s what you are left with, when you walk away.” At the center of the operation are the four functioning cremation chambers, high-temperature ovens known as retorts. They have been used in about 270,000 cremations since Fresh Pond opened in the mid-1880s and have changed little in the past 130 years, said Mr. Di Troia, walking into the cremation hall with its marble walls and its retorts, which have impressive bronze sliding doors. They reach temperatures as high as 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit within three hours and can reduce a body to bone fragments, which are then pulverized. “Of course the coffin adds to the fuel,” whether made of wood or cardboard, said Mr. Di Troia, who has operated the retorts and held many other jobs at the crematory. He grew up in the neighborhood, and as a child he hung around the crematory, which back then was run by his Uncle Joe. He began working here at 17 and went from office boy to clerk to sales agent, he said. “They threw me into the lion’s den, but I had a personality and I knew how to talk to people,” said Mr. Di Troia, who became superintendent, then vice president and finally succeeded his uncle as president in the late 1990s. It is a career that landed him and Ms. Di Troia on the cover of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association magazine last year. They met as students at Grover Cleveland High School in Queens, and have three adult children. A son died when he was a baby in 1975, and his ashes are in the exquisite Sanctuary Room in a family niche, where Mr. Di Troia himself plans to spend eternity. Mourners can watch a cremation ceremony on a large monitor that bears the written warning, “Viewing this ceremony may be upsetting.” But to Mr. Di Troia, the ceremonies can be fascinating and educational, especially since many clients come from the diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds found in Queens. As a body was being wheeled into the cremation chamber the other day, Mr. Di Troia walked out and headed to some recently filled niches. “This fellow here loved birds — he was a pigeon man,” Mr. Di Troia said pointing to a new niche. Etched on the glass door was the sentiment “Fly with the Pigeons.” A nearby niche contained an urn bearing a small bronze pendant of a city bus. “Bus driver,” Mr. Di Troia said. The urn in another niche was guarded by a stuffed, open-winged sea gull perched atop the container, which was surrounded by colorful tropical coral. “I call him Jonathan Seagull ,” said Mr. Di Troia, moving on to a display he uses as a sales sample: a New York Yankees-themed niche, with a blue-and-white pinstriped urn and a baseball signed by Yogi Berra. The crematory is used for some film and television shoots, said Mr. Di Troia, who rejects those that seem tasteless, like a recent proposal to shoot a scene with a hand rising out of a coffin in the cremation hall. “I said, ‘No,’” he recalled. “‘That’s not happening here.’”

Funerals
Cremation
Middle Village Queens
Queens


A Case That Lets You Be the Designer

Abstract: With a sea of device accessories designed by other people, one company, Caseable , is turning the tables and letting you be the designer. The company, which has offices in Brooklyn and Berlin, has its eye on urban consumers who like to customize their devices. To meet their desire, Caseable offers easy tools on its website to let customers create their own cases for Apple, Samsung and Kindle devices, among others. The cases incorporate durable recycled products wherever possible; iPhone cases, for instance, are made entirely from recycled plastic bottles. Users can upload their graphics or photos, edit them and add text. To offer ideas to those who might need a little creative inspiration, Caseable has a gallery dedicated to user submissions, which include a lot of selfies and vacation photos, but also a few smart designs. The website also includes a gallery of ready-to-use designs from featured artists. The series, a collaborative effort between Caseable and graphic artists around the world, includes some striking urban artwork — this is definitely not Shutterfly. Artists receive about 10 percent of net sales, according to Caseable. To create a case for my iPhone 5, I submitted a high-resolution image of Batman (naturally, because I’m a nerd). About a week later, my handmade case arrived in the mail. Caseable says the typical delivery time “from click to door” is less than 12 days. The case was sturdy, although a little stiff, as you might expect of a product made from recycled plastic. The design looked great, and it has not faded or scratched in the couple of weeks that I’ve used it. Caseable offers a fun way to personalize your devices and show off your artistic side. At $35 for an iPhone case, the price is low enough that I can afford to get a Superman case to go with the Dark Knight.


Commitments on Three Fronts Test Obama’s Foreign Policy

Abstract: WASHINGTON — In vowing in Estonia on Wednesday to defend vulnerable NATO nations from Russia “for as long as necessary,” President Obama has now committed the United States to three major projections of its power: a “pivot” to Asia, a more muscular presence in Europe and a new battle against Islamic extremists that seems very likely to accelerate. American officials acknowledge that these three commitments are bound to upend Mr. Obama’s plans for shrinking the Pentagon’s budget before he leaves office in 2017. They also challenge a crucial doctrine of his first term: that a reliance on high technology and minimal use of a “light footprint” of military forces can deter ambitious powers and counter terrorists. And the commitments may well reverse one of the critical tenets of his two presidential campaigns, that the money once spent in Iraq and Afghanistan would be turned to “nation-building at home.” Image Russian soldiers near a Ukrainian military unit outside Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula, in March. Credit Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images But the accumulation of new defensive initiatives leaves open the question of how forcefully Mr. Obama is committed to reversing the suspicion, from Europe to the Middle East to Asia, that the United States is in an era of retrenchment. In his travels in Europe this week and a lengthy tour of Asia planned this fall, the president faces a dual challenge: convincing American allies and partners that he has no intention to leave power vacuums around the globe for adversaries to fill, while convincing Americans that he can face each of these brewing conflicts without plunging them back into another decade of large military commitments and heavy casualties. “There is a growing mismatch between the rhetoric and the policy,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior national security official as the war with Iraq loomed a dozen years ago. “If you add up the resources needed to implement the Asian pivot, recommit to the Middle East and increase our presence in Europe, you can’t do it without additional money and capacity. The world has proved to be a far more demanding place than it looked to this White House a few years ago.” It is not a world that requires, at least for now, the kind of deployments that marked the Cold War, when the United States kept roughly 100,000 troops in Europe and only slightly fewer in Asia. But the prospect of drastically shrinking the military after the post-9/11 era, in which total national security spending more than doubled, now seems highly unlikely. And at a moment when Mr. Obama is still answering critics for saying last week that, “We don’t have a strategy yet,” to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, he now needs to articulate several strategies, each tailored to problems that in the last year have taken on surprising complexities. Video President Obama pushed the alliance to send a message of support to Ukraine and to help modernize and strengthen its security forces. Credit Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times In facing the more than 10,000 ISIS fighters, he must find a way to confront a different kind of terrorist group, one determined to use the most brutal techniques to take territory that the backwash from the Arab Spring has now put up for grabs. The American bombing campaign against ISIS targets in Iraq does not approach the costs of invading and occupying that country, but Pentagon officials say the weapons, fuel and other expenses of taking on the Islamic extremists are running up bills of about $225 million a month, a figure that will rise if Mr. Obama has to take that fight into Syria. ISIS “is not invincible,” Matthew G. Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a talk at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday, and ISIS does not yet pose the kind of direct threat to the United States that Al Qaeda did before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But it is “brutal and lethal,” he said, and defeating it will require a long-term commitment of a kind Mr. Obama clearly did not anticipate earlier this year. In the Russia of President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Obama faces a declining power, afflicted by a shrinking population, a strident nationalism and an economy vulnerable because of its extraordinary dependency on oil exports. Washington is betting that while sanctions are having little effect now, over time they will hollow out Mr. Putin’s poll ratings. But the short term is more complex. For months now, arguments inside the administration have been over how directly and where to draw the line. In Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, on Wednesday Mr. Obama drew it at NATO’s own boundaries. The question is whether Mr. Putin believes him. Image A Chinese vessel using a water cannon on a Vietnamese ship on the South China Sea, where China placed an oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam. Credit Vietnam Marine Guard, via Reuters In China, the president faces the opposite challenge: a rising power with growing resources and a sense that this is China’s moment to reassert influence in Asia in a way it has not in hundreds of years. Here, the surprise to Mr. Obama has been the aggressiveness shown by Xi Jinping, China’s president, in embracing efforts to press territorial claims against Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines, rather than focusing on the domestic economy. “We didn’t see this coming,” one former member of Mr. Obama’s national security team said this summer, “and there’s a lot of debate about how to counter it.” The statement could be true for each of the challenges confronting Mr. Obama. It explains why the administration is having difficulty explaining how this combination will affect its future plans. Image Fighters for ISIS during a parade in Raqqa, Syria. Credit via Associated Press Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was put in his job in part to find ways to shrink the military, on the assumption that America’s Iraq commitments were over and as the official combat mission in Afghanistan ends this year. But Mr. Hagel has been either unable or unwilling to articulate the long-term implications of the new commitments. “There is a chronic disconnect, not just in this administration, between the policy, the budget guidance, and the classified strategies,” said Shawn Brimley, the director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, who served as the director of strategic planning at the National Security Council during Mr. Obama’s first term. That is what Mr. Obama needs to do for a “lasting legacy” of rethinking America’s defenses, Mr. Brimley said, but “if you don’t do it in the next six months, it’s too late.” So far, the administration has twice delayed the publication of its second term report, “National Security Strategy of the United States” — events have overwhelmed it. There are still plans afoot to shift the American presence to the Pacific over the next six years, aiming toward the moment when 60 percent of America’s forces abroad are in the region. But many Asian leaders question whether Mr. Obama and his successor will carry through. Many Europeans and Middle Eastern leaders see those efforts and shudder. Mr. Obama floated several American-led efforts to deter Russia in his speech in Tallinn, from NATO’s impending “rapid response” forces, to increased training missions, to “investing in capabilities like intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance and missile defense.” The last was an interesting allusion, because in the past he was always careful to say that missile defense was aimed at deterring outlier states — clearly meaning Iran — rather than nuclear powers like Russia. This time, he made no such disclaimer.

Barack Obama
US Foreign Policy
US Military
Federal Budget
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Syria
Iraq
Pentagon
China
Russia


Sikh Soldier Allowed to Keep Beard in Rare Army Exception

Abstract: On his first day at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Simratpal Singh sat in a barber chair where new cadets get their hair buzzed short, forced to choose between showing his faith and living it. Cadet Singh had grown up a Sikh. As part of his faith, he had never cut his hair or beard. But his faith also encouraged protection of the oppressed, which inspired him to join the Army. The Army would not allow a soldier with long hair or a beard, so that day he watched his locks drop to the floor. “Your self-image, what you believe in, is cut away,” he said in an interview. For a long time after, he would shave without looking in the mirror. That was almost 10 years ago. The cadet graduated, led a platoon of combat engineers who cleared roadside bombs in Afghanistan and was awarded the Bronze Star. Last week, the Army finally granted now Captain Singh, 27, a religious accommodation that allows him to grow his beard and wrap his hair in a turban. “It is wonderful. I had been living a double life, wearing a turban only at home,” he said. “My two worlds have finally come back together.” It is the first time in decades that the military has granted a religious accommodation for a beard to an active-duty combat soldier — a move that observers say could open the door for Muslims and other troops seeking to display their faith. But it is only temporary, lasting for a month while the Army decides whether to give permanent status to Captain Singh’s exception. If it decides not to, the captain could be confronted with the decision of whether to cut his hair or leave the Army. He has said he is prepared to sue if the accommodation is not made permanent. “This is a precedent-setting case,” said Eric Baxter , senior counsel at the Becket Fund, a nonprofit public interest law firm that specializes in religious liberty. “A beard is a beard is a beard. If you let one religious individual grow it, you will need to do it for all religions.” The Army does not comment on individual personnel decisions, said Lt. Col. Jennifer R. Johnson, a spokeswoman. She added that future requests for accommodations would be evaluated “on a case-by-case basis, considering the impact on unit and individual readiness, unit cohesion, morale, discipline, and health and safety of the force.” For years, the Army has argued that beards in the ranks — religious or not — threatened the very foundations of military order and discipline. The United States military has become increasingly inclusive, allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly , and women to serve in combat roles . But it has held a stiff line on uniforms and grooming standards. Though over the centuries these standards have included powdered wigs and Civil War mutton chops, in recent decades the military has insisted on men being clean-shaven with hair shorn high and tight. Image Before joining the Army, Captain Singh had never cut his hair or beard. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Resistance to departures from uniformity is so strong that while official standards allow for toupees, it took a Supreme Court case and an act of Congress in the 1980s to clear the way for skullcaps. In recent years, almost all requests for a religious accommodation for a beard have been dismissed. In a 2014 letter denying a beard to a Sikh student at Hofstra University who had tried to join the Army’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, Lt. Gen. James C. McConville, the officer in charge of all such accommodations, said beards under gas masks posed a safety hazard. The general added that any break from uniformity could erode esprit de corps and “damage the esteem and credibility” of the entire officer corps. However, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Special Operations soldiers have had lax facial-hair regulations, and having a beard has even become a mark of elite soldiers. This summer, a United States District Court judge rejected the safety argument , noting that more than 100,000 troops have been allowed to grow beards for medical reasons such as acne and sensitive skin. The judge ruled the Army’s denial was illegal. But the decision applied only to students enrolling in R.O.T.C., leaving the larger question of beards for active-duty troops untouched. Sikhs say lifting the ban is particularly important to them because they have had a long history of military service. Sikhism developed in northwestern India as a religion centered on protecting the innocent and resisting tyrants during long bouts of conflict and oppression from invading Mughals and Afghans. Bearded Sikhs fought in the United States Army in World War II and Vietnam. Today, Sikhs in full religious garb serve in militaries around the world. For centuries, Sikh teachings have required adherents to leave their hair and beard unshorn, and to wear a turban. “It was a way to identify the Sikhs, who became a sort of military order that stood up against oppression,” said Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi, a doctor who is a major in the Army Reserve. Major Kalsi got permission to grow a beard in 2009. He was the first of only three Sikhs to receive permission before Captain Singh. Two Muslims and a Jewish rabbi also have been granted accommodations since 2009. But all apparently served either as chaplains or in specialty medical fields, a spokeswoman for the Army said. No combat soldiers had been given a pass. The Army has used a procedural Catch-22 to sidestep the question of whether regulations protecting religious freedom allow for beards. For years, it denied requests from incoming recruits, saying accommodations could be granted only after recruits had formally joined. Recruits could not formally join without conforming to grooming standards. In short, to get permission to not shave, you had to shave. After Captain Singh had his hair and beard cut at West Point, he continued following Sikh teachings. He went to temple on Sunday. While on roadside bomb-clearing missions in Afghanistan, he ate only vegetarian versions of military field rations. But he said his faith demanded that he do more. “A true Sikh is supposed to stand out, so he can defend those who cannot defend themselves,” he said. “I see that very much in line with the Army values.” During leave before a new assignment this fall, he stopped shaving and filed for an accommodation with the help of the advocacy group the Sikh Coalition. He received the accommodation, at least on a temporary basis, on Thursday. He has made his own camouflage turbans to wear to his first day of work at Fort Belvoir, Va., on Monday. “I hope this shows others that they can both serve their faith and serve their country,” he said.

Sikh
Simratpal Singh
Beards and Mustaches
US Military
Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi


Kidd's Amazing Shot Goes for Naught in Boston

Abstract: BOSTON, Jan. 20 - Nets Coach Lawrence Frank did not care to ask "what if" after Friday night's game against the Boston Celtics. But there were several ifs that did not go the Nets' way late in the game, uncharacteristic of a veteran team. The miscues proved to be decisive and nullified the good things the Nets had done in the second half to push this game to the brink. The Celtics used a couple of timely offensive rebounds and clutch foul shots in the game's waning moments to survive a near miracle shot from Jason Kidd and beat the Nets, 99-96. Nets swingman Vince Carter, who finished with 20 points, had an opportunity to tie the game, but his 3-pointer at the buzzer was off the mark. "We gave ourselves the chance to win tonight, and we just couldn't get it done," said Frank, whose team will get a chance at redemption Saturday night when it plays host to the Celtics. Kidd led the Nets (21-16) with 24 points and Cliff Robinson, with timely shooting, had 18 off the bench. The Celtics (16-23), led by Paul Pierce's 25 points, had six players, including all five starters, in double figures. The Nets got lax on defense at several crucial moments late in the game, and it cost them. With the game tied at 92-92, Paul Pierce missed a layup, but forward Kendrick Perkins got the offensive rebound and put the ball in the basket to put the Celtics ahead. Moments later, with the Celtics leading, 95-93, guard Ricky Davis missed the second of two free throws, but Boston forward Al Jefferson got the offensive rebound, then found himself open under the basket and hit a layup, extending his team's lead to 97-93 with 1 minute 25 seconds to play. "They made a couple more hustle plays than we did," Robinson said. "That offensive rebound off the free throw was really big. But we still had opportunities after that. They just made a few more plays." A short time later, Kidd nearly helped the Nets forget about their rebounding woes with a spectacular 3-pointer. He caught the ball close to the top of the key, pump faked to get Pierce in the air, then leaned in to draw the foul and hit the shot with 38.1 seconds to play. Kidd missed the free throw, but his 3-pointer had cut the deficit to 97-96. Ricky Davis missed a jumper on the other end with just under 20 seconds to play, giving the Nets a chance to recapture the lead. But Carter's one-handed floater did not fall, and Davis hit a pair of free throws with 3.1 seconds remaining to ice the game. Davis's free throws were big considering how poorly the Celtics shot from the foul line, hitting only 20 of 34 attempts (58.8 percent). Though the Nets suffered from late-game miscues -- all four free-throw misses Friday night were in the fourth quarter -- Frank said he would not single them out as the deciding factor. "The simplistic view is just to look at the end, but there's a lot of possessions prior to that," he said. "Sometimes, the ball bounces long. There are a lot of things that go into it. You try and get the rebound. They got it. Just to reiterate it: It's a 48-minute game." The Celtics were the aggressor in the first 24 minutes, hitting 6-of-7 3-pointers in the first 12 minutes, and led by 53-44 at halftime. The Nets fought back in the second half, and took a 3-point lead -- their biggest of the night -- with a 10-4 run early in the fourth quarter. The catalyst was a baseline 3-pointer from Robinson that tied the score at 78-78 with 9:22 to play. But the Nets' crunch-time gaffes rendered Robinson's clutch shooting useless.

NEW JERSEY NETS
BOSTON CELTICS
CARTER VINCE
KIDD JASON
BASKETBALL


Kentucky Women Play On in N.C.A.A. Tournament

Abstract: One week after defending national champion Kentucky made a swift exit from the National Invitation Tournament with an upset loss at Robert Morris, the Wildcats’ basketball banner is flying high. The women’s program, which has gone from a footnote at the university to the 28-5 team ranked seventh in the nation, can set a record for victories by beating Dayton on Tuesday night in the N.C.A.A. tournament in Queens. “The men’s program has a great tradition over the years, with eight national championships and countless people playing in the N.B.A., but the women’s team is starting a tradition of its own,” the senior guard A’dia Mathies said before Monday’s practice. Mathies, chosen by The Associated Press as the Southeast Conference player of the year for the second consecutive season, is playing a huge part in that. The Wildcats, buoyed by a fierce defense they refer to as “40 minutes of dread,” are competing in the N.C.A.A. tournament for a team-record fourth consecutive season. Kentucky has won at least 25 games in each of those seasons. Image Kentucky's Samarie Walker driving past Navy's Kara Pollinger (32) on Sunday. The No. 2 Wildcats play No. 7 Dayton on Tuesday. Credit Frank Franklin Ii/Associated Press “We have the goal of becoming the best program in the country,” the sixth-year coach Matthew Mitchell said. “We have a lot of work to do, but we are making a lot of progress.” Mathies and Brittany Henderson, a reserve forward, are the Wildcats’ only seniors, but they represent the most successful class in the program’s history, with 109 wins in four years. In pulling away in the second half to rout Navy, 61-41, in the opening round Sunday, the Wildcats earned their eighth tournament victory in the past four years. That matched the previous total since the program was established 39 years ago. The performance against Navy was encouraging from several perspectives. Kentucky was able to find other answers offensively when Mathies, who had scored in double figures in 23 consecutive games, was limited to five foul shots and went without a field goal for the first time in her career. The 41 points allowed were the fewest surrendered by the Wildcats in an N.C.A.A. tournament game, and that enabled them to recover from a 26-25 halftime deficit. Exhaustion inevitably showed in the bent-over body language of the Navy players, who pride themselves on their conditioning. “The speed of the game; we have never been pressured so hard for 40 minutes,” said Jade Geif, a junior forward who was forced to bring the ball upcourt against a relentless full-court press. Kentucky forced 800 or more turnovers each of the past three seasons, including an N.C.A.A.-best 939 last year. Samarie Walker, a junior forward who transferred to Kentucky after one semester at Connecticut, said of the defense taught by Mitchell: “It’s a mentality we have and that he made a focus for us.” Women’s N.C.A.A. Tournament: March 25 6 Photos View Slide Show › Image Jessica Hill/Associated Press According to Mitchell, defensive success begins with a grueling summer training regimen and continues with equally demanding practices. Court boundaries are eliminated. A manager puts a new ball into play when one gets away. “If you came to one of our practices, especially early on, you would see there is not a lot of stopping,” Mitchell said. Players are driven almost to the breaking point. “It is tough, but once you see the results of how many turnovers we force, steals we get, and we’re out there making plays, we know our fans love it and we love doing it, too,” said Mathies, the Wildcats’ all-time steals leader with 313. Kentucky will look to again create havoc against Dayton (28-2) in a bid to advance to a Round of 16 game on Saturday in Bridgeport, Conn. The Flyers, seeded seventh, outlasted St. John’s, 96-90, in double overtime Sunday in their first-round game. For as far as Kentucky has come, Mitchell acknowledged that more would have to be done to close the gap on the perennial powers in the women’s game. The Wildcats lost to top-ranked Baylor, 85-51, in a road game on Nov. 13. At the least, Mathies said the groundwork was being laid for more success. “We know our best is yet to come,” she said.

NCAA Women's Basketball
College basketball
University of Kentucky
University of Dayton
A'dia Mathies
Brittany Henderson


Without Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, Spurs Beat Bulls

Abstract: Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili could do no more than watch and cheer Monday night. Their San Antonio Spurs teammates took it from there, beating the host Chicago Bulls, 103-89, behind Kawhi Leonard’s career-high 26 points and Danny Green’s 18. The Spurs’ three stars were all out with injuries, and swingman Stephen Jackson also missed the game because of “personal business,” according to the team. “One would hope that you could play with anybody in your system, but it was a tough challenge for them tonight,” Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich said. “And I couldn’t be more proud of what they did.” Gary Neal and Tiago Splitter had 16 points apiece for San Antonio, which improved the league’s best road record to 19-10. Nando De Colo, subbing for Parker, had 9 points and 7 assists in his second career start. Popovich said Parker’s knee swelled during a 111-86 victory over the Nets on Sunday, when he had 29 points and 11 assists. Duncan missed his fourth straight game with a sore left knee. Ginobili was out for the fifth consecutive game with tightness in his left hamstring. BOBCATS 94, CELTICS 91 Byron Mullens had 25 points and 18 rebounds, and host Charlotte ended Boston’s winning streak at seven. Kevin Garnett had 16 points and 13 rebounds for the Celtics, but he missed an 18-foot shot that would have given Boston the lead late in the game. Paul Pierce and Avery Bradley had chances to send the game into overtime in the final seconds, but they missed open 3-pointers. The Boston backup guard Leandro Barbosa, whose playing time has increased since a season-ending injury to Rajon Rondo, injured his left knee late in the third quarter and was carried to the locker room by a trainer and a teammate. HAWKS 105, MAVERICKS 101 Josh Smith had 26 points and 13 rebounds, and Devin Harris made a steal in the final minute as Atlanta won at Dallas. With the Hawks ahead, 99-98, Harris poked the ball from O. J. Mayo and kept it from going out of bounds with 23.9 seconds left. CLIPPERS 107, 76ERS 90 Chris Paul had 21 points and 11 assists, Blake Griffin scored 20 points, and visiting Los Angeles cruised. TIMBERWOLVES 100, CAVS 92 Luke Ridnour scored 21 points, Ricky Rubio added 13 points and 10 assists, and Minnesota ended an eight-game road losing streak by beating Cleveland. WIZARDS 102, BUCKS 90 Rookie Brandon Beal scored a season-high 28 points as Washington earned a rare road win. The Wizards have won four consecutive games and are 10-7 since John Wall returned from an injury. HORNETS 105, PISTONS 86 Ryan Anderson scored 31 points, Robin Lopez had 23 points and 10 rebounds, and visiting New Orleans rolled to a win over Detroit.

Basketball
Chicago Bulls
Spurs
Tim Duncan
Tony Parker
Manu Ginobili


William Zeckendorf Jr., 84, Dies; Developer Put Stamp on Skyline

Abstract: William Zeckendorf Jr., the son of a celebrated developer who himself transformed New York City by making big bets on big projects that helped refashion neighborhoods from the Upper West Side to Union Square, died on Wednesday in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 84. The cause was complications of respiratory failure, his family said. In 1986, The New York Times said Mr. Zeckendorf was Manhattan’s “most active real-estate developer,” noting that he was a partner in 20 developments worth well over $1 billion. After Lincoln Center opened in 1962, developers built housing in the immediate vicinity, but few ventured north of 72nd Street into what the real-estate industry called “the wild, wild west.” But in 1981, Mr. Zeckendorf broke ground on a 35-story building called the Columbia at Broadway and 96th Street for “luxury condominiums” in what had been a community garden. “Here come the crooks,” protesters shouted over the roar of bulldozers. But when the condos went on sale in 1983, most of them were snapped up by people who lived in the area. The units soon doubled in value. “The Columbia was pivotal because it stabilized the West Side,” Mr. Zeckendorf told The Times in 1986. “Until then, there had been an uncertainty about where the area was going. The Columbia proved there was a demand for quality construction.” Mr. Zeckendorf named his full-block development at 1 Irving Place at 14th Street in honor of his father, who had assembled the parcel on which the United Nations rose and built the Roosevelt Field shopping center on Long Island and Century City in Los Angeles. Completed in 1987, Zeckendorf Towers replaced many run-down low-rise buildings, and is credited with anchoring the resurgence of Park Avenue South and the Flatiron district. In 1989, Mr. Zeckendorf finished One Worldwide Plaza on the site of the old Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. Major developers had hesitated to go that far west. Mayor Edward I. Koch called the development, in what had been a tattered area, “a tremendously important part of the ongoing renaissance of New York City.” Mr. Zeckendorf also bought, renovated and sold the Mayfair, Delmonico, Statler and McAlpin hotels. He built the Park Belvedere, Bellaire, Vanderbilt and Central Park Place luxury apartment buildings. Other major projects included the Four Seasons Hotel and 4 Columbus Circle in Manhattan, and the Ronald Reagan Building and the International Trade Center in Washington. Image William Zeckendorf Jr., center, with his sons in 1986, built on the Upper West Side when others were hesitant to do so. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times In the 1990s, Mr. Zeckendorf’s luck ran out. He had overreached financially and was swamped in debt. One creditor persuaded a judge to allow a safecracker accompanied by lawyers and a city marshal to break into Mr. Zeckendorf’s apartment and try to recover millions in jewels and other valuables. They could not find a safe, but took pictures of valuable works of art including a Modigliani painting and a Degas sculpture. “Why would they do this to me?” Mr. Zeckendorf said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2000. “They’ve ruined my name.” Eventually, he was able to borrow money to repay the creditor. William Zeckendorf Jr. was born on Oct. 31, 1929, in Manhattan. He graduated from the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, N.J., near Princeton, and attended the University of Arizona for two years before enlisting in the Army, where he was in intelligence officer during the Korean War. After his discharge in 1953, he joined his father’s company, Webb and Knapp. He left before the company went bankrupt in 1965 to work on his own projects, which at first were mainly renovations. In the mid-1970s, he returned to the sort of major developments his father handled, although he recruited more partners to spread the risk. He kept his public profile low, in contrast to his father’s flamboyance. The elder Mr. Zeckendorf was known for hiring star architects like I. M Pei and Le Corbusier, and his son inherited a feeling for good design. He figured that the architecture and décor of apartments accounted for 90 percent of their selling points. “Any time I see someone putting up an ugly building I get upset,” he told The Times. The Journal reported that part of the younger Mr. Zeckendorf’s financial problems in the latter part of his career occurred because he personally guaranteed debts, and wanted to please outside investors by giving them a greater share of profits than is customary. “The idea of building and creating was more important to him than earning a lot of money from these buildings,” Herbert Sturz, a former chairman of New York City’s Planning Commission, told The Journal. Mr. Zeckendorf lived the last 15 years of his life in Santa Fe. His sons, Arthur and William, started their own business and developed two of Manhattan’s most luxurious buildings, 15 Central Park West and 515 Park Avenue. Mr. Zeckendorf was a trustee of Long Island University for 25 years, and served as chairman during the 1980s. His philanthropy in Santa Fe included transforming a quaint 1930s movie house into the Lensic Performing Arts Center. Mr. Zeckendorf’s marriage to Guri Lie, daughter of Trygve Lie, the first secretary general of the United Nations, ended in divorce. In addition to his sons, he is survived by his wife, the former Nancy King, a former ballerina; his sister, Susan Zeckendorf Nicholson; and two grandchildren.

William Zeckendorf Jr
Urban Planning
Obituary
NYC
Buildings


Blast Near British Embassy in Bahrain

Abstract: BEIRUT, Lebanon — A canister containing what Bahrain officials described as highly explosive material damaged the front of a minibus on Sunday near the British Embassy in the capital, Manama, though there were no injuries or serious damage. The blast occurred after midnight, damaging five other cars, the Bahraini Interior Ministry said. Though there was no clear sign that the British Embassy was the target, officials there said they had increased security at other diplomatic missions in the capital. The explosion occurred less than a week after a crowd stormed the British Embassy and a residential compound for diplomatic staff in Tehran. No one in Bahrain’s government immediately linked between the attacks, but it has long insisted that Iran has sought to intervene in the continuing confrontation between Bahrain’s Sunni Muslim monarchy and the Shiite-led opposition. The opposition has denied carrying out an Iranian agenda in a country where Saudi Arabia plays a dominant role. A report last month into an uprising this year that the government relentlessly crushed also found no specific links between the two.

Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )

Diplomatic Service Embassies and Consulates


Study Links Dolphin Deaths to Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Abstract: Lung and adrenal lesions found in dead bottlenose dolphins stranded along the Gulf of Mexico between June 2010 and December 2012 are consistent with the types of damage that marine mammals sustain from exposure to petroleum products after an oil spill , according to a new study published on Wednesday by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The findings are the latest results from the Deepwater Horizon National Resource Damage Assessment, an ongoing investigation by NOAA into the spill, the largest offshore oil spill in United States history. Combined with previous studies by the agency, this paper provides additional support to a link between the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and mass dolphin deaths in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. “The evidence to date indicates that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill caused the adrenal and lung lesions that contributed to the deaths of this unusual mortality event,” said Stephanie Venn-Watson, a researcher with the National Marine Mammal Foundation who was the lead author of the report. “We reached that conclusion based on the accumulation of our studies including this paper,” she added. The researchers analyzed tissue samples collected from 46 dolphins, shortly after they died, in the area affected by the spill. They then compared them with samples from 106 dolphins that had died at different times from the spill and in other regions, including in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. They found more instances of adrenal and lung lesions in the dolphins that died near the Deepwater Horizon spill than in the other dolphins, the team reported in the journal PLOS ONE. A third of the Gulf Coast dolphins had a thinned or damaged adrenal gland cortex compared with only 7 percent of the so-called reference dolphins, the researchers said. Damaged adrenal glands cannot properly produce essential hormones, and can cause fatal problems in dolphins, according to Kathleen Colegrove, a veterinary pathologist at the University of Illinois and an author of the study. She said that there had been many reports of adrenal complications leading to death in mink after exposure to oil . “This was an unusual abnormality to us that has not been previously documented in the literature,” Dr. Colegrove said of both the lung and adrenal lesions. “That evidence is very striking and indicative that the adrenal lesions we are seeing is consistent with oil exposure.” The researchers also found that about a fifth of the Gulf Coast dolphins had lung lesions caused by bacterial pneumonia, and that 70 percent of that group died because of that condition. Only 2 percent of the reference dolphins had any trace of bacterial pneumonia. The researchers said that the dolphins most likely inhaled the fumes from the petroleum products on the ocean surface. They added that exposure to oil fumes is one of the most common causes of chemical inhalation injury in other animals. “These dolphins had some of the most severe lung lesions I have ever seen in wild dolphins throughout the United States,” Dr. Colegrove said. The study was criticized by BP, which owned the well that blew out. It issued a statement saying that “the data we have seen thus far, including the new study from NOAA, do not show that oil from the Deepwater Horizon accident caused an increase in dolphin mortality.”


Winter Worries Come Early

Abstract: IT may seem crazy to fret about winter, with summer’s official start just days away. Yet the rising price of winter is on my mind, as it is for many of us who heat our homes — most unfortunately — with oil. If you depend on natural gas for heat, or if cold winters aren’t an issue where you live, it may be hard to imagine the impact of the recent oil increases in my corner of the Northeast — a rural county in the Catskills, where oil-burning furnaces are the norm. On top of the sticker shock at the gas pump, which has been spilling over into food and utility costs, the jump in oil prices has forced many of us to do a rapid recalculation of what it will take to get through the coming winter. Some market analysts are sticking to a what-goes-up-must-come-down stance. And maybe oil prices will subside. But which way do you hedge your bets? Last winter my husband and I paid $2,950 to heat our home. That was when oil was still $2.79 to $3.69 a gallon. Last month we signed a contract with our fuel company that would cap the price at $4.41, at least through next April. Unless there is a sharp price drop, I estimate we will spend at least $1,000 more this winter. That won’t break us, but it raises the question facing so many people these days. Is it worth spending more now in order to save later? Do you pay out thousands for a more fuel-efficient car, or better windows, or solar panels, in the hope that the investment will pay off? For many people in this oil-dependent region, it’s hard to think of spending more when big bills are looming. “The price of oil is almost double what it was a year ago,” said Neil R. Bartle, president of the Blueox Corporation, a small fuel company in Oxford, N.Y. Many of his customers signed contracts last year that capped their fuel prices at $2.50 a gallon. Now he is about to send out the contracts for the coming winter. “It was looking like we’d have to go to $4.50 a gallon,” Mr. Bartle said, “then last Friday we had another 30 cent per gallon increase, which puts it up to $4.80.” Even if prices drop a bit by the time the first frost settles in, the increases have already hurt enough that many people are doing whatever they can to save money now. Roxanna Harvey, a grandmother of three who lives in McDonough, N.Y., a rural area not far from mine, is frank about her attempts to economize, in anticipation of coming expenses. Mrs. Harvey said that last week she and her husband decided to cut back their dryer use and reduce their electric bill. “We went to Lowe’s to buy a clothesline, but they were sold out,” she said. “The sales guy said he had just gone through all the boxes he had.” It reminds me of the 1970s, when my mother resolutely hung every load of wash to dry on the roof of our six-story apartment building. People would rather expend their own energy than pay these prices. Even sales of vegetable seeds and plants are about 25 percent higher this year at the Green Thumb, a nursery in Hamden, N.Y., said Leslie Mignier, the manager. “We had a big greenhouse full of vegetables and it’s empty now. Even our suppliers are out.” MY husband and I also planted our first vegetable garden this year, but I’m not anticipating any great savings there. “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” I’m not, but I’ll be happy if the tomatoes and kale come in. Still, we are wondering whether now is the time to replace some windows or invest in the bigger job of reinsulating the older parts of our 1914 house. I hate wrangling with the whole “should we spend more to save later” calculation. I know the prudent answer. But it’s the spending that smarts, so you tend to feel it more than the gratification of knowing later on that you did the right thing. At least, some of us do. What I’d really like to do is buy a giant air-conditioner, plan a nice vacation and get through the season at hand. But this year winter won’t wait.

Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)
Heating
Personal Finances
Energy Efficiency


North Carolina Republicans Battle to Save Governor, Trailing by Whisker

Abstract: DURHAM, N.C. — Democrats and Republicans in this fiercely contested political battleground have regularly resorted to creative legal maneuvers and election-law changes in their efforts to wring every last vote from the state’s nearly seven million voters. But even by that standard, the disputed, hairbreadth race for governor is plowing litigious and acrimonious ground. Scrambling to save the incumbent governor, Pat McCrory, Republicans said they were pursuing protests in about half of North Carolina’s 100 counties, alleging that fraud and technical troubles had pushed the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Roy Cooper, to a statewide lead of more than 6,500 votes. But Republican-controlled county elections boards, including one here in vote-rich Durham County, turned back some of the challenges on Friday. The legal and political jockeying raised the specter of a recount, and it could ultimately climax in a political wild card: Mr. McCrory using a state law to contest the election in the state’s Republican-dominated General Assembly. “We’re supposed to have an inauguration on Jan. 7,” Theresa Kostrzewa, a Republican lobbyist, said Friday. “Are we going to have a governor? That, I think, is what most people are going to start wondering pretty soon.” The governor’s race this year was among the most bitterly contested campaigns in the country. The state was a prime battleground in the presidential election, and it has been fractured by debates about voting, transgender rights, Medicaid and abortion. Republicans largely prevailed here on Election Day: Donald J. Trump won North Carolina by more than three percentage points, and Senator Richard Burr was re-elected by a larger margin — but Mr. McCrory struggled. The contest’s aftermath has become a protracted spectacle. Mr. McCrory’s campaign said this week that there were “known instances of votes being cast by dead people, felons or individuals who voted more than once.” A spokesman for Mr. Cooper, Ford Porter, replied that the governor had “set a new standard for desperation.” Such arguments helped transform what might have been perfunctory meetings of elections regulators into crucial sessions that stirred frustration on both sides. In Durham County, a Democratic stronghold, officials held a quasi-judicial gathering with sworn witnesses, an out-of-state lawyer and detailed discussions about the mechanics of elections. “This is not a situation where politics enters into it,” William J. Brian Jr., a Republican who is the chairman of the county elections board, sternly told the crowded hearing room to widespread laughter and skepticism. But to the delight of the McCrory critics who filled the room, the elections board unanimously spurned a challenge that the North Carolina Republican Party’s general counsel, Thomas Stark, had filed. According to preliminary results, Mr. Cooper won the county by nearly 90,000 votes, or about 59 percentage points. (Durham County will not certify its count until at least Monday.) “There are a lot of protests out there going to specific issues that are 10, 15 more votes here and there,” Mr. Stark said. “And by the time you move statewide, that’s a lot of votes. If it’s not resolved at the counties, it will end up at the state board, and the state board will have to sort it all out.” As other Republican-controlled county elections boards rejected challenges from Mr. McCrory’s allies on Friday, the governor’s critics complained of baseless protests that they believed were intended to discredit North Carolina’s political climate. “They’re silly, small in number, poorly researched and often defamatory,” Allison Riggs, a lawyer for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said of the Republican challenges. Ms. Riggs, who was monitoring proceedings in nearby Wake County, which includes Raleigh, the state capital, said some challenges brought by Mr. McCrory’s supporters had been easily rebuffed through a few minutes of internet research. A spokesman for the McCrory campaign, Ricky Diaz, said Friday that the campaign expected people who brought the unsuccessful challenges to appeal to the State Board of Elections , which comprises three Republicans and two Democrats. County elections boards are made up of two Republicans and one Democrat. The wrangling plays out in a state that has often been the epicenter of the national debate about voter identification requirements and other, Republican-backed changes to elections rules. When North Carolina Democrats controlled the state government in recent decades, they sought to cement their franchise by enacting a string of laws that made it easier to register and vote, aiming in part to recruit more black voters. Combined with enforcement of the federal Voting Rights Act, the effect was profound: By 2012, turnout among African-Americans, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, soared to 68.5 percent, up from about 42 percent in 2000. But when Republicans gained absolute control over the executive and legislative branches after the 2012 elections, they set about undoing the framework Democrats had built. After the United States Supreme Court struck down a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act, state legislators pared early voting, imposed a photo ID requirement and ended same-day registration. A federal appeals court ruled against much of that law in July, concluding it had targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision.” That decision faces an uncertain future before a Supreme Court poised to have a justice nominated by Mr. Trump. But the immediate question in North Carolina is how long Mr. McCrory will dispute the results and whether he might ultimately ask the General Assembly to consider the election. Under state law , the legislature could order a new election or, “if it can determine which candidate received the highest number of votes,” it may declare a winner. The law asserts that the legislature’s decision in such a contest is “not reviewable” by the courts. Mr. Diaz said talk about legislative involvement “seems to be media-driven speculation, but we’re not going to discuss possible future steps that the campaign may or may not take.” He added, “We are extremely concerned about the voter fraud revelations that are emerging across the state and intend to ensure that every vote is counted and counted properly.” A lawyer for Mr. Cooper, Marc E. Elias, who also played down the possibility that the General Assembly might decide the election’s outcome, said Republican challenges were “calculated at nothing other than needless delay.” “There is nothing,” he added, “that Gov. McCrory or his legal team are going to be able to do to undo what is just basic math.”

North Carolina
Gubernatorial races
Democrats
Republicans
Pat McCrory
Roy A Cooper