Plenty to Say About Subway Test Gas That Isn’t Seen

Abstract: The subway has always been a peculiar hell for the germaphobic — each station crevice and distressingly warm pole evoking visions of air-filtering masks and hand sanitizer. But this week, New York City’s riders have begun to face down a more disquieting menace still, following them through the turnstiles, wafting toward the platform, slipping between the sliding car doors to zip through the tunnels. They think. On Tuesday, the Police Department and the United States Department of Energy began a study aimed at better understanding the airflow of contaminants in the subway system, including possible chemical weapons, by emitting a nontoxic, odorless and invisible gas in scores of subway stations. It has been billed as the country’s largest-ever urban airflow study. Though interested travelers could find no trace of the gas, questions about the program ranged from the searingly paranoid to the existential. How could the city be sure it was not dangerous? If an odorless gas consumes what is perhaps the least odorless feature of New York City, was it ever really there? And why had they punted on scent in the first place? “What they need to do is add some fragrance,” a police officer said beside a No. 1 train platform at 34th Street, “to cover up the other smells.” Tuesday was the first of three days of testing, though the dates for the next two have not been determined, according to Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner. Speaking at an event in Harlem, Mr. Kelly noted that about 40 percent of terrorist plots around the world centered on transportation systems, including five directed at the New York City subways. He assured the public that the gas was harmless. “It’s actually used to inflate babies’ lungs,” he said. Similar studies have been conducted in subway systems in Boston and Washington, though on a smaller scale. Riders remained skeptical. “They said corn syrup was harmless,” said Mark Cepeda, 27, rubbing his rotund midsection. “And look at this.” Moments earlier, he had been startled to find a black, rectangular gas-detection box beneath a platform bench at Penn Station. “They say if you see something, say something,” he said, his voice rising. “I see a black box underneath a chair.” Some riders planned to opt out of the subway system while the test was conducted, electing to walk, drive or use the city’s new bike-sharing system instead. One man joked on Twitter that he would “see y’all at the class-action lawsuit 10 years from now.” Several made flatulence jokes about the better-known gas of the subway system. Especially mystifying to most riders was the specter of a scent-free addition to the subway. Many have come to accept the devils they know: the sweat-stained flannel shirt of a neighboring rider, sticking to his armpits; the soggy paper McDonald’s bag at Times Square station — crushed but, as any passer-by can attest, not empty; whatever was rising from the two black garbage bags above the L train at Sixth Avenue on Tuesday, beside a workers-only room. “You have rat poop, regular poop, dog poop,” said Michael Polanco, 20, waiting for a train at Bryant Park station. “I don’t think an odorless gas will make much of a difference.” But a force without a footprint — neither seen, nor smelled — seemed to unsettle New Yorkers. “Let’s turn New York City into a huge dome of lab rats,” mused Michelle Hernandez, 22, from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Julian Naderer, 22, from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, said the test called to mind the case of Edward J. Snowden , the former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed information about government surveillance programs. With a gas undetectable to the public, safety “is a question of trust,” he said. “I’m not just going to believe what I hear.” Mr. Polanco was one of the few supporters of the study, arguing that its findings could prove helpful to the Police Department’s counterterrorism work. But even he seemed wary of the subway toxins on Tuesday. As he bade farewell to board a train at 42nd Street, Mr. Polanco declined a handshake, extending his left fist instead for a cautious bump.


L.P.G.A. Adds Points Race and a $1 Million Bonus

Abstract: The drama at the L.P.G.A. Tour’s season finale in Naples, Fla., in November was thick as a Broadway curtain, with Stacy Lewis and Suzann Pettersen battling for the Vare Trophy, given to the player with the lowest scoring average of the season, and with Shanshan Feng holding off Gerina Piller for a one-stroke victory. The 2014 season promises even better theater. On Wednesday, the L.P.G.A. and one of its title sponsors, the CME Group, unveiled a season-long points race called the Race to the CME Globe, with a $1 million bonus, the largest in women’s golf, to be awarded along with a crystal globe trophy at the season-ending event at Tiburon Golf Club. “I was so honored to win the L.P.G.A. money title in 2013, and now I have something even bigger to play for as I look to make it two in a row,” said the world No. 1, Inbee Park, who won six tournaments and nearly $2.5 million last year. “Nothing is guaranteed with this new system, so this race is going to make everyone on our tour work a little bit harder because the payoff is so big.” The yearlong competition, which begins this month in the Bahamas, is the tour’s answer to the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup, which offers $10 million to the winner. The men’s four-event playoff decides the title, but the women will have a winner-take-all showdown in Naples, with the points reset before the event to ensure maximum drama. The goal, said the L.P.G.A. commissioner, Mike Whan, “is to create a Sunday that can be climactic like we haven’t seen before on the L.P.G.A. Tour.” The points race, Whan said, “is a significant difference maker, not only the exposure of lifting the globe but the financial benefits that come with it.” He added that he expected “a heightened level of interest knowing that an additional $1 million is at stake.” The bonus represents more money than all but the top eight players earned in 2013. “To say this figure is significant is a massive understatement,” said Karen Stupples, a one-time major winner employed by Golf Channel as an analyst. “For the first time it will give L.P.G.A. players a chance to feel what it’s like playing for the kind of money the PGA guys play for.” Players will accumulate points by making the cut at full-field L.P.G.A. events and for top-40 finishes at the smaller, no-cut tournaments. At the season’s penultimate event, the Lorena Ochoa Invitational, which has the year’s smallest field, points will be awarded to those in the top 20. The winners of official L.P.G.A. events leading up to the Tour Championship will earn 500 points. In the majors, the winners will earn 625. The top 72 players in the standings at the conclusion of the Ochoa Invitational will earn a place in the $2 million Tour Championship. Any player with at least one official tour win will also be invited. When the points are reset, only the top three players in the standings can guarantee the $1 million bonus by winning the tournament, and only the top nine will have a shot at winning the bonus. The season-ending event is preceded by six tournaments outside the United States, including five in Asia. One of the aims of the points race, Whan said, is to keep women’s golf on people’s minds in the fall when college and pro football games, the baseball playoffs and the basketball and hockey seasons crowd the sports landscape. “It’s easy for some fans to get disconnected when the tour goes to Asia,” Whan said in a teleconference. “This will be less easy when you’re tracking the players’ standing. It creates a lot more scenarios and media stories than we currently have created.” The points race is the latest chapter in the tour’s revival, which began after Whan replaced the deposed commissioner Carolyn Bivens in 2010. The 2014 schedule will feature 32 tournaments, not including the eight-country International Crown, a new event, and will offer an average purse of $1.75 million. In 2011, there were 23 official events. “We have just come out of a tough phase when we were struggling to get companies to sponsor tournaments, let alone a season-long race,” Stupples said in an email. “I feel it speaks volumes as to how far we have come in the last few years.”

Golf
LPGA
Mike Whan
CME Group
Karen Stupples


For a Type of Songbird, Bats Are on the Menu

Abstract: Your typical songbird has a fairly humdrum diet — perhaps seeds or certain insects, or maybe berries and fruits. There are exceptions. In a cave in Hungary, researchers found great tits hunting, pecking and eating small pipistrelle bats. Great tits (Parus major) are largely insect eaters, though there had been a few anecdotal reports of the birds eating bats in Hungary and Poland. Peter Estok of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany and colleagues conducted systematic observations over two winters in a cave in the Bukk Mountains in northeastern Hungary and recorded 18 instances of predation. The findings were published in Biology Letters. Great tits were seen flying into the cave, landing and exploring crevices where bats were hibernating. Captured bats, which with a body length of about two inches are much smaller than the five-inch birds, were carried to the cave floor or outside and were pecked and eaten. Through playback experiments, the researchers found that the birds responded to vocalizations the bats made when they woke from hibernation. The researchers found that if they regularly left food for the birds outside the cave, the predation largely stopped. This suggests that bat-eating developed as a last resort for the birds, which do not migrate and must make do with limited food in the winter.

Birds
Bats
Hungary
Science and Technology


Debate Over March Exposes Split in Gay Rights Movement

Abstract: It was meant to be a unifying show of strength at a critical juncture in the gay rights movement. But a march planned for Sunday on the Mall in Washington is exposing deep divisions among gay rights advocates around the country as they grapple with whether to continue pushing for gains state by state, or embrace a more aggressive strategy to pressure the Obama administration and Congress for federal action. The march is occurring as referendum campaigns in Maine and Washington State seek to overturn laws that expand the rights of same-sex couples. Faced with the specter of a defeat similar to the passage of Proposition 8 in California last year, gay rights advocates have split over whether an undertaking as large and expensive as a march on Washington will come at the expense of ballot fights this fall. The debate around the march — the first mass gathering of gay rights supporters in Washington since 2000 — suggests that as the AIDS crisis has receded, gay activists have had a more difficult time mobilizing around a more diffuse agenda, including issues like same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination laws. “We can be thankful that the threat of AIDS has ebbed and is no longer the death warrant it was, but that also turns down the flame of consciousness,” said Dudley Clendinen, a scholar of the American gay movement who teaches at Johns Hopkins University. “And there’s nothing that remotely replaces it as a galvanizing force for the gay movement,” Mr. Clendinen said. “Marriage is probably the next biggest thing that touched and touches many. But that’s an issue, not an attack. And movements don’t always respond to issues as well as they respond to an attack.” In the vacuum left as AIDS became less of a threat, more of the movement’s attention shifted toward action in state legislatures and city councils. Organizers of the march are now arguing for abandoning that strategy, saying it is too incremental and leaves important rights vulnerable to the whim of state legislatures and ballot initiatives. “The endless pursuit of fractions of equality, state by state, county by county, locality by locality is not enough,” said Cleve Jones, a veteran organizer who has been involved in gay rights battles since the 1970s. “It is a failed strategy. Until we get federal action, every one of those local victories — as important as they are — every one is incomplete and impermanent.” Activists of this mindset believe that with a large Democratic majority in Congress and a Democrat in the White House, now is the ideal time to take on issues like overturning the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military and the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. “There has never been a better time than now,” said David Mixner, a longtime advocate for gay rights. “What are you waiting for? When will you have better than 60 votes in the Senate?” There are signs of progress in Washington that are certain to embolden advocates like Mr. Mixner. The House voted Thursday to expand the definition of hate crimes to include those committed because of a victim’s sexual orientation. But the push to focus on the federal government has angered activists on the state level, who have refused to commit money and volunteers to the march. Of particular concern is that the march could divert volunteers and money away from several crucial battles over same-sex marriage and domestic partnerships under way in various states. In addition to the ballot initiatives in Maine and Washington, gay rights advocates in New York and New Jersey believe legislatures there are close to approving measures that would legalize same-sex marriage. “The march is happening and that’s fantastic, but were focused on what we’re doing here,” said Jesse Connolly, manager of the No on 1 campaign in Maine, which is fighting the ballot initiative that would overturn a law allowing same-sex marriage. “Our effort is so critical for these last four weeks that we need everyone we can on the ground here in Maine. So we’re not going to be sending anyone to the march.” Lynne Bowman, executive director of Equality Ohio, said, “I hope we don’t wake up the day after Election Day and realize we could have won Maine if only so many resources weren’t put toward the march.” Equality Ohio has also declined to endorse the march. State activists are not the only ones who are wary. The nation’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign, waited nearly three months after the idea was first proposed in May before it agreed to get on board. Another influential group, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, did not endorse the march until last month. A war of words has erupted in the gay news media between the march’s organizers and prominent figures in gay and lesbian circles who think the march has been hastily planned and will draw meager crowds. “One of the worst ideas ever,” was the initial judgment of Bil Browning, a widely read gay blogger. Of course, other gay leaders say the debate does not have to be framed in either/or terms. “You are welcome to your opinion that it’s all or nothing and reject incrementalism, but I think we can be fighting for both,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, which eventually decided to support the march because of its potential to energize a new generation of volunteers and activists. Beyond the dispute over strategy, other factors may be at play in the divisiveness that has characterized the efforts to organize the march. With the exception of Mr. Jones, 54, and Mr. Mixner, 63, the organizing has largely been the undertaking of young activists who are making their foray into gay politics. And their brand of activism is not the kind that was hatched in the offices of established gay rights organizations. It has spread through Facebook and Twitter and the blogosphere. Longtime gay rights advocates said they have seen a surge in activism among people in their 20s and 30s, who seemed especially energized after the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which outlawed same-sex marriage in that state, and gave many of them their first taste of adversity. Many of these new activists were in diapers when Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco city supervisor, was assassinated, and in grade school when the AIDS crisis was at its peak. “I’m 27 and I wasn’t even out of the closet when the last LGBT march on Washington took place,” said Kip Williams, the co-director of the march, which is officially called the National Equality March. “This is really the first opportunity for so many people of my generation to take a stand for our equality and march for our rights.” Mr. Williams and the other co-director, Robin McGehee, 36, said they had recruited a considerable share of volunteers and march participants through the Internet and without the help of national and state gay advocacy groups. Strife has characterized previous such marches on Washington, in 1978, 1987, 1993 and 2000. In 1987, for example, organizers debated whether to include the word “bisexual” in the march’s title. They ultimately decided not to; the term “bi” was added to the title of the 1993 march. “Whenever you have these kinds of events, ones that seek to portray a national public image for a group of people, you’re going to see this kind of dissent,” said Amin Ghaziani, a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton who wrote a book on the previous gay rights marches. As seen by the endorsement of groups like the Human Rights Campaign that were initially resistant to the march, there are signs some of the dissent is being resolved. The question remains whether the infighting has already doomed the march. “We’ve undercut the very people we’re supposed to be supporting and empowering,” acknowledged Mr. Browning, the blogger who had said the march was one of the “worst ideas ever” but later came to believe that such a march could be a powerful statement of solidarity for the movement.

Same-Sex Marriage Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships


One More Thing for U.S. Women’s Soccer Team to Worry About

Abstract: The biggest challenge for Olympic and health officials in combating the Zika virus before the Rio Games may be the popular and far-flung sport of soccer, which will be played across Brazil. While many events will be contested in Rio de Janeiro, the soccer competition is to be contested in five additional cities. They include Manaus, the sprawling and isolated gateway to the Amazon, where canals laden with garbage and sewage were evident in places during the 2014 men’s World Cup. Soccer also helps illustrate the conflicted and awkward position in which female athletes can be placed as they consider whether to travel to Brazil and risk possible complications with pregnancy that may be caused by the virus, which is mosquito-borne. Writing on Forbes.com , the medical ethicist Arthur L. Caplan and his New York University colleague Lee H. Igel said: “It is beginning to look like the time has come to call off the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The reason is simple: Young women cannot travel there safely.” History suggests that moving, postponing or canceling the Rio Games is unlikely at the moment. Still, the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee and U.S. Soccer, along with other sports federations, have reacted in an unhurried way that critics have viewed as tone deaf. No officials have spoken with particular forcefulness to reassure women that the health risk will be minimized and that they will not be forced to choose between sport and reproductive health. Image Mario Andrada, communications director for the Olympic Games, spoke about the virus at a news conference in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday. Credit Buda Mendes/Getty Images For months, the I.O.C.’s level of concern for the well-being of athletes in Rio has been widely criticized, given the highly contaminated water at venues for rowing, canoeing, sailing and distance swimming events. And now comes the Zika virus, which, scientists say, can be transmitted sexually and may cause babies to be born with abnormally small heads, a condition known as microcephaly. “I think our sports leaders have been remiss on both counts, to be more protective of not only our athletes, but the international community of athletes,” said Richard Lapchick, the director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. Among the most visible women at the Rio Games should be members of the United States soccer team, winners of three consecutive Olympic gold medals and, most recently, the 2015 World Cup . The team is training in Texas for the regional Olympic qualifying tournament, which begins there on Wednesday. The competition will include teams from Zika-affected places like Costa Rica, Guatemala, Guyana, Mexico and Puerto Rico. “The safety of our athletes and staff is always the highest priority, and we are taking all necessary precautions in regard to the Zika virus,” Dr. George T. Chiampas, the chief medical officer of U.S. Soccer, said Thursday in a statement. Team officials are gathering medical information and will speak to the players in coming days, another American soccer official said Thursday. The official said that if any player declined to play in the Olympics because of concerns over the Zika virus, she would not be blackballed from future inclusion. Image The United States women’s soccer team celebrated winning the World Cup last summer in Canada. Credit Ronald Martinez/Getty Images “Can you imagine the backlash if a player was cut because she was asking her federation to find out more about this?” said Julie Foudy, a retired captain of the American team. Even so, players may be reluctant to speak up, in fear of losing their spot in the lineup, just as players in various sports are often afraid to admit to concussions, Lapchick said. Some women may worry about “having the coach look back and wonder if they’re really committed,” he said, adding, “If they spoke up as a team, obviously they’d be in a more powerful position.” Players displayed unity by protesting against artificial turf used at last summer’s Women’s World Cup in Canada. In December, the American women refused to play an exhibition in Hawaii, saying the turf was unsafe . And they are challenging the federation over collective bargaining . But to threaten to boycott the Olympics over the Zika virus is “not the kind of thing you bluff, and the I.O.C. knows it,” said Mary Jo Kane, the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota. Thomas Bach, the president of the I.O.C., told reporters this week that he was “very confident” that athletes and spectators would be safe in Rio. He noted that there was no travel ban to Brazil and that the Games would take place in the normally cooler, drier conditions in the Southern Hemisphere winter. That is true, but it rained sufficiently at the Pan American Games in Rio in July 2007 to wash out the bronze medal game in baseball. Impeccable weather is not a guarantee. So far, the American women seem single-minded in their purpose. “Rio we got our eyes set on you!” forward Alex Morgan wrote on Twitter . Two players from the World Cup team, Sydney Leroux and Amy Rodriguez, are pregnant and will miss the Olympics, but those decisions had nothing to do with the Zika virus, team officials said. Jill Ellis, the coach of the American women, told The Dallas Morning News , “I have confidence in people that will make decisions much higher up than I in terms of safety and protection for not just our players but the community in general.” Referring to concerns about smog ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and terrorism before the 2012 London Olympics, the star midfielder Carli Lloyd told the Dallas newspaper, “Every time we get there, it’s perfectly fine.” Ultimately, the decision about whether to play in Rio should rest with the players, Foudy and others said. They have trained for years for these Games, and some may have no desire to bear children. Still, Foudy added, it was up to the soccer federation to “do a better job” of educating the players about the Zika virus. “You want every federation to at least educate and have that conversation and have a plan in place,” Foudy said.

United States Women's National Soccer Team


Rift Deepens Between U.S. and Pakistan Over Bin Laden

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The United States and Pakistan are veering toward a deeper clash, with Pakistan’s Parliament demanding a permanent halt to all drone strikes just as the most senior American official since the killing of Osama bin Laden is to arrive with a stern message that the country has only months to show it is committed to rooting out Al Qaeda and associated groups. The United States has increased drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas in the past 10 days in an effort to exploit the uncertainty and disarray among militant ranks caused by Bin Laden’s death on May 2. The latest airstrikes, on Friday, occurred as Pakistan’s spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, in a rare appearance before the nation’s Parliament, denounced the American raid as a “sting operation.” Parliament then passed a resolution declaring that the drone strikes were a violation of sovereignty equivalent to the secret attack on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. The lawmakers warned that Pakistan could cut the supply lines to American forces in Afghanistan if there were more such attacks. The resolution contained no condemnation of a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, who killed more than 80 Pakistani paramilitary cadets on Friday. Pakistan stepped up its condemnations of the United States as Senator John Kerry , Democrat of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime emissary to Pakistan in times of crisis, was preparing to land in Islamabad. He was arriving with a list of actions — and some offers from Washington to ease tensions — that he finalized in meetings with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and other top American security officials. A senior administration official said Saturday that the United States would try to use the threat of Congressional cuts to the $3 billion in annual American aid to Pakistan as leverage. Any evidence of Pakistan’s complicity in sheltering Bin Laden — culled from the hundreds of computer flash drives and documents recovered in the raid — could also be used, the official said. So far, no such evidence has been found. “In the Congress, this is a make-or-break moment” for aid to Pakistan, Mr. Kerry said in an interview just before he left for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Kerry said he would tell Pakistan that there needed to be “a real demonstration of commitment” to fighting terrorist groups in the next few months. But he will also reassure Pakistani officials that they will be a central part of any political accord with the Taliban in Afghanistan, to ease their fears that India will take over large areas of Afghanistan as the United States pulls out. The Obama administration has said nothing about the Pakistani government’s criticisms, in the hope that they are designed to alleviate public anger and the Pakistani military’s embarrassment that American forces attacked the Bin Laden compound without being detected. Mr. Donilon and other senior administration officials declined to be interviewed about the administration’s strategy. The American reticence stems in part from the reality that such ultimatums have been sent before — most recently after the arrest of Raymond Davis, a Central Intelligence Agency contractor who shot two Pakistanis during what he said was a robbery. Pakistan has repeatedly called the administration’s bluff and revealed the threats as hollow. The United States relies heavily on transit routes in Pakistan to supply American troops in Afghanistan, and any move to cut off aid would probably lead Pakistan to close the supply routes, as it has done during previous disputes. Mr. Kerry is arriving at the moment of highest tension between the two countries since Pakistan, given little choice, formally broke with the Taliban and allied with the United States just after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Kerry said both countries must make “fundamental choices” about their relationship. “I have had some of these conversations with Pakistan before,” he said, “but never in the context of the world’s No. 1 terrorist being found 35 miles from the capital, next door to Pakistan’s West Point, and with the discovery he was fully, fully operational.” Mr. Kerry’s main piece of negotiating leverage is Pakistan’s uncertainty about what officials are finding in the trove of computer data — which Mr. Donilon has compared to “a small college library” — about Pakistani complicity hiding the Qaeda leader. American officials say they believe the top leaders of the country were genuinely surprised about Bin Laden’s whereabouts, based on their reaction to phone calls from the administration on the night of the raid and electronic surveillance of Pakistani government communications. But the officials strongly suspect that others in the government, the military or the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, the main intelligence agency, were aware of Bin Laden’s location. So far the United States has not said what kind of inquiry Pakistan should conduct to answer those questions, and given the political atmosphere surrounding Bin Laden’s killing, they question whether any such investigation would be thorough or credible. Mr. Kerry will also raise an issue that the administration has refused to discuss publicly: Pakistan’s escalating production of nuclear fuel to expand its arsenal of 100 or so nuclear weapons. Members of Congress, in closed sessions, have complained that since the $3 billion American annual aid to the Pakistani military is fungible, the United States is effectively helping bankroll the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world. “It will jeopardize funding if that continues,” Mr. Kerry said. In fact, according to some officials, the administration is on alert for signs that Pakistan’s reaction to the Bin Laden raid could be an expansion, or repositioning, of its nuclear forces. “The very public discussion that the raid showed the nuclear assets could be vulnerable to seizure may lead them to disperse them, or increase their number,” said one United States official involved in monitoring Pakistan’s nuclear program. “It’s a significant worry because the more they spread it around, the higher the risk something gets loose.” The Pakistani Parliament’s resolution warned of a “strong national response” if any nation — clearly it meant the United States — sought to seize or immobilize the country’s nuclear arsenal. On Capitol Hill last week, senior lawmakers warned that without answers to questions of possible Pakistani complicity in harboring Bin Laden, American aid could be imperiled. The House speaker, John A. Boehner, who visited Pakistan last month, told reporters on Thursday that the United States should remain engaged with Pakistan as an ally against terrorists, but that Pakistani leaders must prove their resolve in fighting terrorist groups. “It’s time to look the Pakistanis in the eye and get a commitment that they are fully onboard with us,” Mr. Boehner said. “If we’re going to continue to provide aid and strengthen this relationship, I think we need to have a clearer understanding.” Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee, went a step further, saying he would cut off $1.5 billion in annual nonmilitary aid unless Pakistan explained how Bin Laden could have gone undetected for years and how militant groups like the Haqqani network use Pakistan as a haven for attacks into Afghanistan.

United States Defense and Military Forces


Slimming Down, and Other NYTimes.com Reader Tales

Abstract: DEAR DIARY: The search for a beautiful Christmas tree reminded me of a funny episode in my apartment building several years ago, when I lived with my sister. She and I were on a crowded elevator when a young couple stepped on, carrying a freshly purchased Christmas tree. “What a lovely tree!” I said. “Thanks,” said the guy, unenthusiastically, “but we were hoping for taller and thinner.” “Aren’t we all?” remarked my sister. The whole elevator was chuckling as we exited. Kristin Swenton Dear Diary: At a Christmas cocktail party I attended in Manhattan, this was the conversation between the hostess and a couple who had just arrived. Couple: “Is that a fireplace?” The hostess: “Yes.” Couple: “A real fireplace?” Hostess: “Yes, a real fireplace.” Couple: “Those are logs?” Hostess: “Yes, they are logs.” Couple: “They are real logs?” Hostess: “Yes, real logs.” Couple: “Wood logs?” Hostess: “Yes, real wood logs.” Couple: “And the fire is real?” Hostess: “Yes, it is a real fire.” Couple: “In a real fireplace?” Hostess: “Yes, a real fire with wood logs in a real fireplace.” Couple: “Ooh. Aah.” Then a gentleman standing next to me said, “That is so New York.” Kimberley Wiseman Dear Diary: Last December, my husband and I were visiting in Manhattan for a few days. My husband is a big man with a full white beard. We were enjoying our dinner at an Upper West Side cafe when I noticed that the little girl at the next table, with her grandparents and mom, kept turning around in her chair to look at my husband. It dawned on me that she might think he was Santa Claus. I whispered this to my husband. Finally, when the family got up to leave, the little girl came over to our table and just stood staring at my husband. He asked her if she had made a list. She was almost speechless and shook her head. I asked if she had been good. She nodded as her mother helped her get into her coat. As she went off with her grandparents, the mother came back to tell us that her daughter had been very afraid of Santa until then, but somehow seeing him had gotten her over the fear. Nancy Marshall Dear Diary: At the American Museum of Natural History, I was charmed to see how even the youngest visitors were happy to cooperate with new, tightened procedures at security checkpoints. Waiting in line to be cleared at the pavilion entrance was a very serious young lady of perhaps 3 or 4 years old, all dressed up for a day of visiting the butterflies and the dinosaurs. Accompanied by her nanny, she carried by its chain a shiny little pocketbook about the size of a playing card. When her turn came, she stepped up and solemnly handed this to the security guard. He hesitated, and then bent down and opened the tiny bag. Making a show of searching it, he handed it back, thanked her and told her she was cleared to come in. The sight of her, walking off down the corridor with the pocketbook in her hand, put a very human face on how quickly we New Yorkers adapt and move on in our new world. Nancy A. Connor Dear Diary: As a recent transplant from Southern California, I was told, “Beware of Sin City.” Disregarding the warning, I recently headed to Central Park for a run. Returning home, I discovered that my cellphone had bounced out of my pocket. I called my number then and there, to no avail. Early the next morning I called my number again, and a man answered: “My dog found your phone. He was sniffing the grass when he jumped up with a yelp. He had heard your phone.” This soft-spoken gentleman asked where I lived so he could mail me my phone. The next thing I knew, this young man, on Rollerblades, had skated down 30 blocks to make the delivery. “No reward, thank you. I only did what was right.” And off he skated. Alis McCurdy-Sauers

Christmas
Christmas Trees
Fireplaces
Santa Claus
New York City


In Divided Wisconsin County, Packers Talk is O.K., but No Politics

Abstract: LIME RIDGE, Wis. — It was late afternoon and her bar was close to empty, so Lisa Buttonow poured herself a cherry-chocolate beer and broke one of her rules: Never reveal in a public place how she feels about President Trump. “You’ve got to be so careful around here,” explained Ms. Buttonow, owner of the Branding Iron Roadhouse in Lime Ridge, population 165. “You never know who’s a Democrat and who’s a Republican.” (As if to emphasize the point, she insisted that her own leanings were not for publication.) In this county, there are almost equal numbers of both. Sauk County, known for its small farms, sweeping bluffs and award-winning cheese making, is one of the most closely divided counties in the United States. Out of more than 31,000 votes cast here in the November election, Mr. Trump edged out Hillary Clinton by only 109 votes . Here is a place that defies easy stereotypes of red and blue America, a mostly rural county in central Wisconsin that split nearly down the middle between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump. Residents say they will freely discuss the Packers, the fickle weather, the best kind of feed for Black Angus cattle. But especially since the election, there has been a tacit agreement not to talk about presidential politics, except among small, trusted groups of like-minded friends. “Everybody has their opinions, of course,” said Wendy Crary, the clerk and treasurer for the village of Spring Green. “But they keep them to themselves.” Some people said that even in a place with a nearly 50-50 mix of Republicans and Democrats, they still managed to live in their own bubbles. “I try to hang around with the people that I’m used to hanging around with, people that I know share my beliefs,” said Larry Mundth, 61, a dairy and beef farmer in Reedsburg who is a Democrat. “I do know people who are positive, optimistic and Democratic. Those are the people I surround myself with, more often than not.” Mr. Mundth said it was conservatives who had isolated themselves from everyone else. “There are some very strong bubbles in our area, people who are basically one-issue voters,” he said. “They do not look at the whole picture.” Republicans described a similar silence on political talk. John Starling, 55, a farmer in Lime Ridge who is a Republican, said that even mentioning whom you voted for could be needlessly provocative. “It’s so polarizing,” he said. “You don’t torment people to their face.” Al Exner, chairman of the Sauk County Republicans, sat in a diner in Reedsburg on a recent morning, recounting the times when arguments about politics could go on “tooth and nail” for hours, even among the best of friends, and nobody would walk away offended. Mr. Exner, 80, regularly gets together over eggs and hash browns with old friends who have met for years. There are a few Democrats in the group. No one is allowed to discuss the new president or his policies. “I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut,” Mr. Exner said. “There were days when we had our differences, but you could talk about it. Those days of disagreeing and being able to continue a conversation just don’t exist anymore.” “It’s the Democrats’ fault,” he added. Both sides said the animosity in Wisconsin began to fester years ago, when Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, was elected and began an aggressive campaign to scale back the power of public sector labor unions. He succeeded , and was the target of widespread protests and a statewide recall campaign that ultimately failed . Image John Dietz, who voted for Hillary Clinton, restricts political discussions to a small group of Democrats who meet every two weeks at the cabinetry shop he and his wife own. “The issues have become very intense,” he said. Credit Ben Brewer for The New York Times Then in November, many rural, blue-collar voters who had previously favored Barack Obama turned their support to Mr. Trump, helping him win the state by almost 23,000 votes. To Wisconsinites who knew that their state had not voted for a Republican in a presidential election since 1984, it was a jolt. “I look at these farmers and think, how can you vote Republican?” said Diane Kirt, 64, a retired teacher in Reedsburg who favored Mrs. Clinton. She said she did not “advertise” her choice in the November election, and tended to associate with people who were like-minded. “You don’t go out of your way to make enemies,” she said. “I spend most of my time with educators.” In interviews around Sauk County, Democrats and Republicans said they now found it nearly impossible to debate the issues. Democrats asked: How can they talk about politics with Republicans when the Republicans don’t even believe that Mr. Obama was a United States citizen? (Mr. Exner said he believed Mr. Obama’s birth certificate was a fake, but he does not talk about it unprompted.) Republicans countered that the Democrats do not consider Mr. Trump to be a legitimate president, because he lost the popular vote and because they believe he received a boost from the Russians, who interfered with the election by hacking the Democratic National Committee. The residual tension over the election has played out in other ways. One man said he had been told that some Republicans who know of his political affiliation would not shop at his business. Another woman said she had stopped shopping at a neighbor’s store in town after seeing a Trump sign in his front yard. Wessie and John Dietz, a married couple in Reedsburg who voted for Mrs. Clinton, mostly keep political talk to a small group of Democrats who meet every two weeks at their cabinetry shop after they have closed down for the day. “This is very much a 50-50 community,” Mr. Dietz said. “It is different here now than it ever was. The issues have become very intense. I think the biggest problem is the lack of people studying the issues.” During the campaign, they learned that their next-door neighbors, a couple they have been friends with for 35 years, were supporting Mr. Trump. “From that time on, I decided that until they stopped watching Fox News all the time, there was no use talking to them about politics,” Mrs. Dietz said. They are still close. But the friendship has chilled a bit since that conversation, Mrs. Dietz said. “There’s a different feeling now,” she said. “In my mind, how can they vote for a sexual predator? These are churchgoing people.” Carolina Lipscomb, 32, works in a store in Reedsburg that sells flags and other patriotic items. Her husband is in the military and stationed in Germany; she voted for Mr. Trump, partly based on her belief that Mr. Obama did not really support military families. She and her co-workers can freely discuss politics in the store, but not outside it. “All of us here are conservative, so we can talk here,” she said. “But you can’t get into it with anyone unless you know how they voted. If you’re talking to a liberal, they would just lash out at you, saying how stupid and ignorant you are. That’s why I stopped.” She and her best friend argued about refugee policy once during the campaign — a conversation that ended with Ms. Lipscomb’s friend accusing her of being heartless. “I didn’t have fights like this in 2012,” she said. They have not talked about Mr. Trump since the election.

2016 Presidential Election
Sauk County
Democrats
Republicans
Donald Trump
Hillary Clinton


Pennsylvania Governor Faces an Uphill Battle for a Second Term

Abstract: HARRISBURG, Pa. — Since Pennsylvania changed the law in 1968 to allow its governor to serve two consecutive terms, no incumbent has been denied re-election. But Tom Corbett, a Republican, is in danger of becoming the first. Explanations have turned as much to the governor’s personality as his policies. Even his chief re-election strategist, John Brabender, said Mr. Corbett suffered by comparison to the governor next door, who, for better or worse, captures attention. “Chris Christie is this dynamic, bantering politician who makes news on all sorts of national programs,” Mr. Brabender said. “Tom Corbett is somebody who goes to work and does their job to the best of their ability and doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about all those things.” The governor, a direct, no-nonsense former attorney general, has not bounced back from an unpopular first year. Faced then with a $4 billion deficit, he honored a pledge not to raise taxes and presided over cuts that forced thousands of teacher layoffs and fewer services for the poor. As he runs for re-election, he is widely seen as the most vulnerable incumbent governor in the country. G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College, pointed to a Franklin & Marshall poll conducted in January showing that most Pennsylvania voters do not believe Mr. Corbett cares about people like them. “He’s been unable to explain in language that was clear and unmistakable and compassionate what he’s been trying to do,” Mr. Madonna said. With four Democrats vying for the chance to challenge Mr. Corbett, his advisers say polls will begin to reverse themselves once a specific opponent emerges from the primary on May 20. The potential challengers have begun to do the governor’s work for him, aggressively attacking one another, and especially the front-runner, Tom Wolf. But even those in Mr. Corbett’s party do not always sound convinced. Republicans in the State Senate, for example, still talk about the last time Mr. Corbett paid them a visit. The moment preceded a vote on school vouchers, which the governor favored, but which made many senators nervous because of the opposition of teachers’ unions. The senators were hoping Mr. Corbett was prepared to take the political heat, and even visit their districts, if needed. Instead, they heard a stump speech about school choice — and the governor left without taking questions. He has not been invited back to address the senators since, more than two years ago. “Sometimes I think he still thinks he’s attorney general,” said Senator Mike Folmer, a Republican who supports the governor but laments that his blunt style limits his appeal. “He doesn’t seem compassionate enough.” In an interview, Mr. Corbett was affable and unguarded, as close associates say he is one on one. Standing in a corridor of Harrisburg University, where he had given a talk to schoolchildren at a science fair, he spoke in quarters close enough to frequently touch a reporter’s elbow. He dismissed the idea that he faced a charisma gap with voters. “This style got me elected,” he said. “I was hired to do a job. I was hired to go in there and make the tough decisions.” Image In a January poll, most voters said they did not believe Gov. Tom Corbett, seen at a student competition, cared about people like them. Credit Matt Roth for The New York Times Democrats are hammering at what they call Mr. Corbett’s $1 billion cut to education. Polls, including one by Quinnipiac University , show education is a top concern of voters, after jobs and the economy. It is true that classroom spending dropped by close to that figure, $841 million, in the governor’s first budget. But he argues that it was because federal stimulus dollars ended that year. He has restored money to education, and in February proposed an election-year budget increasing public school spending by $400 million. “They don’t want to accept the truth because it is not convenient,” he said of his opponents. Mr. Wolf, a former revenue secretary, called the governor’s explanation of a drop in federal stimulus money “crocodile tears” in a Democratic debate. He blamed him for 20,000 teachers who lost jobs. “He was there to decide what the priorities of the state are, and he, for whatever reason, decided education is not a priority,” Mr. Wolf said. All four Democratic contenders agree on how to increase education spending: by taxing the booming natural gas industry. They argue that Pennsylvania is giving away the store to drillers in the Marcellus shale formation by not collecting more. Allyson Y. Schwartz, a Democratic congresswoman from the Philadelphia suburbs running for governor, called on the state to “demand they give us 5 percent and use the money to invest in education.” The governor opposes adding new taxes to fees that drillers already pay, mostly to the counties where they operate. The argument the other side makes, he said, is that the gas is the property of all Pennsylvanians. “No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s the property owner’s gas. I’m sorry: It’s the mineral owner’s gas.” His invoking of property rights was a reminder that the governor hews strongly to conservative principles, even in a state that has a moderate tradition. Elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, Mr. Corbett has refused to expand Medicaid under the president’s health care law, and he has presided over corporate tax cuts of $1.2 billion. “You can go all the way back to Reagan: Reduce your taxes, you’re going to see growth,” he said. But it is unclear whether the economy will benefit the governor. Pennsylvania’s 6 percent unemployment rate has dropped 2.1 points during his term. But the state ranked 48th in job creation last year , according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Standard & Poor’s recently scolded state lawmakers for a budget out of whack between revenue and spending. In a year when other states have surpluses , Pennsylvania is facing a $1 billion deficit, for which critics say the governor’s business tax breaks are to blame. “Tom Corbett has dug us into a hole because he has been ideologically driven to say no new revenues no matter what,” Ms. Schwartz said in the debate. With the Democrats agreeing on their anti-Corbett line, they have turned on one another ahead of their primary. Mr. Wolf, a businessman from York, spent nearly $4.5 million of a personal fortune in an early airwaves barrage, portraying himself as a folksy outsider concerned about his employees. He opened a double-digit lead. Now Ms. Schwartz is questioning his business practices, accusing him of structuring a buyout of his kitchen-cabinet company that led to layoffs of a majority of its work force. A third candidate, Rob McCord, the state treasurer, recently aired an ad harshly attacking Mr. Wolf for supporting a former mayor of York who played a role in a 1969 race riot. The ad drew an unusual rebuke from two of the state’s leading Democrats, Senator Bob Casey and Edward G. Rendell, a former governor. The fourth Democratic candidate, Katie McGinty, a former state secretary of the environment, has not attacked her rivals, but is lagging in fund-raising and is not well known to voters. Normally incumbents root for a particular opponent who they perceive would present the weakest target. Mr. Corbett and his advisers profess no preference for the Democrat they would most like to face. At the moment, they are enjoying watching the other side carve itself up. Mr. Corbett said: “I’m not the politician; I’m the prosecutor. You can have all the opinions you want. I’ll take the facts.”

Pennsylvania
Tom Corbett
Gubernatorial races


Bloomberg Takes Blame for N.Y.C. Response to Storm

Abstract: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg admitted on Wednesday that his administration’s response to the blizzard that buried New York this week had been inadequate, and he pledged to hold himself and others accountable as the city continued to work its way to normalcy. Speaking at a hardware depot in Hunts Point, the Bronx, the mayor said he was “extremely dissatisfied” with the performance of the city’s emergency management system. He said the reaction to the snow as it accumulated was “a lot worse” than after other recent snowstorms and was not as efficient as “the city has a right to expect.” Still, most subway and bus service had been restored by midday on Wednesday, and he and other city officials said they expected all streets to be plowed by 7 a.m. on Thursday. Having cleared almost all the main arteries, the plows were attending to residential areas that had largely been ignored, including swaths of South Brooklyn, western Queens and Staten Island, Mr. Bloomberg said. He added that the city planned to hire about 1,200 additional day laborers to help shovel snow from bus stops and crosswalks. Mr. Bloomberg acknowledged that the city’s 911 emergency dispatching system had been “overwhelmed” by calls during the blizzard and that some people had suffered while waiting for help to arrive. But he said there was no way of knowing if anybody who died during the storm would have survived if ambulances had not had so much trouble getting through the clogged streets. The city medical examiner’s office said Wednesday that no deaths were attributable to the snow. Seeming less defensive than he was on Tuesday, the mayor suggested a few reasons for the poorer response but said city officials would not fully understand what went wrong until they had time to analyze their actions. But Mr. Bloomberg said the City Council members who had called for a hearing into the response to the storm must not “have enough things to do if that’s what they are focusing on.” As he often has done, he defended his commissioners, particularly John J. Doherty, who runs the Sanitation Department. The mayor bridled at any suggestion that city officials had been relaxing on the day after Christmas when they should have been preparing for a powerful storm that had been accurately forecast as it roared up the East Coast. “Everybody has worked hard,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “The results were not what we’d like them to be, but it has not been for lack of effort. And we’ll find out what was different this time and try to do everything we can to make sure it’s better the next time.” A complicating factor, the mayor said, was the number of cars and buses left stuck in the middle of streets, making it impossible for plows to get through. City officials admitted that about one-third of what they call “tertiary streets” had not been plowed at all by midday on Wednesday. They define tertiary streets as those that are not main thoroughfares and do not connect to main thoroughfares. Almost all of the primary streets and more than 85 percent of the secondary streets in the city had been plowed, the mayor said. But in some residential neighborhoods in Brooklyn, he said that only about one-fourth of the streets had been visited by a plow in the past three days. In Jackson Heights, Queens, Carlos Torres, a Budweiser delivery man, had to park his truck more than a block away from the convenience store that he was replenishing on Wednesday. “The worst you could possibly imagine is what it’s like,” Mr. Torres said as he muscled a loaded cart through the street. “It’s hard to park, hard to deliver, hard to walk anywhere.” He said he had much less trouble making deliveries in Manhattan on Tuesday. One lifelong resident of Long Island City said he could not recall city workers’ coping so poorly with a snowstorm. “I’ve been in the neighborhood 45 years, and this is the first time I saw Vernon Boulevard in a panic,” said Mario Migorelli, 58, who owns Mario’s Deli. “There was a cab and a car parked in the middle of the street out here for three days. The bottom line is the plows were not out there.” Of the affected subway lines, only the N line and the Franklin Avenue shuttle in Brooklyn remained out of service because of snowdrifts that had not been cleared. The Metro-North Railroad was back on schedule, and the Long Island Rail Road was expected to be by Wednesday evening. At least some service had been restored on 93 percent of the city’s bus lines, and fewer than 50 buses remained stuck in the snow, down from more than 500 on Monday, transit officials reported. More than 200 flights were canceled at the region’s three major airports on Wednesday, but operations were improving rapidly, said Ron Marsico, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. All of their major runways were clear of snow. “We’re getting back to normal slowly but surely,” Mr. Marsico said. “Hopefully we’ll be fully back to normal tomorrow or Friday.” That will be too late for some travelers, like Sri Nagubandi, who packed the terminals at Kennedy Airport in Queens. Mr. Nagubandi and his mother, who live on Staten Island, had been trying to get to a wedding in India on Thursday. But their flight out on Qatar Airways on Monday night was canceled, then canceled again and again. Trying to obtain information from the airline’s staff about when they might get off the ground was a true test of Mr. Nagubandi’s patience. “They were saying all kinds of things,” he said. “Who knew what the truth is?” On Wednesday afternoon, the airline offered to take the passengers by bus to Washington in hopes that they could fly to Asia from there. His hopes of attending the wedding dashed, Mr. Nagubandi said he would just go home.

Bloomberg Michael R
New York City
Snow and Snowstorms
Transit Systems


Bedbug Problem Closes Building at John Jay College, Postponing Classes

Abstract: John Jay College of Criminal Justice shut down one of its buildings on Thursday because of bedbugs . The college said it hoped to reopen the building, at 445 West 59th Street, by Monday morning after it is treated by an extermination service. Meanwhile, all classes in the building, North Hall, were postponed and rescheduled. “The college is taking it seriously and moving as quickly as possible to treat the building,” said Jim Grossman, a spokesman for John Jay. John Jay is calling the situation a bedbug “condition.” Mr. Grossman said, “Infestation is when you can see them swarming.” At an information session held Thursday afternoon, college officials said that rashes among staff members were reported in mid-August and that the reports grew in numbers as time went on. Most staff members affected with skin rashes were from the financial aid and registrar’s office. A deep cleaning was ordered on Sept. 14 and one bedbug was found. Soon after, a second was caught. The college brought in an inspection team with bug-sniffing dogs on Tuesday that confirmed the bedbug problem on the first floor of North Hall. The crowd of about 200 faculty, staff members and students gasped when officials showed a map of affected areas. Evidence of bedbugs was found in about half of the rooms on the second floor. The inspection had not been completed on the third or fourth floors of the building, though evidence was found on the third floor. Officials said other buildings would also be inspected. The president of the college, Jeremy Travis, said no bites had been reported, only skin rashes, but a forensic psychology student said she and a co-worker had been bitten in the last two weeks. The student, Deirdra Assey, 24, of Brooklyn, said she and the coworker checked their homes and spoke with landlords about bedbugs, but she said they concluded the bites were happening during the day. “As soon as I figured out that campus had been infected, it all made sense,” said Ms. Assey, a second-year master’s degree student. “I had no idea they could be infecting offices.” Despite the “bed” descriptor, the bugs can survive in many locations, like buses, trains and movie theaters. Last year they were reported at Fox offices. Bedbugs, once nearly eradicated, have spread across New York City, in part because of the decline in the use of DDT. In March, the city set up a bedbug advisory board. Meanwhile, on Thursday, students expressed glee at the interruption in classes. Rudy Pamphile, 18, a freshman, walked past the yellow tape blocking the entrance to the building, laughing and joking with a friend. “No test today!” he said. Though Mr. Pamphile said he had stayed up until midnight studying, he was not unhappy to be relieved of the burden, adding he would probably hang out with friends until his next class. Faris Khalaf, 21, a student who is also on the admissions staff in North Hall, said he had talked to fellow employees who had rashes because of the bedbugs. The rashes were mostly on forearms and exposed areas of skin, like legs, he said. Bahar Kocyigit, 20, a law student from Queens, said she was relieved to hear that the building was closed because she had been late for her economics class. “I’m surprised they do have bedbugs,” she said. “I heard about it on Facebook, but I didn’t know if it were a rumor or not. I figured it would be in the dorms.”

Colleges and Universities
Bedbugs
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
New York City


Aversion to Risk Deepens Credit Woes

Abstract: The credit markets came under renewed stress Thursday as investors sought absolute safety and even moved away from debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , the government-sponsored mortgage lending enterprises. The intensifying credit crisis came as one regulator, Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said that some banks had moved from being too willing to take on risks to being reluctant to take any chance of losing money, a move that was making the crisis worse. “The rational actions taken by even the strongest financial institutions to reduce exposure to future losses have caused significant collateral damage to market functioning,” Mr. Geithner said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “This, in turn, has intensified the liquidity problems for a wide range of bank and nonbank financial institutions.” Those liquidity problems intensified Thursday as a new increase in the number of mortgage foreclosures was reported and two financial companies that had relied on borrowed money said they were unable to raise the cash demanded by their lenders. Both Carlyle Capital, a company sponsored by the Carlyle Group, a major private equity fund, and Thornburg Mortgage, the second-largest independent mortgage lender in the United States after Countrywide, said they had been unable to meet the demands and had defaulted on some obligations. Their stock prices plunged. The credit market jitters were blamed for a sharp drop in stock prices, with the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index falling 2.2 percent. Financial stocks were the hardest hit, with an index of such shares falling to its lowest level in more than four years. Fannie Mae shares fell $2.57, or 10.6 percent, to $21.70, and Freddie Mac shares dropped $1.50, or 6.7 percent, to $20.14. Both are at their lowest level in more than a decade. As the economy grew through most of this decade, much of the growth was fueled by borrowing, both by individuals taking out mortgages and by investors who sought high returns through highly leveraged investments. Some of those investments are now unraveling because lenders will not lend enough money to enable investors to hold on to them. That reluctance forces the sale of investments, which lowers prices and makes lenders even less willing to risk their capital. “Leverage is acceptable in a stable economic environment, but not in an economic crisis,” Geraud Charpin, a strategist at UBS, wrote last week. At the end of last year, Carlyle Capital had $21.76 billion in assets, of which $21.69 billion had been pledged as collateral against loans. It had borrowed $31 for every dollar of equity, and even a $150 million line of credit from its parent, the Carlyle Group, was not enough to keep it out of trouble as lenders demanded more collateral to back up their loans. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose debt has been viewed as almost as safe as that of the government itself, have played an essential role in keeping the mortgage markets functioning. That is because many mortgage companies have gone out of business and investors have been unwilling to buy mortgage-backed securities unless the government, or one of the enterprises, guaranteed the mortgages. The difference between the yield on long-term debt guaranteed by Fannie Mae and that of similar Treasury debt rose to its largest level in more than 20 years, providing a new sign of the nervousness that has affected financial markets. In Congressional testimony, William B. Shear, an official with the Government Accountability Office, warned that Fannie and Freddie, “with more than $6 trillion in outstanding obligations,” could pose “significant risks to taxpayers” if they ran into difficulty. Each of the two enterprises has a $2.25 billion line of credit with the Treasury, but that is a small fraction of what they owe. Mr. Shear said it was “generally assumed on Wall Street that assistance would be provided in a financial emergency.” With the trading levels indicating that some traders were no longer as confident of that assumption as they had been, rumors swirled that the Treasury Department was preparing to issue an explicit guarantee of the debts of government-sponsored enterprises, or G.S.E.’s, to calm the market. A Treasury spokeswoman denied those rumors. “The rumor of an explicit government guarantee for the G.S.E.’s speaks to the gravity of the current situation,” said Margaret Kerins, a strategist at RBS Greenwich Capital. The index of yields on Fannie Mae guaranteed loans rose to 5.96 percent on Thursday, an increase of 13 basis points from the previous day. (A basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point.) At the same time, the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds fell 9 basis points, to 3.58 percent. The difference in the two yields, of 2.38 percentage points, was the largest since 1986 and was more than twice the difference of a year ago, before credit fears began to grow. The credit crisis began last year with indications of rising defaults on subprime mortgage loans, a problem that bankers and regulators said could be easily contained. But it gradually spread as confidence declined in the financial engineering that has remade the financial system in recent years. The bond rating agencies have been forced to reduce the ratings on some structured finance products — many of them ultimately backed by mortgage loans — from AAA to very low levels. That has damaged the credibility of the agencies at the same time that it has made investors wary of taking on any risk. Many of those structured finance products had been guaranteed by bond insurers like MBIA and Ambac, and the fact that they could face significant claims has led to concerns about their solvency. An effort to bail out Ambac with guarantees from banks foundered on the reluctance of banks to commit capital they might need for other purposes, and a plan announced Wednesday for the company to raise additional capital by selling stock was greeted with hostility by investors, causing its share price to lose nearly a third of its already depressed value in the last two days. Concerns have also grown about a recession, with economists forecasting an increase in the unemployment rate when February’s job figures are released Friday. On Thursday, the Federal Reserve reported that the net worth of households fell in the first quarter, the first time that had happened since 2002. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that the proportion of borrowers more than 30 days delinquent rose to 5.82 percent, the highest since 1985. The situation was worst among subprime borrowers who had taken out adjustable rate mortgages, but the proportion of prime mortgages that were delinquent also rose, to 3.24 percent.

Carlyle Group
Mortgages
Freddie Mac
Fannie Mae


Wildfire Empties Fort McMurray in Alberta’s Oil Sands Region

Abstract: OTTAWA — The entire community of Fort McMurray , the heart of Alberta’s oil sands region, was ordered to evacuate on Tuesday night as a fast-spreading wildfire advanced on the city and cut off its only highway link to the south. The fire destroyed a number of homes in one neighborhood and some trailers in a trailer park, said Robin Smith, a spokesman for the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which includes Fort McMurray. According to television news reports, commercial buildings downtown were also ablaze. There were no reports of injuries by early evening. A video showed flames and smoke rising hundreds of feet into the sky, prompting the largest fire evacuation in Alberta’s history, The Edmonton Journal reported. The fire was expected to get worse on Wednesday, when winds were forecast to switch direction and increase in speed. Thousands More Flee Fast-Spreading Wildfire in Canada A state of emergency was declared in Alberta, Canada, forcing the frightened residents of three additional communities to evacuate. Mr. Smith said early Tuesday that Highway 63, which connects Fort McMurray to Edmonton, Alberta, to the south and the main oil sands production areas to the north, was heavily congested with cars fleeing the fire, which began over the weekend. Late in the afternoon, however, the fire jumped over the highway, making evacuation to the south impossible, Mr. Smith said. He added that there was no immediate danger in areas north of Fort McMurray. The highway was later reopened. As of early Tuesday evening, the city’s airport was open, but some airlines were canceling flights, said Jillian Philipp, an airport spokeswoman. After leaving the airport earlier in the day, Ms. Philipp said she was unable to return because of the fire. But employees still there told her that it did not appear to be in the immediate path of the flames. The provincial government had ordered residents out of six neighborhoods and a trailer park by late in the afternoon after declaring the fire “out of control.” Video Rachel Notley, the premier of Alberta, said officials were doing all they could to ensure the safety of those affected by wildfires in the Canadian province. Credit Credit CTV, via Associated Press The fire had consumed about 6,500 acres of forest by late Monday night and increased substantially in size by Tuesday, said Laura Stewart, a spokeswoman for the provincial government. Ms. Stewart said that strong, changing winds were shifting the fire’s direction, making it unsafe for firefighters on the ground. As a result, their efforts had been limited to aerial water bombing. A photograph posted by the government showed only a relatively small line of trees and a hill separating a commercial district from a tower of flame. Until last year, the oil sands had made Fort McMurray Canada’s boomtown, where the biggest concern was dealing with frenetic growth and the housing shortages and social problems it created. The collapse of oil prices, however, has hit the city particularly hard. Oil sands companies have been laying off workers as projects are completed, but no major oil sands projects have shut down. Last year, the regional municipality had a population of about 125,000, excluding thousands of workers who officially claimed residency elsewhere but who commuted by air to Fort McMurray and lived in work camps.

Fires
Wildfires
Evacuation
Fort McMurray
Oil sands
Alberta


Distraught Elephant to Remain in Dallas

Abstract: HOUSTON — The Dallas Zoo has decided to keep a troubled elephant named Jenny and build a larger exhibit for her after a public outcry over plans to send the animal to a wildlife park in Mexico. “We believe we have found a solution that benefits Jenny as well as the Dallas community,” the zoo’s executive director, Gregg Hudson, said Wednesday in a statement. “This plan serves Jenny’s best interests.” Mr. Hudson had planned to ship the 10,500-pound elephant, who has suffered from bouts of depression and panic attacks, to the Africam Safari Park in Puebla, Mexico, after her companion, Keke, died of heart disease in May. African elephants mourn their dead, and it was feared that Jenny might slip into a profound funk. But the plan led to a firestorm of criticism from local residents, lawmakers, animal-rights advocates and several elephant experts. These critics said the zoo in Puebla, with its cars, might trigger Jenny’s rages. They argued that she should be sent to a 2,700-acre sanctuary for traumatized circus and zoo elephants in Tennessee. That plan met stiff resistance from Dallas Zoo officials and a national umbrella organization that accredits zoos in North America — the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Dallas Zoo officials argued that the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn., was not accredited by the zoo association and, consequently, would not provide Jenny with proper care, a claim the sanctuary denies. Facing irate citizens on one side and the zoo association on the other, Mr. Hudson found a compromise. He said he would speed up construction of a new 15-acre habitat for large African mammals — elephants, giraffes, lions and warthogs — and acquire a second elephant to give Jenny companionship. A four-acre parcel is to be completed within 18 months, officials said. In a recent interview, Jenny’s three keepers said she had adjusted better than had been expected to the loss of her companion and appeared to be in good health, physically and mentally. Still, some people who had advocated sending Jenny to Tennessee were disappointed. Councilwoman Angela Hunt of Dallas, who opposed the Mexico plan, said that she doubted the new exhibit would be completed on time and that she worried that Jenny, who at 32 is old for an elephant in captivity, might not live to see it. “Jenny’s old,” Ms. Hunt said. “She’ll spend her final years in a small cage, waiting for her new exhibit to be built as its construction is delayed for several years.”


N.S.A. Will Not Be Allowed to Keep Old Phone Records

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Analysts at the National Security Agency will no longer be permitted to search a database holding five years of Americans’ domestic calling records after Nov. 29, the Obama administration said on Monday. Legislation enacted in June barred the N.S.A. from collecting Americans’ calling records after 180 days, but did not say what would happen to the data already gathered. Under a new system laid out by the USA Freedom Act, the government will not hold the bulk data, which is used to analyze links between callers in search of terrorism suspects. Earlier this month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to say whether the government would keep using the data collected under the old procedures or would purge it after the new system is in place. On Monday, the intelligence office said in a statement that N.S.A. analysts would lose access to the old database after Nov. 29, but that N.S.A. technicians would still be able to view the historical records for an additional three months. That will allow them to compare the data to the calling records produced under the new system, the statement said. After those three months, that access will cease, too. The N.S.A. said that it planned to then purge the records, but that it must wait for a resolution to lawsuits challenging the program. A court has ordered the N.S.A. to preserve records relevant to the litigation. “The telephony metadata preserved solely because of preservation obligations in pending civil litigation will not be used or accessed for any other purpose, and, as soon as possible, N.S.A. will destroy” those records, the agency said. After Congress enacted the Freedom Act , the Obama administration gained approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to keep the old bulk phone records program going during the transition. The American Civil Liberties Union has asked a federal appeals court to partially block the program , but the court has not issued a ruling. The intelligence court’s rules have required the N.S.A. to purge the data after five years on a rolling basis. The bulk call-data program dates to October 2001, and was revealed in June 2013 in leaks by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden.

NSA
Government Surveillance
Spying and Intelligence Agencies
Barack Obama


Ex-Baathists Get a Break. Or Do They?

Abstract: BAGHDAD — A day after the Iraqi Parliament passed legislation billed as the first significant political step forward in Iraq after months of deadlock, there were troubling questions — and troubling silences — about the measure’s actual effects. The measure, known as the Justice and Accountability Law, is meant to open government jobs to former members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein — the bureaucrats, engineers, city workers, teachers, soldiers and police officers who made the government work until they were barred from office after the American invasion in 2003. But the legislation is at once confusing and controversial, a document riddled with loopholes and caveats to the point that some Sunni and Shiite officials say it could actually exclude more former Baathists than it lets back in, particularly in the crucial security ministries. Under that interpretation, the law would be directly at odds with the American campaign to draft Sunni Arabs into so-called Awakening militias with the aim of integrating them into the police and military forces. That plan has been praised as a key to the sharp drop in violence over the past year and as being the most effective weapon against jihadi insurgents like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. There has been mostly silence from American officials, who have pushed Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government hard over the past year to ease restrictions on former Baathists as a sign of political reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis. The two highest-ranking Americans in Baghdad, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus, were with President Bush in Kuwait on Saturday when the measure was passed. And a day afterward, officials were still putting off questions about it. “We still have to go through it,” said a United States Embassy spokeswoman, Mirembe Nantongo. “We’re not going to comment at this time.” Col. Steven Boylan, General Petraeus’s spokesman, said he had not seen a translation of the legislation and was uncertain whether his boss had. According to a translated copy received by The New York Times, a whole new rung of former party members could be allowed back into government. Where the old de-Baathification law barred members of the top four of the party’s seven levels, the new measure would bar three, theoretically allowing as many as 30,000 people back in. And a vast majority of the ones still excluded, who held top national- and regional-level jobs, would become eligible for pensions if they had not been implicated in crime or corruption. But interpretations of the measure’s actual effects varied widely among Iraqi officials. In general, Shiite politicians hailed it as an olive branch to Sunni Arabs. But some Sunnis say it is at best an incremental improvement over the old system, and at worst even harsher. “This law includes some good articles, and it’s better than the last de-Baathification law because it gives pensions to third-level Baathists,” said Khalaf Aulian, a Sunni politician who opposed the legislation. “But I don’t like the law as a whole, because it will remain as a sword on the neck of the people. “Maybe in the future they will use it to prevent anyone they like from keeping their job,” he said. The most extreme interpretations of the measure’s effects actually came from Shiite officials. Some of them hailed it because it would ban members of even the lowest party levels from the most important ministries: justice, interior, defense, finance and foreign. That would seem to preclude the government from keeping its promise to offer military and police jobs to the thousands of Sunni Arabs who have joined the Awakening groups. Mr. Aulian, among other Sunni Arab politicians who opposed the measure, pointed out that the greatest risk could be that it would unravel successful efforts to draw more Sunnis away from the insurgency, perhaps toppling the country back into open sectarian conflict. “Many Baathists hated the Baath Party, but they were part of it to have a job,” he said. “By this law, we will push them into the insurgency.” But the proof of the measure will come in how it is applied. Even the old de-Baathification process did not achieve its goal of purging all of the former high-ranking party members from the government. The process lost track of many and avoided prosecuting others, like the former interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, out of political expediency. Some officials pointed out that there was still room to interpret the legislation liberally, allowing more former Baathists in while still satisfying the pride of Shiites who have been dead-set against conciliation toward officials who worked for Mr. Hussein. Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser to Mr. Maliki, said the new bill was a result of compromises by both hard-line Shiites and Sunni Arabs. One particular improvement, he said, was that de-Baathification cases would now be subject to judicial review, whereas the old de-Baathification committee’s decisions were final. And the Council of Ministers would have the right to make exceptions to the law in order to serve the public interest. “Before, we dealt with Baath Party members as a group,” he said. “Now, being a Baath Party member is not a crime by itself. If someone has committed a crime in the old regime, that accusation should be made in court. And all of the members can get a pension.” In the meantime, Iraqi legislators said Sunday that they were making progress on two more key benchmarks urged by the Bush administration: the approval of an oil revenue sharing law and the settlement of competing claims to the contested northern city of Kirkuk. Several Iraqi political parties — including the one led by the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, along with the National Dialogue Front, a Sunni Arab group, and several independent and secular groups — said they had formed a coalition of at least 140 legislators, of 275 total, to work on the issues. While they have yet to propose a specific plan, the unusual alliance stands opposed to Iraq’s powerful regional interests, including the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, which dominates the oil-rich south, and the Kurdish bloc, which has cut independent deals with foreign oil companies to exploit vast oil reserves in the northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Both groups favor more regional control of oil revenues and political power. The sharing of oil revenues has been a major obstacle for Iraq’s competing political groups, especially for Sunni Arabs in the western Anbar Province, which has little oil. Salih Mutlaq, a member of the National Dialogue Front, said he hoped the coalition would promote nationalism. “We are against creating regions,” he said. “This bloc is against investment and oil contracting unless it is approved and consulted about with the central government.” Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish politician, took a dim view of the alliance and said he suspected that Mr. Maliki, despite his own party’s agreement with the Kurdish bloc, secretly supported the coalition. “I think he indirectly participated in this alliance and encouraged it to make problems for the Kurds,” Mr. Othman said. “Maliki is a double-faced man.”

Iraq
Baath Party
Politics and Government
Hussein Saddam
Law and Legislation


Before Australian Open, a Focus on Something Bigger

Abstract: MELBOURNE — It was a sharp contrast. Down below, on a luminous blue court, star tennis players like Novak Djokovic, Andy Roddick and Caroline Wozniacki were in a playful mood, preparing to entertain a sellout crowd in Rod Laver Arena. But the reason they were out there in the summer sunshine on the eve of the Australian Open was to be found higher up on the arena’s giant screens, where images of flooded homes and despair in Queensland were playing in a space usually reserved for Hawkeye replays or flashy groundstrokes. Tennis and humanitarianism — like sports and humanitarianism — have long been intertwined, with meaningful charity work being done through the decades by players like Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Andrea Jaeger, Andre Agassi and others. But what separates this latest generation — the most collegial and civic-minded in the sport’s recent history — is its ability to react magnanimously and collectively in a hurry. Last year, with Haiti in need after an earthquake, Roger Federer was the driving force behind organizing exhibitions in Melbourne and Indian Wells, California, on the eve of both tournaments. This time, with the floods this month in the Australian state of Queensland generating headlines globally, Federer, other top players and Open organizers put their heads together and organized “Rally for Relief.” This is fast becoming a habit and a good one. “I think we’ve all been very shocked and surprised by a lot of the images,” said Kim Clijsters, the reigning U.S. Open champion and pretournament favorite here. She joined Samantha Stosur — Australia’s leading player — Rafael Nadal and Federer in the final group to take the court Sunday. “You don’t want to see people go through such disasters,” Clijsters said. “Especially when you talk about, O.K., there’s a lot of material damage, but there’s a lot of emotional damage. A lot of people’s lives are lost. It’s very sad to hear and see. If we can help in a small way, I think it’s our obligation to be out on that court.” More than a dozen people have died because of the flooding, and thousands more Australians have been displaced. Other parts of the country have been affected, including the state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital. Sports are naturally secondary at the moment as the disasters continue to dominate news coverage and discussion. Coverage of the disasters continues to dominate discussion in Australia, and the Open provided a bully pulpit for fund-raising. Two of the other Grand Slam tournaments, the French Open and U.S. Open, already have well-established charity events the day before their tournaments begin. But the Australian Open had the space available, and the 15,000 tickets to the Sunday event in Rod Laver Arena, priced at 20 Australian dollars, about $20, sold in a matter of hours. With matching corporate donations, the event had raised 1.8 million Australian dollars by early Sunday evening. “That’s an amazing feeling,” said Vera Zvonareva, the world’s second-ranked women’s player. “We make our living by ourselves, but if we can come together and help as a group and raise that kind of money, I think that’s great. I hope there are no more disasters of course, but if we can make these kinds of events happen more often when there are big problems, I think it can motivate people to give and give back.” Federer lent his support to a similar event in 2005 when he played in a fund-raiser before the Indian Wells tournament to help with tsunami relief in Asia. He has become more active through the years and said that when he watched reports of how the Queensland flooding was affecting the city of Rockhampton, he immediately thought of Rod Laver, the Australian great who won the Grand Slam as both an amateur and as a professional. Laver was born and raised in Rockhampton. “I tried to reach out to him to see if he wanted to do anything, if he needed my help,” Federer said. But Laver, now 72 and living in Carlsbad, California, was not making the trip to Melbourne this year. “Once I came down to Australia, I spoke to him,” Federer said. “I told him, ‘Look, I’m really trying to get something going like we had here going last year. But this time we have more than 24-hour notice, so I think we’ll be able to generate more money, especially in a country where we’re playing right at the moment.’ I think it’s very appropriate and a must-do for us to do something as a tennis family, really.” What distinguishes this group of leading players is not just a gesture like the one Sunday, but the spirit that prevails. It is no straightforward task to transform the metronomic art of hitting tennis balls across the net into comedy, particularly with the year’s first major tournament looming. But Djokovic , who is making rumblings about considering a second career as an actor, and Roddick , who was once host of Saturday Night Live and has long organized his own charity event in Florida, are as adept at clowning around under pressure as they are at slamming big serves under pressure. With all the players wearing microphones on court, those two set the tone from the start, with Roddick calling for water in the middle of a rally much better described as a mock rally and Djokovic actually drinking water as he volleyed from a seated position. There were trick shots in abundance — the steadiest supply coming from Andy Murray — and when Victoria Azarenka missed her between-the-legs attempt (badly) she banished herself briefly to the locker room. There were also grunts and parodies of grunts, including one exchange that sounded like a Bobby McFerrin song as players created sounds of varying pitches to accompany each of their strokes. It is hard to imagine John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg or Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl laughing it up at the peak of their careers as charity doubles partners with a Grand Slam about to start. But Nadal and Federer continue to set aside their rivalry for good causes and sometimes leverage it for good causes, too. They played back-to-back exhibition matches last month for their respective foundations in Zurich and Madrid. Both looked fresh on Sunday. It would be no surprise at all if they meet again in a more belligerent mood two weeks from now on the same blue court for the final.

Australian Open (Tennis)
Nadal Rafael
Federer Roger
Floods


At Liberty National, a Course to Match the View

Abstract: JERSEY CITY — A statue had never tended the flagstick for me before, let alone a statue some 300 feet tall and recognized around the world. But I was playing the second hole at Liberty National golf club , and there, seemingly close enough to be on the green — with hand raised as if grasping the flag — was the Statue of Liberty. It was more than an aiming point. It was the point. Liberty National, the host of the 2009 Barclays tournament, the first stage of the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs, is a new and distinctive course in a region blessed with elite golf offerings. But from the beginning — it was first envisioned in 1992 — Liberty National was laid out along the New Jersey waterfront to take advantage of an unmatched vista: the Statue of Liberty, less than 1,000 yards away, the Manhattan skyline beyond, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the harbor all around. A good golf course makes a beautiful backdrop. At Liberty National, the backdrop makes the golf course beautiful. “In this site, it was always about the landmarks, even if they are off-site,” said Tom Kite, a former PGA Tour star and a co-designer of Liberty National with the veteran golf architect Bob Cupp. “How many holes can we position in a direction so you can see the Statue of Liberty, the skyline or the harbor? You went there and just let your imagination run wild.” It took plenty of imagination when Kite, Cupp and Liberty National’s co-founders, Paul and Dan Fireman , visited the location. “As a piece of property, it was an awful blight on the landscape — a swath of mistreated land,” Kite said last month. The 160 acres that would become Liberty National — 4,000 feet of it waterfront — were a condemned collection of toxic waste, petroleum and garbage. “But we did stand there and wonder, What if this were a lush green golf course? Imagine the setting,” Dan Fireman said. He and his father, Paul, the founder of Reebok, financed the building of Liberty National at a cost of $250 million. It wasn’t long before someone wondered: Imagine the views on television if the course hosted a PGA Tour event. Or a major championship. Imagine everything a TV blimp would be able to focus on from the sky above New York. The TV networks would love that panorama. Not surprisingly, two years ago, when Liberty National was announced as the site of the 2009 Barclays , Commissioner Tim Finchem of the PGA Tour was on the same page. “Liberty National will look like New York to the rest of the country on television,” Finchem said. So, just like that, Liberty National had found its place among prominent golf courses, right? Not so fast. “We did a lot of early dreaming, but frankly, we were naïve,” Dan Fireman said. “We had no idea how hard it was going to be.” Kite now looks back on the 14 years that passed from his first visit to the site until the golf course opened in 2006 and laughs. “The project brought out every emotion, from devotion to love to hatred,” he said. First, the land had to be acquired, assembled in parcels from different owners. Negotiations over who was going to take responsibility for various stages of the cleanup were thorny. Vast stretches of the property were contaminated, and a host of regulatory agencies weighed in on what needed to be done. Construction plans had to be devised and designs filed. Governmental approvals and permits had to be obtained. Finally, when work was allowed to begin, nothing related to the golf course could commence until the polluted earth was capped by a thick layer of sand, clay and silicate. That took three years. After that, Kite and Cupp had to import the materials to create a new landscape. “The land was dead flat, with an elevation of 8 to 10 feet above sea level,” Kite said. “If we wanted a hole to rise or fall from tee to green, or we wanted a fairway to fall off left to right, we had to bring in new dirt and build it high above the cap. We had to create the lakes and bring in the water that filled them. Every bunker had to be constructed — built up and then dug down.” Drainage and irrigation systems were installed above the cap. About 2,000 trees were planted above it. More than 5,000 sprinkler heads were positioned — part of a subterranean pipe network that also collects fertilizer, then cleans and recycles it. “We couldn’t dig into the ground for anything,” Fireman said. “So if you wanted to plant a 20-foot tree, you had to build up enough ground beneath it to do that. It was like building a huge sandbox and then building a sand castle over it.” In Kite and Cupp’s vision, it is a sand castle with few gimmicks. Sure, there is some wild fescue and the fairways are narrow, but there are no eye-catching 100-yard-wide bunkers or immense water hazards. Because the area was last forested before Dutch ships arrived 400 years ago, the layout has an open feel. The course, with some links-style elements, plays more than 7,400 yards from the championship tees. So it is long, but its difficulty is in subtle fairway and green contours — and in a plethora of difficult tee placements. When I played it last month, it seemed for a while as if I was never without a testing lie or a daunting putt from the wrong side of the green. Take the deceptive par-4 fifth hole, at about 440 yards. The tee shot must skirt water on the left. But as Liberty National’s golf pro, Mark Diamond, pointed out, being on the right side of the fairway leaves you with a hook lie to a green sloping right to left. And there’s a stream on the left of the green. Care to guess where my shot ended up? It bounced just left of the green and into the stream. The pros will no doubt find the green more successfully, but can they hit a fade out of a hook lie to combat the slope of the green and still find the part near the hole? “We won’t know exactly how challenging it will play until those guys get here,” Diamond said. “It’s still a very young golf course. But it has some teeth. I think the winning score will be about 9 or 10 under par.” The real show at the Barclays this week — on the ground and on television — will begin at the 14th hole. A short par 3, it is the signature hole, with unobstructed views of all the noted landmarks, including the bridges and the boating commerce trolling by in the harbor. Stand on the tee and pick your aiming point: the Empire State Building, or some other skyscraper’s spire? The 16th hole is a drivable par 4 at 331 yards, but there is likely to be a breeze from the left. A daring tee shot will have to carry a creek and a waterfall that front the right side of the green. The 17th hole has a Scottish golfing ambience and appropriately plays into the wind from the harbor. You will never be completely convinced that you are in Scotland, however, since, once again, the Statue of Liberty rises just behind the green. The 18th hole should be a sweeping closing hole, as it plays uphill with the waterfront just to the right of the fairway from tee to green. A par 4, it will play at least 487 yards, and maybe 31 yards longer, which could really test a tiring final group of leaders. If there is a criticism of Liberty National, it is that it has a manufactured look. It does not look like a traditional premier Northeastern United States golf course, with a layout designed a century or more ago. And Liberty National is certainly not in vogue with the current minimalist trend in course architecture , which eschews engineering tricks to shape holes. Alas, at this site, where the natural environment disappeared many decades ago, that wasn’t an option. Without question, Liberty National needs to mature. But it has other modern and evident attributes, and there’s a good chance the PGA pros and their families will like being so close to Manhattan and all it has to offer when the golf is done for the day. “Long ago, I quit trying to guess how my peers or competitors will like a golf course,” Kite said. “It is a strong golf course built to eventually host a major championship. This tournament will show us how we can make it better, because a golf course has to evolve. I’m sure there will be changes and modifications. But I know three things about it won’t change: location, location, location.”


Product information on Casio's Exilim EX-S880 and EX-Z77 digital cameras

Abstract: Posting a note on an Internet forum is simple. Uploading a video to YouTube isn’t. Matching a video you have shot to YouTube’s requirements for file size, running time, resolution and file format often takes some fiddling with video editing software. And loading most camcorder videos into that computer takes as long as playing them. Two still cameras from Casio may help change that. The Exilim EX-S880 and EX-Z77 shoot YouTube-compatible videos that can be uploaded quickly, without even pausing to load them onto your computer’s hard drive. This is accomplished by using the included YouTube Uploader software, which also lets you add tags and other information to each video. Both cameras also have an eBay mode that shoots 2-megapixel stills, just the right size for eBay sellers. Maximum resolution is 8.1 megapixels for the EX-S880 ($299.95) and 7.2 megapixels for the EX-Z77 ($229.95). Both models have 3X zoom lenses, face detection and electronic antishake systems that work even in video mode. But don’t dump your video editing program yet — you may want it for deleting those frames you wish you hadn’t shot. IVAN BERGER

Cameras
YouTube.com
Recordings and Downloads (Video)
Computers and the Internet