Exxon’s Profit Jumped to a Record in Quarter

Abstract: In what may prove to be a high-water mark for corporate profits, the oil giant Exxon Mobil reported another blowout quarter on Thursday, thanks to record oil prices this summer and gasoline prices that rose above $4 a gallon. With nearly $15 billion in profit, Exxon once more set a record for most profitable American corporation, during the three months that ended in September, when prices were at their highest. Oil prices have dropped sharply in recent weeks, falling more than 50 percent from their peak just three months ago, as oil consumption slows in the economic downturn. Exxon’s report came as the Commerce Department said the economy shrank on an annual basis by 0.3 percent in the third quarter. The contraction, as consumers curbed their spending, signaled that the United States was probably in a recession. Still, the last quarter extended a staggering run for Exxon, which has routinely set records only to beat them. Exxon’s profit has exceeded $10 billion in 9 of the last 12 quarters. The third quarter was no exception as Exxon’s profit rose 58 percent, to $14.8 billion, exceeding its previous quarterly record by more than $3 billion. While the record earnings were well above analysts’ expectations, they also masked a growing problem for Exxon. Its production has dropped because of contractual terms in places like Nigeria, falling output from mature fields, and disruptions caused by hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Exxon’s combined oil and gas output fell 8 percent in the third quarter compared with the year-earlier period, to the equivalent of 3.5 million barrels a day. But Exxon, which prides itself on its long-term view of the business, appeared unfazed by the decline. Thanks to seven major new projects starting this year, including offshore fields in Angola and Malaysia, and a large gas project in Qatar, the company expects its production to pick up in the fourth quarter and next year, according to Kenneth Cohen, the company’s vice president of public affairs. Excluding the effect of hurricanes and the impact of specific contracts that reduce its production when oil prices rise, Exxon’s output would have dropped by 2 percent in the last quarter. “These are uncertain and challenging times, and these are the times that our company is built to handle,” Mr. Cohen said on a conference call. “We understand we operate in a commodity business. We understand that the cycle will go up, and it will go down. We don’t get excited in the highs; we don’t panic in the lows.” Exxon is the latest oil giant to report stellar earnings. Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s biggest oil company, said earlier Thursday that its third-quarter profit rose 22 percent, to $8.45 billion, from $6.9 billion in the period a year ago. At the same time, Shell’s crude oil and natural gas output declined 6.6 percent. Earlier this week, BP, ConocoPhillips and Occidental Petroleum reported big jumps in their earnings for the quarter. Chevron reports its earnings on Friday. Exxon’s profit has been frequently mentioned during the presidential campaign. With less than a week before the elections, the latest report provided more fodder for the company’s critics. Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming , estimated that the top five oil companies would earn $150 billion this year, and accused them of failing to invest enough in alternative fuels. “For these oil companies, there are hundreds of billions of reasons why they want to keep the status quo intact,” Mr. Markey said in a statement. But as prices fall, oil company profits are set to shrink in future quarters. During the third quarter, oil prices in New York have averaged $118 a barrel, compared with $75 a barrel in the same quarter last year. Since then, however, prices have plummeted from their peak above $145 a barrel in July. Some analysts say global oil demand could fall this year for the first time in a quarter-century. Oil prices fell $1.54, to $65.96 a barrel, on Thursday as the government’s report on economic growth kindled concern. After being down throughout the day, Exxon’s shares were unchanged at the end of the trading session at $74.65. The turnaround in oil prices has been surprisingly swift and could have a long-lasting impact on the world’s energy supplies as some companies cut their spending and slash costs. Clarence P. Cazalot Jr., the president and chief executive of Marathon Oil, said his company would cut its capital expenditures by 15 percent next year. Marathon is also considering a potential breakup of the company’s businesses, Mr. Cazalot said. “Given the fall in the oil price, an issue for all oil and gas companies is current levels of capital expenditure,” said Tony Shepard, an analyst at the broker Charles Stanley, based in London. Shell’s chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, said the company had decided to delay a decision to invest in the second expansion phase of its Athabasca oil sands project in Canada to wait for labor and raw material prices to fall. “We are watching the world economic situation closely,” Mr. van der Veer said in a statement. “Shell is robust across a wide range of energy prices.” But Exxon said it had no plans to cut back its investment program this year, which is projected to reach $25 billion. So far this year, the company has spent $19.3 billion on exploration, including $6.9 billion in the last quarter. Exxon also continued to reward its shareholders generously. It gave back $10.1 billion in the third quarter — dividends of $2.1 billion and share buybacks of $8 billion. The company said it had $37 billion in cash. “Our investment strategy is consistent through business cycles, which has led to industry-leading returns in the past, and we believe we will continue to do so in the future,” Mr. Cohen said.

Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Company Reports
Exxon Mobil Corp


These Walls Speak, Recalling Victims of Violence

Abstract: MEXICO CITY — The memorial to Mexico’s victims of violence looks like it has been dropped from the sky by an angry God. Welcoming it is not, with its rusted slabs the size of movie screens standing next to a busy intersection. Nor is its mission clear. Even before it was inaugurated in April, the monument had set off debate over whether it should be a tribute to all the drug war’s killed, missing, kidnapped and extorted — or just those subjected to human rights abuses by the Mexican authorities. But then, you walk a little closer and the slabs begin to speak. “Pinta lo que sientes ... expresa lo que piensas.” The graffiti scribbled in white paint across the hunk of steel introducing the memorial — “Paint what you feel ... express what you think” — is not vandalism. It’s a request: Share. Remember. Grieve. By design, the metal panels are blank pages. Quotations chosen by the architects, from Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and others, appear in the corners, cut out like stencils. The rest is open to public expression. “Don’t Kill Our Dreams.” Some of the messages, like those calling for protecting dreams or legalizing drugs, are in English. All but a few inscriptions are drawn and scratched by Mexican relatives or friends of those lost to violence. The police officers guarding the memorial say people come from all over Mexico, but cities where the back alleys have seen more blood are better represented. Ciudad Juárez. Torreón. Tijuana. Usually, it is just one person or two who visit with something to add. Many, the guards say, sob as they write or carve a message into the metal with their keys. Image By design, the metal panels are blank pages. Quotations chosen by the architects appear in the corners. The rest is open to public expression. Credit Rodrigo Cruz-Perez for The New York Times “Cuántos muertos?” The question — How many dead? — hangs above a large portrait of a crying heart with hands drawn on its sides as if waving for help. Spartan and direct, it is a question that haunts all of Mexico. An honest answer is hard to find. The most recent government report, released in January 2012, showed that 47,515 had died in drug war violence between Dec. 1, 2006, and Sept. 11, 2011, but that does not include the thousands who are missing. And the definition of “drug-related” has also never been clear. This year The New York Times submitted public records requests with the attorney general’s office, the Interior Ministry and 10 states with the highest murder rates in an effort to review case files with basic data on the dead: age, gender, place and cause of death. The goal was to explore details of cases that were defined as drug-related and those that were not. Only one state delivered information. Every other entity refused, mostly citing privacy exemptions, though one state admitted that it was “not competent on the matter.” Now even the federal government has decided to broaden its tally: On Aug. 9, officials announced that all murders would be included, whether drug-related or not. “Alfonso Arqui Medina te extrañamos!” The memorial’s reddish walls include a handful of names, but their stories are nowhere to be found. The message to Mr. Medina — “We miss you” — could refer to the death of an architect named Alfonso Medina who was killed in his Ford pickup five years ago, just a few blocks from the home of Tijuana’s mayor. Or it may not. The stories of most victims will never be known. State and local authorities increasingly keep information about violence to themselves, saying they must protect their communities’ image from sensationalism, even though many Mexican news media outlets have become so intimidated by organized crime that they no longer cover the murders corroding their own communities. Even the families that come to write on the memorial seem scared to share; there are far more first names than full names. An exception is Marcela Geovana Mendoza. A steel slab in the middle of the monument has been turned over to a message of love for her, and more discreet iterations of “te amo Marcela” appear elsewhere in white, like soft whispers heard from behind. But that is all there is. She cannot be found in the databases of Mexican newspapers. A Google search for her full name turns up nothing. Another for just Marcela and Mendoza leads to a single lead: Fanny Marcela Mendoza Rodríguez, 19, a college student in Honduras who was shot in the head at home last September. Image The mission of the memorial — and exactly whom it honors — is not fully clear, months after it was inaugurated. Credit Rodrigo Cruz-Perez for The New York Times “Menos monumentos, menos minutos de silencio. Más acción.” Many of the memorial’s messages are not for individuals, but for Mexico as a whole, for “fewer monuments, fewer moments of silence. More action.” They plead for and demand more justice in a country with so much going for it: resources, history, culture. Those who visit say the memorial has a lot of potential. “The messages surprised me,” said Salvador Enriquez, 43, a visitor on Saturday. “It’s a beautiful idea.” But even here on the walls, it is a struggle to keep the focus where it belongs. One recent afternoon, on the panel farthest from the entrance, a man in gray quietly drew a face with white chalk, suggesting a lost brother. Then he added a mane of hair, a guitar and a long tongue. It was Gene Simmons, from Kiss. “I work in maintenance here,” the man said, nodding toward a broom near his celebrity portrait. “When I get bored, I draw.” Over a fence, a giant Mexican flag hung, as limp as a broken arm, at the military base next door — a jarring juxtaposition in a country where the military has been implicated in many cases of death and disappearance. To the right, one of the memorial guards could be seen using chalk to outline the ears of a rabbit in what appeared to be a child’s version of heaven. To the left, car horns wailed in clogged traffic along Paseo de la Reforma — Boulevard of Reform — as a mime with a cherry-red nose performed for laughs and change from drivers. Closest to the entrance, the first panel held more messages than all the rest, from “ shalóm ” to “ quiza la reina mala nos protéga ” — maybe the bad queen protects us. There were also names here (Lupita y Jerry) that could represent love or loss. Hidden among them all was a simple phrase in small handwriting. As confounding or clear as the memorial itself, it exhorted Mexicans to look inward for a way out, and to acknowledge that all of society plays a role in both violence and peace. “Si sabes lo que vales. Ve y busca la que mereces.” “If you know what you’re worth,” it said, “go find what you deserve.”

Monuments and Memorials
Drug Abuse
Mexico City
Murders
Kidnapping
Human Rights
Mexico


Devils Find Way to Beat Rangers’ Lundqvist

Abstract: NEWARK — The Rangers traveled a short distance, just across the Hudson River, to learn what might happen if their willingness to check opponents and their pursuit of the puck do not match their opponents’. Their 4-1 loss to the Devils on Tuesday night at Prudential Center was a rare lapse in effort and execution. “A little bit of both,” Coach John Tortorella said. “Some details, some turnovers were just ridiculous. It catches up to you.” With the game tied at 1-1, David Clarkson and Ryan Carter scored goals 1 minute 54 seconds apart early in the third period to carry the Devils to victory. Patrick Elias scored an empty-net goal with 1:53 left. The lessons came early for the Rangers. The last time the teams played, on Feb. 27, the Devils took 13 shots on goal and failed to score. On Tuesday, Ilya Kovalchuk scored 49 seconds into the game. As the Rangers mangled a line change, Zach Parise flipped the puck to Kovalchuk with his backhand. Defenseman Ryan McDonagh, the only Ranger with any hope of confronting Parise, lost his edge and fell to the ice. Breaking in alone, Kovalchuk ripped a wrist shot by Henrik Lundqvist to give the Devils an early lead in this battle of tight-checking rivals. Derek Stepan tied the score when, positioned in the slot, he slapped a pass from behind the net from Carl Hagelin by Martin Brodeur at 6:56 of the second period. The Rangers, kept in the game by a pair of superb saves by Lundqvist on Kovalchuk on a power play late in the first period, were excellent throughout the second, outshooting the Devils, 14-7. But their sharpness lasted only 20 minutes. In the four previous meetings this season, the Rangers outscored the Devils in the third period, 6-2. But the Devils were the far stronger team when it counted most Tuesday. After Clarkson scored on a deflection of a Petr Sykora shot at 2:27 of the third period to give the Devils the lead, Carter made the score 3-1 when he converted a crossing feed by Jacob Josefson at 4:21. Both goals were scored with the Rangers outmanned in the defensive zone. The Rangers managed only three shots on goal in the final period. “In the third, we have to kick it up a notch and we didn’t,” Ryan Callahan, the Rangers’ captain, said. “They looked more desperate. We have to work harder.” Brodeur, who made 25 saves, was outstanding. “We made some tough mistakes that cost us,” Lundqvist said. “The reason why we’ve been winning is that we haven’t made those mistakes.” The Rangers lost a key forward when Brandon Dubinsky injured a hand during a fight with Carter 3:33 into the game. The team announced during the second period that Dubinsky would not return to the game and said it would not have an update until Wednesday. After a 9-1-1 streak after the All-Star break, the Devils had lost five of six games. But the victory evened the season series with the Rangers at 2-2-1 and solidified the Devils’ position for a playoff berth in the Eastern Conference at 37-24-5. “Big win for us,” Devils Coach Peter DeBoer said. “We came out really well, they kind of grabbed momentum back in the second, but I really liked our push in the third.” In the visitors’ locker room, the Rangers were disgusted with their performance in the final period, especially their failure to equal the Devils’ intensity. “They hated us tonight,” Rangers forward Brian Boyle said. “They wanted to kill us. We didn’t match their passion. We expect more of ourselves. That’s the way it’s going to be the rest of the season, so it was a very good lesson we learned tonight.”

Hockey Ice
New York Rangers
New Jersey Devils
Kovalchuk Ilya
Lundqvist Henrik


Sylvan Fox, 79, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Dies

Abstract: Sylvan Fox, the first “rewrite man” to be singled out for a Pulitzer Prize, died on Saturday at New York University Medical Center. Mr. Fox, who also worked as a reporter and editor for The New York Times, was 79 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was complications from pneumonia, his wife, Gloria Fox, said. Mr. Fox was a reporter at The New York World-Telegram & The Sun when, on March 1, 1962, he was part of a team assigned to cover an airplane crash on Long Island that killed all 95 passengers. While his fellow reporters at the paper rushed to the crash site and phoned him with their unprocessed notes, Mr. Fox calmly worked the facts into order and delivered an article within a half-hour of the accident. He then rewrote the article for seven editions of the paper, adding new details as they came in. Within 90 minutes of the crash, he had produced a 3,000-word article. The Pulitzer was awarded to Mr. Fox and two colleagues in the now-obsolete category of “local story, edition time.” From 1967 to 1973, Mr. Fox worked as a reporter and editor at The Times. Mr. Fox grew up in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and was a classically trained pianist. He spent four years at the Juilliard School of Music, but left without a degree because of his decision to change his major from piano to musical composition. It was at Juilliard that he met the woman who became his wife, Gloria Endleman, a fellow piano student. They married when he was 20 and she was 17. Mr. Fox graduated from Brooklyn College with a degree in philosophy, then earned a master’s degree, in musicology, from the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Fox worked as a reporter at several newspapers in upstate New York before he came to The World-Telegram as a rewrite man. He left the paper over a salary dispute in 1966 and took a job as the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner in charge of press relations. But he returned to journalism a year later when Arthur Gelb, The Times’s metropolitan editor, offered him a job. On Mr. Fox’s first day at the paper, according to Mr. Gelb’s memoir, news broke of a bank robbery in Brooklyn, and Mr. Fox was instructed to “forget about orientation and get to work on the story, which was tailor-made for him,” Mr. Gelb wrote. The following morning’s edition of The Times carried Mr. Fox’s byline on the front page. Mr. Fox held several other jobs at The Times, including a stint as the Saigon bureau chief in 1973. He then spent 15 years at Newsday, where he was editorial page editor from 1979 to 1988. Besides his wife, Mr. Fox is survived by a daughter, Erica.

Deaths (Obituaries)
Newspapers
Pulitzer Prizes


Maurice Barbash, a Builder Who Fought for Fire Island, Dies at 88

Abstract: Maurice Barbash, a homebuilder and environmental activist who was instrumental in blocking two giant projects that threatened to radically alter Long Island’s environment — a $6 billion nuclear power plant near completion on the North Shore, and a four-lane highway that Robert Moses proposed building along the spine of Fire Island — died on March 13 in Bay Shore, N.Y. He was 88. His death, several weeks after undergoing heart surgery, was confirmed by his daughter Susan Barbash. When he took on Mr. Moses and later the Long Island Lighting Company over its nuclear plant in Shoreham, Mr. Barbash had already established an unusual reputation among developers as the builder who loved trees. Beginning in the 1950s, he often clustered houses in a development to maximize green space — a concept decades ahead of its time — and to maintain the character of the landscape. Probably the fullest expression of that idea was Dunewood, a development of 100 identical cottages-in-the-woods that his company, Barbash Associates of Babylon, shoehorned into a leafy section of Fire Island. Mr. Barbash himself owned a Dunewood house. Mr. Moses, the powerful master planner, had long talked of building a highway on Fire Island, the slender, 32-mile-long barrier beach on Long Island’s South Shore. In 1962, having transformed much of metropolitan New York with bridges, tunnels, parks and parkways, he revived the notion as president of the Long Island State Park Commission. He envisioned a highway running about five miles along the center of the island, between two existing bridges to Long Island, that would stimulate its economy, offer motorists a scenic drive and help protect its beaches from further erosion. A storm that year had washed away huge scoops of the beach and taken many houses with it. Summer residents recoiled at the thought of a highway in their paradise, which in places is little more than a sandbar only several hundred feet wide. But public officials and the local newspapers largely endorsed the plan as an economic boon. Mr. Barbash told interviewers that he could not have beaten Mr. Moses head-to-head. Mr. Moses had bulldozed neighborhoods and dispatched almost every opponent. Instead, Mr. Barbash and a group of Fire Island residents, including Irving Like, a lawyer who was also his brother-in-law, seized on a little-noticed proposal in a federal publication recommending that Fire Island’s seashore be considered for designation as a national park. Image Maurice Barbash with his wife, Lillian, in 1998. Credit Vic DeLucia/The New York Times The group, the Citizens Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore, outflanked Moses in a two-year grass-roots lobbying campaign. They spoke at Kiwanis Clubs, mounted petition drives and gained support from Stewart L. Udall, the interior secretary. Eventually they turned local opinion, and even the opinion of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, Moses’ boss, in favor of establishing the national park . It was dedicated on Sept. 11, 1964. “Murray’s idea was that if you wanted to win people over to your side, you had to be for something, not just against something,” Mr. Like said in an interview. Mr. Barbash applied the same principle when he joined efforts in the 1970s to stop the Long Island Lighting Company from completing the nuclear power plant at Shoreham. Citizens to Replace Lilco, the group he formed, brought together many core members of the Fire Island campaign, including Mr. Like. The group proposed an end to construction and a public takeover of Lilco. The company went ahead with its plans despite widespread opposition from Long Island residents. This was a much longer fight than the one for Fire Island. By the late 1980s, the plant was being shuttered and a state takeover of Lilco had been negotiated, a deal Mr. Barbash disowned as overly generous to stockholders and burdensome to rate payers. (The utility is now the Long Island Power Authority .) Still, he was credited for promoting the takeover idea and showing a new generation of activists how to battle giants. Maurice Barbash, who was known as Murray, was born on May 10, 1924, in the Bronx, the only child of Shep and Sadie Barbash. His father, a butcher, died two weeks after Murray’s bar mitzvah. Afterward, Mr. Barbash and his mother spent a lot of time in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where they had relatives, and where family members believe he acquired his love of nature. Mr. Barbash enlisted in the Army during World War II before finishing his studies at City College, earning a bachelor of science degree in 1946. His first jobs were in advertising, and many of his clients were homebuilders. He went on to build about 700 homes throughout Long Island. In addition to his daughter Susan, he is survived by his wife, Lillian; another daughter, Cathy Barbash; a son, Shepard; and six grandchildren. Mr. Barbash and his wife, who were married in 1947, shared a love of classical music. In 1979, they were among the founding organizers of the Long Island Philharmonic. For their 40th wedding anniversary, they commissioned a cello concerto for a friend, having known him since the 1970s, when he played in the student orchestra at Harvard with their daughter Cathy. The friend was the cellist Yo-Yo Ma; the concerto, “Music for Cello and Orchestra,” was written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Leon Kirchner. Mr. Ma performed the concerto’s premiere in 1992 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. “We’re not do-gooders,” Mr. Barbash said in 1998 in an interview with The New York Times. “We’ve just done what was interesting to us, and if it contributed to the happiness of people in the area, fine.”


Iraq Leaders Denounce Bombings by Turkey

Abstract: BAGHDAD — Iraqi leaders criticized Turkey on Monday for bombing Kurdish militants in northern Iraq with airstrikes that they said had left at least one woman dead. The Turkish attacks in Dohuk Province on Sunday — involving dozens of warplanes and artillery — were the largest known cross-border attack since 2003. They occurred with at least tacit approval from American officials. The Iraqi government, however, said it had not been consulted or informed about the attacks. Massoud Barzani, leader of the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, condemned the assaults as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty that had undermined months of diplomacy. “These attacks hinder the political efforts exerted to find a peaceful solution based on mutual respect,” he said in a statement. At a news conference in Najaf, he went further, declaring that “the Americans are responsible because the Iraqi sky is under their full control.” The bombing raids focused on an area where some commanders for the Kurdish militant group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish initials, P.K.K., were believed to have been hiding. The Turkish military said on its Web site that it had conducted “casualty and damage analysis” of the areas it hit in the airstrikes, and it concluded that “all intended targets have been successfully hit.” Reports in the Turkish news media said the United States had detected movement by the Kurdish militants and, suspecting a meeting of the group, had given the information to Turkey. One Turkish official said the attack would help to persuade the militants to consider a surrender. “It has international backing,” the official said. “We hit specific targets. We’ll do it again if we have to.” Turkey, a NATO member, has thousands of troops at the Iraqi border and was threatening a military operation into northern Iraq. But it appears to be using a more limited offensive, as the United States requested. The assault was the second set of strikes against the Kurdish militant group since Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey met with President Bush in Washington last month. In the first strikes, on Dec. 1, artillery was fired from Turkish territory. Elsewhere in Iraq, more than 20 people were killed or found dead in and around Baquba, the largest city in Diyala Province. The police said a suicide motorcycle bomber had killed at least seven people and wounded 24 in one of the city’s markets. Six were killed in two separate shootings. Two died from roadside bombs, and the authorities found six bodies in two locations on the city’s western outskirts. Farther north near the Mosul dam, a truck bomb severely damaged a bridge over the Tigris River, killing at least one member of the Iraqi security forces. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden’s lieutenant in the Qaeda terrorist network, Ayman al-Zawahri, warned of “traitors” among insurgents in Iraq. In a video posted Monday on the Web, he called for Iraqi Sunni Arabs to purge those who help the Americans. Mr. Zawahri’s comments were aimed at undermining the Iraqi “awakening councils,” groups of Iraqi Sunni tribesmen that the United States military has backed to help fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led. Some Sunni insurgent groups have fought alongside American forces. The United States military has promoted the councils as a major factor in reducing violence. In central Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed two people in a minibus and wounded seven others, police and hospital officials said.

Iraq
Turkey
Kurds
Kurdistan Workers Party
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia
Erdogan Recep Tayyip
Bush George W


For Jets and Family, Future Is in Cotchery’s Hands

Abstract: FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Jerricho Cotchery drove in circles around the airport last September, stealing glances at the brand-new car seat in the back, attempting to soothe his frayed nerves. Eventually, his wife, Mercedes, came into view outside of baggage claim. She wore a shoulder harness, and as he put the car in park, she lifted a newborn girl — their newborn girl — with both hands. The infant’s size struck Cotchery more than anything. Entering his fourth season as a Jets receiver, Cotchery had carved a career from hands both sure and strong. As he cradled his daughter for the first time, those hands trembled, and he worried he might crush her accidentally. “That feeling of just, wow,” Cotchery said, trying to explain and failing. “It was indescribable.” Cotchery never, not in the wildest fancies of his imagination, pictured a year like the one that he had just lived through. He never imagined the lows, like when the couple’s first attempt at adoption fell through in August 2007 or when the Jets’ season fell apart in the months that followed. He never imagined this preseason, when he became the Jets’ top option at receiver, catching passes delivered from the heralded right arm of their new quarterback, Brett Favre. Mostly, though, he never imagined that everything would fall into place so quickly, that he would become a household name and the head of the kind of household he always wanted, all in 12 months. “From a quiet kid from Birmingham all the way to this,” Cotchery said during an extended interview last week. “I went through a lot last year. And everything this year has gone just the exact opposite.” Confirmation came a few weeks back when Cotchery took his family to a local fast-food restaurant. Earlier in his career, which he started as a fifth receiver used mainly on special teams, he went unnoticed by the public. Yet here came a man, midmeal, looking for a handshake. Cotchery thanked him but wondered silently, did that just really happen? The transformation — from the bottom of the depth chart to the top of it, from childless to doting dad — took time. Cotchery never rushed. Blessed with deceptive speed and a personality so laid back that it qualifies as recliner, he returned kickoffs his rookie season in order to force his way onto the field. Never mind that he had never returned kicks before. Slowly, surely, he rose up the depth chart, until he secured a starting receiver spot before the 2006 season. One year later, Cotchery caught more passes (82) than all but seven receivers in the American Football Conference. Coach Eric Mangini points to Cotchery’s path as a model of career development, one marked by incremental progress. Asked to describe the key to that development, Mangini answered with one word repeated twice — work. Reminded that dozens of players on dozens of teams are noted for having a solid work ethic, Mangini said: “It’s better than solid. It’s hard to get better than Jerricho Cotchery. He works every single day exactly the same way.” Teammates have taken notice. The second-year receiver Chansi Stuckey tries to spend as much time around Cotchery as possible, mimicking his preparation and approach in hopes of replicating his career path. The best piece of advice Cotchery gave him? Nothing he ever spoke, Stuckey said, but “the way he carries himself, the things he does on the field.” Running back Leon Washington said: “There are not enough things you can say about Jerricho. He’s the ultimate, ultimate teammate.” Something was always missing, though, until September 2007. The Cotcherys met at North Carolina State, and they married a month after the Jets selected Jerricho in the fourth round of the 2004 draft. At that point, because they knew Mercedes could not carry a child, they began looking at adoption. Cotchery struggled with the concept at first. The second youngest of 13 children, he knew little about adoption. Something about it felt inauthentic. “I was kind of against it,” he said. “I was stuck on this fact of being able to have something I could call my own.” Cotchery has made a career of changing other people’s minds. But before he could embrace adopting a newborn, he first needed to change his own mind. It happened at a religious retreat in February 2007, when Cotchery, to the surprise of everyone, even himself, stood at a microphone and told hundreds of strangers that he wanted to adopt a child. The process proved more difficult than expected. The Cotcherys were set to adopt a newborn in mid-August, only to have the birth mother change her mind. Cotchery found out before the Jets’ second preseason game, and he played with uncharacteristic anger, making uncharacteristic mistakes. A few weeks later, another adoption opportunity came. A few weeks after that, Cotchery was circling the airport, glancing at the car seat. When he saw his daughter for the first time, his reservations faded and he felt silly for even having them. “It was the best decision I ever made,” he said. “This is my daughter. She’s definitely my seed.” The couple named the child Jacey, a play on the initials in Dad’s name. She has brown hair and big, probing eyes, just like Dad. Her smile, Cotchery swears, lights up a room, just like Mom. “His daughter changed him,” receiver Brad Smith said. “Every time I see him, every time he talks about her, he smiles.” Cotchery celebrated his first Father’s Day in June and his new quarterback in August. In between, Cotchery went to Arizona to work out with Ken Croner of Athletes’ Performance, who also trains Favre. Cotchery and Favre hooked up for a 56-yard touchdown pass in the Jets’ season-opening victory against the Dolphins. Cotchery has emerged as Favre’s go-to receiver early in the season, and if the Jets are to unseat the New England Patriots as division champions, the chemistry between Cotchery and Favre will be important. But the biggest instrument of change in Cotchery the last 12 months remains the smallest person in his life. He gravitates toward Jacey after arriving home each day, and she shows him her purse and which toys go where inside. The other day, she grabbed a banana from his hand, a 1-year-old eating like a grown-up. “Football is a great sport, it’s my life, but you can’t get lost in it,” Cotchery said. “You can’t get down about everything that goes along with football. You need to remember what’s important.”

Cotchery Jerricho
Football
New York Jets


Attorney General Candidates Step Up Attacks

Abstract: Daniel M. Donovan Jr. was born and raised on Staten Island, worked his way through law school at Fordham University and has spent most of his professional life as a local prosecutor. Eric T. Schneiderman is a native Upper West Sider and a Harvard law school graduate who abandoned a lucrative career in private practice to work as a public-interest lawyer, leading lawsuits against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority over subway fare increases. Mr. Donovan is a product of the Staten Island Republican organization, a former deputy borough president twice elected district attorney and a social conservative who opposes same-sex marriage . He is also against abortion, except in cases of rape or incest. Mr. Schneiderman emerged from the Democratic political clubs of Manhattan to become a state senator, an outspoken liberal recently endorsed by The Nation. Mr. Schneiderman, who leads the Senate committee that oversees New York’s criminal justice system, also led successful efforts to reduce prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. While Mr. Donovan was president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, he led a statewide campaign by prosecutors to try to block that overhaul. Few general election campaigns like the ones that began on Wednesday offer as stark a choice as the race between Mr. Schneiderman and Mr. Donovan to become the next attorney general of New York State. “The question is whether you’re going to have an activist attorney general who goes after not just street criminals but also white-collar crime, who is a consumer and environmental advocate, or a more traditional law-and-order enforcement person,” said Kenneth Sherrill, a professor of political science at Hunter College. On Wednesday, each candidate sought to sharpen those distinctions, exchanging attacks intended to shape the statewide battlefield and pigeonhole his rival. Mr. Schneiderman began by challenging Mr. Donovan to a debate over the attorney general’s role in policing Wall Street, questioning statements Mr. Donovan had made in recent months suggesting that he would de-emphasize the high-profile securities fraud cases that defined the tenures of Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer. “While you’ve suggested in recent interviews that you would seek to relax the focus of the attorney general’s office when it comes to cracking down on these crimes, vowing not to ‘disturb the garden,’ ” Mr. Schneiderman said in an open letter to his opponent, “I intend to make protecting homeowners and consumers from bad actors on Wall Street a key concern.” Mr. Donovan did not agree to a debate about Wall Street, but aggressively questioned Mr. Schneiderman’s law-enforcement credentials. “I have spent my career as a prosecutor, putting criminals in jail and protecting New York families from crime and violence,” Mr. Donovan responded in his own letter. “Possibly because you have never prosecuted a case, you have taken a different approach, starting with fighting for laws to reduce oversight of sex offenders, letting drug dealers out of jail and advocating for the rights of criminals ahead of the needs of law enforcement.” The Democratic primary went down to the wire on Tuesday, making it difficult for Mr. Donovan to know whether he would be facing Mr. Schneiderman or the second-place finisher, Kathleen M. Rice, the Nassau County district attorney. But with returns showing Mr. Schneiderman in the lead, Mr. Donovan leaked word late Tuesday that he would be endorsed by former Mayor Edward I. Koch, a Democrat. While Mr. Koch has often endorsed Republicans, Mr. Donovan said he believed such endorsements would help establish him as an independent figure free of political entanglements, in contrast to Mr. Schneiderman, who won his primary with the support of powerful labor unions like S.E.I.U. 1199, which represents health care workers, and the endorsements of an array of Democratic leaders. Mr. Schneiderman, of course, has also been backed by nonpartisan government watchdog groups like Citizens Union, and has won endorsements from newspapers that praised his commitment to the public financing of campaigns and the wider disclosure of lawmakers’ outside income. Mr. Donovan, meanwhile, is not without powerful allies. His first endorsement came from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a move that some saw as an effort by the mayor to broaden his influence in Albany. “The Republican candidate is going to say that Eric Schneiderman is not part of the solution but part of the problem,” said Norman Adler, a political consultant who has worked for Republicans and Democrats. “Eric Schneiderman is going to say that he has got the experience and the credentials to run an attorney general’s office that represents the people.” For Mr. Schneiderman, Mr. Donovan in some respects represents a rematch — like Ms. Rice, he is a popular district attorney whose signature cause is prosecuting drunken drivers — but on a far bigger stage, with the burden of trying to persuade independent and Republican voters rather than simply turn out the Democratic base. The two candidates do have a few things in common. Like Mr. Schneiderman, Mr. Donovan is from New York City, so he begins the race without the suburban or upstate base that many Republicans have used to vault to statewide office. Both have also advocated aggressively for stricter regulation of illegal guns. Mr. Schneiderman, the national co-chairman of Legislators Against Illegal Guns, sponsored legislation this year to equip handguns sold in New York with so-called microstamping technology to help police officers trace the guns from which bullets are fired at crime scenes. Mr. Donovan helped lobby this year for the bill in Albany. “We probably disagree on 90 percent of things, but here’s one thing that both he and I agree on,” Mr. Donovan said jokingly at a news conference in Albany in June that both men attended. “I looked at the bill and believed the bill was the right bill before I realized that Eric was the sponsor.”

Elections
Attorneys General
Schneiderman Eric T
Donovan Daniel M Jr
Politics and Government
Democratic Party
Republican Party
New York State


Extreme Weather Grows in Frequency and Intensity Around World

Abstract: WORCESTER, England — Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace. Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk. Bush fires are raging across Australia , fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September . A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began. “Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.” Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr. Baddour said, a sign that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds. Here in Britain, people are used to thinking of rain as the wallpaper on life’s computer screen — an omnipresent, almost comforting background presence. But even the hardiest citizen was rattled by the near-biblical fierceness of the rains that bucketed down, and the floods that followed, three different times in 2012. Image RUSSIA In Siberia, a man braved temperatures of 47 degrees below zero last month. Credit Viktor Everstov/Reuters Rescuers plucked people by boat from their swamped homes in St. Asaph, North Wales. Whole areas of the country were cut off when roads and train tracks were inundated at Christmas. In Mevagissey, Cornwall, a pub owner closed his business for good after it flooded 11 times in two months. It was no anomaly: the floods of 2012 followed the floods of 2007 and also the floods of 2009, which all told have resulted in nearly $6.5 billion in insurance payouts. The Met Office, Britain’s weather service, declared 2012 the wettest year in England, and the second-wettest in Britain as a whole, since records began more than 100 years ago. Four of the five wettest years in the last century have come in the past decade (the fifth was in 1954). The biggest change, said Charles Powell, a spokesman for the Met Office, is the frequency in Britain of “extreme weather events” — defined as rainfall reaching the top 1 percent of the average amount for that time of year. Fifty years ago, such episodes used to happen every 100 days; now they happen every 70 days, he said. The same thing is true in Australia, where bush fires are raging across Tasmania and the current heat wave has come after two of the country’s wettest years ever. On Tuesday, Sydney experienced its fifth-hottest day since records began in 1910, with the temperature climbing to 108.1 degrees. The first eight days of 2013 were among the 20 hottest on record. Every decade since the 1950s has been hotter in Australia than the one before, said Mark Stafford Smith, science director of the Climate Adaptation Flagship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. To the north, the extremes have swung the other way, with a band of cold settling across Russia and Northern Europe, bringing thick snow and howling winds to Stockholm, Helsinki and Moscow. (Incongruously, there were also severe snowstorms in Sicily and southern Italy for the first time since World War II; in December, tornadoes and waterspouts struck the Italian coast.) Image AUSTRALIA A bush fire, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave, killed dozens of sheep at a farm near Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory. Credit Lukas Coch/European Pressphoto Agency In Siberia, thousands of people were left without heat when natural gas liquefied in its pipes and water mains burst. Officials canceled bus transportation between cities for fear that roadside breakdowns could lead to deaths from exposure, and motorists were advised not to venture far afield except in columns of two or three cars. In Altai, to the east, traffic officials warned drivers not to use poor-quality diesel, saying that it could become viscous in the cold and clog fuel lines. Meanwhile, China is enduring its worst winter in recent memory, with frigid temperatures recorded in Harbin, in the northeast. In the western region of Xinjiang, more than 1,000 houses collapsed under a relentless onslaught of snow, while in Inner Mongolia, 180,000 livestock froze to death. The cold has wreaked havoc with crops, sending the price of vegetables soaring. Way down in South America, energy analysts say that Brazil may face electricity rationing for the first time since 2002, as a heat wave and a lack of rain deplete the reservoirs for hydroelectric plants. The summer has been punishingly hot. The temperature in Rio de Janeiro climbed to 109.8 degrees on Dec. 26, the city’s highest temperature since official records began in 1915. At the same time, in the Middle East, Jordan is battling a storm packing torrential rain, snow, hail and floods that are cascading through tunnels, sweeping away cars and spreading misery in Syrian refugee camps. Amman has been virtually paralyzed, with cars abandoned, roads impassable and government offices closed. Israel and the Palestinian territories are grappling with similar conditions, after a week of intense rain and cold winds ushered in a snowstorm that dumped eight inches in Jerusalem alone. Amir Givati, head of the surface water department at the Israel Hydrological Service, said the storm was truly unusual because of its duration, its intensity and its breadth. Snow and hail fell not just in the north, but as far south as the desert city of Dimona, best known for its nuclear reactor. From Freezing to Burning: Extreme Weather Across the World 25 Photos View Slide Show › Image Kevin Frayer/Associated Press In Beirut on Wednesday night, towering waves crashed against the Corniche, the seaside promenade downtown, flinging water and foam dozens of feet in the air as lightning flickered across the dark sea at multiple points along the horizon. Many roads were flooded as hail pounded the city. Several people died, including a baby boy in a family of shepherds who was swept out of his mother’s arms by floodwaters. The greatest concern was for the 160,000 Syrian refugees who have fled to Lebanon, taking shelter in schools, sheds and, where possible, with local families. Some refugees are living in farm outbuildings, which are particularly vulnerable to cold and rain. Barry Lynn, who runs a forecasting business and is a lecturer at the Hebrew University’s department of earth science, said a striking aspect of the whole thing was the severe and prolonged cold in the upper atmosphere, a big-picture shift that indicated the Atlantic Ocean was no longer having the moderating effect on weather in the Middle East and Europe that it has historically. “The intensity of the cold is unusual,” Mr. Lynn said. “It seems the weather is going to become more intense; there’s going to be more extremes.” In Britain, where changes to the positioning of the jet stream — a ribbon of air high up in the atmosphere that helps steer weather systems — may be contributing to the topsy-turvy weather, people are still recovering from the December floods. In Worcester last week, the river Severn remained flooded after three weeks, with playing fields buried under water. In the shop at the Worcester Cathedral, Julie Smith, 54, was struggling, she said, to adjust to the new uncertainty. “For the past seven or eight years, there’s been a serious incident in a different part of the country,” Mrs. Smith said. “We don’t expect extremes. We don’t expect it to be like this.”


Their Food Scarce From Drought, Animals Dine in Town

Abstract: DENVER — People move to the mountains to be closer to nature. But not this close. At least two candy stores have been burglarized this summer by ravenous, drought-starved bears. They are being struck by cars as they roam dark highways, far from their normal foraging grounds. Growing numbers are invading campsites and kitchens in search of food. One even tried to storm a hotel bar in Telluride, Colo. In addition to destroying crops, this summer’s record-breaking drought has also killed off the wild acorns, berries and grasses that sustain animals like mule deer, elk and bears. Without that food, the great outdoors is pushing its way inside, looking for calories wherever they can be found. Elk and mule deer are stealing into farmers’ corn and alfalfa fields more aggressively, and in greater numbers, than usual, wildlife officials say. Bears have been spotted lumbering through alleys, raiding garbage cans and scooting into people’s homes through open windows and unlocked kitchen doors. “My God, they’re everywhere,” said Sheriff Bill Masters of San Miguel County, in the mountains of southwest Colorado. “A lot of them just don’t seem to care anymore. They’re just wandering around.” Similar stories abound, from ranches in Montana to tourist towns in New York’s Catskills, to the Appalachians in Kentucky. With their natural food sources ruined by drought, animals are descending from mountains and mesas, desperate to eat whatever they can find before the winter freeze comes. There isn’t much to go around. In Utah, officials are hoping to cull part of the state’s elk herd this fall to prevent wintertime competition over the shrunken and brittle patches of grasses. They have issued an additional 1,450 hunting tags for female elk, in the hopes that smaller herds of elk, which are relatively hardy, would enable more of the deer to survive. “It’s kind of an emergency,” said Lowell Marthe, a state wildlife biologist. “If there’s not enough food on those winter ranges, we’re looking at potential for heavy die-offs in our deer.” Bears are even more visible. One wandered through a farmer’s market in downtown Aspen, Colo., this summer. Others have broken into cars after sniffing out fast-food leftovers, or ransacked people’s kitchens. One woman in Eagle, Colo., told ABC News that her home had been bear-burgled five times. Officials at the Grand Canyon made a rare black bear sighting this summer. In Kentucky, officials closed two campsites in late July after a family spotted a young bear rummaging through a trash can — an unusual sight for the area. “It’s just been bear call after bear call,” said Perry Will, the wildlife manager in Glenwood Springs, Colo. “Right now, they’d eat about anything.” And there is little relief in sight. The remnants of Hurricane Isaac soaked parts of the Midwest enough that the federal government was able in its weekly drought report Thursday morning to downgrade much of Missouri from extreme to severe drought. But the same report elevated wide swaths of the central and southern Great Plains to extreme drought, and said that roughly 63 percent of the continental United States remained in a state of moderate to extreme drought. The rash of drought-related bear encounters is part of a long trend of increasing run-ins between humans and wildlife (which, it should be said, was here first). States passed more restrictive hunting regulations and natural predators dwindled at the same time that homeowners built deeper and deeper into the forests, their homes climbing from valley floors to elevations where mountain berries ripen and animals like bears find their food. Wildlife officials in Colorado said that they had to euthanize 133 “problem bears” last year and that they have killed 80 so far this year. With autumn approaching, the run-ins are growing more common as the bears race to find the 20,000 daily calories they need for hibernation. Local residents sometimes protest the state’s “two strikes” policy for bears that wander into civilization (first encounter, it’s tranquilized, tagged and released; second time, it’s bear meat) but wildlife officials say they have few other options. “We don’t have this utopia tucked away that we can take all our problem bears to,” said Renzo DelPiccolo, the wildlife manager in Montrose, Colo. “It’s tough.” In Choteau, Mont., Lane Yeager settled things himself. He came home one recent night to find a 2-year-old black bear eating peanut butter, bread and flour from his pantry. The bear had apparently climbed a fence outside Mr. Yeager’s house and pushed a window open. Mr. Yeager got his gun and shot the bear twice — once to kill it and once, he said, to make sure. “This is private property,” he said. Towns have urged homeowners to minimize the allure for bears by storing their dog food inside and taking down bird feeders. Several require that all garbage be kept in bear-proof trash cans, which have thick sides and lockable lids. But homeowners and officials say people still find claw marks and gouges in the trash cans, and paw prints under their kitchen windows. Or at a local bar. One evening last month, Peter DePrez was working the door of the New Sheridan bar in Telluride when he noticed “the biggest dog I’d ever seen in my life.” Just after he realized it was a 400-pound black bear, the animal made a run at the door. “I think it just wanted to come in,” he said. Mr. DePrez slammed the door and began yelling and clapping to shoo the bear away from the bar, and from an unlucky beagle that was tied up just outside. The bear complied, he said, and wandered west down the main drag, toward another saloon at the other end of town.


France Opens Homicide Inquiry in Arafat’s Death

Abstract: A French court will open a homicide investigation into the 2004 death of the former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat , left, French news media reported Tuesday. Mr. Arafat’s widow, Suha, petitioned French authorities to investigate last month after findings by a Swiss laboratory suggested that Mr. Arafat may have been exposed to polonium 210, the same radioactive isotope used to poison a dissident Russian former spy in London in 2006. Mr. Arafat died in a French military hospital on Nov. 11, 2004, after an infection that was never identified, according to medical records. There have long been suggestions, however unspecific, that he may have been the victim of foul play. The Palestinian Authority, which has agreed to exhume the body for analysis, welcomed the French decision, Saeb Erekat, an aide to the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, told Agence France-Presse.

Arafat Yasir
Deaths (Fatalities)
Palestinians
France
Poisoning and Poisons
Radiation


Ailing District to Get Grant for Schools

Abstract: Legislative leaders announced on Friday that they had reached an agreement for an $8 million bailout of the financially troubled, 2,800-student Roosevelt school system in Nassau County after earlier efforts stalled last fall. The State Senate and the Assembly are expected to pass legislation next week to provide a one-time state grant of $8 million to the district to settle an accumulated debt that has threatened to cripple its daily operations. District officials have said that without a bailout they would run short of money to pay salaries, busing costs and utilities. In addition, the legislation would increase an annual state grant to the district for academic improvement to $12 million, from $6 million. Legislative leaders said the measure was intended to allow the district, whose students are largely poor and members of minorities, to raise its per-pupil spending. “For far too long, the Roosevelt School District has been shortchanged,” said the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver. “This compromise measure effectively brings per-pupil spending for the Roosevelt School District on par with the rest of Nassau County.” The legislation will be sponsored by two Long Island legislators, Senator Charles J. Fuschillo Jr., a Republican, and Assemblywoman Earlene Hooper, a Democrat. The district was taken over by the State Education Department in 2002 after decades of mismanagement and weak student performance, the first takeover in New York State. Since then, the state has poured $200 million into the district for improvements, including new buildings. But financial problems have drawn sharp criticism from parents and teachers over what they see as a failed effort to turn around the district. The education commissioner, Richard P. Mills appointed a new superintendent, Robert-Wayne Harris, who took over the district on Oct. 15. “As we have stated in the past, we are excited and anxious about any and all assistance and support for our students, district and school community,” Mr. Harris said on Friday. “We are eagerly awaiting the outcome. It would be a great victory for this wonderful community.”

Roosevelt School System
Finances
Education and Schools
Legislatures and Parliaments
Education Department
Long Island (NY)


Many Japanese Factories Have Recovered From Quake

Abstract: SHIBATA-MACHI, Japan — When the ground shook violently on the afternoon of March 11, the ceiling collapsed in part of the huge Ricoh copier factory here, exposing the vents and wires above. The ceiling is still not fixed. But employees are back at their posts, working under temporary lighting and wearing hard hats to protect themselves in case debris falls. The factory may be a case study for the can-do recovery of Japan’s manufacturing industry. Only seven weeks after the huge earthquake in northeastern Japan collapsed the ceiling, toppled a huge water tank and upended assembly line equipment, the Ricoh factory here is nearly back to full production. And so, for the most part, is all of Ricoh, a nearly $25 billion company that makes copiers and other office equipment. “The influence of this disaster is not as large as the world thinks,” Shiro Kondo, Ricoh’s president, said in an interview at the company headquarters in Tokyo. At varying speeds, Ricoh’s story is being played out all over the quake-affected parts of Japan. The pattern suggests that whatever the long-term effect of the natural and nuclear disasters on this country, manufacturing — the most important cog in Japan’s export-oriented economy — might largely rebound within a few months. Without doubt, things are not back to normal yet. And some sectors, particularly automobile manufacturing, are suffering more than others. Still, almost every day companies are reporting progress on some of the hundreds of factories knocked out of commission by the quake or ensuing tsunami. The government estimates that 7 percent of Japanese factories were in the region heavily affected by the earthquake. A survey of 70 damaged factories released last week by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry found that nearly two-thirds of them had recovered while most of the rest in the survey group expected to do so by summer. Shin-Etsu Chemical, a leading producer of silicon wafers used to make computer chips, said last week that it expected to return to pre-earthquake production levels by July. Sony has resumed operations at nine of its 10 halted factories, with the 10th expected to come online in phases from May to July. Masatomo Onishi of Kansai University, who studied the recovery after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, said that when a disaster strikes, Japanese companies tend to cooperate with one another and workers rally to the cause. That seems to be the case at the Ricoh factory here. Even many of the Ricoh workers who lost family members to the tsunami came to work. Some whose homes were destroyed or flooded slept on blankets on the floor of a factory conference room. With gasoline scarce, many rode bicycles. And with bathrooms not working because of blocked sewer lines, employees improvised with plastic bags. Still, the disaster exposed vulnerabilities that simply restoring any one factory’s assembly line cannot fully resolve. The biggest susceptibility for Ricoh and many other companies has proven to be parts shortages. Although Japanese manufacturers have spread their factories around the world — Ricoh makes 70 percent of its products outside of Japan — many of those overseas plants often still depend on parts made in Japan. For example, Tohoku Ricoh, as this plant is known, is the company’s only factory making a particular motor used in copiers. When the factory here went down, a giant Ricoh plant in Shenzhen, China — which supplies most of the Ricoh copiers sold in the United States — had to stop production for a full week. (Mr. Kondo said he did not think Ricoh’s sales in the United States would be affected much.) Ricoh is also dependent on parts from various suppliers in Japan, some of which suffered their own damage from the earthquake. That is forcing Ricoh to live off its inventory of certain computer chips and connectors. If production of those parts does not resume in the next couple of months, Ricoh might have to slow or halt production. Another weakness was in emergency planning. Tohoku Ricoh, for instance, had 200 metric tons of backup water for cooling and ink production, in case water service was disrupted. But when the power also went out, it could not pump the water to where it was needed. Workers had to deliver the water, one ton at a time, by truck. The emergency plan at Ricoh’s headquarters was designed to cope with a big earthquake in Tokyo, not one in northeastern Japan. “We had a manual of what to do in such cases, but things did not go as written,” said Toshihiro Kenmoku, a leader of the recovery task force at headquarters. When the earthquake occurred, powder started coming out of the walls and ceilings of the office of Hiroshi Tsuruga, the president of Tohoku Ricoh. “I felt like I would be crushed with the building and die,” Mr. Tsuruga recalled. Neither Mr. Tsuruga nor any of the other 1,270 Tohoku Ricoh employees were killed at the factory, which is about a 20-minute drive from the coast. But one employee, sleeping at home to prepare for the night shift, was swept away by the tsunami. A Ricoh sales and service employee was also killed by the wave while calling on a customer near the coast. Some 26 family members of factory workers perished or are missing, 42 homes were partly or completely destroyed and another 37 flooded. The day after the quake, 70 factory employees gathered in the gym to plan the recovery, posting the plans on the walls. A similar scene was taking place at headquarters in Tokyo, where a conference room was converted into a war room for a recovery task force. The table soon became covered by phones, documents and packages of instant noodles. One of the first tasks was to send 10,000 bottles of water, as well as food, blankets and other supplies, to Ricoh’s stricken factories using the company’s own trucks. Besides Tohoku Ricoh, three other Ricoh factories making a variety of products and one research center were damaged. But Tohoku Ricoh — which accounts for about $60 million in annual revenue, or one-fortieth of Ricoh’s total — posed the biggest challenge. The priority was to restore production of ink and the motors made only at the Tohoku plant. Finally, by April 6, all the production lines were back in operation, with the exception of toner manufacturing. (Toner is used for machines that can print, copy and scan, while ink is used for some copiers.) Then, On April 7, an aftershock of magnitude 7.1 jolted the region. Electricity and water were knocked out again and many repairs undone. “Production went back to zero again,” said Hiroyuki Murakami, a general manager. It took until April 15 to restore motor production. Mr. Kondo, Ricoh’s president, said it would probably take half a year for the company to be fully back to normal. He declined to say how much the lost production and the lower economic activity expected in Japan this year would hurt the company’s sales and profits. “We have many problems, so it’s very difficult to think about the results of this year,” he said. His main concern was that a drop in industrial and consumer spending would mean less photocopying. Japan accounts for about 45 percent of Ricoh’s sales. On April 12, Masahiro Nakanomyo, an analyst at Barclays Capital, cut his estimate of operating profit for the fiscal year ending next March to 85 billion yen, or $1.05 billion, from 93 billion yen, or $1.14 billion. Last week Ricoh reported sales for the year that ended March 31 of 1.94 trillion yen, or $23.9 billion. That was about 3.9 percent below the forecast the company made on Feb. 2. Operating profits were 60.2 billion yen, or $740 million, 29 2 percent below the forecast. The company attributed part of the shortfall to the earthquake. Ricoh predicted that operating profits for the year that ends next March would be 70.0 billion yen, or about $860 million. Based on that revised forecast, Mr. Nakanomyo at Barclays further reduced his estimate of operating profit for the year, to 63 billion yen. At Ricoh headquarters, the war room has reverted to a conference room. But a new challenge looms. Because of the power plants disabled by the earthquake and tsunami, big companies like Ricoh will have to cut their use of electricity by up to 25 percent in the summer, which could also disrupt production. Another task force has gone into action.

Ricoh Company Ltd
Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011)
Factories and Manufacturing
Economic Conditions and Trends


As Olmert’s Time in Office Nears End, Captive Soldier’s Saga Gains Urgency

Abstract: JERUSALEM — For the family of the captive Israeli soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit , the waning days of the Olmert government represent a time of dwindling hope and growing despair. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has as little as two weeks left in office as his probable successor tries to form a new government. By then, Corporal Shalit, who turned 22 in captivity, will have been a hostage of Hamas for about 1,000 days. The parents and friends of Corporal Shalit are pressing Mr. Olmert to clear his desk, and his conscience, by reaching an 11th-hour deal for the soldier’s return. “We think there is still a last chance before the prime minister ends his term,” Noam Shalit, Corporal Shalit’s father, said Sunday as he and the rest of his family began a sit-in at a protest tent near the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. “With a new government we do not know what will happen,” he said. “They could do a reset and start another three-year nightmare.” The Shalit saga has gripped the Israeli soul. In a small country where 18-year-olds are conscripted into the army, complete strangers feel intimately connected with the Shalits. But people here also remember the names of youths who were blown up on buses by terrorists, and they are debating the morality of releasing those convicted of such attacks in exchange for Corporal Shalit, part of a list of prisoners Hamas wants freed. On Sunday, across the street from the Shalits’ protest tent, families of terrorism victims began a vigil of their own. They set up placards on the sidewalk outside the former Café Moment, where a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up about seven years ago, killing 11 Israelis and wounding 54. One of those opposing the release of the convicted Palestinians is Yossi Mendellevich, an engineer whose son Yuval died at the age of 13 in a bus bombing in Haifa in March 2003. “For a father to bury a boy of 13 and a half — it should be the other way round,” Mr. Mendellevich said. “His voice was changing, he was getting the beginnings of a mustache, and he got killed in a most brutal way.” Mr. Mendellevich argues that Israel has not fully examined other options for freeing Corporal Shalit. “It is clear that if Gilad Shalit was my son, I’d be ready to give back Tel Aviv,” he said. “But we have to also think of the parents of the kids who could yet be killed by those to be released.” Corporal Shalit was seized from Israeli territory by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in a cross-border raid and was dragged into Gaza, wounded, in June 2006. He has been allowed no visits by the Red Cross. The last sign that he is alive was a handwritten letter to his parents last June. Despite the pain involved, many Israelis across the political spectrum seem ready to release the Palestinian prisoners to secure his return. “From a personal perspective,” said Yael Barkai, 52, a teachers’ trainer and a mother of four from Pardes Hanna in northern Israel, “everyone here has or had or will have a child in the army, or a cousin or a nephew or niece.” Ms. Barkai said she and her sister, Ruthi, 48, were bothered by Corporal Shalit’s fate, to the point of dreaming about it at night. Feeling the need to do something, they decided to set up the Jerusalem protest tent six months ago. The sisters e-mailed their friends, who passed the message on. Within five hours, Ms. Barkai said, they had replies from 300 Israelis prepared to sit in the tent in two-hour shifts from morning to night, seven days a week. With Israel balking at releasing all the prisoners on the Hamas list and negotiations apparently stuck, members of the Shalit family came from their small Galilee village to join the volunteers on the sidewalk here in a last-ditch attempt to get their son freed. Drivers honked their horns in solidarity, and children passing by in fancy dress costumes for the Purim holiday joined in a chant. Mr. Olmert spoke out over the weekend against the public displays of sympathy for Corporal Shalit, saying they only raised Hamas’s expectations and raised the price for his release. But that did not stop a 15-year-old girl from Tel Aviv, who gave her name as Shir, from showing up at the tent on Sunday to show her support; nor Yehudit Mahlu, 72, from the Negev Desert city of Beersheba; nor Yaakov Milo, 57, from a village near Eilat, at Israel’s southernmost point. “Three years is enough,” Mr. Milo said. “Otherwise, we’ll end up with another Ron Arad.” Mr. Milo was referring to an Israeli airman whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986. Mr. Arad was taken alive, but negotiations for his release collapsed in 1988. He never came back. Indictment Looms for Ex-Leader JERUSALEM — Israel’s attorney general announced plans on Sunday to indict the country’s former president, Moshe Katsav, on charges of rape and indecent assault against women who worked for him when he was the tourism minister and president. Mr. Katsav, who stepped down from the presidency in mid-2007, first faced an accusation of indecent assault in 2006 when he said he was being blackmailed by a former female employee. After her story was made public, other women came forward and the case grew more serious with the addition of the rape charge. Mr. Katsav then struck a plea bargain under which he would pay compensation and admit his guilt to the lesser charges in exchange for the dropping of the rape charge. But in a turnaround in April, he pulled out of the deal, saying he preferred to stand trial. The original charges have now been restored.

Shalit Gilad
Israel
Hamas
Olmert Ehud
Prisons and Prisoners
Politics and Government


Yankees Assessed Lowest Luxury-Tax Bill Since 2003

Abstract: Not much has gone the Yankees ’ way this off-season, but some relatively good news arrived Tuesday, when they were assessed their lowest luxury tax bill since 2003. The Yankees must pay $18 million — nearly $8 million less than 2009, when they won the World Series — as a penalty for surpassing the $170 million luxury-tax threshold, according to The Associated Press. The Yankees have exceeded the threshold in all eight years since the tax was imposed, topping out at $33.98 million in 2005 and owing more than $191 million in all for regularly having the highest payroll in baseball. Last season, their payroll for luxury-tax purposes was $215,053,064. Since 2003, three other teams have paid the competitive-balance tax, as it is formally known, including the Boston Red Sox, the only other club this year to owe money. The Red Sox, who missed the playoffs for the first time in four seasons, must pay $1.5 million, their first penalty since 2007. The Detroit Tigers were billed $1.3 million in 2008, while the Angels were taxed $927,059 in 2004. LOCAL TALENT About a year ago, Leonel Vinas was, by his own admission, finding trouble along the streets of Freeport on Long Island. In two weeks, he is slated fly to Tampa, Fla., to begin a new phase of his life — as a professional baseball player. Vinas was the ace of Hank’s Yanks, the team established by the Yankees co-chairman Hank Steinbrenner to give 15- to 18-year-old boys new opportunities. Vinas, a 19-year-old right-hander, signed a minor league contract with the Yankees on Tuesday. Vinas recently had three private tryouts at the Yankees’ facility in Tampa, pitching in front of Damon Oppenheimer, the team’s vice president for amateur scouting, and Billy Connors, the vice president for player personnel. “They told me, ‘You’ve got a chance to be a Yankee,’ ” Vinas said at a news conference. “When they first told me that, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t think it was true.” Vinas, who will work as a reliever, was 12-0 with a 1.12 earned run average and 168 strikeouts in 84 innings for Hank’s Yanks. He pitched four no-hit innings against Adelphi and five no-hit innings against Suffolk Community College, but he said the highlight of his season came Aug. 26, when he led Hank’s Yanks to a 3-2 victory over a team sponsored by Mariano Rivera in the first Boss’ Cup at Yankee Stadium. “I’ve been to China and Japan to bring back some players, and it’s great also to show that we can look around the corner in our backyard and find players, too,” General Manager Brian Cashman said. At first, finding Vinas was difficult. Herman Hernandez, the general manager of Hank’s Yanks, said Vinas, who moved from the Dominican Republic when he was 11, was a superb pitcher at Freeport High School. But after Vinas graduated, in 2009, “he just fell off the map,” Hernandez said. He tracked him down and called his childhood friend Ray Negron, a longtime adviser for the Yankees, who introduced Vinas to Steinbrenner. “This team has given him a life,” Negron said. HELP FOR BURNETT Until Brian Cashman hears otherwise — and he said he had little hope that he would — he does not expect Andy Pettitte to pitch for the Yankees in 2011. But A. J. Burnett will, and Cashman said that the new pitching coach, Larry Rothschild, was scheduled to visit Burnett in late January at his Maryland home for a troubleshooting session. Whether or not Pettitte returns, it is imperative that Burnett corrects his mechanical flaws and move past his dreadful 2010 season. “We need A. J. to come back to his previous form, there’s no doubt about it,” Cashman said. “I believe he will. But we need that to happen, too.” The Yankees are also searching for a right-handed reliever to complement Joba Chamberlain and Dave Robertson and a right-handed hitter off the bench, but there are not many options in free agency. “There’s not much available, to be quite honest,” Cashman said, “but if something’s there for the taking that we like and we can match up, then we’ll strike.” HARDEN RETURNS TO A’S The right-hander Rich Harden, who has been plagued by injuries for much of his career, is rejoining the Oakland Athletics, his first major league team. Harden, 29, and the Athletics completed a one-year, $1.5 million deal after he passed a physical. He went 5-5 with a 5.58 earned run average in 20 appearances last season for the Texas Rangers before being released. (AP) COSTLY KOUFAX JERSEY A game-worn Sandy Koufax Brooklyn Dodgers jersey, which he had signed, sold Sunday for $80,000 on the Lelands auction house Web site. Lelands did not identify the buyer. A glove used by Yankees catcher Thurman Munson in 1969, his rookie year, sold for $54,000 as part of the same sale. (BLOOMBERG NEWS)

New York Yankees
Baseball
Taxation
Vinas Leonel
Oakland Athletics
Brooklyn Dodgers
Uniforms
Auctions


7 Killed as Pakistan Police Clash With Preacher’s Followers

Abstract: LAHORE, Pakistan — At least seven people have been killed and about 100 wounded in Lahore in violent clashes between the police and followers of Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a fiery preacher turned political activist who has called for a mass movement against the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. It was the deadliest political confrontation in Lahore, Mr. Sharif’s hometown, since a short-lived but turbulent period of emergency rule under the military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf in late 2007. And it came at a critical time for Mr. Sharif, who is marshaling public support as the army begins a perilous offensive against the Taliban in the tribal district of North Waziristan. The clashes started about midnight on Monday, when a large contingent of police officers reached the headquarters of the Pakistan Awami Tehrik, Mr. Qadri’s party, and demanded that his supporters remove barricades that they called illegal outside the office and an adjoining residence. The barricades were set up four years ago after Mr. Qadri, who is in Canada but has said he will return to Pakistan next Monday, issued a decree against the Taliban and received death threats from the militants. Mr. Qadri’s supporters resisted the police demands, and the situation turned violent, with clashes through the night. By morning, police reinforcements, including bulldozers and armored vehicles, had arrived to disperse the crowd. Several women and men lay down in front of barriers on the road, challenging the police to run the bulldozers over them. The police fired tear gas and charged with batons, then fired bullets into the air. Mr. Qadri’s supporters accused the police of firing directly into the crowd. The Lahore police chief, Chaudhry Shafique, accused the protesters of instigating the clashes. Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab Province and a brother of the prime minister, said at a news conference that of the 97 people reported wounded, 27 were police officers. Later, he removed Mr. Shafique from his position as police chief. In January 2013, Mr. Qadri, who has been based in Canada, led a march of thousands of followers to Islamabad to demand electoral overhauls and the removal of the previous government, which was led by the Pakistan Peoples Party. Under Pakistan’s Constitution, Mr. Qadri is barred from participating in elections because of his dual Pakistani and Canadian citizenship, and critics accused him of being a proxy for political interference by the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. Mr. Qadri said he would land in Islamabad on Monday and had urged the Pakistani military to provide him with protection. But given the suddenly precarious security situation, with the authorities in major cities stepping up security in anticipation of Taliban reprisals for the North Waziristan operation, it seems doubtful that the military will allow him to hold mass street rallies. Mr. Sharif’s government has hinted that Mr. Qadri might be arrested if he tries to return to Pakistan next week, and has warned that the courts could bring money-laundering investigations against him. In a telephone address to supporters on Tuesday, Mr. Qadri accused the Lahore police of firing on unarmed protesters. On Twitter, he said that Mr. Sharif had ordered the attack because he was “gripped by fear of my arrival.”

Muhammad Tahir-ul Qadri
Lahore
Civilian casualties
Pakistan


Sabathia and Cano Reunite, via Jay Z

Abstract: Pitcher C. C. Sabathia became the latest professional athlete to join Roc Nation Sports, the agency that represents Robinson Cano, Sabathia’s former teammate on the Yankees. Roc Nation announced the deal Thursday and sent out a photograph of Sabathia signing his contract with Jay Z, the head of the company, which negotiated a 10-year, $240 million contract for Cano with the Seattle Mariners in free agency last month. Sabathia, a left-hander who was 14-13 last season, is signed through 2016 with a vesting option for 2017 based on the health of his left shoulder. ■ Catcher Francisco Cervelli and the Yankees agreed to a one-year, $700,000 contract. Cervelli was limited to 17 games last season. He broke his right hand April 26 when hit by a foul tip and then was suspended for 50 games on Aug. 5 for violating the league’s antidoping rules. (AP)

C C Sabathia
Baseball
Roc Nation
Yankees
Jay Z
Robinson Cano


Henry Leads by 2 in the Fog

Abstract: Scott Henry shot a five-under-par 67 to take a two-shot clubhouse lead in the first round of the fog-affected Madeira Islands Open.


Troubles at Women’s Prison Test Alabama

Abstract: WETUMPKA, Ala. — For a female inmate, there are few places worse than the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women . Corrections officers have raped, beaten and harassed women inside the aging prison here for at least 18 years, according to an unfolding Justice Department investigation . More than a third of the employees have had sex with prisoners, which is sometimes the only currency for basics like toilet paper and tampons. But Tutwiler, whose conditions are so bad that the federal government says they are most likely unconstitutional, is only one in a series of troubled prisons in a state system that has the second-highest number of inmates per capita in the nation. Now, as Alabama faces federal intervention and as the Legislature is weighing its spending choices for the coming year, it remains an open question whether the recent reports on Tutwiler are enough to prompt reform. “Yes, we need to rectify the crimes that happened at Tutwiler, but going forward it’s a bigger problem than just Tutwiler,” said State Senator Cam Ward, a Republican from Alabaster who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We’re dealing with a box of dynamite.” The solution, Mr. Ward and others say, is not to build more prisons but to change the sentencing guidelines that have filled the prisons well beyond capacity. Just over half the state’s prisoners are locked up for drug and property crimes, a rate for nonviolent offenses that is among the highest in the nation. “No one wants to be soft on crime, but the way we’re doing this is just stupid,” Mr. Ward said. Still, in many corners of Alabama, a state where political prominence is often tied to how much a candidate disparages criminals, the appetite for change remains minimal. The Legislature is in the middle of its budget session, working over a document from Gov. Robert Bentley that includes $389 million for the state’s prisons. That is about $7 million less than last year’s budget. The Department of Corrections argues that it needs $42 million more than it had last year. Alabama prisons are running at almost double capacity, and staffing is dangerously low, said Kim T. Thomas, the department’s commissioner. He said he would use about $21 million of his request to give corrections officers a 10 percent raise and hire about 100 officers. Image Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka. Credit Bob Miller for The New York Times The odds of approval for that much new money are not great, but they are better this year than they have been in a long while, said Stephen Stetson, a policy analyst with Arise Citizens’ Policy Project , a liberal policy group. Even so, “for the average legislator, it’s still, ‘These bodies don’t matter,' ” he said. There is no ignoring the prison crisis. Even Stacy George, a former corrections officer who is challenging Mr. Bentley in the June Republican primary by promising to be “the gun-toting governor,” this past week issued a plan for prison reform. It calls for changing sentencing rules, rescinding the “three-strikes” law for repeat offenders, releasing the sick and elderly, and sending low-level drug offenders into treatment programs instead. The federal government has stepped in to fix Alabama’s prison problems before, but it has been years since the state has faced a situation as serious as that uncovered by a series of damning investigations into Tutwiler. “We think that there is a very strong case of constitutional violations here,” said Jocelyn Samuels, the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights for the Justice Department, who sent a 36-page report to the governor in January. The toxic, highly sexualized environment, she said in an interview, has been met by “a deliberate indifference on the part of prison officials and prison management, who have been aware of the conditions for many years and have failed to curb it.” The prison was built in 1942 and named after Julia Tutwiler, a woman called the Angel of the Stockades for her work trying to improve conditions for inmates in Alabama. More than 900 women live there, including some on death row, although the original building was designed for about 400. The prison’s abysmal staffing levels, abundant blind spots and only three cameras created a situation where sex among prisoners and with guards was rampant, the report said. Male guards have routinely watched women showering and once helped prisoners organize a strip show. Sex is sometimes exchanged both for banned items like drugs and for basic needs like clean uniforms. At least six corrections employees have been convicted of sexual crimes since 2009. The Justice Department is still investigating Tutwiler, scrutinizing medical and mental health care there. “It is just a culture of deprivation and abuse, not just at Tutwiler but in institutions across Alabama,” said Charlotte Morrison, a senior lawyer with the Equal Justice Initiative , a legal organization that represents indigent defendants and prisoners. In 2012, the organization asked the federal government to step in after its own investigation into Tutwiler showed rampant sexual abuse. The Department of Corrections says conditions at Tutwiler were beginning to improve well before the Justice Department began its investigation in April 2013. Six months after the Equal Justice Initiative report came out in May 2012, the longtime warden and other top prison officers were replaced, said Mr. Thomas, the corrections commissioner. He also asked the National Institute of Corrections to review practices and policies at Tutwiler. Using those findings, he issued a wide-ranging plan in January 2013 that included recruiting more female corrections officers, pressing the Legislature for more money and changing several policies and procedures. Among them was a system to better investigate and track reports of assaults and abuse. Image A picture of Monica Washington with her two children, including KaMyrrie, right. She said that despite a federal investigation, prisoners were still fearful and that conditions remained bad. Credit Bob Miller for The New York Times “That report came about because I wanted an abundance of caution and to be transparent,” Mr. Thomas said. But women recently released and still inside say life at Tutwiler has improved only marginally. Monica Washington, who is serving 20 years for armed robbery, said she had been raped by a prison guard and gave birth to a daughter who is now 3 and living with relatives near Montgomery. The guard, Rodney Arbuthnot, served six months in jail for custodial sexual misconduct. He has since moved to Texas. The courts only recently tracked him down, and the family is finally getting about $230 a month in child support. In a telephone interview, Ms. Washington said that prisoners were still fearful and that conditions remained bad. “Right now, for me personally, it’s still the same as far as the officers,” she said. “It’s like an act of Congress to get the things you need just to live. It’s inhumane for inmates to be here, period.” Marsha Colby, a mother of six, served almost 10 years of a life sentence without parole for a murder conviction. Her premature son had been stillborn, and she buried him in a marked grave near her home. A medical examiner said the child had been drowned in a bathtub, but the conviction was overturned after a court agreed that the autopsy had been botched. She was released in December 2012. She remains in contact with some Tutwiler prisoners, who she said were split on whether attention from the federal government was a good thing. Sex is an important commodity there, Ms. Colby said. The inmates use it to get better treatment and secure contraband items that they can then sell to get food and other basics. “The women do it for favors,” she said. “They get makeup, cologne, anything that’s stuff that is resellable. That’s how they make their money.” She and others believe it will take a larger overhaul at the top of the Department of Corrections to fix the prison’s problems. “It’s a primitive, very backward prison system,” said Larry F. Wood, a clinical psychologist who was hired at Tutwiler in 2012. He quit after two months, appalled at the conditions and what he said was the administration’s lack of support for mental health services. “I’ve worked in prisons for most of 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “We need to back up and look at it with fresh eyes. The people who are running it don’t have the perspective to see what can change.”

Prison
Women and Girls
Rape
Security guard
Justice Department
Tutwiler Prison for Women
Alabama


Obama Raises Concerns About Freedom and Judicial Independence in Russia

Abstract: MOSCOW — Ahead of his departure for Moscow on Sunday night for a visit aimed at repairing strained relations with Russia , President Obama vowed not to sacrifice American support for greater freedom here and questioned the politically charged prosecution of a prominent Russian businessman. Mr. Obama raised concerns about the treatment of the businessman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky , who along with his partner has been put back on trial six years after they were first arrested. Critics say the new trial seems aimed at keeping Mr. Khodorkovsky, an opponent to the government who was once Russia’s richest man, in prison. “Without knowing the details, it does seem odd to me that these new charges, which appear to be a repackaging of the old charges, should be surfacing now, years after these two individuals have been in prison and as they become eligible for parole,” Mr. Obama said in written answers to questions posed by a Russian opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, over the weekend. “Nonetheless, I think it is improper for outsiders to interfere in the legal processes of Russia.” But Mr. Obama called on President Dmitri A. Medvedev to follow through on his promise “to strengthen the rule of law in Russia, which of course includes making sure that all those accused of crimes have the right to a fair trial and that the courts are not used for political purposes.” In a television interview that was broadcast in Russia on Saturday night, Mr. Obama did not repeat critical comments that he had made about Vladimir V. Putin, the former president and current prime minister, who is widely considered Russia’s dominant leader. Mr. Obama plans to conduct negotiations with Mr. Medvedev on Monday and have breakfast with Mr. Putin on Tuesday. In the interview on Russian state television, Mr. Obama was asked why it was important to meet both men. Mr. Obama noted that he had never met Mr. Putin, but added, “Obviously, he has been a very strong leader for the Russian people.” The interview with Russian television was conducted on Thursday shortly after Mr. Obama offered a different view of Mr. Putin in an interview with The Associated Press. In the A.P. interview, Mr. Obama said Mr. Putin had “one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.” Mr. Obama said that it was time to move forward and that Mr. Medvedev “understands that.” The comment was seen as provocative, and some American officials worried that Mr. Obama may have been too sharp in taking on Mr. Putin while others argued that it let the president come in a position of strength. On Sunday, the Kremlin released the text of an interview in which Mr. Medvedev once again suggested that the United States needed to compromise on its proposed antimissile system in Eastern Europe in order to obtain a broader agreement on cutting nuclear arsenals. Mr. Khodorkovsky’s case is one of three that have come up as Mr. Obama heads here. Supporters want him to press Russia not only to free Mr. Khodorkovsky but also to do more to pursue the killers of two journalists, Anna Politkovskaya , a crusading war correspondent , and Paul Klebnikov, an editor for Forbes magazine . Ms. Politkovskaya held dual Russian and American citizenship while Mr. Klebnikov was an American of Russian heritage. Mr. Obama is sending top advisers to a memorial service to be held in Moscow on Tuesday for the fifth anniversary of Mr. Klebnikov’s death, and offered a show of support for Ms. Politkovskaya’s colleagues by answering written questions posed by her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. Novaya Gazeta’s editors, Dmitri Muratov and Andrey Lipsky, asked Mr. Obama if he would ratchet back American attention to liberty issues in Russia. “Of course not,” Mr. Obama wrote, adding: “I agree with President Medvedev when he said that ‘freedom is better than the absence of freedom.’ So, I see no reason why we cannot aspire together to strengthen democracy, human rights, and the rule of law as part of our ‘reset.’ ” Mr. Khodorkovsky, who led Yukos, Russia’s most successful oil company at the time, was arrested in 2003 when he challenged Mr. Putin. He was convicted of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to eight years in prison, while his oil company was effectively taken over by the state. He is back on trial on new charges of embezzlement and money laundering. Mr. Khodorkovsky’s parents hoped that Mr. Obama’s interest would prompt Mr. Medvedev to stop the trial and free their son. “I liked very much what Obama said,” his father, Boris Khodorkovsky, said in an interview. But Mr. Medvedev dismissed the possibility of a pardon, at least for now, comparing the case to the recent conviction of Bernard L. Madoff in the United States. “Some businessmen have been given very long sentences, 150 years in the United States of America,” Mr. Medvedev said in his interview with Italian news media. “Why is it that somehow no one is unduly upset about this case?”

Russia
United States International Relations
Khodorkovsky Mikhail B
Freedom and Human Rights
Politkovskaya Anna
Obama Barack