Swiss Triumphs in Downhill, and Miller Finishes Fifth

Abstract: Patrick Küng gave his countrymen a lot to cheer Saturday by winning the shortened Lauberhorn downhill in Wengen, Switzerland. Küng clocked 1 minute 32.66 seconds on a course in which more than a minute’s worth of racing and signature features were eliminated because of strong wind. He earned his second World Cup victory — and first in the downhill. Hannes Reichelt of Austria finished second, 0.06 of a second behind, and the overall World Cup leader, Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway, was third. Bode Miller of the United States finished fifth, 0.35 back. Miller’s teammate Jared Goldberg was 12th. Svindal leads Marcel Hirscher by 82 points in the overall standings. In the downhill rankings, Svindal leads with 360 points, Reichelt is next with 260, and Küng is third with 221. U.S. TEAM WINS IN BOBSLED Steven Holcomb drove to victory in a World Cup two-man bobsled race in Igls, Austria — his first win outside North America in a two-man race since February 2007. With the fastest time in each heat, Holcomb and the brakeman Steve Langton finished two runs in 1:43.72. (AP) RANDALL OF U.S. WINS AGAIN Kikkan Randall of the United States won her second straight freestyle sprint at a World Cup cross-country event in Szklarska Poreba, Poland, to bolster her status as a medal favorite at the Sochi Olympics. (AP) U.S. NAMES SKELETON TEAMS Katie Uhlaender and Noelle Pikus-Pace were named to the United States women’s Olympic skeleton team. The men’s roster spots went to Matt Antoine, John Daly and Kyle Tress. (AP) GERMAN CLINCHES POINTS TITLE Felix Loch of Germany clinched his third straight World Cup season points championship in the luge. Loch wrapped up the title in Altenberg, Germany, with one race left, getting his fifth win in eight races over all by rallying past Russia’s Albert Demchenko and finishing two runs in 1:48.921. (AP) SPANIARD SKATES TO VICTORY Javier Fernández of Spain successfully defended his European figure skating title in Budapest. Fernández scored 267.11 points and is the first repeat champion since Russia’s Evgeni Plushenko in 2005 and 2006. (AP)

Patrick Kung
World Cup Skiing
Luge
Skeleton Sport
Skiing


Much More Than a Roof Overhead

Abstract: GARDEN CITY THE second graders swarming onto the deck of the Malaysian home on display at the Long Island Children’s Museum may have been unfamiliar with the environment, but they quickly adapted to hunting and gathering. “Pretend I’m a cat,” shouted one as she swatted at a school of fish from the deck of the stilt house overlooking the sea. Another decided to dive in to pursue her catch, a method that brought a warning from Richard Driver, a teaching assistant. “Hey, watch out,” he said. “That’s water.” Actually, it was a blue plastic mat sprinkled with plastic bass. The Malaysian seaside habitat was only a facade, of course, an example of dwellings from around the world represented in the “Your House, My House” exhibition at the museum here. Several of the children from the Jackson Annex Elementary School in Hempstead who were touring that day showed potential as fishermen, especially when it came to bragging prowess. “I bet I caught a hundred fish,” 7-year-old Jazmine Campos said above the din in the museum’s lunchroom. The homes, on display until Jan. 6, are a traveling exhibition created by the Children’s Museum of Memphis to demonstrate how things like culture, environment and materials determine the way a dwelling is designed. They include a full-scale ger (a yurt or tent used by Mongolian herdsmen) and a thatched-roof hut from Fiji. At the exhibit’s entrance, the children had a chance to create their own dream home at two computer stations. “Now, I’m going to make one in the snow,” said Monse Rosales, 7, flipping through several habitat options. At a crafts table inside the Fijian bure made of woven palm, the children used a series of rubber stamps to adorn paper (and sometimes themselves) with traditional cloth patterns. Gathered into a circle inside the ger, they listened to an instructor explain how the dome-shaped dwelling is constructed to withstand the area’s extreme winters and hot summers. Recorded music from an instrument called a horse-head fiddle filled the air as the children examined a huhur, a goatskin bag used to make cheese and other dairy products. They laughed hearing that visitors do not knock at the entrance — it’s considered rude — but simply enter after yelling out “Nokhoi Khor!” That’s Mongolian for “Hold the dog!” Ronald Hernandez, 7, looked surprised when asked if he would like to live in one. “No,” he said, emphatically. He much preferred his brick home, he said. But he did admire the ger’s handy fold-up design. “It’s made like a fence, you know? Like the one around my house.” Monse Rosales thought it might be fun for a while. She noted that it did have shortcomings. “My mom and dad might be a little big for it,” she said. The tacit lesson of the bilingual exhibit — the ingenious ways people adapt for survival — begins to soak in after awhile, said Helen Basile, a museum educator. The children come to see how, for example, the cramped quarters of the ger might be an advantage in frigid climates where human warmth is appreciated. “I ask them if it feels comfortable sitting in a circle in here and they say, ‘Yes, it does.’ They get it,” she said. Another educator, Jennifer Estrada, said several children had told her they wouldn’t mind living, at least temporarily, in some of the technologically deprived homes. “They liked the idea of being in a place without a television or an Xbox,” she said. “That kind of took me off guard.” One of the most popular attractions, designed by the Long Island museum to complement the Memphis exhibit, was an interactive theater program that explores the history of bay houses on the South Shore of Nassau County. Using a slide show, a narrator explained how the marshland homes, which can be reached only by boat, once were a way of life for baymen. Today, only about 30 of the bay shacks remain. Jordy Duron, 7, liked the fact that you could walk out the door and go fishing off the deck. “That’s something I could do with my dad,” he said. But as far as playing around the house, he definitely preferred his own home sweet home to one perched above the water. Why? “Because you could fall off,” he said.

Art
Long Island Children's Museum
Long Island (NY)


Manhattan Construction Worker Injured in Fall Down Elevator Shaft

Abstract: A worker was critically injured at a construction site in Manhattan on Wednesday after he lost his balance on a ladder and fell into an elevator shaft, plummeting four stories and landing on metal bars, the authorities said. The worker, a 55-year-old man, was preparing to hang drywall on a ceiling at 34 West 17th Street when he fell, shortly after 8 a.m., the police said. According to the police, the worker was impaled by three metal bars that protruded from the base of the shaft, piercing his torso, a leg and an arm. Cinder blocks also fell on him. The metal bars had to be cut so he could be taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he was listed in critical condition on Wednesday afternoon, the authorities said. The New York City Buildings Department said on Wednesday that it had initiated an investigation. In a statement, the department said the man was not wearing safety equipment, such as a harness, at the time of the fall. A full stop-work order was issued for the site, where a 10-story commercial building, near Avenue of the Americas, is being converted into condominiums. The work was properly permitted, officials said. But the site was fined $1,000 for a violation in August that involved safeguarding the building’s elevator shafts, according to department records. The contractor at the site, New Empire Builder Corporation, did not immediately return messages for comment on Wednesday. The city is in the midst of a building boom, and there has been a surge in the number of deaths and injuries of construction workers, many of whom are undocumented laborers. But the rise in such cases has outpaced the rate of new construction, leading to concerns about a lack of training and adequate safety measures.

Accidents and Safety
Construction
Manhattan
NYC
Buildings Department NYC


City Catholic School League Makes National Impact

Abstract: After several years of steady if unspectacular play, New York City’s Catholic High School Athletic Association Class AA boys basketball league has returned to prominence — as much for its talent as for its depth. Four of the league’s nine teams have been ranked in nationwide polls this season, and at least eight players are expected to join N.C.A.A. Division I programs next season. “It’s kind of like the Big East,” said Oliver Antigua, the coach at St. Raymond in the Bronx. “If you’re not playing your A game, you get knocked off.” His team is among five from the league considered contenders for the city championship. The others are the defending league champion, Christ the King in Queens; Holy Cross in Queens; Rice in Harlem; and Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn. It is the first time that Tom Konchalski, a scout who publishes a recruiting pamphlet distributed to college coaches, said he could remember such balance in the league. “The strength of the Catholic league is not based on having the best players, best teams, best coaches, but it’s the best league,” he said. The five top teams all have at least one league loss, and four of their games against one another have gone into overtime. On Friday, Christ the King (14-4) topped Holy Cross (12-6) in double overtime, 92-87. Christ the King forward Ryan Pearson, a George Mason University recruit, sent the game into overtime by catching a long pass and hitting a 3-pointer off the glass at the buzzer. His coach, Bob Oliva, said the play summoned the image of Christian Laettner’s shot that lifted Duke past Kentucky and into the Final Four of the 1992 N.C.A.A. tournament. Mike Quick, the host of “High School Weekly” on the MSG Network, said the last time the league was this deep was in 1999, when point guards Omar Cook (Christ the King) and Andre Barrett (Rice) dominated the competition. “You can say with conviction: it’s the best league in America,” said Quick, who has covered high school sports since 1987. “Look at when these teams go around America, how well they play.” Earlier this month, Christ the King won the Bass Pro Tournament of Champions in Springfield, Mo., winning the final in overtime against LeFlore, a nationally ranked team from Mobile, Ala. The Rice Raiders captured the McDonald’s Classic trophy in Erie, Pa., by knocking off powerful St. Patrick of Elizabeth, N.J. They also claimed the Iolani Classic in Hawaii and the Bay Ball Classic in Delaware. St. Raymond won the Gatorade International Shootout in Puerto Rico, and Holy Cross captured the Stop-DWI Holiday Classic in Binghamton, N.Y. Among the projected college talent is the 6-foot-1 point guard Kemba Walker of Rice, who has committed to play for Connecticut, and two Bishop Loughlin players: the 6-7 power forward Kevin Phillip (Drexel) and the 6-foot point guard James Johnson (Quinnipiac). Others include the 6-1 shooting guard Darryl Bryant of St. Raymond (West Virginia), the 5-8 point guard Erving Walker of Christ the King (Florida) and the 6-6 swingman Sylven Landesberg of Holy Cross (Virginia). Landesberg is his school’s career scoring leader and the league’s reigning most valuable player. The league has remained strong despite an exodus of players to top programs in New Jersey and to prep schools elsewhere. One reason is the coaching, according to Providence’s associate head coach, Steve DeMeo. Coach Jack Curran of Archbishop Molloy is four victories short of 900 for his career. “You get a kid from a C.H.S.A.A. program, you know you’re getting a guy who is ready to compete at a high level,” DeMeo said. After a game last week, Erving Walker said every game tested the stamina, resolve and poise of league players. Players in some other leagues, he said, compile enviable statistics by breezing through the regular season. But he said he would not trade in his high school basketball experience. “You get better,” he said, “by playing the best.”

Basketball
Interscholastic Athletics
New York City


N.F.C. — Falcons’ Tony Gonzalez Narrows Focus

Abstract: FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. — For Michael Palmer, breakfast consists of oatmeal with blueberries and cinnamon. Why not a higher-calorie meal for a strapping, energy-burning N.F.L. tight end? Because Tony does it. Off to the side at each Atlanta Falcons practice, Palmer, an understudy whose chief duty is blocking, catches about a hundred passes. Why? Because Tony does it. In the team’s fitness area, Palmer devotes increased time to stretching because ... Tony does it. For 16 seasons, Tony Gonzalez, 36, has done it better than most tight ends. But amid the glittering career numbers that would make a statistician swoon — 1,242 receptions for 14,268 yards and 103 touchdowns — one protrudes like a rotten apple in a bushel full of Red Delicious: zero. Gonzalez spent 12 seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs and went 0-3 in playoff games, their extended postseason doldrums portending a limited future. So he negotiated a trade to the Falcons — the franchise with the worst N.F.L. postseason history (six victories since its inception in 1966). Yet with Atlanta, Gonzalez saw promise at the administrative and coaching levels and in quarterback Matt Ryan and wide receiver Roddy White, players he speaks so highly of he could preside over their fan clubs. With the Falcons for four years, Gonzalez has celebrated 45 regular-season victories, more than any other team during that time except for Green Bay and New England. Yet in the playoffs, he is 0-2 with them. With retirement looming — Gonzalez lists the odds of his playing next year at 19 to 1 — his desire for his first playoff victory falls well short of obsession. But, asked if a loss Sunday to the Seattle Seahawks would leave a hole in his résumé, he responded tersely. “That’s a tough question,” he said. “Ask me after the game.” Gonzalez has been around long enough to recognize that players are judged significantly on their postseason fortunes. “Obviously, in the playoffs, it steps up more because that is really kind of where your legacy comes in,” he said. “What you do in the playoffs is what a majority of people remember.” To Falcons Coach Mike Smith, one of Gonzalez’s many fans, there should be no win-for-Gonzalez sentiment in the locker room. Team-driven motivation should suffice. Image The 36-year-old tight end Tony Gonzalez has had an impressive season, leading the Falcons to the postseason. Yet he has an 0-5 record in the playoffs. Credit John Bazemore/Associated Press “Everybody needs to put individual thoughts behind them,” Smith said. That might be more challenging for the Falcons than containing Russell Wilson in the pocket. Palmer is among Gonzalez’s teammates who have told him how much they want to win for him. “It’s no secret,” Palmer said of the sentiment. The figure most associated with Gonzalez lately is 95, as in the percentage that he invokes on the likelihood of his retirement. The number appears to reflect reality. Gonzalez says his longtime companion and three children have similar leanings. Yet he intends to mull it over deep into the off-season, which partly explains why he has no intention of mimicking linebacker Ray Lewis’s moves in Baltimore last weekend during his final home game. “You don’t want to see me dance,” he said. “That’s not a pretty thing.” Gonzalez evidently has not disclosed his intentions to his coaches or teammates. He and the tight ends coach Chris Scelfo, in fact, agreed in training camp that the topic would stay off-limits. If he does retire, Gonzalez will become part of a select group of players who quit before their production began tailing off. His reception and touchdown totals this season surpassed those of his previous seasons in Atlanta, even after, by Scelfo’s estimate, Gonzalez confronted bracket coverage in six or seven games. “Frankly, I think he’s gotten better,” said Scelfo, who has been Gonzalez’s position coach from the outset in Atlanta. Gonzalez has offset any physical regression with a strict diet and a tweaked training regimen that features workouts with a kettlebell. Scelfo has reduced Gonzalez’s load at practice, telling him: “We don’t need you on Wednesday or Thursday. We need you Sunday.” Broad shouldered, Gonzalez is a master at applying to football the craft of blocking out a defender that he honed as a ferocious rebounder for the University of California basketball team. An innate sense of impending contact enables Gonzalez to protect himself, minimizing injuries. “I feel fine,” he said. “Honestly, probably a little bit healthier than I did the last few years.” Still, the probability of retirement sounded closer to certain with this comment: “There is no tomorrow. There is no saying, ‘We’ll get them next year.’ It’s about going out there and trying to finish on the right note.” If Gonzalez heads into retirement, Palmer’s playing time figures to grow next season should the Falcons bring him back. Nonetheless, the increased workload would be bittersweet. “As long as he wants to play,” Palmer said, “I’m all for it.”

Tony Gonzalez
Atlanta Falcons
Football
Seahawks
Playoffs


Casio Solar-Powered MTG-1000 Stopwatch

Abstract: Next to the plastic pocket protector, there is probably no better-known artifact of the nerd than the Casio G-Shock watch. But the chunky digital watch, created in 1983, has become a fashion item on the wrists of those who aren’t necessarily technologically inclined. To celebrate the brand’s longevity, Casio has created a number of multifunction watches, some with analog faces. They include the solar-powered, water-resistant MTG-1000, a stopwatch that tells time in 27 cities and features what Casio calls “multiband atomic timekeeping.” It is available at certain Macy’s stores and from Casio at www.gshock.com . Casio continues to engineer watches the way it has for a quarter-century, adding features and rarely removing any. One thing remains constant, though: programming the $400 watch by pushing its four buttons in a precise order is the true test of whether you are smart enough to wear it. For those who give up, leave the radio-controlled watch on a windowsill anywhere in the United States (or in Japan and most of Western Europe), and the next morning it will tell the correct time. DAMON DARLIN


N.L.D.S.: Brewers Beat Diamondbacks in 10th to Advance

Abstract: MILWAUKEE — The man of many personas, Nyjer Morgan, flitted from euphoria to sadness in the aftermath of the most important hit of his career. Morgan’s ground single through the middle delivered Carlos Gomez from second base in the 10th inning Friday, enabling Milwaukee to overcome closer John Axford’s first blown save in six months and eliminate Arizona, 3-2, in Game 5 of the teams’ National League division series. After Morgan ran around the field, traded his batting helmet for one that read T Plush (after Tony Plush, one of his three alter egos) and accepted Champagne and beer baths from teammates, he walked to an unoccupied place in the clubhouse, sat cross-legged on the floor and began to cry. “My grandfather, man — I wish he was here to see this,” Morgan said. “He was the only one who played in my family. And I lost him in May.” Morgan held a can of beer in his left hand and slowly dumped a little on the blue carpeting, until white foam bubbled. “I’ll pour one out for him,” he said. “Here ya go, bud. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Pretty solid. Pretty solid.” Morgan’s hit set off a thunderous celebration from the sellout crowd of 44,028 at Miller Park and a shower of blue and gold confetti and fireworks. It also rendered the excitable Morgan so out of control he yelled an off-color phrase to the crowd that the TBS microphones picked up live. The rally completed a game that had been tense throughout, as Milwaukee — which led the majors with 57 home victories — avoided becoming the first N.L. team to lose a division series after taking a two-games-to-none lead. Instead, the Brewers will face St. Louis in the N.L. Championship Series beginning Sunday. The Brewers had not won a playoff series since 1982, when the franchise was in the American League. “That was incredible, the intensity,” said Brewers left fielder Ryan Braun, who had two hits and batted .500 in the series (9 for 18). “You could feel the crowd. Everybody was nervous. Everybody was excited. I think everybody in the stands was waiting for a moment to go crazy like they did, and it was pretty cool.” Or, as the Milwaukee owner Mark Attanasio put it, “It was the most exquisite torture you could have, I guess.” The Brewers cobbled together the winning run against J. J. Putz in the 10th after a one-out single by Gomez, a defensive replacement in center field. With Morgan squaring to bunt, Gomez took off for second. Catcher Henry Blanco, who entered the game two innings before after starter Miguel Montero left for a pinch-runner, jumped from his crouch to throw but missed the pitch, allowing Gomez to steal easily. “When I got to second base, I said, if he hits it on the ground, I’m going to try to score,” Gomez said. “Nobody’s going to stop me. “I know Nyj. In those kind of moments, he’d be so big. I’ve had that feeling before, and I know he’s going to drive me in.” The Milwaukee ace Yovani Gallardo held the Diamondbacks to one run in six innings in his rematch with the 21-game winner Ian Kennedy, whom he outpitched to win Game 1. Neither figured in the decision, leaving Gallardo undefeated against Arizona this season (6-0, 1.23 earned run average). Gallardo allowed only a homer by Justin Upton in the third, the Diamondbacks’ 10th homer of the series. Gallardo would have been the winning pitcher if Axford, who had converted 44 consecutive save chances since April 18, had held the lead in the ninth. Axford found instant trouble when Gerardo Parra led off with a double and Sean Burroughs blooped a single into short left, putting runners at the corners. Willie Bloomquist dropped a squeeze bunt single toward first base to score Parra, as Axford accidentally tripped the charging first baseman Prince Fielder, who had hoped to throw home. “We talked about it a little bit,” Axford said. “That ball was just perfect. I didn’t know if I was going to get to it. If I did, I wasn’t going to have much of a shuttle throwing it home. I don’t know if got into Prince’s way, whether he was going to have a shot. “It worked out the way it did, and everyone pulled through.” Especially Morgan, who had been 1 for 11. Manager Ron Roenicke stuck with him, and Morgan rewarded that faith by doubling in the fourth and scoring a run to tie the game, 1-1. Yuniesky Betancourt put the Brewers in front with a sixth-inning single after center fielder Chris Young raced back to rob Jerry Hairston Jr. of an extra-base hit. Morgan likes to call himself an entertainer. He alternately refers to himself as Tony Plush, Tony Gumbel or Tony Tombstone. His interviews as the bubbly Plush, a persona he crafted with two friends back home in San Jose, Calif., endeared him to Brewers fans, though some of his quirks have tested Roenicke’s patience. “People have lost sight of how great he’s been for us on the field,” Braun said. “He’s obviously entertaining off it. He comes to the ballpark with a different personality every day. He’s a character, but he’s been so successful on the field. Tonight was as big as it gets.” Braun revealed a fourth Morgan persona, one that may stick. “The other day I started calling him Tony Clutch,” he said. “It was Tony Clutch that came through.”

Baseball
Playoff Games
Milwaukee Brewers
Arizona Diamondbacks
National League
Roenicke Ron
Axford John
Blanco Henry
Gallardo Yovani


Hazing and Drinking Deaths at Asian-American Fraternities Raise Concerns

Abstract: Syracuse University students trying to join Nu Alpha Phi, an Asian-American fraternity, were given demerits when they made mistakes during pledging, and a way to work them off . There were push-ups and situps in the attic of the fraternity house, according to investigators and students. There were extended periods in a sitting position — knees bent, backs to the wall — that tested their physical strength and resolve. And on one frigid night in March, there were exercises outdoors in a park, with three pledges crawling and rolling in the snow with no gloves. One of them got frostbite on both hands and faced losing several fingers. The number of Asian-American fraternities and sororities has grown over the last generation as the children and grandchildren of immigrants, feeling shut out of existing Greek organizations, began to create their own. And as those groups have spread across the country, some have replicated not only the social networking of other fraternities, but also their excesses. Last month, prosecutors in Pennsylvania announced that they planned to charge members of an Asian-American fraternity, Pi Delta Psi, in connection with a hazing-related death of a freshman at Baruch College in Manhattan during a retreat in the Poconos in December 2013. At least three other students have died during activities at Asian-American fraternities since 2005, and many more have been injured, resulting in a spate of criminal prosecutions, lawsuits and school disciplinary actions against fraternities and their members. Image Chun Hsien Deng It is difficult to say whether abuses are more common in Asian-American organizations than in others. There are no official statistics on fraternity deaths and injuries across the United States. But people who have studied the issue say they have been surprised by the number of episodes, given that Asian-American fraternities occupy just a small corner of the collegiate Greek world. “There shouldn’t be this many deaths, this many cases, for this small number of organizations, chapters and members, ” said Walter M. Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University in New Orleans, who is leading a task force on hazing prevention for the North-American Interfraternity Conference. Across the country, there are more than 65 Asian-American fraternities and sororities, by some estimates, though most have small memberships and operate without permanent headquarters, professional staff or campus housing for students. Lambda Phi Epsilon International Fraternity , one of the largest with dozens of chapters, has experienced the most problems, including three deaths. Peter Tran, 18, a student at San Francisco State University, died after attending a fraternity party in 2013; the fraternity was subsequently expelled by university officials. Phanta Phoummarath, 18, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, died after drinking at a fraternity party in 2005; his family received a $4.2 million settlement in a lawsuit against Lambda Phi Epsilon and its members. In a third case, in 2005, Kenny Luong, 19, a student at Cal Poly Pomona in California, died from head injuries after playing football against Lambda Phi Epsilon members from the University of California, Irvine. Mr. Luong and his schoolmates were trying to start a chapter at their own college, and as a requirement, they had to face off against the existing chapter at Irvine in a game without any helmets or pads, the authorities said. In a lawsuit against the fraternity that ended with a $1.7 million settlement, Mr. Luong’s family said the game was simply hazing in disguise, with the Irvine players often gang-tackling members of Mr. Luong’s outnumbered team, even when they did not have the ball. In the Baruch case, Chun Hsien Deng, 19, died after a ritual known as the “glass ceiling,” in which he was tackled by fraternity members while blindfolded and weighed down with a sand-filled backpack as he tried to cross a frozen yard, prosecutors said. After he was knocked out, they said, fraternity members delayed getting help and sought to cover up their involvement. Five of the 37 defendants are facing third-degree murder charges; the rest face charges that include assault, hindering apprehension and hazing. Amid growing concerns over hazing, members of Lambda Phi Epsilon and other Asian-American fraternities and sororities say their organizations have actively promoted no-hazing policies, increased training for members and replaced potentially abusive pledging rites, such as strenuous runs around campus, with talks on Asian-American issues and walks for cancer. Image A Syracuse University student seeking to join the Nu Alpha Phi fraternity suffered frostbite during pledging. Credit Brendan Bannon for The New York Times Alex Huang, 21, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, who belongs to Lambda Phi Epsilon, said that students who want to join his fraternity go to workshops, including one on “Lambda Man training,” where they are told to stand up for themselves and to know what is right. “Now there’s not much of anything that happens,” he said. Still, problems continue to crop up. Mr. Huang’s chapter was cited by university officials for hazing and serving alcohol to a minor in 2013. It was placed on probation and barred last year from holding social activities and recruiting new members. The Lambda Phi Epsilon chapter at Rutgers University was suspended this year over hazing. In the Syracuse case involving frostbite, Nu Alpha Phi was banned from campus and two of its members, Tae Kim and Jeffrey Yam, who served as pledge masters, are awaiting trial on a misdemeanor charge of hazing. If convicted, they face up to a year in jail. A lawyer for Mr. Yam could not be reached. James Hopkins, a lawyer for Mr. Kim, described him as a good student from a humble background who had no prior record and teaches chess to children. While he said it was unfortunate that the pledging student suffered frostbite, he said, “we are adamant that the same was not the result of criminal conduct on the part of Tae Kim.” (Ultimately, the student did not lose any fingers.) Richard Cohn, a lawyer who represented the family of Mr. Luong, the student who died after the football game, said that hazing continues even when students are told they do not have to take part. Pledges are intimidated and fear they will be rejected by the fraternity if they do not participate in the rites, he said. “In practice, what is really happening is flat-out hazing despite the fact that they put together all kinds of legal documents that set forth rules against hazing and all the members are supposed to sign off on it,” he said. The leaders of Lambda Phi Epsilon, Nu Alpha Pi and Pi Delta Psi did not respond to emails or calls seeking comment. Image Randall Sorrels, the lawyer for the family of Phanta Phoummarath, 18, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, who died after drinking at a fraternity party in 2005; his family received a $4.2 million settlement in a lawsuit against Lambda Phi Epsilon and its members. Credit Kevin Fujii/Houston Chronicle Brian Gee, the director of risk reduction for another Asian-American fraternity, Pi Alpha Phi, says that any time there is a hazing-related death or injury “it’s a huge setback” for leaders who are trying to make positive changes within their organizations and reinforces negative perceptions of them. “We’re always trying to do our best,” Mr. Gee said. “Every fraternity out there, Asian or not, has had setbacks. We do have very high expectations of our memberships to follow our policies. When violations are found, we do our best to hold chapters accountable. Sometimes that comes in the form of educational programming. Other times, it’s sanctions or suspensions of chapters.” The history of Asian-American fraternities and sororities can be traced back to Rho Psi, which was started in 1916 at Cornell University by Chinese men who found themselves excluded from all-white fraternities. Several Asian-American fraternities and sororities took root in California, where they thrived primarily on state university campuses. Starting in the mid-1980s and for the next two decades, many more Asian-American fraternities and sororities were founded across the country as the Asian population grew. The organizations are open to non-Asian students as well. Today, the groups remain relatively unknown, partly because, like many fraternities and sororities, their members are often secretive about the organizations’ inner workings. When Lambda Phi Epsilon and Pi Alpha Phi brawled in a park in San Jose, Calif., in 2003, leaving one man dead and others injured, Dr. Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University, noted that some police officers initially mistook them for Asian gangs. Julie J. Park, an assistant education professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, who has studied national data on college freshmen, estimated that approximately 2 percent of Asian-American students join Asian-American fraternities and sororities. For those who do, she said, those organizations add diversity to Greek life and can give Asian-Americans a more prominent role in campus social life. “I think when they are at their best, there’s a lot of good potential,” she said. Image The reports of hazing among Asian-American fraternities prompted Minh Tran, a director of curriculum and academic enrichment at U.C.L.A. School of Dentistry, to conduct his own field research in 2009. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times The reports of hazing among Asian-American fraternities prompted Minh Tran, a director of curriculum and academic enrichment at U.C.L.A. School of Dentistry, to conduct his own field research in 2009. Mr. Tran, who had joined Lambda Phi Epsilon at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1997, was allowed to conduct focus groups at Asian-American fraternities on three California campuses after agreeing not to use names. Many members said they joined because they were looked at as nerds rather than leaders by non-Asians, and felt stereotyped as socially and athletically inferior to other men, he recalled. Mr. Tran, 37, concluded that some men were taking hazing too far as “a form of hyper-masculinity.” Often, the hazing grew worse from year to year as members tried to outdo one another, and the worsening reputation of their fraternities attracted what he called “lower quality recruits” who tended to perpetuate that behavior. He added that there was inadequate oversight and support from national fraternity leaders, often recent graduates with little idea about what was going on in local chapters. Instead, these chapters relied on university-provided advising and support services, only to be cut off when they got in trouble and were suspended. Kai Tan, the national president of Xi Kappa Fraternity, with 300 members at three campuses in Georgia and at one campus in Boston, said that his organization was working with college administrators and outside consultants; participating in workshops to prevent hazing, alcohol use and sexual assault; and offering support to local chapters. “We’re trying to show we want to be part of the movement away from what happened in the past,” Mr. Tan, 27, said. He said that Xi Kappa’s “new member education process” — the term “pledging” is no longer used — focused on shared cultural identity through rituals such as the “privilege walk,” in which students line up and either take steps backward or forward, depending on successes or setbacks, such as whether their parents could vote, or whether they were racially profiled. Other activities, such as résumé workshops, emphasize personal growth. Justine Chang, 20, a member of Sigma Phi Omega at the University of California, Berkeley, said that more Asian-American fraternities and sororities needed to have frank discussions about hazing problems and their recurrence. Too often, she said, no one wants to talk about the issue. “When we hear about a horrible incident in the news, the immediate reaction for a lot of Asian Greeks is, ‘It’s a one in a million chance,’ ” she said. “That chapter did something that no one ever thinks would happen in their own chapter. But I think that’s a big mistake. A lot of the processes are similar. It could really happen anywhere.”

Fraternities,Sororites
Asian American
Hazing
College
Lawsuits
Baruch
Chun Hsien Deng
Alcohol abuse


Oregon Standoff Ends as Last Militant Surrenders

Abstract: PRINCETON, Ore. — They implored the last holdout in the armed occupation of a wildlife refuge here to think about the Holy Spirit. They explained that the First Amendment was about freedom of speech and the Second was about the right to bear arms, and said that they were in that order for a reason. They asked him what he thought Jesus would have done in his situation. He, in turn, asked for pizza and marijuana, criticized a government that condoned abortion and drone strikes, and talked about U.F.O.s and dying rather than going to prison. In the final moments, a standoff fed by big ideas about the role of government came down Thursday morning to the grievances and fears of one troubled young man, and the tense but successful efforts of his sympathizers and F.B.I. agents to coax him to surrender, ending the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon. “I’m actually feeling suicidal right now,” said David Fry, 27, of Blanchester, Ohio, the last of the remaining protesters to leave the wildlife sanctuary, during telephone negotiations over his surrender. “I will not go another day as a slave to this system. I’m a free man. I will die a free man.” In an extraordinary conclusion to the 40-day occupation, the four final holdouts, in a conversation streamed live online to tens of thousands of listeners, spoke with supporters trying to persuade them to give up, including Gavin Seim and KrisAnne Hall, both antigovernment activists; Michele Fiore, a Republican state legislator from Nevada; and the Rev. Franklin Graham, the evangelist. Three of the occupiers emerged in quick succession, hands raised in surrender, but Mr. Fry at first refused. For the next hour and a quarter, sitting alone in a tent, hugging a blanket, he veered between resignation and agitation, rambling across a wide range of issues and conspiracy theories, as the audience listening on the live stream, operated by Mr. Seim, climbed as high as 30,000. Mr. Fry said that bankers caused wars, and that the government suppressed breakthrough inventions and was “chemically castrating everybody,” and occasionally he could be heard talking on another phone with the F.B.I. Then, suddenly, it was over. “One more cookie, one more cigarette,” he said, just before leaving his hide-out. “Alrighty then.” With the end of the standoff — which left one protester dead and 25 others indicted — the movement behind the occupation moved to a new phase. Ammon and Ryan Bundy, the brothers who spearheaded the occupation and now sit in a Portland jail, have vowed to escalate their fight, using the court as a platform. Image Thomas Wagner waved a flag near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Thursday. Credit Rebecca Boone/Associated Press “Now we go from the refuge to our next battleground, which is the court system and legislation,” Ms. Fiore told reporters. She and Mr. Graham accompanied F.B.I. agents to the refuge Thursday, reassuring the holdouts as they gave themselves up, and she said she hugged each of them and the F.B.I. negotiators. The occupation highlighted longstanding grievances over federal government ownership and management of vast acreage in the West. The Bundy brothers’ father, Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher, was arrested Wednesday on charges related to the armed standoff in 2014 between his supporters and federal agents. He and his supporters, like the Oregon occupiers, maintain that the federal government does not have the legal right to own so much land and is too restrictive on ranchers using it. From the start, the Malheur standoff had a foot firmly planted in unfiltered live media, bypassing mainstream journalists, whom the protesters called tools of the government. Pete Santilli , who has an online talk show, was a frequent presence, interviewing and supporting the occupiers on his YouTube channel; he is among the jailed. Mr. Fry live streamed videos of the occupation and posted them online, while other protesters gave interviews on talk radio. The occupiers repeatedly called on people from around the country to join them at the refuge. But the mass movement they hoped for never materialized. Critics said the protesters relied on a strained reading of the Constitution that the courts have rejected. And many experts argued that, in fact, ranchers — along with loggers, miners and others — get the use of federal land at bargain prices, heavily subsidized by taxpayers. But Western lands experts and supporters of the occupation’s goals said that however quietly the standoff ended, and however garbled its message was at times, the deeper meaning will continue to resonate, because the occupiers in some ways reframed one of the nation’s oldest and thorniest arguments. The question of who should control land in the West — often a dry matter of economics in the past — has now been pulled into the polarized political terrain that has already made the nation a house divided. In the 1980s and early ’90s, in what is now called the Sagebrush Rebellion, ranchers in the West protested higher prices that the federal government wanted to charge to let cattle graze on public lands. That fight, said David J. Hayes, a former deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior — the agency that oversees hundreds of millions of acres of Western lands — was largely over money. The new argument, as the occupiers said repeatedly, is not overtly about money at all — rather, it is a much broader fight about the role of government and what constitutes federal overreach. “The claim is that the land belongs to private parties, and that public ownership is a foreign concept in our Constitution,” said Mr. Hayes, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, and now teaches law at Stanford University. “That’s a relatively new one,” he added, “and it finds no credible support in the U.S. Constitution.” However alien their arguments might seem to people in the East and in urban areas, where the federal government holds relatively little acreage, it has power in the rural West, where Washington controls more than half the land. But in this region, opinions were bitterly divided over the occupation; many people who supported its aims opposed its methods, and resented what they saw as interference and grandstanding by outsiders like the Bundys. Image A family waved a flag on Thursday in support of the last of the occupiers at Malheur Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore. Credit Rob Kerr/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The occupation of the refuge, about six hours’ drive from Portland, began on Jan. 2. Armed militants demanded the release of two local ranchers who were imprisoned on arson charges for burning public lands. They also called for federal lands that had been in private hands, generations ago, to be turned over to ranchers or to local government. The standoff appeared to be faltering in late January, when several prominent occupiers — including Ammon and Ryan Bundy — were arrested while venturing out of the refuge. A spokesman for the group, LaVoy Finicum, was killed , and several of the remaining occupiers heeded calls by the Bundys to go home. But four of them held out for another two weeks, before revealing in a live-streamed conversation Wednesday that they intended to surrender on Thursday. They invoked the death of Mr. Finicum as evidence that the government did not want a peaceful conclusion, saying that they feared being killed, too. On Thursday morning, Ms. Fiore urged the last four militants to surrender so they could continue to spread their message. “A dead man can’t talk, a dead man can’t write,” she told them. “We have to just stay together, stay alive.” Sean Anderson, his wife, Sandy, and Jeff Banta emerged after 9:30 a.m. But Mr. Fry, still on the phone with Mr. Seim, Ms. Hall and an F.B.I. agent, resisted until almost 11 a.m. “I’m paying taxes, and it’s going for abortion,” Mr. Fry said, and also for “murder of millions in the Middle East.” Later, he said, “My concern is that if I go to prison, I’ll probably be raped.” In a telephone interview, Mr. Fry’s father, William Fry Jr., 56, said he had spoken with his son after the arrest. “He said, ‘Hi, I’m O.K., I’m going to be fine.’ ” The two had been in contact during the occupation, and the elder Mr. Fry said he supported his son in “trying to make a change, to save our country from the problems that we’ve got.” About 50 or 60 cars were parked at the roadblock outside the sanctuary on Thursday, where protest sympathizers mixed with journalists. Thomas Wagner, 32, an unemployed security guard from Christmas Valley, Ore., stood atop his pickup truck in full military fatigues, and said, “I came here to support these four patriots, to let them know that they are not being abandoned.” In Burns, the town closest to the refuge, people raised American flags up and down the main street to celebrate the occupation’s end. “This is better than the Fourth of July,” said Bekka Riess, 15, beaming as she put flags up. “Maybe now we can finally get our town back.”

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
Civil Unrest
Federal lands
Ammon Bundy
Ryan Bundy
FBI
Cliven Bundy
Oregon


After Loss, Freddie Mac Seeks Aid

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Freddie Mac , the mortgage finance giant, is asking for an initial injection of $13.8 billion in government aid after posting a large quarterly loss. The mortgage finance company is making the first request to tap the $200 billion promised by the Treasury Department to keep it and its sibling company, Fannie Mae, afloat after the two were seized by federal regulators more than two months ago. Freddie Mac said it expected to receive the money by Nov. 29. The company, which is based McLean, Va., posted a loss Friday of $25.3 billion, or $19.44 a share, for the third quarter. The results compared with a loss of $1.2 billion, or $2.07 a share, in the year-ago period. Analysts were looking for a loss of 89 cents a share for the latest quarter, according to Thomson Reuters. The loss was mainly because of a $14.3 billion charge to reduce the value of tax assets, but also was driven by $9.1 billion in write-downs on mortgage securities, and $6 billion in credit losses because of soaring mortgage delinquency rates and foreclosures. Freddie Mac said that rising unemployment rates, tightening credit and deteriorating economic conditions “contributed to a substantial increase in the number of delinquent loans,” including prime loans made to borrowers with strong credit. “Continuing home price declines and growing unemployment are now affecting behavior by a broader segment of mortgage borrowers,” the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Freddie Mac’s overall delinquency rate rose to 1.22 percent, from 0.9 percent at the end of June, and 0.5 percent a year earlier. The number of foreclosed properties that Freddie Mac holds rose to 28,000, from 22,000 in June. On Monday, Fannie Mae posted $29 billion loss in the third quarter as it took a tax-related charge. While Fannie Mae said it might have to seek the government’s help in the coming months, it has not yet done so. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which own or guarantee around half of the $11.5 trillion in outstanding home loan debt, operate in a conservatorship that enables the government to inject up to $100 billion in each company in exchange for ownership stakes of almost 80 percent. Both Fannie and Freddie have changed their accounting for their deferred-tax assets, which can emerge from operating losses, and can be used to reduce future tax expenses. Companies must be able to show they will be profitable if they intend to use the tax assets for earnings in later periods. Freddie Mac’s net worth — the value of its assets minus the value of its liabilities — fell to negative $13.8 billion at the end of September.

Freddie Mac
Company Reports
Subprime Mortgage Crisis


A Political Jolt at a Literary Festival, but Courtesy Wins Out

Abstract: JAIPUR, India — Every year at this time, India’s beau monde rearranges itself in Jaipur for a spectacularly popular five-day literary festival. There are Punjabi princesses in Jackie Onassis sunglasses, book club aunties in top-shelf homespun, parboiled-looking Englishmen, men of letters with Oxbridge accents and the occasional well-buffed South Delhi influence peddler. At night, they gather for cocktails in floodlit palaces. To be liberal, if not leftist, is as proper as a quilted handbag. So it was a startling sight this year to see the Jaipur Literature Festival feature a panel by two leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh , the far-right group that gave rise to India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi. The R.S.S., which maintains that India is fundamentally a Hindu nation, has been barreling toward drawing-room respectability for some time. Left-leaning Congress governments banned it three times in the last century, saying its ideas risked inciting violence against minority groups. These days state television carries its leader’s speeches live. But there are few invitations in Indian public life more coveted than one to appear at the festival in Jaipur, that Mount Olympus of panel discussions. The two R.S.S. men took their seats on a podium, where a minute before, an author had been asking rhetorical questions about the existence of beauty. How would the audience greet them: As India’s version of the Tea Party, giving voice to ideas that have taken on extraordinary force in the electorate? Or as India’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, propagating “extremism and bigotry,” as one author put it in a letter withdrawing from the event? In the end, arm’s-length politeness reigned. “We are acknowledging that the intellectual nerve center has shifted, and the seat of cultural power has shifted, because no one was interested in inviting these guys before 2014,” said Supriya Nair, a writer and editor who has attended the festival for the last six years. In any case, she said, the shift rightward had already taken place in the larger society. “This is a last bastion,” she said. The R.S.S., for its part, savored its moment. “R.S.S. was allowed entry into this space for the first time,” said Prafulla Ketkar, who edits Organiser, the group’s in-house magazine. “For whatever reason, now they are compelled to recognize the fact that R.S.S. is a force to reckon with, and one which cannot be ignored at panel discussions.” Image Most of the people cramming into the festival discussions were neither haughty leftists nor right-wing polemicists, but ordinary people, and thousands of students. Credit Poras Chaudhary for The New York Times Not everyone was handled with such delicacy. Among the festival’s designated victims was Suhel Seth, a ubiquitous man about town and one of Delhi’s master bloviators. Even by Bengali standards, Mr. Seth, the author of the self-help book “Get to the Top,” is skilled at drowning out other speakers, deflecting all contenders with sonorous repetitions of “one minute, one minute, one minute” until they retreat into dejected silence. On Monday, he appeared on the panel “Manelists, Misogyny and Mansplaining,” next to a row of female writers who turned on him with gusto, asking why he kept interrupting. He tried, haltingly, to discourage them from viewing this phenomenon through the lens of gender. “In Calcutta, we didn’t know misogyny or mansplaining,” he said starchily at one point. “All that we knew was the idea of ‘gentleman’ and ‘gentlemanly.’ ” Pressed on these terms, he fluffed himself up. “Yes,” he said, “gentleman is what we use. I’m sorry if it doesn’t stand up to the rigors of today’s understanding.” At this, Bee Rowlatt, author of a book about Mary Wollstonecraft , an 18th-century crusader for women’s rights, took the microphone and asked why he was onstage at all. The audience cheered. Mr. Seth, at this point, fell silent for several consecutive minutes, a fact so remarkable that an anonymous gossip blogger known as JLF Insider publicly invited Ms. Rowlatt for coffee. Among the great draws of the Jaipur festival, of course, is that it is possible to be excluded. At a party thrown by Penguin Random House India, in a palace once occupied by a maharajah, guests were led through a gate where dancing girls whirled giddily on the ramparts and over a red carpet across an expanse of gardens, dark except for thousands of tiny flickering candles and liveried servants offering Champagne. “We almost got run over by horses,” one partygoer said blandly, drifting off toward the gin. JLF Insider observed a well-known journalist, young women in tow, frantically mining his contacts to get through the door. “It’s important,” the blogger said. “If you make the right impression with the right person, you will perhaps be in a panel next year.” Indeed, there is a category of Delhi writers who spend much of the year angling for an invitation to speak, through assiduous attendance at other writers’ book launches. Rosalyn D’mello, who had waited fruitlessly for an invitation for two years after the publication of her memoir, “ A Handbook for My Lover ,” wrote despairingly on Facebook about the experience, describing it as “so, so painful to watch so many random so-called authors, who seemed to be invited more because of their networks than any real talent.” Her complaint seemed to penetrate a fourth wall, and William Dalrymple , a historian and one of the festival’s co-directors, offered her a spot on a panel. But the real gatekeeper for Indian writers is the festival’s other co-director, Namita Gokhale, the writer and publisher, and she is not easily moved. Image The Jaipur Literature Festival runs for five days and is extremely popular. Credit Poras Chaudhary for The New York Times “I never appease anybody,” she said. “If I don’t want to call someone I can be quite cussed.” Mr. Dalrymple, who selects non-Indian writers, said he felt fortunate that Ms. Gokhale handled this part. “She is constantly avoiding people at Delhi parties, people who have written self-published memoirs and think they should be there,” he said. Among those who did not appear was Raghu Karnad, the author of a well-received recent history, “ Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War .” In a letter explaining his withdrawal as a moderator, he said that he had watched as right-wing politics suffused other popular literary festivals, and that inviting the R.S.S. was “beyond the pale.” Mr. Dalrymple sounded genuinely sad at the mention of Mr. Karnad. He said the rise of right-wing politics had posed a dilemma for organizers of events like his, because India’s elite universities and publishing houses are so overwhelmingly left-liberal. “It’s like captaining a slightly listing boat, that is kind of toppling to one side,” he said. He said the R.S.S., which was founded in 1925 in imitation of European fascist movements , had become too important to ignore in intellectual forums. The invitation did not convey any particular imprimatur, he argued, “because they run the country.” “This is an organization that controls the ruling party,” he said. “To exclude this element would be to relegate us to a left-liberal bubble with ourselves.” In the end, most of those cramming into the festival were neither haughty leftists nor right-wing polemicists, but ordinary people afflicted with book love. At a discussion on Hindu scripture, a man in a plaid scarf rose to ask, after a moment of hesitation, “What is the best way for an old man to try and learn Sanskrit, and enjoy it before he dies?” And there were students, thousands of them, subsisting on 30-rupee cups of sweet tea. Some of them spent five days sleeping in the train station because they did not have enough money to rent a room, said Payal Rajawat, 20. For her part, she said, she craved the free-ranging discussion of art and literature, something not available at the Vivekananda Institute of Technology, which she attends. “I am a totally freaky lover of language,” she said. As for the inclusion of the R.S.S., Ms. Rajawat saw no problem. Like her friends, she celebrates the rise of Mr. Modi, saying he had elevated India’s standing to the point that “even America is paying attention.” One of her friends this year had rejected a Happy New Year greeting because he said it was a holiday imposed on India by Western colonizers. This line of thinking gave her an idea, which she suggested passing on to the organizers of next year’s literary festival. “Mr. Modi is a mesmerizing speaker,” she said. “Believe me, ma’am, the whole world would come into this place.”

Books
Politics
Publishing
India
Writer
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh India
Jaipur


Alderson, Mets’ G.M., Assesses Team With Humor

Abstract: INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Laughter may often be the best medicine for the Mets , who face a catalog of serious tasks this winter, and Sandy Alderson , the team’s cerebral general manager, demonstrated again Thursday that he has the comic chops to elicit it. Holding court inside the hotel lobby Thursday morning at baseball’s annual general managers meeting, Alderson deadpanned his way through a question-and-answer session. The pack of reporters was eager for clues on how he might try to improve a financially challenged team that has finished a combined 22 games under .500 in the two seasons he has been in charge. Alderson has serious issues to address these days — the foremost one at the moment may be whether to trade the 38-year-old knuckleballer R. A. Dickey rather than try to sign him to a contract extension — but that did not stop him from poking fun at his problems, of which there are many. One reporter asked Alderson for his assessment of the Mets’ outfield, which presently resembles a wasteland, without a single everyday player. “What outfield?” Alderson replied, spurring a burst of laughter from those gathered around him. That quickly led to another quip. “We’re going to bring those fences in another 150 feet,” he said, playing off the fact that a season ago he shortened the dimensions of spacious Citi Field in a bid to help the team’s power hitters. Two jokes are a lot for a general manager speaking on the record, but Alderson was just getting started. Asked from where the team’s new outfielders would be acquired, he grinned. The reporters waited. “A cardboard box?” he said, finally. Not even his current players were spared. Alderson affirmed that, at present, Lucas Duda, who is blessed with power but not with defensive skills, was the team’s best option in left field. But he then took the opportunity to tweak Duda, who fractured a bone in his right hand while moving furniture at his apartment in Southern California last month. “He does come with a lot of furniture, though,” Alderson said. “I mean baggage. I’m sorry.” As the laughter died down, Alderson added, “We’re counting on him at this point.” Alderson’s sense of humor has surfaced often enough as he has wrestled with the daunting assignment of reviving the Mets. The team has been too often overmatched on the field and is still trying to regain its balance financially after its entanglement with the Bernard L. Madoff fraud scheme. During last year’s winter meetings, Alderson shot down a line of questioning about whether he had tried hard enough to re-sign shortstop Jose Reyes, who ended up joining the Miami Marlins on a six-year, $106 million deal. “If you’re asking whether I should have sent him a box of chocolates, perhaps I should have done that,” he said. “On the other hand, the box of chocolates would have cost $106 million.” A little while later, Alderson opened a Twitter account, @MetsGM , which he then used in February to poke fun at his organization’s financial difficulties. His first message — “Getting ready for Spring Training-Driving to FL but haven’t left yet. Big fundraiser tonight for gas money. Also exploring PAC contribution.” — was reposted 410 times on the site, and he proceeded to post in real time about his drive to Port St. Lucie with a similar spirit of satire. At one point, he posted : “Will have to drive carefully on trip. Mets only reimburse for gas at a downhill rate. Will try to coast all the way to FL.” This summer, when Pablo Sandoval of the San Francisco Giants beat out David Wright in fan balloting for third base on the National League All-Star team, Alderson went at it again. “Wright vs. Sandoval,” he wrote on Twitter . “A city of 8 million was outvoted by a city of 800,000.” Alderson’s counterpart on the Yankees, Brian Cashman, has become noticeably more direct in recent seasons, often saying exactly what he is thinking and occasionally using some humor, too, although not to the degree that Alderson does. Cashman has also taken to rappelling down a building in Stamford, Conn., during the holiday season, a feat that Alderson, a former Marine who will turn 65 in two weeks, has not shown any desire to match. But Alderson has his own heights to scale simply in trying to make the Mets competitive again. Amid the jokes on Thursday remained the question of whether the team would be able to sign both Dickey, a surprise 20-game winner in 2012, and Wright to contract extensions. Alderson said discussions with both players were continuing and said of Dickey, who is signed through 2013: “We’d love to retain him. We’re trying to.” But Alderson, his humor put aside, also acknowledged that trading a member of the Mets’ fairly deep starting rotation might be the best way to acquire talented players to fill some of the holes in the Mets’ lineup. He also said that while it might be “a little unusual” to trade someone now favored to win the Cy Young Award, it was not inconceivable that Dickey would be sent elsewhere. “It happens,” Alderson said. If it does, Mets fans will not be laughing. But Anderson will not be, either. After all, he knows that the jokes only go so far.

Baseball
Alderson Sandy
New York Mets
Dickey R A
Trades (Sports)
Wright David


Disappointing Fall for ‘Rock Center,’ a News Program With Big Ambitions

Abstract: If “Rock Center With Brian Williams” has proved anything in the last year and a half, it is this: However hard it is to gather an audience for any kind of show in prime time, for news programming, the task is even harder. The ambitious NBC newsmagazine was scheduled to be shown for the final time on Friday night. Within NBC News, employees expressed a sense of disappointment — not so much in the quality of the program, but that it was not rated highly enough to remain on the network schedule. To those who invested much in producing the show, its demise raises doubts about whether any new newsmagazine can succeed on network television these days. To that point, Rome Hartman, the founding producer of “Rock Center,” said in an interview: “I hope that’s not true. I sure hope that somebody figures it out.” “Rock Center” was the first new prime-time newsmagazine to be introduced by any network since CBS added “60 Minutes II” in 1998. Mr. Williams, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” had been eager to try something in prime time, and when Comcast took control of NBCUniversal in 2011, he got his chance. For Comcast, giving the go-ahead to “Rock Center” was, among other things, a way to provide clear support to the network news division it had just acquired. The newsmagazine had its premiere on Halloween. Unlike CBS’s “48 Hours” and NBC’s “Dateline,” which are mainly about crimes and court cases, “Rock Center” presented a wide array of stories each week and was closer to the “60 Minutes” model than anything else on television. But the comparisons to “60 Minutes” were rarely complimentary; “It’s a very hard standard to match,” Mr. Hartman said. More important, “60 Minutes” was able to find its footing four decades ago, before the days of cable and Internet competition. It has a protected Sunday night time slot that often gets a big ratings lift from sporting events that are shown beforehand. “60 Minutes II,” on the other hand, was canceled in 2005. And “Rock Center” was canceled in May, shortly before NBC announced its schedule for the television season that starts in September. With an audience that sometimes slipped below three million people, the network could not justify another season of “Rock Center.” At a time when audiences have far more choices than ever before, online as well as on TV, the people involved with “Rock Center” may have simply overestimated the public’s appetite for taped news stories in prime time. Said one former NBC executive: “You can’t launch a serious newsmagazine anymore. Those potential viewers, if they’re around, they’re watching cable news.” There is no shortage of niche news and information programming on cable. CNN, for instance, will show a new documentary series from Morgan Spurlock this Sunday. HBO recently granted a second season to a youthful newsmagazine, “Vice,” and OWN has “Our America,” hosted by Lisa Ling. These programs, though, do not have the sweep of a network newsmagazine. Video In 2013, Brian Williams sat down with The Times’s Bill Carter to discuss the ever-changing news industry. If the decision to cancel “Rock Center” was not surprising, it was still dismaying to Mr. Williams and to others on the staff, some of whom will lose their jobs after Friday’s final broadcast. (Many others will be absorbed by other NBC News programs.) One staff member said Mr. Williams felt insulted by the network’s decision; another said what pained Mr. Williams most were the layoffs. Staff members were told not to talk to the news media, so those who did speak did so on condition of anonymity. An NBC spokeswoman said on Thursday that Mr. Williams was not available for an interview about the program’s accomplishments. Patricia Fili-Krushel, the chairwoman of the NBCUniversal News Group, declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the end of “Rock Center.” Staff members expressed pride in the program, asserting that it was a rare outlet for interviews and investigations that lasted longer than a few minutes. (Typically the program had three to five stories an hour. Once in a while the hour was devoted to a single subject, like one show titled “Mormon in America.”) “There’s a feeling of loss for the practice of long-form journalism, as hokey as that sounds,” said another staff member, who cited “60 Minutes” and another CBS program, “CBS Sunday Morning,” as two places where in-depth reporting could still be found on commercial television. Mr. Hartman, who was replaced in the fall but stays in touch with former co-workers at “Rock Center,” said, “Everyone, from Brian to the correspondents to producers, feels like they’re glad they did it, even though it didn’t end the way they wanted it to.” The reason most often cited by employees for the show’s struggles was out of the staff’s control. It was the series of time slot changes, from Monday to Wednesday to Thursday and finally Friday, that robbed the program of any real consistency. “They moved it around so much; they treated it like filler,” said the former NBC executive. Mr. Hartman noted that “60 Minutes II” had suffered from the same problem. Some television critics pointed to a different reason: the program’s sometimes confusing mix of high and low, serious and silly. (Debates about news programming frequently center on such questions.) Critics also pointed to the hiring of Chelsea Clinton, who was a “special correspondent,” as evidence that the show was not up to the challenge of a high-quality newsmagazine. The show had only two full-time correspondents, Kate Snow and Harry Smith, several fewer than “60 Minutes,” raising a question about whether the network had devoted the necessary resources to the program. Many other NBC correspondents, including Ann Curry and Meredith Vieira, also contributed. Some staff members said they wished they had generated more nights like Nov. 14, 2011, when Bob Costas scored a news-making live interview with Jerry Sandusky, who then stood accused of sexual abuse. Alexandra Wallace, who replaced Mr. Hartman, declined to be interviewed about the end of “Rock Center,” but said in a statement: “Our gifted staff and correspondents have told unbelievably important stories — from Sandusky to Scientology to the Boston bombing survivors — and Brian was also able to show a looser side of his personality and sense of humor. We’re proud of every minute of television we put on air and thankful to the viewers who tuned in.”


A.N.C. Weighs How to Lift South Africans

Abstract: JOHANNESBURG — During apartheid, in the coastal municipality of Overstrand, just east of Cape Town, whites lived in plush, seaside enclaves whereas blacks and mixed race people lived in ugly townships and shacks. Whites owned almost all the businesses, and had access to the best jobs, health care and schools. Eighteen years after the end of apartheid, not much has changed, said Maurencia Gillion, a local politician who grew up and still lives in Overstrand. “The rich white people live in their beautiful holiday homes,” Ms. Gillion said. “The rest are in slums, in squatter areas. Even after 18 years, in reality apartheid remains.” That would seem a harsh critique of the party that has governed South Africa since the end of minority rule in 1994, the century-old African National Congress . It came not from an opposition leader, but one of the party’s own. Ms. Gillion is a senior A.N.C. leader in her province, and her words were simply an echo of what the party’s leader, President Jacob Zuma, said in a speech minutes earlier. “The structure of the apartheid economy has remained largely intact,” Mr. Zuma said, in a speech to thousands of delegates to the A.N.C.’s policy conference, held every five years, before the presidential election, to work out the party’s platform. “The ownership of the economy is still primarily in the hands of white males, as it has always been.” The four-day conference here, which began Tuesday, has been devoted to considerable soul-searching about what the A.N.C. has, and has not, achieved in 18 years in power. With unemployment at 25 percent, and much higher for young blacks, and corruption widespread, there is a growing perception that the A.N.C. has become the party of a small black elite interested only in its own enrichment. To counter this perception, the party has released a set of back-to-basics policy proposals that it claims will help deliver on its old election slogan: “A better life for all.” The party’s own analysis had this to say about South Africa’s predicament nearly two decades after the end of apartheid: “Too few people work; the standard of education of most black learners is of poor quality; infrastructure is poorly located, under-maintained and insufficient to foster higher growth; spatial patterns exclude the poor from the fruits of development; the economy is overly and unsustainably resource-intensive; a widespread disease burden is compounded by a failing health system; public services are uneven and often of poor quality; corruption is widespread; and South Africa remains a divided society.” Officials were quick to say that 18 years is a short time to reverse centuries of discrimination under colonial and apartheid rule that left black South Africans ill equipped to compete in a liberalized economy. And Mr. Zuma ticked off a list of major achievements: millions of new houses for the poor; millions more connected to the electric grid and piped water systems; and a growing and vibrant black middle class. Embedded in the policy documents and Mr. Zuma’s remarks is an argument that the process of transforming the country’s economy to put more wealth in the hands of blacks was hampered by the need to make peace with the former white rulers. “We had to make certain compromises in the national interest,” Mr. Zuma said. “We had to be cautious about restructuring the economy in order to maintain economic stability and confidence at the time. Thus the economic power relations of the apartheid era have remained intact.” The party is thus proposing what it calls a “second transition,” this one focused on economic, rather than political, change. The policy proposals take a hard look at some of the most difficult issues facing South Africa, and at the A.N.C.’s internal struggles. One asks whether the government should dispense with the current policy of land redistribution and replace it with a more aggressive one. Another contemplates nationalizing the country’s mines. Taken together, the proposals would, if adopted, represent a sharp leftward shift for the A.N.C., which despite its roots has largely backed a free-market economy with minimal state intervention. The proposals are being discussed this week and will be decided upon when the party holds its convention in December. Some A.N.C. members have been pushing for a more radical program of redistribution of wealth from whites to blacks. The party’s Youth League, under the firebrand leader Julius Malema , had demanded that gold, platinum and diamond mines be nationalized. Cosatu, an alliance of trade unions that is one of the A.N.C.’s main allies, has pushed for banks to be nationalized. Yet, according to the A.N.C.’s own analysis , its failure to deliver economic progress may be its own fault. The party has experienced “a silent shift from transformative politics to palace politics wherein internal strife and factional battles over power and resources define the political life of the movement,” a far cry from its founding as a liberation movement built on socialist principles. For all the fears of a leftward shift that could lead to the repossession of white-owned land, as happened in Zimbabwe, or the nationalization of mines, such moves are highly unlikely, said Steven Friedman , a political analyst at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg. “There is going to be lots of fairly radical rhetoric, and the actual proposals are going to be actually quite meek and mild,” Mr. Friedman said. “This has been the pattern all along.” Indeed, some delegates at the conference advocated a go-slow approach. “I support the sharing of wealth, but I don’t think we should go for a radical approach,” said Tim Mkhari, a delegate from Limpopo, a province on the country’s northern edge. “We should not take the Zimbabwe route,” he said.

South Africa
African National Congress
Apartheid (Policy)
Politics and Government


F. Maynard Sundman, Stamp Dealer, Dies at 92

Abstract: F. Maynard Sundman, a stamp and coin dealer whose innovative mail-order marketing, using everything from comic books to matchbook covers, introduced millions to the once exclusive worlds of philately and numismatics, died Oct. 31 in Littleton, N.H. He was 92. The cause was heart failure, said his youngest son, Donald. It was Mr. Sundman’s advertising acumen that set his companies apart. Reaching beyond trade publications, he squeezed little ads onto matchbook covers and splashed big ones — “Free! 30 Much-Wanted Foreign Stamps!” — in Sunday supplements, comic books, TV Guide, Parade magazine and National Geographic. As early as the 1950s, his commercials were on late-night radio, coast to coast. Mr. Sundman’s breakthrough came in 1952, when a nationwide ad in Sunday supplements offered a free set of 10 stamps from Bohemia and Moravia depicting Adolf Hitler. “The mail just flooded in,” recalled Mr. Sundman’s oldest son, David — a total of half a million orders, exhausting the world’s supply of the stamps. A stamp collector since childhood, Mr. Sundman started his second company, the Littleton Stamp Company, in 1945, after returning from Army service in World War II. Within 10 years the company had branched out into collectible coins. Mr. Sundman widely expanded the practice of shipping items “on approval” — trusting prospective customers either to buy the collectibles or to send them back. Over the years he sent hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stamps and coins to a diverse clientele. “It just shows you that the average person is honest,” Mr. Sundman said in a 1992 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer. “He became a master at mail order,” said Q. David Bowers, a co-chairman of Stack’s, a New York coin dealer, explaining that Mr. Sundman used a scientific approach to learn which ads increased sales. “His theory was that if this ad showed a 5 percent improvement, and if something else was 4 percent, the next ad would multiply all those factors and be even better.” Mr. Bowers likened the Littleton Coin Company to Wal-Mart, because of its versatility and its huge stock of popular collector coins. “For people in the hinterland, it’s easy to order by mail,” he said. “Also, there’s something very special about receiving a package in the mail. People like to open them.” Mr. Sundman has had “a huge impact in the stamp industry, primarily with the marketing to nonestablished collectors,” said Ken Martin, deputy executive director of the American Philatelic Society. “Most people aren’t going to start off paying a thousand dollars for a postage stamp. A collector starting out at $5 a month may become a customer for $50, $100 a month in a year or two.” Frederick Maynard Sundman was born on Oct. 17, 1915, in New Britain, Conn., the only child of Frederick William Sundman and Floy Rae Maynard. He graduated from Bristol High School in 1935; that year, operating out of his parents’ house with $400 and a small line of credit from a prominent stamp dealer in Boston, he started the Maynard Sundman Stamp Company. He shut the company a few years later and, from 1941 to 1945, served in North Africa and Italy with the Fifth Army, earning a Bronze Star. After the war, Mr. Sundman moved to Littleton and started the Littleton Stamp Company with his first wife, Fannie Kasper of Terryville, Conn., whom he married in April 1941. The company started in a one-room office on Main Street in Littleton; the couple lived down the street, over an A.&P. store. Today the company employs about 350 people and occupies 85,000 square feet. In 1974 Mr. Sundman bought the Mystic Stamp Company of Camden, N.Y., now the country’s largest stamp dealer. His earlier firm, which had been called the Littleton Stamp and Coin Company until the mid-1970s, was renamed the Littleton Coin Company. Until recently, Mr. Sundman reported to work almost daily, using a 1948 Royal typewriter to correspond with collectors around the country, his friends and family said. Mr. Sundman’s first wife died in 1993. He remarried in 1994 and is survived by his wife, Dorothy; his sons from his first marriage, David and Frederick, both of Littleton, and Donald, of Skaneateles, N.Y.; his stepdaughter, Jeanne Joslin of Canterbury, N.H.; his stepson, Richard Joslin of Littleton; eight grandchildren; and four stepgrandchildren. His sons David, president of the Littleton Coin Company, and Donald, president of the Mystic Stamp Company, have endowed a lecture series in his name at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum and another at the World’s Fair of Money, the American Numismatic Association’s annual convention.

Deaths (Obituaries)
Sundman F Maynard
Collectors and Collections
Numismatics


Amazon Reading Device Doesn’t Need Computer

Abstract: Jeff Bezos knows that the world is not exactly clamoring for another way to read electronic books. “If you go back in time, the landscape is littered with the bodies of dead e-book readers,” Mr. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.com , said yesterday. Mr. Bezos is hoping that Kindle, an ambitious $399 e-book device that he introduced in New York, will avoid that fate. Kindle, which Amazon spent three years developing, lets users wirelessly download best sellers for $9.99 each, and it is designed to be simpler to use and more comfortable to hold than similar devices. Most significant, Amazon has made it easy to shop for and buy books through Kindle without using a computer. The device connects to a high-speed wireless data network from Sprint, and wireless delivery is included in the cost of books and other products. Downloading a book takes less than a minute. Mr. Bezos said Kindle was most likely to appeal to travelers and others who want to carry several books with them. “Anyone who is reading two, three, four books at the same time should have one of these,” he said in an interview. Kindle can store 200 books at once. Mr. Bezos added that he thought Kindle would be more comfortable for people to curl up with than previous reading devices. It weighs 10.3 ounces and uses so-called electronic ink technology licensed from the company E Ink, based in Cambridge, Mass. The screen reflects light, making it easier to read in a bright room, and it uses less power and generates less heat, because there is no backlight to the display. Kindle will also download and display newspapers, magazines and blogs. Among the newspapers available are The New York Times for $13.99 a month and The Wall Street Journal for $9.99 a month. Some 300 blogs are available for 99 cents or $1.99 a month. Amazon shares some of that fee with newspaper and blog publishers. The device will only be available at Amazon. Amazon, which is one of the world’s largest booksellers, reached agreements with all the major publishers to sell their wares on Kindle. It has about 90,000 titles so far and 90 percent of current best sellers. Sony, which introduced an e-book reader a year ago, has about 20,000 titles for sale. Publishing executives said they were optimistic about Kindle. “You kind of understand why it has been three years in development because it offers so much in an uncomplicated way,” said David Young, the chief executive of the Hachette Book Group USA, which owns Little, Brown. “The big challenge, of course, is that it is still relatively expensive,” he added. “You have to be a very committed book person to get a repay on that investment.” The publishers themselves are concerned about return on investment; most have been spending a great deal to digitize their libraries for electronic readers, with little to show for it so far. “If it does contribute to the many millions of dollars we have invested as an industry, that’s great,” Mr. Young said. Amazon and the publishers declined to discuss the specifics of their financial arrangements. But several publishing executives said the industry practice was to sell an electronic version of a hardcover with a list price of $27 for about $20. While deals vary, the wholesale price of a $20 e-book is about $10, and most retailers have been selling them for about $16. The publishers said Amazon was paying about the same wholesale price as Sony and other e-book vendors. By offering best sellers for $9.99, Amazon is leaving no profit margin, and it will have the expense of paying Sprint for the data transmission. Amazon says it hopes to make money on older titles that have better profit margins. Digital distribution of books would seem to have a lot of benefits for publishers. So far there is not much book piracy online (although there have been some high-profile leaks, most notably that of the latest Harry Potter book). There also is not much pressure to break books into smaller pieces, in the way that people want to buy songs, not albums. And there are no conflicts with distributors of the sort that complicate the online video business. Indeed, e-books have the potential to save publishers the cost of printing, distribution and returns. But publishers said their biggest hope was that Kindle would expand sales of books to a new generation of gadget lovers. “We have great authors, and we want to get our books to readers, and this is another channel to us,” said Kate Tentler, senior vice president for digital media at Simon & Schuster.

Books and Literature
Computers and the Internet
Amazon.com Inc
Bezos Jeffrey P


Raptors Add Bismack Biyombo

Abstract: The Toronto Raptors signed Bismack Biyombo, a free agent who played last season with the Charlotte Hornets, to a one-year contract. The Raptors did not disclose terms of the deal.


Expected Benefits of Renewed Brooklyn Sewage Station Include a Creek Less Foul

Abstract: The jewel-like brick structure stands unmarked in a jumbled corner of Brooklyn, amid housing projects and plain rowhouses and elevated train tracks and the headquarters of the Aardvark Amusements carnival ride company. Soaring ornamented columns frame arched windows 15 feet high. Eye-pleasing rhythms in the Beaux-Arts style abound. A golden eagle gleams atop a flagpole. For all the building’s splendor, though, many in the neighborhood have no idea what goes on inside. “I would think a library, or hopefully some kind of center for youth?” guessed A. J. Malone, 24, who was walking by on a recent afternoon. Taylor Jones, 23, admired the facade. “I’m thinking it’s some kind of sort of mausoleum” for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, he ventured. “It looks very secluded in there.” It is a sewage pumping station. Not just any sewage pumping station. It is the Avenue V pumping station in Gravesend, near Coney Island, the largest in New York City, a nearly 100-year-old testament to the majesty of public works that conveys the daily waste of 300,000 residents to a treatment plant in Bay Ridge. Image The station was designed in a neo-Classical style. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times It has just had an $8 million face-lift intended to bring it back to its original glory. But the real upgrade, which goes into full operation this month, is beneath the surface: $200 million worth, of new equipment at the station and pipes leading out of it, part of New York’s continuing $10 billion effort to stop dumping untreated sewage into waterways like Coney Island Creek, just half a mile from the plant. “This investment will go a long way toward restoring ecological health to Coney Island Creek,” said Emily Lloyd, commissioner of the city Department of Environmental Protection. The plant was built in 1917, before there was even such a thing as sewage treatment. Back then, the city’s sewers simply transported waste to a convenient dumping point. As Brooklyn developed, its waters became unswimmable. “ Bathing in Filth ,” a 1914 editorial headline in The New York Times read. The first pumping stations were commissioned to redirect the effluent to less desirable places, like Coney Island Creek , a brown slash mark separating Coney Island from the rest of Brooklyn that had already been turned into a watery dead-end, its flow blocked off by trash and ashes. For the building to house the plant, said Vincent Sapienza, the environmental department’s deputy commissioner for design and construction, “the city fathers wanted our municipality to be one of the great cities of the world, and we wanted to compete with Vienna and Paris.” Image Glazed green wall tiles inside the plant repeat motifs of lanterns and leaves. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times “And so the thought was, ‘Hey, why not make even the humble sewage pumping stations look beautiful?’ ” he continued. Thus dawned the city’s brief golden era of sewage pumping-station design. A public servant named Albert Martin drew up plans for the Avenue V plant and four others in Brooklyn. Avenue V was done in a neo-Classical style often seen in libraries of the era , with symmetrical facades and terra cotta details. When the Owl’s Head treatment plant opened in the 1950s in Bay Ridge, the Avenue V station sent its sewage there. But the city’s 19th-century sewer system, still largely intact, has a built-in problem. It sends wastewater from buildings and storm runoff from the streets through the same pipes. When there is a big storm, it is more than the system can handle, and the excess is simply flushed into the nearest waterway in what is called a combined sewer overflow. Each year, more than 20 billion gallons of this mix of untreated sewage and polluted storm water are discharged. Avenue V’s contribution was 300 million gallons a year dumped into Coney Island Creek, nowadays a forlorn backwater known mostly for its collection of spavined ships and a rotting yellow submarine . But under state and federal mandates to reduce sewer overflow, in 2005, the upgrade of Avenue V began. Image Discharge into Coney Island Creek is expected to fall by nearly 90 percent. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times Six new 350-horsepower pumps were installed and hooked up to six miles of new, widened pipes, some of them four feet across, running to Owl’s Head. Ancient switches and banks of equipment were replaced. (The station is now fully automated and controlled remotely; on a typical day, the only discernible sound is the muffled hum of pump motors.) Avenue V can now pump more than twice as much sewage, and the discharge into Coney Island Creek is expected to fall by nearly 90 percent. While the city was at it, it gave the building, which was falling apart, a full renovation. Inside the plant now, a balcony with fine bronze rails looks down at a maze of fat pipes. Glazed green wall tiles, bathed in light from the picture windows, repeat motifs of lanterns and leaves. Mr. Malone, the man who thought the building might be a youth center, was disappointed to learn what the city had been sprucing up. “To be honest, wow,” said Mr. Malone, who works at a BJ’s Wholesale Club and lives in the nearby Marlboro Houses. “A sewage building.” Yes, but a sewage building that is part of the city’s history, Mr. Sapienza said. “D.E.P. believes that we should try to restore great public works as best we can,” he said. “We think it’s worth the effort and a little bit of extra money.” “Recognizing the uniqueness of the facility,” said Ted Timbers, a department spokesman, “we will consider public tours.”

Department of Environmental Protection NYC


Couple Charged in Killing of Girl’s Mother

Abstract: A 16-year-old girl and her boyfriend were arrested yesterday in the killing of her mother, who was found on Sunday in her Brooklyn apartment with her throat slit, the police said. The girl, Vintarra Martin, and the boyfriend, Damasoh Kelly, 24, of Columbus Avenue in Upper Manhattan, had fought with Ms. Martin’s mother, Sharon Taylor, 41, at the apartment on Rogers Avenue in East Flatbush where both mother and daughter lived, the police said. The fight turned violent and, the police said, Mr. Kelly used a stun gun on Ms. Taylor, a secretary with the New York Police Department. When she was down, her daughter slit her throat with a house knife, the police said. The police, following tips, were led to the teenager and her boyfriend about 1 a.m. yesterday in the Bronx. The two were charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon. Ms. Taylor had worked as a police administrative aide since 1993. Most recently, she was assigned to the Brooklyn transit division. Investigators believe that the killing was the result of a fight over the girl’s possible pregnancy. There was no history of domestic disputes reported at the home, the police said.

Brooklyn (NYC)
Murders and Attempted Murders


Packer Is Leaving CBS After Calling 34 Final Fours

Abstract: Billy Packer’s 34th Final Four was his last. Packer, the occasionally controversial CBS Sports college basketball analyst, is leaving the network after 27 seasons and will be replaced by Clark Kellogg, who has been CBS’s top studio analyst. “This is a decision that was made more than a year ago,” Packer said Monday from his home in North Carolina. “CBS has a relationship with the N.C.A.A. long beyond the number of years I can do the tournament, and I have things I want to do. They have to have plans for the future, and I’m not doing the tournament when I’m 75.” Packer, who started his network career at NBC, is active in real estate and other businesses and is working on a major college basketball project that he hopes to announce by September. “It involves Web sites and interactive games,” he said. Packer, 68, said he had worked for CBS under a series of one-year contracts that gave him the freedom to depart when he felt he had lost his motivation to continue to call games. “I wanted to have the guts to say to myself, ‘Billy, you didn’t really prepare for this game and you ought to be somewhere else,’ and I’d know it’s time to leave,” he said. He said that time never came and that the new project was his primary reason for leaving. He said he still enjoyed calling the N.C.A.A. men’s tournament, “but it’s a challenge like 34 others.” Still, CBS officials decided a year ago that the time had come to make the transition to Kellogg. “We didn’t have to make the transition, but, intuitively, it felt right,” said Sean McManus, the president of CBS News and Sports. “Billy understood the rationale for it. It was a cordial discussion.” Packer’s involvement in college basketball has at times been overshadowed by controversial incidents. In 1996, he called Allen Iverson, then with Georgetown, a “tough little monkey” to praise his style of play; in 2000, he apologized for making allegedly sexist comments to two female Duke students who were checking his credentials before a game; and in 2004, he argued on the air with St. Joseph’s Coach Phil Martelli over the university’s No. 1 regional seed. McManus said that the Kellogg-for-Packer move had nothing to do with Packer’s opinions, performance or expertise. Greg Anthony is in talks with CBS about replacing Kellogg in the studio.

Basketball
NCAA Basketball Tournament
College Athletics
CBS Corp
Packer Billy