Accused Nazi Arrives in Munich

Abstract: BERLIN — John Demjanjuk of Seven Hills, Ohio, born Ivan Demjanjuk in Ukraine in 1920, arrived in Munich Tuesday morning to face accusations of crimes committed as a Nazi death-camp guard. Mr. Demjanjuk was deported for the second time by the United States on Monday. The first time was 23 years ago, and he was bound for worldwide notoriety, accused of being the unfathomably cruel “Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka,” one of the Holocaust’s most infamous sadists. He was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel, before new evidence won him a reprieve and eventually a trip back to the United States and the return of his stripped citizenship. But the wheels of justice began to grind again, and the whole process has repeated itself step by step. Monday night, a frailer Mr. Demjanjuk, now 89 and once again stateless, boarded a special medically equipped airplane bound for Germany , where he is accused of being an accessory in the murder of 29,000 Jews while working as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in eastern Poland. Investigators say that the documentary evidence is strong and that they will be able to prove that Mr. Demjanjuk was a living cog in a killing factory, where some 250,000 people were put to death in just one and a half years of operation. His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., says that his father, who has bone-marrow and kidney diseases, is being hounded by the United States Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and German prosecutors in an inhumane fashion. Mr. Demjanjuk’s guilt will be decided in a Munich courtroom, assuming he lives long enough and is deemed fit to stand trial. But throughout the recent months of courtroom battles over appeals and stays of deportation, the gulf between the enormity of the crimes Mr. Demjanjuk is accused of and the frail old man he is now has grown more apparent. Ultimately Mr. Demjanjuk’s advanced age and poor health serve as reminders, regardless of the outcome in court, of how the living memory of the crimes committed during World War II is on the verge of disappearing. Mr. Demjanjuk’s case might well be the last major war crimes trial in Germany, marking the end of an era that began in Nuremberg in 1945. Thomas Blatt, 82, who was a prisoner at Sobibor at the same time Mr. Demjanjuk has been accused of having worked there as a guard, said the trial itself was more important than meting out any punishment. “I don’t care if he is released; I do care about his testimony,” said Mr. Blatt, who now lives in California and has written two books about his experiences. “There’s many people right now who say the Holocaust never happened.” Mr. Blatt said he did not remember Mr. Demjanjuk from Sobibor, but he pointed out that he also could not recall the faces of his parents who were killed at the death camp along with his younger brother. Mr. Blatt was one of the few prisoners to escape Sobibor, in an uprising there in October 1943. Mr. Demjanjuk was a soldier in the Soviet Army, fighting against the Germans, until he was captured in the Crimea in 1942. Mr. Demjanjuk says he spent most of the remainder of the war as a prisoner. But according to prosecutors, he went to an SS training camp in Trawniki, Poland, where foreign nationals were trained to take part in the Holocaust. After the war, Mr. Demjanjuk moved to the United States, where he became an autoworker and raised a family. But in 1977, several Holocaust survivors identified him as Ivan the Terrible. Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death by an Israeli court in 1988. But the conviction was overturned in 1993, and he was freed by Israel’s Supreme Court after evidence surfaced suggesting that another man was most likely Ivan the Terrible. An identity card from Trawniki indicates that Mr. Demjanjuk was sent to serve at Sobibor. His family has maintained his innocence throughout the three-decade legal odyssey. “Now at the age of 89, when alleged witnesses are now dead, he’s faced with having to defend himself again, when with the pain and suffering he’s no longer capable,” his son said on Monday in a telephone interview. “You would have thought that after the mistake they made in nearly sending him to the gallows, they would have just let this go.” The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Mr. Demjanjuk’s latest appeal last week, and a Berlin court declined an appeal on Monday. “The only reason not to put someone like Demjanjuk on trial is if he is not capable to stand trial,” said Cornelius Nestler, a professor of criminal law at the University of Cologne, who is advising possible co-plaintiffs in the case. “I think in the same way that the grief of the people who left their parents, very often their whole family, in Sobibor will not be over until their death, the responsibility of the people who did it will not be over until they’re dead.”

War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity


4 U.S. Military Efforts on ISIS and Syria Yield Mixed Results

Abstract: The Obama administration has tried four military approaches to combat the Islamic State and to help shape the outcome of Syria ’s civil war, which began more than four years ago. The main objective has been to cripple the Islamic State, which has gained control of territory straddling Syria and Iraq , rather than to aid the Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad. But the administration has said Mr. Assad must give up power for there to be any settlement to the conflict. The American actions, which critics say have sometimes worked at cross purposes, have achieved mixed results at best. The emergence in recent weeks of a muscular Russian intervention in Syria to support Mr. Assad has raised new complications for the United States. Here is a look at each American approach: TRAIN AND EQUIP The Obama administration said Friday that it had halted this $500 million program , which was undertaken by the Pentagon and was meant to train as many as 5,400 Syrian fighters this year, and 15,000 over three years, at facilities in Turkey and Jordan for ground combat against Islamic State militants in Syria. The program was plagued with problems, including desertions and low recruitment, because many rebels wanted to fight Mr. Assad and not just the Islamic State. Only a handful of trainees completed it. COVERT C.I.A. TRAINING Little has been disclosed about this operation, which has helped train fighters battling Mr. Assad’s forces. Groups vetted by the C.I.A. and deemed sufficiently moderate and secular — calling themselves part of the loose-knit Free Syrian Army — have received training and supplies, sometimes including advanced antitank missiles. The Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, dealt a setback to the C.I.A. program last year by dismantling its main fighting groups and seizing American weapons, including some of the missiles. More recently, however, some of the groups have fought alongside Nusra in tactical alliances, aiding the advances that helped to spur new Russian intervention. In the past week, some units have been hit by Russian airstrikes. KURDISH-ARAB COALITION This effort, which American officials have increasingly promoted in recent days, is intended to arm 3,000 to 5,000 Arab fighters, who would join more than 20,000 Kurdish combatants to attack Islamic State forces protecting Raqqa, the Syrian city that is the group’s main stronghold and the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate. The Arab contingent, which the Pentagon calls the Syrian Arab Coalition, is said to be composed of 10 to 15 groups. They would also be used in a related undertaking with Turkey to create a 60-mile “safe zone” along the border. AIRSTRIKES IN SYRIA AND IRAQ An American-led coalition of Western and Arab states has been bombing Islamic State positions for more than a year, initially in Iraq and then in Syria. Since Russia’s intervention a few weeks ago, American officials have said, the United States has undertaken more bombing missions in Iraq and fewer in Syria, partly to minimize the risk of conflict with Russian warplanes. While the American-led effort appears to have hurt the Islamic State’s expansion, the group remains ensconced not only in Raqqa, but also in the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Ramadi.

ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Syria
Russia
US Military
Iraq


Young, Female, Energetic and, Now, Dean

Abstract: HEMPSTEAD NORA DEMLEITNER has never been afraid to take chances. At the age of 19, she left her home in Germany to attend college in the United States, following her dream of becoming a lawyer like her childhood TV idol, Perry Mason. Since then her path has included a degree from Yale Law School, a master’s degree in international and comparative law from the Georgetown University Law Center, and a clerkship for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., then sitting on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and now a Supreme Court justice. She made her way to the Hofstra Law School faculty in 2001, and on Jan. 1, Ms. Demleitner, 41, became the law school’s youngest dean ever and the first woman to fill the dean’s chair since the school was founded in 1970. She had served as interim dean since March, and her appointment concluded a national search that took almost a year. Alan N. Resnick, one of six members of the law school faculty on the 13-member search committee, said Ms. Demleitner “has energized the school.” Hofstra and Touro are Long Island’s only law schools. “We were looking for someone who was not only highly regarded in the law school world, but someone who has vision,” he said. “We found a dean who sees where the future of legal education is going and who will help Hofstra retain and grow its excellent faculty.” The search committee was not the only one impressed by Ms. Demleitner. Justice Alito, for whom she served as a clerk in 1992 and ’93, said he was, too. “She had a wonderful academic record and came highly recommended to me by people at Yale Law School,” Justice Alito said in a telephone interview. “I was immediately impressed by her poise and intelligence.” Ms. Demleitner was particularly eager to clerk for Justice Alito because they shared an interest in sentencing. She later became a managing editor for the Federal Sentencing Reporter, a journal that explores sentencing law. A self-described liberal Democrat, Ms. Demleitner said politics was never an issue in her relationship with Justice Alito, a conservative. Justice Alito said he likes to think he taught Ms. Demleitner “to keep an open mind and not to come to cases with any preconceived notions.” She said that even when she was ready to make a judgment, “He would always say, ‘You may want to read this case one more time.’ ” Her first university position came in 1994, when Ms. Demleitner became a professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio at the age of 27. Jeffrey J. Pokorak, who was part of the hiring team at St. Mary’s, said: “Even at a young age, Nora was well known and respected. She was a brilliant young scholar who had drive and a commitment to social justice.” Reflecting on her appointment as dean, Mr. Pokorak, who is now an associate professor at Suffolk University in Boston, said: “Hofstra has not only gotten a great scholar, but a really fine manager. Nora has all of the pieces.” As dean, her ultimate goal is “to make Hofstra Law School a household name.” “We have a faculty that can be compared to the country’s top 30 law schools,” said Ms. Demleitner, who has a son, 6, and a daughter, 3. “But now we need to create a buzz about the exciting things going on here and raise awareness that Hofstra is an intellectual powerhouse.” Another priority for her is to help the law school, which has 1,150 students, become a legal hub for Nassau County businesses and news media, Ms. Demleitner said. “If someone has a legal issue, we want to be the first resource,” she said. Her enthusiasm is evident when she talks about the presidential debate to be held at Hofstra on Oct. 15. But she is particularly excited about a March 11 visit by Justice Alito that will include a number of public events. “It is important for students to see someone who has achieved such a high office by being very smart, hard-working and extremely ethical,” she said. “Justice Alito taught me about ethics and the importance of being aboveboard. In his office he had a roll of stamps, so that when he sent a personal letter, it wouldn’t go out with a U.S. government seal.” “He also taught me about the importance of hard work,” she said. “Intellect doesn’t matter unless you put in the effort.” To which Justice Alito responded, “Nora has both.”

Law Schools
Colleges and Universities
Politics and Government


Congressional Portfolios, Outpacing the Market - Essay

Abstract: SHOW me a new study about water on the moon, or why pregnant women don’t tip over, and I’m happy as a pig in whatever it is that pigs like. I’m just a big fan of science. So I am thrilled by a recent learned paper that says quite a lot about money and the people who make it. The study, “Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives,” is a real eye-opener. Using the financial disclosures of politicians, the research team built model portfolios and charted their performance. They found that House members “earn statistically significant positive abnormal returns,” outperforming the market by 6 percentage points. Senators do even better, the authors say, citing their own earlier research from 2004. Senate portfolios “show some of the highest excess returns ever recorded over a long period of time, significantly outperforming even hedge fund managers,” with gains that are “both economically large and statistically significant.” They beat the market, my friends, by 10 percentage points a year. Take that, Jim Cramer! The authors suggest that members of Congress have access to “nonpublic information that could have a substantial impact on certain businesses, industries or the economy as a whole,” and that investing on that information “could yield significant personal trading profits.” In the study, the authors recommend all kinds of new disclosure and monitoring requirements to root out misconduct and shut the door on the Congressional casino. Wonks! The real lesson here, obviously, is an unbeatable investment strategy. To your impecunious correspondent, the path is clear: I need to be elected to Congress! Over the years, my own strategy has produced abnormal returns, but in the wrong direction. Like a reverse Midas, I have a way of turning gold into stuff that pigs like. It’s time for me to produce gains that are “both economically large and statistically significant.” I called one of the authors of the report, Alan J. Ziobrowski, an associate professor of business at Georgia State University, to learn more. He explained that he and the other researchers used the phrase “abnormal returns” to describe profits “beyond the area that we would call normal good fortune,” money so large that “it’s not rational to assume that they are just plain dumb-lucky.” Professor Ziobrowski also gave one possible explanation for why the trading profits appeared to diminish the longer that someone served in office. “At some point,” he said, “it could be that the risk isn’t worth the return, if you know what I mean.” About now, you are probably thinking, “Schwartz, you idiot.” And, if you’ve read this column before, it’s not a new thought. But this time I really think I’m on to something. You run for office on other people’s money. Once you win, you get the bits of information — academics might call them the Ziobrowski Whispers — that will bend the markets to your will. What could possibly go wrong? Well, Professor Ziobrowski’s enthusiasm for my idea seemed somewhat muted, as if he actually did not appreciate its brilliance. “The key is, you’ve got to get elected,” he explained patiently. “You may have to sell your soul to do that.” I asked, “And the problem with that is?” He laughed. Considering what he knows about the possible returns, I asked, had he ever thought of running himself? “No, I can’t honestly say I did,” he said. “I’m a lowly little college professor.” From Georgia, I pointed out. College professors from Georgia haven’t done badly on the national stage. Newt Gingrich has had two lines of credit at Tiffany’s worth more than a million bucks! Mr. Ziobrowski, astonishingly, demurred. “I’m not ready to trade my free time for money.” Frustrated, I called a former member of Congress, Nick Lampson, a Texas Democrat who served from 1997 to 2009, with a break from 2005 to 2007 because of an electoral loss. I told him that I was looking for a role model. “You may have the wrong person,” he said. Especially when he served in Congress, he said, “I’ve always lived hand to mouth and didn’t have disposable income to invest.” Even now, he said, “I don’t have any stocks in anything of consequence.” While he heard things while serving that might have made him some money, he said, “I never felt comfortable doing things when I heard.” His time in Congress did not make his family rich, he said, but he’s not complaining. “We’re paying our bills, and I sleep well at night, and I’m reasonably happy,” he said. What’s wrong with these people? That’s certainly not the way I’d play the game. I disclosed to him my desire to cash in by getting in. He said something that caught me by surprise. Though you couldn’t tell it by looking at many of the members, it’s actually not that easy to be elected to Congress. “It’s ugly,” he said. “It’s hard.” Party labels set voters against you, he said, and people say awful things about you. Still, he said, “If you’re there, and you’re there for the right reasons, it’s for me the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life.” I don’t think we have the same working definition of “rewarding” or “the right reasons.” This was starting to sound like a less attractive deal than I had thought. An opponent who wanted to say awful things about me probably wouldn’t even have to lie, or to dig very deep. People have said awful things about me for most of my life, and to my face. They are called editors. But I digress. If I can’t win, here’s another thought: How about a mutual fund tied to senators’ purchases? If their information is so good, let’s all sign on. The possible flaw in that plan, of course, is that information is only valuable if it’s held by the few. Let everyone in on the secrets, and they aren’t secrets any more. The senators and House members wouldn’t make any more money in the market than the rest of us. And the problem with that is?

Stocks and Bonds
House of Representatives
Senate
Mutual Funds
United States Politics and Government


Panel Wants BP Fines to Pay for Gulf Restoration

Abstract: WASHINGTON — A large share of the penalties collected from BP for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill should be dedicated to repairing the ecological, economic, public health and psychological damage from the spill, according to a group named by President Obama to chart a course for the future of the wounded gulf. In a report to be presented Tuesday in New Orleans, Ray Mabus , the Navy secretary and a former Mississippi governor, will urge Congress to create a Gulf Coast Recovery Fund to oversee the restoration efforts. The fund should be managed by a council including federal, state, local and tribal representatives, the report states. The goal is to create a steady stream of money and a consistent governmental focus on a restoration project that will last years. The Mabus report provides no estimate of the overall cost of the effort, but it is likely to run into the billions of dollars over the next several years. BP’s civil and criminal liabilities could exceed $15 billion, although the final figure will hinge on whether the company is found guilty of gross negligence in causing the spill of nearly five million barrels of oil. Eleven workers were killed when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20. Mr. Mabus declined in an interview to estimate how much of BP’s money should be devoted to long-term recovery efforts, saying only that it should be a “significant amount.” “The gulf took the risk and the gulf took the damage and the money should be dedicated to going back there,” he said. As a first step in the restoration plan, the president plans to soon sign an executive order creating a Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, which will led by Lisa P. Jackson, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator and a self-described “New Orleans girl.” The group will begin the longer-term tasks that the recovery fund is intended to address, with a particular emphasis on public health concerns, including many cases of stress and depression brought on by one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. Ms. Jackson said the task force was intended to go out of business when Congress creates the permanent restoration council. She did not venture a guess as to when that might happen. Mr. Obama said in a June 15 address to the nation that the injury to the gulf would persist long after the well was capped, which effectively occurred in mid-July. “Beyond compensating the people of the gulf in the short term,” the president said in that speech, “it’s also clear we need a long-term plan to restore the unique beauty and bounty of this region.” He continued, “The oil spill represents just the latest blow to a place that’s already suffered multiple economic disasters and decades of environmental degradation that has led to disappearing wetlands and habitats.” BP has pledged as much as $20 billion to compensate those who lost their property or livelihoods as a result of the spill, but has not committed to gulf restoration projects that go beyond the immediate impact of the spill. Company executives said recently that their willingness to contribute to such work would depend on their continued access to oil and gas beneath the gulf waters. Some in Congress want to deny BP any future rights to drill in the gulf because of its poor safety and environmental record. The difficulty of assessing the continuing damage to the gulf was underscored Monday in conflicting testimony before the commission investigating the causes of the accident. Federal scientists have calculated that as much as three-fourths of the oil that leaked from the stricken well evaporated, was dispersed, eaten by microbes or collected at the surface. But Ian R. MacDonald, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University, testified Monday that more than 50 percent of the oil is still in the gulf, much of it buried in marine and coastal sediments. He said the remaining oil was likely to have long-lasting effects on plant and animal species in an area that was already badly damaged by the stresses of overfishing and coastal runoff of pollutants. “We should use the BP fine (as much as $19 billion) to establish an endowment to restore, understand and sustain the coastal and marine environment in perpetuity,” Dr. MacDonald said in his prepared testimony.

Fines (Penalties)
BP Plc
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Gulf of Mexico
Environment
Wetlands
Oceans and Seas
Mabus Ray


Seven Share Lead at U.S. Senior Open

Abstract: Kenny Perry shot a three-under-par 67 and is in a seven-way tie for the lead at the United States Senior Open in Omaha. Perry, who won the Senior Players Championship two weeks ago, is joined at the top by Michael Allen, Jay Don Blake, Gary Hallberg, Mark O’Meara, Tom Lehman and Fred Funk. ■ Phil Mickelson eased back into links golf with a six-under-par 66 at the Scottish Open, leaving him behind two Englishmen, John Parry (64) and Simon Khan (65), after a low-scoring first round. ■ Angela Stanford and Catriona Matthew each shot eight-under-par 63 to share the first-round lead at the Manulife Financial L.P.G.A. Classic in Waterloo, Ontario. They are two strokes ahead of the top-ranked Inbee Park, who is trying to become the first golfer to win four straight L.P.G.A. Tour events since Lorena Ochoa in 2008. ■ Zach Johnson shot a seven-under-par 64 and is tied with Camilo Villegas for the lead after the opening round of the John Deere Classic in Silvis, Ill.


Vote on New Boeing Contract Highlights a Rift in the Machinists’ Union

Abstract: After Boeing’s workers in Washington State voted down an eight-year contract extension in November, Boeing wasted little time in soliciting offers from other states to build its new 777X aircraft. Within weeks, 22 states made proposals to Boeing, with some offering billions of dollars in subsidies to lure a project that would mean thousands of jobs and the prestige of having such a prominent manufacturer. All this so alarmed the leaders of the main union representing Boeing workers, the International Association of Machinists, that its president has brushed aside the objections of the local union and ordered a new vote — scheduled for Friday — on a slightly revised version of the contract. The dispute highlights a rift within the union, one that reflects the varying priorities of its leadership. Union officials in Washington State want to preserve gains hard won from a company that has surging profits and record plane orders. But the international leadership sees a different threat — the possibility of losing a large manufacturing center and more than 10,000 union jobs to a right-to-work state where it would be difficult to win representation. And that could mean a big loss in dues — Boeing workers in the Puget Sound area paid $25.5 million in dues to the international union in 2012. Boeing has promised to put final assembly of the 777X in the Seattle area, as well as fabrication of the aircraft’s wings, if the 31,000 Boeing machinists vote to approve the revised deal. But that is by no means a sure thing. The president of the international union, R. Thomas Buffenbarger, defied union leaders in the Puget Sound area by ordering the new vote, and those leaders are urging Boeing workers to once again vote down the extension, which calls for numerous concessions. In a message to Boeing workers in the Puget Sound area, Thomas Wroblewski, president of Machinists Union District Lodge 751, which is based there, said, “Because of the massive takeaways, the union is adamantly recommending members reject this offer.” Mr. Wroblewski has asserted that the revised deal is not different enough from the previous deal — which was rejected 67 percent to 33 percent — to warrant a new vote. District 751’s leaders oppose Boeing’s demand that the machinists approve a deal that would freeze their pensions in favor of less generous, riskier 401(k) plans. District 751’s leaders also voice dismay that the deal would increase out-of-pocket health spending and includes raises totaling just 4 percent over eight years. If the machinists reject the revised deal, Boeing will continue its search on where to locate assembly of the 777X. The 777 is a long-range, twin-aisle aircraft that carries about 365 passengers. The 777X, which Boeing hopes to begin delivering by 2020, would be about one-fifth more fuel-efficient and carry up to 400 passengers. Washington State, where the 777 is assembled, has promised Boeing $8.7 billion in tax breaks through 2040 if it puts the final assembly of the 777X in the state. Some workers resent being asked to approve a deal filled with concessions at a time Boeing has record profits and a record backlog of $400 billion in orders. And those objections have grown since Boeing’s board decided two weeks ago to raise the company’s dividend about 50 percent and approve a $10 billion stock buyback. “The optics of this are not good,” said Richard L. Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group in Fairfax Va. “Boeing couldn’t have timed this any worse from a negotiating standpoint.” Many Boeing workers complain that the parent union has scheduled the vote for Friday, when many will still be on vacation for the holiday season. Many machinists also say they are not being given enough time to study and discuss the revised proposal — the new vote was announced four days before Christmas. Frank Larkin, communications director for the machinists’ parent union, said it was vital to hold the vote soon. “The timing was driven largely by Boeing’s attempt to announce in early January its plans for where it will place assembly of the 777X.” On Dec. 26, Mr. Buffenbarger, the international’s president, sent a letter to the 31,000 workers eligible to vote, praising the revised deal, without specifically urging a yes vote. “The total value of the new improvements to the contract offer adds more than $1 billion to the previous offer,” he wrote. “I believe this represents a significant improvement worthy of the membership’s consideration.” Mr. Buffenbarger said the revised deal added a $5,000 one-time payment, payable in January 2020, on top of the $10,000 bonus Boeing had previously promised upon ratification. In the biggest revision, the new proposal would preserve the current six-year “progression” it takes for new workers to reach full pay. In the first deal, that would have taken 16 years. A Seattle television station, KING-TV, reported that Boeing sent a letter on Tuesday to all machinists preparing to vote. The letter was written by Alan May, vice president for human resources at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, and said that a yes vote would “secure jobs in the Puget Sound region for the next decade and beyond.” On their website, District 751’s leaders have posted a detailed explanation of what they say is wrong with the revised contract extension, which would be added onto the contract that expires in 2016. One objection is that the extension calls for a 1 percent raise every other year during the eight-year extension. “It’s a bridge too far; it’s asking too much from us,” said Wilson Ferguson, president of the Local A unit of District 751. “The problem is that it seems that our international union is complicit and working with the company to push this thing through.” District 751’s leaders say it makes business sense for Boeing to put 777X assembly in Washington State, largely because there is so much manufacturing expertise and experience there. As a result, they see little justification for far-reaching concessions. “There’s an overwhelmingly strong argument for keeping this project in Puget Sound,” Mr. Aboulafia said. “Boeing would have to be willing to inflict a lot of damage to itself to leave.” The Seattle Times obtained a copy of the request for proposals that Boeing sent to other states. It said total investment to build the 777X could reach $10 billion. District 751 officials note that the Puget Sound area already has most of the needed facilities as well as trained workers and a proven supplier network. Mr. Ferguson asserted that W. James McNerney Jr., Boeing’s chief executive, is so anti-union that he might decide to place 777X production outside Washington State even though, in Mr. Ferguson’s view, it would end up costing the company more and delaying production. “I’d call it corporate suicide if Boeing moves this elsewhere,” Mr. Ferguson said. Boeing officials have long been dismayed with the militancy of the Puget Sound machinists; they have gone on strike against Boeing five times since 1977. Jake Rosenfeld, a labor relations specialist at the University of Washington, said he admired District 751’s toughness, although he said the fight to retain pensions had generally been lost across corporate America. “The international union will say the local is too dug in, too focused on local issues,” he said. “The international will say we have a broader perspective on these issues, ‘We fought our fight and this is the best we could get here.’ ”

Boeing
Labor Unions
International Assn of Machinists
Manufacturing
Relocation
Washington
Jobs


Scientology’s Pasadena Center Is Part of Global Growth

Abstract: PASADENA, Calif. — The opening of a Scientology center in this city’s Old Town neighborhood was a significant local event. Church members spent $10 million to buy a historic four-story building and $6 million more to restore it to its 1906 luster before a gala dedication ceremony on July 18. But the Pasadena project is just one part of a much larger undertaking for the church: the creation of about 50 new centers in 16 countries. The global real estate firm CB Richard Ellis is managing the project on behalf of the church. Dana Barbera, a senior director of CB Richard Ellis, said the challenge facing his firm was that the church was seeking to install nearly identical facilities in buildings as distinctive as a resort near Johannesburg, a bank headquarters in Brussels and a hotel in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. His project management team, working with the architecture firm Gensler, which is based in San Francisco, is inserting chapels, private counseling rooms and saunas for purification into each of the newly acquired buildings. “We have larger clients, but I can’t think of another rollout of this complexity,” said Mr. Barbera, who is based in Los Angeles. Instructions for the buildings, called “ideal orgs,” are derived from the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, the church’s founder, who died in 1986. According to a Scientology spokesman, Tommy Davis, Mr. Hubbard was “extremely specific” about how the buildings should be laid out. “There’s no interpretation involved,” he said, though he credited David Miscavige, the church’s leader, with driving the project. Mr. Davis, a second-generation Scientologist, said the buildings, which must be at least 40,000 square feet, cost from $4 million to $20 million each, bringing the price of the current expansion to $500 million. In each case, he said, local parishioners raise money to buy and renovate the buildings. Bob Wright, the church’s international construction supervisor, said the organization typically looked for buildings “with a presence” in places with significant pedestrian traffic. Those criteria often lead it to historic buildings. Choosing historic buildings gives the church, which was established in 1954, “legitimacy as an established, historical religion and not just some new invention,” said Hugh B. Urban, a professor at Ohio State University who has completed a new book on Scientology. The property in Pasadena, known as the Braley Building, was built in 1906 as an auto showroom and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its ground floor, which contains a cafe, a bookstore and a multipurpose room for community events, stays open until 10 p.m. On a recent Saturday, a worker stood on the street handing out cards that offered a free introduction to Mr. Hubbard’s philosophy, called Dianetics. Whether the church’s current membership needs all these new buildings, or can sustain them, is an open question. Mr. Davis said membership is “in the millions,” with one third in the United States. But the American Religious Identification Survey found that the number of American Scientologists dropped to 25,000 in 2008 from 55,000 in 2001. And the church has other problems. In recent years, Scientology has faced defections and accusations of abuse by former members. Professor Urban said that opening so many new centers “could be a marketing strategy to give the appearance that Scientology is in a period of massive growth, which would in turn attract people. That’s the kind of thing they’ve done, historically.” But Mr. Davis said the church’s expansion project had a simple goal: “We are building the cathedrals of the future.” In the next year, he said, the church expects to add centers in Minneapolis; Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio; Sacramento, Inglewood and Santa Ana, Calif.; Tampa, Fla.; Portland, Ore.; Melbourne, Australia; Caracas, Venezuela; and Kaohsiung. In some cases, the old buildings have outlived their original purposes and can be picked up at fire-sale prices. “We’re tough negotiators,” Mr. Wright said. He said that applies not only to the real estate but also to the contents of the buildings. “Say we’re doing 60 churches with 400 or 500 chairs per church. Can we get a good price?” he said. “The same with the saunas, the same with the carpets.” In the case of Pasadena, Mr. Davis said, parishioners wanted to have a building there, and they raised the money to make it happen. “They couldn’t have chosen a more expensive place than Old Town Pasadena. Not only that, but we bought at the top of the market.” The church’s expansion in Pasadena has not been without hitches. The building was bought by a group of parishioners, which some saw as obscuring the purpose of the acquisition. But Mr. Davis said it was a common business practice for large organizations to buy properties without revealing their identities. “It has do with getting the best possible price,” he said. The church was also criticized for leaving the Pasadena building vacant for almost two years before starting the renovation. “If you find just the right building, you’re going to snap it up if you can, even if you’re not ready to start construction right away,” Mr. Davis said. Religious protests have been rarer, although a march in 2008 brought out about 30 opponents of the church, including a woman in a medical mask with a sign saying, “Scientology disconnects families,” and a man whose shirt said, “Scientology Kills,” according to an article in The Pasadena Weekly. “The protesters are not a legitimate source of information about the Church of Scientology,” Mr. Davis said. Paul Little, the head of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, said he had fielded calls from concerned members of the community. Some, he said, were simply worried that the church would proselytize in Pasadena. But, he said, the church is a longtime member of the chamber, and “our job is to support our members. We don’t go judging their beliefs.” In the Old Town neighborhood, some business owners were concerned that giving over a large building to a noncommercial use would diminish foot traffic to adjacent stores and restaurants, Mr. Little said. Though the styles of the Scientology buildings vary — many of the details in Pasadena reflect that city’s Arts and Crafts tradition — they share certain features, including elaborate signs made in a church-owned workshop in Los Angeles. Other common features of the churches are offices for Mr. Hubbard, set up as if he could arrive at any moment. “It’s a sign of respect,” Mr. Davis said. Mr. Barbera said that CB Richard Ellis, which has 2,500 employees in its global project management division, is handling everything from contract negotiations to construction management. CB Richard Ellis began became the exclusive project manager in 2009. Mr. Barbera said the church employees he had worked with were “very old school. They pay their bills. They work hard, and they expect to get a lot done.” Donna Taliercio, a spokeswoman for Gensler, said the architecture firm, which is based in San Francisco, began working with the church in 2005. It has completed 10 projects, she said, and has several more under way. She said Gensler had teams in three offices — Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Francisco — working on Scientology projects. One of those employees is Irwin Miller, who served as design principal on the Pasadena project. Mr. Miller, who has a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, said he was a “Jewish kid from Boston” who enjoyed working for the church, because it gave him a chance to “tackle important civic projects.” The new Scientology buildings, he said, “are helping to revitalize the urban landscape.”

Church of Scientology
Churches (Buildings)
Pasadena (Calif)
Historic Buildings and Sites


Turning a Man Onto the Right Path

Abstract: Dear Diary: A few months back my partner, Tom, and I visited New York. As I walked out of a restaurant on Madison Avenue one evening, a few minutes after Tom, I discovered him speaking to a well-dressed older gentleman. I overheard Tom say, “I don’t know where 93rd is, but this young guy might know” as he gestured to a 30-something young man in gym clothes walking toward them. Tom asked the young man if he knew, not realizing we were between 92nd and 93rd. The young man said sure and asked the older gentleman if he would like him to walk him home. Older man said, “I live on 93rd, but what I would really like is if you could walk me to a bar for a drink.” Noting that the older man seemed a little less than sober, the young man politely said, “Perhaps you should just go home.” Then paused and calmly said, “What do you think would be better for you?” Older man: “I would like to get a drink.” Younger man: “But what do you think would be better for you?” Older man: “I want to go to a bar.” Continuing in a very calm voice, the younger man said, ”But what do you think would be better for your health?” Tom patted the young man on the back and said, “You are a great guy.” The older gentleman in good company, we turned and started to walk in the opposite direction. After a few steps I stopped and looked back to see the two men slowly walking side by side toward 93rd. As a native New Yorker I like to think the young man walked the older gentleman directly home.


Paris Climate Deal Passes Milestone as 20 More Nations Sign On

Abstract: UNITED NATIONS — More than 20 world leaders tendered legal documents on Wednesday, formally binding their governments to the Paris climate accord at a General Assembly ceremony here and all but ensuring that the agreement will go into force by the end of the year. The specifics of each country’s plans, though, are voluntary. There are no sanctions for failing to control pollution or to put economic polices into practice, or for submitting unambitious pledges. The legally binding portion of the Paris accord does little more than require governments to continue to convene at high-profile global climate summit meetings, make public pledges to tackle global warming at home and submit those plans to be published on a United Nations website. The ultimate importance of the climate accord will be determined by its members. “If enough countries start implementing the Paris agreement, historians will see this as a watershed moment,” said Erik Solheim, director of the United Nations environment program. “But if we don’t implement it, this will just be bringing a bunch of politicians together around a piece of paper.” In total, 60 countries representing 48 percent of global planet-warming emissions have now legally bound themselves to the Paris accord. The deal goes into legal force when at least 55 countries representing 55 percent of global emissions sign on. At Wednesday’s ceremony, leaders of countries representing at least an additional 12 percent of global emissions pledged to submit their legal documents by the end of this year. If they follow through, the pact will take effect. “What once seemed impossible now appears inevitable,” said Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, who will step down from his position at the end of the year. Some of the plans that were already submitted, such as those of the United States, the world’s second-largest greenhouse polluter, have hard targets backed up with detailed policy pledges. The Obama administration promised that by 2025, aggressive regulations designed to shut down coal-fired power plants will cut the nation’s emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent from 2005 levels. Even that plan stands in legal limbo. Twenty-seven states have sued the administration to stop it, and the Supreme Court has halted it until the suit is resolved. Other plans are less aggressive and less detailed. India, the world’s third-largest polluter, would essentially allow its emissions to triple by 2030 — an improvement, Indian officials say, from the sevenfold increase in emissions without any action. Exactly how India can carry out that plan, which includes a significant increase in solar power, is not clear. India’s climate strategy does include references to Gandhi and yoga. The more detailed plan put forth by China, the world’s largest polluter, calls for Chinese emissions to drop — but only after 2030 — and for China to put a national cap-and-trade system in place starting in 2017. But China has also been plagued by questions about its own emissions data. “Obviously, ratifying Paris quickly is better than doing it slowly,” said Christoffer Ringnes Klyve, director of climate and environment programs at Future in Our Hands, a Norwegian advocacy group. “But there are lots of problems with the Paris agreement, and lots of problems with the countries that are ratifying it not having the faintest idea how they’re going to achieve the goals.” Lacking emissions-reduction targets and sanctions, the Paris accord relies heavily on global peer pressure and public scrutiny — including many more events like Wednesday’s. A regular series of global conclaves will spotlight countries that follow through on ambitious emissions cuts and publicly name those that don’t. Countries will be legally bound to attend summit meetings where they must give progress reports on their commitments. After 2025, countries must draw up more stringent emissions reduction plans, although the Paris pact does not say how much more stringent those plans should be. “If I’m Singapore and I see China’s doing it, that leads me to do it,” said Jonathan Pershing, the American climate envoy. “If I’m a Latin American country and I see Mexico’s doing it, I’ll do it too.” But that strategy does not account for leaders who do not care about global opinion. Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has called climate change a hoax and vowed to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement if he is elected. Once the deal has entered into force, all countries will be legally bound to it for four years. But a Trump administration could refuse to attend summit meetings or submit plans or progress reports, with no consequences beyond lacerating speeches at United Nations podiums. That attitude appears to be shared by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the world’s fourth-largest climate polluter. Russia put forth a plan that is essentially business as usual, requiring no new domestic policies. At the next major United Nations climate change summit meeting in November in Marrakesh, Morocco, diplomats hope to create an independent body to monitor and verify countries’ pollution levels — and to use public scrutiny to push countries to reduce their emissions. If each nation’s pollution levels are publicly reported on a website that showcases apples-to-apples comparisons of progress, governments will be more inclined to act, diplomats reason. But several countries, including China and India, are expected to push for a more lenient system that is reliant on self-reporting. “There is an expectation that people will report their emissions. But how does that happen?” said Jo Tyndall, the climate change envoy of New Zealand, who played a central role in brokering the Paris agreement. “What’s the process for review? Who will review?” In Marrakesh, countries will also take up the thorny question of money: Under the Paris deal, rich countries voluntarily pledged to spend $100 billion annually by 2020 to help poor countries adapt to climate change and develop new clean energy technologies. There is already resistance in several countries, particularly the United States. Peer pressure may be enough to persuade countries to sign on to a global deal, but diplomats fear it may not be enough to open their wallets.

UN
Climate Change
Global Warming
Greenhouse gas
UNFCCC
UN General Assembly
Ban Ki moon
China
India
US


Answers to Questions About New York

Abstract: Q. I don’t remember when, but there was a New York City political campaign that included a jingle: How can you miss With a ticket like this Lefkowitz, Gilhooley and Fino Can you fill in the details for me? A. F.Y.I. thanks Alice Furlaud for her question. That jingle, broadcast from sound trucks in English and Spanish, was used in 1961 in the unsuccessful attempt by Louis J. Lefkowitz, a Republican from the Lower East Side who was the state attorney general, to defeat Mayor Robert F. Wagner. His ticket included Representative Paul A. Fino of the Bronx, running for City Council president, and John J. Gilhooley of Brooklyn, a former assistant secretary of labor, for city comptroller. Here are some other stanzas: Let’s make a note To get out and vote For Lefkowitz, Gilhooley and Fino You’ll be safe in the park Any time after dark With Lefkowitz, Gilhooley and Fino There’ll be new golden rules You’ll be proud of your schools With Lefkowitz, Gilhooley and Fino That fine City Hall Will be open to all With Lefkowitz, Gilhooley and Fino. The campaign pressed 5,000 records of the song, which was written, with original music, by the professional songwriters Mario Del Guercio, Ted Eddy and Frank Davis. It was performed at a Republican fund-raiser before former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller. Ike reportedly loved it. The campaign had minstrels following Mr. Lefkowitz on his walking tours, singing it. The song and the slate were cited as an example of New York City ticket-balancing “almost to the point, indeed, of caricature” by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan in “Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City” (second edition, 1970). “Ethnic considerations have always been primary in New York City politics,” Mr. Glazer and Mr. Moynihan wrote, referring to the practice of dividing candidacies for what were then the three major citywide offices — mayor, City Council president and comptroller — among a Jew, an Italian and an Irishman (or an occasional white Protestant). The Republicans lost that November to the ticket of Mr. Wagner, Paul R. Screvane and Abraham D. Beame, who later became mayor. They in turn had won a bruising Democratic primary against the similarly balanced slate of Arthur M. Levitt, Justice Joseph DiFede and State Senator Thomas J. Mackell. Q. What were the city’s worst sweatshops? A. While the garment industry, centered on the Lower East Side, was described by the Cosmopolitan magazine of a century ago as “the most grinding oppression that can be practiced on a woman,” it was not the most inherently dangerous, Otto L. Bettmann wrote in 1974 in “The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!” “There were the soap-packing plants, for instance, where girls were exposed to caustic soda that turned their nails yellow and ate away at their fingers,” Mr. Bettmann wrote. “There were the flower-making workshops where arsenic, liberally applied to produce vivid colors, wrecked the appearance and health of thousands of girls with sores, swelling of the limbs, nausea and, often, complete debility.” “But nothing,” he went on, “compared with the hazards and indignities of the tobacco ‘in home’ factories. Here, for a meager income, women and children were forced to endure the most sickening exhalations as they stripped the leaves. Harper’s Magazine described the effects of endless hours of this work: ‘Their eyes are dead, a stupor overcomes them, their nerves are unsettled and their lungs diseased in almost every case.’ ” Tragically, the garment industry did turn out to be the most fatal in practice. The Triangle Waist Company fire on March 25, 1911, killed 146 people, all but 23 of them young women. The fire galvanized the labor movement in New York City and led to sweeping legislation to improve workplace safety, limit the workweek and curb the worst abuses of the sweatshops.

NYC
Jobs
Accidents and Safety
Labor Unions


Bat Flipping Draws Shrugs in South Korea but Scorn in America

Abstract: DAEGU, South Korea — Hwang Jae-gyun, a third baseman for the Lotte Giants in South Korea’s top baseball league, received some curious text messages from his American teammates one morning in July. His name, they told him, was popping up on websites around the world. He was prominent on English-language social media websites. “This might be the most ostentatious Korean bat flip of all time,” a headline on Sports Illustrated’s website read. “Step aside,” Yahoo Sports wrote . “The world’s greatest bat flip has been unearthed.” CBS Sports hailed what it called the “mother of all bat flips.” After hitting a home run, Hwang had flipped his bat with a flourish — producing the latest darling in an international phenomenon that stirs outrage, awe and glee. In the United States, the bat flip exists on the list of baseball behaviors considered rude and worthy of confrontation. In Korea, the flip is, well, just a flip. No one cares. This cultural variance, combined with the world-shrinking influence of social media, has created a disjointed international sports milieu in which players like Hwang have been celebrated, derided and debated in a language they do not understand for a move they regard as involuntary. In the at-bat that provoked American baseball fans, Hwang crushed a pitch. As the ball was floating perilously close to the left-field foul pole, he paused to track its flight, pointing the bat beyond his left shoulder, bending gently at the hip. When the ball finally landed for a home run, he stylishly twirled the bat and flung it high into the air. And as he swaggered up the base path, he took one last peek backward to watch the bat tumble to the grass. “I was kind of nervous about it,” Hwang, 28, said about the global reaction to his flip. “I wasn’t sure if it was a negative thing — like, ‘What is this jerk doing?’ ” Every few weeks, a new bat flip emerges from South Korea that supposedly supplants all previous bat flips as the best — and most egregious — that American society has ever seen. “We laugh about it because we can’t imagine a player doing that in America,” said the Minnesota Twins’ Torii Hunter, a fan of Korean bat flips. “In America, it would be considered so disrespectful that the next time he came up to the plate, he’d get hit right in the neck, guaranteed.” Bat flips in Korea are commonly referred to as ppa-dun, a portmanteau that combines the first syllables of the words for “bat” and “throw,” although the English term is used as well. Korean fans recall seeing bat flips decades ago, but they have become far more frequent, appearing in virtually every Korea Baseball Organization game, on all types of plays. They are common, if less publicized, in Japan and Taiwan, too. The promotion of Korean flips is largely the work of Dan Kurtz, a 35-year-old stay-at-home father from Lancaster, Pa., who runs the website MyKBO.net . Kurtz, who was adopted from South Korea when he was 4 months old, started the site in 2001 as a message board for English-speaking K.B.O. fans while he was enrolled in an international program at Yonsei University in Seoul. Some years ago, hoping to spread awareness of the league, he started uploading videos of nice plays, bloopers and absurd ceremonial first pitches. Kurtz first injected Korean bat flips into the American sports consciousness on May 15, 2013, when he alerted a few websites about a video that showed Jeon Jun-woo, an outfielder for Lotte, aggressively tossing his bat and celebrating a blast that ended up being caught on the warning track. It was Korean bat flipping’s first viral moment. These days, Kurtz posts bat flips to his Twitter account when he deems one “bat-flippy enough” — that is, it has the speed, trajectory and accompanying pose to please American tastes — and they are disseminated to the masses from there. He said the number of fans expressing dismay at the bat flips seemed to have decreased since 2013, possibly signifying a relaxing of American baseball mores. “I used to get a lot more comments like ‘that guy needs a 95-mile-an-hour fastball to the head,’ ” said Kurtz, who now lives in Seoul, where his wife is a military physician. “Well, you still have those,” he added, laughing. “They’re called St. Louis Cardinals fans.” In September 2013, one of Kurtz’s videos appeared, remarkably, on five ESPN programs. The star of that clip was Choi Jun-seok, a burly slugger and a sort of mythic figure among connoisseurs for the consistency and quality of his flips. Choi, then a member of the Doosan Bears, clouted a ball down the left-field line and chucked his bat violently toward third base, his arms raised in celebration. The ball curled foul, and he had to walk over to retrieve his bat. Choi, now a member of Lotte, said he never felt embarrassed about that play. It was an instinctive reaction, he said, so why would he? “When I get the barrel on the ball, that pose just naturally comes out, and my hands move like that,” Choi said. “It’s not conscious.” In describing swings that produce flips, Choi and many other Koreans invoked the term “shiwonhada” — a feeling without a convenient English translation. Koreans might use it to describe concepts like a cool breeze, a heartwarming stew, an open highway or a smooth golf swing. The bat flip, in this context, might be considered the rough equivalent of a satisfied sigh after a gulp of cold beer. “I think if I was playing in America and did it, because it’s such a natural thing, people would understand,” Choi said. Maybe. The bat flips of Zack Greinke , a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, have made him popular among many young fans, and this summer, the Major League Baseball social media team ran a bat-flip bracket on its Twitter feed that featured many of the league’s biggest stars. (How “bat-flippy” these were constitutes a separate debate: “They were bat drops,” Kurtz said.) But more broadly, American players and coaches still seem uncomfortable with the flip. Just last week, Larry Bowa, the bench coach of the Philadelphia Phillies, threatened Daniel Murphy of the Mets with retaliation for a vaguely demonstrative flip in a previous game. Even Yasiel Puig of the Dodgers, known as one of the league’s most expressive players, vowed earlier this season that he would temper his bat flips. “I want to show American baseball that I’m not disrespecting the game,” Puig told The Los Angeles Times . Image Hwang Jae-gyun, a third baseman for the Lotte Giants in South Korea’s top baseball league, received global attention for flipping his bat. Credit Jean Chung for The New York Times Some Korean players are mindful of American baseball etiquette when necessary. Park Byung-ho, 29, a star first baseman for the Nexen Heroes and the Korean player most coveted by American teams, was as recently as last season one of the K.B.O.’s most entertaining bat flippers . But this season, he began gently dropping his bat after home runs. Brandon Knight, who pitched for Nexen from 2011 to 2014, said he and others advised Park that if he moved to the United States, American players would not appreciate the flips. Park, who refers to Knight as B.F., as in best friend, took the advice to heart. “Sometimes he’d hit a huge home run and do it and then come back to the dugout, look at me and say, ‘Sorry, B.F.,’ ” Knight said. Hwang, too, has aspirations to play in America. He has been meeting with American agents. He will train this off-season at a complex in Florida. On the recommendation of his nutritionist, he has been eating less kimchi, a traditional Korean dish of fermented vegetables. Having seen how Park eliminated the bat flip from his game, Hwang would like to do the same. “I have been trying these days to stop,” he said with a smile, “but it’s just not going that well.”

Baseball
Etiquette
South Korea
Choi Jun-seok
Hwang Jae-gyun
Dan Kurtz


Former Aide Pleads Guilty

Abstract: The onetime chief of staff to former Representative Curt Weldon pleaded guilty in federal court to a conspiracy charge as part of a plea agreement. The aide, Russell J. Caso Jr., 34, acknowledged that he intentionally did not report to the House income his wife made for doing work for a nonprofit company tied to Mr. Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania. Howard Sklamberg, an assistant United States attorney, told Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. of Federal District Court that Mr. Caso had agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in an investigation.

Decisions and Verdicts
Federal District Courts
Plea Bargaining


In Bayonne Mayoral Race, Development is a Central Issue

Abstract: BAYONNE THERE’S a two-mile spit of land here with magnificent views of Manhattan, within commuting distance of Wall Street, that has so much potential as a maritime port that shipping companies and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are fighting over it. But its most valuable feature can be summed up in five words: it’s not yet fully developed. The biggest issue in the city’s special mayoral election on Tuesday is what to do with the 437-acre Military Ocean Terminal that was once an Army base. The city was forced to have an election when its two-term mayor, Joseph V. Doria Jr., resigned a year ago after being named to run the state Department of Community Affairs. The new mayor will not only lead the peninsula’s development but will also control the lucrative contracts to be doled out to lawyers, planners, architects, engineers and builders. Five candidates are running, but local political observers say the race is really between two: Patrick D. Conaghan, a former municipal judge, and Mark Smith, the police director. And just as the presidential election has become a referendum on George W. Bush’s policies, the Bayonne election has become a referendum on those of Mr. Doria, whose popularity fell when he left for Trenton as the city faced a $22 million budget deficit. Critics contend Mr. Doria blew it on the peninsula’s development, saying he could have helped this blue-collar town by creating more commercial property on the old base that would have brought in more jobs and more tax revenues. Instead, under Mr. Doria, officials approved a plan that emphasized residential development, which puts more of a burden on city services and brings in less revenue. Construction has begun on a 65-acre portion on the peninsula’s east end, known as Bayonne Bay. It will have 500 units of residential housing and a hotel. But nine years after the Army terminal closed down, the fate of the bulk of the property is still up in the air, and many people here blame Mr. Doria for drawing out the process. Supporters of Mr. Conaghan say that if Mr. Smith were elected, he would continue the policies of Mr. Doria. “People realize Doria is the reason the city is almost bankrupt,” said Anthony Chiappone, a State Assemblyman and a member of the Bayonne City Council who works for Mr. Conaghan’s campaign. “Smith is trying to run a campaign saying he’s not with Joe Doria, when in fact everyone who was with Doria is now with Smith.” Despite strong ties to the same Democratic Party organizations that supported the former mayor, Mr. Smith, 45, says he is independent. His campaign literature states he is “Not Somebody’s Puppet.” “To paint me with that brush is unfair,” he said. Mr. Conaghan, 71, also believes his opponent is receiving the backing of the party apparatus that helped elect Mr. Doria. He said so many of his campaign posters have been taken down, he has been forced to order 200 more. “Who am I going to complain to? The police department?” he asked. Mr. Doria, for his part, says Mr. Conaghan has been criticizing his administration’s handling of the peninsula since the last mayoral election, in 2006, when Mr. Conaghan ran against Mr. Doria and lost. Development takes time, he said, particularly when environmental cleanup is involved. As for the deficit, it predates his tenure as mayor, he said. “He’s trying to run a campaign against me, but I’m not running,” Mr. Doria said. Mr. Conaghan’s supporters say he did not lose that election to Mr. Doria by much: 53 percent to 47 percent. They say Mr. Doria won because of a last-minute boost from the Bayonne and Hudson County Democratic organizations, whose workers distributed fliers. “They sent in troops to bail him out,” said Louis Manzo, a former Hudson County assemblyman, noting they would most likely do the same for Mr. Smith. “They have a vested interest in seeing Smith win.” Both sides acknowledge the race is tight. One voter, Neil McCabe, 56, a lifelong Bayonne resident who stocks shelves at a ShopRite supermarket, believes that both Mr. Smith and Mr. Conaghan are capable of fixing Bayonne’s woes. After seeing the way the old administration handled development at the peninsula, he just wants new blood in City Hall. “This town is so close to Manhattan. You’d think it would be marketed a little better,” he said.

Elections
Bayonne (NJ)
Building (Construction)


Tech Accessories, Courtesy of the Mountain Pine Beetle

Abstract: FOUR years ago, the trees on Larry Lipson’s property in western Montana began to die. Not just one or two, but 10,000 of them. The culprit was the mountain pine beetle, which has ravaged 23 million acres of forests in the United States since 2000. With his father and stepmother, Dave and Nadine Lipson, he owns 37,000 acres that include a cattle ranch, a resort and a 10-mile stretch of the Blackfoot River, other parts of which were featured in the 1992 film “A River Runs Through It.” The infestation had the potential to ruin their business, which banks on the area’s scenic beauty. “Having a resort in Montana with no trees is a big problem,” Mr. Lipson says. So rather than watch the bugs turn the land into a tinderbox for wildfires, the Lipsons decided to take steps to stop the beetles in their tracks. In the process, they found a way to turn their ravaged wood into something useful: a material for making accessories for Apple products. Their story offers lessons in adapting when an environmental crisis hits and, more broadly, how to be resilient in the face of adversity. The mountain pine beetles that descended on the Lipsons’ ranch have coexisted with pine trees for millenniums, but as temperatures have risen in recent years, the insect’s range, population and winter survival rate have grown. The beetles now inhabit trees from Southern California all the way up to the Northwest Territories of Canada and as far east as South Dakota. “From an evolutionary perspective, it’s very similar to a pack of wild dogs attacking an elk,” Andrew M. Liebhold, an entomologist with the United States Forest Service , says of the beetles’ prowess. “When they gang up on the tree in large numbers, they’re able to overcome its resistance.” The Lipsons’ challenge was to shut down the pack. “We had scouts that hiked through the forest, identifying trees that were infected,” Mr. Lipson says, adding that the needles turn a burnt-red color. The next step was to isolate those trees by thinning around them, then cut them down and haul them out. Within two years, their corner of the infestation was under control. But now they had thousands of tons of lumber to dispose of. While other landowners burned the wood or sent it to mills to be mulched into sawdust, Mr. Lipson, a self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur, was eager to find a better use. He learned that beetle-kill timber retains its structural integrity if harvested before the natural decay process begins. He reasoned that the wood could be used for flooring, framing and moldings in projects on the ranch, which has more than 50 buildings, so he sent 16 feet of raw timber to a mill for processing. What came back surprised him: a shimmery, blue-tinged wood. The mountain pine beetle, he found out, carries a fungus that produces a natural blue stain. “We thought it was pretty spectacular-looking,” he says. That further motivated the Lipsons to make something out of the wood. Last June, they started Bad Beetle , which makes accessories for Apple computers, tablets and phones. They also hope that the company will raise awareness about the mountain pine beetle infestation. The accessories “have the ability to reach people who are interested in eco-minded issues,” Mr. Lipson says. In January, Bad Beetle started offering iPhone backs and iPad stands on its Web site and has sold 730 so far. This summer, it will roll out cases for MacBook computers and iPads. Should Apple, which doesn’t require a licensing agreement for the products, become interested in selling Bad Beetle items in its stores or online, Mr. Lipson says he’s prepared: “We have a stockpile of blue-stain pine that will provide the raw material for Bad Beetle products indefinitely.” Image The mountain pine beetle leaves a blue stain in the wood of trees it destroys. Credit Larry Lipson Were his supply to somehow run out, replenishing it would be easy. Some 20 billion cubic feet of such beetle-kill timber is now standing in 12 Western states, by Forest Service estimates. Private land with gently sloping contours and good access to roads provides the easiest and most profitable harvesting and manufacturing opportunities. Bad Beetle is not the only company using this type of wood. Judson Beaumont, a furniture designer who owns Straight Line Designs , based in Vancouver, British Columbia, creates cabinets, benches and children’s treehouses with beetle-infected two-by-fours. He estimates that in the past three years he has sold about 75 items at $1,000 to $4,000 each. “It’s probably been my most successful run of furniture pieces,” he says. John Stein, owner of Kirei, a company based in Solana Beach, Calif., says architects and interior designers have been enthusiastic about the beetle-kill wood panels it began selling six months ago. When they hear the back story, “it resonates,” he says. That’s especially true in the West, where many prospective buyers have firsthand experience with the beetle infestation. The Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory based in Madison, Wis., has worked with insect-killed wood for 50 years, and is now using it as a component in plywood-like panels. The state of Colorado has exempted beetle-kill lumber, sawdust and furniture from sales tax, and estimates that the value of items made from trees felled by the mountain pine beetle and the spruce beetle will hit $22 million this year. The byproducts of two environmental scourges in Southeast Asia have similarly been transformed into furniture at the hands of Bannavis Andrew Sribyatta, founder and design director of a Miami design firm, Project Import Export . He obtains dried water hyacinths and liana vines — both considered destructive plants — from his home country, Thailand. He weaves them into chairs, chaise lounges and wall panels for individual and commercial clients, including a Nobu restaurant in Los Angeles. The story behind his creations often “seals the deal” for potential buyers, he says. “Our work doesn’t stop at the point where I tell the customers about the product,” he says. “They tell their friends. It’s a topic of conversation.” The effort involved in transforming these raw materials typically results in higher prices. Bad Beetle’s iPhone backs, for instance, cost $69, whereas silicone ones by the fashion designer Marc Jacobs sell for up to $48 and resin hard cases by Kate Spade are $40. GIVEN the industry’s youth, it’s not yet known how many consumers will pay a premium for such products, but according to Thomas Lyon, a professor at the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, the beetle-kill wood could be a tough sell. Since it would otherwise go to waste, the timber that’s used can be considered sustainable. But the response to sustainably produced wood has been underwhelming so far, Professor Lyon says, adding that people tend to open their wallets enthusiastically only for items that affect their health or are showpieces. With wood products, those criteria rarely exist. “Typically they’re hiding behind your walls,” he says. “Nobody can see that you bought sustainable wood.” Buyers, however, could consider high-end furniture or hand-held tech accessories as a kind of wooden bling that’s worthy of their dollars. If businesses can “transform the color into a positive so that it becomes something cool, then it may sell for a premium,” Professor Lyon says. “But it won’t be because it was sustainable, is my guess.”

Wood
Beetles
Larry Lipson
Entrepreneurship
Western States
Apple
Bad Beetle
Trees
Sustainable living
Montana


Arizona Cardinals Finally Sell Out Home Playoff Game

Abstract: In the last decade, the state of Arizona has hosted 37 N.B.A. playoff games, 9 N.H.L. playoff games, 4 World Series games, 3 college football title games and one Super Bowl . During that period, Arizona’s N.F.L. team, the Cardinals, has not had a single playoff game at home. Even if you go back another 10 years, to the season when the Cardinals first played in the state, the needle still points to zero. This season’s Cardinals are about to change that. They will play host to the Atlanta Falcons in a first-round playoff game Saturday, the first time the vagabond Cardinals franchise — Chicago, St. Louis, Arizona — has played at home in the postseason in 61 years. Still, until 4:30 p.m. Friday, many Cardinals fans in the Phoenix area were in danger of missing the moment. Because the Cardinals were having trouble selling out their home field — University of Phoenix Stadium, with a seating capacity of about 65,000 — a local blackout loomed. Under league rules, a team must sell out a home game before it can be broadcast on local television. Normally, the deadline to do so is 72 hours before kickoff. On Wednesday, the Cardinals were still 5,600 tickets shy of a sellout. History in the making was proving a tough sell. So the N.F.L. extended the deadline by 24 hours. But as that new deadline approached Thursday afternoon, 3,700 tickets remained unsold. The Cardinals, a charter member of the N.F.L., were playing just the eighth playoff game in their history, but that idea just didn’t seem to be resonating in the Phoenix area. A team marketing campaign that included an appearance by wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald at a cellphone store wasn’t closing the deal, either. So the league granted the Cardinals another 24 hours. And this time, with the help of a local pool supply company, which bought a chunk of tickets, the game finally sold out. “It’s the outcome that we expected, but you’re always glad when you cross the finish line,” said Ron Minegar, Arizona’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. Nothing comes easy for the Cardinals. Their one championship came in 1947, with a victory over the Philadelphia Eagles in Comiskey Park in Chicago. In their two decades in Arizona, they made the postseason only once before now, in the 1998 season. They won a first-round game in Dallas before losing in Minnesota. Since moving to the University of Phoenix Stadium three seasons ago, Cardinals home games have consistently sold out. Which is why, Minegar theorized, sales might have been slow for Saturday. He believes many Cardinals fans assumed there were no tickets available. And now there aren’t. Meanwhile, the Vikings were still flirting with a potential blackout of their own for their Sunday game against the Eagles. With 3,100 tickets still unsold, the league extended the deadline to Saturday afternoon. Which is when the Cardinals will be taking the field, at home and on local TV.

Arizona Cardinals
Atlanta Falcons
Playoff Games
Football


Women Take Their Case to the Ballot

Abstract: NEW YORK — This is the year when, after a long period of political stagnation, a record number of American women — feminists, liberals, pro-choice middle-of-the-roaders, conservatives — got off the sidelines and stepped up to run for office. “We’d been going downhill,” said Karen Middleton, president of Emerge America, a 12-state donor-funded group that trains female Democratic candidates. “Now the number of women running for Congress could break all records” for women in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives — “if everybody wins.” Back in the contentious early months of this year, when the “war on women” rallied many who believed that hard-right Republicans were threatening women’s reproductive rights, few predicted that scores of women would sign up to run for the Senate and the House. This unusually diverse group includes a professional wrestling entrepreneur, a leftist consumer advocate, a lesbian, a former police chief and the first black female Republican to run for the House. Out in Wisconsin, Representative Tammy Baldwin, a 50-year-old liberal Democrat, is battling former Governor Tommy G. Thompson, a hard-right Republican. If she wins, as recent polls suggest she will, she would become the first female senator from Wisconsin and the first openly gay senator in the United States. In Florida, Val Demings, 55, is a first-time candidate, a black woman vying for a seat in Congress from a district that is overwhelmingly Republican and white. “Redistricting did me no favors,” she told me, laughing, over the phone. She came out of poverty — her mother was a maid, her father a janitor — to become the celebrated first female police chief of Orlando, a tourist mecca in central Florida that is home to diverse ethnic and racial groups. Now, at the behest of her supporters, she’s running an uphill battle against a Tea Party incumbent. It’s a struggle not unlike her old fight against violent crime in her district, a war she won. It’s not all a Democratic women’s game. Republicans are busily recruiting and training female candidates, and according to Kirsten Kukowski of the Republican National Committee, they expect to elect Mia Love of Utah, who would make history as the first black Republican woman elected to the House. This lineup of assorted female candidates did not come together overnight. Over the past decade or so, activists had watched the number of women in Congress stall and the number of women in state legislatures fall. Alarmed at the slow progress, women’s research centers and advocacy groups like the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey and feminists like Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, have campaigned for women in public life. “Women’s tendency is to think that politics is not for them,” Ms. Middleton said in a telephone interview last week. But women, she said, are realizing that by staying outside the political arena they are giving up responsibility to others. “It’s been a wake-up call. They say, ‘Oh, my God, unless I actually step up and do this, no one else is going to do it for me.”’ A rare set of circumstances is making this a potential new “year of the woman.” Twenty years ago, in 1992, a record 24 new women were elected to Congress, the largest class of freshman women ever. “What happened in 1992 is similar to this election cycle,” says Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics. As in 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected president, this is a year when congressional districts are redrawn according to population growth. Redistricting makes incumbents more vulnerable, creates new seats, and often results in more retirements. And presidential election years tend to draw more candidates and more voters, giving women more opportunities. Ms. Walsh recalled last week that the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas sexual harassment hearings had also happened around that time. “She had to testify in front of an all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee,” she said, referring to Ms. Hill. “A lot of people, particularly women, saw how male the Senate was. We’ve had some of that in this cycle around the discussion about contraception. It might have had an impact on making people feel more energized and mobilized for the women who are running.” Today, with the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns tussling fiercely for women’s votes, Democrats continue to hold an edge in women running for high office. Twelve Democratic women and six Republican women are running for the Senate; 116 female Democrats and 47 Republican women are running for the House. With just three weeks until voters go to the polls on Nov. 6, some voting surveys suggest that women are likely to make notable gains. Such a turnaround would help lift the United States’ standing in the world, where it falls well below many less developed nations in the percentage of women in parliaments. While Cuba ranked third, for instance, the United States tied Turkmenistan at No. 78, according to the U.N. Women’s 2012 rankings. Ms. Walsh refused to predict who would win but proffered the number 20 as optimal in the Senate — “If all the stars align the right way.”

Women and Girls
Elections
Senate
House of Representatives


Developer Would Include Low-Cost Units in East Side Towers

Abstract: A developer seeking to build seven high-rise buildings on a former Con Ed property by the East River has agreed to set aside hundreds of apartments for poor and working-class tenants, as well as space for a school. Community leaders and elected officials who negotiated with the developer, Sheldon H. Solow, planned to announce the agreement at a news conference today. The Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, and the congresswoman who represents the area, Carolyn B. Maloney, described the concessions as a significant breakthrough, but concerns remain. Mr. Solow bought the land, including the former Waterside steam plant, from Con Edison in 2000. He is seeking rezoning in the onetime industrial area for high-rise development. The property consists of three parcels along First Avenue south of 42nd Street. The developer is proposing a project of 6.1 million square feet, which would include a 1.5-million-square-foot office tower and six residential towers with a total of 4,166 apartments. Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and by Richard Meier, the buildings would range from 47 to 69 stories. The tallest would be outside the rezoned area and not part of the agreement. The proposal also calls for 1,554 parking spaces and for nearly five acres of green space accessible to the public. Under the terms of the agreement, the rezoned parcels east of First Avenue would become part of the city’s “inclusionary housing area,” which requires the developer to permanently set aside 20 percent of the apartments, or in this case as many as 600 units, for low- and moderate-income families. The developer is also working with the city’s School Construction Authority to build a school for an estimated 650 students on the site. Mr. Stringer, who is holding a public hearing on the project before the Manhattan Borough Board on Nov. 15, said the commitments from the developer were “major victories” and a testament to the community’s hard work and advocacy. “This was one of the last great pieces of turf in Manhattan,” Representative Maloney said. “How it’s treated will affect the quality of life on the entire East Side.” Daniel Garodnick, who represents the area on the City Council, said that because the neighborhood is already overcrowded, he would not have considered the rezoning without the affordable housing and the school. Ultimately, the project requires the approval of the Council. Community Board 6, which covers the East Side, had developed its own rezoning plan for the land, but the Bloomberg administration put that plan aside in favor of the developer’s proposal. The board does not oppose development on the site so much as it is leery of Mr. Solow’s towering buildings in a neighborhood of 40-story structures. The board also wants 39th and 40th Streets east of First Avenue reopened to traffic; the city turned them over to Con Ed decades ago. The community board, like the borough board, makes recommendations to the City Council. The community board and the Municipal Art Society, a nonprofit urban design and planning group, have also called for the rebuilding of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in the area to allow public access to the waterfront.


Ancient Caffeinated ‘Black Drink’ Was Made With Holly, Analysis Finds

Abstract: Long ago, at a pre-Columbian ritual center across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis, the home of Budweiser, people were heartily imbibing a caffeinated tealike beverage commonly known as “black drink.” The chemical residues found in their porous, unglazed ceramic mugs tell the tale. Early European explorers described the drinking practice throughout what is now the southeastern United States. Indian men consumed large portions of black drink brewed from toasted holly leaves and bark and boiled it in water. Then they would go off to vomit. Whether this was the effect of the drink or was self-induced is not clear; anyway, the practice was a ritual purification in preparation for important community undertakings like religious ceremonies, political councils or ballgames and war. For the first time, researchers have now found direct evidence that the use of black drink goes back as early as A.D. 1050 at what is now Cahokia, Ill., which was the largest known pre-Columbian site north of Mexico. The chemical analysis identified the primary ingredients of the Cahokia brew: caffeine, theobromine and ursolic acid. “Ursolic acide is the biomarker that tells us, yes, this was made from holly,” Patricia L. Crown, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, said in an interview. She was the lead author of a report published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Two holly species, Ilex vomitoria and Ilex cassine, have approximately the same chemical mix, although the researchers wrote that only I. vomitoria was used in the drink, “an argument bolstered by the considerably higher amount of caffeine” in it. The best-known caffeinated drink in the New World, still prevalent in parts of South America and Mesoamerica, is derived from the cacao tree. Since the holly grew in coastal areas several hundred miles to the south, Dr. Crown said, the findings are strong evidence that a wide trading network existed among distant tribes and that ritual practices at Cahokia may have influenced their subsequent activities over a wide region. Traces of the beverage were tested in drinking cups dated until at least 1250. In its heyday, Cahokia, a city of about 250 earthen mounds, had an estimated 15,000 inhabitants who flocked there from up and down the Mississippi River Valley. The site was abandoned in the 1300s. People in South America continue to make drinks from varieties of holly, the research team noted. As recently as the Civil War, Southerners were known to use the black drink as a pick-me-up, Dr. Crown said, and a few in South Carolina still like the holly caffeine’s energy charge. She said she had never tried the drink, not even under the pressure to finish the research paper.


Markets Close Mixed as Investors Await Fed Action

Abstract: Stocks closed mixed Wednesday as markets focused on the prospect of new bond purchases by the Federal Reserve and earnings reports, which have generally exceeded forecasts for the third quarter. The stock market declined amid uncertainty, some analysts said, over how assertive the Federal Reserve might be in efforts to stimulate the economy. Analysts expect an announcement on the purchases after Fed policy makers meet on Nov. 3. But some also say that the markets have already factored in expectations of at least $500 billion more in asset purchases. “The Fed has everybody built up on this big stimulus” and investors are concerned, said Douglas Roberts, chief investment strategist for Channel Capital Research Institute. “But I think what is really key is not the size of the initial package but the continuity.” He added, “If that does not work, are they going to come back with more?” The Dow Jones industrial average fell 43.18 points, or 0.39 percent, to 11,126.28. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index dropped 3.19 points, or 0.27 percent, to 1,182.45. The Nasdaq composite index rose 5.97 points, or 0.24 percent, to 2,503.26. The benchmark 10-year note fell 22/32, to 99 6/32, and the yield rose to 2.72 percent from 2.64 percent late Tuesday. The dollar was slightly stronger. Traders also considered new data on manufacturing and housing, and many earnings reports for guidance into the state of the economy. Procter & Gamble, the consumer products company, reported a higher-than-expected quarterly profit, helped by sales in emerging markets and cost cuts. Its shares edged up 0.35 percent, to $63.08. Northrop Grumman, the military contractor, raised its earnings guidance for the year. Its shares rose 0.05 percent, to $61.38. Dr Pepper Snapple, the beverage maker, reported earnings that reflected the closely watched consumer market. The company raised its full-year profit forecast to reflect a recent licensing agreement with the Coca-Cola Company, but it lowered its sales outlook. Its share rose 2.21 percent, to $36.48. The S.& P. energy sector was down 0.6 percent because of the stronger dollar. Shares of ConocoPhillips were down 1.22 percent, to $60.08, despite reporting a quarterly profit that was more than doubled from the period a year ago. Exxon Mobil was down 1.29 percent, to $65.67, while Anadarko Petroleum was more than 1.39 percent lower, at $62.56. Oil prices fell 61 cents a barrel, to $81.94. A report about durable goods orders confirmed that the rebound in spending by businesses remained sluggish. The Commerce Department reported a 3.3 percent increase in September for durable goods orders, above analysts’ forecasts of 1.3 percent. But when volatile aircraft and military orders were excluded, the figures declined 0.6 percent. Statistics about the housing market showed that new-home sales rose 6.6 percent to top 307,000 in September, a seasonally adjusted annualized rate that was close to expectations, and that was above 288,000 in August. But economists suggested that the rate had a long way to go to signify a recovery in the sector.


Missouri Hospital Reports Errors in Radiation Doses

Abstract: A hospital in Missouri said Wednesday that it had overradiated 76 patients, the vast majority with brain cancer , during a five-year period because powerful new radiation equipment had been set up incorrectly even with a representative of the manufacturer watching as it was done. The hospital, CoxHealth in Springfield, said half of all patients undergoing a particular type of treatment — stereotactic radiation therapy — were overdosed by about 50 percent after an unidentified medical physicist at the hospital miscalibrated the new equipment and routine checks over the next five years failed to catch the error. The revelation comes at a time of growing concern about safety procedures for a new generation of powerful, computer-controlled medical radiation equipment. Stereotactic therapy delivers radiation in such high doses that usually only one treatment is required. It is commonly used to treat small tumors in the head, which must be firmly stabilized, allowing radiation to be delivered to a precise location. The error was discovered in September 2009 only after a second physicist received training on the equipment, made by BrainLAB, and the hospital began questioning whether the machine had been installed correctly in 2004, in a process called commissioning. The overdoses at CoxHealth occurred in a state where there is little or no government oversight of radiation therapy, a fact that Robert H. Bezanson, the hospital’s president and chief executive, chose to emphasize. On Wednesday, he released a letter that he wrote to the Food and Drug Administration , saying that its recent decision to toughen oversight of diagnostic radiation did not go far enough. “The initiative should be broadened to include regulation of medical radiation therapy as well,” he wrote. “We have also learned that the incident here at CoxHealth is, unfortunately, not an isolated occurrence. Rather, similar instances of medical overradiation have occurred at other hospitals throughout the country. Without increased regulation and oversight, these instances of medical overradiation will likely continue.” The hospital promised to work with state legislators on ways to better regulate radiation therapy. Last month, The New York Times documented the harm that can result from radiation errors when basic safety rules are not followed. It also found that in a variety of ways, the pace of technology had outpaced the ability of the medical profession and regulators to keep up. The overdoses in Springfield echoed what occurred at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., where a similar commissioning error resulted in 77 brain cancer patients’ receiving 50 percent more radiation than prescribed in 2004 and 2005. The failure of medical facilities to properly commission new radiological equipment was cited as a concern last November by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. A testing service for institutions participating in National Cancer Institute trials recommends that certain newly installed radiotherapy equipment undergo an external, independent review before patients are treated. That did not occur at either Moffitt or CoxHealth. CoxHealth said that so far it had not found any patients who had been harmed beyond the complications of routine radiation therapy. But patients are still being contacted. Some patients, who were seriously ill, have died, and the hospital is looking into those cases. “The review of their charts and situation is still ongoing,” said Dr. John Duff, senior vice president for hospital operations. “It would be premature to speculate whether the overexposure was a contributing factor to their death.” Dr. Duff said he did not know why the BrainLAB employee who was present while the new equipment was being installed had not caught the mistake. He said that the hospital did not have any reports from BrainLAB indicating a problem. The physicist who incorrectly installed the equipment no longer works at the hospital. Officials there declined to explain the circumstances of his departure. “It’s unacceptable to us that an error like this occurred, and we are taking steps to make sure that an error like this doesn’t happen again,” Mr. Bezanson said. The hospital said its stereotactic system “remains suspended indefinitely while we are auditing the entire program.” Kate Franco, a spokeswoman for BrainLAB, issued a statement Wednesday that said the company had assisted CoxHealth in figuring out what went wrong. “Reviews determined that BrainLAB equipment performed as designed and did not malfunction,” the statement said.

Medicine and Health
Radiation
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry
Hospitals
Food and Drug Administration
Missouri


Ft. Hood Shooting Suspect, Nidal Hasan, in Court

Abstract: FORT HOOD, Tex. — Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan returned Tuesday to Fort Hood in a wheelchair and combat fatigues for a pretrial hearing 11 months after he opened fire in a base processing center, killing 13 people and wounding 32 more. The 10-minute rampage last Nov. 5 was the bloodiest shooting on a United States military base in modern times. Roughly 100 rounds were fired until two police officers shot Major Hasan, a 40-year-old Army psychiatrist. He is the only suspect in the shooting. Major Hasan has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. He is paralyzed below the middle of his chest, spending most of this year at an infirmary cell at the Bell County jail 15 miles from Fort Hood. The opening session of the hearing was dominated by procedural matters and a defense motion to postpone the hearing for nearly a month. Major Hasan, wearing a green fleece cap, looked pale as he was rolled into the courtroom by a police officer. During the proceeding he listened, expressionless, saying nothing. There was no interchange between him and several relatives and others who knew the victims, who sat in the public viewing area of the Fort Hood courtroom. One of the women carried a black-and-white photograph of a soldier encased in a plastic bag on her lap. A base security detail had placed a green cloth around fences on the courtyard — apparently to block any outside view of the suspect. Col. James L. Pohl, the investigating officer conducting the hearing, requested that the defense prepare a written argument overnight, which he will consider in the morning. The military hearing, known as an Article 32, is roughly equivalent to a civilian grand jury. Colonel Pohl has said that he will call all of the 32 wounded victims, who will be asked to describe what they saw of the shooting. At the end of the proceedings, which are expected to continue for weeks or even months, Colonel Pohl will decide whether Major Hasan will face a court-martial, and possibly the death penalty. Military justice experts have said they do not believe the hearing will investigate Major Hasan’s motivations. That would probably wait for a trial. The shootings raised questions of Major Hassan’s mental health, or whether he was a terrorist. Military investigators have not found a direct link between Major Hassan and any radical Jihadist groups, although he exchanged numerous e-mails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born cleric based in Yemen who has encouraged and applauded terrorist acts. After the shootings, Mr. Awlaki called Major Hasan “a hero” on his Web site. Major Hasan was born in the United States to Palestinian immigrant parents who apparently were not particularly devout Muslims. But Major Hasan became increasingly religious after his mother died in 2001. As a resident at the Walter Reed hospital, he received mediocre reviews and reportedly made several extreme statements to colleagues about how the United States was making war on Islam. He argued that Muslim soldiers could not be expected to kill fellow Muslims. A Pentagon review of the case found that supervisors missed repeated warning signs about Major Hasan. Four months before the shooting, he had been transferred to Fort Hood. Major Hasan became a regular participant at a local mosque, and purchased a handgun. On the morning of the shooting, he stopped by a neighbor’s apartment to give her and a friend new Korans. Major Hasan’s lawyer, John Galligan, has complained that his client cannot receive a fair hearing on the base. He has hinted he will make an insanity defense on behalf of his client, although in recent weeks he has resisted the prosecution’s efforts to professionally assess Major Hasan’s mental state.

United States Defense and Military Forces