St. Joseph, Superagent in Real Estate

Abstract: MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. Lord knows it’s rough out there in the housing market. Still, you had to feel bad for Patty Bonadies, digging with a spoon in the rocky soil in front of the new three-story colonial for sale at 7 Old Roaring Brook Road in search of the tiny statue of St. Joseph she had buried in hopes of helping the house sell. “I should have brought a bigger spoon,” she said. She wanted to move the statue, which she had planted near the front door in May, to a perhaps more propitious spot. Her late mother-in-law’s house in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., is for sale, and she plans to plant a statue there, too. “You have to believe,” she said. “In this market, you’re looking for any help you can get.” Mrs. Bonadies, a real estate agent for three years, is Roman Catholic, but St. Joseph, who is said to look after homes, families and carpenters, among many other things, isn’t just for Catholics anymore. With the housing market still dismal, the Catholic tradition of planting a statue of him as a way to help a house sell is going like gangbusters online, in stores selling religious goods and elsewhere — even if home sales are not. “In the past, we’ve seen some upticks in sales of the kits whenever there’s a sign that the housing market is on the skids,” said Nicholas Cole, director of marketing for the Catholic Company , based in Charlotte, N.C., which sells religious items online and through catalogs. “But the sales of the product have been really strong for the last two years. We saw a really big spike last year, and they’re still really selling. I don’t want to say ‘desperate’ is the right word, but I think it’s selling to people across the board, not just Catholics.” He added that the statue had helped him sell a house and a condominium in the past few years. It’s not completely clear when the tradition began, and devotees disagree over how best to participate. Head down? By the “for sale” sign? In a flowerpot? But it has been adopted by many real estate agents, who suggest that sellers, particularly in this market, give the statue a chance. A religious-goods store in the area has four green-and-white St. Joseph kits — a 3 ½-inch plastic statue, a card with the words to a prayer to St. Joseph, and an instructional pamphlet — on its front counter. The front of the kit shows the statue and a house with a “sold” sign. The back explains: “Can’t sell home? Ask St. Joseph. He’s helping 1,000s.” It adds, “Faith can move mountains and homes!!!” And online, St. Joseph is everywhere. The Underground Real Estate Agent Kit offers four-inch and eight-inch statues; a book, “St. Joseph, My Real Estate Agent”; and a free online home listing. On sites like Amazon.com, the reviews of the statues tend to be pretty straightforward. It either worked (“House had been on the market for 7 months and got an offer within 1 week of this statue’s arrival”) or it didn’t (“I fell for it! I bought the St. Joseph. I followed his instructions to the T and got no buyers for my house still after 2 months.”) SOME find the notion of magic house sales distasteful. “If you just bury the statue in the ground, you’re not going to sell your home,” said Gerard Siccardi, whose family runs a religious-goods business in White Plains. “You’re supposed to pray. You’re supposed to have some reverence about this. It’s a faith-based item.” But Stephen J. Binz, the author of 25 books on religion, including “St. Joseph, My Real Estate Agent” (“It’s the lightest of them,” he said), said that even on a casual level, there’s a kind of grass-roots spirituality involved. “I believe God can work in people’s lives in all sorts of ways without our really understanding them,” he said. And so, for whatever reason, the statue has plenty of fans, even if asking the right price might mean more than finding the right statue. Joe Becwar, an observant Catholic, said he sold his house in Southampton, N.Y., soon after his mother suggested the statue and his real estate agent told him to plant it head down, facing the house, by the “for sale” sign. His brother in Chicago had the same experience, he added. And Cheryl Katz, who is Jewish and works with Mrs. Bonadies, said the statue helped her sell two houses as a real estate agent. Now that her own house is on the market, she’s using it for herself. “You want to believe in something,” she said.

Housing and Real Estate
Superstitions
Roman Catholic Church
Christians and Christianity


Searching for the Best Bar Burgers in New Jersey

Abstract: Finding a simple cheeseburger is difficult these days. Gastropubs, for example, take enormous pride in offering fancy burgers with novel-like back stories. You know them: hamburgers made from a hand-massaged steer that was slaughtered by Michael Pollan himself, grilled over virgin charcoal and topped with an insouciant blue cheese that was aged under the bed of a Trappist monk in New Hampshire. But there are only so many overwrought burgers a girl can eat. I yearned for a great bar burger, the kind best enjoyed along with a beer or three, so I went on a quest to find one in North Jersey. I found three shining examples. My criteria: They had to be simple; asking what kind of meat the burger was made from, I would be just as likely to hear “cow” as “I don’t know.” They needed proximity to beer. And they had to be juicy — the right amount of greasy to sop up the hops. And one more rule: Each of these burgers had to be found in bars that served food, not restaurants that served alcohol, a distinction that Ellen LaMotta of Krug’s Tavern in Newark made clear to me. Image Left, the burger at Zagursky’s; right, its counterpart at the New Park Tavern. Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times Ms. LaMotta is the co-owner of Krug’s along with her brother- and sister-in-law, Frank and Susan LaMotta. Krug’s has been in the same family since 1932. Ellen LaMotta lives in the apartment above the bar, just as earlier family members did before her. I visited Krug’s shortly after its bacon cheeseburger had been named New Jersey’s Best Burger by NJ.com. We were welcomed with a friendly warning from our waitress, Christina LaMotta, Ellen’s daughter: Because of the recent triumph, we were told we might have to wait an hour for our burgers. The wait turned out to be only 40 minutes, and it was well worth it. The bacon cheeseburger was excellent, with a crunchy exterior and juicy middle. Ellen LaMotta’s pride in her family’s accomplishments was evident in a conversation we had after my visit. “It’s a lot of burgers, a lot of chop meat and a lot of running around,” she said. On my visit to Zagursky’s Bar and Grill in Whippany, my friend and I sat in our car behind the unassuming white building on the side of the old Route 10 as we considered which of the two not-very-inviting doors was the entrance. Luckily, a man popped out of one, grinned and waved at us enthusiastically. We sheepishly waved back, assuming he had mistaken us for people he knew. Image Bobby Courtney in the kitchen of the New Park Tavern in Jersey City. Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times We met him moments later, after braving one of the doors. “Hiya, I’m Kevin,” he said as he handed us menus. “But you can call me ‘Kevin from Heaven.’ ” Kevin also goes by the name Kevin Yannotta. He owns the bar with his equally friendly brother Bobby. The Yannotta brothers’ grandparents, Anna and John Zagursky, built the bar in 1945. At the time, Whippany was home to three mills and a box-making factory, Bobby Yannotta said. With the mills running three shifts, 24 hours a day, Zagursky’s would close at 2 a.m., only to reopen again at 7 to receive the workers from the night shift. “It was a way different world,” Bobby Yannotta said wistfully. When mill workers went on strike, he said, Mr. Zagursky would lend them money. “When the strike was over, they’d pay him back. And the guys who didn’t? He’d chase them down at the other bars in town to get his money back.” The mills closed in 1979, just as the Yannotta brothers were starting out at the bar (their grandparents turned the license over to Bobby and Kevin in 1987). Nowadays, the crowd is made up of softball teams, patrons wanting to watch sports and local construction workers popping in for a quick lunch and some midday cheer, plus a stalwart group of retirees who used to work nearby. No matter who shows up, they can expect a warm welcome and a very good burger. The patties come from a local butcher and are gently griddled and then steamed, which accounts for their superior juiciness. American cheese is placed on both the top and bottom roll, a simple innovation we should all consider. Image The interior of the New Park Tavern. Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times In my highly unscientific study of bars with the best burgers, I found two recurring facts: The places with the tastiest burgers were all on their second or third generation of continued ownership. The other: They were all easy to miss. And finding the New Park Tavern in Jersey City was the most difficult. The discreet, unmarked doorway of the tavern is meant to invoke a speakeasy, but it also means any new patron is more likely to find the latex fetishist shop a few doors down. The proximity of said shop made me pause before pushing open the unmarked door to the tavern. The bartender gestured toward a small chalkboard at the end of the bar that displayed the six-item menu, which ranged in offerings from a cheeseburger to that quintessential New Jersey food, the Taylor ham sandwich . I placed my order and was a little surprised to see the bartender turn and walk to the grill to start preparing it. He turned out to be Bobby Courtney, the bartender, cook, manager and son of the owner of the tavern. Mr. Courtney’s father, John, bought the bar in 1972, but the original tavern was built in the late 1930s. The patrons are a mix of police officers and firefighters, public workers and families. “It’s a regular crowd,” Bobby Courtney said. “The grandkids of our early patrons are now coming in. It’s a lot of neighborhood people.” In fact, they only felt the need to list themselves in the phone book three years ago. Mr. Courtney’s burger, which won a similar NJ.com “best burger” contest in 2013, was a testament to simplicity. It was nearly round, like a glorious giant meatball, and it was perfect: beefy with just the right amount of shirt-staining fattiness. When I pressed Mr. Courtney for the secret, he was humble. “There’s no special technique,” he said. “Flip it a few times. Don’t squeeze it. And give it a little bit of love.”

Restaurant
Hamburger
Newark NJ
Jersey City
Whippany
bars,nightclubs
Krug's Tavern
New Park Tavern
Zagursky's Bar and Grill


Helping Immigrants Navigate Local N.Y.C. Government

Abstract: At a Haitian church in Canarsie, Brooklyn, officials from the mayor’s office spent a recent Saturday morning discussing food stamps and discrimination in the workplace, their words translated into Creole for an audience of some 50 people. The next night, another delegation spoke to a group of Bangladeshi immigrants in the Bronx about police precincts and community boards. In recent weeks, officials have held similar meetings with Albanians, Mexicans and West Africans. The forums are part of a new program, run by the mayor’s office, that is intended to improve the relationship between city government and immigrants who are often wary of local authorities or unaware of city services available to them. One N.Y.C., One Nation, as the program is called, is in some ways an acknowledgment that despite Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ’s vocal support for the city’s immigrants, too many of them remain cut off from the mainstream. The first forums have found many immigrants distrustful of the local police, unengaged with their elected officials and unable to find reliable legal help for their immigration problems. “How do we fundamentally engage our immigrant communities to help them understand that their voice matters?” asked Fatima A. Shama , commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs , which is coordinating the program. The initiative, which began in February, also represents a shift of emphasis for the Bloomberg administration, which has spent significant energy rallying mayors and business leaders to lobby for a broad overhaul of federal immigration policy — only to see its campaign stall in Congress. Instead of looking toward Washington, the new program focuses on government at its most humble: police precinct councils, community board meetings, zoning laws. While local officials and agencies directly affect immigrants’ quality of life and sense of empowerment and security, Ms. Shama said immigrants rarely connect with them. At the meeting with Haitian immigrants at Beracan Baptist Church on Flatlands Avenue, the program’s director, Camelia Ghiuzeli Mitchell, asked whether anyone had ever heard of police precinct councils — neighborhood groups that meet with the local police to discuss safety issues. Not a hand went up. “Our immigrant communities,” Ms. Shama said, “know how to navigate a lot of the city that they participate in — they know how to put a parade together. But do they know what a community board is? Are they engaged with the park cleanup?” “The success of the city will always be dependent on people being a part of their communities,” she added. “Now more than ever we have to make sure that immigrants trust us.” The program was created in part as a response to some of the inflammatory remarks in last summer’s debate over a proposed Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, as well as several high-profile attacks against Muslims, gays and other minorities. “We had some intolerance happening in the city, which forces us to be smarter to ensure that our immigrant communities feel more comfortable,” Ms. Shama said. One Nation , a national foundation that promotes civic engagement with an emphasis on reaching Muslims, is financing the project with a two-year, $500,000 grant to be supplemented by at least $500,000 raised by the New York Community Trust. Ms. Shama said the New York initiative, which seeks to engage myriad immigrant groups on a wide range of projects, is the first of its scale in the country. Posters and speakers will urge immigrants to become more involved with their children’s schools, to participate in English study programs and to open bank accounts. College readiness seminars and financial literacy sessions will be offered. But the program also seeks to identify a new wave of leaders in immigrant communities who have ideas for reshaping their neighborhoods to better suit the changing populations. The mayor’s office is teaming up with the Coro New York Leadership Center to offer small grants to 20 immigrants, who will receive leadership training and help in creating community development projects. The hope is to cultivate a group of potential leaders to represent communities whose voices are seldom heard, Ms. Shama said. Advocates for immigrants said they were pleased to see the city focusing on civic engagement, as long as the authorities continued offering basic services to the needy. “If you’re shuttling your family to soup kitchens, it’s hard to play a meaningful role on the community board,” said Andrew Friedman, co-executive director of Make the Road NYC . “But there is a real desire in immigrant communities throughout the city to figure out how to engage.” The meeting with the Haitians showed both the project’s potential and its challenges. The group sat patiently through more than an hour of presentations about city services and privacy policies, but at the end, few questions touched on any of the programs mentioned. Instead, nearly all asked about their immigration status, a matter largely beyond the program’s purview. Still, many in the audience said the session proved valuable. “As an immigrant, we don’t know our rights, how to get help, who to talk to,” said Verlande Antoine, a Haitian nursing assistant who has lived in New York for nearly a decade. “You never know when you’re going to need help.”

Immigration and Emigration
Bloomberg Michael R
New York City
Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs


‘Facts Are Stubborn,’ Romney Once Said, and He Should Know

Abstract: FORT DODGE, Iowa — There was the period last spring when Mitt Romney claimed while campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire that he had been a hunter “pretty much all my life,” only to have to admit later that he had seriously hunted only on two occasions. Then there was the endorsement Mr. Romney claimed on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” last Sunday that he received from the National Rifle Association while running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, when it turned out the group had never endorsed him. Mr. Romney’s latest concession is that he only “figuratively” saw his father, George, march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., something he claimed in his highly publicized speech about his Mormon faith this month. Some publications have raised doubts that Mr. Romney’s father ever marched with Dr. King. But Mike Allen, a writer for the political Web site Politico.com , reported on Friday that he had interviewed two people who recalled seeing George Romney and Dr. King marching together in Grosse Pointe, Mich., in 1963. Mr. Romney once said, in reference to misstatements by his Republican rival Rudolph W. Giuliani, “Facts are stubborn things.” But does he have his own problem with blurring the truth? Some of the instances when Mr. Romney has tripped up on his facts show that he is prone to exaggeration, taking what is essentially a kernel of truth and stretching it to bolster his case. On Thursday, for instance, at a campaign stop in Indianola, Iowa, he ran into trouble when talking about his record on illegal drugs while governor. Mr. Romney had been running ads in Iowa attacking his rival Mike Huckabee for his record on clemencies while governor of Arkansas and for reducing penalties for methamphetamine-related crimes. “I’m very proud of the fact that we, my state, when I was governor, we made it tougher for people with meth labs,” Mr. Romney said, echoing his commercial in which he claimed that he “got tough on drugs like meth” while in the governor’s office. “We cracked down on crime and on meth in particular,” Mr. Romney added. “It’s a very important topic. I want to make sure we do everything we can to keep our kids off of this terrible, pernicious, captivating drug.” But both the advertisement and Mr. Romney’s claims on his record were misleading. Mr. Romney’s office proposed legislation that would have toughened penalties on those in possession of methamphetamine and the chemicals to manufacture it, but the bill stalled in the state legislature. After The New York Times pointed out Mr. Romney’s misstatement in a posting on its politics blog, he made sure to correct himself before taking questions from reporters at his next campaign stop here. “If I said this morning that we ‘got tough’ on methamphetamines , I proposed we get tough on methamphetamine, and I’ve corrected that right here for all of you,” he said. “You don’t need to make any error of reporting that somehow Governor Romney actually got it done.” His claim of being a lifelong hunter was similar. When asked at public forums about his stance on guns, Mr. Romney portrayed himself as a sportsman, a “hunter pretty much all my life,” who strongly supported the right to bear arms. He recalled how he had gone hunting with his cousins as a teenager. The last time he went hunting, he said, was last year, when he shot quail in Georgia and “knocked down quite a few birds.” “So I’ve been pretty much hunting all my life,” he said again. After the notion was challenged by The Associated Press, Mr. Romney’s campaign initially conceded that those were the only two instances he had really been hunting in his life, but later rushed to add that he had also gone pistol shooting for “varmints” at his vacation home in Utah, although he did not have a hunting license or own a gun. On the National Rifle Association endorsement, Mr. Romney argued that the group had phone banked for him, but he conceded it did not formally endorse him. “Frankly, I didn’t realize the N.R.A. had an official endorsement program that was different than their phone banking for me,” Mr. Romney said Thursday to reporters here. “The fact that they phone banked and encouraged their members to vote for me, I thought qualified for saying they had endorsed me.” With the questions now being raised by various publications about whether Mr. Romney’s father, a former Michigan governor who died in 1995, ever marched with Dr. King, no one is disputing that George Romney was active in the civil rights movement. What is being challenged is the precision of his son’s statement. Indeed, with many of these instances, there has often been at least an element of truth in his claims. But for a candidate who has featured his business background and made much of his propensity for careful analysis of data, Mr. Romney is not always precise. Asked about it on Thursday, he said he would correct whatever was wrong. “There’s going to be hyper-scrutiny of each word,” Mr. Romney said. “That’s part of running for president. I’m up to it. You can look at the things I’m saying about my record and about the events of campaign and history, and you’ll find if now and then I miss a word or I get something slightly off, I’ll correct it, acknowledge where it’s wrong. But the overall thrust, the overall meaning, of the story, is very accurate.”

Presidential Election of 2008
Romney Mitt


Fifa to Examine Bribe Story

Abstract: FIFA said it would examine evidence from a British newspaper alleging that two FIFA executive committee members offered to sell their votes in World Cup bidding. The Sunday Times of London filmed Amos Adamu of Nigeria and Reynald Temarii, a Tahitian who is the president of the Oceania Football Confederation, asking for money to finance projects. The reporters were posing as lobbyists who wanted to help bring the World Cup to the United States. ¶New Mexico defender Elizabeth Lambert, an Internet sensation when she was caught on video last November yanking a Brigham Young player to the ground by the ponytail, stayed on the bench as the Lobos beat B.Y.U., 1-0, in double overtime in Albuquerque in the teams’ first game since the hair-pulling fracas. Lambert was suspended for the first two games of the season and has played sparingly since. lambert ¶The Manchester United star Wayne Rooney was dropped from the team’s starting lineup without explanation and played only the last 20 minutes of a 2-2 draw with West Bromwich Albion in a home game in the Premier League. Rooney was left on the bench days after contradicting Manager Alex Ferguson by denying that he had missed games because he had been struggling with an ankle injury. rooney

World Cup (Soccer)
FIFA
Sunday Times
Bribery and Kickbacks
Soccer


Behind Stabbing, a Feud About a Band Called the Cro-Mags

Abstract: The violence that erupted during a music festival at Webster Hall in the East Village on Friday night lasted just a few minutes, but apparently it had been brewing for some time. When it was over, Michael Couls, the bass player of the Cro-Mags , an influential New York hard-core punk band, had been slashed with a knife, and one of the band’s founders, Harley Flanagan, was under arrest after being caught by security, witnesses said. The attack took place during a show that also featured the bands Sick of It All and Vision of Disorder and was part of the first CBGB Festival , organized by investors who recently bought the assets of the now-defunct music club that stood on the Bowery for more than 30 years before being closed in 2006 . Mr. Flanagan, 45, was the band’s original bassist. On Saturday, he was charged with assault and criminal possession of a weapon. John Joseph, the band’s lead singer, said that Mr. Flanagan had been at odds with other members of the Cro-Mags since he left the band in 2000 and had not been permitted to rejoin. “This dude has been a negative thorn in the side of this band forever,” Mr. Joseph said. “I hope he gets what’s coming to him.” Few bands were as energetic as the Cro-Mags during the heyday of the Lower East Side hard-core scene in the mid- to late 1980s. Their first record, “The Age of Quarrel,” featured an illustration of a mushroom cloud on the cover and driving songs with shouted lyrics about existential fear and the limits of anarchism. In many ways the songs were a reflection of the world as seen by Mr. Flanagan, who left school at an early age and began hanging out on the decaying streets of the Lower East Side, where rent was cheap, abandoned buildings proliferated and the drug trade flourished. The hard-core scene gradually become less visible, said Clayton Patterson, a photographer on the Lower East Side who has documented many of the bands, but it has experienced a revival in recent years. The crowd was waiting for the Cro-Mags on Friday night when Mr. Flanagan darted from the dressing room while yelling something that onlookers could not make out, according to a spectator, Elie Perler, 30. At almost the same time, Mr. Perler, the co-creator of the Bowery Boogie blog , said security guards yelled, “Get his hands,” and “He has a knife,” as they converged on him. “It took all of those huge guys; he was squirming and flailing,” he said. The guards subdued Mr. Flanagan, with one sitting on his back, Mr. Perler said, and others grabbing his hands and feet. Mr. Flanagan appeared to have injured his leg in the struggle, Mr. Perler said. Mr. Couls emerged from the dressing room pressing a bandage against his chest, according to Mr. Perler. “It was a little tense,” he said. “It was a little scary.” It was also the end of the show. The police ordered everyone out. The festival ends on Sunday. “We are saddened to learn about the events that occurred last night at Webster Hall,” a spokesman for the festival said on Saturday. A police report did not shed any light on exactly what motivated the melee but said that Mr. Flanagan first attacked a man in the dressing room, slashing him in the side and arm with a knife. When a second person intervened, the police said, Mr. Flanagan bit that person’s hand and slashed him.

Rock Music
Assaults
Webster Hall
Cro-Mags (Music Group)
East Village (NYC)
Music
Couls Michael
Flanagan Harley
Cro-Mags


At Duke, Basketball Tent City for Fun and Profit

Abstract: DURHAM, N.C. — Duke is an elite private university where the buildings are pretend Gothic, where tuition is $42,000 a year, and where hundreds of students eagerly and voluntarily spent five wintry weeks camping in the famed tent city known as Krzyzewskiville for one simple reason: to get a good seat for the basketball game against archrival North Carolina. But even at Duke, where crazy is cool and basketball is king, some administrators, faculty and students are asking if big-time sports — and some of the behavior that goes with it — is a big waste of time and energy. “For a big state school, there’s some justification for big-time sports; for a private institution like Duke, it’s a little harder to figure out,” said Charles T. Clotfelter, a professor of public policy, economics and law at Duke who has written a book called “ Big-Time Sports in American Universities .” “Why are we here?” Clotfelter added. “We’re here to educate people. There has been a lot of new chatter about this in the past three years. I think it’s better for us to come clean and say, yes, we do commercial sports.” That kind of talk is not confined to Duke, or to other elite, private universities. It is taking place at college campuses of all sizes around the country. Duke, however, is a university accustomed to having it all — high academic standards, a vibrant social life and big-time sports — and that was enough to take a trip to see what the debate on campus was like. In 2010, the Knight Commission, an N.C.A.A. watchdog group made up of university presidents and other leaders, reported that spending on high-profile sports was growing at up to triple the pace of spending on academics. “We’ve reached the point where big-time intercollegiate athletics is undermining the integrity of our institutions, diverting presidents and institutions from their main purpose,” William E. Kirwan, the chancellor of the University of Maryland system and a co-director of the commission, said last year. Clotfelter pointed out that the current debate about the damaging fallout from big-time college sports echoes an argument that dates to the 1920s. “The only thing that’s different now is the money,” he said. Image Duke students camping in the tent city called Krzyzewskiville in a bid for tickets to the game against North Carolina. Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times And at Duke, the money generated by the basketball team is way past crazy. In his book, Clotfelter set out to document the nationwide academic cost of athletic success. Among his findings: at colleges with teams in the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, library patrons view 6 percent fewer articles a day as long as the team is in the tournament; on the day immediately after a team wins in an upset or a close game, library use plunges by 19 percent. Clotfelter also found that from 1985 to 2010, average salaries at public universities rose by 32 percent for full professors, 90 percent for presidents and 650 percent for football coaches. Just how crazy is the basketball money at Duke? To find out, I visited a six-story ziggurat called the Schwartz-Butters Athletics Center . It towers over Cameron Indoor Stadium and a new $18.5 million structure known as the Michael W. Krzyzewski Center for Academic and Athletic Excellence, where the men’s and women’s basketball players practice and lift weights, and where all of the university’s 620 athletes in 26 sports can come to work on their studies. On the top floor, I was ushered into the office of Mike Cragg, the senior associate director of athletics, who is in charge of what is called the Legacy Fund, which has raised $65 million since 2000 to finance the men’s basketball program — scholarships, salaries, the operating budget and capital projects. I asked Cragg who came up with the idea. “Coach K had a vision,” Cragg said. “We realized we had an opportunity to monetize the commitment to the basketball program, and we could expand our donor base outside alumni.” The most generous donor has kicked in $7.5 million, and the minimum donation is $1 million. With a thought to some of the ideas Clotfelter has studied, I said, “Have you ever considered getting rid of K-Ville?” Cragg looked at me like I might require medical attention. “It’s nothing we would want to get rid of,” he said. “It’s part of the university fabric. It brings an energy to the program because our staff and players know we’re all in this together with the students. That translates onto the court.” Indeed, Duke’s fans, known as the Cameron Crazies, are as synonymous with the team as Krzyzewski. They are passionate, inventive and, depending on your viewpoint, uproariously funny or brutally annoying. Krzyzewski — winner of 946 college games, 4 national championships and 2 Olympic gold medals — has called them Duke’s “sixth man.” When it comes to the tent village, students say that the experience is a vital part of their Duke education. No one pretends much studying is done, but they say it helps them with team building, time management and organizational skills. (There are various self-imposed rules that must be followed in the village.) Many opponents of the practice realize it is here to stay. “By now, tenting has become part of the Duke brand and undergraduate experience,” said Orin Starn, who teaches the anthropology of sports at Duke and has spoken out against the “strain of anti-intellectualism” that comes with big-time college sports. “None of us on the faculty or in the Duke administration would dare to suggest that student time might be better invested elsewhere.” In “ Buck Duke’s University ,” a withering satire that appeared in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine in 1933, W. J. Cash derided the tobacco baron James Buchanan Duke’s school as a “Babbitt factory — a mill for grinding out go-get-’em boys in the wholesale and undeviating fashion in which his Chesterfield plant across the way ground out cigarettes.” Image Students formed a line in the early morning for a home basketball game against Maryland. Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times That is a far cry from what Duke is today. It is a diverse institution that attracts qualified and motivated students from nearly every state and some 90 foreign countries. Consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the country, Duke has a strong reputation for teaching and research, as well as renowned graduate schools of business, public policy, engineering, medicine and law. Amid all the diversity and academic excellence, there is also a concerted effort to curtail some of the less-than-intellectual practices linked to sporting events, including tailgating parties, heavy drinking and other assorted shenanigans. The face of this moderation effort is Larry Moneta, the vice president for student affairs. Moneta discontinued Tailgate, an alcohol-saturated costume party that used to precede football games. (The last straw was when a 14-year-old boy was found passed-out drunk in a portable toilet.) Moneta also supported a policy that requires most on-campus parties to have a monitor who looks for signs of excessive drinking. When people started pitching tents in K-Ville as early as December, Moneta put a stop to it, decreeing that tenting could not start until after winter break. “The extremes have been cut back dramatically — out-of-control parties, the number of alcohol-related hospitalizations,” Moneta said. “I think we’ve done a good job of working with students to find reasonable solutions. Our goal has been to take extremes out of the equation. I want them to have a good time and wake up alive the next morning.” There have even been timid steps to let some of the air out of Duke basketball. Richard H. Brodhead, a former English professor and dean at Yale who was named Duke’s president in 2004, recently said he found it “foolish” and “disheartening” when high school students listed the men’s basketball team as the primary reason they applied to Duke. The comment set off a typhoon of response — some of it positive, most of it negative — among students and alumni. Brodhead probably was not surprised. On his first day on the job, he got the distressing news that Krzyzewski was being wooed by the Los Angeles Lakers of the N.B.A., who were said to be offering $40 million. Brodhead found himself in an unfamiliar bind. He had spent his entire career in the Ivy League, where there are no athletic scholarships, and now he was getting a crash course on the importance of sports at Duke. Specifically, he was learning that the most powerful person on campus is the men’s basketball coach. Realizing that losing Krzyzewski would not be the ideal way to start his tenure, the scholarly Brodhead swallowed hard and joined a crowd of students chanting, “Coach K, please stay!” Brodhead was also part of a human chain forming the letter “K” outside Cameron. Starn, the professor of the anthropology of sports, said at the time, “What you saw there was the lay of the land.” Sitting among the Cameron Crazies during a Duke game is a lot of fun. The team is thrilling to watch, and the fans are, well, crazy. The experience is like being trapped in a mosh pit inside a jet engine during a hurricane. But if you can get beyond the clichés — the costumes, the body paint, the pep band, the noise — you realize you are in a rarefied world of oak paneling, gleaming brass rails and polished floors, where things happen with military precision, echoing Krzyzewski’s West Point background. Cameron, you realize, is not just a basketball arena. It is a tabernacle, a place whose trappings, rituals and exclusivity are perfect to prepare Duke students for the places they are likely to wind up after graduation: big banks and law firms, corporate board rooms and country club locker rooms. No, Cameron is not only a basketball arena. It is a flawless expression of the thing that beats in the heart of Duke and every other elite school in the land: privilege. And privilege comes with prerogatives for students, including the freedom to do things that seem to have nothing to do with getting an education. Things that are, quite simply, nuts.

Basketball
College Sports
Duke
College basketball
College


Build a Wiffle Ball Field and Lawyers Will Come

Abstract: GREENWICH, Conn. Vincent Provenzano, 16 years old, experienced his Kevin Costner moment one Sunday afternoon in May after a thrilling day of Wiffle ball in a friend’s backyard. He came home, gazed at a field of weeds, brush and poison ivy in an empty lot off Riverside Lane, turned to his friend Justin Currytto, 17, and proclaimed: “If we build it, they will come.” After three weeks of clearing brush and poison ivy, scrounging up plywood and green paint, digging holes and pouring concrete, Vincent, Justin and about a dozen friends did manage to build it — a tree-shaded Wiffle ball version of Fenway Park complete with a 12-foot-tall green monster in center field, American flag by the left-field foul pole and colorful signs for Taco Bell Frutista Freezes. But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present. “People can remember how much fun it was to go out in the woods in the summer, build a fort, do something fun and creative, so there’s something pretty cool in what these kids did, especially at a time kids grow up in such an incredibly structured and stressful environment,” said Lin Lavery, one of three Greenwich selectmen, who inherited Wifflegate while the first selectman, Greenwich’s version of mayor, is on vacation. “But we have a situation that’s escalated,” Ms. Lavery said. “Neighbors are upset that it’s too close to their property; building has been done on town property; there are issues of traffic and drainage. We’re hoping to come up with a compromise, but there are a lot of issues to address.” There’s plenty of local history in Wiffle ball (it was invented up the road in Fairfield) and Greenwich land-use disputes (where to start?), but Vincent and Justin say they just wanted a place to play Wiffle ball. They got materials from a friend’s basement plus two big pieces of plywood being thrown away by a Shell station on East Putnam Avenue. They fished pallets out of Dumpsters and spent perhaps $200, mostly on green paint. But even before they were finished, things began to get complicated. They were told the neighbors had complained, the field was on town-owned land, they needed a permit to put up their field and it would probably have to come down. This being Greenwich, they decided not to go quietly. They and/or parents alerted the local newspaper and politicians up to Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele of nearby Stamford. Soon they had everyone in town talking about it, with most of them seemingly put off by the notion that even a Wiffle ball field needs to enlist the armies of adult supervision and legalistic oversight. “BACK before we lost our collective minds and began shrieking with horror at the thought of kids having fun on their own (as in not part of an official league or otherwise organized activity), they used to do things like find a vacant field, turn it into a makeshift diamond and spend glorious hours in the summer sun,” the local newspaper, Greenwich Time, wrote in an editorial in support of the youths on Wednesday. The regular players, mostly high school boys but including Tara Currivan, 15 (who swings a mean bat and brings lemonade to the field), and Scott Atkinson, 13, seem a little befuddled by the whole thing. “They think we’re a cult,” said Jeff Currivan, 17. “People think we should be home playing ‘Grand Theft Auto.’ ” And they seem to get the fact that many adults are taken with the idea of kids’ doing something that’s not structured, not organized and not oriented toward improving your SAT scores. “It’s just old-fashioned fun,” said Vincent Provenzano. “We did it on our own. Maybe people think that’s unusual.” We’d all like our own Field of Dreams, but it’s worth remembering that Mr. Costner’s was in an Iowa cornfield. And, with all due nostalgia for simpler childhoods in simpler times, it’s possible Greenwich’s Wiffle version — on a lot valued at $1.25 million, according to the Greenwich newspaper — was too good to be true. The neighbors, one an ultra-endurance athlete who does charity work around the globe, another building a house to accommodate her brother, who uses a wheelchair, turn out to be not that much different from most suburbanites seeing their backyard go from their own to a quasi park full of teenagers from near and far. They say that the land floods and that the area was designated by the town as a drainage area, a function largely undone when the youths stripped away all the greenery and undergrowth. The complaining neighbors want the field closed immediately. The field had 40 people last weekend for a Wiffle tournament, which is something no one bargained on when they bought their houses. “I’m all for Wiffle ball and apple pie and baseball and the American flag, but there are plenty of fields in town they can use instead of building something in people’s backyard,” said Liz Pate, who is building a new house behind what’s now home plate. “If I come home at 6 at night after working all day, I want peace and quiet. I can’t have that. I have dozens of people behind my house playing Wiffle ball. If their parents think this is so great, let them play at their house.” The liability panic is adult nuttiness except when it’s not. It’s a fairly raw issue in Greenwich, where, for instance, a doctor was awarded $6.3 million a few years back when he broke his leg in two places while sledding with his 4-year-old son. All kids deserve a Huck Finn summer. We perhaps have lost our collective minds about our overscheduled, overstressed young. But, in the end, maybe there was a reason that Kevin Costner built that Field of Dreams in Iowa and not in Greenwich.

Athletics and Sports
Children and Youth
Greenwich (Conn)


The Complexities of Being on a Roll

Abstract: Galileo’s rolling of spheres down an inclined plane four centuries ago disproved Aristotle’s notion that falling (or rolling) objects move at a constant speed. That was one of the earliest examples of using experiments to devise and test hypotheses to explain observations. When the rolling object is not rigid but flexible, the behavior of the rolling becomes more complicated and counterintuitive, as students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered in more recent experiments. Christophe Clanet , a professor at École Polytechnique in France who was a visiting lecturer at M.I.T. in 2008, challenged graduate students there to update Galileo’s 17th-century study. One group came up with the idea of rolling circular elastic bands. Placed on their sides, the bands, about two inches in diameter and cast out of rubberlike vinyl polysiloxane, were squashed a little by gravity into an oval shape. To study the rolling behavior, the students placed the bands inside a steel cylinder, a foot in diameter, which spun like a hamster wheel or a clothes dryer drum. One might expect that as a band began rolling, it would become more circular with the centrifugal force counteracting the pull of gravity. Instead, the top of the band sagged even more, into a peanut shape. At fast enough speeds, the band’s top half sagged enough to touch the bottom part. While the rotating motion would make the band’s shape more circular, that was not the only force at work. There was also energy stored in the stretching and bending of the band, and the interplay of the dynamics. The findings appeared last month in the journal Physical Review Letters .


Pittsburgh Steelers at Baltimore Ravens Preview

Abstract: Steelers (9-5) at Ravens (4-10) 1 p.m. Line: Steelers by 11.5 It is hard to imagine this season going worse for the Ravens, who have 19 players on injured reserve but were on their way to irrelevance long before the injuries. As the Ravens wait for the season to end, they will have to endure a week against a dominant Pittsburgh offense that is playing as well as it has in recent memory, even without the star running back Le’Veon Bell. Ben Roethlisberger, Antonio Brown, Martavis Bryant and DeAngelo Williams have the Steelers dreaming of a seventh Super Bowl ring, and the Ravens are just a small speed bump on the road. Pick: Steelers


On Avenue of Americas, No Brazil or Mexico. Panama or Peru, Either.

Abstract: There is no Brazil. It’s a good thing the eyes of the world are on Rio. If they scanned the Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan — intended as an expression of Pan-American unity — they would find Brazil missing from the shrinking, deteriorating ranks of national medallions suspended over the thoroughfare. Sixth Avenue, a wide north-south artery of Manhattan, was renamed on Oct. 20, 1945, as “an expression on the part of our people of the love and affection we have for our sister republics of Central and South America,” in the words of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia , who presided at the ceremony with President Juan Antonio Rios of Chile. In 1959, medallions depicting the coats of arms of the nations of the Western Hemisphere were installed on 300 lampposts from Lower Manhattan to the southern edge of Central Park. They were made of porcelain enamel. Each was three feet in diameter. Many, if not most, were removed during a renovation of the avenue in the 1990s. Today, if you’ve seen 22 Americas medallions, you’ve seen them all. Mexico is missing. (No small matter in this presidential election year.) So are Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Jamaica, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico and El Salvador, to name just a few. Streaks of rust darken the center of many of the surviving medallions, seeping down from their attachment clips. These are not the only ways the medallions betray the indifference of the city’s Transportation Department. A white horse gallops rightward in a field of blue on Venezuela’s coat of arms. But in 2006, President Hugo Chávez ordered the “ imperialist horse ” to turn leftward , as his government was doing. New York’s horse never got the memo. Canada added a red ring to its coat of arms in 1994. It symbolizes the Order of Canada , an honor bestowed for outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation. The ring is missing from the New York medallion. Image A statue of President Benito Juárez of Mexico near 41st Street and the Avenue of the Americas. Credit Christopher Lee for The New York Times So is the 10th star from a ribbon in the Bolivian coat of arms , symbolizing a claim to the coastline area of Litoral, which would be the landlocked nation’s link to the sea — if it were not in the hands of Chile. Surinam changed its spelling to Suriname after it gained independence from the Netherlands. You wouldn’t know it from the country’s two medallions on the Avenue of the Americas. But you probably don’t even know the avenue by that name. Even on Day 1, the fancy designation had a hard time getting traction. Four thousand World War II veterans marched in the October 1945 renaming ceremony. They stole the show. The New York Times said the street more truly resembled the “ Avenue of the Navy ” that day. Over the years, New Yorkers clung to Sixth Avenue. Only real estate developers, prestige-minded corporate tenants and The Times used Avenue of the Americas. In 1984, Mayor Edward I. Koch ordered the restoration of supplementary “Sixth Avenue” signs. The thoroughfare still retains a special hemispheric character, thanks to the presence of monuments along its route honoring Juan Pablo Duarte of the Dominican Republic, Gen. José Artigas of Uruguay, José Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva of Brazil, Benito Juárez of Mexico, Gen. José de San Martín of Argentina, Simón Bolívar of Venezuela and José Martí of Cuba. There is also Little Brazil Street , which New Yorkers know as West 46th Street. It intersects with the Avenue of the Americas and would seem the perfect spot for a Brazilian coat of arms. Asked about the fate of the remaining medallions in 1998, when Brazil was in their ranks, a spokesman for the Transportation Department said, “D.O.T. is reviewing what would be required to put them back up .” The medallions were stored in an agency sign shop, where they still are. Asked about the fate of the remaining medallions in 2008, a spokesman for the agency said, “In the interest of safety, we have removed some medallions but the spirit of the avenue will live on .” Asked about the fate of the remaining medallions last week, a spokesman said there were no plans to replace them but that the department would “consider discussions with any entities wishing to pursue the matter.” The agency’s inaction has had advantages. When the medallions went up, the leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, was not yet anathema in the United States. Even after relations between the two countries ruptured, Cuba’s coat of arms remained on the avenue. Today, three Cuban medallions can be seen, at King, West Fourth and 57th Streets, as if the City of New York has always known what your mother told you: Keep something around long enough and it is bound to come back into fashion.

NYC Transportation Dept
Avenue of the Americas NYC
Signage
NYC
Fiorello H la Guardia


Red Bulls Display Some of Their Star Power

Abstract: HARRISON, N.J. — Global soccer stars have been shuttling into the United States all summer, some playing exhibitions for national teams or foreign clubs, others as designated players in the domestic league. At times, the fanfare that accompanied those cosmopolitan figures as they jetted in and out has overshadowed the fact that there is a league here in full swing. In the thick of a playoff hunt, the Red Bulls played an important match against Toronto F.C., a division rival, on Wednesday night at Red Bull Arena, and won, 1-0. The victory kept the Red Bulls in second place in the East with 31 points, while Toronto stayed in third with 26. “It was a key game for both teams,” Red Bulls Coach Hans Backe said. “We knew it was going to be a battle.” And still, the focus for some remained on which stars were in the building, and which ones were not. The Red Bulls’ marketing team trumpeted this match as the “official” home debut of the designated player Thierry Henry . He had previously played in an exhibition at home against Tottenham Hotspur on July 23 — and even scored a goal to appease the crowd of 20,312. But that did not count. Just 19,035 bought tickets for Wednesday, yet another game that the Red Bulls, with a new $200 million, 25,000-capacity stadium, failed to sell out. But the building will have its first sellout soon, on Saturday night, when the Los Angeles Galaxy arrives with its own star, Landon Donovan, on the field and another, the injured David Beckham, on the bench. That game has been sold out since July 27. That night will also mark the home debut of Rafael Marquez, the Mexican midfielder who along with Juan Pablo Angel completes the Red Bulls’ troika of designated players. Toronto forward Wade Barrett called them “the Miami Heat of our league.” Marquez missed Wednesday’s game after being summoned for duty with his national team. So Red Bulls fans made do with two stars. At its best, the forward-line tandem of Henry and Angel will operate like a see-saw, the two of them making contrapuntal moves, up and down, to draw defenders and create space for one another. It was this dynamic that created the game’s only goal, in the 23rd minute. After coaxing the Toronto defense into its own area, Angel dropped back into a pocket of space and headed a lofted ball into the path of Henry, who had been sprinting toward him from the center circle. “We talk, I know his movements,” Angel said. “What I try to do is the opposite of what he does, just to create spaces for each other.” Released on his own and at full speed behind Toronto’s defense, Henry appeared to be tripped by keeper Stefan Frei, who had slid wildly toward the ball. Henry yelled for a penalty, but his protestations were short-lived. Seconds later, Henry regained possession of the ball and barreled his way through three Toronto defenders before laying it off to Seth Stammler at the top of the penalty box. Stammler scooped the ball with his laces over a wall of defenders to Joel Lindpere, who knocked the ball easily inside the far post. “For me it was a penalty, but the ref didn’t call it,” Henry said. “I stood up after, and we scored straight after, so it’s not really important.” Henry came into the game nursing a strained groin muscle sustained in the Red Bulls’ game against the Chicago Fire on Sunday and was substituted at halftime. But he had done his job. And the Red Bulls reverted to a rough and scrappy defensive stance in the second half to preserve the lead. “It wasn’t pretty today,” said Backe, who admitted that with better players, the play on the field would be more attractive. But the quality of play should elevate Saturday when the Red Bulls face the Galaxy, who sit in first place in the West. The Red Bulls will also welcome back Marquez, who played 57 minutes in a 1-1 draw against Spain in Mexico City. “We are all in a hurry to play against them,” Henry said of the Galaxy. “Rafa is going to be back. When he plays in the middle, he does make a lot of difference. Henry is the most famous player to sign with M.L.S. since Beckham joined the Galaxy in 2007, but their experiences have been markedly dissimilar. No “Henry-cam” has made its way into a broadcast, and he has generally avoided painting himself as an ambassador of the game. Instead, Henry has extolled the virtues of life’s simpler pleasures: enjoying a cup of coffee undisturbed, or riding public transportation. The Red Bulls say that Henry was signed to win games. With Marquez about to join him again, they will be expected to do just that.

New York Red Bulls
Henry Thierry
Toronto FC
Major League Soccer
Soccer


Austrian Court Unblocks Assets of Former U.S. Ambassador’s Wife

Abstract: BERLIN — A Vienna court has unfrozen assets belonging to the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, a former United States ambassador reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department on suspicion of tax evasion and money laundering, according to a statement from the couple and their lawyer on Thursday. Holger Bielesz, a lawyer for the couple, said in a telephone interview that a higher Vienna court ordered the accounts unfrozen on Sept. 3, but that the decision was conveyed to him only on Wednesday. The case surfaced on Monday after Profil, an Austrian newsmagazine, reported that the American authorities were investigating transfers into seven accounts held by Mr. Khalilzad’s wife, Cheryl Benard, totaling 1.15 million euros, or nearly $1.5 million. Profil said that documents from the Vienna legal authorities, including a Justice Department order from May 2013 concerning an investigation into Mr. Khalilzad’s financial dealings, had been found in a garbage dump by a blogger between March and August. The newsmagazine said the inquiry concerned possible tax evasion and money laundering. Although the American authorities had sought only information about Ms. Benard’s accounts in Vienna, Mr. Bielesz has said, Austrian prosecutors obtained a court order in February freezing them. Ms. Benard, a social scientist and author, holds American and Austrian citizenship. Mr. Khalilzad is a former ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations. Mr. Bielesz refused to confirm details in the Profil report, but the statement said: “The appellate decision by the regional high court is a complete vindication of the position of Ms. Benard and Ambassador Khalilzad. The seizure of the accounts is lifted, and the funds in the accounts are no longer frozen.” Image The former envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is reported to be under investigation on suspicion of tax evasion and money laundering. Credit Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times Quoting the couple, the statement said the Vienna court “further ruled that there was no authority for Viennese prosecutors to seek the bank information regarding our accounts in the first place, much less be given the ability to unlawfully restrain us from accessing our accounts.” It made no mention of any continuing investigation into Mr. Khalilzad’s financial dealings. On Monday, a law enforcement official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Justice Department had asked the Austrian government for help in the case but did not elaborate on its nature and scope. Asked about the investigation, Mr. Khalilzad said in an email, “I am not aware of what the D.O.J. is doing and so cannot comment on that.” Mr. Bielesz called it “a scurrilous twist of fate” that the appellate court had already ruled in favor of Mr. Khalilzad and Ms. Benard when the matter became public on Monday. In a statement issued by his lawyers on Monday, Mr. Khalilzad, 63, emphasized that neither he nor his wife faced any formal accusation or charges. The former ambassador, who was born in Afghanistan, is now a business consultant in Washington. He first served in the State Department in the mid-1980s, and worked for the Reagan administration and both Bush presidents. He was a special adviser to President George W. Bush on Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In 2003, he was appointed ambassador to Kabul, the Afghan capital. He became ambassador to Iraq in 2005, and to the United Nations in 2007. Ms. Benard earned her doctorate at the University of Vienna. The two met at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1972.

Zalmay Khalilzad
Money laundering
Tax Evasion
Cheryl Benard
Frozen Assets
Vienna
Austria


Fantasy Football: Week 1 Player Tiers

Abstract: In this statistical model, I apply a clustering algorithm called the Gaussian mixture model to an aggregation of expert ranking data provided by Fantasypros.com . The algorithm finds natural tiers and clusters within the data. The charts that result visualize the tiers and help you decide your starting lineup each week. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers slides down to Tier 3 in Week 1 because of his matchup against the N.F.L.'s best defense, the Seattle Seahawks. Others in this tier include Nick Foles, Matt Ryan, Colin Kaepernick and Jay Cutler. Tom Brady leads Tier 4, as Rob Gronkowski is expected to play, or at least that’s what Gronkowski has said. Philip Rivers did not make the cut to Tier 4. Those who drafted him as an underdog will have to wait until Week 2, as he faces the tough Arizona Cardinals this week. His opponent, Carson Palmer, gets a boost to Tier 5, as the San Diego Chargers’ defense was the eighth most generous to fantasy quarterbacks last season. Fantasy Football: Tiered Player Ranking Charts Charts resulting from a statistical algorithm find natural tiers and clusters within fantasy football player ranking data. Running back Nine players make up the top two tiers this week at running back. Montee Ball and Marshawn Lynch have a slight edge on Eddie Lacy, Arian Foster and DeMarco Murray in Tier 2. While Frank Gore lands in Tier 4, he should be benched in favor of Alfred Morris and Doug Martin. Reggie Bush is only one tier ahead of Joique Bell, who is expected to get much of the goal-line work for the Detroit Lions. After Bell, a large drop off occurs to Tier 7, where we find Steven Jackson facing New Orleans, and Bernard Pierce, who has been underwhelming and faces Cincinnati, which had the second best run defense last season. Wide Receiver The top 23 wide receivers, filing Tiers 1-4, all have a good chance of posting WR1 numbers this week. Emmanuel Sanders makes the cut into Tier 4 with the recent news of Wes Welker’s four-game suspension. There is some uncertainty about all the players in Tier 5. With Robert Griffin III looking shaky in the preseason, DeSean Jackson’s first game with Washington will be closely watched. Eric Decker debuts for his new team, the Jets. He is clearly the No. 1 receiver for a team that is known for being unproductive for fantasy league players. Marques Colston continues to not break into the top tiers because he shares the field with Jimmy Graham. Tight End The position is largely unaffected by matchups in this first week, with the same 10 players from the fantasy draft season making up the top three tiers. Zach Ertz does not make the cut to Tier 3. It looks like experts are waiting to see if his preseason hype carries over into a real game before buying into him. He is also expected to split the position with Brent Celek. Travis Kelce has a higher expert consensus rank than Delanie Walker, despite having a lower average rank, signaling that the top experts like Kelce more.


Arrest of Suspected Drug Lord in Mexico Is Seen as Symbolic Amid Police Scandal

Abstract: MEXICO CITY — Vicente Carrillo Fuentes was the mediocre heir, the authorities said. He never quite gained the fame or authority of his brother, Amado Carrillo Fuentes — the Juarez cartel’s late founder and the kingpin famous for both flying cocaine to the United States in jumbo jets and dying during failed plastic surgery in 1997. Instead, Vicente was vicious. Mr. Carillo Fuentes, who was arrested Thursday by Mexican authorities in the northern city of Torreon, ran the Juarez ring with an eye for killing and a thirst for allies, according to American and Mexican officials who have been pursuing him for 14 years. His was the era when the battle between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels made Ciudad Juárez as bloody and violent as a war zone. And yet at this point, with Juarez far more calm, experts said, his arrest was mostly symbolic. “By 2012, it was clear his forces had lost, and he went into exile,” said Steven S. Dudley, a director of InsightCrime.com , a website that tracks and analyzes Latin American crime trends. “Some thought he was even retired.” Thus the timing of his arrest has raised suspicions among some in Mexico. President Enrique Peña Nieto is in the midst of the largest security scandal of his term, with Mexico and the world aghast at the recent discovery of a mass grave with 28 bodies near a town in the state of Guerrero, where 43 students were reported missing after a confrontation with the police in late September. At a news conference Thursday, Mexico’s attorney general announced that more graves and bodies had been found in the area, and that four more people had been arrested, in addition to the 22 police officers already detained. The Peña Nieto administration is also weathering criticism from human rights advocates over the way it has handled another case from late June, in which 22 people were killed by Mexican soldiers in a small mountain town near a common drug route. Mexican military officials initially claimed the deaths had occurred in a firefight only to later admit that at least some were killed after surrendering. Security analysts and former intelligence officers — along with American officials — have been arguing for months that these and other episodes clearly show that Mr. Peña Nieto needs to get serious about reforming the criminal justice system and establishing more effective systems of accountability for security forces, after spending the first two years of his presidency emphasizing the improving economy. The president, though, has stopped far short of an overhaul. Responding to the case of the missing students, Mr. Peña Nieto delivered a four-minute speech on Monday, in which he kept the focus relatively narrow, saying, “We need to find the truth and make sure the law is applied to those responsible for these outrageous, painful and unacceptable acts.” At least in part, some experts said, the theatrics around Thursday’s arrest — with Mr. Carrillo Fuentes put on display upon arrival at the airport here — seemed aimed at casting security forces in a better light. “The Mexican federal government is in desperate need of this kind of success, in order to neutralize the effects of all the attention to what happened in Guerrero,” said Raúl Benítez Manaut, a researcher at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City who studies criminal groups. And yet, he and others added, it was a legitimate success. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes has been on the run for more than a decade. “These people should not be allowed to walk free, unpunished, enjoying their drug-related money,” Mr. Benítez said. Alejandro Hope, a former intelligence official under Mexico’s last president, Felipe Calderón, added that the positive attention from an arrest dissipates too quickly — and the arrests themselves are too hard to obtain — to believe that this was simply a political ploy. If anything, he said, the arrest and its promotion “reinforces the sense of continuity between Calderón and Peña, something the Peña people have been trying to run from.” Indeed, Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, 51, was the second suspected kingpin captured over the last two weeks. On Oct. 1, the Mexican Army arrested Héctor Beltrán-Leyva, 49, who the authorities say is the head of the Beltrán-Leyva cartel. He was caught in the colonial city of San Miguel de Allende while eating dinner at a seafood restaurant. Both men were heirs to their family businesses, and in middle-age, dinosaurs of the trade. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes often used disguises and moved from city to city, authorities said. Mr. Beltrán-Leyva had been presenting himself as a local businessman. The new generation of criminal leaders, experts note, tends to be less polished, at least as brutal, and more diffuse in their organizational structure — like the gangs that are believed to have colluded with the police in the case of the missing students. That case, many argue, is far too significant and too telling to be brushed aside by an unrelated arrest. “If the capture had happened in any other given moment, it would have had a much greater effect and impact, a much bigger political gain for Peña Nieto,” said Jorge Chabat, a drug and security expert at CIDE, a Mexico City research group. “But it’s happening at a moment where all eyes and everyone’s attention is on the missing students.”

Mexico
Vicente Carrillo Fuentes
Drug Abuse
Drug cartel
Enrique Pena Nieto
Juarez Cartel


July 4 Terror Plots Foiled, F.B.I. Chief Says

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Thursday that counterterrorism authorities had thwarted multiple attacks being plotted for July 4 by the Islamic State and its sympathizers in the United States. Mr. Comey would not say what the plots entailed or how many people had been arrested, but he said the plotters were among more than 10 people with ties to the Islamic State — also known as ISIS or ISIL — who had been arrested across the country in the past month. Those arrested “are products of this ISIL online recruiting, motivating, directing effort” that often begins on Twitter, he said in his quarterly meeting with reporters, adding that some of the plotters had switched to encrypted communication that made them more difficult to track. In the days leading up to July 4, federal authorities and national security experts said that the United States was more susceptible to an attack. They cited repeated calls by the Islamic State for its sympathizers to carry out acts of violence in the group’s name. Instead of pulling off spectacular attacks like those Al Qaeda often tried to mount, the Islamic State has tried to motivate its followers to stab police officers or shoot members of the military. To call attention to the threat, federal authorities sent bulletins to state and local law enforcement officials in the days before July 4. Image Workers set up a security checkpoint near the Capitol for an Independence Day concert. Credit Alex Wong/Getty Images Mr. Comey said the bulletins were sent because “we perceived a potential threat that we were looking to make sure we motivated our state and local partners to focus on.” The comments from Mr. Comey came a day after he and Sally Quillian Yates, the deputy attorney general, testified on Capitol Hill about how law enforcement agencies are struggling to intercept communications as encrypted channels have become more popular. Senators and representatives from both parties appeared to embrace that perspective. Mr. Comey has said he is hoping to spawn a debate on the subject and to find a solution that protects the privacy of individuals but also gives law enforcement officials access to the communications of criminals and terrorists. “The tools I have are significantly diminished by this phenomenon,” Mr. Comey said. “We’re going to stay after it and, as I said, we will try and use all the tools that we have. What I’m trying to do is make sure the American people, who own the F.B.I., as I said yesterday, understand these tools you think we have are being changed significantly and I can see the future in which that change continues to grow.” The country may decide ultimately that the problem is too difficult to fix, Mr. Comey said, and “that we’re just going to live with law enforcement having the set of the tools they have.” “And my response to that is ‘O.K., fine that what people decided is O.K. and that’s where we’ll operate and we’ll stay at it and we’ll still find ways to make these cases.’”

Terrorism
July 4th
FBI
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
James B Comey
Security
Spying and Intelligence Agencies
US


Did Patriots’ Title Hopes Go Down With Rob Gronkowski? Not So Fast

Abstract: To hear some tell it, the Patriots’ bid for a Super Bowl title was just derailed by the injury to their totemic tight end, Rob Gronkowski. Gronkowski has a herniated disc in his lower back and is most likely out for the rest of the season. He was to have surgery on Friday. Gronkowski gets a lot of attention, whether he is catching passes, hosting Nickelodeon shows or going on a cruise . But how big a blow will his absence be, really? At first glance, Gronkowski’s numbers seem as great as ever, maybe even better. Before the injury, he was averaging more than 21 yards per reception, the best in the league and in his career. But those long catches do not hide the fact that Gronkowski was also being used less. He has been targeted only 38 times this season, fewer than five times a game. That is down from his average of eight or nine targets a game in recent seasons. N.F.L. Playoff Simulator: Every Team’s Playoff Path Explore every team's path to the playoffs. He accounts for 10 percent of the Patriots’ catches this season, 18 percent of their receiving yards and 14 percent of their receiving touchdowns. All those figures are down significantly from the last two seasons, when they were 20, 26 and 33 percent. And the Patriots still have one strong tight end, Martellus Bennett, who has actually been a bigger part of the offense than Gronkowski this year. They are not deep beyond Bennett, however, and will have to stop using so many two-tight-end formations. “It doesn’t help losing great players,” quarterback Tom Brady said on Westwood One radio . “And to not have Gronk out there — one of our best players and most dependable, consistent players — not in the lineup makes things challenging for us. But that’s what the N.F.L. season is about — it’s about overcoming challenges.” Gronkowski is a four-time Pro Bowler who is at the top of nearly everyone’s list when the league’s tight ends are rated. It would be laughable to suggest that his loss is not a blow to New England. But the Patriots (9-2) are still a serious title contender, and it helps that there is no obvious threat to them in the A.F.C. The Raiders also are 9-2 but have yet to convince most experts that they are for real. The Chiefs (8-3) are winning ugly . The traditionally strong Steelers (6-5) may not even make the playoffs, and last year’s Super Bowl champions, the Broncos, are still finding their equilibrium with their new quarterback, Trevor Siemian. The Patriots evoke strong feelings among N.F.L. fans, and for fans and critics, it is hard to evaluate a big blow like the loss of Gronkowski dispassionately. But oddsmakers tend to see though partisanship and focus on the bottom line, and they have not flinched. The Patriots remain the comfortable favorites to win the Super Bowl with every bookmaker out there .

Rob Gronkowski
Patriots
Sports injury
Football


Yankees Beat a Rival, but Alex Rodriguez Goes Hitless in His Fenway Finale

Abstract: BOSTON — As Alex Rodriguez stepped into the batter’s box for his 133rd game at Fenway Park on Thursday, the memories flooded back to him. It was not Eduardo Rodriguez that he saw on the mound facing him, or Sandy Leon catching, but Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe on the mound and Jason Varitek crouching down behind the plate in a wave of recollection culled from the height of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry of a dozen years ago. “That just kept coming back to me,” he said. “I kept seeing Schills back there and Pedro. It was pretty awesome.” But in reality, it is 2016, and Alex Rodriguez, 41, who will be released by the Yankees after Friday’s game, was not in his first year with the team, but in his penultimate game with it. He was greeted in much the same manner as he was in those overheated days of 2004 and 2005, with resounding boos and a smattering of cheers. He went 0 for 4 with a strikeout and an R.B.I. in the Yankees’ 4-2 win over the Boston Red Sox , then headed back to New York, where he will be honored Friday night at Yankee Stadium. Rodriguez came to the plate in the eighth inning with the bases loaded and one out, and he cued a 2-2 pitch in front of the plate. Leon pounced and threw out Rodriguez at first, but Brett Gardner scored for the 2,085th R.B.I. of Rodriguez’s career, and his 1,095th as a Yankee. “It was not how I pictured it when I woke up this morning,” Rodriguez said with a laugh. The Yankees announced Sunday that they would release Rodriguez after Friday’s game against the Tampa Bay Rays but that he would remain an adviser to Hal Steinbrenner, the managing general partner. The Yankees allowed him to stay with the team until Friday so his mother and his two school-age daughters could watch his final game with the team. “Tomorrow,” he said, “is about me thanking the fans for putting up with me for such a long time.”


A Humorous Campaign for ThinkThin Urges Consumers to Skip the Guilt

Abstract: Decades after the adman played by Cary Grant in “North by Northwest” asked his secretary to put a note on his desk reminding him to “Think thin,” a brand of protein bars offering those words of advice is starting a campaign centered on an idea long popular among admen: that a food product can be indulged in without generating guilty feelings. The campaign is the first significant national effort for the brand, known as the ThinkThin High Protein Bar, and it is the first big campaign being created by a new agency, Adams & Partners , based in the Venice section of Los Angeles. The budget for the campaign is estimated at more than $9 million. The campaign, which takes a humorous tack in introducing ThinkThin to a wider audience, includes commercials on television and online; print, digital and mobile ads; and a presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter . The ads use a slogan, “thinkPositive,” styled like the brand name, which is officially thinkThin, and an accompanying hashtag, #thinkPositive. The campaign is the most recent in a skein of marketing initiatives for protein-laden products, reflecting a growing interest — or fad, trend, craze, take your pick — among consumers in getting more protein in their diets, which is increasing sales of groceries like Greek yogurt and nuts in addition to protein bars . For example, the August issue of Family Circle magazine carries four full-page ads that play up the protein in Barilla Plus pasta, Horizon organic milk boxes, Kellogg’s cereals and MorningStar Farms veggie burgers. An article last week in USA Today bore the headline “Taco Bell Pumps Protein Into Eats.” And General Mills has brought out a version of its venerable Cheerios cereal brand called Cheerios Protein , in two flavors. The new variety got top billing in a recent Target weekly circular on a section of a page devoted to products “new at Target.” The ThinkThin High Protein Bar comes in 10 flavors, and sibling bars like ThinkThin Lean Protein and Fiber, along with ThinkThin High Protein and Fiber, come in multiple flavors, too. Add to the mix all the products energy bars — among them, Balance Bar , Clif Bar, Kind, Luna, Power Bar and Zone Perfect — and the target audience, typically women ages 18 to 54, could be overwhelmed when trying to figure out which bar to buy. “We call it a rainbow of confusion at the shelf,” says Megan Crossland, the marketing director, based in Santa Monica, Calif., of the ThinkThin parent, ThinkThin L.L.C . That is compounded because “we know we have very low awareness as a brand,” she adds. “We had a lot of success with experiential marketing and sampling, doubling distribution in the last year,” Ms. Crossland says. “We need to create a lot of brand awareness to support that distribution.” “We have some better awareness in the West,” she adds, because the brand started in California, “but over all, awareness is low, under a percent nationally.” “I’d be really happy,” Ms. Crossland says, if the unaided awareness of the ThinkThin High Protein Bar — that is, consumers bringing up the brand without being prompted — grew to 2 percent as a result of the campaign. In addition to generating awareness, she adds, the campaign seeks “to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the category, to set ourselves apart, in an emotional and unique way.” Humor is a differentiator because “if you look at a lot of positioning” of other brands, Ms. Crossland says, “you’ll see performance and functional messages.” Image A print ad in the new campaign for ThinkThin protein bars. The thought that the campaign seeks to convey — that a ThinkThin High Protein Bar can be enjoyed with “zero guilt” — helps deliver the message that the bar has “20 grams of protein” and “zero grams of sugar,” she adds. The idea to focus on guilt-free eating came, Ms. Crossland says, after the company began working with Chris Adams, the founder of Adams & Partners; he had been an executive creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles and before that worked at TBWA/Chiat/Day on brands like Apple, Nissan and Pedigree. “A group of us at the company come from a more traditional packaged-goods background and were fortunate to have worked with him,” she adds. “In talking through things with the consumer, we landed on this insight that nobody really has to feel guilty” about eating a ThinkThin bar, Ms. Crossland says, which could be dramatized by “trying to juxtapose” that in a lighthearted way with “what other things in life women can feel guilty about” and then concluding with the “thinkPositive” theme. For instance, the initial commercial in the campaign, directed by Michael Downing at Epoch Films, begins with a lanky young man, running in skimpy shorts and a tank top, attracting the attention of three women at an outdoor cafe. After the ogling goes on for a bit, he and one of the women connect in a way that suddenly brings a look of dismay and chagrin to her face. “Hi, Mrs. Adams,” says the runner, played by an actor named Pierson Fode. “Hey, say hi to Brian for me. O.K., bye.” The voice of a female announcer then declares: “There are lots of things to feel guilty about. ThinkThin isn’t one of them. Twenty grams of protein. Zero sugar. Zero guilt.” The theme “thinkPositive” then appears on screen. In a similarly jocular vein, a print ad shows a ThinkThin High Protein Bar above the headline: “Guilt free. Unless you steal one.” The text at the bottom of the ad reads: “20 grams of protein. 0 grams of sugar. 0 guilt. ThinkThin. ThinkPositive. Look for us in the energy bar aisle.” Among the many products that have been peddled through the decades as guilt-free foods, perhaps the best-known is TCBY frozen yogurt, with this slogan: “All the pleasure. None of the guilt.” A couple of years ago, Special K Popcorn Chips were promoted with the phrase “Nothing guilty about this pleasure.” And the British retailer Marks & Spencer sells products under the label “Guilt-free snacking.” According to Mr. Adams, who is executive creative director of Adams & Partners, a “strategic brainstorming day” with executives of ThinkThin led to a decision that the brand needed to convey more than “energy on the go” to stand out in its crowded category. The idea that “women should never have to feel guilty about what they eat” was “such a huge idea,” he says, “and in creative development we made sure that was something we pushed.” The decision was made to take a humorous tack so that “we would create something enjoyable and shareable,” Mr. Adams says, making “the point in a fun way that indulging in a ThinkThin bar is something you can do without feeling guilty.” Image A new ThinkThin commercial features a young man, in running shorts and a tank top, attracting the attention of a group of women. One of the women soon realizes with dismay that he is her son's friend. “There are lots of ways you could go with ‘guilty’; it’s a pretty loaded word,” he adds. “We didn’t want to bring people down.” The campaign is meeting with some criticism in social media. For example, on Facebook and YouTube someone left this comment: “Your commercial is so sexist! Since when should women be ashamed about checking out a younger man?” Another comment, on Facebook, reads: “Women are already filled with more guilt than they should carry. Telling us there are a lot of things to feel guilty about perpetuates this silly myth that women should feel guilty over nothing. We shouldn’t.” There are also supporters of the commercial who have left positive comments — “Win,” “ha HA!” — as well as rebuttals of the critics’ remarks. There is also this comment from ThinkThin on both Facebook and YouTube: “At ThinkThin, we believe that women should never have to feel guilty about what they eat. Our new campaign makes this point in a fun way, while reminding women that they can always #thinkPositive about ThinkThin.” Ms. Crossland weighs in, too. “We are all about empowering women,” she says, “and we want our brand to play a very positive role in their lifestyles.” The founder of ThinkThin L.L.C. is a female entrepreneur named Lizanne Falsetto, she adds. The guilt-free idea “tested terrifically” with consumers, Ms. Crossland says. “We feel we have something with stopping power that will break through the clutter.” “Guilt could be a really serious topic; we’re not trying to deal with it in that way,” she adds. “We want to catch their attention and entertain a bit as they learn more about our brand.” “It’s not about bringing out the measuring tape,” Ms. Crossland says. “We’re not a diet brand.” Mr. Adams echoes her. “We believe in eating well and living well,” he says, adding: “We are not about guilt and deprivation. You will never see a little red bikini or measuring tape in our communications. Unless we are cutting them up.” (The red bikini and measuring tape are staples of campaigns for various Special K products sold by the Kellogg Company.) “The most important thing I could do for my business is to get this right and have this be a great case study,” Mr. Adams says of bringing out the campaign, which began this month and is to continue through October. The commercials will appear, Ms. Crossland says, on broadcast networks as well as cable channels watched by women like Cooking Channel, DIY Network, HGTV, Lifetime and TLC. The print ads are running in magazines like InStyle, People and US Weekly, she adds. The media agency for the campaign is the Universal City, Calif., office of Starcom, part of the Starcom MediaVest Group division of the Publicis Groupe. If more than $9 million is spent on the campaign, that would be a huge increase compared with recent spending levels reported by the Kantar Media unit of WPP: $416,000 in 2011, $11,000 in 2012 and $293,000 last year. If you like In Advertising, be sure to read the Advertising column that appears Monday through Friday in the Business Day section of The New York Times print edition and on nytimes.com .

advertising,marketing
ThinkThin
Adams & Partners


Denmark Cuts Interest Rates for Fourth Time in a Month

Abstract: Denmark’s central bank has cut a key interest rate for the fourth time in a month as it tries to keep the krone currency stable against the euro. Nationalbanken said on Thursday it had cut the interest rate on certificates of deposit by a further 0.25 percentage point to minus 0.75 percent. The change takes effect Friday and is the bank’s latest attempt to prevent the krone from rising too much against the euro. A negative deposit rate means banks have to pay to park their cash at the central bank. Other key interest rates were left unchanged.

Denmark
Interest rate
Banking and Finance


On the Internet, a Video Showcase for Poets

Abstract: SETAUKET DUANE ESPOSITO had just been introduced to the crowd at Setauket Neighborhood House as a college professor and a “new daddy,” an image that didn’t quite seem to fit with his military cap and his tattoo-covered arms. The contrast definitely added interest to the poetry he began to read: Seeing and hearing a poet speak his own words is what attracts audiences to live poetry readings. But the more than 60 poetry lovers gathered at the Neighborhood House last weekend were not only appreciating the live poets, they were also celebrating the first anniversary of poetryvlog.com , a Web site that has taken poetry reading to a 21st-century level. Each Saturday, poetryvlog.com introduces a new video of a poet reading about five minutes’ worth of his or her work. While many of those featured have been Long Islanders, others have been from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Ireland and Iceland. The videos are filmed and archived by the Web site’s creator, Michael Mart of St. James, and the poets are chosen by George Wallace, of Huntington, who was named Suffolk County’s first poet laureate in 2003. The inception of poetryvlog.com was largely a result of a physical space problem. Mr. Mart, a contemporary poetry enthusiast and the owner for more than 30 years of the tiny Good Times Bookshop in Port Jefferson, never had room there for readings, he said. But a few months before he closed the shop last July, he said, he realized that virtual space was the solution. Inspired by Rocketboom, a New York City-based videoblog, Mr. Mart discovered he could start a Web site for very little money. “It helps everyone,” he said. “The poet gets noticed, and it expands the audience to whomever might have an interest and an Internet connection.” A year later, Mr. Mart said, the poetry site receives an average of 17,000 visits a month. “That’s more attention than any poet would’ve gotten in our bookshop,” he noted. Exposure has increased primarily through word of mouth, according to Mr. Mart. Neither he nor Mr. Wallace makes money from the site, he said. Mr. Wallace, who met Mr. Mart as a customer at Good Times, is also well connected to the Long Island poetry community. He organizes poetry readings in Manhattan and Long Island and publishes an online poetry magazine at www.poetrybay.com . As a Web-based publisher, Mr. Wallace said he understood the power and potential of the Internet when Mr. Mart approached him with his idea. “The Internet is really the downtown of the 21st century,” Mr. Wallace said at the anniversary party. Mr. Wallace said he does not choose the featured poets based on their performance ability. “I’ve tried to be as inclusive as possible while maintaining the quality,” he said. “I also want to present different voices.” Among those voices has been that of Mr. Esposito, who lives in South Huntington and teaches in the English department at Nassau Community College in Garden City. Another is that of Adam D. Fisher, a retired rabbi from Stony Brook, who was also one of more than two dozen guests to read at the poetryvlog.com party, which was sponsored by the Greater Port Jefferson-Northern Brookhaven Arts Council. Although Mr. Wallace said he did not know of any poets who had been discovered by agents or publishers as a result of the site, it has helped the writers in other ways. Marcia Slatkin, a poet from Shoreham, said her video helped her publicize a scheduled reading of her work. Others said the site introduced them to the local poetry community. Mr. Wallace said that with all the poets he now knows on Long Island alone, he could fill two or three years’ worth of the site’s weekly slots. “For quality of poets,” he said, “Long Island can compete with any region pound for pound.”

Poetry and Poets
Computers and the Internet
Long Island (NY)


Aston Martin and LeEco Plan to Develop Electric Car

Abstract: The British luxury-car maker Aston Martin has set up a venture with the Chinese consumer electronics group LeEco to jointly develop an electric vehicle. Aston Martin and LeEco said that the car would be based on Aston Martin’s Rapide S model, and that if successful the venture would develop other electric vehicles, including for LeEco. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. “It brings Aston Martin’s electric car project forward,” Aston Martin’s chief, Andy Palmer, said, adding that the new car would come to market in 2018 and be built in Gaydon, England.

Aston Martin
LeEco
Electric Cars and Hybrids
China
Great Britain


Detained AIDS Doctor Allowed to Visit U.S. Later, China Says

Abstract: BEIJING, Saturday, Feb. 17 — China gave in to international pressure on Friday and agreed to release a prominent AIDS doctor from house arrest so she can attend an awards ceremony in Washington next month. “We’re just really excited about it,” said Wenchi Yu Perkins, an officer with Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit women’s advocacy group that will honor the doctor, Gao Yaojie, in March along with other women from around the world. “I just talked to Dr. Gao,” Ms. Perkins added. “She confirmed that last night an official visited and informed her that they would respect her wish to come to the U.S. I think that is the best gift for her for the Chinese New Year.” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton , an honorary co-chairwoman of Vital Voices, announced China’s decision on Friday after receiving the news from the Chinese ambassador in Washington. Mrs. Clinton said in a statement that she was “delighted” and that she had been assured that Dr. Gao would “be allowed to travel freely to the United States.” Dr. Gao, 80, has been kept under house arrest since Feb. 1 in the central China city of Zhengzhou in Henan Province. Authorities detained her to stop her from traveling to apply for a travel visa , friends and AIDS advocates said. Dr. Gao is famously outspoken, and although China has taken a more open approach toward AIDS in recent years, officials were apparently worried she might say something provocative or embarrassing in Washington. She gained international attention for her work helping to expose the government-sponsored blood-selling operations that caused thousands of farmers to be infected with H.I.V. during the 1990s. Dr. Gao’s detention had attracted international attention and brought pressure on the Chinese government. On Tuesday, a provincial newspaper, Henan Daily, published a photograph and article detailing how provincial officials had visited Dr. Gao to wish her “sincere greetings” for the upcoming Lunar New Year. Many AIDS advocates saw the photograph and assumed it meant that China had released her. But, in fact, she was still under house arrest. Dr. Gao could not be reached for comment on Saturday morning.

China
Clinton Hillary Rodham
Gao Yaojie
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
International Relations


He Never Stopped Walking

Abstract: Matthew Stanley, 43 Senior environmental manager, State Dormitory Authority FAVORITE WALK From his office at West 34th Street and Eighth Avenue down to 14th Street and Eighth Avenue and back, almost every workday during lunch. WHY HE WALKS “I started long walking when I moved to New York in 1989 after graduate school. I lived in Astoria, in Queens, and the nearest subways were a 20-, 25-minute walk. “Eventually I found a job and moved to Manhattan. But I never stopped walking. My longest walks have been from Bowling Green north to Grant’s Tomb, from the Municipal Building over the Queensboro Bridge to Long Island City, and from Washington Heights to Columbus Circle. Now I wouldn’t dream of taking the subway for a distance of less than 30 blocks. Except maybe in the pouring rain.”


Personalities Fuel a One-Party Race for Washington Mayor

Abstract: WASHINGTON — At times it seems like the mayoral race here between the two front-runners — Mayor Adrian M. Fenty , who is seeking a second term, and Vincent C. Gray, the City Council chairman — is boiling down to a personality contest. It is not because there are no important issues at stake as the two men battle for the Democratic nomination. At a spate of campaign events last week, for example, sparks flew over Mr. Fenty’s schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee. Ms. Rhee has earned the ire of a teachers’ union after dismissing dozens of teachers for poor performance, even as she has won plaudits for improving a notoriously bad school system. Mr. Gray has not indicated whether he would keep Ms. Rhee in the job if he were to take office, and Mr. Fenty has criticized what he characterized as Mr. Gray’s wishy-washiness on the issue. Mr. Gray also asserts that Mr. Fenty has not done enough to create jobs in a city where unemployment in some areas runs as high as one-third. And the two candidates have traded accusations of corruption and cronyism, each claiming the other steered city contracts worth millions to friends or supporters. To some degree, it is a surprise to supporters on each side that Mr. Fenty, who has a big advantage in fund-raising and name recognition, appears at all vulnerable, given his reputation among Democrats in Washington as a successful reformer. Yet critics and even some supporters say that after a charmed first two years in office, Mr. Fenty grew aloof, canceling appearances, minimizing personal contact with residents and failing to adequately explain controversial new policies, including Ms. Rhee’s overhaul of the school system. In this heavily Democratic city, the race for the party’s nomination, to be decided on Sept. 14, is tantamount to winning the general election in November, and the campaign has grown heated. At a raucous mayoral forum hosted by the Ward 6 Democrats last week, Mr. Fenty’s supporters were vocal and numerous but clearly outmatched by Mr. Gray’s boisterous crowd. Mr. Gray, who as chairman was elected at-large and formerly represented Ward 7, has earned numerous prominent endorsements and won a number of straw polls in the city. City Councilman David A. Catania, who has not endorsed either candidate, said the mayor had had a “generational impact” on the reform of Washington’s public schools. Another City Council member who has not announced an endorsement, Jim Graham, said Mr. Fenty “has done things in this city that are truly remarkable.” Mr. Graham said that Mr. Fenty had demonstrated good leadership during the blizzards that blanketed snow over the Washington area for weeks last winter, and that he had had also proved his ability to streamline and improve city services. But, Mr. Graham added, “in the process of being mayor he’s obviously upset people, over issues that I bet in hindsight he would say didn’t matter that much.” Mr. Graham, citing one example of strained relationships in Washington political circles, pointed to the mayor’s decision to withhold from City Council members the season tickets they traditionally receive to Nationals baseball games. Mr. Fenty conceded in a forum last week that the episode “shouldn’t have happened.” The Fenty campaign said that making significant changes to the city’s bureaucracy had meant upsetting entrenched interests, and that his administration had simply been making the tough decisions his predecessors avoided. Mr. Fenty had raised just under $4.4 million as of June, compared with $561,343 for Mr. Gray. In an interview, Mr. Fenty acknowledged that his administration had not always done a particularly good job of connecting with voters. “If you cannot communicate to people how much you have done, and how hard it’s been, and how important it’s been to them, you are going to have people who are disconnected,” he said. “Some people very plainly need more information, and if we don’t get them that information, they really may not vote for us.” Even Mr. Fenty said that constituents had come up to him and spoken of the substantive similarities between the candidates. Critics of the mayor point less to any substantial policy failures than to what they called Mr. Fenty’s unresponsive and at times even arrogant decision-making process. “I think a lot of the decisions have been made absent of working with the other elected officials in this city,” said City Councilman Harry Thomas Jr. Mr. Thomas, who is supporting Mr. Gray, said the City Council had not been made a partner in education reform efforts, for instance. Lawrence Guyot, a civil rights activist who supports Mr. Fenty, said that many African-Americans in Washington were “mad as hell” at Mr. Fenty for not attending the funerals of prominent blacks and not including more blacks in his inner circle. Franklin Garcia, the president of the District of Columbia Latino Caucus, said Mr. Gray had reached out to Latinos during his time on the Council more than Mr. Fenty had. “All these different events that we’ve held throughout the years, we’ve always reached out to the mayor for his presence,” Mr. Garcia said. “At all times he’s said no or ignored our calls. Chairman Vincent Gray has been able to substitute that void.”

Fenty Adrian M
Washington (DC)
Elections
United States Politics and Government