Physics of Hard Drives Wins Nobel

Abstract: Two physicists who discovered how to manipulate the magnetic and electrical properties of thin layers of atoms to store vast amounts of data on tiny disks, making iPods and other wonders of modern life possible, were chosen as winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday. Albert Fert, of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, of the Institute of Solid State Research at the Jülich Research Center in Germany, will share the $1.5 million prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. They will receive the money in a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10. Dr. Fert, 69, and Dr. Grünberg, 68, each working independently in 1988, discovered an effect known as giant magnetoresistance, in which tiny changes in a magnetic field can produce huge changes in electrical resistance. The effect is at the heart of modern gadgets that record data, music or snippets of video as a dense magnetic patchwork of zeros and ones, which is then scanned by a small head and converted to electrical signals. “The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,” Börje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy, said, according to The Associated Press. “You would not have an iPod without this effect.” In remarks broadcast over a speakerphone at the academy in Stockholm, Dr. Fert said: “I am so happy for my family, for my co-workers. And I am also very happy to share this with a friend.” Experts said the discovery was one of the first triumphs of the new field of nanotechnology, the science of building and manipulating assemblies of atoms only a nanometer (a billionth of a meter) in size. The scanning heads in today’s gizmos consist of alternating layers only a few atoms thick of a magnetic metal, like iron, and a nonmagnetic metal, like chromium. At that small size, the strange rules of quantum mechanics come into play and novel properties emerge. The Nobel citation said Dr. Fert and Dr. Grünberg’s work also heralded the advent of a new, even smaller and denser type of memory storage called spintronics, in which information is stored and processed by manipulating the spins of electrons. Engineers have been recording information magnetically and reading it out electrically since the dawn of the computer age, but as they have endeavored to pack more and more data onto their machines, they have been forced to use smaller and fainter magnetic inscriptions and thus more and more sensitive readout devices. It has long been known that magnetic fields can affect the electrical resistance of magnetic materials like iron. Current flows more easily along field lines than across them. The effect was useful for sensing magnetic fields, and in heads that read magnetic disks. But it amounted to only a small change in resistance, and physicists did not think there were many prospects for improvement. So it was a surprise in 1988 when groups led by Dr. Fert at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides and by Dr. Grünberg found that super-slim sandwiches of iron and chromium showed enhanced sensitivity to magnetic fields — “giant magnetoresistance,” as Dr. Fert called it. The name stuck. The reason for the effect has to do with what physicists call the spin of electrons. When the magnetic layers of the sandwich have their fields pointing in the same direction, electrons whose spin points along that direction can migrate freely through the sandwich, but electrons that point in another direction get scattered. If, however, one of the magnetic layers is perturbed, by, say, reading a small signal, it can flip its direction so that its field runs opposite to the other one. In that case, no matter which way an electron points, it will be scattered and hindered from moving through the layers, greatly increasing the electrical resistance of the sandwich. As Phillip Schewe, of the American Institute of Physics, explained, “You’ve leveraged a weak bit of magnetism into a robust bit of electricity.” Subsequently, Stuart Parkin, now of I.B.M., came up with an easier way to produce the sandwiches on an industrial scale. The first commercial devices using giant magnetoresistance effect were produced in 1997. Dr. Grünberg was born in Pilsen in what is now the Czech Republic and obtained his Ph.D. from the Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany in 1969. He has been asked many times over the years when he was going to win the big prize, and so was not surprised to win the Nobel, according to The A.P. He said he was looking forward to being able to pursue his research without applying for grants for “every tiny bit.” Dr. Fert was born in Carcassonne, France, and received his Ph.D. at the Université Paris-Sud in 1970. He told The A.P. that it was impossible to predict where modern physics is going to go. “These days when I go to my grocer and see him type on a computer, I say, ‘Wow, he’s using something I put together in my mind,’” Dr. Fert said.


Most Favor Lower Government Spending Over Higher Corporate Taxes

Abstract: While most Americans say corporations do not pay their fair share in taxes, they still prefer cuts in government spending to increasing taxes on corporations as a means of cutting the federal budget deficit, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll. But when given a choice between raising taxes on corporations and raising taxes on households that make more than $250,000 a year, almost two-thirds of respondents opt for taxing businesses. There is a strong partisan divide: A majority of Republicans and independents favor cutting government spending over raising taxes on businesses, while Democrats are evenly divided. Democrats strongly support increasing corporate taxes rather than adding to the taxes of affluent households; Republicans and independents are closely divided. In general, however, few Americans back increasing taxes on American businesses: only 37 percent said corporate taxes should be increased to help reduce the federal budget deficit. The rest agree with an alternative argument that increased taxes would discourage American companies from creating jobs and hurt them in the global marketplace. Thirty-two percent would rather see corporate taxes remain as they are now and 26 percent said taxes on corporate profits should be decreased. “If you increase taxes, you limit the ability to produce and compete, especially in a global market,” Larry Williams, 70, of Hoover, Ala., said in a follow-up interview. “If we increase taxes on manufacturers, they will turn around and send the work overseas because that’s the only way they can survive,” said Mr. Williams, a retired business owner. Six in 10 Americans surveyed think companies use their tax savings to give bonuses to executives and dividends to shareholders. About a quarter, 23 percent, said they thought tax savings were mostly reinvested back in the corporation and only 4 percent said savings were used to create new jobs for American workers. Almost half, 46 percent, said all companies should be taxed at the same rate. About a third said some industries deserved a tax break. Small businesses, green companies and those in the health care industry were most frequently mentioned as deserving of tax breaks. “In this economy we should be supporting smaller business owners, who will, hopefully, eventually turn into larger business owners,” said Scott Cochran, 34, a furniture designer who owns his own business in Columbus, Ohio. The nationwide telephone survey was conducted March 2 to 7 with 1,266 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. The complete methodology and questionnaire are available at NYTimes.com.

Taxation
Polls and Public Opinion
Federal Taxes (US)
Corporations


Ex-Judge Admits Bias, but a Murder Conviction Is Upheld

Abstract: Donald Kagan had been in prison for murder for more than a decade when doubts about his guilt arose from an uncommon source: the former judge who had convicted him. The reason was more extraordinary still: The now-retired jurist, Frank J. Barbaro, who is white, said he felt he had been swayed by bias against Mr. Kagan, also white, in the killing of a black man. On Wednesday, another judge upheld the conviction in the 1998 case. Acting Justice ShawnDya L. Simpson of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn said that she found the case emotionally wrenching but that legally, there were no grounds to reverse the conviction. “It’s unfortunate that my hands were tied” by the law, Justice Simpson said. “This may be one of those cases that bothers me for the rest of my life.” Mr. Kagan sat still, looking downward, after hearing her decision. His lawyers said they would appeal. Mr. Kagan, 40, has always maintained that he was defending himself in a confrontation with Wavell Wint outside a Brooklyn movie theater in November 1998. Mr. Kagan said that Mr. Wint had grabbed the gold chain he was wearing; Mr. Kagan shot him with a gun he said he had flashed at Mr. Wint earlier to ward him off. Mr. Wint was unarmed. In 1999, Justice Barbaro of State Supreme Court heard the case without a jury, convicted Mr. Kagan and sentenced him to 15 years to life in prison. An appeals court upheld the conviction, saying there was evidence that Mr. Kagan had escalated a scuffle that stemmed from an argument, not a robbery attempt. "We are satisfied that the verdict of guilt was not against the weight of the evidence,” judges with the State Supreme Court Appellate Division wrote in 2004. But as time passed, Justice Barbaro was not as satisfied. A former longshoreman and labor lawyer, onetime mayoral and congressional candidate and 24-year state assemblyman, Justice Barbaro, a Democrat, retired from the bench in 2003 after six years as a judge. As he read news accounts about wrongful convictions, he started to question his verdict in Mr. Kagan’s case. Rereading the transcript, Justice Barbaro, a longtime civil rights advocate, became convinced he had done an injustice: His own hatred of anti-black racism had tainted his view of the conflict between Mr. Kagan and Mr. Wint, leading him to believe that Mr. Kagan acted out of bigotry and to misinterpret facts that supported his self-defense argument, the former judge said. ”I saw a black man being killed by a white man, and that triggered my unconscious in ways I wasn’t aware of,” Justice Barbaro said Wednesday by phone. Although he was convinced at the time of the trial that he had conducted it justly, ”when I came to the conclusion that I had made a mistake, I’ve been tortured by this ever since,” Justice Barbaro said. He contacted Mr. Kagan’s lawyer, who in 2011 asked a court to overturn the conviction. Justice Barbaro said he was outraged by Justice Simpson’s decision and hoped that Mr. Kagan’s planned appeal would succeed. “The man was not given a fair trial,” he said. “Those facts are irrefutable.” The Brooklyn district attorney’s office argued that the conviction should stand. Mr. Kagan has applauded Justice Barbaro for coming forward with his misgivings. But Mr. Wint’s relatives expressed anguish at revisiting the case. ”It was a little nerve-racking, but I’m satisfied with the decision,” Mr. Wint’s sister-in-law, Lisa DeJesus, said on Wednesday. “She made the right decision. Why overturn something now?”

Donald Kagan
Frank J Barbaro
Murders
Race and Ethnicity
Brooklyn


Profit Falls but Stock Surges as Dell Beats Forecasts

Abstract: For years, Dell feasted on a banquet of corporate technology spending, as large companies spent millions of dollars every three years or so to update their fleets of personal computers. However, ever since the recession began more than a year ago, the computer maker has had to fight for every morsel as companies hoarded their technology dollars. Now, Dell’s involuntary diet looks as if it might be coming to an end. On Thursday, after Dell reported unexpectedly strong second-quarter earnings , executives said that its commercial business should pick up again in 2010, starting in the United States. The advent of new technologies from Intel and Microsoft, including October’s release of the Windows 7 operating system, and the cost of maintaining older machines will spur companies to replace their aging PC fleets, said Brian T. Gladden, Dell’s chief financial officer. “We’ve seen the whole entire installed base is basically 12 to 15 months older than it usually is,” he said. A new refresh cycle could prove vital for the recovery efforts at Dell, which despite its recent struggles remains a top contender in the market for commercial desktop and notebook sales. The company, based in Round Rock, Tex., generates more than 80 percent of its revenue from commercial customers, and it continues to lean heavily on sales of PCs even as it expands its higher-end products and services. On a conference call with investors to discuss the quarterly financial results, Michael S. Dell, the chief executive, said the company already had won bids to upgrade several large computer fleets. While many deployments have been delayed because of tight budgets, he said, “we’re convinced they’ll occur.” Dell reported net income of $472 million, or 24 cents a share, for the quarter ended July 31. That was a 23 percent decline from the $616 million in net income, or 31 cents a share, reported in the period last year. Excluding costs associated with its continuing revamping, the company reported earnings of 28 cents a share, substantially exceeding the forecast of 23 cents a share from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. Dell’s revenue declined 22 percent, to $12.8 billion, from $16.4 billion a year ago. Analysts had expected revenue of $12.6 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. Looking ahead, Mr. Dell said he expected revenue in the second half of the fiscal year to be stronger than in the first half. The better-than-expected performance caused Dell’s stock price to surge nearly 7 percent, to $15.65, in the final minutes of trading Thursday. The shares had been roughly flat, but about 15 minutes before the 4 p.m. market close, they started rising sharply on heavy volume. About three minutes before the market closed, the company put out its full earnings news release, which had been scheduled to come out after the close of trading. Jess Blackburn, a Dell spokesman, said the company accidentally posted some material from its quarterly financial presentation too early. “It was an inadvertent error on our part,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Consistent with full disclosure, we immediately posted our news release as soon as we recognized what had happened.” The brightest spot for the quarter came from Dell’s public group, which includes government, school and health care customers. Buoyed in part by customers’ use of federal stimulus funds and strong sales to educational institutions, revenue for that group rose to $3.8 billion, a 20 percent increase over the previous quarter. David Bailey, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, said he was pleased to see that Dell’s gross profit margin actually rose slightly in the quarter. He said that the company appeared to be selling a more profitable mix of products. “That puts them in a better position in the near term,” he said. Dell’s efforts to improve its cost base should also put it in a good position to defend and perhaps expand its commercial market share, he said. The company has spent the last two years revamping its operations to gain a better competitive footing. Its ability to recapture or expand its share of large PC contracts will be a critical test of its reorganization efforts. Meanwhile, rivals have upped the ante. In particular, Hewlett-Packard has gained significant momentum in the last two years. The company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., now ships more PCs worldwide than any other computer maker. It accounted for 19.8 percent of worldwide PC shipments in the second quarter, according to IDC, a research firm. Dell, once the market leader, was a distant second with 13.7 percent. Throughout 2008, Dell retained its lead in market share for shipments to commercial customers, according to IDC. But during the second quarter, H.P. passed Dell in that segment, too, IDC said. “H.P. has a much higher proportion of its business in the consumer market, so it gets a proportionally better lift when consumers are buying and corporations aren’t,” said Roger L. Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. “If corporations are buying, Dell gets a bigger swing than H.P.” A positive swing from corporate technology spending cannot come soon enough for Dell. Its commercial businesses showed some early signs of recovery in the company’s most recent quarter, but revenue and profit fell far short of last year. H.P.’s momentum could help sway a handful of corporate technology buyers, said Matthew Eastwood, vice president of enterprise platform research at IDC, but large companies do not change PC vendors on a whim. Companies typically want to maintain some consistency with vendors and supplies, he said, and being clued in on a computer maker’s road map for future products helps technology managers plan for what’s next. “Up until now, a lot of the end users and actual customers have been very quiet, sitting back and more or less trying to manage their infrastructure by looking in the rearview mirror,” Mr. Eastwood said. “Now they’re starting to shift and focus toward the future again: ‘What kind of investments am I going to make in I.T. to fuel my next business cycle?’ ” Computer makers need to have an answer for that question now, or they risk the loss of new hardware sales and sales of the more profitable services and products that go along with the computer. Sales of technology-management services like online monitoring of PC fleets have become increasingly important for computer makers as profit margins on hardware narrow. Dell has pushed hard into these services through acquisitions, partnerships and internal development work, but its list of services still lags the size and scope of H.P., especially after H.P.’s acquisition of Electronic Data Systems last year. “If you’ve got better services than your competitor, then you can drag your hardware in on the one-stop shopping idea,” Mr. Kay said. “H.P. is better positioned with its services and software acquisitions.”

Dell Inc
Company Reports
Computers and the Internet


A Measured Rebuttal to China Over Solar Panels

Abstract: The Commerce Department said on Tuesday that it would impose tariffs on solar panels imported from China after concluding that the Chinese government provided illegal export subsidies to manufacturers there. The tariffs were smaller, at 2.9 to 4.73 percent, than some American industry executives had expected. At that size, their effect on the market could be limited. But additional tariffs could be imposed in May, when the Commerce Department is scheduled to decide whether China is “dumping” solar panels into the United States at prices below their actual cost. A finding of dumping would result in additional tariffs that could be far larger than these. But whatever the size of the penalties, Tuesday’s ruling is likely to further heighten trade tensions with China, and to have implications for renewable energy policy in this country. Although the ruling is the result of a quasi-judicial review process by civil servants in the Commerce Department, the imposition of tariffs by an arm of the Obama administration also seems certain to enter the partisan fray. The president’s supporters might point to it as evidence that he continues to play tough with Beijing . But opponents, including the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney , who are already criticizing Mr. Obama for what they say is a low level of attention to China trade issues, might call the small penalties insufficient. The Commerce Department declined to comment Tuesday. Li Junfeng, a Chinese government renewable energy policy maker who is also the president of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association, a government-backed trade group, welcomed the Commerce Department’s decision not to levy heavier tariffs. “I’m happy that it’s not a lot, but not surprised — the Chinese government does not give too many subsidies to the companies,” he said. Whatever political spin proponents or critics might want to put on the tariff decision, there is no question that solar panels from China now control about half of the American market, while panels from the United States control less than a third. American imports of Chinese solar panels have soared to $2.65 billion last year from $21.3 million in 2005. While American manufacturers oppose the imports and filed the trade case against China, users of solar energy have benefited from low-cost Chinese solar panels. An American industry group composed of companies that sell and install solar panels said Tuesday that it was pleased with the relatively small size of the tariffs, having braced for higher ones. “This is a huge victory for the U.S. solar industry and our 100,000 employees,” said Jigar Shah, president of the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy. “Given all our expectations, this is really good news.” Barry Cinnamon, chief executive of Westinghouse Solar, which imports panels from China and adds wiring, racking and other components, said he was relieved by the decision, which will raise the price of his 250-watt system to about $610 from $600. “If the tariffs were big, 20 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent, it would be really bad for U.S. jobs,” he said. “If it’s a small tariff, it does send a signal to encourage manufacturers to do more manufacturing in the U.S., but it’s not enough to have a huge impact on costs.” And it will not set off a trade war, he predicted. Globally, low-cost Chinese panels have driven down the cost of solar energy by two-thirds in the last four years, narrowing but not eliminating the wide price gap that used to separate solar power from electricity generated by burning fossil fuels. But the solar energy boom has had few benefits for American manufacturers. The plunging prices led to the bankruptcy of three American solar panel makers last August. One of the failures was Solyndra , which cost the federal government more than $500 million. Solyndra’s collapse has been the subject of an investigation by Congressional Republicans, who contend that the Obama administration should not have lent so much money for an unproved clean energy program. The Commerce Department decision Tuesday may be the most comprehensive review yet by an American government agency of how China uses subsidies to dominate an industry. China now has about 700 solar panel manufacturers with a combined annual production capacity of 40 gigawatts of electricity — the electric power equivalent, at peak sunlight hours, to the total output of every electrical generating station in New York State . Chinese companies have been able to grow so fast, and cut costs so quickly, because they could take large loans from government-owned banks . Although Chinese bankers and solar panel executives now deny that those loans were made at subsidized rates, that was a central issue in the Commerce Department’s antisubsidy review. The question facing the Commerce Department was whether the Chinese government’s support violated American laws — and international free trade rules — meant to prevent countries from spending government money to help exporters buy market share overseas. A few Chinese companies have acknowledged receiving substantial government assistance. Executives at Hunan Sunzone Optoelectronics, a solar panel manufacturer in Changsha, in south-central China, said in interviews in 2010 that they had been able to buy valuable land near downtown for a third of the citywide rate for industrial land. And the company said that Chinese bankers had offered large loans at just 6 percent interest — below market rates at the time — with the provincial government paying much of the interest. China’s huge and growing need for oil imported from volatile countries in the Mideast and Africa has made energy independence one of the country’s highest strategic and economic objectives. Top Chinese officials have talked extensively in recent years about the need to support renewable energy industries. They also have encouraged local and provincial governments to remove regulatory obstacles and have pushed state-owned banks to lend heavily to the sector. And yet, until very recently, China has not focused on installing solar panels domestically. The factories were primarily geared for export. Government subsidies are by no means solely a Chinese practice. The United States supported the development of solar energy by offering financial incentives for companies and households to buy solar panels. And many states have put quotas on power companies for the amount of renewable energy they must buy. But China focused first on developing large-scale manufacturing of solar panels for export, and only in the last year has it started to subsidize the installation of large numbers of panels in China. The result is that up to 95 percent of China’s output in recent years has been exported, leading critics to suggest that China was capitalizing on other countries’ solar subsidies. Chinese officials have rejected those suggestions and have hinted that they might retaliate with a trade case against American exports of polysilicon, a material used in manufacturing solar panels. Ben Santarris, a spokesman for SolarWorld, a leader of the manufacturing coalition that filed the antisubsidy case at the Commerce Department, said that the company still hoped that higher tariffs would come this year. The Commerce Department will continue investigating evidence of Chinese subsidies, and later this year will reassess Tuesday’s preliminary ruling. The Commerce Department assigned a tariff of 2.9 percent to solar cells and panels from Suntech, 4.73 percent to solar cells and panels from Trina Solar and 3.61 percent for products from all other Chinese solar panel makers. The tariffs “are the first step in a multi-step process, but we believe they are a clear indication Suntech has been managing its business from a competitive perspective,” said Andrew Beebe, the chief commercial officer of Suntech. Mr. Li, the Chinese regulator, said that it would be wrong for the Commerce Department to assess any antidumping tariffs on Chinese solar panels in May because panel prices are even lower in China than in the United States. Some trade experts are already suggesting that the United States and China should look at trade strategies worked out between the United States and Japan in the 1980s to manage Japan’s rapid rise as an exporter. These strategies included so-called voluntary export restraints by Japan, which were actually far from voluntary. They included restraints on Japanese cars in 1981 and government-led research efforts like Sematech, which President Reagan helped establish to assist the American semiconductor industry. “The future of renewable alternative energy, and in this case solar energy, is too important to be left to be ‘solved’ by litigation,” said Alan Wolff, a trade official in the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations who was one of the leading trade lawyers during the struggles with Japan in the 1980s. “Beijing and Washington have the means to work out a mutually and globally beneficial way to work out a solution to the solar panel trade case.” The solar panel industry also faces a serious challenge from the plunging price of natural gas in the United States, where new drilling techniques have brought large increases in the amount of gas on the market. The deployment of those same drilling techniques in foreign markets could bring down the price of gas there as well. That could make solar panels seem costly. The Commerce Department decision is subject to a ruling by the International Trade Commission that the domestic industry has suffered harm from imports. Such decisions usually favor the domestic industry when there have been bankruptcies or mass layoffs. Besides the three bankruptcies in the American solar industry, all last August, at least four of the biggest survivors have also resorted to sizable layoffs in the last two years. One of the companies, Evergreen Solar, announced in January of last year that it was moving production from Massachusetts to China because the Chinese government was offering more financial support for manufacturers there. But the move came too late to save the company from declaring bankruptcy.

Solar energy
Tariff
US
China
Commerce Department
Solyndra


Uneasy Truce on Gay Marriage Is Shaken by Kentucky Clerk’s Defiance

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Kim Davis did more than register a protest when she went to jail last week after defying a federal court order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Ms. Davis, the clerk in Rowan County, Ky., also helped unravel an uneasy détente in the nation’s culture wars that had prevailed since the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in June. Some Republican presidential aspirants rushed to the defense of Ms. Davis, a Democrat, and other public employees who say sanctioning same-sex marriage undermines their religious freedom. Her resistance seems certain to generate a burst of new legislation aimed at carving out exemptions for such employees, and it could spur others to risk jail in states like Alabama, where religious objections are strong. Ms. Davis, 49, who has said she attends her Apostolic Christian church “whenever the doors are open” and who cited “God’s authority” in turning away gay couples who sought to marry, has emerged as a heroine to religious conservatives, many of whom feel deeply aggrieved by the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision on same-sex marriage, in Obergefell v. Hodges. Her lawyer, Mathew Staver, called her “the poster child for why you need religious liberty exemption laws.” Image Kim Davis has emerged as a heroine to religious conservatives. Credit Carter County Detention Center Yet her jailing by a Federal District Court judge, David L. Bunning, a former federal prosecutor who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, has also exposed divisions within the Republican Party. While all 17 Republican presidential contenders are opposed to same-sex marriage, not all of them embraced Ms. Davis. Although polls show more than half of Americans support same-sex marriage, a survey released in July by The Associated Press found that Americans were split on whether state and local officials who have religious objections should be required to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Forty-nine percent said officials should not be required to do so; 47 percent said they should. Nonetheless, the Davis case has given fresh voice to religious conservatives, reawakening their anger over the Obergefell decision. “This is a wake-up call,” declared Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a Republican presidential candidate, who plans to visit Ms. Davis in jail with Mr. Staver on Tuesday. He added: “The question that was always asked of us traditional marriage people was, ‘What difference does it make to you? So what? Why does it bother you?’ Well, maybe people are waking up and seeing why it bothers us. Now you have a county clerk sitting in jail.” What’s Next for Kim Davis and Kentucky’s Gay Marriage Standoff Answers to questions about the case of a Kentucky clerk who has refused to issue marriage licenses to any couples, gay or straight. Barriers to same-sex marriage fell with astonishing speed after the ruling, and advocates for equal rights for gay people were quick to declare an end to the national same-sex marriage debate. “Our opponents leading up to the decision were making the case that there would be a pretty massive backlash, that there would be very serious resistance, protests in the streets,” said Marc Solomon, the national campaign director of Freedom to Marry, an advocacy group, in an interview last month. “That certainly is not the case. Even people who are not with us are not fired up about this.” Ms. Davis, who quit issuing marriage licenses to both heterosexual and same-sex couples after the Obergefell ruling, seems to have upended that relative quiet. From talk radio to the grassy plaza outside the brick-and-granite Rowan County courthouse — where Ms. Davis’s deputies issued licenses to gay and straight couples on Friday while she was in jail — conservatives vowed their fight to exercise their religious rights was just beginning. “The homosexual side, they feel they’ve won,” said Randy Smith, a Freewill Baptist pastor who has been organizing rallies in support of Ms. Davis and pressing Gov. Steven L. Beshear of Kentucky, unsuccessfully, to issue an executive order giving her the exemption she is seeking. Mr. Smith, who was a speaker at a rally on Saturday, had 2,000 signatures on a petition that, he said, asks the governor to issue an executive order “giving protection to county clerks,” which he hopes to deliver this week. Image Supporters of Kim Davis on Saturday at the jail in Grayson, Ky. Credit Chris Tilley/Reuters “If the governor refuses to meet with me,” he said, “I will make an unannounced trip down there, and I will have as much media coverage as I possibly can. I am not going to let this thing go.” Twenty-one states have some form of religious-exemption law, but just one — North Carolina — has a specific measure exempting public officials from participating in same-sex marriages, according the Movement Advancement Project , which tracks gay-rights legislation. Some legal experts, including Katherine M. Franke, a law professor at Columbia University who studies religious freedom and sexual liberty, say the North Carolina statute will not hold up in court — for the same reason that Judge Bunning ruled that Ms. Davis must issue licenses. Government officials, Professor Franke said, “don’t have a First Amendment right to pick and choose which parts of the job they are going to do.” Other states, including Georgia, Minnesota, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas, this year considered passing religious exemption laws targeted to public officials but failed. Religious conservatives say they expect similar measures to be proposed as state legislatures reconvene in the coming months. Other states are trying to tackle religious objections in other ways. In Alabama, probate judges in 13 of 67 counties are, like Ms. Davis, declining to issue marriage licenses to anyone. State Senator Greg Albritton, a Republican, said some of those judges were “preparing to go to jail” if ordered, as Ms. Davis was, to issue same-sex marriage licenses. When the Legislature convenes a special session next this week, Mr. Albritton said, he intends to reintroduce legislation requiring couples to draft their own marriage contracts, which the state would simply record, putting Alabama out of the business of issuing marriage licenses. “Kentucky is a precursor to where we are headed,” Mr. Albritton said. On the presidential campaign trail, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, are among the Republicans who have taken up Ms. Davis’s cause. After the Republican candidate Donald J. Trump said on MSNBC that the United States is a “nation of laws” that must be followed, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a fellow candidate, picked a fight on Twitter, telling Mr. Trump that “even really rich New Yorkers should oppose jailing Christians for their religious beliefs.” Advocates for same-sex marriage, meanwhile, dismissed the hubbub over Ms. Davis, predicting the conservative efforts would go nowhere. “We had a huge victory and the Supreme Court ruled for marriage,” said Rebecca Isaacs, the executive director of the Equality Federation, a national advocacy group. “This seems dramatic because she is obviously enjoying her role, but it’s really the last gasp of protest against marriage equality. It’s over.” In Kentucky, the State Senate president, Robert Stivers, predicted bipartisan support for changing marriage laws when the Legislature convenes in January, and Ms. Davis’s backers have argued that although public officials were mostly complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling, many did so under duress. Chris Jobe, the president of the Kentucky County Clerks Association, said that after the Obergefell decision, 60 of the state’s 120 county clerks agreed to sign a petition to the governor saying they objected on religious grounds. “Not a day doesn’t go by, hardly, out on the street that I don’t run into two or three people that are upset by this,” Mr. Jobe said in an interview before Ms. Davis was jailed. “Our country is founded upon the principles of God, and we feel that every day our rights are taken away.”

Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage
Kim Davis,Kentucky Clerk
Rowan County
Kentucky
2016 Presidential Election
Separation of church and state


Jay Adams, Who Revolutionized Skateboarding, Dies at 53

Abstract: Jay Adams, a member of the renowned Z-Boys team, which transformed skateboarding from a childish pastime into a raw and dangerous activity that is as much a lifestyle as it is a sport, died on Friday in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. He was 53. Allen Sarlo, a lifelong friend of Adams’s who was with him in Mexico, said Adams spent Thursday surfing and went to bed complaining of chest pain. Adams, who had a history of drug trouble but had recently been sober, had a heart attack that night and died early Friday morning, Sarlo said. To skateboarders, Adams was an evolutionary figure. He came from a generation of surfers for whom skateboarding was sidewalk surfing. They infused it with aggression and attitude, coining phrases like “get radical” and creating foundational maneuvers that paved the way for stars like Tony Hawk. “Jay embodied our culture and our lifestyle all in one,” said Christian Hosoi, a professional skater and a friend of Adams’s. But Adams also embodied darkness and excess: His competitive skate career lasted only a few years before it was derailed by addiction and jail time. Jay J. Adams (his middle name was simply the letter J) was born in Santa Monica, Calif., on Feb. 3, 1961. He never knew his father. When he was 3, his mother began a 14-year relationship with Kent Sherwood, who worked at a local surf shop and later ran a surfboard rental business in the Venice section of Los Angeles. Sherwood raised Adams as his son. “I got him in the water when he was 4,” Sherwood said in an interview. Adams was a fixture at local beaches by the time he was in the first grade. Sometime in the late 1960s, he paddled up to the surfboard designer and builder Jeff Ho and complimented his surfing style. “It really took me aback because in that time you didn’t see little kids in the water,” Ho said in an interview. That was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that put Adams on the path to fame — not as a surfer but as a skateboarder. When Adams was growing up in Southern California, there was not much of a distinction between people who surfed and people who skated. In the 1970s, when Ho opened a shop called Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions, Adams became a member of a surf team that traveled to local competitions and, by extension, a member of the shop’s skate team as well. At the time, organized skateboarding, such as it was, was a cross between acrobatics and ballet, with tricks like rolling handstands and twirling 360s similar to what figure skaters did in the Olympics. Ho’s Zephyr team, which became known as the Z-Boys, had an aggressive, surf-influenced style in which the skaters lowered their bodies and, as if riding a wave, did hard turns into embankments and walls. That style became the standard after a 1975 skateboard contest in Del Mar, Calif., when the arrival of Adams and the Zephyr team more or less ended the era of skateboarding as gymnastics. “It took off; everybody started skating like that,” said J. Grant Brittain, a photographer who was a spectator at the contest. A few years later, Adams, along with Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta and others, started to unleash himself on empty swimming pools. Skateboarders had experimented with empty pools as far back as the early ’60s, but with the advent of urethane wheels, which got more traction than the clay wheels they replaced, Adams’s generation was able to go faster and higher and ultimately out of the pool. Over a two-year period, Adams and the other skaters laid the foundations for vertical skateboarding. “Every week was a month, and every month was a year; things just really progressed,” Glen E. Friedman, a fellow skater who photographed the era, said in an interview. Through sponsors and endorsement deals, Adams made some money and achieved some fame. But as skateboarding faded in the early 1980s, he became a heavy drug user and began a long run of legal trouble. He cleaned up for a time but then became addicted to heroin and landed in jail several times from the late 1990s until the late 2000s. The 2001 documentary “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” directed by Peralta, revived Adams’s legend and brought him a new generation of fans. He continued to have troubles with drugs and the law but became a Christian in jail and recently became sober. His survivors include his wife, Tracy Hubbard Adams, as well as a son, Seven, and a daughter, Venice, from previous relationships. A few months ago, several of the Z-Boys, including Adams, Alva and Peralta, met for a reunion dinner at Hostaria del Piccolo, a restaurant near Venice Beach. Two busboys, realizing they were hosting the Z-Boys, were awed. “Years ago we would have been kicked out of a restaurant like that,” Peralta said, “and here they are: ‘Thank you for choosing us.’ ”

Jay Adams
Skateboarding
Obituary
California


Walmart Stock Sinks After a Warning on Sales

Abstract: Walmart startled investors on Wednesday by slashing its sales forecast for the year, warning that heavy investments in wages and in e-commerce would curb future earnings. The news sent Walmart shares plunging, casting a pall over retail stocks, as analysts worried about broader ripple effects across the economy, and about consumer spending ahead of the holiday season. Walmart’s slowing performance underscored concerns that its superstores, which once upended the way people shopped and for decades dominated the world of retail, are finally succumbing to nimbler rivals in the sprawling world of Internet commerce. Sales will be flat this year, Walmart said at a meeting with investors in New York. The retailer previously said that it expected net sales to grow 1 to 2 percent for the current fiscal year, through January. Shares in Walmart fell 10.04 percent to $60.03, their worst one-day slump in 17 years. Doug McMillon, Walmart’s chief executive, said the company needed to invest to return to growth. “We can deliver stronger financial performance in the short term simply by running our core business better, but that won’t be enough,” Mr. McMillon said. In a bid to soften the blow, Walmart also announced a new $20 billion share buyback program. Still, Walmart, eclipsed by Amazon this year as the world’s biggest retailer by market capitalization, lost more than $20 billion in market value as its shares fell to their lowest level in three years. So far this year, Walmart’s shares are down 30 percent. “Retail history is very clear,” Mr. McMillon said. “Those that are unwilling or unable to change go away. That’s why we’re taking decisive steps now to change and grow our business.” Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of the Strategic Resource Group, a retail consulting firm, said: “We’ve reached a point of demarcation. As of today, it’s clear Amazon is clearly eclipsing Walmart as the No. 1 growth retailer for the next decade.” Walmart’s executives, Mr. Flickinger said, made many meaningful improvements, including finally pouring serious resources into its online and delivery operations. But as growth continues to stall, investors realized that even those efforts would fall short in the face of the fierce competition facing brick-and-mortar retailers. Image "We’re taking decisive steps now to change and grow our business,” said Doug McMillon, Walmart’s chief executive. Credit Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press Walmart’s woes sent ripple effects through the wider retail sector, as worries mounted over what is expected to be weak holiday spending this year. The National Retail Federation, a trade group, said last week that it expected sales in November and December to rise 3.7 percent to $630 billion, less than last year’s 4.1 percent gain. Figures released by the Commerce Department earlier Wednesday showed overall retail sales virtually flat in September. Target shares fell 3.5 percent, while Dollar General slumped 4.2 percent. Sears fell 3.0 percent. “Amazon’s clearly winning the retail wars with its advanced robotics and so on,” Mr. Flickinger said. “Walmart is already a proverbial light year behind Amazon in online retailing.” Mr. McMillon acknowledged that competition with e-commerce juggernauts, as well as discounters, remained tough. But in a shot at Amazon, he defended the advantages of Walmart’s large physical store over purely online merchants, asking whether it was easier for a brick-and-mortar store to build up e-commerce or for an e-commerce player to build out stores. Walmart’s strength, he said, lay in giving consumers the choice of shopping at its superstores or its increasing number of smaller “neighborhood” stores, or online, with products available for in-store pickup or for home delivery. Only Walmart could provide that wide array of options at a huge, nationwide scale, he said. “We like our chances,” Mr. McMillon said. The retailer will invest $2 billion in its e-commerce arm over the next two years, opening online grocery operations in 20 new markets. It said it planned to pour billions of dollars into making its prices more competitive. Mr. McMillon also said he was willing to close stores that were underperforming, as well as sell assets. That prompted speculation over a potential spinoff of businesses, like Sam’s Club, whose performance has lagged, as well as exits from difficult international markets. Though Walmart has bolstered growth in some markets overseas, like Mexico and Canada, it has struggled further afield, including in Britain, where Walmart’s Asda chain has been engaged in a price war in a hypercompetitive grocery business. Walmart’s growth in China and in Brazil has also lost steam as economies slowed in those markets. In the most recent quarter, net sales at Walmart’s international stores fell by almost 10 percent. After years of being a target of labor and consumer groups seeking higher wages and better schedules for retail workers, Walmart is spending $1.2 billion this year to increase pay for its hourly employees to $9 an hour and $1.5 billion next year to raise wages to $10 an hour. The move, executives have said, is necessary to reduce staff turnover and to improve customer experience in its stores, including better restocking of shelves. Image A parking lot at a Secaucus, N.J., Walmart on the Friday after Thanksgiving last year. The company expects flat sales this year. Credit Matt Rainey for The New York Times Walmart has said it is also addressing erratic scheduling practices that have come under fire from labor groups for the destabilizing effect it has on workers’ incomes and livelihoods. But it still faces pressure to do more to improve the lot of its lowest-paid employees — including committing to raising pay to at least $15 an hour. In ads financed by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents workers primarily in grocery and retail stores, that were broadcast during the Democratic presidential candidates’ first debate, former and current Walmart employees call on the retailer to pay a better living wage for the sake of the country’s middle class. “We’re struggling,” one worker says. “We can’t survive on these wages,” says another. Charles Holley, Walmart’s departing chief financial officer, said earnings per share would fall 6 to 12 percent next year before they would recover. He said profits would rebound by fiscal year 2019, when earnings per share were expected to grow 5 to 10 percent a year. The company’s executive vice president, Brett Biggs, is set to succeed Mr. Holley at the end of the year. Mr. Holley also said that the company expected sales to increase in a range of $45 billion to $60 billion over the next three years, the equivalent of the annual sales of many of the country’s biggest corporations. The company trails Amazon by market capitalization, but Walmart’s sales — which reached $482 billion last year — dwarf Amazon’s annual revenue of about $89 billion. Walmart’s size has not calmed investors’ fears or translated into confidence in the retailer’s future. Mr. McMillon acknowledged as much, telling investors in a question-and-answer session that the biggest and the best were not the same. Still, “this is a growth company,” Mr. McMillion said. “It just happens to be a really large growth company.”

Walmart Stores
Retail
Earnings Reports
E Commerce
Stocks,Bonds


Indonesia Upholds Death in Drug Cases

Abstract: JAKARTA, Indonesia , Oct. 30 — The Constitutional Court of Indonesia upheld the death penalty for serious drug offenses on Tuesday, dimming hopes of a reprieve for three Australians facing execution for trying to smuggle heroin off the resort island of Bali. Lawyers for the three men, members of a group of Australians convicted of drug offenses who have become known as the Bali Nine, had hoped a successful constitutional challenge would add weight to their final appeal to the Supreme Court. Should that appeal fail, their last avenue would be a direct plea to Indonesia’s president. The Constitutional Court ruled 6 to 3 that a 2000 constitutional amendment upholding the right to life did not apply to capital punishment. The court added that the right to life had to be balanced against the rights of the victims of drug trafficking. “The request by the applicant is rejected,” said the chief judge, Jimly Assidiqqie. Lawyers representing the three Australians, along with two Indonesians also facing capital punishment for drug offenses, filed the challenge with the Constitutional Court last January. Three more of the so-called Bali Nine on death row here had hoped that a constitutional ruling might lead to a review of their cases. The last three of the nine are serving 20 years to life for their involvement in the smuggling ring. The nine Australian men were arrested in 2005 for trying to smuggle 18 pounds of heroin out of Bali. They ranged in age from 18 to 28 at the time. The death penalty is not an uncommon punishment for drug trafficking in Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. At the beginning of this year 134 people, including 34 foreigners, were on death row in Indonesia, a vast majority for drug-related crimes, according to government statistics. In 2004 two Thai citizens were executed in Indonesia on drug charges. The Australian government, a staunch opponent of capital punishment, has usually pleaded for clemency for citizens facing execution abroad.

Indonesia
Capital Punishment
Drug Abuse and Traffic
Australia
Bali (Indonesia)


Picks Made for S.E.C. and Transportation Post

Abstract: President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday will announce Mary L. Schapiro to be the chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to Democrats familiar with the decision, elevating Ms. Schapiro from her current position as the head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Mr. Obama has also settled on Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois, as his choice for transportation secretary, officials familiar with the decision said, and on Friday is scheduled to announce that Mr. LaHood will be nominated to lead the department through a vast public works program intended to stimulate the economy. Mr. Obama, who has only a handful of key appointments remaining, will name Ms. Schapiro to the post during a news conference Thursday morning in Chicago. She would be the first permanent female chairwoman of the S.E.C. The S.E.C. decision, which was first reported by Bloomberg News and confirmed by two officials familiar with the decision, comes as Wall Street faces a slew of regulatory questions in the wake of the economic downturn, chaotic shakeup in the financial industry and new revelations involving the possible $50 billion fraud by the investment adviser Bernard L. Madoff. Ms. Schapiro, 53, is a former commissioner of the S.E.C. She met with Mr. Obama in recent days in Chicago, officials said, and her appointment was on the agenda during a meeting on Tuesday of Mr. Obama’s top economic advisers. Although her appointment is not a cabinet-level position, she faces confirmation by the Senate, some of whose members have been critical of how the S.E.C. performed in overseeing the faltering investment banks this year. In addition to serving at the S.E.C., Ms. Schapiro was chairwoman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission during the Clinton administration. Her service at both agencies could suggest that Mr. Obama is considering combining the two regulators, a structure long supported by many experts to streamline market oversight. Mr. LaHood, who is retiring after seven terms in Congress, has overseen major spending projects as a member of the House Appropriations Committee. Known for his bipartisan alliances and his moderate views, he will be the second Republican named to the cabinet, after Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary who has agreed to stay on. With transportation secretary off his list, Mr. Obama would have only one remaining cabinet seat to announce: labor secretary. He also has yet to name a director of national intelligence, which is not a cabinet position but aides said could be filled soon. The next transportation secretary will face several challenges. One is that the gasoline tax , regarded since the Eisenhower administration as a user fee to pay for building highways, is no longer reliable or sufficient. Gas at $4 a gallon stunted sales and tax revenue, and the Congress had to come to the rescue of the Highway Trust Fund with $8 billion. With a growing number of hybrid cars, use of tax-exempt ethanol and the possibility of plug-in hybrids, gasoline consumption is becoming disconnected from highway use. When the bill to re-authorize the Transportation Department is considered by Congress in 2009, there will be proposals for a variety of replacement financing methods, including tolls that vary by time of day, possibly using transponders like those now provided by E-ZPass and similar systems. Another open question is the status of rail transportation, both passenger and freight. Many freight lines are now operating at capacity. And Amtrak, strongly backed by Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and spoken of favorably by Mr. Obama, needs cash for new equipment. The Federal Aviation Administration, another agency within the Transportation Department, faces a monumental task in replacing its aging work force of air traffic controllers, and improving air traffic control. Mr. LaHood, 63, was elected to Congress from downstate Illinois as part of the 1994 class that gave House Republicans the majority for the first time in nearly a half-century. A former state legislator and a senior Congressional aide, Mr. LaHood became a leading bipartisan voice in an increasingly polarized Congress. Mr. LaHood is close to Mr. Obama and Rahm Emanuel, the incoming White House chief of staff. Mr. LaHood was among the group of moderate Republicans who traveled to the White House last year to tell President Bush that he was in danger of losing support from many in his party over the Iraq war.

Schapiro Mary L
Securities and Exchange Commission
Transportation Department
Appointments and Executive Changes
United States Politics and Government
Presidential Election of 2008
Obama Barack
LaHood Ray


Jets’ Dearth Perseveres Despite Family Turmoil

Abstract: FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — In 2001, the Jets ’ first signing under Herman Edwards was a mostly anonymous long snapper, a soft-spoken Texan named James Dearth. So tenuous was his job status that he moonlighted at Home Depot, working nights. Dearth played in every game that season and in every game in every season since. He has snapped for four kickers, three head coaches and more punters than he can count. On Sunday, against the Carolina Panthers at Giants Stadium, the 6-foot-4, 265-pound Dearth will play in his 139th consecutive game — the model of consistency in the Jets’ inconsistent season. The streak remains remarkable. But this season has been different from the others, different because of the turmoil that surrounds him, because his father’s health worsened before training camp, because his mother died unexpectedly two weeks ago. “Because James has come to work and performed admirably takes nothing way from his constant concern about his family,” said Mike Westhoff, the special-teams coordinator. “He’s in two places at one time, and he’s doing both jobs exceptionally well.” Dearth missed two work days this season, to attend his mother’s funeral. That is how Jan Dearth raised him. She embodied sacrifice. She worked at the local gas station in Scurry, Tex., and each day after school her children and their friends would stop in, filling up on hamburgers and candy. Most months, they ate more than she made in wages. That was Jan Dearth, everybody’s mother. She took in family members, friends, anyone who needed a place to stay. On Nov. 13, Dearth felt a strong urge to call her. They talked for 40 minutes, about family and faith and her upcoming visit. Christmas was her favorite holiday, and last year she spent December with her son, joking when it ended that she did not want to leave. The next day, Dearth’s nephew and niece went into his mother’s bedroom. She was not breathing. Family tried to resuscitate her. So did the paramedics. As her husband’s health declined in recent years, Jan Dearth had suffered a series of minor strokes. But her death, at 57 from cardiac arrest, came as a shock. The Jets told Dearth to take as much time as he needed, but he played that Sunday against Jacksonville, went home, spoke at the funeral and returned to practice later in the week. “I needed to go to work,” he said. “I could almost hear my mom. She never quit anything. Because of her, I can’t remember ever wanting to quit anything. I never thought about not playing.” Dearth’s father took the news the hardest. He said things like “it wasn’t supposed to happen this way” and “this is the worst.” Dearth heard his father implying that he thought he would die first. In recent years, Dearth had watched his parents’ marriage blossom. They built a garden together, played bingo together, raised chickens and horses, spent each weekend at the local flea market. In July, his father, also James, was found to have kidney cancer. Doctors told the son that the father had one to three years to live, depending on how he responded to medication. It was the latest in a long line of ailments for his father, whose friends call him Jim and whose family calls him Pops. He had served in Vietnam, as a military police officer, and when he returned, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. His family believes his health problems stem from his exposure in Vietnam to Agent Orange, the herbicide used by the military. Jim Dearth had his first heart attack at 42. He had open-heart surgery a few years ago. He is diabetic. He has declining eyesight and rashes that cover his body and five cracked vertebrae on his spine. Many of his military friends died in their 50s, but not Jim Dearth, who is 60 and ill and retains a commanding presence. This is a man who once kept a weight set in the yard, who put 285 pounds on the bar, benched it, military pressed it, squatted it and curled it. A man who could pick up an engine block as if it were a loaf of bread. A man who dunked a basketball at 48, despite weighing 320 pounds. “He is a gigantic, powerful man,” Westhoff said. “James is big, but he’s the smallest one in that whole family. I wouldn’t want to feed that outfit.” Jim Dearth worked construction, often far from his Texas home. Still, he never missed his son’s football games, sometimes driving 18 hours from Washington and arriving just before kickoff. His son works now to repay that loyalty, spending his free time in the locker room contacting the Department of Veterans Affairs. Dearth wants his father moved from the veterans’ hospital in Dallas to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. So far, the transfer has been blocked. “What’s frustrating is why they wait for so long to do anything about it,” Dearth said. “This is a guy who fought for his country. This is a guy they promised to take care of.” Work has provided Dearth a necessary distraction, a needed support system. When Dearth struggles with concentration, when his mind drifts, he thinks about his perfectionist parents. Teammates and coaches see that same quality, the drive for perfection, in their son. Westhoff said Dearth took such detailed notes on opponents that they resembled a doctoral dissertation. He said Dearth watched so much film that he has unearthed favorable matchups, like the one the Jets exploited last week in New England when they blocked a punt and scored. That is James Dearth, Westhoff said. Last year, Westhoff needed to work out punters in the off-season. Westhoff said Dearth was baby-sitting, but came in anyway. He snapped to the punters while the stroller sat nearby. “If you want to talk about a team player, he should have his picture next to that phrase in some book,” Westhoff said. “I’ve coached for 30 years, and rarely do you find someone who gets the absolute maximum out of what he has every single day. If anyone has the perseverance to pull through tough times, believe me, it’s James Dearth.” The anonymous long snapper has become the mainstay, the pillar of consistency in an inconsistent season. He is, more than anything, the product of his parents.


Folks Who Brought You Slate Build a Business Site for the Facebook Set

Abstract: The editors of The Big Money, a new business Web site by the editors of Slate, had their work cut out for them Sunday: it was the day before their site opened, and Wall Street seemed to be in free fall. But if it was not the most auspicious time to introduce a financial news site, the editors did not let on. “I think there’s a real opportunity now to tap into people’s interest and even anxiety about the economy,” James Ledbetter , the editor of The Big Money, said in an interview last week. He and his colleagues know that attracting an audience will take time, particularly amid a sharp economic downturn. They also know that, as John Alderman, the general manager of the Slate Group, put it, business news is “not an uncrowded space.” Just as Slate has established itself over time as a respected online magazine, so does its parent, The Washington Post Company , hope that The Big Money can do the same for financial information. “Slate has obviously carved out a real niche,” Mr. Alderman said. “We think the same opportunity is there in the business category.” Three months ago Jacob Weisberg, the longtime editor of Slate, became the chairman of the Slate Group, a new unit of the Post Company that intends to spread the 12-year-old site’s imprint to new subjects. Mr. Weisberg will oversee The Big Money and other new sites, the first of which was The Root, introduced last February for an African-American audience. The plan is to start up one or two sites a year. The Big Money aims to be something in between authoritative print sources of business news and the myriad of newly minted business blogs. A lean editorial team will be supported by Slate’s marketing, technology and sales staff members and, like Slate, most of the site’s content will come from freelance writers. For instance, in an e-mail message on Sunday, when the main news was about the cloudy fate of Lehman Brothers, Mr. Ledbetter said the site would be “handling the Lehman saga in several ways.” There would be, he said, a summary of the coverage in Monday’s papers, a commentary by Daniel Gross about government bailouts and a column by Michael Lewis “on Lehman’s downfall as the unintended legacy of the Bear Stearns bailout.” “Depending on what happens between now and tomorrow morning, there may be more,” he added. The ambitions and the names may be big, but the market for online business news is “extremely saturated,” said Herb Greenberg, a former columnist for MarketWatch.com , The Wall Street Journal and TheStreet.com . Mr. Greenberg, who left MarketWatch to help start GreenbergMeritz Research and Analytics this year, cited the struggles of Portfolio, the business magazine published by Condé Nast, to gain traction. “Everything takes a while in media — everything,” Mr. Greenberg said. Among the other competitors cited by Mr. Ledbetter were CNNMoney.com , Forbes and Fortune. Mr. Ledbetter draws distinctions between sites like TheStreet.com, which pitch stock tips, and what he intends The Big Money to be. Rather than promising to “read us and we’ll make you rich,” Mr. Ledbetter is offering to “read us and we’ll make you smart.” Several popular Slate features, including the “Explainer” (answers to unusual questions) and “Moneybox” (financial commentary) will migrate to The Big Money. The site will also borrow Slate’s “Today’s Papers” concept, an early-morning summary of national newspapers, with “Today’s Business Press.” Infiniti, one of the site’s two initial advertisers, sponsored a preview of the business news summary on Slate in the months leading up to the financial site’s introduction. Infiniti and the other advertiser, American Express, will underwrite the site through the end of the year, when it will adapt a traditional online advertising model. While The Washington Post and Newsweek have been trimming their staffs, the (much smaller) Slate Group has expanded. Its growing family of Web sites attracts six million unique visitors a month, according to Nielsen Online. “We are investing in new sites because we think we’ve found a business model that works,” Mr. Alderman said. Building an audience will not be easy. WashingtonPost.com and Slate and will steer some users to The Big Money, and MSN will offer links to the site. Reuters will republish some of its articles. The Big Money also hopes to use technological tools to differentiate itself. One of them, a data base for socially responsible investing, will let users filter 500 companies to see if they minimize environmental damage or profit from vice. Another feature, called “We Build Your Presentation,” will offer PowerPoint slides of charts and graphs. A third, the “YouTube BrandWatch,” will show popular videos involving companies and ask users to decide whether they help or hurt the brands. The site has also established a Twitter feed called “WSJquips” that consists solely of short observations about, and corrections to, articles in The Journal. “The Facebook generation needs a business site,” Mr. Ledbetter said, “and I think we aspire to be that site.”

Slate
Ledbetter James
Weisberg Jacob
Finances
News and News Media
Magazines
Computers and the Internet
Washington Post Co


Japan’s Largest Bank Cuts Earnings Outlook

Abstract: HONG KONG — Mitsubishi UFJ Financial, Japan’s biggest bank, cut its full-year earnings outlook on Friday, joining several domestic rivals in reporting dismal earnings that exposed the strains to the sector from falls in the stock market last year. While toxic mortgage-related assets have dragged down numerous banks in the United States and Europe, in Japan a shrinking economy and a drop in the value of sizable stock holdings have emerged as the main problem for banks like Mitsubishi UFJ, the Mizuho Financial Group and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial. Ownership of Japanese companies’ helps cement business ties for many banks but the market rout has forced them to lower the value of the assets, eroding their capital bases. Although analysts had long cautioned that the sharp fall in the stock market in the last three months of 2008 would have this effect, the third-quarter results by Japanese banks highlighted the scale of the problem. The governor of the Bank of Japan, Masaaki Shirakawa, on Friday reiterated that the falling value of the cross-shareholdings represented the biggest risk for Japanese banks. And earlier this week, the central bank aimed to address the point by offering to buy up to 1 trillion yen, or $11.1 billion, of the shares that Japanese banks hold in other corporations. The plan, which echoes purchases made by the central bank in 2002 through 2004, is aimed at allowing banks to reduce their exposure to fluctuating markets, which the central bank said represented a critical business challenge. Concerns have also intensified that Japan’s lenders, with their balance sheets much weakened, will become even more reluctant to extend credit, further entrenching a credit squeeze that has hurt companies that are already struggling thanks to Japan’s recession. Small and medium-size companies, especially, are suffering, an issue that has become highly politicized ahead of elections in Japan later this year. Mitsubishi UFJ said on Friday that it now expected net income of 50 billion yen, or $555.5 million for the year ending March 31, rather than the 220 billion yen that it had previously forecast. The revision, it said, was mainly the result of write-down of equity securities caused by a drop in stock prices in the October through December quarter. The company lost 134.1 billion yen, or about $1.49 billion during that quarter, compared with a net profit of 57.9 billion yen a year earlier. Write-downs on equity holdings totaled about 400 billion yen, it said. Mitsubishi UFJ, which last year took a 21 percent stake in Morgan Stanley and raised billions in new funds, also said it planned to issue more preferred shares. Separately, Nomura, the largest brokerage in the country, announced Friday that it would raise up to 300 billion yen by selling stock. This comes after Nomura last month reported a net loss of 343 billion yen for the quarter through December, in part because of costs related to its acquisition last year of the Asian, European and Middle East operations of the investment bank Lehman Brothers.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
Company Reports
Banks and Banking
Japan


Texas Town, West, Is Bound by Loss After Explosion

Abstract: WEST, Tex. — The explosion at the fertilizer plant here on Wednesday sliced a path of devastation through this farming community nestled on the prairie some 80 miles south of Dallas, binding in sorrow people already connected by blood, marriage and a shared immigrant past. It squashed the roof of David Pareya’s truck, parked on the next block, as if it had been punched by a giant fist. It flattened a nursing home across the street; Gladys Quilter, 85, helped her 92-year-old sister, Lucille Price, escape through the window of her room. Five miles to the north, it loosened the nails holding the wallboard to Debbie Robertson’s living room, as her house shook softly, like a baby’s rattle. On Thursday, over beers at Wolf’s Bar or the Czech sweet buns known as kolache at Mimi Montgomery’s Village Bakery, residents pieced together the destruction they have not yet been able to assess. Stories from behind the roadblocks rolled in on Thursday, told by rescuers, survivors and their relatives, who converged on the small strip that is the downtown here to share companionship and grief. Ms. Robertson said Mr. Pareya, her cousin and West’s justice of the peace, talked to her not about the damage to his truck or the buckled walls of his home, but of the friends whose deaths he had spent the day pronouncing in his official capacity, as he made his way across the debris field. Thomas Wolf, who runs the bar an uncle opened on the sole commercial strip about 20 years ago, spoke of the many relatives he has taken in: his parents, Tommy and Joann, whose home was leveled by the blast; his brother Rick, whose house now stands crooked; a daughter who drove three hours on Wednesday to check in on everyone. There were people who came to watch, and people like Joyce and Steve Brock who came to help. Sipping coffee at the Village Bakery, whose owners put out free food for whoever walked through its doors on Thursday “just because,” as Ms. Montgomery put it. The Brocks — she is 75 and he is 80 — offered their lake home nearby to anyone who needed a place to stay. “One time when we needed help we got help from folks we knew and from complete strangers,” Mrs. Brock said. “We think it’s time to do our part and help others.” West sprouted along railroad tracks and got its name from Thomas M. West, an entrepreneur who had a big safe and offered to use it to store the payments for railroad workers, some of whom put down roots. The experiment eventually turned into a bank, which extended credit to many Czech immigrants who arrived here with nothing but a desire to farm the area’s fertile lands and make a life for themselves in their new country. Farming remains West’s economic driver. There is a feed mill to the south of Oak Street, the main drag here, where the area’s corn and oat crops are ground. The fertilizer plant sits to the north, near houses, the nursing home, a school and an apartment building, which has been destroyed. The largest employer is the school system, but a job at the plant was “a good job, of decent pay,” said Ms. Montgomery, whose grandfather came here from Moravia at the start of the 20th century. Farmers hauled the liquid fertilizer it distributed in tanks hooked to the backs of their pickup trucks. The fertilizer is made of anhydrous ammonia, a nitrogen-hydrogen combination that is used as a crop nutrient. The mayor, Tommy Muska, lost his home. The president of the Kiwanis Club, Donald Cernosek, lost his. Ms. Montgomery said Mrs. Price, her aunt, had held on to her house after moving into the nursing home and stayed there occasionally on weekends, when her children visited. That home, too, is now gone. “In the end, I don’t know how much we care about all that,” Ms. Montgomery, teary-eyed, said as she opened the door of her bakery to a visitor. “We’re still counting the bodies.”

Explosion
West TX
West Chemical and Fertilizer
Fertilizer
Accidents and Safety
Fatalities,casualties
Manufacturing


Crist and Rubio Spar Over Spending in Debate

Abstract: MIAMI — Gov. Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio faced off Sunday in the first debate of the race to become Florida’s next senator, and each unleashed a line of attack based on dollars and cents. The question posed to the state’s Republican voters was which is worse: Mr. Rubio’s use of campaign contributions for personal expenses when he served in the Florida Legislature, including as speaker of the House? Or Mr. Crist’s support of the federal stimulus package ? “Speaker Rubio views public service as a way to enhance his personal enrichment,” said Mr. Crist, who spoke first, and attacked first, during the 40-minute debate on “Fox News Sunday.” The governor went on to criticize Mr. Rubio’s use of campaign money for personal expenses, including $134 for a haircut, as well as his billing of what some said appeared to be personal flights to either the Republican Party or the state. Mr. Rubio said that he had proved all the questioned expenses were legitimate or had repaid them. Then he tried to broaden the scope. “You just don’t get it,” Mr. Rubio said. “This campaign is not about you, and it’s not about me. It’s about the people watching this program, that are watching their country being fundamentally redefined by this administration and this Congress.” He added: “This election is about trust. Who do you trust to go to Washington and stand up to Barack Obama?” Republican voters must decide which of the men will represent their party in the general election this fall. And in the candidates’ first face-to-face meeting, there was less bile than there has been in their campaign e-mail messages, perhaps because they were sitting just a foot apart. Nevertheless, there were surprises. Mr. Rubio, 38, said that, if elected, he would consider raising the age for Social Security benefit payouts and slowing the cost-of-living increases for recipients in his generation when they reach retirement age. Mr. Crist, 53, said repeatedly and almost unequivocally that although he was behind in the polls by double digits, he would stay in the Republican column and not run as an independent. “That’s right,” he said when asked about the persistent rumors that he would leave the party. “I’m running as a Republican.” On policy, Mr. Crist emphasized his record of pragmatism. He defended his support for the $787 billion federal stimulus package — saying it had created or saved 87,000 jobs — and said that bringing assistance to Florida was more important than “rattling the cage and saying you’re going to do great things and stand on principle or politics above the people.” He looked most frustrated, frowning noticeably and complaining, when the Fox News moderator, Chris Wallace, cut him off from talking about his mixed record on taxes. Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, looked most flummoxed on the issue of immigration , when Mr. Wallace said he had taken a tougher line as a Senate candidate than as speaker of the Florida House. On the federal health care overhaul, more differences emerged. Mr. Crist said he supported the new law’s ban on canceled coverage for pre-existing conditions. But after emphasizing his own efforts in Florida, he had little to say when Mr. Wallace pointed out that the state’s program for the uninsured had largely failed, with only 5,000 people signing up for coverage. Mr. Rubio was more direct. He said the overhaul should be rejected for one reason: “We can’t afford it.”

Crist Charlie
Rubio Marco
Florida
United States Politics and Government
Campaign Finance
Debating


The Man Who’ll Do Triage on Europe’s Banks

Abstract: FRANKFURT — All Ignazio Angeloni has to do is figure out Europe’s banking system. Mr. Angeloni, 59, heads the European Central Bank’s financial stability division, giving him a lead role in a task about to begin: examining the books of the 130 or so largest banks in the 17 members of the European Union who use the euro. It will be financial triage aimed at determining which banks are sound and which are not. Good luck with that. Over the last few years, the world’s financial institutions have become black boxes, so opaquely complex that they are little understood by regulators or their own executives. Lehman Brothers vanished in a puff of financial wizardry gone wrong. JPMorgan Chase was humbled when it lost control of its own traders in London. And European regulators gave the French-Belgian banking giant Dexia a clean bill of health in 2011 after a supposed “stress test,” only to see it collapse subsequently. This week, Mr. Angeloni and other central bankers are expected to announce new details of the review process. The undertaking, at the behest of the European Union, is meant to place the big banks of Europe more directly under the supervision of the European Central Bank, instead of the current patchwork of national regulators. At stake is the world’s confidence in Europe’s banking system. If the effort fails, it could undermine Europe’s fragile economic recovery and the credibility of the European unity project. “You have to supervise what banks do,” Mr. Angeloni said, during a recent interview at the central bank’s headquarters here. “You cannot leave them alone, because if you do, they can become dangerous.” The banks of Europe, of course, are particularly treacherous. The ones in Greece were crippled by their government’s toxic debt. Those in Cyprus were “bailed in” by their own depositors. Spain’s have sucked in billions of euros in aid to make up for bad loans. And several banks across Europe have become wards of the state. So can anyone really make sense of it all? “Nothing will be perfect, right?” Mr. Angeloni said. “There will be mistakes, there will be things that are not uncovered fully. The goal is to make as much progress as possible.” James Chappell, a banking analyst at Berenberg, called the banking review exercise “incredibly important.” “Ultimately, for a banking union you need to have a credible supervisor, and investors want to have trust in banks’ balance sheets, and that’s what’s been lacking and continues to lack now,” Mr. Chappell said. “What the market has to believe is that the process has been credible.” From the window of Mr. Angeloni’s downtown office, the future headquarters of the European Central Bank can be seen rising on Frankfurt’s horizon. The grand skyscraper, bracketed by cranes, is a testament to the central bank’s growing role as a world power. The unwieldiness of some banks is a symptom of technological advances that have led to nano-speed trading and the use of complex computer algorithms that guide investment decisions, Mr. Angeloni said. While he expressed doubts about the usefulness of splitting the investment and retail arms of banks, as many on both sides of the Atlantic have advocated, he still suggested that some banks had grown too complex for their own good, or for society’s. Perhaps ominously for the banks, the silver-colored cuff links on his monogrammed shirt were shaped like bears. “The C.E.O.’s, they look superhuman, but, in fact, very often they don’t know what’s going on, and they don’t understand because it is very, very complicated,” Mr. Angeloni said. “The algorithms that govern the movements of asset prices are very difficult to understand for any C.E.O.,” he added. “In the end, the C.E.O., the people at the top, have to concentrate on the politics, right? If you are in that mind frame, it’s very difficult to concentrate on the nitty-gritty technical details. So there is a growing gap between the people who work at the bottom and understand the little things, and the people on the top.” Mr. Angeloni is a global citizen. Born in postwar Milan, Italy, he studied economics at Bocconi University in Milan with Mario Monti, the respected technocrat who led Italy’s previous government. At the University of Pennsylvania, where Mr. Angeloni received his doctorate, he studied macroeconomics under Robert J. Shiller. “He gave me an ‘A,’ ” Mr. Angeloni joked last Tuesday, the morning after his former professor was named a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. But Mr. Angeloni’s career has ranged beyond traditional economic research, to include diplomatic work for the Italian Treasury, where he also led the state-run export credit agency. He quotes Kant and Pirandello in his published works. Now Mr. Angeloni is one of the more multifaceted lieutenants of Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank. The immediate task is to prepare for the inception of a quasi-independent supervisory branch of the central bank, which will have its own chairman. The first step is reviewing the financial health of the biggest banks of Europe. The central bank must do so in the next 12 months, while creating a supervisory wing staffed by a thousand new employees. “People come to us and ask, ‘How can you do it? You have to recruit many supervisors, you don’t have many resources,’ ” he said. “That’s not true.” The central bank has the advantage of drawing on the aid and experience of national regulators that have long been at work in member states, he said. “What makes it difficult is that it is very fragmented,” he said. “It is diversified in different countries, and they are not used to working together, so it’s a huge organizational effort, and it’s also a huge political effort in the sense of convincing everybody to converge to common styles of supervision.” The review process will have three parts, he said. The first will be to make a broad assessment of a bank’s risk profile. The second is the so-called asset quality review, reviewing the logbooks of each bank and assessing whether loans and other assets are performing as advertised. The third is a stress test, in which several models are created to simulate what would happen if the bank were exposed to a variety of economic shocks. It is a job that was fumbled by other European regulators, most notably in the case of Dexia. For the supervisory process to be truly useful, specialists say it must be accompanied by a so-called single resolution mechanism — a system for winding down failing banks in an orderly way, to avoid market upheavals. Regulators hope an independent body to oversee such work will be in place by 2015, but almost every detail of the banking overhaul effort has been mired in political wrangling among the member states. “The stakes are the recovery and well functioning of Europe and the euro,” Mr. Angeloni said. “Europe has this project for several decades, to not only live in peace — that’s already an important thing in itself — but also to make its economic model function and potentially — why not? — be also exported elsewhere. And it’s a good economic model, because the quality of life in Europe is very high in many ways.” The question, he said, was, “Can you make this economic and social model, which to some extent is a luxury, can you make it compatible with the increasing pressure of competition from emerging markets and from elsewhere?” “You have to make the system work, you have to reform it a little bit, and what we are doing is part of this reform,” he said, adding, “Building a federation is a long process.”

Banking and Finance
European Central Bank
Europe
Ignazio Angeloni
European Monetary Union


Uzbeks Say Inmate Due for Release Died in 2010

Abstract: MOSCOW — The Uzbek government, lobbied by rights groups and pressured quietly by the United States to free a high-profile political prisoner, has finally revealed a secret: He died five years ago. Akram Yuldashev, one of the most prominent religious leaders in post-Soviet Central Asia, died in prison in 2010 at the age of 52, the Uzbek authorities confirmed this month. The news came with only a month remaining on Mr. Yuldashev’s 17-year sentence. The cause was said to be tuberculosis. “I don’t think the government thought this through,” Steve Swerdlow, a Central Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in a telephone interview on Monday, referring to the government’s policy of shrouding the death in secrecy for years. Mr. Yuldashev’s death would inevitably have to be announced when it became apparent that he would never be released from prison, so by concealing it, the government risked further angering his followers and making him a martyr, Mr. Swerdlow said. Mr. Yuldashev, a former math teacher and Communist Party member, emerged as a leader of the broad Islamic revival that flourished in the 1990s in the Fergana Valley, which sprawls across eastern Uzbekistan, southern Kyrgyzstan and northern Tajikistan. His followers, who now number a few thousand, staged an uprising in the eastern city of Andijon in 2005 to protest corruption and the persecution of Muslims, which ended in bloodshed when government troops fired on the crowds . While rights activists lobbied the government, State Department officials considered other approaches for pressuring Uzbekistan to release Mr. Yuldashev, working in consultation with his family. American officials, as they have on a variety of rights issues in Uzbekistan, had advocated quiet diplomacy, lest the government of President Islam Karimov take offense or fear losing face in a public dispute, and retaliate by closing military supply routes to Afghanistan. Mr. Yuldashev’s widow lives in the United States and lobbied for years for his release. But three years ago, his family, dismayed by the lack of progress, started to accept the American government’s position that confrontation was counterproductive and diminished its public advocacy, Mr. Swerdlow said. The debate turned out to be moot, as Mr. Yuldashev was long dead. Mr. Yuldashev’s movement tried to resolve the pressing debate of the mid-1990s — how to transition from communism to capitalism — with Islamic teaching. In a philosophical tract, he advocated capitalism and in particular ownership of small businesses like grocery stores or cafes as a moral lifestyle under Islam. Followers were supposed to adhere to guidelines, like paying workers respectable wages and contributing to a credit union to help other businesses. It was in sharp contrast to the raucous, capitalistic free-for-all gripping most of the former Soviet states. By the late 1990s, however, Uzbekistan’s resurgent Communist-era leadership accused the group of terrorism and cracked down. A spiral of repression and resistance ensued. Mr. Yuldashev was imprisoned in 1999 on charges of terrorism after a bombing in Tashkent, the capital. In 2005, his followers in Andijon overran a prison to free a dozen or so small-business owners, then staged a rally on a central square. Soldiers fired into the crowd. Human rights groups put the death toll at over 700, the worst shooting of protesters on a square since the Tiananmen massacre in China in 1989, but the government claims that fewer than 200 were killed. Human Rights Watch is urging the United States government to take a more upfront stance on Uzbek rights abuses, including in meetings with Uzbekistan’s foreign minister, Abdulaziz Komilov, who is visiting Washington on Tuesday. “The quiet approach has done nothing to give Uzbekistan an incentive to address its woeful record on torture, the ongoing imprisonment of government critics and religious believers,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

Uzbekistan
Akram Yuldashev
Islam
Human Rights
Fatalities,casualties
Uzbeks
Political prisoner
US
Human Rights Watch
State Department


Martellus Bennett Lightens Mood for Giants

Abstract: ALBANY — The tall, bearded man was smiling, joking, laughing. He is new to the Giants and their all-business coach, which makes his demeanor different from most of his teammates’. He could be the Giants’ starting tight end. And he has become one of their most talkative players. Throughout training camp, Martellus Bennett has not disappointed anyone. He has impressed teammates and Coach Tom Coughlin and shown his personality in a number of ways. Before practice Monday, Bennett joked with fans hoping to get an autograph. Later, the large crowd cheered every time Eli Manning completed a pass to him. “I’m happy being here and with the things that we’re doing,” said Bennett, who signed a one-year deal as a free agent after four seasons with the Dallas Cowboys . “Happiness makes a big difference.” The Giants and Bennett are hoping to get the best out of each other. The Giants are hoping Bennett will be an improvement at tight end after they lost Jake Ballard. And Bennett is quick to tell people he was not used much in Dallas playing behind Jason Witten. Bennett even became a philosopher for a short period. He said that during free agency, he, like all Americans, was in the pursuit of happiness — as well as a chance to make the perfect play, whether it was blocking or catching. And Bennett’s wife, Siggi Walker, said he seemed more pleased to be with the Giants. To begin camp, Bennett made the most noise by saying he hated the Cowboys and wanted to kick their backsides in the Giants’ season opener Sept. 5. In the past, Coughlin did not like his players to be so outspoken. But with two championships, he said he had become more patient. Coughlin has also enjoyed talking with Bennett. “He’s an interesting guy,” said Coughlin, who smiled and would not elaborate. “I like them to have their own personality. I just like them to be able to structure it within the concept of trying to keep the focus on the game and on the team. I don’t like robots.” Bennett first considered playing for the Giants while watching the Super Bowl , in which Ballard and Travis Beckum sustained knee injuries in the win over the New England Patriots. In Dallas, where Witten was the primary receiving tight end, Bennett was asked to block most of the time. He had only 23 passes thrown his way last season and had 17 receptions. Bennett said he expected his responsibilities to change. In the preseason opener against the Jacksonville Jaguars, Bennett had three catches for 27 yards, including a 12-yard touchdown from the backup quarterback David Carr. “I haven’t been in the end zone in a long time,” said Bennett, who has not scored in the regular season since 2008, his rookie year. “I’m just happy to be somewhere where I feel wanted and needed.” Since 2007, the Giants have not had a tight end make more than 50 catches. Bennett hopes to change that. Bennett has been splitting first-team snaps in practice with Bear Pascoe. He ran a crisp corner pattern in practice Sunday for a 35-yard touchdown pass from Manning. He impressed fans Monday by tipping a throw from Manning that was behind him, then making an acrobatic catch. “I think with Martellus, he’s more athletic than maybe some of the tight ends we’ve had,” Manning said. “I thought he’s come in with the right attitude. He should have a lot of opportunity to get catches.” Bennett has sat behind Manning during the offense’s meeting. Manning said Bennett had asked a lot questions. In general, Bennett has enjoyed having training camp at the University of Albany, a location Coughlin has used so players can have extended time together. Bennett has played cards with teammates, seen three movies in two days (“The Campaign,” “The Bourne Legacy” and “The Watch”) and watched the Olympics. “Sometimes, when you’re on a team for so long, you forget about the bonding experience that you have at camp,” Bennett said. “I’m just trying to grow so that everyone gets to know me not only as a teammate, but also as a person.” Bennett knows he still has a lot of work to do. He said he needed to continue working on blocking technique and route running. He said he could learn from the premier tight ends, like the Patriots’ Rob Gronkowski, Jimmy Graham of the New Orleans Saints and Owen Daniels of the Houston Texans. “I try to steal something from everybody,” Bennett said. “I think there’s a lot of room for me to grow in this offense.” The Giants hope Bennett’s performance will match his boisterous personality. EXTRA POINTS Receiver Hakeem Nicks, who has been rehabilitating a broken foot, was removed from the physically unable to perform list Monday. He is expected to start practicing next week. “I’m very excited about that,” said Nicks, who anticipates progressing slowly. ... Linebackers Michael Boley (hamstring) and Jacquian Williams (hip) and defensive linemen Shaun Rogers (leg) and Justin Trattou (ankle and heel) did not practice. Receiver David Douglas (leg) and offensive lineman Jim Cordle (knee) also did not participate.

Football
New York Giants
Bennett Martellus
Dallas Cowboys
Ballard Jake


Lakers Find Way to Win as Wizards Fall to 3-17

Abstract: Kobe Bryant got a locker-room visit from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who wanted to know how the Los Angeles Lakers ’ point-guard-by-default was holding up. “I’m beat up,” said Bryant, who sat at his locker with a cold pack on his bothersome back, wraps on both knees, and feet in a plastic tub filled with water and ice. “Trucking along, though.” Straining to work out the problems in an offense that Coach Mike D’Antoni compared to dancing with two left shoes, the Lakers ended a four-game losing streak by holding off the host Washington Wizards , 102-96, on Friday night. Bryant had 30 points and 7 assists, and Jodie Meeks scored 24 points. The Wizards are an N.B.A.-worst 3-17 this season. “We’re not there yet; we’re not even close — we’re not close to being a good team,” said D’Antoni, who at one point stomped his foot in anger at his 10-14 club. “But can you build on it? I hope so.” He also called his players “lackadaisical” and “lethargic.” Bryant made only 9 of 29 shots, but his performance included one highlight-reel play. With a little less than one and a half minutes left, he sneaked in from the 3-point arc to tip in a missed free throw by Dwight Howard, who was 4 for 8 at the line and finished with 12 points and 14 rebounds. “All night, I’m missing easy shots left and right, and I have no idea how that one went in,” Bryant said. Howard jokingly said it was a set play called “12 Miss,” referring to his uniform number. He and Bryant appeared to get into a heated exchange during a break in the action; Howard said they were discussing defensive strategy after a breakdown. Led by the reserve Cartier Martin’s season-high 21 points, Washington led by as many 9 points in the first half and, after trailing by as many 16 in the second, closed to 92-89 on Nene’s free throws with five and a half minutes left. But Howard made a jump hook, and with four and a half minutes left, Martell Webster was called for a foul on Bryant’s 3-point shot even though a replay appeared to show no contact. Bryant made three free throws. Before the game, D’Antoni said, “Every good offense is a rhythm, and our rhythm is off beat right now.” D’Antoni had his players do a film session and walk-through at a ballroom at their hotel. “I felt like we had a pretty good feel of how Mike, today at morning brunch, kind of communicated how he wanted the offense to flow,” Bryant said. The Lakers were still without Steve Nash and Pau Gasol. ROCKETS 101, CELTICS 89 James Harden scored 21 points, and Greg Smith added 20 to help host Houston beat Boston. MAGIC 99, WARRIORS 85 J. J. Redick had 16 points, and Nikola Vucevic added 12 points and 17 rebounds to help host Orlando hold off Golden State. THUNDER 113, KINGS 103 Kevin Durant scored 31 points, Serge Ibaka added 18 points and 11 rebounds, and host Oklahoma City won its 10th straight — the franchise’s longest winning streak since 1996, when it won 11 in a row as the Seattle SuperSonics. SUNS 99, JAZZ 84 Jared Dudley had a season-high 22 points to lead host Phoenix, which won consecutive games for the first time since Nov. 21-23. PACERS 95, 76ERS 85 Paul George scored 28 points, and Roy Hibbert had 19 points and 14 rebounds for host Indiana, which beat short-handed Philadelphia. The Pacers’ George Hill had a triple-double with 15 points, 10 assists and 10 rebounds. Philadelphia played without guard Jrue Holiday, who sat out with a sprained left foot. RAPTORS 95, MAVERICKS 74 Linas Kleiza scored 12 of his 20 points in the fourth quarter, and host Toronto beat Dallas, snapping a six-game losing streak. BUCKS 90, CAVALIERS 86 Monta Ellis scored a season-high 33 points as visiting Milwaukee won its fourth straight. WOLVES 113, HORNETS 102 Nikola Pekovic scored a season-high 31 points as visiting Minnesota won its third straight. Timberwolves Coach Rick Adelman said that guard Ricky Rubio worked out in Minnesota on Friday and might be ready on Saturday night in Dallas.

Basketball
Washington Wizards
Los Angeles Lakers