William Rees-Mogg, Former Editor of The Times of London, Dies at 84

Abstract: LONDON — William Rees-Mogg, the longtime editor of The Times of London and one of Britain’s most respected, if mercurial, conservative voices, who rose to the defense of Richard M. Nixon as well as the Rolling Stones, died here on Dec. 29. He was 84. The cause was esophageal cancer, his family said. In a statement, Prime Minister David Cameron called him “a Fleet Street legend.” Mr. Rees-Mogg was 38 when he was named editor of The Times in 1967, making him the youngest ever to hold the job. He was perhaps the last in that post to reasonably aspire to the formidable influence in Britain’s ruling circles that his predecessors at The Times had wielded for almost 200 years. When Mr. Rees-Mogg took over the editorship, the paper’s circulation and profitability had slipped sharply in the face of stiff competition from The Daily Telegraph, and The Daily Mail, both competing for the same, mostly conservative readers as the Times. Under the Canadian press baron Roy Thomson, who bought the paper in 1967, Mr. Rees-Mogg worked to restore The Times’s fortunes and editorial authority, and to shed its fusty image. Innovations included a women’s page, a business section and bylines for the paper’s hitherto anonymous reporters and commentators, as well as expanded sports and arts coverage. But when the innovations failed to reverse the declines, he presided over a return to some of the old ways at the paper. This was the state of affairs when Lord Thomson’s son Kenneth R. Thomson decided to sell The Times and its sister paper, The Sunday Times, to Rupert Murdoch in 1981. At the time, Mr. Murdoch was moving News International, his British subsidiary, into a dominant position in Britain’s newspaper market. In character and temperament, Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Rees-Mogg were poles apart. Mr. Murdoch, an Australian regarded by many in Britain’s upper classes as a colonial upstart, harbored a deep hostility toward the country’s ruling establishment, of which Mr. Rees-Mogg was a proud member. Mr. Rees-Mogg resigned shortly after the takeover and was soon replaced by Harold Evans, whose own tenure was ended after barely a year amid policy differences with Mr. Murdoch. As a writer of editorials and columns, Mr. Rees-Mogg was as elegant in his prose as he was courteous in manner and conservative in attire, holding fast to pinstripe suits in the office as his colleagues shifted to shirt sleeves, even jeans. One younger staff member said Mr. Rees-Mogg was the only man he could imagine wearing double-breasted pajamas. Mr. Rees-Mogg shunned typewriters and computers, writing his articles and books in longhand. He found little that was offensive in being called a fogy, or being satirized, as he was in journals like Private Eye and in the play “Pravda,” by Howard Brenton and David Hare, where his alter ego was the unforgettably named Elliot Fruit-Norton. Image William Rees-Mogg with the paper he edited for 14 years. Credit The Sunday Times, via European Pressphoto Agency He expressed his passion in his columns. He defended President Nixon during the Watergate scandal (he later called it “a hysterical overreaction”) and argued for years for a return to the gold standard. In 1976 he entered a dispute between the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson against his more right-wing foreign secretary, George Brown, a man known for excessive drinking. “Lord George Brown is a better man drunk than the prime minister is sober,” Mr. Rees-Mogg wrote. He incensed some Times readers in 1967 with a lead editorial in which he attacked the severity of jail sentences imposed on the Rolling Stones’s Mick Jagger (three months) and Keith Richards (one year) for drug offenses. “If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity,” Mr. Rees-Mogg wrote, under the headline “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” The jail terms were soon quashed on appeal. William Rees-Mogg was born in southwest England on July 14, 1928, the son of a wealthy farmer, Edmund Fletcher Rees-Mogg, and an American mother, the former Beatrice Warren. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and began his journalism career in 1952 with The Financial Times before moving to The Sunday Times in 1960. In retirement, Mr. Rees-Mogg served on the governing board of the BBC and was appointed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to lead the British Broadcasting Council, monitoring standards on the country’s radio and television channels. Above all he remained a prolific writer, turning out volumes on economics and rare books — a passion that led to his purchase of one of London’s best-known antiquarian bookshops, Pickering and Chatto — and contributing commentaries to The Times and other newspapers until shortly before his death. His survivors include his wife, the former Gillian Shakespeare Morris, and the couple’s two sons, Thomas and Jacob, and three daughters, Emma, Charlotte and Annunziata. Jacob was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in 2010. Mr. Rees-Mogg, who was defeated badly in two attempts to win a seat in Parliament for the Conservatives in the 1950s, made no secret of his ambition to emulate his Times predecessors in occupying a seat in the councils of power. Answering critics who called him haughty, snobbish and a pillar of the Establishment, he declined to apologize, especially for the last one. “It seems to me, provided one doesn’t allow oneself to become pompous and opinionated, a useful and helpful thing to be,” he once said in an interview. “I think it’s a good thing, the Establishment.”

William Rees-Mogg
Times of London
Obituary


Trustee in Madoff Case Sues Mets Owners

Abstract: The trustee seeking assets for victims of Bernard L. Madoff ’s huge fraud on Tuesday sued the Wilpon family, the owners of the Mets , which had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the global Ponzi scheme . Sterling Equities, the Wilpon-controlled company that owns the Mets, was named as a defendant in the case along with its partners, family members, and certain related trusts and entities. Fred Wilpon and his family own Sterling, and the Mets, along with Saul Katz, Wilpon’s longtime business partner. Sterling and its related entities had dozens of investment accounts with Madoff. The substance of the trustee’s claims against Sterling are unavailable because the complaint was filed under seal. “We will have no further comment at this time,” Sterling Equities said in a statement. “Regardless of the outcome of these discussions, we want to emphasize that the New York Mets will have all the necessary financial and operational resources to fully compete and win. That is our commitment to our fans and to New York.” In a news release, Irving H. Picard, the trustee for the Madoff victims, said that he was engaged in “good-faith negotiations” to settle the claims with Sterling and the other defendants. As a result, the court ordered that the complaint be filed under seal. “In light of the ongoing negotiations between the Sterling defendants and the trustee, and consistent with court orders, we have filed the complaint under seal,” said Fernando A. Bohorquez Jr., a colleague of Picard’s at Baker & Hostetler, the law firm overseeing the dissolution of the Madoff firm. “Under those circumstances, we will not move to unseal the complaint and exhibits at this time.” When Madoff was arrested two years ago, there was widespread speculation that the Wilpons lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the fraud. But in October 2009 Picard revealed in a court filing that an account called Mets Limited Partnership put a total of $522.7 million into Madoff accounts and withdrew $570.5, a profit of $47.8 million. This qualified the Mets account as “net winners” of the Ponzi scheme under the bankruptcy trustee’s calculation. That subjected the account to a potential “claw back” lawsuit that would seek to recover those profits and redistribute them to eligible victims. Tuesday’s lawsuit comes as the Mets are sending out repeated signals that they intend to spend little money this winter on free agents despite their disappointing performance on the field in recent seasons. The new general manager, Sandy Alderson, clearly wants to devote a good part of 2011 to getting the Mets’ house in order and allowing the expiration of some onerous player contracts — ones belonging to Oliver Perez , Luis Castillo and Carlos Beltran . Whether the Mets’ current reluctance to spend money is also being influenced by the Madoff lawsuit, and the financial burden it could pose, is unclear. Picard has a deadline of Saturday to bring legal action against those investors who he thinks profited from the Madoff scheme before it collapsed in December 2008, even if they are not accused of criminal wrongdoing. As such, he has already filed lawsuits that seek to recover more than $32 billion. He has managed to recover about $2.6 billion through asset sales and out-of-court settlements. On Tuesday, Carl Shapiro, one of the early investors with Madoff, agreed with Picard and federal prosecutors to forfeit $625 million that will go toward returning money to victims of the fraud.

Baseball
Suits and Litigation
Ponzi Schemes
New York Mets
Sterling Equities
Madoff Bernard L
Wilpon Fred


Wayne Rooney Now Sets the Table for England

Abstract: LONDON — Many years ago, when Wayne Rooney was an 18-year-old making his debut at the European Championships with England, a Scandinavian journalist asked for help. He had recorded a question with Rooney but could not understand a word of his reply. The problem was Rooney’s Scouse accent, a Liverpool dialect difficult enough for Englishmen to understand. And Rooney was, at best, a diffident speaker. Much has changed. On Monday in Nice, France, Rooney will lead England against Iceland in the Euros. He is the team’s elder statesman, its captain, its spokesman, and he is about to join David Beckham as the country’s most-capped outfield player. It will be the 115th game Rooney has played for England. And whereas Beckham padded his numbers with short and at times almost celebrity substitute appearances toward the end, Rooney’s role is still pivotal to the team. One might almost place him on par with another player, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who retired last week from international play after 116 appearances with the Swedish national team. There is a difference. If Zlatan failed to score, Sweden had almost nobody else who could. England has four capable strikers. So Rooney — still a workhorse who is full of energy, even if he does not quite possess the speed he once did — has adapted. He drops deeper into midfield and uses his knowledge to be the passer that England has been missing since Paul Scholes, Rooney’s former teammate with Manchester United, retired from the national team 12 years ago. A captain of industry, rather than a front-runner of sharpness? Maybe, but nobody has scored more goals for England than Rooney has, with 52. And except for maybe Switzerland’s Xherdan Shaqiri, few can strike a scissors kick with such instinctive and almost violent unexpectedness as Rooney still might do. Iceland knows everything about his career because, as the Iceland players will tell you, very little beats English Premier League soccer on television during the long, dark winter nights near the Arctic Circle. It will be England, the mother country of soccer, against little Iceland, which has almost become a cliché with its rags-to-riches romance at this year’s tournament. It will be the 330,000 people of Iceland against England and its 53 million. Using humor and homespun psychology, the coaches of Iceland, Lars Lagerback and Heimir Hallgrimsson, pinned a picture during their training base in the French Alps. It showed a rhinoceros running away from a Chihuahua. The message was clear. Size and salary are not everything. Nor is reputation. “We are not the Chihuahua,” Iceland defender Theodor Elmar Bjarnason told English reporters who visited the camp. “If you underestimate us, it’s a mistake.” Short, succinct and backed up by performances. In reaching this tournament, Iceland beat the Netherlands at home and away and also won against Turkey, the Czech Republic, Latvia and Kazakhstan. Iceland, built around its stubborn and organized defense, is very difficult to break down. If its players are not the Chihuahua, there is definitely something of a terrier in their mentality. The Euro tournament has shown so far that no team, far less the Icelanders, will go down without a fight. Rooney knows it, and England Manager Roy Hodgson certainly must know it, because he cut his teeth as a coach in Scandinavia — in Sweden and Denmark. While the Scandinavian teams might lack — outside of Ibrahimovic — individual flair and hubris, they compensate with esprit de corps and athleticism. Opponents can forget at their peril what Denmark achieved in the 1992 Euros, when it became the smallest country to ever win the tournament. England, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany all failed to stop Denmark then. And Rooney has played and lost in enough tournaments to know that England’s reputation stirs, rather than scares, underdog opponents. Listening to him address the media is to see how he has changed not just as a player, but as a man. He is the manager’s assistant on the field, and the players’ frontman for the media. The accent is less pronounced, and his firebrand temperament now lies beneath the surface. He is cleareyed, unafraid and unselfconscious. “You don’t play for the achievement of getting to a quarterfinal,” he says. “We want to win the competition, and we think we can. So I’m not going to sit here and say we’ll be happy with the quarterfinals or the future’s bright because we are a group of young players.” Young, apart from the captain. Rooney’s main role now is to create chances for England’s strikers, who are likely to be any two from the foursome of Harry Kane, Daniel Sturridge, Jamie Vardy and Marcus Rashford — possibly in that order. Their tournament, Rooney says, starts here. “I don’t want to be remembered as a captain who wasn’t good for his team, wasn’t good for his teammates, and wasn’t good for his club or country.” The former Rooney, the player who let frustration get the better of him, is, he says, a different person. “Having kids,” he concluded, “made me look at things differently.” His three sons, Kai, Klay and Kit are 6, 3, and six months old. Iceland might push his new temperament to the limits, but he has responsibilities now.

Soccer
England
Euro 2016 UEFA European Championship
Iceland
Wayne Rooney


Kyle Busch Wins LifeLock.com 400 for Seventh Sprint Cup Victory of Season

Abstract: JOLIET, Ill. (AP) — Kyle Busch passed Jimmie Johnson after a restart on the next-to-last lap Saturday night to claim his seventh Nascar Sprint Cup series victory of the season by winning the LifeLock.com 400. Johnson went by Busch with 17 laps remaining. But on the restart after the ninth caution period, Busch drove high on the track at Chicagoland Speedway, passed Johnson and held on for yet another victory. Busch has 14 victories this season, spanning Nascar’s top three series. “This is a dream season, man,” Busch said. He won a Nationwide series race on the Chicagoland track on Friday night. And Busch, 23, again showed why he leads the Sprint Cup points standings this season with some great driving at the end. Busch’s biggest problem came after the race, when he got stuck in the mud as he tried to perform a celebratory drive through the infield grass. Johnson, the two-time defending series champion, was second. Kevin Harvick, who improved four spots to ninth in the points standings, was third. “I thought I had such a good car, I thought I’d get away from him on the restart,” Johnson said. “If I could do it over again I’d play more defense on the restart.” Busch, the pole sitter, led the first 43 laps but then fell off the pace. He got back in front on the 121st lap and held the lead for 80 more. He led 165 of 267 laps; Johnson was in front for 15. Carl Edwards took the lead from Busch with 64 laps left. But Edwards’s lead was brief; he was forced to pit with a punctured left front tire. Moments later, Busch was back in front. Greg Biffle, who led 43 laps, finished fourth. Tony Stewart, still looking for his first victory this season, was fifth. Stewart announced last week that he would leave Joe Gibbs Racing at the end of the season to become a part owner and driver with a team that will be called Stewart-Haas Racing next season. Gibbs said before the race Saturday that he wanted Stewart to stick around. When it became apparent that Stewart wanted to leave to pursue an ownership role, he agreed to let him go. “It was brought to a head between Tony and us and I think the farther we went with it and the more we talked about it, we just reached the conclusion it would probably be best under these circumstances to go ahead and let Tony pursue another option here and let him get started and let us get started” in a different direction, Gibbs said. Stewart’s partnership with Joe Gibbs Racing has produced 32 victories, two Cup championships and more than $68 million in winnings.

National Assn of Stock Car Auto Racing
Busch Kyle
Johnson Jimmie
Automobile Racing


New York Times Names Kinsey Wilson to Leadership Role

Abstract: The New York Times has appointed Kinsey Wilson, a former NPR executive and USA Today executive editor, to its masthead to oversee innovation and strategy, the newspaper announced on Tuesday. Mr. Wilson, 58, who will begin his new job in February, will collaborate with the editorial and business sides of the organization, the company said in a statement, and will report to the executive editor, Dean Baquet. He will be responsible for “expanding mobile strategy and creating new digital products inspired by Times journalism,” the statement said, citing recent examples like the NYT Now and Cooking apps. Most recently, Mr. Wilson was an executive vice president and chief content officer for NPR, where he oversaw news gathering, programming and digital operations. He left NPR last month after six years at the organization. Previously, Mr. Wilson was executive editor of USA Today, and also worked at Congressional Quarterly and Newsday. In a note to employees, Mr. Baquet said that Mr. Wilson would “help map our path to becoming a truly digital news organization.” Mr. Baquet added: “He will ensure that our journalists have the tools they need to tell great stories, and that we engage and serve our readers wherever and however they come to us.” Mr. Wilson’s position will be equal to the paper’s deputy executive editors — Susan Chira, Janet Elder, Ian Fisher and Matthew Purdy — and its creative director, Tom Bodkin. Citing new digital initiatives such as a dedicated audience development team, Mr. Baquet said that The Times’s readership grew 21 percent in October to reach its highest level. The announcement of Mr. Wilson’s appointment comes during a round of staff reductions in the newsroom, aimed at reducing its size by about 100. If that number is not met with buyouts by next month, the paper has said, it will have to resort to layoffs.

Kinsey Wilson
The New York Times
News media,journalism
NPR
Dean Baquet
Appointments and Executive Changes


Flyers Rout Canadiens in Eastern Finals Opener

Abstract: James van Riemsdyk, Danny Briere and Simon Gagne scored in a stretch of 9 minutes 23 seconds in the second period against the playoff star goalie Jaroslav Halak, and the Philadelphia Flyers routed the visiting Montreal Canadiens , 6-0, in the Eastern Conference finals opener on Sunday night. There was no comeback necessary this time for the Flyers, who rebounded from a 3-0 series hole against the Bruins and a three-goal deficit in Game 7 in Boston on Friday night. Philadelphia has won five straight over all and is 5-1 at home in the playoffs. Halak was easily outplayed by the Flyers’ fill-in goalie, Michael Leighton, who is unbeaten since replacing the injured Brian Boucher in Game 5 of Philadelphia’s win over Boston. Leighton made 27 saves in his first N.H.L. postseason shutout. “It makes it a little but easier when we score that many goals,” Leighton said. “In the second period, we played really well. We got a few goals and that kind of calmed me down and I think it calmed the team down. It took a lot of pressure off us after that.” Game 2 of the N.H.L.’s first conference finals between a No. 7 and a No. 8 seed will be Tuesday night in Philadelphia. The seventh-seeded Flyers had home-ice advantage for the first time since the second round in 2004, and they made the most of it. Defenseman Braydon Coburn scored his first N.H.L. playoff goal during a first-period power play, van Riemsdyk pushed the lead to 2-0 just 30 seconds into the second period, and Briere and Gagne — on another power play — beat Halak 5:30 apart to finish the spurt. Scott Hartnell and Claude Giroux added third-period goals against Carey Price. BLACKHAWKS 2, SHARKS 1 Antti Niemi made 44 saves and Dustin Byfuglien scored the tie-breaking goal with 6:45 remaining to help Chicago get off to a fast start for once this postseason by beating host San Jose in the opener of the Western Conference finals. Niemi stopped almost everything that came his way in his first career game against the Sharks, helping Chicago kill four of five power plays including a six-on-four advantage in the closing minute. That ended a run of four straight series-opening losses for Chicago. Patrick Sharp also scored for the Blackhawks, who will try to take a 2-0 series lead Tuesday in San Jose. Chicago improved to 6-1 on the road this postseason. The rookie Jason Demers scored on a first-period power play for San Jose, which fell to 0-4 in conference finals games at home. Chicago got the tying goal midway through the second period when Sharp beat Evgeni Nabokov with a tricky shot through a screen to cap a three-on-two break.

Hockey Ice
Playoff Games
National Hockey League
Philadelphia Flyers
Montreal Canadiens
Chicago Blackhawks
San Jose Sharks


Chris Gibson, an Upstate Republican, Starts Early on a Possible Run for Governor

Abstract: Inside a Knights of Columbus post, far from his Hudson Valley district, Representative Chris Gibson spoke insistently to the Brooklyn Young Republican Club , urging the sparse crowd to get to work rebuilding New York’s depleted Republican Party before the next campaign for governor in 2018. “We have to do the work now to get our message out, to connect, to show that we have the solutions for this,” said Mr. Gibson, 50, a retired Army colonel and West Point professor. “This is what my calling is now. I’m here to try to help our party.” To many Republicans, Mr. Gibson’s quest to help revive the party also looks like a long head start on a bid for the governorship, or perhaps a seat in the Senate. But in campaign-style appearances, Mr. Gibson’s target seems clear: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. In visits to party organizations in Buffalo and around New York City, Mr. Gibson has assailed business as usual in Albany, calling for term limits on the governor and the Legislature, and accusing Mr. Cuomo of failing to live up to his pledge to confront corruption in the state capital. Amid a continuing wave of lawmaker indictments , Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, enacted new government ethics restrictions in the most recent state budget. “In 2010, he ran to clean up Albany of this corruption,” Mr. Gibson said of the governor in a recent interview. “By any reasonable standard, he has failed.” Mr. Gibson, who won a landslide re-election in the fall, stunned Republicans less than two months later by announcing he would not seek another term in Congress. He has since offered himself up to state party leaders as something of a motivational speaker for downcast Republicans. Behind the scenes, Mr. Gibson has instructed advisers to study his options for creating a new political fund-raising entity, to help collect and spend money for Republican causes throughout the state. The congressman said he has not yet decided how to proceed, but allies, who asked to speak anonymously about legal deliberations, said Mr. Gibson was likely to create that new political vehicle inside of a year. Mr. Gibson’s allies said he has confided to Republicans in Washington that his eye is on the governorship, and that he did not want to seek another two-year congressional term and then run immediately for another position. An unpredictable legislator who has bucked his party on a handful of key issues, including climate change , Mr. Gibson has sought to introduce himself to Republicans as an unconventional figure with a winning record. In Washington, he has made a show of returning his military pension to the government every year, as a demonstration of fiscal discipline. In 2014, he dispatched a flawed but heavily funded challenger, Sean Eldridge, in a highly competitive district . Mr. Gibson has shown himself to be a wild card on state matters, too: As a vocal critic of Common Core education standards, the third-term lawmaker has taken issue with Mr. Cuomo’s recent attacks on teachers’ unions, a traditionally Democratic-leaning constituency. “Teachers are not the problem,” Mr. Gibson said. Karen E. Magee, president of the New York State United Teachers, which has supported Mr. Gibson in the past, said he would have a “good chance” of winning the influential labor group’s backing for governor, if it were deciding on an endorsement today. “He values and respects teachers and the work we do, and I would not say that that’s anywhere aligned with the current governor of the State of New York,” Ms. Magee said. Mr. Cuomo has not yet said if he will seek a third term, though he has millions stashed in a political account that was recently renamed Andrew Cuomo 2018. Regardless of the governor’s decision, any Republican would face formidable obstacles running statewide: Campaigning is expensive, and Democrats have controlled every top office in New York since former Gov. George E. Pataki left office at the end of 2006. The national Republican brand is deeply unpopular in important areas, especially New York City. And Mr. Gibson has staked out some positions that could prove problematic statewide: He opposed the Safe Act, a gun control law that Mr. Cuomo signed, and has voted for restrictions on abortion, though he does not favor banning the procedure early in pregnancy. Image Mr. Gibson at the Desmond Hotel in Albany in 2010. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times Peter E. Kauffmann, a spokesman for state Democrats, criticized Mr. Gibson as a conservative seeking to position himself toward the middle. “Calling yourself a moderate doesn’t make it so,” Mr. Kauffmann said. “Chris Gibson is anti-choice, anti-gun safety, with the same out-of-touch conservative philosophy that New Yorkers continue to reject every election cycle.” Yet Mr. Gibson has plainly sensed opportunity in the legal turmoil that has seized Albany. With a parade of state lawmakers facing indictment or conviction, Mr. Gibson has criticized the Albany tradition of concentrating power with the governor and a pair of legislative leaders: the so-called three men in a room . Mr. Gibson faulted Mr. Cuomo specifically for the “premature” closing of the Moreland Commission , a panel investigating corruption in state government. Broadly, he accused Mr. Cuomo of seeking to govern through “intimidation and fear.” Mr. Gibson’s past opponents have found him an elusive target, and he has seemingly sought out opportunities to show political moderation. Shortly after announcing his retirement, Mr. Gibson gave a speech calling for action to combat climate change and urging his party to operate in the “realm of knowledge and science” on the issue. Siding with environmentalists, he said he was not convinced that the natural-gas extraction technique known as fracking was safe (Mr. Cuomo banned it after his re-election last year). Mr. Gibson also recently signed a brief urging the Supreme Court to legalize same-sex unions, and for the first time gave a clear personal endorsement of same-sex marriage . “Jesus’s first commandment was to love one another,” Mr. Gibson said. “I think people should be authentic and who they are. If that calls people to same-sex attraction and same-sex marriage, then they should be true to who they are, and I think that the world could benefit by more love.” Still, Mr. Gibson has taken stances that may not travel well. Former Representative Bill Owens, a North Country Democrat who worked cordially with Mr. Gibson in Washington, said the Republican’s views on guns would “make a campaign, realistically, very difficult.” “I would say that I think he’s got to move slightly to the middle,” Mr. Owens said. “Beyond the Safe Act and maybe health care, I don’t see many issues where Chris strikes me as that far-off from me.” Mr. Gibson might not have an open path to the Republican nomination, in the event he runs. The Westchester County executive, Rob Astorino, who challenged Mr. Cuomo unsuccessfully last year, has signaled strongly that he aims to run again. And to much of the Republican rank and file, Mr. Gibson is an unfamiliar face. On his trip to South Brooklyn on a weekend late last month, barely 20 listeners came to the Knights of Columbus post, where he competed for attention with a disco ball hanging over his head, the rattling of an elevated subway train next door and a St. Patrick’s Day parade occurring in nearby Bay Ridge. Bob Turner, the former congressman who now heads the Queens Republican organization, said he was impressed by the sheer persistence of Mr. Gibson’s early efforts. At a party dinner in Queens Village, Mr. Turner said, the congressman worked the room for hours before heading home. “He stayed until the end of this thing and close to 10 o’clock was driving back to Kinderhook,” Mr. Turner said, adding: “Wherever that is.” Whatever Mr. Gibson’s long-range ambitions are, Republican leaders said they were grateful for the pick-me-up now. Edward F. Cox, the chairman of the New York Republican Party, said he expected Mr. Gibson to be a leading partner in reviving the party. “He’s really a ferocious campaigner,” Mr. Cox said. “This is a mission that he wants to take on and we have talked about it and he is following through.”

New York
Chris Gibson
Republicans
Gubernatorial races


N.Y. Area’s First Ironman Attracts 3 Who Nearly Died

Abstract: No one wakes up one morning and decides to do an Ironman triathlon. It takes time for the mind and body to agree on pursuing one of the most daunting events in sports. For some, finding enjoyment in swimming, cycling and running will lead to the Ironman. Others love the event for its test of mental toughness. And then there is a group who gravitate to the sport after doctors say it will be nearly impossible for them to participate in so grueling an activity. Chris Cleary, Robert Geller and Johno Goldsmith are among those who survived life-threatening injuries or illnesses and are competing Saturday in the Ironman United States Championship , the first Ironman to be held in the New York metropolitan region. The nearly 3,000 competitors know what awaits them at 7 a.m. when the race begins: a 2.4-mile open-water swim in the Hudson River, a 112-mile bike up and down the hilly Palisades Interstate Parkway and a 26.2-mile run that begins on the parkway and ends in Riverside Park on the West Side of Manhattan. Cleary, Geller and Goldsmith, who all live in the area, say they have had many people ask the same question: after spending so much time in hospitals, why risk your life doing the Ironman? “I think for me,” Cleary said, “when someone tells me I can’t do it, I’m going to try to do to it.” Some sports psychologists believe there is a correlation between athletes’ almost dying and using the experience to find another test of their physical limits. “Sports have always been about discovery,” said Eric Zillmer , a professor of neuropsychology and the athletic director at Drexel University. “The Ironman is an individual celebration of life. I think people are doing cognitive behavior on themselves by doing the Ironman because it takes an amazing commitment.” In 2007, Cleary was on a business trip in Santa Clara, Calif., when he was hit by a car in a parking lot. He sustained a fractured skull, two brain hemorrhages and multiple ruptured disks in his spine. He said doctors called his wife, Dina, in Skillman, N.J., who was pregnant with their third child, to say Cleary might not make it home. “I was starting to wither away,” said Cleary, now 40 and a vice president at Worldwide Channel Sales. After months of minimal improvement in bed, Cleary went against his doctors’ advice and stopped taking prescription medicine. “As much as the doctors tried to help, I said, ‘I have to figure out a way to get back to doing some exercise,’ ” said Cleary, who still cannot type with four of his fingers. At the time, he did not own a bicycle or have running shoes. In his first workout, he could run for only one minute before experiencing pain. But in six months, Cleary finished his first triathlon. He sent a photo of himself crossing the finish line to his doctors. Goldsmith received a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma when he was 13 and battled the cancer for five years. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of being cancer free, Goldsmith, now 29, competed in the Ironman just days after he received a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University. He had begun running for the first time in years in 2007 and started swimming in 2010. While training for his first marathon, Goldsmith met a man at the gym who spoke passionately about doing a triathlon. Goldsmith soon bought a bike and left marathons for triathlons. In June, he competed in a half-Ironman in Galveston, Tex. “It’s a day when you thrive off the pain and the experience,” Goldsmith said. Robert Swoap, a sports psychology professor at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C., said it was natural for someone like Goldsmith to keep pushing himself to find a bigger obstacle to overcome. “That person who has come through cancer has already figured out coping strategies for mental and physical fatigue,” Swoap said. “They will have the ability to push through the mental challenges that the Ironman presents.” Geller has Marfan syndrome , a genetic disorder that can cause heart problems. After having open-heart surgery in 2006, he made a plan with his wife, Gina Roselli, to exercise together. The couple finished their first triathlon in 2006 and have spent this summer training for their first Ironman. “She really pushes me,” Geller, 40, said of his wife, 42. “She’s very disciplined. She embraces my goals, and she helps me deal with the challenge.” Roselli, who Geller said is the better athlete, keeps her husband on schedule by building their training routines. Between the swimming, biking and running, the two say, the change in their lifestyle helps them stay energized and focus on living a healthy life. “The training alone for the Ironman is its own challenge,” Swoap said. “I think it helps keep the athlete feel very alive. When you finish a grueling workout, that’s one more notch toward their confidence.” The couple competed in their first half-Ironman in Middlebury, Conn., in June. When Geller finished, Roselli watched him get on his knees, overwhelmed with emotion. “He was so ecstatic to do it,” she said. While the two embraced, Geller gave his wife a short message: “Ironman next!” Cleary, Geller and Goldsmith have the same simple goal: finish the race. The athletes have until midnight — 17 hours — to complete the event. “I’m on the 16:59 plan,” Cleary said.

Ironman US Championship
Bicycles and Bicycling
Running
Swimming
New York Metropolitan Area
Triathlon
Geller Robert
Cleary Chris
Goldsmith Johno


A Tale of Personal Demons, and a Bit of History, Too

Abstract: Hurricane Katrina, in all its spectral horror, makes a ghoulish appearance at the opening of “The Deacons,” a new drama of truth, forgiveness and absolution by Yusef Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer Prize -winning poet, that is receiving its world premiere at the Passage Theater in Trenton. “I saw a parrot on the rooftop callin’ his keeper’s name,” a mournful, weary Troy Lewis intones, recalling the terrible days of the hurricane. “I saw a dog eatin’ a corpse. Now, the Big Easy is a Kingdom of Smoke, gone forever, like Thelma is gone.” Who is Thelma, and why is her death so devastating to Frank Junior, Troy Lewis and his daughter Annie Mae, the three intertwined characters from Louisiana at the core of Mr. Komunyakaa’s work? During more than two hours of chatty “kitchen sink drama” (Patrice Andrew Davidson’s 1960s kitchen setting, replete with knotty-pine cabinets and a water-spouting sink, is right on target), Mr. Komunyakaa explores the personal demons that beset the men, former best friends. They were members in the 1960s of the Deacons for Defense, a black self-defense group in Jonesboro, La., and are reuniting after more than 30 years without contact. Before the gumbo is out of the pot, served ceremoniously by Frank Junior to a wary Troy Lewis, we learn what happened when Thelma betrayed one man, Frank, by escaping into the arms of his buddy, Troy, locking the first in a vise of jealousy and bitter recrimination and forcing the second to undertake a quest for inner peace. A redemptive journey toward forgiveness might make for a compelling play. And Mr. Komunyakaa’s socially sensitive subtext, with Frank Junior railing against a new generation of disaffected, self-destructive young black men “who sit on my fence and throw trash on Mama’s roses,” has the potential for provoking thoughtful dialogue about a serious contemporary issue. Unfortunately, when Annie Mae, an idealistic teacher, counters by prescribing love as a cure-all for most social ills, the entire discussion is reduced to a series of greeting-card bromides — not exactly what one would expect from a distinguished writer like Mr. Komunyakaa. That is not to say the Passage Theater, which commissioned and nurtured “The Deacons,” deserves anything but praise for encouraging Mr. Komunyakaa to write a dramatic play and for making sure it received a production he could be proud of. If the direction of Kemati Porter seems at times sluggish and ponderous, the cast could not be better. As Frank Junior, Count Stovall begins tentatively but quickly assumes the bluster and stubborn self-righteousness that this bitter loner wears as armor. Playing Troy Lewis, Gerard Catus has the hangdog mien of a man enveloped by guilt yet still holding precious the ancient passion that caused him to betray his friend. Letecia Moore’s Annie Mae is 100 percent attitude and sass. Arriving at the first-act curtain just as a melodramatic flourish with a knife threatens to push things into the realm of the ludicrous, she provides a gust of desperately needed fresh air. While “The Deacons” disappoints as a work of dramatic power, it does expose a little-known chapter in American history. The Deacons for Defense were an actual part of the civil rights movement. We owe Mr. Komunyakaa gratitude simply for bringing this obscure organization to life onstage.

Komunyakaa Yusef
Writing and Writers
Passage Theater


Police Release Video of Traffic Stop of Princeton Professor

Abstract: The police in Princeton, N.J., released a dashboard video of the traffic stop of a black Princeton professor that led to her being handcuffed and searched by a white male officer — an encounter that she said left her humiliated and was emblematic of officers’ mistreatment of African-Americans. The video shows what appears to be a routine traffic stop with the professor, Imani Perry, who sounds shaken but appears compliant after two white officers, one male and one female, pulled her over last week after, they said, she had been speeding. She was then arrested and handcuffed over unpaid parking tickets. Dr. Perry, a professor of African-American studies at the university, described her experience in posts on Facebook and Twitter, setting off a social media debate and spurring what she said was some online abuse by commenters who said she had brought on the treatment herself. She said her posts also received words of support. In the posts, Dr. Perry said the male officer had performed a “body search” even though a female officer was present, she was not allowed to contact colleagues to inform them of her arrest before being placed in the squad car, and she was later handcuffed to a table at the police station. “The police treated me inappropriately and disproportionately,” she wrote in a Facebook post on Monday . “The fact of my blackness is not incidental to this matter.” The Police Department chief, Capt. Nicholas K. Sutter, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that officers had followed policy in arresting the professor. But although the department released footage of the arrest, it has declined to release video of the episode from inside the police station. Responding to a public records request from The New York Times for that footage and other information, Captain Sutter said the department was “researching the legal requirements” but had “clearly demonstrated compassion to Dr. Perry’s concerns, transparency and responsiveness to media and other public information requests.” Image Imani Perry, a professor at Princeton. Credit Imani Perry Captain Sutter, who said on Tuesday that he had watched dashboard camera footage of Dr. Perry’s arrest, said it did not show anything unusual. He said the male officer had checked the “exterior portion of her clothing,” meaning Dr. Perry’s jacket pockets and the areas around her shoes. He added that “we will look at the policy,” which does not require female officers to search female suspects. “When we can, we should,” he said. While the 27-minute video released Thursday shows most of Dr. Perry’s traffic stop, key moments of the encounter happen out of view of the camera, and the audio is party drowned out by the sound of passing vehicles. After pulling Dr. Perry over, the male officer told her he had clocked her driving at 67 miles per hour in a 45-m.p.h. zone, according to the footage. He asked if she was in a rush, and she said she was trying to get to work. He asked where she worked, and she told him Princeton University. “Just give me a couple minutes; let me just look over everything, just make sure everything else is valid by checking your registration and everything, and we’ll get you out of here,” the officer told her, going back to his squad car. Fifteen minutes elapsed before the officer returned to her car to tell Dr. Perry that her license had been suspended, which, she said, she did not know. He said he would ask dispatch why it had been suspended. About two minutes later, the officer returned to tell her she had a warrant out for her arrest over a parking offense from 2013. “Oh my goodness,” she responded. Dr. Perry showed no verbal or physical resistance as she exited her car with a bag. “Unfortunately, anytime we transport anyone, because you’re under arrest because of the warrant, we have to put you in handcuffs, O.K., that’s anyone,” the male officer said. “It’s just a parking offense, so nobody else has to know about it,” he added. Dr. Perry asked if she was allowed to text anyone at the university to let them know about the arrest before going to the police station. He said, “When we get there, you can call them, you can make as many phone calls and texts as you want.” Dr. Perry and the two officers, whose names were not immediately available, then walked out of view of the camera. During what sounded like the search, the male officer asked if she had anything in her pockets like keys or a cellphone. “We just gotta be sure that you’ve got nothing sharp, not saying you do,” the officer said. At one point, the male officer appeared to show concern, while the female officer mostly observed. “Are you O.K.?” he asked. “No,” Dr. Perry responded. “No? Are you hyperventilating?” he asked. “As long as you have the money ... we’re just going to process you real quick.” In 2015, black motorists were pulled over in 14.7 percent of Princeton police stops, according to data provided by the department after a public records request. The black population of Princeton in 2014 was 6.4 percent, according to the United States census . Dr. Perry said Thursday that she was mostly relieved to learn that the Police Department had been careful with her personal information — blurring her face and her license plate in the video — because of the “hundreds upon hundreds of threats and slurs online, by email and via telephone” that she had received since telling her story online. “I find myself saddened because I believe I offered a measured account of my experiences, not to the media but simply on my own social media accounts, and the snowball effect of that is that I have been attacked with incredible ugliness,” she said. “However, I believe the outpouring of care and support were a sign that what I shared struck a nerve with many people. And that resonance is something that we as a nation must contend with.”

Black People,African-Americans
Imani Perry
Video Recordings
Downloads and Streaming
Princeton
Traffic and Parking Violations
Police
Search and seizure
Princeton NJ


Cabela’s, Under Pressure, May Consider Offers

Abstract: Cabela’s, the outdoor sporting goods chain known for its elaborate in-store wildlife displays, may be seeking a buyer. The retailer has been under pressure since late October when the investment firm Elliott Management started pushing for money-generating maneuvers from Cabela’s, possibly the sale of its credit card unit or the entire company. Tommy Millner, Cabela’s chief executive, said in a written statement that the board maintained faith in its current strategy but would consider other options. The company has been trying to cut spending and in September it laid off 70 people, eliminating about 4 percent of its corporate work force.


Britain to Press U.N. to Authorize ‘Necessary Measures’ in Syria

Abstract: LONDON — As politicians here prepared to debate a possible military intervention in Syria, Prime Minister David Cameron said Britain would propose a resolution at the United Nations on Wednesday accusing the authorities in Damascus of responsibility for a chemical weapons attack one week ago and authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. The resolution, to be circulated among the five permanent members of the Security Council, came as the momentum toward retaliatory military action gathered pace in the West, while the allies of President Bashar al-Assad in Russia and Iran warned against an attack. In a Twitter feed, Mr. Cameron said Britain had “drafted a resolution condemning the chemical weapons attack by Assad” and “authorizing necessary measures to protect civilians.” “We’ve always said we want the UN Security Council to live up to its responsibilities on Syria,” he wrote. Syria has denied using chemical weapons, blaming antigovernment rebels for the attack. A spokeswoman for Mr. Cameron, speaking in return for anonymity under departmental rules, said the British draft proposed invoking Chapter Seven of the United Nations Charter, which can be used to authorize the use of force “to maintain or restore international peace and security.” As Syria’s turmoil has deepened since revolt took root in March 2011 and grew into a bloody civil war, Russia — a permanent member of the Security Council along with China, the United States, France and Britain — has steadfastly blocked efforts to subject Mr. Assad’s government to military pressure. Britain’s latest move seemed to be designed to lay the diplomatic groundwork for action by a coalition of outside forces, led by the United States, if there was no consensus at the United Nations. The maneuvers have alarmed some Britons, including the archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, who was quoted on Wednesday as urging lawmakers to avoid a rush to judgment about military action that could have “unforeseeable ramifications across the whole Arab and Muslim world.” His remarks sounded a cautionary note that contrasted with the more bullish tone of government leaders ahead of two key gatherings in London: the National Security Council of senior ministers and military commanders on Wednesday and an emergency debate in Parliament on Thursday after Prime Minister Cameron recalled lawmakers early from their summer recess. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, acknowledged that he had no inside information about what had happened in Syria or what the government has planned. “The Government and the Americans are seeing intelligence nobody else sees,” he said. “I just think we have to be very careful about rushing to judgment.” Lawmakers should “bear in mind in what is going to be a very, very difficult debate,” the archbishop said, asking two questions — “are we sure about the facts on the ground?” and “is it possible to have a carefully calibrated response including armed force, if you are sure about the facts on the ground, that does not have unforeseeable ramifications across the whole Arab and Muslim world?” “I have had a lot of conversations with people in the region,” the archbishop said. “I think the overwhelming sense is of a really moving and terrible sense of fear about what might come out of, what might be happening in the next few weeks — not predicated on people doing one thing or people doing another, just a sense that this a terribly, terribly dangerous time.” Writing in the same newspaper, however, Foreign Secretary William Hague said a failure to respond “would send a signal to the Syrian regime that they will never face any consequences for their actions, no matter how barbarous. It would make further chemical attacks in Syria much more likely, and also increase the risk that these weapons could fall into the wrong hands in the future. “But this is not just about one country or one conflict. We cannot afford the weakening of the global prohibition against the use of chemical weapons. We must proceed in a careful and thoughtful way, but we cannot permit our own security to be undermined by the creeping normalization of the use of weapons that the world has spent decades trying to control and eradicate,” Mr. Hague wrote. “This actual, repeated use of chemical weapons in Syria is a moral outrage, a serious violation of international humanitarian law and a challenge to our common security. We are now weighing with the United States and our other allies how to respond in a way that is legal and proportionate. The goal of any response should be to prevent further similar humanitarian distress, to deter the further use of chemical weapons in Syria and to uphold the global ban against their use.” He also repeated his argument that outsiders could take military action without a consensus at the deadlocked United Nations Security Council. “We cannot allow diplomatic paralysis to be a shield for the perpetrators of these crimes,” he said. Mr. Hague warned that inaction would unravel “decades of painstaking work to construct an international regime of rules and checks, overseen by the U.N., to prevent the use of chemical weapons and to destroy stockpiles.” In a message to lawmakers, Mr. Hague also said: “Parliament will have the opportunity to debate these issues, and to make its views known. This is a moment of grave danger for the people of Syria, a moment of truth for democratic nations to live up to their values, and a weighty test of the international community. The way ahead will not be without risks, but the risks of doing nothing are greater.”

Justin Welby
Syria
Great Britain
Biological and Chemical Warfare
Arab Spring


Brooklyn Bouncer Gets 50 Years to Life for 2 Murders

Abstract: A Brooklyn strip club bouncer and martial arts enthusiast who had said he was framed by police assassins was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison on Thursday for the murders of two men in 2005. The bouncer, Stephen Sakai, 32, was dealt the maximum sentence by Justice John P. Walsh of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, but not before introducing yet another wrinkle into a case that has had more than its share. Mr. Sakai retained a new lawyer for the sentencing, who moved to overturn the conviction on the ground that Mr. Sakai’s previous lawyer had failed to introduce a journal of Mr. Sakai’s that would prove he had been elsewhere at the time of the crimes. “His attorney worked against him,” said the new lawyer, Tamara M. Harris. During the trial, Mr. Sakai testified to the journal’s existence but failed to produce it. His former lawyer, Kleon C. Andreadis, said by phone on Thursday that he had asked Mr. Sakai for the journal repeatedly. “At no time was it offered to me despite my insistence that I see it before he take the stand,” Mr. Andreadis said, adding that the journal would have had little evidentiary value anyway. Ms. Harris also told the judge that Mr. Andreadis had refused to call Mr. Sakai’s mother as a witness despite assurances that he would. Mr. Sakai’s mother, Ms. Harris said, was prepared to corroborate Mr. Sakai’s contention that he was repeatedly drugged by detectives during his interrogation. “Her son didn’t even resemble himself” when the police got through with him, Ms. Harris said. Mr. Andreadis said that he had seen no reason to call Mr. Sakai’s mother, because she had not witnessed the effects of mistreatment claimed by Mr. Sakai. Justice Walsh seemed little moved by Ms. Harris’s arguments. “I don’t see anything on the record that as a matter of law would reverse his conviction,” he said before passing sentence. Mr. Sakai is also charged with fatally shooting a patron of a Manhattan club, Opus 22, in 2006. Jury selection is set to begin in that trial on Jan. 28. Mr. Sakai, dressed in a black coat, gray shirt and slacks, and in handcuffs, declined to speak in his own behalf Thursday and stood expressionless as Justice Walsh pronounced sentence. He had been more forthcoming during the trial, when he told jurors that he and the two murdered men were victims of a corrupt detective who was trying to horn in on Mr. Sakai’s security consulting business. Police assassins, Mr. Sakai said, killed the two men after Mr. Sakai began using his martial arts students to spy on the police. On the stand, he promised that his mother would soon arrive with a journal providing his alibi. She was already in the courtroom and did not offer a journal. Mr. Sakai, a bouncer at the Wild Cherry club in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was convicted last month of the second-degree murder of Wayne Tyson, 56, an occasional patron of the club and a martial arts student, and Edwin Mojica, 41, a security coordinator there. Mr. Tyson was found stabbed to death in his apartment in Crown Heights, and Mr. Mojica was found shot in the back of the head on his stoop in Williamsburg. Before the sentencing, Mr. Mojica’s older sister, Zoraida Cook, gave a victim impact statement. She made a point of refusing to use the defendant’s last name, which he adopted in 1998 after years of martial arts study, and addressing him by his birth name, Stephen Sanders. “Martial arts is a system of ethics,” involving humility, respect and loyalty and honor, Ms. Cook said. “You’re not a man of honor. You’re nothing but a coward, Stephen Sanders.”

Murders and Attempted Murders
Sentences (Criminal)
Brooklyn (NYC)


North Korea Threatens Violent Response to Propaganda Campaign

Abstract: SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea threatened on Friday to attack the South if activists proceeded with a plan to send leaflets across the border criticizing the North Korean regime. South Korea’s military said it would immediately strike back if the North did so. The exchange of saber-rattling, though hardly unprecedented, comes at a politically sensitive time in South Korea , where a presidential election is to be held in December and parties are highly attuned to how a surprise North Korean move might affect the outcome. An umbrella group of anti-North Korean organizations, mostly led by defectors from the North, has announced plans to release balloons bearing propaganda leaflets on Monday in Imjingak, a South Korean village near the western border with North Korea. Activists have conducted similar balloon launches near the border before. The statement Friday, released by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, said that as soon as a balloon launch is detected, the North Korean People’s Army “without warning will start a merciless attack” targeting Imjingak and its surroundings. “The leaflets are a most undisguised act of psychological warfare, a violation of the armistice and an intolerable act of war,” the statement said. It urged South Koreans to leave the targeted area. The two Koreas are technically at war, the 1950-53 Korean War having ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty. They have engaged in several skirmishes in recent years. Speaking to lawmakers on Friday, the South Korean defense minister, Kim Kwan-jin, noted that North Korea had issued similar threats before about leaflets from the South, without following up on them. But he said that if North Korea does strike, “we will eradicate their origin of attack.” Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector who is organizing the leaflet campaign, said his group remained undeterred. “We send facts about the North Korean regime to the North Korean people through peaceful means,” he said. “We will send our balloons as planned.”

South Korea
North Korea
Korean Central News Agency
Defectors (Political)


DNA - Encoded Messages - Dennis Overbye - Essay

Abstract: In Douglas Adams’s science fiction classic, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” there is a character by the name of Slartibartfast, who designed the fjords of Norway and left his signature in a glacier. I was reminded of Slartibartfast recently as I was trying to grasp the implications of the feat of a team of Japanese geneticists who announced that they had taught relativity to a bacterium, sort of. Using the same code that computer keyboards use, the Japanese group, led by Masaru Tomita of Keio University, wrote four copies of Albert Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc 2 , along with “1905,” the date that the young Einstein derived it, into the bacterium’s genome , the 4.2-million-long string of A’s, G’s, T’s and C’s that determine everything the little bug is and everything it’s ever going to be. The point was not to celebrate Einstein. The feat, they said in a paper published in the journal Biotechnology Progress, was a demonstration of DNA as the ultimate information storage material, able to withstand floods, terrorism, time and the changing fashions in technology, not to mention the ability to be imprinted with little unobtrusive trademark labels — little “Made by Monsanto” tags, say. In so doing they have accomplished at least a part of the dream that Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and musician, and David Sulzer, a biologist at Columbia, enunciated in 1999. To create the ultimate time capsule as part of the millennium festivities at this newspaper, they proposed to encode a year’s worth of the New York Times magazine into the junk DNA of a cockroach. “The archival cockroach will be a robust repository,” Mr. Lanier wrote, “able to survive almost all conceivable scenarios.” If cockroaches can be archives, why not us? The human genome, for example, consists of some 2.9 billion of those letters — the equivalent of about 750 megabytes of data — but only about 3 percent of it goes into composing the 22,000 or so genes that make us what we are. The remaining 97 percent, so-called junk DNA, looks like gibberish. It’s the dark matter of inner space. We don’t know what it is saying to or about us, but within that sea of megabytes there is plenty of room for the imagination to roam, for trademark labels and much more. The King James Bible, to pick one obvious example, only amounts to about five megabytes. Inevitably, if you are me, you begin to wonder if there is already something written in the warm wet archive, whether or not some Slartibartfast has already been here and we ourselves are walking around with little trademark tags or more wriggling and squiggling and folded inside us. Gill Bejerano, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who mentioned Slartibartfast to me, pointed out that the problem with raising this question is that people who look will see messages in the genome even if they aren’t there — the way people have claimed in recent years to have found secret codes in the Bible. Nevertheless, no less a personage than Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helix, writing with the chemist Leslie Orgel, now at the Salk Institute in San Diego, suggested in 1973 that the primitive Earth was infected with DNA broadcast through space by an alien species. As a result, it has been suggested that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, should look inward as well as outward. In an article in New Scientist, Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University, wrote, “So might ET have inserted a message into the genomes of terrestrial organism, perhaps by delivering carefully crafted viruses in tiny pace probes to infect host cell with message-laden DNA?” I should say right now that I am not talking about theology or the near theology known as intelligent design. The ability to stick a message in a cockroach does not make us the designers or creators of the cockroach — only evolution could be so kind or clever. But I’m a sucker for secret messages. Once, long ago, I stayed up all night with my friends playing the Beatles’ “White Album” backward hoping to hear the words “Turn me on dead man,” referring to the rumored death of Paul McCartney. I’m ready to find Slartibartfast’s signature and rediscover my cosmic heritage. The sad truth is, as others will tell you, this is a bit like writing love letters in the sand. “I don’t buy it,” said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., pointing out that DNA is famously mutable. “Just ask Chuck Darwin,” he added in an e-mail message. It is the relentless shifting and mutating, the probing and testing of every possibility on the part of DNA, after all, that generates the raw material for evolution to act on and ensures the success of life on Earth (and perhaps beyond). Dr. Davies said that he had been encouraged by the discovery a few years ago that some sections of junk DNA seem to be markedly resistant to change, and have remained identical in humans, rats, mice, chickens and dogs for at least 300 million years. But Dr. Bejerano, one of the discoverers of these “ultraconserved” strings of the genome, said that many of them had turned out to be playing important command and control functions. “Why they need to be so conserved remains a mystery,” he said, noting that even regular genes that do something undergo more change over time. Most junk bits of DNA that neither help nor annoy an organism mutate even more rapidly. The Japanese team proposed to sidestep the mutation problem by inserting redundant copies of their message into the genome. By comparing the readouts, they said, they would be able to recover Einstein’s formula even when up to 15 percent of the original letters in the string had changed, or mutated. “This is the major point of our work,” Nozomu Yachie said in an e-mail message. At the rate of one mutation per generation, Dr. Yachie estimated it could take at least millions of years for the bacteria’s genome to change by 15 percent — a huge change. Only 1 percent separates us from chimps. But other experts say that a stretch of DNA that is at best useless, and perhaps annoying to the little bug could disappear much more rapidly. Calling the idea of storing information in living DNA “a nifty idea,” Dr. Bejerano said: “The bottom line is if you want something to perpetuate forever, you can’t just come in and type what you want. It would get washed away.” That dream, he said, “is hopeless with our current knowledge.” If we want to leave a message that would last for eons, it seems, we have to be clever enough to make sure that the message would remain beneficial to its host pretty much forever. The challenge for an erstwhile interstellar Johnny Appleseed is to make the message part of the basic nature of its host. If that ever turns out to be us, if we find that we are the medium, to paraphrase the late Marshall McLuhan, then, in some sense, we are also the message. Never mind who or what are the intended readers. But if we find, say, the digits of the number pi encoded in a cockroach, I want to have a talk with old Mr. Startibartfast.

DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)
Genetics and Heredity
Science and Technology
Archives and Records
Genetic Engineering
Bacteria


In New York City, Chic, Rusty Steel Facades Leave a Fiery Stain Below

Abstract: At the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn , dozens of men and women in hard hats are scurrying about each day, hanging this and attaching that, preparing the Barclays Center for its opening, which is now just a few weeks away. The lights have come on inside, some treetops are visible along the arena’s edge, and some bright blue signage has gone up along the building’s facade, an undulating shell of brownish steel. After years of building, and even more years of bickering, the arena is almost finished — but this is not immediately obvious to all those who wander by. “Is it meant to be that way, with the rust?” one woman asked, squinting at the steel. “I thought they were going to paint it,” said a man who stopped to stare. No, they are not. For the facade of the Barclays Center , more traditional materials were rejected in favor of 12,000 separate pieces of what is called “weathering steel,” and that leathery brown hue, which is the arena’s final finish, is not paint but an intended layer of rust. Weathering steel — often known by its old brand name, Cor-Ten — develops a fine layer of rust, which then acts as a protective coating against moisture, slowing its own corrosion process almost to a stop. While it can look suspiciously unfinished to the casual observer, it has many fans in the world of art and architecture . This industrial, raw-looking material can be seen on a smattering of homes in and around New York City , and though they may be vastly different in design, scale and method of construction, they all have one thing in common: a fiery apron of orange on patches of the pavement below. That is because especially in its early life, weathering steel drips. “When the material gets wet, there is a rusty wash that goes down onto adjacent areas of concrete,” said Michael Devonshire, a materials expert at Jan Hird Pokorny Associates, an architecture firm. “It can get really funky looking.” The East of East condominium building in Long Island City, Queens , for example, uses thin slabs of corrugated weathering steel, applied as a scrim over the building’s envelope. The slabs have rusted to a deep burnt orange, staining sections of the surrounding sidewalk. But Andrea Salerno, who recently rented an unsold unit with views of the Manhattan skyline, pointed out that the rusty stains on the sidewalk have plenty of competition from less pedigreed grime. “This is New York,” Ms. Salerno said. “It’s not exactly pristine.” Property owners are responsible for maintaining their sidewalks, but a spokesman for the Department of Transportation said it would not generally issue a notice of violation for a big orange splotch. If those sunset hues are not to your liking, however, Jeremy Stitt, a project manager at Dissimilar Metal Design, which has worked on the Barclays Center project, said afflicted sidewalks could be cleaned with typical rust removers. Amol Sarva, the developer of East of East, said he planned on tidying up the sidewalks by pouring new ones. (His architect said that a gutter system was designed to catch the rusty drips, but they were not properly installed). There are those, however, who prefer to leave the drips where they drop. “I kind of like the lines it makes and the marks, that russet red,” the architect Matthew Baird said of the colors left by weathering steel just outside a town house he designed in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. “It looks good.” The town house, which stands on Greenwich Street just south of Gansevoort Street, has a solid piece of weathering steel stretching from the base of the second floor to the top of the four-story facade. It is 40 feet tall, 14 feet wide and an inch and a half thick. The home, which is surprisingly bright inside, thanks to a rear wall of glass, was built about six years ago, and Dr. Neal M. Blitz, who lives across the street and looks directly at the steel plate from his living room, said passers-by still photograph it daily. Every one of them, he added, seems to have an opinion. “People either say, ‘This is really amazing,’ or ‘Why would they do that?’ ” Dr. Blitz said. Though there is plenty of weathering steel on display in the New York area, from highway supports to the Ford Foundation headquarters, residential examples are not plentiful. Architects suggest that the reason might be that the material can be tricky to work with and the detailing must be done precisely. For example, if the design allows water to pool in a given spot, the building is likely to end up with holes in its facade where the rust has eaten all the way through. Brian Messana, a partner at the architecture firm Messana O’Rorke, who built a weathering steel extension on his own country house in Columbia County, N.Y., mentioned another big drawback. “It rusts,” he said. “In the city, you don’t want it to rust onto somebody else’s property.” Mr. Messana said he considered the material to be quite beautiful, describing it with words like modern, warm and tactile. But he has reservations about it, even in his own country home. “It stained some of the glass,” he said. “Just a couple weekends ago I was thinking, ‘I should really figure out how to get that off.’ “ To fend off some of the headaches, the steel on the Barclays Center was weathered before it ever made it to Brooklyn. Gregg Pasquarelli, a principal at SHoP Architects, which designed the arena, said the steel components spent about four months at an Indianapolis plant where they were put through more than a dozen wet-and-dry cycles a day. (Mr. Pasquarelli said the arena looked to him like what would happen if “ Richard Serra and Chanel created a U.F.O. together.") The process put about six years of weathering onto the steel, according to Robert Sanna, an executive vice president and director at Forest City Ratner, the developer of the Barclays Center. So while there probably will be some rusty dripping, Ms. Sanna said, “this should keep it to a minimum, and you won’t have to worry that it will stain your sweater as you walk by.” In addition to its texture, its dynamism and its drippings, weathering steel has another dimension that was richly on display at the Greenwich Street town house last week. Against the steel’s shimmering grays and giant streaks of reddish rust, there were a dozen or so tiny black circles, squares and triangles, each no more than an inch across, clinging to the lower portion of the slab. They were magnets, presumably tossed onto the facade by a mischievous passer-by.

Construction
Barclays Center NYC
Gregg Pasquarelli
SHoP Architects
Forest City Ratner Companies
Buildings
Stadiums Arenas
Brooklyn
Steel Iron


Asafa Powell Wins at 100 Meters

Abstract: Asafa Powell, the former world-record holder, ran the third-fastest 100 meters of the year at the Diamond League meet in Paris. Powell’s time of 9.81 seconds improved on his previous season best of 9.84. Powell, a Jamaican, was the evening’s star attraction in the absence of his countryman Usain Bolt, the world-record holder, who pulled out with a blocked joint in his left leg. Jimmy Vicaut of France was second, equaling the European record with a time of 9.86. Michael Rodgers of the United States was third, in 9.99. Justin Gatlin of the United States is heading to the world championships in Beijing in August as the favorite. He ran a 9.74 in May and a 9.75 in June. In the women’s 100, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce of Jamaica finished in 10.74 seconds, becoming the fastest woman this year. There was also a year’s best of 7 minutes 58.83 seconds in the men’s 3,000 steeplechase from Jairus Kipchoge Birech of Kenya. Orlando Ortega of Cuba also ran a world-best 12.94 seconds in the 110-meter hurdles.

Track and field
Asafa Powell
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce


Rex Ryan Says He’s ‘Not Afraid of Anything’

Abstract: MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Rex Ryan wore a white long-sleeve shirt, as he always does on game days, and a black sweater vest, as he always does, and khaki pants, as he always does. He hugged his players during stretching and windmilled fist pumps after touchdowns and gave Geno Smith a flying chest bump. He grimaced when the Jets allowed the longest run in Dolphins history and glowered when his defense blew a coverage that led to a touchdown and scowled when Miami scored just before halftime. Until he is told otherwise, Ryan is still the Jets’ coach. That was how he approached Sunday, when the team he led for perhaps the final time battered the Dolphins by 37-24, and that is how he will approach Monday, when the owner, Woody Johnson, is expected to deliver the punishment for this 4-12 season. “Just understand that I’m not afraid of anything,” Ryan said. “I’m not afraid of what lies ahead, I can tell you that.” He added, “I think we generally know when these things happen.” What lies ahead for the Jets are changes; this much is certain. Firing the general manager, John Idzik, is all but a certainty, his mishandling of the team’s cornerback and quarterback situations — Smith’s too-little-too-late brilliance Sunday notwithstanding — precipitating his departure less than two years after he was hired. Ryan, hardly oblivious, has been resigned to losing his job for weeks. Even the Jets’ first offensive call Sunday — a Chris Ivory run to the left, netting 7 yards — was rooted in nostalgia; it mirrored the first play run by the Jets in their lone Super Bowl victory. One possibility that seemed implausible, not to mention awkward, was floated by ESPN, which reported Sunday that Johnson could decide to spare Ryan and instead allow the next general manager to determine whether he stays or goes. Allowing Ryan to dangle for what could be a few weeks hardly seems fair if the result, in all likelihood, is going to be his dismissal anyway. Asked whether he would want a definitive answer by Monday, Ryan demurred. “Last time I checked, I am under contract,” Ryan said, “so whatever happens happens.” As he was hustled away by team security, Johnson declined to comment. “Today it’s all about the players,” Johnson said. So it was. The Jets have not felt good about themselves many times this season, and if ever there was a day when they could rejoice in their accomplishments, this was it. Smith went 20 of 25 for 358 yards and three touchdowns, with a perfect 158.3 passer rating. Eric Decker emerged as the deep threat the Jets had lacked all season, catching 10 passes for 221 yards. A relentless pass rush flustered Miami’s Ryan Tannehill, producing seven sacks. The Jets fooled Miami on a fake punt, and the juxtaposition — how Ryan, possibly nearing the end, outcoached Joe Philbin, who was told last week that he would be retained — was striking. But the mood afterward was not euphoric, or defiant, or even that buoyant. Somber is how offensive lineman Willie Colon described it, somber because the players recognized what Sunday represented — or rather, they thought they knew. The emotion they expressed toward Ryan — love, admiration, respect — was tinged with regret. Image Ryan on Sunday. “Deep down, everybody was playing for him,” linebacker Calvin Pace said. Credit Lynne Sladky/Associated Press Had they played as hard, or as well, for him all season as they did on Sunday, perhaps Ryan would have been assured of returning, as he was after the Jets’ season-ending victory here last year. Perhaps Leger Douzable would not have doused Ryan in a Gatorade bath. “I think the whole team understands,” Colon said. “Things are going to happen whether you want them to happen.” For some time, Ryan has been urging his players not to worry about his tenuous status — that such is life in the zero-sum N.F.L. During the team meeting Saturday night, he cracked a few jokes and told the Jets to play for themselves, not for him. “Deep down, everybody was playing for him,” linebacker Calvin Pace said. “It’s only right to send him out with a win.” Quickly correcting himself, Pace said he had no inside information. He just had a feeling. “If you don’t win,” Pace said, “bad things happen.” The Jets have not won much this season — their worst since 2007 — or really at all since 2010, when they advanced to their second A.F.C. title game. Ryan has won 18 of his last 51 games. Idzik miscalculated in several areas. The scouting department has not unearthed a Pro Bowler in the draft since 2007. By contrast, nearly half the league’s teams — 15, according to Pro Football Reference — have selected at least four over that span. Sheldon Richardson and Muhammad Wilkerson might deserve the honor, but fairly or not, players on 4-12 teams tend to be overlooked. That Johnson would boot Idzik 23 months into his tenure is commendable and at once inconceivable. It acknowledges a mistake, with Johnson’s apology probably soon to come in the form of a replacement who has a strong background in personnel. There will be plenty of options recommended by the former N.F.L. general manager Charley Casserly, whom Johnson lined up as a consultant in the event of a search. But having to dismiss Idzik so soon reflects poorly on Johnson, and what he at the time called a “very thorough and careful process,” after enlisting a search firm and interviewing 10 candidates over almost three weeks before deeming Idzik the best option. Then, perhaps, but no longer. About 45 minutes before kickoff, Idzik, clad in a dark suit, his hands in his pockets, watched the team he had assembled warm up. The person nearest him was about 10 yards away — his boss, Johnson, who spoke to a friend with his back to Idzik. An hour after the game, Idzik walked out of the locker room. He wore as ashen a look as any N.F.L. executive whose team had just won by 13 points. “I’ll get you guys later,” he said, even though, in all likelihood, no he would not. Three out of the last four years, the Jets ended their season at Sun Life Stadium, and each time they confronted a serious organizational decision, or milestone — from Santonio Holmes’s insubordination to the announcement last season that Ryan would return to the uncertainty clouding the team. It is the sign of an unstable franchise, one whose only constant was its charismatic and audacious coach, who left with a parting thought that captured his six years in charge. “You are what your record says you are,” Ryan said. “But we’re a hell of a lot better than that. We are a hell of a lot better than that, and I’ve been proud coaching this team. I’m proud of this team.”

Football
Rex Ryan
NFL
Super Bowl
Super Bowl 2015
John Idzik
Miami Dolphins
Jets


Banks That Bundled Bad Debt Also Bet Against It

Abstract: In late October 2007, as the financial markets were starting to come unglued, a Goldman Sachs trader, Jonathan M. Egol, received very good news. At 37, he was named a managing director at the firm. Mr. Egol, a Princeton graduate, had risen to prominence inside the bank by creating mortgage -related securities, named Abacus, that were at first intended to protect Goldman from investment losses if the housing market collapsed. As the market soured, Goldman created even more of these securities, enabling it to pocket huge profits. Goldman’s own clients who bought them, however, were less fortunate. Pension funds and insurance companies lost billions of dollars on securities that they believed were solid investments, according to former Goldman employees with direct knowledge of the deals who asked not to be identified because they have confidentiality agreements with the firm. Goldman was not the only firm that peddled these complex securities — known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations , or C.D.O.’s — and then made financial bets against them, called selling short in Wall Street parlance. Others that created similar securities and then bet they would fail, according to Wall Street traders, include Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley , as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc., an investment company whose parent firm was overseen by Lewis A. Sachs, who this year became a special counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner . How these disastrously performing securities were devised is now the subject of scrutiny by investigators in Congress, at the Securities and Exchange Commission and at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s self-regulatory organization, according to people briefed on the investigations. Those involved with the inquiries declined to comment. While the investigations are in the early phases, authorities appear to be looking at whether securities laws or rules of fair dealing were violated by firms that created and sold these mortgage-linked debt instruments and then bet against the clients who purchased them, people briefed on the matter say. One focus of the inquiry is whether the firms creating the securities purposely helped to select especially risky mortgage-linked assets that would be most likely to crater, setting their clients up to lose billions of dollars if the housing market imploded. Some securities packaged by Goldman and Tricadia ended up being so vulnerable that they soured within months of being created. Goldman and other Wall Street firms maintain there is nothing improper about synthetic C.D.O.’s, saying that they typically employ many trading techniques to hedge investments and protect against losses. They add that many prudent investors often do the same. Goldman used these securities initially to offset any potential losses stemming from its positive bets on mortgage securities. But Goldman and other firms eventually used the C.D.O.’s to place unusually large negative bets that were not mainly for hedging purposes, and investors and industry experts say that put the firms at odds with their own clients’ interests. “The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.” Investment banks were not alone in reaping rich rewards by placing trades against synthetic C.D.O.’s. Some hedge funds also benefited, including Paulson & Company, according to former Goldman workers and people at other banks familiar with that firm’s trading. Michael DuVally, a Goldman Sachs spokesman , declined to make Mr. Egol available for comment. But Mr. DuVally said many of the C.D.O.’s created by Wall Street were made to satisfy client demand for such products, which the clients thought would produce profits because they had an optimistic view of the housing market. In addition, he said that clients knew Goldman might be betting against mortgages linked to the securities, and that the buyers of synthetic mortgage C.D.O.’s were large, sophisticated investors, he said. The creation and sale of synthetic C.D.O.’s helped make the financial crisis worse than it might otherwise have been, effectively multiplying losses by providing more securities to bet against. Some $8 billion in these securities remain on the books at American International Group , the giant insurer rescued by the government in September 2008. From 2005 through 2007, at least $108 billion in these securities was issued, according to Dealogic, a financial data firm. And the actual volume was much higher because synthetic C.D.O.’s and other customized trades are unregulated and often not reported to any financial exchange or market. Goldman Saw It Coming Before the financial crisis, many investors — large American and European banks, pension funds, insurance companies and even some hedge funds — failed to recognize that overextended borrowers would default on their mortgages, and they kept increasing their investments in mortgage-related securities. As the mortgage market collapsed, they suffered steep losses. A handful of investors and Wall Street traders, however, anticipated the crisis. In 2006, Wall Street had introduced a new index, called the ABX, that became a way to invest in the direction of mortgage securities. The index allowed traders to bet on or against pools of mortgages with different risk characteristics, just as stock indexes enable traders to bet on whether the overall stock market, or technology stocks or bank stocks, will go up or down. Goldman, among others on Wall Street, has said since the collapse that it made big money by using the ABX to bet against the housing market. Worried about a housing bubble, top Goldman executives decided in December 2006 to change the firm’s overall stance on the mortgage market, from positive to negative, though it did not disclose that publicly. Even before then, however, pockets of the investment bank had also started using C.D.O.’s to place bets against mortgage securities, in some cases to hedge the firm’s mortgage investments, as protection against a fall in housing prices and an increase in defaults. Mr. Egol was a prime mover behind these securities. Beginning in 2004, with housing prices soaring and the mortgage mania in full swing, Mr. Egol began creating the deals known as Abacus. From 2004 to 2008, Goldman issued 25 Abacus deals, according to Bloomberg, with a total value of $10.9 billion. Abacus allowed investors to bet for or against the mortgage securities that were linked to the deal. The C.D.O.’s didn’t contain actual mortgages. Instead, they consisted of credit-default swaps , a type of insurance that pays out when a borrower defaults. These swaps made it much easier to place large bets on mortgage failures. Rather than persuading his customers to make negative bets on Abacus, Mr. Egol kept most of these wagers for his firm, said five former Goldman employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity. On occasion, he allowed some hedge funds to take some of the short trades. Mr. Egol and Fabrice Tourre, a French trader at Goldman, were aggressive from the start in trying to make the assets in Abacus deals look better than they were, according to notes taken by a Wall Street investor during a phone call with Mr. Tourre and another Goldman employee in May 2005. On the call, the two traders noted that they were trying to persuade analysts at Moody’s Investors Service , a credit rating agency, to assign a higher rating to one part of an Abacus C.D.O. but were having trouble, according to the investor’s notes, which were provided by a colleague who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to release them. Goldman declined to discuss the selection of the assets in the C.D.O.’s, but a spokesman said investors could have rejected the C.D.O. if they did not like the assets. Goldman’s bets against the performances of the Abacus C.D.O.’s were not worth much in 2005 and 2006, but they soared in value in 2007 and 2008 when the mortgage market collapsed. The trades gave Mr. Egol a higher profile at the bank, and he was among a group promoted to managing director on Oct. 24, 2007. “Egol and Fabrice were way ahead of their time,” said one of the former Goldman workers. “They saw the writing on the wall in this market as early as 2005.” By creating the Abacus C.D.O.’s, they helped protect Goldman against losses that others would suffer. As early as the summer of 2006, Goldman’s sales desk began marketing short bets using the ABX index to hedge funds like Paulson & Company, Magnetar and Soros Fund Management, which invests for the billionaire George Soros . John Paulson , the founder of Paulson & Company, also would later take some of the shorts from the Abacus deals, helping him profit when mortgage bonds collapsed. He declined to comment. A Deal Gone Bad, for Some The woeful performance of some C.D.O.’s issued by Goldman made them ideal for betting against. As of September 2007, for example, just five months after Goldman had sold a new Abacus C.D.O., the ratings on 84 percent of the mortgages underlying it had been downgraded, indicating growing concerns about borrowers’ ability to repay the loans , according to research from UBS , the big Swiss bank. Of more than 500 C.D.O.’s analyzed by UBS, only two were worse than the Abacus deal. Goldman created other mortgage-linked C.D.O.’s that performed poorly, too. One, in October 2006, was a $800 million C.D.O. known as Hudson Mezzanine. It included credit insurance on mortgage and subprime mortgage bonds that were in the ABX index; Hudson buyers would make money if the housing market stayed healthy — but lose money if it collapsed. Goldman kept a significant amount of the financial bets against securities in Hudson, so it would profit if they failed, according to three of the former Goldman employees. A Goldman salesman involved in Hudson said the deal was one of the earliest in which outside investors raised questions about Goldman’s incentives. “Here we are selling this, but we think the market is going the other way,” he said. A hedge fund investor in Hudson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that because Goldman was betting against the deal, he wondered whether the bank built Hudson with “bonds they really think are going to get into trouble.” Indeed, Hudson investors suffered large losses. In March 2008, just 18 months after Goldman created that C.D.O., so many borrowers had defaulted that holders of the security paid out about $310 million to Goldman and others who had bet against it, according to correspondence sent to Hudson investors. The Goldman salesman said that C.D.O. buyers were not misled because they were advised that Goldman was placing large bets against the securities. “We were very open with all the risks that we thought we sold. When you’re facing a tidal wave of people who want to invest, it’s hard to stop them,” he said. The salesman added that investors could have placed bets against Abacus and similar C.D.O.’s if they had wanted to. A Goldman spokesman said the firm’s negative bets didn’t keep it from suffering losses on its mortgage assets, taking $1.7 billion in write-downs on them in 2008; but he would not say how much the bank had since earned on its short positions, which former Goldman workers say will be far more lucrative over time. For instance, Goldman profited to the tune of $1.5 billion from one series of mortgage-related trades by Mr. Egol with Wall Street rival Morgan Stanley, which had to book a steep loss, according to people at both firms. Tetsuya Ishikawa, a salesman on several Abacus and Hudson deals, left Goldman and later published a novel, “ How I Caused the Credit Crunch .” In it, he wrote that bankers deserted their clients who had bought mortgage bonds when that market collapsed: “We had moved on to hurting others in our quest for self-preservation.” Mr. Ishikawa, who now works for another financial firm in London , declined to comment on his work at Goldman. Profits From a Collapse Just as synthetic C.D.O.’s began growing rapidly, some Wall Street banks pushed for technical modifications governing how they worked in ways that made it possible for C.D.O.’s to expand even faster, and also tilted the playing field in favor of banks and hedge funds that bet against C.D.O.’s, according to investors. In early 2005, a group of prominent traders met at Deutsche Bank’s office in New York and drew up a new system, called Pay as You Go. This meant the insurance for those betting against mortgages would pay out more quickly. The traders then went to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, the group that governs trading in derivatives like C.D.O.’s. The new system was presented as a fait accompli, and adopted. Other changes also increased the likelihood that investors would suffer losses if the mortgage market tanked. Previously, investors took losses only in certain dire “credit events,” as when the mortgages associated with the C.D.O. defaulted or their issuers went bankrupt. But the new rules meant that C.D.O. holders would have to make payments to short sellers under less onerous outcomes, or “triggers,” like a ratings downgrade on a bond. This meant that anyone who bet against a C.D.O. could collect on the bet more easily. “In the early deals you see none of these triggers,” said one investor who asked for anonymity to preserve relationships. “These things were built in to provide the dealers with a big payoff when something bad happened.” Banks also set up ever more complex deals that favored those betting against C.D.O.’s. Morgan Stanley established a series of C.D.O.’s named after United States presidents (Buchanan and Jackson) with an unusual feature: short-sellers could lock in very cheap bets against mortgages, even beyond the life of the mortgage bonds. It was akin to allowing someone paying a low insurance premium for coverage on one automobile to pay the same on another one even if premiums over all had increased because of high accident rates. At Goldman, Mr. Egol structured some Abacus deals in a way that enabled those betting on a mortgage-market collapse to multiply the value of their bets, to as much as six or seven times the face value of those C.D.O.’s. When the mortgage market tumbled, this meant bigger profits for Goldman and other short sellers — and bigger losses for other investors. Selling Bad Debt Other Wall Street firms also created risky mortgage-related securities that they bet against. At Deutsche Bank, the point man on betting against the mortgage market was Greg Lippmann, a trader. Mr. Lippmann made his pitch to select hedge fund clients, arguing they should short the mortgage market. He sometimes distributed a T-shirt that read “I’m Short Your House!!!” in black and red letters. Deutsche, which declined to comment, at the same time was selling synthetic C.D.O.’s to its clients, and those deals created more short-selling opportunities for traders like Mr. Lippmann. Among the most aggressive C.D.O. creators was Tricadia, a management company that was a unit of Mariner Investment Group. Until he became a senior adviser to the Treasury secretary early this year, Lewis Sachs was Mariner’s vice chairman. Mr. Sachs oversaw about 20 portfolios there, including Tricadia, and its documents also show that Mr. Sachs sat atop the firm’s C.D.O. management committee. From 2003 to 2007, Tricadia issued 14 mortgage-linked C.D.O.’s, which it called TABS. Even when the market was starting to implode, Tricadia continued to create TABS deals in early 2007 to sell to investors. The deal documents referring to conflicts of interest stated that affiliates and clients of Tricadia might place bets against the types of securities in the TABS deal. Even so, the sales material also boasted that the mortgages linked to C.D.O.’s had historically low default rates, citing a “recently completed” study by Standard & Poor’s ratings agency — though fine print indicated that the date of the study was September 2002, almost five years earlier. At a financial symposium in New York in September 2006, Michael Barnes, the co-head of Tricadia, described how a hedge fund could put on a negative mortgage bet by shorting assets to C.D.O. investors, according to his presentation, which was reviewed by The New York Times . Mr. Barnes declined to comment. James E. McKee, general counsel at Tricadia, said, “Tricadia has never shorted assets into the TABS deals, and Tricadia has always acted in the best interests of its clients and investors.” Mr. Sachs, through a spokesman at the Treasury Department, declined to comment. Like investors in some of Goldman’s Abacus deals, buyers of some TABS experienced heavy losses. By the end of 2007, UBS research showed that two TABS deals were the eighth- and ninth-worst performing C.D.O.’s. Both had been downgraded on at least 75 percent of their associated assets within a year of being issued. Tricadia’s hedge fund did far better, earning roughly a 50 percent return in 2007 and similar profits in 2008, in part from the short bets.

Subprime Mortgage Crisis,2008 Financial Crisis