Cliff Lee’s Suitors Will Be Counting on His Durability

Abstract: Say what you will about A. J. Burnett, whose erratic performance last season gave critics plenty to work with. But the biggest concern about Burnett before the Yankees signed him was health, and that has not been an issue. This is exactly what Darek Braunecker promised. Braunecker is the agent who negotiated Burnett’s five-year, $82.5 million contract with the Yankees in December 2008. He is talking with the Yankees again now about another pitching client from Arkansas: Cliff Lee of the Texas Rangers . The Yankees were one of several teams that called Braunecker after midnight Saturday, when bidding on free agents officially began. “It was what we expected it to be, as well as for every other club — just that initial call to express some interest,” Braunecker said in a telephone interview Monday. “They, and everyone else who contacted us, essentially took the same approach. Nobody has any illusions of things getting done today.” He added: “We know of their interest, and we all agreed to kind of let the process go. That’s kind of the way we’ve dealt with things in the past. We understand how the process works.” If the process mirrors the courtship of Burnett, expect talks to intensify at the winter meetings in the second week of December, with an agreement soon after that. Also expect Braunecker, a former minor league pitcher , to assure clubs that Lee is a safe gamble for a long-term contract, despite being 32 on opening day of Year 1, the way Burnett was. “He’s a really, really healthy pitcher, and his delivery lends itself to continuing to go out there and pitch well into his latter 30s,” Braunecker said of Lee, before comparing his physical makeup to that of Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine. “If you could replicate his mechanics throughout baseball, you’d have a whole lot less injuries. But you can’t. He’s pretty much perfected his delivery from a physical standpoint.” Although a blister hampered Lee in two World Series losses against the San Francisco Giants, he has been strong enough to dominate the last two postseasons, going 7-2 with a 2.13 earned run average in 10 starts, and a cartoonish strikeout-to-walk ratio of 80 to 8. Lee missed a start in late August with a pulled muscle in his back, although he had no history of back issues. Of more concern, perhaps, is that he missed about a month at the start of last season with an abdominal strain, the type of injury that ruined his 2007 season. If Lee commands, say, a six-year deal on the open market, he will be 38 at the end of the contract. C. C. Sabathia will be 35 at the end of the seven-year, $161 million deal he signed with the Yankees before the 2009 season. Burnett will be 36 at the end of his contract. Whoever signs Lee will be putting a lot of faith in his durability. The Yankees are not alone in their pursuit. The Rangers have been outspoken about their commitment to keeping Lee, and while Braunecker would not specify which other teams have called, several will at least window-shop. The Rangers’ exclusive negotiating period ended at 11:59 p.m. Saturday. “Everybody in baseball knew nothing was going to transpire during that five-day period, including the Texas Rangers,” Braunecker said. “We had conversations with them, but the level of conversation was what we anticipated. They did their part during that five-day period to express their continued interest in keeping him in Texas. That’s all we needed from them at that point.” When Sabathia signed with the Yankees, he moved his family to New Jersey year round. Lee and his family just bought a home in Little Rock, Ark., and will move there this off-season. Given that, the Rangers may have a geographic edge. But common sense says that edge will be minimal, because Lee could easily afford a private jet to whisk him to Little Rock without much hassle. As for Lee’s priorities, Braunecker said they would be consistent with the factors most elite free agents value. That usually means a lot of money and a chance to win, in that order, although Braunecker did not characterize it that way. “We believe he has a certain value that he has earned throughout the course of his career, and so it’s my job to make sure we maximize the value of the contract,” Braunecker said. “But that’s just one of the components of the deal.” Braunecker said that he had no timetable and that Lee would decide on a case-by-case basis whether to visit a team before signing. But Braunecker said Lee would be ready whenever the right team presented the right offer. That offer, it stands to reason, will be worth more than $100 million. Several pitchers who have signed $100 million contracts have not been worth the investment. Kevin Brown and Mike Hampton were hampered by injuries, Barry Zito has underperformed, and Johan Santana had shoulder surgery three years into a six-year deal. Then again, the Yankees have been thrilled with Sabathia so far, and they seem eager to take their chances with Lee, too.

Lee Cliff
Baseball
Free Agents (Sports)
New York Yankees
Texas Rangers
Braunecker Darek
Sabathia C C


Schick Sponsors a Reality TV Series - Advertising

Abstract: WITH branded content, videos that emphasize entertainment over a marketing message, products usually are featured but not sold overtly. For example, BMW Films , a branded-content touchstone produced by the automaker beginning in 2001 mostly for online viewing, featured stars like Clive Owen in short films driving BMWs, but contained no sales pitches for the car. Likewise, a current online series by Denny’s, “ Always Open ,” features the comedian Dave Kochner interviewing other comedians while sitting in a booth at Denny’s, but the only direct reference to the chain is when its slogan appears at the end of episodes. Now a new reality series, “Clean Break,” by the Schick Hydro razor, is taking the unusual step of neither mentioning nor showing the razor. The series, which will appear in six weekly episodes beginning Wednesday on Fuel TV, as well as online, refers to the brand only with occasional “Presented by Schick Hydro” messages.  In “Clean Break,” three men in their 20s and 30s — Luke Rodgers (whose brother is the Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers), Steven Helmkamp and Chase Penny — are initially shown partaking in what can be humdrum personal and professional routines. Then they are flown to Hawaii, where they are subjected to physical challenges like diving with sharks, surfing perilous waves and jumping out of an airplane. The premise is that both the activities, and men they meet in Hawaii with dream jobs like professional surfer and surfboard designer, may inspire the three to make a clean break (thus the title) from the ruts they were in upon returning home. The series is by Content & Co., a Los Angeles producer of branded entertainment. Schick, an Energizer Holdings brand, declined to reveal the cost of the series. Last year, it spent $66.8 million on advertising, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Advertisements for Schick will appear along with commercials for other products when the series appears on television, and will often precede the episodes online. Brad Harrison, the senior group marketing director for Schick Hydro, said it was tempting to try to incorporate the razor into the series. “I’m the brand guy, and my first instinct was, ‘Can’t we make the guys shave when they get home from surfing at night?’ ” Mr. Harrison said. “‘And why can’t they all wear Schick T-shirts?’” But ultimately, Mr. Harrison said that having them do either “would make them look like paid actors or shills.” The market for the razor is men 18 to 34, and Mr. Harrison said young men “believe maybe 10 percent” of what they see in a commercial. “Our guys are inherently cynical about advertising,” he continued, “so you need to go beyond the traditional marketing, you need to do something much more engaging that creates an environment that feels more trusting and authentic.” Stuart McLean, the chief executive of Content & Co., said, “If you spend every sunrise with guys shaving, you’re going to create a false reality, because guys don’t shave every day, and Schick understands that.” The most popular frequency for men to shave is every few days, followed by every day, and by only workdays but not on weekends or other time off, according to a survey by Mintel, a market research firm. “It’s the emotion they want, the connection they want,” said Mr. McLean about the brand. “And ‘Clean Break’ was designed as a vehicle to create that emotional bond with Schick Hydro consumers.” Introduced in 2010 , Schick Hydro culminated what the brand claimed was its largest research and development investment ever. Available in a three- and five-blade version, advertising for the razor has focused largely on a “gel reservoir” on its head that exudes aloe and vitamin E, which the brand claims reduces irritation better than typical moisturizing strips. Schick is a perennial also-ran against Gillette, the dominant Procter & Gamble brand, but marketers said the Hydro would help it gain ground. Schick did, in fact, have a 15.1 percent share of the men’s razor and blades segment in 2011, up from 11.2 in 2007, according to Euromonitor International, a market research firm. Over the same period, Gillette’s share of the men’s category dropped to 70 percent, from 71.5 percent. While Schick, again, never appears in “Clean Break,” the concept for the series — getting men to break away from their normal routine by exposing them to something new — is exactly the attitude that the brand aims to cultivate in men when it comes to shaving. The brand hopes that men who may have been using Gillette since they were taking algebra will give the Hydro a try.  “We think there’s a synergy between the two,” said Mr. Harrison, of Schick, referring to the message of both the brand and the series. “We have a competitor who has been the dominant player for many, many years, and we’re saying to guys, ‘You’re in kind of rut — why keep using the same old razor when there’s one that’s better?’ ” David Vinjamuri, author of “Accidental Branding” and an adjunct professor of marketing at New York University, reviewed a “Clean Break” episode and was impressed. “I like the idea of finding ways to use content to tell stories that personify the brand,” said Mr. Vinjamuri. “It is clear that these guys can’t visualize themselves somewhere other than where they are,” Mr. Vinjamuri said, referring to the everyday lives of the three men in the series. “And that’s the problem that Schick has in the category: People can’t see themselves moving away from Gillette, which they may have been using for 20 years.”

Schick Wilkinson-Sword
Advertising and Marketing
Shaving and Shavers
Online Advertising
Reality Television
Television
Clean Break (TV Program)


Coach Breaks Wins Record

Abstract: Harry Statham earned his record-breaking 1,099th victory as a head coach as the freshman Nate Michael scored 40 points to lead McKendree, a Division II college in Southern Illinois, to a 92-84 win over host Maryville. Statham, 78, moved past the Tennessee women’s coach Pat Summitt for the most wins by a coach at a four-year college program. He has 476 losses during his 50 years coaching at McKendree, his alma mater. McKendree had tremendous success under Statham at the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics level, ending in 2011. Then the Bearcats moved up to Division II, where they have struggled.

College basketball
Southern Illinois University
Coaches


Two Friends, One Unlikely Trek

Abstract: NEWPORT, R.I. — For men born and raised more than 5,000 miles apart, Charlie Enright and Mark Towill share plenty of common ground. They made a movie together, sailed together at Brown University and chased funding together for a long-shot project. Now, the two close friends with the thickly calloused hands that come with years of yanking on ropes and hoisting sails are well on their way to racing around the world together. It has been a grueling shared journey involving four-hour sleeping shifts, a bacchanalian celebration at the Equator and even a rescue mission. Though they still have the Atlantic to cross before finishing their first Volvo Ocean Race, they are already eager to do it all again. “We’ve learned so much the last nine months, we’re ready to get another crack at it,” Enright, the skipper of Team Alvimedica, said in an interview before sailing out of Newport, R.I., for Lisbon on Sunday. The odds were heavily against their making this journey at all. The nautical world is awash in young talent. It is not awash in deep-pocketed sponsors prepared to provide the young and the gifted with the $15 million or more necessary to fund a round-the-world Volvo campaign. To make matters more daunting, Enright, a 30-year-old from Rhode Island, and Towill, 26 and from Hawaii, had little offshore racing experience compared with many of the more weathered competitors they would face. “In some ways, I think it was harder putting the team together than it’s been doing the race,” Towill said. While there was once a shortage of buying power, there has never been a shortage of brainpower. Enright has a steel-trap memory, a quick wit and the ability to steer a yacht through heavy traffic during a practice race while cracking a joke or mischievously poking a crew member in the back. Towill, the more overtly earnest of the two, attended Punahou School, the private school in Oahu that is also President Obama’s alma mater. He was later accepted by Stanford, M.I.T. and Brown, but he chose Brown because he liked its location, its lack of a core curriculum and its strong sailing team. “A lot of people told me I was crazy, but then a lot of people told us we were crazy to do this, too,” Towill said. Towill and Enright met in 2007 when they were chosen to be subjects of the documentary “Morning Light,” which was filmed largely in Hawaii. The film depicts a crew of young sailors, funded by Roy E. Disney, competing in the 2007 Transpacific Race. Enright, who is from a sailing family, had once followed the Volvo from afar with his Rhode Island elementary school as part of a class project. And during the making of “Morning Light,” he and Towill met several sailors who had done the Volvo, including the American navigator Stan Honey. The dream endured, and their first big task was to persuade Knut Frostad, the former Norwegian round-the-world racer who is the chief executive of the Volvo. “We had a lot of options of young people we could have gone with, and I think the main reason was simply that I felt Mark and Charlie understood what it took,” Frostad said. He added: “When Mark called me the first time, I said: ‘Don’t ask me anything. Just show up, and I’ll talk to you when I see you show up.’ ” Showing up meant flying across the Atlantic to the race headquarters in Alicante, Spain, in 2011. “They told me they would do anything it took to make it happen, spend all their time and sacrifice anything they could sacrifice,” Frostad said. “That’s what it requires. It is truly much harder to get to the starting line than to get around the world.” That is not to underestimate the challenges of the sailing: spartan conditions, physical exhaustion and living on board at an often-extreme angle in a class of yachts that are sturdy but heel very easily. “The part that surprised me most is the mental part of it,” Towill said. “You can go out and do an hourlong race and be very focused. We’re all very used to sailing inshore. But having to be on for 24 hours a day for 27 days in a row is a whole different skill set.” Enright, soon to be a father for the first time, has found himself in his bunk thinking of the future and wondering if he was losing an edge to more single-minded competitors. “I wonder if maybe I should be thinking about what’s the next sail, the next shift, all this stuff,” he said. “Which is crazy, but it’s the life we’ve chosen for now.” They want a top-three finish. But the Volvo, even in an age when thrill-seeking has become increasingly banal, remains part adventure, part race. Finishing is still an accomplishment in itself, and with six of the nine legs completed, Alvimedica is in fourth place among the seven yachts that started in Alicante in October. The high-water mark so far for the young Americans and their crew was rounding Cape Horn in first place on a clear day during the fifth leg through the Southern Ocean from Auckland, New Zealand, to Itajaí, Brazil. “Cape Horn is the Everest everyone says it is,” Enright said. “It’s a rugged part of the world that most people that round it aren’t always privileged to see.” The low point? Team Vestas Wind running aground on a reef during Leg 2 in a remote, shark-infested stretch of the Indian Ocean, which required Alvimedica to change course. “That night, it turned from a race into a rescue mission,” Enright said Wednesday in a talk he gave to members of the New York Yacht Club in Newport. “Everybody talks about how noble it was for us to stop racing and come to their aid, but really it wasn’t a decision at all. It’s just what you do, and we were about three hours away from them when they ran aground. “You guys all know that everybody made it out O.K., but at the time, there was no saying that was going to be the case.” Alvimedica eventually established communication with the crew, which was picked up by the local authorities and whose badly damaged boat was recovered. The boat is being repaired in Italy in the hope that the team will be able to rejoin the race in Lisbon for the final two short-haul legs in Europe. Enright and Towill, the American rookies, have managed to keep their 65-foot yacht in one piece, even if they could do no better than fifth on the leg into Newport, which Enright, who lives in nearby Bristol, considers a home port. “Obviously they had a bad leg, which happens to everyone in the end,” said Ian Walker, the British skipper of the race leader, Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing. “If we’d done this interview a month ago, you’d just have been talking about their rate of improvement and progression. Obviously now they’ve got a bit of work to do.” Enright and Towill concur, and they have no intention of slowing their work rate, even when their circumnavigation ends and with fatherhood looming for Enright, whose wife, Meris, is expecting their first child in August. “You are going to think we’re crazy,” Towill said. When they finish the Volvo in late June in Goteborg, Sweden, they plan to fly back almost immediately to the United States and take part in the Transatlantic Race from Newport to England. They then intend to fly back to California and take part in the Transpacific Race to Honolulu. “And then be a dad,” Enright said.

Sailing
America's Cup
Volvo Ocean Race
Brown
New York Yacht Club
Mark Towill
Charlie Enright


Logano Advances in Chase

Abstract: Joey Logano earned a critical win at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C., to move into the third round of Nascar’s playoffs in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship. Kevin Harvick finished second for the 11th time this season.


Princeton’s Jordan Culbreath Regains Health and Form

Abstract: PRINCETON, N.J. — It would have been completely understandable if Princeton running back Jordan Culbreath, brimming with potential off the field, had decided never to play football again. A mechanical and aerospace engineering major, he, along with a friend, invented a cold-water treatment tub with a refrigeration and filtration system that has saved Princeton thousands of dollars on ice. Then there was worry over his physical well-being. “None of us wanted him to feel guilty about not being able to play football,” Coach Bob Surace said. “We just wanted him to lead a normal life.” A senior and a former first-team all-Ivy League selection, Culbreath missed the final eight games of the 2009 season after receiving a diagnosis of aplastic anemia, a rare disease in which bone marrow cannot produce enough blood cells. His body was unable to control bleeding, making any football hit potentially life-threatening. Culbreath, though, was determined to return. “I’m a football player — it’s part of me and my identity,” he said. “Getting back on that field for me is almost like not allowing that illness to beat me.” Early in his first game this season, against Lehigh, a linebacker hit him squarely and muttered, “Welcome back.” Culbreath smiled to himself as he jogged back to the huddle. Once a week he has his blood tested, and twice a month he receives a platelet infusion at the campus health center. Those sessions allow Culbreath to keep playing football. After being treated for the disease for the better part of a year, Culbreath surprised his teammates by showing up at preseason camp in August. He regained his starting job and, in the Tigers’ second game, scored the winning touchdown in a 36-33 double-overtime victory over Lafayette. “You can’t script all the things that came to place,” Surace said. Last September Culbreath was rushed to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., where he underwent blood and platelet transfusions. In the weeks before, Culbreath had not shown many outward signs of trouble. Internally, though, he could feel that something was wrong. As the preseason pick for Ivy League offensive player of the year in 2009, and a team captain, he expected to have a memorable senior season. But in training camp, he began lagging behind in conditioning drills and breathing abnormally. Headaches developed, his fingers tingled and his gums bled. He grew lethargic and felt cold constantly. “He just looked terrible,” said Dr. Margot Putukian, the team physician. “It looked like he was running in quicksand.” As the symptoms worsened, Culbreath remained quiet. Early in the 2009 season’s second game, Culbreath twisted his ankle. When he went to the sideline, blood was dripping from his mouth. At halftime, he finally told Putukian how he had been feeling. “I was confused,” Culbreath said. “I didn’t know what was going on with my body.” Putukian ordered a blood test. The results were startling: hemoglobin, platelets and white blood cell counts were at what she called “panic values.” She told Culbreath to get to the hospital immediately. “The doctors were surprised I could even walk into the building, let alone play a game on the previous Saturday,” Culbreath said. After five days in the hospital, Culbreath learned he had aplastic anemia, which affects about one in every 500,000 people in the United States. The initial treatment option for Culbreath, who had never had an injury worse than a sprained ankle, was a bone marrow transplant. “He used to run away from getting his blood drawn,” his mother, Alma Culbreath, said in a telephone interview. A suitable match could not be found. For three weeks, he was given antibody infusions and medication. In late October, he developed a severe infection that put him back in the hospital, and for a time he wore a pouch attached to his hip that automatically injected him with antibiotics at regular intervals. But his condition progressed enough that Alma Culbreath wished aloud at Christmas dinner that he would one day return to the field. She wanted to see him finish an unlikely career . Jordan Culbreath, from Falls Church, Va., was recruited by only one college, Washington and Lee in Division III. He walked on at Princeton and became the starting running back as a junior. That year, he was the eighth player in team history to rush for more than 1,000 yards (1,206), and was a unanimous first-team all-Ivy League selection. He said he tries not to think about what could have happened had the ankle injury not forced him from the game last year. “I would have collapsed on the field,” Culbreath said. In March, after six months of treatment, Culbreath was cleared to begin physical activity. He kept in contact with Surace but did not tell his teammates he was considering a comeback. He kept in shape by training at his high school gym in Virginia. In June, he requested a medical hardship waiver from the N.C.A.A., and was cleared to play by doctors two days before preseason camp started. “Everybody was like, ‘Wow, he’s back,’ ” quarterback Tommy Wornham said. “He didn’t tell anybody he was coming.”

Princeton University
Football
Anemia
Blood
Culbreath Jordan


From Espada to the Supreme Court, Health Care Hinges on One Person

Abstract: No, the spokeswoman said, Pedro Espada Jr. is not currently serving as president of the Soundview Health Care Network that he set up in the Bronx more than 30 years ago. “He has taken a leave of absence,” the spokeswoman, Rachel Fasciani, said. That is because he has daily appointments in a federal court in Brooklyn to listen to a parade of witnesses testify that he looted the clinics run by Soundview. Nevertheless, patients continue to be seen at the clinics, Ms. Fasciani said. In Mr. Espada’s absence, who is running Soundview? “Oh, we have a senior vice president,” she replied. By the name of? “Alejandro Espada,” she said. There is no sense in getting too wrapped up in the gnarly branches of the Espada family tree. But for those keeping track, Alejandro is a son of the founder, Pedro Espada Jr., and a brother of Pedro G. Espada, who, by the way, is in court with his father. The two Pedros are charged with using credit cards, invoices and lies to pilfer $500,000 from the clinics. In their defense, they say they are servants of the people who have been smeared by political elites and ambitious prosecutors. Whatever version of reality the jury settles on, the Espada trial, as seedy as its details are, has common strands with the case argued this week in the United States Supreme Court over the constitutionality of the national health care reform act that became law in March 2010. Much depends on a single person. The Supreme Court is thought by many observers to be likely to split 5 to 4 in its ruling on the act, giving the fifth vote a colossal presence in American health care. That is how we do things. The Soundview network was set up in the southeast Bronx by the Espada patriarch in 1978, an act of determination by one person. The neighborhood had plenty of things, like the Bruckner and Cross Bronx Expressways, but not much in the way of health care. When the city dropped its plans to build a clinic in a housing development where Mr. Espada lived, he stepped forward and secured funding. Until recently, the Soundview clinics were seeing 20,000 patients a year, Ms. Fasciani said, but that is trailing off. Because audits found that so much money had been misspent at the clinics, the state has moved to cut off Medicaid financing. So much power was vested in Mr. Espada and his family that the state was unable to rein in what seemed to be grotesque excesses. A single man could create and destroy a network of clinics in the Bronx; a single Supreme Court justice will, apparently, have the power to reshape the basic health care machinery for the whole country. Only a profoundly unstable system can be knocked over so easily. A senior doctor at a major city hospital recently told me that this was a golden age for public health in New York, because the mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, had a deep interest in the area. The same doctor said the system had always seemed to him to be under threat from Mr. Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was thought to be temperamentally hostile to the city’s public hospitals. PEOPLE are taken care of by doctors, nurses and other medical workers; they are at the end of a long train of authority, which operates to thousands of unseen instructions. The public hospitals in New York have decent, if not perfect, reputations for efficiency and quality. Not so the archipelago of private hospitals. A report by Anemona Hartocollis this week in The New York Times on Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, a private hospital serving some of the city’s poorest people, described an executive director who arrived for work in a Bentley and the appointment of vendors to the hospital’s board, as well as how doctors with questionable pasts were able to get jobs there by having elected officials make calls. And of course, the elected officials and their families had jobs there, too, with little or no qualifications. By such frail threads as Wyckoff and Soundview does so much health care hang. The Espada clinics, faced with a loss of Medicaid financing earned through years of contempt by its management for audits, are being eroded. As the criminal trial grinds along, the clinics are pleading with state judges for reprieves. “We care for more than 20,000 patients, many of whom are impoverished and some of the sickest in the nation,” Ms. Fasciani said. “We are the only community health center easily accessed in the area. They are the true victims here.” She blamed state regulators, not Pedro Espada Jr. But even he is not the only one at fault. We bet the house on one man, one empire, over and over.

Espada Pedro Jr
Soundview Health Care Network
Supreme Court
Health Insurance and Managed Care
Espada Pedro G


Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Rebuffs Report’s Criticism of Email Use

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Clinton campaign on Wednesday released a 203-word statement largely dismissing the criticisms in the inspector general’s report on the email practices of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It reprised many of the arguments Mrs. Clinton has made throughout the 14-month drama over her use of a personal email and server. Now, though, the statement can be compared directly with the findings in the 79-page report. From the statement: “The inspector general documents just how consistent her email practices were with those of other secretaries and senior officials at the State Department who also used personal email.” Only one other secretary of state — Colin L. Powell — exclusively used his personal email for official communications. Condoleezza Rice said she did not use personal or government email. Madeleine K. Albright did not use email, which was in its infancy when she was in the job. Secretary of State John Kerry said he occasionally used personal email, mostly to reply to people who emailed him on his personal account. But the report said that after discussing the issue with his aides and other staff members, “he began primarily using his department account to conduct official business.” _____ “The report shows that problems with the State Department’s electronic record-keeping systems were longstanding and that there was no precedent of someone in her position having a State Department email account until after the arrival of her successor.” The report does acknowledge chronic issues with record keeping at the State Department. But it also traces how regulations were modified in the years between Ms. Albright and Mrs. Clinton to make sure digital communications were preserved for federal archives. More than once, State Department officials proposed setting up an official email address for Mrs. Clinton — in part so she could use two BlackBerrys. Her aide Huma Abedin rejected that, telling her colleagues, “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.” _____ “Contrary to the false theories advanced for some time now, the report notes that her use of personal email was known to officials within the department during her tenure, and that there is no evidence of any successful breach of the secretary’s server.” What We Know About the Investigation Into Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server The F.B.I. recently uncovered new emails potentially related to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. That Mrs. Clinton used a private address was hardly a mystery to the dozens of people in the State Department, White House or other agencies who sent or received email from her. It is equally clear, however, that senior department officials were sensitive about people raising red flags about it. When two junior staff members expressed concerns to their boss in the Information Records Management office, he “instructed the staff never to speak of the secretary’s personal email system again.” While the report does not find evidence that Mrs. Clinton’s server was breached, it notes that the Clintons’ outside I.T. consultant twice shut down the unit in the family home in Chappaqua, N.Y. – on Jan. 9 and 10, 2011 – because he feared that someone was trying to hack the system. “We were attacked again, so I shut down for a few min,” he wrote in an email to Ms. Abedin. _____ “We agree that steps ought to be taken to ensure the government can better maintain official records, and if she were still at the State Department, Secretary Clinton would embrace and implement any recommendations, including those in this report, to help do that.” Among the inspector general’s recommendations is to remind employees regularly that the use of personal email for official business is discouraged, that they could incur penalties for doing so and that all departing officials, including the secretary of state, must sign a document pledging that they have turned over all federal records, including emails. Mrs. Clinton has admitted her use of a personal email was a mistake, but many of these regulations existed, in one form or another, when she was in office. _____ “As this report makes clear, Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email was not unique, and she took steps that went much further than others to appropriately preserve and release her records.” Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email and server stored in her home was, in fact, unique. She left the State Department without turning over any emails, and only did so after she was contacted by the department’s lawyers, who were under pressure to produce documents from the House Select Committee on Benghazi . The 55,000 pages of emails she delivered did not include anything from the first three months of her tenure. _____ Wednesday’s statement from the campaign does not repeat an assertion Mrs. Clinton has made before: that her arrangement, while unwise, was permitted. Last September, she told The Associated Press: “What I did was allowed. It was allowed by the State Department. The State Department has confirmed that.” The report says Mrs. Clinton “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business.” Had she done so, the department would not have approved her exclusive use of a personal email because of potential security risks and because of restrictions on the transmission of sensitive information. In fact, the State Department began disciplinary proceedings against an ambassador to Kenya, J. Scott Gration , for his use of a personal email account — in effect, mimicking the practice of his boss.

Email
Hillary Clinton
State Department
2016 Presidential Election
Inspector General
US Politics


Madden NFL 12 Adds Depth to the Franchise

Abstract: The very best video games are those that permit gamers to dwell inside a world in which they would never otherwise be allowed. In particular, sports games give those of us born without superhuman speed or strength the chance to dominate when we would normally be asked to pay a stunning sum just for the privilege of sitting up close. The Madden NFL Series from EA Sports began in 1988, and it consistently ranks among the year’s 10 best-selling games. Madden is a staple for sports gamers, and is firmly ingrained in the culture of sports, spawning ancillary businesses: tours, television shows, guidebooks. It has been a must-play game long enough that not only have most N.F.L. players grown up playing the game, there are now N.F.L. coaches weaned on Madden: Raheem Morris, the coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, once joked that he majored in Madden in college. The latest iteration, Madden NFL 12, is out Tuesday. Madden 12 offers no new game modes from Madden 11, instead focusing on adding to the pre-existing. The franchise mode has been deepened, with additions like the ability to trade picks from future drafts. A bidding system adds suspense to the free agency period, although it can be a confusing experience, at least the first time around. While trying to sift through menu layers and decide where to best spend my money, and simultaneously keep tabs on available players, I somehow ended up winning the bidding on a highly rated defensive end, even though depth at defensive end was my franchise’s biggest strength. I ended up sweating, wondering if I’d hurt my franchise for years to come. Some graphical updates make the look of the game more realistic. This year, for instance, we see green stickers on helmets wired for sound, plus a new “degradation system” that accurately displays wear and tear on uniforms. When the weather is bad, small raindrops occasionally land on the camera lens. While playing zone defense, defenders point to receivers as they cross into other zones; you can almost imagine them yelling, “You get him!” Game presentation has been pumped up, particularly pregame introductions and the coin toss, which are now shown with an unstable, hand-held-style camera that adds to the anticipation of the kickoff. Other adjustments add realism to the game play. Tackling has been revamped, requiring more precision from defenders than before. Cornerbacks are quick to jump short passes to wide receivers, and middle linebackers seem more aware of passes between the hash marks, making it tougher to squeeze the ball in on intermediate crossing patterns. In Madden 11, passes into coverage too often ended up bouncing off an unsuspecting player’s helmet. That has been addressed in Madden 12, and in general, the artificial intelligence of the players seems much improved. Madden 12 has such a commitment to replicating the N.F.L. game that even gamers who are experienced with the franchise may find themselves struggling to catch up, at least initially. The insider lingo can be daunting, as new defensive formations include “4-3 Over Plus” and “Sub 3-3-5 Odd,” and offensive formations include mouthfuls like “Gun Normal Y-Flex Tight.” To simplify or speed up the games, as part of the GameFlow feature you can rely on your offensive coordinator to suggest plays. Unfortunately, my coach kept suggesting we run the ball in the two-minute drill, despite being out of timeouts; I audibled to passing plays. In a game so focused on realism and without any glaring errors, it is only the little things that detract from the overall experience. I played an entire season in franchise mode and saw no blocked punts. Pass interference was called so infrequently, I wondered if it had been turned off in the game’s options. The game’s announcers, Cris Collinsworth and Gus Johnson, get locked into talking points, and the commenting frequently lags behind the game play. (In an Atlanta-Chicago game, while Dunta Robinson was in the midst of an interception and long return for a touchdown, Collinsworth talked calmly about what a complete running back Matt Forte has turned out to be for the Bears.) While it’s not an evolutionary leap from Madden NFL 11 to 12, there is no escaping that Madden 12 is a game that both gamers and N.F.L. fans will want to play. Even though it hurts to admit it, the truth is, the most egregious mistakes in Madden NFL 12 were my own. There were times I would drop back to pass, anticipate a receiver coming open, but pass the ball too late, resulting in an interception. While my initial reaction was to throw my controller at the TV and blame my quarterback — “Come on, Sanchez! Hit the open man!” — there’s no escaping the understanding that when playing Madden, there’s no one to blame for poor decisions but yourself.

Football
Computer and Video Games
Madden NFL 12 (Video Game)
Electronic Arts Inc


Myopenbar.com Lists Where Drinks Are Free

Abstract: Frank Leone does not just dislike Drambuie, the Scottish liqueur, he hates it. Its sweetness and thickness remind him, he says, of “corn syrup straight from the jar.” Yet there he was the other night at the Slipper Room , a club with red velvet-lined walls on the Lower East Side, downing one Drambuie and soda and ordering another. Because while Mr. Leone, a 37-year-old personal trainer and musician, insisted that “there’s no amount of free liquor that would help me acquire a taste for Drambuie,” he does have an acquired taste for free drinks. He is among the growing audience of myopenbar.com , a Web site that lists where free drinks can be had across New York City each night. On this night, it was the Drambuie Variety Show, which meant that all who got in the door were entitled to all the Drambuie they could drink, courtesy of the liqueur’s vendor. The Slipper Room was packed by 7:30 p.m., a long line snaking around the corner outside. Myopenbar.com has been around since 2005 but is now attracting more listings, promotions and readers than ever, despite — or perhaps because of — the tanking economy and shrinking advertising dollars and liquor sales at bars. The site’s founders, Seva Granik and Jason Fried, said that more bars and restaurants are clamoring to get their events listed, eager to drive customers through the door. And, to no one’s surprise, demand for free drinks is skyrocketing. (Liquor sales are considered recession-proof, though one recent study by the Nielsen Company suggests that while sales at liquor stores have increased, people are going out to nightclubs and bars far less frequently.) “The bad economy is doing nothing but helping us,” Mr. Granik wrote in an e-mail message. “We’re probably the only company we know of that’s doing very well because of the downturn.” Myopenbar.com has 30,000 subscribers in New York, most of them in their 20s and 30s, the very demographic that liquor companies want to reach. The site also has listings for five other cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and Honolulu) that have attracted 19,000 subscribers, and it has 30 employees. Mr. Granik, 33, and Mr. Fried, 34, declined to say how much revenue the site generates, but they said it was profitable, both through advertising (Toyota Scion and American Apparel are among the sponsors) and the consulting fees that they collect for holding, marketing and promoting events. Those events are noted on the site; otherwise, bars and liquor companies do not have to pay to be listed. Lauren Goldberg, who is 23 and works in publishing, said the events listed at myopenbar.com suit her because she would be watching her budget even if the economy was not in crisis. “Normally I could not afford this fine liqueur,” she said, taking a sip of a Drambuie fizz . Myopenbar.com does not only promote Drambuie events, though it has listed so many of them that Mr. Fried has begun using the liqueur in his cooking, especially in glazes. As often as not, the site lists places that offer free beer or vodka, restaurants that serve free wine, and brunch spots that allow diners to bring their own bottles. It started with Mr. Granik, then a broke musician living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who simply forwarded text messages to his friends about various open bars around town. Demand grew, so he launched a crude Web site that Mr. Fried, a Web designer he had met through a friend’s band, helped to fine-tune. Within six months, 3,000 people had signed up for weekly e-mail blasts. By mid-2006, there were 18,000 subscribers, and a lot more places offering open bar nights. “We watched open bars as a culture explode, along with this new avenue of promotion,” Mr. Granik said. Mr. Granik and Mr. Fried rented space in the Decker Building in Union Square, which used to house Andy Warhol’s Factory, and thus did their empire grow. A hallmark of the site is its honesty, and its edge. Each event is rated on a scale of 1 to 5 designated with small icons — cocktail glasses — and accompanied by a brief descriptive paragraph. “If something’s not good, we’ll say so,” Mr. Fried said. One recent posting: “Who goes to the East Village anymore? Every time I come through, I’m up to my ears in fossils wearing studded jackets and guyliner.” Another said: “Two hours of free top-shelf vodka on a Wednesday night draw a thin line betwixt an asset and a liability. Ever the optimists, we’ll opt for the former.” And then there was this, about a club on Broome Street: “I need a vacation from this place. I love you Happy Ending , but I snuck into you when I was too young, and now that I’m older, being inside you makes me feel like a 40-year-old hooking up with a spring break coed in South Padre.” Even though Mr. Granik and Mr. Fried say demand for their service has not abated, there has been a shift in who is promoting what: Drambuie notwithstanding, liquor giveaways have declined, they say, but more places are offering free beer and wine. The number of people signing up for the weekly e-mail list continues to grow; Mr. Granik said 7,000 subscribers have joined since the summer. “If there’s ever a moment that you’re going to love your drink,” Mr. Fried said, “it’s going to be right now.”

Bars
MyOpenbar.com
Alcoholic Beverages
New York City
Recession and Depression


British Government to Sell Eurostar Stake for $1.16 Billion

Abstract: LONDON — The British government said on Wednesday that it had agreed to sell its 40 percent stake in Eurostar International, which operates high-speed trains connecting London with Paris and Brussels through a tunnel under the English Channel, for about 757 million pounds, or $1.16 billion. A consortium that includes Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, which manages public pension funds in Quebec, and Hermes Infrastructure, a unit of the British fund manager Hermes Investment Management, will pay £585.1 million for the British government’s stake. Eurostar will also redeem preference shares held by the government for £172 million after the sale closes, which is expected in the second quarter of this year. “It’s great that we have reached an agreement to sell the U.K.’s shareholding in Eurostar that delivers a fantastic deal for U.K. taxpayers that exceeds expectations,” George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a news release . Eurostar, which began service in 1994 , operates up to 19 round trips a day between London and Paris and 10 round trips a day between London and Brussels. S.N.C.F., the French state-owned railway operator, owns 55 percent of Eurostar, and S.N.C.B., the Belgian national rail company, holds 5 percent. S.N.C.F. runs the rail service and will continue to do so after the sale. The French and Belgian operators did not participate in the bidding process, which began in October. They have the right to acquire shares at a 15 percent premium over the final bid, but they are not expected to exercise that option. The sale is subject to regulatory approval and to S.N.C.F. and S.N.C.B. not exercising their rights to acquire the shares. Eurostar transported 10.4 million people in 2014 and posted revenue of £867 million in 2014. The sale of its Eurostar stake is the latest in a push by the government to put Britain on more solid financial footing through asset sales and reductions in public services. Mr. Osborne is proposing the sale of a variety of government-owned assets and entities by 2020, in hopes of raising £20 billion. The British government plans to use the proceeds from the sale of the Eurostar stake and other government assets to reduce the country’s public debt.

Mergers and Acquisitions
Eurostar
Railroads
George Osborne
SNCF
Great Britain


Nocturnalist - At Fragrance Awards, Sniffing Celebrity Wrists

Abstract: We caught a whiff of Halle Berry , a sniff of Paz de la Huerta and a deep breath of Padma Lakshmi . At the Fragrance Foundation’s FiFi Awards, billed as the Oscars of the perfume industry, our correspondent came face to face with a sea of celebrity wrists on Wednesday night. All around us, scented arms, flung into the faces of others, were sniffed with the solemnity of a sommelier. The celebrities in the audience sat out of smelling distance from one another at the awards show, which was held in a tent at Lincoln Center. A good thing, we learned. Ms. de la Huerta hates rose scents, while Ms. Lakshmi was doused in the flower; Ms. Berry finds vanilla scents too cloying, but Ms. de la Huerta smelled like a cupcake; and Ms. Lakshmi, it seemed, wouldn’t have worn either aroma — she doesn’t do commercial scents. Desirée Rogers , the former White House social secretary, presented the awards for Media Campaign of the Year. Nominees like Mary J. Blige and Fergie took home perfume bottle-shaped trophies. Fergie won an award for her fragrance “Outspoken” (appropriately, since her speech included some unprintable language). Ms. Berry won the award for Fragrance Celebrity of the Year for her perfume “Reveal,” which also seemed apt: her cutout Halston dress could have doubled for a bikini. Marsha Brooks, a vice president of marketing at Coty, the fragrance and cosmetics brand that makes Reveal, said that even the bottle for Ms. Berry’s first perfume was modeled after the actress. We’ll take her word for it; the bottle is a rectangle. Gadget Love At a gala for Hillel, a foundation for Jewish student life on college campuses, we tried unsuccessfully to speak to the evening’s honoree. “He’s the bar mitzvah boy tonight,” a Hillel spokesman said of Morris W. Offit, the chairman of Offit Capital Advisors. “Everyone has to say hello to him.” Leonard Feinstein presented the award to Mr. Offit at the Pierre Hotel, over a meal of kosher chicken breast and sushi hors d’oeuvres. “I have a sickness,” Mr. Offit said. “I love going to Jewish dinners.” Next to us, a man named Alan Oirich said he was overseeing the evening’s coverage by something called Shalom TV. “Jews are always in the news; that’s why we need Shalom TV, to try and cover it all,” he said, before returning to his iPad to play Scrabble (the word “gonif” scored nine points). Gadgets seemed to interest Mr. Oirich more than the event at hand, and he spoke about his voice-recognition software. “The day I got it, the famous Jewish journalist Sidney Zion died,” he said, prompting him to say into the machine that day, “Sidney Zion dead.” The words that popped up on the screen? “Lindsay Lohan naked.” Dining in Darkness The red carpet was green at the Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park on Wednesday night, but to some guests it didn’t matter. The carpet led into a ball given by the Foundation Fighting Blindness , and some attendees were blind, or nearly so, a fact that some flaunted with style. James McNiel, who sits on the foundation’s board, flashed his mismatched cufflinks at us. “I did it to make a statement,” he said. Later, onstage, he said, “If you want to know if someone is visually impaired, check out their cufflinks and their socks, their plaids and their stripes.” Jody Kelly, a trustee, told us she relies on a neighbor’s advice to make sure nothing clashes. In her charcoal gown and glittering heels, accessorized with a collapsible cane, it was clear that she needed no help at all. At 8:05 p.m., the lights in the ballroom snapped off. Visually impaired waiters deftly served dinner to around 300 guests in darkness. At least it was supposed to be dark; star bursts of BlackBerry light shot through the room. “We’ve done this dinner in other cities,” Ms. Kelly said. “But no one cheats like they do in New York. They just can’t be disconnected for a minute.” After a half-hour of fumbling for steak and scalloped potatoes (only by those without impaired vision; Ms. Kelly and the others wielded their cutlery impeccably), the lights jumped back on, and the diners gasped as their eyes adjusted. “Welcome to our world,” Ms. Kelly said.

Perfumes and Fragrances
Coty Inc
Foundation Fighting Blindness
Awards Decorations and Honors
Berry Halle
de la Huerta Paz
Lakshmi Padma
Blige Mary J
Rogers Desiree
Zion Sidney


After 26 Days at Sea, Missing Father and Daughter Arrive in Australia

Abstract: SYDNEY, Australia — A father and his 6-year-old daughter have arrived in Australia unharmed after 26 days at sea in a tiny catamaran. The pair, who had departed from New Zealand’s North Island, had been the subject of an air and sea search by the New Zealand authorities since Dec. 26. The New Zealand police said the man, Alan Langdon, contravened a family court order not to take the child from New Zealand. Mr. Langdon, 49, and his daughter, Que, left Kawhia Harbor on North Island on Dec. 17. His plan was to sail north to the Bay of Islands, also on the North Island, for Christmas, according to the New Zealand police. Col Chapman, a child recovery agent, said he was employed by Que’s mother, Ariane Wyler, to find her around Dec. 26. He said the couple are estranged. Mr. Langdon and Que arrived in the southern coastal port of Ulladulla in New South Wales, more than 1,300 miles from Kawhia Harbor, on Wednesday. In an interview with ABC television news , Mr. Langdon said a broken rudder on the 21-foot-long boat had forced him to dramatically alter his course, and he ended up on Australia’s east coast. Ulladulla, a tiny coastal village, is about 140 miles south of Sydney. “We didn’t have much fine weather, which I was hoping for to repair the rudder,” said Mr. Langdon, who was described by the police as an experienced sailor. “Once we were in a position with no rudder, we did not have as many options.” He said that the boat was pushed south, and away from New Zealand, and that he did not realize sailing with one rudder was going to be so difficult. Mr. Langdon said that the pair had fresh water and that Que was safe. “New Zealand police are carefully considering the circumstances and information relating to the arrival of Alan Langdon and his daughter,” the New Zealand police said in a statement.


Rep. Michael Grimm Pleads Guilty but Says He Won’t Resign

Abstract: Staten Islanders can’t say they didn’t see this one coming. Michael G. Grimm , the Republican representing New York’s 11th Congressional District, who carried the burden of a 20-count federal indictment to a landslide re-election in November, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a single felony charge of tax fraud. Representative Grimm said he had no intention of stepping down. “Absolutely not,” he said. He sounded equally resolute when he declared himself “guilty” to Judge Pamela K. Chen of United States District Court in Brooklyn, who accepted his plea and noted that it included his signing of a “statement of facts” in which he acknowledged committing perjury, hiring illegal immigrants and committing wire fraud. Judge Chen then commanded Mr. Grimm to return to court for sentencing on June 8. Federal prosecutors, who along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Internal Revenue Service have investigated Mr. Grimm for years, are seeking a penalty of at least two years in prison. His lawyers, some of whom joined the proceedings via conference call from Florida, are asking for a more lenient sentence and will almost certainly recommend probation. Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who is President Obama’s nominee to replace Eric H. Holder Jr. as attorney general, said in a statement, “With today’s guilty plea, Michael Grimm has admitted that while running his business he chose lies and deception over honest dealings with federal and state authorities as well as his own employees.” None of which, Mr. Grimm suggested after entering his plea, should endanger his representation in Congress of all of Staten Island and a sliver of Brooklyn. Standing outside the courthouse under a tree still dripping from an earlier rainfall, Mr. Grimm faced a clamoring horseshoe of reporters and cameramen — including the NY1 correspondent he had once threatened to throw off a Capitol balcony. A protester held a sign, reading, “Grimminal.” “As I said before, as long as I am able to serve I’m going to serve,” Mr. Grimm said. “As of right now, I’m still in a capacity to serve, and that’s exactly what I plan on doing.” House rules, however, dictate that a member convicted of a crime for which a prison sentence of two years or more may be imposed should not participate in committee meetings or vote on the floor until winning re-election. The stricture could leave Mr. Grimm’s district effectively disenfranchised until 2016. Still, Mr. Grimm has shown an uncanny ability to come back . His new status as a felon presents a new headache for the House speaker, John A. Boehner, and the Republican leadership, with whom Mr. Grimm said he had had “private discussions.” Mr. Grimm has, in fact, not yet spoken with Mr. Boehner, according to an aide to the speaker. The aide also said that, with members of the leadership scattered around the country for the holiday break, there was no intention to make a decision about what actions to take regarding Mr. Grimm until after the New Year. The House could vote to censure, reprimand or, with the approval of two-thirds of its members, expel a felon from its ranks. One Republican congressman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a frank assessment of a colleague, said that there was a feeling that Mr. Grimm would eventually resign, and that he was holding onto his seat as a bargaining chip against further investigation. The pressure from leadership, the isolation in Congress and the potential inability even to cast a vote would force Mr. Grimm’s hand, he said. But Mr. Grimm seemed fonder of his job than ever. Wearing a long blue overcoat, he read from a script, printed in large type, that could be described as kind of contrite. Image Representative Michael G. Grimm, a Republican from Staten Island, on Tuesday. Credit John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times He sought to both accept responsibility for and shrug off as trivial his failure to accurately report revenues when he owned a Manhattan restaurant called Healthalicious. “It’s true I had, for example, delivery boys that were paid off the books,” Mr. Grimm said, though people often do the same with their “nannies” and “landscapers.” Still, he added, “It doesn’t make it right, and I’m taking full responsibility for my actions.” He then redefined “full.” “First of all, all of these, everything we’re talking about here, happened before I was in Congress,” he said — a sentence that was not accurate. The statement of facts he signed included an admission that he committed perjury in a deposition in 2013; he entered Congress in 2011. Mr. Grimm then argued that many of his constituents evidently did not think the crime was a big deal. “Just last month I had an unprecedented, overwhelming victory which shows that support,” he said. He did not mention that he defeated an underwhelming Democratic challenger, Domenic M. Recchia Jr ., to win a third term. Mr. Grimm also sought to depict his guilty plea as the end of what he called a “terrible chapter in my life.” But federal prosecutors have shown no indication that they have given up on other investigations of Mr. Grimm, potentially including his possible campaign-finance abuses . Mr. Grimm arrived in court after 1 p.m., adjusting his striped tie and taking a seat at a wooden table, flanked by his lawyers. Two freelance sketch artists, Shirley and Andrea Shepard , a mother-and-daughter team, asked him to sign their earlier renditions of his court appearances. “Where do you want me to sign it?” Mr. Grimm said amiably. A former Marine and F.B.I. agent, he was exceedingly courteous and rose every time Judge Chen asked him a question. “You may remain seated and just use the microphone,” she told him. He stated his full name as “Michael G-for-Gerard Grimm”; gave his age, 44; and swore that he was of sane and sober mind. Then he listened, his face motionless, as the judge read aloud the charge that in September 2010 he knowingly and willfully filed a false tax return. “Do you understand all of the possible consequences of your guilty plea?” she asked. “I do, Your Honor,” he said. Judge Chen warned that she could “depart upward or downward” from sentencing guidelines. Mr. Grimm said he understood, and also acknowledged that he had forfeited his right to appeal any sentence less than 33 months in jail. The hearing ended, and roughly 50 onlookers left the gallery. Mr. Grimm lingered, shuffling the printed speech he was about to give and talking to one of his lawyers, who suggested that, when it came to the congressman’s nontax matters, “the less we say, the better.” Mr. Grimm then thanked the judge’s clerks, before crossing the room to the sketch artists who had been busily capturing his image. “You guys are so talented!” he said.

Michael G Grimm
Tax Evasion
US
NYC
Staten Island


Jamie Davies Is Dead at 73; Made Sparkling Wine

Abstract: Jamie Davies, who with her husband, Jack, founded Schramsberg Vineyards and pioneered the production of fine sparkling wine in California, died Feb. 12 at her home in Calistoga, Calif. She was 73. The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said her son Hugh Davies, the chief executive of Schramsberg. The Davieses were living in Los Angeles in the early 1960s when they decided they wanted to give up city life and become grape growers and winemakers. They searched Napa Valley for hillside property before settling in 1965 on an abandoned vineyard on Diamond Mountain, which came with a crumbling gingerbread house and a network of caves that had been dug into the hillside by Chinese railroad workers in the 1870s and ’80s. California produced a lot of sparkling wine in the 1960s, but little of it was any good, and none of it was made in the style of real Champagne. But the Davieses were ambitious and determined to make sparkling wine that could stand among the world’s best. They began to restore the house, rid the caves of bats and replant the vineyard with the grapes of Champagne: pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot meunier. They made their first wine with purchased grapes, a 1965 blancs de blanc. They called it Schramsberg after Jacob Schram, who bought the land in 1862, built the house and planted 100 acres of grapes. The Schramsberg sparkling wines won early recognition and by 1972 were being served in the White House at state dinners. “She was the romantic, creative force behind the whole endeavor,” Hugh Davies said. “My dad, in the classic sense, was the planner. His training was more business management, figuring out how to execute the vision. It was very much a team effort.” Jamie Peterman was born Dec. 8, 1934, in Pasadena, Calif., and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree. Schramsberg nowadays has plenty of competition. California sparkling wine producers abound, but Schramsberg remains among the elite, though the grapes no longer come from the original vineyard. The family eventually realized that the warm growing season on Diamond Mountain was unsuited for grapes destined for sparkling wine, which are best when barely ripe. Today, Schramsberg gets grapes for its sparkling wines from dozens of other vineyards in Northern California. The estate vineyard was replanted with Bordeaux varieties, which go into a cabernet sauvignon, released under the J. Davies label. Its first vintage was 2001. Jack Davies died in 1998, but Jamie Davies continued to preside over the vineyard as chairwoman. In addition to Hugh Davies, Ms. Davies is survived by two other sons, William and John. Last year John Davies, who works for an investment firm in Moscow, sued his mother, contending that she had manipulated the family trust to deprive him of his share of the Schramsberg business while favoring Hugh. Part of the lawsuit was thrown out, and the remainder is unresolved.

Davies Jamie
Schramsberg Vineyards
Wines
Deaths (Obituaries)


Quenneville Rises to Second in Wins, With 783

Abstract: Jonathan Toews scored, Corey Crawford made 39 saves, and the Chicago Blackhawks beat the Canadiens, 2-1, on Thursday night in Montreal to extend their winning streak to nine games and move Coach Joel Quenneville into sole possession of second place in career N.H.L. victories. Quenneville has 783 wins, one more than Al Arbour but still well behind the leader, Scotty Bowman, who has 1,244. The Blackhawks have not lost since Dec. 27 against Carolina and will try to make it 10 straight Friday night in Toronto. Ryan Garbutt also scored in the first period. Paul Byron scored for the Canadiens, who fell to 5-14 since Dec. 1 despite a spirited effort against Chicago. Montreal outshot Chicago, 40-33, and both Crawford and the Canadiens’ Mike Condon had strong performances in net. AVALANCHE 3, DEVILS 0 Calvin Pickard stopped 27 shots for his first N.H.L. shutout, Matt Duchene scored 51 seconds in, and Colorado won at home against the Devils. Defenseman Tyson Barrie added a short-handed goal, and Carl Soderberg an empty-netter to help the Avalanche improve to 9-0-1 in their last 10 games against the Devils, whose last win at Pepsi Center was on March 15, 2008. Pickard started give rest to the regular starter, Semyon Varlamov, who has allowed 14 goals over his last four games. CAPITALS 4, CANUCKS 1 On Evgeny Kuznetsov had two goals and an assist, and Washington defeated Vancouver for its fifth straight victory. Kuznetsov scored his 14th and 15th goals of the season and set up Tom Wilson, and the Capitals also got a rare goal from defenseman Karl Alzner and 29 saves from Braden Holtby. Holtby passed Don Beaupre for second in franchise history with 129 wins. Ryan Miller, who was returning from an eight-game absence with a groin strain, allowed three goals on 39 shots. Radim Vrbata scored for the Canucks, who were beginning a six-game trip against Eastern Conference opponents. HURRICANES 4, BLUES 1 Jeff Skinner had a goal and an assist, and Carolina won at St. Louis to extend its winning streak to four games, its season high. Brett Pesce, Brock McGinn and Riley Nash also scored, and Eddie Lack made 23 saves for Carolina. Jori Lehtera scored for St. Louis, but the Blues ended a two-game winning streak. Brian Elliott made 21 saves before being replaced in the third period by Jordan Binnington, who had three saves in his N.H.L. debut.

Ice hockey
Fines
Devils
Chicago Blackhawks
Montreal Canadiens


Palestinians End Torture of Hamas Prisoners

Abstract: NABLUS, West Bank (AP) — Palestinian security forces in the West Bank have stopped torturing Hamas prisoners, ending two years of systematic abuse, Hamas inmates said in jailhouse interviews. The change in practice, said to have taken effect in October, was confirmed by a West Bank Hamas leader, human rights activists and the Palestinian prime minister. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said the decision to halt any abuse was part of an effort to make sure a future state is built on the right foundations. Hamas legislators and human rights researchers said the worst behavior — prisoners beaten with clubs and cables; suspended from the ceiling while tied up in painful positions; and forced to stand for days — had ended. But they said they still received sporadic reports of prisoners being slapped or forced to stand for several hours during interrogations. And security forces often arrest Hamas activists and hold them for lengthy periods without charge. Mr. Fayyad confirmed a “dramatic change for the better” in West Bank prisons and said that 43 officers had been jailed, fired or demoted for abusing prisoners. In an interview, he denied that torture was ever official policy but acknowledged past “excesses” that he said stemmed from a flawed culture of revenge. He said interrogations could be done legally. “If that means we get less information, so be it,” he said. Palestinian security forces under President Mahmoud Abbas, dominated by supporters of his Fatah movement, have been clamping down on Hamas in the West Bank since June 2007, when Hamas wrested control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian leader. Since then, about 4,000 Hamas followers have been arrested in the West Bank, and 500 are in detention, according to Hamas. In Gaza, Hamas has rounded up hundreds of Fatah supporters, who have also complained of severe mistreatment. In the West Bank, persistent reports of abuse emerged in the past two years from prisons and interrogation centers. Since 2007, 8 detainees have died in jails in the West Bank and 15 in Gaza, human rights researchers say, though circumstances in some cases remain murky. The abuse was driven both by a desire to take revenge for the Gaza takeover and by fear that Hamas would seize control of the West Bank, said Salah Mousa, a human rights activist and former member of the Palestinian security forces. The worst accounts of abuse came from Jneid Prison, a barbed-wire-topped jumble of low buildings in Nablus, a former Hamas stronghold. Last week, inmates there, speaking while wardens were out of earshot, described past abuse and said that it had largely stopped. Khaled Susah, 48, at Jneid for the past 14 months, pulled back a sleeve to show a swollen right wrist, which he said was the result of being repeatedly handcuffed and strung up from the ceiling during 80 days of interrogation at the start of his detention. “They were dealing with us like sheep in a slaughterhouse,” Mr. Susah said.

Hamas
Palestinian Authority
Torture
Freedom and Human Rights


Daily Reminder of Texas State Budget Cuts

Abstract: Ross Ramsey, the executive editor of The Texas Tribune, writes a column for The Tribune. If you don’t like Texas, this gravel road idea should make you deliriously happy. The state’s highway department is scratching around for money, and one of their stopgaps is to convert some paved state roads, damaged by truck activity related to the current drilling boom, back to gravel. Economic development types in New York, California, Missouri and Maryland — where Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, has made very public overtures to companies that might be persuaded to move to Texas — ought to be carrying bags of gravel to their pitch meetings.The latest transportation idea in Texas illustrates the troubles of meeting the demands of growth and plain old wear and tear in a state where voters think government already costs too much. The people at the Transportation Department, like their counterparts in other state agencies, estimate how much money they need. They give the numbers to the budget writers, defend them in hearings and find out over the course of a legislative session how much money they will have over the next two years. Lawmakers are in a self-made box, stuck between the promises they and their predecessors have made about government programs and services and their own promises to hold the line on spending. Spoiler alert: they can’t afford to do the things they have promised to provide without crossing the voters in other ways — by raising taxes or fees or borrowing gobs of money. Image Credit Eddie Seal for The Texas Tribune The road folks haul around an awesome talking point that probably would be unmentionable at any other state agency: the cost of maintaining the current level of congestion in the state. The engineers and other number-crunchers are telling state officeholders that they can increase spending on roads or they can go home and tell their voters that traffic is going to get worse. The political message is a real mess. The candidates end up telling their voters that it will cost $4 billion to $5 billion a year just to keep traffic as tangled up as it is right now. No improvements ahead, but no backsliding, either. Unless, of course, the money isn’t available. Then you have to replace some of your pavement with cheaper road materials. Gravel, for instance. Transportation is not the state’s only underfinanced program, but it is in a unique position when talking about the consequences of its budget. Health and human services agencies don’t get to talk about how many more people will get sick or die if their financing is cut. It is somewhere between difficult and impossible to tie public school performance to state financing, if only because so many other variables muddle the numbers. Regulatory agencies don’t wave around projections on how many industrial plants won’t be inspected and what the consequences might be. You have to admire the honesty of the transportation people. This is what you spend, and that is what you get. Cut spending, cut expectations. Easy as pie. They seem to be in one of the rare areas of state government where the people involved are allowed to say right out loud what a budget decision will actually mean. Others have to say they will do more with less, a way of saying that they either didn’t need as much money to do the job as they first thought or that they hope the corners they cut to save money won’t cause anyone any trouble — or at least any trouble that will get noticed by voters and politicians. Roads have another characteristic not shared by most state services: they are visible, and we all use them. Most Texans are not involved with public schools on a daily basis, or with the health and human services safety net, or even with regulators or state police. But the roads are right there, every day, in all their glory, with potholes and construction projects and traffic jams growing worse as more people, and more cars, flow into Texas. That visibility makes a difference. Texas residents can see the quality of one of the government services they pay for. In some places, they’re finding gravel where there once was pavement. Other state programs have their equivalents of the gravel roads. They’re just not allowed to talk about it.

Texas
Budget
Transportation
Rick Perry
Roads and Traffic


Flash Market Crash Is Still Under Investigation

Abstract: It sounds like “Wall Street” meets “The X-Files.” The stock market mysteriously plunges 600 points — and then, more mysteriously, recovers within minutes. Over the next few weeks, analysts at Nanex, an obscure data company in the suburbs of Chicago, examine trading charts from the day and are stunned to find some oddly compelling shapes and patterns in the data. To the Nanex analysts, these are crop circles of the financial kind, containing clues to the mystery of what happened in the markets on May 6 and what might have caused the still-unexplained flash crash. The charts — which are visual representations of bid prices, ask prices, order sizes and other trading activity — are inspiring many theories on Wall Street, some of them based on hard-nosed financial analysis and others of the black-helicopter variety. To some people, like Eric Scott Hunsader, the founder of Nanex, they suggest that the specialized computers responsible for so much of today’s stock trading simply overloaded the exchanges. He and others are tempted to go further, hypothesizing that the bizarre patterns might have been the result of a Wall Street version of cyberwarfare. They say high-speed traders could have been trying to outwit one another’s computers with blizzards of buy and sell orders that were never meant to be filled. These superfast traders might even have been trying to clog exchanges to outflank other investors. Jeffrey Donovan, a Nanex developer, first noticed the apparent anomalies. “Something is not right,” he said as he reviewed the charts. Mr. Donovan, a man with a runaway chuckle who works alone out of the company’s office in Santa Barbara, Calif., poses a theory that a small group of high-frequency traders was trying to introduce delays into the nation’s fractured stock-market trading system to profit at the expense of others. Clogging exchanges or otherwise disrupting markets to gain an advantage may be illegal. Mr. Donovan indulges Wall Street’s increasing fascination with the charts by christening more of them each day, with names like Continental Crust, Broken Highway and Twilight. There is also the Bandsaw, a zigzag pattern of prices that appear and then abruptly vanish. There is the Knife, a sharp, narrowing price sequence. There is the Crystal Triangle, the Bar Code, the Mountain Range, each one stranger than the last. The truth of what happened on May 6 could be hiding somewhere in those mysterious configurations. Or it may lie somewhere else entirely. But 15 weeks later, the authorities are still looking for it. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission plan to issue a final report on their findings in September. A preliminary report in May blamed a confluence of factors, including worries over rising sovereign debt and a lack of marketwide circuit breakers, but the new report is expected to go further. For now, this much is known: The markets were already down and on edge that morning as Europe’s debt crisis seemed to be spiraling out of control. As markets fell, a mutual fund manager in Kansas made a big sale of stock futures. The rout, some say, was worsened by a lack of coordination among the dozens of exchanges that make up the modern-day stock market. As the New York Stock Exchange slowed trading, rival exchanges that were more automated allowed the selling to continue. “It’s just madness to say we don’t know what caused it. We do,” said Steve Wunsch, a market structure consultant. “The crash was an inevitable consequence of creating multiple market centers.” That is one explanation. Others have pointed to the high-frequency traders, who use powerful computers to transmit millions of orders at lightning speed. Some of these traders, who now dominate the stock market, appear to have fled the market as prices went haywire. Then their computer programs might have dragged down exchange-traded funds , popular investment vehicles that fell sharply during the crash, said Thomas Peterffy, chief executive of Interactive Brokers. “Computerized arbitrage kicked in,” he said. But if Nanex’s theory is to be believed, computer algorithms might have been at work as well, knowingly or unknowingly wreaking havoc and creating data crop circles. “There is a credible allegation that there is seriously abusive practices going on,” said James J. Angel, a financial market analyst specialist at Georgetown University, “to the extent that somebody is firing in a very high frequency of orders for no good economic reason, basically because they are trying to slow everybody else down.” At a Washington hearing on the flash crash last week, Kevin Cronin, director of global equity trading at Invesco, a big fund manager, warned about “improper or manipulative activity” in the stock market. Traders at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto said they had also identified a “data deluge” a few minutes before the crash. They said people in the markets were poring over Nanex’s colorful charts. “Whether they are intentional or not, the regulators should be looking into it closely,” said Doug Clark, managing director of BMO Capital Markets. In an Aug. 5 letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Senator Edward E. Kaufman, Democrat of Delaware, warned about a “micro-arms race that is being waged in our public marketplace by high-frequency traders and others.” He said that the traders were moving so fast that regulators could not keep up. The idea that shadowy computer masterminds were trying to disrupt the nation’s stock trading struck many people as ridiculous. Wall Street experts generally characterize it as a conspiracy theory with little basis in fact. But some of the patterns suggested that traders might have been testing their high-speed computers, perhaps to see how rivals would react. Or it may just be that the computers produced so much data so quickly that exchanges simply could not cope with the onslaught. “We live in a day when things are measured in milliseconds,” said Sang Lee of the Aite Group, a financial services consulting company. “It is meant to be a level playing field, but if you have better technology you will have the edge.” Back in Chicago, Mr. Hunsader of Nanex is still not sure what his crop circles mean. But that does not stop him from admiring them. “The patterns are quite beautiful,” he said. “We can’t see any economic reasons for what they are doing.”

High-Frequency and Flash Trading
Stocks and Bonds
Frauds and Swindling
Nanex


Indiana Races to Fight H.I.V. Surge Tied to Drug Abuse

Abstract: AUSTIN, Ind. — Jeanni McCarty, a nurse and native of this threadbare city of 4,200, hurried up and down Main Street in Saturday’s bright sun, handing out stacks of fliers to any business that would take them. They were announcing a hastily planned specialty clinic — FREE, they emphasized in red — that would provide H.I.V. treatment to anyone who needed it. Quite suddenly, a lot of people around here do. And the number keeps growing. More than 80 people in Scott County have tested positive for H.I.V. since December, mostly in the last few weeks. They range in age from 20 to 56, and health officials say almost all of them live in Austin, which sits along Interstate 65 about 80 miles south of Indianapolis, surrounded by rural space. The outbreak, the worst in Indiana’s history, stems largely from the intravenous use of the prescription painkiller Opana, which everyone from the police to pastors to the owner of the city’s sole grocery recognizes as a plague on one ragged neighborhood in particular. Gov. Mike Pence declared a public health emergency in the county on Thursday, and against his political beliefs, he also authorized a short-term needle-exchange program last week in hopes of stopping transmission of the virus through contaminated needles. Ms. McCarty and her boss, Dr. William Cooke, the city’s only physician, have been at the forefront of a whirlwind response effort. Dr. Cooke’s medical practice, Foundations Family Medicine, will house the new clinic, with infectious disease specialists from Indiana University coming once a week along with mental health counselors and addiction specialists. The weekly clinic will open on Tuesday, with six of Dr. Cooke’s 15 exam rooms devoted to it. Teams of state workers from Indianapolis will be on hand to sign up uninsured patients for Medicaid , which Governor Pence, a Republican, recently expanded under the Affordable Care Act to cover most low-income adults. The questions now are how many of the newly infected will show up — and whether the effort, which is being led by the Indiana State Department of Health and involves the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will keep the number of new cases from spiraling further. “I really, truly don’t know what to expect,” an exhausted Ms. McCarty said after distributing the fliers. “Even if only a couple come, that’s more than we had before and then maybe they can talk others into it.” Several worried people asked for H.I.V. tests on the spot. The outbreak here was detected because Indiana requires newly confirmed cases of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, to be reported to state health officials. It is jolting not only because national rates of H.I.V. diagnosis have remained stable or even decreased in recent years, but because the virus is a largely urban problem. Only about 6 percent of new diagnoses in 2013 were in counties with fewer than 50,000 people, according to the C.D.C. One of the only other rural outbreaks to draw national attention took place in Belle Glade, Fla., where in 1985 researchers found an infection rate higher than New York City’s or San Francisco’s. Image Dr. William Cooke, the only physician in Austin, Ind., has been at the forefront of organizing a whirlwind response effort to an H.I.V. outbreak. Credit William DeShazer for The New York Times There is reason for urgency. The transmission rate has been about 80 percent, Dr. Cooke said, meaning that eight in 10 of those who have acknowledged sharing needles with someone who has the virus have tested positive. That indicates “a very high viral load in the community right now,” he said. Health officials from nearby Clark County, which handles H.I.V. testing in 11 counties, have been going out since February to test people at their homes, using oral swabs that deliver preliminary results in 20 minutes and asking those who are tested to disclose any needle-sharing and sexual partners. For the last week, a team from the C.D.C. has been helping with that work; a spokeswoman for the agency said it was not aware of any other jurisdiction’s ever declaring a public health emergency because of an H.I.V. outbreak. For those who are H.I.V. positive, case managers have been assigned on the spot to help arrange counseling and treatment. But most have not started treatment yet, partly because the closest H.I.V. clinic is in Louisville, Ky., about 35 miles south of here. “Our first three, we had appointments for them at the Louisville clinic, and to a person, none of them showed up,” said Dr. Kevin Burke, the public health officer who oversees H.I.V. testing in the region. “That may be fatalism. But at the same time, this population doesn’t have reliable transportation.” Some will not be coming to the clinic for now because they are in the Scott County jail. Sheriff Dan McClain said that 11 of his 120 inmates had tested positive so far, but that they had not started treatment because the cost is so high — upward of $20,000 a year per patient, according to Dr. Burke — and he wants a guarantee of financing first. “That’s a discussion I’ve had with the governor,” Sheriff McClain said. “Once we get that support, we’ll screen whoever comes through our doors, medicate them, educate them and eventually refer them over to Dr. Cooke.” For now, only inmates identified as having shared needles or having had sex with someone who has tested positive are being screened, he said. “Most of them take it no differently from somebody telling them they have a cold,” the sheriff added. “They’re resigned to the addiction.” That is where the needle exchange may prove crucial to the containment effort, he and others said, although many believe that 30 days — the length of time Governor Pence authorized it for — will not be nearly long enough. The clinic will also help those who are willing get into detoxification and addiction treatment programs, Dr. Cooke said. Image Donald Spicer, Austin's longtime police chief, said the city had been dealing with a growing drug problem for years. Credit William DeShazer for The New York Times To understand how this could happen in Austin, or perhaps any small, poor, insular American town, is to take a drive with Donald Spicer, the city’s longtime police chief, through a neighborhood known as the North End. There, people in their 20s wandered the streets one afternoon last week, alone or in small groups, often averting their eyes as the police cruiser passed. “No trespassing” signs were posted in most yards, and many were strewn with ragtag furniture and trash. As many as two-thirds of the modest homes are rented out, Chief Spicer said, and they are often neglected to the point of crumbling. “We have houses I like to refer to as shooting galleries, where they all lay around and get high all day,” he said. Addicts have long crushed narcotic pills and combined them with liquid to inject directly into their veins. And while the makers of Opana reformulated it in 2012 to make it harder to abuse, many addicts still manage to do so. Tammy Breeding, 41, who lives in the neighborhood, put a handwritten sign on her lawn that says, “No loitering or prostituting is allowed in front of these premises.” She said that she had taken several hundred pictures “of all this stuff going on” since moving back to Austin last summer, and that she had gotten a license to carry a handgun because she feared for her young children. “I do nothing but call into the tip line,” she said. Chief Spicer said his force of seven had made about 60 arrests this year, almost all of them drug-related. I-65, which runs from Mobile, Ala., to Gary, Ind., is a conduit for illegally trafficked prescription drugs that make their way here, he said. People also travel to Louisville for drugs, he said. Chief Spicer and Sheriff McClain said that local doctors had been their partners in trying to solve the problem and had not been lax prescribers, but that people with valid prescriptions sometimes sold Opana for at least $30 a pill. The jobs situation, though bleak, could be worse. Austin is home to a canning plant, a Pepsi plant and an auto-parts plant. It is close enough to Louisville, a relatively thriving city of 600,000, for people to commute. But unemployment remains high, perhaps partly because of addiction problems that go back a generation, Chief Spicer said. In retrospect, an outbreak of H.I.V. was inevitable, Dr. Cooke said. The county has seen a torrent of hepatitis C cases in recent years, he said, and a number of overdoses and cases of endocarditis, an infection of the lining of the heart that can be caused by injecting drugs with dirty needles. “We had all the ingredients in place for this,” he said on Saturday morning, after finishing an overnight shift in the hospital emergency room in Scottsburg, about five miles away. “I suspect a lot of rural America does.” As the response effort begins, the organizers are also looking to quell fear in the community. An elderly patient told a physician assistant at Dr. Cooke’s practice that she feared catching H.I.V. from pushing a shopping cart. Ms. McCarty said the practice had received several threats after announcing its plans to house an H.I.V. clinic. Anxiety over the outbreak even affected the Easter egg hunt at a local park: A group of volunteers scoured it for needles on Saturday before hiding the candy-filled eggs. Money remains a question mark — the governor has not said how much will be attached to the 30-day public health emergency, or to continuing treatment for those affected. “My biggest fear with this is they come in like a hurricane, and then after 30 days, they leave us high and dry,” Chief Spicer said. “Don’t leave us. Stay with us until we get past this thing.”

AIDS,HIV
Mike Pence
Indiana
Opioids
Hypodermic Needles and Syringes
Drug Abuse
Austin


Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them

Abstract: THE World Wide Web is awash in digital video, but too often we can’t find the videos we want or browse for what we might like. That’s a loss, because if we could search for Internet videos, they might become the content of a global television station, just as the Web’s hypertext, once it was organized and tamed by search, became the stuff of a universal library. What we need, says Suranga Chandratillake, a co-founder of Blinkx , a start-up in San Francisco, is a remote control for the Web’s videos, a kind of electronic TV Guide. He’s got just the thing. Videos have multiplied on social networks like YouTube and MySpace as well as on news and entertainment sites because of the emergence of video-sharing, user-generated video, free digital storage and broadband and Wi-Fi networks. Today, owing to the proliferation of large video files, video accounts for more than 60 percent of the traffic on the Internet, according to CacheLogic, a company in Cambridge, England, that sells “media delivery systems” to Internet service providers. “I imagine that within two years it will be 98 percent,” says Hui Zhang, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But search engines — like Google — that were developed during the first, text-based era of the Web do a poor job of searching through this rising sea of video. That’s because they don’t search the videos themselves, but rather things associated with them, including the text of a Web page, the “metadata” that computers use to display or understand pages (like keywords or the semantic tags that describe different content), video-file suffixes (like .mpeg or .avi), or captions or subtitles. None of these methods are very satisfactory. Many Internet videos have little or obscure text, and clips often have no or misleading metadata. Modern video players do not reveal video-file suffixes, and captions and subtitles imperfectly capture the spoken words in a video. The difficulties of knowing which videos are where challenge the growth of Internet video. “If there are going to be hundreds of millions of hours of video content online,” Mr. Chandratillake said, “we need to have an efficient, scalable way to search through it.” Mr. Chandratillake’s history is unusual for Silicon Valley. He was born in Sri Lanka in 1977 and divided his childhood among England and various countries in South Asia where his father, a professor of nuclear chemistry, worked. Then he studied distributed processing at Kings College, Cambridge, before becoming the chief technology officer of Autonomy, a company that specializes in something called “meaning-based computing.” This background possibly suggested an original approach to search when he founded Blinkx in 2004. Mr. Chandratillake’s solution does not reject any existing video search methods, but supplements them by transcribing the words uttered in a video, and searching them. This is an achievement: effective speech recognition is a “nontrivial problem,” in the language of computer scientists. Blinkx’s speech-recognition technology employs neural networks and machine learning using “hidden Markov models,” a method of statistical analysis in which the hidden characteristics of a thing are guessed from what is known. Mr. Chandratillake calls this method “contextual search,” and he says it works so well because the meanings of the sounds of speech are unclear when considered by themselves. “Consider the phrase ‘recognize speech,’ ” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Its phonemes (‘rek-un-nise-peach’) are incredibly similar to those contained in the phrase ‘wreck a nice beach.’ Our systems use our knowledge of which words typically appear in which contexts and everything we know about a given clip to improve our ability to guess what each phoneme actually means.” While neural networks and machine learning are not new, their application to video search is unique to Blinkx, and very clever. How good is blinkx search? When you visit blinkx.com , the first thing you see is the “video wall,” 25 small, shimmering tiles, each displaying a popular video clip, indexed that hour. (The wall provides a powerful sense of the collective mind of our popular culture.) To experiment, I typed in the phrase “Chronic — WHAT — cles of Narnia,” the shout-out in the “Saturday Night Live” digital short called “Lazy Sunday,” a rap parody of two New York slackers. I wanted a phrase that a Web surfer would know more readily than the real title of a video. I also knew that “Lazy Sunday,” for all its cultish fame, would be hard to find: NBC Universal had freely released the rap parody on the Internet after broadcasting it in December 2005, but last month the company insisted that YouTube pull it. Nonetheless, Blinkx found eight instances of “Lazy Sunday” when I tried it last week. By contrast, Google Video found none. Typing “Lazy Sunday” into the keyword search box on Google’s home page produced hundreds of results — but many were commentaries about the video, and many had nothing to do with “Saturday Night Live.” Blinkx, which has raised more than $12.5 million from angel investors, earns money by licensing its technology to other sites. Although Blinkx has more than 80 such partners, including Microsoft, Playboy, Reuters and MTV, it rarely discloses the terms of its deals. Mr. Chandratillake said some licensees pay Blilnkx directly while others share revenue and some do both. Blinkx has revealed the details of one deal: ITN, a British news broadcaster, will share the revenue generated by advertising inserted in its videos. For all of Blinkx’s level coolness, there are at least three obvious obstacles to the company’s success. First, because Google Video is not much good now doesn’t mean it won’t get better: after all, when Blinkx was founded, it first applied machine learning to searching the desktops of personal computers, a project that was abandoned when Google and Microsoft released their own desktop search bars. Second, even if Google improbably fails to develop effective video search, the field will still be crowded: TruVeo, Flurl, ClipBlast and other start-ups are all at work on different subsets of the market. Finally, Blinkx might not go far enough in searching the content of videos: the company searches their sounds, but not their images. THIS last objection is the most serious. “Because Blinkx emphasizes speech recognition, there is a great amount of multimedia content that they cannot address, like photographs,” said John R. Smith, a senior manager in the intelligent information management department of I.B.M.’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y. “But what’s worse, speech is not a very good indicator of what’s being shown in a video.” Mr. Smith says he has been working on an experimental video search engine called Marvel, which also uses machine learning but organizes visual information as well as speech. Still, at least for now, Blinkx leads video search: it searches more than seven million hours of video and is the largest repository of digital video on the Web. “Search is our navigation, our interface to the Internet,” said John Battelle, chief of Federated Media Publishing and author of “The Search,” an account of the rise of Google. With Blinkx, we may have such an interface for digital video, and be a little closer to Mr. Chandratillake’s vision of a universal remote control.

Blinkx
Recordings and Downloads (Video)
Computers and the Internet
Remote Control Systems


Theodore Roosevelt’s Elephant

Abstract: Q. The F.Y.I. column last Sunday mentioned several small animal specimens at the American Museum of Natural History that were collected by Theodore Roosevelt . Does the museum display any big game that Roosevelt shot? A. Yes, although Roosevelt’s name does not appear on the display. One of the museum’s most spectacular exhibits, the group of eight elephants in the center of the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, includes an elephant shot by Roosevelt in 1909 during his African expedition, on which he set out almost as soon as he had left the White House. In the book “ Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History ” (2006), Stephen C. Quinn, a senior project manager at the museum, writes that the naturalist Carl Akeley was hunting elephants for the museum in 1909 and joined with Roosevelt and his son Kermit, who were collecting for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The former president shot a cow and Kermit, its calf. They let Mr. Akeley, an expert in the creation of animal displays, take them back to New York, where he mounted them as part of the original group of four elephants. Four others were mounted in 1934. Roosevelt’s African expedition brought back to the Smithsonian 5,013 mammals, 4,453 birds, and 2,322 reptiles and amphibians, according to “Theodore Roosevelt the Naturalist” by Paul R. Cutright (1956).

Elephants
American Museum of Natural History
Roosevelt Theodore
Hunting and Trapping