Japan’s Ruling Party Suffers Setback

Abstract: TOKYO — Japan ’s governing Democratic Party suffered a stinging setback in midterm elections on Sunday that showed growing voter disappointment with the party’s apparent inability to deliver on promises to revamp the country’s sclerotic postwar order. The election, for seats in the Upper House, was widely seen as a referendum on the nine-month-old leadership of the Democrats, who won a historic election victory last year over the long-governing Liberal Democrats, but then got mired in money scandals and a dispute over an American airbase. With most districts reporting final results, the Democrats trailed the opposition Liberal Democrats, failing to win enough of the 121 contested seats to gain a controlling majority in the chamber. “No one expected it to be as bad as this,” said Naoko Taniguchi, a professor of political sociology at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. “Voters see a leadership crisis.” The election was another big blow to the party after the sudden resignation last month of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who faced deepening criticism over his indecisive leadership. The Democrats are not in danger of losing control of the government, since they have a comfortable majority in the more powerful Lower House. But their failure to control the Upper House could result in a split Parliament, making the Democrats’ promises to strengthen social welfare and assert more control over the nation’s powerful bureaucracy far more difficult to achieve. Analysts said the vote showed growing doubts about the party’s ability to end the prolonged economic stagnation in Japan, once the powerhouse of Asia. They credited the Liberal Democrats’ apparently strong showing after months of disarray to its still formidable local vote-gathering ability, though the gains also reflected a protest vote against the Democrats. Opinion polls had predicted a tough race for the Democrats, who suffered as Mr. Hatoyama’s popularity plummeted. The party then voted in a new prime minister, Naoto Kan ; his approval ratings also fell after he proposed an increase of the national consumption tax only to waffle about it later, raising questions about his leadership skills. On Sunday, Mr. Kan took responsibility for the election setback but said he would stay on as prime minister. “My insufficient explanation was a big reason in this big election defeat,” Mr. Kan said at a news conference. The Democrats appeared to have won 44 of the 121 contested seats, far below their previous total of 54 and much less than the 60 seats needed to claim a majority in the Upper House, according to N.H.K., Japan’s national broadcaster. N.H.K. used actual vote tallies and its own projections of contested races. The Liberal Democratic Party, or L.D.P., appeared to have secured 51 seats, with the rest going to smaller parties. Final results were available for about two-thirds of the races. The rest were expected on Monday. Without a majority in the Upper House, the Democrats may be forced to seek a coalition partner. One possibility was a grand coalition with the Liberal Democrats, whose election platform was very similar to the Democrats’, including the call for a consumption tax increase. Failure to form a coalition could result in renewed political paralysis, and possibly pressure to dissolve Parliament and call new elections, political experts said. But a Democratic official said Sunday that the party might instead ask opposition parties to cooperate on a policy-by-policy basis. A likely candidate is the oddly named Your Party, a new party advocating small-government policies that emerged as a distant third on Sunday with 10 seats. Voters casting ballots at a fire station in Yokohama, a city outside Tokyo, agreed that the Democrats had stumbled since taking office. But they were divided on whether to support them. Mineko Tokumasu, 79, a tobacco shop owner, said the party should be given a reprieve. “I think it’s too early to judge the Democratic Party,” she said. “You cannot change something like the bureaucracy in just nine months.” Other voters said they were already fed up with the country’s new leaders. “I voted for the Democratic Party last time, but they did not live up to expectations,” said Yoshifumi Shimura, 56, a transportation industry worker who said he voted for the L.D.P. this time. The Democrats “just talked about ideals but lacked the skill to make them reality,” he said. In fact, many had expected this election to be an easy victory for the Democrats, who had seen a rebound in popularity after Mr. Kan, a plain-spoken former social activist, replaced the unpopular Mr. Hatoyama. But Mr. Kan saw his approval ratings quickly drop, first by proposing a tax increase before an election — a political no-no in almost any country — and then by seeming to vacillate when the proposal proved predictably unpopular among voters. The apparent flip-flopping appeared to raise broader doubts here about whether the inexperienced Democrats, an alliance of L.D.P. defectors and former socialists who once seemed permanently relegated to Japan’s opposition sidelines, could mold themselves into an effective governing party. Mr. Hatoyama’s and then Mr. Kan’s inconsistencies appeared to fan fears of what some political experts characterized as a leadership crisis in Japan, where voters are eager to find someone to point a way out of the country’s seemingly intractable decline. “Kan’s handling of the tax issue backfired by reminding people of the hapless Hatoyama,” said Jeff Kingston, a politics professor at Temple University in Tokyo. “People here are desperate for leadership, and for change.” Indeed, this election was already history-making in one regard: This was the first time since the mid-1950s that a party other than the L.D.P. had been the incumbent party going into a national election. During the campaign, Mr. Kan ran on a platform that called for the strengthening of Japan’s social safety net while using revenue from the tax increase to invest in job-creating industries like medical care and new energy. He seemed to avoid foreign policy issues after his predecessor was forced to resign over his mishandling of a dispute with Washington over relocating an American military base on Okinawa. The focus on economic issues appeared to be part of the party’s strategy to regain credibility with voters. “This election is about whether voters have confidence in the Democratic Party,” said Goshi Hosono, the party’s deputy secretary general.

Japan
Elections
Democratic Party (Japan)
Kan Naoto
Politics and Government
Liberal Democratic Party (Japan)


In Denver, Residents Lament the Closing of a Newspaper

Abstract: DENVER — The people of Denver woke up on Saturday for the first time in a one newspaper town. After 150 years, The Rocky Mountain News — The Rocky, as it was called — was closed for good by its owner, the E. W. Scripps Company . It was the mention of daily newspapers, not the strong black coffee, that curled lips among the breakfast crowd at Annie’s Café and Bar on Denver’s gritty East Colfax Avenue. The kitschy restaurant, decorated with an assortment of vintage lunch boxes and toys, had the one remaining large paper in town, The Denver Post, to offer customers. There were not many takers — and not because diners were carrying a torch for The Rocky. “I don’t know anyone my age who has time in the morning to read a newspaper,” said Chris Olivier, 37, a retail manager who said he gets his daily news from dozens of Web sites and a few niche publications circulating in specific Denver neighborhoods. “It’s sad to see such a huge part of our state’s history lost, but the market is moving, and newspapers haven’t moved with it. They don’t get the Web.” Two tables away, Paige Ramey, 27, a stay-at-home mother, lamented the Rocky’s closing. Though she, like Mr. Olivier, turns to the Internet for news and information, Mrs. Ramey said she had counted on both Denver papers — The Rocky is widely considered the more politically conservative of the two — to glean a more complete picture of her home state. Would she pay online subscription fees to receive local news? “Probably not,” she said. Dozens of The Rocky’s empty newspaper boxes dotted the drive east from Annie’s to a Starbucks in Denver’s growing Stapleton neighborhood, where residents enjoy abundant access to wireless networks. As the 230 members of the paper’s editorial staff hastily packed up their desks and discarded files that had been meticulously kept for decades on the state’s most powerful people and companies, Coloradans who had not bought a newspaper in years scoured news racks for The Rocky’s last edition. “I want one for sentimental value,” said Jason Perez, 36, a salesman, who said he had not subscribed to a Colorado newspaper in several years. “The Rocky has always been more integrated in the community than The Post. It’s the paper that talks straight to you. The Post is the more academic and aloof observer.” Chatting with neighbors at the Stapleton Starbucks, Terrance D. Carroll, a Democrat who is the speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives, said he hated that Denver would not have two fiercely competing big dailies — even if The Rocky’s politics rarely squared with his. “I’m afraid of the echo chambers that are emerging because more people are choosing to get their news only from sources that reinforce what they want to believe,” he said. Nearby, Linda Maier, 61, an administrative assistant at Denver Water, dived eagerly into The Post’s sports section as she has nearly every day for more than 25 years. The Rocky’s passing was unfortunate, Ms. Maier said — particularly because she thinks one of its reporters, Jerd Smith, did an outstanding job of explaining Colorado’s continuing water woes and keeping the local authorities honest. “She really knows her stuff and wrote things people didn’t always want to hear,” Ms. Maier said. “But they were the things that needed to be said. “I hope she finds another way to tell those stories because I’m afraid they won’t be told without her.” A small group of Rocky reporters who huddled one last time in the Denver Newspaper Agency’s building on Friday wondered about the absence of reporting, too, as their readers fled to the Web. “They want the amount of print you would find on a cereal box, which is what you get online,” said Mike Pearson, 49, a features writer and editor for The Rocky for 21 years. “They want headlines only and graphs that summarize everything without going into a lot of analysis. And they feel entitled to even the most complex and sophisticated news coverage for free.”

Rocky Mountain News
Newspapers
Shutdowns (Institutional)
Layoffs and Job Reductions
Denver (Colo)
Scripps E W Co
Denver Post


Who Will Save the Children?

Abstract: Who Will Save the Children? Wednesday night and we were at the TriBeCa Grand Hotel, where the Cinema Society was the host of a screening of "Winter Passing," which stars ED HARRIS as a SALINGER-like writer and ZOOEY DESCHANEL as his estranged daughter. They were both there (Mr. Harris and Ms. Deschanel, we mean, not Mr. Salinger, who spends his Wednesday nights at Bungalow), as were AMELIA WARNER, MARCIA GAY HARDEN, MICHAEL STIPE, HELENA CHRISTENSEN, JANICE COMBS (who wasn't sure what movie was showing), and RALPH MACCHIO (who wore all black). "Maybe he's mourning his karate teacher," a photographer said. The years have been kind to Mr. Macchio, but he did spend much of the night wandering around looking rather lost. But on to the movie. Mr. Harris tried to explain the whole however-many degrees of separation thing to us: he told us he was in a play, "Precious Sons," about 20 years ago in which he played the father of a character played by ANTHONY RAPP, the brother of ADAM RAPP, who directed "Winter Passing." Moreover, in "The Right Stuff," the wife of Mr. Harris's character (JOHN GLENN) was played by MARY JO DESCHANEL, and the cinematographer was CALEB DESCHANEL, Zooey's parents. "I knew Zooey," Mr. Harris said. "I think I actually painted her bedroom when she was 1 or 2." We suppose this is all quite cute, but it was so complicated and we are so bad at math, and something about it that we couldn't put our finger on said such strangely unsettling things about Hollywood that our eyes began to hurt. So we will turn to another actor in the movie, DALLAS ROBERTS, who said his leisure time was dominated by his 16-month-old son. What's his name? "PILOT." Hm. It isn't BOB, but then again it isn't KAL-EL either. Where did the name come from? "We were pregnant," Mr. Roberts said, "and I had a dream that we were referring to the kid as Pilot and then I woke up and I forgot it and then we were in a cab together, and I said, 'Oh, I had this dream,' and then I realized what I was about to say and I was sure she was going to go, like, 'Oh, funny,' but, she said she liked it and so that was that." What was the dream? You were on a plane or something? "No, no, it was like we were at a grocery store or something and we went like, 'Oh, do we need this for Pilot?' " So. Came to you in a dream. We'll buy that. What's Pilot's middle name? "EAGLE." Well, at Least the Children Could Go Bowling Hey, here's an event called Celebrity Bowling! O.K. It happened last week, an event lost amid all the toothing and clawing of Fashion Week. And, unfortunately, it was not what we pictured: row upon row of celebrities standing nervously at the end of a lane, or, better yet, Publicist Bowling: row upon row of white suits with red chokers and the little headsets, those malicious smiles glazed across their faces, foolishly unaware of the heavy orb hurtling toward them Oh, forgive our reverie. Bad day. The event, at the glamorous Leisure Time alley in the Port Authority building, was a fund-raiser for Second Stage Theater and featured the talents, bowling and otherwise, of MICHAEL McKEAN, JAMES LAPINE, BOB BALABAN, AMY IRVING, CAROL KANE, IRINA PANTAEVA, KATE BURTON and JULIE WHITE, the star of "The Little Dog Laughed," currently at the theater. "Bowling was offered as a P.E. elective at my high school," Ms. White said, revealing in one sentence all sorts of things about globalization and China and America's future. "If you had a car and could get to the lanes you could take bowling." "I think I got an A," she continued. "I had a Ford Pinto. It's a wonder I didn't get rear-ended and blown up."

NEW YORK CITY
SECOND STAGE THEATER
HARRIS ED
DESCHANEL ZOOEY
MOTION PICTURES
BOWLING
PHILANTHROPY
CELEBRITIES
WINTER PASSING (MOVIE)


No. 15 Connecticut Denies West Virginia a Signature Win

Abstract: HARTFORD — West Virginia has had little trouble defeating the teams it ought to defeat. But at tournament time, that is not always enough. Although the Mountaineers reached 20 victories for the fourth consecutive season, not one was the kind of marquee win a team needs to make a case for an at-large berth to the N.C.A.A. tournament. Their only victory against a ranked opponent came at home in January against Marquette, which was then No. 10. On Saturday, on the road against No. 15 Connecticut, West Virginia had its last opportunity in the regular season for that elusive big victory, the one that would quiet talk about the Mountaineers’ being on the tournament bubble before the Big East tournament. But West Virginia had never won in six games at UConn . And the story was no different Saturday. Unable to match the Huskies’ depth on the inside and outshot from the perimeter, the Mountaineers lost to UConn, 79-71, despite a stirring second-half comeback. West Virginia Coach Bob Huggins was in no mood to talk about whether his team was on the bubble. To say his team needed to beat UConn to make its case for an at-large bid, Huggins said after the game, was “ridiculous.” “We’re going to hopefully end up with 10 or 11 wins in this league; that’s not good enough?” he said. “If that’s not good enough, then we have problems. We have serious problems.” Indeed, Huggins and his players seemed to take considerable solace in their comeback against the surging Huskies, who have won 12 of 13 games. The Mountaineers (20-9, 9-7) trailed by as many as 17 points in the first half but went on a 20-6 run to draw within 3 points with just over four minutes to go. Leading the charge was the junior forward Joe Alexander, who scored 20 of his career-high 32 points in the second half and also had 10 rebounds. “We can play with anybody in the country if we just play like that all game,” Alexander said. “I think all of us have always thought that, but we just have more confidence in it now.” But it was too little, too late, and the Huskies (23-6, 12-4) held on. The hot-handed Mountaineers had been expected to test the Huskies from the perimeter. West Virginia shot 52.6 percent from the field in an 85-73 victory at DePaul on Wednesday, and it has not lost in the 18 games in which it shot better than its opponent. On Saturday, though, the Huskies shot 51.1 percent — including 62.5 percent in the first half, their best half of the season — compared with West Virginia’s 41.4 percent. The Huskies were propelled by the 3-point shooting of the junior guard A. J. Price, who finished with a team-high 24 points. Price made 5 of 8 3-point attempts. With two regular-season games remaining, against Pittsburgh on Monday and at St. John’s next weekend, the Mountaineers still have time to win their way into the N.C.A.A. tournament. But they also have reason to worry, something a victory Saturday could have eliminated. “It definitely would have looked good on our résumé,” said Darris Nichols, a senior guard. Last season, in its next-to-last regular-season game, West Virginia had a chance to make an impressive closing argument to the N.C.A.A. selection committee. But on the road against 12th-ranked Pittsburgh, the Mountaineers could not hold a 3-point halftime lead and lost, 80-66. Their chance to make a statement was gone. Two weeks later, so was the at-large bid they had expected. Now, the Mountaineers must hope that history does not repeat itself. If it was any comfort, UConn Coach Jim Calhoun said after the game that he did not think such a fate should befall the Mountaineers. “In my opinion,” he said, “they’re an N.C.A.A. tournament team.”

College Athletics
Basketball
University of Connecticut
West Virginia University


Compromise in Connecticut Property Seizure Case

Abstract: HARTFORD, Feb. 7 - A handful of property owners in New London, Conn., who have resisted having their property taken by eminent domain even after the United States Supreme Court ruled last year that the taking was legal, could be allowed to stay on their land -- or at least very close to it -- under a plan approved by the City Council. "For the first time in this ongoing saga we are considering and asking our attorneys to explore the possibility of occupancy on the peninsula as a way of settling the dispute," said Mayor Beth Sabilia, referring to the location of the disputed property, which overlooks the Thames River in a neighborhood called Fort Trumbull. The proposal, approved by a 7-0 vote of the New London City Council on Monday, instructs the city's director of law, Thomas J. Londregan, to determine whether the site development plan could be revised so the half-dozen remaining property owners, scattered on two blocks, could be clustered on a single block, known throughout years of debate and court proceedings as "Parcel 4A." The idea would allow property owners to stay in the area, if not in precisely the same place. It would also free the surrounding area to make way for a planned 90-acre hotel, office and residential development. The city took the property in 2000 to make way for construction of the project, but it was paralyzed while property owners sued to keep their property and eventually took the case to the Supreme Court. In June, the court ruled, 5 to 4, that the city had legally taken the land for the sake of economic development, but the decision provoked a political backlash around the country. Ms. Sabilia, a Democrat, said on Tuesday that the enduring political opposition, as well as the election of two council members in November who felt the city needed a different approach, had overwhelmed the fact that the city had won in court. "It's great to talk about this in the abstract," Ms. Sabilia said, "but when you're down here on the ground, you've got to come up with something." She conceded that the clustering plan might not work. Suzette Kelo, who lives on Parcel 4A and was the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, is likely to have to move her small pink house slightly north to make way for the widening of a road. The city would still own the whole block, possibly requiring residents to make regular payments in lieu of taxes or rent. Ms. Kelo said Tuesday that the proposal was "a step in the right direction." She added, "At least we're all going to be discussing the issue in the open." Despite the court ruling against her and the others, Ms. Kelo said, she would not accept a compromise that would leave the city as the owner of the property where she lives. Scott G. Bullock, a lawyer who argued for property owners before the Supreme Court, said "the idea of the city owning the land and then renting it to them for the next 30 to 40 years is just not the way to go." He emphasized, however, that the Council vote showed new political will. "Now it's just a matter of how it can be done," he said. Ron Angelo, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development, said the state was open to "any ideas that would provide a resolution," but he also cited potential conflicts with the city's municipal development plan, a just-revised agreement with a private developer and questions over environmental damage and zoning restrictions. "It's a whole legal quagmire down there," he said.

NEW LONDON (CONN)
CONNECTICUT
SUPREME COURT
LONDREGAN THOMAS J
AREA PLANNING AND RENEWAL
SUITS AND LITIGATION
EMINENT DOMAIN


Afghan Officials Attacked, and NATO Raid Protested

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — Violence struck southern Afghanistan on Wednesday, with attacks on government and security officials. There were also allegations that NATO forces had killed two civilians in a night raid in the northeast, although the military sharply disputed that. In Kandahar Province, a district police commander and three officers were killed when a suicide bomber exploded near a police patrol in the early evening. In Zabul Province, gunmen assassinated Atta Khan Qadir Wal, 50, the director of the province’s office of tribal affairs, as he returned from evening prayers at a mosque in Qalat, the provincial capital. He was a highly respected elder, said Mohammad Jan Rasool Yar, a spokesman for the Zabul governor. The disputed raid occurred early Wednesday in the Surkh Rod district of Nangarhar Province, about nine miles from Jalalabad, the largest city in eastern Afghanistan. It was at least the third raid in the district in four months, and in each, the military’s account and that of local people have been sharply at odds, with local residents insisting that those killed were civilians and the military asserting that there were Taliban present. Hundreds of suburban residents of Jalalabad blocked its main east-west highway on Wednesday to protest the killings. Local residents said that the two men killed were both civilians, while a NATO military spokesman said that they had been shot by American troops only after opening fire themselves. The troops were searching for a known Taliban commander living in the area, said Maj. Steven Cole, the NATO spokesman. “The force received AK-47 fire from the compound courtyard,” he said. “Our force entered the courtyard and returned fire at one man firing the AK-47, killing him.” When a second man tried to pick up his gun, he was also killed, Major Cole said, adding: “At least one person living in the compound on the scene identified one of the men killed as an insurgent commander.” Three other men were detained, the military said; women and children in the compound were unharmed. The Nangarhar provincial police complained that they had not been consulted, nor had the Afghan national security forces, and said that there was no evidence that those killed were combatants. “The dead and captured were not armed members of the governmental opposition,” said Col. Ghafour Khan, the spokesman for the provincial police chief. “They were father and son,” he said. “They were innocent civilians. The father was a farmer, and the son sold vegetables in the bazaar.” He added that the NATO forces should be held accountable “for the subsequent consequences.” Major Cole said that all NATO operations were coordinated with Afghan security forces, but that did not mean that the provincial or district police were informed ahead of time. The coordination can be with Afghan military leaders at the national level or those who work for another Afghan security agency, he said. A member of Parliament from Nangarhar Province, Safia Sidiqi, owns a house in the district where an elderly civilian man was killed in a raid on April 28. She denounced the latest raid as an unwarranted attack on civilians. She also accused the soldiers of beating the two men before they were shot to death. “The Americans say that ‘We were looking for a Taliban commander by the name of Yusuf,’ ” she said. “This is just an excuse and in the name of these things, they go to people’s houses and kill innocent people.”

North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Afghanistan War (2001- )
Afghanistan
Defense and Military Forces
Civilian Casualties
Wal Atta Khan Qadir
Demonstrations Protests and Riots


State Plans for Possibility of School Closings

Abstract: An advisory panel of the New York State Board of Regents recommended yesterday that the Education Department ask Interboro Institute and its sister college, Technical Career Institutes (TCI), to plan alternative placements for their 7,000 students should they have to shut down. The move was set off by the panel's concerns about the financial viability of the two colleges and their parent company, EVCI Career Colleges Holding Corporation, following recent regulatory actions against Interboro, a commercial school based in New York City. This month, the Education Department directed Interboro to cut enrollment of new students in half while it fixed problems the state had found, including too-rapid expansion, misconduct in determining student eligibility for financial aid and low graduation rates. "They're in a very serious place right now," said Russell K. Hotzler, president of the New York City College of Technology, part of the City University of New York, and chairman of the Regents Advisory Council on Institutional Accreditation. Johanna Duncan-Poitier, the deputy education commissioner for higher education, said that the request "does not mean we expect to be closing them down, but there should be a plan because of the large number students involved." EVCI executives expressed surprise yesterday when told the state would ask them to draw up contingency plans for closing and said they had no plans to shut down. "Interboro is financially viable," said John J. McGrath, EVCI's president and chief executive. "TCI is financially viable. EVCI is financially viable. We do not believe we will be closing our doors." Dr. McGrath said that the council had "acted prematurely," because it had not asked the company "to present assurance of financial viability." He expressed concern the action "could falsely convey the impression that we are not financially viable and could cause unnecessary concern and harm throughout our colleges." Joseph Frey, an assistant education commissioner, said the department would ask Interboro and Technical Career Institutes for the plans, known as teachouts, next week. Under a teachout, a school thought to be in possible danger of closing is expected to line up other schools willing to take its students and consider accepting their credits. Nearby schools usually try to take students to help the students and protect the industry's reputation. David Rhodes, president of the School of Visual Arts, also a commercial school, and vice chairman of the Regents advisory panel, said his concern about EVCI's finances stemmed from a company release this month that said the enrollment limits would reduce revenues at the same time Interboro had to spend more. EVCI said it expected to invest another $400,000 in capital and $1 million more in operating money this year, and had identified $1.8 million in cuts to save money.


Uzbekistan: President Is Re-elected

Abstract: President Islam Karimov has won another term in a landslide, as expected, according to preliminary results issued Monday. Mr. Karimov garnered 91 percent of the vote, with about 91 percent of the ballots from Sunday counted, the Central Election Commission said in a statement. Mr. Karimov, 77, has led the former Soviet republic since 1989 and ruthlessly quashed opposition. On Monday the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe criticized the election as a foregone conclusion because people lacked “genuine political alternatives.” It noted that Mr. Karimov, first elected president in 1990, was allowed to run for his fourth consecutive term despite the constitutional limit of two.


As Police Investigate Deaths in Truck, Migrants and Smugglers Appear to Shift Tactics

Abstract: NICKELSDORF, Austria — Investigators continued to work their way on Sunday through a truck that carried 71 migrants to their deaths last week, removing articles of clothing and bagging and labeling them as possible evidence in an inquiry against the smuggling operation believed to be responsible. The truck was brought here after the police discovered it on the side of an Austrian highway, the decomposing bodies crammed against one another in a back compartment. One passenger’s Syrian passport was found, leading the authorities to believe that at least some had fled the war there. Autopsies are expected to be completed by midweek, according to law enforcement officials. The 26 done so far have not yielded any positive identification of the bodies, the Austrian public broadcaster reported. On Sunday, the authorities in Hungary announced a fifth arrest in the case, which has shocked Europe and highlighted the proliferation of highly organized smuggling operations responding to the wave of migrants from war-torn and turbulent spots in the Middle East and Northern Africa. At this border town, a point where the Iron Curtain once divided Austria from Hungary, the authorities said they were considering stepping up efforts to detect international smugglers. In the absence of a more ambitious European solution, police and politicians were mulling whether to randomly stop cars and trucks to search for illicit human cargo. By late Sunday, it appeared as if smugglers had caught wind of the possible traps, and they steered clear of the border. Red Cross volunteers, police officers and even some Austrian soldiers had braced for a predicted wave of some 7,000 new arrivals, but by evening they had not materialized. Normally cars, trucks and vans thread their way through the maze of old Communist border posts and present-day truck stops without being stopped. The beginnings of that open border came 26 years ago, when thousands of people from Communist East Germany surged past this and other crossing points. Now, the mass movement of people across Europe shows how globalization and digital technology have lured arrivals from further afield — Afghans, Bangladeshis, Iraqis, Syrians and the occasional Iranian. Many of them have willingly handed off hundreds or thousands of euros to get further on their northward trek — which frequently takes them through Greece, the Balkans and Hungary — to seek asylum in more prosperous European countries, especially Germany. Late Saturday, the Hungarian police detained one more Bulgarian suspected of being part of the smuggling operation that lead to the deaths. The police said in a statement that they would request pretrial detention, as they have with four others — three other Bulgarians and an Afghan — pending a trial in Kecskemet, Hungary, on Saturday. The officials would not discuss any more details of the investigation. At least a dozen people suspected of attempting to smuggle migrants through the country in decrepit vans were also detained over the weekend. In the meantime, the flow of migrants entering Hungary by the thousands from Serbia has not slowed, despite the completion of a barbed-wire barrier, with a higher fence still being constructed . It became apparent over the weekend that the 71 were not alone in being packed tightly into the backs of trucks and vans, driven without adequate air flow or relief despite a heat wave. Temperatures were as high as 98 degrees Fahrenheit in eastern Austria this weekend. The police said Saturday that three children were found severely dehydrated early Friday in a truck at Austria’s border with Germany, near Passau. But in a sign of the desperation of the asylum seekers, the parents of the children whisked them out of the hospital where they had been taken on Friday and then disappeared. Mahmoud Otri, 23, from Aleppo, Syria, said Sunday that it was only after a similar journey of his own that he learned of the tragedy involving the 71 migrants. The Global Refugee Crisis, Region by Region In the latest crisis, tens of thousands are racing to Hungary before a border fence is finished. “We were close to being like them,” he said as he recounted a careening 10-hour drive from southern Hungary to just short of the border here. Mr. Otri, who spoke English and gave a detailed account of his journey from Aleppo to Hungary via Turkey, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia, said during that last stage he was in a small truck crammed with about 50 others, including at least four women and three children. They were so cramped that most men stood, he said, while women, children and some other males could only kneel. By the time they neared Austria, they were gasping for air. One of the Afghans on board had a knife, which Mr. Otri said he had earlier used to intimidate some of the Arabs — Syrians, Iraqis and one Lebanese — on board. But the Afghan used it to cut a hole in the roof of the small truck. “We were close to death,” Mr. Otri said. He paid 1,500 euros for his passage, which he said was arranged after complex negotiations took him to the northern Serbian border town of Subotica, then back to a Belgrade hotel and again to Subotica. From there, his group of about nine was taken to a “point” in the forest, he said, where they waited one night. Hungarian police officers combing the border apparently forced their guide — who Mr. Otri said was part of the “service” provided by smugglers — to move the group to another spot, where they waited two nights, Mr. Otri said. He added that he had been in his fourth year of studying engineering in Aleppo but decided two months ago to flee the war-torn home. “There is no life in Aleppo,” he said, as he and a fellow native of the city named at least four militias they said were battling in the area. “There is no future there for 10 years,” said one young man. Mr. Otri corrected: “Twenty.” The men then agreed that Aleppo would be fortunate if it recovered even in that time.

Middle East and Africa Migrant Crisis,European Migrant Crisis


Toll in Quake in Pakistan Rises Past 300

Abstract: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The death toll from a devastating earthquake in western Pakistan rose to 327 on Wednesday, as soldiers and rescue workers scrambled to reach victims in one of the country’s remotest areas. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is in New York, ordered officials to expedite relief efforts for victims of the country’s deadliest earthquake since 2005, when about 70,000 people died in an earthquake that struck the northwestern mountains. This week’s magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck Tuesday afternoon and was felt across the country, even causing a small island to rise from the Arabian Sea. But its force was greatest in a particularly impoverished part of Baluchistan Province. Violent tremors felled hundreds of mud-walled houses in six remote districts in southwestern Baluchistan, killing hundreds and injuring at least 446, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. Image A small island arose off Pakistan’s coast in the Arabian Sea after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck on Tuesday. Credit Gwadar Government Office, via Associated Press While official estimates put the death toll at 271, officials in the affected districts said that it had reached 327 and that it was expected to rise. The greatest damage occurred in Awaran, Baluchistan’s poorest district, which is near the deep-sea port of Gwadar, which Pakistan built with Chinese help over the past decade in the hope of stimulating regional trade. The army said it was airlifting troops by helicopter to Awaran to supplement at least 1,000 troops who had been sent by truck. The head of the National Disaster Management Authority, Maj. Gen. Muhammad Saeed Aleem, said his priority was to provide shelter to the homeless and added that supplies of medicine, blankets and water were on the way. Image Residents searched for survivors. Credit Banaras Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images But, he added, the remoteness of the area was impeding relief efforts. “It was a big quake, and the damage is extensive,” he said. Pakistan has not yet requested international assistance, General Aleem said, and hopes that it can deal with the crisis on its own. Baluchistan is Pakistan’s largest but poorest province, troubled by many conflicts, including a nationalist insurgency that has lasted decades and a spate of suicide bombings this year by sectarian militant groups. In addition, the province is prone to earthquakes and recently dealt with a crippling drought, and the provincial government is generally ill prepared to deal with natural calamities. Video More than 200 people have been killed in a powerful earthquake in Pakistan. “We are seriously lacking medical facilities, and there is no space to treat injured people in the local hospitals,” Jan Muhammad Buledi, a provincial spokesman, was quoted as saying by local television networks. Baluchistan was also badly hit by devastating floods that swept Pakistan in 2010 , inundating about one-fifth of the country and affecting about 20 million people. About 2,000 people died in that disaster. The earthquake resulted in an unusual geographical occurrence in the Arabian Sea when the force of the tremors caused a small rocky island to rise from the seabed near the Port of Gwadar. Ali Rashid Tabriz, the head of Pakistan’s National Institute of Oceanography, said in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon that the surfacing of the island, which was visible from the coast, had been caused by an emission of methane gas on the seabed. “Such islands have appeared in the past in 1955, in 1999 and most recently in 2010,” said Mr. Tabriz, who is based in the port city of Karachi. “But they sink back, and this new island will also not stay there for long.” He said experts were conducting a survey and collecting samples in the area.


Lady Gaga Said to Fire Her Manager

Abstract: Lady Gaga has fired her manager, Troy Carter, just days before the release of her new album, according to three people with direct knowledge of the news who were not authorized to speak about it. Mr. Carter had managed Lady Gaga — whose real name is Stefani Germanotta — since 2007, before the release of her first album, and he is regarded in the music industry as an important force in her rise to megastar status. The reasons for their split were not immediately clear. Showbiz411 , a celebrity blog that, along with the music industry gossip site Hits Daily Double , was the first to report the news, attributed it to “creative differences.” But for months the music business has been rife with talk about an estrangement between the two, as well as speculation about how it might affect the commercial performance of her album, “Artpop,” to be released next week by Interscope Records. Representatives of Mr. Carter and Lady Gaga declined to comment, and a spokesman for Interscope did not respond to an email on Tuesday morning. The dismissal of a manager by a top pop act is an occasional occurrence in the music industry; such representatives often serve at will or through loose handshake contracts. But it is rare for such a break to happen on the eve of a major release. Previous Lady Gaga albums have been phenomenons. The last, “Born This Way,” in 2011, had an enormous and flawlessly executed marketing campaign, and sold more than 2 million copies in the United States. Lady Gaga, who is in constant dialogue with her 40 million Twitter followers , has also become emblematic of pop’s reach on social media. But the performance of early singles for “Artpop,” her third studio album, have been disappointing. “Applause,” released in August, peaked at No. 4 on Billboard’s chart, and has been outshined by Lorde and Katy Perry. “Do What You Want,” released two weeks ago, opened with 156,000 sales, the third-most downloaded track that week. Her tearful appearance at the YouTube Music Awards on Sunday was mocked in the news media as “bizarre” and “deeply strange and out-of-tune.” Mr. Carter, who also manages John Legend and the violinist Lindsey Stirling — a breakout star on YouTube — has also made a name for himself in Silicon Valley as an investor in technology start-ups, including the taxi-hailing app Uber and the music site Songza. According to the technology news site PandoDaily , Mr. Carter is also raising $75 million to $100 million for an investment fund.

Lady Gaga
Interscope Records
Music
Troy Carter


Boston’s Mayor Faces Formidable Foes, but Is Still a Favorite

Abstract: BOSTON — While the three men hoping to unseat him crammed last Thursday for a final candidates’ forum, Mayor Thomas M. Menino , who skipped the forum that night, played sous-chef to Wolfgang Puck , gleefully stirring lobster risotto at a Macy’s cooking demonstration. “I met you before,” he reminded Mr. Puck as he barreled into the room — a line that Mr. Menino, the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history, can use on countless Bostonians, too. That, his reverent supporters and exasperated foes say, helps explain why Mr. Menino is favored to place first in Tuesday’s preliminary election and win an unprecedented fifth term in November. Still, this has been the toughest re-election fight of Mr. Menino’s career, suggesting that his challengers have at least partly succeeded with their message that Boston desperately needs change. The challengers, fellow Democrats who are decades younger than the 66-year-old mayor, are two city councilors and an affordable-housing developer who has painted himself as the unjaded outsider. All have struggled to raise money, not least because developers and other big donors shudder at the thought of angering Mr. Menino. But the candidates, City Councilors Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon , and Kevin McCrea , the developer, have turned heads, if only by relentlessly asking why Mr. Menino should be “mayor for life.” They seized on the news last week that a top mayoral aide might have improperly deleted months’ worth of e-mail messages — which has led to a state investigation into possible violation of the public records law — as evidence that Mr. Menino’s administration was either “technologically backward” or had “something to hide,” in the words of Mr. Yoon. “It clearly shows there’s a need for a new way of doing business,” said Mr. Yoon, 39, who grew up in Pennsylvania and settled in Boston after attending the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “For a lot of undecided voters who were waffling between ‘I like the mayor’ and ‘It might be time for a change,’ this is certainly going to be one issue that is going to tip them.” Mr. Yoon, a City Council member since 2006, and Mr. Flaherty, a member since 2000, have focused on winning over newcomers to Boston and progressives who do not usually vote in mayoral races, rather than longtime Menino supporters. But without statewide or national elections to energize them, those voters may not turn out in enough numbers to make a difference. Jeffrey Berry , a political science professor at Tufts University, said Mr. Menino’s political machine, fortified over the years through his diehard devotion to constituent services, would trump his opponents’ efforts. He pointed to a poll in The Boston Globe in May in which 57 percent of respondents said they had met Mr. Menino personally. “He’s an incessant worker,” Professor Berry said, “and he’s managed to extend a personal touch that is unusual in a city the size of Boston. In his bumbling, inarticulate way, he does manage to give off a sense of, ‘I care.’ ” He was referring to Mr. Menino’s habit of mangling words and phrases, which has led some here to call him Mumbles. After running for re-election unopposed in 1997, Mr. Menino won 77 percent of the vote in 2001 and 67 percent in 2005. His opponents have criticized his stewardship of the public schools, accused him of making backroom development deals and questioned his autocratic style. Even if their points were valid, Professor Berry said, the city, with its abundant universities and hospitals, has weathered the economic meltdown reasonably well. “Boston needs a lot of things, like every big city,” Professor Berry said, “but most would love to trade their problems with us.” After helping Mr. Puck cook on Thursday, Mr. Menino talked to local reporters about his aide’s deleted e-mail messages, rolling his eyes as the questions went on. He never communicates by e-mail himself, he said, but not because he fears a paper trail. “I’m one of those elected officials who believes you accomplish more talking to a person up close and personal,” he said. “There’s too much technology and not enough people talking to each other solving problems.” One could argue that such statements bolster his opponents’ accusation that Mr. Menino is behind the times and that this brainy, high-tech city needs younger, more modern leadership. The up-close-and-personal mayor disagrees. “I get good reception in the neighborhoods,” Mr. Menino said, summing up his popularity in his signature unpoetic style. “And I’m working every day.” It seemed there was nothing more to say.

Menino Thomas M
Politics and Government
Boston (Mass)
Elections


Deal Is Near on Far-Reaching Reforms at Rikers, Including a Federal Monitor

Abstract: New York City officials have tentatively agreed to sweeping reforms that would remake Rikers Island , including the appointment of a federal monitor to oversee the jail complex, explicit prohibitions against guards’ striking prisoners in the head and even the introduction of body cameras worn by guards. Other reforms city officials are poised to endorse include the development of a computerized system to better track the use of force by correction officers, the implementation of an early warning program to flag guards who use force against inmates three or more times in six months, injuring at least one of them, and the installation of 8,000 new surveillance cameras throughout the jail complex. The measures are part of a far-reaching legal settlement that has been largely agreed upon, after months of negotiation, by lawyers for the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio and the office of Preet Bharara , the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, as well as the Legal Aid Society and a group of private lawyers who in 2011 filed a class-action lawsuit against the city, which Mr. Bharara’s office joined in December, according to people who have been briefed on the talks. They cautioned that there was no final deal and that certain remaining disputes could still get in the way of a settlement. But Mr. Bharara’s office and the city’s Law Department told a federal magistrate judge two weeks ago that they expected a deal to be completed by Monday, June 22. Some of the measures that lawyers for the city have tentatively agreed to would have seemed unimaginable as recently as early 2014, underscoring the suddenness with which Rikers reform has leapt to the forefront of the agenda of the de Blasio administration over the last year. The city’s Department of Correction has been under extraordinary scrutiny after articles by The New York Times , The Associated Press and The New Yorker , as well as reports by the city’s Investigation Department, documented widespread brutality, corruption and dysfunction at Rikers. In August, Mr. Bharara’s office, after a two-and-a-half-year investigation, issued a blistering report that found a “deep-seated culture of violence” directed toward adolescent inmates at Rikers, and a systematic deprivation of their civil rights. Image The office of Preet Bharara, left, the United States attorney, has been negotiating with the city to counter brutality at Rikers. Credit Mike Segar/Reuters Saying he was frustrated with the pace of change at Rikers, Mr. Bharara announced plans in December to sue the city and seek court-ordered reforms. His office joined in an existing class-action lawsuit on brutality at Rikers, Nunez v. City of New York, filed by the Legal Aid Society and two law firms, Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady and Ropes & Gray. There have been “dozens and dozens” of negotiating sessions, a city lawyer said recently in court. The sessions have been attended at times by Mr. Bharara; Zachary W. Carter, the corporation counsel for New York City; and Joseph Ponte , the correction commissioner, whom Mr. Bharara, at a news conference last week about charges being filed in a 2010 beating death of a Rikers inmate, praised as “dedicated to the cause of reform.” But Mr. Bharara has also expressed impatience with the grinding progress of the talks. “Every day that goes by where we don’t have enforceable and enduring reform at Rikers Island is one day too many,” he said. Even as bigger issues were resolved, some of the obstacles in recent weeks were over finer points. The city objected, for example, to a provision that would require the Correction Department to notify United States prosecutors whenever it referred a potentially criminal occurrence involving the use of force to the city’s Investigation Department. The agreement that now appears close would seem to address many of Mr. Bharara’s concerns as well as those voiced by Mr. de Blasio, who, when he visited the jail in March, vowed to make Rikers a “national model of what is right again.” A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, in a statement Thursday night, said the agreement would be “a major step” toward his administration’s goal of reducing violence in the jails. She added, “We fully expect a successful conclusion to this process within a few days.” The correction commissioner, Mr. Ponte, who came into the job a little over a year ago, has already undertaken major changes that track some areas of agreement between the parties. In December, for example, Mr. Ponte ended solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year-olds at Rikers. The tentative agreement mandates doing just that, and would also prohibit placing 18-year-old inmates with serious mental illness in isolation. Mr. Ponte, in a recent interview with The Times, expressed openness to the idea of a federal monitor, a remedy he once said he had hoped to avoid. “I don’t think a monitor hinders anything we want to do,” Mr. Ponte said. Image The Rikers Island jail complex seen from the East River. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times The city already has court-appointed monitors overseeing reforms in the Police Department’s stop, question and frisk policies and the Fire Department’s hiring practices. Under the proposed Rikers agreement, the monitor would have broad access to the jails and records, and the ability to interview inmates confidentially and to speak with staff members outside the presence of their colleagues or supervisors. The monitor would review all policies adopted under the settlement, including a new training curriculum for the staff. The monitor would report to the federal judge in Manhattan who is overseeing the Nunez lawsuit, Laura Taylor Swain, and the monitor, in publicly filed reports, would regularly evaluate the status of the department’s compliance with the settlement. Judge Swain would be asked to approve any settlement. The agreement itself would end only when the court finds that the city has achieved and maintained substantial compliance with the terms of the settlement for two years. A critical part of the proposed deal is a requirement that the Correction Department, in consultation with the monitor, develop a comprehensive new policy on the use of force by guards. The policy would emphasize that staff members have a duty to protect inmates from harm, and delineate what are — and are not — permissible uses of force. There would be an explicit ban, for example, on blows to the head, face, groin, neck, kidneys and spinal column, as well as kicks and chokeholds. The only exception would be for guards who believe they are in imminent danger of death or serious injury. Force could not be used to punish inmates or retaliate against them, or to respond to an inmate’s insults or threats. Guards could not cause inmates to assault others, a major problem in recent years. And there would be rules on how and when force may be used, and escalated, if necessary. For the officers flagged for repeated use of force, jail wardens would be required to review the officers’ histories to determine whether they need additional guidance or counseling. Also, correction officers would be required as part of the agreement to prepare their reports independently when force is used against an inmate; collusion would be prohibited. Image The city correction commissioner, Joseph Ponte. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times Just last week, when Mr. Bharara announced charges against a current correction officer and two former officers in the beating death of a 52-year-old inmate, Ronald Spear , in a Rikers medical unit, the prosecutor’s office also accused the defendants of lying in official reports about the episode. Mr. Bharara’s office said in its August report that officers and supervisors used coded phrases like “hold it down” to pressure inmates into not reporting assaults, and that some civilian staff members, like doctors and teachers, had failed to report abuse of prisoners and faced retaliation when they did. The proposed agreement would require a medical staff member who suspected an inmate had been injured because of force that had not been disclosed to make a report, and the Correction Department’s investigation division would have to open an immediate inquiry. In addition to installing thousands of additional video surveillance cameras, the agreement would mandate, as part of a pilot project, that 100 body cameras be distributed to officers and supervisors in parts of the jail complex that are prone to violence. The experiment would be re-evaluated after a year to determine if it should be expanded or ended. Another provision would require the use of hand-held video cameras to record the removals of prisoners from cells — often a violent process — and other actions. Such recordings would have to be continuous, and any breaks would have to be documented and explained. Staff members wearing or carrying cameras who repeatedly failed to capture sensitive incidents on video would be referred for discipline. Much of the proposed agreement focuses on bettering conditions for teenage inmates, which was the primary focus of Mr. Bharara’s report last August. Additional video cameras would have to be installed in the jail for teenage inmates, the Robert N. Davoren Center, with a goal of ensuring total camera coverage of areas that are accessible to 16- and 17-year-olds. The agreement also pushes the city to look into taking teenage inmates off Rikers Island completely. City officials, in consultation with the monitor, would be required to make their best efforts to find a new location for inmates under age 18. The site should have access to recreation and educational services. And it should be accessible by public transportation, to make it easier for family members to visit. The city would be required, in periodic reports to the monitor, to detail its search process, the places under consideration and how long it would take before they would be available for housing inmates. But the proposal would allow the city to report that after a diligent search, it could not find a suitable location.

Rikers
Preet Bharara
Prison Guards,Corrections Officers
Lawsuits


China Streamlines Its Cabinet

Abstract: BEIJING — Chinese officials announced Sunday that the government would consolidate some cabinet-level ministries in an attempt to streamline the bureaucracy. The move is the seventh restructuring in three decades, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. Officials said the number of ministries under the State Council, China’s cabinet, would be reduced to 25 from 27. The plan was submitted on Sunday at a session of the annual National People’s Congress, a legislative body that generally approves policy that has already been made by senior Communist officials. The changes were presented by Ma Kai, secretary general of the State Council. The Ministry of Railways, long criticized as being rife with corruption, will be split into administrative and commercial arms. China Railway Corporation will oversee the commercial duties, while the actual network of trains and railways will fall under the Ministry of Transportation. The Railway Ministry has come under particularly harsh criticism in recent years. In February 2011, Liu Zhijun, the minister at the time, was placed under investigation for corruption . He was expelled from the party months later and now awaits trial. Five months later, China’s ambitious plans for high-speed rail across the nation were called into question following a fatal high-speed train crash near the eastern city of Wenzhou . Among the other changes announced Sunday, the Health Ministry will merge with the National Population and Family Planning Commission, according to Xinhua. The family planning commission manages China’s one-child policy, which some economists say is now out of date, given the nation’s demographic changes. The policy has led to widespread abuse and corruption by family planning officials at the local level — forced sterilizations and abortions still take place — and has led to a stark gender imbalance, with men outnumbering women. Xinhua also said the State Administration of Food and Drug would be given more power to combat tainted food and drugs. Two agencies that manage and censor the media, the General Administration of Press and Publication and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, will be merged. The government will also streamline the National Energy Administration to change the way the energy industry is regulated. Xinhua reported that Mr. Ma said at the legislative session on Sunday that the “Departments of the State Council are now focusing too much on micro issues.”

China
National People's Congress China
Communist Party of China
Politics


Royals’ Base Stealers Are in Neutral. One Reason: They’re Not on Base.

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Jarrod Dyson, the speedy outfielder of the Kansas City Royals, led off the sixth inning of Game 4 of the World Series on Saturday with a single to right field. Dyson has two primary functions for the Royals — to be swift on the basepaths and to catch fly balls — and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to steal a base. Dyson did not, though, and was erased when Nori Aoki hit into a double play. It was another example of how the Royals had cut down on their base stealing since the regular season and, most visibly, since the American League wild-card game against the Oakland Athletics, when Kansas City’s speed was considered one of its primary weapons. The Royals led the major leagues in stolen bases the past two seasons, with 153 each year. That speed did not always translate to productive offense, though: The Royals ranked ninth in the American League this season in runs scored, with 651. During the regular season, they averaged just under one stolen base a game, but in the World Series, their steal rate has plummeted. The Giants have done a good job of shutting down Kansas City’s speedy runners and keeping the Royals off the bases in general. The Royals stole only one base in the first four games against the Giants — by Alex Gordon in Game 4. Buster Posey, the San Francisco catcher, could have nabbed Gordon, but his throw tailed into Gordon’s shoulder and bounced into center field. Alcides Escobar, the only other Royal to try to steal in the first four games, was thrown out. The Royals put on a memorable display in the wild-card game, stealing seven bases in a comeback victory, but they did most of that against an injured backup catcher. Part of their problem in the World Series was that their on-base percentage in the first four games was only .281, compared with .314 in the regular season. It is difficult to steal bases when you cannot reach base. Also, the Giants’ pitchers, like the Baltimore Orioles’ pitchers in the A.L. Championship Series, have done a good job of making the Royals wary of running. A closer look at Dyson’s situation in Game 4 revealed that reliever Yusmeiro Petit waited a long time before throwing the first pitch to Aoki. That made Dyson unsure of his timing. The first pitch was a ball, so Dyson had good reason to think that the next pitch would be a fastball, not a good pitch on which to steal. ROUTINE OF THEIR OWN The Giants have eschewed the usual travel routine of many baseball teams, and they planned to do the same after Game 5. Instead of leaving Sunday night to head to Kansas City for Tuesday’s Game 6, the Giants were scheduled to depart Monday morning. “We do it to try to keep the players on a normal routine,” Manager Bruce Bochy said before Sunday’s game. “It’s simple. The guys like it. They seem to prefer it now that they’ve been doing it. They get to sleep in their own bed tonight.” ALL IN, ALMOST The Giants and the Royals combined to use 49 players through the first four games, with only Erik Kratz, the backup catcher for Kansas City, yet to see action. Ned Yost, the Royals’ manager, was in Kratz’s position for the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1982 World Series. He played only in Game 6, catching Doc Medich and Dwight Bernard in the final two innings of a 13-1 loss on a rainy night in St. Louis. The Cardinals won the series the next night. Yost came to bat with two outs in the top of the ninth against John Stuper. He still can hardly believe what happened. “I was going to hit a home run,” Yost said, as he watched the Royals take batting practice from the bench before Game 5. “I was going for the homer or striking out, one of the two. I ended up walking — and I never walked.” The experience taught Yost — who walked only 21 times in his 640 other career plate appearances — a lesson he has tried to pass on to his players. Despite the stage, he has told them, the World Series is the same game that they have played all their lives. “I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “I thought when you played in the World Series, it would be like this magical, wonderful feeling when you got in the game, and I walked out of the dugout, waiting for this magical experience to hit. Then I got out to home plate, squatted down, waited for this magical feeling, and the pitcher threw the first pitch and I thought: ‘Dadgum, I’ve been doing this my whole life. It’s a baseball game.' ” As for trying to give all his players a taste of the World Series, Yost said it was not a goal — which was probably bad news for Kratz, although a ring could make up for any disappointment. “Just trying to win the game,” Yost said. “If we get everybody in, that’s great. If we can’t, we can’t. We’re just trying to win a world championship for our fans.” — TYLER KEPNER

Baseball
World Series
Kansas City Royals
San Francisco Giants
Jarrod Dyson
Alcides Escobar


In Season of Upsets, No. 1 Perch Resembles an Ejection Seat

Abstract: Remember when a No. 1 team being upset was a cause for storming the court, television bulletins and front-page headlines? This season, a loss by the top team in men’s basketball seems to bring little more than a shrug. On Wednesday night, No. 5 Xavier beat No. 1 Villanova. Xavier had been 0-6 against Villanova since joining the Big East, but J. P. Macura and Edmond Sumner each scored 19 points as the Musketeers won at home, 90-83. It was the seventh time this season that a No. 1 team had fallen. Three Big 12 teams have knocked off top-ranked programs. So has Iowa. And Northern Iowa . Six teams have sat at the top of the Associated Press poll this season: North Carolina, Kentucky, Michigan State, Kansas, Oklahoma and Villanova. Kentucky has since sunk all the way to No. 16. No team has stayed on top for more than four weeks. It has been the type of season in which any team can lose at almost any time. Xavier has lost three times this season, but every other team in the top 10 has at least four losses . No. 3 Virginia has six, and No. 8 Iowa has seven. By contrast, Kentucky ended the 2014-15 regular season unbeaten, and six other ranked teams had three or fewer losses. Just since Monday, No. 3 Virginia has lost to Miami, No. 8 Iowa has lost to Wisconsin, and No. 9 Arizona has lost to Colorado. With the loss by Villanova, No. 2 Kansas looks poised to return to the top, assuming it beats Texas Tech on Saturday. But the Jayhawks then have games at No. 25 Texas and at home against No. 17 Iowa State, both potential trip wires. Given the way the season has been going, they could easily lose one of those games, opening the door for a final regular-season No. 1 of ... Xavier? Oklahoma? Michigan State? At this point, who knows? Even coldblooded computers are having trouble settling on which team is best. Ken Pomeroy ’s and Jeff Sagarin ’s respected rankings have Michigan State on top, though the Spartans are just No. 6 in the A.P. poll. Others point to Kansas, Villanova, North Carolina or even Louisville, which is ineligible for the N.C.A.A. tournament. Theories for the parity abound. The decline of top programs like Kentucky and Duke has left a void at the top. The increasing attraction of 3-pointers has led to streakiness. Many top players are leaving for the N.B.A. after one season, resulting in poor continuity on teams. Upsets are also happening down the charts. Wisconsin, conqueror of Iowa this week, has lost to Western Illinois and Milwaukee. Columbia, which is in the hunt for the Ivy League title, lost to Longwood, which was 8-21 entering Thursday and ranked No. 300 by Pomeroy. The lack of a dominant team has certainly increased excitement this season. But it will not make N.C.A.A. tournament brackets easy to fill out.

College basketball
Xavier University
Villanova


Sunnis Fleeing ISIS Find Few Doors Open Elsewhere in Iraq

Abstract: AMIRIYAT FALLUJA, Iraq — On one side of a rickety bridge that spans a narrow stretch of the Euphrates River were panicked families on the run from Islamic State forces, hoping to escape Anbar Province and reach safety in Baghdad. On the other side were Iraqi Army officers and Shiite militiamen, under orders to keep the bridge closed because of fears that militants could slip in among the displaced civilians. “It’s like the other side is Europe and this is Asia,” said Ehab Talib, 27, who was waiting to meet relatives fleeing the fighting in Anbar, the Sunni-dominated region whose capital, Ramadi, recently fell to the Islamic State . With new waves of civilians fleeing violence in Anbar there are now more internally displaced Iraqis, nearly three million, than there were at the height of the bloody sectarian fighting that followed the American invasion, when millions of Iraqis were able to flee to Syria. That door is closed because of that country’s own civil war. And now doors in Iraq are closing, too, worsening sectarian tensions as the Shiite authorities restrict where fleeing Sunnis can seek safety. “We are all Iraqis,” said Marwan Abdul, a doctor’s assistant, standing outside his mobile clinic here. “This wouldn’t happen in any other country.” The violence unleashed by the Sunni militants of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has hit Sunnis disproportionately. Nearly 85 percent of the Iraqis on the run are Sunnis, and they often find themselves seeking safety in Shiite-dominated areas, including Baghdad, where, as at the bridge here, they are frequently treated as security threats rather than as suffering fellow citizens. In seeking funding from donors, United Nations officials have stressed that containing the crisis is not only a moral imperative but also crucial in fostering reconciliation and setting the conditions for long-term stability, should ISIS be defeated. Rather than seizing on the crisis as an opportunity to win Sunnis, a minority in Iraq, to the government side, the Shiite authorities in Baghdad have acted in a manner, critics say, that has worsened the country’s sectarian divide, risking the alienation of young Sunni men in particular by restricting their movements within the country. Image Iraqis who had fled Ramadi, which recently fell to the Islamic State, on the outskirts of Baghdad. The Shiite authorities in the capital have started restricting the entry of displaced Sunnis. Credit Reuters On days that the bridge is open, for instance, not everyone can reach safe areas. To get to Baghdad, Anbar civilians need to have a sponsor in the capital who can reach them and escort them into the city, as Mr. Talib was trying to do. Some Baghdad residents have exploited this system, selling sponsorship to the displaced for as much as $700, according to the International Rescue Committee , an aid organization. The group warned this week that the strict security checks and chokeholds at checkpoints near Baghdad are forcing people to return to areas where fighting is raging. Even in the northern Kurdish region, long a haven for civilians fleeing Iraq’s turmoil, the authorities are reluctant to accept large numbers of Arabs, worsening the country’s ethnic divisions and adding to the sense that the very cohesion of Iraq is being pulled apart. Aid agencies, already overwhelmed by the refugee crisis in Syria, say they are running out of money to cope with the growing problems in Iraq. A $500 million donation to the United Nations by Saudi Arabia last year ran out at the end of March, and other funds are quickly dwindling. The United Nations says it needs another $500 million for Iraq to get through to the end of this year, and it plans to release a new response plan and an appeal for donations at an event in Brussels on June 4. “We are tapped out of money,” said Lise Grande, the senior United Nations official in charge of humanitarian efforts in Iraq. The situation has also further complicated the challenge of reconciling Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq amid efforts to defeat ISIS. Government officials in Iraq have said that concerns over a security threat from internally displaced people are legitimate because the Islamic State is deeply entrenched in Anbar and counts on some support from local citizens. Some officials have even blamed displaced Anbar residents for a recent round of car bomb attacks. Valerie Amos, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs at the United Nations, in a recent statement to the Security Council, detailed a grim list of circumstances faced by civilians in Islamic State areas, including sexual slavery and the forcible recruitment of children to become militants. How ISIS Expands The Islamic State aims to build a broad colonial empire across many countries. “The humanitarian outlook in Iraq remains deeply worrying,” she said. “The number of people in need of assistance has grown sevenfold in just under a year. This number is likely to increase further before the end of the year, as conflict continues and as fear of sectarian-motivated retaliation spreads through newly accessible areas.” Ms. Amos also criticized the government’s response to the crisis, saying, “Restrictions on the freedom of movement of civilians by security forces and armed groups are growing worse, limiting the ability of civilians to flee the conflict and enter safer territory or to return home after areas have been retaken.” In Baghdad, thousands of Sunni civilians who fled violence in Anbar are living in 32 mosques scattered around the city, where they are essentially quarantined. “The government, if they see any identification from Anbar, they will ask them, ‘What are you doing?’ ” said Imad Jassim, the director of the Umm al-Qura mosque, the capital’s largest Sunni mosque, where about 900 people from Anbar are living. Mr. Jassim advises them not to leave the mosque premises. “To be honest, we are afraid,” he said. “Maybe some militias are hanging around and could kill them.” The Iraqi authorities, he said, “have done nothing to help the people of Anbar.” If the authorities took a different approach, he said, “they would gain the support of all the Sunni people.” “They missed this great opportunity to be close to the Sunni people,” he said. One man living in the mosque, Khamis Jassim, 45, said he had fought for months against the Islamic State in Ramadi before leaving just before the city fell. Many of his neighbors stayed, he said, rather than seek safety in Shiite-dominated areas. Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi Efforts to stem the rise of the Islamic State. “Most of them would prefer to stay with Daesh,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “They told me that if I went to Baghdad maybe I would be killed.” At the bridge on a recent afternoon, dozens of residents of Baghdad, clutching identification papers, waited for passage to open so they could bring relatives and friends to the capital. Frustrated with the government’s approach, Omar Mansour, who had come to the bridge as an escort, said: “This is a very good opportunity for the Iraqi government. If there is ISIS over there, they could catch them.” But, looking across the river, he said, “There are families over there and they are scared from both sides — ISIS and the Iraqi Army.” Standing nearby, though, was a Shiite militiaman named Eissa al-Jabiry who voiced the anger that is deeply felt among many in Iraq’s Shiite majority. “Let them suffer more,” he said. “They deserve this. This is their fault.” Waving toward the river, he said: “They were supporting Daesh. The men were supporting Daesh, and see — their families are now suffering.” Officials are preparing for the crisis to get only worse as the Iraqi government, allied militias and the international coalition led by the United States prepare for offensives against the Islamic State in Anbar and then Mosul, in the north. United Nations officials believe that more than one million more civilians could be displaced from operations in Anbar and elsewhere, before a campaign for Mosul even begins. “During the upcoming military campaigns there are going to be enormous humanitarian consequences, and maybe even a disaster,” Ms. Grande said. “How do we prepare for it?”

Iraq
Refugees,Internally Displaced People
ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Islam
Sunnis
Shiite
Anbar Province
Syria


Jewish Homeland in Birobidzhan, Russia, Retains Appeal

Abstract: BIROBIDZHAN, Russia — Andrey Zasorin, the spiritual leader of the old synagogue here in the capital of Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region, is a born-again Jew who found God after 23 years in prison for robbery. Even then, he returned to Judaism only after flirting with the Russian Orthodox and Pentecostal churches. Yelena Sarashevskaya, the editor of the local paper, Birobidzhaner Shtern, which still publishes two or three pages a week in Yiddish, is not Jewish. She is a descendant of Cossacks, but married a Jew and learned to read and write Yiddish in college. Identity is a complex issue in the quixotic Jewish homeland established by Stalin here in the mosquito-infested swampland of Russia’s Far East, some 20 years before the founding of Israel. While the big menorah standing outside the railroad station, the Yiddish street signs and ubiquitous Stars of David give Birobidzhan the veneer of a Jewish Disneyland, the city often seems to have the religious authenticity of a pizza bagel with pepperoni. Because of this gap between the city’s spirit and its spirituality — not to mention the dwindling number of people who actually call themselves Jews — commentators have been predicting the Jewish Autonomous Region’s demise for decades. But whether on the Upper East Side, or in Jerusalem, or on this last patch of Siberia along the Chinese border, Jewish is as Jewish does. And when it comes to the so-called Soviet Zion, Ms. Sarashevskaya, for one, is sick of the snickering. “I don’t blame foreign journalists, even our own native journalists suffer from this,” Ms. Sarashevskaya said, sitting in her office on Lenin Street. “They say, ‘ Stalin’s experiment, the Birobidzhan Project, failed ’ — these are the clichés they use — and honestly it’s annoying already. By God, we are talking about living people, you understand. And it’s not for them to judge. History turned out this way and made all this possible. At least the Jews who came here survived the Holocaust. This place saved many lives.” Of course, some survived the Nazis only to die by the thousands under Stalin. But if coaxing Russia’s Jews virtually to the end of the land always had the feeling of a cruel joke, the comrades in the Kremlin could hardly have predicted the punch line. Unlike other places contemplated for Jewish resettlement over the years, like Uganda or Alaska or Japan, Birobidzhan, (pronounced bi-ra-bi-JAN) cannot be written off as a historical footnote or dismissed as fiction. Though it never became the agrarian, socialist-Jewish utopia that some founders envisioned, Birobidzhan remains a Jewish place. The old synagogue, a ramshackle, one-story wooden house, is still functioning, after closing briefly in the mid-1990s. A new synagogue, financed by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, has been built in the center of downtown, along with a Jewish community center. Sholem Aleichem Street remains the main road, and a statue of the Fiddler on the Roof still greets concertgoers outside the symphony hall. No doubt, the Jewish population has dropped, to less than 7 percent of the 76,000 people who live in Birobidzhan, and less than 2 percent in the wider region. Very few are religious. But some Jews who left for Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union have returned — tugged home even from the Promised Land, which still cannot promise peace or tranquillity. On the same weekend last month, Birobidzhan celebrated Rosh Hashana and the city’s 75th anniversary. Visitors arrive by train, a stop on the Trans-Siberian, to see the city’s name written in huge Yiddish letters. One local elementary school still teaches Yiddish. “For me Birobidzhan was a shock, because I was born in Yiddish civilization,” said Marek Halter, the French-Jewish novelist, who was so struck by the place when he visited in 2011 that he made a documentary film, “ Birobidzhan, Birobidzhan, ” and wrote a novel set in the city. “It was like Jurassic Park.” Among the Jews to return to Birobidzhan from Israel is Gershon Riss, whose son, Eliyahu, 22, is now the rabbi of the new synagogue. “In 2004, after a long absence, we came here for vacation,” Mr. Riss said. “We saw new buildings, a new, beautiful synagogue and the revival of the Jewish culture.” As a boy, Mr. Riss recalled going to the Yiddish theater with his father, to see productions like “Tevye the Milkman,” by Sholem Aleichem, and “The Witch,” by Abraham Goldfaden. Officials recently announced that they had allocated land for the city’s first mosque. At the ceremony, Roman Leder, a Jewish leader, gave the local imam a copy of the Old Testament. Berel Lazar, the chief rabbi of Russia, said in an interview in Moscow that Stalin’s goal was to exile Russia’s Jews to where “they wouldn’t be able to do much harm.” Historians say another goal was to use the Jews as a buffer between Russia and China . As a result, Rabbi Lazar said, Birobidzhan was never really a homeland. “Is it any more Jewish than any other area of Russia? Surely not,” he said. “He took the Jewish soul out of the Jewish people.” But while Jewish imagery is rare in Moscow or St. Petersburg, Birobidzhan revels in it. Even signs in Russian often use a Hebraic calligraphy. Such pride was not always in evidence. “There were times when we were young when it was not very convenient to be Jewish, it was even dangerous,” said Vilen I. Arnapolin, who, on Dec. 24, 1937, became the very first baby recorded in the city’s birth records. “Now everybody wants to be Jewish.” But to say a renaissance is under way would be going too far. Mr. Arnapolin’s daughter and two grandchildren have assimilated and are listed as Russian, not Jewish, in their passports. His granddaughter, Vlada Yakshina, 18, is studying not Yiddish but Chinese. There is no kosher supermarket or restaurant — only a Chinese chef named Van Bao-lin, who goes by Kolya, serves up the occasional schnitzel and delights in toasting guests at his restaurant with a hearty “L’Chaim!” The religious, meanwhile, are surviving as best they can. Mr. Zasorin, who rejoined the synagogue his grandmother attended when he was a boy, leads an aging congregation, called Beit T’Shuvah — House of Redemption — that often cannot muster the 10 men required for a prayer group. The rabbi of the new synagogue, Eliyahu Riss, is hoping its Sunday school will engage a new generation. Riva Khaskelevna Shmain, a founding Birobidzhaner who recently celebrated her 78th birthday, said she has hope for the future. “There is a Jewish kindergarten,” she said. “So I think all this will continue.” Ms. Sarashevskaya, the editor, said those who declared Stalin’s experiment a failure missed the point. “Of course, this is not Israel,” Ms. Sarashevskaya said. “But that was not the goal. The Jewish Autonomous Region is wonderful as it is. This is a quiet, tranquil and cozy place, good for married couples, elderly people and children.” She added, “This is a Jewish place.”

Siberia
Jews and Judaism
Religion and Belief
Birobidzhan (Russia)


Burberry Profit Rises 14% on Growth in Asia

Abstract: LONDON — The British luxury group Burberry said Tuesday that its full-year pretax profit rose 14 percent on strong retail growth in Asian markets, where the company is expanding its numbers of branded stores. Burberry, known for its camel, red and black plaid-lined raincoats, posted adjusted pretax profit of £428 million, or $651 million, in the year to March 31. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected £415 million. Revenue in the Asia-Pacific region, the company’s largest with around 35 percent of sales, rose 13 percent, led by demand for more expensive products in China and Hong Kong. Burberry said profit for the first half of the current financial year, which ends next March, would be below that of last year as its focus shifts to high-growth Latin American and Asian retail sales from Burberry-branded stores from wholesale markets, or sales through non-Burberry stores. Retail sales now account for 71 percent of Burberry’s revenue. Burberry affirmed earlier guidance that it expected first-half wholesale underlying revenue to decrease by around 10 percent as the company reduces its activity in Europe and in North America. The company is focused instead on tapping appetite for Western luxury in faster-growing, higher-end Asian and Latin American retail markets. The company expects to open 10 Burberry-branded stores in the new year, with three larger-format stores opening in Shanghai to serve local customers and Chinese domestic tourists. The forecast for strong growth in China contrasts with more cautious recent comments on the region from fashion rivals like PPR, which owns Gucci, and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, both of which have reported slower growth in China. Revenue in Europe and the Americas each rose by 6 percent last year, Burberry said.

Burberry
Luxury good
Earnings Reports
Asia


Shael Polakow-Suransky Is Believer in (More) Testing

Abstract: He stood out at Community High School in Ann Arbor , Mich., an experimental school light on structure that was mockingly called “Commie High,” and at Brown , the Ivy League university known for giving students free rein, and where one of his inspirations was an education dean who espoused flexibility in teaching. Today, Shael Polakow-Suransky is the chief accountability officer of the New York City Department of Education, a job that is as institutional as they come. He traffics in hard numbers, overseeing a system that assigns grades to schools based on complex and fixed formulas, in which success depends largely on how students score on a single test. On Jan. 3, he will become the No. 2 official in the nation’s largest school system, the educational counterpart to Cathleen P. Black , the businesswoman chancellor. Because of his background at Brown and as a teacher familiar with real-world classroom challenges, his appointment tempered some fears that Ms. Black would run the schools too much by the numbers. But one thing Mr. Polakow-Suransky and his colleagues make clear is that he is a believer in the power of testing. And if he has his way, there will be better tests, and more of them. “Until we start seeing assessments that ask kids to write research papers, ask them to solve unfamiliar problems, ask them to defend their ideas, ask them to engage with both fiction and nonfiction texts; until those kinds of assessments are our state assessments, all we’re measuring are basic skills,” Mr. Polakow-Suransky said in an interview. In his evolution from an idealist teacher to a data-mining administrator, Mr. Polakow-Suransky, 38, personified the seismic changes in education that were beginning to take shape just as he was drawing up his first lesson plans. He came of age as the school system was moving to replace large high schools with small ones, and making testing both a means and an end. He jumped aboard both movements, mentored along much of the way by an educator who, next month, will be working under him. But he also had his own ambition, an easy-to-speak-to manner that endeared him to others, and a capacity for deep analysis of educational policy. While Ms. Black has given journalists polished answers that reveal little of her thinking, Mr. Polakow-Suransky offers context, distills each point that sustains his argument and summarizes his opinion at the end, a structure reminiscent of a book report. He can sometimes strain one’s attention: one question during an interview elicited an answer 1,477 words long. He was born in South Africa , where his parents, Valerie Polakow and Leonard Suransky, were active in the African National Congress , the political party that had been working underground to unseat the apartheid regime. The first of their two sons had just been born, and they named him Shael, a close approximation to a Hebrew verb that means “to ask intensely,” which they pronounced “shale.” (His last name is pronounced poh-LA-coe soo-RAN-skee.) “There was a feeling that things were closing down on us,” said Leonard Suransky, now chairman of the international relations department at Webster University in the Netherlands . “We also made a decision that it wouldn’t be wise for Shael to grow up in a place as unstable as apartheid South Africa.” In Ann Arbor, he enrolled in Community High, a small public school that embraced a personalized approach toward education, where students had a large say in defining their course work. But his school’s progressive style did not shield it from racial tensions. Several of Mr. Polakow-Suransky’s black classmates transferred out, “uncomfortable with the predominantly white student population,” according to an article he co-wrote for the educational magazine Phi Delta Kappan in 1990. As a student there, Mr. Polakow-Suransky helped put together a survey to assess racial attitudes among Ann Arbor high school students and then helped create a peer-educator program that spread throughout the district, connecting high school students to younger children to talk about tolerance. “That,” said Cheryl Grace, who taught him social studies at Community High, “was his most lasting legacy.” At Brown, he studied with Theodore R. Sizer, one of the country’s most prominent education-reform advocates, who believed that teaching and learning ought to be assessed through observation, projects and other ways, and that policy decisions should be made on the school level. His beliefs would come to be viewed by some as antithetical to the testing movement beginning to rise around the country. Mr. Polakow-Suransky took his ideals to New York, where he taught history and math to middle and high school students, and then was assistant principal for a year at Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School, a new progressive public school in Harlem . That year he met Eric Nadelstern, a Queens principal who had joined the school system the year Mr. Polakow-Suransky was born. He shadowed Mr. Nadelstern to fulfill a requirement of his master’s in educational leadership from Bank Street College of Education. Mr. Nadelstern, who is now deputy chancellor responsible for school instruction and support, took Mr. Polakow-Suransky under his wing. Together, they opened Bronx International High School, a school for recent immigrants. As the founding principal, Mr. Polakow-Suransky was able to put Professor Sizer’s ideas into practice, in addition to some of his own. Norma Vega, a counselor at Bronx International at the time, said that Mr. Polakow-Suransky felt that all of the students should be taught together, but that when some teachers proposed that struggling students be separated for remedial instruction, he let them have their way. Eventually, the teachers came back to him, saying the experiment was not producing any better results. “Without passing any judgment, he got things back to where they used to be,” Ms. Vega said. After that, Mr. Polakow-Suransky’s rise was steady and fast, and his role increasingly focused on measuring progress through assessment tests, the central tenet of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ’s education platform. Mr. Polakow-Suransky acknowledges that the tests are imperfect, but says they are a necessary measurement tool. “To put it very simply,” he said, “how do you know that the kids are learning?” In 2004, Mr. Nadelstern made him his deputy in the Office of New Schools, and Mr. Polakow-Suransky moved on to become chief academic officer and a deputy chancellor overseeing instruction before becoming chief accountability officer in 2009. He has also been in charge of the city’s roll-out of the new national standards for what students should learn in English and math each year from kindergarten through high school, with more emphasis on writing and critical thinking. That is where the new tests would come in. He has been working with officials from New York and other states to create a new kind of testing that would include essays, classroom projects and multiple-choice exams, and that would be administered in stages, perhaps at four times during the year. He described one prototype question. Students would be asked to calculate the diameter that a straw needs to fit through a juice box’s hole, then write to a juice box manufacturer whose straws keep getting stuck in the hole to explain why its diameter should be changed. “It’s a ninth-grade problem that involves geometry and algebra in an unfamiliar context,” and tests several skills at once, he said. As to whether more tests might encourage even more test preparation, Mr. Polakow-Suransky said he believed that this was not necessarily bad, if the tests were better and if teachers were imparting skills rather than test-taking strategies. He acknowledged that some of them wound up taking the “fastest, cheapest, easiest way to get there,” teaching to the test rather than for it. But “that’s not the norm,” he added. “The goal,” he went on, “is to actually create something that you would want kids to prepare for; that is rich, engaging, interesting, rigorous curriculum, so when they prepare for it, they’re learning.” Mr. Polakow-Suransky has no children, but he has been married twice. His first marriage, in 2003, to Lynette Delgado, a fellow young teacher and principal, ended after a few months. His second marriage, in 2008, to an actress and fellow Brown graduate named Brienin Bryant, ended with Ms. Bryant’s death from breast cancer at the age of 37 last December, at the end of a heartbreaking year in which he split his time between the education headquarters and the hospital. One year later, he is set to become the second-in-command of all city public schools. (He makes $192,000 now, but his new salary has not yet been determined.) When the state education commissioner proposed that the city appoint a deputy with education experience to offset Ms. Black’s lack of the same, a few expected that Mr. Nadelstern would be the choice. But instead it was Mr. Polakow-Suransky, who will now be his mentor’s boss. In an e-mail, Mr. Nadelstern said, “Shael is an outstanding educator who will certainly continue to distinguish himself in this position.” Mr. Polakow-Suransky said of Mr. Nadelstern: “It’s been very clear that he’s going to do whatever he can to support me in this role. It’s always complicated in situations like this.”

Shael Polakow-Suransky
NYC
NYC Department of Education
K-12 Education
Cathleen P Black


Need to Lower the Bills? Just Ask

Abstract: IF someone said that you could reduce your bills by a significant amount by taking one simple step — and this step would be neither time-consuming nor embarrassing — wouldn’t you want to know what it was? This may sound like the sort of empty instant-money promise you would see in a New York subway ad, but I have a bona fide bill-reduction strategy. It’s as simple as this: Just call and ask. That may not sound like much. But negotiating with your creditors is a too-often neglected staple of the personal finance canon. And I have to credit a family member with reminding me that it is also an efficient way to restore a chunk of money to your budget. My sister-in-law, Deirdre Scanlon Dunleavey, rediscovered this technique after she volunteered to take over the household bill-paying operations from her husband. When she noticed that their cellphone bill was more than $100 a month — for relatively scant use — a red flag went up. “When I looked at the bills there was all this stuff on there we didn’t need,” she said. One phone call later, their basic cellphone package was $35 lighter. That inspired her to do some old-fashioned comparison shopping with their car insurance, which, upon seeing their premiums, infuriated her. “Why were we paying $176 a month when we’re both over 35 and driving safe cars?” She put in a call to a rival insurer and got a rate that was $75 cheaper per month. Total savings: about $110, and there was an added bonus. “I was surprised by how nice people were when I asked,” she said. If shrinking the bills is really this easy, why doesn’t everyone do it? Is it the dread of being mired in an endless, automated phone tree? The fear of being seen — even by an unseen customer service representative — as a cheapskate? I wondered whether most people even considered this sort of negotiating as a financial option. Katherine Meyers, an administrative assistant at a small company in Burlington, Vt., said that she thinks many people don’t realize that even the biggest corporations might be responsive to a customer’s request for a lower price — and sometimes the better deal is already there for the asking. Ms. Meyers was looking for ways to lower shipping costs at her office and called FedEx to see what was possible. “I didn’t even have to ask if there was a better deal they could give us,” she said. “The rep immediately mentioned that we could probably get a 25 to 30 percent discount if we switched to another plan.” Ms. Meyers said that she was amazed, and not just by the on-the-spot bargain: “Why didn’t they ever mention this before?” She estimates that her company now spends about $375 less a month on shipping — a large enough gain that she is considering a similar approach with her personal bills. “It makes you realize that it’s worth asking.” THAT was Toni McLellan’s attitude a couple of years ago when she learned that her health insurance would cover only part of a surgical procedure, leaving her with a $1,000 medical bill. “I called the hospital and asked if they offered any discounts if you paid in full.” They did, and Ms. McLellan, a freelance writer in Woodstock, Ill., ended up paying only $750. “Who knew?” she said. Now she said she deploys the “ask and it’s likely ye shall receive” strategy all the time. She isn’t always successful, but Ms. McLellan said that she believed in challenging the financial status quo. “We’re socialized to be good citizens, and we tend to take our bills at face value,” she said. “We’re not a culture that haggles. In other parts of the world haggling is an art. If you do it here, it’s seen as somewhat shady.” It’s a shame that more people don’t view basic financial negotiations as a citizen’s right and privilege, because they are. I suspect many people not only fear being seen as underhanded, but as poor. The point isn’t what you can afford to pay, but whether it is sometimes reasonable to ask to pay less. Inspired by my own research, last month I decided to call my cellphone company to protest more than $100 in charges that were assessed because I had exceeded my allotted minutes. I knew that the company allowed people to purchase extra minutes, although usually before the end of the billing cycle. It took some effort — and two phone calls — but they finally agreed to reduce my bill by $47. Now if only I could do that at the gas station.

Finances
Health Insurance and Managed Care
Retail Stores and Trade
Wireless Communications