Thrive Market, an Online Grocer, Raises $111 Million

Abstract: Investors are betting that a start-up aiming to become the online equivalent of Costco for healthy foods can grow and blossom. The company, Thrive Market, said on Monday that it had raised $111 million in a new round of financing, led by the investment firm Invus. Other existing investors, including Greycroft Partners, E-Ventures and Cross Culture Ventures, also took part. Thrive, founded three years ago by a group of entrepreneurs, is one of several start-ups built around a membership model. But customers pay $60 a year to be able to buy organic food at what the company says are lower prices than what traditional grocers like Whole Foods offer. The aim is to give more customers access to what the founders say is better food. “We’re looking to make healthy living affordable and accessible to any American family,” Nick Green, a Thrive Market co-founder, said in an interview. It was an idea that initially drew little enthusiasm, according to Mr. Green, with dozens of venture capital firms rejecting him and his co-founder Gunnar Lovelace for their seed round of funding. But the two found support from individual backers online, leading to subsequent rounds of financing that included the likes of Greycroft. Now, the company says that it has more than five million registered users and more than 300,000 paid members, and ships more than $200,00 worth of goods a day. The fund-raising announced on Monday is meant to help the company grow, including creating more of its own branded goods and paying for more media marketing. Thrive Market is also built around a philanthropic element: With every regular membership sold, Thrive Market also sponsors a membership for a low-income family. The impulse is rooted in part in Mr. Lovelace’s childhood, part of which was spent growing up poor with his single mother. “We’re really a stakeholder-aligned business,” Mr. Lovelace said. “We want to be known for social advocacy.” Along with the fund-raising news, Thrive Market also plans to announce that it will petition the Agriculture Department to allow buyers to use food stamps online. Mr. Gunnar said that Thrive Market had been in talks with the department for over a year and a half on the issue, but had made no progress. “They jerked us around,” he said. “We know they’re going to do this eventually, but we want to show the support there is for making this happen and happen quickly.” As part of the fund-raising round, two executives from Invus will join Thrive Market’s board. “At Invus the best part of our job is to meet and partner with entrepreneurs who are passionate about their mission and are looking to transform their industries,” Evren Bilimer, a managing director at the firm who will join the Thrive Market board, said in a statement. “That’s exactly what we saw with Gunnar and Nick and the rest of the Thrive Market team.”

Venture capital
Health food
Startup
Thrive Market


Tips for Sorting Through the Social Networks

Abstract: Bonnie Smalley has Internet bragging rights: She has been blocked by Twitter for hand-typing too many tweets in an hour. They thought she was a computer program made to spew spam. Ms. Smalley, it turns out, is a 100 percent human customer service representative for Comcast. She is one of 10 representatives who reach out to customers through social networks, rather than waiting for them to find Comcast’s support site. Known on Twitter as comcast bonnie, Ms. Smalley reads at least 400 customer tweets on a slow day at her desk in Philadelphia. Amazingly, she replies to all of them, and an additional hundred or more e-mail messages and a few more messages on Facebook , MySpace, Second Life and LinkedIn. On days when Comcast makes an announcement, the volume of everything triples. How does she do it? Ms. Smalley, 24, has plenty of advice to give, as do other always-on pros and amateurs. Their tips will help you minimize your time and effort while maximizing your social bliss. Install a Console Application Doing your social networking inside a browser window is slow, clumsy and prone to losing work in crashes. That is why serious networkers usually install a console application like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. There is a small war on the Internet over which of these two consoles is the best. The truth is, they both do a lot of the same things. Pick one. What matters is that they are much faster and less crash-prone than loading Facebook and Twitter into your browser. Also, replies and comments appear almost instantaneously, but in a separate, lightweight application instead of your browser. You can ignore the updates until it is time to pay attention. Ms. Smalley organizes her Seesmic desktop by putting the busiest parts of the interface on the left, where she found she could read them faster. She then sorts the other components by how busy they are, parking the most idle of the Seesmic Desktop’s windows on the right, where she can ignore them most of the time. Pick a Good Avatar Nearly every social site now lets you upload a photo or other image to serve as your bio photo and as an indentifying thumbnail image next to posts, tweets and comments you write. Besides letting you show a bit of yourself to your readers, avatars make your writings easier to spot and harder to confuse with someone else’s work. Before you get sucked into typing, set up an avatar image that you can upload wherever you go. “When I started with the team, I had just the Comcast C as my icon,” Ms. Smalley said by phone from her home in Delaware. “This doesn’t tell people I’m a real person.” She soon replaced the corporate logo with a smiling self-portrait and a goofy background image packed with cartoon characters. By appearing as real, individual and approachable, she has prompted customers to share their problems and frustrations with her. “People tweet me all the time about nonwork things,” she said. If you are not keen on having a real photo of yourself up there, try the cartoon avatar generators at “The Simpsons Movie” Web site (Simpsons characters); Joystiq (Nintendo Wii style); South Park Studios (characters from Comedy Central’s bad-taste hit); and BeFunky, which lets you stylize a photo and then save it directly to your accounts on several networks. Ms. Smalley warns, though: don’t change your avatar too often. It’s fun for you, but your growing crop of readers will be confused. Know When to Keep It Private Ariana Evans, known as faery queen21 on Twitter, is an administrator in the office of a small company near Pasadena, Calif. When she discovered Twitter, Ms. Evans recognized it as an oversharer’s paradise. But worrying about who might see what took time away from tweeting at full tilt. Ms. Evans’s solution was to protect her Twitter updates. The option restricts her updates to only users who request access and whom Ms. Evans personally approves. (It is in the settings screen on Twitter.) In her walled garden, she feels she can say what she wants. Be warned, though: Twitter makes it cut-and-paste simple for friends to accidentally retweet your protected updates into the public stream. Social networks are built by techies eager to share text, pictures and videos, not lock them up. Take Notes Once you get sucked into a marathon networking binge, you’ll probably never remember all the newly discovered Web sites you want to go back and try later. To memorize those, Twitter has a bookmarking function that few can find. Roll over a tweet you want to save and a star-shaped icon appears to its right. It’s faint, but it’s there. Click the star. Now click the Favorites link in the right-hand column of your Twitter homepage. The tweet that you starred, to use the vernacular, should be there. Ms. Smalley keeps a separate notepad window open next to Seesmic, with a list of customers she is actively helping with a problem. “It keeps their phone number handy if they come back to ask a question,” she wrote. “It lets me see how long I’ve been helping them. It’s not fancy, but it does the job. I learned early on that it’s impossible to remember everything, even if you do write it down.” Don’t Let the Web Rule You The biggest problem with social networks is they are always on, 24 hours a day. Setting up efficient social networking habits may make you even more addicted to the constant contact. Pete Cashmore edits Mashable, a blog about Internet businesses that draws millions of readers every month. Yet he is as vulnerable as anyone else to the siren call of the Internet when he sits down to work. Rather than learning to manage time, Mr. Cashmore suggests a Firefox add-on called LeechBlock. “Use it to ban distracting sites like YouTube and Facebook between certain hours,” he says, “so you’re forced to get on with your work.” Ms. Smalley, who cannot turn off Twitter at the office, sets a cutoff time for networking and lets her customers know when she will be unavailable. Returning to their problems the next morning, she found, works better than staying up late. “Twitter never sleeps,” she said to me in an e-mail message at 11:37 p.m. “But you need to.”

Computers and the Internet
Social Networking (Internet)
Twitter
Facebook.com
LinkedIn


U.S. Envoy Affirms Support for Universal Suffrage in Hong Kong

Abstract: HONG KONG — The new top American diplomat in Hong Kong reiterated on Tuesday the United States’ support for “genuine universal suffrage” in Hong Kong, but said he would not take any position on how this should be achieved. Clifford A. Hart Jr., the new American consul general , who arrived on July 30, said in his first public speech here, “We have no prescription for Hong Kong’s electoral process — one of the fundamental precepts of democracy is that the people themselves have a full say in how their systems work.” An electoral committee of just 1,200 people, mainly business leaders and others with financial and personal ties to Beijing, now chooses the chief executive of the territory, which has retained considerable autonomy since Britain returned it to Chinese rule in 1997. Beijing authorities have said universal suffrage might be granted in elections for the next chief executive in 2017 and for the legislature in 2020. An active debate has already emerged in Hong Kong over whether the general public should be allowed to nominate candidates for chief executive or whether a nominating committee should control who can appear on the ballot. Democracy advocates fear that some version of the current electoral committee could end up as a nominating committee and limit eligibility to allies of the Chinese Communist Party. Pro-Communist media organizations have accused Mr. Hart, like his predecessors, of intervening in China’s internal affairs merely by commenting on any aspect of Hong Kong politics, and have even suggested at times that the United States seeks to create a base in Hong Kong for subversion. Addressing the American Chamber of Commerce here, Mr. Hart said he had no hidden agenda but would comment on issues relevant to American national interests or American core values.

Hong Kong
Diplomats Embassies and Consulates
Clifford A Hart Jr
China
Voting


Beijing Tightens Its Control of Vital Minerals

Abstract: HONG KONG — A Chinese government agency has taken steps to more tightly manage the production and export of rare earth minerals, crucial materials used in a wide range of technologies and products vital to the West. The agency, the Ministry of Land and Resources, invoked a seldom-used mining law to take direct control of 11 rare earth mining districts in southern China. The ministry said in a statement, posted on its Web site Wednesday and briefly mentioned Thursday by the state media, that rare earth mining in those districts, all at the southern end of Jiangxi Province, had been placed under its national planning authority. That step removes administrative oversight of mining from provincial and municipal control; local officials in southern China are widely suspected of collusion with crime syndicates responsible for illegal strip-mining and refining of rare earths. The ease of digging up and refining some of the most valuable rare earths from the clay hills of southernmost Jiangxi Province and northernmost Guangdong Province, together with soaring prices, has led to a surge in illegal strip-mining that has turned many hillsides into lunar landscapes. Crime syndicates have dumped the mine tailings , including powerful acids and other materials, into local waterways. The fields and water supplies of peasant farmers who live downstream have been contaminated. The land ministry, which has inspectors, hinted that it planned to place additional districts under the control of the national government. It said repeatedly in the statement that this was the first designation of national rare earth mining areas. A legal notice dated Jan. 4 was posted with the statement and invoked China’s obscure, decades-old planning statute. American officials had said before the current visit of President Hu Jintao of China to Washington that they wanted some assurance that China would continue to supply rare earths. But Chinese officials have been leery of international commitments on mining output, and the 41-point joint statement issued Wednesday by the United States and China after the meeting of President Obama and Mr. Hu made no mention of rare earths. China produces 92 percent of the world’s light rare earths like cerium and lanthanum, which are used in applications like glass manufacturing and oil refining, and 99 percent of the world’s heavy rare earths like dysprosium, which are used in trace amounts but are vital for products like smartphones and compact fluorescent bulbs . Most of the heavy rare earths come from an unusual geological formation that straddles the hilly, sometimes lawless southern border area of Jiangxi Province with Guangdong Province. According to geologists, it is the only known commercial deposit of rare earths in the world that has virtually no contamination from thorium, which is radioactive. Many companies in the West indirectly depend on illegal mining and smuggling. Industry experts estimate that illegal production accounts for about a seventh of the supply of light rare earths in the world and as much as half of heavy rare earths. Smuggling is less common for light rare earths, partly because they are less valuable. They sell for about $20 a pound outside China, compared with more than $100 a pound for some of the heavy rare earths. Most of China’s light rare earths come from a large state-owned iron ore mine in a desert near Baotou, in northern China, where illegal mining and smuggling are more difficult and are becoming harder. Security forces have begun erecting electrified fences to discourage trespassers. China has repeatedly cut its quotas for exports of rare earth minerals from government-approved mines and refineries in the last two years, while raising taxes on the exports. It separately imposed a two-month, unannounced ban on exports of rare earths to Japan during a territorial dispute last September and carefully checked other countries’ orders for rare earths to discourage trans-shipment to Japan. The United States Energy Department concluded in a report last month that clean energy industries in America relied heavily on imports of rare earths and would be highly vulnerable to supply disruptions for as long as the next 15 years. Efforts to dig mines elsewhere face many legal and environmental obstacles. The Obama administration has included China’s export restrictions on rare earths in a broad investigation of whether China has violated World Trade Organization rules to help its clean energy exports; the United Steelworkers union has accused China of limiting exports of rare earths to force manufacturers to move their factories to China, an accusation supported by comments in 2009 by Chinese provincial officials saying exactly that. W.T.O. rules ban most export quotas and taxes and require countries to provide foreign buyers with the same access to natural resources as the best-connected domestic buyers. But China has recently defended the export quotas and taxes as needed for environmental protection, invoking an exception in W.T.O. rules that allows the conservation of natural resources. Alan Wolff, a former senior United States trade official and now the chairman of the international trade practice at the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf, said the crackdown against illegal mining, which has included numerous raids by Provincial police in northern Guangdong Province, could buttress its defense against W.T.O. cases by showing Beijing’s concern for the environment. But Mr. Wolff added that a W.T.O. case against China’s rare earth export restrictions could still be successful. In addition to seizing control of the rare earth mining districts in southern Jiangxi Province, the Ministry of Land and Resources announced that it was imposing national planning authority on an iron ore mining area in the western Chinese province of Sichuan that has two other scarce and valuable metals, titanium and vanadium. Titanium has many applications in aerospace and other industry sectors, while vanadium is used in the production of sulfuric acid, which is the main material needed to refine rare earth ores.

China
Rare Earths
Mines and Mining
Metals and Minerals


A Table Tennis Star in China Now Uses Her Paddle for the U.S.

Abstract: Wang Chen is one of two American table tennis players ranked high enough in the world to automatically qualify for the Olympics this summer in Beijing. Yet she has no coach and she receives no direct financing from the sport’s national governing body. What Wang does have is the support of Jerry Wartski, a 77-year-old New York City landlord who, like Wang, ended his formal education at 9 and was separated from his family, albeit under entirely different circumstances. He is a Holocaust survivor. Wang, like Wartski, said she moved to New York because “I wanted to change my life.” “In China, I was just a player,” she said. “In New York, I learned how to do everything. I think I grew up here.” There is such a dearth of American players of Wang’s caliber that if she wants high-intensity training to prepare for Beijing, she must poach practice time with European teams at international events or lure training partners from China to Manhattan, Wang’s home since 2001. Twice passed over for the Chinese Olympic team, Wang had retired from the sport that she was chosen for in first grade, when she and her classmates were instructed to throw table tennis balls into a basket. Students who landed three balls in the basket became table tennis specialists. “It wasn’t easy,” Wang said recently. “Not many kids could do it. The ball is small, the basket is small, and it’s very far.” By 9, Wang was living at the junior training center. By 11, she was a professional, which meant training eight hours a day, competing internationally and receiving a small government salary and a tutor. She made the junior national team when she was 13, quick by Chinese standards. “The coach already liked me,” Wang said. “I had long arms, long legs and a good serve.” (Now 5 feet 10 inches, Wang is one of the taller female competitors.) Wang became a junior national singles champion at 14 by defeating opponents two years older. But at 22, she was left off the table tennis team for the 1996 Atlanta Games because coaches picked older, more experienced players. When the 2000 Sydney Games approached, Wang had won two world championship medals — bronze in doubles in 1995 and the team gold in 1997 — yet she was overlooked again. “I was ranked No. 4 in the world, and they only took three,” she said. She quit in 1999 and moved to the United States to help her older sister, Wang Sai, run two leather goods stores, in Pennsylvania and in New Jersey. Word of her arrival circulated quickly, and Wang discovered there was a demand here for table tennis lessons. “The Chinese parents all know me, so they wanted me to coach at their house,” Wang said. She charged $40 an hour and shuttled to Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey. In 2002, she began coaching Wartski, who owned a table tennis club on the Upper West Side. Wartski knew what it was like to grow up quickly. As a Jew living in Ozorkow, Poland, in the 1940s, he and his family were taken to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, he said. In April 1945, he and his brother were liberated from Mittelbau-Dora in Germany, where their father died a month earlier. Wartski, then 15, spent the next three years at a displaced-persons camp outside Frankfurt. “We didn’t do much,” he said. “We were just trying to get our stuff together and decide what to do.” That is where he discovered table tennis. In 1949, he moved to Brooklyn and eventually made a career in real estate. When Wang began dabbling in the sport, he offered her a place to play and a part-time job managing his club — one of two centers in Manhattan devoted exclusively to table tennis. Eventually, Wartski named the club on West 100th Street after Wang, and Wang’s co-manager, Paul David, an Olympic hopeful from Guyana, convinced her that she could still play. “I could see she still had the urge,” David said. “But every time, she had a different excuse: ‘I’m too old. I’m not motivated.’ ” He reminded her that she had never competed in an Olympics and, at 34, this could be her last chance. Wang began running in Central Park to lose weight. She continued training Columbia University students and top junior players. Because she is so tall relative to the table, she began having back pain and started sleeping on the floor of an uptown apartment she shares with her husband, Forrest, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia. Because of Wang’s tournament schedule, they were apart six months in 2007. She gave up coaching and managing the Wang Chen Table Tennis Club to devote herself to making the Olympic team. Wartski estimated that he had invested a six-figure sum in Wang’s career over the past six years, including housing, importing practice partners and her flights and hotel rooms for tournaments around the world. “I just do it, and I’m happy to do it,” he said. Wartski said he had one regret. “I feel bad that she was unable to get a passport in time for the 2004 Games,” he said. “She lost a lot of good years.” Gao Jun, who at 39 will competing in her fourth Olympics, agreed. “If she could have had her citizenship at the time, we could have had a better result, because the Olympics still had doubles,” she said. (At the Beijing Games, the doubles events will be replaced by a three-person team format.) Gao is the other automatic qualifier for the United States team, and she, like Wang, owes part of her current success to a New York benefactor: she competes in professional tournaments with financing from the New York Athletic Club. She also is affected by the dearth of elite players in the United States. Gao, a two-time Olympian for the United States, has been training in Shanghai for the past six years, partly because she did not believe she could sustain her level of play by remaining here. No American has advanced past the Round of 32 at the Olympics since the sport made its debut in 1988. But Wang made a surprise run to the quarterfinals at the world championships last year in Croatia. Despite back pain that left her barely able to walk without three or four massages a day, Wang was one of only two non-Chinese citizens in the final eight. She lost to the eventual champion, Guo Yue, who had been the best junior player when Wang was on China’s senior national team. Wang said she considered it her greatest satisfaction so far — not only because it secured an Olympic berth. “The result was like a miracle,” she said. “Because I came to the U.S., and everyone thinks it’s impossible to play table tennis here.”

Tennis Table
Olympic Games (2008)
Olympic Games
Beijing (China)


Argentina: Fire Forms Toxic Cloud

Abstract: A public scare over a toxic cloud that formed Thursday prompted the evacuation of offices, schools and the central train station in Buenos Aires, and sent about 80 people to seek emergency treatment. The government declared a public health emergency after a shipping container from China carrying a pesticide caught fire at a Buenos Aires port, sending a thick, foul-smelling cloud of smoke over several parts of the city. An emergency official recommended that people living near the site of the fire “avoid going out” and “close doors and windows.” A laboratory analysis identified the active ingredient in the pesticide as thiodicarb, classified as “moderately hazardous” by the World Health Organization in 2009. Sergio Berni, the security secretary, said a sample of the pesticide was “of low toxicity” and posed little risk.

Argentina
Pesticides
Fires and Firefighters
Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Hazardous and Toxic Substances


China Bidder Tries Again for Australian Mining Firm

Abstract: SYDNEY — Yanzhou Coal Mining of China said Monday that it had resubmitted its application for the purchase of Felix Resources to the Australian Foreign Investment Review Board. The review board had asked Yanzhou to resubmit its application for the deal, which would be worth 3.5 billion Australian dollars, or $3.2 billion, Felix said. The Australian coal miner gave no further details. Yanzhou Coal’s spokesman in Australia, Ian Smith, said, “We continue to work with the government and respect its processes. We are happy to resubmit.” Uncertainty over the approval process has kept Felix’s shares below the offer price of 18 dollars a share. The stock held steady at 16.70 dollars Monday. On Sept. 30, Felix had said it expected the takeover to be completed in December. The review board, an advisory body to the Australian treasurer, has been flooded with applications by Chinese state companies, including the bid by Sinochem for the farm chemicals group Nufarm and Baosteel’s plan to buy 15 percent of the iron ore explorer Aquila Resources. Last month, the review board’s general manager, Patrick Colmer, said the board wanted to limit foreign investments in start-up projects to less than 50 percent and in major mining companies to 15 percent. Felix falls in between, being neither a start-up nor a major mining company. Earlier this year, the review board allowed Minmetals of China to buy the assets of OZ Minerals, except for one mine near a military weapons-testing site. Last month, however, the board blocked China Nonferrous Metal Mining from buying more than 50 percent of Lynas Corp., a prospector for rare earths, amid concerns about Chinese control of the market for rare-earth minerals.


Lithuania Advances to European Final

Abstract: Lithuania beat Serbia, 67-64, in Lille, France, to advance to the final of the European basketball championship and clinch a slot at next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Jonas Valanciunas led Lithuania with 15 points. In its second consecutive final, Lithuania will play Spain on Sunday.

Basketball
Lithuania
Serbia
2016 Summer Olympics


Looking Back in Anger at the Crisis

Abstract: “Did they first bring up the bailout to you, or did you bring it up to them?” asked Congressman Edolphus Towns, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “I prefer to use the word ‘rescue,’ ” replied Henry Paulson Jr. , the former secretary of the Treasury.  It was Thursday morning, and Mr. Paulson was once again before Congress, as he had been so many times last fall, defending his actions during the financial crisis . This time the subject was the Bank of America ’s $50 billion purchase last year of Merrill Lynch , which Mr. Towns’s committee had become almost bizarrely obsessed with. In the middle of all the important issues Congress is currently tackling, it has managed to devote three full days of hearings to this seven-month-old deal. Each hearing has had only one witness: the first to be grilled was Bank of America’s chief executive, Ken Lewis. Then came the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke. Thursday was Mr. Paulson’s turn on the hot seat. The questions, from both parties, were uniformly hostile. “Mr. Lewis, isn’t it true that ...” “Yes or no, Mr. Bernanke ...” “Isn’t that why you issued that threat, Mr. Paulson?” The congressmen claimed to be investigating the events of last December. You’ll recall that just weeks before the Bank of America deal with Merrill Lynch was supposed to be consummated — and after shareholders had approved it — Mr. Lewis suddenly got cold feet. With Merrill Lynch’s toxic assets rapidly deteriorating, Mr. Lewis called Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke to tell them he was thinking of pulling out of the deal. Terrified that this might set off renewed panic in the financial markets, Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke persuaded Mr. Lewis to stick by the deal. Quietly, over the next few weeks, they agreed to lend Bank of America an additional $20 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to help shore up the bank’s capital. (They also agreed to backstop some $118 billion in troubled assets — though that part of the deal was later abandoned.) The first time the world learned of the additional government assistance was when the bank made its quarterly financial disclosure in January 2009 — weeks after the deal had closed. To the congressmen at the hearings, something nefarious must have taken place during those negotiations. But what exactly? Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, told me that Mr. Lewis’s failure to inform shareholders was a “potential violation of securities law.” He felt that Mr. Lewis had gamed the banks’ regulators to get more money. Mr. Towns, for his part, seemed to think that Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke should have fired Mr. Lewis as a condition of more bailout money — that the government had been too nice to an incompetent management. Republicans, meanwhile, felt that Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke had overreached, using intimidation and threats to force through a private transaction. And they all cited e-mail from the Fed that expressed skepticism at Mr. Lewis’s motives, and emphasized the need to keep things quiet for as long as possible. I had watched the first two hearings with a growing sense of bewilderment. It always seemed obvious to me that if the Bank of America-Merrill deal hadn’t gone through, Merrill Lynch would have been in a horrible position, akin to Lehman Brothers or the American International Group. The government very likely would have had to spend an awful lot more than $20 billion to save it. Surely, the end result was worth whatever arm-twisting and additional government aid was required. So why the anger? Why the suggestions of “cover-up” and “lies”? On Thursday, as I watched Mr. Paulson being castigated, it dawned on me. Seven months later, with the palpable fear of a financial collapse largely subsided, it really all boils down to how you view what happened last year. Was it, as Mr. Towns believes, a bailout of a handful of unworthy but too-big-to-fail institutions? Or was it, in the eyes of Mr. Paulson, a rescue of a teetering financial system? My vote is for the latter.  In retrospect, the events of last December have a kind of irrefutable logic. Mr. Lewis, scared by the mounting losses at Merrill, tells the government he is thinking of invoking the “material adverse event” clause in the contract to get out of it. Even though the clause is pretty airtight — among other things, it says that deteriorating assets are not enough to create a material adverse effect — it is still a useful weapon, and a common tactic. No matter what the actual wording, invoking it usually prompts litigation or a renegotiation of the terms, or both. Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke understand this, of course. But having just finished giving Citigroup another round of TARP aid, they fear that even a rumor that the Merrill deal is in trouble will set off a rerun of the awful events of last September, when the financial system melted down. They persuade Mr. Lewis to take one for the team. “They needed to say to Ken Lewis, ‘You haven’t had very good capital ratios, and we’ve looked the other way,’ ” said Nancy Bush, a prominent bank analyst. “‘Now it is payback time. We’ve let you do deal after deal after deal. Now it’s time to take one on the chin.’ ” That appears to be exactly what happened. Instead of renegotiating the deal with Merrill Lynch, Mr. Lewis wound up renegotiating it with the federal government. Mr. Paulson helpfully pointed out that as Bank of America’s regulator, the Federal Reserve had the right to remove him and his management team from their jobs if it no longer trusted his judgment. I can almost picture Mr. Lewis gulping as he listened to “Hammerin’ Hank” laying down the law. Seen in this light, virtually all the Congressional objections seem almost laughably naïve. Mr. Lewis gamed the regulators? Hardly. Bank of America is paying 8 percent interest on the $20 billion. Unlike Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase, it lacks the financial wherewithal to pay it back. And accepting the extra money means it has now taken as much overall TARP money as Citigroup, the very symbol of a crippled bank. Plus, of course, it has to abide by strict executive compensation rules. The threats that Mr. Lewis could lose his job if he didn’t play ball? During Thursday’s hearing, Mr. Paulson happily admitted that he had told Mr. Lewis his job might be on the line. Why wouldn’t he? That was part of his leverage in the negotiation. Besides, that’s Mr. Paulson’s style — when he feels the need to get something done, he gets very aggressive. So what? As for the secrecy, since when do deal makers negotiate in public? From Mr. Paulson’s and Mr. Bernanke’s point of view, a leak was potentially disastrous. It was critical to keep things quiet. Yes, it would have been nice if Bank of America’s shareholders had had a chance to vote on the deal after the government assistance was revealed. But the shareholders weren’t Mr. Paulson’s or Mr. Bernanke’s problem — all they cared about was saving the system. And Mr. Lewis had been told by his lawyers that disclosure wasn’t required before the quarterly results were announced in January. So that’s what he did. We’ll never know what would have happened if Bank of America had canceled the Merrill deal. What we do know is that the system didn’t melt down last December, and it seems reasonable to assume that the decision by Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke to hold Mr. Lewis’s feet to the fire was the right one. “They were making it up as they were going along last year,” said Ms. Bush. “There was no precedent.” By all rights, Congress ought to pat them on the back for saving the deal. Instead, it wants to pummel them. Why? Part of the answer is that the three men can’t tell the narratives as bluntly as I just have. Mr. Lewis doesn’t want to be portrayed as having been pushed by the government — even though he was. Mr. Paulson feels the need to portray himself as helping Bank of America, even though his real concern was the system itself. Mr. Bernanke insists that he never told Mr. Lewis not to inform shareholders — though he was clearly relieved that there would be no disclosure until after the details were completed. Their modest dissembling makes for easy targets. But there is also something else going on here. There was a point during Thursday’s hearing when the questions turned from the particulars of the Bank of America-Merrill deal to the larger questions surrounding the events of last year. The questioners seethed with anger. Hadn’t Mr. Paulson lied to Congress about the original purpose of the TARP money? Hadn’t his former company, Goldman Sachs, been the recipient of billions of dollars in government money that was funneled through A.I.G.? Why weren’t any of the heads of the financial firms — A.I.G. excepted — forced out of their jobs, given the calamity they helped create? One congresswoman practically accused Mr. Paulson of creating the crisis himself. In retrospect, Congress felt bullied by Mr. Paulson last year. Many of them fervently believed they should not prop up the banks that had led us to this crisis — yet they were pushed by Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke into passing the $700 billion TARP, which was then used to bail out those very banks. Like Mr. Lewis, they took one for the team. Now that the crisis has subsided, it is payback time. As they watch Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan and — yes — Citigroup and Bank of America report billions in profits once again, they feel taken. Their constituents are out of work, home foreclosures are on the rise, yet Goldman, for instance, is planning to pay billions in bonuses for this year. The “investigation” into the Bank of America-Merrill deal is simply a convenient vehicle to express that fury. Maybe, if we’re lucky, the score is settled now. But I doubt it. If the Bank of America hearings show anything, it is that Congress is taking away all the wrong lessons from the crisis. In all likelihood, if the crisis erupts again, Congress won’t let itself be pushed around by Treasury, the way it was last time. Then we’ll really be in trouble.


For War Veterans Returning to Connecticut, Writing Proves to Be a Balm

Abstract: The explosion directly in front of me made no sound. A cloud of smoke darker and thicker and bigger than I had ever seen bloomed like the life span of a giant oak tree condensed into a few milliseconds. Then, the earth shook and a sonic blast knocked me back a few steps. I stared at the cloud of smoke, mesmerized. From “Go Now, You Are Forgiven,” by Dario DiBattista Jr. DANBURY WHEN Dario DiBattista Jr., now 25, enrolled at Central Connecticut State University three years ago, after two tours of duty in Iraq, he had no intention of writing a memoir about his experiences as a Marine reservist in Iraq. “He was floundering, and writing gave him direction as well as vindication,” said Mary Collins, his writing professor. Mr. DiBattista said he found that writing was also a catharsis, a “way to put the past behind.” A senior, he has been accepted into Johns Hopkins University’s graduate writing program this fall, and has been blogging his memoir, “Go Now, You Are Forgiven.” More returning soldiers, facing a weak job market and lured by a new, generous G.I. Bill, are enrolling in colleges and universities, and those institutions are seeking to expand their support services and establish veterans’ centers, according to Paul Susen, chief academic and student affairs officer for the state’s community college system. In the next two years, Dr. Susen said, the veteran enrollment is expected to double to 10 percent from 5 percent. Universities and colleges are trying to meet their needs by setting up a variety of services for the veterans, many of whom face challenges making the transition from the combat zone to the classroom. At many colleges, officials are finding that writing programs have helped ease the transition. Some have started weekly writing seminars for veterans. Others have hosted writing conferences or focused on the war in writing projects. Gregg Taylor, a former Army reservist majoring in history at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, said that the hardest thing about going to war is coming home. “One day you’re carrying a rifle over your shoulder, and the next day you’re sipping a Slurpee” with college classmates, he said. Mr. Taylor, 30, who lives off campus, said he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, which had affected his grades. “I just hated school,” he said. After he started working with a writing specialist he found through the university, his grades began to improve, and so did his attitude. “I had anxiety issues, a lot of pent-up aggression from my experience in Afghanistan that I learned to apply to my writing,” he said. Western Connecticut State University recently held its first public writers conference for veterans, which featured Anthony Swofford, author of “Jarhead.” About a dozen of the university’s 100 or so enrolled veterans attended, said Elizabeth Cohen, a creative writing professor who organized the event, adding that she was encouraged by the quality of the work. There is such a “disconnect between veterans and the rest of the students,” she said, and providing a public forum for their writing may help bridge the gap. The Connecticut Review , a literary journal published twice a year by the state university system, is dedicating its next issue to veterans’ writing, according to Lisa Siedlarz, one of its editors. “This issue is of particular importance to me because my youngest brother spent a year in Afghanistan,” said Ms. Siedlarz, a graduate student at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic, who also wrote a collection of poems that address the affect of the war on families. Returning soldiers are writing more, both in and out of college, said Andrew Carroll, founder of the Legacy Project , a repository for American war letters in Washington, and editor of “Operation Homecoming,” an anthology of letters by soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “There are no studies that I know of that compare different generations of veterans,” Mr. Carroll said. “But in looking at the last 30 years, it seems the generation of veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are writing more than any other since World War II.” E-mail, blogging and social sites like Facebook have made a more palatable venue for some veterans to express themselves, he said. Lisa Smith-Overton, 39, a graduate student at Western Connecticut State University, said the tough skin she developed in the Navy prepared her for a writing career. “To be honest, I had been writing since I was about 14 or 15 — I wanted to be the next S. E. Hinton,” Ms. Smith-Overton said. “But the discipline instilled in me during my enlistment, and the determination I discovered I had, toughened me up to venture into writing as a career.” The Navy did not allow women to serve in combat when she enlisted. But Ms. Smith-Overton, who served as petty officer third class from 1989 to 1993, volunteered for temporary duty on a combat ship as part of a Navy test to see how men and women would work together. The experience became the basis of a short story, and later part of her master’s thesis. Darnell Carpenter, 33, a student at Western Connecticut State who served 16 years in the Army, including a year in Iraq, wants to write a book about PTSD. When a convoy he was in was struck by enemy fire, he suffered injuries including traumatic brain damage. Later, he developed PTSD. “People can’t see it, so they think it doesn’t exist,” said Mr. Carpenter, who gets around campus using a cane. Most students do not ask him about his war experience, but those that do “mostly ask if I killed anyone,” he said. “It shows you that to them the war’s not real.”

Colleges and Universities
Veterans
Iraq
Afghanistan
Connecticut


For Top General in Iraq, Role Is a Mixed Blessing

Abstract: BAGHDAD — Gen. David H. Petraeus looked out from a Black Hawk helicopter at the vistas of Baghdad rushing by 150 feet below on a recent summer evening, pointing at bustling markets, amusement parks and soccer fields scattered through neighborhoods where miles of concrete barriers stood like sentinels against the threat of suicide bombers. Pressing the talk button on his headset, the slightly built, 54-year-old general, the top American commander in Iraq , said glimpses of the normal life that have survived the war’s horrors have helped to boost his own flagging spirits, especially on days when signs of battlefront progress are offset by new bombings with mass casualties, the starkest measure of continuing insurgent power across Iraq. Then, he said ruefully, he wondered whether he “should have taken that civilian job” before accepting what many see as the most unpromising command since that of Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr. in Vietnam — who took charge, in 1968, when that war was going badly and American opinion was running strongly in favor of a pullout. General Petraeus’s task may be tougher still. When he was appointed six months ago and promoted to full general, President Bush cast him as a man known for aggressive, innovative thinking on counterinsurgency warfare who could take the nearly 30,000 extra troops deployed to Iraq in January and turn the war’s tide with a “surge” aimed at securing Baghdad and its surrounding “belts.” At the time, Mr. Bush compared General Petraeus to an audacious, offense-minded football coach with a record of turning around losing games. The general echoed that mood. “Hard is not hopeless,” he said in a message to American troops on his arrival in Baghdad. Since then, Mr. Bush has often sounded as though his Iraq commander offers a fount of credibility on the war that can compensate for the president’s poor poll ratings. In war speeches, he cites General Petraeus like a talisman. At a news conference at Camp David this month, he used the general’s first name three times. “I look forward to what David’s going to say,” he said, referring to the Sept. 15 deadline for General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador in Iraq, to give a comprehensive status report to the White House and Congress. The date, for Mr. Bush, has become a kind of firebreak — the right moment, he says, for lawmakers locked in a showdown over the war to decide whether to support a continuation of the American military effort here. But for General Petraeus, being cast as the president’s white knight has been a mixed blessing. While he talks with Mr. Bush once or twice a week, in interviews he depicts himself as owing loyalty as much to Congress as the White House and stresses the downside, as well as the upside, of the military effort here. His view, he says, is that he is “on a very important mission that derives from a policy made by folks at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the advice and consent and resources provided by folks at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. And in September, that’s how I’m going to approach it.” Whether to fight on here, he says, is a “big, big decision, a national decision,” one that belongs to elected officials, not a field general. The importance of sober assessments — and, by implication, of shedding the rose-tinted view of the war that has strained Congress’s patience with Iraq commanders in the past — has been one of his themes. Talking to American officers this summer during a counterinsurgency course at Taji, 15 miles north of Baghdad, he put it squarely. “We need forthright reports. We’re not trying to sugarcoat things, or put lipstick on a pig, or anything like that.” American officials say he has carried this unvarnished approach into his dealings with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The men have differed over a range of issues, particularly the American command’s push to recruit former Sunni insurgents into the Iraqi security forces or tribal auxiliaries. It is a move General Petraeus sees as having the potential for dealing a decisive blow to Islamic militant groups linked to Al Qaeda, but which Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, fears will empower Sunnis for an eventual civil war with the ruling Shiite majority. General Petraeus, in an e-mail message, played down reports that the relationship had been stormy, with Mr. Maliki threatening on one occasion to ask Mr. Bush to appoint a new American commander. “Actually, I have a very good relationship with the p.m., and I think he’d echo that assessment,” he said. “In fact, only on one occasion, several months back, have I ever been anything other than my normal easygoing self with the p.m. And that was while both of us were seated.” More than 30 years ago at West Point, where he married the former Holly Knowlton, daughter of the academy’s superintendent, General Petraeus was cited in his class yearbook as “always going for it in sports, academics, leadership and even his social life.” Since then, he has won a broad Army following that helped him assemble a star cast of officers who accompanied him to Baghdad, including one, Col. H. R. McMaster, who wrote a widely acclaimed book about the failures of the Army’s highest-ranking officers to give an honest accounting of the state of the war in Vietnam. But General Petraeus has been dogged, too, by detractors within the Army who say he is prone to overstate his accomplishments. His two previous Iraq tours, one as a two-star general commanding the 101st Airborne Division in the northern city of Mosul, another as a three-star general in Baghdad leading the effort to rebuild Iraq’s security forces, drew praise at the time. His pacification of Mosul proved short-lived. The rapid, $19-billion Iraqi force buildup produced, on his watch, battalions impressive for the numbers trained and the huge arsenal of weapons handed over by the Americans, but the Iraqi soldiers were often unreliable, and their units prone to infiltration by militias when deployed. Now, in the face of a stubbornly brutal conflict and declining war support at home, General Petraeus has pulled back from the pulsating sense of self-confidence that fellow officers say has been his hallmark — that he can prevail against any odds. He has become strikingly cautious, avoiding on-the-record comments on many politically contentious issues. Shunning generalizations on the war in interviews, he lays out colored charts and graphs that show falling numbers of suicide attacks, other bombings and civilian casualties, when comparing January’s figures with those in June and July. But he eludes anything that might signal what broader conclusions he will be carrying to Washington in September. His caution extends to the most fundamental question: whether the war can still be won. “Obviously, what we’re going to try and do is win it,” he says. “What we’re trying to do right now is generate enough hope to give it a chance. But the problem is, it’s likely to muddle along for quite a long time.” A campaign plan the general and Ambassador Crocker recently sent to Washington envisages an American troop presence of some size here at least through 2009. Despite the challenges, some of the old bullishness has survived. When asked which American generals he most admires, General Petraeus names two remembered for turning around wars that were going badly: Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, hero of the Civil War; and another Army legend whose biography the general read on a recent 14-hour flight from Washington to Baghdad: Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, who reversed Chinese advances in Korea in 1951. In Baghdad, he goes for regular five-mile runs in the 120-degree heat, and thrives on outpacing younger officers. His do-or-die competitiveness is legend in the Army. Fifteen years ago, he carried on during maneuvers at Fort Campbell, Ky., after being struck by a rifle bullet in the chest, until a commander ordered him taken away on a stretcher. Laughing about it now, he says he would have died if the bullet had hit the ‘A’ in Army, over his heart, instead of the ‘a’ in Petraeus on his nametag. One issue on which the general, like Mr. Crocker, is likely to part with proponents of an early American withdrawal is on the risk of much higher levels of violence if the troops leave quickly. In an interview last month, Mr. Crocker compared the killing to a five-reel movie, saying that “as ugly as the first reel has been the other four-and-a-half are going to be way, way worse.” Speaking to the officers at Taji, General Petraeus put the matter just as bluntly. “If you didn’t like Darfur, you’re going to hate Baghdad,” he said.

Petraeus David H
United States Armament and Defense
Iraq
Appointments and Executive Changes
Bush George W


Where the Traffic Median Is a No-Pilates Zone

Abstract: SANTA MONICA, Calif. — From his squad car on a sun-drenched corner, Lemont Davis, a Santa Monica park ranger, spotted the perpetrator: white male, 40 to 45 years old, feet pressed against palm tree, legs fully extended in situp position. Mr. Davis strode from his vehicle, stopping just feet from the wide traffic median where Kieran Clarke was clearly breaking the law. “Sorry, sir,” he said, “I need to inform you that this area is for walking and jogging only.” Mr. Clarke, who had been working his abdominals, stood up and quietly walked away. That warning the other day was among hundreds that have been issued in a culturally tumultuous crackdown by Santa Monica officials against violators of a city ordinance, rarely enforced till now, that bars congregating on traffic medians. The target is increasingly loud, littering and generally intrusive groups of exercisers who gather from dawn until dusk along the Fourth Street median. The ocean view, the air and for some the architectural spectacle have transformed the area into a huge outdoor gym rimmed by multimillion-dollar homes. In the last six months, park rangers, dispatched by the Santa Monica Police Department in response to complaining neighbors, have stationed themselves on the corner of Fourth Street and Adelaide Drive during much of the day, at the ready to break up any unauthorized kickboxing. “I agree with the residents that they should not be rousted out of bed by a professional gym instructor at 6 in the morning saying, ‘One, two, three, four!’ ” said Bobby Shriver, a Santa Monica city councilman (“Recently re-elected with an even greater margin than I won by last time!”), who lives on Adelaide Drive but says he did not request the enforcement. Since the patrols began, the city has issued eight citations for the flouting of the median law — the fine is $158 — and has given warnings, which are generally heeded, to about 600 people a month. “Most people will comply,” said Mr. Davis, the park ranger. While the median ordinance covers every grassy stretch of its kind in the city, the one at Fourth Street is where the workout overload occurs. The area has long been a runner’s paradise, and people also use it to sprint up and down an enormous set of concrete steps that lead to the beach. “The use of the median has been going on for years,” Mr. Shriver said, adding that what has apparently happened more recently “is the commercialization by these boot-camp-type groups.” Naturally a fair share of exercisers are unhappy with the new enforcement, and at a recent City Council meeting, officials batted the matter around: Would the law withstand legal challenges? What constitutes too “early” to be awoken by whistles? But there was no resolution. Now a community meeting to address median use is set for Jan. 8, “just to see if we can’t get some common-sense solutions,” said Kate Vernez, assistant to the city manager. “What we are trying to do,” Ms. Vernez said, “is mediate between residents who have seen an uptick in use of the median, with pickup gyms and the like, and the exercisers.” James Birch, a music executive from the neighborhood, is among those Santa Monicans who have not taken well to enforcement of the law, which was passed in the 1970s and, it is believed, was intended to keep vagrants away. After 15 years of working out on the median, Mr. Birch arrived there one day in mid-September and saw five officers. “I went up to them,” he recalled, “and said, ‘What’s the deal here?’ They put up these trendy new yellow signs. The cops just looked at me and said, ‘We’ve been told by the watch commander that we’re supposed to run people off here.’ I told them I was going to break the law.” So he did. One morning he showed up at the median, video crew in tow, and refused to cease doing situps. The exchange that followed was posted on YouTube. “They let me do it for about three minutes,” said Mr. Birch, 63, “and then came over and said: ‘If you continue doing this, I will arrest you. It’s not allowed here.’ ” Though he was arrested, he said, the officers did not handcuff him, to his chagrin. “I asked them to,” he said. “But they found out they could only do what was procedurally appropriate.” He did get a ticket, though, and now awaits his day in court. “I just want to go and do my push-ups and situps that I have been doing for 15 minutes three times a week for the last 15 years,” he said. On a recent morning, the area was alive with joggers, some of them pushing strollers, others walking large dogs; a dozen people with demeanors ranging from doleful to boastful trotting up the steps; and at least one trainer pushing his client to move it. An extremely fit woman of indeterminate Los Angeles age pulled her Mercedes up to the curb on Adelaide Drive, popped open her trunk, pulled out a five-pound weight and began lifting. Geoff Parcells, who was running along the street, said that he sympathized with residents but that the area “is a public place” and that he did not quite know how to view the enhanced enforcement. “If I lived here and there were all really good-looking people working out, I probably wouldn’t mind,” said Mr. Parcells, 45. “So I guess it depends on who parks in front of your house.”


E-Mails Outline N.Y.C. Debate Over Street-Hail Apps

Abstract: In late August, as a taxi-hailing smartphone application neared its debut in New York City’s yellow cabs, David S. Yassky , the chairman of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission , presented three options in an e-mail to city officials. The city, which does not allow prearranged rides in yellow taxis, could approve such apps explicitly once they were in use; move to shut them down; or “continue to dither in our public statements,” Mr. Yassky wrote. “I vote for Option 1,” he said, “and I’d like to do it sooner rather than later.” More than six weeks later, it is clear that the city has charted a different course. After the app company, Uber, introduced its service in early September, the commission issued an industry notice saying that it had not approved the use of any apps for hailing or payment, noting its existing contracts with payment processors, which expire in February. The agency added that it was considering changes to its rules to open the market to app developers after that time. On Tuesday, Uber announced it was suspending the service, citing “obstacles and roadblocks” placed before it by the city. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, has said that the commission signaled to him that the app met existing guidelines, a characterization that the commission has denied. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Yassky said the city had done “exactly the right thing” in declining to endorse apps immediately but making clear that it supported their future use. “I think smartphone apps are a worthwhile addition to the menu of customer choices,” he said. “Since no payment app would be permissible prior to February, I think it makes sense to allow the full range of smartphone apps beginning in February and then let the marketplace work it all out.” He said that his support for a more immediate endorsement of apps came before he and other officials had properly weighed the legal distinctions between applications that incorporate payment and those that do not. The agency noted that Mr. Yassky’s e-mails, which were obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by the commission, were a small sample of a broader administration-wide dialogue about apps. Nonetheless, the messages provide a unique window into the policy considerations and political calculations informing the city’s stance. In a message dated Aug. 31, Mr. Yassky predicted that approving the apps would be “a political loser” because of opposition from the black car and livery industries, among others, but “probably a modest political winner with the broader public.” “But as you’ve seen,” he continued, in an apparent nod to the city’s now-stalled plan to provide street-hail service outside of Manhattan, “doing something that the general public likes a little bit but the interest groups hate a lot is not much fun!” The commission has not publicly addressed whether electronic hailing qualifies as a prearranged ride under the current guidelines. But in an e-mail dated Aug. 6, Mr. Yassky said its current rules did allow electronic hailing because there was no rule on the books that banned it explicitly. “Our policy view is that e-hailing should be permitted,” he wrote. On Wednesday, Mr. Yassky said that the city had not determined definitively whether an app like Uber’s constituted unlawful prearrangement — and did not have to, if an app was deemed untenable because of the payment processing contracts. “If all anyone is giving us is a payment app, we don’t have to decide right now whether a nonpayment app is permissible,” he said. Officials from the black car, livery and yellow taxi industries have united in opposition against smartphone apps since Uber’s introduction, while many of Uber’s users have accused the Bloomberg administration of sullying its self-professed reputation for tech-friendliness. In his e-mail on Aug. 6, Mr. Yassky alluded to this reputation, pointing out that allowing electronic hailing was “the policy choice most consistent with N.Y.C.’s image as a ‘tech-forward’ place to do business.”

Taxi and Limousine Commission
Mobile Applications
Taxicabs and Taxicab Drivers
New York City
Uber Technologies Inc
Yassky David


The Wedding Was Quirky. Now the Government Is Submitting Its Bill.

Abstract: The wedding guests sat on bales of straw lined up evenly in rows. Heads of wheat served as boutonnieres for the groomsmen. Two flower girls, actually cows named Mona and Lisa, were led by their handler. The bride walked down the aisle to John Lennon’s “Imagine.” A glittery headband held her platinum blond hair in place while a so-called cowboy preacher, flown in from Colorado, began a prayer. The wedding, at a farm near the town of Nassau in upstate New York in May 2014, was beautiful, according to witness accounts. And though the event may also have been a bit unusual, it would seem an unlikely candidate to draw the scrutiny of the federal government. This week, though, federal prosecutors filed a civil complaint against the bride’s father, J. Felix Strevell, 54, an official in the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki, and the bride herself, Nicole Strevell-Childrose, 30, saying the wedding was paid for with money that belongs to the state. Mr. Strevell, a deputy New York secretary of state from 1997 to 1999, pleaded guilty to fraud in 2007 for diverting money from a nonprofit institute that the state had created to help small businesses and entrepreneurs and that he ran. Mr. Strevell spent the money on himself and family members, including buying airplane tickets for Ms. Strevell-Childrose and paying her and her boyfriend wages as “interns,” according to the civil complaint. After entering his plea, Mr. Strevell was ordered to pay restitution of $111,500 in monthly installments of $100, or 10 percent of his income, whichever was greater. Under the order’s terms, he was to pay the full amount if he became able to at any time. Mr. Strevell instead diverted money to his daughter to pay for her wedding and to satisfy a tax debt on a property she owned, according to the civil complaint. The complaint says Mr. Strevell had transferred $157,646 to his daughter from 2012 to 2014, while paying only $6,750 in restitution during the same period. In March, Mr. Strevell was charged with five felony counts of making false declarations under oath, stemming from his misrepresentations of what he could pay to the government, according to a federal indictment filed in the Northern District of New York. (The indictment says he spent another $75,000 as a down payment on the farm where the wedding was held.) The civil complaint accuses Mr. Strevell of transferring $28,000 to his daughter’s checking account for the wedding. He also paid for three wedding gowns ($1,400 to $2,500 each), a wedding tent, tables and chairs ($10,435.75 in cash), a wedding photographer ($2,246) and the couple’s honeymoon at the Four Seasons Hotel, in Santa Fe, N.M., the complaint says. “I remember the wedding because I really loved it,” Trisha Millier, the photographer hired by Ms. Strevell-Childrose, said. She recalled the tables at the reception having a horseshoe motif, and invitations hand-sewn onto handkerchiefs. “I have certainly done more extravagant weddings,” Ms. Millier said. “It seemed down to earth.” Except, perhaps, for the multiple dresses, she added. The civil complaint seeks payment of Mr. Strevell’s restitution, in part by voiding transfers from him to Ms. Strevell-Childrose. While testifying under oath in 2014, according to the criminal indictment, Mr. Strevell said he had given his daughter a couple of thousand dollars for the wedding and no wedding gift. “If people try to avoid their restitution obligations, we will investigate,” Thomas Spina, the assistant United States attorney supervising the civil case, said in an interview this week. “We will take whatever steps necessary to repay the victims.” Ms. Strevell-Childrose, according to her Facebook profile, is an assistant professor of history at Columbia-Greene Community College, where she has lectured on topics such as how to envision a more just, compassionate world. Under the pen name N. C. Childrose, she wrote a children’s book, “Mona and Lisa Come Home,” about a father and daughter who buy two cows for their farm. Mr. Strevell still owes the state just over $102,000 on his restitution judgment as of June 14, according to the civil complaint. His criminal lawyer, Paul Evangelista, declined to comment. Matthew Kelly, a lawyer for Ms. Strevell-Childrose, said the government was “grossly overreaching” in its lawsuit. “While the government has a right to enforce the judgment, I think it’s beyond the pale for them to seek to enforce it against the daughter,” Mr. Kelly said. “I think it’s a way to try to punish the daughter for the sins of the father.” Ms. Strevell-Childrose declined through Mr. Kelly to comment herself, but her appreciation for her father was evident on the wedding program. “TO OUR DADS,” it read. “Thank you for your love. You have given us all you have.”

Fraud
New York
J. Felix Strevell
Nicole Strevell-Childrose
Embezzlement
Politics


With Elusive French Open Title, Federer Secures His Place

Abstract: PARIS — Through the years and the disappointments, as Roger Federer imagined what it might be like to finally win the French Open , it was surely not quite like this. How could he have imagined that his opponent in one of the most important matches of his life would be Robin Soderling, a relatively unknown Swede, instead of his nemesis, Rafael Nadal? How could he have thought that an intruder would jump out of the stands, run toward him and brusquely attempt to place a hat on Federer’s head, leaving him shaken? How could he have predicted, on top of the pent-up expectations weighing upon him, that he would also have to deal with some of the dankest, dampest weather ever experienced during a modern major singles final? No, it was all quite extraordinary, but Federer shrugged it all off and kept his focus on the one Grand Slam singles trophy he was lacking. By winning the French Open on Sunday, Federer tied the record of 14 major singles titles held by Pete Sampras. But Sampras, the retired American champion, never won the French Open, the only one of the game’s four most prestigious tournaments to be played on clay. A strong case can now be made for Federer in the inevitable, probably irresolvable debate over who deserves to be considered the greatest player ever. Federer became the sixth man to win the singles title at all of the Grand Slam tournaments: the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the United States Open. The others to have managed it are Don Budge, Fred Perry, Roy Emerson, Rod Laver and Andre Agassi. “This could be my biggest victory, the one that takes off the most pressure,” said Federer, a 27-year-old Swiss who was in tears (not for the first time this season) after the 6-1, 7-6 (1), 6-4 victory. “Now for the rest of my career, I can play relaxed and never hear again that I never won the French Open.” Sampras, who won the last of his 14 Grand Slam singles titles at the 2002 United States Open, said he was content to share his record with Federer, with whom he has become friendly during exhibition tours . “I didn’t think it would take only seven years to tie,” Sampras told the men’s tour’s Web site. “It feels like I’m in good company with Roger.” Agassi presented the trophy to Federer on Sunday, which was an appropriate coincidence considering that Agassi also completed his collection of major titles in Paris by winning by surprise in 1999 . “It was destiny I guess in many respects,” Agassi said of Federer. “Roger has earned his place, his rightful place in the game. Winning here was just something that would have been a bit of a crime if he never did. He’s been the second-best clay courter for five years running, and if it weren’t for one kid from Majorca, he would have won a handful of these things.” The kid from Majorca is the 23-year-old Nadal, who supplanted Federer at No. 1 last year. Federer has won the Australian Open three times, Wimbledon five times and the United States Open five times. But the French Open had eluded him because of Nadal, who beat him in the semifinals here in 2005 and in the final the last three years. Comparing greatness across tennis eras is complicated because the sport was once divided into amateur and professional circuits, with professionals unable to compete in the Grand Slam tournaments until 1968, the beginning of the open era. Top players in the pre-open era rarely played in Grand Slam events and stars in the early open era often skipped the Australian Open. “To me he’s the best player in history, he really deserved to win here,” said Soderling, the 23rd seed who upset Nadal in the fourth round and was playing in his first Grand Slam final. Federer has still not won the Grand Slam, which requires winning all four major titles in the same calendar year. The only men to do that are Budge and Laver. Laver managed it in 1962 as an amateur and in 1969 as a professional. “What Laver did is godlike,” Agassi said. “To win all of them in the same year twice — how do you argue with that? At the same time, Federer could have done it in a pretty intense era. He could have done it a couple of times. So for him to get over the line here, how could you argue anybody had done something better than he has?” Last year, when Federer was in the midst of a four-year run at No. 1, Nadal embarrassed him , 6-1, 6-3, 6-0, in the French Open final. It was a harbinger of bigger disappointments. Nadal ended Federer’s five-year run at Wimbledon, won the Olympic gold medal in singles and took over the No. 1 ranking . Although Federer recovered to win his fifth straight United States Open title in September, he lost again to Nadal in this year’s first Grand slam tournament, the Australian Open. During the trophy ceremony in Australia, Federer sobbed uncontrollably and was comforted by Nadal, who had, at that stage, beaten him five times in a row and 13 times in 19 matches. With questions increasing about his state of mind, Federer took a six-week break because of a lingering back problem. After his return, he failed to win a tournament until he unexpectedly beat Nadal on clay in the Madrid Open final last month. In Sunday’s match, played in swirling wind and persistent rain, Federer jumped out to a 4-0 lead and swept through the opening set in 23 minutes. In the second set, with Soderling trailing by 1-2 and serving at 15-0, a red-clad man jumped on to Federer’s side of the court and was soon face to face with him behind the baseline. The intruder tried to force a cap onto Federer’s head before being tackled by a security guard. Federer, understandably shaken, lost the next three points as Soderling evened the score at 2-2. But Federer held serve in the next game and then took command of the match in the second-set tie breaker. After he broke Soderling’s serve in the opening game of the third set, the suspense was dissipating, but not the historic opportunity. Federer served for the title at 5-4 with his nerves jangling. “It was almost unplayable for me,” he said. “I was just hoping to serve some good serves and hoping he’d make four errors. It was that bad.” But after winning the match, Federer was on his knees and soon crying in earnest as the Swiss national anthem played during the awards ceremony. It was hard not to flash back to Australia earlier this year when his tears were flowing for quite a different reason.

Federer Roger
French Open (Tennis)
Soderling Robin
Tennis


Politicians Embrace Soccer Teams, Win or Lose

Abstract: LONDON — The role of governments, royalty and the masses in welcoming home sports players as if they were soldiers from a war is becoming embarrassing. It was perfectly understandable for Spain to give its team the mother of all fiestas when it paraded the World Cup through Madrid on Monday. But for the Dutch prime minister to honor Coach Bert van Marwijk and the team captain, Giovanni van Bronckhorst, as Knights of the Order of Oranje Nassau for finishing second seemed excessive. Spain triumphed, with class and a truly historic performance . The Netherlands betrayed what talents it has by turning Sunday’s final match in Johannesburg into a mean-spirited attempt at intimidation. Even Johan Cruyff, the most famous Dutch player ever, wrote on Monday\, “Sadly, they played very dirty — so much so that they should have been down to nine men immediately.” And he didn’t stop there. “Holland chose an ugly path to aim for the title,” Cruyff added. “This was vulgar, hard and hermetic. They ended up losing, playing antifootball.” Yet the Dutch state, and its Queen Beatrix, lauded the players. This is not sport. This is nationalism. And it is becoming a cult. After Argentina was eliminated, taken apart, 4-0, by Germany, its team, led by Coach Diego Maradona, arrived in Buenos Aires to thousands of worshipers. The vanquished were hailed as victors in a place where Maradona is as much a cult figure as was Eva Perón. This could be a return to the oath of Pierre de Coubertin, the reviver of the Olympic Games, who said it is not the winning, but the taking part. But this feels like something different. It appears that politicians are determined to ride the popularity of big sporting events, regardless of actual performance. The people shall have their parade whether or not the players return as heroes. So, as Spain truly celebrated a peak in its sporting history, the Netherlands went through with the celebration regardless of the outcome. I am not a winner-take-all junkie, but I do fear it defeats the purpose of heralding competitors if states are so determined to acclaim the players whether they win, lose or even betray the spirit of sports. Spain is the one true champion. But even its team labored to wins, four times in a row finishing 1-0, 1-0, 1-0, 1-0. Its team appears less free, less self-assured, less dynamic than it was when virtually the same squad of players won the European Championship in Vienna two years ago. That Spanish triumph broke 44 years of failure. Its players, driven by hunger and almost bullied psychologically by the coach, Luis Aragonés, seemed then to have more vivacity about them. Aragonés would sometimes goad individual players to make them perform. He retired, and Vicente Del Bosque, more avuncular, less demonstrative, took up the coaching reins with scarcely a missed beat. So today, after 51 victories and 2 losses from 55 games, Spain is the European and World Cup champion. If it has lost a touch in those two years, maybe that is because the team has taken hits, the injury to striker Fernando Torres and the loss of form of David Silva and Marcos Senna, for example. Or, possibly, it is the fatigue factor, being that the team is dependent on players from Barcelona, and with that club exhaustively becoming champions of year-round competitions, including the La Liga, the European Champions League and the World Club Cup played in Asia. The more of a champion you aspire to be, the more the modern fusion of competitive trophies and commercialism will set challenges to the body and mind. Those players paraded in Madrid on Monday as “campeones” are saluted as modern gods who it is hoped can provide Spain with a pleasurable distraction to regional divisions that remain from the Franco dictatorship that ended 35 years ago. This is a team that the Catalans can support because of Xavi, Carles Puyol and Gerard Piqué. And yes, Andrés Iniesta because, although he was born in central Spain, in Albacete, he has been a part of Barcelona’s training academy since he was 12. It is a team that has a Basque, Xabi Alonso, in its midfield. A team led by goalkeeper Iker Casillas of Real Madrid . “They won the Cup,” Spain’s prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, said Monday. “But it belongs to all Spaniards.” As firefighters turned their hoses on sweltering fans in the heat of Madrid on Monday, there were even bigger claims. Some speculated that the winning team could, if only for a summer, cool the rising fears of the unemployed and those struggling through recession. If Spain indeed deserves to enjoy this week, its troubles are not going to go away because of Iniesta’s bravery or his fine goal in Johannesburg. Very soon, the hardships will return. And just as soon, the Spanish kings of the world game will meet their own challengers on the field. With luck, they will not be as fierce and as destructive as the Dutch, but every opponent will study every facet of Spain’s sweet passing rhythm and try to disrupt it. The new club season starts in a little more than a month. Madrid and Barcelona will be rivals again, and the relentlessness of sport will be in full flight.

World Cup 2010 (Soccer)
Soccer
World Cup (Soccer)
Spain
Netherlands
La Liga
Real Madrid


Mass Grave Found in Mexican Mine

Abstract: Authorities in a southern Mexican state popular with tourists reported Monday that 55 bodies -- more than double the number initially thought -- had been recovered from an abandoned silver mine apparently used by drug gangs as a mass grave. Evidence of the bodies, apparently the victims of drug gang violence, was discovered last week and officials said at the time that there appeared to be up to 25 bodies in the mine. However, during the week, additional bodies were found and over the weekend, 55 had been recovered, said Albertico Guinto Sierra, the attorney general for Guerrero state. The body count was announced Monday in a statement on the state government’s Web site. Three of the bodies were mummified and two had been reduced to skeletons, the statement said, making it unclear how long the mine, called San Francisco Cuadra, had been used as a mass grave. The federal police said last week that a suspect in a case involving organized crime had told the authorities about the mass grave. At least 15 people have been detained in the case, The Associated Press reported Monday. Guerrero is plagued by drug violence among rival gangs, and marked by brazen attacks on the police and soldiers engaged in a crackdown on traffickers. The authorities Monday also released the names of four victims: José Luis Gómez Ortiz, Gilberto Hernández Rosales, Alejandro Pérez Zúñiga and Daniel Bravo Mota, who Mexican newspapers have reported was a prison warden in nearby Iguala. The authorities asked families who might be missing members to come forward to initiate genetic testing in case their family members were among the dead. Officials also planned to explore other mine shafts to determine if other bodies had been placed there. The bodies appeared to have been tossed over time down about 300 feet into the abandoned mine, which is near Taxco, a city in the state of Guerrero that is known for its silver jewelry and other items. The area is popular with tourists from the United States and elsewhere.

Guerrero (Mexico)
Gangs
Drug Abuse and Traffic
Mines and Mining


China Is Said to Use Powerful New Weapon to Censor Internet

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Late last month, China began flooding American websites with a barrage of Internet traffic in an apparent effort to take out services that allow China’s Internet users to view websites otherwise blocked in the country. Initial security reports suggested that China had crippled the services by exploiting its own Internet filter — known as the Great Firewall — to redirect overwhelming amounts of traffic to its targets. Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto say China did not use the Great Firewall after all, but rather a powerful new weapon that they are calling the Great Cannon. The Great Cannon, the researchers said in a report published on Friday , allows China to intercept foreign web traffic as it flows to Chinese websites, inject malicious code and repurpose the traffic as Beijing sees fit. The system was used, they said, to intercept web and advertising traffic intended for Baidu — China’s biggest search engine company — and fire it at GitHub, a popular site for programmers, and GreatFire.org, a nonprofit that runs mirror images of sites that are blocked inside China. The attacks against the services continued on Thursday, the researchers said, even though both sites appeared to be operating normally. But the researchers suggested that the system could have more powerful capabilities. With a few tweaks, the Great Cannon could be used to spy on anyone who happens to fetch content hosted on a Chinese computer, even by visiting a non-Chinese website that contains Chinese advertising content. “The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control,” the researchers said in their report. It is, they said, “the normalization of widespread and public use of an attack tool to enforce censorship.” The researchers, who have previously done extensive research into government surveillance tools , found that while the infrastructure and code for the attacks bear similarities to the Great Firewall, the attacks came from a separate device. The device has the ability not only to snoop on Internet traffic but also to alter the traffic and direct it — on a giant scale — to any website, in what is called a “man in the middle attack.” China’s new Internet weapon, the report says, is similar to one developed and used by the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ, a system outlined in classified documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the former United States intelligence contractor . The American system, according to the documents, which were published by The Intercept, can deploy a system of programs that can intercept web traffic on a mass scale and redirect it to a site of their choosing. The N.S.A. and its partners appear to use the programs for targeted surveillance, whereas China appears to use the Great Cannon for an aggressive form of censorship. The similarities of the programs may put American officials on awkward footing, the researchers argue in their report. “This precedent will make it difficult for Western governments to credibly complain about others utilizing similar techniques,” they write. Still, the Chinese program illustrates how far officials in Beijing are willing to go to censor Internet content they deem hostile. “This is just one part of President Xi Jinping’s push to gain tighter control over the Internet and remove any challenges to the party,” said James A. Lewis, a security expert at the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. Image Bill Marczak, right, a co-author of the report on a powerful new Chinese cyberweapon, with Morgan Marquis-Boire, a fellow Citizen Lab researcher. Credit Thor Swift for The New York Times Beijing continues to increase its censorship efforts under its State Internet Information Office, an office created under Mr. Xi to gain tighter control over the Internet within the country and to clamp down on online activism. In a series of recent statements, Lu Wei, China’s Internet czar, has called on the international community to respect China’s Internet policies. Sarah McKune, a senior legal adviser at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and a co-author of the report, said, “The position of the Chinese government is that efforts to serve what it views as hostile content inside China’s borders is a hostile and provocative act that is a threat to its regime stability and ultimately its national security.” The attacks also show the extent to which Beijing is willing to sacrifice other national goals, even economic ones, in the name of censorship. Baidu is China’s most visited site, receiving an estimated 5.2 million unique visitors from the United States in the last 30 days, according to Alexa, a web ranking service. Kaiser Kuo, a Baidu spokesman, said that Baidu was not complicit in the attacks and that its own networks had not been breached. But by sweeping up Baidu’s would-be visitors in its attacks, researchers and foreign policy experts say, Beijing could harm the company’s reputation and market share overseas. Beijing has recently said that it plans to help Chinese Internet companies extend their influence and customer base abroad. At a meeting of the National People’s Congress in China last month, Premier Li Keqiang announced a new “Internet Plus” action plan to “encourage the healthy development of e-commerce, industrial networks and Internet banking and to guide Internet-based companies to increase their presence in the international market.” Yet the latest censorship offensive could become a major problem for Chinese companies looking to expand overseas. “They know one of their biggest obstacles is the perception that they are tools of the Chinese government,” Mr. Lewis said. “This is going to hurt Baidu’s chances of becoming a global competitor.” Researchers say they were able to trace the Great Cannon to the same physical Internet link as China’s Great Firewall and found similarities in the source code of the two initiatives, suggesting that the same authority that operates the Great Firewall is also behind the new weapon. “Because both the Great Cannon and Great Firewall are operating on the same physical link, we believe they are both being run under the same authority,” said Bill Marczak, a co-author of the report who is a computer science graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley and a research fellow at Citizen Lab. Mr. Marczak said researchers’ fear is that the state could use its new weapon to attack Internet users, particularly dissidents, without their knowledge. If they make a single request to a server inside China or even visit a non-Chinese website that contains an ad from a Chinese server, the Great Cannon could infect their web communications and those of everyone they communicate with and spy on them. Ultimately, researchers say, the only way for Internet users and companies to protect themselves will be to encrypt their Internet traffic so that it cannot be intercepted and diverted as it travels to its intended target. “Put bluntly,” the researchers said, “unprotected traffic is not just an opportunity for espionage but a potential attack vector.”

China Cyberwarfare Censorship Baidu GitHub


Taliban Official Killed in Afghanistan

Abstract: KABUL, Afghanistan — Coalition forces killed the top-ranking Taliban official in restive Kunduz Province during an overnight raid, according to the Afghan police and a local governor. The officials said that Mullah Bahador, the Taliban’s shadow governor in the province, was killed late Thursday night. Abdul Rahman Saidkhaili, the provincial police chief, said the target of the raid was a house in the Chardara district. In a statement, coalition forces confirmed that they had killed an insurgent leader who “makes improvised explosive devices and suicide vests, leads a group of Taliban fighters and employs antiaircraft weapons against Afghan and coalition forces.” Coalition officials could not be reached Friday to try to confirm the name of the man who was killed. Several suspected insurgents were arrested in the operation, the statement said. Formerly stable, Kunduz Province, which borders the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, has become increasingly violent in the past two years, as Taliban fighters have relocated there after coalition operations against them in southern Afghanistan . Kunduz City is now nearly cut off by violence, with all roads leading out controlled by the Taliban and other armed groups. The governor of Kunduz was killed in October by a bomb as he prayed in a mosque, and four Taliban suicide bombers killed five policemen two weeks ago. Mullah Bahador was responsible for coordinating attacks against coalition forces in the Kunduz area, said Abdul Wahid Omar Khail, the governor of the Chardara district. “He has been doing terrorist activities for the past three years; he was trained in one of the madrasas in Pakistan,” he said. Mullah Bahador was the fourth Taliban governor in Kunduz, officials said; three previous ones were killed or fled to Pakistan.

Afghanistan
Afghanistan War (2001- )
Taliban


For Trump and Bloomberg, Cordial Ties Have Soured

Abstract: Listening to Michael R. Bloomberg rage about Donald J. Trump in his speech at the Democratic National Convention this week — labeling him a public menace and hinting that he was not quite sane — it would be easy to think that the two billionaires had a rift going back many years. “Trump says he wants to run the nation like he’s run his business,” Mr. Bloomberg said on Wednesday. “God help us.” But in all their time in New York City, their interactions have been limited, yet cordial, according to people who know both of them. They existed in different circles of New York’s ultrarich: Mr. Bloomberg is known as a generous philanthropist ; Mr. Trump appears to have been flinty in his giving. Mr. Bloomberg is a supporter of the arts and aligns himself with Manhattan’s sophisticated cultural scene; Mr. Trump relishes in being crude. Mr. Bloomberg made his billions in finance and technology; Mr. Trump got his start in real estate before becoming a casino magnate and then a reality-show celebrity. Mr. Bloomberg is not overly ostentatious for a man of great wealth; Mr. Trump loves to show off his possessions. “I’ve been by Mike’s side for 19 years, and I’ve never met Donald Trump,” said Kevin Sheekey, an adviser to Mr. Bloomberg, underscoring the extent to which the men were not close. “Trump hasn’t been part of the business, political or charitable community since the Koch administration. The only place Mike and Donald would have seen each other is on a golf course or on a TV set.” On at least a few occasions, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Trump met up on the golf links. In 2007, when Mr. Bloomberg was in the second of his three terms as mayor, the two played together in a charity event at Trump National Golf Club in the city’s northern suburbs. An article in New York magazine described how Mr. Trump, Mr. Bloomberg, the comedian Billy Crystal and the former New York Yankees manager Joe Torre were set to play together in the lead foursome — but could not agree on who would go first. Video Leaning on his own business record, the former mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg, attacked Donald J. Trump’s record, saying, “I’m a New Yorker, and I know a con when I see one.” Credit Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times “How about the mayor starts it off in honor of the city?” Mr. Trump was quoted as saying, playing peacemaker and showing deference to Mr. Bloomberg. Mr. Bloomberg also appeared twice on Mr. Trump’s reality TV show, “The Apprentice,” in 2004 and 2008, in part as a way to demonstrate support for the show, which was produced in New York. And the men have a filial connection: acquaintances said that Mr. Bloomberg’s daughter Georgina is friends with Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Mr. Trump, an avid user of Twitter, made positive comments about Mr. Bloomberg when he was in office. “Mike Bloomberg is doing a great job as mayor of New York City,” he posted in 2012. In 2013, he praised Mr. Bloomberg’s administration for choosing him to finish a stalled Bronx golf course project, and then wrote on Twitter about a ribbon-cutting with the mayor. In 2014, Mr. Trump tweeted congratulations at Georgina for winning an equestrian tournament. But the cordiality dissipated not long after Mr. Trump declared his candidacy. Mr. Bloomberg began exploring his own presidential bid, as an independent, in part to block Mr. Trump from being elected. And when Mr. Bloomberg ruled out running , he did so because he said he did not want his third-party candidacy to siphon enough votes to help Mr. Trump. “As a former Republican presidential campaign manager told me, Hillary has some baggage, but Trump is crazy,” said Mr. Sheekey, who was involved in Mr. Bloomberg’s explorative bid. “And you can’t fix crazy.” Mr. Trump, typically, has not shied away from counterattacks. In a CNN interview in January , Mr. Trump voiced skepticism that Mr. Bloomberg was worth as much as Forbes magazine estimated and speculated that Mr. Bloomberg’s company, which provides data terminals to financial firms and wealthy individuals, was vulnerable to competitors. “We used to be friends,” Mr. Trump told CNN. “I guess we’re not friends anymore.”

2016 Presidential Election
Democratic National Convention,DNC
Mike Bloomberg
Donald Trump
NYC


Here’s His Story: People Still Read

Abstract: Leonard S. Riggio , the founder and chairman of Barnes & Noble, thinks that Steven P. Jobs is wrong, at least when it comes to the reading habits of Americans. In January, Mr. Jobs, the chairman of Apple, declared that a new electronic book reader introduced by Amazon.com was unlikely to be a commercial success because of a fundamental problem. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” Mr. Jobs said. “People don’t read anymore.” In a telephone interview last week, Mr. Riggio — who has based a long and profitable career on the proposition that people love to read — said that Mr. Jobs’s perception “is off by a lot.” While Mr. Riggio said he could not comment on Amazon’s device, the Kindle, he said that at Barnes & Noble, “our business in general is fairly sound.” And while the book industry as a whole is “fairly flattish” now, Mr. Riggio said, “it has had periods of flattish growth in the past.” “I’m still very optimistic,” he added. Mr. Riggio spoke after he and his wife, Louise, announced in New Orleans that the Riggio Foundation would donate $20 million for housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina . Project Home Again, as the Riggios’ effort is called, broke ground Tuesday. He said he was asked whether he could put a bookstore in Gentilly, the neighborhood where the first homes will be built. He said he hoped this would occur after “residents return and shopping centers begin to develop.” Across the country, Mr. Riggio said, senior citizens and college graduates remain avid readers; he also said book-buying for children is the fastest-growing segment of his company’s business. A self-described “big jazz fanatic,” Mr. Riggio said he and his wife “always loved to travel to New Orleans; we think the culture is magnificent.” He said the $20 million donation is the foundation’s second largest, exceeded only by its support of Dia:Beacon, the museum in Beacon, N.Y. It has given the museum at least $35 million, but he declined to specify the exact amount. JANE L. LEVERE BONUS BOOSTER Major corporations often dismiss critical reports about their performance as simplistic or wrongheaded, but favorable accounts are another matter — especially when they can provide arguments for increasing the pay of top executives. In a proxy statement, United Technologies cited several such reports as if they were infallible. George David , the longtime chief executive of the company, was due for another big bonus last year as part of a one-year pay package that the company valued at $38 million. According to the formula that was spelled out to shareholders, Mr. David, 65, would deserve a cash bonus of $3.4 million and the company’s president, Louis R. Chênevert , would receive $1.5 million. But the proxy statement said the board’s compensation committee had decided to take other factors into account, including Mr. David’s selection as a top-ranked boss by Barron’s and Institutional Investor magazines and United Technologies’ inclusion on the best-companies lists in Barron’s, Forbes and BusinessWeek. Combined with their progress toward a smooth succession, that earned the men bigger bonuses: $4 million for Mr. David and $2 million for Mr. Chênevert. PATRICK McGEEHAN PAYBACK TIME American Express may have lost its chief financial officer, Gary L. Crittenden , to Citigroup last year, but at least it received something in return. Mr. Crittenden wound up repaying American Express about $3 million in cash and stock that the company had given to him for his work in 2006, according to an American Express proxy statement. The payback of the bonuses was required because Mr. Crittenden immediately went to work for a competitor after leaving American Express. Ultimately, the money will come not from Mr. Crittenden’s pockets but from those of Citigroup’s shareholders. When Citigroup hired him, it agreed to pay him as much as $20 million for his first two years on the job and promised to make up for any pay he had to forfeit to American Express. PATRICK McGEEHAN INSIDE TRACK It took eight months, but William Hill, a London operator of more than 2,000 betting shops, has finally found a new chief executive, and he was right under the company’s nose. Ralph Topping , who heads the company’s British operations, was named last month to replace David Harding, who announced in June that he was quitting and left several months later. The company said it made “an extremely thorough search” and tested the marketplace considerably in its quest for a new chief. But analysts speculated that the company had been unable to persuade an outsider to take the job as British regulators adopt a stricter stance on slot machines and horse racing and as Internet gambling also faces increased scrutiny. PHYLLIS KORKKI

Riggio Leonard
Barnes & Noble Incorporated
Executives and Management
Hurricane Katrina
Books and Literature
Amazon.com Inc