For the Love of Animals

Abstract: Linda and Gary Childs go almost everywhere with their “little girl.” The retirees, from West Boylston, Mass., love to parade 3-year-old Chino down busy streets in her stroller. They take her to restaurants dressed in her fur-lined vest or polo hoodie where “she sits in her own chair, very polite.” But their favorite place may be the seashore, where Chino wears sunglasses and one of her four beach dresses while lounging in a chair embroidered with her name. “Chino gives us so many laughs and so much love,” Ms. Childs, a 67-year-old retired schoolteacher, said of the 12-pound Chihuahua-pug mix. “She just makes everything better.” The Childs are unusual in some respects. Retirement remains a time when many Americans move away from things they have to paint, feed or nurture. Only 41 percent of Americans 65 and older live in households with pets, compared with 68 percent of those 45 to 54 and 76 percent of 18- to 24-year olds, according to a 2014 survey by Mintel, a market research agency. The golden years may have less bark, bite and meow, but in the last decade new scientific studies, evolving attitudes about pets and changing family structures have reshaped the relationship between retirees and animals, even if much of the new research is not universally accepted. Erika Ribaudo, a senior adviser at A Place for Mom , which helps about 200,000 families a year find living arrangements for retirees, noted a growing demand for pets by retirees and the willingness of senior living communities to accept them. “As recently as 2005 there were very few communities that accepted pets,” Ms. Ribaudo said. “Now, probably 40 percent of them are pet friendly, and that number is growing. Science tells us that pets make people feel so much better, and more clients just don’t want to give up their beloved family member. Today, they don’t have to.” From 2010 to 2015, pet ownership in the United States increased about 3 percent; 65 percent of households own a pet, usually a dog or cat. During that same time, according to the American Pet Products Association, spending on pet items increased about 25 percent, to what is expected to be $60.5 billion this year. For retirees, smaller is better. Younger pet owners are more likely to own dogs than cats — by a roughly 60-40 split, Mintel found. This gap begins to narrow with age, so that the 65 and older crowd is slightly more likely to own cats than dogs. Image Chino at home in West Boylston, Mass., with his owner, Linda Childs. Credit Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times There are no definitive statistics on the breeds of dogs favored by various age groups, but the American Kennel Club suggests that less active retirees — as well as those living in apartments or who travel a lot — consider smaller breeds like Chihuahuas or Dachshunds. It is easier to trip over smaller dogs, but it is harder for them to knock down their owners. As more Americans live alone and families have fewer children, “their attachment to pets is deepening,” said Hal Herzog, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University and author of “Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals.” “They think of them as people, and they are making greater emotional and financial investments in their pets.” Glenn A. White, an 87-year-old retired businessman of Waltham Crossings, Mass., said he “spends a lot of time talking to my 8-year-old Havanese, Cody. “Of course,” Mr. White added, “he talks back. I even sing to him” — though Cody has yet to respond with his own version of “Hound Dog.” Just as helicopter parents try to provide their children with every advantage, pet owners primp and pamper their cosseted companions. Pet shops become superstores with designer clothes and jewelry. High-end pet foods — including organic, holistic, grain-free, non-G.M.O. offerings rich with meat, poultry and fish — account for more than 40 percent of sales. And veterinarians report a rise in pet obesity. Retiree pet owners seem especially devoted as they buck the tendency to give up pets. “As boomers become empty nesters, they look for other things to nurture,” said Richard Rosso, a certified financial planner in Houston. “I’ve been in this business for 26 years, and during the last seven to 10 years I have noticed that the retirement dream for many clients is still drinking a piña colada on the beach, but now they see a Lab next to them.” Since the average American pet owner spends more than $1,600 per year on a dog and $1,100 on a cat, Mr. Rosso said, he now includes pet budget lines in his financial plans for retirees. Retirees and other pet owners have become more demanding in recent years, expecting businesses that cater to them to also serve their pets. The changing landscape of pet ownership is apparent at R.V. parks and campgrounds. “They have always accommodated pets, but in the last five years or so they have started investing capital in dog parks, agility courses, sticks and tubes and doggy washing stations,” said Debbie Sipe, executive director of the California Association of R.V. Parks and Campgrounds . “Just having a dog run is no longer enough.” Kampgrounds of America , which has over 485 locations in the United States and Canada, is expanding such pet-friendly features through its Kamp K-9 program, according to Mike Gast, vice president of communications. He said that about 55 percent of its campers — the vast majority of whom travel by R.V. — own pets. Image Jackie Caldwell and her husband, Paul, with their 10-year-old Pomeranian, Foxy, who accompanies them on R.V. journeys between their homes in Pennsylvania and Florida. Credit Jeff Swensen for The New York Times “All of our facilities are pet–friendly, and about half of them now have Kamp K-9s, which includes off-leash areas, agility courses,” Mr. Gast said. “We’ve added 50 of them in just the last year.” The changing role of pets and retirement can be seen at Brighton Gardens of Raleigh, an assisted-living and memory care community in Raleigh, N.C., that could almost be mistaken for a menagerie. A pair of love birds greets visitors at the door. A well-fed Basset mix named Mr. Copper — the community pet known as the king of the table scraps — lounges on the dining room floor amid residents enjoying an afternoon cocktail. A volunteer pet therapist has a Shetland sheepdog in her lap as a smiling resident gently strokes it under the ear, while dogs and cats scamper down the hallways with their owners. “Every one of our 302 communities has at least one community pet,” said Rita Altman, senior vice president of memory care and program services for Sunrise Senior Living , which operates Brighton Gardens communities throughout the country. “It is hard to measure all the benefits they bring — the happiness, the sense of purpose, the ability to nurture something — but we know they make a meaningful difference.” Blair Patterson, a 79-year-old Brighton Gardens resident who uses a wheelchair because of arthritis, said his 9-year-old Shih Tzu is a constant source of joy. “She is so good for my ego,” Mr. Patterson, a retired investment broker, said. “She thinks my wife and I are the most. Sometimes I think, ‘Dear God, please help me be the man my dog thinks I am.’ ” The growing belief that pets are not just good, but good for you, may make ownership more appealing to retirees. Some studies find that pet ownership can help reduce blood pressure, triglycerides and cholesterol while increasing one-year survival rates after a heart attack, according to Alan Beck, a researcher who is the director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University. Other studies show that pets reduce loneliness and stress, promote interaction between people and encourage exercise. “It is clear that animals are good for your health” Mr. Beck said, while cautioning that the field is still relatively young, with few comprehensive studies to draw from. Although people have owned pets for tens of thousands of years, scientists only began investigating the health implications of the human-animal bond during the 1970s. “Until then most research focused on the harm animals might pose through bites or spreading disease,” he said. Mr. Herzog, the Western Carolina University professor, is less convinced that pets provide specific, widespread health benefits. He said studies showing specific benefits received wide attention in the media, whose addiction to “feel-good stories” about pets was matched only by their penchant for reports of astounding “medical breakthroughs.” These studies, he said, are also trumpeted by the pet industry. “We don’t hear much about the compelling research finding that pets do not improve our health, reduce our loneliness or make us happier,” Mr. Herzog said. “Or about the 85,000 or so people a year, many of them older, who go to emergency rooms with broken bones each year because of their pets. Pets may be good for us, but, right now, I think it is more of a hypothesis than a proven fact.” Such debates are an afterthought to retirees like Paul and Jackie Caldwell, whose 10-year-old Pomeranian, Foxy, is their constant companion as they travel in an R.V. between their homes in Florida and Pennsylvania. “I can’t imagine life without her,” said Ms. Caldwell, 67. But sometimes Ms. Caldwell does need a break. Fortunately, a neighbor in Florida is happy to babysit. “Foxy loves her Aunt BeaBea so much,” she said. “During the summer, when she is back home in New Brunswick, Canada, we Skype her once a month, and Foxy is so excited to see her.”

Pet
Retirement
Old age,elderly,senior citizens


Suspects in Terror Case Wanted to Kill Jews, Officials Say

Abstract: The 26-year-old man from Queens had discussed growing a beard and the side curls of a Hasidic Jew, the police commissioner said, a disguise that he apparently hoped would enable him to attack a synagogue in Manhattan “and take out the whole entire building.” His ambitions did not end there. The man, a native of Algeria, also expressed an interest in blowing up the Empire State Building, the commissioner said. He was not a member of a terrorist group like Al Qaeda, the commissioner said. Indeed, his father said, he once sold cosmetics at Saks Fifth Avenue and was now trying to be a fashion model. Yet driven by a hatred of Jews and a belief that Muslims are mistreated the world over, the man, Ahmed Ferhani, began piecing together a plan to commit terrorism, the authorities said on Thursday, leading to his arrest after he and an accomplice bought weapons in a police undercover operation. Mr. Ferhani, along with a 20-year-old naturalized United States citizen from Morocco, were charged on Thursday in a terrorism case that is remarkable not only for the would-be model-actor the authorities have identified as its central player, but also for the unusual way the case was brought. The charges were announced at a City Hall news conference with arrest photos on display, featuring comments from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly; and the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. The case was presented in State Supreme Court, with no involvement from the F.B.I. or the United States attorney’s office, typically crucial in such investigations and prosecutions. The accusations as detailed by the three officials sounded chilling. Just before Mr. Ferhani and his co-defendant, Mohamed Mamdouh, were arrested on Manhattan’s West Side on Wednesday evening, they had bought a hand grenade, three semiautomatic pistols and 150 rounds of ammunition. They wanted to kill Jews; they mulled blowing up churches; and shortly before Mr. Ferhani was arrested at 58th Street along the West Side Highway, he asked an undercover detective, who was posing as a gun dealer, if the man could get him a bullet-resistant vest, a silencer and a police radio. Mr. Mamdouh was arrested nearby. “They conspired and took concrete steps to blow up synagogues and churches to advance those ideological goals and to possess and use illegal firearms and explosives,” Mr. Vance said at the news conference. “They did it for jihad, something they referred simply to as the cause, which meant the violence and armed fight against Israel, Jews and other non-Muslims and the West.” Mr. Kelly said Mr. Ferhani, using an expletive, explained he was fed up that Muslims around the world were being treated “like dogs.” The two men, who both live in Queens, were charged in a criminal complaint under a state terrorism statute passed after the Sept. 11 attacks that Mr. Vance said had not been used before in New York City in a terrorism case. Among the charges were second-degree conspiracy as a crime of terrorism, second-degree conspiracy as a hate crime and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism. If convicted of the top count, the men face life in prison without parole. The charges concluded what Mr. Kelly said was a seven-month investigation. Major terrorism cases are generally investigated by the F.B.I.- N.Y.P.D. Joint Terrorism Task Force, staffed with police detectives and federal agents, and prosecuted by the United States attorney’s office in federal court. One law enforcement official said the Police Department’s Intelligence Division, which handled the case, had notified the task force about it and the group had opted not to get involved. Little clarification was offered at the news conference, where officials offered explanations for why a case presented as a serious terrorism matter had not been brought in federal court. “They don’t take all the cases,” Mr. Bloomberg said simply, referring to the federal authorities. The commissioner said federal authorities have the right of first refusal on any tip, adding that the case began as a local criminal matter with the district attorney’s office, and “it was logical to keep it going when it morphed into a terrorism investigation.” Mr. Vance said in this case, prosecutors worked with the local police, but suggested that in some matters, it was important to share information with federal authorities. A spokesman for the F.B.I., Timothy Flannelly, declined to comment. The reasoning notwithstanding, Mr. Vance described Mr. Ferhani as a volatile threat. “He was committed to violent jihad, and his plans became bigger and more violent with each passing week,” Mr. Vance said. At Mr. Ferhani’s home in Whitestone, Queens, his father said his son had befriended people who were bad influences. “He’s a very good kid,” the father, J. Ferhani, 51, said. “He got involved with a bad kid. He’s a naïve person. He has a very good heart, but if somebody tries to tell him something, he always believes it.” Told of the accusations against his son, Mr. Ferhani, a cabdriver, laughed in disbelief. “Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,” he said. “Bomb a synagogue? That’s not my son.” He said his son was raised as a Muslim, in Algeria, before the family fled in 1994 at the height of its civil war. “But he’s not a religious fanatic,” Mr. Ferhani said. “He doesn’t pray; he drinks.” Late in the afternoon, the two suspects appeared before Judge Melissa C. Jackson in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. A prosecutor, Margaret E. Gandy, asked the judge to hold both men without bail. “The seriousness of this crime is considerable,” she said, adding that investigators had an overwhelming amount of evidence. As she spoke, Mr. Ferhani lifted his head and mouthed words that could not be heard from the gallery. Neither defendant entered a formal plea, but lawyers for both said their clients denied wrongdoing. Judge Jackson ordered the men held without bail.


Secretary Chu’s Bumpy Ride From Laboratory to Washington

Abstract: WASHINGTON — As a physicist, Steven Chu has seen atoms suspended in a powerful laser beam and DNA stretched out in a vacuum chamber. But in his new job as energy secretary, Dr. Chu is observing phenomena he never saw in the science laboratory. At a recent Senate hearing, for example, he witnessed a junior cabinet member (himself) being systematically dissected by a senior senator (John McCain). Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, was unhappy when Dr. Chu affirmed the Obama administration’s intention to suspend work at a planned nuclear waste site in Nevada. “What’s wrong with Yucca Mountain, Dr. Chu?” he demanded repeatedly as Dr. Chu tried to explain. “I think we can do a better job,” Dr. Chu finally replied. For a slight, soft-spoken Nobel laureate, Washington has been an initiation that he has likened to being “dumped in the deep end of the pool.” Dr. Chu, 61, was chairman of Stanford’s physics department and ran a national research laboratory. But in addition to being verbally slapped around by Mr. McCain, he has been forced to backtrack on some ill-informed comments about OPEC and ordered to spend quickly tens of billions of dollars in stimulus money with virtually no top-level help. Dr. Chu is still mastering skills like ducking a tough question from a reporter and delivering the all-purpose “I’ll get back to you on that.” He has admitted his naïveté on certain policy questions, like OPEC production quotas, and is still getting used to the scrutiny that comes with a cabinet job. “I didn’t appreciate how much of a public figure you become,” Dr. Chu said in an interview recently in Milwaukee, where he spent the day talking to scientists about biofuels and touring a home that was being weatherized under a local program. President Obama has assigned Dr. Chu to carry out some of his central priorities: wean America from dependence on fossil fuels, rebuild the nation’s electrical grid and address the challenges of climate change . The science part of his job is the most rewarding, Dr. Chu said. On his visit to Milwaukee, he visibly brightened when one University of Wisconsin researcher told him about a local entrepreneur who was turning the waste products from cheesemaking into ethanol, which was then blended with gasoline at a nearby convenience store. “Does he drop some off at the liquor store on his way?” Dr. Chu asked impishly. A few hours later, wearing khakis frayed at the cuffs and brown, thick-soled professorial shoes, he dutifully traipsed through the small house that was getting new insulation and appliances to cut the owner’s electric bills. When he emerged, five news cameras were set up on the lawn. But to his relief, most of the questions went to Gov. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin, who had accompanied him on the tour. Asked later what part of his job he liked the least, Dr. Chu said: “The fact that I’m constantly being told that I have to be careful what I say to the press and in public. I can’t speculate out loud anymore. Everything I say is taken with total seriousness.” Yet as he takes on one of the toughest policy and management challenges in government, Dr. Chu brings certain assets that none of his peers or predecessors have had: a Nobel Prize , a YouTube following (for his lectures on climate change) and an unofficial theme song (“Dr. Wu” by Steely Dan). He is a major celebrity in Taiwan, where scientific achievement is rewarded with rock star status. He is a member of Academica Sinica, Taiwan’s most distinguished scholarly society, as was his father. Dr. Chu is struggling to get his arms around one of the most perplexing and intractable bureaucracies in Washington and to efficiently — and carefully — disperse $39 billion in funding from the stimulus package . Most of the department’s top appointed positions, including deputy secretary, remain unfilled, leaving him largely reliant on career staff members to manage 114,000 employees and contractors and a budget that has more than doubled this year. The task at times appears overwhelming, and some in Washington quietly wonder if Dr. Chu is in over his head. Karen Harbert, president of the Institute for 21st Century Energy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, praised Dr. Chu’s academic credentials, calling him Mr. Science. But she suggested that the main decisions on energy and climate change policy were being made at the White House by a small team led by Carol Browner, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. “Is he secretary of energy or secretary of research and development?” Ms. Harbert asked. Dan Leistikow, the Energy Department’s director of public affairs, said that Dr. Chu was a scientist, not a politician, and should be given a little time to adjust. “A Nobel scientist is more likely to figure out Washington than a career politician is to figure out how to deal with carbon sequestration,” Mr. Leistikow said. Dr. Chu came to Washington after serving as director of the Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, a civilian research organization with 4,000 employees and a $600 million annual budget. Before that, he was a professor and research scientist at Stanford and Bell Laboratories. He shared the 1997 Nobel in physics for his work on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. He comes from a family of academic overachievers. His father emigrated from China to study chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and retired as a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. His mother studied economics in China and at M.I.T. One brother, Gilbert, is a professor of medicine and biochemistry at Stanford; the other, Morgan, is a highly regarded intellectual property lawyer in Los Angeles. Dr. Chu once described himself as the academic black sheep of the family. Morgan Chu said of his brother, “He’s acclimating very well, all things considered.” He added, “He has a wonderful set of skills for the job — an unbending respect for discovering the unvarnished truth and a willingness to challenge established dogma.” Matt Rogers, an energy expert with McKinsey & Company whom Dr. Chu brought in last month to help speed the pace of Energy Department spending, said it would be a mistake to dismiss Dr. Chu as just a science geek. “He is a kind man; he is a nice man,” Mr. Rogers said. “But he is not a patient man. People are going to have to take a deep breath and realize they’re going to be moving at a much quicker pace than they were used to.” Dr. Chu said he had been frustrated by the job vacancies and the glacial pace of his department. He is eager, he said, to get on with what he sees as his main task: finding and financing the scientific breakthroughs that will end the nation’s dependence on carbon-based fuels and solve the climate change problem. Borrowing an analogy from the world of physics, he said that in Washington, Newton’s first law — a body in motion tends to stay in motion — does not apply. “In a bureaucracy, if you start something in motion, it either stops or gets derailed,” he said. “You have to keep applying force.” He intends to keep applying that force, he said, because it could help solve the world’s energy and climate change problems. “If we don’t spend this money wisely and invest in new technology that addresses these challenges,” he said, “we will have failed the country. We will have failed the world.”

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009)


The Impossible Mayor of the Possible

Abstract: The question was a trap, put to a novice politician who had only just been elected mayor and had no government experience whatsoever. Would Michael R. Bloomberg be keeping any of the seasoned hands from the administration of his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, acclaimed after 9/11 as America’s Mayor, Time Magazine Person of the Year, not to mention The Guy Who Personally Tamed and Therefore Saved New York City? Mr. Bloomberg had no intention of doing so, nor was he going to say that. He praised the Giuliani team. Then he explained why he needed new faces. “After you’ve done a job for six or eight years,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “you know what can’t be done.” Mr. Bloomberg was keen to take on the impossible, or at least the seemingly so. And he did. A man whose public personality came in a plain brown wrapper presided during an era of radical change and rebirth in the city, much of it fostered by his administration. He has stayed so long that he and New Yorkers are now getting on each other’s nerves: he, increasingly peevish and deaf to his critics; they, in turn, no longer able to detect or grant him any qualities beyond arrogance. Mayors rarely leave office in New York on affectionate terms. In the case of Mr. Bloomberg, a relationship that was always fraught — and could it have been anything else with a mayor whose net worth, enormous to begin with, increased every 15 minutes by more than the city’s median annual household income? — has frayed. Baffling, visionary, obstinate and brilliant, Mr. Bloomberg had complications that could be maddeningly hypocritical or endearingly human. He preached the virtues of dietary sodium restrictions, but sneaked shakes of salt onto slices of pizza. His staff let it be known that Mike Bloomberg had a regular guy palate for beer and a hot dog; at dinner with a few commissioners, he confided that he didn’t see why anyone should have to pay more than $300 for a good bottle of wine. He led the country — indeed, the world — in taking strong measures to reduce carbon emissions, anticipating that the city’s population would grow by one million in the decade after he left office; meanwhile, he flew everywhere on private jets, the least carbon-efficient form of transportation on or above the earth, whether going to spend weekends at his house in Bermuda, or to lecture at a climate change conference in Copenhagen. He was not naturally inclined to soaring oratory, so on his rare forays, the eloquence was indelible. Practically alone among elected officials in the United States, Mr. Bloomberg spoke in 2010 for the right of a Muslim group to open a mosque a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attacks, citing the founding principles of the nation. As he stood on Governors Island, with the Statue of Liberty visible over his shoulder, Mr. Bloomberg said: “We would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.” Last week, during a news conference in City Hall, the same mayor snarled at a judge for ruling that in searching the pockets of millions of young black and Latino men who had done nothing wrong, the police and the city had violated their constitutional rights. The moment lacked even a whisper of the grace that had made his voice so powerful on Governors Island. It would be futile to try squaring those two Bloombergs. Yet as he enters his final months in City Hall, the full arc of his era is coming into view. Mayors are often spectators, forced to play the hands dealt them by history, the economy, the public, their allies or campaign contributors. As much as any mayor of modern New York, Mr. Bloomberg has been a transformative figure, a shaper of his time. Elected to lead a city that was the grieving, wounded site of an atrocity, he will depart as mayor of a city where artists have been able to decorate a mighty park with thousands of sheets of saffron, for no reason other than the simple joy of it; where engineers figured out how to turn sewage gas into electricity; where people are safer from violent crime than at any time in modern history. He is shrewd and has often had good luck, and when that happy combination was in short supply, his vast personal fortune helped patch things over, do good deeds, buy allies. He was not conventionally partisan, and was clumsy in dealing with the baroque centers of power in Albany. The ideology that shaped his goals was, broadly, the allure of large numbers: get enough rich people and companies here, and they will support a government that can keep the city running for everyone else; make policies in public health, education and policing that, when multiplied across eight million people, will create a healthier, smarter, safer city. The love of big numbers led to great success and, at times, toxic excess. Perhaps most important, he has had a knack for avoiding unnecessary political fights, and little anxiety about trying and failing. At his best, that combination of emotional efficiency and fearless experimentation changed not only the city, but the world. He didn’t want to know what couldn’t be done. Imagine the deep, drawn breaths of the audience — the gasps — at the finale of a special show held at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle on Feb. 24, 2005. In an elegant performance hall, 13 honored guests, delegates from the International Olympic Committee, had been treated to aperitifs and a 40-minute revue that captured the New York of story, song and cinema. Mayor Bloomberg and his committee had spared nothing in the enchantments, hoping to lure the 2012 Olympics to the city. Dancers whirled. Meryl Streep charmed. Whoopi Goldberg cracked wise. The trumpeter Wynton Marsalis pulled rhythm and melody from sky and cellar. A reel of iconic movie clips rendered the city in every shade from the noir to the gaudy. Finally, at the very back of the stage, a giant curtain began to drop from a three-story wall of glass, shifting the spectacle to the actual city. Framed in the giant window was Central Park. Its winter browns were pillowed in snow and swaddled in streaks of the saffron cloth of “The Gates,” an art installation that was glowing, thanks to lights held by volunteers stationed along miles of winding paths. Overhead, fireworks spattered rivers of color in the sky. The only word for it was breathtaking: what human brain trying to process such a scene would not instantly demand more oxygen? The Olympics delegation rose in ovation. Now, eight years later, all of that evening’s shimmer has been stilled, the last trumpet notes faded with the embers from the rockets and the pinwheels. The 2012 Olympics went to London, not New York. That is the way of political administrations: a million struggles and crises and circuses, “an October surprise every month,” as Mayor Edward I. Koch once said, so many of them vanishing in the wink of a New York minute. Tucked into that evening was something beyond a fling with the Olympics, which many New Yorkers could not have cared less about. Beyond the overreaching was something far-reaching. In the gasps at the finale, in every breath drawn by the audience, was the invisible substance that could be counted as Mr. Bloomberg’s most enduring, radical work: cleaner indoor air. The room was free of tobacco smoke. Even during cocktails, no one lit up. And not just on that gilded night, in that privileged space at the center of Manhattan, but in every restaurant, bar and watering hole throughout the five boroughs since March 30, 2003. Soon after taking office, Mr. Bloomberg had met at Gracie Mansion with his first health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who urged him to push for a complete ban on smoking in places where people work — no exceptions, no special pleadings by hotels or small places or private catering halls. A person who spent one minute in a smoky bar, Dr. Frieden said, would be exposed to as much pollution as someone who stood in the Holland Tunnel for 60 minutes at rush hour. Image The mayor at a news conference on May 2, 2010, after a bomb was discovered in a car in Times Square. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Would such a ban save lives, Mr. Bloomberg wanted to know. Yes, Dr. Frieden said. Then go ahead, the mayor said. With that, Dr. Frieden continued his briefing by mapping the political heat that would be applied by the hospitality industry. The mayor cut him off. “He told me, ‘The first rule of business is, once you make a sale — leave,’ ” Dr. Frieden said in Joyce Purnick’s authoritative biography, “Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics.” Most dramatically, the New York ban included bars and restaurants, whose trade lobbyists tried to stop it by warning of economic disaster. Commentators jeered about “Mommy Mayor” and the “Nanny State.” Mr. Bloomberg pushed past the catcalls and got a bill through the City Council that in addition to the ban, included money for cessation programs and steep taxes on cigarettes. The smoking rate for adults declined by a third, and for young people by half. California and a few cities and towns in the United States already had similar restrictions, but they were little-noticed beyond their borders. After New York City took the step, the crusade started by Mayor Bloomberg and Dr. Frieden crossed the country and then the oceans. Since New York City passed its law, 500 other cities in the United States and 35 states enacted smoke-free legislation. In March 2004, a national smoking ban in public places was adopted by the Republic of Ireland , making it the first country in Europe to have one; anyone who had frequented Irish pubs fogged with smoke might have thought they would be the last places on earth to stub out cigarettes. There was more. On the night in 2005 of the Olympic spectacle, only one of the 10 countries with delegates in the audience had a law that restricted smoking in public places. Now nine of those countries do. By the end of 2012, 48 countries had followed New York in adopting smoking bans, providing some protection to 1.2 billion people. That works out to about one in seven of all the humans now on earth: breathtaking and breath-giving. Not just the air changed. City parkland grew by about 800 acres; 750,000 new trees have been planted, toward a goal of one million, an initiative that took off after the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, reported that every dollar the city spent on a tree returned $5.50 in savings on heating, cooling and public health. The transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, added 285 miles of bike lanes and turned over parts of Broadway near Times Square to pedestrians. The waterfront on the East River in Queens and Brooklyn, rezoned to accommodate the Olympics that never came, grew to absorb a population that increases by the thousands every month. The No. 7 train line is being extended to 11th Avenue from Times Square, and then south, to irrigate a new crop of skyscrapers being planted on and around train yards. The city alone picked up the bill — unusual for transit projects — and intends to pay for it with the real estate taxes collected from new development. Mr. Bloomberg committed $4 billion, more than all his predecessors combined , to build the third water tunnel, which was first proposed more than 60 years ago. Construction had begun in 1970, then dragged on through six mayoral administrations, slowing and stopping when money was tight; his acceleration of the project, however farsighted, had no political upside — it will not be completed until 2018, but property owners have had to pay steep increases in annual water bills. Cornell University, with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, is building a new campus for applied sciences on Roosevelt Island; the project was instigated by the Bloomberg administration and became possible when the philanthropist Charles F. Feeney pitched in $350 million . The city cut the number of young people detained for trial in juvenile court by as much as 50 percent, and reduced over all the number of people it sent to jail . Crime went down. At the same time, public health doctors increased screenings and treatment at Rikers Island, a likely vortex of communicable disease. As one of his first acts, Mr. Bloomberg sought and won control of the schools, saying it would create accountability. He invested heavily in education: the amount of money spent on schools has doubled since 2001. More students graduated from high school in four years, though that success was not closely tied to how much money was spent in a given school ; nor were the additional resources able to close the frustrating gap in test scores between higher-performing Asian-American and white students and their lower-scoring black and Hispanic classmates. The city opened 28 career and technical education high schools, the first new ones since the 1960s. Teachers were paid more, though the city did not negotiate a new evaluation system when it agreed to the increases, and later got into an ugly fight over it. However, approval of tenure applications, once all but automatic, dropped to 55 percent from 97 percent. Mayoral control of the education system meant that a central administration had the power to close schools, corral space for charter programs, and set rigid rules for assigning students to schools. Many parents found the new educational bureaucracy hidebound and remote, and looked fondly back at the once-reviled community board system. Air, water, ground had changed. So did the tone. Unlike most elected officials, Mr. Bloomberg had ample balm to spread around when the city budget dried up; over nine years, he gave about $200 million through the Carnegie Corporation to 600 arts and cultural groups, many of which had been cut adrift from the city budget. “The grants conveyed an indisputable good to the city’s social and cultural fabric,” the investigative reporter Tom Robbins wrote in The New York Post in June. “But political advantage was equally inescapable.” The giving doubled in 2005, an election year, and tripled in 2008, when Mr. Bloomberg sought the right to run for a third term in office by undoing a limit of two that had been voted into law by public referendum. He spent more than $110 million on his re-election campaign, and barely won. No mayor finishes all the business that needs to be taken care of. When Mr. Bloomberg was toying with a run for president, he kicked liabilities down the road. In recent weeks, he has been saying how important it is for the next mayor to negotiate concessions on pensions and health benefits from the city unions — something he did talk about at the time, but did not win at the bargaining table. Meanwhile, the city’s public housing authority, which provides homes or vouchers for more than 600,000 people, has deferred maintenance in thousands of apartments. It needs $6 billion in capital financing . And the durability of the experimental spirit that Mr. Bloomberg encouraged remains uncertain, as is the $383 million in private donations he raised in support of varied pilot projects: stopping domestic violence, preventing black and Latino young men from falling behind, manufacturing green roofs, getting salads into schools. The siren song of large numbers led the city to multiply the number of people that the police stopped and frisked. But the Constitution protects the rights of individuals and does not recognize the laws of large numbers. It requires that the more invasive an action the authorities take against a person, the greater the cause must be. More than a year ago, Mr. Bloomberg himself had — sotto voce — said there would be changes to the police approach. The number of stops declined sharply. A more agile Mr. Bloomberg would have avoided a needless fight on behalf of a program that was already being reformed. Asked on Monday about a judge’s order that the police wear body cameras in five precincts for a year, to document precisely what was happening in the streets, Mr. Bloomberg seemed especially angry. A “nightmare,” he said. He insisted the test would fail: a police officer might turn his or her head and the camera would miss the action. The judge said it would be an experiment, a pilot project for a year, but Mr. Bloomberg wasn’t having it. “It is a solution that is not a solution,” he declared. Michael Bloomberg had become the kind of expert that 12 years ago he would not hire for his government: someone who knew “what can’t be done.”


Jay Maeder, 67, Newspaperman Who Wrote ‘Annie’ Comic Strip, Dies

Abstract: Jay Maeder, a columnist and editor for The Daily News and The Miami Herald and the last writer of the comic strip “ Annie ,” died on Tuesday at his sister’s home in Houston. He was 67. The cause was cancer, his companion, Amanda Hass, said. He lived in Greenwood Lake, N.Y. Mr. Maeder wrote the “People” column for The Herald in the 1970s and ’80s and the “Newsreel” and “Lounge Lizard” columns for The News in the 1980s and ’90s. His irreverent style could test his editors; in one 1982 Herald column, he quoted Mother Teresa as saying she preferred being “with lepers” to dealing with journalists and asked: “Something we said? You don’t like our cologne?” A Daily News editorial he wrote about Joel B. Steinberg, who was released from prison in 2004 after being convicted of beating his 6-year-old adopted daughter to death in 1987, drew wide attention. It appeared in part on the front page, beginning, “Let him feel every New York eye burning straight through his rotten soul.” Mr. Maeder also edited The News’s Sunday magazine and the newspaper’s Big Town series about New York history. A historian of the comics pages, Mr. Maeder wrote “Dick Tracy: The Official Biography” (1990) and contributed to “The Encyclopedia of American Comics.” In 2000, he took over writing “Little Orphan Annie,” as the comic strip was known when Harold Gray began writing it in 1924. Mr. Maeder and the artist Andrew Pepoy updated Annie’s red dress and curly hair and added the pilot and former C.I.A. agent Amelia Santiago, but kept the catchphrase “Leapin’ Lizards!” “I tell people it’s ‘Indiana Jones’ with chicks,” he told The News. Jay Edward Maeder Jr. was born in Cleveland on Jan. 29, 1947, and grew up in Fort Myers, Fla. He attended several colleges and served in the Army in Vietnam before taking his first newspaper job, at The Morning Journal in Northern Ohio. He joined The Miami Herald in 1971 and moved to The News in 1985. After retiring in 2008 he continued to work on “Annie.” He also contributed posts to the City Room blog of The New York Times. They were discontinued after similarities were found between descriptive passages in the posts and those in articles he had written for The News. His two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his sister, Jane Walsh, and Ms. Hass, he is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Jordan and Christopher; and four grandchildren. Mr. Maeder’s updating of “Annie” could not reverse its decline. Tribune Media Services stopped the strip mid-storyline in 2010, when fewer than 20 American newspapers carried it. “It is no longer a great marketplace for adventure comic strips in the daily newspapers,” Mr. Maeder said in 2010, adding, “I’m going to miss the girl a lot.”

Jay Maeder
Newspaper
Comic strip
Obituary
New York Daily News
Miami Herald


A Mellowed Pirro, but No Less Blunt on TV

Abstract: CHICAGO — Jeanine F. Pirro ’s brassy, salty style always made her one of the more vivid characters in New York’s Technicolor cast of political personalities. When she bowed out of politics after her loss to Andrew M. Cuomo in the 2006 campaign for state attorney general, the lingering image that many New Yorkers were left with was textbook Jeanine. She was caught on a recording fuming to her friend Bernard B. Kerik, the former police commissioner, in terms not quite the Queen’s English (and certainly not printable here) about exacting revenge on her husband, Albert, who she suspected had been carrying on an affair. So last week, as she was scolding a defendant during a taping of her new television show on the CW network, “ Judge Jeanine Pirro ,” her choice of words seemed somewhat un-Jeanine. “You know what?” Ms. Pirro barked at the defendant, a man who was being sued by his soon-to-be-ex-wife for spending his income tax refund on an Xbox video game console and a tattoo rather than on day care for their son. “You’re full of hogwash!” Hogwash? That’s just one snippet of a Jeanine Pirro who on TV seems a little tamer, a little less defiant, maybe even a little Zen. “I’ve mellowed,” Ms. Pirro said during a recent interview from her “chambers,” which are actually more of a dressing room and contain not shelves of law books but a lighted vanity mirror, overstuffed couches and framed pictures of her with the country singers Toby Keith and Brooks & Dunn. For much of her three-decade career as a Westchester County assistant district attorney, a judge and a three-term district attorney, Ms. Pirro was a woman whose image was defined by other people — her political opponents, the media and, most of all, her husband. Mr. Pirro’s highly publicized extramarital affairs, his child with another woman, reputed mob ties and conviction on tax-evasion charges in 2000 were constant distractions, and many political observers have said that his baggage kept her from winning higher office. But she has tried to put much of that behind her. She separated from her husband last year and swore off politics. When she wags her finger at one of the many derelicts who appear before her in court, a wedding ring is nowhere to be seen. “Let me tell you something,” Ms. Pirro said, sounding as if she were lecturing from the bench, “life really is a series of ups and downs. I know. I’ve made the journey many times. And you don’t look back and say what would’ve or could’ve or should’ve. You look forward.” Make no mistake about it: Ms. Pirro has hardly lost her ability to rant or harangue or slam down her gavel in disgust. As she rendered her decision in the case with the couple feuding over day care payments, she admonished the young man, who was countersuing his wife for slander after she wrote disparaging comments about his abilities as a father on her MySpace page. “Truth is an absolute,” Ms. Pirro shouted, “and you are a bad father.” She ruled in favor of the wife. But she is just as quick to sympathize as she is to chastise. In a case she heard last week involving two mothers who were battling heroin addictions and who were fighting over $3 an hour in babysitting wages, Ms. Pirro expressed outrage that the two women were getting high while raising their children. “If I was a district attorney, I’d be looking to put you in jail,” she told them. But her demeanor softened as the defendant choked back tears and explained how she had recently gotten herself clean and managed to scrape together just enough money to buy a house for her and her daughter. “You’re a very lucky lady,” Ms. Pirro said, her voice dropping almost to a whisper. The show has provided a convenient point from which to begin a midlife transition for Ms. Pirro, who recently turned 57. She works in Chicago — from the same studios just off Michigan Avenue where Jerry Springer and Judge Greg Mathis film their shows — three days a week. She said it provided a nice break from life in New York. If Ms. Pirro has any regrets or second thoughts about any of her public stumbles — her abortive bid against Hillary Rodham Clinton for Senate in 2005, her 10-point loss to Mr. Cuomo in 2006 or her comments to Mr. Kerik that became part of a federal investigation into whether she illegally eavesdropped on her husband — she does not betray them. As for being made into a political punching bag at times, she said: “It just goes with the territory. I mean, grow up and deal with it. Otherwise get out of the business.” As for her troubled marriage: “I don’t regret anything. Period. End of story.” Though the Pirros separated last November, they have not yet divorced. Mr. Pirro did not respond to messages left at his legal office in White Plains. Ms. Pirro’s friend and former campaign strategist, Kieran Mahoney, said it was consistent with her character not to get bogged down thinking about what her political career could have been. “I never felt that after that process she wavered or gave into self-pity,” Mr. Mahoney said. “She liked the fight.” Telepictures Productions, which produces “Judge Jeanine Pirro” and other programs like “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and “The People’s Court,” has agreed to film a year’s worth of shows, or 150 episodes. The CW airs the program across the country on weekdays at 3 p.m. “I’m in a very good place. I am,” she said, referring at first to her job, then to her overall state of mind. “I’m happy. I’m really happy.” Michael Edelman, a Republican political consultant who was close to the Pirros during their most trying times as a couple, said life outside of politics must come as a relief to Ms. Pirro. “She has to be happy that it’s now just about her. It’s not about her family life. It’s not about Al,” he said. “It’s nice to get out from under all that.” Ms. Pirro, who has been a legal commentator for CourtTV, CNN and, most recently, Fox News, said being a television personality was a good fit. And she insisted that she had no intention of returning to political life. “For everything there is a season. That season has passed,” she said. Mr. Edelman said he had watched “Judge Jeanine Pirro” and thought to himself, “It’s right up her alley.”

Television
Pirro Jeanine
Suits and Litigation
New York State
Judge Jeanine Pirro (TV Program)


Chromebook From Samsung Has Its Head in the Cloud

Abstract: You can say all kinds of nice things about Google ’s Chromebook laptop concept. You can say it’s ahead of its time. Or that it’s thinking way, way outside the box. Or that, as failures go, at least this one swung for the fences. Last year, Google made limited quantities of the CR-48, a gorgeous, sleek, prototype black laptop that it sent to journalists and bloggers, seeking feedback. Its hope was that, eventually, real laptop companies would manufacture Chromebooks. Tomorrow, the first one goes on sale: the Samsung Series 5 ($500 with cellular, $430 Wi-Fi only). So what is the Chromebook concept? Assumption 1: These days, you can get online almost anywhere. Assumption 2: Google’s free online software can do almost everything regular software can do — e-mail (Gmail), Web browsing (Chrome), chat (Google Talk), photos (Picasa), word processing, spreadsheets, slide shows (Google Docs). Conclusion: A laptop doesn’t need a hard drive. Doesn’t need programs on it. Doesn’t need Windows or Mac OS X. Doesn’t need a desktop, files or folders. Everything you need is online, so all the laptop needs is a Web browser. It’s a sexy idea. No hard drive? That means no moving parts and long battery life (8.5 hours on a charge). That also means lighter weight (3.3 pounds). The Samsung has only a 16-gigabyte SSD drive (basically a big memory chip, like on the iPad or iPhone ). No Windows? That means no viruses or spyware. No serial numbers or copy protection. No payments to Microsoft for upgrades every couple of years. No two-minute start-up process; a Chromebook starts up in under 10 seconds. No files stored on the laptop? That means you don’t care if your Chromebook is lost or stolen. (Well, not as much.) You don’t have to worry about backups. You can log into any other Chromebook, and find your whole software world waiting for you. The Samsung itself is beautiful, with a sparse, uncluttered MacBookish feel. The rounded edges of the black plastic body (and the white or silver top panel) make it a joy to hold — and to behold. The typing feel is fantastic. The simplicity and purity of this laptop is refreshing and unthreatening; it’s like an iPad with a keyboard (and no touch screen). Samsung/Google may, in fact, have gone a little too far in the pursuit of spartan elegance. Instead of a row of function keys at the top, you get dedicated keys for brightness, speaker volume and Web browsing (Back, Forward, Refresh, Full Screen, Next Window). There’s no Forward Delete key, Fn key, menu key, Print Screen key or Windows key (duh). In fact, there’s not even a Caps Lock key. It’s great that Google wants to weed out keys it doesn’t think people use very much, but come on — Caps Lock? What’s next, the bracket keys? The semicolon? Q, Z and X? (Deep on a Settings page, there’s a way to reassign the magnifying-glass key — the Search key for Web browsing — so that it performs the Caps Lock function. But even if that were an ideal solution, which it’s not, you’d be lucky to find it: Samsung doesn’t provide a single page of printed operating instructions.) The laptop has two USB jacks, a Web cam, a video output jack, a memory card slot and a headphone/microphone jack — but no Bluetooth, Ethernet jack, FireWire port or DVD drive. It’s really weird to use a computer where everything happens in your browser; if you attach a hard drive or flash drive, you even see its contents in a browser window. You can never quit or minimize the browser; there’s no desktop behind it, no matter what your instincts say. But let’s give this shifted paradigm a chance. How well does Google’s newfangled concept hold up in the real world? Unfortunately, not very well. The first assumption is that you’re online everywhere you go. That’s rather critical, because when it’s not online, a Chromebook can’t do much of anything. You can’t peruse your e-mail, read documents or books or listen to music . With very few exceptions, when the Chromebook isn’t online, it’s a 3.3-pound paperweight. (Google says that an upgrade this summer will at least permit you to read your e-mail, calendar and Google Docs when you’re offline, and that over time, more apps will be written to be offline-usable.) Maybe in Silicon Valley, where Google’s engineers live, you can live your entire life online. But in the real world, you can use this laptop only where you can find, and afford, Wi-Fi hot spots. Or a Verizon cell signal, if you’ve bought the $500 Samsung model. Verizon offers two years of free service with that model, but you’re capped at 100 megabytes of data a month — a laughably small quota for a laptop that can’t even scratch its nose without an Internet connection. You can upgrade: for example, 1 gigabyte of data for $20 a month, or 5 gigabytes for $50. At least no two-year contract is required. I tried valiantly to use the Samsung as my main machine, but by the end of a week, I was about ready to toss it like a Frisbee. I took four flights with it. At each departure gate, I had to pay $7 for Wi-Fi. Three of the flights had no Wi-Fi on board, so the Chromebook sat uselessly in my bag. On the fourth, Wi-Fi cost $13. That’s right: $13 every time you fly, just to look at your own photos and documents. Then $17 for the hotel’s crummy Wi-Fi. Heaven help you on a cruise ship, where Wi-Fi can cost several dollars a minute. What about the second assumption — that Google’s free online software can do everything you’d ever want? Google’s software does the job for the basics (you can’t use a Chromebook without a Google account). But what if you want to run real, brand-name software? Photoshop? Quicken? Skype ? World of Warcraft? FileMaker or Access? How will you sync or back up your iPad, iPhone or iPod if you can’t run iTunes? What about the specialized apps that your company might require? The Chrome marketplace offers 1,000 Chrome programs. Most are free. But most are also lightweight, phone-type programs: weather, sports tickers and so on. They live online, so all you’re actually installing is a bookmark. There’s another, more disturbing problem: doesn’t it make you feel a little antsy that your photo collection isn’t on a computer that you can put your hands on? That when the Internet goes down, you can’t get to any of your files? Furthermore, Google says that its Chrome operating system is supersecure. But these days, every week brings another story of a hacker attack on a major corporation, and more of our private data stolen: Sony , Citibank and so on. In March, someone hacked a marketing company and gained access to the mailing lists of Best Buy , Wal-Mart , TiVo , CapitalOne, Marriott, the College Board , Hilton, Ritz-Carlton, US Bank, Chase Bank, Kroger, Barclays and many others. Is “the cloud” really where you want to keep the only copies of your most private, most important files? Truth is, considering how stripped-down the Samsung is, you have to wonder why it’s as big, heavy and expensive as it is. You can find plenty of full-blown Windows laptops with the same price, weight and size. Maybe the Chromebook concept would fly if it cost $180 instead of $500. Maybe it makes more sense if you rent it (students and corporations can lease Chromebooks for $20 to $30 a month). Maybe it will fly once this country gets free coast-to-coast 4G cellular Internet, which should be just after hell freezes over. For now, though, you should praise Google for its noble experiment. You should thrill to the possibilities of the online future. You should exult that somebody’s trying to shake up the operating system wars. But unless you’re an early-adopter masochist with money to burn, you probably shouldn’t buy a Chromebook.

Google Chrome OS
Laptop
Google
Samsung
Computers and the Internet
Cloud computing


Loophole Lets Bank Rewrite the Calendar

Abstract: It is not often that a major international bank admits it is violating well-established accounting rules, but that is what Société Générale has done in accounting for the fraud that caused the bank to lose 6.4 billion euros — now worth about $9.7 billion — in January. In its financial statements for 2007, the French bank takes the loss in that year, offsetting it against 1.5 billion euros in profit that it says was earned by a trader, Jérôme Kerviel, who concealed from management the fact he was making huge bets in financial futures markets. In moving the loss from 2008 — when it actually occurred — to 2007, Société Générale has created a furor in accounting circles and raised questions about whether international accounting standards can be consistently applied in the many countries around the world that are converting to the standards. While the London-based International Accounting Standards Board writes the rules, there is no international organization with the power to enforce them and assure that companies are in compliance. In its annual report released this week, Société Générale invoked what is known as the “true and fair” provision of international accounting standards, which provides that “in the extremely rare circumstances in which management concludes that compliance” with the rules “would be so misleading that it would conflict with the objective of financial statements,” a company can depart from the rules. In the past, that provision has been rarely used in Europe, and a similar provision in the United States is almost never invoked. One European auditor said he had never seen the exemption used in four decades, and another said the only use he could recall dealt with an extremely complicated pension arrangement that had not been contemplated when the rules were written. Some of the people who wrote the rule took exception to its use by Société Générale. “It is inappropriate,” said Anthony T. Cope, a retired member of both the I.A.S.B. and its American counterpart, the Financial Accounting Standards Board. “They are manipulating earnings.” John Smith, a member of the I.A.S.B., said: “There is nothing true about reporting a loss in 2007 when it clearly occurred in 2008. This raises a question as to just how creative they are in interpreting accounting rules in other areas.” He said the board should consider repealing the “true and fair” exemption “if it can be interpreted in the way they have interpreted it.” Société Générale said that its two audit firms, Ernst & Young and Deloitte & Touche, approved of the accounting, as did French regulators. Calls to the international headquarters of both firms were not returned, and Société Générale said no financial executives were available to be interviewed. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission has the final say on whether companies are following the nation’s accounting rules. But there is no similar body for the international rules, although there are consultative groups organized by a group of European regulators and by the International Organization of Securities Commissions. It seems likely that both groups will discuss the Société Générale case, but they will not be able to act unless French regulators change their minds. “Investors should be troubled by this in an I.A.S.B. world,” said Jack Ciesielski, the editor of The Analyst’s Accounting Observer, an American publication. “While it makes sense to have a ‘fair and true override’ to allow for the fact that broad principles might not always make for the best reporting, you need to have good judgment exercised to make it fair for investors. SocGen and its auditors look like they were trying more to appease the class of investors or regulators who want to believe it’s all over when they say it’s over, whether it is or not.” Not only had the losses not occurred at the end of 2007, they would never have occurred had the activities of Mr. Kerviel been discovered then. According to a report by a special committee of Société Générale’s board, Mr. Kerviel had earned profits through the end of 2007, and entered 2008 with few if any outstanding positions. But early in January he bet heavily that both the DAX index of German stocks and the Dow Jones Euro Stoxx index would go up. Instead they fell sharply. After the bank learned of the positions in mid-January, it sold them quickly on the days when the stock market was hitting its lowest levels so far this year. In its annual report, Société Générale says that applying two accounting rules — IAS 10, “Events After the Balance Sheet Date,” and IAS 39, “Financial Instruments: Recognition and Measurement” — would have been inconsistent with a fair presentation of its results. But it does not go into detail as to why it believes that to be the case. One rule mentioned, IAS 39, has been highly controversial in France because banks feel it unreasonably restricts their accounting. The European Commission adopted a “carve out” that allows European companies to ignore part of the rule, and Société Générale uses that carve out. The commission ordered the accounting standards board to meet with banks to find a rule they could accept, but numerous meetings over the past several years have not produced an agreement. Investors who read the 2007 annual report can learn the impact of the decision to invoke the “true and fair” exemption, but cannot determine how the bank’s profits would have been affected if it had applied the full IAS 39. It appears that by pushing the entire affair into 2007, Société Générale hoped both to put the incident behind it and to perhaps de-emphasize how much was lost in 2008. The net loss of 4.9 billion euros it has emphasized was computed by offsetting the 2007 profit against the 2008 loss. It may have accomplished those objectives, at the cost of igniting a debate over how well international accounting standards can be policed in a world with no international regulatory body.


Obama to Delay Budget Request So Congress Can Comment

Abstract: HONOLULU — President Obama agreed on Friday to delay a request to Congress to expand the government’s borrowing authority by $1.2 trillion, allowing lawmakers time to return from recess and register their views on it. The delay, which a White House official said would be only a few days, will not jeopardize the operations of the government, as last summer’s impasse over the debt ceiling did. The budget agreement of Aug. 2, which broke that deadlock, has made it highly unlikely that Congressional Republicans could block an increase in the debt limit through the 2012 election. Since signing legislation to codify that agreement, Mr. Obama has already obtained two increases totaling $900 billion. Still, House Republicans, who led the battle over the debt ceiling, are likely to seize the opportunity to condemn further borrowing and vote against the increase even if they cannot block it. By agreeing to the request for a delay from Senate and House leaders, the White House in effect is giving lawmakers the chance to weigh in without having to cut short their vacations. The delay also insulates the White House against accusations that it sought to push the increase through while Congress was away. House Republicans said they were willing to come back early if had been necessary to vote on the debt limit increase. “Our members want to vote on the resolution of disapproval provided in the Budget Control Act,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio. “It was our preference not to call members back early to do so, but we would have if the timing of the submission required it.” Under the terms of the budget act, Congress has 15 days after the president submits a request for additional borrowing authority to vote on a motion to block it. If he had submitted it by the end of Friday, as expected, the 15 days would have passed before Congress was back in session. (The House is back in session on Jan. 17, the Senate the following week.) Mr. Obama’s request of $1.2 trillion would raise the federal debt limit to $16.4 trillion, and after that the White House would not have to seek further increases before the election, officials said. The Senate, with a Democratic majority, is all but certain not to oppose the additional borrowing authority. Even if both houses voted against the proposed increase, President Obama would veto the legislation, the White House official said, and the votes are not in place to override the veto. “The Treasury Department expects that debt will be within $100 billion of the limit by the close of business today, and therefore, we had anticipated submitting a certification to Congress later today,” Joshua R. Earnest, the deputy press secretary, said in a statement issued in Hawaii, where Mr. Obama is on vacation this week. “However, we have been asked by the bicameral leadership of Congress to delay certification in order to give both houses time to consider when votes may occur, given the current Congressional schedule,” he said. The Treasury Department will be able to put into place accounting measures to keep the government from hitting the debt limit in the next few days, the White House official said. As a result, he said, there is no danger that the government’s creditworthiness will be affected. The official declined to give details about which Congressional leaders asked for the delay, or whether the White House resisted. He portrayed the president’s agreement to delay as a sign of cooperation between the executive and legislative branches.

Law and Legislation
National Debt (US)
Federal Budget (US)
Obama Barack


Cable and Satellite Ads Aim to Revamp the Industry’s Image

Abstract: Who knew cable guys had a sense of humor? Owning up to its ranking at the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys — not only for cable but for all industries — Time Warner Cable is poking fun at itself, and promising to do better, in a new marketing campaign starting this weekend. “We get it,” reads an open letter that the cable operator plans to publish in 18 news outlets starting Saturday. “We’ve seen where Time Warner Cable falls on customer satisfaction surveys and we know the ‘cable guy’ jokes by heart.” Time Warner Cable knows the jokes so well that it is starting to make some of its own. A new TV spot — one of more than 30 planned for the campaign — features a man dancing to the elevator music that people hear when they call the cable company and are put on hold. The company offers a mock apology for the fact that it is no longer offering extended periods of the music free, saying that it created a website with its greatest on-hold hits for people who miss the music. "Hold Music" - Reduced Wait Time - Time Warner Cable Credit Credit Video by TimeWarnerCable The ad is one of a series by cable and satellite operators, including Comcast and DirecTV, aimed at restoring trust and satisfaction in an industry detested by millions of disaffected consumers. Time Warner Cable has spent nearly two years working to improve its customer service, executives say. Among the goals: reducing the time people spend on hold, offering one-hour arrival windows for service visits, creating self-service options and delivering faster Internet speeds and more programming. “We are done making excuses,” Robert Marcus, chief executive of Time Warner Cable, said in a telephone interview. “We are all about fixing and making the situation better. Poking fun at ourselves and acknowledging these issues is a big step, and a good one.” While Time Warner Cable is making fun of itself, its competitors are making fun of each other. The satellite company DirecTV released two new commercials this week that star the Emmy Award-winning actor Jeffrey Tambor. He plays the chief executive of a fake cable company that tries to beat the competition from satellite providers by merging with another much-hated cable company. After the merger, executives acknowledge that they forgot to come up with ideas on how to take on DirecTV. “We got messed up last night, you’re lucky we’re even here,” one says. Comcast and Charter Communications, meanwhile, have both released ads in recent months that mock DirecTV, which was acquired in July by AT&T for $48.5 billion. The Comcast ad called the merger “the dawn of an old day,” saying that it offered “yesterday’s technologies today: TV from space, as long as it’s not too rainy or windy, or there isn’t a branch in the way.” The Charter ads — one of which spoofs “Star Trek” — characterize satellite TV as a 20-year-old technology that doesn’t work during bad weather. While the ads might generate some laughs, branding experts said that they were likely to cause more harm to an industry already suffering a dire image crisis. Customer satisfaction with TV and Internet service providers scored dead last this year, resulting from poor service and higher prices, according to a survey of 43 industries by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. This despite the fact that the category is a big advertiser. Time Warner Cable’s ad spending, for instance, totaled $60 million in 2014, while DirecTV, with a nationwide customer base, spent $355 million, according to WPP’s Kantar Media. Allen Adamson, a branding expert at WPP’s Landor Associates, said the new ads were likely to reinforce the negative perceptions consumers have about both cable and satellite television and will make it harder in the long run for the companies to improve their image. “They are all throwing stones at glass houses,” he said. “The net takeaway is that it is going to reinforce all the negatives about the entire category.” The enmity, some industry analysts said, didn’t do Comcast any favors with regulators this year with its failed $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable, which collapsed under regulatory pressure . Regulators are now scrutinizing Charter’s proposed acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, which together total $67.1 billion. Since their deal fell apart, both Comcast and Time Warner Cable have ramped up public relations campaigns about their initiatives to improve customer service. Time Warner Cable executives said they were doing this not to sway regulators but because it was good for business. They added that the time was right to open the marketing campaign because the company had already started making strides in its initiatives. For example, the number of calls Time Warner Cable receives has dropped about 12 percent in the past two years, and its technicians now arrive within their designated one-hour time windows 98 percent of the time, the company said. Time Warner Cable is also creating a new “tech tracker” service that lets customers monitor appointments and see the technician’s name, identification number and photo when the technician is on his way. “We wanted to make sure that when we did,” start a marketing push, “we had a lot of things to say about what we’d already done,” said Dinesh Jain, chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable. But it remains to be seen whether Time Warner Cable can change the image of the cable guy. Ultimately, the task might fall to Charter if regulators approve the merger. “It takes a short time to establish a really bad relationship, and a really long time for customers to have a really good point of view,” Mr. Marcus said. “We don’t like being at the bottom of that list.” Mr. Adamson, the branding expert, said customers were looking for cable and satellite companies to show them — not tell them — that they have improved their service. “There is much skepticism and burned bridges,” he said. “Promises don’t really stick in this category.”

advertising,marketing
TV
Time Warner Cable
DirecTV
Comcast
Cable television


McCormick Brings Spices to Retail Store - Advertising

Abstract: AS savings accounts shrank in recent years, spice racks expanded, with Americans cooking more to save money. Revenue for individual spices (excluding salt and pepper) grew 4.1 percent, to $1.34 billion, for the 52 weeks that ended Aug. 12, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a market data firm whose totals do not include Walmart, warehouse club stores and convenience stores. Over the same period, pepper revenue grew 6.8 percent; salt, seasoned salt and salt substitute grew 2.1 percent; and dry seasoning mixes for meat and seafood grew 1.3 percent. Now McCormick & Company , the spice maker whose revenue grew 10.8 percent in 2011, to $3.7 billion, is feeling so bullish that for the first time in its 123-year history it has entered the retail business.  In late August, the company opened McCormick World of Flavors , a 3,800-square-foot retail space, in the Inner Harbor section of Baltimore. McCormick, which today is based in Sparks, Md., began in Baltimore in 1889 , and for almost seven decades, until 1989, operated its factory and headquarters directly across the street from its new store. (Baltimoreans at the time grew fond of the emanating smell of cinnamon.) Along with its spice brand, the store also features other brands that McCormick owns, including Lawry’s, Old Bay, Zatarain’s and Thai Kitchen. While it carries products from those lines, along with branded items like cooking utensils, aprons and oven mitts, the objective of the store is less to make a sale than an impression. “This is much more of a destination for building brand excitement than a traditional retail outlet,” said Alan D. Wilson, chief executive of McCormick. McCormick spent $71.1 million on advertising in 2011, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Sales of seasonings have accelerated in recent years, both because of more eating in and because of Americans’ “growing interest in gourmet cooking and ethnic cuisines, which often requires an investment in new varieties of seasonings,” according to a Mintel report. McCormick tops several spice categories including a 48.2 percent share of the pepper market, a 35.8 percent share of individual spices and a 52.3 percent share of flavor extract and food coloring, according to SymphonyIRI. Brand loyalty is strong among spice buyers, with 64 percent telling Mintel that they usually buy the same brand. High brand loyalty has helped McCormick thrive during the downturn because the company has been able to raise prices on some items with a smaller risk of losing customers, said James Early, a senior analyst at the Motley Fool, an investment Web site. If price-sensitive consumers do switch to store-brand oregano, that, too, is apt to be made by McCormick, and it will still profit, albeit with smaller margins. McCormick produces about half of store-brand spices sold annually (though the company declines to reveal which stores), and store brands account for a significant share of spices like pepper (36 percent) and extracts and coloring (27.4 percent).“They’re the 800-pound gorilla,” Mr. Early said of McCormick. “Shelf space is the most precious commodity in retail and they just own the grocery store aisle.” Consumer sales accounted for 59 percent of McCormick revenue in 2011, with the remaining 41 percent being industrial sales, primarily to restaurants and to snack makers. The flavors in a bag of mesquite-flavored chips, or a chipotle chicken sandwich from a chain may well have been custom-developed and produced by McCormick. Since 2000, the company has issued an annual “flavor forecast,” directed primarily at the food industry, in which it collaborates with chefs internationally. Among the flavor combinations it is predicting this year, for example, is ginger with coconut . Its objective is to encourage restaurant and snack industry executives to introduce products with the flavor and then, naturally, to hire McCormick for its seasoning expertise. The company wants to be recognized not just for its sage, but also for its sage advice. “People have tended to think of McCormick as a spice and seasoning company, and that’s absolutely true,” Mr. Wilson said. “But we definitely see ourselves as a flavor company.” Sales for seasonings are, appropriately enough, seasonal. McCormick revenue is lowest in the first half of the year, picks up in the summer grilling months and peaks with holiday cooking in the last three months. While McCormick brands are prominent in the spice aisle, the company strives to display them closer to foods they will accompany, like positioning taco seasoning near ground beef and marinade near chicken. Products in satellite displays outside the spice aisle account for 15 percent of supermarket sales, said Ken Stickevers, president of the United States consumer products division at the company.  “Consumers are looking for inspiration while they’re shopping, because they’re not sure what they’re going to have for dinner,” Mr. Stickevers said. McCormick’s new store in Baltimore features an open kitchen for cooking demonstrations, display cases with company memorabilia and interactive displays with touch-screen monitors. For a “flavor print analyzer,” visitors proceed through several screens where they highlight dishes they find most appealing, and based on those preferences are assigned one of 12 flavor print types, like “Cocoa Loco” (“You enjoy the sweet, roasted bitter taste of coffee or chocolate”) or “Hot” (“Heat from the chili pepper is your thrill of flavor”). At “Guess That Spice,” a scent wafts out of a nozzle and participants seek it among choices on a touch screen, with those who ace the contest receiving 25 percent off purchases. The company also is sniffing around itself, offering some items exclusively at the store, like flavored oils and balsamic vinegars under the McCormick brand, and monitoring how they sell. “If they work out in the store, we’ll roll them out nationally,” Mr. Wilson said. “We’ll use it as a laboratory to develop consumer insight.”

Advertising and Marketing
Spices
Shopping and Retail
McCormick & Company Inc


Royal Bank of Scotland’s Shining Star in Connecticut

Abstract: STAMFORD, Conn. — The Royal Bank of Scotland may be one of Britain’s most bailed-out banks. But at its American headquarters here, there is hardly a whisper of distress. The gleaming glass and steel building — planned years before the financial crisis curbed R.B.S.’s sway over the British financial industry — now looms over Interstate 95, a scrappy challenger to another once-swaggering foreign bank, UBS of Switzerland, which put down roots near the same spot more than a decade ago. With an outdoor terrace, a gym where workers can purchase massages and one of the largest trading floors in the world, the 11-story building would probably stir the ire of British taxpayers already reeling from a government bailout of more than $71 billion at today’s exchange rate. But perhaps luckily for the workers here, those taxpayers are an ocean away. R.B.S., in some ways, is the British version of Citigroup or the American International Group, the two financial companies in which the United States government still owns large stakes. A year ago, R.B.S. recorded the largest ever loss for a British company, £24.1 billion ($35 billion at exchange rates at the time). The British government took what is now an 84 percent stake in exchange for the bailout. Like A.I.G., the British bank has been the target of many attacks by unhappy taxpayers, including protests during the Group of 20 summit meeting in London in April 2009 and a snowball barrage on some of its workers in London two months earlier that became popular images on the Internet. Last month, the British singer Billy Bragg rallied a crowd in Hyde Park in London to demand that R.B.S halt bonus payments. And so, five time zones away, executives in R.B.S.’s American outpost are a bit cautious as they give a tour of their new offices, a $500 million building designed in 2006. “It’s very bull market,” said Michael Lyublinsky, co-head of global banking and markets for R.B.S. in the Americas. R.B.S. traders and investment bankers moved into the new building throughout last year from several offices in Stamford, in Greenwich, Conn., and in New York City. Executives say the company never considered canceling the move in light of the bank’s problems, and they say the building has been a morale booster in tough times. “It’s been a source of pride and kind of a rallying cry,” said Robert McKillip, the other co-head of global banking and markets in the Americas. “We’ve been through a lot.” The Stamford office holds R.B.S.’s second-largest trading center, making it akin to the London trading offices of United States banks. Visitors are greeted by receptionists wearing tartan-plaid blazers. Unlike the foreign headquarters of other powerful banks, there is no grand collection of art on display in the entrance. Instead, videos of workers and the bank’s customers flash in the lobby, an electronic testament to the ebb and flow of the monumental business R.B.S. does in global financial markets. The building’s highlight is an elevator ride away from the entrance. Though R.B.S. combines consumer banking, insurance and trading under one roof, a button pressed for the sixth floor is a voyage to the bank’s true nerve center: a trading floor as immense as an airport hanger. About 900 people work there in space that can hold up to 1,000 traders. In a world where numbers matter, the trading floor was rumored during construction to be larger than UBS’s, currently the world’s largest. R.B.S.’s ultimately came in 3,000 square feet smaller, but bank officials are fond of saying that there is always room for expansion. On Wall Street, the R.B.S. brand had long been an afterthought because until last year its trading unit used the name Greenwich Capital, which R.B.S. acquired as part of its purchase of another British bank, National Westminster, in 2003. Traders there were not fully integrated into R.B.S. until the move into the new headquarters. Much of R.B.S.’s growth in recent years has been driven by acquisitions, but the last one caused the bank particular trouble. In 2007, R.B.S. led a hostile takeover of the Dutch bank ABN Amro, for which, as it turns out, it grossly overpaid. Soon, it was saddled with heavy investments in leveraged loans and real estate assets. The bank’s former chief executive, Frederick A. Goodwin, who signed off on the new American building, was pushed out early last year. Mr. McKillip and Mr. Lyublinsky said the British government’s ownership had not worked against R.B.S.’s business interests, citing the bank’s involvement in helping Kraft Foods take over Cadbury, even though it was a British company. But the bank has been shedding divisions and slimming down as required by the British government, while trying to retain workers. R.B.S. announced on Tuesday that it had sold part of Sempra, a lucrative energy trading unit, to JPMorgan Chase for $1.7 billion. Recently, the biggest buzz around the new building centered on bonuses, a topic of speculation across Wall Street and a sore spot for the British taxpayers who are helping keep R.B.S. afloat. The bank said a year ago that bonuses would no longer contain cash, a more draconian step than ones taken by most banks, which simply reduced the cash portion of bonuses. Soon after, a spate of traders quit R.B.S., executives said, saying that the change was an affront to the culture of many who previously had worked entirely on commission for Greenwich Capital. “It was painful,” said Mr. McKillip. “But the market has come our way in terms of clawbacks and deferrals.” The bank ultimately decided to allow employees to sell a portion of their stock bonuses this June, alleviating some of the restrictions. Despite proposals to rein in risky banking activity and compensation in the United States, which could add to the list of changes they must make, Mr. McKillip and Mr. Lyublinsky are optimistic about the market and say they are eager to take on the likes of Goldman Sachs and foreign banks like Credit Suisse that did not receive government aid. Now is the time for the bank to pursue a fresh start, they said. “No other bank was cleaned up more than R.B.S.,” Mr. Lyublinsky said.

Office Buildings and Commercial Properties


70 Die and 200 Are Feared Dead in 2 Congo Boat Accidents

Abstract: KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo (AP) — Two boats capsized in one weekend on Congo ’s vast rivers, leaving 70 people dead and 200 others feared dead in unrelated accidents that both involved heavily loaded boats operated with few safety measures, officials said Sunday. Early Saturday, a boat on the Rupi River in northwest Equateur Province hit a rock and capsized, a provincial spokeswoman, Ebale Engumba, said Sunday. She said more than 70 people were believed dead among an estimated 100 passengers. She said officials were investigating why the boat was traveling through the darkness without a light. In another accident on the Kasai River in Kasai-Occidental Province, 200 people were feared dead after a boat loaded with passengers and fuel drums caught fire and capsized in southern Congo, survivors said Sunday. The episode in southern Congo would be the deadliest boat accident in that country and among the worst in Africa this year. The boats that cross Congo’s rivers are often in poor repair and filled beyond capacity. The industry is not well regulated and operators are known to fill boats to dangerous levels. In the first accident, in northwest Congo, Ms. Engumba said officials believed the boat’s lack of lighting was responsible. “We are going to arrest people involved who are in charge of regulating the boat’s movement who failed to stop that boat from traveling at night,” she said. In the second accident, survivors said the boat was overloaded with people and goods. Francois Madila, a local official, said two of the boat’s crew members had been arrested, but he did not say how many people were aboard. A survivor, Romaine Mishondo, said the boat was already packed with hundreds of passengers when it stopped about 10 minutes before the fire to pick up more people. When the fire started and people began jumping overboard, she said, nearby fishermen ignored pleas for help. “Fishermen attacked the boat and started beating passengers with paddles” as they tried to loot goods, she said. The boat’s owner said a survivor and an employee had told him that workers spilled fuel and the engine ignited.

Congo (Formerly Zaire)
Accidents and Safety


Inquiry Sifting Cause of Blast in the Bay Area

Abstract: SAN BRUNO, Calif. — For weeks, residents in this community of trim suburban homes in the hills near San Francisco International Airport had reported catching the occasional whiff of natural gas in the bay breezes. Utility repair crews were regularly seen driving around the neighborhood. And on Thursday night, just around dinner, a 30-inch natural gas pipe running three feet under ground erupted and fueled a devastating explosion and towering walls of wind-whipped fire, killing at least four people and consuming dozens of homes with a blaze that moved so quickly that residents barely had time to gather their belongings and run. Throughout the day on Friday, firefighters struggled to put out the remnants of the blaze, search parties with dogs hunted for more bodies and residents huddled in Red Cross shelters, confronting the loss of their homes and the realization that part of their neighborhood had been reduced to a deep crater filled with water. “I need to know if my house burned down,” Steve Hoff, 38, implored a California Highway Patrol officer at a police barrier that cordoned off the 15-acre disaster site on Friday. “I don’t know if I have a home left or not.” The National Transportation Safety Board , which also investigates natural gas explosions, sent a team of four investigators to this city 12 miles south of San Francisco to determine what had caused the blast. One of the board members, Christopher A. Hart, toured the site on Friday afternoon and said he had been stunned by the destruction he saw. He said a large portion of the pipe had been blown out of the ground and across the road. “My immediate assessment was the amazing destruction, the charred trees, the melted and charred cars, the houses disappeared,” he said. Officials at Pacific Gas and Electric promised to cooperate, but declined to confirm reports from many neighbors of a history of complaints of gas odors, or that a Pacific Gas repair truck had been spotted the other day near the area where the blast occurred. “We have yet to be able to get close enough to the actual source to be able to determine exactly why this happened,” said Christopher P. Johns, president of PG&E. “We’re working diligently to do that.” Mr. Johns said that the company was aware that residents were saying they had called complaining of gas odors and that the company was now going through records to see what calls were made and what the company’s response was. PG&E also said it would provide temporary housing, food and clothing for the survivors. Christina Veraflor, 41, said she had visited her mother, who lives here, six weeks ago and noticed the smell of gas in the air. “That happened a lot in that area: You would get a whiff of gas, and then it would disappear.” Darlene Esola, 59, a teacher who has lived in San Bruno for 26 years, said she noticed an odd odor while walking in the neighborhood on Tuesday night. “It smelled a bit gaslike,” Ms. Esola said, as she spent the afternoon at a Red Cross shelter where people waited to talk to insurance company representatives and passers-by dropped off food and clothing. She said she had mentioned it to her husband but did not think of it again until after the explosion, when several neighbors also mentioned smelling gas in recent weeks. Jerry Hill, a member of the State Assembly who represents the area, estimated that the pipeline had been installed in 1948, a reflection of just how old and worn much of the gas system is in this part of the state. He criticized the company for the way it had dealt with maintenance questions and responded to the crisis. “If the indication is that there is a problem, a pipe deterioration problem or a gas leak problem, this needs to be resolved quickly and statewide,” Mr. Hill said. The utility has some history of problems with federal regulators, records show. The N.T.S.B. cited PG&E for shortcomings in its response to a 2008 natural gas leak in Rancho Cordova, one that eventually killed a resident and injured two more in an explosion. The N.T.S.B. found that the company had used improper piping that allowed gas to leak from a mechanical coupling in 2006. When a neighbor smelled gas, the company delayed nearly three hours before sending a properly trained crew to identify the leak, and the slow response was a key reason for the explosion that same day, according to the N.T.S.B. report. The 2008 episode had been the worst of 65 gas pipeline accidents involving PG&E since 2004; cases that include nine other injuries, according to federal Department of Transportation records. Seventeen incidents were deemed “significant” by federal regulators because large amounts of gas escaped from leaking pipes, ruptures and other failures. More than half the time in all the accidents, the gas either ignited or led to an explosion. At least 16 episodes also spurred evacuations of dozens of homes and businesses, in part because of threats to public safety. Mr. Hart, the member of the N.T.S.B., said it could take up to 18 months until the board issued its finding on what caused the blast, but he said that if it discovered any safety lapses, it would not delay announcing them and recommending changes. Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, who was running this state while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was on a trade mission to China, said the authorities had gone through 75 percent of the disaster site. The rest, he said, was too hot to confront. As of late Friday, besides the 4 people confirmed dead, 52 people were injured and 3 suffered third-degree burns, Mr. Maldonado said. A total of 37 structures had burned, and 7 more were damaged, he said. There was one arrest on Thursday night for looting. As many as 400 firefighters from local and state crews responded to the blaze, which began about 6:30 p.m. Thursday. The explosion comes as the fossil fuel industry is reeling from a succession of deadly and costly accidents, including the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It also comes two months before California is to vote on a proposition backed by the oil industry that would suspend a tough law intended to curb carbon emission and push the state to explore different forms of energy. Whatever the cause of the explosion, the effects were devastating. On this sparkling late summer day, residents walked up and down the streets, many with sweeping views of the hill and bay, peering over police lines to get a glimpse of the damage. They traded stories of what happened when they heard the explosion; even in this part of the state, hardened by living in the heart of earthquake territory, residents seemed rattled by the randomness of the destruction. “I got the dogs, kids and wedding pictures and started running,” said Rhonda Boone, who emerged from her house to see walls of flame higher than the trees. Vijay Duggal, 60, was watching a football game. “I thought we’d been attacked by a missile,” he said. “Everything was shaking. I thought, This is the end.”

San Bruno (Calif)
Explosions
Natural Gas
Fires and Firefighters
Accidents and Safety
Pacific Gas and Electric Co
National Transportation Safety Board