Mt. Gox Creditors Seek Trillions Where There Are Only Millions

Abstract: $2,411,412,137,427. That figure — $2.4 trillion for those with an untrained eye for very large numbers — is in the same ballpark as the annual economic output of France. It is also exactly the amount that people around the world claim they lost when Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based virtual currency exchange, collapsed into bankruptcy in 2014, after huge, unexplained losses of the volatile digital currency Bitcoin. As with most of the people who lost money with Bernard L. Madoff, the investment manager who was convicted of running a Ponzi scheme, most of those who put their Bitcoin in Mt. Gox will be disappointed: The Japanese trustee overseeing the case said on Wednesday that only $91 million in assets has been tracked down to distribute to claimants — a small portion of the more than $500 million in assets that Mt. Gox claimed it had in the weeks before it went bankrupt in February 2014, and a tiny portion of the amount that claimants have requested. The giant gaps between those numbers are an indication, if nothing else, of the sheer number of dishonest people who have been drawn to the fiasco around Mt. Gox and Bitcoin. They are also the latest reminders of the topsy-turvy nature of the digital-currency realm. A currency designed to bring computer precision and traceability to money has been marked by multiple unsolved mysteries swirling around it. Journalists and others have made many unsuccessful attempts to determine the true identity of the creator of the Bitcoin technology, a programmer or group of programmers going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin experts and law enforcement officials have spent over two years trying to figure out how hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins disappeared from the Mt. Gox exchange. There have been lots of conspiracy theories but few solid answers. The amount that claimants have requested from the Mt. Gox bankruptcy estate is absurd on its face, given that all the Bitcoins in the world today are worth about $7 billion, or 0.3 percent of the $2.4 trillion being claimed. Most of that huge number is an outsize claim by one individual — but even after that is taken out, the rest of the claimants said they lost some $27 billion, or 54 times what the exchange claimed it held before it went under. The trustee said on Wednesday at a meeting with creditors that $414 million of the claims appeared to be legitimate and have been approved. Each of those claimants will get some portion of the $91 million. It is not yet clear how much because of outstanding lawsuits and investigations. Bitcoin investors have complained about how long it has taken to work through the claims, not to mention the legal and accounting costs. The trustee reports that those costs have added up to about $5.5 million so far. “I am disturbed by the amount of money which the bankruptcy process has burned through,” Kolin Burges, one of the most outspoken creditors , said on Wednesday. “We have seen very poor results from the investigations, and the details have been constantly shrouded from the creditors.” Image Mark Karpeles, second from left, at a news conference after the 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox, the Bitcoin exchange he ran. Mr. Karpeles was arrested by the Japanese authorities last August, though not on charges directly related to the missing Bitcoins. Credit Kimimasa Mayama/European Pressphoto Agency Mt. Gox’s collapse in 2014 threatened to destroy the cottage industry that was built around Bitcoin in the years after it was released in early 2009. The price that people were willing to pay for Bitcoin steadily declined for over a year after the bankruptcy. But the problems in Tokyo also led to a professionalization of the virtual currency world, with established entrepreneurs and venture capitalists getting involved and regulators establishing basic rules for businesses in the industry. These days, many banks are examining how to harness the technology underlying Bitcoin, known as the blockchain, though Bitcoin itself has been hurt by infighting among the developers working on the technology. Mt. Gox was the most prominent company during Bitcoin’s early, Wild West years, as it became one of the first widely used places to exchange dollars or euros for Bitcoin. The company was run from Tokyo by a young Frenchman named Mark Karpeles, who had essentially no experience working with financial software. The exchange suffered several breakdowns and attacks, but many customers still kept their money there. Mr. Karpeles filed for bankruptcy after months of unexplained behavior. While he initially said the exchange could not locate 850,000 Bitcoins — worth about $450 million at the time — he later reported to the court that he had found 200,000 Bitcoins in misplaced digital wallets. Those 200,000 Bitcoins form the bulk of the money that the bankruptcy trustee will return to Mt. Gox customers. In an unusual step, the trustee has indicated that he will allow valid claimants to be paid in Bitcoin rather than yen or dollars. Mr. Karpeles was arrested by the Japanese authorities last August on suspicion of illegally adding money to an account under his control, though not on charges directly related to the missing Bitcoins. This week, the trustee said he was helping with the “ongoing criminal investigation” of Mr. Karpeles. Japanese government officials have still given few indications of what they think happened to the missing money. A Tokyo computer security company, WizSec, has published reports on its own private investigation of the money using the blockchain ledger on which all Bitcoin transactions are recorded. WizSec has said it appears that Bitcoins began disappearing from Mt. Gox back in 2011 and continued being transferred out of the exchange in small amounts over time. The researchers believe that the thief altered Mt. Gox’s internal records so that Mr. Karpeles did not realize the money was gone. “The unfortunate reality of Bitcoin is that it’s just so tempting to steal it digitally,” Kim Nilsson, a researcher with WizSec, said on Wednesday. Mr. Nilsson says he lost a few thousand dollars with Mt. Gox, some of which he hopes to recover from the estate. Mr. Nilsson said he no longer trusted his Bitcoin to anyone other than himself. But he says he is as excited as ever about the virtual currency, in part because of the way that the blockchain made it possible for individuals like him to do their own investigation of the Mt. Gox collapse. “Thanks to the blockchain, everyone has an equal starting point,” he said. “It’s possible to crowdsource forensic investigations.”


Kings Needed 45 Year and Hot Goalie to Hoist Cup

Abstract: It was around this time five years ago, as the Los Angeles Kings celebrated their 40th birthday by cleaving to tradition (they missed the playoffs), that the upstart Anaheim Ducks, nee Mighty Ducks, were partying with the Stanley Cup 30 miles south down the 5 freeway. Anchored by Scott Niedermayer and Chris Pronger on defense, and with Jean-Sebastien Giguere in goal, the Ducks beat the Ottawa Senators in five games that June, clinching on home ice , near Disneyland. Not long afterward the Cup itself, in its misguided good will, paid a visit to the cafeteria of The Los Angeles Times, where I was working. Go downstairs and touch the sacred trophy? Pass. As I saw it, the Kings, the team I had been rooting for since adolescence, had gone so long without winning a Stanley Cup, there had been time for Emilio Estevez to grow up; become an actor like his father, Martin Sheen; rise to fame in “The Breakfast Club;” get engaged to Demi Moore and break off that engagement; age another seven years; say no to a role in a Disney kids movie called “The Mighty Ducks,” then say yes to that movie, which then became such a hit that Disney felt emboldened to turn it into Southern California’s second N.H.L expansion franchise. And now, even that team had won a Cup before the Kings? “All the excuses Kings regimes have trotted out to mask their follies — warm weather isn’t conducive to focusing on hockey, the team had too many injuries, too tough a travel schedule and too few demands from media and fans — were immediately invalidated when the Ducks hoisted that big silver trophy in June,” the Times’ Helene Elliott wrote at the time. The Kings, that 40th summer of their existence, were selling another rebuilding phase. The team had dismissed the favorite son and Triple Crown Line legend Dave Taylor as general manager, replacing him with a scout for the Flyers, Dean Lombardi, who in a previous G.M. stint had built California’s other, other hockey team, the San Jose Sharks, into respectability. “I’m amazed this franchise hasn’t developed its own goalie over 40 years,” Lombardi said. As if to prove it, five different goalies, including the league’s first Japanese goalie, Yutaka Fukufuji , played at least a game during the 2006-7 season, Lombardi’s first in the front office. The next season, the Kings tried seven goalies. One of those was Jonathan Quick; he played three games and gave up nine goals. But by the spring of 2010, when the Kings made the playoffs for the first time in eight years, Quick was their goalie, in net for 72 of 82 regular-season games. On Monday night, he carried the Kings to their first Stanley Cup , winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoff’s most valuable player and receiving from Martin Brodeur an extended embrace in the handshake line. In no other sport does everyone on a team, game after game, crowd around the same position player to offer congratulations or consolation. Quick, the 26-year-old from Connecticut , earned his share of both. He’d gotten the Kings into the playoffs this season, backstopping a team that finished next to last in goals scored . Credit Taylor for drafting Quick with the 72nd pick in 2005 (and nabbing Anze Kopitar with the 11th), and credit Lombardi for not trading Quick when he might have, since he seemed to be grooming his own first-round pick, Jonathan Bernier, as the Kings’ future goalie. But Quick never let Bernier truly audition for the job, nailing it down himself while patrolling the net like a Navy Seal. In these playoffs, by my count, Quick made all of three mistakes in 1,200 taut playoff minutes. He gave up a goal from center ice to the Phoenix Coyotes’ Derek Morris in the conference finals, but by that time, the Kings had room for a mulligan, having jelled into an efficient and fierce machine. From the outside, in fact, their run to the Cup looked too easy and thus suspicious. This was a team, after all, that had fallen out of the playoffs on March 26, earning enough points the last week of the season to end up eighth in the Western Conference. Going into the playoffs, they weren’t so much massive underdogs as an unknown quantity. The winning goal in Game 1 of their first-round series against top-seeded Vancouver was a harbinger on multiple fronts. Late in a 2-2 tie, center Mike Richards, who sustained what was never called a concussion in December, knocked down a clearing pass in the Canucks’ zone and sent a pass to the feet of his former Flyers teammate Jeff Carter, a pricey, underachieving scorer the Kings had acquired at the deadline from Columbus. Carter neatly managed to direct the puck with his skate to last year’s trade-deadline disappointment, Dustin Penner, who put the puck home. The next game, Dustin Brown, the captain and subject of rumored trades this season, erupted for two short-handed goals. Brown had six more points in the next round against St. Louis. By then, Kopitar had cranked up, as had the big, bruising rookies Dwight King and Jordan Nolan. Lombardi, in what seemed a fit of pique, had called up the pair from the minors back in February. He would later say he had forgotten to factor in chemistry on this team; indeed, the Kings, for much of the regular season, were incredibly boring to watch. Coach Terry Murray drilled defensive responsibility, and it showed. The Kings, while competitive most nights, suffered from a failure to launch. Murray was fired in December and replaced by Darryl Sutter, who during one of his inimical news conferences indicated he had been shoveling manure in a barn on his Alberta farm the day Lombardi called to offer him the job. When Sutter finally got his chance to lift the Cup, you could sense more emotion in the moment than when any of the players hoisted the trophy. Perhaps because Sutter personifies that triumph of the hockey life. He gave the Kings’ story its Hollywood ending: hard-nosed coach leaves farm in the Canadian prairie for another shot at glory. Even Sutter had to wonder a bit at what he was seeing. How much more normal would this championship feel if the Kings had gone about it the way the Rangers tried to: with do-or-die road games, triple overtimes, players suspended for illegal head shots and horrific bruising from blocked shots? The Kings, by contrast, took the portrait-of-excellence route, getting goals from nearly everyone. Fortune, in that way, seemed to show itself at every turn. Vancouver was without one of the Sedin twins; St. Louis did not have goalie Jaroslav Halak (six shutouts, 1.97 goals-against average). The Kings also never had to face a team with a dominant defenseman. Nashville, with the imposing Shea Weber, imploded against Phoenix in the conference semifinals after two Predators violated curfew and were suspended. It probably helped, too, that the Kings don’t have a rival (the Ducks only half-count, since the two teams have never met in an epic playoff series). The Flyers overindulged on heated dramatics while beating Pittsburgh, then fell to the calmer, stealthier Devils. As the finals began, the Devils seemed slow to transition out of their gripping six-game series with the hated Rangers. The Kings didn’t find adversity until they dropped two games in a row in the finals, by which time it was apparent they were the team that Lombardi thought he had before the season began. “The first Cup is always the toughest to win,” Rogie Vachon, the legend from the Kings teams of the 1970s, said Monday. The Kings aren’t the 2004 Red Sox. They’re more a middle-aged franchise that can finally say they’ve won a title, in the time it took Barack Obama to succeed Lyndon Johnson as president.

Hockey Ice
Stanley Cup
Los Angeles Kings
Quick Jonathan
Lombardi Dean
Sutter Darryl


Giants Level the Cowboys in an Uneven Performance

Abstract: EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — By the end of the Giants ’ 35-14 rout of Dallas on Sunday, Jerry Jones, the Cowboys’ owner, might have searched the waiver wire for Seth Maxwell, the quarterback in Peter Gent’s 1973 novel, “North Dallas Forty.” Who could blame him? With Tony Romo out for a third consecutive week with a broken pinkie, the Cowboys looked weak on offense, first with Brad Johnson at quarterback, then with Brooks Bollinger. The Giants intercepted three passes. Romo is expected back for the next game, after Dallas’s bye week. In the meantime, the last-place Cowboys (5-4) will look up and at some distance in the National Football Conference East to the first-place Giants (7-1). “We’re not what I thought we would be at the backup,” Jones said after the game as his players filed out past him. “But I don’t want to load this whole thing on the backup quarterback. He’s not playing behind the team that I thought we’d be playing behind.” Giants quarterback Eli Manning threw three touchdown passes but turned the ball over three times, twice on fumbles and once on an interception that was returned for a touchdown. He completed 16 of 27 passes for 147 yards. His touchdown passes were to Kevin Boss (13 yards), Steve Smith (5 yards) and Amani Toomer (11 yards). Running back Brandon Jacobs carried 17 times for 117 yards, including a touchdown run of 12 yards. Derrick Ward had a 17-yard touchdown run. Several key Cowboys missed the game with injuries, which would have made a Dallas victory a shock in this game between longstanding rivals. The Cowboys were a popular preseason pick to win the Super Bowl , and the Giants are the defending Super Bowl champions, so the feelings between the teams were especially sensitive. “We hate each other, that’s just how it is,” Jacobs said. Defensive end Justin Tuck, who had two and a half of the Giants’ four sacks, said, more gently: “I don’t like to throw the word ‘hatred’ around. There’s a dislike that comes from mutual respect.” Tuck added that the Giants still must play four divisional games, including one at Dallas against what may be a healthy Romo. “We’re not smiling at anything now,” Tuck said. Tuck and his fellow defenders held running back Marion Barber to 54 yards on 19 carries. Cornerback Corey Webster intercepted two passes by Johnson, and safety James Butler stole one by Bollinger. Webster said they were just doing their share. “The D-linemen have been doing their thing for a number of years,” Webster said. “It was our time to pick up our end of the deal.” Manning’s interception in the second quarter led to a 23-yard touchdown return by Mike Jenkins that cut the Giants’ lead to 14-7. The pass was intended for Plaxico Burress, who ran long and behind the secondary as Manning expected him to cut off a shorter route. “I read one thing, and he didn’t,” Burress said, “and it resulted in a touchdown for those guys.” On the sideline immediately afterward, Burress appeared to speak in a demonstrative way, waving his arms. Afterward, Manning seemed to confirm the diagnosis of Burress. “He probably made the right read,” Manning said. “A bad play by me.” Referring to his team’s status at midseason, Manning said: “Seven and one is a great place to be. We couldn’t ask for much more.” Burress later dropped two passes, including one in the end zone, but he was not the only Giant unable to capture catchable balls. Ward and Madison Hedgecock also dropped passes. In last week’s 21-14 victory at Pittsburgh, the Giants dropped five passes. The Cowboys made it close again, briefly, in the first minute of the fourth quarter, when Bollinger threw an 8-yard touchdown pass to Terrell Owens that cut the Giants’ lead to 28-14. The drive, spanning 75 yards and lasting 16 plays, was aided by a roughing-the-passer call against Tuck. The play appeared to be a clean, hard knockdown after an incomplete pass on third down. Tuck was flagged for landing with his full 274 pounds on the quarterback. “I thought the object of hitting the quarterback is to land on him,” Tuck said. “I guess, in the air, I’ve got to twist my body to land on the ground.” Down the hall, Jones had other things to worry about. But, as the Giants showed the Cowboys last season with a postseason upset in Dallas, the division winners do not always win their playoff games, and the wild-card qualifier can win the Super Bowl. “You have to be quite the optimist, and I don’t know that I’m that much of an optimist,” Jones said of the divisional race. But, he added: “Crazy things happen. It doesn’t change what I think we have a chance to do.” EXTRA POINTS Steve Smith, in his second season, caught his first touchdown pass. He had a team-high five receptions for 29 yards. ... Terrell Owens caught five passes for Dallas but also fumbled one away that was recovered at the Giants’ 6. ... James Butler and Kevin Boss left the game with injuries, and their condition was not made known.


Société Générale’s Profit More Than Doubles

Abstract: PARIS — Société Générale, the French bank, reported Wednesday that its third-quarter profit more than doubled, making it the latest big international lender to benefit from a strong rebound in financial markets. The bank posted net income of €426 million, or $629 million, up from €183 million a year earlier. The investment banking unit’s share of net banking income nearly tripled to €1.76 billion, from €643 million. Like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and other banks that have recently reported strong results, Société Générale reaped profit from the recovery in trading. The CAC-40 index of French stocks, for example, rose 21 percent in the July-September period. Ultralow interest rates have also helped banks by reducing their funding costs and increasing the “spread” between the rates at which they borrow and lend. “Fixed income has seen a bit of a boom,” said Anshuman Jaswal, an analyst at Celent, “and all banks have benefited from that.” Market conditions continued to “normalize” in the quarter, Société Générale said in a statement, with many indicators returning to levels that prevailed before the collapse last year of Lehman Brothers. Shares of Société Générale, which is based in Paris, rose 5.3 percent in afternoon trading. The bank has a market capitalization of about €34 billion, second in France only to BNP Paribas, which reports its results Thursday. On Tuesday, Christian Noyer, governor of the Bank of France, told Parliament that he expected French banks as a whole to do well. “As of today, we expect wholly satisfactory results for the upcoming quarters,” Mr. Noyer said. “We have no reason to believe they won’t be profitable.” Société Générale’s corporate and investment banking unit posted profit of €133 million, a turnaround from the year-earlier loss of €240 million. Equity trading added €786 million, up 52 percent from a year earlier. Trading in fixed income, currencies and commodities contributed €656 million of net banking income, compared with a loss of €372 million a year earlier. “They’ve tightened up risk management,” Mr. Jaswal said. Under Frédéric Oudéa, the chief executive, Société Générale in October raised €4.8 billion by issuing new shares to pay back aid received from the French government and to buy the 20 percent of Crédit du Nord that it did not already own. The bailout came in two tranches, last year and again in May, when the French state twice stepped in to prop up not just Société Générale, but also BNP and other large banks. As their performance has improved, however, banks across Europe have been raising capital to pay back state aid. Société Générale also booked €500 million of write-downs on its credit portfolio hedges and financial liabilities. One weak spot in the earnings report was the company’s international retail banking unit, where operating income plunged 65.9 percent, compared to a year ago, and profit fell 10.4 percent. The bank cited a “sharp slowdown in Russia, significant in eastern Europe and moderate in the Mediterranean Basin.” “We’re still in the early stages of recovery,” Mr. Jaswal said, “and most banks would do well to remember that.”

Societe Generale
Banks and Banking
Company Reports
France


An Erector Set for Rockefeller Center

Abstract: In the early 1970s, the artist Chris Burden pioneered a kind of sculpture that explored boundaries few people would care even to approach. The basic material was his body, and the work involved what he or others could do with it or to it. The most infamous pieces, “Shoot” and “Trans-fixed,” were accurately titled. In one, a friend shot Mr. Burden in the left arm with a .22-caliber long rifle; in the other, he had his hands nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen bug. Sitting at a sunny lunch table near Rockefeller Center recently, Mr. Burden, now 62 and seemingly no worse for the wear, reached into a briefcase and pulled out a piece of raw material for a new work that seemed almost as pliant as a human body. It was part of a thin Erector Set truss, actually a stainless steel replica of one from the original version, which was patented by an architecture-loving toymaker named A. C. Gilbert in 1912. “Look how flimsy it is,” said Mr. Burden, flexing the piece easily between his hands. “It really is just a toy.” But not far from him, partly shrouded on the trailer of a red Peterbilt truck, sat a sculpture made of hundreds of thousands of such pieces, painstakingly screwed together into a sturdy, almost crystalline creation. In essence, he had transformed a toy inspired by Manhattan buildings into a toy building approaching the size of some real buildings in Manhattan. The work, called “What My Dad Gave Me” — a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper, assembled over the last year by Mr. Burden and a team of assistants near Los Angeles — was hoisted into place early Saturday. It will officially open Wednesday as part of Rockefeller Center’s program of monumental outdoor exhibitions presented by the Public Art Fund and Tishman Speyer, which controls the center. In work he has made over the last 25 years, Mr. Burden has been fascinated with feats of engineering as the means by which people try to defy their physical environment, ignoring obstacles like gravity and distance, weight and water. He has built several elaborate, scaled-down bridges using Erector Set and Meccano toy construction parts, including a 28-foot version of the steel-arch Hell Gate Bridge over the East River. (In an article last year, Peter Schjeldahl, an art critic for The New Yorker, described him admiringly as “a boyish gimcracker diverting us by diverting himself.”) But Mr. Burden said his obsession with such models sprang from some serious thinking over many years about the nature of toys. “They’re the tools we use to inculcate children into how to be adults, how to live in the world,” he said. “But because they’re for children, there is this potential in them that’s never realized.” He gestured back toward the toy skyscraper, which lay on its side on the truck bed in Rockefeller Plaza as two assistants, Joel Searles and Tim Rogenberg, used screwdrivers to attach its spire. “I mean, children could have made that, theoretically, but they would never have enough time or parts,” he said. As early as 1991, Mr. Burden had begun thinking about making a tower-size toy (one drawing from that year shows something he called “Small Skyscraper, Quasi Legal, LA County” that was never realized). So when Rochelle Steiner, the director of the Public Art Fund, approached him in 2006 in a general way about whether he was interested in making a project for Rockefeller Center — where his father, an engineer, had once worked — his answer was not general at all. “He said, ‘Absolutely, and I know exactly what I want to do,’ ” she recalled. Though he has developed a fairly keen intuitive sense about the amount of weight that Erector Set pieces can bear, Mr. Burden said he had not settled on a height for the toy tower until he visited Rockefeller Center and reminded himself of its scale. “And I said, ‘Holy cow, this can’t be a 25-footer,’ ” he said. “It has to be really big.” He said he felt confident that he could have built to well over 100 feet, or more than 10 stories. But he decided to stop at 65 feet when engineers became involved and wind and stress tests were conducted to ensure that 16,000 pounds of nickel-finished stainless steel would not rain down on Fifth Avenue or a clutch of French tourists. (Asked whether a 100-plus-foot tower would have been safe, Mr. Burden said, smiling: “I think it would have been. But failure is very interesting, too.”) The tower was built in sections at Mr. Burden’s studio in Topanga Canyon, and then pieces of it — including the largest one, the base, which had to be lifted out by helicopter — were taken to Los Angeles to be assembled. Ms. Steiner, who saw the piece upright during tests before its cross-country truck journey, said she loved it particularly because of the ways it pits the mind and the eye against each other. “The fact that it is both a model and the height of a real building is bizarre,” she said. “It is simultaneously right and wrong from a traditional building perspective. And so it starts to play tricks on you.” Mr. Burden, who describes the tower as a poetic interpretation of Rockefeller Center, said he also saw it as saying something about the ambitions of America, which he has always viewed in a slightly idealized way after growing up mostly in France and Italy. “I see it as optimistic and positive, though it feels corny to say those things,” he said. The Erector Set and the skyscrapers that inspired it are emblems of the kind of confidence the country had at the turn of the 20th century, he said. “I think we could get it back,” he added. “I don’t think it’s impossible.” In person, Mr. Burden — a barrel-chested man still built like the wrestler he was in high school — is personable and funny, making it slightly difficult to imagine him performing the confrontational and at times horrific pieces of his youth. He said he saw his engineering pieces as part of the same tradition. “These are structures that are performing themselves in their forms,” he said. But by 1975 he had turned away from body-based performance, in part because of the kind of attention it was attracting. “It became very misunderstood,” he said. “I wasn’t doing it to be some kind of stuntman.” (He said he bore no physical infirmities from those years; one of his worst injuries came only a few years ago when he wrestled a coyote to the ground after it latched onto his dog. The coyote then latched onto his left hand and almost tore off part of a finger.) As Mr. Burden finished lunch and headed back to his tower, he said he was relieved that the piece made it across the country unscathed. “It required intense concentration to put together — it’s really easy to make a mistake, and when you do, you have to take apart what you’ve done and start over,” he said. “It might look like child’s play, but it’s anything but.”


Two Left-Handers Go to Work, but With Plenty of Help

Abstract: TAMPA, Fla., Feb. 17 - There has never been a pitcher quite like Randy Johnson. Only a few have ever been as tall, and none of those have approached Johnson's success. So, a few years ago, when the Arizona Diamondbacks considered Steve Carlton for their pitching coach job, Johnson was intrigued. Like Johnson, Carlton was a dominant left-handed strikeout artist with a vicious slider. Carlton did not get the job. But Johnson, in his second season as a Yankee, will work with another left-hander known for strikeouts and sliders. On Friday, when pitchers and catchers had their first workout at Legends Field, Ron Guidry watched Johnson throw. "Gator's going to be a lot of fun to work with," Johnson said, using Guidry's nickname. "I'm excited about that. He's a throwback pitcher and the game has changed quite a bit since then, but there's a lot I can still learn." Guidry, the Yankees' new pitching coach, is nearly a foot shorter than Johnson, who is 6 feet 10 inches. But both have won the Cy Young award, and their fastball/slider styles are similar. That could be a foundation for a strong relationship. "I hope I can get in the door with that, being left-handed and pitching here, being pretty successful," Guidry said. "I've talked to him two or three times the last two or three days. He's been fun to talk to." Johnson and Guidry are not strangers. They worked together last spring when Guidry was a guest instructor. Guidry's predecessor, Mel Stottlemyre, is one of five former pitching coaches in camp to help out. The others are Billy Connors, Nardi Contreras, Gil Patterson and Joe Kerrigan, the new bullpen coach. "I know it's a hard job, and a lot rides on that job, but I've got a lot of help around here," Guidry said. "There's so much pitching talent, like Mel and Kerrigan, the guys that are in here. They're all going to help you. They're not going to overload you and let you sink by yourself." Manager Joe Torre, who delegated virtually all pitching matters to Stottlemyre, said he would be "more hands-on, more aware" with Guidry learning on the job. But Torre was comfortable hiring Guidry, despite his inexperience as a coach. "What it all comes down to is, when he goes to the mound and says something to a pitcher, he's speaking from experience," Torre said. "He's telling the pitcher what he's supposed to feel like, because he's been out there in key situations and he knows how he felt. He has the ability to get that across, plus mechanically he can help. He can see things in pitchers you need to see as a pitching coach." Guidry will be part of a new support staff for Johnson. Kerrigan was Johnson's minor league coach in 1988, and catcher Jorge Posada has pledged to work more closely with Johnson. The Yankees did not re-sign John Flaherty, who became Johnson's personal catcher midway through last year. Flaherty monitored Johnson's mechanics, helping him maintain a higher arm angle. At a lower angle, Johnson's slider flattened out and he could not drive his fastball down and in to right-handers. Posada said he was too deferential when he caught Johnson last season, giving him his space between innings instead of talking about hitters and pitch sequences. Posada said that would change, but Johnson brushed off the topic. "If he's back there, he's back there; if he's not, he's not," Johnson said. "I just want to win ballgames. That's what everybody expects me to do. It's kind of a nonissue to me." If Johnson is mechanically sound, he said, he could pitch to anybody and it would make no difference. Struggling with mechanics was part of a series of adjustments Johnson faced last season. He says he believes Guidry understands what he needs. "He realizes what I like to do, as far as throwing," Johnson said. "It's important he knows what I want to get accomplished in spring training so I can carry it into the season. It's important we communicate about mechanics." Johnson wants to pitch more innings this spring than he did last spring, when the Yankees held him back because of a minor calf injury. Johnson threw off a mound more than 10 times before coming here, and after his session Friday, he asked Guidry what he thought. "I don't know," Guidry said he told Johnson. "But I think you're right where you should be." INSIDE PITCH Derek Jeter said he understood why George Steinbrenner, the Yankees' principal owner, opposed the World Baseball Classic, but Jeter was still eager to represent the United States. "I'm excited about it and looking forward to it," Jeter said. "You hope nobody gets hurt, whether it's the world cup or spring training. You can't really worry about it." White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen apologized to Alex Rodriguez for comments he made in a Sports Illustrated article in which he criticized Rodriguez for waffling on his choice of countries for the World Baseball Classic. "I learned a lesson. I never took a first shot at anybody in my life, and now I feel like I took the first shot. I feel embarrassed. I feel guilty," Guillen told reporters.

NEW YORK YANKEES
JOHNSON RANDY
GUIDRY RON
GUIDRY RONALD
BASEBALL
COACHES AND MANAGERS


4-Foot-Wide Lot, Carved Out by Developers, Causes Big Stir in Manhattan

Abstract: In 2014, a developer sought approval for an odd alteration to a lot on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Instead of a 30-foot-deep lot, abutting East 88th Street, the developer sliced off a narrow sliver only four feet wide. The change, approved by New York City, became part of the official map of taxable lots that November. But the motivation behind it became clearer only in recent months. That thin buffer between the building’s lot and the street allowed the developers, DDG Partners, to avoid an array of requirements for a structure’s shape and size when it touches the street — and ultimately, opponents of the project say, build a tower about 60 feet higher. The Upper East Side tower takes its address from 88th Street, but because of the tiny lot, the entrance is around the corner on Third Avenue. With permits issued in March, the developers have wasted no time: Rebar jutted out in clusters above street level on a recent afternoon from the poured foundation of what is to be among the neighborhood’s tallest towers. Signs outside announce the multimillion-dollar condominiums now on the market . Height, one of the developers has said , is a major selling point. Image A rendering of a 521-foot luxury condominium tower to be built near the intersection of East 88th Street and Third Avenue. Credit March But the fast-rising 521-foot tower, known as 180 East 88th Street and approved by the city’s Buildings Department, now faces a challenge from residents and elected officials arguing that the developers, who donated at least $19,900 to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign and causes, used a novel tactic to circumvent zoning regulations and build taller than would ordinarily be allowed. Their argument centers on the four-foot-wide lot along 88th Street. “There’s lots of little lots in Manhattan, some that are five square feet, but they’re relics, or they provide access,” said George M. Janes, a planning expert who has been working with local opponents of the tower. “This is novel; this is new; this is a very aggressive strategy.” The brewing fight over a soaring luxury tower in one of the city’s more rarefied neighborhoods highlights how a surge in residential development has rankled New Yorkers up and down the economic ladder. And the presence of DDG Partners on the rolls of donors to the 2013 campaign of Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, and among the contributors last year to his political nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, emphasizes the way in which donations appear to have become a cost of doing business in the city. Many of those who have given to the nonprofit, which advocated the mayor’s policies but is now defunct, are developers or others who do business with the city. Councilman Ben Kallos, a Democrat from the Upper East Side, sent a letter to the Buildings Department last Monday requesting an immediate stop-work order for the tower, arguing that the “unbuildable lot” could create a “dangerous precedent for a new and dangerous loophole.” In March 2014, the department said the project could go forward with the adjacent lot along 88th Street. But at the time of that approval, the lot proposed by the developer was more than 30 feet deep — a size that could be developed into a separate building. After that determination, the developers shrunk its size and filed papers with the city that created the new four-foot-wide property, known as Tax Lot 138. Plans describe the space between the building, Tax Lot 37, and the side street, designed as a garden for residents that is open to the street, as a “rear yard.” Mr. Kallos, in his letter, a copy of which was shared with The New York Times, wrote that the "sole purpose” of the small parcel was “to frustrate the intent of the zoning resolution.” Image The developers of the luxury tower, DDG Partners, got approval from the city to place a four-foot buffer between the proposed tower and the street. Opponents of the project say it allows the developers to circumvent some zoning laws and build higher. Credit Tina Fineberg for The New York Times The Manhattan borough president, Gale A. Brewer, a Democrat, has also questioned the city’s approval of the tower. “At first glance, this project looks like a prime example where the Department of Buildings has failed to enforce the law,” Ms. Brewer said. “The zoning here is what it is, not what the developer wishes it were.” There has been no allegation of wrongdoing by the de Blasio administration in connection with the project or favorable treatment afforded to the developers. But the Buildings Department, which approved permits for construction, said it was currently reviewing its earlier rulings. “We are auditing this project for compliance with the city’s construction codes and zoning resolution,” a department spokesman, Alex Schnell, said in a statement. “D.O.B. conducts thousands of such audits every year.” Mr. Janes, who was hired by Carnegie Hill Neighbors to analyze the site, said the developers appeared to be seeking to avoid building a bigger base for the tower, which would be required if the lot touched 88th Street. And the square footage that would have had to go into that extra base could be used instead to add additional height to the 521-foot tower. If required to add to the base, he said, the tower might have to be shortened by about 60 feet, or roughly six floors in a typical building. Image Councilman Ben Kallos, who represents part of the Upper East Side, at a news conference after a brick fell from a Manhattan building in 2015. He wrote a letter to the city’s Building Department last week, calling the four-foot plot an “unbuildable lot” that could lead to a “dangerous precedent for a new and dangerous loophole.” Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times “It’s a blatant device,” Lo van der Valk, the president of Carnegie Hill Neighbors, said. “That principle, we have to put it to the city: Do you allow this? Did you do this intentionally?” The luxury tower, part of a boom in slim-but-tall condominium buildings, is designed to have soaring rooms with floor-to-floor heights of about 15 feet. The chief executive of DDG, Joseph A. McMillan Jr. , said in an interview this year that the tower could have been built even taller. Still, he said at the time, its height would be a draw for buyers “because it offers 360-degree views that are mostly unobstructed.” The pricing reflects Mr. McMillan’s philosophy: Apartment 42, a four-bedroom unit three stories from the top that takes up an entire floor , is listed at $15.5 million. Though it would be taller than the surrounding apartment buildings, its 32 floors would be roughly equivalent in number to the broad but shorter brown-brick building facing it on Third Avenue. “We do have tall buildings on Third Avenue, but none are this tall,” Mr. van der Valk said. His concern is not that the tower would gentrify the neighborhood, which includes a Whole Foods Market across the street. “It’s already gentrified,” he said. Rather, the issue is forcing developers to abide by zoning regulations. “We’re challenging an approval,” he added. Mr. McMillan declined a request for comment on challenges to the project or his and his firm’s donations to Mr. de Blasio. Through a spokeswoman, the developers said in a statement that they “have and will continue to support public officials with a positive economic development platform that allows New York City to remain a beacon and attraction for the rest of the world.”

DDG
Construction
Upper East Side Manhattan
Buildings Department NYC
Buildings
Bill de Blasio
Real Estate
Housing
Zoning


Back Talk on Pretending to Be Busy, or Infallible

Abstract: SOMETIMES I am tempted to take the e-mail address off the bottom of this column, especially when a subject really riles up readers and I get messages that cannot be printed in a family newspaper. But usually I greatly enjoy hearing your comments and stories, and rest assured, I read every message. The top hits this year were columns on why it is so difficult to admit mistakes and why some people feel the need to be so busy. I also received much reader response on paying for architectural plans you cannot use and why giving away books is so painful (and where to give them). All Shortcuts columns can be found on www.nytimes.com . Following are excerpts of a sampling of the past year: FEB. 3 The taboo of talking about money — particularly salaries. Thanks for a great article. It was lively and fun but addressed a serious issue. I meant to ask you, how much do you make? Allen Kanner Berkeley, Calif. FEB. 17 Paying for architectural plans that you cannot use. Like too many articles on the subject, “The Pain of Paying (a Lot) for House Plans You Don’t Use” begins with a confrontational title, and the apocryphal (but in your case, real) story of a homeowner being “misled” by an architect. Fuel on the fire — architects are not villains nor are homeowners victims — misunderstandings require two participants. Ian J. Cohn Diversity: Architecture & Design Manhattan Over the December break, I spent time with my very disheartened father and stepmother who had just gotten bids back from contractors on a fairly extensive remodeling project in their 1850 Massachusetts farmhouse. It was just as you described — the architect’s estimate was less than half of the lowest bid. They invested a lot in having the plans drawn, and now are having to scale the project back considerably. I forwarded them your piece on the theory that misery can at least take comfort in company! Annie Ward White Plains MARCH 3 What is the truth about (over)charging cellphone batteries? Everyone I know who has a Verizon cellphone (regardless of manufacturer) has had their batteries die, very conveniently about 18 months into their two-year Verizon contracts. We were all told the same thing about “overcharging the batteries” regardless of the service locations we went to. I went back to my Verizon “service center” on 34th Street here in Manhattan with the instruction book from Motorola (manufacturer of my cellphone) that states clearly to recharge the phone overnight. I was told the book is wrong and that I would need to purchase a new battery from Verizon for $40. This is a shameful scam that Verizon is pulling and getting away with. My brother, his wife, my supervisor at work and two friends have had the same experience. I was determined not to fork over another $40 to Verizon and in the end purchased a replacement battery for $10 from 1800emart.com . Eugene Stein Manhattan MARCH 31 Why “busyness” is a badge of honor and why it should not be. So right on! After a somewhat forced move into “pre”-retirement a few years ago, I feel I’ve done the most important work ever in — and on — my life: Reclaiming my life, my time, my identity (and no longer that of the prestigious organizations I was so proud to represent). I’m human again — and live happily with reduced material means, without golden credit or priority air travel cards. (O.K., my long legs miss first-class air travel.) By now I’m almost over the feeling of guilt at being so free. I still have pangs of “I must USE this time” (study yet another language, learn to cook, start horseback riding again, exercise every day, see every art exposition, etc., etc.) — but I battle them fiercely. Gunilla K. Knutsson  Paris This story is very relevant in New York, sure, but outside of the middle-aged urban professional demographic, I don’t really think you’ll find such a prevalence of this occurring. I’m only 19, so my perspective may be a bit skewed, but take a step back, look at the world outside of New York, New York. Curtis James Blakeslee Wyoming, Mich.  In the Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer (speaking as a pilgrim) makes all of the following observations about the sergeant-at-law (the attorney): “He is very well dressed, in brocades, silks, and satins. “He is very well versed in legal precedent, “Able to cite case law all the way back to William the Conqueror. ... “He is very busy.” And last, the zinger, cloaked as an arch observation: “And yet, he seemed busier than he was.” Well-dressed professionals today still practice the art of seeming busier than they are. Christine Bird Atlanta AUG. 4 Putting your tapes on DVD. I have been trying to convert 1/4-inch reel-to-reel audiotapes made by my father when he was in Vietnam. After many false starts, the Paley Media Center suggested I call Vidipax. Today, I heard my dad’s voice again for the first time in over 35 years ... clear as a bell. Alden Jordan Manhattan OCT. 13 Figuring your way through the health insurance maze. Yesterday, my husband had a complex radiology X-ray. It took about 15 minutes. He wasn’t sedated and didn’t have to prepare for the X-ray by fasting or drinking a strange concoction. The hospital charged him an “inpatient” fee of $250. Inpatient? Isn’t that when you sleep overnight? As he said, “What is ‘outpatient?’ Treatment in the parking lot?” Geraldine Dallas Centennial, Colo. I can’t help wondering: when you write an article like this, does it ever occur to you that this system is obscene, ridiculous, utterly inefficient and inequitable and totally unworthy of a great, rich nation? How about a real discussion on health care: free-market, for-profit insurance (which has brought us to our current mess) vs. single-payer (which exists in nearly every other Western industrialized nation and at lower costs, with better outcomes and far higher citizen satisfaction than what we put up with here)? Consuelo Reyes Manhattan The one thing the article didn’t mention was that many insurance agents offer medical billing advocacy to their clients free of charge. Before paying for the service, claimants should contact their agent for help. Not all agents provide the service or have the experience or knowledge to help. We recommend that patients not assume this will take care of the problem. They need to follow up regularly and be a “squeaky wheel.” Stephanie D. Freeman Konecny Insurance Services  Fort Smith, Ark. NOV. 24 Why are we so afraid of making mistakes? As an attorney in constant fear of making mistakes and who is not open enough to “the process” ... and as a mother of two young children who wants them to not follow in her footsteps in this regard, I thank you. Elizabeth R. Leong Springfield, Mass. I remember reading a book on Einstein and how he was told about a researcher who worked on difficult problems with little likelihood of success. Einstein’s comment: He had little respect for a man who took a board, found the thinnest part and drilled holes. Mark Dennen  Newton, Conn.

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Balancing Art and Business

Abstract: PETER C. SUTTON looked a little weary as he presided over a senior staff meeting at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. Dr. Sutton had just returned the night before from a business trip to Japan, where he had given a lecture on Vermeer and the Delft School, his specialty, and discussed loans of artworks for future shows at the Bruce. Now he was listening as Nancy Hall-Duncan, senior curator of art, reported on plans for a 2009 show devoted to the French Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley. Ms. Hall-Duncan’s summary, which included details of loan requests and a complementary costume exhibition, was as close as Mr. Sutton would get to working with art that day. Earlier that morning he had met with a board member, then attended a governance committee meeting. Immediately after the staff briefing came another meeting, one with visiting members of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. By 6 p.m. he had left the museum, heading to what he called a “donor cultivation event” at the home of a local collector. “I am lucky if I get an hour a day dealing with art,” Dr. Sutton said, after a quick break between meetings to countersign a batch of checks, return phone calls and answer e-mail messages. “It sounds glamorous, but running a museum is a whole lot of administration and organization. I sit on 12 different committees, and when I am not sitting in meetings, here I am raising money from patrons and donors.” Dr. Sutton’s is a familiar refrain throughout the region. “One way or another it just eats into your day,” said Erik H. Neil, director of the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington. Last month Dr. Neil completed a $1.5 million renovation of the museum’s historic building with money raised from public and private sources. “Even if you are not at an event or asking a patron for money to support a program, you are always on the lookout for new patrons and potential supporters.” With an annual operating budget of $4.9 million and 40 employees, the Bruce does 14 shows a year, attracting about 100,000 visitors, including 12,000 schoolchildren. “Directors are responsible not only for overall administration,” Dr. Sutton said, “but also the financial stability of the institution, which means both the expenditure and revenue.” Dr. Sutton, who was director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford before coming to the Bruce in August 2001, is not alone in devoting a great deal of his time to administrative matters. Take Michael Botwinick, the director of the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, who spent a morning several weeks ago studying changes to the museum’s insurance policies. “It is pretty boring stuff, but incredibly important,” he said. The same morning, Mary Sue Sweeney Price, director of the Newark Museum, had started her day attending a city-sponsored meeting on diversity in the workplace. Mrs. Price, who has been the head of the museum for 15 years, is also a former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. “These days, to be a successful art museum director,” she said, “you have to get sustenance from knowing that you may not have the good fortune to be dealing with art and exhibitions all day, but that the broad range of responsibilities and duties which you are expected to perform make it possible for others on the staff to make it happen.” As an older generation of museum directors begins to retire, there are an unprecedented number of vacancies in the field; in the last six months alone, there have been openings for directors at more than two dozen major American art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Dia Art Foundation in Manhattan; the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and the Phillips Collection in Washington. Similarly, there are numerous current or imminent vacancies at museums outside of Manhattan. At the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, Neil C. Trager is retiring next month after more than 26 years. There are also vacancies at the Princeton University Art Museum, where Susan Taylor, who has been on leave since mid-January, will officially depart at the end of June; at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum on the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, N.J., where Greg Perry left on Dec. 31; and at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, which has had three directors in the last three years. Vacancies were recently filled at two high-profile museums in the region. Terrie Sultan joined the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton on April 1, replacing Trudy C. Kramer, who had been director for 26 years. Susan Lubowsky Talbott is taking the top job this month at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, which had been vacant for more than a year. Salaries paid to museum directors are “disparate,” Mrs. Price said, depending on the candidates’ skills and “where an institution is in its life cycle.” Generally, however, “in nonprofits there is still a huge difference in resources available in comparison to the corporate sector,” she said. The changing of the guard at museums often brings with it a renewed emphasis on financial stability, particularly at successful regional museums, which rarely have the large endowments bestowed on their urban counterparts. “The director’s job description has metamorphosed over the last decade as museums have grown in size and are increasingly expected to generate their own revenue,” Mrs. Price said. “Obviously, in addition to traditional attributes of connoisseurship and scholarship, candidates for director jobs these days also need to have skills in management, business and other areas like marketing, new technology and, of course, resource gathering, which is more popularly known as fund-raising. And I would probably put this last one top of the list.” During Mrs. Price’s 15-year tenure, the Newark Museum’s operating budget has more than tripled, growing to $18 million from $5.6 million. When she joined the museum, 85 percent of the operating budget came from city and state funding, she said. These days it is closer to 60 percent, and Mrs. Price says she spends about 40 to 50 percent of her time working directly or indirectly on fund-raising activities. Fund-raising and the constant pressure to get more people through the door — audience numbers are an important measure of success, especially for government funding bodies — are responsibilities that directors of regional museums have in common with their counterparts in major cities. But there are significant differences, clustering around issues of scale, staffing levels and community involvement. In general, regional art museums tend to be small to medium in size, with operating budgets of $1 million to $10 million. (As a point of comparison, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has an annual operating budget of $200 million.) They survive from one year to the next on very tight margins, raising money to put on shows with little endowment to fall back on in hard times. They also tend to give priority to programming rather than people, so they are frequently understaffed. Multitasking is common, even among directors. Dr. Neil of the Heckscher said that at one recent fund-raiser he did everything from setting up tables to giving the welcoming speech. But the most striking difference between metropolitan and regional art museums is their relationship to their community. “It tends to be much more organic” in the suburban museums, Mr. Botwinick said, referring to their focus on local audience and outreach. By contrast, tourists and casual visitors tend to form the core metropolitan museum audience. “The people who come to a regional museum are usually from the local area and use it genuinely by choice,” Mr. Botwinick said. “They see it as part of the fabric of the community and often have a sense of ownership over it and certain expectations about what it provides.” Mr. Botwinick believes this kind of relationship to a local community is the best — and the most challenging — aspect of running a regional art museum. “It is about understanding what your place is, what your mission is, and being comfortable with that,” he said. “But it is also about understanding that this goal doesn’t let you off the hook on the highest standards and scholarship. This is not some alternative, dumbed-down version of the real thing. You are part of a national conversation on matters of art and culture, and informed visitors expect the very highest standards.” Ms. Sultan, 55, the new director of the Parrish Museum, who came from the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, said she wants the Parrish “to be known for strong local ties but also to have a more global outlook.” “I want to be part of a national and global museum network,” she said. However, she said: “To be successful the Parrish has to be a center for community engagement. What matters is how you define community. I’d also like to see us take a leadership role among Long Island museums.” At the Bruce Museum, where the vast majority of visitors are from a 30-mile radius, “we cater very much to the local community and do tailor our offerings,” Dr. Sutton said. “At the same time, we also try to mix things up, with shows ranging from old masters to contemporary art, with research catalogs and loans from collectors and museums,” he said. “It is all about striking the right balance between responsibilities to the community and maintaining a commitment to professional, quality programming.” To meet those standards, many regional art museums have had to be entrepreneurial, partnering with other institutions to make shows happen or drawing on all the talents and connections of the staff and board. Some regional museum directors continue to curate shows, like Harry Philbrick, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., who spent a recent day trying to organize the manufacture of 50,000 camouflage-colored tennis balls in China for an outdoor installation by Serge Spitzer. He eventually found a factory in Shanghai that could do it for him. “As a noncollecting museum, the Aldrich is focused on exhibitions, so I probably have a bit more contact with art and artists than directors at other museums,” Mr. Philbrick said. “But it is true that a lot of your time is spent doing things that don’t seem to have a lot to do with art.” Despite his busy schedule, Dr. Sutton recently found the time to curate an exhibition at the Bruce devoted to old master works from the collection of Jacques Goudstikker, a Dutch-Jewish art dealer whose gallery was plundered by the Nazis. Given his expertise in Dutch and Baroque art, the show, which opened this month, was a natural fit for Dr. Sutton, who started as a curator of European art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But even for a show like the Goudstikker, which received $40,000 in a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he said he spent more time fund-raising than anything else. Ms. Sultan at the Parrish is determined to try to balance her business and art interests. “I have a lot of energy and care very deeply about museum management,” she said. “But I am in this business because I love art, so I try to make sure that one part of every day at work has something to do with art. I am very directed about that.”


Simoni Heeds Giro's Call and Races Once Again

Abstract: Gilberto Simoni is an inspiration to all retirees who wonder what they will do now with so much time on their hands. Instead of taking up golf or lurking at home and watching television, the first thing he does after saying goodbye to the workplace is rejoin it. No surprise: The intrepid Simoni is back racing in the Giro d’Italia for the 14th time during his 16-year career as a professional. This will be his final race, he says, repeating his farewell addresses of last year and as recently as last month. Closing in fast on age 39 in August, the Italian rider experienced a woeful Giro del Trentino in April, finishing 29th. That’s it, he said — finito. Then the alarm bell rang, the fire trucks pulled out, and Simoni, that old dog, trotted after them. “It was the Giro that brought me to cycling when I was a child,” he told the Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport. “It triggered my dreams.” The Lampre team needed him in this 93rd Giro, he explained. His fans needed him there as well, he added. Even he himself needed him there, he nearly said. He has one dream left. Not that Simoni expects to win the Giro, as he did in 2001 and 2003, or even finish second, as he did in 2005, or third, as he did in 1999, 2000, 2004 and 2006. He knows those days are over. At the three-week race’s midway point, he trailed the leader by an astronomical 1 hour 42 minutes, almost a different time zone. Again, no surprise; it’s part of the plan. “I have the possibility to watch what happens a step back,” he told La Gazzetta before the start in Amsterdam on May 8. “I don't have the pressure of a result. The final victory is not the only one. There are so many possibilities. I just want to be at the height of my own story.” That story focuses on his home in the village of Palù di Giovo, in the northern province of Trentino, which is also the hometown of the 1984 Giro winner and grand champion, Francesco Moser, and his two obscure brothers. “It counts 550 souls,” Simoni told La Gazzetta. “But it’s won three Giros, and four riders coming from there have worn the pink jersey” of the overall leader. “Aldo, Enzo and Francesco Moser and myself. We have the Giro in our genes.” Another part of his DNA concerns Monte Zoncolan, a fearsome climb in the Dolomites near his village. Taking the road from Ovaro on Sunday, the pack will face a Zoncolan rise of 1,210 meters, or 4,000 feet, over 10.5 kilometers, or 6.5 miles. The gradient averages 11.5 percent, with stretches of about 20 percent. The Giro has ascended the Zoncolan only twice, in 2003 and 2007, and both times, Simoni was fastest across the line. A third victory there would be “absolutely beautiful, but I don’t want to dream about the impossible,” he told the newspaper. “The Zoncolan, I love it. My fans are already waiting for me there. “I love the mountains. It’s a challenge against yourself. This is my battle territory. Either I win or I die.” Filippo Pozzato became the first Italian rider to win a nonteam stage in this year’s Giro d’Italia on Thursday as the sun finally shone and tempers boiled over, Reuters reported from Porto Recanati, Italy. Pozzato, the Team Katusha rider and the Italian national champion, just edged out Thomas Voeckler in a thrilling sprint finish on stage 12 with the Australian Richie Porte hanging on to the leader’s pink jersey for Saxo Bank. Driving rain on Wednesday led to a huge turnaround in the overall rankings with Porte taking charge and the previous leader Alexander Vinokourov sliding down the standings after being caught in a slow group as the weather-beaten peloton split. The world champion, Cadel Evans, who had been second over all, was also punished by the events on Wednesday and his frustration was plain to see on the 206 kilometer uncomplicated stage from Citta Sant’Angelo to Porto Recanati on the east coast of Italy. The BMC rider argued with other riders about the lack of pace at the front of the pack late on and gesticulated wildly. The stage lead had changed hands numerous times amid an array of breakouts but the main block of riders was never far behind. But an exciting climax did ensue with Pozzato’s timing his burst just right having already had a good look at the finish during an earlier loop through Porto Recanati. “I’m very happy,” he said. “It’s what we needed. We had to have a stage like this after yesterday. The last week will be spectacular and it won’t be over till it’s over.”

Giro d''Italia (Bicycle Race)
Bicycles and Bicycling


Phillies’ Lee Allows 4 Homers in Span of 8 Batters

Abstract: Gio Gonzalez tossed seven sharp innings, the Nationals hit a pair of consecutive homers off Cliff Lee, and Washington beat the host Philadelphia Phillies, 5-1, on Wednesday night. Anthony Rendon and Wilson Ramos hit back-to-back shots off Lee to start the fifth, and Ryan Zimmerman and Jayson Werth did it to open the sixth. Gonzalez (7-3) gave up one run and six hits, striking out five to win his fourth straight start. Gonzalez has eight quality starts in a row. Lee (10-3) had allowed nine homers in his first 1352/3 innings this season before yielding four in a span of eight batters. REDS 6, BREWERS 2 Mike Leake scattered four hits over eight and a third innings, and Brandon Phillips drove in three runs as Cincinnati snapped a three-game losing streak with a win in Milwaukee. Leake (8-4) bounced back from a rare rough start in his last outing and seemed to get stronger as the game progressed. He allowed four walks and struck out two. Image The Reds’ Mike Leake gave up four hits and two runs over eight and a third innings. Credit Mike Mcginnis/Getty Images MARLINS 6, BRAVES 2 Giancarlo Stanton hit a two-run double to end a 10-game streak in which he did not have a run batted in, and Miami ended a five-game losing streak. Stanton had been in a 3-for-26 slump before he put the Marlins ahead in their four-run first inning against Paul Maholm (9-8). ORIOLES 6, RANGERS 1 Wei-Yin Chen returned from the disabled list to pitch seven innings of three-hit ball, and host Baltimore got a three-run homer from Nolan Reimold. Chris Davis, the major league home run leader, went 0 for 3 with a walk and is hitless in his last 17 at-bats. He has not had a hit since Major League Baseball announced he was the leading vote-getter in All-Star fan balloting. TIGERS 8, WHITE SOX 5 Prince Fielder homered, and Rick Porcello pitched six solid innings for host Detroit. Detroit allowed 23 hits in an 11-4 loss to the White Sox on Tuesday, but it was the Tigers who did the slugging Wednesday. BLUE JAYS 5, INDIANS 4 Munenori Kawasaki hit a two-run single with the bases loaded in the ninth inning, and Toronto won in Cleveland. Kawasaki, who broke an 0-for-18 slump, lined a 1-2 pitch from Joe Smith into left-center field to score two runs. A third run scored when center fielder Michael Bourn booted the ball for an error. ANGELS 13, CUBS 2 Josh Hamilton hit two home runs, Albert Pujols also connected and visiting Los Angeles went deep a season-high five times. Mark Trumbo and Brendan Harris also homered for the Angels. The Angels have won 11 of 14. Once 12 games under .500, they are now within two games of the break-even mark — since June 12, they have the best record in baseball at 17-8. D.H. RECORD FOR ORTIZ Boston’s David Ortiz has passed Harold Baines to become Major League Baseball’s career leader in hits by a designated hitter. Ortiz collected his 1,689th hit as a D.H. when he doubled to left-center field leading off the second inning Wednesday night against the Seattle Mariners. DAULTON HAS BRAIN CANCER The former Phillies All-Star catcher Darren Daulton has brain cancer. A statement released by the Philadelphia radio station 97.5 The Fanatic said Daulton has glioblastoma. The American Brain Tumor Association calls that form of cancer “highly malignant.” INJURY SIDELINES DARVISH Yu Darvish has been placed on the 15-day disabled list by the Rangers and will miss the All-Star Game next week with a strain in his upper back. He is 8-4 and leads the majors with 157 strikeouts.

Baseball
Phillies
Washington Nationals
Yu Darvish
Cliff Lee


For a Stealthy Transit Fare Increase, Listless Boos and Shows of Regret

Abstract: The fate of subway and bus riders — a polite way to say higher fares — was sealed on Wednesday in a well-lighted but thoroughly soulless boardroom of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority . That opening sentence is factually correct. It is also not true. The existing fare structure was doomed well before Wednesday. Everyone knew it. There were as many surprises in that room as you might expect in a Kabuki performance. What took place was but a formal affirmation of fare increases by the authority’s board members, some of whom may well not have seen the inside of a subway car since the Lindsay administration. It is normally thus at the authority’s public sessions. If anything, this one had a smidgen more life than is usual. Two members actually voted no to higher fares. More typically, these gatherings are exercises in Politburo-style unanimity. The public is allowed to make its voice heard. Twelve people spoke this time, all but one opposed to the increase. It was not what you’d call an overwhelming turnout. They were, in the main, the same people who can always be counted on to show up in opposition. Everyone seemed to be going through the motions. The city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., and the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, sent aides to register their dissent. Even the boos and hisses from the audience were perfunctory whenever board members spoke in favor of raising the fare — an action that, of course, they took with a heavy heart and a troubled soul and so on and so forth. One could not help walking away with a sense that New Yorkers, as a group, felt beaten down. Fares were going up, whether they liked it or not. Maybe subway and bus service would improve, as promised, or maybe not. Either way, there was nothing they could do about it. As increases go, this one was hardly the worst ever. It came to 4 percent or so. That’s piddling compared with the 33 percent sock in the jaw of 2003, when the base fare went to its present $2 from $1.50. But this increase is arguably stealthier than most. Sure, Gov. Eliot Spitzer may boast that he preserved the $2 base fare. In fact, that’s exactly what he did. “The $2 is staying constant, which we think is the benchmark that people look at and understand as the defining price,” Mr. Spitzer said proudly last month. The reality, however, is that the $2 fare is increasingly irrelevant. It means more to the average tourist than to the typical subway or bus passenger. Overwhelmingly, New Yorkers rely on the various discounted MetroCards that enable them to pay less than $2 per ride, even with the latest increase. Subway managers say, correctly, that the riders who will feel the most pain are those with the deepest pockets, notably those who will soon pay $81 for a monthly MetroCard instead of the current $76. Anyone able to shell out $76 at a time can probably come up with $5 more without raising a sweat. Still, users of the unlimited cards are, almost by definition, the most frequent users of mass transit. Why else buy those cards? So the authority’s most loyal customers are the ones who will be hit the hardest. It is an intriguing way to do business. For the save-the-fare forces, the big question was, Why rush? Why not wait till spring? By then, the outlines of a congestion pricing transportation plan might be known. That, and the shape of the next state budget. About 100 legislators, these critics said, are ready to do pitched battle for enhanced state aid for mass transit, enough to make a fare increase unnecessary. Let’s first see what Albany does. Sounds like a plan. While we’re at it, we might also wait for an end to the Iraq war and the completion of the Second Avenue subway. Who knows when, or if, Albany will act? Is there anything about Mr. Spitzer’s troubled first year to suggest that the state capital’s tradition of stasis has ended? These are still the days of whine and poses. Wisely or not, a strong majority of the transportation authority’s board chose not to gamble on Albany’s finally getting its act together. No one in that sad room on Wednesday seemed thrilled about the situation. They all plodded through the meeting, including the authority’s new chairman, H. Dale Hemmerdinger. Cut from the same cloth as the old chairman — a real estate man who is politically tight with the governor — he uttered barely a word that didn’t come from a prepared text. But he managed to wish everyone happy holidays. That was something, anyway.

Prices (Fares Fees and Rates)
Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Transit Systems


From Warm Weather to Chilly, in Less Than a Week

Abstract: For a moment, it felt like spring. For a fleeting, flip-flop-flecked, sundress-decked, get-yourself-to-the-nearest-ice-cream-stand moment last Friday, 77 flirtatious degrees beguiled us out of our down jackets and downtrodden demeanors, to melt a winter’s worth of woe-is-me’s. In a tree bed on the High Line Park in the meatpacking district, purple crocuses peered out over the pavement . Less than a week later, they were flattened by a hailstorm. The bipolar weather of the first few days of spring has teetered between “balmy with a chance of flurries” and “sundress weather, but bring your parka.” On each sunny day, we wonder, “Are we there yet?” And the response is another slushy no. On Thursday, there was an inch of snow in Central Park overnight, setting a record for the shortest interval between a 77-degree day and a day of measurable snowfall — just six days, according to Stephen Fybish, an amateur weather historian. The result has been a state of limbo in the winter-weary city, a confusion perfectly illustrated by two Upper East Side storefronts. On the southeast corner of 90th Street and Madison Avenue, Intimacy, a lingerie shop, has two svelte mannequins in blue bathing suits; spring’s siren song seems to glance off the glass. But on the southwest corner, the 90th Street Pharmacy has a windowful of glittering snowflakes, cotton-ball snow and — to add insult to injury — a stuffed penguin on a Styrofoam glacier. The display was unintentional, if apropos: “Our window person had surgery, hence the reason why our windows are stuck in winter,” said Will Perez, 41, the pharmacy’s manager, raising the question, “What’s nature’s excuse?” “The weather being what it’s been,” Mr. Perez added, “it’s actually worked out for the best.” (Presumably, the on-the-mend window-dresser disagrees.) On Fifth Avenue by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Linda Brunnwasser, a former schoolteacher visiting from Merrick, on Long Island, stood squinting in a patch of cold sunlight on Thursday, bemoaning the fact that she had not brought sunglasses. Then again, why should she have, when she woke up to flurries? “You change the calendar and the clock, but it doesn’t mean that it’s warm,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s snow on the ground, and there’s buds on the trees.” Sprays of perennially overeager pyracantha flounced down the stone walls of the 79th Street transverse in Central Park, branch tips almost mingling with small snowdrifts at the walls’ base. At Laila’s Florist on Madison Avenue, Augustine Soto, 41, spent the afternoon out front, tending butter-yellow daffodils, dressed in a red ski cap and gloves. Inside, Evan Christon, the shop’s co-owner, said he was concerned about the effects of the chill on the 700 or so golden Apeldoorn tulips that he had sold to the building at 1075 Park Avenue. Mr. Soto was not perturbed. “These guys are survivors; they’re not going anywhere. They’re tough,” he said. Like New Yorkers? “Not really,” Mr. Soto said of the human species. “They’re using a jacket. Tulips don’t.”

Snow and Snowstorms
Weather
Flowers and Plants
New York City


Once a Union’s Friend, a Bloomberg Aide Is Now a Target of Its Anger

Abstract: Howard Wolfson, a top aide to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is an unabashed skeptic regarding the United Federation of Teachers. He says the union is working to restore dysfunction to city schools, and he recently dismissed its forum for mayoral candidates as a “ PanderPalooza .” But not so long ago, Mr. Wolfson was a champion of the union’s efforts. In the mid-2000s, as a consultant for the Glover Park Group , a strategic communications firm based in Washington, he counted the union as a client. Mr. Wolfson is no stranger to political reinvention — he was once a tireless gadfly criticizing the mayor who now employs him. But his turnaround on education has come under attack as he assails the Democrats running for mayor and their union ties. New Yorkers for Great Public Schools, a group often aligned with the teachers’ union, denounced Mr. Wolfson last week as “Howard the Hypocrite,” saying he had “zero credibility” on education issues. Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers’ union, suggested that Mr. Wolfson had changed his views to gain a larger paycheck. In an interview on Monday, Mr. Wolfson noted that he was the son of teachers — his father taught social studies in New Jersey, and his mother, a union member, was a special-education teacher in the South Bronx. He said he had grown disenchanted with the teachers’ union after watching it try to block Mr. Bloomberg’s efforts to overhaul the city’s school system. “They’ve basically obstructed every positive thing we’ve tried to do,” said Mr. Wolfson, 46, deputy mayor for government affairs and communications. In an op-ed in The Daily News on Sunday , Mr. Wolfson criticized another former client: William C. Thompson Jr., a Democrat and former president of the city’s Board of Education, who received the teachers’ union endorsement last week. Mr. Wolfson, who assisted in Mr. Thompson’s successful campaign for city comptroller in 2005, called him “the man who presided over the dysfunction and mediocrity of the school system in the 1990s.” Image Howard Wolfson Credit Louis Lanzano/Associated Press “Who will run the school system — the union or the mayor?” Mr. Wolfson wrote. “And will it be run for the children it serves or the adults who work in it?” Mr. Thompson’s campaign, in response, accused Mr. Wolfson of promoting the candidacy of Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker and a frequent ally of Mr. Bloomberg. “Deputy Mayor Wolfson is campaigning for Deputy Mayor Quinn? Shocking,” the campaign said in a statement. As a consultant for the teachers’ union, Mr. Wolfson worked on a variety of issues, including the union’s efforts to reduce class sizes (which Mr. Bloomberg has dismissed). He also helped it beat back attacks on its contract in a series of heated hearings before the City Council. Randi Weingarten, a former United Federation of Teachers president, said Mr. Wolfson helped woo the union as a client, and she credited him with suggesting the use of the term “star chamber” to discredit the City Council hearings. (Mr. Wolfson said he did not remember.) “It’s very sad to me that he would have done this 180 and walk away from his roots,” said Ms. Weingarten, now president of the American Federation of Teachers. The union said it paid Glover Park $2 million from 2003 to 2011 for consulting services. Mr. Wolfson said he helped intermittently on union issues for a few years but was not the firm’s chief representative. “My attitude is that people are entitled to change their mind if they’re presented with new sets of facts,” Mr. Wolfson said Monday. “People will judge whether or not it’s sincere.”

Howard Wolfson
UFT
Mayoral races
Mike Bloomberg
Glover Park Group
NYC
Labor Unions
Teachers
William C Thompson Jr


Judges Let New York City Ban Worship Services From Schools

Abstract: New York City may again block religious groups from using school facilities outside of regular school hours for “religious worship services,” a federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled on Thursday. Deciding 2 to 1, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said the city had “a strong basis to believe” that allowing the religious services to be conducted in schools could be seen as the kind of endorsement of religion that violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause. “When worship services are performed in a place,” Judge Pierre N. Leval wrote for the majority, “the nature of the site changes. The site is no longer simply a room in a school being used temporarily for some activity.” “The place has, at least for a time, become the church,” he wrote, adding that the city’s policy imposed “no restraint on the free expression of any point of view.” Rather, it applied only to “a certain type of activity — the conduct of worship services — and not to the free expression of religious views associated with it.” Judge John M. Walker Jr. dissented, saying the ban on religious worship services violated the First Amendment’s free speech clause. The decision is the latest twist in a legal battle that dates to 1995, when an evangelical Christian church, the Bronx Household of Faith, sued, contending the city was violating the First Amendment in denying it access to a school, when it allowed other community groups to have space for their activities. Initially, the challenge was unsuccessful, but in 2002, after the United States Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional to exclude a student Bible study group from an upstate New York school building, a judge ruled that New York City had to provide religious groups with the same access as other community groups. The judge, Loretta A. Preska of Federal District Court, later made her order permanent. The city’s Law Department said Thursday that more than 60 “congregations” obtained permits to use public schools for regular worship services in the 2008-9 school year. The Bronx Household of Faith has been using Public School 15. The Law Department also said the Education Department was reviewing “its next steps for groups that are currently holding worship services in city schools” and would not ask groups “to cease using school buildings for services before the end of the school year.” One city lawyer, Jane L. Gordon, called Thursday’s ruling “a victory for the city’s schoolchildren and their families.” Ms. Gordon added that the Education Department was “quite properly concerned about having any school in this diverse city identified with one particular religious belief or practice.” Judge Leval wrote that “the fact that New York City’s school facilities are more available on Sundays than any other day of the week means that there is a de facto bias in favor of Christian groups who want to use the schools for worship services.” His opinion was joined by Judge Guido Calabresi. Jordan Lorence, a lawyer for the Bronx Household of Faith, said he would seek a review of the decision, either by the full appeals court or by the Supreme Court. “It’s very sad when government officials misinterpret the Constitution and attempt to kick such groups out,” Mr. Lorence said. “That is clearly not at all what the authors of the Constitution intended.” Judge Leval, in his ruling, distinguished the Bronx Household of Faith from the Bible study group involved in the Supreme Court decision. The Bronx church and others using the city’s schools, he wrote, “tend to dominate the schools on the day they use them.” “They use the largest rooms and are typically the only outside group using a school on Sunday,” he wrote.

Religion-State Relations
Decisions and Verdicts
Education (K-12)
Education Department (NYC)
New York City
Leval Pierre N
Walker John M Jr
Preska Loretta A
Freedom of Religion


Details, but Little Insight, on Craigslist Killing Suspect

Abstract: This article was reported by Abby Goodnough, Nate Schweber and Javier C. Hernandez , and written by Ms. Goodnough . BOSTON — An eviction notice hangs on Philip Markoff ’s door at the apartment complex where he lived with his fiancée, and the medical school where he took the Hippocratic oath has suspended him indefinitely. Mr. Markoff’s wedding is now officially delayed, too: his fiancée’s family canceled the B-Street Band, hired to play Bruce Springsteen hits at the beachfront reception on Aug. 14, its lead singer said Monday. But while Mr. Markoff’s seemingly normal life has crumbled in the week since his arrest on charges of killing one woman and robbing another at gunpoint after meeting them through Craigslist , hints have been slow to emerge as to why he might have committed the crimes. “What has been portrayed and leaked to the media is not the Philip Markoff that I know,” said Megan McAllister, his fiancée, in a statement released Monday through her lawyer. “To me and my family, he is a loving and caring person.” But contrary to statements she made last week, Ms. McAllister did not assert that Mr. Markoff had been “set up.” Pressed for details of his character, friends and acquaintances have described a young man who was competitive but not cutthroat, politically opinionated but not confrontational, nerdy but not painfully so. Though he grew up middle class and had planned a costly wedding, Mr. Markoff, 23, was poor enough to have the court appoint him a lawyer after his arrest, according to a court document. A probation officer who signed the document reported that Mr. Markoff, who has pleaded not guilty, said he received no financial support from his parents and was “essentially living off” $130,000 in student loans . The tuition at Boston University Medical School, where he was in his second year, is $45,000. Mr. Markoff grew up outside Syracuse, in Sherrill, population 3,150. A welcome sign boasts it is “the smallest city in New York State.” He was a child of divorce who lived with his mother, Susan, after the breakup while his older brother, Jon, eventually went to live with their father, Richard, a dentist. Both parents remarried; Mr. Markoff’s mother had a baby girl with her new husband in 1991, when Mr. Markoff was 5. Mr. Markoff’s stepfather, Gary Carroll, worked as a banker, said a neighbor, Dorothy Guider. Mr. Carroll once worked at a toy store over the Christmas holidays, Mrs. Guider said. Mr. Markoff’s mother, a doll collector, did not work during his childhood, but later worked in the gift store of the Turning Stone casino outside town. “Every little bit helped,” Mrs. Guider said, adding that she had no idea that the mother’s second marriage had broken up until she saw her selling off her doll collection at her own garage sale. Several former teachers said Mr. Markoff had shown no signs of emotional turmoil. He was a model student, said Sonja Hluska, a former teacher. A bowling alley was the biggest draw for teenagers, and Mr. Markoff was avid enough to practice there daily. He was so intent on being a good bowler that, unsatisfied with the grip, he had his bowling ball redrilled. “Everything had to be just so,” said one childhood friend. Ms. Hluska said that high school students in Sherrill looked forward to turning 18 so they could gamble at the nearby casino. Mr. Markoff, whom several friends remembered as an exuberant poker player, would round up members of his bowling team after a match and say, “ ‘Let’s go to the casino,’ ” said Jessica Scheuerman, 22, who was a year behind Mr. Markoff at Vernon-Verona-Sherrill High School. Later, at the University at Albany, Mr. Markoff was a member of the College Republicans, and traveled to Washington in 2004 to hear speeches by Ann Coulter and Karl Rove. “We were surrounded by such a left-wing student body, and he was more like me: he didn’t really share those sentiments,” said one classmate, Jonathan Zierler, who said he had accompanied Mr. Markoff on the trip. “He was a traditionalist as far as things like men and women’s roles in society. He was a throwback from a more conservative era.” Mr. Zierler could not remember Mr. Markoff’s ever having a girlfriend until he met Ms. McAllister in his sophomore year at Albany, when they volunteered in an emergency room. Mr. Markoff graduated summa cum laude in 2007 with a degree in biology. His hard work in college paid off, and he was accepted at the Boston University School of Medicine, where 11,000 applicants compete for 150 slots. On a handsome brick campus in Boston’s trendy South End, Mr. Markoff more or less blended in, several classmates said. “He seemed like the rest of us in med school,” Shanna Rone, a classmate, wrote in an e-mail message, “making ends meet with some skeletons in the closet ... nothing out of the ordinary.” Another classmate, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Mr. Markoff “was pretty passive.” The classmate added: “He seemed a pretty chill guy. He seemed to be definitely smarter than other students.” In Quincy, Mass., Mr. Markoff and Ms. McAllister paid $1,400 a month for a one-bedroom apartment at Highpoint, an upscale complex with a pool and a clubhouse for social gatherings. But Mr. Markoff apparently did not spend much time socializing; several neighbors said he was rarely home and when he was, he would say a quick hello before locking the door behind him. In Ms. McAllister’s statement Monday, which her lawyer, Robert Honecker Jr., read outside her parents’ home in Little Silver, N.J., she said she would continue to support Mr. Markoff, emphasizing that he was innocent until proven guilty. “I just can only hope that the criminal justice system will not be overwhelmed and persuaded by what is being put forth in the media,” she said. “My fiancé’s fate should not rest in the court of public opinion, but rather in a court of law.”

Markoff Philip
Murders and Attempted Murders
Craigslist
Boston University
Boston (Mass)


No Quick Fix When Stimulus Ends

Abstract: FRANKFURT — Even though the Federal Reserve has decided to maintain its economic stimulus for now, the recent behavior of global financial markets and national economies shows just how tricky it will be for the world to adjust to life without central bank painkillers. The mere prospect of a gradual decline in Fed bond purchases in the United States pushed up borrowing rates in Europe in recent months, even as the European Central Bank was trying to tamp them down with its own limited set of remedies. But whether in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere, the big doses of monetary stimulus of the sort the Fed has been administering since the global financial crisis erupted five years can go only so far in healing sick economies. The withdrawal symptoms as markets have anticipated a Fed tapering of the dosage include the fluctuations in currency values over the summer that added a new element of uncertainty for multinational companies. And an investor exodus from developing countries threatened to undercut the buying power of some of Europe’s most important customers. Although European stocks rose Thursday and market rates for government bonds declined after the Fed said it would continue dispensing its stimulus at full strength a bit longer, those movements were very likely only a temporary reprieve from disruptive forces largely outside Europe’s control. “This is a deferral, it’s not a cancellation,” said Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York. “Higher rates are coming.” Now the question is what, if anything, policy makers outside the United States will do about it. In Europe, at least, the early indications are: not much. European leaders are still too preoccupied with their own domestic political problems to act more aggressively to stimulate demand and promote job growth for the euro zone. They are too fractured and factionalized to take the actions that are beyond the scope of the monetary policies of the European Central Bank, like spending on common infrastructure or other joint projects that might help put people and companies back to work. And they seem to have run out of energy for further overhauls of the flawed architecture of the currency union, including continued aggressive action to fix Europe’s troubled banks. In Germany, the euro zone’s wealthiest country, Chancellor Angela Merkel may be constrained even after elections on Sunday are behind her. That is because, even though her Christian Democrats are likely to retain power, polls on Thursday showed that Alternative for Germany, a right-wing party that wants to dissolve the euro, will probably get enough votes to win seats in Parliament. Meanwhile, Italy, which still has one of Europe’s biggest economies despite its debt problems, is once again preoccupied with Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister. Despite his legal perils, Mr. Berlusconi still has the political clout to disrupt the stability of the Italian government. Marco Tronchetti Provera, chairman of the Italian tire maker Pirelli, said by telephone that Europeans needed a clear signal that things were getting better so that they would be willing to start spending again. “Without a project to regain confidence, it’s difficult to predict a strong recovery,” he said. But he was pessimistic about the ability of European leaders to act. “What we need is a simpler and more effective euro, which means stronger integration with bureaucratic simplification,” Mr. Provera said. “The decision-making process in Europe is too complex.” The European economy has emerged from a recession that lasted a year and a half. But the growth has little momentum of its own and remains dependent on demand from abroad, including the United States and developing countries like China and Brazil. As a result, the euro zone is acutely sensitive to policy made in Washington, over which it has little influence. “If the Europeans got their own house in order, with a healthy banking system, with genuine growth of credit, then they could care less what the Fed is doing,” Mr. Weinberg of High Frequency Economics said. “Let’s not mistake the Fed’s action for the real problems in Europe.” One of Europe’s fundamental problems is the scarcity of bank loans for consumers and businesses, especially in troubled countries like Italy and Spain. The credit crunch, in turn, reflects the failure of European countries to conduct a determined cleanup of troubled banks, by either forcing them to raise more capital or close down. But progress toward any sort of banking union is moving in slow motion. The European Parliament agreed last week to give the European Central Bank power to supervise the euro zone’s largest banks. Still, Germany remains opposed to plans to share the cost of injecting new capital into weak banks, and there is no system for shutting down a terminally ill bank without destabilizing the financial system. “Government policy should be aimed at strengthening the domestic economy,” said Marie Diron, an economist in London who advises the consulting firm Ernst & Young. “That means strengthening the banking sector first and foremost. They are taking a long time.” Ms. Diron and other economists said they were surprised at how rapidly investors had pulled their money out of emerging markets like Indonesia in recent months, after expectations of higher interest rates lured money back to the United States. The sudden outflow of money from developing nations coincided with slower growth in places like China, India and Brazil, which in turn contributed to a decline in foreign demand for European products. That had particular repercussions for Germany, which is dependent on exports and is crucial to the euro zone’s growth. Carmakers and other manufacturers express concern that markets like China might no longer compensate for weak demand in Europe as well as they have in the past. “People had gotten used to the fact that weak demand from Southern Europe would be offset by demand from emerging countries,” said Ralph Wiechers, chief economist of the German Engineering Association, which represents makers of machine tools and other industrial equipment. “We have to adjust to less dynamic growth and bigger fluctuations in demand.” The United States is also a crucial market for companies in Europe. For them, the Fed decision to delay winding down its stimulus was not necessarily good news, because it signaled that the Fed may lack confidence in the strength of the American rebound. “The postponement is a bit disappointing, to be honest,” Ms. Diron said. “It means the Fed is not confident enough in the U.S. economy to start tapering now, which is actually bad news.” And perhaps most crucially, the European Central Bank, which has succeeded in holding the euro zone together through the crisis, seems to lack the remedies to counteract the effects of Fed policy. The E.C.B.’s biggest worry is that, despite the initial market response, borrowing costs will creep upward. The market interest rate, or yield, on 10-year Spanish government bonds fell Thursday to 4.11 percent from 4.22 percent. That was down from more than 5 percent in mid-June, not long after Ben S. Bernanke first started talking about Fed tapering. But there is little confidence such declines will last. The rates on government bonds have a far-reaching effect on national economies, because they set a benchmark for the rates that businesses and consumer pay for bank loans. In addition, European banks tend to have large holdings of their home nations’ bonds. If yields are rising, a sign of investor nervousness, banks can suffer losses and face questions about their health. Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, has tried to keep borrowing costs in check by promising that official rates in the euro zone will remain at record lows indefinitely. There is also some chance that the central bank could cut its benchmark rate to one-quarter of a percent from half a percent in coming months if market rates continue to rise. The bank’s governing council next meets on Oct. 2-3. But analysts question whether a cut would do any good and are at a loss to think of any other measures. The medicine cabinet is looking rather bare. As Mr. Weinberg said, “They have very limited options.”

Federal Reserve
Economy
Euro Crisis
Ben S Bernanke