Dickey Pitches a Shutout as Mets Beat Cardinals

Abstract: R. A. Dickey saw the ninth inning of Johan Santana’s no-hitter with a towel wrapped around his head, because he could not bring himself to watch what was unfolding. The ninth inning was too much, Dickey said, so he focused on Santana and his reactions, wanting the no-hitter so badly for both Santana and the city of New York. “I went to bed last night, reminding myself to bring what I bring, whatever that is,” Dickey said. “And try to be me. I can’t be Johan.” What Dickey was Saturday was one half of a dominant, odd-couple 1-2 punch that the Mets can now flaunt around the National League. Allowing seven hits more than Santana, Dickey still threw a 100-pitch shutout, and the Mets beat the Cardinals, 5-0 , at Citi Field. It was not a no-hitter, but it was close to Dickey’s best; he struck out nine and did not walk a batter. His manager, Terry Collins , pointed out that there was still room for improvement as Dickey’s knuckler was not its sharpest because of the wind. Dickey’s ceiling may be Santana. Of course, the Mets’ top two pitchers could not be more different. “R. A. throws a knuckleball, Johan’s conventional,” said their catcher, Josh Thole, who went on to point out that “one’s right-handed, one’s left-handed; if anything, they’re complete opposites.” What they can bond over, Dickey said, is a friendly competition between teammates, a sort of anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better relationship. “You sit over there and watch a guy do what he did, and you watch him continually do it, and you know you have to follow it every time because he’s the No. 1 guy,” Dickey said. After Dickey’s gem Saturday, Collins was asked if these friendly rivals are one of the better pitching duos in the National League. “Well, they’re sure showing it,” Collins said. “They can stop anybody.” Santana has a 2.38 earned run average, has thrown back-to-back shutouts, including the no-hitter, and has proved he can be a dominant pitcher even though his fastball has lost some of its velocity. Dickey’s record improved to 8-1, and he has a 2.69 E.R.A. He has helped the Mets win six straight games in which he has started, and has baffled hitters to the tune of 38 strikeouts with just two walks and four runs in his past four games. The Cardinals, just like the Reds, the Pirates and the Padres, did not stand a chance because, as Dickey explained, he has been controlling his knuckleball, throwing it for strikes, forcing hitters to swing at what he throws. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” Carlos Beltran, who went 1 for 4 with a double, said about preparing to face Dickey. “You have to actually go out there and be aggressive.” Dickey’s counterpart, Lance Lynn, looked younger, sturdier and scarier than Dickey, but it made no difference. Lynn left the game with two outs in the fifth inning, while Dickey needed only 49 pitches during that stretch to make believers of the Cardinals. Lynn labored; Dickey lobbed, to much better effect. The Mets got all the runs Dickey needed in the second inning, when they scored three runs with only one ball — Ike Davis’s leadoff single — leaving the infield. Another run scored on a wild pitch in the seventh, and David Wright hit a solo shot, his sixth home run, in the eighth. Dickey struck out the side in the eighth, a scene punctuated by the Cardinals’ Tyler Greene swinging, missing and dropping his bat in disgust. By then, a shutout was still possible, even if a no-hitter was not. “Look, I try and throw a no-hitter every time that I go out there,” Dickey joked afterward. He praised shortstop Omar Quintanilla for one nifty diving stop; second baseman Daniel Murphy for his glove work; and Thole for catching most of his knuckleballs. The shutout, it was made clear, belonged to the team. But, just as Dickey could not explain how he controlled an uncontrollable pitch, he could not explain the Mets’ new winning ways. “It’s organic,” he said. INSIDE PITCH Terry Collins announced that Mike Baxter would be placed on the disabled list and could be out for up to six weeks. Baxter has a displacement of his right collarbone and fractured rib cartilage after running into the left-field wall to make a catch during Johan Santana’s no-hitter. ... Ramon Ramirez strained his hamstring while running from the bullpen to celebrate with Santana, and he will be placed on the disabled list. “No, I haven’t seen that stuff before,” Collins said of Ramirez’s injury. “There’s a lot of stuff that happens here that I haven’t seen.”

Dickey R A
New York Mets
St Louis Cardinals
Collins Terry L
Baseball


Stars Sue Organizers of Women’s World Cup Over Use of Turf

Abstract: A group of the world’s best female soccer players sued FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association on Wednesday, arguing that the plan to play next summer’s Women’s World Cup in Canada on artificial turf amounts to gender discrimination under Canadian law. According to the players’ filing with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario in Toronto, World Cup organizers are violating Section 1 of Canada’s human rights code , which states that “every person has a right to equal treatment with respect to services, goods and facilities, without discrimination.” The filing seeks an order requiring that the tournament, scheduled to begin June 6, be played on natural grass fields. It also proposes possible resolutions that include installing grass fields on top of artificial ones and even relocating games to stadiums with grass surfaces. “Men’s World Cup tournament matches are played on natural grass while C.S.A. and FIFA are relegating female players to artificial turf,” a lawyer for the players, Hampton Dellinger, said in a statement. “The difference matters: Plastic pitches alter how the game is played, pose unique safety risks and are considered inferior for international competition.” The group of players named in the filing consists of national team players from approximately a dozen countries, including the former world players of the year Abby Wambach of the United States and Nadine Angerer of Germany. Nearly every top contender for next year’s World Cup title is represented, although the filing does not name any players from host Canada’s national team. The players have been threatening to sue FIFA and the C.S.A. since July but have expressed a clear preference for a negotiated solution. That now seems unlikely. A top FIFA official told reporters in Canada this week that there were no plans to accede to the players’ demands. “We play on artificial turf, and there’s no Plan B ,” said Tatjana Haenni, FIFA’s head of women’s competitions. The concept of a player boycott also seems to be a nonstarter: The World Cup is a rare global stage for women’s soccer, and many players, even some of the plaintiffs in the current case, are reluctant to surrender it. Still, when the group received no response after setting a deadline of Sept. 26 for negotiations to begin, Dellinger said, the players had “no choice” but to go to court. They have requested an expedited hearing because the tournament begins in less than nine months, and installing grass fields or relocating games — if ordered — could take time.

Soccer
Canada
Discrimination
Women and Girls
FIFA Women's World Cup
FIFA
Canadian Soccer Assn
Lawsuits


Consumption of Buffalo Meat at an All-Time High

Abstract: DENVER — The nation’s buffalo ranchers have no catchy marketing slogan about what’s for dinner, and no big trade association budget to pay for making one up. What they have these days are people like Joe and Matt Gould, an ambitious father-and-son team from western Kansas who branched out after 100 years of traditional cattle ranching by their family, and bought their first buffalo herd last year. The Goulds, with 40 animals as a start, made their first delivery of buffalo meat, also known as bison, to friends here in Denver last week. They are opening a themed restaurant on the Kansas-Colorado border supplied by the ranch, and planning bison hunts for tourist-visitors. “People want the high omega-3s,” which are healthy fats, said Joe Gould, 61, as he scribbled notes at a mentoring session for buffalo-ranching newcomers at the National Bison Association’s winter conference at a hotel here last week. With prices and American consumption of buffalo at all-time highs — though still minuscule in volume compared with beef, chicken or pork — a new chapter is clearly beginning for one of the oldest animal-human relationships on the continent, dating back millennia before the first Europeans arrived. New ranchers are coming in. Older ranchers are straining to build up herds, holding back breeding females from slaughter and thus compounding what retailers say is already a supply crunch. Buffalo meat prices, meanwhile, have soared — up about 28 percent last year for an average rib-eye steak cut, according to the federal Department of Agriculture. At Tony’s Market here in Denver, that surge is even steeper, up 25 percent just last week for a New York strip buffalo steak, to $24.98 a pound, $10 more per pound than premium beef for the same cut. What happened, producers and retailers say, is that the buffalo, the great ruminant of the Plains — once endangered, now raised on ranches by the tens of thousands — has thundered into an era of growing buyer concern about where food comes from, what an animal dined on and how it all affects the planet. Trendsetting consumers and restaurants on the East and West Coasts caught on. Grass-fed, sustainable and locally grown, obscure concepts to most people 15 years ago or so when the buffalo meat market first emerged, became buzzwords of the foodie culture. Nutritional bean counters, obsessing over lipid fats and omegas, found in buffalo a meat they could love. “For the last two years, it’s been one of the fastest-growing categories in our meat department,” said Theo Weening, the global meat coordinator for Whole Foods Market, one of the nation’s largest retailers of buffalo at its chain of stores. Mr. Weening said buffalo benefited from a kind of synergy: customers started embracing the idea of grass-fed beef, and from there it was a short leap to bison. “Both categories went hand in hand,” he said. But this new moment, buffalo ranchers and retailers say, is also loaded with risk that growth could come too fast or prices could surge so much that buyers or retailers back away. It is also spiced with a debate about what people really want. Many of the new ranchers, like the Goulds, say the future of buffalo can be summed up by one term: grass-fed. Feeding animals only on grass, with no grain in their diet at all, is more natural for the animal and produces the kind of low-fat, environmentally sustainable product that they say best competes with beef for a place on the nation’s dinner table. Many veteran ranchers, though, say that what consumers and retailers really want is consistency — one cut of buffalo tasting about the same as the next in both flavor and texture. And only grain-feeding, with some grain — often corn — in the diet in the last months before slaughter, can do that, they say. Crucially, they say, grain-finished buffalo is what most people have probably tasted, bought at Whole Foods or off a restaurant menu. Purely grass-fed buffalo, they say, is harder to find and can vary in taste and tenderness from region to region and season to season. However it is raised, buffalo meat has much less fat than beef. “We want no surprises for our customers,” said Russell Miller, the general manager at Turner Enterprises, which owns the chain of buffalo ranches owned by the media mogul and conservationist Ted Turner. Turner Enterprises, by far the nation’s largest buffalo rancher, with more than 50,000 animals, supplies some of the buffalo at Whole Foods, as well as the meat for Mr. Turner’s buffalo-themed restaurant chain, Ted’s Montana Grill. When it comes to the question of grass-fed versus grain-fed, the answer from David E. Carter, the executive director of the National Bison Association, is a Buddha-like wisdom of abstention. “I’m not going to say one is better than the other,” he said in an interview between meetings at the association’s conference, where straight-leg jeans and boots was the uniform du jour. “People are moving forward from here in different ways, and we’ll let our customers tell us the answer.” Mr. Weening at Whole Foods said his company was trying a third way, of sorts. It is in discussions with its three suppliers to end feed-lot finishing for buffalo — still feeding the animals a partly grain-based diet to build up a little fat in the final months of life, but doing so in a pasture setting instead of in confined lots. But with all the hand-wringing and hope about the future, the fact remains that buffalo is still barely a footnote. The average American ate about 65 pounds of beef last year but not even a Quarter Pounder’s worth of bison, according to the Bison Association. The numbers of animals in the food chain reflect that disparity — about 70,000 buffalo slaughtered for their meat last year, according to the association, compared with more than 125,000 cattle every day. But for newcomers like the Goulds, Lesson 1 is that buffalo are not anything like cattle. While cattle can be easily herded along, their wild genes muted by generations on a treadmill to the slaughterhouse, buffalo might decide to turn and charge. When they do, they can outrun a track star, up to 30 miles per hour. And while a cattle herd will usually respect a fence, a buffalo herd will not. “We’ve figured out some things already, mostly by doing them incorrectly,” said Matt Gould, 32. “But it’s a pretty steep learning curve.”


Roller Skaters Revel in a New Rink in New York City

Abstract: The skies over Coney Island put on a spectacular show on Saturday evening, with the sunset casting violet hues and a fat yellow moon disappearing and reappearing through clouds. But for a row of spectators lined up along a lonely section of the Boardwalk, the real entertainment was happening opposite the beach, inside an ornate yet decrepit building. There, under disco lights and mirror balls, and displaying varying degrees of agility, roller skaters were circling, circling around a makeshift rink that offered a taste of the glory years of indoor roller-skating in New York City. “Skaters have been so horribly sad, being orphans,” said Beth Emerson, who was one of the original roller-skate dancers at the Roxy, the beloved nightclub in Manhattan and one of two popular roller rinks to close in the city in 2007. “Now, we’re not going to be orphans anymore.” The site of Saturday night’s roller-skating was Lola Staar’s Dreamland, the brainchild of Dianna Carlin, an entrepreneur who runs a tiny and bustling souvenir shop on Coney Island’s Boardwalk. Lola Staar is Ms. Carlin’s alter ego, and this year Ms. Carlin’s dream came true when she won a contest sponsored by Glamour magazine and the designer Tommy Hilfiger that helped her open a roller rink in Coney Island. Ms. Carlin is also the founder of the Save Coney Island organization, formed to stave off overdevelopment, and she wants to help breathe new life into a blighted area of the Boardwalk. Roller-skating, she believed, would be the ideal fix. The rink opened in March in the Childs Restaurant building, an 80-plus-year-old terra-cotta landmark that has spent much of the past half-century closed to the public. A floor of interlocking plastic tiles was laid and about 200 pairs of roller skates were donated, Ms. Carlin says, by “a family whose grandfather was active in the roller-skating world.” The plan, at first, was to open the rink for just one night, but the response from the public, and the city’s legions of bereft roller skaters, was so overwhelming that Ms. Carlin resolved to reopen the place on a semi-permanent basis. “It was amazing,” Ms. Carlin said of the rink’s inaugural night, which drew luminaries like the singer Ashanti and the actress Marisa Tomei. “Over 1,000 people RSVP’d for the party, but we could only allow 300 people in. It showed how passionate people are for roller-skating.” It took nearly four months for Ms. Carlin to navigate a thicket of building permits and insurance needs to reopen the rink, but finally, in July, she did. The rink is scheduled to open every weekend until October, at least. Longtime roller skaters who showed up at Dreamland on Saturday night said they had yet to find a new home since the Roxy and the Empire roller-skating rink in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, closed within a month of each other last year (a third rink, Skate Key in the Bronx, closed in 2006). Some make their way to rinks in New Jersey and on Long Island and Staten Island. Some skate on the weekends in Central Park, though several said they avoided outdoor skating because they did not like rolling on asphalt. Yet no rink, the skaters said, has filled the void left by the Roxy and Empire. “Empire was the love of our life,” said Yvonne Blugh, who showed up at Dreamland shortly past sunset on Saturday with her husband, Ian — the two met and fell in love at Empire. The night’s theme at Dreamland was “Purple Rain,” the 1984 movie starring Prince, and the Blughs dressed accordingly: she in a shiny black leather minidress and fishnet stockings, and he in a purple velour pantsuit with leopard-print flares. Alex Kirby, a 63-year-old who wears 38-year-old custom-made roller skates, drives on most weekends to rinks in New Jersey. But Mr. Kirby, who polished his roller-dancing technique over decades at the Roxy and other rinks in the city, finds the New Jersey skaters too fast. Irving Rollins, 52, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, said he had not been able to find a rink that equaled the Roxy’s all-inclusive vibe. “People from all over the world, upper-end people, lower-end people, there was no place like Roxy’s,” he said. And Angela Pinder, who showed up at Dreamland with her friend Lecia Williams, finds the New Jersey rinks too far away, the Long Island skaters standoffish and the Staten Island rink too hard to find. “We need something in New York,” said Ms. Pinder, who used to skate at Empire. “Urban children have nowhere to skate.” It remains to be seen whether Lola Staar’s Dreamland will fill the void. Attendance has been erratic, possibly because people are unaware that the rink is there. Ms. Carlin is hoping to build enough momentum to open a permanent rink in Coney Island after Taconic Investment Properties, which holds the lease on the Childs Restaurant space, reoccupies the building. She also envisions finding a sponsor and laying a wooden floor in the rink. The place might see some competition from a new rink being planned by Lezly Ziering, a 75-year-old roller-skating teacher who plans to start a skating night called “Crazy Legs” in September at an old gym in Bedford-Stuyvesant. But Mr. Ziering, who showed up at Dreamland on Saturday, said his skating nights would be on Wednesdays, and Ms. Carlin’s rink is open only on weekends. Indeed, Julio Estien, who was the D.J. at the Roxy, was spinning at Dreamland on Saturday night, and suggested that there was enough demand to fill both venues. “They’re still broken-hearted,” Mr. Estien said of the city’s skaters. “But now they have Lola Staar’s Dreamland.”

Roller Skating
Coney Island (NYC)
Carlin Dianna


Terrorists Mock Bids to End Use of Social Media

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — In the hours after 14 people were killed in San Bernardino, Calif., a familiar voice celebrated the attacks on Twitter: “California, we have already arrived with our soldiers. Decide how to be your end, with knife or bomb.” That comment was posted from the 335th Twitter account of a pro-Islamic State group that calls itself Asawitiri Media. Twitter has repeatedly tried to cut off the authors of the account, most recently known to its thousands of followers as @TurMedia335, @TurMedia334 and @TurMedia333. As soon as Twitter suspends one account, a new one is created. After the group’s 99th account was suspended, it taunted Twitter by creating @IslamicState100, posting images of birthday candles, cake, trophies and fireworks. Politicians and even some technologists say that account, and hundreds just like it, show how Silicon Valley’s efforts to crack down on the use by terrorists of social media have been toothless. And Washington is using the latest terrorist attacks to renew its calls for Silicon Valley to roll back the encryption in their products. On Sunday, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, called on tech companies to become more aggressive. “Resolve means depriving jihadists of virtual territory, just as we work to deprive them of actual territory,” she told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “They are using websites, social media, chat rooms and other platforms to celebrate beheadings, recruit future terrorists and call for attacks. We should work with host companies to shut them down.” But as the 335 versions of the pro-Islamic State Twitter account demonstrate, technology companies are dealing with a tenacious adversary. Also, when it comes to terrorists using encryption technologies to hide their communications — a frequent complaint of law enforcement — technology companies are quick to point out that of the top five encryption apps recommended by the Islamic State, none are American-made. Indeed, members of the Islamic State used technology created by a company in Germany to claim credit for last month’s attacks in Paris , and text messages discovered on one of the attackers’ phones suggested that the attackers were not even using encryption. Still, while the tech industry cannot block all terror content on the web, people who have battled other online threats say it could be doing more. They point to technology that has successfully eradicated large swaths of child pornography on the web, or even older tools for spotting computer viruses, as potential guideposts for blocking terror-related content. “When Twitter says, ‘We can’t do this,’ I don’t believe that,” said Hany Farid, chairman of the computer science department at Dartmouth College, who co-developed the child pornography tracking system with Microsoft. The actual task of identifying child pornography is managed by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Mr. Farid said the same technology could be applied to terror content, so long as companies were motivated to do so. “There’s no fundamental technology or engineering limitation,” he said. “This is a business or policy decision. Unless the companies have decided that they just can’t be bothered.” The 335th pro-Islamic State account certainly did not escape the notice of executives at Twitter after it carried simultaneous death threats against Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo, Twitter’s current and former chief executives. And its recent naming convention — adding one digit to a new account after the last one is suspended — does not seem as if it would require artificial intelligence to spot. Asawitiri Media also uses the same photo of a bearded man’s face over and over again, said Rita Katz, the director of SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks terrorists’ communications. “The bottom line is that Twitter is not doing enough,” Ms. Katz said. “With the technology Twitter has, they can immediately stop these accounts, but they have done nothing to stop the dissemination and recruitment of lone wolf terrorists.” In response, Twitter said it actively investigated potential terrorist threats. “Violent threats and the promotion of terrorism deserve no place on Twitter, and our rules make that clear,” a Twitter spokesman said. “We have teams around the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, and they work with law enforcement entities around the world when appropriate.” Image Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has removed some posts. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The White House on Monday also urged the technology industry to do more. “There should be common ground the government and tech can find to address this concern and make sure the American people are safe,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, echoing comments made earlier by President Obama. Conversations between government officials and tech companies have been going on for more than a year, but since the mass shootings in San Bernardino and Paris, “there has been a reintensified or reinvigorated engagement,” according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But some who advocate free speech argue that relying on companies like Twitter and Facebook to be more aggressive arbiters of what constitutes free speech puts those companies in a difficult spot. “We don’t believe that law enforcement should delegate their responsibilities to private enterprise,” said David Greene, director for civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Especially ones that haven’t sought out that role.” In some cases, Internet companies have been criticized for not taking down websites that belong to the Islamic State, only to have it discovered later that the sites were critical of it. Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare, a San Francisco company, said that in one case Internet activists criticized his company for keeping several Islamic State websites online when, in fact, the sites in question were pro-Kurdish. “It’s particularly risky to take a bunch of tech companies that are not certified policy experts and insert them into Middle East politics,” Mr. Prince said. Pulling all terror-related content is not always preferred by law enforcement. In several cases, tech executives say, they have been asked to keep terror-related content online so that law enforcement agents can monitor terrorist networks or because the content was created by law enforcement agents to lure terrorists into divulging information. The issue is thornier for companies like Facebook, in which the bulk of posts are meant to be private. “Do you want Facebook looking at over 1.5 billion people’s posts?” said Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor in technology policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “And if so, then for what?” Facebook primarily relies on user reports to ferret out terrorist accounts, but recently it has gone further. If the company is informed of specific terrorist activity, Facebook will take down the account as well as others similar to the one reported. Last week, it went a step further. Tashfeen Malik, one of two terrorists involved in the San Bernardino attacks, posted her public allegiance to ISIS on Facebook just minutes before the shootings occurred on Wednesday. The post did not initiate any user reports to Facebook, and until now it had been unclear how the authorities were able to tie Ms. Malik to the post. According to law enforcement officials, the Facebook account that Ms. Malik used was linked to an email account she had used for many years. Facebook found the posting, reported it to the F.B.I., and removed it on Thursday. “We work aggressively to ensure that we do not have terrorists or terror groups using the site, and we also remove any content that praises or supports terrorism,” said Monika Bickert, head of global product policy at Facebook. A spokeswoman for YouTube said that it had policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content meant to incite violence and that it quickly removed those videos when flagged by users. A trickier issue is presented by the encryption deployed by Apple, Facebook, Google and a range of smaller services that thwart law enforcement’s ability to access a target’s communications, even with a court order. Companies say that weakening the encryption in their products would only make regular users more vulnerable to cybertheft and set a bad precedent for other countries to follow. What’s more, they note, there are plenty of encryption options not made by American companies and many of them are free. Addressing the topic on Monday, the White House urged Silicon Valley to find a compromise. “We are going to resist the urge to trample a bunch of civil liberties,” Mr. Earnest said in the White House briefing. But he added, “We don’t want terrorists to have a safe haven in cyberspace.”

ISIS,ISIL,Islamic State
Terrorism
Social Media
Silicon Valley
Freedom of speech


Once a Leader, Yahoo Now Struggles to Find Its Way

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo has been one of the most-visited sites on the Internet since its glory days as a Web portal. Yet as the rest of the Internet moved on to social networks and mobile devices, Yahoo has failed to keep up. That became painfully clear Tuesday when Yahoo’s board abruptly fired its chief executive, Carol A. Bartz . She focused on bolstering Yahoo’s online media and original reporting, but neglected to develop the new social networking tools, video services or mobile apps that people now prefer to use. In that way, the tale of Yahoo’s misfortunes is not just one of management woes, but a vivid illustration of the transition from Web sites that publish professional content to a new digital world dominated by mobile phones and sites where the users are the content creators. Yahoo’s problems are shared with another Internet pioneer, AOL. Both astutely capitalized on the first huge shift in how people read — moving online from paper — but they failed to follow Internet users and advertisers to cellphone screens and social networks. Both companies have tried to become media companies. Meanwhile, the next generation of companies, like Google and Facebook, have happily satisfied the demand for information and entertainment — not by creating content but by building mobile and social networking services that attract users and, increasingly, valuable advertisers. “Yahoo hangs on to the pieces that made it a giant years ago,” said Shar VanBoskirk, a digital marketing analyst at Forrester Research. “It assumes people will come to its Web site, and what users are looking for now is a much more syndicated experience that allows them to go to mobile devices and co-create content.” As the way people use the Internet changed, she said, Yahoo and AOL “hit the wall and didn’t continue to evolve as the rest of the market did.” Yahoo’s sites, like its home page, e-mail service and sites for finance and entertainment, still have a huge audience — 177.6 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore — second only to Google’s but more than Facebook’s. But while Yahoo’s traffic has flattened, both Google and Facebook are growing in popularity. And people spend about half as much time on Yahoo as they do on Facebook. Advertisers are chasing what they say is more profitable prey — users of smartphones, video sites and social networks, and the companies that cater to them. Yahoo has always led in one of the most important corners of the advertising marketing: display ads, those that show images and video. But Facebook and Google are closing in on Yahoo, in large part because they can offer advertisers more personal information about users. Yahoo’s slice of the display advertising pie has shrunk for three years in a row, according to eMarketer, a digital-marketing research firm. Last year, its share of display ads was 14.4 percent, compared with 12.2 percent for Facebook and 8.6 percent for Google. But this year, Facebook will surge ahead of Yahoo with 17.7 percent to Yahoo’s 13.6 percent, eMarketer predicts. And by next year, Google will have nearly caught up to Yahoo, too, with 12.3 percent of display ads compared with 12.5 percent at Yahoo and 19.4 percent at Facebook. “Yahoo still has an enormous amount of traffic,” said David Hallerman, principal analyst at eMarketer. “But more and more ad buys are being made in a more targeted way.” Advertisers are attracted to information that Facebook has about a user’s friends or Google has about a user’s search queries, he said. Mr. Hallerman compared Yahoo and its audience to the mass-circulation magazines of the 1960s, like Life and Look. Those publications were done in by the shift among advertisers to magazines aimed at specific groups like celebrity news or golf. “The idea of a portal trying to be everything to everybody is outdated,” he said. Advertising executives also criticized Yahoo for the shortcomings of its advertising technology as well as executive turnover that meant that every few months, ad agencies had to teach a new Yahoo executive about their accounts. “When you look at Yahoo, there’s a lot of distractions,” said Christian Juhl, president of the Western region at Razorfish, a digital ad agency owned by the Publicis Groupe. In 2007 Google bought DoubleClick, a display advertising company, to compete with Yahoo. Two years later Google had developed DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which was more efficient for buyers and sellers of ad space. It invested heavily to acquire or create tools for targeting, serving and optimizing online display ads. It has also invested in YouTube, its video site, to try to lure TV advertisers to display ads. “You see the likes of Facebook and Google eating their lunch,” said Julie Berger, vice president and managing director for digital at the Los Angeles office of Horizon Media, a leading media agency. “Consumers’ habits are changing,” and Yahoo executives have not sufficiently realized that, she said. But even as Internet users began to surf the Web differently — reading bits and pieces on different sites and devices — Yahoo and AOL dug in, creating content as they had in their heyday in the 1990s. Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive since 2009, is investing heavily in news and original reporting. His biggest bet was to buy The Huffington Post, the news and aggregation site founded by Arianna Huffington, for $315 million earlier this year. He also bought the tech blog TechCrunch and is pushing into local news with Patch, which has reporters in more than 800 towns writing about city council meetings, neighborhood crimes and civic events. But like Yahoo, Mr. Armstrong is dealing with unhappy shareholders and calls to break the company into pieces and sell them off. AOL has an investment bank and lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisition on retainer. A steady decline in its Internet access business makes increasing its overall advertising business difficult. In the latest quarter, AOL reported a 5 percent gain in global advertising sales, its first increase since spinning out of Time Warner in 2009, but it remains a money loser. Ms. Bartz took a parallel approach at Yahoo, hiring dozens of journalists and bloggers and buying Associated Content, which enlists amateur journalists to write about a variety of topics. Its first social network, Yahoo 360, introduced in 2005, never caught on. Inside Yahoo on Thursday, the management team held an all-hands meeting with employees to try to reassure them about the company’s future. Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder, who was pushed out as chief executive before Ms. Bartz was hired, said the decision to remove Ms. Bartz was a difficult one but the company should be growing faster. “We’re at a critical time in Yahoo’s history,” he said. It may not have been what advertisers want to hear. “What advertisers want is an innovator, a partner that is going to help them know the next best place to reach their customers,” said Ms. VanBoskirk of Forrester. “Yahoo’s problem is they look like a legacy player that’s not thinking about the next thing.”

Yahoo! Inc
Computers and the Internet
Search Engines
Social Networking (Internet)
Cellular Telephones
Bartz Carol A
Executives and Management
Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations


Bloomberg Retreats on Overhaul of Programs for the Elderly

Abstract: Under pressure from the City Council, the Bloomberg administration is backing down from a contentious proposal to revamp the city’s sprawling system of senior centers , officials said on Friday. In a victory for the Council, the administration said that it would hold off on plans to consolidate up to $20 million in financing for the centers, which serve as a home away from home for thousands of older residents. In a conciliatory statement, three officials said that they planned to re-evaluate the overhaul. The statement came from Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services; Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, the city’s new commissioner on aging; and Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. Aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had argued that the current system needs to be modernized to appeal to a new generation of active, longer-living residents, who crave programs like yoga classes and live musical performances. And they are trying to introduce corporate-style accountability standards into a system operated by a patchwork of neighborhood providers. City records show that the roughly 300 senior centers, which are largely financed through taxpayer dollars, are used by 2 percent of the city’s elderly population. But council members chafed at the changes, saying that their constituents were happy with the system as it is — and they privately grumbled that the mayor’s proposal would diminish their influence over the program. This month, as the plan for the senior centers became public, Ms. Quinn angrily denounced it, declaring it belongs “in the garbage can.” Even as aides to the mayor backed away from the plan, they said they would still push to modernize the senior centers. The overhaul is vital, city officials say, to keep pace with a projected 46 percent surge over the next 25 years in the number of people above age 60, the city’s fastest-growing group. Ms. Quinn and her colleagues in the Council said they agreed that the system needed to be modernized, but wanted time to review how best to accomplish that goal. “I am pleased that today we are moving forward in a collaborative manner to ensure our seniors receive quality services,” Ms. Quinn said.

New York City
Elder Care
Finances
Bloomberg Michael R
Elderly
City Councils


Bulger Guilty in Gangland Crimes, Including Murder

Abstract: BOSTON — James (Whitey) Bulger, the mobster who terrorized South Boston in the 1970s and ‘80s, holding the city in his thrall even after he disappeared, was convicted Monday of a sweeping array of gangland crimes, including 11 murders. He faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. The verdict delivers long-delayed justice to Mr. Bulger, 83, who disappeared in the mid-1990s after a corrupt agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation told him he was about to be indicted. He left behind a city that wondered if he would ever be caught — and even if the F.B.I., which had been complicit in many of his crimes and had relied on him as an informer, was really looking for him. “This was the worst case of corruption in the history of the F.B.I.,” said Michael D. Kendall, a former federal prosecutor who investigated Mr. Bulger’s associates. “It was a multigenerational, systematic alliance with organized crime, where the F.B.I. was actively participating in the murders of government witnesses, or at least allowing them to occur.” The trial was the final reckoning for a man small in stature but large in legend, who ruined hundreds of lives and deepened the stain on Boston’s already corrupt federal law enforcement bureaucracy. Mr. Bulger was on the run for 16 years, until the authorities found him in 2011 in Santa Monica, Calif., with an arsenal of weapons and $822,000 in cash in the walls of his retirement apartment. The trial also offered a glimpse of a time and a place that has all but disappeared. The South Boston of Mr. Bulger’s day has been transformed from a parochial, mostly Irish-American working-class enclave into part of Boston’s booming innovation economy. Old triple-deckers have given way to glassy condos for young professionals. The dilapidated waterfront of Mr. Bulger’s era, where he once imported 36 tons of marijuana, is now a showcase harbor dotted with pleasure craft and rimmed by the soaring glass walls of the federal courthouse where he had stood trial since June 12, with his former partners in crime parading to the witness stand to testify against him. Image Whitey Bulger, in 1953, left, and 2011. Credit Boston Police, left, U.S. Marshals Service, right “When you hear about those days, it’s as if all that took place in another century, on another planet,” said Thomas J. Whalen, an associate professor of social science at Boston University. “Those were the bad old days of Boston, and there is nothing to be nostalgic about. There was brutality at every level.” June Barry, a 79-year-old who has lived in South Boston her entire life, and who used to joke with her friends about Mr. Bulger’s grip on the neighborhood, greeted the verdicts with relief. “It’s good to be over,” she said. “I’m glad they got him, and they got him alive. He has to pay for it now,” she added. “We always said, ‘Well, Whitey might be listening, we’d better behave ourselves.' ” As a clerk read the verdicts in the lengthy and complicated list of charges, Mr. Bulger looked away from the jury and showed no reaction. He was found guilty of 31 of 32 counts of his indictment, the one exception involving an extortion charge. While the jury of eight men and four women convicted him of 11 murders, they found the government had not proved its case against him in seven others, and in one murder case it made no finding, leading to gasps inside the courtroom by relatives of those murder victims and explosive scenes outside the court. “My father just got murdered again 40 years later in that courtroom,” said the son of William O’Brien, who is also named William. When he was led from the courtroom, Mr. Bulger gave a thumbs-up sign to a few family members seated behind him, prompting a woman sitting with the relatives of victims to yell out, “Rat-a-tat Whitey.” His sentencing is set for Nov. 13. His lawyer J. W. Carney Jr. vowed to appeal. He said the basis for an appeal would be that Judge Denise Casper had not allowed Mr. Bulger to mount the defense he wanted: that he was given immunity for his crimes — in essence, that he had a license to kill. Image The United States attorney in Boston, Carmen M. Ortiz, spoke outside court after Mr. Bulger was convicted on 31 of 32 counts. Credit Darren Mccollester/Getty Images Others said such an argument was ludicrous and had little chance of success, particularly since Mr. Bulger maintained he was never an informant. “It’s difficult enough to persuade a court of appeals that you were immunized for proven murders if you were an informant,” said Martin Weinberg, a prominent Boston criminal defense lawyer. “It’s impossible to make that argument when you say you were never an informant.” Perhaps one glimmer of gratification for Mr. Bulger was that the jury reached “no finding” in the death of Debra Davis, one of two women he was accused of strangling. He has long maintained that his personal code of honor did not allow for the killing of women, although the jury did determine that he had killed the other woman, Deborah Hussey. Ms. Davis was the longtime girlfriend of Stephen Flemmi, Mr. Bulger’s former partner in crime who testified against him. Ms. Hussey was the daughter of another of Mr. Flemmi’s longtime girlfriends. Mr. Bulger had spent much of the trial scribbling on a yellow legal pad, perhaps for an appeal or a memoir, or maybe just for something to do. Some of the witnesses, particularly those who testified against him, had made him bristle with anger, and on a few occasions he exchanged obscenities with them, as if the courtroom were a schoolyard. In his last few appearances in court, after deciding that he would not take the stand in his own defense, Mr. Bulger seemed defeated. He slumped more in his chair. He did not take notes as vigorously. Mr. Weinberg said the seven murders that the government had not proved Mr. Bulger had committed were the oldest of the murder charges and were based on uncorroborated testimony. But, he noted, the jury also rejected the defense’s argument that “because the F.B.I. was corrupt, Mr. Bulger deserved to be exonerated.” Image Steve Davis, Debra Davis’s brother, on Monday. The jury reached “no finding” in her death. Credit Brian Snyder/Reuters Mr. Bulger’s defense lawyers, Mr. Carney and Hank Brennan, described a culture in which agents took bribes, alerted criminals in advance to wiretaps and pending indictments, and gave them information about informants that led to their murder. But they produced almost no evidence that Mr. Bulger could not have committed the crimes of which he was accused. Mr. Bulger seemed to view the trial as more about his legacy than his guilt or innocence. He maintained he was not an informant, though that would have been no crime and was not part of the indictment against him. Though previous courtroom proceedings — notably those presided over by Judge Mark L. Wolf in Federal District Court in 1998 — exposed the symbiotic relationship between Mr. Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang and the F.B.I., this trial focused more on Mr. Bulger’s criminal actions while under the bureau’s protection. Fred Wyshak, the assistant United States attorney who was the lead prosecutor, maintained that some victims were killed because the F.B.I. had told Mr. Bulger they were informants who were going to testify against him. Others were rival hoodlums or innocent bystanders. Some were lured into traps and shot. Others were felled in a hail of bullets. Some were bound in chains and shot at close range. Ms. Hussey and Ms. Davis were strangled. Afterward, Mr. Bulger would routinely take a nap while others cleaned up the mess, which included removing the teeth of victims so their bodies could not be identified. The corpses were shoveled under the dirt floor of a basement or tossed into a car trunk and dumped in a shallow grave. Beyond the murders, there were guns in people’s faces and in their crotches. There were threats, shakedowns, demands for “rent” for the privilege of doing business on Mr. Bulger’s turf. “The depth of depravity is stunning — the killing of weak people, the women, the treachery against their own friends, shooting them in the back of the head,” said Anthony Cardinale, a criminal defense lawyer who has represented mobsters and who first exposed Mr. Bulger as an F.B.I. informant. “It’s almost Toscaesque in terms of the treachery that went on, and in the end, everyone winds up dead.”

Whitey Bulger
Organized crime
Boston
FBI
Murders
Racketeering


Empathetic Judge in 9/11 Suits Seen by Some as Interfering

Abstract: Over nearly three decades as a litigator at a downtown law firm, Alvin K. Hellerstein shared a view of the World Trade Center towers with dozens of other colleagues in an office building on Maiden Lane. Yet as a United States District Court judge in Manhattan, he has had a singular perspective on the towers — specifically, the suffering that has lingered long after the terrorist attacks that leveled them in 2001. As the federal judge who has overseen the wrongful death, property damage and personal injury lawsuits arising from 9/11, Judge Hellerstein, 76, has developed a visible empathy for both the families of the victims and for the workers who fell ill after the rescue and cleanup efforts. “He had my clients in his chambers for over one hour to listen to them,” said Norman Siegel, a lawyer for families seeking to recover human remains from the debris that was carted off to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. “He, more than anyone, understands deeply the pain.” Yet in eight years of 9/11 oversight, many who have appeared before him say that Judge Hellerstein has also grown determined to put his own stamp on financial settlements reached between a plaintiff and defendant. And recently the city and lawyers have been smarting over his clout. On March 19, the judge stunned lawyers on both sides by rejecting a $657.5 million settlement reached in individual suits brought against New York City by more than 10,000 rescue and cleanup workers who say their health was damaged at ground zero. Saluting the workers as “heroes,” he said that the compensation was inadequate, the terms were poorly understood by the plaintiffs and lawyers should not expect to extract their fees from the $657.5 million payout. He would also reduce those fees. While some plaintiffs cheered, their lawyers and those for the city were dismayed to see a settlement that was two years in the making fall apart. What is more, Judge Hellerstein had waded into untested legal waters: such intervention is not the norm in cases that are not a class action, legal experts say. Last month the city filed an appeal challenging his authority, even as it returned to the table to negotiate new terms. The struggle over control of the settlement has underscored two different, but not necessarily contradictory views of the judge: the compassionate jurist driven by a sense of social responsibility and with a wealth of experience with victims’ suffering, and the aggressive judge unwilling to cede ground on cases he has shepherded for years. Judge Hellerstein declined repeated requests for an interview. Still, his decisions and remarks on the bench appear to shed some light on his philosophy. A Bronx native and Columbia Law School graduate who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1998, Judge Hellerstein has shown independence and a strong adherence to the First Amendment and to transparency, for example. He ordered the government to release videos and photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after the American Civil Liberties Union sued under the Freedom of Information Act. In a 1999 decision against the New York Police Department that was later overturned, he ruled that members of the Ku Klux Klan could wear their traditional masks at demonstrations. Charles G. Moerdler, a friend and former co-partner at the firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, said that Judge Hellerstein, an Orthodox Jew who has been active on the board of several Jewish organizations, was motivated by “a very high standard of morality and decency.” As a litigator representing banks and large corporations, he said, the judge was willing to tell a bank client being sued by an investor over money losses to reconsider its position. “He’d say, I can litigate this, and I can fight this, but in fairness, this person was injured,” Mr. Moerdler said. Judge Hellerstein lost several former clients in the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11. But legal experts suggest that he has a bigger motivation for championing the ground zero victims: he may see his handling of the 9/11 cases as his legacy. “This is history for him,” said Arthur Miller, a professor at New York University School of Law who specializes in federal procedure. “This is an awesome responsibility. He wants to be the person who brought peace to this entire situation. He would not be human if he didn’t feel a personal interest in this.” At the March hearing, Judge Hellerstein called the ground zero cases he had handled his “greatest challenge.” “This is different,” he told the lawyers in spurning the settlement terms. “This is 9/11.” But lawyers who have sparred with Judge Hellerstein suggest that his moral compass and commitment to doing what he thinks is right have sometimes led him to overreach. Just as he rejected the settlement in the workers’ case for giving too little, he has spurned settlements of individual suits filed by survivors of the airline passengers killed on 9/11 for giving too much in comparison with similar cases, some noted. Donald A. Migliori, a lawyer for survivors in airline-related cases whose settlement amounts were reduced, said that such intervention was unusual in a non-class-action suit. “It’s a very frustrating thing for lawyers,” he said. “He’s guided by a concept of fairness that’s not in the law.” Mr. Migliori said he did not appeal Judge Hellerstein’s stance because his clients wanted to put the litigation behind them. But lawyers for New York City are more determined. They went to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to try to challenge Judge Hellerstein’s authority for blocking the settlement. They argue that the judge has no legal basis to try to approve, reject or modify a private, hard-won deal that took about two years to broker and that both sides consider fair. The city was particularly alarmed that Judge Hellerstein was trying to get the city’s insurer to pay the contingency fees for the plaintiffs’ lawyers, which would sharply raise the ultimate cost of the settlement by tens of millions of dollars. And the lawyers for the plaintiffs now face a tougher time trying to sell the settlement to their clients, 95 percent of whom must approve the agreement if it is to take effect. “We have extracted every penny from the city that we can get,” said Marc J. Bern, one of the lawyers. But now both sides are trying to hammer out modifications to the settlement to try to satisfy the judge and ensure that it will be accepted by most plaintiffs. In advocating for more money, Judge Hellerstein has emerged as their chief protector, some of the 9/11 workers say. “He’s keeping it fair,” said one plaintiff, Ernest Vallebuona, 45, a retired police detective who developed lymphoma after 9/11. Some plaintiffs disagree with the judge. Joe Greco, 41, a retired police detective who said he needed to use a breathing machine up to five times a day for his asthma, said that he appreciated Judge Hellerstein’s effort to look after his interests but that he wished the judge had not interfered. People struggling with serious illness need to ensure their families’ financial well-being, he explained. They “want this thing settled,” he said. “We’re on borrowed time right now.” But John Feal, who works as an advocate for the 9/11 workers through his FealGood Foundation , counters that Judge Hellerstein himself has emerged as a ground zero hero. “The judge is now like Elvis in the 9/11 community,” he said. “For years these guys have been neglected, and now there’s someone who cares.”

September 11 (2001)
Suits and Litigation
Hellerstein Alvin K
World Trade Center (NYC)
Decisions and Verdicts
Legal Profession


Weekend Entertainments From the Archives of The New York Times

Abstract: 68 YEARS AGO Pin some Peeps on your felt fedora and head to the Avenue — that’s Fifth Avenue — on Sunday for the Easter Parade. You might find like-hatted strollers enjoying what might actually be a springlike day. There won’t be as many parading as there once were. The informal fashion show is less of a draw than it was back in, say, 1947, when a front-page article in The New York Times reported that well over a million people — a record — watched or participated in the parade. The article noted that the event was something of a return to the gaiety that had attended it before the war: “Most noticeable was the fact that, with wartime restrictions off fashions, the styles yesterday were like the mood of the day, free and easy. For the first time in long years fabric was used plentifully in the long, coachmen-styled jackets flaring gracefully over hips and in the longer skirts.” Nylons were “in blue, black and pastel shades,” the article continued, “and startled eyes saw even one pair of fuchsia stockings.” There was the inevitable anthropomorphizing: “An ambitious woman dolled up a live bunny in a miniature duplicate of her own flowered hat. Several dogs were doomed to tulle and flowers as frames for their ears.” Here are excerpts from other years’ Easter Parade accounts in The Times, starting with the first article to describe the event in the paper. 1879 “The beautiful weather of the morning tempted those who had provided themselves with Spring attire to indulge in the luxury of taking part in the annual display, and the clouds which afterward gathered were not sufficiently threatening to reconcile the feminine heart to a disappointment once the feminine mind had been made up.” “Bows and plaits, and piping and beads, and laces and fringes, and all the other pretty devices known to the forefathers as furbelows, appeared, tacked on to the skirt in every imaginable spot below the waist, leaving only here and there a glimpse of the material forming the groundwork.” 1887 “Everybody and his cousin were on the pavement yesterday. For was it not Eastertide, Fifth-avenue’s brilliant day of days in all the length of the year!” “It is a beautiful custom that of the Easter bonnet. It is, in the words of St. Thingam à Thingamy, surnamed the Considerate, that when the days of mourning shall have passed the daughters of Eve shall put upon themselves raiment that maketh the hair curl and upon their heads such garniture as wooeth the sunbeam and maketh other women wild.” 1889 “It was a gay throng, happy in its possessions and easy in its conscience, for the most of it had just been to church, although it seemed to have momentarily forgotten that fact in the excitement of the parade.”

The New York Times
Parade
Easter
Hats
Fashion


New ‘Genius Grant’ Winner Alison Bechdel to Write New Graphic Memoir

Abstract: The cartoonist and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel was in a castle in Umbria as part of an artist’s residency in Italy when she learned that she had been selected as one of 21 MacArthur “genius” grant recipients this year. She bought a case of prosecco to share with the other artists in residence. Ms. Bechdel, 54, has even more to celebrate these days. Her 2006 memoir, “Fun Home,” which detailed her coming-out story and her life growing up with a closeted gay father, inspired a musical that is headed to Broadway in the spring. And she recently sold her next book, “The Secret to Superhuman Strength,” to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for publication in 2017. “The Secret to Superhuman Strength” is Ms. Bechdel’s third graphic memoir and chronicles her decades long obsession with various fitness and exercise fads, including downhill skiing, uphill skiing, rollerblading, martial arts, running, hiking, weight lifting and home workout videos and currently, yoga. The book will also explore the history of American fitness fads, and Ms. Bechdel’s efforts to rekindle her creativity through exercise, and it is shot through with her signature darkness. “Alison Bechdel’s sheer talent — now I guess we can say ‘genius’ — built on her once-strange pursuit of cartooning about lesbian subculture has changed the world just a little bit,” Deanne Urmy, a senior executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said in a statement announcing the acquisition. “Or at least the world has changed enough to recognize just how much of the universal there is in Alison’s fierce, close looks at her own family and greater culture and at her own becoming.”

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation


Generic Copy of a Blood Thinner Lowers Profit at Sanofi-Aventis

Abstract: PARIS, Oct. 31 (AP) — Sanofi-Aventis said Tuesday that its third-quarter profit fell 12 percent, blaming competition from a generic copy of its top-selling blood thinner Plavix and government health spending cuts in France and Germany. The company said net profit fell to 1.7 billion euros ($2.16 billion), or 1.26 euros ($1.60) a share, compared with 1.92 billion euros, or 1.44 euros a share, in the period a year earlier. Sales fell 4 percent, to 6.9 billion euros ($8.77 billion), after a Canadian generic drug maker, Apotex, flooded the market with cheap copies of Plavix in August. Plavix sales rose 2.5 percent, to 543 million euros ($689 million). Analysts had expected Sanofi to report sales of 7.35 billion euros ($9.33 billion). Shares of Sanofi fell 3 percent, to 66.6 euros. Sanofi, which is based in Paris, and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, which markets Plavix in the United States, both cut their earnings forecasts on Sept. 1, the day after a judge ordered Apotex to stop selling its Plavix copy, but did not order it to recall any of the product that had already been shipped. Sanofi said then that Apotex might already have sold enough of the cut-price medicine to satisfy demand in the United States through the end of the year.

Sanofi-Aventis
Drugs (Pharmaceuticals)
Company Reports
Medicine and Health
Paris (France)


Health Law Debate Puts Focus on Limit of Federal Power

Abstract: WASHINGTON — If the federal government can require people to purchase health insurance , what else can it force them to do? More to the point, what can’t the government compel citizens to do? Those questions have been the toughest ones for the Obama administration’s lawyers to answer in court appearances around the country over the past six months. And they are likely to emerge again if, as expected, the Supreme Court , as early as Monday, agrees to be the final arbiter of the challenge to President Obama ’s signature health care initiative. The case focuses on whether Congress overstepped its constitutional authority in enacting parts of the law. Lower courts have reached divergent conclusions. Even judges in lower courts who ultimately voted to uphold the law have homed in on the question of the limits of government power, at times flummoxing Justice Department lawyers. “Let’s go right to what is your most difficult problem,” Judge Laurence H. Silberman , who later voted to uphold the law, told a lawyer at an argument in September before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “What limiting principle do you articulate?” If Congress may require people to purchase health insurance, he asked, what else can it force them to buy? Where do you draw the line? Would it be unconstitutional, he asked, to require people to buy broccoli? “No,” said the lawyer, Beth S. Brinkmann. “It depends.” Could people making more than $500,000 be required to buy cars from General Motors to keep it in business? “I would have to know much more about the empirical findings,” she replied. Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, who ended up in dissent, then jumped in. “How about mandatory retirement accounts replacing Social Security ?” he asked. “It would depend,” Ms. Brinkmann replied. Ms. Brinkmann was cut off before she could elaborate on her answers. In other settings, she and other administration lawyers have described what they see as the constitutional limits to government power, though not typically using concrete examples. They have said, for instance, that laws authorized by the Constitution’s commerce clause must be economic in nature, must concern interstate commerce and must address national problems. They have also said that the health care market is unique. And they have suggested that questions about constitutional limits can miss the point. The only question actually before the courts, they said, is whether the particular law under review was within Congress’s authority. Other cases, they said, can be decided as they arise. But there is reason to think that at least some Supreme Court justices will want to hear what a ruling in favor of the health care law implies and what precedent it sets. In 1995, when the court struck down a federal law that prohibited people from carrying firearms in school zones , Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that “we pause to consider the implications of the government’s arguments” in defending the law — that stopping activities that could lead to violent crime relates to interstate commerce because it affects “national productivity.” Under that reasoning, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, “It is difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power,” adding that “if we were to accept the government’s arguments, we are hard pressed to posit any activity by an individual that Congress is without power to regulate.” Chief Justice Rehnquist died in 2005, but three of the justices who joined his majority opinion — Justices Antonin Scalia , Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas — are still on the court. The concerns expressed by Chief Justice Rehnquist amount to what lawyers call the slippery slope. Many judges are reluctant to issue rulings without some sense of what their consequences will be in other cases. But defenders of the health care law say that such concerns are not a reason to doubt its validity. “Slippery slope arguments are themselves often slippery,” Walter Dellinger, who was acting solicitor general in the administration of President Bill Clinton , told the Senate Judiciary Committee in February . He gave an example. “If it is within the scope of regulating commerce to set a minimum wage,” he said, “one might argue, then Congress could set the minimum wage at $5,000 an hour.” But that would never happen, he said, for practical, political and legal reasons. When a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta , struck down in August the mandate that individuals purchase and maintain health insurance from private companies, slippery slopes were very much on the minds of the judges in the majority. “The government’s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual’s existence substantially affects interstate commerce, and therefore Congress may regulate them at every point of their life,” Chief Judge Joel F. Dubina and Judge Frank M. Hull wrote. On Tuesday, on the other hand, a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the law . Judge Silberman, who had grilled Ms. Brinkmann so aggressively, wrote the majority opinion, and his discussion of the limits of Congressional power may have handed the administration a bigger victory than it wanted, because it presumably did not want to win on the grounds that Congress could do anything at all. Judge Silberman said he remained troubled by what he called “the government’s failure to advance any clear doctrinal principles limiting Congressional mandates that any American purchase any product or service in interstate commerce.” Then he adopted a version of Mr. Dellinger’s argument. “That a direct requirement for most Americans to purchase any product or services seems an intrusive exercise of legislative power,” Judge Silberman wrote, “surely explains why Congress has not used this authority before — but that seems to us a political judgment rather than a recognition of constitutional limitations.” Judge Silberman said there were Supreme Court decisions on issues like regulating the use of medical marijuana that had endorsed broad Congressional power to legislate in the name of commerce. “It certainly is an encroachment on individual liberty,” he wrote of the health care law, “but it is no more so than a command that restaurants or hotels are obliged to serve all customers regardless of race , that gravely ill individuals cannot use a substance their doctors described as the only effective palliative for excruciating pain , or that a farmer cannot grow enough wheat to support his own family .” In dissent, Judge Kavanaugh praised the majority for its honesty in describing what followed from its ruling. “The majority opinion here is quite candid — and accurate,” he wrote, adding: “The majority opinion’s holding means, for example, that a law replacing Social Security with a system of mandatory private retirement accounts would be constitutional. So would a law mandating that parents purchase private college savings accounts.” Within hours of the decision on Tuesday, opponents of the health care law were issuing statements, and their theme was predictable. “Like the government,” said Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown, “the majority could identify no limit to an unprecedented power of Congress.”

Supreme Court
Barack Obama
Legislation
Obamacare,Affordable Care Act
Health Insurance
US Politics


CNN’s Cooper Is Not Pushing an Airline, Just His Network

Abstract: New magazine advertisements for Delta Air Lines are meant to promote an in-flight entertainment system that shows live television programs. But the screen depicted in one ad has a big picture of Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, perhaps leading readers to wonder: Is Mr. Cooper endorsing Delta? As it turns out, sticklers for the separation between news and advertising can relax. CNN says it has not changed its policies that prohibit employees from peddling products. (The exception is Larry King, who has long served as a pitchman both on and off CNN, part of Time Warner .) A CNN spokesman, Sal Petruzzi, said the network has always let cable companies, cellphone services and satellite TV and radio providers “use our talent and programs in ad campaigns that showcase how they distribute programming offered on our networks.” He added: “Delta’s in-flight campaign is another example of one of our distribution partners showcasing our programming.” Other ads in the Delta campaign show the cast of the HBO series “Entourage” to promote the presence on the in-flight system of programs from HBO, also owned by Time Warner. CNN ran into trouble in 1997 when a young correspondent, Jonathan Karl, was featured in a Visa print ad about consumers in Generation X. Although he had received permission from a senior manager, CNN said at the time, his ad work was nevertheless a policy violation. The policy was tightened after the incident, and Visa agreed to stop running the ads. Mr. Karl is none the worse for wear: he is still on television as the senior national security correspondent for ABC.

Cable News Network
Advertising and Marketing
Television
Delta Air Lines Incorporated
Time Warner Inc
Cooper Anderson


Vatican Monsignor Suspected of Money Laundering

Abstract: A Vatican monsignor already on trial for plotting to smuggle $26 million from Switzerland to Italy was arrested Tuesday in a separate case, suspected of using his Vatican bank accounts to launder money. The financial police in Salerno said Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, known as “Monsignor 500” for his purported favored bank notes, had transferred millions in fictitious donations from offshore companies through his accounts at the Vatican’s Institute for Religious Works. Acting on evidence provided by the Vatican bank, the police said, they seized real estate and assets in Italian bank accounts on Tuesday, including Monsignor Scarano’s luxurious Salerno apartment. Police said that in all, 52 people were under investigation. Monsignor Scarano’s lawyer, Silverio Sica, said his client had merely taken donations from people he thought were acting in good faith to fund a home for the terminally ill. He conceded, however, that Monsignor Scarano had used the money to pay off a mortgage.

Nunzio Scarano
Vatican Bank
Catholic Church
Money laundering


Now a Giant, Google Works to Retain Nimble Minds

Abstract: When a product manager at Google told his bosses this year that he was quitting to take a job at Facebook, they offered him a large raise. When he said it was not about the money, they told him he could have a promotion, work in a different area or even start his own company inside Google. He turned down all the inducements and joined Google’s newest rival. “Google’s gotten to be a lot bigger and slower-moving of a company,” said the former manager, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity to protect business relationships. “At Facebook, I could see how quickly I could get things done compared to Google.” Google, which only 12 years ago was a scrappy start-up in a garage, now finds itself viewed in Silicon Valley as the big, lumbering incumbent. Inside the company some of its best engineers are chafing under the growing bureaucracy and are leaving to start or work at smaller, nimbler companies. Recent departures include low-level engineers, product managers and prominent managers like Lars Rasmussen, who helped create Google Maps and Wave before he left for Facebook, and Omar Hamoui, the founder of AdMob who was vice president for mobile ads at Google and is now looking for his next project. At least 142 of Facebook’s employees came from Google. Corporate sclerosis is a problem for all companies as they grow. But a hardening of the bureaucracy and a slower pace of work is even more perceptible in Silicon Valley, where companies grow at Internet speed and pride themselves on constant innovation — and where the most talented people are often those with the most entrepreneurial drive. Much of Silicon Valley’s innovation comes about as engineers leave companies to start their own. For Google, which in five years has grown to 23,000 employees from 5,000 and to $23.7 billion in revenue from $3.2 billion, the risk is that it will miss the best people and the next great idea. “It’s a short step from scale to sclerosis,” said Daniel H. Pink, an author and analyst on the workplace. “It becomes a more acute problem in Silicon Valley, where in a couple years, you could have some competitor in a garage ready to put you out entirely.” Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, says that people who think Google faces brain drain are “fundamentally wrong.” The company’s attrition rate for people it wished would stay has been constant for seven years, he said. Nevertheless, Google’s maturation worries him. “There was a time when three people at Google could build a world-class product and deliver it, and it is gone,” Mr. Schmidt said. “So I think it’s absolutely harder to get things out the door. That’s probably our biggest strategic issue.” As a result, Google is taking aggressive steps to retain employees, particularly those with start-up ambitions. Google has given several engineers who said they were leaving to start new companies the chance to start them within Google. They work independently and can recruit other engineers and use Google’s resources, like its code base and servers, according to half a dozen employees. Google Wave, a way for people to work together online, was one example. The engineering team, based in Sydney, Australia, worked independently and got equity in the project, according to three people briefed on the agreement. But Google shut down Wave this year, and Mr. Rasmussen, who led the project, quit for Facebook soon after. Google is considering opening a start-up incubator inside the company, according to two people briefed on the plans. Other big companies have made similar attempts with varying success. Cisco Systems’s program has given birth to new businesses like TelePresence, a videoconferencing service, but Yahoo’s incubator was shut down in 2008, a year and a half after it started. From the beginning, Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have tried to prevent atrophy. That is one reason Google gives everyone time — called 20 percent time at the company — to work on their own projects. The company tries to limit groups of engineers working on projects to 10. But in reality, engineering groups quickly swell to 20 or even 40, several Google product managers said. And new products created during 20 percent time are less likely to get anywhere these days. Popular Google products like Gmail grew out of 20 percent time, for instance. But engineers say they have been encouraged to build fewer new products and focus on building improvements to existing ones, like the terrain layer on Google Maps. “There’s a lot of these cool features that are very hidden, and a lot of people worked very hard on them and they were kind of sad that they spent a year of their life on something that gets 0.1 percent usage,” said another product manager who is considering leaving for a start-up. Part of Google’s problem is that the best engineers are often the ones with the most entrepreneurial thirst. Google loaded up on that type in its early hiring. Some of those go-getters now want to leave as they become frustrated with the processes and procedures. Josh McFarland, a former Google product manager who left last year and started TellApart, which helps retailers advertise online, said he knew it was time to leave as the number of people he had to copy on e-mail messages ballooned. “I think that there is a class of person who is able to walk away from this relatively easy, consistent money because they are so dissatisfied with the processes of a big company,” he said. For others, it is about making more money elsewhere. Start-ups have a riskier and potentially more rewarding lure: shares in a company before an initial public offering. Google, which has always been generous with salary, stock options and benefits like massages, dry cleaning and free food, is going a step further to keep employees happy. This month, Google gave every employee a raise of 10 percent or more. The motivation was, in part, the “war for talent,” Mr. Schmidt said. People who have other job offers have been persuaded to stay with seven-figure bonuses. Google says 80 percent of people who get a counteroffer stay put. Of those who leave, employees going to Facebook get the most attention. According to résumés posted on LinkedIn, 142 of Facebook’s 1,700 employees came from Google. Mr. Schmidt dismissed the idea that Facebook was poaching Google’s best people, saying, “We hire more people in a week than go to Facebook in its lifetime.” Despite Google’s growing pains, it remains remarkably innovative when it wants to be. Last month, for instance, it unveiled robotic cars that drive themselves. And like many big companies, Google has been acquiring new technologies, like Android, instead of inventing them. While he worries about the consequences of becoming a big company, “People are dying to come here and they’re staying,” Mr. Schmidt said. “So I guess they’re putting up with the complexity.”

Google Inc
Start-ups
Engineering and Engineers
Computers and the Internet


Giants Are Finding That Kickoff Coverage Has Some Holes in It

Abstract: EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Oct. 12 — If football really boils down to a battle of field position, the Giants seem to have surrendered the equivalent of Mount Everest. They rank second to last in the N.F.L. in kickoff coverage, allowing the opposition’s offense to start, on average, at the 32-yard line. “It has to stop,” safety Gibril Wilson, a regular on special teams, said Friday. “The bleeding has to stop this week.” The best team in the N.F.L. is the Minnesota Vikings, who usually stop their opponents at the 21-yard line on kickoffs. Lawrence Tynes has kicked off 27 times this season. So if the Giants had somehow managed to save 11 more yards on each kickoff, they would have backed up their opponents by a combined 297 yards. There is no telling how many points that may have prevented. So, what is wrong when the Giants kick off? There appear to be several factors, any one of which can cause a breakdown and give the other team’s offense a shorter field. Sometimes the offense does not even take the field. In the third quarter last Sunday against the Jets, Tynes kicked to Leon Washington, who scampered 98 yards for a touchdown. “Oh man, every aspect of our coverage needs improvement, starting with me,” Tynes said. “I got to be more consistent with hang time and direction. “And obviously, we got to run down field and make tackles. There’s really not one thing that sticks out.” Tynes said he strived for a hang time of four seconds. His ideal kick will land near the 5 and on or outside of the numbers on the field. The Giants will sometimes kick up the middle if the other team is having success along the sidelines, Tynes said. But wouldn’t the problems be eliminated if he kicked the ball out of the end zone each time? “That’s impossible,” Tynes said. “There’s no one in the world that can do that.” If Tynes does his job, the challenges essentially just begin. The other special-teamers must sprint down the field, absorb or avoid blocks and attempt to tackle the ball carrier, who is often the fastest player on the field. Kickoffs usually appear to be the most chaotic plays during a game. Washington, who leads the league in kickoff returns with a 36.2-yard average, had a running start on his touchdown return Sunday, said Reggie Torbor, a backup linebacker who plays on special teams. The Giants angled their coverage in a manner that enticed Washington to run up the middle of the field. But no one came close to making a solid tackle. “The guys who were being single-blocked didn’t get off the blocks,” Torbor said. “And the guys who ran into their wedge didn’t destroy. So once he came through and the hole opened up, he shot through it. As simple as that.” Torbor added that the toughest aspects of kickoff coverage were bouncing off blocks and not running out of position, which creates holes. Under the guidance of their first-year special-teams coordinator, Tom Quinn, the Giants regularly practice their kickoff coverage. But several players said it was difficult to duplicate the speed and force they see on game day. The next test will come Monday night, when the Giants face the Falcons in Atlanta. The Falcons’ kickoff returner, Jerious Norwood, leads the National Football Conference with a 30.8-yard average. “Very fast,” David Tyree, an All-Pro special-teams specialist, said, referring to Norwood. “He’s a straight-line runner. That’s how it is week in and week out. This is the N.F.L., so you got to expect people to do some positive things on their side.” There is nothing more deflating, Tyree said, than watching the offense score a touchdown, then give points back on the ensuing kickoff. But Tyree noted that the news on kickoffs was not all bad. Tyree and Torbor are among a core group of special-teamers who have excelled when the Giants are on the receiving end of kickoffs. The Giants rank 12th in the N.F.L., getting the ball, on average, to the 28. Does that take the sting out of being ranked so low in kickoff coverage? “No,” Tyree said. “We’ve just been getting beat. It’s nothing I’ve been a part of since I’ve been here. And it’s nothing I’m looking forward to getting used to. So we got to journey back.”

New York Giants
Football
Wilson Gibril
Tyree David
Tynes Lawrence


For China’s State Media, Trump Victory Can’t Cure ‘American Disease’

Abstract: BEIJING — Donald J. Trump isn’t Mr. Popular in Beijing lately. But China’s ruling elite seems to be consoling itself with the idea that the American president-elect will take charge of a country staggering into decline and disunion. A flow of articles in Communist Party publications in recent weeks has argued that the United States’ tumultuous past year showed it to be dysfunctional and dissolute, and blighted by corruption, social and political polarization, reckless debt and an enfeebled news media. “Can an American Dream sick with the American Disease last for long?” read a headline in the latest issue of Red Flag Papers, a party journal that has enjoyed renewed prominence in recent years. “America’s political problems have long been the instigator of its other problems,” said the accompanying essay, by a researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences , one of the government’s main think tanks. “The clear and unequivocal slide in the public’s belief in the ‘American dream’ directly reflects their lack of optimism in the country’s future and their own prospects,” wrote the researcher, Liu Weidong. “The American political system that once was their greatest pride has constantly proven powerless to restrain the despicable conduct of incompetent politicians.” Some of the comments appeared before Mr. Trump irked the Chinese government by having a phone call with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, and then throwing into doubt his adherence to the longstanding One China policy. The Chinese government says that policy, which keeps Taiwan diplomatically isolated, is a bedrock of relations with Washington. A spokesman for the Chinese government’s Taiwan Affairs Office reinforced that warning on Wednesday. “If this basis suffers from meddling and destruction, then the healthy and stable development of Sino-American relations is out of the question, and the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait will suffer a serious impact,” the spokesman, An Fengshan, told a news conference in Beijing. The strait is the body of water between Taiwan and mainland China. Dim views of America’s prospects are, of course, not only found in China. The rancorous election and Mr. Trump’s victory have stirred up plenty of gloomy commentary from critics on the left and the right in the United States as well as around the world. And even before Mr. Trump’s victory, the Chinese state news media used the election to argue that the United States was a political mess that showed why one-party rule was right for China. But these postelection jeremiads suggest that researchers and ideologues who shape and reflect official Chinese views of the United States put little store in Mr. Trump’s vow to “make America great again.” In China, there has for years been debate between researchers who see the United States as in decline and those who believe that the country’s strength and capacity for renewal remain formidable. Image A Chinese magazine featuring Mr. Trump at a Shanghai newsstand on Wednesday. Credit Johannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The first view is more prevalent now, especially as President Xi Jinping, who took power in 2012, has focused intensely on what he sees as the threat from Western liberal values. “Mainstream Chinese views of the United States have shifted from admiration to doubt, especially after the financial crisis, and now increasingly to rejection of its values,” Shi Yinhong , the director of the Center for American Studies at Renmin University in Beijing, said in an interview. “Among elite scholars, fewer and fewer voice awe of the United States,” Mr. Shi said. “Trump’s victory, like ‘Brexit,’ is seen as an opportunity for the official media to teach the public they have no reason to envy the West.” People’s Daily, the chief newspaper of the Communist Party, has for the past three Sundays devoted one of its broadsheet pages to dissecting America’s maladies. “Currently, America is facing major domestic reforms that require someone who is farsighted and shrewd,” said an article in the first part of the series, which was published in late November along with three other articles on the same theme. “Is Trump the man for this? People have different views,” said the writer, Ye Zicheng , a professor at Peking University . “Many Americans worry whether their leader is up to the task. If not, doesn’t that mean that America’s domestic political decline will worsen?” The second part of the series excoriated the American news media, including The New York Times, for failing to anticipate and explain Mr. Trump’s rise, especially among blue-collar voters. “It’s difficult for such a media to reflect the realities of America,” read one commentary in that issue. “How much it can contribute to the development of American democracy is also doubtful.” The latest in the series argued that Mr. Trump’s policies would take the United States’ already dangerous budget deficit to even more perilous heights. “It will be hard to avoid a snowballing increase in debt levels,” one of the articles said. “Without doubt, the American government’s debt situation is unsustainable.” There is some irony in all this — not least, in a heavily censored party-run paper that faithfully echoes official views scolding the American news media for failing to take on the powerful. China’s own problems with debt have also raised alarm with investors, and Mr. Xi’s crackdown on official corruption has revealed levels of plunder that have no equivalent in Washington. And while Chinese politicians like to criticize the United States, they also often send their children there to study. Mr. Xi’s own daughter, for example, attended Harvard. How long and intensely the criticism persists will depend on Mr. Trump’s policies after he takes office, said Qiao Mu, a liberal commentator and researcher at Beijing Foreign Studies University . “They always have two faces. One is talking up the friendship between China and the United States, but there is also the criticism and suspicion of America and its political system,” Mr. Qiao said. “When a leader is preparing to visit, there’ll always be upbeat reports.”

US Politics
Communist Party of China
Donald Trump
Xi Jinping
China
US
US Foreign Policy


Jason Day Leads Deutsche Bank by a Stroke

Abstract: NORTON, Mass. — The way the roars reverberated through the trees and across the golf course at T.P.C. Boston on Sunday, it almost sounded as if Tom Brady and the Patriots were pouring on the points up the road in Foxborough. But all this exuberance was generated by a day of chip-ins, hole-outs, back-nine 30s, eagles and double eagles at the Deutsche Bank Championship — where Jason Day, Brandt Snedeker, Luke Donald, Steve Stricker, Phil Mickelson and a host of others put on an extraordinary show in the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs. When Snedeker holed the last pitch for an improbable par and a 67 from off the green at the 18th and Day holed the last putt for birdie and a 66 to tie the tournament 54-hole scoring record of 17-under-par 196, that one stroke separated the pair who had come into the day tied for the lead. Donald (66) was a stroke further back at 198. Day, a 22-year-old Australian, had only one bogey and a chance to eagle the 18th from 25 feet above the hole. Snedeker, who hit his second shot into a hazard at the par-5 18th and chunked his fourth from short of the green, staved off bogey with a 40-foot chip for par that ignited a roar from the grandstand and a smile from Day. “I was thinking he was going to just get up and down and make bogey, and I was going to make an eagle or birdie,” Day said. “That would have gave me a nice little cushion going into tomorrow. But Brandt is a competitor, and he stuck it out until the end and made a really good par save. I’m going to look forward to tomorrow. It’s going to be really, really enjoyable.” It should be that, and for more than just the final pairing. Stricker, who shot a 67 in his fourth straight round without a bogey dating to the Barclays, can supplant Tiger Woods as the No. 1 golfer in the world rankings if he wins and Mickelson finishes out of the top three. Mickelson shot a 67 and is five strokes back. “I’m going to have to shoot something really low, I imagine, to catch the leaders,” Stricker said. “But it’ll be fun to try, and we should have a good day.” Mickelson can also knock Woods from the top spot he has occupied for 273 weeks by winning, finishing second (with Woods out of the top three) or fourth, if Stricker does not win and Woods — who shot a 69 and was tied for 23rd — finishes out of the top 24. A right-hander who plays golf left-handed and is sometimes known as Phil the Thrill, Mickelson gave the crowd plenty of what it came to see. In one highlight, he hit the flagstick on his approach from 134 yards at the 15th hole, and after the ball bounced back 46 feet from the cup, he drained a birdie chip from off the green. His day was set up by his driver, which he hit straight — 12 of 14 fairways — and long, with half his tee shots exceeding 300 yards. When Mickelson drives the ball in the fairway with regularity, he is a threat to win. As for the race for No. 1, this is his best chance to grab it since the W.G.C.-Bridgestone last month, where he closed with a 78. “I’m looking forward to getting in the hunt tomorrow and seeing if I can get off to a good start and make some birdies and move up that leader board,” he said. Mickelson saw how fast that can happen here. Vijay Singh, playing in the twosome ahead of Mickelson on Sunday, took aim at the back pin position at No. 2, a 567-yard, par-5 playing dead downwind. After a drive of 337 yards, Singh had 230 remaining and hit a 5-iron on the front of the green. His ball rolled up the shelf, hit the middle of the flagstick and went in for golf’s rara avis, the double eagle. It was that kind of day, a setup for a finish in which anything can happen.

Golf
Deutsche Bank Championship
Day Jason
Snedeker Brandt


U.S. Unveils Gold Cup Roster

Abstract: Jurgen Klinsmann, the coach of the United States national soccer team, released his 23-man roster Thursday for next month’s Concacaf Gold Cup tournament. “It’s kind of a roster where you have to go player by player and evaluate each situation to see where they are at and see how strong they are, but we are excited about a roster for the Gold Cup that really has a shot of winning it,” Klinsmann said in a statement. “This tournament gives us a huge opportunity to see where a lot of the players are. Even though we don’t have the European-based players that were part of our World Cup qualifying process, we put together the strongest team possible for this huge opportunity at the Gold Cup.” Perhaps the most notable player on the roster is Landon Donovan, 31, who has not played for Klinsmann’s “A” team since August 2012 after taking a sabbatical from soccer over the winter. Donovan has played in 28 Gold Cup games and scored 13 goals, both national team records. Another national team veteran, Oguchi Onyewu, will return for the first time since June 2012. Thirteen on the roster play in leagues outside the United States that are on summer breaks. Six of those — DaMarcus Beasley, Edgar Castillo, Joe Corona, Herculez Gomez, Michael Orozco Fiscal and Jose Torres — play in Mexico. Tijuana sends three players to the United States team, as does Real Salt Lake of Major League Soccer. Two M.L.S. players — defender Corey Ashe and striker Jack McInerney — are seeking their first national team cap. McInerney is the league’s leading goal scorer with 10 goals. All of the tournament’s first-round games are part of doubleheaders. The same goes for the quarterfinals (in Atlanta and Baltimore) and the semifinals (in Arlington, Tex.). The final is scheduled to be played at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 28. The United States begins play in the Gold Cup with a game against Belize in Portland, Ore., on July 9. It will then play Cuba in Sandy, Utah, on July 13 and close out the first round against Costa Rica in East Hartford, Conn., on July 16. If the United States finishes first or second in Group C, it will advance to the quarterfinals at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore. Mexico, which won the 2011 Gold Cup, returned recently from the Confederations Cup in Brazil, where it represented Concacaf. Now, however, the sport’s regional governing body has changed the format. The winners of the 2013 and 2015 tournament will engage in a playoff for the right to represent Concacaf in the 2017 Confederations Cup in Russia. The roster (M.L.S. unless otherwise noted): Goalkeepers Bill Hamid (D.C. United), Sean Johnson (Chicago), Nick Rimando (Real Salt Lake) Defenders Corey Ashe (Houston), DaMarcus Beasley (Puebla/Mexico), Tony Beltran (Real Salt Lake), Edgar Castillo (Tijuana/Mexico), Clarence Goodson (Brondby/Denmark), Oguchi Onyewu (Malaga/Spain), Michael Orozco Fiscal (Puebla/Mexico), Michael Parkhurst (Augsburg/Germany) Midfielders Kyle Beckerman (Real Salt Lake), Alejandro Bedoya (Helsinborg/Sweden), Joe Corona (Tijuana/Mexico), Mix Diskerud (Rosenborg/Norway), Joshua Gatt (Molde/Norway), Stuart Holden (Bolton), Jose Torres (Tigres/Mexico) Forwards Will Bruin (Houston), Landon Donovan (Los Angeles), Herculez Gomez (Tijuana/Mexico), Jack McInerney (Philadelphia), Chris Wondolowski (San Jose).

Soccer
CONCACAF Gold Cup
US Men's Soccer Team
Landon Donovan
Jurgen Klinsmann
Jack McInerney