Sometimes, Inflation Is Not Evil

Abstract: Sometimes, you have to unlearn your lessons. Thirty years ago, it became clear that defeating inflation was crucial, even if the means needed to accomplish that would cause a deep recession . By the time the European Central Bank was created in the 1990s, it seemed so obvious that inflation must be fought that the bank was given only one mandate — to fight inflation. The other mandate given to its United States counterpart, the Federal Reserve — to promote employment — was pointedly not included. It is time for a new lesson to be learned. Sometimes we need inflation, and now is such a time. Had the central bankers of the world understood that inflation in asset prices could be just as bad as, if not worse than, inflation in the prices of consumer goods, this would not be necessary. But they did not. So they did nothing to resist soaring home prices, just as they had seen no reason to worry about the Internet stock bubble. When pressed, they would say they knew what to do if an asset bubble did burst — ease monetary policy. That seemed to work after the Internet bubble burst, and the ensuing recession was a mild one that did little damage to anyone except foolish investors. But the strategy only worsened the housing bubble and has not done much to revive the debt-choked economy over the last two years. In 2008, when the credit crisis brought the world economy to a screeching halt, governments and central banks stepped in to bail out large financial firms on the theory that a decently functioning financial system was a prerequisite to economic recovery. That analysis was correct, but there were at least two problems with the fix: First, at least some banks were not really made healthy again. That was especially true in Europe, where recapitalization of banks proceeded slowly. They were thus vulnerable to a new round of credit worries, this one based on sovereign debt issues. Second, this country is full of people whose homes are worth less than they owe. That provides threats to the lenders and to the borrowers. Those borrowers need debt relief, but there are many issues that have prevented any real action. Simply put, you can’t operate an economy where huge numbers of people are desperately in debt and have no real way out. We need to either find a way to reduce what they owe or to raise the value of the homes securing the loans, or some of both. In a column in The Financial Times this week , Ken Rogoff, the Harvard economist, suggested central bankers consider “the option of trying to achieve some modest deleveraging through moderate inflation of, say, 4 to 6 percent for several years.” Mr. Rogoff conceded that “any inflation above 2 percent may seem anathema to those who still remember the anti-inflation wars of the 1970s and 1980s.” He was right about that. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” was one of the milder comments I got from the most celebrated veteran of those wars, Paul A. Volcker, the former Fed chairman. And anyway, he added, “Right now they probably could not get inflation if they wanted to.” People are not spending the money they have, he said, adding that the situation reminded him of an era he studied in college — the Great Depression . In an interview, Mr. Rogoff recalled how a parade of economists suggested to Japan that it seek to raise inflation to an announced target after its bubble burst, how Japan did nothing of the kind, and how it never really recovered. The Fed, he said, could make clear that it wanted some inflation and would buy Treasuries until it got that result. “It has to be open-ended,” he said of such a program, not limited to a certain dollar amount of bond purchases, and it needs to be connected to a stated inflation target. The Fed chairman, he said, could say that “If and when inflation starts rising above the path I am aiming for, we will taper back bond purchases and raise interest rates to rein it back in.” As it is, millions of mortgage loans secured by homes are worth far less than the loan amount. That keeps people from moving in search of better opportunities, and it removes an incentive for maintenance spending to preserve the value of the home. Many of those loans will never be paid in full, but there seems to be no route to a quick resolution. To make things worse, we are still fighting about who should take the losses on those loans, and thus over who is in a position to offer a modification that reduces the amount owed. The banks that packaged the loans in private-label mortgage securitizations are being sued by the buyers of the securities and by insurers who foolishly guaranteed the securities. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are pursuing similar claims for mortgages they guaranteed. Moreover, state laws vary. In some states, mortgages are secured only by the value of the home, but in others the buyer is personally liable for paying even if the home’s value plummets. In nonrecourse states, it would be easier to argue that banks should be willing to offer reductions in the amounts owed. The Fed has pushed down interest rates to extremely low levels. That means people who have good credit, and homes worth more than they owe, can refinance and save money. But others cannot. One minor step that the president might be able to take without Congressional action would be to require Freddie and Fannie to offer to refinance mortgages they own or have guaranteed even if the collateral is no longer worth what is owed. That would at least pass on some savings to homeowners in distress. Another idea tossed around has been to have the government force banks to offer principal reductions to underwater borrowers, perhaps in exchange for a portion of any eventual sales proceeds over the new mortgage amount. Any such proposal runs into issues of fairness and huge difficulties deciding which borrowers would or would not be covered. Fears of moral hazard did not stop the government from assuring that lenders to overleveraged banks were paid back, but it may prevent any plan that would seem to help homeowners who took foolish risks. After all, is it fair to bail out someone who went in over his head while doing nothing for a neighbor who acted responsibly? A partial way to deal with that would be to allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the amounts owed to market value. Since that would be available only to homeowners who filed for bankruptcy, it would not be available to those with other assets, and presumably the bank would be no worse off than if it foreclosed. But banks fought the idea and Congress refused to include it in the Dodd-Frank law. Mr. Volcker agrees that something needs to be done to reduce mortgage debt, although he points to a long list of obstacles, starting with moral hazard and including worries that banks do not have enough capital to admit how much they have lost. “But it is going to happen over a period of time,” he said. “It would be a good thing if it could be facilitated.” The chaos that has engulfed financial markets, with new rumors of European bank failures, arose as it became apparent that recovery was unlikely until something was done to write down bad debts, whether American mortgages or Greek government loans, or to make them good again by raising asset values and thus increasing the ability to repay. And yet the anti-inflation warriors continue to fight old battles. There were three dissents from regional Fed presidents when the Fed promised this week to hold down rates for at least two more years. The European Central Bank has been raising rates on the belief that it must vigorously fight any sign of inflation. In the future, central banks will have to realize that debt-financed expansions in asset prices can be a threat. For now, it would be nice if they would at least recognize that major deflations in asset prices can be much more important than the relatively small gains in commodities that show up in the Consumer Price Index .

United States Economy
Inflation (Economics)
Banking and Financial Institutions
Politics and Government


Cash Influx for Major League Soccer Players

Abstract: Each Major League Soccer team will receive $500,000 in additional money over the next five years to spend on players. The league said the funds could be applied to sign or re-sign players who earn more than the maximum salary budget charge and are not high-priced designated players.


The Politics of Trade in Ohio

Abstract: Watching Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton compete with each other to say the nastiest possible thing about the Nafta trade deal has made me think about the politics of abortion. In campaign after campaign for more than 30 years now, Republicans have been denouncing Roe v. Wade. Yet even though they have held the White House for most of that time — and made 12 of the last 14 Supreme Court appointments — abortion remains legal. This straddling has served Republicans well. They have been able to win over voters who care about abortion above all else without alienating swing voters, most of whom, polls show, think it should be legal at least some of the time. Talking tough and governing gently helped the party build a majority. Now come Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, campaigning across Ohio with a similar kind of tough talk about foreign trade. Based on what they’re saying, you’d have to conclude that they believe that Nafta and other trade agreements have caused Ohio’s huge economic problems. “She says speeches don’t put food on the table,” Mr. Obama said in Youngstown. “You know what? Nafta didn’t put food on the table, either.” Later, he went further, claiming that Ohio’s workers have “watched job after job after job disappear because of bad trade deals like Nafta.” Mrs. Clinton’s advisers, meanwhile, have been putting out the word that she tried to persuade her husband not to support Nafta — which liberalized trade with Mexico and Canada — when he was running for president. (He did support it, aggressively, and signed it into law in 1993.) “I’m not just going to talk about what’s wrong with Nafta,” she said in Youngstown, the day after Mr. Obama had been there. “I’m going to fix it and I have a four-point plan to do exactly that.” But when you read this plan, or Mr. Obama’s trade agenda, you discover none of it is particularly radical. Neither candidate calls for a repeal of Nafta, or anything close to it. Both instead want to tinker with the bureaucratic innards of the agreement. They want stronger “labor and environmental standards” and better “enforcement mechanisms.” It’s a bit of an odd situation. They call the country’s trade policy a disaster, and yet their plan to fix it starts with, um, cracking down on Mexican pollution. The question this raises is what Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton would really do about Ohio’s troubles if one of them became president — and whether it would make a difference. There is no doubt that trade has hurt many people in Ohio. In just the last few months, Alcatel-Lucent has announced plans to close a telecommunications equipment factory in Columbus and move some of the jobs to China, while a steel-door plant near Youngstown shut its doors and shipped some of its equipment to Mexico. Back in 2000, the typical Ohio family was still making more money than the typical American family, according to Moody’s Economy.com . But over the last eight years, real median income in Ohio has dropped almost 10 percent, to about $47,000, leaving it $2,300 below the national median. “Trade has winners and losers,” said Alan Blinder , a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and a Democrat, “and there have been a lot of losers in Ohio.” The first problem with what the candidates have been saying is that Ohio’s troubles haven’t really been caused by trade agreements . When Nafta took effect on Jan. 1, 1994, Ohio had 990,000 manufacturing jobs. Two years later, it had 1.03 million. The number remained above one million for the rest of the 1990s, before plummeting in this decade to just 775,000 today. It’s hard to look at this history and conclude Nafta is the villain. In fact, Nafta did little to reduce tariffs on Mexican manufacturers, notes Matthew Slaughter , a Dartmouth economist. Those tariffs were already low before the agreement was signed. A more important cause of Ohio’s jobs exodus is the rise of China, India and the old Soviet bloc, which has brought hundreds of millions of workers into the global economy. New technology and better transportation have then made it easier for jobs to be done in those places and elsewhere. To put it in concrete terms, your credit card’s customer service center isn’t in Ireland because of a new trade deal. All this global competition has brought some big benefits, too. Consider that cars, furniture, clothing, computers and televisions — which are all subject to global competition — have become more affordable, relative to everything else. Medical care, movie tickets and college tuition — all protected from such competition — have become more expensive. So what can be done for Ohio? There is actually a fair amount of agreement among economists on this question. The solution should involve more government investment in infrastructure, the medical sciences, alternative energy and other areas that could produce good new jobs. A more strategic approach to investment, one less based on the whims of individual members of Congress, would also help. “While our competitors — China and others — are investing heavily in infrastructure,” Donald Plusquellic, the mayor of Akron, the world’s onetime rubber capital, told me, “we’ve done a terrible job reinvesting in America.” But as Mr. Slaughter, a former adviser to President Bush, points out, the payoff from these investments won’t come for a long time. They will do little to help former factory workers who have had to take lower-paying jobs — which is one reason that calling for new investments doesn’t bring nearly the cheers on the campaign trail that denouncing Nafta does. The best way to help those workers, Mr. Slaughter argues, is to cut their taxes and make the tax code more progressive. This would allow global trade to continue expanding the country’s economic pie, while making sure that high-income workers weren’t the only ones benefiting. Here, finally, is where we get to the good news about the Ohio campaign. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton favor all these ideas. They both want to invest in infrastructure, science and alternative energy, and they both want to cut taxes for everyone but the affluent. Mr. Obama, in particular, has proposed a cut in payroll taxes, perhaps the most regressive part of the tax code. Over the last week, the candidates’ talk has, at times, been silly and even inaccurate. And Ohio’s problems would certainly be easier to solve if, as Luis Proenza, president of the University of Akron put it, the candidates were “more true to reality and less prone to invective.” But the larger problem is that Ohio’s voters have good reason to be angry. For years, they have been promised that globalization was making the United States a richer country. They’re still waiting for their share of the bounty.

Democratic Party
North American Free Trade Agreement
Presidential Election of 2008
United States Economy
International Trade and World Market
Republican Party
Obama Barack
Clinton Hillary Rodham


In Matchup of Top Coaches, Duke Easily Handles UConn

Abstract: Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Calhoun , the elder statesmen of college basketball coaches, stood together, smiling on the court Friday evening before they stood apart, scowling on the sidelines. Never had a college basketball game pitted two coaches with 800 career victories, and the N.C.A.A. was taking a moment to recognize that. Together, Duke ’s Krzyzewski and Connecticut’s Calhoun had 1,647 victories in more than half of a century of coaching. No matter the outcome, they knew that total could only increase by one Friday. And after a fast-paced, ugly N.I.T. Season Tip-Off final, that notch went in Krzyzewski’s column, as Duke defeated Connecticut, 68-59, at Madison Square Garden. Arizona State beat Louisiana State in the consolation game, 71-52. Krzyzewski now has 839 victories to Calhoun’s 809, putting them fourth and sixth on the career list. “It was a very unusual game,” Krzyzewski said after watching his team miss 53 shots and UConn commit 16 turnovers. “But it was a game where both teams played with a lot of heart.” Duke and UConn had not crossed paths in five years. Their total number of matchups stayed frozen at six, with Calhoun winning the last four, all in the N.C.A.A. tournament. But at least as far as 2009 is concerned, Duke has the upper hand. Ranked No. 7, the Blue Devils (6-0) are on their annual mission to reaffirm their pedigree after failing to advance past the N.C.A.A.’s Round of 16 since 2004. Led by the senior guard Jon Scheyer, who finished with a game-high 19 points, Duke opened up a 10-point gap in the closing minutes of a breathless first half. The Blue Devils went into the break ahead by 37-28. “He’s the most important player we have,” Krzyzewski said of Scheyer, who was named the tournament’s most outstanding player. Even as Duke’s shooting became more erratic in the second half — the Blue Devils shot just under 29 percent for the game — UConn (4-1) failed to capitalize. The Huskies’ repeated efforts to push the ball inside got them nowhere and they had little to show for their efforts on the perimeter. The result was an 18-8 Duke run to open the second half, leaving the sputtering Huskies trailing by 19 points with a little under 13 minutes left. Against a smaller L.S.U. opponent, the 13th-ranked Huskies dominated the defensive glass and finished with 13 blocks. But against Duke and the Blue Devils’ towering 7-1 center, Brian Zoubek, the Huskies were outrebounded, 45-39. UConn also missed 13 free throws. Guard Jerome Dyson was one of only three Huskies in double-figures, finishing with 15 points. “If you hold somebody to 28 percent, you can’t lose,” Calhoun said. “But if you give them 25 offensive rebounds and can’t make a foul shot, you’ve got problems.”

Duke University
Basketball
Krzyzewski Mike
Calhoun Jim
College Athletics
Coaches and Managers
University of Connecticut


McDonagh Remains a Ranger

Abstract: The Rangers fulfilled perhaps their biggest off-season priority Monday, re-signing Ryan McDonagh, their best young defenseman, to a six-year contract. But two of the club’s key restricted free agents remain unsigned. “I couldn’t be happier about it,” McDonagh said. “It’s just great to see the Rangers show confidence in me as far as the terms and the years — everything together is a great feeling.” The contract for McDonagh, 24, is worth $4.7 million a season. That is a significant raise over the $1.3 million per year he earned under his entry-level deal, and a salary that makes him the Rangers’ highest paid defenseman. Given the large contracts other defensemen are receiving, however, it is considered a bargain, and it gives General Manager Glen Sather a little more flexibility as he tries to finalize next season’s roster. McDonagh’s contract also contains a limited no-trade clause over its last three years. The details of the contract were confirmed by McDonagh’s agent, Ben Hankinson. Sather is still trying to sign the first-line center Derek Stepan, 23, and the top-six wing Carl Hagelin, 24, who are coming off entry-level deals worth $875,000 a year. After signing McDonagh, Sather has $6.56 million left to spend before reaching the salary cap, and it is believed he can sign Stepan and Hagelin with that money. But he may not have enough left to re-sign Mats Zuccarello, the wing useful for his skill at shootouts and his stickhandling on the power play. The same goes for Justin Falk, a defenseman acquired from Minnesota last week. Falk’s salary last season was $825,000. Zuccarello’s was $700,000, but he is seeking something closer to the $1.75 million-a-year deal he had with the Rangers from 2010 to 2012. McDonagh said he had not spoken with the Rangers’ new coach, Alain Vigneault, but was looking forward to playing more of an offensive role in Vigneault’s system. McDonagh said he had “nothing but respect” for the former coach John Tortorella, who was fired in May. “He was my first coach when I first got in the league, and he gave me an opportunity and taught me a lot, especially about the mental side of the game,” McDonagh said. “I wish him nothing but the best.” McDonagh, who is getting married this summer, said he was glad to have his contract negotiations settled. “It’ll be nice not to have to worry about that going into what will be a very special day,” he said.

Ice hockey
Rangers
Ryan McDonagh
Derek Stepan
Carl Hagelin
Mats Zuccarello


Jack Griffin Appointed Chief of Tribune Publishing

Abstract: Jack Griffin, who was ousted as chief executive of Time Inc. in 2011, will become the new head of Tribune Publishing in mid-April, the Tribune Company announced Thursday. The appointment of Mr. Griffin as chief executive comes at a crucial moment for the Tribune Company as its creditor owners prepare to spin off its eight newspapers — including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun — from its more lucrative broadcast assets. In an era of dwindling newspaper advertising, other companies, including Time Warner and News Corporation, have made similar decisions to cleave their print assets from higher-performing broadcast and cable assets. Still, the Tribune Company’s plan has been particularly criticized as unworkable. Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show the new publishing company would be saddled with debt while the parent company would maintain the physical buildings and charge the newspapers rent worth roughly $30 million a year. Industry analysts and union members said such burdens threatened the newspapers’ future viability. Although he was an experienced print executive who had headed Meredith Corporation, the Des Moines-based publisher of magazines like Better Homes and Gardens, Mr. Griffin ran into trouble during his tenure at Time Inc. Within six months of being appointed as the first outsider to lead the company’s magazine group, he was fired and rebuked for his brusque style by Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Inc.'s parent company, Time Warner. “Although Jack is an extremely accomplished executive, I concluded that his leadership style and approach did not mesh with Time Inc. and Time Warner,” Mr. Bewkes wrote in an email to his staff. At the time, Mr. Griffin’s supporters maintained that the problem was Time’s unwillingness to make the changes necessary to compete in an increasingly tough market. In the three years since leaving Time, Mr. Griffin has run Empirical Media, a New York-based consulting firm whose clients included the Tribune Company. In addition to Mr. Griffin’s appointment, Eddy W. Hartenstein will step down as publisher and chief executive of The Los Angeles Times and will serve as nonexecutive chairman for the publishing company. “This is an experienced leadership team, all of whom have the necessary vision and expertise to lead Tribune Publishing into its next chapter,” the Tribune Company’s chief executive, Peter Liguori, said in a statement.

Appointments and Executive Changes
Tribune Company
Eddy W Hartenstein
Jack Griffin


Rangers Are Often at Their Best When Facing Elimination

Abstract: The Rangers, the N.H.L.’s best team in the regular season, enter Friday’s Game 5 of their second-round series against the Washington Capitals trailing by three games to one. But the Rangers have been in this position many times in the past three seasons and have excelled when on the brink. They are 11-3 when facing elimination since the 2011-12 season, reaching the Eastern Conference finals once and the Stanley Cup finals once. They have not lost a home game when facing elimination since 2007. “The core has past experience in dealing with this situation,” Coach Alain Vigneault said Thursday. “I expect them to pass on their experience and leadership to the remainder of the group.” Goalie Henrik Lundqvist, in particular, has been a leader, allowing only 20 goals in 14 elimination games since 2012, with a .957 save percentage. 2012 First Round vs. Ottawa Senators The Rangers were the top seed in the East, but they got all they could handle from eighth-seeded Ottawa and were stymied by goalie Craig Anderson. The Rangers were booed by the crowd at Madison Square Garden after losing Game 5, 2-0 , to fall behind, three games to two. But they won Game 6 in Ottawa, 3-2, with Chris Kreider, in only his fourth N.H.L. game, scoring his first professional goal to win it. In Game 7, the Rangers jumped to a 2-0 lead with goals from defensemen Marc Staal and Dan Girardi and held on for a 2-1 victory . Lundqvist had 26 saves, and his teammates blocked another 23 shots. Image Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist, left, greeted Capitals left wing Alex Ovechkin after Game 7 of a first-round playoff series in 2013. Credit Alex Brandon/Associated Press Lundqvist: 3 goals allowed on 54 shots Second Round vs. Washington Capitals Ahead by three games to two, the Rangers lost Game 6 in Washington, 2-1, falling behind on an Alex Ovechkin goal 1 minutes 28 seconds into the first period and never recovering. They once again found themselves facing elimination against a lower-seeded team. The Rangers got the early goal in Game 7, with Brad Richards scoring 1:32 in. Michael Del Zotto added a goal midway through third to make the score 2-0, but the Capitals answered 38 seconds later to set up a tense final stretch, with the Rangers prevailing, 2-1 . Lundqvist: 1 goal allowed on 23 shots Eastern Conference Finals vs. Devils When the conference finals came around, the Rangers had been repeatedly pushed to the brink, playing 11 one-goal games and six overtime periods. The Devils were well rested, having played two fewer games than the Rangers and having had almost a week off before the series started. The Devils won Games 4 and 5 by a combined score of 9-4 to take a 3-2 series lead. They jumped to a 2-0 lead in the first period of Game 6, but they squandered it in the second. Adam Henrique’s goal 1:03 into overtime won the series for the Devils. Lundqvist: 3 goals allowed on 29 shots 2013 First Round vs. Washington Capitals Washington has blown series leads to the Rangers before. In 2013, the third-seeded Capitals were ahead of the sixth-seeded Rangers, two games to none and three games to two. But Lundqvist had shutouts in Games 6 and 7 as the Rangers won a Game 7 on the road for the first time in franchise history. Lundqvist: 0 goals allowed on 62 shots Second Round vs. Boston Bruins Boston built a 3-0 series lead and was ahead by 2-0 early in Game 4 . The Rangers closed to 2-1 when Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask fell down in the crease , and they tied it when Derek Stepan stole the puck from Zdeno Chara behind the net. The Bruins went ahead, 3-2, in the third, but the Rangers evened the score two minutes later. Kreider scored the game-winning goal in overtime, but the Rangers’ charmed life did not last long. Boston won Game 5 , 3-1. Lundqvist: 5 goals allowed on 71 shots 2014 First Round vs. Philadelphia Flyers The Rangers fell to Philadelphia in Game 6, 5-2 , to claim an unwanted N.H.L. record: 12 losses in a row when holding a lead in a playoff series, a streak that stretched to 2009. But the next day, the Rangers improved to 6-0 at the Garden in Game 7s since 1992, winning by 2-1 . “This team comes up big when we have to,” defenseman Dan Girardi said at the time. Lundqvist: 1 goal allowed on 27 shots Image Rangers center Derick Brassard put the puck past Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury during Game 6 of a second-round playoff series in 2014. Credit Jason Szenes for The New York Times Second Round vs. Pittsburgh Penguins A year ago, the Rangers were in the same situation as now: trailing a second-round series by 3-1. But this series against the Penguins will end up part of the team lore for years to come. The day after a dismal Game 4 loss, the mother of forward Martin St. Louis died. He decided to play Game 5, and, inspired by his presence, the Rangers won, 5-1 . St. Louis scored the first goal of Game 6, played on Mother’s Day, leading the Rangers to a 3-1 victory . By Game 7, destiny seemed to be on the Rangers’ side. Lundqvist stopped 35 of 36 shots, and Brad Richards scored the winning goal on an assist from St. Louis in the 2-1 victory. It was the first time in franchise history that the Rangers had won a playoff series after trailing, three games to one. Now they are trying to do it again. “I think there’s certainly a group of us in the room who knows how much hard work it takes to get ourselves back into this thing,” Stepan said Thursday. “I think that’s about all we can really take from last year, the work it’s going to take. “At the same time, we can’t focus on winning the series. We have to focus on winning Game 5. That’s all we can do. I think that’s one of the things we really did a good job with last year. Just focusing on winning one game at a time.” Lundqvist: 3 goals allowed on 105 shots Stanley Cup Finals vs. Los Angeles Kings The Rangers dropped the first three games of the finals to Kings, two in overtime. Faced with the possibility of the Kings lifting the Stanley Cup on Garden ice, Lundqvist was stalwart, making 40 saves. Anton Stralman and Stepan each batted the puck away from the goal line to preserve a 2-1 victory . But 48 saves from Lundqvist could not keep the Kings’ hands off the Cup in Game 5, which Los Angeles won, 3-2 , in the second overtime. Lundqvist: 4 goals allowed on 92 shots

Ice hockey
Playoffs
Rangers
Ottawa Senators
Washington Capitals
Devils
Bruins


Taxi’s Grille Has Fried Chicken Wings for Super Bowl Munching

Abstract: On Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 7, Peter Ambrosio, the owner of Taxi’s Grille in Huntington, expects to sell more than 500 dozen fried chicken wings. That’s roughly 1,000 pounds of takeout, just in time for the big game. “During football season, we’re cranking out the wings,” Mr. Ambrosio said. “Super Bowl Sunday is my busiest day of the year.” The plump, tasty, fresh (not frozen) wings are deep-fried and flipped in one of 12 house-made sauces. Choices include honey barbecue, teriyaki, mild, medium, hot and suicide, a spicy blend of four hot peppers. They are $7.95 for a dozen, $32.95 for 5 dozen and $57.95 for a platter of 10 dozen. Sides of celery sticks and blue cheese dip are included. The original Taxi’s Grille, in the heart of the village, which also was owned by Mr. Ambrosio, closed in 2003. This one, a retro-style order-at-the-counter diner seating 16, with a bigger menu and ample parking, popped up just outside the village in 2008. It has a big-screen television that is usually tuned to whatever ballgame is on. The menu also includes Philly cheese steak stuffed with thin-sliced rib-eye, sautéed onions and a squiggle of Cheez Whiz (or other cheese) on a hero roll ($7.99) or crunchy garlic bread ($8.49). Toppings of sautéed peppers, jalapeños, mushrooms or bacon are 50 to 75 cents each. The thick, skin-on French fries are hand-cut ($2.50 for a regular order, $3.25 for large). There are also sweet potato fries ($3.25 and $3.75), Sabrett hot dogs ($2) and hamburgers ($4.25). Party platters should be ordered in advance; usually, a half-hour’s notice is fine, Mr. Ambrosio said, but for Super Bowl Sunday, customers should call a day or two ahead. The grille delivers within a two-mile radius. SUSAN M. NOVICK Taxi’s Grille, 217 New York Avenue, Huntington; (631) 470-9480. taxisgrille.com . Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday to Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.


Ringleader of British Jewelry Theft Is in Failing Health, Lawyer Says

Abstract: LONDON — The white-haired ringleader behind an audacious $20 million jewelry theft at a safe deposit company in central London is in critical condition, a court heard at a sentencing on Monday. The thief, Brian Reader, 77, and three others — John Collins, 75; Daniel Jones, 61; and Terrence Perkins, 67 — have admitted breaking into Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd. in London’s historic jewelry district around Easter last year. Prosecutors have called the case the largest burglary in English history. After disabling the alarm, the gang used diamond-tip drills to bore a hole through more than six feet of reinforced concrete. Once inside, the thieves ransacked 73 security deposit boxes, stuffing plastic garbage bins with $20 million worth of diamonds, emeralds, gold and cash. At a sentencing hearing on Monday at Woolwich Crown Court, Mr. Reader’s lawyer, James Scobie, said his client had been hospitalized after having a stroke at Belmarsh prison in London. Mr. Scobie said Mr. Reader’s imprisonment had contributed to his poor health. “It may still be that he does not have many months to live,” Mr. Scobie said. He added that Mr. Reader was a “very sick and old man.” Mr. Scobie said his client also had prostate cancer, was blind in one eye and could barely hear. Mr. Reader did not attend the sentencing hearing on Monday. The age of the men and their bungling during the theft and its aftermath have helped fan a perception of them among some as endearing rogues. But the police have emphasized that the criminals were dangerous and had ruined many lives in the burglary, including those of older victims who had kept their life savings at the safe deposit company. On Monday, as the prosecutor summarized the case against the gang, Mr. Collins, Mr. Jones and Mr. Perkins sat behind glass paneling at the back of the court. Wearing glasses, they looked ahead with blank expressions as the prosecutor went over the facts of the case. But when the prosecutor read out the men’s expletive-laced boasts about the burglary — captured in the weeks after the burglary by surveillance equipment placed in some of their cars and at a pub — Mr. Jones suddenly smirked. Peter Rowlands, the defense lawyer for Mr. Perkins, argued that his client was ailing, and took 29 medical tablets a day. Mr. Perkins was part of a gang with sawed-off shotguns who stole 6 million pounds, or about $8.5 million, from a security company in East London in 1983. Prosecutors said Mr. Perkins absconded midway through his 22-year sentence for that crime and was on the run for nearly two decades before being rearrested. But Mr. Rowlands told the court that Mr. Perkins had not been on the run but rather had been living with his mother, and that the police had not “knocked on his door.” The four pleaded guilty to the Hatton Garden burglary last year. In January, a jury in London found three other men — Hugh Doyle, 48; William Lincoln, 50; and Carl Wood, 58 — guilty of involvement in the burglary . They have not been sentenced. “We may never see another heist like this one,” said Ed Hall, a leading prosecutor in the case. “You see one of these every 30 years.” The four were all experienced criminals, but their skills predated the digital age. Police officers later found the book “ Forensics for Dummies ” at one of their homes. They continued to use their cellphones even after the burglary, helping detectives to trace them. While the police have uncovered some of the stolen goods — hidden under a tombstone in a Victorian cemetery in London — a vast amount remains unaccounted for, prosecutors said. One mystery hovering over the case is the identity of another man, known as Basil , who was filmed by security cameras during the theft but who has not been caught. In February, Mr. Jones wrote a letter to Sky News saying that Basil was a former police officer who was involved in private security. Scotland Yard did not comment on the specific claims of Mr. Jones, who prosecutors say has misled the authorities in the past. The police have offered a reward of £20,000 for information leading to Basil’s arrest.


Celtics and Warriors Finish Deal for David Lee

Abstract: The Golden State Warriors completed a trade sending the two-time All-Star forward David Lee to the Boston Celtics for Gerald Wallace and Chris Babb, the teams said. The Warriors and the Celtics agreed to the deal July 7. ■ Guard Matthew Dellavedova, who drew attention with his hustling defense in the N.B.A. finals, re-signed with the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team said. (REUTERS) ■ The Miami Heat trimmed their payroll, trading point guard Shabazz Napier to the Orlando Magic and guard Zoran Dragic to the Celtics and then waiving forward Henry Walker. Dragic, the brother of Heat guard Goran Dragic, appeared in 16 games.

Basketball
Gerald Wallace
Chris Babb
Sports Trades
Celtics
Golden State Warriors
David Lee


Queens Man, Possibly Armed, Shot by Police

Abstract: Police officers shot and wounded a Queens man yesterday who had been threatening people with what appeared to be a handgun, but may have been a pellet gun, the police said. The man, whose identity has not been released, was standing in front of his home in the Rosedale section about 9 p.m., waving what appeared to be a firearm, the police said. It is unclear what happened once officers arrived, but the police shot the man. He was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, where he was in critical condition last night, the police said. An officer involved in the shooting was taken to the hospital with a shoulder injury, though the nature of the injury was not immediately clear, the police said.


Alejandro Bedoya Considers the Next Stop in His Soccer Odyssey

Abstract: TORRANCE, Calif. — Imagine you are an American professional athlete entering free agency. You have to decide where next to play. Money will be a huge factor. Location matters, too. How about playing time? You have a whole list of concerns. Now imagine you are a promising American pro soccer player. Take those issues, pile on several more, and, just so you know, some of those issues you will need to translate from Swedish. “There are many, many, many variables,” Alejandro Bedoya, a player facing these issues, said last week, laughing. “So many more factors come into play.” Bedoya, a 25-year-old midfielder raised in Miami, has been participating this month in the United States national team’s training camp. Of the 25 players invited, he was the only one not attached to a club team, having become a free agent when his short-term contract with Helsingborgs IF , the reigning champion of Sweden, expired earlier this month. It is not that teams are not vying to sign him. Bedoya, who has also played in Scotland, has been receiving updates every morning from his agent, Lyle Yorks, about clubs coming forward with offers. As of Thursday night, he was considering opportunities from more than 15 clubs — in Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland, as well as Major League Soccer. Last week, a national team staffer went around the team hotel asking players where they needed to fly after Tuesday’s exhibition match against Canada in Houston. “I was the only one who responded, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Bedoya said. Bedoya’s circumstance offers a glimpse of a process common among American soccer players, who continue to search far and wide for opportunities in the world’s most popular sport. And each choice comes stocked with dizzying implications. Athletes often have reservations about whether they will get along with their coach. Bedoya, who is fluent in English and Spanish and conversational in Swedish, cannot be sure whether they will even speak the same language. Players in other sports in the United States sometimes dislike the idea of moving from the West Coast to the East. Bedoya is pondering jobs more than 6,000 miles from where he grew up. Other things, Bedoya can ignore. He is single, so he does not have to worry about moving a family overseas. And he probably does not need to consider whether he will face overt racial abuse, a lingering problem in some European leagues. Add politics, climate and food — issues that concern players in all sports, but ones seemingly magnified for globe-trotting soccer players. “Maybe the culture is crazy and maybe I never pick up the language,” Bedoya said. “Maybe the money is really good. But am I going to be happy there? I think to play at your highest level, you have to be satisfied in life, also.” But there is more. For instance, in no other major sport does the national team represent such a life and career goal. Bedoya was on the United States’ preliminary 30-man roster for the 2010 World Cup before missing the final cut. He wants a better outcome for the World Cup next year in Brazil, assuming the United States is successful in the final regional qualifying round, which begins Feb. 6 at Honduras. “I can’t speak for everybody, but I assume that the World Cup represents the pinnacle for any soccer player,” Bedoya said. “I would take less money to find a club situation that will get me to playing time, a path to becoming a better player, and a spot for 2014.” For that reason, Bedoya said he was unlikely to sign for any of the interested clubs from Eastern Europe, out of the spotlight, even though they offered the most money. Growth and stability are his main concerns. United States Coach Jurgen Klinsmann said he wanted to see Bedoya find a stable environment. “He needs a club that challenges him,” Klinsmann said. “He has to be a regular starter. He has to be a consistent performer for his team. And once he breaks into the team, if it’s in Europe or even in M.L.S., he has to become a leader in the team.” But finding stability is not so simple. Teams that add players over the winter often do so while trying to avoid relegation to a lower league. Bedoya may settle nicely into a squad, only for it to be demoted. “Fighting relegation is not easy, and being a part of that, it can get messy,” Bedoya said. “For your future: it’s, ‘What happens if we’re relegated? Am I doing to have to switch clubs again? Is my salary cut?’ It’s just more to think about.” Despite his free-agent status, Bedoya said he felt pressed to find a team before February, when the international transfer period closes. But that feeling of urgency has clashed with the impulse to see what other offers might materialize. Maybe another team — maybe from another country, perhaps another continent, and bringing a whole set of professional and personal issues — will come calling.

Soccer
2014 World Cup
Jurgen Klinsmann
Alejandro Bedoya
US Men's Soccer Team


9/11 Memorial Access Will Be Limited

Abstract: For years after the Sept. 11 memorial opens this fall, access will be limited, the president of the memorial foundation said on Monday. Ultimately, visitors will be able to approach the memorial and its green spaces and cobblestone plazas from all sides. But for years, said Joe Daniels, the president of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum , the memorial will be surrounded by the construction sites of skyscrapers and a transit hub, and visitors will be able to use only one entrance. Organizers will observe strict capacity limits for safety reasons, Mr. Daniels said. Plans call for a limit of 1,500 visitors at a time, with special consideration given to relatives of Sept. 11 victims. Visitors will have to sign up online for available spots and print tickets. The foundation president presented details of the opening to a downtown Manhattan community board on Monday night. The 1,776-foot 1 World Trade Center , formerly known as the Freedom Tower, is being built just northwest of the memorial site and will not open until 2013. Hundreds of trees will still need to be planted on the eight-acre memorial plaza after Sept. 11, 2011, and cobblestones will need to be filled in. The transit hub will not be completed until at least 2015. Visitors from the general public will be allowed in Sept. 12, the day after a 10th-anniversary ceremony for invited guests. The “vast majority” of the four million to five million visitors expected to visit the memorial the first year are expected to get in, Mr. Daniels said.

September 11 (2001)
World Trade Center (NYC)
Monuments and Memorials
Manhattan (NYC)


Google Intensifies Focus on Its Cardboard Virtual Reality Device

Abstract: SAN FRANCISCO — Google has seen the future, and it is littered with cardboard boxes. At its Google I/O developer conference here on Thursday, the search giant announced several programs that aim to put its virtual reality viewer, called Cardboard, at the center of a growing online world in which people can use their smartphone and YouTube to watch videos rendered in 3-D. Google introduced its virtual reality viewer — a cardboard box, with some lenses and a magnet, that looks a lot like a plastic View-Master toy — as a gift at last year’s I/O conference. The idea was to create an inexpensive virtual reality device that allowed anyone with a smartphone to do things like fly through a Google Earth map of Chicago or view personal pictures in three dimensions. It is a comically simple contraption: A smartphone slips into the front so it sits just inches from a user’s eyes. Peering through a pair of cheap, plastic lenses renders the images on the phone’s screen in 3-D. It costs around $4. Typical of the Google playbook, the company put Cardboard’s specifications online so hobbyists and manufacturers could build them. In the year since, people have made viewers from foam, aluminum and walnut, and the Cardboard app was downloaded a million or so times. “We wanted the viewer to be as dumb as possible and as cheap as possible because we basically wanted to open VR for everyone,” said David Coz, an engineer in Google’s Paris office who developed Cardboard. At this year’s I/O, Google is doubling down on Cardboard with initiatives meant to expand virtual reality to as many phones as possible. First of these is a new software kit that will make it easier for developers to build Cardboard apps for iPhones. The company also redesigned the cardboard hardware so that it is easier to fold and can now accommodate any smartphone, including popular, larger-screen, so-called phablets. Image Google's virtual reality viewer, a cardboard box with some lenses and a magnet, was introduced as a gift at last year’s I/O conference. Credit Peter Earl McCollough for The New York Times The Cardboard update is a modest offering compared with the product splashes of previous Google conferences, which have included a spherical entertainment system that was never released and Google Glass, the much hyped and now discontinued computerized eyewear that caused significant privacy concerns. With Cardboard, Google’s virtual reality is decidedly low cost and low frills, but, as in other Google efforts, like the free Android software that is the most widely used operating system in the world , it seems meant more to amass an audience than make money. Over the last year, Google has developed a 360-degree camera that looks like a chandelier rigged with 16 GoPro video recorders, and currently has about a dozen of them filming sights around the world. When run through Google’s software and processors, the footage will turn into a virtual reality rendering that tries to mimic the view from a human eye. Google said it would allow people to start uploading virtual reality videos to YouTube this summer. During a recent demonstration at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus, Clay Bavor, vice president for product management for Google’s virtual reality efforts, demonstrated a video of a courtyard at the University of Washington. The video felt like an immersive version of the company’s Street View mapping product that displays street-level views of city streets and historical sites. Over time, the company is hoping this real-life version of virtual reality will grow into a vast collection of videos and experiences similar to how YouTube videos are shared now. Google also said on Thursday it had formed a partnership with GoPro to develop a version of its virtual reality recorder that anybody could buy. The companies did not list a price for the recorder, but given that it has 16 cameras that retail for $400 each, it is likely to be expensive. Where any of this goes is anyone’s guess. One might imagine videos from the front row of a concert or a television channel filming breaking news in 3-D. At the same time, one might remember that Google has a history of announcing new products and initiatives that flop, like Google Glass. And virtual reality has for decades been the next big thing that never actually happened. Now companies like Facebook, Sony and Microsoft are placing big bets on both virtual reality, a computer-generated version of the world, as well as augmented reality, or AR, in which real-world experiences are enhanced with computer-generated images. Analysts expect the first applications will be in video games. But in time they say virtual reality experiences could feature in everything from business meetings to doctor’s appointments. Image Mr. Bavor holding the $4 virtual reality viewer known as, and made of, Cardboard. The phone is not included. Credit Peter Earl McCollough for The New York Times Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has on several occasions said he believed virtual reality could be the next computing platform. That belief is enough to drive significant investment. “The shift from desktop to mobile caught so many off guard and so dramatically impacted the competitive landscape, every tech and media company is going to have to be prepared for just the possibility that VR/AR will become the next platform,” wrote Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Securities. At its conference, Google also announced Google Photos, a photo app that comes with free, unlimited storage of the uncountable numbers of photos that people amass on their devices. There were new search features that allow people to do things like use their thumb to search for a restaurant in their text messages, instead of opening a new application. In addition, the company outlined a new operating system, Brillo, that is based on Android and will allow household devices like refrigerators and thermostats to talk to one another and their owner’s phone. Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for products, suggested that users could use it to turn on their oven with a voice command. Cardboard was the final act of the show, which featured a giant screen that wrapped around a San Francisco auditorium as if to mimic the experience of being immersed in a deep, three-dimensional world. Beyond the virtual reality videos it plans on putting on YouTube, Google is also using its Cardboard device in its growing education efforts. Over the last year, the company has been running a trial called Expeditions in about 100 classrooms, in which teachers can use the viewers to take their students on a tour of world sites. Last year, Google was the lead investor of a group of companies that invested $542 million in Magic Leap, a Florida company that is developing augmented reality technology that creates imaginative images like an elephant that can fit in one’s hand. And Mr. Bavor said the company had made “a significant investment” in virtual reality that goes well beyond the efforts presented at I/O. He would not say how much money or how many full-time employees are dedicated to these efforts, but virtual reality has grown to occupy a small building on Google’s sprawling Mountain View campus. “The upshot is we are making a big investment in VR and this whole space well beyond Cardboard,” Mr. Bavor said. “This reality-capture system and amazing software that powers it, that has been a yearlong investment and is just one of the many things we have brewing.”

Virtual reality
Google
Wearable Computing
GoPro


Coloradan Finds a Rugby Home Where the Sport Is King

Abstract: WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Chris Baumann has racked up plenty of miles over the last few years in his quest to play rugby. Baumann, a Colorado native, has spent time with the Scottish club East Kilbride, played a club season in Japan for Yokohama Country & Athletic Club and had a stint in Australia with the University of the Sunshine Coast team and in Sydney with the Randwick team — all four amateur clubs — before helping the Denver Stampede win the inaugural PRO Rugby title in the United States. Now Baumann, 29, is in New Zealand, playing on his first professional contract outside the United States with the Wellington provincial team in the Mitre 10 Cup competition, which is ranked only behind the New Zealand All Blacks and Super Rugby, in New Zealand. Baumann, a tighthead prop who has played nine times for the USA Eagles national team, is one of a growing number of Americans who are playing professionally abroad. Most play for clubs in Europe, though, and it is still a rarity to see an American playing rugby in New Zealand, where it is the national sport. Eric Fry played for Manawatu in 2012, and this year Baumann and New Zealand-born Tony Lamborn are the only Eagles players playing in the Mitre 10 Cup. Baumann’s opportunity came courtesy of Eagles Assistant Coach Marty Veale, a New Zealander, who suggested that Wellington take a look after the club’s incumbent tighthead prop, Jeffery Toomaga-Allen, was injured. ‘‘Marty Veale sent some footage, and they said, ‘Yeah, send him over,’ ’’ Baumann said. “I had nothing to lose because if I didn’t do well, I would just get sent home.” But after impressing during preseason matches in what was essentially a tryout, Baumann has become a mainstay in the Wellington front row since August, starting every match so far. Wellington Coach Earl Va’a has liked what Baumann, a 6-foot, 260-pound prop, has brought to the team — aside from Baumann’s eye-catching mullet hairstyle. “He’s definitely brought a bad haircut! We’re talking to him about that!” joked Va’a. “He’s a great character. He works hard. He’s a student of the game and always asking questions and always wants to learn.” Baumann came to rugby relatively late in his athletic career and played hockey and football until his first year at the University of Wyoming. But he knew plenty about the Wellington club and its opponents, after watching the provincial competition on television. ‘‘That kind of made it pretty exciting when I did come over here,” he said. “I already knew about all the teams and their stadiums and thought how cool it would be to play in them.” Still, there was a steep learning curve. “The full-time training has been very . . . I don’t even know the word for it,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s definitely put my body to levels it hasn’t experienced before. The week-in, week-out level of competition that’s something that doesn’t happen in the U.S., either.” “The club competition in the U.S. is actually pretty good. It’s just spread out and sporadic as far as levels of play is concerned,” he said. “You do get some very good teams put together. There are definitely hotbeds, but it’s not like this.” Baumann admits he is not much of a planner and has not looked beyond the end of Wellington’s season, which will be over by the end of this month. “We’re happy to have him here,” said Va’a. “Hopefully we can extend his stay here for a longer period if that’s possible.” Baumann’s future is also likely to include more Eagles matches in November. The team will play the Maori All Blacks, the New Zealand team featuring players of Maori heritage, in Chicago, then tests against Romania and Tonga.

New Zealand
Chris Baumann
Wellington Rugby Team
PRO Rugby


What Would Scalia Want in His Successor? A Dissent Offers Clues

Abstract: WASHINGTON — What sort of person would Justice Antonin Scalia have wanted President Obama to name as his successor? We know more than you might think. In a largely overlooked passage in his dissent from the court’s decision in June establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage , he left detailed suggestions. Avoid “tall-building lawyers,” especially ones who work in skyscrapers in New York. Find someone who did not go to law school at Harvard or Yale. Look for a candidate from the Southwest. Consider an evangelical Christian. Justice Scalia was criticizing the lack of diversity of the court he sat on, and he did not exclude himself. He was right as a factual matter: Supreme Court justices these days are by many measures remarkably similar, giving the court the insular quality of a private club or a faculty lounge. The same-sex marriage decision, he said, underscored the obligation of the president to diversify the Supreme Court. “To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine,” Justice Scalia wrote, “is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.” How Long Does It Take to Confirm a Supreme Court Nominee? Republicans and Democrats are arguing over whether President Obama, whose term expires in 342 days, should try to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat. To be sure, the court is by some standards reasonably diverse. For the first time it has three women, one of whom is Hispanic. It has an African-American member, only the second in its history. On the other hand, Justice Scalia wrote, the court “consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School.” Justice Scalia attended Harvard, as did five other members of the court. The other three went to Yale. There is one asterisk, Justice Elena Kagan joked in 2012. “Justice Ginsburg spent one year at Columbia,” said Justice Kagan, a former dean of Harvard Law School. “You know, slumming it.” (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent two years at Harvard Law School but then moved to New York with her husband and earned her law degree from Columbia.) Since Justice John Paul Stevens retired in 2010, the court, for the first time, has no Protestant member. Justice Scalia was Catholic, as are five other justices. The other three are Jewish. In his dissent from June, Justice Scalia lamented this state of affairs, writing, “Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination.” Justice Scalia also surveyed the lack of geographical diversity on his court. “Four of the nine are natives of New York City,” he wrote. Indeed, every borough but Staten Island was represented. Justice Scalia was from Queens. Justice Ginsburg is from Brooklyn, Justice Kagan is from Manhattan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx. “Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States,” Justice Scalia wrote. “Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between,” he added, referring to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is from Indiana. “Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count),” he added, discounting the backgrounds of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was born in Sacramento, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who was born in San Francisco. In general, Justice Scalia seemed suspicious of elite legal opinion, suggesting that it reliably espoused liberal orthodoxies. “The predominant attitude of tall-building lawyers with respect to the questions presented in these cases,” he wrote, referring to the same-sex marriage cases before the court, “is suggested by the fact that the American Bar Association deemed it in accord with the wishes of its members to file a brief in support of the petitioners.” There are other ways in which the current court may be out of touch with ordinary lawyers, to say nothing of ordinary Americans. Three of the current justices are former Supreme Court law clerks. Only one has served as a trial judge, and none has served on a state court. Not one has run for public office. Highlights From Justice Antonin Scalia’s Opinions The tenure of the conservative justice spans almost three decades, and includes a legacy of sharply written opinions. All of the justices but one are former federal appeals court judges. With one exception, those eight served on what might be called the court of appeals for the Acela Circuit, in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington. These trends are new. Before Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, about a third of the nominations to the Supreme Court went to sitting judges. Since 1953, more than two-thirds have. In 1946, for instance, eight of the nine justices had not been sitting judges when they were appointed, Timothy P. O’Neill wrote in a 2007 article in The Oklahoma Law Review criticizing the current uniformity of the backgrounds on the court. The article was titled “ The Stepford Justices .” The decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the towering judicial landmark that struck down segregation in public schools, was written by Earl Warren, a former governor of California. Among the justices who joined the unanimous decision were Hugo L. Black, a former senator; Felix Frankfurter, a former law professor; William O. Douglas, who had served as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Robert H. Jackson, who had been the United States attorney general. Justice Scalia wrote in the June dissent that he wished various kinds of diversity did not matter in judicial appointments. “Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular constituency is not (or should not be) relevant,” he wrote. But he added that a court capable of finding a right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution was doing something other than using legal skill to interpret legal materials, meaning presidents should consider factors other than legal acumen. “The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges , answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage,” he wrote. Mr. Obama will consider many factors in deciding on the next nominee. He will no doubt nominate someone to the left of Justice Scalia. But he may want to listen to the departed justice’s plea to broaden the court’s profile.

Supreme Court,SCOTUS
Antonin Scalia
Barack Obama
Judiciary
Appointments and Executive Changes


Paul A. Samuelson, Who Reshaped Economics, Dies at 94

Abstract: Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , which Mr. Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centers of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity. When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson,” said Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague of Mr. Samuelson’s at M.I.T. Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the university, among them Mr. Solow as well as others who would go on to become Nobel laureates like George A. Akerlof, Robert F. Engle III, Lawrence R. Klein, Paul Krugman , Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton and Joseph E. Stiglitz . Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, “Economics,” first published in 1948, was the nation’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20 languages, it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared. “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks,” Mr. Samuelson said. His textbook taught college students how to think about economics. His technical work — especially his discipline-shattering Ph.D. thesis, immodestly titled “The Foundations of Economic Analysis” — taught professional economists how to ply their trade. Between the two books, Mr. Samuelson redefined modern economics. The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes , the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong push from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to restore them. Many economics students would never again rest comfortably with the 19th-century view that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention. That lesson was reinforced in 2008, when the international economy slipped into the steepest downturn since the Great Depression , when Keynesian economics was born. When the Depression began, governments stood pat or made matters worse by trying to balance fiscal budgets and erecting trade barriers. But 80 years later, having absorbed the Keynesian teaching of Mr. Samuelson and his followers, most industrialized countries took corrective action, raising government spending, cutting taxes, keeping exports and imports flowing and driving short-term interest rates to near zero. Lessons for Kennedy Mr. Samuelson explained Keynesian economics to American presidents, world leaders, members of Congress and the Federal Reserve Board, not to mention other economists. He was a consultant to the United States Treasury , the Bureau of the Budget and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers . His most influential student was John F. Kennedy , whose first 40-minute class with Mr. Samuelson, after the 1960 election, was conducted on a rock by the beach at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. Before class, there was lunch with politicians and Cambridge intellectuals aboard a yacht offshore. “I had expected a scrumptious meal,” Mr. Samuelson said. “We had franks and beans.” As a member of the Kennedy campaign brain trust, Mr. Samuelson headed an economic task force for the candidate and held several private sessions on economics with him. Many would have a bearing on decisions made during the Kennedy administration. Though Mr. Samuelson was President Kennedy’s first choice to become chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, he refused, on principle, to take any government office because, he said, he did not want to put himself in a position in which he could not say and write what he believed. After the 1960 election, he told the young president-elect that the nation was heading into a recession and that Kennedy should push through a tax cut to head it off. Kennedy was shocked. “I’ve just campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets and here you are telling me that the first thing I should do in office is to cut taxes?” Mr. Samuelson recalled, quoting the president. Kennedy eventually accepted the professor’s advice and signaled his willingness to cut taxes, but he was assassinated before he could take action. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson , carried out the plan, however, and the economy bounced back. Adding Bite to Academia In the classroom, Mr. Samuelson was a lively, funny, articulate teacher. On theories that he and others had developed to show links between the performance of the stock market and the general economy, he famously said: “It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle. The stock market has called nine of the last five recessions.” His speeches and his voluminous writing had a lucidity and bite not usually found in academic technicians. He tried to give his economic pronouncements a “snap at the end,” he said, “like Mark Twain .” When women began complaining about career and salary inequities, for example, he said in their defense, “Women are men without money.” Remarkably versatile, Mr. Samuelson reshaped academic thinking about nearly every economic subject, from what Marx could have meant by a labor theory of value to whether stock prices fluctuate randomly. Mathematics had already been employed by social scientists, but Mr. Samuelson brought the discipline into the mainstream of economic thinking, showing how to derive strong theoretical predictions from simple mathematical assumptions. His early work, for example, presented a unified mathematical structure for predicting how businesses and households alike would respond to changes in economic forces, how changes in wage rates would affect employment, and how tax rate changes would affect tax collections. His relentless application of mathematical analysis gave rise to an astonishing number of groundbreaking theorems, resolving debates that had raged among theorists for decades, if not centuries. An Economic Theorem Early in his career, Mr. Samuelson developed the rudimentary mathematics of business cycles with a model, called the multiplier-accelerator, that captured the inherent tendency of market economies to fluctuate. The model showed how markets magnify the impact of outside shocks and turn, say, an initial one dollar increase in foreign investment into a several dollar increase in total domestic income, to be followed by a decline. Mr. Samuelson provided a mathematical structure to study the impact of trade on different groups of consumers and workers. In a famous theorem, known as Stolper-Samuelson, he and a co-author showed that competition from imports of clothes and similar goods from underdeveloped countries, where producers rely on unskilled workers, could drive down the wages of low-paid workers in industrialized countries. The theorem provided the intellectual scaffold for opponents of free trade. And late in his career, Mr. Samuelson set off an intellectual commotion by pointing out that the economy of a country like the United States could be hurt if productivity rose among the economies with which it traded. Yet Mr. Samuelson, like most academic economists, remained an advocate of open trade. Trade, he taught, raises average living standards enough to allow the workers and consumers who benefit to compensate those who suffer, and still have some extra income left over. Protectionism would not help, but higher productivity would. Mr. Samuelson also formulated a theory of public goods — that is, goods that can be provided effectively only through collective, or government, action. National defense is one such public good. It is nonexclusive; the Navy, for example, exists to protect every citizen. It also eliminates rivalry among its many consumers; that is, the amount of security that any one citizen derives from the Navy subtracts nothing from the amount of security that any other citizen derives. The features of public goods, Mr. Samuelson taught, stand in direct contrast to those of ordinary goods, like apples. An apple eaten by one consumer is not available to any other. Public goods, he concluded, cannot be sold in private markets because individuals have no incentive to pay for them voluntarily. Instead they hope to get a free ride from the decisions of others to make the public goods available. A Predictive Principle Mr. Samuelson pushed mathematical analysis to new levels of sophistication. For example, economists routinely write mathematical models of market economies that assume consumers and producers make choices to maximize their well-being. The question arises when such economies are stable: if disturbed by, say, droughts or wars or technological change, will the economy return to appropriate levels of prices and output or, instead, fly out of control? What Mr. Samuelson’s “correspondence principle” shows is the theoretical link between the behavior of individuals and the aggregate stability of the entire economic system. Information about individual responses, Mr. Samuelson’s theorem holds, shapes predictions about overall economic stability. He analyzed the evolution of economies with a mathematical model, called an overlapping generations model, that scholars have since used to study, for example, the functioning over time of the Social Security system and the management of public debt. He also helped develop linear programming, a mathematical tool used by corporations and central planners in socialist countries to calculate how to produce pre-set levels of various goods and services at the least cost. Late in his career, Mr. Samuelson laid out the mathematics of stock price movements, an analysis that became the basis for Nobel Prize-winning research by his student Mr. Merton and Myron S. Scholes . They designed formulas that Wall Street analysts use to trade options and other complicated securities known as derivatives. But beyond his astonishing array of scientific theorems and conclusions, Mr. Samuelson wedded Keynesian thought to conventional economics. He developed what he called the Neoclassical Synthesis. The neoclassical economists in the late 19th century showed how forces of supply and demand generate equilibrium in the market for apples, shoes and all other consumer goods and services. The standard analysis had held that market economies, left to their own devices, gravitated naturally toward full employment. Economists clung to this theory even in the wake of the Depression of the 1930s. But the need to explain the market collapse, as well as unemployment rates that soared to 25 percent, gave rise to a contrary strain of thought associated with Keynes. Mr. Samuelson’s resulting “synthesis” amounted to the notion that economists could use the neoclassical apparatus to analyze economies operating near full employment, but switch over to Keynesian analysis when the economy turned sour. Midwestern Roots Paul Anthony Samuelson was born on May 15, 1915, in Gary, Ind., the son of Frank Samuelson, a pharmacist, and the former Ella Lipton. His family, he said, was “made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered considerably in World War I, because Gary was a brand new steel town when my family went there.” But after his father lost much of his money in the years after the war, the family moved to Chicago . Young Paul attended Hyde Park High School, where as a freshman he began studying the stock market. At one point he helped his algebra teacher select stocks to buy in the boom of the 1920s. “Hupp Motors and other losers,” he remembered in an interview in 1996. “Proof of the fallibility of systems,” he said. He left high school at age 16 to enter the University of Chicago . “I was born as an economist on Jan. 2, 1932,” he said. That was the day he heard his first college lecture, on Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British economist who studied the relation between poverty and population growth. Hooked, he began taking economics courses. The University of Chicago developed the century’s leading conservative economic theorists, under the later guidance of Milton Friedman . But Mr. Samuelson regarded the teaching at Chicago as “schizophrenic.” This was at the height of the Depression, and courses about the business cycle naturally talked about unemployment, he said. But in economic-theory classes, joblessness was not mentioned. “The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern,” he recalled, “yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, ‘We are starving, how about a potato?’ I speak from poignant memory.” After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Chicago in 1935, he went to Harvard , where he was attracted to the ideas of the Harvard professor Alvin Hansen, the leading exponent of Keynesian theory in America. As a student at Chicago and later at Cambridge, Mr. Samuelson had at first reacted negatively to Keynes. “What I resisted most was the notion that there could be equilibrium unemployment” — that some level of unemployment would be impossible to eliminate and have to be tolerated. “I spent four summers of my college career on the beach at Lake Michigan,” he said. “It was pointless to look for work. I didn’t even have to test the market because I had friends who would go to 350 potential employers and not be able to get any job at all.” Eventually he was converted. “Why do I want to refuse a paradigm that enables me to understand the Roosevelt upturn from 1933 to 1937?” he asked himself. Mr. Samuelson was perceived at the outset of his career as a brilliant mathematical economist. He shot to academic fame as a 22-year-old prodigy at Harvard when he began a boldly sweeping and highly technical doctoral dissertation, published as a book in 1947 by Harvard University Press. At Harvard, as at Chicago, he was not shy about criticizing his professors — “respecting neither age nor rank,” according to James Tobin, a Nobel laureate of Yale University . The young Mr. Samuelson’s chief complaint against economists was that they preoccupied themselves with finer economic principles while all around them people were being thrown into bread lines. A Bold Dissertation His attitudes did not endear him to the austere chairman of the economics department at Harvard, Harold Hitchings Burbank, with whom he had a rocky relationship. But the publication of his dissertation was an immediate success. It won him the John Bates Clark Medal awarded by the American Economic Association to the economist showing the most scholarly promise before the age of 40; it would eventually help him win his Nobel, and it was frequently reprinted despite the heavy resistance of Professor Burbank, selling to economists around the world for more than 20 years. (“Sweet revenge,” Mr. Samuelson said.) Among Mr. Samuelson’s fellow students was Marion Crawford. They married in 1938. Mr. Samuelson earned his master’s degree from Harvard in 1936 and a Ph.D. in 1941. He wrote his thesis from 1937 to 1940 as a member of the prestigious Harvard Society of Junior Fellows. In 1940, Harvard offered him an instructorship, which he accepted, but a month later M.I.T. invited him to become an assistant professor. Harvard made no attempt to keep him, even though he had by then developed an international following. Mr. Solow said of the Harvard economics department at the time: “You could be disqualified for a job if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?” During World War II, Mr. Samuelson worked in M.I.T.’s Radiation Laboratory, developing computers for tracking aircraft, and was a consultant for the War Production Board. After the war, having resumed teaching, he and his wife started a family. When she became pregnant the fourth time, she gave birth to triplets , all boys. Marion Samuelson died in 1978. Mr. Samuelson is survived by his second wife, Risha Clay Samuelson; six children from his first marriage: Jane Raybould, Margaret Crawford-Samuelson, William and the triplet sons, Robert, John and Paul; and 15 grandchildren. Mr. Samuelson is also survived by a brother, Robert Summers, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and father of Lawrence H. Summers , director of President Obama ’s National Economic Council and former secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton and former president of Harvard. A Keynesian Textbook The birth of the triplets doubled the number of children in the Samuelson household, which soon found itself sending 350 diapers to the laundry each week. His friends suggested that Mr. Samuelson needed to write a book to earn more money. He decided to write an economics textbook, but one that would not only be compelling for students but also sophisticated and comprehensive. And he wanted to center it on the still poorly understood Keynesian revolution. President Herbert Hoover , he noted, had never referred to Keynes other than as “the Marxist Keynes.” “I never quite understood that venom,” Mr. Samuelson said. He said he “sweated blood” writing his book, employing detailed charts, color graphics and humor. He wrote: “Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they’ll all turn over together.” It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of “Economics.” Business Week, taking note of the textbook’s publication in Greek, Punjabi, Hebrew, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and other languages, once said that it had “gone a long way in giving the world a common economic language.” Students were attracted to its lively prose and relevance to their everyday lives. Many textbook authors began to copy its presentation. “Economics,” together with shrewd investing, made Mr. Samuelson a millionaire many times over. Friendship With a Rival A historian could well tell the story of 20th-century public debate over economic policy in America through the jousting between Mr. Samuelson and Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel in 1976. Mr. Samuelson said the two had almost always disagreed with each other but had remained friends. They met in 1933 at the University of Chicago, when Mr. Samuelson was an undergraduate and Mr. Friedman a graduate student. Unlike the liberal Mr. Samuelson, the conservative Mr. Friedman opposed active government participation in most areas of the economy except national defense and law enforcement. He thought private enterprise and competition could do better and that government controls posed risks to individual freedoms. Both men were fluid speakers as well as writers, and they debated often in public forums, in testimony before Congressional committees, in op-ed articles and in columns each of them wrote for Newsweek magazine. But Mr. Samuelson said he always had fear in his heart when he prepared for combat with Mr. Friedman, a formidably engaging debater. “If you looked at a transcript afterward, it might seem clear that you had won the debate on points,” he said. “But somehow, with members of the audience, you always seemed to come off as elite, and Milton seemed to have won the day.” Mr. Samuelson said he had never regarded Keynesianism as a religion, and he criticized some of his liberal colleagues for seeming to do so, earning himself, late in life, the label “l’enfant terrible emeritus.” The experience of nations in the second half of the century, he said, had diminished his optimism about the ability of government to perform miracles. If government gets too big, and too great a portion of the nation’s income passes through it, he said, government becomes inefficient and unresponsive to the human needs “we do-gooders extol,” and thus risks infringing on freedoms. But, he said, no serious political or economic thinker would reject the fundamental Keynesian idea that a benevolent democratic government must do what it can to avert economic trouble in areas the free markets cannot. Neither government alone nor the markets alone, he said, could serve the public welfare without help from the other. As nations became locked in global competition, and as the computerization of the workplace created daunting employment problems, he agreed with the economic conservatives in advocating that American corporations must stay lean and efficient and follow the general dictates of the free market. But he warned that the harshness of the marketplace had to be tempered and that corporate downsizing and the reduction of government programs “must be done with a heart.” Despite his celebrated accomplishments, Mr. Samuelson preached and practiced humility. The M.I.T. economics department became famous for collegiality, in no small part because no one else could play prima donna if Mr. Samuelson refused the role, and, of course, he did. Economists, he told his students, as Churchill said of political colleagues, “have much to be humble about.”

Paul A Samuelson
Nobel Prize
Obituary
MIT


Lax U.S. Guidelines on Ebola Led to Poor Hospital Training, Experts Say

Abstract: Many American hospitals have improperly trained their staffs to deal with Ebola patients because they were following federal guidelines that were too lax, infection control experts said on Wednesday. Federal health officials effectively acknowledged the problems with their procedures for protecting health care workers by abruptly changing them. At 8 p.m. Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued stricter guidelines for American hospitals with Ebola patients. They are now closer to the procedures of Doctors Without Borders, which has decades of experience in fighting Ebola in Africa. In issuing the new guidelines, the C.D.C. acknowledged that its experts had learned by working alongside that medical charity. The agency’s new voluntary guidelines include full-body suits covering the head and neck, supervision of the risky process of taking off protective gear, and the use of hand disinfectant as each item is removed. Sean G. Kaufman, who oversaw infection control at Emory University Hospital while it treated Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, the first two American Ebola patients, called the earlier C.D.C. guidelines “absolutely irresponsible and dead wrong.” Speaking by phone from Liberia, where he was training workers for Samaritan’s Purse, the medical charity that Dr. Brantly and Ms. Writebol worked for, Mr. Kaufman said he had warned the agency as recently as a week ago that its guidelines were lax. “They kind of blew me off,” he said. “I’m happy to see they’re changing them, but it’s late.” Melissa Brower, a C.D.C. spokeswoman, said the agency was “taking a hard look at our recommendations and may be making changes.” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the C.D.C., expressed regret about his agency’s initial response to the first Ebola case in Dallas. “In retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight,” he said a few hours before his agency tightened its guidelines, “we could have sent a more robust hospital infection control team and been more hands-on with the hospital from Day 1.” Image A dummy depicting an Ebola patient was part of a C.D.C. training session for health care workers Wednesday in Anniston, Ala. Credit Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto Agency Some major hospitals, aware of the inadequacy of the older C.D.C. guidelines, have followed more stringent standards in training their staff. But many — including Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where two nurses were infected by a dying patient — have not. The Doctors Without Borders guidelines are even stricter than the new C.D.C. directives in that they require full coverage of the torso, head and legs with fabrics that blood or vomit cannot soak through, along with rubber aprons, goggles or face shields, sealed wrists and rubber boots. Doctors and nurses wear two sets of gloves, including long outer ones that strap or are taped to the gown; janitors wear three sets. As they undress in choreographed steps, Doctors Without Borders workers wash their hands with chlorine solution eight times and are sprayed with a chlorine mist. Most important, all personnel disrobe only under the eyes of a supervisor whose job is to prevent even a single misstep. Risky procedures like blood sampling are kept to a minimum. “I’ve seen the C.D.C. poster,” said a Doctors Without Borders representative who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she did not want to be named criticizing the agency, and who was referring to C.D.C. guidelines before they were changed on Tuesday. “It doesn’t say anywhere that it’s for Ebola. I was surprised that it was only one set of gloves, and the rest bare hands. It seems to be for general cases of infectious disease.” National Nurses United, the country’s largest union and professional association of nurses, with 185,000 members, criticized the C.D.C. on Wednesday for taking so long. Worse, the union said, many hospitals ignored even the lax guidelines because they were voluntary. For example, the union said, nurses at the Texas hospital complained that the protective gear the hospital issued left their necks exposed — and they were told to wrap their necks with medical tape. “They were learning infection control on the fly,” said DeAnn McEwen, chief of infection control for the union. “That’s no substitute for planning.” Nurses United called for federal and state laws making C.D.C. guidelines mandatory. While Dr. Frieden has been criticized for arguing that almost any American hospital can handle Ebola patients and critics have demanded that all Ebola patients go to special isolation units, that debate is somewhat misguided, experts said. The isolation units — which have filtered air, double doors and negative pressure — were built to prevent the spread of airborne diseases like SARS and tuberculosis. The greater Ebola danger is large amounts of blood, vomit or diarrhea splashing caregivers. That is prevented by training, proper protective gear, rigorous cleaning and close supervision, specialists said. Ebola victims resemble cholera victims in some ways. In Bangladesh, which trains doctors all over the world in cholera treatment, hospitals do not place cholera patients on padded mattresses with bedpans. They usually lie on rubber sheets stretched across bed frames with holes cut so diarrhea can run out into buckets. Doctors Without Borders personnel place buckets or chamber pots under patients. Its protocols require cleaning pools of fluid not by mopping, but by spraying them with chlorine and then throwing large absorbent cloths over them. Like doctors, janitors work in pairs, watching over each other. All infected materials are immediately burned, sometimes in a field right behind the hospital. Reusable rubber items like aprons and boots are cleaned with detergent and bleach. One important Doctors Without Borders step — chlorine sprays — could be dangerous inside hospitals because it would make corridors slippery. A step considered vital — which the new C.D.C. guidelines now include — is having a sharp-eyed “site supervisor” constantly watching for errors. “The buddy system works for getting dressed, but not for getting undressed,” said Dr. William Fisher II , a critical care specialist from the University of North Carolina who worked in a Doctors Without Borders center in Guinea this summer and said he was now designing training for the C.D.C. Doctors go into wards feeling fresh, he explained. But they emerge an hour later exhausted, sweating and sometimes shaking from a close call, like one he had when a patient grabbed his mask. In the exit area, he said, “there was someone in charge whose sole focus was helping you get undressed safely.” “You stood in front of them and did nothing until they said so,” he said. “They didn’t care if it was your first time or your 800th time. I was exhausted and emotionally drained. I looked forward to it.” Initial Doctors Without Borders training takes two to five days, followed by three to six weeks of supervised work. The nurses’ group, which is unfamiliar with those protocols, sent a letter to the White House on Wednesday demanding the adoption of the standards used by the University of Nebraska Medical Center with some enhancements. That hospital is a designated isolation center, and its guidelines resemble those of Doctors Without Borders in some ways. A recent update to them called for head and neck hoods and the wiping of rubber clogs with bleach. The nurses’ union also demanded hazardous materials suits and powered air-purifying respirators. Those can be cumbersome and claustrophobic, and the Nebraska guidelines treat them as recommended, not as standard.

Ebola
Hospital
Protective Clothing
CDC
Epidemic
Thomas R Frieden
Doctors Without Borders