Fearing for Many at Home, City’s Burmese Unite to Aid Cyclone Victims

Abstract: Linda Wu said that whenever troubles in Myanmar make news in the United States, business spikes at the two Burmese restaurants she owns in Manhattan, with regular patrons coming by daily to check on her and the restaurants’ staff. And once the regulars check in, Ms. Wu said, most of them stay to eat. That’s how it was in September, when Myanmar’s military rulers unleashed a violent crackdown on Buddhist monks who staged pro-democracy protests. And that’s what has been happening since May 3, when a cyclone churned across Myanmar’s coast, wiping out entire villages and killing thousands of people. “I came here for lunch as well, just to make sure everyone was O.K.,” said Iwan Setyawan, an Indonesian who was having dinner with several friends on Friday at one of Ms. Wu’s restaurants, Village Mingala, at 21 East Seventh Street. Ms. Wu left Myanmar 40 years ago, when the southeastern Asian country was still known as Burma, and came to New York with her family by way of Taiwan. She bought Village Mingala in 1990, after working there as a waitress. Seven years later, she opened Cafe Mingala, at 1393 Second Avenue, between 72nd and 73rd Streets. The restaurants are perhaps one of New York City’s best known Burmese outposts, where a predominantly non-Burmese clientele savors tea leaf salad, rice noodles and pineapple chicken curry that are cooked and served by Burmese workers. Most of them, like Zin Moe, who manages Cafe Mingala, have relatives in Myanmar and have heard little — if anything — from them since the cyclone struck. “I can’t reach any of them by phone,” said Mr. Zin Moe, who has three brothers and two sisters in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta region, which was devastated by the storm. “I don’t know what’s happened to them.” Myanmar is a fragile patchwork of ethnic minorities held together by a military government that took power in 1962. Hundreds of thousands of Burmese have fled since then, many living as illegal immigrants in neighboring countries. Many are stuck in refugee camps in Thailand and some have resettled in the United States, which received 14,000 Burmese in 2007 alone, according to the State Department. The Rev. Myo Maw of the Myanmar Baptist Church in Elmhurst, Queens, estimated that there are about 10,000 Burmese living in New York City — a tight-knit immigrant community living in relative isolation, even in a city with a large Asian population. New York does not have an identifiably Burmese neighborhood, just tiny Burmese clusters in places like Sunset Park and Homecrest in Brooklyn; Flushing, Sunnyside and Woodside in Queens; and in Chinatown. Among them are refugees who work as cooks and cleaners, as well as computer programmers, college students and researchers. The vast majority are Buddhist, but some are Christians, Pastor Myo Maw said, including the 150 Burmese who are members of his church. “Maybe in Burma we’re different because we come from different backgrounds, but here, we’re all the same,” the pastor said. Over the past week, the city’s Burmese have come together in churches and temples, and in living rooms, on the streets and on the Web to collect donations for the cyclone victims and raise awareness about their plight. Pastor Myo Maw’s congregation was to hold a special prayer service on Saturday. Eunice Wong, a 20-year-old junior at City College whose mother and grandmother live in Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, has used Facebook, the social networking Web site, to spread word about the cyclone’s devastation. “I feel very lucky that nothing happened to my family, but I’ll do as much as I can here in the States to get aid over to the people,” Ms. Wong said on Friday outside the United Nations, where dozens of Burmese rallied under a cool drizzle. At Loka Chantha Temple in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, a relief drive has raised $10,000, the chief monk, Sayadaw Ashin Indaka, said on Saturday. At Ms. Wu’s restaurant in the East Village, hundreds of dollar bills hung from the branches of a 4 ½-foot-tall leafless tree, with more money tucked into the frames of tapestries that hung from the walls. Ms. Wu said that patrons had been contributing money since the monks’ protests last year, but getting money to Myanmar is challenging because of the military government’s tight control. But she might have found a solution: A friend is scheduled to visit Myanmar in August and offered to take the money for her, she said. “I wanted to give the money to support the monks last year, but it’s so hard to get the money to them,” Ms. Wu said. “Now,” she said, “this is a good time.”

Cyclones
Myanmar
New York City
Immigration and Refugees


J.C. Penney Chief Restoring Old Strategies

Abstract: J. C. Penney already brought back its old chief executive. Now it is restoring his old strategies. From increasing promotions to bringing back house brands like St. John’s Bay, Myron E. Ullman III, the new C.E.O., is erasing most of the changes made by Ronald B. Johnson, the former Apple retail head who started with much fanfare in 2011. After significant changes and several disastrous quarters, Mr. Johnson was fired this spring and Mr. Ullman, who had been his predecessor, resumed command about five weeks ago. Mr. Ullman detailed his plans for the chain, as the company reported a net loss that was much bigger than analysts had expected, at $1.58 a share in contrast to estimates of $1 a share. The company previously reported that sales fell 16.4 percent to $2.6 billion, but apparently the pre-announcement was not enough to steel analysts for the profit decline. Penney has already started to reverse Mr. Johnson’s overhaul by restoring a pricing system in which it artificially marks some items up and then down to give the appearance of a discount. Customers wanted to buy items “at the price-promotion calculus they were used to; that’s how they want to shop,” Mr. Ullman said. And while Mr. Johnson decried the number of promotions Penney conducted each year, Mr. Ullman says he wants to bring back event promotions 26 times a year, often around holidays like Mother’s Day. The chain will add back basic clothing, along with again offering a wider range of sizes. Mr. Johnson had focused on trendier, younger and generally thinner shoppers, alienating many longtime Penney customers who could not find items to suit their size or style. Mr. Ullman is also reviving many of Penney’s in-house brands, notably St. John’s Bay. One of Mr. Johnson’s main strategies was to create boutiques devoted to brands like Levi’s and Nanette Lepore within the stores — something Mr. Ullman said on Thursday that he, too, did a few years earlier, when he set up sections selling Sephora products. Nevertheless, Mr. Ullman indicated he was happy with the new stores-within-stores for brands like Joe Fresh, which Mr. Johnson brought in. “We’re obviously going to take advantage of the huge investment in the visual excitement” of the new boutiques, he said. Mr. Ullman also said that the company’s Web site “lost significant sales volume in 2012,” with double-digit declines, perhaps a surprising oversight for Mr. Johnson, who came from the technology world. “It’s self-inflicted,” Mr. Ullman said. “We basically made it hard to use.” There are potential bright spots for Penney. More than half of the shoppers who have stopped shopping there say they would return if the company stocked its old merchandise and used its old pricing mechanisms, a survey released in late April showed. And those who continue to shop there tend to have higher incomes, according to the survey, which was conducted by Langer Research Associates and the hedge fund Kase Capital. Penney has been hurrying to welcome back any customer. A few weeks ago, it apologized to customers in an ad that said: “Come back to J. C. Penney. We heard you. Now, we’d love to see you.” Earlier this week, it ran a second ad thanking customers for returning, though when asked if that meant that traffic was increasing, Mr. Ullman would only say that Penney was “encouraged” by what it saw. “We’re looking forward, not back,” Mr. Ullman said on Thursday — although his vision seems to blend the past and the future.

Earnings Reports
JC Penney
Ron Johnson
Myron E Ullman III
Retail


Dilma Rousseff of Brazil Visits U.S. Amid Turbulence at Home

Abstract: WASHINGTON — President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil said at the White House on Tuesday that the spying scandal that damaged ties with the United States had been surmounted because telephones between Brasília and Washington work both ways. In 2013, Ms. Rousseff canceled a planned state visit, a rare honor, because of revelations that the National Security Agency had hacked into her cellphone and private email . While the Brazilian government demanded a written explanation and an apology, no expression of regret ever came. But on Tuesday, Ms. Rousseff said that President Obama’s promise that such spying had ended was enough for her, in part because he had told her that “should he ever need nonpublic information about Brazil, he would just pick up the phone and call me.” Ms. Rousseff’s change of heart could also be a result of a series of crises that have enveloped her administration almost from the moment she won a second term late last year . Her approval rating was only 10 percent in a poll conducted in June by the Brazilian firm Datafolha, a major drop from 42 percent last December. Brazil’s economy is widely thought to be in recession, unemployment is rising along with inflation and consumer debt, and the central bank continues to raise interest rates, further hurting growth. So fixing Ms. Rousseff’s relationship with the United States and wooing American investors are widely seen as vital to Brazil’s recovery. Video President Obama and the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff laid out their plans to increase the countries’ use of renewable energy. Credit Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Ms. Rousseff spent Monday in New York speaking to investors, had dinner Monday night with Mr. Obama in the White House, and will be in California on Wednesday for meetings with technology, biotechnology and air-and-space executives. Midday on Tuesday, she stood beside Mr. Obama and declared that Brazil would, like the United States after the 2008 recession, emerge from its present problems. “We will do so very sure-footedly, very decisively, with a great sense of commitment,” she said. Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy analysis group, said that Ms. Rousseff was hoping that a successful trip could help stop the bleeding from a miserable year. “She’s in real trouble,” Mr. Shifter said. Besides a poor economy, Ms. Rousseff must contend with a huge corruption scandal involving a onetime jewel, the state-owned oil company Petrobras, which continues to widen. Marcelo Odebrecht, the powerful chief executive of the construction and chemicals conglomerate Odebrecht — a major backer of Ms. Rousseff’s political party — was arrested and charged with leading a bribery scheme this month. In response to a question about the scandal, Ms. Rousseff gave a rambling answer in which she insisted that “people have the right of proving that they are innocent,” that “the burden of proof lies on the accusing party,” and that anything less “would send us back to the Middle Ages.” Ms. Rousseff also complimented Mr. Obama on his decision to open diplomatic relations with Cuba, praise that came a day before the United States and Cuba are expected to announce the opening of embassies in Havana and Washington. “It is really about putting an end to the last lingering vestiges of the Cold War, and it ultimately elevates the level of the relations between the U.S. and the entire region,” Ms. Rousseff said. “May I acknowledge the importance of that gesture to all of Latin America and also to world peace at large.”

Brazil
Dilma Rousseff
Wiretapping Eavesdropping
NSA
Barack Obama
Recession and Depression
US Foreign Policy
Inflation
US


Irish Government Votes to Shed Stake in Aer Lingus

Abstract: PARIS — The Irish government agreed late on Tuesday to accept a takeover proposal for its 25 percent stake in the country’s flag carrier, Aer Lingus, from the parent company of British Airways, removing one of the last hurdles to the airline’s full privatization after three-quarters of a century of state ownership. The decision followed a marathon meeting in Dublin of the cabinet of Prime Minister Enda Kenny, where ministers of the governing coalition debated the findings of an expert group’s report presented this month. The report had concluded that an informal offer from the British Airways parent — International Consolidated Airlines Group, or I.A.G. — valuing Aer Lingus at close to $1.5 billion was fair. In a brief statement, the Irish transport minister, Paschal Donohoe, said the government had decided to support I.A.G.’s bid following “detailed consideration” of “all of the issues surrounding a potential disposal of the state’s shareholding.” The cabinet’s recommendation of the sale — still subject to a vote of the Irish Parliament — was expected to remove a major stumbling block to a formal bid, which I.A.G. has said would be conditional on the support of the government, as well as the Irish budget airline Ryanair, which is Aer Lingus’s largest shareholder with a stake of 29.8 percent. Ryanair, which has itself made three unsuccessful attempts to acquire Aer Lingus, has yet to weigh in publicly on I.A.G.’s proposed offer. Robin Kiely, a Ryanair spokesman, said late on Tuesday that the airline was still awaiting a formal offer for its Aer Lingus shares from I.A.G., which he said would be considered “on its merits.” I.A.G. — which also owns Iberia, a Spanish full-service airline, and Vueling Airlines, a low-cost carrier — made an informal offer in February for Aer Lingus, after two previous bids were rejected late last year. I.A.G.’s sweetened offer for Aer Lingus stands at 2.55 euros a share, including a dividend. The deal, if completed, would value Aer Lingus at about €1.36 billion, or $1.48 billion. Given its proximity to Britain, the Irish airline market is appealing to I.A.G., which with its partners in the Oneworld airline alliance already controls roughly one-fourth of the air travel market between the European Union and North America. Acquiring Aer Lingus would further consolidate the group’s position with flights crossing the Atlantic. Video Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive, discusses on CNBC factors that led to a 66 percent increase in net profit, including more customers turning from legacy airlines to discount carriers. Aer Lingus, which began scheduled service in 1936, was first privatized in 2006, but the government retained a 25 percent stake. Since emerging from a painful restructuring several years ago, the carrier has quietly pressed for an end to state ownership, as it has sought to reinvent itself as a leaner, nimbler competitor against the likes of larger European rivals — including British Airways. In recent years, Aer Lingus has focused increasingly on trans-Atlantic services, a strategy that has brought the Irish carrier into greater competition with British Airways. Analysts expect Ryanair would ultimately be amenable to a sale, which would value its stake at just over €400 million — roughly the amount the carrier spent acquiring its Aer Lingus shares from 2006 to 2008. A sale of the stake would also bring an end to a costly legal battle in Britain, where Ryanair has fought a 2013 order by the competition authorities that it reduce its holding in Aer Lingus to no more than 5 percent. Ryanair has threatened to take the case against a forced sale to Britain’s Supreme Court on human rights grounds. Separately, Ryanair reported a record full-year profit on Tuesday, but warned of an intensifying fare war across Europe in the coming months as lower oil prices help to reduce operating costs for many of its full-service rivals. Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by number of passengers, said its net profit jumped 66 percent in the year to March 31, to €867 million, or about $952 million, from €523 million a year earlier. Sales increased 12 percent to nearly €5.7 billion as annual passenger traffic climbed to nearly 91 million, up from 82 million a year earlier. Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive, said the airline was on course to carry more than 100 million passengers this year as it reaps the benefits of a series of initiatives aimed at helping it to shed a reputation for gruff and inflexible service. But Mr. O’Leary conceded that competition with rival airlines remained intense. He cautioned that while passenger traffic was expected to increase roughly 10 percent this year, Ryanair’s revenue per passenger could slip around 2 percentage points because of “some irrational pricing response from competitors.”


In Japan, American Beef Is Once Again on the Menu

Abstract: KYOTO, Japan - At Yakiniku Den, a crowded restaurant in this western Japanese city, Kosei Ishishita and his family are getting their first taste in two years of American beef. "To be honest, I'm still not 100 percent confident that U.S. beef is safe," said Mr. Ishishita, a 32-year-old sushi chef. "Somewhere inside of me, I'm worried. But now that I've tasted it, I have to admit that I want to eat more." American beef is reappearing on Japanese tables and supermarket shelves for the first time since Tokyo banned it in December 2003 after the discovery of mad cow disease in a dairy cow in Washington State. Tokyo lifted the ban in mid-December after a food safety commission ruled that American safety measures were now adequate. So far, the reaction here to the first shipments of American beef has been mixed. While some restaurants and grocery stores have rushed to put it on sale, others have refused to serve it. At the same time, most Japanese say they remain concerned about safety. In a poll in early December by Kyodo News, 75.2 percent of respondents said they were unwilling to eat American beef. Winning back Japanese consumers is important for the American beef industry. Before the ban, American beef was popular here as a low-cost alternative to expensive Japanese beef, and this was the largest overseas market for American ranchers. In 2002, the last full year before Tokyo banned imports, Japan consumed 240,000 tons of American beef, according to the Ministry of Agriculture in Japan, about a quarter of all American beef exports. But the Americans now face an uphill battle. The months of tense negotiations between Tokyo and Washington to reopen Japan's market received extensive coverage in Japan's media. "There's a tremendous amount of work ahead to reposition ourselves in the minds of Japanese consumers," said Philip Seng, chief executive of the U.S. Meat Export Federation, an industry group. "The Japanese now equate the U.S. with B.S.E.," referring to the formal name of mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Mr. Seng said his group planned an advertising campaign to explain American safety measures. In addition, he said, the group planned to send executives of Japanese restaurants and supermarkets to visit slaughterhouses in the United States. Still, he said it would probably take three years before consumption of American beef here returns to levels before the ban. Businesses that have already begun serving American beef say that most customers show initial hesitation, but then quickly accept it again. Cowboy, a small supermarket chain in the northern city of Sapporo, began a test sale of American beef at four stores on Dec. 26. Ichio Abe, head of the chain's general affairs department, said the entire amount, 208 kilograms (460 pounds), sold out in three days. While that was less American beef than a single store sold in a single day before the 2003 ban, it showed that American meat remained popular, he said. "Some customers were wary of it," Mr. Abe said. "Others came up and told us, 'We've been waiting for this.' " In addition, Yoshinoya D&C, the largest chain of restaurants selling beef bowl, a popular form of fast food featuring sautéed meat on a bowl of rice, says it is rushing to get American beef into all its 1,000 locations in Japan by February. A spokeswoman said the company was confident that customers would welcome the meat because of the reaction to a one-day sale of American beef last February, when Yoshinoya used frozen meat that it had imported before the ban. She said the entire stock of 150 tons was sold in a few hours, as customers braved winter temperatures to form long lines outside stores. "There is clearly demand for U.S. beef," said the spokeswoman, Yukiko Abe. But another large beef bowl chain, Zensho, proudly proclaims on its Web site that it has no intention of selling American beef. The company, with 657 restaurants across Japan, said that it conducted its own on-site inspection of slaughterhouses in the United States. It says it found that dangerous parts like spinal cords, which carry mad cow disease, were not being properly discarded. "To be honest, we'd like to use American beef, but we cannot," the company said on its Web site. One of the biggest complaints in Japan has been Washington's refusal to test all cattle killed for the disease. American officials rejected such thoroughness as expensive and unnecessary. The United States conducts random tests of only a small percentage of slaughtered cattle. Japan finally agreed to import American beef, but only from cattle younger than 21 months. Testing has found that the younger animals do not catch the disease. Still, many Japanese concluded that Tokyo had capitulated to political pressure from its larger ally. Consumer groups, in particular, have criticized the United States' refusal to adopt Japanese health standards on meat bound for the Japanese market. Some say they have begun organizing a boycott and vow to wage a national leaflet campaign to warn Japanese away from American beef. "Japan has the safest standard in the world," said Yasuaki Yamaura, deputy chairman of the Consumers Union of Japan. "Why can't the world adopt this?" But many in the restaurant industry say they believe that the low price and tastiness of American beef will quickly win over customers. At the Yakiniku Den restaurant in Kyoto, most customers agreed. "If all those Americans can eat it, so can we," said Yoshikazu Mori, 46, a worker at a battery factory, sitting before a brazier covered with sizzling American beef. "American beef is cheaper. That means I can eat more of it." Zenshoku, a company based in the western city of Osaka that runs the Kyoto restaurant and 109 other beef restaurants, said its restaurants were the first in Japan to put American beef back on sale. Shigemi Oishi, the company's president and founder, said he bought 10 tons from the first planeloads to arrive on Dec. 18. He said he had already sold most of that. His restaurants serve American beef on plates adorned with tiny American flags. Mr. Oishi said about 80 percent of his customers had ordered the American beef since it went on sale. "Once they try it, they realize it's really the best type of beef for grilling like this," Mr. Oishi said, adding that he was confident of the safety of American meat after visiting a slaughterhouse in Denver last year. "The United States has to do more to let Japan know that its meat is safe," he said. "It can't just rely on restaurants like us."


Montana: Permission Denied to Hunt Gray Wolves

Abstract: Federal officials have denied the state’s request to hunt endangered gray wolves in response to the predators’ increasing attacks on livestock and big-game herds. The state hoped to use a loophole in the federal Endangered Species Act and hold a “conservation hunt” for up to 186 wolves this fall. Daniel Ashe, United States Fish and Wildlife Service deputy director, denied the request on Thursday, saying that his agency supported sport hunting of wolves, but that it would not expect approval of Montana’s proposal to survive a legal challenge. A federal judge in August restored wolves in Montana and Idaho to the endangered species list after a lawsuit from environmentalists.

Wolves
Endangered and Extinct Species
Hunting and Trapping
Montana


Increasing Sales by Answering Customers’ Questions

Abstract: It is an indelible image of the financial crisis: a bird’s-eye view of the backyards of foreclosed houses, their in-ground pools festering with algae and mosquitoes. In Northern Virginia, Marcus Sheridan was in the financial storm. By early 2009, his company, River Pools and Spas , a 20-employee installer of in-ground fiberglass pools in Virginia and Maryland, had a decline in orders from an average of six a month to barely two. That winter, four customers who had planned to install pools costing more than $50,000 each demanded their deposits back. For three consecutive weeks, the company overdrew its bank account. Around this time, Mr. Sheridan began to overhaul his marketing. The company had been spending about $250,000 a year on radio, television and pay-per-click advertising. It would now cut the budget to about a tenth of that and focus on generating sales through informational blog posts and videos, what has become known as content marketing. But Mr. Sheridan took an unconventional approach to his content. As a result, River Pools has recovered to exceed its peak pre-2007 revenue, and Mr. Sheridan, a 35-year-old father of four, has become something of a Web marketing guru. While he still owns a 33 percent interest in the pool company, his partners manage it day to day while he concentrates on his new venture, TheSalesLion.com. He recently spoke about his marketing approach in a conversation that has been edited and condensed. Q. Take us back. How did you save your company? A. I just started thinking more about the way I use the Internet. Most of the time when I type in a search, I’m looking for an answer to a specific question. The problem in my industry, and a lot of industries, is you don’t get a lot of great search results because most businesses don’t want to give answers; they want to talk about their company. So I realized that if I was willing to answer all these questions that people have about fiberglass pools, we might have a chance to pull this out. Q. What was the first question you answered? A. The question I was always asked within the first two minutes of talking to customers was, How much does a fiberglass pool cost? Pool installers are like mattress or car dealers — we hate talking about how much a pool costs until we have you in person because there are so many options and accessories we want to sell you. As a result, pool companies never mention price on their Web sites. But I said, I don’t care what the question is, we’re going to answer it. Q. Did you actually tell people the price of a pool? A. No — because I couldn’t. But see, that’s the magic behind this. Google’s search engine doesn’t really care if we answer the question. It’s just looking for companies that are willing to address the question. So I said in that article , there are a ton of options, so it depends, the price can range anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000 and a lot of our customers end up between $40,000 and $80,000. And that was enough. Within about 24 hours of writing that article, it was No. 1 for every fiberglass-pool, cost-related phrase you could possibly type in. And because I have analytics, so far to this day, I’ve been able to track a minimum of $1.7 million in sales to that one article. Q. What was the next question? A. People used to ask me all the time, “Marcus, I’ve been hearing that fiberglass pools have all sorts of problems and issues. So what are the problems and issues?” Of course, they’d been talking to a concrete pool guy, but it doesn’t matter where they got it, now they have the question. So we wrote an article about the problems with fiberglass pools and specifically came right out and said: Here are the issues. Here are the benefits. You decide. Now, when you go in and type anything about fiberglass issues and problems, you’re going to see the River Pools Web site and you’re going to think, “Oh my gosh, these guys are so honest.” Q. Anything else? A. In most industries, there comes a time in the sale process where the customer turns to you and says, “O.K., I like you, but who are some of the other good companies that do this?” Half the time it’s a test, because people know who our competitors are because they can find them in .5 seconds online. Most contractors avoid the question. They say, “Oh, we don’t really have competition.” But because I was asked that question so often, I decided to answer it. I wrote a blog post about the best swimming pool builders in Richmond, Va., one of our main service areas. Q. Where were you on the list? A. I wasn’t on it. Q. You weren’t? A. No, because the moment I put my name up there I would lose all my credibility. But here’s the thing. Take the first company on the list, Pla-Mor Pools , a top competitor of ours. If you type in, “ Pla-Mor Pools reviews Richmond, Va. ,” which of course people do all the time when they’re vetting a company, what comes up? Me! You vet all my competitors, now I’m showing up for all their key words. If you really want to understand the power of inbound marketing, it comes down to this idea: I want to have the conversation at my house. Q. Once you wrote a blog post, how much time did you spend promoting it on Twitter and Facebook? A. I didn’t. Dude, that one article on price has never been tweeted. It’s never been Facebooked. I’m not saying social media doesn’t help, but it’s nowhere near what people think. The only metric that really matters is total pages viewed. Here’s a statistic for you: If somebody reads 30 pages of my River Pools Web site, and we go on a sales appointment, they buy 80 percent of the time. The industry average for sales appointments is 10 percent. So, our whole marketing campaign revolves around getting people to stick around and read our stuff, because the longer they stay on our site, the greater the chance they’re going to fall in love with our company. Q. What do you say to business owners who say they don’t know what to blog about? A. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard, and I hear it a lot. What they should be doing is just listening to every single question they get and answering it. In my consulting business the first thing we do is brainstorm what questions the company gets on a regular basis. I’ve never had a company come up with less than 100 questions in 30 minutes. Q. How do you suggest companies find time to do all of this blogging? A. Most of the time, they can take the employees they already have talking to customers and turn them into content producers. If you have 25 salespeople, and each one of them writes one post a month, your search is going to be through the roof because that’s a new piece of content every day. Q. How have your competitors responded to all of this? A. They still don’t really get it. They’re nice about it. I’ll have one of my best-pool-builder lists come out, and I’ll run into them. And they’ll say, “Hey, man, thanks for including me in that list. I’m not sure why you did it, but thanks.”

Small business
Online advertising
advertising,marketing
Blog
Customer service


Carly Fiorina Shapes Herself as the Republican Foil to Hillary Clinton

Abstract: WASHINGTON — She has been the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, a senior adviser to a Republican presidential nominee and a candidate for the United States Senate. But Carly Fiorina recently took on her boldest role yet: Hillary Rodham Clinton ’s loudest critic. Over the past few weeks, Ms. Fiorina has mocked Mrs. Clinton’s globe-trotting as secretary of state, assailed Mrs. Clinton’s use of only a private email account to do official business, and even accused Mrs. Clinton of stealing intellectual property. From her. Twice. Ms. Fiorina insists she has no problem with Mrs. Clinton personally — only with her liberal philosophy and policies, and what she dismisses as an unimpressive record on getting things done. “Like Hillary Clinton, I too, have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe, but unlike her, I have actually accomplished something,” she told conservatives in Iowa in January. “Mrs. Clinton: Flying is an activity, not an accomplishment.” On Tuesday, an hour after Mrs. Clinton’s news conference to explain her email practices, Ms. Fiorina came down on her just as harshly. “In effect, @HillaryClinton told us to trust her,” Ms. Fiorina said on Twitter . “Nothing in her track record suggests we should do so.” Ms. Fiorina easily sticks out among the wide field of possible Republican contenders for president: Most of the others are white men. But what has distinguished her most so far, aside from her gender, is not her private-sector experience or her pro-market policies, but her increasingly pointed attacks on Mrs. Clinton. Of course, every Republican contender has taken aim at Mrs. Clinton, the presumed Democratic opponent who looms in the distance. But Ms. Fiorina alone can present herself as a natural foil without the added risk of being labeled a sexist man. Image Ms. Fiorina visited the Healthy Families Partnership in Hampton, Va., last month, where she met with young mothers. Credit Matt Eich for The New York Times “In a field of men, she could really emerge as a very effective critic of Hillary, which Republicans are going to need,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist in Sacramento. “You look at the field, and obviously there is a space for a very articulate, conservative woman.” Allies of Mrs. Clinton, who plans to make gender a central part of her appeal, call this a cynical ploy. Ms. Fiorina, they say, is being put to use by a Republican Party that is desperate to damage Mrs. Clinton without antagonizing female voters. “These guys really believe it’s unfair that women are now running,” said Ann Lewis, a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton in her 2008 campaign. Speaking after Ms. Fiorina had just ridiculed Mrs. Clinton’s travel pace as secretary of state at the Iowa event, Ms. Lewis said: “Carly Fiorina went only to show she could be mean to Hillary.” And Adrienne Elrod, a spokeswoman for Correct the Record, a group set up to defend Mrs. Clinton, dismissed Ms. Fiorina as “short on substance, with sophomoric one-liners,” in contrast to Mrs. Clinton’s “forward-thinking agenda and lifetime of work fighting for children and families.” In an interview, Ms. Fiorina, 60, said she was not seeking the approval of Republican leaders. “The party is not leaning on me to do anything, and I didn’t ask the party’s permission,” she said. But she did not shy away from arguing that her gender, along with her having worked her way up from a secretary to chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, made her particularly well positioned to go after Mrs. Clinton. “The Democrats and Hillary Clinton have made gender an issue with their ridiculous ‘war on women,’” Ms. Fiorina said, alluding to the contention that Republicans have sought to hold women back by denying them reproductive rights and pay equity, among other things. “I think if Hillary Clinton faces a woman opponent, she will get a hitch in her swing.” In addition to her belief in deregulation and free markets, Ms. Fiorina is adamantly against abortion rights. “Liberals believe that flies are worth protecting but that the life of an unborn child is not,” she said in Iowa . Some of Ms. Fiorina’s lines of attack seem less high-minded. She accused Mrs. Clinton, whose most recent memoir is “Hard Choices,” of copying the title of her own 2006 memoir, “Tough Choices.” An aide to Ms. Fiorina posted an image on Twitter of the two book jackets side by side. And last month, after Mrs. Clinton urged 5,000 female tech professionals in Silicon Valley to “unlock our full potential,” Ms. Fiorina again accused Mrs. Clinton of stealing: Her leadership political action committee, an aide to Ms. Fiorina noted, is called the Unlocking Potential Project. And next weekend she will kick off an Unlocking Potential conference , with the tagline “From Hometowns to Washington: How Women Across America Can Create Real Conservative Change.” A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton declined to comment, but Ms. Fiorina came in for some derision on The Huffington Post , which recounted the tussle under the headline “Overused Management Bromide Now the Exclusive Property of Carly Fiorina, Apparently.” A Nexis search identified 618 uses of the phrase “unlocking potential” in news articles in the past year. Despite their vastly different politics, Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Fiorina have had to weather the challenges of being powerful women in male-dominated worlds. Who Is Running for President? Donald J. Trump officially accepted the Republican party's nomination on July 22. Hillary Clinton was officially nominated on July 26 at the Democratic Convention. When Ms. Fiorina, formerly a top executive at Lucent Technologies, took over at Hewlett-Packard in 1999, it was the largest publicly traded company ever to be led by a woman. Yet she also outraged some feminists by saying, “ I hope that we are at a point that everyone has figured out that there is not a glass ceiling.” Her business career ended a few years later in one of the more notorious flameouts in modern corporate history. After orchestrating a merger with Compaq that was then widely seen as a failure, she was ousted in 2005. Still, Ms. Fiorina received more than $21 million in severance , and she began to dabble in politics. In 2008 she advised Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee. Two years later, Ms. Fiorina challenged Senator Barbara Boxer of California, but lost by 10 percentage points. “We gained a lot of Republican votes,” she said, but her campaign could not compete with the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort in California. Ms. Fiorina moved to Virginia in 2011 with her husband, Frank, and is now involved in several nonprofits, including Opportunity International, a provider of microloans to people in developing countries that lists her friend Deborah Bowker as an executive. She also left behind nearly $500,000 in campaign debt and several unhappy political consultants. The San Francisco Chronicle called Ms. Fiorina the “deadbeat presidential candidate,” a characterization the newspaper later took back. In the interview, she said the debts were her campaign’s, not hers personally, and that she had repaid them. Ms. Fiorina has not spared her Republican rivals entirely. She suggested that Jeb Bush hoped to “scare people out of the race” by raising the most money, but added, “I don’t think it’s working.” She also said her party could be more sensitive when it comes to discussing women’s issues. “I think Democrats have to work on their policies,” she said, “and Republicans have to work on our tone.” For now, though, Ms. Fiorina seems content to focus most of her fire on Mrs. Clinton, a target who in practical terms is a very long way off. “I don’t know that she views it as her assigned role,” Ms. Bowker said of Ms. Fiorina’s attacks on Mrs. Clinton. “But is she comfortable making those comments she’s made lately? Absolutely, she’s comfortable.”

Carleton Fiorina,Carly Fiorina
2016 Presidential Election
Hillary Clinton
Republicans


Obama Rules Out Military Force Over Ukraine

Abstract: WASHINGTON — President Obama said on Wednesday that he had ruled out the use of United States military force in the Ukraine crisis, and that the international response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea will be limited to diplomacy. “We are not going to be getting into a military excursion in Ukraine,” Mr. Obama told Mark Mullen, a news anchor at the NBC affiliate in San Diego. “What we are going to do is mobilize all of our diplomatic resources to make sure that we’ve got a strong international correlation that sends a clear message.” The comment was Mr. Obama’s most direct rejection to date of the idea of taking military action in response to Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula, a process that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia set in motion in late February. Mr. Obama said the United States would continue to “ratchet up” pressure on the Russians with sanctions, but said, “I think even the Ukrainians would acknowledge that for us to engage Russia military would not be appropriate, and wouldn’t be good for Ukraine either.” Video In an admission of defeat, Ukraine’s leaders began plans for a military pullback after the Russian takeover. Credit Credit Uriel Sinai for The New York Times The comments came a day after Ukrainian leaders in Kiev effectively ceded control of Crimea to Russia, ordering their own military in the region to withdraw. Ukrainian forces in Crimea had been trapped in their bases by pro-Russian militias and had striven to avoid armed clashes. Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, made similar comments about American military options in Ukraine earlier on Wednesday. “It certainly is not at the forefront of discussions,” Mr. Carney said. He added that “diplomacy remains the only acceptable means of resolving this situation, and we are prepared to impose further costs on Russia for its violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Some Republicans have pressed Mr. Obama to respond more assertively to to Mr. Putin’s actions, though even Mr. Obama’s harshest critics have tended to shy away from the idea of sending American forces to directly confront the Russian troops now in Crimea. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said on Sunday that the administration should consider providing military assistance to Ukraine, but he stopped short of saying that Americans should be sent there to fight. “We need to give a long-term military assistance plan,” Mr. McCain said, “because God knows what Vladimir Putin will do next, because he believes that Ukraine is a vital part of his vision of the Russian Empire, and we need to understand that and act accordingly. And again, no boots on the ground. It’s not the Cold War over again. But we can do a lot of things.”


Car Hits Deer. Then What?

Abstract: MIDDLETOWN, N.J. JOE FIXTER’S only defense against the pungent odor that wafts into his pickup from the deer carcasses he collects off the sides of Monmouth and Ocean County roads is a vanilla-scented candle he keeps in the glove compartment. “I call it my secret weapon,” he said, leaning over a dozen dead deer in the back of his truck to flip the switch on a winch that cranked in yet another, an 85-pound doe found on the side of a rural Middletown road. Mr. Fixter, 63, a retired phone company employee, is busier than ever, rushing from one carcass to another — sometimes more than 25 a day. Often he finds them by watching for the turkey buzzards overhead. Across New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, Mr. Fixter and others with similar jobs are cleaning up the bodies of animals, an activity that hits its peak in fall and early winter — the busiest time for deer killed on roads. This is mating season, so male deer, crazed with hormones, are most likely to charge onto roads, and they account for many of the tens of thousands of deer carcasses disposed of annually in the three states. In 2006, the New York State Department of Transportation disposed of more than 20,000 deer on state highways. In New Jersey, the state stopped picking up deer killed on county roads last October, around the peak for deer fatalities, but the State Department of Transportation still picked up more than 14,000 deer from interstates and state highways. Connecticut does not keep tallies of dead deer. State Farm Insurance estimates that each year more than 63,000 deer are hit and killed in New York, more than 28,000 in New Jersey and 10,000 in Connecticut, said Victoria Hodson, a company spokeswoman. Nobody keeps track of the thousands of other animals that wind up dead on the road, including raccoons, skunks, groundhogs, turkeys, opossums, squirrels and Canada geese. State officials say a few dozen bears and coyotes are killed by cars annually. What becomes of the corpses depends on where the body lies, its size and the amount of time it has been there. Sandy Burkhart, the animal control officer for Montville in Morris County, N.J., said her office would arrange the pickup of an animal smaller than a deer on a municipal road “if it’s not too gross.” The carcass is then cremated in the town incinerator. If the body is not fresh, she said, it is left for the birds. “The turkey vultures do their job and remove them,” she said. In East Hampton, deer carcasses, as well as occasional raccoons and opossums, are sent to a landfill with the rest of the city’s trash, said Chris Russo, the superintendent of highways. He said his crew picks up an average of three deer a day. “It’s just endless,” he said. In Irvington in Westchester County, when the town’s public works department finds dead animals on municipal roads, it buries them in the woods deep enough to prevent other animals from digging them up, Superintendent Greg Nilsson said. If the animal falls on private property, though, disposal is the landowner’s responsibility. In Connecticut, deer carcasses are buried on the side of the road where they were killed, said Kevin Nursick, a Department of Transportation spokesman. Deer disposal in New Jersey is more complicated, particularly since the state stopped paying for removal of deer killed on county roads a year ago. The state saved the roughly $750,000 it used to spend annually on deer removal, said Erin Phalon, a Department of Transportation spokeswoman, but counties complain that the expense has been passed to them. Morris County and its municipalities, for example, have spent more than $91,000 to remove 1,523 deer in the past year, said Stephen W. Hammond, the director of public works. Some counties were too low in their estimates of the number of deer that would be hit and have broken their roadkill-cleanup budgets. Burlington County, N.J., spent almost $37,000 through the end of August, and Bergen County spent more than $32,000 this year, both nearly triple what the counties expected, according to officials there. Mabel Aragon, a Bergen County spokeswoman, said the state told the county it had removed 158 deer carcasses from Bergen roads in 2005. “This year that number has doubled,” she said. In Hunterdon County, N.J., George D. Muller, the board of freeholders’ director, estimated that deer cause 23 percent of all car accidents in the county. Carol Breen, a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Transportation, said the state spends around $350,000 annually on roadkill cleanup. The New York State Thruway Authority and several counties have started composting carcasses as an alternative to hauling them to landfills, which New Jersey does. The process involves burying deer in wood chips, and then three months later all that remains is compost that highway crews use in replanting vegetation along roadsides, said Jean Bonhotal, a compost specialist for Cornell University. Rockland County, N.Y., may soon start composting its roadkill, said Skip Vezzetti, its superintendent of highways. “You can dispose of a tremendous amount of carcasses in a relatively small area with no odors and no environmental impact,” he said. Some roadkill is not roadkill at all. Kelly Winthrop, who runs the deer removal company that employs Mr. Fixter, said she had fielded reports that turned out to be lengths of tan carpet or plastic deer used for target practice. Her employees have also arrived at the scene of a reported kill and found nothing, possibly because someone took the carcass home to eat. More often they have found mutilated carcasses — heads or antlers missing. “They look like they’re sawed off, which plagues me,” she said. “Because I don’t drive with that kind of equipment. Do you?” This fall she has expanded her hours to keep up with the number of deer to send Mr. Fixter to collect. The buzzards will be waiting.

Accidents and Safety
Animals
Waste Materials and Disposal


Muirfield Village: The Course That Jack Keeps Building

Abstract: DUBLIN, Ohio — The name is a nod back to Scotland, where golf’s first rules were written. The inspiration draws upon Bobby Jones and Augusta National. But the stamp upon Muirfield Village Golf Club is wholly that of Jack Nicklaus. Muirfield Village, site of the 10th Presidents Cup this week, is but one of nearly 300 layouts designed by Nicklaus in his second career as a golf course architect. But the Muirfield course, built partly as a gift to his hometown, is the one with which he is most closely associated. As the site of the annual Memorial Tournament, the P.G.A. Tour stop that attracts one of the strongest collections of golf’s marquee names outside the major championships, it also keeps him in touch with new generations of players. “I have always considered Muirfield Village Golf Club a showcase for my love and respect for the game of golf,” Nicklaus said last year. The Memorial completed its 38th edition in June, with Matt Kuchar joining its list of champions. A year earlier, Tiger Woods captured his fifth Memorial title — his 73rd career victory, which pushed him past Nicklaus for second place on the all-time list. Muirfield Village also was the site of the 1986 U.S. Junior Amateur, and The Presidents Cup will complete the course’s triad of professional golf’s biggest team events: The Ryder Cup was held there in 1987 and the women’s Solheim Cup in 1998. “I have been extremely proud of my association over the years with The Presidents Cup,” Nicklaus, 73, said, “and have been amazed and impressed with its growth as one of the game’s premier team competitions. I think this is an ideal marriage.” Nicklaus is a four-time captain of the U.S. Presidents Cup team, with a 2-1-1 record that includes the historic shared title in 2003 in South Africa, after darkness halted a gripping, all-the-marbles playoff between Woods and Ernie Els. “To this day, it’s the greatest event I’ve ever been involved in,” he has said on numerous occasions. His role this time, however, won’t be as captain but as host. Given Nicklaus’s record of meticulous fine-tuning over the Memorial’s nearly four decades of existence, “Jack’s Place” is likely to provide a supreme test. “He knows every tuft of the grass,” said the current U.S. captain, Fred Couples. Since Kuchar took home the Memorial trophy in June, Nicklaus has added a new back tee at No.18 that resolves one of his longstanding annoyances. A downhill drive is guarded by a stream on the left, with a cluster of nine bunkers at the dogleg on the right. “As the golf ball has changed, [players] kept driving it over bunkers, over bunkers, over bunkers — negating the strategy of the golf hole,” Nicklaus said. “I’ve got nine bunkers on the right side of the hole, which I hate.” Superintendent Paul Latshaw had been proposing another tee for a couple of years, but Nicklaus was concerned with encroaching on No.15. Finally, though, Nicklaus relented. “So we went back and looked at it — my gosh, you can get [a new tee] back there,” Nicklaus said. The hole now measures 485 yards, or 443 meters, an increase of 21 yards, with a cluster of black walnut trees now guarding the right-side landing area at about 300 yards. Most pleasing to Nicklaus: He can make plans to take out about five of those bunkers sometime next year. “The golf hole actually is just beautiful from there,” he said. Three years ago, Nicklaus overhauled a lackluster par-3 16th that even he described as simply “a nice way to get from 15 green to 17 tee.” With the likelihood that several Presidents Cup matches could end at No.16, something better was needed. Nicklaus repositioned the green to the right and installed a pond to guard the front-left of the putting surface. In its Memorial debut, the new design ranked second among the course’s toughest holes. In 2012, Woods demonstrated No.16’s potential for drama when his chip-in from behind the green proved the catalyst to victory. “I didn’t want to see those matches finish on a weakish hole,” Nicklaus said. Now Muirfield Village presents a gantlet of five pivotal holes on which matches could turn or conclude: the drivable par-4 14th, the par-5 15th with its steep hazards, the 16th, the par-4 17th with a blind approach shot to a small, heavily bunkered green, and the new-and-improved No.18. “It’s hard not to think about those last closing holes and just the unknown,” said Steve Stricker, the 2011 Memorial champion. Rare is the year in which Nicklaus doesn’t tweak his baby in one form or another. In various years, he has altered green slopes and chipping areas, moved bunkers or adjusted their depth, shifted tees, removed trees and tinkered with fairway widths. In 2006, Nicklaus replaced bunker rakes at the Memorial with a wooden model featuring widely spaced tines. Deep furrows created by the rakes produced less consistent lies. Alas, the experiment only lasted a year. If the Ryder Cup and Solheim Cup events are any indication, players will find a far different course than what they usually encounter at the Memorial. “In the spring, you have a lot of rough and a lot of rain,” Nicklaus said. “In the fall, we have a little drier conditions. The ball is going to run a lot.” He cited Muirfield Village’s first two holes, where golfers must try to keep the ball from running through the fairway at No.1 and avoid a stream at No.2. “They’re going to have to be careful,” he said. “The golf course doesn’t play long in the fall, and that to me is when it plays fun. It plays fun when it’s fast.” It was back in the early 1960s when Nicklaus first began contemplating the idea of giving back to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, by building a course that would attract the P.G.A. Tour’s best for an annual tournament. The concept was similar to that of Jones, who after his retirement in 1930 sought to honor the game by holding an invitational on a new course he was building in Augusta, Georgia. The Masters began four years later. Nicklaus acquired property in 1966 in Dublin, Ohio, on land where he had hunted rabbits with his father in his youth growing up in nearby Columbus. Construction began in 1972, with Desmond Muirhead collaborating with Nicklaus on the design. For a name, Nicklaus looked to the game’s origins and Muirfield, where the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers penned golf’s original 13 rules. Muirfield is where Nicklaus represented his country for the first time at the 1959 Walker Cup and won the 1966 British Open to complete a career Grand Slam. Muirfield Village was dedicated on May 27, 1974, with an exhibition match between Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf. Nicklaus won with a 6-under-par 66 that stood as the course record for five years. The Memorial Tournament began two years later, quickly establishing itself as one of the P.G.A. Tour’s top destinations. “This golf course that Jack has not just created, but fine-tuned over and over again, is a favorite of the players,” said Tim Finchem, the P.G.A. Tour commissioner. “It’s one of the best-operated tournaments in golf. They absolutely like to compete on this golf course.” For Nicklaus, though, Muirfield Village always has been meant to be his lasting stamp on the game. “What it represents is my total vision as it relates to a golf course, a club and a tournament,” Nicklaus said. “We’re very proud of it.”

Masters Golf,Masters
Ryder Cup
Presidents Cup
Solheim Cup
Jack Nicklaus
Tiger Woods


Two World War II Veterans Honor 19 Soldiers Who Disappeared 70 Years Ago

Abstract: EAST FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — On Monday morning, two World War II veterans held bouquets of roses and boarded an old warplane at Republic Airport here. Both men — Frank Kittle, 90, and Jack McMullen, 91 — narrowly escaped death while serving on such planes over Europe during the war. And now, 70 years later, they were being pulled back into service, aboard this military transport plane built in the 1940s. Their mission this time was to honor 19 soldiers who most likely crashed into the Atlantic off the coast of eastern Long Island 70 years ago in two B-24 bombers running training missions before going overseas. Neither plane was ever found; nor were the crews. Their stories were largely forgotten — at least until last May, when a clue to their disappearance emerged from the ocean. A local fisherman off the East End of Long Island snagged his net on a 600-pound rusted piece of metal that resembled the landing gear of an airplane, some 250 feet underwater. A friend of the fisherman brought the piece to the American Airpower Museum, which has a space at this airport on Long Island. Image Jack McMullen, left, 91, next to Frank Kittle, 90, in a memorial flyover on Monday. Credit Uli Seit for The New York Times “I knew right away it was a B-24 landing gear,” recalled Mr. Kittle, who volunteers at the museum. He was referring to a common type of bomber used by the United States in World War II. It is a type of plane he used to repair, and the type that Mr. McMullen flew on 32 missions during the war, including on D-Day. By tracing the landing gear’s serial number, and checking military records, Mr. Kittle and fellow museum volunteers concluded that the landing gear was probably from a B-24 that, along with its 11-man crew, went missing off the coast of eastern Long Island on April 7, 1944 — 70 years ago Monday — just two months before D-Day. “Back then, they didn’t have the technology to find it — it just disappeared,” said Mr. McMullen, adding that the crash did not generate the type of worldwide headlines that have resulted from the disappearance of a Malaysian commercial airliner last month. Inside the plane on Monday, the two men sat on riveted steel seats, secured by simple seatbelts in the plane’s bare-bones interior. The roses bounced in their laps as the noisy old warplane rumbled down the runway and roared into the sky, heading out over the open ocean, just off Robert Moses State Park. “There were a lot of planes that went down here in the States that need to be commemorated,” Mr. McMullen said over the roar of the twin engines during the flight, which was organized by the museum as a flyover memorial. The plane being used was a C-47 transport aircraft built in the 1940s that the museum restored and uses for educational tours and flights. “The B-24 was a hard plane to fly — it didn’t have power steering,” said Mr. McMullen, who flew for the Army’s Air Corps. Image Wreckage believed to be the landing gear of a B-24 bomber was recovered off Long Island last year. Credit Uli Seit for The New York Times Mr. McMullen, who later became a commercial pilot and lives in Seaford, N.Y., noted that the two lost bombers were just two of thousands of military training flights that crashed in the United States during the Second World War. The B-24’s disappearance 70 years ago was followed by a 10-day search by the military, from New Jersey to Canada, museum officials said, adding that it was also possible that the landing gear was from a B-24 that had taken off four months earlier — on Dec. 12, 1943 — with an eight-man crew bound for the same training area. It, too, disappeared without a trace, along with its crew. Both flights originated in Westover field in Massachusetts. “There’s probably not much left of the plane down there to look for,” Mr. Kittle said as he ran his hand over the landing gear, displayed in the museum’s hangar. A piece of fishing net remained lodged near the wheel section, and a section of chromed steel was still shiny. Mr. Kittle, a retired aircraft mechanic living in Deer Park, N.Y., was a Navy mechanic and flight engineer whose B-24 was on patrol off the coast of Spain when it crashed into the Atlantic in 1943. He and the nine other crew members spent several days in a life raft until rescue. On Monday, the plane approached Fire Island Inlet, flying at about 1,400 feet. A crew member opened an emergency exit so that the old war veterans could drop the roses down. The flowers were sucked out the window and floated down to the wind-rippled waters below. “This is for all the men who never came home,” Mr. McMullen said.

Military aircraft
Plane Crashes and Missing Planes
Missing person
World War II
Veteran
Farmingdale NY
Long Island


De Blasio’s Investigations Chief Recuses Himself From Fund-Raising Inquiry

Abstract: The commissioner of New York City’s Investigation Department, in an abrupt turnaround, has recused himself from a federal inquiry into Mayor Bill de Blasio’s political fund-raising operation, the agency said on Friday. The commissioner, Mark G. Peters, a longtime friend of Mr. de Blasio’s who served as the treasurer for his 2013 campaign, made the move “in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict” in connection with the inquiry, according to a two-sentence statement from the agency. The mayor appointed Mr. Peters to lead the Investigations Department in January 2014. The statement did not mention either what the potential conflict might be, or Mr. Peters’s role in the campaign. It referred to the fund-raising investigation without mentioning the mayor, citing “allegations related to certain campaign donors.” Image Mark G. Peters, commissioner of New York City’s Investigation Department, is a longtime friend of Mayor Bill de Blasio and served as Mr. de Blasio’s campaign treasurer. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times The inquiry, which is being conducted by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with the Investigation Department, is focused on two businessmen who served as fund-raisers for Mr. de Blasio. One of the men, Jona Rechnitz, bundled over $40,000 in donations for Mr. de Blasio while Mr. Peters was campaign treasurer. Around the same time, Mr. Rechnitz and his wife each gave the campaign $4,950, the maximum amount allowed. As commissioner, Mr. Peters oversees criminal and administrative inquiries into corruption, fraud, waste and abuse throughout city government. Asked why Mr. Peters had changed his position, a spokeswoman for the Investigation Department, Diane Struzzi, said the agency would not comment beyond the statement. Karen Hinton, a spokeswoman for the mayor, declined to comment. Responding to questions on Wednesday about whether Mr. Peters should recuse himself, the agency said in a statement that he would not do so , despite his history and familiarity with Mr. de Blasio’s fund-raising efforts. That statement said, “The allegations of wrongdoing regarding campaign finance postdate Commissioner Peters’s involvement with the campaign.” It pointed to the timing of the possible wrongdoing under scrutiny, suggesting there was no appearance of a conflict of interest in Mr. Peters’s role. But he was the campaign treasurer when the funds bundled by Mr. Rechnitz and those from him and his wife were donated. In January 2014, after Mr. de Blasio had taken office and named Mr. Peters as investigation commissioner, Mr. Rechnitz gave $50,000 to a nonprofit group, the Campaign for One New York, that supported the mayor’s agenda . Mr. Rechnitz also gave $102,000 to the New York State Democratic Senate Campaign Committee in late 2014, after Mr. de Blasio sought support to help the Democrats regain control of the State Senate. The Investigation Department statement on Wednesday had also suggested he was playing an important role in the federal inquiry, noting that his recusal “would only serve to impede D.O.I.’s active investigation of this matter.”

Conflict of interest
Department of Investigation NYC
Mark G Peters
Campaign finance
Bill de Blasio
NYC
Jona Rechnitz


A Court Ruling and Weak Jobs Report Hurt Shares

Abstract: Stocks fell Friday after a court ruling in a foreclosure case prompted investors to pull out of bank stocks, adding to weakness after a lackluster jobs report. Even with the decline, however, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average recorded their sixth consecutive week of advances. Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp lost a ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which said the banks failed to show they held the mortgages at the time they foreclosed. The court decision is the latest on the validity of foreclosures conducted without full documentation, and the mortgage fiasco could prove costly for the banks. The news turned the market lower, but some said the reaction was overdone. “Financials have really been a leader in the market in recent weeks — this could close that sector out,” said Nick Kalivas, senior equity index analyst at MF Global in Chicago. Shares of Wells Fargo fell 65 cents, or 2 percent, to $31.50, and US Bancorp eased 20 cents, or 0.76 percent, to $26.09. The KBW Bank index lost 0.9 percent. The S.& P. financial index rallied more than 10 percent in December. On Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average slipped 22.55 points, or 0.19 percent, to 11,674.76. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was off 2.35 points, or 0.18 percent, to 1,271.50. The Nasdaq composite index declined 6.72 points, or 0.25 percent, to 2,703.17. For the week, the S.& P. 500 rose 1.1 percent, the Dow industrials gained 0.8 percent and the Nasdaq composite climbed 1.9 percent. Investors were treading lightly after the employment report, which showed nonfarm payrolls rose a less-than-expected 103,000. But overall employment for October and November was revised upward to show 70,000 more job gains than previously reported. The Labor Department report showed that a surprisingly large number of people had given up searching for work, tempering the positive news of a decline in the unemployment rate to 9.4 percent from 9.8 percent. Analysts said that while the data showed steady, if slow, progress, it did not meet expectations that had risen through the week. The mortgage issue has been overhanging banks, prompting an uproar last year that led lenders like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Ally Financial to temporarily stop seizing homes. On the upside, Diamond Offshore rose $3.28, or 4.87 percent, to $70.57, after Goldman Sachs upgraded the oil and gas drilling company. Goldman also upgraded Baker Hughes, sending its shares up $1.77, or 3.23 percent, to $56.60. Interest rates were slightly lower. The Treasury’s benchmark 10-year note rose 18/32, to 94 5/32, and the yield fell to 3.32 percent from 3.39 percent late Thursday.

Stocks and Bonds
United States Economy
Labor and Jobs
Foreclosures


Chinese Messaging App Gains Ground Elsewhere

Abstract: BEIJING — Chinese Internet companies have long struggled to establish their products beyond the country’s borders. In 2007 China’s dominant search engine, Baidu, announced an ambitious plan to break into the Japanese search engine market; as of last year, the company said it had lost more than $108 million trying. WeChat, a mobile messaging application created by Tencent Holdings, China’s largest Internet company, is aggressively trying to buck the trend and establish itself in the expanding global market for smartphone apps. Based on some analysts’ predictions, the company may actually have a shot. WeChat is most often likened to WhatsApp, a smartphone application popular in the United States that allows users to send text, image or audio messages for free to other subscribers. But WhatsApp’s Chinese counterpart is quickly moving beyond simple multimedia instant-messaging. In the last few months, it has announced a steady stream of new features that many say surpass those offered by WhatsApp and Asian competitors like Kakao Talk and LINE. “I use WeChat for messaging and group chatting, but I’ve also started getting into its social network,” said Kate Wan, a 29-year-old media professional in Beijing, referring to WeChat “Moments,” a feature that allows users to post pictures and update their online status. “It’s become a huge part of my daily life.” Since the introduction of the application in January 2011, WeChat, known as Weixin in Chinese, has grown at a blistering pace. In September, Pony Ma, Tencent’s chief executive, announced that its user base had doubled to 200 million from 100 million in six months. Tencent is vying to make WeChat the dominant global mobile messaging application. The app is available in eight languages, including Russian, Indonesian, Portuguese and Thai, and there are plans to expand into other languages. “The Chinese Internet market is so set apart from other countries that we inside the industry refer to it as the Galápagos Island syndrome,” said Kai Lukoff, the editor of TechRice, a China-focused technology blog based in Beijing. “Domestic Internet products are extremely well adapted to the Chinese market, but they are way out of place for global users.” But industry experts now argue that app retailers like the Apple iTunes Store and Google Play empower developers anywhere to reach consumers everywhere. The openness of these distribution platforms could provide WeChat with a conduit into the international smartphone market, some analysts say. Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China, a consulting firm that specializes in China’s technology and Internet sectors, said WeChat, with its sophisticated but easy-to-navigate interface and features, had the potential to overcome any lingering doubts in the West over the Made-in-China label. “Many people are afraid of Chinese products, whether milk, cat food or Internet services,” Mr. Clark said. “But with the App Store, it’s hard to even know that WeChat is Chinese — it really levels the playing field.” According to App Annie, a mobile analytics company based in Beijing, WeChat’s outward push is beginning to bear fruit. Based on download data from the first three quarters of 2012, the app is growing fastest in Southeast Asia, but it is making headway elsewhere, including Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The most promising markets this year include Vietnam, Turkey, Thailand, India and Indonesia, with Russia and Saudi Arabia following closely behind. While WeChat remains relatively obscure in the United States, where players like WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger dominate the mobile messaging market, analysts say WeChat registered nearly 100,000 new users in the United States in September alone. “All of my Chinese friends use it here in North Carolina, whether to send group messages or to organize events,” said Zhang Xue, a student at Duke University Law School who is from the city of Harbin in China’s northeast. “I downloaded WhatsApp out of curiosity, but it’s not nearly as convenient as WeChat.”

Mobile Applications
Smartphones
China
Tencent Holdings


Injury Delays Culmination of Amanda Kessel’s Career

Abstract: MINNEAPOLIS — Saturday is Senior Day for the University of Minnesota women’s hockey team, so earlier this week, Amanda Kessel joined the other four members of her graduating class for an on-ice photo at Ridder Arena, their home rink. Kessel smiled, though the whole thing felt a bit weird. Kessel arrived with the class of 2014, not 2016. This became her class by happenstance. “They were freshmen when I was a junior here,” Kessel said. “I got a new class. But it’s a good class.” Kessel, 24, is just finishing her eligibility after missing one season for the 2014 Olympics and then the next year and a half recovering from postconcussion symptoms. The 2013 Patty Kazmaier Award winner as Division I’s best female hockey player, Kessel, a right wing, rejoined the third-ranked Golden Gophers this month. She has one goal and three assists in four games. Only recently has Kessel, a former N.C.A.A. scoring champion and the younger sister of Pittsburgh Penguins right wing Phil Kessel, spoken in detail about her concussion and lengthy recovery. It started with a freak accident in a United States national team scrimmage several months before the Sochi Olympics. “Somebody tripped, took out my legs and I went headfirst into the boards,” said Kessel, who could not recall exactly where or when it took place. Kessel, who sustained one concussion in high school, said she did not play for a month and a half. She sat out the Bring on the World Tour before the Olympics with what the team called a lower-body injury. In Sochi, Kessel scored three goals and tied for the team lead with six points, as the United States won the silver medal . But after the Games, she said, things unraveled. “Going into Sochi, I felt well,” she said. “Then a week and even months after, I noticed these weird things that I thought were normal, but they weren’t — sensitivity to light, headaches, fogginess, and I was nauseous all the time. I couldn’t figure out why, because I wasn’t hit again or anything.” Josephine Pucci, an American teammate of Kessel’s, and Haley Irwin of Canada also missed significant periods with concussion-related problems before and after playing in the gold medal game in Sochi. Instead of returning to the Gophers in September 2014 as planned, Kessel spent the next few months being treated at the Carrick Brain Center in Marietta, Ga. Dr. Ted Carrick, a chiropractic neurologist, helped Pucci and the former American Olympian Caitlin Cahow return to play, so Kessel was hopeful. But she still struggled. “It took some of my symptoms away, but not what I would have liked,” she said. “I got my eyes back on track. They did everything they could to try and help me, and they’ve had a lot of successes with a bunch of my teammates. I think over all, it wasn’t the treatment that was going to push me where I needed to be.” A physical therapist Kessel knew in her hometown, Madison, Wis., recommended she see Dr. Michael Collins, the highly regarded director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s sports medicine concussion program . Collins has treated hundreds of amateur and professional athletes, among them the Nascar driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Chicago Cubs catcher David Ross. Kessel said she started seeing Collins in June. Collins declined to discuss Kessel’s treatment, but at a concussion conference at the medical center in October, Collins was among about three dozen clinicians and researchers who recommended physical activity for concussion rehabilitation. Kessel had stopped working out when her symptoms took hold, and she said Collins urged her to resume. “That was really the main piece that started turning things around,” Kessel said. “Being a highly active athlete, and then doing nothing for a year and a half, that wasn’t helping my symptoms. I started working out, started doing things, and my symptoms continued to do better. Thirty minutes of cardio a day is pretty much what I was doing for a while.” “At first it was tough, because I couldn’t understand why you were doing more when you don’t feel well. Then I really started to understand more and more what I was doing. A month into treatment, I re-enrolled in school.” In September, Kessel took her first twirls around the ice since Sochi, alone. “It was nice being back out there,” she said. “But right away, I missed the competitiveness of actually playing. It wasn’t so bad going out there the first four, five times by myself. But then I was ready to get in there and play with others.” In July, Gophers Coach Brad Frost announced that Kessel would not play this season. That changed in January when she began practicing with her teammates. The university medical staff cleared her for games in early February. “Back two or three years ago, I’m not sure she thought she would be playing hockey again,” Frost said. “Now over the last six months, to get back to where she is, 100 percent healthy, is just tremendous.” Kessel led Minnesota to N.C.A.A. championships in 2012 and ’13, the second of those coming in a 41-0-0 season, the first undefeated campaign in Division I women’s hockey. She returned too late this season to help the Gophers (27-3-1), the defending N.C.A.A. champions, overtake their rival Wisconsin (30-1-1) for the Western Collegiate Hockey Association regular-season title. The second-ranked Badgers swept Minnesota in a two-game series in early December in Madison, ending an 18-game winless streak against the Gophers. The teams meet again here Friday and Saturday in the final series of the regular season. Minnesota is 12-0-1 since losing to the Badgers and 3-0-1 with Kessel. “She was gone for three years, and you wouldn’t know it the way she plays,” said the senior center Hannah Brandt, Kessel’s linemate then and now. “It’s awesome having her back. I obviously enjoy playing with her. It’s been a lot of fun so far.” Now Kessel is thinking about another N.C.A.A. title bid, and perhaps the 2018 Olympics. She expects to graduate in August with a sports management degree — a little late, but healthy at last. “It has definitely been a whirlwind,” she said.

Ice hockey
Amanda Kessel
Concussion
Sports injury
2014 Winter Olympics


A Comic Book Artist Finds Community Online

Abstract: D EAN HASPIEL, a 41-year-old resident of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, is not your stereotypical comic book eccentric. He is charming and funny, and he enjoys bringing people together, whether to talk about comic books or knock back a sociable Scotch. Mr. Haspiel’s credits include illustrating “The Quitter,” the autobiographical tale of his fellow comic book maven Harvey Pekar, and Jonathan Ames’s graphic novel “The Alcoholic,” about life under the influence. His art is defined by bold lines and figure work reminiscent of the legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby. A native New Yorker with dark hair and a scruffy beard, Mr. Haspiel has lately become something of a champion of Web comics. His work can be found online in “Billy Dogma,” a noirish tale of love and redemption; at Act-I-Vate.com , an online cartoonist collective that he founded three years ago; and at “Street Code,” his semiautobiographical anecdotes of city life, at zudacomics.com . Mr. Haspiel works out of an art studio in Gowanus, a space that screams “aspiring artists at work,” which he shares with a group of like-minded Brooklyn cartoonists. The décor includes dog-eared reference material, drawing materials, and a microwave and an electric coffee pot, which have both seen better days. Starting Friday, Mr. Haspiel will be signing autographs and talking comics in appearances at the New York Comic Con, a pop culture show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. During a recent chat at a cafe near his studio, Mr. Haspiel spoke about his art, and his life, in New York. GEORGE GENE GUSTINES  When I moved to Brooklyn in 1997, there was a certain cultural polarization in the neighborhood, which is some of the stuff I write about in “Street Code.” Because I grew up on the Upper West Side, I was the new guy. Some old-school Italians looked at me as if I was some kind of yuppie, which I’m not. It was really kind of gratifying to eventually be accepted by the tribes. I definitely enjoy community. I worked alone at home for the five years I was first in Brooklyn, and when I discovered blogging, I realized it was like having office mates. It was a good distraction, a good way to talk or complain. And when I realized you could show stuff on these sites, I got excited because I could post a preliminary sketch or a finished piece and get a response. After a while, I realized there were a bunch of cartoonists online. And so I thought, why not create a comic blog of creator-owned stuff and create this online anthology? You own the material, you post on a weekly basis, and you piggyback off each other’s fan bases. So I started this comics collective called Act-I-Vate. I wanted a buzzword. When I looked up the name online, I found that it had been taken by something else, so I added the dashes. I did Act-I-Vate and “Billy Dogma” while doing print work. The difference between the two is for a printed graphic novel, you know the beginning, the middle and the end of the story when you get the script, and you take a year to draw it. Not many people see what you’ve done, except for the editor and the writer. It’s printed and marketed, and you hope a bunch of people see it and weigh in. What’s cool about doing “Billy Dogma” is that every week people tell me what they like, or don’t like, or “keep drawing!” Over the years, the free “Billy Dogma” comics that I was posting have led to me making money off of other Web comics. I joked about being the “dean of Web comics,” but I don’t know anybody else who could say that. And the comics still exist. It’s not like there’s an expiration date. You can still click on them. You don’t have to go into the back-issue bin. All you need is a link. The more interesting thing is, O.K., I gave my stuff away for free, and you’d think no one would want to buy my stuff when it became available in print. That’s not true. In a weird way, you’re building loyalty and a fan base. I think books haven’t lost their luster yet. Print is still alive, despite the hard times. I believe that comics won’t ever go away, for one reason: They’re affordable, budget-orientated art and entertainment. When times are tough, people need to escape. I think being a New Yorker informs the types of stories I tell and how I draw them. I’m trying to decide if you could tell if an artist was from Michigan, say, by reading his comics. I don’t know, but I feel that because New York is so analyzed and admired and criticized, there’s a lot of creative energy that goes into the work of New York comic artists. Like Will Eisner or Jack Kirby, for instance, you can tell by their work that they were born and bred New Yorkers. In a small way, Brooklyn reminds me of those great Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, only the vistas are bordered by brownstones and churches and a magnificent park. I was born in Manhattan, but I found my art and my heart in Brooklyn.

Haspiel Dean
Comic Books and Strips
Computers and the Internet
Cartoons and Cartoonists


David Price of Rays Realistic About Worth and Future

Abstract: PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. — David Price was shooting a commercial for a home-security company at his house in Tampa on Feb. 7 when his brother, Damon, called. Price ignored him once, then twice. With the third call, he finally picked up. He figured it must be important. Damon was eager to share the news that Felix Hernandez, the ace of the Seattle Mariners, had agreed to a contract worth $175 million over seven years. The cost for elite pitchers had just crossed a threshold. “I was like, Wow, that’s insane,” Price said Friday morning in the Tampa Bay Rays’ spring training clubhouse. “That’s Monopoly money.” He shook his head and laughed. Price, 27, won the American League Cy Young Award last season and is the hardest-throwing starting pitcher in the majors. In the last 12 months, peers like Matt Cain, Cole Hamels, Zack Greinke and now Hernandez have each signed for more than $125 million. Price is among the next in line. With others — Justin Verlander of the Detroit Tigers and Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers — the question is: How much will their well-financed current teams pay? With Price, it is, when will the low-budget Rays deal him? Their contract with Evan Longoria, the star third baseman, runs through 2022. Nobody pretends they can afford another nine-figure deal, putting Price’s future in limbo. “But I don’t think about it,” Price said. “I just don’t. That’s not why I play the game. I love the game. I’ve loved it since I was 2 years old. I enjoy being a part of an environment like this and doing stuff the way that we do stuff. It’s the right way.” The Rays have averaged nearly 92 victories a season since 2008, when they won the A.L. pennant with Price on the mound. He had been drafted first over all the previous June, and when he visited Tropicana Field, he received bags of free merchandise, only to learn that the trinkets would soon be obsolete. The next season, he was told, the team would drop its black-and-green color scheme and no longer be known as the Devil Rays. It was Price’s introduction to an organization in which nothing stays the same — except a relentlessly creative operating philosophy. In 10 tries, the Devil Rays had only losing seasons. In five tries, the Rays have known only winning. To sustain that streak, they have traded several top starters, including Scott Kazmir, Matt Garza and, this winter, James Shields. “There’s nothing we do where we’re not thinking about the future and how to extend our talent runway, to have the requisite depth to put us in position to have success in the American League East,” General Manager Andrew Friedman said. “So we’re consumed by that. We’re driven by that.” The Rays have kept some stars until they reached free agency, including outfielders Carl Crawford and B. J. Upton. They could always do the same with Price, whose rights they retain through 2015. But the trade of Shields, who actually had more innings and strikeouts than Price last season, came with two years left on his deal and netted an impressive return. The Rays sent Shields and another starter, Wade Davis, to the Kansas City Royals for a prospect package that included two pitchers and outfielder Wil Myers, Baseball America’s minor league player of the year. Rays players understood the move. “I get it,” starter Matt Moore said. “It’s part of the game. This isn’t Little League, where you get to play with your friends all the way up. I’m just grateful he was my teammate.” Shields, 31, had been with the organization for 13 years, including 7 in the majors. He was a leader on the staff, a role that now falls mainly to Price, who enthusiastically fills it. Each inning a fellow starter comes off the mound, Manager Joe Maddon said, Price is the first to greet him in the dugout. When a teammate throws live batting practice, Price stands behind the cage, encouraging him. Price invites teammates to his home to play video games, and his French bulldog, Astro, is the clubhouse mascot. “Stuff like that, that goes so far,” Maddon said. “Those kinds of things are impactful. I don’t know exactly how much, but I know it’s great.” Mostly, of course, Price leads with his left arm. According to Fangraphs, his average fastball last season was 95.5 miles per hour, best among major league starters. Yet he continued to grow as a pitcher, using the fastball less often and baffling hitters by throwing off-speed pitches nearly 40 percent of the time. He held opponents to a puny .276 slugging percentage with runners in scoring position. The result was a 20-5 record and an A.L.-best 2.56 earned run average, and the Rays rewarded him with a one-year contract for a little more than $10 million, avoiding salary arbitration. Price said there were no active discussions on a long-term deal, but he has no plans to take a discount. An economics major at Vanderbilt, he has a strong grasp of the marketplace. “As major league players, we’re a brotherhood,” Price said. “We have to look out for other guys that are coming along, the next King Felix or the next C. C. Sabathia or Justin Verlander. Those guys are putting their work in now, whether they’re in the minor leagues or still in high school. “If we sign a lesser deal, or whatever the case is, it affects everybody, not just you. That’s something you want to take into consideration, because people have obviously paved the way for us to make the money that we’ve been making. We’re very fortunate, and we’re very grateful.” Friedman said that it was obvious that Price deserved a “very substantial contract,” and that the team would continue to evaluate his status. For now, he said, it makes most sense to concentrate on this season, and that seems fine with Price. Price said he rarely thought about the business side of baseball until 2010, his first full year in the majors. He had signed for $8.5 million out of college, but teammates never held it against him. The hazing at his first training camp, he said, was harmless fun — Troy Percival slapped a sticker of himself on the hood of Price’s BMW, and Price drove around with it for a week. The high jinks never seem to end around the Rays, a loose team with few rules. On the clubhouse bulletin board Friday, someone superimposed Maddon’s likeness into a photo of Peyton and Eli Manning, poking fun at the manager’s prowess as a small-college quarterback. Around the corner, the giant head of a wild boar hung from the locker of outfielder Luke Scott, who killed it with a spear. Price said he had always liked being on the Rays — the proximity to his Nashville home, the diversity of the roster, the chance to win. But he does not discount the possibility he might even be traded this season. “Whether I spend the rest of my career here, whether I spend a half-year here, a year or more, I cherish this time — because I know it’s invaluable, what we have going on here,” he said. “You can’t say enough about what this organization has done for me, how they’ve all taken me in.” Soon enough, they may have to let him go, an outcome that might be necessary, even if neither side really wants it to happen. Price can appreciate the resourcefulness of the front office, even if it means he must leave someday to keep the talent runway moving. “You can’t knock it,” he said, “because what they’ve done has worked.”


Anglican Leader Defends Faith as Vatican Welcomes His Members

Abstract: ROME — When the Vatican announced last month that it was creating a new Anglican rite within the Roman Catholic Church aimed at Anglicans uncomfortable with the ordination of women and gay clergy members, a headline in a British newspaper read, “ Rome Parks Tanks on Rowan’s Lawn. ” It was referring to the Most Rev. Rowan Williams , the archbishop of Canterbury and the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion . On Thursday, Archbishop Williams came to Rome and fired back , albeit cushioning his blow in dense theological language. Two days before a scheduled meeting with Pope Benedict XVI , Archbishop Williams delivered a strong defense of Anglicanism, including its commitment to female priests. He also called for clarity on the future of Catholic-Anglican dialogue, widely seen as compromised after the Vatican’s move. In Rome on a visit that had been planned before the Vatican’s announcement, Archbishop Williams sought to play down the tensions between the churches. “The ecumenical glass is genuinely half full,” Archbishop Williams said, speaking at an academic conference honoring a cardinal who worked for ecumenical dialogue. And yet all eyes were on the empty half, including, it seemed, Archbishop Williams’s. He has said that he was kept largely in the dark about the new Anglican rite , which on Thursday he jokingly called “the elephant in the room.” Last week, the Vatican issued a document outlining the new structure, which will allow Anglicans to keep elements of their liturgy while joining the Catholic Church, but it will not change the rules for priestly celibacy . As is permitted now, Anglican priests who are already married can become Catholic priests on a case-by-case basis. When the new rite was announced, there had been much speculation that the Catholic Church would accept married Anglican priests en masse, which some experts said ran the risk of opening the larger and much debated question of priestly celibacy among Catholics. On Thursday, the archbishop called the new document “an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some,” but added that it “does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground.” The Vatican has repeatedly stressed that it was creating the new Anglican rite in response to requests from Anglicans seeking to become Catholic, and not as a bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans. But so far, few Anglicans have expressed interest in joining the new rite, beyond the Traditional Anglican Communion, which split from the Anglican Church in the 1990s over the ordination of women. “They built a room, and so far it’s empty,” said the Rev. William Franklin, the academic fellow of the Anglican Center in Rome . In his 30-minute speech, Archbishop Williams asked why the ordination of women by some local Anglican churches had become a deal-breaker in Catholic-Anglican dialogue, in spite of the fact that the two religions had reached agreement on far more complex theological questions in the years since the Protestant Reformation. And he added a rebuke to the Catholic Church. “In what way,” he asked, does ordaining women as priests “compromise the purposes of the church?” Speaking at the conference on Thursday, Cardinal Walter Kasper , the Vatican’s point man for relations with the Anglicans, said ecumenism was strong but he alluded to problems. He acknowledged in a recent interview with the Vatican newspaper that Archbishop Williams had called him “in the middle of the night” after finding out at the last minute about the new Anglican rite. In the future, Cardinal Kasper said, such delicate issues “should be undertaken in the greatest possible transparency, tactfulness and mutual esteem in order not to entail meaningless tensions with our ecumenical partners.” Pope Benedict is expected to make his first official visit to Britain next year. Vatican insiders speculate that he may use the trip to announce the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman , an Anglican convert to Catholicism who worked to bring the two churches closer.

Williams Rowan
Anglican Churches
Cardinals (Roman Catholic Prelates)
Religion and Belief
Priests
Benedict XVI
Roman Catholic Church


N.H.L. Toughens Rules on Diving

Abstract: Repeat offenders for diving will face increasingly steeper fines as part of a series of rule changes announced by the N.H.L. Starting with players’ fourth diving offenses, coaches will be fined, too. In shootouts, coaches no longer have to submit a list of their first three shooters. Players are also no longer able to do a 360-degree “spin-o-rama” on penalty shots or in a shootout.


Wall Street Slips at End of Upbeat Quarter

Abstract: Shares fell Thursday on Wall Street, but the broader market ended the third quarter with its strongest three-month performance in a year. Shares started higher on Thursday, helped by reports on weekly unemployment claims, economic growth and regional manufacturing output that exceeded expectations. But as the day wore on, the major indexes slipped, taking some of the edge off a September rally and raising questions about whether the surge could be maintained. The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 47.23 points, or 0.4 percent, at 10,788.05. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index lost 3.53 points, or 0.3 percent, to 1,141.20, while the Nasdaq composite index dropped 7.94 points, or 0.3 percent, to 2,368.62. The broader market, using the S.& P. as a gauge, has risen nearly 9 percent this month, its best September performance since 1939. The index has risen 10.72 percent in the three months from June 30, its best quarter since the third period of 2009. The Dow gained 10 percent in the quarter and the Nasdaq rose 12.29 percent. Tom di Galoma, head of United States rates trading at Guggenheim Securities, attributed the rally to the Federal Reserve. “The start of the bull market in the last quarter,” Mr. di Galoma said, came after the Fed’s announcement in August that it would try to bolster the economy by buying long-term Treasuries and the subsequent talk of quantitative easing . Analysts said the rally occurred despite the relative absence of improved economic data, meaning investors had probably adjusted their expectations. In addition, trading volume in the quarter was down 23 percent compared with the year-earlier period as uncertainty kept many investors on the sidelines. “The market moved up on good news but did not move down on bad news,” said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for Standard & Poor’s. “There is still an enormous amount of uncertainty about where to put your money.” Most of the data in the quarter reinforced the notion that the economy was growing, though very slowly, calming concerns about the potential for a double-dip recession . The broadest measure of the nation’s economic activity, gross domestic product, for example, grew in the second quarter at an annual pace of 1.7 percent, down from 3.7 percent in the first. While government data in the first two months of the quarter showed that businesses added more jobs than originally estimated, the unemployment rate remained just below 10 percent. And the housing industry continued to struggle, feeling the fallout from the expired home buyer tax credit. Sales tumbled 27 percent in July, their second-weakest level since 1997, though they started to stabilize in August. For most of the quarter, the Fed was a factor in the markets. Its announcement in early August that it would buy long-term Treasury debt with proceeds from its mortgage-related bond portfolio reassured traders, at least for a while. Last week, the Fed said that it was worried that the sluggish recovery could be undermined by very low rates of inflation. The Fed’s policy-making arm then deferred a decision on whether to begin a new push to speed the recovery by additional purchases of financial assets, which would increase the money supply. Stock prices responded by initially rising before falling back in the absence of bolder steps. Jeffrey Nichols, the senior economic adviser to Rosland Capital, said rising expectations of more creation of money by the Fed helped gold prices shatter the psychologically important level of $1,300 an ounce. “I think the latest news suggesting that they might buy a range of securities without any time frame was taken as being sort of an open-ended possibility of much greater monetary easing, which is positive for gold,” Mr. Nichols said. “There are enough investors who are worried about inflation, and expectations are rising because of Fed policy.” Since the Fed’s Aug. 10 decision to buy government debt, “more investors took a greater interest in gold,” said Mr. Nichols, who is also the managing director of American Precious Metals Advisors. In general, Treasury rates have fallen steadily through the quarter. The price of the 10-year Treasury note fell 2/32, to 101, on Thursday, while the yield rose to 2.51 percent from 2.50 percent late Wednesday. In the currency market, the dollar finished the third quarter lower against a range of currencies, including the yen . Japan intervened in international currency markets in September for the first time since 2004, buying dollars and selling yen and weakening its currency in a bid to protect its export-led economy. “It has been a miserable quarter for the U.S. dollar,” Marc Chandler, the global head of currency strategy for Brown Brothers Harriman, said. Even so, the dollar was still higher against the euro and the British pound than it was at the beginning of the year. “In some ways, the big picture for the third quarter was very unusual,” Mr. Chandler said, “in the sense that the stock market rallied, bonds rallied and gold rallied.”