Retailers Look to Small Stores for Bigger Profits

Abstract: SANTA ANA, Calif. — A temporary wall slices the Anchor Blue store here in half. On one side are abandoned dressing rooms, a few mannequins and no customers. On the other are racks jammed with clothing and accessories — and more customers than ever coming into the store. Tom Shaw, the head of Anchor Blue, a clothing chain for teenagers, looked with approval at the 2,500 square feet of empty space that his company still rents. Foot traffic is up more than 7 percent, the chain says, and sales have increased nearly 23 percent since the trial remodeling last year. “We don’t want a department-store feel,” Mr. Shaw said. “With that much product in that much space you can get lost, not know where to go.” Anchor Blue is among a growing number of retailers thinking small — chopping off big chunks of stores or moving to more efficient spaces. The change reflects two trends in the retail world: Chains looking for new ways to cut costs in the sour economy, and consumers demanding a less sprawling shopping experience as they spend with greater purpose. “The customer walks in the door, and often sees a huge selection of stuff in a multibrand store, and can’t figure out what to buy and ends up buying nothing,” said Paco Underhill, founder and chief executive of Envirosell, a Manhattan-based company that advises stores on shoppers’ behavior. “We have reached the apogee of the big box, meaning that we can’t grow the store or the shopping mall any bigger, or get any more time or money out of somebody’s pockets.” Big chains like Bloomingdale’s and Nike are trying smaller stores, as are specialty retailers like Charlotte Russe. Mr. Underhill said most of his clients are exploring the idea, which can require creative thinking. The new Bloomingdale’s in Santa Monica, Calif., for example, saves space with dressing rooms that retract into the ceiling. Charlotte Russe uses free-standing glass walls that can be rearranged. At Nike, the cash registers are wired into movable counters. The smaller stores help clean retailers’ balance sheets. Rents drop, and smaller amounts of inventory cost less. Retailers can also reduce payroll costs because fewer employees are needed. At the Anchor Blue store here in Santa Ana, three employees now work on the floor instead of four. Retail chains “saw their lives flash before their eyes in the financial crisis downturn,” said John D. Morris, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets, a financial services provider. “When you’re looking at such a severe slowdown as they were in consumption, you worry about the commitment in real estate.” Mr. Shaw said he reduced the amount of clothing in the Santa Ana store by about 15 percent, removing many slower-moving items like unpopular sizes — and increasing profitability. As leases expire on its 118 stores, Anchor Blue is moving into spaces about half their size . “You’re placing a sizable bet when you’re buying a lot of inventory and filling up a 6,000-square-foot box,” he said. The financial success of many smaller stores is simple, retail analysts and the stores say: Smaller spaces are cheaper, and can be easily changed to carry the most profitable, fastest-selling inventory. The stepped-up foot traffic at the Anchor Blue store in Santa Ana, and the sales increase, for example, are both above the chain’s averages. “It certainly enhances the productivity,” Mr. Morris said of the smaller spaces. Bloomingdale’s store in Santa Monica, which opened this summer, is about 105,000 square feet on two floors, less than one-eighth the size of the chain’s Manhattan flagship store. The developer packaged in the third floor, but Bloomingdale’s declined the extra room, said Michael Gould, chairman and chief executive of Bloomingdale’s. Mr. Gould said he wanted a smaller store to move through inventory faster. The Santa Monica store dropped two slower-moving categories, home and children’s, that are often found in other Bloomingdale’s stores. It has also saved space with innovations like a mobile rack, that resembles those dry cleaners use, on the second floor ceiling that moves mannequins and clothes. “You have a store that’s turning very quickly,” he said. In addition, Mr. Gould said, many shoppers have responded to a more focused retail experience — stores that have been stripped of the distractions and temptations of unwanted merchandise — as the success of Bloomingdale’s smaller Manhattan store in SoHo, opened in 2004, has demonstrated. “We can be very specific to a customer and to a marketplace, and that’s what we need to do,” he said. Nike is also looking at flexible layouts as it experiments with smaller stores. The typical Niketown store is more than 50,000 square feet, while its prototype “brand experience” store, opened in Santa Monica in August, is just 22,000 square feet. Nike has no plans to open more Niketowns, opting instead for smaller options like the “brand experience” store. The driving force was to make shopping simple, said Tim Hershey, Nike’s vice president and general manager of North American retail. “Customers are always asking us to make it easy,” he said. Almost all the elements of the new Nike store can be rearranged at a moment’s notice. Each wall contains horizontal slats about six inches apart, and almost every piece of hardware — the circle of metal that holds a soccer ball, the wire cages that contain socks — can be hooked into the wall slats. Freestanding tables and locker-compartmentlike display cases are on wheels. A big orange station where the cash registers are housed looks like the only permanent fixture in the store — but it is not. “It’s wired to be relocated in multiple places,” Mr. Hershey said. “We like where it’s at but we haven’t been through a holiday. Live and learn.” Charlotte Russe, which has more than 500 outlets nationally, is also experimenting with a new concept store in Santa Monica that is about 25 percent smaller than the norm. Jenny Ming, the chief executive, ordered freestanding glass walls to distinguish between types of clothes. “It just makes it more shoppable,” she said. “So many stores now, it’s just big, you throw everything in there,” Ms. Ming said. For maximum versatility and efficiency, each fixture has been designed for multiple purposes. A metal rod that lies perpendicular to the wall can hold shoes on plastic hooks, underwear looped through a leg hole or hangers. Ms. Ming tried stacking shoe boxes on the selling floor so customers could select their sizes without waiting for a clerk. But that backfired, she said, as boxes were scattered, requiring extra staff (and money) for cleanup. The boxes are back in the storage area, the experience pointing to an axiom of the new smaller-is-better movement. “It’s building in as much flexibility as possible,” Ms. Ming said.

Shopping and Retail
Shopping Centers and Malls
Bloomingdale's
Consumer Behavior


Toronto’s Counterattack Breaks Down the Red Bulls

Abstract: HARRISON, N.J. — Before a disheartening home opener Sunday, Red Bulls Coach Jesse Marsch had spoken about a possible Plan B for this season, if opponents adjusted too effectively to his club’s high-press tactics. But when the Toronto F.C. midfield pinched the Red Bulls coming forward and set six to 10 men behind the ball, in and around the box, there were no effective answers. Marsch switched to three strikers, then back to two, to no avail. Half-chances were botched. The match devolved into a frustrating 2-0 defeat decided by two late, disastrous counters against the run of play. Clearly, after the Columbus Crew derailed his team in the playoffs last season with ambushes from the rear, Marsch can expect much more of the same this season — a bogging down of the beautiful game from opposing teams. “They tried to stop the game and slow it down at almost every point,” Marsch griped. “Goal kicks. Fouls. The slowing-down tactic has to be mitigated by officials. There were very few times Toronto pressed us and caused us trouble.” On two counters, though, there was a great deal of trouble. Toronto’s Sebastian Giovinco, who spent much of the match as a sneaky soloist downfield, scooted down the left side and found Tsubasa Endoh cutting into the box with a cross in the 81st minute. When Red Bulls defender Kemar Lawrence slid into the pass and took down the wing, the referee Allen Chapman took a moment before whistling for a foul and pointing to the penalty spot. “We were both going, and I think he was going down before I slid in,” Lawrence said, referring to Endoh. “It went past a couple seconds, and the referee blew the whistle trying to make up his mind whether it was or was not a penalty.” Regardless, Giovinco ripped the penalty kick past Luis Robles, low and to the left corner. Then, in the first minute of added time, Marco Delgado beat a stretched, desperate Red Bulls defense for a clean breakaway and finished an easy clincher past a helpless Robles. The roving Giovinco, M.L.S.’s most valuable player in 2015, had been a constant source of concern for the back line. Image Toronto’s Damien Perquis won a header over Martins, right. Toronto scored both of its goals after the 80th minute. Credit Adam Hunger/Associated Press “They did a good job of staying compact, and we realized at that point they were just going to spring Giovinco,” Robles said. “We lacked the mental toughness to shut a player like that down.” The defeat did nothing to alleviate early fears among fans that the rest of the league had caught on to the Red Bulls’ frenetic tactics and that the team might need to mix things up considerably if it is to repeat the success of 2015. Last year, the Red Bulls won the Supporters’ Shield with the best record in the league, only to be knocked out in the Eastern Conference finals by Columbus, which gummed up the works around the box and countered effectively. Toronto did not produce as many dangerous opportunities as Columbus did, but it did not need to, because the Red Bulls could not finish their own opportunities. “We weren’t very sharp,” said Bradley Wright-Phillips, who missed a couple of chances. “Our touches let us down. It’s the first game. It’s nothing to worry about.” The Red Bulls did not lose a match last season until their eighth game and did not drop a home match until May 24. Marsch insisted, however, that his side would regain its form quickly. It is a familiar group. His lineup included 10 of the 11 players who started the last playoff game in November against Columbus, with the exception of Gideon Baah, who played at center back in place of Matt Miazga, who left the team for Chelsea. Baah played brilliantly, held his space and marked Giovinco effectively for most of the match. Still, the Red Bulls frayed near the end, and Marsch acknowledged that he might need to tweak his system and loosen things up a bit. “We believe what we’re doing,” he said last week. “That being said, there are ways to address what we’re doing. Mixing it up, varying our formations a little, looking at rotations and matchups. We have more flexibility. I think it will be even harder to prepare for us. “This year, you’ll see greater variations,” he added. A slight variation on a theme was not good enough on Sunday, when the Red Bulls were stymied on offense and then caught flat-footed twice in the final minutes. “We got them in transitions,” Toronto Coach Greg Vanney said. “We knew that would be a big part of the game.”

Soccer
Toronto Soccer Team
New York Red Bulls Soccer Team


Ryan Braun Begins to Draw on His Store of Support

Abstract: Phoenix The public-address announcer at Maryvale Baseball Park put a little more pep in his delivery. A low rumble swept through the crowd, then a sustained, hearty cheer. The National League most valuable player was coming to the plate, and when he was hit by a pitch, the fans dutifully booed the pitcher. There would have been nothing unusual about that scene Thursday — fans generally adore their team’s superstar — but the recent history of the player, Ryan Braun of the Milwaukee Brewers , made it noteworthy. He is still revered despite a trying off-season . Nearly two months after the Brewers were eliminated in the N.L. Championship Series last October, Braun learned he had failed a test for performance-enhancing drugs . He spent the winter building a successful appeal of the 50-game punishment he faced, and opened camp with an impassioned news conference in which he asserted his innocence. Had Braun been suspended, there would have been palpable gloom around a team that also lost its star first baseman, Prince Fielder, who signed a $214 million contract with the Detroit Tigers. Instead, the Brewers can dream of building off their first division title in 29 years. “The timing of it gave us an immediate bounce into our spring training,” the Brewers’ owner, Mark Attanasio, said Thursday. “We were able to open up with a lot of energy and have a very positive, relaxed vibe in the clubhouse. That was great. From a player and management standpoint, it was all forward-looking.” Braun is trying to move on, but at a low volume, and without much success on the field. He has one home run but is 0 for 12 otherwise , and has not yet played on the road. He did not appear in the clubhouse when reporters were there Thursday, and he declined an interview request when asked through a team spokesman if he would talk about fan support and his plans for moving forward. That decision was a bit surprising from Braun, who has been one of baseball’s most engaging and accommodating stars. His personality — if he chooses to show it — is probably his best tool in restoring his image, as it was for others who have tried to shake similar clouds. “I was in a little bit different situation than he’s in right now, but I just worked hard at it,” said Colorado’s Jason Giambi, whose outgoing nature helped him win back fans after the Balco scandal midway through his Yankees career. “I always had a great relationship with the fans, when I was in Oakland and New York. I treasured that, and it seemed like it got even better after the situation because it kind of humanized me. Ryan’s a phenomenal player, as good as anybody in the league, and he’s a great kid. He’s just got to be himself. The biggest thing that’ll help is if he goes out and plays well, but also stays humble like he is.” Playing in the majors’ smallest market, the Brewers drew more than three million fans last season , setting a franchise record. They signed Aramis Ramirez to replace Casey McGehee at third base, and gave Fielder’s spot to a prospect, Mat Gamel. Their starting rotation returns intact, and Francisco Rodriguez, acquired from the Mets last July, will be there all season to set up closer John Axford. The Brewers are a popular pick to finish third, behind St. Louis and Cincinnati, but they concede nothing. “I thought they had a chance to be pretty good — that’s why I chose to come here,” said Ramirez, who hit .306 with 26 homers for the Cubs last season. “It’s a pretty winnable division. There are some good teams and some teams that got better over the winter, but I think we’ll have a pretty good chance.” The Brewers may not be fully healthy on opening day. Right fielder Corey Hart is out after having knee surgery last week. Hart, the Brewers’ leadoff man, told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he might have been injured when he slipped on concrete, while wearing cleats, on his way to see Braun’s news conference. Whether it happened quite that way, the story is a fitting metaphor for Braun’s influence on the Brewers. The team has other pressing issues — the former Cy Young Award winner Zack Greinke can become a free agent after this season — but Braun will be scrutinized most, especially on the road. “Is he going to get yelled at more or whatever?” Axford said, responding to a question. “He’s Ryan Braun, he’s one of the best players in the league. People are always yelling at the best players and trying to get them off their game. He’s used to it, but I think it’s just going to encourage him even more to show what he can do.” Axford said he was confident that Braun would win his appeal because he trusted Braun’s declaration of innocence. Catcher Jonathan Lucroy said he also trusted Braun, but not the appeal process. “It was like hitting the lottery,” Lucroy said. “We all thought, ‘Oh man, there’s no way he’s going to beat it.’ I knew he was innocent from the beginning, but the way the system works, it’s kind of set up where it’s hard to beat, and for good reason. But still, when it came out that he had passed it, it was a big sigh of relief for a lot of us.”  At his news conference, Braun based his claim of innocence on what he called a “fatally flawed” collection process. He has denied using banned drugs, but he has offered no explanation for how he could have tested positive for synthetic testosterone. Lucroy said there was more to the situation than Braun has said publicly, and his explanation to teammates, Lucroy said, has been convincing. “I’m not going to get into the details, but if you knew what we knew, people would be like, ‘Wow,’ ” Lucroy said, adding that he understood why Braun has elaborated only in private. “You’ve got to do that because it’s his prerogative. It’s up to him, it’s his choice. And honestly, if some of the things came out, it would be a lot more negative than positive. There are reasons.” Braun may never reveal those reasons, and unless he does, it is hard to untangle what happened. But if the Maryvale ovation foretells the Milwaukee reaction, Braun can count on half of his games playing out in peace. “He’s built up a huge reservoir of support,” Attanasio said. “It’s not like he’s this introverted, sullen athlete who’s trying to remake himself. He’s got a phenomenal image, and fans embrace him.”

Braun Ryan
Baseball
Milwaukee Brewers
Doping (Sports)


Administration’s Challenge to Arizona Law Is Not Over Profiling

Abstract: PHOENIX — In the public outcry that followed passage of Arizona’s new immigration law, President Obama and other critics worried that it would lead to racial profiling. But while that concern has dominated the public debate and inspired a round of boycotts of the state, it played little role in the actual legal challenge the administration filed Tuesday against the law. The word profiling appears only once, in passing, in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the law, which allows the police to demand legal papers from those its officers think might be illegal immigrants. And while the lawsuit does argue against a patchwork of state immigration laws Mr. Obama has fretted over, the idea that legal residents and citizens might find themselves swept up in Arizona’s enforcement, which is intended to discourage illegal immigrants from coming and prompt those here to leave, is not a central argument. In this case it is clear the administration’s arguments in the court of public opinion took a backseat to those expected in the actual courtroom. Justice Department officials and legal experts say the government, political consequences aside, faced up to cold legal practicalities. Racial profiling claims are difficult enough to prove, let alone before a law takes effect, and there are no examples that prosecutors can point to of legal citizens whose lives were disrupted by the Arizona law because they looked like an illegal immigrant to a police officer. Dennis Burke, the United States attorney here, said in an interview that focusing the case on “pre-emption,” the legal doctrine based on the Constitution’s supremacy clause that elevates federal law over states’, was the surest route to suspending the law before it goes into effect July 29. The federal government has successfully used the pre-emption argument in several cases, but this would be the biggest test in an immigration case. “The supremacy clause and a pre-emption argument require no waiting for the law to be actually in implementation,” Mr. Burke said. “It doesn’t allow the defense to say, ‘They are in here too early, judge, this should be allowed to play out for a while.’ “ The Arizona law, known as SB 1070, requires police officers to check the papers of people they stop or arrest if suspicious of their immigration status and makes it a state crime to be in the country without authorization. The Justice Department did argue in its suit that the law “will cause the detention and harassment of authorized visitors, immigrants, and citizens who do not have or carry identification documents specified by the statute, or who otherwise will be swept into the ambit of S.B. 1070’s ‘attrition through enforcement’ approach.” But people on both sides of the debate concede racial profiling is not what the Justice Department case, the biggest gun in the legal fight, is about. To supporters of the law, this is validation of their claims that the law, which includes language forbidding profiling, is not discriminatory. “It’s nice to see the Obama administration finally concede there is no allowance for racial profiling in Arizona’s immigration law,” said Kirk Adams, the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives. “After all the sound and fury about discrimination, it’s now clear that the administration’s entire case against SB 1070 rests on a technical claim that the law is indirectly pre-empted by federal immigration law.” United States Representative Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican, said Mr. Obama’s discrimination worries are “glaringly absent from his lawsuit.” “It is beyond ironic,” Mr. Franks added, “that the main claim in the lawsuit is that Arizona is wrongly pre-empting a federal responsibility when the entire reason the legislation was necessary in the first place was precisely because the federal government was simply not living up to its responsibility.” And it turns out Kris Kobach, the University of Missouri law professor who wrote the bill for legislators here, had accurately predicted the government’s stronger case would rest over who has authority over immigration law and not concerns about racial profiling. Lawyers in the other five lawsuits against the law that play up the potential for discrimination shrugged off their opponents’ glee, saying the government shrewdly chose not to “throw the kitchen sink” at the state, as Thomas A. Saenz of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund put it. They were happy the government stepped in and did so forcefully, even raising arguments, like the potential effect on diplomatic affairs, that others had not emphasized. “I am overwhelmed by their case,” said Stephen Montoya, the lawyer for a Phoenix police officer who has sued, in part, on the basis that he would be forced to consider people’s race or ethnicity to enforce the law. He and others said they had played up the possibility of racial profiling because, unlike the federal government, they represent clients who might be affected by the law and its repercussions. Above all, they said, they will take anything that stops the law, even if it does not turn on what all the fuss has been about. “To me it’s clear the Justice Department’s goal is to stop the law from going into effect and prevent the harassment and racial profiling from occurring,” said Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Arizona
Illegal Immigrants
Law and Legislation
Obama Barack
Justice Department
Discrimination
Immigration and Emigration
Suits and Litigation


Airline Passengers Detained Amid Fear of Terrorist Plot

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Two United States residents of Yemeni descent who flew from Chicago to Amsterdam on Sunday night were detained by the Dutch police after landing on Monday in a bizarre episode that American officials feared might be a dry run for a terrorist plot. But American law enforcement officials cautioned on Monday night that the men had not been charged with any crime and that the episode might be a misunderstanding. “There’s nothing at all confirmed at this point that’s associated with terrorism,” one official said. A search of one of the men by airport security screeners in Birmingham, Ala., as he waited to board a flight to Chicago earlier on Sunday found that he was carrying $7,000 in cash and that his luggage contained a cellphone taped to a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, three cellphones taped together and several watches taped together, a senior law enforcement official said. Because no evidence of explosives was found, the man, 48, was permitted to fly to O’Hare Airport in Chicago. He was joined there by the second man, a 37-year-old, and they both boarded United Airlines Flight 908 to Amsterdam. American officials said federal air marshals had been aboard the flight, which continued to its destination without incident. But officials discovered that at Birmingham, the 48-year-old passenger had checked his luggage on a different set of flights, to Dulles International Airport outside Washington and on to Sana, Yemen, by way of Dubai. After security agents realized that he had not boarded the flight from Chicago to Dulles, they ordered the airliner back to the gate and retrieved his luggage, which contained the suspicious items. “The items were not deemed to be dangerous in and of themselves, and as we share information with our international partners, Dutch authorities were notified of the suspicious items,” said Amy Kudwa, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. “This matter continues to be under investigation.” ABC News first reported the incident on Monday night. A Dutch official said the two men had been detained by the police upon their arrival at Schiphol Airport at the request of the American authorities “on the basis of suspicions of preparation for terrorist attacks.” The official said the men were being questioned by the police. Omar Sufi of Detroit, who said he was a cousin of the passenger who boarded in Alabama, said his relative’s actions did not sound unusual. He said that his cousin had most likely been trying to take medication and phones back to his family, and that it was common to bind together items meant for the same recipient. “This is our culture,” he said. He described his cousin as “a nice guy” who worked as a cashier in Alabama and spoke little English. Pakistanis Removed From Flight A delegation of Pakistani military officers, traveling to the United States Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., was removed from a flight at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, a Pakistani official said Monday night. The nine passengers were removed before takeoff from United Airlines Flight 727 after one of them made what a flight attendant considered to be an “inappropriate remark,” a spokesman for the airline said. (An American military official confirmed the accounts.) Members of the delegation, led by a two-star general, were offended by their treatment and canceled the Central Command meeting, the official said. He said Defense Department officials had apologized for the incident.

Terrorism
Airports
O'Hare International Airport (Chicago)
Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Chicago (Ill)
Birmingham (Ala)


Denmark: Fatal Outbreak Tied to Meat

Abstract: An outbreak of listeria tied to contaminated Danish meat has killed 12 people since last September, with most of the deaths in the past three months, the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries said Tuesday. The outbreak was finally traced on Monday to a popular type of cold cut called rullepolse — “rolled sausage” in Danish, typically made of pork stuffed with herbs and spices — produced by a company near Copenhagen, Jorn A. Rullepolser A/S. “This is completely incomprehensible for us,” Christina Lowies Jensen, an official at the company, told TV2 television, saying all production and sales had been halted. Listeria can lead to fatal infections, especially in the young or the elderly.

Denmark
Meat
Food Safety
Listeria monocytogenes
Europe


Alaska: Palin Defense Fund Is Called Illegal

Abstract: A legal defense fund set up for Sarah Palin when she was Alaska governor was illegal, an investigator for the State Personnel Board said Thursday. The investigator, Timothy Petumenos, said the Alaska Fund Trust inappropriately used the word “official” on its Web site to describe it, wrongly implying Ms. Palin’s endorsement as governor. He said, however, that Ms. Palin acted in good faith and relied on lawyers to make sure the fund was lawful. Her lawyer said she would return the money from the fund, which brought in almost $390,000.


North Carolina: Crime Lab to Be Examined

Abstract: Attorney General Roy Cooper has ordered a review of the state’s crime laboratory after revelations about practices there that led to exoneration of a man wrongly accused of murder. Two former assistant directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation will review the lab’s practices in cases dating to the 1990s. In a case last month, a three-judge panel found “convincing evidence” that a man who had served more than 16 years in prison for murder, Gregory F. Taylor, was innocent and had been convicted based on flawed evidence and unreliable testimony. Among other things, his lawyers had argued that stains on his truck turned out to not have been human blood.

Murders and Attempted Murders
Forensic Science
Decisions and Verdicts
Prisons and Prisoners
North Carolina


7 Police Officers Guarding Vaccination Team in Pakistan Are Shot Dead

Abstract: KARACHI, Pakistan — Seven police officers keeping watch over a polio vaccination campaign were gunned down in two separate attacks in a suburb of Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi on Wednesday, government officials said. The attacks occurred in a poor neighborhood of Orangi Town, where health workers have been administering vaccinations. There was no immediate claim of responsibility and police officials said they were investigating whether the attacks were connected to the immunization campaign. Taliban militants have repeatedly targeted health workers in the past, accusing them of being spies, and the violence has seriously hindered immunization campaigns in Pakistan, which is one of three countries in the world where polio remains endemic. But Karachi itself has a long history of political and sectarian violence, and criminal gangs have also been known to kill police officers. Feroze Shah, a senior Karachi police official, said eight gunmen riding on four motorcycles had carried out the killings. “In the first attack, militants killed three policemen escorting a polio team in streets of the locality,” Mr. Shah said. “In the second attack, the same men killed four policemen in a police van, a few streets away.” The officers were rushed to the nearby Abbasi Shaheed Hospital but all seven were dead on arrival, the hospital said. No health workers were harmed in the attacks. The four-day polio vaccination drive started on Monday, with the goal of immunizing 2.2 million children in and around Karachi. According to city government officials, the campaign involves 6,200 health workers and teams of police officers to protect them. Commissioner Syed Asif Haider Shah, a city official, vowed that the polio eradication campaign would continue on Thursday, its last day. The police chief of Sindh Province, A.D. Khawaja, announced a reward of 5 million rupees, or about $47,000, for information leading to the arrest of the gunmen. He said that the families of the police officers would receive $19,000 each in compensation. Although the Taliban have long accused health officials in Pakistan’s northwestern and southern provinces of spying, the hostility toward polio vaccinations escalated after the United States killed Osama bin Laden in a raid on his compound in May 2011. It later emerged that the C.I.A. had used a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, operating under the cover of a vaccination campaign to help find Bin Laden in Abbottabad. In January, a suicide bomber killed 15 people, including police officers, outside a polio vaccination center in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province in the southwest. But officials cautioned that it was too early to say who might be behind Wednesday’s attacks near Karachi. A campaign to stamp out political violence has been in operation there for some time, and various political and criminal factions, as well as the Taliban, have lashed out at the police and security forces in retaliation. “We have been investigating whether today’s attack is part of the trend,” said Raja Umar Khitab, a senior police official overseeing counterterrorism operations. At least 95 officers have been killed in the last 16 months in the city, police statistics show. “Taliban groups in the city have been weakened because of the ongoing operation,” Mr. Khitab said. “However, they still have ability to carry out hit-and-run attacks.” “We did not suspend the vaccination drive,” said Faiza Bibi, a polio worker in Gulshen-e-Buner, a Karachi neighborhood, because the campaign’s officials “said the police killing today has nothing to do with the polio drive.” In a statement, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who recently returned to the country after a trip to London , condemned the attack and praised the police officers. “They laid down their lives to secure the country’s future,” he said.

Karachi
Vaccines Immunization
Polio
Taliban
Terrorism


New York Legislators Plan to Introduce Measure on Carried Interest Tax

Abstract: A coalition of progressive groups is starting a state-level campaign to close the so-called carried interest loophole, which allows fund managers to pay a substantially reduced federal tax rate on much of their income. Two New York State assemblymen plan to introduce a bill on Monday that would raise taxes on state residents who benefit from the lower rate, to precisely offset the tax savings they receive at the federal level. In addition to correcting what its members see as a glaring inequity in the tax code, the coalition hopes to generate revenue that could be spent on public investments in areas like schools and economic development. “People from Buffalo, when they work, they pay their taxes,” said Assemblyman Sean Ryan, one of the two Democratic legislators who are sponsoring the bill. “We don’t have a lot of hedge funds in Buffalo, but we do have a need for state assistance.” The bill would make the tax increase contingent on the passage of corresponding legislation in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut, so that fund managers could not avoid the tax by simply moving to a nearby state. Those who helped draft the bill estimated that it could raise roughly $3.7 billion a year in New York if the tax increase were to go into effect. The coalition includes groups focused on reducing inequality and challenging the political power of the wealthy, such as the Patriotic Millionaires and Hedge Clippers. Hedge Clippers is backed by the American Federation of Teachers and targets the influence of hedge funds and private equity funds. The coalition plans to push for similar legislation in California, Illinois and Pennsylvania. The name of the so-called loophole refers to a feature of the compensation of many fund managers, who frequently receive a management fee equivalent to 2 percent of their fund’s assets, as well as 20 percent of the fund’s profits (sometimes contingent on reaching a certain profit threshold). The latter is known as “carried interest.” The effort to change the tax treatment of carried interest, long a priority of progressive Democrats in Congress, has attracted support across the political spectrum in recent years. Two Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, proposed such a change last year. Despite this growing support, however, Congress has repeatedly declined to make the change. “It is not just ridiculous and unfair, it is the kind of thing that has led to the rise of Donald Trump,” said Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager and member of the Patriotic Millionaires, who has long opposed the tax provision despite personally benefiting from it. “When you tell the average person what’s going on here, it makes them so mad they can’t see straight,” he said. “They turn to someone like Trump who confirms to them that the whole system is corrupt.” Some of those involved in this latest effort say it was inspired in part by the campaigns to raise the minimum wage on the state and local level, another step Congress has declined to take on the federal level despite widespread support for the idea among voters. Image Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager and member of the Patriotic Millionaires. Credit Robin Hood Investors Conference, via Reuters “It’s absolutely modeled on that,” said Michael Kink, a leader of the Hedge Clippers who helped write the legislation that will be introduced in New York. “A lot of people around the country are demanding action, and there’s absolutely no action in Congress.” As written, the legislation does not include a provision to end the state-level tax if Congress were to change the federal law. But Assemblyman Ryan said he would insist on that being the case, and some of the bill’s supporters said it would be critical. Assemblyman Jeffrion L. Aubry, the lead sponsor of the forthcoming bill in New York, noted that legislators in Albany were engaged in the annual budget process, a time when many of their priorities frequently go by the wayside for lack of revenue. He suggested that the ample revenue the bill would generate could help build support for it. Still, enacting the tax appears to be a long way off, and supporters concede that the effort is as much about raising public awareness about the issue as it is about changing tax rates. “How many people know what the word ‘carried interest’ is?” asked Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “That’s part of why they’re so successful. They create names for things that no one understands.” Under the current law, the federal government treats carried interest as long-term capital gains, which are mostly taxed at a rate of 20 percent for the wealthy, rather than as ordinary income, which would generally be taxed at a rate of 39.6 percent for this group. (An additional tax of 3.8 percent also typically applies to capital gains and to most other forms of income above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.) Opponents of this approach say that carried interest is simply compensation for services rendered — in this case, managing other people’s money — not investment gains. That is because the share of profits that fund managers receive through carried interest does not derive from money they have personally invested. As such, opponents say, it should be taxed as ordinary income. “I’m sorry, you’re selling a service; that means it’s labor income,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts who is a longtime opponent of the current approach. Representatives of industries in which fund managers earn carried interest deny that this tax treatment amounts to a loophole. They say that even if the managers’ share of their funds’ profits is not a return on money they have personally invested, it is compensation for the “sweat equity” they invest in building their businesses. They say their situation is analogous to sales of Facebook stock by the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. He pays the capital gains rate, even though outside investors provided most of the company’s capital. Private equity fund managers should also pay the capital gains rate, they say, on profits from the sale of a portfolio company, even though others provided most of the capital for purchasing it. “Private equity fund managers are more than money managers,” said James Maloney of the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, an industry group. “They hire executives, sit on boards, develop strategic plans.” But many tax experts say even that logic is a stretch. The argument for taxing Mr. Zuckerberg at a lower rate “is that there’s an undersupply of entrepreneurs, and the world needs more Zuckerbergs,” said Victor Fleischer, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, who writes occasionally for The New York Times and has advised the coalition on its revenue estimates. “You can’t make the argument that there’s an undersupply of venture capitalists or private equity fund managers.”

New York
Jeffrion L Aubry
Income tax
Sean M Ryan
Tax
Hedge fund
Legislation
Capital gains tax


Matt Stafford of Lions Back From Hip Injury

Abstract: BALTIMORE — About an hour before the Baltimore Ravens kicked off to the Cleveland Browns to begin their game Thursday night, a roar circulated through the lower bowl of M&T Bank Stadium. But the fans were not cheering for the home team. They were applauding the return of the regular officials, who had, at last, replaced the replacements. During warm-ups before Baltimore’s 23-16 victory, Ravens Coach John Harbaugh hugged the referee Gene Steratore, who is entering his 10th season. Players from both teams approached the officials and shook their hands. And several officials stood at the edge of the field doffing their caps and waving to the fans who were cheering for them. When the Ravens played the New England Patriots here on Sunday, Michael Phelps roamed the sideline before the game and was mostly unnoticed. The officials on Thursday, meanwhile, acknowledged the crowd as if they were a band on a reunion tour. As Steratore, with his microphone on, presided over the opening coin toss at midfield, he summed up the feelings of many. “Good evening, men,” Steratore told the captains. “It’s good to be back.” The officials were mostly unnoticed. But with 10 seconds left in the game and the Browns facing fourth-and-10 from the Ravens’ 33-yard line, Baltimore linebacker Paul Kruger was whistled for a personal foul, giving the Browns one more chance from the 18. But Brandon Weeden’s pass fell incomplete, and this time there were no flags. “The communication was good,” Harbaugh said. “I didn’t agree with every call.” The game’s first penalty flag was thrown 2 minutes 41 seconds into the first quarter. This call was greeted with applause, although it was mostly because the Browns’ defense had been whistled for illegal contact. On the next play, Ravens wide receiver Torrey Smith was entangled with a defender as he streaked down the right sideline. No flag was thrown, and boos rained down. For the most part, the officials were not a factor in the game. The teams combined for 18 penalties totaling 166 yards. There were no egregious errors, and there was little of the post-whistle pushing and shoving by players that had escalated under the watch of the replacements. “They wanted to control the game from the beginning,” Ravens cornerback Cary Williams said. “I think they did a good job of that.” Before the game, the former N.F.L. quarterback Boomer Esiason said: “The one thing, honestly, is that these guys know what they’re doing. People don’t understand how hard it is to referee an N.F.L. game with a lunatic standing on the sideline and lunatics playing the game itself.” Some Ravens fans came to the game dressed as football officials, including Kyle Krysiak, 25, who wore his dodge ball referee’s uniform as a show of solidarity. “This year has seemed weird so far,” Krysiak said. “Maybe now we can get back to normal.” STRAHAN A HALL CANDIDATE Morten Andersen, John Lynch, Michael Strahan and Steve McNair are among 13 first-year-eligible players for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Fifteen finalists from the modern era will be announced in early January. (AP)

Football
Officiating (Sports)
Cleveland Browns
Baltimore Ravens


In Westchester, Cameras and Microphones Help Fight Gun Crime

Abstract: Shortly before the end of October, ShotSpotter went live in Mount Vernon, blanketing the city’s entire 4.5 square miles with its acoustic gunshot tracking technology. Using half of the $3 million earmarked by Westchester County for the system — the other half went to Yonkers, where ShotSpotter is expected to be running by year’s end — the Mount Vernon Police Department installed the system and synchronized ShotSpotter’s sensors with cameras that were installed in the roughest pockets of the city. When a shot is fired in the city, the nearest camera is programmed to swing toward the sound; if the view is blocked by buildings, the camera turns toward the nearest intersection, often a point of egress for gunmen on the run. Currently, images from the cameras as well as the sound of gunshots are seen and heard by Mount Vernon’s emergency dispatchers, but David E. Chong, the Mount Vernon police commissioner, hopes to one day get the funds to install the dispatchers’ computers in police cars. “Putting information immediately to police officers will kick it up even more,” Mr. Chong said. In Yonkers, where ShotSpotter sensors are also being paired with cameras, the police commissioner, Edmund Hartnett, said he hoped the system would act as a deterrent. “Just the idea that they’re out there makes residents feel safer, and makes bad guys uncomfortable,” he said. Mr. Hartnett put to rest fears that the sensors and cameras would replace the local police . “There’s no plan to replace live police officers with this kind of machinery,” he said. “It’s more of a tool in our toolbox.”

Cameras
Firearms
Police
Westchester County (NY)
Crime and Criminals


3 in Family Are Killed in New York; Suspect Falls to His Death

Abstract: If there were any doubt that Hector Quinones was intent on causing grievous harm Thursday, it would have been dispelled by one look at his hands — covered by two sets of gloves, one rubber and one leather. It was clear, said the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, that Mr. Quinones, 44, “came not wanting to leave fingerprints.” By the time he was through, the police said, he would kill three members of a family: Carlos Rodriguez Sr., 52; his son Carlos Jr., 24; and Fernando Gonzales, 87, who was the elder Mr. Rodriguez’s father-in-law. Mr. Rodriguez’s wife, Giselle Rodriguez, 49, was wounded, and a fifth relative managed to escape only when Mr. Quinones lost his balance after his pants had fallen down, the police said. The final act of violence was Mr. Quinones’s alone: He apparently fell to his death from a window while trying to escape, the police said. In piecing things together later and trying to determine a motive for the murders, the police said they learned that Mr. Quinones, of the Bronx, and Carlos Rodriguez Sr. both had long arrest records and had met in state prison. Detectives also found a significant amount of heroin in a box and a small amount of cocaine in the apartment, said Mr. Browne, who said detectives were investigating the possibility that the killings were drug-related or possibly part of a robbery. It was about 1:45 p.m. Thursday, and the calm outside the apartment on Amsterdam Avenue between 83rd and 84th Streets — a busy stretch lined with taverns, restaurants and boutiques — had yet to be pierced. No one nearby said they had heard any gunshots, and things appeared normal as Ms. Rodriguez and her daughter, Leyanis, 27, came home from a day of shopping and errands, the police said. When they got to their apartment door, they found Mr. Quinones, carrying a black .380-caliber Hi-Point semiautomatic pistol in one of his gloved hands. He forced the mother and daughter down the hallway of their railroad-style walk-up apartment, the police said. Lying dead in a back bedroom inside Apartment 3-S were the two Rodriguez men, both apparently shot, the police said. Slumped next to the tub in the bathroom was the body of Mr. Gonzales, though it was unclear if he had been shot, stabbed or both, the police said. At some point, the younger woman broke free and locked herself in the bedroom where her dead father and brother were, the police said. Outside, her mother began struggling with Mr. Quinones. The daughter heard a shot, and her mother, who had suffered a graze wound to her head, fled from the apartment and ran down to the street, where people saw her screaming. Meanwhile, Mr. Quinones broke down the bedroom door and fought with Leyanis Rodriguez. But his pants came down during the struggle and he tripped, allowing her to also run away. She banged on a neighbor’s door on her floor, but no one answered. Then she ran up to the roof and found some construction workers. One of the workers, Anthony Cicalo, 23, later described how a woman, apparently unharmed, came up to the roof, yelling that several people in her family had been shot. “Her father, her brother and her mother were shot,” said Mr. Cicalo, who dialed 911 for help. Linda Wolff, 55, who owns a clothing boutique across the street, said she came back to the store just as the police were arriving. Leyanis Rodriguez was standing outside, in a state of silent shock, she said. As officers from the 20th Precinct descended on the location, Mr. Quinones crept out a window to escape, but wound up falling to his death on concrete in a small backyard area. It was unclear if he first tried to ascend the exterior of the five-story building. They also found a blood-stained 12-inch kitchen knife on the apartment’s kitchen table, and the gun believed to have been used in the killings on the floor, the police said. Erik Kriss, a spokesman for the state Correctional Services Department, confirmed that Mr. Quinones and Mr. Rodriguez had both served time at the Gouverneur Correctional Facility from late 1996 through most of 1997. The Rodriguez family had lived in the apartment for about 20 years, relatives said. The younger Mr. Rodriguez had grown up as part of a tightknit group of friends around his age in the neighborhood. He loved motorcycles, cars and video games. The father worked in construction, said a cousin, Jose Crespo, 28. The grandfather was a jovial retiree who had just come out of the hospital two days ago and who loved spending time with Leyanis’s two young children, who go to a nearby elementary school, friends added.

Murders and Attempted Murders
Families and Family Life
Bronx (NYC)
Falls
Drug Abuse and Traffic
Upper West Side (NYC)


Condé Nast Faces Suit From Interns Over Wages

Abstract: Two former interns filed a lawsuit against Condé Nast on Thursday, saying the company failed to pay them minimum wage at their summer jobs at W Magazine and The New Yorker, and asked that it be approved as a class-action suit. Lauren Ballinger, who worked as an intern at W Magazine in 2009, and Matthew Leib, an intern at The New Yorker in 2009 and 2010, said in the suit that Condé Nast, which owns the magazines, paid them less than $1 an hour. According to court papers filed Thursday morning in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. Leib was paid $300 to $500 for each summer he worked. During that time, he was asked to review pieces for submission to the “Shouts and Murmurs” section and proofread and edit articles for the “Talk of the Town” section. Mr. Leib, a cartoonist, also helped maintain the online cartoon database, did research in the cartoon archives and coordinated the work of cartoon artists, the suit claims. He worked three days a week from 10 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. A Condé Nast spokeswoman said the company did not comment on litigation. The case is the latest in a series of lawsuits filed by interns for media companies who have sued for lack of payment. Juno Turner, the lawyer representing Ms. Ballinger and Mr. Leib, said her law firm, Outten & Golden, settled a case against the “Charlie Rose” show last year. In February 2012, a former Harper’s Bazaar intern sued Hearst Magazines, asserting that she regularly worked 40 to 55 hours a week without being paid. Last July, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that the plaintiff could move forward with her lawsuit as collective action that others could join voluntarily. But in May, that same judge ruled that the intern’s parallel claims under New York State’s wage laws could not proceed as a class action. On Tuesday, a Federal District Court judge in Manhattan ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated federal and New York minimum wage laws by not paying two interns who worked on the film “Black Swan.” Thursday’s lawsuit cited United States Labor Department guidelines, which consider unpaid internships lawful if they are part of an educational training program and do not replace employees and if the company does not gain immediate advantage from an intern’s work. The work experience also must benefit the intern. Ms. Ballinger, a graduate of the American University of Paris, said in a phone interview that she saved one credit before graduating to use toward an internship at W. Ms. Ballinger was paid $12 a day to work in W’s accessories department. She said she worked from 8 or 9 a.m. each morning until 8 to 10 p.m. each night, packing, organizing and delivering accessories to editors. She later worked 10-hour days, three days a week, in W’s fine jewelry department, she said. For both jobs, she said she was trained only by other interns. She said that even one of the editors at W marveled how poor their work conditions were. The editor said the job was reminiscent of Anne Hathaway’s job in “The Devil Wears Prada,” but worse, “because we don’t get any makeover in the end,” Ms. Ballinger said in the interview. Ms. Ballinger said she decided to get involved in a class-action lawsuit because W editors failed to give a recommendation to her university that she needed for course credit. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Leib graduated from Northwestern University and works for AD Lubow, an advertising agency. Ms. Ballinger, who graduated from the New School in January with a master’s degree in media studies, said she was currently looking for a job in digital brand strategy.

Internship
Lawsuits
Wages and salaries
Conde Nast Publications
Manhattan
Minimum wage


Radiation Exposure Could Curtail Efforts of Workers

Abstract: As radiation levels rise at the crippled reactors in northern Japan , a basic question arises: how long can workers keep struggling to ward off full meltdowns? The workers are performing what have been described as heroic tasks, like using fire equipment to pump seawater into the three failing reactors to keep the nuclear fuel from melting down and fighting the fire at a fourth reactor. They are operating in places that have been contaminated by radioactive isotopes from all four reactors. Technicians who have not been evacuated face an escalating exposure, and will have to be replaced if the fight is to go on. “If they exceed a certain amount, they can’t go back in for a day or a week or longer,” said Dr. Lew Pepper, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health who has studied the effects of radiation on nuclear weapons workers. And the pool of available replacements is finite, he said: “What do you do? You don’t have a lot of people who can do this work.” The nuclear plants’ operator, Tokyo Electric Power, has declined to provide details about the workers. But Arnold Gundersen, a consultant who worked in American plants nearly identical to the stricken Japanese ones, said it was likely that the company was calling in retirees and workers from unaffected plants for help. And perhaps for sacrifice, as well. “They may also be asking for people to volunteer to receive additional exposure,” he said. People who are working close to the reactor — pumping water, or operating valves inside the secondary containment structure — would almost certainly be wearing full bodysuits and air packs, Mr. Gundersen said. But some forms of radiation can penetrate any gear. Gamma rays and other penetrating radiation can cause cancers and other long-term illnesses or, in high amounts, near-term illness or death. Health physicists should gauge the radiation level in the work area, and the workers would normally be told how long they can remain. “There may be a health physicist who will say, You only have an hour or two to do this job,” Mr. Gundersen said. Each worker would carry a dosimeter, which measures radiation exposure, “and they’ll be looking at it,” he added. “When it hits a certain number, they should leave.” Suits and air packs are meant to keep radioactive particles off the skin and out of the lungs until the workers return to a safer area. Workers are trained to remove the gear in a specific way to avoid leaving any particles on their skin that would result in continuing exposure. While regulations may differ somewhat in Japan, in the United States the usual radiation exposure limit for nuclear power plant workers is 50 millisieverts, or 5 rem, per year (compared with the 0.3 rem that the Environmental Protection Agency says most people get from normal background radiation). When there is an emergency, the limit can be raised to 25 rem, which is still far below the level at which people would show symptoms or get sick. The explosion at Fukushima’s Reactor No. 2 on Tuesday morning sent radiation levels spiking, to 8,217 microsieverts an hour from 1,941 about 40 minutes earlier. Later Tuesday, Japanese nuclear officials announced much higher levels and evacuated most of the emergency workers. During the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1986, when the reactor caught fire, operators and firefighters received high doses of radiation, sometimes within minutes and without being made aware of the dangers. More than two dozen of them died of acute radiation illness. “People in Chernobyl were just over overexposed,” Dr. Pepper said. “The outcome for those folks was death.” Determining allowable exposure is usually based on three principles: distance, time and shielding. In the Japanese plants, extensive contamination would mean that distance and shielding are not really factors, so the controlling variable is time. Mr. Gundersen said that when he worked at the Vermont Yankee plant, which is nearly identical to some of the crippled Japanese reactors, he had one maintenance task where the “stay time,” in which workers would be exposed to their yearly limit, was three minutes. He hired local farmers, trained them on a mock-up for two weeks, and then sent them in for their brief stint. “Then I’d send them home for a year,” he said. In Japan, the plant operators do not have the luxury of time for training. “You need somebody who is familiar with the plant, because you need somebody to do it now,” Mr. Gundersen said. Japanese workers might be so committed that they might be willing to exceed accepted levels of exposure. But that might not extend to extremely high radiation. “I don’t think anyone is going to take 50 rems,” he said. “But if it’s a difference between 5 and 7, they might say: ‘I’ll take it. It’s worth the risk.’ ”

Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011)
Nuclear Energy
Radiation
Japan


Productivity Rose a Slight 1.6% in Second Quarter

Abstract: WASHINGTON (AP) — American businesses got slightly more work out of their employees this spring after reducing hiring. The gain, a 1.6 percent annualized increase in productivity in April through June, suggests employers may need to hire if demand picks up. The Labor Department said Wednesday that the increase in productivity in the second quarter followed a 0.5 percent decline in the first quarter, less than first estimated. Productivity is the amount of output per hour worked. Rising productivity can increase corporate profits, but can slow job creation because it means companies are getting more work from current employees and do not need to hire more. Still, there are limits to how much companies can get from their workers. Productivity is rising at a relatively weak pace. It is up 1.1 percent compared with a year earlier. Since 1947, productivity gains have averaged 2.2 percent a year. So companies may need to hire if they see only modest gains in productivity and more demand. “In the near term, is unlikely that firms will be able to increase output much further without proportional increases in hiring,” said Erik Johnson, an economist at IHS Global Insight. “Maxing out the efficiency of their existing work forces would typically encourage firms to hire more workers,” he added, though he cautioned that the economy “is on shaky footing right now.” Labor costs rose 1.7 percent, far below the 5.6 percent increase in the first quarter. But labor costs rose only 0.8 percent in the last year, indicating that employees are not getting big raises and that inflation is likely to remain tame. One reason productivity improved is that hiring slowed in the second quarter. Employers added an average of 75,000 jobs a month in April through June, down from an average of 226,000 a month in the first quarter.

Economic Conditions and Trends
United States Economy
Labor and Jobs
Bureau of Labor Statistics


An Alert for Agent Cool Blue

Abstract: Johnson & Johnson recalled a Listerine rinse marketed primarily for use by children after testing revealed contamination by microorganisms. The company’s McNeil-PPC Inc. unit recalled all four million bottles of the Listerine Agent Cool Blue plaque-detecting rinse in Glacier Mint and Bubble Blast flavors, a spokeswoman said. The recall covers all lots sold or distributed since the product became available last year. The recall does not include any other Listerine products. Consumers should stop using and discard the product. The company is offering full refunds. Information is available at call (888) 222-0249 or www .agentcoolblue.com .

Johnson & Johnson Inc
Recalls and Bans of Products


A Magazine for the Rich (and Lucrative Ads)

Abstract: SELLING any print advertising these days means sailing against the wind, but as some categories battle a gale, the safest harbor is in ads for luxury consumer products. That is the theory behind WSJ., the new magazine from The Wall Street Journal, which was unveiled to reporters on Wednesday and will be delivered to many subscribers on Saturday. It joins an increasingly crowded field of magazines unabashedly celebrating wealth and consumption, all trying to take advantage of the healthiest part of a shrinking print advertising pool. And it is the latest in a series of bids by The Journal to capture a bigger piece of the consumer ad market and lessen its traditional dependence on ads aimed at businesses. At just over 100 pages, the first issue of WSJ. has 51 advertisers, mostly of the type publications covet: high-end makers of clothes, handbags and other accessories, with brand names like Hermès, Audemars Piguet and Dior. Executives at The Journal said that some had signed on for two years.  “And 19 advertisers are new to The Wall Street Journal,” said Michael Rooney, chief revenue officer of Dow Jones & Company , the division of the News Corporation that publishes The Journal. In this climate, 51 advertisers is “a very solid number, a respectable number,” said Roberta Garfinkle, senior vice president and director of print strategy at TargetCast TCM, a media agency. “It’s a smart move on The Journal’s part to go after that luxury retail marketplace that they really haven’t had,” she said, despite the growing number of magazines chasing essentially the same ads. “What remains to be seen is their execution.” The Journal starts with a major advantage in that it can offer advertisers the wealthiest readership of any American newspaper. An even more affluent subgroup of subscribers will receive the magazine, Mr. Rooney said, with an average household income of $265,000. Out of The Journal’s domestic Saturday circulation of about 2 million, 800,000 copies — those sold by subscription or at newsstands in 17 large markets — will include WSJ. In addition, 160,000 copies will be distributed on Fridays overseas. The magazine begins as a quarterly, with plans to go monthly next year. Executives would not say how much The Journal had invested in WSJ. or when the company expected it to break even. For several years, advertising for luxury goods has outpaced mass-market and business-to-business ads, and a number of publishers have tried to capitalize on that trend, including The New York Times, which introduced T, a style magazine, in 2004. As the economy has struggled over the last year, the divide between high-end ads and others has widened. Ad pages in United States magazines fell 7.4 percent in the first half of 2008, according to the Magazine Publishers Association, but some categories appealing to affluent consumers — high-end apparel and other retail, and hotels and resorts — were roughly flat.  Newspapers have fared worse, with advertising revenue down almost 8 percent last year, and about 13 percent in the first half of 2008. The Journal does not make figures public, but executives there have said that ad revenue is down sharply this year. In this decade, The Journal has taken several steps to broaden its identity as a publication primarily about business news, read mostly by men, to win more consumer ads. It added the softer Personal Journal and Weekend Journal sections, and in 2006, began publishing on Saturdays. Since being taken over last December by News Corporation and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch , the paper has put greater focus on general-interest news, including politics and international news. WSJ. resembles How To Spend It, the weekend magazine of The Financial Times, a Journal competitor, with slightly less focus on consumption — though there is plenty of that, from canine couture to face cream to trench coats. It aims a bit more for features articles, with items on, among other things, business executives, philanthropy, feuding over the America’s Cup and the workout regimen of Gov. Sarah Palin, a piece planned well before she became Senator John McCain’s running mate. Tina Gaudoin, editor in chief of WSJ., said her magazine was less about how to spend it and more about “how to live it.” Reflecting the magazine’s high style, its unveiling was held at the Pierpont Morgan Library over a breakfast that included smoked salmon, caviar and raspberry parfait, with a digital slide show and executives reading from teleprompters. Robert J. Thomson, managing editor of The Journal, poked a little fun at the pomp, saying, “This being convention season, histrionics are the order of the day.” Mr. Thomson, like Mr. Murdoch, likes to take a few shots at the competition, in keeping with the rough-and-tumble of British newspapering — he was the editor of The Times of London — and Wednesday was no exception. Referring to the industry’s woes, he said, “We don’t have the fetid air of failure at Dow Jones,” and proceeded to take a veiled swipe at T magazine. And as for the magazine of The Financial Times, he said, “How to Spend It is like a BMW 3 series, and this is a BMW 7 series.”

Advertising and Marketing
Wealth
Wall Street Journal
Magazines
Millionaires and Billionaires
Luxury
Murdoch Rupert
Dow Jones & Co


Jacob Ruppert’s Knickerbocker Brewery Resurfaces in Yorkville

Abstract: Like a beer drinker’s Brigadoon, a red-brick vestige of the enormous Jacob Ruppert & Company brewery in Yorkville emerged for a few hours this week before disappearing, this time forever. The brewery, which produced the best-selling beer in America in the early 20th century, closed in 1965. Within five years, its 35 buildings between 90th and 94th Streets and Second and Third Avenues had been leveled. Apartment buildings, one called Ruppert Towers, now occupy much of the site. But not all of it. A swath of land where the brewery’s power house once stood, at 205 East 92nd Street, had been maintained until 2011 as the Ruppert Playground . “Parks and parking lots are archaeologists’ dreams,” said Joan H. Geismar , an urban archaeologist who specializes in New York City history. Image A rendering of the new apartment tower. As excavators tore ever deeper into the playground site this week, in preparation for the construction of a 35-story apartment building developed by the Related Companies, they unearthed what looked almost like a natural mesa, save for the presence on its south face of two precisely framed openings topped by shallow brick arches. Suddenly, Yorkville had a newly visible — if modest — link to its German heritage, and an era in which the neighborhood abounded in breweries. And the city had a small reminder of the larger-than-life Col. Jacob Ruppert , the founder’s son, who was active in the business until shortly before his death in 1939. “New York’s brewing history is a rich and important layer of our industrial archaeology and history,” said Steve Hindy , a co-founder of the Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg. “The New York Yankees are another anchor of Col. Jacob Ruppert’s legacy. He also built Yankee Stadium and brought Babe Ruth to town.” Even as the business teetered in the early 1960s, visitors could still take the 75-minute tour of the Yorkville complex. “Stops are made at the pungent hop room, the busy brewhouse, a couple of seventh-floor fermentation and aging ‘cellars’ containing vast tanks holding over 57,000 gallons apiece, and the bottling and canning plant with its elaborate conveying machines,” the “Hart’s Guide to New York City” declared in 1964. “You can hear the hops whoosh down through the 50-foot chutes which connect the hoproom with the monstrous gleaming 23,000-gallon copper kettles,” the guide continued. Then: “No samples of the finished product are given to guests.” Image Ruppert Playground in 2009. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times K. Jacob Ruppert , a great-grandnephew of the colonel living in New Orleans, said he was beside himself when he heard about the discovery this week. “The brewery closed in 1965, the year I was born, so I never had an opportunity to see, in real time, any part of the brewery,” he wrote in an email. “To think that I can lay my hands on a brick from my family’s brewery!” Mr. Ruppert said. When the structural remnant of the brewery came to light, Kathryn A. Jolowicz, the president of the Yorkville/Kleindeutschland Historical Society , scrambled. She alerted Franny Eberhart, the president of the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts , who reached out to Dr. Geismar, vice president of the Professional Archaeologists of New York City , which is known as Panyc for a reason. Dr. Geismar and Ms. Eberhart met Monday afternoon at the excavation site, but could not get any closer to the arches than the far side of the construction fence. “This is the nightmare, with the feature right there and the bulldozer next to it,” Dr. Geismar told me, after I hurried to join them on East 92nd Street. The development of the Ruppert Playground site has already been controversial, as neighbors and elected officials criticized the process under which the Related Companies was allowed to build the 230-unit tower. Image Excavation on East 92nd Street, between Third and Second Avenues, unearthed two arched openings below street level that were used for power or refrigeration by the Ruppert Brewery. Credit David W. Dunlap/The New York Times But Dr. Geismar said she did not want to stop the development project nor even save the brick outcropping. She hoped simply to photograph it in detail, measure it and collect any nearby artifacts, especially bricks stamped with the brickmaker’s name. The arched openings looked to me as if they might be the mouths of furnaces — the furnaces, perhaps, that helped power a brewery that made 1.5 million barrels of beer annually before Prohibition. Dr. Geismar, however, consulted an 1896 insurance map that identified the building at 205 East 92nd Street as a refrigerating house, before it was a power house. “I’m all at sea,” she confessed, saying that the openings “may be related to cooling.” The Related Companies allowed Dr. Geismar and Ms. Eberhart into the excavation site at noon on Tuesday. By then, demolition crews had all but destroyed the feature that Dr. Geismar had hoped to document, though she did take pictures and measurements of what was left. And she salvaged a brick for Mr. Ruppert, so he could finally lay hands on his family’s brewery.

Historic preservation
Jacob Ruppert
Yorkville Manhattan
Steve Hindy
Related
Beer
Real Estate
Housing


Ukraine Cease-Fire Leaves Control of Border Unresolved Until Year’s End

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The cease-fire accord announced in Minsk on Thursday was hailed by Secretary of State John Kerry and European leaders as a potential breakthrough that could finally bring the bitter conflict in Ukraine to an end. But while the agreement may succeed in establishing a cease-fire by mid-February, it is likely to leave Russia and the separatists it supports holding the upper hand in eastern Ukraine for months, if not longer. That is because the accord delays the resolution of a central issue — restoring Ukraine’s control of its eastern border with Russia — and sets no deadline for the withdrawal of Russian forces, weapons and equipment from Ukraine. “The deal likely was the best that Poroshenko could have achieved under difficult circumstances, with Russia continuing to back the separatists,” said Steven Pifer, a former American ambassador to Ukraine, referring to Petro O. Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president. “But Minsk II raises tough questions and leaves difficult issues for later,” Mr. Pifer added. “It is a fragile arrangement, requiring good faith and follow-through from parties that have shown little of that in the past.” From the start, Germany and France said that their goal was to find a way to defuse the conflict — and avert the need for the United States to consider sending defensive weapons to the Ukrainians — by coming up with a plan for carrying out the peace agreement that was announced in Minsk in September. That earlier accord has been regularly violated by Russia and the separatists it supports, Western officials said. So the challenge was not just to produce a cease-fire but also to find a way to make a broader agreement stick. The approach Germany and France pursued was to negotiate a new plan with the Russians and Ukrainians, which would be implemented in stages. But as the agreement was drafted, some of the most important elements were left for the end of the implementation process. A major concern for Ukraine and its Western supporters, for example, has been restoring Ukrainian control over its border, which NATO says the Kremlin has repeatedly violated when it sent troops and heavy weapons to eastern Ukraine. “The U.S. position, all along has been that the international border in particular should not be a question that is sort of deferred further down into the implementation phase, because what we don’t want is a situation where we have a partially implemented deal that leaves that question unresolved,” a senior State Department official told reporters who were attending a security conference in Germany on Saturday. The official cannot be identified under the ground rules the department set for the briefing. The agreement, in fact, addresses the issue. But it states that the process of restoring “full control of the state border by the government of Ukraine throughout the conflict area” is to happen by the end of 2015. And it is only to happen then if constitutional reforms that will decentralize authority to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are first carried out and local elections held. One senior Western official, who asked not to be identified because the official was discussing internal deliberations, said the delay in restoring Ukraine’s control over the border was a major weakness in the agreement and voiced concern that the local elections could be seriously flawed if Ukraine’s border is left open for Russian agents and operatives. There are other ambiguities, officials say. The accord calls for disarming illegal groups. But the separatists may maintain that their militias are not illegal and that therefore the provision does not apply to them. The United States did not send a representative to the talks in Minsk but consulted closely with its allies. Mr. Kerry commended Germany and France for their efforts on Thursday while noting that major work still lies ahead. “The parties have a long road ahead before achieving peace and the full restoration of Ukraine’s sovereignty,” Mr. Kerry said in a statement on Thursday. “We will judge the commitment of Russia and the separatists by their actions, not their words,” he said. “As we have long said, the United States is prepared to consider rolling back sanctions on Russia when the Minsk agreements of September 2014, and now this agreement, are fully implemented. That includes a full cease-fire, the withdrawal of all foreign troops and equipment from Ukraine, the full restoration of Ukrainian control of the international border, and the release of all hostages.”


Financier Denies Inflating Price of Stock

Abstract: The Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi denied accusations yesterday that he had helped inflate the share prices of a telemarketing company as part of a $130 million securities deal. Mr. Khashoggi and Ramy El-Batrawi, the former chief executive of a defunct California telemarketing company, GenesisIntermedia, were sued Thursday by the Securities and Exchange Commission over claims that they had orchestrated a stock loan and manipulation scheme. But Mr. Khashoggi, 70, said the deal was in place before he acquired Ultimate Holdings Ltd., a Bermuda company that the S.E.C. says improperly loaned 15 million GenesisIntermedia shares to broker-dealers in November 2000. "This all happened in America, we were not involved," he said. The company sold the Ab Twister exercise device and "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" relationship products through infomercials. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles, accused the men of improperly profiting by loaning out the company's stock at market value while artificially inflating the share price.

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
GENESISINTERMEDIA
EL-BATRAWI RAMY
KHASHOGGI ADNAN
FRAUDS AND SWINDLING
SECURITIES AND COMMODITIES VIOLATIONS
SUITS AND LITIGATION
ETHICS


Pettitte Is in Control as Yankees End Skid

Abstract: BALTIMORE — Fresh from a vintage performance that included seven shutout innings in a 7-1 victory against the Baltimore Orioles , Yankees starter Andy Pettitte walked toward his locker and was met by a fan. “Yeah, Andy! Woo!” the 22-year-old Joba Chamberlain boomed. “Good player. Really good. My idol.” Pettitte, a 35-year-old left-hander, is something of a relic on a pitching staff that is full of young arms. But he continues to show that he is someone the young pitchers should follow. In the first three weeks of this season, starters Ian Kennedy, 23, and Phil Hughes, 21, have combined to go 0-5 and allow 31 earned runs in 30 1/3 innings. Pettitte is 3-1 with a 2.45 earned run average, and on Sunday he retired the first 14 batters he faced before Jay Payton dribbled an infield single down the third-base line. After the game, Pettitte said he would try to help the team’s young pitchers however he could, but it was not always so simple. “Sometimes, what’s inside of you, you can’t put in other people,” Pettitte said. “These guys have a great idea how to pitch, and they’re figuring out this is a very difficult league to pitch in. They’re going to have to continue to go out there and figure out how to do it.” On Sunday, Pettitte did it calmly and efficiently. He needed only 89 pitches — 59 of them strikes — to get through seven innings. He allowed four hits and had five strikeouts. Despite Pettitte’s effort, which kept the Yankees (10-10) from their first four-game losing streak since last June, all was not well. Third baseman Alex Rodriguez left the game in the top of the sixth inning after straining his right quadriceps. Rodriguez felt the muscle tighten on his swing when he reached base on a fielder’s choice grounder. He said he also felt “a little twinge” when he got about five steps up the first-base line. “Of course I’m a little concerned about it,” Rodriguez said. “Any time you have any type of ill feeling, you’ve got some concern.” Rodriguez left the stadium with a heating pad over his quadriceps. He said he would ice the muscle Monday, when the Yankees have their first day off after playing on 20 consecutive days. The Yankees start a three-game series Tuesday against the White Sox in Chicago, and Rodriguez said he hoped to play. “That would be ideal in a perfect world,” he said. “Let’s see how I wake up tomorrow.” Rodriguez said this was his first quadriceps strain since he was in high school. Derek Jeter missed six games with the same injury earlier this month. “Hopefully, it’s not as serious,” Rodriguez said. Even if he is healthy, Rodriguez could miss a game against the White Sox because his wife, Cynthia, is expecting the couple’s second child soon. The day off on Monday will give Rodriguez a chance to rest and Manager Joe Girardi a chance to move Pettitte up a day in the rotation. Girardi said that Pettitte would pitch Friday against the Cleveland Indians, and that Kennedy’s start would be pushed to Saturday. Girardi, who criticized Kennedy after he allowed five walks and four earned runs in two and two-thirds innings in his last start, used Pettitte’s performance to support his young pitchers. “I believe any of our starters can do that,” Girardi said. “I believe in our guys. Andy’s often kind of found a way to do what he did today.” Pettitte faced little trouble. After Payton reached in the fifth and Adam Jones singled to center, Guillermo Quiroz flied out to deep center to end the threat. In the sixth and the seventh innings, the Orioles got a runner to third base with one out, and each time he was stranded. Pettitte said he was one of several Yankees slowed by a mild virus, and he thought the resulting lack of strength in his legs actually helped him get movement on his pitches. “I felt good with my command early,” Pettitte said. “They were swinging early, and it helped me obviously pitch deep in the game.” Center fielder Johnny Damon snapped a 2-for-14 slump by going 2 for 4 with a two-run homer. Jeter was 2 for 5 with a three-run double. The Yankees led, 4-0, when the Orioles put runners on first and third to start the eighth inning against Chamberlain. Then a brief downpour caused a 37-minute rain delay. When the teams returned, Chamberlain was replaced by Brian Bruney. “You want to go back in,” Chamberlain said, “but you know better.” Bruney allowed a run-scoring sacrifice fly, but no hits. Jeter’s three-run double in the top of the ninth gave the Yankees a 7-1 lead. After another 37-minute rain delay, Mariano Rivera pitched a scoreless ninth, and, finally, the long-awaited day off had arrived.

New York Yankees
Pettitte Andy
Baltimore Orioles
Rodriguez Alex


Newtown Debates the Fate of Sandy Hook Elementary

Abstract: NEWTOWN, Conn. — Many people here still remember the huge green footprints that once led up to the front entrance of Sandy Hook Elementary School. Children were told that they had been left by the Jolly Green Giant. That was one of the many fond memories of the school, memories that connect families and generations. Now, as this community of 27,000 struggles to recover from a mass shooting that killed 20 first graders and six staff members at the school, public officials and residents have begun preparing for the painful decision over what to do with the building. Residents packed into the auditorium of Newtown High School on Sunday afternoon for the first of what might be several meetings to discuss the school’s future. Opinions varied sharply about whether to reopen the school, renovate it, turn it into a shrine or a park, or raze it. Stephanie Carson, who has a son who was at the school on Dec. 14, the day of the shooting, said it should be knocked down. “I cannot ask my son or any of the people at the school to ever walk back into that building, and he has asked to never go back,” she said. “I know that there are children who were there who have said they would like to go back to Sandy Hook. However, the reality is we have to be so careful. Even walking down the halls, the children become so scared at any unusual sound. I don’t see how it would be possible.” Image A resident of Newtown, Conn., spoke Sunday during a community meeting about the future of Sandy Hook Elementary School. Credit Michelle Mcloughlin/Reuters A month after the shooting, Sandy Hook Elementary remains a crime scene. Few have been allowed past the police cars and barricades still guarding the roadway and into the building where Adam Lanza, for reasons still unknown, went on a horrifying killing spree before fatally shooting himself. Earlier this month, the school’s 400 students began attending a school that had been shuttered in nearby Monroe, Conn. That building was reopened after the hallways and classrooms were remade to resemble the ones they had left behind. Audra Barth, the mother of a third grader and a first grader at Sandy Hook, was among the parents who said closing the school would further rob children who had already lost so much. “My children have had everything taken away from them,” she said. Referring to the numerous gifts, including candy, that had been donated since the shooting, she added, “Chocolate is great, but they need their school.” If there was a unifying theme among parents and others in Sunday’s comments, it was that the children should be kept together, at least for the next several years, and not split apart into separate schools. The concerns, raised by many of the parents who spoke, stemmed from discussions last year — before the shooting — in which school officials proposed closing down an elementary school and shuffling the district. E. Patricia Llodra, Newtown’s first selectwoman, said that proposal was no longer being considered. Discussions over the school building’s fate seemed to be the latest step in the community’s slow path to recovery, coming after the Public Works Department began picking up the bounty of flowers, teddy bears, paper angels and other tributes that had accumulated on the roadsides around the school. Image Mergim Bajraliu, 17, who attended Sandy Hook Elementary and whose sister was there the day of the shooting, said he did not want the school destroyed. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times More meetings will come when the town begins looking at how to honor the victims with a permanent memorial. Ideas on Sunday included turning the school into a planetarium where children could gaze at the stars and converting it into a center for peace education. Newtown is the latest in a growing list of communities that have been thrust into making such a choice. After two students killed 12 other students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in April 1999, that community ultimately decided to keep that school open. Some $2.6 million, much of it donated, was spent on renovations that included turning the library, where the gunmen ended their rampage, into a glass atrium with a canopy of evergreens and aspens painted on the ceilings. At Virginia Tech, where 32 people were gunned down by a student in April 2007, the building where 30 of the killings occurred was turned into the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention . Mergim Bajraliu, 17, a senior at Newtown High School who attended Sandy Hook Elementary and whose sister, a fourth grader, was there the day of the shooting, urged the town to follow the examples of Columbine and Virginia Tech. “Despite everything that happened to my sister, both her and I have amazing memories of that school,” he said on Sunday, recalling sack races and visits to the nearby firehouse. “I think children in the future deserve the same youthful memories I have.”

Sandy Hook Elementary School Newtown Conn


Michigan: Voters Reject Tax Increases for Infrastructure

Abstract: Voters resoundingly defeated tax increases Tuesday that would have pumped more than $1 billion a year into roads, a setback for Gov. Rick Snyder and others who warn that the state’s infrastructure is falling into disrepair because of inadequate funding. A one-cent increase in the sales tax was the centerpiece of the ballot measure, which also would have raised more money for education, local governments and public transit and would have fully restored a tax break for lower-income workers. The constitutional amendment was placed on the ballot by the Republican-led Legislature and had backing from the Republican governor, Democrats, and a coalition of business, labor and government groups. It would have eliminated the sales tax on fuel so all taxes at the pump could go to transportation. It also would have restructured and doubled fuel taxes, and increased vehicle registration fees, to raise the $3.7 billion transportation budget to $5 billion.

Michigan
Referendum
Infrastructure,public works
Rick Snyder
Sales Tax
Excise Tax
Tax


Think Blankfein Will Resign? Want to Bet?

Abstract: Goldman Sachs , if you listen to Congress, is little more than a casino where gamblers masquerade as traders and bet on the fortunes of the rest of us. Well, now the rest of us can bet on Goldman. Fancy a wager on whether Lloyd C. Blankfein , Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, will be able to hang on to his job through the end of the year? Or whether the embattled investment house will settle with the Securities and Exchange Commission and have to ante up $25 million or more in fines? People are placing these bets and putting their money down at Intrade.com , an online prediction market where wagers can be made on real-world events. Congress might not have been swayed by Mr. Blankfein’s cool demeanor under the klieg lights at a Senate hearing on Tuesday, but, according to odds on Intrade, he just might have been able to save his job. When the wagering began on Tuesday morning, as Fabrice P. Tourre and other more junior Goldman executives defended their conduct before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 55 percent were betting on a Blankfein resignation. By Wednesday afternoon, that figure was 45 percent. Mr. Blankfein’s stock continued to rally on Thursday, with expectations of a resignation falling to just 20 percent. The likelihood of a settlement, however, rose to 55 percent from 49 percent. Each contract on Intrade, which is based in Dublin, costs up to $10, depending on the odds. So if you still believe Mr. Blankfein will go, despite it being a seeming long shot, you can put down $2 and take home $10 if you are right. As of Thursday, 194 contracts had been traded. Intrade would not disclose how much those wagers were worth. Intrade’s chief executive, John Delaney, conceded that trading had been light, but in a show of confidence worthy of Goldman itself, he predicted that the two contracts would be hits. “We fully expect volume will climb if there is no resolution soon,” he said. “Based on 10 years of experience in listing similar markets on people, I know that it will.” The contracts were suggested by several Intrade customers, and if the action does indeed gain momentum, the bets could end up being more than another Wall Street sideshow. That is because Intrade and other similar markets have a good record of predicting the future. Mr. Delaney said Intrade bettors had accurately anticipated the resignation in 2006 of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, as well as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003. They also managed to correctly predict the outcome in all 50 states in the 2004 presidential election, he said, and 49 out of 50 in 2008 (Indiana was the exception). When there is enough participation, the electronic market serves as a vast aggregator of individual opinions, boiling them down into a conclusion resembling reality, or at least conventional wisdom. Speaking of conventional wisdom, the Goldman Sachs betting contracts are drawing criticism strikingly similar to that leveled against the complex financial instruments Mr. Blankfein and his underlings were questioned about on Tuesday. Senator after senator complained that the products Goldman had peddled simply allowed clients to speculate on the direction of the mortgage market, and had nothing to do with buying and owning homes. Betting on Goldman isn’t much different, said George R. Neumann, a University of Iowa professor of economics who in 1988 invented the Iowa Political Stock Market, the predecessor to the still-popular Iowa Electronic Markets. Professor Neumann’s online futures market serves primarily as a teaching tool, while Intrade is a profit-making exchange that charges 5 cents a contract. “I don’t know what the economic gain is,” Professor Neumann said of the betting on Goldman and its chief, “and it’s in bad taste.”

Goldman Sachs Group
Intrade
Gambling
Blankfein Lloyd C


The Brewers’ Cornerstone Develops Unexpected Cracks

Abstract: Ryan Braun can still tell you the high school class in which he got a B: Advanced Placement Chemistry. Otherwise, Braun said this summer, on the bench before a game in Milwaukee, he got straight A’s. He attended the University of Miami on a partial academic scholarship and has tried to apply the lessons he learned in the classroom, branching out from baseball to business. Braun has interests in a restaurant, a T-shirt line and an energy drink. This season, his likeness covered an AirTran billboard on Interstate 94, just outside downtown Milwaukee. He understands the value of his good name. “I realize all these things are a result of me having success on the baseball field, carrying myself the right way and staying out of trouble off the field,” he said. “If I wasn’t able to do those three things, I wouldn’t have an opportunity to be involved in these other things.” Braun was on his way to a dream season, leading the league in All-Star votes, winning the National League Most Valuable Player award and carrying the Brewers to their first division title in 29 years. Now he vows to wage a vigorous defense after a positive test for performance-enhancing drugs. Without a successful appeal, Braun faces a 50-game suspension and a stain on the legacy he was carefully starting to build. “I am completely innocent,” Braun told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a text message Sunday, and if you love baseball, you hope that is true. Braun is part of a handful of young, single-team stars to emerge in what we have called, perhaps too hopefully, the post-steroids era. Who else’s fall could do so much to undermine public confidence in the integrity of the sport? Robinson Cano, Matt Kemp, Evan Longoria, Troy Tulowitzki and Justin Verlander come to mind. Braun is there with them. The Brewers believed so much in Braun last April that they extended his contract through 2020, even though he was already signed through 2015. The new deal — five years, $105 million — effectively made Braun a partner with the Brewers’ owner, Mark Attanasio . “I think the biggest thing is clearly he believes in who I am as a person,” Braun said in September. “If the team didn’t believe in my work ethic and my character and my commitment to this game or to this team, there’s no chance that they sign somebody to a deal like that. That means the world to me. He’s said that to me many times, and I truly appreciate it.” Attanasio did not respond to a message Saturday, after ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” broke the news of Braun’s positive test. In a statement issued after 1 a.m. Eastern on Sunday, Attanasio called Braun “a person of character and integrity” and warned against a rush to judgment. He added that he supported baseball’s testing program. Braun is listed at 6 feet 1 inch and 210 pounds, but he seems smaller. He said in June that he had worked out with Gabe Kapler, a former teammate. Kapler is well known for his physique, but Braun said in June that he was not going for bulk. “I think he just really helped to push me, and I feel like he helped make me a better athlete and more explosive,” Braun said. “For me, I’ve never been a big guy. I probably weigh 20 to 30 pounds less than anybody else that hits home runs, so for me to be able to consistently drive the ball, I need to be explosive, I need to be athletic and I need to get as much as possible out of the little size I do have.” Even so, there was nothing suspicious about Braun. His production last season was consistent with his career norms. He had 33 home runs and 77 extra-base hits, both figures he had reached twice before. His .332 average and 33 steals were career highs, but at 28 years old, he is squarely in his prime. The Brewers need Braun to prove his innocence, however daunting that may be. They will probably lose their other top slugger, the free agent Prince Fielder, in the next few weeks. They retain a strong team, but Braun is their face. “The day Braun signed that contract, he got standing ovations every time he came to the plate, and for the next week,” Bob Uecker, the Hall of Fame broadcaster for the Brewers, said in June. “Here’s a guy from L.A., who’s a California guy, but he’s a Milwaukee guy, too. He may not stay here during the off-season, but he’s recognizable now, and he’s fan-friendly.” Moreover, Braun is a symbol of hope for small markets, specifically the one most dear to Commissioner Bud Selig. When Braun’s home run on Sept. 23 all but clinched the division for the Brewers, Selig compared it to Hank Aaron’s pennant-winning homer for the Milwaukee Braves — 54 years earlier, to the day. Until the news of Braun’s test, these were heady days for Selig, who presided over a thrilling postseason and a new labor agreement that made baseball the first major North American professional sports league to test for human growth hormone. Selig has held up Braun as a success story of the testing era. In the minors and the majors, since he signed as a first-round pick in 2005, Braun has been subjected to steroids testing. It is all he has ever known. That makes Braun different from the others who have tested positive. When Alex Rodriguez was outed as a past user, in 2009, he referred to the “loosey-goosey era” in which he was raised in the game. It was a clunky excuse, but hard to dispute. When Rodriguez came to the majors, in the 1990s, the game was flexing its enhanced muscles — home runs soaring off the bats of Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Roger Clemens, said to be in the twilight of his career, suddenly surged. No one was surprised to see them caught, albeit retroactively. The most prominent stars to be suspended in the testing era are Rafael Palmeiro and Manny Ramirez, but both were somewhat predictable. Canseco had already accused Palmeiro, who had famously wagged his finger at Congress. Ramirez was a well-established rogue when he flunked. Braun? He was everything a player was supposed to be, a guy who aced every test, until now.

Braun Ryan
Doping (Sports)
Steroids
Milwaukee Brewers
Baseball
Tests (Drug Use)