8,000-Year-Old Female Figurine Uncovered in Central Turkey

Abstract: Whoever she was, she had achieved celebrity status. At Catalhoyuk, an ancient site in central Turkey, archaeologists have discovered a rare stone figurine of a woman about 8,000 years old. Only a handful of statuettes of the era have been found in one piece. The figurine was found beneath a platform with a piece of obsidian, which suggests that it may have been placed there as part of some ritual. Such figurines are often thought of as fertility goddesses. The archaeologists, however, suggest the object represents older women who have achieved status. A Unesco World Heritage site, Catalhoyuk dates back nearly 9,000 years. Archaeological research has been conducted there since the 1960s.


Red Bulls Play Scoreless Tie in Home Opener vs. D.C. United

Abstract: HARRISON, N.J. — When they last met, the Red Bulls and D.C. United sat through a one-day postponement of their playoff game because of a snowstorm. The next day, D.C. ended the Red Bulls’ 2012 season. On Saturday, back at Red Bull Arena before an announced crowd of 22,022 four months later, the teams kicked off Major League Soccer’s Rivalry Week playing a spirited, if that is possible, 0-0 tie in a steady but light snowfall. It was the Red Bulls’ home opener after a tie at Portland and a loss at San Jose. The Red Bulls, who scored four goals on the road, had the majority of the scoring opportunities Saturday, outshooting D.C. United by 24-4 (and by 13-2 in the second half). Strong play in the Red Bulls’ midfield, particularly from Eric Alexander, was wasted by generally anemic finishing up front. Fabian Espindola hit the crossbar with shots in both halves. “I’m very satisfied, for the most part, not happy with the result; I guess we left 2 points out there,” Red Bulls Coach Mike Petke said. “What did we have to do to get the ball in the net?” With time winding down and the match in second-half added time, Juninho, who entered in the 68th minute, took a corner kick. The ball was turned toward the far post by the head of defender Brandon Barklage and came tantalizingly close to bouncing over the goal line, but D.C. goalkeeper Bill Hamid swatted it down and pinned it to the turf. “I got a head on it, and it was headed to the far post,” Barklage said. “I thought it was in. It was just another one of our good chances that didn’t go in. I started celebrating, but I guess not.” Image The Red Bulls have more ties (2) and losses (1) through three games than Thierry Henry has goals (0). Credit Mike Stobe/Getty Images In the second half, the Red Bulls strained and struggled for a goal. In the 58th minute, Alexander, on the right side of the midfield, sent a long crossing ball to the far post intended for Thierry Henry. Henry’s half-volley sailed high over the bar. Seven minutes later, Alexander, acquired before the start of the season from Portland, pounced on a loose ball and blasted a shot from about 30 yards that went high and wide. “We had a lot of good chances,” Alexander said. “When that shot started off, I thought it was going to catch the inside of the post. Some games are just like that.” The entry of Juninho, a 38-year-old midfielder from Brazil, helped the Red Bulls control the ball for the game’s final 25 minutes. Yet even his calming influence could not spur his teammates to put the ball into the goal. The defense Petke sent onto the field was the third combination in three games. Roy Miller, who committed a handball in the penalty area last week in San Jose and encroached on Chris Wondolowski’s ensuing penalty kick, was excused the possible wrath of the home fans when he was allowed to travel a day earlier than expected to Costa Rica. The Ticos are preparing for next week’s World Cup qualifier against the United States in Commerce City, Colo. “I just thought it would have been unfair to put him out there today, even on the bench, with all that has gone on in the media and with our fans,” Petke said. “It was better to let him leave a day early and have an extra day at home with his family so he could figure things out.” In Miller’s absence, Petke rearranged the back line, moving Heath Pearce to the left and inserting Markus Holgersson into central defense, with Jamison Olave. It was Holgersson’s first start of the season after he started 31 games in 2012. Barklage started on the right. “The only thing we lacked today was goals,” said midfielder Tim Cahill, who headed for the airport after the match to join Australia’s national team for next week’s World Cup qualifier against Oman in Sydney. NOTES Tito Vilanova, the coach of Barcelona who is on sabbatical from the club while he is receiving treatment for cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, dropped in on the Red Bulls’ training session Friday. The practice was held at Red Bull Arena instead of the team’s training center at Montclair State.

Soccer
New York Red Bulls Soccer Team
DC United


David C. Headley Gets 35 Years for Mumbai Attack

Abstract: CHICAGO — David C. Headley, an American who confessed to helping plan the deadly 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, was sentenced here on Thursday to 35 years in prison, the maximum sought by federal prosecutors. Balancing what was described in court as a “very heinous crime” and “very significant cooperation,” the ruling came after lawyers for the government and the defense urged Judge Harry D. Leinenweber of Federal District Court to downgrade Mr. Headley’s punishment from life in prison. They said he had cooperated with the authorities and provided useful information about Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group with which he had worked. “No matter how good our intelligence is, no matter how technologically advanced our investigative techniques are, we need witnesses,” Gary S. Shapiro, the acting United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, said after the decision. “And the only way you get witnesses in this world is by threatening to prosecute them and then offering them some real incentive to provide you with that information.” According to court documents, Mr. Headley, 52, attended Lashkar-e-Taiba training camps in Pakistan between 2002 and 2005. He later admitted to scouting targets in Mumbai for the group before the raids in November 2008, in which 163 people and 9 gunmen died. Six of the victims were American. After his arrest at a Chicago airport a year later, Mr. Headley pleaded guilty to 12 conspiracy charges over his involvement in the Mumbai attack and a proposed terrorist plot against a Danish newspaper that published cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Prosecutors said that Mr. Headley immediately began sharing information that led to criminal charges against at least seven other people. He also testified against his co-defendant, the Chicago businessman Tahawwur Rana , who last week was sentenced to 14 years in prison. In exchange for his cooperation, which is expected to continue while he is in prison, prosecutors also agreed not to seek the death penalty or extradite Mr. Headley to Pakistan, India or Denmark. But on Thursday, some expressed concern that Mr. Headley was getting more leniency than he deserved. Standing before the court, Linda Ragsdale, who was injured in the Mumbai attack, fought back tears as she described the gunfire she witnessed at a hotel that was raided in the militant attack. “I know the sound of life leaving a 13-year-old child,” she said.

David Coleman Headley
Criminal Sentence
India
Terrorism


Long Island Latino International Film Festival Will Feature 25 Movies

Abstract: Soon after Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, was stabbed to death in Patchogue last year, James Garcia Sotomayor, a filmmaker who lives in nearby Brentwood, got a worried phone call from his mother, who lives in his native Ecuador. The call, he said, inspired him to make a movie based on the Patchogue event. Mr. Garcia Sotomayor poured his life savings — $40,000 he had intended to use to buy a home — into “Taught to Hate,” a 27-minute fictional film. It includes a confrontation between a group of non-Latino teenagers and two Latino immigrants, much like the real-life incident for which seven youths are awaiting trial. “These are personal issues,” Mr. Garcia Sotomayor said. “They are so important to me.” After he cast Brandon Hannan , a 16-year-old from Dix Hills who played Vito Spatafore Jr. in “The Sopranos,” 700 actors applied to audition, he said. “Taught to Hate” will be among 25 films featured next weekend at the fifth annual Long Island Latino International Film Festival at the Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University . Besides the United States, they come from countries including Peru, Bolivia, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. The festival was founded by T. J. Collins of Hicksville and Janet Cruz of Holbrook, who share the title of executive director. Mr. Collins, who owns a film production company, has included his first feature, “Willets Point,” which he wrote, directed and produced. “It’s the story of a family struggling to make ends meet,” he said. “My mother and father worked very hard. They had their own cleaning company.” His protagonist, Guillo Blanco (Alfredo Suarez), is an auto mechanic in the Queens industrial enclave the film takes its title from. Mr. Collins said he expanded the film after visiting the New Jersey home of his cinematographer and co-producer, Ivan Velez, where he met Mr. Velez’s father-in-law — who turned out to be Moses Caban, Mr. Collins’s former mechanics teacher at East Meadow High School. Not only did Mr. Collins cast Mr. Caban in the film, he said, but he also incorporated his story. Mr. Caban’s wife, Diane Victoria Caban, has Huntington’s disease, an incurable degenerative disorder. In the film, Guillo’s wife, Doris (Lorraine Rodriguez, who also appears in “Taught to Hate”), learns she has the disease. For Frances Lozada , an actress and writer who lives in Bayside, Queens, the frustrations of auditioning inspired her documentary “StereoTYPEd.” Ms. Lozada said casting directors often found her looks either too Latina or not Latina enough. “I can’t win,” she said. She wrote and directed the 24-minute film, and her husband, the actor Franky G , whose credits include “The Italian Job” and “Wonderland,” was executive producer. He, Ms. Lozada and other actors talk onscreen about stereotyping. “I want to send the message that we’re all the same,” Ms. Lozada said. In “Evergreen,” shot mostly in Mineola, Rolando Sanchez , the writer and director, tells a fictional story of spousal abuse in just 20 minutes, including flashbacks to the abusing husband’s abysmal childhood. Mr. Sanchez, an electrical engineer who lives in Forest Hills, Queens, said he became fascinated with film in 1998 as he watched “Saving Private Ryan” while serving with the Navy in the Persian Gulf. He said his film has universal appeal. “I don’t make movies for Latinos,” he said, quoting another director, Franc Reyes. “I make films with Latinos in them.”

State University of New York at Stony Brook


Protesters in Malaysia Demand Electoral Reforms

Abstract: KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The police fired tear gas and water cannons on Saturday at thousands of protesters here calling for free and fair elections, in one of the largest rallies in Malaysia in recent years. Nearly 400 people were arrested during the demonstration in central Kuala Lumpur organized by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, a group of 84 organizations that is demanding an overhaul of the country’s election system before a national vote that is widely expected to be held in June. The group, known as Bersih — or clean, in Malay — argues that the electoral system unfairly favors the governing coalition, which has led Malaysia since independence in 1957. The police estimated that 40,000 to 50,000 people had gathered for the protest. Bersih organizers put the number at 250,000. Swarms of protesters, many wearing the canary yellow T-shirts that have come to symbolize the Bersih movement, began gathering on Saturday morning at various roads leading to Independence Square in Kuala Lumpur, the capital, creating a festive atmosphere. A group of protesters chanted, “Long live the people” and sang the Malaysian national anthem under a sweltering tropical sun, their voices competing with the sound of a police helicopter flying overhead while police officers looked on from behind a row of barbed wire and barricades. The demonstrators were kept out of Independence Square, the site of many parades and celebrations, by a court order issued Friday. A rally in the streets around the square appeared to have been peaceful until Bersih organizers, who had pledged that they would not break through the barricades, instructed protesters to disperse. A small group then appeared to breach the barriers, prompting the police to fire tear gas and water laced with stinging chemicals at parts of the crowd, The Associated Press reported. A police spokesman, Ramli Yoosuf, said the tear gas was fired after protesters breached the barriers. “They cut the barricade, and they were barging in,” he said. A news Web site, The Malaysian Insider, reported that protesters overturned a police car. The report said the car had crashed after it was attacked by protesters, and hit two people. Andrew Khoo, a lawyer and a member of the Bersih steering committee, said the organizers were “extremely disappointed” that people ignored their requests to disperse and instead broke through the barriers. But, he said, the police had overreacted. Their response was “wholly disproportionate to any risk they may have felt they were under,” he said. “The police went in and broke up people who were sitting on the road, who were very peaceful,” Mr. Khoo said. “The water cannon truck came charging at them so they had to run for their lives. This was followed by tear gas. It was a pincers movement, and people were getting trapped in between.” Another Bersih supporter, Anand Lourdes, said people started screaming when the police fired the tear gas. Saturday’s protest was Bersih’s third call for changes to the country’s election system. At the group’s previous protest, in July, more than 1,600 people were arrested, and tear gas and water cannons were also used to disperse protesters. Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, said Saturday that the Malaysian government had again shown its contempt for basic rights and freedoms. “Despite all the talk of ‘reform’ over the past year, we’re seeing a repeat of repressive actions by a government that does not hesitate to use force when it feels its prerogatives are challenged,” Mr. Robertson said. The minister of home affairs, Hishammuddin Hussein, in a statement released Saturday, commended the police for “their professionalism and the restraint they have shown under difficult circumstances.” Mr. Hishammuddin said it was regrettable that Bersih had declined to use an alternative site for its rally because Independence Square was not approved for public protests under the new Peaceful Assembly Act. Bersih has said that the offer to use a stadium in the city came too late, and that the other sites offered were far from the center of the capital. Prime Minister Najib Razak has introduced many reforms in recent months, after promising last year to improve civil liberties in Malaysia. However, critics say that the legislative changes do not go far enough to ensure that democratic rights are protected. Activists decided to rally again on Saturday because Bersih’s leadership contends that recommendations for changes to the election system made by a parliamentary committee, established after last year’s protest, are unlikely to ensure that the next election will be conducted fairly. The Election Commission said that it would carry out some of the parliamentary committee’s recommendations, like extending the campaign period to a minimum of 10 days and using indelible ink to stain voters’ fingers to ensure that people do not vote more than once. Mr. Hishammuddin said the Election Commission had “gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the next elections are free and fair and meet the highest international standards.” But Bersih is demanding that senior officials of the Election Commission resign, that the voting rolls be purged of fraudulent names and that the election be monitored by international observers. One protester who gave her name as Wan Zabidah, 60, said she had traveled two hours by bus to attend the rally and express her concerns about the integrity of the voting rolls and the independence of the Election Commission. “We are already old, but it’s for the children and the grandchildren,” she said.

Malaysia
Elections
Demonstrations Protests and Riots
Historic Buildings and Sites
Reform and Reorganization


The Last Smokers in New York City

Abstract: “WHEN,” announced Luis Davila, glancing at the clock: 11 a.m. “When,” repeated his colleague, Oana Marian, confirming the code. The two grabbed their cigarettes, punched G in the elevator and zipped down 28 floors to one of the last remaining refuges for the New York City smoker: the sidewalk, in this case a concrete canyon separating the two wings of the old MetLife building across Madison Avenue from Madison Square Park. Parliament, Marlboro, Winston, Benson & Hedges glow throughout the day in this canyon as smoker after smoker dashes down, lights up and vanishes again like a wisp of smoke. Between drags, they gab into their cellphones, soak in the solitude, pace to the curb and back, or chat briefly, most conversations lasting only as long as the ember at the tip of their cigarettes. They know one another’s faces and throw a quick nod or wave this way and that, but the names and back stories go mostly untold. Ms. Marian, 51, first lighted up in her native country, Romania, where everyone smoked, inhaling her first stream of nicotine along with the mountain air at a summer camp outside of Bucharest. Mr. Davila, 36, who straddled New Jersey and Ecuador as a child, remembers buying two packs a day for his dad. Linda Greene’s father bribed her not to smoke; she pocketed the cash and lighted up anyway. Up the canyon, there is a Vietnam War veteran, a pack-a-day man who wakes up every morning determined to quit. They are the holdout smokers. The ones who have survived the ever-scarier health warnings (and the social stigma that made the Vietnam veteran ask that he not be identified in this article); the ones who have persisted despite legislation banning butts from bars, restaurants and office buildings; the ones who keep paying those rising taxes, the latest of which, starting this summer, raised the typical price in New York City to $11 a pack. The ones who can’t, won’t or just don’t give it up. The city’s health department, in a 2008 study, found that 959,000 adults in New York, or 15.8 percent of that population, smoked. A bit more than half of those are 25 to 44 years old (as are 46 percent of the city’s population); 53 percent of them are men (compared with 46 percent of the city); 41 percent are white (39.5 percent). People who live in the Bronx and on Staten Island are more likely to smoke than those in Queens and Manhattan. Unemployed people are much more likely; 23 percent of them smoke, and they account for 15.5 percent of the smokers, compared with 9.3 percent of the overall population. Nineteen percent of New Yorkers born in the United States smoke, compared with 11 percent of immigrants. They all hope to quit, at some point, and they are even known to celebrate their dwindling numbers. When a woman on Mr. Davila’s team at HRG, a travel management company, quit two years ago — with the help of prescription medication — colleagues decorated her cubicle with congratulations. Mr. Davila, an operations supervisor at the company, said he would stop if he became a parent. For sure. “Oh, yeah, I’m going to quit,” he said. “Eventually, when I’m ready, I’ll quit.” There was a time, not so long ago, that no one lingered, cigarette in hand, between the MetLife buildings on East 24th Street. They smoked at their desks, or, later, in a smoking lounge. Then in 1995, City Hall started rolling out its restrictions and the herding began: big room to small room, inside to outside, public to private, acceptable to anathema. Today, the stigma runs deeper than ever. “They look at you like you just clubbed a baby seal,” Mr. Davila said. Once in a while, he and the others point out that their smoke rings are nothing compared with the fumes buses belch out onto city streets. They wonder aloud why the city does not address that hazard. Not that they don’t know: People need buses. People don’t need smokers. So they stand in ever-shrinking clusters all over New York, their turf continually circumscribed, or so it seems. A few months ago, a new sign went up at the MetLife buildings: No smoking within 25 feet. The smokers, by now regulated into submission, mostly complied by moving from the front door to the side of the building. When it rains, they crowd under a tiny overhang near the loggia and hope the security guard won’t shoo them away like loiterers at a convenience store. The latest $1.60 cigarette tax, which the state passed in June to help close a $9 billion budget gap, has inspired some of them to roll their own. Others are downgrading to cheaper, harsher brands, including some made in China — “One cigarette and you have throat cancer,” Mr. Davila complained. New Jersey residents make sure to stock up at home, and when Mr. Davila announced he was going on a business trip to North Carolina — Mecca for smokers — Ms. Marian was quick to ask for a carton. “So, are you doing anything this weekend?” he said to Ms. Marian, his partner in exile. The clock was ticking. Back to work. “NOBODY knew how bad it was,” said the Vietnam veteran, a man of 64 with a ruddy face and a slight paunch who prefers short answers to long questions. Back in ninth grade, maybe 10th, at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, he tapped that first Chesterfield out of the pack and put it to his lips. It was the early 1960s, the era of “Mad Men,” when cigarettes oozed charm and the only place you really couldn’t light up was at church. He grew up in Yorkville, in Manhattan, and, after school, took the bus to Spanish Harlem to help his father run the family candy store, where newspapers jostled for space on overstuffed racks. Cigarettes were 35 cents a pack, give or take. Unlike many other dads, his smoked only a couple a day; his mom, a homemaker, didn’t have a taste for tobacco at all. But when their son picked up the habit, they didn’t blink. A teenager without a cigarette during the Kennedy era was like a young woman out on the town without a set of heels. Not easy to find. He was a good student, a math whiz who studied chemical engineering at Manhattan College. In 1968 he joined the Air Force and, inevitably, shipped out to Vietnam, where he was a combat photographer for 15 months in the Central Highlands, an area that suffered some of the war’s heaviest fighting. “Basically, they trained me on the aircraft cameras,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’ Most of my pictures appeared in Stars and Stripes or were classified.” Back in the United States, he scrounged around for a job like so many other returning servicemen, and landed at Irving Trust, where he met his wife; they married in 1971. He never left banking or lost his taste for cigarettes. (He would not allow the name of his current company to be published — that anti-smoking stigma again.) His wife managed to quit six or seven years ago. “She was getting emphysema and stuff like that,” he said. So he smokes outside, on the deck of his Staten Island house, or at the front door. None of his friends smoke; his daughter does, but not his two sons. These days, he zips down for a Marlboro Light twice in the morning, at lunch, and twice in the afternoon. Sure, he feels winded when he climbs stairs. But it’s not as if he was planning on running a marathon. “My doctor used to smoke in the office with me,” he noted. “Now he says, ‘You know I have to tell you to stop smoking.’ ” He has tried quitting. Acupuncture worked for a couple of weeks. Cold turkey lasted a day. A prescription pill he took briefly was deemed harmful. The nicotine patch did nothing; he smoked while wearing it. The gum — “a waste of time.” Hypnosis: a disaster. “Everybody who got hypnotized threw their cigarettes on the back table,” he said. “I walked out and grabbed my cigarettes, and all theirs, too.” “I’VE never been a heavy smoker,” Mr. Davila explained after putting out his Parliament Ultralight. “I like it, but not that much. Plus, I know that it’s really bad for me.” This is a common refrain among those who line the canyon. They classify themselves mostly as dabblers — a few cigarettes a day, no more than half a pack. They don’t feel enslaved to their addiction because they don’t feel the need to light up right after dinner, on the train, on a plane, in the house, in the car. They comfortably sidestep the word addict. Like the Vietnam veteran, Mr. Davila started as a teenager, 20 years ago, while attending an American school in Ecuador, where his parents were born. He and his best friend, Chris, were out shopping at a mall. “Chris said, ‘I’m going to light up,’ and I said, ‘What’s that like?’ ” he recalled. It was menthol . “I thought, ‘If this is what a cigarette is like, I want one.’ ” After that, Mr. Davila smoked a few when he went out with friends. He kept it hidden from his parents, who wouldn’t have approved. The habit followed him to Jersey City, where he went to St. Mary’s High School, back when cigarettes cost $4 a pack, and then to Saint Peter’s College. Clubbing was his weakness. Hard not to smoke with a drink in his hand. He doesn’t drink much anymore. And now he has rules: he and Ms. Marian go down to the street once in the morning, once at lunch and once more in the afternoon. He seldom smokes on weekends, never in the Montclair, N.J., home he shares with his wife. “She hates it,” he said. His father-in-law is a chef, a skill passed on to his wife, and, tempting as it is to light up after a sumptuous meal, he takes a pass nowadays. That’s progress. Before, he said, “after eating, if I didn’t have a cigarette in my hand, I would go berzerko.” “And I don’t smoke in the car, no way,” he said. “I don’t want to smell like an ashtray.” Though Mr. Davila long ago made peace with living on the wrong side of acceptable, the latest commandment, “no smoking within 25 feet of the building,” unnerved him. “Where do you draw the line?” he said. “What’s next? That’s the whole thing. You feel like you’re a second-class citizen, worse than before.” “I always thought it would have made me sick or made me cough,” Ms. Marian said as she recalled her first drag, at 16, at that summer camp in Romania. “But it was like I had always smoked.” Her father was a journalist and her mother worked at the National Theater; both smoked. Her father’s position brought them privilege — a nice apartment in the center of Bucharest, the summer camp. Ms. Marian attended a government school that focused on physics. She smoked off and on, mostly at a cafe over a cup of coffee. But it wasn’t until she moved to Haifa, Israel, with her mother, after her father died, that she bought her first pack. She was a student again, studying electromagnetic engineering at Technion, Haifa’s polytechnic university. Everyone smoked, so she smoked more. She met her husband there. He was studying civil engineering. They began as friends in 1981 and romance seeped in. In 1986, they married. In time, she tossed engineering aside to help a friend with corporate accounts at a travel agency. “I always liked to travel,” she said. “All these nice places. It spoke to me.” Moving to the United States was a key goal. She settled into Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1990 with her husband and had a son, who graduated from Bronx High School of Science two years ago. He is 19 now, a sophomore at the State University at Stony Brook. She worked first as manager of an Israeli restaurant in Queens, then jumped to reservations at a travel agency, and now coordinates travel road shows for clients of HRG, a huge firm specializing in corporate travel. She became a citizen in 2000 and, like many immigrants, is fiercely loyal and proud of her adopted country. “If anybody asks what I am, I say American,” she said. But, like a parent with a gifted child who doesn’t live up to expectations, she has been occasionally disappointed. She expected a meritocracy, where hard work and intelligence rule the day, and found that whom you know and how you present yourself can best the best. The smoking rules, too, bring back a few memories of her childhood. “Land of the free, I envisioned it that way,” she added. “I probably idealized it. Being born and raised in a Communist regime, I was looking for the exact opposite — capitalism, free market, individual freedoms.” “I really try to be a courteous smoker,” Ms. Greene said. “If I’m smoking a cigarette on the street and run into a friend, I won’t have them stand downwind.” If someone is visiting her apartment who does not like cigarettes, she does not light one. “I use Febreze all the time,” she said, “on the rugs and on the furniture.” At 62, Ms. Greene is an executive assistant for a large financial services organization whose identity she wants to keep to herself. She stands alone on the sidewalk, which is how she began her smoking life. She was 15 and stole a Pall Mall from her sister’s pack — no filter — then ran into a cornfield that was shouting distance from her home in Conyngham, Pa. “I got sick,” she recalled. “Nauseous.” She persevered: “Everyone was doing it, advertising it, glamorizing it.” Her father, who owned a heavy-equipment business, had quit before she was born and was determined to keep cigarettes away from his three daughters. He made a bargain: every month, he forked over $100 to each girl as long as she did not smoke. Taking a chapter from “King Lear,” the girls smoked anyway, just out of his line of vision. “After dinner we would all get up, and he would say, ‘Where are you going, dollies?’ ” Ms. Greene recalled. “It went on a couple of years. He knew it didn’t work. He was just pleased we didn’t smoke in front of him.” In New York, she landed a job at Alcoa and smoked at her desk, at the movies, on a plane, at the dentist’s office. “Even on a plane, I always asked someone next to me if it bothered them,” she said. “I did have one nun who said yes. I was furious.” She doesn’t know why she smokes. She likes it. What more is there? Why she doesn’t quit is easier to pinpoint. “I don’t want to gain weight.” Once in a while, when her husband gets fed up with the haze in their one-bedroom apartment a quick walk from Madison Square Park, he’ll demand that she put out “that damn cigarette,” Ms. Greene said. “I just say no.” She does limit it to about 10 per day, or her chest hurts. She knows she has the will power to quit: She lost 40 pounds three years ago and stopped a lifelong habit of cracking her knuckles before that. But it will be on her terms. “I have to decide I’m going to quit,” Ms. Greene said. “It can’t be someone else who decides.”


Tim Babcock, Ex-Governor of Montana, Is Dead at 95

Abstract: Tim Babcock, a former governor of Montana who took office when his predecessor was killed in an airplane crash and who was later involved in an illegal financial scheme to help President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election, died on Tuesday in Helena, the state’s capital. He was 95. Chris Shipp, executive director of the state’s Republican Party, confirmed the death. Mr. Babcock was lieutenant governor when Gov. Donald G. Nutter, 46, and five others died in the crash of a twin-engine C-47 in mountainous timberland north of Helena on Jan. 25, 1962. The state’s agriculture commissioner and the governor’s executive secretary were among the dead. Mr. Babcock, a Republican, narrowly won election in 1964 before losing four years later to Forrest Anderson, a Democrat. After leaving the governor’s office in 1969, Mr. Babcock worked for the wealthy businessman Armand Hammer as a vice president at a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum. He later got caught up in a campaign finance scheme linked to Mr. Hammer and Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972. Mr. Babcock pleaded guilty in 1974 to concealing the source of a $54,000 contribution to Nixon. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to four months in jail. The jail term was later set aside. President George Bush pardoned Mr. Hammer in 1989. Mr. Babcock had served three terms in the state’s House of Representatives before being elected lieutenant governor in 1960. His wife, the former Betty Lee, also a state legislator, helped write the Montana Constitution. She died in 2013. Republican stalwarts, they attended every Republican National Convention for 60 years. Mr. Babcock was born in Littlefork, Minn., on Oct. 27, 1919. A high school graduate, he served in the Army infantry in World War II. His survivors include a daughter, Lorna. Another daughter, Maria, died before him. Mr. Babcock later started a mining industry consulting firm, owned a hotel in Washington State and operated a cattle ranch in Wolf Creek, Mont. He often said he was the only Montana governor to take the oath of office with tears in his eyes, The Billings Gazette, a Montana newspaper, said in its obituary . Mr. Nutter had been a close friend.


Shutoff of Sprinklers Cited in Fire at New York Courthouse

Abstract: Part of the sprinkler system in the basement of a Manhattan courthouse was illegally disconnected, allowing a fire that erupted there to grow before firefighters arrived to control it, the authorities said Wednesday. It was unclear when or why that portion of the sprinkler system had been disconnected, but the Buildings Department issued a violation to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which manages the building for the court system, according to Tony Sclafani, a spokesman for the Buildings Department. Six sprinkler heads in a storage area where the fire occurred on Tuesday morning were not connected to the rest of the system, said Mark Daly, a spokesman for administrative services. As a result, the sprinklers did not turn on when the fire started. The department hoped to have a new sprinkler line in place by the end of the week, Mr. Daly said. Meanwhile, the Fire Department said an electrical problem with temporary construction lights in the basement of the building, at 100 Centre Street , had caused the fire. Workers in the basement were updating the fire alarm system when the fire ignited, Mr. Daly said. The building was closed Wednesday and will remain so Thursday while the smoky odor airs out, the area of the fire is cleaned and the electrical system on the north end of the building is repaired, Mr. Daly said. Tests showed no air-quality hazards, he said, and the department planned to test every floor. The lobby of 100 Centre reeked of soot on Wednesday. It was mostly empty except for several court officers and maintenance workers. David Bookstaver, a spokesman for the Office of Court Administration, said it was the first time in recent memory that 100 Centre Street, the busiest criminal court building in the state, had been fully shut down. Across the street, the workers and dockets for about two dozen court parts at 100 were jammed into 111 Centre Street, causing confusion and crowded hallways. The elevator bank on the ground floor was packed, creating long waits. With the galleries full in arraignment courtrooms, people sat on benches in the hallway. Certain proceedings were delayed as technicians set up computers and cables. And some people with surgical masks hanging around their necks rolled carts full of files into the building. “We put a plan in really quickly that seems to be working,” Mr. Bookstaver said. “It wasn’t without some confusion, but we expected that.” A recreational vehicle in front of 111 Centre served as the administration’s command post. Many people were told that their cases would be rescheduled. But judges did still hear time-sensitive matters. The fire earned the rapper Lil Wayne an extra weekend of freedom. He was to begin serving his one-year sentence on an attempted gun possession charge on Tuesday. But the fire caused his sentencing to be postponed until Monday.

Fires and Firefighters
Manhattan (NYC)
Lil Wayne


Suit Accuses Citibank of Abetting Viola Scheme

Abstract: Giuseppe Viola gave his 2008 holiday party at Trattoria Pinocchio in North Beach. It was a lavish affair, with a menu of salmon and filet mignon. Mr. Viola invited about 45 guests, and most were bankers and staff members from local branches of Citibank, according to the restaurant’s owner, Giovanni Zocca. But Mr. Viola and Citi are no longer celebrating. Mr. Viola, 59, is accused in court documents of running a Ponzi scheme that cost investors — including Mr. Zocca — millions of dollars, and Citi’s role in the alleged scheme has also come under scrutiny. Last week, an independent trustee appointed by the federal bankruptcy court in San Francisco filed a lawsuit charging that Citi “knowingly aided and abetted” Mr. Viola’s activities. The suit alleges that Citibank and Mr. Viola had a close relationship. The suit also alleges that Citi skirted federal banking laws by failing to properly oversee the account. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is also investigating Mr. Viola, and has interviewed at least one of the bankers who dealt with him for more than a decade, court records show. “Citi is cooperating with law enforcement authorities,” said Robert Julavits, a bank spokesman. “We do not believe that Citibank acted improperly.” Mr. Julavits said the lawsuit was “without merit.” Mr. Viola is accused of bilking at least 60 investors out of more than $17 million over much of the past decade. He has denied in a court document that he is the same man who used a Citi trust account to funnel money that, according to former investors and the lawsuit, was acquired during convivial meetings in cafes and pastry shops in North Beach. In March, Mr. Viola was arrested for skipping bail in 1990 in a separate fraud case in Arizona. He is being held in the Maricopa County Jail in Phoenix. Citi’s “status as the world’s largest financial institution added a veneer of respectability” to Mr. Viola’s activities, the 23-page lawsuit filed in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California charges. It asks that Citibank be forced to return about $18 million to defrauded investors and pay punitive damages. The lawsuit contends that Citibank continued to do business with Mr. Viola for years, ignoring irregularities in the documentation for the account and the large financial transactions as money flowed in and out. According to former clients and court documents, Mr. Viola and his banker had an unusually close relationship. Mr. Viola opened the Citi account in 1999 even though an internal fraud investigation had led the bank to close his previous Citi accounts held under his original name, Joseph Viola, in Arizona in 1990, court documents show. Mr. Viola, a fugitive and former convict, began calling himself Giuseppe when he arrived in North Beach in the 1990s. With Ralph Napolitano, Mr. Viola opened an account at Citi’s office at 451 Montgomery Street with no valid personal identification, according to court documents. Mr. Napolitano was an elderly dockworker whose life savings of $220,000 made up the initial deposit. He disappeared shortly after opening the account, the lawsuit states, and is now presumed dead. Rik Schrammel, a Citi vice president, said in a May deposition for the bankruptcy case that he had served as Mr. Viola’s banker for more than a decade. Mr. Schrammel also acknowledged that he had been interviewed by the F.B.I. Court filings state that Mr. Schrammel was named on the Viola-Napolitano account as “successor trustee,” meaning he would oversee it should Mr. Viola be unable to do so. Such an arrangement would likely violate Citi’s conflict-of-interest rules, a Citi lawyer wrote in a 2009 e-mail message to Mr. Viola. Mr. Schrammel was asked to resign and left Citi on April 27, he said in his deposition. He could not be reached for comment, and his lawyer said he would advise Mr. Schrammel not to talk about the case. After the Citi account was opened, Mr. Viola ostensibly controlled it for the benefit of Mr. Napolitano, who had stated on the form to open the account that he earned $25,000 a year. The account was called the Ralph Napolitano Irrevocable Living Trust. In May 2005, Citi asked that records from the trust be updated, according to the lawsuit. This was required by the federal USA Patriot Act of 2001, given the account’s sharply increased balance, which reached $771,000 by the end of that year. Citi allowed Mr. Viola to sign the paperwork, even though he still had no valid identification, according to the lawsuit. A signature from Mr. Napolitano was not obtained. By December 2005, Citi was insisting that Mr. Napolitano’s signature be included in the account-updating forms, the lawsuit states. In January 2006, the bank received a form stating that Mr. Napolitano had met personally with Mr. Schrammel. Mr. Schrammel signed and stamped the form, which was also signed by Ralph Napolitano. The lawsuit asserts that the signature of Mr. Napolitano, who had disappeared years earlier, was an “obvious forgery.” The account-update form stated that Mr. Napolitano and Mr. Viola shared a single phone number and an address at 268 Bush Street, which was actually a UPS mail drop two blocks from Citi’s Montgomery Street branch. Until his arrest in March, Mr. Viola cashed Mr. Napolitano’s pension checks and used his credit cards. He also used a cellphone registered to Mr. Napolitano, according to John MacConaghy, the attorney representing the trustee in the bankruptcy case. The trust account, which Citi closed last year, would ultimately take in and disburse about $17 million. One client of Mr. Viola and Mr. Schrammel said he met with the two men in 2006 to invest about $450,000 into the Napolitano Trust. Mr. Viola was able to use a conference room at the bank to conduct business, even though he was not a Citi employee, according to that client and court documents. “Viola took me to Citi on Montgomery Street, told me he worked through this office,” said the investor, adding that Mr. Viola and Mr. Schrammel also persuaded him to move about $360,000 from his retirement account into a Citi I.R.A. overseen by Mr. Schrammel. “He knew everybody,” the investor said of Mr. Viola at the Citi branch. “He used the phones. He brought me into a big office on the second floor. That’s how he made me comfortable.” In 2007, according to court documents, Milton D. Kirsch sought to move about $8 million from a bank account in Gibraltar to Citi in San Francisco. Mr. Schrammel declined the transfer, saying that Citi could not accept the money because it lacked proper documentation about its origin, the documents show. Mr. Schrammel said in his deposition that in December 2007 he introduced Mr. Kirsch to Mr. Viola. Shortly afterward, Mr. Schrammel testified, he noticed that the Napolitano Trust received a wire transfer from Gibraltar for approximately $8 million, but Mr. Schrammel did not mention it to his superiors. In July 2009, Gary Sullivan, a Citi senior vice president and assistant general counsel, notified Mr. Viola by phone and then by e-mail that the Kirsch transaction appeared inconsistent with the Napolitano Trust’s stated purpose. Mr. Sullivan informed Mr. Viola that as a result the account would be closed, court documents show. But Citi did not actually close the Napolitano Trust until Sept. 30, 2009. During those three months, Mr. Viola took in an additional $112,000 and withdrew $912,000, essentially draining the account, court records show. According to Mr.MacConaghy, even after the Napolitano account was closed, Mr. Viola was still able to conduct business using an account he and some business partners had recently opened at Citi’s North Beach branch.

Banks and Banking
Viola Giuseppe
Suits and Litigation
Frauds and Swindling
San Francisco (Calif)


Napa Home and Garden Recalls Pourable Fuel Gel After Firepot Accidents

Abstract: A maker of pourable fuel gel for decorative firepots is recalling about a half-million bottles after learning of dozens of accidents, including two near-fatal ones in New York, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced on Wednesday. Reports of severe burn accidents connected to the use of gel-fueled firepots, a relatively new product, have surfaced in states like California, Florida and Indiana since The New York Times first reported on June 11 on the two accidents in New York. One involved a 14-year-old Riverhead boy who remains in a coma in a Long Island hospital. In these and other cases, witnesses and victims likened the fuel gel to napalm, saying it exploded in a flash, stuck to clothing and would not stop burning even when a victim dropped to the ground and rolled or the flames were covered with a blanket. The commission said the manufacturer, Napa Home and Garden Inc. of Duluth, Ga., had become aware of 37 reported accidents, 23 of them involving injuries to consumers. The company has sold 460,000 containers of the fuel, a form of ethanol, in quart bottles and gallon jugs, since December 2009, under the names Napafire and Firegel. Napa Home and Garden is offering full refunds of $5 to $78 to consumers who return the fuel to the original merchant — whether they bought it from retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond, ShopKo or Restoration Hardware, or through Amazon.com, catalog companies, decorators or landscape architects. Napa Home’s are not the only fuel gel products linked to serious burn cases: BirdBrain Inc., a rival manufacturer based in Ypsilanti, Mich., is being sued by the parents of a 13-year-old New Jersey girl, an 8-year-old Maryland boy and a 3-year-old Illinois girl, each of whom spent weeks in the hospital recovering from severe burns last year. The recall does not extend to BirdBrain products, but a commission spokesman said its investigation into other companies and burn cases was “open and active.” The commission’s inquiry began after The Times reported on the fuel gel explosions that injured Michael Hubbard, 14, of Riverhead, on Long Island, and Nick Stone, 24, of Manhattan, and one of his friends. Mr. Stone has had surgery a half-dozen times and still faces many more procedures, his stepfather said Wednesday. Mr. Hubbard remains in a coma and on a ventilator, his aunt said, but his condition had improved enough for doctors to apply skin grafts to most of his wounds on Tuesday. A Suffolk County legislator has introduced a bill , called “Michael’s Law,” to ban the sale of fuel gels there. Personal injury lawyers, meanwhile, have pounced on the recent burn cases. Napa Home and Garden is being sued in federal court in Spartanburg, S.C., by a Florida couple who were seriously wounded there in May. The woman, Barbara Satterfield, remains in the intensive care unit at a burn center in Augusta, Ga., according to the lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday.

Accidents and Safety
Recalls and Bans of Products
Napa Home & Garden Inc
Consumer Product Safety Commission


City Is Doubling Police Program to Reduce Crime

Abstract: Every new police officer in New York City will be sent onto the streets of some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods as part of a broad anticrime operation that the authorities say has helped produce historic drops in crime, the city announced on Wednesday. Police officials and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that each of the 914 police recruits being sworn in on Thursday would join the program, Operation Impact. They also announced that crime in almost every major category declined again this year, with violence down in the schools and on the subways and with homicides on track to fall below 500 for the first time since reliable statistics became available 44 years ago. Because some areas, mostly in Brooklyn, show stubbornly higher crime rates, they will get a bigger influx of Operation Impact officers, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said. They include parts of Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York and Crown Heights. Operation Impact, begun in 2003, matches new recruits with seasoned officers and supervisors to tackle crime spikes in narrowly drawn geographic areas. Coming at a time when the department is facing recruitment challenges, the new influx will double — to more than 1,800 — the number of officers assigned to those duties in a force that currently has 35,400 members. “If you look at a map showing where crime is, it is clearly concentrated in a couple of areas, and the people that live in those areas have a right to live in a safe neighborhood just like those who are lucky enough to do so today,” Mayor Bloomberg said as he stood with Commissioner Kelly and a phalanx of police commanders inside the 28th Precinct station house in Harlem. As of 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, 484 homicides had been recorded in New York City in 2007, Mr. Kelly said, 97 fewer than at the same time last year. Officials said the city was headed toward having fewer than 500 homicides this year, by far the lowest number in a 12-month period since reliable Police Department statistics became available in 1963, when there were 548 killings. Asked why the officials had gathered in Harlem, Mr. Kelly said that so far this year, there have been three homicides in the 28th Precinct, while “we had over 100 homicides here, consistently,” in years past. Homicide, which is often viewed as a bellwether for larger trends in crime, was not the only type of violent crime to decrease. Through Dec. 23, the latest date for which overall police statistics were available, crime had fallen by 6.3 percent compared with the same period in 2006, officials said. Rapes, robberies, burglaries, grand larcenies and auto thefts also declined, compared with last year. Only felony assaults increased, to 16,864 from 16,801, a 0.3 percent rise. Officials said crime in the subway system fell by 13 percent compared with last year. In 1990, the officials said, 48 crimes were committed, on average, each day in the subway system, compared with a current average of 6. The decline occurred despite increasing numbers of riders and a Police Department that has nearly 2,500 fewer officers than was allowed for in the city budget. Police officials said crime in the school system dropped 20 percent compared with last year. Dennis C. Smith, a professor at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University and an author of an analysis of Operation Impact, hailed the new emphasis on the program as a “targeted use of scarce resources.” He said he had feared that city officials might curb the program because of a crisis in the recruitment of city police officer candidates. “This is further validation of research that has been done around the country — on smaller, more temporary versions of this approach — that hot-spot policing really works,” Professor Smith said. Homicides hit their peak in 1990, with 2,245. Mr. Bloomberg said on Wednesday that he hoped the declines would continue after he left office in two years. “I think Ray and I have one hope, and that is whoever succeeds us takes the numbers that we left and takes them down dramatically more,” the mayor said. Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that stamping out crime was “good and important.” But in doing so, she said, the Police Department could not engage in tactics that alienate the community and violate individual rights. “We have concerns, of course, about the possibility, or indeed the likelihood, that flooding the streets that are identified as ‘high crime’ will result in a sharp escalation of suspicionless street stops and breed antagonism on both sides,” Ms. Lieberman said. “If police come in there with a hostile attitude and the assumption that everyone on the street is suspicious because it is a so-called high-crime neighborhood, then that is an invitation for civil rights violations that breed hostility, mistrust and bad experiences all around, and certainly no guarantee of a good result in reducing crime in the long term.” Since criminals can get a sense of police operations, police officials must continually change their tactics, said Thomas A. Reppetto, a police historian who monitors the city’s crime numbers. “The police in New York have to continue to be two steps ahead of the criminals,” Mr. Reppetto said. “There is now a lot more pinpointed police activity, aimed at smaller locales. It used to be, 10 or 12 years ago, there was drug gangs on every corner and the police swept through a whole precinct. But now there are smaller pockets of crime, and that is what these impact areas are for, and the areas are constantly shifting.” Of the 76 police precincts in New York, there were 6 that showed slight increases in overall crime, officials said. Of those, four were in Brooklyn — the 73rd, 77th, 79th and 84th Precincts; one in Queens, the 101st Precinct; and one on Staten Island, the 122nd Precinct. In one of the Brooklyn neighborhoods, Brooklyn Heights, the increase was very small, 0.65 percent higher than last year, the police said. And homicides rose in only one of those precincts, the 73rd, reaching 28 compared with 22 last year, officials said. Mr. Kelly said that overall shootings — the number of occurrences and the number of victims — were down compared with last year. He said that the Operation Impact program was being changed: Rather than moving the roughly 900 officers currently in the program to precinct assignments — and replacing them with two-thirds of the recruits graduating from the Police Academy on Thursday — the existing officers will remain in the program and be joined by all 914 recruits, who will go to existing zones or to others being newly configured. Mr. Kelly said that about one-third of the 1,800 officers in the program would be sent to central Brooklyn precincts: the 70th, 71st, 73rd, 75th, 77th and 79th. Also, 45 officers will be assigned to northern Brooklyn as Impact Response Team officers, a flexible component within Operation Impact where the borough commander has the option of using the officers as he sees fit. In the Bronx, the 44th, 46th and 52nd Precincts will get Operation Impact officers. In northern Manhattan, the 32nd Precinct in Harlem will get them. In southern Manhattan, the Midtown North and Midtown South Precincts will get Operation Impact officers. In Queens, the 103rd, 110th and 115th Precincts will get additional officers in the program. In addition, a housing police unit in Brooklyn will get an Impact Response Team. Police in the transit system will get a similar team of officers, known as an Impact Task Force. Staten Island will also get more overtime tours for the program. Mr. Kelly said that if he had to identify one program “that has been the prime reason why crime has gone down in this city, at least in this administration, it has been Operation Impact.” The program could have fallen victim to the continuing recruiting crisis, officials said. But a historical oddity in hiring numbers is allowing Operation Impact to continue and expand. There were about 800 officers hired in 1988, compared with 5,000 the previous year, and since about 81 percent of police officers retire after 20 years on the job, Mr. Kelly said, a large loss of officers was not expected to occur in the coming year. “We’re going to give this a try, and we’ll monitor it very closely to see if in fact we have to take officers from Impact and put them into precincts,” the commissioner said. “We’ll monitor it literally on a daily basis.” The authorized head count for the Police Department is 37,838 officers — which is what is allowed for in the city budget. But the department has not been able to meet that goal. Several city officials have criticized the starting salary for officers in their first six months of employment — $25,100, which first went into effect for officers hired in January 2006 — as a reason for the current recruitment crisis. The department is now authorized to hire 2,400 new officers, but as a result of the shortage of recruits, it says it will hire only 1,000 officers for the class that begins in January.

Crime and Criminals
Police
New York City
Bloomberg Michael R
Kelly Raymond W


Automakers Seek $14 Billion More in Aid

Abstract: DETROIT — The price tag for bailing out General Motors and Chrysler jumped by another $14 billion Tuesday, to $39 billion, with the two automakers saying they would need the additional aid from the federal government to remain solvent. In return, the two companies also promised to make further drastic cuts to all parts of their operations, in the hope that they can eventually strike a balance between their bloated cost structures and a dismal market for new car sales. G.M. , for example, said it would cut 47,000 more of its 244,000 workers worldwide; close five more plants in North America , leaving it with 33; and cut its lineup of brands in half, to just four: Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC and Buick. The Pontiac brand will have a much smaller role, if any, in G.M.’s future, and the company also said it would phase out its Saturn brand, which it once hoped would build small cars to counter the best of the Japanese brands. G.M. also said it had made progress in discussions with the United Automobile Workers union and its bondholders to reduce its costs further. The cash crisis will require fast action by the administration’s new cabinet-level Presidential Task Force on Autos, which is overseeing the reorganization of G.M. and Chrysler. The deteriorating finances of the two companies present the Obama administration with two options, neither of them appealing. It can provide the money in the hopes that the companies will stabilize, and no longer have to keep pushing workers into a growing pool of people without jobs. But there are no guarantees, as the Treasury Department learned on Tuesday when the automakers filed updates on their restructuring plans, that they might not be forced to come back again with requests for more money. But if the federal government balks at the automakers’ requests, that would mean the two companies probably would have no choice but to file for bankruptcy protection, because they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars each month. And the car companies said on Tuesday that the cost of a bankruptcy reorganization, with the government providing financing to help it through that process, would be far greater than their latest loan requests. Without such help, the companies would have to liquidate, creating staggering new job losses. In a statement, the administration said Tuesday night that its task force would be reviewing the carmakers’ reports in coming days, adding that “more will be required from everyone involved — creditors, suppliers, dealers, labor and auto executives themselves — to ensure the viability of these companies going forward.” The third Detroit auto company, Ford Motor , has not received federal assistance and has no requests pending. By March 31, the presidential task force is expected to rule on whether G.M. and Chrysler have restructured enough to be viable businesses for the long term. Big questions remain, including whether G.M. and Chrysler, as well as Ford , will be able to cut their unionized labor costs to parity with foreign automakers, as was required in the original loan agreement from last December. The companies have been in marathon negotiations with the United Automobile Workers on reducing costs, as well as determining how they will finance health care trusts for retired blue-collar workers and their surviving spouses. G.M. is also pushing for a deal with its bondholders to help it reduce its debt to $9 billion, from $27 billion. The U.A.W. said on Tuesday it had reached “understandings” with the Detroit companies on modifications to their contracts. Ron Gettelfinger , the union’s president, said “discussions are continuing” regarding how to fund the health care trusts at each of the companies. Rick Wagoner , G.M.’s chief executive, said there had been “good progress” in talks with both the union and bondholders. On the concessions in the U.A.W. contract, he said, “the things that have been negotiated really take a big bite out of what needed to accomplish.” G.M.’s restructuring plan extends to its global operations. It will cut 47,000 jobs worldwide by the end of this year. It also said it would close 14 plants in North America by 2012 — five more than were included in its Dec. 2 loan request. Mr. Wagoner said on Tuesday that the revamping plan was “comprehensive, responsive and achievable,” and could help the company break even by 2010. Both G.M. and Chrysler said they expected to begin paying back their federal loans by 2012. A bankruptcy filing, Mr. Wagoner said, would be a “highly risky and costly process.” G.M.’s president, Frederick Henderson, said the company would require as much as $100 billion in debtor-in-possession financing from the federal government if it filed for Chapter 11. Chrysler said it would need $25 billion if that step were required. G.M. and Chrysler admitted that their current federal loans would be exhausted by March 31. G.M. said Tuesday that it had increased its overall loan request from the government to a total of $30 billion, up from $18 billion. The company has received $13.4 billion so far from Treasury, and the most recent installment — $4 billion — was turned over to G.M. on Tuesday. But G.M. said that loan would not last long. Company officials said they hoped to receive another $2 billion loan in March and $2.6 billion in April. Beyond that, G.M. is asking for another $12 billion by 2011 — $7.5 billion in loans and $4.5 billion to pay off a credit facility that comes due. Chrysler, which has received $4 billion in loans, also increased its overall request for funding. In December, it said it needed $3 billion more to survive 2009, but it raised that request to $5 billion. The smallest of Detroit’s Big Three, Chrysler has drastically scaled back its operations since being acquired in 2007 by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. On Tuesday, Chrysler said it would cut another 3,000 jobs and discontinue three models — the Dodge Durango , P.T. Cruiser and Chrysler Aspen . “Chrysler will be viable,” said the company’s chairman, Robert L. Nardelli . “An orderly restructuring outside of bankruptcy, together with the completion of our stand-alone viability plan and enhanced by a strategic alliance with Fiat , is the best option for Chrysler employees, our unions, dealers, suppliers, customers, and certainly the taxpayers.” The company is exploring a deal with Fiat to share products. But Mr. Nardelli said Chrysler would have to consider liquidating itself in the event that it received no more federal aid. G.M. executives sidestepped questions on Tuesday on whether they had been given any assurances by administration officials about additional loans. “They fully understood we would be coming in with additional requests,” said Ray Young, G.M.’s chief financial officer. But the possibility exists of a negative political reaction to the administration’s pouring more taxpayers’ money into the companies, especially when they continue to operate at huge losses.

Subprime Mortgage Crisis,2008 Financial Crisis


Tunisians Call for Women’s Affairs Minister to Resign

Abstract: TUNIS (Agence France-Presse) — Dozens of angry Tunisians brandishing shoes on Friday demanded the resignation of the minister of women’s affairs, accusing her of failing to stand up to the ruling Islamists. The minister, Sihem Badi, has for months been strongly criticized by civil society activists over her ties to Ennahda, the Islamist party that leads the coalition government and that secular opposition groups say seeks to curtail women’s rights. Fifty members of Parliament on Thursday signed a no-confidence motion against the minister, according to the official news agency TAP, after similar protests earlier in the week. On Friday, protesters chanted “Badi get out!” and “Government of terrorism, minister of rape.” Many of them waved shoes, a gesture considered insulting in conservative Arab societies, and likened Ms. Badi to the reviled wife of former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was ousted in 2011. Calls for Ms. Badi’s resignation have increased since the recent rape of a 3-year-old girl at a nursery in a Tunis suburb. The main suspect was arrested last Sunday. After reports of the rape case emerged, Ms. Badi said that a member of the girl’s family was to blame and that no measures against the nursery were needed. “She has not fulfilled her role as minister for the affairs of women and the family, and she has done nothing to guarantee the rights of children since her appointment” in 2011, said Lilia Ben Kheder, a lawyer. Other critics of Ms. Badi say that the ministry has allowed illegal day care centers to operate without supervision and that rapes have occurred at other facilities under the ministry’s authority. A number of people staged a counterdemonstration in support of the minister, shouting slogans like “The people still want Badi” and “Tunisia is Islamic and not secular.” Ms. Badi belongs to President Moncef Marzouki’s party, which is Ennahda’s center-left ally in the governing coalition.

Tunisia
Women's rights,Feminism
Sihem Badi
Islam
Rape
Ennahda Party Tunisia
Women and Girls


Numbers Tell the Story: The A.F.C. North Is the N.F.L.'s Best Division

Abstract: At the midway mark of the season, the A.F.C. North is the best division in football. By the end of the year, it may be viewed as one of the strongest divisions in N.F.L. history. The Cleveland Browns , the Cincinnati Bengals , the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens are a combined 14-5-1 when not facing one another, which includes a five-game winning streak (no A.F.C. North team has lost an interdivision game since Oct. 19). That equates to a 72.5 winning percentage; the next-best record in interdivision games belongs to the N.F.C. West, but at 15-9 (62.5) that division is a full 10 percentage points behind the A.F.C. North. Since 1970, only five divisions have won more than 70 percent of interdivision games over the course of a full season. Image The Ravens’ Justin Forsett is averaging 5.4 yards a carry, the best mark so far among running backs. Credit Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press The numbers may overstate the case because the division has benefited from some fortuitous scheduling. Teams in every division play all four teams from two other divisions each year. This year, the A.F.C. North was lucky to land the A.F.C. South and the N.F.C. South, the two worst divisions in 2014. Still, all four teams have winning records. In fact, the 2014 A.F.C. North is only the third division in N.F.L. history in which all of its teams posted a winning record after nine weeks, joining the 2008 N.F.C. East and the 1935 N.F.L. West. This sort of success is close to unprecedented, especially for a division that was an afterthought to many only two months ago. So what has been the secret behind the success of each team in the division? The Ravens have outscored opponents by 66 points this season, the third-best differential in the league, behind only the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. And yet the Ravens are in last place in the A.F.C. North. Despite a 5-4 record, Baltimore has been one of the more balanced and successful teams in the league. In fact, the Ravens are the only team to rank in the top quarter of the league in both points scored and points allowed. Baltimore joins New England as the only teams this year to record four wins of at least 20 points, but a 2-3 record in A.F.C. North play has left the team in the division cellar. Image Travis Benjamin is one of three receivers for the Browns averaging 18 yards per reception. Credit Don McPeak/USA TODAY Sports, via Reuters A pair of off-season additions have helped the Ravens on offense. Wide receiver Steve Smith leads the team with 711 receiving yards, the 10th most in the N.F.L. this year. After fielding one of the worst rushing offenses in league history in 2013, Baltimore has a rejuvenated running game this year. In an under-the-radar transaction in the spring, Baltimore signed running back Justin Forsett, who is 29 and had produced six nondescript N.F.L. seasons for four teams before joining the Ravens. Now he is averaging 5.4 yards per carry, the most among all running backs through nine weeks, and also ranks ninth in the league in yards from scrimmage. With a 5-3 record, the Browns are one of the surprise stories of the season. Brian Hoyer ranks eighth among all quarterbacks in adjusted net yards per attempt, thanks in part to a league-leading 13.8 yards per completion average. There are seven players in the N.F.L. with at least 200 receiving yards who have averaged 18 yards per reception, and three of them (Travis Benjamin, Jordan Cameron and Taylor Gabriel) play for the Browns. Already boasting one of the league’s most vertical offenses, Cleveland should be bolstered when Josh Gordon (the N.F.L. leader in receiving yards in 2013) returns from his suspension in Week 12. Meanwhile, safety Tashaun Gipson has a league-leading six interceptions, while the off-season acquisitions Karlos Dansby and Donte Whitner are leading a resurgent Cleveland defense. The hottest unit in the league is undoubtedly the Steelers’ offense. Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger followed his masterly six-touchdown performance against the Colts in Week 8 with a six-touchdown showing against the Ravens in Week 9. He is the first player in league history to throw 12 touchdowns over a two-week span, and he now sits among the leaders in most meaningful passing categories. He ranks second in passing yards and completion percentage, third in passing touchdowns and passer rating, fifth in yards per attempt and first in interception rate. Image The Steelers’ Ben Roethlisberger made league history with consecutive six-touchdown games. Credit Gene Puskar/Associated Press It is an M.V.P.-caliber season for Roethlisberger, but he might not even be the most valuable player on his own offense. Wide receiver Antonio Brown is having another magnificent season: He leads the N.F.L. in both receptions and receiving yards. Among wide receivers, only Randall Cobb (nine) has more than Brown’s eight receiving touchdowns. (Brown has also thrown for one score.) Over the last three weeks, the rookie Martavis Bryant has benefited from all the attention defenses are paying to Brown by catching five touchdowns. The Steelers (6-3) remain a work in progress on defense, but their passing attack could be enough to guide the team to the postseason. But the team atop the toughest division in football is the Bengals. Because they won the division in 2013, it might not be surprising to see them playing well. But the Bengals (5-2-1) have been without the top wide receiver A. J. Green for most of the season, tight end Tyler Eifert for all but one game and Marvin Jones (who was second on the team to Green last season in receiving yards) for the entire year. While Green is back, running back Giovani Bernard is banged up. Even the offensive line — a strength point in 2013 — has taken a step back this year. But through it all, the much-maligned quarterback Andy Dalton has steadied the ship. Dalton is posting career-best numbers in completion percentage, interception rate and sack rate, which means he is playing at a consistent level and avoiding negative plays. That has been necessary as the defense has fallen off: After allowing only 11 points per game through three weeks, Cincinnati has allowed 30.8 points per game over its last five games. The Bengals, despite being in first place, have the worst point differential among A.F.C. North teams. As a result, the league’s toughest division is also its most unpredictable. All four teams have reasons for optimism: The Bengals are in the pole position and also have the best division record at 2-0. The Steelers are the hottest team right now, while the Ravens are the most balanced. And the Browns will get Gordon back for the final six weeks of the year. After nine weeks, we don’t yet know where the teams will wind up ranked inside the division. But we have a pretty good idea where this division ranks in the N.F.L.

Football
Ben Roethlisberger
Antonio Brown
Andy Dalton
Ravens
Bengals
Browns
Steelers


Fossils Add More Proof of Global Climate Shift

Abstract: The Antarctic Dry Valleys are among the most extreme environments anywhere, so dry and windswept and barren that they are thought to be the closest analog to the surface of Mars. So imagine the surprise when, several years ago, Adam R. Lewis, a glacial geologist, and a colleague found what Dr. Lewis described as “freeze-dried fossils sticking out of the ground.” The well-preserved mosses were “completely out of place,” he said, and a sign the area was more like tundra long ago. Those fossils, and others of insects, diatoms and tiny freshwater crustaceans, now form the basis for further understanding of global cooling that occurred during the mid-Miocene epoch, some 14 million years ago. In a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Lewis, now at North Dakota State University, Allan C. Ashworth of North Dakota State, David R. Marchant of Boston University and colleagues show that the Antarctic cooled by at least 14 degrees Fahrenheit over about 200,000 years. The fossils were found at sites that had been small lakes, in sediments that were 14.07 million years old. So that must have been a period of “wet glaciation,” when it was warm enough for glaciers to melt and create the conditions for these organisms to thrive. Then, at sediments that are 13.85 million years old, there are no fossils at all, Dr. Lewis said. By then, conditions must have been so cold that the glaciers did not melt at all, and they must have remained cold and dry since then for the fossils to remain so well preserved. Previously, most knowledge of mid-Miocene cooling came from marine records. “Those are great if you want to do an average for the whole globe,” Dr. Lewis said. “But nobody knew particularly what was Antarctica’s role,” he added. “That’s where the fossils come in.”

Antarctic Regions
Fossils
Paleontology
Global Warming


Final Arguments in Pistorius Murder Trial Begin

Abstract: PRETORIA, South Africa — The murder trial of Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee sprinter accused of killing his girlfriend in a fit of rage, entered a decisive stage on Thursday as lawyers began two days of final arguments at the High Court here before handing over the case to the presiding judge. The main prosecutor, Gerrie Nel, said he wanted to show how the “domino effect of lies” had undermined Mr. Pistorius’s case with a “baker’s dozen” of inconsistencies in his testimony on matters including the position of a room fan and the timing of Mr. Pistorius’s decision to switch off a burglar alarm. “If one piece of the mosaic is moved,” Mr. Nel said, referring to Mr. Pistorius’s version of events, “the rest has to move as well to keep the picture intact.” But a defense lawyer, Barry Roux, offered a an opposing vision, citing a psychologist’s report issued during the trial that said, “There are two Oscars — one an athletic superstar, the other a disabled and vulnerable man.” Mr. Roux is expected to wrap up his argument on Friday, capping a five-month courtroom drama that has been compared by some to the O. J. Simpson trial and by others to a high-profile soap opera. Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Pistorius, 27, fatally shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model and law school graduate, through a locked bathroom door after an argument on Feb. 14, 2013, inside his home in Pretoria, the capital. The defense team has argued that Mr. Pistorius fired four rounds from a handgun in the mistaken belief that an intruder had entered his home and was in the bathroom. Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa will deliver her ruling with the help of two assistants, as South Africa does not have a jury system. She has provided few hints about her thinking during the trial and maintained much of her inscrutability throughout Thursday’s hearing. In her longest comment, Judge Masipa questioned the prosecutor’s categorical description of the couple’s relationship as unhappy. Mr. Nel said many text messages between the two might have been affectionate, sarcastically recalling some of the terms they contained, like “booboo, baba.” But a few crucial, serious ones written by Ms. Steenkamp the month before the killing indicated her unhappiness and fear of Mr. Pistorius, he said. Video A look at Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa’s interactions with those in her courtroom during the Oscar Pistorius trial in Pretoria, South Africa. Credit Credit Associated Press Referring to the messages, the judge asked, “Can you make a proper inference one way or another?” She added that relationships have their ups and downs, saying, “The fact that you are unhappy today doesn’t mean you’ll be unhappy tomorrow.” Cliff Alexander, a criminal defense lawyer who has been closely following the trial, said, “She’s still given absolutely no indication whatsoever of where she is leaning.” As the 40th day of hearings got underway on Thursday, Mr. Nel, a pugnacious prosecutor known as the Pit Bull, attacked Mr. Pistorius’s character and his version of events on the night of the killing. “The accused was an appalling witness,” Mr. Nel said, referring several times to the defendant’s “mendacity.” Mr. Pistorius, he said, was “more concerned about the implications of his answers” rather than the truth. Mr. Nel aimed his scorn at the defense’s explanation that Mr. Pistorius — feeling extremely vulnerable because of his disability — shot into the bathroom thinking that a noise behind the door indicated the presence of a burglar. The prosecutor tried to cement his portrayal of the athlete as a reckless young man unwilling to accept responsibility for his actions. He recalled one incident in which Mr. Pistorius accidentally fired a gun inside a restaurant and tried to get a friend to take the blame. The defendant, he said, has shown a “blatant disregard for the safety of others in handling” firearms. Seeking to reinforce the charge of premeditated murder, the prosecutor accused Mr. Pistorius of intending to kill the person behind the door. “The mere fact that it turned out to be Reeva is of no consequence,” he said. Throughout the hearing, Mr. Pistorius sat behind his lawyers, alone on a long wooden bench. He mostly kept his head down, only occasionally looking up at the prosecutor. Two rows behind him, parents and relatives of the defendant and victim squeezed into another bench — with members from each family rubbing shoulders in the middle. Judges can take weeks or months to deliver their rulings in such cases, though some experts say that Judge Masipa may arrive at a decision sooner because of the many delays in this trial. If convicted of premeditated murder, Mr. Pistorius would face a mandatory life sentence with a minimum of 25 years in prison. He has also pleaded not guilty to three firearms charges.

Oscar Pistorius
Murders
Reeva Steenkamp
South Africa


Antares Rocket, Bound for Space Station, Explodes

Abstract: An unmanned cargo rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station exploded seconds after liftoff Tuesday night. The Antares rocket, carrying 5,055 pounds of supplies, science experiments and equipment, lifted off on schedule at 6:22 p.m. from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in eastern Virginia. But soon after it rose into the sky, there was a flash of an explosion. “The ascent stopped,” Frank L. Culbertson Jr., the executive vice president of Orbital Sciences Corporation, the maker of the rocket, said during a news conference Tuesday. “There was some disassembly of the first stage, it looked like, and then it fell to earth.” No one was injured. Orbital, based in Dulles, Va., first launched a 14-story-high Antares rocket on its maiden flight in April last year. It then conducted a demonstration flight to the space station to show NASA the capabilities of the rocket and the cargo spacecraft. Then came two more flights carrying cargo to the space station, part of a program in which NASA has hired private companies to ferry cargo to the space station. Tuesday’s launch would have been the third of eight cargo missions under a $1.9 billion contract. Orbital will lead an investigation. Mr. Culbertson said the company would not launch another Antares rocket until it had identified and corrected the problem. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., of Hawthorne, Calif., known as SpaceX, has successfully flown four cargo missions to the space station, the most recent mission ending on Saturday. NASA officials said the failure would not cause immediate issues for the space station, which had adequate supplies to last at least until next spring. SpaceX’s next cargo mission is scheduled for December and Russia on Wednesday successfully launched its own resupply cargo ship from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan. "We have plenty of capability to support the crew on board,” said Michael T. Suffredini, the manager of the space station program. In 2011, a Russian supply ship failed to reach orbit; space station managers adjusted. By hiring private companies, NASA hoped to reduce costs, improve efficiency and spur a new commercial space industry, and it has taken a similar approach toward launching its astronauts in the future. Last month, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to take astronauts to the space station beginning as early as 2017. But the failure of the Orbital rocket will probably raise questions about whether NASA has done enough to ensure the reliability of the rockets. This Antares rocket carried a more powerful second-stage engine for the first time. The cargo spacecraft was to reach the space station on Sunday. The rocket was also carrying a satellite, also destroyed, for Planetary Resources, a start-up looking to develop technology for mining asteroids.

International Space Station
Orbital Sciences
Accidents and Safety
Rocket
Explosions
Virginia
NASA


Field in Women’s 200 Bolstered for Grand Prix

Abstract: Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce of Jamaica, the reigning world and Olympic champion in the 100 meters, and Carmelita Jeter of the United States, who was ranked No. 1 in the world in the 100 last year, will compete in the 200 on June 11 at the Adidas Grand Prix on Randalls Island, meet organizers announced. Allyson Felix of the United States and Sherone Simpson of Jamaica had already entered. Also committing to the meet were Bernard Lagat of the United States, a two-time Olympic medalist in the 1,500, who will run the 5,000, and Richard Thompson of Trinidad, the 2008 Olympic champion in the 100, who joins a stellar field that includes the American Tyson Gay and Nesta Carter of Jamaica.

Track and Field
Fraser Shelly-Ann
Jeter Carmelita


Mets Expand Rotation and Keep Losing Games

Abstract: CINCINNATI — Baseball players attach significance to routine, find comfort in repetition. The Mets ’ starters had their routines disrupted Wednesday — in more ways than one. Earlier, the Mets revealed their plan to shift to a six-man rotation, subverting the accepted standard of having five pitchers who work every fifth day. Hours later, R. A. Dickey, the one Mets pitcher whose work schedule will actually remain unaltered, had his routine affected in a more bizarre manner. In the early part of a frustrating outing, Dickey was forced by the umpires to cut off a pair of handmade bracelets given to him by his two young daughters before the start of the season. Dickey, who had worn the bracelets during his previous 23 starts, went on to have one of his worst starts of the season. The unsettling day ended for the Mets with a 6-1 loss — one that dropped the team seven games below .500 for the first time this year — and with some bewilderment in the clubhouse. Manager Terry Collins said he thought the episode bothered Dickey. “These guys do things, they get into patterns, they wear the same shirts, they wear the same pants, they wear the same socks, they wear the same shoes, and there’s some other things that go along with all of their routine,” he said. Dickey was asked by the umpires at the start of the second inning to remove the bracelets. After some animated discussion, Dickey snipped them off with scissors. Dickey did not blame the loss on the episode, but he said he was “a little bit angry.” He became even more annoyed when the home-plate umpire James Hoye went back to the mound in the third, further delaying the game. Dickey said Hoye wanted to inform him that the request was not made by the Cincinnati Reds as a means of gamesmanship. Collins said Jim Joyce, the crew chief, told him the league had directed umpires to regulate uniform violations. Dickey said it was strange to see this occur this late in the season. “If you look around the league, there are all kinds of things that go unsupervised, whether it’s a glove string that’s too long or a Band-Aid on somebody’s arm,” Dickey said. “It’s almost like a holding penalty. You can call one on every play.” Before the episode, Dickey allowed a run-scoring single to Brandon Phillips. Things got worse after that. With one out in the fourth, Scott Rolen ripped a 3-1 fastball into the seats in left field. Then Todd Frazier pummeled a 1-0 knuckleball to center field, clanging it off the windows of the seating lounge there. The ball traveled an estimated 474 feet, making it the fourth longest home run in baseball this season, according to the Web site Hit Tracker. In the sixth, Jay Bruce sent a home run halfway up the seats in right field — this one landing 428 feet from home plate. Later, Reds starter Mike Leake lined a run-scoring single to left field. Dickey allowed 5 runs, 10 hits and 2 walks, while striking out 9, in six innings. “When it was there, it was filthy,” he said of his knuckleball. “And when it wasn’t, it kind of tumbled up there.” Ryan Ludwick drove in the Reds’ sixth run with a single off Jeremy Hefner in the seventh. The Mets scored their only run in the fourth, when Mike Baxter came home on Daniel Murphy’s double-play grounder. Collins said Wednesday afternoon that he would begin to employ a six-man rotation — Hefner will start Sunday — with Dickey being the one player who will continue to pitch every five days. The switch was the result of much internal discussion and planning as the Mets looked for ways to keep their pitchers fresh in the final weeks of the season. There will be three primary beneficiaries of the plan. Johan Santana and Chris Young, both 33-year-old pitchers who returned this season from serious shoulder injuries, will be afforded additional rest. Matt Harvey, the team’s promising 23-year-old right-hander, will be given a chance to finish the season, rather than being shut down when his cap of about 170 innings is reached. Harvey has thrown 1321/3 innings this season between the minors and the majors. Collins said regular work for Dickey was necessary for him to maintain his feel of his quirky knuckleball. Perhaps more important, Dickey gives the Mets an opportunity to win each time he takes the mound. As Collins said earlier this season, the Mets would like to give him the chance to reach 20 wins. The Mets have not had a 20-game winner since Frank Viola in 1990. But Dickey, a creature of habit, remained stuck on 15 wins after being jarred somewhat from his routine.

Baseball
New York Mets
Cincinnati Reds
Dickey R A
Collins Terry L


Spoils of War Add Up to 56% Profit Gain for Lazard

Abstract: As Bruce Wasserstein left the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon after presenting Lazard's plan to break up Time Warner, he wore a mischievous smile on his face. He had good reason: He knew Lazard, his investment bank, would report fourth-quarter earnings that would again beat Wall Street's estimates by a wide margin. Lazard, which became a publicly traded company last year after Mr. Wasserstein won a bitter battle with the firm's patriarch, Michel David-Weill, said yesterday that its profit surged 56 percent, to $57.3 million, from $36.6 million in the year-earlier period. This is the second consecutive quarter that Lazard has exceeded Wall Street's estimates, perhaps vindicating Mr. Wasserstein's strategy and his enormous efforts to wrestle control of the firm from its former partners to pursue the public offering. Shares of Lazard jumped $2.07, or 6 percent, to $36.47 on the news of its earnings and an announcement that it plans to buy back $100 million of its stock. The stock is up 46 percent from its May offering price of $25. The strong results, however, are something of a sideshow to Lazard's center-stage appearance as the adviser to Carl C. Icahn in his proxy contest to oust Time Warner's board. Lazard is taking perhaps the most prominent role in a proxy contest that a Wall Street bank has ever taken, raising questions about whether blue-chip corporate clients will continue to work with the firm. In an interview yesterday, Steven J. Golub, Lazard's vice chairman, said the firm's relationship with Mr. Icahn had not affected its ability to retain current clients or obtain new assignments. In a statement, Mr. Wasserstein said: "By every measure, 2005 was an outstanding and historic year for Lazard. We have delivered on our promises and remain dedicated to serving our clients and creating shareholder value." Lazard's earnings were bolstered by its mergers and acquisitions advisory business. The firm said net revenue from advising on mergers increased 9 percent, to $183 million. In the quarter, the firm was paid for its work on transactions, including advising Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial in its $41.4 billion acquisition of UFJ Holdings and advising Viacom on the $36.9 billion spin-off of its cable network business. For the year, Lazard's advisory revenue rose 40 percent, a bigger gain than those of its larger rivals, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. Revenue in its restructuring practice fell in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, in what the firm said was the result of "the timing of completed transactions." Its asset management revenue increased 10 percent from a year earlier. Total fourth-quarter net revenue was down 2.6 percent, to $367.1 million, from $376.9 million in the year-earlier period, but it was higher than the $356.9 million in the third quarter. The firm's compensation costs, which have been the subject of some debate on Wall Street because they are considerably higher than its peers', rose 21 percent in the quarter, to $774.2 million.


Boston Scientific Considers a Spinoff to Raise $1 Billion

Abstract: There is more to Boston Scientific than the troubled heart stent and defibrillator businesses for which it is best known — enough, in fact, that the company predicts it could raise at least $1 billion by spinning off a portion to the public. Boston Scientific, based in Natick, Mass., said yesterday that it was considering a public stock offering for 18 percent to 25 percent of those other businesses, which are grouped under its Endosurgery division. The public offering, if completed, would be the biggest in the medical device business since Nestlé sold just over 23 percent of Alcon, its eye care subsidiary, for $2.3 billion in 2002. The endosurgery products include catheters, clamps, feeding tubes, stents, lasers, and microwave and ultrasound gear used to diagnose or treat a wide range of gastrointestinal ailments, cancer and urological and gynecological conditions. In a conference call with analysts yesterday afternoon, company executives said that many of the group’s 17 businesses controlled 50 percent or more of their market categories. Boston Scientific said that getting Wall Street to look at Endosurgery as a separate business would lead investors to value the unit’s performance more highly than if it remains buried inside the larger company. Separate stock for the unit could also be used as compensation for its executives and to help attract talent to the group, the company said. “We’re just not getting credit for how good a business this is,” James R. Tobin, Boston Scientific’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. Mr. Tobin said that the offering, if the company proceeded, would probably be completed late this year or early in 2008. He said that the simplest approach would be to sell less than 20 percent, which would keep the deal tax free. But Lawrence C. Best, Boston Scientific’s chief financial officer, told analysts yesterday that the company was investigating whether its tax structure would allow it to sell as much as 25 percent of the subsidiary without incurring too much expense. Boston Scientific’s shares fell nearly 4 percent to close at $15.16 in trading yesterday, which ended before the announcement of the possible offering. The stock has fallen nearly 37 percent since its 52-week high of $23.96 late last March, on investor concerns about problems with the company’s core businesses. The shares were up by about 1 percent in after-hours trading. The Endosurgery unit already has its own headquarters, in Marlborough, Mass. But some of its products are made in the same factories as Boston Scientific’s cardiovascular products, one of many separation issues that would have to be resolved before any public offering. Stephen F. Moreci, the senior vice president who runs the Endosurgery businesses, would continue to head the unit if it went public. The company said money from the offering could help reduce the nearly $9 billion in debt that Boston Scientific carries thanks largely to its purchase of Guidant last year. Guidant’s cardiac pacemaker and defibrillator businesses, which had been Boston Scientific’s main reason for the takeover, have been struggling to recover from a decline in sales after reports of deadly defects in a small number of units. At the same time, Boston Scientific is also generating less cash than it had forecast from its drug-coated stent business. Doctors have become more cautious about the devices, which are used to keep coronary arteries propped open. In a small number of cases, reports have linked the stents to deadly clotting long after they were put in place. In addition, regulators and a Congressional committee have been exploring whether the devices have been marketed too aggressively. The company’s shares have also been weighed down by warning letters from the Food and Drug Administration about quality control problems at Guidant and across all of Boston Scientific. The F.D.A. generally refuses to let companies introduce major new products until it is satisfied all of its complaints have been addressed. Endosurgery revenue last year was nearly $1.35 billion, or about 17 percent of the company’s $7.82 billion. Revenue has grown annually, ranging from 10 percent to 14 percent over the past five years. The unit’s steady growth and reliable profits, however, have been overshadowed by the hopes — and more recently, fears — surrounding the company’s far larger cardiovascular business. Boston Scientific’s roots lie in a catheter that the co-founder John Abele developed to help doctors extract gallstones through a tiny incision instead of traditional surgery. But in the 1990s the company’s focus increasingly switched to stents. The move into stents paid off strongly in 2004 when Boston Scientific introduced its drug-coated version, Taxus, in the United States. Taxus generated more than $2 billion in sales its first year in this country. But the fast start also left Wall Street skeptical that the company could ever achieve a comparable success. The shares hit a peak of $45.81 in April 2004. Boston Scientific’s need for additional growth spurred it to outbid Johnson & Johnson for Guidant. But the victory came at a price that many analysts said was too steep.

Boston Scientific Corporation
Mergers Acquisitions and Divestitures
Stocks and Bonds
United States Economy