Iraqi Soccer Heroes Return Out of Sight of Adoring Fans

Abstract: BAGHDAD, Aug. 3 — They won the Asian Cup on the most public of stages, but Iraq ’s soccer heroes returned home on Friday to celebrate behind the blast walls and razor wire of Baghdad’s Green Zone, far from the gaze of their disappointed fans. Welcomed with a bagpipe fanfare, the team was granted an honor guard in scarlet, blue, white and khaki when they flew back to the Iraqi capital, five days after their 1-0 victory over Saudi Arabia in Indonesia. Looking exhausted, the players were ushered along a red carpet to a late-night reception at Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s heavily guarded Baghdad compound. Missing were Younes Mahmoud, the captain and scorer of the winning goal, who said he feared for his life if he returned (he had said he would go to Syria to visit his family), and a handful of players who officials said have other contractual obligations. Of the players who did return, many had not been back in quite some time because they trained abroad, and many play for foreign teams. Ambassadors, generals, lawmakers and senior government officials spent hours waiting for the team, whose flight was delayed and then still had to make the hazardous trip from the airport to the city center. Seeking to associate his government with a rare feel-good moment, Mr. Maliki pointedly noted the contrast between Iraq’s past and present sporting fortunes. “Under the previous regime, however much they spent, they could not achieve anything,” he said. “Iraq couldn’t attain such a victory. But in the environment of freedom, we achieved it,” he told the assembled team. “While you were on the field none of you considered what sect you belong to: you were only thinking of Iraq, and that Iraq should win.” Giving the thumbs-up sign as he arrived at the celebration, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of American forces in Iraq, congratulated the team members and called them “an example for all of Iraq: a team of Sunni, Shia and Kurd who overcame lots of adversity to achieve a common goal, and they did it by teamwork. On that day we were all Iraqi, too.” One thing missing was ordinary Iraqis, with only a handful of Green Zone permit holders making it through the military cordon to cheer and honk at the team along the final stretch of their return. Across town at Shaab Stadium, Baghdad’s main soccer venue, a cluster of youths turned up more in hope than expectation that Iraq’s new heroes would be allowed to risk their lives at such an easily attacked location. As they loitered, one new arrival appeared only to be told: “The squad won’t come; the players have been taken to the Green Zone.” Fans were also frustrated as they gathered around televisions for hours from midafternoon, only to see daylight fade long before the players appeared. “It is so sad to feel that your national football team celebrates its victory inside the Green Zone. They are Iraqis and every citizen has a share in them,” said Rasool Shibeeb, 40, from Karada, in Baghdad. Others pointed out that more than 50 people were killed by bombers after the team’s semifinal victory. “Baghdad’s streets are not secure,” said Ammar Abdul-Atheem, a carpenter. “There are gangs and terrorists who might turn this happiness into a funeral.” The team members are certainly likely to be more prosperous than their predecessors. Mr. Maliki awarded each team member $10,000 and a diplomatic passport. By contrast, the Iraqi youth team members who won the Asian Cup in 1977 were each awarded a Soviet-made Lada car by Saddam Hussein’s predecessor, President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. Although Mr. Hussein sometimes rewarded major victories, defeats became costly to the players. Mr. Hussein’s son, Uday, was known to torture players, and in the Arab Olympic Games in 1998, he threatened to make the team pay the costs of the trip if it did not achieve good results. (They did not win, but it is unclear whether the players were actually fined.) In the war on Friday, the American military announced that four American soldiers were killed in Baghdad, three of them in one roadside bombing.


For Chinatown Bakery Treasured by Generations, a Decision to Walk Away

Abstract: Tucked into Pell Street, just off the crook in Mott Street, the May May Chinese Gourmet Bakery has attracted three generations of customers with its steamed red bean buns, sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and packaged frozen dim sum. From a tiny two-table coffee shop opened in 1965, the family-owned business has radiated outward to include a factory in Long Island City that distributes across the eastern half of the United States and a catering side that supplies hundreds of delicate dumplings for stylish cocktail parties. But the doors to the original shop and its kitchen still open onto Pell Street, and the aromatic puffs of steam entice passers-by. “It’s something you grow up with,” said one regular customer, Jan Lee, whose family has been in Chinatown since the 1920s. “Everyone had a mom or an aunt who made them at home, but if you didn’t have someone to make them, you could rely on getting it from May May.” But at the end of this month, after 42 years, the three Hung brothers who run May May will shutter the doors of both the shop and factory, sell the equipment for a small fraction of what it cost, and slowly let the inventory in the pipeline dry up until the May May brand is just a memory. May May’s closing is not a tale of rising rent or falling demand — as is often the case with ethnic food shops in New York City that are doubly squeezed by gentrification and assimilation of the customers. The company’s products are as popular as ever. The clunky red-and-white logo can be seen in the freezers of Chinese groceries up and down the East Coast. Families drive from as far as Boston and Washington to stock up on frozen dim sum. The store has broadened its appeal beyond the Chinese community, marketing the bamboo-wrapped sticky rice as “Chinese tamales” and its puffy white buns as “steamed pita bread.” They have modernized their selection, with offerings like mango and crab dim sum and ginger lemon cider. The Hung brothers are closing the company because they are tired, and their five children — who include a lawyer, a pharmacist and a teacher — are unwilling to put in the 11-hour days in steaming kitchens and on the factory floor. “Our second generation is fully educated, so they don’t want to work as hard as their uncles and their father,” said John Hung, 55, the youngest of the brothers. “This is one thing we most regret. We don’t have the young generation to take over.” After five years of deliberating whether to sell the business, the brothers — John, Alex and Bill — decided they could not find a buyer who could continue to assure the same quality. “I can sell at a good price, but if they ruin the name, that’s something we don’t want,” John Hung said. The family arrived in New York in 1965, one of the first Chinese families to be let in after immigration reform. Their father, who ran a bakery in Hong Kong, opened May May when Chinatown was a modest cluster of shops around Pell, Doyers and Mott Streets, before Canal Street and East Broadway became known for their Chinese presence. Back then the bakery’s customers almost all worked in Chinese laundries, and the only Chinese spoken on the street was the dialect from Toisan, a region in Guangdong Province that was home to an overwhelming majority of early Chinese immigrants to the United States. During the shop’s early days, the brothers, then in their teens, ran to the shop after school. Hours at the bakery were long, and the work was hard. At 2 or 3 one morning, as they were preparing for the next day, their mother held her three sons together and asked out loud, crying, whether it had been worth it to come to America. To help at the store, John dropped out of City College of New York when he was 19. He is thinking of finishing school after the store closes, in addition to doing more Buddhist charity work and spending time with his 86-year-old mother, for whom the bakery is named. The company has about a dozen employees in the shop and two dozen in the factory, many of whom have been with the bakery for 20 years or more. “After the store closes, where will we go?” asked Lan Ling Sun, who has worked for May May for 23 years. “We don’t even know.” As the news about the closing has trickled out in the Chinese media, customers have shown up at the doors, stricken that a Chinatown institution would willingly erase itself. In the final weeks, a phrase often heard around the store is “shebude” (pronounced seh-boo-deh). The customers say shebude, the employees say shebude and Mr. Hung says shebude. It is an emotional phrase familiar to Chinese immigrants, roughly translated as “can’t bear to let go,” and is often used when departing hometowns for faraway places or leaving family members who will not be seen for decades. Faced with shebude, it is sometimes best to just walk away. Wen Chi Tso, a customer visiting May May from Myrtle Beach, S.C., described the feeling: “You almost have to cut it off.”

Chinatown (NYC)
Bakeries and Baked Products
Immigration and Refugees
Asian-Americans


Fewer Chiefs Also Serving as Chairmen

Abstract: Disney did it. So did Fannie Mae, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Most companies in Britain do it. And now, more American companies are doing it, too: wresting board chairmanships away from chief executives. According to executive recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates, 29 percent of the companies in the S.& P. have separated the jobs, up from 21 percent five years ago. Some, like Disney, were forced by shareholders to decouple the roles. Others, like Dell, did so to give a hard-working president a promotion to chief executive. Many others want to let a new chief executive grow into the job under the watchful eye of the former one, serving as chairman. The insurance industry may soon give companies a financial incentive to split the top jobs, too. "We always ask, Are you considering dividing the titles, and if not, why don't you?" said Lou Ann Layton, managing director in charge of national directors' and officers' liability insurance at Marsh Inc. Companies that do decouple the roles are starting to ask for discounts. "Our clients ask us about this every day," said Peter Tulupman, a spokesman for the American International Group. Many shareholders say such splits are overdue. "When the same person fills both roles, the odds are much less that the board will challenge inappropriate decisions," said the New York State comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi, who oversees New York's pension funds. The Council of Institutional Investors, which counts most large pension funds as members, has a policy that all boards should have an independent director as chairman. Directors themselves are jumping on the bandwagon. In a poll last year by Russell Reynolds that asked the question for the first time, 59 percent said they liked the idea of splitting the job of chairman and chief executive. "It is just harder to achieve independent oversight of a C.E.O. who's also the chairman," said Patricia C. Dunn, who became chairwoman of Hewlett-Packard when Carleton S. Fiorina, then chairwoman and chief executive, was ousted last year. Ms. Dunn retained the title after Mark V. Hurd was named chief executive. More boards are putting the concept on the table. In February, John W. Rowe, who had been chairman and chief executive of Aetna, ceded the chief executive slot to Ronald A. Williams. Mr. Rowe said he would lead a board review of whether to keep the roles split permanently. And a few chief executives, wearied by the amount of time top jobs consume in this Sarbanes-Oxley era, welcome the split. Steven A. Raymund, the chairman and chief executive of Tech Data, plans to give up the chief executive slot as soon as the company finds a successor. "I want to stay involved in the company," Mr. Raymund, 50, said. "But I'm getting fatigued, and I want to do other things with my life." Charles A. Tribbett III, a Russell Reynolds managing director, said that more people aspiring to be chief executives were willing to accept the split, though most still found it unsettling. "Candidates still want both titles, but it's just not the deal breaker it was five years ago," he said. Management specialists argue that too many corporate disasters can be traced to concentrating power at the top. James E. Schrager, a management professor at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago, is certain that Ms. Fiorina's role as chairwoman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard enabled her to push through the company's ill-starred acquisition of Compaq Computer. Mr. Hevesi and other Disney shareholders say that Michael D. Eisner, Disney's former chairman and chief executive, used his dual role to get a huge severance package for Michael S. Ovitz, whom he hired and then fired as his No. 2. Disney has since amended its guidelines to make separating the posts the norm. No one suggests that splitting the roles by itself ensures good governance. Chairmen who were once the chief executive are hardly independent voices. According to Thomas J. Neff, chairman of United States operations at the recruiting firm Spencer Stuart & Associates, only 9 percent of S.& P. 500 companies have chairmen who had no previous ties to the company. "C.E.O.'s still see moving up to chairman as a career pinnacle," he said. Many shareholders prefer to keep the roles combined. Despite public outrage over the rich retirement package that the board of General Electric granted to John F. Welch Jr., G.E.'s former chairman and chief executive, G.E. shareholders voted to let Jeffrey R. Immelt, who succeeded Mr. Welch, keep both titles. Peter O'Toole, a G.E. spokesman, said that the "presiding director" role of Ralph S. Larsen, who had never worked for G.E., conferred enough independence. Indeed, many companies now have "lead" or "presiding" directors overseeing committees that deal with compensation and other sensitive areas. "If there's a lead director who has the final say on meeting agendas or information flow, we're happy," said Patrick S. McGurn, executive vice president of Institutional Shareholder Services, which advises institutions on proxy matters. But that setup does not address perhaps the most compelling push to decouple the top two roles: the need, as corporations are under increasing scrutiny, to prove that the company takes governance seriously. Splitting the roles "sends a signal to the outside world that the board really cares about governance," Ms. Dunn, the Hewlett-Packard chairwoman, said, "and to the senior-level staff that they are responsible for providing information to the board, not just to the C.E.O."

RUSSELL REYNOLDS ASSOCIATES
APPOINTMENTS AND EXECUTIVE CHANGES
EXECUTIVES AND MANAGEMENT


Spanish Judge Issues Summons to King’s Son-in-Law

Abstract: PARIS — A court in Spain issued a summons Thursday to the son-in-law of King Juan Carlos I as a suspect in a spreading fraud scandal that involves millions of euros in public money given to his private foundation. A judge in Palma, Majorca, called on the son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, 43, to face questioning on Feb. 6 about allegations of the misuse of public funds through his Noos Institute, which organized events to promote sports, tourism and development. After he was named as a formal suspect Thursday, the royal palace and a number of government institutions issued careful comments offering “respect” for the decision of judges. The king has taken a number of steps to keep a distance from his son-in-law, whose family did not spend Christmas Eve with the royal family for the first time in years. The king also seemed to take a stand with one sentence in his annual Christmas Eve address , a 13-minute speech that in part urged exemplary behavior among public officials. “Justice is equal for all,” he said, adding that “any reprehensible act should be tried and punished in accordance with law.” To demonstrate its own transparency, the royal palace offered an unprecedented glimpse of its spending this week, posting on the palace Web site the king’s annual salary, which is €292,752, or $379,000, and total royal budget of €8.43 million for the year. The palace’s moves to be more transparent and accountable come at a time when Spain is struggling with unemployment of more than 21 percent and as the euro zone debt crisis has increased the country’s financing costs. Mr. Urdangarin, a former Olympic medalist in handball who became the duke of Palma after marrying the king’s daughter Cristina, has been the target of widespread news leaks for weeks. The police have raided the offices of his private companies. Lifting a secret gag order Thursday, Judge José Castro formally cited Mr. Urdangarin as a suspect in the criminal investigation. The exact details of the allegations were not made public in the judge’s one-page statement. But elements of the inquiry have been fodder for Spanish news reports. From 2004 to 2006, Mr. Urdangarin landed multimillion-euro contracts for his foundation from regional governments in Valencia and in the Balearic Islands, which include Majorca. The suspicion is that some of the money, intended to organize events, was then funneled into his private companies. Mr. Urdangarin, who resigned from the foundation in 2006, has denied improper behavior. His lawyer, Mario Pascual Vives, spoke to reporters on Thursday, emphasizing that the duke was “absolutely innocent.” The outcry has led some politicians to demand the ouster of Mr. Urdangarin from his position in Washington with Telefónica, the private phone company that was once a government monopoly. A private wax museum in Madrid moved even more quickly, shifting the figure of the duke of Palma earlier this month from a display of the royal family to the sports gallery. Along with Mr. Urdangarin, Judge Castro named eight others as suspects: a business associate of the duke, four people tied to the Noos Foundation and three officials in the Balearic Islands’ regional government. The palace issued a brief, measured statement about the summons for Mr. Urdangarin, saying simply that the royal family “respects the work of the judges in the case investigating the alleged illegal activities of Iñaki Urdangarin.”

Spain
Juan Carlos I
European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- )
Urdangarin Inaki


Justice Department to Streamline Tracking of Police Killings

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is moving forward with a plan to better track killings by police officers, as heightened national scrutiny of such deaths has reinforced criticism of its reliance on self-reporting by state and local law enforcement agencies. In a notice published in the Federal Register this week , the Justice Department said it would ask law enforcement agencies and medical examiner’s offices to fill out forms when there is a news report or another indication that a person died while in police custody. Under the proposed system, which would cover 19,450 state and local law enforcement agencies and about 685 medical examiner’s or coroner’s offices, they would also be asked to fill out forms about the total number of such cases every three months. The department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics would then compile that information. The proposal comes as police killings of African-Americans have fueled protests in recent years in places like Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, and led to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The resulting scrutiny of the issue has focused attention on the lack of reliable and comprehensive data about how many people are killed by the police each year. The government’s existing system is called the Arrest-Related Deaths program, which is intended to be a census of a variety of causes of such deaths, including suicides, accidents and deaths from natural causes. Critics say it does not provide accurate data about killings by police officers in part because it relies on self-reporting by law enforcement officials. In 2014, for example, The Wall Street Journal gathered data on police shootings from 2007 to 2012 from 105 of the nation’s largest police agencies and compared it to the F.B.I.’s statistics. It found that more than 550 police shootings were not included in the national database or were not attributed to the agency involved. The Guardian , which reported the Justice Department proposal on Monday, and The Washington Post are conducting projects that will try to fill the gaps by compiling data on arrest-related deaths across the country. “Because of concerns about variations in data collection methodology and coverage,” the Justice Department notice said, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has “developed and tested new methodologies for collecting data” aimed at enabling “accurate and comprehensive accounting of deaths that occur during the process of arrest.” Such information, it said, is critical for law enforcement agencies to “demonstrate responsiveness to the citizens and communities they serve, transparency related to law enforcement tactics and approaches, and accountability for the actions of officers.” The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had previously foreshadowed that the government was trying to develop a better system to understand the scope and frequency of arrest-related deaths. The notice, which invited comments on the proposed system until Oct. 3, was a step toward that policy goal. The notice did not make clear whether killings by federal law enforcement agents would be included in the new system. It proposed asking state and local agencies — not federal ones — to fill out forms about arrest-related deaths. However, the notice did not address how coroners were supposed to address killings by federal officers. In 2013, The New York Times reported that the F.B.I. had deemed its agents faultless in all 150 cases, dating to at least 1993, in which agents had shot people, based on documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation . The bureau later decided to fire one agent it had faulted over a shooting in Queens in 2012, although the person he shot — a man trying to burglarize his car — survived. More recently, a bureau review panel proposed disciplining an agent who shot the tire of a suspected drug dealer’s car during an arrest attempt in Baltimore in 2014, finding that the agent violated the bureau’s policy on using lethal force. But it cleared other agents who shot and killed the suspect.

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


Iran Says It Will Free One of Three U.S. Hikers

Abstract: BEIRUT, Lebanon — Iran plans to release Sarah E. Shourd , one of the three American hikers detained last year and accused of spying, Iranian officials said Thursday. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in Iran has invited reporters to witness the release on Saturday morning at a Tehran hotel, the same hotel where the three Americans were allowed to meet with their mothers in May — their only meeting with relatives or other Westerners since they were detained after straying across the mountainous border with northern Iraq in July 2009. The detention of the hikers — Ms. Shourd, 32, and Shane M. Bauer and Joshua F. Fattal , both 28 — further strained relations between Iran and the United States, which have long been at odds over Tehran’s nuclear program. Earlier this year, Washington imposed a new round of sanctions on Iran, as did the United Nations Security Council and the European Union. Iran maintains that it aims only to produce nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, but Western powers have long suspected that the Iranian program could be used to produce weapons and fuel a regional nuclear arms race. American officials have also expressed concern that the hikers could be used as bargaining chips in nuclear negotiations. Iranian officials have suggested repeatedly that the hikers might be traded for Iranians being held by the United States. Iran’s press attaché at the United Nations, Muhammad Bak Sahraei, confirmed in an e-mail that Ms. Shourd would soon be released. Earlier in the day, Iranian officials announced that one of the three hikers would be released without saying who. There was no word on the fate of the other two. It is traditional in Iran to release prisoners as a gesture of clemency to mark the close of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which ends this week. Asked about the planned release, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said, “We are — and the State Department, I believe, is — working to actively confirm with the Swiss government the veracity of those reports.” American officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, have repeatedly called for the release of the hikers, saying the accusations against them are baseless. Iran’s intelligence minister, Heidar Moslehi, has said that Tehran had proof the three Americans had links to intelligence services, and that the investigation of their case would be completed soon. Ms. Shourd has medical problems, including precancerous cervical cells and a breast lump, according to her mother, Nora Shourd, and has been kept in solitary confinement in Evin prison. During the American hostage crisis from November 1979 to January 1981, the hostage-takers released women and African-Americans first, in a gesture intended to show respect for women and sympathy for minorities. The mothers of the three hikers released a statement on Thursday saying: “We hope and pray that the reports are true and that this signals the end of all three of our children’s long and difficult detention. Shane, Sarah and Josh are all innocent and we continue to call for their immediate release, so they can return home together and be reunited with our families.” Family members have said that the hikers, all graduates of the University of California, Berkeley, had crossed from Turkey into the Kurdish region of northern Iraq and were headed toward Ahmed Awa, a resort area, when they apparently crossed the Iranian border by accident. Mr. Bauer and Ms. Shourd have worked as freelance journalists, writing about Iraqi refugees , Iraqi Special Operations forces and other subjects. In November, they were accused of espionage , a crime that carries the death penalty under Iranian law, though it was not clear whether formal charges had ever been drawn up.

Shourd Sarah Emily
Iran
Bauer Shane
Fattal Joshua Felix
United States International Relations
Prisons and Prisoners


Kim Jong-un Says North Korea Is Preparing to Test Long-Range Missile

Abstract: SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said on Sunday that his country was making final preparations to conduct its first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile — a bold statement less than a month before the inauguration of President-elect Donald J. Trump. Although North Korea has conducted five nuclear tests in the last decade and more than 20 ballistic missile tests in 2016 alone, and although it habitually threatens to attack the United States with nuclear weapons, the country has never flight-tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. In his annual New Year’s Day speech, which was broadcast on the North’s state-run KCTV on Sunday, Mr. Kim spoke proudly of the strides he said his country had made in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. He said North Korea would continue to bolster its weapons programs as long as the United States remained hostile and continued its joint military exercises with South Korea. “We have reached the final stage in preparations to test-launch an intercontinental ballistic rocket,” he said. Analysts in the region have said Mr. Kim might conduct another weapons test in coming months, taking advantage of leadership changes in the United States and South Korea. Mr. Trump will be sworn in on Jan. 20. In South Korea, President Park Geun-hye, whose powers were suspended in a Parliamentary impeachment on Dec. 9, is waiting for the Constitutional Court to rule on whether she should be formally removed from office or reinstated. If North Korea conducts a long-range-missile test in coming months, it will test Mr. Trump’s new administration; despite years of increasingly harsh sanctions, North Korea has been advancing toward Mr. Kim’s professed goal of arming his isolated country with the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States. Mr. Kim’s speech on Sunday indicated that North Korea may test-launch a long-range rocket several times this year to complete its ICBM program, said Cheong Seong-chang , a senior research fellow at the Sejong Institute in South Korea. The first of such tests could come even before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Cheong said. “We need to take note of the fact that this is the first New Year’s speech where Kim Jong-un mentioned an intercontinental ballistic missile,” he said. In his speech, Mr. Kim did not comment on Mr. Trump’s election. Doubt still runs deep that North Korea has mastered all the technology needed to build a reliable ICBM. But analysts in the region said the North’s launchings of three-stage rockets to put satellites into orbit in recent years showed that the country had cleared some key technological hurdles. After the North’s satellite launch in February, South Korean defense officials said the Unha rocket used in the launch, if successfully reconfigured as a missile, could fly more than 7,400 miles with a warhead of 1,100 to 1,300 pounds — far enough to reach most of the United States. North Korea has deployed Rodong ballistic missiles that can reach most of South Korea and Japan, but it has had a spotty record in test-launching the Musudan, its intermediate-range ballistic missile with a range long enough to reach American military bases in the Pacific, including those on Guam. The North has also claimed a series of successes in testing various ICBM technologies, although its claims cannot be verified and are often disputed by officials and analysts in the region. It has said it could now make nuclear warheads small enough to fit onto a ballistic missile. It also claimed success in testing the re-entry technology that allows a long-range missile to return to the Earth’s atmosphere without breaking up. In April, North Korea reported the successful ground test of an engine for an intercontinental ballistic missile. At the time, Mr. Kim said the North “can tip new-type intercontinental ballistic rockets with more powerful nuclear warheads and keep any cesspool of evils in the Earth, including the U.S. mainland, within our striking range.” On Sept. 9, the North conducted its fifth , and most powerful, nuclear test. Mr. Kim later attended another ground test of a new long-range rocket engine, exhorting his government to prepare for another rocket launch as soon as possible. In November, the United Nations Security Council imposed new sanctions against the North.

Nuclear weapons testing
Nuclear weapon
Kim Jong-un
North Korea


Trial Starts for Argentine Ex-President in ’94 Bombing of Jewish Center

Abstract: BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s labyrinthine investigation into the suicide bombing of a Jewish community center here two decades ago began a new chapter on Thursday with the start of a trial in which Carlos Menem, a former president, is accused of trying to derail the case. Mr. Menem, 85, is one of 13 defendants, mostly former officials, suspected of conspiring to conceal what prosecutors have said was Syrian involvement in the 1994 bomb attack, which killed 85 people. The trial points to the struggles of Argentina’s judiciary, which has failed to convict anyone of the bombing but has pushed ahead with separate cover-up allegations. For some in Argentina, the long-awaited trial arouses hopes of one day solving the bombing, a case scarred by setbacks and controversy, including the mysterious death this year of Alberto Nisman , the prosecutor who was leading the investigation. Before Mr. Nisman took the helm a decade ago, the investigation had been tainted by scandal. Mr. Menem was not in the federal trial court on Thursday because of poor health, his lawyer said. But in their opening statements, prosecutors and lawyers for private plaintiffs, who have joined the case as allowed by Argentine law, told judges that one of the defendants — Juan José Galeano, who was the judge first assigned to the investigation — paid a witness, Carlos Telleldín, $400,000 to falsely incriminate four police officers in the bombing, as part of a state-directed scheme to distort the evidence. Separately, prosecutors and plaintiffs’ lawyers claim that Mr. Menem, who is of Syrian descent, ordered Mr. Galeano to deflect suspicion away from a Syrian-Argentine textile merchant by using the former president’s brother, Munir Menem, as an intermediary. In the days after the attack, the investigation of the textile merchant, Alberto Jacinto Kanoore Edul, “was prematurely discontinued following an order by Carlos Menem, obeyed without objection by Galeano,” the court was told, “paralyzing one of the leads that, without doubt, had serious probabilities of deepening knowledge” of the bombing. The Mysterious Death of Alberto Nisman A prosecutor in Argentina accuses the president of attempting to cover up a secret deal to shield terrorists. Days later, the prosecutor is found dead and the president alleges a conspiracy. An overview of key developments in the case. Munir Menem, who was a presidential secretary for his brother, has since died. In an interview before the trial began, Mr. Galeano, 57, claimed that the payment to Mr. Telleldín, 54, who sold the van used by the suicide bomber, was not a bribe to induce false testimony but a legitimate use of state funds to foster cooperation by witnesses. (A fund is available to pay reluctant witnesses who have information about the Jewish center bombing and another terrorist attack here two years earlier, according to a 1994 presidential decree .) “It was totally legal,” he said. “What I needed was information to move the case forward.” Mr. Galeano denied ever speaking to Munir Menem and allegations that he maneuvered to clear Mr. Kanoore Edul of suspicion. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whom Mr. Nisman also accused of conspiring to derail the investigation, has supported the trial of Mr. Menem, now a senator who has been convicted of arms smuggling. In a new line of inquiry, Mr. Nisman had claimed that Iranian officials were behind the bombing. Days before his death in January, he accused Mrs. Kirchner of conspiring to shield them from prosecution in return for trade benefits. But a prosecutor who inherited the Kirchner conspiracy case dropped it. One theory about the bombing is that it was an act of revenge: Syrian leaders may have been angered that Mr. Menem, who had forged ties with Syria before he became president, terminated an arms deal after he was elected, historians say. Likewise, Mr. Nisman said in 2006 that he agitated Iran by ending nuclear energy cooperation. Some victims’ relatives say that the trial could provide new leads. “The hope is not illusory,” said Alejandro Rúa, a lawyer for Active Memory, a group representing some victims’ relatives that is a plaintiff in the trial. “The very state authorities that were supposed to investigate the case covered it up. Now, we will try to verify their motives.” Others said the trial, which may involve about 140 witnesses, according to local news media reports, and is expected last at least a year, would yield few results. “There is nothing to be discovered after so many years,” Carlos Escudé, an Argentine political scientist who has written on the case, said in an email. “Leads have faded.”

Terrorism
Carlos Saul Menem
Alberto Nisman
Iran
Syria
Bombs
Argentina
Judaism


How to Lower (or Raise) the Odds of Getting Bumped

Abstract: To avoid getting bumped, check in as early as possible. Many airlines allow customers to check in online, as much as 24 hours in advance. Passengers with discount tickets are the most likely to be bumped. First- and business-class passengers, those paying full fare for coach tickets and elite frequent fliers tend to have the greatest protection. If you are involuntarily bumped and the airline arranges a way to get you to your final destination within one hour of your original arrival time (including connections), you are not owed compensation. And if the airline substitutes a smaller plane at the last minute, it is not required to pay travelers who are bumped because fewer seats are available. Bumping rules do not apply to charter flights or to scheduled flights on planes with 30 seats or less. They also do not apply to international flights headed to the United States; the regulations of the originating country take precedence. Flights on planes with 30 to 60 seats are not required to pay passengers who are bumped because of “safety-related aircraft weight or balance constraints” — in other words, too much cargo on board. If you want to increase your chances of getting bumped to cash in on the airline’s payout, fly during a busy time and show up late. If a flight is oversold, the last passengers to check in are often the first to be bumped, even if they arrive at the gate on time. Customers have the most bargaining power in situations where “there aren’t a lot of simple options to rebook the passengers,” like on routes with limited air service, said Dave Pelter, chief executive of InsideTrip.com . Tell the gate agent that you may be willing to give up your seat, even before an announcement is made. Explore your options. Will the airline provide free meals while you wait for the next flight? What about a hotel room or an airline lounge pass? Is there an open seat in first class on the next flight? Asking these questions can pay off when it is time to bargain for the best deal. Know the rules. The Department of Transportation requires airlines to pay passengers who are involuntarily bumped from a domestic flight a maximum of $400 in cash if they reach their destination within two hours of their original arrival time. As a volunteer, do not accept any flight vouchers worth less. Find out whether the flight vouchers expire or have any blackout dates. And do not trade in your ticket until you have a confirmed seat on another flight.

Airlines and Airplanes
Delays (Transportation)


Sympathy for Greeks Inspires Outraged Commentary Tagged #ThisIsACoup

Abstract: The strict terms of the deal imposed on Greece by fellow members of the eurozone on Sunday inspired hundreds of thousands of comments on social networks deriding the agreement as the equivalent of a coup against the left-wing government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. As Ashifa Kassam reported for The Guardian, the global trend #ThisIsACoup appears to have started with socialjustice activists in Barcelona, where the term was used on Sunday by Ada Colau, the city’s new mayor, who rose to prominence in protests against evictions. Grecia quiere estar en Europa, quiere pagar deuda y negociar. Pero quiere tb respeto, democracia y DDHH. Yo estoy con Grecia #thisIsACoup — Ada Colau (@AdaColau) July 12, 2015 Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Spain’s anti-austerity movement, Podemos, followed, as Anne-Marie Tomchak of BBC Trending noted . Mr. Iglesias, who had campaigned with Mr. Tsipras in Athens in January before Syriza, his party, won the Greek elections, used the tag with a comment pledging “All of our support to the Greek people and government against the Mafia bosses.” His party later described the deal — in which the Greek government agreed to give up power over large issues, like putting state assets into a trust fund to pay the debt, but also small ones, like the number of pharmacies per square mile — as a coup that effectively made Greece into “a protectorate.” The Twitter trend was then picked up by Greek commentators and embraced by sympathetic observers around the world, including Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics and New York Times Op-Ed columnist. “The trending hashtag ThisIsACoup is exactly right,” Mr. Krugman wrote on his blog. “This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief.” “In a way, the economics have almost become secondary,” he added. “But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line.” The theme was echoed by Yanis Varoufakis, who stepped down as Greece’s finance minister last week, comparing the debt deal to “the 1967 coup d’état” in Athens in an interview with Australia’s state broadcaster on Monday. “The choice of weapon used in order to bring down democracy then was the tanks; well, this time it was the banks,” Mr. Varoufakis said. “The banks were used by foreign powers to take over the government. In ’67, they used the tanks to take over the government. The difference is now that this time they’re taking over all remaining public property.” Paul Mason, the economics editor of Britain’s Channel 4 News, noted that the phrase was used with particular intensity in European countries where austerity is unpopular, and across Latin America. Suspicions that Europe’s centrist and right-wing governments were working to undermine the “coalition of the radical left” that now leads Greece were further fueled by a comment from the finance minister of Slovakia, who compared Mr. Tsipras’s election to the short-lived Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, which was extinguished by Soviet tanks. The opposite case was made by James Kirkup, who suggested in a column for The Telegraph that the rejection of austerity measures in last week’s Greek referendum did not mean the new deal was undemocratic: Here’s a quick Politics 101 lesson for the #thisisacoup mob: Greece is not a direct democracy. It is a representative one. That means that the Greek people elect their governments to make decisions on their behalf. Referendums are not binding in Greece; they simply advise the government of the day on the views of the people. Although much of the anger was aimed at Germany, the largest economy in the eurozone, which also holds a very large portion of the Greek debt, a spokesman for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, called the comparison to a coup inappropriate. The popularity of the hashtag also resonated in Egypt, where supporters of the military takeover in 2013 had lambasted the international media for daring to describe the forcible removal of power of an elected president by the army commander as a coup.

Greece
Euro Crisis
Syriza,Coalition of the Radical Left
Alexis Tsipras
Yanis Varoufakis
Pablo Iglesias
Ada Colau
Paul Krugman
Eurozone
Social Media


U.N. Calls Lag in Syria Aid Worst Funding Crisis in Recent Memory

Abstract: GENEVA — As Syria’s crisis moves into its third year, international relief agencies are expressing alarm at the slow arrival and modest levels of financial support they are receiving to help the tens of thousands of civilians who have been fleeing the conflict and the millions trapped inside the country whose plight becomes more desperate. Halfway into an appeal for $1.5 billion to cover the cost of aid to Syrians in the first six month of the year, United Nations officials say they have received barely one-fifth of the money. “That math just doesn’t work,” said Radhouane Nouicer, the United Nations’s regional humanitarian coordinator, in a statement from the Jordanian capital, Amman, on Friday. “It translates into less food, fewer blankets, fewer medicines, less clean water.” The sluggish pace of money that has been pledged is only part of the problem. The rising violence in Syria has accelerated the flow of refugees, making the need more severe, United Nations officials say. Their appeal for expedited flows of humanitarian donations came as European leaders were weighing whether to ease a ban on the arms embargo to Syria as a way to help the insurgents who are fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad, whose harsh repression of a peaceful political uprising in March 2011 signaled the start of what has become a civil war. Both France and Britain have increasingly made clear they are in favor of arming the insurgents, a position that is not widely shared among other European Union members. The United States remains opposed to providing weapons to the Syrian rebels. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, has repeatedly expressed opposition to a further militarization of the conflict, which has left more than 70,000 people dead. When the United Nations began its appeal in December, its refugee agency was coping with a little more than half a million refugees, a number that had been expected to double by June. The refugee population surpassed 1 million last week. By Thursday, an additional 126,000 refugees had been registered. “It gives us a chilly feeling down our spine,” Amin Awad, the refugee agency’s emergency director based in Geneva said in a telephone interview, explaining that it had committed more than half its stocks for global emergency responses to its Syrian operation. “This is the worst crisis in terms of funding in recent history. We are basically living week by week,” he said. Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, reported on Friday that it had raised around $45 million for Syrian aid, or more than one-fifth of the $220 million it is seeking for all of 2013, but that it had to borrow $32 million from its own core resources to keep operations going in the past year and is still appealing urgently for additional money. “We have been able to secure enough resources to keep going in the immediate weeks ahead,” Ted Chaiban, its emergencies director, said by telephone, “but there’s no doubt that funding is a constraint.” Image Key components of Unicef’s Syrian operations are its drinking water supplies for about 10 million people, mobile clinics in areas where the fighting endangers civilians and programs to vaccinate children against polio and measles. Unicef has warned that a funding lag could prevent it from inoculating millions of Syrian children. Unicef also has warned that Syria’s children risk becoming a “lost generation,” traumatized by the violence and the near collapse of the country’s education system. United Nations officials have little leverage to pressure countries that pledged $1.5 billion at a Syrian donor conference held in Kuwait a few months ago to make good on their promises. Given the almost daily headlines on Syria, “we’re a little surprised that this money is not coming forward,” Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters in Geneva on Friday. In Brussels, European Union leaders asked their foreign ministers to discuss the bloc’s arms embargo on Syria as a matter of urgency at a meeting to be held in Dublin on March 22 and 23, the European Council president, Herman Van Rompuy, said after a two-day summit. France and Britain are pushing their colleagues to lift the embargo immediately, and the French in particular have become increasingly outspoken on the issue. But other European Union officials at the summit, including its foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, expressed doubt about the wisdom of such a move. President François Hollande of France told reporters he had even received guarantees from the Syrian opposition that no weapons would fall into the hands of Islamist extremists who have joined the fight against the Assad government. There is considerable skepticism, however, that Syria’s opposition can reliably make such guarantees. Asked about the French position, a United Nations spokesman, Eduardo del Buey, reiterated the secretary general’s view that the introduction of more weapons into Syria is “counterproductive and will not lead to a solution. He said “President Hollande knows what the secretary’s views are.” Germany and Austria are among the European Union members that remain opposed to lifting the embargo. But it will lapse in any case at the end of May if Britain and France continue to oppose it. Germany has a “whole range of reservations” over lifting the embargo, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday, as she warned that a common European position might not be reached. “It is an extremely difficult situation,” she told a news conference at the end of the summit.

Syria
Arab Spring
Great Britain
France
UNICEF
Bashar al-Assad


Jewish Group Opposes Muslim Center Near Ground Zero

Abstract: An influential Jewish organization on Friday announced its opposition to a proposed Islamic center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero in Lower Manhattan , intensifying a fierce national debate about the limits of religious freedom and the meaning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The decision by the group , the Anti-Defamation League , touched off angry reactions from a range of religious groups, which argued that the country would show its tolerance and values by welcoming the center near the site where radical Muslims killed about 2,750 people. But the unexpected move by the ADL, a mainstream group that has denounced what it saw as bigoted attacks on plans for the Muslim center, could well be a turning point in the battle over the project. In New York, where ground zero has slowly blended back into the fabric of the city, government officials appear poised to approve plans for the sprawling complex, which would have as many as 15 stories and would house a prayer space, a performing arts center, a pool and a restaurant. But around the country opposition is mounting, fueled in part by Republican leaders and conservative pundits. Sarah Palin , the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, has urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject the center, branding it an “unnecessary provocation.” A Republican political action committee has produced a television commercial assailing the proposal. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has decried it in speeches. The complex’s rapid evolution from a local zoning dispute into a national referendum highlights the intense and unsettled emotions that still surround the World Trade Center site nine years after the attacks. To many New Yorkers, especially in Manhattan, it is a construction zone, passed during the daily commute or glimpsed through office windows. To some outside of the city, though, it stands as a hallowed battlefield that must be shielded and memorialized. Those who are fighting the project argue that building a house of Muslim worship so close to ground zero is at best an affront to the families of those who died there and at worst an act of aggression that would, they say, mark the place where radical Islam achieved a blow against the United States . “The World Trade Center is the largest loss of American life on our soil since the Civil War,” Mr. Gingrich said. “And we have not rebuilt it, which drives people crazy. And in that setting, we are told, why don’t we have a 13-story mosque and community center?” He added: “The average American just thinks this is a political statement. It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.” Several family members of victims at the World Trade Center have weighed in against the plan, saying it would desecrate what amounts to a graveyard. “When I look over there and see a mosque, it’s going to hurt,” C. Lee Hanson, whose son, Peter, was killed in the attacks, said at a recent public hearing. “Build it someplace else.” Those who support it seem mystified and flustered by the heated opposition. They contend that the project, with an estimated cost of $100 million, is intended to span the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim, not widen it. Oz Sultan, the programming director for the center, said the complex was based on Jewish community centers and Y.M.C.A. ’s in Manhattan. It is to have a board composed of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders and is intended to create a national model of moderate Islam. “We are looking to build bridges between faiths,” Mr. Sultan said in an interview. City officials, particularly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg , have forcefully defended the project on the grounds of religious freedom, saying that government has no place dictating where a house of worship is located. The local community board has given overwhelming backing to the project, and the city’s landmarks commission is expected to do the same on Tuesday. “What is great about America, and particularly New York, is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us?” Mr. Bloomberg asked recently. “Democracy is stronger than this,” he added. “And for us to just say no is just, I think — not appropriate is a nice way to phrase it.” Still, the arguments against the Muslim center appear to be resonating. Polling shows that a majority of Americans oppose building it near ground zero. Resistance is particularly strong among some national Republican leaders. In stump speeches, Twitter messages and op-ed articles, they have turned angry denunciations of the plan into a political rallying cry that they say has surprising potency. The two major Republican candidates for governor of New York, Rick A. Lazio and Carl Paladino, are making it a central issue in their campaigns, attacking the state’s attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo , who is also the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, for not aggressively investigating the project’s finances.. In North Carolina , Ilario Pantano, a former Marine and a Republican candidate for Congress, has also campaigned on the issue, and says it is stirring voters in his rural district, some 600 miles away from ground zero. A few days ago, at a roadside pizza shop in the small town of Salemburg, he attacked the proposal before an enthusiastic crowd of hog farmers and military veterans. “Uniformly, there was disgust and disdain in the room for the idea,” Mr. Pantano said. The issue was wrenching for the Anti-Defamation League, which in the past has spoken out against anti-Islamic sentiment. But its national director, Abraham H. Foxman , said in an interview on Friday that the organization came to the conclusion that the location was offensive to families of victims of Sept. 11, and he suggested that the center’s backers should look for a site “a mile away.” “It’s the wrong place,” Mr. Foxman said. “Find another place.” Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions. “Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said. Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.” The Anti-Defamation League’s statement drew criticism almost immediately. “The ADL should be ashamed of itself,” said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, which promotes interethnic and interfaith dialogue. Speaking of the imam behind the proposed center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, he said, “Here, we ask the moderate leaders of the Muslim community to step forward, and when one of them does, he is treated with suspicion.” C. Welton Gaddy, the president of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington group that emphasizes religious freedom, called the decision “disappointing,” and said he read about it “with a great deal of sorrow.” On Friday, Mr. Sultan, the programming director for the proposed Muslim center, expressed surprise and sadness at the news. Told of Mr. Foxman’s remarks about the families of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “That response is just not well thought out.” He said that Muslims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin towers, or responded to the scene. “The ADL has always been antibigotry,” he said. “This just does not seem consistent with their message.”

World Trade Center
Mosque
Islam
Manhattan
Anti Defamation League
Abraham H Foxman


Lacking Leverage, U.S. Grasps for a Solution in Lebanon

Abstract: DOHA, Qatar — Even as tensions over Iran’s nuclear program seemed to ease a bit, a new Middle East crisis erupted Wednesday during Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ’s Persian Gulf tour, with the collapse of Lebanon ’s government after a walkout by Hezbollah ministers. In contrast to the Iranian case, where the Obama administration doggedly stitched together a sanctions campaign that it claims has delayed Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb, the United States has fewer options in Lebanon. President Obama and Mrs. Clinton both threw their support behind the embattled leader, Prime Minister Saad Hariri , as well as reaffirming the work of the international tribunal that is investigating the assassination of his father and a former prime minister, Rafik Hariri . But critics say the administration’s engagement in Lebanon has been episodic, in part because it is preoccupied with bigger problems in the region — not only Iran, but also the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and the terrorist threat in Yemen. The United States also has little leverage over pivotal players in the drama, most notably the Islamist militant group, Hezbollah. Hours after the collapse in Beirut, Mrs. Clinton met with Arab foreign ministers who had gathered for a conference in Qatar, the gulf emirate that helped broker a truce in 2008, the last time Lebanon tumbled into political disarray and even seemed headed for renewed civil war. Afterward, both she and the prime minister of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, pledged to preserve stability in Lebanon. But there was a palpable gap in their enthusiasm for the special tribunal, which precipitated this crisis because of widespread expectations that it would indict Hezbollah members in connection with the 2005 car bombing that killed the elder Hariri and 22 others. “We view what happened today as a transparent effort by those forces inside Lebanon, as well as interests outside Lebanon, to subvert justice and undermine Lebanon’s stability and progress,” Mrs. Clinton declared at a news conference. “We believe that the work of the special tribunal must go forward so justice can be served and impunity ended.” Prime Minister Thani said only, “We have enough problems in the region that this problem we have to take care of it, in a way to solve it, not to complicate it.” Mrs. Clinton said the United States would consult with all countries that had a stake in Lebanon to prevent the situation from deteriorating. A senior administration official traveling with her said she had been in touch in recent days with officials from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France. But it was not clear that the United States was talking to Syria, he said. Syria and Saudi Arabia had been trying to negotiate a solution to the tensions over the tribunal, and analysts said they would remain far more important to resolving it than would the United States. The government’s collapse came shortly after a frenzied but inconclusive round of talks in New York, where King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has been recovering from back surgery. Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Hariri and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France all met him at his hotel suite over the last two weeks. By last weekend it was clear the Saudis had grown frustrated and decided to cut off the talks, according to Arab and Western diplomats who had roles in the talks and spoke on condition of anonymity, under diplomatic protocol. The American role has largely been confined to advising Mr. Hariri to stand firm in his support for the tribunal. Mr. Obama recently named a seasoned diplomat, Robert S. Ford, as ambassador to Syria, and he is expected to leave for Damascus next week. One of Mr. Ford’s priorities will be enhancing Washington’s influence with Syria in the Lebanese crisis. Administration officials have previously criticized Syria for interfering, but on Wednesday Mrs. Clinton held her fire. “We don’t think it is at this moment useful to be pointing fingers or blaming or going about the business of recriminations about what did or didn’t happen, or who did or didn’t do what,” she said. Mrs. Clinton had come to this region with renewed confidence about the administration’s strategy toward Iran and a well-received message of reassurance to Yemen. The only hopeful note, the administration official said, is that Hezbollah is using constitutional means to undermine the special tribunal, not turning its members out on the streets. With other influential countries, like Turkey, apparently behind Mr. Hariri, the United States may be able to navigate this moment in Lebanese politics without violence.

Lebanon
United States International Relations
Clinton Hillary Rodham
Hezbollah
Obama Barack
Hariri Saad
Hariri Rafik


Lining Up for Central Perk, a Pop-Up Tribute to ‘Friends’

Abstract: The line stretched down Lafayette Street, past security officers in suits and earpieces, along Broome Street and back up Cleveland Place. Devotees of the sitcom “Friends” made the pilgrimage to SoHo on Tuesday to enter a pop-up replica of Central Perk, the coffeehouse where the gang on that long-running hit show sighed and shared the quirky woes of their 20-something lives. Warner Bros., in partnership with the Eight O’Clock Coffee company, had set up the shrine-museum, which will be open through Oct. 18, for the 20th anniversary of the show’s debut. The coffee is free. The gift shop items are not. Memorabilia are displayed — Phoebe’s guitar; Joey’s ceramic white dog; an invitation to Monica and Chandler’s wedding; the bronze picture frame from the door of the huge loft Monica and Rachel shared in the show’s early years. Fans got to sit on the show’s pumpkin-color couch for 22 seconds and have their pictures taken. Many of them had barely been born when the show was first broadcast. ON THE COUCH Leda Strong, 22, and Carly Uhlman, 22, recent graduates of the University of North Carolina, best friends since freshman year who bonded because both were from the New York area and were called “Yankees” upon arriving on campus. They were also Delta Delta Delta sorority sisters who shared a house where “Friends” reruns played constantly. Ms. Uhlman, who said she had every episode on DVD, was applying for international fellowships before starting a consulting job next summer. Ms. Strong, a teacher, was waiting to be assigned to a Success Academy charter school. Image Outside the Central Perk pop-up shop. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times WHY THEY CAME They had been planning a visit since hearing about the pop-up in August and had discussed picking what they hoped would be a less crowded time. No such luck. On Tuesday, the doors opened at 8 a.m.; by 3:30 p.m., 1,176 people had already come through. WHAT THEY ORDERED Ms. Strong had a caramel macchiato, “because I have a sweet tooth,” she said. Ms. Uhlman got the Central Perk roast, which Eight O’Clock produced specially for this event. “It’s a long line for coffee,” she said. “But it’s New York, and it’s free.” And what of the couch? “It was a short experience,” Ms. Uhlman said. Said Ms. Strong: “It’s really cool to think, if nothing else, that all those actors sat on it.” WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT They had nearly an hour in line to discuss jobs, men, life, their lunch at Osteria Morini nearby and, of course, how long they were waiting. “We got more and more excited as we got closer,” Ms. Strong said. “The decal on the window looked so real. We were trying to figure out if the Central Perk in the show was near Central Park because they all lived downtown.” Ms. Uhlman said: “Everyone, at least our age, decides for themselves what characters we are. People always tell me I’m Monica.” Ms. Strong said she was probably Rachel, with a bit of Phoebe. There were coupons and a recipe for Monica’s tiramisù on the high, round tables. “I wish I could cook as well as Monica,” Ms. Strong said. “It might come out the way Rachel’s trifle came out.” Ms. Uhlman responded, “Half shepherd’s pie and half trifle.”

Coffeehouse
TV
Pop-up retail
Friends
SoHo Manhattan


Opel to Scale Back Operations in Russia

Abstract: FRANKFURT — Opel, the European unit of General Motors, said on Tuesday it would cut production and hundreds of jobs in Russia amid declining sales and profitability, and dispatched a senior manager from Germany to take charge of operations there. The announcement by Opel, which is based in Rüsselsheim, Germany, near Frankfurt, was one of the first concrete indications of how the conflict in Ukraine has disrupted trade with Russia and begun to have economic repercussions for Europe and the United States. Carmakers have not been affected directly by the sanctions that the United States and the European Union have imposed on Russia. But the international tension has hurt the value of the Russian currency and accelerated an economic slowdown, causing a severe slump in auto sales. Opel, which has been struggling to return to profitability after years of losses, is particularly vulnerable. Last year Russia was the carmaker’s third-biggest market, after Britain and Germany. “This market is caught up in serious turbulence,” Karl-Thomas Neumann, the Opel chief executive, said in a statement. “We believe in the long-term potential of Russia, but volumes and prices are currently under strong pressure and the ruble is continuing to lose value.” Other carmakers have also had to scale back their ambitions in Russia. Volkswagen last week stopped production at its factory in Kaluga for 10 days after sales in Russia fell 12 percent during the first eight months of 2014, to 177,000 vehicles. In contrast to other countries that are targeted by sanctions, like North Korea or Iran, Russia was seen until recently as a promising and fast-growing market, with deep economic ties to Europe. Image The Opel display at the Moscow auto show last month. Credit Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters Germany is particularly exposed to Russia. About 6,200 German companies are active in the country, according to a study by Roland Berger Strategy Consultants. Last year, Russia bought German products valued at a total of 77 billion euros, or almost $100 billion, about half as much as the United States bought from Germany. But exports to Russia from Germany are likely to plunge 25 percent this year, according to the study. Opel said Susanna Webber, head of purchasing and logistics for the company, would take charge of the Russian operations. The previous head of Russia, Andy Dunstan, will be in charge of Russian sales. Opel said that production at its main factory in St. Petersburg would be reduced to one shift a day from two, eliminating 500 jobs at the site, from 1,600 today. Workers will be offered financial incentives to leave voluntarily, it said. Opel also said it would seek to buy more parts from local suppliers, a strategy that would help isolate the company from fluctuations in the Russian currency. General Motors produces Opel Astra and Chevrolet Cruze cars in St. Petersburg. Opel did not give current sales or profit figures for Russia, but said the total auto market declined 12 percent from January through August from the same period last year. General Motors’ market share, including the Opel, Chevrolet and Cadillac brands, fell to 7.8 percent during that period from 9 percent in the same period last year, Opel said. Despite problems in Russia, Mr. Neumann said General Motors would press ahead with a joint venture with the Russian automaker Avtovaz, which is planning to begin selling a new Chevrolet model in 2016 called the Niva. In addition to St. Petersburg, General Motors produces cars with Russian partners in the Russian cities of Kaliningrad, Nizhniy Novgorod and Togliatti.

Cars
GM
Russia
Saint Petersburg
Embargoes Sanctions


Pierre Mauroy, Former French Socialist Premier, Dies at 84

Abstract: PARIS — Pierre Mauroy, who as France’s first Socialist prime minister since the beginning of the Fifth Republic in 1958 pushed through some of the Socialist Party’s most important overhauls, died on Friday in a hospital near Paris. He was 84. His death was announced by the foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, who succeeded Mr. Mauroy as prime minister in 1984. The cause was complications of lung cancer, his family said. A longtime ally of François Mitterrand’s, Mr. Mauroy became prime minister when Mr. Mitterand became president in 1981, and he promoted a pro-European vision of socialism. He resigned in 1984. Mr. Mauroy’s government carried out changes that transformed the face of French society, including the abolition of the death penalty; the lowering of the retirement age to 60; a reduction in the legal workweek to 39 hours from 40; a fifth week of paid vacation; and an increase in welfare benefits. In 2000 the workweek was shortened still further, to 35 hours. His policies helped reduce poverty but inevitably produced higher inflation and a growing budget deficit, forcing Mr. Mitterrand to shift toward a more prudent budget, which Mr. Mauroy also oversaw. He was widely praised for persuading Mr. Mitterrand to keep the French franc in the European monetary system. Image François Mitterrand, left, with Pierre Mauroy, in March 1974. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Mr. Mauroy was also mayor of Lille, near the Belgian border, from 1973 to 2001 and served in both houses of the French legislature, as well as in the European Parliament. He was known for his lyrical speeches in the Senate. The news of Mr. Mauroy’s death prompted a flow of tributes from across the political spectrum. Speaking from Tokyo, where he was on an official visit, President François Hollande, the first Socialist president since Mr. Mitterrand, praised Mr. Mauroy as a “humanist” who had “served his country without concealing its fundamental values.” Mr. Fabius, the foreign secretary, said that with Mr. Mauroy’s death, “it is a whole epic and a pillar of democratic socialism that goes away.” Born on July 5, 1928, in Cartignies, in the industrial north, Mr. Mauroy came from Roman Catholic working-class stock. His grandfather was a lumberjack, and his father was a schoolteacher. He joined the Socialists at 17, starting his political career with the Jeunesses Socialistes (Young Socialists), and in 1966 became general secretary of the French section of the Workers’ International, which later became the Socialist Party. He served as Mr. Mitterrand’s spokesman before Mr. Mitterand was elected president. Mr. Mauroy led the Socialist Party from 1988 to 1992. In 1990 he founded the Fondation Jean-Jaurès , a research institution promoting Socialist policies. He left the Senate in 2011 and resigned from his various other positions because of health problems. He is survived by his wife, Gilberte, a former teacher, and their son, Fabien.


U.S. Will Finance Devices to Track Children With Autism

Abstract: Following the death of a 14-year-old who walked away from his Queens school, the Justice Department will pay for voluntary-use GPS tracking devices for children with autism or other conditions that put them at risk for fleeing their caregivers. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said on Wednesday that the federal government already provided grant money for devices to track seniors with Alzheimer’s and that the department would now allow for the grant funds’ beneficiaries to include children with autism spectrum disorder. The teenager, Avonte Oquendo, who had severe autism and was nonverbal, disappeared on Oct. 4, setting off an extensive search. His remains were found in the East River this month, miles from where he was last seen. The cause of Avonte’s death remains under investigation. Mr. Schumer said the program would be voluntary for parents and would be run by local law enforcement agencies. Last weekend, Avonte’s family and Mr. Schumer called for legislation to provide the devices. He said he would continue to push for it, to provide a stable source of funding. The senator had put the cost of each monitor at about $85, plus a few dollars in monthly fees.

Justice Department
Autism
Avonte Oquendo
Fatalities,casualties
Chuck Schumer
Security


Lyon’s Last-Minute Goal Puts Liverpool in Danger in the Champions League

Abstract: Liverpool’s chances of progressing in the European Champions League took a big hit on Wednesday when the five-time European champion conceded a late goal in a 1-1 draw at Lyon, which advanced to the next round. Liverpool appeared to have secured the victory when the substitute Ryan Babel scored with seven minutes left. But Lisandro took advantage of a defensive error to tie the score in the last minute and put the French team through. With Arsenal moving to the verge of qualification with a 4-1 win over AZ Alkmaar, Liverpool is in danger of becoming the first English club to be eliminated after the group stage since Manchester United in 2005. Even wins in its final two games may not be enough. Also Wednesday, Sevilla advanced to the knockout stage after its 1-1 draw at Stuttgart, and Inter Milan scored twice in the last four minutes to revitalize its chances with a 2-1 win at Dynamo Kiev. But Liverpool let its winning position slip when defender Sotiris Kyrgiakos tumbled to the ground while contesting a long ball into the area, allowing Lisandro to steady himself and shoot past goalkeeper Pepe Reina. “We deserved to win,” Manager Rafa Benitez said. “To concede a goal in the last minute is really unlucky. I will see the replay and analyze carefully.” Goalkeeper Hugo Lloris had starred for Lyon, which won, 2-1, at Anfield two weeks ago. Lloris made saves on Lucas Leiva in the 69th minute, and then helped block Dirk Kuyt’s overhead kick on the rebound. But Liverpool remained shaky in defense and remained under pressure even after Babel had smashed a shot past Lloris from well outside the penalty area. Liverpool has four points after four games, six fewer than Lyon and five fewer than Fiorentina, which routed Debrecen, 5-2. “It’s hit us hard,” Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher said. “A draw doesn’t mean we were totally out of it, but a win would have been great.” Arsenal needs one more point to be sure of joining Manchester United and Chelsea, which advanced to the next round on Tuesday along with Porto and Bordeaux. Cesc Fàbregas put the Gunners ahead at Emirates Stadium in the 25th minute with a soft 20-yard shot that goalkeeper Sergio Romero let in at the near post, and Samir Nasri made it 2-0 just before halftime, stepping inside a defender and placing a shot in at the post from the edge of the area. Sevilla advanced despite surrendering a late goal to draw, 1-1, against Stuttgart. Inter Milan vaulted from last to first place in Group F, ahead of Barcelona.

Champions League
Liverpool (Soccer Team)
Soccer


Q. and A.: Eric Korita Shares the Keys to a Power Serve

Abstract: In the 1980s, the most powerful serve in tennis belonged to Eric Korita. He never achieved the overall success of his big-serving predecessor Roscoe Tanner or successors like Mark Philippoussis or Ivo Karlovic . Korita’s highest world ranking was 30th in doubles and 46th in singles, but he regularly served faster than 140 miles per hour in an era when that was unheard of. Korita will be at the United States Open, giving a clinic on serving, for The New York Times on Facebook Live on Tuesday at 1 p.m. First, he shared some thoughts on his biggest weapon. How did you develop such a fast serve? For me, it started with a lot of throwing — throwing footballs and baseballs. That was a key. I was taught good mechanics, too, but then I used my own creativity to develop my serve. I would toss balls way out to the side to work on kicks and twists. I have seven different tosses. That’s not for everyone, but even four tosses would give different options. I think creativity is missing in sport today. How old were you when you realized you had something special with your serve? When I was playing junior tournaments, I hit serves so hard sometimes my opponents didn’t have time to react, and it would just hit them in the chest and knock them over. When did you know just how fast your serve actually was? I was signed to a sponsorship with Prince, and they wanted to say you could serve 140 miles per hour with the Prince Boron. So to document that, they brought out the guns, and I served in the mid-to-high 140s and even broke 150. What is the most important thing to keep in mind on a serve? I’m 6-5, but power is not just size and strength. You can be 5-10 and add more speed to your serve. You need to stay really relaxed, and then at the top of your swing, you need to really have a good wrist snap. People would say to me, “You don’t look like you’re doing anything, you’re so relaxed.” Pancho Segura told me I reminded him of Pancho Gonzalez that way, that my body was so relaxed. That allowed me to stay loose. If you maximize relaxation and there’s no tension in your grip, wrist, elbow or shoulder, then you can really go up and fire. Without that, there’s no free flow. And then you need to really snap your wrist. There’s so much force in that snap. Do you think that looseness would help pro players improve, too? Even the biggest servers, whether it’s John Isner or Serena Williams, could serve even harder and get more on their serves if they were loose with their wrist. People lose velocity and spin. There’s more opportunity if you know what your wrist can do. I could serve 150 miles per hour with the rackets and strings we were using back then. My rackets were strung at 80 to 82 pounds, and when strings broke, they would just explode. Someone now could hit 180 miles per hour. It could be a big difference for the women; their serve could be much, much harder. The game is so tough and so physically demanding now, who wouldn’t want one or two free points per game? How fast do you think you can serve now? I’m 53, but if I worked my way up to it for a little while, I can still serve hard. I could probably get into the 130s.


Judge Questions Legality of N.S.A. Phone Records

Abstract: WASHINGTON — A federal district judge ruled on Monday that the National Security Agency program that is systematically keeping records of all Americans’ phone calls most likely violates the Constitution, describing its technology as “almost Orwellian” and suggesting that James Madison would be “aghast” to learn that the government was encroaching on liberty in such a way. The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered the government to stop collecting data on the personal calls of the two plaintiffs in the case and to destroy the records of their calling history. But Judge Leon, appointed to the bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush, stayed his injunction “in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues,” allowing the government time to appeal it, which he said could take at least six months. “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,” Judge Leon wrote in a 68-page ruling . “Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Andrew Ames, a Justice Department spokesman, said government lawyers were studying the decision, but he added: “We believe the program is constitutional as previous judges have found.” The case is the first in which a federal judge who is not on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorized the once-secret program, has examined the bulk data collection on behalf of someone who is not a criminal defendant. The Justice Department has said that 15 separate judges on the surveillance court have held on 35 occasions that the calling data program is legal. It also marks the first successful legal challenge brought against the program since it was revealed in June after leaks by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden. In a statement from Moscow, where he has obtained temporary asylum, Mr. Snowden praised the ruling. “I acted on my belief that the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts,” Mr. Snowden said in his statement. It was distributed by Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who received leaked documents from Mr. Snowden and wrote the first article about the bulk data collection. “Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights,” the statement said. “It is the first of many.” The case was brought by several plaintiffs led by Larry Klayman , a conservative legal activist. Mr. Klayman, who represented himself and the other plaintiffs, said in an interview on Monday that he was seeking to turn the case into a class action on behalf of all Americans. “I’m extremely gratified that Judge Leon had the courage to make this ruling,” he said. “He is an American hero.” Mr. Klayman argued that he had legal standing to challenge the program in part because, he contended, the government had sent inexplicable text messages to his clients on his behalf; at a hearing, he told the judge, “I think they are messing with me.” The judge portrayed that claim as “unusual” but looked past it, saying Mr. Klayman and his co-plaintiff instead had standing because it was highly likely, based on the government’s own description of the program as a “comprehensive metadata database,” that the N.S.A. collected data about their phone calls along with everyone else’s. Similar legal challenges to the N.S.A. program, including by the American Civil Liberties Union and the advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, are at earlier stages in the courts. Last month, the Supreme Court declined to hear an unusual challenge to the program by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which had sought to bypass lower courts. The ruling on Monday comes as several government panels are developing recommendations on whether to keep, restructure or scrap the bulk data collection program, and as Congress debates competing bills over the program’s future. Though long and detailed, Judge Leon’s ruling is not a final judgment on the program, but rather a preliminary injunction to stop the collection of data about the plaintiffs while they pursued their case. He also wrote that he had “serious doubts about the efficacy” of the program, saying that the government had failed to cite “a single instance in which analysis of the N.S.A.’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive.” Judge Leon rejected the Obama administration’s argument that a 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland, had established there are no Fourth Amendment protections for call metadata — information like the numbers dialed and the date, time and duration of calls, but not their content. The 1979 case, which involved collecting information about a criminal defendant’s calls, helped establish the principle that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy for information they have exposed to a third party, like the phone company, which knows about their calls. The surveillance court, which issues secret rulings after hearing arguments from only the Justice Department and without opposing lawyers, has maintained that the 1979 decision is a controlling precedent that shields the N.S.A. call data program from Fourth Amendment review. But Judge Leon, citing the scope of the program and the evolving role of phones and technology, distinguished the bulk collection from the 34-year-old case. Last month, a federal judge declined to grant a new trial to several San Diego men convicted of sending money to a terrorist group in Somalia. Government officials have since acknowledged that investigators became interested in them because of the call records program. Citing Smith v. Maryland, the judge said the defendants had “no legitimate expectation of privacy” over their call data. David Rivkin, a White House lawyer in the administration of the elder President George Bush, criticized Judge Leon’s reasoning. “Smith v. Maryland is the law of the land,” Mr. Rivkin said. “It is not for a District Court judge to question the continuing validity of a Supreme Court precedent that is exactly on point.” Judge Leon also pointed to a landmark privacy case decided by the Supreme Court in 2012 that held it was unconstitutional for the police to use a GPS tracking device to monitor a suspect’s public movements without a warrant. Although the court decided the case on narrow grounds, five of the nine justices separately questioned whether the 1979 precedent was still valid in an era of modern technology, which enables long-term, automated collection of information.

Richard J Leon
NSA
Government Surveillance
Larry Klayman
Lawsuits
Privacy
4th Amendment
Decisions and Verdicts


In Bullying Case, Questions on N.F.L. Culture

Abstract: Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito spent most of the season side by side, a pair of 300-pound men made rich from football, crouched inches apart on the offensive line of the Miami Dolphins. When the defense took the field, they sat on the bench in order of their position — Martin, the left tackle, next to Incognito, the left guard. They were as connected as teammates could be — though they could hardly be more different. Now Martin and Incognito are gone from the team, at least temporarily, opposites embroiled in a twisted controversy over hazing and workplace abuse. Martin, a classics major who attended Stanford and is the son of two Harvard graduates, left the Dolphins last week after an episode in the cafeteria in which teammates stood as Martin sat, the last in a string of perceived slights. Incognito, a 30-year-old veteran with a reputation for dirty play and a history of rough behavior, was suspended indefinitely by the Dolphins late Sunday while the team and the league investigated the matter. Their unfolding saga is forcing the National Football League to uncomfortably turn its gaze toward locker room culture and start defining the gray areas between good-natured pranks and hurtful bullying. For years, young players in the N.F.L. have been subjected to a wide swath of indignities straight from the hallways of high school or the back rooms of fraternity houses. Young players are often expected to carry teammates’ equipment off the field. They are sometimes forced to sing or otherwise entertain teammates on demand, left helplessly taped to goal posts or asked to regularly bring sandwiches or fast food to teammates. They are often called names — Incognito referred to Martin, privately and publicly, as the Big Weirdo. In the glossy program sold at the Dolphins’ Halloween night home game, after Martin left the team, Incognito called Martin the “easiest teammate to scare.” ESPN and The Associated Press, among other outlets, citing unnamed sources, have reported that Incognito sent threatening and racist voice mail and text messages to Martin. Many teams have a tradition of requiring rookies to pay the bill at an annual steakhouse dinner, with free-flowing liquor, where tabs run into the tens of thousands of dollars. One report Monday said Martin was pressured to pay $15,000 toward a trip to Las Vegas that he did not attend. In 2010, Dallas receiver Dez Bryant paid a $54,896 tab. Image Richie Incognito, left, and Jonathan Martin played side by side for the Miami Dolphins, but their relationship was strained. Credit Lynne Sladky/Associated Press “Everything tastes better when rookies pay for it,” Dolphins defensive lineman Jared Odrick wrote in a Twitter message on Friday, accompanied by a photograph of a table of food, including bowls of shrimp and other seafood. Most incidents come with the tacit, unsupervised approval of coaches and executives, who see the pranks as a rite of passage, a worthy bit of team building and character strengthening. Last year, Martin and other Miami rookies were subjected to deliberately bad haircuts at the hands of veterans. Offensive lineman Josh Samuda had his eyebrows shaved and his hair shaved into a penis-shaped Mohawk. “Glad we’re such a first-class organization, Josh,” Joe Philbin, then in his first year as head coach, said to a room full of laughing teammates, according to The Miami Herald. But the hazing generally stays in the macho atmosphere of the locker room. The Dolphins’ latest problems — symbolized by two behemoth millionaire teammates turned archetypical opposites — burst into the public in recent days, forcing the team to address the matter. “I want you to know as the head coach of the Miami Dolphins, I’m in charge of the workplace atmosphere,” Philbin said Monday, declining to provide specifics about what led him to suspend Incognito. “If the review shows that this is not a safe atmosphere, I will take whatever measures necessary to make sure that it is.” Martin has not spoken publicly, and neither he nor his agent responded to messages seeking comment. Incognito fell silent after his suspension after initially using Twitter to defend himself from damning news media reports over the weekend. (“Enough is enough,” he wrote to ESPN’s Adam Schefter in one. “If you or any of the agents you sound off for have a problem with me, you know where to find me. #BRINGIT.”) Players and coaches around the league generally defended the culture of pranks, provided they did not become overly aggressive. Those borders may be impossible to define. Image Martin left the Dolphins last week. Credit Joel Auerbach/Getty Images “Any time a guy feels disrespected and like he can’t go to work and feel comfortable, that’s when you can’t have that in the locker room,” the veteran Jets guard Willie Colon said. “Because at the end of the day, he’s playing, he’s playing for you, so you’ve got to take care of each other.” Jets offensive tackle Austin Howard said pranks were ubiquitous in the N.F.L. “Everybody’s done it,” he said. “It’s all in good fun. And then the next year, they’re going to do it to the guy who’s there the next year. It builds camaraderie. It’s never intended to be hurtful or disrespectful.” For most of the two seasons since Martin was a second-round choice of the Dolphins in the 2012 N.F.L. draft, he has been subjected to the humiliations that others endure, usually for the entertainment of veterans. Martin, 23, is the son of Harvard graduates who pondered becoming a fourth-generation Harvard student before choosing Stanford and its top-level football program. His father, Gus Martin, is associate dean of the College of Business Administration and Public Policy at California State University, Dominguez Hills. His mother, Jane Howard-Martin, is an assistant general counsel for Toyota. They declined to comment on Sunday when reached at their Southern California home. Jonathan Martin, raised on classic literature and classical music, grew to 6 feet 5 inches and 312 pounds and became known as Moose as he dominated other linemen at Harvard-Westlake School in the Los Angeles area. At Stanford, he became an all-American while protecting the blind side of quarterback Andrew Luck, the No. 1 overall draft pick in 2012, now starring for the Indianapolis Colts. Martin left Stanford before he finished his degree in ancient history. He has said that he would like to attend law school and become a lawyer. “He’s a phenomenal person,” said his former Stanford linemate Andrew Phillips. “He cares for people in the utmost way at all times. I’ve never heard him say a bad word, a bad thing, to or for anybody in my entire time at Stanford. He was one of the guys that everybody loved in the locker room.” Incognito revealed glimpses of his locker room behavior on Twitter. In April, he posted a photograph of Martin squeezing into a go-kart. “Big weirdo barely fits in the go kart,” Incognito wrote. Image Incognito was suspended indefinitely while the Dolphins investigated reports that he hazed Martin. Credit J Pat Carter/Associated Press At question is whether Incognito wandered past the loose parameters of locker-room decorum. But current and former players did not seem surprised that Incognito, 30, would be at the center of this type of incident. Throughout his collegiate and professional career, Incognito has had an image as an energetic player who will do anything to win, even if he has to cross the line into dirty play. A New Jersey native, Incognito excelled at the University of Nebraska, but in 2004, he was suspended because of incidents off the field. That did not deter the St. Louis Rams from drafting him in the third round the next year. He built a résumé that included games with multiple personal fouls and a $50,000 fine for head-butting. He was also fined for three incidents in one game, including verbally abusing a game official. Isaiah Kacyvenski, a former Rams linebacker, considered Incognito an upbeat prankster in the locker room. “But I can see how things could get out of hand at times, though I’ve never seen anything this vicious,” he said, referring to the allegations involving Martin. Incognito’s sense of humor “revolved around ribbing guys,” Kacyvenski said. “If you live it day to day to day, you could reach a breaking point.” Incognito was signed by the Dolphins before the 2010 season and seemed to start anew. He was chosen to play in the Pro Bowl last year and tapped by his teammates for the Dolphin’s leadership council. Last December, Incognito was recognized by local football reporters with the “Good Guy” award for his cooperation with the media. “A large part of this has been growing up, making a conscious effort on my end to change some ways in my life and change some of my ways on the football field,” Incognito told The Sun-Sentinel in August. He spoke two months after receiving a trespassing warning after a suspected bar fight in Miami Beach, according to The Palm Beach Post. Giants kicker Josh Brown, who played with Incognito at Nebraska and in St. Louis, called him “a person with a tortured soul.” “He’s always been a fighter,” Brown said. “It’s just something he hadn’t been able to kick. It’s unfortunate and it’s sad, very sad.”

Football
Miami Dolphins
Richie Incognito
Bullying
NFL
Super Bowl
Super Bowl 2015
Jonathan Martin


Lawyers Paint Informant in Bronx Synagogue Attack as Plotter

Abstract: The man accused of masterminding a plot to blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale section of the Bronx was offered $250,000 by a paid government informant for his effort, according to papers filed in court on Wednesday by defense lawyers. The papers, which seek dismissal of the federal charges, detail how the informant spent nearly a year courting the man, encouraging him to identify targets and recruit others to the mission. The informant, identified in the court papers as Shaheed Hussain, who had helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation in at least one other case, has been credited with helping to prevent the plot’s success. Mr. Hussain posed as a wealthy representative of a Pakistani terrorist organization. He repeatedly dangled the promise of large cash payments as he helped oversee the recruitment of the four men arrested last May in the plot, according to the court papers, which draw from recorded conversations. During one conversation last April, James Cromitie , the Newburgh, N.Y., man accused of leading the plot, told Mr. Hussain that he was out of the state trying to make money. The two had not spoken for six weeks, and Mr. Cromitie expressed reluctance at joining Mr. Hussain’s plan. “I told you,” Mr. Hussain replied, according to the court documents, “I can make $250,000, but you don’t want it, brother. What can I tell you?” In another conversation, Mr. Cromitie referred to being told to offer $25,000 to anyone willing to participate as a lookout. “If you can assure them that they gonna see that much money, they gonna go for it,” Mr. Cromitie said, according to the documents. The excerpts from the recordings, culled by defense lawyers seeking to have the case thrown out under entrapment rules, paint Mr. Hussain as the hands-on manager who steered Mr. Cromitie, along with three other men whom Mr. Cromitie recruited, to the doorsteps of the two synagogues, the Riverdale Temple and the Riverdale Jewish Center. The defendants deposited packages that they believed to be timed explosives in cars parked out front. The defense lawyers contend that Mr. Cromitie and the other defendants — David Williams , Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen — would not have carried out an attack without the provocation of Mr. Hussain. The recordings, they wrote, show the government “decided to use large cash offers to try to cobble together a ‘conspiracy’ where none existed.” Local and federal officials involved in the case have argued that Mr. Cromitie and the others were independently dangerous and that their desire to stage an attack was merely facilitated by the government. The officials pointed out that, unlike terrorism cases in which the attacks were stopped during the planning phase, the men actually tried to carry out the plot , which was later to involve firing a missile at a National Guard base in Newburgh. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment. The role of informants in encouraging criminal acts has been a frequent point of contention in terrorism cases, including another in which Mr. Hussain was an informant, but juries have not generally been sympathetic to the defenses’ arguments. The defense lawyers in the Riverdale case said Mr. Hussain had controlled the plot through to the final stages: he overruled Mr. Cromitie’s suggestion that the attack be at night so that no one would get hurt, and, during the would-be bombing itself, he reassured a panicked Mr. Cromitie, who could not figure out how the timers on the fake bombs worked. “But for government’s money and supplies and Hussain’s indefatigable efforts, there is not the slightest chance that the crimes charged would or even could have occurred,” Susanne Brody, a federal defender, wrote in one of two filings in United States District Court. Mr. Hussain and Mr. Cromitie met in June 2008 at the Masjid al-Ikhlas mosque in Newburgh, where Mr. Hussain had been approaching young men with offers of gifts and jobs. Mr. Hussain told Mr. Cromitie that he was a member of a Pakistani militant group with connections to Al Qaeda, according to the court filings. During the meetings, they complained about America and Jews, discussed possible targets for an attack and recruiting other participants. Even as he offered cash for recruits, Mr. Hussain emphasized that participants must be motivated by principle. But Mr. Cromitie said that was not the case. “They will do it for the money,” he responded in one exchange. “They’re not even thinking about the cause.”

Cromitie James
Terrorism
Synagogues
Williams David IV
Riverdale (NYC)
Williams Onta
Payen Laguerre
Hussain Shaheed