Growing Pains for Field of Epigenetics as Some Call for Overhaul

Abstract: Our genes are not just naked stretches of DNA. They’re coiled into intricate three-dimensional tangles, their lengths decorated with tiny molecular “caps.” These so-called epigenetic marks are crucial to the workings of the genome: They can silence some genes and activate others. Epigenetic marks are crucial for our development. Among other functions, they direct a single egg to produce the many cell types, including blood and brain cells, in our bodies. But some high-profile studies have recently suggested something more: that the environment can change your epigenetic marks later in life, and that those changes can have long-lasting effects on health. In May, Duke University researchers claimed that epigenetics could explain why people who grow up poor are at greater risk of depression as adults . Even more provocative studies suggest that when epigenetic marks change, people can pass them to their children , reprogramming their genes. But criticism of these studies has been growing. Some researchers argue that the experiments have been weakly designed: Very often, they say, it’s impossible for scientists to confirm that epigenetics is responsible for the effects they see. Three prominent researchers recently outlined their skepticism in detail in the journal PLoS Genetics . The field, they say, needs an overhaul. “We need to get drunk, go home, have a bit of a cry, and then do something about it tomorrow,” said John M. Greally, one of the authors and an epigenetics expert at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Among other criticisms, he and his co-authors — Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute and George Davey Smith of the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol in England — argue that in some cases, changes to epigenetic marks don’t cause disease, but are merely consequences of disease. Some studies, for example, have found that people with a high body mass index have unusual epigenetic marks on a gene called HIF3A . Some researchers have suggested that those marks change how HIF3A functions, perhaps reprogramming fat cells to store more fat. If that were true, then drugs that reverse these changes might be able to help obese people lose weight. But Dr. Smith and his colleagues have found that overweight subjects experienced epigenetic changes to HIF3A only after they put on weight . James M. Flanagan, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London, agreed with Dr. Smith and his co-authors that tracking epigenetic changes over time can be revealing. “It’s the best way to go about it,” he said. But these experiments are especially hard to set up, he noted, because scientists have to gather blood or other genetic samples from healthy people and then wait years for some of them to get sick. In other cases, apparent changes in epigenetic marks may actually be the result of different kinds of cells becoming more or less common in people, Dr. Greally and his colleagues also warned. “That’s where things get hairy,” Dr. Greally said. Smoking, for example, triggers a boom in immature blood cells, which carry epigenetic marks different from those of other cell types in the blood. Rafael A. Irizarry, an applied statistician at Dana-Farber Cancer Center and the Harvard School of Public Health, said new methods could help researchers steer clear of this confusion. Scientists can sort cells into different types before looking at their epigenetic marks, he said. It’s even becoming possible to look at the epigenetics of one cell at a time. “But it makes the process way more expensive,” Dr. Irizarry said. Dr. Greally and his colleagues note another source of confusion: Normal genetic variation leads some people to produce different epigenetic marks than others. If researchers were to find that alcoholics carry an unusual epigenetic mark, for instance, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that it resulted from heavy drinking. These people may have a genetic variation that puts them at risk of alcoholism and, perhaps coincidentally, creates an unusual epigenetic mark on their DNA. Dr. Greally said these possibilities have been neglected because scientists have been so captivated by the idea that epigenetic marks can reprogram cells. “Since you don’t talk about anything else, you interpret the results solely through that little sliver of possibility,” he said. He and his colleagues go so far as to claim that no published results on the links between epigenetic marks and disease “can be said to be fully interpretable.” Other experts feel that such an indictment is a bit too broad. Dr. Flanagan pointed to several recent studies in which scientists confronted the very challenges that Dr. Greally and his colleagues wrote about. Last year, for example, a team of European scientists investigated how smoking causes lung cancer. They took advantage of large-scale studies in Australia, Norway and Sweden that collected blood from tens of thousands of people and tracked their health for years. The scientists found that smokers who got lung cancer tended to lose the same epigenetic marks on a pair of genes . Dr. Greally said that genetic variations the smokers were born with might account for the results. “That’s not tested in the study,” he said. “It could definitely be the case.” Nevertheless, he added, these reports offer some good starting points for bigger studies in the future. “There’s nothing wrong with an exploratory study, but call it an exploratory study and acknowledge the fact that it may merely be reporting noise,” Dr. Greally said. “If you say, ‘Look, I’m finding something that’s intriguing here,’ that’s legit.”

Genetics and Heredity
DNA
PLoS Genetics Journal
John M. Greally
Ewan Birney
George Davey Smith


N.F.L.: Saints Have Taken Steps to Avoid a Letdown

Abstract: The N.F.L. will throw one more parade for the New Orleans Saints on Thursday night, a brightly colored pageant meant to usher in a new season. The Saints will host a rematch with the Minnesota Vikings , whom they vanquished in overtime in the N.F.C. championship game , and provide a final joyride into the sunset for the feel-good story of last season. But the party really screeched to a halt in March, when the cold-blooded decisions of the off-season replaced the warm fuzziness of the Saints’ Super Bowl victory. When the team let its beloved linebacker Scott Fujita leave for Cleveland as a free agent, it showed that while the rest of the country was still swept up in the romanticism of a New Orleans triumph, the Saints had moved on. That alone is not enough to ensure another championship — whether the defense can wrench 39 takeaways, as it did last year, will be more telling. But if the fans who will drape themselves in beads Thursday night are looking for signs of a repeat, they can take solace in the fact that the shrewd decisions that propelled their team in the first place are still being made. “You love the people and the players that were part of the first Super Bowl championship for the region,” General Manager Mickey Loomis said. “They’ll have a place in history here forever. It was very difficult to let Scott Fujita move on to another team. It was very difficult to tell some of the players that we’re going to move on. But we would be doing a disservice to this year’s team if we didn’t do what we felt was best.” There is no formula for repeat success in the N.F.L. The roadblocks are many: the shorter off-season, the heightened expectations, the adulation around every corner, the teams that are desperate to make their own mark by knocking off the champion. Those challenges certainly do not compare with the ones Loomis and Coach Sean Payton already conquered when they persuaded players to move to ravaged New Orleans. “That whole season was rough for us,” Loomis said. Rodney Harrison, the former New England safety, said on an NBC conference call last week that he was curious to see how the Saints handled their success. He was a member of the last N.F.L. team to repeat, the Patriots, in February 2005, and when he assessed the Pittsburgh Steelers’ chances of repeating last year, he spoke of complacency and the feeling of accomplishment that sets in after a team ascends to a championship. He predicted that those things would not derail the Steelers. But he could not predict that the All-Pro safety Troy Polamalu would injure his knee in the season opener, unraveling his season and the Steelers’ with it. Did complacency get them, or was it just Alge Crumpler ? And how can the Saints — who are without the All-Pro safety Darren Sharper for at least six weeks after microfracture knee surgery, and have put their projected starting linebacker Jonathan Casillas on season-ending injured reserve — know if they will be any different from the Steelers, who did not make the playoffs last season? “I don’t know that we are different,” Loomis said. “I bet if you’d asked them if they were complacent in August, they wouldn’t have said it. I have to wait and see what the results are. I don’t feel like we’re complacent. I think the effort level in the preseason was good. We tried to look at the team with a real critical eye. We made changes where we felt they were needed.” The Saints might have reveled in their victory more fully and colorfully than any other team, riding on Mardi Gras floats, swan-diving into a hurricane-swilling city, waiting until training camp opened to take the traditional White House trip. Loomis has had an extraordinary year — his wife gave birth to twins — and he waxes poetic about the joy he saw in the eyes of long-suffering Saints fans. But they also have approached the coming season clinically, trying almost everything to ward off a letdown — a particular issue in the N.F.C. South, where no team has earned consecutive playoff appearances since the division’s creation in 2002. They offered Sharper, coming off a nine-interception season, a one-year contract for less than he could have made elsewhere. Quarterback Drew Brees talked to stars in other sports. Mark Schlereth, the ESPN analyst who was a member of the Denver Broncos teams that won in 1998 and 1999, spoke to the team. The Saints also made sure they were doing the same things in the off-season that they did last year, even running training camp the same way. But it was in his bleary-eyed post-Super Bowl news conference that Payton identified the best antidote to complacency and parity: an elite quarterback. With the Lombardi Trophy slung over his shoulder that morning, Payton admitted that the Saints had already looked far ahead, toward the Super Bowl in Arlington, Tex., that will conclude this season. “When you get a quarterback like Drew Brees in the prime of his career, it’s not enough,” Payton said that February morning. “Last night was great, and yet still there is something that burns in you to separate yourself more.” In a place that knows hangovers, the Saints hope they have found the remedy.

Football
New Orleans Saints
National Football League
Minnesota Vikings
Fujita Scott
Payton Sean
Polamalu Troy


Study on Horse Deaths

Abstract: An updated analysis of thoroughbred deaths was released by the Jockey Club, providing a look at fatal injuries to the animals over a two-year period. The veterinarian and epidemiologist Tim Parkin of the University of Glasgow performed the study, which includes two years’ data in the Equine Injury Database, the North American database for racing injuries. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported the analysis covered 754,932 starts between Nov. 1, 2008, and Oct. 31, 2010, and showed the prevalence of fatal injury dropped to 2.00 per 1,000 starts. Information reported in March showed a rate of 2.04 for the one-year period from Nov. 1, 2008, to Oct. 31, 2009. Parkin said the cumulative two-year data revealed a statistically significant difference in the prevalence of fatality on turf and synthetic surfaces as opposed to dirt.

Horse Racing
Jockey Club Incorporated (The)


Anger in Cambodia After Sentencing of Khmer Rouge Jailer Duch

Abstract: PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — For 30 years since the brutal Khmer Rouge regime was driven from power, Cambodians have lived with unresolved trauma, with skulls and bones from killing fields still lying in the open and with parents hiding the pain of their past from their children. On Monday, Cambodia took a significant step toward addressing its harsh past with the first conviction of a major Khmer Rouge figure in connection with the deaths of 1.7 million people from 1975 to 1979. But some survivors were distraught over what they saw as a lenient sentence, one that could possibly allow the defendant, Kaing Guek Eav , 67, commonly known as Duch, to walk free one day. A United Nations -backed court found Duch (pronounced DOIK), the commandant of the central Khmer Rouge prison, Tuol Sleng, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to 35 years in prison for overseeing the torture and killing of more than 14,000 people. The court reduced that term to 19 years because of time already served and in compensation for a period of illegal military detention. “I am not satisfied!” cried one of the few survivors, Chum Mey, 79, who had testified in excruciating detail about his 12 days of torture. “We are victims two times, once in the Khmer Rouge time and now once again.” He was shouting in agitation in the muddy courtyard outside the tribunal building. “His prison is comfortable, with air-conditioning, food three times a day, fans and everything,” he said. “I sat on the floor with filth and excrement all around.” It was the first time in Cambodia’s modern history that a senior government official had been made accountable for serious human rights violations and the first time such a trial had been held that met international standards of justice. The verdict took into account mitigating circumstances that a court spokesman, Lars Olsen, said included Duch’s cooperation, his admission of responsibility and limited expressions of remorse, the coercive environment of the Khmer Rouge period and the possibility of his rehabilitation. There is no death penalty in Cambodia and prosecutors had sought a 40-year sentence, but many people said they would accept nothing less than a term of life in prison. “People lost their relatives — their wives, their husbands, their sons and daughters — and they won’t be able to spend any time with any of them because they are dead now,” said Nina You, 40, who works for a private development agency. “So why should he be able to get out in 19 years and spend time with his grandchildren?” Bou Meng, 69, another survivor who testified at the trial about his torture and humiliation, said he had waited for this day to quiet the ghosts he said continued to torment him. “I felt it was like a slap in the face,” he said of the verdict. But Huy Vannak, a television news director, said it was enough simply to have justice in a court, 30 years after the killing stopped. No sentence could measure up to the atrocities Duch committed, he added. “Even if we chop him up into two million pieces it will not bring our family members back,” he said. “We have to move on now.” Others still needed more time. “Actually I’m kind of shaking inside at the moment,” said Sopheap Pich, 39, a sculptor. “I’m not sure how I should feel. I’m not happy, not sad, just kind of numb.” For its symbolism, he said, a life sentence would seem most appropriate. “To come up with a number doesn’t seem to make sense,” he said. “I’m not sure how you come up with a number.” Mr. Olsen said the prosecution had 30 days to file an appeal. For now, Duch was returned to the special detention house he shares with four other defendants who are awaiting trial in what is known as Case 2. In that case, four surviving members of the top Khmer Rouge leadership are accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes. In addition to those tortured to death and executed in killing fields, many people died of starvation, disease or overwork or in the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, in which the entire population of the city was driven out to the countryside. The defendants include Ieng Sary, 84, who was foreign minister; his wife, Ieng Thirith, 78, who was minister of social welfare; Nuon Chea, 84, known as Brother No. 2 ; and Khieu Samphan, 78, who was head of state. Several other major figures have died, including the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, in 1998. The judicial investigation in this case is expected to conclude in September with formal indictments, and the trial itself is not expected before sometime next year. Unlike Duch, these defendants have denied guilt, and their lawyers have been active in raising legal challenges. In their most interesting challenge, they failed in an attempt this year to exclude evidence obtained through torture — in other words, the Tuol Sleng archives of prisoner confessions that contain some of the potentially most damaging testimony about the chain of command. The four defendants have been in custody since late 2007 and some of them hate each other, according to people familiar with the conditions of their detention. In particular, these people say, Mr. Nuon Chea refuses to speak to Duch, who implicated him during his trial. According to testimony in pretrial hearings, Ms. Ieng Thirith, who has shouted angrily during court hearings, has been abusive to her fellow detainees on at least 70 occasions. For his part, Duch is said to be fascinated by the court’s actions and follows reports and analyses closely on television.

War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity


Security Check Firm Said to Have Defrauded U.S.

Abstract: The company that conducted a background investigation on the contractor Edward J. Snowden fraudulently signed off on hundreds of thousands of incomplete security checks in recent years, the Justice Department said Wednesday. The government said the company, U.S. Investigations Services, defrauded the government of millions of dollars by submitting more than 650,000 investigations that had not been completed. The government uses those reports to help make hiring decisions and decide who gets access to national security secrets. In addition to Mr. Snowden, the company performed the background check for Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old military contractor who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last year. Mr. Alexis, who died in a shootout with the police, left behind documents saying the government had been tormenting him with low-frequency radio waves. The accusations highlight not just how reliant the government is on contractors to perform national security functions, but also how screening those contractors requires even more contractors. U.S. Investigations Service, now known as USIS, is the largest outside investigator for government security clearances. It is one of many companies that has found lucrative government work during the expansion of national security in the last decade. From 2008 to 2012, about 40 percent of the company’s investigations were fraudulently submitted, the Justice Department said. The government made the accusations in a 25-page complaint filed in United States District Court in Montgomery, Ala., where USIS has been the subject of a whistle-blower lawsuit since 2011. News that the government officially joined that case on Wednesday was reported by The Wall Street Journal. Government lawyers accused the company of releasing investigations that had not been complete, a practice referred to in court documents as “dumping.” The government quoted from internal company emails to argue that the practice was widespread. “Have a bit of a backlog building, but fortunately, most people are off this week so no one will notice!” one USIS employee wrote in 2010. A spokesman for USIS said Thursday morning in a statement: “These allegations relate to a small group of individuals over a specific time period and are inconsistent with the strong service record we have earned since our inception in 1996. Since first learning of these allegations nearly two years ago, we have acted decisively to reinforce our processes and management to ensure the quality of our work and adherence to OPM requirements. We appointed a new leadership team, enhanced oversight procedures, and improved control protocols. From the outset, we have fully cooperated with the government’s investigation and remain focused on delivering the highest quality service under our OPM contracts.” In September, former and current USIS employees detailed how the company had an incentive to rush work because it is paid only after a file is marked “FF,” for fieldwork finished, and sent to the government. In the waning days of a month, investigations were closed to meet financial quotas, without a required review by the quality control department, two former senior managers said at the time. The federal Office of Personnel Management confirmed that it paid USIS on a piecework basis. “The vendor is paid upon the delivery of a completed case,” the agency said in a statement shortly after the navy yard shooting. People familiar with the contract said it was intended to give the company an incentive to be efficient. The 2007 background report done by USIS on Mr. Alexis showed that investigators learned he had been arrested three years earlier in Seattle, but the report did not include the crucial information that he had shot the tires of a construction worker’s car in what he told the police was an anger-fueled blackout. Mr. Alexis was given a secret security clearance in 2008, which was still valid on Sept. 16 when he stalked and killed a dozen victims at the navy yard with a sawed-off shotgun before the police killed him. Investigators relied on an interview with Mr. Alexis, who claimed he had only deflated the construction worker’s tires, Merton W. Miller, an associate director for investigations in the personnel office, said in a statement. USIS also conducted the most recent security investigation of Mr. Snowden, in 2011. Patrick E. McFarland, the inspector general of the personnel office, told a Senate hearing in June that “there may be some problems” with the Snowden investigation, but he declined to give details.

Edward Snowden
Aaron Alexis
US Investigations Services LLC USIS
Fraud
Defense contractor
Office of Personnel Management
Justice Department


Ex-New York Senate Leader Gives Speech in Court

Abstract: ALBANY — Joseph L. Bruno arrived at the federal courthouse here on Thursday, not knowing whether he would be ordered to live out his remaining days behind bars. But that was not enough to take away his swagger. Mr. Bruno bounded into the courtroom and headed toward the more than two dozen family members and friends who were seated in the gallery to support him. Working the room like a rope line at a campaign rally, he greeted them, shook their hands and thanked them for coming. “Hi, babe,” he said warmly to one. “I’m doing good,” he assured another. When Judge Gary L. Sharpe told Mr. Bruno, who was the State Senate majority leader for more than a decade, that he had the right to address the court before being sentenced, Mr. Bruno did not just seize that opportunity. He nearly took over the proceedings. Mr. Bruno walked over to the lectern, placed both hands on its sides and began a speech that lasted more than 40 minutes — too long, it seemed, for Judge Sharpe, who asked him to pause at the 30-minute mark so that he and the rest of the courtroom could take a 10-minute bathroom break. The remarks were vintage Bruno, part stump speech and part farewell address, describing his hardscrabble childhood in a house with no heat or hot water, his bootlegger uncle and his service during the Korean War. And he made no qualms about telling the judge that he thought his conviction for defrauding the voters he was elected to serve was a sham. Mr. Bruno alternately faced the judge, the prosecutor’s table and the gallery, swiveling around to make sure that everyone in the room could see him as he spoke. The crowd listened intently. “I grew up with my father saying, if you didn’t earn it, it didn’t belong to you,” he said, arguing that the fraud he was accused of simply was not in his nature. “My father would never go on welfare because he didn’t earn it.” Mr. Bruno said he had received “literally thousands” of letters and phone calls from people wishing him well — people he said he had always served faithfully. He said the $20,000 payments he received from businesses as a consultant while he was a senator were not improper. “I knew I wasn’t bribed,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t extorting anybody.” Besides, he added, some might even consider that price a bargain. “I know consultants to get paid $50,000 a month for doing what I was doing,” he said. At times, Mr. Bruno grew indignant, even defiant, and his voice rose with anger. Referring to a charge that he had sold a worthless horse to an Albany-area businessman in exchange for $40,000 in cash and forgiveness of a $40,000 debt, he exclaimed, “I got convicted on the price of a horse?” At other moments, Mr. Bruno could not suppress his urge to crack a joke. When the judge interrupted him to ask a court clerk for a glass of water, he apologized to the former senator, saying he feared he might choke from coughing. “I sure don’t want that to happen right now, judge,” Mr. Bruno said. Wrapping up his declamation, Mr. Bruno, 81, offered a gentlemanly “Thank you for your patience” to the court, and returned to his seat at the defense table. When the judge delivered the sentence — two years in prison, conditional on how the United States Supreme Court decided a case that could render his sentence moot — Mr. Bruno smacked on a piece of gum and nodded. Mr. Bruno’s companion, Kay Stafford, who sat in the back of the courtroom between his son and daughter, covered her mouth as the judge spoke. On his way out of court, Mr. Bruno stopped repeatedly to entertain questions from reporters even as his advisers tried to hustle him away. “It is what it is,” he said of the sentence. As he was crossing the street, a blue compact car slowed, and the driver rolled down his window and let Mr. Bruno know in rather crass terms that he did not think very much of him. Unruffled, Mr. Bruno walked up to the car, extended his right arm and shook the driver’s hand.

Bruno Joseph L
Sentences (Criminal)
Frauds and Swindling
New York State
Politics and Government
Sharpe Gary L


California Gets Federal Help to Ease Its Water Woes

Abstract: RANCHO CORDOVA, Calif. — As part of the federal stimulus plan , Interior Secretary Ken Salazar offered California $260 million on Wednesday to patch the Central Valley’s decrepit water-delivery system and protect its threatened fish. He also offered his good offices as a mediator in the fierce battles to come over how water will be allocated, and to whom. “There is a lot of passion around these issues,” Mr. Salazar said at a news conference with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at Mather Air Field near here. “It is my wish that the Department of Interior can play a helpful role.” But he said he would not try to impose solutions on the state and its many water districts, even though much of California’s available surface water is controlled by the Bureau of Reclamation, an Interior Department agency. The $260 million, to be overseen by the state’s Department of Water Resources, will be spread among various projects throughout the state’s complex water delivery system, which is often forced to balance environmental interests and agricultural and industrial demands. The largest chunk of federal money, nearly $110 million, will be used to build a screened pumping plant to protect fish at a dam in the northern city of Red Bluff, on the Sacramento River, while also feeding more water to some 150,000 acres of farmland. About $20 million is earmarked to protect salmon and Delta smelt along the Contra Costa Canal, a 48-mile-long structure east of San Francisco. The state is well into its third year of drought, and the pressure on agriculture has been intensified by court decisions requiring that the endangered Delta smelt be protected. Some $40 million is meant for immediate drought relief, including new wells in the Central Valley, the vast agricultural area where unemployment, hunger and homelessness have soared as the recession and drought have packed a double wallop. “Our hope is that some of this money can help farm workers,” Mr. Salazar said. Lester A. Snow, director of the Department of Water Resources, said in a statement, “This is exactly the kind of immediate federal action we’ve been seeking.” Mr. Snow added that the stimulus would “create needed jobs up and down the state.” About $26 million is designated to help restore fisheries in Northern California, where low numbers of fall Chinook salmon — usually the Sacramento River’s richest harvest — have led to the canceling of the salmon fishing season for a second straight year.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009)


Giants Left Their Hearts at Coogan’s Bluff

Abstract: Once they were the darlings of Coogan’s Bluff , but now the San Francisco Giants are the darlings of a bar in New York’s East Village as well as thousands of passionate baseball fans back East who stay up late to root. For the last two decades, the Giants have acknowledged their inner Christy Mathewson, their inner Monte Irvin, as part of their heritage. Did this help them win the World Series in 2010 and 2012? Well, Posey and Sandoval did not hurt. A cadre of Giants, including one Willie Howard Mays Jr., will return to the ancestral home in the next week to be honored for the most recent Series victory. This organization is touching all the spiritual bases. During the World Series of 2010, I wandered the halls in the ballpark in China Basin and loved seeing old photographs of wondrous doings in a far-off time and land — Mel Ott, Sal Maglie. The Giants had names from their glorious past tossing out the first ball — McCovey, Cepeda, Perry, Marichal, Irvin, Bobby Thomson’s family, Dave Dravecky. They invited Barry Bonds, who is part of the history. A few days later, they polished off the Texas Rangers for their first championship since Leo Durocher and Dusty Rhodes in 1954. I wrote a column that began with two words: Karma counts . “There was a ticker-tape parade in 1958,” said Larry Baer, the president of the Giants , who cherishes history as a partner of profit. “We replicated that in 2010.” Baer and the current ownership also honored the haunts of the ancient past. Two years ago, Mays visited Public School 46 in Harlem, where the Polo Grounds once stood. This week, Buster Posey will make a private visit to the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little Falls, N.J., for some catcher talk. The Giants are coming home for a visit. That is their attitude, and it is a marvelous one. By honoring their past, they have illuminated their present. At the moment, they generate more emotional wattage in New York than the franchise hunkered down in the marshes of Flushing. Does karma really matter? Why did it take 86 years for the Boston Red Sox to get past the disposal of Babe Ruth? What miasma hangs over the North Side of Chicago? How long will the creepy smirk of Bernie Madoff haunt the Mets? For a long time, the Giants seemed haunted by some malediction from their departure from New York. At the same time, the Los Angeles Dodgers, pursued by outright hatred from Brooklyn for being the alleged instigators of the move to California, won five World Series while the Giants failed, often with comparable talent. Image Willie Mays visited Public School 46 in Harlem, former site of the Polo Grounds, in 2011. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times In 1992, with the team facing a possible move to Florida, Peter Magowan of Safeway, a New Yorker who had coincidentally moved to San Francisco in 1958, joined a new ownership team put together by Baer. (There are now 32 owners, with Charles B. Johnson, chairman of Franklin Resources, the largest single shareholder.) “We wanted to celebrate the connections to New York, and not deny it or minimize it,” said Baer, comparing his hometown, San Francisco, to New York, where he worked for a decade. I told Baer I have always thought of San Francisco, with its bustling waterfront, as European — Genoa or Istanbul or Naples or Barcelona. “When you live in Northern California, this big thing, this elephant in the room, is the rivalry with L.A.,” Baer said. “We feel more like New York or Boston. We think of ourselves as a city. The City. Longtime San Franciscans call it the City. L.A. is the biggest city in California, but we are a city like New York or Boston, with a central business district, people go downtown for entertainment, to the opera, the symphony, the theater, the ballpark.” He also compared New York and San Francisco because of ingenuity, electronics, energy. Some of this is marketing babble, but the Giants made the visceral connection with an expedition to deepest Gotham in January 2011 for the baseball writers’ annual dinner, and they came bearing superstars and hardware. They also had the acuity to accept an invitation from a sports bar, Finnerty’s on East 14th Street. Two new owners, Brian Stapleton and Dieter Seelig, had been renovating its East Village funk for a year, trying to induce patrons to stop and have a beer, anything. One bartender invited some friends of hers to root for the San Francisco 49ers on Sundays, and some began coming back for the Giants. “Ten-thirty on weekday nights,” Seelig said the other day. “We’re open till 4 a.m., and sometimes, those games don’t end till 3 a.m. The night Matt Cain pitched his perfect game , people began coming over at midnight and stayed till the end. We must have had 60 people here.” Finnerty’s gained a reputation as a Giants bar, much the way there is a trend toward soccer pubs for specific teams, cricket and rugby pubs, Steelers bars, college football bars, you name it, Seelig said. Could the success and new bicoastal reach of the Giants cut into the popularity of the Mets? What popularity? you ask. The cash-poor Mets are trudging into the new season without one legitimate major league outfielder, not a good omen in Front-Runner City. Seelig says Finnerty’s sends busloads of Giants fans to Queens — 200 tickets for each of four Giants games last April. Many of his patrons are transplants from the Bay Area, Seelig added, saying, “I don’t think they’d become Met or Yankee fans.” He does not see the Giants as a threat to the Mets. It’s all good for business, he suggested. Are the Giants touching hearts and minds back East? Stan Isaacs , the great sports columnist at Newsday for many decades, grew up a Giants fan — in Brooklyn, no less. Isaacs, 83, said he hated Horace Stoneham for moving the franchise, but added that recently, “I was delighted by the act of emblazoning the words of Russ Hodges — ‘the Giants win the pennant,’ the historic call,” from 1951, in faraway San Francisco. The Giants painted the quotation on a wall of the ballpark’s club level. Isaacs admits it: he’s rooting for his old team again. Image San Francisco players celebrated another title last year. Credit Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press Christopher Russo, the Mad Dog himself, now yapping away weekday afternoons on SiriusXM satellite radio, has been a Giants fan since childhood, long after the team’s defection. Russo can recite the horrors of 1993 and the 2000 postseason loss to the Mets, as well as the nastiness of the Bonds era. This team, Russo pronounced, “is likable,” and has won two Series. “I never thought I’d see the day,” the Mad Dog barked. The Giants might also be candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, having brought together opposing Giants fan clubs. This sounds like one of those New York jokes (“that other congregation, you wouldn’t catch me dead in”), but this schism really exists between the New York Baseball Giants Nostalgia Society and the New York Giants Preservation Society , offshoots of a faded group whose name must not be spoken. Having once covered religion, I felt right at home delving into this. The Nostalgia people are a mix of old fans and young fans who meet periodically to talk about the Giants. For that matter, so are the Preservation people. When the Giants come to New York, both groups will meet Mays & Company at a Midtown hotel. Together. “They have a truce,” Baer said. “A détente.” Bill Kent is the leader of the Nostalgia group. The highlight of his early childhood was watching the lumbering slugger Ernie Lombardi chasing a pal of Kent’s around the field during batting practice. (Old Giants fans know right away that the Schnozz never did catch the little kid.) Kent says that at meetings of the Nostalgia group, “We go into the twilight zone” and become little kids again. Gary Mintz is the leader of the Preservation group. He is 51, a schoolteacher, and honors the Giants in memory of his dad, Louis. “I’d wake up every morning and ask him the score” from the Giants’ West Coast games, Mintz said in a husky voice. Last year, a group of Preservation people made the hegira to San Francisco and were honored before the game. Then Magowan led the group into the glass-enclosed office of the clubhouse manager Miguel Murphy , who has worked for the team since 1958. There, the Preservation people got to shake hands with Mays. Mintz is still glowing. Murphy’s office may be the emotional center of the franchise. He has been there since Seals Stadium, since Candlestick Park, and now China Basin, and knows all the secrets. Ownership has encouraged him to make his office the home for former players. I do not know any other major franchise where old-timers gather so routinely. “For any home game, Willie Mays and Willie McCovey are there,” Baer said. “Plus Orlando Cepeda, Will Clark, Vida Blue, plus visual depictions of Mathewson, McGraw.” He says it is funny to watch a new Giant take a gulp of air and tiptoe into Murphy’s sanctum and introduce himself to one or more deities who tell him to sit down and talk awhile. “We’re not just winning for the 25 guys in uniform today but also for the hundreds or thousands of guys who have worn the uniform over 131 years,” Baer said. Baer says the Giants are no threat to the popularity of the Mets or the Yankees. Nonetheless, they will surely sell tickets as they visit the two boroughs (Queens, Sept. 17-19 , and the Bronx, Sept. 20-22 ). Six Giants games in their old city in 2013. They’re not moving back to Coogan’s Bluff, but they have honored their roots. Karma still counts.

San Francisco Giants
Giants
Baseball
World Series
NYC


A New Start for Sylvia Hatchell, a Veteran Tar Heel

Abstract: CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — In this season of many returns — to health, to basketball, to the N.C.A.A. tournament — Sylvia Hatchell has embraced a saying. “I tell people, ‘This is my 40th year,’ but in a lot of ways, it feels like my first,” Hatchell, the 63-year-old coach of the North Carolina women’s basketball team for the past 29 years, said of her coaching career after her fourth-seeded Tar Heels survived No. 13 Liberty, 71-65, in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament on Saturday at Carmichael Arena. Hatchell, women’s basketball’s winningest active coach, who was inducted to the Hall of Fame in 2013, learned she had leukemia in October that year. She underwent treatment and missed all last season, which ended for North Carolina with a loss to Stanford in the quarterfinals. A year ago at this time, Hatchell said, she was “probably at my weakest point.” She begged doctors to let her watch North Carolina’s first-round N.C.A.A. tournament game against Tennessee-Martin at Carmichael. They said no, that her immune system was too weak. So Hatchell watched the Tar Heels’ win from her house, four miles from the arena. “Here they were just a few miles away, and I couldn’t even come watch them,” she said. This season, though, after completing rounds of chemotherapy treatments, Hatchell is free of cancer. And with a new perspective, she has led North Carolina to a 25-8 record and a berth in the second round of the tournament, where the Tar Heels will play fifth-seeded Ohio State on Monday night. “It’s not all about basketball,” Hatchell said. This season, Hatchell said, she has placed more emphasis on building relationships and teaching her players life lessons. She has more conversations with their parents, telling them how their daughters have matured. She has organized several nonbasketball team activities and loves to spend time with her players in the locker room, she said, “listening to their music.” Hatchell squinted her eyes in mock pain as she said this, because the musical tastes of a 63-year-old basketball coach do not typically parallel those of a 20-year-old college student. “They always make sure they got the good stuff on when I’m in there,” she said, smiling. Her players, some of whom had never got to know Hatchell before this season, have welcomed her return. “It’s like, ‘Oh, man, my mom’s here now,’ ” said the sophomore forward Stephanie Mavunga, who played her first N.C.A.A. tournament game under Hatchell on Saturday. “She’s like a mama bear around us. She really takes care of us, on and off the court.” Women’s N.C.A.A. Bracket Women’s N.C.A.A. bracket. Hatchell said: “I am — I’m like a mama bear. And sometimes, I have to call them in and straighten something out, but they know I’m always there for them. I’ve got their back.” If she’s getting pounded by an opponent under the basket, Mavunga said, Hatchell will make sure the referees are aware. “Your mom’s coming out there, and it’s like, ‘Yo, you’ve got to watch it. They’re hitting my kid,’ ” Mavunga said, laughing. “She’s not going for that.” When she gets really mad, Allisha Gray, a sophomore guard, said, Hatchell will peel off her jacket and curl back her hair behind her ears. Mavunga compared it to the fictional character Horatio Caine of “C.S.I.: Miami,” taking off his sunglasses. “That’s business right there,” Mavunga said. “Don’t let her take off that jacket.” Latifah Coleman, a senior guard, said North Carolina has used Hatchell’s return as motivation to make a deep run in the tournament. “Every time we think about the tournament and last year, we get filled with emotion,” Coleman said, adding that having Hatchell back adds “fuel to the fire.” “It’s more purpose behind what we do and why we do it,” she said. Gray concurred. “You want to make an impact her first year back,” she said. “You want to make it great.” Mavunga recognized this burden during a game earlier this season, when the Tar Heels were playing poorly. From the sideline, Hatchell, her voice quavering, yelled, “Can you guys at least do this for me?” “That really hit home,” Mavunga said, as Coleman whispered those same words and softly pounded her chest twice in the seat next to her. Hatchell may want to win for her players even more than they want to win for her. “I just don’t want to let these kids down,” she said. That is because this, her 40th season, which feels like her first, has taught her to treasure simple conversations with players and intense tournament games. “Trust me, I don’t take it for granted, not one bit,” Hatchell said. “You know, I’ve been smiling for the last five or six months. Everything that I do — you would think it would be old to me. But no, it’s special. This is really, really special.”

College basketball
Sylvia Hatchell
NCAA Women's Basketball
UNC


Van Riemsdyk, From New Jersey, Is Skating for the Enemy

Abstract: NEWARK — Frans van Riemsdyk did not see his son, James, score his first N.H.L. goal live, so there was no way he was going to miss James’s first Stanley Cup playoff game Wednesday. He bumped up a few appointments and caught an earlier flight. Van Riemsdyk, who had been out of town, arrived at Newark Airport by 7:10 p.m. and was at Prudential Center in time, he said, to miss only one or two shifts. James van Riemsdyk, a rookie forward for the Philadelphia Flyers , saw five minutes of ice time and did not score, but the Flyers beat the Devils, 2-1. “I hate to miss these games,” Frans van Riemsdyk said Friday. He had more time to spare for Game 2 of the best-of-seven series, a 5-3 Devils victory in which his son had an assist, and he was joined by at least 100 relatives and friends from Middletown, N.J., the Monmouth County township bordering the Atlantic Ocean that is the family’s hometown. They had all become Flyers fans, of course. The van Riemsdyks — and many relatives and friends — used to be Rangers fans, but as James said before Friday’s game, that allegiance was thrown out the window. It is an ideal series for Van Riemsdyk and his family, because their hometown is in the middle of the action. “This is something you dream about when you’re a kid,” James van Riemsdyk said. “Playoff hockey is the most exciting to watch.” Three years ago, the Flyers used the second pick in the N.H.L. draft to select van Riemsdyk, a rangy, 6-3, 190-pound left wing. He was the highest pick from New Jersey since Brian Lawton, who was from New Brunswick but played at a prep school in Rhode Island, was the No. 1 overall choice of the Minnesota North Stars in 1983. Van Riemsdyk, who scored the winning goal for the state parochial championship in his last game at Christian Brothers Academy in Lincroft, played for the USA Hockey program in Ann Arbor, Mich., for two years, then spent two years at the University of New Hampshire. When van Riemsdyk was drafted, Ron Rolston, one of his USA Hockey coaches (and the brother of Devils forward Brian Rolston), said of him, “I think a lot of his improvement is in front of him.” Only 12 ½ months ago, he signed with the Flyers and played briefly for their farm club, the Philadelphia Phantoms. But even as a first-round pick, a spot with the Flyers for this season was not assured. He made the team and scored 15 goals in 78 games. Van Riemsdyk was drafted one spot behind a forward from Buffalo named Patrick Kane, who scored 46 goals for the Chicago Blackhawks while van Riemsdyk was at New Hampshire. Kane played for the United States at the Winter Olympics. Van Riemsdyk moved at his own speed. “Those expectations have been around him for a long time,” Blair Betts, the veteran Flyers forward, said Friday. “I don’t think that it was anything he was not used to. He’s been a success. He’s just kind of a reserved guy. Good kid. Takes his job seriously. Comes to the rink and works hard.” Van Riemsdyk, who will celebrate his 21st birthday May 4, lives by himself in an apartment not far from the Flyers’ practice rink in Voorhees, N.J. He focuses mostly on hockey, but he enjoys the Flyers’ community outreach programs, such as visiting children in hospitals. Although he said his rookie season had been an unqualified success, there have been some bumps. He scored only one goal in his last 20 games. His ice time has diminished slightly. He understands he needs to be bigger and stronger to deal with the grind. Darroll Powe, a 24-year-old Flyers forward who played at Princeton, said: “Obviously, the biggest thing coming from the university to the pro level is the schedule. He’s learned to prepare himself, to play 80 games instead of 30 games.” Powe, who is in his second full N.H.L. season, said of van Riemsdyk: “For a guy coming out of college, there’s a lot going on. It’s your first time having a job. You’re on your own for the first time. You’ve got all these games. But James has figured it out pretty quickly.” Van Riemsdyk has learned to count on the Flyers’ veterans for advice. He said he has enjoyed the challenge. The Flyers scrambled to qualify for the playoffs — beating his old favorites, the Rangers, for the last spot — and now they are playing an opponent even closer to home. “At this time of year, it’s not about personal statistics,” he said. His father said: “I’m extremely proud of him, for starters. When the season started, there were no guarantees that he’d be able to make the jump directly from college hockey to the Flyers.” This summer, van Riemsdyk plans to work on becoming, in his words, “a dominant presence” close to the net. As he explained it, a player can never be too good. He said, “I’ve never thought of myself as someone who’s figured it all out.” Van Riemsdyk is just starting to do that. And now, in a playoff series between two teams separated by about 90 miles, his family and friends from New Jersey can watch. His father said there were not as many Rangers and Devils fans in town as there used to be.

Hockey Ice
Philadelphia Flyers
van Riemsdyk James
Playoff Games


Vogue Publisher Leaves Condé Nast After 25 Years

Abstract: The publisher who oversaw Vogue through some of its most robust times — and issues — said Thursday that he was leaving Condé Nast after nearly 25 years. Thomas A. Florio, a senior vice president with responsibility for Vogue, Teen Vogue, Bon Appétit and Condé Nast Traveler, said he would depart at the end of the month to lead a business venture of his own. “The reason I decided to leave this way was I wanted to openly pursue other opportunities,” he said in an interview, declining to be more specific. “I am just ready to do it.” Mr. Florio has a long career at Condé Nast, holding top positions on the business side at many of the company’s marquee titles like GQ and The New Yorker. As the publisher of Vogue, he led the magazine’s business side when it produced its now-fabled September 2007 issue, which at 840 pages was the largest issue in the magazine’s history. But Mr. Florio was also known for being opinionated and outspoken, the kind of executive who was not afraid to question a decision by Condé Nast management. One person with direct knowledge of Mr. Florio’s recent conversations said Mr. Florio had become increasingly vocal about his disapproval of some decisions made by managers. “His displeasure with the running of the company was all over the place,” this person said, speaking anonymously to discuss Mr. Florio’s private conversations. Though Mr. Florio has one of the most senior positions within Condé Nast, he recently has found himself with fewer responsibilities over the daily management of the magazines he supervises. Since the beginning of 2010, the company has added management layers between Mr. Florio and two of the magazines he oversees. It brought in two new publishers, Susan Plagemann at Vogue and Carol Smith at Bon Appétit, to run the business operations at those magazines. They both reported to Mr. Florio. Condé Nast employees were informed of Mr. Florio’s departure on Thursday by the company’s chief executive, Chuck Townsend, who sent a short e-mail message under the nondescript subject heading “Executive Announcement.” “We wish him well as he pursues his new professional goals,” Mr. Townsend wrote, praising Mr. Florio for his “long and distinguished career.” Condé Nast has no plans to replace Mr. Florio.

Florio Thomas A
Conde Nast Publications Inc
Vogue
Executives and Management


A Fighter’s Hour of Need

Abstract: On Nov. 2, 2013, Mike Perez defeated Magomed Abdusalamov in a heavyweight bout at Madison Square Garden. This is a reconstruction of the hour after the fight, based in part on the transcripts of two dozen interviews given under oath and conducted by the New York State Office of the Inspector General as part of its continuing investigation into the fight and the operations of the State Athletic Commission. His undercard loss unanimous, the heavyweight exits. Cocooned by his entourage, he trudges toward his distant locker room, up two dozen steps and down backstage halls the hue of a yellowing bruise. His face is misshapen, his eyes swollen slits, his brain most likely bleeding. It is nearly 11 o’clock, the crowd of 4,600 already girding for the main event, and the repeated blows to his head will soon exact a toll from which this boxer, Magomed Abdusalamov, will never recover . He is 32, a husband and father. They call him Mago. Trailing behind is Matt Farrago, 52, a compact man in a dark blazer adorned with a New York State patch. A former middleweight who fought 28 professional bouts and too many amateur fights to remember, he is one of tonight’s boxing inspectors — the eyes and ears of the New York State Athletic Commission when two fighters risk cognitive ability for public enjoyment. Farrago’s job is to shadow Mago. Among his duties are to collect the boxer’s urine before the fight; observe the wrapping of his hands with protective gauze; inspect his gloves; keep an eye on everything in the ring, down to the proper placement of the spit bucket; look for hints of neurological distress; collect more urine; and stay with the boxer until he is medically cleared. “Nothing goes on without me seeing it,” he will say. For his vigilance, Farrago will earn a New York inspector’s standard pay of $52. But he is on quasi probation tonight. His bosses have warned him to end his habit of collecting boxing detritus — namely, the sweaty, discarded hand wraps — which he auctions off to raise money for indigent boxers. Well intentioned, but unbefitting a state boxing inspector, his superiors at the athletic commission say, even as some of the state agency’s officials, including its chairwoman, Melvina Lathan, have accepted Christmas gifts from boxing promoters and others. Wine. Jewelry. Fruit baskets. Farrago isn’t interested in hypocrisy right now; he’s interested in the forbidden wraps of the evening’s star attraction, the middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin. Farrago plans to collect them after the main event and then conceal them in a Corona beer towel. This is a central goal of his night. Those wraps. Farrago follows the Russian boxer Mago and his Team Mago entourage into a cramped dressing room. Just an hour ago, the thrill of violence in the offing filled the room, with Mago pounding the pads and speaking with his American trainer in the shared language of boxing: Keep your hands up, slip, jab, punch. The violence is now done, the thrill gone. Mago says his face hurts. Or is it his head? The boxer collapses into a foldout chair, his hands still encased in protective white wraps. Here is a 6-foot-3, 231-pound vessel damaged by the 10-round bout he has just lost. In the black-blue arena, where tickets sold for $50, $100, $200, $300, he took 50, 100, 200, 300 punches, many to the head. Hovering about in the suffocating room are all types: Mago’s father, his brother, his trainer, his cut man, his manager, his manager’s son. A doctor with a kit in his hand. A boxing inspector with wraps on his mind. The ghosts of the middleweight Willie Classen, who died days after a brutal bout in this arena in ’79, and the lightweight Gino Perez, who died days after taking a pummeling here in ’83, and whose last words, while he was still in the ring, were: “Oh, jeez, my head.” A Blood Clot Forms There have been other traumatic brain injuries , other deaths caused by bleeding in the brain. Now, a blood clot is forming in Mago’s skull, compressing space, requiring a relief of pressure before it’s too late. Brain bleeds can be slow to reveal themselves. Doctors in the boxing trade often cite the death of the actress Natasha Richardson , who hit her head while skiing on a beginner’s trail in 2009 and appeared to be fine — even joking about her fall — but then lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered. It is an imperfect analogy. Richardson’s death was accidental, and a result of a single blow. Boxing’s intent is to render your opponent unconscious, with brain trauma an anticipated possibility. Mago studies his pulped face in the dressing room mirror. He is not a cursing man, but bad words escape. He is saying his face hurts, or maybe it’s his head that hurts. The back and forth between English and Russian confuses things. His younger brother, Abdusalam Abdusalamov, tries to calm him. His cut man, Chico Rivas — whose tools include Vaseline, Q-tips, and an “eye iron” to cool and reduce swelling — scurries to find ice. The doctor in the room, Gerard Varlotta, a sports medicine specialist, places his bag beneath a low shelf that he bumped his head against in a prior exam. Another veteran commission doctor, Anthony Curreri, an ophthalmologist fresh from having sewn up another boxer’s face — “repairing,” he will say — soon joins him. Varlotta subjects Mago to the King-Devick test, which is designed to detect possible concussions through a reading of jumbled numbers displayed on cards. Using his smartphone as a stopwatch, Varlotta records that Mago performs slightly slower than he did during an earlier administration of the test. At some point the doctor tests Mago’s balance by having him stand and sit. The quick physical exam detects probable hand and nasal fractures, but Varlotta sees no sign of neurological damage. ‘Take Him to the Hospital’ Meanwhile, Mago’s trainer, John David Jackson, is becoming agitated by what he believes is the wasting of valuable time. What he will remember is his repeated insistence that his fighter — once a proud, seek-and-destroy boxer, now broken — needs to go to the hospital. Now. Jackson, 50, knows the game. His career ended with a 36-4 record and a couple of world titles, but he is best remembered for the 1994 “Fight of the Year.” He had Jorge Castro on the ropes in the ninth round, Castro staggering and all but blind in one eye, the TV announcers saying this title bout should be called — and then, bam, a left hook from nowhere dropped Jackson into YouTube eternity . Tonight is a different kind of bad. Jackson never liked this matchup to begin with, believing that Mago’s opponent, Mike Perez, was much more experienced. And the fight was particularly brutal; probably should have been stopped. Too late now. “Take him to the hospital,” Jackson will remember saying. “He said his head hurts.” But Varlotta will be certain in his recollection that Mago never indicates having a headache, a possible harbinger of neurological damage. Acknowledgment of a postfight headache would be cause enough to summon one of the two ambulances parked beside the Garden. “I always ask them about head pain and also headache, because everybody interprets that all differently,” Varlotta will say. “And boxers that do experience a number of punches, you can get head pain separate from a headache.” Varlotta tells the boxer that his hand and nose do not seem to require immediate attention, and can be taken care of at some other time. Nothing urgent. The second doctor, Curreri, studies Mago’s swollen face. The orbital rim is intact. The pupils are reactive. No evidence of double vision. But there is possible damage to the zygoma, the bone beneath the eye. Contrasting Accounts of Pain Curreri will later recall asking Mago if he has any pain in his head. The boxer indicates that his face hurts. Any headache? The answer, coming from an interpreter, is no. But Mago’s brother will remember the boxer saying in the locker room that his “whole face was hurting, and everything inside his face was hurting.” That “he felt a lot of headaches, big headaches.” Wearing magnifying eyeglasses and white surgical gloves, Curreri sutures a cut around Mago’s eye as the boxer leans back in his chair, tears forming, strawberry bruises staining his massive chest and shoulders. Farrago, the boxing inspector, watches and thinks, in the parlance of boxing, that Mago is “a good bleeder.” He snaps a quick cellphone photograph of the private moment, in abuse of his official position. Curreri instructs Mago to keep the wound clean, perhaps with antibiotic ointment, and to have the sutures removed in seven to 10 days. He confers with the other doctor, Varlotta, then leaves to fill out an athletic commission form, an “accident report,” about injuries incurred entirely by design. Possible fractures to the nose and to the zygoma, he writes. And this: “to hospital.” Curreri will later say that his hospital reference is meant not to convey urgency, but rather to indicate that “the boxer is going to need to go to a facility, which would be the hospital, to get imaging study” — a CT scan at some point. To his mind, this is not an “emergent situation.” 15 Minutes of Attention By 11:14, both doctors are gone. Mago has received about 15 minutes of medical attention in the small room. He is not asked to hang around for further observation. He is not re-examined. Pressure is building within his cranial wall. Varlotta reports his findings to Dr. Barry Jordan, a neurologist and the athletic commission’s chief medical officer, who sits ringside in the arena, where the tension-filled main event is about to begin. The underdog, Curtis Stevens, taunted Golovkin before their match, and now the champ plans to school the upstart. In addition to serving as the night’s medical supervisor, Jordan has responsibilities that include reviewing the accident reports and determining the length of time before injured boxers can return to the ring. In the case of Magomed Abdusalamov, he scribbles his decisions: 60 days for the facial laceration; “indefinite” for the nasal injury. Jordan will later say that he interprets Curreri’s “to hospital” notation to mean that Mago has been told to have his nose checked out. This is “absolutely not” a matter requiring an ambulance, he will say, adding that at this point nothing suggests “anything neurological.” “If we sent every boxer that had a swollen cheek or a fat nose to the emergency room by ambulance,” he will say, there would be “boxers going in the ambulance three and four times a night.” Jordan, who has been involved with the athletic commission for 30 years, is considered a leading expert on boxing injuries, particularly those to the brain. He will say with pride that New York is a national leader in boxing safety, and that if Mago had indicated having a headache, the fighter would have been “out the door,” bound for the hospital in an ambulance. Jordan will also repeat what soon becomes athletic commission lore: that Mago came out at one point to watch part of the Stevens-Golovkin fight — suggesting that the boxer seemed fine after his pummeling. But given Mago’s condition, this is highly unlikely. Probably just another ghost. An Alarming Sign Back in the dressing room, Farrago, the inspector, announces that Mago needs to give urine before being able to leave. But Mago takes a while to deliver. His brother helps him to his feet and walks him to the shower stall, where he eventually urinates into a cup. “He was feeling worse and worse,” his brother will say. Farrago becomes alarmed after seeing what he thinks is the cloudiness of blood in the urine sample. “You need to go to the hospital ASAP,” he says. “You need to take him to the hospital. Get him dressed. Come on.” As Team Mago hurries to comply, someone asks the boxing inspector how to get to the nearest hospital. Farrago says he doesn’t know — such details were not discussed with boxing inspectors at the athletic commission’s prefight “pep talk” — and points to the door. “Go outside; hail a cab,” he says. “Just tell them, ‘Go to the nearest hospital.’ ” Farrago takes the sealed urine sample to the athletic commission’s command post down the hall. No one is around, so he leaves the sample in a bag — even though protocol requires that he hand it to a supervisor. But at least he’s collected Mago’s urine; another inspector forgot this postfight responsibility entirely, and has left without collecting the urine of the winner, Perez. Farrago heads toward the arena, where doctors are sitting ringside, but things, he will say, are too chaotic. Golovkin is in the midst of teaching Stevens an eight-round lesson so brutal that Stevens’s handlers will refuse to subject him to a ninth. So Farrago returns to the deserted hallway, still having told no one his blood-in-the-urine news. Curreri and Varlotta will later say that had they known, they would have sent Mago by ambulance to the hospital. A frustrated Jordan will say that Farrago knew where he was sitting and should have imparted the information, but little would have changed. He would have merely noted Mago’s need to receive medical clearance before boxing again. Mago, meanwhile, has been handed a $30,000 check for his night’s labor, but he is struggling to dress himself. His brother helps him into his street clothes, including a blue coat with a hood to grant him anonymity. “There’s your exit,” Farrago says, because, as he later explains: “I’m just not comfortable with where to go, which hospital is closest. I don’t work Manhattan.” Stumbling Out About 13 minutes before midnight, Mago and his entourage leave a dressing room that in a couple of weeks will be occupied by a cast member of a holiday musical called “A Christmas Story.” His father and brother keep close to ensure that he stays on his feet. At one point he stumbles, as if a leg has gone limp, and leans against a wall. Out into the yellow-bruise hall. Down the steps. Across the arena floor, a hood shielding Mago’s aching, puffed face. Through the doors and into the concrete cacophony of Eighth and 33rd. He takes a knee a few yards from a television satellite truck that has just shared his loss to the world, and now he is vomiting. “Hold on, brother,” his younger brother says. Team Mago panics. Two of its members race to find help. A police officer offers no assistance. A Russian-speaking livery driver speeds away. Mago’s distraught father is saying that no one seems to care about his son anymore, and keeps asking, Where is the ambulance? Finally, a man and a woman on the street bequeath the cab they have flagged down to Team Mago. The boxer is hustled into the taxi, which speeds to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital as hidden blood seeps. Back in the Garden’s labyrinth, the boxing inspector, Farrago, lingers. He moved on from boxing to become a medical-supply salesman with a college degree, but he has begun to worry that all those blows he took to the head have finally caught up with him, that he might have what they call dementia pugilistica. There have been hints of memory loss. But he hasn’t forgotten the wraps. He hustles to Gennady Golovkin’s dressing room to collect those valuable strips of gauze, which the champion has kindly signed. They will someday go for $350 at a fund-raiser for boxers down on their luck. Farrago also peeks into Mago’s small dressing room. Empty now. But he spots some garbage on the floor: the loser’s discarded wraps. The boxing inspector picks them up. Who knows? Maybe this fighter Mago will bounce back to become heavyweight champion of the world. Then these wraps will be worth something.  Despite emergency treatment at the hospital, Magomed Abdusalamov was left with severe brain damage. The family’s lawyer, Paul Edelstein, filed lawsuits against the athletic commission, its doctors and others, including Farrago (who later helped to raise money for the Abdusalamovs). The athletic commission — an agency within the Department of State in Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration — has undergone changes, including the appointment of a new chairman and the institution of new protocols. For example, a boxing inspector’s per-diem compensation has nearly doubled, to $100. Abdusalamov and his family live in a friend’s house in Greenwich, Conn. He is partly paralyzed, cannot speak and requires round-the-clock care .

Boxing
Magomed Abdusalamov
Mike Perez
Sports injury


Hershey Expects Lower Earnings This Year

Abstract: CHICAGO (Reuters) — The Hershey Company , which is losing market share to rivals like Mars Inc. as it battles rising costs, forecast on Thursday a drop in 2008 earnings. The company, which makes Hershey’s Kisses and Reese’s peanut butter cups, also said that profit fell 65 percent in the fourth quarter, affected by charges for the overhaul of its supply chain, impairment charges in its Brazilian operations and flat sales. The news drove shares of Hershey down 2 percent on the New York Stock Exchange. David J. West, the chief executive, said the company’s primary goal in 2008 was to stabilize its business in the United States. Hershey plans to spend more on marketing and will offer new products, including a line of chocolates developed with Starbucks. For 2008, the company forecast a 3 to 4 percent increase in sales and said earnings would be $1.85 to $1.90 a share before one-time items. The company reported earnings of $2.08 a share on that basis for 2007. Analysts, on average, had forecast $2.16 a share for 2008. Hershey has had little success with new dark chocolate products, was slow to get into the premium chocolate market and has faced tough competition in the gum and mint business. Hershey said profit was $54.3 million, or 24 cents a share, in the fourth quarter, compared with $153.6 million, or 65 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, earnings were 54 cents a share, a penny below the average analyst estimate compiled by Reuters Estimates. Sales were $1.34 billion, about flat with a year earlier. Hershey shares fell 71 cents Thursday, to $35.68.

Company Reports
Hershey Co
Chocolate
Stocks and Bonds


Ode to Pasta, and to the Pluck of the Italian Family Business

Abstract: PARMA, ITALY — Captains of industry came and kissed hands. Celebrities slipped through the crowds sipping sparkling wine. And local television reporters buttonholed smiling politicians, from both the left and the right, who had come together in a rare moment of concord for a nation stuck in parliamentary gridlock and economic crisis. What united them was the one thing that nearly all Italians can agree on: pasta. Or more precisely, the pasta maker Pietro Barilla, who died in 1993 but would have turned 100 on Tuesday, and whose life was being celebrated in old-world elegance at the gilded Teatro Regio in Parma. The show this week was part ode to pasta (“the soul of Italian cuisine,” according to one actor) and part biography. But mostly it was a feel-good moment for a country whose businesses are feeling bad, and a reminder to all of what has long distinguished the Italian economy — the charm and pluck of its family-run enterprises, which have weathered tough times before and even thrived to become global brands. It was also a chance of Italy’s politicians to stand up and show their pro-business bona fides, even if they are blamed by many industrial and financial leaders for prolonging a political paralysis that has made it all the harder to mobilize the economy. Emilia Romagna, where Parma is the provincial capital, is home to some of Italy’s most agriculturally abundant lands, which produce its famed cheese and prosciutto products, as well as an industrial sector that makes some of the world’s most famous sports cars. Titans of both sectors were on hand to celebrate the success story of a man praised by one guest, the Ferrari chairman, Luca di Montezemolo, as “an important made-in-Italy icon.” “Barilla is to Parma what Agnelli is to Turin,” said Marco Federici, a reporter for the Gazzetta di Parma, the local newspaper, which gave the commemoration copious coverage. “For Parma, this is a big event. The city is grateful to him, he did a lot of good.” The Italian entrepreneurial model that the Barilla story represents is based largely on small and medium businesses closely tied to their territory. The story of how Mr. Barilla propelled a family business based in Parma into a multinational brand is not without setbacks, a fact that made it more timely and appealing to many who watched and participated in the event. “It underscores that a moment of crisis can be useful for people to rethink their own lives, it can be a moment of opportunity,” said Giovanni Minoli, an Italian television reporter who narrated and wrote the script, “Pietro. One Hundred Years Ahead.” The Barilla brand began in 1877, with Mr. Barilla’s grandfather and a family-run bakery. “Barilla is not a brand, it is my family name,” Mr. Barilla said in a 1986 video, excerpts of which were shown during the performance, interspersed with musical interludes, poems and vignettes portraying the impact that Barilla — the man and the company — had on postwar Italy. The company produces both pasta and baked goods. A trip to New York in the early 1950s inspired significant investment in stylish designs and distinctive promotional campaigns that have entered into the history of Italian advertising. “Pasta became queen of the Italian kitchen,” said Francesco Alberoni, the author of a biography published this week, adding that Barilla had left a mark on Italian customs and that the ads had moved generations of Italians. Mr. Barilla’s foresight and optimism even in times of economic hardship were championed in the performance as a call to arms for local industrialists and entrepreneurs feeling the pinch of Italy’s lingering recession. The food industry is not without competition — in this moment, locals say, from Germany, Europe’s No. 1 exporter — and foreign companies have bought some of the area’s most iconic companies. The French food group Lactalis has bought the dairy giant Parmalat, which survived a 2003 financial fraud scandal. “We should not rest easy,” said Vincenzo Bernazzoli, president of the province of Parma. Persistent political instability in Rome has become a matter of growing concern for Italian industrialists, whose calls for support during the economic downturn have gone mostly unheeded. “The political situation doesn’t help us when it comes to making plans,” said the Barilla chief executive, Claudio Colzani, noting that the company had continued to invest in Italy, opening a sauces factory in a nearby town in October. At the same time, a sizeable portion of the business is now based outside Italy. Early elections appear increasingly likely after the failure of political leaders to form a governing majority seven weeks after inconclusive national elections, and many Italian lawmakers have gone into permanent campaign mode. The event, held Monday evening, was no different. Mr. Barilla’s life “is the story of a possible dream, the Italy that is achievable if you have vision and farsightedness, not the Italy of stagnation,” said Matteo Renzi, the 38-year-old mayor of Florence who has been aggressively vying for the past year to lead Italy’s main center-left party. He worked the hall expertly, with easy charm. Silvio Berlusconi, who announced over the weekend that he would again run as the center-right candidate for prime minister if snap elections were called, also made an appearance, his arrival at the theater here on Monday greeted by admiring fans, irate hecklers and a swarm of journalists roughly jostled by Mr. Berlusconi’s sizeable security detail. “Pietro was proud when he increased the number of his employees, or when a new factory opened,” said Mr. Berlusconi, 76, a media tycoon from Lombardy who counted Mr. Barilla as a friend, as many industrialists did. The proceeds of the show’s ticket sales were devolved to the Pietro Barilla children’s hospital in Parma, which this year received an €8.5 million, or $11 million, donation from the family. But the sold-out performance was also relayed on a maxi-screen in one of Parma’s main squares, and TV Parma broadcast it live. Despite the challenges facing Italy today, Mr. Barilla’s heirs are “optimistic about the future, even though we are aware of the difficulties of the moment, and know that significant resources are called for, but we see success ahead,” said Guido Barilla, one of the three Barilla sons who now run the business. Mr. Minoli, who scripted the show, believes that were the entrepreneur still alive today he would inspire his descendants with one of his trademark phrases: “Let’s move forward, move forward with courage.”

Italy
Economy
Pasta
Food
Silvio Berlusconi


Olesen Leads by 3 Strokes

Abstract: Thorbjorn Olesen took a three-shot lead at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in Scotland after a seven-under-par 65 at St. Andrews. Florian Fritsch was second after a 64 at Kingsbarns, with Benjamin Hebert another shot back after a 67 at Carnoustie. The players alternated among the three courses on the first three days, with the final round to be held at St. Andrews.


A Call to Streamline Drug Development by Sharing Information

Abstract: CAMBRIDGE, Mass. WHAT’S smaller than a breadbox, can cost $800 million or more, and takes more than eight years to research and develop? A new medicine, according to data from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development in Boston. And that’s just for traditional drugs made by using old-fashioned chemical molecules. Developing new biopharmaceuticals — those high-tech wonder drugs fashioned from living cells — can cost $1.2 billion, according to the center . Such amounts, of course, are staggering. Mind you, those costs aren’t only for the drug that has successfully made it through the testing gamut to your medicine cabinet, but also for all earlier iterations that failed. In fact, most of the cost in drug development is the price of failure, said Mervyn Turner, the chief strategy officer at the drug giant Merck. This linear, trial-and-error method is no longer a sustainable model for big pharmaceutical companies. “We invest far too long in bad ideas,” Dr. Turner said in a phone interview. “It is really important to stop that at an earlier stage in the cycle.” Now big-picture thinkers, within the industry and outside it, are re-examining every stage of drug development — from molecule to market — in an effort to foster faster innovation. It’s a holistic approach, called “systems thinking,” that originated in methods that engineers used to streamline projects in the aeronautics and automotive industries. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for one, started a pharmaceutical innovation program this year to help drug companies adapt some successful approaches now used in aeronautics, like lean management and information-sharing among rivals. “Aerospace had to change from ‘higher, faster, further,’ the mentality of performance at all costs, because they could not stay competitive,” said Deborah Nightingale, a professor of the practice of aeronautics and astronautics, and systems engineering, at M.I.T. Aeronautics had to re-examine cost in concert with quality, she said. “They had to become better, faster, cheaper.” Still, even Dr. Nightingale said that pharmaceutical executives weren’t yet feeling the heat — or “the burning platform” beneath their feet, as she calls it — that would force them to make large-scale, systemic changes. Perhaps that’s why initiatives at M.I.T. and other places are all the more important if the industry is to be nudged forward. The M.I.T. project, called New Drug Development Paradigms , has gathered a powerful consortium of interested parties — including major drug makers and federal health authorities. One short-term goal is to identify, and rectify, the root causes of bottlenecks in the existing system. Longer term, the ambition is to create new prediction models, new ways to share information about the biology of diseases, and a new inclusiveness involving earlier participation of regulators, health insurers, health care providers and patients. If that is to happen, some drug companies that have been fierce rivals will have to play nicer. Think of it not so much as swords into plowshares but as silos into platform-sharing. One idea is for drug makers to share information about compounds they have tried and shelved, for reasons like toxicity or inefficacy. Although many companies have committed to publishing the results of clinical trials, whether or not they succeed, drug makers don’t typically publish information about projects that fail at an earlier stage. A result is that companies waste many millions going down experimental paths that their competitors have already found to be dead ends. M.I.T. is proposing dead-end drug disclosure, a concept that goes by a euphemistic mouthful: “precompetitive information sharing.” Drug makers may realize that the financial and medical value of sharing such information outweighs the competitive risk, said Dr. Gigi Hirsch, the executive director of the M.I.T. Center for Biomedical Innovation, the locus of the drug project. “There should be more information available about failed compounds in the interest of the greater good,” Dr. Hirsch said. (Disclosure alert: This reporter’s father is a math professor at M.I.T. I did not tell him until now that I had spent a day on campus gathering material for this column at a conference on systems thinking. Sorry about that, Dad.) IN the absence of a public database on failed drug compounds, a small group from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. and the Harvard Business School has created Pharmer’s Market , an online prediction market that uses crowd-sourcing to forecast the likelihood of a drug’s success. Introduced last month, the market has invited biomedical researchers and other drug industry experts to place anonymous bets, using virtual money, on the likelihood that certain breast cancer drugs, currently in clinical trials, will succeed or fail. After the clinical trials conclude, researchers can assess whether this kind of collective intelligence may be a useful predictive tool for drug companies, said Ragu Bharadwaj, who helped devise the project as an M.I.T. graduate student. Many drug companies, meanwhile, are already incorporating new paradigms for collaborating on drug innovation. Two years ago, for example, Merck established a virtual lab, called External Basic Research, where company scientists can collaborate with outside researchers on identifying novel “targets” — the disease pathways in the body that medicines are intended to treat. This year, Dr. Stephen H. Friend left Merck, where he had worked as head of oncology, to start a nonprofit open-access information platform called Sage Bionetworks ; the idea is to collect huge biomedical data sets to help researchers better understand the molecular basis of disease, ultimately leading to the creation of smarter drugs. The overarching goal of new approaches industrywide, said Thomas Unger, executive director of research and development at Pfizer, is to bring new medications to patients faster, using a system “that makes the drugs more efficacious, offers greater safety and ultimately reduces the cost of therapies.”

Drugs (Pharmaceuticals)
Science and Technology
Medicine and Health
Research
Clinical Trials


Remembering Two Seminal Kennedy Speeches

Abstract: WASHINGTON — These days it is hard to imagine a single presidential speech changing history. But two speeches, given back to back by President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago this week, are now viewed as critical turning points on the transcendent issues of the last century. The speeches, which came on consecutive days, took political risks. They sought to shift the nation’s thinking on the “inevitability” of war with the Soviet Union and to make urgent the “moral crisis” of civil rights. Beyond their considerable impact on American minds, these two speeches had something in common that oratory now often misses. They both led quickly and directly to important changes. On Monday, June 10, 1963, Kennedy announced new talks to try to curb nuclear tests, signaling a decrease in tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. Speaking at American University’s morning commencement, he urged new approaches to the cold war, saying, “And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.” “In the final analysis,” he continued, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” The next evening, Kennedy gave an address on national television, sketching out a strong civil rights bill he promised to send to Congress. For the first time, a president made a moral case against segregation. He had previously argued publicly for obedience to court orders and had condemned violence, but not the underlying system. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution,” Kennedy said. “The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” Action followed. An agreement to establish a hot line between Washington and Moscow came in a few days, and a limited nuclear test ban treaty in four months. In just over a year, the 1964 Civil Rights Act became the most important American law of the 20th century. Kennedy, of course, did not live to see the comprehensive civil rights legislation, a crowning achievement of his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Republican leaders like Representative William M. McCulloch of Ohio and Senator Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois. Image "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution," said President John F. Kennedy on June 11, 1963, taking up the issue of civil rights. Credit Charles Gorry/Associated Press Robert Dallek, Kennedy’s leading biographer, said the two speeches were “not just two of his best speeches, but two of the better presidential speeches of the 20th century.” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a scholar of political discourse, said the two “compelling” speeches invited the country “to see the world differently, expanding our concept of basic rights and propelling action vindicated by history.” They are underappreciated as oratory, she said, because neither had a “simple central phrase” like “Ich bin ein Berliner,” which Kennedy said later that month, or “Ask not what your country can do for you,” from his inaugural address. Though Theodore C. Sorensen , the president’s main speechwriter, was the principal writer of both speeches, they were prepared in very different ways. The American University speech was a month in the making, growing out of Kennedy’s sense that if some progress on controlling arms was to be made, it had to happen in 1963, not in the election year of 1964, and from signals from the Kremlin that new talks might be productive. But it was kept secret from the Pentagon, because of fears that generals might object to any steps toward conciliation. In contrast, the civil rights speech was written in a few hours and was almost not given. Mr. Dallek said the American University speech reflected Kennedy’s “real passion” about his presidency, the goal of building “not merely peace in our time but peace for all time,” as Kennedy put it that morning. To achieve it, Kennedy said, it was necessary to “examine our attitude toward peace itself.” “Too many of us think it is impossible,” Kennedy said. “Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable — that mankind is doomed — that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. Image "We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal," said President John F. Kennedy at American University on June 10, 1963, announcing talks with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear tests. Credit Associated Press “We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made — therefore, they can be solved by man.” Another step was to “re-examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union.” He said that while it was “sad” to read Soviet propaganda insisting that the United States was planning many wars so it could dominate the world, “it is also a warning — a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.” He said Americans should understand that “no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements — in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.” Reminding his audience that at least 20 million Soviet citizens died in World War II, Kennedy said, “Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war.” “Today, should total war ever break out again — no matter how — our two countries would become the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.” On June 11, Kennedy had planned to speak about civil rights if there was trouble in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where Gov. George C. Wallace had vowed to stand in the way to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama. But Wallace simply made a statement and then stepped aside, and the process went smoothly. The speech seemed unnecessary. Sorensen, who had labored over the Monday speech, went home, only to be summoned back at midafternoon when the president’s brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy persuaded Kennedy to go ahead. Sorensen finished his draft with only minutes to spare, and Kennedy ad-libbed concluding paragraphs. Image President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act a year after President John F. Kennedy called the issue a “moral crisis.” Credit Associated Press The president had come to the civil rights issue only “grudgingly,” as Mr. Dallek put it. He thought segregation wrong and the Southerners who defended it “hopeless.” But for more than two years in the White House, he had treated the issue as a distraction from not only foreign policy but also tough domestic issues like a tax cut to spur the economy. Moreover, Mr. Dallek said, Kennedy and his brother thought the issue would cost him the Southern states he won in 1960 and could bring his defeat in 1964. Still, by late spring in 1963 the spread of civil rights demonstrations, and the brutality used in Birmingham and elsewhere to suppress them, forced his hand. And while he had fitfully used the word “moral” in civil rights statements, he had not made it a cause. He told the nation: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” Kennedy said: “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?” He was not addressing just the South, or even just Congress. “It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another,” he said. “A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.” This “moral crisis,” he said, “cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.” In between the two speeches, another critical issue arose. At a busy intersection in South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire. That set off the political developments that led to the ouster and murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem just three weeks before Kennedy’s own assassination.

Speeches
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Civil Rights
Soviet Union
President of the United States


Kenya Burns Elephant Ivory Worth $105 Million to Defy Poachers

Abstract: NAIROBI, Kenya — What do you do when you have more than $100 million worth of ivory sitting around, just collecting dust? You burn it, of course. That is what Kenya did on Saturday, when President Uhuru Kenyatta lit a huge pyre of elephant tusks as a way to show the world that Kenya is serious about ending the illegal ivory trade, which is threatening to push wild elephants to extinction. “No one, and I repeat, no one, has any business in trading in ivory, for this trade means death — the death of our elephants and the death of our natural heritage,” Mr. Kenyatta said. In the past few years, heavily armed poachers, using military tactics, have wiped out tens of thousands of elephants across Africa. Many of the tusks enter an underground pipeline to Asia, especially China, where ivory is used to make eyeglass frames, combs, statuettes and other trinkets. Wildlife experts say the street price of a kilogram of ivory is around $1,000. On Saturday, Kenya set alight 105 metric tons of ivory — its stockpile of confiscated and recovered tusks. It was the most ivory ever destroyed at one time, representing 6,000 to 7,000 dead elephants. At current prices, and without including the rhino horns also burned, that is a $105 million bonfire. Richard Leakey, one of Kenya’s leading conservationists, said he was “humbled, sad and encouraged.” “We shouldn’t have to burn 105 tons of ivory and 1.5 tons of rhino horn,” he said. “It is a disgraceful shame this continues.” This was not the first time that truckloads of tusks had been burned. Mr. Leakey presided over a large ivory bonfire in Kenya in 1989. Since then, many other countries have done the same to make the statement that ivory is worthless — unless it is on an elephant. For the first time in days, a pale blue sky stretched over Nairobi. Heavy rains had soaked the city in the past week, causing deadly floods. But the mountains of ivory, even though they had been sitting out in the rain, went up fast. Minutes after Mr. Kenyatta stuck a flaming torch inside one of the pyramids of tusks, columns of gray smoke curled out, wafting up toward the evening sky.

Kenya
Ivory
Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta
Poaching
Elephant


Prosecutor in Galleon Case Plans to Set Up His Own Firm

Abstract: Joshua I. Klein, an important prosecutor in the widening insider-trading case involving the Galleon Group and its founder, Raj Rajaratnam , is planning to resign to set up his own criminal defense firm, people close to the case said on Thursday. Mr. Klein, who has been an assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York for 10 years, is expected to leave the office next week. Along with fellow prosecutors Andrew Z. Michaelson and Jonathan R. Streeter, Mr. Klein has been front and center in the Galleon case, frequently speaking in court hearings, since Mr. Rajaratnam and five others were arrested in October. Earlier this week, he argued before Judge Richard J. Holwell in Federal District Court that Mr. Rajaratnam’s $100 million bail should not be reduced because he posed a risk of fleeing to his native Sri Lanka. The government did not ask the court to revoke Mr. Rajaratnam’s bail. Some legal experts said Mr. Klein’s departure was surprising given the prominence of the Galleon case. But others noted that Mr. Klein’s plans had most likely been in the works for a while and that there was enough time before trial to bring another prosecutor up to speed. People briefed on the matter said Mr. Klein was setting up a new firm with Guy Petrillo, a former head of the office’s criminal division, who recently worked at the law firm Dechert. Mr. Petrillo could not be immediately reached for comment. Mr. Klein, who worked as a senior counsel for the Securities and Exchange Commission before joining the United States attorney’s office, declined to comment on Thursday. A spokeswoman for the Southern District also declined to comment.

Federal District Courts
Galleon Group
Joshua I. Klein
Securities and Exchange Commission
Rajaratnam Raj