A Rise in Confidence Amid Mild Inflation

Abstract: Personal spending rose at its slowest rate in nine months in June while inflation moderated, but consumers’ mood brightened considerably in early July, data showed yesterday. Despite a rise in income, personal spending rose a slight 0.1 percent in June after posting 0.6 percent gains in April and in May, according to a Commerce Department report that suggested falling home prices and high gasoline costs were pinching consumers. That was well below Wall Street economists’ forecasts and was the weakest since last September, when spending declined. But the report also contained positive news about inflation. A closely watched inflation indicator has been rising over the last 12 months at its slowest rate in three years. The Federal Reserve has held benchmark interest rates steady for more than a year in hopes that persistent inflation would ease. The indicator, the core personal consumption expenditures price index — which excludes food and energy — rose 0.1 percent on the month and 1.9 percent on the year, the smallest year-on-year increase since March 2004. The overall price index rose 0.1 percent on the month and 2.3 percent on the year. Incomes grew in June by 0.4 percent, matching May’s increase, with its wages and salaries component advancing a solid 0.5 percent. The prospects for continuing income gains in a solid job market appeared to buoy consumer spirits as July got under way, despite concerns about problems in the subprime mortgage lending sector. A report from the Conference Board in New York showed consumer confidence hit a six-year high of 112.6 in July — its highest since August 2001. “It is quite noticeable that consumers are significantly more positive about employment,” said David Sloan, an economist with 4CAST, a market research firm in New York. “That might have people wondering if the employment report is going to be strong in July.” The Labor Department is scheduled to issue its July employment report on Friday. In separate data, the Labor Department said second-quarter employment costs had risen by 0.9 percent, slightly faster than the first quarter’s 0.8 percent rise, as benefits climbed sharply. But in the 12 months through June, employment costs were up 3.3 percent, moderately lower than the 3.5 percent increase in the 12-month period that ended in March and therefore unlikely to trouble the Fed. Another sign of the problems facing the housing industry came in a Commerce Department report showing that construction spending fell 0.3 percent in June, as more commercial building failed to offset declines in home building. Spending on private residential construction slipped 0.7 percent to a $544 billion annual rate, the lowest since March 2004 and the 16th consecutive month that spending to build homes has declined. Analysts said the slower pace of consumer spending would bear watching since spending drives two-thirds of national economic activity. “The worry is that consumers have finally decided that saving is good and spending everything may not be the way to salvation,” said one economist, Joel L. Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pa. The concern was offset to some degree by the confidence estimate issued by the Conference Board. John Spinello, a Treasury bond strategist for Jeffries and Company in New York, noted: “As someone said, you can’t spend confidence, but this is a pretty huge number.”

United States Economy
Economic Conditions and Trends
Interest Rates
Federal Reserve System


Iran Says It Will Offer New Nuclear Proposals

Abstract: Iran ’s top nuclear negotiator said Wednesday that he would offer “new initiatives” at the coming talks with world powers on its disputed nuclear energy program , apparently trying to strike a posture of conciliation without specifying which ideas he intended to propose. The assertion by the negotiator, Saeed Jalili, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, came two days before the talks, suspended in mutual frustration more than a year ago, are to reconvene in Istanbul. Mr. Jalili’s remarks, reported by the Islamic Republic News Agency, represented the first time he had publicly suggested that Iran would present something new at the talks since an agreement on resuming them was announced last month. Still, Mr. Jalili said nothing about the substance of Iran’s position or the central issue in the dispute: Iran’s enrichment of uranium, which at low-purity levels is used to produce energy and medical isotopes, but at much higher purity levels can fuel atomic bombs. Iran has been stockpiling a supply of enriched uranium for years, some of it considered only a few technical steps away from bomb grade, in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding a halt to the activity. Iran insists that it is legally entitled to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes and denies that it wants to become a nuclear weapons state. But the United States and its European allies have imposed increasingly onerous sanctions on the country in response to the enrichment program, including a European Union embargo of Iranian oil that will take effect on July 1. President Obama has called the negotiations Iran’s “last chance” to resolve the dispute diplomatically. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said that the United States has no patience with Iranian stalling in the negotiations. Israel has suggested that it will bomb suspected Iranian nuclear sites if the negotiations fail. The negotiations will be held Friday and Saturday between negotiators for Iran and the so-called P5-plus-1 group of countries — Britain, China, France, the United States and Russia, which are the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany. “Iran’s representatives will participate in the negotiations with new initiatives and we hope that the P5-plus-1 countries will also enter talks with constructive approaches,” Mr. Jalili said. He also denounced the sanctions imposed on Iran as useless bullying. “The language of threat and pressure against the Iranian nation has never yielded results but will lead to more seriousness in the attitude of the Iranian nation,” he said. His remarks echoed more boastful assertions on Tuesday by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who declared that the sanctions were a failure and that Iran had accumulated such a stockpile of hard currency that it could survive for years even if the country were unable to sell any oil, its most vital export. But American and European diplomats have said the United States and its European allies will demand that Iran immediately dismantle the new Fordo uranium-enrichment facility buried deep under a mountain near Qum, halt all production of uranium fuel enriched to 20 percent purity, which is considered just a few technical steps from weapons-grade purity, and ship stockpiles of that fuel out of the country. That position suggested that the world powers are at least open to the idea of monitored low-purity uranium enrichment in Iran, rather than a blanket halt to all enrichment. A hint of possible compromise from Iran emerged this week, when Ferydoon Abbasi, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, was quoted by Iranian news agencies as saying that Iran was prepared to enrich uranium to a maximum 20 percent purity just to meet the needs for a medical research reactor.

Iran
International Relations
Nuclear Weapons
Jalili Saeed


Michigan Residents Sue Officials Over Emergency Manager Law

Abstract: More than two dozen residents of Michigan filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against top officials in the state, contending that a new law broadly expanding the powers of emergency managers in the most financially troubled cities violates Michigan’s Constitution. The lawsuit , filed in Ingham County Circuit Court, contends that the law approved by Michigan lawmakers this year improperly allows the state to place new costs on municipalities without paying for them and, in essence, bars local residents from picking their own elected representatives. In March, leaders in Michigan — whose legislative chambers and governor’s office have been controlled by Republicans since last fall’s election — approved the measure granting more control to those sent into local governments and school districts by the state to avoid allowing such places to go bankrupt or fail entirely. Leaders of labor unions, in particular, were outraged by the provision because it allows such state-appointed emergency managers to, in some cases, undo provisions of the contracts that towns and cities had already agreed to. Some appeared for rallies in opposition in Lansing, the capital, this spring. But others had broader complaints; how, they asked, can a state-assigned official simply step into the role of an elected local leader and do whatever he or she wishes? “What you’re saying is that an emergency manager now controls all, including the right to enact or repeal local ordinances,” said John Philo, the legal director of the Sugar Law Center in Detroit, one of several groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, that is representing the plaintiffs in the suit. “What you’re saying is that one individual now without any sort of legislative process gets to enact a law.” Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican who is named as a defendant in the suit, along with the state’s treasurer, has strongly defended elements of the law in the past. The point is not to take over cities, Mr. Snyder said in an interview this spring, but to spare the state more financial distress and gauge fiscal distress in cities before they wind up in need of an emergency manager. The increased control by an appointed manager would make rehabilitation of the most miserable places possible, without the crushing, ratings-lowering possibility of bankruptcy. “It’s not an assault on collective bargaining, the way I viewed it,” Mr. Snyder said in the interview. “It’s about helping communities and municipalities do the best they can to survive during difficult economic times.” The notion of an emergency manager is not uncommon. States have tried a variety of approaches, including appointed receivers, to step in to spare cities from default, and the results have been mixed. Only four places in Michigan — including Detroit’s public school system — are now considered in such grave financial shape as to require oversight by emergency managers. But those numbers are expected to grow, as local budgets shrink further. Detroit’s pension funds had already filed suit challenging the measure, which they say presents emergency managers with “czarlike powers,” and more suits have been threatened. In the suit filed on Wednesday, 28 Michigan residents, including some community activists, expressed dismay, even astonishment, over the reach of the new law. “We have the right to vote and elect people and hold them accountable,” said Edith Lee-Payne, a plaintiff who is 59 and an activist who has grandchildren in Detroit’s public school system. “We don’t have that right with an emergency manager.”

Michigan
Suits and Litigation
Constitutions


Guerrillas Step Up Campaign in Paraguay

Abstract: TACUATÍ, Paraguay — The guerrillas appeared at dusk. Wielding assault rifles, they arrived at the remote cattle ranch clad in “para’i,” or camouflage, according to survivor accounts in Guaraní, the indigenous language that prevails here in Paraguay’s northern frontier. They abducted security guards at the Brazilian-owned ranch, freed a supervisor, who then rushed to inform the authorities, and ambushed the police officers who arrived at the scene. By the time the well-orchestrated raid in August had ended, five people were shot dead, including a police officer. The attack was the deadliest yet by the Paraguayan People’s Army, or E.P.P., a shadowy Marxist rebel group exerting influence across vast stretches of this California-size nation of 6.6 million people . “This is already a declared war against the republic,” said Francisco de Vargas, the interior minister. Insurgencies by groups like the Paraguayan People’s Army, which has been meticulously picking off security forces in remote frontier settlements, planting bombs under police vehicles, and kidnapping and killing wealthy Paraguayans, find a lot less maneuvering room in Latin America these days. Around the region, many such groups have been hunted down or incorporated into leftist political parties as military dictatorships gave way to democracies and dissent began emerging in different forms. Even where guerrillas persist, they are significantly winnowed down, like the Shining Path in Peru, or pursuing peace talks with the government, like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia . Then there is Paraguay, one of Latin America’s poorest and most unequal nations. Even as the economy booms, the Paraguayan People’s Army is evolving from a ghostlike irritant for the authorities in Asunción, the capital, into a broader security threat in a backcountry that is already a hub for traffickers of marijuana, defiantly cultivated here on sprawling plantations, and Andean cocaine smuggled into Brazil and Argentina. Nearly everything about the Paraguayan People’s Army is in dispute, from its size to its ideology, with an important exception: The group’s operations are intensifying this year, building on a slow-burning insurgency in areas where the guerrillas are thought to draw support from impoverished farmers chafing at the expansion of large-scale soybean farms and cattle ranches. The group is carrying out attack after attack on isolated police and army posts, while pursuing targeted killings of peasants accused of collaborating with security services. Bivouacking in the dense remnants of the Atlantic Forest that once blanketed much of Paraguay, it has eluded every military campaign aimed at eradicating it. While the official estimates of victims killed by the group remains relatively low, numbering in the low dozens, pockets of northern Paraguay have nevertheless taken on the semblance of a war zone as the central government ramps up military patrols and deploys special operations units to find the guerrillas. In Tacuatí, a town of 11,000 people that is thought to be a Paraguayan People’s Army bastion, police officers barely out of their teens nervously grasp rifles, squinting at visitors behind a makeshift barrier of sandbags. Tanks roll down nearby country roads. Personnel trucks carry elite army forces, their faces covered in bandannas. “The soldiers think they’ll find the E.P.P.,” said Elizabete Schneider, 32, the owner of a small food store on the lonely road into the town. “But the guerrillas are like phantoms,” she said. “No one sees them; no one talks about them.” Army units chasing a mysterious rebel group credited with a baffling elusiveness: it sounds retro enough to evoke old tales like Graham Greene’s 1973 novel, “The Honorary Consul,” about hapless guerrillas from, of all places, Paraguay, led by a renegade priest who kidnap the wrong man, a whiskey-soaked Briton. Image The Paraguayan People’s Army is believed to have been created by trainee priests, similar to the rebels in Mr. Greene’s book, in 1992 who abandoned a seminary. The group originally functioned as a cell of a leftist political party and was implicated in the 2004 abduction of Cecilia Cubas , the 32-year-old daughter of Raúl Cubas, Paraguay’s former president. Her corpse was found in a shallow grave near Asunción in 2005 after her family had paid a ransom for her release. “The E.P.P. are Marxists who want to take over Paraguay,” said Bernardo Cristaldo Mieres, 35, a Roman Catholic priest in the town of Choré whose younger brother, Manuel Cristaldo Mieres, a leader of the group, is thought to have masterminded Ms. Cubas’s kidnapping. The priest said he had not spoken with his brother for nine years. “I don’t support his violence,” he said. Estimates of the Paraguayan People’s Army’s size now range from a little more than a dozen hardened combatants to as many as 150, in addition to a broader support network in poor villages. The group’s most prominent published document, a manifesto by Alcides Oviedo Brítez, an imprisoned leader, is “surprisingly shallow and unimpressive,” said Andrew Nickson, an expert on Paraguay at the University of Birmingham in Britain. In the manifesto, the group, which adopted its current name in 2008, proposes the destruction of “imperial-bourgeois democracy” and lauds José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the despot who tried to seal off Paraguay from the outside world in the 19th century, establishing a bizarre police state while declaring himself head of the landlocked nation’s Roman Catholic Church. Beyond its nationalistic underpinnings, the Paraguayan People’s Army opposes industrialized agriculture, feeding off resentment in rural areas over the growth of large soybean farms (many of which are Brazilian-owned), drawing and sometimes coercing support from poor farmers in areas where the public services are minimal. In the group’s heartland, the challenges facing the rebels are clear. On recently deforested lands, marked by the brick ovens where peasants convert felled trees into charcoal, soybean farms are expanding. The deforestation presents an existential threat to the guerrillas, limiting the terrain where they can hide from security forces. The guerrillas were blamed for the killing in May of Luis Lindstron, 63, the former mayor of Tacuatí and the owner of a logging operation who was shot dead in an ambush. The group had kidnapped him in 2008, releasing him after more than 40 days of captivity. Seeking to stop such killings, various political leaders have tried to eliminate the Paraguayan People’s Army. In 2010, Fernando Lugo, then the president, declared a state of emergency and sent nearly 200 elite troops, some trained by the United States military, to find the rebels. In 2011, the central government tried yet again, sending about 3,000 troops and police officers into the group’s territory. While some arrests were made, the group itself remains elusive. It appears to have recently shifted strategy, focusing less on kidnappings and more on attacking large ranches in an effort to extract payments from landowners. The raid here in August, coming soon after President Horacio Cartes was inaugurated, followed this pattern. Since then, the Paraguayan People’s Army seems to have renewed attacks on security forces, including an ambush in October in which the guerrillas are suspected of shooting dead a police officer in a convoy of official vehicles. From the Paraguayan Army’s new military outpost in Tacuatí, a collection of tents and barracks put up about two months ago, soldiers fan out each day on patrols aimed at finding the rebels. The mood one recent morning was decidedly relaxed for a counterinsurgency outpost. Officers sipped tereré, Paraguay’s ubiquitous infused drink, while a villager rolled up a cart, selling Kentucky cigarettes. Soldiers in a tent watched “S.W.A.T.,” a 2003 movie starring Samuel L. Jackson, on a laptop computer. “It’s calmer here than in Horqueta,” said Maj. Pedro Argüello, 40, referring to the town where a senior police official was killed just hours earlier in an attack attributed to the Paraguayan People’s Army. “We know the guerrillas are out there,” he said. “We just don’t know where.”

Paraguay
Military
Attacks on Police
Agriculture


Making a Match for College’s Reluctant Elite

Abstract: The man who saved this college football Saturday for the couch potato fan is neither a millionaire coach nor a Heisman Trophy candidate. Dave Brown , a vice president for programming at ESPN , will not even get any airtime on his own network. Instead, he is a college football matchmaker with an increasingly prudish clientele. Brown’s job is to help create attractive games for television in an environment dominated by universities trying to schedule more home games to make money and athletic directors and coaches becoming more squeamish about playing difficult out-of-conference opponents. “If your whole thing is to get your team ready to win your conference championship and be undefeated, then the way the system is set up, it’s encouraging people to have less games across the nation that might have a chance to put you with one loss,” Texas Coach Mack Brown said. It is Dave Brown’s job to combat that reality, which is underscored by there being no games between top 25 teams this weekend. He helped create more than 10 attractive games this season, including Saturday’s matchup between Penn State and Oregon State, and Cincinnati’s game at Oklahoma. “There’s not a great rocket science to it,” Brown said. “If someone has a game available, if someone has an opportunity for us to come up with a situation that works for everyone, we see if we can get some more games.” Brown’s job is to play Chuck Woolery to interested universities as he crisscrosses the country, spending about 100 days a year on the road to build relationships and make pitches. He was spotted chatting up Kansas Coach Mark Mangino on an escalator at the Big 12’s media day. He pulled aside South Florida Coach Jim Leavitt by a table of lobster carcasses at the Big East media day clambake. While the current environment is working against Brown, he said it was no more difficult than creating games 12 or 15 years ago. “The increasing popularity of the sport really has helped us,” he said. Both the Oregon State-Penn State game and the Cincinnati-Oklahoma game were hatched last fall. The situations were quite different, but they worked for the universities involved. Oregon State will not be getting a return visit from Penn State, but it will receive an $800,000 check and three hours of exposure on ABC. Penn State got a chance to improve a soft nonconference schedule that included games against Coastal Carolina, Syracuse and Temple. The Nittany Lions will also get the benefit of a sold-out stadium and the revenue from a home game without having to sacrifice one in an upcoming season by playing on the road. For Oklahoma and Cincinnati, the circumstances were a bit different. The Sooners had lacked a big-time nonconference game, but now they have three respectable ones against Washington, Cincinnati and Texas Christian. Oklahoma Coach Bob Stoops said the need for big out-of-conference games had decreased since the Bowl Championship Series switched its emphasis to human polls and away from a computer-weighted strength of schedule. “There’s less incentive to play them,” Stoops said. “They’ve devalued strength of schedule. Everyone says when they vote that they still pay attention to it, but when you look at the top 25, it usually goes in order of losses. At the end, if a team is undefeated regardless of who they’ve played, they jump any team who lost one game.” In a coup for the Bearcats, the Sooners will play at Cincinnati in 2010. That game would be considered one of the biggest home games in the university’s history. “This was a one-shot deal for us,” Cincinnati Coach Brian Kelly said at Big East media day. He added that the Bearcats would not play a major out-of-conference game without a return game. In a weekend slim on attractive matchups, Miami’s visit to Florida looms as an intriguing game. Florida Athletic Director Jeremy Foley noted that the Gators played in the Southeastern Conference, usually one of the toughest in the country, and also faced rival Florida State of the Atlantic Coast Conference in their final regular-season game every year. Foley said that a 14-week season, which gives the Gators two bye weeks, helped make the Miami game a possibility. Foley said games like Ohio State’s trip to Southern California on Sept. 13 were becoming a rarity. “I think you’re going to see a lot of teams early in the season schedule games that folks don’t see as too attractive,” Foley said. Brown said one of the reasons this week was so light on big games was that Tennessee and U.C.L.A. moved their game from this weekend to Labor Day night to accommodate ESPN. Another Labor Day weekend matchup that Brown set up, Fresno State’s victory at Rutgers last Monday, came together this March only because Kansas State bought out its game with the Bulldogs for $250,000. Kansas State Coach Ron Prince said there was a simple reason why coaches did not want aggressive scheduling. “It’ll get you fired,” he said. “There’s pressure to qualify for a bowl. If you don’t have a high enough ranking, you can’t get in the B.C.S. The money is such where there’s consequences of not winning a certain number of games.” To coaches, that reality is a lot more important than television ratings.

Brown Dave
ESPN
College Athletics
Football
Colleges and Universities
Television


Bale Has Setback, but His New Team Is Surging Ahead

Abstract: MADRID — Gareth Bale’s long-awaited home debut for Real Madrid was delayed Sunday after he injured himself warming up. Even without Bale, its star summer signing, Real Madrid overpowered lowly Getafe, winning, 4-1. Bale was scheduled to play on Sunday for the first time at Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu stadium, raising huge expectations among home fans and prompting Marca, Spain’s biggest-selling sports newspaper, to call the occasion “B-Day.” While warming up with his teammates, though, Bale clutched his left thigh. He soon left the field. After the match, Carlo Ancelotti, Real Madrid’s coach, said Bale had what appeared to be a “small problem” rather than a serious injury, with further medical examination scheduled for Monday. Ancelotti predicted that Bale would miss Wednesday’s game against Elche but would probably be fit for Madrid’s match against city rival Atlético next weekend. Ancelotti said Bale’s early-season difficulties went beyond his lack of playing time after a prolonged summer vacation. Bale’s future was also unclear for weeks. His London club, Tottenham Hotspur, resisted Madrid’s attempts to sign him until a day before the closing of the transfer season. Image Gareth Bale, right, was hurt in warm-ups and missed his first scheduled home game with Real Madrid. Credit Denis Doyle/Getty Images “The season of Bale was very peculiar, and not only physically but also mentally,” Ancelotti said. “He had to wait a lot. I think that is the problem.” Bale played his last meaningful match for Tottenham in May, scoring the only goal against Sunderland. After switching teams three weeks ago for about $135 million, Bale has played twice for Madrid and played 87 minutes over all — about the equivalent of a full game. He scored in his debut against Villareal and came on as a substitute in Madrid’s opening game in the Champions League, a rout of Galatasaray in Istanbul. After Bale was injured Sunday, his replacement in the lineup, Isco, played as if he, not Bale, might be Madrid’s most impressive summer signing, scoring his fifth goal of the season on a powerful curling shot. Cristiano Ronaldo scored twice for Madrid. Ancelotti said that Isco, a 21-year-old whom Madrid signed from Málaga, was showing not only great talent but also “a lot of personality.” Asked whether he had rejoiced at the news that Bale would not play, Getafe’s coach, Luis García, said that “it’s all the same” because a team like Madrid has enough talent to beat 80 percent of the other teams in La Liga. Based on Sunday’s evidence, it would be hard to disagree.

Soccer
Gareth Bale
Real Madrid
Getafe CF Soccer Team


An Instant of Nut-Fueled Rage Draws a Year in Korean Jail

Abstract: SEOUL, South Korea — A former Korean Air vice president who ordered a plane back to its gate in a fit of anger over how she had been served macadamia nuts was convicted Thursday of violating aviation safety law and sentenced to a year in prison. The executive, Cho Hyun-ah, whose father is the airline’s chairman, became an object of international ridicule after the Dec. 5 episode, in which she forced a Korean Air plane taxiing at Kennedy International Airport in New York to return to the gate so the chief steward could be removed. She was said to have been angry that a first-class flight attendant had served the nuts without first asking her, then in an unopened package rather than on a plate. A district court in Seoul ruled Thursday that Ms. Cho had illegally forced the flight to change its route by ordering it back to the gate. Her conduct subjected the passengers to potential danger, the court said. “She forced the plane to turn around as if it were her own private plane,” Judge Oh Seong-u said in announcing the sentence. Ms. Cho, who has been in custody throughout her trial, sat upright during most of the sentencing hearing, wearing a green jail uniform. But when the judge read the letter of repentance she had submitted to the court seeking leniency, she lowered her head and wiped away tears, her shoulders shaking with sobs. In the letter, Ms. Cho, one of South Korea ’s wealthiest women, described how she was adjusting to life in jail, where she was issued the bare minimum of necessities. She said she was humbled by the generosity of fellow inmates who shared lotion, shampoo and other toiletries with her. “I know my faults and I’m very sorry,” Ms. Cho said in her letter. But the judge said her tantrum, widely covered by international news media, damaged the “national image” of South Korea. “It is doubtful that the way the nuts were served was so wrong,” he said, adding that her verbal and physical assaults on crew members had violated their “human dignity.” He also questioned the sincerity of Ms. Cho’s expressions of remorse. Prosecutors had asked that Ms. Cho be sentenced to three years. What became known as the “nut rage” episode set off outrage in South Korea, where many harbor deep misgivings about the perceived arrogance of the families who control the country’s major conglomerates, known as chaebol. The scandal escalated as prosecutors charged that Korean Air management had tried to silence the flight’s crew to protect Ms. Cho. Her father, Cho Yang-ho, apologized for her conduct and removed her as vice president of the airline. The court also sentenced a Korean Air executive, Yeo Un-jin, to eight months in prison on Thursday for pressuring crew members on the December flight to lie to government investigators and delete emails describing the episode. In their emails, crew members had accused Ms. Cho of using abusive language and throwing documents at one of the flight attendants, prosecutors said. Mr. Yeo also blamed the crew for the episode in order to “hide the wrongdoings of management,” the court said in a statement. A Transport Ministry official, Kim Un-seob, was sentenced to six months in prison for illegally briefing Mr. Yeo on what were supposed to be confidential details of an official inquiry into the episode. The sentence was suspended. Earlier this month, Park Chang-jin, the steward who was removed from the plane, said Ms. Cho had forced him and the junior attendant to apologize on their knees, “like slaves in a medieval era.” Korean Air had no immediate comment on the court’s rulings.

Korean Air Lines
Cho Hyun-ah
Airlines,airplanes
Cho Yang-ho
Decisions and Verdicts
South Korea


U.S. Player Ratings: Austria (1), U.S. (0)

Abstract: VIENNA — On a cold night at Ernst Happel Stadium, the United States men’s national soccer team ended its 2013 year Tuesday with a sloppy exhibition loss against an Austria team that failed to qualify for the World Cup. After a dull scoreless draw against Scotland on Friday night, the United States was able to create more chances against Austria, but it also turned the ball over too frequently and was sloppy over all in a 1-0 defeat. It was a disappointing end to a positive year in which the United States won the Gold Cup and finished first in its World Cup qualifying group. The nature of these exhibitions was to give Coach Jurgen Klinsmann a chance to evaluate his roster, and several players improved their standing. Geoff Cameron was given the rare opportunity to start at right back and made the most of it. The substitute midfielder Mix Diskerud also helped his case, providing a spark in the second half. Next up for the United States will be the annual January camp which will culminate in an exhibition for its first game of 2014. Starting Lineup TIM HOWARD: It was a solid performance from the New Jersey native, who distributed well and made all the saves expected of him. Rating: 6.0 GEOFF CAMERON: Usually a central defender for the United States, Cameron was given the chance against Austria to play right back, where he is a regular with Stoke City. Over all, he was the best American player as Austria had few chances down his side. He also was involved in the attack, and his crosses were dangerous. Rating: 7.0 OMAR GONZALEZ: After an average game against Scotland, Gonzalez was better against Austria, improving as the game wore on. Several times when Austria threatened, Gonzalez made an important clearance. Rating: 5.5 JOHN BROOKS: Im his second game for the national team, Brooks appeared nervous at the start. He should have cleared the low cross that led to Austria’s goal. He was much better in the second half, but his grade suffered because he was partly at fault in one of the deciding moments of the game. Rating: 4.5 DAMARCUS BEASLEY: In a year in which Beasley has been converted to the United States team’s left back, the results have been mixed. Against Austria, Beasley again showed that the move was still a work in progress. He was involved in the attack and was dangerous, but Austria had success attacking down his side. Rating: 5.0 JERMAINE JONES: As one of two United States defensive midfielders, Jones turned the ball over too frequently. As a result, the team lost the possession battle for long periods of time. He tried to push forward more than usual but rarely was dangerous. Rating: 4.5 MICHAEL BRADLEY: With Fabian Johnson, Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan injured, Bradley had the job of helping the United States win the midfield battle. He had several nice moments and helped kept the midfield in order when many others were having off-nights. Rating: 6.0 ALEJANDRO BEDOYA: Playing on the right wing, Bedoya worked hard at both ends but had little to show for it. He was part of a few dangerous chances but was rarely a threat to the Austrian defense: Rating: 5.0 ARON JOHANNSSON: In his second start for the national team, Johannsson was asked to play a completely different role. Usually a forward counted on for shots on goal, Johannsson played in the midfield and was asked to distribute and create plays. He appeared uncomfortable. Rating: 5.0 BREK SHEA: After a surprisingly good outing against Scotland in which he came on in the second half, Shea was not a factor against Austria. He was rarely dangerous and lost the ball when under pressure from the Austrian defense. Rating: 4.0 JOZY ALTIDORE: In his usual role of starting as the lone forward, Altidore battled all night to win possession for the United States and was a handful for the defense. His finishing could have been better, but he was effective in creating offensive opportunities. Rating: 6.0 Substitutes EDDIE JOHNSON: The Seattle Sounders attacker was an improvement over Shea with his holdup ability, but he could not break down the defense. Rating: 4.5 MIX DISKERUD: The Rosenborg defender looked comfortable in the attack when he entered in the second half. He was a boost of energy and certainly helped his standing with the team. Rating: 6.0 TERRENCE BOYD: Tuesday’s game was a homecoming for Boyd, who plays his club soccer with Rapid Vienna. He was part of the buildup to a few good chances, but his execution was lacking. Still, the team played well with him on the field. Rating: 5.5 SACHA KLJESTAN: When he came on in the second half,, he was an improvement as the United States began to press for an equalizer. Rating: 5.5 ERIC LICHAJ: It was a difficult task for Lichaj to replace Cameron, who was the top American player in the game. The Nottingham Forest right back did not make any major mistakes, but he was not impressive enough to be in contention for a spot on the World Cup roster. Rating: 5.5 CHRIS WONDOLOWSKI: After coming on late in the second half, Wondolowski did not play enough to earn a grade: Rating: Incomplete Coaching JURGEN KLINSMANN: The effects of these November games are not going to be measured by the results, but rather by what Klinsmann learns as he prepares the team for the World Cup. He had an extended look at the newcomers John Brooks and Aron Johannsson, while perhaps seeing that Geoff Cameron may be an option to start at right back. His team lost and did not score, but it was a good opportunity to learn. Rating: 5.5


Brand Brings Extra Baggage to Philadelphia

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — Sitting courtside at Game 2 of last season’s N.B.A. finals, Elton Brand went unnoticed among his N.B.A. brethren. That was a problem. He was dressed in a suit, not a jersey. That was a problem. Once again, Brand, a nine-year N.B.A. veteran, was not playing for a championship. That was the biggest problem. During the game, Brand’s mind drifted back a couple of years, when the Clippers began to show promise, stepping out of the Lakers’ shadow and qualifying for the playoffs. Then last season, the Clippers regressed after a ruptured Achilles’ tendon limited Brand to eight meaningless games. He would soon become a free agent, and he had a decision to make. His intentions at the time, he said, were to re-sign with the Clippers if they surrounded him with talent. Four months later, Brand is a 76er, and his off-season signing carries the potential to disrupt the balance of power in the Eastern Conference. He is closer to his hometown, Peekskill, N.Y., and is ready to embark on a campaign to jump-start the upstart 76ers . “It’s real life,” Brand said of leaving the Clippers, where he was the workmanlike face of a woebegone franchise. “It’s business and just a part of my career. I had a great time there, but I totally moved on since that.” But as nearly all beginnings do, this one also signaled an end. How exactly he landed here remains a contentious issue. Brand’s career is defined as one step too late or one step askew. It originated in Chicago with the post-Michael Jordan Bulls; they won a combined 32 games in his two seasons there. Brand’s seven-year tenure with the Los Angeles Clippers, save for one playoff run, was flanked by years of untapped and unfulfilled potential among his teammates. Still, productivity and Brand were synonymous. He established his résumé as one of the best in the N.B.A., a steady forward who called 20 points and 10 rebounds an average night’s work. The talent that seemed to ensure Brand’s re-signing with the Clippers came when they acquired point guard Baron Davis, who had surprisingly opted out of his contract with the Golden State Warriors. Insiders whispered collusion, that the Clippers tampered with Davis before he became a free agent, promising a long-term contract, a return to his hometown of Los Angeles and a potent inside-outside pairing with Brand. Except there was one problem: Brand never re-signed. He was on the verge, focusing on the fine print with Clippers Coach Mike Dunleavy, who also had the role of general manager, a title recently made official by the team’s parting with its longtime vice president for basketball operations, Elgin Baylor. Dunleavy negotiated directly with Brand. They agreed on money and years, but became stuck at a point for an early termination option, a clause that would allow him to become a free agent earlier. “My last correspondence with him was July 1 at 7:57 p.m.,” Dunleavy recently said in a telephone interview. “He texted, ‘Hey Coach, I have some problem with some language and the E.T.O.’ “By the next morning, I texted him back and said I got it taken care of and to call me. I haven’t heard from him since.” At that point, Brand recalled, his agent, David Falk, told him: “Turn your phone off. You’re not talking to them anymore. I’m your agent. Let me do my job.” Brand cut off communication with everybody from the Clippers. Falk took charge of Brand’s negotiations and, after entertaining an offer from the Warriors, Brand signed a five-year, $82 million deal with the 76ers. The signing ignited a war of words between Dunleavy and Falk, through radio waves and newspapers. It put a mark on Brand’s good-guy reputation in the N.B.A. “It wasn’t an issue of him leaving,” Dunleavy said. “It was an issue how Elton left. To me, it was that he didn’t even call or explain it after the time we had together. I basically did all I could for the guy. He could have called me up and said this is better for my family and I would have said O.K. What could I do with that? “After being with somebody for five years and being as close as I thought I was with someone and a guy gives his word, that’s all it would have taken as far as I’m concerned. It’s just one of those types of things.” Brand acknowledged that he had not spoken with Dunleavy since. “After that, it was kind of he-said, she-said; I didn’t know what was true,” Brand said. “But Coach Dunleavy was the best pro coach I played for. I got the furthest in my career and I was an All-Star under him. I hope it’s water under the bridge because I think he’s a good coach and a good person.” He has joined a 76ers team that was already young and athletic before he arrived. Now, they possess an All-Star and a guiding influence in Brand, who says that his Achilles’ tendon is fully healed. The Knicks learned as much when Brand scored 18 points in the first quarter of a recent preseason game. Knicks Coach Mike D’Antoni saw enough of Brand in the Pacific Division when Brand cobbled together most-valuable-player-like numbers and pushed the Phoenix Suns to the brink of elimination in the 2005-6 playoffs. The 76ers are transforming into a run-and-gun team, in the mold of D’Antoni’s former Suns. Whether Brand upsets or aids that progress, D’Antoni said, is up for debate. “They were a big, up-tempo, running kind of a team and we’ll see if they have to slow it down with him,” D’Antoni said. “We’ll see if that’s good or bad. I’m hoping it’s bad. But they’re hoping it’s good. Knowing him, it’s probably good, though, because he’s a heck of a basketball player.” Already, Brand said, the atmosphere is different from his years on the West Coast. “Out here, they analyze and say, ‘Oh, he didn’t do this,’ or, ‘He didn’t do that,’ ” Brand said. “It’s kind of cool because it makes you be a better player, but I don’t think people will talk too much about a preseason Clipper game at this time, unless it was against the Lakers or something like that. They’re dissecting your game in the first preseason game. But I like that pressure. That’s what you play for.” So much time has lapsed, it is somewhat easy to forget Brand hails from the East Coast. “People definitely say where have you been and people think I’m from Chicago or Los Angeles,” Brand said. “They remember me from my first few years in the league or the games on the West Coast are so late on the East Coast, so they didn’t get a lot of chances to watch.” He can return to Peekskill, about an hour north of Manhattan and straddling the Hudson River, on an off day to see his mother and grandfather. His wife, Shahara, has family in New Jersey, and the couple is expecting their first child this month. He is nearly home. But this return is also about business. Brand is in Philadelphia to lose the notion of himself as the likable All-Star destined to never play for a championship. “Winning cures all ails,” said Brand, 29. “Whatever it is, if you can win, they’ll see you in that light. And that’s what I have to do. And I think this is definitely my best opportunity right now and maybe last.”

Brand Elton
Los Angeles Clippers
Philadelphia 76ers
Free Agents (Sports)
Basketball
National Basketball Assn


Citizen Vigilance Leads to Toy Recalls

Abstract: When the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered a recall of half a million pieces of lead jewelry yesterday, it had two unusual partners: Ward Stone and his 10-year-old daughter, Montana. Mr. Stone, a wildlife pathologist in New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, and his daughter discovered the hazardous levels of lead in dozens of children’s necklaces and bracelets sold at stores like Michaels and Big Lots after they tested jewelry that Montana had received at birthday parties. They then took their findings to the New York state attorney general’s office. Toys and other products have long been recalled after consumers reported injuries or deaths related to those items. But the spate of toy recalls seems to have stirred up more interest among ordinary consumers like Mr. Stone and his daughter, who marched a determined path to bring their testing results to the government’s attention. Flawed products including poisonous toothpaste, baby bibs containing lead and children’s bracelets with cadmium have been discovered and reported by individuals this year. “These folks are our eyes and ears and can catch stuff as it hits their community,” said Katherine Kennedy, a special deputy attorney general at the New York attorney general’s office, which brought the items in yesterday’s recall to the attention of the federal commission after meeting with Mr. Stone. In addition to agreeing to recall the items, Big Lots, Michaels and 10 other companies signed a consent agreement with Andrew M. Cuomo , New York’s attorney general, promising not to sell items with elevated lead levels. That agreement that will give Mr. Cuomo the power to fine the 12 companies for any future lead jewelry infraction anywhere in the country — a power that the federal consumer product agency does not have. The commission says that the surge in toy recalls in the last few months was mostly the result of companies stepping up their testing for lead and other hazards. But the commission is seeing an increase in inquiries from consumers and consumer groups, said Scott Wolfson, a spokesman for the commission. Mr. Wolfson said the commission welcomes the tips and does its best to respond quickly. But consumers and consumer groups that have contacted the commission said the agency’s response is often slow, if it comes at all. “They don’t thank people, and they often come out and deny problems when consumer groups raise them,” said Charles Margulis, the communications director for the Center for Environmental Health, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, Calif., that frequently tests toys. This week, the center released a list of 10 children’s products, like ceramic tea sets and bat and ball sets, that the center says have hazardous levels of lead. Two of the products had lead paint, and eight contained lead in vinyl material, the center said. The product commission says it is investigating these products and others found in the last week by several consumer advocacy groups. Judy Braiman is another consumer vigilante who has been telephoning government officials this month. Ms. Braiman, a grandmother of six, leads a small group of mothers based in Rochester, who regularly buy children’s products to test them. Two weeks ago, Ms. Braiman purchased a Sassy & Chic bracelet sold to children at a Dollar Tree store. Testing at a local lab found that metal beads on the jewelry consisted of 23 percent cadmium, a metal that the federal Department of Health and Human Services has identified as a potential carcinogen. This week, Ms. Braiman tested a second bracelet sold at Dollar Tree under the Holiday Ice brand. She found that one of its charms had a 34 percent cadmium content. Dollar Tree pulled the Sassy & Chic bracelets off shelves after Ms. Braiman’s group issued a press release, said Timothy Reid, vice president of investor relations for Dollar Tree Stores, in an e-mail message. The company is investigating her claim about the Holiday Ice bracelets, which are still on shelves. The federal products commission is also investigating Ms. Braiman’s findings, an agency spokesman said. The commission does not have an explicit standard about cadmium but could choose to take action on the Dollar Tree bracelets under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. Ms. Braiman says her testing has caused two children’s jewelry recalls in the last two years — an assertion the commission would not confirm or deny. The commission’s recall releases sometimes mention other government agencies that discover hazardous products. But the commission does not generally credit individual people or nonprofit groups when they discover problems. The Center for Environmental Health, for example, was not listed on the Nov. 8 recall of Curious George plush toys, because of lead paint on George’s plastic face. That hazard that was discovered by the center. Mr. Stone and his daughter Montana began their testing nine months ago after Montana heard news reports about lead in children’s jewelry. She asked her father about the safety of the jewelry she had received as favors at birthday parties. Mr. Stone, 68, used a lead testing process that he usually uses on deer carcasses to test for bullets in New York. (It is illegal in some circumstances to shoot deer with guns rather than bow and arrow.) Mr. Stone found that more than half of his daughter’s jewelry tested positive. Soon, the Stones bought 75 more pieces of jewelry in stores near their home in Albany. Of those, 56 pieces contained more than 0.06 percent lead, the federal limit, and some were half lead, Mr. Stone said, adding that he plans to continue testing children’s jewelry even after the recall. Mr. Stone works in an agency of New York state government unrelated to the attorney general, but he took his test results to Mr. Cuomo’s office last February. Mr. Cuomo then started an investigation of children’s jewelry sold in the state, including additional testing. Lead paint on toys is banned by federal law but the amount of lead found in metal objects for children is covered by a voluntary regulation that says such products should not consist of more than 0.06 percent lead, by weight. Mr. Cuomo’s office is approaching companies that have had lead problems and asking them to agree to a mandatory 0.06 percent limit nationwide. That way, his office can levy penalties when such limits are broken, even outside New York. The attorney general’s settlement also has a provision that requires the retailers to do their own testing and makes them liable if their suppliers’ tests are found to be faulty. Many companies in last summer’s recalls were quick to blame their suppliers. “We are in charge here, we can enforce it, and we can hold their feet to the fire,” said Ms. Kennedy of the attorney general’s office. The federal products commission does not have the power to fine companies who sell lead-laden metal jewelry, because the limit is voluntary. The commission is working on a rule that would ban jewelry with more than 0.06 percent lead and give the commission the power to fine companies that break the rule. Mr. Stone was in an unusual position because he knew who to call in the state government. Consumer advocates say it can be difficult for most people to get regulators’ attention. “As an individual, it’s like a voice screaming in the wilderness. It’s hard to be heard,” said Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumers League, a nonprofit organization in Washington. “Bureaucracies are not really set up to listen to the public.” Marilyn Furer, a 66-year-old retired postal service worker, took on the cause of lead-tainted baby bibs last year. She used a testing kit at her home in Mount Prospect, Ill. and found lead on 8 out of 20 bibs. “I was in utter disbelief,” she recalls. “My grandson had been stuffing those into his mouth.” Ms. Furer took her findings to the Center for Environmental Health, which helped her pursue her cause. Companies like Toys “R” Us stopped carrying the bibs last summer. “I kept saying to myself over and over again, ‘someone should do something, someone should do something,’” Ms. Furer said. “Then you look around and realize that you’ve got to be the one to do it.”

Recalls and Bans of Products
Consumer Protection
Consumer Product Safety Commission
Cuomo Andrew M
Toys


Derek Stepan and Rangers Upbeat Despite Injury

Abstract: GREENBURGH, N.Y. — The Rangers were philosophical Thursday about the top-line center Derek Stepan’s fractured left fibula, which he sustained during conditioning drills the previous day. There were no long faces, even from Stepan. Stepan, 24, who has missed only one game in four N.H.L. seasons, is expected to miss four to six weeks . “It’s a bummer, but injuries happen in sports,” Stepan said, resting at his locker with his lower leg in a cast, his shiny crutches to the sides. “The most important thing is to heal up and get back on the ice as soon as possible.” Stepan is more fortunate than Carolina Hurricanes center Jordan Staal, who broke his right leg Tuesday and is expected to miss three to four months. Stepan’s absence will create opportunities throughout the Rangers’ roster ahead of their season opener Oct. 9 in St. Louis. Help in the middle may even come from unexpected sources. “Marty texted me yesterday to say that ‘if you need me in the middle, I’m ready,’ ” Rangers Coach Alain Vigneault said, referring to right wing Martin St. Louis. “But this is about a chance for the kids to show us what they can do.” Vigneault spoke of openings for the rookies Oscar Lindberg and Kevin Hayes and forwards J. T. Miller, Matthew Lombardi and Chris Mueller. For the veteran center Dominic Moore, an invaluable contributor for the Rangers last season, especially in the playoffs, the chance for increased playing time suits his daily approach. “My mentality is to do my job, do what I’m asked to do,” Moore said. “Last year when we had guys go down as a team, we did our jobs well. That’s the kind of mentality we all have to have.” Center Derick Brassard also figures to play more with Stepan out of the lineup. Stepan was expected to center Chris Kreider and Rick Nash on the Rangers’ top unit. “You never want to see a teammate go down,” said Brassard, who last season primarily centered a successful line with Mats Zuccarello on the right and the departed Benoit Pouliot on the left. “We just have to make sure we are ready to go.” The Rangers’ coaching staff has time to assess roster moves; the team has three preseason games in the next five days. After playing the Blackhawks in Chicago on Friday, the Rangers have a home-and-home against the Philadelphia Flyers on Monday and Tuesday. Entering his first full season with the Rangers, St. Louis, 39, said he was prepared for any role the team required of him. As one of the club’s leaders, he was confident that positive results could emerge from a challenging situation. “Every team goes through this,” he said. “If there’s a good part to this, it’s that we have two weeks before the season starts and many guys are working hard, ready for the chance. We just have to keep working and let the chips fall where they may.” Stepan missed more than two weeks of training camp last year during a holdout before signing a two-year, $6.15 million contract. He spent the summer recovering from a broken jaw sustained in the Eastern Conference finals against the Montreal Canadiens. He said he did not return to eating solid food until early July. A broken leg presents his latest obstacle, but Stepan’s outlook remained upbeat. “I don’t think anybody is going to come out of the gates without a training camp and play well,” he said. “This time is a little different. I’ll be able to practice with the team leading up to it, get reps here and do what I can to get up to speed as fast as possible.”

Ice hockey
Rangers
Derek Stepan
Alain Vigneault
Dominic Moore


Saudis Turn Birthplace of Wahhabism Ideology Into Tourist Spot

Abstract: DIRIYAH, Saudi Arabia — More than 250 years ago, in this sunbaked oasis of mud-brick houses and ramparts, the ancestors of the Saudi royal family and an outcast fundamentalist preacher formed an alliance that has shaped this land ever since. In return for political supremacy, the House of Saud endorsed the doctrine of Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhab and followed it to wage jihad against anyone who rejected their creed, gaining control of much of the Arabian Peninsula. That alliance laid the foundations of the modern Saudi state, which has in more recent times used its oil wealth to make the cleric’s rigid doctrine — widely known as Wahhabism — a major force in the Muslim world. And now, this site, the birthplace of it all, is becoming a tourist attraction. Inside a massive complex on the outskirts of Riyadh filled with parks, restaurants and coffee shops, hundreds of laborers are rehabilitating mud palaces once home to the Saud family and building museums celebrating its history. Nearby stands a sleek structure that will house a foundation dedicated to the sheikh and his mission. The project comes at a tough time for Saudi Arabia. Popular revolts and civil wars have shaken the regional order; the drop in oil prices has hit the national budget; and the kingdom is once again being accused by many of promoting an intolerant brand of Islam similar to that of the Islamic State. But the kingdom is doubling down on its origins. The development of Diriyah is a pet project of the new king, Salman, who is seeking to create a showcase attraction to reinforce the royal family’s national narrative. The entire complex is expected to open in two years at a total cost of about a half-billion dollars, according to a contractor who declined to be named because the sum has not been made public. Saudi officials hope the project will link citizens to their past and rehabilitate the reputation of Sheikh Abdul-Wahhab, which they say has been wrongly sullied. While Wahhabism has adherents around the world, many Muslims detest it, because it considers Shiites and followers of other non-Sunni sects — not to mention Christians and Jews — to be infidels. Others blame Saudi Arabia’s promotion of Wahhabism abroad for giving theological fuel to groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, an accusation Saudi officials reject. “It is important for Saudis who are living now, in this century, to know that the state came from a specific place that has been preserved and that it was built on an idea, a true, correct and tolerant ideology that respected others,” said Abdullah Arrakban of the High Commission for the Development of Riyadh that oversees the project. The planned Abdul-Wahhab foundation is to be an international study center, showing the importance Saudi Arabia still puts on spreading the sheikh’s teachings. However, many scholars say that the cleric was not known for his tolerance. “If someone else did not agree with his conception of monotheism, they had to either convert or be conquered,” said David Commins, a history professor at Dickinson College who has written a book on Wahhabism . In the 18th century, that sense of divine mission gave the House of Saud an advantage in the tribal battles that rocked the Arabian Peninsula. “When you throw a theological reform movement into the mix, you create an ideological foundation for people here and there to support the Saudi banner rather than another chieftain,” Dr. Commins said. Some found the ideology appealing and accepted Saudi leadership. Others resisted and were deemed “polytheists” who had strayed from monotheism, perverting the one true faith, and needed to be corrected. These included other Sunni Muslims who practiced different versions of the faith as well as Shiites, thousands of whom were slaughtered when Saudi forces sacked Karbala, in modern-day Iraq, in the early years of the 19th century, Dr. Commins said. After the House of Saud extended its control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the Ottomans struck back, toppling the first Saudi state and destroying its capital in Diriyah. Surviving members of the family moved to Riyadh, where King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, Salman’s father, founded the modern Saudi state in 1932. He also re-established the alliance with Sheikh Abdul-Wahhab’s descendants, which endures to this day. Image Laborers at the site, which will have a foundation honoring Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhab, an 18th century cleric whose support and ideology was crucial to the House of Saud. Credit Tomas Munita for The New York Times Many Saudis reject the term Wahhabism, saying the sheikh did not create a new ideology, but restored the original teachings of Islam by stripping away additions like the veneration of saints. Nothing should be celebrated except God, he taught, leading his followers to destroy saints’ tombs and reject national holidays and birthdays. Some critics say the interest in Diriyah by the kingdom’s rulers is more about politics than about historical preservation, noting that the government has neglected or destroyed many other heritage sites. Ottoman buildings have been scrapped or left to collapse, and researchers struggle to get permits to visit relics of historic Christian settlements. The Wahhabi fear that any relic could itself become an object of worship has led to the destruction of more than 95 percent of the historic sites near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, according to Irfan al-Alawi, the director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation. Scores of tombs have been destroyed; a house associated with Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, was replaced with a bank of public toilets; and a home believed to have belonged to his companion Abu Bakr was razed to make way for a Hilton Hotel, Mr. Alawi said. At the same time, the Saudi government has filled Mecca with increasingly modern buildings that include the world’s third tallest building and, soon, its largest hotel . Madawi al-Rasheed, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics who has written books on Saudi history, said the royal family tries to bolster its legitimacy by creating “historical amnesia” about aspects of the kingdom’s past that do not relate to its rule. Image An old house under restoration in Diriyah. Credit Tomas Munita for The New York Times “Diriyah is extremely important in this because for the Saud, it all started there and they want to say that the Arabian Peninsula had no history before them,” Dr. Rasheed said. The site has changed dramatically in recent decades. After the city lay abandoned for centuries, families moved in in the mid-1900s and built new mud-brick homes. The government bought the site in 1982 and the development program began around 1990, when King Salman was the governor of Riyadh Province. The king remains among the development’s champions and has built a palace next door where he spends his weekends. Visitors to the site can see his convoy enter on Friday and return to Riyadh on Saturday. The complex will feature parks, restaurants, underground parking and a series of museums about traditional Saudi life, warfare and the Arabian horse. Visitors will also be able to stroll through the old mud settlement, Turaif, which was named a Unesco World Heritage site in 2010; shop in a traditional market; and sleep in a boutique hotel. On a recent evening, footpaths snaking between restaurants and coffee shops filled with children playing and riding bicycles, while families picnicked under date palms. “It is nice to have something like this in Riyadh because it looks like a desert,” said Saleh al-Mohaya, who was strolling with his wife. Others came for the history. “France is based on the revolution, America is based on the founding fathers and Saudi Arabia is based on the mission of Sheikh Abdul-Wahhab,” said Turki al-Shathri, scion of a prominent clerical family who said he visits often. He dismissed any suggestion that Sheikh Abdul-Wahhab was intolerant or had anything in common with the Islamic State. Wahhabi theology does not promote the caliphate, he said, and preaches obedience to rulers, not jihad to overthrow them. “Look around,” he said, gesturing at Saudi families strolling and eating ice cream. “Where is the extremism and the terrorism?”

Saudi Arabia
Historic preservation
Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhab
Diriyah
Islam


In Istanbul, Optimism Fades to a Familiar Melancholy

Abstract: ISTANBUL — When the army cut off traffic in Istanbul on Friday night by shutting two bridges in the opening moments of a coup , the municipality ordered ferries to work overtime. City trucks blocked roads near army barracks. Buses and subways operated free of charge, and local officials and mosque preachers helped mobilize government supporters to the streets. And when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan finally emerged in public, after uncertain hours in which he narrowly missed being seized at a seaside hotel by soldiers trying to topple his government, he flew, not to the capital, Ankara, but to Istanbul, where he remained throughout the weekend and on Monday. Ankara may be the seat of Turkey’s government, but it was Mr. Erdogan’s grip on Istanbul, a city he once governed as mayor, that was crucial in putting down the coup. In the failed coup’s aftermath, it was in the streets, mosques and public squares in Istanbul that his Islamist supporters raucously celebrated, and where Mr. Erdogan consolidated his hold on power . The two cities, in many ways, represent Turkey’s deep divisions: Istanbul owns the hearts of the Islamists and is Turkey’s showcase to the world, while Ankara is a special place for secular Turks. “Istanbul’s becoming almost the second capital of the country has been very instrumental in preventing the coup,” said Yusuf Muftuoglu, who was an adviser to the former president, Abdullah Gul, and briefly for Mr. Erdogan. The drama of the failed coup mostly played out across two urban spaces and the skies overhead — Istanbul, the sprawling megacity that symbolizes the country’s past as the seat of Islamic empire, and Ankara, the utilitarian capital, a onetime Anatolian backwater built up by modern Turkey’s secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Much of the violence occurred in Ankara, where different factions of the armed forces battled over government buildings. But the events in Istanbul proved crucial in fending off the coup. It was there that two private news channels broadcast anti-coup coverage and gave a platform to elected leaders, including Mr. Erdogan. During his time in power, Mr. Erdogan has spent far more time in Istanbul than previous presidents and has overseen the construction of Turkey’s largest mosque in the city. He has also built up the police force, much of which is based in Istanbul. By stocking the force with loyalists and purging suspected enemies, he created a counterweight to the military, which has a history of carrying out coups against civilian governments. And it was largely the police special forces that defended the government over the weekend, confronting the renegade military factions. Image A pro-government demonstration in Istanbul on Sunday. It was in Istanbul that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan consolidated his power in the aftermath of a failed coup. Credit Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images In the days before the attempted coup, a palpable sense of melancholy could be felt when walking through the city, whose singularity is measured in numbers: seven hills, two continents, the capital of three former empires. Turks call it “huzun,” a rich, Arabic-rooted word that means melancholy and a lot more: loss, sadness, spiritual anguish. Turkey’s most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, used it to describe Istanbul in the dreary years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The word is back in the city’s lexicon now, as years of optimism about Turkey’s growing power on the world stage give way to anxiety over terrorism and internal conflicts. After the coup was decisively put down, and Mr. Erdogan’s supporters flooded the streets and city squares over the weekend to celebrate, a sense of buoyancy returned to the streets, but the joy masked a deep unease that has enveloped the city. Istanbul, where ancient mosques and churches jostle with gleaming skyscrapers and faux-Ottoman shopping malls to define an evolving cityscape, was reshaped by Mr. Erdogan’s Islamist government, which created a glistening image of the city that is now threatened by instability. The government embraced Turkey’s Ottoman and Islamic past as a mythical time of harmony and reimagined Istanbul as Turkey’s true capital, investing heavily in public works projects, new shopping malls and office buildings. Ankara took a back seat. “I think the city was presented as this perfect dream without its problems,” said Kaya Genc, a novelist and essayist who wrote about “huzun” after the recent attack on Istanbul’s main airport , which left dozens of people dead. “Maybe it was a lie, but we miss it.” Now, he said, “is the return of the real Istanbul.” By that he meant a city whose mood is more in sync with its unstable past of military coups, political violence and economic crisis. In recent years, the government built an image of Istanbul as an urban wonderland of fascinating history and great architecture and cuisine, and tourism boomed. Mr. Genc said that like many other liberals and intellectuals he bought in to the vision. “A past was reinvented, and repackaged as this great, multicultural history where there are no conflicts,” he said. Even before the failed military coup, all that was clouded by spillover from the Syrian civil war — terrorism and a flood of refugees, hundreds of thousands in Istanbul alone — that set the city on edge. “Everything is being Arabized,” said Karaca Borar, who owns an antiques shop on one of the crooked, cobbled streets in European Istanbul, and supplied many of the items that fill a nearby museum owned by Mr. Pamuk that is based on his novel “Museum of Innocence.” He said he was tired of hearing the Arabic greeting of “salaam aleikum” on the streets, and tired of so many Syrians in general. (It is a widely shared sentiment: When Mr. Erdogan recently said Turkey should offer citizenship to Syrians, a right-wing secular newspaper called Syrians “vermin” in a front-page headline.) The Arc of a Coup Attempt in Turkey Here is a visual timeline of the country’s violent and chaotic insurrection. Asked about the mood of the city, which before the coup attempt had faced several devastating terrorist attacks for which the Islamic State was blamed, Mr. Borar said, “Terrible, terrible, terrible.” “We’re not happy,” he said. “I’m not at ease.” He continued: “We were the only secular, decent country in a bad region. Now, we are like one of those Arab states.” With so many threats, even the weather can set off panic, a clap of thunder sending people scampering for cover. People walking the streets are scrutinized for what they are wearing and what they are carrying. A backpack could be a bomb. A sweater or jacket in summertime could conceal a vest of explosives. Nowadays, it seems, all of Turkey’s old conflicts — most prominently the divide between religious and secular Turks — and many new ones, are coming to the fore. The most dramatic was the long night of uncertainty as fighter jets buzzed the sky, gunfire echoed across the city, and protesters mobilized as the military tried to secure the city. But even before that, Turkey’s traumas were playing out across Istanbul, in bitter conversations about politics, in painful decisions to move away or in to gated communities, in smatterings of protests quickly put down by the police, and in new debates over the use of public spaces. Three years ago, protesters in Gezi Park, in Taksim Square in European Istanbul where Mr. Erdogan’s supporters rallied over the weekend, rose up to oppose plans to convert the park into a shopping mall. The protests became a widespread challenge to his rule, which is growing increasingly autocratic. It produced no lasting political changes, but it did save the park. But maybe not for long. In recent comments that seemed designed to provoke his enemies, Mr. Erdogan said he could revive the plan. On a recent afternoon, Ali Erdogan, a retired military man in his late 60s who is not related to the president, sat on a bench in Gezi Park, where the city has planted new trees, blossoming with pink flowers, and told how his life had improved since Mr. Erdogan came to power more than a decade ago. He pulled out his card for retirees for free rides on Istanbul’s subway, which has been modernized in recent years, as has Turkey’s health care system. “Everything is new and shiny,” he said. More important, he said, he can freely express his religion, something he was unable to do when Turkey’s secular elite ruled the country for decades. Image Mr. Erdogan, center, in Istanbul on Sunday after attending a funeral for people killed while protesting against an attempt to overthrow the government. Credit Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press He said when he was in the military, the guardian of secularism, he had to conceal his religiosity. “I had to lie that I prayed five times a day,” he said. “I had to find a secret corner to pray.” The city’s most conservative district is Fatih, in the old city, across the Golden Horn waterway that divides European Istanbul. There, Mr. Erdogan spoke at a funeral on Sunday, and rallied his supporters to keep gathering in the city’s public squares. It is also where three suicide attackers who carried out the airport bombings lived in an orange apartment building. But the area is far from homogeneous. In one gentrifying enclave of Fatih, in a neighborhood called Balat, shabby-chic cafes and quirky antique shops have sprouted on the narrow streets, raising tensions and testing the limits of social diversity. “Istanbul used to be like a village,” said Hikmet Bardok, 63, a longtime resident. “I don’t recognize it anymore. A lot of people who live here are poor. And these rich people are coming in an looking for places to park their Ferrari.” Mr. Bardok said he quit drinking in 1994 when he turned to religion, and blamed secular Turks for the country’s polarization because they are “arrogant and disrespectful.” Now that they are moving in to his neighborhood, he is worried that “in five to 10 years this place is going to turn into Amsterdam.” Mr. Genc, meanwhile, has been thinking of writing a book on what he calls the “New Istanbul,” a chronicle of the “artificial, distant new neighborhoods” that have built up in the city’s outer reaches during Mr. Erdogan’s tenure. Mr. Erdogan once enjoyed the support of many of Istanbul’s intellectuals and elites , some of whom now call him a dictator, even though they opposed a coup. They once thought him capable of healing the country’s divides, and basked in the optimism that flowed through Istanbul. Now, in the aftermath of the coup attempt, they are left to wonder if Mr. Erdogan will turn more autocratic or, perhaps, seize the time to patch up relations with segments of the society he has alienated. That will become clearer in the days and weeks ahead. For now, Turks are simply trying to make sense of their dizzying weekend. The morning after the coup attempt, Mr. Genc woke early, and went for a walk along the Bosporus. “In the background was the waterway,” he wrote in an essay for The New York Times, “a burning sun and two bridges that span two continents, where just hours before tanks had been firing shots.”

Istanbul
Coups D'Etat
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Taksim Square Istanbul Turkey
Turkey


Agency Rejects .xxx Suffixes for Sex-Related Sites on Internet

Abstract: A longstanding proposal to create a specialized .xxx suffix for sex-related entertainment Web sites received a final rejection yesterday by the agency governing the Internet address system. The plan, first introduced seven years ago by ICM Registry, was rejected by a vote of 9 to 5 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers , or Icann, at a meeting in Lisbon. The issue will not be brought for further discussion by Icann, but ICM Registry, the Florida company that was also applying to manage the address, said it would continue to pursue the issue. “We are extremely disappointed by the board’s action today,” Stuart Lawley, chairman of ICM Registry, said. “It is not supportable for any of the reasons articulated by the board.” Board members who voted against the plan expressed concern that it would compel Icann to become involved in regulating content, among other issues. To ease concerns over promoting content, ICM had said that .xxx Web sites would be issued only to entertainment providers identifying themselves as complying with a set of business practices that included a ban on child pornography and warnings about content. ICM had argued that creation of the domain would enhance safety for young users by clearly defining .xxx sites as a no-go zone. Described last week by Paul Twomey, Icann’s chief executive, as “clearly controversial, clearly polarizing,” the issue had been discussed among Internet enthusiasts and on blogs. Some who objected to the proposal included companies in the sex-related entertainment industry as well as religious groups. The entertainment executives raised fears that use of the domain, although voluntary, could open the way for governments to isolate sex-oriented Web sites into a single part of the Internet. Religious groups expressed concern that creation of the .xxx domain would serve only to encourage creation of more sex-related content. Others warned that the move would create a bonanza for ICM Registry, since companies with existing Web sites would be compelled to buy .xxx domain names to prevent someone else from creating sites using their company names. Supporters of the proposal on the Icann board argued that the agency’s role was to serve as a technical arbiter about the feasibility of new domain names, not to discriminate on the basis of content. The decision to reject .xxx was “weak and unprincipled,” a board member, Susan Crawford, said. “No centralized authority should set itself up as the arbiter of what people may do together online,” Ms. Crawford said in a statement to the board, adding that political pressures played an undue role. “This is not a technical stability and security question.”

Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers


European Union Seeks to Remove Market Obstacles

Abstract: BRUSSELS — Seeking to spur growth in the single market introduced nearly two decades ago, the European Commission on Wednesday proposed a dozen measures to dismantle barriers still obstructing the free flow of people, goods and services in the European Union . In announcing the proposals, all of which need approval from national governments, José Manuel Barroso, the commission president, called on countries to reject the lure of economic nationalism and help open up their markets. “The single market is not just another policy area,” Mr. Barroso said. “It is what makes Europe real for citizens and businesses.” The proposals include plans to allow professional qualifications in one country to be recognized in another, as well as efforts to encourage consumers to shop online from Web sites in other European countries. The list of proposed measures was a vivid reminder of the problems of doing business across borders in the 27-nation European Union, which has almost 500 million consumers. Mr. Barroso acknowledged that several of the ideas proposed had been “around for quite some time,” but had yet to be acted upon. That underlines the likely political difficulties in winning agreement from national governments on the proposals, which also include coordinating corporate tax rules, standardizing public procurement procedures and establishing a unitary patent across the European Union. Mr. Barroso acknowledged that “times of economic crisis provide sometimes a strong temptation to roll back the single market. And we have seen that coming from some member states recently.” “In these times, many like to question competition rules, exploit the missing links and seek refuge in economic nationalism,” Mr. Barroso said. “That is exactly the wrong approach.” Europe’s single market was put in place on Jan. 1, 1993. The proposals announced Wednesday would require new legislation or revision of old laws, and the goal is to complete them by Jan. 1, 2013. “We don’t want the anniversary to be a moment of nostalgia,” said Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for the internal market. “We want to be dynamic and proactive.”

European Union
International Trade and World Market


Justices Rule California Must Free Some Inmates

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — The United States Supreme Court on Friday rejected California’s attempt to stop the release of nearly 10,000 inmates from state prisons to relieve overcrowding, dealing a blow to Gov. Jerry Brown’s efforts to fight federal court orders to reduce the prison population. The decision is the latest in a long line of federal rulings demanding that the state drastically reduce its prison population. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that the overcrowding created conditions that amounted to cruel and unusual punishment , with inmates unable to receive proper health care, and some inmates dying while under the care of the state. Mr. Brown has spent several months arguing that the prisons have greatly improved, and that the state should no longer be subjected to federal oversight. State officials were appealing to the Supreme Court for a full review of an order from a three judge-panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The justices were split 6 to 3, and Justice Samuel A. Alito said that he would grant a stay of release. Justice Antonin G. Scalia wrote a bitter dissent — calling the lower court’s order a “terrible injunction” — that was signed by Justice Clarence Thomas. “California must now release upon the public nearly 10,000 inmates convicted of serious crimes,” Justice Scalia wrote. He said the population reduction mandate goes “beyond the power of the courts.” The court’s ruling on Friday appeared to leave the governor with no choice but to reduce the prison population to 110,000, 137.5 percent of design capacity, by the end of this year, as the court ruled in its 5-to-4 decision in 2011. Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case, which has gone on for more than two decades, hailed the ruling as extraordinary and said it would compel the state to act or Mr. Brown could be held in contempt of court, as a lower court panel has threatened. “Their hope to be rescued in the process is gone,” Michael Bien, a lawyer for the plaintiffs — the prisoners and their advocates — said of Mr. Brown and state corrections officials. “This was a Hail Mary pass to the end zone and the ball was dropped. We fully expect them to comply with the courts, and we will make sure they do so.” Along with three former governors, Mr. Brown argued to the Supreme Court that the early release of thousands of prisoners would endanger the public with offenders who have “a history of serious or violent offenses who are very likely to commit more serious crimes, impacting already stretched law enforcement, social service, mental health and substance use treatment resources of counties.” Justice Scalia wrote that the state had shown evidence it had “made meaningful progress” in serious overcrowding in its 33 prisons , and that additional releases were not necessary. While it has protested doing so, the State Corrections Department has already begun preparing to expand some parole programs, and release inmates it deems have the lowest risk of committing new crimes. In court filings, the state said it could identify only 1,205 inmates who had less than a year left on sentences for nonviolent crimes. The current state plan calls for the release of nearly 4,200 additional prisoners, but the state could also increase the time taken off sentences for completing rehabilitation programs in prison. For nearly two years, the state began requiring that county jails take in low-level felons and parole violators, which has reduced the state prison population by about 25,000. Mr. Brown has repeatedly argued that the change, along with other shifts in the state system, has resulted in constitutional care and conditions for the remaining 132,000 inmates. State officials said Friday they planned to continue to press for a hearing for a full appeal from the Supreme Court “so that the merits of the case can be considered without delay,” but would move forward with a plan to comply with the lower court order. It is unclear precisely how many prisoners will be released. The state could also move to put more prisoners in private out-of-state facilities or contract with county jails that have open beds. The ruling comes as hundreds of prisoners continue a hunger strike to protest solitary confinement policies. State officials said 477 inmates in six prisons were participating on Friday, down from more than 30,000 when the strike began last month.

Prison
Supreme Court
Decisions and Verdicts
California
Jerry Brown
US Politics


Newspaper for Dogs Has Bite, if Not Taste

Abstract: They say that the newspaper business is going to the dogs. A campaign for a new product has been making that sentiment come true, with humorous results. The campaign is for a line of dog food from Mars Petcare U.S., a division of the giant marketer, Mars. The line is called Cesar Sunrise, part of the Cesar brand of offerings for small dogs, and it is being billed as “the first-ever gourmet canine cuisine breakfast.” Yes, it has come to this: dividing dog-feeding occasions into day parts and designating the morning meal as requiring something special for Spot. It is, no doubt, just the kind of innovative get-up-and-go that will help pull us out the Great Recession. Kidding aside, marketers often refer to new products as providing “news” for consumers, assisting a brand to stand out in a crowded category. Mars Petcare U.S. and its agency, the BBDO West division of BBDO Worldwide, have taken that literally, by creating a make-believe newspaper to chronicle the arrival of Cesar Sunrise. The newspaper, an eight-page broadsheet, carries the fanciful name of The West Highland Herald. There is an accompanying Web site as well , from which a PDF version of the paper may be downloaded. An estimated 306,000 copies of the print edition of The Herald were distributed in a promotion that took place in eight major markets, including Atlanta, Chicago and Miami. In two of those markets — New York and San Francisco — the free (fake) paper was accompanied by free (real) cups of coffee. The jest behind the paper is that it was reported and edited by dogs for dogs. From the weather forecast (“It’s going to rain men and women”) to the classified ads (“For sale: Used stick. Hardly chewed. Has most of its original bark”), The Herald is completely canine-centric. After all, if they say “Dog bites man is not news; man bites dog is news,” how newsworthy must it be when “dog writes newspaper”? The mock newspaper is a time-honored tactic in advertising, but it would not be surprising if the decline of the newspaper industry led to fewer marketers undertaking such efforts. That has not happened, at least not yet. In addition to The Herald from Mars Petcare U.S., the HBO division of Time Warner plans to publish a parody of the giveaway tabloid AM New York. The spoof, reported by AdAge.com , will promote the coming second season of the series “True Blood.” Or, as a man asks as his dog brings him the paper in a cartoon in the June 8-15 issue of The New Yorker magazine, “Yes, we still love print, don’t we?” The campaign for Cesar Sunrise includes, in addition to The Herald, television commercials, magazine ads, coupon inserts and content on the cesar.com Web site. The campaign carries the theme “Wake up to something special,” along with the slogan for the Cesar brand, “Love them back.” It may seem risky to bring out a breakfast food for dogs during a severe economic downturn, but that has not proven to be the case, says Anne Herrington, marketing director for Mars Petcare U.S. in Franklin, Tenn. “We’ve had some really strong results” since Cesar Sunrise was brought out in late March, Ms. Herrington says. “It is such a perfect extension of the core brand.” Over all, “our core consumers have stayed quite strong,” she adds, reflecting that “Cesar’s loyalty rate is the highest in the category.” Assisting Cesar’s sales performance is the fact the brand is perceived as an “affordable luxury,” Ms. Herrington says, because “in most parts of the country it’s under a dollar per unit.” Cesar Sunrise is “another opportunity to increase purchase frequency,” she adds. The idea for the new product grew from Cesar’s brand DNA as “gourmet food for the small dog you adore,” Ms. Herrington says, and the new line “leverages the strength of the connection consumers have with their small dogs.” “Most of our line is meat-based, acknowledging the humanization trend,” she adds, referring to the increasing predilection for dog owners to feed their pets the types of food they themselves eat. The Cesar varieties include pork tenderloin, grilled chicken, turkey and filet mignon. But “you don’t want to eat filet mignon for breakfast,” Ms. Herrington says, hence the concept to develop varieties that would be “customized for the breakfast occasion.” The three flavors of Cesar Sunrise are smoked bacon and egg; chicken and cheddar cheese soufflé; and grilled steak and eggs. Is it any reason that the expression “It’s a dog’s life” is changing from one that means how hard things are to one that means to have it easy? The belief that dogs, like their owners, ought to have special food in the morning came from a study conducted by BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, about behaviors that become daily rituals — for humans, not pets. “We learned a lot about breakfast rituals” from the study, says Jim Lesser, executive creative director at BBDO West, based in San Francisco, primarily that “people are on autopilot and you have to shake them awake, no pun intended, to get them to change behavior.” The make-believe newspaper, along with the coffee giveaways, were “to really plug the brand into the morning ritual in exciting ways,” he adds, so that Cesar Sunrise would seem as much a part of breakfast as French toast, oatmeal or pancakes (for humans, that is). As part of that strategy, some ads are being scheduled to appear during “morning media,” Mr. Lesser says. So, for instance, the television commercials run only in early day parts. And The Herald was, of course, a morning newspaper, distributed to commuters and passers-by early in the work day. The parody paper was very low-key in its peddling, limiting references to Cesar Sunrise to ads on inside pages. The ads, which are doubling as the print campaign that is running in magazines, show small dogs mimicking the morning behavior of humans. In one ad, a dog is yawning with its eyes practically closed. In another ad, the fur atop a dog’s head is askew, as if it was suffering from a bad case of bed head. Mixed in with the real ads in The Herald are hilarious fake ads for products like a fragrance named Heat (“Bring out the animal in him”); a canine lawyer, Merv the “legal beagle”; and a language course called Rosetta Bone, for dogs that want to “bark in a different language.” Then there are the classified ads, which take up only a small part of a page of The Herald — just like in an actual newspaper. (Are dogs using Craigslist, too?) In addition to the for-sale ad for the used stick, there are classifieds seeking a lost human (“Responds to ‘Knuckles’ ”), romance (“Are you my Tramp?”) and canines that want jobs like junkyard dog (“Must provide own chain”) and start-up mascot (“Hip Internet software company seeks dog to lie around on poured concrete floors to give office casual air”). The dog paper has many other features that are staples of papers for humans. There is a daily horoscope, a fashion and life style page, sports news, a crossword puzzle and even a Op-Ed page with articles carrying headlines like “Sorry Big Dogs, Small Is Way Better” and “Begging: Is It Always Beneath You?” There are also articles that mock the conventions of real journalism. Some report court news (“Catnip Pyramid Scheme Sends Pooch to Pound”). Some report medical news (“Chasing Tail Okay, Vets Say”). And some are breathy bearers of scandal (“Pics of Dog Show Winner Drinking From Toilet Posted on Web”). “It was a tremendous amount of work to write all that content,” Mr. Lesser says, “but it was really worth it.” The laughs continue from the print edition of The Herald to the Internet. Careful readers of the article about the dog-show winner caught “bleary-eyed with a rabid gleam as she dives snout-first into the toilet of an unidentified human” will notice a reference to a Web site called chokingbone.com . On that site, part of the Cesar Sunrise campaign, are photographs of additional imaginary canine scandals bearing sensational write-ups worthy of tmz.com or perezhilton.com . Among them are photos of “once glamorous Chou-Chou LaRue caught ungroomed” and “a disoriented and disorderly Rex Ruff found rummaging through neighbor’s garbage.” The funniest item may be a report about “notorious French bulldog-about-town Rowdy,” spotted outside a Kabbalah Center wearing a yarmulke. “When questioned about his new faith, Rowdy barked, ‘Until Kabbalah, my life was just about the next bone — but now I want something more,’ ” the item reads. “Is our little mutt becoming a mensch?” Hmmmm. Perhaps the next flavor of Cesar Sunrise will be smoked salmon with a schmear.  If you like In Advertising, be sure to read the Advertising column that runs Monday through Friday in the Business Day section of The New York Times print edition and on nytimes.com .

Newspapers
Online Advertising
Advertising and Marketing
Dogs


An Online Hoax Becomes a Source About a Suspect

Abstract: It was not hard, in the end, to figure out that the Web site was a hoax, however tantalizing the site was for reporters eager to fill out details on the fugitive life of Radovan Karadzic , the Bosnian Serb leader reincarnated as a hippie guru of alternative healing. Any public search of the site, dragandabic.com , which was named for the identity Mr. Karadzic assumed, could have revealed that the Web address was registered after Mr. Karadzic was arrested last week on charges of war crimes. And, oddly enough, a returning visitor would notice that it was being updated while he was in jail. Still, the site — with a brief biography, conveniently in English and Serbian, along with some favorite Chinese proverbs — became, in the days after the arrest, a prime source of information for newspapers and Web sites around the world, including news agencies like Agence France-Presse and Reuters and publications like Le Monde. On Wednesday, in a first and pretty much virtual interview, a person who claimed responsibility for the site said that was exactly his intent. The hoaxer identified himself as Tristan Dare, and described himself as a “media artist who specializes in masterminding viral ‘guerrilla style’ interactive online performances,” who is a “citizen of the world, and currently resides in the global village.” He agreed to be interviewed, but only via e-mail, after being reached at the randomized e-mail address assigned to the person who registered the site. His identity could not be confirmed. He would not speak over the phone, but laid out a chronology of the site’s creation and editing, and had meticulously tracked his viral experiment across the media landscape with a couple of dozen screenshots of news Web sites, from Poland to China to Japan, that referred to the site. The details, he said, were meant to draw in journalists and other curious Internet users. He wrote that many bloggers had criticized the design, “because it was simple and rather bland.” “These people don’t get it. It was intended to be that way. It was supposed to be a ‘personal site’ of an ‘old man’ living in some drab post-Communist country not exactly known for a stellar Web design. It was supposed to be believable,” he said. He said the Internet traffic totals “reached 24,000 by the end of Day 1 (July 22), to 180,000 visitors on Day 2 (July 23).” He added, “In those first two days over 1.6 million files from this one-page site were served to automatic server requests,” which includes not only accessing the site but also viewing or linking to the photos on the site. There are the unlikely, but journalistically tempting, details, particularly for a man who is accused of masterminding the slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. The site says Dr. Dragan Dabic endorsed a holistic health regimen “requiring more than just taking care of the various singular components that make up the human body. It points out that emotional and spiritual well-being is the key not only for happy, but also healthy life.” His e-mail address was listed as the plaintive healingwounds@dragandabic.com . The hoaxer wrote in the e-mail that he took five minutes to fill in a fictional persona, not caring whether details — like place of birth — matched up with Mr. Karadzic’s known biography. Hours after the site went live, the hoaxer wrote: “I decided to add more content to the page. I liked the idea of putting a few traditional Chinese proverbs, with the explanation that they were the favorites of ‘Dr. Dabic.’ “I looked at the various Web sites around, and was specifically on a lookout to those proverbs that could be interpreted in more ways than one.” The final proverb: “The one who turns on his own, shall dig two graves.”

War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity