Smith Center, Kan., Affirms its Values Even as Winning Streak Ends

Abstract: HAYS, Kan. — The standing ovation erupted as soon as the Centralia defender emerged from the pile with the ball. It was over, finally, in overtime: the Panthers had defeated Smith Center to win the Kansas state Class 2-1a championship game, 20-12, and had ended the longest active winning streak in high school football at 79 games. Leading the ovation Saturday were the red-clad Smith Center faithful . They had just witnessed an epic, well-played game and were giving Centralia its due. They were also hoping to comfort their sons and grandsons and neighbors who were now crying, but who had given them so much joy and put this little town in the heartland in the nation’s consciousness over the past six years. It has been uttered, written, and put on big and small screens countless times how high school football best evokes the innocence and purity of American sports. Stand on a high school football field this time of year and you know why. At the end of the game here Saturday, Centralia Coach Larry Glatczak was sharing a jubilant embrace with his sons, Tyler and Michael, the quarterback and receiver who had led the Panthers to victory. Ten yards away, the Smith Center assistant Mike Rogers held his son Colt tight as the senior running back sobbed in his father’s chest. Winning streaks are elusive and mysterious and rely on a mix of talent and chemistry as well as luck. Most of the truly eye-popping streaks have been posted by high school teams, which is perhaps remarkable considering how many more personalities have to be built into a team. Over its six-year unbeaten span, Smith Center relied on hundreds of kids to buy into Redmen football. De La Salle of Concord, Calif., which holds the record for consecutive high school football victories, incorporated thousands of them in compiling 151 victories from 1992 to 2003. “Winning streaks are about the focus of a surrounding culture,” said Matthew L. Davidson, a psychologist who has studied sports teams and is president of the Institute for Excellence and Ethics in LaFayette, N.Y. “At the top is a leader who shapes the character of the culture. He incorporates signature practices that are essential to his way of doing business.” Over the 32 seasons in Smith Center, a town of 1,931, Coach Roger Barta has won 301 games by creating a culture that values the whole man over a football player, that emphasizes getting “a little bit better each day,” and that insists the Redmen cannot be champions until they learn to love one another. Barta, like everyone else, knew the day would come when the streak would end. Long after the Redmen had accepted their runner-up trophy here and answered the questions from reporters about how it felt to lose for the first time, Barta addressed his team in a locker room overflowing with fathers, grandfathers and former players, all of whom were holding hands. It has long been one of his signature practices. “Nobody hang their heads in here,” Barta said. “We have lined up 80 times against teams, and finally one of them got us in a game that is going to go down there in the history books. They were a play better than us today. “We’ve never judged ourselves on wins and losses. We’ve measured ourselves on whether we have been there for each other,” he continued. “You guys have been there along. What you and those who came before you have achieved over 79 games is something a lot of schools in America would like to say they have done.” Then each of the other coaches offered similar thoughts to a group of young men who remained heartbroken. “Who’s got a prayer?” Barta asked. “Right here, Coach,” rose from the middle of the locker room. It was Rogers, a senior captain, and perhaps one of the greatest athletes in school history, rushing for more than 4,500 yards in his career. His dad, Mike, still had his arm around his son. Colt has won many games for the Redmen over the years, but he could not make one more play in overtime to finish his career undefeated and keep the streak intact. Colt’s eyes were rimmed red, and his words got caught in his throat more than once, but he made it through. When the two teams finally boarded buses to leave, each was greeted with thunderous applause. Centralia was a state champion for the first time; Smith Center had narrowly lost what would have been its ninth title. The Panthers had the longer trip back to their homes in northeast Kansas, but their smiles made it clear that theirs would be a shorter ride.

Football
Interscholastic Athletics
Kansas
Smith Center (Kan)


Colombia Suspends 7 in Military After Children’s Killings

Abstract: CARACAS, Venezuela — Colombia ’s army has suspended seven officers and soldiers for failing to control their troops in connection with the brutal murders last month of three impoverished children near Colombia’s northeast border with Venezuela. The killings have stirred outrage among human rights groups in Colombia. Medical examiners determined that one of the children, Yenni Torres, 14, was raped before she was killed. Her body and those of her brothers, Jimmy, 9, and Jefferson, 6, were found on Oct. 14 in a shallow grave near the town of Tame in rural Arauca, a war-torn border region. One of the suspended officers, Second Lt. Raúl Muñoz, has acknowledged raping Yenni Torres before she was killed, Gen. Alejandro Navas, commander of the army, said Wednesday on Caracol Radio . General Navas said Lieutenant Muñoz had also confessed to having raped a 13-year-old girl in a separate episode near Tame on Oct. 2. But Lieutenant Muñoz asserted that he was not involved in killing the three Torres children, General Navas said. The authorities in Arauca arrested Lieutenant Muñoz on Wednesday. The connection of the other suspended men to the killings remains unclear, aside from the supervisory roles they had in the area. In addition to Lieutenant Muñoz, two colonels, a major and three noncommissioned officers were suspended. The suspensions, which were announced Tuesday night by the army’s high command, raised new questions about abuses by Colombia’s armed forces, which are a major recipient of security assistance and training from the United States. Despite the Colombian military’s recent strides against rebel groups , its reputation remains tarnished by a 2008 scandal in which soldiers killed civilians, then classified the victims as subversives to inflate statistics about the number of rebels killed in combat. Sandra Lorena, a human rights official in Arauca, said of the murders of the three children, “These killings have left us perplexed.” On Oct. 14, residents of the village of Temblador, near Tame, found the children buried together. Their father, José Torres, 49, a farm worker, had reported them missing the day before. With the help of Red Cross officials, Mr. Torres himself took part in recovering their bodies. All three children had wounds from a sharp object in their necks and heads. Mystery still shrouds the killings, though some of the details that have emerged have shocked some in Colombia, a country that has grown somewhat numbed to atrocities during decades of war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Tame and surrounding areas rank among Colombia’s most dangerous. A bomb placed on a bicycle was detonated in Tame by remote control in mid-October, wounding four soldiers and three civilians. Earlier in October, the army killed two midlevel FARC commanders near Tame. A unit of the Colombian Army’s Mobile Brigade No. 5 was camped several hundred feet from the site of the Torres children’s grave around the time when the three were killed. Investigators think that whoever killed them and dug the grave needed tight control of the area, according to a report by Semana, a Colombian news magazine. The Colombian authorities said that an inquiry was continuing and that it involved DNA samples from the children and 60 soldiers from Mobile Brigade No. 5.

Colombia
Defense and Military Forces
Murders and Attempted Murders
Children and Youth
Sex Crimes


Netflix Fuels a Surge in Scripted TV Shows. Some See a Glut.

Abstract: The great scripted-TV boom is showing no signs of abating. By year’s end there could be anywhere from 430 to 450 scripted television shows, which would serve, once again, as a record for the industry, said John Landgraf , chief executive of FX Networks. In 2015 there were 417 scripted TV shows — nearly double the 210 that were on the air in 2009, FX’s research department said. And who is responsible for all the growth? Streaming services like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix. Through July, 322 scripted shows were broadcast, a 6 percent rise from the 304 at this point last year. And while basic cable, premium cable and the broadcast networks are relatively steady in volume year over year, digital services have had enormous increases: 49 shows have appeared on streaming services so far this year versus 24 at the same time last year. Mr. Landgraf, who unveiled the numbers at a Television Critics Association media event in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Tuesday, said he believed that by next year there could easily be 500 TV shows, pointing specifically to the huge growth at Netflix, which he said had 71 original adult scripted series that were either currently available on the service or had been announced. “For reference, that’s more than the announced future output of HBO, Showtime, Starz and FX combined,” he said at the event. “And this list does not include Netflix’s dozens of original children’s series or documentary series or late-night series or even fully scripted series produced primarily in a language other than English — say, for example, a high-end French-language crime drama like ‘Marseille’ — because we are deeming a dubbed or subtitled show to be fundamentally noncompetitive in the U.S. with a show in English.” Image John Landgraf, chief executive of FX Networks, spoke onstage at a Television Critics Association event on Tuesday in Beverly Hills, Calif. He said he worried that there was a glut of scripted television programs. Credit Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images A spokeswoman for Netflix declined to comment. When Mr. Landgraf spoke about the number of scripted shows last year, he started what has turned into a yearlong conversation in the industry about whether for viewers and for the networks themselves, there is simply too much television. Ratings continue to decline, and the future of cable and its expensive and large bundles is uncertain. Sharing Mr. Landgraf’s concern, some TV executives have said that they also felt audiences were becoming fatigued and having a difficult time finding the best shows out of the glut. Other executives argued that it was their responsibility to overwhelm the audience with choice, and that television had never been stronger creatively or offered greater diversity in terms of casting and programming. Despite the crowded landscape, FX is having a particularly strong year. It received the most Emmy nominations in its history — 56, second only to HBO — and its limited series “ The People v. O.J. Simpson ” became the highest-rated new show in the history of the network. But as he said a year ago, Mr. Landgraf is skeptical that this sort of scale can be justified economically. Scripted TV costs a great deal to produce and therefore requires a large audience. He reinforced that argument on Tuesday, saying there was a greater supply of television “than can be produced profitably given the demand and the business model.” “I also believe,” he continued, “that there is so much U.S. television, we’ve lost much of the thread of a coherent, collective conversation about what is good, what is very good and what is great.”

John Landgraf
FX TV Network
Web television
TV
Video Recordings
Downloads and Streaming
Netflix


Seneca Tribe Reaches Deal With Cuomo on Gambling

Abstract: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the Seneca Nation of Indians announced the settlement of a bitter dispute over gambling revenues, the third agreement in the past four weeks that brings to an end a longstanding source of tense relations with tribes operating casinos in New York. By resolving the tribal disputes, the governor expects to gain political momentum for his plan to legalize up to seven Las Vegas-style casinos outside the upstate areas set aside for tribal gambling. The Senecas agreed to resume making the required payments to state and local governments from the tribe’s casinos in Niagara Falls, Buffalo and Salamanca and to immediately turn over $408 million, or 65 percent of the more than $630 million owed on gambling revenues and regulatory fees since the dispute began in 2009. As a result of the settlement, the cities of Buffalo, Salamanca and Niagara Falls will get a combined $140 million, or the entire amount owed them since 2009. Governor Cuomo called the agreement a new chapter in relations between the two parties based on trust and mutual respect. “This agreement is a win-win-win; a win for local governments of Niagara Falls, Buffalo and Salamanca, a win for the Seneca Nation, whose exclusivity will be honored, and a win for all New Yorkers, with hundreds of millions of dollars coming to the state now and for the future,” Mr. Cuomo said. Barry E. Snyder Sr., the tribe’s president, noted that while the governor did not start the dispute, he had worked hard to restore the compact between the Senecas and the state. The dispute with the Senecas, like the disagreements that were recently settled with the St. Regis Mohawks and the Oneida Nation, had festered for years, embroiling state government and local communities dependent on the revenues. The Mohawks and the Senecas both have compacts with the state in which they agreed to pay 25 percent of the slot revenues to state and local government in exchange for the exclusive rights to operate within a specified territory. Last month, the Oneidas, who operate the Turning Stone casino near Syracuse, also agreed for the first time to pay the state 25 percent of slot revenues, in return for a 10-county exclusivity zone. The Cuomo administration expects to reap about $50 million a year from the Oneidas and $135 million from the Senecas. The resolution of the tribal disputes are tied to the governor’s plan to expand casino gambling in a state where there are five Indian casinos and electronic slot machine parlors at nine racetracks, mostly upstate. Mr. Cuomo announced in late 2011 that he favored a constitutional amendment allowing full-scale casino-resorts in the state. The Legislature adopted the amendment last year, giving his administration some leverage with the tribes. Mr. Cuomo had threatened to allow a commercial casino in counties where the tribes had exclusive rights to operate if they did not come to terms with the state. The governor suffered a setback in 2012 after the collapse of a $4 billion proposal to build an expanded slot parlor and the nation’s largest convention center at Aqueduct in Queens. And this year, he dismayed some Las Vegas gambling companies when he said that the first three of a possible seven casino resorts would be built upstate, but not in densely populated New York City or on Long Island for at least five years. To become law, the casino amendment needs to pass the Legislature again, presumably in the next week, and be approved by voters in a referendum on the November ballot. But at the moment, there is no consensus in the Legislature.

Seneca Indians
Andrew Cuomo
Casino
Gambling
New York
Politics


Carl Paladino’s Ancestral Village Feels Pride

Abstract: SANTA CROCE DI MAGLIANO, Italy — To many in this hilltop village in southern Italy, Carl P. Paladino is simply known as “O’Mericano,” or the American. Most of the town’s 4,876 residents do not spend much time on the Internet and know little about United States politics. But word of mouth travels fast, and when the news hit that Mr. Paladino, whose family left here in 1926, was running to be governor of New York, residents were excited. And even though Mr. Paladino, the Republican nominee, trails in the polls, here, at least, he has nothing but supporters. “We are all happy and really proud of him,” Francesco Di Nunzio, 60, a construction worker with a tanned face and a hunter’s jacket said as he watched friends play cards at the local association of war veterans on a recent Saturday afternoon. According to the phone book, 17 Paladinos still live in Santa Croce, which is perched between the Adriatic Sea and the Matese mountains. Mr. Paladino still has cousins in the area, and his side of the family here is descended from an uncle, Antonio Paladino. Antonio Paladino was 13 when he left for Naples with his mother and three siblings, including Carl Paladino’s father, Belisario, on the first leg of their journey to join their father in Buffalo. But because of an eye infection, Antonio was not allowed to leave Italy, and did not see his family for more than 40 years, his grandchildren said. Still, the Paladino bonds remained strong. Carl Paladino has returned about seven times since 1982, when he came with his parents to see the village where his father was born. Mostly, he travels to attend weddings and funerals or just to relax. His cousins say he likes to eat. His favorite menu includes Santa Croce parmigiana, with fried eggplant, minced beef and mozzarella, followed by tagliolini in chicken broth, and pizzaiola, a dish with beef, tomatoes, garlic and rosemary. He particularly enjoyed homemade meals at the home of his favorite cousin, Albina, who died in March. “He’d just say ‘Albina, I love you,’ ” recalled her son, Carlo Rosati, 39. “And then he’d eat, eat and eat.” Mr. Paladino also enjoys sipping cappuccino at a bar once owned by a cousin and driving to a nearby town to buy clothes. The local dialect can be impenetrable, a mishmash of dialects from three neighboring regions, as well as Greek and Albanian. An interpreter often helps ease communication when Mr. Paladino visits. Few townspeople are familiar with Mr. Paladino’s political campaign, especially his blunt and sometimes provocative and controversial verbal outbursts. But Mr. Rosati and other members of the family keep up with the race, and Mr. Paladino himself is known to send them e-mails about how his campaign is going. Mr. Rosati also sends messages to relatives and acquaintances living in the United States asking them to support his cousin. For all its natural beauty, there is not much sightseeing to do in Santa Croce. The ancient church of San Giacomo was severely damaged by an earthquake that struck the region in 2002. Many buildings are still undergoing major reconstruction or are kept standing by wooden poles. For decades agriculture has been the main source of income in the area, but has never provided enough to keep many from leaving in search of more money. Today, many local carpenters and blacksmiths leave the village from Sunday night through Friday to work on construction sites in northern Italy. The Paladinos are not the only family to have made their way from here to western New York. “This is where it all started,” said Louis Casciano, 65, who was part of a group of Italian-Americans living in Buffalo who visited Santa Croce recently, where some of them had family ties. “I wanted to see where my father was from. We just had to come back here.” Mr. Casciano said he played stickball in the street with Mr. Paladino when they were young boys living next door to each other in the East Lovejoy neighborhood of Buffalo. “It was my dream to come back here,” said Lucille Cannata Crimi, 68, who said she used to live near the Paladinos in Buffalo. “You just feel the presence of your family here.” Mr. Paladino’s Democratic opponent, Andrew M. Cuomo, also has roots in Italy, in a town not far from Naples. But in rural areas of Italy, the connection to the local soil is more important than bonds of nationality. As Teodoro Colombo, 75, a retired construction worker from Santa Croce, put it, “We always like our paesani better.”

Santa Croce di Magliano (Italy)
Paladino Carl P
Politics and Government
Elections
New York State
Governors (US)


In Land of Fútbol, Hoping for Football Fans

Abstract: NOGALES, Mexico — About 180 miles from the site of Super Bowl XLII, through a desert lined with tumbleweeds and cacti, a fence rises with barbed wire coiled across the top. The fence separates two countries. On the American side, children throw footballs in the street and play on high school football teams. The people there wait with great anticipation for the game played Sunday in the spaceship of a stadium up the road in Glendale, Ariz. On the Mexican side, fútbol fans outnumber football fans, but the people anticipate the big game with a capitalist’s glee. Here in shops lined with glass plates and ornate pottery and intricate paintings, they hope the economic effect will trickle down to their struggling economy. Earlier this week, Rafael Vizzerra leaned on the wall outside his shop, arms crossed, gazing into the distance across the border. “The politics, the immigration problem, oh, it’s bad,” he said. “The mafia. The drug cartels. Here in Mexico, and every frontier, like here in Nogales, you can really feel the pressure from the economy.” Vizzerra, 58, talked wistfully of the “good old days,” when he opened his shop 33 years ago and the economy held strong. He pulled out his wallet to reveal proof that he served two years in the United States Army. He could always go across the border to find work, but he met his wife here, runs his business here. This place, he said, is part of him. He worries about new passport laws, worries about the surrounding businesses that closed in the past six years. He worries about the disappearing tourists from whom he makes his living. He wonders if the Super Bowl will help. “Every little thing counts,” Vizzerra said. “Every little thing helps. If one person comes here from there. There’s a lot of poverty here. We make our living off the tourists. When there are no tourists, there’s no money.” A few blocks away on the downtown grid, Arturo Arreola stands in front of his shop wearing a matching Pittsburgh Steelers hat and sweatshirt. A fan since 1978, Arreola detailed his love for every Steelers player from Terry Bradshaw to Jerome Bettis. Football hooked Arreola as a young man. He loved the contact, loved the violence. “I didn’t know much about football,” Arreola said. “But I like the rough sports. I don’t like those sissy games.” Just then two gentleman walked by. One wore a Yankees hat, the other a cap with the Boston Red Sox logo. With the Patriots and Giants set to square off in the Super Bowl, they appeared the perfect odd coupling — except neither one liked football. Sports interest here runs the spectrum, from baseball to bullfighting to football and fútbol. The Regis Bar, a historical saloon that has been downtown since 1928, satisfies all of Nogales’s sports fans. At first glance, it looks like an American sports bar. Televisions broadcast ESPN, and patrons drink bottles of beer. A neon Bud Light sign hangs in the corner. On a typical Sunday, the owner Jesus Pesqueira said people came from Tucson, and all over Mexico wearing jerseys and waving flags and rooting mostly for what he called “Western teams,” like, um, the San Francisco 49ers and the Green Bay Packers. Pesqueira, 41, sometimes rents his back room, the one with pictures of old Nogales on the wall, hanging next to a television and two toro heads — each about 4 feet long and about 300 pounds, like mini defensive tackles. Pesqueira said his family has owned the bar for generations, and while he expected a full crowd on Super Bowl Sunday, he also said he felt the recent economic pinch. “If the American people have economic problems, then the world has the same problems,” Pesqueira said. “Or more.” Shop owners, more than any other business, feel the impact the most here. Like Carlos Duran, 31, whose family owns Centro Comercial, a store tucked in a downtown alley. Duran roots for the Miami Dolphins and worships Dan Marino, so this Super Bowl, with the Patriots aiming for perfection, remains difficult to stomach. Six stores in the same alley closed in the past six years, Duran said. He shook his head, then turned back to talking football. “Whatever happened with the spying?” he asked. “New England is going to set history anyway,” Duran said, cringing at the thought of the Patriots joining his undefeated Dolphins team from 1972. “New York, they’ve got Eli Manning, but he ain’t no Peyton.” Alejandro Castro and Duran work together. Castro, the family member who owns the store, does not follow football. He follows the local economy, which he says slowed after the Sept. 11 attacks and will slow more drastically now that United States citizens are required to have a passport in order to return home. He points to the shop to the right of his family’s. “Closed,” he said. He points to another shop, to the left. “Closed, too.” “I enjoy listening to people talk about football and their favorite players,” Castro, 42, added. “But I’d rather have a lot of Americans buying in my shop.” He paused, before adding, “For good prices.” He paused again. “And big discounts.” Much of the sports gambling takes place in a one-room building locals call the casino. Inside, there are folding tables and televisions spread wall to wall with horse races and basketball games unfolding. Men smoke cigarettes and drink beer. The security guard asks that no one take pictures, lest someone come back next week with guns. Across the town square, near the border entrance to the United States, a true Yankee stood in front of one of the Nogales shops. Kevin Mineconzo, a 29-year-old from Schenectady, N.Y., wore a Yankees fleece jacket and a Yankees cap turned backward. His family had flown west for a vacation starting in Tucson and ending in Las Vegas, where they plan to watch the Super Bowl and place a small bet on Mineconzo’s beloved Giants. Crazy, Mineconzo said, that the Super Bowl is only a few hundred miles from this town. “I just got here,” he said. “And everybody’s selling something.” About 180 miles from the Super Bowl, on the Mexican side of the fence rising to the sky, the spirit of capitalism lives. This is the spirit of the Super Bowl. “Tell all the fans to come here,” Castro said. “I promise they won’t be sorry.”

Mexico
Super Bowl
Economic Conditions and Trends
Arizona


Bulls’ Derrick Rose Vows Injury Won’t Change Him

Abstract: CHICAGO — Derrick Rose, the Chicago Bulls’ point guard, hobbled on crutches into a room in the basement of the United Center on Thursday morning to meet the news media for the first time since he had surgery last week to repair a meniscus tear in his right knee. He wore a red hooded sweatshirt with his trademark logo, a design with the letter “D” inside a rose. Ten minutes into his news conference, Rose, 25, was asked what he might say to people who think the Bulls ought to reconsider his role as the centerpiece of the franchise, given his injury history. He missed all of last season recovering with a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee and played in just 39 games during the shortened 2011-12 season. The Bulls ruled him out for this season when they announced his operation. Rose paused, pondering the question. He scratched his chin thoughtfully. Then he said: “You can be a fool if you want to. I know I’m going to be all right.” While fans in Chicago and plenty of others around the N.B.A. fret about Rose’s future, the former most valuable player remained defiant in the wake of his latest setback, assuring everyone that he would be back — again. “I could get hurt 10 more times,” Rose said. “I’m never going to stop.” Rose spoke for more than 20 minutes about his faith in God, in himself and in his body to heal. He said he knew in the locker room immediately after the injury — which occurred as he cut to the basket without the ball in a game at Portland — that it was serious. He said that he had hoped it was not another injury to his anterior cruciate ligament and that he was relieved when tests revealed the meniscus tear. The injury is considered less severe than the one to the A.C.L. Rose said he has put weight on the leg, something he did not do for several months after his last operation. He has also begun his rehabilitation, which includes swimming and yoga. Image “I could get hurt 10 more times,” Derrick Rose said Thursday. “I’m never going to stop.” Credit Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press “This is the nature of the N.B.A.,” Bulls Coach Tom Thibodeau said. “Most players, at some point in their career, they’re going to deal with injury. That he made it through the A.C.L., I think that gives him a frame of reference to deal with this one.” Rose said he chose not to be bogged down by negative thoughts and self-pity. Instead, he promised he would be the same explosive player he was before tearing his A.C.L., although his aggressive style of play has been cited as a possible cause for the injuries. “I could care less what people say about me, criticize my game, or whatever,” he said. “I have a unique way of playing basketball and I can’t change that.” Contrary to the team’s statement after the injury, Rose also left the door open for a return should the Bulls advance to the playoffs. “If I’m healthy and the situation is right, I’m going to be back,” he said. What precisely those circumstances might be are unclear, but the Bulls, despite recent struggles, remain in playoff contention in the notoriously bad Eastern Conference. The Bulls were 6-4 when Rose went down. They wound up losing to Portland after his exit, and have gone 1-4 since, including the worst loss in franchise history, a 121-82 defeat to the Los Angeles Clippers on Nov. 24. At 7-9, the Bulls were in seventh place in the Eastern Conference heading into Thursday night’s game against the visiting Miami Heat. It would have been a matchup of heavyweights if Rose were healthy. Three seasons ago, the Bulls fell to the Heat in the Eastern Conference finals. It looked like the beginning of a worthy rivalry. “I think about it,” Rose said of the disappointing thought that he and the Bulls’ other current core players might never get another shot at Miami in the postseason. “But at the same time, I have to deal with the reality. I have an injury and I’m rebuilding my other leg all over again.”


Floods and Landslides in Sri Lanka Leave Dozens Dead

Abstract: COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — At least 37 people were killed in landslides and flash floods and hundreds of thousands were displaced, Sri Lankan officials said on Wednesday, as torrential rains and gusting winds continued to lash the country just days after the beginning of the monsoon season. Rescue workers recovered at least 15 bodies from two major landslides in the Kegalle district, about 75 miles east of the capital, Colombo, said Pradeep Kodippili, a spokesman for the Disaster Management Center of Sri Lanka. Officials said the death toll from the flooding was likely to rise. One of the landslides buried three villages in the mountainous region of Aranayake, claiming at least 14 lives, with more than 130 people still missing and feared dead, said Maj. Gen. Sudantha Ranasinghe, the commanding officer in charge of the rescue operation. “Military personnel and medics are still digging through the rubble from the mudslide to find survivors despite the risk of further landslides in the area,” General Ranasinghe said. Image Survivors of the landslide in the Aranyake region of Sri Lanka on Wednesday. Credit Eranga Jayawardena/Associated Press Earlier, the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society had said that 200 families remained unaccounted for after the Aranayake landslide, though Mr. Kodippili said the government was unable to confirm that figure. President Maithripala Sirisena toured the landslide area on Wednesday and said the government’s priority was locating the missing and providing relief and shelter to the displaced. “The loss is devastating,” he tweeted from his official account after the visit. While little is known about what happened in the landslide areas, Red Cross officials said they had heard complaints from residents in the affected villages that the country’s disaster management agencies had failed to issue any alerts or evacuation warnings. “The Disaster Management Center does not have the resources and manpower to go door to door in the endangered areas,” said Mahieash Johnney, a senior manager at the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society. “It relies on getting these messages across to residents at risk from landslides, by using loudspeakers and megaphones. These warnings don’t always get transmitted in time.” Meteorologists had predicted a stronger-than-average monsoon season in Sri Lanka this year, the effects of a waning El Niño. Though the tropical island nation in the Indian Ocean frequently experiences intense monsoons and flooding, this year’s devastation was unusually fierce for so early in the rainy season. The Sri Lanka Meteorological Department said that a deep low-pressure area in the Bay of Bengal that had become a tropical depression by Wednesday had caused the rains, but that it was moving away from the island. The Sri Lanka Red Cross was managing one of at least four camps near the Aranayake landslide to provide relief to survivors, Mr. Johnney said. The Red Cross said 19 of Sri Lanka’s 25 districts had experienced flash flooding, a result of ceaseless rains across most parts of the island since Monday. Three hundred members of the military were deployed in a huge rescue operation to find survivors in Aranayake early on Wednesday. Thirteen bodies were recovered from the rubble, a military spokesman said, adding that most of the victims had been buried in their homes by the mudslide Tuesday night. By early Wednesday morning, the Disaster Management Center had recorded 23 injuries related to flash flooding in the southwestern parts of the island. Some parts of Colombo also suffered flooding.

Sri Lanka
Flood
Landslides,Mudslides
Fatalities,casualties
Maithripala Sirisena
Monsoon
Aranayake


G.M. Chief to Appear Before House Panel Once Again

Abstract: The chief executive of General Motors and the former prosecutor hired by the company to investigate why it failed to recognize a fatal defect in Chevrolet Cobalts and other small cars will testify before a House subcommittee next Wednesday. The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations will call Mary T. Barra, the chief executive, and Anton R. Valukas, the former United States attorney whose report on June 5 was a scathing critique of management culture. The company dismissed 15 employees, including at last three senior corporate lawyers, and disciplined five in the wake of the report. In April, Ms. Barra endured withering criticism from lawmakers when she testified before the same House panel, as well as a Senate subcommittee the following day. She deferred questions at least 54 times, saying she could not talk freely until the internal investigation was complete. “Next week, we will have the chance to get those answers and compare the company’s findings with our own,” said Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican and the chairman of the full committee, in a statement with Representative Tim Murphy, a Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the subcommittee. The committee staff is poring over hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. “Mr. Valukas’s exhaustive report revealed disturbing truths about G.M.’s systemic and cultural failures that allowed this problem to go undiagnosed for over a decade,” the two Republicans said, “but many questions remain unanswered about the recalls and resulting changes within the company.” Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, will ask about how G.M. is approaching the problem of its poor internal communications, with one group of engineers not knowing what another is doing, a problem Ms. Barra referred to as “silos.” Ms. DeGette will also ask about compensation for crash victims, her staff said. But G.M. has delegated that issue to another outside expert , Kenneth Feinberg, a lawyer who specializes in allocating payments to victims in disasters. Mr. Feinberg has not yet given his recommendations on whom G.M. should pay, and how much, for the Cobalt crashes. His recommendations are expected this month. Another question likely to surface is who was fired or disciplined, and who was not. The Senate panel also plans a follow-up hearing, but not until summer. In a statement, G.M. said Ms. Barra was looking forward to talking with lawmakers. “Ms. Barra wants to return to Congress and update the House Energy and Commerce Committee members on the actions G.M. is taking in response to the ignition switch recall,” the company said in a statement. “As outlined by Ms. Barra last week, these efforts include fixing the failures identified in the Valukas report, building a culture centered on safety, quality and excellence, and doing what’s right for victims and their families.”

Automobile safety
GM
Mary Barra
House Committee on Energy and Commerce
Anton R Valukas


Saudis Retool to Root Out Terrorist Risk

Abstract: RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Near the guard tower outside this country’s main counterterrorism training center, some of the concrete barriers are still scarred with shrapnel. They are kept as a reminder: in December 2004, a suicide bomber detonated his car there, in one of a series of deadly attacks by Islamist insurgents that shook this kingdom. “It was a wake-up call,” said the commander of the training center, a tall, wiry officer in fatigues and a black beret who cannot publicly give his name for security reasons. “The situation was bad.” A plaque just inside the commander’s office bears the names of 57 Saudi officers who died fighting terrorists from 2003 to 2005. Those deaths forced a decisive shift here. Many Saudis had refused to recognize the country’s growing reputation as an incubator of terrorism, even after the international outcry that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Since then, much has changed. When Saudi Arabia released its latest list of wanted terrorism suspects in January, all 85 of them were said to be outside the kingdom. That fact was a measure of the ambitious counterterrorism program created here in the past few years. The government has cracked down ruthlessly on terrorist cells and financing, rooting out officers with extremist sympathies and building a much larger and more effective network of SWAT teams. Even regular police officers now get a full month of counterterrorism training every year. “We have killed or captured all the fighters, and the rest have fled to Afghanistan or Yemen,” said the commander, in an assessment largely echoed by Western security officials. “All that remains here is some ideological apparatus.” The extent of that ideological apparatus remains uncertain. The list of 85 suspects that was released in January included 11 men who had been freed from the American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had passed through Saudi Arabia’s widely praised rehabilitation program for jihadists, and then had fled the country. Two of them broadcast their aim of overthrowing the Saudi royal family in a video released on the Internet by the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda , in an embarrassing moment for the authorities here. But the Saudi government, which once seemed unwilling to acknowledge this country’s critical role in fostering jihadist violence around the world, has become far more open about the challenges it faces. “We are still at the beginning, we have a lot to learn,” said Turki al-Otayan, the director of the rehabilitation program’s psychological committee. Like others involved in the program, he conceded that the return of some of its graduates to terrorism was a blow, but he said he believed that the success rate (14 failures out of 218 graduates) was still impressive. Mr. Otayan and his colleagues won a partial vindication last month when one of the two graduates who had fled to Yemen later returned to Saudi Arabia and gave himself up. But Mr. Otayan shrugged that off. “We can’t guarantee that he won’t go back to Yemen again,” he added. “You’re dealing with people, not cars.” Saudi officials are also frank about the fact that Al Qaeda still has some popular sympathy here, though far less than before the bloody attacks from 2003 to 2005. “Changing mind-sets is not easy, and it takes a long time,” said Abdul Rahman al-Hadlag, the Interior Ministry’s director of ideological security. “We have to monitor mosques and the Internet, because the extremists use these places to recruit people. Sometimes they even use afterschool activities. Sleeper cells exist.” Some of the softer approaches to fighting terrorism, including the rehabilitation program, have been labeled coddling by Western critics. But the Saudi state must provide many former jihadists with jobs and financial assistance, Mr. Hadlag said, because if it does not, others will. “Sometimes the extremists leave money in envelopes under the door, with ‘From your mujahedeen brothers’ written on it,” Mr. Hadlag said. “We can’t let them be the good guys.” The postprison rehabilitation program, which is now being expanded, is only one part of a broader effort to address the issue of violent extremism across Saudi Arabia. It includes dialogues with — or even suppression of — the more extremist clerics. There are also a variety of outreach programs in areas known to harbor extremists, with the Interior Ministry sending its preferred clerics or sheiks to speak in schools and community centers for two or three weeks at a time. At the same time, the kingdom has completely retooled its prison system, which had been criticized as having inhumane conditions. Five new prisons were built in a matter of months last year — as it happens, by the bin Laden family company — that hold 1,200 to 1,500 prisoners each. Unlike the old prisons, the new ones allow a maximum of four inmates to a cell, and Islamists are kept separate from common criminals for the first time, minimizing the spread of jihadist ideas, or so the theory goes. Some internal critics say that the “soft” counterterrorism strategies remain weak, and that the only way to address the roots of jihadist violence is by thoroughly reforming the Saudi educational system, a task that will take decades. “One major problem is that the sheiks they bring for these programs aren’t authoritative,” said Mshari al-Zaydi, a Saudi journalist and political analyst who is himself a former hard-liner, referring to the rehabilitation efforts. “They don’t have credibility because they are seen as people who take money from the government.” In the meantime, Saudi Arabia’s main terrorist threat appears to come from Yemen, where a number of Saudi extremists have regrouped in that country’s mountainous, tribal hinterland. They have struck there repeatedly in the past year and have declared a goal of using Yemen as a base for attacks against Saudi Arabia. The border with Yemen is long and porous, and militants appear to have no trouble crossing it at will. For all their success on the military front, Saudi officials seem cautious about declaring a victory against jihadists, especially when unexpected crises like the recent war between Israel and Hamas can create a sudden upwelling of popular anger that fuels extremist sentiment. “We are victims of terrorism,” said the commander of the Riyadh training center, where 400 commandos sit ready to respond to attacks 24 hours a day. “It’s not what the world thinks.”

Saudi Arabia
Terrorism
Al Qaeda
Defense and Military Forces


Bishop Eddie Long, From Pulpit, Rejects Sex Claims

Abstract: LITHONIA, Ga. — Bishop Eddie L. Long, the megachurch leader accused in a series of civil lawsuits of sexual misconduct with young men, vowed from the pulpit to thousands of supportive congregants on Sunday that he would contest the accusations. Bishop Long, senior pastor of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, did not directly proclaim his innocence or specifically address charges that he had lured four young church members, now in their 20s, into sexual activity. But, to fervent applause and scattered fist pumps from two sets of worshipers, he pledged to legally challenge the claims against him. “I have never in my life portrayed myself as a perfect man, but I am not the man that’s being portrayed on the television,” Bishop Long, 57, said. He said the case would be resolved “in the court of justice” and added: “Please understand, I think this is the only place I’ll find justice. This thing, I’m going to fight.” Bishop Long, labeling the past week as probably the most difficult period of his life, likened himself to David facing Goliath. “I’ve got five rocks, and I haven’t thrown one yet,” he said. In a statement last week, Bishop Long said, “We continue to categorically deny each and every one of these ugly charges.” Anticipating his remarks on the matter, churchgoers filled the 10,000-seat church to nearly overflowing for both morning services. Bishop Long was received warmly, with standing ovations and shouts of “We love you.” One exception was a man who attended the second service and was escorted out, according to an Associated Press report, after he stood and yelled, “We want to know the truth, man!” Bishop Long, wearing a beige suit and toting an iPad , tailored the day’s sermon to his personal travails. “Many are the afflictions of the righteous,” he said, quoting a biblical phrase from the Book of Psalms, “but the Lord delivers him out of all of them.” “Unfortunately, my brothers and sisters, life is filled with painful situations that make the time of joy and happiness not as magnificent as we would like,” he said in a subdued tone. “Some way and somehow, we will become better and walk through this painful situation.” Bishop Long seemed overcome by emotion over the outpouring of allegiance at the early service. Before speaking, he tapped his heart several times and pointed appreciatively at the congregants. The pastor, a father of four, was accompanied by his wife, Vanessa. He cited several ministers from other churches who came in support. During his remarks, ushers handed out tissues to those in tears. A church elder closed the early service by twice saying, “We stand by our pastor.” New Birth says it has 25,000 members, many drawn by the message championed by Bishop Long that wealth and material prosperity are blessings from God that should be embraced. The church’s property fills 240 acres east of downtown Atlanta, and it was buzzing before sunup Sunday, with many attendees waiting at the still-locked church doors. The church is stadiumlike, with a lower and upper deck, multicolored spotlights, six large video screens and loudspeakers that hang from the ceiling, spilling out gospel songs from a rousing 11-piece band. The service is recorded and sold within minutes after it is over on DVDs and compact discs. A gift shop offers snacks, books, music and apparel bearing the New Birth logo. Mr. Long’s accusers contend that he gained their trust by plying them with gifts, employing them and taking them on overseas trips on his private jet. But other members of the church dismissed the accusations. “I don’t believe the charges,” said Katrina Maben as she exited with her husband and two children. “I love my pastor.” She expressed similar affection for New Birth. “I’ve been going here for 10 years, and I’ve never felt God’s presence the way I feel it here,” Ms. Maben said. “My life has changed since I came here.”

Long Eddie L
New Birth Missionary Baptist Church
Sex Crimes
Georgia
Churches


Video: A Pro Skier’s Birthday Present

Abstract: Behind the Line is a video series produced by Teton Gravity Research that takes you into the minds of skiers. In each episode, the athletes will look back on a line, a jump or a session, and discuss the moment. What is the best birthday present you could give pro-skier Tim Durtschi? How about a big backcountry jump commonly referred to as a “booter”. Last year, Durtschi, along with Powder’s Breakthrough Skier of the Year Nick McNutt ,headed into the backcountry of Jackson Hole with the goal to build the perfect jump. After scoping out the landing and two days of building the pair had an epic time jumping off of Durtschi’s birthday gift.


Floridians Shiver, and Pray for the Strawberries

Abstract: DOVER, Fla. — Icicles hang from the thermometer: 25 degrees, at dawn, and the strawberries that should be on cereal sit suspended beneath hard ice, shiny and clear as lacquer. Michelle Williamson smiles. The ice, she says, did its job of keeping all but the ripest berries safe, and the worst has been averted. Again. For now. Tuesday brought the fourth consecutive night of freezing temperatures and all-night watering to the nation’s winter strawberry capital, and with another cold front on its way, nearly everyone here expects the frenzy and fatigue to continue. “You work as hard as you can for the best outcome you can,” said Ms. Williamson, 46, as a handful of workers sucked down coffee. “Then you pray.” The good news is that the current freeze, so far, has not been nearly as damaging as the bitter cold snaps of 1835, 1962 or 1989, each of which destroyed dozens of businesses and altered breakfast menus nationwide. The bad news is that its unusual length has already begun to test the patience of nearly everyone who touches a strawberry or wants to. Prices for the red wonders of winter — with Florida names like Radiance — have increased by $2 a pound since Christmas, and supplies will be limited for weeks, even if temperatures rise. Growers said Wednesday that supermarket chains were already pressuring them to produce what they planned to advertise in fliers. “You can only say so many times, ‘We tried,’ ” said Shawn Pollard, a salesman at Astin Strawberry Exchange, one of the area’s largest strawberry packers. “We have zero control.” Nature, of course, currently runs the show, and without much compassion. The berries that were ripe and red like nail polish beneath the ice this morning will have to be thrown away because the water and thawing destroys them, growers said. The low temperatures — 20 degrees below normal — also delay the second and third rounds of fruit that the plants produce. Ms. Williamson said that a 10 percent loss on what is ripe right now would be the best-case scenario for her family’s company, G&F Farms, which has been planting berries here since the 1880s. Other farmers sounded more concerned. “I’m really worried that there won’t be a lot of strawberries for Valentine’s Day ,” said David Spivey, 32, at his family’s 45 acres in Plant City. “That’s a big time for us.” He walked over to a field still frozen. A tiny strawberry, only half-red, floated in a river of water between the crop rows. “We haven’t picked in three days,” Mr. Spivey said. “I can’t tell you when we’ll pick again.” Like many other farmers here, he looked exhausted. Half-shaven, glasses at a tilt, he wore a camouflage snowsuit, gloves and a hat. It was 9 a.m. and 34 degrees. Mr. Spivey said that he, his father, Dennis, and his brother, Stephen, who goes by Bubba, had been up all night. This has been the freezing routine for strawberry farmers since at least the ’50s when ice became a commonly used protective measure. The idea of a berry under an igloo — as a good thing — may seem odd, but farmers say it is a function of the plant’s DNA: strawberries are destroyed at 28 degrees, so ice, constantly watered to stay at a stable 32, protects them. (Florida citrus plants, which appear to have also survived Tuesday night intact , are also kept warm this way and with water flooding the roots.) The problem for strawberries is that an uneven coating of ice leaves the plants vulnerable to the colder air. Wind is a villain hated most of all because it creates uneven spraying, but farmers stay up at night to deal mainly with broken sprinklers and pipes. Mr. Spivey said that at his farm early Wednesday morning, two vinyl pipes connected to sprinklers burst from the cold, forcing him to trudge through muddy fields to replace the pipe and re-attach it to the “rain bird” sprayer on top. Farmers made similar moves all night, all over the 35-mile area east of Tampa, where Florida’s $375 million-a-year strawberry industry is concentrated. Help seems to come from the shared experience of nature’s universal wrath. Everyone in Dover and Plant City, Florida’s two main strawberry towns, has become familiar with the fruit’s leadership role; for decades, schools in the area have been closed for the annual strawberry festival parade in Plant City (March 8 this year). And for freezes, certain rules apply. Calls are not made during daylight when people are expected to be sleeping. “Stay warm” replaces “goodbye” and irrigation stores give farmers their own sets of keys so they can get what they need at any hour. “They just let them know what they took and pay later,” Ms. Williamson said. By midmorning, she was standing in the sun. It was bright, not warm: cows nearby stood confused in frozen, crunchy grass for another hour. But at the farm, doughnuts had arrived, thanks to a group of businessmen who showed up from Driscoll, the national distributor she grows for. The executives, Ms. Williamson and the tired workers were all undoubtedly worried about the weather; some forecasts call for more cold weather and more wind this weekend. But for a few minutes, as the mercury moved toward 40 degrees, they were just a bunch of friends drinking coffee and laughing — ignoring the elements they could not control.

Strawberries Florida Ice Agriculture Weather


Sidewalk Labs, a Start-Up Created by Google, Has Bold Aims to Improve City Living

Abstract: Google’s ambitions and investments have increasingly broadened beyond its digital origins in Internet search and online advertising into the arena of physical objects: self-driving cars, Internet-connected eyeglasses, smart thermostats and a biotech venture to develop life-extending treatments. Now Google is getting into the ultimate manifestation of the messy real world: cities. The Silicon Valley giant is starting and funding an independent company dedicated to coming up with new technologies to improve urban life. The start-up, Sidewalk Labs, will be headed by Daniel L. Doctoroff, former deputy mayor of New York City for economic development and former chief executive of Bloomberg L.P . Mr. Doctoroff jointly conceived the idea for the company, which will be based in New York, with a team at Google, led by its chief executive, Larry Page. The founders describe Sidewalk Labs as an “urban innovation company” that will pursue technologies to cut pollution, curb energy use, streamline transportation and reduce the cost of city living. To achieve that goal, Mr. Doctoroff said Sidewalk Labs planned to build technology itself, buy it and invest in partnerships. “It’s going to evolve and we’re just starting up,” he said in an interview. Neither Mr. Doctoroff nor Google would say how much Google intended to invest in Sidewalk Labs, but it could be sizable eventually. A model for Sidewalk Labs, they said, is Calico, a company backed by Google, established in 2013 and run by Arthur D. Levinson, a former Genentech chief executive. Last September, Calico and AbbVie, a pharmaceutical company, announced that they would build a research center in the San Francisco Bay Area for diseases that affect the elderly, like dementia, with an initial investment, split evenly, of $500 million. In a post on Google Plus, the company’s social network, Mr. Page termed Sidewalk Labs “a relatively modest investment” and one “very different from Google’s core business.” It is a business but a decidedly long-term bet, Mr. Page wrote, and he compared it with Calico and Google X , the lab that incubated Google’s autonomous vehicles. Mr. Doctoroff said he had known Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, for years, and only began meeting with Mr. Page in recent months. Over the last year, Adrian Aoun, an engineering manager, had been traveling, studying and scouting the opportunity in urban technology for Google, and also met with Mr. Doctoroff repeatedly. In his post, Mr. Page thanked Mr. Aoun for helping “bring Dan on board.” Mr. Doctoroff brings an understanding of urban challenges to the venture, from his six years as deputy mayor, while Google brings money and technical expertise. Mr. Doctoroff left Bloomberg, a technology-driven information company, last year after the founder, Michael R. Bloomberg, decided he wanted to again take control of the enterprise. Image Daniel L. Doctoroff conceived the idea for Sidewalk Labs with a Google team. The timing for Sidewalk Labs is right, Mr. Doctoroff said, because “we’re on the verge of a historic moment for cities,” when technologies are rapidly maturing to help address needs like the environment, health and affordable housing. The arsenal of fast-developing technologies, he said, includes sensors, smartphones, and the resulting explosion of digital data combined with clever software to help residents and municipal governments made better decisions. The technology, he said, can open a door to “extraordinary business opportunities and opportunities for improving quality of life.” Major technology companies, like IBM and Cisco, already have large businesses that apply information technology to improving the efficiency of cities. IBM has used its researchers and technical prowess in projects like traffic management in Stockholm and microlevel weather forecasting to predict the location of life-threatening mudslides in Rio de Janeiro. Sidewalk Labs, Mr. Doctoroff said, planned to work in “the huge space between civic hackers and traditional big technology companies.” While big technology companies take a “top-down approach and seek to embed themselves in a city’s infrastructure,” he said Sidewalk Labs would instead seek to develop “technology platforms that people can plug into” for things like managing energy use or altering commuting habits. He pointed to New York’s bike-sharing program as an early example of a technology-assisted innovation in transportation. There is already an emerging academic focus on applying modern digital technology to cities’ physical systems. Leading examples include New York University’s Center for the Urban Science and Progress, and the University of Chicago’s Urban Center for Computation and Data. “It’s great to see an ambitious private sector initiative like this recognize that cities are important,” said Steven E. Koonin, director of the N.Y.U. urban science center. “And there are technology opportunities, but they are complicated.” Personally, Mr. Doctoroff said, the new venture promised to tap the experience of his entire career. “I do think this job is a convergence of my skills at a time of historic convergence for cities,” he said.

Google
Urban area
Daniel L Doctoroff
Energy Efficiency
Infrastructure,public works
Conservation of Resources


Spray Time

Abstract: New Haven The inspiration for the latest exhibition at Artspace was the windows. Denise Markonish, the curator, liked how the gallery walls were visible from the street through expansive side windows, so she decided to invite four graffiti artists from Boston, New Haven and New York, whose tag names are Demo, Dooley O, Mister Never and Nick Z, to use the space as if they were working outside. The exhibition is called “The New English,” a title chosen by the artists because all of them are interested in language. Lively, pregnant lettering is among the characteristics of this clandestine, often illegal mode of expression, but the title is also a play on the fact that all of the artists hail from New England, even though Nick Z and Mister Never recently relocated to New York. Graffiti has long been a daring means of public confession of private sentiments about everything from true love to the ills of the planet. But what exactly is graffiti art? Is it a kind of popular or folk art, or just glorified vandalism? Graffiti’s origins as a modern art form are vague, although in the 1940’s, artists like Jean Dubuffet, Antoni Tapies and Cy Twombly began to imitate and later incorporate graffiti into their paintings. It was also about this time that artists began to experiment seriously with airbrushes and aerosol paints. But it was not until the 1980’s that graffiti art came into its own, a byproduct of the radical atmosphere of the East Village art scene in New York City. From here it fell out of favor, its youthful authenticity compromised by overzealous marketing — think of Keith Haring, whose graffiti was translated onto T-shirts and coffee mugs. Times change, and a survey of graffiti now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art suggests that it might be undergoing a resurgence as an art form. Like the artists who are showing in the Brooklyn exhibition, those at Artspace once worked solely on the street but at some point moved into gallery spaces. But unlike the Brooklyn show, where the artworks are mostly on canvas and other support material, the Artspace exhibition consists of works painted directly on the walls. By asking the artists to paint the walls, loose and fast, Ms. Markonish has sidestepped a perennial problem of showing graffiti art in museums, where it can lose much of its authenticity and immediacy when transferred to a support, hauled into a gallery and hung under lights like a regular artwork. At Artspace, the designs are fresh and raw, with visible smudges and mistakes. This is the real deal. The most striking piece at Artspace is by Dooley O, who, Ms. Markonish said, also runs a shop in Westville, Conn., that specializes in selling graffiti gear (markers and spray cans) and skateboard and other youth culture accessories. He is also a hip-hop musician and D.J. who performs around Connecticut. His work at Artspace is old-school style graffiti, the artist using his name written in blocky letters combined with figurative elements (large-headed, small-bodied figures with big Afros) in bold, almost acidic colors that practically sting the eyes. The other New Haven artist here is Demo, a graphic designer. This is the first time he has done an indoor, straight-on-the-wall graffiti mural of this scale. He likes to paint arrows, which shoot through his work to create a bold and intricate abstract pattern. He also alternates the use of glossy and flat paint, giving the design an interesting sense of three-dimensionality and light. Mr. Never’s piece is different from the super-colorful stuff. It is entirely text, basically little word vignettes drawn on the wall in blue, pink and gray paint that tell of the artist’s transition from Boston to New York — his thoughts, feelings and fears. It is not as visually rich as the other pieces, but it is the one work here with a greater sense of purpose and meaning. Despite its street-low quality, it is like looking into someone’s soul.


In China, Myths of Social Cohesion

Abstract: KASHGAR, China — They come for the camel rides, the chance to dress up like a conquering Qing dynasty soldier or to take selfies in front of one of the most historic Islamic shrines in Xinjiang, the sprawling region in China’s far northwest. But the busloads of Chinese tourists who converge on the Afaq Khoja Mausoleum each day are mostly interested in a single raised crypt amid the dozens of tombs ensconced under the shrine’s soaring 17th-century dome. It is the one said to belong to Iparhan, a Uighur imperial consort, who, according to legend, was so sweetly fragrant that she caught the attention of a Chinese emperor 2,700 miles away in Beijing — and was either invited to live with him or dragooned into the palace as a trophy of war. “The love between her and the Qianlong emperor was so strong, after she died, he sent 120 men to escort her body back here for burial,” one guide explained, eliciting nods and knowing smiles from the crowd. “It was a journey that took three years.” But with the group out of earshot, a local resident offered up a starkly different version, describing Iparhan as a tragic figure, little more than a sex slave who was murdered by the emperor’s mother after she repeatedly rejected Qianlong’s advances. “The story that most Chinese know is completely made up,” said the man, an ethnic Uighur, who asked that his name be withheld for fear of angering the authorities. “The truth is she isn’t even buried here.” In the six decades since coming to power, China’s Communist Party has devoted enormous resources to composing historical narratives that seek to legitimize its rule and obfuscate its failures. The disastrous famine that claimed millions of lives last century is said to have been caused by bad weather, not Mao’s misguided policies. Chinese history books often blame the United States for starting the Korean War, not the Communist troops from North Korea who, most historians agree, first invaded the South. When it comes to China’s ethnic minorities, the party-run history machine is especially single-minded in its effort to promote story lines that portray Uighurs, Mongolians, Tibetans and other groups as contented members of an extended family whose traditional homelands have long been part of the Chinese nation. Alternate narratives are far less cheery. They include tales of subjugation and repression amid government-backed efforts to dilute ethnic identity through the migration of members of China’s dominant group, the Han. Chinese historians rarely veer from the officially sanctioned scripts; Uighur and Tibetan scholars who have insisted on writing about the disagreeable aspects of Communist rule have seen their books banned and their careers destroyed. James A. Millward , a professor at Georgetown University who studies China’s ethnically diverse borderlands, said the drive to shape history, while not unique to China, was zealously practiced by each succeeding dynasty in an effort to malign an emperor’s predecessors and glorify his own rule. But the Communists have also sought to use history as a tool against separatist aspirations and to legitimize their efforts to govern potentially restive populations. “The ability to control historical narratives and airbrush out problematic truths is a powerful tool but it also reveals the party’s insecurity over certain aspects of the past it would rather the world forget,” Professor Millward said. In Xinjiang, as Uighur resentment over Chinese rule boils over into increasing bloodshed , this propagandistic approach to history has taken on greater urgency. Over the past year, at least 200 people have been killed here, some of them Han murdered by what the government calls “terrorists,” but many of them Uighurs shot by security forces under murky circumstances. Image A night market in Kashgar, Xinjiang, in July. There have been growing tensions in the region between Uighurs and members of the Han ethnic group. Credit Kevin Frayer/Getty Images At times like these, it would seem that Iparhan is just the salve that China needs. Although the story of Iparhan, known to the Chinese as Xiangfei, or Fragrant Concubine, was first popularized in the early 20th century, party-backed historians have made significant alterations. Most seek to turn her into a vehicle for conveying enduring amity between Han and Uighurs, whose Central Asian culture, Muslim faith and Turkic language set them apart from the Han. Earlier versions of the story cast Xiangfei as a defiant beauty, captured by the Qing during battle, who kept daggers in her sleeve and remained chaste to the end, when she was either killed by palace eunuchs or forced to commit suicide. But that narrative has been supplanted by a happy-ending tale of romance that celebrates the emperor’s efforts to win her affections by building a miniature Kashgari village outside her window in Beijing and showering her with the sweet melons and oleaster of her homeland. These days, Xiangfei is the subject of poems, plays and television shows as well as the namesake of a chain of roast-chicken restaurants , a brand of sun-dried raisins and, not surprisingly, a line of perfumes. Rian Thum , a professor of Uighur history at Loyola University New Orleans, said that in addition to suggesting longstanding affections between Han and Uighur, the mythicized Xiangfei served to reinforce the image of Uighur women as exotic, strong-willed and slightly dangerous. “The fact that Uighurs are sexualized and exoticized by so many Han Chinese makes the Xiangfei story very appealing,” he said. Party propagandists have been especially drawn to female protagonists, often royal consorts, who were bit players in grand power struggles involving warring states on the fringes of the ancient Chinese empire. In Inner Mongolia, the vast grasslands that form a buffer between China and Mongolia, it is Wang Zhaojun, a lovelorn Han dynasty consort who supposedly offered herself to a “barbarian” Mongolian prince to cement an alliance between the two peoples. In Tibet, it is Wencheng, a seventh-century Chinese princess who, according to popular lore, was a matrimonial peace gift to a bellicose Tibetan king. To the consternation of many Tibetans, Princess Wencheng is frequently portrayed as having pacified Tibet and introduced from China advanced farming practices, weaving and even Buddhism and the Tibetan alphabet. Some historians question whether she even existed. The story of Princess Wencheng is a familiar one to Chinese youngsters, and her persona has come to dominate Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, in the form of an operatic extravaganza that, according to promotional materials, “celebrates the enduring friendship between the two peoples.” Tsering Woeser , a Tibetan writer who saw the show soon after it opened last year, said she was troubled by the overriding message that painted the Tibetan people as savages who needed civilizing. “We used to think the story of Princess Wencheng was cute, but she has become such an over-the-top work of propaganda that we can’t help but be offended,” Ms. Woeser said. Many Uighurs also find the popularized story of Xiangfei galling, although their ire is often focused on the Afaq Khoja Mausoleum — a hallowed Sufi shrine and burial place for a clan that once ruled the Kashgar region — and its transformation into a prop for a Chinese fable. Archaeologists, they note, long ago identified the grave of a concubine named Xiangfei outside Beijing. Some of the resentment also stems from the government’s decision to turn what was an important site for pilgrimages into a tourist attraction devoid of religious meaning. These days the site is managed by a Chinese company that charges an entry fee. Professor Thum said the government had largely succeeded in shaping both Han and Uighur understandings of the shrine, especially its association with the rebellious Khojas, who fought off the Qing occupiers and established a short-lived independent state in the mid-19th century. “To their credit,” he said, “the government took a symbol of Uighur resistance to Chinese rule and turned it into a vehicle for a message they want to get out.”

China
Propaganda
Mythology
Uyghur
Kashgar
Tibet
Han Chinese
Communist Party of China


Hayward Defends BP’s Safety Record

Abstract: LONDON — The chief executive of BP , Tony Hayward , told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday that there was no evidence that the accident in the Gulf of Mexico was partly the result of cost-cutting measures at BP. Mr. Hayward, along with BP’s safety chief, Mark Bly, and the head of North Sea operations, Bernard Looney, went before the parliamentary committee to discuss deepwater drilling off the British coast and faced questions about its safety record, including the explosion in April on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people and leaked millions of barrels of oil into the gulf. The committee is weighing the need for additional drilling regulations in the aftermath of the explosion and as BP plans to drill a well almost as deep as the one in the gulf off the coast of Scotland. “The safety measures that oil companies have to comply with in the U.K. are already stricter than in the U.S., but serious questions still need to be asked in light of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill,” Tim Yeo, chairman of the energy and climate committee, said before the hearing. The hearing was less a grilling and more a question-and-answer session, and the British lawmakers were less persistent than their American counterparts at a hearing in June. Speaking in a calm and factual tone, Mr. Hayward and Mr. Looney said safety lapses at BP’s North Sea operations, which include a lack of emergency training for employees, as reported Wednesday by The Financial Times , did not point to “any fundamental weaknesses” at the operation but were merely administrative oversights. The newspaper report cited offshore inspection records and said that BP was cited for failing to conduct adequate oil spill exercises. “It is true that there were less than 10 people who have not undergone refresher training,” Mr. Looney said. “It was an administrative error. We’ve taken action that this administrative error does not occur.” The Department of Energy and Climate Change, which monitors compliance, had accused BP of failing to adequately conduct oil spill exercises and questioned whether all workers had been correctly trained. On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the department said that BP had confirmed that offshore managers completed the required training. BP also confirmed that the installations had tested oil pollution emergency plans within the last year, she said. Defending his company’s safety record, Mr. Hayward said a blowout preventer on the gulf rig that failed to stop oil leaking “was fully compliant with the regulatory regime and it should have functioned.” Why it did not is something the industry has yet to find out, he said. Mr. Looney said that BP had changed some procedures since the accident in the gulf and that one of them was to “bring in a third party,” or an independent company, to ensure the quality of blowout preventers. Asked why an engineer had called the gulf well a “nightmare well,” Mr. Hayward said that such a description was “unfortunate” but that the well “had been challenging — not unusually so for the Gulf of Mexico. The gulf is a more challenging drilling environment than the rest of the world.” In June, Mr. Hayward faced relentless questioning by American lawmakers and was sharply criticized for saying that he had little knowledge of decisions that led to the oil rig explosion. Peppered with questions in Washington over whether BP officials had cut corners to save time and money, Mr. Hayward repeatedly said he had not been present on the rig and had no advance knowledge of problems with what one company engineer called a “nightmare well” six days before the accident on April 20. “I’m not stonewalling,” he said at the time . “I simply wasn’t involved in the decision-making.” Mr. Hayward bowed to pressure and announced his resignation as chief executive in July after a series of public relations blunders and accusations that he had mishandled the oil spill. Robert Dudley, who was in charge of the gulf cleanup effort, was named as his successor . He is to take over on Oct. 1. Asked Wednesday whether he felt unfairly treated by the media in the United States and whether he regretted his public relations mistakes, including telling reporters he would like to have his life back. Mr. Hayward said that “there are many things I’d do differently if I had the opportunity. But it’s also important to understand that the emotion and anger in the United States was very high and quite understandably so.” BP has started to sell assets worth a combined $30 billion as part of a plan to raise cash to pay for the damage from the oil spill. BP has decided to shed mostly older onshore fields, many with declining output. Such divestments would increase BP’s reliance on riskier deepwater assets, which are much more difficult to develop and maintain but have greater profit potential. Several investigations are under way to find out how the explosion occurred. BP published the results of its own investigation on Sept. 8, mostly pointing fingers at other companies involved in the construction and maintenance of the rig. In the report, BP said that the accident had been the result of “a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces.” Mr. Hayward said that there was a “lack of rigor and quality of oversight of contractors” and that given “the nature and gravity of the accident” it would be “surprising if the industry does not look afresh at the relationship with contractors.” BP has agreed to set aside $20 billion to cover any claims and damages as a result of the spill. The company is engaged in an effort to rebuff claims that it acted with gross negligence in order to keep damage costs from spiraling.

Hayward Tony
BP Plc
Legislatures and Parliaments
Accidents and Safety
Offshore Drilling and Exploration
Gulf of Mexico


Illinois: Federal Government Agrees to Buy Prison

Abstract: The federal government has agreed to buy the closed Thomson Correctional Center in western Illinois for $165 million, state leaders announced on Tuesday. Many Illinois leaders said the sale would bring up to 1,100 jobs to the state, and federal officials have said it would help alleviate prison overcrowding. The sale has been stalled for years. Most recently, Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Virginia Republican who leads a House subcommittee that oversees the federal Bureau of Prisons, objected because he believed that terrorism suspects would be housed there. The Obama administration has vowed that will not happen, and federal law now prohibits any transfers from the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to the Thomson prison.

Thomson Correctional Center
Illinois
Prisons and Prisoners


Webdenda

Abstract: Linda Bailey and Stacey Davis joined the Cadient Group, King of Prussia, Pa. Ms. Bailey becomes senior copywriter; she had been a lead writer at the Newtown, Pa., office of InVentiv Health. Ms. Davis becomes creative director for copy; she has worked as a freelance creative director, copywriter and marketing consultant for the last decade. Hester Bloch joined Isobar, London, in a new post, global chief marketing officer. She had been global marketing director at AKQA, part of WPP. Isobar is part of the Aegis Group, which is being acquired by Dentsu. Jonathan Bokor joined MediaVest, New York, in a new post, senior vice president and director for advanced media. He had been general manager for interactive television solutions at Canoe Ventures, New York. MediaVest is part of the Starcom MediaVest Group division of the Publicis Groupe. Bold Communications Group, Daniel Island, S.C., and Pearson DeBoer Creative Solutions, Salisbury, N.C., are merging under the Bold Communications Group name. Financial terms were not disclosed. Pearson DeBoer becomes the Salisbury office of Bold. Matthew DeBoer, a partner at Pearson DeBoer, is leaving to pursue other opportunities, the merged agency said. Patrick Pearson, a partner at Pearson DeBoer, becomes vice president and general manager at Bold. Jonathan Weaver, creative director at Pearson DeBoer, becomes creative director at Bold. Michael Bryce joined DraftFCB, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, as executive vice president and executive creative director for the Irvine, Calif., office and a satellite office that the agency is open soon in Los Angeles. He succeeds Teddy Brown, who is now at the DraftFCB headquarters in Chicago as an executive creative director. Mr. Bryce had most recently been creative director at 72andSunny, Los Angeles, part of MDC Partners. Jana Carriere joined Scales Advertising, St. Paul, in a new post, client services director. She had most recently been an account supervisor at the New York office of TPN, part of the Omnicom Group. Catalyst Public Relations, New York, was acquired by IMG Worldwide, New York, as IMG seeks to expand into the communications realm. Financial terms were not disclosed. Catalyst, which also has offices in Charlotte, N.C., and Los Angeles, will operate under its current name and management as part of the consulting business at IMG. Adam Chandler joined the New York office of Jumptap in a new post, senior vice president for sales. He had most recently been executive in residence at Lerer Ventures and before that was chief revenue officer at the Thrillist Media Group, New York. Jumptap created the sales post after Todd Anderman, who had been chief revenue officer, left to join Thrillist as president for sales, marketing and operations; Mr. Anderman’s post at Thrillist, which is new, includes the duties that Mr. Chandler had handled there. Sabrina Chapman joined SK&G, Las Vegas, as a public relations account executive. She had most recently been a writer for publications like Las Vegas Weekly and Las Vegas magazine, covering spirits and cocktails. Dbray Media, Parsippany, N.J., was hired by three clients. They are: Becker Brothers, Montclair, N.J., and New York, a real estate firm; Cinchcast, New York, a webcasting company that had previously worked with Affect, New York; and MyEchain, Raleigh, N.C., which offers apps that help consumers upload, store and organize their loyalty cards, membership cards and rewards cards. Dentsu, Tokyo, said it would encourage certain employees to retire early with an incentive program. The effort is aimed at employees who will be ages 40 to 59 as of March 31 and will have worked at Dentsu for 10 years or longer. It is the sixth early-retirement incentive program at Dentsu and the first since 2007. Mark Hansen joined the Chicago office of DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, as executive vice president and director for account management. He assumes those duties from Peter McGuinness, chief executive at DDB Chicago, who had been acting as head of accounts for the last 18 months, the agency said. Mr. Hansen had been group account director for North America at TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles, which is the Playa del Rey, Calif., office of TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of Omnicom. Jason Hoffman joined Optimedia, New York, in a new post, senior vice president for digital. He had been head of United States digital media and strategy at OMD, part of the Omnicom Media Group division of the Omnicom Group. Optimedia is part of the ZenithOptimedia division of the Publicis Groupe. Hoosier Lottery, Indianapolis, named Mortenson Safar Kim, formerly MeyerWallis, Indianapolis and Milwaukee, as its creative agency of record. The decision to award a contract to Mortenson Safar Kim came after a required review; the budget for the first year of the contract, including media, production and agency fees, is more than $10 million. The Lottery had previously divided creative assignments between Mortenson Safar Kim and Boyden & Youngblutt, Fort Wayne, Ind. The Lottery plans reviews for assignments handled by other agencies that include media planning and media buying. IPG Mediabrands, New York, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, shifted three media specialty units in the United States to its Orion Holdings division from its Geomentum division. They are NSA Media, the Outdoor Advertising Group and Wahlstrom. David Jenkins joined Taxi New York — the New York office of Taxi, part of the Young & Rubicam Group division of WPP — as president. He succeeds Durk Barnhill, who left in the summer to become chief executive of the flagship New York office of Saatchi & Saatchi, part of the Publicis Groupe. Mr. Jenkins had most recently been chief integration officer at Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners, New York, part of MDC Partners. D’nae Kingsley-Cronan was named to a new post, vice president for integrated planning at Trailer Park, Hollywood, Calif., and its advertising unit, Goodness Mfg. She has worked for agencies that include GolinHarris and TBWA/Chiat/Day. McCann Worldgroup, New York, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, formed a division, McCann ExtraBoldCondensed, that will be devoted to one of the agency’s biggest worldwide clients, MasterCard. The new division will be led by Joyce King Thomas as president; she had been chief creative officer at the McCann Erickson New York unit of the McCann Worldgroup from 2004 to 2010 and helped create the original MasterCard “Priceless” campaign in 1997. MediaWhiz, New York, a digital media agency, was acquired by the Matomy Media Group, Tel Aviv, and becomes the North American hub of Matomy Media. Financial terms were not disclosed. MediaWhiz had been a part of Hyper Marketing, which was recently acquired by the Epsilon unit of Alliance Data, but the acquisition did not include MediaWhiz. Hakan Lindskog becomes chief executive at MediaWhiz, succeeding John Kuendig, who continues as chairman of the Ryan Partnership division of Hyper Marketing. Mr. Lindskog had most recently been a consultant to Matomy Media and before that was president and chief executive at Neverblue, Vancouver, British Columbia. Sujata Mitra, manager for media relations at CQ Roll Call, Washington, part of the Economist Group, was named to a new post, director for marketing communications. Dee Mustafa-Bowne joined the Atlanta office of Digitas, part of the VivaKi division of the Publicis Groupe, in a new post, vice president and group creative director. She had most recently been creative director at the Atlanta office of Engauge. RMM Online Advertising, New York, part of Lin Media, was renamed Lin Digital. Rokkan Media, New York, was acquired by the Publicis Groupe, Paris. Financial terms were not disclosed. Rokkan will operate as an autonomous unit of the Publicis Groupe under its current managers. Marty Senn joined Carmichael Lynch, Minneapolis, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, as an executive creative director; the agency will now have two executive creative directors as Mr. Senn joins Randy Hughes. Mr. Senn had been a creative director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group. Chris Wilson, a business director at JWT New York, part of the JWT division of WPP, joined the JWT Atlanta office as senior partner and director for account management. He succeeds Mary Margaret Connell, who left JWT Atlanta last year.

Appointments and Executive Changes
advertising,marketing
Public relations
Job Recruiting and Hiring


Lynch Says She’s Unable to Consider Scalia’s Seat

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Tuesday that she was taking herself out of consideration for the open Supreme Court seat because of the demands of her current position. Ms. Lynch “determined that the limitations inherent in the nomination process would curtail her effectiveness in her current role,” Melanie Newman, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said in a statement. “She is honored to serve as attorney general, and she is fully committed to carrying out the work of the Department of Justice for the remainder of her term,” Ms. Newman said. After the death of Justice Antonin Scalia last month, Ms. Lynch was seen by some Supreme Court watchers as a potential nominee, but her name seemed to have faded in recent weeks. She is the second prominent official to ask publicly not to be considered for the job, after an announcement last month by Gov. Brian Sandoval, Republican of Nevada. With Republicans vowing not to hold hearings on any nominee, many political and legal observers in Washington have suggested that it might be difficult for President Obama to find someone to accept the nomination. The White House has kept a tight lid on its consideration of possible nominees. Among those said to be under consideration are four federal judges: Jane L. Kelly, 51, Merrick B. Garland, 63, and Sri Srinivasan, 49, who are all appellate judges, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, 45, a trial judge. If nominated, Ms. Lynch might have faced an even tougher fight in the Senate than other potential nominees, because she was only narrowly confirmed as attorney general in April after a long delay. Senate Republicans were particularly upset about her support for Mr. Obama’s executive action on immigration.

Loretta E Lynch
Supreme Court,SCOTUS
Justice Department
Attorney general
US Politics
Appointments and Executive Changes
Antonin Scalia
Barack Obama


Brooklyn Teenager Gets 19 Years to Life for Fire That Killed Officer

Abstract: A Brooklyn teenager was sentenced on Tuesday to 19 years to life in prison for having set fire to a mattress in a hallway of his apartment building, resulting in the death of a police officer who responded to the blaze. The young man, Marcell Dockery, sat still and silent in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn as Justice Danny K. Chun issued the sentence after scolding him for having killed the officer, Dennis Guerra, and having gravely injured his partner, Officer Rosa Rodriguez. “The saddest thing about this case,” Justice Chun said, was that the two officers had responded to the fire “because of their love for the job and their love for helping people in trouble, and because of that, Officer Guerra is dead.” After a two-week trial in April and May, Mr. Dockery, now 18, was convicted of murder, assault and arson. The officers went to the apartment building, at 2007 Surf Avenue in Coney Island, after receiving a report about the fire on April 6, 2014. When the two entered the lobby, they saw no sign of flames and took an elevator to the 13th floor. Prosecutors introduced surveillance video at the trial of the thick black smoke that awaited them, and Officer Rodriguez testified that she had been unable to breathe in the hot, chaotic scene. Image Cathy Guerra, the widow of Officer Dennis Guerra, after the sentencing. She told the court she often went to sleep crying. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times When Mr. Dockery was arrested shortly after the fire, he told the police that he had set it because he had been bored. Before the trial began, however, he accused the police of having coerced his confession . He continues to maintain that he is innocent. Even though the prosecution acknowledged from the start that Mr. Dockery had not intended to kill or injure anyone, he was charged with what is known as felony murder, a provision of the law that permits a death to be considered a homicide if the killing occurs during the commission of another felony — in this case, both arson and assault. Before Justice Chun issued the sentence, Cathy Guerra, Officer Guerra’s widow, addressed the court, saying that she often went to sleep crying and woke in the morning forced to put on a strong face for her children. Of Mr. Dockery, she said, “We know he did not mean to hurt anyone on that day,” but, she added, “there are others suffering the consequences.” Then Howard Jackson, who prosecuted the case, told Justice Chun that he was “bothered and disturbed” that Mr. Dockery still refused to take responsibility for his crimes or even to show remorse. Instead of blaming himself, Mr. Jackson said, Mr. Dockery had placed blame on a shifting cast of others: the police, the district attorney and his own lawyer. “I find it quite alarming, Judge,” he said. Image Officer Rosa Rodriguez, who was gravely injured in the fire, leaving the courtroom. She testified that she had been unable to breathe in the hot, chaotic scene. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times The district attorney’s office had recommended a sentence of 18 years to life in prison in part because Mr. Dockery had a history of arson, reaching back to junior high school, when, Mr. Jackson said, he created a makeshift blowtorch in his school cafeteria. “He has a problem that has lasted years, setting fires,” Mr. Jackson said, and yet refused to admit it. Jesse A. Young, Mr. Dockery’s lawyer, in turn told Justice Chun that it was his client’s right to profess his innocence, even to show no remorse. “He is innocent,” Mr. Young said, “and will appeal.” In a sentencing memo filed before the hearing, the prosecution noted one bright spot in Mr. Dockery’s behavior: After he had set the fire, he valiantly ran through the 13th-floor hallway warning his neighbors. But Justice Chun, his voice unusually firm, took issue with that finding. “I find nothing valiant about the defendant’s actions that day,” he said.

Murders and Homicides
Marcell Dockery
Arson
Dennis Guerra
NYPD
Attacks on Police
Fatalities,casualties
Brooklyn
NYC


Racial Politics Rear Its Head in French Soccer

Abstract: London The conundrum for global sports is that no nation has profited more from multiethnicity than the French team that won soccer’s World Cup in 1998 — and none seems more alarmed today by racial issues than France. At the heart of the defense for that triumph, and for close to 100 performances, Laurent Blanc stood shoulder to shoulder with Lilian Thuram, who was born in Guadeloupe, and Marcel Desailly, from Ghana. Their job was to hold the line, to win the ball, and to get it to the man acknowledged as the master creator of his generation, Zinédine Zidane, the French-born son of Algerian parents. The crowds that spent the night celebrating from the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Bastille in Paris that night in 1998 have never been bettered in my 40 years of covering sports. Whatever their race, people danced through a euphoria that was beyond sports, beyond politics and certainly beyond the poisonous denunciation from far-right politicians that the squad of “Black, Blanc, Beur” — black, white, Arab — should not represent France. How unthinkable that today the country is divided over accusations that Blanc, in his short time as national team coach, is perceived as a racist. How astonishing that Thuram and others feed the Internet with derogatory statements about him. On Tuesday, France’s sports minister, Chantal Jouanno, declared that Blanc had broken no antidiscrimination laws but that he and his coaching colleagues had held a “clumsy and clearly uncalled-for” discussion that bordered on racism. The Sports Ministry and the soccer federation are concluding separate interrogations of Blanc and his coaches. The rest of the world, seeking to emulate French achievements, grows less prejudiced by the year. Germany’s rising team has sons of Turkish, Polish, Ghanaian and Bosnian immigrants. Switzerland builds around young players whose parents fled the Balkan conflicts. Arsène Wenger, one of the world’s most successful club coaches, recruits young players from Africa, Europe and his native France to his London club, Arsenal. Nobody has made a greater statement of colorblindness in sports than the French, unless it is the Dutch with their marvelous integration of Surinamese descendants like Ruud Gullit. Yet, France is caught in an incendiary debate about quotas of how many dual-nationals it allows in the regional academies. These academies take boys ages 12 to 15, turning street kids into the global superstars that Thierry Henry and Zidane became. Given the laissez-faire FIFA rules regarding nationality, young players exploit the system. The world body of soccer allows them two chances — to represent one country at the youth level, and to switch to another in maturity, provided they have ancestral links to the country of their choice. There lies the French problem. Blanc, named the national team coach after the debacle last summer when France’s national squad rebelled against the previous coach at the World Cup, held a planning meeting with the director of youth soccer, François Blaquart, and the under-21 and under-20 national coaches. In a three-hour meeting in November, the discussion about losing players to other nations occupied 20 minutes. A secret recording of the conversation was leaked. An investigative Web site, Mediapart, published a transcript of the recording last week. Blaquart, who like Blanc was installed after the World Cup, was immediately suspended. The transcript depicted him as advocating some kind of quota to limit the numbers of boys with dual-nationality in the academies. Blaquart claimed the discussion was never meant to become public. Blanc told French reporters that words were taken out of context. But they are damning words. Blanc is trapped by this sentence attributed to him: “The Spanish say to me: ‘We don’t have this problem. We don’t have any blacks.’ ” Blaquart appears to have instigated the talk of limiting the intake into the academies along ethnic lines. The news media revealed the words quicker than government could intervene. FIFA ostensibly forbids political interference in the autonomy of national soccer associations. Its rule is enforced with alacrity against smaller nations, but France, the founding nation of FIFA, is no small nation. And soccer is now intrinsic to France’s image abroad. The government of Nicolas Sarkozy changes sports ministers quicker than clubs fire and hire coaches. Last summer, Sarkozy’s sports minister, Roselyne Bachelot, read the riot act to the players at the World Cup, telling them they had damaged the nation’s image. Bachelot was then dropped. In November, a week after the meeting of the French coaches, Jouanno moved from secretary of state for ecology to head the sports ministry. Jouanno, a champion in karate, cannot have imagined what was brewing. Once the furor broke on Mediapart, Jouanno called for an inquiry. Her on-the-spot judgment was that Blanc was not a racist, but that discriminatory quotas that singled out dual-national players would be illegal. Reports that her boss, Sarkozy, was ready to dissuade Blanc from resigning were just that. The world is watching. Whatever FIFA’s rules about keeping politics out of its sport, a response by the government is inevitable. Lindsay Krasnoff, who wrote a doctoral dissertation titled “Goals and Dreams: The Quest to Create Elite Youth Athletes in France, 1952-1992,” is now a specialist for the Office of the Historian of the State Department in Washington. “When I conducted my oral history interviews, very few were willing to speak about racism within French football,” Krasnoff said. “However, the present day and former officials, coaches, doctors and players who I spoke with made a clear distinction: While there was racism surrounding football, there was no racism within the game or among the players.” There is now. The leaks from that meeting in November are turning teammates from 1998 against one another, casting Blanc in a different light to the colleague they knew. One last look back to 1998. It was the day that France met Italy in the quarterfinals. Among the residents of the largely immigrant population in bars and restaurants in St.-Denis, which surrounds the Stade de France, the national stadium near Paris, not one person had a ticket for the game. One cafe owner, who like Zidane came from an Algerian Kabyle family, smiled. “Never mind,” she said. “When Zidane is playing, I feel more French than the French.”

International Federation of Association Football (FIFA)