After Supreme Court Ruling, Aereo’s Rivals in TV Streaming Seize Opening

Abstract: Mark Ely saw an opportunity, and he took it. The day after the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo in a copyright case brought by the nation’s major broadcasters, Mr. Ely was trying to scoop up Aereo customers by promoting his start-up, Simple.TV, on social media. “Former Aereo customer? Join the Simple.TV Family,” the company wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “We’re telling Aereo customers: ‘Your favorite service is going away. Here’s an idea that isn’t,’ ” Mr. Ely, who started his company in 2011, said in an interview. The television establishment still has much to worry about after its Supreme Court victory on Wednesday over Aereo, the digital start-up that had threatened to upend the economics of the media business. “Television is a castle filled with money,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivaki, the Publicis Groupe’s digital marketing unit. “People are trying to get into that castle and take some money.” But while the court’s decision broadens the moat, traditional broadcasters still must find ways to defend themselves against an array of companies like Mr. Ely’s that want to give viewers an alternative to the their model. Eager for a piece of the $167 billion American television market, dozens of companies are offering options for the growing number of viewers known as cord cutters, who are canceling their traditional pay-television subscriptions. The providers range from Hulu, which the broadcasters own, to bigger services like Amazon, Google and Netflix, all of which offer cheaper streaming alternatives. Other companies, including Roku, Sling Media, TiVo, Simple.TV and Mohu, sell hardware that allows viewers to stream television to digital devices or watch web video on television sets. And Aereo may yet stick around; the company said on Saturday that it would pause its service temporarily as it sorted out its options but that its journey was “far from done.” Image Chet Kanojia, the chief executive of Aereo, showing one of the dime-size antennas the company rents to customers. Credit Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press “I don’t think you are going to find a silver bullet to disrupt the broadcast industry,” said Kenneth Lerer, a venture capitalist who has invested in a series of digital media start-ups. “I think you are going to find a lot of little bullets. Aereo was hoping it was a silver bullet.” Aereo and its two-year legal battle with broadcasters overshadowed the efforts of several other start-ups that offer ways to watch free over-the-air television on cellphones, tablets, laptops and Internet-connected televisions. Those companies paid tribute to Aereo, saying it helped advance the notion that there are ways to watch TV without paying expensive cable bills. But they are now trying to grab the spotlight after the Supreme Court ruled that Aereo had violated copyright laws by capturing broadcast signals on tiny antennas stored in warehouses and transmitting them to paying subscribers. Mr. Ely started Simple.TV, based in Tiburon, Calif., months before Aereo made its debut in 2012. A former president of Sonic Solutions, a computer software firm, Mr. Ely noticed how a growing number of people were watching television shows and movies over the Internet but did not have access to live television programming like news and sports. His idea was to sell consumers a “private TV server” that plugged into an antenna, a hard drive and a router. With Aereo, subscribers paid $8 to $12 a month to rent a dime-size antenna stored in a warehouse. Users could then stream near-live television and record programs from major broadcasters. With Simple.TV, people buy their own antenna and the $199 Simple.TV box. Users can record programs on a hard drive that they connect to the device. The company also sells a premium service that provides features like automatic recording and remote access from almost anywhere in the world. Mohu, a start-up based in Raleigh, N.C., also hopes to grow after the Supreme Court’s ruling. The company, which sells over-the-air antennas and offers a streaming service, began as a military contractor developing high-performance antennas for the Army and Navy. Since its founding in 2011, it has sold 1.5 million high-definition television antennas to consumers. “Aereo made people aware that they can get high-definition broadcast television for free without paying for cable,” said Mark Buff, Mohu’s founder and chief executive. Video The Supreme Court ruled that Aereo violated copyright law, granting television networks a much-desired win that will preserve the status quo — at least for now. Credit Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images The main difference between these companies — which have not drawn the ire of broadcasters — and Aereo is that their customers own the antennas and capture signals in their homes, as opposed to remotely. Mr. Ely and Mr. Buff say they believe that will satisfy the requirement under copyright law that the transmissions be private performances, a position that Aereo argued unsuccessfully before the Supreme Court. “Where you capture the signal makes all the difference,” Mr. Ely said. “This fits squarely in fair use.” Simple.TV, which has 30 employees and counts tens of thousands of customers, has raised $5 million in financing and is working on a new round of funding. Some venture capitalists said they would continue to invest in streaming-television start-ups despite Aereo’s loss in court. “If cable companies believe that their old ways of doing business are protected by the Aereo Supreme Court decision, they are clearly misguided,” said Dan Nova, a partner at Highland Capital Partners, one of Aereo’s backers. “Consumers are rejecting cable companies and traditional consumption models. The horse is out of the barn.” The number of households in the United States subscribing to pay-television services has slipped in recent years. About 101 million households in the United States subscribe to pay TV, down 7 percent from 2013, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. At the same time, the total number of households in the United States that use the Internet or other streaming services instead of traditional TV to watch television shows or movies has climbed to 7.6 million, up about 30 percent from 5.8 million in 2013, according to SNL Kagan. Recognizing the threat, cable and satellite companies are introducing options to lure new customers and keep those who might be tempted to cancel their subscriptions. Comcast, the largest cable provider in the United States by subscribers, is offering cloud-based television-streaming technologies; an Internet Plus bundle that includes broadband, basic cable and HBO; and special packages for college students. Broadcasters, too, are trying to profit by offering to sell their programming to streaming companies that are willing to pay for it. During a phone interview after the Supreme Court ruling, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, said his network did not oppose the new technology. “We are not against people moving forward and offering our content online and all sorts of places, as long as it is appropriately licensed,” he said. “Innovation is still alive and well and thriving.”

TV
Simple.TV
Supreme Court,SCOTUS
Cable television
Copyrights
Aereo
Hulu.com
Amazon
Netflix


Changing Face in Poland: Skinhead Puts on Skullcap

Abstract: WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God. “I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.” Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family. Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland , of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past. Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted. Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews “our elder brothers,” had finally entered the public consciousness. Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered. “Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ” Rabbi Schudrich said. “But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn’t correspond to the Poland of 2010.” The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II. In the past five years, Warsaw’s Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250. The cafes and bars of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow brim with young Jewish converts listening to Israeli hip hop music. Michal Pirog, a popular Polish dancer and television star, who recently proclaimed his Jewish roots on national television, said the revelation had won him more fans than enemies. “Poland is changing,” he said. “I am Jewish and I feel good,” he said. Pawel’s metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute. “Oy vey, I hate to admit it, but we would beat up local Jewish and Arab kids and homeless people,” Pawel said on a recent day from the Nozyk Synagogue here. “We sang about stupid stuff like Satan and killing people. We believed that Poland should only be for Poles.” One day, he recalled, he and his friends skipped school and took a train to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, near Krakow. “We made jokes that we wished the exhibition had been bigger and that the Nazis had killed even more Jews,” he said. Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said that he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His churchgoing father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets. “One time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, ‘If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!’ ” Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel’s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents. When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust. “I went to my parents and said, ‘What the hell’? Imagine, I was a neo-Nazi and heard this news? I couldn’t look in the mirror for weeks,” he said. “My parents were the typical offspring of Jewish survivors of the war, who decided to conceal their Jewish identity to try and protect their family.” Shaken by his own discovery, Pawel said he spent weeks of cloistered and tortured reflection but was finally overcome by a strong desire to become Jewish, even Orthodox. He acknowledged that he was drawn to extremes. He said his transformation was arduous, akin to being reborn. He even forced himself to reread “Mein Kampf” but could not get to the end because he felt physically repulsed. “When I asked a rabbi, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ he replied, ‘The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.’ ” At age 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He and his wife are raising their two children in a Jewish home. Pawel noted that he was still singled out by the same anti-Semites who once counted him among their ranks. “When younger people see me on the street with my top hat and side curls they sometimes laugh at me,” he said. “But it is the old ladies who are the meanest. Sometimes, they use the language I used when I was a skinhead and say, ‘Get out and go back to your country’ or ‘Jew go home!’ ” And now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. “I am good with knives,” he explained.

Jews and Judaism
Poland
Synagogues
Holocaust and the Nazi Era
Anti-Semitism


Granderson’s Catches Add to October Lore

Abstract: Talk about fast hands and professional skills: on Wednesday morning, just a few hours after Curtis Granderson ’s magnificent evening in center field, I was at the gate for the flight from Detroit back to New York, surrounded by other sleepy souls. Four photographers were clustered nearby, discussing their own challenges under pressure. One photographer said, “I got the catch,” and a colleague — maybe even a rival — gave him a fist bump. It’s easy to focus on the mound or the batter’s box, but once the batter swings, who knows where the ball is going to go? Some of the greatest moments in postseason baseball have taken place after the deliberate pitch and the reactive swing. Granderson, who is smooth on the field and off, made two very different catches to stave off trouble as the Yankees stayed alive with a 10-1 thumping of the Tigers on Tuesday night. Granderson overcame his own false step forward to snag Don Kelly’s bases-loaded smash to end the first inning. That change, of course, was sheer terror on Granderson’s part, and is no doubt the most important reason everybody is trooping back to the Bronx on Thursday night. But Granderson also reacted with a long race into left-center field to haul in Jhonny Peralta’s bid for a gapper in the sixth inning, while the game was still within reach. Granderson made the play with an elbows-and-knees dive that may have also included his chin, as the entire stadium saw the white ball vanish into the glove.  The two catches put Granderson in the category of fielders who have had epic moments in the autumn. Perhaps in a separate category — mind over matter — were plays performed by No. 1 and No. 2 of the Yankees. Billy Martin chased down Jackie Robinson’s wind-blown pop-up in the 1952 World Series, because nobody else did. And Derek Jeter knew enough to wander past the first-base line to corral the loose throw and toss out Slide-Jeremy-Slide Giambi at the plate. (Jeter, now a poor old feller of 37, was up to his old tricks last Saturday, when he grabbed the relay and made a terrific throw home to nab the Tigers’ Alex Avila.) Outfield catches are a different art form because they take long seconds to develop. Some of the greatest defensive plays in the postseason include: Kirby Puckett’s elevating his 5 feet 8 inches against the plexiglass to haul down Ron Gant’s long drive in the sixth game of the 1991 World Series; Paul O’Neill, tight hamstring and all, going back, back, back to catch Luis Polonia’s shot to right-center in the ninth inning of the fifth World Series game in 1996. (The Yankees coach Jose Cardenal had just waved O’Neill farther over toward center, seeing that Polonia was swinging late on John Wetteland’s fastball.) Going back further in time are gems like Mickey Mantle’s race to grab Gil Hodges’s line drive during Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956, Ron Swoboda’s dive on Brooks Robinson’s smash in 1969, Sandy Amoros’s tracking down of Yogi Berra’s slice to left field in 1955, when Next Year finally arrived for Brooklyn; Al Gionfriddo’s similar catch off Joe DiMaggio in 1947; and Willie Mays’s chasing down of Vic Wertz’s long shot into the canyon of center field of the Polo Grounds in 1954. Admittedly, Granderson’s two plays took place in the first round of what could be called the playoffs, not quite the same thing as catches in the singular majesty of the old-fashioned World Series. But great catches are great catches. Granderson was the first to admit he made the Kelly catch more difficult than it needed to be. “Right away I thought he hit it right to me,” Granderson said . “I took a step in and froze. It started to get some air. At least for my perspective, it kind of went up. I was, like, ‘Oh man.’ I was able to go ahead and not be committed one away or the other. I ended up having to leave my feet, which I didn’t want to. I ended up reeling it in finally at the end. Don Kelly came up to me later in the game. He goes, ‘How did you do it?’ ” Granderson told Kelly that his big mistake was hitting the ball too hard.  The second catch, on Peralta, was made more difficult because of Granderson’s positioning. “I felt he was a guy that was going to hit the ball to the right-center gap, so that’s where I was shading him,” he said. “Sure enough, he ended up hitting the ball to the left-center gap. So I ended up having to go a lot further for it. Looked at Brett Gardner, he wasn’t there yet. So I decided to lay out for it. Ended up holding onto the ball. “The reason I was slow getting up,” Granderson continued, “I ended up knocking the wind out of myself and I think I hit my head a little bit because I had a little headache afterwards.” The first catch probably saved three or even four runs and surely gave a boost to A. J. Burnett, the starter on a very short leash. Granderson liked the second catch better because it did not begin with a mistake. His proud response was a mirror into the heart of a professional. For that matter, so was eavesdropping on photographers, talking shop about great defensive plays at a time of year when they matter most.

Baseball
Playoff Games
New York Yankees
Granderson Curtis
Detroit Tigers


Just Before Brooklyn Boy’s Funeral, 2 Arrests in His Killing

Abstract: Hours before mourners began filing past the open coffin of a 16-month-old Brooklyn boy who was fatally shot in his stroller last weekend, detectives on Friday broke into a Pennsylvania apartment and arrested two suspects in the killing. The arrests were the culmination of a five-day manhunt that stretched from the Brownsville neighborhood, where a .45-caliber bullet ended the life of the boy, Antiq Hennis, to Maryland and Pennsylvania, where investigators suspected the fugitives had gone to hide with relatives or friends. Yet that was cold comfort to the hundreds of people gathered at the Grace Funeral Chapel in Ozone Park, Queens. Some wore T-shirts bearing a message written with childlike punctuation: “im ok mommy grandpa will take good care of me.” Surrounded by nine clusters of white balloons and dressed in a white suit and a white Yankees cap, Antiq (pronounced an-TEEK) lay with his hands folded at his waist in a small white coffin. His eyelashes curled upward; his face appeared to glisten. The search for the suspects, Daquan Breland, 23, and Daquan Wright, 19, was complicated from the start by the boy’s father, Anthony Hennis, who had been pushing Antiq in the stroller when the shooting occurred and appeared to have been the target. According to the police, he refused to answer questions. Image Daquan Breland was apprehended Friday. Credit Aimee Dilger/The Times Leader, via Associated Press But others in Brownsville, where gun violence among young men is despairingly common, did come forward. On Friday, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said that a witness told investigators that Mr. Wright handed a pistol to Mr. Breland, who fired four shots. Two bullets hit the stroller; one struck Antiq in the head. The shooting, on the corner of Livonia Avenue and Bristol Street, shocked the neighborhood and drew condemnation from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and candidates seeking to replace him next year. A few hundred people attended the wake and funeral in a long, narrow parlor. Relatives and family friends were also dressed in white and most remained silent. An older woman, perhaps not yet aware that two suspects had been taken into custody, wailed in the back. “He’s a baby,” she said. “They need to turn themselves in.” During the funeral, family members and friends stood by the coffin and called for an end to killings like Antiq’s. A young girl stood at the front and delivered a message. “Why don’t you let us live our time?” she sang to the group. “Lay the guns down. Don’t try to kill us now.” Applause rippled through the audience. Over several days, detectives from the New York Police Department tracked the two suspects to the Sherman Hills Apartments in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., about 130 miles northwest of where the shooting took place. Image Daquan Wright was also arrested. Credit Aimee Dilger/The Times Leader, via Associated Press Mr. Kelly said the police zeroed in on the complex, near Interstate 81, after learning that Mr. Wright’s sister lived there. Mr. Kelly said the same woman was also the girlfriend of Mr. Breland, who is on parole for a conviction in a June 2009 shooting in Auburn, N.Y. About 6 a.m. on Friday, Mr. Kelly said, New York detectives as well as members of the Wilkes-Barre Police Department and the United States Marshals Service arrived at the apartment, but the woman, who was not identified, said the men had left two days before. “Upon further investigation, detectives had reason to believe that they were still in the neighborhood,” Mr. Kelly said. They began showing residents pictures of the two men, and about an hour and a half later discovered that the men were in another apartment in the complex. When people in that apartment refused to open the door, officers forced their way in and found Mr. Wright and Mr. Breland lying facedown in a bedroom, Mr. Kelly said. The men were taken into custody by the Wilkes-Barre police, Mr. Kelly said, and the authorities were arranging for their return to New York. Image Antiq Hennis was fatally shot last weekend in Brownsville, Brooklyn, while he sat in a stroller pushed by his father. Mr. Kelly added that ballistics tests on the .45-caliber casings recovered at the scene appeared to link the handgun to previous crimes, but he did not elaborate. He also declined to describe any affiliations the two men might have with criminal gangs in Brownsville or delve into the motivation for the shooting. “We’re still looking to determine” those things, he said. Mr. Wright’s 24-year-old brother was a victim in two separate shootings in Brownsville last year, the police said. He was the only victim in a shooting on May 28, and was among several people in a crowd who were shot on July 29. Mr. Breland served about two years in prison for his role in the Auburn shooting, in which two shotguns were fired into a crowd in a dispute over money. One man was wounded. The police earlier described Mr. Hennis, 22, who has a record of drug arrests, as an associate of the Crips gang and suggested that, because of his son’s death, there was the possibility of retaliatory shootings. “You always have to worry about retaliation,” Mr. Kelly said on Friday. “You have to look at that right away.” On Friday evening, several police officers stood outside the funeral home.

Funerals
Murders
Antiq Hennis
Daquan Breland
Daquan Wright
Brownsville Brooklyn
Anthony Hennis
Pennsylvania


Fire in Garage Cuts Short Party After Formula One Victory

Abstract: Pastor Maldonado held off Fernando Alonso to win the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona, giving the Williams team its first Formula One victory in eight years. Maldonado started from the pole and withstood the challenge by Alonso’s Ferrari to take the 66-lap race at the Catalunya Circuit by 3.1 seconds. The celebration quickly gave way to concern when a fire in the Williams garage left 31 people injured. Seven were hospitalized. Maldonado, making his first visit to the podium, is the first Venezuelan winner in Formula One. It was Williams’s 114th triumph but its first since the 2004 Brazilian Grand Prix. ¶ Sebastian Saavedra of Colombia ran the fastest lap of the week in practice for the Indianapolis 500. Saavedra covered the 2.5 miles at 221.526 miles per hour. Qualifications are next weekend, and the race is May 27. (AP)

Automobile Racing
Formula One
Alonso Fernando
Maldonado Pastor


Problem Loans Plague Banks in Austria

Abstract: BERLIN — The Austrian banking regulator said Tuesday that it expected “massive write-offs” this year by the country’s banks as they recognized more bad loans in Eastern Europe. Austrian banks have been among the biggest lenders to corporate borrowers in Eastern Europe, booking €180 billion, or $254 billion, in loans over the past few years. A so-called stress test published last year by the Austrian central bank indicated that Austrian banks faced €10 billion to €20 billion in bad debt write-downs over the next two years. “We expect that massive write-offs will be needed in the next 12 months,” Helmut Ettl, co-chairman of the Financial Market Authority, said in Vienna. Kurt Pribil, also a co-chairman of the regulator, said it was “very important that risk buffers are built up further. We strongly recommend that profits are not paid out excessively but are retained to create capital.” Representatives of two major Austrian banks said Tuesday that while the financial crisis had taken its toll on bank balance sheets, the banks were now on solid financial footing. “There was a lot of panic at the time,” said Ionut Stanimir, a spokesman for Erste Group, parent of Erste Bank. “And of course there is continuing concern for the banking sector. “We are not out of the woods, yet,” he added, “but neither are we in the middle of the woods.” By the end of the third quarter of 2009, Erste Group had a total of €51 billion in deposits in Central and Eastern Europe. Loans, made mostly to individuals and small and midsize companies totaled €50 billion, Mr. Stanimir said. During that period, Erste Group’s problem loans made up 6.3 percent of its total customer loan exposure of €130 billion. “We see our exposure as manageable,” Mr. Stanimir said. “We feel adequately capitalized.” Michael Palzer, a spokesman for Raiffeisen International, the parent of Raiffeisen Bank, said Tuesday that the regulator’s comments were not surprising. “The bank said just last week that nonperforming loans will increase throughout the region this year,” he said. “Banks are challenged to build up their capital position. This is something that we never neglected.” Raiffeisen International’s nonperforming loans in Central Europe rose to 6.7 percent, or €1.5 billion, by the end of the third quarter of last year compared with 1.7 percent, or €751 million, a year earlier. One reason for an increase in nonperforming loans during 2010 will be the growing rate of unemployment, Mr. Palzer said. Poland, which until now has been the only country in the region to maintain some economic growth, is expected to have unemployment rise to nearly 13 percent in 2010 from 11 percent last year, according to recent forecasts published by the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. In the Czech Republic, unemployment will rise in the same period to 10 percent from 8.1 percent, the institute predicts. “The deteriorating labor market will affect repaying loans,” Mr. Palzer said. Raiffeisen International last year teamed up with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to strengthen the banks in Ukraine, Romania and Russia. The development bank provided a €150 million financing package for three subsidiaries of Raiffeisen International, complementing the group’s own continued provision of capital and financing for its banks in Eastern Europe.

Banks and Banking
Austria
Central Europe
Eastern Europe
Subprime Mortgage Crisis


Interception Interrupts Pennington’s Hopes for Last-Second Win

Abstract: MIAMI — Miami Dolphins quarterback Chad Pennington ended his practice Friday afternoon with a touchdown pass on fourth down — a dream situation for the man who would be facing his former team only a month after he had been dumped for Brett Favre. Pennington had insisted all week that he was not seeking revenge for the unceremonious breakup with the Jets , but he also knew that the game was likely to come down to the final moments. He wanted his new, younger teammates to be prepared. But there was no perfect finish for Pennington on Sunday. Instead, on the final play of the game, with 10 seconds remaining and the Dolphins on the Jets’ 18-yard line, Pennington put as much air under a pass as he could, trying to give receiver Ted Ginn Jr. a chance to snatch a jump ball in the end zone. But as soon as Pennington released the ball, he saw Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis boxing out Ginn, as if they were on a basketball court instead of a grass field. Then, Pennington thought something else. “Knock it down,” he said. No such luck. Revis intercepted the pass, and Pennington, who had come up short enough times in New York that the Jets went after Favre, came up short again, and the Dolphins lost, 20-14. Pennington is achingly new to the Dolphins. He is still living in a hotel. And he said that he was so excited to start the game that he went through his reads too quickly, leading to off-the-mark passes. Pennington, who finished 26 of 43 for 251 yards, did not complete a pass for a gain until late in the first quarter. And the Dolphins’ offense sputtered so often that Coach Tony Sparano almost abandoned the run in the second half — it ran just four times — in an attempt to generate some passing rhythm. But the Dolphins, who won only one game last season, are young. Their mistakes came in bunches, short-circuiting nearly every drive. They gave up four sacks. Receivers ran the wrong routes. They kicked the ball out of bounds. They committed bad penalties on two Pennington scrambles. The Dolphins avoided the run so much that when they drove to the Jets’ 2-yard line early in the fourth quarter, the coaches called for two straight passes instead of rushes. They turned the ball over on downs. Miami’s most damaging error was in leaving Jets receiver Chansi Stuckey uncovered at the goal line, allowing him to catch Favre’s all-or-nothing heave on a fourth-and-13 midway through the second quarter. “It was a game of errors,” Pennington said. “They made less errors than we did. A lot of times, experience doesn’t happen until it’s real.” Still, the Dolphins had a chance to win, largely because the offense was in Pennington’s hands. With 6 minutes 48 seconds remaining in the game, they started a drive at the Miami 47. Pennington completed six of seven passes, finishing the drive with an 11-yard touchdown pass to tight end David Martin. The Jets had taken away the Dolphins’ receivers, allowing Pennington to connect with his tight ends. Both touchdown passes and 12 of his completions were to tight ends. With 1:43 left, Pennington took the ball on the Miami 39 and completed five consecutive passes to put the Dolphins at the Jets’ 18 with 23 seconds to play. The drive ended with Revis’s interception. But Pennington continued to forge a bond with his new team, like the one he developed during his eight seasons with the Jets. That bond was so strong that Pennington talked to Jets receiver Laveranues Coles on Saturday night and said he was trying to say hello and shake hands with 75 or 80 people — his former teammates. “Chad’s a leader from beginning to end,” Dolphins receiver Greg Camarillo said. “He looked us in the eye and said, ‘Let’s get going.’ He’s not going to let the offense lose its swagger. That last drive started with him. We just wish we could have ended it.” Camarillo said that he could see a little blood in Pennington’s mouth from the pounding he had taken. Pennington was subdued and soft-spoken afterward, but no more so than when he lost with the Jets. He said it did not matter whether he lost to the Jets or to any of the other teams in the league. But his former team escaped with a victory for their new quarterback. Pennington, a Dolphins cap on his head, was asked where he was hurting. He pointed to his chest. “My heart,” he said. “My pride is hurt. Losing is not fun. True pros bounce back and continue to fight another day. You’ve got to have a heart to lose. You’ve got to continue to prepare and fight through those things, not let it get into a downward spiral.” The Dolphins, and the Jets, too, know something about that.

Football
Miami Dolphins
New York Jets
Pennington Chad


Dateline North Korea, but Still Reporting From a Distance

Abstract: Journalists from around the world were invited to North Korea to cover the ruling party’s first congress in 36 years on Friday. But while many were allowed to travel to Pyongyang, the capital of the reclusive country, they were then barred from the actual event. So on Twitter and Facebook, journalists reported far from the proceedings taking place inside the convention hall where the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, is using the rare political gathering to consolidate his power . In theory, the Workers’ Party, which governs North Korea, is supposed to hold a congress every five years. But this is only the seventh in the party’s 70-year history. The last one was held in 1980, before Mr. Kim was even born. Kim Il-sung was in charge then. It is not entirely clear why the event is happening now or what the government hoped to get with world news coverage. Reporters were working around the restrictions, with some improvisation on social media. The press restrictions were not unusual for the country, which does not allow journalists to move freely. They are typically accompanied by government minders who monitor every step outside the hotel. Interviews with people on the street are overseen by the monitors as well. News bureaus operated by foreign press organizations are rare. The Associated Press, for example, has been permitted to have an office, but without a full-time presence. The agency’s journalists are required to get government permission each time they visit, which they are allowed to do only for several weeks at a time. They are not allowed to move about freely when they do. (The New York Times was not granted visas to enter the country for the conference.) This congress was not the first time that international journalists have been corralled far from the action. In 2012, more than 50 foreign journalists accepted coveted invitations to North Korea for celebrations exalting the centenary of the country’s deceased founder, Kim Il-sung, the ascension of Kim Jong-un and a rocket launching. They were cloistered in a hotel’s press room, which North Korean government chaperones would not let them leave for hours. The reporters learned about the rocket launching via messages and telephone and Internet connections from people outside the country. On Friday, as in 2012, as the congress proceedings got underway, foreign journalists on the scene reported at a distance. It was not immediately clear whether access to the event, which last several days, will change for the unusually large press corps in the country, which Reuters reported was 128 reporters from 12 countries. So the visiting journalists found themselves out on Twitter and Facebook, with the rest of us.

News media,journalism
Social Media
AP
Workers' Party of Korea
Kim Jong-un
North Korea
Pyongyang


For Labor Day Drivers, Lowest Gasoline Prices in 11 Years

Abstract: HOUSTON — Despite the recent tumult in global stock and energy markets, American travelers can count on bargains at the pump this Labor Day weekend, with prices for gasoline at their lowest levels in 11 years. With oil prices diving by more than 50 percent since last summer, the low prices are no surprise, analysts say. But the numbers can be startling to any driver who habitually glances at the gasoline price billboards along the highway. On Friday, the national average for regular gasoline was $2.42 a gallon, 9 cents lower than only a week ago and $1.01 lower than last year, according to the AAA motor club. “Consumers will feel a lot better at the pump this holiday than they will looking at their 401(k)’s,” said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service. All told, Mr. Kloza estimated that Thursday through Monday, Americans would spend $3.9 billion on fuel, down from $5.5 billion during the holiday weekend in 2014 and 2013. Behind the low gasoline prices are widespread fears that the global economy is slowing, along with a resilient expansion of domestic oil production. The prices represent an astonishing reversal from recent years, when motorists complained bitterly about gas expenses. An estimated 8,250 gas stations in 24 states — representing more than 5 percent of the nation’s stations — now have prices below $2 a gallon. Not a single station in the country sold gas at that price last Labor Day weekend, specialists say. “Average U.S. gas prices are falling at the fastest rates since December,” said Michael Green, a spokesman for AAA, referring to the month after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries shocked oil traders by refusing to cut production and allowing crude prices to collapse. Several AAA clubs project that 35.5 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more over the weekend, the highest volume since 2008 and a 1 percent increase from last year. The AAA clubs say 86 percent of the travelers will drive. Cheap gasoline is encouraging motorists to drive more. The Federal Highway Administration has reported that the mileage driven in the first half of the year was the highest since 2008, before the recession. In July, drivers traveled 266.8 billion miles, a 1.5 percent increase from last year, when prices exceeded $100 a barrel and gasoline prices were roughly a dollar a gallon higher. Today, global oil benchmark prices are hovering around $45 to $50 a barrel, although in recent days they have been on a particularly wild ride, jumping or falling 5 percent or more, sometimes within hours. Last summer, oil and gasoline prices jumped as turmoil rocked the Middle East. But Iraq kept pumping and exporting, as have Saudi Arabia and other gulf states. Meanwhile production in the United States has remained high as producers have become more efficient. And after the recent nuclear deal, the prospect of Iran exporting large amounts of oil again has worried traders and energy executives that a glut could last years. But drivers have not saved as much this summer as they might have expected. Typically, according to AAA, gas prices drop 2.4 cents a gallon for every $1 a barrel drop in crude price. But this summer the savings have been less than 2 cents a gallon largely because of refinery mishaps. An explosion in February at an Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, Calif., was so severe the plant is still not operating at full capacity. And last month, BP’s refinery in Whiting, Ind., the largest in the Midwest, was forced to shut down its biggest crude distillation unit for several days because of leaky pipes. That sent gasoline prices soaring across the Great Lakes region, and some energy specialists warned that high prices could last more than a month. But technicians fixed the problem sooner than expected, and the national average for a regular gallon of gasoline has dropped every day for more than two weeks, in time for the holiday weekend. Prices are bound to decline more as the busy summer driving season ends and refineries process cheaper winter blends. “September looks like another month that consumers will save about $60 at the pump versus last year,” Mr. Kloza said. He estimated that the average driver puts 60 gallons a month into his or her gas tank. The Energy Department recently predicted that the average national price for regular gasoline would decline to $2.11 in the fourth quarter, contributing to an annual average of $2.41 for 2015. That is roughly a dollar lower than last year. The one wild card for prices is, as always, the price of crude oil, which can jump in the event of a crisis in the Middle East. But at the moment, commodity traders are more fearful of a decline in global demand mostly because of the slower economic growth in China. “A slowdown in China means more than just a slowdown in Chinese oil demand,” according to a Barclays report on Friday. “China’s industrial activity and global links, the energy intensity of its commodity imports, and even the oil used to get these goods to the country will all stumble if China does.”

Oil and Gasoline
Cars
American Automobile Assn
Price
Labor Day
International trade


As Spain Trims Deficits, Scrutiny Falls on Regional Governments

Abstract: FIGUERES, Spain — Facing a wider than expected budget deficit, Spain’s new government announced a $19.3 billion package of tax increases and spending cuts on Friday and admitted that the country’s finances were probably even worse because of overspending by the autonomous regions. Spain’s new prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, said the austerity package was needed to maintain the confidence of European bond markets after it became clear that the budget deficit was expected to reach 8 percent of gross domestic product this year — two percentage points above the government’s target. And while Spain’s overall fiscal status is nowhere near as dire as Italy ’s, it has another problem all its own, as the new budget minister, Cristóbal Montoro, made clear Friday: serious budget shortfalls in its 17 autonomous regions, which have spent recklessly in the past decade. Evidence of the regional profligacy dots the countryside. On the top of a hill here in the birthplace of Salvador Dalí , in northeastern Spain sits a giant, empty penitentiary. But even without a single prisoner in residence, the prison is costing Spain’s heavily indebted regional government of Catalonia $1.3 million a month, largely in interest payments. If prisoners were actually moved in, it would cost an additional $2.6 million a month. So it sits empty, an object of ridicule around here, often referred to as the “ spa .” Analysts say the mistakes are adding up. The Bank of Spain announced this month that regional debt had surged 22 percent, to $176 billion in September from $144 billion the year before. And some experts say that there remain tens of billions of dollars in “hidden” regional debt yet to be discovered. The financial state of the regional governments is so bad, in fact, that some may be willing — maybe even eager — to shed some of their wide-ranging and costly responsibilities, like health care and education. Much as the debt crisis is forcing the European Union to refashion its relationship with its member countries, stepping up oversight and control, some experts believe that some of Spain’s autonomous regions may be less so in the future. “Whether publicly or not, some of the regional governments are saying: ‘Take this away from me. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be,’ ” said Ángel Berges Lobera, an economist at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and an expert on regional debt. In recent years, the regions and municipalities have racked up debts, offering generous public services and investing in a wide range of projects, some of them bordering on the ridiculous, critics say. Castilla-La Mancha, for instance, an agricultural region bordering Madrid, built itself an airport complete with a runway big enough for jumbo jets. But it may close soon, as no airline — even with smaller planes — is interested in flying there. Municipalities have not done much better. They have also been accumulating debt, a total now of about $48 billion. One town, Alcorcón, about 10 miles southwest of Madrid, spent $150 million on a cultural center, complete with a permanent circus and free birthday parties for its children. “It’s been chaos out there,” said Lorenzo Bernaldo de Quirós, an economist who has been critical of Spain’s system of autonomous regions, a structure developed after Gen. Francisco Franco ’s dictatorial rule ended in 1975. And there is that “hidden debt,” most of it in unpaid bills, which is not included in Spain’s total national indebtedness of $915 billion. That could easily amount to $25 billion to $40 billion more, experts say. And the bad news probably is not over. Some experts believe that as newly elected members of Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party take control of some regional administrations, they are sure to unearth even more financial excesses. That is what happened in Catalonia, where the “hidden debt” problem first popped up this year. When elections were held there in 2010, the ratio of debt to regional G.D.P. was believed to be less than 2 percent. But after the vote, the departing government disclosed that its full year deficit could be 3.3 percent. The new government later revised that figure again, to 3.8 percent. Experts believe that this kind of markup is possible elsewhere, including Andalusia in the south, which has Seville as its capital. “Andalusia could be spectacular,” Mr. de Quirós said. Some areas, like the Basque region, which suffered particularly severe repression under Franco, pushed hard for the right to govern themselves. Now, however, the trend seems to be heading in the other direction. One important factor favoring a redrawing of Spain’s system of autonomous regions was the landslide victory of the Popular Party. That gave the conservatives control over the central government and most regional administrations, something that had never happened before. In the past, the regions and the central government, usually from opposite parties, could blame one another for whatever fiscal issues arose. But that is not going to work this time. “They used to fight to tell the voters, ‘It’s not my fault,’ ” said Mr. Berges Lobera, the economist. “Now they can’t do that.” Spain’s autonomous regions have huge responsibilities. They are generally in charge of administering schools, universities, health and social services, culture, development and, in some cases, policing. The education and health care portfolios are particularly problematic, because those costs just keep growing. At the same time, some main sources of financing — taxes on real estate sales and building permit fees — have dried up with the collapse of the housing boom. For that reason, some regions may actually want the central government to take health care and education back. In July, officials from the regions of Murcia, Valencia and Aragón suggested as much. Catalonia, like the Basque region, remains fiercely independent. But it faces an uphill battle as it tries to get its budget under control. The prison in Figueres, which experts say was not needed, was not the only big project the region undertook in the last few years, arguing that public works would provide much-needed economic stimulus in the face of Spain’s high unemployment rate, currently 22 percent. In addition to the prison, Catalonia started highway projects and a 30-mile extension of Barcelona ’s subway system, which has now proved difficult to halt. “We have a lot of contractual obligations that don’t make these projects easy to stop,” said Albert Carreras, the secretary general of the regional Ministry of the Economy. In recent months, however, Catalonia has been slashing its budget in ways that other regions expect to have to follow soon, though like many other regional governments, it failed to meet its year-end targets. The cuts have spawned a range of protests and strikes, involving even high school students, including those at the Institut Francesc Maciá , a secondary school on the western outskirts of Barcelona. When Adria Junyent, 17, found himself in a philosophy class so large that his teacher had to use a microphone to be heard, he organized a “sleep-in” in the auditorium. “We were not the only ones with problems,” he said. “The chemistry classes had their budget cut for Bunsen burners. There are all kinds of cuts. This didn’t even happen under Franco.”

Economy
Euro Crisis
Spain
Mariano Rajoy
Catalonia


Navajo Leader Drops His Support for Slaughter of Wild Horses on the Reservation

Abstract: PHOENIX — Under pressure by animal welfare groups and many of his own people, the president of the Navajo Nation, Ben Shelly, has reversed his stance on horse slaughtering, saying he will no longer support it and will order the temporary suspension of the roundups of feral horses on the reservation. The agreement, brokered by Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, is scheduled to be announced on Tuesday. One of its key provisions is to pressure the federal government to do more to help the Navajos handle the tens of thousands of horses that roam freely on their land. Mr. Shelly has estimated that feral horses cost the Navajos $200,000 a year in damage to property and range. “I am interested in long-term humane solutions to manage our horse populations,” Mr. Shelly said. “Our land is precious to the Navajo people as are all the horses on the Navajo Nation. Horses are sacred animals to us.” Mr. Shelly’s recalibrated position is sure to strengthen the arguments against horse slaughter in the nation, just as a legal fight to block the opening of horse slaughterhouses in New Mexico and Missouri reaches its final stages. It could also smooth relations between his administration and tribal elders in some of the Navajo Nation’s largest chapters, who have stood steadfastly against the roundups even as Mr. Shelly embraced them in August as the best available option, given the tribe’s limited resources, to keep its feral horse population under control. At the time, his stance put the country’s largest federally recognized tribe in a collision course with Mr. Richardson and the actor Robert Redford, who had justified joining a lawsuit against horse slaughtering filed by animal-rights groups by saying they were “standing with Native American leaders.” In a unanimous vote last month, the Navajo Nation chapter in Shiprock, N.M., banned horse roundups in its territory. The chapter’s president, Duane Yazzie, said members were concerned about the abandoned colts and the sale of the horses to meat plants in Mexico, where slaughter is legal. Image Ben Shelly On Saturday, several of the chapter’s members protested as Mr. Shelly took part in a parade at the Northern Navajo Nation Fair in Shiprock. Mr. Shelly and Mr. Richardson met in Farmington, N.M., just outside Navajo lands, shortly after the parade to complete the agreement. It charges several animal welfare groups — including Animal Protection of New Mexico and the Foundation to Protect New Mexico Wildlife, founded by Mr. Richardson and Mr. Redford — with developing alternative policies. One option is rounding up the horses and putting them up for adoption; another is dispensing contraceptives. “This is a huge event,” Mr. Richardson said. “One of the most important and largest tribes in the country is now on the record against horse slaughtering, and that should be a major factor both in Congress and in the courts.” All along, Mr. Shelly had spoken about the “delicate balance,” as he put it, between the horses’ significance to the Navajos and the cost of repairing the damage caused by feral horses on the reservation, which covers roughly 27,500 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. The Navajos estimate there are 75,000 feral horses roaming the reservation, an estimate based on aerial observations, a method they concede is unreliable. One of the points of the agreement is to find a way to take an accurate count. During a meeting in Washington last month, Mr. Shelly told several animal welfare groups that the federal government needed to “live up to its responsibilities,” according to his spokesman, Erny Zah, and help the Navajos manage the feral horses. It was not until the agreement with Mr. Richardson, however, that he made his new stance on horse slaughtering official. The Humane Society of the United States and other groups sued the United States Department of Agriculture in July to keep horse slaughter plants from opening in New Mexico, Iowa and Missouri, arguing that the agency had failed to carry out all of the environmental checks, and asked the courts to block its inspectors from working there. The owners of the plant in Iowa have since scrapped their plans to slaughter horses and turned their focus to cattle. In August, Judge M. Christina Armijo of United States District Court in Albuquerque halted the inspections until she makes her final ruling on the case, which is expected by the end of the month.

Navajo Indians
Horse
Animal Abuse
Slaughterhouse
Bill Richardson
New Mexico
Missouri
Lawsuits
Iowa
M Christina Armijo


Two Freshmen and a Baby Leave Duke Wailing

Abstract: ATLANTA, March 23 - J. J. Redick went to the Duke bench with 13 minutes 36 seconds remaining, his face flushed red, his head down. He had made just 2 of 12 field-goal attempts and Coach Mike Krzyzewski wanted Redick, the second-leading scorer in the nation and the career leading scorer in the Atlantic Coast Conference, to collect himself. "He just told me to take 30 seconds, take a little break, and go back in there and take my shot," Redick said. The rest, however, did little good for Redick, who was hounded for almost 40 minutes by the 6-foot-5 Louisiana State freshman guard Garrett Temple. In his final collegiate game, Redick made just 3 of 18 field-goal attempts and scored 11 points as top-seeded Duke was upset by fourth-seeded L.S.U., 62-54, in an N.C.A.A. tournament regional semifinal in the Georgia Dome. On Saturday, L.S.U. faces second-seeded Texas, a 74-71 winner over West Virginia on Thursday night, for the right to advance to the Final Four in Indianapolis. "He's long and it was just a very physical game; he was physical with me as well," Redick, who was averaging 27.2 points a game, said of Temple. "He did a good job of contesting my jump shots, and when I did drive, they had shot-blockers back there." Duke, which has been to the Round of 16 nine consecutive seasons, played a gruesome game offensively, tying a season low for points and shooting just 27.7 percent from the field (18 of 65). The senior center Shelden Williams, who also played his final game for Duke, led the Blue Devils with 23 points. Duke, which had been ranked in the top three all season, finished 32-4. It was the first trip to the Round of 16 for L.S.U. since 2000, and the Tigers (26-8), the champions of the Southeastern Conference, were supposed to be at a disadvantage in a close game with tournament-tough Duke. But in the final minute, the big plays were made by the L.S.U. freshman forward Tyrus Thomas. L.S.U. led, 55-54, when the 6-foot-9 Thomas broke the Duke press and dribbled down the floor for a dunk with 34 seconds to play to make it 57-54. "We were in the double bonus, so the objective was to get fouled, but I saw an open lane so I took it," Thomas said. On Duke's possession, Thomas blocked the shot of Greg Paulus, who was driving the lane with 27 seconds to play. The Big Baby, the 6-foot-9 L.S.U. sophomore Glen Davis, then took over with two offensive rebounds after missed free-throw attempts by the Tigers, who stretched their lead to 60-54 and held on for the shocker. Thomas, who is already being considered a first-round draft pick in the N.B.A., had 5 blocked shots and 13 rebounds in a physical game. The senior guard Darrel Mitchell and Davis led L.S.U. with 14 points. There were two significant possessions before Thomas decided the game with his run-out dunk. Duke led, 45-40, with 8:47 to play after a 10-0 run. L.S.U. was struggling through a drought of eight minutes without a field goal. Redick had a chance to increase the Duke lead to 8 points, but another of his 3-point field-goal attempts rimmed out. On L.S.U.'s possession, Mitchell came down and sank a 3-pointer to make it 45-43 to end the Tigers slump. "I think it was real big, it got the team back on its intensity level," Mitchell said. "That shot got us going again." "It was huge," Krzyzewski said. There was nothing bigger, however, than Temple's defense on Redick. The L.S.U. freshman would chase Redick around screens, but dip his shoulders and stay low as he cut so he did not run square into the bodies of the 6-foot-9 Williams and the 6-foot-10 Josh McRoberts. "The big thing was getting under them so they couldn't get their shoulders on me," Temple said. Temple said he finally saw Redick get frustrated in the second half when he threw the ball against the stanchion holding up the basket. Temple played 40 minutes and spent nearly all of them chasing Redick around the floor. He made just 1 of 6 field-goal attempts, but it went unnoticed in the L.S.U. locker room, as Temple was surrounded by reporters and asked about shutting down Redick, the second-highest scorer in the country. Redick and Williams were pulled from the game with nine seconds to play so they could enjoy one more ovation from the throng of Duke fans and others that crowded into the Georgia Dome. "It's just to make sure they get a chance and for our fans, and not just our fans, but basketball fans at that moment, to say thanks," Krzyzewski said.

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
DUKE UNIVERSITY
NCAA BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT
BASKETBALL


NASA Set to Launch Supply Ship to Space Station

Abstract: NASA ’s supply ships to the International Space Station are soon to fly again. Orbital ATK , one of two companies that NASA has hired to ferry cargo, is set to launch 7,700 pounds of equipment, experiments and supplies, but bad weather delayed the launch until at least Friday. Orbital’s last cargo run, in October last year, ended in a fireball when the rocket exploded 15 seconds after liftoff . Investigators blamed the failure of one of two refurbished 1970s-era Soviet engines that powered Orbital’s Antares rocket. The launchpad at Wallops Island, Va., was badly damaged. This time, Orbital’s unmanned spacecraft, Cygnus, is flying on top of a competitor’s rocket, an Atlas 5 built by the United Launch Alliance. “We’re very confident once we’re delivered into orbit, we’ll be able to get back in the groove and do what we’ve done before,” said Frank L. Culbertson Jr., president of the space systems group at Orbital ATK. Liftoff was scheduled for a 30-minute window beginning at 5:55 p.m. Eastern time Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, but rain, clouds and winds persisted. Poor weather is also expected Friday, with only a 30 percent chance of favorable conditions during a 30-minute window that starts at 5:33 p.m. When it finally gets off the ground, the cargo spacecraft is to orbit for a few days before arriving at the space station, greeted by the six astronauts on board: two Americans, three Russians and one from Japan. The Atlas 5 is a more powerful rocket, and an upgraded Cygnus capsule, about three and a half feet longer, has 25 percent more cargo space than earlier Orbital flights. The cargo on the Cygnus includes small satellites to be deployed from the space station; a new jetpack for astronauts during spacewalks; high-pressure nitrogen and oxygen tanks for the space station’s air supply system; and Microsoft HoloLens visors, “mixed reality” devices that project holograms to appear next to real, physical objects. In one mode, the visors will allow controllers on the ground to see exactly what an astronaut is seeing. Experts on the ground can then draw annotations that show up in an astronaut’s field of view. In a second mode, animated holograms could act as a real-time, three-dimensional instruction manual, potentially simplifying and speeding training. The science experiments include one that will test the effectiveness of flame-resistant fabrics in space. In the absence of gravity, flames and combustion behave differently than on Earth. Image In its last cargo run, in October 2014, Orbital exploded 15 seconds after liftoff. Credit Joel Kowsky/NASA, via Associated Press The cargo flight will also take up a new laboratory for the study of bacteria and other micro-organisms, cells and tissues, and small plants and animals. One of the small satellites on the Cygnus was built by students from prekindergarten through eighth grade at St. Thomas More Cathedral School in Arlington, Va. In January, the Cygnus is to undock from the space station carrying 3,000 pounds of trash. By design, it will burn up while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. Orbital is to launch one more time on top of an Atlas 5 rocket next spring, and then plans to resume launching its Antares rocket. Orbital will no longer use the old Soviet-era engines, having revamped the Antares design with newer, more powerful RD-181 engines from Russia. Meanwhile, NASA’s other cargo company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation , or SpaceX, also hopes to resume flying this month by launching a couple of commercial satellites. SpaceX has been grounded since June when a Falcon 9 rocket carrying supplies for the space station broke apart in flight , because of the failure of a strut within the second-stage liquid oxygen tank. SpaceX’s next cargo delivery for NASA, which will include an inflatable module to be added to the space station, will not occur until next year. A Russian Progress cargo rocket failed in April , but another Progress successfully launched in July . Because of cargo launches by Russia and Japan, the astronauts on the space station have not run out of supplies. At a news conference Wednesday, Kirk Shireman , NASA’s space station program manager, said toilet supplies would last until February and food until April. “We’re not overly concerned at this point in time,” he said, “but we’re not as robust as we would like to be.” NASA originally awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract for 12 flights, and Orbital — then known as the Orbital Sciences Corporation — a $1.9 billion contract for eight flights. SpaceX and Orbital ATK, formed in February in the merger of Orbital Sciences and the aerospace portion of Alliant Techsystems, are among the companies competing to operate a second batch of cargo flights. NASA had delayed announcing three times; it is now expected by the end of January. Instead, NASA ordered three additional flights from SpaceX and two from Orbital ATK under the current contracts. NASA has not revealed how much it will now be paying SpaceX and Orbital ATK, but the space agency said both contracts remained under the maximum potential value of $3.1 billion.

NASA
International Space Station
Space
Rocket
Private spaceflight
SpaceX
United Launch Alliance
Cape Canaveral


Using Fashion to Make a Statement on Technology

Abstract: THE fashion designer Alexander Wang is joining forces with Samsung to create a new print based on doodles, sketches and photographs that are being contributed via smartphone by some of the top names in fashion. Mr. Wang’s collaborators will participate electronically, sending ideas on Samsung Galaxy Note II smartphones, as inspiration for a one-of-a-kind print that will be used on a limited collection bag. Proceeds from sales of the bag will be donated to a New York art charity for children. For Mr. Wang, who recently became the creative director of the storied French fashion house Balenciaga, partnering with Samsung “represents a new way that technology and style can come together,” he said in an interview. In a nearly two-minute video , called “Be Creative,” which was released on Thursday in tandem with the opening of New York Fashion Week, Mr. Wang uses his Galaxy phone to capture ideas on the way from his Soho apartment to his design studio, and then to configure the space where his collection will be shown. Samsung, which is taking a viral approach and showing the video only on social media, hopes the partnership with Mr. Wang will underscore its message that “technology empowers creativity,” said Christine Cho, director of global marketing for Samsung Electronics, from its headquarters in Seoul, South Korea. “We thought Alexander Wang would be able to show that,” she said, “because of his passion for experimentation and his on-the-go lifestyle.” The electronics giant is walking in the footsteps of companies in other industries, like automakers that have allied with luxury-level fashion to distinguish themselves from rivals. To gain notice for the 2013 Chevy Malibu, General Motors, for example, worked with the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, who created an apparel and accessories collection celebrating the car’s redesign. “Fashion can be a good way to humanize technology,” said Sabrina Horn, head of the Horn Group, a digital communications agency, who noted that technology companies “often forget to strike that emotional connection with consumers.” Image Alexander Wang teamed up with Samsung to market the Galaxy Note II smartphone. Credit Matthew Hranek For Samsung, establishing a distinctive identity is critical as it battles its biggest rival, Apple, in the hotly contested mobile devices market. Last year, Samsung shipped 396.5 million mobile phones worldwide, according to a report from the Boston research firm Strategy Analytics. Smartphones earn the most revenue for Samsung, which had more than $143 billion in sales last year. Samsung also sells products like flat screens, chips and microprocessors. Samsung did not divulge how much it is spending on its partnership with Alexander Wang, but overall, the company spent nearly $212 million on advertising in the first nine months of 2012, according to figures provided by Kantar Media, the WPP unit. Samsung introduced the Galaxy Note II smartphone last year. It is striving to familiarize consumers with its abilities with its new campaign. “It’s all about association. If Samsung wants to be perceived as hip, cool and cutting edge, it has to have a partner with the same qualities,” Hal Hershfield, assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said of Samsung’s alliance with Mr. Wang. “Like Apple, which has a certain image, both Microsoft — with indie bands — and Samsung with fashion are saying that we can play this game, too,” Mr. Hershfield said. After the Feb. 23 deadline for submissions from Mr. Wang’s fashion circle — including models, photographers and fashion editors like Vogue’s Sally Singer — Mr. Wang will create a designer print for the limited edition bag. Samsung, an official sponsor of New York Fashion Week, plans to donate the proceeds to Art Start, a New York City nonprofit that provides art workshops for at-risk children ages 5 to 21. Mr. Wang chose the charity. Samsung has made other forays into the fashion field. Last summer, the company paired with the well-known designer Zac Posen to highlight an earlier Samsung tablet. A video featuring Mr. Posen showed him using his Samsung for notes, draping and creating a gown. He has appeared as a judge on “Project Runway,” the Lifetime Television show whose sponsor, Hewlett-Packard, provided touch-enabled screens for fledgling designers to create original patterns. Samsung’s current pairing, with Mr. Wang, allies it with a young designer who created his own fashion label and entered fashion’s top ranks when he won the prestigious CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award in 2008. In his video, filmed by Matt Bieler, a director for Serial Pictures, the boyish Mr. Wang collects ideas, designs and makes business preparations for his Fashion Week show. “With a little multitasking, I can keep it all together,” he says in the video, where he uses the stylus to write notes and create drawings. “It’s not just the clothes. It all makes up the bigger picture.” When he arrives at the Cunard Building in Lower Manhattan, the 1921 Art Deco edifice that once housed the passenger shipping company, to plan his Fashion Week showing, he sketches out the seating, lighting and runway placement on his Galaxy. Then, using the device’s file-sharing software, he taps his phone to an assistant’s to instantly transmit his plan. “When I see something that inspires me, I don’t have to wait until I get home or to my office to sketch it.” Mr. Wang said. “I can do it on the spot,” he added, “which is helpful because I have the worst memory.”

Fashion
Smartphone
Samsung Electronics
Art
advertising,marketing
Alexander Wang


O’Shea and Uhlaender Win Skeleton Medals

Abstract: No American woman had reached a World Cup skeleton medals podium in nearly three years, a drought that finally ended in the snowy mountains of France on Saturday. Annie O’Shea took the silver medal and Katie Uhlaender won the bronze at La Plagne, a breakthrough finish for an American program that is trying to build momentum for the 2014 Sochi Olympics in Russia. Uhlaender is a former two-time World Cup overall champion, but O’Shea is a second-year member of the tour who had never finished better than seventh. Mellisa Hollingsworth of Canada won the race, putting down the fastest time in each of the two runs and finishing in a combined 2 minutes 6.09 seconds. O’Shea was 0.37 back, Uhlaender another 0.18 off Hollingsworth’s pace — but completed a rare 1-2-3 sweep for North Americans on a European track. Uhlaender was the last American woman to win a medal in a World Cup race, on Feb. 12, 2009. She has been bothered by knee and hip injuries since then and missed the opening race on this season’s circuit while competing in a weight-lifting competition with hopes of qualifying for the 2012 London Games in that sport. AUSTRIA IS UPSET IN SKI JUMP Norway upset the favored Austrians to win a World Cup ski jumping team event in Harrachov, Czech Republic. Anders Bardal cleared 139 meters in the final jump on the large hill to seal the victory with 997.3 points. Austria was 37.7 points behind in second; Slovenia was third. Gregor Schlierenzauer of Austria, who won an individual competition on the large hill in the northern Czech resort on Friday, jumped only 124 meters. GERMANS BEAT U.S. IN BOBSLED Thomas Florschuetz and Kevin Kuske of Germany won a World Cup two-man bobsled event in La Plagne, edging Steven Holcomb and Steve Langton of the United States. Florschuetz drove his two runs in 1:58.50. Holcomb was 0.35 back for the silver medal, another 0.06 ahead of the bronze medalists, Beat Hefti and Thomas Lamparter of Switzerland. NORWEGIANS 1-2 IN BIATHLON The two-time Olympic biathlon champion Emil Hegle Svendsen edged Tarjei Boe by a tenth of a second at a World Cup 12.5-kilometer pursuit in Hochfilzen, Austria, for a Norwegian 1-2 finish. Benjamin Weger of Switzerland finished 4.9 seconds back in third. Darya Domracheva of Belarus beat Olga Zaitseva by 0.3 to win the women’s 10-kilometer pursuit in 29:34.4. The overall World Cup leader, Magdalena Neuner of Germany, was third. SCHMID WINS NORDIC COMBINED Jan Schmid of Norway defeated the Olympic and world champion Jason Lamy-Chappuis at a Nordic combined World Cup event in Ramsau, Austria, for his first career victory. Schmid, who was fourth after the jumps, posted the 19th-fastest time in the 10-kilometer cross-country race to finish in 22:05.8. Tino Edelmann of Germany was another 0.6 back in third to retain his lead in the World Cup standings. CROSS-COUNTRY TO NORWAY Petter Northug and Marit Bjoergen of Norway won cross-country skiing World Cup distance races in Davos, Switzerland. Northug won the 30-kilometer freestyle in 1 hour 7 minutes 43.8 seconds, beating Maurice Manificat of France by 51.4 seconds. The Czech Lukas Bauer was third. Bjoergen captured her 49th World Cup victory, covering the 15-kilometer freestyle course in 35:59.5. In a Norwegian podium sweep, Vibeke Skofterud trailed Bjoergen by 41.8 seconds and Therese Johaug was third.

World Cup (Skiing)
Nordic Combined (Winter Sport Event)
Skiing
Alpine Skiing
Hollingsworth Mellisa
Uhlaender Katie
Canada
O'Shea Annie
Skeleton (Sport)


Cubans Urged to Work Toward Change

Abstract: HAVANA — The leader of Cuba ’s labor union told tens of thousands of workers gathered in Havana’s Revolution Plaza on Thursday morning that they must get to work to build a better country. In a May Day address, Salvador Valdés Mesa, secretary general of the Cuban Workers Confederation, said “inefficiencies and weaknesses” needed to be overcome as Cuba advanced from the long era of Fidel Castro to his younger brother, Raúl, who took over officially as president in February. “It is fundamental to concentrate efforts on increasing production and productivity, above all of food,” he said, citing rising food and fuel prices across the globe. Looking on and waving was the younger Mr. Castro, 76, who was dressed in a green military uniform. Unlike his brother, who sometimes used May Day to deliver provocative lectures on the state of the world, the new president stayed silent. But he has issued a flurry of orders in recent weeks loosening up an array of government restrictions that had irritated Cubans. Now accessible to those who can pay are hotel rooms, rental cars and an array of consumer items. Experiments are also under way to allow private farmers to use fallow government land and keep the profits.

Cuba
Labor
Labor Role In Politics
Havana (Cuba)


Wealthy Americans Under Scrutiny in UBS Case

Abstract: One afternoon in April, six dozen wealthy Americans were entertained at a luncheon party in Midtown Manhattan, along with a special guest from Paris: Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre. The host of the exclusive gathering was the Swiss bank UBS , whose elite private bankers built a lucrative business in recent years by discreetly tending the fortunes of American millionaires and billionaires. As the wine flowed and Mr. Loyrette spoke of the glories of France, UBS bankers courted their affluent guests. But now, as the federal authorities intensify an investigation into offshore bank accounts, the secrets of this rarefied world are being dragged into the open — and UBS’s privileged clients are running scared. Under pressure from the authorities, UBS is considering whether to divulge the names of up to 20,000 of its well-heeled American clients, according to people close to the inquiry, a step that would have once been unthinkable to Swiss bankers, whose traditions of secrecy date to the Middle Ages. Federal investigators believe some of the clients may have used offshore accounts at UBS to hide as much as $20 billion in assets from the Internal Revenue Service . Doing so may have enabled these people to dodge at least $300 million in federal taxes on income from those assets, according to a government official connected with the investigation. One prominent UBS client, a wealthy property developer in California named Igor Olenicoff, has already pleaded guilty to filing a false 2002 tax return. But as the investigation tears holes in the veil of secrecy surrounding tax havens like Switzerland and Liechtenstein, other names are surfacing, according to the authorities. New revelations are likely to come Monday, when a former UBS banker is expected to testify in a court in Florida about how he helped Mr. Olenicoff and other clients evade taxes. The former banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, is set to plead guilty to helping Mr. Olenicoff conceal $200 million. “He’s going to sing like a parakeet,” one of Mr. Birkenfeld’s former clients said. UBS said that it was cooperating with investigators and that it was against its policy to help Americans evade taxes. Officials at the bank declined to comment for this article. Using offshore accounts is not illegal for United States taxpayers, but hiding income in so-called undeclared accounts is. At issue is whether the UBS clients filed W-9 tax forms with the bank, disclosing their names, addresses and taxpayer identification numbers, as required by law. Switzerland does not consider tax evasion a crime, and using undeclared accounts is legal there. The case could turn into an embarrassment for Marcel Rohner, the chief executive of UBS and the former head of its private bank, as well as for Phil Gramm, the former Republican senator from Texas who is now the vice chairman of UBS Securities, the Swiss bank’s investment banking arm. It also comes at a difficult time for UBS, which is reeling from $37 billion in bad investments, many of them linked to risky American mortgages. The federal investigation, which is part of a broad, international crackdown on tax cheats, suggests that United States authorities are shifting their focus to Liechtenstein and Switzerland from Caribbean havens like the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is scheduled to hold hearings as early as this month on offshore products sold by UBS and by the LGT Group, the bank owned by Liechtenstein’s royal family. At the center of the UBS investigation is Mr. Birkenfeld, 43, who grew up in the Boston area and went on to live what might seem like a charmed life as a private banker in Switzerland. Through his lawyer, Danny Onorato, Mr. Birkenfeld declined to comment. Mr. Birkenfeld’s testimony could deal a stinging blow to UBS, the world’s largest money manager for people whom bankers politely call “high net worth individuals.” Since 2006, the bank has opened plush offices in New York and six other United States cities, among them Boston, Chicago and Houston, to cater to people who are worth at least $10 million. Many UBS customers are worth far more than that. To lure them, UBS bankers canvassed cultural and sports events like Art Basel , the America’s Cup and Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts. “It’s not a question of finding wealthy people; it’s a question of how do you develop a network,” said Purvez Siddiqi, who recruits private bankers like Mr. Birkenfeld for big banks. But Mr. Siddiqi said he was “astonished” by how aggressively UBS marketed its offshore accounts to Americans. Mr. Birkenfeld took care of important clients for UBS’s private bank catering to United States citizens with offshore accounts, and was central to UBS’s effort to lure them. Before joining UBS in 2001, he worked at Barclays Bank in Geneva, where brought in Mr. Olenicoff, the billionaire owner of Olen Properties. When Mr. Birkenfeld joined UBS, he brought Mr. Olenicoff along, and later helped him move hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bahamas to Switzerland, according to a financial executive briefed on the matter. Shortly after Mr. Olenicoff left UBS for LGT, the Liechtenstein bank, in 2005, Mr. Birkenfeld resigned. The banker formally left UBS in March 2006. Mr. Birkenfeld later claimed in a Swiss legal proceeding that UBS had not paid him a bonus he was owed. A former associate said Mr. Birkenfeld had become angry over what he considered the bank’s wink-and-nod standard regarding tax evasion. UBS typically rewarded private bankers for attracting new clients in the United States, rather than for the fees the bankers generated for UBS from existing customers. Mr. Birkenfeld also was angered when UBS asked bankers to sign papers saying that they, not the bank, would be responsible if they broke non-Swiss tax laws, according to a European financial executive briefed on the matter. About a year ago, concerned by a tax investigation into Mr. Olenicoff, Mr. Birkenfeld contacted the Justice Department and California authorities and offered to cooperate with prosecutors in the hope of securing immunity for himself, according to a person close to the case. His deal fell through, however, and Mr. Birkenfeld was charged, along with a financial executive from Liechtenstein, in an indictment unsealed May 13. As the authorities focused on UBS last January, the bank abruptly shut its three Swiss offices that had sold undeclared offshore banking services to United States clients. Those offices catered to thousands of wealthy Americans, some of whom may now have their tax secrets put on public display.

UBS AG
Tax Evasion
Banks and Banking
Frauds and Swindling
Justice Department
Internal Revenue Service
Birkenfeld Bradley


Jets Hire Assistants

Abstract: Brian VanGorder, who spent four years as the Falcons’ defensive coordinator before holding the same position at Auburn last season, will coach the Jets’ linebackers next season. He replaces Bob Sutton, now the defensive coordinator in Kansas City. The Jets also hired Bobby April III as a defensive quality-control coach. He held the same job the last two seasons in Philadelphia.

Football
Jets
Brian VanGorder
Bobby April III


Obama Ends Jobs Bill Bus Tour in Virginia

Abstract: NORTH CHESTERFIELD, Va. — Wrapping up his three-day bus tour on an intimate note, President Obama dropped in at a suburban firehouse here on Wednesday and urged firefighters and rescue workers to pressure Republicans to support his jobs bill. The Senate will vote in the coming weeks on a $35 billion chunk of the bill designed to retain teachers and emergency workers. And for all the personal encounters and human moments that animate these bus tours, the president made it clear he wanted something from this audience. “It’s wonderful to have a chance to see everyone and shake hands and take pictures,” Mr. Obama said, standing in front of a yellow-and-white pumper truck, “but the main reason I’m here is that I want you to send a message to Congress that this is important.” The president pounded that message everywhere he went in Virginia and North Carolina, two important states that he won in 2008 and faces a struggle to hold on to in 2012. But as his black bus stopped at a military base and the firehouse in this historically Republican country, Mr. Obama seemed to soften his partisan tone just a shade. Maybe it was the presence of Michelle Obama, who joined the president at Joint Base Langley-Eustis to announce a partnership with private industry aimed at employing 25,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and military spouses within two years. Describing the initiative as a “huge deal,” Mrs. Obama said 270 companies — including giants like Procter & Gamble and Tyson Foods, which supply goods to military commissaries and post exchanges on bases — had agreed to hire more veterans. “It’s huge enough for you to even be involved,” she said drily, glancing back at a grinning Mr. Obama. Afterward, Mrs. Obama hopped on the bus to accompany the president to a nearby farmers market in Hampton, where he played a mix of amused spectator and harried husband as he watched his wife hoist 10 pumpkins — including two giant white specimens weighing 70 pounds each — onto a metal cart. “How many are you going to buy?” Mr. Obama asked. “You want anything else?” The first lady demurred, saying it would be challenging enough to fit the pumpkins on the bus. Mrs. Obama’s presence livened up a tour that has had some good moments (the president’s rapturous welcome at a child-care center in Virginia) but also a few awkward ones, including an exchange in which a diner at a restaurant in North Carolina said he was a funeral director and Mr. Obama replied: “Fantastic! That’s important work.” This was the president’s second bus tour — he tooled through Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois in August — and it was different in several ways that illustrate how much has changed for him since the grueling debt-ceiling impasse of the summer. On the heels of that dismal experience, Mr. Obama had little to sell. In town-hall sessions dressed up with bales of hay or bags of seed corn, he mostly listened to people voice frustration with the gridlock in Washington and seconded their emotions. Now, the president has a meaty, if politically divisive, bill that he is avidly selling. This week, the White House scrapped the town-hall format in favor of traditional campaign-style speeches, where Mr. Obama presented his proposals and assailed Republicans for blocking them. Speaking to 2,400 troops at the base, Mr. Obama outlined the proposal to give companies a tax incentive to hire veterans. Unlike other parts of the jobs bill, that provision, which is also likely headed for a Senate vote as a separate measure, has won the support of Republicans. “When I first proposed this idea to a joint session of Congress, people stood up and applauded on both sides of the aisle,” Mr. Obama said to noisy applause. “So when it comes for a vote in the Senate, I expect to get votes from both sides of the aisle.” The itinerary was also different, and arguably more challenging. In August, Mr. Obama’s caravan rolled through Midwestern farming counties he won easily in 2008. This time, he ventured into Republican strongholds like Wilkes County in North Carolina, where Senator John McCain rolled up close to 70 percent of the vote. Yet Mr. Obama was also politically opportunistic — nowhere more so than in Chesterfield County , a changing suburb of Richmond that Democrats view as ripe for gains. “The suburbs are getting better and better for Democrats,” said Mike Henry, a Democratic strategist who is managing former Gov. Tim Kaine’s bid for a Senate seat. “Chesterfield County is really getting to be much more like northern Virginia,” where Mr. Obama piled up big numbers in 2008.

United States Defense and Military Forces


BP Is Fined $25 Million For ’06 Pipeline Spills

Abstract: WASHINGTON — BP will pay $25 million in civil fines to settle charges arising from two spills from its network of pipelines in Alaska in 2006 and from a willful failure to comply with a government order to properly maintain the pipelines to prevent corrosion, federal officials announced on Tuesday . The fine is the largest per-barrel assessment ever levied against an oil company in a spill case and represents a new blow to BP’s corporate treasury and reputation. The aggressive approach of federal prosecutors in this case could portend huge fines and penalties from BP’s much larger spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year. That case, which is still under investigation, could cost the British oil giant more than $20 billion if the company is found grossly negligent, as it was in the Alaska pipeline matter. “This penalty should serve as a wake-up call to all pipeline operators that they will be held accountable for the safety of their operations and their compliance with the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the pipeline safety laws,” Ignacia S. Moreno, head of the environmental enforcement division at the Justice Department, said in a conference call with reporters. “This agreement will help prevent future environmental disasters and protect the fragile ecosystem of Alaska’s North Slope.” Ms. Moreno declined to answer any questions about the investigation into the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill in the gulf in April 2010, which killed 11 people and poured nearly five million barrels of oil into the ocean. BP Exploration Alaska owns the largest share of the consortium that runs the pipeline and depends on income from North Slope production to pay for damages caused by the gulf blowout. As a result of corrosion and poor maintenance of its pipelines in Alaska, BP was found responsible for the discharge of more than 5,000 barrels of oil onto the Arctic tundra and into a lake on the North Slope in March 2006; a much smaller spill occurred in August of that year. The company paid more than $20 million in criminal fines and restitution and was ordered by the federal Department of Transportation to perform extensive repairs on its system of 1,600 miles of pipelines. The Department of Transportation’s pipeline safety division determined that BP had failed to fully comply with the order to clean and replace miles of pipeline, and the government sued the company again in 2009. The consent decree announced on Tuesday requires BP to develop a program to maintain the safety and integrity of its pipelines and will subject the company to enhanced surveillance of its operations by federal regulators. The company also will be required to hire an outside monitor to ensure that it is regularly inspecting and maintaining its pipelines. “We are not just going to take BP at its word,” said Cynthia Giles, director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s office of enforcement and compliance assurance. “This requires an independent monitor to assure that BP is fully complying with the terms of today’s settlement. This case sends a clear message that we are vigorously enforcing the nation’s environmental laws.” Since the Deepwater Horizon spill and a fatal natural gas pipeline explosion last year in San Bruno, Calif., federal regulators have been taking a much harder regulatory line on drilling permits and pipeline inspections in general. In a brief statement, BP said the company did not admit to any liability in reaching the agreement with the government. The company also said the penalty was not calculated on a per-barrel basis, although government officials described the payment in those terms. BP did not say how it was calculated or offer specifics. The settlement must be ratified by a federal court to take effect. Alaska’s North Slope is one of BP’s most important oil fields and provides a vital income stream. BP produces nearly two-thirds of the 600,000 barrels a day that come from the North Slope, a giant oil field that has been in decline for many years but still produces about 3 percent of the crude oil consumed by the United States. Last week BP reported a first-quarter profit of $5.37 billion excluding one-time items and inventory changes, down 4 percent from a year earlier. The results included a $400 million charge related to the gulf spill.

Pipelines
Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
Fines (Penalties)
Clean Water Act
BP Plc
Alaska


In India, Making Small Changes on a Large Scale

Abstract: LONDON — It was the taxi ride from the Mumbai airport that pulled Sharath Jeevan off the corporate ladder. Although born in Chennai, India, he had been raised mostly in Saudi Arabia and England, graduating from Cambridge with a degree in economics. An M.B.A. from Insead, a prestigious France-based business school, led to a management consultant’s job at Booz Allen and then a job with eBay in Britain. “I’d go back to India every summer, and the only option was to go through Mumbai,” he recalled. “We’d drive through the slums and kids would run up to the cab to sell things, or to beg. It made me see how on a knife edge their lives were. Education seemed like an area where you can make a real difference.” The problem is not a lack of schools. “Ninety-five percent of kids in India have access to free government schools within a half-mile of where they live,” he said, a distance of 800 meters. The problem is that many of these schools offer poor-quality education. “The average Indian fifth grader reads like a second grader in Britain or the U.S. Two-thirds of them can’t read a paragraph or do simple fractions,” Mr. Jeevan said. His new venture, Schools and Teachers Innovating for Results , which will be officially introduced on Monday in Delhi, aims to change that. Backed by funding from the British Department for International Development and a number of British charities, STIR has spent the past 15 months researching the most successful “micro-innovations” — small, inexpensive, easy-to-implement changes — in classrooms across India. “We visited 300 schools and conducted 600 face-to-face meetings, speaking to over 3,000 teachers,” he said in an interview at the STIR office in London. The explosive growth of Indian schools means that many teachers have had little or no formal training. “Indian teachers are used to thinking of themselves as instruments of a ministry or of government policy,” Mr. Jeevan said. “It was the first time many of them had been asked about anything.” “Through innovation, we wanted to get teachers to think of themselves more seriously — as professionals,” he said. “The idea is to create a platform to collect the best of these micro-innovations, test them to see if they work, and then take them to scale. There are 1.3 million schools in India, so scale is a huge problem.” Some of the ideas, recounted in STIR materials, will sound familiar to parents in wealthier countries. At Majeediya Madarsa-e-Jadeed, a school catering to a predominantly Muslim community in Seelampur, Iram Mumshad, a teacher, noticed that parents, many of whom worked as day laborers, seemed unaware of how to support their children’s education. To engage parents, the school started incorporating their feedback on children’s behavior at home into school reports, building relationships between teachers and parents, and underlining the importance of parental support. At Babul Uloom, a public school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in East Delhi, Sajid Hasan realized that his students started school with fewer learning skills than students from wealthier parts of the city — a gap that seemed to increase with each passing month. So Mr. Hasan, a member of the Teach for India program that puts young, highly motivated teachers in some of the country’s toughest schools, decided to give his students extra time to catch up by extending the school day for two hours. “India normally has one of the shortest school days in the world,” Mr. Jeevan said. Most schools finish by 1 p.m. The two extra hours, he said, “gives the children more time to learn and also more structure in their lives. It also helps the teachers to focus on the students’ current level to help get them to where they need to be.” But some of the innovations have a uniquely Indian flavor. Students at the S.R. Capital School in Shahadra struggled with the poetry included in the curriculum, yet they all seemed well versed in the latest Bollywood hits. So Bindu Bhatia, their teacher, fit the words of the texts studied in class to the tune of popular songs, then encouraged the students to perform the poems, making classes more fun and giving students added confidence in approaching potentially daunting material. After it is officially introduced in Delhi, STIR plans to open additional hubs in Mumbai and Bangalore — big ambitions for a program that has just 10 full-time employees, four in Britain and six in India. But Mr. Jeevan has a track record of developing similar programs. While he was at eBay, he started eBay for Charity, which let buyers and sellers on the auction site donate a portion of the price of items they bought and sold to the nonprofit organization of their choice. The initiative has raised €43 million, or $65 million, for British charities. Then he introduced a new program, Teaching Leaders . “We know that Sharath is really good at taking an organization from scratch and building it, because that’s what he did with Teaching Leaders,” said Sally Morgan, an adviser to Absolute Return for Kids , a hedge-fund education charity that is one of STIR’s main backers. Based on the recognition that standardized tests showed four times as much variation within schools as between schools, Teaching Leaders was started by Mr. Jeevan in 2008 “to help great teachers become great leaders and managers.” The program was given initial backing by Absolute Return for Kids and within five years, the results were sufficiently impressive to win the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a £10 million, or $15 million, grant to expand the program across Britain. “Sharath is very focused, very driven by results,” said Ms. Morgan, who also serves as the chairwoman of Ofsted , the British government’s school inspection agency. “So when he came to us and was able to show that seemingly simple things — like using phonics when teaching English as a second language, instead of making the students start by memorizing grammar or rules — had a big impact in the classroom, it ticked a lot of our boxes.” “Even if you find something that works in your own class, there was no way of sharing those results with anyone else,” Ms. Morgan said. “People who want to make change happen can feel really isolated.” STIR is designed to allow innovative teachers to feel like they are part of a network. “Small changes in practice can make a big difference in the classroom,” Mr. Jeevan said. “But what matters more in the long term is the change in how teachers think of themselves.”

Education
Great Britain
India
Teachers
Mumbai,Bombay