A.M.A. Recognizes Obesity as a Disease

Abstract: The American Medical Association has officially recognized obesity as a disease, a move that could induce physicians to pay more attention to the condition and spur more insurers to pay for treatments. In making the decision, delegates at the association’s annual meeting in Chicago overrode a recommendation against doing so by a committee that had studied the matter. “Recognizing obesity as a disease will help change the way the medical community tackles this complex issue that affects approximately one in three Americans,” Dr. Patrice Harris, a member of the association’s board, said in a statement. She suggested the new definition would help in the fight against Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, which are linked to obesity. To some extent, the question of whether obesity is a disease or not is a semantic one, since there is not even a universally agreed upon definition of what constitutes a disease. And the A.M.A.’s decision has no legal authority. Still, some doctors and obesity advocates said that having the nation’s largest physician group make the declaration would focus more attention on obesity. And it could help improve reimbursement for obesity drugs, surgery and counseling. “I think you will probably see from this physicians taking obesity more seriously, counseling their patients about it,” said Morgan Downey, an advocate for obese people and publisher of the online Downey Obesity Report. “Companies marketing the products will be able to take this to physicians and point to it and say, ‘Look, the mother ship has now recognized obesity as a disease.’ ” Two new obesity drugs — Qsymia from Vivus, and Belviq from Arena Pharmaceuticals and Eisai — have entered the market in the last year. Qsymia has not sold well for a variety of reasons, including poor reimbursement and distribution restrictions imposed because of concerns that the drug can cause birth defects. Those restrictions are now being relaxed. Belviq went on sale only about a week ago, so it is too early to tell how it is doing. Whether obesity should be called a disease has long been debated. The Obesity Society officially issued its support for classifying obesity as a disease in 2008 , with Mr. Downey as one of the authors of the paper. The Internal Revenue Service has said that obesity treatments can qualify for tax deductions. In 2004, Medicare removed language from its coverage manual saying obesity was not a disease. Image Dr. Patrice Harris said the obesity definition would help in the fight against heart disease. Credit Ted Grudzinski/A.M.A. Still, Medicare Part D , the prescription drug benefit, includes weight loss drugs among those it will not pay for, along with drugs for hair growth and erectile dysfunction. The vote of the A.M.A. House of Delegates went against the conclusions of the association’s Council on Science and Public Health, which had studied the issue over the last year. The council said that obesity should not be considered a disease mainly because the measure usually used to define obesity, the body mass index, is simplistic and flawed. Some people with a B.M.I. above the level that usually defines obesity are perfectly healthy while others below it can have dangerous levels of body fat and metabolic problems associated with obesity. “Given the existing limitations of B.M.I. to diagnose obesity in clinical practice, it is unclear that recognizing obesity as a disease, as opposed to a ‘condition’ or ‘disorder,’ will result in improved health outcomes,” the council wrote. The council summarized the arguments for and against calling obesity a disease. One reason in favor, it said, was that it would reduce the stigma of obesity that stems from the widespread perception that it is simply the result of eating too much or exercising too little. Some doctors say that people do not have full control over their weight. Supporters of the disease classification also say it fits some medical criteria of a disease, such as impairing body function. Those arguing against it say that there are no specific symptoms associated with it and that it is more a risk factor for other conditions than a disease in its own right. They also say that “medicalizing” obesity by declaring it a disease would define one-third of Americans as being ill and could lead to more reliance on costly drugs and surgery rather than lifestyle changes. Some people might be overtreated because their B.M.I. was above a line designating them as having a disease, even though they were healthy. The delegates rejected the conclusion of the council and voted instead in favor of a resolution pushed by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American College of Cardiology and some other organizations. This resolution argued that obesity was a “multimetabolic and hormonal disease state” that leads to unfavorable outcomes like Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. “The suggestion that obesity is not a disease but rather a consequence of a chosen lifestyle exemplified by overeating and/or inactivity is equivalent to suggesting that lung cancer is not a disease because it was brought about by individual choice to smoke cigarettes,” the resolution said.


On the Data-Sharing Trail, Try Following the Breadcrumbs

Abstract: WOULD you like to donate to the Obama campaign? Sign up for a college course? Or maybe subscribe to Architectural Digest? If you have ever felt inundated by such solicitations, by e-mail or by snail mail, you may have wondered what you did to deserve it. I did. I wondered how all those campaigns, companies and institutions got my number. And how much money data brokers behind the scenes might make by flipping my name and address. Turns out there’s no easy way for consumers in the United States to track the data dealers who profile our spending, Web browsing and social media habits, the better to sell us stuff. Although the Federal Trade Commission issued a consumer privacy report last month urging companies that collect and share customer information to give people more notification and control over the proliferation of their personal details, the recommendations don’t have the force of binding regulations. So, without a right to compel vendors to show me where my data goes, I decided to do some profiling of my own. I subscribed to a half-dozen print magazines last year, signing up for each with a different typo in my name or variation in my address. Then I collected the direct mail that resulted, tracking the solicitations back to the publishers who had shared my erroneous contact information. Admittedly, it was unscientific. But I figured this little off-line experiment might provide insight into an even more opaque world — online behavioral targeting — where ad networks deliver tailored marketing pitches to people based on their location, search queries, online purchases and the like. Here are the results: Natawsha, the name under which I had subscribed to Wired and The New Yorker, got hit up for a donation to Literacy Partners, a tutoring company in Manhattan, and received a bulletin from the New-York Historical Society. Nafasha, who signed up for Fast Company, received solicitations from Forbes. The mangled address I had submitted to Foreign Policy received a cascade of mail from, among others, the World Monuments Fund, Barron’s and the Kiplinger Letter. And a subscription to The New York Review of Books led to solicitations from the Central Park Conservancy, the New York Public Library and The New York Times — and, on behalf of President Obama’s 2012 campaign, an appeal from Michelle Obama. “It is revenue-producing for a publisher to collect subscribers’ information and sell it,” said Paul Stephens, the director of policy and advocacy at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse , a consumer group in San Diego. “It’s just information that is very valuable to advertisers who want to target individuals based on their interests.” INDEED, the Direct Marketing Association , a trade group, has estimated that spending on direct marketing in the United States reached $163 billion in 2011. Still, a report earlier this year from the White House, laying out a privacy bill of rights for consumers , implicates the decades-old practice of list-sharing, among others. The report says consumers have a right to expect that companies will collect, use and share information in ways consistent with the context in which people provided it. In other words, if you subscribe to a magazine, you might reasonably expect to receive offers from magazines owned by the same publishing house, said Nancy J. King, a privacy law expert who is an associate professor at Oregon State University’s College of Business. “But you probably would not have expected a magazine to share your information with a political campaign” that has inferred your political preferences from your choice of periodicals, Professor King said. Of course, publishers are hardly the only businesses sharing and selling consumer information. In the United States, with the exception of specific sectors like credit and health care, companies are free to use their customers’ data as they deem appropriate. That means every time a person buys a car or a house, takes a trip or stays in a hotel, signs up for a catalog or shops online or in a mall, his or her name might end up on a list shared with other marketers. That can happen directly, or through middlemen known as list brokers and data brokers. The ultimate purpose of all this sharing and profiling is to personalize marketing, using analytics to predict the offers most likely to interest consumers based on their past behavior, says Linda A. Woolley, the executive vice president of Washington operations at the Direct Marketing Association . “Sometimes the analytics are right; sometimes they are wrong,” Ms. Woolley said. “The industry exists to try to perfect those guesses.” For those who’d rather not receive such offers, she said, the trade group offers a dedicated Web site, dmachoice.org , where people can opt out of getting all kinds of direct mail or specific categories of it, like credit card offers. But Christopher Olsen, the assistant director of privacy and identity protection in the Federal Trade Commission’s bureau of consumer protection, said companies ought to notify their customers if they plan to share information about them with third parties — rather than simply permitting people to opt out after the fact. Indeed, the agency’s recent report calls on industry to be more transparent with consumers. “If your name is flying around the ether because you have subscribed to a magazine,” Mr. Olsen said, “you ought to understand who has got that information and whether you have a choice about its onward distribution.” ALTHOUGH all of the magazines contacted for this article said their subscribers could opt out, some publishers took a more active approach than others to notifying readers of their practices. Natalie Raabe, a spokeswoman for The Atlantic, for example, said the magazine occasionally allows companies it has screened to contact subscribers about products or services that may be of interest. But the magazine does not share subscriber addresses directly with these companies, she said; it uses a third party to administer the process. A spokeswoman for Condé Nast, publisher of The New Yorker, said it adhered to industry best practices and offered subscribers multiple ways to opt out. Diane R. Seltzer, list manager at The New York Review of Books, vets all proposals from companies that want to market to subscribers to ensure the offers are appropriate. Those making the cut are charged a rental fee of $105 per 1,000 names for one-time use, she said. The publication runs an ad in every issue, she added, notifying subscribers of this practice and explaining how to opt out. “We are very proactive in trying to keep subscribers happy,” she said. In light of the new federal privacy reports, however, at least one publisher said it might halt, or at least further limit, the selling of its subscriber list. “I think media companies are going to have to tackle this issue,” said David Rothkopf, the new chief executive of Foreign Policy. Two months into the job, he said, he had hired a new circulation director and intended to review his magazines’ list-sharing policy: “I think there are people out there who don’t want to be part of some giant circulating mailing list.”

Advertising and Marketing
Magazines
Consumer Protection
Privacy
Consumer Behavior
Computers and the Internet
Direct Marketing Assn
Federal Trade Commission


Man Waving Gun Is Shot by Officers in the Bronx, Police Say

Abstract: A man who had been seen waving a gun and pointing it at people was shot and wounded by police officers outside a playground in the South Bronx on Monday afternoon, the authorities said. The man, George Watson, 29, was shot once in the right upper arm after he repeatedly ignored officers’ requests to drop his firearm, police officials said. He was taken to Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx in stable condition, and charges against him were pending on Monday night. The officers were not injured, but they were taken to Jacobi Medical Center for observation, the authorities said. The episode began in the late afternoon, in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. In a surveillance video that police officials said showed Mr. Watson before his encounter with officers, a man drops a pole and walks down a snowy sidewalk with a gun in his right hand. When he passes a driver closing the back doors of a van, the man points his gun at the driver. He then drops his arms and continues walking, pausing briefly near a dog on the sidewalk. Just before 3:45 p.m., another witness saw the man brandishing a firearm and pointing it at passing cars, the authorities said. The witness flagged down three officers in a patrol car and gave them a description of the man. After a short search, the police said they came upon him carrying a gun on the sidewalk on Tinton Avenue near East 166th Street, between Behagen Playground and the Forest Houses, a 15-building public housing complex within the 42nd Precinct. The housing project, known for gang activity and gun violence, has been the site of a string of serious shootings in recent years, including one in 2012 that killed a 4-year-old boy caught in a gun battle as he played outside. The police said two officers had fired when the man refused to drop the gun, striking him once. Investigators at the scene recovered a .22-caliber Ruger pistol.

Police Brutality,Police Misconduct,Police Shootings


Saturn’s Ring of Dust and ‘Soccer Balls’

Abstract: Saturn’s outermost ring is made up of an unusual combination of fine dust particles occasionally interspersed with rocks the size of soccer balls, scientists reported in the journal Nature. The faint ring, discovered in 2009 , is probably made of material ejected from one of Saturn’s moons, Phoebe . With images from NASA’s WISE spacecraft, researchers at the University of Maryland discovered that the ring was dominated by small particles , a rarity in our solar system, while the ring itself is enormous, 10 times as big as the E ring, the next largest.

Saturn
Nature Journal
NASA
Space
Science and Technology


The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web

Abstract: MONS, Belgium — On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet. In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.” Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.” Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology. Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.” Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes — not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life’s work. But in recent years, a small group of researchers has begun to resurrect Otlet’s reputation, republishing some of his writing and raising money to establish the museum and archive in Mons. As the Mundaneum museum prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary on Thursday, the curators are planning to release part of the original collection onto the present-day Web. That event will not only be a kind of posthumous vindication for Otlet, but it will also provide an opportunity to re-evaluate his place in Web history. Was the Mundaneum (mun-da-NAY-um) just a historical curiosity — a technological road not taken — or can his vision shed useful light on the Web as we know it? Although Otlet spent his entire working life in the age before computers, he possessed remarkable foresight into the possibilities of electronic media. Paradoxically, his vision of a paperless future stemmed from a lifelong fascination with printed books. Otlet, born in 1868, did not set foot in a schoolroom until age 12. His mother died when he was 3; his father was a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune selling trams all over the world. The senior Otlet kept his son out of school, out of a conviction that classrooms stifled children’s natural abilities. Left at home with his tutors and with few friends, the young Otlet lived the life of a solitary bookworm. When he finally entered secondary school, he made straight for the library. “I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle,” he later wrote. Soon after entering school, Otlet took on the role of school librarian. In the years that followed, Otlet never really left the library. Though his father pushed him into law school, he soon left the bar to return to his first love, books. In 1895, he met a kindred spirit in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him in planning to create a master bibliography of all the world’s published knowledge . Even in 1895, such a project marked an act of colossal intellectual hubris. The two men set out to collect data on every book ever published, along with a vast collection of magazine and journal articles, photographs, posters and all kinds of ephemera — like pamphlets — that libraries typically ignored. Using 3 by 5 index cards (then the state of the art in storage technology), they went on to create a vast paper database with more than 12 million individual entries. Otlet and LaFontaine eventually persuaded the Belgian government to support their project, proposing to build a “city of knowledge” that would bolster the government’s bid to become host of the League of Nations. The government granted them space in a government building, where Otlet expanded the operation. He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance. As the Mundaneum evolved, it began to choke on the sheer volume of paper. Otlet started sketching ideas for new technologies to manage the information overload. At one point he posited a kind of paper-based computer, rigged with wheels and spokes that would move documents around on the surface of a desk. Eventually, however, Otlet realized the ultimate answer involved scrapping paper altogether. Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, “Monde,” where he laid out his vision of a “mechanical, collective brain” that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network. Tragically, just as Otlet’s vision began to crystallize, the Mundaneum fell on hard times. In 1934, the Belgian government lost interest in the project after losing its bid for the League of Nations headquarters. Otlet moved it to a smaller space, and after financial struggles had to close it to the public. A handful of staff members kept working on the project, but the dream ended when the Nazis marched through Belgium in 1940. The Germans cleared out the original Mundaneum site to make way for an exhibit of Third Reich art, destroying thousands of boxes filled with index cards. Otlet died in 1944, a broken and soon-to-be-forgotten man. After Otlet’s death, what survived of the original Mundaneum was left to languish in an old anatomy building of the Free University in the Parc Leopold until 1968, when a young graduate student named W. Boyd Rayward picked up the paper trail. Having read some of Otlet’s work, he traveled to the abandoned office in Brussels, where he discovered a mausoleumlike room full of books and mounds of paper covered in cobwebs. Mr. Rayward has since helped lead a resurgence of interest in Otlet’s work, a movement that eventually fueled enough interest to prompt development of the Mundaneum museum in Mons. Today, the new Mundaneum reveals tantalizing glimpses of a Web that might have been. Long rows of catalog drawers hold millions of Otlet’s index cards, pointing the way into a back-room archive brimming with books, posters, photos, newspaper clippings and all kinds of other artifacts. A team of full-time archivists have managed to catalog less than 10 percent of the collection. The archive’s sheer sprawl reveals both the possibilities and the limits of Otlet’s original vision. Otlet envisioned a team of professional catalogers analyzing every piece of incoming information, a philosophy that runs counter to the bottom-up ethos of the Web. “I think Otlet would have felt lost with the Internet,” said his biographer, Françoise Levie. Even with a small army of professional librarians, the original Mundaneum could never have accommodated the sheer volume of information produced on the Web today. “I don’t think it could have scaled up,” Mr. Rayward said. “It couldn’t even scale up to meet the demands of the paper-based world he was living in.” Those limitations notwithstanding, Otlet’s version of hypertext held a few important advantages over today’s Web. For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks. Otlet also saw the possibilities of social networks, of letting users “participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus.” While he very likely would have been flummoxed by the anything-goes environment of Facebook or MySpace, Otlet saw some of the more productive aspects of social networking — the ability to trade messages, participate in discussions and work together to collect and organize documents. Some scholars believe Otlet also foresaw something like the Semantic Web, the emerging framework for subject-centric computing that has been gaining traction among computer scientists like Mr. Berners-Lee. Like the Semantic Web, the Mundaneum aspired not just to draw static links between documents, but also to map out conceptual relationships between facts and ideas. “The Semantic Web is rather Otlet-ish,” said Michael Buckland, a professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. Critics of the Semantic Web say it relies too heavily on expert programmers to create ontologies (formalized descriptions of concepts and relationships) that will let computers exchange data with one another more easily. The Semantic Web “may be useful, but it is bound to fail,” Dr. Buckland said, adding, “It doesn’t scale because nobody will provide enough labor to build it.” The same criticism could have been leveled against the Mundaneum. Just as Otlet’s vision required a group of trained catalogers to classify the world’s knowledge, so the Semantic Web hinges on an elite class of programmers to formulate descriptions for a potentially vast range of information. For those who advocate such labor-intensive data schemes, the fate of the Mundaneum may offer a cautionary tale. The curators of today’s Mundaneum hope the museum avoids its predecessor’s fate. Although the museum has consistently managed to secure financing, it struggles to attract visitors. “The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum,” said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. “People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It’s like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?” Striving to broaden its appeal, the museum stages regular exhibits of posters, photographs and contemporary art. And while only a trickle of tourists make their way to the little museum in Mons, the town may yet find its way onto the technological history map. Later this year, a new corporate citizen plans to open a data center on the edge of town: Google.

Computers and the Internet
Archives and Records
Museums
History
Otlet Paul
Belgium
Mundaneum


Donald Trump Thrusts Taiwan Back on the Table, Rattling a Region

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Over the past two decades, Taiwan has slipped from its position atop the list of flash points in the complex relationship between the United States and China. In meetings between President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China, it has typically come up after half a dozen more pressing issues, like trade, cyberattacks and Beijing’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea. Now, though, in a single protocol-shattering phone call with the president of Taiwan, President-elect Donald J. Trump has thrust it back on the table. Not since President Richard M. Nixon met with Mao Zedong in 1972 — when the two issued the Shanghai Communiqué clarifying the status of Taiwan — has an American leader so shaken up the diplomatic status quo on the issue. “Taiwan is about to become a more prominent feature of the overall U.S.-China relationship,” said Jon M. Huntsman, who served as ambassador to China during Mr. Obama’s first term. “As a businessman, Donald Trump is used to looking for leverage in any relationship. A President Trump is likely to see Taiwan as a useful leverage point.” In the short run, Mr. Trump has rattled the entire region. Representatives of several Asian countries contacted the White House on Saturday to express concern, according to a senior administration official. In the longer term, officials in the Obama administration worry that the episode could not just ignite tensions across the Taiwan Strait but also inflame trade relations and embolden China in the South China Sea, where it has clashed with the Philippines, Vietnam and other neighbors over competing claims to reefs and shoals. Mr. Trump expressed no misgivings about taking the call from President Tsai Ing-wen, which was arranged beforehand at the initiative of the Taiwanese government, not Mr. Trump’s camp. Image President Richard M. Nixon greeted Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972 during Mr. Nixon’s trip to China. Credit Associated Press Mr. Trump bridled at suggestions that he had committed a faux pas, writing on Twitter on Friday evening that it was “interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.” Nor did Mr. Trump or his aides make a gesture to reaffirm the One China policy, much to the chagrin of the White House. It fell to a spokesman for the National Security Council to affirm that the United States was not changing the policy. Under that policy, the United States formally recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1979, abrogating its ties with Taiwan, as the Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, sought to bolster China’s economy and create closer ties to the West. Whether Mr. Trump views the call as the beginning of a change in approach toward Taiwan is not clear. A person close to him insisted that he was just being polite in taking Ms. Tsai’s call. But Stephen Yates, a former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney who is advising the Trump transition, said in an interview that people around Mr. Trump were well aware of the nuances of American policy toward Taiwan. Among hard-line Republicans, there has always been a push to confront China by reaching out to Taiwan. In a statement on Friday, Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who was briefly believed to be a candidate for Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, praised him for taking the call, saying it “reaffirms our commitment to the only democracy on Chinese soil.” President Ronald Reagan antagonized China by inviting a delegation from Taiwan to his inauguration. Aides to President George W. Bush pressed him to take a more confrontational approach with China until the attacks of Sept. 11 reordered his priorities, increasing the need for him to cultivate China on counterterrorism and other issues. Tensions over Taiwan peaked under a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who in March 1996 ordered two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait after China conducted missile tests to intimidate the island. For some China experts, shaking up the cross-strait relationship would not be the worst thing in the world. “We have had a status quo of sorts in the Taiwan Strait that has kept the peace, but it recently has not looked all that durable, nor was it very agreeable to most citizens of democratic Taiwan,” said Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “Whether a new kind of Trumpian brinkmanship will now cause China to reconsider its hard-line position towards Taiwan, or to respond in a dangerous and militant way, remains to be seen,” he said. Image President Xi Jinping of China and President Obama at a ceremony in Hangzhou in September announcing the formal adoption of the Paris climate agreement. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Mr. Trump has spoken harshly about China, accusing it of concocting climate change as a hoax to undercut American manufacturers, branding it a currency manipulator (when it in fact is trying to prop its currency up), and threatening to impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods. Mr. Trump’s trade advisers have also advocated punitive responses to what they portray as unfair Chinese actions. A few days after he was elected, however, Mr. Trump spoke with China’s president, Mr. Xi, and released a statement afterward that said the two men had a “clear sense of mutual respect.” Taiwan is also likely to seek a closer relationship with the United States. After years of a Kuomintang government, which pursued closer China ties, Taiwan elected Ms. Tsai as its second president from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. Analysts said that Ms. Tsai, though not a firebrand, was seeking to diversify Taiwan’s economic partners and carve out more space for it in international affairs. There are also lingering questions about Mr. Trump’s business dealings in Taiwan. The news media there has reported that the Trump Organization sent a representative to Taiwan to explore building a luxury hotel in a government-backed development near Taipei’s airport, though an official with the Trump Organization said it was not planning any expansion into Taiwan. The Trump Organization does not dispute that one of its employees — assigned to promote hotel sales related to Asia — was in Taipei, the capital, in October for a work-related visit. The duties of the executive, Anne-Marie Donoghue, include trying to find guests for the company’s hotels worldwide, and she is not involved in developing new real estate projects for Trump Hotels. For the Chinese government, as for many other governments around the world, Mr. Trump’s freewheeling diplomacy poses a challenge. At first, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, played down the episode, saying it was a “petty action by the Taiwan side” that would not upset the longstanding policy of One China. But hours later, the Chinese Foreign Ministry lodged a formal complaint with the Obama administration. It urged the United States to “handle issues related to Taiwan carefully and properly to avoid causing unnecessary interference to the overall U.S.-China relationship.” David Shambaugh, the director of the China policy program at George Washington University, said Beijing’s measured response made sense. But he said that if the Trump administration took more concrete steps to change time-tested ways of dealing with Taiwan, “they can expect additional pushback from China.”

Donald Trump
Taiwan
US Foreign Policy
China
Asia


Man Wrongly Convicted in ’97 Brooklyn Killing Settles With City and State

Abstract: A man who fought his murder conviction while he was behind bars for 17 years and ultimately won an exoneration without a lawyer has reached a $3.75 million settlement with New York City. The settlement, announced on Friday by Comptroller Scott M. Stringer , puts a dollar value on the time the man, Roger Logan, spent behind bars when he should have been free. By the time Mr. Logan walked out of court in June 2014, at age 53, his parents had died, his younger brother had died, and his daughters, young girls when he was imprisoned, had their own children. Mr. Logan has also settled with New York State for $2.975 million, said Harold Baker, the lawyer who handled Mr. Logan’s civil claims after he was freed. The law allows victims of wrongful convictions to bring a separate claim against the state, in addition to what they might file against the city (including individual police officers and prosecutors). Mr. Logan was convicted of fatally shooting a man in a Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, vestibule in 1997, with the police and prosecutors alleging Mr. Logan murdered the man as retribution for the theft of a gold chain after a dice game. He was cleared of the murder in 2014 after an investigation by the Conviction Review Unit of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. After his exoneration, he notified the city he would sue. The comptroller’s office has the authority to settle claims before they are filed as lawsuits, and has been doing so frequently in wrongful-conviction cases and some civil rights cases . It has settled eight wrongful-conviction cases for a total of $41 million since 2014, according to comptroller records. “Somebody victimized by the system, we want to bring closure and allow them to get on with their lives,” Mr. Stringer, a Democrat, said in an interview. “My job is also to weigh the fiscal exposure, and act in a fiscally responsible way.” Under Ken Thompson, a Democrat, who became district attorney in 2014, Brooklyn’s Conviction Review Unit has cleared 17 men of old convictions, mostly murders. The unit is examining all the cases involving a retired detective, Louis Scarcella, whose questionable methods were investigated by The New York Times . It has upheld 38 of those and moved to clear the convictions in 17 others so far, according to the district attorney’s office. Mr. Scarcella worked on Mr. Logan’s case, and, after he heard about the scrutiny of Mr. Scarcella, Mr. Logan wrote the district attorney’s office from prison, asking them to revisit his conviction. “He realized, ‘That’s the guy that came to my house, dragged me down to the precinct and forced me to sign a statement’ ” saying he was there at the time of the crime, Mr. Baker said. Mr. Scarcella’s lawyers have maintained the detective did nothing to contribute to wrongful convictions in the cases being questioned. All along, Mr. Logan said he was innocent. There had been a dice game and his chain was stolen, he said, but he had recovered the chain and he and the thieves let the matter rest. Investigators and lawyers for the review unit did not have DNA results or newly uncovered evidence to help in Mr. Logan’s case. Instead, they reviewed prosecution arguments, witness statements and other records, and returned to the site of the crime, at 373 Chauncey Street. As in several of the other flawed Brooklyn prosecutions, the government had relied largely on a single eyewitness. The eyewitness, Aisha Jones, said she knew Mr. Logan from around the neighborhood; had seen him on July 23, the day before the murder, at a dice game; and had seen him throughout the day of the murder, July 24, from about noon onward. She described how she saw Mr. Logan kick open the door to the Chauncey Street vestibule and start firing, and how she heard 10 shots in rapid succession. She said she ran upstairs to her apartment, and from her window, saw him finish shooting. A lawyer in the Conviction Review Unit, however, saw something suspicious in the files. Ms. Jones was arrested on July 23. Looking into it, he found that the earliest she could have been released after the arrest was 7 p.m. on July 24. That meant she could not have seen Mr. Logan at the dice game, nor throughout the day of the murder, and that could have made her entire identification of Mr. Logan inadmissible, lawyers with the unit said. The lawyer and an investigator then spoke to four other witnesses. Two were the admitted gold-chain robbers, and they backed up Mr. Logan’s account. Only one of the four said he saw Mr. Logan at the crime scene, and that man said he did not see Mr. Logan shoot. Finally, the lawyer and the investigator went to 373 Chauncey Street. The investigator mimicked the sound of 10 gunshots being fired in quick succession from the vestibule as the lawyer tried to run from the street to Ms. Jones’s apartment, which Ms. Jones claimed she did in time to see the final shot. They determined it was all but impossible to cover that distance in such a short time.


Google, Mighty Now, but Not Forever

Abstract: Technology giants often meet their end not with a bang but a whimper, a slow, imperceptible descent into irrelevancy that may not immediately be reflected in the anodyne language of corporate earnings reports. Old kingpins like Digital Equipment and Wang didn’t disappear overnight. They sank slowly, burdened by maintenance of the products that made them rich and unable to match the pace of technological change around them. The same is happening now at Hewlett-Packard, which is splitting in two. Even Microsoft — the once unbeatable, declared monopolist of personal computing software — has struggled to stay relevant in the shift from desktop to mobile devices, even as it has continued to pump out billions in profits. Now Google is facing a similar question about its place among tech’s standard bearers. And like those companies before it, its strength today — a seemingly endless reservoir of ads next to search results — may turn out to be its weakness tomorrow. “I’m not saying that Google is going to go away, just as Microsoft didn’t go away,” said Ben Thompson, a tech analyst who writes the blog Stratechery . “It’s just that Google will miss out on what’s next.” At first glance , the Mountain View, Calif., company looks plenty healthy. It generated $14.4 billion in profits in 2014 and revenue was up 19 percent from the year before. Google accounts for three-quarters of the world’s web searches, and the company also controls Android, by far the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, and YouTube, the world’s most popular video site. Yet a look behind the search bar shows cracks. Growth in Google’s primary business, search advertising, has flattened out at about 20 percent a year for the last few years. The company’s financial results have failed to meet consensus analysts’ expectations for five straight quarters. And its stock price has fallen 8 percent over the last year. Although Google has spent considerable resources inventing technologies for the future, it has failed to turn many of its innovations into new moneymakers. About 90 percent of Google’s revenue is from ads, most of that on its search engine. But as smartphones eclipse laptop and desktop computers to become the planet’s most important computing devices, the digital ad business is rapidly changing. Facebook, Google’s archrival for advertising dollars, has been quick to profit from the shift. Image Credit Stuart Goldenberg Google’s place in the future is less clear. In a much-discussed article published last fall , Mr. Thompson argued that the search company is ill suited to capitalize on the huge cache of ad dollars that marketers now spend on TV — a bundle of money that is slowly shifting to mobile apps. Here’s why: The advertising business is split, roughly, into two. On one side are direct-response ads meant to induce an immediate purchase: Think classifieds, the Yellow Pages or catalogs. In 2000, Google began running text-based ads alongside its search results. These ads quickly became one of the world’s most successful forms of direct-response advertising. In 2014, Google sold about $45 billion in search ads. But Google’s enormous search haul is only a slice of the $550 billion global advertising market, according to the research firm eMarketer. As Mr. Thompson pointed out, most of that money is not in direct response ads like Google’s. Instead, the bulk of the ad industry is devoted to something called brand ads. These are the ads you see on television and print magazines. They work on your emotions in the belief that, in time, your dollars will follow. Google is great at information but it is still learning emotion. This gets to the crux of Mr. Thompson’s argument that Google has peaked. The future of online advertising looks increasingly like the business of television . It is likely to be dominated by services like Facebook, Snapchat or Pinterest that keep people engaged for long periods of time. “Google doesn’t create immersive experiences that you get lost in,” Mr. Thompson said. “Google creates transactional services. You go to Google to search, or for maps, or with something else in mind. And those are the types of ads they have. But brand advertising isn’t about that kind of destination. It’s about an experience.” Google disputed the idea that it may face a challenge in brand advertising. “The brand and video advertising opportunity is huge and we feel well positioned to invest with confidence and excitement,” a spokesman said. YouTube attracts more than a billion users a month, and the company thinks that if ad dollars begin flowing from TV to the Internet, a lot of that money will flow to YouTube . Image Ben Thompson, a tech analyst, argues that Google is ill suited to capitalize on ad dollars that marketers now spend on TV. Credit Dilip Bhoye At YouTube’s headquarters just south of San Francisco, Google built a huge workshop it calls BrandLab , where sales people shepherd representatives from big advertisers like Coca-Cola and Toyota through online advertising lessons. Google has also created technology to measure how marketers’ ads affect potential customers , which was not so easy to do in the predigital era. And it keeps investing in its formidable ad infrastructure, including technology to serve up and measure how ads are performing, and a staff of thousands of sales people. The problem for Google, though, is that its efforts aren’t impossible to replicate. In less than five years, Facebook has also built an enviable ad-technology infrastructure, a huge sales team that aims to persuade marketers of the benefits of Facebook ads over TV ads, and new ways for brands to measure how well their ads are doing . These efforts have paid off quickly: In 2014 Facebook sold $11.5 billion in ads, most of them on mobile devices. That was up 65 percent over 2013. Any number of up-and-coming social services, including Pinterest and Snapchat, could also do well. So even if YouTube does very well, it will be only one of several services where marketers want to spend their money. “The movement of brand advertising into digital will probably not be winner-take-all, like it was in search,” said Ari Paparo, a former advertising product director at Google who is now the chief executive of an ad technology company called Beeswax. “And if it were to be winner-takes-all, it’s much more likely to be Facebook that takes all than it would be Google.” Google would still make a lot of money if it doesn’t dominate online ads the way it does now. But it would need to find other businesses to keep growing. Perhaps this explains why Larry Page, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, recently delegated responsibility for most of Google’s products to a subordinate , allowing Mr. Page to focus on strategy. It could also explain why Google’s research and development spending increased to $2.8 billion in the fourth quarter, from $2.1 billion in the same quarter a year ago. That spending, on projects like a self-driving car, Google Glass, fiber-optic lines in American cities and even space exploration, generates plenty of buzz for the company. But the far-out projects remind Mr. Thompson of Microsoft, which has also invested heavily in research and development, and has seen little return on its investments. “To me the Microsoft comparison can’t be more clear,” he said. “This is the price of being so successful — what you’re seeing is that when a company becomes dominant, its dominance precludes it from dominating the next thing. It’s almost like a natural law of business.”

Google
advertising,marketing
Ben Thompson
Computers and the Internet
Tech Industry
Online advertising
E Commerce


New Mets Manager Mixes Intellect With Fire

Abstract: ANAHEIM, Calif. — Standing a few feet from his soon-to-be office at Shea Stadium, Jerry Manuel was talking excitedly Saturday evening about a package he received in the mail. A copy of “One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation,” the latest book by the columnist and author George F. Will, had just arrived, and Manuel was eager to start reading. Manuel, a thinking man’s manager if there ever was one, may now have far less time to pursue one of his favorite pastimes. In replacing Willie Randolph as the Mets ’ manager, Manuel is being promoted from the bench coach and is being counted on to revive a team in fourth place in the National League East. The appointment will be on an interim basis; the Mets will conduct a full-scale managerial search after the season, but Manuel, who managed the Chicago White Sox from 1998 to 2003, will treat the rest of the season as if he plans to be around next year. In his first news conference as manager, Manuel came across as relaxed and thoughtful, but he showed his disciplinarian side when he paused in mid-answer to gently admonish a reporter beside a wall who was speaking on camera. He also took special care to delineate the differences between his style and Randolph’s. Manuel vowed to rest the team’s key players — Carlos Beltrán, José Reyes and David Wright — more often to keep them fresh, although he did not anticipate that beginning as early as the first inning of his first day on the job, when Reyes felt stiffness in his left hamstring after leading off the Mets’ game Tuesday against the Angels with a single. He decided to remove Reyes, who recoiled and tossed his helmet as he headed to the dugout. Manuel’s other preferences include more fluidity within the lineup, which includes a partiality for moving Beltrán, the regular cleanup hitter, or Wright, the No. 3 hitter, if he sees fit, and the hopes of establishing more definite roles among his relievers. Manuel said he viewed the team’s demise last September through a different prism than Randolph and, if he were managing during spring training, he would have harped on it more with the hopes of motivating the team to play better. Although he has a low-key personality that is similar to Randolph’s, Manuel’s intellectual interests and his ability, at times, to display a fiery temper set him apart from his friend and predecessor. One example of the difference between the men came during the nationally televised game the Mets played in Yankee Stadium on May 18. When Carlos Delgado’s slicing liner to left was incorrectly ruled foul instead of a three-run homer, Randolph argued the call but was not ejected. Manuel continued to plead the Mets’ case from the dugout, and he grew so passionate he was tossed from the game. For Randolph, being ejected always seemed as if he had lost control. Whereas Manuel, a man who has studied the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., feels he must go with the flow of the game, and if an outburst is called for, then so be it. After that May 18 game, Randolph said that taking on an umpire, as Manuel had done, was more of a bench coach’s responsibility. But within the Mets’ clubhouse, the fact that Randolph did not strenuously argue the Delgado call was viewed as a missed opportunity for him to stand up for one of his struggling players. In his three-plus seasons as Mets manager, Randolph fashioned himself as someone who communicated with his players, saying he knew them better than anyone. But in those hours when the clubhouse was open to reporters, the 54-year-old Manuel was often seen engaged in quiet conversation with the players. “Being a coach, the relationship is a lot different,” Manuel said. “But I think at the same time they have to respect that. And now that you’ve moved into the office of manager, you haven’t changed, but there’s a definite line in the sand that has to be drawn as to how they can approach you and how you can approach them.” Before games on the road, Manuel often sat in the stands near the visiting dugout reading whichever book he had brought with him. He has a wide-ranging collection: Cornel West, Reinhold Niebuhr and Gandhi are just three men whose thoughts and philosophies he says have influenced him. But his favorite, his inspiration, is King, so much so that he asked Aaron Heilman, the team’s resident technological wizard, to create a ring tone for his cellphone that played part of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In spring 2007, Manuel had a Zen-like response when the former Met Cliff Floyd criticized Randolph’s handling the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championship Series, when Floyd struck out as a pinch-hitter during a failed Mets rally. Asked about Floyd’s criticism, Manuel called it a “cloud with no rain,” an inkling he may think a bit differently than other coaches and managers. Manuel can play it loose, too. During split-squad games in camp, Manuel would manage the B team, a group he affectionately called “the gangsters,” and even played along one morning by borrowing a fedora-like hat and modeling it in the clubhouse. “That’s our in-house line,” Manuel said. “We do this all the time we say, ‘Gangsters get on the field, ladies get on the bus.’ Done that for a while.” He then nodded and waved at his wife, Renette, who was in the audience, before continuing. “We do those things. It’s about having fun. We’re going to try to perform for the fans in New York. That’s a tremendous responsibility that we do it right for the people in New York.” Manuel’s name surfaced as a managerial candidate for other teams after the 2006 season, but he was never asked for an interview. All along, though, he has said that he had a backup plan. If he was not managing a major league team by 2009, he would coach the baseball team at William Jessup University, a small college near Sacramento that will play its first season next year. But for Manuel, those plans will have to wait. “I think that hopefully they have respect for me in the clubhouse, and I have a respect for the players,” Manuel said. “With that being said, I think we have a foundation there so we can really grow and get us back on track.”

Baseball
New York Mets
Manuel Jerry
Delgado Carlos
Alou Moises
Easley Damion


Relations Warms Between Russian Orthodox Church and Vatican

Abstract: MOSCOW — Festivities in Rome this weekend for the dedication of an Orthodox church on the grounds of the Russian Embassy near the Vatican attest to a surprising but marked warming of relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican in recent months, according to church officials and analysts. If trends hold true, they add, a meeting of the pope and the patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Russia may be close. Whether even that could begin to overcome the centuries-old hatred surrounding the two churches’ conflicting authority over Christians is another question. To mark the dedication Sunday of the Church of St. Catherine the Great Martyr, Orthodox clergy will conduct a prayer service Saturday at the Church of San Clemente, and the choir of the Danilov Monastery, the seat of the Moscow Patriarchate, will sing in a Roman basilica. Pope John Paul II long dreamed of visiting Russia and mending relations with its Orthodox church, the world’s largest. But the pope’s Polish origins apparently heightened the suspicions of Russian church leaders about his intent, and he was neither invited to Russia nor able to overcome tensions about the Uniate Church, which follows the Eastern rite but is loyal to Rome, and Catholic priests prosyletizing here. After John Paul’s death, and the election in January of Patriarch Kirill as the new head of the Russian Orthodox Church, relations have warmed. In March, Pope Benedict XVI, a German, sent a message to a ceremony in Bari, Italy, where the Italian government handed back to Russia a church and pilgrimage center built in the czarist era. “How could we not recognize that this beautiful church awakens in us the nostalgia for full unity and maintains alive in us the commitment to work for union among all the disciples of Christ,” Benedict wrote. Reflecting Russia’s geopolitical dance with Europe, the Moscow Patriarchate has found common ground with Benedict, and since Patriarch Kirill was enthroned, he has appointed church officials who portray the pope as a like-minded man of the church, not politics. “This pope, in contrast to the previous one, doesn’t strive to always be politically correct,” said Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk, an Oxford-educated theologian who was until recently the Russian Orthodox Bishop of Vienna and Austria and the Russian Church’s representative to European institutions. “He believes he must speak of the teachings of the Catholic church. The task of such a church figure, especially of such rank, is to clearly state the teaching of the church, even if it doesn’t correspond to contemporary standards of political correctness.” Archbishop Hilarion was selected in March to lead the patriarchate’s Department of External Church Relations, which Patriarch Kirill headed for two decades. Both Archbishop Hilarion and the Reverend Vsevolod Chaplin, another rising church official in his early forties who heads a newly created department on church and society relations, strongly backed Benedict’s controversial comments in March that condoms are not the solution to the spread of AIDS. Their voices were among the few supporting Benedict’s stand. From Rome come indications that Patriarch Kirill’s election represents a new chance for Russian Orthodoxy. His predecessor, Patriarch Aleksy II, “had to work to refound the church, to set up structures, organize the clergy” after Soviet power crumbled, said Monsignor Bruno Forte, archbishop of Chieti-Vasto and a member of the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. “Kirill has been handed a reborn church, so he has the strength to forge a new path.” As Metropolitan of Smolensk in 2006, Patriarch Kirill wrote the foreword to the first Russian-language edition of Pope Benedict’s book “Introduction to Christianity,” written when he was still the theologian Joseph Ratzinger. He wrote: “The traditionalism of Benedict XVI offers a profound view, a wise insight into the essence of things. It is my deep conviction that this must be the approach of all Christians desiring to remain loyal to the never-aging Tradition of the Ancient Church in the face of the latest in a series of onslaughts of totalitarian relativism, which we are observing today.” Ironically, while conservative values unite the new patriarch and Benedict, Patriarch Kirill has been under attack by Russian Orthodox fundamentalists, in part for an outgoing style and presence that more readily recall John Paul II. Tensions between Moscow and some of the world’s Orthodox churches are a stumbling block to relations with the Roman Catholic Church. Moscow and Constantinople have been wrestling for centuries over jurisdictional issues, and with renewed vigor since the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the issue of primacy, the Moscow Patriarchate chafes especially when the Patriarch of Constantinople is described as the leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, and when that patriarch is compared with the pope. The Russian Church, said Archbishop Hilarion, would like to promote the role of Orthodoxy in the European Union. “Now several Orthodox states are part of the European Union,” he said, alluding to Bulgaria, Romania and Greece. All this has experts saying that a meeting of pope and patriarch is now much more likely, if hard to predict. “Patriarch Kirill is unpredictable,” said Aleksei Yudin, a member of the editorial board of the Russian Catholic Encyclopedia. “He might have some powerful move. If a goal appears, he won’t be slow.” Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome

Russian Orthodox Church
Roman Catholic Church
Kirill I
Benedict XVI
Religion and Belief


Philippines Tries to Temper Rodrigo Duterte’s Call for U.S. Withdrawal

Abstract: MANILA — Military cooperation between the Philippines and the United States appeared to be undisturbed on Tuesday, as the Southeast Asian country sought to temper comments by its president suggesting American troops should leave Mindanao, where they have been helping to fight an insurgency. Brig. Gen. Restituto Padilla, a spokesman for the Philippine armed forces, said the remarks the president, Rodrigo Duterte, delivered on Monday at a swearing-in ceremony for officials in Manila were an expression of “his concern to the U.S. servicemen in Mindanao.” “Pursuant to the same statement, he desires that our American counterparts should be eased from harm’s way,” General Padilla said. Mr. Duterte said on Monday that the American Special Forces in Mindanao should withdraw. “I do not want a rift with America,” he added, “but they have to go.” General Padilla said that the areas where Americans were at risk included western Mindanao, the Zamboanga Peninsula and the islands of Basilan and Sulu, regions where the Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf is known to operate . Abu Sayyaf is holding at least 23 hostages, including a Dutch bird-watcher seized in 2012 and a Norwegian taken last year from a beach resort he helped manage near Davao City, where Mr. Duterte was formerly mayor. Image President Rodrigo Duterte speaking in Manila on Monday. Credit Ted Aljibe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images General Padilla said the military had yet to “receive any specific directives as to how this pronouncement will be effected,” and that any changes would “affect only a token number of American servicemen who are confined mainly in Zamboanga City,” on Mindanao. Those affected, he said, provided technical assistance and training to their Filipino counterparts. The general also emphasized that the alliance remained “rock solid” and that activities scheduled for the rest of 2016 were expected to continue. Plans for next year and beyond are also unchanged, he said. Mr. Duterte’s spokesman, Ernesto Abella, said that there “remained no official directives” as of Tuesday regarding an American withdrawal, and that the president’s statement about the soldiers was not an order but “an injunction, like a warning.” Mr. Abella emphasized that the government was not preparing to cut economic or military ties with the United States, but that it was seeking to create an independent policy in the south. He also portrayed Mr. Duterte’s comments as part of an attempt to highlight an aspect of American history on Mindanao that could hinder the government’s efforts to gain the trust of rebels on the islands. In his appearance on Monday, Mr. Duterte showed photographs and cited accounts of American atrocities against Muslims during its occupation of the country more than a century ago. “The lack of acknowledgment by the Americans of their shortcomings, and our continued collaboration with them, is the true origin of the ethnic conflict in Mindanao,” Mr. Abella said. “The Muslims doubt Filipinos want genuine peace with them, while we are viewed as dependent on America,” he added. “The continued presence of the Americans in Mindanao is perceived to underscore this.” Mr. Abella said that a majority of Muslims in the southern Philippines felt that Americans were the “perpetrators of a wrong that has not been redressed.” By extension, he said, leaders in Manila were also seen as “suspect in their intentions regarding peace in Mindanao.” The latest controversy comes just a week after remarks by Mr. Duterte cast a shadow over President Obama’s visit to Laos for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations . Those remarks, including an angry rebuke to Mr. Obama for warning Mr. Duterte to observe human rights and the rule of law in his campaign against drug-related crime, led to the cancellation of a formal meeting between the two. Mr. Duterte is hugely popular at home as a result of the crackdown, which has claimed many hundreds of lives since he took office this year. At the peak of a joint campaign against Abu Sayyaf in Mindanao, the United States had 1,200 special forces in the area providing technical and logistical support to the Philippine military. That program was discontinued in 2015, but small numbers of advisers remain. The Philippine Senate voted to end the lease on two vast American bases in 1991. But Manila later ratified an agreement that provided the legal basis for the resumption of large-scale joint military exercises. American troops subsequently returned to train Philippine forces to fight Abu Sayyaf. John Kirby, a spokesman for the State Department, said on Monday that Manila had not formally explained what Mr. Duterte meant, but that Washington remained “committed to our alliance.” “We maintain concerns about the safety of our troops all around the world,” Mr. Kirby said. “It’s one of the prime considerations of American military leadership.”

US Military
Abu Sayyaf
Rodrigo Duterte
Mindanao
Philippines


Obama Says ‘Justice’ Is Needed for Iranians

Abstract: WASHINGTON — President Obama ratcheted up his language against Iran ’s leadership on Saturday, in a statement that invoked the American civil rights movement as an analogy for what was unfolding on the streets of Tehran. “Martin Luther King once said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,’ ” Mr. Obama said in a statement released after security forces in the Iranian capital clashed repeatedly with protesters. “I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian people’s belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.” Mr. Obama’s remarks came after intense debate and multiple meetings all day Saturday at the White House, administration officials said, and reflected growing concern within the administration that the violence in Iran could continue to escalate. Despite his forceful words, however, Mr. Obama is still resisting calls from conservatives and Republicans to harshly and publicly condemn the Iranian government and impose stiff sanctions on refined gas exports to Iran. In particular, the president’s use of the word “justice,” which White House officials have been debating all week, is a departure from the more measured tones he had struck earlier in the week. “The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching,” Mr. Obama said. “We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.” Mr. Obama said that the “universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.” White House officials were monitoring the events unfolding in Tehran throughout the day on Saturday, including in meetings in the president’s study next to the Oval Office. But they were hampered by the fact that the United States does not have an embassy in Tehran, or consulates in any Iranian cities, because the two countries do not have diplomatic relations. In addition to intelligence reports, the White House also is relying on information from European and other allies with more resources in Iran, along with news reports. In invoking Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement, Mr. Obama moved toward adorning the protesters on the streets of Tehran with the mantle of America’s most intense movement for human rights and justice. Even as Mr. Obama’s statement was released, on Saturday afternoon Eastern time, the leader of Iran’s opposition, Mir Hussein Moussavi, announced to supporters that he was ready to take on that role, and its risks. “I am ready for martyrdom,” he told supporters at a street gathering in southern Tehran, as he called for more civil disobedience and an annulment of the announced result that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been re-elected as president. Mr. Obama did not comment on the disputed election results. But he did appear to take on a difficult balancing act, trying to strike a note of moral clarity while still shying away from demonizing Iran’s clerical leadership. “As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away,” Mr. Obama said. “The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government.” And he delivered a warning to the Iranian authorities: “If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.”

Iran
Obama Barack
Elections
Demonstrations and Riots
United States International Relations


David Challinor, Conservationist, Dies at 87

Abstract: David Challinor, a conservationist who combined his career as a top scientific administrator at the Smithsonian Institution with an equally intense pursuit of excellence as a champion oarsman, rowing competitively into his 80s, died on March 5 at his home in Washington. He was 87. The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said. Through the 1970s and ’80s, Dr. Challinor, as assistant secretary for science and research at the Smithsonian, oversaw the budgets, staff and general direction of the National Zoo , the National Museum of Natural History, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and other scientific units of the Smithsonian. Dr. Challinor’s professional and athletic pursuits had followed an unusual course, coming to fruition in midlife and in the wake of several false starts. In the 1940s, after graduating from Harvard, where he was a varsity oarsman, he worked as a cotton broker in Houston before becoming a farmer of cotton, wheat and sorghum. He later sold his land after irrigation problems and worked for a time as a mortgage banker. In 1957, while in his late 30s, he began graduate studies in forestry at Yale, embarking on the path that would lead him to the Smithsonian. Dr. Challinor received his doctorate in biology in 1966, and was recruited by S. Dillon Ripley, then the Smithsonian’s secretary, to an administrative post, from which he eventually rose to assistant secretary. Dr. Challinor brought a broad understanding of botany, evolutionary and marine biology to his role at the Smithsonian, as well as a “wealth of political experience and optimism toward solving problems of the conservation of species worldwide, in the effort to lessen human pressures” on the natural world, said John Berry, director of the National Zoological Park in Washington. From the 1990s until recently, Dr. Challinor also wrote engagingly about ecology, global warming , endangered species and other subjects in monthly meditations that were published for the Smithsonian’s science staff and reached a readership outside its walls. In a 2001 essay, he said museums of natural history should be viewed as libraries for future generations, that might provide a “yet-undreamed-of key” of genetic material to help preserve threatened species and explain the losses of others. At the Smithsonian, and working near the Potomac River, Dr. Challinor’s interest in rowing was also revived. In his late 40s, he picked up an oar again, to become a powerful performer at the Potomac Boat Club. He competed in crews of two, four and eight rowers, and continued to row five miles each day into his 80s. For three decades, Dr. Challinor rowed in the Head of the Charles race in Cambridge, Mass., and won his age class a dozen times. He compared his experience on the water to a “mystical man thing, like a monastery.” David Challinor was born in Manhattan. He attended Harvard Law School briefly before becoming a cotton broker. While at Yale, he was deputy director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History from 1960 to 1965. Dr. Challinor retired from the Smithsonian in 1996, as a scientist emeritus. Dr. Challinor is survived by his wife of 56 years, the former Joan Ridder, a historian; a son, David Thompson of Bainbridge Island, Wash.; three daughters, Julia, of Amsterdam, Mary, of Washington and Sarah, of San Francisco; a sister, Mary Ewing of Noroton, Conn.; and six grandchildren. In 2000, at the age of 80 and while preparing for yet another race at the Head of the Charles, Dr. Challinor offered this advice: “Since you’re rowing backwards, you’ve got to have a pretty good idea of where you are by where you’ve been.” He finished: “Rather than always be turning around to see where you’re going.”

Deaths (Obituaries)
Museums
Smithsonian Institution
National Zoo
Challinor David


B.C.S. Meetings Look at Big, and Bigger, Picture

Abstract: SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The Bowl Championship Series meetings usually revolve around minutiae, like who will be voting in the Harris college football poll and how the standings formula will be tweaked. But when the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision conference commissioners gathered here this week, those issues rested on the back burner. As college athletics face an overhaul, with the possibility of conference realignment , a dozen reporters, far more than usual, flew here to listen to how the commissioners would address such a different landscape. Here is what unfolded. BIG TEN Its decision on whether to expand looms over college sports. Its commissioner, Jim Delany, disclosed little but insisted that, despite reports of an expedited timetable, the decision process would not change, meaning December at the earliest. “It’s got to be a little bit quicker than that,” Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson said. Delany said: “You’re not trying to find somebody that you want to spend a year with. You’re trying to find out who you’re going to be for the next 25 to 50 years.” SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE Perhaps the most interesting development on Wednesday was SEC Commissioner Mike Slive’s not-so-subtle reaction to Delany’s expansion exploration. Slive made it clear that the SEC, which has won four consecutive national football championships, would not sit idle on its perch atop college sports. “I won’t sit back and just ignore what is going on around me,” Slive said. “We will be thinking ahead so we are prepared to do whatever we need to do.” Translation: If the Big Ten expands to 16 universities, as many have predicted, Slive will do whatever is necessary to keep up. (Hello, Texas and Texas A&M?) “If there’s going to be a significant shift in the conference paradigm, the SEC will be strategic and thoughtful to make sure that it maintains its position as one of the nation’s pre-eminent conferences,” Slive said. BIG EAST Trying to show it is being proactive at the prospect of the Big Ten’s raiding its league, the Big East announced that Paul Tagliabue, the former National Football League commissioner, who played basketball at Georgetown, will work as an unpaid adviser for the conference. His priority will be to help the league prepare for its next round of television contracts and help it evaluate the media landscape. In a phone interview on Thursday, Tagliabue questioned the way that the Big Ten was handling its potential expansion. Tagliabue called the Big Ten’s evaluation process “very disruptive” and added that it was having a “terrible negative effect” on non-Big Ten leagues, which would depreciate their value. He added that the Big Ten’s plan to add universities in big markets like New Jersey and New York did not make sense because the product, in this case Rutgers football, was not desirable. “One of the real challenges for the networks is to provide value, but you only provide value in markets where you provide traction,” he said. “Is Minnesota and Rutgers going to get a big rating on Long Island? Give me a break. Every game isn’t Michigan and Michigan State.” Big East Commissioner John Marinatto said: “This is something we would have done regardless, but it lends itself to have more importance in light of everything else going on. I don’t know what the timetable will be; that’s up to the Big Ten’s presidents to move forward on. We’re going to be aggressive and we’re going to be strategic.” NOTRE DAME Since Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said in March that Notre Dame was evaluating its football independence while bracing for “seismic change,” speculation has swirled about the potential of the Fighting Irish’s joining the Big Ten. Swarbrick reiterated the importance of Notre Dame’s keeping its football independence. “We’re the reactor,” he said. “So I have no sense of timing. Things could happen here among any elements of the industry. I think what will happen is that when anyone moves, and everyone is focused on the Big Ten, but if there are shifts, the other shifts will happen very quickly, they’ll cascade quickly. I have no idea what the timetable for that is.” PACIFIC-10 The Pac-10 has earned a reputation as a stagnant bystander in the evolving world of college sports. In his first year, Commissioner Larry Scott has aimed to change that reputation. The league is exploring expansion, the potential of a conference title game and the start of a television network. “I think the Pac-10 is extremely well laid out for a TV network,” he said. He said the league preferred its Noah’s ark format — any expansion would come two-by-two — which would fit with the league’s DNA of natural rivals. Scott said the Pac-10 would make a decision about expansion early next year, but sounded fascinated by the opportunity. “This is a very dynamic and exciting time for college sports,” he said.

Bowl Championship Series
Football
Big Ten Conference
College Athletics
National Collegiate Athletic Assn
Southeastern Conference
Big East Conference
University of Notre Dame


Braves Again Look to Curaçao and Find Another Top Prospect

Abstract: JUPITER, Fla. — Ozhaino Albies can mark his birth in relation to the most famous baseball player his country ever produced, a man who inextricably linked their small island nation, Curaçao, to the Atlanta Braves. “I was born four and a half months after Andruw Jones made his debut,” Albies, a top prospect for the Braves, said before a recent spring training game. It seems fitting that Albies entered the world — or Willemstad, to be precise — so shortly after the inception of Jones’s major league career in Atlanta. Few teams can match the success that the Braves have had in Curaçao. It began in 1996 with Jones, who went on to play 12 years in Atlanta. The Braves subsequently added Randall Simon, Jair Jurrjens and the gifted shortstop Andrelton Simmons. Albies, who turned 19 on Jan. 7, could become the next in that chain. Compact, athletic and as smooth as any of the other terrific shortstops who learned to play on Curaçao’s gravelly youth fields, Albies, who goes by Ozzie, has impressed in his first major league training camp. “He’s really, really good,” said Jeff Francoeur, the veteran Braves outfielder. “He could play in the big leagues right now. I’m not saying he would be a star, but he would hold his own. He is fun to watch, and it seems like he gets it. I think he can be really special.” Albies is listed at 5 feet 9 inches, but to some scouts he looks closer to the height of Jose Altuve, the Houston Astros’ 5-6 second baseman, whose 425 hits the last two years have demonstrated that height is not a prerequisite for baseball success. Albies can field his position well, and with eight hits in his first 24 at-bats in spring training, he has shown proficiency against some major league pitching, and gained confidence. “I feel I am ready for this,” he said. “I know I have a lot to work on and a lot to learn. But I feel I am ready to do whatever is necessary to get there.” Albies batted .328 with an .812 on-base plus slugging percentage in 155 minor league games over two seasons, mostly in Class A. He hit only one home run but had 28 doubles and 11 triples and has landed on many top-prospect lists. “He’s faced every challenge we’ve given him, and we’re very excited to have him,” Braves General Manager John Coppolella said. “He’s a winning player and an exciting player.” Coppolella credited the Curaçaoan scout Dargello Lodowica for signing Albies, who learned to play baseball on the same field as Simmons (now with the Los Angeles Angels), Jurickson Profar of the Texas Rangers and the Yankees’ Didi Gregorius. Philip Elhage, a longtime scout and one of the deans of Curaçao baseball, has been watching Albies since he was a boy. “He was kind of overlooked because of his size, but he has a big heart,” Elhage said. “He’s a very polite kid, but he is a fighter. I think he can be the next guy.” Players from Curaçao often intrigue major league teams. They come from a tradition of good coaching and are usually well educated in the Dutch system. Many people from Curaçao are fluent in Dutch, English, Spanish and Papiamento. “Players from Curaçao speak four different languages and grow up playing baseball,” Coppolella said. “They have the intellect as well as the instincts. Not to say the guys from other countries don’t have that. But just speaking about Curaçao, we have been very happy with the players we have brought to the Braves.” Albies is not only a good baseball player; he says he plays a good deal of tennis, too. His girlfriend, Janet Evans, is a high-level tennis player from Curaçao, and they often play together. (Albies says he uses a one-handed backhand; otherwise he would swing his racket like a bat and send the ball into the Caribbean.) The couple envision a day when Evans can come to the United States to train near Albies. The hope is for that to be in Atlanta in the not-too-distant future. For now, the Braves have Erick Aybar, whom they acquired from the Angels in the deal that included Simmons. He is expected to be the regular shortstop for the next year or two. But the future is quite intriguing, beyond Albies. In December, the Braves acquired Dansby Swanson from the Arizona Diamondbacks, who had picked him with the first overall pick in the 2015 amateur draft. Swanson is an exceptional shortstop, too. Perhaps one of them will eventually move to second base, and the Braves can envision a foundational double-play combo of Albies and Swanson for years to come. “It’s a good problem to have,” Coppolella said. “We are excited about the options we have in the future, and excited about the options we have right now.” Before their recent spring game against the Miami Marlins, Albies and Swanson worked out together at shortstop, and when Aybar went onto the field, they moved in tandem to second base to gather more ground balls. “I just want to help the Braves any way I can,” Albies said. “I know about the history with the Braves in Curaçao going back to Andruw Jones, of course. I was a big fan, and then I was a fan of Andrelton, too. It would be great to follow their footsteps.”


Lindu Airport Deemed Unsafe Before Jet Crash

Abstract: BEIJING — China ’s largest passenger airline deemed nighttime landings at a new airport in northeastern China unsafe a year before a Henan Airlines jet crashed there on Tuesday night , killing 42 passengers and injuring 54 others. China Southern Airlines, the country’s largest passenger carrier, concluded that the Lindu airport, outside Yichun, a city of one million people in Heilongjiang Province, was “in principle not suitable for night flights,” according to a safety notice posted on a Chinese news organization’s Web site. Daytime landings in rainy conditions were also ruled out for the airline, the notice said. The small airport, nestled in a thickly forested valley, opened last year, according to Chinese news media. The crash Tuesday at the Lindu airport was China’s first major passenger airline disaster since a China Eastern Airlines plane crashed into a lake in northern China in 2004, killing 55 people. China has recently made a concerted effort to tighten safety rules and improve training. It has also been rapidly opening new airports to help spur economic development and satisfy surging demand. The number of airline passengers in China more than tripled between 2000 and 2009, government statistics show. On Wednesday, investigators continued to search for clues that would explain why the plane, a Brazilian-made Embraer E-190, crashed into a grassy area and burst into flames at 9:36 p.m. Tuesday while trying to land on a fog-shrouded runway at the Lindu airport. The jet had taken off about 40 minutes earlier from the provincial capital of Harbin. A team of Chinese officials, led by Deputy Prime Minister Zhang Dejiang, headed for Yichun for the inquiry. Technicians from Embraer also flew to China to investigate. Henan Airlines grounded flights for three days. The state-run Xinhua news agency reported that Chinese carriers had previously complained of problems with E-190 aircraft, including cracks in the turbine plates and flight control system errors. China’s Civil Aviation Administration organized a workshop in June to discuss the concerns, Xinhua said. Embraer has 650 E-170 and E-190 model jets operating in 39 countries according to the company, and until the crash of Henan Airlines on Tuesday, there have been no fatal crashes of the 190. JetBlue, USAirways, and Air Canada operate E-190s. Embraer officials confirmed that the company was scheduled to meet with Henan next week.A local official told Xinhua that crew members of the Henan Airlines flight reported that they could see lights on the ground and requested a normal landing. Survivors said the plane jolted so violently while trying to land that luggage flew off the overhead racks. One middle-aged man, interviewed in a hospital bed by the state-controlled CCTV television network, said that after the jet hit the ground, smoke billowed from the rear of the plane and he feared suffocation. “It was very strong,” he said. “It looked like we had only two or three minutes left. I knew something bad was going to happen.” Hua Jingwei, head of the Communist Party’s propaganda department in Yichun, told Xinhua that the plane broke in two as it approached the runway, throwing some passengers out of the cabin. That account was not immediately confirmed by survivors. Henan Airlines primarily operates regional flights. Passengers on the Tuesday flight included five children and a team of officials from Beijing, among them the vice minister for human resources, Sun Baoshu. He was described as seriously injured.

China
Airlines and Airplanes
China Southern Airlines
Accidents and Safety


Fannie Mae Ignored Foreclosure Misdeeds, Report Says

Abstract: Fannie Mae , the mortgage finance giant, learned as early as 2003 of extensive foreclosure abuses among the law firms it had hired to remove troubled borrowers from their homes. But the company did little to correct the firms’ practices, according to a report issued Tuesday. Only after news reports in mid-2010 began to describe the dubious practices, like the routine filing of false pleadings in bankruptcy courts, did Fannie Mae’s overseer start to scrutinize the conduct. The report was critical of that overseer, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and was prepared by the agency’s inspector general. In one notable lapse, even after the agency reported problems to Fannie Mae in late 2010 about some of the approved law firms, it did not request a response from the company, the report said. “American homeowners have been struggling with the effects of the housing finance crisis for several years, and they shouldn’t have to worry whether they will be victims of foreclosure abuse,” said Steve Linick, inspector general of the finance agency. “Increased oversight by F.H.F.A. could help to prevent these abuses.” The report is the second in two weeks in which the inspector general has outlined lapses at both the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the companies it oversees — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac . The agency has acted as conservator for the companies since they were taken over by the government in 2008. Its duty is to ensure that their operations do not pose additional risk to the taxpayers who now own them. The companies have tapped the taxpayers to cover mortgage losses totaling about $160 billion. Elijah E. Cummings, the Maryland Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and who requested the inspector general’s report, said in a statement, “As a member of Congress and an attorney, I find the systemic failures by F.H.F.A. and Fannie Mae to adequately oversee these foreclosure law firms to be a breach of the public trust and an assault on the integrity of our justice system.” The new report from the inspector general tracks Fannie Mae’s dealings with the law firms handling its foreclosures from 1997, when the company created its so-called retained attorney network. At the time, Fannie Mae was a highly profitable and powerful institution, and it devised the legal network to ensure that borrower defaults would be resolved with efficiency and speed. The law firms in the network agreed to a flat-rate fee structure and pricing model based on the volume of foreclosures they completed. The companies that serviced the loans for Fannie Mae, were supposed to monitor the law firms’ performance and practices, the report noted After receiving information from a shareholder in 2003 about foreclosure abuses by its law firms, Fannie Mae assigned its outside counsel to investigate, according to the report. That law firm concluded in a 2006 analysis that “foreclosure attorneys in Florida are routinely filing false pleadings and affidavits,” and that the practice could be occurring elsewhere. “It is axiomatic that the practice is improper and should be stopped,” the law firm said. The inspector general’s report said that it could not be determined whether Fannie Mae had alerted its regulator, then the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight , to the legal improprieties identified by its internal investigation. Amy Bonitatibus, a Fannie Mae spokeswoman, declined to comment on the inspector general’s report, but said that the 2006 legal analysis identified a specific issue with the practice of filing lost-note affidavits, which the company immediately addressed. The inspector general said that both Fannie Mae and its regulator appear to have ignored other signs of problems in their foreclosure operations. For example, the Federal Housing Finance Agency did not respond to borrower complaints about improper actions taken by law firms in foreclosures received as early as August 2009, even though foreclosure abuse poses operational and financial risks to Fannie Mae. The report cited a media report from early 2008 detailing foreclosure abuses by law firms doing work for Fannie Mae. Nevertheless, a few months later and just before its takeover by the government, Fannie Mae began requiring the banks that serviced its loans to use only those law firms that were in its network. By then, 140 law firms in 31 jurisdictions were in the group. Among the largest firms in the network was the David J. Stern firm in Plantation, Fla., which was handling more than 75,000 foreclosure actions a year before Fannie Mae terminated it because of vast problems with its legal work. Finally last fall, after an outcry over apparently forged foreclosure documents and other improprieties, the Federal Housing Finance Agency began investigating the company’s process. In a report issued early this year, it determined that Fannie Mae’s management of its network of lawyers did not meet safety and soundness standards. Among the reasons: the company’s controls to prevent or detect foreclosure abuses were inadequate, as was the company’s monitoring of the law firms. “If a law firm self-reported no issues as it processed cases,” the inspector general said, “then Fannie Mae presumed the firm was doing a good job.” The agency is still deciding how to handle the lawyer network, the inspector general said. Mr. Cummings has asked the federal housing agency to consider terminating the program. Officials at the housing agency agreed, however, with the recommendations in the inspector general’s report. Corinne Russell, a spokeswoman for F.H.F.A. said the agency was concluding its supervisory work in this area and would direct Fannie Mae to take necessary action when the work was completed. In a response, the agency said that by Sept. 29, 2012, it would review its existing supervisory practices and act to resolve “deficiencies in the management of risks associated with default-related legal services vendors.”

Federal National Mortgage Assn Fannie Mae

Subprime Mortgage Crisis,2008 Financial Crisis


Concern for Business Leaders as Cameron’s Win Edges Britain Closer to E.U. Exit

Abstract: David Cameron’s re-election as Britain’s prime minister increases the risk that the country will quit the European Union in the next few years. Although this is still not a probability, the possibility will concern business, as an exit would degrade Britain’s access to by far its largest market. Mr. Cameron has promised to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the European Union and then hold a referendum on its membership by the end of 2017. The prime minister has done well enough not to need to renew his coalition with the pro-European Liberal Democrats, who have been crushed. On the other hand, Mr. Cameron may not have done well enough to ignore euroskeptics in his own party. They will try to push him to make impossible demands in the planned negotiation with the European Union knowing that, if he fails to get what he asks for, it will be harder to argue that Britain should stay in the bloc. What’s more, the U.K. Independence Party, which wants to take Britain out of the 28-nation European Union, secured roughly one-eighth of the popular vote — although they will have only one lawmaker because of the way the “first past the post” electoral system works. One early skirmish will be over what question the British people are asked in the planned referendum. Euroskeptics may press for something like, “Do you want to leave the European Union?” with the result that “yes” meant “out.” Being the “yes” campaign could give the euroskeptics an edge in the coming battle. Another early skirmish will be over the aspects of Britain’s relationship with the European Union that Mr. Cameron will seek to renegotiate. So far, he has been fairly vague. The Conservative manifesto makes four pledges: to control migration from the European Union by overhauling welfare benefits; to reclaim unspecified powers from Brussels; to change the system so national parliaments can work together to block European Union legislation; and to end Britain’s commitment to “ever closer union” in Europe. Whether these are feasible objectives will depend on the detail of what Mr. Cameron demands. One problem is that there will probably not be a change in the European Union treaties before the referendum — unless, perhaps, Greece quits the eurozone, and that move prompts an emergency repair job to the bloc’s economic arrangements. But if there is no new treaty, Mr. Cameron will only be able to get diluted versions of what he has promised. Maybe he can get a commitment from other European Union leaders to alter the phrase on “ever closer union” when and if there is a treaty change. Perhaps he can persuade the European Commission to abandon any legislation that half of the national parliaments propose. The knottiest issue may be overhauling social benefits, because immigration is a hot topic with the electorate. Among other things, Mr. Cameron wants to stop European Union migrants gaining access to so-called in-work benefits — money those in low-paid jobs get to replenish their earnings — until they have lived in the country for four years. While many other leaders are sympathetic, that particular plan may fall foul of treaty commitments not to discriminate against European Union citizens from other countries. The euroskeptics in Mr. Cameron’s party will presumably try to box him in on all these issues. It will important that he maintains wiggle room. A further question will concern when the referendum occurs. Mr. Cameron has promised that it will be by the end of 2017 but said he would like it to be earlier if possible. If there was a prospect of a new treaty, there would be a good reason for waiting until 2017. But, in the absence of that, Mr. Cameron should go for an earlier vote. This is partly because of the European Union economic cycle. The eurozone will grow this year as a result of the European Central Bank’s huge new money printing operation. But the effects of this will wear off and, with oil prices rising again, there’s no certainty that the eurozone will perform well from mid-2016 onward. Mr. Cameron will find it harder to persuade the British people to stay in the European Union if it looks like Britain is shackled to a corpse. The European Union political cycle is another reason to prefer an earlier referendum. In 2017, there is a general election in Germany and a presidential election in France. Neither country will find it easy to agree to concessions to Britain very close to its own elections. What’s more, Angela Merkel may not run again as Germany’s chancellor. If she goes early, that could further complicate Mr. Cameron’s plans for renegotiating Britain’s relationship with the European Union, as Ms. Merkel has been his most important ally. It is not guaranteed that Mr. Cameron will be pulled hither and thither by the euroskeptic wing. After all, he will feel pumped up by an election victory, which is, in many ways, a vindication of his leadership. The prime minister may, therefore, have the courage to face down any rebels in his party. In this regard, the fact that Mr. Cameron has promised not to run for a third term as prime minister in 2020 could strengthen his hand. Although he will still need to hang on in power until then, he will presumably now focus on his long-term legacy — and he almost certainly does not want to go down in history as the man who took Britain out of the European Union.

Election
Referendum
Conservative Party
EU
Eurozone
David Cameron
Europe
Great Britain


Adrian Paunescu, Romanian Poet, Dies at 67

Abstract: BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Adrian Paunescu, Romania’s most famous poet, who remained popular among his countrymen despite his praise for the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu , died here on Friday. He was 67. The cause was multiple organ failure, the Floreasca Emergency Hospital said. His last poem was written last Sunday from his hospital bed. Mr. Paunescu, a prolific writer who was both physically huge and a larger-than-life character, appeared on television several times a week. During the Communist era, he wrote flattering poems about Ceausescu that critics said contributed to the dictator’s personality cult. Still, Mr. Paunescu’s verse, often sentimental and melancholy, struck a chord with many Romanians. In a message of condolence, President Traian Basescu of Romania thanked Mr. Paunescu for helping a generation of young artists but did not mention the poet’s involvement in politics. Mr. Paunescu was born in the Soviet Union, in what is now Moldova, and moved to Romania as a child. He is survived by his wife and three children.

Paunescu Adrian
Poetry and Poets
Deaths (Obituaries)
Ceausescu Nicolae


Donald Young Beats No. 7 Seed

Abstract: Donald Young reached his first ATP semifinal by beating No. 7-seeded Marcos Baghdatis , 6-3, 7-6 (4), at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington. Young, an American who turned 22 two weeks ago, entered the hardcourt tuneup for the United States Open ranked 128th and with a 19-53 record since turning pro as a teenager in 2004. The match against Baghdatis, a 2006 Australian Open finalist, was Young’s second quarterfinal on the top men’s tennis circuit. He lost in that round at Memphis in 2008. In the semifinal, Young will face Radek Stepanek, who defeated Fernando Verdasco, 6-4, 6-4.

Tennis
Baghdatis Marcos
Young Donald (1989- )