Former Real Estate Investing Executive Is Charged With Fraud

Abstract: The former chief financial officer of the real estate investing giant American Realty Capital Properties was arrested on Thursday morning at his home in Pennsylvania on charges that he fraudulently inflated financial performance numbers for the company in 2014. The executive, Brian Block, was expected to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon to face charges that he knowingly misled investors through material misrepresentations about American Realty Capital’s financial results, prosecutors said. “When investors are lied to about material information, as is alleged to have happened here, the perpetrators need to be investigated and prosecuted,” said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan. Mr. Block is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, two counts of making false filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and two counts of submitting false certifications with required filings. American Realty’s former chief accounting officer, Lisa McAlister, pleaded guilty in the case in June to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, one count of making false filings with the S.E.C. and one count of making false statements. In a separate case filed Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud charges against the two former executives. A lawyer for Ms. McAlister was not immediately available. Reid H. Weingarten, a lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson who represents Mr. Block, said the charges “are entirely unwarranted. We are very disappointed that the government, after a two-year investigation, has decided to charge Brian. He is completely innocent and will be exonerated in court.” American Realty Capital, which changed its name to Vereit last year, was one of the largest creators of real estate investment trusts. It was founded and built by Nicholas S. Schorsch and William M. Kahane. But the dynasty began to fall apart in 2014 after the accounting irregularities surfaced and forced Mr. Schorsch and the other executives to resign. A spokesman for Vereit said the company had no comment. The company has said in regulatory filings that it has cooperated with the S.E.C. and investigators. Last year, Massachusetts’ securities regulators accused a brokerage firm affiliated with American Realty Capital of faking proxy votes. After the charges were made public, American Realty Capital said it would stop creating new investment products and close existing ones to new investors.

Brian Block
American Realty Capital Properties
Real Estate
Housing
Fraud


Woman Guilty in Suffocation Murder of 91-Year-Old

Abstract: A 25-year-old woman was convicted of murder on Wednesday in the plastic-bag suffocation death of a 91-year-old in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx. Jurors found the woman, Sparkle Daniel, guilty of second-degree murder, said a spokesman for the Bronx District Attorney’s office, Steven Reed. Ms. Daniel faces a maximum sentence of life in prison when she is sentenced on Oct. 25. Prosecutors say Ms. Daniel and another woman, who is awaiting trial, bound Nellie Hocutt to a chair with tape and a telephone cord, poured wine down her throat and stuffed her mouth with a piece of cloth before suffocating her with a plastic bag. The suspects were arrested in 2007, after a belated tip. At the time, the police said the women had decided to rob Ms. Hocutt.

Bronx (NYC)
Murders and Attempted Murders
Sentences (Criminal)
Crime and Criminals
Daniel Sparkle
Hocutt Nellie


Suicide Attack Against Shiites Kills at Least 22 in Southern Pakistan

Abstract: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide bomber attacked a procession of Shiite Muslims in southern Pakistan on Friday, killing at least 22 people and wounding at least 20 others, officials said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but hard-line Sunni extremists are believed to be behind the attack, the officials said. Shiites in Pakistan have been repeatedly attacked by militants with close links to the Taliban . Video At least 22 people were killed when a suicide bombing hit a celebration for the Shiite Muslim holiday Ashura in Sindh Province, Pakistan. Credit Credit Amir Hussain/Associated Press The attack took place in Jacobabad, a city in the southern province of Sindh, as Shiite Muslims were taking part in a Muharram procession, to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who was killed in the battle of Karbala in 680. Bisharat Haider, a local Shiite leader, said that 22 people, including five children, were killed in the suicide attack. The wounded were taken to a hospital in the city but because of a shortage of medicine, many had to be moved to a hospital in nearby Larkana. Soon after the attack, dozens of angry protesters took to the streets in Jacobabad, throwing stones at police officers and setting several vehicles on fire. Additional security measures have been put into effect across Pakistan amid fears of sectarian attacks. Thousands of police officers and paramilitary troops have been mobilized to provide security during Shiite processions.


Alcoa Accused of Fraud by Firm in Bahrain

Abstract: A smelting firm in Bahrain is seeking more than $1 billion in a lawsuit against the aluminum manufacturer Alcoa , accusing it of a 15-year conspiracy involving overcharging, fraud and bribery. Aluminum Bahrain, known as Alba, filed suit Wednesday, accusing Alcoa of steering payments for alumina, the crucial material for making aluminum, to companies abroad to pay kickbacks to a Bahraini government official. The company, which is 77 percent owned by the government of Bahrain, also accused Alcoa of overcharging for alumina. According to the suit filed in Federal District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the bribes were sent through a series of shell companies controlled by Alcoa and led to hundreds of millions of dollars in overpayments. Alcoa, based in Pittsburgh, supplied the alumina from its Australian unit to a Singapore-based company controlled by Victor Dahdaleh, a Canadian citizen who lives in Britain and who, according to the lawsuit, facilitated the bribes that caused Alba to overpay for the material, starting in 1993. Alba said in the lawsuit that it was seeking damages in excess of $1 billion, including punitive damages. The suit was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. “The suit was filed very late last night, so we have not had an opportunity to review the allegations,” an Alcoa spokesman, Kevin Lowery, said Thursday. “That said, we are not aware of any wrongdoing by any of our employees or by the company.” Later, Mr. Lowery said that Alba, a 30-year customer of Alcoa, contacted the company two weeks ago and asked Alcoa to investigate and settle the case. Alcoa began looking into the accusations, but believed two weeks was not long enough for a full investigation, Mr. Lowery said. “We offered to do a full investigation of our practices, but they chose, for their own reasons, to instead immediately file a lawsuit. “We plan to vigorously defend ourselves in this matter,” he said.

Alcoa Incorporated
Frauds and Swindling
Bahrain
Suits and Litigation


Fish Farms Also Harbor Deadly Lice

Abstract: Sea lice that thrive in salmon farms near the Pacific Coast can kill up to 95 percent of the juvenile salmon that pass near them, researchers in Canada say. The researchers, from the University of Alberta and elsewhere, studied the number of juvenile fish that become infested with the parasitic lice as they swim past commercial fish pens on their way from inland rivers to the ocean. In laboratory work, they tested the parasites’ effects on fish mortality. Then they used mathematical models to estimate the overall impact of fish farming on wild stocks. Depending on when the young salmon pass by the fish pens, up to 95 percent receive lethal parasite exposure, they said. They report their findings today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers, led by Martin Krkosek of the Center for Mathematical Biology at the University of Alberta, had already reported that the parasites appeared in large numbers among caged fish. And they said it had long been known that aquaculture could change the population of wild fish stocks by exposing young fish to parasites. In their new paper, they said coastal fish pens and the parasites that grow there “may undermine a functional role of migration in protecting juvenile fish from parasites associated with adult fish.” In the case of salmon, they said, juvenile fish that hatch inland and make their way downriver to the sea do not ordinarily encounter adult fish and their parasites until they are several months old. Adult fish can tolerate the presence of parasites, but because juvenile fish are only a few inches long, “it takes only one or two sea lice to kill a juvenile pink or chum salmon,” Mr. Krkosek said in a statement. In a commentary on the work, also published in the journal, Ray Hilborn, a fisheries expert at the University of Washington, points out that commercial fish farming is growing quickly as wild stocks succumb to overfishing. As arguments over its effects continue, he said, “political responses have been highly variable, ranging from outright banning to wholesale support.” While this work provides new ammunition to opponents of fish farms, he said, researchers should get more data on lice infestations in juvenile fish that do not encounter commercial pens on their way to the ocean. Ransom A. Myers, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University, said the work “raises the question of whether we can have native salmon and large-scale aquaculture, as it is currently practiced, in the same place.”

Fishing Commercial
Parasites
Canada
University of Alberta


Deadly Factory Fire Bares Racial Tensions in Italy

Abstract: PRATO, Italy — Dozens of bouquets block the entrance to the Teresa Moda outlet and factory where seven Chinese workers died last Sunday in a fire that swept through the establishment where they worked and lived. Enlarged photos of the seven victims, two women and five men, have been affixed to the door under a handwritten sign that reads: “Sorrow Has No Color.” Behind police barricades, in soggy piles, are charred bolts of cloth, mountains of plastic hangers and garbage bags full of newly cut garment pieces. The building, which houses Teresa Moda, a wholesale distributor which also prepared clothing for assembly lines, did not have emergency exits, officials said. Windows were blocked by bars. Officials believe that a camp stove used for cooking probably caused the fire, in which two others were seriously hurt. It took calamity to fan national outrage at the low-cost business model that took root here 20 years ago and that has transformed the economy of this Tuscan town 12 miles north of Florence. But for officials who have tried to get a grip on the problem, “a tragedy is always just around the corner,” said Stefano Bellandi, the local secretary for the CISL, one of Italy’s main unions. The fire at Teresa Moda, and the uproar that followed, exposed the complicated, and at times tense, cohabitation in Prato of Italian residents and Chinese immigrants, who now own nearly 45 percent of the city’s manufacturing businesses. Law enforcement officials have struggled for years to rein in illegal and unsafe practices here. They say several factors hinder their efforts, including inadequate staffing to carry out checks on nearly 8,200 factories in the textile and garment manufacturing sectors, and the reluctance of Chinese workers to cooperate with Italian officials. Last week Prato’s prosecutor, Piero Tony, placed four Chinese citizens under investigation for the fire on charges of multiple manslaughter, failure to uphold workplace safety measures and exploitation of illegal workers. On Thursday, prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 11 people, Chinese and Italian, including a City Hall employee, on charges of procuring illegal residence permits for Chinese immigrants who paid $820 to $2,050 for the papers. Several defendants remained at large. Italian news media reported Friday that an Italian man — a partner in the company that owned the building — was also under investigation. There are nearly 16,000 legal Chinese residents in Prato, a city of 191,000. Estimates for the number of Chinese people living here illegally fluctuate from 15,000 to 25,000, and the exact figure is “unknowable,” officials say. Law enforcement and health officials have carried out 1,571 checks on businesses in Prato over the last two years, Labor Minister Enrico Giovannini told the Italian Parliament on Tuesday. More than half of those businesses belonged to Chinese citizens. The checks were part of Italy’s effort to “confront conditions of unsustainable illegality and exploitation,” he said. More than 1,700 fines have been issued to companies for not paying social security contributions, while about 400 people living in the country illegally have been identified, Mr. Giovannini said. More than 350 companies were closed and production was halted for various violations. In many cases, said Aldo Milone, the municipal council member responsible for the city’s security, “the situation inside the businesses we checked had the same characteristics as in Teresa Moda.” After the fire, several wholesale stores adjacent to the burned factory were shut down after firefighters found dormitories inside. But the problems always seem to stay one step ahead of discovery. Officials say many businesses here open and close before health or fire inspectors, and even the tax police, can check them. Often they reopen with new tax code numbers. And while in Prato there is sympathy for the victims and outrage at the Dickensian conditions under which they lived and worked, the fire in the outlet-turned-factory also exemplified what some Italians say angers them most. Chinese businesses, they say, have flourished while Italian companies have failed because the Chinese ones depend on poorly paid labor and have ignored workplace safety standards in the name of cutting costs. “They operate at the edge of legality in conditions that are more or less risky,” Mr. Bellandi, the union leader, said. Chinese businessmen affiliated with Italian industrial organizations declined to comment. Last week the Chinese consul general in Florence, Wang Xinxia, met with representatives of Chinese associations in Prato and urged them “to play an even more active role in the promotion of legality and security,” to “eliminate potential risks and put an end to fires and other tragedies,” the consulate wrote in a statement. Labor leaders say they have tried, in vain, to convince factory workers that they must fight for better conditions. “If you want to build consensus, you have to offer them opportunities, residence permits, new jobs, show them it’s better to be legal,” said Manuele Marigolli, regional secretary of the CGIL, another large labor union. “Instead, when factories are raided, the workers are brought to the police station, fingerprinted and given a paper that tells them they have to leave Italy.” The moribund Italian economy, in its third year of recession, makes things only worse between the Chinese immigrants and their Italian hosts. Claudio Bettazzi, president of the local chapter of a national group that represents artisans and small business, notes a growing “climate of hate.” There are no official estimates for how much revenue Prato’s Chinatown brings in because so much of the business is underground. Mr. Milone, the council member in charge of security, estimates that the losses to the state, “just in terms of tax evasion,” are more than $1.4 billion a year in Prato. Others counter, however, that the local economy would sink even further were it not for the Chinese. Many local property owners depend on rental income from the factories and warehouses built for Italian companies and now used by Chinese-owned firms. “It’s wrong to say that all Chinese businesses are bad,” said Mr. Bettazzi, whose association has persuaded a few dozen Chinese businesses to join. “There are also many opportunities. It is a community that has been able to withstand the crisis.” And, in fact, Italian companies use Chinese-run factories in Prato to reduce their costs. “We can’t pretend that only the foreigners are involved,” said Marco Paggi, a lawyer in Padua who works for an association that defends the rights of immigrants. “We can’t resolve everything by criminalizing the Chinese, because we end up criminalizing the victims, too.” Prato’s mayor, Roberto Cenni, called on business owners and homeowners to hang black banners from their windows as part of a day of mourning on Wednesday, although none were in evidence in several streets in the city center. A candlelight vigil that evening, however, drew several hundred people, both Chinese and Italian. Controls and crackdowns were contentiously stepped up in Prato in 2009 after the city’s center-right government was elected. Mr. Milone says he wishes only that he had the staff to redouble his security efforts. “Maybe we could have avoided Sunday’s tragedy,” he said.

Prato Italy
Fires
Fatalities,casualties
Accidents and Safety
Race and Ethnicity
Manufacturing
Italy
Immigration


Spain and Italy Benefit From Pledges of Support for the Euro

Abstract: LONDON — Borrowing costs for Spain and Italy eased once again on Monday as officials in the region continued voicing their commitment to supporting the euro currency union. The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, and the United States Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner , issued a joint statement expressing confidence in euro zone members’ efforts to revamp their economies after meeting on the North Sea island of Sylt. And Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister and the head of the Eurogroup of 17 euro zone finance ministers, added his support in comments published Monday in Le Figaro in France and Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany. “The euro zone is at a point where it must prove, with all its means, its determination to guarantee stability,” Mr. Juncker said, adding that “no one should doubt the collective will of the 17 countries.” Mr. Geithner met Monday evening in Frankfurt with the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, who incited a market rally last Thursday by saying the central bank would do “whatever it takes” to support the euro. In fact, given the three-session rally in European stocks since then, the market could be set up for a significant drop if there was no sign of a big move after the central bank’s governing council meeting on Thursday. If anything, the European tour by Mr. Geithner is a visible reminder that the euro crisis, which began in early 2010, is having global repercussions. Mr. Draghi is trying to win support for a move by the central bank to help Italy and Spain finance government debt at lower rates than the bond markets had been allowing lately. Since he stated his intention, the Italian treasury was able to auction 4.73 billion euros, or $5.79 billion, worth of five- and 10-year bonds at reduced costs on Monday. The yield, or interest rate, paid on 10-year debt was 5.96 percent, down from 6.19 percent on June 28, while five-year bonds were priced to yield 5.29 percent, compared with 5.84 percent last month. In market trading, Spain’s 10-year bond yield fell Monday, to 6.53 percent, nearly a full percentage point lower than where it traded last week before Mr. Draghi’s pledge of support. But pledges and investor enthusiasm cannot mask fundamental problems. The difficulties confronting Spain, which is imposing strict measures to curb its deficit while dealing with a banking crisis, were underlined Monday when new data showed that it had slid deeper into recession in the second quarter. The Spanish economy shrank 0.4 percent from the previous quarter, after contracting 0.3 percent in the first. The economy was 1 percent smaller than it had been a year earlier, according to the data. And in Greece, which is still trying to secure its next installment of bailout money from international lenders, a meeting of leaders of the coalition government Monday evening ended without a final decision on the 11.5 billion euros in budget savings for 2013 and 2014. The cuts have been demanded by the creditors in exchange for further rescue aid for Greece. The two junior partners in the tripartite coalition are reluctant to impose further cuts to pensions and social benefits on austerity-weary Greeks. The office of the Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, released no comment immediately. Envoys representing the troika of Greece’s international lenders — the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund — announced Sunday that they were extending their mission to Athens indefinitely to help government leaders complete a “credible package” of savings. Over the last two years, the troika has given Greece two loan deals worth 240 billion euros but has expressed frustration at the Greek authorities’ slow adoption of overhauls they had promised in return for the aid.

Economic Conditions and Trends
European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010- )
Italy
Spain
Geithner Timothy F
Schauble Wolfgang


Ohio State President Mocked Notre Dame

Abstract: The president of Ohio State said Notre Dame was never invited to join the Big Ten Conference because Notre Dame’s priests were not good partners, and he joked that “those damn Catholics” could not be trusted, according to a recording of a meeting he attended late last year. Ohio State said the president, Gordon Gee, was undergoing a “remediation plan” because of the remarks. “The comments I made were just plain wrong, and in no way do they reflect what the university stands for,” Gee said in a statement.

College Sports
Ohio State
University of Notre Dame
Big Ten Conference
College football
College


Obama Addresses Parliament, Saying Alliance Remains Vital

Abstract: LONDON — Britain and the United States remain “indispensable” partners, President Obama declared Wednesday in an address to the British Parliament , even as he and Prime Minister David Cameron revealed subtle differences over issues like the military campaign in Libya and the Middle East peace process. “The time for our leadership is now,” Mr. Obama proclaimed, asserting the relevance of the British-American alliance in a world of rising powers and new threats. He rejected the argument that emerging titans like China , India and Brazil “represent the future, and the time for our leadership has passed.” The United States and Britain, he said, “remain the greatest catalysts for global action.” The president’s speech , to a rare joint session of Parliament under the vaulted timbers of ancient Westminster Hall, was the capstone of a two-day state visit to Britain in which Mr. Obama was greeted with great pomp and personal warmth. Yet earlier, after a backyard barbecue at 10 Downing Street, Mr. Obama and Mr. Cameron demonstrated that even those in a “special relationship” fail to agree on everything. Speaking at a news conference, Mr. Cameron refused to rule out British support for the Palestinians as they push for United Nations recognition of an independent state. He suggested that the threat of European support could force the Israelis and Palestinians back to peace talks. Mr. Obama, however, reiterated his opposition to the campaign, saying, “What the United Nations is not going to be able to do is deliver a Palestinian state.” The president struck a cautious note about the American military role in Libya, which contrasted with Mr. Cameron’s pledge to intensify the pressure on Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi . While Mr. Obama said he was committed to the operation, even if it took a long time, and voiced confidence that Colonel Qaddafi would be forced out, he rejected calls for the United States to deploy more aircraft. “I think there may be a false perception that there are a whole bunch of secret, supereffective air assets that are in a warehouse somewhere that could just be pulled out and that would somehow immediately solve the situation in Libya,” Mr. Obama said, after raising the issue himself. “That’s not the case.” Mr. Cameron, while seeking to project unity on Libya, said each country had to ask itself, “What is it that we can all do to make sure the pressure is really brought to bear” on Colonel Qaddafi. Britain, he said, would look at all options, though he did not confirm reports that it planned to escalate the air campaign by following France ’s lead in sending Apache attack helicopters to Libya. Calling each other Barack and David, Mr. Obama and Mr. Cameron strived for the easy familiarity of previous leaders like George W. Bush and Tony Blair . Mr. Cameron praised Mr. Obama for his proposal to use Israel ’s pre-1967 borders, with land swaps, as a starting point to break a deadlock between Israelis and Palestinians. But both drew a clear distinction between the “special relationship” that existed during the Bush-Blair years, and the relationship today. “We are doing things in a different way,” Mr. Cameron said. “We have ruled out occupying forces, invading armies.” For Mr. Obama, Wednesday was a day of business after the high ceremony of Tuesday, when he attended a state dinner with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and was honored with a 41-gun salute. He spent two hours at the Downing Street residence of Mr. Cameron, and also met with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg . The two leaders discussed the timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan , efforts to help Arab countries achieve democracy and how each was addressing spiraling deficits. Mr. Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government has undertaken deeper budget cuts than the Obama administration, but Mr. Obama deflected suggestions of a philosophical divide, saying it was natural that they would devise their own remedies. Those discussions complete, Mr. Obama and Mr. Cameron dropped in on a barbecue hosted by their wives, Michelle Obama and Samantha Cameron, for war veterans and their families. They were put to work flipping hamburgers and sausages, which prompted Mr. Cameron to joke that it was the first time a British prime minister had given an American president “a bit of a grilling.” Formality returned in the afternoon, when Mr. Obama was escorted into Westminster Hall in the Houses of Parliament, a majestic 900-year-old building where King Richard I had his coronation banquet in 1189, Sir Thomas More was tried for treason in 1535 and Winston Churchill ’s body lay in state in 1965. Mr. Obama was the first American president invited to speak in the hall, joining a rarefied list that includes Charles de Gaulle , Nelson Mandela and Pope Benedict XVI . Taking note of his illustrious company, Mr. Obama said it was either “a very high bar or the beginning of a very funny joke,” cracking up an audience that included Mr. Cameron and his predecessors, Gordon Brown and Mr. Blair. The president did not sketch out a new vision for the British-American alliance, sticking to a familiar list of challenges including nuclear nonproliferation and the Middle East peace process. The two countries faced years of hard work in dealing with the Arab uprisings, since, he said, “Power rarely gives up without a fight.” Though the address was not as soaring of some of his best-known speeches, it had its moments, most strikingly when Mr. Obama spoke of the “patchwork heritage” of the United States and Britain as a common strength. That heritage, he said, made it “possible for the sons and daughters of former colonies to sit here as members of this great Parliament, and for the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British Army to stand before you as president of the United States.” The audience, which had been listening in respectful silence, erupted in applause, and afterward, he needed 30 minutes to make his way out of the hall, as the crowd mobbed him for handshakes and pictures.

Barack Obama
Great Britain
US Foreign Policy
Elizabeth II,Queen Elizabeth
David Cameron


China’s Energetic Enforcement of Antitrust Rules Alarms Foreign Firms

Abstract: HONG KONG — When almost 100 government antitrust investigators simultaneously marched into four of Microsoft’s offices across China late last month, they were not looking for tea and gossip. In what Microsoft characterized internally as “surprise visits,” the agents from China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce interrogated a company vice president and other senior managers, copied contracts and financial records, and downloaded large amounts of data from the company’s computer servers, including emails and other internal communications. The swoop on Microsoft stood out for its scale, but it was just one of dozens of similar actions across China recently that have set off alarm in boardrooms across the globe. Chinese regulators appear to be energetically expanding enforcement of the antimonopoly law, and foreign companies fear that they could become easy targets for officials from an array of competing agencies and local governments aiming to impress President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party leader who has promoted visions of patriotic resurgence and technological pre-eminence . The regulators’ increasing application of the antimonopoly law, said Scott Kennedy, director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics & Business at Indiana University, embodies the party leadership’s efforts to overhaul the economy without abandoning control of the levers of power. “China’s not moving towards a free market, but it’s moving towards a wider palette of regulatory tools,” Mr. Kennedy said. “These aren’t meant to create a level playing field; they obviously want the field to be slanted, but they want to use what I’d guess we call more sophisticated tools.” Foreign companies worry that the investigations could represent the rise of a newer, subtler form of protectionism, one cloaked in regulatory impartiality but intended primarily to promote Chinese companies, especially the big, powerful state-owned companies. The government contends that it is using the antimonopoly law, first established in 2008, to protect the interests of consumers against price gouging and other abuses. “If China is going to be the third leg in the global antitrust regime, along with the U.S. and the E.U., and that’s clearly coming, then the key question is, What sort of approach is China going to take?” John Frisbie, president of the US-China Business Council in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “Is it going to be more the socialist state-run model, or is it going to be more of a market- and consumer-oriented model, or something in between? I don’t think we know the answer yet.” Not everything in China is stacked against multinationals, some of which may well have engaged in questionable practices and often have their own political allies and business partners. Nor is China the only country where Microsoft and other companies have faced consumer ire and regulatory scrutiny. But multinationals appear to be facing new and substantial challenges in navigating a clutch of separate regulatory agencies across China, each keen to amass victories, and the fines and political kudos that go with them. “China has a very large bureaucracy, but each agency has its incentives and missions, so when they enforce the law, they try to maximize their own interests,” said Angela Zhang , a lecturer in law at King’s College London, who studies Chinese antimonopoly law. “But I wouldn’t underestimate the power of some really large multinational companies, because these companies are also very deep-pocketed and have very good connections in China, and they can also do the lobbying.” For now, though, Microsoft; the San Diego-based chip maker Qualcomm ; Daimler , the German auto giant ; and other formidable companies are on the defensive. Over the last couple of years, the government agencies empowered with enforcing China’s antimonopoly law have increased their investigations of both domestic and foreign companies. The foreign companies cover sectors such as technology, car parts, pharmaceuticals, jewelry retailing and food packaging. Over the last few weeks, investigators have been particularly busy — and particularly public — in their efforts, setting a pattern of making abrupt searches of foreign companies’ offices. These are then reported by local media, tersely confirmed by the companies and followed by the government declaring that the companies are suspected of violating pricing, distribution and bundling rules, harming Chinese businesses and consumers. Last Wednesday, the State Administration of Industry and Commerce, or S.A.I.C., conducted a follow-up raid on two Microsoft offices in China and searched Accenture’s offices in the northeastern city of Dalian. Last week, officials at the National Development and Reform Commission searched the Shanghai offices of Daimler, which makes Mercedes-Benz cars, and said they planned to fine Chrysler and Audi. The reform commission enforces pricing violations of China’s antimonopoly law and has been investigating how automakers price the spare parts that are sold by their distributors in China. In response to the investigation, BMW said on Friday that it would lower parts prices in China. Similar component price cuts have been made recently by Mercedes and Audi. Image Bill Gates of Microsoft with President Xi Jinping of China in 2013. They have met several times. Credit Tyrone Siu/Reuters The reform commission is one of three agencies with a role in enforcing the antimonopoly law, which includes rules against unfair pricing and sales restrictions, even when a company has plenty of competitors. The Ministry of Commerce vets domestic and overseas mergers and acquisitions to ensure that they don’t give any one company dominance over the market for a particular good or service in the country. The ministry has expanded the number of deals it examines — reaching decisions on 207 cases last year, an increase of 26 percent from 2012, and imposing significant conditions on those transactions. Alongside the commerce ministry, S.A.I.C. and the reform commission have taken on a higher profile in antimonopoly cases since last year. The commission in August of last year fined six companies that sell infant milk powder a total of $109 million, accusing them of price fixing and anticompetitive behavior. Five of the companies, including Mead Johnson Nutrition of the United States, were foreign and the other was based in Hong Kong. Qualcomm has also been subject to an antimonopoly investigation by the reform commission since at least late last year, as have dozens of foreign pharmaceutical companies. S.A.I.C., which investigates cases not directly related to pricing, started its own investigation a year ago into abuse of market position by Tetra Pak , a giant food packaging company based in Sweden. Analysts say foreign companies may be relatively more vulnerable to investigation because they generally lack the deep networks of political patronage that prevail in many sectors of China’s economy, particularly those like energy and finance that remain state-dominated. “As Beijing prunes back outdated forms of government intervention, regulations to protect consumers and promote competition must come to the fore, which is why President Xi scoped this into his reform design,” said Daniel H. Rosen, the founding partner of the Rhodium Group, an economic and political consulting firm in New York. “It does seem that foreign firms are the subject of a disproportionate share of China’s new enthusiasm for competition policy.” But the enforcers, too, appear to be feeling the pressure from shifts in Chinese economic policy making. The powerful National Development and Reform Commission has traditionally been China’s top economic planning agency and remains responsible for setting the retail prices that state energy companies like PetroChina and Sinopec can charge for products like gasoline. But its influence has waned under Mr. Xi, who has shifted the oversight of some economic policies to newly established committees that he heads. Shoring up influence through enforcement of antimonopoly rules may help the agency compensate for that change. Ms. Zhang, the law lecturer, noted that while antitrust cases involving foreign companies tend to grab the headlines, authorities have in many instances also gone after local and state-owned companies. To date, the biggest such case was in February 2013, when the reform commission slapped total price-fixing fines of 449 million renminbi, or about $73 million, on two of China’s leading state-owned liquor companies: Wuliangye Yibin Group and Kweichow Moutai . Among foreign companies, few would appear to be better connected in China than Microsoft. Its co-founder, Bill Gates, has met with Mr. Xi several times to discuss the charitable work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and he hosted Mr. Xi’s predecessor, President Hu Jintao, at a 2006 dinner at his home in Medina, Wash. Since then, however, the Chinese government’s wariness of Western technology providers has deepened, especially after Edward J. Snowden’s disclosures about surveillance done by the United States. It is not clear to Microsoft executives precisely how the Chinese authorities believe that they violated the country’s antimonopoly law. For months, Microsoft was in private discussions over competition issues with S.A.I.C. officials. The discussions were not hostile, said one person briefed on the meetings who spoke on condition of anonymity. So it was a surprise to Microsoft executives when investigators raided its offices. S.A.I.C. officials have said publicly that the investigation is related to software compatibility, bundling and file verification issues for Windows and Office. Late last week, The People’s Daily, the chief newspaper of the party, told foreign companies to get used to tougher scrutiny. “In the future, the focus on market order will continue to be constantly enhanced,” it said. “Every kind of business should adjust its behavior and thinking to this new regulatory normal.”


Internet Analysts Question India’s Efforts to Stem Panic

Abstract: MUMBAI, India — The Indian government’s efforts to stem a weeklong panic among some ethnic minorities has again put it at odds with Internet companies like Google , Facebook and Twitter . Officials in New Delhi, who have had disagreements with the companies over restrictions on free speech, say the sites are not responding quickly enough to their requests to delete and trace the origins of doctored photos and incendiary posts aimed at people from northeastern India. After receiving threats online and on their phones, tens of thousands of students and migrants from the northeast have left cities like Bangalore, Pune and Chennai in the last week. The government has blocked 245 Web pages since Friday, but still many sites are said to contain fabricated images of violence against Muslims in the northeast and in neighboring Myanmar meant to incite Muslims in cities like Bangalore and Mumbai to attack people from the northeast. India also restricted cellphone users to five text messages a day each for 15 days in an effort to limit the spread of rumors. Officials from Google and industry associations said they were cooperating fully with the authorities. Some industry executives and analysts added that some requests had not been heeded because they were overly broad or violated internal policies and the rights of users. The government, used to exerting significant control over media like newspapers, films and television, has in recent months been frustrated in its effort to extend similar and greater regulations to Web sites, most of which are based in the United States. Late last year, an Indian minister tried to get social media sites to prescreen content created by their users before it was posted. The companies refused and the attempt failed under withering public criticism. While just 100 million of India’s 1.2 billion people use the Internet regularly, the numbers are growing fast among people younger than 25, who make up about half the country’s population. For instance, there were an estimated 46 million active Indian users on Facebook at the end of 2011, up 132 percent from a year earlier. Sunil Abraham, an analyst who has closely followed India’s battles with Internet companies, said last week’s effort to tackle hate speech was justified but poorly managed. He said the first directive from the government was impractically broad, asking all Internet “intermediaries” — a category that includes small cybercafes, Internet service providers and companies like Google and Facebook — to disable all content that was “inflammatory, hateful and inciting violence.” “The Internet intermediaries are responding slowly because now they have to trawl through their networks and identify hate speech,” said Mr. Abraham , executive director of the Center for Internet and Society, a research and advocacy group based in Bangalore. “The government acted appropriately, but without sufficient sophistication.” In the days since the first advisory went out on Aug. 17, government officials have asked companies to delete dozens of specific Web pages. Most of them have been blocked, but officials have not publicly identified them or specified the sites on which they were hosted. Ministers have blamed groups in Pakistan , a neighbor with which India has tense relations, for creating and uploading many of the hateful pages and doctored images. A minister in the Indian government, Milind Deora, acknowledged that officials had received assistance from social media sites but said officials were hoping that the companies would move faster. “There is a sense of importance and urgency, and that’s why the government has taken these out-of-the-way decisions with regards to even curtailing communications,” Mr. Deora, a junior minister of communications and information technology, said in a telephone interview. “And we are hoping for cooperation from the platforms and companies to help us as quickly as possible.” Indian officials have long been concerned about the power of modern communications to exacerbate strife and tension among the nation’s many ethnic and religious groups. While communal violence has broadly declined in the last decade, in part because of faster economic growth, many grievances simmer under the surface. Most recently, fighting between the Bodo tribe and Muslims in the northeastern state of Assam has displaced about half a million people and, through text messages and online posts, affected thousands more across India. Officials at social media companies, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending political leaders, said that they were moving as fast as they could but that policy makers must realize that the company officials have to follow their own internal procedures before deleting content and revealing information like the Internet protocol addresses of users. “Content intended to incite violence, such as hate speech, is prohibited on Google products where we host content, including YouTube, Google Plus and Blogger,” Google said in a statement. “We act quickly to remove such material flagged by our users. We also comply with valid legal requests from authorities wherever possible.” Facebook said in a statement that it also restricts hate speech and “direct calls for violence” and added that it was “working through” requests to remove content. Twitter declined to comment on the Indian government’s request. Telecommunications company executives criticized the government’s response to the crisis as being excessive and clumsy. There was no need to limit text messages to just five a day across the country when problems were concentrated in a handful of big cities, said Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India. “It could have been handled much more tactically,” he said. Others said the government could have been more effective had it quickly countered hateful and threatening speech by sending out its own messages, which it was slow to do when migrants from the northeast began leaving Bangalore on Aug. 15. “It has to also reach out on social networking and Internet platforms and dismantle these rumors,” Mr. Abraham said, “and demonstrate that they are false.”

Google Inc
Facebook Inc
Twitter
India
Social Networking (Internet)
Politics and Government
Muslims and Islam
Bodos (Ethnic Group)


U.N. Envoy Optimistic on Yemen Peace Talks Starting Soon

Abstract: CAIRO — A senior United Nations official said Thursday that he hoped negotiations could start by the end of October to resolve the nearly seven-month-long war in Yemen. The war between a Saudi-led Arab military coalition and the Houthi rebels began in March and has killed more than 5,000 people, according to the United Nations. The official, Jan Eliasson, the United Nations deputy secretary general, said that during a recent visit to the Middle East he had found “interest” in negotiations from both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are leading members of the military coalition, as well as from Iran, which is allied with the Houthis. Mr. Eliasson also said there were discussions underway to ease a coalition maritime blockade of Yemen that has prevented fuel, food and other goods from reaching the country and has helped cause a growing humanitarian crisis.

UN
Yemen
Houthis
Saudi Arabia
Middle East
International relations
Jan Eliasson


N.Y.C. Elections Chief, George Gonzalez, Is Fired

Abstract: With Election Day less than a week away, the head of New York City’s embattled Board of Elections was fired on Tuesday after a series of problems with a new computerized voting system and the ballots prepared for the general election. The troubles that occurred during last month’s primary, including the failure of dozens of polling sites to open on time, prompted a furious Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to declare the board’s handling of the election “a royal screw-up.” Election officials said that the firing of the board’s executive director, George Gonzalez, would have no impact on next Tuesday’s election — when New Yorkers are expected to turn out in much bigger numbers than they did for the Sept. 14 primary — to vote for governor, attorney general, comptroller, Congress and other key offices. Still, even election watchdogs who have been fiercely critical of Mr. Gonzalez expressed trepidation about the latest internal rumblings at the elections board. Mr. Gonzalez, a longtime Democratic loyalist from the Bronx, had been in his post since August. He will be replaced, temporarily, by Dawn Sandow, the deputy executive director. “We question the wisdom of having this decision made now, and we think this is just an overreaction to public pressure,” said Neal Rosenstein, government reform coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group. “The voters of New York don’t need sacrificial lambs, but fundamental change in the way the board is administered.” This year was supposed to represent a watershed moment for city voters, because it was the first time that residents would use electronic voting machines rather than the lever-operated ones. But when the machines made their debut on Primary Day, many things went wrong. Some polls opened as much as four hours late because they had not received the scanners needed to read paper ballots. Some machines malfunctioned. Some polling sites reported a shortage of manila folders to hold the ballots to guarantee privacy. A day after the primary, city election officials conceded that the problems were a result, in part, of inadequate preparation, but they said that the city was trying to abide by requirements imposed by the state. By the time Mr. Gonzalez made his first public appearance to discuss what had happened, however, he struck a more defiant tone. At a Sept. 29 hearing of the State Senate Elections Committee , he graded the board’s performance as “fair” and said there had been only “minimal difficulties.” He accused the news media of incorrectly depicting “a day of chaos.” But at a City Council hearing this month, board members testified that on Sept. 14, more than 3,000 of the 26,000 poll workers staffing the 1,300 polling sites had not been trained to operate the new voting machines. In preparing for the Nov. 2 election, there has also been confusion over instructions for filling in ovals on the paper ballots, and the board said it would be providing additional information to voters. But what really troubled some board members, according to one commissioner and people who have talked to the board, was a report in The New York Post that a ballot for a special City Council election in Queens had been redesigned in a manner that might confuse voters into believing that a leading Democratic candidate was running with Carl P. Paladino, the Republican nominee for governor. “There’s no question this is what made people lose confidence in his ability to do the job,” said a commissioner who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the private nature of the board’s deliberations. “When you lose confidence in the integrity of the balloting process itself, then why would you bother doing this job?” At a board meeting on Tuesday, the commissioners said they had to discuss a personnel issue in executive session. About 45 minutes later, Julie Dent, the board’s president, announced Mr. Gonzalez’s dismissal, effective immediately. The board’s vote was 6 to 0, with 4 abstentions. Mr. Gonzalez, who had been present at the start of the meeting, was nowhere to be found. Mr. Bloomberg, who has long criticized the board as being a political patronage mill reminiscent of Tammany Hall, seemed unimpressed. “Until our elected leaders in Albany get serious about reforming the board so that the people running elections are hired based on merit instead of political connections,” he said at a news conference, “we should expect more problems like the ones we’ve had, more failures like the ones we’ve had, more finger pointing and more frustration and more headache for voters.” But others, including the League of Women Voters, the New York Public Interest Research Group and several City Council members, used the occasion to prod the board to conduct a national search for a new executive director who was not a political insider, but someone with experience in administrating elections.

Gonzalez George
Board of Elections (NYC)
Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations
Voting Machines
New York City


European Central Bank’s Stimulus Leads to Low-Interest Auto Loans

Abstract: FRANKFURT — As it moved boldly in recent months to avert a credit squeeze and a rash of bank failures, the European Central Bank might also have subsidized the market rollout of Volkswagen ’s newest subcompact. Volkswagen Financial Services, a unit of Europe’s largest carmaker, borrowed 2 billion euros ($2.6 billion) from the central bank at the end of February, one of numerous car company credit units to avail itself of the cheap, three-year loans. Volkswagen said it would, in turn, lend the money to customers to buy cars, including the new fuel-efficient Up. The industry infusion has been done without the fanfare — or testy debate — of Washington’s bailout of Detroit three years ago. In fact, helping Europe’s hard-pressed auto industry move cars off dealers’ lots was probably not what Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank’s president, had in mind when the bank issued a total of more than 1 trillion euros worth of cheap three-year loans in December and February. Mr. Draghi was clearly more concerned about a severe banking crisis caused by dysfunctional money markets. But one consequence of the loan program was to give automakers, through their in-house consumer finance units, a chance to raise low-interest money they could lend to customers to buy cars. The European auto industry can use all the help it can get. Carmakers are suffering from a surplus in production capacity at a time when the market for midprice cars is slumping. As long as their financial services units have banking licenses, automakers are eligible for European Central Bank money, just as any other bank. The central bank is lending the money at an interest rate of 1 percent. Volkswagen said it planned to pass the benefits on to customers, and is enticing Up buyers with financing at a relatively low annual interest rate of 3.9 percent. “It would be foolish not to do it,” Frank Witter, the chief executive of Volkswagen Financial Services, said in an interview last week on the sidelines of a news conference at a Frankfurt hotel, where an Up was on display. Mercedes Bank, a unit of Daimler, said it also borrowed from the central bank, while PSA Financing, a unit of the maker of Peugeot and Citroën cars, hinted that it did so as well. Neither disclosed amounts. “I think everybody does it,” Mr. Witter said of his competitors. The central bank’s money could be crucial for the European car industry, which appears to be headed for its second big downturn since the beginning of 2009. Registrations of new cars in Europe were down 8.3 percent in January and February compared with the same period in 2011. The slump is particularly ominous for brands sold primarily in Europe, like Peugeot or Opel from General Motors. The European Central Bank’s loans cannot solve the problems those companies have with underused factories, but it at least ensures that customers who want cars can get financing to buy them. But the automakers’ borrowing also illustrates the extent to which the central bank’s loan program was something of blind leap of faith by policy makers. The flood of money has clearly lowered tensions in the euro zone — but there was also a risk the cash might be put to use in ways that the bank did not intend and might not regard as positive. So far, for example, the commercial banks that were the main intended recipients have not shown much enthusiasm for putting the money to use in ways many economists might have liked — by stepping up interbank lending, or lending to businesses or snapping up large numbers of the bonds issued by European Union member governments. And in the case of the car companies, it is not clear whether Mr. Draghi and the central bank are happy that the auto credit banks joined the queue for cheap loans. Asked his views earlier this month, Mr. Draghi was noncommittal. “I don’t really have any reaction to that,” he said at a news conference. “They are acting within the law.” Licensed and regulated as banks, the car companies’ credit arms cannot escape the same headwinds facing other institutions, like investor hesitancy to buy corporate bonds issued by banks. Mr. Witter of Volkswagen Financial Services said the money borrowed from the central bank “goes straight into financing our core business.” The European Central Bank said it could not provide a breakdown of how much the car companies borrowed in recent months, but Mr. Draghi said he did not think the sums were “awfully relevant.” The bank does not disclose the names of its borrowers. If the central bank does have concerns about the auto companies, it might be that their lenders are skewed toward a particular product and customer. Theoretically, a traditional bank plays an important role in the economy by allocating capital to whatever companies will use it most productively. On the other hand, car company banks may be more likely to channel the new cash directly into the hands of customers, as opposed to hoarding the money — as many other banks appear to be doing. “It takes away the question mark whether the banks will lend on to the economy,” said Nick Matthews, senior European economist at Royal Bank of Scotland. Volkswagen and Mercedes, both of which are profitable and less vulnerable to the industry slump, borrowed from the European Central Bank for the first time in February. But other carmakers had done so before. FCE Bank, a financing arm of Ford Motor, borrowed from the central bank in 2009 and 2010, and has continued to borrow small amounts, said Christopher Makin, a spokesman for FCE. But Ford does not need to depend on the central bank, Mr. Makin said in an e-mail message, noting that FCE raised £250 million selling five-year notes on the debt market in February. “An expansion of E.C.B. funding is not part of our present funding strategy,” Mr. Makin said. For Volkswagen, by far the biggest automaker in Europe, central bank financing is more a matter of opportunity than necessity. But there is no question that the central bank money became particularly attractive to carmakers starting in December, when the bank’s usual one-year loan limit was expanded to three. The time period coincides nicely with the term of an auto loan . “It is perfectly matched,” Mr. Witter of Volkswagen Financial Services said. Banks tied to car companies or other manufacturers make up a small percentage — a few dozen at most — of the more than 6,000 credit institutions in the euro zone. But virtually every car company has an in-house financing arm, as do as other manufacturers like Caterpillar, the maker of bulldozers and other heavy machinery. Caterpillar, however, did not borrow from the central bank, said Jim Dugan, a company spokesman. Carmakers’ financing units encourage demand for a company’s products and allow the companies to collect lending profits that might otherwise go to banks. And though they tend to be relatively small, the car company banks are forces to be reckoned with. Volkswagen Financial Services made a profit in 2011 of 658 million euros — more than Commerzbank, Germany’s second-largest bank, which has eight times as many employees. The 2 billion euros that Volkswagen borrowed will amount to, at most, about 20 percent of the total funds that the bank raises this year to lend on to customers, Mr. Witter said. He said Volkswagen had no trouble raising money on capital markets. Earlier this month the bank sold 1 billion euros in debt in the credit markets. The debt, secured by receivables from outstanding auto loans, carries a variable rate currently about 1 percent, the same as the central bank cash. Still, Volkswagen Financial and other banks could get the European Central Bank money just by requesting it and posting collateral. They did not need to hire investment banks or go on investor road shows, as is usually the case when marketing debt. And the money ensures that Volkswagen is not too dependent on any one source of funds, Mr. Witter said. “It’s a piece of the puzzle.”

Europe
European Central Bank
Credit and Debt
Automobiles
Volkswagen AG


A Different Path to Fighting Addiction

Abstract: When their son had to take a medical leave from college, Jack and Wendy knew they — and he — needed help with his binge drinking. Their son’s psychiatrist, along with a few friends, suggested Alcoholics Anonymous. He had a disease, and in order to stay alive, he’d have to attend A.A. meetings and abstain from alcohol for the rest of his life, they said. But the couple, a Manhattan reporter and editor who asked to be identified only by their first names to protect their son’s privacy, resisted that approach. Instead, they turned to a group of psychologists who specialize in treating substance use and other compulsive behaviors at the Center for Motivation and Change. The center, known as the C.M.C., operates out of two floors of a 19th-century building on 30th Street and Fifth Avenue. It is part of a growing wing of addiction treatment that rejects the A.A. model of strict abstinence as the sole form of recovery for alcohol and drug users. Instead, it uses a suite of techniques that provide a hands-on, practical approach to solving emotional and behavioral problems, rather than having abusers forever swear off the substance — a particularly difficult step for young people to take. And unlike programs like Al-Anon, A.A.’s offshoot for family members, the C.M.C.’s approach does not advocate interventions or disengaging from someone who is drinking or using drugs. “The traditional language often sets parents up to feel they have to make extreme choices: Either force them into rehab or detach until they hit rock bottom,” said Carrie Wilkens, a psychologist who helped found the C.M.C. 10 years ago. “Science tells us those formulas don’t work very well.” When parents issue edicts, demanding an immediate end to all substance use, it often lodges the family in a harmful cycle, said Nicole Kosanke, a psychologist at the C.M.C. Tough love might look like an appropriate response, she said, but it often backfires by further damaging the frayed connections to the people to whom the child is closest. The center’s approach includes motivational interviewing, a goal-oriented form of counseling; cognitive behavioral therapy, a short-term form of psychotherapy; and harm reduction, which seeks to limit the negative consequences of substance abuse. The psychologists also support the use of anti-craving medications like naltrexone, which block the brain’s ability to release endorphins and the high of using the substance. A 2002 study conducted by researchers at the University of New Mexico and published in the journal Addiction showed that motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioral therapy and naltrexone, which are often used together, are far more effective in stopping or reducing drug and alcohol use than the faith-and-abstinence-based model of A.A. and other “TSF” — for 12-step facilitation — programs. Results of an updated study have not yet been released. Image The center’s pamphlet advises parents on helping children in recovery. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times Researchers elsewhere have come up with similar findings. In 2006, the Cochrane Library , a health care research group, reviewed four decades of global alcohol treatment studies and concluded, “No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or TSF approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems.” Despite that research, A.A.’s 12-step model is by far the dominant approach to addiction in America. Jack and Wendy’s son, who is in his early 20s, began drinking to alleviate crippling anxiety and ease persistent depression. His drinking, while worrisome, was not an entrenched pattern, his parents believed. Some of Jack’s friends suggested that if their son did not attend A.A. of his own volition, the only thing Jack and Wendy could do was attend Al-Anon. “The implication was that there was no other solution,” Jack said. “There was a great deal of sadness on their part, empathetic sadness, which in some ways was frightening in itself.” “A lot of people credit A.A. with saving their lives,” he added. “It’s understandable that they can’t dissociate themselves from a program that worked for them. But it’s an all-or-nothing commitment for life. That really freaked me out.” In A.A.’s literature, “alcoholism” is defined as “a progressive illness that can never be cured.” Members describe themselves as being “in recovery,” which translates to lifelong abstinence and adherence to the 12 steps mapped out in the Big Book, published four years after the organization was founded in 1935. First among them is the obligation for members to admit their “powerlessness” over alcohol. It also relies heavily on faith; God is mentioned in five of the 12 steps. On a warm evening last month, about a dozen parents gathered to hear Dr. Kosanke describe the center’s program for families, which goes by the acronym Craft, for Community Reinforcement and Family Training. It rejects, she said, the use of three words: “addict,” “alcoholic” and “enabling,” a term often used to describe the acts of loved ones that help perpetuate unhealthy behaviors. Instead of addict or alcoholic, she prefers the terms favored by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, or the DSM-V, which says that patients suffer from “alcohol use disorder” or “substance abuse disorder,” terms that convey a spectrum of severity. “Substance use takes on a lot of different shapes and sizes,” Dr. Kosanke said. “There are real downsides to labeling a child with a lifetime identity, when that truly may or may not turn out to be the case.” And calling caring behavior enabling, she said, has a way of turning even acts of kindness into something negative. “Our field hasn’t done a good job of defining it in a narrow way that’s appropriate,” she said. “If you give your kid money knowing he will go buy pot, that’s enabling. If you take your kid to soccer practice, you’re encouraging healthy behavior. That’s not ‘enabling.’ ” Image Nicole Kosanke of the Center for Motivation and Change. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times Part of the Craft approach has parents take care of themselves, too, said Lorraine McNeill-Popper, who volunteers for the parent hotline at the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids , a nonprofit group devoted to recovery for young people. “If you are sleep-deprived and stressed out, how can you think clearly?” she said. Ms. McNeill-Popper has her own family history of drug abuse. Her twin brother died of an overdose, and she adopted his son, who later became a heavy marijuana user and ended up in rehab. “I tell parents, ‘It’s like when you’re on an airplane, and they tell you to put the oxygen mask over yourself first. That way you can help with the others.’ ” The center’s approach is controversial in the recovery world. David Rotenberg, executive vice president of treatment at the nonprofit Caron Treatment Centers , a large drug and alcohol rehabilitation provider with branches in several states, cautioned against approaches that do not set abstinence as a goal. “The majority of people who are chemically dependent would love to be able to drink and drug in a more moderate fashion,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “Most drug addicts and alcoholics would love to drink just a couple of drinks, and they try to do so, with poor results.” The C.M.C. doctors say treatment for young people needs to be tailored for them, since teenagers and young adults are neurologically, psychologically, socially and legally different from adults, and have different treatment needs. Dr. Wilkens founded the center with a fellow psychologist, Jeffrey Foote, in 2003. The two had worked together in larger hospital-based treatment centers where they struggled to introduce evidence-based treatments, she said. When it opened, the C.M.C. was one of the few centers in the nation that were not tethered to the 12-step model, she said. “It was our strong belief that you can work with people at any stage of change, ranging from ‘I’m not even sure I have a substance problem’ all the way to ‘I just got out of rehab and want to go to A.A. meetings every day,’ ” Dr. Wilkens said. “We don’t have a judgment on how you address your substance use problem. Maybe A.A. is helpful to you and you find everything you need there. If it’s not, we genuinely believe there are many strategies for helping to resolve them.” In fact, a majority of college binge drinkers do not go on to become alcohol dependent, said Stanton Peele , a Brooklyn psychologist who has studied substance use for decades and is a longtime critic of the A.A. model. While binge drinking and other drug use are risky, multiple studies show that most people “mature out” of such recklessness when they begin to have increased responsibilities. A federally financed study of 43,000 randomly selected Americans, called the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, or Nesarc, found that 75 percent of those who are heavy drinkers eventually regain control without rehab or A.A., Dr. Peele said. The survey, which was conducted in the early 2000s and was designed to be representative of the larger United States population, was aimed at helping researchers understand high-risk drinking patterns, design better-targeted treatment programs and monitor recovery. It found that over half of those who recover managed to cut back instead of abstaining, Dr. Peele said. Image Lorraine McNeill-Popper at her home in Queens. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times “Isn’t it more encouraging to know that most people are going to outgrow these habits than to think they’re going to have a disease for the rest their lives?” Dr. Peele asked. “The data show that the odds are in your favor.” Dr. Wilkens is familiar with that pattern. She was a college binge drinker herself and also struggled with bulimia. Once she left her home state of Kansas for New York City, where she attended Hunter College, she felt culturally stimulated and intellectually challenged, she said, and the drinking and disordered eating disappeared. “When you focus on building up the world around you, you find stimulation and rewards that are very different from using drugs and alcohol. You find other ways of soothing yourself, and things can get better,” she said. That is precisely what L.S. learned five years ago. L.S., a Manhattan lawyer in his early 30s who asked to be identified only by his initials to protect his privacy, spent nearly a decade as an episodic binge drinker. He began drinking as a student at his large Midwestern university, where he played rugby and where many of his best friends belonged to fraternities. Alcohol, he said, flowed freely through both subcultures. L.S. said he thought his drinking — weeks of no drinking followed by serious binges of a few dozen drinks over several days — would end after college. Yet the behavior did not fade. The morning after his wedding, he awoke with a hangover that lasted a day and a half. His father, who drinks socially, told him that people either were alcoholics or were not. But L.S. was unprepared to accept that label and began researching moderation on his own. He found a New York branch of Moderation Management , or M.M., a secular, peer-led support group that takes a cognitive behavioral approach. In contrast to A.A., which stresses a drinker’s lack of power in the presence of alcohol, M.M. encourages personal responsibility for drinking. The group, founded in 1993, encourages members to start with an alcohol-free month, and then allows for the reintroduction of moderate amounts of alcohol. (Critics note that one of its founders, Audrey Kishline, was involved in a fatal accident while driving drunk. She left the group in January 2000 with the intention of joining A.A., and three months later, crashed head-on into another vehicle, killing the driver and his 12-year-old daughter.) L.S. now attends hourlong meetings once a week at which he and about a dozen others discuss their goals for moderate drinking, as well as tips, challenges and progress on avoiding triggers. Since he began attending, L.S. limits himself to about five drinks a week, well below the 14 drinks M.M. advises as a safe limit for men. L.S. is convinced that there is no single approach for all problem drinkers. “M.M. doesn’t profess to work for everybody. It has a scientifically based approach that works for some people,” he said. The C.M.C. psychologists are blunt about the reasons many teenagers and young adults use drugs: When it comes to decreasing anxiety and relieving depression, substances tend to work for the short term. “Kids aren’t crazy for using them,” Dr. Wilkens said. “They have an effect that is reinforcing in some way. If you understand that, you can strategically work to support and reinforce other healthy, competing behaviors.” Image Ms. McNeill-Popper with a photo of her mother and her twin brother, an overdose casualty. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times That approach runs through the book she wrote with Dr. Foote and Dr. Kosanke, “Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Can Help People Change.” It was published in February, just as the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman from a heroin overdose struck fear in the hearts of many parents whose children use drugs. It landed Dr. Wilkens on several talk shows and drew scores of calls to the center. (In addition to its New York office, the group has opened a residential treatment center in the Berkshires.) Dr. Wilkens’s message struck a chord with Wendy. Her son had just left school, and the couple was exploring treatment options. Wired in the evenings with extreme anxiety, he drank excessively to get himself to sleep. Once in bed, he’d stay there till 5 p.m. Before she read the book, Wendy said, she would stomp upstairs hourly to announce in an exasperated voice, “It’s 2 o’clock. You’ve got to get out of there.” “I’d do that three or four more times and then be fuming,” she said. “I’d be fuming all day, at home doing my work and knowing he was upstairs sleeping off whatever he’d been drinking the night before.” After learning the Craft approach, Wendy said, she stopped nagging, changing her negative, accusatory tone to a more pleasant one by asking open-ended questions. Today, Wendy and Jack’s son is working with his psychiatrist and getting help for his depression and anxiety. He seems to be bingeing much less. When the family went out to dinner on a recent night, the parents each ordered a beer or a glass of wine and sipped slowly through dinner. “How will he learn moderation if he doesn’t see it modeled?” Wendy asked. Ellie hopes her daughter, too, will be able to change her drinking patterns. Ellie is a New York editor, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her family’s privacy. Her daughter, 23, has struggled with binge drinking since she was 16. While her daughter graduated from college and holds a responsible job, she still binges on weekends. “It’s so much a part of the culture, it’s everywhere,” Ellie said. “She says she’d have no social life if she stopped drinking.” Ellie, who grew up in a home in which many relatives attended A.A., at first tried Al-Anon. “They talk about ‘disengaging,’ ” she said. “But it’s your child, and I’m not one of those people who can put her out on the street.” While their daughter has resisted treatment so far, Ellie and her husband have begun seeing a therapist at the C.M.C. to better navigate their relationship. “My child is much more than a label or a diagnosis,” she said. “She’s not a problem to be solved, but a child to be loved and guided toward a better life.”

Therapy
Psychology
Alcohol abuse
Addiction
NYC
Carrie Wilkens
Nicole Kosanke
Center for Motivation and Change
Drug Abuse


Court Bars Life Terms for Youths Who Haven’t Killed

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that juveniles who commit crimes in which no one is killed may not be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Five justices, in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy , agreed that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids such sentences as a categorical matter. “A state need not guarantee the offender eventual release,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “but if it imposes the sentence of life, it must provide him or her with some realistic opportunity to obtain release before the end of that term.” The ruling marked the first time that the court excluded an entire class of offenders from a given form of punishment outside the context of the death penalty. “ ‘Death is different’ no longer,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent. The overall vote was 6-to-3, though that is a little misleading. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voted with the majority in saying that the inmate who brought the appeal had received a sentence so harsh that it violated the Constitution. But the chief justice endorsed only a case-by-case approach, saying that an offender’s age could be considered in deciding whether a life sentence was so disproportionate to the crime as to violate the Eighth Amendment. The case involved Terrance Graham, who in 2003, at age 16, helped rob a Jacksonville restaurant, during which an accomplice beat the manager with a steel bar. Mr. Graham was sentenced to a year in jail and three years’ probation for that crime. The next year, at 17, Mr. Graham and two 20-year-old accomplices committed a home invasion robbery. In 2005, a judge sentenced Mr. Graham to life for violating his probation. The Supreme Court has carved out categories of offenders and crimes that are not subject to the death penalty, including juvenile offenders and those who do not take a life. Monday’s decision applied those two decisions to life-without-parole sentences. Justice Kennedy, who was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens , Ruth Bader Ginsburg , Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor , said both national and international practices supported the court’s ruling. Justice Thomas said the majority was wrong about the facts in the United States and abroad and wrong as a matter of principle to take account of international opinion. Justice Antonin Scalia joined all of Justice Thomas’s dissent and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. most of it. Thirty-seven states, the District of Columbia and the federal government have laws allowing life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of non-homicide offenses. That represents, Justice Thomas said, a super-majority of states in favor of the punishment. Justice Kennedy responded that a study relied on by Mr. Graham and supplemented by the court’s own research had located only 129 juvenile offenders convicted under such laws. Seventy-seven were in Florida , the rest in 10 other states. Those numbers, Justice Kennedy said, make the sentence “exceedingly rare” and demonstrate that “a national consensus has developed against it.” Justice Thomas drew a different conclusion from the same numbers. “That a punishment is rarely imposed demonstrates nothing more than a general consensus that it should be just that — rarely imposed,” he wrote. “It is not proof that the punishment is one the nation abhors.” Justice Kennedy added that the sentences at issue had been “rejected the world over.” Indeed, only the United States and perhaps Israel , he said, impose the punishment even for homicides committed by juveniles. “The judgment of the world’s nations that a particular sentencing practice is inconsistent with basic principles of decency,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “demonstrates that the court’s rationale has respected reasoning to support it.” Justice Thomas disputed Justice Kennedy’s math, saying 11 nations seem to allow the punishment in theory. More important, he said, “foreign laws and sentencing practices” are “irrelevant to the meaning of our Constitution.” He added that most democracies around the world remain free to adopt the punishment should they wish to. “Starting today,” Justice Thomas wrote, “ours can count itself among the few in which judicial decree prevents voters from making that choice.” Although the majority limited its decision to non-homicide offenses, advocates may try to apply its logic more broadly to the some 2,000 inmates serving life-without-parole sentences in the United States for participating in killings at 17 or younger. Justice Thomas questioned the distinction drawn by the majority between killings and other sorts of violent crimes. “The court is quite willing to accept that a 17-year-old who pulls the trigger on a firearm can demonstrate sufficient depravity and irredeemability to be denied re-entry into society,” he wrote, “but insists that a 17-year-old who rapes an 8-year-old and leaves her for dead does not.” Justice Alito, in a separate dissent that seemed directed to sentencing judges, said the majority’s opinion did nothing to affect even quite long fixed sentences. Justice Thomas predicted that Monday’s ruling would give rise to years of litigation about just what sort of parole or other processes states must provide to provide the required “meaningful opportunity to obtain release.” The case decided Monday, Graham v. Florida, No. 08-7412, was argued in November along with a companion case, Sullivan v. Florida, No. 08-7621. The court declined to decide the second case, which involved Joe Sullivan, who raped a woman when he was 13. Instead, the court dismissed the case as improvidently granted, probably because it was beset with procedural difficulties. Mr. Sullivan’s lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, said his client and everyone else in his situation would be entitled to challenge their sentences under the Graham decision. As usual in cases involving the Eighth Amendment, the justices debated whether the Constitution should consider, in a one common formulation, “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Justice Thomas said the court should look to the practices at the time the Bill of Rights was adopted. Given that capital punishment could be imposed on people as young as 7 in the 18th century, he said, Mr. Graham’s punishment would almost certainly have been deemed acceptable back then. Justice John Paul Stevens, in a concurrence joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor, said Justice Thomas’s “static approach to the law” did not allow for societal progress and would entail unacceptable human consequences. “Justice Thomas would apparently not rule out a death sentence for a $50 theft by a 7-year-old,” Justice Stevens wrote. “Knowledge accumulates,” he wrote. “We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes.”

Supreme Court
Juvenile delinquency
Criminal Sentence
8th Amendment
Probation and Parole
Murders
Decisions and Verdicts


BMC Takes First Leg in Spain

Abstract: The BMC team, including the American rider Tejay Van Garderen, had a time of 8 minutes 10 seconds to win the opening stage of the Vuelta a España. Organizers responded to riders’ complaints about safety on narrow stretches by deciding that the 4.6-mile stage, from Puerto Banús to Marbella along Spain’s southern coast, would count only toward the team classification, not toward individual times. ■ Roman Kreuziger survived an early breakaway to win Stage 6 of the USA Pro Challenge in Colorado. Rohan Dennis finished in the main pack to retain his overall lead.


New Archbishop of Canterbury Takes Over Church of England

Abstract: LONDON — On the eve of a divisive vote in Parliament on the legalization of same-sex marriage, Justin Welby , the former bishop of Durham, on Monday took over formally as the 105th archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, saying he shares the Church of England’s opposition to marriage among people of the same gender. Archbishop Welby, 57, was confirmed in his new post at a ceremony here at St. Paul’s Cathedral attended by other senior bishops of the church. He is to be enthroned next month at a ceremony in Canterbury, replacing the Most Rev. Rowan Williams , who held the position for 10 years. In an interview broadcast on the BBC after his inauguration, the new archbishop said he was not on a “collision course” with the government. But he endorsed the traditional view that while the church has no objection to civil partnerships between people of the same gender, it is, as a recent church statement put it, “committed to the traditional understanding of the institution of marriage as being between one man and one woman.” Speaking to reporters on Monday, Archbishop Welby, a former oil company executive, said: “I support the Church of England’s position on this. We have made many statements about this, and I stick with that.” His stance did not come as a surprise since he had made it clear at the time of his appointment in November, but the timing of his remarks was certain play into both the political and the ecclesiastical debate about the issue. The church has long been locked in debate over gender issues, including the consecration of female and gay bishops and same-sex marriage. In December, the church voted narrowly to reject the notion of female bishops, despite support from senior clerics including Archbishop Welby. In January, the church followed up with a ruling admitting openly gay priests in civil partnerships to its ranks, provided that, unlike heterosexual bishops, they remained celibate. Parliament is set to vote on Tuesday on a proposal to legalize same-sex marriage that has been championed by Prime Minster David Cameron. The issue, however, has inspired one of the most toxic and potentially embarrassing rebellions among Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party colleagues since he took office as the head of a coalition government in 2010. British news reports have suggested that as many as 180 of the 303 Conservative Party members of Parliament might oppose Mr. Cameron or abstain from voting. Some Conservatives have said publicly that they feared Mr. Cameron’s prospects of being returned to office in the next national election, in 2015, could be jeopardized. But campaigners in favor of same-sex marriage say that he will draw new supporters. Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, said Monday that he would be “voting for equal marriage in the House of Commons, and I’ll be doing so proudly.” He also said he would urge his 255 legislators in the 649-member body to vote with him. “I’ll be voting for equal marriage for a very simple reason: I don’t think that the person you love should determine the rights you have,” Mr. Miliband said. The legislation would permit civil marriage between same-sex couples, but specifically exempt the Church of England and other faiths from an obligation to perform such ceremonies. “The point the prime minister would make is that this legislation is about what goes on in register offices, not churches,” said a spokesman for Mr. Cameron, referring to the sites where civil marriages are performed. The government believes that the law would provide “the comprehensive safeguards that religious organizations will want,” the spokesman said.

Justin Welby
Church of England
Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage
Great Britain
Anglicanism


Auto Sector’s Role Dwindles, and Spending Suffers

Abstract: THE automobile industry’s share of the American economy has fallen to a historic low, the government reported this week, a few days before Chrysler announced another round of layoffs. During the third quarter, the government reported, spending by Americans on autos and auto parts fell to 3.1 percent of the total gross domestic product. As one chart accompanying this article shows, that is the lowest share of the economy in a quarter century, going back to a severe recession in the early 1980s. By that measure, the automobile industry appears to be suffering recession-level problems, even though the overall economy grew at a surprisingly strong 3.9 percent annual rate during the third quarter. As recently as 2003, the auto industry was taking a 4 percent share of G.D.P., well above its average share, over the last 50 years, of 3.7 percent. A few tenths of a percentage point do not sound like much. But if the auto industry were taking its normal share this year, that would mean additional spending of about $80 billion. Some of that money is still going into transportation, as the price of gasoline has risen. Personal energy spending — including gasoline, fuel oil and gas and electric utility bills — now takes up 4.2 percent of the total economy, far above the 2.8 percent figure in 1999, when oil prices were low. But it is well below the 5.8 percent peak reached in 1982. The government’s report showed some expected weak points. The data from housing and autos was bad, but some of that was made up by the strongest spending on construction of nonresidential buildings in 17 years. Within the public sector, state and local governments are spending at the fastest pace in three decades, and federal military spending is also up. But federal spending on everything but the military is at its lowest level, as a percentage of the economy, in six years. The charts with this article look at the American economy since 1975 by examining the share of spending going to various sectors. Rising lines show that the sector is taking a bigger cut of the economic pie, while falling lines show the opposite. Each chart also shows the average share over the last 50 years, to provide a standard to measure current spending. Personal consumption spending, which leaped in the 1980s and 1990s, has now stabilized at around 70 percent of the total economy. Within that, however, there have been some big shifts. Medical care spending is now more than 12 percent of the economy, double the level in 1975. The share of national income going to residential construction is falling rapidly, but is still not very low. It peaked at 6.3 percent of the total economy in late 2005, and is now down to 4.5 percent. That is a rapid decline, but even now the level is only a bit below the long-term average. Nonresidential construction spending makes up a smaller part of the economy, but its strength has helped to offset some of the pain brought on by the housing plunge. Its 3.4 percent share of the economy is the highest since 1990. The real estate boom of recent years bolstered property tax revenues in many states, and spending followed. Spending by state and local governments is now 12.4 percent of the economy, the highest since 1976. Federal nonmilitary spending, however, has not grown nearly as rapidly as the economy. At 2.3 percent of the economy, it is lower than at any time since 2001.

Gross Domestic Product
Automobiles
Economic Conditions and Trends
United States Economy


2 Norwegians (1 Also British) Are Sentenced to Die in Congo

Abstract: KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo (AP) — A military court on Thursday sentenced to death two men, a Norwegian and a man who holds British and Norwegian citizenship, who had been convicted of espionage and murder, a court official said. The men — Joshua French and Tjostolv Moland, who are both former Norwegian soldiers — were convicted last year of murdering their driver and trying to murder a witness. The court in the northeastern city of Kinsangani also convicted them of spying for Norway , because they were carrying military identification cards at the time. The Norwegian government has denied that they were spies. Lawyers representing them said the men had five days to file an appeal. The British government said that it deplored the sentence handed down to Mr. French, who has British and Norwegian citizenship, and that it would work to appeal the conviction in conjunction with the Norwegian government. Mr. Moland is Norwegian. The judge who sentenced the men on Thursday also ruled that together with the Norwegian government, they must pay a fine of $65 million. A court clerk said $3 million of that amount would go to the widow of the murdered driver and $1.5 million to the driver’s parents. A spokesman for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, Kjetil Elsebutangen, said Norway would communicate to Congolese authorities its opposition to the death penalty. “Norway is against the death penalty in principle and in all its forms,” Mr. Elsebutangen said. “It’s time for us now to reiterate our position and also remind the Congolese authorities of their responsibility for the health and security of the two Norwegian citizens that are their prisoners.” No one has been executed in Congo since 2001, when the government declared a moratorium. Norway has broached the idea of transferring the men to Norway to serve a prison sentence.

Congo (Formerly Zaire)
Norway
Sentences (Criminal)


Parsing What Makes a Trump Supporter Tick

Abstract: PHOENIX — “Donald!” cried a woman in the front row at the Arizona Republican Party headquarters on Monday night. On the large TV screen before her, Donald J. Trump strode out to do battle with Hillary Clinton. Among the 84 million people tuned in to the first presidential debate of the general election, the crowd in Phoenix was primed for a gladiatorial contest. They played their role with gusto: hissing, guffawing or cackling when Mrs. Clinton spoke; whooping and air-punching for Mr. Trump. Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of modern Republicanism, grinned from a framed portrait in the corner. Pizza was served. It seemed as good of a place as any to ask a question that has baffled so many observers outside the United States: Why do so many Americans support Mr. Trump? Readers emailing from abroad are surprised by the campaign’s bluster, insults and prevarications. They don’t understand how a race for the American presidency can be dominated by arguments over missing emails, “ birtherism” and beauty queens . Across the United States, though, the campaign is about much more than that. I’ve spent the past 10 days talking to Trump supporters, looking for answers. Arizona, with its searing deserts and saw-toothed mountains, has long been a Republican bastion, a place of conservative-leaning politics and liberal gun laws. The state’s most prominent Trump advocate is Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, who became notorious for his intolerance of unauthorized immigrants and making prison inmates wear pink underwear. At the debate party in Phoenix, the largely white crowd was seized by a palpable air of anticipation. After a sharp dip in August, Mr. Trump was suddenly riding high again in the polls. Could he pull ahead of Mrs. Clinton? The first thunderclap of applause erupted when Mr. Trump said that Mrs. Clinton has been “doing this for 30 years,” with little to show for her efforts. But as the debate wore on, and Mr. Trump’s energy started to flag, so too did the atmosphere in the room. Onscreen, Mrs. Clinton grew in confidence , unleashing a volley of attack lines. As Mr. Trump struggled to respond, the crowd in Arizona lapsed into ever longer silences. A supporter of Mr. Trump in the crowd who refused to be identified, citing unspecified threats from Clinton loyalists, said he didn’t expect his candidate to be as polished as a professional politician. He was willing to take the brash Mr. Trump as is, he said. Others at the viewing party said they were worried by Mr. Trump’s performance. Kathy Manie, wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, said she was disappointed that Mr. Trump appeared ill-prepared for Mrs. Clinton’s rehearsed barbs. “He could have spoken more eloquently,” she said. “Hillary knew exactly how to taunt him, and he fell for the bait. He gave as much as he got, but I wish his words were stronger.” Ms. Manie was not the prototypical Trump supporter. Born in Trinidad, she immigrated to the United States more than two decades ago, at 21. She is a social worker and a committed Christian, and she said that she was praying for Mr. Trump to win. Image Supporters of Mr. Trump at a rally on Tuesday in Melbourne, Fla. A common sentiment among them: Their man fuses a potent anti-establishment vim with a certain brand of American authenticity. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times “I can’t stand another four years of a Democrat running this country,” she said, but she worried the forces of history were pulling against her preference. “We’re at a time when the world seems to want a woman president.” Some Trump supporters are less forthcoming. Last week in Houston, I was ejected from a Trump event hosted by an anti-immigration group that objected to my attempts to interview their supporters. Before I was asked to leave, a Trump supporter sidled up, making pointed comments to me about “snakes in the grass that bite people.” Days later, at a county fair in southern Arizona, representatives of a local gun club refused point blank to speak to me. The only quote came from their T-shirts, which read: “Hillary For Prison.” Yet many other voters were more thoughtful about their support for Mr. Trump. On Sunday, I went to see Dan Bell, a cattle rancher who lives on the Arizona border with Mexico, and whose land is frequently trespassed by migrants and drug smugglers. Mr. Bell was a classic rancher: a burly man with blue eyes, in a cowboy hat, quietly forthright. For him, Mr. Trump represents urgently needed change. “Sure, there’s been things I wish he hadn’t said,” he told me as we bumped along the border in his Jeep, rain spitting against the windshield. “But this country needs a course correction. He’s been successful in business. We need to get the career politicians out.” That is a common sentiment among Trump supporters: Their man fuses a potent anti-establishment vim with a certain brand of American authenticity. They may not agree with all of his more lurid attacks — although some clearly do — but they see in him the archetype of a successful if boastful businessman. To them he is someone whose words are to be taken with a pinch of salt. Mr. Trump seems to have been stung by Monday’s debate, which was widely seen as a victory for Mrs. Clinton. Lashing out, he has blamed his performance on the debate moderator’s bias and a defective microphone , and threatened to turn Bill Clinton’s marital infidelity into an issue in the next debate, scheduled for Oct. 9 in St. Louis. Conventional political wisdom has it that Mr. Trump’s mercurial debate performance, while pleasing to his core supporters, did little to persuade other demographics, like women and college-educated whites, whose support he desperately needs. Mainstream Republicans are shunning him. On Tuesday, The Arizona Republic, which has never endorsed a Democrat for president since it started publishing in 1890, formally declared for Mrs. Clinton . “The 2016 Republican candidate is not conservative and he is not qualified,” the paper said. But the conventional wisdom has been wrong so many times in this election that only the foolish would dismiss Mr. Trump. As people filed out of the debate party on Monday night in Phoenix, Phil Lovas, a member of the Arizona House of Representatives who heads the state Trump campaign, urged them to take home a Trump yard sign. “We’ve got 43 days until we elect President Trump,” he said. “We need your help.” The man seated beside me, who had been silent for much of the debate, piped up. “President Trump,” he repeated, speaking the words in a low murmur, as if testing them out to see how they might sound.

2016 Presidential Election
Political Debates
US Politics
Republicans
Donald Trump
Hillary Clinton
Arizona
Maricopa County AZ
Phoenix
US