Yani Tseng, a Golf Celebrity in Taiwan, Finds Less Fanfare in America

Abstract: ORLANDO, Fla. — It is the all-American girl’s study as conceived by a Hollywood set director. In addition to her growing collection of trophies, Yani Tseng has displayed two dozen Starbucks mugs from all over the world, an ad for a local pizzeria and a plush Angry Bird scowling from a loving cup. Only the 8 ½-by-11 certificate noting Tseng’s completion of a Level 4 English class hints at her deepest roots. Tseng, 22, is the world’s No. 1 female golfer, a one-name celebrity in her native Taiwan and the spark of the sport’s next big boom, in her homeland and in China. She is the youngest golfer, man or woman, to win five major titles. For her next act, Tseng wants to win over America. She may find it easier to become the first woman to win a calendar Grand Slam. With the exception of superstars like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, golfers are faint stars in the American firmament, outshined by football, basketball and baseball players. For a female golfer to make the rounds of the morning talk shows, all the planets have to align. It happened in September, but the player was not Tseng, who had won eight tournaments by then. It was Lexi Thompson, a tall, blond American teenager fresh off her first professional victory. Over the past decade, the L.P.G.A. has had a proliferation of South Koreans in its ranks after the success of Se Ri Pak. Since 2008, its overall schedule has been downsized, but the number of tournaments in Asia has been rising. Among the official events added this year was one in Taiwan, which Tseng fittingly won for the 10th of her 11 worldwide titles in 2011. The crowds that met Tseng at the airport when she arrived for the event were so large, she required the same security detail that accompanied the pop star Lady Gaga when she performed there. It was the same story on the course, where Tseng’s large following led her 92-year-old grandmother to ask if she had paid to have all the people brought in. “It was so much fun,” Tseng said, adding, “Now I know what Tiger feels.” After the success of the event, organizers in Taiwan paid handsome appearance fees to lure 8 of the top 10 female golfers to New Taipei City this week for what amounts to a curtain call: an 18-hole skins game, followed by the Taiwan Ladies Professional Golf Association Invitational. Tseng’s fame in Asia dwarfs her profile in the United States, which raises the question: in an increasingly globalized world, does it matter if the brightest stars shine in the East or West? Robert Thompson, a professor of mass media and popular culture at Syracuse, said, “We have this prejudice that it does not matter if you’re huge anywhere else, that the only real sign of success is if you’re famous in the United States.” He added: “If I were advising her, I don’t think I’d put being famous in the United States at the top of my list. When you’re really famous in Asia, there are billions who know you, compared to millions in the U.S. I’d tell her to keep playing the way she’s playing and if she doesn’t make the highlights on ESPN, oh well.” Last year, a Chinese company, looking ahead to 2016, when golf becomes an Olympic sport, reportedly offered Tseng millions of dollars, the use of a private jet and an apartment in Beijing to change her nationality so she could represent China. “I didn’t think too much about that,” Tseng said. “I’m just very proud to represent Chinese everywhere.” At a tournament in China last month, Tseng was asked about playing against men, as her mentor Annika Sorenstam once did in a PGA Tour event. She said if the opportunity presented itself, she would like to try it. Within days, a tournament director in Puerto Rico offered her a sponsor exemption to his 2012 event. “It was really nice to have people who really pay attention to you,” said Tseng, who declined the invitation. “I feel like every word I say now, I can really inspire people.” Tseng may be on the vanguard of a new world order, but as long as Madison Avenue is in New York, she will polish her English, wiggle into form-fitting outfits and do her best to woo American advertisers. “We know Yani has a couple of strikes against her in America,” Tseng’s adviser, Ernie Huang, said. “One, she is a woman, and second, she is Asian. It does not diminish her desire to be a sports icon, and in order to accomplish that, she still needs to embrace Western society. “We have been pretty patient. We don’t care how long it takes. We’re like that old Smith Barney commercial. We want to make money the old-fashioned way. We want to earn it.” Tseng is often compared to Sorenstam, a former No. 1 player with a powerful game. Temperamentally, she is more like Shaquille O’Neal, the playful former N.B.A. superstar. Like O’Neal, who invited reporters to his retirement party, Tseng opened her Orlando home to members of the golf news media before the first round of the season-ending CME Group Titleholders last month at Grand Cypress Resort, a 30-minute commute from the gated community where she lives. Her caddie, Jason Hamilton, grilled steaks, and his fiancée, Katy Mullin, made appetizers. Dressed like Harry Potter in a black cape and black-rimmed glasses, Tseng delivered a welcome speech to her guests. That would have been unimaginable four years ago, when Tseng’s command of English was so poor, she was reluctant to speak. At 18, Tseng moved with her mother to the Southern California desert town of Beaumont to work on her game. She had announced herself three years earlier with a victory over Michelle Wie in the final of the 2004 United States Women’s Amateur Public Links. Tseng turned pro in 2007 and earned her L.P.G.A. playing privileges for the 2008 season, when she won her first major, at the L.P.G.A. Championship, and rookie of the year honors. She won 23 worldwide titles in her career, 12 on the L.P.G.A. tour. On the course, Tseng is a beguiling mix of fire and nice; she walks with her shoulders forward, but her smile takes the edge off her aggression. She dresses in slacks or shorts, and would sooner hit out of a poison ivy patch than wear a skirt to play. So the photographs of her in the upscale Taiwanese lifestyle magazines scattered throughout her 5,400-square-foot house drew double takes. In one magazine, Tseng kicked up a heel in a green minidress and dark stockings with a leopard-print scarf tied loosely around her neck. Her short hair was moussed and styled, and her face was luminous. Tseng turned away from that page and thumbed through another magazine. She stopped at a photo layout in which she wore a tailored black suit and a fedora, and leaned forward on a stool. “This is my favorite,” she said, sounding more bashful than boastful. The former L.P.G.A. player Val Skinner, now a Golf Channel analyst who has walked countless rounds alongside Tseng, said: “She’s always had an openness and a vulnerability about her. There’s a humility in her that’s different than what people might expect.” Playing pool in her recreational room, Tseng strutted after her shots the same way she does after hitting a putt on a perfect line. Then, after collecting $20 from her vanquished opponent, she tried to give the money back. Tseng’s older brother, Hung-Wei, had just arrived for a visit. Tseng followed their father, a recreational golfer, on to the course, but her brother briefly raced motorcycles professionally. “He had more sponsors than me,” she said. She was kidding. Tseng is the Arnold Palmer of women’s golf, increasing the sport’s visibility with her genial nature and go-for-broke playing style. “The young golfers are increasing because of Yani,” Julie Wang, a Taiwanese journalist, said by e-mail. “And China, golf is popular there, so lots of Chinese fans are proud of Yani. She is a hero in our era.” Tseng drew more fans at the L.P.G.A. Taiwan Championship in October than Woods did at the 1999 Johnnie Walker Classic in Taiwan. “We had 60,000 people in four days come, 20,000 fans in the final round,” Wang said. “We never had a sight like that before.” Wang, who has written a biography of Tseng, said Tseng last year was voted the fourth most influential figure in Taiwan in a television poll behind the president, the chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party and the electronics tycoon Tai-Ming Gou. Taiwan has had other star athletes: pitcher Chien-Ming Wang, who played last season for the Washington Nationals; Chi Cheng, the 1968 Olympic bronze medalist in the women’s 80-meter hurdles; Liang-Huan Lu, the 1971 British Open runner-up; and the golfer T. C. Chen, who led after the first three rounds of the 1985 United States Open before finishing second. “Those stars are old now; we need new blood,” Julie Wang wrote. The night after the gathering at her house, Tseng was honored at the L.P.G.A.’s year-end awards dinner. She sat with her family and made changes in her speech until she was called to the podium to receive her second consecutive Player of the Year award. Tseng acknowledged Louise Suggs, a founding member of the L.P.G.A. who was in the audience, and thanked everybody and her mother for their support. She vowed to continue improving, to keep the L.P.G.A. in the public eye with her fine play. “We have a long way to go,” Tseng said, “to get the recognition we deserve.”

Tseng Yani
Golf
Women and Girls
Ladies Professional Golf Assn


Belarus Escalates Dispute With Russia Over Gas

Abstract: MOSCOW — The president of Belarus ordered a halt to the transit of Russian natural gas to Europe on Tuesday, escalating an energy conflict with Moscow over unpaid debts that he said was turning into a “gas war.” The move came after Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom announced that it was doubling the cut in supplies to Belarus to 30 percent of normal volumes on Tuesday in an effort to collect about $200 million it says the country owes. The Belarussian president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, accused Gazprom in turn of failing to pay $260 million in fees to transport gas through Belarus’s pipeline to Europe — roughly a fifth of Russia’s westward exports — and ordered the flow halted. “I have ordered my government to stop transit through Belarus as long as Gazprom does not pay for the transit,” Mr. Lukashenko said in a meeting with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov. “They have not paid one kopeck for a half a year.” Gazprom officials denied that, saying that the government of Belarus had been hindering payment of the transit fees to gain leverage in the dispute. “Instead of looking for money to pay for the debt,” Belarus “decided to cut off the Russian supplies,” Sergei V. Kupriyanov, Gazprom’s spokesman, said at a news conference. “This is not only our gas; this is our pipeline that belongs to Gazprom.” Marlene Holzner, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, said at a separate news conference that there was no indication that Belarus had in fact halted the flow of gas. Ms. Holzner had said that it was unlikely that Europe would be affected by any cutoffs because of low summertime energy demands. Nevertheless, the conflict has raised further questions about Europe’s reliance on Russian energy supplies. There have been other conflicts with Russia over energy in recent years, including Gazprom’s pricing dispute last year with Belarus’s southern neighbor, Ukraine, which led to a gas shutoff that left millions of European homes without heat. The latest dispute erupted Monday when Russia said it was reducing gas deliveries to Belarus by 15 percent because of its unpaid debts, vowing to cut deliveries by as much as 85 percent. On Tuesday, Mr. Kupriyanov assured Europe that gas flows would continue unhindered, saying that Ukraine had agreed to move additional supplies through its pipelines, which already carry most of Europe’s Russian gas. “We are sure that our European clients will get all the necessary amounts of volumes of gas according to our contract” regardless of Belarus’s actions, he said. Mr. Lukashenko, meanwhile, accused Russian officials of insulting the Belarussian people, saying that he had been forced to seek loans from “strangers” to satisfy Russian demands for immediate payment. “The behavior of the Russian leadership is incomprehensible to me,” Mr. Lukashenko said. The conflict comes at a time of rising tensions between Russia and Belarus. Mr. Lukashenko, who in the past has readily fallen into line with Russian policies, has of late grown recalcitrant, refusing to go along with several Kremlin initiatives, including a strengthened and simplified trade relationship featuring a customs union with Russia and Kazakhstan. Mr. Lukashenko has also provoked Moscow by harboring Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev, the former president of Kyrgyzstan, who was ousted after an uprising that Russia appeared to encourage.

Belarus
Pipelines
Natural Gas
Energy and Power


Choosing Wines Wisely by Consulting the Sommelier in Your Pocket

Abstract: Shopping for wine is a lot like parenting a teenager. You feel stupid when you’re in the middle of it, and when you finally emerge, you’re desperately ready for a drink. There is, alas, no app for raising teenagers. But mobile software developers have begun aiming at oenophiles, and in so doing, they have established one of the more useful categories of wireless apps. Appropriately enough, choosing the right one can be puzzling and tedious. Some of the refined entries in the current vintage include Cor.kz ($4), Wine Enthusiast Guide ($5), Nat Decants Food & Wine Matcher ($3) and Pair It! ($3). I’d give them a rating of 85, with an asterisk. They’re fairly good now, and they should age nicely. Before digging into the details, though, consider the overall value of these services for a moment. Let’s say you’re at your favorite wine shop with about 15 minutes to spare, and you want a bottle that will make your dinner guests coo, without maxing out your credit card. The shop owner is helping someone near the Mouton Rothschild, and the other employees are 23-year-olds with extensive beer-stocking skills. Rather than choosing a random bottle or asking the beer guys, you can now just reach for the sommelier in your cellphone. From there you have a couple of options. Some apps, like Wine Enthusiast, let you find the most highly rated wines at specific price levels, so you can quickly browse the store — or, if you’re in a restaurant, the wine list — for matches. If you have Cor.kz or, to a lesser extent, Nat Decants, you can reverse the process, and look through the wine list or shelves until you find a promising label. Then it’s a matter of doing a quick check on its rating. The second approach has limits, simply because it takes too long to type in, say, “2003 Hochheimer Königin Victoriaberg Riesling Beerenauslese,” to say nothing of the time it might take to click through the ratings and then move onto another bottle. Smartphone mavens are already wondering why you can’t just use the phone’s camera to scan the bottle’s bar code and have the app display the wine’s rating? In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to get fairly close to that bit of grape-soaked geekery, thanks to a new feature from Cor.kz. But first, more about the core features of this app, which will soon be available to BlackBerry users and owners of Android devices like T-Mobile’s MyTouch 3G. Cor.kz stands on the shoulders of an Internet giant, CellarTracker.com , which houses more than a million reviews by roughly 82,000 wine aficionados. Cor.kz can also help users manage their wine cellar inventory, but it is perhaps best used by those who just want to buy more intelligently. Type in the name of the wine you are considering — Del Dotto, say — and Cor.kz retrieves everything in CellarTracker’s data base about the wine. This can be a blessing and a curse. Wines from Del Dotto, a small but much-beloved vintner in Napa Valley, Calif., yield 581 tasting notes. If you type something more specific into your iPhone , like “2005 Del Dotto Cabernet,” Cor.kz returns 95 matches. Some of these results include a numerical rating. To save yourself wasted clicks, choose those listings. The rating represents the average from CellarTracker’s reviewers, and those entries will also include detailed reviews and retail prices. The bar code scanning feature, cool as it sounds, will have handicaps. Wine makers often use the same bar code for every vintage, and some makers allow distributors to paste different bar codes on the bottles. Still, with this method, users should at least be able to retrieve a short list of bottles from which to choose. The Wine Enthusiast Guide is simpler to navigate than Cor.kz, but it is much less comprehensive, with 73,000 wine reviews in the database. Del Dotto, as well as other wines like Educated Guess from Roots Run Deep Winery, are two examples of wines that the app overlooked. To be fair, though, the Wine Enthusiast reviews cover many of the most widely sold wines, as well as a fair selection of lesser-known vintners. When you type the name of a wine, the search results are nicely arrayed, with the maker’s various wines listed on the first page. Click through to a specific type of wine — like, say, the Lancaster Estates Cabernet Sauvignon, and the app offers a review and a rating for specific vintages. The app also offers users the ability to select specific criteria — like price, rating and varietal — and browse a list of wines that qualify. That feature is at the core of another wine-related app, Nat Decants, which is available on iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android devices, like the MyTouch 3G. But this app belongs in a different subset of wine-related software — those that help users pair wine with food. Nat Decants is the creation of Natalie MacLean, a wine journalist and registered sommelier, and includes much of the information available on her Web site, Nat Decants (at NatalieMaclean.com ). To use it, select from a drop-down menu of either food or wine, and the software offers you suitable options from nearly 400,000 food and wine pairings. It only goes so far, in that you are given, for instance, 18 wine varieties that go well with lobster. If you want to drill down and read reviews on specific wines, you must click through to Ms. MacLean’s Web site and purchase a monthly subscription for about $2. Ms. MacLean said she hoped to integrate her reviews into the app in the future, but in the meantime users who have a poor cellular connection will find this additional step a source of frustration. To get pairing suggestions from the kitchen instead of the bar, consider Pair It! (on iTunes only), created by Bruce Riezenman, a chef based in Sonoma County, Calif. Compared to Ms. MacLean, Mr. Riezenman offers more context around his suggestions, which will help you refine your own choices. I was initially surprised that, of the services I tested, none suggested the best wine to pair with a specific occasion — like, say, reaching the end of school vacation. But maybe that would be silly; the best choice for that, clearly, is the first bottle you can get your hands on. Quick Calls Wireless headsets help cyclists and hikers avoid tangles, but what if you want to share your tunes with the world around you? The CyFi wireless sports speaker mounts on handlebars or clips to your backpack, and wirelessly transmits music. It weighs four ounces and has a Bluetooth range of 30 feet ($149, at MyCyFi.com .). ... Those in the mood for private listening might consider one of the higher-end earphones to hit the market. The Mobile In-Ear Headset ($130 at Bose.com ) includes a microphone for phone calls, but the earphones are, not surprisingly, the device’s strong suit. ... Boost Mobile, the prepaid specialist, has a new push-to-talk phone, the Motorola Debut i856 ($170). It also has a video camera. Sprint, meanwhile, released the HTC Touch Pro2 ($350 with two-year contract). HTC’s “TouchFlo” interface smoothes out the device’s otherwise clunky Windows Mobile 6.1 software.

Wireless Communications
Cellular Telephones
Smartphones
Food & Wine
iPhone
Software


Fourth Line Gives Bruins an Advantage Once Again

Abstract: BOSTON — The victory was secured. The Bruins were moving on to the Eastern Conference finals after their series-clinching 3-1 victory over the Rangers, and all Boston forward Shawn Thornton could think of was the one that got away. It was his point-blank shot in the third period that Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist turned aside. Had the puck gone in the net, Thornton would have had that N.H.L. rarity, a Gordie Howe hat trick: a goal, an assist and a fight. In this case, two out of three was quite all right. Thornton assisted on his linemate Gregory Campbell’s second-period goal, the eventual winner. He got in some good blows in a first-period, crowd-pleasing joust with Derek Dorsett. And his line, the Bruins’ fourth, again produced above and beyond in the Game 5 victory Saturday at TD Garden. Campbell had two goals, the second scored into an empty net with 51 seconds left. Over the course of the five games, the line of Campbell, Thornton and Daniel Paille produced four goals (three by Campbell), six assists and the aforementioned fight. They completely dominated the Rangers’ fourth-liners and even their Ranger superiors. Rick Nash and Ryan Callahan? One goal each. It was the second time in three games that Boston’s fourth line made the game’s big plays. It did so in the Bruins’ 2-1 victory in Game 3, with Paille recording the winner and assisting, along with Thornton, on Boston’s first goal. “That line makes a coach look good,” Boston Coach Claude Julien said. “That line played a big role in this series. We’re moving on, and they certainly deserve a lot of credit for that.” Julien had said before Game 5 that he did not like the Rangers’ attempt to pick fights with his fourth-liners because they were too valuable to be in the penalty box. Then Thornton went out and picked up seven minutes (along with Dorsett) before the game was seven minutes old. Game 5: Rangers vs. Bruins 9 Photos View Slide Show › Image Jared Wickerham/Getty Images “I thought he was trying to take liberties with my line, and I wasn’t O.K. with that,” Thornton said of Dorsett, who also had been jawing with Paille. “That’s the end of it.” In the second period, with the game tied at 1-1 after the now seemingly obligatory goal by defenseman Torey Krug matching one from Dan Girardi, the Bruins’ fourth line made the plays that broke the final deadlock of the series. Paille controlled the puck in the neutral zone and fired it into a scrum in front of Lundqvist. The puck hit Thornton in the pants (that was his assist) and bounced in front, where Campbell was a step ahead of Kris Newbury for a quick wrister to the far side. Campbell ended up on his back, behind the net, arms raised in jubilation. He also fell to the ice on his empty-netter, sweeping the puck in from the right side about 50 feet away from the goal. “We know we’re important to this team whether we score or not,” Campbell said. “This team is built on the play of four lines and we need everybody. Our line wants to be the line that makes a difference in any way we can.” Thornton added: “I don’t say it too often, but I think we’ve earned the right to be out there, too. We’ve proven that we can actually play.” The Rangers can certainly attest to that. Defenseman Ryan McDonagh said, “They were pretty dangerous the whole series.” Coach John Tortorella added: “They’ve got a deep team and that is part of it. It can’t be an excuse.” No, but it can be a reason the Bruins are advancing to meet the Penguins and the Rangers are not. The Bruins got 10 points out of their fourth line in the series. They got the same number of points from their first line. And one fewer fight.


Former Top British Official to Join BlackRock as an Adviser

Abstract: LONDON — The revolving door between Washington and Wall Street is well known, but Britain has its own revolving door. George Osborne, the former chancellor of the Exchequer, is the latest example. He is joining the investment behemoth BlackRock as a part-time adviser. He was the chancellor under former Prime Minister David Cameron, who resigned after Britain voted to leave the European Union in June. Mr. Osborne will serve as a part-time senior adviser to the BlackRock Investment Institute beginning on Feb. 1. The institute, which develops research and investment insights that help investors, is led by Philipp Hildebrand, the former head of Switzerland’s central bank and BlackRock vice chairman. “George has a unique and invaluable perspective on the issues that are shaping our world today,” Laurence D. Fink, the BlackRock chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. “At the center of our mission is helping people around the world save and invest for retirement, and George’s insights will help our clients achieve their goals.” In his new role, Mr. Osborne, who will be based in London, will provide perspectives on European politics and policy, Chinese economic reform, and trends that affect retirement planning. He will not engage in any lobbying of the British government, BlackRock said. “It’s a chance for me to work part time with one of the world’s most respected firms and a major employer in Britain,” Mr. Osborne said. Other recent moves from Westminster, where Britain’s government is based, to the City, as the historical London financial district is known, include: William Hague, the former British foreign minister, who this week announced that he was joining Citigroup as a senior adviser. Alistair Darling , a former member of Parliament and the chancellor before Mr. Osborne, joined Morgan Stanley’s board of directors last year. Gordon Brown , the former British prime minister, joined a global advisory board at Pimco last year. The advisory board’s members include Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman. Tony Blair , the British prime minister before Mr. Brown, joined JPMorgan Chase as a part-time senior adviser in 2008.

George Osborne
BlackRock
Great Britain
Banking and Finance


State to Audit No-Bid Award of City’s School Contracts

Abstract: The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli , is opening an audit of the City Education Department’s increasing practice of awarding contracts without competitive bidding. In the past five years such contracts have totaled $315 million. To keep down costs, competitive bidding is normally required of city agencies. But although the Education Department is controlled by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, it is by law a state-authorized entity free from some of the more stringent city financial regulations. School officials have said that awarding contracts without bidding gives them more flexibility and allows them to get better and faster results, but the city has been fiercely criticized for a rapid rise in no-bid contracts since Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein came into office. In 2002, when the school system was still controlled by the Board of Education, 32 contracts totaling $11.9 million were awarded without bidding. In 2003, after Mr. Klein took over, the number nearly doubled and totaled more than $56 million. They reached a high of $121 million in 2006, then dropped again last year to $62 million, according to the city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, who has been a critic of the practice. She pressed the state for the audit last fall. “This is about transparency and accountability,” Ms. Gotbaum said. “Why are they awarding so many contracts without any other consideration? It may all be perfectly legitimate and fine, but we don’t know why.” In a letter sent to Mr. Klein on Tuesday, the comptroller’s office said it would begin the audit on Jan. 21. Audits typically take between six months and a year. The audit was reported in The Daily News on Friday. Most city education contracts are still competitively bid, but some of those that were not have been particularly well publicized. The city came under tough criticism in 2006 over a $15.8 million deal with Alvarez & Marsal, a consulting firm that was hired to restructure the schools’ financial operations and cut as much as $200 million from the city’s more than $15 billion budget. The consulting firm also restructured several school bus routes to save money, but the plan infuriated parents when it took effect last January. Some of the consultants charged as much as $450 an hour for their work, and were able to bill as much as $500 a day for such expenses as transportation and housing.

Education Department
New York City
no-bid
Education and Schools
DiNapoli Thomas P


Refco Executive Gets 10 Years for Fraud

Abstract: Tone N. Grant, former president of Refco, once the largest independent commodities brokerage firm, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in a $2.4 billion fraud that involved hiding huge trading losses from clients. His sentence was handed down by Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of Federal District Court in Manhattan at a hearing Thursday. No surrender date was set. Mr. Grant, 64, was the lone top executive at Refco to go to trial. In February, the former chief executive, Phillip R. Bennett, pleaded guilty to 20 criminal counts, a month before he was to go to trial. Mr. Bennett was sentenced last month to 16 years in prison. He is appealing that sentence. Refco unraveled in 2005, shortly after it became a public company, after revealing that Mr. Bennett had hidden $430 million in bad customer debt. Refco stock plummeted and the company filed for bankruptcy. Judge Buchwald said Mr. Grant had played a pivotal role in the fraud, rejecting arguments that Mr. Bennett was the main culprit. She said Mr. Grant issued “totally false” statements to the public and showed a clear willingness to lie. Roger Zuckerman, one of his lawyers, said after the sentencing: “Mr. Grant continues to maintain his innocence. We look forward to the appeal.” Prosecutors say total losses in the fraud totaled $2.4 billion. After recoveries, the losses still exceed $1.5 billion, the judge said on Thursday. Mr. Grant was convicted in April by a federal jury of five criminal counts: conspiracy, securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering.

Refco Inc
Frauds and Swindling
Sentences (Criminal)


Roger Chapman Wins U.S. Senior Open

Abstract: Roger Chapman of England won the United States Senior Open by two strokes after shooting a four-under 66 Sunday in Lake Orion, Mich., to finish the tournament at 10 under. Chapman, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Hale Irwin are the only players to win the Senior Open and Senior P.G.A. Championship in the same year. Chapman’s career highlight before this year was a European Tour win in Brazil 12 years ago. ¶ Zach Johnson birdied the second hole of a sudden-death playoff to beat Troy Matteson and capture the PGA’s John Deere Classic in Silvis, Ill. (REUTERS) Jeev Milkha Singh, a 40-year-old from India, beat Francesco Molinariin a playoff to win the Scottish Open in Inverness and secure a late berth in the British Open. Singh made a 15-foot putt for birdieon No. 18 to win the title. (AP)


A Modest Proposal to End Those Outlandish Bonuses

Abstract: Maybe bankers don’t really need big bonuses. That idea is heretical in financial circles, but it may in fact be valid. The financial system might well work better if most pay at financial institutions came in the form of fixed salary, not sharply varying bonuses. Bankers’ pay might be too high or too low — that is another question — but the mix between fixed and variable looks oddly skewed in favor of the variable. Many bankers accept that their remuneration practices — bonuses often being a big multiple of base salaries — are anomalous in modern economies. When employees of large companies get bonuses, they are typically relatively small: 10 percent to 40 percent of base pay. But bankers think their business is different, for three reasons. Actually, they are more like three myths. Myth No. 1: The lure of a big bonus — and the threat of no bonus — is an incentive to perform well. It’s hard to see why that would be truer for traders, analysts and investment bankers than for doctors, teachers or midlevel executives at a consumer goods company. Employees work well for many reasons: for pay, but also to please customers or please themselves by doing a good job. If anything, the trend in big companies has been away from sharply variable pay, even for salespeople. Employers have found that while moderate bonuses help extract effort, pay that varies greatly over the short-term may inspire short-term thinking that can be bad for long-term business relationships. Investment banks are happy to talk about their commitment to “clients.” The bonus-first culture suggests they don’t quite mean it. Myth No. 2: Variable pay is an efficient and fair way to recognize individual performance. Again, that’s old-fashioned. Individual payments determined by straight commission were big at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The home seamstress knew what each garment was worth. But most professions have gotten over that. Too many people are involved in a successful enterprise to calculate individual contributions with any precision. The best way to recognize distinctive individual performances is through the labor market. “You’re fired” gives a clear sign to the especially weak, and “If you want a pay rise, show me a job offer” helps the very good find the right remuneration level. Bankers are happy to hop from one job to another, but they also often want “eat-what-you-kill” pay — say 40 percent of all commissions generated. That would be fine if individuals really mattered at investment banks. But Goldman Sachs might be revealing more than it intends by calling its personnel department “Human Capital Management.” Employee capital may not be as fungible as financial capital, but the knee-jerk hiring and firing at the beginning and end of investment banking cycles suggest that individual differentiation isn’t all that important. Myth No. 3: The bonus-skewed system gives banks added flexibility to respond to market conditions. Paying higher base salaries, it is said, would saddle banks with high fixed costs and enrich bankers come the next crisis. But it hasn’t worked that way. In practice, structuring pay mainly as bonuses encourages banks to pay out too much of their profit when times are good and fire too many people when times are bad. Properly set, higher base salaries and lower bonuses would have the effect of lowering overall pay in good years. And that would leave banks with more profit to store up that could finance the various costs of a downturn — like absorbing loan losses and keeping skilled but underutilized people on the payroll. Of course, employees deserve to share in the success of their firm. And individuals who do better than others should be rewarded with larger bonuses. But it might do investment banks and the world no harm if salaries accounted for a higher proportion of the total package. CHRISTOPHER HUGHES

Wages and Salaries
Banks and Banking
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Investment Banking


It Was Soriano's Move, So He Made It

Abstract: JUPITER, Fla., March 22 - Like so many times in the past, Alfonso Soriano started a double play during Wednesday's game between the Washington Nationals and the St. Louis Cardinals. Only this time, he started it from the outfield. After refusing to play left field Monday, Soriano not only accepted the switch from second base, he insisted on playing there after Nationals Manager Frank Robinson had decided to give him the day off. "I want to play this game because I love this game," Soriano said. "That's why I changed my mind." Soriano was penciled in Monday to lead off and play left field against the Los Angeles Dodgers. But when the Nationals took the field in the first inning, left field was vacant, sparking a bizarre confrontation between Soriano and the team. Soriano apparently had few options but to acquiesce to the Nationals' wishes. After Monday's game, General Manager Jim Bowden threatened to put him on the rarely used disqualified list Thursday for failing to honor his contract. If that happened, Soriano would not have gotten paid or received credit for time served, preventing him from becoming a free agent after the season. Soriano, who will make $10 million this season, said he did not change his mind because of the money. In 782 career games as a fielder, Soriano has played 762 at second base, with the other 20 split between third and short; he has never played in the outfield. But he said that he was now committed to playing left field for the rest of the season. "Try to do the best I can in left field," said Soriano, who never hid his unwillingness to leave second base after he was traded to Washington by the Texas Rangers in December. Using George Lombard's outfielder's glove, Soriano settled under a fly ball hit by Albert Pujols in the fourth inning. After making the catch, he threw to second base to double off David Eckstein, who had overzealously headed to third. "I never think I want to make a double play in the outfield, but I did it today," Soriano said, laughing. He played the entire game, which the Cardinals won, 9-3, but did not have another chance to make a putout. Soriano, who was making his Nationals debut after spending most of spring training with the Dominican Republic team at the World Baseball Classic, went 1 for 3 from the leadoff spot, doubling down the left-field line in the fourth inning. "I liked the at-bats he had today," Robinson said. "Very patient at the plate." Robinson met briefly with Soriano a few hours before the game. Robinson said he needed to hear from Soriano directly that he was committed to the switch, not just for one game but for the season. "When he answered me that he was willing to play left field, that was the end of the conversation," Robinson said. Robinson put Soriano on his lineup card Monday after meeting with him and Bowden. Soriano said that he indicated during the meeting that he was not ready to play in the outfield against the Dodgers. He said a miscommunication led to the confusing moments in the first inning before he was replaced. For now, the pressure is off the Nationals, who need help in the outfield. They traded three players to Texas for Soriano, including center fielder Brad Wilkerson, and right fielder Jose Guillen is recovering from off-season shoulder surgery and a wrist injury. The Nationals already have a former All-Star at second base in Jose Vidro, which explains why they were not about to move him for Soriano, who led second basemen in errors each of the last five seasons. But offensively, Soriano is among the elite players in the game, having hit at least 36 homers three times in his seven seasons in the majors. Although the Nationals were relieved that a potentially combustible situation had been defused, Bowden, who has a reputation as a dealmaker, may still try to trade Soriano, who at some point could resent the switch. "The issue's never closed," Bowden said. "It's baseball." Bowden said the Nationals would have never traded for Soriano if they had known he would refuse to move to the outfield. They even tried trading him recently, but were unable to find equal value. And Bowden did not sound as convinced as Robinson about Soriano's commitment to the new position. "My preference probably would have been to trade him so he could have been happy and play the position he wanted to play," Bowden said. "But we didn't find a deal we liked. I wasn't going to make a bad deal." A few minutes later, however, Bowden told reporters that his preference was to keep Soriano because he makes the Nationals a better team. Bowden has a lot riding on Soriano, who is 30. He surrendered a lot of chips to acquire him even though he received no assurances that Soriano would agree to switching positions. The Rangers would not even allow the Nationals to meet with Soriano before the deal. In many ways, Bowden's reputation hinges on a trade he now admits was risky. Soriano said that he had not requested a trade in recent days. If he plays well this season, he could then be marketed as a second baseman or an outfielder. Asked if he would like to be traded to a team that needs a second baseman, Soriano said: "I don't know. I don't make that decision."

WASHINGTON NATIONALS
SORIANO ALFONSO
BASEBALL


New Efforts in Europe to Bolster Lending

Abstract: PARIS — After a first round of costly bank bailouts and stimulus programs came up short, governments in Europe and the United States are moving more forcefully to assure that bailed-out banks lend more money to offset the recession that has engulfed both continents. On Monday, a day after officials of the incoming Obama administration promised to take steps to force banks to lend, Britain outlined details of a new £100 billion, or $147.5 billion, plan to limit banks’ losses from troubled assets in exchange for their pledge to increase the flow of credit. “In return for access to any government support, there will have to be an increase in lending, and that will be legally binding,” Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, said. As if to illustrate the depths of the problem, the Royal Bank of Scotland warned on Monday that it faced losses of up to £28 billion or $41 billion for 2008, a record for any British company. The bank’s already depressed shares fell nearly 67 percent, touching off a rout in European financial stocks that could extend to United States markets when they reopen on Tuesday. The second round of efforts in Britain and Europe to jump-start lending comes as the region girds for a more painful recession than expected. The European Commission warned on Monday that the 27-nation European Union faced a “deep and protracted recession” that would shrink the economy by 1.8 percent in 2009 and cut 3.5 million jobs across the bloc. Adding to the sense of urgency, Standard and Poor’s ratings agency downgraded Spain’s sovereign debt from its AAA rating. Greece’s sovereign debt was cut on Wednesday, rekindling worries about what might happen to the euro zone as a whole if a member were to default on its public debt. The bleak prospects have prompted leaders to try other ways of urging banks to lend as it becomes more clear that the bailout measures pledged by governments at the height of the financial crisis in autumn have not flushed away the bad loans that still clog the system. If anything, the problems are set to worsen as the downturn accelerates. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is to meet on Tuesday evening with French bankers to press them to lend more money to French businesses. “The banks must understand that the times have changed,” Christine Lagarde, the finance minister, told a business daily, Les Échos, on Monday. The French plan would require banks receiving new capital injections to make “precise commitments,” including giving up bonuses this year, she said. Late Sunday, Denmark announced an $18 billion aid plan for its banks, saying it would inject the funds on the condition that the recipients increase lending. In Germany, Deutsche Bank’s chief executive, Josef Ackermann, who is also chairman of the Institute of International Finance, an organization of the world’s largest financial institutions, suggested last week that the creation of so-called bad banks might be the way forward. In a bad-bank arrangement, governments would buy up scorched assets, said George Magnus, senior economic adviser at UBS Investment Bank in London. That contrasts with the method now being used in the United States and Britain, where troubled assets remain on the balance sheet, but losses beyond some limit are insured by the government. “There is no ‘right’ way and both schemes have their merits and drawbacks under given and local circumstances,” Mr. Magnus wrote in a research note. He said the bad-bank plan might be more suited to the United States, while Britain might be able to manage with its plan for an insurance program because it has far fewer banks. Members of the incoming Obama administration are considering proposals that include buying up bad assets, a return to the original vision of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program . “The focus isn’t going to be on the needs of banks,” Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “It’s going to be on the needs of the economy for credit.” Simon Adamson, a banking analyst at CreditSights, an independent research firm in London, said he thought that Europe was also “edging toward the creation of bad banks.” Under Britain’s latest bank bailout, its Treasury will “protect financial institutions against exposure to exceptional future credit losses on certain portfolios of assets” in return for a fee. Participating institutions will take the initial losses, with the Treasury bearing about 90 percent of the rest. Britain’s central bank could buy up to £50 billion worth of “high-quality assets” from banks, giving it more monetary policy tools after it cut its benchmark interest rate to a record of 1.5 percent this month. The government is also extending measures to increase liquidity, including a £250 billion program to let banks to issue government-backed bonds. The latest steps would cost taxpayers an additional £100 billion on top of the £37 billion plan announced in October and a £20 billion stimulus plan announced in November. Mr. Brown said he was angry at Royal Bank, whose losses include as much as £20 billion of good-will write-downs from the acquisition of a portion of another bank. “Almost all their losses are in the subprime markets in America and related to the acquisition of the bank ABN Amro,” he said. “And these are irresponsible risks, which were taken by a bank with people’s money in the United Kingdom.” European bank stocks fell sharply on Monday on fears that more pain, including the wiping out of some shareholders, might lie ahead. Last week, the Irish government nationalized the Anglo Irish Bank, rendering equity stakes worthless. Peter Dixon, a global equities economist in London for Commerzbank, said the latest British rescue plans were “a step in the right direction.” But, he added, “In the end, either banks will have to be nationalized or have their bad loans split off into another institution. That’s the only way they will be clear about their capital positions.”

Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008)


Finding Trash and Worse, but So Far, No Ship With Treasure

Abstract: It did not have the glamour of the Titanic, the infamy of the pirate ship Whydah, or the historical importance of Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria. But for more than two centuries, an ordinary British frigate pressed into service during the Revolutionary War has been the object of countless searches in and around the East River. The H.M.S. Hussar might have been forgotten along with other shipwrecks lying at the bottom of New York’s waters, if not for one thing: an oft-repeated story that it might have gone down with a fortune in gold coins. Now, after Hurricane Sandy’s wrath remade parts of the city’s coastline, could the ship have finally been found off the South Bronx? Far-fetched, perhaps, but not to Steven Smith, who discovered curved wooden joints last month, on the shores of the South Bronx, that might have formed the side of an old ship. They were partially submerged in the river, and had been, until the storm last fall, hidden under layers of concrete blocks and building scrap. “Hey, this could be the Hussar,” Mr. Smith, 60, exclaimed recently, before swearing a reporter and photographer for The New York Times to secrecy about the location, for fear of being overrun by treasure hunters. The Hussar is the ship that got away. It has long been part of the lore of a South Bronx community that is among the poorest in the nation, promising untold riches for anyone with the imagination and courage to pluck it from the mud and trash of the East River. Its call has enthralled generations of residents and historians, and lured numerous fortune seekers. “The Hussar sits out there as a ship of dreams,” said James Sinclair, a marine archaeologist who was part of an expedition in 2000 to the Titanic shipwreck. “It has value because it’s part of the story, it’s part of the history of New York.” Historical records indicate that in November 1780 the Hussar was sailing through Hell Gate — a treacherous strait between Randalls Island and Queens — when it hit rocks and sank. Soon afterward, a story began circulating that the ship, which normally did not carry gold, was loaded with coins to pay British troops in the colonies. The British denied there was gold aboard the Hussar, but that failed to stop the story from spreading. Treasure hunters were not far behind, among them Simon Lake, an inventor of the modern-day submarine who lost part of his fortune searching for the ship and its supposed cargo. The New Yorker magazine, in a 1934 article about Mr. Lake’s quest, noted that “the first attempts to reach the Hussar were made while her masts were still visible above the water.” These efforts later included trying to grab the ship with an apparatus that looked like “huge iron tongs,” in 1823, and deploying a salvage ship, in 1880, that was financed by a company called Treasure Trove. Image Mr. Smith thinks some curved wooden joints he found last month on the South Bronx shore might be part of a ship. Credit Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times The Hussar captured the public’s imagination, and even inspired the Lorillard tobacco company, which owned a mill in the Bronx, to name a line of cigarettes Old Gold in the ship’s honor, said Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian. Eventually, the Hussar’s location became a mystery, obscured by murky waters, fast-flowing currents and shifting topography. A salvage expert, Barry L. Clifford, fresh from his discovery of the pirate ship Whydah off Cape Cod, arrived in the mid-1980s with a seasoned crew of two-dozen divers and archaeologists. For the next three winters, they dove nearly every day. At one point, they thought they had found the Hussar, using the kind of sonar technology that had pinpointed the Titanic. They were wrong, of course. (Mr. Clifford said the ship they uncovered was the same size as the Hussar and even had the same hatch openings.) “Every other day we were breaking open the Champagne bottles because we thought we found it,” Mr. Clifford said. After sinking over $1 million into the hunt, Mr. Clifford and his crew finally packed up their dive gear. They saw all forms of human waste, and even a dead body, but no Hussar. “It’s a very tough place to dive,” he said. “If you asked me if I’d do it today, I’d say no.” The latest claim to have found the Hussar suggests that it might have come to rest under fill that was used to extend the shoreline off the South Bronx for more than a century. Hurricane Sandy swept away the top layers of the fill, uncovering potential treasures. The wooden joints Mr. Smith saw appear only at low tide. Mr. Smith hunched over the curved joints recently, tracing them to a thick beam that might have been part of the ship’s ribs. He scraped away mud and seaweed. The wood frame appeared to continue under the landfill. There was no sign of any treasure. Mr. Smith said he was in the process of contacting experts to identify the wooden remains. He acknowledged, though, that part of the fun was not knowing, like holding a lottery ticket before checking the numbers. There are skeptics, understandably. “Every previous attempt to try to raise the Hussar has never found it,” Mr. Ultan, the historian, pointed out. “But we can always add to the lore. After all, Edgar Allan Poe lived here in the Bronx and he invented the detective story.” Mr. Smith has been hearing about the Hussar since he first came to the Bronx in 1998 to develop a power plant along the waterfront. The plant was never built, but he ended up acquiring the site himself and spending millions to clean and restore it, including planting wetlands that were partly destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Mr. Smith said that the Hussar’s gold, if there ever was any, would probably have scattered and washed away long ago. Instead, he said, he hoped the remains of the ship — whether or not it turned out to be the Hussar — would enrich the Bronx as a tangible piece of its history, and serve as a reminder of the borough’s once bustling waterfront. “The treasure is the land,” he said, waving his arm at the shoreline. “However, I’ll take whatever gold I can get.”

Shipwreck
American Revolutionary War
South Bronx
Hurricane Sandy
Great Britain


U.S. Soldiers Leave Outpost in Afghan ‘Valley of Death’

Abstract: KORANGAL OUTPOST, Afghanistan — The last American soldier left here Wednesday, abandoning a base surrounded by tall cedar trees and high mountains, in a place that came to be called the Valley of Death. The near daily battles here were won, but almost always at the cost of wounded or dead. There were never enough soldiers to crush the insurgency, and after four years, it became clear that there was not much worth winning in this sparsely populated valley. Closing Korangal Outpost in Kunar Province, a powerful symbol of some of the Afghan war’s most ferocious fights, and a potential harbinger of America’s retreat, is a tacit admission that putting the base there in the first place was a costly mistake. It is also part of an effort by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of forces here since last summer, to consolidate and refocus forces where they might change the momentum of what had become a losing contest. Fighting for isolated mountain valleys like this one, even if they are hide-outs for clusters of Taliban , was no longer sustainable. It did more to spawn insurgents than defeat them. Better to put those soldiers in cities and towns where they could protect people and help them connect to the Afghan government, he reasoned. “There’s never a perfect answer,” General McChrystal said as he visited this outpost on April 8 for a briefing as the withdrawal began. “I care deeply about everybody who has been hurt here, but I can’t do anything about it. I can do something about people who might be hurt in the future. “The battle changes, the war changes,” he added. “If you don’t understand the dynamics, you have no chance of getting it right. We’ve been slower here than I would have liked.” Forty-two Americans died fighting in the Korangal Valley and hundreds were wounded, according to the military. Most died in the period from 2006 to 2009. Many Afghan soldiers died as well, and in larger numbers, since they had poorer equipment. In a war characterized by small, brutal battles, the Korangal had more than its share, and its abandonment has left soldiers who fought there confronting confusion, anger and pain. “It hurts,” said Specialist Robert Soto of Company B, First Battalion, 26th Infantry, who spent 12 months in the valley from 2008 to 2009. “It hurts on a level that — three units from the Army, we all did what we did up there. And we all lost men. We all sacrificed. I was 18 years old when I got there. I really would not have expected to go through what we went through at that age.” During the period Specialist Soto served there half of his platoon was wounded or killed, according to the unit’s commanding officer. “It confuses me, why it took so long for them to realize that we weren’t making progress up there,” Specialist Soto said. Korangal Outpost was the third area of eastern Afghanistan where combat outposts closed: In 2007 and 2008 two posts and a smaller satellite base were closed in the Waygal Valley of Nuristan Province; in 2009 two posts were closed in the Kamdesh region of Nuristan. Along with the main Korangal outpost, five satellite bases closed; at least two, Restrepo and Vimoto, were named for soldiers who died there. Perched on a steep hillside sprinkled with gnarled trees, Korangal Outpost is little more than a dozen structures made of stone and wood and is heavily sandbagged. It is a primitive-looking place built into the hillside, like the nearby villages. Farther down the valley tower the deodar cedars that the Korangalis cut down to make their living. The vulnerability of these combat outposts was hardly surprising. Though sparsely populated, Kunar and Nuristan Provinces have a long history of strident resistance to outsiders. Kunar was one of the first places to rise up against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, giving the area the label of “cradle of jihad.” Much of the American mission in the last couple of years has been to try to get the reclusive people who live here to recognize the Afghan government and work with it. In some places that approach is reaping modest results. Not so in the Korangal. The Korangalis speak a language unrelated to Pashto or Dari, the two main Afghan tongues. They practice a conservative brand of Islam and have repeatedly rebuffed American offers of aid. The area remains under the influence of a Taliban shadow governor along with two Taliban leaders, Hajji Mateen and Nasrullah, who make their money from the valley’s lumber. The sawmill and lumberyard run by Hajji Mateen was seized by Marines to build the Korangal outpost in April 2006. The troops had set out to penetrate the six-mile-long valley, but never made it more than halfway. There have been only two missions to the valley’s southern end since 2005, said Maj. Ukiah Senti, the executive officer of Second Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, Task Force Lethal, which oversees Korangal and neighboring areas. He said the antagonism from local Taliban and insurgents was so great that it would have taken a battalion-size force to make a foray there. The Korangal Outpost was opened to root out Taliban fighters hiding deep in the mountains, according to soldiers who fought there. Even before then, it was apparent that the valley’s inhabitants were hostile to outsiders. In June 2005 a four-man Navy Seals team was ambushed on a ridge above the valley; three members were killed, and a helicopter sent to rescue them was shot down, killing eight more members of the Navy Seals and eight other servicemen. While there were Taliban in the valley and operatives of Al Qaeda passed through, Korangal was not a major haven, said Maj. James Fussell, a former Army Special Forces soldier who spent nearly two years fighting here, from 2004 to 2005 and again from 2008 to 2009. He recently was co-author of an analysis of the mission in Kunar and Nuristan for the Institute for the Study of War . “Occasionally a Taliban or Al Qaeda member was transiting through that location, but the Korangalis were by no means part of the insurgency,” he said. “Unfortunately, now they are, because they were willing to accept any help to get us out.” American commanders sporadically discussed closing the base almost since it was put there, but over the last 18 months the plan was pushed by Col. Randy George, who commands Task Force Mountain Warrior, which is responsible for four eastern Afghan provinces: Kunar, Nuristan, Nangarhar and Laghman. “We’re not going to go deep into these valleys and bring them into the 21st century in a couple of months,” said Colonel George, who determined early on that keeping forces in the Korangal and in the Kamdesh region was not an effective way to use resources or win over local people. Major Senti concurred. “Realistically no one needs to be there,” he said. “We’re not really overwatching anything other than safeguarding ourselves.” The current company commander, Capt. Mark Moretti, Company B, Second Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, said he still hoped that his efforts to connect the Korangal elders with the district center in Nangalam would bear fruit, but other soldiers expressed skepticism. “They are connected to the district government now a little bit,” said First Sgt. Bryan Reed, Company B, Second Battalion, 12th Regiment. “But it’s not one of their priorities.” Looking back, soldiers say the effort shows how choices made from a lack of understanding or consultation with local people can drive them into the arms of the insurgents. “We had the best intentions, but when you don’t fully understand the culture” it is impossible to make the right choices, Major Fussell said. A number of the infantrymen who fought here ruefully accept that the time has long passed for the military to spend lives and resources in a small and isolated valley that could not have been won without many more troops. “It is frustrating, because we bled there and now we’re leaving,” said Capt. John P. Rodriguez, who as a first lieutenant served there with the 26th Infantry Regiment. “So you question: Were those sacrifices worth it? But just because you lost guys in a place, doesn’t mean you need to stay there.” An earlier version of this article mistakenly refered to Capt. John P. Rodriquez as a first lieutenant in the Marines. He served as a lieutenant with the 26th Infantry Regiment.

United States Defense and Military Forces


A Family Consents to a Medical Gift, 62 Years Later

Abstract: Henrietta Lacks was only 31 when she died of cervical cancer in 1951 in a Baltimore hospital. Not long before her death, doctors removed some of her tumor cells. They later discovered that the cells could thrive in a lab, a feat no human cells had achieved before. Soon the cells, called HeLa cells, were being shipped from Baltimore around the world. In the 62 years since — twice as long as Ms. Lacks’s own life — her cells have been the subject of more than 74,000 studies, many of which have yielded profound insights into cell biology, vaccines, in vitro fertilization and cancer. But Henrietta Lacks, who was poor, black and uneducated, never consented to her cells’ being studied. For 62 years, her family has been left out of the decision-making about that research. Now, over the past four months, the National Institutes of Health has come to an agreement with the Lacks family to grant them some control over how Henrietta Lacks’s genome is used. “In 20 years at N.I.H., I can’t remember something like this,” Dr. Francis S. Collins, the institute’s director, said in an interview. The agreement, which does not provide the family with the right to potential earnings from future research on Ms. Lacks’s genome, was prompted by two projects to sequence the genome of HeLa cells, the second of which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Though the agreement, which was announced Wednesday, is a milestone in the saga of Ms. Lacks, it also draws attention to a lack of policies to balance the benefits of studying genomes with the risks to the privacy of people whose genomes are studied — as well as their relatives. As the journalist Rebecca Skloot recounted in her 2010 best-seller, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” it was not until 1973, when a scientist called to ask for blood samples to study the genes her children had inherited from her, that Ms. Lacks’s family learned that their mother’s cells were, in effect, scattered across the planet. Some members of the family tried to find more information. Some wanted a portion of the profits that companies were earning from research on HeLa cells. They were largely ignored for years. Image Henrietta Lacks in the 1940s. Credit Lacks Family, via The Henrietta Lacks Foundation Ms. Lacks is survived by children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many still living in or around Baltimore. And this March they experienced an intense feeling of déjà vu. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory published the genome of a line of HeLa cells, making it publicly available for downloading. Another study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health at the University of Washington, was about to be published in Nature. The Lacks family was made aware of neither project. “I said, ‘No, this is not right,’ ” Jeri Lacks Whye, one of Henrietta Lacks’s grandchildren, said in an interview. “They should not have this up unless they have consent from the family.” Officials at the National Institutes of Health now acknowledge that they should have contacted the Lacks family when researchers first applied for a grant to sequence the HeLa genome. They belatedly addressed the problem after the family raised its objections. The European researchers took down their public data, and the publication of the University of Washington paper was stopped. Dr. Collins and Kathy L. Hudson, the National Institutes of Health deputy director for science, outreach and policy, made three trips to Baltimore to meet with the Lacks family to discuss the research and what to do about it. “The biggest concern was privacy — what information was actually going to be out there about our grandmother, and what information they can obtain from her sequencing that will tell them about her children and grandchildren and going down the line,” Ms. Lacks Whye said. The Lacks family and the N.I.H. settled on an agreement: the data from both studies should be stored in the institutes’ database of genotypes and phenotypes . Researchers who want to use the data can apply for access and will have to submit annual reports about their research. A so-called HeLa Genome Data Access working group at the N.I.H. will review the applications. Two members of the Lacks family will be members. The agreement does not provide the Lacks family with proceeds from any commercial products that may be developed from research on the HeLa genome. With this agreement in place, the University of Washington researchers were then able to publish their results. Their analysis goes beyond the European study in several ways. Most important, they show precisely where each gene is situated in HeLa DNA. A human genome is actually two genomes, each passed down from a parent. The two versions of a gene may be identical, or they may carry genetic variations setting them apart. Image Cancer cells taken from Ms. Lacks not long before her death in 1951 have been the subject of more than 74,000 studies. Credit Maggie Bartlett/NHGRI “If you think of the variations as beads on a string, you really have two strings,” said Dr. Jay Shendure, who led the Washington genome study. “The way we sequence genomes today, for the most part we just get a list of where the genes are located, but no information about which ones are on which string.” Dr. Shendure and his colleagues have developed new methods that allow them to gather that information. By reconstructing both strings of the HeLa genome, they could better understand how Ms. Lacks’s healthy cells had been transformed over the past 60 years. For example, they could see how Ms. Lacks got cancer. Cervical cancer is caused by human papillomavirus infections. The virus accelerates the growth of infected cells, which may go on to become tumors. Dr. Shendure and his colleagues discovered the DNA of a human papillomavirus embedded in Ms. Lacks’s genome. By landing at a particular spot, Ms. Lacks’s virus may have given her cancer cells their remarkable endurance. “That’s one of the frequent questions that I and the Lacks family get whenever we talk about this stuff,” Ms. Skloot said. “The answer was always, ‘We don’t know.’ Now, there’s at least somewhat of an answer: because it happened to land right there.” Richard Sharp, the director of biomedical ethics at the Mayo Clinic, said he thought the agreement “was pretty well handled.” But he warned that it was only a “one-off solution,” rather than a broad policy to address the tension between genome research and the privacy of relatives, now that recent research has demonstrated that it is possible to reveal a person’s identity through sequencing. Dr. Sharp considered it impractical to set up a working group of scientists and relatives for every genome with these issues. “There’s absolutely a need for a new policy,” he said. Eric S. Lander, the founding director of the Broad Institute, a science research center at Harvard and M.I.T., said resolving these issues was crucial to taking advantage of the knowledge hidden in our genomes. “If we are going to solve cancer, it’s going to take a movement of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of patients willing to contribute information from their cancer genomes towards a common good,” Dr. Lander said. “We are going to need to have ways to have patients feel comfortable doing that. We can’t do it without a foundation of respect and trust.”

Henrietta Lacks
Genetics and Heredity
DNA
Research
NIH
Francis S Collins


Marcos Cruz Is Fatally Stabbed Trying to Stop a Bronx Fight

Abstract: A Bronx man who the police said was trying to be “a good guy” by breaking up a fight early Saturday was fatally stabbed by one of the people involved in the fight, according to the authorities. The stabbed man, Marcos Cruz, 27, was pronounced dead at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center. The stabbing took place about 3:30 a.m. outside a chicken restaurant on East 149th Street near the Grand Concourse. Investigators said a fight had broken out, though what started it and how many people were involved was not immediately clear. Also unclear was whether Mr. Cruz knew the people involved. Several hours later, a number of people who knew Mr. Cruz gathered in front of the apartment building where he lived, on Brook Avenue in Mott Haven, and spoke of the violence that had swept him away. Many of them were crying. “He was a loved man,” said one of his brothers. Anthony Greene, 25, who wiped away tears as he spoke. “He was a good man. He lived for his family.” Mr. Greene said he believed that Mr. Cruz had been at a club with a former companion before he was killed. As Mr. Greene spoke, the other people, about 20 or so, shared memories of Mr. Cruz as they stood outside a store, A & B Liquors, where an improvised memorial was arrayed around a street lamp. “What happened is still vague,” said George Ortega, 27, who said he had known Mr. Cruz for about 15 years. “What happened should have never happened.” As part of the memorial, someone had taped three photographs of Mr. Cruz to the lamp’s base; on the sidewalk, people had placed plastic crates topped with bouquets of flowers, and about 20 lighted candles flickered in a cardboard box. Those who gathered near the memorial said Mr. Cruz had had some difficult times in his life, and had sold cocaine and marijuana in the past. But Mr. Greene said his brother, who lived with him, along with another brother and a sister, had tried to atone. “He preached to the youth not to follow him,” Mr. Greene said. “But he would give you his last.”The police said Mr. Cruz had been arrested about a dozen times, on drug, weapons-possession and other charges, since May 2002. His most recent arrest was on Feb. 25, when he was charged with resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration, the police said. “He’s no saint,” said a law enforcement official, who added, “Bad guys are good guys, too.” By Saturday evening, as detectives from the 44th Precinct were investigating the killing, no arrests had been made. A woman who works at a store near the scene of the killing said she heard loud noises as she was opening up, and looked out the front windows. There, by the corner, she saw what she believed to be the aftermath of the stabbing. “The guy’s girl was right outside,” said the woman, who declined to be identified. “She was with him. She wasn’t crying. I don’t think she thought he was dead.”


5 in New Delhi Rape Case Face Murder Charges

Abstract: NEW DELHI — Rape, murder and other charges were filed on Thursday against five men suspected of carrying out the gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student who later died of her injuries in a case that has prompted outrage and protests across India . A court official announced that beyond rape and murder, the charges include destruction of evidence and the attempted murder of the woman’s companion, a list of crimes that could result in the rare imposition of the death penalty. A court official said the charges would be made public on Saturday. A sixth suspect is a juvenile, and his case will be handled separately for now. The case against the five men will be referred almost immediately to a new fast-track court set up in recent days to handle cases involving crimes against women, officials said. That court is expected to hold a trial soon in stark contrast to the apathy and years of delay that Indian rape victims often face when seeking justice. The five are accused of luring the woman and her friend onto a bus in South Delhi, beating them and abusing her so brutally with a metal rod during the rape that she sustained fatal internal injuries. The woman clung to life for two weeks but died Saturday in a Singapore hospital, where she had been transferred for special care. Gang rapes have become common in India, a country that some surveys suggest has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world. Rape complaints increased 25 percent between 2006 and 2011, although it is impossible to know whether this represents a real increase in crime or simply an increased willingness by victims to file charges and by the police to accept them. But something about the recent crime caught the public’s attention. Among the reasons could be the randomness of the crime (most rape victims know their abusers), its brutality and the sympathetic profile of the victim. The outpouring of anger at the crime caught the government by surprise, and there has been widespread criticism of its aggressive response to protesters, which included tear gas, water cannons and beatings by truncheon-wielding riot police officers. The government invoked a terrorism law that prohibits even small gatherings, and it closed a huge portion of the capital to vehicular and pedestrian traffic. The government’s reaction fed longtime criticism that India’s police are too often used to guard the powerful from the people rather than to protect the people from predators. India’s police are generally poorly trained, deeply corrupt and often viewed by women as predators rather than protectors. The case has also led to a continuing discussion about the conflict between the aspirations of India’s rising middle class and a deeply conservative and patriarchal culture that views the recent educational and economic successes of Indian women with unease and even alarm. Kishwar Desai, an author, wrote an opinion article in The Indian Express on Thursday that said the gang rape illustrated to some that “a certain class of men is deeply uncomfortable with women displaying their independence, receiving education and joining the work force. The gang rape becomes a form of subduing the women, collectively, and establishing their male superiority.” Because of the intense interest prompted by the case, a crowd of television cameras and reporters jostled inside and outside of the courthouse for much of Thursday. And with officials refusing to provide routine information about whether the suspects would arrive at the courthouse, rumors about the day’s events ricocheted around the media scrum like a drop of water on a hot frying pan.


Bob Wall, a Former Kings Captain, Follows Los Angeles’s Run

Abstract: LOS ANGELES — For Bob Wall, the first captain of the Los Angeles Kings , watching his hockey descendants play for the Stanley Cup on Wednesday night compounds the personal significance that June 6 has had for 48 years. “That would be an awesome anniversary gift for my wife and myself,” said Wall, a defenseman who played for the Kings in their first three seasons and served as their captain in the first two. Those three seasons were the only full ones Wall spent in the N.H.L. He was to attend Game 4 as the team’s guest. The Kings gave Wall his chance to break into the N.H.L. in 1967, when the club chose him in an expansion draft that was the first step in transforming a six-member coterie into today’s 30-team behemoth. Wall, who had played only 40 games for the Detroit Red Wings over the previous three seasons, discovered that the Kings had selected him by reading The Toronto Star. “I didn’t know what to expect,” Wall said. “It was a brand new adventure for me and my family.” The draft also created the Philadelphia Flyers, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the St. Louis Blues, the former Minnesota North Stars (now the Dallas Stars) and the now-defunct California Seals, who played in Oakland. “There were a lot of players close to N.H.L. caliber,” Wall said. “It gave them a chance to prove that they could play in the National Hockey League.” That opportunity involved confronting culture shock, an owner’s whims and an intensely competitive locker room. “It wasn’t easy,” Wall, 69, said. “There wasn’t a whole bunch of fun the first year or the second year, as far as that goes. It was hard work.” The TV announcer Jiggs McDonald remembered Wall as projecting composure and generating respect in the midst of that travail. “His teammates liked him,” said McDonald, the Kings’ play-by-play voice for their first five seasons. “From his first day at training camp, Bob impressed me with his calmness, his laid-back approach to things. He had the wherewithal to think through things and then act. “He would talk to anyone about anything. He always had time for fans and the media.” Although Los Angeles had minor league hockey before the Kings arrived, fans in the 1960s focused on the Dodgers, the Rams, the University of Southern California’s football team and U.C.L.A.’s basketball team. “We had to sell the game to the fans,” Wall said. “It was a tough sell. We didn’t draw very many people in our own rink, unless we played against the Original Six teams. Against our own expansion teams, there were 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 people at the most. That was it.” Adjusting to the Los Angeles weather, Wall was not accustomed to going to practice in shorts and tank tops, he said. He had not been a captain before either. Wall viewed his role as “trying to keep peace between management and players, more than anything.” His first challenge involved getting the club to pay for training camp expenses. That was his initial exposure to the management’s disorganization. “When we came down here we were so lost,” Wall said. “We knew the hotel we were staying in, but I don’t think rooms were booked.” No pucks were available for the Kings’ first practice. A television producer lent the team a puck that the Hall of Famer Bernie Geoffrion had given him. “You begin to wonder,” Wall said. “‘Are we really a National Hockey League team? Is this the way it’s supposed to be?’ ” Such were the ways of Jack Kent Cooke, who owned not only the Kings, but also the Lakers and the Washington Redskins. Cooke tried to impose nicknames on the players and even dictated that goalie Terry Sawchuk play the final game of the Kings’ playoff series that inaugural season: a 9-4 loss to the North Stars. “He was very domineering,” Wall said of Cooke. Sawchuk, who spent one season with the Kings and retired in 1970, was the team’s only recognizable veteran. “There were only three of us, I think, who had any N.H.L. experience at all,” Wall said. “I thought, ‘Hey, we’ve got to work our buns off to survive.’ ” Wall, whom the Kings traded in 1970, retired from hockey in 1976. Yet he follows the Kings’ progress from his home in Minden, Ontario, about 120 miles northeast of Toronto. “After their run in the first round, I thought, ‘Oh boy, this team’s for real,’ ” Wall said. “I’m really impressed with the solid defensive game that they have. They play smart, poised hockey.” Watching the Kings also reminds Wall of his own hopes after he was drafted. “When expansion started in ’67, I felt like I was probably a seedling or a sapling that was planted in California,” he said. “It would be nice to have that seedling or sapling grow into something potent. Unfortunately, I wasn’t around to do that. But it’s nice to see it all come about.”

Wall Bob (1942- )
Los Angeles Kings
Stanley Cup
Hockey Ice
Los Angeles (Calif)


As Markets Seesaw, China’s Central Bank Tries to Allay Concern on Tight Credit

Abstract: HONG KONG — The Chinese central bank reassured investors worried about a lingering credit squeeze and declared that it had already been selectively supporting bank liquidity, as Chinese stock markets swung wildly again Tuesday after several days of volatility. The central bank, People’s Bank of China, eager to rein in soaring lending growth and financial risk, initially refrained from intervening as bank-to-bank interest rates soared last week, but then apparently released more money for lenders. Uncertainty over the central bank’s position produced wide trading swings Tuesday, with the main Chinese stock indexes dropping to their lowest levels since early 2009 before recovering most of the day’s losses near the end of trading. The Shanghai composite index, which tumbled 5.3 percent Monday, slumped more than 5 percent again by early afternoon Tuesday. It recovered almost all of those losses to close down 0.2 percent. The index’s total decline since a peak in early February has been nearly 20 percent. After China’s stock markets closed, the People’s Bank of China issued a statement apparently meant to soothe investors’ nerves and maintain pressure on banks deemed to be carrying too much risk. “In recent days, the central bank has provided liquidity support to some financial institutions that meet the demands of macro prudence,” the bank said on its Web site. “Some banks with ample liquidity have also begun to play a stabilizing role in circulating capital into markets.” On Tuesday the bank pledged that it would apply open market operations — buying or selling securities to manage liquidity and rates — and other methods to offset “short-term abnormal volatility, stabilize market expectations and maintain stability in monetary markets.” The reassurances were accompanied by a warning to commercial banks to contain risk and to report promptly any “sudden major problems.” Chinese banks that follow government policies in lending practices and risk controls can expect support from the central bank if they have brief capital shortfalls, the bank said. But wayward banks can expect tougher treatment, it suggested. “For institutions that have problems in their liquidity management, corresponding measures will be taken on a case-by-case basis, while maintaining the overall stability of money markets,” it said. “The stock markets are continuing to react to the very elevated funding costs,” said Dariusz Kowalczyk, a senior economist and strategist at Crédit Agricole in Hong Kong, referring to the recent surge in interbank lending rates. Those rates determine what banks pay to borrow from each other, often to cover short-term obligations. Interbank lending rates, which began to decline last Friday, continued to do so Tuesday. The benchmark overnight lending rate, a gauge of liquidity in the financial market, stood at 5.736 percent. That was down from 6.489 percent on Monday and well below the record high of 13.44 percent reached last Thursday. But with rates still well above where they were in the last 18 months, around 3 percent, anxiety over the effect on the financial system and the economy persisted Tuesday. The central bank’s stance could help economic conditions in China, many analysts have said, by instilling more lending discipline and reducing the chances of asset price bubbles and loan defaults that have increased with rapid lending growth in the last few months. In its latest statement Tuesday, the central bank urged commercial banks to “prudently control the excessively rapid expansion of credit and assets that may lead to liquidity risks.” Still, many analysts contend that the central bank’s tough stance has risks. “We believe the biggest risk comes from the P.B.O.C. potentially mishandling the situation,” Ting Lu, China economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said Tuesday, referring to the People’s Bank of China. “That being said, we believe the P.B.O.C. and Chinese policy makers will be aware of the potential dangers and take decisive measures to revive the interbank market, to calm investors and to stabilize the economy.” In the rest of the Asia-Pacific region, the prospect of slower economic growth in China has weighed on markets for months.

Stocks,Bonds
China
Economy
People's Bank of China


Determining New York City’s Record Wind Chill

Abstract: Q. Tuesday’s freeze was hideous. What was the lowest wind-chill temperature ever recorded in New York City? A. We can’t give you a clear-cut record: The measurement of wind chill did not begin until well into the 20th century, and the methods used to calculate it have changed several times. But here’s a guess. For simplicity, let’s stick to the weather station in Central Park. Its record low, 14.3 degrees below zero, was recorded on Feb. 9, 1934, at 7:25 a.m. At 8 a.m., the wind speed was about 14 miles per hour. That works out to a pretty horrible wind chill of minus 37 degrees, using the National Weather Service’s calculator. (For the record, temperatures in Albany and Buffalo reached minus 20 degrees that day.) Another contender is Dec. 25, 1980, going by the website Weather Underground: At 7 a.m., the temperature was just above zero, but the wind was blowing at 35 m.p.h., producing a wind chill of roughly minus 27 degrees. The most frigid measurements at Central Park on Tuesday were at 8:51 a.m., when the temperature was 4 degrees and the wind speed was 21 m.p.h., producing a wind chill of minus 16 degrees. Below-zero days in New York City are quite rare; the warmth of the Atlantic Ocean moderates the city’s temperature. According to the website Yahoo Voices, since 1869 there have have been only 58 days when the temperature was below zero in Central Park. Wind chill is not a temperature reading but a measure of heat loss the body experiences when exposed to the wind. The body produces a layer of heat that protects against the cold. Wind can blow that layer away. According to weatherbug.com, exposure to wind chills below zero can cause frostbite within five minutes, and wind chills below minus 20 degrees can result in frostbite within a minute of exposure. On Feb. 9, 1934, hundreds of schoolchildren in the city had to receive treatment for frostbitten hands, noses and ears, and more than 40 police officers were treated for frostbite.

Weather
Wind
Temperature
Records and Achievements
Central Park
NYC


Curry Sidelined With Swelling in His Right Knee

Abstract: Eddy Curry sat out Saturday night’s loss to Portland, and he may be out longer because of a right knee injury that will require further tests. Curry stayed in New York while the Knicks flew to Dallas late Saturday night. He is scheduled to have a magnetic resonance imaging test Sunday. “At this point, I’m not too worried,” said Curry, who has never had a serious knee injury. “I don’t believe it’s anything that’s going to be career-threatening or nothing like that. But we’ll see what happens tomorrow.” Curry said he “tweaked” the knee in the first half of Friday’s loss to Detroit but continued to play. He said he woke up Saturday morning with “a lot of discomfort” and swelling. Curry received treatment when he arrived at Madison Square Garden in the afternoon but decided not to test the knee on the court. “It just wasn’t right; I didn’t want to risk it,” he said. Doctors have not speculated on the nature of the injury, Curry said, and it is unclear how long he may be out. The Knicks play road games Monday in Dallas and Wednesday in Miami, then are off the rest of the week. Curry was enjoying a modest resurgence, scoring 19, 20 and 23 points in the first three games last week after Zach Randolph went down with a foot injury. Curry has had an otherwise disappointing season, averaging 13.2 points and 4.7 rebounds.


Star Turns at Liberian’s War Crimes Trial

Abstract: PARIS — Testimony in the case against the former warlord Charles G. Taylor sounded more like a Hollywood mystery than a war-crimes trial last week, with a cast of characters including Naomi Campbell and Mia Farrow and a plot involving plans to trade guns for a bag of diamonds. Battles over diamonds have been at the heart of the trial of Mr. Taylor, the former Liberian president who is accused of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity linked to conflicts in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. The prosecution has charged that Mr. Taylor traveled to half a dozen African countries in 1997 carrying rough diamonds that he wanted to sell or exchange for weapons. What he did with those diamonds was the focus of the hearing on Thursday at a court in The Hague. At the start of the 1997 trip, according to the prosecution, Mr. Taylor gave one large rough-cut diamond to Ms. Campbell, a British model. He sent her the gift hours after they met at a charity dinner hosted by President Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Prosecutors supported their claim with a signed declaration from Ms. Farrow, an American actress who was a guest at the same dinner. The story of this gift may seem frivolous in a trial dealing with crimes in which tens of thousands of people were killed or maimed, but prosecutors offered it in order to challenge Mr. Taylor’s credibility. Mr. Taylor has repeatedly testified he never carried, owned, sold or traded diamonds for weapons, an issue that goes to the heart of the prosecution case. The only diamonds he ever owned, he told the court, were those set in a few pieces of personal jewelry. In their cross-examination of Mr. Taylor, prosecutors have sought to demonstrate that he lied on a number of issues while testifying under oath. An international panel of four judges of the Special Court for Sierra Leone is trying Mr. Taylor, 61, on charges that he armed and controlled a rebel force in his quest for power and money, including a share of Sierra Leone’s diamond fields. The indictment holds Mr. Taylor accountable for many of the rebels’ atrocities. The journey discussed in court last week began in South Africa in September 1997, a month after Mr. Taylor took office as Liberia ’s president. On arrival in South Africa, Mr. Taylor has testified, he received $500,000 in cash from the government of Libya. He said that sum was intended to pay for “medical expenses.” Prosecutors suggested the money was meant for buying weapons. The diamonds Mr. Taylor was carrying, given to him by the Sierra Leone rebels, were also meant for procuring weapons during his African trip, said Brenda Hollis, a former United States military lawyer and the lead prosecutor in the case. At the hearing on Thursday, Ms. Hollis turned to the night of Mr. Mandela’s charity dinner, whose guests included Mr. Taylor as well as several celebrities including the singer Quincy Jones, Ms. Farrow and Ms. Campbell. Afterward, Ms. Hollis said, Mr. Taylor sent his men to deliver the diamond to Ms. Campbell, who was asleep in her room.. “After this dinner that you attended, you sent your men to Ms. Campbell’s room to provide her with a large rough-cut diamond,” Ms. Hollis said. “That is correct, is it not, Mr. Taylor?” “That is totally incorrect,” Mr. Taylor replied. “And indeed Mr. Taylor,” Ms. Hollis went on, “your men awakened her and presented her with a large rough-cut diamond.” “Totally, totally incorrect,” Mr. Taylor said. Ms. Hollis said Mr. Taylor had received this diamond and others a month earlier, along with money, from the rebels in Sierra Leone to procure weapons for them. “Totally incorrect,” Mr. Taylor persisted. According to the prosecution, Ms. Campbell told the story of being awakened by Mr. Taylor’s men to Ms. Farrow the next morning. Ms. Farrow provided the prosecutors with a signed declaration of her account of Ms. Campbell’s story. Debora Cunha, a spokeswoman for Ms. Campbell, said she could not comment on the story or the fate of the diamond. “It’s with the lawyers,” she said. “Naomi has been assisting the special prosecutor where possible, but beyond that has nothing to add.” After visiting South Africa, Mr. Taylor, according to his presidential records, traveled to Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Niger, Tunisia and Libya. Prosecutors said that at the end of that trip, a large drop of clandestine arms and ammunition was delivered to the rebels at a small airstrip in Sierra Leone. The smuggled goods were airlifted from Burkina Faso, a regular transshipment point for illegal weapons for Mr. Taylor’s rebels, the prosecution said.

War Crimes Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity


Prosecutors Say Colorado Shooting Suspect Talked to Classmate About Plans to Kill

Abstract: DENVER — James E. Holmes , the former graduate student charged with murdering 12 people in a shooting spree inside a Colorado movie theater last month, told a classmate months earlier that he wanted to kill people, prosecutors said in court filings on Friday. Mr. Holmes, a neuroscience student who had been in his first year at the University of Colorado , Denver, had those conversations in March, prosecutors said, reportedly telling the classmate that he would kill people “when his life was over.” The court documents, which were unsealed on Friday as part of an effort by prosecutors to obtain access to the university’s records on Mr. Holmes, also said that he was banned from campus after June 12, following unspecified threats he made to a professor. Mr. Holmes, once a gifted student , had struggled in graduate school, doing poorly on his oral examinations in June. Prosecutors have tried to cast his academic troubles as a possible motive for the shooting spree, which took place at a midnight showing on July 20 of “The Dark Knight Rises” at an Aurora movie theater not far from the Anschutz Medical Campus where Mr. Holmes studied. Prosecutors stated in the filings that it was only after the university barred Mr. Holmes from campus that he developed a meticulous plan “to obtain firearms, ammunition, a tear-gas grenade, body armor, a gas mask and a ballistic helmet,” weaponry he went on to use that night in the theater. University officials, however, have vigorously disputed this version of events. Jacque Montgomery, a spokeswoman for the university, said that once Mr. Holmes informed school officials that he was withdrawing in June, his access card to certain secure buildings was disabled, as is standard procedure when someone drops out. That did not mean he was barred from the university grounds, she said. “The university has never banned Mr. Holmes from campus,” she said. Ms. Montgomery declined to comment on the assertion that Mr. Holmes had threatened a professor, citing a court order that prohibits the university from speaking about the case. At a hearing on Thursday, prosecutors also claimed that university officials had reported concerns about Mr. Holmes to the police. Defense lawyers, who have said that Mr. Holmes is mentally ill, are trying to keep the university’s records on Mr. Holmes private, accusing prosecutors in court filings of going on a “fishing expedition,” and exaggerating the link between his flailing academic career and the shootings. Mr. Holmes has been charged with dozens of counts of murder and attempted murder in the shootings, which also left 58 people wounded. He could face the death penalty.

Holmes James Eagan
Aurora Colo Shooting (2012)
University of Colorado