Notice Those Ads on Blogs? Regulators Do, Too

Abstract: BLOGGERS, be warned. Advertisers, you too. Two of the National Advertising Review Council’s investigative units plan to announce Tuesday their first decisions involving blogs. Their recommendations call for clear disclosure when a company is sponsoring a site or paying for product reviews. That’s nothing shocking, but it’s part of a sharper focus on the relationships between bloggers and advertisers. Attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission, which is about to expand its endorsement guidelines to include blogs, are investigating the area, along with the self-regulatory groups. “It’s something everyone in the consumer protection area is newly focused on,” said C. Lee Peeler, the chief executive of the National Advertising Review Council, which sets policies for the advertising industries’ self-regulatory programs. “One of the issues of advertising in new media is, is it clear that it’s paid-for advertising, or does it look like something else?” Paid-for advertising includes paid blogging, the programs’ recommendations make clear. One of the cases concerns Urban Nutrition , a company that sells supplements like MiracleBurn, an appetite suppressant. The Electronic Retailing Self-Regulation Program, an investigative unit of the National Advertising Review Council for the e-commerce industry, examined some of that company’s marketing after a competitor filed a complaint. Urban Nutrition was running Web sites like WeKnowDiets.com , and GoogleDiets.com , which were “formatted as independent product-review blogs,” according to the investigative unit’s statement. The investigation found problems with the sites, including that Urban Nutrition didn’t disclose it was paying bloggers for the reviews, that it portrayed the sites as independent, and that the blogs featured accolades like “Customer Choice Awards” when “the marketer’s product appears to be permanently featured as the selected product,” the organization’s statement said. “For paid-for statements about products, the traditional principles apply,” Mr. Peeler said, and here, the principle was that advertising needs to be marked as such. “That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone,” he said.  The investigative unit asked Urban Nutrition to prominently disclose that it owned the Web sites and that it was sponsoring reviewers, along with adding contact information to the sites and changing some other claims. “The company is currently in the process of making all the changes recommended by E.R.S.P., as well as additional changes Urban Nutrition volunteered to make,” said Thomas Cohn, a lawyer at Venable, which represents Urban Nutrition. The other decision concerns the marketer Herbal Groups , which makes the prostate supplement Prostalex Plus. The National Advertising Division, another unit of the review council, handled this case. Herbal Groups had been running a “Prostate Health Blog,” which published items about prostate function with promotions for the Prostalex product. The entire blog constituted an advertisement, the N.A.D. said, and Herbal Groups took down the blog at the beginning of the N.A.D.’s inquiry. “We came to a mutually agreeable solution,” said Scott Schalin, president of Herbal Groups, in an interview. The N.A.D. also recommended that the company stop making certain claims about the supplement in its ads, which Herbal Groups said it would do. These self-regulatory programs are voluntary, but if companies refuse to participate or comply, the programs can refer complaints to the F.T.C. And the F.T.C. can sue those it sees as violating guidelines. The F.T.C. is close to updating its guidelines on endorsements and testimonials for the first time since 1980. Its proposed guidelines go further than the self-regulatory bodies have, saying that bloggers must disclose not only when they are paid by a company, but also when they receive a free product . As an example, the F.T.C. cited the fictional case of a video blogger who receives a free copy of a new video game system from its manufacturer for review. “The readers of his blog are unlikely to expect that he has received the video game system free of charge in exchange for his review of the product,” the commission wrote. As this fact would likely affect how credible consumers find the review, the blogger should disclose that he received the game free. That’s something advertising and retailing groups have bristled at, arguing that this sort of promotion occurs all the time offline. Major industry associations including the Electronic Retailing Association, the American Association of Advertising Agencies , the Association of National Advertisers , and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association , among others, all filed comments with the commission taking issue with the proposed guidelines. “It’s an example of the F.T.C.’s failure to understand the medium and appreciate the nuances,” said Linda A. Goldstein, a partner at the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which represents several industry groups. “It’s not uncommon for marketers to provide the blogging community with samples of their product or service, but the company has no control over what the blogger writes.” Besides, she said, companies regularly host free events or send samples to journalists in the hopes of attracting coverage. “It’s analogous to a studio inviting critics to a free premiere. Taken to its logical conclusion, those critics would have to disclose in their review that they were allowed to see the movie for free,” she said. The commission’s comment period is now closed, and it is expected to issue final guidelines soon.  Meanwhile, bloggers and advertisers are under pressure from state attorneys general. In June, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York noted in a settlement with seven electronics retailers that in addition to illegal practices, “all of these companies obtained fake ‘consumer testimonials’ through Web sites that claim to be impartial consumer-based ‘rating’ Web sites” but were not. In July, in what Mr. Cuomo’s office said it believed was the first such case in the nation, it settled with a cosmetic-surgery company called Lifestyle Lift, charging that company employees were posting fake positive reviews about its services on various message boards and sites, a practice known as “astroturfing.” Lifestyle Lift stopped the postings and paid $300,000 to the state. “My office has and will continue to be on the forefront in protecting consumers against emerging fraud and deception, including ‘astroturfing,’ on the Internet,” he said in the statement.

Blogs and Blogging (Internet)
Online Advertising
Advertising and Marketing
Computers and the Internet
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry


U.S. Loses Leverage in Iraq Now That Troops Are Out

Abstract: WASHINGTON — As Iraq erupted in recent days, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in constant phone contact with the leaders of the country’s dueling sects. He called the Shiite prime minister and the Sunni speaker of the Parliament on Tuesday, and the Kurdish leader on Thursday, urging them to try to resolve the political crisis. And for the United States, that is where the American intervention in Iraq officially stops. Sectarian violence and political turmoil in Iraq escalated within days of the United States military’s withdrawal, but officials said in interviews that President Obama had no intention of sending troops back into the country, even if it devolved into civil war. The United States, without troops on the ground or any direct influence over Iraq’s affairs, has lost much of its leverage there. And so the latest crisis, a descent into sectarian distrust and hostility that was punctuated by a bombing in Baghdad on Thursday that killed more than 60 people, is being treated in much the same way that the United States would treat any diplomatic emergency abroad. Mr. Obama, his aides said, is adamant that the United States will not send troops back to Iraq. At Fort Bragg, N.C., on Dec. 14 , he told returning troops that he had left Iraq in the hands of the Iraqi people, and in private conversations at the White House, he has told aides that the United States gave Iraqis an opportunity; what they do with that opportunity is up to them. Though the president has been heralding the end of the Iraq war as a victory, and a fulfillment of his campaign promise to bring American troops home, the sudden crisis could quickly become a political problem for Mr. Obama, foreign policy experts said. “Right now, Iraq, along with getting Osama bin Laden, succeeding in Libya, and restoring the U.S. reputation in the world, is a clear plus for Obama,” said David Rothkopf, a former official in the administration of Bill Clinton and a national security expert. “He kept his promise and got out. But the story could turn on him very rapidly.” For instance, Mr. Rothkopf and other national security experts said, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq is swiftly adopting policies that are setting off deep divisions among Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites. If Iraq fragments, if Iran starts to assert more visible influence or if a civil war breaks out, “the president could be blamed,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “He would be remembered not for leaving Iraq but for how he left it.” Already, Mr. Obama is coming under political fire. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said that Mr. Obama’s decision to pull American troops out had “unraveled.” Appearing on CBS News on Thursday, Mr. McCain said that “we are paying a very heavy price in Baghdad because of our failure to have a residual force there,” adding that while he was disturbed by what had happened in the past week, he was not surprised. Administration officials, for their part, countered that it was hard to see how American troops could have prevented either the political crisis or the coordinated attacks in Iraq. “These crises before happened when there were tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq, and they all got resolved, but resolved by Iraqis through the political process,” said Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser. “The test will be whether, with our diplomatic help, they continue to use politics to overcome their differences, pursue power sharing and get to a better place.” So far, the administration is maintaining a hands-off stance in public, even as Mr. Biden has privately exhorted Iraqi officials to mend their differences. Several Obama administration officials have been on the phone all week imploring Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi officials to quickly work through the charges and countercharges swirling around Mr. Maliki’s accusation that the Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, enlisted personal bodyguards to run a death squad. Aides said that Mr. Biden talked to Mr. Maliki; Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni political leader; and Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader. He urged the men to organize a meeting of Iraq’s top political leaders, from Mr. Maliki on down, conveying the message that “you all need to stop hurling accusations at each other through the media and actually sit together and work through your competing concerns,” a senior administration official said. That official, like several others, agreed to discuss internal administration thinking only on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. American officials say they believe that Mr. Talabani is the best person to convene such a meeting, because he is respected by the most Iraqis. Mr. Biden is not the only high-ranking American official who is actively involved in discussions with Iraqi officials. David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. who formerly served as the top commander in Iraq, traveled to Baghdad recently for talks with his Iraqi counterparts. Beyond that, Obama administration officials have conveyed to Mr. Maliki that the American economic, security and diplomatic relationship with Iraq will be “colored” by the extent to which Mr. Maliki can hold together a coalition government that includes Sunnis and Kurds, one administration official said. Even without a military presence in Iraq, the United States maintains at least some leverage over Iraqi officials. Iraq wants to purchase F-16 warplanes from the United States, for example, and the Obama administration has been trying to help the government forge better relations with its Sunni Arab neighbors, like the United Arab Emirates, which recently sent its defense chief to Baghdad to talk about how the Iraqis could participate in regional exercises. Pentagon officials and military officers had hoped a deal could be struck with the Iraqi government to keep at least several thousand American combat troops and trainers in Iraq after Dec. 31. But domestic politics in Iraq made that impossible, and the outcome also fit with Mr. Obama’s narrative of a full withdrawal from a war he vowed to end. Even plans quietly drawn up for the continued deployment of counterterrorism commandos were just as quietly pulled off the table, to make sure that Mr. Obama’s pledge to reduce American combat forces to zero would be met, according to senior administration officials. The only American military personnel remaining in Iraq today are the fewer than 200 members of an Office of Security Cooperation that operates within the American Embassy to coordinate military relations between Washington and Baghdad, particularly arms sales. The United States has about 40,000 service members remaining throughout the Middle East and the Persian Gulf region, including a ground combat unit that was one of the last out of Iraq — and remains, at least temporarily, just across the border in Kuwait. Significant numbers of long-range strike aircraft also are on call aboard aircraft carriers and at bases in the region. As the responsibility for nurturing bilateral relations shifts to the State Department, the responsibility for security assistance moves to the C.I.A., which operates in Iraq under a separate authority, independent of the military. Although the United States military is unlikely to return to Iraq, it is possible that military counterterrorism personnel could return, if approved by the president, under C.I.A. authority, just as an elite team of Navy commandos carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden under C.I.A. command. The C.I.A. historically has operated its own strike teams, and it also has the authority to hire indigenous operatives to participate in its counterterrorism missions. “As the U.S. military has drawn down to zero in terms of combat troops, the U.S. intelligence community has not done the same,” a senior administration official said. “Intelligence cooperation remains very important to the U.S.-Iraqi relationship.” The official acknowledged a risk punctuated by the recent unrest. “There are serious counterterrorism issues that confront Iraq,” the official said. “And we don’t want to let go of the very solid relationships we have built over the years to share information of importance to both countries.” Even if the unrest rose to levels approaching civil war, American officials said, it was unlikely that Mr. Obama would allow the American military to return. “There is a strong sense that we need to let events in Iraq play out,” said one senior administration official. “There is not a great deal of appetite for re-engagement. We are not going to reinvade Iraq.”

United States Defense and Military Forces


Verifying Gmail on the Road

Abstract: Q. I have the Gmail two-step verification turned on for my account, but I am preparing to travel overseas and will not be able to use my cellphone to get verification codes. Should I just turn off the two-step verification for my trip? A. If you will not have access to your cellphone for the Gmail verification process, you can print out a set of codes before you leave. When the Web browser on your friend’s computer requests a verification code, type in one of those codes. You get 10 codes at a time. After you use one to log in, it becomes inactive and you move on to the next one when you need to check your Gmail account again. You can create a set of codes by logging in to your Google account and clicking the Show/Generate Code option in the “Printable backup codes” section. You can print the codes or save them to a text file. You can also generate a new set of codes if you use (or lose) the first batch. Google has more information on using backup codes on its support site . Along with printable backup codes, that same Google page of verification settings has options for sending codes to other phone numbers, like those of trusted friends or family members. And even if you do not have cellular service for your phone overseas, you can use the Google Authenticator app for Android, BlackBerry or iOS to generate codes on the device. The “Mobile application” section of the verification settings page has instructions. Reclassifying Songs in iTunes Q. I noticed that iTunes has labeled some of the music I have loaded from CDs “Unclassifiable” in the genre list. Can I change this so the tracks sort into the proper music types? A. Song files can sometimes be tagged improperly if the information used by iTunes to label the converted CD contains errors or incomplete information. The labels are not permanent, though, and you can edit them. Select a song in iTunes, go to the File menu and choose Get Info; you can also right-click on the song and choose Get Info. When the Info box appears, go to the Genre field and use the drop-down menu to select a new style of music — or type in a new one. Make any other corrections you need to in the other text fields and click O.K. TIP OF THE WEEK Want to grab a photo you have uploaded to your Flickr account, to print out or use as a profile photo for a social media site? Just log into Flickr and click on the thumbnail image of the picture you want to use in your Photo Stream or other photo set. On the picture’s main page, click the More menu icon in the bottom-right corner (it looks like three large dots) and choose “View all sizes.” On the resulting page, you should see a variety of sizes for the photo. The sizes are measured in pixels, like “Square (150 x 150),” “Medium 500 (333 x 500)” and the original size of the image when you uploaded it. Click the size you want and then click the Download link on the page. If you already know the image size you need, you can just right-click on the picture and choose the desired option from the “View all sizes” menu from the photo’s main page.


3 Shot Dead at Brussels Jewish Museum

Abstract: BRUSSELS — An unidentified gunman opened fire on Saturday at the Jewish Museum in the center of Brussels, killing at least three people in what officials said appeared to have been an anti-Semitic attack. Belgium’s interior minister, Joëlle Milquet, told RTL television that two women and a man were killed in the attack and a fourth person was seriously wounded. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said two of the dead, a man and a woman, were Israeli tourists, according to Reuters. Israeli news media reported that they were from Tel Aviv. Ms. Milquet said security was being tightened at Jewish sites across the country. The gunman, apparently alone, was initially reported to have fled in a car that had been double-parked outside the museum, on a cobblestone street near the Place du Grand Sablon, a large square lined with luxury chocolate shops and high-end antiques dealers. Officials later said they believed he had left the scene on foot. Local news media reported that one person had been arrested, but officials did not confirm this. Deputy Prime Minister Didier Reynders, who was in the neighborhood at the time of the attack, told Belgian television he heard gunfire, rushed to the scene and was “shocked to see bodies lying on the ground.” He said investigators still had to determine the motive for the shooting but added that the fact it took place at the city’s Jewish Museum indicated an “anti-Semitic attack.” Maurice Sosnowski, a leader of Belgium’s Jewish community, described Saturday’s shooting as the first act of anti-Semitic terrorism in the Belgian capital since World War II, and compared it to a 2012 shooting that killed four people at a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse. “A symbolic site has been hit,” Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo said at a news conference. “Our country and all Belgians, whatever their language, their origins or their beliefs, are united in face of this act.” Saturday’s shooting occurred on the eve of elections in Belgium for both the national legislature and the European Parliament. Far-right groups, some of which are tainted by a history of anti-Semitism, are expected to perform well in voting for the European legislature, which began on Thursday in Britain and the Netherlands and comes to an end Sunday in other members of the 28-nation European Union. In a statement, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, condemned the assault as “an attack on European values which we cannot tolerate.” Mr. Barroso has repeatedly warned about the danger of extremism from the rise of right-wing nationalists opposed to European integration. In Belgium and most other European countries, however, anti-Semitism has in recent years been rooted more on the left and in Muslim immigrant communities than on the right, according to a survey last year by a European Union agency that monitors discrimination. The survey by the Fundamental Rights Agency found that only France and Hungary had higher levels of anti-Semitism than Belgium. Raya Kalenova, the executive vice president of the European Jewish Congress, a group based in Brussels, said anti-Semitism had grown much worse in Belgium over the past decade, in part because of a rise in hostility toward Israel, and added that the authorities had often ignored the danger. “The spirit of the Jewish people, the Jewish community, here in Belgium is really very, very low,” she said in a telephone interview. “They do not even report anti-Semitic attacks. They feel that it is useless to report and they do not feel protected. For sure, the general atmosphere is not good here in Belgium, especially because of anti-Israeli sentiment.” This month, the Belgian authorities banned opponents of Israel from holding a conference in Brussels that Jewish groups condemned as anti-Semitic. The conference, known as the European Congress of Rebellion, had been organized by a far-right member of the Belgian Parliament. At the time of Saturday’s shooting at the Jewish Museum, pro-Palestinian groups were holding a concert and political rally on the other side of Brussels in Parc du Cinquantenaire. Pierre Galand, the head of the Belgian-Palestine Association, interrupted speeches denouncing Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territory to request a minute of silence for the victims of the shooting. “This is an extremely odious crime,” Mr. Galand told the crowd, denouncing the Jewish Museum attack as an act of “primitive anti-Semitism.”

Murders
Antisemitism
Judaism
Brussels
Jewish Museum of Belgium


Still No. 1? Golf Rankings Reflect a Longer View

Abstract: PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — In sports, you either win or you don’t — a rigid bottom line underlying the “what have you done for us lately” attitude exemplified by the criticism aimed at the N.B.A. star Kevin Durant days before the formal announcement this week of his Most Valuable Player award. The world golf rankings, with a two-year rolling points system , are the rare perch offering athletes a place to rest on their laurels. Nine months have passed since top-ranked Tiger Woods last visited the winner’s circle. In that time, Jimmy Walker and Patrick Reed each have collected three titles on the PGA Tour. Neither has cracked the top 10; Walker is No. 22, two spots ahead of Reed. Eight weeks have passed since Woods’s last competitive round before he was sidelined with a back injury. Eight players have notched victories on the PGA Tour and five on the European Tour. Only two, Bubba Watson and Matt Kuchar, appear in this week’s top 10 , which includes six players, in addition to Woods, who are winless in 2014. At the Players Championship this week, the fourth-ranked Watson, in his first start since his Masters victory , and the fifth-ranked Kuchar join No. 2 Adam Scott and No. 3 Henrik Stenson as players who can take over the top spot from Woods, the defending champion who wrote on his blog this week that he was hopeful of a summer return. The way the rankings are calculated, if Scott had joined Woods on the sidelines this week, he would have been assured of passing Woods in next week’s standings. Informed Wednesday of the quirk in the calculations, Scott said, “See you later, guys.” He was kidding, but his circumstance raises this question: If playing is a potential roadblock to No. 1, is professional golf on the right rankings path? “With tours all around the world, people playing everywhere and awarding fair points for everything, I think they have come up with the best they possibly can,” Scott said, “and they have been fairly accurate over the years.” The job of slotting players falls to a world ranking governing board, which consists of one representative each from the PGA Tour, the European Tour, the alliance of international PGA Tours and the four majors. Golf has to make a single serving from different cups of alphabet soup because there is no world tour, as exists in tennis. The Association of Tennis Professionals settled on a 52-week rolling system after experimenting more than a decade ago with a calendar-year points race. The yearlong system creates a heightened sense of urgency for players defending points and more accurately mirrors what the fans are seeing on the court. Rory McIlroy, whose fiancée is the tennis player Caroline Wozniacki, said: “You could argue that if you wanted to make them more current, you could go the way tennis is, where it’s a one-year system. But then, if it’s one year, all you’re thinking about is the ranking, because you’ve so many points to defend this week and that week. And believe me, I know.” McIlroy rose to No. 1 in 2012 and fell out of the top 10 last week for the first time in more than three years. “I think some people, especially in sports, we have short memories, and you’re thinking, ‘How is that guy still there?’ ” he said. “But, ‘Oh, hold on a minute — 18 months ago, he won one of the biggest tournaments we have.’ So I think it works pretty well. If you look at it, it is pretty current.” Scott probably needs a top-16 finish to become the second Australian after Greg Norman to reach No. 1. Stenson, the reigning champion of the FedEx Cup and the Race to Dubai, probably needs a top-six finish. Watson, who won his second Masters last month, needs a victory or a solo second, and Kuchar, who has eight top 10s in 11 starts this season, must win. “We’ve seen Phil Mickelson, who is arguably top-five best of all time, and he’s never been No. 1,” Watson said. “That would just show me that the rankings are kind of messed up if Bubba Watson could be No. 1 and Phil Mickelson has never been No. 1.” Watson, a two-time winner in 2014, has six career tour victories, including two majors. Mickelson has 42 tour titles, including five majors, and four international victories. He has risen as high as No. 2, most recently last August. Mickelson called the rankings fair. Referring to Watson, he added: “He’s probably missing that I played Tiger at his best. I played against Tiger for years when he was at his absolute best.” Woods has spent a total of 682 weeks at No. 1 since his first ascent in 1997, his shadow blocking out everyone else’s view of the summit, perhaps so much so that some of his competitors have not even perceived it as a target. When asked about his chance to reach No. 1, Kuchar said: “That’s really cool. I don’t think I knew that.” Scott said he did not know he would have been better off, mathematically speaking, staying at home if he wanted to reach No. 1. Not that it would have made any difference. “Obviously, playing the Players means more to me than sitting at home just to get to a No. 1 world ranking,” he said. He added, “I would like to win to go to No. 1.”

Golf
Players Championship
PGA Tour
Adam Scott
Tiger Woods
Bubba Watson
Matt Kuchar
Henrik Stenson
Professional Golfers Assn European Tour


12 Aircraft Targeted by Laser Beams Above New Jersey

Abstract: Eleven commercial airliners and one military aircraft were illuminated with laser lights over the course of 90 minutes as they flew over New Jersey on Wednesday night, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which is investigating the episodes along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The flights, which were struck between 9 and 10:30 p.m., landed safely, the F.A.A. said, but one pilot was said to have been temporarily blinded. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I., Mollie F. Halpern, said she was not aware of any case in at least the last five years that has involved as many aircraft in such a contained region. JetBlue, Delta, United and American were among the airlines whose planes were affected. Eight of the commercial flights were bound for Newark Liberty International Airport, while the other three were headed to La Guardia Airport. The planes seemed to have been targeted in four clustered areas, according to the authorities. Jim Peters, a spokesman for the F.A.A., said the geographical spread indicated that “not one person was capable of doing all of that lasering.” What begins as a pinhole-size beam on the ground can expand several feet in the sky and temporarily blind pilots. The F.B.I. reported 3,960 such strikes in 2014 — a drastic rise from the mere 283 reported in 2005. President Obama signed a law in 2012 that made shining lasers at aircraft a federal crime carrying up to 20 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. The F.A.A. can also levy a civil penalty of up to $11,000 for each infraction. Ms. Halpern estimated that since 2004, there have been 162 arrests for laser interference with aviation across the country. Of those, 132 were prosecuted, 97 of them under federal jurisdiction, with 87 people convicted. At least 11 of the 12 affected aircraft were hit by green lasers, which are highly visible and dangerous. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, has called on the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates lasers because of their risks to skin and vision, to ban such high-powered, long-range green lasers. “These green laser pointers are flying off the shelves faster than planes leaving our airports,” Mr. Schumer said, “and we’ve got to change that for the safety of the pilots and the passengers.”


2 Entrepreneurs Help a Monastery Thrive

Abstract: SPARTA, Wis. — At the ringing of a bowl-shaped bell, five monks at a remote monastery congregated in the chapel here for the fourth of their seven daily rounds of prayer, their voices murmuring a Gregorian chant in Latin. At the same time, in a nearby house on the monastery’s property, the phone was ringing in a small office where two women and an office manager run a multimillion-dollar business that generates the money to run the monastery. “Good morning, LaserMonks. Greetings and peace,” answered the office manager, Victoria Bench, a patient sort who often hears callers remark, “You don’t sound like a monk.” Monks in Roman Catholic monasteries are expected to support themselves, balancing a life of prayer and work according to the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict . Some monasteries make cheese, others make jam, chocolate or wine. The monks here at the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank make their money from the sale of ink and toner cartridges, and little of the labor is their own. The Rev. Bernard McCoy, the monastery’s superior, had the idea for LaserMonks.com . But the enterprise really took off when the monks turned it over to two entrepreneurial laywomen who originally came from Colorado to give them advice and never left. “We feel we’re stewards of their business, and we really put bread on the table,” said one of the women, Sarah Caniglia, sitting in their impeccably organized office amid lighted candles and CDs of Gregorian chants. “I feel like the head of a family, but the boys are grown up and they’re never going to get married.” Father McCoy, who at 42 already has a monk’s bald pate and fringe of hair, said: “Our life as monks is not set up to sit around and answer phones. We’re supposed to be a little removed.” “We are professional pray-ers,” said Father McCoy, who wears a white habit, a long black smock called a scapular cinched with a leather belt and, on his feet, knock-off Crocs. Some days he wears a T-shirt that says, “Ask me about my Vow of Silence.” This is not the only monastery to employ laypeople, but the monks and the women here have a surprising symbiotic relationship. The monastery had tried various self-supporting enterprises before: moving and rehabilitating houses scheduled for demolition, growing shitake mushrooms, developing a golf course and corporate retreat center. One day, the monks were in the midst of a big report on the golf project when the printer ran out of toner and Father McCoy went to order more. “I thought, that’s way too much for a bunch of black dust,” he said. He discovered it was possible to buy new and recycled cartridges at a fraction of the cost charged by office supply companies. He started LaserMonks in 2002 with the idea of marketing to charitable groups, but the business expanded so fast that soon they were scrambling to keep up. Meanwhile, Ms. Caniglia and Cindy Griffith were looking to sell their online ink and toner business, based in Loveland, Colo., and called Father McCoy to see if LaserMonks wanted to buy their database. They hit it off, and soon the women were driving to rural Wisconsin. “I was scared to death,” said Ms. Griffith, 50, a Web designer and divorced grandmother who is not Catholic. “I’ve been to Catholic weddings, but I don’t know anything about monks. Do they talk? What do I do when they pray? Do I sing this stuff? I don’t know Latin.” The women stayed in the monastery’s hermitage overlooking the Mississippi River. Two weeks became two months, then six. The women shared their skills at database management and Web design, but also ideas for the future of LaserMonks. The monks gave the women a taste of a life that was contemplative, balanced and simple. “I was a yuppie, I wanted to make a lot of money, drive a nice car and belong to a tennis club,” said Ms. Caniglia, 41, who is Catholic. “I’ve just learned to simplify my life, and I get joy out of seeing the stars at night, walking the dogs.” The women now live on the top two floors of a small house on the monastery’s property, above the office and overlooking fields of soy and corn. Ms. Caniglia and Father McCoy send e-mail messages to each other daily, but meet only every three weeks. The women and monks all come together on feast days and holidays. Ever entrepreneurial, the women also sell products made by other monasteries, including chocolates, pralines and a barbeque sauce called “ Burnt Sacrifice .” They sell Benevolent Biscuits, dog treats the monks here make on cookie trays in the monastery kitchen. Their latest product is a laser printer cartridge made with soybean oil instead of petroleum. Holding up a newly printed page, Ms. Caniglia said, “It’s environmentally safe, the print is great,” and it produces more pages per cartridge than an oil-based cartridge at a lower price. “It’s a no-brainer.” LaserMonks took in $4.5 million in revenue last year, she said. Expenses and the cost of products are 80 percent, leaving 10 percent for the monastery and 10 percent for charities. The two women made about $60,000 combined. (“It isn’t about the money,” Ms. Caniglia said.) While LaserMonks hums along without monks, the monks are free to develop their talents and hobbies. The Rev. Robert Keffer paints and sculptures, Brother David Klecker sews vestments and takes photographs, Brother Joseph Watson does woodworking, Brother Adam Mathews tends the property and Brother Stephen Treat writes a blog. Standing at his easel in a sunny studio, Father Keffer dabbled at a painting of St. Bernard, whose hair looked a bit too 1980s blow-dried. “Professional artists come visit,” Father Keffer said, “and they say to me, ‘You’re in my idea of heaven.’ ”

Computers and the Internet
Monasteries
Entrepreneurship
Computer Printers
Christians and Christianity
Roman Catholic Church
Wisconsin


Padded Pensions Add to New York’s Fiscal Woes

Abstract: In Yonkers, more than 100 retired police officers and firefighters are collecting pensions greater than their pay when they were working. One of the youngest, Hugo Tassone, retired at 44 with a base pay of about $74,000 a year. His pension is now $101,333 a year. It’s what the system promised, said Mr. Tassone, now 47, adding that he did nothing wrong by adding lots of overtime to his base pay shortly before retiring. “I don’t understand how the working guy that held up their end of the bargain became the problem,” he said. Despite a pension investigation by the New York attorney general, an audit concluding that some police officers in the city broke overtime rules to increase their payouts and the mayor’s statements that future pensions should be based on regular pay, not overtime, these practices persist in Yonkers. The city has even arranged for its police to put in overtime as flagmen on Consolidated Edison construction sites. Though a company is paying the bill, the city is actually reporting the work as city overtime to the New York State pension fund, padding future payouts — an arrangement at odds with the spirit of public employment, if not the law. The Yonkers experience shows how errors, misunderstandings and wishful thinking are piling hidden new costs onto New York’s public pension system every year, worsening the state’s current fiscal crisis. And the problem is not just in New York. Public pension costs are ballooning everywhere, throwing budgets out of whack and raising the question of whether venerable state pension systems are viable. In fact, the cost of public pensions has been systemically underestimated nationwide for more than two decades, say some analysts. By these estimates, state and local officials have promised $5 trillion worth of benefits while thinking they were committing taxpayers to roughly half that amount. The use of public money for outsize retirement pay really stings when budgets don’t balance, teachers are being laid off, furloughs are being planned and everything from poison-control centers to Alzheimer’s day care is being cut, as is happening in New York. According to pension data collected by The New York Times from the city and state, about 3,700 retired public workers in New York are now getting pensions of more than $100,000 a year, exempt from state and local taxes . The data belie official reports that the average state pension is a modest $18,000, or $38,000 for retired police officers and firefighters. (The average is low, in part, because it includes people who worked in government only part time, or just a few years, as well as surviving spouses getting partial benefits.) Roughly one of every 250 retired public workers in New York is collecting a six-figure pension, and that group is expected to grow rapidly in coming years, based on the number of highly paid people in the pipeline. Payouts for Decades Some will receive the big pensions for decades. Thirteen New York City police officers recently retired at age 40 with pensions above $100,000 a year; nine did so in their 30s. The plan’s public information officer said that the very young retirees had qualified for special disability pensions, which are 50 percent larger than ordinary police pensions. He said several dozen of the highest-paid New York City police retirees had disabilities related to 9/11 and the rest of the disabilities resulted from injuries in the line of duty. In virtually every case, the officials who granted the rich pensions thought they were offering something affordable, because the cost estimates were too low. Before Yonkers adopted a richer pension formula for police in 2000, for instance, it was told the maximum cost would be $1.3 million a year. But instead, the yearly cost is now $3.75 million and rising. David Simpson, a spokesman for the mayor of Yonkers, said pension cost projections were “often lowballs,” so the city could get stuck. “Once you give something, you can’t take it away,” he said. Police pensions and overtime have been a sore point in Yonkers for many years and were the subject of an exposé in The Journal News in Westchester in 2009. A special audit of police overtime in Yonkers in 2007 found that the police department had failed to enforce its own rules, creating pervasive opportunities for abuse. Despite all the attention, police are now being paid as flagmen by Con Edison on their days off, Mr. Simpson confirmed, adding that the city was tacking the extra hours onto their pay, which is then reported to the state pension fund. “The system encourages police to take as much overtime as they can in the last year before retirement. That’s the way the system is structured,” he said. “There’s nothing illegal or unethical about this.” In fact, a Con Edison spokesman, Robert McGee, said a number of other towns also require the company to use their police officers as flagmen, raising its labor costs. A spokesman for the New York State comptroller’s office said that the city was in error and pointed to a 1986 decision by the Supreme Court of New York that found that hours worked by police for outside businesses could not be included in their state-paid pensions. “It has long been established that such overtime from private special duty cannot be included,” said the spokesman, Mark Johnson. The question of how to pay for generous benefits is proving a challenge to New York and many other states whose revenue has fallen and whose debts have become harder to manage, while public officials try to limit the kind of deep service cuts that often mean political death. Some hard-pressed governments are belatedly coming to the grim conclusion that they have promised workers more than their sagging economies can deliver. Outside the United States , Greece and Spain have recently reduced government pensions to deal with burdensome debt that has impeded their ability to finance themselves. The new British coalition government has said it will review public pension costs there as well. Municipalities in this country cannot easily follow suit even as financial problems mount, though, because reducing benefits for their existing employees is considered impossible under the current laws of most states. The New York State constitution bars public employers from slowing the rate at which workers build up their pensions over the course of their careers. That degree of protection contrasts sharply with the private sector, where companies can generally change the rate at which workers build their benefits at any time. Furthermore, as companies have reduced pensions substantially over the last two decades, states and cities have embellished theirs with sweeteners like inflation adjustments and lower retirement ages that appealed to unions and their members, who vote. Police and other safety workers are in many cases allowed to retire with full pensions after 20 years. Other workers can often do so after 30 years, even as young as 55, although future hires in New York will have to work to age 62 to get their full benefits, under a law passed in January. Census data from 2008 show that the typical state or municipal pension is substantially richer than the typical company pension — $15,941 versus $7,904 — for retirees aged 65 and older. By tradition, public employees have said they accepted lower salaries in exchange for better benefits, but the Census data show this has not been true for a number of years. In 2008 the median pay for a worker in the private sector was $39,877, compared with $45,124 for a state or local employee. The data show broad national aggregates that do not try to compare similar occupations. And, while companies must adhere to uniform federal guidelines about setting aside money to pay pensions, states do not. Some, like New Jersey , have failed to fund their pensions for years and have fallen so far behind they may never catch up again. New York City and New York State have been more diligent about contributing the required amounts each year — but the required amounts now turn out to have been too low, in part because they counted on solid investment returns that have not materialized. In Yonkers, contributions to the state pension fund keep rising. This year, to save money, the city is proposing to eliminate about 90 police jobs, out of 640. The savings, though, will not even cover the extra cost of the overtime-enriched pensions. Meanwhile, the police say the layoffs will make the situation worse, because shrinking the police force means those who remain must work even more overtime, driving up pension costs even more. An online, searchable database compiled by The Times contains the names and pensions of about 3,700 public retirees in New York who receive more than $100,000 a year. Information was provided by New York State’s two big pension plans, one for teachers and the other for other state and local workers outside New York City. Four of New York City’s five big pension funds also provided data. But the city police pension fund listed the six-figure amounts being collected by 536 retired police officers without giving their names. The pension plan for the city’s firefighters has yet to provide the information, as required by public information law. Even without names, the pension list from the New York City police plan shows a trend toward very youthful retirement, at a time when the city’s contributions to the police pension fund have risen sharply. New York City has budgeted a contribution of about $2 billion for this year — about 64 percent of the police payroll, one of the highest pension contribution rates in the United States. That amount does not yet include money to make up for the investment losses of 2008, so the rate is almost sure to rise. A Variety of Occupations Not all the people getting six-figure pensions are former police and firefighters from cities with liberal overtime and disability policies. Hundreds more worked at hospitals , power utilities, port authorities and other “public benefit corporations” — hybrid entities that compete with the private sector and pay their officials accordingly, but allow them, at the same time, to participate in the state pension fund. Edward A. Stolzenberg makes a good example. He started out more than three decades ago in the Westchester County government; today, in retirement, he collects $222,143 a year, one of the biggest pensions paid by the New York State pension fund. In between, he became county health commissioner, running the Westchester Medical Center when it was a big, struggling county hospital. The county made it a public benefit corporation in 1997, with a mandate to grow and compete with the big hospitals in New York City. In the process Mr. Stolzenberg’s salary shot up. By the time he retired, he was the highest-paid official in Westchester County, he said, with a salary of more than $400,000 a year. That was still less than the rate at a for-profit hospital, he said. “In a time when the state budget is pretty bad and money is pouring out, people look at pensions and say, ‘This is terrible! Why are people getting this kind of money?’ ” he acknowledged. “It may not be viable. But that’s the way the state structured it.” He added that his successor at the medical center was making more than $900,000 and accruing a pension. Companies that find they have overpromised have a way out. They can declare bankruptcy, and if a judge approves, they can send their pension plans to the federal agency that insures corporate pensions. That agency limits its coverage to what is considered a basic pension, currently $54,000 for a 65-year-old retiree, much less for younger people. If Yonkers could send its police plan to the federal guarantor, for instance, Mr. Tassone, at 47, would have his benefit cut from $101,333 to just $15,660. But state plans don’t have such an insurance program, much less any definition of a basic, guaranteed benefit. Federal tax law does put a cap on pension payouts, currently $195,000 a year. Congress set this cap, which has risen with inflation, more than 30 years ago to keep employers from turning their pension funds into abusive tax shelters. But New York State found a way around it. In 1997, lawmakers created a safe-harbor mechanism allowing retirees to collect bigger pensions legally — a second pool of money called the Excess Benefit Fund. Towns all over the state pay the associated costs, even though only a few of them have retirees who qualify. At least 28 recipients in New York get pensions above $195,000 a year. One of the highest is George M. Philip, who gets $261,037 after retiring as chief executive and chief investment officer of the New York State teachers’ pension fund. Since retiring, he has gone back to work as president of the State University of New York at Albany , drawing an additional $280,000 last year. New York’s attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo , has said public pensions are getting out of hand, and has begun an investigation of places, like Yonkers, where there are unusual concentrations of six-figure retirees. But he may well find that most recipients have done nothing illegal. The benefits have been enacted by legislators, signed into law by governors, hailed by comptrollers and adopted by local officials — all of whom were told by actuaries and other financial advisers that the pensions would cost just a fraction of what they are now turning out to cost. “In very few cases do they know what they’re agreeing to,” said Edmund J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, which tracks pension costs. “They almost always obscure the costs, from themselves and from the public.” Offended by Comments Mr. Cuomo did not name Mr. Tassone but spoke of a Yonkers officer who had retired at 44 on $101,033 a year. Mr. Tassone said all his neighbors knew it was him, and he bristles at the implication that he got more than he was supposed to. He said he could correctly document all the overtime he worked, and that the practice was approved by the mayor and city council. The special audit in Yonkers named Mr. Tassone in its sample of retirees with unusual overtime records, but did not accuse him of doing anything wrong. Disciplinary proceedings were brought against only one officer, who is now retired. Mr. Tassone said the only reason he joined the police force was the promise of a full pension after just 20 years, and it would have been wrong for the state or city to go back on the promise after using it to recruit him. He said he put up with hardships for 20 years as a police officer, “and now I’m at the end of it and I’ve become a target,” he said. “I broke my hand three times. I broke my left ankle. I blew out my knee. In my last two years alone, I made between 350 and 400 arrests, and a lot of those people weren’t volunteering.” Because he could retire young, he added, it was important to start out with the largest pension possible. In the coming years, inflation will eat away at his benefit. Public pensions in New York City and State have had a cost-of-living adjustment feature since 2000, but it applies only to the first $18,000. “I concede, I have a very good pension, but what’s that pension going to be worth when I’m 70 years old?” Mr. Tassone said. Although limited to the first $18,000, the cost-of-living adjustment was the most expensive pension enhancement enacted in recent memory in New York, according to the Independent Budget Office . The cost has, once again, proved higher than expected. Yonkers still offers full pensions to police after 20 years, but just in theory. For the moment, the city is too broke to send any new cadets to the police academy, and retirees are not being replaced.

Pensions and Retirement Plans
New York
Yonkers NY
Police
Budget
Edward A Stolzenberg
Andrew Cuomo
NYC


A Slow Ride Toward the Future of Public Transportation

Abstract: HELSINKI, Finland — A small electric bus chugged along at a slow but steady seven miles per hour when a white van, entering the street from the side, cut in front of it. The bus slowed, as if its driver had hit the brakes, and got back up to speed after the van moved out of the way. But this bus has no brake or accelerator pedal. It has no steering wheel, either. In fact, it doesn’t have a driver — it operates using sensors and software, although for now, a person is stationed on board ready to hit a red “stop” button in an emergency. At a time when self-driving cars are beginning to make progress — most notably with a trial program that the ride service Uber began in Pittsburgh this fall — the bus represents a different approach to technologically advanced transportation. A driverless car, after all, is still a car, carrying at best a few people. By transporting many passengers on what could be very flexible routes, driverless buses could help reduce the number of cars clogging city streets. It’s no surprise that the bus is being tested in Helsinki, which has been at the forefront of efforts to use technology to rethink public transportation. Image Harri Santamala, the coordinator of the Helsinki project, said a good outcome would be fewer and fewer city residents owning cars. Credit Ugri Touko Tapani Hujanen for The New York Times Driverless buses like this one are being used in private, controlled settings, for example to shuttle students around a campus or employees on the grounds of an industrial plant. Helsinki is one of the first cities to run so-called autonomous buses on public roads in traffic; another project, in Sion, Switzerland, has been operating for several months, although the service was suspended in September for two weeks after a minor accident. The Helsinki bus is a project of several universities with cooperation and money from government agencies and the European Union. The two-year, $1.2 million project, called Sohjoa , is just one manifestation of a movement to reduce the use of cars, and the traffic jams and greenhouse gases that come with them. “A good possible outcome is that less and less people will own personal vehicles in the cities because they really don’t need them anymore,” said Harri Santamala, who coordinates the project and directs a “smart mobility” program at Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences . In September, a Sohjoa bus, which can accommodate up to 12 passengers sitting and standing, made its debut on a straight, quarter-mile route in the city’s Hernesaari district, turning 180 degrees at both ends. The trip connected a popular sauna and restaurant at one end with several restaurants at the other, and attracted a small stream of curious riders. “We chose this as a first route because we can study a huge amount of different traffic issues depending on the time of day,” Mr. Santamala said. The buses are not as sophisticated as Uber’s self-driving cars, or those being developed by Google and other companies. Those are essentially “free-range” vehicles, able to travel just about anywhere by comparing what their sensors detect about roads and surroundings with a database that has been compiled by the cars over time. (Before Uber began offering rides in Pittsburgh, for example, employees drove its cars around the city for months, collecting data.) Image The interior of one of Helsinki’s autonomous buses. There’s no steering wheel. Credit Ugri Touko Tapani Hujanen for The New York Times The buses, made by a French company, are “taught” a route by having operators drive them using steering and acceleration controls on a small box. The route is then fine-tuned with software. In operation, the buses have laser sensors and GPS to keep them on the route, and can deviate only if alternate routes have been “learned” as well. While the buses are designed to travel at about 15 m.p.h., or 25 kilometers pe hour, they are running at half that for the Helsinki trials. Lateral movement is also restricted; if a car is double-parked along the route, for instance, the bus must wait until the car moves or the bus operator steers around it using the control box. “We have to be very keen about safety,” Mr. Santamala said. Those restrictions provide an underwhelming experience for now. The most excitement occurs when a vehicle like the white van crosses too closely, or when a motorist approaches from the rear and, impatient with the bus’s tortoiselike pace, swerves around it. Mr. Santamala said the project aimed to establish a real bus route — probably a seasonal one — in the next two years. And there’s no reason self-driving technology could not be applied to bigger buses eventually. For now, the project is focusing on so-called last mile service — taking riders from a stop on a more conventional bus line to a point closer to their homes, shops, offices or schools. An autonomous bus, presumably going faster, could be useful, especially because of a quirk in Finland’s motor vehicle laws. “It doesn’t state anywhere that we need to have a driver holding the steering wheel or even inside the vehicle,” Mr. Santamala said. “A legal driver can be observing the operation through a computer.” That means a number of buses could run autonomously, with one operator in a central office intervening remotely as needed. Reducing the number of operators could make it financially feasible to run routes that serve only a few customers, or to vary routes throughout the day based on ridership. Helsinki has already seen several efforts to use technology to change public transportation. One was an on-demand minibus service, Kutsuplus , that was operated by the regional transport agency for four years. Using a smartphone, customers could choose pickup and drop-off locations. The service’s software then combined requests from several customers and calculated an optimal route for one of its 15 minibuses. “It was a good experiment,” said Sami Sahala, who advises the city on “intelligent transportation” issues. “But it was a little bit ahead of its time.” Kutsuplus was heavily subsidized by the city, and although the service was popular and gaining riders, it was doomed by budget cuts at the end of last year. A spinoff company, Split, ran an on-demand service in Washington that was discontinued last month , and Uber and its ride-service rival, Lyft, have developed similar ride-share services that use the companies’ drivers and their private cars. Other efforts to remake transportation continue in Helsinki. The most ambitious is a service introduced this fall by a Finnish company, MaaS Global , that offers all-inclusive transit services for a monthly fee. The concept, called “mobility as a service,” takes its inspiration from the changes that have occurred in the telecommunications industry over the past several decades, Mr. Sahala said. “You used to pay for all the calls you made,” he said. “But with the advent of mobile phones, the business model started to change. Now you pay a fixed price, and everything is included.” Image A Sohjoa project bus in Helsinki. It can carry as many 12 passengers sitting and standing, and go up to 15 m.p.h. Credit Ugri Touko Tapani Hujanen for The New York Times Through an app called Whim , MaaS Global lets customers order transportation from point A to point B and then guarantees it will provide it, using a combination of trams, buses, taxis, rental cars and car-sharing services. “You’re covered,” said Sampo Hietanen, the chief executive of MaaS Global. “You can just concentrate on going.” The monthly fees vary depending on how much transportation is needed. Mr. Hietanen said that to be successful, the service should provide the same feeling of independence that owning a car does. Cars are expensive, and studies have shown that most urban car owners rarely use them, so there’s a potential market in people who give up their cars and spend some of the savings on a service like Whim. Self-driving cars and buses may eventually help to make services like MaaS Global’s widely affordable, Mr. Hietanen said. For now, the bus trials continue. Last month, the project moved to a more complex route in Espoo, on Helsinki’s outskirts, and is now operating in Tampere, 111 miles (179 kilometers) to the north. Mr. Santamala and his colleagues analyze each trip to learn how a self-driving bus differs from one operated by a human, and how motorists and pedestrians interact with it. One difference was apparent to everyone aboard the bus after the white van cut in front of it: There was no driver to yell at the driver of the van, which had pulled into a nearby parking space. So Helena Bensky, a Helsinki resident who was giving the bus a try, offered to fill in. “Should I go give that guy a telling off?” she asked.

Driverless Cars,Self-Driving Cars
Bus
Helsinki
Public Transit


Canada Agog at Security Price Tag for Summit

Abstract: HUNTSVILLE, Ontario — Few Canadians expected that hosting world leaders at back-to-back summit meetings here this weekend would be cheap or convenient. With downtown Toronto a security maze, businesses boarded up and even the beloved Blue Jays baseball team sent packing, the meetings have met all expectations for aggravation. But it is the cost of providing security that has elicited gasps. The latest government estimate is $897 million for three days of summitry. That comes to about $12 million per hour, or a total near what the government spends per year in the war in Afghanistan. “The cost of these summits is completely out of whack and extravagant and exorbitant,” said Don Davies, a New Democratic Party member of Parliament. Mark Holland of the Liberal Party called the conference “the most expensive 72 hours in Canadian history.” Ever since the infamous Battle in Seattle , the World Trade Organization summit meeting in 1999 in which violent street protests led to 600 arrests and $3 million in property damage, security has been a prime concern for international summit meetings. And as terrorist threats have increased, the costs have soared. But critics point out that Canada ’s security expenses are several times larger than those of other recent summit meeting hosts. The security costs for the Group of 20 meeting last year in Pittsburgh, for example, was about $95 million, slightly over a tenth of Canada’s budget, according to a study by Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer. Until this weekend, the highest security cost for a Group of 20 summit meeting was $345 million for the 2008 meeting in Hokkaido, Japan, the report said. Government officials have defended the costs as necessary. “The cost is expensive, but the security is worth it,” Public Safety Minister Vic Toews told Parliament last month. “Nobody has written a blank check,” Ward P. D. Elcock, the federal government’s summit meeting security coordinator, told the newspaper The Globe and Mail . They point out that Canada’s hosting of two summit meetings — the Group of 8, which ended here on Saturday, and the Group of 20, which began later that day in Toronto — was unprecedented and required unprecedented levels of security. And they say other countries may have undercounted their costs. The estimate for Pittsburgh, for example, did not account for some costs that Canada included, like the purchase and leasing of equipment and security-related transportation. Mr. Davies said those amounts may have added another $100 million, but would still leave the total a fraction of what Canada is spending. Since Seattle, other summit meeting hosts have sought to cut costs and improve security by holding the meetings in remote resort areas that are difficult to reach and easy to seal off. Security for the 2002 Group of 8 meeting in the Canadian resort of Kananaskis, Alberta, for instance, cost only $217 million. The 2004 meeting on Sea Island, Ga., separated from the mainland by four miles of marsh, cost about $135 million to secure. Canada initially sought the same kind of advantages when it invited the Group of 8 to Huntsville, a town in the Muskoka tourist region known for its lakes, summer cottages and, this time of year, bloodthirsty swarms of mosquitoes and black flies. But last September, the leaders of the wealthiest nations decided to add a meeting of the Group of 20, which includes major developing countries. Huntsville was too small for the larger group, Toronto was offered, and officials say that is when security costs began to compound. The cost in Canadian currency is $930 million, a figure newspapers and angry politicians have rounded up to a billion. While that figure may be closer to the truth once the final bill is reckoned, it has also encouraged use of the alliterative aspersion “billion-dollar boondoggle.” By far the largest chunks are for personnel. The security force for the two meetings includes 20,000 soldiers, intelligence agents and police officers drawn from across Canada, a draft of about 13 percent of all available police officers and troops in the country. The Public Safety Department has budgeted $438 million for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Another $285 million was designated to reimburse local and provincial police departments for the officers borrowed by the federal government. The military gets $72 million. Beyond these general categories, the government has offered little information about how the money is being spent, citing national security concerns. But the lack of information has provoked loud demands for explanations. “No Canadian begrudges them spending an appropriate amount on security and we also understand that with security there’s lots we can’t be told,” Mr. Davies said. “But having said that, we should know an awful lot more.” Governments “justify any and all spending for any reduction in security risk,” the parliamentary report said, making it extremely difficult to determine “what is necessary and what is less than necessary.” The parliamentary report, for instance, found that the salaries per police officer, adjusted for inflation, were four times higher than those at the Kananaskis meeting. Why? No explanation. The security system received its first big test on Saturday in Toronto, and at least a few residents were unimpressed. A group of militant protesters broke away from a peaceful demonstration and vandalized two police cars, set two others on fire and smashed store windows on Yonge Street, the city’s main commercial avenue. The police officers appeared to retreat into the security area, and then disappear. “Where were the police, the fire?” asked Juavon Herbert, a passerby. “You have businesses beside that and the fire could have spread.” The disruptions for residents and businesses also have done little to assuage the criticism over costs. A $5.5 million, four-mile-long fence of perforated steel sheeting, a material favored by prisons because it resists climbing, encircles the Toronto conference zone, dividing the city in remarkably inconvenient ways. Businesses within the fence, including the head offices of some of Canada’s largest banks, closed or relocated late last week. Because the main railroad station is on the edge of the zone, intercity trains are now ending their trips in distant suburbs. Downtown theaters went dark. The Toronto Blue Jays wore their home uniforms at a game that was shifted to Philadelphia on Saturday. Drowning one’s frustration is not an option: government-owned liquor stores are closed, their windows boarded with plywood. And although a stylized image of the CN Tower, icon of the Toronto skyline, is the Group of 20 meeting’s logo, sightseeing is banned atop the tower because it looms directly above the meeting site. Another security cost, critics say, is the suspension of civil liberties in and around the meeting zone. The province of Ontario has handed the police extraordinary powers to stop and search anyone near the fence. Julian Fantino, the commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, said such curbs on constitutional rights were necessary. “With these things you plan for the worst and you hope for the best,” he said, taking a break from shaking hands with bystanders on Huntsville’s Main Street on Friday. “All I can tell you is that were it not something the police felt necessary to have in place, it would not have happened.”

Group of Twenty
Police
Canada
Politics and Government


F.B.I. Is Adding Slayings Suspect to Wanted List

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The fugitive likes to eat at Denny’s and the International House of Pancakes. He loves black and tan German shepherds. His cigarettes of choice are Marlboro Lights 100s. The description of the fugitive, Yaser Abdel Said, was included in a particularly detailed announcement Thursday from the Federal Bureau of Investigation , which added Mr. Said to its Ten Most Wanted list . The F.B.I. said that Mr. Said executed his two teenage daughters seven years ago after telling them he was taking them to a Dallas-area restaurant in his taxicab. Their bodies were found in Irving, Tex. Mr. Said, 57, was born in Egypt, is 6 feet 2 inches and weighs about 180 pounds, the F.B.I. said. He has a dark brown spot on the side of his neck, the F.B.I. said, and may “seek shelter in Egyptian-affiliated communities in the United States or abroad.” He “is believed to have ties to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, the New York City area, Virginia, Canada and Egypt,” and could be working as a taxi driver. He is believed to carry a firearm, the F.B.I. said. The F.B.I. tries to release as much distinctive information about fugitives it adds to the Ten Most Wanted list in the hope that it will make it more difficult for them to blend into society. Mr. Said replaces Eric M. Frein, 31, who was accused of killing one state trooper and wounding another in Pennsylvania, on the list. Mr. Frein was apprehended in October, about a month after being put on the list.

Murders and Homicides
FBI
Dallas
Eric Matthew Frein
Yaser Abdel Said


Heat Roll Past Knicks Amid Concern Over Chris Bosh

Abstract: Moments before the national anthem on Friday at Madison Square Garden, the Knicks produced a highlight reel, featuring players whom fans could expect to see over the remaining 29 games of the season. It was not so much an inspirational video as a reminder of who was still on the team. There was no Carmelo Anthony (knee surgery), Amar’e Stoudemire (waived), J. R. Smith (traded), Iman Shumpert (traded) or Pablo Prigioni (traded). There was a lot of Lou Amundson, Langston Galloway and Jason Smith. Ostensibly, there will be a lot more of them to come. This is how the Knicks slinked into the second half of the season, unraveling, it seems, almost hourly. The most optimistic fans might at least be able to view this as the beginning of the end. If the first game after the All-Star break — a 111-87 loss to Miami — was an indication, the two-month descent into April will be a palliative exercise, with no winning cure in sight. Typical of the Knicks’ season, the bigger story on Friday revolved around a star player on the opposing team, the All-Star forward Chris Bosh, who did not make the trip to New York after being hospitalized in Miami. Tests were being conducted on Bosh’s lungs, and the concern was that he might have blood clots in the area. The Nets’ Mirza Teletovic was sidelined for the rest of the season after pulmonary embolus, a formation of blood clots in the lungs, was discovered in January while the team played in California. More grimly, the former N.B.A. forward Jerome Kersey died Wednesday at 52 as a result of a blood clot in his leg that migrated to a lung. The Heat are responding to Bosh’s condition with caution. Coach Erik Spoelstra declined to speculate on the situation until further testing was completed. “He’s still going through more tests,” Spoelstra said before the game. “I’ve been in contact with him. Anything right now is still premature.” Bosh, generally viewed as the third leg of the LeBron James-Dwyane Wade triumvirate the past four seasons, was in the midst of a resurgent season after re-signing with the Heat during the summer. His scoring average (21.1 points per game) was its highest since 2009-10. “I want to send my thoughts and prayers to Chris Bosh and his family that he is O.K. and will be O.K.,” Knicks Coach Derek Fisher said to open his pregame news conference. “We’ll keep him in our thoughts and prayers.” Friday was supposed to be a celebratory day for Miami, which pulled off a coup at Thursday’s trade deadline by acquiring the playmaking point guard Goran Dragic from Phoenix in exchange for, among other things, two first-round picks. Dragic, who is a free agent at the end of the season, was thought to be a target of the Knicks, but the Heat swayed the Suns with their package of assets. Dragic had not joined the Heat, so the Knicks at least avoided the indignity of having to face him at home in his Miami debut. “They have a number of guys on their side who have experience and know what it takes to compete on this level,” Fisher said of the Heat. “We have guys who didn’t know how to sustain that. That is what this is about and what we are looking to do the last few months of this season.” The Heat are fighting for the eighth seed in the Eastern Conference, and although Spoelstra said there was concern among teammates about Bosh’s condition, Miami’s second-half effort showed that it was not too much of a distraction. The Knicks trailed by 10 points at halftime, and eventually that deficit trickled to 28 in the fourth quarter. They were outscored, 53-39, in the second half. Tim Hardaway Jr., effectively handed the keys to the offense in Anthony’s absence, steered the scoring effort at times, finishing with 17 points. Galloway led the Knicks with 19 points, including a long-range 3-pointer at the buzzer, which helped inflate his point total but did little to effect the final outcome. “We can’t make excuses,” Galloway said. “Whoever steps on the floor has to help in whatever way possible. It didn’t happen tonight.”

Basketball
Chris Bosh
Erik Spoelstra
Goran Dragic
Carmelo Anthony
Miami Heat
Knicks


Matt Williams to Manage Nationals

Abstract: Matt Williams, a former major league third baseman, is the new manager of the Washington Nationals. He replaced Davey Johnson, who is retiring. It will be Williams’s first job as a major league manager. Williams, 47, a five-time All-Star and a four-time Gold Glove recipient, is the first player to become a major league manager who was mentioned in the Mitchell report — the accounting of baseball’s steroids era that was released in December 2007.

Baseball
Washington Nationals
Matt Williams
Mitchell Report
Doping


As Academy Snubs Affleck for ‘Argo,’ Iran Plans Own Movie

Abstract: TEHRAN — A tough week for Ben Affleck just got tougher. First, he was snubbed in the Oscar nominations on Thursday, overlooked in the best director race for “Argo,” his film about the Central Intelligence Agency’s extraction of six American diplomats from revolutionary Tehran. Now, news reports from Tehran say the Iranian government is planning to finance a movie that will correct what it says are numerous distortions of the historical record in “Argo.” Not much is known about the proposed movie, other than its title, “The General Staff,” and its director, Ataollah Salmanian, a minor figure in Iran’s cinema industry. But it is a sure bet that it will center on the official Iranian view of the 1979 hostage crisis, in which 52 American diplomats were held by Islamic students for 444 days. Image A scene at the American Embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Credit Associated Press Following its release in October, “Argo” was condemned by Iranian officials as anti-Iranian. One former hostage taker, Abbas Abdi, after seeing the movie, said that he and his comrades would always be seen as “bad guys” in the United States. Others in Iran accused Mr. Affleck of promoting “Islamophobia.” Certainly, the director, Mr. Salmanian, sees his task in those terms. “This film, which will be a huge production, should be an appropriate answer to the film ‘Argo,’ which lacks a proper view of historical events,” he told the semiofficial Mehr news agency this week. He has also written the screenplay for the movie, which, according to The Tehran Times newspaper, will be paid for by the Iranian government’s Art Bureau. Video Several of the Americans who were held by Iran between 1979 and 1981 reflect on tensions between that country and the United States and how their ordeal affects today’s crisis. Credit Credit Fred Conrad/The New York Times|Associated Press|UPI|Getty Images Word of Tehran’s cinematic plans was a surprise to Kenneth Taylor, the Canadian ambassador to Iran at the time, who sheltered the six Americans for three months and has commended Mr. Affleck and the film, in which he is played by Victor Garber. “I’m not sure what the Iranians found wrong,” he said in a telephone interview. “It will be amusing to see what they take issue with. I think the Iranians know the true story of the Canadian involvement.” Video Ben Affleck, the director of “Argo,” discusses a scene from the film. Iran’s leaders, who in recent years have started several foreign-language satellite channels to spread their ideology of political Islam, seem keen to get into the influential English-language movie industry. In February, Sean Stone, Oliver Stone’s son, was invited to visit Iran, where he is now rumored to be making a movie with the help of the Iranian authorities. Nevertheless, it is independently made Iranian films that have attracted foreign acclaim, with “A Separation,” by Asghar Farhadi claiming the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2012. Last year the authorities closed down Iran’s main film directors union, “The House of Cinema,” accusing its members of having relations with foreign-based opposition channels. That has not kept controversial films out of Iranian cinema, however — the movie “I Am Mother” showed people drinking alcohol and women without their obligatory head scarves, prompting protests from conservatives.

Argo
Iran
Ben Affleck
Movies
Hostage
CIA


Hotel Pools as a Destination

Abstract: YOU can find almost anything in New York City — a store devoted to spandex, a restaurant that specializes in peanut butter sandwiches, a supply store for superheroes — but in the long hot days of summer it is hard to find a private pool. You may have a friend, or a friend of a friend, who lets you use that indoor in her high-rise, but a real pool with outdoor space to lounge in the sun takes a bit of searching. For a price, however, you can have the same poolside privileges tourists enjoy in the city by taking a dip in a hotel pool. For $60 a day — cash only, please — the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street in Clinton gives you access to its 25-foot-by-50-foot unheated pool on an 11th-floor roof deck. Padded lounge chairs line the sides, and at the bar you can quench your thirst and grab something to eat. (Coolers are not allowed.) The pool and surrounding area are immaculate and are a welcoming retreat on weekday afternoons. (The pool is often crowded on weekends.) “We don’t promote it or advertise it,” said the hotel’s general manager, J. Edward Cecala, but word gets around. And Mr. Cecala advised prospective poolgoers to arrive early to get a chair by the water. Rules — like don’t crowd in one spot — have developed over time, Mr. Cecala said, and are aimed at creating a happy and familial atmosphere. A regular, Michael Sherman, who lives on the East Side of Manhattan, is a fan of cruises, and he described the Holiday Inn pool as a “cruise ship standing still.” He added, “I love a private pool but am not fond of the beach.” On a recent Tuesday afternoon the only downside was the soft rock that played on a loop in the early afternoon: Anne Murray, John Denver, Chicago ... Anne Murray, John Denver, Chicago. As a younger crowd moved in later, though, the soundtrack jumped a couple of generations and soon Katy Perry was kissing a girl and liking it (in her lyrics anyway). A short walk away is the Le Parker Meridien, which has a rooftop pool, 42 floors up, with three decks lined with artificial grass for enjoying the great urban outdoors. Because the pool is up so high, the sun has unfettered access to you in the early afternoon hours. Be sure to remember sunscreen. Windows surrounding the 20-by-40-foot pool, which is covered, and an outdoor upper deck look out onto the city. “We have the best views of Central Park,” said Sandra Pinnock, the general manager of the Gravity Fitness and Spa, which includes the pool. On a recent Monday afternoon the sun went behind a tall building about 3:30, leaving all but one deck in the shade. By then I had had enough brightness and moved a lounger to the northwest corner of the top deck, offering an amazing view — from the Dakota to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with its summer bamboo crown — by which to read and meditate. With your $100 day pass, towels (several, it seems) are included. The staff was so attentive that as soon as I put a towel down and walked away, just for a minute, it disappeared and I found a new one in its place. It felt a little environmentally unfriendly, so I began to carry my towel with me. The pool is heated to 84 to 86 degrees. That could have been too warm, but it was perfect on a day when the outdoor temperature climbed into the high 80s. Day passes are available first come first served. Ms. Pinnock said seats were in particular demand on weekends, and that prospective poolgoers should call ahead. (There are no refunds.) You can have food delivered poolside, or head down to the Burger Joint or Norma’s in the lobby for a bite. For sun worshipers downtown the Gansevoort Meatpacking NYC offers a $250-a-day spa package with pool access through Sept. 16. The deal includes an exercise class, a spa treatment, gym and pool access, a cocktail and a goody bag. The swag ran mainly to pool-day essentials: water, sunscreen, a fluffy white towel, Evian spray mist ... and Red Bull. (For post-pool clubbing in the neighborhood?) I signed up for a 9:30 a.m. class, the tough but invigorating CoreFusion, and then had an hourlong massage. After all that I made it to the pool, on the 14th floor, where a polite attendant set me up in a lounge chair but warned me that there might be a photo shoot in an hour. I guessed this would mean I would have to move. I settled in, and as I started drifting off after my exhausting morning, I heard not the click of a camera but the whir of a saw and the tap, tap of a hammer — construction — on a neighboring building. The noise was not overpowering, but if sound bothers you, bring earplugs or headphones. During the afternoon I took many a dip in the 10-by-45-foot pool. The water was perfect at 84 degrees, cool and refreshing. A hotel guest named Brad Jordan Fujimoto, who lives in Paris and works for Louis Vuitton, was observing his 31st birthday lounging by the pool on this, his second trip to the hotel. “The pool is why I come here,” he said. The threatened photo shoot never materialized, and I spent up to almost the last allowable day-pass minute (6 p.m.) getting some “good color,” as another poolgoer put it. If you’re looking for a swim without the sun, there are indoor pools that offer day passes, including the one at the Millennium Health and Racquet Club at the Millennium UN Plaza Hotel in Midtown. On the day I went to check out this pool, a certain Iranian president was staying at the hotel, staff members said. That explained the metal detector in the lobby, and there were so many dark-suited guys with earpieces that I was starting to suspect myself. On a return trip to the 27th-floor 24-by-40-foot pool, no such extra security measures were in place, and a $40 day pass was easy to secure. Still, call before you go, and keep an eye on the U.N. schedule. IF YOU GO HOLIDAY INN MIDTOWN 440 West 57th Street, Clinton; (212) 581-8100, holidayinn.com ; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Towels and lockers provided, but bring a lock; $60, cash only. LE PARKER MERIDIEN 119 West 56th Street, Manhattan; (212) 708-7340, parkermeridien.com ; Monday-Friday, 6 a.m. to 10:45 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 8 a.m. to 8:45 p.m. Call for availability; check in at Gravity Fitness and Spa. Towels and lockers provided; bring a lock. $100 for access to the pool and Gravity, $190 for “Full Day of Wellness” package, including 90-minute massage. GANSEVOORT MEATPACKING NYC 18 Ninth Avenue, between Gansevoort and West 13th Streets, meatpacking district; (212) 660-6700, hotelgansevoort.com ; Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. “Renewal Day Package” is available until Sept. 16 (including access to pool, cocktail, exercise class and spa treatment at Exhale Mindbody Spa). Call for availability. Towels and lockers with keys provided. $250 plus tax. MILLENNIUM HEALTH AND RACQUET CLUB At Millennium UN Plaza Hotel, 1 United Nations Plaza, 44th Street between First and Second Avenues, Manhattan; (212) 702-5016, millenniumhotels.com ; Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.; until 6 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday. Towels and lockers with keys provided. $40.

Swimming Pools
New York City
Hotels and Motels


Qualifying Tests for Chinese Financial Workers

Abstract: BEIJING — Li Wuchen is 33 years old and has worked as a stock broker for three years, but he looked as nervous as a high school student facing the SAT as he stood outside a university building on a recent Saturday morning and studied a government-issued manual one last time. “This is my third time taking the test,” he said. “I must pass by the end of this year or lose my job.” Chinese regulators have stepped up their policing of banks, ordered them to limit their counterparty risk in overseas derivatives transactions and reviewed trust companies to make sure that they are not taking inappropriate risks. But China ’s most unusual response to international financial turmoil has been the government’s decision to increase rapidly the number of qualification tests that are required for workers in the financial sector. The government has also increased the number of people required to take these tests. The improvements that China is starting to make in its financial regulatory system are likely to be tested heavily in the next few months. Recently Chinese banking regulators have taken a series of steps to encourage banks to lend much more heavily, as part of a broader government effort to halt an economic slowdown unfolding with alarming speed. State-controlled banks — and almost all banks in China are still majority-owned by the government — are being told to lower the required down payments on home mortgages, lend more money to exporters and provide much greater financing for local and provincial governments engaged in building new roads and other infrastructure projects. Yet the longer-term health of the Chinese economy may depend on regulators’ and bank managers’ ability to accomplish all of this without impairing the credit quality and risk management systems still being introduced here. Failure could expose Chinese banks to the kinds of problems now bedeviling their Western rivals. Testing managers could be part of the answer. China has a long history of relying much more heavily than Western countries on tests to choose winners and losers — imperial officials were tested for their knowledge of literature as early as 2,000 years ago. Mao eliminated many examinations, but Deng Xiaoping began to revive them after 1978, partly as a way to weed out incompetent officials who had risen through the ranks based only on political connections or seniority. As the number of college graduates rises steeply in China and universities struggle to maintain the quality of education in a rapid expansion, the number of exams is rising even more quickly. That is particularly true in financial services, as the government worries about repeating the West’s financial mistakes. More cautious and more heavily regulated, Chinese financial institutions appear to have weathered the crisis better so far. Chinese banks require down payments of 20 to 50 percent on mortgages to discourage borrowers from reneging on debts, and since 2004 have been forced by the government to limit their real estate lending. But like the United States and many other countries, China faces falling real estate prices and steeply declining share prices — and regulators are increasingly worried. “Bad loans are already showing an upward trend, especially in the property market, where the mortgage default risk is growing at an accelerating pace,” said Jiang Dingzhi, the vice chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, at a conference this autumn. He provided no details, nor have Chinese banks released any recent updates on their nonperforming loans. Bush administration officials have pushed China to open up its financial markets and allow greater financial innovation. “That need not be at odds with learning the lessons from the recent turmoil in the United States,” David H. McCormick, the under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs, said, adding that improvements in international financial regulation were also needed. Without singling out China, Mr. McCormick cautioned that protectionism was “a very real risk — throughout history in times of stress, in times of turmoil and anxiety, there’s a tendency to turn inwards.” Chinese banks have disclosed holdings of American mortgage-backed securities, but such holdings have been tiny compared with the banks’ total assets. Yet — despite signs of trouble in the domestic real estate sector — regulators have focused on foreign transactions in particular, fearing that international turmoil in financial markets will spread to China. “There are new sources of volatility that threaten our sound and stable growth,” the China Banking Regulatory Commission said in a statement in October. “It is important to recognize these new problems and make careful decisions to cope with them.” Some financial experts warn that China may go too far in continuing to limit competition for its banking system through heavy regulation. “Strengthening regulation of risk control, strengthening bank examination — all of these are good in principle,” said Shang-jin Wei, a Columbia University finance professor. “It’s always difficult to resist the temptation to go overboard, and China might miss the chance to strengthen its banking system.” For instance, with the government maintaining very large majority stakes in each bank, Chinese banks remain susceptible to pressures to lend to politically connected borrowers. The China Banking Regulatory Commission already has a basic competence test for bankers but abruptly authorized three more in July, all of which are supposed to be ready by the end of this year. The new tests are for risk managers, certified financial analysts and information security engineers. Approximately 200,000 people in the banking sector alone will be required to pass the risk management test within one year or lose their jobs, said Walter Wang, the president of ATA, a Beijing-based company traded on Nasdaq that administers many of the Chinese government’s financial regulatory tests. Even bank branch employees who sell products like mutual funds and currencies will be required to pass the risk management test. The only limit on how many times someone can try to pass the test is that the tests are typically administered three or four times a year. Chinese regulators are also preparing to require bank employees involved in the issuance of mortgages to start taking a national qualification test late next year as well, Mr. Wang said. The China Insurance Regulatory Commission is also drafting extensive new test requirements, and the government is considering certification tests for real estate brokers and other professionals. “The authorities are paying attention to what is happening outside of China, and they are reacting,” said Carl Yeung, ATA’s chief financial officer. Mr. Li, the stock broker, took his recent test at the College of Computer Science and Technology at the Beijing University of Technology. He was one of 2,500 men and women taking the brokerage test, most of whom appeared to be in their 20s or 30s. Age discrimination is widespread in China, partly because many people who grew up during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s were denied years of formal education. The college, on the northeast outskirts of Beijing, has a leafy campus that rivals those of many American universities, and is certainly well equipped. Each of the 2,500 test takers was sent to a different desktop computer, arranged in rows on desks in a series of well-lighted halls. Before taking the test, each test taker was photographed and the image stored. Some in China try to send ringers to take the test for them. When there is any hint of fraud, the photos taken at the test center are compared with reliable photos of the person who was supposed to be taking the test. In some cases, the tests offer a guide to where China wants to go someday in financial deregulation: Mr. Li had to take the stock brokerage test for a third time because he had previously failed twice a section involving financial derivatives. “The financial derivatives are not even launched yet in the market,” he said, “so we don’t have practical experience.”

China
Banks and Banking
Regulation and Deregulation of Industry
Tests and Testing
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Economic Conditions and Trends


Anthony Open to Pay Cut to Bolster Knicks

Abstract: NEW ORLEANS — Far removed from the prying eyes of his employers at Madison Square Garden, Carmelo Anthony sat on a dais inside a large ballroom at the Hyatt Regency on Friday afternoon and, with the news media gently nudging him along, decided to make some announcements. One was that he was fully convinced that Mike Woodson would coach the Knicks when they reconvened next week, after the N.B.A. All-Star Game on Sunday night. “We have our practice in Memphis on Monday, and Woody will be there, plain and simple,” Anthony said. Another was that his “first priority” was to re-sign with the Knicks this summer, though he still intends to explore free agency and offered the familiar caveat that it was up to the Knicks to assure him that the right pieces were in place for them to become a legitimate contender. “I’ll evaluate that when that time comes,” he said. And then there was Anthony’s boldest declaration to date: He would be willing to take less money from the Knicks if it gave the team greater flexibility under the salary cap to surround him with better talent. “I tell people all the time: If it takes me taking a pay cut, I’ll be the first one on Mr. Dolan’s steps saying, ‘Take my money, let’s build something stronger,’ ” said Anthony, who was referring to James L. Dolan, the team’s owner, who surfaced here earlier in the day at an off-the-record summit about N.B.A. technology. Anthony added: “As far as the money, it don’t really matter to me. If I go somewhere else, I’ll get paid. If I stay in New York, I’ll get paid. So as far as the money goes, that’s not my concern. My concern is being able to compete on a high level, at a championship level, coming at this last stretch of my career.” The Knicks, of course, are not competing at that level — at least, not this season. They lurched into the All-Star break with a 20-32 record, and the Los Angeles Clippers’ Chris Paul said he could tell that Anthony was still fuming over the Knicks’ loss Wednesday to the Sacramento Kings when they met Thursday night in New Orleans. “I could see it on his face,” said Paul, who added that he would give Anthony his advice about free agency if he asked for it. “Melo’s a big boy,” Paul said. “He’ll be all right.” Anthony’s tenuous future with the Knicks has been a story line since training camp, when he divulged that he would opt out of his current contract in July. The Knicks can offer him the most lucrative new deal under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement — five years, $129 million — but Anthony has not been a happy camper. In recent weeks, he has reiterated how desperately he wants to win, and win now, with the expiration date on his career coming into clearer focus. Anthony’s next contract could be his last, and various confidants, including Jim Boeheim, his former coach at Syracuse, have advised him to choose wisely. “He’s got to do what’s best for him and his family,” the Clippers’ Blake Griffin said. In addition to fielding questions about what he hoped to eat this weekend (po’ boys) and whether he was looking forward to any musical acts (Kendrick Lamar), Anthony came prepared for the usual probing of his plans. Although he celebrated the Garden’s “electricity” and said he hoped to retire with the Knicks, he left the door ajar. “For the most part, I’ve had a fantastic time,” he said. “I mean, up until now.” Anthony said he had never spoken with management about personnel decisions and indicated that he did not feel it was his place to do so. But if members of the front office were to seek his input after the season, he said he would be more than willing to sit down with them. Anthony was not the only All-Star overwhelmed by questions about free agency. The Minnesota Timberwolves’ Kevin Love, who cannot opt out of his current deal until 2015, sounded exasperated. “What’s there to say?” Love asked. “It’s just something that you guys ask about and that’s kind of brought up by you guys. I don’t know what else to say.” As for Anthony, there were times when he even seemed optimistic about the Knicks. He cited Paul Pierce, who stuck with the Boston Celtics through a series of dismal seasons before they were able to rebuild and win a championship in 2008. Anthony made at least one thing clear: He expects to be with the Knicks after next Thursday’s trade deadline. “I know for a fact I’m not getting traded,” he said.

Basketball
Free agent
Carmelo Anthony
Knicks


Argument Escalates to Stabbing at Kennedy Airport

Abstract: A man was stabbed in the face during a dispute in a parking lot at Kennedy International Airport on Friday afternoon, the police said. The argument between two men began inside Terminal 8 at the airport before they moved outside to the lot, according to Ron Marsico, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. One man slashed the other man with a knife above his left eye, Mr. Marsico said. The victim was in serious condition at Jamaica Hospital Center in Queens, with injuries that were not life threatening. Officials said they did not know the nature of the argument between the men, which took place around 4:30 p.m. The attacker fled in a 2007 Acura, officials said. He had not been arrested as of Friday evening.